Free House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds Page A

a long time ago. It was as if a face had been carved in a cliff and then subjected to aeons of weather, until the features were no more than residual traces. The eyes alone were ten metres across; the face ten times as wide. The mouth was a dark and immobile crevasse in the granite texture of the creature’s grey-tinged flesh. The nose, the ears, were no more than worn-away mounds on the side of a hill. The head swelled at the neck and vanished into a huge body concealed by the connecting ring around the base of the domed helmet.
    The eyes blinked. It was less a blink than the playing out of an astronomical event, like the eclipse of a short-period binary. It took minutes for the lids to close; minutes again for them to ooze open. The eyes were looking at me, but there was no focus in them, no hint of animation.
    The figure drifted closer. From one side of the hull, a string of jointed ovoids became a grasping arm with fingers at the end. The fingers were as large as trees. They closed around Dalliance, and I felt their tips clang against the hull. The ship, sensing my mood, was wise enough not to take retaliatory action.
    It turned out that the curator was only interested in touch. Over the course of several hours, he ran his hand along Dalliance, cupping and stroking her, as if he needed reassurance that she was not a phantasm. Then he slowly pulled back.
    The voice, which I had not heard for more than eleven years, boomed again. It was as if no time at all had passed for the curator. ‘There is just the one of you, shatterling. You have come alone.’
    ‘It’s the way we travel, except when we have guests. Thank you for letting me come this far.’
    The giant being’s face registered no change when I was being spoken to, but I had no doubt that I was being addressed by the curator. Whatever functions that mouthed served, the creation of language was not one of them.
    The creature floated where it was, perfectly still save for the occasional blink of those monstrous, pond-like eyes. It blinked about once an hour.
    ‘You have been very patient, shatterling.’
    ‘It was told that patience would be necessary, curator.’ Aware of how easily the Vigilance could be angered, I felt as if each word I uttered was a grenade about to be thrown back in my face. ‘Is that the right term of address?’ I asked.
    ‘For you,’ the curator answered. ‘Do you have a name, other than Gentian shatterling?’
    ‘I am Campion,’ I told it.
    ‘Tell me about yourself, Campion.’
    I gave it my potted life story. ‘I was born six million years ago, one of a thousand male and female clones of Abigail Gentian. My earliest memories are of being a little girl in a huge, frightening house. It was the thirty-first century, in the Golden Hour.’
    ‘You have come a long way. You have outlived almost all the sentient beings who have ever existed, including the Priors.’
    ‘I’ve been very, very lucky. Lucky to have been born into Gentian Line, lucky to have been able to live through so much time without experiencing more than a fraction of it.’
    ‘To live through deep time would be considered unfortunate?’
    ‘I didn’t mean that, rather that I’m carrying a brain not so very different from the ones humans had when we were still hunter-gatherers. There are some modifications that help me process memories and the strands of my fellow shatterlings, but Abigail never touched the deep architecture. Our minds just aren’t engineered to experience that much time in the raw.’
    ‘You would go mad.’
    ‘I’d need help.’
    ‘You must wonder how we have coped. It is known that curators are very old, very long-lived. Unlike you, unlike the late Rimrunners, we do not have the luxury of time-dilation to make the centuries fly past.’
    ‘You appear to be managing well enough.’
    ‘You would presume to know?’
    ‘The mere continued existence of the Vigilance is evidence that you have overcome the difficulties of extreme longevity.