She didn’t look too interested. I searched for another topic of conversation.
“It used to be so cold here in the winter,” I said. “I can remember when it used to snow sometimes.”
She ran her hand through her hair and let out a long breath. “No kidding,” she said. “Before the greenhouse effect?”
“Before that and the sea rising. Before the Central European desert. Rainfall was different.”
The by-products of centuries of industralization had caused the build up of heat. I wondered if those previous generations had considered the consequences. Mine hadn’t.
“I’ve been in the simulations of it,” she said. I was going to say that unless you had been there you couldn’t know the difference but I remembered what she had said about the simulations. Maybe they really were that accurate.
We sat and talked all the way to the Portryan stop, exchanging information in the way only strangers on a train can. She told me to call her Debbie. At the stop a Grey Man inspected our tickets. I could not look him in the eye. I am not proud of my part in their creation.
* * *
The Castle was built by a returned explorer in the 16th century, a sprawling white pile covering many acres. It had a nasty annex built for the homeless in the housing crisis of ‘97, good air conditioning and, more importantly, facilities for the disabled.
Technically speaking a Frame is capable of taking stairs, but not many people I know would risk it. Ramps and lifts are safer.
My room was standard. If the blankets had not been tartan and the wallpaper had not had a discreet bluebell pattern it could have been anywhere on Earth from Tokyo to Timbuktu.
I debated whether to call my brother’s family but put it off. They knew I was in town, Deborah had gone ahead. I made the call I could not put off, the one to my doctor. I plugged the extension cable from the Frame into the phone. As I talked it would broadcast its information to orbit. I dialled the number.
Nancy Chan appeared. She looked pale and tense, not her usual jovial self. “How is the suicide attempt coming along?” she asked.
There would be a three second delay throughout the conversation. It’s a long way to the Trojan points. Even light can seem slow.
“Don’t start that again, Nancy. I told you Brian was the last surviving member of my original family. I’ll be damned if I miss his funeral.”
“You could have watched it by remote. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean you have to try and join him. You know how bad the political situation is getting down there. Heimdal Station reports massive troop buildups in North Africa, Turkey and what used to be Soviet Georgia. Looks like the big one.”
The timelag suddenly seemed very long. My mouth felt dry. I shook my head.
“We’ve intercepted coded transmissions from Cairo, Tehran, Riyadh. All say the same thing. Troops been moving in from as far as Ethiopia and Pakistan. Looks like the hardliners have finally seized control in the United Islamic Republic.”
I remembered a tube broadcast I had watched in the arrival lounge at Heathrow, a satellite propaganda show straight from Tehran. A lean Arab had been explaining in Oxbridge tones why biological research had to stop in Federal Europe. He had shown some horror shots of experimentation on clones, said the creation of soulless automata was the work of the devil. Two Canadian tourists had laughed; a Grey Man had stopped sweeping and smiled, pleased by the laughter.
I shrugged. “Surely it’s not that bad.”
“It is. It’ll be Jihad, holy war. A delegation has just returned to Tehran from the Hague. Euro-parliament refused to sign the Ethical Science Treaty.”
“I’m not surprised. Most of the European economy is based on Grey Men and other forms of vat labour. They won’t give it up without a fight.”
“Well the Council is putting out a warning. Any Overtowner who isn’t back up in one week may have to remain on Earth if war comes. Too dangerous to run a shuttle down through the interceptors and antimissile satellites.”
“Thanks for telling me. I’ll be seeing you, Nancy.”
“Yeah. Take care, Councillor.”
Nancy broke the connection. I decided to crawl from my Frame into the bed. It took a lot of effort. For a brief second I longed for the clear, soaring freedom of the Overtowns. It was a useless feeling so I pushed it aside.
I drifted off to sleep, feeling as if my chest was about to cave in.
* * *
Next morning I was awakened by the sound of a light rain tapping against the window. I lay in the warm bed, savouring my aches and debating my next move. I called the old family home and was greeted by Sheena. She informed me that the funeral would be at one pm, then she cut the connection.
After breakfast I decided to go for a walk along the beach. The chance of seeing a place I had once loved seemed to outweigh the discomfort of travelling by Frame. Anyway I felt I was becoming acclimatized.
I clambered into the Frame and lumbered to the shore. It was not as I remembered it. The old concrete seawall was gone, eaten away by the rising tides; the sea now flowed where the beach once had been. Part of the town was submerged. A bubble harbour nestled between the drowned remains of the two old piers. Warm rain pattered off my face and dripped down the carbon-fibre shell of the Frame. Palms swayed lightly in the breeze. Welcome back to Scotland, I thought. The shower slackened and died.
I studied the new harbour, superimposing my memories of the old. Where small fishing boats had docked, there were now pleasure hovercraft. A new hydrofoil sat where once great ferries had rested. Passengers disembarked while servile Grey Men carried their bags.
I walked along the new shorefront which once had been well above sea level, trying to ignore the tumbled houses and the fusty smell that came from them. Some kids on dwarf pachyderms raced exuberantly past along the remnants of roads where I remembered motorcars.
Nothing of the old days remained except the outline of the land. There were the two arms of the bay, reaching out to frame the distant sky, between them a sea the colour of stormclouds.
The slopes of the hills were bare of conifers, killed by acid rain at the end of last century. Imported palms had replaced them. On the hills were the mirror-bright condominiums where the population dream their lives away in Simulation.
The topography was the same but I knew that if I lived long enough even the shape of the earth would change, eaten by erosion and the hungry centuries.
“Aunt!” I heard a shout. It was Deborah. “Folk at the hotel said they saw you come this way.”
She reined her pachyderm to a halt. I noticed the hairs bristling from its grey hide and its ugly stunted trunk. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
I nodded.
“I’ve never met anyone who has really been in space,” she said. “I may never get another chance if the news broadcasts are right.”
“War?”
“Might be. Border incident, some combatants opened fire on U.I.R. invaders. Turns out they were fifteen years old and unarmed. Tube just showed pictures.”
She seem shocked and disoriented. I spoke as softly as I could.
“Those combatants wouldn’t know any better. They would have been told to open fire on anyone crossing the border. They follow orders.”
“Tube says that the kids were probably boy soldiers from the Revolutionary Guard, sent to provoke an incident. It would say that, wouldn’t it?”
“Might be right. There’s been a lot of tension between the United Islamic Republic and Europe recently.”
Suddenly she pointed out to sea. I turned swiftly, almost overbalancing the Frame. I don’t know what I expected—helicopter gunships maybe.
I saw them out in the deep water. A group of humanoids, leaping from the waves like dolphins, playing and throwing something large backwards and forwards. We watched them in silence until they sank beneath the surface and did not come back up.
“Swimmers,” said Deborah softly. “When I was little we used to say that it was
good luck to see one.”
“When I was little there were no Swimmers, not like those.” I looked back at her pachyderm, an efficient pollutionless mode of transport which fed on the palm leaves. The Swimmers were products of the same thing. Genetic engineering. My chosen career.
“Swimmers have a dome-city just outside the mouth of the loch. Its beautiful, but close up Swimmers don’t look like us: more like seals.”
Another intelligent race, one I hadn’t seen before except on the tube. I felt as if the world had grown strange and that I had stayed the same. Once I had designed combatants, combat replicants, for the Pentagon. It was hard to reconcile the image of the frolicing Swimmers with the biological war machines that stand guard along the European border, waiting for the Jihad.
The Swimmers farm the Atlantic algae fields that help counter the ecological imbalance caused by the destruction of the rain forests. Like the Grey Men they are servants of humanity, happy but not free, variations on a prototype I helped create.
* * *
We stopped at a café, sat drinking coffee inside a converted farmhouse. Grey Men waited on tables, smiled at customers, prepared food.
“Most of the old town is underwater now,” said Deborah. I took a sip of the coffee. It was hot and frothy. It took me back briefly to my teenage days, drinking capucino and discussing all the burning issues.
“Fish probably swim in that old café,” I said. Deborah looked lost. “A lot of the landmarks of my youth have gone.”
“We sometimes swim there using artificial gills. Its mostly just walls and the outlines of streets.”
Deborah was looking down into her cup. Some of the young ones I had seen earlier came in and sat down. They talked softly about the U.I.R. and what war might mean. There was tension in the air.
“What’s it like up there in the Overtowns?” Deborah asked.
“Different. People are different. More purposeful. Have to be. Space is an unforgiving environment.”
“My mother says that they are all dreamers up there.”
I smiled. “No, the dreamers are all down here. Most downsiders are settling into a sort of apathy. Work done by AI, robots, constructs. You name it, anything but humans. Most of the population seem to be hooked into the simulations.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, just that nothing new is being done by people.”
“The big AI’s are making far more discoveries than the Overtown scientists.”
“Your machines are doing the important stuff.”
“We made them. They look after us. Life’s good.”
This was true. In the secular states wealth was everywhere. Even in the United Islamic Republic the standard of living was high for most of the population.
“Anyway as soon as the machines find anything out they let us know. We can experience anything we want through the simulations. I can visit truly alien worlds, meet truly alien minds created by an AI. It’s a lot more interesting than the boring pictures the probeship sends back.”
“Yes, that’s the problem. Those Downsiders who don’t live in religious dictatorships are turning inwards, exploring fantasies instead of the real universe.”
“That’s your problem if you’re not happy with it.”
“Doesn’t it worry you that your people may end up machine-dependent? That human evolution may have reached a dead end. Mankind needs challenges to grow. That’s why we don’t allow simulations or very smart AI’s in the Overtowns.”
“Progress hasn’t stopped here. We’re just taking a different path. One you don’t like. You sound like the Fundamentalists. No offence.”
It was an argument not worth continuing. Neither of us really understood the other. Deborah called for our bill. A Grey Man waiter brought it. He had happy, vacant eyes.
* * *
The funeral was a lonely affair. The cemetery was high on a hillside. It had escaped the drowning of the town. The church had not been so lucky. I could see its spire rising above the sunken streets.
There were very few at the service. Those who had come were all old. Formal religion wasn’t popular among the young here.
The minister was a woman. Without the benefit of anti-agathics she looked all of her seventy years. She conducted the whole service at the graveside. As her voice droned through the clichés of the eulogy my mind drifted to memories of Brian.
I tried to remember happy things but it was the horror of his last two years that haunted me.
The disease had eaten him away from within. It had taken the blurred lines of his face and pulled the thin bone structure out from below. The peculiar thing was that his face had re-acquired the lean angularity of his youth as death approached.
We had talked a lot over the tubelink as he lay in bed, discussed old times. We had gone over our old feud, decided it was silly. He had thought that I should have stayed behind, become a farmer. I had other plans. It had caused friction at the time.
Brian had felt that humankind should sort out its problems here on Earth before leaping into space. I couldn’t wait that long. Of course Earth had sorted out its problems without help from either of us.
Cheap fusion, smart computers, genetic screening and the withering of the nation state had seen to that. The transition had not been painless. Food riots, holy wars and partial economic collapse had been landmarks along the way. There were new problems now but the old world was dead, drowned beneath the twin tides of resurgent fundamentalism and advancing technology. The conflict between the two had redrawn the map more than the rising of the sea.
We advanced. I took a cord with five others and we lowered the coffin into the grave. The smell of mud and freshly turned Earth was quite distinct. I dropped the cord. It fell away from my hand like the Earth below a rocketliner.
The minister said her final words. We dispersed from the grave towards the waiting cars. A lot of people with familiar-looking faces and cold expressions stared at me. We all shook hands.
“You’ll be coming back to the house,” said Sheena.
“Do you think I should?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “He’ll want to see you.”
A small electric coach took us back to the farm. For a while the only sound was the keening whine of the motor as it laboured on the steep hill road. The countryside opened up to the wide open moor of the Ganlach. Great white windmills dominated the landscape. Giant propellors that looked as if they could have lifted a passenger airliner aloft quivered in the breeze.
At the close of the twentieth century this area had been a windfarm, selling power back to the national grid. Cheap fusion had done away with that idea. The towers still stood because no-one had bothered to take them down. Polymer plastic has no value as scrap.
At the foot of one tower pink sheep, colour-coded for the insulin their milk carried, were watched by a Grey Man shepherd. I looked away.
“You don’t like that do you?” said Sheena.
“No, I don’t.” I could not keep the edge out of my voice. The vibration of the car was passing through the Frame and making my teeth rattle.
“They love it. It’s what they were made for, menial work.”
“I know. That doesn’t make it right.” The sad thing was that the Grey Men really did love it. We had engineered them well. They were perfect slaves.
“There’s no need for you to look down your nose at us. It was you and people like you that created those constructs,” said Sheena.
“I know.” Too late to uncreate them now. The future had rushed at us headlong. We go forward or we go under had been our slogan. Had we been so wrong? Times change. The slaves were happy and would not be so if freed.
My sensibilities were products of the last century and the citizens of the new age did not conform to them. Whose fault was that?
The coach pulled into the farmyard and the natural stench of the place filled my nostrils. Suddenly I wanted to run but it was too late. I was on my way to a meeting with my de
ad brother.
* * *
The birds sang as I walked down to the stream. I knew I would find him there, lying on a rock, watching the fish. The grass crumpled under my feet and the copse of oaks was ahead, casting dappled shadows in the summer sun. I wore my nine-year-old body; my real one was in the Frame back at the farmhouse, wearing an induction helmet.
Deborah had been right. The simulation was perfect; the illusion pumped directly into the brain could not be distinguished from the real world.
He was just as I remembered him at thirteen, lanky and awkward with a thatch of blonde hair and a smiling, rosy-cheeked face. No pain lines now.
“Hello,” he said and smiled. I didn’t smile back. I kept my distance. The experience was too disturbing. There was an aspect of nightmare about it.
“You’re dead,” I said. “I thought you said you would never let them record you. What happened, did you get scared at the end?”
He nodded. “Anything seemed better than death. It’s for the kids too. They can visit me when they like.”
He picked up a stone and lobbed it into the water. I watched the ripples. A dragonfly hovered above them.
“Of course I won’t look the same to them. I chose this setting for you. Do you like it?”
I shrugged. “It’s exactly as I remember it. So are you.”
He smiled slowly. “Aye, it would be the same. The machine provides the big details out of my memory, the rest are filled in by your mind.”
“That means it’s not accurate. It’s blurred. My memories have probably altered details of the original.”
“What does it matter? How can you tell?”
I felt trapped. The echo of the question I had asked Deborah on the train rang in my ears.
“You’re not Brian. You’re just a computer program that thinks its him, a sub-program in whatever is holding this illusion together.”
“No. You’re wrong. I’m Brian. I remember every little detail of my life. I was recorded. They mapped my brain a bit at a time and transferred the results to a computer. I’m the same. I have the same emotions, the same reactions. I just live here now.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Page 30
