A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

  Perhaps that was the only remaining edge that humanity had—the superstitions of machines.

  “Very eloquent,” Czudak said, and sighed. “Almost, you convince me."

  The Mechanical stirred, seeming to come back to itself from far away, from a deep reverie. “You are the one who must convince your followers of your sincerity, Mr. Czudak,” it said. Abruptly, it stood up. “If you publicly recant, Mr. Czudak, if you sway your followers, then we will let you Go Up. We will offer you the same benefits that we offer to any of our companions in the Orbital Companies. What you would call ‘immortality', although that is a very imprecise and misleading word. A greatly extended life, at any rate, far beyond your natural organic span. And the reversal of aging, of course."

  “God damn you,” Czudak whispered.

  “Think about it, Mr. Czudak,” it said. “It's a very generous offer—especially as you've already turned us down once before. It's rare we give anyone a second chance, but we are willing to give you one. A chance of Ellen's devising, I might add—as was the original offer in the first place.” Czudak glanced quickly at Ellen, but she kept her face impassive. “You're sadly deteriorated, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical continued, softly implacable. “Almost non-functional. You've cut it very fine. But it's nothing our devices cannot mend. If you Come Up with us tonight, you will be young and fully functional again by this time tomorrow."

  There was a ringing silence. Czudak looked at Ellen through it, but this time she turned away. She and the Mechanical exchanged a complicated look, although whatever information was being conveyed by it was too complex and subtle for him to grasp.

  “I will leave you now,” the Mechanical said. “You will have private matters to discuss. But decide quickly, Mr. Czudak. You must recant now, today, for maximum symbolic and psychological affect. A few hours from now, we won't interested in what you do anymore, and the offer will be withdrawn."

  The Mechanical nodded to them, stiffly formal, and then turned and walked directly toward the wall. The wall was only a few steps away, but the Mechanical never got there. Instead, the wall seemed to retreat before it as it approached, and it walked steadily away down a dark, lengthening tunnel, never quite reaching the wall, very slowly shrinking in size as it walked, as if it were somehow blocks away now. At last, when it was a tiny manikin shape, arms and legs scissoring rhythmically, as small as if it were miles away, and the retreating kitchen wall was the size of a playing card at the end of the ever-lengthening tunnel, the Mechanical seemed to turn sharply to one side and vanish. The wall was suddenly there again, back in place, the same as it had ever been. Joseph peeked out of it, shocked, his eyes as big as saucers.

  They sat at the kitchen table, not looking at each other, and the gathering silence filled the room like water filling a pond, until it seemed that they sat silently on the bottom of that pond, in deep, still water.

  “He's not a cultist, Charlie,” she said at last, not looking up. “He's a hobbyist. That's the distinction you have to understand. Humans are his hobby, one he's passionately devoted to.” She smiled fondly. “They're more emotional than we are, Charlie, not less! They feel things very keenly—lushly, deeply, extravagantly; it's the way they've programmed themselves to be. That's the real reason why he wants to take humans along with him, of course. He'd miss us if we were left behind! He wouldn't be able to play with us anymore. He'd have to find a new hobby.” She raised her head. “But don't knock it! We should be grateful for his obsession. Only a very few of the AIs care about us, or are interested in us at all, or even notice us. Bucky Bug is different. He's passionately interested in us. Without his interest and that of some of the other Clarkists, we'd have no chance at all of going to the stars!"

  Czudak noticed that she always referred to the Mechanical as “he,” and that there seemed to be a real affection, a deep fondness, in the way she spoke about it. Could she possibly be fucking it somehow? Were they lovers, or was the emotion in her voice just the happy devotion a dog feels for its beloved master? I don't want to know! he thought, fighting down a spasm of primordial jealous rage. “And is that so important?” he said bitterly, feeling his voice thicken. “Such a big deal? To talk some machines into taking you along to the stars with them, like pets getting a ride in the car? Make sure they leave the windows open a crack for you when they park the spaceship!"

  She started to blaze angrily at him, then struggled visibly to bring herself under control. “That's the wrong analogy,” she said at last, in a dangerously calm voice. “Don't think of us as dogs on a joyride. Think of us instead as rats on an ocean-liner, or as cockroaches on an airplane, or even as insect larva in the corner of a shipping crate. It doesn't matter why they want us to go, or even if they know we're along for the ride, just as long as we go. Whatever their motives are for going where they're going, we have agendas of our own. Just by taking us along, they're going to help us extend our biological range to environments we never could have reached otherwise—yes, just like rats reaching New Zealand by stowing away on sailing ships. It didn't matter that the rats didn't build the ships themselves, or decide where the ships were going—all that counts in an environmental sense is that they got there, to a place they never could have reached on their own. Bucky Bug has promised to leave small colonizing teams behind on every habitable planet we reach. It amuses him in a fond, patronizing kind of way. He thinks it's cute.” She stared levelly at him. “But why he's doing it doesn't matter. Pigs were spread to every continent in the world because humans wanted to eat them—bad for the individual pigs, but very good in the long run for the species as a whole, which extended its range explosively and multiplied its biomass exponentially. And like rats or cockroaches, once humans get into an environment, it's hard to get rid of them. Whatever motives the AIs have for doing what they're doing, they'll help spread humanity throughout the stars, whether they realize they're doing it or not."

  “Is that the best destiny you can think of for the human race?” he said. “To be cockroaches scuttling behind the walls in some machine paradise?"

  This time, she did blaze at him. “Goddamnit, Charlie, we don't have time for that bullshit! We can't afford dignity and pride and all the rest of those luxuries! This is species survival we're talking about here!” She'd squirmed around to face him, in her urgency. He tried to say something, even he wasn't sure what it would have been, but she overrode him. “We've got to get the human race off Earth! Any way we can. We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket anymore. There's too much power, too much knowledge, in too many hands. How long before one of the New Men decides to destroy the Earth as part of some insane game he's playing, perhaps not even understanding that what he's doing is real? They have the power to do it. How long before some of the other AIs decide to exterminate the human race, to tidy up the place, or to make an aesthetic statement of some kind, or for some other reason we can't even begin to understand? They certainly have the power—they could do it as casually as lifting a hand, if they wanted to. How long before somebody else does it, deliberately or by accident? Anybody could destroy the world these days, even private citizens with the access to the right technology. Even the Meats could do it, if they applied themselves!"

  “But—” he said.

  “No buts! Who knows what things will be like a thousand years from now? A hundred thousand years from now? A million? Maybe our descendants will be the masters again, maybe they'll catch up with the AIs and even surpass them. Maybe our destinies will diverge entirely. Maybe we'll work out some kind of symbiosis with them. A million things could happen. Anything could happen. But before our descendants can go on to any kind of destiny, there have to be descendants in the first place! If you survive, there are always options opening up later on down the road, some you couldn't ever have imagined. If you don't survive, there are no options!"

  A wave of tiredness swept over him, and he slumped in his chair. “There are more important things than survival,” he said.

  Sh
e fell silent, staring at him intently. She was flushed with anger, little droplets of sweat standing out on her brow, dampening her temples, her hair slightly disheveled. He could smell the heat of her flesh, and the deeper musk of her body, a rich pungent smell that cut like a knife right through all the years to some deep core of his brain to which time meant nothing, that didn't realize that forty long years had gone by since last he'd smelled that strong, secret fragrance, that didn't realize that he was old. He felt a sudden pang of desire, and looked away from her uneasily. All at once, he was embarrassed to have her see him this way, dwindled, diminished, gnarled, ugly, old.

  “You're going to turn us down again, aren't you?” she said at last. “Damnit! You always were the most stiff-necked, stubborn son-of-a-bitch alive! You always had to be right! You always were right, as far as you were concerned! No argument, no compromises.” She shook her head in exasperation. “Damn you, can't you admit that you were wrong, just this once? Can't you be wrong, just this once?"

  “Ellen—” he said, and realized that it was the first time he'd spoken her name aloud in forty years, and faltered into silence. He sighed, and began again. “You're asking me to betray my principles, to betray everything I've ever stood for, to tear down everything I've ever built..."

  “Oh, fuck your principles!” she said exasperatedly. “Get over it! We can't afford principles! We're talking about life here. If you're still alive anything can happen! Who knows what role you may still have to play in our destiny, you stupid fucking moron? Who knows, you could make all the difference. If you're alive, that is. If you're dead, you're nothing but a corpse with principles. Nothing else is going to happen, nothing else can happen. End of story!"

  “Ellen—” he said, but she impatiently waved away the rest of what he was going to say. “There's nothing noble about being dead, Charlie,” she said fiercely. “There's nothing romantic about it. There's no statement you can make by dying that's worth the potential of what you might be able to do with the rest of your life. You think you're proving some kind of point by dying, by refusing to choose life instead, it enables you to see yourself as all noble and principled and high-minded, you can feel a warm virtuous glow about yourself, while you last.” She leaned closer, her lips in a tight line. “Well, you look like shit, Charlie. You're wearing out, you're falling apart. You're dying. There's nothing noble about it. The meat is rotting on the bone, your muscles are sagging, your hair is falling out, your juices are drying up. You smell bad."

  He flushed with embarrassment and turned away, but she leaned in closer after him, relentlessly. There's nothing noble about it. It's just stupid. You don't refuse to refurbish a car because it has a lot of miles on it—you re-tune it, refresh it, tinker with it, replace a faulty part here and there, strip the goddamn thing down to the chassis and rebuild it if necessary. You keep it running. Because otherwise, you can't go anywhere with it. And who knows where it could still take you?"

  He turned further away from her, squirming around in his chair, partially turning his back on her. After a moment, she said, “You keep casting yourself as Faust, and Bucky Bug as Mephistopheles. Or is your ego big enough to make it Jesus and the Devil, up on that mountain? But it's just not that simple. Maybe the right choice, the moral choice, is to give in to temptation, not fight it! We don't have to play by the old rules. Being human can mean whatever we want it to mean!"

  Another lake of silence filled up around them, and they at the bottom of it, deep enough to drown. At last, quietly, she said, “Do you ever hear from Sam?"

  He stirred, sighed, rubbed his hand over his face. “Not for years. Not a word. I don't even know whether he's still alive."

  She made a small noise, not quite a sigh. “That poor kid! We threw him back and forth between us until he broke. I suppose that I always had to be right, too, didn't I? We made quite a pair. No wonder he rejected both of us as soon as he got the chance!"

  Czudak said nothing. After a moment, as if carrying on a conversation already in progress that only he could hear, he said, “You made your choices long ago. You burnt your bridges behind you when you took that job with the Company and went up to work in space, against my wishes. You knew I didn't want you to go, that I didn't approve, but you went anyway, in spite of all the political embarrassment it caused me! You didn't care so much about our marriage then, did you? You'd already left me by the time the AI revolt happened!"

  She stirred, as if she was going to blaze at him again, but instead only said quietly, “But I came back for you too, didn't I? Afterward. I didn't have to do that, but I did. I stuck my neck way out to come back for you. You were the one who refused to come with me, when I gave you the chance. Who was burning bridges then?"

  He grunted, massaged his face with both hands. God, he was so tired! Who had been right then, who was right now—he didn't know anymore. Truth be told, he only dimly remembered what the issues had been in the first place. He was so tired. His vision blurred, and he rubbed his eyes. “I don't know,” he said dully. “I don't know anymore."

  He could feel her eyes on him again, intently, but he refused to turn his head to look at her. “When the AIs took over the Orbital Towns,” she said, “and offered every one of us there immortality if we'd join them, did you really expect me to turn them down?"

  Now he turned his head to look at her, meeting her gaze levelly. “I would have,” he said. “If it meant losing you."

  “You really believe that, don't you, you sanctimonious bastard?” she said sadly. She laughed quietly, and shook her head. Czudak continued to stare at her. After a moment of silence, she reached out and took him by the arm. He could feel the warmth of her hand there, fingers pressing into his flesh, the first time she had touched him in forty years. “I miss you,” she said. “Come back to me."

  He looked away. When he looked around again, she was gone, without even a stirring of the air to mark her passage. Had she ever been there at all?

  The places where she had touched his arm burned faintly, tingling, as if he had been touched by fire, or the sun.

  He sat there, in silence, for what seemed like a very long time, geological aeons, time enough for continents to move and mountains flow like water, while the shadows shifted and afternoon gathered toward evening around him. Ellen's scent hung in the room for a long time and then slowly faded, like a distant regret. The clock was running, he knew—in more ways than one.

  He had to make up his mind. He had to decide. Now. One way or the other. This was the sticking point.

  He had to make up his mind.

  Had it ever been so quiet, anywhere, at any time in the fretful, grinding, bloody history of the world? When he was young, he would often seek out lonely places full of holy silence, remote stretches of desert, mountaintops, a deserted beach at dawn, places where you could be contemplative, places where you could just be, drinking in the world, pores open ... but now he would have welcomed the most mundane and commonplace of sounds, a dog barking, the sound of passing traffic, a bird singing, someone—a human voice!—yelling out in the street—anything to show that he was still connected to the world, still capable of bringing in the broadcast signal of reality with his deteriorating receiving set. Still alive. Still here. Sometimes, in the cold dead middle of the night, the shadows at his throat like razors, he would speak some inane net show on, talking heads gabbing earnestly about things he didn't care about at all, and let it babble away unheeded in the background all night long, until the sun came up to chase the graveyard shadows away, just for the illusion of company. You needed something, some kind of noise, to counter the silences and lonelinesses that were filling up your life, and to help distract you from thinking about what waited ahead, the ultimate, unbreakable silence of death. He remembered how his mother, in the last few decades of her life, after his father was gone, would fall asleep on the couch every night with the TV set running. She never slept in the bed, even though it was only a few feet away across her small apartment, not even clos
ed off by a door. She said that she liked having the TV set on, “for the noise.” Now he understood this. Deep contemplative silence is not necessarily your friend when you're old. It allows you to listen too closely to the disorder in your veins and the labored beating of your heart.

  God, it was quiet!

  He found himself remembering a trip he'd taken with Ellen a lifetime ago, the honeymoon trip they'd spent driving up the California coast on old Route 1, and how somewhere, after dark, just north of Big Sur, on the way to spend the night in a B&B in Monterey (where they would fuck so vigorously on the narrow bed that they'd tip it over, and the guy in the room below would pound on the ceiling to complain, making them laugh uncontrollably in spite of attempts to shush each other, as they sprawled on the floor in a tangle of bedclothes, drenched in each other's sweat), they pulled over for a moment at a vista-point. He remembered getting out of the car in the dark, with the invisible ocean breathing on their left, and, looking up, being amazed by how many stars you could see in the sky here, a closely packed bowl of stars surrounding you on all sides except where the darker-black against black silhouette of the hills took a bite out of it. Stars all around you, millions of them, coldly flaming, indifferent, majestic, remote. If you watched the night sky too long, he'd realized then, feeling the cold salt wind blow in off the unseen ocean and listening to the hollow boom and crash of waves against the base of the cliff far below, the chill of the stars began to seep into you, and you began to get an uneasy reminder of how vast the universe really was—or how small you were. It was knowledge you had to turn away from eventually, before that chill sank too deeply into your bones; you had to pull back from it, shrug it off, try to immerse yourself again in your tiny human life, do your best to once more wrap yourself in the conviction that the great wheel of the universe revolved around you instead, and that everyone else and everything else around you, the mountains, the vast breathing sea, the sky itself, were merely spear-carriers or theatrical backdrops in the unique drama of your life, a vitally important drama unlike anything that had ever gone before.... But once faced with the true vastness of the universe, once you'd had that chill insight, alone under the stars, it was hard to shake the realization that you were only a minuscule fleck of matter, that existed for a span of time so infinitely, vanishingly short that it couldn't even be measured on the clock of geologic time, by the birth and death of mountains and seas, let alone on the vastly greater clock that ticks away how long it takes the great flaming wheel of the Galaxy to whirl around itself, or one galaxy to wheel around another. That the shortest blink of the cosmic Eye would still be aeons too long to notice your little life at all.