House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds Page A

might not bear much resemblance to that of a baseline human, even if one allowed for the differences in scale.
    The peculiarities of the curator’s digestive tract became apparent as I took in more of my surroundings. The chamber was more or less hemispherical, with the entry point near the pole of the half-sphere. The walls of the hemisphere were ribbed with stiff, glistening struts, radiating out from the door - some kind of bone or cartilage. The ribs flexed and eased on a very slow cycle, as if the curator’s balloon-sized lungs were expanding and contracting somewhere above us, behind metres of abdominal wall and pleural cavity.
    What was unusual about the chamber, what made me think it had no counterpart in my own body, was the floor - or wall - opposing the domed part. It was a sea of waving, undulating arms, like a grove of anemones. The arms were two or three times longer than me and they pulsed with hypnotic colours, flickering and strobing as they brushed against each other. Some of the arms were bent back on themselves, their tips vanishing into the luminous mass. I paddled closer and saw dark objects lodged in the gaps between the arms, pressed deep into the fleshy base in which the arms were rooted. The objects were cylinders, cubes and ovoids, and the arms that were bent over were attached to them, fixed by their sucker-like tips to the shells of the boxes or plunging into them via holes or gaps in their casings.
    I was still carrying the trove. Without being told what to do, I gave it a shove in the direction of the waving arms and let it drift. A dozen or so arms flexed towards it, stretching to their fullest extent and puckering their tips like animals hungry for the teat. The trove fell within reach and the arms wrestled with it, squabbling over which of them should have possession.
    ‘Welcome to my gut,’ the curator said. ‘This is an interface to my nervous system. There are others inside me, but this will suffice for our purposes.’
    ‘Those other objects - they’re also troves, aren’t they?’
    ‘Troves, or things very like troves. In most cases they were donated by their owners. I will not expect the same of you, but I am still curious about the contents of your trove.’
    One of the arms fastened itself to the middle of the trove, contacting the gold interface ring. The arm shivered with colour, vibrant pulses racing from the tip to the fleshy root.
    ‘Are you reading it now?’
    ‘The process has begun, shatterling. It will take a while, but these things must be done properly. The data is not going any further than my head. I am a buffer between your trove and the rest of the Vigilance, for now. We have long been wary of data contamination.’
    While I was distracted, three of the arms had reached out and made contact with my suit. I was being hauled in slyly, as if they did not want me to realise what was happening. I flinched and jerked myself free.
    ‘May I ask some questions, curator?’
    ‘There is never any harm in asking.’
    But there was, I thought. There was potential harm in the most innocent act of data acquisition, as even the curator had acknowledged.
    ‘There’s quite a lot about the Vigilance we don’t know.’
    ‘Many of your kind have been here already. Did they not satisfy your curiosity?’
    ‘There are still some pieces missing from the picture.’
    ‘And you think you will make a difference?’
    ‘It’s my duty to try. My duty to the Line and the Commonality.’
    ‘Then far be it from me to stand in the way of your enquiries, shatterling.’
    I felt as if I was standing tiptoe on the edge of something treacherous. I had done well so far, if only because I was still breathing. I had been allowed entry into the swarm, into one of the swarm’s processing nodes, and I had been given an audience with a curator. Very few envoys had got this far - at least not the ones who ever reported back.
    ‘We’ve long understood that the Vigilance gathers information