Stranger Suns
Page 33
He dried himself in a rush of hot air, put on his father's long red robe of Spanish silk, and went up to the attic. The steeply set oak planks did not creak. He reached the top and saw faint daylight filtering in through the drawn shades on the three small windows. He pulled the chain on the old Edison industrial bulb. The irregular filament glowed in the clear glass, casting a harsh light into the gables and distant corners, summoning into being a universe of brittle cardboard boxes, old night tables, footstools, broken chairs, rolled-up rugs, and two old closets, on which sat an assortment of empty cake and cookie tins—all travelers from the past, trapped here in the stillness of dry wood.
He imagined protons decaying in the house beams, forcing the structure back into chaos, and wondered about this attic's variants.
Feeling warm, he took off his robe, hung it on an old brass hook set in a beam, and began to move boxes. Sweat ran down his back, and he coughed from the dancing dust. He smiled as he imagined Lena and Magnus coming up and finding him here like this, obviously out of his mind.
What contingencies, he wondered, had arranged the objects in this attic? He saw endless pages scrolling up on a screen, listing in minute, economically phrased steps the actions of countless people, all leading to the deposit of one article after another under these beams, throughout the infinity of variants. . .
He caught sight of himself in a partially covered mirror. An olive-skinned biped with a large head peered back at him, as if it had just pulled back the old sheet from the other side and been surprised to find him here. He stepped closer and covered up the old mirror. This place, he realized, made him happy, and wondered if Tasarov was fulfilled in the distant red universe.
Voices echoed downstairs. Lena and Magnus had arrived. He marveled suddenly at the intimacy of the social world, at the way it blacked out the universe around it, arranging itself for the exchange of simple needs, making strangers of those outside the circle.
Disoriented, he put on his robe; in another moment he might have slipped through an event horizon and scrambled up on a new shore of understanding. It always seemed that way, when the world dragged him back into commonplaces. Kafka was right, he thought; at every turn we need an ax to break the frozen sea within us. The scheme as given, to live, reproduce, and die, was a sorry thing for an intelligent being to bear. Mind should live as long as it pleased, pursue knowledge, and love profoundly.
“We're here!” Lena shouted from below. His heart skipped a beat as he recalled her other self calling to him, and remembered how they had slowly drifted apart. Her death was still within him, forcing him to admit that he had failed to achieve fellowship with his kind. He was closest to Lena, who had turned him away from self-hatred.
The aliens in their entropy-free zone attained fellowship by dancing and swallowing each other. Did they also mix and remix their thoughts? Was the vast swirl of their red heaven a system for processing a finished body of knowledge—in the hope of extracting something new from it?
“Juan, are you here?” she called as he started down the attic stairs, thinking that probability was a form of divine hesitation. God was reluctant to lose anything, so He let it all happen. No joy or sorrow could ever be avoided; the best and worst embraced in the infinite sum of histories.
“Be right there!” he answered, but stopped on the landing, fearing that he would not live to see what would become of his kind, even though the alien technology might offer life-extension along with its other secrets. Titus had put Lena in charge of a team of biologists to work in Earth's suncore station, where the medical mode of the alien technology had revealed itself most obviously; Mal's British facade had slipped when Lena told him that Dita would join the group. Together with Malachi and himself, Magnus would lead a group of physicists and systems analysts in attempts to gain control of the starships. A map of the web would be made.
He turned left, hurried into his bedroom, and dressed quickly, overwhelmed by the thoughts of how many working lifetimes would be swallowed by the web; but its treasures would be earned, after all, and that was better than wallowing in an alien inheritance. In time, humanity might transform itself, and pass on to a realm of its own making. The nature of that existence was unforeseeable, but it might free his kind from its inner torments and fulfill its deepest longings. Then humanity would be ready to start its dialogue with the leviathans of superspace.
He finished dressing and sat down in the gable. Early spring sunlight warmed his face, reminding him that the web had already bettered the chances for human survival, through Tasarov's colony, for one thing. Summet had found the right way in this variant.
He heard footsteps and turned to see Lena, Magnus, and Malachi in the open doorway. The sight of them flooded him with recognition, and he swam through their most private regions, liberated beyond himself with a new gift of childhood.
His friends were here and it was time to play.