Woolgathering
Page 24
Hindsight is undeservedly notorious. The historian is derided for it, and the simple minds that commit that slander would also have us believe that it brings only regret.
The truth, of course, is that hindsight is the most beatific of humor. It brings with it the kind of gut-wrenching laughter that makes tears of joy and pain glide in harmony down rose-pink cheeks.
This is true particularly with ideas. The speculation of one generation is the amusement of the next. Doomsday predictions aside, this isn't because the projections that men make are a far from the truth, from their destinies. In reality, such predictions are usually chillingly accurate. It's the little ironies that get people.
It was the little ironies that got Cinder that day, trailing as she so often did behind the rustling fabric of her friend's canary coat and black hakama. Hakama, as in the ancient pleated trousers they wore in Japan. It was the year 3005, and men and women alike were back to the antiquated, if now shimmering, styles of medieval times. Kolkander, the northernmost of Europa's nations, was a tad frigid in the winter, and somehow the most efficient way of crafting insulated clothing was to style it after traditional kimonos. All those new materials sewn into a worn design, new wine in old bottles... Ironies like that were the ones on Cinder's mind.
She and her friend Yura were strolling through what Yura called the ugly, patchwork streets of Cosm. There urban advancement and brittle, hardy weeds did battle, stitches of cheap and hastily erected old tech attempting to sew them together.
It was only natural that in the fifth largest city on planet Europa (it may have been an oceanic moon, but for as long as her professors weren't listening it was where she lived) the inner streets would be too poor to contrive better. But the fact that steel and concrete, once the proud monuments of industrialization, had faded to the disparagement with which adobe huts and dirt were once regarded amused Cinder. That was, after all, another irony. Another hindsight.
Man told himself his every discovery was the gateway to a 'golden age', but all were mere levies raised and dissembled to direct the flow of progress. Steel? Try plastics. Plastics? Try nanofibres. Perspective was ever changing.
Then, Cinder reflected, pushing a pair of goggles up her nose against the harsh wind as she and Yura passed a relic from the city's earliest days— sometimes progress branched off in trickling streams, too. Sometimes those streams dwindled, then vanished altogether.
Across the faintly glowing, fiber-optic walkway she strolled was a platform like an egg-shaped cradle next to two, giant loops. Their form was reminiscent the rings circus tigers would have leapt through in times gone by, but the truth was a tad less aged, if just as romantic.
The assemblage was the remains of a time machine—the last vestige of Cosm's original, tiny scientific community before it had radiated out and left its center to a pulsing mass of commerce, emigrants, and vagrants.
The loops were the two ends of a worm hole that a ship was to propel endlessly through at near the speed of light, launching it into the future where it would bring the entrance to another wormhole whose end used to be the egg-shaped cradle.
They'd done it. They'd travelled to the future and then the past only to discover that Novikov's self-consistency principle was right all along—you couldn't change the outcome. Or, you mostly couldn't. Little things changed, on rare occasion. There was individual willpower. But if you did or didn't do something someone else was going to restore the balance, guaranteed.
It was complicated. And that was beside the point. The real point was the futility of all the physicists' effort; convoluted or not it was another entry in Cinder's book of ironies.
Though… it was significant, the complexity of it all. The truth of the matter was that the whole world was complicated, and somewhere along the line people had just stopped worrying about it.
She and Yura certainly weren't worrying about it—or, at least, Yura wasn't as they pressed on. And should she have? Their health monitors were pulsing green over their hearts, the tiny oval gleaming through their clothes as it streamed anonymous "all's-wells" back to the city's security networks. They were in no hurry. And everyone else was just the same. Certainly men and women—not of a brisk pace, mind you, but with a determined bent— were leaning a bit eagerly toward work. But it was always such when one had mouths to feed.
In Cinder's age, people weren't rushed anymore. Watches hardly existed. Haste had died when Earth stopped choking on greenhouse gases and diseases had been cured, stretching the hypothetical hourglass. Man still advanced, but at his leisure. Or, rather, with caution.
The clock had finally slowed. That was a third irony, a lighter one, and it raised Cinder's spirits before the last and darkest could descend upon her. It was, after all, through their generation's indolent mien that Cinder and Yura had enough time to visit their friend in the slums. That their guardians didn't scold them for doing so.
Overhead the sunshine from the Solar Reformatory was fading and the glow of celestial bodies were faint on the bluish horizon. How strange, that light and life were provided by convicts forced to labor on a space station thousands of miles away. Yet, queer or no, their refulgence glittered off streamlined bullet trolley cables overhead. Overhead… and underground, where the fiber-optic walkways and translucent cobblestones lent passersby a murky picture of what was underfoot.
The city was like every other on Europa, except that most were floating gardens, and Cosm was more a floating gyroscope. All of Kolkander looked to it for precedents in technology and infrastructure, but there was little green. Instead, its body was a series of metamorphasizing rings into which the city was tidily arranged. The innermost of those rings was the only solid one—another irony, seeing as business and poverty battled for it, immovable, beyond redemption. That core was surrounded, pointedly, by a ring of police, security, and public service offices. From there expanded more circles of buildings devoted to civilians, scientists, markets, and the outermost docks. Cinder spent a great deal of time watching the docks. It was there that Cosm's habit of removing and rearranging entire blocks of the city like an overgrown Rubik's cube became apparent. One minute a pier might be on the east side, and the next it might have been paddled over to the west face of the city for convenience's sake.
Cinder liked looking at pictures of the city from afar, too. It defied the human aesthetic, a garish protrusion from the glittering sea climbing up and up—teetering and functional. But was it stable? Presumably that was the reasoning behind the subways under her feet; they provided a base for the city. That, and they kept commuters off the streets. Cosm didn't believe in congestion. It would only complicate things.
And what with Cinder's last irony in place, things were twisted enough.
People didn't like complications—at least, people like Yura didn't. She was energetic, and she strode resolutely with her shoulders back beneath her warm haori. But she wanted to keep order, fit things to the laws and universe. For her, like most of Kolkander, the ebb and flow of theories was a fluid, acceptable deviation from that truth. Complexity was fine.
Contradictions and paradigm shifts, however…
That was where Rad and Cinder's final irony came in.
"I worry about you, you know," Yura spoke up matter-of-factly. She turned just so that Cinder caught a glimpse of her auburn ponytail and dazzling smile—a sheepish smile that apologized for all the inferiority it was bound to make you feel. What was worse, it wasn't arrogant, but assured. She didn't have to wear goggles. "I mean, most would feel like a third wheel, and you come just so my father won't worry."
Her concerns were unfounded. Based on Cinder's own lies. But naturally the shorter and more frazzled of the two didn't admit as much.
"Rad's my friend too, in a different and infinitely less appreciable way," she shrugged. "Come to think I really just tag along to make love to his lab."
The satisfaction Cinder derived from Yura's pout wasn't so much the jealousy most had of her gorgeous friend as the amusement of a tiny, f
razzle-haired girl with a secret to make up for the fact that her parent's hadn't been able to afford having thicker eyelids biologically engineered onto their now be-goggled child.
"It's uncanny how good you are with his gadgets," Yura said.
Again, she wasn't aware Cinder had helped build them. But Cinder refrained from one of her eccentric, disorienting grins, in part out of restraint. The other part was that just then a twisted iron rod fell from a banister above, clattering through the quiet and drawing attention to the thinning streets. Rad's neighborhood was eerie enough—dilapidated, with hoardes of consumer incentive boards pulsing rather than glowing expectantly at passersby, as though aware the rag-tag civilians couldn't pay. Gone were the translucent walkways. In places the only light was that of the heart monitor over Cinder and Yura's breasts, its greenish blink seeming deathly pale under their kimonos.
This didn't bother Cinder. She knew of worse places in the solar system. What bothered her was the knowledge that she was drawing ever closer to Rad.
It wasn't that the boy was sinister. He wasn't the kind of scary that would hurt you... more the kind of scary where it happened by accident. The kind of scary that would forbid you to swat a fly then catch it sleepwalking and smother it in his palm.
Yura hadn't noticed yet, though, Cinder thought wryly. Yura frowned as they picked their way through the various engines, computers, and processors that littered Rad's "garden"— or "graveyard" as Cinder preferred to think of it. Yura turned the fringes of her yellow haori away from the grimy tiles and slick steel walls of the abandoned factory Rad called his "fort."
But Yura didn't fear him.