“You gave me absolutely no room to grow, Vasily.”
The enormous triviality of this conversation, at the end of time, strikes me and I want to laugh out loud. Not possible. I stare at this monstrous Elisaveta, so bitter and different . . . And now, to me, shaded by her indifference. “I feel like I’ve been half a dozen men, and we’ve all loved you badly,” I say, hoping to sting her.
“No. Only one. You became angry when I disagreed with you. I asked for more freedom to explore . . . You said there was really little left to explore. Even in the last half of the twenty-first century, Vasily, you said we had found all there was to find, and everything thereafter would be mere details. When I had my second child, it began. I saw you through the eyes of my infant daughter, saw what you would do to her, and I began to grow apart from you. We separated, then divorced, and it was for the best. For me, at any rate; I can’t say that you ever understood.”
We seem to stand in that gray cubicle, that comfortable simplicity with which I surrounded myself when first awakened. Elisaveta, taller, stronger, face more seasoned, stares at me with infinitely more experience. I am outmatched.
Her expression softens. “But you didn’t deserve this, Vasily. You mustn’t blame me for what your tributary has done.”
“I am not he . . . It. It is not me. And you are not the Elisaveta I know!”
“You wanted to keep me forever the student you first met in your classroom. Do you see how futile that is now?”
“Then what can we love? What is there left to attach to?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t much matter, does it? There’s no more time left to love or not to love. And love has become a vastly different thing.”
“We reach this peak . . . of intelligence, of accomplishment, immortality . . .”
“Wait.” Elisaveta frowns and tilts her head, as if listening, lifts her finger in question, listens again, to voices I do not hear. “I begin to understand your confusion,” she says.
“What?”
“This is not a peak, Vasily. This is a backwater. We are simply all that’s left after a long, dreadful attenuation. The greater, more subtle galaxies of Libraries ended themselves a hundred million years ago.”
“Suicide?”
“They saw the very end we contemplate now. They decided that if our kind of life had no hope of escaping the Proof – the Proof these teachers helped fix in all our thoughts – than it was best not to send a part of ourselves into the next universe. We are what’s left of those who disagreed . . .”
“My tributary did not tell me this.”
“Hiding the truth from yourself even now.”
I hold my hands out to her, hoping for pity, but this Elisaveta has long since abandoned pity. I desperately need to activate some fragment of love within her. “I am so lost . . .”
“We are all lost, Vasily. There is only one hope.”
She turns and opens a broad door on one side of my cubicle, where I originally placed the window to the outside. “If we succeed at this,” she says, “then we are better than those great souls. If we fail, they were right. . . Better that nothing from our reality crosses the Between.”
I admire her for her knowledge, then, for being kept so well informed. But I resent that she has advanced beyond me, has no need for me. The tributaries watch with interest, like voyeurs.
(“Perhaps there is a chance.” My descendant self speaks in a private sending.)
“I see why you divorced me,” I say sullenly.
“You were a tyrant and a bully. When you were stored – before your heart replacement, I remember now . . . When you were stored, you and I simply had not grown far apart. We would. It was inevitable.”
(I ask my descendant self whether what she says is true.
“It is a way of seeing what happened” it says. “The Proof has yet to be disproved. We recommended no attempts be made to do so. We think such attempts are futile.”
“You taught that?”
“We created patterns of thought and diffused them for use in creation of new tributaries. The last students. But perhaps there is a chance. Touch her. You know how to reach her”)
“The Proof is very convincing,” I tell Elisaveta. “Perhaps this is futile.”
“You simply have no say, Vasily. The effort is being made.” I have touched her, but it is not pity I arouse this time, and certainly not love – it is disgust.
Through the window, Elisaveta and I see a portion of the plain. On it, the experiments have congealed into a hundred, a thousand smooth, slowly pulsing shapes. Above them all looms the shadow of the Coordinator.
(I feel a bridge being made, links being established. I sense panic in my descendant self, who works without the knowledge of the other tributaries. Then I am asked: “Willyou become part of the experiment}”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are the judgment engine”)
“Now I must go,” Elisaveta says. “We will all die soon. Neither you nor I are in the final self. No part of the teachers, or the Coordinator, will cross the Between.”
“All futile, then,” I say.
“Why so, Vasily? When I was young, you told me that change was an evil force, and that you longed for an eternal college, where all learning could be examined at leisure, without pressure. You’ve found that. Your tributary self has had billions of years to study the unchanging truths. And to infuse them into new tributaries. You’ve had your heaven, and I’ve had mine. Away from you, among those who nurture and respect.”
I am left with nothing to say. Then, unexpectedly, the figure of Elisaveta reaches out with a nonexistent hand and touches my unreal cheek. For a moment, between us, there is something like the contact of flesh to flesh. I feel her fingers. She feels my cheek. Despite her words, the love has not died completely.
She fades from the cubicle. I rush to the window, to see if I can make out the Coordinator, but the shadow, the mercury-liquid cloud, has already vanished.
“They will fail,” the We-ness says. It surrounds me with its mind, its persuasion, greater in scale than a human of my time to an ant. “This shows the origin of their folly. We have justified Our existence.”
(You can still cross. There is still a connection between you. You can judge the experiment, go with the Endtime Work Coordinator.)
I watch the plain, the joined shapes, extraordinarily beautiful, like condensed cities or civilizations or entire histories.
The sunlight dims, light rays jerk in Our sight, in Our fading scales of time.
(Will you go?)
“She doesn’t need me . . .” I want to go with Elisaveta. I want to reach out to her and shout, “I see! I understand!” But there is still sadness and self-pity. I am, after all, too small for her.
(You may go. Persuade. Carry Us with you.)
And billions of years too late –
Shards of Seconds
We know now that the error lies in the distant past, a tendency of the Coordinator, who has gathered tributaries of like character. As did the teachers. The past still dominates, and there is satisfaction in knowing We, at least, have not committed any errors, have not fallen into folly.
We observe the end with interest. Soon, there will be no change. In that, there is some cause for exultation. Truly, We are tired.
On the bubbling remains of the School World, the students in their Berkus continue to the last instant with the experiment, and We watch from the cracked and cooling hill.
Something huge and blue and with many strange calm aspects rises from the field of experiments. It does not remind Us of anything We have seen before.
It is new.
The Coordinator returns, embraces it, draws it away.
(“She does not tell the truth. Parts of the Endtime Coordinator must cross with the final self. This is your last chance. Go to her and reconcile. Carry Our thoughts with you.”)
I feel a love for her greater than anything I could have felt before. I hate my descendant self, I hate the
teachers and their gray spirits, depth upon depth of ashes out of the past. They want to use me to perpetuate all that matters to them.
I ache to reclaim what has been lost, to try to make up for the past.
The Coordinator withdraws from School World, taking with it the results of the student experiment. Do they have what they want – something worthy of being passed on? It would be wonderful to know . . . I could die contented, knowing the Proof has been shattered. I could cross over, ask . . .
But I will not pollute her with me any more.
“No.”
The last thousandths of the last second fall like broken crystals.
(The connection is broken. You have failed.)
My tributary self, disappointed, quietly suggests I might be happier if I am deactivated.
Curiously, to the last, he clings to his imagined cubicle window. He cries his last words where there is no voice, no sound, no one to listen but Us:
“Elisaveta! YES!”
The last of the ancient self is packed, mercifully, into oblivion. We will not subject him to the Endtime. We have pity.
We are left to Our thoughts. The force that replaces gravity now spasms. The metric is very noisy. Length and duration become so grainy that thinking is difficult.
One tributary works to solve an ancient and obscure problem. Another studies the Proof one last time, savoring its formal beauty. Another considers ancient relations.
Our end, Our own oblivion, the Between, will not be so horrible. There are worse things. Much____________________
STUFFING
Jerry Oltion
We need to calm down a little after the last few stories and so, as a final apres-repas – almost literally – here’s a sly little piece by Jerry Oltion (b. 1957). We’ve already encountered Jerry in full hard-tech flow in collaboration with Stephen Gillett on “Waterworld”, but here he’s in a rather different mode.
Jerry claims he has been a gardener, stone mason, carpenter, oilfield worker, forester, land surveyor, rock ‘n’ roll deejay, printer, proofreader, editor, publisher, computer consultant, movie extra, corporate secretary, and garbage truck driver. He has also invented a new type of telescope mount that allows amateur astronomers to make homemade telescopes that track the stars while they’re observing.
But he’s also a prolific writer. He’s written over a hundred short stories since his first sale to Analog back in 1982, plus fifteen novels. These include four Star Trek novels plus his most recent offerings The Getaway Special (2001) and its sequel Anywhere But Here (2005).
When Dennis arrived in the park for their lunch date, he found Cheryl already basking in the sun. She was flat on her back in an open spot between two orange trees, arms and legs stretched wide to intercept the maximum amount of light, and wearing only a pair of dark sunglasses. Her skin was in maximum photosynthesis mode, and it intercepted so much light that she looked like a shadow on the ground, which gave Dennis an idea. He stepped softly around the other sunbathers until he stood at her feet, positioned his toes next to her heels, then leaned forward and stretched out his arms in the same posture as hers so his shadow fell over her in a nearly perfect outline.
“Hey, you’re blocking my lunch,” she said in a peevish tone, and then she must have opened her eyes. “Oh, it’s you. Ha, ha. But you’re still blocking my lunch.”
“You look rather delectable there,” he said. “Maybe I’ll block it some more from a little closer in.”
“You do that, and we’ll get kicked out of the park. Scares the children, you know.”
“Hmm. You’re right.” He stepped aside and stripped off his shorts, then sat down beside her while she scooted over to make room. He looked down the length of the colony, a mile-wide, tenmile-long cylinder with three transparent windows running its entire length, trying to judge how much time they had before the afternoon rain reached them. The ring of misty fog that worked its way up the length of the cylinder each day looked at least an hour away; plenty of time for an unhurried meal, and maybe even time enough to use some of their recently acquired energy in a more private setting later.
He lay down on his back and took Cheryl’s right hand in his left, careful to make sure hers was on top, although strictly speaking his higher body mass made maximum exposure more important for him than for her. “Ah, that feels good,” he said as his skin pigment kicked into action and began flooding his system with sugar and oxygen.
“I love wintertime,” Cheryl said. “I know we’re only a couple million miles closer to the Sun than other times of year, but I swear I can feel it.”
“It’s possible.” Dennis wiggled his butt to scratch an itch against the grass. “It’s your source of sustenance; it wouldn’t be surprising if you could sense the quality of it pretty accurately. Like the sense of taste, back when people still ate food.”
She laughed. “Yeah, maybe our brains are starting to remap that whole cortical region. Instead of taste, now we’re measuring voltage.”
“Maybe.”
They lay side by side for a while, just enjoying each other’s company. They had started taking lunch together a few weeks ago after meeting by chance in line at a fast-flash booth and agreeing that neither of them liked the sudden shift in body chemistry they got from the high-intensity lamps. Cheryl had suggested a more leisurely, natural meal in the park, and they had had so much fun getting to know one another that they had made it a regular date.
“You know,” Dennis said, “thinking about the solstice; there used to be a big traditional festival this time of year, back when the spacehabs were new. My great-grandmother told me about it. They called it ‘Thanksmas.’ People would buy each other gifts, and they would cook up a huge meal and stuff themselves silly, then exchange all their gifts, and—”
“ ‘Buy?’ ” Cheryl asked. “What’s that?”
“Oh. It’s a different kind of exchange that people did when they weren’t giving things away. They kept track of who did useful work for other people, and they got some kind of points for it, and then when they wanted something that they couldn’t make themselves they traded points with the guy who made it.”
“Oh,” said Cheryl. “That must have been before they had AIs to keep track of stuff like that.”
“Yeah, I think so. And before they had nanofabs to do the producing. People actually had to do things they didn’t like just to collect these points. But once a year they blew all their credit on this big feast and gift-giving thing, so life must not have been that bad or people wouldn’t have given everything away like that.”
“Or maybe they did it just to take their minds off of how awful it was the rest of the time,” Cheryl said.
“Could be. The point is, people used to look forward to this time of year at least in part because of the big meal, so there’s actually historical precedent for liking the solstice sunlight more than other times of the year.”
“Ah, I see.” She was quiet for a minute or so, but then she said, “So do you want to have a solstice meal? Get some big mirrors and intensify the sunlight in your back yard for an afternoon or something?”
Dennis considered that. The only real advantage to highintensity sunlight was the speed at which you could recharge your body’s energy, and that seemed kind of counter to the spirit of the occasion, at least what Dennis remembered from his greatgrandmother’s stories about it. “No,” he said, “if we’re going to observe Thanksmas, we ought to take our time and savor it the way they used to.”
Cheryl rose up on one elbow to look at him. “What, you mean actually sticking food in our mouths? And swallowing it?”
“Huh? Eeew, no, I didn’t mean that!” Then he realized the tone of voice she had used. “I mean . . . did you mean that?”
“No!” She lay back down, but a second later she was back up on her elbow again. “Okay, maybe I did. It . . . it sounds kind of sensual.”
“Then by all means, let’s do it!” He rose up for a kiss and ran his tongue along her lips,
enjoying their delicious womanly flavor. Would food taste anything like that? He had no idea.
“We’ll need to check with a doctor to make sure our bodies can still handle it,” he said. “And we’ll need to invite some friends. The whole point of Thanksmas was to share it with as many people as you could.”
“Of course,” she said. “What good’s an intensely personal experience without friends there to watch you make a fool of yourself?”
“Exactly!” He lay back on the grass again. “So who should we invite?”
They settled on two friends each, for a total of six at the party. Since things could get kind of embarrassing while they re-learned how to do what people hadn’t done for over a century, they decided to invite couples, who would at least presumably have developed some tolerance for each other’s foibles. Dennis knew immediately who he would invite: his childhood friend Joachim and his wife, Teeliam. Joachim had always been an adventurous sort, climbing trees and running around the rain ring and hanggliding from the zero-gravity middle of the colony down to the high-gee surface. He had even eaten a bug once on a dare, and claimed it hadn’t been all that bad, so he already had some experience. Teeliam was a bit more conservative, but she had a good sense of humor about Joachim’s peculiarities, so Dennis was willing to bet she would be okay at a food-feast. She accepted the invitation, at any rate, which was better than the first two sets of friends that Cheryl tried.
Cheryl eventually talked her sister, Frieda, and her sister’s partner, Aylette, into joining them. Both women were skeptical, but Frieda wanted to meet this new man her sister had been spending time with, and Aylette decided she could use the experience for her Master’s thesis on the evolution of fads in post-colonial societies.
“Oh, great,” Dennis said when Cheryl told him about that. “Now it’s going to be documented. No pressure.”
Cheryl gave him a puzzled look. “What’s to feel pressured about? We get some food; we eat it. How hard is that?”
Dennis laughed. “You haven’t heard my great-grandmother’s stories. Food doesn’t come ready to eat; you have to cook it. People used to work for days preparing the Thanksmas meal. It had to be a work of art, and everything had to be ready at exactly the same time. Except for the pie, which you cooked while you were eating the other food.”
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 65
