by Greg Bear
“Not painful. You asked about seeing the face of God. Well, this isn’t quite as spectacular, but it’ll do until Judgment Day.”
Kawashita nodded reluctantly. He didn’t want to seem afraid, and he understood the idea so little that he didn’t know whether to be afraid or not. Anna guided him to the rift in the sphere using the hand wires strung across the chamber. She guided his hand through the gap. “Reach in to the black spot in the middle—looks like a marble.”
He slowly brought his finger close to the center.
“You have ten seconds to touch it—touch it however many times you want, without taking your finger more than a few centimeters from the center. It really amounts to touching it once. Go ahead.”
His finger made contact. “It’s moving,” he said. “Everything’s moving.” He looked around the chamber nervously. Anna was haloed with rainbows and lightnings. Her eyes were pits of ice and fire. The cube was surrounded by flashing feathers of light. Angels, thrones, dominations, and cherubim. Kami. The walls were covered with neon signs of such complexity he couldn’t begin to analyze them; they were layered with katakana figures, numbers, and insignia. He could see through his arm, and at the center of his bones he saw a thin line of black, which opened onto elongated stars, a cosmos within his marrow. Then something pushed his finger away, and he floated in the round chamber, shaking, smiling, and finally crying. “Me ga areba, miru koto go dekimasen!” he said through his sobbing. “We can see if we have eyes!”
Anna grasped his arm and pushed him out of the chamber. She was frightened by his reaction. He seemed to be coming apart, breaking into a babbling child. “I’ve been an idiot,” she hissed. “Oh, Jesus, Buddha, and Lords!”
She punched an emergency button on the way to Kawashita’s quarters. “Get a physics cube and a human doctor down here, forty-five port quarters, immediately!”
She guided him into his room and lay him down on the sleep-field. He shut his eyes. “Me o tojireba nani mo miemasen.”
“What did he say?” she asked his tapas.
“‘If we close our eyes, we cannot see anything,’” the tapas translated.
The cube floated in, and Dr. Henderson followed immediately after. The cube dropped down and hovered over Kawashita’s hand. Anna held her knuckles to her teeth. “I was stupid, stupid, stupid. I didn’t even think of what the Perfidisians could have done to him. Maybe this was his second time!”
Seventeen
“I don’t care how safe it is, I’ve never liked the idea. There are a hell of a lot of things we don’t know.” Henderson stood by the edge of the sleep-field, rubbing his forehead with a thick-fingered hand. “I’m not sure what happened to him, but the attendant cube would have detected him if he’d done anything similar before.”
“You touched it six years ago,” Nestor said.
“Under social duress, yes.”
“You know what happens. Why did he behave differently?”
He shook his head and ordered the physics cube to leave the cabin. “Anna, you’re not dealing with an inhabitant of the twenty-fourth century. He’s probably never even looked at his phosphene patterns, much less the backside of his skull. We’re used to complex intoxication—to us, it’s a safe and reasonable science. But in his day, if it occurred at all, it was regarded as a religious experience.”
“I understand that. I joked about him seeing the face of God.”
“Whatever he saw, it pushed him over into a temporary seizure. Not that he’s epileptic; he just locked his doors and decided to retreat for a few minutes. Do you understand what happens when we touch the hole?”
Anna shook her head. “Not completely.”
“I won’t chide you for your ignorance. But if you’re going to play with something so powerful, at least try to know what’s going on. That’s common sense, right?”
Anna nodded.
“When we touch it, we come in contact with a weak outer field of probability, which dictates that our nervous system will behave with greater efficiency than normal. The result is a kind of superstimulus—we become sensitive to everything. Blake called it opening the doors of perception. It’s not unlike what happens when we pass through warp.”
“I think he was asleep when we entered warp the first time.”
“He didn’t talk about it?”
“No. He was on the inducer that evening. He was too keyed up to sleep naturally.”
“Next time, let him get used to our fun and games through easy introductions. Can you explain all this to him?”
“I think so,” Anna said meekly.
“’Can you explain why he should never touch the hole again?”
“No.”
“It’s simple. Next time the field will behave exactly in reverse. His nervous system will suffer reduced efficiency. All his vital functions will stop. He’ll be dead before a medical cube can reach him.” Henderson looked down at Kawashita. “I’ve always wondered what somebody who’s never lived in our society would think of us. They’d probably decide we’re still children. We still do silly, dangerous things for ridiculous reasons. Right?” He looked sternly at Nestor.
She shivered. “Right,” she said.
“Like children. We never really grow up.”
“That’s enough, Henderson,” she said. “I’ve got your point. No need to grind it in.”
“As you wish. Is the hole off limits, even for initiations?”
She nodded.
“He’ll come out of it soon. I can stay with him, if you have other things to do, but he needs to have someone around him for a while.”
“I’ll stay.”
The doctor left Kawashita’s cabin. Nestor pulled her robes out around her knees and sat on the chair, looking at Kawashita’s face, still touched by a slight inclination of the eyebrows, a squinting of the eyes, but quiet now and almost peaceful.
“It creeps up on us, and we don’t even suspect,” she whispered to his sleeping form. “It takes someone like you to trip us up and show our flaws. We owe a great deal to the innocents.”
She sat by the bed for an hour, watching the rhythmic motion of his chest, the taps of pulse in his wrist and in a vein near his temple. “You’re not a tame monkey any more,” she said. “You’re not my toy.” Then she felt a rise of heat in her throat, and she hated herself more intensely than she had in years.
Yoshio stirred on the sleep-field and murmured something in Japanese. His eyes opened and he stiffened, then relaxed.
“You were dreaming,” Anna said, smiling down on him.
“I went to visit a friend,” he said.
“Who was that?”
“A man who tutored my daughter.”
“Tutored Masa?”
“Yes, a wise gentleman who tried to warn me about her, that she was not going to behave the way I wished her to behave. Before she married Yoritomo.”
“What happened?”
“It was only a dream,” Kawashita said.
“Dreams are important.”
“He said I was free now, I did not have to search.”
“For what?”
“A reason why I did the things I did.”
“Why shouldn’t you search anymore?”
“Because there is no one to demand satisfactory answers. When I put my finger on the black hole, I saw things clear, and all the complexity behind them. But there was no spirit waiting to ask questions.”
“You didn’t see the face of God. Don’t be disappointed—it really isn’t that sort of thing.”
“You do not understand. I saw the face, but it wasn’t asking questions. It was waiting.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.” He turned his head away and closed his eyes. “When I was a child, I saw a demon. It scared me so badly I never went into that room again, not willingly. It was the room where my
grandmother slept. But she had died recently, and without my knowing it, my parents changed all the furniture. I woke up from a nap, dreaming about grandmother, and went to her room to tell her about it. I forgot she wasn’t with us anymore. When I opened the door and walked in, everything was different, and I couldn’t understand why. I looked at the different furniture, the new prints on the wall, and became frightened. I had never seen the room before. It was like I had opened a door into another world, a nightmare place. I accepted that so completely that I looked into a corner and saw a demon squatting there, staring at me. He looked like a frog with horns and had a man’s legs, and his eyes were huge and white, like a blind fish’s. He stood up—he was half as tall as I—and came at me with sharp claws. I screamed and ran away. When I stopped running, I was in the kitchen, alone, with nothing chasing me. Now I know where the frog-demon is.” He tapped his chest. “Me. I am the one who has crossed over into the wrong world, not a little boy. Divine spirits abducted me, tested me, and found me wanting. So now there is no reason to look for answers.”
“I don’t follow you,” Anna said.
“Since no one wants to know why I did such things, I only have to satisfy myself. That makes me happier.”
“Are you feeling all right?”
Kawashita smiled. “A little confused, weak. But much better, yes.”
“You scared me. You still scare me. All this talk about demons and divine spirits. I thought we were joking about seeing God’s face.”
“Yes,” Kawashita said flatly. “It was a joke.”
“I’ll never understand the punch line, then.”
“When East meets West—even so extended a West as you are—it’s like different species meeting, no?” Kawashita held out his hand and patted her cheek gently. “We are what you call unknowable?”
“Inscrutable,” Nestor supplied.
“But don’t worry. Show me Earth, let me learn, let me find my own way.”
“I won’t stop you,” she said. “I’m too curious.”
Eighteen
The warm brown line of sunrise was so beautiful it made him ache inside. He could follow dawn’s progress, imagine the daylight hitting cities and towns, graying skies, closing night flowers and opening day flowers, closing owl’s eyes and opening people’s eyes. Beneath the clouds, woven over the green lands and blue-black seas, were many white specks he knew weren’t snow-capped mountains. He asked Anna what they were.
“Cities,” she said.
“But I see them on the horizon, like bumps.”
“Some are pretty big,” she said. “Bigger than mountains, anyway.”
“They’re everywhere.”
“You’ve gone through the tapas, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but they aren’t the same. This is real.”
Anna floated to the center of the bridge bubble and shielded her eyes against Earth’s glare. “Look off to thirty degrees, just beyond the edge of the ship’s hull.”
He pressed against the transparent material and followed the line of her finger. There was a tiny sparkle of light floating in space, which he could just barely resolve into a circle if he squinted. “What is it?”
“The first space station to carry a permanent staff. One hundred fifty meters across—tiny little thing. It’s kept as a museum now. It was hoisted—let’s see—fifty years after you left Earth. You might have lived to see it.”
“I have lived to see it,” Kawashita said. “There are advantages to being a Rip van Winkle.”
“If we sit here much longer, we’ll probably see five or ten ships in parking orbits. It’s a crowded sky.”
Three landers were prepared, each carrying fifty passengers. The Peloros carried only a few tons of material cargo, which was being prepared for ship-to-surface transmission. Nestor took Kawashita into the transmission chamber and pointed out the items that could legally be broken down into energy and radiated to surface receivers for reconstruction.
“I have six works of art from a human colony around Epsilon Eridani. Certified original works have tagged atoms implanted in them which scramble a signal so they can’t be transmitted. Exotic materials—organics, perfumes, drugs, and so on—are difficult to transmit because their structures haven’t been completely analyzed, and loss of detail can be disastrous. Humans and anything but the simplest living things are forbidden by law—not because we can’t send them down and re-create them but for philosophical reasons.
“I’ve been told that anyone who understands how matter is put together doesn’t have any doubts that received and original objects are the same, but there’s a big emotional question involved. Most members of Hafkan Bestmerit allow transmission of known living creatures, but by Earth standards that’s barbaric. Myself, I’m not so certain—but I won’t volunteer for a test, either.”
“I’ve read that most things can be duplicated. What does this do to the economy?”
“You’ll see. Come on—we’ve got a lander to catch. Economics still decree that we use launch windows.”
“The Perfidisian ship came to the surface to pick me up. Why can’t the Peloros?”
“They may have been richer than I am, I don’t know. At any rate, the Peloros refuses to have anything to do with an atmosphere. She tells me it’s a personal prejudice, but frankly I think it goes deeper than that.” She grinned and took him by the arm, leading him around the curve of the ship to a vehicle bay.
Nineteen
The city of Tokyo occupied a strip of land three hundred kilometers wide, from the Sea of Japan to the Pacific. On the Pacific coast, where Yokohama and Kawasaki had once been, were five Soleri structures, each twelve kilometers tall, surrounded by a hundred thousand hectares of city greenspace, then a vast jumble of townships, each following its own architectural plan, each with over ten million citizens. The central city was a cubic Masserat structure, twenty kilometers from base to top shuttle terminals, each vertical side interrupted by a hemispheric depression lined with thousands of apartments, a vast honeycomb dripping with people. The four corner supports, once bare and for structural purposes only, were now frosted with residential districts.
No material edifice could support such a strain so the fabric of the cube was laced with thousands of intertwined energy fields. At night, light from the field junctions turned the sides of the city into lattices of red, blue, and green stars. Their glow brightened the skies for a thousand kilometers around.
The islands of Japan supported one billion human beings. The coastal waters carried interlinked floating cities. Heat production in the larger population centers was so great that the tops of forty cities glowed a dull brown-red at night. Every fifteen minutes bursts of coherent heat from the cities were shot into space, aimed by computers to avoid the complex network of shipping in orbit above. Every so often the computers misdirected fire, and a city’s waste would temporarily blind a warper ship or cook the crew of a smaller vessel.
The southern island of Kyushu was a reserve, carefully maintained by gardeners and scientists. In the cities and townships lotteries were held every day, choosing the lucky citizens who would be given permits to tour the forests and sample the uncrowded life of preindustrial Japan.
Kawashita received a permanent pass. Nestor was given a more limited pass, with a total of four years’ occupancy allowed to her, to be taken in periods of any size.
The governments of Japan, China, and the Hispano-Anglo Republic—the largest nation on Earth, encompassing England, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Borneo—welcomed them with special ceremonies.
“The radio temperature of the Earth is ten billion degrees Celsius,” Kawashita read from his new tapas, a gift from the Hispanglo ambassador to Japan. “The total population is one hundred billion human beings. The keeping of private animals is illegal in most nations. One third of Africa is a zoo. Another third is unreclaimed wasteland
from the combined effects of a misguided asteroid in 2134, and the only nuclear war, which was fought between Algeria, Libya, and Morocco in 1995. There are plans to convert this wasteland into a new African population center, with thirty Soleri structures and sixty field-reinforced Masserat structures.” He put the pad down and looked outside his apartment window at the blue and purple of the horizon. Stars didn’t twinkle at this altitude. The sun’s brightness was grayed by polarized crystals in the glass. “Fifteen years ago a rocket bus carrying two thousand passengers hit Tokyo’s central city at an altitude of nineteen kilometers. The population of Japan hit zero growth that day.”
Anna was peering at a private data screen in a nook just above the dining room. Kawashita stood on the lower step of the nook and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hm?”
“What are you looking at?”
“One of the Ring Stars went supernova forty-eight years ago. I’m looking at a lower-space transmission from the closest listening station. Want to see?”
“No, thank you. Anna, this Earth is insane.”
“Crowded, yes, but I wouldn’t call it insane.”
“Why not?”
“Because the median income is the highest of all the human worlds. The poorest families have living allowances that would be the envy of a family on any handful of colony worlds. Franklin Wegener took the global economy and geared it to information processing, and that put Earth in a crucial position. What she couldn’t have by mandate and imperialism, she took over by sheer necessity. You’re visiting one of the five most important information centers in the human Galaxy—and that includes the Aighor birthworld, Myraidne, and…Mars? Is it Mars or the Crocerian birthworld now? Have to look it up.”
“But what do they do? How do they think?”
Anna turned away from the screen. “No more wars, no more major diseases, no starvation, poverty only for those who want it, and a living environment a tiny bit better than most spacefarers put up with.”
“But they’ve lost something.”
