Read Online In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Paul McAuley
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about people and institutions and movements long dead. Ware and gear that had no obvious practical applications, or required a technological base that the Quick’s isolated and decadent civilisation couldn’t support. And then there was all the stuff uploaded by the Quick themselves: all kinds of cultural junk; so-called living journals that recorded every transient thought and sense impression of citizens; the results of subjective and introspective investigations procured by processes more like meditation than experimentation, in which acquisition of knowledge was secondary to the emotional and intellectual states achieved during the search. The theosophical quicksand in which so many Quick had disappeared.
The transmissions from the Solar System had fallen silent long before we arrived at Fomalhaut, rescued the Quick from their long decline, and restarted history. We Trues had brought our own databases and archives; the Library of the Homesun had fallen into disuse, haunted only by eccentrics, renegade philosophers and would-be illuminati searching for nuggets of esoteric knowledge amongst the dross. Then the Ghost seedship had arrived, and everything had changed.
It hadn’t come from Earth, like our own seedship and the seedship of the Quick, but from a colony at the nearby star of beta Hydri. Our Thing tried to negotiate with the intruders; they pushed back; we struck out at their nascent settlements; agents and avatars which had infiltrated our information networks struck back, the networks fell over, and the highly distributed nodes and matrices of the Library of the Homesun were poisoned and ripped apart.
After the last of the Ghosts had been destroyed (or so we thought), the leader of our clan, Svern, volunteered to reconstruct and manage what was left of the Library. He believed that the Ghosts had not attacked it on a whim, and was quickly proved right. There was a purpose and a pattern to the damage. The devils, haunts, bogeys, and other monsters which had infiltrated the intricate tapestry of infoscapes had targeted seams and nuggets of scientific, mathematical and philosophical data threaded through yottabytes of antique garbage. But because the Ghosts had lost the first war so quickly and comprehensively, their agents inside the Library hadn’t been able to mirror and transmit most of their discoveries. Anyone who followed their trails and managed to defeat them could win back what they’d found.
Svern organised a reconstruction project that gathered up fragments of the Library and knitted them together inside a hyperlinked informational architecture of his own design, which he’d installed in a disused building in Thule’s twilight zone. And so my clan became librarians, and because Svern had been forced to borrow credit from the common pool to pay for his visionary project, we had to provide free access to information salvaged from the wreckage or wrestled from the Ghosts’ agents. Not just to the other clans, but also to freemartins who won entrance tickets in a public lottery – cowboys and information-leggers armed with attitude and home-brewed agents and gear, obsessives tracking private theories that, according to them, would win the war or make them secret masters of the universe. Although less than twenty per cent of the original Library had been restored, and much of that was junk, with a little luck, considerable judgement and the right analytical gear, there was still plenty of useful information to be gleaned from the ruins, much as mining gliders winnowed precious heavy metals from rainstorms of molten rock on Dis.
So it had been for the past three gigaseconds, between the end of the first war with the Ghosts and the beginning of the second, when legions seeded by a few survivors had risen from nests hidden amongst the myriad worldlets of Fomalhaut’s dust belt and swept towards Cthuga. A war still ongoing; a war in which, after my fall and disgrace, I’d become a minor foot
The transmissions from the Solar System had fallen silent long before we arrived at Fomalhaut, rescued the Quick from their long decline, and restarted history. We Trues had brought our own databases and archives; the Library of the Homesun had fallen into disuse, haunted only by eccentrics, renegade philosophers and would-be illuminati searching for nuggets of esoteric knowledge amongst the dross. Then the Ghost seedship had arrived, and everything had changed.
It hadn’t come from Earth, like our own seedship and the seedship of the Quick, but from a colony at the nearby star of beta Hydri. Our Thing tried to negotiate with the intruders; they pushed back; we struck out at their nascent settlements; agents and avatars which had infiltrated our information networks struck back, the networks fell over, and the highly distributed nodes and matrices of the Library of the Homesun were poisoned and ripped apart.
After the last of the Ghosts had been destroyed (or so we thought), the leader of our clan, Svern, volunteered to reconstruct and manage what was left of the Library. He believed that the Ghosts had not attacked it on a whim, and was quickly proved right. There was a purpose and a pattern to the damage. The devils, haunts, bogeys, and other monsters which had infiltrated the intricate tapestry of infoscapes had targeted seams and nuggets of scientific, mathematical and philosophical data threaded through yottabytes of antique garbage. But because the Ghosts had lost the first war so quickly and comprehensively, their agents inside the Library hadn’t been able to mirror and transmit most of their discoveries. Anyone who followed their trails and managed to defeat them could win back what they’d found.
Svern organised a reconstruction project that gathered up fragments of the Library and knitted them together inside a hyperlinked informational architecture of his own design, which he’d installed in a disused building in Thule’s twilight zone. And so my clan became librarians, and because Svern had been forced to borrow credit from the common pool to pay for his visionary project, we had to provide free access to information salvaged from the wreckage or wrestled from the Ghosts’ agents. Not just to the other clans, but also to freemartins who won entrance tickets in a public lottery – cowboys and information-leggers armed with attitude and home-brewed agents and gear, obsessives tracking private theories that, according to them, would win the war or make them secret masters of the universe. Although less than twenty per cent of the original Library had been restored, and much of that was junk, with a little luck, considerable judgement and the right analytical gear, there was still plenty of useful information to be gleaned from the ruins, much as mining gliders winnowed precious heavy metals from rainstorms of molten rock on Dis.
So it had been for the past three gigaseconds, between the end of the first war with the Ghosts and the beginning of the second, when legions seeded by a few survivors had risen from nests hidden amongst the myriad worldlets of Fomalhaut’s dust belt and swept towards Cthuga. A war still ongoing; a war in which, after my fall and disgrace, I’d become a minor foot
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