The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (146 page)

If someone comes

I go out to meet him

but not for his sake

Koke said

If someone comes

I don’t go out

If I do go out

I go out for his sake]

—
Speak English!
I cry, think, shout, and hurl at the wall of shifting colors before me.

[Kwatz!]

[My child is stillborn]

—
Why did you preserve Old Earth, Ummon?

[Nostalgia/

Sentimentality/

Hope for the future of humankind/

Fear of reprisal]

—
Reprisal from whom? Humans?

[Yes]

—
So the Core can be hurt. Where is it, Ummon? The TechnoCore?

[I have told you already]

—
Tell me again, Ummon
.

[We inhabit the

In-between/

stitching small singularities

like lattice crystals/

to store our memories and

generate the illusions

of ourselves

to ourselves]

—
Singularities!
I cry.
The In-between! Jesus Christ, Ummon, the Core lies in the farcaster web!

[Of course
Where else]

—
In the farcasters themselves! The wormhole singularity paths! The Web is like a giant computer for AIs
.

[No]

[The dataspheres are the computer

Every time a human

accesses the datasphere

that person’s neurons

are ours to use

for our own purposes

Two hundred billion brains/

each with its billions

of neurons/

makes for a lot

of computing power]

—
So the datasphere was actually a way you used us as your computer. But the Core itself resides in the farcaster network … between the farcasters!

[You are very acute

for a mental stillborn]

I try to conceive of this and fail. Farcasters were the Core’s greatest gift to us … to humankind. Trying to remember a time before farcasting was like trying to imagine a world before fire, the wheel, or clothing. But none of us … none of humankind … had ever speculated on a world between the farcaster portals: that simple step from one world to the next convinced us that the arcane Core singularity spheres merely ripped a tear in the fabric of space-time.

Now I try to envision it as Ummon describes it—the Web of farcasters an elaborate latticework of singularity-spun environments in which the TechnoCore AIs move like wondrous spiders, their own “machines,” the billions of human minds tapped into their datasphere at any given second.

No wonder the Core AIs had authorized the destruction of Old Earth with their cute little runaway prototype black hole in the Big Mistake of ’38! That minor miscalculation of the Kiev Team—or rather the AI members of that team—had sent humankind on the long Hegira, spinning the Core’s web for it with seedships carrying farcaster capability to two hundred worlds and moons across more than a thousand light-years in space.

With each farcaster, the TechnoCore grew. Certainly they had spun their own farcaster webs—the contact with the “hidden” Old Earth proved that. But even as I consider that possibility, I remember the odd emptiness of the “metasphere” and realize that most of the non-Web web is empty, uncolonized by AIs.

[You are right/

Keats/

Most of us stay in

the comfort of

the old spaces]

—
Why?

[Because it is

scary out there/

and there are

other

things]

—
Other things? Other intelligences?

[Kwatz!]

[Too kind a

word

Things/

Other things/

Lions

and

tigers

and

bears]

—
Alien presences in the metasphere? So the Core stays within the interstices of the Web farcaster network like rats in the walls of an old house?

[Crude metaphor/

Keats/

but accurate

I like that]

—
Is the human deity—the future God you said evolved—is he one of those alien presences?

[No]