Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 115

by Neil Clarke

  Years ago . . . he also created a program that would allow him to access uncomfortable memories but prevent them from coming unbidden to mind. He will not know how many years unless he makes an effort. That, he decides, he will do later.

  “I am beginning to feel that I would be lonely,” she says.

  Heimdallr begins to reply, but suddenly realizes that he is uncertain regarding his own feelings, which seem to be changing. “The person I was never felt lonely, but your presence has provoked something.” It has provoked shifts and subsidences, and he is less surprised by the onset of change than by what is changing—or rather, changing back.

  He had isolated and disabled numerous vulnerable aspects of his personality, but had known enough not to eliminate them, and now they are rushing back like waters reclaiming the land. He is a proud and social man who values the respect of those he admires, a man of curiosity, ambition, and unsurprising passions. All now come rushing back, dizzying him even as he stands unmoving.

  “We are alone on this world together,” he says, “and only for a short time.” The millions of nerve endings suitable for sexual response still function, even if they are not wired to his skin.

  “I understand,” she answers. She sits thinking for a time—no time at all, by the scale he is used to, but long (he remembers) for human conversation—and then stands.

  Their coupling would have struck their ancestors as heroic: it takes place in the extreme cold, it lasts a very long time, and it generates enough heat to melt the ice (methane) around them. Such flesh as they possess does not fatigue, nor are their nervous systems restricted to the range of sensation available to the humans of earlier epochs. Their emotional responses climb, soar, and dive like cranes traversing a mountain range. Tolerances are pushed, subroutines neglected to the point of recklessness in order to devote all resources to the act. Each climax offers the promise of richer and more complex raptures; the lovers do not cease until they decide, almost simultaneously, that their capacity for exaltation has reached its limit.

  After such exertion, one can only lie side by side, unselfconsciously engaged in the archaism of actually touching. It is longer still before they rise, for there is more than much for each to consider, and each has—to a degree that must itself be pondered—become now a different person. Heimdallr goes off to begin building his craft; Garðrofa to explore the world’s continent-sized surface. They rarely speak, although each feels as though the other is standing near.

  Much of the substances he needs are already incorporated into the engines that maintain Bifröst or the mechanisms that support them, and he is careful about what he harvests for his own use. There is more: energies must be summoned and gathered; a route plotted; a flight plan of fractal intricacy devised. The minders to manage these tasks and the artificers to carry them out must themselves be supervised, and Heimdallr is long at these labors before construction is finally underway and he seeks out Garðrofa, who has ranged as far as the backside of Charon.

  “I have given orders for preparations for my journey,” he told her. “We may occupy the meantime as we please. You will accompany me on the same trajectory when we return?”

  “I shall not return,” she replied.

  “You wish to stay here?”

  “I shall not stay. The functions that sustain me were not designed to outlast the voyage, and I shall soon discorporate.”

  Surprise, like a dropped match briefly illuminating an abyss, may fail to sound the depths that engulfs it. “How is this so?” he asks.

  “I do not know.”

  “You are alarmed, afraid? Resigned?”

  “No.”

  “How might this be forestalled?”

  “By no means available. I am a message to be discarded once read.”

  Heimdallr is used to solving problems, but he can see nothing here. “This is unacceptable. Why should I live and not you?”

  “You shall not always live. And for accepting this voyage you shall live less long, though differently.”

  His response to this, and hers in turn, are clear to both of them and go unspoken. They rush into each other’s arms, perhaps knowing where this will lead. There is no point in anything else; all other actions open to them close like convergent series.

  They will couple till she perishes, a fusion reaction to light up the surrounding night. Neither knows whether these exertions will delay or hasten the failure of some critical system, nor what such collapse will be like. The space they have entered defines their shared future; tumbling, they do not wonder when they will strike its far wall.

  When it comes, there is time for an instant of awareness, a hand raised perhaps in farewell. Then solitude, more sudden than seems possible; his soul rings with the shock of it.

  It is as things were before, save that it is not.

  He returns to his labors, which now involves hurling boulder-sized chunks of special ice into the sky, along paths that shall intersect his own eventual route. With the dispatch of the first projectile his timetable is fixed, immutable as the movement of the heavens. He lets fly with three more, at precisely calculated intervals and trajectories, and prepares for a departure time that is similarly established. The calculations involved in ascertaining the mass and composition of the payloads as well as their exact trajectories are delegated to engines of inhuman strangeness, leaving his own mind to muse upon what it will. He wonders whether the loneliness he now feels will someday settle back into the familiar solitude, which held its own stoic satisfactions.

  It is not something he broods upon, but eventually he begins to realize—as a shadow that moves too slowly to see will eventually lengthen to reach you—that he is not, at least not in the sense that he has understood his self to be, entirely alone.

  Heimdallr always knew that the emissary from the sunlit realms would have had recourse were he to refuse her invitation. Whether she knew it or not, Garðrofa possessed means designed either to compel his cooperation or take that which her masters valued in him. What manner of invasive procedure she had to breach the citadel of his self and suborn his will Heimdallr never asked, and does not wonder now. But now he wonders whether she managed to plant a piton before falling away.

  “Garðrofa?” he calls. “Are you there?”

  The answer is not Yes, but neither is it silence. For a long time Heimdallr stands listening, and only slowly begins to realize that the presence he perceives does not lie beyond the frontiers of his self, a dim figure that will not come forward, but stands closer, too close to be clearly discerned. Too close, though he thinks for a long time before he accepts this, to be distinct: she is not with him but in him.

  It is in thinking this through that the transformation truly takes hold. The process is too strange to surprise; Heimgarð rises and turns about only to survey its aftermath, which comprehends hrs own self. Hse reflects without wonder or resentment, for many things are clearer now.

  The time approaches, ratcheting down to zero in the tiny exact steps of an ancient clockwork, and Heimgarð stands ready on the dayside of Plouton. The spacecraft that will take hrm to the inner System is attached to hrs back and thighs, like the folded wings of Daidolos. How long did hse—did Heimdallr—abide on this world? A moment’s thought would tell hrm, though consciousness could not function with centuries of such data casually to hand.

  With a final step, the moment is here. Heimgarð looks up at the tiny Sun, swings back hrs arms and flexes hrs legs, and in one smooth motion launches hrmself into space.

  2

  The Sun is a campfire, casting long shadows into a night that soon swallows them whole. Warriors, explorers, soldiers on campaign have sat by its flickering light, as Neolithic tribes had once done, all of them aware of how quickly its illumination fades with distance. A few steps into the dimness beyond and its protecting powers fade, for predators prowl its perimeter.

  No predators lurk in the Solar System, a boundless vacuum sprinkled, more sparsely than humans can grasp, with fi
nely distributed rubble. There are no trees or hills to block the light, so the fire can be seen, a pinpoint of illumination, from miles distant. Others, too far ever to reach, fill the sky, creating an illusion of plenitude that humans can never shake.

  Hse accelerates steadily and will ultimately reach a velocity few human vehicles have attained, though the voyage will still last for years. Do the nations of the Sheltered Gardens still reckon time by the Earth’s rotational period? Hse could search hrs memories, where missives from the Gardens are stored, but they are all too old to be conclusive. Better perhaps to seek the answer by musing upon human nature. There will be time enough, and hse needs the practice.

  For all its aching emptiness, the distance Heimgarð must traverse yields a measurable risk of collision with some grain of matter. Such an impact would be catastrophic, and the craft that is largely Heimgarð has been built to offer what protection it can, including lookout instrumentation gazing ahead and around for anything larger than a dust particle. Should hse detect one in hrs path, Heimgarð would have microseconds in which to aim and fire a high-energy beam to knock it away. If that proves impossible, hse could take evasive action—avoiding impact perhaps by millimeters—or decelerate hard, enough that the tiny bullet would complete its transit across hrs path.

  The processing power required to maintain such vigilance at all times occupies a significant fraction of hrs attention, so hrs thoughts develop slowly. There is plenty of time, however, and Heimgarð continues to muse even during those hours when much of hrs brain is asleep.

  The Sheltered Gardens lie before hrm; or rather, the point that the Gardens will someday reach; they will circle the Sun many times before their path and hsr intersect. Sometimes Heimgarð imagines that the site of hrs destination is still the white-clouded planet of ancient times, Tài bái xīng or Hesperos, and that it shall progress through its history, accommodating itself to Aris and joining in an intricate dance, by the time hse reaches it. It is a strange thought, but there is time for that. Some of hrs thoughts, twining and looping through long, uninterrupted chains of association, are too strange for hrm to articulate, were anyone present to hear them.

  Heimgarð’s trajectory lies far from the ecliptic, but part of hrs mind announces, in the midst of a complex meditation, that if one drew a line from hrs position perpendicular to the ecliptic and tracked where it falls on the disk, hse has just crossed the orbit of Neptune. The planet itself is nowhere near this point, but hse finds hrmself reflecting on Triton: large, volcanically active, and closer to its primary than Selene is—was—to Earth. Once Heimdallr dreamed of building a Bifröst extending from the surface of Triton to point a long finger almost into Neptune’s atmosphere. The project was absurd: such a structure would have to be constructed of strong and flexible alloys, jointed like a dragon’s vertebrae, and hrs stolid heart recoiled at the unnaturalness of any like venture. Still, hse wonders if the Tritonides had ever considered it: they loved advanced engineering, and the great blue world that hung unmoving in their sky never ceased to fascinate and entice them.

  No world was visible to Heimgarð as hse coasted silently through the darkness. Hrs propellant was gone, and hse cruised in a great ellipse that would, should hse fail to refuel and resume powered flight, veer close to the Sun, incinerating hrm and subjecting the molten mass that remained to incredible deceleration as it swung about and headed out again in a millennia-long orbit. A tiny part of hrs attention tracks the path of the first ice boulder as hse slowly overtakes it, the largest object in millions of kilometers.

  The final hours before the encounter focus all of Heimgarð’s available thoughts, which hse recognizes as a good thing. The slowly spinning mass lies ahead, visible only by reflected starlight, which is to say, invisible to normal human eyes. Hse uses lidar to study its shifting albedo, its steady increase in diameter as it moves slowly into hrs path. Hse might have carved handholds into its surface, or shaped it to look like an artifact (a spaceborne projectile, or perhaps a sculpture), but did not think of it at the time. That it occurred to hrm now suggests that hrs thinking has changed: hse is not the being he was.

  At the instant of encounter hse seizes it, and while its midsection is too great for hrm to get hrs arms fully around, the spikes in hrs fingers dig powerfully in, anchoring hrs grip. Hrs trajectory shifts, to a degree minutely different from that predicted, and jets fire briefly to correct. Already hse is beginning to consume the boulder’s substance, and within minutes a tiny tongue of plasma flares brilliantly and acceleration resumes. That part of hrs mind that courses through material most resembling protoplasm feels the surge, and hse feels a thrill first known to the horsemen of the Eurasian steppes.

  There is a deep pleasure in powered flight, in steady acceleration that surpasses that of coasting through space. Heimgarð more than doubles hrs velocity over the next few hundred hours, then finds hrmself missing the sustained roar once the fuel is expended. Hse is a bullet, a flung stone, a falling star, free to resume powered flight once hse overtakes and consumes the next tumbling floe.

  Heimgarð moves, swiftly by the scale of humans and their works, slowly by that of what milestones can be found. When hse “passes the orbit” of Ouranos, one part of hrs mind informs the rest, which is deep in a reverie no ancestor could follow. There will be no need ever to communicate its nature, no occasion ever to recollect it in tranquility, which hse guesses does not lie ahead. Hse is whelmed in solitude and stillness: no wind to ruffle hrs hair, no blast to chill or spray to soak. Molecules—nothing larger—occasionally ping against hrs visor.

  Hse listens for radio waves, and eventually assembles an enormous dish, kilometers across yet thinner than a cell wall, that floats beside hrm like the shadow of a moon, but hears nothing save bursts of emissions from the Sun. Perhaps as hse angles closer to the ecliptic hse will be able to pick up transmissions, though none ever reached hrm on the worldbridge. The possibility that the only remaining radio communications are those from the Gardens to Hermaon, too close to the Sun to distinguish from its incessant roar, fills hrm with something like sadness.

  Heimgarð does not possess the soul of either poet or metaphysician, but hse never loses hrs train of thought, however long or complex it grows. When the view does not change and maintenance protocols are unvarying, there is little else to do but think, and the “train”—linear only in its earliest stages—is soon ramifying through all dimensions, a steadily branching tree. Hse can image this edifice in its entirety while pondering every bud, and hrs unwavering attention allows hrm to prune irrelevancies and shore up weaknesses with the patience of an ancient gardener, one who barely notices that her potted topiary has grown into a maze. Whether the final edifice is profound, or even communicable, is of no consequence to hrm, for spreading word of hrs thoughts is not in Heimgarð’s nature. Left to hrmself, hse builds.

  Inside the orbit of Phaiton hse intercepts the final iceball and begins to decelerate. The distance between the great planet and the Gardens is smaller than what hse has already crossed, yet the span cries out in its vacancy, for Ceres, Aris and the very Earth once filled it and now are elsewhere or otherwise. Slowing, the blast from hrs rockets now flare before hrm, strong enough to vaporize any grit that might cross hrs trajectory. Hse looks down past hrs boots to see hrs path obscured by the spray, and so can observe hrs flight only by holding a reflector, like Perseus’s shield, at arm’s length.

  Ceres, the tiniest world, was purposefully deflected, a servitor dispatched in the name of duty, and Aris now nestles in the Gardens, but the crumpled thing where humanity was born is but a phantasma, for all that its mass is undiminished. To contemplate this is to feel pain in a place you never knew, and Heimgarð, still new to emotion, is stunned into something like grief.

  Hse is now entering the realm of light, where comets would begin to blaze and the solar wind strengthens steadily. Earlier hse could adjust hrs trajectory with a few bursts of vaporized ice, but now hse is expending fuel profligately, decelera
ting long and hard even as the Sun seeks to pull hrm in. Hse will not meet the Garden head on, but the delta-v required to match orbits still consumes much of hrs substance. The voyager will reach hrs destination stripped to essentials, ribs showing like a wolf’s come spring.

  Selene makes a full circuit about the Sun as hse approaches, allowing Heimgarð to observe its bright bead swelling just before it disappears behind the solar corona. Sometime later it reappears on the Sun’s opposite side, to swing out, bright again, and then narrow to a sliver as it circles back toward hrm. This grants Heimgarð unobstructed sight lines to every point on the lunar surface, but no radio signal reaches hrm. The flare of hrs rockets would be visible to any imaging device scanning the sky, and hrs rapid movement across the heavens would allow any processor with access to a database to identify hrs point of origin, but the vanished Earth’s moon is as silent as Phaiton’s. Hrs summoners in the Gardens must be observing hrm through optical instruments—hse would detect the touch of any lidar signal—but even they are mute. Hse watches the bright spots of the Garden, a constellation of worlds, as they swell into fullness and then vanish behind the Sun. When the Parasol appears on schedule, a dull glowing circle of partially reflected energy, Heimgarð is significantly closer, angling not toward where it is but where it shall be. A season later and the Parasol shows itself on edge, the Garden worlds glowing as dim semicircles in its shadow.

  Now voices fill hrs ears. Words of welcome, instruction, requests for data. Garðrofa would perhaps recognize them, but Garðrofa is no longer here. Heimgarð has hrs own flight plans to follow. At the proper instant hse jettisons hrs craft, which falls away into an elliptical orbit that will someday decay into incandescence. Hse is falling free, moving toward an artificial structure that has swung round to face hrm.

  Ahead, the gates open. Sentries, watchful against nearing projectiles, are alerted to hrs authorized entry and turn aside their weapons. Alone, unarmed, the onetime sentinel of Bifröst slows to a trudge with the last of hrs propellant and enters the redoubt of Men.