by Dan Simmons
On our third or fourth day there, just prior to our mealtime, I joined them in the old priest’s study as they chatted. I had already gone over the books on the shelf: volumes of philosophy and theology, mysteries, astronomy texts, ethnology studies, newanthro tomes, adventure novels, carpentry guides, medical texts, zoology books …
“The greatest sadness of my blindness thirty years ago,” Father Glaucus had said, that first day he proudly showed us his library, “was that I could no longer read my dear books. I am Prospero denied. You can’t imagine the time it took me to drag these three thousand volumes up from the library fifty stories down!”
In the afternoons, while I explored and A. Bettik went off to read by himself, Aenea would read aloud to the old priest. Once when I entered the room without knocking, I saw tears on the ancient missionary’s cheeks.
This day when I joined them, Father Glaucus was explaining Teilhard—the original Jesuit, not the antipope whom Julius VI had supplanted.
“He was a stretcher bearer in World War One,” Father Glaucus was saying. “He could have been a chaplain and stayed out of the line of fire, but he chose to be a stretcher bearer. They awarded him medals for his courage, including one called the Legion of Honor.”
A. Bettik cleared his throat politely. “Excuse me, Father,” he said softly. “Am I correct in assuming that the First World War was a pre-Hegira conflict limited to Old Earth?”
The bearded priest smiled. “Precisely, precisely, my dear friend. Early twentieth century. Terrible conflict. Terrible. And Teilhard was in the thick of it. His hatred of war lasted the rest of his life.”
Father Glaucus had long ago built his own rocking chair, and now he rocked back and forth in front of the fuel-pellet fire set in a crudely fashioned fireplace. The golden embers threw long shadows and more warmth than we had enjoyed since coming through the farcaster portal. “Teilhard was a geologist and paleontologist. It was in China—a nation-state on Old Earth, my friends—in the 1930’s that he devised his theories that evolution was an uncompleted process, yet one with a design. He saw the universe as God’s design to bring together the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal into a single conscious entity. Teilhard de Chardin saw every step of evolution as a hopeful sign—even mass extinctions as a cause for joy—with cosmogenesis, his word, occurring when humanity became central to the universe, noogenesis as the continued evolution of man’s mind, and hominization and ultrahominization as the stages of Homo sapiens evolving to true humanity.”
“Excuse me, Father,” I heard myself saying, only slightly aware of the incongruity of this abstract discussion amid the frozen city, beneath the frozen atmosphere, surrounded by wraith-killers and cold, “but wasn’t Teilhard’s heresy that humankind could evolve into God?”
The blind priest shook his head, his expression still pleasant. “During his lifetime, my son, Teilhard was never sanctioned for heresy. In 1962 the Holy Office—it was quite a different Holy Office then, I assure you—issued a monitum—”
“A what?” said Aenea, who sat on the carpet near the fire.
“A monitum is a warning against uncritical acceptance of his ideas,” said Father Glaucus. “And Teilhard did not say that human beings would become God … he said that the entire conscious universe was part of a process of evolving toward the day—he called it the Omega Point—where all of creation, humanity included, would become one with the Godhead.”
“Would Teilhard have included the TechnoCore in that evolution?” Aenea asked softly. She was hugging her knees.
The blind priest stopped rocking and combed his fingers through his beard. “Teilhardian scholars have wrestled with that for centuries, my dear. I am no scholar, but I am certain that he would have included the Core in his optimism.”
“But they are descended from machines,” said A. Bettik. “And their concept of an Ultimate Intelligence is quite different from Christianity’s—a cold, dispassionate mind, a predictive power able to absorb all variables.”
Father Glaucus was nodding. “But they think, my son. Their earliest self-conscious progenitors were designed from living DNA—”
“Designed from DNA to compute,” I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls.
“And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe’s self-awareness as a means to understanding His will.”
“The TechnoCore wanted to use humanity as part of its UI project,” I said, “and then to destroy us.”
“But it did not,” said Father Glaucus.
“No thanks to the Core,” I said.
“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.
Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. “Precisely, my dear. But we are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design. They may resist it. They may try to undo it for their own complex purposes. But the universe continues to weave its own design.”
“You make the universe and its processes sound like a machine,” I said. “Programmed, unstoppable, inevitable.”
The old man shook his head slowly. “No, no … never a machine. And never inevitable. If Christ’s coming taught us anything, it is that nothing is inevitable. The outcome is always in doubt. Decisions for light or dark are always ours to make—ours and every conscious entity’s.”
“But Teilhard thought that consciousness and empathy would win?” said Aenea.
Father Glaucus waved a bony hand at the bookcase behind her. “There should be a book there … on the third shelf … it had a blue bookmark in it when last I looked, thirty-some years ago. Do you see it?”
“The Journals, Notebooks, and Correspondences of Teilhard de Chardin?” said Aenea.
“Yes, yes. Open it to where the blue bookmark is. Do you see the passage I have annotated? It is one of the last things these old eyes saw before the darkness closed.…”
“The entry marked twelve December, 1919?” said Aenea.
“Yes. Read it, please.”
Aenea held the book closer to the light of the fire.
“ ‘Note this well,’ ” she read. “ ‘I attribute no definitive and absolute value to the various constructions of man. I believe that they will disappear, recast in a new whole that we cannot yet conceive. At the same time I admit that they have an essential provisional role—that they are necessary, inevitable phases which we (we or the race) must pass through in the course of our metamorphosis. What I love in them is not their particular form, but their function, which is to build up, in some mysterious way, first something divinizable—and then, through the grace of Christ alighting on our effort, something divine.’ ”
There was a moment of silence broken only by the soft hiss of the fuel-pellet fire and the creak and groan of the tens of millions of tons of ice above and around us. Finally Father Glaucus said, “That hope was Teilhard’s heresy in the eyes of the current Pope. Belief in that hope was my great sin. This”—he gestured to the outer wall where ice and darkness pressed against the glass—“this is my punishment.”
None of us spoke for another moment.
Father Glaucus laughed and set bony hands on his knees. “But my mother taught me there is no punishment or pain where there are friends and food and conversation. And we have all of these. M. Bettik! I say ‘M. Bettik’ because your honorific does you no honor, sir. It sets you apart from humanity by falsely inventing false categories. M. Bettik!”
“Sir?”
“Would you do this old man the
favor of going into the kitchen to retrieve the coffee that should be ready? I will see to the stew and the bread that is heating. M. Endymion?”
“Yes, Father?”
“Would you like to descend to the wine cellars to select the finest vintage available?”
I smiled, knowing that the old priest could not see me. “And how many floors must I descend before finding the cellar, Father? Not fifty-nine, I hope?”
The old man’s teeth showed through his beard. “I have wine with every meal, my son, so I would be in far better physical shape if that were the case. No, lazy old thing that I am, I keep the wine in the closet one flight below. Near the stairwell.”
“I’ll find it,” I said.
“I’ll set the table,” said Aenea. “And tomorrow night I cook.”
We all scattered to our duties.
45
The Raphael spins down into Sol Draconi System. Contrary to the explanations received by Father Captain de Soya and others who travel by archangel craft, its drive mechanism is not a modification of the ancient Hawking drive that has defied the light-speed barrier since before the Hegira. Raphael’s drive is largely a hoax: when it reaches near-quantum velocities, it keys a signal on a medium once referred to as the Void Which Binds. An energy source from elsewhere triggers a distant device that ruptures a subplane of that medium, tearing through the fabric of space and time itself. That rupture is instantly fatal to the human crew, who die in agony—cells rupturing, bones being ground to powder, synapses misfiring, bowels releasing, organs liquefying. They are never to know the details: all memory of the final microseconds of horror and death are erased during cruciform reconstruction and resurrection.
Now Raphael begins its braking trajectory toward Sol Draconi Septem, its very-real fusion drive slowing the ship under two hundred gravities of strain. In their acceleration couches/resurrection creches, Father Captain de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, and Corporal Kee lie dead, their shredded bodies being pulverized a second time because the ship automatically conserves energy by not initializing internal fields until resurrection is well under way. Besides the three dead humans on board, there is one other pair of eyes. Rhadamanth Nemes has opened the lid of her resurrection creche and now lies on the exposed couch, her compact body buffeted but not damaged by the terrible deceleration. As per standard programming, the life support in the general cabin is off: there is no oxygen, atmospheric pressure is too low to allow a human to survive without a spacesuit, and the temperature is minus-thirty degrees centigrade. Nemes is indifferent. In her crimson jumpsuit, she lies on the couch and watches the monitors, occasionally querying the ship and receiving a reply on a fiberthread datalink.
Six hours later, before the internal fields switch on and the bodies begin to be repaired in their complex sarcophagi, even while the cabin is still in virtual vacuum, Nemes stands, shoulders two hundred gravities with no expression, and walks to the conference cubby and the plotting table. She calls up a map of Sol Draconi Septem and quickly finds the former route of River Tethys. Ordering the ship to overlay its long-range visuals, she runs her fingers across the holoed image of ice rills, sestrugi dunes, and glacial crevasses. The top of one building rises from the atmospheric glacier. Nemes double-checks the plot: it is within thirty kilometers of the buried river.
After eleven hours of braking, Raphael swings into orbit around the gleaming white snowball of Sol Draconi Septem. The internal fields have long since switched on, the life-support systems are fully functional, but Rhadamanth Nemes takes no more note of this than she had of the weight and vacuum. Before leaving the ship, she checks the resurrection-creche monitors. She has more than two days before de Soya and his troopers will begin to stir in their creches.
Settling into the dropship, Nemes runs a fiber-optic link from her wrist to the console, commands separation, and guides the ship across the terminator into atmosphere without consulting instruments or controls. Eighteen minutes later the dropship sets down on the surface within two hundred meters of the stubby, ice-limned tower.
The sunlight is brilliant on the terraced glacier, but the sky is flat black. No stars are visible. Although the atmosphere here is negligible, the planet’s massive thermal systems flowing from pole to pole drive incessant “winds” accelerating ice crystals to four hundred kilometers per hour. Ignoring the spacesuits and hazardous-atmosphere suits hanging in the air lock, Rhadamanth Nemes cycles the doors open. Not waiting for the ladder to deploy, she jumps the three meters to the surface, landing upright in the one-point-seven-g field. Ice needles strike her at flechette-gun velocities.
Nemes triggers an internal source that activates a biomorphic field within point-eight millimeters of her body. To an outside observer the compact woman with short black hair and flat black eyes suddenly becomes a reflective quicksilver sculpture in human form. The form jogs across the jagged ice at thirty klicks an hour, stops at the building, finds no entrance, and shatters a panel of plasteel with her fist. Stepping through the gash, she walks easily across glare ice to the top of an elevator shaft. She rips open the sagging doors. The elevators have long since dropped to the basement eighty-some stories below.
Rhadamanth Nemes steps into the open shaft and drops into it, plummeting 108.8 feet per second into the darkness. When she sees the light flashing past, she grabs a steel girder to stop herself. She has already reached her terminal velocity of more than five hundred klicks per hour and decelerates to zero in less than three hundredths of a second.
Nemes strides from the elevator into the room, taking note of the furniture, the lanterns, the bookcases. The old man is in the kitchen. His head comes up when he hears the rapid footsteps. “Raul?” he says. “Aenea?”
“Exactly,” says Rhadamanth Nemes, inserting two fingers under the old priest’s collar bone and lifting him off the ground. “Where is the girl Aenea?” she asks softly. “Where are all of them?”
Amazingly, the blind priest does not cry out in pain. His worn teeth are clenched and his blind eyes stare at the ceiling, but he says only, “I do not know.”
Nemes nods and drops the priest to the floor. Straddling his chest, she sets her forefinger to his eye and fires a seeker microfilament into his brain, the seeker probe finding its way to a precise region of his cerebral cortex.
“Now, Father,” she says, “let us try again. Where is the girl? Who is with her? Where are they?”
The answers begin flowing through the microfilament as coded bursts of dying neural energy.
46
Our days with Father Glaucus were memorable for their comfort, their slowed pace after so many weeks of hurrying to and fro, and their conversations. Mostly, I think, I remember the conversations.
It was shortly before the Chitchatuk returned that I learned one of the reasons for A. Bettik’s having taken this voyage with me.
“Do you have siblings, M. Bettik?” Father Glaucus asked, still refusing to use the android honorific.
To my amazement A. Bettik said, “Yes.” How could this be? Androids were designed and biofactured, assembled out of component genetic elements and grown in vats … like organs grown for transplants, I had always thought.
“During our biofacture,” A. Bettik went on after the old priest prompted, “androids were traditionally cloned in growth colonies of five—usually four males and one female.”
“Quintuplets,” said Father Glaucus from his rocking chair. “You have three brothers and a sister.”
“Yes,” said the blue-skinned man.
“But surely you weren’t …” I began, and stopped. I rubbed my chin. I had shaved there at Father Glaucus’s strange home—it had seemed the civilized thing to do—and the feel of smooth skin almost startled me. “But surely you didn’t grow up together,” I said. “I mean, weren’t androids …”
“Biofactured as adults?” said A. Bettik with the same slight smile. “No. Our growth process was accelerated—we reached maturity at approximately eight standard years—but there was a peri
od of infancy and childhood. This delay was one of the reasons that android biofacture was almost prohibitively expensive.”
“What are your brothers’ and sister’s names?” asked Father Glaucus.
A. Bettik closed the book he had been leafing through. “The tradition was to name each member of the quint group in alphabetic order,” he said. “My siblings included A. Anttibe, A. Corresson, A. Darria, and A. Evvik.”
“Which was your sister?” asked Aenea. “Darria?”
“Yes.”
“What was your childhood like?” said the girl.
“Primarily one of being educated, trained for duties, and having service parameters defined,” said A. Bettik.
Aenea was lying on the carpet, cupping her chin in her hands. “Did you go to school? Did you play?”
“We were tutored at the factory, although the bulk of our knowledge came through RNA transfer.” The bald man looked at Aenea. “And if by ‘play’ you mean to find time to relax with my siblings, the answer is yes.”
“What happened to your siblings?” asked Aenea.
A. Bettik slowly shook his head. “We were initially transferred to service together, but we were separated shortly thereafter. I was purchased by the Kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile and shipped to Asquith. It was my understanding at the time that each of us would render service in different parts of the Web or Outback.”
“And you never heard from any of them again?” I said.
“No,” said A. Bettik. “Although there were a large number of android laborers imported for the construction of the Poet’s City during the transfer of King William the Twenty-third’s colony to that world, most had been in service on Asquith before my time, and none had encountered one of my siblings during their transshipment periods.”
