Flux Tales Of Human Futures

by Card, Orson Scott

  Primate language. And the other questions, the old ones. Archaeological, historical

  approaches. Biological. Kinship patterns. Customs. Everything you can think of. Just

  put it together as questions. And then we'll have them index it."

  "Index my questions?"

  "It's what we do-- we read things and think of other things that might be related

  somehow, and we connect them. We don't say what the connection means, but we know

  that it means something, that the connection is real. We won't give you answers,

  Leyel, but if you follow the index, it might help you to think of connections. Do

  you see what I mean?"

  "I never thought of that. Do you think a couple of indexers might have the time to

  work on it?"

  "Not a couple of us. All of us."

  "Oh, that's absurd, Deet. I wouldn't even ask it."

  "I would. We aren't supervised up here, Leyel. We don't meet quotas. Our job is to

  read and think. Usually we have a few hundred projects going, but for a day we could

  easily work on the same document."

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  "It would be a waste. I can't publish anything, Deet."

  "It doesn't have to be published. Don't you understand? Nobody but us knows what

  we do here. We can take it as an unpublished document and work on it just the same.

  It won't ever have to go online for the library as a whole."

  Leyel shook his head. "And then if they lead me to the answer-- what, will we

  publish it with two hundred bylines?"

  "It'll be your paper, Leyel. We're just indexers, not authors. You'll still have

  to make the connections. Let us try. Let us be part of this."

  Suddenly Leyel understood why she was so insistent on this. Getting him involved

  with the library was her way of pretending she was still part of his life. She could

  believe she hadn't left him, if he became part of her new community.

  Didn't she know how unbearable that would be? To see her here, so happy without

  him? To come here as just one friend among many, when once they had been-- or he had

  thought they were-- one indivisible soul? How could he possibly do such a thing?

  And yet she wanted it, he could see it in the way she was looking at him, so

  girlish, so pleading that it made him think of when they were first in love, on

  another world-- she would look at him like that whenever he insisted that he had to

  leave. Whenever she thought she might be losing him.

  Doesn't she know who has lost whom?

  Never mind. What did it matter if she didn't understand? If it would make her

  happy to have him pretend to be part of her new home, part of these hbrarians-- if

  she wanted him to submit his life's work to the ministrations of these absurd

  indexers, then why not? What would it cost him? Maybe the process of writing down

  all his questions in some coherent order would help him. And maybe she was right--

  maybe a Trantorian index would help him solve the origin question.

  Maybe if he came here, he could still be a small part of her life. It wouldn't be

  like marriage. But since that was impossible, then at least he could have enough of

  her here that he could remain himself, remain the person that he had become because

  of loving her for all these years.

  "Fine," he said. "I'll write it up and bring it in."

  "I really think we can help."

  "Yes," he said, pretending to more certainty than he felt. "Maybe." He started for

  the door.

  "Do you have to leave already?"

  He nodded.

  "Are you sure you can find your way out?"

  "Unless the rooms have moved."

  "No, only at night."

  "Then I'll find my way out just fine." He took a few steps toward her, then

  stopped.

  "What?" she asked.

  "Nothing."

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  "Oh." She sounded disappointed. "I thought you were going to kiss me good-bye."

  Then she puckered up like a three-year-old child.

  He laughed. He kissed her-- like a three-year-old-- and then he left.

  For two days he brooded. Saw her off in the morning, then tried to read, to watch

  the vids, anything. Nothing held his attention. He took walks. He even went topside

  once, to see the sky overhead-- it was night, thick with stars. None of it engaged

  him. Nothing held. One of the vid programs had a moment, just briefly, a scene on a

  semiarid world, where a strange plant grew that dried out at maturity, broke off at

  the root, and then let the wind blow it around, scattering seeds. For a moment he

  felt a dizzying empathy with the plant as it tumbled by-- am I as dry as that,

  hurtling through dead land? But no, he knew even that wasn't true, because the

  tumbleweed had life enough left in it to scatter seeds. Leyel had no seed left. That

  was scattered years ago.

  On the third morning he looked at himself in the mirror and laughed grimly. "Is

  this how people feel before they kill themselves?" he asked. Of course not-- he knew

  that he was being melodramatic. He felt no desire to die.

  But then it occurred to him that if this feeling of uselessness kept on, if he

  never found anything to engage himself, then he might as well be dead, mightn't he,

  because his being alive wouldn't accomplish much more than keeping his clothes warm.

  He sat down at the scriptor and began wtiting down questions. Then, under each

  question, he would explain how he had already pursued that particular avenue and why

  it didn't yield the answer to the origin question. More questions would come up

  then-- and he was right, the mere process of summarizing his own fruitless research

  made answers seem tantalizingly close. It was a good exercise. And even if he never

  found an answer, this list of questions might be of help to someone with a clearer

  intellect-- or better information-- decades or centuries or millennia from now.

  Deet came home and went to bed with Leyel still typing away. She knew the look he

  had when he was fully engaged in writing-- she did nothing to disturb him. He

  noticed her enough to realize that she was carefully leaving him alone. Then he

  settled back into writing.

  The next morning she awoke to find him lying in bed beside her, still dressed. A

  personal message capsule lay on the floor in the doorway from the bedroom. He had

  finished his questions. She bent over, picked it up, took it with her to the

  library.

  ***

  "His questions aren't academic after all, Deet."

  "I told you they weren't."

  "Hari was right. For all that he seemed to be a dilettante, with his money and his

  rejection of the universities, he's a man of substance."

  "Will the Second Foundation benefit, then, if he comes up with an answer to his

  question?"

  "I don't know, Deet. Hari was the fortune-teller. Presumably mankind is already

  human, so it isn't as if we have to start the process over."

  "Do you think not?"

  "What, should we find some uninhabited planet and put some newborns on it and let

  them grow up feral, and then come back in a thousand years and try to turn them

  human?"

  "I have a better idea. Let's take ten thousand worlds filled with people who live

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  their lives like animals, always hungry, always quick with their teeth and their

  claws, and let's strip away the veneer of civilization to expose to them what they

  really are. And then, when they see themselves clearly, let's come back and teach

  them how to be really human this time, instead of only having bits and flashes of

  humanity."

  "All right. Let's do that."

  "I knew you'd see it my way."

  "Just make sure your husband finds out how the trick is done. Then we have all the

  time in the world to set it up and pull it off."

  ***

  When the index was done, Deet brought Leyel with her to the library when she went

  to work in the morning. She did not take him to Indexing but rather installed him in

  a private research room lined with vids-- only instead of giving the illusion of

  windows looking out onto an outside scene, the screens filled all the walls from

  floor to ceiling, so it seemed that he was on a pinnacle high above the scene,

  without walls or even a railing to keep him from falling off. It gave him flashes of

  vertigo when he looked around-- only the door broke the illusion. For a moment he

  thought of asking for a different room. But then he remembered Indexing, and

  realized that maybe he'd do better work if he too felt a bit off balance all the

  time.

  At first the indexing seemed obvious. He brought the first page of his questions

  to the lector display and began to read. The lector would track his pupils, so that

  whenever he paused to gaze at a word, other references would begin to pop up in the

  space beside the page he was reading. Then he'd glance at one of the referenees.

  When it was uninteresting or obvious, he'd skip to the next reference, and the first

  one would slide back on the display, out of the way, but still there if he changed

  his mind and wanted it.

  If a reference engaged him, then when he reached the last line of the part of it

  on display, it would expand to full-page size and slide over to stand in front of

  the main text. Then, if this new material had been indexed, it would trigger new

  references, and so on, leading him farther and farther away from the original

  document until he finally decided to go back and pick up where he left off.

  So far, this was what any index could be expected to do. It was only as he moved

  farther into reading his own questions that he began to realize the quirkiness of

  this index. Usually, index references were tied to important words, so that if you

  just wanted to stop and think without bringing up a bunch of references you didn't

  want, all you had to do was keep your gaze focused in an area of placeholder words,

  empty phrases like "If this were all that could be..." Anyone who made it a habit to

  read indexed works soon learned this trick and used it till it became reflex.

  But when Leyel stopped on such empty phrases, references came up anyway. And

  instead of having a clear relationship to the text, sometimes the references were

  perverse or comic or argumentative. For instance, he paused in the middle of reading

  his argument that archaeological searches for "primitiveness" were useless in the

  search for origins because all "primitive" cultures represented a decline from a

  star-going culture. He had written the phrase "All this primitivism is useful only

  because it predicts what we might become if we're careless and don't preserve our

  fragile links with civilization." By habit his eyes focused on the empty words "what

  we might become if." Nobody could index a phrase like that.

  Yet they had. Several references appeared. And so instead of staying within his

  reverie, he was distracted, drawn to what the indexers had tied to such an absurd

  phrase.

  One of the references was a nursery rhyme that he had forgotten he knew:

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  Wrinkly Grandma Posey

  Rockets all are rosy.

  Lift off, drift off,

  All fall down.

  Why in the world had the indexer put that in? The first thought that came to

  Leyel's mind was himself and some of the servants' children, holding hands and

  walking in a circle, round and round till they came to the last words, whereupon

  they threw themselves to the ground and laughed insanely. The sort of game that only

  little children could possibly think was fun.

  Since his eyes lingered on the poem, it moved to the main document display and new

  references appeared. One was a scholarly article on the evolution of the poem,

  speculating that it might have arisen during the early days of starflight on the

  planet of origin, when rockets may have been used to escape from a planet's gravity

  well. Was that why this poem had been indexed to his article? Because it was tied to

  the planet of origin?

  No, that was too obvious. Another article about the poem was more helpful. It

  rejected the early-days-of-rockets idea, because the earliest versions of the poem

  never used the word "rocket." The oldest extant version went like this:

  Wrinkle down a rosy,

  Pock-a fock-a posy,

  Lash us, dash us,

  All fall down.

  Obviously, said the commentator, these were mostly nonsense words-- the later

  versions had arisen because children had insisted on trying to make sense of them.

  And it occurred to Leyel that perhaps this was why the indexer had linked this

  poem to his phrase-- because the poem had once been nonsense, but we insisted on

  making sense out of it.

  Was this a comment on Leyel's whole search for origins? Did the indexer think it

  was useless?

  No-- the poem had been tied to the empty phrase "what we might become if." Maybe

  the indexer was saying that human beings are like this poem-- our lives make no

  sense, but we insist on making sense out of them. Didn't Deet say something like

  that once, when she was talking about the role of storytelling in community

  formation? The universe resists causality, she said. But human intelligence demands

  it. So we tell stories to impose causal relationships among the unconnected events

  of the world around us.

  That includes ourselves, doesn't it? Our own lives are nonsense, but we impose a

  story on them, we sort our memories into cause-and-effect chains, forcing them to

  make sense even though they don't. Then we take the sum of our stories and call it

  our "self." This poem shows us the process-- from randomness to meaning-- and then

  we think our meanings are "true."

  But somehow all the children had come to agree on the new version of the poem. By

  the year 2000 G.E., only the final and current version existed in all the worlds,

  and it had remained constant ever since. How was it that all the children on every

  world came to agree on the same version? How did the change spread? Did ten thousand

  kids on ten thousand worlds happen to make up the same changes?

  It had to be word of mouth. Some kid somewhere made a few changes, and his version

  spread. A few years, and all the children in his neighborhood use the new version,

  and then all the kids in his city, on his planet. It could happen very quickly, in

  f
act, because each generation of children lasts only a few years-- seven-year-olds

  might take the new version as a joke, but repeat it often enough that five-year-olds

  think it's the true version of the poem, and within a few years there's nobody left

  among the children who remembers the old way.

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  A thousand years is long enough for the new version of the poem to spread. Or for

  five or a dozen new versions to collide and get absorbed into each other and then

  spread back, changed, to worlds that had revised the poem once or twice already.

  And as Leyel sat there, thinking these thoughts, he conjured up an image in his

  mind of a network of children, bound to each other by the threads of this poem,

  extending from planet to planet throughout the Empire, and then back through time,

  from one generation of children to the previous one, a three-dimensional fabric that

  bound all children together from the beginning.

  And yet as each child grew up, he cut himself free from the fabric of that poem.

  No longer would he hear the words "Wrinkly Grandma Posey" and immediately join hands

  with the child next to him. He wasn't part of the song any more.

  But his own children were. And then his grandchildren. All joining hands with each

  other, changing from circle to circle, in a never-ending human chain reaching back

  to some long-forgotten ritual on one of the worlds of mankind-- maybe, maybe on the

  planet of origin itself.

  The vision was so clear, so overpowering, that when he finally noticed the lector

  display it was as sudden and startling as waking up. He had to sit there, breathing

  shallowly, until he calmed himself, until his heart stopped beating so fast.

  He had found some part of his answer, though he didn't understand it yet. That

  fabric connecting all the children, that was part of what made us human, though he

  didn't know why. This strange and perverse indexing of a meaningless phrase had

  brought him a new way of looking at the problem. Not that the universal culture of

  children was a new idea, just that he had never thought of it as having anything to

  do with the origin question.

  Was this what the indexer meant by including this poem? Had the indexer also seen

  this vision?

  Maybe, but probably not. It might have been nothing more than the idea of becoming