Author: Alastair Reynolds
Category: Science
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Then, with no forewarning, he had turned to Sylveste and said, with complete clarity: ‘The Jugglers offer the key, Doctor.’
Sylveste was too shocked to interrupt.
‘It was explained to me,’ Lascaille continued blithely. ‘While I was in Revelation Space.’
Sylveste forced himself to nod, as naturally as possible. Some still-calm part of his mind recognised the phrase which Lascaille had spoken. As far as anyone had ever been able to tell, it was what Lascaille now called the Shroud boundary - ‘space’ in which he had been granted certain ‘revelations’ too abstruse to relate.
Yet now his tongue seemed to have been loosened.
‘There was a time when the Shrouders travelled between the stars,’ Lascaille said. ‘Much as we do now - although they were an ancient species and had been starfaring for many millions of years. They were quite alien, you know.’ He paused to switch a blue chalk for a crimson one, placing it between his toes. With that, he continued his work on the mandala. But with his hand - now free from that task - he began to sketch something on an adjacent patch of ground. The creature he drew was multi-limbed, tentacled, armour-plated, spined, barely symmetrical. It looked less like a member of a starfaring alien culture than something which might have flopped and oozed its way across the bed of a Precambrian ocean. It was utterly monstrous.
‘That’s a Shrouder?’ Sylveste said, with a shiver of anticipation. ‘You actually met one?’
‘No; I never truly entered the Shroud,’ Lascaille said. ‘But they communicated with me. They revealed themselves to my mind; imparted much of their history and nature.’
Sylveste tore his gaze away from the nightmarish creature. ‘Where do the Jugglers come into it?’
‘The Pattern Jugglers have been around for a long time and they’re to be found on many worlds. All starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy encounter them sooner or later.’ Lascaille tapped his sketch. ‘Just like we did, so did the Shrouders, only very much earlier. Do you understand what I’m saying, Doctor?’
‘Yes . . .’ He thought he did, anyway. ‘But not the point of it.’
Lascaille smiled. ‘Whoever - or whatever - visits the Jugglers is remembered by them. Remembered absolutely, that is - down to the last cell; the last synaptic connection. That’s what the Jugglers are. A vast biological archiving system.’
This was true enough, Sylveste knew. Humans had gleaned very little of significance concerning the Jugglers, their function or origin. But what had become clear almost from the outset was that the Jugglers were capable of storing human personalities within their oceanic matrix, so that anyone who swam in the Juggler sea - and was dissolved and reconstituted in the process - would have achieved a kind of immortality. Later, those patterns could be realised again; temporarily imprinted in the mind of another human. The process was muddy and biological, so the stored patterns were contaminated by millions of other impressions, each subtly influencing the other. Even in the early days of Juggler exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers - but these impressions had always remained indistinct.
‘So the Shrouders were remembered by the Jugglers,’ Sylveste said. ‘But how does that help us?’
‘More than you realise. The Shrouders may look alien, but the basic architectures of their minds were not completely dissimilar to our own. Ignore the bodyplan; realise instead that they were social creatures with a verbal language and the same perceptual environment. To some degree, a human could be made to think like a Shrouder, without becoming completely inhuman in the process.’ He looked at Sylveste again. ‘It would be within the capabilities of the Jugglers to instil a Shrouder neural transform within a human neocortex.’
It was a chilling thought: achieve contact not by meeting an alien, but by becoming it. If that was what Lascaille meant. ‘How would that help us?’
‘It would stop the Shroud from killing you.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Understand that the Shroud is a protective structure. What lies within are . . . not just the Shrouders themselves, but technologies which are simply too powerful to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Over millions of years, the Shrouders combed the galaxy seeking harmful things left over by extinct cultures - things which I can almost not even begin to describe to you. Things which may once have served good, but which are also capable of being used as weapons of unimaginable horror. Technologies and techniques which may only be deployed by ascended races: means of manipulating spacetime, or of moving faster-than-light . . . other things which your mind literally can’t encompass.’
Sylveste wondered if that really were the case. ‘Then the Shrouds are - what? Treasure chests, where only the most advanced races get the keys?’
‘More than that. They defend themselves against intruders. A Shroud’s boundary is almost a living thing. It responds to the thought patterns of those who enter it. If the patterns do not resemble those of the Shrouders . . . it fights back. It alters spacetime locally, creating vicious eddies of curvature. Curvature equals gravitational sheer stress, Doctor. It rips you apart. But the right kinds of mind . . . the Shroud admits them; guides them closer, protects them in a pocket of quiet space.’
The implications, Sylveste saw, were shattering. Think like a Shrouder and one could slip past those defences . . . into the glittering heart of the treasure box. So what if humans were not advanced enough by Shrouder reckoning to behold that treasure? If they were clever enough to break open the box, were they not entitled to take what they found? According to Lascaille, the Shrouders had assumed the role of galactic matron when they secreted those harmful technologies . . . but had anyone asked them to do it? Then another question ghosted into his mind.
‘Why did they let you know this, if what was inside the Shrouds had to be protected at all costs?’
‘I don’t know if it was intentional. The barrier around the Shroud that bears my name must have failed to identify me as alien, if only fleetingly. Perhaps it was damaged, or perhaps my . . . state of mind . . . confused it. Once I had begun to penetrate the Shroud, information began to flow between us. That was how I learned these things. What the Shroud contained, and how its defences might be circumvented. It’s not a trick machines can learn, you know.’ The last remark seemed to have come from nowhere; for a moment it hung there before Lascaille continued. ‘But the Shroud must have begun to suspect that I was foreign. It rejected me; flung me back out into space.’
‘Why didn’t it just kill you?’
‘It must not have been completely confident in its judgement.’ He paused. ‘In Revelation Space, I did sense doubt. Vast arguments taking place around me, quicker than thought. In the end, caution must have won the day.’
Now another question; the one he had wanted to ask since the moment Lascaille had opened his mouth.
‘Why have you waited until now to tell us these things?’
‘I apologise for my earlier reticence. But first I had to digest the knowledge that the Shrouders had placed in my mind. It was in their terms, you see - not ours.’ He hesitated, his attention seemingly drawn to a smudge of chalk which was marring the mathematical purity of his mandala. He licked his finger and rubbed it away. ‘That was the easy part. Then I had to remember how humans communicate.’ Lascaille looked at Sylveste, his animal eyes veiled by a Neanderthal tangle of uncombed hair. ‘You’ve been kind to me, not like the others. You had patience with me. I thought this might help you.’
Sylveste sensed that this window of lucidity might soon be closing. ‘How exactly do we persuade the Jugglers to imprint the Shrouder consciousness pattern?’
‘That’s the easy part.’ He nodded at the chalk drawing. ‘Memorise this figure, and hold it in mind when you swim.’
‘That’s all?’
‘It will suffice. The internal representation of this figure in your mind will instruct the Jugglers as to your
needs. You’d better take them a gift, of course. They don’t do something of this magnitude for free.’
‘A gift?’
Sylveste was wondering what kind of gift one could possibly offer to an entity which resembled a floating island of seaweed and algae.
‘You’ll think of something. Whatever it is, make sure it’s information-dense. Otherwise you’ll bore them. You wouldn’t want to bore them.’ Sylveste wanted to ask further questions, but Lascaille’s attention had returned to his chalk drawings. ‘That’s all I have to say,’ the man said.
It turned out to be the case.
Lascaille never spoke to Sylveste, or anyone else again. A month later they found him dead, drowned in the fishpond.
‘Hello?’ Khouri said. ‘Is there anyone here?’
She had awoken, that was all she knew. Not from a catnap, either, but from something much deeper, longer and colder. A reefersleep fugue, almost certainly - they were not something you forgot, and she had woken from one before, around Yellowstone. The physiological and neural signs were exactly right. There was no sign of a reefersleep casket - she was lying, fully-clothed, on a couch - but someone could easily have moved her before she was properly conscious. Who, though? And where was she? It seemed as if someone had tossed a grenade into her memory, blowing it into frags. The place where she found herself now was only teasingly familiar.
Someone’s hallway? Wherever it was, it was filled with ugly sculptures. She had either walked past these things a matter of hours ago, or else they were recessive figments from the depths of her childhood; nursery horrors. Their curved, jagged and burnt shapes loomed over her, casting demonlike shadows. Groggily she intuited that these things fitted together in some way, or had once done so, though they were perhaps too warped and torn for that now.
Footsteps padded unsteadily across the hallway.
She twisted her head to view the approaching person. Her neck felt stiffer than cured wood. Years of experience had told her that the rest of her body would be no more supple after the sleep fugue.
The man stopped a few paces from her bed. In the moonlight glow of the chamber it was hard to read his features, but there was a familiarity within the shadowed jowliness that tugged at her memory. Someone she had known, many years ago.
‘It’s me,’ he said, the voice wet and phlegmatic. ‘Manoukhian. The Mademoiselle thought you might appreciate a familiar face when you woke up.’
The names meant something to her, but exactly what, it was hard to say. ‘What happened?’
‘Simple. She made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.’
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Twenty-two years,’ Manoukhian said, offering her a hand. ‘Now, shall we go and see the Mademoiselle?’
Sylveste woke facing a wall of black which swallowed half the sky - a black so total that it seemed like a nullification of existence itself. He had never noticed it before, but now he saw - or imagined he saw - that the ordinary darkness between the stars was in fact aglow with its own milky luminosity. But there were no stars in the circular pool of emptiness which was Lascaille’s Shroud; no source of any light whatsoever, no photons arriving from any part of the detectable electromagnetic spectrum; no neutrinos of any flavour, no particles, exotic or otherwise. No gravity waves, electrostatic or magnetic fields - not even the slight whisper of Hawking radiation which, according to the few extant theories of Shroud mechanics, ought to be bleeding out of the boundary, reflecting the entropic temperature of the surface.
None of these things happened. The only thing a Shroud did - so far as anyone had ever been able to tell - was to comprehensively obstruct all forms of radiation attempting to pass through it. That, of course, and the other thing: which was to shred any object daring to pass too close to its boundary.
They had woken him from reefersleep, and now he was in the state of sickening disorientation which accompanied the crash revival, yet young enough to weather the effects: his physiological age was only thirty-three, despite the fact that more than sixty years had passed since his birth.
‘Am I . . . all right?’ he struggled to ask the revival medicos, while all the time his attention was being snared by the nothingness beyond the station window, like someone staring into the black counterpart of a snowstorm.
‘You’re almost clear,’ said the medico next to him, watching neural readouts scroll through midair, digesting their import with quiet taps of a stylus against his lower lip. ‘But Valdez faded. That means Lefevre’s bumped up to primary. Think you can work with her?’
‘Bit late for doubts now, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a joke, Dan. Now, how much do you remember? Revival amnesia’s the one thing I haven’t scanned for.’
It seemed like a stupid question, but as soon as he interrogated his memory, he found it responding sluggishly, like a document retrieval system in an inefficient bureaucracy.
‘Do you remember Spindrift?’ the medico asked, with a note of concern in his voice. ‘It’s vital that you remember Spindrift . . .’
He remembered it, yes - but for a moment he could not connect it with any other memories. What he remembered - the last thing he remembered which was not adrift - was Yellowstone. They left it twelve years after the Eighty; twelve years after Calvin’s corporeal death; twelve years after Philip Lascaille had spoken to Sylveste; twelve years after the man had drowned himself, his purpose seemingly fulfilled.
The expedition was small but well equipped - a lighthugger crew, partially chimeric, Ultranauts who seldom mingled with the other humans; twenty scientists largely culled from SISS, and four potential contact delegates. Only two of the four would actually travel to the surface of the Shroud.
Lascaille’s Shroud was their objective, but not their first port of call. Sylveste had heeded what Lascaille had told him; the Pattern Jugglers were vital to the success of his mission. It was first necessary to visit them on their own world, tens of light-years from the Shroud. Even then Sylveste had little idea of what to expect. But, rash as it seemed, he trusted Lascaille’s advice. The man would not have broken his silence for nothing.
The Jugglers had been a curiosity for more than a century. They existed on a number of worlds, all of them dominated by single planet-sized oceans. The Jugglers were a biochemical consciousness distributed through each ocean, composed of trillions of co-acting micro-organisms, arranged into island-sized clumps. All the Jugglers’ worlds were tectonically active, and it was theorised that the Jugglers drew their energy from hydrothermal outlet vents on the seabed; that the heat was converted to bioelectrical energy and transferred to the surface via tendrils of organic superconductor draping down through kilometres of black cold. The Jugglers’ purpose - assuming they had a purpose - remained completely unknown. It was clear that they had the ability to mediate the biospheres of the worlds in which they had been seeded, acting like a single, intelligently acting mass of phytoplankton - but no one knew if this was merely secondary to some hidden, higher function. What was known - and again not properly understood - was that the Jugglers had the capacity to store and retrieve information, acting like a single, planet-wide neural net. This information was stored on many levels, from the gross connectivity patterns of surface-floating tendrils, down to free-floating strands of RNA. It was impossible to say where the oceans began and the Jugglers ended - just as it was impossible to say whether each world contained many Jugglers or merely one arbitrarily extended individual, for the islands themselves were linked by organic bridges. They were world-sized living repositories of information; vast informational sponges. Almost anything entering a Juggler ocean would be penetrated by microscopic tendrils, partially dissolved, until its structural and chemical properties had been revealed, and that information would then be passed into the biochemical storage of the ocean itself. As Lascaille had intimated, the Jugglers could imprint these patterns as well as encode them. Supposedly those patterns could include the mentalities of other species which had com
e into contact with the Jugglers - such as the Shrouders.
Human study teams had been investigating the Pattern Jugglers for many decades. Humans swimming in the Juggler-infested ocean were able to enter rapport states with the organism, as Juggler micro-tendrils filtered temporarily into the human neocortex, establishing quasi-synaptic links between the swimmers’ minds and the rest of the ocean. It was, they said, like communing with sentient algae. Trained swimmers reported feeling their consciousness expand to include the entire ocean, their memories becoming vast, verdant and ancient. Their perceptual boundaries became malleable, although at no point was there any sense that the ocean itself was truly self-aware; more that it was a mirror, massively reflecting human consciousness: the ultimate solipsism. Swimmers made startling breakthroughs in mathematics, as if the ocean had enhanced their creative faculties. Some even reported that these boosts persisted for some time after they had left the oceanic matrix and returned to dry land or orbit. Was it possible that some physical change had taken place in their minds?
So it was that the concept of the Juggler transform arose. With additional training, the swimmers learned how to select specific forms of transform. Neurologists stationed on the Juggler world attempted to map the brain alterations wrought by the aliens, but with only partial success. The transformations were extraordinarily subtle, more akin to retuning a violin than ripping it apart and building it from scratch. They were rarely permanent - days, weeks or, very occasionally, years later, the transform would fade.
Such was the state of knowledge when Sylveste’s expedition reached the Juggler world Spindrift. Now he remembered it, of course - the oceans; the tides; the volcanic chains and the constant, overpowering seaweedy stench of the organism itself. Smell unlocked the rest. All four potential Shrouder contact delegates had learnt the chalk diagram on a deep level of recall. After months of training with expert swimmers, the four entered the ocean and filled their minds with the form Lascaille had given them.