by Jaym Gates
The Baron’s eyes narrowed and he disengaged from the hug, already plotting retaliation for this grievous insult to his favorite necktie.
Which, of course, is the subject of the sequel.
Excess Light
Rahul Kanakia
The Jont Society had decided that all members ought to be uncovered when we heard her final revelation, so I woke up early in order to unzip my bodysuit and rinse the slime from my skin.
In the washing-place, I stared at my flesh — so harsh and grey — and made faces at myself while I did a little dance wherein my stomachfat and chestfat were allowed to swing from side to side. I chuckled, thinking of what my partner, Sanua, would say about this dance, and then I frowned and shook my head.
Today was not a day for antics.
After I was clean, I stood alone in the center of my living room, feeling the age all around me — the chairs made from trees which had lived and died long before I was born; the abraded edges of the stone countertops; the tracks that’d been worn into the plastic of the floor. Normally my smooth, gelatinous bodysuit kept me from making too much of an impression upon my apartment, but now I stood perfectly still because I was so aware that every smudge, every footstep, and every touch would make an indelible impression upon this ancient place.
When I was growing up within these very walls, my mother always said that although our people — modern people — could never have built this tower, we had a duty to preserve it.
I glanced at the far wall. The ancestor stone I’d make from my mother — her body compressed down into a fist-sized blue gemstone — lay in the soft light of her burial alcove.
A painful feeling blossomed in my stomach. All my life I had waited for Almeda Jont’s final message, and today I’d finally hear it.
I knew, or thought I knew, what she’d say: Humanity was doomed; we would fall back beneath the waves and this time we’d remain there forever. And I felt the guilt of that indictment. I tried! I wanted to tell her! I tried to go into the stars, but the investors backed out. And yet I’d been willing, I wanted to say. Wasn’t that enough?
But if she could answer, then I knew what Jont would say. “Try again. Try again until you succeed.”
After an hour in the open air, my gills were dangerously dry, so I rustled around in the bedroom cabinets, looking for my fast-water patches.
Sanua woke up, and he watched me from behind his blank red faceplate, emitting tiny chirps as I carefully applied the patches to my neck.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“You are,” he said. “I still can’t believe you’re going to all this trouble.”
Sanua never missed an opportunity to tease me about my beliefs.
I felt logy and odd. My submerged gills were telling me I was still immersed in liquid, but my eyes and skin said I was in the open air.
“You still want to come?” I said.
“Of course!” he said. “As long as we can stop by my tower afterwards.”
I stood up straighter. Would Sanua once again want to discuss the disposition of his now-vacant apartment?
He simply wouldn’t let go of the absolutely insane notion that it was selfish for him to maintain control of an empty apartment when there were so many who were still forced to live down under the sea.
“Fine,” I said. After he heard Jont’s message, I was sure that he’d abandon all notion of uniting our ancestors within one set of walls. “We will go afterwards, if we have time.”
Sanua bounded out of bed and refreshed the reservoirs in his bodysuit. Then he went along the far wall and touched each one of my ancestor stones while I waited impatiently by the door.
I used to keep my ancestor stones hidden behind a rejuvenation vat, but then, without asking me, Sanua cleared the space and changed the light and now they are always with us, shining quietly in their burial nooks.
#
Because I was uncovered, we could not travel by hookline or cannon-toss. Instead we sat in a spider-carrier, and my organs lurched around inside me as the vehicle scuttled from tower to tower.
The world outside our window was a vivid orange, shot through with streaks of excess energy that shot from exposed wires or flickered from within the heart of broken-down towers.
Here and there, I even spotted a few legacies from the uncovered times: a colorful mural etched indelibly on the side of a tower; a slew of signs for an entertainment program; and a few transparent walls that looked in upon lush, overgrown gardens.
But these colorful visions were rare. When I was immured within my bodysuit, the nutrient slime added so much to the taste and sound of the world. But when I had only my bare eyes and ears, I could not ignore the bleak sights that predominated:
above us, the pale white sunshroud that attenuated the light;
down below, the grey mist which veiled our ancestral oceans;
in between, the people in black masks and body suits, scuttling up and down the outside of their towers; and, most of all, the towers themselves, with their coal-black faces and the long gouges that ran across worn, pitted surfaces, which could no longer be restored, but now, in these fallen times, were simply seared shut whenever the cracks became too large to ignore.
After the tarnishing of the air and the rise of the sea, humanity had retreated down beneath the waves, and stared upward, for centuries, at the silent relics that covered our planet. Only in the last several centuries had we gained the technology to crawl upwards and reclaim them from history.
Sanua took my hand. The skin of his bodysuit was moist beneath my bare fingers.
“I’m excited,” he said. “I watched some of her pronouncements last night. It’s something, isn’t it, to hear a voice from so long ago?”
Because he loved me, Sanua thought he understood my feelings. But he interpreted everything through the mask of his personality. In his eyes, my interest in Jont was actuated by curiosity and a sense of wonder, because those were emotions that he could comprehend.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m glad you’re coming.”
Sanua cooed, and his bodysuit grew soft, attempting to merge with me. The only other passenger in the carrier — a returned offworlder with golden thread for veins — was standing silently in the corner. These offworlders were such poor specimens. To Jont, they were the future, but none of them had lasted. Instead they’d limped home to Mother Earth, because even a sad half-life — forever marked as freaks because of the modifications they’d needed in order to live in another atmosphere — was better than the bleak nothingness that awaited them on Mars or the Moon or Europa or any of the half-dozen other worlds that mankind had attempted to conquer.
Most tried to ignore the offworlders, but I only stared. This could have been me. When I was young, the Jontian Society had come very close to launching its own spaceship. We’d assembled the money. The ship was under construction. We were selecting the crew. I was in the final phase of the interview process. They were even matching us for optimal genetic and personal compatibility. If selected, I was to father children with two women, I remember — Chem Andrey and Lin Hezin. Our plan was robust, and we expected to be fully self-supporting within a decade. And then, when the Earth finally fell, we would be humanity’s sole foothold in the universe.
But then our plan had collapsed. And not because of some grand conspiracy, either. Simply bad luck. The ship cost twice what it needed to. One source of funds thought better of it and pulled out. Some of the crew moved on with their lives. A year of delay turned into three. And then ten. And then the ship had been laying half-built for so long that it became decrepit. And now the crew was too old — they’d need to be re-selected. Finally, everything fell into a quiescence from which had never arose.
“What do you think she’ll say?” Sanua said.
“There are several theories,” I said. “The most popular is —”
“I know the theories. What do you think I was doing last night?” he said. “But I want to know your theory.”<
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I touched Sanua’s faceplate. There was a living human there, just a few inches under my fingers. someone soft and warm and alive. And when he looked at me, I had no idea what he saw. But my suspicion was that his vision of me was terrifyingly different from what I actually was.
And yet I was capable of loving him, and that by itself was an accomplishment. After emerging from hibernation beneath the waves, mankind lived and propagated itself for many centuries before regaining the ability to love.
So I said nothing, because I knew what would make him happy, and I knew what would frighten him, and I knew what I believed.
Almeda Jont was a writer and philosopher from the days of the Machine Democracy. In her time, mankind was immortal, and all of life’s conveniences were produced by secret furnaces down beneath the sea. But Jont saw the signs of decay. She saw people becoming distant and detached from reality. She saw the disintegration of love and friendship, and the rise of tribalism. She saw how the speedrails were slowing, and the cannons were firing less frequently and the houses of science were using less and less energy each year. And, most of all, she saw the first stirrings of the madness and hedonism that would eventually drag us out of our towers and drown us beneath the sea. She saw that mankind had finally turned itself into an animal.
So she developed her own science. Carefully modeling human behavior as if each person was nothing more than a single cell in one vast orgasm, she created a robust history of the future.
Then, right before her death, she recorded a series of pronouncements: short, sharp messages that would echo through society at exactly the moment in history at which they would do the most good.
As the Machine Democracy degenerated and the Oceanic Ages began, her voice would occasionally bubble up, at preprogrammed intervals, from the mass-mind. And each time she spoke, her pronouncements were always exactly accurate. She predicted the mind overload and the abandonment of the towers and the irradiation of the Earth and the rise of the Rampants and the frothing of the seas and the return of death.
And her messages always ended with the same prophecy: Paradise will never return, she said. The Earth will never recover from the collapse. The only escape is to leave this tired planet and venture into space.
That was the sum total of her advice. The Earth is doomed. You must abandon it.
And then, as a tiny segment of mankind began to rise from the ocean, Almeda Jont said her work was almost done. There would only be one more message, she said, and it would not arrive for another thousand years.
In that time, the earth stabilized. The towers were patched up and reactivated. Agriculture and engineering were rediscovered. We learned, once again, how to create new knowledge. A few ships even went to other planets. But that was where our progress ended. All of those expeditions failed eventually. Even a decrepit Earth was a thousand times more habitable than any other world within our reach.
“What is it?” Sanua said. “You still wish you were in space, don’t you?” He pointed upwards.
“No,” I shook my head, and then reeled from the strange sloshing of the water against my gills. “That plan is long-dead.”
“What?” he said. “Then what? Why are you doing this?”
I could hear the edge in his voice.
“You did not have to come.”
“Tell me.” He muttered the words and put a hard edge on them. “Why are we here? What do you expect her to say?”
He was clutching my arm now. I drew away slightly, but he pulled closer. “Someone else can live in my apartment,” he said. “Someone who’ll need it more than me. It isn’t right that it should be empty, you know.”
“I know.”
“That’s the real crime,” he said. “Not space travel.” He shook his head. “Not space. There is space right here, and there are people who want to fill it. We’re lucky. We are unified. How can you turn your back on ...”
“I already said that I would visit your tower.”
I turned away, ignoring his importuning. This was so trivial and so slight — not at all the future that Jont would have wanted for us. We were supposed to be ascending for the heavens, not crowding ourselves closer and closer into these dry little spaces.
There were so many theories about what Jont might say, but most people ignored the simplest. What if she simply said, “It is time for you to go?”
What then? We had no more resources, and no more will. The Jontian Society was spiritually, financially, and intellectually inert. If Jont asked us to go to the stars, then we’d be revealed, once and for all, as a bunch of ineffectual crackpots.
#
The hall was not crowded. Once Jont had commanded millions of adherents. Now only a few dozen of us were gathered in a rocky amphitheater carved into a mountaintop whose peak was just a few hundred meters above sea level.
I knelt down and ran my hands over the muddy dirt. A few meters away, the sea hissed and popped, exuding strange gases.
The sun was blocked, and all was dark, except for that which lay within the aura of the lights that we carried. Up above, the towers emitted a terrible grinding sound as they swiveled atop ancient gears.
Most of us had never met each other in person, so we mingled in small groups and speculated about Jont’s final revelation.
The optimists, few in number, believed Jont would say the danger was finally past and that mankind was saved. Her focus on space travel had been a feint, they said—a red herring designed to unsettle and misdirect mankind in some fashion that only Jont herself would ever understand.
“Oooh, I like that,” Sanua said. “So crafty.”
Others, the cynics, thought she’d be completely wrong. No one can truly predict the future, they said. Surely she’ll babble some nonsense that will in no way reflect the more-or-less fine state of the world.
Although I didn’t believe in this, I think a part of me would’ve been relieved to discover that Jont was a false idol. And, to my surprise, Sanua was somewhat intrigued by this possibility.
“Well, wouldn’t there be something quixotic about that?” he said. “Something quite lonely and beautiful and heroic?”
The pessimists — the largest of our number — thought Jont would tell us that we had missed our chance. The Earth was doomed, and it was too late to leave.
To that, Sanua emitted a loud beep. “Why go through the trouble then, of setting up this millennia-long project?”
I didn’t know. Perhaps there were many messages, and this one would only play if the conditions were met. Or perhaps Jont was like a doctor whose only remaining course of treatment is to gently inform the patient that the end is near.
Finally, the sentimentalists thought that Jont’s final recording wouldn’t address the entire planet. Instead, she would have some message meant only for us, the few who had kept the faith.
I detested that theory. Jont had no time for the obsessives and fanatics that made up the Jont Society. If she was to address anyone, then it would be the real doers: the builders and the scientists and the interplanetary explorers.
When I voiced that opinion, I got a chorus of agreement, but Sanua chirped derisively.
“You need to have more faith in your own value,” he said.
I knew this was the prelude to a very familiar argument. “Please,” I said. “Not today.”
Sanua’s family had controlled an apartment in Agrath Tower for seven centuries. Currently it stood empty, because he preferred to live in mine. But his ancestors were there — it was his home. And he wanted to give it up.
Not sell it, since that was illegal, but, rather, simply disengage the locks and leave it open for whatever oceanborn person decided to climb out of the water and occupy it.
I was absolutely opposed to this unbelievably sentimental notion. After all, what if the two of us parted ways? What would happen to him then? The trust that Sanua had in our relationship was ... it was simply chilling.
The final group of Jontians were the nihilists. T
hey believed that the equipment was broken, and that the recording wouldn’t play.
If they turned out to be right, I’d be saddened but unsurprised. Jont lived ten thousand years ago, and if there was anything she had taught us, it was that nothing lasts.
#
Finally, we took our places on the warm stone benches of the amphitheater, and, after a few moments, a hologram appeared.
The ancient projector had produced a shimmery and unreal image, but its eyes were very alive. And as they moved across the amphitheater, I had the disturbing impression that she was staring at each of us in turn.
Jont had claimed her technique could only predict the fate of whole planets. She’d written that the uncertainty and randomness made it impossible to predict the future of individual humans. But if that was true, why did I feel like she was staring directly at me?
“Friends,” she said. Her voice was strong and low. “You would not be true followers of mine if you were willing to accept my words on faith alone. So please know that the details of my theories have been stored in several vaults that are hidden inside the ocean-mind. When this recording is finished, I ask you to go forth and find my proofs and recalculate everything to your satisfaction.
“Now, as for the grosser sorts of evidence, allow me to demonstrate that my predictions are still robust. Exactly 10,341 years have passed since the creation of this recording, and the world is better now than it has been in many years.
“Although trillions of men still lie under the sea, vegetating uselessly, there are some eight hundred billion who have managed to regain sentience, and now you reoccupy the world-city. You’ve learned to shield yourself from the sun. You’ve rediscovered art and science and leisure and love. You are organized into self-governing units that are largely at peace.