by Neil Clarke
“Why? How?”
“I don’t know . . . But if it were true—and if his unconscious mind retained the slightest trace of the learning he had discarded—wouldn’t he do exactly what Leonardo did? Study obsessively, try to fit awkward facts into the prevailing, unsatisfactory paradigms, grope for the deeper truths he had lost?”
“Like Earth’s systems being analogous to the human body.”
“Exactly.” A wisp of excitement stirred him. “Don’t you see? Leonardo behaved exactly as a stranded time traveler would.”
“Ah.” I thought I understood; of course, I didn’t. “You think you’re out of time. And your Leonardo, too!” I laughed, but he didn’t rise to my gentle mockery. And in my unthinking way I launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared . . .
But Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated sun. “All this will pass,” he said. “The sun will die. The universe may collapse on itself, or spread to a cold infinity. In either case it may be possible to build a giant machine that will recreate this universe—everything, every detail of this moment—so that we all live again. But how can we know if this is the first time? Perhaps the universe has already died, many times, to be born again. Perhaps Leonardo was no traveler. Perhaps he was simply remembering.” He looked up, challenging me to argue; but the challenge was distressingly feeble.
“I think,” I said, “you should drink more soup.”
But he had no more need of soup, and he turned to look at the sun once more.
It seemed too soon when the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho Sea.
I summoned his friends, teachers, those who had loved him.
I clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc which had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus—killing us all, in fact, at one rate or another—would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow us. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel which had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit which would lift the first of our ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.
Perhaps. But it was cold comfort.
We ate the soup, of his dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. We took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening our lives as he had.
I have never been a skillful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. I talked with Berge’s teachers, but we had little to say to each other; I was merely his uncle, after all, a genetic tributary, not a parent. I wasn’t sorry to be left alone.
Before I slept again, even before the sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warm air that had cradled me was treacherously fleeing after the sinking sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho Sea. My seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Callisto ice.
1999
British science-fiction author Brian Stableford has published more than eighty novels. He graduated from the University of York with a degree in biology and received a PhD for his his doctoral thesis on the sociology of science fiction. A former lecturer in sociology at the University of Reading, he is a full-time writer and a part-time lecturer on creative writing at several universities.
ASHES AND TOMBSTONES
Brian M. Stableford
I was following Voltaire’s good advice and working in my garden when the young man from the New European Space Agency came to call. I was enjoying my work; my new limb bones were the best yet and my refurbished retinas had restored my eyesight to perfection—and I was still only 40 percent synthetic by mass, 38 percent by volume.
I liked to think of the garden as my own tiny contribution to the Biodiversity Project, not so much because of the plants, whose seeds were all on deposit in half a dozen Arks, but because of the insects to which the plants provided food. More than half of the local insects were the neospecific produce of the Trojan Cockroach Project, and my salads were a key element in their selective regime. The cockroaches living in my kitchen had long since reverted to type, but I hadn’t even thought of trying to clear them out; I knew the extent of the debt that my multitudinous several-times-great-grandchildren owed their even-more-multitudinous many-times-great-grandparents.
When I first caught sight of him over the hedge, I thought the young man from NESA might be one of my descendants come to pay a courtesy call on the Old Survivor, but I knew as soon as he said “Professor Neal?” that he must be an authentic stranger. I was Grandfather Paul to all my Repopulation Kin.
The stranger was thirty meters away, but his voice carried easily enough: the Berkshire Downs are very quiet nowadays, and my hearing was razor-sharp even though the electronic feed was thirty years old and technically obsolete.
“Never heard of him,” I said. “No professors hereabouts. Oxford’s forty miles that away.” I pointed vaguely north-westward.
“The Paul Neal I’m looking for isn’t a professor anymore,” the young man admitted, letting himself in through the garden gate as if he’d been invited. “Technically, he ceased to be a professor when he was seconded to the Theseus Project in Martinique in 2080, during the first phase of the Crash.” He stood on the path hopefully, waiting for me to join him and usher him in through the door to my home, which stood ajar. His face was fresh, although there wasn’t the least hint of synthetic tissue in its contours. “I’m Dennis Mountjoy,” he added as an afterthought. “I’ve left messages by the dozen, but it finally became obvious that the only way to get a response was to turn up in person.”
Montjoie St. Denis! had been the war cry of the French, in days of old. This Dennis Mountjoy was a mongrel European, who probably thought of war as a primitive custom banished from the world forever. It wasn’t easy to judge his age, given that his flesh must have been somatically tuned-up even though it hadn’t yet become necessary to paper over any cracks, but I guessed that he was less than forty: a young man in a young world. To him, I was a relic of another era, practically a dinosaur—which was, of course, exactly why he was interested in me. NESA intended to put a man on the Moon in June 2269, to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the first landing and the dawn of the New Space Age. They had hunted high and low for survivors of the last space program, because they wanted at least one to be there to bear witness to their achievement, to forge a living link with history. It didn’t matter to them that the Theseus Project had not put a single man into space, nor directed a single officially-sanctioned shot at the Moon.
“What makes you think that you’ll get any more response in person than you did by machine?” I asked the young man sourly. I drew myself erect, feeling a slight twinge in my spine in spite of all the nanomech reinforcements, and removed my sun hat so that I could wipe the sweat from my forehead.
“Electronic communication isn’t very private,” Mountjoy observed. “There are things that it wouldn’t have been diplomatic to say over the phone.”
My heart sank. I’d so far outlived my past that I’d almost come to believe that I’d escaped, but I hadn’t been forgotten. I was surprised that my inner response wasn’t stronger, but the more synthetic flesh you take aboard, the less capacity you have for violent emotion, and my heart was pure android. Time was when I’d have come on like the minotaur if anyone had penetrated to the core of my private maze, but all the bull leached out of my head a hundred years ago.
“Go away and leave me alone,” I said wearily. “I wish you well, but I don’t want any part of your so-called Great Adventure. Is that diplomatic enough for you?”
“There are things that it wouldn’t have been diplomatic for me to say,” he said, politely pretending that he
thought I’d misunderstood him.
“Don’t say them, then,” I advised him.
“Ashes and tombstones,” he recited, determinedly ignoring my advice. “Endymion. Astolpho.”
There were supposed to be no records—but in a crisis, everybody cheats. Everybody keeps secrets, especially from the people they’re supposed to be working for.
“Mr. Mountjoy,” I said wearily, “it’s 2268. I’m two hundred and eighteen years old. Everyone else who worked on Theseus is dead, along with ninety percent of the people who were alive in 2080. Ninety percent of the people alive today are under forty. Who do you think is going to give a damn about a couple of itty-bitty rockets that went up with the wrong payloads to the wrong destination? It’s not as if the Chaos Patrol was left a sentry short, is it? Everything that was supposed to go up did go up.”
“But that’s why you don’t want to come back to Martinique, isn’t it?” Mountjoy said, still standing on the path, halfway between the gate and the door. “That’s why you don’t want to be there when the Adventure starts again. We know that the funds were channeled through your account. We know that you were the paymaster for the crazy shots. You probably didn’t plan them, and you certainly didn’t execute them, but you were the pivot of the seesaw.” I put my hat back on and adjusted the rim. The ozone layer was supposed to be back in place, but old habits die hard.
“Come over here,” I said. “Watch where you put your feet.”
He looked down at the variously-shaped blocks of salad greens. He had no difficulty following the dirt path I’d carefully laid out so that I could pass among them, patiently plying my hoe.
“You don’t actually eat this stuff, do you?” he said, as he came to stand before me, looking down from his embryonically-enhanced two-meter height at my nanomech-conserved one-eighty.
“Mainly I grow it for the beetles and the worms,” I told him. “They leave me little for my own plate. In essence, I’m a sharecropper for the biosphere. Repopulation’s put Homo sapiens back in place, but the little guys still have a way to go. You really ought to wear a hat on days like this.”
“It’s not necessary in these latitudes,” he assured me, missing the point again. “You’re right, of course. Nobody cares about the extra launches. Nobody will mention it, least of all when you’re on view. All we’re interested in is selling the Adventure. We believe you can help us with that. No matter how small a cog you were, you were in the engine. You’re the last man alive who took part in the pre-Crash space program. You’re the world’s last link to Theseus, Ariane, Apollo, and Mercury. That’s all we’re interested in, all we care about. The last thing anyone wants to do is to embarrass you, because embarrassing you would also be embarrassing us. We’re on your side, Professor Neal—and if you’re worried about the glare of publicity encouraging others to dig, there’s no need. We have control, Professor Neal—and we’re sending our heroes to the Sea of Tranquillity, half a world away from Endymion. The only relics we’ll be looking for are the ones Apollo 11 left. We’re not interested in ashes or tombstones.”
I knelt down, gesturing to indicate that he should follow suit. He hesitated, but he obeyed the instruction eventually. His suitskin was easily capable of digesting any dirt that got on its knees, and would probably be grateful for the piquancy.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked, fondling a crinkled leaf.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “Some kind of engineered hybrid, mid-twentyfirst-cee vintage, probably disembarked fifty or sixty years ago. The bit you eat is underground, right? Carrot, potato—something of that general sort—presumably gee-ee augmented as a whole-diet crop.”
He was smarter than he looked. “Not exactly whole-diet,” I corrected. “The manna-potato never really took off. Even when the weather went seriously bad, you could still grow manna-wheat in England thanks to megabubbles and microwave boosters. This is headstuff. Ecstasy cocktail. Its remotest ancestor produced the finest melange of euphorics and hallucinogens ever devised—but that was a hundred generations of mutation and insect-led natural selection ago. You crush the juice from the tubers and refine it by fractional distillation and freeze-drying—if you can keep the larvae away long enough for them to grow to maturity.”
“So what?” he said, unimpressed. “You can buy designer stuff straight from the synthesizer, purity guaranteed. Growing your own is even more pointless than growing lettuces and courgettes.”
“It’s an adventure,” I told him. “It’s my adventure. It’s the only kind I’m interested in now.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll be careful not to take you away for too long. But we still need you, Professor Neal, and our Adventure is the one that matters to us. I came here to make a deal. Whatever it takes. Can we go inside now?” I could see that he wasn’t to be dissuaded. The young can be very persistent, when they want to be.
I sighed and surrendered. “You can come in,” I conceded, “but you can’t talk me ‘round, by flattery or black-mail or salesmanship. At the end of the day, I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to.” I knew it was hopeless, but I couldn’t just give in. I had to make him do the work.
“You’ll want to,” he said, with serene overconfidence.
The aim of the project on which we were supposed to be working, way back in the twenty-first, was to place a ring of satellites in orbit between Earth and Mars to keep watch for stray asteroids and comets that might pose a danger to the Earth. The Americans had done the donkey-work on the payloads before the plague wars had rendered Canaveral redundant. The transfer brought the European Space Program back from the dead, although not everyone thought that was a good thing. “Why waste money protecting the world from asteroids,” some said, “when we’ve all but destroyed it ourselves?” They had a point. Once the plague wars had set the dominoes falling, the Crash was inevitable; anyone who hoped that ten percent of the population would make it through was considered a wild-eyed optimist in 2080.
The age of manned spaceflight had been over before I was born. It didn’t make economic sense to send up human beings, with the incredibly elaborate miniature ecospheres required for their support, when any job that needed doing outside the Earth could be done much better by compact clever machinery. Nobody had sent up a payload bigger than a dustbin for over half a century, and nobody was about to start. We’d sent probes to the outer system, the Oort Cloud, and a dozen neighboring star systems, but they were all machines that thrived on hard vacuum, hard radiation, and eternal loneliness. To us, there was no Great Adventure; the Theseus Project was just business—and whatever Astolpho was, it certainly wasn’t an Adventure. It was just business of a subtly different kind.
Despite the superficial similarity of their names, there was nothing in our minds to connect Astolpho with Apollo. Apollo was the glorious god of the sun, the father of prophecy, the patron of all the Arts. Astolpho was a character in one of the satirical passages of the Orlando Furioso who journeyed to the Moon and found it a treasure-house of everything wasted on Earth: misspent time, ill-spent wealth, broken promises, unanswered prayers, fruitless tears, unfulfilled desires, failed quests, hopeless ambitions, aborted plans, and fruitless intentions. Each of these residues had its proper place: hung on hooks, stored in bellows, packed in trunks, and so on. Wasted talent was kept in vases, like the urns in which the ashes of the dead were sometimes stored in the Golden Age of Crematoria. It only takes a little leap of the imagination to think of a crater as a kind of vase.
The target picked out by the clandestine Project Astolpho was Endymion, named for the youth beloved of the Moon goddess Selene whose reward for her divine devotion was to live forever in dream-filled sleep.
Even in the days of Apollo—or shortly thereafter, at any rate—there had been people who liked the idea of burial in space. Even in the profligate twentieth, there had been dying men who did not want their ashes to be scattered upon the Earth, but wanted them blasted into space instead, where they would last much longer.
They knew, of course, that Project Astolpho was a colossal waste of money, but they also knew that all money would become worthless if it were not spent soon, and there was no salvation to be bought. Who could blame them for spending what might well have proved to be the last money in the world on ashes and tombstones?
Were they wrong? Would they have regretted what they had done, if they had known that the human race would survive its self-inflicted wounds? I don’t know. Not one member of the aristocracy of wealth that I could put a name to came through the worst. Perhaps their servants and their mistresses came through, and perhaps not—but they themselves went down with the Ship of Fools they had commissioned, captained, and navigated. All that remains of them now is their legacies, among which the payloads deposited by illicit Theseus launches in Endymion might easily be reckoned the least—and perhaps not the worst.
Dennis Mountjoy was right to describe me as a very small cog in the Engine of Fate. I did not plan Astolpho and I did not carry it out, but I did distribute the bribes. I was the bagman, the calculator, the fixer. Mathematics is a versatile art; it can be applied to widely different purposes. Math has no morality; it does not care what it counts or what it proves. Somewhere on Astolpho’s moon, although Ariosto did not record that he ever found it, there must have been a hall of failed proofs, mistaken sums, illicit theorems, and follies of infinity, all neatly bound in webs of tenuous logic.
