1. (Prologue in a Spaceport)
At last a journey could begin again!
To see the Lord installed in his flagship was always as grotesque an experience as it was impressive. A cylinder of nearly fifty meters in length and sixteen in diameter, made of a glistening black material that seemed at once metallic and ceramic, was lowered into place through a magnetic port behind the bridge at an agonizing speed by a pair of floating fenders. Despite its colossal size, the solar sailer Pascal II shuddered as the command module settled into place, as if the mass inside the proportionally quite small object outweighed the rest of the ship in its entirety. Was it the Lord or was it his vessel that was so heavy?
He was sought after on account of his experience.
Exactly seventy-five years prior, he had led the remnants of a scattered and ravaged battlecruiser force straight through a horrific alien fleet, which some said came from the strangely glowing Gray Giant Gamma in the region of the Wells Condensation, just above the galactic plane and far out in the Periphery. A fleet undoubtedly armed with gravity-weapons and reality-disrupters. And without losing a single ship.
Such displays had been performed by other lords in the annals before him.
But his was original. In the midst of the operation in the sector's center, out in a deserted region in the outskirts of one of the galaxy's spiral arms, he had happened upon a "hungry" black hole-a nearly imperceptible singularity that for millions of years had been forced to content itself with the occasional, quickly devoured handful of free-roaming hydrogen atoms.
A negativity in the void, a scarcely distinguishable trap: a point of departure from the local physics and entry into another-one that no brakes could withstand if you got close enough to the edge that you began to slide downward along the frictionless, steepening slope that led out of the thin spider web of local physics and into a hotter and tighter world where all centers of attraction were non-linear and event horizons unrolled into lazy fractals, as expressive and unpredictable as the fantasies of a good poet.
He had led the whole alien fleet into this ravenous, empty black hole, gracefully dropping a few photons at just the right second to betray their position to the wickedly fast pursuers as he and his "men" (for some reason he often called them that, even though some were flat as flounders or, like Earth's Ediacarian fauna hundreds of millions of years extinct, had all their organs on the outside and spent the whole journey in saltwater tanks under sixteen atmospheres of pressure. "A man is a man," the Lord often remarked. "And you can tell it's a man rather than a woman from the character as clearly as you can from the body." Like all older marine officers, he was a monster of conservatism in such questions.) when, as I was saying, he and all of his men and his ship found themselves on the right side of the periphery of that solar system's gaping giant of a funnel, which-without hope, dread, or anything more than a quickly devoured gamma particle or two every ten thousand years to betray its existence-slowly rotated at whatever rhythm it pleased.
That one after another of the hostile ships disappeared behind them into the invisible singularity was only revealed by the ever-more-cheerful gamma radiation that leaked from the funnel's center. But by then, it was too late to brake.
If the singularity could think, its first reaction must have been something in the vein of pleasant surprise.
(The Lord, for his part, was fully convinced that even such abstract structural disturbances as "hungry" weak singularities could think. Everything thinks, he often said. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.)
Why did it rotate? To stay in contact with the no-longer-local physics to which it belonged? Or perhaps it was the black hole that stood still while the universe rotated? Meaningless questions. Earthbound questions. That small but intense cone of radiation had revealed to the First Spacelord that the hostile fleet had reached its target. The black hole's bottom had thankfully transformed this space into time, spitting out the excess energy in a thin but very noticeable cone of high frequency gamma radiation.
The Spacelord was an extremely social being. Scarcely had a journey begun before he split his mental structure into eight subdivisions. And then over the decades, these offshoots, these egos could somewhat deceptively tell each other stories. A cheerful circle of storytellers, each imagining himself superior to the others in life experience, genius, and rhetorical flourish-a place where conversation often progressed at lightning speed. It was only when an unexpected cluster of comets or some other problem arose that he occasionally had to disperse the circle for a few hours and devote his undivided attention to his duties.
He loathed that, for it meant that all the thrilling stories that he had anticipated from his fellow conversation partners were revealed to him in an instant-the collapse of fiction was the only plausible expression for that sort of rude awakening. Otherwise, he enjoyed himself greatly in this somewhat unique circle of brilliant storytellers where he never quite knew which of the eight around the table he was himself. Was this art of storytelling of a human origin or of a mechanical one? It's not easy to say. Can you really decide about a thought who it was that thought it-machine, animal, god, or man?
Whether he had an audience or not seemed to him even less meaningful. On certain occasions, he was said to have offered a message of a more philosophical nature to the scattered fleet: "There is no void. And it would be nice if you idiots of Darkness could once and for all accustom yourselves to that!
There wasn't much left to see of the cylinder now.
The pale light from the nearest sun was reflected only hesitantly in its black, windowless sides. What strange conditions could prevail in there? Perhaps the pressure of a thousand atmospheres? Incomprehensibly high or very low temperatures? How could a body look to require such a strange costume?
Was the Lord himself really that big? Or was he just a tiny organism, guarded by this impregnable, temperature-regulated environment that he always carried with him? As anyone educated understood, the Spacelord could in reality be quite small. If he was built of material from a dark neutron star, he could theoretically be at the scale of a molecule and still find a great deal to do if he managed to maintain his bizarre living conditions in that darkly polished hulk of a cylinder.
Or perhaps the Spacelord was simply a small object sensitive to the rhetorical implications of size.
Or-as the really sophisticated observer loved to point out-maybe there didn't need to be a "Lord" inside the cylinder at all. Could this big, black-gleaming cylinder quite simply be a communication terminal? Perhaps he had never left the depths of his warm, motherly sea-was it from there that he steered and navigated the ship? Could that be what made him so calm and carefree a commander?
Others still knew to say that he wasn't a commander at all, much less a Lord, but rather a Lem Tank: a simple means of communication originally invented by the great twentieth century visionary Stanislaw Lem. The Lem Tank held millions of microscopic Ciliates, constantly oscillating in Brownian motion and reacting with electromagnetic impulses due to a weak iron salt they received in their food. Nobody knew exactly how it worked, but it evidently allowed the mass of amoebae to sustain a homeostasis so precise that it could hold the ship's location without error in the complicated coordinate system of deep space-and from there, calculate any other course that might be requested, even projecting how the changing constellations would appear from any desired location along the intended path. The only risk with these half-biological, half-electrical artificial intelligences was that the Ciliates, under extended use and particularly if the oxygen supply wasn't perfectly balanced, could degenerate and lose their usefulness entirely. Was the Spacelord just the vessel's Lem Tank?
Or, as the Lord himself was said to have commented:
"There are so many ways to exist that it's next to impossible not to do it one way or another."
Pascall II, the enormous Uranus-class interstellar solar sailer, finally found itself on its way out of dock. Its sail, thin as the membrane of a gigantic insect's wings and reflective as a silver mirror, stood ready to be hoisted by a thousand tireless robot arms, not unlike the multifaceted, articulated antennae in a parasol. It slowly spread itself out a square mile in all directions. The ship's speed failed to match that of a slow cyclist, and months more would pass before it reached even half the speed of light-just as it would gradually take months to slow back down again. That was why you needed an above-average artificial intelligence as a commander. But it would be weeks before the lord needed to devote more than a passing thought to the sail, rig, and navigation.
In the gun room-the Lord loved to call it that-he had set up the arrangement for his beloved game with the same care as always. It was a sort of well-lit parlor (which possibly wasn't a parlor at all but rather a three-dimensional holographic projection), and inside sat eight old-fashioned British naval officers in admiral uniforms around a firm oak table dressed with green leather: their identical faces adorned by eight full but well-groomed beards; their epaulets glistening; their thick, well-manicured fingers playing absentmindedly with the walnuts in the splendid silver dish that, together with the flask of aged port and silver goblets, made up the table's only decoration. It looked like the best mess hall you could imagine on a British flagship, from Nelson's days up to the Falkland War. But there was an interesting difference. None of the eight storytellers around the table knew who they were.
Naturally, each knew that he was one of them, but the special experience of consciousness that the Old Ones had once come to know with such unerring certainty when they found themselves around a table-not just that they were one of those sitting around the table but also who around the table they were, in other words the feeling of being someone in particular-that experience had unfortunately gone missing over the epochs after mankind. Artificial intelligence was naturally of a sophistication to recreate a sort of consciousness: the feeling of being a unique corner of the world-a thing with windows, you might say, with reconstructed shadows and echoes. But nothing really gave that same, original experience of being someone.
It was, for example, quite easy to program a master-file that gave each of the eight well-manicured and blue-uniformed forty-year-old British admirals a perfect sense of which order they were going to speak in. But the feeling of being someone in particular was something that their lord and master, the Spacelord, had not been able to instill. Maybe that was why their fingers now played so nervously along the edges of the table or reached absentmindedly for the walnuts in the silver bowl.
"My lords", said the first of the eight, "my story concerns something for which there is actually no name..."
2. (Of Jailed Princes and their Captors)
"My lords," said the first of the eight, "as your cheerful murmuring subsides, I would like to come at last to my tale, or rather, my tales—for they are numerous. They concern something rather sensitive, namely that which used to be called 'The Prisoners in the Well of Dreams'."
It is well known that many classical civilizations, independent of one another, discovered a method to hold figures of political or dynastic importance in captivity—those too well positioned or meaningful to simply be killed. This method was at once merciful and very cruel, working in such a subtle and pleasant way that the prisoner never once noticed their confinement until their whole life had passed and it was too late to return to dynastic revolt, power, and their rightful revenge.
One way or another, the claimant—a younger brother usually or perhaps a treacherous minister—succeeded in getting ahold of the inconvenient person. Most common was abduction during the deepest of sleeps, but hypnotic drugs and seduction were also employed, as we know from the case of the Queen of Ur, a lady whose indecency and lust for power brought about so much suffering that one had to ask if she might actually have earned her fate. That, however, was far from the case considering all the misfortunes that accompanied that sort of imprisonment.
In any event, the technique these usurpers employed consisted of placing the prisoner in a biological environment that provided their body with everything it might need. Often, this took the form of a tank, held precisely at conditions that resembled those of a mother's womb: a fluid kept at body temperature and other homeostatic systems working constantly to provide oxygen, internal fluid balance, nutrients, minerals, and vitamins-indeed, almost an exact recreation of the experience of an embryo.
But most essential of all was the cable that ran to the helmet fit tightly around the prisoner's head, which continuously shocked his cortex into a simulated life. With a realism that was stronger and more coherent than dreams, all the events of normal life played across the cerebral cortex for the imprisoned: pleasures, adventures, and perils, even down to life's most trivial activities. He could dream that he sailed over an indignant sea in a roaring storm-that he was cast upon a strange coast by a shipwreck, and there engaged in the wildest and most thrilling affairs with the island's pale, slender, and dim-eyed widows. He could experience journeys through fuming snowstorms in remote and desolate mountain regions; luxurious banquets; duels, wounds, grief, and terror-even orgies in perfume-scented harems. And all of it borrowed from someone else's life.
For the whole method was based on the possibility of recording another being's memories-memories which then could be edited, trimmed apart, set together, and allowed to glide over one another in any way the jailer pleased.
In these classical ages, the composition of imaginary lives began to assume the status of high art.
Funk of Fulda on Ugaran was perhaps the greatest of those early masters. He rejected many of his precursors' more Baroque tricks: letting the prisoner live their life as a swallow, glutted on insects and as free and quick as the wind; or as some armored, appallingly powerful creature in a region of seething volcanic lakes; even as an intergalactic being, vegetating in the weak swells of distant gravitational collapses and waiting through millennia on some unknown treasure while its frigid mind contemplated the fundamental problems of mathematics and philosophy with a geological slowness. All such manifestations of a grotesque imagination were mystifying for Funk of Fulda.
Funk was not content to merely combine memories from hundreds of intelligent beings into a single timeline, so consistent, so convincing and simple at its essence, that any real life would seem invented in comparison.
Instead, he amused himself by inserting what one could call dreams within dreams. Remarkable liberations-awakenings from the sterile calm of the dream-tank and subsequent fortune in open rebellion and the seizure of power. In these dreams, the prisoner truly believed himself to be free and back in the reality of his own life, when in fact he had only entered into a livelier section of the same experience.
Such was the lifecycle that Funk of Fulda constructed for Prince Filibert of Ziguinchor: that eighteen-year-old heir to the throne, imprisoned in a dream-tank by an envious and power-hungry uncle and lost very shortly thereafter in one of Funk's sequences of constructed liberation:
When the newly liberated Prince Filibert finally began to breath normally, he pulled slowly on his head, aware of the incredible danger of his position. All he felt were some thistles pushing up here and there from a field of weeds and small stones. He distinctly felt a fire ant's bite near his waistband and hoped it would be the only of its kind.
He pulled, as I said, with the utmost care on his head. Partly because he was unsure if he could lift it, but also partly because if all was as it ought to be, this field would be closely watched by the Baron's strange group of servants and dogs. A treacherous stillness prevailed in the landscape that spread out before him.
Straight ahead was a steep hill where rain water had carved deep grooves and the thistle grew man-high between channels of rounded pebbles. Crawling slowly, he pulled himself up to the hill's crest and looked out over a dense and rough woodland, which seemed to stretch over low hills as far as the horizon where all was lost in haze.
And still no sign of dogs.
What had happened? Could he be free? Who was he, how old? And why did he feel so miserable? He checked his hand, felt a broken thumbnail; the hand gave no lead. Vague memories, not of one but several lives, told him that he just recently had been a Prisoner of Dreams. But in which dreams he had been held captive was no longer so clear. With another careful movement of his hand, he felt down along his neck. The tender, perhaps slightly damp spot where an electrode would have connected him to the machine was gone. All he felt was the thickness of his hair, some dust from that arid hill.
An unfamiliar sunlight beat against the crown of his head; the skin of the forehead stung.
If he really had been a Prisoner of Dreams, how could he have gotten himself out of the tank? Had he managed it in an unguarded moment? Killed his guards? Or had he eluded them, running down endless, labyrinthine corridors with his breath caught in his throat? Had someone come to his aid?
Lost in confused memories, he suddenly recalled those corridors vividly-terrifyingly deserted but at the same time full of people: men, women, and children on their way in all directions. Who had held him captive? Which hereditary right had he been deprived of, lowered so deeply into the dream's bottomless well that he no longer even knew why he was put there or whose prisoner he was? And what was this language that gave form to his thoughts? It felt verbose and old-fashioned, able to form subordinate clauses of all sizes, gerundive constructions-a language that turned quickly from one thing to the next. He seemed to have a mastery over it, never finding himself at a loss for words. Perhaps he was not a royal person himself but a learned advisor to one?
His imagination played a moment with the thought that he had been freed by a great catastrophe-that all others in the region, both friends and enemies, were dead. Then again, he might meet his friends in those very woods-assemble them into a host of rebels and never relent from their glorious campaign until the wicked usurper who so long ago sank him into the Well of Dreams was displayed with his head on a pike from the castle's uppermost tower.
But how could one distinguish between friend and enemy? If he chanced upon someone out there in the woods-the woods which lay so still in the heat of midday-how should he know on whose side they stood?
With renewed attention, Filibert considered the nearest thistle. It was an absolutely normal Carline thistle. Despite the heat, it must have been rather early in the year because it still hadn't broken out in bloom. Around the bud, there was very clearly the light blue coloring that was so characteristic of that species. What was strange about this thistle in particular, though, among a thousand others in the field, was that just around the bud's edge, a faint line of gold sometimes flickered into life before disappearing, almost as if the plant was lit from within.
Could this be a disturbance-an elegant deficiency in the microcircuit that created that part of the dream? Or are there perhaps, despite everything, thistles that behave this way?
If Filibert suspected something in that moment, he never revealed it to anyone. On the whole, this experience made him very reluctant to talk about himself-or at least, about what he eventually knew and did not know about his own existence. From that moment, through the whole long and glorious Filibert Rebellion right up to his heroic death on a battlefield near Os thirty-five years later, he carried out his roles-fugitive, rebel, his enemies' just and stern judge, his people's even-handed and mild lord-with a style and significance that made him unforgettable. But he never once mentioned his imprisonment or his memories; instead, he let his life fade into the grandeur a heroic chronicle.
"Would it really matter in the end," said the First Lord as he played thoughtfully with his black beard as if that was where the answer might lie, "if he really existed or not?"
This method of planting a subtle suspicion in the prisoner that he really was imprisoned was naturally much more interesting for Funk. He was deeply convinced that no captivity in the Well of Dreams was possible without the prisoner's own participation and that the art he practiced was in no way crueler than life itself. He was particularly amused by giving the prisoners double lives-letting them oscillate between two different sets of experiences-the first, let's say, as an impoverished woodcutter with four children in the Chisos Mountains, and the other as a spoiled merchant in the city of Palmyra during the great spice trades. Both lives flashed back and forth abruptly, and it remained a mystery if the prisoner understood himself as one person with two lives or two entirely different people with different lives that in some strange way had access to one another's memories. Or perhaps did they not have access to each other's memories? Funk took many secrets of that sort with him to the grave when his laboratory was destroyed by The Faithful during the Great Rebellion's chaotic first years. Later historians have lamented that so much wisdom was lost all at once.
One of Funk's experiments was as strange as it was sadistic: trapping the prisoners against whom he harbored a personal grudge within circular lives. At least one case is well known; it was the cruel baron Oztek, who, after forcing himself on Funk's own sister, had a gradual change in luck and ended up in the grasp of Funk's employer. Funk let the prisoner live out a very long and complicated dream, in which the Baron was one of his own tax collectors and was accused of having embezzled revenue from his lord. He underwent a tedious process, where after endless and unrelentingly detailed reviews of numbers, he was sentenced to the Well of Dreams-where he found himself again as an accused tax collector for the strict Baron Oztek. Over and over, the same course of events was repeated in the most minute detail, all the way up to the trial. In the end, the wicked Baron must have lived in a barefaced world of knowledge, where not a single number, not a comma, was unknown to him.
Funk's final masterpiece was to persuade a prisoner in the Well of Dreams that he was a very powerful artificial intelligence. Accordingly, the fool-charged with the terrible crime of not only falling asleep but snoring when the Count read one of his self-written cantos-was equipped like his victim with greater mathematical insight and knowledge of physics than any human could fathom.
There was not a single linear or non-linear equation for movement that he couldn't solve within seconds: not a wave-system he couldn't calculate.
(Or maybe the dream only consisted of two thoughts: the first, something very trivial like "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers", and the second, a decision that the first had actually been a brilliant formula for a superstring in sixteen-dimensional space. How would you know the difference?)
The idiot, however, was persuaded that he was an enormous artificial intelligence-as large as a planet and floating in the space between two solar systems-and given the duty to design a simplified model of the local physics that surrounded him. To make doubly sure, Funk also convinced the fool (I seem to remember that his name was Filo) that the people who had designed him were tens of thousands of years extinct and not really concerned with the assignment anymore. Filo could progress at whatever pace he pleased.
The monumental artificial intelligence began to experiment and it wasn't long before he had a sufficient knowledge at his disposal (or, thought he had) to design a small local physics. It consisted of a twelve-dimensional space with string-shaped sequences of events. On their way in and out of the space's loops and pockets, the strings assumed the properties of an elementary particle. Starting with a hot gas cloud, which consisted of a single type of particle that he was naturally obliged to postulate, Filo let galaxies and stars form through a process of slow cooling. The extreme temperature of the new suns was sufficient to create heavy metals and complicated elements.
Filo let everything pass by at a surreal speed, experimenting here and there with different constants. He discovered that the gravity constant was important. In some of his universes, everything tended to implode as gravity collapsed in on itself; in others, the whole system cooled off at a terrifying speed; in a few, a terrible explosion occurred when positive and negative matter couldn't be separated from one another quickly enough.
How long those experiments went on (or seemed to go on) is difficult to say.
The goal, however, was easier to understand: he wanted to bring about a model (or a universe, depending on how you look at it) that was capable of first developing organic life and then organic intelligence. Accordingly, he began to experiment with planets, which arose from the disruptions in gravity between suns. It took him quite a few experiments before he gave up on that idea entirely. It was clearly easy to form planets by shooting the heavy, wandering neutron-stars in on long elliptical paths that sometimes happened to touch the suns, but it was not as simple to create a planet fit for organic intelligence. Filo resolved himself to a simplification; the interstellar dust cloud itself would be placed in just the right electromagnetic border-conditions to develop its own intelligent beings.
Some say that he was struck by a catastrophe somewhere on the way-that his reason, both the fool's and the artificial intelligence's, crashed together and became as empty as the space between his galaxies. Others say that he actually succeeded (or thought he succeeded) and that the monsters he called forth were so terrible, that after some millions of simulated years of pseudo-genetic development, they began to speak and whispered such horrible truths to him that he lost his senses for good-both as an artificial intelligence and as a human being.
No sphinx could set a riddle more intriguing: what had Filo's monsters said to their creator?
In the end, Master Funk of Fulda was convinced that no dream could exist without the consent and participation of the dreamer: that it was impossible for any being, even for Funk himself, to determine between dreams and reality-between captivity and freedom-if the dream itself were constructed with sufficient care.
When one of The Faithful's soldiers burst into his laboratory one October day in the year 49 before the Second Imperium with sword drawn, Funk is said to have only looked up absent-mindedly from the pseudo-organic microcircuit he was designing to simulate the human orgasm. His final words, according to legend:
"And who are you to think that one shadow can cut the head off another?"