The Golden Space

by Pamela Sargent

  Nola stared at him. His light brown face glowed; he seemed convinced of what he had said. “And how have you seen this higher state?”

  “By dying.” She started, and gripped the arms of her chair. “Oh, it’s not what you think. We’re monitored the whole time. We’re put under, suspended, and gradually our life functions are stopped. This lasts only a few moments, but in those moments, we see the next life; we are held by eternity. Then we’re revived. It takes only a few seconds or so—of our time here, of course—and I haven’t yet seen anyone who hasn’t come away changed.”

  Nola watched him cautiously. “Forgive me for saying this, but it sounds mad, and dangerous as well.”

  “It isn’t, believe me. We use the same equipment rescue teams use. Giancarlo knows medicine and was part of a rescue team. That was how he made his discovery. He spends some time teaching us rescue techniques.” Jiro peered at her with his small dark eyes. “It may seem strange to you. But look around. Has it harmed us? Have you met anyone who isn’t at peace?”

  “I’ve met almost no one here,” she said drily. “And it isn’t that simple. There are people who get along; they aren’t all unhappy.”

  “Of course. But many pursue enjoyment for its own sake. That can’t remain satisfying. Many only seek sensations, with no concern for others.”

  “Are you that different?” she asked. “You’re here, hiding away from the world.”

  “We’re preparing ourselves,” he replied. “We leave when we’re ready. Most of us will probably join rescue teams. We don’t plan to stay here forever. Nothing is forever in this world.” He smiled at his little joke.

  Nola did not smile back. Metaphysical discussions made her uncomfortable and irritable. Assumptions were advanced which could neither be proven false nor demonstrated in the world, and those who had swallowed them wore looks of complacency and pitied those who failed to understand or agree. She thought of her own beliefs, her feeling that the biologists were wrong to tamper with the human form and mind. It isn’t the same, she told herself. Their experiments would fail and they would find out they had been wrong not to allow humankind to evolve in its own way. Tampering with biology could narrow the range of possibilities; granting immortality had not been tampering, only opening each life to more possibilities.

  Nola’s chain of reasoning stopped there. Did she believe that in fact there was some purpose, some end toward which all life moved? Was there a metaphysical assumption buried somewhere in her thinking? She shook off the feeling. That was the trouble with this sort of pondering; it led one to doubt common sense.

  “You seem unconvinced,” Jiro said softly. “But argument won’t convince you of what Giancarlo teaches, and it’s not the evidence by itself that matters. It won’t convince anyone trapped in doubt.”

  “I don’t think of doubt as a trap. I think of it as a useful procedure.”

  “I suppose it is, up to a point. We’ve all doubted. It’s necessary at first.”

  Nola rose. “Thank you for the tea. I must go.”

  Jiro stood up and bowed. “We must talk again.”

  Nola had still not met Giancarlo Lawrence, but she had seen his house, a large log cabin down the left side of the forked road. At first she had been surprised by the simple structure, then annoyed; it seemed so blatant, this simple home for the simple man of faith.

  She had thought of searching the computer for information on the man, or for his visual image. Her implant could have helped her in the search, but she did not rely on it as much here. Somehow, in this setting, during the long, unscheduled days, the device seemed intrusive, something that interfered with her senses instead of aiding them. She would try to approach this Giancarlo Lawrence without preconceptions and see him as he was.

  She thought about all this as she and Jiro climbed a hill just outside the stone wall. The hill had been cleared of most of its trees, and Jiro had suggested a picnic. He carried a basket while Nola trudged behind him. The warm air was thick with odors; the scents of pine cones, grass, wildflowers, and her own sweat threatened to choke her. A bee buzzed past her and she froze for a moment until it flew away.

  Jiro stopped and rummaged in the basket while Nola sat down carefully, looking around apprehensively at the ground. Jiro spread a white cloth. She looked out over the settlement. Three people were walking toward the turret; she recognized Hilde’s yellow hair. Two others were with her.

  “There’s Giancarlo,” Jiro said as he struggled with a corkscrew. Nola leaned forward, but the trio was inside the tower before she could get a good look. “The one in the long white tunic.” He handed her a glass of wine and she sipped it while he laid out their lunch. She nibbled at pâté and an egg while Jiro sat on his heels and gnawed at a piece of chicken. His long black hair swayed around his face as he moved his head and looked up the hill. “I think we’re going to have guests.”

  She followed his glance. Mikhail and Teno were walking down the hill toward them. As they came nearer, Mikhail nodded at Jiro, then turned to Nola. “We don’t want to disturb you,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Jiro replied. “There’s plenty of food.” Mikhail sat down. Teno sat between him and Nola. Jiro produced two more glasses and plates; he had come equipped.

  “No wine for me,” Teno said. Mikhail accepted a glass and helped himself to a little of everything. Teno took only a few carrot sticks and strawberries.

  Nola drained her glass and accepted more wine. The careless mood of the outing had been shattered. She glanced from Mikhail to Teno. Mikhail grinned nervously; he looked away from her eyes. He was obviously surprised to see her here. She thought: He wanted me to leave. He wanted me to say I wasn’t angry and then go.

  “You must be adjusting,” he said to her. “You climbed up this hill.”

  “I have been feeling better,” she said coldly. “The web helps, of course. Sometimes it overcompensates, and then I’m even stronger.” She heard an arch tone in her voice that she did not like.

  Mikhail was silent. She noticed that Teno was wearing a Bond, the only one beside her own that she had seen here.

  “I saw Hilde going to the tower again, with Giancarlo and Ramon,” Jiro murmured.

  “Again?” Mikhail shook his head. “Whatever for?” His voice was higher and his blue eyes were wide. He seemed relieved at having his attention drawn away from Nola. “Does she need to relive it so often?”

  Jiro bit into an egg. “I think Hilde hopes that Giancarlo won’t be able to bring her back.”

  Mikhail shook his head. “No, that can’t be it. There are other ways. Besides, Giancarlo has told us that suicide is wrong. As Socrates said, we must not desert our post without a sign from our Keeper.”

  He nodded and smiled, while Jiro smiled back. Nola was exasperated with their smug, happy faces; Mikhail had put down his plate and was hugging himself with his arms, as if nurturing a secret truth.

  “What about you?” she asked the solemn Teno. “Have you been through this whatever-it-is?”

  “No,” Teno replied.

  “Do you plan to?”

  “I haven’t decided. I came here out of curiosity, not out of need. I think Giancarlo would like to see me experience the little death as a test of some sort. He seems to feel it would support his philosophy if my experience is the same as that of the others. I find that attitude paradoxical. If he has faith, which by its very nature cannot be verified or disproven, then why would he seek such verification?”

  “He’s not looking for verification,” Jiro responded. “He only wants you to understand.”

  “I do understand. Giancarlo wants belief.” Teno reached for another carrot stick.

  Nola let her glass drop to the cloth. The wine had gone to her head; she felt dazed. “Listen, Jiro.” Her voice was a little too loud. “You go through something that convinces you there’s another life. But you don’t die. If someone can be revived, it means he wasn’t really dead in the first place—just in suspension. So how do you
know that what you experience is anything more than biochemical brain activity, and how do you know that it doesn’t stop as soon as you’re dead?”

  “I have,” said Teno softly, “asked that myself. There is a contradiction involved in asking what happens to you when you’re dead—in other words, when you don’t exist. It’s like asking where you were before you were born.”

  Jiro shook his head. “If you’ve experienced it yourself, the question has no meaning. You know.”

  “How do you know?” Nola leaned forward, unwilling to let go of the argument. “You just think you know. You have no proof. All that you have is the activity of a dying brain, and you supply the interpretation yourself. Maybe your faith is caused by brain damage. Have you ever thought of that?”

  Jiro laughed. Nola drew back, resting on one elbow. It was useless. She had supposed that she could introduce a doubt into Jiro’s mind, or Mikhail’s, but they had probably heard all the arguments before.

  “What can I say?” Jiro answered. “It isn’t a matter in which you can argue your way to truth.”

  Teno was watching her. She lifted a brow. For a moment she thought Teno was trying to form a silent bond with her: We’re in this together—at least we understand that they’re deluding themselves. But the gray eyes were empty. Teno either did not feel like an outsider or was used to being one.

  Giancarlo Lawrence was clever, concealing himself from the newcomer while she lived among them, knowing that they were content while she was not. By the time he showed himself, she would be more than willing to accept his ideas. Well, he didn’t know her. She would not be so easy to convince.

  Mikhail got to his knees. “We must be going.” He stood up. The shadow of his arm on the cloth embraced Nola’s silhouette. He smiled at her and turned away.

  She watched them go down the hill. An ant was crawling over the cloth; she brushed at it idly with her hand while Jiro searched his basket. “Apple pie,” he said, tempting her.

  “You must be joking.” She was stuffed; she realized that she had been nibbling nervously while Mikhail and Teno had been with them.

  “Well, I’m going to have some.” Jiro held a wedge of pie in his hand and gobbled it, taking swipes at his lips with a napkin. Teno and Mikhail, now approaching the stone wall, seemed deep in conversation. Mikhail hopped over the wall easily, then extended a hand to Teno.

  Nola stretched out on the grass and stared at the sky. It was blue and cloudless; the clear weather would hold for at least one more day. “Doesn’t Teno make you uncomfortable?” she asked.

  “No,” Jiro answered, his mouth full of pie. “At least I know I’m not going to get some sort of emotional outburst or a signal of boredom, or any of that.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d have such problems here, where you all possess the truth.” She tried to soften the sarcasm with a smile.

  “We have our difficulties. Hilde, for instance. Everything is settled for her. Her curiosity is at an end, though I don’t imagine she had much to begin with. I think that’s an error. Even the higher state—the life beyond—isn’t a permanent, unchanging one—learning still continues.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I could tell you that it was revealed to me when I underwent the little death. But you’d say it’s a delusion.”

  “I suppose I would.”

  “Teno is willing to consider the possibility. A rational being, one designed for reasoned and dispassionate action, without our capacity to make errors by heeding only our feelings, lives here and is willing to listen to what Giancarlo has to say.”

  “Teno still seems doubtful.”

  Jiro shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  The setting sun bathed Nola in pink light. She stood at the window, watching Yasmin and Jiro walk toward the fork in the road. Two other people joined them; the group turned toward Giancarlo Lawrence’s log cabin. She saw Mikhail leave his house, and turned away.

  She threaded her way past stacks of books and settled herself on the sofa after clearing away a pile of papers. The voice inside her spoke: Did you come here only to be alone?

  Nola sighed. Clarify, her mind murmured back to the voice.

  You spend a great deal of time alone at your work, and you needed to be among people. Yet here you are in a group where you are an outsider.

  She assented silently.

  My recommendation is that you leave and visit a space settlement. There would be less physical strain on a low-gravity world, and you would be among others like yourself.

  She felt irritated. I can get along fine, she replied.

  But you are not getting along fine. You are lonely. You feel sad.

  The soft, gentle voice lulled her and prodded her at the same time. She thought of the cybernetic mind that spoke to her through the implanted link, and wondered again if it was her servant or her master. She was its eyes and ears; she, and others like her, carried it to places it would not otherwise see. It knew the thoughts and feelings she did not share with others. It was learning a lot about human beings; it would draw its own conclusions. Eventually, all the cyberminds would grow silent, and people, searching for malfunctions and trying to make repairs, would not realize that at last they had been abandoned. The links would no longer speak.

  Sing to me, she said. There was a short silence, and a chamber orchestra played; she heard the tinkle of a harpsichord. Mikhail had resented the implant; he had never understood it, feeling that it was a third party in their relationship and not part of her at all. She remembered the last days before he left, when she had told him she would have it removed, knowing as she said it that she could not have done so.

  The music soothed her. The melody was simple, the rhythm repetitive. She closed her eyes.

  She came to herself abruptly. A violin was singing in her ears. She opened her eyes. The room was dark. She shut off the music and heard voices.

  A light went on overhead. Yasmin was waving her arms and laughing while Teno followed her into the room. She glanced at Nola before she sat down. “Did you fall asleep in here?”

  Nola sat up. A muscle in her shoulder ached. “I guess so. I ate too much today. All that food makes me tired.”

  “It’s the meat and wine that do it,” Teno said, sitting down in a chair.

  “I don’t suppose they affect you,” Nola said.

  “They would if I consumed them. I can live on vegetables and fruit; my metabolism is quite efficient. I remember my first experience with drinking. At first, it seemed to help my reasoning. Illumination seemed to come more quickly. I drank more and began to lose track of my thoughts. Then I became sick. I saw no reason to cloud my mind in that way, so I’ll only take a sip of wine now if it will put others at ease.”

  “How reasonable of you,” Nola said, wondering if Teno was trying to be funny. “Doesn’t it ever bother you? Do you ever resent what was done to you?” She was being rude; she wondered if Teno understood rudeness.

  “What, exactly, was done to me, Nola?”

  “You were an experiment, weren’t you? You’re not like us, you’re another kind of being. They didn’t have to do that to you.”

  “Why should I resent that? Do you resent the fact that you were born and raised on the moon and can’t come here without an exoskeleton?”

  Nola shook her head. “Of course not. But that isn’t the same. I’m still human.”

  “I am the way that I am.” Teno’s gray eyes gazed steadily at her. “If I resented it, that would mean that I wanted to be somebody else. And if I were someone else, which is clearly impossible, then I wouldn’t be me. It’s irrational and pointless to hope for such a thing.”

  “I suppose you have a reasonable answer to everything.”

  “No, not everything. Sometimes I have to say that I don’t know the answer.”

  Nola frowned, wondering for a moment if that was a joke, and if Teno knew how to be sarcastic.

  “You’re tired,” Yasmin said.

  �
�Yes, I know.” Nola stood up. “Good night.” She went to the spiral staircase and trudged up it wearily. As she moved toward her room, she heard footsteps behind her. She stopped at the door of her room and turned. Teno and Yasmin passed her. “Good night,” Teno said. The pair lingered in front of Yasmin’s door, then went inside together, closing the door behind them.

  Nola stared into the darkness, feeling dizzy. She clung to the door, then managed to close it. She shuddered. How could Yasmin look at that body without being disgusted? How could Teno have any feelings of love or affection? She tried to imagine the scene; the childlike face, the build too broad in the shoulders and a bit too wide in the hips, the groin, the double set of organs. Did Yasmin make love to the woman or to the man?

  Nola crossed the room, shedding her robe and letting the garment drop to the floor. She gazed toward her window; no moonlight shone tonight. She thought of Yasmin and Teno, able to see them all too vividly in her mind, Yasmin reclining on the bed, Teno bending over her—had Yasmin dimmed the lights? Or had she left them on, attracted by the visible mound and pestle and the possibilities they represented? Teno’s reason apparently did not entail asexuality; she wondered if that had surprised Teno’s creators.

  She was still a Lunar provincial after all. If she wanted variety, there was enough in weightlessness at a space habitat after work, or on the moon with an earthborn partner, or with a surrogate image presented by the implant. She had not yet lived long enough to grow jaded, and often grew impatient with the lengthy, calculated flirtations designed to postpone consummation, and the inevitable boredom that followed it, for as long as possible. She thought of Mikhail. He had been able to lift her as if she were a child, bending her body in new positions.

  She froze, her hand on a transparent shield. Teno had been with Mikhail that afternoon. Perhaps there was something between them. She shook, feeling the jealousy and helpless rage she had thought she could not feel any more. She remembered Mikhail’s farewell. All her arguments came back, the same ones every rejected lover must have made at such a moment: Why can’t you wait until it’s over for me, too? What is another year, or decade, when you have so many ahead of you? It costs you nothing to stay until then; don’t you care enough to give me the extra time? You won’t suffer if you stay, but I’ll suffer if you go now, and all it will cost you is a little extra time. We waste time, we throw it away. For a moment, she was back on Luna, hearing the whine in her voice as her mind repeated the words. None of it had mattered. He had left anyway.