As he gained altitude, his gaze swept across the tall trees below, taking in the black ribbon of road winding its way between them to the village on the shore of Central Lake, five kilometers away. The lake trickled small streams around the inward curve of the core, feeding the land with moisture recycled for a thousand years.
He looked up at the town four kilometers above him. A winged couple moved across it, passing to his left high above him. He waved but they did not notice.
He stopped moving his wings and his momentum carried him into the zero-g region. He turned once to look at the whole expanse of the interior. Then he looked eight kilometers forward along the axis of the hollow to the light plate.
The giant disk stood in the narrow forwards, lighting the land with soft daylight. John waited motionlessly for what he had come to see, forgetting his resentment toward Margaret. Slowly the kilometer-wide sun plate grew dark, and stars appeared in its field of view. The yellow-white double star appeared, a main-sequence contact binary flooding the core with light. He looked at the strangeness around him. The greenery seemed to grow fresher; the air took on a bluer glow; the lake became a pool of fire, the streams arteries of something living, the trees a thick moss spotted with yellow.
He thought of his ancestral twin, Samuel Bulero, from whose banked cells he had been cloned. When Samuel had walked inside this world a thousand years ago, there had been no urban shells, only the hollow rock; there had been no gravitic control, only the crude spin. Asterome had been dependent on the solar system for its resources, unable to seek on its own. Material synthesis and duplication had been a far-off dream. Macrolife had been a child, still unable to walk.
Why had Samuel Bulero chosen to stay behind? How could he have made such a decision in the face of so much possibility, especially when there had been no earth to return to? The questions made him even more impatient to see a livable planet. There were probably thousands of civilizations in the galaxy, thriving on worlds of air, dirt, water, and growing things, worlds with all their insides out under the stars, open to all the radiation of their parent suns, helpless before the shiftings of the planetary crusts, unable to control winds and storms; on those worlds intelligent life died by the thousands every day and would disappear when its star died.
But he wanted to test for himself what he had been taught—that macrolife was the safest and most durable way of life. Seven other worlds had been modeled after this one, seven children scattered into the galaxy to grow and differ and make others after their own kind. Each could support whatever society it chose to contain within the permanent, self-reproducing framework; each world was immortal, a hyperpersonal organism in which each individuality flowered to enrich the whole.
He floated quietly as he looked at the double star, wondering if he dared go see for himself. Margaret would probably oppose him: Rob Wheeler, his male exemplar, would probably think it was a good idea. He would have to take his chance now, while the planet was being searched for signs of a colony ship which had been lost in the cluster centuries ago; otherwise he would have to wait decades for another earthlike world. Between the search for the colony and the floating up of raw materials from the planet, he would have more than enough time to explore.
Moving a wing, he turned himself to feel the warmth of the new suns on his face. If he were living on the planet, a slight change in the radiation of these suns would alter the genes of his descendants, for better or worse. Life warred with itself on natural worlds, and the direction of evolution’s war was always an adaptation to the status quo, whatever that might be at the moment.
He wondered if he would find something to do with his life. Was it true that some people took most of a century to decide? What if he never found anything? What could he ever achieve that would make him a fit exemplar? What would he be able to say to someone like himself? It wasn’t so much the pressure of Margaret’s prodding, but the lack of something specific; sometimes he wished that his exemplars would simply tell him what to do, instead of making endless suggestions and offering countless alternatives. Wheeler would always tell him to be patient and attentive, that in time he would discover what he wanted. Macrolife had been bought with the dedication of all those who had left the solar system. Its resources were his birthright, to be used in creative ventures. What’s wrong with me? he asked himself. “No one will tell you what to do,” Wheeler had told him. “You’ll have to figure things out for yourself, mistakes and all. That’s the difference between science and faith, dogma and freedom.” Freedom was an open nothingness before him, oppressive and terrifying.
Soon he would be twenty-six earth years old—and still he was a mystery to himself, living in a larger mystery. I’m a mistake, he thought. What was it in Samuel Bulero that they want to see in me?
Sometimes he wished that he had been born like the more modified citizens, who seemed to have better control over their feelings, whose brain chemistry had been designed for better concentration; he wished that he could read body language as well as Margaret could. He thought of the link, and it seemed that he would never be ready for it. I don’t belong here; everyone is different from me.
He looked longingly at the yellow-white suns. Some of their light was being cut down by filters, but he could see that the stars shared atmospheres. They were joined by a river of plasma which flowed back and forth in magnetic channels, a fiery umbilical stretched across a distance of less than one diameter.
John wondered about Lea, the fifth planet. What would he have been if he had grown up there? Then with two powerful strokes of his wings, he pushed himself out of weightlessness. In a moment he was gliding forward across the world, the wind singing in his ears as he plunged closer to the huge sunscreen, drawn by the awesome splendor of the double star.
13. Exemplar
The door slid open and John Bulero stepped into the brightly lit workroom of his exemplar. Rob Wheeler was not in the large circular chamber, but the workscreen on the center desk was on, displaying a dozen mathematical functions. John went past the various Humanity II terminals to the door of the observatory. The door opened and he stepped into darkness.
His eyes adjusted as the door closed behind him, and he saw Rob leaning over a horizontal screen in the center of the room. Only two of the twenty-five screens ringing the observatory were on, showing magnified starfields; the projection space overhead was dark.
Wheeler turned a pale, white-haired profile to John and motioned for him to come closer.
Silently they looked down at the planet on the map screen: a full disk veiled in swirling white clouds, dark blue oceans, brown wrinkles of mountainous land, stretches of desert and greenery, and polar caps, dazzlingly white in the sunlight.
“I haven’t seen a truly beautiful planet for over a century,” Rob said. “The last was when I was two hundred and three.”
“Beautiful and dangerous,” John said, remembering what he had been taught, “filled with disease and unpredictable processes.” He remembered when at the age often he had played in the forest near the lake in the hollow, pretending that he was lost on some far planet half a galaxy away. As he looked down now at the black grid covering the view of Lea, he thought of the glass windows he had seen in the images of old books.
Suddenly the planet was gone, and a column of light was streaming up into the dark observatory from the filtered brightness of the two suns.
“Do you know anything about this planet’s history?” Wheeler asked.
“Only the name.”
“We’re less than a hundred and fifty parsecs from earth’s sunspace.”
“And you think there are earth colonists here?”
“We know the planet’s name from scouts who have been here at various times during the last two centuries. We know something of what happened after the sacking and destruction of the partially completed macro world at Tau Ceti IV in 2331. Evidence suggests that what was left of the destroyed world was used to build a makeshift starship, which disappeared into t
he Praesepe cluster carrying a few thousand people. Blackfriar has evidence that a relative of his was the captain of that ship. Most of the documents we have from Tau Ceti and Centauri show that the names of Blackfriar and Bulero play important roles in the developing schisms over whether to settle natural worlds or build mobiles. There were Blackfriars and Buleros on both sides, apparently. I don’t know what we can find out down there after seven hundred years.”
“I hope we don’t anger them by taking the resources we need.”
“The culture here is almost nonexistent,” Rob said. “There may be no one alive.”
John was silent.
Wheeler stood up and turned to face him. “What do you think about it?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m not sure I want to join the building of the new macroworld or go with it when it’s ready. What I really want is to go down and see the planet. I’ve waited a long time.”
“Go and observe by yourself. I’m glad you’re interested.”
“Why?”
“You’ll get some firsthand experience concerning an old problem, one we’ve never resolved.”
Wheeler had taught him everything he knew about the nature of inquiry, acquainting him with the rich spectrum of the sciences, with the basic questions of scientific philosophy, especially with problems in stellar evolution and comparative cosmology. Rob had taught him the concerns which should belong in every life, stressing the ethical procedures implicit in the honest gathering of knowledge.
Rob had been the first to discuss Samuel Bulero with him, helping him to better accept his own identity. As a clone, John Bulero was simply the twin brother of an earlier individual, no more, no less, free to follow his own path. Cloning was only one of a variety of reproductive methods available to macroworlders. Nevertheless, someone had wanted to give these Bulero genes another try. “That’s true,” Wheeler had said to him a decade ago, “but the rest will be up to you.” The Buleros and Blackfriars had helped create macrolife; and they had seen to it that when a world reproduced itself, it would have a bank of genetic material from earth to draw on, as a complement to normal sexual reproduction. All the people who had dreamed of a new kind of life in those final days of earth were still alive; somewhere each of them had a twin, an individual who had been called up to live his or her permutation of the original. As Samuel Bulero was his historical brother, so he had other brothers on distant macroworlds.
“Are you interested in the solar system?” John asked.
“The star still shines, and I can’t see any signs of the anomaly at this distance.”
“You want to go there, don’t you?”
“I do, but I’ll have to convince the Projex Council. As long as our drive systems move us at a hundred light-years a week, they’ll be prudent about the energy we spend on movement. We need smaller and more efficient power sources. Even a thousandfold increase of power for our drive will only move us a small fraction of a parsec faster. We have the means in exotic forms of matter, but the engineering is a million times more difficult than fusion was a thousand years ago.”
“Do you think civilization survives in the solar system?”
“I suspect that the anomaly might have receded.”
“Do you think life has survived on earth itself?”
“Possibly.” John thought of how easily this man could inspire him about impersonal things. “If we help any natural world, it should be earth,” Wheeler said. “Does this interest you?”
“It seems worth doing.”
John followed him out into the bright workroom. Wheeler sat down behind his desk. John seated himself at one of the terminals and turned the chair around to face him.
“If you like,” Rob said, “we can work together on making a case for a return to the solar system in the near future.”
“I’d like to see Lea first,” John said.
“I’ll help arrange it for you.”
“I don’t want Margaret to know until I’m gone.”
“It’s your business entirely. Not everyone will think you strange for wanting to see a dirtworld. We have our provincialisms, but we try not to enforce their observance. It will be mostly those who are your own age who will look down their noses at you.”
“While the older citizens will merely tolerate my odd taste.”
“We have to. It’s our youth who are conservative. Don’t worry, frivolity is said to return at about age five hundred.”
John laughed.
“You know,” Wheeler continued, “extended life was once regarded as a continuing old age. All kinds of dire predictions were made about the adverse effects of long life on the human mind. Few thought that creativity and vitality would increase to match the new scale of time.”
“Not everyone achieves a dynamic longevity,” John said.
“And not everyone could live a successful century before, or even a productive decade or two. Failure can’t be eliminated by guarantee. It’s still up to the individual, no matter how much help is given.”
That’s me, John thought. “It’s a wonder humanity developed any foresight at all.”
“On earth old men became jesters, “Wheeler said. “There may be such men on Lea. I don’t know what else has survived. There are no standard forms of communication that we can detect, not even radio. That by itself signals trouble; there’s seven hundred years of history down there….”
John got up, feeling uneasy. “I’ve got to meet Margaret at the link training center.”
“But you won’t—you haven’t been there at all today, have you?”
“No.”
“Don’t be too hard on Margaret. She’s not like you. You’re a healthy, relatively unmodified type. Her behavioral range was developed for long attention span, logic, a minute grasp of body language and sexuality, and emotional control. Try to understand her difficulty—in you she faces a very unpredictable person.”
“She has no imagination. I’ll be glad when we go our own ways. I can’t stand her impatience. She talks at me, not to me.”
“You’ll be friends when you’re a hundred,” Rob said. “But if you’re that unhappy, go on your own, do without exemplars.” Wheeler’s bushy eyebrows went up toward his white hair. John looked directly into the wide blue eyes, and for a moment the person he knew was gone. The being who confronted him was alien, projecting what seemed to be an amused empathy toward a lesser creature. John thought of the man who worked on dozens of undiscussed projects, his brain enormously magnified through the Humanity II intelligences who ordered the world for their human partners, as once nature’s gods had ruled earth. John wondered why unchanged types like himself had been permitted to persist. Was it to keep a tie with natural worlds?
Rob smiled, releasing him from his gaze, and John knew how the exemplar would answer his question. Initial types, as well as innovative ones, had to be preserved as a matter of law. The worth of human adaptability and creativity could not be predicted. His life was his own, his own burden, to do with as he pleased. But what could he ever do to please or benefit the world around him? He felt a general, shapeless hunger in himself, a vague devotion which seemed directed at nothing more than itself; there were answers to questions which he could not even put into words.
He turned and the door opened for him. He stepped out into the passageway, feeling ignorant and afraid.
14. Discontent
Level six was dark as he neared the apartment. Half the sky was alive with the bright stars of Praesepe, half with the glow of more distant suns. The curving plain of spaced dwelling columns held up the night sky. Sturdy oaks and white birches from earth rustled in the gentle breeze.
He passed three olive-skinned males sitting on a bench near the column entrance. He did not know them, but they glanced at him with their large brown eyes. He felt hostility toward them as he went through the archway. Tall, black-haired, graceful, they were the true macroworlders. He was an intruder from the past, and not even a copy of a pioneer, but a sha
dow of one who had stayed behind.
He turned left and walked around the curve to his apartment at the end. The door slid open and he stepped inside.
Margaret Toren-Bulero stood in the center of the living room. He stopped and looked at her as if she were a stranger. They had shared this apartment for more than a year now, ever since he had left the dorms on level five. He remembered their closeness of six months before as he looked at the bundle of her long black hair tied up on the back of her head. Her skin had a tendency to lose its tan and become very soft and white. She was not a clone of one person, but a mixture of materials from Janet Bulero and Margot Toren, with modifications. She looked back at him without blinking.
“You were to meet me,” she said.
“I didn’t want to.” He resented the view of him which her age gave her.
“You’ve neglected your Humanity II seminars.”
“That’s my business, isn’t it?”
“You’ll fall behind.”
“I don’t care, right now. Can’t you leave me alone?”
She did not react for a moment. “Let’s make love. It will relax you.”
He shook his head. “I’m going down to Lea.”
She stepped nearer and looked directly at him. She was thin and graceful, making him feel crude in his stockiness.
“Whatever for?” she asked.
“To see…how they live, what it’s like.”
“You really don’t know why you want to go, do you?”
“I want to see a natural world.”
“They’re creatures. Life is an endless war. Do you want to see that?”
Macrolife Page 17