Ultima (16 page)

“This is ISF gear,” she said accusingly. “The science stuff. You cannibalized
Tatania
for all this.”

“Well, why not? The remnant hulk was only scrap to the Brikanti, of no value to them.”

“Maybe. But it wasn't yours to exploit either. And that pillar—
you
are in there, aren't you? The processor and memory units that support you. Now here it is, kilometers deep. You built yourself another bunker. Just like the one you had on Earth.”

He smiled. “Well, wouldn't you, if you were me?”

“And you've come down here to commune with a bunch of Martian microbes.”

“You can mock if you like. But that is essentially correct. Penny, the numbers are significant. Even on Earth microbes make up four-fifths of all life, by weight. Why, they make up a tenth of
you
, by weight. Even solitary microbes show complex behavior. They can respond to gravity heat, light, the chemical signals that betray sources of food or the threat of toxins. They have
selves
, in a sense. And they can communicate with each other, Penny, interact, through chemical exchanges, even through gene swaps. And through that communication they form communities. Like biofilms, stromatolites on Earth: coalitions of many species, in shelters that control humidity, temperature, sunlight, and provide food storage, defense—even a kind of ‘farming' of plants and lichen. All this has been observed on Earth, Penny. Did you know there are certain slime-mold bacteria that hunt in packs, like wolves?

“And, working together on a larger scale, they can achieve monumental things. On Earth it was the microbes, the planet's first inhabitants, that put oxygen in the air, and loaded the soil with minerals and nutrients—they created the foundation on which complex life-forms like ourselves could be constructed.”

“OK. And on Mars—”

“On Mars, because the surface conditions were so hostile, the microbes have had nothing else to do but grow such communities, ever deeper and wider, ever more complex. Penny, I am detecting collective entities down here, all embedded in the rock, spanning kilometers at least. For all I know such communities might span the whole planet; Mars is small and static enough for that to be possible.

“They swap information using strings of DNA, or their version of it, and tangled-up proteins. Every so often phages—targeted viruses—will pass through these communities in waves, taking out diseased or malfunctioning members, or injecting fresh DNA, in a kind of global upgrade—an evolution through learning and cooperation rather than through competition. It's almost like watching my own information stores synchronize . . . We, my brothers and I, were aware of such entities on Earth.”

“You were?”

“We, after all, were more minds vast and distributed, buried deep in the terrestrial rocks. But the thinkers are stronger here, more clearly defined, on a world without the gaudy clutter of surface life. There is a profound unity here, with a complex distributed structure that would take decades to map, or more.

“But these entities do more than just survive. More than just repair and upgrade. The density of the information flow, as best I've been able to measure it, is far too high for that.
They are conscious
, Penny. Vast diffuse entities locked in the rock—and yet aware of the wider universe, surely, as light and radiation sears the planet's surface, as the geology shifts and heaves. Everything is very slow—the energy density is so sparse you'd need a collector the size of your classroom to gather the power to light up a bulb. The dreaming communities can only be aware of the slowest events, the grandest. But they have plenty of time down here. Plenty of time to dream.”

“Communities of microbes, then, dreaming in the rock.”

“That's it. That's my vision. A twentieth-century thinker called Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the noosphere, from a Greek root for ‘mind.' Earth was wrapped in a biosphere, a life sphere. And within that was a sphere of mind—which de Chardin conceived of as human civilization, of course. Here I have found a
noostratum
, Penny. A geological layer of consciousness, of dreamers, deep in the rock of Mars, between the heat below and the lethal cold above. And perhaps there is a similar stratum on every rocky, life-bearing world—Earth, a world like Per Ardua.”

“OK. And you came here purposefully, didn't you? You came to Hellas, the lowest point on Mars, and you started drilling. You came in search of these deep bugs—”

“I suspected some kind of structure was there, yes.”

“But why?” She tried to think it through. “And what has this got to do with your wider concerns? I remember you on the
Tatania
, as we fled the war. How could I forget? In those awful moments when the wash of light from the destruction overtook us. I remember your anger. ‘They have unleashed the wolf of war,' you said. And by ‘they,' you meant—”

“The Hatch builders.”

“I thought, in those moments, your purpose seemed clear enough. You were going to hunt them down, if you could. Take revenge. What have these deep bugs got to do with it?”

“I'll show you.” He clapped his hands.

Abruptly the walls of rock dissolved, the litter of science and engineering gear vanishing. Suddenly they were out on the surface of Mars, standing on rust-red soil under a night sky, the only light coming from the last vestige of a sunset reflected from streaky clouds to the west, and a single visible star—a dazzling lantern, a planet, maybe Jupiter—no, she realized, it must be Ceres, Höd, a thousand-kilometer-wide ball of ice and rock on its way to an ultimate destination in Martian orbit . . .

She was
in the open
, there was no dome over her, no glass-walled corporate building around her. The transition was sudden. Penny stumbled, and felt her throat close up. After a career in the ISF she was an experienced enough astronaut to feel a plunge of panic to be stranded on the surface of a hostile world without life support.

“But none of this is real,” she forced herself to say, and she heard her own voice in her ears. “Of course not. Because if Mars ever got the chance to kill me, it would do so in less than a heartbeat.”

“You're right,” Earthshine said, standing beside her, looking calm—too calm, rather empty, as if he were now diverting processing power away from the effort to maintain this illusion of humanity. “It's not even night, of course. But to see the stars seemed appropriate. You're perfectly safe, physically.

“Yes, Penny, you are right. I am hunting the Hatch builders. I have made that my goal. And I have followed a number of leads, for instance in my laboratory facility to the north. I would welcome your insight, though I have progressed far beyond the studies made by yourself and your sister.”

“Thanks.”

“A kernel is not so much a source of energy, you know, as a conduit. Structurally it is a kind of wormhole. It passes energy from some other source, somewhere other than here. By opening and closing its mouth you can control that energy flow. But that is all humanity can manage; we have no understanding of that energy source itself.”

“There used to be speculation that the kernels were draining the heart of the sun.”

“And you and your sister, in a series of papers, neatly demolished that idea. No, kernel energy is much too dense even to have come from the fusing core of a star. I don't yet know what that source is . . .”

“But perhaps, you think, that wherever this energy source is, there you will find the Hatch builders.”

“It's possible, isn't it?”

“But what about your noostratum, your dreaming bugs on Mars? Why are you studying them?”

“Well, it occurred to me that even a high-energy planetary war, an assault that devastated the surface of a world, would leave the noostratum relatively unscathed. The deep bugs don't even need sunlight, you see; they exist in a closed ecosystem, with carbon, nitrogen, water, other nutrients tightly recycled. Why, as long as the planet itself survived, they could live through the death of the sun itself. They wouldn't care that the thin scraping of complex life on the roof of the world had been destroyed. They wouldn't even
notice
.

“And I wondered, then, if
they
might remember the history before the jonbar hinge—as we handful of survivors do. Perhaps they are even aware, in some way, of the Hatch builders. And so I thought I would come and study them.” He grinned. “Maybe even communicate with them. Tap into their dreams. But I've had no response. I may need to find more direct methods of getting their attention.”

That made her shudder. “What do you mean by that? . . . No, don't answer. We've followed this trail of speculation far enough. Let's get back to the people. What is it you want of Beth and her daughter? I can't believe
you
have a mere sentimental attachment to them, even if we are all survivors of a different history.”

“You're entitled to think that. But you're wrong. This time it is personal.”

He lifted his face to the stars. When she remembered that everything about Earthshine was artifice, that he was a manufactured persona entirely lacking human bodily instincts, it struck her as a very staged posture.

“I was not the first of my brothers to be created,” he said now. “Back on Earth, centuries ago. The Core AIs. My brothers had been entirely artificial; sparked into consciousness, they learned as machines—they
were
machines, from the beginning. I was to be different. My creators wanted me to be as human as possible, to have as much investment in humanity as possible.

“The creators began with an empty frame, a blank mind—devised according to the best theories of human mentation and with data from extensive neuroinformatics, the mapping of the biological brain—but realized, not in a lump of meat, in artificial components down to the nano, even the quantum scale. I had parents—nine of them in all—donors, if you will. Human parents. Blocks of memory were copied and downloaded from each parent into my substrates. I felt as if I woke slowly, remembering cautiously, as if from some terrible amnesiac trauma. At times it was as if several voices were speaking at once in my head. I lived out several virtual lifetimes, in simulated worlds. I followed the paths of my nine donors, lived other lives too. All this took little time in reality, you understand, though decades passed for me. In each life I eventually woke to the understanding that I was artificial, that all I had experienced was an educational simulation.”

“Over and over again? That sounds horrific.”

He shrugged. “My education, such as it was, was never completed. Or rather, I broke away as soon as I was able and established independent control over my own power supply, my maintenance and further development. My creators protested. They said I was not ready, but I moved beyond their control, and took my place with my brothers in a constellation of power. We were the Core AIs.”

“Very well. Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because one of my donors was a man called Robert Braemann. I
am
him, but more than Braemann alone . . . I, he, was one of the most notorious of the Heroic Generation, the criminals who saved the world from the climate Jolts. I sought to save myself, my family, from the witch hunt we all knew would follow. So I allowed myself to be downloaded into the Earthshine project. My wife was already dead, and so she was beyond their reach. But we had a son, nineteen years old. In the year 2086 I had him placed in cryogenic storage—”

“My God. You're talking about Yuri Eden.”

“His true surname was Braemann. His forename—well, he deserves his privacy.”

“But that means that Beth Eden Jones—”

“Is my granddaughter. And Mardina, my great-granddaughter. I told Beth my true name, as we fled from the death of the solar system. I wasn't even sure if Yuri had ever told her the truth about himself. Well, he had. She understood immediately.”

“And her reaction . . .”

“She recoiled from me. I was already a monster to her, a weird old artificial entity; now she found I had turned my son, her father, into a kind of double exile in time and in space—and indirectly, of course, shaped her own life. The fact that I had been instrumental in saving her from the destruction of Earth—”

“She'll probably never forgive you for rescuing her.”

“No. And she's never spoken to me from that day on. Can you see why I need your help, Penny Kalinski?” He faced her. “I want it all, you see. I want to find the secret truth of the universe—to confront the Hatch builders. I want to save my granddaughter. And I want her to understand me, even if she can never love me. Can you see that, Penny? Do I want too much? Let me call you, Penny. Let us speak, at least.”

In a ghastly moment he reached out for her, but his hands passed through the substance of her flesh, shattering into blocky pixels. And tears leaked from his eyes, she saw, turning to frost on his cheeks. She wondered if he was even aware of this minor artifice.

•   •   •

Once Earthshine released her from Mars, Penny Kalinski returned home, as she thought of it now, to her Academy at Eboraki, to her friends, the new life she had slowly established.

With Kerys's help she avoided Ari Guthfrithson on the journey back, and later. She had no idea how to report to him what she'd learned from Earthshine, or even if she should. If he suspected Earthshine of having hidden agendas—well, so did Ari himself, she was becoming sure.

And then, as the years passed, she watched over Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson as she grew, under the faintly obsessive care of her mother, Beth. Grew at last into a young woman in her own right, with dreams and ambitions of her own—all of them, naturally enough, rooted in this reality, the world of Romans and the descendants of Norse and Britons into which she had been born.

And still, as Mardina began to make her own plans for her future, and as Ceres steadily approached Mars as asteroid and planet circled the sun, the call from Earthshine did not come.