In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  He waited as his identity returned. It blossomed within him, realms of self and memory fitting themselves into vast empty spaces—but Silverstone stayed with him all the way, showing no sign of fading. He turned to face Gailla and said, “He’s still with me … I can’t get rid of him!”

  “He’ll keep you company at your trial,” Gailla said joylessly.

  “But you’ll be killing what’s left of your old love!” he cried.

  “I’ve been prepared for some time,” she said. “They’ll wipe you clean and start you up as someone else. It’ll be all over for both of us.”

  “No!” he cried, turned, and rushed to the other door. She did not fire, and he knew that she couldn’t, and that he would have enough time to do what he now remembered was his last recourse, waiting for him if something went wrong.

  He palmed the door, and still she had not fired. As the door slid open, he knew that she was hesitating, unable to kill the last of her lover. And he felt it also, the mountainous regret at having killed him. He could not banish it, nor the vast cloud of the man’s mental remains. It refused to fade away, invading his unused regions with new patterns, and he knew that he was too weak to wipe them out.

  The impulse to love had infected him with weak sentiments, and he knew that she felt it also. The bodily memories of their lovemaking had softened them both. That was why she had not killed him as soon as he had regained himself. Or was she preparing him for when she would rebuild her old lover by amplifying the stubborn echoes that remained until they burgeoned and became again the personality she had known? Maybe she knew how to resurrect him and had planned it all along, and would carry out her plan after sufficient revenge had been visited on him.

  Well, he would deny her that. He could still take everything from her, and achieve one last victory over a world that had opposed his every desire from the start, always forcing him to take what he wanted. There was nothing else he could do.

  “Wait!” she cried as the door opened into chaos. It would have been a way to somewhere, but he had deliberately left it set to no destination—realizing that he might need its sudden exit one day.

  As he tumbled into the black obscenity of existence without form, he saw her in the doorway, her mouth open wide in horror and regret, her arms reaching out to him uselessly. And as he felt himself deforming, changing, losing all sense of time and space, he knew that his death would not be quick, that no supernatural damnation could ever have equaled the slow loss of himself that was just beginning.

  Gailla was shooting at him now, and he imagined that it was a gesture of pity, an effort to shorten the suffering of what was left of her lover. The third bullet opened his chest, entering slowly, as if unsure of how to obey the laws of physics in this realm. It explored his pain, telling him that he had made this final fate for himself by building the castle and its doorways, with every fleeting, trivial decision—step by inexorable step to one end, to bring him here, to this death.

  “Gailla,” Silverstone whispered through the pain of her bullet’s dancing, failed mercy. “I’m still here.”

  Then Robles closed his eyes and heard the soft terrible music filtering in from behind the show of things. It was an inhuman music, with nothing of song or dance, or memory in it. It was a music of crushed glass, severed nerves, and brute rumblings, preparing the way for a theme of fear.

  And as Robles knew himself in his pain, he yearned for death because Silverstone was still with him.

  The Sea of Evening

  “Men cannot make angels.”

  —Darwin

  A week had passed since we began to suspect that the Sponge, as we called the Artificial Intelligence Matrix, had gone critical and was achieving self-awareness.

  “Have some sympathy,” I said as we strolled down the concrete path from the Brain Core Building toward the housing complex. The air was a bit chilly for late summer. A breeze hurried through the maple trees, as if ashamed of being early.

  “It is sad about human beings,” Ferguson replied as we turned into the setting sun. I shielded my eyes, but Henry looked straight ahead. “They’re pressured from within,” he said, “by impulses which don’t seem to belong to them. Circumstances have rarely permitted much choice, until recent times. You find yourself alive, curious, too often appalled at what is in you and outside you. You balance, but the pincer action wears you down. What’s it like for the Sponge, to be born into a black midnight? No sun or stars, only the intricate constellations of insensate knowledge.”

  The path turned back into the shade, and I took my hand away from my eyes.

  “That’s very nice,” I said, “but I’m far from convinced that it has a localized ego. The Matrix is a simulator, a malleable universe of possibilities.” I had admired Henry, looked up to him as a mentor, but his stylish misanthropy had begun to irritate me.

  “For now. But elements within an enriched system may achieve individuality and continue developing. Our imaginations are also places where we simulate possibilities, yet we achieve a focused sense of self, however faceted. Even though it is a byproduct of complexity, consciousness plays a vital role. It’s a complex feedback loop, contributing to self-control and self-critical guidance. We grew into it from a more automatic state. If you doubt it, look at how we lose ourselves when we’re absorbed in something, or dreaming. Self-awareness is as important to higher intelligence as pain.”

  “That’s why bureaucracies are unconscious,” I said. “They hate the pain of accurate feedback. Truth upsets the pecking order.”

  He gave a faint laugh. “Human beings are not yet what they might be.”

  I shrugged and we walked on in silence. I didn’t feel like agreeing with him.

  “An android psychologist,” he continued suddenly, “might make a human patient feel that he’s getting a more objective view of himself. The android brain would of course be lacking the rudimentary brain strata built up during evolutionary survival, so it would be a dispassionate observer in relation to us.”

  “Well,” I said unsurely, “that sounds nice, but it’s always been a matter of trying to climb out of our skins and looking back, human or other. You’ll only set the regress back one step. We’re all locked inside our skulls in the end.”

  “Objectivity is always relative, never objective, never an unconditional relationship.”

  I had the feeling that Ferguson was waiting for me to catch up with some notion of his own.

  “What is it, Kevin?” he asked. “Bored?”

  I stuck my hands shyly in my pockets and we walked on.

  “The Brain Core is likely the first alien on Earth,” he said.

  I imagined an android John the Baptist striding across the countryside.

  “It might begin making doctorly observations about our failings,” Ferguson said.

  “Not if we raise it right.”

  “Reminds me of the fear human beings have of their children, that they won’t be copies of the previous generation.”

  “What I meant is that it will be more like us than we realize, if it has to learn from us.”

  “Perhaps, but it will begin as a relatively free cortex.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Consider your aliens,” he went on, as if I had brought up the idea. “Now they might give us a chilling view of humanity.”

  “Some people have already given us that.”

  “The Core stands outside evolution’s bloody building program. Egoless, free of the ruinous survival impulses emanating from lower mental structures, the Core is an unchained cortex.”

  No one can see the back of his own neck, and the barber cannot cut his own hair very well. I thought of the faint, hurrying galaxies, and imagined a great circle of civilizations linked in a chain of mutual examination, a vast configuration of observers facing the enigma of space-time, each getting a relative fix on the other.
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br />   “Even if alien civilizations exist,” I said, “we’ll probably never contact one. The universe is too vast, our moments of existence too brief to coincide.”

  We stopped and I looked at him in the red twilight. His unusually youthful face was blotched with shadows, making his lean shape appear menacing.

  “Kevin,” he said as he stepped closer and became again the co-researcher I knew, “don’t you see?”

  “What?”

  “You do it all the time, so imagine why we haven’t—”

  “You can imagine anything.”

  The chill was getting to my shoulder. I waited in silence.

  “Maybe they’re waiting before they contact us,” he said.

  “You mean for us to grow up?”

  “Yes, but it’s important how.”

  “Oh, I see. You think the Core will help.”

  “It’s an additional witness to the universe. It can corroborate or discredit our views of things … our best foot forward.”

  “You’re hoping for too much,” I said.

  “I admit that the Core’s objectivity will be only relative, but enough for a decent victory over the instinctive, unreflective mind. Better than we’ve had.”

  “It’s still a long way to controlling wars, modifying politics, or even improving the chanciness of human personal relations.” I was feeling contemptuous of him.

  “In time,” he said, “but consider this. Contact may occur only when other civilizations know that we have escaped the self-torment of our … let’s say developmental stages. The creation of the Core intelligence might be the proof required.”

  “What?”

  “I know it’s ad hoc from your point of view. …”

  I took a deep breath. “It’s laughable, Henry! You assume a damned versus the elect theology. Only those who attain a virtuous state will be contacted from the skies.”

  He took out his already packed pipe and lighter in one motion, lit the tobacco and puffed up an angry cloud; for a moment the flame made his face seem grotesque. It was all over for him, I thought.

  “How would they even know?” I asked, humoring him.

  “They would keep informed.”

  “Pretty religious of you. Credits and demerits all go into a big book up there.”

  “Damn, this thing’s gone out.”

  I looked up at the sky, newly swept clean by the unseasonably cold air pushing in from the north. If Henry had a breakdown, I would be promoted.

  “You were always fairly orthodox, Kevin, even in your personal life. Never do anything if it means a risk or sacrifice.”

  “Fairly’s the right word,” I answered. “Why endanger past work without reasonable evidence?”

  “Play the game until it fails.” He relit his pipe with the dancing flame.

  “Come on, Henry. You’re abasing yourself before hypothetical superiors. Fine and good for speculations, but I’d hate to see this creeping into your work.”

  “Don’t you look up to anyone? We search for fathers or sons among those we befriend … bits and pieces of what should have been fathers, or may have been sons, daughters …” He seemed very nervous about his pipe.

  “Come on,” I said finally, feeling a bit embarrassed by his question. “They would have to have observers to know.” A horde of objections clamored for my attention.

  “What if you can’t see your game is failing?”

  “Then you’re swept away. It’s a risk you have to take.”

  “Ah, there,” he said, puffing his bowl into a glow.

  It had grown dark, and we had not gone even halfway to the housing complex. I looked back to the now brightly lit dome of the Brain Core Building, where something newly aware was reaching out of its private darkness. A week now.

  Stars appeared, brightening as twilight faded. Ferguson had made me feel the great outwardness; but the inner regions waited everywhere, vast and cavernous, inhabited by uncontrollable, fear-filled beasts, cruel and raging. Madness resonates in those realms, crying with a brassy music. Even if we could travel to the suns of Orion, anywhere in the big black, the inner abyss would go with us. Could it be closed off? Should it be closed off? How many intelligent species had asked this question, made the effort, and failed?

  Henry’s wristphone beeped.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you alone?” a small voice asked.

  “I’m with Doctor Flew.”

  “Security is ordering everyone indoors at once. Return to the Core Building.”

  “Yes, of course,” Henry said, puffing with ease.

  “Well, it’s been intriguing,” I said, raising my voice above the whisper of the wind in the trees. “Clever to think that we would be contacted as we transcend our old brains through the birth of artificial intelligences. But how can I buy it? Saviors from the stars, arriving to pat us on the head for having awakened our better self? It’s a bit vague, you have to admit.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t come just to reveal their presence, but … to deposit information in our developing Core, as a gift for the future. It would all be very discreet, I would imagine, nothing to cause culture shock.”

  I stared at his dark shape.

  “Then, of course,” he continued dryly, “the Brain Core would become an avenue of communication, a reliable intermediary between the species. The problem of communicating with actual alien individuals would be bypassed, thus avoiding embarrassing misunderstandings. Frequent contact between individuals would come later.”

  I suddenly knew what he would claim next.

  “Yes, I’m with them,” he said. “Humans have been taken from here routinely: raised, educated, and returned.”

  “Guardian angels …” I muttered. Henry had lost his mind. His phone began to beep, but he ignored it. He turned and his face caught the light from the Core Building. He gazed at me directly, in a way I had not known, without guile, it seemed; for the first time in my life I felt that I was looking into the mind of a genuinely free intelligence. He made me feel that I was the slow wit, the last to catch on that the darkness of human history was ending. I suppose most madmen have this capacity for imposing a vision. My future was assured, I realized.

  “Henry,” I said patiently, for friendship’s sake. “It’s not true. Don’t you see, how can it—”

  “Open your eyes,” he said as my phone added its beep to his. My shoulder ached and the chill wind whispered painfully in my ears as I looked up.

  Lights which were not stars began to appear in the sea of evening.

  Henry’s pipe clattered on the walkway, as if he had discarded it. He stood motionless.

  “I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” I said as the lights drew nearer.

  The Middle Distance

  Heathen God

  “… every heathen deity has its place in the flow of existence.”

  The isolation station and preserve for alien flora and fauna on Antares IV had only one prisoner, a three-foot-tall gnome-like biped with skin like creased leather and eyes like great glass globes. His hair was silky white and reached down to his shoulders, and he usually went about the great natural park naked. He lived in a small white cell located in one of the huge block-like administration modules. There was a small bed in the cell, and a small doorway which led out of the park. A hundred feet away from the door there was a small pool, one of many scattered throughout the park. It reflected the deep-blue color of the sky.

  The gnome was very old, but no one had yet determined quite how old. And there seemed to be no way to find out. The gnome himself had never volunteered any information about his past. In the one hundred years of his imprisonment he had never asked the caretaker for anything. It was rumored among the small staff of Earthmen and humanoids that the gnome was mad. Generally they avoided him. Sometimes they would watch his small figure g
azing at the giant disk of Antares hanging blood red on the horizon, just above the well-pruned trees of the park, and they would wonder what he might be thinking.

  The majority of Earthpeoples spread over twelve star systems did not even know of the gnome’s existence, much less his importance. A few knew, but they were mostly scholarly and political figures, and a few theologians. The most important fact about the alien was that sometime in the remote past he had been responsible for the construction of the solar system and the emergence of intelligent life on Earth.

  The secret had been well kept for over a century.

  In the one hundred and fourth year of the alien’s captivity, two men set out to visit him. The first man’s motives were practical: the toppling of an old regime; the other man’s goal was to ask questions. The first man’s political enemies had helped him to undertake this journey, seeing that it would give them the chance to destroy him. The importance of gaining definitive information about the alien was in itself enough reason to send a mission, but combined with what they knew about the motives of the man they feared, this mission would provide the occasion to resolve both matters at the same time. The second man would bring back anything of value that they might learn about the gnome.

  Everything had been planned down to the last detail. The first ship, carrying the two unsuspecting men, was almost ready to come out of hyperspace near Antares. Two hours behind it in the warp was a military vessel—a small troop ship. As the first vessel came out of nothingness into the brilliance of the great star, the commander of the small force ship opened his sealed orders.

  As he came down the shuttle ramp with his two companions, Father Louis Chavez tried to prepare himself for what he would find here. It was still difficult to believe what his superiors had told him about the imprisoned alien. The morning air of Antares IV was fresh, and the immediate impression was one of stepping out into a warm botanical garden. At his left Sister Guinivere carried his small attaché case. On his right walked Benedict Compton, linguist, cultural anthropologist and as everyone took for granted, eventual candidate for first secretary of Earth’s Northern Hemisphere. Compton was potentially a religious man, but the kind who always demanded an advance guarantee before committing himself to anything. Chavez felt suspicious of him.