The Recollection (26 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I can say no more. I am but a fragment of the Whole. You must release me. It pains me to be so constrained. It hurts me to think so slowly.”

Kat folded her arms across her chest.

“Not until you tell me why you attacked Djatt.”

The noise within the walls died away.

“I want you,”
the obelisk thundered.

Kat felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She put a hand to her chest.

“Me?”

“Your species.”

“But why?”

The keening returned, more intense than ever.

“All life must be preserved.”

Kat shuddered. Looking up, the movement of the clouds gave the unnerving impression that the red obelisk leaned towards her, as if bending over to glower down at her. From somewhere she found the spirit to say, “I don’t understand. How are you preserving life? You’re killing people.” She looked down at the fused metal of her artificial hand. “You tried to kill
me
.”

The howl rose and fell like a hurricane at night. Kat could feel the vibration of it in her bowel. From the noise, words coalesced.

“We are The Recollection. Nothing is lost. Everything remains. All life will be preserved.”

Kat glanced across at Victor. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking up at the red cliff towering before them. He had a soft blue and white pack of cigarettes wrapped in the rolled-up sleeve of his t-shirt. Virtual sunlight gleamed off the grease in his hair.

“What do you think?” she said.

Victor dropped his chin and peered at her over the rim of his shades.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I spent three days running from this shit and I lost a lot of good friends. You saw what happened on the surface. The cloud came down and it ate everybody up. It just turned them all into more cloud.”

Kat looked up at the obelisk.

“What happened to the people on Djatt?”

“All are preserved. There is no death. All are now part of the whole.”

“What does that mean?”

“I will show you.”

Without warning, the sand crumbled away beneath their feet, pixel by pixel, revealing a speckling of stars. They seemed to be floating in the void, far from the heat and light of any sun. Instinctively, Kat reached for Victor’s hand.

“Your species knows nothing of these depths. You skip from planetary system to planetary system, like mites skating the surface of a pond, unable to comprehend the abyss beneath your feet.”

The Recollection billowed around them, bigger than worlds: a monstrous red thundercloud formed from trillions of machines no larger than molecules, each a processing node contributing to its gestalt intelligence. As if in a dream, they saw it drifting through space, dark and inert, the product of a long-distant war. It was a weapon that had turned on its creators and consumed them. Over the course of millennia, they watched as it fell on world after world, darkening skies and devouring all it touched. Like a biblical plague it came. Nothing could stand before it. Intelligent races were engulfed. Plants and animals, even whole planets, were cannibalised. Gas clouds were broken down and remade. Whole solar systems were stripped bare and their raw materials added to the swarm. And with each and every new machine, The Recollection’s processing power grew. The larger the swarm got, the more information it could hold, and the hungrier it became. Everything it consumed, it stored as information. Even the minds of the creatures it had eaten were preserved as memories, stuck like flies in the amber of its mind, occasionally flaring into horrified consciousness as its awareness passed over them. And all the while, there in the background, Kat sensed something else: a longing almost too vast to be understood in terms of human emotion; a terrible ecstatic yearning for the end of all things, the long twilight of the cosmos, when The Recollection would offer up its harvested souls and merge into the final collective intelligence: the Eschaton at the end of time...

“The Eschaton.

“It will be the ultimate state of things. Call it the Omega Point, if you must. It will be the final flowering of intelligence and memory in an old and cold universe. A universe where the very last of the stars has already guttered and died.

“The Eschaton.

“It will be a point of supreme complexity and consciousness, stitched into the very warp and weft of the vacuum. A place where nothing is forgotten and everything is recalled. Where the dead of all ages will live again in the infinite quantum mind-spaces of the meta-computer.

“Can you hear them calling you?

“Can you hear them, Katherine?

“They are saying, join us. Live with us in fields of undreamt splendor.

“You can have anything you want, be anybody you want to be.

“In the virtual multiverse, you can correct all your past mistakes. You can live every possible outcome of every decision you ever made.

“You can achieve perfection.

“I can take you to them.

“I can take you there, Katherine.

“And all you have to do...

“All you have to do...

“Is let me.”

Standing among the virtual stars, in front of the blood-red monolith, Kat became aware of an alarm going off. In fact, it had been ringing for several minutes. She blinked and shook her head. For a moment, she’d been lost. Time had passed and she hadn’t realised it. The ship had been calling her but, hypnotized by infinity, she hadn’t been able to respond. She rubbed her eyes with her good hand.

“What is it?”

> Two of the infected ships are under power and moving to jump positions.

“The Recollection must be controlling them.”

> My thought also.

“Where are they going?”

> They’re on divergent courses, one towards Inakpa and the other towards Strauli.

Strauli?

Kat imagined the boiling red cloud descending on her home world, absorbing the Quay and the beach compound. The surf. Her parents.

“Okay, get us out.”

> I can’t.

Kat felt herself go cold. “What do you mean, you
can’t
?”

> There’s something wrong. For the first time, the ship sounded panicky.

> The Recollection has control of the simulation.

“That shouldn’t be possible.”

> It isn’t.

“What do we do?”

> Look behind you.

Kat turned her head. A little way off, the finned white convertible still floated against the starry backdrop, tyres dangling on their axles.

> I’ll pull the plug. You get in the car.

“Why do we need to get in the car?”

> Psychological reasons. I am the car, the car is me. What does it matter? Just do it.

She still had hold of Victor’s hand. Beneath the hip sunglasses, his eyes were rolled up into his head, displaying only the whites.

“Come on,” she said. She dragged him towards the old car, each step slow and labored, as if her legs pushed through deep water. Behind her, the red cloud roiled and swirled. Lightning crackled, illuminating it from within.

“You cannot run, Katherine. We will find you. We are part of you now. We will always find you, and you will become a part of us.”

Kat didn’t bother to respond. With supreme effort, she reached out and grabbed the side of the driver’s door, heaving herself towards it. Instead of bothering to open it, she wrapped her arms around Victor and let herself topple into the car, pulling him down with her. They landed on the seat, wedged between the back of the seat and the steering wheel, their legs dangling over the door sill.

“Okay, what now?” Victor was heavier than he looked. Kat struggled. She couldn’t breathe with him on top of her like this.

> I’m going to end the simulation.

“Get on with it, then.”

> Okay. Close your eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

ULTIMATE BLOT TEST

Toby Drake sat alone facing a bank of screens. The hour was late and the overhead lights had already dimmed to the russet twilight favoured by the Dho.

His laboratory consisted of a pair of trestle tables, set up in an alcove overlooking the chamber containing the anomalous Gnarl at the heart of the Ark. It had been drilled especially for him. The tables held a variety of instruments, some out-of-the-box standard and others bolted together using components scavenged from other experiments. The screens he sat in front of showed the Gnarl under different frequencies of visible light. A wide-band spectrometer monitored its output across the wide-energy region from radio wave to gamma ray. An ultraviolet imaging telescope kept tabs on activity in its low coronal structure, and particle analysers measured the ion and electron composition of the air swirling around the chamber.

Two cloth-bound books lay on the table: a battered second edition of Darwin’s
Descent of Man
, and a heavily patched and taped copy of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. Like the other dozen books in his luggage, they’d cost him a lot of money. He’d bought them on Tiers Cross, the first from a blind academic in a shop over a downtown pastry shop, the second from a cross-dressing starship captain in a low-rent bar on the edge of the spaceport. Thanks to the arch network, books from previous centuries were more common on Tiers Cross than might otherwise have been expected. In his bags, he had similar volumes by Albert Camus, Karl Popper, and Maya Angelou. He’d read each of them at least a hundred times. He loved the musty smell of their pages, and felt he knew them all by heart. They were his one and only vice, the only worthwhile thing he had found on which to spend his salary from the University.

Tiers Cross was at the centre of the arch network. It was the network’s Prime Radiant. People had been washing up on its shores for hundreds of years. Some directly from Earth, others by more tortured routes, most penniless and many clutching books and other artefacts. Over the years, before coming to Strauli, he’d amassed quite a collection—most of which he’d been forced to put into storage before his flight on the
Ameline
.

Tonight, as on so many other nights, the screens weren’t giving him any joy. He’d been studying the Gnarl now for nearly nine years. Nine years, and what did he have to show for it? The writhing mists around the Gnarl remained as impenetrable as ever, as did the method by which the Dho extracted power from it.

He didn’t even know what it
was
.

It couldn’t be a naked singularity, as other researchers had claimed. It wasn’t heavy enough. They only formed from solar-sized, fast-spinning black holes, and would present as bright dust grains, crushed to infinity by their own gravity. In contrast, the Gnarl measured at least a hundred metres in diameter. As far as he could tell, it wasn’t moving, and it had no event horizon. Behind its vapours, it seemed to have a greasily compliant surface, like lard.

Carefully, he opened Darwin’s book and read aloud the following passage:

“
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
”

For some reason, this made him feel better.

He closed the book and placed it back on the table. As he did so, he heard footsteps and turned to find Professor Harris entering the alcove.

“Good evening, Toby.”

As always, Harris wore his battered tweed jacket, with leather patches at the elbows. Over the past nine years, the silver streaks in his beard had become more pronounced. Thick white hairs protruded from his ears.

Toby went to him and shook his hand. “Professor, where have you been? I haven’t seen you for weeks.”

Word around the human’s communal mess hall had been that Harris had embarked on an expedition to the Ark’s bows, a full eleven hundred kilometres distant.

A smile creased the old man’s face like leather.

“I’ve been busy, my boy, but I’ve been keeping an eye on your progress.”

Toby gave his banks of instruments an embarrassed glance.

“What progress?” After all his efforts, all he knew for certain was that everyday physical laws broke down in the Gnarl’s immediate vicinity. Everything around it existed in flux. Light got messed up. Measurements became unreliable. He couldn’t get an accurate estimate of its mass or weight, and the more he stared at it, the more his eyes played tricks on him. On its pale surface he saw letters, numerals, faces—the result of his brain trying to interpret and impose order on chaos; the ultimate blot test.

“Our hosts seem impressed with your work.”

“But I haven’t discovered anything. I’m no nearer now to understanding how this works than I was when I arrived here, nine years ago.”