Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. What are you talking about?”

  “Eden! Eden!”

  “The planet?”

  “Yes!”

  Yuri looked at me for a moment. “We’re going to freaking Eden?” He threw back his head and laughed. “I knew those two were insane,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Steel and Archie. Holy Shiva. Eden.” He shook his head.

  “That’s where Archie was doing her research,” I told him. “Alice ...” I didn’t know if I wanted to talk about this.

  “What about Alice?”

  “Did you know she was from ...” I didn’t know if I wanted to ask him, if I wanted to find out that he’d been lying to me.

  “From where? Alice is from Eden?” Understanding bloomed on his face, “Oh, that makes sense,” and faded just as quickly, “I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hmm? Oh. Well, it doesn’t explain—”

  “What?”

  He shifted tracks, “Well, I mean, it explains why she doesn’t remember anything, doesn’t it? Before a couple of decades ago, I mean.” He looked at me blandly, “I mean, she wouldn’t, would she?”

  I studied his face. Jesus H. freaking Buddha on a Musadhi lift, who the hell could I trust on this ship? I stared him in the eyes, “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You knew about Alice.” I guess I must have looked threatening; Yuri took a step back:

  “What? I didn’t know she was from Eden.”

  “You knew about Alice. That she was going to—that she couldn’t—that she can’t—”

  “Can’t what? What did they tell you?”

  I took a couple of breaths. I couldn’t say this and look at him. I looked at ... something else. “That Alice has a genetic condition that keeps her from ... re-booting.”

  “Oh,” he scratched his earlobe. “They told you that, did they?”

  “Yes. Only they didn’t make it sound so pretty.” I was so filled with anger and grief and, I don’t know, frustration, or something, “They just said she was going to die. Just like that: Alice is going to DIE.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, settle down. Watch your language.”

  I raged, “They didn’t watch their language.”

  “Well, they should have. Now, just take it easy.” He sat me down on his desk.

  I tried to take it easy. I think I failed. “You knew, didn’t you?” I said.

  Yuri contemplated his reply before he made it. “Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah. I knew she couldn’t re-boot.” He looked at me apologetically, “Sorry. Steel didn’t want us to tell you.”

  “WHY NOT?”

  “Would you want people to know if you couldn’t re-boot?”

  He had a point.

  “But—” I started, “but, why did she tell you?” I sounded like a little kid on a playground: ‘no fair keeping secrets.’ Allah, Alice had been a little kid just a few years ago.

  He replied, “She knows me. She didn’t know you. She knew what it would take to get me to go to Brainard’s Planet.”

  “To—What do you mean?”

  Yuri sat on the edge of his bunk and looked at the deck. He studied a piece of lint on the carpet, “Steel knows how to work people, you know?” I did. Then he changed his mind, “Ah, it’s nothing. It’s ... it’s nothing. It’s stupid.”

  “What?” I sat down on the chair at his desk tucked into the cubby beside his wardrobe. Crew cabins are small. We were only about three feet apart.

  Yuri studied the lint some more and said, “Alice is sweet, isn’t she?” He looked at me.

  “Yeah,” I answered, “she’s great. She’s a great—” Kid? I couldn’t say it. “A great person.”

  “Bright. Funny. Pretty. She’s just about perfect.”

  “Yeah.” I liked Alice. It hurt, it really hurt to think of her being ... not. Not being. Yuri started moving the piece of lint around with the toe of his boot.

  “Steel kinda set me up with her at a party she threw in Katmandu a couple of years ago. Well, thirty-three years ago. Depending on your frame of reference.” He laughed and shook his head, “Time dilation. Really messes with you.”

  “Yeah. So what happened at the party?”

  “Well, you know, I just—got to know her. We had a great time. Then, a couple of days later Steel bullets me. Says she’s got a job for me. A dangerous job.”

  I let out one explosive laugh, “Dangerous.”

  “Yeah. Says we can’t talk about it over the net. Wants me to come up to Neuschwanstein.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “You sure have.” He’d managed to pick up the lint with his feet. He dropped it. “Anyway. You know how I like old movies.”

  Old movies? I nodded.

  “Well, Steel knows it, too. I guess anybody who knows me knows it.” He stopped. This was hard for him. “Anyway, there are all these movies where—ah, this is stupid.”

  “What?”

  He had the lint again; he was rolling it between the edges of his boot soles, spinning it into a tiny piece of yarn. He sighed, “There are all these movies where, you know, the guy would go off and ... you know ... risk his ... risk his life to save the ... you know, the woman.” He shook his head in disgust, “I told you it was stupid.”

  “What do you mean? What’s stupid?”

  He stared into the past. “Well, back when I was hatched, women were pretty upset. Pretty ... angry, I guess. They didn’t want you to do anything for them. They wanted to do it all themselves, you know?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I remember that time.”

  “And then ... things changed. You couldn’t risk your life anymore.” He was looking at a very lonely place. “You just couldn’t. You couldn’t say, ‘I love you more than my life.’ It didn’t mean anything.”

  “Oh.” We just sat there for a while. Then he said:

  “When Steel told me about Alice, I just wanted to ... save her. That’s all.”

  I understood. I really, really understood. Something occurred to me, something I wasn’t sure I could ask. I said, “You once told me that you’d have to be drunker than I was in Kindu to tell me your story.”

  “That’s still true,” he answered.

  “I was just wondering ... I was just wondering if it had anything to do with the, uh, the ‘War of Liberation.’ ”

  He stared at the floor for a long time. A long time.

  Then he looked at me and said, “I don’t think I’m drunk enough to answer that question.”

  We got underway the next morning. We had new ultra-lights, a new cable for the sky-hook and quite a bit of new equipment that Yuri designed for Archie’s research into the Brainardians, the Brainardites, the Brainardese—the slugs.

  Yuri hasn’t been able to figure out a way to make the E-suits impervious to any unpredictable thing the slugs might do, however. That’s the hitch—they’re unpredictable. He can beef up the joints, thicken the armor, but that increases the power needed to run the suits; they already mass over three hundred kilos and they’re having to deal with the robust gravity of Brainard’s Planet, almost twice that of Earth. And even if he does beef them up, how much does he need to? Should he make them twice as durable? Three times? Four? We don’t know what the slugs are capable of and we don’t know when, where, or why they might choose to do something. It’s a real problem.

  When we got on the nav net to boost for Eden I realized that it’s just down the road from Brainard’s Planet. I mean, twenty-three light years is actually an incomprehensibly vast distance, but on a galactic scale, or even that of human occupied space, it seems like it’s right next door. It got me thinking about something, something I hadn’t been able to figure out.

  Marcus and I shared the first watch again. When we came off I asked him, “Sir, do you mind if I talk to you about something?”

  “What is it?” he replied.

  “It’s about Drake.”

  He studied me for a moment and then
said, “Join me in my quarters.” He led me down the passageway.

  After he closed the hatch and offered me a seat he asked, “What’s the problem?”

  I wasn’t sure how I wanted to tackle this. Finally I said, “I was just wondering ... how Drake fit into the engine—after he was sick, I mean. How did you keep him quarantined?”

  “He was never part of the engine after he came down with the plague.” Marcus stated it simply. Even so, I had a very difficult time accepting it.

  “But, wait a minute ... How did you freewheel?”

  Marcus smiled ruefully and shook his head. “I put eighty kilos of dead weight in his spot to balance the engine.”

  I must have looked stunned. “But—but—” I started.

  Marcus held up his hand, “I know, I know,” he said, “The physical balance is the smallest part of the problem. A seven perspective star is not designed to work with one of the perspectives missing. I just shunted Drake’s load onto the rest of us and hoped for the best. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “And it worked?” I asked.

  “After a fashion,” he answered wryly. “We only missed Earth by three hundred eighty-two light years.”

  Thirty light years from Vesper plus the three hundred fifty-two from Vesper to Earth. “So you weren’t aiming for Vesper?” That was one of the things I couldn’t figure out: there were lots of inhabited worlds closer than Vesper to Brainard’s Planet.

  “Why would we? Steel doesn’t have any holdings there. Or friends. We needed to get home.” He mused for a moment, “I’m amazed it worked as well as it did. I was half expecting us to develop some bizarre secondary resonance and end up in another galaxy. Or another universe. I hope to hell I don’t have to do anything like that again.”

  I echoed his sentiment. The math is pretty complex, but theoretically they could have ended up anywhere. Pan-dimensionally anywhere.

  But it still didn’t make sense. I’d been thinking that in order for Drake to synch in with the nav net his bio-chip interface had to be functional, but if that were the case ... “So you never used Drake in the engine ...”

  “Not after he got sick, no.”

  “Then why did you keep him around? Why didn’t you let him— Okay. Let me start again.” I studied Marcus’ face as he gazed steadily back at me. Then I decided, why not? Ask the big question. Marcus had never lied to me. That I knew of. Still, I kind of led up to it gradually: “I was doing some research into the nature of the plague ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you know that quite a few people survived it?”

  “Well, their perspectives survived. Their bodies didn’t.”

  “Right. They uploaded onto the net and waited for new ones to be grown for them.”

  “That’s correct.”

  I looked at him, “Why didn’t Drake do that?”

  Marcus didn’t speak right away, but he never dropped his gaze; he looked square at me the whole time. He started, “A plague victim has to upload in the first few hours—”

  “Before the bio-chip interface degrades. Yes, I know. So why didn’t he upload as soon as he knew his suit was holed? Steel told me there’s some kind of alarm that goes off right away.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So?”

  “Well, he couldn’t very well upload from the surface, could he?”

  “Why not?”

  Marcus considered this for a moment, then he said, “I’m not sure where your confusion is stemming from, but perhaps this will help clear it up. You understand that he couldn’t upload onto Steel’s system?”

  “Uh, no. Actually, I thought he could.”

  “No. Steel’s system doesn’t have near the capacity needed for a comprehensive memory dump. I forget how many people uploaded back during the plague but it was only a few thousand.”

  “Around five thousand.”

  “Yes, that sounds about right. Well, how many were on the net back then? Thirty or forty billion, certainly.”

  “At least.”

  “Even with that many they were only able to handle those few thousand.”

  “So Steel’s system is just too small.”

  “It’s very capable,” Marcus answered, “but it’s not that capable.” He sighed. “We thought we had a workable procedure to cover the possibility of contamination. Archie and Drake had researched it quite thoroughly. According to their figures a person has about eighteen hours to upload from the time they’re exposed. We figured that would give us enough time to get them back up to the ship.”

  “But why? Why bother to go back up to the ship?”

  “We weren’t supposed to be on the surface. If Drake had uploaded from there that would have been it. The project would have been finished. Draco Traffic Control probably would have confiscated the Lightdancer and sent us all to the trades. Or worse.”

  I was incensed, “But Drake was—was—” Even after Lys had used the word I didn’t feel comfortable with it. “You mean to tell me that Steel kept him from uploading just to save her precious project?”

  “No, no. You don’t understand. Steel didn’t keep him from doing anything.”

  He was right. I didn’t understand.

  “It was really a tragedy,” he continued. “We should have gotten him up to the Lightdancer in time; we had the procedures in place. It was just—” He looked for words, or words to avoid, “I was in orbit, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think the pressure was just too great for everyone. We knew this might happen; we’d talked about it, prepared for it, but when it did ...” He didn’t want to judge them. He wanted to excuse them, to pardon them. “They were literally staring at ... death. I don’t think they were able to handle it. Emotionally, I mean.” He shook his head at the memories. “It was chaos down there. They wrecked one of the ultra-lights taking off so we missed the rendezvous. Then Steel didn’t want to leave anyone on the surface without a way up to the ship so they all piled into the other one and screamed west to meet up with the hook on the next orbit. It was so overloaded I’m amazed we managed to hook up at all. As it was, the second ultra-light wasn’t in any kind of shape to fly again. But it didn’t matter, they’d used too much time. Drake was off-line before they’d even made it out of the atmosphere.”

  Marcus’ face grew very solemn, very hard. “Perhaps you should talk to Archie about this. She understands the particulars of the project. Steel tells me that you have been informed of Alice’s condition. Archie knows the details of that as well. But in my opinion, what Drake did was an act of heroism, pure and simple. He sacrificed himself so that the project could go forward.” He sighed and studied his fingernails. “If there were a medal to award him posthumously, I’m sure Steel would do so, but I’m afraid that sort of practice has passed out of fashion.”

  It turned out I didn’t have time to talk with Archie. Steel had decided that, since I’d been an actor, she wanted to take me with her down to the surface of Eden. She must have decided back on Earth; that’s why she’d had my genome re-worked.

  The problem was that Eden was a completely insular society. It had been cut off from the rest of the galaxy since just after the Pleiadean War; no one had been allowed on or off the planet. In order to go there and interact with anyone, we would need to pass ourselves off as natives.

  That entailed a lot of research. I was spending all of my spare time learning about their culture, their history, and learning to speak a dialect of Systemic that hadn’t been used for almost a millennium. More than that: nobody was on the net there. They communicated with strings of graphic symbols that they had to draw by hand, one for each vocal sound they made, and even that wasn’t consistent. It was utterly arcane. There were only a couple of dozen of these little squiggles, but sometimes it took ten or fifteen just to form a single word! Madness.

  It was a fascinating place, really. Even the name: Eden. Of course there were a lot of planets around with names like that—Heaven, Himmel, Celeste, Shangri-La, Val
halla, the list is endless (it’s a long established fact that real estate developers will stoop to anything to sell property), but Eden was named for a different reason.

  The group that colonized and developed Eden was led by two people, Edith Stauber and James Wesley Burroughs. Stauber was a geneticist, Burroughs a nano-surgeon. They met while working on the team that developed the bio-chip. Highly respected scientists in their time, they won a lot of awards, had high-powered careers, all that sort of thing. However, after the advances in healthcare they were helping to develop seemed to be heading toward unlimited life extension, they became very concerned. Both were deeply religious—that much is clear—but it was hard to tell from their recorded works whether they objected more to man playing God or to the idea that, by extending our lives forever, we would never get to meet Him. However, this didn’t seem to stop them from re-booting several times.

  In any case, they decided that humanity wasn’t ready for immortality and set off to found a new society based on spiritual, not material, pursuits. They wanted to go off the net, too, just like the Yin. They were another group that thought the only way they could achieve their goals was to remain unpolluted by the hoi-polloi, the great unwashed— basically people like me. However, where the Yin felt they could attain a utopian society only by banishing masculine thought patterns, Stauber and Burroughs were simply afraid that the temptation to re-boot would be too great for their flock to resist if the option were available to them—that envy of immortals would tear their society apart.

  Lysistrata had been right about one thing: if it hadn’t been for the Pleiadean War, Eden would probably not have been allowed to exist. Power for the net was such an all-consuming goal in the early days that anyone who opted not to hook up was simply convinced to change their minds. The war changed all that.

  Although I wonder if the problem would not have eventually faded away by itself. You didn’t see people popping off to form insular religious societies these days; everybody was pretty well-adjusted to things. Even people in the trades; they might get upset from time to time—like that man in Kindu when Matessa was taken away—but, for the most part, they accepted things as they were.