Analog SFF, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Couldn't you just help me access a handful of randomly selected biographies and let me pick a few?”

  “Certainly. But please remember: it's not what the person finally achieved that matters; what matters is the aggregate of small ways that an individual of your type chooses or fails to choose a direction that fosters the potential for self-realization within him. You might very well learn more of what you need to know from an ordinary person whom circumstances did not allow, finally, to rise to the top, than from a famous or accomplished one whom circumstances did not challenge in any significant way.”

  “What about happiness?”

  “There now,” sighed the old man, this time with more gentleness, “you're doing it again. There has never been a person alive who was once and for all happy or unhappy. You live your life in the present moment, Master Chakrapranesh, which is like a bee in a garden or a stick upon the sea. Suppose you read about one of your selves and learn he was happy. That doesn't mean you will be. Suppose he was unhappy. That doesn't mean you will be either. There's a saying—'First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain again.'”

  Actually, the old man had used the word sky, but Prashan recognized the proverb. He thought his father had made that one up.

  “That never did make any sense to me.”

  “It makes sense only in the context of an experience of conversion or dramatic new knowledge. When you first learn that your phenotype is not unique, it shatters some illusions. For a while, a person tends to measure him or herself against the type, loses a sense of individuality. Eventually, though, you realize that the single most salient feature of every single one of your avatars is the condition of having to exist—just like you—as an individual. Then you begin to measure the type against yourself; you think of yourself as determining the limits of the type and you ask yourself what you can bring to it. Instead of thinking you're just a type, you begin to realize that the type lives only insofar as you give life to it.” The old man paused and smiled gently. “Of course, this will make more sense when you are sixty. Oh my! Look at that! I haven't seen one of those in years.”

  The old man pointed to a small book icon in the near lower right corner of the cube of air that served as a stage for the virtual display.

  “What is it?” Prashan asked, merely to be polite.

  The old man huffed through his nostrils with pride in the domain of his expertise.

  “The phenome system is very old. No one remembers when it was constructed and much of it is no longer understood, but it is more than a database. Each phenome is a key, a fingerprint that unlocks the resources of the system. When you entered your genetic makeup into the system, you not only accessed information about your phenotype; you also identified yourself to the system as the phenotype's owner. At one time, this would have served as a way of logging on to your own account on the system. Now people use the system primarily as a database, but on occasions—rare occasions—accessing the system triggers other functions of the system relevant to the phenotype.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “You have mail.”

  “From whom?”

  The old man did a quick check.

  “From yourself.”

  Prashan stared.

  “Obviously, that's not possible.”

  The old man stared back.

  “Obviously, it is. This file was placed here by someone who accessed the system using your phenotype sequence.”

  “Couldn't someone look that up? It's basically just a net address, right?”

  “You don't understand. Someone accessed the system the same way you just did—by a full DNA sequencing.”

  “You think I put the file there?”

  “Someone with your phenotype did. In a way, it's the same thing. But the file may have been there for millennia.”

  “Can you check?”

  “I think, Master Chakrapranesh, that it is time for you to take possession of something that belongs to you alone. It is not for me to open a document sealed with a phenotype.”

  “Even if I give you permission?”

  “There's some ambiguity about what we're talking about when we talk about ‘you,’ Master Chakrapranesh.”

  Then the old man left Prashan to himself.

  The file was a letter from Prashan's father.

  Dear Prasha,

  If you are reading this letter, then you have made a successful voyage to Polity, found your way to the Hall of Records at the Great Library, and accessed your phenotype. And if you are reading it, then I am dead. Greetings, my beloved son. I pray that all is well with you in the new world and I trust that the life you make for yourself on Polity will be a good one. It is to that end that you must learn all you can about this person that you are, Prasha.

  But you must also know about the situation on Earth. There is another reason that I wanted you away from here.

  Shortly after you were born, I became aware of the existence of the Reticulum. Earth, as you now know, is not, as we all grew up believing, the source of the human race; nor is it sitting “in lone splendor aloft the night,” lonely and remote from other “intelligent life” in the universe. To think we once wondered if we were alone in the cosmos! The story of how I learned about and came to believe the true state of affairs and all the many wonders it entails is worthy of a book in its own right. Much of my journal simply documents my difficult journey toward this belief and the many forms of my astonishment and joy. For you who now have taken up a life in the brave new world—no, brave new heaven of worlds!—the story would seem quite dull and anticlimactic.

  So let me stay with facts you are likely still not to know.

  Since you are now in the Hall of Records, you have seen the East Portico of the Great Library. You have seen the Taffonetta Mosaics, and you know that there is one mosaic for each world in the Reticulum. When a world joins the Reticulum, it gets a mosaic. As you have by now figured out, I led the team of Earth representatives that negotiated this process with the Reticulum. As you have also by now learned, Earth is not among the human worlds represented in the Grand Stair tower.

  Because of its age and stability, the Reticulum does not have much of a sense of emerging civilizations. It assumes things and cultures have always been as they are and will always be as they are. That's background fact number one. Background fact number two is this: There are, as you may or may not know, seventeen “human” species in the Reticulum. Prashan, if you haven't already, you must get over the notion that our species is human and the rest alien. That is the most egregious form of ethnocentrism. Every language in the Reticulum has a word for human, and every species in the Reticulum applies that word to itself. From a purely semantic point of view, the word human is of no practical use whatever, with the exception of making yourself look ignorant and giving offense to others.

  The Reticulum has lived with this problem for such a long time that it has forgotten that its solution is a solution and not a natural law of the universe.

  The Reticulum does not define humanity according to species. The Reticulum defines humanity according to behavior. You may think you know what I'm going to say next, but I'm sorry to disappoint you. It is not using language, creating works of art, or practicing the Golden Rule that they place a premium on. It is not the ability to remember the past or to contemplate the future. It has nothing to do with individual behavior whatsoever. The Reticulum defines humanity at the level of society and of global society at that. The Reticulum defines humanity on a planet-by-planet basis as a society that is unified under a single world government. What kind of government doesn't matter. A military dictatorship, a state religion, white supremacy, democracy—each will serve equally well. The Reticulum is somewhat Confucian (or Machiavellian) in its belief that hierarchy of almost any kind is better than chaos.

  As you can see, the Earth does not qualify as a human world by Reticulum standards by even the greatest stretch of the imagination. This wou
ld no doubt have been disappointing, but we might have continued as before and been no less happy as a race. But once our planet had come up before the Reticulum for classification, our fate had changed forever.

  Imagine that a party of explorers comes upon an uncharted island near major shipping lanes of several powerful nations. On this island are plenty of cows, chickens, and monkeys, but no creatures recognizable as people. What do you call such an island? Uninhabited. And that is what the Earth scored on the Reticulum humanity test.

  The best I could do was to make a case for us being on the verge of unified world government. The representatives knew, I am sure, how farfetched this claim was. But when a request for time to qualify is made, approval is almost automatic. The Reticulum doesn't want to make a mistake. I bought us five years. In that time, if the Earth does not become unified under a single government, then it will be up for grabs for whoever wants to claim it for whatever purpose imaginable. In the meantime, Earth is a protectorate of the Handful of Dust Empery. Look at the mosaic for this planetary consortium and you will see the Earth in the background.

  Prashan, the Earth will not achieve political unity in five years. There are only two choices before it: occupation and annexation. Left to its own devices, Earth will be declared uninhabited. At that point no one will even bother further to keep us informed of what is going to happen next. No amount of force will be considered inappropriate to control or even remove the population. No use or misuse of the native fauna will provoke an outcry of injustice. The only alternative was to cut a deal, and cut a deal I did. The Handful of Dust Empery has already begun the process of annexation. Earth will become a part of that complex. It will be a human world because the Empery is a human empire.

  Let me be clear. The people of Earth will never be citizens of the Empery. But I have seen how the Empery treats its “human animal” population. The best analogy I can think of is a rigid class system like that of nineteenth-century England: little upward mobility but general good treatment. Some young men will be siphoned off to fight in wars; some young women to serve in brothels or seraglia. That happens in our world already, Prasha! For others, there will be virtually no change in life. And for still others, there will be opportunities for service, promotion, responsibility, positions of trust and authority in a civilization far greater than anything Earth has ever dreamed of.

  Like everything else in this universe, it's a trade-off, Prasha. Once the people of Earth are integrated into the Handful of Dust Empery, it will lose the potential one day to become a politically unified, and therefore human, world.

  Am I sure that political unification of the entire planet is an impossible dream? Given the temperament of the world powers that be, the answer is yes. It would take nothing less than a global war of conquest to bring that about in the time allotted. Even if such a thing were desirable, one cannot simply start a war these days. We've spent too many years making that difficult, if not impossible.

  Ironically, all it would take to make it happen would be to tell the people of Earth what their true situation is. The problem is not telling them; the problem is getting them to believe it. As I've said to you many times, magic could be all around us and no one would see it: we'd rather believe ourselves insane and trust reality to go its own way in peace than to admit to the occurrence of something truly out of the ordinary.

  Still, I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't know you to be out of any danger of revealing the secret. It is not permitted. If the Reticulum cannot achieve unification through an appeal to governments, they do not throw the question into the far more chaotic court of the people. Revealing the truth would submit you to the harshest possible retribution of the Reticulum authorities and the personal vengeance of the Handful of Dust Empery. Fortunately, nothing you say or do on Polity will matter in the least.

  And—indeed!—who would want the secret to be revealed? That would almost certainly lead to war, to the worst and most widespread war of all time. Some would want to join the Reticulum. They'd vie to see who gets to do the unifying. Others would rather die than join, fearing to lose an imaginary independence. And of course any resistance to the Reticulum's terms themselves would bring about swift and violent countermeasures. What a mess, Prashan! Would it be worth it for half the population of the Earth to perish so that the other half could take its place in the civilized cosmos? Perhaps, if the people themselves could choose that path, but only perhaps. Who would dare to answer that question with conviction?

  I do not believe that such a war is a fair price for the status of humanity in this brave new cosmos, Prashan. You may not agree. That is your prerogative. But please understand why I have made the choice I have. And, if you can, forgive me. I had no choice but to choose for the entire planet. I maintain that anyone who had the power to do so would do so. To whom else would you leave the decision? That is the dilemma that caused the Reticulum's policy in the first place.

  Forgive me also for the selfish love of my only son that made me determined to put you out of harm's way. I've given you the opportunity to be a full citizen of the Reticulum, Prashan. This is a privilege that you, in my mind, enjoy vicariously for all of planet Earth. I give you my love, my son, and I wish you well.

  Prashan was not so much shocked by what the letter had to say about the Earth—he had guessed as much—as by what it implied about his father's attitude toward him. This was the bitterest disappointment of all—that his father had not believed his son capable of rendering aid or comfort in a crisis or even of sharing in its consequences, but simply wanted him out of the way.

  Time was running out. He could feel sad later.

  Prashan decided to ignore the books of abstract information and start with the animated histories. The number was daunting. At the beginning of each one, an unsettling display appeared. First a diachronic: a Prashan face from prebirth to the last possible stretch of decrepitude. The process took a full minute. As it unfolded, the face turned slowly from a full left profile to a full right profile. Then a synchronic: thirty or so evenly spaced stills of the same process projected simultaneously—an eerie Janus head gone mad, a lifetime captured in a single moment, the flowering and withering of a human face. The head appeared as an icon marker in the far upper left corner throughout each subsequent file. It was, as Prashan eventually figured out, the Politan equivalent of a fingerprint. Looking at it, Prashan felt himself losing the desire to continue. The whole story—the only one that mattered—was contained in that one visual image. Why had his father wanted him to give up everything to come to this horrible place, only to learn that after all he did not matter in the least in the grand scheme of things, that he was not even who he thought he was?

  There was any number of ways to search the list. Prashan thought of beginning with the most famous and successful, but that was a hard parameter to define, and he remembered the old archivist's warning about looking only at the extraordinary avatars. Also, he was struck suddenly with a kind of dread. What if none of them had accomplished anything remarkable?

  He decided to search the list alphabetically in order to generate a few random examples. After what seemed hours of reading, he felt something like existential vertigo. So many lives so different from his own—yet all Prashans! He thought to himself a moment before realizing the absurdity of the notion that any of them were Prashans. Was even he himself a Prashan? Prashan's thrill at discovering the richness and variety of his phenotype's histories had been rapidly tempered by the feeling that he himself had in some sense ceased to exist.

  He was wasting time. He began skimming other biographies.

  There were no words to describe either the wonder or the horror of it. Prashan read a detailed biography of a man, a teacher and writer on a planet called Berryseed, an ordinary man, except that he was genetically identical to Prashan. Even the most mundane details of his life were imbued with significance. And then again, afterward, Prashan felt that sinking, hopeless feeling. This person was not he. It was so
meone else's life, not his own.

  What was he looking for exactly? Some clue, just one, that would tell him what he should do.

  Prashan breathlessly skimmed five biographies and then stopped to think. He was looking for a pattern to emerge, for a thread of consistency, however thin, on which he could hang some sort of plan or weave some sort of connection to the strange predicament of which his father had told him.

  Nothing.

  He was running out of time.

  Quickly, Prashan skimmed five more and then five more. And then he skimmed another five. Again, he stopped to ponder their meaning. The problem was that these men led such different lives: their circumstances were different; their talents seemed to be different; even their choices struck Prashan as very individual.

  Was he looking in the wrong place for a pattern? Was it the content that would provide the consistency? Certainly Prashan had the impression that consulting the histories of their phenotypes would have been the last resort of these men. Each seemed most conscious of himself as a person with the freedom to choose, a person responsible for defining his own character based on circumstances and actions, not inner essence, a person like Prashan himself.

  Prashan's frenetic search for meaning had begun to degenerate into a heady blur of indecision. His aching mind drifted helplessly back to one of the tour guides in the Great Library's east portico. The Taffonetta mosaicspresent a striking visualrepresentation of the light-pump network connecting Reticulum worlds. The networkenables all interplanetary communication. Indeed, the network served as the inspiration as well as the medium for Taffonetta's creation. The medium?