by Greg Bear
Paul-racial memory. Same mechanism as biologic. There are many lives in each of us; in the blood, in the tissue.
Burden on local space-time. Too many. Gogarty. Push right through…they cannot help it. Must take advantage. We—you-of course cannot perhaps would not want to stop them.
They are the grand achievement.
They love. They cooperate. They have discipline, yet are free; they know death, but are immortal.
They now know me, thru and thru. All my thoughts and motives. I am a theme in their art, their wonderful living *fictions*. They have duplicated me a million times over. Which of me writes this? I do not know. There is no longer an original.
I can go off in a million directions, lead a million lives (and not just in the “blood music”—in a universe of Thought, Imagination, Fantasy!) and then gather my selves together, hold a conference, and start all over again. Narcissism beyond pride, propinquitous, far grander than simply living forever. (They have found her!)
Each of them can have a thousand ten thousand, a million counterparts, depending on their quality, their functions. None needs die, but in time all or nearly all will change. In enough time, most of the million me’s will bear no resemblance to the present me, for we are infinitely variable. Our minds work on the infinite variety of life’s foundations.
Paul, I wish you could join us.
We are aware of the pressures on you.
(Text break 0847-1023)
Not tapping keys. Into the keyboard, into the electronics.
Know you must destroy.
Wait. Wait until 1130. Give an old friend that long.
I do not like my old self, Paul. I have given it up, most of it. Pruned away withered pieces. Relived and reshaped whole sections of my 52 years. One could become a saint here, or explore a multitude of sins. What saint can not know sin?
(Text break 1035-1105)
Gogarty.
CGATCATTAG (UCAGCUGCGAUCGAA) Name now.
Gogarty. Amazing Gogarty! Far too dense, far too much seeing theorizing, far too much being. They know in NA. Down to the smallest, they have peered in NA. Telling us, preparing. All go together. Afraid deathly wonderfully afraid the finest fear, Paul, not felt in the gut but wondered in thought, nothing like it. Fear of freedom beyond the constraints now, and seeming wonderfully free already. So much freedom we must change to accommodate. Unrecognizable.
Paul 1130 that much time
1130 1130 1130!
Such a rush of feeling for the old, affection chick for egg man for mother student for school
Diverging. Some other takes the writing.
Meeting myselves. Command clusters coordinate. Celebration. So much, so rich! Three of me stay to write, already very different. Friends back from vacation. Drunk with experience freedom knowing
Olivia, waiting…
And Paul this is backwater noocyte slum not like NA Brief. Coming. New Year!
NOVA
(end text 1126.39)
Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs read the final words on the VDT and raised his eyebrows. Hands on the arm of his chair, he looked at the clock on the wall
1126.46
He glanced at Dr. Schatz and stood. “Open the door,” he said. She reached out to the switch and opened the door to the observation room.
“No,” he said. “To the lab.”
She hesitated.
1126.52
He ran to the console, shoved her unceremoniously aside and flipped the three switches in rapid succession, fumbling the last and repeating.
1127.56
The three-layer hatch began its ponderous slide.
“Herr Paulsen-Fuchs—”
He slid in through the foot-wide gap, into the outer isolation area, still chill with released vacuum, into the high-pressure area, ears popping, and into the inner chamber.
1129.32
The room was filled with fire. Paulsen-Fuchs thought for a moment that Dr. Schatz had begun some mysterious emergency cleansing, had unleashed death in the chamber.
But she had not.
1129.56
The fire cleared, leaving a smell of ozone and something twisting lens-like in the air over the cot.
The cot was empty.
1130.00
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Suzy felt the queasiness and put down her plate. “Is it now?” she asked the empty air. She pulled the cloak tighter. “Kenny, Howard, is it now? Cary?”
She stood in the middle of a smooth circular arena, the gray food cylinder behind her. The sun was moving in irregular circles and the air seemed to shimmer. Cary had told her about what would happen the night before, while she slept; told as much as she would understand. “Cory? Mother?”
The cloak stiffened.
“Don’t got!” she screamed. The air grew warm again and the sky seemed covered with old varnish. The clouds smoothed into oily streaks and the wind picked up, driving between the pillar-covered mound on one side of the arena and the spiked polyhedron on the other. The polyhedron’s spikes glowed blue and quivered. The polyhedron itself sectioned into triangular wedges; light leaked from between the wedges, red as molten lava.
“This is it, isn’t it?” she asked, crying. She had seen so much in dreams the past week, had spent so much time with them, that she had become confused over what was real and what was not. “Answer me!”
The cloak shivered and moved up in a hood over her head. The hood sealed itself under her chin and wrapped her forehead in a thin, translucent white layer. Then it grew around her fingers and formed gloves, down to her legs and feet, wrapping her tight but allowing her to move as freely as before.
The air smelled sweetly of varnishes, fruits, flowers. Then of warm fresh bread. The cloak slapped around her face and she tried to scratch at it with her fingers. She rolled on the ground until the voice in her ears told her to stop. She lay flat in the middle of the arena, staring upward through the transparency.
Be quiet. Be still. It was her mother’s voice, stern but gentle. You’ve been a very willful young girl, the voice said, and you’ve refused everything we’ve offered. Well, I might have done the same. Now I ask one more time, and decide quickly. Do you wish to go with us?
“Will I die if I don’t?” Suzy asked, voice muffled.
No. But you’ll be alone. Not one of us is staying.
“They’re taking you away!”
What Cary said. Did you listen, Seedling? That was Kenneth. She struggled to tear the cloak away.
“Don’t leave me.”
Then come with us.
“No! I can’t!”
No time, Seedling. Last chance.
The sky was warm electric orange-yellow and the clouds had thinned to tangled ragged threads. “Mother, is it safe? Will I be afraid?”
It’s safe. Come with us, Suzy.
Her mouth was paralyzed, but her mind seemed to crackle and come apart. “No,” she thought.
The voices stopped. For a time all she saw was racing lines of red and green, and her head hurt, and she felt like she would vomit.
The air glittered high above. The ground of the arena shrunk beneath her, the surface crazing and breaking up.
And for a dizzy moment, she was in two places at once. She was with them—they had taken her away, and even now she spoke to her mother and brothers, to Cary and her friends…
And she was in the crumbling arena, surrounded by the tattered remnants of the pillared mound and the spiked polyhedron. The structures were falling apart, as if made of sand at a beach, drying and collapsing under the sun.
Then the feeling passed. Her queasiness was over. The sky was blue, though bits and pieces of it hurt to look at.
The cloak fell away from her and was indistinguishable from the dust of the arena.
She stood and brushed herself off.
The island of Manhattan was as level and empty as a cookie sheet. To the south, clouds billowed thick and dark gray. She turned around. Where the food cylinder had been, dozens of o
pen boxes haphazardly filled with cans now rested. On top of the nearest box was a can-opener.
“They think of everything,” Suzy McKenzie said. In minutes, the rain began to fall.
TELOPHASE
FEBRUARY, THE NEXT YEAR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CAMUSFEARNA, WALES
The winter of burning snow had hit England hard. This night, the velvet-black clouds obscured the stars from Anglesey to Margate, scattering luminous blue and green flakes on land and sea. When the flakes touched water, they were immediately extinguished. On land, they piled in a gently glowing cloak that pulsed like bellowsed coals when trod upon.
Against the cold, electric heaters, thermostats and furnace regulators had for months proven unreliable. Catalytic heaters burning white gas were popular until no more could be had, and then they were at a premium, for the machines that made them proved equally unreliable.
Antique coal stoves and boilers were resurrected. England and Europe slipped quickly and quietly back to an earlier, darker time. It was useless to protest; the forces at work were, to most, unfathomable.
Most houses and buildings simply remained cold. Surprisingly, the number of people sick or dying continued its decline, as it had throughout the year.
There were no outbreaks of virulent disease. No one knew why.
The wine, beer and liquor industries had not fared well. Bakeries radically altered their product lines, most switching over to production of pasta and unleavened breads. Microscopic organisms the world around had changed with the climate, as unreliable as machinery and electricity.
In eastern Europe and Asia, there was starvation, which put paid to (or confirmed) ideas about acts of God. The world’s greatest cornucopias no longer existed to spill forth their groceries.
War was not an option. Radios, trucks and automobiles, planes and missiles and bombs, were just not reliable. A few Middle Eastern countries carried on feuds, but without much enthusiasm. Weather patterns had changed there, too, and for a period of weeks, burning snow fell on Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem.
Calling it the winter of burning snow summed up everything that had gone wrong, was going wrong; not just the weather.
Paulsen-Fuchs’ Citroen sputtered along the rugged single-lane macadam road, snow chains grinding. He carefully nursed it, prodding the accelerator, braking gently on a slippery incline, trying to keep the machine from giving up altogether. On the bucket seat next to him, a bag of paperback mystery novels and a smaller bag wrapped around a bottle had been stuffed into a picnic basket.
Few machines worked very well any more. Pharmek had been closed for six months because of severe maintenance problems. At first people had been brought in to replace the machines, but it had soon become apparent that the factories could not operate with people alone.
He stopped by a wooden post and rolled his window down to get a clear view of the directions. Camusfearn, a hand-carved board declared; two kilometers straight ahead.
All of Wales seemed covered with phosphorescent sea-foam. Out of the black sky came galaxies of brilliant flakes, each charged with mysterious light. He rolled the window up and watched flakes fall on his windshield, flashing as the wipers caught them and pushed them aside.
The headlights were off, even though it was night. He could see by the snowglow. The heater made ominous gurgles and he urged the car on.
Fifteen minutes later, he made a right turn onto a narrow, snow-shrouded gravel road and descended into Camusfearna. The tiny inlet held only four houses and a small boat dock, now locked in jagged, crusty sea-ice. The houses with their warm yellow lights were clearly visible through the snow, but the ocean beyond was as black and empty as the sky.
Last house on the north side, Gogarty had said. He missed the turn, rolled roughly over frozen sod and grass, and backed up to regain the road.
He hadn’t done anything half this insane in thirty years. The Citroen’s motor chuffed, snarled and stalled barely ten meters from the old, narrow garage. Snowglow swirled and dreamed.
Gogarty’s dwelling was a very old plastered and whitewashed stone cottage, shaped like a brick-two stories topped with a slate shingle roof. On the northern end of the house a garage had been appended, ribbed metal sheet and wood frame also painted white. The garage door opened, adding a dim orange-yellow square to the universal blue-green. Paulsen-Fuchs pulled the bottle from the bag, stuffed it into his coat and climbed out of the car, boots making little pressure-waves of light in the snow.
“By God,” Gogarty said, coming to meet him. “I didn’t expect you to try the journey in this weather.”
“Yes, well,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “The craziness of a bored old man, no?”
“Come on in. There’s a fire—thank God wood still bums! And hot tea, coffee, whatever you want.”
“Scotch!” Paulsen-Fuchs cried, clapping his gloved hands together.
“Well,” Gogarty said, opening the door. “This is Wales; and whiskey’s scarce everywhere. None of that, regrettably.”
“I brought my own,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, pulling a bottle of Glenlivet from beneath his coat “Very rare, very expensive.”
The flames crackled and snapped cheerily within the stone fireplace, supplementing the uncertain electric lights. The interior of the cottage was a jumble of desks—three of them in the main room—bookcases, a battery-powered computer—” Hasn’t worked in three months,” Gogarty said—an étagère filled with seashells and bottled fish, an antique rose and velvet daybed, a manual Olympia typewriter—now worth a small fortune—a drafting table almost hidden beneath unrolled cyanotypes. The walls were decorated with framed eighteenth century flower prints.
Gogarty took the tea kettle off the fire and poured out two cups. Paulsen-Fuchs sat in a worn overstuffed chair and sipped the gunpowder brew appreciatively. Two cats, an orange tabby with spiky fur and a pug-nosed black long-hair, sauntered into the room and stationed themselves before the fire, blinking at him with mild curiosity and resentment.
“I’ll share a whiskey with you later,” Gogarty said, sitting on a stool across from the chair. “Right now, I thought you’d like to see this.”
“Your ‘ghost’?” Paulsen-Fuchs asked.
Gogarty nodded and reached into his sweater pocket. He removed a folded piece of brilliant white paper and handed it to Paulsen-Fuchs. “It’s for you, too. Both our names. But it arrived here two days ago. In the mail box, though there hasn’t been mail delivery for a week. Not out here. I posted my letter to you in Pwllheli.”
Paulsen-Fuchs unfolded the letter. The paper was unusual, buff-textured and almost blindingly white. On one side was a neatly handwritten message in black. Paulsen-Fuchs read the message and looked up at Gogarty.
“Now read it again,” Gogarty said. The message had been short enough that most of it remained in his memory. The second time he read it, however, it had changed.
Dear Sean and Paul
Fair warning to the wise. Sufficient. Small changes now, big coming. VERY big. Gogarty can figure it out. He has the means. The theory. Others are being alerted. Spread the word.
Bernard
“Every time, it’s different. Sometimes more elaborate, sometimes very concise. I’ve taken to recording what it says each time I read it.” Gogarty held out his hand and rubbed his fingers. Paulsen-Fuchs handed him the letter.
“It’s not paper,” Gogarty said. He dipped it in his tea cup. The letter did not absorb, nor did it drip upon removal. He held it in both hands and made a vigorous tearing motion. Though he carried the motion through, the letter remained in one piece, in one hand, having passed through the other hand in some unobvious fashion. “Care to read it again?”
Paulsen-Fuchs shook his head. “So it is not real,” he said.
“Oh, it’s real enough to be here whenever I want to read it It’s just never quite the same, which leads me to believe it isn’t made of matter.”
“It is not a prank.”
Gogarty laughed. �
��No, I think not.”
“Bernard is not dead.”
Gogarty nodded. “No. Bernard went with his noocytes, and I believe his noocytes are in the same location as the North American noocytes. If ‘location’ is the proper word.”
“And where would that be? Another dimension?”
Gogarty shook his head vigorously. “My goodness, no. Right here. Right down where everything begins. We’re macro-scale, of course, so when we investigate our world, we tend to look outward, to the stars. But the noocytes—they are microscale. They have a hard time even conceiving of the stars. So they look inward. For them, discovery lies in the very small. And if we can assume that the North American noocytes rapidly created an advanced civilization—something that seems obvious—then we can assume they found a way to investigate the very small.”
“Smaller than themselves.”
“Smaller by an even greater factor than our smallness compared to a galaxy.”
“You are talking about quantum lengths?” Paulsen-Fuchs knew little about such things, but he was not totally ignorant.
Gogarty nodded. “Now it so happens that the very small is my specialty. That’s why I was called up for this noocyte investigation in the first place. Most of my work deals with lengths smaller than ten to the minus thirty-third centimeters. The Planck-Wheeler length. And I think we can look to the submicroscale to discover where the noocytes went, and why.”
“Why, then?” Paulsen-Fuchs asked.
Gogarty pulled out a stack of papers filled with text and equations written by hand. “Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum? The noocytes undoubtedly discovered this, worked with it—have you heard about Los Angeles?”
“No. What about it?”
“Even before the noocytes disappeared, Los Angeles and the coastline south to Tijuana vanished. Or rather, became something else. A big experiment, perhaps. A dress rehearsal for what’s happening now.”