Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  “Surrender,” Mason said, “or I will open fire on your ship. Do you hear me also, Captain Scorto?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Land your ship and prepare to be boarded,” Nakamura replied, “or I will kill these hostages before your eyes.”

  Sam was grateful that Janet was not in immediate reach.

  “Scorto—open fire on Asterome and the Mars vessel when I give the command.”

  Sam felt the gun press against his temple. The floor seemed to shift slightly as he tried to keep his eyes on the screen.

  “Mason, you can’t fight a triple threat!”

  “I will not bargain with you, General.”

  The gun pushed Sam’s head sideways. With one eye he peered at the lower-left insert, where Nakamura’s ship was suddenly coming apart, its center glowing cherry red, turning white until the hull was lost in a bright flash. The concussion shook the floor. Sam faced the screen as Nakamura moved the gun away. Gas and debris filled the insert, clearing slowly to show a crater where the ship had stood.

  “I regret the loss of misguided lives,” Mason said. “They and the ship might have served us better.”

  “How?” Nakamura asked as he stepped back from Sam. “You’re too far away.”

  “A simple destruct sequence code. The civilian governments that gathered the taxes to build these old ships kept that much insurance against them. Of course, such a safeguard is only effective when not too many people know about it.”

  Sam looked at Nakamura, aware that the general would take the explanation as an insult, since it implied that he was not important enough to have known.

  “I can still kill the hostages,” Nakamura said.

  Sam gazed into the man’s eyes. There was frustrated hatred behind the gun now. Trapped animals, Sam thought. The nearness of the gun made him angry. He looked at Richard and Margot, at Mike and Greg. If Nakamura loses interest in me, he’ll kill them all. The gun must stay on me.

  “You’re beaten,” Richard shouted. “What can you gain now?”

  Sam knew. An enraged puppeteer’s hand entered his body. His arm came up and knocked the gun out of Nakamura’s hand. The weapon coughed unimpressively, floated toward the floor, bounced with a clatter, and lay still. Sam seized Nakamura by the throat and tried to close his fist. A distant part of Sam watched, startled by his disregard for his own life.

  The general sputtered and punched at him. Sam pushed Nakamura and tumbled down on top of him, feeling an anger that he had almost forgotten existed. Nakamura pulled the hand away from his throat, but Sam punched him in the right eye; the general howled. Sam hit him in the jaw; Nakamura’s head went back against the floor. He lay still, staring up at Sam with one eye.

  A pair of booted feet approached. “That’s enough, Mr. Bulero,” the guard said. “We’ll take him now.” The other guard was removing the handcuffs from Mike Basil and Greg Michaels. Sam rose and looked down at Nakamura. The general was everything that he had wanted to strike out at since they had abandoned earth. Sam shifted his gaze to Soong’s body nearby. He might have saved him if he had acted earlier, if he had been stronger. Nakamura did not expect me to act.

  Margot knelt and felt Soong’s pulse, shaking her head as she looked up at Sam. Suddenly Sam stepped closer to Nakamura and kicked him in the ribs. The general groaned.

  Richard took Sam’s arm to hold him back. Sam stood still, staring at the gun on the floor, as if all the mysteries of creation were somehow contained in the weapon. He had acted because he had sensed weakness, in himself and in Nakamura; and for once his mind was in complete accord with his deepest feelings. The narrow aims of the general’s coup had suddenly clarified Sam’s view of recent events. He had struck out on behalf of a future in which survival would not be as precarious as it had been in the past. Macrolife was about to take its first step out of the cradle of sunspace; humankind was about to gain a larger lease on life; yet it might so easily have become impossible, for lack of men with vision and goodwill. Nakamura’s objections were mere excuses in his bid for power; Asterome’s presence was not absolutely essential, since its facilities were duplicated here and on Mars; Sam realized with a chill that he and Janet might have accepted Nakamura’s views, if he had concealed his motives.

  Sam regarded Richard and Margot, knowing that he had also acted out of love for them—children becoming adults, looking away not so much from the physical as from the psychological ruins of sol.

  He stooped and picked up the gun.

  On the screen, Orton was lighting a cigar next to Alard. There was a hole in Orton’s left eye, where the stray bullet from Nakamura’s gun had pierced the screen.

  Richard and Margot embraced, and for a moment Sam saw something of the boy he had known long ago.

  Alard scowled into the room.

  The sun slid slowly behind Jupiter, leaving a stream of red light at the planet’s edge.

  Nakamura stirred. The two guards helped him to his feet.

  “Hold him,” Mason said. Sam noted the strain in her face. “We’ll have to take him back to Mars for trial with the others. Mr. Bulero—Sam, you’ll be in charge.”

  Sam made sure that the safety was on the pistol and put it in his pocket.

  Nakamura stared at the floor as he was led toward the door.

  “One moment,” Mason said. The guards paused and Nakamura looked back at the screen. “We expected this kind of thing, Kiichi. Alard and I discussed it during his Mars stopover, and we picked the places where it might happen. A false announcement of your exposure unmasked your cohorts on Mars, forcing them to cooperate with us to keep you in the dark. Some of them are reasonable people—“

  “You’re not better than I am,” Nakamura said contemptuously. His hands shook as he struggled to control himself.

  “General—I may still call you that until the court-martial—we are what remains of the UN. Your betrayal of its laws was not motivated by any honest criticism of policy. We may not be better than you, but our laws and ideals are. You did not learn to do what you did at Luna Academy, though I remember you had your hand up often in History 15. Take him away.” Mason’s insert winked out, cheating Nakamura of any further reply. Sam was sure that Mason had wanted to say more, but it would have been pointless.

  The images of Alard and Orton disappeared, leaving only the view of Ganymede’s surface, where the blast crater was still obscured by floating dust.

  Nakamura looked back at Sam as the door slid open. Sam’s hand closed on the gun in his pocket. More than threatening all the lives of those closest to him, Sam thought as the door closed, Nakamura had threatened humanity’s high hopes; he would have denied Orton his new dream, Richard and Margot their future; humanity would not deserve to survive if there were too many of his kind still around. Again Sam was surprised at how his mind came to the support of his feelings. He wondered if this was something new within him or if he had simply not noticed it before.

  Mike Basil, Greg Michaels, Richard, and Margot came and stood around him.

  “Good going,” Richard said. Basil nodded at him. Michaels shook his hand. Margot kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re shaking,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  Sam nodded.

  One of the com technicians was covering Soong’s body with a piece of plastic. Janet might have died, Sam thought.

  The radio noise from Jupiter crackled on the screen’s open channel.

  11. Shares of Glory

  After a seeming eternity of sleep, Janet opened her eyes. The lights on the ceiling were clear, ordinary objects, a relief after the dreams.

  She remembered a lost dream self, cowering from something in the sky….

  Turning her head, she saw Sam, Richard and Margot, and Orton.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “You’ll be up soon.”

  You’re so kind, she thought, remembering why she was here. It might not be okay for long. She tried to smile, but she was tired again, and sleep began to press her into a ca
lm oblivion.

  “She needs weeks of rest,” Margot said. “I’ll stay with her.’

  She’s my friend, Janet thought.

  They sat in a circle of chairs on the huge black floor of the observation level—Sam, Richard and Margot, Janet, Orton, Alard, Commander Mason, Greg Michaels, and Mike Basil. All the dome screens were on, creating the illusion of an open night sky.

  Sam looked at Janet next to him; a new independence had taken hold of her, making her mysterious and desirable. He would still wake up from dreaming that for some inexplicable reason she had died, only to find her warmly next to him, surprising him with her presence; he had fallen in love again.

  All their faces were half in starlight, half in the amber glow of Jupiter’s full phase. As they spoke, they would look up at the giant hanging above the distant mountains. Callisto was a silvery disk; Europa and Io were oranges about to chase each other across Jove’s streaked face.

  Sam was beginning to feel at home. On the map, Ganymede City was a cluster of domes and underground warrens in the northeast, only a few hundred kilometers from the moon’s north pole. To the south lay lava plains and mountains, glaciers and deep valleys which held occasional mists.

  “After you take Asterome out,” Mason was saying, “certainly in this century, after we’ve begun our economic recovery, we’ll probably send out smaller ships in various directions from the sun. Phobos and Deimos might make the beginnings of additional macroworlds. I’m sure that the asteroid dwellers will develop in this direction. We’ll need all the insurance we can afford. Maybe the anomaly around earth won’t grow any larger; maybe it will fade and we can go back for a look.”

  And twenty worlds circle Jupiter and Saturn, Sam thought, worlds we might want to work into something people can live on. Mars and Venus can be terraformed….

  Orton grunted at his right. He had been out of cigars and cigarettes for weeks and had been unable to locate even a small cache.

  Mason got up from her chair next to Orton and stretched. “Back home on Mars they’re saying the universe is a queer place and we should not overstep ourselves. Our survivors are the most educated and skilled human beings of all time, and still they’re superstitious.”

  “The war—” Alard started to say.

  “There’s risk in everything,” Richard said. “What may result from our holocaust may yet be good.”

  “That good and bad will happen is inevitable,” Janet said. Sam noted a coldness in her voice, as if she were speaking to a stranger.

  “Inevitable,” Sam said. “It is a strange universe.”

  “Sam, Janet—last call,” Alard said.

  “No,” Janet answered before Sam could reply. “Our place is here, where we failed, where we have to pick up the pieces.”

  We don’t deserve to go, Sam thought.

  Alard tried to make the best of it. “Ganymede has a new governor, and he’s getting the feel of useful work again—right, Sam?”

  Sam nodded. Janet would never show Richard and Margot how much she would miss them. They would have a new start. She was letting go as she had let go of Jack; perhaps now she would have a chance to be herself; that would be the Janet, Sam knew, who could love him. Sunspace had to let go of its child now; macrolife had to be born as an act of wild faith or not at all. Richard and Margot had to leave before they became overimpressed with humankind’s capacity for cruelty and failure; they would have enough failures of their own.

  “When is departure?” Sam asked.

  “When we’ve finished testing the gravitic pusher units,” Richard answered. “They still produce pretty weak gravitic shortwaves for the power we put in. We have to be sure of one g acceleration for indefinite periods.”

  Orton was going, of course. If anyone were to try and stop him now, he would tear Ganymede City down piece by prefabricated piece. Sam wondered what kind of societies would develop when Asterome grew and reproduced.

  “We’ll miss you,” Margot said, looking at Janet.

  Janet would go back into organizing what was left of Bulero Enterprises on Mars and Ganymede, assembling all the records, plans of projects, and memories into two central facilities. Sam knew that he would have to teach as well as govern; he had a lot to learn. Suddenly he realized that he might well be the last living professional philosopher anywhere; the implacable unknown had given him another chance, after all.

  He looked up and saw Europa’s and Io’s shadows moving across Jupiter’s clouds….

  He was alone, yet it seemed that those who had gone were still sitting here with him under the stars. Jupiter hid the sun. Sam waited, thinking of those last moments here, more than two years ago….

  There had been embraces and handshaking, clumsy words and averted eyes; the effort to get through to the other person had been desperate. Margot and Janet went off to be alone; Orton and he forgave each other’s sins a dozen times. The final conversation with Richard had been impersonal—about the undesirability of deciding the future in advance; it had ended with Richard pleading with him to come along, almost ordering him to convince Janet. “There’s got to be an end to Bulero guilt,” Richard had said. But not yet. Sam remembered Margot’s passionate kiss, so freely given.

  The empty chairs sat with him one day, and all those people he had known were somehow contained in the bright star that was rushing toward Jupiter in half phase, to steal some of its gravitational energy for the outward push to the stars.

  Somewhere out there, Asterome was moving at a considerable fraction of light speed. He imagined its shield of force, a birthing shroud repelling gas and dust from the newborn creature coming out of the trillion-mile whirlpool of sunspace.

  Biological time was slowing for Richard, Margot, and Orton, while he and Janet grew older. Recent communications were becoming unreliable.

  He thought of Kiichi Nakamura. The Hawaiian had recently committed suicide in the Martian prison. Janet had urged Sam to visit the general before he was removed to Mars.

  “What do you want from me?” the general had asked from the corner of his cell.

  “Janet suggested that I see you.”

  “Oh—she feels sorry for me.” He tried to smooth back his black hair.

  “You need a barber.”

  Sam had stood in the center of the cell until the general spoke again. “I suppose, Mr. Bulero—“

  “Sam, please.”

  “I suppose that I am to explain myself.”

  “If you want to.” What had shaken Sam was the way the man had suddenly looked up at him.

  “You think me a villain and a fool?”

  “I think I do,” Sam said, feeling guilty.

  “You think yourself a perceptive man.”

  “What was I to see? Tell me.”

  “I saw Asterome as a source of recovery, while Alard—“

  “But Asterome is helping.”

  “It remains independent when we need everything.”

  “I see your point, but I think we’ll manage. Centralization is a debatable virtue. Asterome is not the only source of recovery left, and there are greater things to consider—but that’s not it. Your methods set lawless precedents for later strife—your means pollute what may be reasonable ends. Our future is dirty enough from what we have to carry around inside. Asterome will have its chance and we’ll have ours, for what it’s worth.”

  “I believed the situation called for desperate measures.”

  “What can I say? You may have been well meaning—but you were wrong. A lot of history was against you. Asterome left us what it had to give. You fail to see that it had to leave, to begin the proliferation of macrolife. That’s the long-range goal for which it was built.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Sam had tried to explain, but Nakamura had shaken his head in disagreement. “All you Buleros are a pack of dreamers! Your bulerium destroyed the world, my family, and whatever career I might have had.” Then he had looked down at the floor, refusing to speak furth
er.

  “You might have contributed your talents, but you’re still thinking in terms of personal glory.”

  But you might be right about other things, Sam said to himself, remembering the desolation of the broken man in the cell. Only future time will justify Asterome’s leaving, but not for us. For us there is the consolation that humanity no longer has its eggs in one basket. If we are to die, it will be from internal failures, from the ungovernable dark places of the mind—the scaffolding left over from evolution’s bloody building program—not from a lack of vision. Apocalypse is the eye of a needle, through which we pass into a different world. Whitehead had once said that it was the business of the future to be dangerous, that the major advances in civilization were processes that all but wrecked the societies in which they occurred. It was as close as he would ever come to a statement of faith. It begged the question, of course, saying no more than that there are things which cannot be decided in advance.

  He smiled, knowing that he would not have let a student get away with such talk, yet it had involved a man’s life and the future of a whole branch of humanity. Deliberate, deductive reason was such a conservative, clockwork thing, best used on known quantities, not on creative acts, which are always a mix of known and unknown. It was almost as if the universe had been designed to be knowable but not exhaustible…an involving creation, one that would not be boring or statically perfect for its inhabitants, but always presenting new things and people. The best of all possible worlds, or a shell game? He resented the lurking, layered, Troy-like nature of the human mind, where old impulses lingered in the shadow of reason, going about their subterranean business in a billion-year-old maze. I could have easily killed Nakamura….

  A river of light carried the sun out from behind Jove’s face, beginning the week. High in its orbit, the solar mirror brightened into life and Sam thought of Soong.

  It was getting on toward the spring of 2026, the spring that would have been on earth, but Sam sensed the coming of spring here also, despite Jupiter and the dark mountains. Ganymede only appeared to be sleeping under its glaciers, with humanity hibernating in its dark crannies; the spring here was one of waiting to live again, while listening for the stars to speak with the voices of humankind’s children.