“Oh, I bet I can find a way in. I still have contacts with the Slan(t)ers.” This was a dubious old conspiracy-theory organization, scattered around the planet like a terrorist network, with whom George had had dealings long ago. “Small-world networks,” he would say. “Whoever you’re trying to reach, there is a Slan(t)er who knows another who knows somebody, and so forth. The Slan(t)ers are a bunch of old nuts. But then so am I.”
“But even if the climate modelers are mapping the hydrate issue, if the whole polar ocean is going to blow its lid, what is there to do about it?”
He snorted. “You design chuffing starships. Can’t you think of anything?”
“Not offhand,” I said heavily, “no.”
“Then start thinking. If you do dig into this business of the gas hydrates, if there’s a significant threat and if there is some way to stop it, you might do some good.” He winked at me. “And of course you will be building up a connection between you and Tom. But, you know, I think you ought to find some way of talking to your son other than through mega-engineering… In here.”
We had come to a gate in an iron fence. Beyond lay a park, with trees scattered over a lawnlike expanse.
We walked in, stepping onto the grass. George sighed with a stiff pleasure at the softness of the ground.
Small black shapes moved purposefully through the grass at my feet. They looked like ants, but I saw the flash of metal jaws and even the spark of tiny lasers; they were miniature bots, nano-gardeners, patiently tending the forest of grass around them.
I pointed them out to George. “Nobody cuts the lawn nowadays,” he said. “Pity. I always enjoyed the smell of freshly cut grass…”
We came to the shade of a tree, a sycamore. I helped George to the ground so we could sit for a while, leaning on the bark. George was breathing hard, and I realized with a pang of guilt that the kilometer or so we had walked was a long journey, for him. My feeling wasn’t lightened by the accusing glare of the robot.
The prospect was attractive, just trees and some low bushes and the grass. But further away I saw what looked like fencing, lines of rectangular panels turned to the sun. They were engineered trees. We controlled genomes so exquisitely that we no longer bothered to grow a tree and cut it down and chop it up; we just grew panels that could be snapped off, taken away, and used immediately. I’d read that in Sweden they had developed living houses, just sprouting from the ground with saunas attached. And in one Chinese lab they were growing whole books on trees, complete with text, like bundles of leaves.
When George got his breath back he sang a few lines from a plaintive song. “All the leaves are brown / And the sky is gray…”
“That sounds pretty.”
He shrugged. “This whole place is totally transformed from when I was a kid. See all these trees? They’re sycamore. And the undergrowth is rhododendron and Japanese knotwood.” He pointed with his stick. “There used to be a big old oak tree over there. Edge of the fifteenth green.” There was nothing left now but a hollow in the ground, faintly shadowed. “As a kid I started coming out here to meet a girlfriend who lived nearby. I’d cycle over and sneak in and read in the shade of that old tree. Sometimes I’d pinch golf balls that came sailing by and sell them back to the punters, but that’s another story.
“Well, I came back — Christ, I must have been in my fifties, your age — to clear up some last bits of business after my father’s death. I took a walk out here. And that old tree was dying. I always thought it would live forever, or at least outlive me. But it actually looked like it was bleeding; there was this awful tarry sap leaking out of cankers on its trunk. All the leaves were brown.
“Later I found out what it was. Sudden oak death, they called it. It was a kind of fungus that kills by cutting off the flow of nutrients in the trunk. You get these fungi all over the world, and where they come from they don’t usually do that much harm. But back then we were shipping plants and trees all over the planet, and bringing their pathogens with them. Now you only see oak trees in hothouses in Kew Gardens.” He waved a hand at the sycamore above him. “Instead we have this spindly crap. And all the wildlife you used to get with the old stuff has gone, too, woodpeckers and butterflies and toads. The world seems emptied out.”
I knew what he meant. Monocultural and silent, England was like an abandoned theater stage, the actors all gone. Much of America was the same.
“But when I first noticed that poor bleeding tree all I could think of was that silly old song. All the leaves are brown. But there is no warm L.A. sunshine to escape to, is there?”
“I guess not.”
George leaned back against the tree trunk and sighed. “Listen, Michael. I hate to sound like an old man, but you ought to know this. I’ve been thinking of getting myself written into a tree…”
I’d heard of this. The idea was you would embed a coded version of George’s genome into the DNA of a sycamore, say. It would make no difference to the tree: there were ways to do this without changing the length of the tree gene, or the protein it spelled out. But the tree as it grew would be a kind of living memorial, with every one of its trillions of cells carrying a genetic echo of George himself.
The robot said sourly, “He’s put it in his will.”
“I never thought you’d be so sentimental, George.”
“Sentimental? Maybe. I don’t have any kids, you know.”
That was the selling point, of course. Across Europe and North America childbirth rates were falling, and an increasing number of people faced the prospect of dying childless. So they were being sold other “ways” of having their heritage live on.
“I think it’s some deep genetic thing,” George said, his voice fading a bit. “I don’t have any regrets about not having kids — not for the sake of the kids themselves, because they never existed, and even if they had they’d probably have turned out to be arseholes. But behind me there is a queue of grandmothers and grandfathers going all the way back to some low-browed Homo erectus. Why should that long line end with me? It doesn’t feel responsible that I should let it all just go without a fight.”
On impulse I touched his hand; the flesh was papery, liver-spotted, but warm. “We share a lot of genes, George,” I said. “What, a quarter? You live on through me. And through Tom. But if you want the tree, I’ll make sure you get your tree.”
“Thank you,” George said.
The robot, standing beside us, whirred softly. I wondered what it made of our talk.
“So anyhow,” George said carefully, “it isn’t just Tom and gas hydrates that’s on your mind, is it?”
Immediately I understood what he meant. “John called you, too, didn’t he? He told you about Morag. That asshole.”
“He means well,” George said, a bit dubiously. “At least I think he does. That’s family for you. They can lift you up and smack you in the mouth with the very same gesture.”
“And what about you? Do you think I’m crazy too?” The robot looked at me warningly, and I realized I’d snapped. “Sorry,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said. “I believe you. Why not? The world’s a strange place; I haven’t lived so long and not figured that out. And you always seemed sensible to me. I have some advice, though. Go see Rosa.”
“Rosa?”
“My sister, your aunt. Look, her background is — odd.” He’d once told me how she’d been taken away from home to be brought up by a holy order in Rome, a peculiar, introverted society of matriarchs of some kind; he’d called it a “Coalescence.” “She left it all behind years ago. By the time she got back in touch with me she was ordained, and working as a Catholic priest in Spain.”
“I should go see a priest?”
“You think you’re haunted,” he said. “Who else are you going to consult? Look, I’ll set up the contact for you. She’s family. And I bet yours won’t be the only ghost story she’ll have heard in her life.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, uncertain. “And
she’ll be — umm, sympathetic?”
George said ruefully, “We Pooles don’t do sympathy, Michael, even those of us who take holy orders. But you may get some truth from her. If you want therapy, I’ll sell you the robot.”
“You chuffing won’t,” said the robot.
“So,” George said, “how are you feeling now?”
“I have all this stuff swirling around in my head,” I said hesitantly. “Tom. The hydrate deposits. The Kuiper Anomaly. Morag. Each of these seems extraordinary, or tremendously significant, or both. And they are all somehow focusing down on my life. Sometimes I wonder if there is some connection between them.”
His eyes, still the family smoky gray, were bright. “Of course there’s a connection. You. ”
I hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. I looked down at my body, my paunchy belly, my fat legs. “That makes no sense.”
“Actually it’s halfway to madness,” the robot pointed out.
“We aren’t all created equal, Michael. Let me tell you something. You know that the Kuiper Anomaly was discovered in the first decade of the century. But it actually showed up on some old records, images and infrared searches, dating from before the formal ‘discovery.’ It had just never been recognized for what it was. But we have a date, I mean to within a day, when that thing appeared on the edge of the solar system. And you know what that date is?”
Suddenly I felt cold. It was like the feeling I sometimes got before one of Morag’s visitations. “Tell me.”
“The Anomaly appeared on the day you were born. Coincidence?” George leaned back and laughed. “We’re a peculiar lot, we Pooles, a damn peculiar lot. Stuck in history. We can’t help it. Now, are you going to help me up, or do I have to rely on the robot?”
The toy robot watched as I struggled to help him rise, its blank artificial eyes fixed on me suspiciously.
I took the train back to London the next day. I would never see George in the flesh again.
The next day, back aboard Reath’s ship, they prepared to leave the Rustball.
Reath had promised to take Alia back to the Nord. After her disturbing experiences on the Rustball she longed to go home for a spell, back to the familiar sights and smells of the ship, its conceptual freedom compared to the dreadful chthonic rigidity of a world. And she longed to see Drea, above all, to put things right.
But before they left orbit Reath came to her. He seemed uncomfortable. Plans had changed, he said.
The Campocs said they felt she was unready to proceed to the next stage of her Transcendence training. She should see more of the post-human Galaxy, if she aspired to join the body that governed it. So she was to be flown off to some other dismal rocky speck of a world.
Not only that, it turned out, the Campocs wanted to come along, too.
She was bewildered. “Reath, can’t you — I don’t know — appeal to somebody?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Reath said. “I have to accept what the Campocs say. Otherwise there would be no point coming here.”
“But I want to go home.” Alia was embarrassingly aware of the whine in her voice.
Reath sighed. “I know. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”
She allowed herself to feel reassured.
But as she watched the Campocs’ ugly, beetlelike shuttle climb up out of their planet’s gravity well once more, she thought back over the exchange. Reath’s control of the situation had somehow been challenged by the Campocs, by Bale and the others. What could they possibly want? She worried at this disturbing development, a shifting in the alignment of the unseen powers that had taken over her life.
The planet to which the Campocs directed them orbited an undistinguished star some three hundred light-years closer to the Galaxy’s center than the Rustball.
The journey was uneventful. Alia spent most of her time immersed in the travails of Michael Poole, trying to shut out the unwelcome complexity of her own life. The Campocs weren’t good company; they kept to themselves throughout the trip. In fact Alia was relieved about that. She had felt uncomfortable with Bale ever since she had figured out that their intimacy must have been shared with his kin.
But, faintly suspicious of the Campocs as she had been since she had met them, she tried tentatively to use her new abilities to sense something of their thinking. It felt eerie to probe for the thoughts and feelings of others with no more difficulty than she might grope for an elusive memory inside her head.
But it worked. She could sense a kind of disciplined excitement shared by the Campocs. It was true they had never traveled much before; this jaunt away from the Rustball was a novelty for them. But there was something else under the surface, she thought, something darker she couldn’t bring into focus. It added to her vague sense of unease; the Campocs had had an agenda concerning her since she had arrived, but she still didn’t know what it could be, what they wanted.
No doubt they could sense what Alia was feeling, too. She tried not to think about that.
At their destination, as Reath’s ship entered orbit, they all crowded to the windows to see the view.
This new world was called Baynix II, after its parent star. It had no name of its own. “Or rather,” Reath said mysteriously, “those who live here have never told us what they call their world — if they are still aware they are on a world at all…”
It was another ball of rock and iron, more or less like Earth, with a scattering of oceans, ice caps, clouds. But where the Rustball had been almost all iron, this world was almost all rock, right to its core.
“It is a Dirtball.” Denh snickered.
Reath said, “Another result of the vicissitudes of planetary impact processing.” He speculated that Baynix II was more like the Moon than Earth, a secondary product of a giant collision, sculpted from the mantle of some larger world.
Alia peered down uneasily. All these worlds seemed to be the products of random acts of immense violence. She couldn’t imagine how it must be to live on such battered fragments.
They all crammed into a small shuttle. It parted from its mother ship, and Alia descended into the air of yet another planet.
There were oceans here, delivered as usual by comets, and a layer of air, mostly carbon dioxide. But the land was ancient, littered with the eroded shadows of features billions of years old, palimpsests of craters and mountain ranges. The native life, battered by radiation, had never progressed beyond single cells, hardy little radiation-resistant bugs. The circumstances of the Dirtball’s difficult birth had left it inhospitable: that shrunken core meant no significant tectonic renewal, and no global magnetic field.
And as far as Alia could see, humans had made little impression here. There were no cities, no farms. A couple of automated monitoring stations, themselves unimaginably old, stood silently, eroded and half-covered by drifting sand. And that was all.
“So why are we here?” Alia asked.
Reath grinned, and allowed the shuttle to dip close to the ground. “For them, ” he said, pointing.
Alia thought the formations on the ground were just geological. They were ridges, low, lumpy, and irregular, the same color as the sandy ground from which they rose. Reath gave her no more clues. Irritated by the mystery, and the sense that everybody knew more about what was going on than she did, Alia refused to ask any more questions.
The flitter landed. The gravity was a little less than standard, not uncomfortable. They disembarked, and waited for the local Mist to prepare them. Alia felt filters in her nose and throat close up against the corrosive dust suspended in the air, and oxygen coolly hissed into her lungs.
She walked up to the rocky formations. From the ground they looked like low, eroded ridges, pushing up from the flat earth. There might have been fifty of these features, lying parallel, their worn summits rising some forty meters into the air.
It wasn’t until she was almost climbing on the first of them that she recognized what it was. Suddenly it snapped into focus — that thin ridge that
pushed into the ground, those deep craters, the smooth bulge above — this worn morphology wasn’t random at all.
“Lethe,” she said. “It’s a face. A human face.”
The “ridges” were like statues of human forms, fallen statues each two or three hundred meters tall. Tremendous arms, legs, torsos rose out of the dirt. On one especially well-sculpted hand four fingers and a thumb were clearly visible. The drifting sand had half-buried the figures — or perhaps they had been left this way deliberately, for the sculptors’ own unimaginable purpose.
The great face before her was shoved into the dirt, so only one eye, one nostril, half of an open mouth was left exposed. Around half-open lips was a spill of sand of a different color, a denser, blue-purple hue, as if it had been vomited out of that rocky mouth. She could have climbed into the great socket of the one exposed eye. But there was an odd sense of watchfulness about that empty pit, she thought uneasily.
“It’s astounding,” she said.
Bale nodded. “I know.”
“But what is it for?”
Bale only smiled.
Reath seemed less interested in the statues than in the sand in which they lay. He squatted on his haunches and lifted a handful of dirt, letting it run through his fingers. “This was the bed of a lake, once. Or perhaps an ocean. These grains are clearly water-formed — see how they are rounded? But the ocean surely vanished billions of years ago.”
Alia confronted him. “What have these monuments got to do with me?”
“Monuments?” He got to his feet, a bit stiffly. Pooling ocean-floor sand in his palm, he rubbed the rounded grains gently. “Almost all these grains are of silicate materials. Silicon is ten times more abundant than carbon in Earth’s crust, you know — and presumably several times more abundant still here on this ball of sand. Have you ever wondered why it should be the scarcer carbon, then, and not the more abundant silicon, that emerged as the basis of Earth life?”
Alia snapped, “Everybody knows that. Because carbon can form multiple bonds. Carbon can make molecules that are complex enough to store a genetic code.”
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