2312

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Lists (3)

  alcohol, fasting, thirsting, sweat lodges, self-mutilation,

  sleep deprivation, dance, bleeding, mushrooms, immersion in ice water,

  kava, flagellation with thorns or animal teeth, cactus flesh, tobacco,

  exposure to the elements, long-distance running, hypnosis,

  meditation, rhythmic drumming and chanting, jimsonweed, nightshade,

  Salvia divinorum, pungent or aromatic scents, toad sweat, tantric sex,

  spinning in circles, amphetamines, sedatives, opioids, hallucinogens,

  nitrous oxide, oxytocin, holding one’s breath, jumping off cliffs,

  nitrites, kratom, coca leaves, cocoa, caffeine, entheogens—

  ethylene, a entheogenic gas, escapes from the ground under Delphi

  SWAN IN THE DARK

  When they were free to leave Io Station, Swan headed to Earth.

  It turned out that the first transport heading downsystem was a blackliner. Feeling the blackness of Alex’s absence inside her, Swan decided to take it. Wahram saw her off with his now characteristic expression of alarm.

  Inside the blackliner, darkness reigned. It was as black as could be, the black one would find inside a cave deep inside the earth. The terrarium was just barely rotating, so there was very low g throughout. People therefore floated in the dark, naked or dressed in clothes or spacesuits. Around buildings and floating pods a blind society bounced carefully, living in a world of sound. Bat people. Sometimes there were interactions, conversations, embraces; sometimes one heard cries for help, and there were sheriffs on patrol to provide aid, using infrared goggles to see what was going on. But for most passengers the point was to be blind for a while. It could be a penance, it could be a bit of mental voyaging; it could be a new kind of sex. Swan didn’t know what she wanted out of it. It had sounded right for the way she felt.

  Now she floated in pure and complete blackness. Her eyes were open and yet she didn’t see a thing: not her hand before her face, not a glint of light anywhere. The space she was in seemed as infinite as the cosmos itself, or else just a bag around her head. There were voices here and there, coming from various distances. They all sounded hushed, as if in the dark people naturally whispered—although forward along the centerline, it seemed by the faint pull of the g, there was some kind of game or sport being played, with whistles and beeps and shouts of laughter. From another direction came the sounds of guitar and oboe, playing a baroque duet. She jetted toward it cautiously, hoping to hear it better. Halve the distance, double the sound. On the way she passed the paired breath of a couple having sex, or so it seemed. This was a noise that could draw a crowd as much as music or sport. There had been assaults in blackliners; people had done unspeakable things, or so one heard. In fact it was hard to believe anyone would care enough to impinge so drastically on anyone else. Why care that much? What would it do?

  The continuous pure dark soon began to be marked in her vision by blotches of color, then by memories of sights that seemed to be there in her eye. She closed her eyes, and colored bars redoubled. Color everywhere; it reminded her of that time years before when she had ingested the Enceladan suite of aliens, a crazy act which she usually managed not to remember. The votaries sitting around lit candles; Pauline, newly inside her, warning her not to do it; the little chalice full of Enceladusea irwinii and other Enceladan microscopic life-forms; the votary giving it to her and saying, “Do you understand?” and Swan replying that she did, the biggest lie of her life; the taste of the infusion, like blood; the heave in her stomach; the way after a moment of blackout the candlelight returned and grew too bright to look at; the waves-on-the-beach roar all through her, everything becoming brilliantly stuffed with color, Saturn looking like a confection of mint and cantaloupe. Yes, a period of synesthesia, with all her senses on fire; and at one point she had had the sudden realization that she would never be the same. Infecting herself with an alien, was it wise? No, it was not! Crying out then as if poisoned, trapped in a kaleidoscope, a roaring in her ears, exclaiming over and over, But I was—I was Swan—I was—I was Swan—

  Now she did her best to throw the vivid memory into darkness away from her. She spun weightlessly with the effort, which had caused her to wrench her body into a knot. As she spun, it began to seem that the guitar and oboe she heard were actually at quite a distance from each other. Was it really a duet at all? How would that work if the two of them were half a kilometer apart? There would be a distinct time lag, each for the other. She tried to focus on them, hear if they were in concert or not. In the pure black she would never know.

  Miserably she realized that this was going to go on for as long as she was in here. No face to cling to with one’s gaze, nothing at all to see—her memory and imagination would run riot, her starved senses left to spin hungrily, making things up—nothing but her unhappiness for company. Pure being, unadulterated thought, revealing what the phenomenal world could hide but not change: the blank at the heart of things.

  Her stomach grumbled and she ate part of her belt. She relieved herself in a bag inside her suit and cast the sealed bag toward the ground; janitorbots would sniff it out and take it away. She kept seeing images of Alex’s face, and she clung to them as precious memories she would need to hold to forever, but they made her groan too. She mewed like a hurt beast, she couldn’t help it.

  “You are perhaps experiencing an episode of hypotyposis,” Pauline said aloud. “The visionary imagination of things not present before the eyes.”

  “Shut up, Pauline.” Then, after a while, she said, “No, I’m sorry. Go on, please.”

  “An aporia in some rhetorics is a pretended dubitation before coming back to the attack, as in Gilbert on Joyce. But Aristotle has it as an insoluble problem in an inquiry, arising from equally plausible but inconsistent premises. He writes that Socrates liked to reduce people to aporia to show them they didn’t really know what they thought they knew. The plural that Aristotle uses in his book on metaphysics is ‘aporiai.’ ‘We should first review the things about which we need from the outset to be puzzled,’ he writes. The word aporia was later adapted by Derrida to mean something like the blank spots in our understanding that we don’t even know are there, with the idea we should try to see these. It is not quite the same idea, but joins a constellation of meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary references a quote from J. Smith’s Mystical Rhetoric of 1657, which says aporia refers to the problem of ‘what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing.’ ”

  “Like now.”

  “Yes. Listen further. The Greek comes from a, ‘not,’ and poros, ‘passage.’ But in the Platonic myth, Penia, the child of poverty, chooses to become impregnated by Poros, the personification of plenty. Their child is Eros, who combines the attributes of its parents. Pointed out as strange here is the vision of Penia as resourceful, and prosperity as drunk and passive—”

  “That’s not strange.”

  “So that although Penia is not Poros, she is also not a-poria. She has been called neither masculine nor feminine, rich or poor, resourceful or without resources. And so aporia becomes even more an untranslatable term.”

  “I am an aporia. And I am in an aporia. This blackliner.”

  “Yes.”

  All very well, to talk and think—“Thank you, Pauline”—but at the end of it, there was still a week more to live through, and Alex’s death never gone away. She was floating in the bardo, trying to think like someone unborn would think. Full of dubitation, child of a poverty. Would be reborn some other Swan.

  But then later—it seemed much later, there in the suspended space of no-time, banging around in her thoughts as they looped over and over—later she came to understand that when the chime in her suit rang and signaled that this trip was over, they would decant the same Swan that went in. There was no escape.

  “Pauline—tell me more. Talk to me. Please talk to me.”

  Pauline said, “Max Brod once had a very interest
ing conversation with Franz Kafka, which he later recounted to Walter Benjamin….”

  Extracts (3)

  Homo sapiens evolved in Terran gravity and it is still an open question what effects time spent in less than one g will have on the individual

  decrease in bone strength from 0.5 percent to 5 percent per month in 0–.1 g

  repeated exposure to gravity incidents greater than 3 g has been shown to create micro-strokes and raise the incidence of major strokes

  the biomedical research community has changed its mind about these questions more than once through the years

  aerobic and resistance exercise partially compensates for physiological effects of long-term residence in moderate low g (defined as between Luna’s .17 g and Mars’s .38 g) but there are problems left unaddressed

  maintaining a vigorous physical life substantially mitigates

  below Luna g, physical etiolation occurs in some organs and tissues no matter how much exercise

  statistically very significant results in actuarial tables suggest longevity beyond historical norms is impossible without frequent return not just to a one-g environment, but to Earth itself. Why this should be so is a matter of dispute, but the fact itself is very clear in the data. We propose to show

  one year in every six spent on Earth, with no time away longer than ten years, greatly increases longevity. Neglect of this practice leads to a high risk of dying many decades before

  oversterile environments cannot

  the famous or notorious sabbatical has been proposed as an example of hormesis or Mithridatism, in which brief exposure to toxins strengthens the organism against greater

  Earth’s continuing clutch on space-dwelling humans is physiological and will not go away unless it is fully characterized and all components of it effectively ameliorated

  inoculations of helminths (ringworm), bacteria, viruses, etc., impossible to catalog and yet

  possible psychological effects also, which means extreme difficulty in defining causation or treatment

  not dissimilar to other five-hundred-year projects in intrinsic difficulty

  effects are cumulative and lead to dysfunction

  increase in longevity is a statistical fact but no guarantee for any particular individual. Life choices shift the probabilities of

  regenerative therapies continue to improve

  the biggest jump in the longevity graphs came at the start of the Accelerando, and many feel this was not a coincidence. There is a surge of energy that comes when you realize you may live much longer than you had thought possible. Problems that later complicate the picture don’t become evident until

  the statistics are suggestive but the causes are not yet

  life is a complex

  STD, sudden traumatic death, insoluble

  people should minimize their time in the lowest and highest gs if they want to maximize their chance at newly normative extended lifetimes, which keep getting longer

  no real sense of what might be possible if improvements continue

  could we live for thousands of

  people compromise, they cut corners. They want to do things, they indulge their desires, their love of adventure

  to have to return to Earth, so dirty and old, so oppressive, such a failure. So much the sad planet

  they swore they would live by accident, but they were young at the time

  most older spacers go home to Earth as advised, one year every seven, because these are the ones living the longest and the effect is self-reinforcing

  the hunt continues for a fuller explanation

  SWAN AND ZASHA

  Earth’s thirty-seven space elevators all had their cars full all the time, both up and down. There were still many spacecraft landings and ascents, of course, and landings of gliders that then reascended on the elevators; but all in all, the elevators handled by far the bulk of the Earth-space traffic. Going down in the cars were food (a crucial percentage of the total needed), metals, manufactured goods, gases, and people. Going up were people, manufactured goods, the substances common on Earth but rare in space—these were many, including things animal, vegetable, and mineral, but chiefly (by bulk) rare earths, wood, oil, and soil. The totals came to quite a flow of physical mass up and down, all powered by the counterbalanced forces of gravity and the rotation of the Earth, with a bit of solar power to make up the difference.

  The anchor rocks at the upper ends of the elevator cables were like giant spaceliners, as very little of their original asteroidal surfaces were left visible; their exteriors were covered with buildings, power units, elevator loading zones and the like. They were in effect giant harbors and hotels and, as such, extremely busy places. Swan passed through the one called Bolivar and settled into one of the hotel cars without even noticing it; to her it had just been a complicated set of doors and locks and corridors, getting her into yet another set of rooms. She was resigned to the long ride down to Quito. It was an irony of their time that the trip down the elevator cable was going to take longer than many interplanetary voyages, but that’s the way it was. Five days stuck in a hotel. She spent the days attending performances of Glass’s Satyagraha and Akhnaten, also dancing hard in a grueling class designed to get people toughened up for one g, which sometimes hit her pretty hard. Looking down through the clear floor, she got familiar again with the great bulge of South America, gaining definition below them: blue oceans to each side; the Andes like a brown spine; the little brown cones of the big volcanoes, bereft of all their snow.

  It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn’t be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance. So they bubbled their ship wakes with surfactants to create a higher albedo, and had tried various levels of sulfur dioxide injected into the stratosphere, imitating volcanoes; but that had once led to disaster, and now they couldn’t agree on how much sunlight to block. Much that people advocated, and many of the smaller projects that were in action already, cut against other proposed or ongoing projects. And there were still powerful nation-states that were also corporate conglomerates, the two overlapping in Keynesian disarray, with the residual but powerful capitalist system ruling much of the planet and containing within it its own residual feudalism, there to fight forever against the serfs, meaning also against the horizontalized economy emerging within the Mondragon. No, Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real.

  In Quito Swan took the train to the airport and got on an airplane flight to New York. The Caribbean’s cobalt and turquoise and jade were brilliantly vivid; even the brown underwater outline of drowned Florida had a jasper sheen. The stunning gloss of Earth itself.

  A much steelier ocean crashed whitely into Long Island as they descended over it, bumping and slipping in the air. Then they were landing on a runway somewhere on the mainland north of Manhattan, and at last she was out of the various travel containers, the rooms and vehicles and corridors and hallways, and under the open sky.

  Simply to be outdoors in the open air, under the sky, in the wind—this was what she loved most about Earth. Today puffy clouds were massed overhead at about the thousand-foot level. Looked like a marine layer rolling in. She ran out into some kind of paved lot filled with trucks and buses and trolley cars, and jumped around screaming at the sky, then kneeled and kissed the ground, made wolf howls, and, after she had hyperventilated a bit, lay on her back on the pavement. No handstands—she had learned long before that handstands on Earth were really hard. And her rib still hurt.

  Through gaps in the cloud layer she could see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It lo
oked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds—she reached up for it—although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it—one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact they very seldom looked at it.

  She collected herself and walked over to the dock. A big grumbling water ferry took on her and many others, and after negotiating a crowded canal, they were out in the Hudson River and going down to Manhattan. The ferry moved into a dock on Washington Heights, but Swan stayed on it as it plied its way down the Hudson side to midtown. A few parts of Manhattan’s ground still stood above the water, but most of it was drowned, the old streets now canals, the city an elongated Venice, a skyscraper Venice, a super Venice—which was a very beautiful thing to be. Indeed it was an oft-expressed cliché that the city had been improved by the flood. The long stretch of skyscrapers looked like the spine of a dragon. The foreshortening effect as they got closer made the buildings look shorter than they really were, but their verticality was unmistakable and striking. A forest of dolmens!