With a cock of his head he invited her to move on again. “I carry my home on my back,” he told her. “You can think of me as a centuries-old tortoise and just as slow. But you’re right. I’ve come a long way. I was born three hundred and one years ago, on a world whose orbit occasionally reached the inner edge of the Sun’s Veil. Just once, that orbital path brought us into the vicinity of Earth.”
The wonder of it was still reflected in his voice. “We could see her easily, blue-white and beautiful with her forest moon.”
He sighed, bittersweet melancholy. “Seventeen! An age when love strikes hard. I fell for her heart and soul, caught in her gravity. The sacred goddess, mother of all. I swore my allegiance.”
“You wanted to emigrate,” Carol guessed.
“It seemed possible, at seventeen.”
Endowed with a young man’s optimism, Hitoshi had promised himself that someday he’d walk on Earth’s shores, swim in her oceans, climb her mountains, lose himself in her forests.
Very soon, the fiercely complex procession of worlds had carried him away from her. He’d never seen her again and he’d never won the emigration lottery.
Eventually, he’d married. Fatherhood had been a joyous consolation, but when time took that away, he’d found solace and some satisfaction in trekking the biomes.
He looked ahead to where the rest house could now be seen between the trees. It stood open, its side walls coiled out of sight within corner columns of dark-purple marble infiltrated with veins of gold. The columns held up a peaked roof with flared eaves, shingled in black-slate.
As they drew closer, he saw that most of Carol’s gear was tumbled in one corner of the gray plasteel platform, with the exception of a bivouac bag that she’d hung over the back of a bench. The bench faced a small table and then a blue vista beyond: a great gulf of atmosphere that appeared planetary in scale.
This was Hitoshi’s first glimpse beyond the trees and awe swept over him. He shrugged out of his pack, set it gently on the platform, and stepped to the edge of the abyss.
White birds. He spied them, tiny with distance, soaring in slow circles beneath him. Raising his gaze, he marveled at an illusion of sea and sky blending into an infinite horizon. He squinted, trying to spot a flaw, a hint of seam or boundary that would reveal the wall of the habitat—he knew it could be no more than twelve kilometers distant—but he could not see it.
Moved by the vastness and the beauty, he sighed deeply, silently acknowledging that the guidebooks were right. Loysan was among the finest imitations of Earth he’d seen and a worthy culmination of his travels.
“And still,” he said aloud, “it is not Earth.”
No artificial world could truly replicate the depth, the complexity, the history, the precarious geological volatility, the very gravity of a planetary body.
“Still, it’s not bad,” Carol said with a note of amusement as she stood with him on the cliff’s edge.
He grunted. “I’ll concede that.” Turning from the abyss, he asked, “Now, would you like tea?”
THEY SAT AND chatted and drank hot tea. Hitoshi felt easy in her company, surprisingly so, and listened with sympathy as she told him her own story.
Carol had been partnered for decades with another weaver. “I lost him nine years ago. He was exploring off trail when the ground gave way beneath him. He fell a long way.”
Hitoshi was familiar with such devastating accidents from his years on the Cherisky management team. Risk could not be eliminated, even in a well-managed world. “I’m sorry.”
Carol said, “We’d planned to transition together.”
Hitoshi grunted, and asked her, “Is that why you’re still here?”
Elderly folk had become especially rare in the Tangible Layer since most people transitioned at younger ages to avoid the ever-increasing risk of death.
Carol said, “It’s hard to imagine eternity without him. But I’m close to my sisters. We’ll transition together when the time feels right.” She gave him a wry smile. “I don’t think we’ll risk waiting as long as you.”
“I thought I might go for the record,” he joked. “Oldest man in the worlds!”
The truth he left unspoken was that he hadn’t planned to transition at all. He’d been sure that long before he trekked a thousand worlds, he would either win the Earth lottery or die along the way, in a predation accident or a fall like the one that had taken Carol’s partner.
No luck either way.
An alarm trilled. An intrusive electronic noise, a casual profanity amid the birdsong. It shattered the reflective silence that had fallen between them, causing Carol to flinch and Hitoshi to spill his tea on the tabletop.
He set his cup down with a sharp rap as the tabletop absorbed all traces of the spill.
“It’s me,” he confessed in irritation.
Then he corrected himself. “Well, really, it’s my kids.” The alarm kept trilling. “Not that they’re kids anymore. They’re all well into their second century. All of them transitioned a long time ago. Now they think they know better than I do.”
If his kids had remained in the Tangible Layer, they would have had to contend with a light-speed delay to keep in touch with him, but from the Virtual Layer, contact was instant—and incessant.
His irritation poured forth as he explained to Carol, over the alarm’s ever increasing volume, the facts of his situation. “You see, if I don’t ‘check in’”—long wrinkled fingers clawed the air, adding sarcastic quotes around the phrase—“at the ‘agreed upon interval’”—more air quotes—“the local management team gets alerted to a possible emergency.
“I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but I used to be on a management team, and I can tell you, we loved the excitement of a call-out. Any excuse to go into rescue mode. I can also tell you from experience that it’s an embarrassment to find yourself surrounded by ‘rescue personnel’”—those air quotes again—“who are really just bureaucratic button-pushers wanting to look like heroes.”
“So maybe you should check in?” Carol suggested in a teasing voice, boosted in volume so she could be heard over the now-strident alarm.
Hitoshi grunted. He pried himself up off the bench, hobbled on stiff legs to his pack, slipped his tablet out, unfolded it.
His youngest daughter, sweet-faced Kimi, smiled at him from the Virtual Layer.
Kimi had been the last of his kids to transition. She’d waited until she was a hundred twenty years old to make the move. Now she was a young woman again, joy lighting up her eyes every time he saw her and always eager to remind him how grateful she was for the Virtual Layer’s “unlimited options”—this time he only imagined the air quotes—before urging him to make the transition too.
“I’m fine,” he growled at her before she could say anything. “No need to call emergency services for the old man.”
“Hi, Dad,” she said, silent laughter behind her smile. “I love you too.”
He curled his lip, made a noncommittal grunt, and for once Kimi looked a little distressed, a little disappointed. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, her smile gone.
“I’m fine, just fine. I was just enjoying the view and a nice cup of tea, and I could do without the nagging.”
“I’m sorry. But we worry about you, Dad. If you shared your biostatus with us, we’d know you were okay—or we’d know if there was a problem.”
“My biostatus is my own business. I’m not a child, Kimi, and neither are you.”
“Dad, you’re not a child. You’re an old, old man and you don’t seem to realize that every day you’re taking a terrible chance. You need to transition.”
“When I’m ready,” he said. He’d said it a thousand times before.
Her eyes glistened. “If something happens, an accident—”
“Don’t worry.” He made an effort to sound reassuring. There really was nothing to worry about. “I’ve got this.”
She didn’t believe him. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”<
br />
“Right.”
He cut the connection, folded the tablet, and shoved it back into his pack. Then he turned to look for Carol.
She’d left the rest house, lingering several steps away along a faint trail that ran close to the edge of the cliff. “All clear,” he called to her, pleased that she hadn’t used the interruption as an opportunity to flee his company and return to her cricket-netting occupation.
She came back to the rest house, greeted him with a smile. “Where to from here?” she asked as he gathered the teacups and returned them to the fabricator.
“Onward.” He said it with some regret. “On to the top. I need to do this. I need to finish. Thank you for sharing a cup of tea with me.”
She held her hand out to him, palm up. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
He slid his palm across hers. “An honor,” he said gruffly. And then, without letting himself think too hard about it, he added, “Maybe we’ll meet again sometime... in the Virtual Layer.”
“It’s another phase, isn’t it?” she mused. “A chance to do those things that never quite worked out here in the Tangible Layer.”
“Maybe it is,” he agreed.
He shouldered his pack and set out, resolved to not look back.
HITOSHI HIKED, ONE foot after another, his thoughts circling.
Some things are not meant to be.
For most of his life he’d longed for Earth. He knew now he would never get there, not in the flesh. But as he followed the winding trail higher and higher through the forest, accompanied by birdsong and the wind-driven rustle of the canopy, he let himself imagine that this was Earth.
And wasn’t it, after all?
The thought came to him with the force of revelation.
All the worlds he’d visited, the diverse biomes he’d trekked through—desert, alpine, grassland, tropical, shoreline, ocean, arctic—all were part of Earth, a flood of Earth-life filling the once lifeless outer reaches of the solar system and slowly claiming the surfaces of the companion planets—the Moon, Venus, Mars.
He found comfort in the thought.
IT WAS LATE afternoon when Hitoshi finally climbed above the tree line. His breathing grew deeper, but it remained steady as he commenced an alpine section of dark basalt supporting tufts of short, stiff grass, tiny flowers, and snowy white patches of lichen.
Clouds had formed around the lower slope, hiding most of it from his view, but at his altitude the sky was clear—that wondrous blue ocean of atmosphere—and he could see in it now the yellow blaze of a lantern sun. Two suns, he realized as he picked out a second, tiny gleam beyond the first.
“And not a damn bit of heat from either,” he groused, pulling the zipper on his jacket a little higher.
The rustle of wind, the crunch of boots and trekking poles against the rocky soil, the creak of his pack: these sounds framed the silence that followed him.
The air became more rarified. The same thing happened on Earth as climbers ascended to the peaks, but here the gradient was steeper. The effective gravity declined as well and that was like Earth too, although there the scale was so vast the difference went unnoticed.
Hitoshi accepted the lower gravity as a boon, but his aged body did not take well to the thinning air. His chest began to hurt and his head to ache.
From the corner of his eye he glimpsed an aerostat. Just a little thing, a thin ten-centimeter wing with a multitude of flaps to stabilize it in the wind. He was familiar with the devices. Most biomes used them to monitor hikers deemed at risk of keeling over.
“Eh,” Hitoshi growled, making a rude gesture. “Be gone!”
The aerostat ignored this of course and after his moment of indulgence, he ignored it, saving his breath for the climb. One slow step after another. Breathe in, breathe out. He grew aware of one more sound worth noting: the pounding of his heart.
The trail zigzagged, climbing steeply, each switchback shorter than the one before it.
He left the last of the plants behind. Only lichen now. Smooth gray patches on the black artificial basalt.
Air so thin! Deep breaths were no longer enough. He had to stop every few steps, breathe deeply, purposefully, drawing in extra oxygen.
His chest ached, but he didn’t have far to go. He could see the rest house just a few switchbacks above him, marking the apex of the trail.
Night coming on.
I’m not ready.
An intrusive thought, breaking through his fatigue.
He kept on.
Twilight arrived, but not as the epilogue to a sunset. The two lantern suns remained high in the sky while the blue walls of the habitat darkened, reaching a steely blue hue textured with thin cloud shapes that flushed brilliant pink, but only for a minute. The color drained away as the sky shifted to a dark grey pierced with stars and the fading glow of the Lantern Suns. Full darkness imminent.
It comes too fast.
A few more steps and he stopped again. Breathe, he coached himself. It’s not that bad. You’ve been on harder climbs. Of course, he’d been younger then.
He sensed the temperature dropping in parallel with the light. Ice would soon be forming in the few pockets of soil gathered among the exposed basalt.
He coughed gently, imagining he heard the hum of the aerostat drifting closer. “Get moving,” he grumbled to himself. “You set the rules, you idiot. Now finish it.”
Step. Breathe. Step. Breathe. He allowed himself no more long pauses, leaning hard on his trekking poles as he pushed on, breath rasping painfully against a dry throat. He imagined Carol settling in for the night in the kinder climate of the forest rest house.
“Should have stayed there,” he muttered. A few steps later, “Wish I could have.”
So focused was he on each small step of his journey that it came as a surprise when he looked up and found he’d reached the rest house.
Like the others he’d seen, this one had a peaked roof with flared eaves and dark marble pillars. The walls were pushed open to the night sky.
He shed his pack with a sigh of gratitude and sat down on the bench. Groaned. Plumes of welcome heat curled up from open vents. He was played out. His back ached, his head ached, his lungs hurt. Another cough was looming but he resisted it.
In the abyss, a hundred thousand stars, but his gaze skipped over them to look downslope where the clouds were breaking up. Was there a light to mark the site of Carol’s camp?
No. How could there be? Any light would be hidden by the trees.
You’re on your own, he reminded himself. He’d planned it that way.
Hitoshi sat back, eyes closed, cherishing the heat against his legs. Shivering slightly, from exhaustion or cold or lack of oxygen. Maybe all three.
One thousand worlds.
All of them had been beautiful. Wondrous creations. Earth’s children.
But only one thousand... leaving so many more he would never see.
His alarm trilled.
“Rads and toxins,” he swore. “Can’t a man have a moment of quiet contemplation?”
The alarm did not have the capacity to respond to his protests. It just kept trilling, ever louder as the seconds passed.
He reached for his pack, retrieved his tablet, and thumbed it open.
Kimi again. She looked tired, flustered, as if she’d been awakened from a deep sleep. Was it necessary to sleep in the Virtual Layer? The idea bothered him. Granted, it was advertised as “Real life, with options.”
“Are you okay, Dad?” Kimi asked.
She sounded really scared this time. Hitoshi responded to that, answering in a gentler tone than he might have otherwise. “Same as always, sweetheart.”
“You’re not the same. You’ve got elevated heart and respiration rates, and a reduced oxygen level in your bloodstream.”
He scowled. “How do you know that?”
“I got a report from the trail monitor.”
He remembered the aerostat and rolled his eyes, regretting it immediately w
hen he felt the dry bite of cold air against them. “I made the summit,” he told Kimi. “So of course my blood is low on oxygen. There’s not much oxygen anywhere.”
She looked past him, seeming puzzled now as well as worried. “It’s dark there.” Her gaze returned to him. “It must be cold.”
“It’s cold,” he agreed. And then, after an awkward pause, “There’s so much more I’d like to see, to do.”
“Come over,” she pleaded. “And you’ll have forever.”
He smiled a gentle smile. He could close the walls of the rest house, get warm, breathe oxygen from his fabricator until his lungs cleared—but that’s not why he’d come here.
He’d chosen the Loysan Escarpment as his last climb—as many had before him—because it was long, challenging, and beautiful, but also because it was a jumping off point.
In a few more minutes he’d get up again and continue on the trail. It climbed no higher, but it did go on a little farther, winding around the perimeter of the habitat’s massive tether to a transition arch on the other side.
He had only to enter the arch to initiate his transition to the Virtual Layer. On the other side he would be able to walk out onto the Earth—a virtual Earth, true, but still his first love.
“I’ve got a little farther to go tonight,” he told Kimi. “But I’ll be home soon.”
THE SYNCHRONIST
FRAN WILDE
IT’S BEEN TWENTY years since I’ve seen him. It’s been thirty days. And nearly two parsecs. And six point five light years. It has been four months outbound and six months inbound. It’s been five rotations.
All of this is simultaneously true.
And there’s not one rotation or day or second or trajectory along which I’ve missed his sorry ass.
And yet.
When Galen Sand disembarks the tradeship Verdant Nine, his expression slips from hero-returns to something-is-wrong in microseconds. Only I notice.
He’s expecting a payoff for the moments he’s saved in transit. He’d told me years ago that the first tradeship to arrive always left with the most rewards. He doesn’t understand until this exact point that he’s been cashed out.
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