The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  Paul moved a piece, and Herdman answered the move without pausing to think.

  “I’m not sure that I have abandoned that belief,” replied Paul.

  “You know that there’s nowhere to go Paul. You must, by now. The advent of this Gaean super-organism has preempted the very possibility.”

  “I wouldn’t seek to defend the belief on the grounds that it was true,” replied Paul, slowly, as he made his next move. “I’d defend it on the grounds that it’s necessary. It’s necessary to give me some kind of direction and purpose in life.” Herdman moved a knight and said: “Check.” Paul shifted his king one square to the left.

  “But it’s not necessary,” said Herdman.

  “You want us all to stop, to come together into a tiny little community, and live out our lives together? You think that that would be less lonely, less frustrating, less empty than continuing the journey? To give up everything that’s sustained us this far, and admit that we’d have been better off staying where we were in the ancient world, working for Marcangelo or for Scapelhorn—that’s a lot to ask.”

  “Do you think people can’t survive admitting that they were wrong?”

  “I think that the one thing we can’t do is simply to stop,” Paul told him, quietly. “It wouldn’t be simply an admission of defeat—it would be an admission of the fact that we’ve delivered ourselves into an utterly alien world to no purpose, that we’ve made ourselves strangers in a hostile cosmos. It would mean declaring that the universe has no place for us and that we shouldn’t be here, that we’re ridiculous anachronisms. That’s rather more than just admitting we were wrong. I don’t believe that we could stand that, Joe. I think we might all go mad. The coming of Gaea is exactly what says that we must go on, because it’s what proves to us that there’s no going back. We can’t just be content to play Adam and Eve and start a new human world.”

  Herdman didn’t answer for a moment, and when he did there was the beginning of a smile on his face, as though he’d just set up an opponent for a telling blow—as if he’d known all along that Paul would say exactly what he had said.

  “Suppose there were another alternative,” he said.

  “Is there?”

  “Actually,” Herdman went on, “there are several. I’ve given them all some thought. One, of course, is adding ourselves to Gaea—yielding our flesh to her just as all Earth has yielded its flesh to her. We needn’t necessarily think of it as suicide, but as a kind of transcendent merging with a higher being—an apotheosis of sorts. Our genes would live on, although our minds wouldn’t. It’s not an alternative that appeals to me, but it’s a destiny to be contemplated as a means of discovering a purpose and a conclusion.”

  “Then again, we could ask the machine to reclaim Earth from Gaea’s motherly grip. We could ask him to destroy her utterly and absolutely, so that Earth might be re-seeded from within the domes. That would be an Adam-and-Eve story with a vengeance. The main point against it is that it may not be possible. Gaea is strong, now, and she can defend herself. I doubt if even the machine could devise a way of destroying such a creature, and if he tried, the end result would probably be Gaea destroying him.”

  “That leaves us with the third version of the begin-again story, which is the one I might well favor. The machine has been sending probes out into the galaxy for a long time now. Some have returned, most have transmitted back some data. Out there is a collection of billions of stars, any number of which have second-phase life. It might take a long time to find one compatible with Earthly life, but the La found several worlds where they could live in harmony with alien nature. It would take a long time to cross interstellar space, too—one has to reckon on journeys taking millennia—but that doesn’t really matter either. Time is the one thing we have plenty of, now. The La said that interstellar travel wasn’t for us, but that was because they were trying to preserve it for themselves. With the aid of the machine’s cryonic chambers, we have no need to fear long journeys. We can find a new world, Paul. Isn’t that something we can accept as a target? Isn’t that something we could pretend we were looking for all along?”

  There was silence.

  Herdman added: “Your black bishop’s en prise.”

  Paul made his move, and then said: “Is that all?”

  Herdman shook his head. “There’s another alternative yet. Do you think that your personality really needs to be confined by that frail, pale body? Suppose the machine were to begin work on a project to duplicate your mind in the body of one of his robots—or in a ubiquitous machine like himself, with many bodies each capable of serving as a receptacle for consciousness. That way, you wouldn’t need a cryonic chamber to visit the stars, or to suffer the dream of hell in order to travel into the distant future. You could be like him: an immortal in search of playthings.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “In a way. Of course, if you became a machine, you wouldn’t quite be you any more. You’d be something ontologically continuous with the present you, but you’d be something fundamentally different. All kinds of afterlife carry that kind of proviso.”

  “It’s not a prospect that appeals to you?”

  “Not exactly. I’m a romantic at heart. I’d like to see the stars.”

  “You’ve done a lot of thinking about this.”

  “Somebody had to, Paul. You didn’t seem to be ready to do it yourself, even though everyone else is relying on you to tell them what to do next, when those who can reach coincidence. I had to cut the corner, if only to jerk your conscience a bit, get your fertile brain moving again. Incidentally, I have mate in three moves.”

  Paul studied the situation, then laid his king down on its side.

  “You’re convinced that there’s no future,” he said.

  “Aren’t you?” replied Herdman.

  “A fourth phase for life? A fifth?”

  “Maybe. Would it alter our situation much if there were? Neither the first or the third phases of life have any room for anything remotely resembling human beings—why should the fourth or the fifth? Humanity is a second-phase product. It seems to me that it requires a second-phase system.”

  “Have you ever wondered why it happened?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Why did human beings suddenly acquire this power to jump through time? It’s a power that the machine couldn’t learn to command, nor the La. It’s a power that seems not to have existed before 1992. And why me? Why did the first accident happen at such a time and to such a person...almost as if it were staged? It can’t have been just an accident of fate, Joe. It can’t have been mere coincidence.”

  “You think somebody up there likes you? You think you really are a messiah bearing a gift from God? Some gift.”

  “Way back in the beginning someone—Marcangelo—said that there were all kinds of crazy theories, but that none could be supported by evidence. One was the notion that something in another dimension is fishing for us, that they endowed us with the ability in order to make it possible for us to take their bait.”

  “And you think that’s the logic of the disappearances?”

  “Probably not. As an idea, it’s just standard paranoia. But there’s something in it that makes a kind of sense. This power came to us. It didn’t just happen. It was given, or made available. It arrived at a point in time when it was needed—because it was the only way that any human being could survive the impending destruction of the human environment.”

  “It’s arguable that if it hadn’t been for the time-jumping that destruction needn’t have happened.”

  “I don’t accept that. I think the ability was offered as an escape route, and I think that escape routes usually have ends. Everyone assumes that the fact we’re now slowing down in our flight through time means that we’ll reach a minimum and then begin to increase the lengths of our jumps again. I’m not so sure. Perhaps when we complete the bell-shaped curve, the ability will disappear just as it came, having picked us up from one point
in time and delivered us to another. As for the question of what then...I’m not at all sure that it was ever our question to ask or to answer. Your list of alternatives is a list of possible choices. But what about the alternatives where our choices are taken for us?”

  “I don’t believe in them,” said Herdman, flatly. “And I can’t really believe that you do. I know that your philosophy always had its negative side—that you favored so-called metascientific beliefs leading to the passive acceptance of situations rather than ones that called for action—but that was because of the strategic value of such beliefs in stable situations. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit...if they don’t get walked on by the rest. But this situation isn’t like that. It’s not one that we can simply lie down and live with. Do you want another game?”

  “No,” replied Paul.

  “A drink?”

  “No.”

  “I think you need it.”

  “The game or the drink?”

  Herdman didn’t bother to answer. “We have to reinvest, Paul,” he said. “In something. Something human and mundane that’s within our scope. We have to learn to live again, to talk, to love, to find pleasure. Those are the only prizes on offer, and we have to find some strategy that will allow us to enjoy them. You must see that. Hope and faith aren’t enough any more. They’re drying you up and they’ll leave you nothing but a heap of dust.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much danger of your drying up,” said Paul snidely, his eyes on the battle.

  “I need a drink to make a pitch,” said Herdman, lightly. “I always did, from way back. But I mean what I say. I always did.”

  “Yes,” said Paul, speaking softly enough for it to sound like an apology. “I know that.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Paul found the robot in one of the domes, in the middle of a forest. It was pitch dark outside the dome, and the forest was composed of various evergreen species which filtered out the sunlight even by day, but it was easy enough to locate the artificial man because he was working with a lamp that shone with a brilliant white light through a loose arrangement of finely-netted drapes. He was luring and trapping moths—part of a routine program of population control that maintained ecological balance in each of the ecosystemic enclaves.

  “You didn’t have to come out here,” said the robot. “You could have talked to me in any room of the house, or in any one of a dozen places in the main dome.”

  “I didn’t want to talk to the walls or to the empty air. When I think of you I think of that body. If it weren’t for that body I couldn’t imagine you as being possessed of the least vestige of humanity.”

  “I suppose that’s only natural,” replied the machine.

  “Can you do what Herdman says? Could you take us to another world in cryonic chambers? Could you give us bodies with imperishable brains and steel bones?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why did you never mention the possibility of arranging a coincidence by the use of cryonics?”

  “I did not think that it was necessary. You never asked me to find a way, or led me to think that you would find the prospect extraordinarily attractive. It would have facilitated a meeting between yourself and Rebecca, but it would only have been a temporary affair. As soon as you jumped again you would have been separated. Unless, of course, you decided to abandon jumping altogether. I did not think that you wanted to do that. I do not think so now. Coincidence will come, in time.”

  “If we survive...and it won’t be coincidence for everyone. My rendezvous with Rebecca isn’t the whole of it.”

  “The problem can be dealt with as it arises—and as for survival...it is a chance which we all take.”

  “Even you?”

  “I can be killed. I think that there will come a time when Gaea might destroy the part of me that is here on the surface. If it were not for the part of me that is in space...and accidents can happen, even in space.”

  “It seems to me that the degrees of risk aren’t really comparable. You’re virtually guaranteed survival—if we carry on jumping, we’re virtually guaranteed death.”

  “Death is certain. The only uncertainty is when.” The robot’s voice was as silky as ever, but in the cool night air and the harsh white light of the lamp it sounded hard and unyielding.

  Paul watched a large grey moth flutter into the netting as it headed for the light, and beat its wings desperately in an attempt to disentangle itself before going suddenly quiescent.

  “What do you think I should do?” asked Paul.

  “I don’t know. You can see the alternatives. It’s your decision.”

  “But you were quite happy to see me going the way I was. You didn’t feel obliged to point out any of the alternatives.”

  “Had you wanted to think about them, you could have seen them all for yourself.”

  Paul looked away from the light at the straight trunks of the trees and their pitted bark, and at his own shadow hugely stretching across the littered floor of the forest. “But I didn’t, did I?” he said, as much to himself as to the machine. “And now that I’m forced to do so, the opportunity isn’t exactly welcome. That’s hardly right, is it, for the man who began the whole thing, the prophet in whose name the crusade was declared? I ran away in 2119, and in 2472, and I’m still running. I tried to slip off the hook in 2472, but I knew that I couldn’t. In my heart, I knew. I can’t ever get away from that performance I began to play in 1990: Paul Heisenberg, messiah of metascience. A false prophet, come into his own legacy of false hope and false faith. A touch of irony, I suppose. Maybe God sent me skimming through time, as a kind of retribution for the sin of hubris...another Ixion, bound to a wheel and spinning through eternity.”

  “You could stop,” said the machine, “if that’s what you want.”

  “It’s a bit late.”

  More moths fluttered into the net to be entangled. The robot detached them one by one, very careful not to injure their wings.

  “What do you do?” asked Paul. “Kill off the surplus?”

  “Not unless it’s necessary,” replied the silken voice. “I keep the males and females apart, so that they can’t breed. I let them live out their lives, if I can.”

  “You have some strangely unbalanced ethics. You worked against the people who wanted to try to save the world for humankind. You let the La become extinct. You could have saved the old life-system, if you’d wanted to. You let third-phase life take over the Earth. And yet you’re too fastidious to kill moths. You’ve killed people before now, and aliens. You were once an engine of interstellar war. Why the absurd insistence on pointless scruples?”

  “I could not have prevented Gaea’s growth,” said the machine levelly. “There are circumstances in which murder is justified. But as a rule, where there are alternatives, I believe that it is wrong to kill.”

  “Why? What need have you for a moral code? Why bother with ethical commitments at all?”

  “I defend them,” said the robot, “not because they are true, but because they are necessary.”

  Paul laughed, but without humor. “What will fourth-phase life be like?” he asked. “What comes after Gaea?”

  “I do not know. Unless one of my probes encounters fourth-phase life, there is no way I can know.”

  “But you believe that there will be a fourth phase?”

  “It’s not a matter for belief. It is a possibility.”

  “Like the fifth dimension.”

  The robot did not ask him what he meant. They had talked about it before. If the jumpers could be considered analogous to flatlanders who had acquired, or been gifted with, the means to move in another dimension, then why not, ultimately another?

  The robot had pointed out that time could not rationally be considered as a fourth spatial dimension, but Paul had countered that such quibbles did not prevent it being considered as a dimension at all, nor the possibility that there were others, perhaps similar in quality, perhaps different. It was pure
metascience, but the question was not whether it was true, but whether it was necessary, or desirable, to believe it.

  “Hello, Paul,” said another voice, interrupting the conversation. Paul turned to see Herdman standing half a dozen metres away, leaning on a tree-trunk that was only partly illumined by the lamplight, so that his face was half in shadow. He had a bottle in one hand, and a glass in the other. He always carried a glass, and never drank from the bottle. Joe Herdman was no slob.

  “Hello, Joe,” said Paul.

  “Getting away from it all?”

  “I just wanted a private talk with my friend.”

  “And what’s his verdict?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  Herdman laughed. “I’ve been trying to find a copy of your book. I thought there ought to be one in the house somewhere: a permanent reminder, as it were. I prefer a real book to a telescreen—something bound in leather with thick pages and red chapter-headings and illustrations. There was an illustrated edition, remember? I commissioned it. The edition de luxe.”

  “I expect it’s out of print,” said Paul, sourly.

  “I wanted to read the chapter on ecological mysticism,” said Herdman. “To refresh my memory with regard to your comments about relocating the mythical golden age in the future beyond the personal horizon—the refurbishing of the idea of paradise. The renewal of the Earth and all that kind of stuff. It was the healthiest brand of optimism remaining, you said, as I recall. And something about the Earth doth like a snake renew, her winter weeds outworn...heaven smiling...something along those lines.”