Free House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds Page B

No other stellar-based culture has endured as long.’
    ‘There would be no point in the Vigilance if it was ephemeral. Our watch is a long and lonely one. We always knew it would require great patience; a willingness to take the long view.’
    ‘Are you as old as the Vigilance?’
    ‘That would make me more than five million years old, shatterling.’
    ‘I’m nearly six.’
    ‘Except you aren’t, really. You were born that long ago, but I doubt you have experienced more than a few tens of thousands of years of subjective time. You are a bookworm who has tunnelled through the pages of history. Is that not so?’
    ‘That’s an apt analogy, curator.’
    ‘For me to be as old as the Vigilance, I would need to have endured all those years. That would make me one of the most ancient organisms in the galaxy.’
    ‘For all I know, you may be.’
    ‘I am not the oldest curator, but I am still growing. All of us are. In the dawn of our kind we found a pathway to biological immortality that depends on continued growth. There are other pathways, but this is the one we settled upon.’
    ‘Are there curators larger than you?’
    ‘Absolutely. You will not see them, though. They inhabit the largest nodes, with the most important kernels. Most of them are too large to leave now. Their heads would fill this chamber. They are beings of awesome wisdom, but they are also very slow. Nothing can be done about that, though: when synaptic signals have to cross distances of hundreds of metres, even the simplest thought may take several minutes to formulate. We find dealing with them ... taxing. But I’m sure you understand. From your perspective ... well, we’ll say no more about that, shall we?’
    I was not really surprised to be dealing with a giant, though it had taken me a moment or two to appreciate the true nature of my host. Many of the accounts in the trove spoke of the enormous size of the curators, although the details varied too widely to be of much use. When I left the Vigilance, I would add my contribution to that confusing picture. The next visitor might encounter something completely, bewilderingly different.
    ‘Do you always live in that suit?’ I asked.
    ‘Not always. We breathe fluid, not air, although you could not be expected to know that. There are spaces where we may discard our suits and still survive, but it would be much too difficult to equip all the nodes with pressure-filled chambers. Eventually, we outgrow our suits. Then we must move to one that has recently been discarded by an even older curator. I have been in this suit for more than a hundred thousand years, and I still have some room for growth. Before me this suit held many other occupants. It must look old to you, but it is constructed very robustly. Many more will wear it after I have moved on.’
    ‘My ship is considered old by the rest of my Line. But it works for me.’
    ‘That’s the important thing, shatterling.’
    ‘Would you like to inspect the contents of my trove, curator? You won’t find anything of interest in there, but as a courtesy it’s the least I can do.’
    ‘Is your trove portable? Clearly, I am much too large to fit inside your ship.’
    ‘I can bring the trove outside.’
    ‘That would be satisfactory. Emerge from your ship when you are ready. Take your time: we don’t rush things around here.’
    Half-suspecting I might need one, I had already instructed the maker to fashion me a suit. It was strange to feel myself encased by the claustrophobic, faintly masochistic contraption. Whisking is a million times easier.
    The suit did its best to make me comfortable. I slipped through Dalliance’s long-forgotten dorsal lock, inspecting the bruise-raw, weapons-scarred hull as I pushed away into the vacuum of the node’s holding chamber. Hexagonal repair platelets were already oozing from various points in Dalliance’s skin, linking together to form the lacy scaffold of a bright new epidermis. The trove was a faceted