by Jerry
The ice fall was an extraordinary event to witness under any circumstance; the narrowness of escape from death that accompanied it overlayed the experience with a religious awe.
She heard the man panting next to her. She turned to study him more carefully.
He was unremarkable for a mountaineer; his lean form supported long straps of hard muscle, and the reflected sun from the glaciers had given him a coffee-colored tan. Then she noticed the sweatband across his head. It was not just a sweatband: she could see from the stretch marks that a series of thin disks ran across within the cotton layers. She realized he was wearing a nection, a headband to connect his mind with distant computers.
She recoiled slightly; he smiled and touched his forehead. “Don’t be too upset,” he said, “my headband just saved your life.”
She stuttered. “I wasn’t upset,” she said, though she knew that he knew she was lying. “I’ve just never seen one up close before.”
It was true. Her grandchildren told her that nections were quite common in space, but on Earth they were almost illegal. It was socially unacceptable to wear one, and when the police saw a nection-wearing person they would use any excuse to hassle the individual. But there were no specific laws against them.
When her grandchildren had told her that they wore headbands all the time, she had tried only briefly to dissuade them; she had spent more time listening to their descriptions of the headband’s capabilities. Her grandchildren’s description sounded considerably different from the list of dangers usually described on the news.
The man who had saved her life watched her for several more seconds, then apparently made up his mind about something. “You really ought to get one yourself, you know. Do you realize how dangerous this mountain is? And it’s getting more dangerous every year.”
She started to tell him that she knew perfectly well how dangerous it was—then stopped, thinking back over the years, realizing that it had, by gradual degrees, grown worse every year.
“With my headband, I see things better,” he explained. “I confess I don’t understand why very well—I mean, it doesn’t affect my eyesight. But I notice more things about what I see, and I can get a view of what the extra things mean—like how that piece of ice would fall, and more or less when.”
She nodded her head, but her mind was distracted. The Mountain was changing! The Mountain was getting more dangerous! The rapid alternation of clear, sunny days with cool, misty days had become more vigorous over the course of the last 50 years, leading to more weak layers and ice faults. She had never really noticed until now.
Then the full impact of her savior’s words struck her—she held her hands to her throat as she considered how her husband had died. She realized that, with a nection, his death could have been prevented.
She smiled at the man. They talked; she invited him to dinner at Alexander’s.
When she returned home, she started searching through electronic equipment catalogs. If she bought one mail order and wore it only while hiking, there was no reason for any of her friends ever to know.
It was a simple white headband, soft absorbent cotton. She slipped it on her head, expecting to feel something special, but nothing happened. She started to clean the house, still waiting for something to happen. It never did. Eventually she sat down and read the instructions that had come with the headband.
The instructions told her to start with a simple request, and to visualize herself projecting the request at her forehead. She projected the request, “2 times 2?” just above her eyes. Nothing seemed to happen. She knew the answer was 4.
She tried again, and this time she noticed a kind of echo—she knew the answer was 4, but the thought of the answer came to her twice, in rapid succession. The next time she tried it, she noticed that the echo seemed to come from her forehead.
Next she projected a request to divide 12345 by 6789. She didn’t know the answer—but wait, of course she did, it was 1.81838. Of course, she didn’t know the answer to many decimal places—but as she thought about it, she realized the next digit was 2, the next was 6, then at an accelerating pace more digits roared from her memory—she shook her head, and the stream stopped. She took the headband off, shaking a little. She didn’t try it again until the next day.
A week later, she hiked past Camp Schurman and peered up the slope. She projected her view of the slope through her forehead to study the patterns of snow and ice.
It did indeed look different as she looked at it this way. She had a sensation similar to that of looking at the edges of a cube on a sheet of paper: at one moment, the lines formed a cube with the top showing. The next moment it was an alternate cube with the bottom exposed. She could flip the cube, or at least the way she looked at it, at will.
In the same manner she could now see patterns of slippage in the layers of ice crystals; then she would flip the image and it was just snow, the beautiful work of nature that she had loved all her life.
For a moment she wished she could see it from above as well—and her heart skipped a beat as the wish came true. Suddenly she was looking down from a great height. She saw the long curves of shadows across the snow from high above, and she saw the shorter but distinctive shadow of a woman with a pack standing on the snow field. She threw the headband to the ground even as she realized what she had just seen: a view of the Mountain from a satellite passing by.
She stared at the white headband, almost invisible in the white snow, for a long time. She felt distaste, wonder, fear, and curiousity. Curiousity finally won out. She twisted the headband back on. She blinked her mind’s eye, blinking from her own eyes to the satellite’s eyes and back again, a moment’s taste of the new sensation.
Vertigo struck her. Though the satellite was interesting, it was not comfortable. She would not look at the world from a satellite’s height often, but it was yet another life-saving form of sight: from a distance, it was easy to spot a depression in the snow that might signal an underlying crevasse, even though the depression was too shallow to be seen close up. Such crevasses were invisible until one stepped through to a long fatal plunge to the Mountain’s heart.
The headband was so clearly a life saving tool, why were people so set against it? Why did some of her friends support laws proscribing it?
It didn’t make any difference; she had no need of it except here on the Mountain.
Though the fight over the headband’s legal status did not at first interest her, it became an increasing impediment to her life. The headband was quite useful in a number of ways; though each individual use was trivial, in sum they qualitatively effected her life. She stopped tracking her checkbook; it was all in her head, all the transactions, the current balance, and even the encumbrances. When she awoke in the morning she could turn on the coffee pot if she wanted to, without getting up.
She wore her headband while hiking, and while working around her house; but she dared not wear it to work. One day an ecologist asked her a question about the marmots that inhabited the park. She grew angry as she had to manually root through the computer systems trying to find the answer, for she knew that the answer was available for the mere thinking about it if she could wear her headband. That night she stopped at the drugstore and bought two more capsules.
She swallowed one. This capsule was nastier than the others she had taken in earlier years. Before, the nanomachines she had swallowed had gone through her body, fixing what was not right, then flushing themselves out again. But the machines in this one would build, just under her forehead, a subcutaneous nection.
The other capsule would dissolve the nection away if she decided she didn’t like it.
When she awoke the next morning she was very hungry. She felt her forehead, but there wasn’t anything there.
The next morning she felt her forehead again, and it was . . . different. She looked in the mirror; with the flickering double vision of her eyes and the analysis from her forehead, she could see on the one hand that she loo
ked the same as always. Yet on the other hand, there were curves there she hadn’t noticed before. When she went in to work, one man complimented her on her new hair color.
No one else commented until her boss arrived. When he entered the reception area and looked at her, his eyes lit up, and he laughed.
She looked at him with mild annoyance. Then she noticed, again with her double vision, that there were very shallow curves in his forehead.
He came up close, and put his finger to his lips. “Listen,” he said.
She listened. As she concentrated, she heard heard soft murmurs in the background; as she focussed on the murmurs, they grew louder, until she could hear that he was speaking—but not with his lips, not through her ears. She heard him through her forehead. “Welcome to the gang,” he said. “Isn’t it great fun, joining a rebellion? I haven’t had this much fun since I was a teenager.”
They both broke into laughter. Everyone else in the room wondered what the joke was about.
She talked to her children, and her children’s children, more often now; though they were spread from Mars to Mercury, they were but a thought away. It surprised her to realize that the simple process of dialing the number, and the uncertainty of whether or not she would get through, had often put her off from calling even though the cost had plummeted in recent years till it was virtually free.
She became increasingly comfortable with her distant grandchildren. Through visual links like the one she had with the satellite, they took her on outings into the stunning naked beauty of their home planet Mars. When they asked her for the hundredth time to come for a visit, she agreed.
In her youth she had ridden trains across the country. She had expected the space trip to be the same, but it was not. The ship was far more comfortable than any other vehicle she had ridden; it was more comfortable than her own home, though she still did not quite like it as well.
When she arrived, she found she loved to hike across the plains and the canyons of an unknown planet. She walked amid forests of alien trees, related to the Earthly trees from which they had been shaped, yet different. Comparing the lands of Mars to the lands of Earth reminded her of watching the sun set two days in a row: though the outcome was the same, the process was nevertheless different. The strange wilderness yielded for her new kinds of solitude.
She came to know her grandchildren’s children for the first time. Before, these children had represented an unspoken, uncomfortable complication in her thoughts of Mars. They were different. They were of her blood, but not in the manner of normal children. They had been genetically engineered.
Her grandchildren had designed them, giving them a parent’s loving care long before they had even been conceived. Only the best characteristics of her family had been passed on; she did not know how the other aspects of these radiantly happy children had been chosen. They were very different from her, but not quite alien. With time she learned to love them as they loved her.
One day they went on a longview picnic. First they walked to the high edge of a deep canyon. She looked over the rim. The height was not great by comparison with the distances in space she had traveled to come here. Yet this distance impressed her. It impressed her because she could appreciate it: thousands of tiny twists and angles of rock acted as signposts, allowing her to mark off the immense distance in tiny steps. She shook her head, smiled, and stepped over the edge.
Together with her family, she descended gently on suspensors; their picnic basket and wine glasses descended with them, on suspensors of their own. They watched the planet come up to meet them as they dined and chatted.
The discussion turned to the family’s upcoming expedition to Jupiter. They had asked her several times to come along, but she had refused. Now they asked her again. She watched the extraordinary scenery float past her and considered the question one last time. A trip to Jupiter would have been all right if it could have been like Mars. But it could not, and that was both the attraction and the horror.
Though humanity had made Mars Earthlike, they could not do the same for Jupiter. Jupiter’s methane oceans simply were not amenable to terraforming. No one could go there in person.
To see Jupiter, she would in a sense have to leave her body. Oh, she wouldn’t have to leave it very far; indeed, in one sense she would stay with her body on Mars throughout the journey. But just as she had seen Rainier through the satellite’s eyes rather than her own, just as she spoke to her friends with her headband rather than her voice, now she would have to use her headband for all her senses.
And the machine would not merely replace her sight, her hearing, her touch, her smell—it would transform them. Ordinary sight and sound did not work on Jupiter; for each of her old senses a new one would be substituted. She would see ultrasonic vibrations; she would smell ionic changes. For all intents and purposes, she would live as a being designed for the comforts of Jupiter’s titanic gravity well.
Of course, she would not be marooned there: she could leave at any time.
The pleasure of her experience on Mars made her confident; the quiet exhiliaration of the longview picnic made her bold. She agreed to go along.
For a moment it was dark, a moment too short to launch the panic she held in trip-wired readiness. Then there was light, a confusing light that seemed oddly related to the sounds that joined it. She held up her hands. They were metal, and she looked at them in alarm. She closed her eyes, and it was better.
The strange sounds took on rhythm. Instinctively she turned toward them, and her back feet rotated, propelling her closer. When she felt she was too close—she could smell the source of the sounds now, a tangy, pleasant odor—she opened her eyes. Studying the shape as it wavered before her, seemingly separated by shimmering air, she realized it was another robot like herself. Indeed, she recognized it: she was looking at her granddaughter.
She looked around and had a sudden overwhelming sensation of immensity.
The hugeness of space had seemed dwarfed by the height of the Martian canyon, for she had been able to comprehend it through the tiny weathered etchings of rock she could peer at in the distance. Here on Jupiter her comprehension was even greater, for her senses ranged distance with new clarity. The ultrasonic echoes told her how far it was to each whorl of current she could see; she could see to distances very great indeed. It made her think of the way she had felt as a child, looking across a vast Kansan plain for the first time. It seemed as if infinity was right there, within easy reach. She reveled in it for a moment, then stepped out.
She was back in her own body again, sitting on Mars.
She dipped back in for ten minutes and stepped out again. Next she went in for half an hour. Then an hour.
She had sworn that she would not stay on Jupiter for more than an hour at a time; a longer stay required mechanical operation of parts of her body while she was away. But once she became so absorbed in exploring the Jovian landscape, she stayed for an hour and a half . The maintenance machines disconnected themselves before she returned, and their intervention didn’t seem to make a difference. So she stayed longer.
Jupiter, she found, was an astonishing world, truly alien from all she had experienced before. And the new senses she acquired through her new robot required extensive exploration of their own. It was all incredibly novel, and she realized she would need at least a year to explore.
The linkage between her mind on Mars and her robot body on Jupiter had delays; to have a completely satisfying experience, she would need a temporary residence that didn’t require such a commute.
So a small cylinder, somewhat smaller than a Coke can, was launched at an asteroid that had been parked in orbit around Jupiter for this purpose. As the billions of robots from the cylinder swarmed across the asteroid, transforming it into a marvelous home, she boarded another ship. It seemed silly to spend any of her transit time stuck in the confines of her cabin; she went to Jupiter for the duration. She intended to return to her own body when it arrived in orbit.
But when it arrived, she was busy. She was learning about a new robot designed for the frozen world of Europa, with another whole new set of senses, new novelties to explore. She left her body in storage for a short time longer.
A year passed. And by then, it just didn’t seem to matter.
A bubble hung poised on the edge of the solar system, a sphere pockmarked with thousands of holes, each hole the width of a pin. A bolt of light struck the sphere, a bolt powered by kilometers of molecular mirrors near the orbit of Mercury.
The bubble seemed to explode as thousands of needles leaped from their cradles, driven forth by tiny beams of laser light, slivers of the titanic bolt from the Sun. The needles accelerated away from the bubble for years, till their speed reached close to that of light. Thereafter they drifted ever outward.
Upon occasion, a needle approached a star. The needle would shift, to ensure a close passage. If planets or other items of note beckoned, the needle would swoop in, on a tight spiral to oblivion: its billions of nanomachines would break apart at the touch of an asteroid, and build anew. Where once there had been a needle, now there would be a bubble, and a molecular mirror, and thousands of needles that would explode out and travel forever.
But in addition, the nanomachines in that system would continue to build. They would build machines and living flesh well suited to the conditions of the planet. And then the nanomachines would come back together into a single structure—not a needle now, but a communication bubble. Through the bubble and its instantaneous communication she could live across space. She could dwell at home near Jupiter yet roam among the stars.
She was often one of the first humans Called to newly opened planets. Her wisdom from earth, her expertise from Jupiter, these made her invaluble as an explorer and a guide. As she had swum within the methane oceans, so now she swam in carbon dioxide atmospheres, or flew through liquid mercury. She imprinted herself upon organic synapses and silicon circuits light years from home, and lived in many places.
