MacLeod, Ken - Engines of Light 3 - Engine City.pdf - Ken MacLeod - przemosta

Engine City

Ken MacLeod

To Carol, with love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Carol, Sharon, and Michael, as always; to Andrew Greig for listening about

light-years; and to Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on the first draft.

There is no middle path between these two, for a man must either be a free and true

commonwealth’s man, or a monarchical tyrannical royalist.

Kingly government governs the earth by that cheating art of buying and selling, and

thereby becomes a man of contention, his hand is against every man, and every man’s

hand is against him; and take this government at the best, it is a diseased government, and

the very city Babylon, full of confusion.

—Gerard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1651)

Contents

• prologue: states of mind

• part one: the very city babylon

• 1 the advancement of learning

• 2 hardy man

• 3 rtfm

• 4 the modern prince

• 5 tidal race

• 6 bright star cultures

• 7 the modern regime

• part two: the human as alien

• 8 new earth (political)

• 9 the hanging libraries

• 10 high strangeness incidents

• 11 lithomancer

• 12 rocket science

• 13 blood of spiders

• 14 the new moon’s arms

• coda: state of play

Prologue: States of Mind

the god who later became known as the asteroid 10049 Lora, and shortly afterwards as

the ESA mining station Marshal Titov, was not unusual of its kind. Around the Sun, as

with most stars, gods swarm like flies around a sacrifice. Life arises from states of matter.

From some of these states of matter arise states of mind.

In the asteroids and cometary bodies the units of life were extremophile nanobacteria.

Regulating their ultra-cold molecular processes, the vanishingly tiny temperature

differentials, detecting the quantum signature of usable energy—over millions of years,

these and other selective advantages drove the development of delicate networks adapted

to processing information. Random variations in the effects of their activities on the

asteroid’s outgassings and on the glacially slow transport of mass within it were selected

for whenever they resulted in more stable orbits and fewer collisions. Increasingly

complex networks formed. Subjectivity flickered into being on trillions of separate sites

within each life-bearing asteroid or cometary mass.

Those within 10049 Lora found themselves in a society of other such minds, exchanging

information across light-hours. They had much to learn, and many to learn from. Billions

of years of evolutionary fine-tuning had given the cometary and asteroid minds an

exquisite sensitivity to the electromagnetic output of each other’s internal chemical and

physical processes.

Communication, exchange of information and material between cometary clouds, became

rumor that ran around the galaxy’s outer reaches, which ring like residential suburbs its

industrial core where the heavy elements are forged.

Just as minds are built from smaller information exchangers—neurons or bacteria or

switches—so from the vast assembly of intercommunicating minds within the asteroid

emerged a greater phenomenon, a sum of those minds: a god. It was aware of the smaller

minds, of their vast civilizations and long histories. It was also aware of itself and others

like itself. Its component minds, in moments of introspection or exaltation, were aware of

it. In moments of enlightened contemplation, which could last millennia, the god was

aware of a power of which it was a part: the sum of all the gods within the Solar System.

That solar god, too, had its peers, but whether they in their turn were part of some greater

entity was a subject on which lesser minds could only speculate.

On Earth, evolution worked out differently. On its surface, the multicellular trick took

off. Beneath the surface, the extremophile microorganisms that riddled the lithosphere

and made up the bulk of the planet’s life formed extensive interacting networks which

became attuned to the electromagnetic fields of the planet and its atmosphere. Constantly

disrupted by processes far more violent than those of the smaller celestial bodies, they

attained the level of symbolic thought, but never quite intelligence. Earth’s mind—

Gaia—was like that of a pre-verbal child or an animal. Its thoughts were dreams,

afterimages, abstractions that floated free and illuminated like sheet lightning.

The large squid of the genus Architeuthys, which men later called krakens, were the first

real intelligences on Earth, and the ones whose outlook on life was closest to that of the

gods. They communicated by varying the colored patterns of the chromatophores on their

skins. The minute electrical currents thus generated interacted with the electromagnetic

flux of the planet and were amplified by it to come to the cometary minds’ acutely

sensitive attention. Responses tickled back from the sky. As the gods began to make

sense of the squids’ sensoria—a research project which kept the equivalent of a billion

civilizations’ worth of scientists happily occupied for several centuries—they modified

their own internal models accordingly. The visible spectrum and the visual field burst

upon astonished inner eyes. Sight dawned for the gods, and enlightenment for the squid.

Mega-years of happy and fertile intellectual intercourse followed.

Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, alien ships emerged from nowhere. Their

occupants were warm-blooded, eight-limbed, eight-eyed, and furry. Celestial minds were

already familiar phenomena to them. They swarmed across the Solar System, cracking

memetic and genetic codes as they went. They talked to the gods with their noisy radio

systems, gibber, jabber, boasting in technical detail of the lightspeed drive and the

antigravity engine. Their discoid skiffs scooted through the skies of all the planets. They

flashed banks of lights at the kraken schools. They listened to the collective voice of the

Martian biosphere, which in all its long dying never rose above a sad, rusty croak.

They made friends. They found a promising species of small, bipedal, tailless dinosaurs

and fiddled with their genes. The new saurs were intelligent and long-lived. The octopods

taught the saurs how to fly skiffs. (Gaia took the saurs and skiffs into her dreams, and

spun shining images of them in plasma and ball lightning, but nobody noticed back then.)

They dangled the prospect of space travel before the kraken. Many of the squids pounced

at the chance. The octopods designed ships and skiffs; the saurs built them and flew the

skiffs; the krakens embraced the algorithms of interstellar navigation. Long ships, whose

pilots swam in huge aquaria, blinked away.

By this time, one thought in the baffled minds of the gods resonated from one side of the

Oort cloud to the other: KEEP THE NOISE DOWN! The radiation noise and the endless

blether of information were not the worst irritations. Despite all appeals, the octopods

persisted in digging on the surfaces of asteroids and comets. They itched like nits. Some

saurs and kraken began to see the gods’ point of view, but they were unable to convince

the octopods. The cometary minds made small, cumulative changes in their orbits,

nudging a metallic asteroid onto a trajectory that ended on the octopods’ single city and

brought the Cretaceous epoch to a cataclysmic close.

The destruction appalled even the gods. The octopods and their allies fled, while the saurs

and krakens who remained behind labored to repair the damage done. They still had

skiffs and ships. Laden with rescued specimens and genetic material, light-speed ships

traveled to the other side of the galaxy. The saurs selected a volume about two hundred

light-years across and seeded scores of terrestrial planets—some hastily and blatantly

terraformed—with the makings of new biospheres. Saurs and kraken settled the new

planets, originally as ecological engineering teams, later as colonists. Others returned to

the Solar System, to bring more species. The traffic was to continue for the next sixty-

five million years.

Echoes and rumors of other conflicts circulated around the galaxy. The kraken picked

them up from the gods in the newly settled systems and passed them on to the saurs. In

those multiple translations, subtleties were lost. Knowledge of the past became tradition,

then religion. Gradually, the saurs, in what they came to call the Second Sphere, diverged

from those in the Solar System. Meetings between the two branches of the species

became mute, and matings sterile.

In the Second Sphere, a quiet and contented civilization was held together by the kraken-

navigated starships that plied between its suns. It assimilated new arrivals at intervals of

centuries. Some fast, bright mammals increasingly reminded the saurs of the octopods.

Lemurs and lorises, apes and monkeys, successive species of hominid; bewildered,

furious bands of hunters, tribes of farmers, villages of artisans, caravans of missing

merchants, legions of the lost. The saurs’ patient answers to their frequently asked

questions became the catechism of a rational but zealous creed. Yes, the gods live in the

sky. No, they do not listen to prayers. No, they do not tell us what to do. Their first and

last commandment is: Do not disturb us.

Slowly, with the help of the saurs and the two other surviving species of hominid, the

transplanted humans built a civilization of their own, whose center was a city that never

fell.

For the gods in the Solar System, the human civilization of the Second Sphere was a

history too recent for them to have heard of. They knew only that the saurs’ snatch-

squads continued their work with ever-increasing caution as the human population grew.

The clutter of images generated by Gaia’s excitable response to the saurs’ presence

provided the perfect cover for their activities. The gods had real aliens to worry about.

The starships might bring back news from the Second Sphere a hundred thousand years

out of date, but they collected much more recent news in their occasional stops on the

way back. From these the gods learned that the octopods were a few tens of light-years

away, and heading toward the Solar System.

The god in 10049 Lora had already lived a long life when it and its peers noticed the

rising electronic racket from Earth. It volunteered to swing by for a closer look. It

absorbed the contents of the Internet in seconds, and then found, microseconds later, that

it was already out of date. It was still struggling with the exponential growth when the

European Union’s cosmonauts arrived. To them, it was a convenient Near-Earth Object,

and a possible source of raw materials for further expansion.

The humans had plans for the Solar System, the god discovered—plans that made the

past octopod incursion seem like a happy memory. But the coming octopod incursion

might be still worse. If the humans could expand into space without the devastatingly

profligate use of resources that their crude rocket technology required, an elegant solution

could be expected to the presence of both species of vermin.

Bypassing the local saurs, who were quite incapable of dealing with the problem, the god

scattered information about the interstellar drive and the gravity skiff across the Earth’s

data-sphere. Several top-secret military projects were already apparently inspired by

glimpses of skiff technology, but their sponsors unaccountably failed to take the hint. (In

their mutual mental transparency, the celestial minds found the concepts of lies, fiction,

and disinformation difficult to grasp.) The minds within 10049 Lora opened

communication with the cosmonauts on its surface, where the ESA mining station

Marshal Titov was giving the god a severe headache.

Having their computers hacked into by a carbonaceous chondrite came as a surprise to

the cosmonauts. In the sudden glut of information, they failed to notice the instructions

for a radical new technology of space travel until it was almost too late. Politics dictated

first that the contact should be secret, then that it should be public. Political and military

conflicts resulted in a mutiny on the station. Before the space marines of the European

People’s Army could arrive to suppress it, the cosmonauts built a lightspeed drive that

took the entire station away. They thought they had understood how to navigate it. They

had not. It returned to its default setting, and arrived at the Second Sphere.

Before their departure, one of the cosmonauts made sure that the instructions distributed

by the god would not be ignored, and could not be hidden. The gods approved. Soon the

noisy humans would be somebody else’s problem.

The Advancement of Learning

the jump is instantaneous. To a photon, the whole history of the universe may be like this:

over in a flash, before it’s had time to blink. To a human, it’s disorienting. One moment,

you’re an hour out from the last planet you visited—then, without transition, you’re an

hour away from the next.

Volkov spent the first of these hours preparing for his arrival, conscious that he would

have no time to do so in the second.

My name is Grigory Andreievich Volkov. I am two hundred and forty years old, I was

born about a hundred thousand years ago, and as many light-years away: Kharkov,

Russian Federation, Earth, in the year 2018. As a young conscript, I fought in the Ural

Caspian Oil War. I was with the first troops to enter Marseilles and to bathe their sore

feet in the waters of the Mediterranean. In 2040, I became a cosmonaut of the European

Union, and three years later made the first human landing on the surface of Venus. In

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