Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“Hello.”

“Oh… hello.”

“I am Shereen. I clean here.”

“My name is Aliyah. I’m a Novice.”

“I can tell.”

“Can you? I guess you can, at that.”

“I saw you here, before.”

“Yes, I saw you, too. I think.”

“Did you?”

“No, I suppose…”

“Your eyes are very beautiful.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry, I have the strangest feeling, as if we’d met before. There are things moving behind my eyes, at least it feels that way.”

“How long do you have before Initiation?”

“Twelve orbits to an Earth year of grafts and surgery.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It’s worth it. Or so they say. I would be a part of the Sisterhood. It’s a way of never really dying, isn’t it. Think about it. Haifa al-Sahara is still alive, in some form, in the Three-times-Three, and soon I will be a part of her, and she a part of me.”

“Who’s to say if it is right not to die? Isn’t our humanity defined by our death?”

“But which humanity? I’m sorry, I–”

“You look flushed. Here, let me help you–”

“It is probably the medication. Your hand feels so hot.”

“Your brow is icy cold. Here, let me loosen your scarf.”

“Thank you, I–”

“I feel strange, sitting like this with you.”

“No one can see us, can they?”

“We are alone.”

“Hold me. Shereen? Shereen.”

“Aliyah. Aliyah?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Yes.”

Things escalated when the Guild of Porters◦– swearing nominal allegiance to the House of Domicile◦– declared a general strike.

Without porters there can be no movement of cargo. Without cargo, Polyport and its adjacent settlements suffered. The House of Mirth sent its own people to replace the Porters, third-hand RLVs rising and falling from orbit. The strike turned violent. One of the RLVs crashed and burned in the violent atmosphere of the moon, and the scabs retired without grace. When at last the Porters went back to work the Cleaners went on strike. Beyond Polyport the nearest large settlement was El Quseir, on the other side of the moon. Now it threatened to rise in prominence as the Houses fought.

Human cells of each Sisterhood met to confer, and try to resolve the impasse. Shereen, cleaning, watched the meeting unobtrusively in the House of Domicile. The two women were almost sister-like◦– both short, dark haired, dark skinned, with violet eyes. Bare-headed, they were an amalgamation of protrusions and augs, their dark hair a mere fuzz on their shaven skulls. They spoke little in language, communicating somewhat by gestures but mostly in the high-bandwidth toktok of the Sisterhoods, which was both like and unlike the protocols of Others, the Toktok blong Narawan .

Their conversation in audio form, then, did not make much sense –

“Cannot?”

“Times three, times four. Mirth–” a raised finger. A shake of the head. “Port.”

“Cargo. Flow.”

“Ours.”

“All.”

“None–” a face turned sideways, light falling on augs. “Impasse?”

“Repeat.”

Silence, two sets of violet eyes staring into each other. Shereen wiping the surface of a desk. “Loop.”

“Loop.”

“Impasse.”

“Yes.”

And depart, disengaging swiftly, the one Sister leaving the room, the House, the other remaining as its others joined her, a Quarter, Four-times-One of an Eight-times-Eight.

The rest of their conversation Shereen could not hear, they did not converse, they thought in parallel. Later, when she left…

Shereen lived on Level Two of Polyphemus Port. An old neighbourhood, dug-in about a century after first settlement. There were hydroponics gardens on that level, the lush vegetation that was everywhere in the humid, Earth-tropical weather of Polyport. Vines grew over the windows of Shereen’s bedroom. She lay in bed with Aliyah. It was late. Aliyah’s body was black and blue, bruised from her latest surgery. A One-times-Nine of one of the Sisters of the House of Mirth was ailing, dying. Aliyah would replace her, become a cell in the Three-times-Three. She was almost ready.

“I can almost hear them, now,” Aliyah said. Shereen ran her finger lightly down Aliyah’s spine, marvelling at the enforced skeleton that pressed against the delicate skin. “Whispering, at the edge of consciousness. It’s not quite a singular identity, not really, it’s more of a choir of voices, that merge into one. With old echoes, old voices weaving into the music. One day soon I will cease being a singular note, and become an orchestra.”

“A part of an orchestra.”

“Maybe. But at least I will keep on living, as sound, as one note in a perfect symphony.”

“While mine will fade and die?” Shereen said, wryly. Aliyah touched her face. “I did not mean…” she said.

“I know what you meant.”

Aliyah withdrew her hand. “I don’t want a fight,” she said, softly.

“Then don’t start one.”

They stared at each other in silence across the bed. Then: “I’m sorry,” Shereen said.

“No, I’m–”

Outside a mosque was calling the faithful to prayer; green cockatoos sang to each other across the tall spindly trees; a group of children ran down the corridor chasing a ball; inside the room it was dark; and nothing, for the moment, was resolved.

It was, essentially, a trade dispute.

Though what is trade if not religion, and what is religion if not commerce? It was, perhaps, first and foremost about prestige.

Old tensions rose to the lunar surface…

The Houses were never so crass as to engage in open warfare. A century earlier the so-called Format Wars erupted in Polyport. Who is to say a Three-times-Three is the perfect format, for instance, for a human network? It is linked on a grid. A single unit◦– a One-times-One◦– can operate independently when need be, at normal human capacity, but it can also link with two of its sisters, forming a One-times-Three linear triple processor. Those Trips can then link vertically and horizontally to form a grid, a perfect◦– so they say◦– unit, a true Sisterhood.

Haifa al-Sahara, or rather the Three-times-Three Sisterhood that had once contained the human once known by that name, argued for the perfection of the form. But others had ambition, and no such faith in the purity of her numbers.

The first Eight-times-Eight had founded the House of Domicile, and others soon followed. The Sisters of the House of Mirth argued the form was too cumbersome, processing ponderous, optimal operations sluggish at best.

And yet the Eight-times-Eights flourished, and the House of Domicile soon encompassed five Sisterhoods, of which it was said that they sometimes joined, in a grid of Five-times-Eight-times-Eight, a massive processing mind occupying some four stories of real estate, only one of which was above ground.

Obviously, the House of Domicile proclaimed its own superiority, and that◦– naturally◦– rankled with the House of Mirth, as the oldest and◦– up to that time◦– strongest of the newly-risen Houses and Sisterhoods. Then came the Sisterhoods of Odd, the Five-times-Sixes of the House of Forgetting, asymmetrical and strange, and they allied themselves with the House of Domicile’s Eight-times-Eights.

Two factions, then: the three houses of the Three-times-Threes, versus the other two houses and their multiplicity of Sisterhoods.

A century back, the rise of the Houses led to conflicts both within and without; over a period of some twenty years the Houses consolidated, accumulated followers and adherents, and finally rested in an uneasy peace.

That peace was now in danger of breaking, and thus unsettling Titanic society as a whole.