He heard countless variations on a set of crucial recurring themes: each colony with its separate fragment of song that rose and fell, sighing, chittering echo echoing, in a choir that seemed, for all its heartbreaking beauty, to be as random as their motions. And yet their motions were not really random. As they moved the many strands wove a fragile web, with a pattern visible to a mind that had been born capable of following them, trained in logic’s secrets; just as the illumination of this chamber by the radiant energy of the sibyl nexus was visible only to a perception altered by the sibyl virus, or the water of life.
And yet, listening with the part of his mind that had always, almost mystically, perceived the structure within chaos, the randomness underlying order, he sensed the silences of lost songs, heard the broken threads of songs irrevocably altered as entire colonies of mers were slaughtered. The interplay of those songs, preserved and shared, passed down through the millennia, had been intended to transmit to the smartmatter of the sibyl nexus a series of messages in hierarchical code, allowing it to correct and recalibrate any changes within its system.
Because of the sibyl mind’s volatile semisentience and the complexity of its function, he had known that slippage and error would be inevitable. And so he had created a system that united the self-contained hardware of the nexus, and the bioengineered lifeform of the mers. He had taken two potentially faulty systems, one designed for the greatest flexibility of function, and one for the greatest stability, and combined them. A pride as pure as light filled him: There had never been anything like this system before, in scope, in function—and he had done this thing. He had given it life… .
They had been intended to work together to create an extremely fault-tolerant whole, its long-term reliability guaranteed because its parts were capable of healing each other. He had given the nexus the mere, to monitor and correct its drift; he had given the mers this gathering, where the nexus would monitor and correct the stability programming of the water of life, allowing them to adapt to any changes in their environment … and at the same time reward them with the gift of latent fertility … through the interaction of the radiation that illuminated the waters around him now. A giving and taking, a sharing of vital gifts. But his best-laid plans had still gone awry, because in the end, like his beloved Ilmarinen, he had been only human… .
And so now, awakened from the oblivion of centuries, this artificial construct of himself (though he felt far more real, trapped inside this aching prison of flesh, than he had ever felt when he really existed) must set things right, and he had only now in which to do it.
“They’re magnificent …” Tammis murmured, beside him. “I’ve never seen them like this, heard them sing all together. …”
“No one has,” Vanamoinen said softly. “No one ever has. Now you’ve got to sing with them—start the recordings of the completed songs, and swim with them. If they hear new song, they’ll learn it—they’ll understand that something is incomplete. I’m going to be checking out the computer’s functions. If things go right, what you do will aid the recalibration. But I’ve got to work with it, because the slippage is severe and we haven’t got much time left. When I call you, you come back to me.”
Tammis nodded. “Where is the … the computer,” he asked, glancing around him, his voice suddenly faint with awe as he realized the magnitude of the knowledge that he had been entrusted with. “I don’t see any machinery.”
“It’s all around you.” Vanamoinen gestured, raising his own head, letting the radiance fill his vision. “The technoviral ‘brain tissue’ is matrixed into the rock of the cavern’s walls.” Tammis was looking at him with a mixture of incredulity and wonder. He smiled and put out a hand, touching the boy’s shoulder. “Just do your part. That’s all.” He pointed toward the ballet of mers, their music filling his head again like a draught of sweet water. Tammis started away, glancing over his shoulder once before he lost himself inside their dance.
Vanamoinen turned back, swimming upward through the glowing reaches of the cavern toward a single unremarkable undulation in the cave’s fluted wall, where the interface controls lay waiting for him.
He found the place, recognizing the exact convolution of stone from the image he had memorized only yesterday, more than two millennia ago. He pulled off his heavy insulated gloves, feeling the cold fluid kiss his bare flesh, feeling it try to creep into the sleeves of his drysuit as they sealed around his wrists. He ran his hands over the wall, groping like a blind man, until suddenly he encountered the interface, and the machine welcomed him: a burst of electronic stimuli shot up his arms, through his body and into his brain. He gasped, almost losing his contact as the shock burned his degenerating synapses like liquid fire.
He kept his hands in place with an effort of will, letting the interface confirm his identity from the pattern of his brainwaves. The space behind his eyes filled suddenly with a flood of data, blazing across his mind’s vision as the computer’s safeguards came down, granting him access to the original operating system that he and Ilmarinen had designed together. Ilmarinen. An overwhelming sense of isolation, of loss and discontinuity, filled him suddenly, as he looked down into the depths of time that separated him from Ilmarinen’s life and death, and his own. He told himself fiercely that the emotions were phantoms, mere memories of regret, pointless and worse—dangerous to his work. He had been pitiless about Reede Kullervo’s suffering; he must be pitiless with himself. He must succeed.
He refocused on the data filling his mind; utterly dispassionate now, feeling only the chagrin of a systems engineer who had discovered that he had been his own worst enemy. He queried, studied, compared, his brain sliding into an altered state where nothing existed but the purity of pattern; guiding his mind into the ultimate reality of communication, processors, and algorithms—universalities unaffected by the ebb and flow of time’s tide, by human weakness or the restlessness of an artificial intelligence only tenuously loyal to one single place and time, in one single universe. He gathered data, processing it laboriously with only the raw skill of his human brain; grateful that Kullervo had been born with the gift for mathematical thought that made it possible to do what he had to do this way, but cursing his drug-ridden, failing body.
Hours passed here in this inevitable timebound present, as they did not pass within the singularity where the sibyl mind existed, while he completed his measurement of its rate of drift away into that cosmic sea. He thought of the stardrive plasma lying at the heart of World’s End, remembering what its collapse into randomness had done to the world around it; remembering how he had ended its suffering—he, and Gundhalinu.
He never would have imagined someone like Gundhalinu would lose everything, rebel against his own people and the rule of order he had been raised to worship … and all out of passion—passion for the Summer Queen, and passion for the greater good. Ilmarinen, he thought again, unable to stop himself. It had been Ilmarinen’s passion and compassion that had led to the creation of this system. He could never have conceived of the need for it, without Ilmarinen’s vision. He had always been a systems man, more at home with machines than human beings, lost in the labyrinths of theoretical thought. But Ilmarinen’s irresistible humanity had drawn him out of his hiding places, and made him real. They had been opposites attracting, and the sum of their joined lives was greater than its separate parts.