by Greg Bear
But the pride was largely masked by a sadness. The book dealt with a future. What future was there? Certainly not the.one he had envisaged—a future of humans and extraterrestrials interacting on a vast mission of adventure and discovery. In some respects, that now seemed pitifully naive.
Life on Earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization ...
And yet . . .
Somebody out there was thinking altruistically.
Or perhaps not.
Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.
He had written that once in an unpublished article on third-world development. The developed nations could serve their interests best by fostering the growth and development of less privileged, weaker nations . . .
And perhaps that was what was happening here.
But many experts on strategy had read his article and criticized it severely, citing many historical examples to prove him wrong. "Whose interests does the Soviet Union serve?" one reader had asked him. The Soviet Union, he had acknowledged, was stronger than ever— apparently—but faced enormous problems coordinating the nations and peoples it had absorbed, problems that others thought might prove fatal in the long run. "But not yet—and how many nations last for more than centuries?" the critic had responded.
Now apply the theory of necessary altruism to groups of intelligent beings that have survived tens of thousands of years. If only one of them launches planet-eating, civilization-destroying probes, and none of them respond by launching probe-killers—
Who wins?
Probe-killers, then, were definitely launched in self-interest. But why attempt to preserve possibly competing civilizations? Why not just destroy the planet-eaters and be done with it?
The network was not available to him; all he had were implanted memories, information he was not always able to access without the help of the network.
He often spurred thought by letting his fingers speak. Now he opened a file and began to type. The first few sentences came out as gibberish and he erased them. There is an answer here, inside me. I know it.
But try as he would, he could not bring it all together.
I don't know why they're trying to preserve us.
When he was outside of the soothing and persuasive direction of the network, that lack of an answer worried him.
Harry Feinman could not make a connection with his past. That time, when he had been mobile and free of pain, was fiction, something concocted by his imagination. He could not conceive of ever having made love or of having eaten a full meal. In the few moments of lucidity left to him each day, he searched his body for any sign of that past and found nothing. All was failing. He was a different person; Harry Feinman had already died.
Most of the time he spent sleeping or nearly asleep, heavily doped. He thought or dreamed vaguely of life after death and decided the question didn't really matter; anything, even complete oblivion, was better than this half-and-half existence.
Ithaca drifted in and out of the room like a cloud. When he was in pain, between medications, she sat by him sharp as a razor, saying nothing as he lay rigid, teeth clamped.
You pays your money coming in, going out. Ticket price for this ride: pain.
The difference between day and night was not clear to him anymore. Sometimes the lights were down when he was awake, sometimes not.
There was a miraculous hour when somehow his medication was perfectly balanced, and he felt almost normal, and in this time he cherished Ithaca's presence. He told her he wanted her to marry again and she accepted this unintentional but necessary torture with the calmness he had come to expect and rely on; then he remembered having told her several times before.
"Why worry about it?" she asked quietly. "We'll probably all be gone soon anyway."
Harry shook his head as if disagreeing, but she looked at him with her "Oh, come on" look, one eyebrow arched, and he said, "I'd like to see that. What a show that'll be, if it comes."
"If?" Ithaca smiled ironically. "You're my favorite pessimist. Now you sound hopeful."
"Just barely hopeful," Harry said.
"What did Arthur tell you?"
"Never try to hide anything from my woman." Harry took a moment to remember. "He said the planet is covered by little spiders now."
Ithaca leaned forward. "What?"
"The cavalry is here, but it's probably come too late."
She shook her head, not understanding.
"He showed one to me. A little robot. They're harvesting the Earth before it goes. Trying to save a little breeding population, I'd guess. Like a zoo expedition. And they're destroying the machines that are doing this to us."
"Arthur told you all this?"
He nodded. "I thought he was nuts, then he showed me one of the spiders. He seemed . . . not happy, but he seemed to know he was doing something useful. He thought maybe they were controlling his thoughts, but he said he didn't mind, and he couldn't be . . ." Harry's weakness came on him and he closed his eyes for several minutes. "He said they knew what was best, probably."
Ithaca studied his face closely, leaning forward. "I saw one," she said softly. "I think I did. In the garden."
"One what? Spider?"
"Silver." She held up her open hand. "Big as this. It ran away before I could see it clearly, but when I looked—it had been on the trunk of the old live oak— there were cuts through the bark, knife cuts. I thought I was seeing things, or just mistaken. Harry, should we tell people?"
"What good?" he asked. His thoughts were blurring again, so he said no more and only held her hand lightly in his.
Ithaca called the Gordon house the next evening and received no answer. The last part of Harry had died, finally, at eleven in the morning.
53
March 10
The Glomar Discoverer, its engines in reverse against a steady surface current and a constant twelve-knot southwesterly wind, drifted at the edge of a vast sea of lime-green and gray and white foam. The air was filled with a constant churning roar. High overhead, peculiar clouds were forming—swirling bands, curving upward as if along the inside of a funnel.
Walt Samshow scanned the foaming sea to the distant horizon and could see no end to it. He hardly needed to breathe at all now. Most of the men held wet rags over their noses and mouths. Nosebleeds were common; the delicate nasal tissues were deteriorating under the drying, burning effect of too much of a good thing: oxygen.
"We can't stay here long," Sand said, standing beside him on the bridge.
"Do we have our samples and readings?" Samshow asked. Sand nodded.
"Any word from the Navy ships?"
"They've left the area already. We've been listening for the deep submersible, but all we hear is the roar of bubbles."
"Tell the captain we should pull back ourselves," Samshow said. "Can anybody fight this?" He had directed his question out over the bridge railing, but Sand shook his head.
"I doubt it."
"It's like watching the whole ocean being dismantled," Samshow said. He pulled a bottle of eyedrops from his peacoat pocket and leaned his head back to administer them.
Sand refused the bottle when Samshow offered it. "It's scary."
Samshow grimaced. "It's goddamned exhilarating, and I don't mean the oxygen. You can see the end of things, you can see a plan—or at least some outline of a plan—and it's horrifying, it's grand."
Sand stared at him, not comprehending.
"Forget it," Samshow said, waving the almost empty bottle of eyedrops. "Tell the captain to get us the hell away from here."
Sand bumped into Chao, the first mate, in the bridge hatchway. Apologizing, he stood back and Chao held out a scribbled note.
"From Pearl Harbor, and from San Francisco!" he said.
"What
?" Sand asked.
"Report of a seismic disturbance in Mongolia. Not an earthquake, a bomb. Perhaps ten megatons. Not an air burst, an underground or something like it."
Samshow looked at the figures on the scrap of paper. "They're no fools," he said.
"You think they blew up the Russian bogey?" Sand asked.
"What else?" Chao grinned broadly. "Maybe we can get them all! Maybe the Australians, too, eh?"
"Where will they get a bomb?" Sand asked.
"If they even want to," Samshow said..
"Only a fool would hesitate now," Chao said. "Put the bastards out of action, cut their lines of communication!"
"Hear that freight train down there?" Samshow pointed figuratively and emphatically down through the deck and the ocean, and jabbed his finger to deepen the thrust to the mantle and core below. "As long as that's running, we've accomplished nothing."
"If the theories are correct," Sand said.
"Still, we got them!" Chao refused to have a wet blanket thrown over his enthusiasm. He stared defiantly at Samshow then dipped his head and raised one leg over the bottom of the hatchway to return to the bridge.
54
Edward Shaw drove the Itasca into Fresno and stopped for gas. The sky to the north was free of smoke but deeper blue than he had ever seen it at this latitude. There was a lot of fine ash in the air from the fires in the Soviet Union and China.
Winter was coming to an end prematurely; across the Sierras, snow was receding rapidly.
California—with the exception of San Diego, where fires had spread north from Tijuana—seemed to have escaped the worst of the conflagrations. Yosemite was intact. That might be explained by the lack of tourists; the roads were unnaturally empty. A few radio stations had gone off the air, abandoned by their personnel. The news broadcasts he had heard driving into Fresno were far from encouraging.
The Kemp-Van Cott objects within the Earth were slowing more rapidly than before. It seemed both scientific and public perception that the harmonic swings of these two (or more, some said) "bullets" were ticking away the Earth's final days. The current estimate was thirty days before they met at the Earth's core. Sentence of death.
He bought basic groceries and several six-packs of beer in the convenience store, then drove through the city, stopping on impulse at a sprawling three-level shopping mall just off the highway in Pinedale.
"What in hell am I doing?" he asked himself after he had parked the RV. He sat in the driver's seat, looking across the half-filled parking lot. "I hate shopping centers." He got out and carefully locked up. In faded blue jeans, Pendleton jacket, and running shoes, he could have passed for any of the locals who wandered on the lowest level of the mall, going from window to window, alone or with girlfriends or family. Still unsure why he was where he was, Edward sat on a bench near a flower-shop kiosk and watched the people passing, concentrating on the men.
Life as usual? Not quite.
The expressions on the men's faces, young or old, seemed fixed, dazed. There was no joy in their shopping. The children still showed enthusiasm, and the women for the most part appeared either calm or blank. Why? Women are supposed to feel things more than the men. Why the difference?
After an hour of watching and puzzling, he stood and approached a bookstore, the only conceivable place in the mall he might find something of interest. Looking through the travel section and picking out books about Yosemite, he heard a commotion near the front counter. A florid, stocky man in white shirt and gray slacks came in shouting, "Hey, hey! Hear this? Hear about this yet?"
He flashed a newspaper around, his face wreathed with a smile. "The Russians blew up theirs, too. That's two down! Just the Aussies now, and we'll have them!"
No one showed much enthusiasm.
We're down and nearly out, Edward thought. The whole planet feels like the four of us did at Vandenberg. What does it matter if we take a small chunk out of them?
He bought the books and quickly left the mall.
On California state highway 41, driving north, passing a car perhaps every five minutes, he nodded his head and clenched his jaw, suddenly realizing why he had made the Pinedale stop. The books were of course superfluous; he had gone there to say good-bye to part of his culture.
If this is going to be an extended wake, he thought, might as well say my farewells to everybody.
Edward followed 41 into the park and took the long, winding drive along a nearly empty Wawona Road, the shadow of Jeffrey and Ponderosa pines crossing his windshield. It was four o'clock and the cool, sweet, green-scented air came through his half-opened side window with strobing warm bursts of sun between stands of trees. Large patches of snow dripped by the roadside, edges round and glittering.
The Wawona tunnel opened onto Inspiration Point and a view of the length of the valley. He parked the RV in the small paved lot, three spaces over from a lone unoccupied car. Climbing down, savoring the moment, he walked to the edge and stood by the railing, hands in pockets, a silly grin on his face.
I'm a kid again.
This is what he remembered most clearly—the valley floor, green with thick pine growth, and in western shadow, the Merced River reflecting snake curves of clear blue sky. Bridal Veil Falls cut its famous brilliant white arc and died in foggy spray against the rocks below. Above the falls, the Cathedral Rocks framed granite monstrosities beyond. On the left, the face of El Capitan glowered gray and pure, dominating the valley from this perspective.
Over twenty years ago, I wondered what it would be like to wander through a mass made of that much granite. There are places inside no one has seen ever, a vast space of solid rock, silent and still, frozen.
Beyond and behind El Capitan rose the Three Brothers and North Dome, from this angle a simple superfluity of rock capped with snow, sure to assume their proper characters when seen from below. Almost on a par with the white peak of Clouds Rest, and above the lower of the Cathedral Rocks, was the calm, bright-faced assertion of Half Dome.
The cold wind drove up the valley and whipped Edward's hair. I'm not dreaming. By God, I'm finally here, and this isn't a dream. He felt compelled to make sure and kicked his boot lightly against a post rail.
For more than twenty years, in his dreams, this had been the place of his greatest happiness, his peace. Nowhere else had he ever felt quite so much at ease, he thought; and his almost monthly returns in sleep to this valley, these monoliths, kept reminding him of what he had lost.
His father, whom he had lost—who had lost him, as well—and his mother, who ignored him. The peace and self-assurance of childish ignorance, or perhaps it was enlightenment; he didn't care.
By five-thirty, Edward had carried the last of his equipment from the Curry Village parking lot to the tent cabin he had reserved (needlessly) three weeks before. He checked out the cabin, a raised wooden platform covered with oft-patched white canvas, placed in isolation in the middle of trees close to the talus slope of Glacier Point. The cabin's single light bulb gave sufficient if not bright light, and the two army-blanketed metal-frame beds were in good repair and comfortable.
He followed the road past the Curry Village shops and over a stone bridge and then crossed the meadow. A red-winged blackbird in a nearby bush took exception to his presence. He grinned and tried to chirp back in a friendly manner, but the bird would have none of his overtures. That didn't matter; he knew he belonged there as much as the bird.
From the middle of a meadow, surrounded by tussocks of grass, he rotated to survey his new world. The valley was dark and quiet; the rich, deep blue evening sky hovered on motionless air. He heard the distant echoes of people laughing and talking, their voices bouncing from the granite walls of Glacier Point, Sentinel Rock, and the Royal Arches across the valley. At the base of the Royal Arches he could make out the lights of the Ahwanee resort hotel. To the west a few hundred yards, a few campfires and electric lights revealed the extent of Yosemite Village.
He and his parents had lodged the l
ast night of their journey in the Ahwanee, after spending a week in the tent cabins. He was still debating whether he would do that when the end approached.
Sublime peace.
How would the people of the world fare if all could spend their lives in this kind of beauty? If humans were rare enough that almost any meeting was precious?
He turned on his flashlight and shone it ahead as he returned to the tent cabins. On a flat-topped granite boulder just down the slope from his cabin, he laid out the Coleman stove and a pot of water and fixed a quick supper of ramen soup, throwing an onion and a hot dog in with the noodles.
He walked in darkness to the showers, wearing only an off-white knee-length terry-cloth robe, shaving kit in hand. A Steller's jay hopped along behind him, watching closely for dropped crumbs. "It's dark," he told the bird. "Go to sleep. I've eaten already. Where were you? No food now." The bird persisted, however; it knew humans were liars.
The communal showers—a large wood-paneled building, women to the left, men to the right—were practically empty. An attendant at the towel and soap station lounged back on his stool and only leaned forward when Edward approached. "Step right up," the young man said, flourishing a small bar of soap and a towel. "No waiting."
Edward smiled. "Must be dull."
"It's wonderful," the attendant said.
"How many people here?"
"In the entire valley? Maybe two, three hundred. At Camp Curry, no more than thirty. Perfectly peaceful."
Edward showered in a clean, virtually unused stall, then shaved himself with a disposable razor in a mirror long enough to accommodate fifteen or twenty men. One other came in to shower, smiling cheerfully. Edward nodded cordially, feeling like privileged nobility, packed up his kit, and returned to the tent cabin.
By eight, he had had enough of reading the books he had bought in the shopping mall bookstore. He turned out the overhead light and plumped up the pillows, and then lay sleepless for an hour, thinking, listening.
Somewhere in the valley, a group of kids sang folk songs, their young voices rising high in the starry darkness. They sounded like cheerful ghosts.