by Ian Watson
So, in either hybertrance or a vivid approximation of that alien state, Keiko attended.
Her escort leads her to the foot of the bier on which the pregnant Kybers lie back to back, their bodies fused. Here she watches—for hours, days, years—as the creatures heave rhythmically toward the birthing of a “saviour offspring”. Finally the babe emerges, parting the fused lips of its parents’ external genitalia and sliding in acute slow-motion into the hands of the Kyber who has led her to this place.
The scene is grainy in Keiko’s vision, prohibitively distanced somehow; and yet she sees that the babe is more metal than flesh, with an immense silver casque of a head. Its lateral pupils throw out wall-eyed beams of light as thick as any human wrist, as though its first act in the world is not to drink in perceived data with newly opened eyes but rather to shed data—instructions, information, perceptions from a realm beyond incarnate reality—to shed these like a metaphysical beacon, thus steering the passage of ships in the stormy night that is the world.
This Kyber is the newest model. Its body armour sheaths its tiny limbs. When Keiko’s midwife-guide lifts the infant toward the midnight occlusion of Dextro (a sun behind a sun, nova in labour), the limbs slide out like star points and the babe burns above its alien deliverer in retake of that fabled night in Bethlehem. All over the planet this is happening, a thousand incandescent robot Baby Jesuses signalling their own advent. …
What did this mean? Was flesh-life not merely a way-station but an error? Had the Programmer decided—comparing Kyber with human feedback—that the most excellent, perfect denizens of its cosmos must be another sort of life entirely?
At last the irreality of kybertrance began to break up for Keiko, killed by the miracle to which she had just been an out-of-time witness; meanwhile the cargo hold reasserted its existence. The Kyber released her hands. She opened her eyes, and the dream of the previous moment flickered in her consciousness like a memory from childhood.
“I don’t believe that,” Keiko said. “I don’t believe what you’ve just given me to see.”
“We wanted you to know that we will survive on Onogoro,” the alien told her aloud. “Even on a world cut adrift from a fevered sun.”
“And Andrik?”
“Andrik thinks us—prays us—toward that survival, too, by obeying the cosmic process whose purpose is continuous acquisition of knowledge at the goad of either pain or its promise.”
“To what end? For what reward?” Keiko cried, again aware of the dingy clutter around her—for the alien seemed to be retreating from her, withdrawing inexorably into the bleak winter light of kybertrance.
“Awareness,” crooned the Kyber. “Perception of the Presence. These are their own rewards.”
“But will Andrik survive? Will he live through what’s happened and what’s going to happen?”
“He?”
“His spirit,” Keiko emended. “His essence.”
“In our offspring saviours, yes. Assuredly. Have no fear.”
“Then why do you come to Earth? Why?”
The Kyber’s arms folded in toward its body and crossed each other at chest height. Its front-facing pupils dimmed and diminished, never having been particularly bright to begin with, while its lateral eye-bulbs shone like those of the infant prophesied in Keiko’s recent approximation of death-sleep.
A cargo hold of the Heavenbridge had become, willy-nilly, a makeshift temple for the ungodly harbingers of a child—thousands of children, really—imagined into provisional existence by the Control System to which they were slave. How could Keiko, or any other human being, worship such chilling embodiments of the Kybers’ enslavement? Given these bleak conditions, a deity was only a cunning chain of data, and a living mortal, whether human or alien, only a finite process whirring toward oblivion. …
“Ah, you’ve come to inspect the skeletons in our communal closet.”
Keiko turned around, not really surprised that Farrell Sixkiller had managed to insinuate himself into the cargo hold without her hearing. He was light of foot, stealthiness as natural to him as breathing.
“How long have you been there?”
“I just came in.” He raised an eyebrow, canted his chin. “Why? You’re not embarrassed to be found in their company, are you?”
“It’s more congenial than some.”
“Even when they’re dead? Not a peep out of them since we left the Gemini system. These days, Dr Takahashi, it’s even possible to put a stethoscope to their pocket-watch tickers without risking a beheading.” He came through the narrow aisle between the crates and the great yellow curtain of the collapsed inflatable. “Look.” He tapped his forefinger against the halo-crest of the alien to whom Keiko had just been talking. “See there. No reflex, no response. The only good Kyber is one whose plug has been pulled. These arc excellent Kybers, Dr Takahashi.”
“So what do you think has happened to them, Farrell?”
“I think they’ve died,” he said, moving to another alien and lifting the scarf of kyberflesh hanging from its arm. “Or, to be more precise, that we’ve cut them off from their motive force by slipping out of ordinary lightspeed space. Yes, we’ve pulled their plugs. Literally, I think.”
“And when we reach Earth?”
“They’ll be too far away from their power source for any hope of resurrection. They’re permanently dead, Dr Takahashi; permanently unplugged.”
“Have you looked at their eyes, Farrell?”
“A residual glow, that’s all. It’ll fade. By the time we reach Luna Port they’ll all be as gloomy as candle nubs.”
“So you no longer object to our taking them home with us?”
“Why should I? They’ll be divided up by governments and research institutes, museums and universities, and shown around like native archaeological treasures. One or two will fall into the hands of surgeon-mechanics for dissection and dismantling, one or the other, choose your terminology. I don’t object to people dickering with machines, Dr Takahashi, only to their kowtowing to them.”
“Which is what you think Andrik did?”
For the first time since entering the cargo hold, Sixkiller seemed daunted by the uncompromising steeliness of her aspect and bearing.
“It’s time—” he began gently, not meeting her gaze. “It’s time you got over that, Keiko.”
She ignored this. “They’re alive,” she defiantly told him. “They’re alive, Farrell—alive.”
“It’s time you got over that, too.” He gripped her shoulders, lowering his head so that he could peer into her face searchingly. “Don’t worship the dead. Don’t.”
“Worship you instead?”
“Or yourself, Lady Kei. Or something living.”
“I will. I do.” She shook free of Sixkiller’s grip and brushed past him into the hold’s narrow aisle. Halting, she looked back. “About which primary do you orbit these days, Farrell? Or have you contrived a way to set yourself at the centre?” Almost immediately she regretted her questions, her tone, her readiness to sacrifice Sixkiller’s feelings to her own ringing anger.
“Sweet woman,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “I envied that single-minded bastard his relationship with you. It’s a helluva thing, envying the dead. I still envy him.”
“Shut up, Farrell.” But she was staring sightlessly at the floor, and her voice conveyed no hint of reproach. She could not find the strength to move her feet. Blood pounded in her temples, and the air in the hold was suddenly stifling, unaccountably so.
When she looked up, Keiko saw that Sixkiller was inscribing a message in huge blue letters on the yellow facing of the collapsed storage balloon. His phosphor-pen moved in swift, luminous parabolas; each turn of the wrist was a hypnotic flourish.
DR TAKAHASHI, said the completed inscription, PLEASE BE MINE.
Keiko stared at it abashed and speechless, balanced between outrage and bewildered laughter. The words glowed. Momentarily even the Kybers were eclipsed by the phenomenon of Sixki
ller’s illuminated gallantry. Then, ceasing to gape, she allowed herself a slow, pale smile.
“Farrell—”
“It’ll fade,” he said resignedly. “Don’t you worry, Lady Kei: it’ll fade.”
She shut her eyes, then opened them again, letting the inscription bleed into her vision like a sunset or a mist. “I know,” she murmured. And left Farrell Sixkiller standing beside the vivid inscription, his phosphor-pen clutched tightly in one hand and a look of cynical melancholy flashing from his eyes.
A few weeks later the Heavenbridge was home.
TWENTY-TWO
Keiko Takahashi retired to Kyoto, where she accepted a teaching post in linguistics and forsook any ambition of going to the stars again. Her work was her life. Although she never married, for a period of three years she lived with a young man—one of her students—who hoped to revive a literary movement devoted to illuminating contemporary events in terms of ancient Japanese history and myth, and who painstakingly composed an unpublishable epic poem while sharing her apartment Eventually, at Keiko’s own insistence, the young man moved out. He later repudiated utterly the thrust and savour of his literary ambitions, accepting a low-level management post with a cryonics firm in Hiroshima.
As a form of self-mocking comment on his surrender to capitalistic paternalism, the young man made a point of sending Keiko a friendly card every April around the date of the Industrial Festival at Fushimi, during which various Japanese industrial products were ceremoniously offered to the deities. Although inflicting pain was clearly not their intention, these cards invariably wounded Keiko—but she always answered them faithfully and tried, in addition, to remember the young man on both his birthday and at New Years.
The exploits of transnational expeditions to other star systems held only a peripheral interest for Keiko. She read about them in commercial news outlets or an occasional speciality journal, where colour portraits of alien landscapes would sometimes provoke disturbing reveries that she was quick to shake back down into her subconscious.
Six years after her return from Onogoro, one of these periodicals reported that Dextro, in the Gemini system, had indeed gone nova: that no further manned missions to that region of space would be undertaken, since there could be nothing there worth investigating any more—an obvious economic decision.
This report so stung Keiko that for an entire year she refrained from reading anything but her own educational materials. She had no idea what sort of command Captain Hsi had assumed after their party’s demobilization at Luna Port, or where the Heavenbridge itself might be these days. Nor did she care.
One lovely spring, in an article about that year’s recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics, Keiko encountered Craig Olivant’s name. He and V. K. Mahindra had taken the award for their work on neutrino-emission interface patterns in unstable stellar binaries.
Like Captain Hsi, however, everyone else connected with the Onogoro expedition—Naomi Davis, Betti Songa, Heinrich Eshleman, Nikolai Taras, Farrell Sixkiller, everyone—disappeared from Keiko’s life as irrevocably as if they had died thirty-seven light-years from home. They were hollow places in her past, echoes of an experience that she regarded with the same ambiguous detachment that adults often reserve for childhood nightmares.
The Kybers were another matter.
Sixkiller had been right about both their imperviousness to resurrection back on Earth and their likely fate at the hands of human researchers and curators. News about the aliens was meticulously controlled and therefore doggedly circumspect—if you cared about their disposition, which Keiko privately told herself she did not. Nevertheless, you could not escape learning that a transnational team of surgeons and cyberneticists in Houston, Texas, had dissected—dismantled—one of the Onogorovans, only to conclude that the alien represented a genuine life form, albeit a variety once powered by an enigmatic vitalism impossible to define or categorize. The term “vitalism”, which appeared in two successive news releases from the Houston hospital where the alien autopsy had taken place, came in for a great deal of sniping from medical professionals in following days; and no one, anywhere, was happy with the team’s lengthy official report, to which three members refused to append their signatures. This controversy was inescapable because everyone was talking about it, even the students in Keiko’s syntactical-transformation classes.
As for the other five Kybers, they disappeared altogether, the victims of Expeditionary Command reticence and red tape. In fact, it was not until an entire decade after the Heavenbridge’s return from the Gemini system that the authorities lifted the lid on their whereabouts, revealing that within the next months the Kybers would be installed, rather like pieces of statuary, at five different public facilities around the world appropriate to their display. They would remain five years at each site, then be moved to museums, religious centres, universities, or open promenades in countries that had not yet benefited from their presence. This rotation would continue as long as there was sufficient public interest to fund and support it.
Initially, then, death-sleeping Kybers were dispatched to the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Bahai Shrine in Haifa, a centre devoted to Inca culture in Lima, and the isolated rock monolith called Yakkagala on the island of Taprobane. Five years later they were dutifully rotated to other sites, and five years after that to still others, and so on.
When Keiko Takahashi was sixty-three, an alert but increasingly less nimble woman, satisfied with her career and her small circle of friends, she learned that one of the Kybers would be rotated to Sanjusangendo to stand among the thousand statues of Kannon in the Hall of Mercy.
As if her entire life had been pointing toward this development, Keiko was only mildly surprised.
More upsetting to her was the manner in which she acquired her knowledge of the Kyber’s imminent transfer—apparently from the National Museum in Kenya—to Kyoto. She had answered a summons to her apartment door one evening to find an earnest young man with a recording unit and a finger camera standing in the hallway.
He was Japanese, quite good-looking, and he reminded Keiko of the young man whom she had inadvertently driven into the cryonics industry, and who had died several years ago in a boating accident off Akashi island near Sumoto.
“Are you Keiko Takahashi?” he asked, lifting the recorder.
She confessed her identity.
“Then you’ll be interested to know …” And he told her about the selection of Sanjusangendo as a display site for one of the Kybers, in such pedantic detail that she was hard put not to interrupt him.
“Why would I be interested to know that?” Keiko asked the young man pointedly when he was at last finished.
“Everyone is,” he replied, smiling. “Besides, you were a member of the expeditionary party aboard the Heavenbridge. You were one of those who brought the Kybers back from the stars.”
She moved to close her door, dismayed by so direct a reference to her past, even though she had quickly surmised what was happening. That someone had taken the trouble to match her name to the manifest of her old light-skimmer and then to seek her out was nevertheless a startling discovery. Wasn’t all that dead?
For a few months after the return of the Heavenbridge she had suffered the scrutiny of journalists and the pleas of various sorts of fortune-seekers, but the attention had died because she adamantly refused to sanction it. Later, her employers had shielded her from the press; and today, so far as she knew, the general public had no more knowledge of her name than it did of that of the first anonymous kamikaze who had given his life in the Battle of Midway. …
“Please, Dr Takahashi,” the young man cried. He had his foot in the door, just like a products salesman, and he was wedging his way inward with an apologetic smile belying the violence of his entry.
“No,” Keiko declared. “Get out. Get out.” She pushed the door against his own insistent pushing, and found that she was no match for him.
�
�What is especially interesting about—ugh!—the timing of the Kyber’s transfer to Kyoto,” the young man was telling her, still cordially grinning, “is that in three years the nova of Dextro will be visible to Earthbound astonomers. How slowly—umpf!—light travels in comparison to wonderful vessels like the Heavenbridge, eh?”
Keiko gave up and let him in. “All right, then—violate my home. And do so without removing your shoes.”
He looked at his feet, but only briefly.
“Know this, however,” Keiko said: “I won’t talk to you, I have nothing to say.”
“Is it true you taught the Kybers to speak?”
She stared at the young man contemptuously, with a fire very like hatred in her eyes. Almost precisely when she thought he would, he withered, turning aside to search for some neutral household item on which to permit his gaze to fall. He settled upon the flower arrangement—of golden chrysanthemums—in the tokonoma alcove; and momentarily, with a skip of her heart, Keiko saw there the golden heads of the haloed statues in that other tokonoma holoniche in her dormicle on Onogoro so many years ago.
“Some scientists believe,” he began, addressing the flowers, “that the nova may be a—one of them calls it, yes, a ‘resurrection trigger’. If that is an accurate speculation, Dr Takahashi, the alien that comes to Sanjusangendo may awaken there. I would think that you might have an interesting comment to make on such a speculation.”
“Then you have thought artlessly, young man.”
The reporter turned to her with a rapt, committed look reminiscent of the one unfailingly worn by her student lover of bygone years. “Don’t you want to believe the Kybers are alive?” he demanded of her. “Don’t you want to feel that a few of them have escaped the tragedy of their sun’s misconduct?”
“Get out,” said Keiko pitilessly. “Get out, please.”
“You’re a hard one,” the young man informed her after a moment of inward struggle. “You’re a terribly hard one, Dr Takahashi.”
