The Galactic Center Companion Read online

  That is a useful suggestion. To truncate my selves into one narrow compass, unable to escape. Yes.

  Ahmihi felt a sudden pressure, like a wall of flinty resolve, course through his sensorium. He had no hope that he would live more than a few moments longer, but still, the hard dry coldness of it filled him with despair.

  The Harvested

  >I had come around the corner and there it was, more like a piece of furniture than a mech, and it poked something at me.

  >The last thing I saw was a ’bot we used for ore hauling, tumbling over and over like something had blown it, and I thought, I’m okay because I’m behind this stressed glass.

  >I still got the memory of something hard and blue in my line of sight, a color I’d never seen before.

  >She fell down and I stooped to help her up and saw she had no head and the thing that was holding her head on the floor jumped up at me, too.

  >It had a kind of ceramic tread that came around on me when I thought it was dead, booby-trapped some way, I guess, and it caught me in the side like a conveyor belt.

  #

  The Noachian ’Sembly fled the mech plunder of their Chandelier. Their Exec, Ahmihi, had emerged from his capture by the Mantis with a sensorium that howled with discord. Each neurological node of his body vibrated in a different pattern. His voice rang like a stone in a bucket. It was as if the symphony of his body had a deranged conductor.

  But within hours he recovered. He would never speak of the experience with the Mantis. He led his ’Sembly into craft damaged but serviceable. The mechs did not attack as over three hundred escaped the drifting hulk their once-glorious spin-city had become.

  This was one of the last routs of the Chandelier Age. After these defeats, humanity fled deep space for the nostalgic refuge of planets. This was in the end foolish, for the Galactic Center is unkind to the making and tending of worlds. There, within a single cubic light-year, a million suns glow. Glancing near-collisions between stars can strip the planets from a star within a few million years. Only worlds carefully stabilized can persist. Even then, they suffer weathering unknown in the calm outer precincts of the great spiral galaxy.

  The Noachian ’Sembly used a gravitational whip around the black hole to escape pursuit. This cost lives and baked their ships until they could barely limp on to a marginally habitable world, named Isis by some other ’Sembly, which a millennium before had departed for greener planets, farther out from True Center. Isis was dry and windswept, but apparently of little interest to mechs. This was enough; the Noachians spiraled in and began to live again. But much had happened on the way.

  Mech weaponry can be insidious, particularly their biological tricks. A ’Sembly platitude was all too true. You may get better after getting hit, but you do not get well.

  A year into their voyage, Ahmihi lay dying. As he gasped hideously, lungs slowly eaten by the nano-seekers the mechs had carried, his wife came near to say goodbye. The ’Sembly folk were afraid to record Ahmihi’s personality into an Aspect, since he was plainly mech-damaged, perhaps mentally. In his fever he spoke of some bargain he had struck with the near-mythical Mantis, and no one could fathom the terms. He had been tampered with in some profound way, perhaps so that the story he told could give away nothing vital.

  But they did have his archived recording from the year before; not everything would be lost. In a desperate era, skills and knowledge had to be preserved into the chips which rode at the nape of the neck of each ’Sembly member. These carried the legacy of many ancient personalities, rendered into Aspects or the lesser Faces or Profiles. Ahmihi would survive in fractional form, his expertise available to his descendants.

  No one noticed when a small insectlike entity crawled from the dying Ahmihi’s mouth. It whirred softly toward his wife, Jalia, and stung her. She slapped it away, thinking it no different from the other vermin released from the hydro sections.

  The flier implanted in Jalia a packet of nanodevices that quickly recoded one of her ova. Then it dissolved to avoid detection. The Noachian ’Sembly burned Ahmihi’s body to prevent any possible desecration by mechs, especially if nanos were alive in the ship.

  Their prayers were answered; apparently the small band of fleeing humans were not worth mech time or effort to pursue.

  Jalia gave birth to a son, a treasure in an era when human numbers were falling. Gene scanners found nothing out of the ordinary. She called the boy Paris, in the tradition of the Noachian ’Sembly, to use city names from Earth—Akron, Kiev, Fairhope—though Earth itself was now a mere legend, doubted by many.

  When he was five his intensive education began. He had been an ordinary boy until then, playing happily in the dry fields from which skimpy crops came. He was wiry, athletic, and seldom spoke.

  When Paris began learning, he made a discovery. Others did not sense the world as he did.

  Every second, many millions of bits of information flooded through his senses. But he could consciously discern only about forty bits per second of this cataract. He could read documents faster than he could write, or than people could speak, but the stream was still torpid.

  Whether the information was going in or out, his body was designed for roughly the same torpid flow speed. All serial ways of taking in information were painfully sluggish. His awareness was like a spotlight gliding across a darkened stage, lighting an actor’s face dramatically, leaving all else in the blackness. Consciousness stood on a mountain of discarded information.

  Even thinking about this fact was slow. It took him much longer to explain to himself what he was thinking than it did to think it. His brain channeled ten billion bits per second, far more than he took in from his surroundings.

  There were as many incoming signals from his sensorium as there were outgoing commands to his body. But nearly none of this could he tell anyone about. His sensibility, his speech—all were hopelessly serial logjams. Everybody else was the same; humans were not alone in their serial solitude.

  He had already learned how important story was to them—and to him. Plots, heroes and villains, for and against, minor roles and major ones, action and wisdom, tension and release—as fundamental as the human linear mouth-gut-anus tube, for story was the key to mental digestion.

  And without knowing it, each of them told their own stories, in every moment. Their bodies gave them away with myriad expressions, grunts, shrugs, unconscious gestures. Big chunks of their personalities came through outside their conscious control, as the unconscious spoke for itself through the body, a speech unheard by the discerning driver, hidden from it.

  For a young boy this was a shock. Others knew more about him than he knew about himself. By sensing the megabits that leaked through the body, they could read him.

  This was enormously embarrassing. Such a silent language must have come early in human evolution, Paris guessed, when it was more vital to know what strangers meant than what they said, using some crude protolanguage.

  And laughter—the wine of speech, he learned—was the consciousness’s admission of its own paucity. He laughed often, after realizing that.

  Soon, even while scampering in madcap joy over the hard-packed dirt of the playground, he felt a part of him stand apart. What he experienced—all those billions of bits per second—was a simulation of what he sensed. This he felt as a gut-level truth.

  Worse, the simulation lagged half a second behind the world outside. He tested this by seeing how fast his body reacted to pain or pleasure. Sure enough, he jerked away from a needle before he consciously knew it was poking him in the calf.

  His sensorium was ripe with tricks. His vision had a blind spot, which he deduced must emerge from the site where nerves entered the back of the eye. An abandoned, ruined Chandelier seemed larger when it hung in its forlorn orbit just above the Isis horizon than when it arched high in the sky. When he ran across the crinkled plains and stopped to admire filmy clouds overhead, his eyes told him for a while that the clouds were rushing by—a kinesthetic mem
ory of running, translated by his mind into an observed fact.

  All because evolution shaped the eye-brain system to regard things high up as farther away, more unattainable, and so made people perceive them as smaller. And retained the sensation of running, unable to discard the mind’s pattern-frame right away.

  He sat in class and regarded his giggling classmates. How odd they seemed. Understanding himself had helped in dealing with them. He was popular, with a natural manner that some mistook for leadership. It was something decidedly different, something never seen in human society before. He felt this but could not name it. Indeed, there was no word.

  Gradually Paris saw that their—and his—world was meaning-filled, before they became aware of it. Scents, rubs, flavors—all carried the freight of origins many millennia and countless light-years away.

  So he came to make his next discovery: the unconscious ruled. He learned this when he noticed that he was happiest when he was not in control—when consciousness did not command. Ecstasy, joy, even simple gladness—these were the fruit of acting without thinking.

  “I am more than my I,” he said wonderingly. “I am my Me.”

  When his work went well—and everyone worked, even children—his Me was engaged. When things went well, they just went, zinging along. He ran ’facturing ’bots, tilled fields, prepared spicy meals—all in the flow, immersed.

  Even when he used his Faces or Profiles for craft labors, he could manifest their outlined selves without conscious management. These ancient sliced segments of real people used some of his perception-processing space, so that when working he lost Isis’s crisp savannah scent, wind-whispers, and prickly rubs. The Faces particularly needed to siphon off these sensory stimuli, to prevent them from becoming husklike embodiments, mere arid digital textbooks. He could feel them sitting behind his eyes, eagerly supping snippets of the world, relishing in scattershot cries. As he slept, he enabled them to raise his eyelids and catch glimpses that fed them gratifying slivers. Listening through his eardrums, they could keep watch—a safety precaution. Of such thin gruel they made their experience. This also isolated him, ensuring deep sleep.

  But there was something more, as well.

  Something shadowy sat within him, a Me beyond sensing except as specter. It seemed to watch while eluding his inner gaze. Yet he could feel this brooding blankness informing his own sense of self.

  This frightened him. He cast about for reassurance. There were sport and sex and spectacle, all unsatisfying. He probed deeper.

  The ’Sembly’s religion—its teachings so varied as to be contradictory—somehow summoned forth that state of free going, while the conscious mind was deflected by prayers, liturgy, hymns, rituals, numbing repetition. One day in Chapel, bored to distraction, Paris tried engaging the skimpy bandwidth of language with a chant, cycling it endlessly in his mind. He found his Me set free; thus he invented meditation.

  #

  In adolescence he found a genuine talent for art. But his work was strange, transitory: ice carvings that melted, sand-sculptures held together by decaying electrostatic fields. He would write poetry with a stylus on pounded plant material, using vegetable pigments…and then rapturously watch them burn in a fire.

  “Poignancy, immediacy,” he replied, when asked about his work. “That is the essence I seek.”

  Few understood, but many flocked to see his strange works pass through the moments he allowed them to have.

  Art seemed utterly natural to him. After all, he reasoned, far back in human history, on mythical Earth, there must have been some primate ancestor who saw in the stone’s flight a simple and graceful parabola, and so had a better chance of predicting where it would fall. That cousin would eat more often and presumably reproduce more as well. Neural wiring could reinforce this behavior by instilling a sense of genuine pleasure at the sight of an artful parabola.

  He descended from that appreciative cousin. Though living 28,000 light-years from the dusty plains where art had emerged in genes, he was building on mental processing machinery finely tuned to that ancient place. While he shared a sense for the beauty of simplicity, though, something in him felt the poignancy of each passing moment. That was human, too, but something else in him felt this sense of the sliding moment as a contrast. He did not know why, but he did know that this set him apart.

  This was his first fame, but not his last.

  Quickly he saw that while the Me acted, society held the I accountable. The human social vow was I agree to take responsibility for my Me. On this he brooded.

  He found love, as a young man, and felt it as an agreement: Lover, my Me accepts you. So as well did spirituality come from I know my Me, just as true courage came from I trust my Me.

  Consciousness—bit-starved, ill-informed—was the brain’s model of itself, a simulation of a much more ornate under-Self.

  To experience the world directly, with no editing—what a grail! He attained that state only now and then, and when in it, felt the shocking fullness of the true world. Language evaporated like a drop of water beneath the sun’s full glare. All he could do was point a finger and mutter, “That.”

  Still riding behind his eyes was that phantom, the watcher who could not be watched. Yet it did not control. He felt it riding in him, and learned to ignore it.

  Or rather, his I agreed abstractly to accept the watcher. His Me never did. But there was no way it could control a shadowy vacancy.

  In dreams, his I could not control. In everyday life, he learned that his body could not lie; its bandwidth was too high, sending out data from his Me in an unconscious torrent. Conversely, with its small bit rate, the I could lie easily—in fact, could hardly avoid lying, at least by omission. But not his Me.

  This made him into the leader he had no real desire to become. He was too busy learning more than anyone had ever known about what it meant to be human.

  One evening, as he stood guard in a distant precinct at the outer edge of their holdings, he caught a mouse and tried to talk to it. Since they were both of flesh and had sprung from similar origins—this was an Earth rodent, imported by the original expeditions for reasons best known to themselves—he thought he should be able to commune with it. The mouse studied his face across an abyss of processing ability, and Paris could get nothing whatever from the creature on his sensorium.

  Yet somehow he knew that within that tiny head lay deep similarities. Why could a communion not come from a mech? He wondered.

  Amid such puzzles, life pressed upon him. The mechs had returned to Isis.

  He met a Rattler while playing with some young men. They were chasing each other, carrying a ball, a game that called forth the hunting joys buried in the primordial past. So immersed they were that the Rattler got within a few hundred meters.

  They were playing near the ruins of a huge Kubla left by the people who had claimed Isis millennia before, then left. Its pleasure dome still offered vibrant illusions if stimulated, and Paris thought the Rattler must be one of these when he first saw it—moving slinky-quick, armatures pivoting to focus upon the men.

  The Rattler cut down six of them before Paris could reach his weapon, a long-bore kinetic rifle. It was hopelessly antique, but that was all they had to give the young men in training. He fired at the Rattler and even hit it but then a friend fell nearby and that distracted him. He had seen death, but not this way. He hesitated and by pure luck the Rattler did not kill him. A bolt from two others stilled the coiled thing. Paris knew he was of no use then and resolved to do better. The emotions that wrenched him as he helped carry the bodies away were like a fever, an illness that did not soon abate.

  That was the beginning. You start out thinking that other people get killed, but not you, of course. The first time you are badly wounded the worst shock of it is not the physical one, but the sudden realization that death can come so easily, and to you.

  It had taken a long time after that to know that nothing could happen to him that had not already happen
ed to every generation before. They had done it and so could he. In a way, dying was the easiest of the hard things.

  There was an inscription above the archway of a broad public plaza, one crowned with a transparent dome through which the whole mad swirl of the Galactic Center constantly churned, and he had written it down to keep it, for the strange joy it brought when he understood it:

  By my troth, I care not: a man can die but once; we owe God a death…and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.

  After a while he came to know that nothing happens until it actually comes to you, and you live your life up until then to get the most out of it. To live well, you had to live in each gliding moment. Cowardice—the real thing, not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future, was the vital secret. With it you could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.

  The Me learned this and the I accepted it.

  The Harvested

  >They threw me in this pit of mech-waste, stuff like greasy packing fluff and I figured, sure as hell I can climb out of this.

  >All around these mechs were gathered like it was a ritual and they hanged me upside down first, shooting me through the belly and watching the blood run out and down over my breasts and into my face so I could taste it, warm in the cold air.

  >A whistling sharp by me and then a smack.

  >Must of been some nanos in the bread I ate before this hot sour taste rose up in my throat and I started choking real bad.

  >It stabbed me with an antenna, a big surprise because I thought it was one of those mechs that only used microwave pulsers.

  >It was at the very end of the campaign and I was tired out and lay down to catch a few snores and this slow thing came by, I didn’t pay it any mind.