Schismatrix Plus

by Bruce Sterling

  By this token he knew that humanity on Earth had become a relict.

  In the long term, the vast biological timescape that had become Lindsay’s obsession, rust ate anything that failed to move. Earth’s future did not belong to humanity but to the monstrous weeds, grown strange and woody, and whatever small fleet creatures leaped and bred among them. And Lindsay felt justice in it.

  They sank into darkness.

  Pressure meant nothing to their alien hull. The gasbags flourished at extremes of pressure that made Earth’s oceans seem as thin as plasma. Pilot switched controls over to the water jets epoxied to the hull. He kicked in aperture radar, and their videoboards lit up with the clean green contour lines of the abyssal floor.

  Lindsay’s heart leaped as he saw the familiar geology. “Just like Europa,” Vera murmured. They were floating over an extended tension fault, where volcanic basalt had snapped and rifted, harsh blocks jutting upward, the cracked primeval violence untouched by wind or rain. Rectilinear mountains, lightly dusted with organic ooze, dropped in breathtaking precipitous cliffs, where contour lines crowded together like the teeth of a comb.

  But here the rift was dead. They saw no sign of thermal energy. “Follow the fault,” Lindsay said. “Look for hot spots.” He had lived too long for impatience, even now.

  “Shall I kick in the main engines?” Pilot said.

  “And make the water boil for miles around? We’re deep, Pilot. That water is like steel.”

  “Is it?” Pilot made an electronic churring noise. “Well, I’d rather have no stars at all than blurry ones.”

  They followed the rift for hours without finding a lava seep. Vera slept; Lindsay dozed briefly, an old man’s cat-sleep. Pilot, who slept only on formal occasions, woke them. “A hot spot,” he said.

  Lindsay examined his board. Infrareds showed sluggish heat from deep within the interior of a jutting cliff. The cliff was extremely odd: a long, tilted plane of euclidian smoothness, rising abruptly from an oozy badlands of jumbled terrain. An angular foothill at the base of the cliff lay strangely distorted, almost crumpled, atop a dome-shaped rise of lava.

  “Send out the drone,” he said.

  Vera pulled the robot’s controls from under her seat and slipped on a pair of eyephones. The robot sculled easily out to the anomalous cliff, its lights blazing. Lindsay switched his board over to the robot’s optics.

  The tilted cliff was painted. There were white stripes on it, long peeling dashes, some kind of dividing line. “It’s a wreck,” he said suddenly. “It’s man-made.”

  “Can’t be,” Vera said. “It’s the size of a major spacecraft. There’d be room in it for thousands.”

  But then she found something that settled it. A machine was lashed to the smooth clifflike deck of the enormous ship. Centuries had corroded it, but its winged outlines were clear. “It’s an aircraft,” Pilot said. “It had jets. This was some kind of watery spaceport. Airport, rather.”

  “A ratfish!” Lindsay exulted. “After it, Vera!”

  The surveyor lunged after the abyssal creature. The long-tailed, blunt-headed fish, the size of a man’s forearm, darted for safety along the broad deck of the aircraft carrier. It vanished through a ruptured crevice in the multistory wreckage of the control tower. The robot pulled up short. “Wait,” Vera said. “If this is a ship, where did the heat come from?”

  Pilot examined his instruments. “It’s radioactive heat,” he said. “Is that unusual?”

  “Fission power,” Lindsay said. “It must have sunk with an atomic pile on board.” Common decency forbade him to mention the possibility of atomic weapons.

  Vera said, “My instruments show dissolved organics. Creatures are huddling up around the pile for warmth.” She tore at an ancient bulkhead with the pressure-toughened arms of the drone. The corroded alloy burst easily, gushing rust. “Should I go after it?”

  “No,” Lindsay said. “I want the primeval.”

  She returned the drone to its hold. They sputtered onward.

  Time passed; terrain scrolled by with a slowness he would have once found dreadful. Lindsay found himself thinking again of Czarina-Kluster. Sometimes it troubled him that the despair, the suffering there, meant so little to him. C-K was dying, its elegance dissolving into squalor, its delicate, sophisticated balance ripped apart, pieces flung like seeds throughout the Schismatrix. Was it evil of him to accept the flower’s death, in hope of seeds?

  He could not think it was. Human time meant nothing to him any longer. He wanted only for his will to leave its mark, to cast its light down those long eons, in a world awakened, a planet brought to irrevocable life. And then…then he could let go.

  “Here,” Pilot said.

  They had found it. The craft descended.

  Life rose all around them: a jungle in defiance of the sun. In the robot’s lights the steep, abrasive valley walls flushed in a vivid panoply of color: scarlet, chalk-white, sulfur-gold, obsidian. Like stands of bamboo, tubeworms swayed on the hillsides, taller than a man. The rocks were thick with clams, their white shells yawning to show flesh as red as blood. Purple sponges pulsed, abyssal corals spread black branching thickets, their thin arms jeweled with polyps.

  The water of life gushed from the depths of the valley. Chimneys slimed with metal oxides spewed hot clouds of energized sulfur. The sea floor boiled, wobbling bubbles of steam glinting through a haze of bacteria. The bacteria were central. They were the food chain’s fundamental link. Through chemosynthesis, they drew energy from the sulfur itself, scorning the sun to thrive on the heat of the Earth.

  Within the warmth and darkness, the valley seethed with life. The rock itself seemed to live, festooned with porous knobs and slimed crevasses, red-black tubes of cold lava-stone coiling like snakes, phallic chimneys of precipitated minerals gleaming copper-green with verdigris. Pale crabs with legs as long as a man’s arm kicked daintily across the slopes. Jet-black abyssal fish, grown fat on unexpected bounty, moved with slick languor through the clustered stalks of the tubeworms. Bright yellow jellies, like severed flowerheads, floated in thick eddies of bacterial soup.

  “Everything,” Lindsay breathed. “I want it all.”

  Vera pulled away her eyephones; her eyes were flooded with tears. She slumped back in the seat, shaking. “I can’t see,” she said, her voice hoarse. She handed him the control box. “Please…it should be yours, Abelard.”

  Lindsay strapped on the phones, slipped his fingers into the control slots. Suddenly he was amid it all, the scanners turning with the movements of his head. He extended the sampling arms, extruding the delicate clockwork of the genetics needles. He advanced on the nearest stand of tubeworms. Above the serried white columns of their wrist-thick trunks, their foliage was rank upon waving rank of arm-long feathered red fronds, sweeping with feminine elegance, combing life from the water. Their white stems clustered with sheltered creatures: barnacles, tiny crabs, fringed worms in sea-green and electric blue, round comb jellies glinting in faint pastels.

  A predator emerged from the jungle, flowing sinuously around the trunks: a jet-black abyssal fish, leg-sized and flattened like an eel, its sides studded with serried dots of phosphorescence. It approached fearlessly, fascinated by the light. Gills pulsed behind its huge-eyed head and it opened a pale, glowing mouth bristling with fangs. “So,” Lindsay addressed it. “You were pressed past the limits, forced into the abyss where nothing grows. But see what you’ve found. The fat of the system, sundog. Welcome to Paradise.” As he spoke he moved the arm toward it; the long needle leaped out, touched it, and withdrew. The fish glowed out in sudden gold and green and flashed away.

  He moved to the forest, touching everything he could see, sampling bacteria with gentle suction filters. In half an hour he had filled all his sample capsules and turned back to the ship for more.

  Then he saw something detach itself from the hull of the ship. At first he thought it a trick of the light, a ripple of pure reflection. Then he saw it moving toward
him, wobbling, fluttering, shapeless, and formless, a jellied mirror, fluid in a silver bag. He heard Vera cry out.

  He wrenched his hands from the controls and tore away the eyephones. She was bent over the videoboard, staring. “The Presence! You see it? The Presence!”

  It was swimming, with an amoebalike rippling and stretching, deeper into the grove. Lindsay quickly jammed on the eyephones and took up the controls, following it with the robot’s lights. Its formless surface threw washes of reflected brilliance over the clams and coral. Lindsay said, “You see it, Pilot?”

  Pilot turned the spacecraft to follow it with tracking systems. “I see something…It reflects in every wavelength. What a strange creature. Take a sample of it, Lindsay.”

  “It’s not native. It came with us. I saw it attached to the hull.”

  “To the hull? It survived raw space? And entry heat? And the pressure of this water? It can’t be.”

  “No?”

  “No,” the Lobster said. “Because if it was real, I couldn’t bear not to be it.”

  “It’s showing itself,” Vera exulted. “Because of where we are! You see? You see?” She laughed. “It’s dancing!”

  The thing floated smoothly above one of the smoking chimneys, flattening itself to bathe in the searing updraft of unthinkable pressure and heat. Hot bubbles seethed beneath it, sliding with frictionless ease off its mirrored undersurface. As they watched, it drew itself together into a rippling globe. Then, liquescing with sudden speed, it poured itself through a thumb-sized crevice into the core of the heat vent. It vanished at once.

  “I didn’t see that,” the Lobster insisted. “I didn’t see it vanish into the bowels of the Earth. Should we leave now? I mean, maybe we should try to get away from it.”

  “No,” Vera said.

  “You’re right,” Pilot quavered. “That might make it mad.”

  Vera marveled. “Did you see it? It was enjoying this! Even it knows. It knows this is Paradise!” She was trembling. “Abelard, someday, in Europa, this will all be ours, we can touch it, feel it, breathe the water, smell it, taste it! I want it! I want to be out there, like the Presence is…” She was breathing hard, her face radiant. “Abelard…if it weren’t for you I’d have never known this…Thank you. Thank you, too, Pilot.”

  “Right, yes, surely,” Pilot fluted uneasily. “Lindsay, the drone. Should you bring it in?”

  Lindsay smiled. “Don’t be afraid, Pilot. It’s done you a favor. You’ve seen the potential. Now you’ll have something to aim for.”

  “But think of the power it must have. It’s like a god…”

  “Then it’s in good company, with us.”

  Lindsay guided the drone into the specimen hold and unloaded the genetic capsules into their pressure racks. He reloaded its arms and returned to work.

  The Presence emerged, ballooning suddenly from a second chimney, beside the drone. It drifted toward him, watching. He waved a claw, but it made no response and soon drifted out of the drone’s lights into darkness and invisibility.

  The creatures showed no fear of the drone. Vera took over, gently parting the supple stems of the tubeworms to harvest everything she could find. The drone walked the length of the valley oasis, probing the ooze, prying into crevices.

  They had a stroke of luck where a new hot spring had broken open, parboiling a colony of creatures clustered above it on an overhang. They used the dead as bait to attract scavengers; they opened them to sample gut bacteria and the agents of decay.

  Their sample could not be complete; the oasis was far too rich for that. But their success was still entire. No creature born to the seas of Earth could live, unaltered, in Europa’s alien waters. That was the task of Europa’s angels, the Lifesiders, who would inherit this genetic treasure, tease it apart, and rebuild new creatures for the new conditions. The living beings here would be models, archetypes in a new Creation, where art and purpose would take the place of a billion years of evolution.

  As they packed the robot away for the last time and lifted ship, they saw no sign of the Presence. But Lindsay had no doubt that it was with them.

  He was tired as they ascended slowly toward the surface. More than his Shaper favorite or the armored Mechanist, he felt the burden of his hubris heavy on him. Who was he to have done these things? The light had drawn him, and he had grown toward it as a tree might grow, spreading blind leaves toward an unknown radiance. Now he had come to his life’s fruition, and he was glad of it. But a tree dies when its roots are cut, and Lindsay knew his roots were his humanity. He was a thing of flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will.

  A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That was what death was for.

  When they saw sunlight flooding just below the surface, Pilot yowled in electronic glee and kicked in the main engines. Steam blasted out in an explosive cratering rosette as the sea recoiled. They broke Mach 1 in seconds. As acceleration crushed them into their seats, Vera strained to see her videoboard and screamed. “The sky! Blue sky! A wall above the world! Pilot, give us space!”

  Below them, the sea absorbed the shock, as it did all things. And they were gone.

  THE NEOTENIC CULTURAL REPUBLIC: 8-8-’86

  Life moved in clades.

  Terraform-Kluster loomed over Mars, shattering red monotony with white steam, green growth, blue nascent seas.

  On Venus, death’s back was broken, as honest clouds threw lace across the searing, acid-bitten sky.

  Ice ships with freshly minted creatures from the labs splashed into Europa, dissolving deep within blood-warm abysses.

  On Jupiter the Great Red Spot was breaking up, sloughing off strange blooming clouds of red krill, tiny creatures gathered into shoals and herds bigger than Earth.

  At the Neotenic Cultural Republic, Abelard Lindsay decamped from a monstrous spacecraft.

  In the free-fall zone he moved easily, with the unconscious grace of extreme age.

  But as he moved down the slope inside the cylindrical world, past the hotels and low-grav tourist shops, he leaned more and more heavily on the squat head of his robot companion. The two of them reached level ground, a loamy wilderness with solemn, ancient ranks of trees. The tub-shaped robot nurse nicked a quick blood sample from the nerveless flesh of Lindsay’s leg. As they shuffled along the leaf-strewn footpath, the machine fractionated the blood and mumbled over its data.

  The Republic had become a place of towering gloom, silence broken by birdcalls, a canopy of foliage cracking mirrored sunlight into dappled shards. Local Neotenics in studiedly antique clothing lounged on lichen-eaten stone benches, while their charges, senile Shapers and obsolescent Mechs, tottered marveling through the woods.

  Lindsay paused, gasping as the cuirass pumped his chest beneath his dark blue coat. The baggy legs of his trousers and his sturdy orthopedic shoes hid the prosthetic framework strapped to his wasted legs. Overhead, at the core of the world, an ultralight aircraft spewed a long trail of gray cremated powder over the rich green treetops.

  No one approached him. The embroidered squids and angler fish on his coat-sleeves identified him as a CircumEuropan, but he had come incognito.

  Catching his breath, Lindsay walked on toward the Tyler mansion and his meeting with Constantine.

  The mansion had expanded. Beyond its ivy-shrouded walls, other estates had sprung up, a complex of asylums and retirement wards. Over the years, despite the Preservationists, the outside world had seeped in irresistibly. The Republic’s premier industries were hospitals and funerals; rehabilitation for those who could make it, a quiet transition for those who could not.

  Lindsay crossed the courtyard of the first hospital. A group of Blood Bathers basked in the sun, waiting with animal patience for their skins to grow again. Beyond that estate was a second, where two young Patternists were surrounded by guards. They scratched at the dirt with twigs, their lopsided heads almost touching. Lin
dsay saw one of them look up for a moment: the boy’s cold eyes had the chilly logic of utter paranoia.

  Neatly dressed Neotenic attendants ushered Lindsay through the gates of the Tyler estate. Margaret Juliano had been dead for years. Lindsay recognized the new Director as one of her Superbright students.

  The Superbright met him on the lawn. The man’s face had the quiet self-possession of Zen Serotonin. “I’ve cleared your visit with Warden Pongpianskul,” he said.

  “That was thoughtful,” Lindsay said. Neville Pongpianskul was dead, but it was not polite to refer to the fact. Following Ring Council ritual, Pongpianskul had “faded,” leaving behind him a programmed web of speeches, announcements, taped appearances, and random telephone calls. The Neotenics had never bothered to replace him as Warden. It saved a lot of trouble all around.

  “May I show you through the Museum, sir?” the Superbright asked. “Our last Curator, Alexandrina Tyler, left an unmatched collection of Lindsaiana.”

  “Later, perhaps. Is Chancellor-General Constantine receiving visitors?”

  Constantine was in the rose garden, lying in a lounge chair beside a beehive, staring up into the sun with flat plastic eyes. The years had not been kind to him, despite the best of care. Long years in natural gravity had left his body knotted with muscle, strange knobs and bulges over his delicate bones.

  There was no ultraviolet in the mirrored sunlight of the Republic, but nevertheless Constantine had tanned, his ancient naked skin taking on mottled birthmark tinges of purple and blue. He had lost most of his hair, and there were dimpled callosities at strategic points on his skull. The treatments had been thorough and exhaustive. And at last they had succeeded.

  Constantine turned as Lindsay creaked carefully toward him. The pupils of his plastic eyes were of different sizes; they irised visibly, struggling for focus. “Abelard? It’s you?”

  “Yes, Philip.” The robot sank down beside the lounge chair; Lindsay sat comfortably on its soft, pulpy head.

  “So. How was your trip?”

  “It’s an old ship,” Lindsay said. “A bit like a flying geriatrics ward. They were having a revival of Vetterling’s The White Periapsis.”