by Dan Simmons
Petra licked her sticky fingers and set the orange rinds back in the outside pocket of their pack. Her brown eyes seemed very deep when she looked at Pinchas. “Have you found a true vision?”
“Yes,” he said, and kissed her.
WITH three days before final fax, several hundred of the old-styles met on the Barrier Reef for a farewell barbecue on the beach. After the meal, they drifted off to dunes and spurs and private peninsulas to drink beer and watch the moon rise. Pinchas and Petra found themselves in a group of about ten old friends.
“Any regrets?” said a thoughtful man named Abe.
“For us personally or for the species about to go extinct?” replied a dark-haired beauty named Barbara. Her voice was light, mocking.
“Let’s start with species,” Abe said in serious tones.
There was a silence broken only by the wind and crash of white-topped waves. Then laughter came from a group a few hundred yards down the beach who were skinny-dipping in the surf while servitors hovered protectively over the water, watching for sharks. Finally a bronze-skinned man name Kile said, “I’m sorry that we never went out in space. You know, found life or anything.”
“Maybe the posts did and didn’t tell us about it,” said Pinchas.
Kile shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re not interested. I keep looking in the archives, but…nothing. And now we’ll never know.”
A woman named Sarah held up her beer and lightened the conversation. “Maybe the voynix are really aliens,” she said. “Extraterrestrials.”
“No, no, no,” said a short, bearded man named Caleb. “They’re temporal incongruities and chronosynthetic artifacts.”
Everyone laughed and the tension lifted a bit.
“If the posts are telling the truth,” she said, “and they bring us back from fax in ten thousand years, what do you think will be different?”
“Damned near everything,” said a famous athlete named William. “Their goal is to eliminate all of the dementia-year experiments and get back to original plants and animals. I think they’re even going to shift the climate back the way it was…well, whenever. Before all the shit hit the fan.”
“There go the cycad forests, primitive conifers like araucarius, soda lakes, podocarps, tree ferns, turtles…” began Caleb.
“No,” said Abe. “The turtles were here before rubicon.”
“…not to mention the tenontosauruses, microvenatars, camptosauruses, T-rexes, haplocanthosauruses,” continued Caleb.
“Bloody good riddance,” said a ruddy-faced man named Pol. “Never liked the damned dinosaurs. Almost got eaten twice. Here’s to their quick demise.” He raised his beer and the others raised theirs.
“Any other regrets?” asked Abe.
“Species or personal?” said Sarah.
“Personal this time,” said Abe.
There was a silence. Finally Petra stood. “If we’re going to get into that, we’ll need a lot more beer. I’ll be right back.”
ON the day before the final fax, Pinchas and Petra faxed to the former coast of Israel. Pinchas had ordered a large, 4-wheel drive vehicle and they picked it up at a supply station in the ruins of the old coastal city of Caesarea and drove through a gap in the tumbled-down Coast Wall and then on down into the Mediterranean Basin.
“I wonder if the posts are going to get rid of the Dam and all of this reclaimed land,” said Petra at one point.
“I would think so,” said Pinchas.
It was a mostly silent drive. In the rougher basin slopes they zigzagged past boulders, fissures, and frequent shipwrecks rising from the rocky soil. Lower down, dirt roads ran through the endless servitor-tended fields and wild cycad forests, but the whole basin had a dementia-era feel to it that gave both of them the creeps. Atlantis was no better. Driving through the wide streets—empty except for the inevitable voynix—Petra suggested that the abandoned posthuman city reminded her of a three-dimensional version of a circuit board.
“What’s a circuit board?” asked Pinchas.
“Something that Savi showed me years ago,” said Petra and dropped the subject.
There were several egg-shaped shuttles parked near the city nexus. Pinchas looked at the nearest shuttle and wondered idly what would happen if he and Petra somehow managed to get into one and ordered it to return to the e-ring with them. Nothing, he was sure. They had all learned that old-style humans and posthuman technology did not mix well.
The main nexus rose in a thousand short, irregular slabs, some topped with violet energy or shifting from phase state to phase state and place to place like the oversized electrons they were. It was an impressive sight, but not pretty to Pinchas or Petra. Alien.
Moira met them on the irregularly spaced front steps of the structure. “It was nice of you to come, my dears,” said the post. A few other posts were visible moving in the nexus shadows and walking atop the airborne bronze conduits beyond it.
“Your message said that you knew something about Savi’s whereabouts,” said Petra.
Moira nodded. “Would you like a drink first? Lunch?”
Petra shook her head and waited.
“Your friend was found in a hollowed-out iceberg south of the Falklands,” said Moira. “She had brought some life-support equipment there but the iceberg was breaking up—calving—literally falling apart around her, so it was lucky that we searched for her when we did.”
Pinchas frowned. “What do you mean? Why didn’t she just fax out? Is Savi all right?”
Moira nodded and wiped sweat from her brow. Her gray hair was only an inch or so long but it shined silver in the heavy Mediterranean light. “Physically she is well enough,” said Moira, “but she appears to have suffered what used to be called a nervous breakdown. A neurological persona wavefront collapse.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Petra. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen to us.”
“Of course it does, my dear,” said Moira. “All of the old-styles are prone to neurological and psychological problems. It comes from the extended life span. Stress, tension, and worries can trigger them and do, more frequently than you know. My dears, you were not designed for such long lives.”
“Where is she?” said Pinchas. “Where is Savi now?”
Moira raised her finger. “In the fax matrix, of course. Undergoing transcription repair. I assure you that she will be well and happy upon her return.”
Petra took a breath. “Do you keep…originals?”
“Original what, my dear?”
“You know, bodies,” said Petra. “Original old-styles. Savi. Pinchas. Me.”
Moira laughed easily. “No, no, my dear. The only originals we keep are the original quantum state patterns in fax memory. Surely you must understand that. And even those aren’t ‘original’ as you put it, since updated memories and persona wavefronts are never the same from microsecond to microsecond, much less from fax to fax. No, my dear, there are no hidden originals.”
“When will Savi be back?” said Pinchas. “Can we see her today?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Moira. “The transcription repair will not be complete for two or three days.”
“I understood that quantum state alterations were instantaneous,” said Petra, suspicion in her voice.
Moira’s smile was gentle. “They are, my dear, to all intents and purposes. But the organic reconstruction does take time. Your friend will join you in a few days.”
“But we’ll be gone in a few days,” said Petra. She had not intended it, but her tone came perilously close to a whine.
Moira shook her head. “Not gone, Petra my dear. Merely in modulated quantum state, perfectly safe, actually, in the mobius loop of the neutrino stream. Savi will be there as well. Certainly you understand that there will be no sense of time passing. It will be less than a blink of an eye for all of you—even if it entails a rather tiresome ten thousand years for the rest of us.”
“So you say,” said Pinchas.
�
��Yes,” said Moira. She smiled at them.
Pinchas and Petra crawled back into their vehicle and drove back to the Israeli highlands.
ON the morning of the final fax, Petra and Pinchas went scuba diving in the Red Sea, down along the great wall. On their dive belts were palm-sized dissuaders in case the hammerheads or other sharks in the sun-shafted waters took interest in them, but the only attention they received was from sea fans and softer things waving slightly in the tricky currents.
They made love later, on the soft sand, and then made love again. Lying there afterward, as was their private habit, Pinchas’s head on Petra’s left breast, her fingers gently kneading his relaxed penis and scrotum, they spoke in whispers.
“Did you believe the post…about Savi, I mean,” said Petra. Her fingers knew him perfectly.
With his eyes closed, smelling the distant iodine of seaweed and the much closer scent of Petra’s skin and sweet perspiration, Pinchas said, “I don’t know. I don’t really give a damn.”
“Well,” said Petra, kissing the top of his head, “we’ll know tomorrow.”
Pinchas kissed her nipple. “Yes. We’ll know tomorrow.”
“If there is a tomorrow,” whispered Petra.
“Yes,” said Pinchas and moved his cheek across her breast. His penis stirred and stiffened in her hand.
“Good heavens,” said Petra, grasping him tighter and kissing him as his face came up to hers.
“Yes,” breathed Pinchas in her ear.
THE final fax was scheduled for just after sunset in the Mid-East. All of the old-styles on Earth would be faxed away at the same instant, of course. Many of them planned final parties for the event, but a majority chose to meet the event in solitude or—like Petra and Pinchas—alone with someone they loved.
The two faxed to Jerusalem for dinner. Pinchas had been there before, but Petra had not. The city was empty except for servitors who prepared them an excellent meal in the King David Hotel west of the walls of the Old City. A city empty except for servitors and voynix. There seemed to be a lot of voynix around.
The vegetables were fresh and well-prepared, the mutton very good, and the wine was excellent, but neither of them took much notice. They held hands from time to time.
After dinner, with the sun red and low above the trees to the west along Gaza Road, they strolled hand in hand through the Jaffa Gate and into the Old City. Avoiding David Street and the other main thoroughfares, Pinchas and Petra made their way through the souk-vaulted maze of the Former Christian Quarter and the Former Muslim Quarter. The souks were mostly in deep shadow, but near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they came out of that shadow and crossed an ancient bridge in a rush of rose-colored light.
“Moving in glory, across a bridge of gossamer,” Petra said very softly.
“What is that?”
“Just some prophecy that Savi told me about decades and decades ago,” said Petra. “Some entering Jerusalem at the End of Days myth. I can’t remember if it was Christian or Muslim or Jewish. It doesn’t matter.” She took his hand and they continued walking toward the Haram esh-Sharif.
“We’d better hurry,” said Pinchas, glancing up anxiously between steep stone walls at the rings meshing in the cloudless sky. The orbital cities were brightening in the long rays of the setting sun.
There were, really, an amazing number of voynix in the otherwise empty city. Pinchas and Petra had to dodge around their motionless, rusted bulks as they hurried toward the Western Wall. It was five minutes until final fax.
Emerging on the raised area just above the plaza in front of the Kotel, both of them stopped their jogging and froze in place, still holding hands.
The plaza lights had come on, even though the twilight was still bright. Below them, filling almost all of the space between them and the Wall, stood hundreds or thousands of voynix, all of them oriented toward the Kotel—the Wall itself.
“Come on,” said Pinchas, a strange, thick urgency filling his chest and throat. He took her hand and started to lead her down the steps into the silent, inhuman throng.
A floating servitor blocked their way. The thing’s cartoonlike arms and hands tugged insistently at Pinchas’s sleeve. Pinchas understood. He took a paper kippa from the servitor and placed it on his head. The servitor slid aside and let them pass.
Pinchas stopped again. “Look,” he said, pointing. His voice trembled. It was one minute until final fax.
“I know,” whispered Petra. “So many of them. I’ve never seen so many…”
“No,” said Pinchas. He pointed again.
The empty Temple Mount was no longer empty. The last time he had visited Jerusalem, there had been only the rubble of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa Mosque on the raised area. Now a heavy structure of gleaming white Jerusalem stone was in the process of being erected atop the Mount. Voynix were visible everywhere on the rising walls and readied stones.
“Oh, damn,” whispered Pinchas. “They’re rebuilding the Temple.”
“Who?” said Petra, totally confused.
Before Pinchas could answer, every voynix in sight—those thousands in the Kotel plaza, those hundreds more huddled at the base of the Wall, the many more spaced along the new Temple works—turned toward the two old-style humans.
The sound, when it came, was not an actual noise—certainly not speech or sound as Pinchas or Petra had ever encountered it—but more a modulated rumble that moved through their bodies and echoed in their skulls via some terrible bone conduction. It was loud enough to be the voice of God, but it was clearly not the voice of God.
Thirty seconds until final fax and the noise struck Petra and Pinchas to their knees, their hands covering their ears in a useless attempt to block out the roaring words, on their knees and screaming in pain in front of the countless blind but staring voynix as the bone-conducted rumble grew louder and louder in them and around them.
“Itbah al-Yahud!”
SAVI, still in her iceberg a few minutes before final fax, reading the time on the luminous dial of her watch, decided that it was time to act.
She used the big-bore burner to cut her way from the fissure-tunnel to the buried tent, but carefully, carefully.
It was the tent, of course. It had been collapsed, but the lateral pressure from the ice had forced it up almost into its original pyramidal shape and it seemed to expand as Savi finished melting the ice around it. She drove an ice piton into the roof of her new ice cave and clipped a carabiner onto the apex of the ancient tent canvas, using the piton to lift it as the bamboo centerpole once had.
Only one halogen stick worked now, but she kept it with her as she dragged her thermoblank and diary into the black mouth of the tent with her. The pistol lay forgotten in one of the abandoned caves. There were two minutes left until final fax.
Bowers, Wilson, and Scott were exactly as Cherry-Garrard had described them. Savi knew that this was impossible after all this time, but she did not have time to worry about that. Making room between Bowers’s body and Wilson’s, Savi squeezed in and opened her diary to the last page. In such tight quarters, she subconsciously expected to be warmer, but the frozen corpses seemed to steal her warmth. The small space, briefly warmed by the big-bore burner but now cooling rapidly, smelled like a supply station meat locker Savi had visited long, long ago. Savi was still historian enough to note that—just as Cherry-Garrard had said—the rock-hard flesh of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers showed no signs of the men having taken morphine from Wilson’s medical chest at the end. There were no dark circles under the dead, sunken, closed eyes.
Savi’s hand was shaking with the cold but she managed to steady her stylus long enough to write—“We were all The Lost Boys. It was never the posthumans. It was always a case of…”
She stopped and laughed out loud. Setting her stylus back in her thermsuit pocket, tucking her frozen hands in her armpits, Savi continued laughing. Who was she kidding? The only old-style she knew who could read her last note without invoking a fu
nction was a scholar named Graf, and he would be gone in…thirty-six seconds.
Savi’s laughter echoed in the lightless ice caverns. Suddenly, with thirty seconds until final fax, the laughter stopped.
The last halogen stick was fading away in Savi’s lap, but it still shed a sick and dying circle of light in the tent. Enough for her to see by.
Wilson, Scott, and Bowers had opened their eyes.
Savi did the only thing that an old-style human being could do under the circumstances. “Fuck it,” she said. “Fuck it all.” And she laughed again.
Introduction to “On K2 with Kanakaredes”
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One of the few pieces of conventional wisdom that I’ve come to believe is the statement that people tend to be attracted to either the mountains or the ocean. I’m a mountain person. My wife’s an ocean person.
This isn’t to say that I don’t love being near the sea, I do, or that my wife doesn’t love the mountains…well, she doesn’t actually, she’s lived in Colorado for twenty-seven years now and while she appreciates the aesthetics of the high peaks, she certainly hasn’t grown to love them…but I do enjoy the ocean. It’s just that in most cases one has to choose to live near mountains or ocean (if one has the luxury of even that choice), and since 1974 I’ve chosen mountains—the Colorado Rockies, to be exact.
Both high mountains and ocean, according to Freud, tend to give rise to what he called an “oceanic” feeling—the sense that one is confronted with something vaster than comprehension, not bound by human scale, and quite possibly alive, if not sentient. The sea certainly seems more alive than the high peaks; its most salient feature to me, when I am living by the shore, is its constant susurration, its night-whispers and morning declarations, that constant low conversation that can shift into a scream of wind and surf with almost no notice. The ocean has the potential to calm or terrify the human spirit, shifting both its mood and ours in a blink of the eye. In that sense, living near the sea is like living with another human being.
