by Drew Ford
As the last energy of the universe is spent, as all potential and all kinesis bottoms out at a useless average, the fractions of seconds become clipped, their qualities altered. Time advances with an irregular jerk, truly like an off-center wheel.
Agreement is reached. Law and persuasion even now have some force.
“Vasily. I haven’t thought about you in ever so long.”
“Elisaveta, is that you?”
I cannot see her. I sense a total lack of emotion in her words. And why not?
“Not your Elisaveta, Vasily. But I hold her memories and some of her patterns.”
“You’ve been alive for billions of years?”
I receive a condensed impression of a hundred million sisters, all related to Elisaveta, stored at different times, like a huge library of past selves. The final tributary she has become, now an important part of the Coordinator, refers to her past selves much as a grown woman might open childhood diaries. The past selves are kept informed, to the extent that being informed does not alter their essential natures.
How differently my own descendant self behaves, sealing away a small part of the past as a reminder, but never consulting it. How perverse for a mind that reveres the past! Perhaps what it reveres is form, not actuality . . .
“Why do you want to speak with me?” Elisaveta asks. Which Elisaveta, from which time, I cannot tell right away.
“I think . . . they seem to think it’s important. A disagreement, something that went wrong.”
“They are seeking justification through you, a self stored billions of years ago. They want to be told that their final efforts have meaning. How like the Vasily I knew.”
“It’s not my doing! I’ve been inactive . . . Were we divorced?”
“Yes.” Sudden realization changes the tone of this Elisaveta’s voice. “You were stored before we divorced?”
“Yes! How long after . . . were you stored?”
“A century, maybe more,” she answers. With some wonder, she says, “Who could have known we would live forever?”
“When I saw you last, we loved each other. We had children . . .”
“They died with the Libraries,” she says.
I do not feel physical grief, the body’s component of sadness and rage at loss, but the news rocks me, even so. I retreat to my gray cubicle. What happened to my children, in my time? What did they become to me, and I to them? Did they have children, grandchildren, and after our divorce, did they respect me enough to let me visit my grandchildren . . .? But it’s all lost now, and if they kept records of their ancient selves—records of what had truly been my children—that is gone, too.
My children! They have survived all this time, and yet I have missed them.
They are dead.
Elisaveta regards my grief with some wonder and finds it sympathetic. I feel her warm to me slightly. “They weren’t really our children any longer, Vasily. They became something quite different, as have you and I. But this you—you’ve been kept like a butterfly in a collection. How sad.”
She seeks me out and takes on a bodily form. It is not the shape of the Elisaveta I knew. She once built a biomechanical body to carry her thoughts. This is the self-image she carries now, of a mind within a primitive, woman-shaped soma.
“What happened to us?” I ask, my agony apparent to her, to all who listen.
“Is it that important to you?”
“Can you explain any of this?” I ask. I want to bury myself in her bosom, to hug her. I am so lost and afraid I feel like a child, and yet my pride keeps me together.
“I was your student, Vasily. Remember? You browbeat me into marrying you. You poured learning into my ear day and night, even when we made love. You were so full of knowledge. You spoke nine languages. You knew all there was to know about Schopenhauer and Hegel and Marx and Wittgenstein. You did not listen to what was important to me.”
I want to draw back; it is impossible to cringe. This I recognize. This I remember. But the Elisaveta I knew had come to accept me, my faults and my learning, joyously; had encouraged me to open up with her. I had taught her a great deal.
“You gave me absolutely no room to grow, Vasily.”
The enormous triviality of this conversation, at the end of time, strikes me, and I want to laugh out loud. Not possible. I stare at this monstrous Elisaveta, so bitter and different . . . And now, to me, shaded by her indifference.
“I feel like I’ve been half a dozen men, and we’ve all loved you badly,” I say, hoping to sting her.
“No. Only one. You became angry when I disagreed with you. I asked for more freedom to explore . . . You said there was really little left to explore. Even in the last half of the twenty-first century, Vasily, you said we had found all there was to find, and everything thereafter would be mere details. When I had my second child, it began. I saw you through the eyes of my infant daughter, saw what you would do to her, and I began to grow apart from you. We separated, then divorced, and it was for the best. For me, at any rate; I can’t say that you ever understood.”
We seem to stand in that gray cubicle, that comfortable simplicity with which I surrounded myself when first awakened.
Elisaveta, taller, stronger, face more seasoned, stares at me with infinitely more experience. I am outmatched.
Her expression softens. “But you didn’t deserve this, Vasily. You mustn’t blame me for what your tributary has done.”
“I am not he . . . It. It is not me. And you are not the Elisaveta I know!”
“You wanted to keep me forever the student you first met in your classroom. Do you see how futile that is now?”
“Then what can we love? What is there left to attach to?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t much matter, does it? There’s no more time left to love or not to love. And love has become a vastly different thing.”
“We reach this peak . . . of intelligence, of accomplishment, immortality . . .”
“Wait.” Elisaveta frowns and tilts her head, as if listening; lifts her finger in question and listens again to voices I do not hear. “I begin to understand your confusion,” she says.
“What?”
“This is not a peak, Vasily. This is a backwater. We are simply all that’s left after a long, dreadful attenuation. The greater, more subtle galaxies of Libraries ended themselves a hundred million years ago.”
“Suicide?”
“They saw the very end we contemplate now. They decided that if our kind of life had no hope of escaping the Proof—the Proof these teachers helped fix in all our thoughts—then it was best not to send a part of ourselves into the next universe. We are what’s left of those who disagreed . . .”
“My tributary did not tell me this.”
“Hiding the truth from yourself even now.”
I hold my hands out to her, hoping for pity, but this Elisaveta has long since abandoned pity. I desperately need to activate some fragment of love within her. “I am so lost . . .”
“We are all lost, Vasily. There is only one hope.”
She turns and opens a broad door on one side of my cubicle, where I originally placed the window to the outside. “If we succeed at this,” she says, “then we are better than those great souls. If we fail, they were right: better that nothing from our reality crosses the Between.”
I admire her for her knowledge, then, for being kept so well informed. But I resent that she has advanced beyond me, has no need for me.
The tributaries watch with interest, like voyeurs.
(“Perhaps there is a chance,”) my descendant self says in a private sending.
“I see why you divorced me,” I say sullenly.
“You were a tyrant and a bully. When you were stored—before your heart replacement, I remember now . . . When you were stored, you and I had not yet grown so far apart. We would. It was inevitable.”
“The Proof is very convincing,” I tell Elisaveta. “Perhaps this is futile.”
“You simply h
ave no say, Vasily. The effort is being made.”
I have touched her, but it is not pity I arouse, and certainly not love.
It is disgust.
Through the window, Elisaveta and I see a portion of the plain. On it, the experiments have congealed into a hundred, a thousand, smooth, slowly pulsing shapes. Above them all looms the shadow of the Coordinator. I feel a bridge being made, links being established. I sense panic in my descendant self, who works without the knowledge of the other tributaries.
Then I am asked, “Will you become part of the experiment?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are the judgment engine.”
“Now I must go,” Elisaveta says. “We will all die soon. Neither you nor I are in the final self. No part of the teachers, or the Coordinator, will cross the Between.”
“All futile, then,” I say.
“Why so, Vasily? When I was young, you told me that change was an evil force, and that you longed for an eternal college, where all learning could be examined at leisure, without pressure. You’ve found that. Your tributary self has had billions of years to study the unchanging truths. And to infuse them into new tributaries. You’ve had your heaven, and I’ve had mine. Away from you, among those who nurture and respect.”
I am left with nothing to say. Then, unexpectedly, the figure of Elisaveta reaches out with a nonexistent hand and touches my unreal cheek. For a moment, between us, there is something like the contact of flesh on flesh. I feel her fingers. She feels my cheek. Despite her words, the love has not died completely.
She fades from the cubicle. I rush to the window, to see if I can make out the Coordinator, but the shadow, the mercury-liquid cloud, has already vanished.
“They will fail,” the We-ness says. It surrounds me with its mind, its persuasion, greater in scale than a human of my time to an ant. “This shows the origin of their folly. We have justified our existence.”
(You can still cross. There is still a connection between you. You can judge the experiment, go with the Endtime Work Coordinator.)
I watch the plain, the joined shapes. They are extraordinarily beautiful, like condensed cities or civilizations or entire histories.
The sunlight dims, light rays jerk in our sight, in our fading scales of time.
(Will you go?)
“She doesn’t need me . . .” I want to go with Elisaveta. I want to reach out to her and shout, “I see! I understand!” But there is still sadness and self-pity. I am, after all, too small for her.
(You may go. Persuade. Carry us with you.)
And billions of years too late—
Shards of Seconds
We know now that the error lies in the distant past, a tendency of the Coordinator, who has gathered tributaries of like character. As did the teachers. The past still dominates, and there is satisfaction in knowing We, at least, have not committed any errors, have not fallen into folly.
We observe the end with interest. Soon, there will be no change. In that, there is some cause for exultation. Truly, We are tired.
On the bubbling remains of the School World, the students in their Berkus continue to the last instant with the experiment, and We watch from the cracked and cooling hill.
Something huge and blue and with many strange calm aspects rises from the field of experiments. It does not remind us of anything We have seen before.
It is new.
The Coordinator returns, embraces it, draws it away.
* * *
(“She does not tell the truth. Parts of the Endtime Coordinator must cross with the final self. This is your last chance. Go to her and reconcile. Carry our thoughts with you.”)
I feel a love for her greater than anything I could have felt before. I hate my descendant self; I hate the teachers and their gray spirits, depth upon depth of ashes out of the past. They want to use me to perpetuate all that matters to them.
I ache to reclaim what has been lost, to try to make up for the past.
The Coordinator withdraws from School World, taking with it the results of the student experiment. Do they have what they want—something worthy of being passed on? It would be wonderful to know . . . I could die contented, knowing the Proof has been shattered. I could cross over, ask . . .
But I will not pollute her with me anymore.
“No.”
The last thousandths of the last second fall like broken crystals.
(The connection is broken. You have failed.)
My tributary self, disappointed, quietly suggests I might be happier if I am deactivated.
* * *
Curiously, to the last, he clings to his imagined cubicle window. He cries his last words where there is no voice, no sound, no one to listen but us:
“Elisaveta! YES! YES!”
The last of the ancient self is packed, mercifully, into oblivion. We will not subject him to the Endtime. We have pity.
We are left to our thoughts. The force that replaces gravity now spasms. The metric is very noisy. Length and duration become so grainy that thinking is difficult.
One tributary works to solve an ancient and obscure problem. Another studies the Proof one last time, savoring its formal beauty. Another considers ancient relations.
Our end, our own oblivion, the Between, will not be so horrible. There are worse things. Much
AUTOMATIC
ERICA L. SATIFKA
HE rents his optic nerve to vacationers from Ganymede for forty skins a night. She finds him in the corner of the bar he goes to every night after work and stays in until it’s time to go to work again, sucking on an electrical wire that stretches from the flaking wall.
“That’s not going to kill you any more,” she says.
He ignores her, grinding sheathed copper between brown-stained molars.
“My name is Linda Sue. I want to make babies with you.”
“That rhymes,” he says.
“Will you do it or not?”
“Or not.”
Linda Sue stamps her foot. “Come on.”
“I’ll take you out first. Then we’ll see.” He takes her by the hand and leads her out of the bar, out into the heart of downtown New York City.
New York City, population three hundred and twenty.
* * *
He guides her to a restaurant he knows where the food is stacked in piles on hygienic white counters and the electricity works. She has two eyes and two hands and one set of lips, which means she is pretty. They each take a few slabs of food—the food here is free—and sit on the ground. He tells her about his life and her eyes open wide as headlights.
“I’ve never known anyone who had a job before.”
“It’s not a job. It’s a career.” He works at a factory, pouring liquid plastic into molds shaped like four-tined forks. “I have a quota to fill.”
“Why don’t you just ask the Ganys for plastic forks? Why does someone need so many plastic forks anyway.” She tears off a corner of her foodslab; it comes off onto her fingers like cotton candy. Or insulation.
“They’re not for me, they’re for people.”
“I don’t have to work. I don’t like to. I just ask the Ganys for everything. They like to give us stuff.”
“Well, I don’t ask them.” He doesn’t think about the creatures dancing spider-like on his nerve. “I’m self-sufficient.”
“Are we going to fuck or what?”
“Later, later. If you’re good.”
* * *
In Central Park they walk past a rusted-over carousel. She’s drunk from the amber-colored alcohol-infused drinkslab she’s consumed, and he’s propping her up, forcing her to walk straight.
“I think I’m in love with you,” she slurs.
“You don’t know what that word means.”
They pass a pair of Ganys wrapped in the form of two wall-eyed Jamaican teenagers, humans whose bodies were either sacrificed to or commandeered by the intelligent energy beams. The girls giggle and point as they
pass. He flips them off.
“That wasn’t very nice.”
“They patronize us. Don’t you see how they patronize us? There’s too many of them in this city. I want to get away from here, out into the country. Will you come with me?”
“Nobody lives in the country.”
“Exactly.” But he knows it is pointless; nobody lives in the country because there is no way to live in the country. The farms are all poisoned and the shadow of the plague still lingers. The Ganys, knowing this, constructed an invisible olfactory wall, to keep humans and germs from mingling.
He will never leave New York City. Always a hotel, never a tourist.
* * *
The story of the plague goes like this:
Once you could be certain that you would not spontaneously grow legs from your shoulder blades and arms from your buttocks. You could be reasonably sure that ears would not sprout on your cheeks overnight. Then the plague happened, and you couldn’t take that for granted anymore.
Until the Ganys came.
* * *
They get back to the bar and she takes off her clothes. Her ribs stick out like a xylophone. The foodslabs keep them alive, but they aren’t the right kind of nourishment. But you couldn’t expect intelligent energy beams to understand food.
Linda Sue’s body is fuzzy and indistinct, a peach-colored blur. His vision is cloudy from the tourists in his head. He crawls back to his corner.
“Aren’t you going to fuck me now? Aren’t you going to give me my babies?”
“No, I’m still not ready.”
“Oh, screw you! You’re crazy. Why don’t you get the Ganys to fix that for you? They fixed it for me.”
Now all you want to do is mate, he thinks. Not make love, you can’t love anymore. Mate with the last members of your species so you can bring us back from the brink of extinction. That’s all it is.
“I can’t.”
She shakes her head. “I’m leaving. I can find some other male to give me my babies. I don’t need you.” She slams the lockless door behind her. He hunkers down in the corner.
