His roommate had already arrived and sat studying a text in a reader. He was an intense youth who introduced himself as Cavalheiro. Kenmuir saw no way out of a conversation. It proved interesting.
“I search for God in the quivira,” Cavalheiro tried to explain. The surprise on his listener’s face was unmistakable. “Ah, yes. You wonder, am I dement? A quivira gives nothing but the full-sensory illusion, the dream, of an experience. True. However, one does not passively let the program run. One interacts with it, not so? The result is that the episode affects the brain and goes into the memory just as if it were real.”
“Not quite,” Kenmuir demurred. “That is, whenever I’ve been there, well, afterward I knew I was actually lying in the tank.”
“All you want is entertainment, or sometimes knowledge,” Cavalheiro said. Not always, Kenmuir thought. On long space missions, sessions in the quivira were a medicine for sensory impoverishment. Their input helped keep a man sane.
“I seek the meaning of things,” Cavalheiro went on. “The programs I use were written by persons who spent their lives pursuing the divine. They had the help of sophotects long intimate with humans, that draw on the whole of every religious culture in history and think orders of magnitude more powerfully than us. The conceptions in the programs go beyond words, images, consciousness. They go to the depths of the spirit and the bounds of the cosmos. I think the Teramind is in them.”
“Um, may I ask what it … feels like?”
“It is no single thing. I have cried to Indra and he has answered me out of the thunders. I have questioned Jesus Christ. I have felt the compassion of Kwan-Yin. I have—no, it is not possible to speak of nearing samadhi. But do you not see, it is interaction. In a little, little way, I give form to the divine, while it fills me and shapes me.”
“You are both finding and making your God, then?” Kenmuir ventured.
“I am trying to understand and enter into God,” Cavalheiro replied. “I am not unique in taking this path. None of us has lived to walk it to the end, and I do not imagine any human ever will. But it is what our lives are about.”
Aleka having demonstrated high competence and sketchily described what she and Kenmuir claimed were their intentions, they received permission to proceed. By then the sun stood at mid-afternoon. They said they would like to relax with a walk now and begin next morning. “An excellent idea,” Sandhu approved. “What you desire lies as much in the living world as in any abstractions.” He signed the air. “Blessings.”
Trails wound down the mountain through its woodland. They chose theirs because it looked unfrequented. Their goal was solitude in which to plan their strategy. Time passed, though, while they fared in silence.
High above them, the greenwood rustled to a breeze. That and their footfalls on soil were the only sounds at first, except when a squirrel chittered and sped aloft or a bird-call came liquid from shadowy depths. Light-flecks danced. Air beneath the leaves lay rich and warm. They passed some crumbling, mossgrown blocks that Kenmuir guessed were remnants of a highway; but if a town had once been hereabouts, it was long abandoned, demolished to make room for the return of nature. Presently he began to hear a trill of running water. The path reached a brook that swirled and splashed in a small cascade, down to a hollow where blackberries beckoned robins.
He and Aleka stopped for a drink. The water was cool. It tasted wild. Straightening, he wiped his mouth and sighed, “Bonny country. And so peaceful. Like a whole different planet.”
Aleka gave him a quizzical glance. Here, where the canopy overhead was thinner, her skin glowed amber below a faint sheen of sweat. “Different from what?” she inquired.
He grimaced. “Those places we’ve lately been.”
“You’ve got it wrong, I think. They are the alien planets. This is the normal one, ours.”
“How?” he asked, puzzled.
“Why, what you said. Here things are beautiful and peaceful. Bueno, isn’t most of Earth?”
“Why, uh—”
He harked back. The heights and heather and bluebells, glens and lochs, old hamlets and friendly taverns of his earlier life. Immensities of forest, prairie, savannah, splendor of horned beasts and lethally graceful predators, birds in their tens of thousands aflight across the sky. An antique walled city, lovingly preserved. A city that was a single kilometer of upwardness triumphant amidst its parkland. A city that floated on the sea. A village where each home was a dirigible endlessly cruising. A guitar plangent through tropical dusk or in an Arctic hut. And nobody crowded, nobody afraid … unless they wanted to be?
“Y-yes,” he admitted. “Most of it. And where it isn’t, by our standards, maybe that’s what the people choose.” He thought of the Drylanders. “I’m not sure how much choice they have, given what they are. But they’re not forced.”
Aleka cocked her head—the obsidian-black hair rippled—and considered him. “You’re a thoughtful kanaka,” she murmured.
Unreasonably, he flushed. “You make me think.”
“Naw, with you it’s a habit.”
“Well, you open my eyes to what’s around me on Earth.”
Suddenly in the sunshine, he felt cold. What did he know of Earth, really? Of common humanity? His universe had become rock and ice, the far-strewn outposts of beings whose blood was not his, and one among them whom he utterly desired but who he knew very clearly did not love him. How glad he was when Aleka pulled him back from the stars: “I don’t claim this world is perfect. Parts of it are still pretty bad. But by and large, we’re closing in on the Golden Age.”
In argument was refuge. “How can you say that, when you yourself—”
Aleka stamped her foot. “I said it isn’t perfect. A lot needs fixing. Sometimes the fixing makes matters worse. Then we have to fight. Like now.”
Kenmuir recalled the bitterness of Lilisaire and other Lunarians against the whole smooth-wheeling system. He recalled how the machines of that system were competing them out of space. Asperity touched him. “I take it you don’t share the standard belief in the absolute wisdom and beneficence of the cybercosm?”
She shrugged. “Never mind the cybercosm. We deal with people, after all. And they’re as shortsighted and crooked as ever.”
“But the system—the advice, that governments never fail to take—the services, everywhere around us like the atmosphere, and we as dependent—” Services that had lately included doping a drink, it seemed; and what else?
“You mean, do I imagine the machines are pure, and humans alone corrupt the works? No.” Aleka’s laugh sounded forlorn. “Maybe I’m eccentric in not thinking the Teramind has anything particular to do with God.”
“Then I’m eccentric too,” Kenmuir agreed.
Through him went: What was the Teramind? The culmination, the supreme expression of the cybercosm? No. The lesser sophotectic intellects, some of them outranging anything the human brain could conceive, took part in it, but they were not it, any more than cliffs and crags are the peak of a mountain. A single planetwide organism would be too slow, too loose; light-speed crawls where thought would leap. The machines, ever improving themselves, had created a supreme engine of awareness, somewhere on Earth—
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born—
and it engaged in its mysteries while, surely, heightening its own mightiness; but it was not omniscient or omnipotent, it was not everywhere.
Its underlings, though, might be anywhere.
He must assume that none were here. Else his battle was already lost.
“I do admit, basically this is a good world,” Aleka said. Her gaze sought peace in the boisterous water. “I don’t want to overthrow it. I feel guilty, lying to our decent, kind hosts. All I want is freedom for my folk to be what they are.”
For which end she did indeed lie, Kenmuir thought, and she would defy the whole civilization of which she spoke so well, until she had w
on or it had convinced her that her cause was wrong.
Why had it not? Why this secrecy, these … machinations?
“I’m no revolutionary either,” he said, while rebellion stirred within him. “I’d just like to see things, well, shaken up a bit.”
Her look returned to him. During their hours in Overburg they had barely begun to know one another. He became acutely aware of her fullness, lips and breasts and hips and round strong limbs. “Why would you?” she asked.
“Oh,” he floundered, “too complacent—When was the last scientific discovery that amounted to more than the next decimal place or the newest archeological dig? Who’s pioneering in music, graphics, poetry, any art? Where’s the frontier?”
“Regardless,” she gainsaid him—how spirited she was—“you’re trying to stop the Habitat.”
Lilisaire’s mission, he thought. His selfishness. But he couldn’t confess that. Most especially not to himself. “Lunarian society deserves to survive,” he replied lamely. “It’s different from anything on Earth, a, a leaven.” He stared about him, randomly into the forest. “It’s created its own beautiful places, you know.”
28
The Mother of the Moon
They were a trio that drew glances as they passed through Tychopolis—the big, white-maned woman, her broad countenance lined across the brow and at the mouth and eyes but her back straight and her stride limber; the tall man, also Earth-born, his locks equally white and the gaunt face weathered, likewise still in full health; and the Lunarian, coppery-dark of skin below the midnight hair, making the slanty sleet-gray eyes seem doubly large. In flare-collared scarlet cloak, gold-and-bronze tunic with a sunburst at the belt, blue hose, he might have been setting youthful flamboyance against the plain unisuits of the elders; but his expression was too bleak.
At the lifelock he identified himself to the portal. It opened on an elevator terminus. “This is a service entrance,” he explained. “The public access is closed for reconstruction.” His English was less idiomatic and lilting than that of most among his generation, perhaps because in his work he necessarily called on many Terrestrial databases and consulted with many Terrestrial experts.
“I know that, of course,” Lars Rydberg answered. “I am not sure just what sort of reconstruction it is.”
Eyrnen led the way into the elevator. “We can ill allow animals, seeds, or spores from low-level to get into the city. Think of bees nesting in ventilators, squirrels gnawing on electrical cables, or disease germs which the high mutation rate here may have turned into a medical surprise for us.”
Dagny Beynac sensed the implied insult. “My son is quite well acquainted with the obvious,” she said tartly.
“I pray pardon, sir,” Eyrnen said to Rydberg. He did not sound as if he meant it. “I did but wish to ensure that the problem stood clear before you. Some folk confuse our situation with that of the L-5 colony. Yonder they have no more than large, closely managed parks. We are fashioning a wilderness.”
Rydberg went along with the half-conciliation. “No offense,” he answered. “I do know this, but wondered about the technical details. It’s very good of you to show us around.”
It was, even if the bioengineer’s grandmother had specifically requested it for herself as well as her visitor, and a request from Dagny Beynac had on the Moon somewhat the force of a royal command. Quite a few Lunarians would have refused anyway, or at least taken the opportunity to display icy, impeccably formal insolence.
Odd that this son of Jinann should show what hostility he did. She was always the most Earthling-like of the Beynac children, the most amicable toward the mother world. Well, Eyrnen belonged to the next generation.
And was he actually hostile? Rydberg thought of a cat asserting itself before a dog, warning the alien lest a fight erupt. Could that be Eyraen’s intent? Rydberg smothered a sigh. He didn’t understand Lunarians. He wondered how well his mother did.
“A pleasure,” the engineer was saying. “My lady grandmother has not guested these parts in some time. We have much new to reveal.” He did not add outright that he’d rather she’d come unaccompanied. Instead: “She has been overly occupied on behalf of her people.” Against the encroachments of Earth, he left unspoken.
Rydberg’s ears popped. They were going deep indeed.
He admired the deftness with which Beynac intervened: “About those technicalities, I’d be interested to hear, too. Okay, you’ve got a long tunnel, for trucking bulky loads and numbers of passengers to and fro. Valves at either end keep the noticeable animals on the reservation. As you said, it’s the bugs and seeds and microbes and such that could sneak by. But I thought your sensors and minirobots were keeping them well zapped. I haven’t heard of anything escaping that couldn’t easily be taken care of.”
Maybe she was giving Eyrnen a taste of his own medicine, no matter how innocent her smile. He accepted it, replying, “The improvements in the lifelock are partwise qualitative, better technology, but mainwise quantitative, more of everything. As the ecology below strengthens and increases its fertility, and as the region grows, invasive pressures will heighten. We must anticipate them.”
The elevator hissed to a stop, the door slid open, and the three emerged onto a balcony from which a ramp spiraled on downward. Rydberg caught his breath.
He stood near the ceiling of a cavern whose floor was almost two kilometers beneath him. The inset sunlike lamps that lighted it shone, as yet, gently, for this was “morning” in their cycle. They made warm a breeze that wandered past, bearing odors of forest which must be thick and sweet on the ground. Distance hazed and blued the air; seen across tens of kilometers, the other walls were dim, half unreal. Cloudlets drifted about. Birds flew by. So did a human a ways off, wings spread iridescent from the arms, banking and soaring not in sport—that was for such places as Avis Park—but watchful over the domain. It stretched in a thousand-hued greenness of crowns, and meadows starred with wildflowers, and a waterfall that stabbed out of sheer rock to form a lake from which a stream wound aglitter. …
Eyrnen let the others stand mute a while before he said, “Let us go and walk the trails. Shall I summon a car for the ramp?”
“Not for me!” Beynac exclaimed. She took the lead, in Lunar bounds, as a girl might have.
“It’s a wonderful creation,” she had said the duskwatch before. “I look forward on my own account, but still more to seeing you see it for the first time.”
Having finished supper, they lingered over coffee and liqueurs. Drinks had preceded the food and a bottle of wine complemented it, for this celebrated the beginning of several daycycles she had arranged free of duties. Her son had completed his business for Fireball and meant to spend that period with her before going home. They were all too seldom together. A glow was in their veins, an easiness in their hearts.
She had cooked the meal herself, to a high standard, but served it in the kitchen. Now that she lived alone, except for visits like his, she saved her baronial dining room for parties. The kitchen was amply spacious, an abode of burnished copper, Mexican tile, and fragrances. A picture of Edmond Beynac in his later years, at his desk, looked across it to a Constable landscape reproduced by molecular scan. A Vivaldi concerto danced in the background.
“I’m eager,” Lars said. “From everything I have screened about it—” He hesitated. “That’s not much.”
If only the Lunarians would cooperate with the news media, at least about matters as harmless and to their credit as this, he thought. If it weren’t for the Earth-gene Moondwellers, what would Earth ever learn?
Dagny let his remark pass. “I’ve been far too long away from it,” she mused. “I do miss natural nature.”
“Most of your communities have lovely parks.”
“Oh, yes.” Her glance went to the painting. “But no living hinterlands.”
He smiled; “If that’s what you wish for, come see us again on Vancouver Island.”
She smiled back, shaking her head
a bit. “I’ve probably grown too creaky for the weight.”
“You, at a mere ninety? Nonsense.” Not just because of faithfulness about her biomed program and regular vigorous exercise in the centrifuge, he thought. She’d had luck in the heredity sweepstakes, and shared the prize with him. He did not feel greatly diminished in his own mid-seventies. “Do come.”
“Well, maybe.” She sighed. “There’s always so bloody much to do, and the months go by so fast.”
“Come for Christmas,” he urged.
Her face kindled. “With your grandchildren!”
She had great-grandchildren here, but they were Lunarian.
She loved them, he felt sure, and no doubt they liked well enough the old lady who brought them presents and had the grace not to hug them or gush over them; but did they listen to her stories and songs with any deep feeling, did they ever care to romp with her?
“I’ll bring along a great-grandchild of mine to help you celebrate your hundredth birthday,” he said impulsively.
She laughed low. The light caught a glistening in her eyes. “You’re a darling, once you’ve had a smidgen of alcohol to dissolve that Swedish starch.” Her look sought her husband’s image. “Oh, ’Mond,” she whispered, “I do wish you could’ve known him better.”
The picture was an animation. Because of the comfort between them, Lars asked what would otherwise never have escaped him: “Do you activate that very often?”
“Not often any more,” she answered. “I know it so well, you see.”
“All these years,” he blurted. “Nobody else. You must have had offers.”
Sudden merriment rang forth. “Lots, though the last one was a fairish time ago. I was tempted occasionally, but never enough. ’Mond kept right on being too much competition for ’em.”
The smile waned. She looked elsewhere. “Although,” she said, “he’s become like a dream I had once long ago.”
“We live by our dreams, do we not?” he replied as softly.
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