By the time they were his age, he thought sadly, their lives would be half over. Their quick powers of observation and intelligence would already be in decline.
The Pope himself was only twice his age.
Human life flickered here, and was constantly starting over.
Memory was a series of fits and starts, order sustained by the enforcement of laws and traditions, by vivid personalities who left their mark of competence on institutions.
At home there were people who remembered the birth of his world, and before that.
A sewer smell almost made him gag. It was an unexpected assault. He hurried after the boys to the park.
15
Josepha was waiting for Paul in his study.
“Take me with you on your visit to their world,” she said, standing up as he came around behind his desk.
“How did you know?” he asked, sitting down.
“It’s obvious that you will be the one asked to go. The Holy Father’s too old and sick. Take me with you.”
He sat back, beginning to feel that he had been cast in a new role after his meeting with Voss Rhazes, and that there was no going back. He wondered whether he would be able to continue as the doubting right hand of Josephus Bely. The Paul Anselle he had known seemed suddenly to be a sinking ship of lost loyalties and despised ideas, without a single lifeboat.
“Paul—are you all right?” she asked.
He nodded. “I suppose there’s no harm in your coming along,” he said, searching her determined face for the young girl he had once known.
“Thank you,” she said pleasantly, letting him hear that young girl again. “When should I be ready?”
“In two days. The Pope must decide whether to permit a group of offworlders to settle here…somewhere. We won’t make a decision until I return.”
“And he will decide then?” she asked.
“Not unless he gets what he wants.”
“What does he want, Paul?” she asked as she sat down.
“There’s more than one demand he’ll make.”
“You sound…disapproving,” she said.
He leaned back. Might as well discuss it with her, he told himself, thinking of how many cardinals would invite him to their apartments, serve him red wine in small glasses, and try to set him to serve their individual ambitions. They all dreamed of replacing Bely upon his death. Josepha was at least as critical as he was, and more openly irreverent, and it might no longer much matter what he told her.
“The old hypocrite wants them to rebuild his health and prolong his life,” he said.
Josepha bit her lower lip. “What do you mean?”
“I mean extend his life indefinitely.”
She took a deep breath. “Can they do that?”
“Yes, they can,” he said, suddenly certain that there was no going back, even if he wanted to do so. Josepha’s reaction to his mention of extended lifespan, the way she suddenly struggled with the idea, was enough to convince him that Bely’s theocracy would not survive the news. General medicine had long prepared the way for a collapse of theology. Medical skill was based on evolutionary biology, especially the use of vaccination and antibiotics; and these in turn were based on chemistry and physics. Nature had not evolved man so that at the end of each life a soul might be launched into the hereafter. Inventive theology had preceded honest studies of nature, but it could not stand in place of facts forever.
The future is our possible heaven, he told himself, and the past our hell. Storied theologies knew this as a cloaked truth, but they did not know to look for salvation in knowledge and its applications.
But now, to let the word escape that the visiting mobile was going to build another like itself in this world’s sky, and that its people lived indefinitely, would open the gate to a new heaven and a new salvation. Bely was already in the grip of contrary ideas. He knew what they meant and how they pulled—with threat and attraction.
“I also suspect,” Paul continued, “that Bely will attempt to trade with the visitors.”
“Trade?” she said. “What can he give them?”
“He might ask that in return for land to settle, perhaps on the other continent, they take away our penal population—the thousand people on the islands.”
“What?” she said confusedly.
“It would save their lives. You might never see Ondro again, but he would live.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “He’s alive…what islands?”
“The Celestine Archipelago. Sooner or later, storms will sweep these desolate penal islands clean of all human life. That’s why the condemned are sent there.”
She stared at him in horror, but he knew that now was the moment to tell her, to side with the angels. Bely would attempt to control the news of what waited in the sky, but it would be too late.
Her expression softened as she saw a chance of helping Ondro. “But is it really possible?” she asked. “Will he agree to such a bargain? Will he even propose it?”
He saw that she imagined that there was a chance for her to go with Ondro, to leave one life for another.
Paul said, “It’s something I can work, with no one being the wiser.”
We need allies, he thought, and that was another reason to visit the mobile. Was it possible that the visitors would not be allies? He did not know enough—but there was a way to learn more. For every thought, think its opposite as possibly true, his old logic training whispered, even though that training had been restricted to theological gymnastics.
“But is it possible?” she asked. “How will Ondro feel about leaving everything to make a new life with these people? What are they? Are they people like us?”
“We’ll see for ourselves,” Paul said, “when we visit their world.”
“Will we really be permitted to go?” she asked.
“We’ll be there before anyone can think about it again,” Paul said.
“Why are they here?” she asked.
“To build another mobile world,” he said. “And when it’s finished, parent and child will go off together, or in different directions. That’s how their culture deals with increases in population and discontent among their people.”
“How wonderful!” she exclaimed, and he saw the girl once more, the one he had promised to look out for—and who, he liked to think, might have been a daughter.
“I suspect,” he said, “that they were also curious about us, to see how a colony from Earth was doing.”
“Are there other colonies?”
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “There may be more mobiles than there are colonies from Earth.”
“And some of the people from the mobile want to settle here?” she asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “I could better understand why some of our people might wish to join the new mobile that will be built.”
Josepha sighed. “But will His Holiness let anyone leave by then?”
“He may not be able to prevent it,” Paul said. “The presence of the visitors changes everything. He feels that even in himself.”
“It may depend on how much force he can use to prevent change,” she said with sadness, then looked at him with wide eyes and asked, “How will you stand against him?”
“I’ll wait and watch, the same as Bely. The cardinals are all waiting for the next papal election. Each of the major contenders has his own forces aligned to elect him—but Bely may not die as soon as they think, even without help. The army guard leadership is also waiting to see which way to jump, as is the business community—but guards and business are essentially timid and don’t want civil war. No one will act unless a clear line of possibility emerges. I’m sure of that.”
And only Josepha has any idea of what I feel, he told himself.
“What about the island exiles?” she asked.
“They’re helpless. Few of them have any family that cares about them. Bely, of course, believes that his authority is secure.”
“The library, the records,” he said. “I would have no access as a private citizen. What else is there for me, except to learn? I do what I can, telling myself that it would be worse if someone else held my office.”
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
“Yes, I do.”
She smiled as she got up to go. “Then you must do more than you have done.”
“I’ll see you in two days,” he said.
When she had gone, he sat back and felt suspended between worlds, wishing that he might feel more certain about what was happening. He closed his eyes and thought of all the imagined afterlives. If any of them were true, then he preferred the darkness to their banal servitude.
Purgatory wasn’t a half-bad idea, since there one lived in hope.
But in heaven, one bowed to an inexplicable central infinity that needed no one, yet was said to love its creatures, but before which a finite creature was certainly nothing at all.
In hell there was no hope, and that at least was clear and settling.
No, he told himself, returning to his earlier thoughts of the day. All heaven was a hope that knowledge might one day grant new powers, and new powers yield even more knowledge.
Hell was the past, purgatory the present, to escape from one day, and heaven…was all possibility! No word was sweeter than possibility. It sang, and he heard a few lines of poetry written by his youthful self, saying to him,
“We must lengthen life
Beyond its youthful nightmare
Into a fairer dream,
Away from survival’s hell
Where we sit and contemplate
The deaths of enemies.”
The strength of his own words shook him, and he recalled heresies that he had once set down. “When Christianity is gone,” he had scribbled, then burned, “we may yet pluck its ethical flowers—and embrace them not because God commands it, but because they are right! And if deep inside us the God of Battles speaks again, commanding us to vengeance, or to the murder of our brothers and sisters, we will say that Right stands above God; and if God commands wrongdoing, then he, or whatever he may be, is wrong.”
He opened his eyes and felt like Satan, sitting damned in the pit. Worse, he loved his clear-eyed, clear-minded damnation. Bely would say that there was no greater fall than that, he thought with a smile. Then, sitting forward at his desk, he resolved that events must not proceed too quickly, that there must be no crisis until he had visited the mobile and knew more about its people. His youthful self stood up within him, decrying caution, mocking timidity, hating all delay.
But Paul made him see reason.
16
The flyer’s swift, inertia-free motion squeezed Paul’s world into a globe of blue, green, and brown—and for an instant he feared that the planet would sink like a stone into a black pool. Starry space seemed indifferent to the small oasis of life, whose only ally was the bright sun.
His thoughts quickened as the habitat’s proud, sunlit shape swam into view on the screen, and he knew that Bely’s world kept human life in chains. Mobile, free of scarcity’s slow dying, the visitor’s life was part of a new aspiring freedom that was forming out in the Galaxy.
“We’ll enter through the long axis,” Voss Rhazes said to him and Josepha, “where we still maintain zero gravity. Before we knew how to generate our own gravity, centrifugal spin kept our feet on the inner shells—but we can still spin the mobile in an emergency. You’ll see something of the engineering shell before we head inward.”
Paul’s imagination played with the image of shells within shells wrapped around inner spaces. It seemed suddenly impossible for the one hundred-kilometer-long egg-shape to withstand the stresses of motion across interstellar distances; yet here it was, more than a century old, and preparing to build another. Endless intricacies of design teased his imagination, and he felt suddenly that his own world was hopelessly lost and that he had spent his life in a strange protraction of Earth’s Middle Ages.
He glanced at Josepha. She sat still, looking with wonder at the forward view, her hands folded in her lap. When she glanced at him, he saw that she also felt disoriented as she tried to grasp where they were going and by what means.
As the flyer shot around to one end of the egg-shape, a large opening became visible. The flyer slowed as it came up to the black circle and passed inside.
“There’s another such bay,” Voss Rhazes said, “one hundred kilometers straight ahead, in the forwards.”
Paul now saw a brightly lit wall of openings. The flyer drifted up to one, slipped inside, and the view became black.
“In a moment,” Voss Rhazes said, “the cradle will rotate us into the first inner shell with gravity, the engineering level, and we will disembark.” He paused, and Paul saw that the man was aware of the apprehension that showed in Josepha’s face. “I know that all this seems unfamiliar to you,” he said to her, “but you will shortly see familiar things in an unfamiliar setting.”
Josepha took a deep breath, clearly overwhelmed.
Paul smiled at her reassuringly.
Rhazes said as he stood up, “We can go out now.”
Paul and Josepha stood up and followed him out through the exit. It led into a long passage that seemed to curve slightly upward, but Paul felt that he was walking slightly downhill. He smiled inwardly as he glanced at Josepha, who was taking short, hesitant steps at his side. Walking downhill, he thought, inside a world in the sky.
17
In the green countryside of the central core, Josepha asked, “Why an asteroid?”
She stood at the forward end of the great hollow, with Voss Rhazes at her right and Paul at her left, near the elevator kiosk out of which they had emerged from the first engineering level. The inner land lay before them—grass, trees, bushes, flowers, waterways, and towns that seemed to swirl toward the light at the far end as if down into a shining whirlpool, but were miraculously held against the inner surface of the long hollow ovoid that would at most points seem level to the inhabitants, despite a rising horizon. They would no more question the firm ground under their feet than she would on the ball of her planet whose surface curved the other way.
“A good question,” Voss Rhazes answered. “All of this might have been built without a hollowed-out rock. But it was our beginning place. We built where we first lived. We mined out the metals, and during that time the asteroid still provided a place of safety akin to a planet, since we did not reproduce directly from the parent mobile that gave us the tools, and then left us to build in the 82 Eridani system. Later, when we were able to make our own strong materials, there was no desire or need to get rid of the core. It was an old piece of nature, a park, and we had already built ten levels around it.”
“Sentiment?” Paul asked.
“You might call it tradition,” Voss Rhazes answered. “Our First Councilman Wolt Blackfriar likes to recall a city on Old Earth. It had a park at its center, and this is something like that central place of nature.”
Josepha saw that Voss’s answer intrigued Paul, and she wondered what the prime minister would say.
“Why were you at Eridani?” Paul asked.
‘There was a group from the parent mobile,” Rhazes said, “that wished to start a settlement on the second planet. But they became disenchanted with the surface conditions even before the mobile could leave, so they asked for the tools and an asteroid to start their own habitat. But some people stayed on the planet, even when our mobile left.”
“Were you there,” Josepha asked, “when this mobile was started?”
“I was not yet born. That was more than a century ago. These thirty levels wrapped the core by the time I was born. The
visual records of construction are complete, if you would like to see them.”
“So there is a human colony at 82 Eridani?” Paul asked, sounding even more intrigued.
“Perhaps,” Rhazes said. “We have not been back to see if it has survived.”
“How many stayed?”
“Several thousand,” Rhazes said, then paused, as if listening to someone. “Sixty-eight hundred,” he added.
Josepha looked at the wispy clouds in the great central space and at the gentle curve of landscape that surrounded this sky. Heaven in a bottle, or an urn, she thought. Up was toward the very center of the mobile, and beneath this soil and rock on which she stood was another level’s sky, and another sky and ground beyond that—thirty worlds with more than a kilometer of open space between them, more surface area than her whole planet.
“Twelve kilometers to the sunplate,” Voss Rhazes said, “about two hundred square kilometers of land in the core alone.”
He went ahead, leading them toward another elevator kiosk. Josepha watched him as she and Paul followed, trying to imagine what this tall, wiry man was like inside; nothing in his manner or speech revealed anything—except that he spoke her language perfectly, as if he were being helped at every moment.
On the residential level above first engineering, Voss Rhazes showed her and Paul to a high structure that reached into a glowing bright blue sky. She squinted to see the top of it.
“Each building touches the next level,” Voss Rhazes said, “and elevators from this one emerge into the first floor of a similar structure.”
“How many people live on each level?” Paul asked as they went up in the elevator.
“About seven hundred fifty thousand,” Rhazes said, “on each of the inhabited twenty-eight levels.”
Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2) Page 7