Skaidon, direct interfacing with the Craystein computer; dead and sainted while opening a whole new vista in physics. The first runcible test between Earth and Mars. That pioneer building going up on the shores of Lake Geneva. Blegg walking inside, into a place where it should have been impossible for any human to come, revealing himself to the entity called Earth Central, ruler of the solar system, ruler then of the near stars as the first runcible seed ships arrived, then of that fast expanding empire called the Polity.
Now a huge ship formed in his view in the shape of a flattened pear, brassy in colour and bristling with antennae, weapons, spherical war drones pouring out of it like wasps from a nest recently whipped with a stick. A Polity dreadnought revolving slowly in space. Once spherical, now fires burnt deep inside it, revealing massive impact sites.
‘Prador,’ said Atheter.
‘Hostile from the first moment of contact. Without the AIs on our side, they would have crushed us. Their metals technology was way in advance of ours and their ships difficult to destroy—exotic-metal armour. But they did not have runcibles, for artificial minds are needed to control them. That gave us easy access to resources, the instantaneous repositioning of planetary forces. The card then showed some vast construct in space: a great claw, nil-G scaffolds groping out into blackness, ships and construction robots amassing all around.
‘We never needed that,’ Blegg said nodding at the huge object. ‘It was one of a planned network of space-based runcibles for shifting large ships, even fleets, or for hurling moons at the Prador. They withdrew before then. We never realized until afterwards that their old king had been usurped. The Second Kingdom became the Third Kingdom, and the new ruler knew this was a fight he could not win.’
‘You are a cipher for your time.’
‘I guess,’ said Blegg. ‘But we are all ciphers for our times. It is just that my time has been a long one. You perhaps are the ultimate cipher, for the time of an entire race?’
The cards began sinking out of sight. The scape around him revolved like some great cog repositioning reality.
You and me both, Alice, thought Blegg, closing his eyes until the nauseating sensation stopped.
‘And now Jain technology.’
Blegg opened his eyes. He stood now on a trampled layer of reedlike plants. Beside him those plants still grew tall, greenish red, small flowers of white and red blooming from a matted tangle of sideshoots. In the aubergine sky hung the orb of a distant gas giant: green and red and gold. In a moment he realized something mountainous now squatted beside him. He turned and looked up at it.
‘No,’ he murmured, ‘I don’t believe you.’
Something chuckled, low and deep.
Using the disassembler, Orlandine removed a silica crystal no larger than a grain of talc. Holding this between hundred-angstrom filaments, she conveyed it to a hollow memcrystal inside the disassembler head. Such memcrystals were designed for analysis of quantum computers used to control human nanotechnology, so perhaps this might be enough. Through nanotubes penetrating the memcrystal, she injected polarized carbon molecules into the hollow, where they underwent Van der Waals bonding. Slowly and surely, connections began to be made. Having already ascertained the connection points on the silica crystal to the sensory structures on the node’s surface, she became able to apply some logic to what she now received. The base code was quaternary, much like the earlier codes used in human quantum computing before they went multilevel synaptic, and was therefore disappointingly simple. Orlandine soon began to track the algorithms: this happens, check this, reach thus, check that, and so on. But a frightening, fascinating picture emerged.
Everything was there to identify the touch of a living creature even prior to physical contact—by movement, heat, environment, organic components in the air, on the skin—but these all together did not stimulate into action the circuits that initiated the ‘stinging cells’, or signal deeper structures within the node. Something more was required: the identification of information conveyed by electromagnetic media, identification of industry-produced compounds in the air, regularity of structures in the immediate environment… the list just kept growing, the deeper Orlandine delved. She saw that each of these could be the product of dumb beasts: social insects produced regular structures, any compound produced by industry could be produced in natural environments, and many lifeforms communicated by electromagnetic media. But it was through an assessment of the whole that the Jain nodes identified intelligent technological life.
Why?
The configuration of what she had thus far seen told her the node was a trap just waiting to be sprung. But what kind of trap required this level of technology? She knew she ought to be frightened, but instead was fascinated and excited. To kill one sentient being you did not need all this. To kill many of them… maybe? No, it could not be as simple as that. Abruptly, disparate thought streams all came together inside her organic and crystalline mind, and she made one of those intuitive leaps more associated with her organic side than with her silicon one, and understood the truth. This was a trap laid for the destruction of intelligent species, of entire races, the complex fantastic technology being both the bait and the teeth of it. She must learn how to take that bait without springing the trap.
Now returning her attention to the node itself, she used the disassembler to begin stripping away those structures already mapped. Very quickly she discovered the stinging cells were the leading ends of mycelial fibres consisting of bundles of buckytubes with guiding heads containing a mass of sensory gear. She realized that again she saw a technology already used in the Polity, for by using similar mycelial fibres an aug made connections inside the human brain. The mycelia in that case, however, were generated by the aug and guided by feedback—the aug changing the tension along each of the four nanotubes of each mycelium to change its direction of penetration. And the sensory heads sought out the particular electrical signatures generated by synapses. These structures, however, were very much more advanced. Designed to incorporate the substance they penetrated, they carried complex bases for exterior silicon crystallization, so as the fibres extended themselves they intermittently grew processors along their length. The sensory heads were also hugely complex and obviously designed to seek out more than just synapses, or perhaps more than human synapses.
The more she worked the more Orlandine saw the sheer extent of the technology involved. The Polity used nanotechnology, and because of that she could easily recognize many of the structures she saw here. But it seemed all about the level of development. Just because a race knew how to make bricks, concrete and steel did not necessarily mean it knew how to put them together to the best effect. Having all the parts and knowing their potential did not mean you yourself could realize that potential. The Polity was building small houses, whereas whatever created this had made something capable of throwing up skyscrapers, by itself.
Other nanomachines she discovered: things like viruses and bacteria capable of replicating for as yet unknown purposes; others that spread their own mycelial networks and created their own controlling processors; some almost prosaic pieces of nanotech that drilled, cut and plucked elementary atoms from compounds. Then she found something that actually grew lasing materials, and understood these were for transmitting light signals down the buckytubes—optics. She tracked back to discover that the quantum processors could respond both electrically and photonically. Not even just skyscrapers, she then realized: cities. She had uncovered less than five per cent of this node’s secrets, but even so reckoned she was delving into an entire technological ecology.