The Stars Are Also Fire
Page 17
Dagny seized on the relief, the lightness. “That question has more answers than kids.”
Edmond nodded. “They scamper about, when they do not—vont à la derobée—go very quietly, like the cat. And they have their private things we know little about.” He sighed. “Less and less, the more they grow.”
“Yes, I’ve gotten that from Dagny,” Guthrie said. Once, after she thus confided in him, his return message spoke of a mother hen he’d seen when he was a boy, given duck eggs to brood and the hatchlings to raise, helplessly watching them swim off across a pond. “But where are they at the moment?”
“Well, Brandir’s in Port Bowen,” she told him. “He aims to be a structural engineer, you may remember, and I arranged for him to work a few weeks on a new cargo launch catapult they’re building, hands-on experience. He’s eager to meet you, but unless you can stay longer than you said, or seek him out, it’ll have to be by phone. Verdea’s at a friend’s, probably trying out a composition on her. Kaino’s wingflight stunt team—”
“Hold on, por favor. Brandir, Verdea, Kaino? You’ve described this fad among the Lunarian youngsters for taking invented names and insisting on them—so have the journalists—but I can’t recall which of yours is which.”
“It is more than a fad,” Edmond said. “They are totally serious about it. In fact, they are developing a whole new language for themselves. Not slang, not an argot, a language.”
“They don’t reject us,” Dagny said. “Not really.” She had to believe that. And they did remain amicable toward their parents, in their individual ways, and if an aloofness dwelt beneath it, was the pain this gave her more than she had given to hers? “It’s just that they are—different, more different than anybody foresaw. They’re trying to learn what their natures are, and, and we can’t help them much.”
Guthrie rubbed his chin. “Not simply adolescent rebellion, then, eh? Though Lord knows, looking at Earth and Earth’s officials on Luna, they have a fair amount of justification.” He knocked I back his beer. Edmond took the mug and the shot glass for refills. “Gracias, amigo. Can you sort of fill me in on them?”
Dagny put recent sequences onto the screen, in succession, and found a few words about each.
Brandir. Anson. Sixteen. Two meters tall, wide-shouldered, supple; ash-blond hair, silver-blue eyes, marmoreal skin on which no beard would ever grow. His face was not purely Lunarian, it bore traces of his mother’s. He often clashed with his father, but not too seriously, and she thought he stayed emotionally closer to her than his siblings did or could. It didn’t stop him from cutting a swath among Earth-gene girls. As for females of his kind, what happened was their choice as much as his. They appeared to have parallel interests of their own, an independence taken so for granted that they didn’t bother to assert it. Whatever had become of school-age sweethearts?
Verdea. Gabrielle. Fourteen. Almost Earthlike in looks, of medium height, buxom, round snub-nosed countenance, brown eyes, brown curls bobbed short. Quiet, studious, and, when she wanted something, steely determined about it. A literary gift, expressed in poems and prose sketches that baffled Dagny. (Starstone freedom: Achilles/Odysseus—) While a couple of other young geniuses had written the program that constructed the basic Lunarian language, she seemed to be among the leading contributors to its expanding and ever more subtle vocabulary. Dagny had cause to wonder whether she was sexually active, but what did a mother know? Lunarian children kept their doings to themselves, and Verdea scorned Earth-gene boys.
Kaino. Sigurd. Twelve. Big for his years, strong, redhaired, blue-eyed, features sharing much of his father’s ruggedness. The athlete of the bunch, the loudest, impulsive, sometimes wildly reckless. In sibling rivalry with Brandir, but it seldom manifested itself in quarrels. They would stalk by one another for daycycles on end, unspeaking, and then abruptly, for a while, be the closest of comrades. Kaino’s all-dream was to pilot spacecraft. He would not, could not accept that the heredity which made Lunar weight normal for him likewise made high accelerations a death barrier.
Temerir. Francis. Going on ten. Slight, platinum-blond, gray eyes oblique and enormous in a visage ascetic save for the full red lips. Even more than Verdea was he a reader, a student, soft-spoken, asocial. He showed great scientific talent.
Fia. Helen. Seven and a half. Still entirely a child, though you saw that she would be beautiful, black hair, umber eyes, face a feminine version of Brandir’s. Already almost as reserved as Temerir. She might be highly musical, but it was hard to tell, and she disliked most of what she heard. Maybe she’d create the first truly Lunarian music.
Jinann. Carla. Four. A little redhead, as her mother had been, vivacious and affectionate. Her Lunarian name she had from her siblings, and often forgot to use it. But who could say what she would become?
“Are the youngest at home?” Guthrie asked.
“In the playroom, I suppose,” Edmond answered. “You will meet thern soon, when Clementine has made them presentable.”
“They demand that,” Dagny explained. “They’re excited about your visit, but none of them likes … outsiders … to see them at a disadvantage.”
Guthrie raised his brows. “You’ve found an actual nurse for them? My impression was the servant problem on Luna is so intractable nobody remembers what the word means. An au pair, maybe?”
“No, no. Clementine’s what we call their robot.”
“A robot nurse? Housekeepers are tough enough to program.”
“This is a new model, lately developed by a small company in the city,” Edmond said. “We consented to test it. To date it goes fairly well.”
“Huh! I hadn’t heard a thing. Ah, hell, who can keep up?”—when computer models and nanolevel experiments compress former years’ worth of R & D into hours. The obstacle that progress must overcome wasn’t innovation, Dagny understood; it was capital investment and market acceptance. “Isn’t this a tad dicey?”
“We’ve got plenty of fail-safes, never fear,” she said. “Besides, it’s just a guardian, a doer of simple chores, and an entertainer. That is, it has a repertory of song and story elements to combine. We are’t making it a substitute for us, only a helper. We wouldn’t want more.”
“You’d scarcely get more anyway. This much surprises me.”
“Is advancement in artificial intelligence slowing to a halt?” wondered Edmond. “I have seen it claimed, but the man who had Clementine built, he does not agree.”
“Oh, we’re getting remarkable machines, amazing programs. You know from your field trips what the top-chop robots are capable of these days, and better are in the works. Yeah. Including a kind of—what you might call thought, creativity. But that’s still basically stochastic, no different in principle from your nanny’s kaleidoscope method of plotting new stories. Real thought, consciousness, mind, whatever you dub it—the way I read the accounts and reports that’ve come to me, we’re as far from that as ever.”
“Strange,” Dagny mused.
“Could it be the fundamental approach is mistaken?” Edmond speculated.
“I suspect those thinkers are right who say it is,” Guthrie replied. “You may remember, according to their school of thought, the mind is not completely algorithmic. If that’s true, then the ultimate Omega that fellow Xuan has been touting, it’ll never come to be. Not by that route, anyhow.”
“Are you sure?” Dagny asked. “You don’t believe in a disembodied soul or anything like that.”
Guthrie laughed. “To be exact, I have a bare smidgen more faith in the supernatural than I do in the wisdom and beneficence of governments.”
Dagny frowned, intent. She had long puzzled over this. “Then the mind does have a material basis. In which case, we should be able to produce it artificially.”
“I s’pose. However, the job may be trickier than the algorithm school imagines. For openers, ‘material’ is a concept full of weirdities. Read your quantum mechanics.”
“What about downloading?”
“Then we would have a machine with consciousness.”
“Sort of, I reckon.” Guthrie drank beer while he assembled words. “But you see, if my guess is right, we wouldn’t have created that mind ourselves. It’d be something that came from, that was a functioning of, a live body and everything that body ever experienced. The whole critter, not an isolated brain. If we can someday impose its … molecular encoding … on an electronic or photonic matrix, maybe that’ll help us figure out what a mind really is, and maybe then we can generate one from scratch. I dunno.” He grimaced. “Me, I’d mainly feel sorry for the downloaded personality, what shadow of it there was in the machine. No belly, no balls, no nothing”
“It would have sensors and effectors,” Edmond pointed out. “And it need never grow old.”
“I’ll settle for what nature gave me, thank you.”
“Plus antisenescents, ongoing celluar repairs, and the rest of the medical program,” Dagny gibed gently.
“Okay, I admit I’d rather not spend my last ten or twenty years doddering,” Guthrie conceded. “And a download of me might find existence interesting after all. But I think I’d be glad it wasn’t me.”
Dagny glanced at her watch. “Not to interrupt—” she began.
“Do,” Guthrie urged. “As Antony said to Cleopatra, I am not prone to argue. I came here to relax for a bit in good company.”
“An intelligent argument, that is among the high pleasures in life,” Edmond reminded him.
“So is a proper meal,” Dagny said, “and this will be on the table very shortly.”
“It is her cooking,” Edmond told Guthrie. “Let us finish our apéritifs. I state as a Frenchman, you have a treat in store.”
13
Seen from the air, Los Angeles was a monstrous wasteland, kilometer after kilometer of ruins sprawling eastward until it scattered itself against summer-brown mountains and dull-hued desert. Things leaped out of the jumble into Kenmuir’s notice: hummocks that had been houses, bits of glass agleam, timbers thrusting up parched and warped; snags of larger buildings; others almost whole, but raddled and empty; a freeway interchange, partly collapsed in some past earthquake; a water conduit, choked with rubble, dry as the sources on which the city once battened; overhead, a cloudless sky softening with evening, crossed by the meteor trail of a transoceanic.
Hitherto he had just glimpsed this on documentary shows, and seldom. The reality shocked him more than he would have expected. He twisted the scan control of his viewscreen, searching for life. It was there, he knew. The slow abandonment had never been total, and eventually, bit by bit, people crept back in, squatters, entrepreneurs, outlandish little groups of the special. Yes, a cleared space, palm trees, grass, ringed by homes mostly built from salvage, not unattractive. And another settlement, in a very different style, its center a pyramid—a religious community? And a third, a single big edifice suggestive of a fortress. And in the offing, fanciful shapes that marked Xibalba. … Probably the colonies were as many as the desalinization plant at Santa Monica could supply. Few; but then, the olden population pressure was gone.
Nevertheless he wondered why no reclamation was under way. Flying down from the north, he had seen a flourishing biome in the Central Valley, suited to its aridity, although habitation was almost as sparse as here. Did nature in these parts not deserve restoration too?
A matter of cost-benefit and priorities, he supposed. No doubt the regional parliament had once discussed it, in cursory fashion, and accepted the recommendations of the appropriate commissioners. The commissioners in their turn would have relied on the findings of a cyberstudy, conducted by everything from nano-robots permeating the soil to climatological monitors in orbit, and on an analysis of the data conducted by a mind superior to theirs.
If that mind saw things in a larger context, and found reasons beyond ecology for leaving this area forsaken, would it have explained? Quite possibly no human being could have understood.
Kenmuir shoved the question aside. His flyer was slanting downward.
Santa Monica perched neat above the ocean, several hundred three- or four-story viviendas ringing their cloister parks, intermingled with bubblehouses, red-tiled Spanish Revival casas, and occasional eccentrics. He had heard of it as mildly prosperous, a place of small-time entertainers and other professionals, retirees who had accumulated funds to supplement basic credit, and the people who provided them their live services. Now he spied boats at a marina, the sands of Malibu Beach across the Bay and the gardens behind them, a bioinspector’s snaky form broaching in a welter of foam. Westward the sea rippled silver and turquoise. Light blazed along it, out of a sun that smoldered as it sank.
Public transport to these parts had been discontinued since Kenmuir was last on Earth, ground as well as air. One by one, faster and faster, it was happening to minor communities, and some that maybe were not so minor. Insufficient demand, he was told. It was more efficient to use one’s own vehicle or engage one or, oftenest, simply communicate. He had wondered whether this would make for community spirit and whether that might be the underlying purpose. On the field below, three volants were parked. They must belong to transients like him, or be hired by them. Those of residents would be in the big garage.
His set down. He unsnapped, rose, stretched. After the faint noise of the flight, silence rang in his ears.
Better get going. He’d overlingered a bit on Vancouver Island today, enjoying Guthrie House and its memories, water and woods and Kestrel forever ready to leap back at the stars. Rendezvous at 2100 hours, was the word from Lilisaire’s agent in San Francisco Bay Integrate. (The number she had given him revealed that that was the location, but nothing more specific, and the reply from there was pictureless.) He didn’t know exactly how long it would take him to get from here to Xibalba.
Nor did he know the person he would meet there. Or what they would speak of. Or where he would spend the night. He’d better leave his luggage behind.
Although he was properly clad, in an inconspicuous gray unisuit and son boots, he felt naked as he stepped forth.
Nonsense. The air lay soft, barely stirring. He thought he sensed fragrance in it. Jasmine, growing somewhere nearby? His hearing captured a murmur. Gentle waves, gentle traffic, or maintenance machinery at work throughout the town? Sunset gilded field and walls.
But what was he bound for?
Why was he?
He squared his shoulders and marched.
Had the terminal been of any size, its stillness and emptiness would have ratcheted the tension in him. A single woman was leaving. She cast him a half-curious glance. Unthinkingly, he gave it back. Brown-complexioned caucasoid, middle-aged, well-dressed, doubtless a local person who’d landed a few minutes before he did. To what contentments was she returning? A door made way and she disappeared from Kenmuir’s sight forever.
He went to the service panel. “A cab, please, uh, por favor,” he said, automatically courteous, as if he were addressing an awareness.
“Where to?” asked the operations robot.
“Xibalba.”
“Post number five, señor.”
He went out. The designated spot was about four meters to the right. Very soon, a car slid up to the curb. He’d had lengthier waits. Maybe population here was declining rather fast, or maybe the residence had the political energy to get a large fleet assigned them.
The car was intended for this region, chassis mounted on tracks rather than wheels and with a ground-effect motor in case of major obstacles. It opened itself and extruded a gangway. He got in, sat down, set the informant on his wrist to give an account number and touched it to the debit scan. “Xibalba district,” he said. “Uh, the Asilo.”
The car purred into motion. A screen di
splayed a map, on which a red dot crawled to show his position. “Advisory,” said a voice. “The Asilo is a gathering house frequented by metamorphs, numbers of whom live in the vicinity. Unpleasant incidents involving outsiders have occurred. On 3 August last year, a patron of standard genome was badly beaten in a fight before police could arrive. Por favor think about this.”
Evidently the robot was programmed to refer questionable destinations and the like to a central intelligence. Kenmuir’s pulse quickened. Nevertheless, “Thank you, but I should be all right,” he said. He wasn’t the sort to go looking for trouble—on the contrary—and if it sought him out, well, at worst he had his martial arts to fall back on. In friendly contests he didn’t do badly.
“As you wish, señor.”
Dusk thickened into night. The ride became slow and lumpy, on lightless pavement cracked, potholed, littered with debris. Twice the car lifted above a heap of wreckage. The glow from riding lamps glanced off remnant walls, then dropped them back into shadow. When he passed through a village, shining windows made the dark beyond seem deeper yet.
It seeped into Kenmuir. What business did he really have here? He had been Lilisaire’s emissary to the Rydberg, and gained nothing. What more did he owe her? What had she given him, what would she in future? His career among the planets, yes; but always the stars taunted him, always Alpha Centauri gleamed out of reach. Her presence, yes, embraces like no other woman’s whom he had known or imagined or even met in quivira dreams; but he did not delude himself that she loved him, and never could he have a child by her. The salvation of her race? So she said; but did she say rightly, did she say truthfully? And was it a claim on him? If somehow he gave her the means of forbidding the Habitat, might that deny his kind its last chance to get back and abide in the outer universe?
Guthrie’s colony didn’t count, he thought. In a few more centuries, Demeter would be shattered. Although transmissions across the light-years swore that folk yonder had not given up hope, neither did they know any means of saving their descendants. Would they ever?