In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  There were two people in the cabin with Briddy. Gemma was startled to see that one of them was Nina, and that the other was Cyril’s stepbrother Nathaniel. She nodded at them in greeting.

  “I take it you three know each other?” Briddy asked.

  “Yes,” Gemma said, wondering whether Alan had known about Nina’s plans, and if they had disagreed about it. If he knew he was going to lose Nina, then that would explain some of his anger and confusion.

  It was very quiet in the cabin. Gemma sat down next to Briddy and waited. Nina and Nathaniel smiled at her shyly and seemed reluctant to speak. She noticed that the tall, thin Nathaniel was sitting very close to his stocky stepsister. A screen lit up in the padded, egg-shaped cabin. Gemma saw Alan on the porch, looking up anxiously at the departing craft, and the sight of her brother’s shrinking image saddened her.

  The only sense she had of motion came from the landscape of farms and small houses unrolling on the screen. The flat roofs and straight dirt roads of the town rushed into view for an instant, and then the craft sailed over the edge of the plateau and out over the forest.

  Gemma looked back to Nina and Nathaniel, and suddenly understood what they meant to each other. “I see,” she murmured. “I should have guessed it after all the times we’ve talked.”

  “It’s true,” Nina said, her hand slipping into Nathaniel’s. He held it awkwardly. “We’ve been lovers for a long time.” She smiled. “We had to keep it a secret. But no one can forbid it now.”

  So that was why Cyril and Nathaniel did not get along, Gemma realized. Cyril must have discovered his sister’s secret love for their stepbrother. It occurred to her that Nina and Nathaniel might not really care about what the offworlders had come to tell the colony, but only saw the mobile as a way of escape to a place where they could be together. Or perhaps they understood the greater life they had been offered and wanted to leave. Things were getting tangled in ways she had not expected. It seemed possible that Nina had even used Alan to hide her life with Nathaniel. Could Alan have known all this time? That would explain why he had not been rushing to marry Nina.

  “I’m sorry,” Nina said softly, “if this is a shock to you.”

  “It’s the only way for us now,” Nathaniel added, “for better or worse. I understood that after I attended the meetings.”

  “What do Cyril … and Alan think?” Gemma asked.

  “Alan tried to understand for a long time,” Nina said sadly. “He thought I might get over it. Cyril …”

  “He blackmailed us,” Nathaniel said angrily, “to please himself. He knew what people in town would think if they found out, how hard it would be for either of us to go there if anyone found out. He knew that Alan would have been shamed in public by the truth. We’ll be free of both of them forever.”

  As Gemma looked into Nina’s and Nathaniel’s anxious eyes, she realized that they had been prisoners, and deserved a better life. She reached over and grasped their hands for a moment. Tears came into Nina’s eyes. Nathaniel seemed moved, but held his feelings in check.

  “Thank you,” Nina managed to say, “for understanding. Alan tried for so long, but it was impossible.”

  Poor Alan, Gemma thought, he’ll be abandoned by everyone who had been close to him.

  Briddy had been gazing at the screen almost too intently, as if sensing that Gemma and her neighbors needed privacy. Now she turned toward them and said, “We’re on an automatic tour.” The flitter dropped low and raced over the forest canopy. “We’ve got small drones in the area that will send what they see to our screen. There!”

  Gemma caught a flash of silver among the greenery as the image on the screen changed with flashing speed. “We’re seeing through the drone’s eyes now,” Briddy continued.

  As the picture slowed down, Gemma peered down into the forest and saw that the drone was following a well-worn path of red clay through the green and black shadows. Suddenly it caught up with two creatures moving down the trail on all fours.

  “They’re headed for water,” Briddy said as the image steadied. Gemma saw large hairy heads set on heavy torsos pushing forward with long hind legs that reminded her of grassy stalks. The creatures entered a patch of sunlight, stopped and raised their forelegs from the ground. The drone moved around in front of them and Gemma found herself looking directly into large white eyes.

  “They take the drone for some kind of insect,” Briddy said as both pairs of eyes stared into the screen and Gemma imagined a future civilization of clothed beings who still exhibited the expressions of these creatures, speaking a strange language, seeing the universe in odd ways, longing for things she could not even guess at.

  After a few moments the creatures lost interest in the drone and began to scratch at the bark of a nearby tree. Nothing much to see, her brother would have said, just an animal that sometimes goes on two legs. We’re no danger to them up here.

  “We’ve examined dead ones,” Briddy said, “and it’s all there in the brain and physiology, the next step. It will happen.”

  “Can you be certain?” Gemma asked, hearing her brother’s voice in the question.

  “As certain as seeing a solar system form in the clouds of a new sun.”

  “Have you seen that happen?” Gemma asked, remembering the old astronomy books she had displayed on a reader that had finally failed.

  Briddy nodded. “And I’ve watched a sun die.”

  “There they go,” Nathaniel said.

  The creatures were off again down the trail. The drone fell back, followed at a distance, and broke through the trees to catch sight of the creatures bathing in a small lake with several dozen of their kind.

  “Listen,” Briddy whispered.

  Laughter-like singing mingled with the sound of splashing as the bipeds played in the sun-shot water.

  6

  “Is that all you’re taking with you?” Alan asked as Gemma finished packing her canvas bag.

  She looked around her room quickly. “I’ll have everything I need there,” she said.

  Alan sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re sure?” he asked, as if hoping to hold her back with the question.

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes, knowing that they would plead with her even if he said nothing.

  “I guess there was never much here that you wanted,” he said, which was an improvement over saying that she would take any excuse to leave a life of hard work.

  She looked at him finally, and saw the resignation in his eyes; no pleading self-pity, just resignation. “I’m going,” she said, “because I can’t live here knowing what will happen. It’s the right thing to do, even if I were the only one.”

  “But it’s useless,” he said. “Most are staying. You won’t change anything.”

  “There are other ways to live,” she answered. “I can do the right thing, for myself, and as an example, no matter how useless.”

  “What do you really think of the people who are coming here?” In his mind it counted against her.

  “Briddy told me that it happens,” she said. “Every time a mobile enters a sunspace, there are those among them who are drawn to planets. It’s best when there’s a colony they can join, where they might be needed. If there isn’t, they’re often never heard from again.”

  “You’ll have to learn a whole new life.”

  “The mobile always needs new people to increase its biological diversity. You’ll benefit in the same way from those who are coming here. I’ll learn. It should be interesting.” She paused, wondering if she sounded almost too much like Briddy. “I’m sorry about you and Nina.”

  “I’ll find someone else.” He was silent for a moment. “They wanted to convince us, but they wouldn’t do anything about it when we refused to leave. I didn’t expect that.” He sounded relieved. “It must not mean that much to them.”

  “What did you
expect? That they would force us all to leave? They did all they could.” She sat down on the edge of her bed for the last time. “Don’t you understand even now?”

  “We’ll do the best we can, about the creatures,” he said softly, “at least in my lifetime. Strange, to think you’ll be alive long after I’m gone. We’ll never see each other again.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, surprised by the coldness in her voice, even though she knew he was trying to reach out to her as much as he could, in his own way.

  “You really do think we’re living in the past here, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, again coldly, “and I can’t be part of it,” and her resolve wavered for a moment as she tried to summon her reasons for leaving, some of them vague and impulsive, others clear and impossible to ignore. She thought of the thousands of jars of preserves she had set up over the years, the countless meals she had cooked, the thousands of books she could not have but had seen references to in the meager data storage of the surviving readers, and the frustrated hunger for knowledge that had grown within her until it could swallow the universe. The hope of knowledge was like new air in her lungs, enabling her to breathe freely for the first time in her life. She would spend the next twenty-five years learning where she had come from and who she might become.

  “I would go with you,” he said almost calmly, “but I just can’t after all the work I’ve put into this place.”

  “I know,” she answered, trying to sound kind as she thought that it was his stubborn pride that made him feel he had to stay. “You imagine the dead judging you as if they were alive,” she continued. “That’s living in the past that’s dead and gone, and neither of us ever knew what it was. Why not accept that this place gave us a refuge for a time, but that now we have to move on?”

  She looked out the window. The flitter was a dark shadow sliding down the white fabric of the curtains sewn by her grandmother.

  “You do look down on us,” Alan said bitterly, his voice breaking.

  “Read some history, Alan. Learn what the books have tried to remember for us—what we did to Old Earth.”

  “I know all that,” he said.

  “But you think it means you have to live the way you do so it won’t happen again. But it will, if you go on like this. I know that the mobiles don’t make deserts around themselves, which is what our kind will make of this planet, of any planet, once we get off on the wrong foot.” She spoke without looking at him, hoping that at any moment he would say that he was coming with her.

  “I had no idea … that you’d thought about this so much,” he said, standing before her, his shoulders sagging.

  She got up, embraced him, and held his head against her shoulder. “Come with me,” she said with a shudder, determined that her words would seize his will and change it.

  He sighed and pushed her away. “I just can’t. You may be right, but I can’t simply force myself to see it.” He looked into her eyes. “Can you understand that?”

  She nodded, holding her feelings in check. “Maybe someday we’ll be back this way. Alan, you don’t know what it was like to look into the eyes of the creatures who may be the real people of this world. They’ll have enough to overcome without having to deal with us. They deserve to have their world to themselves.”

  He gave her a defeated look, and she was unable to accept that he would be long dead when her life was still beginning.

  “Alan,” she said, resolved to try again, “you’ll die here. Come with me and live, even if you don’t understand, even if you can’t feel it’s right. One day you will understand.”

  He was silent, then said with a bitter smile, “I’ll return to nature.”

  “To what?” she asked. “To the nature we transplanted here from jars after we burned the plateau?”

  “It’s all nature—everywhere,” he said in a breaking voice.

  “We had no right,” she replied helplessly.

  “We took only as much as we needed to live. It was live or die, coming here. I have to go on.”

  When he was silent she looked toward her shabby bag and decided that she wouldn’t take anything with her, then went out through the open door of her room for the last time, through the short hall and out the front door, pausing on the porch steps that she had once watched her father and Alan rebuild, noticing that the job would soon have to be done again. The paving stones Alan had set in the path from the house were unchanged, she saw as she went down the steps and hurried across to the dirt road.

  The flitter’s lock opened for her, and she stepped inside, refusing to look back.

  Nina and Nathaniel were waiting in the flitter’s cabin, looking uncertain as Gemma sat down across from them. She realized that they had feared she might decide not to come at the last moment; her arrival seemed to reassure them.

  “How many others?” Gemma asked as the flitter lifted and her world fell away on the screen.

  “Fifty-one,” Briddy said. “Perhaps another time we’ll do better, if we come this way again and the colony is still here.” For the first time, Gemma sensed a touch of sadness in Briddy’s voice. “Perhaps if Earth had not destroyed itself, there would not have been this desperate colonization of planets.”

  “How many colonies are there?” Nina asked.

  “Nine out of twelve are left,” Briddy replied, “within a hundred-light-year radius of Earth. If Earth had lived, mobile habitats would have proliferated routinely in its sunspace, and sooner or later some of them would have set out for the stars, reproducing themselves independently of natural worlds, leaving planets alone, for better or worse, as the nurseries of intelligent life. We let some of our people return to the cradle, if only to prevent the death of these colonies, and because we have not changed ourselves sufficiently to forget this yearning for the daylight of worlds.” She paused and looked at them more intently before going on. “We accept that there is no perfect way for intelligence to arise and flourish. Our macrolife removes us from the unconscious game of nature’s worlds, but we still carry that nature in our bodies even as we strive to change ourselves and break the constraints—no, the tyranny of space-time. If that seems contradictory to you, let me point out that the native possibilities of this planet may also fail. We try to leave as many ways open as possible.”

  “Do you believe the colony will fail?”

  “Given the biological diversity we’ve just given it, it may live for a while. Will it be enough? Probably not. A hundred individuals, more or less, may not make a difference. But we may return here in a century, and then everyone may wish to join us.”

  Gemma felt overwhelmed by complexities, but confirmed in her decision. It was not what she had expected. Although the mobile was leaving behind some people—malcontents, Alan had called them—they were not permitted to bring any major technologies with them, only their personal skills. The colony would not benefit as she had imagined. The problem was not resolved, except for her and a few others—thinking only of themselves, Alan had said.

  But she could not have stayed, waiting for the colony to expand from the plateau, preventing the forest creatures from starting their climb toward the light. Even if the human population behaved like saints, subtle changes in the planet’s ecology would begin to spread as soon as the colony outgrew the plateau.

  Suddenly she felt that nothing would be as she had imagined, that an alien life waited for her, and that home was in the folds of the planetary crust behind her. …

  But the doubting moment passed as she looked at the screen and saw the world where she had been born grow small. The view flashed to the mobile, and she saw a giant egg-shape swimming in the starry night, waiting to receive her.

  Far Futures

  Transfigured Night

  “… pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today’s economists; we shall become the first culture in history t
o employ high technology to manufacture that most transient yet lasting of products: the human experience.

  “… blurring of the line between the real and the unreal will confront the society with serious problems, but it will not prevent or even slow the emergence of the psyche-service industries and psychocorps.

  “… sequences of experience so organized that their very juxtaposition with one another will contribute color, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities … frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured.”

  —Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

  “I begin with two possibilities which are quite probably realized, though not by normal men; namely, that Smith remembers that twenty years ago he was Jones and also Robinson, while Macgregor and Stuart each remember that twenty years ago they were Johnston …

  “If we divide a flatworm in two, both halves may live happily ever after. If each gets a fair share of the nervous system, presumably they get a certain amount of memory from their common parent. And the converse holds when two protozoa fuse. The case of disassociated personality in men is hardly apposite, as two different personalities rarely if ever seem to be fully conscious at the same time. Human consciousnesses do not usually split or unite in this way because human bodies do not. If, on the other hand, as is widely supposed, consciousness may continue without a body, I see no reason why such restrictions should hold. But I leave it as a problem for a person sincerely desirous of immortality whether he would prefer that 100 years hence fifteen distinct spirits each remembered having been he, or that one spirit remembered being he and also fourteen other people. For clearly if 100 years hence someone remembers having been I, I have not died, even though he is less like me than I am now like myself at four years old.”

  —J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds

  “The chief implications [of indefinitely extended life] concern the sanity and outlook of the individual …”

  —R. C. W. Ettinger, Man Into Superman