* * *
At week's end the Russians who had come out of the Sun began to leave in small groups of twenty. Ivan left with the last group, without saying good-bye. Soon the camp was empty again, except for construction and maintenance crews. Juan wandered around the partially exposed ship in the evenings, examining it with new eyes as it sat in the net of utility lights.
Titus was not pressing him to do anything, and Juan felt him to be a more humane version of the man he had known. Crews entered the ship from time to time to duplicate provisions for the base, and sometimes he went in with them. Guards changed regularly at the lock. Occasionally, after a starlight walk around the perimeter, he listened to radio broadcasts. The world was still in a state of shock, but he found that comforting. He missed Lena, Malachi, and Magnus, as well as the three Soviets, whom he had begun to count as new friends. Lena and Mal had been his last link with the primary Earth, which was now probably dead, lost in an infinite regress of variants.
Construction went on around the ship. A ceramic dike and supports were put in place to prevent the ship from shifting during the rainy season. There was talk of putting a weatherproof dome over the entire installation.
One evening he heard voices coming from the ship and went over to the bottom of the ramp to listen. The guards seemed to be arguing in the lock. He started up, hoping for some conversation; there was always a chance of picking up a detail about this variant. The differences he had found so far were minor, but their reality awed him. Sports records were changed; half again as many people had survived the sinking of theTitanic ; Reagan had recovered from his assassin's bullet in the 1980s.
He heard a woman's voice as he neared the lock, and sprinted up the rest of the way.
“Lena!” he shouted, pushing past the guards. She rushed into his arms. Mal and Magnus grabbed his shoulders and laughed with relief as Isak, Dita, and Yerik looked on. Lena kissed him for a long time.
“What do you remember?” Juan demanded suddenly, staring into her eyes. They were still as blue, her hair the same shade of blond.
“Your hand left mine,” she said nervously. “We tried again and arrived here.”
“Yes!” Isak shouted. “It may be that we've come the same way.”
He wanted to believe it was true as he looked at her. She shook him roughly. “Juan, it's me. No matter what, it's me.”
“We were right behind you in the run,” Magnus said.
“How can we ever be sure?” he asked.
“Ask a thousand questions!” Isak cried. “I'll wager you'll find no differences.”
Lena kissed him again. “Take me somewhere private,” she whispered as he led her out to the ramp.
“Welcome home,” one of the guards said, standing aside.
“Lena,” Juan said suddenly, “did President Reagan die when he was shot?”
“Of course he did,” she replied.
31. ANOTHER AUTUMN
A stranger's voice answered when he called his parents' house from his New York City hotel. He looked into the living room.
“Hello, I'm the county's agent for this property.” A short red-haired woman dressed in a gray business suit stepped into view. “May I show you around?” she continued. “If you have a three-dee display, press one now. If you wish to speak to me directly, press two.”
Juan pressed 2 and said, “I'd like to speak to Adela Obrion.” The red-haired woman's face replaced the recording. “Where can I reach her?”
“Oh, I'm sorry, but Mrs. Obrion died a few months ago.”
Juan took a deep breath. “And Mr. Obrion?”
“Oh, she'd been a widow for three years. You might be able to reach her son. One of the neighbors told me he was working on some government thing and couldn't come to the funeral. You'd think they would have let him, even if he was on the Moon or something. Her two sisters were quite upset—”
“Her sisters?” Juan cut in.
“Oh, yes. They get the money from the house and furnishings, after the county takes its taxes, of course, but if you're shopping you won't have to worry about the Federal taxes. It will all be cleaned and personal things removed into storage for her son. The sisters are quite upset. I think his name was Jan or John. I can't be sure. Say, who are you anyway? Are you interested in buying? My name is—”
He hung up.
* * *
The autumn was unchanged as he walked down the leaf-strewn street toward the house, and it seemed impossible that he would not find everyone at home, even the two aunts he had acquired. Somewhere, they were all here, with the same sunset, waiting.
He looked up. Vastness waited to swallow the Earth as stars pierced the clouding sky. The strength of a million suns sang through the alien web, challenging his hopes. What can we learn from it? What can we do with it? What will it do to us? His father's fearful echo asked the questions.
The Earth lived, but his own connections to its history had been weakened further; yet it remained his world. The pulse of possibility beat within him, insisting that joy could be won. Human intellect might still prevail, enabling humankind to escape its torments and reach for what it longed to be, not what it had been given to be. Utopia could not be found in mere probabilities. It would be found within, through basic changes in humanity, in ages to come, where the frames could not take him.
A gust of wind whirled the leaves on the sidewalk in front of him. He walked through them, and for a moment was free of despair. It had deepened his understanding, but he could not follow it into its bitter trap. The exploration of the web would continue; the price of discovery would be paid. “We need time to learn,” Isak had insisted. “The starcrossers left us a piece of their history, and continued on their journey to something very different. One day we may follow, but we must have time.”
“You're right, Isak,” he whispered as he neared the house. Clouds sailed in from the north, threatening rain, and he reminded himself that this variant had not destroyed itself, that it had pulled back from the edge—from beyond the edge. Surely that meant something; even if this world failed in the end, others would succeed. For all things to be possible, everything had to happen.
Meanwhile, he would learn to live in the probabilities, certain of uncertainty as he slipped through the mystery of the variants. Enigmas and ambiguities would blind him; answers might present themselves even when he asked the wrong questions.
He came at last to the house, passed through the open gate, and lacked over the realtor's sign on his way to the door. He was the sole owner now, after paying the taxes, but he was still not sure why he wanted it.
* * *
He wandered the empty rooms on the first floor as if exploring them for the first time, wondering if the house was his in all possible worlds. The living room walls seemed a paler blue, but perhaps the paint had faded. His father's chair still stood in the corner, but there were now two photos of him in his college cap and gown, one taken with his father and another with his mother. The rug was a plain dark blue rather than the patterned one he remembered. He left the room and went to the back, wondering if he was entering the kitchen in all variants.
At last he went upstairs to his old room on the second floor. The rug was gone from the polished wood floor, he noticed as he entered the square, low-ceilinged space. On one shelf, the photo of a solemn, dark-haired boy in his first communion suit was surrounded by certificates won at grade school science fairs. The frames were jumbled, as if someone had begun to put them away.
He sat down in the gable and gazed out through the window. Raindrops began to strike the roof, filling the silence with a whisper. He turned away and noticed the open closet.
A large box held the door open. He got up, went over, and saw that the label was addressed to him, care of a local storage house. He opened the unsealed top and rummaged around in the contents. There were familiar books, lovingly sealed in plastic; one large brown envelope contained academic prizes, certificates of participation, diplomas from grade school,
junior high, high school, college, and graduate school, old report cards, and his parents' death certificates. Another overstuffed manila envelope was filled with correspondence. He tried to take one out, but the envelope slipped from his hands and hit the floor. Letters and postcards slid out and opened like a fan.
He noticed one envelope with a recent postmark, addressed in his own handwriting to his father. He picked it up and took out the letter. It was not dated and seemed hastily written on both sides of one page:
Dear Dad,
Sorry I didn't seem myself last visit, but I did appreciate your long letter, which was waiting for me when I got back. I can't tell you how happy your interest in my work has made me. Yes, I do think I've helped in what may be an important discovery. I'm looking forward to when I can tell you all about it!
He stopped reading the words he had never written, wondering if his mother had put his father up to writing to him. The old man had always valued her advice, and they had been very close, so it seemed unlikely that she could have forced him.
He continued reading:
I can tell you, however, that what I'm doing has nothing to do with weapons. It's communications, but in a new way.
In this variant his father had written to him just before Summet had sent him to the Antarctic. He finished reading:
I hope that your hospital stay won't bore you too much. No, I haven't had time for a steady woman friend, but maybe someday it will happen. You and Mom will be the first to know. I promise. And I'll help you with fixing up the house on my next visit.
Again, your letter made my day, my week, my year!
Love, Juan
He slipped the strange, happy note back into its envelope. How young he had sounded! A parent's approval, so long withheld, had turned him into a boy. Carefully, he put the envelope into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, wondering if he would find his father's letter somewhere in New York.
The rain was now coming down hard outside. Lightning flashed; thunder rattled the gable window and the overhead light winked out. Perhaps the walls between variants should never be breached, he thought as he went back to the window, if choice was to mean anything. The letter in his pocket was a rare prize, telling him that his father had reached out to embrace him, and he had done the same. But it was not part of this son's experience, and never would be. Was it enough, knowing that father and son alternates had succeeded? It was better than nothing, but he was again cheating and being cheated. There were variants where his father remained contemptuous; another where he was actively harmful. All failures and triumphs were both real and illusory.
He sat down in front of the window and stared out at the street lamps in the rainy night, thinking again about utopias. A human mind passing through the alien frames could only slip along the lines of human bias—the strange attractor that limited human history in all possible worlds; but what if a human mind left that axis through some recalibration of the frames? Radically reshaped humanities might exist not only in futurity, but along different axes striking out through infinite superspace. . .
As lightning lit up the street below, he glimpsed a figure hurrying toward the house. Wind stripped leaves from the branches of swaying trees. A leaf plastered itself against the glass as he peered out, startling him. He moved back and stood up, filled with the pleasant dismay that sometimes comes with the sense of overwhelming mystery.
The overhead light went on, and he knew that he was not finished with the alien web, nor with his fellow man.
“Juan?” Lena called from below. “Are you here?”
Thunder drowned out his answer as he hurried downstairs, suddenly afraid of some obscure detail that would reveal she was not the woman he had known.
III. INFINITE SPACES
The universe. . . is a machine for making deities.
—Henri Bergson
32.THE TREMBLING WAY
Ten square kilometers of jungle had been cleared and flattened for access to the alien starship. Juan noticed that vehicles even passed under the giant ball. The dirt ramp that had been used during excavation in the first year had been gradually replaced by one of ridged steel. Two years later, it snaked around the ship and twisted down to level ground.
A growing city of white domes clustered around the ship, housing the researchers who worked within the alien vessel, and providing holding areas for the convicts who were being brought in for their one-way trip away from Earth. A hundred at a time were instructed and equipped, then taken down the corkscrew passage of the starship to the frame chamber and herded through to a distant world, where other rejects were already attempting to make a life for themselves.
The attraction of the scheme was that criminals could be removed from highly visible penal institutions which did not rehabilitate and were a costly problem to their communities; even better, no criminals need ever be executed. Simply remove them forever from their past and future victims. Make your lives elsewhere, the judges were saying, and you'll feel the need for law.
The North Atlantic Nations and the Soviet Confederation had begun this new form of exile about two years ago. It had been one of the first uses to which Soviets and Americans had put the alien ships, but the convenience had been too tempting for other governments to ignore. Working through the UN, every nation had obtained some access to the ships here in Brazil and in the Sun, and to the one recently found on the Moon. All the ships were linked with each other through their identical frame chamber. The pace of expansion into the alien web was quickening despite the problems it posed for human understanding of reality. Practical gains outweighed all other considerations.
“We'll be late, sir,” the tall sergeant said.
Juan nodded and followed him down the dirt path that led from the heliblock to the large central dome. The feeling that he had lost parts of himself weighed more heavily on him with each passing year. He might have felt the same even if he had never passed across the probabilities; but the trembling way offered by the alien technology had given him a view of human history that only confirmed his doubts. Breakouts from the evolutionary maze, made possible by science and technology, only magnified humanity's inner limits. Spinoza was right. A man was free only in his mind, in his sense of possibility; but in action, deeper programs played.
As they approached the main dome, Juan felt dismay and shame as he looked at the domes clustered around the alien colossus. It goes wrong again, he thought.
The sergeant cycled the climate control lock, and the outer door opened. Juan followed him into the white outer chamber.
“Sergeant, what do you think of all this?” he asked as the door slid shut.
“I do my job, sir.”
“And you're happy with that?”
“I get what I want, sir.”
“Juan!” Titus Summet cried as the inner door opened. He stood at the end of a hallway. Juan stepped out of the lock. The door closed behind him.
“Good to see you,” Summet said as he rushed forward and shook his hand. The stocky man seemed as vital as ever, and as vain. His graying hair and bushy eyebrows were again brown.
Juan nodded politely and withdrew his hand. “I see you've visited the ship's medical chambers. How many important people have made the pilgrimage by now? How many favors do you owe for?”
Summet scowled, deforming his brow. “Still not very glad to see me, are you?” Juan was silent as Summet led him into his new office. The large circular room had a daylight ceiling. An oval desk stood in the middle of a green wall-to-wall rug. Summet hurried around behind the desk and sat down. Juan sat down in one of the three high-backed chairs facing it.
“You look well,” Titus said, shifting in his chair. “Ready to come back from your leave?”
“Get to the point.”
Titus nodded, and Juan caught an uncharacteristic sadness in his deeply lined face. “We've got a problem, Juan, and you're the only one who has any chance of solving it for us.”
“Just tell me what you want.”
“What is it, Juan? Haven't we treated you well? How's Lena?”
“Don't tell me you don't know.”
“I knew she went back to Norway to visit her mother and old friends, out of curiosity about this variant, if nothing else.” He paused. “Is it over between you two?”
“For the time being,” Juan lied.
“But that's not why you're so disagreeable, is it?”
“How involved are you with these penal arrangements?” Juan asked.
“The decisions were made without me. You sound very concerned. What about your work, and Lena?”
“Let's say I'm now more interested in what makes my fellow man tick. Maybe I'll learn why we're in such a mess on this world. There's a lot of fear circulating, even among the small professional crooks. The lawyers are spooked. Now tell me how you're tied into it.”
Titus leaned forward. “You're nothing new, Juan. Science is littered with the careers of men and women who cared only for their work, then developed a social conscience when they discovered human imperfection. They become even more outraged when they have to face up to being human themselves. But I'll skip trading insults with you and get to the point, because I need you. This kind of exile for criminals has been legally arrived at. Most people will accept it because it will mean seeing the last of tens of thousands of hardened offenders who have to be supported with public money. Ordinary people want what works, even if it seems a little unjust.”
“A little unjust?”
Titus raised his right eyebrow. “Maybe not unjust at all, but bear with me.”
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