Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Coming and Going was an immense low-relief sand sculpture flash-vitrified into a thousand square mile expanse of dunes and salt pans in the Sahara Desert. Among the images it featured were two standing human figures, one male, one female, both titanic and nude, devoid of pubic hair like Moira's previous Personae, but not bereft of the hair on their heads. The couple both did and did not look like contemporary human beings.

  The male figure in the tableau held up his hand as if waving. The two figures stood before the silhouette of an exploratory probe from the dawn of the age of space travel—which craft purportedly had also once borne, engraved on a plaque of much smaller dimensions, the same constellation of images that now provided the content for the vast sand sculpture.

  To the west of the representational portion with its human figures and spacecraft stood clusters of more abstract information: the position of the Sun relative to the center of the galaxy, the galactic plane, and fourteen pulsars; a schematic illustration featuring the point of origin of the space probe and its trajectory out of the Solar System; a diagram depicting the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, its spin-flip specifying a unit of length, a unit of time, and the binary digit 1—all three simultaneously, and all of those variants functioning asscale-units in the measurements expressed in all the other symbols on the great plaque of sculpted sand.

  “What do you say, Alphonse?” Hisao asked, over the neural-tap translator he and his research team had planted in his swimming friend's head. “You've seen a bunch of other contemporary art. How do you think this compares?”

  “The rest all swim in shallow seas,” Alphonse replied, in the cryptic way of dolphins. “Only Moira moves in deep waters. I would very much like to meet her.”

  Hisao nodded. He had figured the old dolphin—the oldest that had ever lived, now—might find Moira's art interesting.

  Alphonse, like Moira, could not be cured of mortality. All attempts to transfer the motes into nonhuman species ended with the motes immediately kill-switching themselves. A type of “apoptosis,” according to Wilena. Hisao didn't know how much longer the old dolphin would live—or Moira either, for that matter.

  “I think such a meeting can be arranged. I'll get on it.”

  * * * *

  Until he saw her again, Hisao didn't realize how long it had been since he'd last seen Moira. Her hair was white, like that of the old people in the old-time pictures Wilena once showed him. Moira's face was so wrinkled and wizened that when she smiled she looked like a creature of a species only distantly related to contemporary humans. She brought her son—their son?—Masao with her, too.

  Moira and Alphonse spent so much time talking about and modeling the schooling behavior of fish that Hisao found himself spending more time with Masao than he expected. The amount of action and attention Moira and the old dolphin could devote to a single topic frankly amazed Hisao, whose own focus tended to skip much more rapidly from one object to another—as his son's also did, he noticed.

  Although he was one year chronologically closer to fifty than to fifteen, Masao physically looked exactly the latter. Hisao found that he got along well with his son—though more like a slightly older brother than a father. Whatever it was that had caused Moira's atavistic aging, it had not been passed on to Masao—nor to his two siblings, Hisao gathered.

  “Moira,” he asked her over a drink that evening, when the two of them were alone for a moment, “why didn't you tell me Masao was my son? I might have liked to meet him, get to know him, before now.”

  “And why didn't you? I wasn't stopping you, yet you never introduced yourself to him. Wilena told me she told you about Masao, long ago. You've known about him for years—and never visited him.”

  “Maybe you didn't stop me directly, no, but you never came to me and said, ‘Masao is your son.’ Why?”

  “For the same reason I never told any of the fathers. You were all too immature—like everybody else. None of you were grown up enough to help me raise these kids.”

  “Masao says you disapprove of ‘children raising children.'”

  “It's not just that. Everything about the world the Intervention has made—it all struck me as somehow too flashy, too shallow, too trivial, by the time Masao was born. Much superficial knowledge, little real wisdom. Too many blessings damn the children.”

  “Masao hardly seems damned.”

  “No, but the more I looked into the historical records from before the Intervention, the more I saw a profundity of character and culture there that seems lacking in our own times.”

  “During the Dark Centuries, too? Mass atrocities and mass destruction don't sound like ‘profundity’ to me. We're still cleaning up the mess.”

  “Yet even that dark time showed mass creativity too! Since the Intervention, we don't need to think as deeply. No need to invent or create as much. Our world has been perfected. Cherise LeMoyne sprinkled fairy dust over the globe. Now, no matter how far they go, Wendy and Peter Pan never leave Neverland.”

  “I don't follow you.”

  “Did you ever talk with Wilena about LeMoyne, or about psychological neoteny, as they call it?”

  “A little.”

  “You might want to ask her about that a bit more, then. And I wouldn't worry too much about the time you haven't had with your son. You have the rest of forever to get to know each other better.”

  * * * *

  Hisao was sorry to see Moira and Masao leave—but not as sorry as Alphonse was, he suspected. And when, only a few years later, the dolphin was at the end of his earthly time, his last thoughts were for Moira.

  “Tell her to keep doing what she's doing. Tell her what is popular is not always true, and what is true is not always popular. Tell her not to spend so much time accepting others’ rejection of her work that she ends up rejecting their acceptance when it finally comes. And tell her, when she's at death's door, don't knock!”

  The neural tap interpreted the last with a sound almost like laughter, but Hisao couldn't be sure. He promised the dolphin he'd tell Moira what he'd said. Soon the dolphin fell silent in voice and thought, then passed quietly away. Alphonse was there, but he wasn't there, anymore.

  His cetacean friend's death left Hisao more saddened than he might have imagined. Out of that sadness he contacted Moira—who smiled and wiped away a tear at hearing the dolphin's last words for her. She promised she would dedicate her final piece to him.

  Over the following days and weeks and months, Hisao thought from time to time about what Moira had said, when last they talked in person. When he contacted Wilena again, it was to ask her about something Moira had suggested.

  “You told me one time that our hyper-specialization was connected to our being psychologically neotenized. What did you mean by that?”

  “The idea goes way back, before digiculture—perhaps to the middle of the twentieth century,” Wilena said, checking sources in their shared holovirt. “By the time of the Intervention, most scientific research, for instance, was already being done by teams of young, hyperspecialized problem-solvers and technicians—'whiz kids'—each of whom actually needed to fully understand only a small piece of the overall puzzle.”

  “Which is how most of us still work,” Hisao said, nodding. “Depth of individual understanding is far less important than the system of specializations put together in any team.”

  “Right. People who work in specialized teams need to be able to change jobs often, learn new skills and information, move to new places and cultures, make new friends in an ever-expanding social network. ‘Mature adult’ human animals—evolved to cope with small hunter-gatherer societies of just a few hundred people—were not all that good at meeting such challenges.”

  “So being ‘unfinished’ or ‘immature’ or ‘postponed'...”

  “Means increased flexibility of attitudes, behaviors, knowledge—all perfect for working in diffuse, temporary teams. Ramping up neoteny was a fast and simple way to evolve an adaptation—for adaptability!
”

  “What's that mean for Moira, then?”

  “An interesting question. The vast majority of us are Hypers—hyperattentives. We prefer rapidly changing environments, high levels of stimulation, multiple information streams, lots of rapid, specialized task-switching among team members. We get bored easily. I suspect that's less and less the case with Moira, as she's gotten older.”

  “I once saw her discuss the modeling of fish-schooling behavior with Alphonse—for hours on end.”

  “She's become a Deeper, then. A deep-attentive. Someone who can shut out the world and focus for long periods of time on a single complex problem or object without getting bored. Even before the Intervention, Deepers like Moira were already disappearing. The motes just helped us become more of what we were already becoming.”

  “How so?”

  Wilena searched for and then holoed up again the silent blond ghost of Cherise LeMoyne.

  “The release of the motes—and the Wellness Plague, with them—was the action LeMoyne took to address the problems she saw in her time. She intervened, as did her creations—even more so, since they continued to evolve after their release, even after her death. Taken together, the mote solutions to human population and consumption issues corrected most of the problems of the Dark Centuries, as LeMoyne hoped they would.

  “In retrospect, the motes’ short biomech life-cycles and swarm intelligence make them the perfect symbionts for long-lived creatures with individual minds, like us. Over time they have in some ways become more like us, and we have in some ways become more like them.”

  Wilena flashed Hisao a satisfied smile. He nodded slowly, pondering.

  * * * *

  After many more years, Moira exhibited Monument To Unageing Intellect—her strangest and most haunting work of all.

  From asteroidal material, she and her collaborators (their friend Jorge and his longtime love-partner Li, most prominently) crafted myriad, simple, solar-powered and mirror-skinned androids of human size: “Personae,” persisting again. Each Persona incorporated subroutines that mimicked human movement, along with sensors for navigating local space and an array of thrusters so that each “individual” seemed to fly as if in air, or swim as if in water—though all of them were in fact released some dozen degrees above the plane of the ecliptic, in the space between Mars and Jupiter, where they moved, after their complex fashion, together and apart.

  Moira had programmed each Persona unit with simple rules. Steer clear of anything that is not one of your local cohort members (avoidance). Steer so as to prevent crowding your local cohort members (separation). Steer toward the average heading of your local cohort members (alignment). Steer so as to approach the average position of your local cohort members (cohesion). From such rules the Personae, once released and put into play, quickly organized themselves into throngs of sweeping and shifting human forms, moving exactly like schools of fish or flocks of birds.

  “—or like the swarms of mote-machines which made possible our godhood,” Moira said, when Hisao stopped at the Moon to visit her on his way home from the exhibit. “Or yours, anyway.”

  He stared at her, unable to get over the way her body had changed. Slumped in her medical hoverbed, she looked deformed by gravity, even on the moon. Her white hair had grown much more sparse and her skin seemed paper-thin. Her sunken eyes moved inside their frame of starkly prominent cheekbones like hoverballs in smashcradles. Webworks of wrinkles and wattling flesh covered all that was visible of her face and neck. She seemed more than ever a creature of an alien species.

  Despite that, there still flared from her the beauty of afternoons in late autumn. Her eyes flashed, her smile seemed somehow more mellow, human, and humane than ever—though Hisao wondered how much of that might be from the hyperox levels in her rooms.

  “LeMoyne had her rules, I have mine,” she said with a chuckle. “You know what made me think of swarms and human motion? That hoverball game, long ago. Where you conspired with Alphonse to cheat! That was when I first thought there might be some similarities between the way the moteswarms moved and the way the crowds of us moved.”

  Hisao nodded.

  “Wilena says that the motes just helped us become more of what we were already becoming. That we're becoming more like them, and they're becoming more like us.”

  “Well! Good for Wilena! Given her work, she's probably about as close as you unagers can get to understanding what I'm trying to say—and do. You're in touch with her, then? What is my ‘personal physician’ up to these days?”

  “She's got a standing contract to join the crew of a long-cruiser, headed out to one of the habitable-planet star systems. A chief medical officer position.”

  “Wilena's going to join the diaspora? Ha! Do you know what the original name for long-cruisers was, when the idea was first developed? ‘Generation ships!'”

  “Not many generations being born on long-cruisers.”

  “And no one dying of old age, either. Won't be much for Wilena to do.”

  “Maybe that's why she's held off on leaving. But she can join a crew any time she decides to.”

  “Acch, she's just waiting for me to die first! I haven't seen much of my personal physician lately, but I bet I'm still of some professional interest to her.”

  “How's that?”

  “I'm dying of a defect of the heart,” Moira said with a laugh. “Whatever else any gods or fates may lack, they certainly do not suffer from an irony deficiency!”

  “Can't you just get a cardio-replacement?”

  “Wilena harped on that too. She's offered lots of options—mechanicals, clonally grown transplants, you name it. I turned them all down. That might be one of the things that's made her unhappy with me, of late.”

  “Why'd you turn them down?”

  “Wilena would keep me old and alive forever, if I'd let her. She'd turn me into a Struldbrugg, a Tithonian. That's not for me.

  “Nope, I think I'll keep the heart I've got, and go when it goes. She won't have to wait long, now. I've been running through tomorrows like there's no tomorrow, and pretty soon there won't be any left.”

  * * * *

  Not quite a year later, Hisao received his final message from Moira.

  “Dear Hisao: If you're seeing this, then I have died. To you, Wilena, and my children, I've sent very specific instructions concerning my funeral arrangements. I hope you do not find such specificity offensive. At first I thought people might have forgotten how to mourn—it's been so long—but it's not that, really. You can't forget what you've never known.

  "Do take the time to get to know our son Masao. For all I may have done in raising him, he's still part of your world, now.

  “Thank you for all I've learned from you. You and Alphonse showed me that the only product that finally persists is process. I could not have created my last work without learning that. The last piece has been better received than I would ever have dared to believe. Go figure.

  “I suppose I should say something grand at this late date, reveal some big secret of the universe, so here it is: the human heart is more than just some strangely chambered knot in us, pumping blood through a maze of meat plumbing, with just enough chaos in the beat and eddy in the flow to keep things going. In the end it will not allow us the comforting local illusion that there are separate events and separate objects. In fact there is no separation. Space, time, the universe—it's all one.

  “Whether you knew it or not, you taught me that, too—you and Wilena and everyone I knew. Thanks again.”

  As per Moira's very specific instructions, it was to the vicinity of her last great work that he, Wilena, and her children took Moira's body—encased in a titanium coffin sensored, motored, and programmed in much the same way as the bird-flock Personae of Monument had been, and into whose midst they released her little deathship.

  After the ceremony ended, Hisao and Wilena stood on the observation deck of the transport, watching the gray coffin drift off in the midst of inh
umanly perfect human forms, flawless mirror-skinned creatures moving and flashing like shoals of thought, swarms of mind.

  “How are you feeling?” Wilena asked.

  “I feel ... nothing.”

  “Numb. Yes. Same here. Back in the days when people grew old, they comforted each other at times like this by saying things like ‘Life goes on’ and ‘Nothing lasts forever.'”

  Wilena looked back to the monumental mobile sculpture as it moved through space before them, changing and shifting like a murmuration of starlings. Hisao nodded.

  He thought about that on the trip home to LaGrange Port. Once there, he stood beside Wilena as she prepared to board a long-cruiser for the stars.

  “Back in the days when they called them generation ships,” Wilena said, staring at the cruiser Hyperboreas out the observatory port, “someone who knew about both space travel and generations said that dealing with the speed of light barrier was like coping with the loss of a loved one: You never actually get over it. At best you just get around it.”

  She looked away from the ship, to him.

  “I suppose if we can take forever to get where we're going,” she said, “it doesn't much matter how fast or how slow we go.”

  He hugged her and bid her a quiet farewell. They both knew they would never see each other again. There was nothing to say, because there was everything to say.

  * * * *

  Life goes on, Hisao thought as he climbed aboard his big orange-and-red fireboard and slid his feet into the augmented footlocks. Nothing lasts forever.

  Hisao had dropped from orbit and astrosurfed deep into atmosphere dozens of times on half a dozen worlds. He knew how to play shooting star as well as anybody. His vintage big board had the best ablative shielding, deflection tiling, astrogation, and avionics tech to be found. Even on hard burn the board had enough fuel to let him bounce into atmosphere, bolide through, and skip out again—at low enough angle and high enough speed to avoid becoming a shooting star for real.