Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 626
investigated it. The nanotech tried to make sense of where it
was and what it clung to. It traded data with its neighbors to
that end.
It was semi-sentient, but more than that, he now knew, it
was semi-thalient as well.
The sand grains traded more than just data. They
speculated as to the category of object they were; when unsure,
they invented new categories. So the sand grains sang their
names, but around and about Armiger, the land itself said,
Sand.
The grains coordinated in creating a network intelligence
greater than themselves. This intelligence also tried to define
itself, and it did so as Sand.
And so it went, up the fractal levels of consciousness, for
the sand strove to comprehend its greater context.
Armiger had heard these tiny voices ever since arriving
on Ventus. One of the things that had puzzled him was that, in
a place like this, he should have heard a continuum of rational
categories: quartz grain, said the grain of sand, sand, said the
hollow he stood in; the land to the horizon should be saying, I
am Desert! This was the design of the mecha.
He didn’t hear that. As things scaled up, the invented
and temporary languages began to drown out those that
followed human categories. The sand organized itself into a
larger entity, true; but that entity was not the desert. It was
something else: an alien category. Armiger had never cracked
the codes of these higher entities, and he had focussed much of
attention on them, believing that here lay the secret of how he
could command the Winds.
He was half-right. It was thalience he heard, a mad selfinvention
of new consciousness that made the greater Winds
inaccessible to human communication. Now that he knew that,