Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days is a pair of novellas bound into a single book. While they don't share any characters or take place in any obvious continuity, they are both set in Reynolds's larger Revelation Space universe, and they have a number of themes in common. Both center on a viewpoint character who makes a kind on contact with an alien intelligence, a contact that has the potential to become a form of self-destruction. In both, this viewpoint character has a close friend who is even more enthusiastic about the contact, and in both the protagonist faces a final decision about whether or not to succumb to temptation. These stories would be good companions to The City in the Middle of the Night, which I read last year.
In Diamond Dogs, Swift is the childhood friend of Childe, an eccentric billionaire type. They grew up playing a game in which they navigate mazes, solve puzzles, and outwit traps (a game that Reynolds not-so-subtly alludes, 'hey, it's D&D, stupid!') Now Childe has found a real life dungeon, in the form of an alien tower. He claims to have learned about it from a dying starship captain who was killed by the tower itself, and proposes a kind of mountain-climbing expedition to traverse the tower and reach its top.
Childe assembles a party that includes a pilot to get them there, a burglar who ends up with surprisingly little to do, a cyberneticist who's a social pariah for the extremity of his alterations, and Swift's ex-wife Celestine, who is a mathematical savant because her brain was altered by the alien Pattern Jugglers. Inside the tower, they find a series of featureless empty room, each with a puzzle door as its only exit. One side of the door has some sort of mathematical pattern and the other has multiple choice answers. Pick the right answer to advance, pick the wrong answer and you get punished until you figure out the right one. The punishments involve one or more party members getting their limbs amputated, and/or dying.
As a game, this has all the appeal of being the learner in a real version of the fake experiment Milgram pretended to run as a cover for his actual study. There are no interesting sights to see, no treasures or rewards, no living things to interact with, nothing even to fight. Imagine taking the SAT, except you get physically tortured for every wrong answer. If someone tried to run me through a D&D game like this, I might quit the hobby afterward.
The story is compelling because of the emotional dynamics involved - Celestine wants to push the limits of her gift for math, Childe wants to reach the summit just because it's there, Swift wants Childe to give up before he does, and the cyberneticist enjoys the chance to radically roboticize the others' injured bodies. The pilot and burglar provide a bit of everyman commentary, and show us how horribly one can die from the tower's injuries.
By the end, they can only advance by becoming 'diamond dogs,' almost entirely robotic and no longer recognizably human, either physically or psychologically. The cyberneticist then kills himself to ensure that his magnum opus can't be taken apart. Childe presses on past a point where it seems suicidal. Swift initially allows Celestine to lead him away, but ultimately realizes he still has to decide for himself to either go back and probably die, or recommit every day to staying away.
Although the first story is more interesting to gamers, Turquoise Days is, I think, a much better tale. Naqi and her older sister Mina are scientists on an ocean world who help study the local population of Pattern Jugglers. The Jugglers are like alien algae who self-organize into vast computational nodes, that in turn communicate with each other worldwide. (And maybe across worlds?) Humans can 'swim' with the Jugglers, giving the aliens access to their minds and memories in exchange for knowledge and sometimes 'gifts' like Celestine's mathematical fluency from before.
In the first act of the story, Naqi and Mina observe a strange phenomenon that they interpret as an invitation to swim at the same time their isolated world learns that a human starship will arrive in a few years. Naqi glimpses a copy of a dangerous mind inside the Pattern Jugglers' mental archive. Mina is absorbed entirely and vanishes.
In the second act, Naqi is second-in-command of The Moat, an attempt to wall off a lagoon of Pattern Jugglers from the rest of the ocean for special study, and the spaceship has arrived, bringing delegates who want to study the planet's Jugglers. The delegates come to The Moat, and Naqi and her team are asked to try closing it early to show off to the foreigners.
In the third act, one delegate goes into the moat and somehow poisons the Pattern Jugglers there. The Moat is closed to protect the ocean, and Naqi gives chase. Also the rest of the delegates turn out to be more sinister, and take over the facility. Naqi catches up to the poisoner and learns that the last time a ship came to her world, the Pattern Jugglers absorbed a wannabe dictator, the malign presence she detected before. The other delegates are actually disciples, hoping to get the Jugglers to over-write their own personalities with copies of their leader. The poisoner wants to kill the Jugglers to prevent that from happening.
Naqi swims and communes again and meets Mina's mind. She begs her sister to get the Jugglers to expel the fascists and warns her about the poison. The global network of Pattern Jugglers resolve the multiple problems in a way that satisfies them but maybe not any of the human factions involved, and Naqi has to decide whether to stay and help rebuild the world, or swim a final time and get absorbed to rejoin her sister.
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