Oceanic

by Greg Egan

  “You must be a real emotional Swiss cheese,” observed Margit tartly.

  Jamil came to his senses. “Why don’t you fuck off to some other universe? No one wants you in Noether.”

  Margit was amused. “You are a bad loser.”

  Jamil gazed at her, honestly confused for a moment; the game had slipped his mind completely. He gestured at the embers. “What are you doing here? Why did you follow the smoke, if it wasn’t regret at not saying goodbye to him when you had the chance?” He wasn’t sure how seriously to take Penina’s light-hearted insinuation, but if Chusok had fallen for Margit, and it had not been reciprocated, that might even have been the reason he’d left.

  She shook her head calmly. “He was nothing to me. I barely spoke to him.”

  “Well, that’s your loss.”

  “From the look of things, I’d say the loss was all yours.”

  He had no reply. Margit turned and walked away.

  Jamil crouched on the ground again, rocking back and forth, waiting for the pain to subside.

  #

  Jamil spent the next week preparing to resume his studies. The library had near-instantaneous contact with every artificial universe in the New Territories, and the additional lightspeed lag between Earth and the point in space from which the whole tree-structure blossomed was only a few hours. Jamil had been to Earth, but only as a tourist; land was scarce, they accepted no migrants. There were remote planets you could live on, in the home universe, but you had to be a certain kind of masochistic purist to want that. The precise reasons why his ancestors had entered the New Territories had been forgotten generations before – and it would have been presumptuous to track them down and ask them in person – but given a choice between the then even-more-crowded Earth, the horrifying reality of interstellar distances, and an endlessly extensible branching chain of worlds which could be traversed within a matter of weeks, the decision wasn’t exactly baffling.

  Jamil had devoted most of his time in Noether to studying the category of representations of Lie groups on complex vector spaces – a fitting choice, since Emmy Noether had been a pioneer of group theory, and if she’d lived to see this field blossom she would probably have been in the thick of it herself. Representations of Lie groups lay behind most of physics: each kind of subatomic particle was really nothing but a particular way of representing the universal symmetry group as a set of rotations of complex vectors. Organizing this kind of structure with category theory was ancient knowledge, but Jamil didn’t care; he’d long ago reconciled himself to being a student, not a discoverer. The greatest gift of consciousness was the ability to take the patterns of the world inside you, and for all that he would have relished the thrill of being the first at anything, with ten-to-the-sixteenth people alive that was a futile ambition for most.

  In the library, he spoke with fellow students of his chosen field on other worlds, or read their latest works. Though they were not researchers, they could still put a new pedagogical spin on old material, enriching the connections with other fields, finding ways to make the complex, subtle truth easier to assimilate without sacrificing the depth and detail that made it worth knowing in the first place. They would not advance the frontiers of knowledge. They would not discover new principles of nature, or invent new technologies. But to Jamil, understanding was an end in itself.

  He rarely thought about the prospect of playing another match, and when he did the idea was not appealing. With Chusok gone, the same group could play ten-to-a-side without Jamil to skew the numbers. Margit might even choose to swap teams, if only for the sake of proving that her current team’s monotonous string of victories really had been entirely down to her.

  When the day arrived, though, he found himself unable to stay away. He turned up intending to remain a spectator, but Ryuichi had deserted Ezequiel’s team, and everyone begged Jamil to join in.

  As he took his place opposite Margit, there was nothing in her demeanor to acknowledge their previous encounter: no lingering contempt, but no hint of shame either. Jamil resolved to put it out of his mind; he owed it to his fellow players to concentrate on the game.

  They lost, five nil.

  Jamil forced himself to follow everyone to Eudore’s house, to celebrate, commiserate, or as it turned out, to forget the whole thing. After they’d eaten, Jamil wandered from room to room, enjoying Eudore’s choice of music but unable to settle into any conversation. No one mentioned Chusok in his hearing.

  He left just after midnight. Laplace’s near-full primary image and its eight brightest gibbous companions lit the streets so well that there was no need for anything more. Jamil thought: Chusok might have merely traveled to another city, one beneath his gaze right now. And wherever he’d gone, he might yet choose to stay in touch with his friends from Noether.

  And his friends from the next town, and the next?

  Century after century?

  Margit was sitting on Jamil’s doorstep, holding a bunch of white flowers in one hand.

  Jamil was irritated. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to apologize.”

  He shrugged. “There’s no need. We feel differently about certain things. That’s fine. I can still face you on the playing field.”

  “I’m not apologizing for a difference of opinion. I wasn’t honest with you. I was cruel.” She shaded her eyes against the glare of the planet and looked up at him. “You were right: it was my loss. I wish I’d known your friend.”

  He laughed curtly. “Well, it’s too late for that.”

  She said simply, “I know.”

  Jamil relented. “Do you want to come in?” Margit nodded, and he instructed the door to open for her. As he followed her inside, he said, “How long have you been here? Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll cook something for you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  He called out to her from the kitchen, “Think of it as a peace offering. I don’t have any flowers.”

  Margit replied, “They’re not for you. They’re for Chusok’s house.”

  Jamil stopped rummaging through his vegetable bins, and walked back into the living room. “People don’t usually do that in Noether.”

  Margit was sitting on the couch, staring at the floor. She said, “I’m so lonely here. I can’t bear it any more.”

  He sat beside her. “Then why did you rebuff him? You could at least have been friends.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t ask me to explain.”

  Jamil took her hand. She turned and embraced him, trembling miserably. He stroked her hair. “Sssh.”

  She said, “Just sex. I don’t want anything more.”

  He groaned softly. “There’s no such thing as that.”

  “I just need someone to touch me again.”

  “I understand.” He confessed, “So do I. But that won’t be all. So don’t ask me to promise there’ll be nothing more.”

  Margit took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of wood smoke.

  Jamil said, “I don’t even know you.”

  “No one knows anyone, any more.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “No, it’s not,” she conceded gloomily. She ran a hand lightly along his arm. Jamil wanted badly to see her smile, so he made each dark hair thicken and blossom into a violet flower as it passed beneath her fingers.

  She did smile, but she said, “I’ve seen that trick before.”

  Jamil was annoyed. “I’m sure to be a disappointment all round, then. I expect you’d be happier with some kind of novelty. A unicorn, or an amoeba.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think so.” She took his hand and placed it against her breast. “Do you ever get tired of sex?”

  “Do you ever get tired of breathing?”

  “I can go for a long time without thinking about it.”

  He nodded. “But then one day you stop and fill your lungs with air, and it’s still as sweet as e
ver.”

  Jamil didn’t know what he was feeling any more. Lust. Compassion. Spite. She’d come to him hurting, and he wanted to help her, but he wasn’t sure that either of them really believed this would work.

  Margit inhaled the scent of the flowers on his arm. “Are they the same color? Everywhere else?”

  He said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

  #

  Jamil woke in the early hours of the morning, alone. He’d half expected Margit to flee like this, but she could have waited till dawn. He would have obligingly feigned sleep while she dressed and tip-toed out.

  Then he heard her. It was not a sound he would normally have associated with a human being, but it could not have been anything else.

  He found her in the kitchen, curled around a table leg, wailing rhythmically. He stood back and watched her, afraid that anything he did would only make things worse. She met his gaze in the half light, but kept up the mechanical whimper. Her eyes weren’t blank; she was not delirious, or hallucinating. She knew exactly who, and where, she was.

  Finally, Jamil knelt in the doorway. He said, “Whatever it is, you can tell me. And we’ll fix it. We’ll find a way.”

  She bared her teeth. “You can’t fix it, you stupid child.” She resumed the awful noise.

  “Then just tell me. Please?” He stretched out a hand toward her. He hadn’t felt quite so helpless since his very first daughter, Aminata, had come to him as an inconsolable six-year-old, rejected by the boy to whom she’d declared her undying love. He’d been twenty-four years old; a child himself. More than a thousand years ago. Where are you now, Nata?

  Margit said, “I promised. I’d never tell.”

  “Promised who?”

  “Myself.”

  “Good. They’re the easiest kind to break.”

  She started weeping. It was a more ordinary sound, but it was even more chilling. She was not a wounded animal now, an alien being suffering some incomprehensible pain. Jamil approached her cautiously; she let him wrap his arms around her shoulders.

  He whispered, “Come to bed. The warmth will help. Just being held will help.”

  She spat at him derisively, “It won’t bring her back.”

  “Who?”

  Margit stared at him in silence, as if he’d said something shocking.

  Jamil insisted gently, “Who won’t it bring back?” She’d lost a friend, badly, the way he’d lost Chusok. That was why she’d sought him out. He could help her through it. They could help each other through it.

  She said, “It won’t bring back the dead.”

  #

  Margit was seven thousand five hundred and ninety-four years old. Jamil persuaded her to sit at the kitchen table. He wrapped her in blankets, then fed her tomatoes and rice, as she told him how she’d witnessed the birth of his world.

  The promise had shimmered just beyond reach for decades. Almost none of her contemporaries had believed it would happen, though the truth should have been plain for centuries: the human body was a material thing. In time, with enough knowledge and effort, it would become possible to safeguard it from any kind of deterioration, any kind of harm. Stellar evolution and cosmic entropy might or might not prove insurmountable, but there’d be eons to confront those challenges. In the middle of the twenty-first century, the hurdles were aging, disease, violence, and an overcrowded planet.

  “Grace was my best friend. We were students.” Margit smiled. “Before everyone was a student. We’d talk about it, but we didn’t believe we’d see it happen. It would come in another century. It would come for our great-great-grandchildren. We’d hold infants on our knees in our twilight years and tell ourselves: this one will never die.

  “When we were both twenty-two, something happened. To both of us.” She lowered her eyes. “We were kidnapped. We were raped. We were tortured.”

  Jamil didn’t know how to respond. These were just words to him: he knew their meaning, he knew these acts would have hurt her, but she might as well have been describing a mathematical theorem. He stretched a hand across the table, but Margit ignored it. He said awkwardly, “This was … the Holocaust?”

  She looked up at him, shaking her head, almost laughing at his naïveté. “Not even one of them. Not a war, not a pogrom. Just one psychopathic man. He locked us in his basement, for six months. He’d killed seven women.” Tears began spilling down her cheeks. “He showed us the bodies. They were buried right where we slept. He showed us how we’d end up, when he was through with us.”

  Jamil was numb. He’d known all his adult life what had once been possible – what had once happened, to real people – but it had all been consigned to history long before his birth. In retrospect it seemed almost inconceivably stupid, but he’d always imagined that the changes had come in such a way that no one still living had experienced these horrors. There’d been no escaping the bare minimum, the logical necessity: his oldest living ancestors must have watched their parents fall peacefully into eternal sleep. But not this. Not a flesh-and-blood woman, sitting in front of him, who’d been forced to sleep in a killer’s graveyard.

  He put his hand over hers, and choked out the words. “This man … killed Grace? He killed your friend?”

  Margit began sobbing, but she shook her head. “No, no. We got out!” She twisted her mouth into a smile. “Someone stabbed the stupid fucker in a bar-room brawl. We dug our way out while he was in hospital.” She put her face down on the table and wept, but she held Jamil’s hand against her cheek. He couldn’t understand what she’d lived through, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t console her. Hadn’t he touched his mother’s face the same way, when she was sad beyond his childish comprehension?

  She composed herself, and continued. “We made a resolution, while we were in there. If we survived, there’d be no more empty promises. No more day dreams. What he’d done to those seven women – and what he’d done to us – would become impossible.”

  And it had. Whatever harm befell your body, you had the power to shut off your senses and decline to experience it. If the flesh was damaged, it could always be repaired or replaced. In the unlikely event that your jewel itself was destroyed, everyone had backups, scattered across universes. No human being could inflict physical pain on another. In theory, you could still be killed, but it would take the same kind of resources as destroying a galaxy. The only people who seriously contemplated either were the villains in very bad operas.

  Jamil’s eyes narrowed in wonder. She’d spoken those last words with such fierce pride that there was no question of her having failed.

  “You are Ndoli? You invented the jewel?” As a child, he’d been told that the machine in his skull had been designed by a man who’d died long ago.

  Margit stroked his hand, amused. “In those days, very few Hungarian women could be mistaken for Nigerian men. I’ve never changed my body that much, Jamil. I’ve always looked much as you see me.”

  Jamil was relieved; if she’d been Ndoli himself, he might have succumbed to sheer awe and started babbling idolatrous nonsense. “But you worked with Ndoli? You and Grace?”

  She shook her head. “We made the resolution, and then we floundered. We were mathematicians, not neurologists. There were a thousand things going on at once: tissue engineering, brain imaging, molecular computers. We had no real idea where to put our efforts, which problems we should bring our strengths to bear upon. Ndoli’s work didn’t come out of the blue for us, but we played no part in it.

  “For a while, almost everyone was nervous about switching from the brain to the jewel. In the early days, the jewel was a separate device that learned its task by mimicking the brain, and it had to be handed control of the body at one chosen moment. It took another fifty years before it could be engineered to replace the brain incrementally, neuron by neuron, in a seamless transition throughout adolescence.”

  So Grace had lived to see the jewel invented, but held back, and died before she could use it? Jamil kept himself
from blurting out this conclusion; all his guesses had proved wrong so far.

  Margit continued. “Some people weren’t just nervous, though. You’d be amazed how vehemently Ndoli was denounced in certain quarters. And I don’t just mean the fanatics who churned out paranoid tracts about ‘the machines’ taking over, with their evil inhuman agendas. Some people’s antagonism had nothing to do with the specifics of the technology. They were opposed to immortality, in principle.”

  Jamil laughed. “Why?”

  “Ten thousand years’ worth of sophistry doesn’t vanish overnight,” Margit observed dryly. “Every human culture had expended vast amounts of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be something other than it was – though a few were dishonest about life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that death was for the best.

  “It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extreme – and its most transparent, but that didn’t stop anyone. Since any child could tell you that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust, and abhorrent beyond words, it was a hallmark of sophistication to believe otherwise. Writers had consoled themselves for centuries with smug puritanical fables about immortals who’d long for death – who’d beg for death. It would have been too much to expect all those who were suddenly faced with the reality of its banishment to confess that they’d been whistling in the dark. And would-be moral philosophers – mostly those who’d experienced no greater inconvenience in their lives than a late train or a surly waiter – began wailing about the destruction of the human spirit by this hideous blight. We needed death and suffering, to put steel into our souls! Not horrible, horrible freedom and safety!”

  Jamil smiled. “So there were buffoons. But in the end, surely they swallowed their pride? If we’re walking in a desert and I tell you that the lake you see ahead is a mirage, I might cling stubbornly to my own belief, to save myself from disappointment. But when we arrive, and I’m proven wrong, I will drink from the lake.”