World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  All the labels her mother and the Prefect stuck on him the whole time. Labels that were meant less to diagnose than to isolate, he was beginning to think. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a traumatised, out-of-time, culture-shocked idiot, but an idiot all the same. Please come show me the ropes. After all, it’s you or Bartholomew.’

  ‘Oh, he can come. He’s always useful.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. He can hold the coats. OK, Deirdra, it’s a deal. See you in the morning . . .’

  But as he settled for the night, beginning his usual search for elusive sleep, he wondered how the day was going to turn out.

  Maybe Deirdra was more typical of her era than she seemed to him. Even if he had issues about the attitude of the age towards a dangerous future, he was getting the impression that the past at least was cherished, the dead remembered. By contrast, he came from a time of deep denial about such things. In the military, in NASA, you shed a manly tear at the funeral, sank a few, then buried it all deep down inside and next day got back to fighting for your place on the flight rotation.

  ‘And it was you, dead or not, lost in my own past, who called for me, Emma,’ he murmured in the dark. ‘This is a message for Reid Malenfant. If you can hear this, come get me . . . If anybody can, you can. I don’t know why I believe that, but I do . . .’

  He repeated the lines until he fell asleep.

  The basic geography of Chester was obvious from the air.

  Of course the flood waters had erased much of the local countryside; the Irish Sea had pushed far inland here. But Chester, at least the historic core, had been high enough to be saved, it seemed, with drainage schemes and sea walls. Saved, as a physical record of its own history. And that history seemed to be all about invasions and war.

  Bartholomew pointed out the highlights. Which was a small kindness, Malenfant knew. Malenfant could have got it all from his bangle; this way felt more human.

  The local people had settled here millennia ago, at this useful location close to the River Dee which had fed into the sea. When the Romans came to Britain they had set up a legionary headquarters, a rectangular walled fort whose plan was still visible. Later the Saxons had invaded, and then the Normans, and later still the citizens had been caught in the middle of the seventeenth-century English Civil War. And so on: walls and forts. It was like the whole city was one big scabbed-over wound. The Industrial Revolution had left more constructive monuments, rail and road links, a canal. But, during all the human turmoil, too many wells had been built to extract too much water, and the river had silted up – so that the original purpose of the settlement had long been lost.

  Still, as the flyer came down, Malenfant made out the geometry of the old Roman fort, a plan followed by later generations of streets, a grid layout that looked remarkably modern – modern in Malenfant’s own twenty-first-century terms, anyhow – with an obvious point of symmetry at the centre of the rectangle, where big avenues that he imagined had run in from main gates in the walls had crossed.

  ‘At that centre point,’ Bartholomew said, ‘the Romans built their principium. The commander’s headquarters. Later the Christians put a stone cross there. And now . . .’

  And now on that spot there stood a Pylon, tall and sleek.

  The flyer, self-piloting, gave them a tour, a spiralling descent to the foot of the tower, and back up. Malenfant spotted detail in the walls, such as what looked like a band of viewing windows maybe three-quarters of the way up from the ground. People waving within.

  And, on the very top of the Pylon, a flat area, bounded by rails and glass walls. He saw no obvious doors, no hatches on that roof. He wondered idly how you would get up there, from inside the building. And why you would want to. But those rails and glass barriers did indicate folk went up there, sometimes, for whatever reason.

  He filed the observation away.

  The flyer descended smoothly to an empty airfield just to the north of the walls.

  20

  The walk through the old streets of the city was a short one. But after the openness of the rest of the countryside, the spread-out places Deirdra and her family inhabited, Malenfant found the enclosure of something like a traditional town of his day oddly oppressive, even claustrophobic.

  There seemed to be few people about, however. Many properties were sealed up – even, in some instances, encased in what looked like glass, as if for preservation. And whole areas were cordoned off, presumably for fear of toxic waste or other antique nasties. Malenfant wondered how it had been in places like this when the period they called the Chaos had come – when, he speculated, the food deliveries had stopped and the power had failed, and finally the government started breaking down.

  Deirdra murmured, ‘It’s always like this. The old cities. They’re like museums, really. Most people prefer to live out in the country, where – well, where you can build things of your own. And anyhow, real history isn’t about the buildings but about the people. And there is where we will find out about that.’

  She pointed ahead, to where the Pylon loomed over the medieval clutter like a landed spaceship.

  Inside, the heart of the ground floor of this Pylon looked pretty much the same to Malenfant as the twin he had visited in Birmingham, only the day before. The central chamber, the oddly formal layout of the walls, the stone courtyard. The single blank screen set in the wall.

  ‘Same set-up?’ Malenfant asked.

  ‘Right,’ Bartholomew said. ‘So, after yesterday, you know what to do?’

  Malenfant shrugged. ‘I just ask.’ He faced the screen. ‘So what are you, another Answerer?’

  Even the voice was identical. But the reply was different.

  You may call me Kleio, Colonel Malenfant.

  He grunted. ‘You have a name, this time? Greek muse of . . . memory?’

  Of history. Good try. I, and my siblings around the country, around the world, are the principal interface to the Codex of Mankind. We are all called Kleio, by the way. But we do share the same technology as the Answerers. In your terms, perhaps, Colonel Malenfant—

  ‘Call me Malenfant,’ he said reflexively.

  —we share the same hardware, but differing software. Although those categories have become so blurred as to be all but meaningless.

  ‘You know me, then?’

  Of course. We Kleios are interconnected, as are all the Answerers, and the two applications share information with each other and with other systems. Since the Codex is in essence nothing but a compilation of information – a vast and growing database – such sharing is vital. So I know that you presented yourself to an Answerer yesterday. But of course before that I, we, saw you on the news.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Still he felt baffled. He looked around, at the screen, the nearly featureless chamber. ‘So what am I supposed to do? I mean, I came here in search of information about Emma Stoney. My wife. I don’t understand how this works.’ He turned, slightly hesitantly, to Deirdra. ‘And you come here to talk to your father, right?’

  She frowned. ‘That’s – well, that’s personal, Malenfant. But that’s the idea. The Codex is . . .’

  ‘The word “codex”,’ said Bartholomew, ‘is just an archaic word for “book”. But that’s what all this amounts to, Malenfant. A compilation of knowledge. And part of it is a big book of people. In principle, a catalogue of all the people that ever lived.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Deirdra said eagerly. ‘And all you have to do, to find out about anybody, is turn the page of the book.’

  ‘Who ever lived? That’s impossible,’ Malenfant said.

  Is that a question?

  ‘I . . . yeah. Is that possible?’

  In theory, yes. In practice, not yet. Perhaps not ever. But there have only ever been fewer than two hundred billion human beings, Malenfant. Such is the current estimate. So the task of listing them all is in principle finite, at least.

  He frowned at that. ‘Starting when? Humans emerged from a process of evolution. If you go back far enough yo
u find us splitting off from the chimps. After that we were – well, this is what they thought in my day – just one twig on a whole bush of divergent possibilities, of human-like types. And we competed and cross-bred, and the genome became a patchwork . . .’

  Of course there is a limit to what can be meaningfully called human – as you imply, it is a fuzzy boundary, both in time and in the space of related species. But in terms of sheer numbers, it makes little difference. The fabric of this city was laid down in Roman times. At that time there may have been only some hundred million people on the planet. Malenfant, when you were born the population was three billion; by the time you nearly died—

  ‘Break it to me gently, why don’t you?’

  Today humanity again is counted in the hundreds of millions. Perhaps you can see that the tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals that made up the earliest populations of humans were, in terms of sheer size, insignificant. The beginning of our count is blurred, but that blurring is unimportant, statistically. Even if—

  ‘Even if everybody else flowed from them, the people at the beginning of the count. OK. Two hundred billion, then. Two hundred gigapeople. Ha!’ He was growing frustrated. He hadn’t come here for lectures. He paced, and said bluntly, ‘So what? That doesn’t mean you can bring back the dead.’

  Deirdra stepped forward. ‘No. But . . . sort of. Let me show you.’

  ‘Show me what? You wouldn’t want to show me your father.’

  She smiled. ‘I won’t. But you can see anybody in the Codex, as long as the family approve – or if they gave permission themselves, if the death was recent enough. Just watch.’ She faced the screen. ‘Kleio.’

  Yes, Deirdra?

  ‘I’d like to speak to Stavros Gershon.’

  Malenfant was startled. ‘I know that name. The Answerer mentioned it. Pilot of a ship called the Last Small Step, after the final space programme. Also – Gershon, that surname – somebody else I knew—’

  Identification sufficient. Deirdra, you have accessed this individual before. Permissions still stand.

  ‘Thank you.’

  And suddenly he was there.

  A fourth person in the chamber.

  A man. He wore what looked like a lightweight pressure suit, hood pushed back. Malenfant didn’t recognise the design, but you’d expect that if this guy Gershon came from centuries after Malenfant had begun his own long career break.

  The newcomer glanced around, smiling. ‘Hello. I am Stavros Gershon . . . I’m sorry, I don’t recognise you. Save for you, Greggson Deirdra.’

  ‘Good to see you again, Stavros. These are my friends. The artificial person is called Bartholomew. And this is Reid Malenfant.’

  Gershon’s eyes widened. ‘The Constitution crash hero? No! I’m so pleased to meet you, Colonel Malenfant.’

  ‘Just Malenfant.’

  ‘If I’d known you were in the Codex—’

  ‘I’m not.’ Malenfant stamped his foot on the solid floor. ‘I’m here in the flesh, if you can call this old wreck flesh. Cryogenics. I came here the long way round.’

  ‘Well, well. I’m even more honoured. You were very much part of the pantheon in my day.’

  Malenfant didn’t feel flattered so much as irritated. He walked up to the guy, or his image. Walked around him. He looked maybe fifty years old, dark hair streaked with grey. Gershon didn’t move; he smiled patiently. Malenfant presumed that this projection, if it had any independent sentience in any meaningful way, would be accustomed to indulging newcomers to the process.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Malenfant said. He passed a hand through Gershon’s arm. His hand passed inside the apparently solid object, emerged from the far side, but Malenfant felt nothing and Gershon didn’t so much as flinch. ‘Some kind of hologram, then.’

  We call the projections the Retrieved. But ‘hologram’ is near enough. I can explain later if you are interested, Malenfant.

  ‘Oh, I suspect the projection tech is a minor miracle by comparison.’

  Deirdra said, ‘Malenfant, Stavros here is probably the last famous space traveller.’

  ‘Last Small Step. It was a kind of a last-gasp consolation programme, when humanity gave up on space. Right?’

  Gershon said, ‘That was the idea. Just as the Homeward movement closed everything down. We went out to each of the worlds of the Solar System, any that hadn’t yet been reached, and planted a flag there. I managed to secure the rights to visit the very last such world of all – that is, the last known spherical body within the boundary of the Oort cloud, which—’

  ‘I don’t care about the rules of your game, centuries ago.’

  ‘No. OK. But the target had intrinsic interest, as it happens.’

  Malenfant pursed his lips. ‘OK, I’ll bite. What intrinsic interest?’

  ‘This particular dwarf planet had an anomalous density. Far too high. That’s one thing. And for another—’

  Bartholomew stepped forward. ‘You can look this stuff up later, Malenfant, if you’re interested. Although I’m being unethical to interrupt; Stavros here wasn’t my patient, and never will be. But I think I can say he can be a little – obsessive – when it comes to the rationale for his mission. He called his target world Voga. He didn’t advertise the high density, as such. He spread rumours it was made of gold. And what he did there, totally illegally, was to try to seed terrestrial life. He did it by blowing himself up. Took a clean-up crew a hell of a time to fix it all. Well, they scraped up what was left of Gershon, and took his ship, and brought it all home.’

  Gershon said proudly, ‘My ship is in a museum in the Sahara.’

  A spaceship museum in the Sahara? Where the forest was? Malenfant filed that away for future reference. ‘I am curious about a few things.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Gershon. I knew another guy with that name. In fact I met him a few times. Ralph Gershon, one of the first crew to reach Mars in 1986. I don’t suppose you’re any relation.’

  Gershon seemed delighted to be asked. ‘Yes! He’s my ancestor, my something-something grandfather . . .’

  He didn’t much resemble his famous ancestor, Malenfant thought. But then there had evidently been a huge mixing of mankind since. And maybe few people looked much like their great-to-power-n grandparents anyhow.

  Gershon went on, ‘When I found out about Ralph, he became a big hero to me. My ancestor, who lived in the Heroic Age of space exploration. I guess his example made me what I became in my own life. And you met him.’ He gazed at Malenfant with a kind of puppyish adoration. ‘Why, that sure beats meeting a Retrieved copy here in the Codex.’

  For some reason that surprised Malenfant. ‘You could reconstruct Ralph Gershon?’

  Deirdra smiled. ‘Of course they could, Malenfant. People from your own time can be Retrieved, like anybody else. You still don’t think of yourself as a person out of history, do you?’

  Bartholomew stepped up. ‘Thank you, Stavros. We’ll speak to you some other time.’

  Gershon nodded politely enough, stepped back – and, just before he popped like a soap bubble and vanished, he fixed Malenfant with a look of extraordinary longing.

  Malenfant suddenly felt shaken to the core.

  What was he dealing with here? He had just assumed these avatars, these ‘Retrieved’, were sock puppets, mouthpieces for some new set of algorithms surfing on this Codex, this vast database . . . That final expression hadn’t been a puppet’s, though. Was it possible that these creations really were in some sense self-aware? Had Gershon, say, suffered fear or dread about going back into the unconscious oblivion of storage?

  He turned on Bartholomew. ‘How does this thing work, exactly? Exactly how are these avatars cooked up? What are they?’

  Let me answer, murmured Kleio.

  It is a standard question.

  Malenfant, I told you that our current estimate is that somewhat less than two hundred billion humans have ever lived. A finite universe of people, and so a finite database could
contain their definitions, regardless of the degree of detail. In principle. And that is the goal towards which the designers of the Codex aimed when the Kleios were created a century ago. Of course the Forgetting was a significant setback . . .

  ‘OK, but how? How do you create these – definitions?’

  There are two sides to the answer, Malenfant.

  Imagine a tremendous family tree, mapped on a wall, with two hundred billion spaces to fill. Of course the lines of descent are a tangle, as distant cousins encounter each other and breed; you don’t have to go back too many generations before an individual like yourself finds two or more descent tracks leading back to any given ancestor.

  To populate these spaces, the techniques we use were pioneered in your own time, the first great age of data. We use records, and genetics. In a complementary fashion.

  The records include human traces: technological recordings, written accounts, preserved artefacts. Gravestones. And also archaeological data retrievals. You may know that even by your time, Malenfant, using probabilistic and other techniques, it was often possible with archaeological evidence to pin down dates of events, even in prehistory, to a single year, often a single day. When the systematic recording and cross-indexing of such data first became possible, history finally began to resemble a science rather than an art.

  And, given such records, we could reconstruct the detail of a life: how and when exactly did this person live and die? Thus we flesh out the biographies of more and more of that finite universe of humanity.

  But a biography is only that. A shell. To reconstruct the person, we need their genetics. The DNA is the potential, the history is the actualisation, the fulfilment. We need the two together.

  ‘Nature and nurture,’ Malenfant murmured. ‘I get it.’

  Often the DNA is available for direct sampling, such as in your own case, Malenfant. Your body was in storage for centuries. And many such samples have been kept in archives of medical records.

  But even if a direct sample is not available, the DNA of an individual can often be reconstructed from that of their descendants. Again the technology was pioneered in your time, Malenfant, when the genetics were recovered of the first human being from Africa to land on Iceland: an unusual arrival, in a country where careful family records were kept for centuries. Records plus genetics, you see. Soon it was possible in principle to reconstruct the DNA of anybody who had lived within five centuries past, and had living descendants. Gradually that limit was pushed back and back . . .