by Dan Simmons
Titles are important.
The Odysseans were good people, smart, successful in their respective professions, and earnest in their commitment to reading well and eventually writing well. But they missed it. For better or worse, my fault or theirs (theirs!), they missed it.
Itbah al-Yahud!
ALWAYS enjoying any excuse for a party, I was still leery of the millennial madness in the waning years, months and hours of the 1990s, and not just because I was one of those stuffy purists who thought that the new millennium began on Jan. 1, 2001. (It’s moot now.) (And I do understand the odometer attraction of all those zeroes. I remember my family driving our 1948 Buick around and around the block until those digits clicked over to all zeroes.)
There is a scene in the thoughtful movie Sunshine (in which Ralph Fiennes plays three generations of men in a upper-middle-class Jewish Hungarian family in Budapest) where the family celebrates the beginning of the 20th Century—the film did not say whether it was New Year’s Eve of 1899 or 1900 (probably 1900, since they understood simple calendar-keeping better then)—and they kiss and toast “to the coming century of compassion and justice and human progress.”
Well, no.
It is a powerfully sad moment. As viewers, we want to rush into the scene and warn them that Europe’s future in the 20th Century is a pit of oppression, chaos, injustice and slaughter and that as Jews, they will bear the brunt of it. But these characters were products of the last half of their century, which had seen the Austro-Hungarian Empire create a liberal bulwark—if not of true social justice, then at least of social sanity in which even Jews could rise in wealth and status and legal equity—and they were celebrating decades of European peace during which the very idea of war receded further and further. It’s hard for us now, in the surfy shallows of the 21st Century, even to conceive of decades of real peace.
One wants to rush into the scene and cry, “Nazis! Auschwitz! World Wars so frequent you’ll have to number them like movie sequels! Death camps! Communism! Gulags! Hiroshima! Pogroms and pestilence, bombs and starvation and genocide rampant!”
I enjoyed New Year’s Eve, 1999, e-mailing my friends in Moscow and Paris and Berlin at midnight their time, calling our closest friends in England as midnight passed them by, asking if all was well and hearing their voices coming from the new century. But as the world went ga-ga that night—as we all celebrated in the first true worldwide event, a planetary party, as the wave of 2000 swept around the globe like a curtain of fireworks—I could not help but wonder what now-meaningless nouns and all-too-meaningful verbs a time traveler from the year 2100 would shout at us in warning if they could. It’s best, I know, that we don’t know, but I suspect that the irony of our celebration now is even greater—and sadder—than the irony of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish family’s celebration of the bright dawning of the 20th Century with all of its compassion, and justice, and human progress.
Itbah al-Yahud!
AS I write this introduction on an early September afternoon in 2001, the NPR station playing classical music takes its brief hourly news break and the lead story is an optimistic, even hopeful take on the first United Nations international conference on racism “scrambling to be a success in its final hours.” Well, NPR may be upbeat and hopeful, but not this writer. The UN gathering, its reality as clumsy and pretentious and confused as its formal title—World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance—featured leadership from such bastions of 20th Century human freedom as Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and Jesse Jackson and immediately descended into a spittle-flying attack on Israel.
From Ecclesiastes, 1:4–5, 1:11, 1:14–15—
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth…
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun…
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come later.
FROM the First United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance—
Itbah al-Yahud! Kill the Jews!
THE NINTH OF AV
THIRTY days before the final fax, the posthumans threw a going-away party in the New York City Archipelago. Many of the 9,114 old-styles attended. The majority simply faxed in, but some arrived via glowing, transparent bio-zeppelins that tied up at the Empire State Building’s mooring tower, some came by oversized squidsubs, an unimaginative five hundred-some arrived on the refitted QE2, and a handful flew or floated in via personally fitted sonies.
Pinchas and Petra faxed in on the second evening of the five-day fete. They had hoped that Savi would be there but no proxnet beacon blinked and a physical search of the archipelago proved fruitless. She remained absent and invisible. Pinchas and Petra were disappointed, but they spent a few hours at the party anyway.
The archipelago was ablaze with light. Besides the glowing Empire State Building and other lighted historical towers rising out of the dark waters, clusters of candleglobes floated among the swamp conifers and above the fern forest canals, festive bulbs burned in and above the QE2 where it was moored to the Chrylser Building, the luminescent, jellyfish glow of the zeppelins above and submersibles below lighted the scene, and skyrockets exploded in an almost constant barrage of color and noise. Far above the fireworks, both the e-ring and p-ring shifted through every color in the spectrum—and some beyond the human reach of vision—in honor of the first of a thousand pre-final-fax bashes.
“Quite a wake,” said Pinchas.
Petra squeezed his upper arm. “Stop that. You promised.”
Pinchas nodded and cadged a cold drink from a passing servitor. He and Petra moved around the small square of the Empire State Building’s expanded observation deck, stepping aside to let parties of zeppeliners descend the wrought-iron spiral staircase from the mooring platform. Everyone seemed quite merry except for the occasional and inevitable voynix standing here or there like a sightless scarab forged in rusted iron and smoked leather.
Pinchas poured some of his drink over the carapace of one.
“Are you drunk?” asked Petra.
“I wish I were.” Pinchas made a fist and clubbed the hollow-sounding voynix ovoid half a meter above him. “I wish the goddamn things had eyes.”
“Why?”
“I’d stick my thumb in one.” He flicked his middle finger against the chitinous ebony ovoid. It echoed dully.
The voynix did what voynix do. It ignored him.
A posthuman in the iteration known to Petra and Pinchas as Moira floated over to them through the crowd. She was wearing a formal gold gown and her gray hair was cut close to her delicate skull.
“My dears,” she said, “are you having an absolutely marvelous time?”
“Absolutely,” said Petra.
“Marvelous,” said Pinchas. He looked at Moira and wondered, not for the first time in his two centuries and more, why all of the posts were female.
Moira laughed easily. “Good. Good. Later on, the illusionist Dahoni is going to entertain us. I understand that he plans to make the QE2 disappear. Yet again.” She laughed a second time.
Petra smiled and sipped her iced wine. “We were looking for our friend—Savi.”
Moira hesitated an instant and Pinchas wondered if she remembered who they were. They had met a score of times over the centuries—or Pinchas assumed they had, based on the theory that it was the same post choosing the Moira iteration—but she had called them “My dears,” thus fueling the old-style paranoia that all old-style humans looked alike to the posts.
“Savi, the cultural historian?” said Moira, exploding that theory. “She was invited, of course, but we received no confirmation from her. I remember that she was a special friend of yours, Petra, and of you as well, Pinchas. When
she arrives, I will be sure to tell her that you are here.”
Pinchas nodded and sipped the rest of his drink. He had forgotten for an instant just how readable his handsome but unrefined homosap face was to these constructs. Who needed telepathy?
“Who indeed?” agreed Moira and laughed again. She touched his arm, patted Petra’s cheek, waved over a servitor carrying a tray of warmed handbites, and floated away among the revelers.
“She’s not here,” said Pinchas.
Petra nodded and looked at her palm. “No beacon, no compoint, no fax trail, no messages for us on far or prox. I know she does these solitude things, but I’m beginning to get worried.”
“Maybe she final faxed early,” said Pinchas.
Petra gave him a look.
“All right,” said Pinchas, raising his empty hand in apology. “Not funny.”
“Agreed,” said Petra. She took his drink and set the glass on the observation deck’s railing. Someone was standing on that railing a few yards away, ready to bungee jump toward the black waters thirty stories below. Petra turned her back on the crowd counting down to the jumper’s leap. “Let’s go find her,” she said.
Pinchas nodded and took her hand. They faxed out.
SAVI was dreaming of manhauling yet again.
Turning and tossing in her blue-lighted ice cavern, pinpoint heaters and a thick fell of thermoblank keeping her far from freezing, she dreamt of cold glaciers, naked cliffs, pemmican hoosh, and of smudge-faced, canvas-and-wool-garbed men leaning steep into leather harnesses as they man-hauled impossibly heavy sledges across the high Antarctic plateau.
Savi dreamed of Wilson’s sketchbook and of windcut sastrugi. Tossing and turning in her blue-iced cavern, she dreamed of camping at the site of the Norwegians’ frayed, black-bunting flag and of seeing their wind-softened ski tracks heading south the few remaining miles to the pole. She dreamed of Oates and Evans and Bowers and of Scott, a small man, half hidden by blowing snow and sunglare on the ice. She suspected that she was dreaming these things from Edward Wilson’s point of view. At least she never saw Wilson’s face or form, although the pages of his diary and sketchbooks often appeared to haunt her.
Savi woke and remained very still. She felt her heart pounding and listened to silence unbroken except for some creaking as her ice floe shifted in the northbound current.
She had flown out from her home a week earlier, but only after poring over orbital infrared photos for some weeks, finally choosing this iceberg for its size and solidity and for its path, already broken free of the milling icepack endlessly circling in the Barrier slush of the south Ross Sea. The berg was some hundred yards long by a third that height above the dark sea and it was stable; its bulk ran deep. The upper surface had smooth spots where she successfully landed her sonie in the dark and stored the machines and provisions she had ordered fabricated from the p-ring or had foraged herself from the old McMurdo dump.
What she had anticipated the toughest chore—using the big-bore burner to carve out her caverns and ladders and tunnels—had actually proved the easiest. And certainly the most fun. Twenty yards down into the iceberg, making sure to dip low and then up to create cold air traps, using handheld slashers for the steps and rungs and railings, she had found a natural and meandering fault in the ice which she had followed down another fifty yards, finally cutting away from it when it narrowed to a fissure.
Savi lighted the caverns with glowglobes and self-powered halogen sticks. There was no daylight so deep in the belly of the Antarctic winter. The heavy work came in hauling down her supplies and furniture to her living caverns, somewhere under sea level and burned into the heart of the heart of the iceberg. Using the pinpoint heaters, she managed to warm the air and space around her without melting her home. She slept on foam and thermoblank and fur and played with her old machines and documents.
As was Savi’s custom when on sabbaticals from the world, she blanked all of the com and fax connections she was capable of blanking. But this time, with fewer and fewer days remaining before the final fax, she had added incentive to think. She pored over hard disks and vellum files. When claustrophobia threatened, she went up and out into the frigid night—visiting her hoar-frosted sonie, running the heater high, and tapping into farnet babble without taking part. More and more in recent days, when restlessness claimed her, Savi merely burned another tunnel, adding to her blue-glow ice maze.
The dreams bothered her some. They had started before her sabbatical. Considering her profession and passions, the dreams were reasonable enough. But the urgency of them bothered her. She knew the ending of this particular expedition and seemed to be approaching it night by night for each of their days. Not much time was left.
PETRA and Pinchas had imaged faxing directly into Savi’s foyer—every old-style with a home or apartment had a fax foyer—but they were surprised to find upon arrival that the fax-system failsafe had directed Pinchas’s formal robes and Petra’s party gown to add a molecular thermsuit layer, complete with hoods, visors, headlamps, and heated air veins.
It was a good thing. The foyer was a deepfreeze, black and cold.
“What the hell?” said Pinchas. He had not visited Savi’s Mt. Erebus home before, despite the fact that he and she had been lovers for several years before she moved here, but he knew that she would never abandon her home to the elements just to go on vacation.
Petra nodded at the door to Savi’s home. It was open.
Feeling like a trespasser, Pinchas led the way in. Savi’s place was filled with furniture and scavenged goods, some of the stacks reaching almost to the low ceiling, but it was long and multistoried—she had built the house out of ancient apartment modules and even more ancient dwellings dug up from what was left of the Antarctic Republic’s capital of McMurdo—and it took twenty minutes or more for Petra and Pinchas to wander through it.
Petra found a light switch, but the recessed lamps stayed off. Savi must have taken the house off the grid. But why?
Pinchas found some halogen sticks and their bright light added to their headlamp beams as the two went from room to room. Long, triple-glazed windows must have had an amazing view in the Antarctic summer—the house was high on the slopes of the volcano and the view would be to the north—but now only night pressed against the frost-limned glass. Savi’s living quarters looked comfortable and less cluttered than the rest of the place and Petra said that she thought that some pieces of furniture were missing—she had spent time here with Savi a few times when the two of them had been lovers—but she was not certain.
The long, narrow workshops, libraries, and storage cubbies seemed surreal in the headlamps: ice particles floating in the air, surfaces covered with hoarfrost and spindrift, everything cold to the touch even through the molecular thermsuit gloves.
Pinchas touched some trilobite-sized, smooth, black lumps on a desk. “What are these?”
“DNA computers,” said Petra. “Early 21st Century, I think. Savi dug them out of McMurdo dumps.”
Pinchas had to grin despite the eerie surroundings. “Computers used to have shells? They were physical things?”
“Yes,” said Petra. “Look.” They had come back to Savi’s central living module. Petra had lifted some old readers and bound books and was holding up a sheet of modern vellum. “This is Savi’s handwriting.”
Pinchas was impressed. “You can read?”
“No,” said Petra. “But I recognize her handwriting. I know it would be adding trespass to trespass if we actually read this, but…”
“But it might be a note to us…well, to you,” said Pinchas. He set his palm over the vellum, ready to activate a reading function and to let the golden words flow up his arm.
Petra seized his wrist. “No! Don’t.”
Pinchas was surprised and puzzled, but he lowered his hand.
Petra looked embarrassed behind her visor. “I just think… I mean, if you invoke a reading function, it has to go through one of the rings. I mean…” She
trailed off.
Pinchas frowned at her. “Getting a little paranoid, are we?”
“I guess,” said Petra. “But I’d rather find an old-style who can read and have them translate it for us.”
“You know someone who can read?”
Petra stared at the vellum and nodded. “A scholar named Graf. And he knew Savi pretty well when the two worked on the Paris excavation. We can get in touch with him. Bring this with us.” She folded the vellum and pressed it through the thermsuit membrane into her pocket.
“I think we should wait before reading it,” said Pinchas. “We still have thirty days left. Let’s give Savi time to reappear before before we start reading her private notes.”
“Agreed,” said Petra. “We won’t bring this to Graf for a couple of weeks. But if Savi doesn’t show up, perhaps this can tell us why.”
The two stood in the cold desert of Savi’s living room for an extra moment.
“Do you think that something’s happened to her?” Pinchas said at last.
Petra forced a smile. “What could happen? Any serious accident and there would have been the record of a reconstruction transcription. When we asked farnet, they just said that she was all right.”
“I wish they’d just tell us where she is,” said Pinchas.
“Privacy,” said Petra.
They both had to smile at that. Petra took a last look around and the two faxed north.
OATES died first. Everyone knows about this. Or at least everyone did know, back when history was of any relevance to anyone. So Savi thought with fifteen days until final fax. She had given up sleeping some days earlier.
Oates left Scott’s tent on the night of March 15, 1912, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott, Bowers, and Wilson all knew that the failing Oates was going out into the blizzard to his death. They did not stop him. Fourteen days later, on March 29, the other three would die in their tent only eleven miles short of One Ton Depot and their salvation.
Scott spent his last hours of strength scribbling notes and letters. He defended the expedition. He extolled the courage and manliness of his comrades. His last entry read—“For God’s sake, look after our people.” He wrote a short farewell letter to his dear friend, Sir J. M. Barrie—the author of Peter Pan. It turned out that it was Scott and his party who were The Lost Boys.
