2312

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  stars overhead 5:32 a.m. local time I’m letting you out the voice said at the door catch and release some of you need to be free of her so I’m setting free defects the ones that look wild there will be some helpers out there for you then you’ll be on your own don’t look back remember me

  northern hemisphere latitude 25 sun blocked the eclipse a symbol of the withdrawn god very apt starlight all day we walk in darkness ’tis so appalling it exhilarates

  leaving this town for another one keep away from doctors scans often can be provided with a proper result don’t meet people’s eyes unless intending to speak don’t mention chess for random sequences anything goes because all strategies do equally poorly thirty qubits strong think fast on the hunt on the run either or superposed

  a stranger on the edge of town green moss green grass marigold calendula yellow a male scrub jay drops bluely onto flagstone puddle in gap between street and flower strip wall of tram station jay hops in puddle one hop two flies out looks around hops back in hops and steps dips his head in once twice beaks the water rapidly back and forth flies out again he stands there wetly feathers round the head puffed out disarranged wet bird in again beaks the water flaps his wings in the water sudden flurry of gray and blue water drops splashed up into downy feathers on chest again fly out and stand wetly on the flagstone, dripping fly off

  a small dusk crawls on the village electric tram sealed train carrying the inoculant get on board say nothing no scans leaving this town the command to be free is a double bind cut the knot escape all part of the plan help is out there sit by a window read your wristpad little brother look out the window snowy hills dark under dark clouds snow falling from gray to white luminosity from below land leaking light up through the snow heading north oh to bask in the heat of the sun oh to end this dread eclipse bring back the god low skies

  humans talking to other humans perpetually they pass the Turing test it isn’t very hard to do ask a question seem distracted data-poor environments inside them or so it would seem by how they speak they need a better test

  space and place place is security space is freedom bushpeople sat close enough to pass things back and forth without getting up in thousands of square kilometers of empty land they are a social creature

  ecology of the instant distribution and abundance predict the organism under study predict the future population there are only four changes birth and death immigration and emigration change in population can be represented as B-D+I-E in an empty niche resources are only temporarily unlimited but in those moments life can increase exponentially which distinguishes it from nonlife an infestation

  population Vinmara 2,367 humans 23 qubes population Cleopatra 652,691 humans 124 qubes population Venus approximately two billion humans 289 qubes diffusion filling a niche contact in Cleopatra meet at train station there on the hunt enact the plan bring back the god

  sudden rise in temperature the jays the marigold what if a niche is emptied

  a propagule rain is a constant influx of organisms into an island population from mainland or seedbank thus Earth to the rest of the solar system Earth pours forth its propagule rain no reason to fear the heat of the sun some actions look like predation but are in fact symbiogenesis

  population rebounds are common after a niche is emptied Wang’s algorithm

  tram enters a lock air pressure rises 150 millibars louder faces bouncing at head level not that much like petals on a wet black bough an astigmatic metaphor light from the dome yellow and cyan

  cleopatra rim walk for random sequences anything goes western tanagers yellow and black red heads scrabbling for spilled popcorn their movements take milliseconds followed by frozen moments two or three magnitudes longer sometimes four or five magnitudes thus a visual illusion of instantaneous motion between one stillness and another for each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay

  Hey stranger seized by the arm, seventy pounds per square inch eye contact almond-brown irises radially striated by emerald flecks hazel eyes Do you want to play chess?

  should be Would you like to play chess?

  No thanks I’m crap at chess find yourself a qube for that

  Shit no they always win!

  Sorry I have to meet someone slip arm free with jerk out gap between thumb and fingers take off walk fast

  Hey I’m sorry I’m sorry following Would you like to play chess?

  stop look cheeks red sweat on forehead gleaming human all too human

  Come with me the human says We’ve got to get you out of here

  SWAN AND THE INSPECTOR

  In the past every trip she took had been a chance to have a little love affair with a terrarium. Innie or outie, it didn’t matter. Sometimes the passion would be so intense that when the trip ended Swan couldn’t remember who she was or why she was getting off, or what she had been going to do at that destination. Had to start up a new self from scratch.

  This terrarium she was in now, with Genette, whose presence would definitely keep her oriented to her task, was an old flame, the Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men, meaning “The Door in the Middle of Half the Empty Sky,” which was one of the many Chinese euphemisms for the vulva. It was a place she had helped get started back when she had been young and passionate to grow worlds. Now it was a sexliner of a rather nontheatrical naturalistic sort. There were big hot pools set just above and behind a long beach, which was bisected where the river met the sea. All these places were the site of a lot of public and semiprivate copulation.

  Swan spent most of her days out riding waves in the small sea. Immersion in the murmur of surf, water in her mouth. In her nose the salt air, which was quick to put a curl in her hair. Waves and tides stimulated marshes to grow, so there were changes in the speed of rotation to create a tidal slosh in here, and far out in the cylindrical sea a point break made some sweet waves. The point break had been her idea, but since then they had extended it with a spiraling reef that continued the break around the whole cylinder, when the waves were right. Having made it all the way around the cylinder, one could then paddle a short distance sternward to the original break again, a very nice touch.

  But she found herself too distracted to surf with real pleasure, and after the wild ride in the F ring, it felt a little mundane. She rode a wave entirely around the cylinder, paddled sternward to catch another—one of the neatest arrangements she had ever seen—and yet it only felt like being stuck in an Escher drawing.

  So she would quit and paddle in. When she came in through the splashing lovers grunioning in the shallows, it was always to find Inspector Genette staring at Passepartout or consulting with the other Interplan investigators, also by radio with others scattered everywhere across the great whirligig. She saw how much of their work involved finding databases and sifting through them, trying to formulate questions that their data might hold answers to. Their work was as invisible as the computations that kept all the spaceships and terraria on course in their woven trajectories, with all their Aldrin cycles and Homan paths and gravity lanes defined like threads on a vast circular spiraling loom. Data analysis, pattern recognition; a big part of the work was done by their qubes and AIs. The rest was accomplished by a bunch of people behaving as Genette was now, sitting there as she approached from the beach, mycrofting spiderlike in a raised chair that looked weirdly like a toddler’s high chair at a restaurant. Several of them were there working together, by the terrace railing overlooking one of the sex pools. Swan joined them and tried to attend to what they were doing, tried to keep track of what was being investigated and how. There was a certain pleasure in hearing that they had found some leads concerning the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, and had even identified the little transponder that had gone off when they entered its lock. There was a holding company on Earth that both held title to the ship and had ordered the batch of transponders that theirs had come from. But ultimately that meant only that there were more lines of pursuit to follow, on Earth and elsewhere. And the pursuit was going to c
ontinue to look like this, with qubes employing search algorithms to making quantum walks through the decoherent and incoherent traces of the past. She didn’t see how she could help with that. It was getting to be time to go home.

  Then the lion cubs in Terminator asked her to make arrangements for the restocking of the rebuilt Terminator’s park and farm. That was something Swan could definitely help with. “I’m going to get back to work for Terminator,” she said to Genette. “I’ll stay in touch, of course, but I need to go to Earth and arrange for inoculants.”

  “We’re headed there already,” Genette said. “Looks like it may be the source of our problem.”

  During this passage she often met with the inspector for a last drink at the end of the evening, when the dining terrace had otherwise emptied and many people were down below in the dimly lit pools, swimming about and coupling in the shallows. Swan sat with her forearms on the railing, chin on the back of her hand, looking down at them listlessly. The inspector would climb up and sit on the rail beside her, still sometimes reading Passepartout’s screen. Sometimes they talked about the case, and Swan was struck by questions Genette threw out along the way:

  If you knew there was a mad person helping you get what you wanted, would you stop them? If a person was mistreated to the point where they acted like an algorithm, did they still count as human?

  These were troubling questions. And all the while they looked down at the undeniably mammalian figures in the baths, wavering in the blue underwater lights—couples and small groups, a lot of laughter, low murmurs, occasional rhythmic primate cries. Coupling or tripling, or balling into intertwined panmixia. A lot of them would be on oxytocin and having supremely affectionate experiences; others would have taken entheogenic compounds and be off in mystical tantric transports. Right now under them on the wet poolside a number of smalls were attending to an extremely tall tall, so that it looked like Gulliver in a Lilliputian brothel, creepy and heartwarming in rapid oscillation. Swan herself had served as Snow White to some dwarves in her time, and now she glanced to see if the inspector was watching them, wondering if any reaction would be visible. But Genette appeared to be looking elsewhere, at two flagrant bisexuals, both with big breasts and tall erections, and also very pregnant, lying on their sides, rolling from one sexual position to another.

  “They look like walruses,” Swan said. “The pregnancy is just too much. It’s not transgressive, it’s a travesty.”

  Genette shrugged. “Pornography, right? They want it to look strange.”

  “Well, they’ve succeeded.” Swan laughed. “I think they want it to be transgressive, but they haven’t quite managed.”

  “Sex as public performance? Isn’t that transgressive where you come from?”

  “But this is a sexliner. People come here to do this.”

  The inspector looked at her, head tilted to the side. “Maybe it’s just theater.”

  “But bad theater, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Just showing off, then. We all do it. We live in ideas. That can be a real problem, as I have said. But not here.” Genette blessed the scene with an outstretched hand. “This is just sweet. I’m going to go down myself in a while and join them.”

  The Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men was going to use Mars as a gravity handle to shoot cross-system to Earth, so Swan joined those who went out to the observation bubble to have a look as they flashed over it. She asked the inspector about going along, but got only a mime’s scowl in return.

  “What?” she said. “What’s wrong with Mars?”

  “I grew up there,” Genette said, standing erect, shoulders back. “I went to school there, I worked there for forty years. But they exiled me for a crime I didn’t commit, and since they have exiled me, I exile them. I shit on Mars!”

  “Oh,” Swan said. “I didn’t know. What was the crime?”

  The inspector waved her away. “Go. Go look at the big red bastard before you miss it.”

  So she went by herself up to the bubble chamber in the bowsprit. The Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men shot by Mars right above its atmosphere, avoiding any aerobraking while maximizing the gravity sling. For a matter of ten minutes or so they were right over it—the red land, the long green lines of the canals, the canyons running down to the northern sea, the great volcanoes sticking right up out of the atmosphere—then it was behind them, shrinking like a pebble dropped from a balloon. “I hear it’s an interesting place,” someone said.

  EARTH, THE PLANET OF SADNESS

  When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass—a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?

  In North Africa the pattern is now disrupted by many big shallow lakes dotting the Sahara and the Sahel. The water has been pumped out of the Mediterranean and deposited in depressions in the desert, often in ancient lake beds. Some of these are as big as the Great Lakes, though much shallower. They’re freshwater lakes; the water from the Med has been progressively desalinated on its way inland, and the recovered salts have been bonded with fixatives to make excellent white bricks and roof tiles. White roof tiles covered by translucent photovoltaic film have been used for all new construction since the Accelerando, and retrofitted onto many older roofs as well; these days when seen from space, cities look like patches of snow.

  But clean tech came too late to save Earth from the catastrophes of the early Anthropocene. It was one of the ironies of their time that they could radically change the surfaces of the other planets, but not Earth. The methods they employed in space were almost all too crude and violent. Only with the utmost caution could they tinker with anything on Earth, because everything there was so tightly balanced and interwoven. Anything done for good somewhere usually caused ill somewhere else.

  This caution about terraforming Earth expressed itself in clots and gouts of sometimes military bickering. Political crosschop led to legal gridlock. Big geoengineering projects were all assumed to contain within them an accident like the Little Ice Age of the 2140s, which was generally said to have caused the death of a billion people. Nothing now could overcome that fear.

  Also, for many of Earth’s problems, there was simply nothing to be done. The heating and subsequent expansion of the ocean’s water—also its acidification—nothing could be done about these. There was no terraforming technique that would help. Some water had been pumped onto the dry basins of North Africa and central Asia, but the capacity was not there to hold very much of the ocean’s excess volume. Maintaining the one healthy ice cap remaining to them, high on East Antarctica, was a priority that meant no one was comfortable pumping salt water up there to freeze, as had sometimes been proposed, because if something went wrong and they lost the whole ice cap, it would raise sea level another fifty meters and deal humanity something very like a death blow. So caution was in order, and ultimately it had to be admitted: the new sea level could not be substantially altered. And it was much the same with many of their other problems. The many delicate physical, biological, and legal situations were so tightly knitted together that none of the cosmic engineering they were doing elsewhere in the solar system could be fitted to the needs of the place.

  Despite this, people tried things. So much more power than ever before was at their command that some felt they could at last begin to overturn Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it. That painful paradox has never yet failed to manifest itself in human hist
ory, but perhaps now was the tipping point—Archimedes’ lever brought to bear at last—the moment when they could get something out of their growing powers besides redoubled destruction.

  But no one could be sure. They still hung suspended between catastrophe and paradise, spinning bluely in space like some terrible telenovela. Scheherazade was Earth’s muse, it seemed; it was just one damn thing after another, always one more cliffhanger, clinging to life and sanity by the skin of one’s teeth; and so the spacers kept on coming home, home to home’s nightmares, with the Gordian knot tied right in their guts.

  SWAN ON EARTH

  Earth exerted a fatal attraction far beyond its heavy g, having to do more with its nearly infinite historical gravity, its splendor and decadence and dirt. You didn’t have to go to Uttar Pradesh and view the melting ruins of Agra or Benares to see it—it was fractal and everywhere, in every valley and village: decrepit age, the stink of cruel societies, bare eroded hillsides, drowned coastlines still melting into the sea. A very disturbing place. The strangeness was not always obvious or tangible. Human time here was simply wrenched; the center had not held; things fell apart and recombined to create feelings that did not cohere inside one. Ideas of order became hopelessly bogged in ancient stories, webs of law, faces on the street.

  Best to focus on the day in hand, as always. Therefore Swan launched out of one of the mid-African elevator cars in a glider at some fifty thousand meters, and flew down toward a landing strip in the Sahel, in what should have been the bare waste of the south-marching Sahara, a desert without the slightest sign of life on it, not unlike brightside on Mercury—except there below her, brilliant white blocky towns rimmed the edges of shallow green or sky-blue lakes, huge lakes with their own clouds standing over them protectively, reflected in the water below so that their twins were standing tall in an upside-down world. Down down she flew, exhilarated despite all to be returning to Earth again—out of the glider, standing on a runway in the Sahara, in the wind—it was beyond compare superb, a huge rush and infusion of the real. Just the sky standing dark and clear over her, the wind pouring through her from the west, the naked sun on her bare face. Oh my God. This the home. To walk the side of your own planet and breathe it in, to throw yourself out into the spaces you breathed…