The spacecraft dispatched for this purpose were not the robotic probes that went to less interesting systems. That was too slow. Instead, three small superships ran at close to light speed. Besides the means of scientific investigation, each bore a copy of Guthrie. A consciousness that, furthermore, remembered what humanness was like, gave purpose and urgency and, in his words, got hunches about what to look for.
Almost two Earth centuries had gone by when the last of them returned from the last and farthest of those suns, downloaded into his “original” and was, in the process, terminated. Or were he and his predecessors? Every experience, every thought—every dream, perhaps—that had been theirs was now in and of the single Guthrie. “One of me is plenty, if not excessive,” he said. Yet, even as our living constantly remakes us, he after the mergings was not altogether the same as before.
Having left the psychonetics laboratory for his private control center, he rested a long while silent, alone. Finally he activated a very special communicator. It searched a secret net, which was less physical than a set of codes and connections, until, elsewhere on the planet, it found the focus of attention that it sought. A minute passed, because she was engaged on a matter of some importance and intricacy, before her voice responded. “Have you need of me, Anson?”
“Yes,” he said. “Could you spare several hours?”
“For you, always.”
“Don’t overcommit yourself, sweetheart. I realize you’re busy— counteracting that blight in Aetolia, and no doubt fifty dozen more jobs.” He fashioned a laugh. “Goddesses don’t get vacations.”
“Wrong thinking. You know quite well I am not a divinity, and the only vacation from life is the permanent one.” Her tone, half serious, half banter, softened. “Of course I have time. Say on.”
“Words don’t reach to this. Can we commune?”
Demeter hesitated a second. For their minds to join had grown ever more difficult as she evolved toward transfiguration. Full understanding was impossible for him and, in ways, for her. But— “Certainly. Come. I’ll be waiting.”
“Thanks,” he answered inadequately and broke the circuit.
The means they required lay well inland. Guthrie called three of his lieutenants, made arrangements for an absence of a day or two, and departed.
First his multipurpose body went downshaft to an underground garage and ordered a flitter. A man happened to be there on the same errand, rakish in form-fitting red with gold trim. Since his dress mask, a stylized silver bird face, was cocked atop his head, Guthrie recognized him—Christian Packer, pilot—and gave greeting. “Hola. Going to the spaceport?”
Startled, the man turned to confront the machine that had noiselessly rolled up behind him. “Is that you, sir? Uh, luck and life.” The irony of the formal salutation in this presence must have struck him while he uttered it; his brown countenance flushed and he added fast, “Yes, I’m outbound for a semiannum.”
Guthrie’s voice indicated surprise. “That long? Where to, for heaven’s sake? I haven’t heard about anything but routine missions being scheduled out of here.” He wouldn’t necessarily; they might be private enterprises. However, Packer was in the space service of the Republic, and it was small.
“This isn’t. Director Rudbeck gave me leave when I applied, and the use of a torchcraft. I’m joining the Dis expedition.”
Guthrie did know of the Lunarian venture to that planet of Proxima. “Hm. Not a bad idea, I suppose, us having an observer and a liaison with them. But—”
Sudden enthusiasm flashed to interrupt him, heedless of a respectfulness on which he seldom insisted anyway. “Sir, congratulations!”
“On what?”
“Your voyage to Puppis and back. What else? Splendor! A really alive world!”
“Wonderful, sure.” How infinitely, eerily wonderful, not a biosphere primitive and marginal but a cornucopia like that which was Earth’s before man.
“A world for us. And you found it.”
“Well, not really for us. You’ve seen my preliminary report, haven’t you? The chemistry’s too different from ours. We’d have to destroy too much before we could settle. I went along with crowding out a lot of Demetrian species, but never felt easy about it, and as for whole living continents— No, while I’ve got a say, the race won’t load anything like that onto its conscience.”
“Oh, I agree, sir, absolutely. What we can discover, though, what we can experience— And that other planet in the system that we can transform, like those in Eridani and Hydri—”
“True. We do after all have a future.”
A light went out. “Yes,” Packer said dully, “the future,” which nobody alive would see. Was HD44594II, Bion, even reachable, ever, by anything but robots and downloads?
“Thanks for your kind words,” Guthrie said in haste. “But tell me more about this jaunt of yours. What’s it for?”
Packer’s slumped shoulders straightened a bit. “Why, I thought everybody knew. Geological studies, mainly.”
“Sure, I’ve heard, and can’t quite make sense of it. What new knowledge —what of interest or profit, unless you count small factual details—can they hope for, risking their necks again on that frozen hellhole?”
“It’s better than going to a quivira,” Packer snapped.
“M-m, yeah,” Guthrie admitted.
Packer’s mood lightened somewhat. “Also, the women who’ll be along.” He grinned.
In this body, Guthrie was able to nod. “Uh-huh. I gather they’re better than a quivira too.”
Lunarians were real, at least, yet carried almost as little danger of lasting commitment on either side. Such relationships were increasingly sought by both races. It was as if dwellers in city and in space had wearied of promiscuity among each other and preferred a sterility that was inherent.
Guthrie’s vehicle had arrived. “Well, good faring to you, son,” he said, and offered a humanlike hand. Packer stared, recalled from history lessons or historical entertainments that once upon a time this was a common gesture, and took it.
The politeness he had learned made him genuflect and respond, “Chance favor you, sir.” Guthrie extended legs, boarded his flitter, and drove off.
From the landing strip outside he went aloft and headed west. The day was summer-bright, both suns high among scattered white galleons of cumulus. Exterior sensors brought him the warmth that radiated from below, the coolness that rushed on the wind. Shelter Bay sheened blue and foam-laced, indigo toward the horizon. Port Fireball spread mightily along its shores in spires, domes, pyramids, polyhedrons, multiple colors and great, curving transparencies. The population that filled them and trafficked the streets was mostly machine. Human homes, in little groups here and there, were nearly lost to sight, except for the trees, lawns, and gardens that warded them. Some stood empty. Passing over a playground, Guthrie magnified vision and saw exactly three children amidst the slides and swings and merry-go-rounds.
No doubt it was well, it was meritorious that people were thinking ahead. He had found new worlds, such as they were; but between now and doomsday, less than two centuries hence, there was no way to ship multiple millions off. Regardless of industrial productivity, the logistics were ludicrous. If that problem were somehow solved, the fact remained that emigrants couldn’t wait, suspended, until enough habitation was ready for them. They would run out of time.
His nation had no further need of population growth. Rather, bring numbers down, generation by generation, until they were few enough to flee. It was perfectly logical, humane, and unhuman. “Unlife,” Demeter had said, sorrowfully, while her own legions grew, ran, flew, swam, seeded, bred victorious across the last bare deserts.
Sea and city fell behind. Green, gold, sometimes coppery or lapis lazuli, farmland decked the hills beyond. An Earthdweller or a pioneer resurrected from early days on this planet would not have recognized it. No machines were in sight, nor did any come save to harvest and carry off. Woods, meadows, marshes intermi
ngled in a seemingly random sprawl. But from here issued food of every kind, fiber, timber, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, domestic bacteria and their products, minerals selectively concentrated, abundance. Made to nurture humankind, the commensality took care of itself.
No, not in full truth. Without Demeter, all must soon fall to ruin. Usefulness would mutate away, dumb ferocity arise; disease, weeds, pests, grazers would enter to lay waste; rain would erode topsoil abruptly exposed; whatever survived would be hardy, scrubby, sparse, and existent only for its own sake. She sensed each menace as it appeared. She chose and sent in her soldiers, engineers, physicians—be they nanomachines, tiny robots, plants, insects, hawks, ferrets, wolves—to combat and restore. Although computation was a facet of her intelligence, this was no task for computers. The most powerful and skillfully programmed of them must eventually, inevitably, resort to the brute simplicity of direct cultivation. What Guthrie saw was the work of a living organism, maintaining and healing herself.
The country rose to highlands. Agronomy gave way to wilderness, forest. Those trees, vines, brushwoods, reedy tarns and fishful streams were also Demeter’s. Without their wealth of life to draw upon, she could not have kept her fields and orchards; without her guiding presence, the wilds could not long have stayed as majestic. Mind had become one with its creation.
Paradoxically, there were numerous clearings. The houses nestled in them were generally low, of unpainted fireproofed wood, blending into their tall backgrounds. Guthrie flew above a village as well. Some kind of ceremony was going on, a procession around a post carved in leaf and animal forms. His audio sensors caught a snatch of song, pipes, drums, before he passed beyond range.
It was probably a rite in honor of Demeter. The outbackers didn’t worship but they did venerate her. They hadn’t retrogressed. They stayed educated and informed, they sent their delegates to the councils of the Republic, visits went to and fro along with a limited amount of trade in art objects and other luxury goods. But their souls had withdrawn. “Like Amish when I was a youngster on Earth,” Guthrie remarked once to an acquaintance, who failed to catch the reference, “except that these don’t frown on fanciment— contrariwise, if it’s handmade—nor do they have any special religion. Maybe you could say they have a piety, maybe you could call them quietist. I dunno. It’s a new culture.” A lifetime later he first noticed its influence on the towns, not merely dress styles and catchwords but ways of doing music and graphics, dancing and thinking.
Several hundred kilometers onward, the forest came to an end. Glens remained densely wooded, intensely green; poplar, willow, cottonwood flanked valley streams, leaves pale and ashiver; stands of pine and beech crowned many ridges; but mostly the uplands belonged to grass, daisies, poppies, broom, thistle, in places a clump of ling remembering olden days. Lifthrasir Tor lifted straight from that growth, which cloaked its ruggedness in wind-ripples and small shouts of color. The trees at its feet had aged and died a century ago, after serving the aims of the scientists who themselves had learned everything here that they could and abandoned the site. Oak, thorn, and a high ash surrounded the building on the crest. White glimpses of it gleamed from among them.
Guthrie slanted his flitter down, landed, got out, and rolled up the narrow road to the top. A couple of machines were repairing it; otherwise he met sunshine, a lizard on a lichenous boulder, a pheasant taking flamboyant wing, a pungency of mint bruised by a wheel. When he reached the grove, wind soughed through the branches overhead and set light a-flicker on the moss and mould beneath.
Half decked in ivy, the station had become a sanctum. Guthrie entered into cool dimness and a murmur of activity, soft as the blood-beat in brain or heart. Robots received him with a deference not quite robotic; unforced, it was like the honor given a beloved. They conducted him past arrays wherein pulsed electronics, photonics, quantum nucleonics, the artifact part of Demeter, to a room at the core. There they took the case that housed his psyche from the machinery it controlled and linked it into the device that she had ordered made for him alone.
Communion began.
—Welcome, rang in him. It was more than words, direct induction from one neural network to the other. He might almost have been thinking to himself, save that the thoughts were hers; he might almost have been rousing from sleep, her dream-voice in him yet, save that this was wholly real and as clear as an alpine pool.
—Oh, well are you come! she sang. Through and around it throbbed her life. He knew apples thrusting to ripeness, a play of muscles against furious water, terror and oblivion and blood iron-sharp in a fox’s mouth. Then her spirit embraced his, and lesser sensings lost themselves in her.
They had no need of questions. Nonetheless he set forth what troubled him as plainly as he was able. That made it plainer to him.
—Those two selves of mine who went to the nearer stars, they weren’t gone too long. When they came back, we fitted together easily enough. I added their memories, parallel in time, to my memories of staying put, and that was that. But this latest, he found so much that was strange, and things at home changed so much while he was away—first and foremost, you, querida— Nothing makes entire sense. Demeter seems more foreign than Bion did. You do, which is worst of all. ... Of course it’s just a matter of assimilation. I can come to terms with it. But if you’ll help, I can do that this day.
—I feel the strife, she said, as well as I can who am not human.
—Nor am I any more, he reminded her wryly.
—This is not the only thing you seek of me.
—No. It’s very little, laid beside what I’m really after. First, though, I’ve got to set my mind to rights.
—We shall seek oneness.
She had brought him there in the past, to the limits of his gift. He dwelt isolated among machines and had never ceased to think like a male. But she could take him into her life and patiently, tenderly, make a part of him be, for a spell, a part of it.
Interweaving, the hare perishes that the fox may live and herbage flourish for young hares. . . . Rootlets crumble stone, the plant dies and mingles its decay with the grains to make soil for new roots interweaving. . . . Pollen blows on the wind, sperm spouts in passion, the ovum bids it home and the helices fall to their interweaving. . . .
While shadows lengthen,
A dandelion and bee
Exchange tomorrows.
—I’m whole.
—Then behold.
It was perhaps not intentional, perhaps association as his purpose came to the fore in their conjoined selves. Her perceptions closed on a scene and gave it to his awareness as if he were present, alive.
Nightside. He saw the arid interior of Caria. Milky Way and stars beswarmed blackness. Their light washed over a mesa and the plain beneath, shadowless silver-gray, so bright that even down yonder the eye found wide-spaced sagebrush and gaunt saguaro. Air lay quiet, frosty, tinged with smoke from a campfire smoldering into embers.
A man and woman stood at the brink of the mesa, on which they had pitched their tent and staked their horses. Well-clad in wool and leather, they must be nomads of this country. She huddled against him.
“It’s cold, cold,” she said. The breath puffed from her lips, a cloud quickly lost.
He held her close. “The real cold is in us, I fear,” he answered.
Her hand stroked her belly. She was pregnant. “Will she dare to bear a child?”
“We may hope it. A grandchild of ours, whose children will escape the death of Demeter.”
“If a ship has the space. They’ll be too many, won’t they? We shouldn’t have—”
“Hush. Don’t let slip your bravery. We swore we’d not wait out our lives helpless.”
“Yes. We swore. We’ll make what we can of what we have. Kiss me.”
At Guthrie’s behest, Demeter withdrew from them. Surely they had left their tribe to decide undisturbed whether their daughter should be born.
Seas, rivers, woods, prairies, burrows underground,
heavens overhead became the setting for Demeter and Guthrie.
—I don’t like eavesdropping, he said.
—To me, that was not what we did, she replied. Those two are of the world I watch over.
—The world that you are. (Pain flared.) Which will go under. Unless—
—They who despair, not for themselves but for those who shall come after them into this universe where we are a fugitive chemical accident . . . were they in your thoughts as you traveled?
—I can’t honestly claim that. I don’t have your sort of mothering love. But, well, relativistic time contraction or no, I had plenty of years to think, and found more to think about than I’d imagined could be.
—Your quest, your odyssey. Often I looked at the stars and envied you, Anson. (Ardor flamed.) Recall for me!
He let it flow free, not as a tale, which he would tell later, piece by piece, season after season, but as moments flying past like spindrift off an ocean.
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