by Joe Haldeman
We were in an unadorned anteroom that had protective clothing on wall pegs. I followed her into a large room furnished with simple chairs and tables, and up a winding stair to an observation bubble.
“Wish we could see the ocean from here,” she said. It was dramatic enough. Wavering sheets of water marched across the blasted landscape, strobed every few seconds by lightning flashes. The tunic I’d left outside swooped in flapping circles off to the sea.
It was gone in a couple of seconds. “You don’t get another one, you know. You’ll have to meet everyone naked as a baby.”
“A dirty one at that. How undignified.”
“Come on.” She caught my wrist and tugged. “Water is my specialty, after all.”
The large hot bath was doubly comfortable for having a view of the tempest outside. I’m not at ease with communal bathing—I was married for fifty years and never bathed with my wife—but it seemed natural enough after wandering around together naked on an alien planet, swimming in its mud-puddle sea. I hoped I could trust her not to urinate in the tub. (If I mentioned it, she would probably turn scientific and tell me that a healthy person’s urine is sterile. I know that. But there is a time and a receptacle for everything.)
On Seldene, I knew, an unattached man and woman in this situation would probably have had sex even if they were only casual acquaintances, let alone fellow artists. She was considerate enough not to make any overtures, or perhaps (I thought at the time) not greatly stimulated by the sight of muscular men. In the shower before bathing, she offered to scrub my back, but left it at that. I helped her strip off the body paint from her back. It was a nice back to study, pronounced lumbar dimples, small waist. Under more restrained circumstances, it might have been I who made an overture. But one does not ask a woman when refusal would be awkward.
Talking while we bathed, I learned that some of her people, when they become wealthy enough to retire, choose to work on their art full-time, but they’re considered eccentric, even outcasts, egotists. White Hill expected one of them to be chosen for the contest, and wasn’t even going to apply. But the Earthling judge saw one of her installations and tracked her down.
She also talked about her practical work in dealing with personality disorders and cognitive defects. There was some distress in her voice when she described that to me. Plugging into hurt minds, sharing their pain or blankness for hours. I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to bring up the aspect that most interested me, a kind of ontological prurience: what is it like to actually be another person; how much of her, or him, do you take away? If you do it often enough, how can you know which parts of you are the original you?
And she would be plugged in to more than one person at once, at times, the theory being that people with similar disorders could help each other, swarming around in the therapy room of her brain. She would fade into the background, more or less unable to interfere, and later analyze how they had interacted.
She had had one particularly unsettling experience, where through a planetwide network, she had interconnected more than a hundred congenitally retarded people. She said it was like a painless death. By the time half of them had plugged in, she had felt herself fade and wink out. Then she was reborn with the suddenness of a slap. She had been dead for about ten hours.
But only connected for seven. It had taken technicians three hours to pry her out of a persistent catatonia. With more people, or a longer period, she might have been lost forever. There was no lasting harm, but the experiment was never repeated.
It was worth it, she said, for the patients’ inchoate happiness afterwards. It was like a regular person being given supernatural powers for half a day—powers so far beyond human experience that there was no way to talk about them, but the memory of it was worth the frustration.
After we got out of the tub, she showed me to our wardrobe room: hundreds of white robes, identical except for size. We dressed and made tea and sat upstairs, watching the storm rage. It hardly looked like an inhabitable planet outside. The lightning had intensified so that it crackled incessantly, a jagged insane dance in every direction. The rain had frozen to white gravel somehow. I asked the building, and it said that the stuff was called granizo or, in English, hail. For a while it fell too fast to melt, accumulating in white piles that turned translucent.
Staring at the desolation, White Hill said something that I thought was uncharacteristically modest. “This is too big and terrible a thing. I feel like an interloper. They’ve lived through centuries of this, and now they want us to explain it to them?”
I didn’t have to remind her of what the contest committee had said, that their own arts had become stylized, stunned into a grieving conformity. “Maybe not to explain—maybe they’re assuming we’ll fail, but hope to find a new direction from our failures. That’s what that oldest woman, Norita, implied.”
White Hill shook her head. “Wasn’t she a ray of sunshine? I think they dragged her out of the grave as a way of keeping us all outside the dome.”
“Well, she was quite effective on me. I could have spent a few days investigating Amazonia, but not with her as a native guide.” Norita was about as close as anyone could get to being an actual native. She was the last survivor of the Five Families, the couple of dozen Earthlings who, among those who were offworld at the time of the nanoplague, were willing to come back after robots constructed the isolation domes.
In terms of social hierarchy, she was the most powerful person on Earth, at least on the actual planet. The class system was complex and nearly opaque to outsiders, but being a descendant of the Five Families was a prerequisite for the highest class. Money or political power would not get you in, although most of the other social classes seemed associated with wealth or the lack of it. Not that there were any actual poor people on Earth; the basic birth dole was equivalent to an upper-middle-class income on Petros.
The nearly instantaneous destruction of ten billion people did not destroy their fortunes. Most of the Earth’s significant wealth had been off-planet, anyhow, at the time of the Sterilization. Suddenly it was concentrated into the hands of fewer than two thousand people.
Actually, I couldn’t understand why anyone would have come back. You’d have to be pretty sentimental about your roots to be willing to spend the rest of your life cooped up under a dome, surrounded by instant death. The salaries and amenities offered were substantial, with bonuses for earthborn workers, but it still doesn’t sound like much of a bargain. The ships that brought the Five Families and the other original workers to Earth left loaded down with sterilized artifacts, not to return for exactly one hundred years.
Norita seemed like a familiar type to me, since I come from a culture also rigidly bound by class. “Old money, but not much of it” sums up the situation. She wanted to be admired for the accident of her birth and the dubious blessing of a torpid longevity, rather than any actual accomplishment. I didn’t have to travel 33 light-years to enjoy that kind of company.
“Did she keep you away from everybody?” White Hill said.
“Interposed herself. No one could act naturally when she was around, and the old dragon was never not around. You’d think a person her age would need a little sleep.”
“‘She lives on the blood of infants,’ we say.”
There was a phone chime, and White Hill said “Bono” as I said “Chå.” Long habits. Then we said Earth’s “Hola” simultaneously.
The old dragon herself appeared. “I’m glad you found shelter.” Had she been eavesdropping? No way to tell from her tone or posture. “An administrator has asked permission to visit with you.”
What if we said no? White Hill nodded, which means yes on Earth. “Granted,” I said.
“Very well. He will be there shortly.” She disappeared. I suppose the oldest person on a planet can justify not saying hello or good-bye. Only so much time left, after all.
“A physical visit?” I said to White Hill. “Through this weather?”
She shrugged. “Earthlings.”
After a minute there was a “ding” sound in the anteroom, and we walked down to see an unexpected door open. What I’d thought was a hall closet was an airlock. He’d evidently come underground.
Young and nervous and moving awkwardly in plastic. He shook our hands in an odd way. Of course we were swimming in deadly poison. “My name is Warm Dawn. Zephyr-boulder-brook.”
“Are we cousins through Zephyr?” White Hill asked.
He nodded quickly. “An honor, my lady. Both of my parents are Seldenian, my gene-mother from your Galan.”
A look passed over her that was pure disbelieving chauvinism: Why would anybody leave Seldene’s forests, farms, and meadows for this sterile death trap? Of course she knew the answer. The major import and export, the only crop, on Earth, was money.
“I wanted to help both of you with your planning. Are you going to travel at all, before you start?”
White Hill made a noncommittal gesture. “There are some places for me to see,” I said. “The Pyramids, Chicago, Rome. Maybe a dozen places, twice that many days.” I looked at her. “Would you care to join me?”
She looked straight at me, wheels turning. “It sounds interesting.”
The man took us to a viewscreen in the great room and we spent an hour or so going over routes and making reservations. Travel was normally by underground vehicle, from dome to dome, and if we ventured outside unprotected, we would of course have to go through the purging before we were allowed to continue. Some people need a day or more to recover from that, so we should put that into the schedule, if we didn’t want to be hobbled, like him, with plastic.
Most of the places I wanted to see were safely under glass, even some of the Pyramids, which surprised me. Some, like Ankgor Wat, were not only unprotected but difficult of access. I had to arrange for a flyer to cover the thousand kaymetras, and schedule a purge. White Hill said she would wander through Hanoi, instead.
I didn’t sleep well that night, waking often from fantastic dreams, the nanobeasts grown large and aggressive. White Hill was in some of the dreams, posturing sexually.
By the next morning the storm had gone away, so we crossed over to Amazonia, and I learned firsthand why one might rather sit in a hotel room with a nice book than go to Ankgor Wat, or anywhere that required a purge. The external part of the purging was unpleasant enough, even with pain medication, all the epidermis stripped and regrown. The inside part was beyond description, as the nanophages could be hiding out anywhere. Every opening into the body had to be vacuumed out, including the sense organs. I was not awake for that part, where the robots most gently clean out your eye sockets, but my eyes hurt and my ears rang for days. They warned me to sit down the first time I urinated, which was good advice, since I nearly passed out from the burning pain.
White Hill and I had a quiet supper of restorative gruel together, and then crept off to sleep for half a day. She was full of pep the next morning, and I pretended to be at least sentient, as we wandered through the city making preparations for the trip.
After a couple of hours I protested that she was obviously trying to do in one of her competitors; stop and let an old man sit down for a minute.
We found a bar that specialized in stimulants. She had tea and I had bhan, a murky warm drink served in a large nut shell, coconut. It tasted woody and bitter, but was restorative.
“It’s not age,” she said. “The purging seems a lot easier the second time you do it. I could hardly move, all the next day, the first time.”
Interesting that she didn’t mention that earlier. “Did they tell you it would get easier?”
She nodded, then caught herself and wagged her chin horizontally, Earth-style. “Not a word. I think they enjoy our discomfort.”
“Or like to keep us off guard. Keeps them in control.” She made the little kissing sound that’s Lortian for agreement and reached for a lemon wedge to squeeze into her tea. The world seemed to slow slightly, I guess from whatever was in the bhan, and I found myself cataloging her body microscopically. A crescent of white scar tissue on the back of a knuckle, fine hair on her forearm, almost white, her shoulders and breasts moving in counterpoised pairs, silk rustling, as she reached forward and back and squeezed the lemon, sharp citrus smell and the tip of her tongue between her thin lips, mouth slightly large. Chameleon hazel eyes, dark green now because of the decorative ivy wall behind her.
“What are you staring at?”
“Sorry, just thinking.”
“Thinking.” She stared at me in return, measuring. “Your people are good at that.”
After we’d bought the travel necessities we had the packages sent to our quarters and wandered aimlessly. The city was comfortable, but had little of interest in terms of architecture or history, oddly dull for a planet’s administrative center. There was an obvious social purpose for its blandness—by statute, nobody was from Amazonia; nobody could be born there or claim citizenship. Most of the planet’s wealth and power came there to work, electronically if not physically, but it went home to some other place.
A certain amount of that wealth was from interstellar commerce, but it was nothing like the old days, before the war. Earth had been a hub, a central authority that could demand its tithe or more from any transaction between planets. In the period between the Sterilization and Earth’s token rehabitation, the other planets made their own arrangements with one another, in pairs and groups. But most of the fortunes that had been born on Earth returned here.
So Amazonia was bland as cheap bread, but there was more wealth under its dome than on any two other planets combined. Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.
Two other artists had come in, from Auer and Shwa, and once they were ready, we set out to explore the world by subway. The first stop that was interesting was the Grand Canyon, a natural wonder whose desolate beauty was unaffected by the Sterilization.
We were amused by the guide there, a curious little woman who rattled on about the Great Rift Valley on Mars, a nearby planet where she was born. White Hill had a lightbox, and while the Martian lady droned on we sketched the fantastic colors, necessarily loose and abstract because our fingers were clumsy in clinging plastic.
We toured Chicago, like the Grand Canyon, wrapped in plastic. It was a large city that had been leveled in a local war. It lay in ruins for many years, and then, famously, was rebuilt as a single huge structure from those ruins. There’s a childish or drunken ad hoc quality to it, a scarcity of right angles, a crazy-quilt mixture of materials. Areas of stunning imaginative brilliance next to juryrigged junk. And everywhere bones, the skeletons of ten million people, lying where they fell. I asked what had happened to the bones in the old city outside of Amazonia. The guide said he’d never been there, but he supposed that the sight of them upset the politicians, so they had them cleaned up. “Can you imagine this place without the bones?” he asked. It would be nice if I could.
The other remnants of cities in that country were less interesting, if no less depressing. We flew over the east coast, which was essentially one continuous metropolis for thousands of kaymetras, like our coast from New Haven to Stargate, rendered in sterile ruins.
The first place I visited unprotected was Giza, the Great Pyramids. White Hill decided to come with me, though she had to be wrapped up in a shapeless cloth robe, her face veiled, because of local religious law. It seemed to me ridiculous, a transparent tourism ploy. How many believers in that old religion could have been offplanet when the Earth died? But every female was obliged at the tube exit to go into a big hall and be fitted with a chador robe and veil before a man could be allowed to look at her.
(We wondered whether the purging would be done completely by women. The technicians would certainly see a lot of her uncovered during that excruciation.)
They warned us it was unseasonably hot outside. Almost too hot to breathe, actually, during the day. We accomplished most of our sigh
tseeing around dusk or dawn, spending most of the day in air-conditioned shelters.
Because of our special status, White Hill and I were allowed to visit the Pyramids alone, in the dark of the morning. We climbed up the largest one and watched the sun mount over desert haze. It was a singular time for both of us, edifying but something more.
Coming back down, we were treated to a sandstorm, khamsin, which actually might have done the first stage of purging if we had been allowed to take off our clothes. It explained why all the bones lying around looked so much older than the ones in Chicago; they normally had ten or twelve of these sandblasting storms every year. Lately, with the heat wave, the khamsin came weekly or even more often.
Raised more than five thousand years ago, the Pyramids were the oldest monumental structures on the planet. They actually held as much fascination for White Hill as for me. Thousands of men moved millions of huge blocks of stone, with nothing but muscle and ingenuity. Some of the stones were mined a thousand kaymetras away, and floated up the river on barges.
I could build a similar structure, even larger, for my contest entry, by giving machines the right instructions. It would be a complicated business, but easily done within the two-year deadline. Of course there would be no point to it. That some anonymous engineer had done the same thing within the lifetime of a king, without recourse to machines—I agreed with White Hill: that was an actual marvel.
We spent a couple of days outside, traveling by surface hoppers from monument to monument, but none was as impressive. I suppose I should have realized that and saved Giza for last.
We met another of the artists at the Sphinx, Lo Tan-Six, from Pao. I had seen his work on both Pao and ThetaKent, and admitted there was something to be admired there. He worked in stone, too, but was more interested in pure geometric forms than I was. I think stone fights form, or imposes its own tensions on the artist’s wishes.
