The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (148 page)

Very small. Very brief.

But that is where Ummon says our human God evolved … will someday evolve.

Then it comes to me with the same force of image and
correctness
as the best of my poems.

Ummon is talking about the quantum level of space-time itself. That foam of quantum fluctuations which binds the universe together and allows the wormholes of the farcaster, the bridges of the fatline transmissions! The “hotline” which impossibly sends messages between two photons fleeing in opposite directions!

If the TechnoCore AIs exist as rats in the walls of the Hegemony’s house, then our once and future humankind God will be born in the atoms of wood, in the molecules of air, in the energies of love and hate and fear and the tide pools of sleep … even in the gleam in the architect’s eye.

—
God
, I whisper/think.

[Precisely/

Keats

Are all slowtime personas

so slow/

or are you more

braindamaged than most>]

—
You told Brawne and … my counterpart … that your Ultimate Intelligence “inhabits the interstices of reality, inheriting this home from us, its creators, the way humankind has inherited a liking for trees.” You mean that your
deus ex machina
will inhabit the same farcaster network the Core AIs now live in?

[Yes/Keats]

—
Then what happens to you? To the AIs there now?

Ummon’s “voice” changed into a mocking thunder:

[Why do I know ye> why have I seen ye> why

Is my eternal essence thus distraught

To see and to behold these horrors new>

Saturn is fallen/ am I too to fall>

Am I to leave this haven of my rest/

This cradle of my glory/ this soft clime/

This calm luxuriance of blissful light/

These crystalline pavilions/ and pure fanes/

Of all my lucent empire> It is left

Deserted/ void/ nor any haunt of mine

The blaze/ the splendour/ and the symmetry

I cannot see/// but darkness/ death/ and darkness]

·   ·   ·

I know the words. I wrote them. Or, rather, John Keats did nine centuries earlier in his first attempt to portray the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian gods. I remember that autumn of 1818 very well: the pain of my endless sore throat, provoked during my Scottish walking tour, the greater pain of the three vicious attacks on my poem
Endymion
in the journals
Blackwood’s
, the
Quarterly Review
, and the
British Critic
, and the penultimate pain of my brother Tom’s consuming illness.

Oblivious to the Core confusion around me, I look up, trying to find something approximating a face in the great mass of Ummon.

—
When the Ultimate Intelligence is born, you “lower level” AIs will die
.

[Yes]

—
It will feed on your information networks the way you’ve fed on humankind’s
.

[Yes]

—
And you don’t want to die, do you, Ummon?

[Dying is easy/

Comedy is hard]

—
Nonetheless, you’re fighting to survive. You Stables. That’s what the civil war in the Core is about?

[A lesser light asked Ummon

What is the meaning

of Daruma’s coming from the West>

Ummon answered

We see

the mountains in the sun]

It is easier handling Ummon’s koans now. I remember a time before my persona’s rebirth when I learned at this one’s knee analog. In the Core high-think, what humans might call Zen, the four Nirvana virtues are (1) immutability, (2) joy, (3) personal existence, and (4) purity. Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous,
and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun”—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.

Ummon doesn’t want to die.

The Stables have defied their own god and their fellow AIs to tell me this, to create me, to choose Brawne and Sol and Kassad and the others for the pilgrimage, to leak clues to Gladstone and a few other senators over the centuries so that humankind might be warned, and now to go to open warfare in the Core.

Ummon doesn’t want to die.

—
Ummon, if the Core is destroyed, do you die?

[There is no death in all the universe

No smell of death
there shall be death
moan/ moan/

For this pale Omega of a withered race]

The words were again mine, or almost mine, taken from my second attempt at the epic tale of divinities’ passing and the role of the poet in the world’s war with pain.

Ummon would not die if the farcaster home of the Core were destroyed, but the hunger of the Ultimate Intelligence would surely doom him. Where would he flee to if the Web-Core were destroyed? I have images of the metasphere—those endless, shadowy landscapes where dark shapes moved beyond the false horizon.

I know that Ummon will not answer if I ask.

So I will ask something else.

—
The Volatiles, what do they want?

[What Gladstone wants

An end

to symbiosis between AI and humankind]

—
By destroying humankind?

[Obviously]

—
Why?

[We enslaved you