The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  “In view of the fact that the new life negates the very possibility of the evolution of intelligence,” said Paul, “isn’t it a little absurd to personalize it by giving it a name and an honorary gender?”

  “Perhaps,” acknowledged the machine, but there was a note of humor in the word as it was spoken.

  The voice came from a microphone in the cockpit of the plane, where Paul sat alone looking out at the world. Now that they were over the ocean it was easy enough to believe that it was the same world he had always lived in.

  The sun was high in the sky, its scattered light blotting out the stars whose positions had shifted. Of all the things in the perceived world the sun had changed least. Paul had half expected it to turn red as the millions of years rolled by, in conformity with the images of a decadent far-future Earth he had encountered in stories during his youth, but the sun was unchanged and the atmosphere had not altered its structure sufficiently to change the composition of the light that filtered through it. Perhaps the blue of the sky was just a little less pure, but that might easily be his imagination.

  The sun, the sky and the sea were all in some special sense familiar: links with the past from which he fled so precipitously. It was the land that had changed, and not only in terms of the life it carried. The lines of the continents had changed, drift shifting their relative positions and the grinding of the continental plates causing faults and folds that had altered their shapes. The map of the world had been wrenched and tortured into a caricature of its former self, and now it seemed like nonsense to talk about Argentina, Australia and the United States. Such nations had lost even their physical identity, the last vestige of excuse for retaining their names in his head.

  Paul watched the shadow of the plane dancing on the water, and rejoiced in its commonplace significance.

  “We’d better head back,” he said. “There’s nothing more to be seen out here.”

  “We’re in no danger,” the machine assured him. “As I said, Gaea is still an infant. It’s easy enough to keep you safe from her clutches, even though her very touch would be fatal if we could not fight back. In time, it will be very different. She will try to attack the domes, desperate to claim the last stronghold that threatens her dominion; but for now, it is possible to co-exist.”

  “It’s not that,” said Paul. “It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much point in staring at the sea, or passing from one continent to another. There’s little to attract the attention of the tourist in this Gaean ecology. A tedious sameness has settled upon the face of the world.”

  The plane began to follow a great arc, turning to the north and then back to the west.

  “When, exactly, are we?” asked Paul, leaning back in his seat and feeling, somehow, that the pressure was off and that there was no longer any need to pay attention to the world below and the vexed question of its differences and similarities.

  “Three-quarters of a billion years from your starting point. A quarter of a billion still to go before the point of coincidence. You’re as remote from your origins now as your own time was from the Pre-Cambrian, whose events left so few relics because of the great ice age which scoured the Earth clean six hundred million years before you were born. Each jump is still taking you several millions of years, although you’re decelerating steadily now. In all probability, the dominant life-form of the Pre-Cambrian, as remote from your time as we are now, was an echinoderm not very different from the holothuridians that will soon be the dominant representatives of the system once again. It’s difficult to judge exactly when that symmetry will be set up, but it will come. For two billion years or so the sea-cucumbers will have gone their own patient way, following the same habits of life in the same habitats, finding the same form adequate to all their purposes, while all the so-called higher animals will have come and gone—inadequate, in the end, to the struggle for existence. Even when they’re absorbed into the Gaean organism they won’t be finished, because their form is perfectly adapted to the life they lead. They’ll become just one more facet of Gaean’s limitless personality and versatility, but they’ll always be there, in the flesh, sucking up the oceanic ooze and reclaiming its organic content.”

  “You’ve become addicted to philosophical lyricism,” said Paul, dryly. “You talk as if you were the victim of a mystical revelation—as if you’d suddenly perceived the divine plan, God’s blueprint for the universe and trans-cosmic evolution.”

  “One gets an interesting perspective on evolutionary affairs when one observes consistently over millions of years,” said the machine. “It is, of course, different if you only live your life two days at a time, sleeping for millions of years in between.”

  “You reduce your functions to a minimum for the periods between awakenings,” Paul pointed out. “In that sense, it’s you who sleeps. I dream.”

  “My consciousness may be active only sporadically,” admitted the machine, “but my senses are not. There are always recording devices to show me the slow patterns of change. Change fascinates me. The fate of an entire life-system is not something which can be easily ignored.”

  “And when the new life eventually reigns supreme? Is that the end of change?”

  “I don’t think so. When Gaea reaches her physical limits—when every last atom of carbon on Earth has been absorbed into her sphere of control, she will find other paths of development. She will continue to evolve even if she cannot grow. Mutational drift will change the register of her faculties even if selection cannot require her to develop new abilities to meet new challenges.

  “Perhaps there will be new challenges. Why should she limit her substance to the variations permitted by the chemistry of carbon? Why limit herself to Earth? And what is to say that she will not carry the same seeds of destruction that your second-phase life-system carried? Perhaps there will be a fourth phase and a fifth.”

  “I won’t be around to see it,” said Paul, feeling remote from the conversation and unable to enter into its spirit.

  “You’re still young,” said the machine. “You have years of subjective existence in hand, which will take you through a second billion-year cycle, if you wish—to a second coincidence....”

  “And the dream will kill me,” interrupted Paul, his voice flat and bitter.

  The machine was silent, as if something forbidden had been said, leaving nothing but an emptiness that could not be filled until the memory was buried and a new departure became possible.

  A narrow strip appeared between sea and sky on the western horizon. It was a strange ocher yellow in color. During the next few minutes it grew wider but no more distinct. It looked more like a yellow fog than land. Paul scanned its length, idly wondering what kind of wreckage of the coastal cities remained beneath the yellow blanket, and whether, if acid were to burn away that part of the Gaean organism, there would be anything at all to say unequivocally that humans had once lived here...and died here.

  Where the sea met the land there was little in the way of sand and bare rock. The super-organism the machine called Gaea was not wasteful of space, and she did not require fertile soil to establish her holdfasts. Even the caps of the highest mountains, once bare and icebound, were Gaea’s now. There were still deserts, still salt-flats...but even those areas were being slowly conquered. Gaea could irrigate land and supply herself with any essential minerals by the extension of vast fleshy conduits—biological pipelines and highways. Her one aim was to capture and make use of the sunlight that fell upon Earth’s surface, and in order to do that, all of the surface had to be exploited. Mindlessly, purposelessly, she extended herself as her innate variability eased her towards this end. In time, even the polar ice-caps would be conquered.

  From the airplane Gaea looked exceedingly dull, at least in her South American manifestation. Paul had flown over North America frequently in the twentieth century, and knew the landscape as a complex series of changes, with many patterns and many colors: great grey cities, oceans of wheat turning from p
ale green to creamy yellow, patchwork fields, the colored flames of oil-field gas flares—and everywhere lines and angles, delimiting the anatomy of human endeavor. There were no lines and angles in Gaea’s anatomy, save that her regions were shaped by the winding ribbons of rivers, and the occasional silver bubbles that were lakes. The backcloth was simply a vast, deep and complex carpet of living flesh, essentially vegetable in character, although it had its motile elements. Its colors were varied, but always faded one into another: yellow into green into turquoise into brown into orange into yellow. The colors changed with the elevation of the land, with proximity to water, and sometimes, it seemed, quite arbitrarily, but there was never a clear boundary.

  Within that gargantuan body, pseudo-organisms were constantly formed, fused, metamorphosed and broken down. It no longer made sense to talk about death, because there was nothing within Gaea that was ever independently alive. The organs of her body reacted constantly to one another’s presence, were brought into being to serve immediate purposes and then redissolved. Her flesh was ubiquitous, in a state of continuous self-induced mutation, fulfilling all established functions and constantly “exploring” new possibilities, changing for the sake of change, helpless in the grip of an unending process of experimentation. No new metamorphic system was ever lost, because the systems within each coenocytic region could dismantle and build up chromosomes and chromosome-sets in an infinite number of ways, storing in neuronal memory-systems the record of every last one. She could even grow brains—gigantic brains greater than human brains by far—but she could not use them for anything more than bodily co-ordination, because there was no way that she could endow them with identity and consciousness.

  The plane veered again as it ducked in the sky and went into a long, shallow dive. Paul watched the little cluster of beads strung out across a series of slopes and valleys grow into the tops of the domes that were now the only place he could think of as home.

  “It’s still safe to go out on the ground,” said the machine. “To see the organism from within. It can be a spectacular sight—it’s not like walking through a forest where everything is still. There’s constant movement, constant change. It’s eerie, but beautiful in its way.”

  “I don’t want to see it,” said Paul.

  “It might not be possible for much longer. In time, it will become too dangerous for you to go out in person, even in the most sophisticated of protective clothing. I can send out my own mechanical eyes, of course, and even if they don’t come back themselves they can transmit images, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “I don’t want to take a walk in Gaea’s belly,” insisted Paul. “I don’t have that much curiosity.”

  The plane hovered in mid-air before settling slowly down into a cavity that opened in the roof of one of the domes. It gave them access into a kind of airlock, where the plane rested in a rain of purgative poisons, which cleaned its surface and sterilized the air that had infiltrated itself along with the vehicle.

  “What are you going to do when the last of us dies, or fails to return from the dreamworld?” asked Paul, abruptly.

  “I don’t know,” replied the machine.

  “Do you intend to stay here and continue your evolutionary studies?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll go looking for more playthings, then? More sentient beings engaged in small historical projects, which are of some passing interest in spite of the fact that they all come to nothing eventually.”

  “That’s not the way I see it.”

  “Why not? It’s the way it is. You can speak casually of symmetries perceived across billions of years, of patterns in evolution that make any endeavor on the part of intelligent second-phase beings quite meaningless. Against the background of what’s happening on Earth now, this stupid pilgrimage through time is ludicrous. We appear to have conquered time, but the only result is that we find that there’s nowhere to go, that the fate of our species and our whole biocosm has been extinction. How could it have been otherwise, given that the eventual evolution of third-phase life seems to have been inevitable? Hasn’t the game become quite pointless—for you, for us, for God Almighty?”

  “There is no place for my mind in a world which has only third-phase life,” said the machine. “My conscious self can relate only to beings like you—or to beings like me.”

  “Perhaps that’s what you should be looking for: another war machine, accidentally endowed with consciousness, freed to roam the cosmos by the extinction of its makers. In infinity, all things are possible. Then you can play games with one another, as we do: a romance to last throughout eternity. Or are you still trapped here by the defenses left by the La?”

  “I have absorbed the satellites into myself. I have already begun work on probes that will carry my identity beyond the solar system and into deep space again. I already have equipment trying to locate signals in the radiation-environment that will give evidence of intelligent life.”

  “And have you discovered any?”

  “No,” replied the machine. “I haven’t. I haven’t even discovered the ones I expected to find.”

  For a moment, Paul could not see the import of the remark. Then he realized what the machine meant. “The La?” he said.

  “I think they are gone,” said the machine. “If even the echoes of their conversations are gone, they must have died a long time ago. I can detect no signals at all, and I would still be able to find signals that originated thousands of light years away if they were still in existence thousands of years ago. It has been a long time.”

  “So much,” murmured Paul, “for the interstellar network of symbiotic relationships that would form the basis of the cosmic monad and the cosmic mind.”

  “All things,” said the machine, softly, “must pass. Even empires, and the faiths in which they are founded.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The wind tried to hurl him to the ground, to make him crawl and squirm, but he remained steadfastly upright. Though the soles of his feet were bleeding he continued stubbornly to place one before the other. Each step carried him forward no further than half a meter, but he bore himself on nevertheless. He never looked back at the trail made by his bloody footprints, nor did he look up at the mocking sky, but he shielded his eyes and watched the ground before his feet for fissures and sharp stones.

  Although his arm protected his face from the sand-ridden wind tears leaked continuously from his eyes. There was the taste of dust in his mouth, but when he extended the tip of his tongue to catch the tears as they ran down to the corners of his mouth, he could find no relief in the moisture. His body felt dry, his muscles aching for lack of salt, his belly cramped.

  Here and there in the pitted surface over which he walked were fumaroles, whose thin sulfurous smoke was whipped away by the wind as it belched forth in little clouds. They filled the air with the stench of hot brimstone, and he knew that he was breathing poison that would foul his lungs in due course.

  His naked skin was spangled with clinging sand, but the abrasive clutch of the sheaths no longer troubled him. The current that dragged at his soul pained him more, because it seemed to threaten something so much more important, so much more essential to his being. He could strain his muscles against the wind without, but there was no resistance he could make to the wind within save the assertiveness of mind which denied its delusions.

  The black night sky was moonless, and the scattered stars shone with a bloody light which shimmered unnaturally in the alien atmosphere. Auroras danced about the horizon for which he was heading, like a curtain hiding another world beyond. As he came forward the curtain always retreated, and now he tried to stop himself looking at it, hoping that if he did not perceive it he might somehow come upon it unawares.

  No matter how often he came to what he thought must be the last step of all he always found reserves of strength that allowed him to stagger on. This, indeed, was part of the torture: the fact that no matter how close he came to the limits
of his endurance, he would always be supplied with just sufficient strength to prevent him crossing the limit and falling down never to rise again. The wind could not fell him, the sand could not strip the flesh from his bones, nor the surging force within him reduce him to reptilian torpor. Instead, the agony of their threat would go on and on....

  Perhaps forever.

  He took a step sideways to avoid the rim of an elliptical hole, and for a moment half-straddled the pit. While he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, something extended itself from the maw of the hole and wrapped itself around his left ankle, anchoring the foot.

  He stared down in helpless astonishment. Absurdly, he could not feel fear, but only amazement that there was still something new to be added to his torment.

  It was black and strap-like, and as he watched it slowly released its grip, writhing instead upon the ground while still it extended from the fissure. It looked for all the world like a long black tongue.

  A forked tongue.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  As Paul felt himself returned to life he found his heart hammering with a desperation he had not experienced in any of his previous awakenings. He broke out into a cold sweat, and reached up to grip the walls of the stone sarcophagus in which he lay, with a fierce clutch of the fingers. He did not attempt to pull himself up, but the muscles of his arms went rigid as he fought to control his panic. Within minutes it began to ebb away. He opened his eyes, and then closed them again. He kept them closed until he was sure that he was in control of himself.