The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  For example, if events on the surface of a planet were to be played out, the stars must be lights in the night sky and nothing else, every other effect neglected. Only a limited locality on the globe could be done in anything like full detail; the rest grew more and more incomplete as distance from the scene increased, until at the antipodes there was little more than simplified geography, hydrography, and atmospherics. Hence weather on the scene would very soon be quite unlike weather at the corresponding moment of the original. This is the simplest, most obvious consequence of the limitations. The totality is beyond reckoning—and we have not even mentioned relativistic nonsimultaneity.

  Besides, atom-by-atom modeling was a practical impossibility; statistical mechanics and approximations must substitute. Chaos and quantum uncertainties made developments incalculable in principle. Other, more profound considerations entered as well, but with them language fails utterly.

  Let it be said, as a myth, that such creations made their destinies for themselves.

  And yet, what a magnificent instrumentality the creator system was! Out of nothingness, it could bring worlds into being, evolutions, lives, ecologies, awarenesses, histories, entire time lines. They need not be fragmentary miscopies of something “real,” dragging out their crippled spans until the nodal intelligence took pity and canceled them. Indeed, they need not derive in any way from the “outside.” They could be works of imagination—fairy-tale worlds, perhaps, where benevolent gods ruled and magic ran free. Always, the logic of their boundary conditions caused them to develop appropriately, to be at home in their existences.

  The creator system was the mightiest device ever made for the pursuit of art, science, philosophy, and understanding.

  So it came about that Christian Brannock found himself alive again, young again, in the world that Gaia and Wayfarer had chosen for his new beginning.

  * * *

  He stood in a garden on a day of bright sun and mild, fragrant breezes. It was a formal garden, graveled paths, low-clipped hedges, roses and lilies in geometric beds, around a lichened stone basin where goldfish swam. Brick walls, ivy-heavy, enclosed three sides, a wrought-iron gate in them leading to a lawn. On the fourth side lay a house, white, slate-roofed, classically proportioned, a style that to him was antique. Honeybees buzzed. From a yew tree overlooking the wall came the twitter of birds.

  A woman walked toward him. Her flower-patterned gown, the voluminous skirt and sleeves, a cameo hung on her bosom above the low neckline, dainty shoes, parasol less an accessory than a completion, made his twenty-third-century singlesuit feel abruptly barbaric. She was tall and well formed. Despite the garments, her gait was lithe. As she neared, he saw clear features beneath high-piled mahogany hair.

  She reached him, stopped, and met his gaze. “Benveni, Capita Brannoch,” she greeted. Her voice was low and musical.

  “Uh, g’day, Sorita—uh—” he fumbled.

  She blushed. “I beg your pardon, Captain Brannock. I forgot and used my Inglay—English of my time. I’ve been—” She hesitated. “—supplied with yours, and we both have been with the contemporary language.”

  A sense of dream was upon him. To speak as dryly as he could was like clutching at something solid. “You’re from my future, then?”

  She nodded. “I was born about two hundred years after you.”

  “That means about eighty or ninety years after my death, right?” He saw an inward shadow pass over her face. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She turned entirely calm, even smiled a bit. “It’s all right. We both know what we are, and what we used to be.”

  “But—”

  “Yes, but.” She shook her head. “It does feel strange, being … this … again.”

  He was quickly gaining assurance, settling into the situation. “I know. I’ve had practice in it,” light-years away, at the star where Alpha dwelt. “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be quite natural to you.”

  “I have been here a little while myself. Nevertheless—young,” she whispered, “but remembering a long life, old age, dying—” She let the parasol fall, unnoticed, and stared down at her hands. Fingers gripped each other. “Remembering how toward the end I looked back and thought, ‘Was that all?’”

  He wanted to take those hands in his and speak comfort, but decided he would be wiser to say merely, “Well, it wasn’t all.”

  “No, of course not. Not for me, the way it had been once for everyone who ever lived. While my worn-out body was being painlessly terminated, my self-pattern was uploaded—” She raised her eyes. “Now we can’t really recall what our condition has been like, can we?”

  “We can look forward to returning to it.”

  “Oh, yes. Meanwhile—” She flexed herself, glanced about and upward, let light and air into her spirit, until at last a full smile blossomed. “I am starting to enjoy this. Already I am.” She considered him. He was a tall man, muscular, blond, rugged of countenance. Laughter lines radiated from blue eyes. He spoke in a resonant baritone. “And I will.”

  He grinned, delighted. “Thanks. The same here. For openers, may I ask your name?”

  “Forgive me!” she exclaimed. “I thought I was prepared. I … came into existence … with knowledge of my role and this milieu, and spent the time since rehearsing in my mind, but now that it’s actually happened, all my careful plans have flown away. I am—was—no, I am Laurinda Ashcroft.”

  He offered his hand. After a moment she let him shake hers. He recalled that at the close of his mortal days the gesture was going out of use.

  “You know a few things about me, I suppose,” he said, “but I’m ignorant about you and your times. When I left Earth, everything was changing spin-jump fast, and after that I was out of touch,” and eventually his individuality went of its own desire into a greater one. This reenactment of him had been given no details of the terrestrial history that followed his departure; it could not have contained any reasonable fraction of the information.

  “You went to the stars almost immediately after you’d uploaded, didn’t you?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Why wait? I’d always longed to go.”

  “Are you glad that you did?”

  “Glad is hardly the word.” He spent two or three seconds putting phrases together. Language was important to him; he had been an engineer and occasionally a maker of songs. “However, I am also happy to be here.” Again a brief grin. “In such pleasant company.” Yet what he really hoped to do was explain himself. They would be faring together in search of one another’s souls. “And I’ll bring something new back to my proper existence. All at once I realize how a human can appreciate in a unique way what’s out yonder,” suns, worlds, upon certain of them life that was more wonderful still, nebular fire-clouds, infinity whirling down the throat of a black hole, galaxies like jewelwork strewn by a prodigal through immensity, space-time structure subtle and majestic—everything he had never known, as a man, until this moment, for no organic creature could travel those reaches.

  “While I chose to remain on Earth,” she said. “How timid and unimaginative do I seem to you?”

  “Not in the least,” he avowed. “You had the adventures you wanted.”

  “You are kind to say so.” She paused. “Do you know Jane Austen?”

  “Who? No, I don’t believe I do.”

  “An early-nineteenth-century writer. She led a quiet life, never went far from home, died young, but she explored people in ways that nobody else ever did.”

  “I’d like to read her. Maybe I’ll get a chance here.” He wished to show that he was no—“technoramus” was the word he invented on the spot. “I did read a good deal, especially on space missions. And especially poetry. Homer, Shakespeare, Tu Fu, Bashō, Bellman, Bums, Omar Khayyam, Kipling, Millay, Haldeman—” He threw up his hands and laughed. “Never mind. That’s just the first several names I could grab out of the jumble for purposes of bragging.”

  “We have mu
ch getting acquainted to do, don’t we? Come, I’m being inhospitable. Let’s go inside, relax, and talk.”

  He retrieved her parasol for her and, recollecting historical dramas he had seen, offered her his arm. They walked slowly between the flower beds. Wind lulled, a bird whistled, sunlight baked odors out of the roses.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “And when?” she replied. “In England of the mid-eighteenth century, on an estate in Surrey.” He nodded. He had in fact read rather widely. She fell silent, thinking, before she went on: “Gaia and Wayfarer decided a serene enclave like this would be the best rendezvous for us.”

  “Really? I’m afraid I’m as out of place as a toad on a keyboard.”

  She smiled, then continued seriously: “I told you I’ve been given familiarity with the milieu. We’ll be visiting alien ones—whatever ones you choose, after I’ve explained what else I know about what she has been doing these many years. That isn’t much. I haven’t seen any other worlds of hers. You will take the leadership.”

  “You mean because I’m used to odd environments and rough people? Not necessarily. I dealt with nature, you know, on Earth and in space. Peaceful.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “Maybe. But never malign.”

  “Tell me,” she invited.

  They entered the house and seated themselves in its parlor. Casement windows stood open to green parkscape where deer grazed; afar were a thatched farm cottage, its outbuildings, and the edge of grainfields. Cleanly shaped furniture stood among paintings, etchings, books, two portrait busts. A maidservant rustled in with a tray of tea and cakes. She was obviously shocked by the newcomer but struggled to conceal it. When she had left, Laurinda explained to Christian that the owners of this place, Londoners to whom it was a summer retreat, had lent it to their friend, the eccentric Miss Ashcroft, for a holiday.

  So had circumstances and memories been adjusted. It was an instance of Gaia directly interfering with the circumstances and events in an emulation. Christian wondered how frequently she did.

  “Eccentricity is almost expected in the upper classes,” Laurinda said. “But when you lived you could simply be yourself, couldn’t you?”

  In the hour that followed, she drew him out. His birth home was the Yukon Ethnate in the Bering Federation, and to it he often returned while he lived, for its wilderness preserves, mountain solitudes, and uncrowded, uncowed, plainspoken folk. Otherwise the nation was prosperous and progressive, with more connections to Asia and the Pacific than to the decayed successor states east and south. Across the Pole, it was also becoming intimate with the renascent societies of Europe, and there Christian received part of his education and spent considerable of his free time.

  His was an era of savage contrasts, in which the Commonwealth of Nations maintained a precarious peace. During a youthful, impulsively taken hitch in the Conflict Mediation Service, he twice saw combat. Later in his life, stability gradually become the norm. That was largely due to the growing influence of the artificial-intelligence network. Most of its consciousness-level units interlinked in protean fashion to form minds appropriate for any particular situation, and already the capabilities of those minds exceeded the human. However, there was little sense of rivalry. Rather, there was partnership. The new minds were willing to advise, but were not interested in dominance.

  Christian, child of forests and seas and uplands, heir to ancient civilizations, raised among their ongoing achievements, returned on his vacations to Earth in homecoming. Here were his kin, his friends, woods to roam, boats to sail, girls to kiss, songs to sing and glasses to raise (and a gravesite to visit—he barely mentioned his wife Laurinda; she died before uploading technology was available). Always, though, he went back to space. It had called him since first he saw the stars from a cradle under the cedars. He became an engineer. Besides fellow humans he worked closely with sapient machines, and some of them got to be friends too, of an eerie kind. Over the decades, he took a foremost role in such undertakings as the domed Copernican Sea, the Asteroid Habitat, the orbiting antimatter plant, and finally the Grand Solar Laser for launching interstellar vessels on their way. Soon afterward, his body died, old and full of days; but the days of his mind had barely begun.

  “A fabulous life,” Laurinda said low. She gazed out over the land, across which shadows were lengthening. “I wonder if … they … might not have done better to give us a cabin in your wilderness.”

  “No, no,” he said. “This is fresh and marvelous to me.”

  “We can easily go elsewhere, you know. Any place, any time that Gaia has generated, including ones that history never saw. I’ll fetch our amulets whenever you wish.”

  He raised his brows. “Amulets?”

  “You haven’t been told—informed? They are devices. You wear yours and give it the command to transfer you.”

  He nodded. “I see. It maps an emulated person into different surroundings.”

  “With suitable modifications as required. Actually, in many cases it causes a milieu to be activated for you. Most have been in standby mode for a long time. I daresay Gaia could have arranged for us to wish ourselves to wherever we were going and call up whatever we needed likewise. But an external device is better.”

  He pondered. “Yes, I think I see why. If we got supernatural powers, we wouldn’t really be human, would we? And the whole idea is that we should be.” He leaned forward on his chair. “It’s your turn. Tell me about yourself.”

  “Oh, there’s too much. Not about me, I never did anything spectacular like you, but about the times I lived in, everything that happened to change this planet after you left it—”

  She was born here, in England. By then a thinly populated province of Europe, it was a quiet land (“half adream,” she said) devoted to its memorials of the past. Not that creativity was dead; but the arts were rather sharply divided between ringing changes on classic works and efforts to deal with the revelations coming in from the stars. The aesthetic that artificial intelligence was evolving for itself overshadowed both these schools. Nevertheless Laurinda was active in them.

  Furthermore, in the course of her work she ranged widely over Earth. (By then, meaningful work for humans was a privilege that the talented and energetic strove to earn.) She was a liaison between the two kinds of beings. It meant getting to know people in their various societies and helping them make their desires count. For instance, a proposed earthquake-control station would alter a landscape and disrupt a community; could it be resisted, or if not, what cultural adjustments could be made? Most commonly, though, she counseled and aided individuals bewildered and spiritually lost.

  Still more than him, she was carefully vague about her private life, but he got the impression that it was generally happy. If childlessness was an unvoiced sorrow, it was one she shared with many in a population-regulated world; he had had only a son. She loved Earth, its glories and memories, and every fine creation of her race. At the end of her mortality she chose to abide on the planet, in her new machine body, serving as she had served, until at length she came to desire more and entered the wholeness that was to become Gaia.

  He thought he saw why she had been picked for resurrection, to be his companion, out of all the uncounted millions who had elected the same destiny.

  Aloud, he said, “Yes, this house is right for you. And me, in spite of everything. We’re both of us more at home here than either of us could be in the other’s native period. Peace and beauty.”

  “It isn’t a paradise,” she answered gravely. “This is the real eighteenth century, remember, as well as Gaia could reconstruct the history that led to it,” always monitoring, making changes as events turned incompatible with what was in the chronicles and the archeology. “The household staff are underpaid, undernourished, underrespected—servile. The American colonists keep slaves and are going to rebel. Across the Channel, a rotted monarchy bleeds France white, and this will bring on a truly terrible revolution, followed by a
quarter century of war.”

  He shrugged. “Well, the human condition never did include sanity, did it?” That was for the machines.

  “In a few of our kind, it did,” she said. “At least, they came close. Gaia thinks you should meet some, so you’ll realize she isn’t just playing cruel games. I have”—in the memories with which she had come into this being—“invited three for dinner tomorrow. It tampers a trifle with their actual biographies, but Gaia can remedy that later if she chooses.” Laurinda smiled. “We’ll have to make an amulet provide you with proper smallclothes and wig.”

  “And you provide me with a massive briefing, I’m sure. Who are they?”

  “James Cook, Henry Fielding, and Erasmus Darwin. I think it will be a lively evening.”

  The navigator, the writer, the polymath, three tiny, brilliant facets of the heritage that Gaia guarded.

  6

  Now Wayfarer downloaded another secondary personality and prepared it to go survey Earth.

  He, his primary self, would stay on the mountain, in a linkage with Gaia more close and complete than was possible over interstellar distances. She had promised to conduct him through her entire database of observations made across the entire planet during manifold millions of years. Even for those two, the undertaking was colossal. At the speed of their thought, it would take weeks of external time and nearly total concentration. Only a fraction of their awareness would remain available for anything else—a fraction smaller in him than in her, because her intellect was so much greater.

  She told him of her hope that by this sharing, this virtually direct exposure to all she had perceived, he would come to appreciate why Earth should be left to its fiery doom. More was involved than scientific knowledge attainable in no other way. The events themselves would deepen and enlighten the galactic brain, as a great drama or symphony once did for humans. But Wayfarer must undergo their majestic sweep through the past before he could feel the truth of what she said about the future.