Tides of Light (53 page)

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 proto-language.

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 memory 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 ’factoring ’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 happened to every generation
before. They had done it and so could he. In a way, dying was the easiest of the hard things.