The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  “It was a quotation,” said Paul. “From Shelley.”

  “Ah! Prometheus unbound....”

  “Hellas, actually.”

  “Not the poem—you. Prometheus, released from the bondage of time, to retreat into your cave instead of assuming your role again in the human world, leaving it to the spirit of nature to lead them to the glorious future. I still remember my Shellery...approximately, at least But it’s not here, Paul, is it? The paradise born to the spirit of nature, that is. The Earth’s renewed itself, but there’s no golden age for the survivors of humankind. There’s nothing, Paul...nothing at all...except you. Paradise seems to have been mislaid. It’s time to come out of the cave, to man up. Sometimes, I wonder why I ever chose you to promote, when I could have found someone with balls.”

  “You’re drunk, Joe.”

  “I do seem to have allowed myself to slip over the edge a little. It must be lack of sleep.”

  “Go to bed, Joe. We’ll talk again in the morning.”

  “I came out here to eavesdrop a little. I want to know what you intend to do.”

  “I don’t know.” Paul looked sideways at the robot, but he was bending over his nets, as if oblivious to it all. He took a couple of steps towards Herdman, and then faltered. He stood still, watching.

  “You’re going to go on, aren’t you, Paul?” said the old man, softly. “I knew it when I told you the alternatives. I just don’t know why. You’re not too stupid or too cowardly to admit that you were wrong. It’s not that at all. It’s something I just can’t figure. But you’re going to go on, in spite of everything.”

  Paul took a deep breath. “I think I have to,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just have to see this thing through. It has got another side to it—there is a way through...a fourth phase, a fifth dimension. I need to be believe that.”

  “Shall I tell you why you feel that you need to go on?” said Herdman, the alcohol blurring the words and taking the sting out of them.

  “I’d be glad if you would,” said Paul, tiredly.

  “You’re afraid. Not a cowardly fear, and not of anything superficial or immediate. You can’t admit that you were wrong because of a much deeper fear—the sheer terror that strikes you when you contemplate the possibility that there’s nothing left, and that it was all for nothing. You can’t face the thought that there’s nothing to go on to, and because you can’t face it you can’t draw back. You have to go on, and on, rushing further and further, and coming closer and closer to the terrifying absence of everything meaningful. It’s as if you were being drawn towards a curtain, knowing that when you draw it back there’ll be something beyond it that will be so terrible that your blood will freeze, and not being able to refrain because of that knowledge.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Joe.”

  “It makes more sense than you imagine. Imagine yourself in the place of the man who’s reaching out for the curtain. Imagine yourself in his shoes. You’re not so different, Paul, except that what you’re afraid of isn’t anything immediately and implicitly terrifying—it’s the more subtle and fundamental terror of nothingness, of alienness, of Godlessness. You’re afraid of being a shadow, Paul—nothing but a shadow on the face of existence. You’re afraid that you don’t matter, that you don’t mean anything, that even a life smeared across the face of eternity is nothing more in the context of the cosmos as a whole than a scale falling from the wing of one of those moths as it struggles against the netting. And so you’ll go on, and on, and on, screaming your desperation as you stagger into the biting wind. The world isn’t a poem, Paul...it’s real....”

  Herdman stood clear of the tree then, and began to declaim, with a voice full of sarcasm and gestures of parody: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  The voice died away, and silence reigned for a moment. Then Herdman said, in a voice closer to his normal manner of speaking: “Another old favorite. Worn well, hasn’t it?” Then, in a near-whisper: “I used to be an actor too, before I was an agent.”

  “We’d better go home, Joe,” said Paul, softly.

  Herdman poured himself a drink, and then touched the glass to the neck of the bottle to make a little clink—a mock salute.

  “That’s...what you’re...afraid of...,” he murmured. “And that’s...why...tomorrow and tomorrow...to the last syllable....”

  He turned on his heel, and began to walk away into the night.

  Paul looked back at the robot, who looked up again now. The lamplight caught the red lenses that were his eyes.

  “If I do go on,” said Paul, “what’s going to happen to him? To all of them?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Paul sat in his chair, quite relaxed, as the lights dimmed and the screen flickered into life. It filled one wall of the room, and as the image was clarified it seemed as though the wall dissolved, becoming a window to the world outside. The machine adjusted the scale of the three-dimensional projection so that everything was life-size. The chair was positioned so that Paul’s viewpoint was that of the camera which had transmitted the film from the depths of Gaea’s leviathan body.

  There was a ghostly quality to the image—hardly any color was visible and there was relatively little light. There were only shades of grey and yellow-brown.

  “I have to use the image-intensifier at this level,” said the machine. “Hardly any light gets down to the ground.”

  The ground itself was invisible, covered by a carpet of keratinous material woven into fibers. Projecting through this carpet were massively thick pillars, as smooth as marble columns. These were the basic elements of Gaea’s skeletal structure. Strung between them were webs of vegetable silk, which bulked into many-layered bowls where shafts of sunlight contrived to pass through the stratified canopy. The webs were supported by thicker strands of tissue, and across the strings swarmed motile blobs of protoplasm, which resembled planarian worms. Most were flattened and transparent, but occasionally they would flex themselves into coils or contract into globules. Similar vermiform things moved over the keratinized mat that hid the ground, and there were also many-legged creatures like primitive insects and other arthropods. The largest that was visible at the moment was something like a king crab, but there were others about the size of a man’s fist that resembled giant woodlice.

  “Scavenger elements,” said the machine. “They keep Gaea’s body clean. From time to time she reingests them. She has others like them inside her solid structure: worm-like things that repair all tissue damage and suck up injured nuclei and redundant membrane-structures. The largest are five to six times as big as these. The plates aren’t armor, of course, just a convenient way of stacking spare chitin and keratin. The tail of the largest one is a kind of probe carrying chemoreceptors; they’re all eyeless, of course.”

  The camera-viewpoint began to move slowly upwards into Gaea’s body. For a few minutes there was nothing to be seen but the vertical stems and their connecting strands, but then the camera began to catch the flutter of white wings.

  “Effectively, they’re vegetable moths,” said the machine. “A double leaf mounted on a musculated frame. They carry photosynthetic material from point to point, wherever the stimulus of sunlight remains for any length of time. It’s quicker and more convenient than having elaborate internal translocation systems to drain away manufactured sugars.”

  The next region was characterized by laminated elements linking the pillars, which began to diversify here into clusters of thinner stems. There were many rigid cross-pieces which formed arches between the pillars, sometimes linking four in a complex double bridge. There were often swellin
gs in the stem where elements diverged. There were relatively few of the web-like light-traps here, but the foliage was sparse; clusters of the moth-like double leaves arranged themselves in ranks and circlets at particular points. There were many flatworm-like bundles of flesh engaged in their slow crawling over the smooth surfaces.

  “At this level only a fifth or a sixth function as scavengers,” said the machine. “Most are migrating protoplasm redistributing support-strength to contend with metamorphoses in the main photosynthetic region. We’re still in the stable stratum here. You can see the blobs being absorbed and extruded if you care to watch for long enough, but it’s not an exciting sight. Their metamorphosis into flying elements is more interesting, but the best place to see that is in the crown. It’s easy enough to induce; I’ve sent out small explosive charges, and when they explode it’s as if the shockwave turns everything it touches into a cloud of insects. The experiment can be expensive; the fluttering things often function as absorptive surfaces and they’ll settle on anything in a situation like that. They can dissolve the plastic parts of my traveling eyes in no time. Usually I’m more discreet, and can keep the flow of sensory information going for hours.”

  The camera continued to rise, coming now into the lower canopy, the lowest and the most stable of the three main photosynthetic strata. Here there were nets of foliage, often bizarrely structured, continually attended by dancing pseudomoths. The leaf-elements twisted and shifted, but only very slowly, and their supporting branches coiled and squirmed. There was a lack of integration between the different elements, which were constantly poaching one another’s sunlight; they constantly induced movement and change in one another.

  Higher still, in the middle stratum of the canopy, there was more light and more space, and much more color. There were many more fluttering forms commuting between the dendrites, and life seemed better coordinated as well as less unhurried. The surfaces of the branches were no longer so smooth, but were pitted and structured with sensory hairs, pores and the occasional eye. Paul felt that the eyes were staring at him, because they turned immediately towards the camera when they perceived it. Tentacles began to grow out of the nearer branches, and they reached out for the spy in their midst, seeming to come right out of the screen in a vain attempt to touch Paul, and to destroy him.

  The camera kept ascending, moving just quickly enough to avoid the reaching tentacles, but the pseudo-insects now began to cluster about it in great swarms, and the whole image was filled with their fluttering colored wings. Through the chaotic swirling cloud, Paul could see great domes of green and yellow, for all the world like the skyline of some ancient oriental city. Soon, it was impossible to see anything at all.

  “That’s Gaea at peace,” said the machine, as the image died and the lights came on in the room. “When she’s really reactive, you have very little time to see anything at all.”

  “She can metabolize your camera-eyes?” said Paul.

  “Yes.”

  “How long before she can metabolize the material of the domes?”

  “Metal and glass she can’t cope with yet. It’s difficult to say whether she ever will be able to dissolve the material protecting the enclaves. She isn’t aware of us in any real sense; to her we’re just a bunch of globular rocks. The main battle is to keep her contained round the edges so that she doesn’t grow over us as she’s done every other mountain in the world. You should see her when it rains, and she becomes a water-trap as well as a light-trap. That was her main limitation in many areas: water supply. But the way she’s expanding now, she’ll soon change the climate sufficiently to melt the polar ice-caps. That will flood a great deal of what is now land surface, but she’ll adapt, just as she’s adapted in extending herself over the continental shelves. In time, she might be able to absorb enough water into her body to allow her to cover the whole surface, land and sea. She already has command of the oceans in the form of a vast Sargasso Sea of floating weed.”

  “Suppose the domes were breached?” said Paul.

  “There’d be an emergency, but as long as it happened when no one was awake, I could contain the invasion. Once she shows herself to be capable of that, though, it might be worth considering the possibility of removing the whole project into orbit.”

  “The domes as well?”

  “No. But some of the life could be transferred. Seed, ova...enough to start again in an orbital Ark.”

  “You couldn’t move the statues.”

  “No. The people would have to come one by one, as they awake.”

  “If that has to be done,” mused Paul, “there’d be no real point in keeping the Ark in orbit. Once forced to abandon Earth...unless there’s something to wait for.”

  “It’s possible,” said the machine, “that Gaea might ultimately become versatile enough to transcend the limits of carbon. There are other elements capable of forming long-chain molecules: silicon and boron. But what possibilities there are, we can’t know until they begin to emerge in reality. Perhaps, when she reaches the limit of her growth-potential on Earth, she will begin to send Arrhenius spores into space. There is time enough for all accidents and eventualities to come to fruition.”

  “She’s rather frightening,” said Paul, “although she doesn’t look it in the film. She’s like a great, silent forest, where everything is in harmony and nothing is wasted, and yet, if anything that’s not already part of her steps into her body....”

  “She uses relatively little of her infinite variety,” said the machine. “It’s intriguing that, although she’s absorbed all the genetic potential of all animal life that existed on Earth—including that of the La—she rarely makes use of any animal faculty except the eye, and some of the functions of striated muscle. Everything else is more primitive, or hers alone.”

  “Can we be sure that she can never evolve intelligence and identity?” asked Paul.

  “We cannot be sure of anything, but it’s highly unlikely. Intelligence and identity are the products of ecological competition and social organization. She’s not that kind of being. I would say that it was impossible, but you might with justice quote to me some words from your book: There still remain hopes that we dare not entertain, and possibilities we cannot imagine.”

  “I wish you’d stop quoting my words back at me. Herdman’s bad enough.”

  “Why? Have you recanted?”

  “No, of course not, but I don’t need constant reminders. Make up your own aphorisms and stop parasitizing me.”

  “Herdman’s presence seems to make you very uneasy.”

  “Of course it does. He’s the only remaining link with the life I led before this all began. Rebecca came into the story after the beginning, and she’s part of it, but Herdman’s not. He’s part of what I left far, far behind. He belongs to the dead past, like Wishart. I never saw Wishart, you know, in 2119. He was there but only as a name—just as I was only a name during the century before. Herdman’s the only thing I’ve seen that remains from before the beginning. Of course he disturbs me.”

  “After today, you’ll never see him again.”

  “How do you know? Suppose he goes back into his deepfreeze, to trip through absolute zero to my next awakening? He doesn’t have to jump again; he can stay with me every step of the way, if he wants to.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the machine.

  Paul didn’t know whether to welcome the opinion or not. He felt guilty about Herdman, although he didn’t know exactly why. Herdman had asked him for a favor, and he had refused, but not for lack of charity...surely there was nothing he need feel guilty about. He didn’t really want to see Herdman, ever again. Perhaps that was what disturbed him—the fact that, no matter how isolated he had become in skipping through time, he still shied away from such human contact as Joseph Herdman could offer.

  He got up, and went to the door, knowing that he would have to face Herdman one more time, before returning to the vault and taking up his station among the undead.


  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The vault, as always, was dim-lit, its air cool and still. Paul touched the hard stone of the bed that would bear him through a million years and more. Effortlessly, he swung himself over the polished rim.

  Herdman was behind him, watching from dull, bloodshot eyes. His face seemed to be drained of all expression, and the sallow flesh hung limply on the narrow jaw-line. “You’re making a mistake,” he said, levelly but a little listlessly.

  “Perhaps,” Paul replied, as he extended his legs into the hollow that was designed for them. “But I’ve got to go, at least until the point of coincidence, and I have to go this way. I can’t abandon it now.”

  “You’re condemning people to death,” said Herdman, harshly. “You know that. The people following you will die...including the girl. If you want to see her again, you should stop now, and do things my way.”

  “You might be right,” Paul conceded.

  “But you won’t?”

  “No.”

  “Did you look at the film of the others? The zombies, who gave up thinking in favor of a traumatized trip through time? Did you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll fight you for them, Paul. Every last one—including the girl. I’ll be here for every awakening from here on. I’m going to make a sales pitch to everyone. You’d better pray that it works, Paul, because it’s the only hope they have left. If they decide to stay on course, you’ll be to blame. You had the option, here and now, of calling a halt, and you refused.”

  “It’s their decision,” said Paul, calmly. “They’ll make it for their own reasons, just as I’m making my decision for my reasons. They’re entitled to the best sales pitch you can give them. I wish you luck.”

  Herdman laughed.

  “I mean it,” said Paul.

  “I know you do,” replied the other. “That’s what’s funny.”