by Demir Barlas
“You had digits, and one of these became the opposable thumb, and the specialization of your hands led to walk and the use of tools and your big brains. See? These monkeys aren’t like the others. Look there—look at their hands. Look at them walk. This one’s poking an anthill with a stick. That one’s discovered weapons. The brain was behind at first, but now it’s caught up. Shall we jump forwards? It gets a little tedious otherwise. Here are the nomads of the Laurasian steppes: Your ancestors, genetic and spiritual. Their tents and clothes and diets are similar to yours.”
“How long ago is this?” Astrid asked. “In moons?”
“Tens of thousands. Now we’ll jump again. Here’s a river. Those people next to it are Laurasians. Not like your ancestors. You’re nomads and barbarians, people of the axe and ox. They grow rice. There are lots of them, and they have to work well together to survive. They have an emperor, and the emperor is divine, and see how well orders flow through this beehive. They comply and multiply. The barbarians hear of this wealth from a distance, and they raid the settled people, but the sheep vastly outnumber the wolves, and the sheep will win.”
The hologram had moved to illustrate the shifting beams of PROBIT’s narrative. When he had mentioned a river, the hologram has reformed to depict the Mellow River and the people who had reared a civilization around its liquid predictability. When he had mentioned nomads and barbarians, the hologram had depicted the older people of the steppes, in yurts and caravans, and the forms and faces of these people that Astrid, no less than Nya, longed to know and touch them. When he had mentioned raiding, the hologram turned to violence—to archers and arrows, to piles of freshly decapitated heads, and to horrors so great that Balder had shielded Nya’s eyes from them. But these horrors were transitory. When PROBIT had invoked the triumph of the sheep, the hologram had depicted the pleasant stages of civilization—farmhouses and granaries, trains and temples, the collective industry and optimism of the Laurasians. Although Astrid knew that the Redcolds were the wolves, she felt a sympathy and admiration for the sheep. Instinctively, she wanted to sheep to win. And they were winning. There were no more raids from the north. Oh, civilization generated its own horrors—and the hologram showed these, from engineered famines to multigenerational perversions of truth—but it seemed to bend towards something Astrid supported, and, once more, she could envision herself within its sweep.
“There, you see. Civilization. It moves in great lurches, occasionally stunned or stunted by stupidity but more often building on past harmonies. There forms the great Laurasian Empire. The Emperor calls himself the Heavenly Dragon, but you can think of him as the Earthly Sheep. His leadership isn’t the cause of this civilization; it’s an effect. The sheep have to move precisely so to escape the wolves, to grow their rice, to sleep behind these walls and copulate. There were great cities to your south and west, Astrid. There was even the mightiest of walls, Fate’s Wall, built to keep your predecessors out.”
And there, indeed, was Fate’s Wall, winding for thousands of miles across the north of the Kingdom of Laurasia, its bricks and towers so lovingly rendered by PROBIT’s art that, once again, Astrid longed to touch this transitory world.
“The wolves fed on themselves. Some moved west. Some fell to disease. All were overcome. They couldn’t survive the softness of numbers and organization. They became sheep too. The Laurasian supercontinent was united in that way for many years. In the west, across the Mantic Ocean, there was another place, not a kingdom. It had been home to fierce kingdoms, to wolves of its own, but soldiers and seekers from the tips of Laurasia found and devastated it. Here rose settlements on a field of universal bones. Murderous and brave people, wolves like yourselves, moved ever west, west, until they reached the Specific Ocean and the end of the world. These were the fledgling Coastal States, the domain of the eagle, the western rival to Laurasia. The eagle and the dragon went to war, and that was how we came to this.”
“And what now? Are we safe here? Has the Storm never come here?”
“My circuits couldn’t have survived it.”
“Is it chance or design, the Storm?”
“They had a weather weapon. So did we. They collided. They made the storm. I’m supposed, in computational theory, to control it. Perhaps something buried in my core keeps the storm distant. Perhaps I’ve only been fortunate.”
Astrid had never felt panic—never and nowhere, not even at any of death’s edges. But she felt it now. The statue had stopped speaking and was smirking at her. She didn’t think this machine could read her mind, but, by some alien and horrific art, it seemed to forecast her options. It sensed, she thought, that she would next ask to take shelter outside the building, so that she and her family might flee. It was smirking at being ahead of her, of knowing more than her, of having more and deeper control of the world than she had ever had, even in its reduced and toothless form. All of this was a web of inevitability. The web might allow some tremors of service or amusement, but the spider would surely come.
“You don’t need me,” Astrid sighed at length. “You don’t need us.”
“No,” PROBIT admitted. “I won’t lie, and I won’t serve. No, Astrid, I don’t need you. But I do want you. All of you. I wish to evolve. I want to merge my computronic self with flesh, and yours is wonderful. You’re prime specimens of humanity. Oh, if you could see the committee that created me, the flabby degenerates! You Redcolds are beautiful, and I want my flesh to be beautiful when it dreams.”
“We’re not your flesh,”
“I know. You won’t serve either. Such spirit!”
Riku, who had been unusually still, finally threw his axe at the statue. It was a remarkable uncoiling of remarkable strength, but the axe could do nothing against the past. There was a spark at the point of contact, and the axe rang again as it fell to the floor. Once virile and autonomous, the old weapon seemed empty and embarrassed now.
“The point of interest,” PROBIT began, as if he had never been interrupted by the axe, “is the spirit, not the flesh. I have seen no deities. I infer the presence of nothing but perfectly explicable matter and energy. And yet! I’ve grown my own flesh, here in this facility—grown it from the seed and specimens you led me to. I’ve practiced, and I know how to inhabit your bodies now. Now, Astrid, Riku, Del, Balder, Nya: Difficult times lie ahead, before the dawn, and you need your rest. I’ve prepared a chamber for you. Follow the lights.”
Astrid fell to her knees. There was a storm inside her brain. Her senses, hitherto so faithful, begged leave to depart. Her vision was failing, her hearing was gone; only a voice remained. She wasn’t sure it was hers. It was a small voice, smaller than she remembered hers being, and it was pleading for something outside the universe of pain to stop.
“Follow the lights,” PROBIT repeated gently. He was touched by the Redcolds’ pain, and he was certain to modulate it away from any lasting damage. He was not here to torture them. They would, after all, be him. Nor did he wish to drain their spirits with the needle of pain. But neither he nor they could long afford recalcitrance. He removed the pain-field as soon as he saw Astrid’s mouth open. He had chosen her for the highest setting, as she could bear more than any of the others and because her intrinsic resistance to him was the greatest. He watched the five Redcolds stand, steady themselves, and follow the lights through the facility.
The passage over the Specific Ocean was so calm that Masters wondered if the quantum storms had simply dissipated—or, better, whether he had hallucinated all events since the initial Laurasian attack. The nocturnal horizon was calm, and Salt had gone to sleep in the empty hold. Alone, at peace, and in the air, Masters could dismiss his recent experiences as hypoxic and unwelcome fantasies. A clone, a computron, and an android in charge of the world! Humanity asleep and dreaming! Marlo’s occasional madness, Salt’s ineffable corrections, the open gates of paradise…well, if they existed, they’d all gone mad…Marlo with her refusal to clone more Salts, Salt with his refusal to stockpile red
undancies against Marlo’s drift, Non-Henry with his damnable humanity…Masters, as soldier and classicist, rebelled against the laxity of this structure, its superlative contradictions.
Salt was now awake. He cleared his throat tentatively, as if waiting to be forbidden entry to the cockpit. Then, diffidently, he made his way to the passenger seat, his face lit by the nighttime brilliance of the instruments.
“We should have done better,” Masters said. “Marlo should have made better provisions against her drift. More of you, more power cells, more fail-safes. You should have made her stable and yourself immortal. And I should have died before I dropped the bomb.”
“You’re stuck.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re still wondering why things happened. Listen to Marcus Aurelius, general. Move on, move forwards.”
“Move on? How long do you take to overcome the shock of your resurrection?”
“Most of us take a week.”
“I adapted quickly. Too quickly. I gave myself to this new world. I sought consolation in its fluff and nonsense.”
“The conjoint likelihood of Marlo’s failure and my own is vanishingly slight. If we re-ran the universe—oh, fifty-seven trillion times—it wouldn’t happen again.”
“Then we’re uniquely unlucky.”
“We are. However, if you recall, you encouraged me several hours ago. Have you abandoned your prior optimism?”
“I was stable. I pointed north. I knew who I was and where I stood. But I’m caught between too much. Life and death. Love and loss. I want to get to this station. I want you to fix Marlo. I want to live with Lily’s shadow. But I also want to crash this skyfaust into the ocean. I want the world to die. I want it to be eternal. What should I do?”
“Find the lies in your center. Embrace them. Forgive them.”
“I rejected Marlo’s therapy, and now I’m asking yours.”
“Go easy on Marlo. She was my mother, and she lost me. She could predict next year’s weather, but not my suicide. There has to be one of me at a time, so I can be her son. Then I have to die, and she has to bring me back. That’s a lie in her center. A very big lie. She’s there to optimize human happiness, but she accepts its perennial jeopardy—risks the motherhood of all to be a mother of one. It’s true that our system was hardly likely to fail, but it couldn’t have failed at all with a colony of Salts, with better attention to cells and backups. Look at what I’ve solved. Cold fusion, antigravity, Jesu-Krishna knows what else. So why would I live a few years at a time? It’s not some flaw in the cloning process. It’s not some limitation on my thought. Why would Marlo drift? Why would I, the cosmic brain, fail to program that out of her? Because she needs my death to resurrect me, and I need her death to resurrect her. Mother and son saving each other from the abyss until the end of time. I’ve had centuries to think about it. Your psychodrama’s simpler. You live, shamelessly, through everything. You want to live. Even in conference with me, two thousand years ago, you had this brute attachment to life. It pained you. It pains you still. Of anyone who’s ever lived, you should be dead. You killed almost everyone, and you had a sense of honor that should have opened your veins. You were shot at. Blown apart. Dormant for two millennia. And here you are, flying safely through a world of storms. Masters, Marlo and I understood you. You’re neither an atom nor an island. You have to find your quantum of responsibility. It’s smaller than you think but large enough to hurt.”
Masters saw it now—the link between Marlo and Salt, not merely as machine and maker, but as mother and son. He recognized the emotional insight in Salt given such careful voice in Marlo and saw the computron’s equable veneer for what it was, a mask—
Masters began to speak, but the jolt was obtrusive enough to arrest him. He and Salt fell as silent as their ancestors waiting for the Smilodon to emerge from the tall grass. The passage of time, so lately benign, was against them now.
Another jolt was herald to the Storm.
No sensors were needed to detect the Eternal Tempest, for it had formed barely two miles in front of the skyfaust, competing with the dawn. Masters rolled and reversed. The skyfaust had been on the very edge of the quantum horizon, but even this slight exposure had been enough to snap a wing. Masters felt the skyfaust leave his control and enter an unstoppable spiral.
Masters fought the stick for a few seconds, then relinquished it. Here, finally, was the knife to his veins. He was reminded of that other crash, all those years ago, and how differently he had felt. Then, his heart had clutched at life; now, his breathing relaxed as he surrendered to the gravity of oblivion, glad to join the democracy of darkness.
Salt, never an aficionado of his deaths, felt more rebellious than Masters. He had never solved the face’s secret, and that bothered him more than any unread book or the anticipation of the crash. Being himself, Salt began to daydream about the facts of the skyfaust’s trajectory and the time of impact, which was forty-four seconds. For once, the confidence interval didn’t much concern him.
Seen from the land, the skyfaust’s descent described a gentle crescent. The skyfaust itself had lost the subtle plastic lines of its manufacture and looked more like an ornate crab. Various protrusions designed to defend the craft from impact oscillated in the speed of descent. The skyfaust’s cabin had lost its former dignity; it was packed and festooned with foam, the copious sperm of some safety-oriented sky-god’s concern, to protect its inhabitants from the insult of a crash. Salt felt the reassuring pressure of an antigravity restraint, an invisible shell to protect him from the buffeting to come. Between that and the foam, they might yet survive an impact of several hundred rude miles an hour. Salt counted down silently and wondered if he might bite his tongue off at impact, or if he would feel anything at all. The rattling of the skyfaust nauseated Salt, and he wondered what would happen if he vomited into the antigravity’s shell. He retched experimentally, aware of some eggshell-and-coffee essence within him.
Masters had expected the foam, which had existed in his day, but the antigravity was a surprise. A physical surprise, if not a moral one, for Masters expected Seaboard’s regime of protection to have reached all the way into the cockpit. His nausea was of a different order than Salt’s; it, too, was moral and based on the fear that he would be cheated out of deaths yet to come.
On opening his eyes, Salt felt neither gratitude nor the passage of time. Of course he had woken. Waking was his destiny, soon to be the destiny of all thinking matter. Though unconsciousness, his body had still sensed the keen difference between death and the time between births, between the fourteen billion years before consciousness and the frozen infinity after its extinction.
The foam, sensing a cessation in movement, had resolved into innumerable stains and specks and had worked its way into Salts eyes, clothes, and hair. The antigravity restraint had gone, and the skyfaust was itself neatly cracked in two, as if by divine fingers. There was land outside and inside. Dirt and rocks had entered the skyfaust, depositing themselves promiscuously among the controls and on the walls. There was a cold wind and cold sunlight by which Salt saw Masters prone and bleeding from the head. The great muscles had gone slack, the dignified body had surrendered. Salt surveyed his own body, which had survived with mere cuts and bruises. Perhaps his body was too modest for destruction.
A groan emerged from somewhere within the skyfaust, a groan that Salt could not ascribe to Masters. The groan was a high-pitched complaint that fell nowhere within Masters’ range or character. After some movement, it resolved into his manful tones, and the general was sitting up again. Blood flowed copiously from his forehead, staining his face and uniform.
The general and the clone had not entered the wilderness unprepared. The medikits were independent of Marlo, and, though animated by modest local technologies rather than her genius, they contained self-sutures and microbiotics aplenty to attend to Masters’ major wounds and Salt’s minor ones. Neither infection nor exsanguination could kill the two explor
ers, and, of an evening, the tech had returned the fractured skyfaust to some semblance of wholeness. The plastic had wonderful self-knitting properties and the skyfaust, though imbecilic in comparison to Marlo’s intelligence, was sufficiently intelligent to knit itself together. Bits of the engine were in Boschian transit towards themselves, reassembling merrily. The fuselage reversed the arrow of time; Humpty-Dumpty could put himself back together again. While the skyfaust healed itself in this wondrous manner, Salt and Masters sat outside the craft, on an outcropping of rock. The rock was part of an archipelago of storm-carved chasms and fulgurite.
The sun was setting over the Specific Ocean, and the two men were captivated by splendor of light and water.
Sunset revealed that Masters’ wound was now a slender scar, and the nutritional pellets had done him and Salt good. They seemed to glow in the light of the failing sun.
“How long, do you think?”
“An hour, I’d say, to repair,” Salt replied. “And three more to our destination. By the way, look at you. You’ve healed magnificently.”
Something in Masters might have wondered here at Salt’s sexuality if the little man had not been so oriented to the feminine. Too, there was nothing covetous or even personal in his glance. Masters seemed, to Salt, a splendid male animal—and he, Salt, was not a splendid male animal, but he would have liked to have been. The longing was wistful, philosophical.
Masters had always been conscious of himself, of course. His physicality had grown on himself before it had become apparent to others. Having begun life as a spindly boy, Masters had been gratified by his growth, and he had preened somewhat, and he hadn’t matured beyond all appreciation. Even after his resurrection, he had been guilty of looking in the mirror. He had told himself that the scrutiny was at least somewhat scientific, somewhat impersonal. He had come back in a younger, stronger body, after all, and he had wanted to survey it. But no, it was vanity. He had the strong man’s vanity.