Phillida’s cheeks grew warmer, as if she were crying, silently, into her daughter’s hair.
Lieserl returned to her snakes and ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.
Already she’d outgrown it.
She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.
She wasn’t the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She read about the Brontes, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read about the history of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha-Patamu. There were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It was easier to fail than to succeed… The British in the nineteenth century had adopted the game as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life would be rewarded.
But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found images from the early twentieth century of a sad-looking little clown who clambered heroically up ladders and slithered haplessly down snakes.
The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the twenty centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown. Lieserl stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking cane and little moustache.
She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game. The twelve-to-four ratio of Moksha-Patamu clearly made it a harder game to win than Kismet’s thirteen-to-eight — but how much harder?
She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractions clean, colorless, little more than sketches. She ran through high-speed simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to combinatorial mathematics, the theory of games — to different forms of wonder.
On her fifteenth day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own, high-speed learning.
The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.
She read up on nanobots. She learned the secret of Anti-Senescence, the process which had rendered humans effectively immortal.
Body cells were programmed to commit suicide.
Left alone, a cell manufactured enzymes which cut its own DNA into neat pieces, and quietly closed itself down. The suicide of cells was a guard against uncontrolled growth — tumors — and a tool to sculpt the developing body: in the womb, for example, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and toes from blunt tissue buds.
Death was the default state of a cell. Chemical signals had to be sent out by the body, to instruct cells to remain alive. It was a dead-man’s-switch control mechanism: if cells grew out of control — or if they separated from their parent organ and wandered through the body — the reassuring environment of chemical signals would be lost, and they would be forced to die.
The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made AntiSenescence simple.
It also made simple the manufacture of a Lieserl.
Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms.
She looked up the word Superet in the Virtual libraries. She had access to no reference to it. She wasn’t an expert at data mining, but she thought there was a hole here.
Information about Superet was being kept from her.
With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the House without her parents, for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where she’d played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where she’d discovered mussels. The place seemed less vivid — less magical — and she felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses. She wondered why no adult ever commented on this dreadful loss of acuity. Perhaps they just forgot, she thought.
But there were other compensations.
Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone-laden air in her lungs. She and Matthew mock-wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other like children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence.
As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.
That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.
The next day — her sixteenth — Lieserl rose quickly. She’d never felt so alive; her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.
When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the base of his neck to glow.
He turned to face her.
He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides. He didn’t seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.
She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The thought of touching him — the memory of her feverish dreams during the night — seemed absurd, impossibly adolescent.
She felt the muscles in her neck tighten; she felt as if she must scream. Matthew seemed to recede from her, as if she were viewing him through a tunnel.
Once again the laboring nanobots — the vicious, unceasing technological infection of her body — had taken away part of her life.
This time, though, it was too much to bear.
Phillida had never looked so old. Her skin seemed drawn tight across the bones of her face, the lines etched deep. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Believe me. When we — George and I — volunteered for Superet’s program, we knew it would be painful. But we never dreamed how much. Neither of us had children before. Perhaps if we had, we’d have been able to anticipate how this would feel.”
“I’m a freak — an absurd experiment,” Lieserl shouted. “A construct. Why did you make me human? Why not some insentient animal? Why not a Virtual?”
“Oh, you had to be human. As human as possible…”
“I’m human in fragments,” Lieserl said bitterly. “In shards. Which are taken away from me as soon as they’re found. That’s not humanity, Phillida. It’s grotesque.”
“I know. I’m sorry, my love. Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Outside. To the garden. I want to show you something.”
Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida’s warm grasp.
It was mid-morning now. The Sun’s light flooded the garden; flowers — white and yellow — strained up toward the sky.
Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.
Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the Sun. The sky was a searing-blue dome, marked only by a high vapour trail and the lights of orbital habitats.
Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl’s hand down from her face, and, cupping her chin, tipped her face fl
ower-like toward the Sun.
The star’s light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes and stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images. “The Sun?”
“Lieserl, you were — constructed. You know that. You’re being forced through a human lifecycle at hundreds of times the normal pace — ”
“A year every day.”
“Approximately, yes. But there is a purpose, Lieserl. A justification. You aren’t simply an experiment. You have a mission.” She waved her hand at the sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. “Most of the people here, particularly the children, don’t know anything about you, Lieserl. They have jobs, goals — lives of their own to follow. But they’re here for you.
“Lieserl, the House is here to imprint you with humanity. Your experiences have been designed — George and I were selected, even — to ensure that the first few days of your existence would be as human as possible.”
“The first few days?” Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall, looming toward her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she were a counter on some immense, invisible snakes-and-ladders board. She lifted her face to the warmth of the Sun. “What am I?”
“You are… artificial, Lieserl.
“In a few weeks your human shell will become old. You’ll be transferred into a new form… Your human body will be — ”
“Discarded?”
“Lieserl, it’s so difficult. That moment will seem like a death to me. But it won’t be death. It will be a metamorphosis. You’ll have new powers — even your awareness will be reconstructed. Lieserl, you’ll become the most conscious entity in the Solar System…”
“I don’t want that. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida.”
“No, Lieserl. You’re not free, I’m afraid; you never can be. You have a goal.”
“What goal?”
Phillida lifted her face to the Sun once more. “The Sun gave us life. Without it — without the other stars — we couldn’t survive.
“We’re a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars — for tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that… If we’re allowed to. But we’ve had — glimpses — of the future, the far distant future. Disturbing glimpses.
“People are starting to plan, to assure we’re granted our destiny. People are working on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition… People like those working for Superet.
“Lieserl, you’re one of those projects.”
“I don’t understand.”
Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of megayears and the future of the species.
“Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is dying; something — or someone — is killing it.” Phillida’s eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. “Don’t be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. And you will see wonders which I can only dream of.”
Lieserl stared into her mother’s huge, weak eyes. “But you don’t envy me. Do you, Phillida?”
“No,” Phillida said quietly.
2
Louise Ye Armonk stood on the weather deck of the SS Great Britain. From here she could see the full length of Brunel’s fine steam liner: the polished deck, the skylights, the airy masts with their loops of wire rigging, the single, squat funnel amidships.
And beyond the glowing dome which sheltered the old ship, the sky of the Solar System’s rim loomed like a huge, empty room.
Louise still felt a little drunk — sourly now — from the orbiting party she’d left a few minutes earlier. She subvocalized a command to send nanobots scouring through her bloodstream; she sobered up fast, with a brief shudder.
Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu — Louise’s ex-husband — stood close by her. They’d left the Great Northern, with its party still in full swing, to come here, to the surface of Port Sol, in a cramped pod. Mark was dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit of some pastel fabric; the lines of his neck were long and elegant as he turned his head to survey the old ship.
Louise was glad they were alone, that none of the Northern’s prospective interstellar colonists had decided to follow them down for a last few moments on this outpost of Sol, to reminisce with this fragment of Earth’s past — even though reminiscence was part of the reason Louise had had the old ship brought out here in the first place.
Mark touched her arm; his palm, through the thin fabric of her sleeve, felt warm, alive. “You’re not happy, are you? Even at a moment like this. Your greatest triumph.”
She searched his face, seeking out his meaning. He wore his hair shaven, so that his fine, fragile-looking skull showed through his dark skin; his nose was sharp, his lips thin, and his blue eyes — striking in that dark face — were surrounded by a mesh of wrinkles. He’d once told her he’d thought of getting the wrinkles smoothed out — it would be easy enough in the course of AS-renewal but she’d campaigned against it. Not that she’d have cared too much, but it would have taken most of the character out of that elegant face — most of its patina of time, she thought.
“I never could read you,” she said at last. “Maybe that’s why we failed in the end.”
He laughed lightly, a sparkle of intoxication still in his voice. “Oh, come on. We lasted twenty years. That’s not a failure.”
“In a lifetime of two hundred years?” She shook her head. “Look. You ask me about my feelings. Anyone who didn’t know you — us — would think you cared. So why do I think that, in some part of your head, you’re laughing at me?”
Mark drew his hand away from her arm, and she could almost see the shutters coming down behind his eyes. “Because you’re an ill tempered, morose, graceless — oh, into Lethe with it.”
“Anyway, you’re right,” Louise said at last.
“What?”
“I’m not happy. Although I’m not sure I could tell you why.”
Mark smiled; the sourceless light of the Britain’s dome smoothed away the lines around his eyes. “Well, if we’re being honest with each other for once, I do kind of enjoy seeing you suffer. Just a bit. But I care as well. Come on, let’s walk.”
He took her arm again, and they walked along the ship’s starboard side. The soles of their shoes made soft sucking sounds as the shoes’ limited processors made the soles adhere to and release the deck surface, unobtrusively reinforcing Port Sol’s microgravity. The shoes almost got it right; Louise felt herself stumble only a couple of times.
Around the ship was a dome of semisentient glass, and beyond the dome — beyond the pool of sourceless light which bathed the liner — the landscape of Port Sol stretched to its close-crowding horizon. Port Sol was a hundred-mile ball of friable rock and water-ice, with traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons. It was like a huge comet nucleus. Port Sol’s truncated landscape was filled with insubstantial, gossamer forms: sculptures raised from the ancient ice by natural forces reduced to geological slowness by the immense distance of the Sun.
Port Sol was a Kuiper object. With uncounted companions, it circled the Sun beyond the orbit of Pluto, shepherded there by resonances of the major planets’ gravitational fields.
Louise looked back at the Great Britain. Even against the faery background of Port Sol, still Brunel’s ship struck her as a thing of lightness, grace and elegance. She remembered going to see the ship in her dry dock on Earth; now, as then, she compressed her eyes, squinting, trying to make out the form of the thing — the Platonic ideal within the iron, which poor old Isambard had tried to make real. The ship was three thousand tons of iron and wood, but with her slim, sharp curves and fine detail she was like a craft out of fantasy. Louise thought of the gilded decorations and the coat-of-arms figurehead around the stern, and the simple, affecting symbols of Victorian industry carved into the bow: the coil of rope, the cogwheels, the
set-square, the wheat-sheaf. It was impossible to imagine such a delicate thing braving the storms of the Atlantic…
She tilted back her head, and looked for the brightish star in Capricorn that was Sol, all of four billion miles away. Surely even a visionary like old Isambard never imagined that his first great ship would make her final voyage across such an immense sea as this.
Mark and Louise climbed down a steep staircase amidships to the promenade deck; they strolled along the deck past blocks of tiny cabins toward the engine-room bulkhead.
Mark ran a fingertip over the surface of a cabin wall as they passed. He frowned, rubbing his fingertips together. “The surface feels odd… not much like wood.”
“It’s preserved. Within a thin shell of semisentient plastic, which seals it, nourishes it… Mark, the damn boat was launched in 1843. Over two thousand years ago. There wouldn’t be much left of her without preservation. Anyway, I thought you weren’t interested.”
He sniffed. “Not really. I’m more interested in why you wanted to come down here: now, in the middle of all the celebrations for the completion of the starship.”
“I try to avoid introspection,” she said heavily.
“Oh, sure.” He turned to her, his face picking up the soft glow of the ancient wood. “Talk to me, Louise. The bit of me that cares about you is outvoting the bit that enjoys seeing you suffer, just for the moment.”
She shrugged. She couldn’t help sounding sour. “You tell me. You always were good at diagnosing the condition of the inside of my head. At great and tedious length. Maybe I’m feeling melancholy after completing my work on the Northern. Could that be it, do you think? Maybe I’m going through some equivalent of a post-coital depression.”
He snorted. “With you, it was post, pre and during, frankly. No, I don’t think it’s that… And besides,” he said slowly, “your work on the Northern isn’t finished yet. You’re planning to leave with her. Aren’t you? Spend subjective decades hauling her out to Tau Ceti.”
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