Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  After a while he sat up and looked toward Anulka. She lay dead in the warm afternoon, sunlight bright on her bloody head. He could just see the red wound under her chin. There was a pool of drying blood next to her skull.

  “John!” a voice shouted, breaking.

  He turned and saw Tomas Blakfar writhing on the ground a dozen meters away. John climbed to his feet and staggered toward him, falling on his knees next to the old man.

  “You should have been here to protect her,” Blakfar whispered loudly. “You could have helped with your flier.” The old man coughed. John noticed wounds in his chest and head. Blakfar was lying in his own blood, much of it already soaked up by the dusty ground.

  “I’ll get the flitter and take you to one of the med units at the mining sites.”

  “I’ll be dead before you get back.”

  “I’ll try anyway.”

  Blakfar grabbed his wrist.

  “I’m going, lie still,” John said. He felt tears pushing out of his eyes, more for Blakfar than for Anulka. The realization surprised him, making him angry.

  “Don’t let me die alone,” Blakfar said, gasping.

  “I won’t, I won’t.”

  “Save some of the children…if they live.”

  “I will, I will,” John said, looking around.

  The old man closed his eyes as John held his hand. There was still a pulse, but he had lost consciousness.

  John forced himself to stand up. If he could reach the flitter, there might still be time to save Blakfar’s life. He looked to Anulka, knowing that he could not approach her body; if her eyes were open, he would never be able to forget them.

  He lifted the flitter out of the clearing. Somehow his body was still running up the long trail, which seemed to grow longer with each stride he took. He felt that his heart would burst before he reached the clearing. The pain in his chest and stomach was coming back, pouring now into his arms and legs; at any moment the molten liquid would solidify, freezing his motion.

  He swooped down toward the village, bringing the craft to a hover over the circle of rocks, then setting down near Blakfar.

  Climbing out quickly, he reached the old man and felt his pulse. The hand was cold, but there was still a pulse. Blakfar opened his eyes as the pulse died and the head fell sideways. John noticed the caked blood in the old man’s hair.

  John rushed back to the flitter and climbed inside. Clumsily he thumbed Frank Blackfriar’s channel.

  There was no answer.

  He tried Miklos.

  “Yes?” a voice asked after a few moments.

  John opened his mouth to speak, but his throat was so dry that nothing came out. He swallowed hard and tried again.

  “Miklos—there’s been a massacre here. I think most of the village is dead. Can we get a freezer down here fast?”

  “For how many, John?”

  “Two people,” he said, feeling the injustice immediately.

  “If they have massive head wounds of any kind, we won’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too hard to repair. They come out different people and with too many functional problems. We couldn’t get anyone there in less than two hours anyway. Are they dead now?”

  “Yes,” John said, the anger rising inside him.

  “Forget it.”

  “Damn you, get them over here!”

  “John, it’s too late. We can’t get approval fast enough. There are head wounds, right?”

  “We can worry about that later.” Time was running away from him and there was nothing he could do to grasp it.

  “Come home,” Miklos said softly.

  John broke off the link. He looked out through the canopy at the burning buildings, most of them smoldering now, hiding the bodies among the charred timbers. Blakfar and Anulka seemed lonely lying so far apart in the bright sunlight.

  Suddenly he reached for the manual stick and lifted the flitter straight up for a thousand feet, shrinking the village to a messy patch of stones, smoke, and barren ground surrounded by greenery.

  He looked around, hoping for a glimpse of the retreating raiders. Beyond the green edge he saw the plain where the horsemen were certain to emerge. Dropping the craft to treetop level, he moved quickly toward the open country.

  His thoughts raced, a thousand whispering voices merging into a babble. Then he was over the plain, an endless desolation of flat grassland stretching skyward, stirred into waves by a dry wind. He stopped his forward rush, turned the craft around, and settled on the grass.

  Resting his face in his hands, he leaned forward, watching the tree-line. He closed his eyes for a moment. The voices became sparks of light in his brain, threatening to coalesce into an angry mass of power.

  He sat up. The horses were out of the trees, hoofs flying as the riders forced the animals forward. Together men and beasts made a larger creature, a giant insect body of brown and black dotted with human faces.

  He waited until they were well into the open. Lifting the flitter, he moved it forward at a height of two meters, aiming for the center of the multilegged monster, flattening the grass before him as he increased speed.

  The riders were clearly visible now, bearded men in thick animal skins driving their horses mercilessly. The tethered packhorses were overloaded with stolen provisions.

  They’re not human, John thought. I’m killing a dangerous animal. At two hundred kilometers per hour, he had enough speed to cut through the center without slowing. He gripped the stick with both hands as the craft closed. What am I doing? He wanted to close his eyes, but the skin of his face and scalp seemed to be stretched tightly around his skull, forcing his eyes to stay open. Faces filled his view, white patches with eyes, attached to a moving mass of flesh. He felt a thud, and another, and two more before he was rushing at the trees. Suddenly he felt the lash marks Anulka’s mother had left on his back. Pulling the stick back, he climbed above the forest and circled for another run. The creature had split in two, leaving the center to riderless horses; mercifully, the ocean of grass had swallowed the disfigured dead.

  Enough. He aimed for the riders at his right, accelerating until speed pulled clear perception into a blur at his sides. His heart was a cold, beating stone as he sped forward to shatter flesh. He looked up beyond the trees, farther to the lower hills, past the treeline to the mountain ridges, toward wall after wall of rock and snow; and it seemed that no amount of force would ever be enough to carry a man over the top. Two thuds registered as constrictions in his stomach. He pulled the stick back, circled again over the trees, and drifted back toward the riders.

  The scattered survivors were moving slowly. John dropped down and flitted after a group of three still heading due east. Enough, leave them. He let the craft strike two blows in one sweep and turned his head in time to see the third steed stumble and throw the rider forward. The figure hit the ground and lay still, becoming small as the flitter rushed away.

  He circled for a closer look. The man was crawling as John landed a dozen meters away. Raising the canopy, he climbed out into a dry wind and heard labored breathing. He walked up to the figure and stopped. The man fell from all fours onto his side and stared at him. It was Jerad.

  “I did not want her killed!” He held his hand out to keep John away. “I did not know there would be so much killing. I could not stop it.”

  “You led them here to take our food!”

  “They took me in when I had no place to go.”

  “The whole village!” John heard himself shout over the wind. Jerad rolled over onto his back. His brown eyes stared upward, tear-filled from dust and pain. “You could have left them their lives. It would have cost you nothing to do that!”

  “It was a favor, they said, to kill them after we took the food. The village would not get through the winter.”

  “I would have gotten them through!” John shouted.

  Jerad was silent, looking at the sky. John stepped up to his head and kicked it as if it were
a ball, feeling the temple give way. Jerad’s mouth opened and his throat gurgled. John kicked again.

  He looked east and saw horses on the horizon. The riderless beasts were following the survivors. The suns started their late afternoon eclipse, fading one of his two shadows from the ground. He coughed from the dust in his throat, then turned and walked back to the flitter. He climbed under the canopy, shutting out the wind, leaving only the small voices in his head.

  At twilight the twin suns pulled at each other with arms of fire. The world’s deep blue was filling with stars; the reds and yellows of the sinking suns made a fresh wound in the western sky, spilling a bloody light onto the blue-white glacier below the peaks.

  Anulka, Anulka, he called down into his bottomless, newly opened self, I killed you. My coming made Jerad an exile. I caused his bitterness and your death, and I killed him and so many others I never knew….

  He had come here hoping to be helpful. The village was avenged—except there was no village now, no community that he might have raised into something better.

  Fire-linked, the suns touched the mountains, settling entwined into the quenching cold of snow and stone. In a moment the primaries were only a wash of light behind the range, leaving the sky to the growing light of the great cluster.

  The night brightened and began to burn, hurling spears of starlight through the flitter’s canopy.

  Blakfar, Anulka, forgive me.

  Are you leaving us? the small voices asked.

  Yes, John said silently, looking up into the cold starlight.

  And suddenly he was alone again. The voices were still, as if they had forgiven him; he lifted his hands to his face and wept.

  20. Home

  He was asleep on the rock, on a patch of soft moss; the warming sun filtered through his eyelids as the noon eclipse ended. The wind was gentle, cooling him just enough for comfort. He opened his eyes, remembering that Anulka was dead and he had come home. The silence was perfect in the apartment he had shared with Margaret. His eyes followed the ceiling as it curved gently down into a wall. Daylight spilled into the room through the one-way window at his right. Lea was far away as he floated in the room’s blue hues. The reduced gravity of the bed, the lack of blankets and clothing, seemed strange, but his sleep had been deep and long, giving the kind of rest he had been without for months.

  No one had come to see him since his return, and he did not want to see anyone. He stretched and thought of the Humanity II intelligences, who knew everything that had ever been known. He thought of Wheeler, whose link-extended mind roamed through a universe of superconducting patterns. Would life be so much different with a link? Would he be able to pass the tests of health and sanity to be granted a license? How much of humankind’s collective wisdom would it take to teach him to live with murder? The pressure of the question forced him to consider alternatives. He had been living only a small part of human life, the life that had been the rule in the past, the life that can be only one thing at a time, that moves outward to grasp all things and fails, craving infinity as it falls back into finitude. The mode of consciousness bestowed by the link was also power over the limits of one’s self, Wheeler had once told him; through it a macroworlder was also every human being who had ever recorded a feeling, thought, or discovery. One could never think all the information in the memory bank all at once, but it was available as one desired it, keeping faith with the past. In a sense it was no different from biological memory, which also had to be summoned a piece at a time; and like individual memory, the link formed a perceived background, tacitly altering one’s sense of identity. The link made an individual a full citizen, a complete participant; to use the link critically was all of education. I’ve been alone for so long, I don’t want to be myself any more. The thought of Lea tightened his stomach. His body moved with the memory of death, twitching as he saw himself breaking the bodies of the horsemen, faceless except for Jerad, all forever dead.

  He had thrown his clothes from Lea into the recycler, where nothing was wasted. Hands had stitched the garments together with bone needle and leather thread, hands now still beneath the ground. The clothes had seemed such pitiable things lying on the floor of the bathroom.

  He got up from the bed and went to the window. From the first floor, he could see people walking among the trees. The widely spaced columns stood like sentries over the scene, hundred-story pillars holding the levels apart as far as the eye could see. Irregularly shaped daylight screens covered the sky, looking like clouds of bright white light. The blue sky itself, the underside of the next level, seemed very near when he looked at it, but the light screens appeared to be portals into an infinity of white space. All this, he thought, is also the work of human hands, fingers and thumb made powerful by the brain’s dreams.

  He remembered that he had promised himself that he would never come back to this apartment, that he would never see Margaret again. Anulka, you might have liked it here. I would have brought you. He knew that it would have taken her a long time to adjust, to learn, and by then they might not have been together; but he was thinking of how it would have been for her, and her alone, and it would have been better than dying.

  Suddenly he remembered his dream. He was with Jerad on the glacier, rolling down toward the edge with his hands around the other’s throat. The sky looked as if someone had painted it a shade of blue too dark; the mountains looked too sharp, as if focused through a distorting lens. Jerad’s neck was hot in his hands, the blood pulsing desperately into the dirtworlder’s head. John squeezed harder as Jerad held him in a hug. Over and over they turned on the hard-pack ice, and still the final swift drop into a crevass did not come. I wanted to kill him. I would have left him on the glacier to die. I wanted to kill him, but I wanted him to take me with him. He thought of his boot and Jerad’s head.

  “Hello.”

  John turned around at the sound of Margaret’s voice. She was standing in the bedroom doorway with both hands in the pockets of her short coveralls. He struggled against his own reaction, but he was glad to see her.

  “You’ll have to talk to someone sooner or later,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to see anyone,” he mumbled lamely, feeling that he would not have the strength to resist her presence.

  “Miklos checked the village and took care of the dead. We have a pretty good idea of what happened, Rob, Frank, and myself.”

  She came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “The planet hardened your body. You look coarser, older, too lean for a stocky person.”

  “I became a murderer down there.”

  She was silent for a moment. “It won’t settle you to hear me, I know, but please listen.”

  He sat down next to her and sighed nervously, feeling himself tremble. She touched the small of his back reassuringly.

  “I’ve been a menace,” he said. He turned and looked at her, noticing that she still wore her hair in a bundle at the back. “I—I caused everything that happened down there—the bad feelings between Jerad and the village, the raid.”

  “Listen,” she said. “The raiders destroyed the village, not you. How else could you have judged them except in their own way?”

  “But I went down there to help, don’t you see?”

  “The raiders might have died in the winter except for the stolen food.”

  “But they didn’t have to kill so much.”

  “The village would have starved without its food stores.”

  “I didn’t have to kill so many.”

  “You were angry, unprepared. You’re not responsible for the killing they did, only for your own, and that only in part. Why do you think you went to Lea?”

  John shrugged. “I don’t think I know anymore. I wanted it very much—to see something different, I guess.”

  “You felt it was important, and later you wanted to help change what you saw. A similar historical experience motivated the founders of macrolife. Many of us have agonized about earth’s scatte
red colonies. We know they’re isolated and backward. Humankind is a collection of fragments right now—those who are planetbound because they have no choice and maybe a dozen macroworlds like us.”

  “I know all that. What’s your point?”

  “Simply this: We’re following our own path and maybe we’re not wise enough or powerful enough to help.”

  “And we tend to discount the possibility of a successful civilization existing on a planet—that’s really what is behind our reluctance to help.”

  “That’s true. We haven’t seen much to change our minds. That’s the way cultures seem to grow. Earlier social forms are—well, earlier. A child is not an adult. A collection of dust in space will not necessarily become a star.”

  “But all we’ve seen is the overspill from a ruined solar system,” John said. “What about alien cultures? Maybe others have done well with planets.”

  “Possibly, but only by turning their world into a garden through a return from space-based industry. Even so, they would have to limit their world’s population, while off world population would be growing without check, because it could do so without much trouble.”

  “You’re assuming that any advancing culture will develop macroforms.”

  “It’s not the terrible thing you seem to feel it is. Planets are geothermal bombs, plates of mud and rock floating on a molten core—all of it left over from objects that were not big enough to become stars. The surfaces are dangerous beyond anything you have seen, killing a myriad intelligent beings across the course of historical time. Resources are scarce, the level of industrialization limited by the capacity of the planet to absorb heat. Ecobiological concerns slow the pace of technical evolution, effectively preventing the emergence of an efficient technology and economics that would exist to serve humane aspirations. A culture moves off its planet in order to take chains off the human spirit.”

  John shrugged again. “How can I argue with any of this? I don’t think I ever did, yet all that seems good is forever fleeing from my grasp.”