by Paul McAuley
There were no children. The Sloth People were born fully formed after a gestation of two years in ectogenetic tanks, and lived on average a little over twice that. The tanks were maintained by bots, as were the gardens of fungi that grew in low galleries on mulches of wood chips collected from the distant forest by roving machines. In real life, Jaguar Boy told the Child, the fungi were vacuum organisms, growing on carbonaceous material collected from the surfaces of the asteroids into which the Sloth People had burrowed. The Child said that she knew about vacuum organisms – the Outers had developed many kinds, to generate power from the faint sunlight at Jupiter and Saturn, to mine carbon and other elements from the silicates and ice of the gas giants’ moons, to manufacture edible plastic and CHON food, and so on, and so forth.
‘Vacuum organisms went everywhere humans went in the Solar System and beyond,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘They are genuine commensals. As rats and cockroaches and fleas once were, in the ships that sailed the oceans of Earth in the long-ago. The genetic templates of all kinds of organisms were carried in seedships, but few were used, and most of those died out in places like this.’
The Sloth People were slow and small because theirs was a low-energy ecosystem. Carbon and nitrogen were plentiful, but many other essential nutrients were not. Their machines had adapted them to their circumstances, and over time they had lost all curiosity and much of their intellect. All they had was their past, celebrated in song and in murals they daubed on the walls of their burrows. Recycling was not perfect, so essential elements were slowly lost and had to be replenished from dwindling sources. And as the resources of their chosen home became rarer and harder to mine, the Sloth People grew smaller still, and their numbers further declined: a meagre tribe huddling against the encroaching cold and dark.
After Jaguar Boy had explained this long, slow attrition, the Child said that it must have taken millions of years. She had the floating feeling that this was a dream. A calm acceptance of the impossible. She’d had it ever since she’d first met the River Folk. The feeling that Jaguar Boy had drugged her and was controlling her dreams. Or perhaps she’d been dreaming when she’d first met Jaguar Boy in the strip of forest in the ruined city, and was dreaming still, and would wake up to find that her mother wasn’t engaged to Vidal Francisca, that she wasn’t going to be sent away . . .
Jaguar Boy said that the human race had split into dozens of clades as it spread through the Solar System, and dozens more as it spread through the systems of other stars, but most evolved in only two directions. Some became highly intelligent sybarites who dedicated themselves to the study of esoteric philosophies and mathematics, but the pursuit of knowledge was too often a trap. The River Folk had already become neotenous; their children reproduced before they transformed into sexless, big-brained scholar-adults. If evolutionary pressure caused the loss of the ability to make the transformation from child to adult, the intelligence of the clade would diminish until they became only a little smarter than seals. Other clades became so obsessed by their abstract philosophies that they gave up the messy business of reproduction altogether, choosing instead various kinds of amortality, flickering out one by one like stars in some ancient galaxy. And other clades, trapped like the Sloth People in resource-poor environments, began to evolve away from intelligence.
‘Most histories converge on one or another of these strong attractors,’ Jaguar Boy told the Child. ‘Only a few escape.’
‘What happens to them?’ the Child said.
‘Some develop or stumble upon a philosophy that engulfs them in a moment of transcendence so marvellously advanced that no one left behind understands where they went, or the manner of their passing.’
‘They become gods?’
The idea was strangely exciting, resonating with the stuff of her own dreams and fantasies.
‘No one knows what they become,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘But most often, as with the River Folk and many others, philosophical investigation leads only to decadence and decline. Sometimes, clades engineer limits on their intelligence to avoid that fate. They celebrate and imitate the fierce and terrible past when most human beings were no more than human. The consequences are never very happy, as you’ll soon see.’
‘We’re moving on to another fairy tale.’
Jaguar Boy shook his head. ‘It’s time you learned about where you will soon arrive, and the kind of people you will meet.’
They set out one cloudless night, the sky spanned by the dust belt and the two burning stars rising in the east: the Child and Jaguar Boy each cast green and red shadows as they walked north across the ruined land of the dead zone. But they had not been walking for very long when clouds boiled up in the west and spread out across the sky and the air grew warmer and heavy with moisture. The Child wondered if the long drought was going to break; Jaguar Boy said this wasn’t an ordinary storm.
Lightning cracked at the horizon and lit the stark landscape in fitful strobes. Rain fell with a sudden fierce intensity, as if the sky had been the bottom of an ocean and had inverted. The Child was drenched in an instant, her hair flattened to her skull, her cotton dress flattened against her body. Jaguar Boy caught hold of her arm and pulled her up a slope already turning to mud. The Child shouted that it was very definitely a storm, hardly able to hear herself; Jaguar Boy said no, it was a pathetic fallacy.
‘We must hurry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already given you more time than you should have had. There’s only a little left.’
There was a motorcycle at the top of the slope, a lean black machine with a bubble shell. Jaguar Boy lifted the Child on to the back seat and swung up in front of her and told her to hold on to his waist and not to let go. The motorcycle kicked into life with a terrific roar and they shot into rain and darkness. Rain drummed on the bubble and rain streaked past on either side, each drop seeming to elongate and grow brighter, suddenly frozen in mid-air. The raindrops ahead were blue and those behind were red, either end of a rainbow that enclosed the roaring motorcycle.
‘Time slows when you speed up,’ Jaguar Boy said.
‘Where exactly are we going?’
‘To meet the True People. You need to see them because they are about to become part of your story. Also, they might be able to defend us against those who want you back.’
The rain stopped as abruptly as a curtain being raised. They had outrun the storm and were travelling alongside a vast river that spread out to the horizon. The Child supposed that it was the Amazon. The dark sky was cloudless once more, packed with stars and spanned by the bridge of luminous dust.
There were islands on the great river, and this was where the True People lived. Like the Sloth People, they were conceived by crossing genetic templates in virtual matrices, and grew to term in ectogenetic tanks. They were divided into clans whose rivalries sometimes broke out into open warfare, and they had enslaved the descendants of a posthuman clade, the Quick, that had first settled the islands. For many years the Quick had lived in peace, setting out on the road down which the River Folk had travelled, losing themselves in contemplation of infinitely complex philosophies. So that when the True People had finally reached the islands, they’d had no difficulty conquering the Quick and altering their descendants. Making them stupider, short-lived, and obedient. Turning them into slaves.
The Child was greeted with much ceremony. It seemed that she was an important figure from the mythic past of the True People, and her return was believed to herald a new Golden Age. The clans made her their queen and promptly began quarrelling over who should have access to her. Jaguar Boy told her that they hated and feared and loved her in equal measure because of who she was and what she would do.
‘You did not begin the divergence between humans and posthumans, but you played an important role in its development. You became a great and powerful gene wizard. You helped to win the war against the Outers, and then you helped to win a second war, which freed the Outers and began the great expansion out into the Solar System and beyo
nd. The True People love you because you gave ordinary human beings more influence than they deserved, and they fear you because of what you became, and hate you because they need you still.’
‘Will I become as great as Avernus?’
‘Greater.’
‘And will I meet her?’
‘No. But one of your sons will.’
‘I don’t plan to have any children.’
‘You’ll find it necessary and useful. Besides, the Quick are your children, in a sense,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘Their genomes contain sequences that you designed.’
‘For all the good it did them,’ the Child said.
She’d had several clandestine meetings with Quick slaves, learning about their history and the long years of suffering under the Trues. They were melancholy and defiant. Resigned to their fate, yet still carrying a spark of the original fire of curiosity and creativity that had carried them across the big dark of interstellar space to a place where they had, briefly, reached the full flower of their potential.
‘They could rise again if they were freed,’ Jaguar Boy said.
‘Is that why you brought me here? To change this part of the story?’
‘I want to help you to learn something of the worlds in which you will soon awake. What you do with that knowledge is up to you. I wish I could have shown you more, but there wasn’t enough time.’
It was night. The same night on which she’d reached the archipelago of the True People. A very long night. So long it seemed to the Child that she had been living in it all her life. They were standing on a terrace of her palace at the summit of the hill that dominated the central island. Below, the hill stepped down in terraced tiers, each owned by a different clan, each a home and a hunting ground. Apart from the scattered and isolated stars of campfires, the tiers were dark, but the base of the hill was ringed with a small crowded town where Trues unaffiliated with any of the clans lived cheek by jowl with posthuman slaves. Beyond were other islands afloat on the black water of the great river, dark silhouettes limned by the lights of towns and the solitary stars of hunting camps.
And in the distance, like a sunrise, was a sudden conflagration where the clans of the True People had encountered and begun to fight a common enemy. The weather wranglers had arrived, and were advancing towards the Child. The islands of the True People sparkled with the discharges of every kind of weapon and arcs of tracers and the blades of energy beams split the night, but all fell short.
‘They will be here soon,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘You will have a choice to make then. I cannot advise you what to do. All I can ask is that you choose wisely.’
An especially large flash lit the horizon, seeming to circle half the world. The Child laughed in terror and awe. ‘This isn’t real! None of this is real!’
‘It is the only reality you know. You were born into it, and those who have raised you have made sure that it was as similar to your childhood as possible.’
‘Who? Who raised me?’
‘Your children. Descendants of servants you clipped from your own genome when you started on the long process of change that led you here. Driven by love and duty, they attempted to recreate you as you once were, but they are blind to certain facts. They do not understand that it isn’t possible to remake someone out of old and partial stories of the long-ago. And they do not understand that they are no longer free agents. That they have been captured. They are about to destroy this avatar because they believe I am manipulating you, but they do not realise that they are being manipulated by an old enemy of yours. Remember all I told you. Remember the various fates of humankind. Remember that nothing is inevitable. Above all, remember who you are.’
There was another terrific explosion. It lit up the river and the forest on either side, and whited out the sky. As its light died away, the Child saw that most of the islands were gone. The cargo blimp of the weather wranglers floated high above the river, making directly towards the hilltop palace. She turned to Jaguar Boy and discovered that he had vanished.
The blimp ploughed on, unharmed by the furious displays of the Fierce People, occluding the starry sky. It was very low now, very close. The Child could see rows of lighted windows in the cabin slung beneath the blimp, could see people moving inside or staring down at her. She did not have time to feel afraid. She wondered briefly if she was going to wake up, and then searchlights sprang on along the margins of the cabin, overlapping beams that pinned her like a moth. A rope ladder dropped and an imposingly tall, pale-skinned woman dressed in a black spidersilk blouson and khaki trousers climbed down.
The Child looked up at her and asked if she was going to take her home.
‘You have been found just in time,’ the woman said. Her face was shaded by the bill of her cap; only her wide white smile showed. ‘We thought you would be late.’
‘Late? Late for what?’
‘Your wedding, of course,’ the woman said, and held out her hand.
2
The Horse and I were taken back to Thule aboard a bottle rocket, and separated at the orbital station. He was returned to the Library, looking small and forlorn as he was led away amongst an escort of armoured troopers; I was taken to the Office of Public Safety, where I was interviewed by a grey little man with a parched voice, a perfect memory, and seemingly infinite patience. Although I insisted on making a formal protest about the violation of my right to be tried by my own clan, I was eager to cooperate. I wanted the truth to be placed on record. I wanted to make it clear that my clan and I had been tricked into working for Lathi and Prem Singleton.
And so I recounted every detail of our adventures, from my meeting with Lathi Singleton to the discovery of Yakob’s decerebrated body in the ruined tower, with especial emphasis on my theory that Bree Sixsmith had been possessed by a demon that was using her to further the cause of the enemy. When I finished there was a long silence before my interrogator told me that he was interested only in facts, and started to take my story apart. No detail was too fine, no discrepancy too small, to escape his attention. He pounced on what he believed to be faults and contradictions and explored them so thoroughly that I soon began to have trouble remembering what had actually happened and what he said I’d said had happened. He showed me select clips of the field interrogations of Quicks on Ull – the housekeepers of the lodge, stoic lichen hunters I did not recognise. He implied that I had caused their suffering. He told me that others would suffer as badly as the investigation proceeded. He told me that I deserved to be treated no better.
He was only doing his job, but it was not a job any sane man would have chosen, and it was hard not to hate him. In the long and intense kiloseconds of my interrogation, I grew to believe that he enjoyed tormenting me. That he had a fine contempt for everyone he met, seeing them as imperfect vessels that he had been born to test to destruction.
At last he told me that he was done with me for now. And as he stood up I told him what I wanted, speaking quickly and clearly and fixing my gaze on his in the manner of a pitchman in the Permanent Floating Market.
‘I must reconsider my analysis of you,’ he said. ‘I believed that you were a simple fool. Now I must wonder if you are insane.’
‘Tell your masters what I told you,’ I said. ‘That is, if they aren’t listening to this conversation.’
‘I am their servant, not yours,’ he said, and turned his back on me and walked out.
I was relieved to be rid of him, happy to be left alone in the small room with my fantasy that everything would work out for the best. After a few hundred seconds, two troopers came in, and I rose, smiling, believing I would be taken to someone who would discuss my proposition. Instead, I was promptly blindfolded and transported to a high, bare cell near the top of one of the spines of the thistledown city, and left there.
It was shaped like a trumpet flower, with a circular floor and a seamless wall of slippery ceramic that was three times my height and angled inwards. There was a soft patch of the floor where I slept,
another patch that absorbed my wastes, and a third that extruded basic food pellets. I had no connection to the outside world except a view of the sky whose skin was less than a hundred metres above my head, and the cell was open to the vagaries of Thule’s climate conditioning. I was exposed to the naked light and heat of the thistledown city’s minisun, and the freezing fogs of its clouds. Once, it rained so long and so hard that I thought I might drown, because the floor could not absorb the water fast enough: by the time the rain stopped I was up to my knees in it. It rained at other times, too, but never again so fiercely. Apart from the weather and the usual cycle of night and day, there was no variation in the dreary kiloseconds of my isolation except once, when a small bird perched briefly on the rim high above me.
It was an unremarkable dun little creature, hardly bigger than my cupped palm, with a blunt beak the colour of old bone and a short tail cocked above its back and wings barred with black and white, like the rank stripe of a trooper. The kind I had seen a hundred times in the park beyond the Permanent Floating Market and scarcely noticed. Now, intruding on my involuntary solitude, it seemed like a celestial messenger. I hardly dared breathe as it perched above me, unreachable, cocking its head and fixing me for a moment with its unblinking gaze. Then it looked away and its beak opened and it sang a brief song like pure cold water bubbling over silvery pebbles, and with a quick flick of its wings it flew away.
I sang its song to myself, over and again. I cannot explain why, but it gave me the strength to believe that my position was not hopeless, that my proposal had not been rejected outright but was still being considered, that I would not be imprisoned for ever. I remember it still.
Despite my initial bravado, I quickly lost count of how long I had been there. I started to mark the beginning of each diurn by making scratches on my thigh, but I’d been infected with theriacae to treat the various small wounds and injuries I’d acquired during my struggle with the possessed lichen hunter, and they quickly healed the marks I made on my skin, so that I had to remake all the previous scratches at the beginning of each day as well as adding a fresh one. It wasn’t easy, keeping count.
