The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I wonder if I ever will, quite.”

  He did not remind her that this “I” of her would no longer exist save as a minor memory and a faint overtone. Instead, trying to console, however awkwardly, he said, “I think I want it for you, in spite of everything. Immortality. Never to grow old and die. The power, the awareness.”

  “Yes, I know. In these lives we’re blind and deaf and stupefied.” Her laugh was a sad little murmur. “I like it.”

  “Me too. We being what we are.” Roughly: “Well, we have a while left to us.”

  “But we must get on with our task.”

  “Thank you for saying it for me.”

  “I think you realize it more clearly than I do. That makes it harder for you to speak.” She lifted her hand to cradle his cheek. “We can wait till tomorrow, can’t we?” she pleaded. “Only for a good night’s sleep.”

  He made a smile. “Hm. Sleep isn’t all I have in mind.”

  “We’ll have other chances … along the way. Won’t we?”

  * * *

  Early morning in the garden, flashes of dew on leaves and petals, a hawk aloft on a breeze that caused Laurinda to pull her shawl about her. She sat by the basin and looked up at him where he strode back and forth before her, hands clenched at his sides or clutched together at his back. Gravel grated beneath his feet.

  “But where should we go?” she wondered. “Aimlessly drifting from one half-world to another till—they—finish their business and recall us. It seems futile.” She attempted lightness. “I confess to thinking we may as well ask to visit the enjoyable ones.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking differently.” Even during the times that were theirs alone.

  She braced herself.

  “You know how it goes,” he said. “Wrestling with ideas, and they have no shapes, then suddenly you wake and they’re halfway clear. I did today. Tell me how it strikes you. After all, you represent Gaia.”

  He saw her wince. When he stopped and bent down to make a gesture of contrition, she told him quickly, “No, it’s all right, dearest. Do go on.”

  He must force himself, but his voice gathered momentum as he paced and talked. “What have we seen to date? This eighteenth-century world, where Newton’s not long dead, Lagrange and Franklin are active, Lavoisier’s a boy, and the Industrial Revolution is getting under way. Why did Gaia give it to us for our home base? Just because here’s a charming house and countryside? Or because this was the best choice for her out of all she has emulated?”

  Laurinda had won back to calm. She nodded. “Mm, yes, she wouldn’t create one simply for us, especially when she is occupied with Wayfarer.”

  “Then we visited a world that went through a similar stage back in its Hellenistic era,” Christian continued. Laurinda shivered. “Yes, it failed, but the point is, we discovered it’s the only Graeco-Roman history Gaia found worth continuing for centuries. Then the, uh, conciliar Europe of 1900. That was scientific-industrial too, maybe more successfully—or less unsuccessfully—on account of having kept a strong, unified Church, though it was coming apart at last. Then the Chinese-American—not scientific, very religious, but destined to produce considerable technology in its own time of troubles.” He was silent a minute or two, except for his footfalls. “Four out of many, three almost randomly picked. Doesn’t that suggest that all which interest her have something in common?”

  “Why, yes,” she said. “We’ve talked about it, you remember. It seems as if Gaia has been trying to bring her people to a civilization that is rich, culturally and spiritually as well as materially, and is kindly and will endure.”

  “Why,” he demanded, “when the human species is extinct?”

  She straightened where she sat. “It isn’t! It lives again here, in her.”

  He bit his lip. “Is that the Gaia in you speaking, or the you in Gaia?”

  “What do you mean?” she exclaimed.

  He halted to stroke her head. “Nothing against you. Never. You are honest and gentle and everything else that is good.” Starkly: “I’m not so sure about her.”

  “Oh, no.” He heard the pain. “Christian, no.”

  “Well, never mind that for now,” he said fast, and resumed his gait to and fro. “My point is this. Is it merely an accident that all four live worlds we’ve been in were oriented toward machine technology, and three of them toward science? Does Gaia want to find out what drives the evolution of societies like that?”

  Laurinda seized the opening. “Why not? Science opens the mind, technology frees the body from all sorts of horrors. Here, today, Jenner and his smallpox vaccine aren’t far in the future—”

  “I wonder how much more there is to her intention. But anyway, my proposal is that we touch on the highest-tech civilization she has.”

  A kind of gladness kindled in her. “Yes, yes! It must be strange and wonderful.”

  He frowned. “For some countries, long ago in real history, it got pretty dreadful.”

  “Gaia wouldn’t let that happen.”

  He abstained from reminding her of what Gaia did let happen, before changing or terminating it.

  She sprang to her feet. “Come!” Seizing his hand, mischievously: “If we stay any length of time, let’s arrange for private quarters.”

  * * *

  In a room closed off, curtains drawn, Christian held an amulet in his palm and stared down at it as if it bore a face. Laurinda stood aside, listening, while her own countenance tightened with distress.

  “It is inadvisable,” declared the soundless voice.

  “Why?” snapped Christian.

  “You would find the environment unpleasant and the people incomprehensible.”

  “Why should a scientific culture be that alien to us?” asked Laurinda.

  “And regardless,” said Christian, “I want to see for myself. Now.”

  “Reconsider,” urged the voice. “First hear an account of the milieu.”

  “No, now. To a safe locale, yes, but one where we can get a fair impression, as we did before. Afterward you can explain as much as you like.”

  “Why shouldn’t we first hear?” Laurinda suggested.

  “Because I doubt Gaia wants us to see,” Christian answered bluntly. He might as well. Whenever Gaia chose, she could scan his thoughts. To the amulet, as if it were a person: “Take us there immediately, or Wayfarer will hear from me.”

  His suspicions, vague but growing, warned against giving the thing time to inform Gaia and giving her time to work up a Potemkin village or some other diversion. At the moment she must be unaware of this scene, her mind preoccupied with Wayfarer’s, but she had probably made provision for being informed in a low-level—subconscious?—fashion at intervals, and anything alarming would catch her attention. It was also likely that she had given the amulets certain orders beforehand, and now it appeared that among them was to avoid letting him know what went on in that particular emulation.

  Why, he could not guess.

  “You are being willful,” said the voice.

  Christian grinned. “And stubborn, and whatever else you care to call it. Take us!”

  Pretty clearly, he thought, the program was not capable of falsehoods. Gaia had not foreseen a need for that; Christian was no creation of hers, totally known to her, he was Wayfarer’s. Besides, if Wayfarer noticed that his avatar’s guide could be a liar, that would have been grounds for suspicion.

  Laurinda touched her man’s arm. “Darling, should we?” she said unevenly. “She is the … the mother of all this.”

  “A broad spectrum of more informative experiences is available,” argued the voice. “After them, you would be better prepared for the visit you propose.”

  “Prepared,” Christian muttered. That could be interpreted two ways. He and Laurinda might be conducted to seductively delightful places while Gaia learned of the situation and took preventive measures, meantime keeping Wayfarer distracted. “I still want to begin with your highes
t tech.” To the woman: “I have my reasons. I’ll tell you later. Right now we have to hurry.”

  Before Gaia could know and act.

  She squared her shoulders, took his free hand, and said, “Then I am with you. Always.”

  “Let’s go,” Christian told the amulet.

  * * *

  Transfer.

  The first thing he noticed, transiently, vividly, was that he and Laurinda were no longer dressed for eighteenth-century England, but in lightweight white blouses, trousers, and sandals. Headcloths flowed down over their necks. Heat smote. The air in his nostrils was parched, full of metallic odors. Half-heard rhythms of machinery pulsed through it and through the red-brown sand underfoot.

  He tautened his stance and gazed around. The sky was overcast, a uniform gray in which the sun showed no more than a pallor that cast no real shadows. At his back the land rolled away ruddy. Man-high stalks with narrow bluish leaves grew out of it, evenly spaced about a meter apart. To his right, a canal slashed across, beneath a transparent deck. Ahead of him the ground was covered by different plants, if that was what they were, spongy, lobate, pale golden in hue. A few—creatures—moved around, apparently tending them, bipedal but shaggy and with arms that seemed trifurcate. A gigantic building or complex of buildings reared over that horizon, multiply tiered, dull white, though agleam with hundreds of panels that might be windows or might be something else. As he watched, an aircraft passed overhead. He could just see that it had wings and hear the drone of an engine.

  Laurinda had not let go his hand. She gripped hard. “This is no country I ever heard of,” she said thinly.

  “Nor I,” he answered. “But I think I recognize—” To the amulets: “This isn’t any re-creation of Earth in the past, is it? It’s Earth today.”

  “Of approximately the present year,” the voice admitted.

  “We’re not in Arctica, though.”

  “No. Well south, a continental interior. You required to see the most advanced technology in the emulations. Here it is in action.”

  Holding the desert at bay, staving off the death that ate away at the planet. Christian nodded. He felt confirmed in his idea that the program was unable to give him any outright lie. That didn’t mean it would give him forthright responses.

  “This is their greatest engineering?” Laurinda marveled. “We did—better—in my time. Or yours, Christian.”

  “They’re working on it here, I suppose,” the man said. “We’ll investigate further. After all, this is a bare glimpse.”

  “You must remember,” the voice volunteered, “no emulation can be as full and complex as the material universe.”

  “Mm, yeh. Skeletal geography, apart from chosen regions; parochial biology; simplified cosmos.”

  Laurinda glanced at featureless heaven. “The stars unreachable, because here they are not stars?” She shuddered and pressed close against him.

  “Yes, a paradox,” he said. “Let’s talk with a scientist.”

  “That will be difficult,” the voice demurred.

  “You told us in Chinese America you could arrange meetings. It shouldn’t be any harder in this place.”

  The voice did not reply at once. Unseen machines rumbled. A dust devil whirled up on a sudden gust of wind. Finally: “Very well. It shall be one who will not be stricken dumb by astonishment and fear. Nevertheless, I should supply you beforehand with a brief description of what you will come to.”

  “Go ahead. If it is brief.”

  What changes in the history would that encounter bring about? Did it matter? This world was evidently not in temporary reactivation, it was ongoing; the newcomers were at the leading edge of its time line. Gaia could erase their visit from it. If she cared to. Maybe she was going to terminate it soon because it was making no further progress that interested her.

  * * *

  Transfer.

  Remote in a wasteland, only a road and an airstrip joining it to anything else, a tower lifted from a walled compound. Around it, night was cooling in a silence hardly touched by a susurrus of chant where robed figures bearing dim lights did homage to the stars. Many were visible, keen and crowded amidst their darkness, a rare sight, for clouds had parted across most of the sky. More lights glowed muted on a parapet surrounding the flat roof of a tower. There a single man and his helper used the chance to turn instruments aloft, telescope, spectroscope, cameras, bulks in the gloom.

  Christian and Laurinda appeared unto them.

  The man gasped, recoiled for an instant, and dropped to his knees. His assistant caught a book that he had nearly knocked off a table, replaced it, stepped back, and stood imperturbable, an anthropoid whose distant ancestors had been human but who lived purely to serve his master.

  Christian peered at the man. As eyes adapted, he saw garments like his, embroidered with insignia of rank and kindred, headdress left off after dark. The skin was ebony black but nose and lips were thin, eyes oblique, fingertips tapered, long hair and closely trimmed beard straight and blond. No race that ever inhabited old Earth, Christian thought; no, this was a breed that Gaia had designed for the dying planet.

  The man signed himself, looked into the pale faces of the strangers, and said, uncertainly at first, then with a gathering strength: “Hail and obedience, messengers of God. Joy at your advent.”

  Christian and Laurinda understood, as they had understood hunted Zoe. The amulets had told them they would not be the first apparition these people had known. “Rise,” Christian said. “Be not afraid.”

  “Nor call out,” Laurinda added.

  Smart lass, Christian thought. The ceremony down in the courtyard continued. “Name yourself,” he directed.

  The man got back on his feet and took an attitude deferential rather than servile. “Surely the mighty ones know,” he said. “I am Eighth Khaltan, chief astrologue of the Ilgai Technome, and, and wholly unworthy of this honor.” He hesitated. “Is that, dare I ask, is that why you have chosen the forms you show me?”

  “No one has had a vision for several generations,” explained the soundless voice in the heads of the newcomers.

  “Gaia has manifested herself in the past?” Christian subvocalized.

  “Yes, to indicate desirable courses of action. Normally the sending has had the shape of a fire.”

  “How scientific is that?”

  Laurinda addressed Khaltan: “We are not divine messengers. We have come from a world beyond your world, as mortal as you, not to teach but to learn.”

  The man smote his hands together. “Yet it is a miracle, again a miracle—in my lifetime!”

  Nonetheless he was soon avidly talking. Christian recalled myths of men who were the lovers of goddesses or who tramped the roads and sat at humble meat with God Incarnate. The believer accepts as the unbeliever cannot.

  Those were strange hours that followed. Khaltan was not simply devout. To him the supernatural was another set of facts, another facet of reality. Since it lay beyond his ken, he had turned his attention to the measurable world. In it he observed and theorized like a Newton. Tonight his imagination blazed, questions exploded from him, but always he chose his words with care and turned everything he heard around and around in his mind, examining it as he would have examined some jewel fallen from the sky.

  Slowly, piecemeal, while the stars wheeled around the pole, a picture of his civilization took shape. It had overrun and absorbed every other society—no huge accomplishment, when Earth was meagerly populated and most folk on the edge of starvation. The major technology was biological, agronomy, aquaculture in the remnant lakes and seas, ruthlessly practical genetics. Industrial chemistry flourished. It joined with physics at the level of the later nineteenth century to enable substantial engineering works and reclamation projects.

  Society itself—how do you summarize an entire culture in words? It can’t be done. Christian got the impression of a nominal empire, actually a broad-based oligarchy of families descended from conquering soldiers. Much upwa
rd mobility was by adoption of promising commoners, whether children or adults. Sons who made no contributions to the well-being of the clan or who disgraced it could be kicked out, if somebody did not pick a fight and kill them in a duel. Unsatisfactory daughters were also expelled, unless a marriage into a lower class could be negotiated. Otherwise the status of the sexes was roughly equal; but this meant that women who chose to compete with men must do so on male terms. The nobles provided the commons with protection, courts of appeal, schools, leadership, and pageantry. In return they drew taxes, corvée, and general subordination; but in most respects the commoners were generally left to themselves. Theirs was not altogether a dog-eat-dog situation; they had institutions, rites, and hopes of their own. Yet many went to the wall, while the hard work of the rest drove the global economy.

  It was not a deliberately cruel civilization, Christian thought, but neither was it an especially compassionate one.

  Had any civilization ever been, really? Some fed their poor, but mainly they fed their politicians and bureaucrats.

  He snatched his information out of talk that staggered everywhere else. The discourse for which Khaltan yearned was of the strangers’ home—he got clumsily evasive, delaying responses—and the whole system of the universe, astronomy, physics, everything.

  “We dream of rockets going to the planets. We have tried to shoot them to the moon,” he said, and told of launchers that ought to have worked. “All failed.”

  Of course, Christian thought. Here the moon and planets, yes, the very sun were no more than lights. The tides rose and fell by decree. The Earth was a caricature of Earth outside. Gaia could do no better.

  “Are we then at the end of science?” Khaltan cried once. “We have sought and sought for decades, and have won to nothing further than measurements more exact.” Nothing that would lead to relativity, quantum theory, wave mechanics, their revolutionary insights and consequences. Gaia could not accommodate it. “The angels in the past showed us what to look for. Will you not? Nature holds more than we know. Your presence bears witness!”