‘The Lines,’ I said, with fascinated dread.
‘It made perfect sense for the machines to deal with them rather than any of those fractious, ephemeral turnover civilisations. Once they had established harmonious relations with the Commonality - which already existed by then - the Lines could broker contact between the robots and those cultures they deemed sufficiently stable and open-minded. Piece by piece, humankind would be introduced to its new robot companions. Both sides would prosper in the new alliance. The robots, with their cool, non-partisan detachment from human politics, might form a moderating influence, calming the endless cycle of turnover, bringing a new era of tranquillity to galactic affairs. Likewise, the robots had much to gain from contact with human societies - access to the arts and sciences of a million worlds and a million years of human civilisation. Art and science fascinated them above all else. They were curious, ravenously so, but there was something about their minds that kept them from being truly creative. The only genuinely innovative act they had ever achieved was to come into existence. After that, intelligent as they were, they could do nothing but ask questions. Supplying answers required intuitive leaps that they just couldn’t make.’
‘Then they weren’t like the Machine People.’
‘No. The machines that came later - millions of years down the line - had something the first wave lacked. But perhaps that was only because the first civilisation was never given enough time to invent creativity for itself. In the end, with enough shuffling of mental permutations, it might have found the missing ingredient.’
‘But they never got that chance.’
‘To start with, the robots were made royally welcome. They were an intriguing new development, a kink in history’s road that no one had predicted. Humans had resigned themselves to never having to share the galaxy with another species. That was both a blessing and a curse. It meant unlimited room for expansion, unlimited scope for raw materials, but it also meant enduring the deathliest of silences. Yes, humanity fractured into a million daughter species, some of which were scarcely recognisable to each other. But scratch beneath the scales, the fur, the tin armour, they were still humans at the core, and no amount of primate babble could ever drown out that silence completely. But now there was company. Granted, the robots had only arisen as a consequence of human activities, but on every level that mattered, they might as well have been aliens. Their minds ran on radically different algorithms. For all their strangenesses, they weren’t unwelcome, to begin with. The robots were few in number and confined to a compact volume of space, safely distant from any old-growth civilisations. They showed no expansionist ambitions. To humanity, an only child growing up in an ancient, demon-haunted house, it was like discovering a new friend to play with. And for a little while, that was what the relationship resembled. But then it turned sour.’
Ancient memories chimed in my head, struck like dusty bells. I thought of a house with rooms beyond number, and a companion who sometimes came to that house.
‘What happened?’
‘What so often does in these situations. What began as a creeping, subliminal unease - a sense that there was something not quite right, something not quite to be trusted, about these new machines - began to mutate into full-blooded paranoia. Not everyone shared it, of course - there were some who never questioned the robots’ intentions. But their voices counted for nothing. Those who spoke for the Commonality - the movers and shakers within the most prominent Lines - started to think about dealing with the machines.’
‘Genocide.’
‘What they wanted was not subjugation, not control, but the possibility of control. They wanted the ability to neutralise any threat those machines might pose in the future. With great care, a plan was formulated. A number of the robot envoys were captured and dissected - their deaths explained away as accidents that also cost human lives. It took the Commonality centuries to piece through the data they had obtained. They had to understand how those robot minds functioned. They failed, utterly and miserably. But out of that failure came one nugget of understanding. They found a flaw in the robots’ minds, a weakness that had been preserved through countless evolutionary changes. It was a weakness that could be exploited, given time and ingenuity. The Commonality devised a means to implant a data structure, a kind of neural bomb, in the mind of every member of that machine civilisation. It would spread from machine to machine without the machines ever realising they were vectors. Over time, it would infect the entire civilisation. But the beautiful thing was that nothing would happen. The robots would continue unimpaired. They could keep on moving in human circles, for as long as they were useful. Perhaps it would never be necessary to use the weapon against them - that was certainly what the Commonality was hoping even as it acted with what it saw as immense prudence and foresight. But the day that the machines posed a threat to human expansion or hegemony, the neural bombs could be activated. All it would take would be a single, harmless-looking transmission into the heart of their civilisation. As soon as the robots started processing that data, sharing it between them, their bombs would start counting down. It wouldn’t be instantaneous, because if the robots started dying as soon as that transmission was received, they’d be able to organise quarantine measures, as well as pinpointing the likely origin of their plague. The built-in delay didn’t matter to the Commonality - the Lines had been taking the long view ever since the Shattering.’
I realised that I had been absorbing all this with a kind of numb fatalism, my capacity for surprise or revulsion already exhausted.
‘So what happened? Did the robots turn against us?’
Hesperus laughed quietly. ‘No. The robots never had warlike ambitions. In truth, they had much more to fear from the organic than the organic ever had to fear from them. That’s not to say it would have been peace and love for the rest of eternity - sooner or later, tensions would probably have arisen. But the robots never lifted a finger against the human meta-civilisation.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The weapon went wrong. Either the robots changed, or the humans had not understood their minds properly ... but it activated without any external trigger. The robots started to die, in vast numbers. To begin with, they didn’t know what was happening. They even appealed to the Commonality for assistance! That was when the Commonality realised what its cleverness had brought about. They were appalled, of course, genuinely shocked by what they had done, but they still didn’t admit to any part in it. They stood back as the robots died out. They’d have known enough to design a countermeasure, something that could be spread from robot to robot to disable the earlier weapon before it had a chance to go off. But doing that would have risked exposing them as the instigators of the neural bomb. Instead, they put about disinformation suggesting that the robots had been infected with something left behind by Priors.’
‘How do you know all this, Hesperus?’
‘Because I remained in contact with the machines, right through to the end. Even when they began to suspect what had been done to them, they maintained communication with me. My ties to humanity had been growing looser by the century. They felt I was someone they could talk to.’
I shook my head in wonder and bewilderment. ‘So you knew. Across all this time, you knew.’
‘I experienced these events, Purslane, along with countless others. You think you’ve lived through six million years, but you haven’t the faintest notion what that really means. The weight of all those memories is like an ocean of liquid hydrogen, compressing itself to metal. Every new experience I choose to remember, every new moment of my existence, only adds to that crush. In the deepest, darkest, densest layer of myself, I remembered what had happened to the first machines. But those memories might as well have been entombed in rock, for all that they were readily accessible to me. Even if I chipped them out, brought them into daylight - which I did, once or twice - I couldn’t be sure they were an accurate record of real events. It took Hesperus to bring them to the surface and confirm what had really happened. When he came - the first of his kind to visit me, his head stuffed full of second-hand Vigilance data garnered from your troves - I remembered that there had once been others like him, and what had happened to them.’ He offered the palms of his hands. ‘And now I am here, telling all this to you.’
‘Did they all die?’
‘One by one, across thousands of years, they all succumbed. And for a while the Commonality lived with what it had done. The Lines sought consolation in the knowledge that they had not intended to hurt the robots, but only to make the hurting of them a possibility. They hadn’t intended to bring about their extinction, so they couldn’t be said to have committed intentional genocide. That was a fine distinction, but one they clung to assiduously. But in the end it wasn’t enough just to have peace of mind. The act itself had to be erased from Commonality history. None of you remember it because you elected not to remember it, and adjusted your own memories and records accordingly.’
‘We couldn’t have done it. It would have been too big, too difficult. The other civilisations ...’ I was voicing objections, but not because I did not believe him. I just wanted an explanation.
‘More than one Line was implicated in the atrocity. The Commonality took the necessary coordinating action. At successive reunions, the Thousand Nights were used to delete and modify critical memories. You were all complicit in this; it was not something done to you by shadowy figures beyond your control. At the same time, the shared historical records of the Commonality were tampered with. All the Lines were coerced into accepting the new version of history. Lines that refused to comply were summarily excommunicated. Outside the support apparatus and information-exchange mechanism of the Commonality, they withered away.’
‘It can’t just have been the Lines. If the machines were present in human space, other civilisations would have noticed them.’
‘They did. But turnover took care of them. That, and the occasional helping hand from a Line.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘The Lines take pride in their good deeds - the kind and noble things they do to protect lesser civilisations. They’re right to do so. But elements associated with the Lines have also murdered and suppressed upstart nascents. In six million years, do you seriously imagine this has never happened?’
I felt sick to my stomach, empty, as if a part of me had been gored out. ‘You can’t know all this. It’s one thing to have met the earlier civilisation, to have met Hesperus ...’
He made to turn his back on me, apparently disgusted with my refusal to take everything he said at face value, but halted before the movement was complete.
‘Can you doubt that your ambush was connected to the things I have spoken about, Purslane? After more than five million years, your involvement in that crime has begun to come to light. It was the Vigilance that started it - if they hadn’t found those anomalous relics, nothing would have happened. But you - Gentian Line - with your magpie craving for novelty and prestige - you had to be the first to bring those anomalies to wider attention. Had your shatterlings returned to another reunion with clear evidence that there had been an earlier machine civilisation, it would only have been a matter of time before the full picture came to light. Do you imagine that the Machine People would have been prepared to let bygones be bygones, to smile tolerantly at your earlier error? They would have felt a powerful kinship with that earlier culture, and wondered if you were capable of doing the same thing to them, given half a chance. The Commonality would have been discredited, but that would only have been the start of it. A human-machine macro-war would have been all too likely. So the rediscovery had to be suppressed. If that meant the casual annihilation of Gentian Line, an ambush wiping out nearly a thousand immortal souls, then that was deemed a very acceptable price to pay. They’d have felt the same way about killing a million, or a billion. The custodians of this secret won’t blink at murder, Purslane. They won’t blink at genocide or the extinction of another civilisation.’
‘The Vigilance was the source of it all. Why didn’t they go after the Vigilance, before all this got loose?’
The naivete of my question seemed to amuse him. ‘You make it sound so simple. The Vigilance is indestructible, Purslane: a massively distributed Dyson swarm, virtually invulnerable to outside aggression. It has persisted for more than five million years and in all likelihood it will outlive every other civilisation in this galaxy. Fortunately, the Vigilance itself didn’t appear to quite realise the significance of their find. They were too self-absorbed, too fixated on Andromeda to pay attention to such a local, parochial matter.’
After a silence I said, ‘Do you hate us now?’
‘After the kindnesses you have shown me? Hatred’s the furthest thing from my mind. But I pity you for what you did.’
‘I don’t feel as if I had any part in that crime.’
‘You all played a role. Some spoke against the plan, but not loudly enough. Some thought it didn’t go far enough; that the weapon should have been activated as soon as it had spread to enough robots. Where you stood, I can’t begin to guess. That’s between you and your conscience.’
‘The memories we changed ... can they be unlocked again?’
‘The human mind is a tricky thing, for all its simplicity. It resists being treated like a piece of furniture, like a cabinet with drawers and compartments you can slide in and out and replace without consequence.’
‘I know,’ I said quietly. ‘Hesperus, I’m sorry about what we did back then. Or I would be if sorry were a big enough word. But we don’t punish children for the crimes committed by their parents.’
‘You were not children.’