It did no good to brood on such things. She lay back on her bed. Later, in the routine she'd used to structure her empty days, she'd take some exercise. For now, sus- pended in light that was never quenched, she tried to blank her mind.
A hand touched hers.
THE UGHT OF OTHER DAYS
Amid the chaos and recrimination and anger that fol- lowed the retrieval of Mary and Kate, David asked to see Mary in the cool calm of the Wormworks.
He was immediately jotted by the familiarity of Mary's blue eyes, so like the eyes he had followed deep into time, all me way back to Africa.
He shivered with a sense of the evanescence of human life. Was Mary really no more than the transient mani- festation of genes which had been passed to her through thousands of generations, even from the long-gone Neandertal days, genes which she in turn would pass on into an unknown future? But the WormCam had de- stroyed that dismal perspective. Mary's life was tran- sient, but no less meaningful for that; and now that the past was opened up, she would surely be remembered, cherished by those who would follow.
And her life, shaped in a fast-changing world, might yet take her to places he couldn't even imagine.
She said, "You look worriedL"
"That's because I'm not sure who I'm speaking to."
She snorted, and for an instant he saw the old, rebel- lious, discontented Mary.
"Forgive my ignorance," David said. "I'm just trying to understand. We all are. This is something new to us."
She nodded. "And therefore something to fear?... Yes," she said eventually. "Yes, then. We're here. The wonnhole in my head never shuts down, David. Every- thing I do, everything I see and hear and feel, everything I think, is—"
"Shared?"
"Yes." She studied him. "But I know what you imply by that. Diluted. Right? But it isn't like that- I'm no less me. But I am enhanced. It's just another layer of mind. Or of information processing, if you like: layered over my central nervous system, the way the CNS is layered over older networks, like the biochemical. My memories are still mine. Does it matter if they are stored in some- body else's head?"
"But this isn't just some kind of neat mobile phone network, is it? You Joined make higher claims than that. Is there a new person in all this, a new, combined youl A group mind, linked by wormholes, emergent from the network?"
"You think that would be a monstrosity, don't you?"
"I don't know what to think about it."
He studied her, trying to grasp Mary within the shell of Joinedness.
It didn't help that the Joined had quickly become re- nowned as consummate actors—or liars, to be more blunt. Thanks to their detached layers of consciousness, each of them had a mastery over their body language, the muscles of their faces—a power over communication channels that had evolved to transmit information reli- ably and honestly—that could beat out the most expert thespian. He had no reason to suppose Mary was lying to him, today; it was just that he couldn't see how he could tell if she was or not.
She said now, "Why don't you ask me what you really want to know?"
Disturbed, he said, "Very well. Mary—how does it feeir
She said slowly; "The same. Just—more. It's like coming fully awake—a feeling of clarity, of full con- sciousness. You must know. I've never been a scientist. But I've solved puzzles. I play chess, for instance. Sci- ence is something like that, isn't it? You figure some- thing out—suddenly see how the game fits together— it's as if the clouds clear, just for a moment, and you can see far, much farther than before."
"Yes," he said. "I've had a few moments like that in my life. I've been fortunate."
She squeezed his hand. "But for me, that's how it feels all the time. Isn't that wonderful?"
"Do you understand why people fear you?"
'They do more than fear us," she said calmly. 'They hunt us down. They attack us. But they can't damage us. We can see them coming, David."
That chilled him.
"And even if one of us is killed—even if/am killed—then we, the greater being, will go on."
"What does that mean?"
"The information network that defines the Joined is large, and growing all the time. It's probably indestruc- tible, like an Internet of minds."
He frowned, obscurely irritated. "Have you heard of attachment theory? It describes our need, psychologi- cally, to form close relationships, to reach out to inti- mates. We need such relationships to conceal the awful truth, which we confront as we grow up, that each of us is alone. The greatest battle of human existence is to come to terms with that fact- And that is why to be Joined is so appealing.
"But the chip in your head will not help you," he said brutally. "Not in the end. For you must die alone, just as I must." ^
She smiled, coldly forgiving, and he felt ashamed.
"But that may not be true," she said. "Perhaps I will be able to live on, survive the death of my body—of Mary's body. But /, my consciousness and memories, will not be resident in one member's body or another, but—distributed. Shared amongst them all. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
He whispered, "And would it be you? Could you truly avoid death that way? Or would this distributed self be a copy?"
She sighed. "I don't know. And besides the technol- ogy is some way away from realizing that. Until it does, we will still suffer illness, accident, death. And we will always grieve."
"The wiser you are, the more it hurts."
"Yes. The human condition is tragic, David. The greater the Joined becomes, the more clearly I can see that. And the more I feel it." Her face, still young, seemed overlaid by a ghostly mask of much greater age. "Come with me," he said. 'There's something I want to show you."
Kate couldn't help but jump, snatch her hand away.
She finessed her involuntary gasp into a cough, ex- tended the motion of her hand to cover her mouth. Then, delicately, she returned her hand to where it had been, resting on the top sheet of her bed.
And that gentle touch came again, the fingers warm, strong, unmistakable despite the SmartShroud glove which must cover them. She felt the fingers squirm into her palm, and she tried to stay still, eating the peach.
Sorry shocked you. No way warn.
She leaned back a little, seeking to conceal her own handspelling behind her back. Bobby ?
Who else??? Nice prison.
In Wormworks right?
Yes. DNA trace. David helped. Refugee methods. Mary helped. All family together.
Shouldn 'l have come, she signed quickly. What Hiram wants. Get you. Bait in trap.
Not abandon you. Need you. Be ready.
Tried once. Guards smart, sharp . ..
She risked a glimpse to her side. She could see no sign of his presence, not so much as a false shadow, an indentation in the bedcover, a hint of distortion. Evi- dently SmartShroud technology was improving as rap- idly as the WormCam itself.
I might not get another chance, she thought. I must tell him.
Bobby. I saw David. Had news. About you.
His signing now was slower, hesitant. Me what me ?
Your family ... I can't do it, she thought. Ask Hiram, she signed back, feeling bitter.
Asking you.
Birth. Your birth.
Asking you. Asking you.
Kate took a deep breath.
Not what you believe. Think it through. Hiram wanted dynasty. David big disappointment, out of control. Mother a big inconvenience. So, have boy without mother.
Don't understand. I have mother. Heather mother.
She hesitated. No she isn't. Bobby, you're a clone.
David settled back and fixed the cold metal Mind'sEye hoop over his head. As he sank into virtual reality the world turned dark and silent, and for a brief moment he had no sense of his own body, couldn't even feel Mary's soft, warm hand wrapped around his own.
Then, all around them, the stars came out. Mary gasped and grabbed at his arm.
He was suspended in a three-dimension
al diorama of stars, stars spread over a velvet black sky, stars more crowded than the darkest de«ert night—and yet there was structure, he saw slowly. A-great river of light— stars crammed so close they merged into glowing, pale clouds—ran around the equator of me sky. It was the Milky Way, of course: the great disc of stars in which he was still embedded.
He glanced down. Here was his body, familiar and comfortable, clearly visible in the complex, multiply sourced light that fell on him. But he was floating in the starlight without enclosure or support.
Mary drifted beside him, still holding on to his arm. Her touch was comforting. Odd, he thought. We can cast our minds more than two thousand light years from Earth, and yet we must still grasp at each other, our primate heritage never far from the doors of our souls.
This alien sky was populated.
There was a sun, planet and moon here, suspended
ARTHUR C. ClARKE AND STEPHEN BAXTER around him, like the trinity of bodies that had always dominated the human environment. But it was a strange enough sun—in fact, not a single star like Earth's sun, but a binary.
The principal was an orange giant, dim and cool. Cen- tered on a glowing yellow core, it was a mass of orange gas, growing steadily more tenuous. There was much detail in that sullen disc: a tracery of yellow-white light that danced at the poles, the ugly scars of gray-black spots around the equator.
But the giant star was visibly flattened. It had a com- panion star, small and bluish, little more than a point of light, orbiting so close to its parent it was almost within the giant's scattered outer atmosphere. In fact, David saw, a thin streamer of gas, torn from the parent and still glowing, had wrapped itself around the companion and was falling to its surface, a thin, hellish rain of fusing hydrogen.
David looked down to the planet that hovered beneath his feet. It was a sphere the apparent size of a beachball, half-illuminated by the complex red and white light of its parent stars. But it. was obviously airless, its surface a complex mesh of impact craters and mountain chains. Perhaps it had once had an atmosphere, even oceans; or it might have been the rocky or metallic core of a gas giant, an erstwhile Neptune or Uranus. It was even pos- sible, he supposed, that it had harbored life. If so, that life was now destroyed or fled, every trace of its passing scorched from the surface by the dying sun.
But this dead, blasted world still had a moon. Though much smaller than its parent, the moon glowed more brightly, reflecting more of the complex mixed light of the twin stars. And its surface appeared, at first glance, utterly smooth, so that the little worldlet looked like a cue ball, machined in some great lathe. When David looked more closely, however, he could see there was a network of fine cracks and ridges, some of them evi- dently hundreds of kilometers long, all across thesur- face. The moon looked rather like a hard-boiled egg, he thought, whose shell had been assiduously if gently cracked with a spoon.
This moon was a ball of water ice. Its smoothed sur- face was a sign of recent global melting, presumably caused by the grotesque expansion of the parent star, and the ridges were seams between plates of ice. And per- haps, like Jupiter's moon Europa, there was still a layer of liquid water somewhere beneath this deep-frozen sur- face, an ancient ocean that might serve as a harbor, even now, for retreating life....
He sighed. Nobody knew. And right now, nobody had the time or resources to find out. There was simply too much to do, too many places to go.
But it wasn't the rocky world, or its ice moon—not even the strange double star itself—but something much grander, beyond this little stellar system, which had drawn him here.
He turned now, and looked beyond the stars.
The nebula spanned half the sky.
It was a wash of colors, ranging from bright blue-white at its center, through green and orange, to somber purples and reds at its periphery. It was 4ike a giant watercolor painting, he thought, the colors smoothly flowing, one into another. He could see layers in the cloud—the tex- ture, the strata of shadows made it look surprisingly three- dimensional—with finer structure deeper in its heart.
The most striking aspect of the larger structure was a pattern of dark clouds, rich with dust, set out in a star- tlingly clear V-shape before the glowing mass, like an immense bird raising black wings before a flame. And before the bird shape, like a sprinkling of sparks from that bonfire behind, there was a thin veil of stars, sepa- rating him from the cloud. The great river of light that was the Galaxy flowed around the nebula, passing be- hind it as if encircling it.
Even as he turned his head from side to side, it was impossible to grasp the full scale of the structure- At times it seemed close enough to touch, like a giant dy- namic wall-sculpture he might reach into and explore. And then it would recede, apparently to infinity. He knew his imagination, evolved to the thousand-kilometer scale of Earth, was inadequate to the task of grasping the immense distances involved here.
For if the sun was moved to the center of the nebula, humans could build an interstellar empire without reach- ing the edge of the cloud.
Wonder surged in him, sudden, unexpected. I am priv- ileged, he thought anew, to live in such a time. One day, he supposed, some WormCam explorer would sail be- neath the icy crust of the moon and seek out whatever lay at its core; and perhaps teams of investigators would scour the surface of the planet below, seeking out relics of the past.
He envied those future explorers the depth of their knowledge. And yet, he knew, they would surely envy his generation most of all. For, as he sailed outward with the expanding front of WormCam exploration, David was here first, and nobody else in all of history would be able to say that.
Long story. Japanese lab. The place he used to clone tigers for witch doctors. Heather just a surrogate. David WormCammed it all. Then all that mind control. Hiram didn 't want more mistakes...
Heather. I felt no bond. Know why now. How sad. She thought she could feel his pulse in the invisible touch at her palm. Yes sad sad.
And then, without warning, the door crashed open. Mae Wilson walked in holding a pistol. Without hes- itation she fired once, twice, to either side of Kate. The gun was silenced, the shots mere pops.
There was a cry, a patch of blood hovering in the air, another like a small explosion where the bullet exited Bobby's body.
Kate tried to stand. But the nozzle of Wilson's eufl was at the back of her head. "Don't even think about it."
Bobby's 'Shroud was failing, is great concentric cu- cles of distortion and shadow that spread around his wounds. Kate could see he was trying to get to the doof
But there were more of Hiram's goons there; he would have no way through- Now Hiram himself arrived at the door His facfi twisted with unrecognizable emotion as he looked al
Kate, at Bobby's body. "I knew you couldn't resist it Gotcha, you little shit"
Kate hadn't been out of her boxy cell for—how long? Thirty, forty days? Now, out in the cavernous dimly lit spaces of the Wormworks, she felt exposed, ill at ease.
The shot turned out to have passed straight through Bobby's upper shoulder, ripping muscle and shattering bone, but—through pure chance—his life was not in danger. Hiram's medics had wanted to give Bobby a general anaesthetic as they treated him, but, staring at
Hiram, he refused, and suffered the pain of the treatment in full awareness-
Hiram led the way across a floor empty of people past quiescent, hulking machinery. WilsoQ and the other goons circled Bobby and Kate, some of them walking backward so they could watch their captives making it obvious there was no way to escape.
Hiram, immersed in whatever project he was progress- ing now, looked hunted, ratlike. His mannerisms were strange, repetitive, obsessive: he was a man who had spent too much time alone. He's the subject of an ex- periment himself, Kate thought sourly: a human being deprived of companionship, afraid of the darkness sub- ject to constant, more or less hostile glares from the rest of the planet's population, their invisible eyes surround- ing him. He was being steadily
destroyed by a machine he had never imagined, never intended, whose implica- tions he probably didn't understand even now. With a pang of pity, she realized there was no human in history who had more right to feel paranoid.
But she could never forgive him for what he had done to her—and to Bobby. And, she realized, she had ab- solutely no idea what Hiram intended for them, now that he had trapped his son.
Bobby held Kate's hand tight, making sure her body was never out of contact with his, that they were insep- arable. And even as he protected her he was able subtly to lean on her without allowing the others to see, draw- ing strength she was glad to give him.
They reached a part of the Wormworks Kate had not seen before. A kind of bunker had been constructed, a massive cube half-set into the floor. Its interior was brightly lit. A door was set in its side, operated by a heavy wheel as if this was a submarine bulkhead.
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 31
