Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

“I have a right to go.”

  “I don’t recommend it. You’re easily impressed.”

  “I won’t get another chance very soon.”

  “You’ll handle it better later, not now.”

  He remembered how much he had needed her once, how happy he had been when she had taken him from the loneliness of the dorms.

  “I wish to dissolve our bond,” he said.

  “You’re upset. Think about it later.” She tried to embrace him.

  He pushed her away and turned to leave, knowing that he could never live in this apartment again. Margaret was a manager, leaving him nothing for himself; she meant well, but she could not understand what he wanted, especially if he himself did not know. It would not be fair to stay with her.

  She was silent as he went out the door.

  The nearest watch held only a dozen people, though it could accommodate three hundred. Lea swam in the darkness on the screen. John sat alone in the front row.

  The view changed and he was looking into a conference pit. Franklyn Blackfriar, a clone of Orton Blackfriar, sat between council-men Stav Rees and Miklos Anastasian. The four-hundred-year-old first councilman scratched the black stubble of hair on his scalp and waited for the report to begin. John knew him as the most respected first councilman who had ever held the office. He would retire for decades, but something would always draw him back into public planning.

  Rees and Anastasian were scarcely half Blackfriar’s age, but he liked to pick younger people for his administrations. John knew them both from the engineering school, where they had been his instructors. Both were at the head of the action to build a new mobile.

  Rees summarized the resource-gathering procedures, already in progress. It was easier to bring materials up from Lea than to send out foraging vessels to hook and bring back asteroid fragments; before the advent of large-scale gravities, the task of bringing up resources from a planet would have been too large even for atomic boosters, but now entire mountains could be floated off using a portable generator, while smaller loads of scarcer materials would be brought up by shuttle haulers.

  Miklos Anastasian said a few words about security precautions. As long as the macroworld stayed in a sunward parallel orbit, directly in line with the planet, an undetected boarding attempt would be impossible. The accidental transfer of an unknown disease would be minimized through strict procedures, but preliminary investigations had revealed nothing dangerous. The first scouts had concluded that there was little possiblity of any danger from Lea’s surface. Its human population was made up of scattered tribes, too backward to have an opinion about the macroworld’s presence; few, if any, would even understand what it was that had come into their sky.

  “When will the two outer shells be ready?” Blackfriar asked.

  “We can separate the two outer shells almost immediately,” Rees said.

  “Where will you go when all is ready?” Blackfriar asked. He seemed to have little interest in the project, but he would go through all the public hearings and administrative functions connected with the process of world reproduction.

  Rees started to answer again, but Anastasian cut in. “Maybe one of the globular clusters, assuming we have a faster drive soon. Planetary civilizations might have developed favorably there, easily spanning the closer spaces between the suns to achieve an optimum distribution of population. We may find a great diversity in a small space. I think the isolation of cultures in the spiral arms may be a grave handicap to their progress. A culture must limit energy consumption and population at its most productive stage of development, when the momentum of cumulative innovation is just beginning to produce decisive breakthroughs; the culture must reach beyond its planet or die.”

  “Or fall into a marginal existence, like Lea,” Rees added.

  John decided not to hear the rest. He had expected Blackfriar to contribute more to the discussion. What would the councilman think of his desire to visit Lea? Their meetings had always made John feel that Blackfriar was taking a personal interest in him, that the way to friendship was always open.

  He felt a growing sense of hope as he left the hall. He would go see Blackfriar and make his own arrangements to visit Lea. Maybe Blackfriar would understand what he felt.

  “Go,” Franklyn Blackfriar said. “Go right away.”

  John stood in front of the first councilman’s huge desk.

  “Well, sit down. I’ve been waiting for you to come and see me.”

  Blackfriar rapped his desk with his knuckles as John sat down. “Old earth teak. There’s nothing like it, not even mirrored bulerite.” He paused. “Why do you want to go?”

  “I can’t give a reason—I just want to see.”

  “You realize,” Blackfriar said, leaning back, “that a macroworlder is a powerful individual on any dirtworld? We lose a lot if we lose one of our own. Afraid?”

  “I don’t think this world is a threat to us.”

  “You’ve got an idea about helping out down there?”

  “I don’t know—I don’t know anything. I want to see.”

  “Good. What does Margaret think?”

  “We’re dissolving our bond.”

  Blackfriar shrugged. “Nothing unusual. Maybe one day your experience may be useful. So few of us have any direct experience of natural worlds.”

  John looked directly at him. To be accepted so casually was disturbing.

  “Have you talked with Wheeler?” John asked.

  Blackfriar smiled and leaned forward. “Of course I have. You’re going—but see the medics. There are a number of tricky things you should know about dirtworlds.”

  “I will.” Blackfriar’s breezy sympathy had disoriented him.

  “I know that look, John, I’ve worn it myself. You’re distrustful of me. Don’t bother answering. I don’t need to confirm what I know. Let me tell you what it means to live a long time. It’s the younger people who are most rigid, because they ask that things go one way—their way and no other, according to some idea of proper development which they think just. They exclude and exclude, concentrating all their skills on their desire, whatever that may be. And they often get what they want. That’s more true in our social system, but it happened surprisingly often in past cultures. Nothing can stand forever against that kind of patience and persistence, because when the one chance for success comes along, the youth is there and waiting, ready to seize it. And he was there all the other times when the chance was not there. That one time is all the time he needs. That’s why youth has a historical reputation for innovation and change.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Don’t you see? Youth’s approach is narrow. The older you get, the more innovative you will become, at least in our way of life. You’ll begin to see how long it takes to do anything really well, and you’ll know that you have the time, if you’re patient. You’ll take the time to do more than one thing well. On dirtworlds young and old were rigid. The young person had only one thing to add; the old, one thing to preserve—the things he learned when he was young. There was no time to do more, no energy. So the generations struggled hand over hand, unaware of their closeness, blind for lack of life and vitality. They could not have what we have, what still lies before you.”

  “I know all that,” John said.

  Blackfriar got up from behind his desk and stretched his huge frame. Then he came around into the center of the room. John stood up. Blackfriar paused and looked down at him. “John, what you want is vague enough to intrigue me. You want to go and poke around in places. Go see Miklos Anastasian; he’ll help you get down. Rees will be supervising the final separation of our outer shells, but Miklos will be going dirtside. I think you and he will get along. Eventually an investigative team will go down and make some sort of historical report. I have a lot of interest in that. But for the moment we’ll send you.” He smiled again. “Right now I have to go and resolve a bitter feud in the outer levels. Seems the new world is carrying off equipment they’re
not supposed to have. Maybe someday research will stop complaining to me and produce some of the dreams I’ve been ordering for more than a century.”

  “What dreams?”

  “Walk out with me part way and I’ll tell you,” Blackfriar said as he led the way out of the office.

  15. Wayside World

  The map screen was a large oval well in the control room. John looked down into the planet’s ocean of air. Three haulers drifted nearby, slugs readying to descend from low orbit, fill their bellies with ore, and depart. Each was a kilometer of hull with a detachable passenger module in front, a cargo hold in the middle, and a gravitic workhorse in the back.

  “Thirty percent of the surface,” Miklos Anastasian was saying, “is two continents joined by a narrow land bridge. The northern mass extends to within thirty degrees of the pole, the southern reaches the south pole. The sea between the continents is warm and shallow. The land bridge is part of the western mountain chain running up across both continents. There are deserts and grasslands east of the range, then wooded mountains and the eastern coastal plain. The coast itself is cliff rock, with hundreds of offshore islands, once part of the mainland.”

  John sensed amusement in the wiry man’s voice. A hundred-fifty-year-old researcher in planetary geologies, Miklos belonged to the middle range of modified citizens. Stronger than most of the populace, he was able to run at better than twenty kilometers per hour, and he needed one-third less sleep; implanted in his bare head was the usual Humanity II link. His dark eyebrows seemed to be made of solid material in the light streaming up from the screen.

  “What about settlements?” John asked.

  Miklos extended a muscular arm over the screen. “There seem to be cities in the northeast near the coast. There’s a big city some thirty kilometers north of the shallow sea. Everything is very quiet.” He leaned over the screen intently, as if preparing to scrape his bony fingers through the wrinkles of land in search of life.

  “What about climate?”

  “Be prepared for changes during the day, something you’re not used to. The north is tundra, changing through temperate to tropical as you go south. Vegetation and animals are hybrids of earth-derived and local. It will be hard to separate the kinds. Gravity is eighty-seven percent earth. It’s the fifth planet out of ten, orbiting the double star at one point four astronomical units. A stormy place.”

  Miklos stood up and looked down at John. “I’ll fill you in on as much as I can before we land. The suns are slightly smaller than sol. You’ll see them taking up about twenty-five minutes of arc in the sky. They’re within ten percent of each other in size; one is brighter than the other, but you won’t notice that because your eye is not sensitive enough to differences between very bright sources.”

  And yours is, John thought.

  “During day you’ll see only a spread-out mass of light when you glance up, not two disks. By the way, don’t look directly at them, you’ll harm your eyes. The suns circle each other in nine hours, producing eclipses every four and one-half hours. The amount of light is then cut down, depending on which sun is eclipsing which at what time and position, and where you are on the planet. It’s a twenty-nine-hour day. When the suns are side by side, it gets warmer in the afternoon. On a clear day you may see two shadows of yourself. At sunset you’ll see that the suns are elongated, flattened at the poles, sharing stellar material across the distance between them. Watch out for winds and storms. Auroras are intense at night.”

  “What about intelligent life, besides the colonists?”

  Miklos shook his head and a sad look came into his gray eyes. “I suspect there aren’t many left. Something has been very wrong down there for a long time. We’ve located the dead hulk of the starship in orbit. I doubt anyone we’ll run into will know who we are. We may not run into anyone, native or colonist.”

  “You mean they’re all dead?”

  “A few individuals might find the mountain valley where we’ll be mining, but it’s a big world and few people. We’ll see more animals than intelligent life. It may be too early in the planet’s history for intelligent life, or it never developed for some reason.”

  John imagined large beasts creeping through thick vegetation, breathing shapes covered with hide and hair, eyes filled with madness.

  “I’ll find them,” John said.

  “That’s up to you,” Miklos said, the tone of amusement returning to his low voice. “What are you looking for?”

  John looked into the well of the screen instead of answering. The angle of view was changing rapidly. The shuttle was in the atmosphere, coming down fast. Cloudy material rushed by; filaments of white and dark wispiness gathered and were torn apart by the shuttle’s passage. The view cleared to show mountains only a few kilometers below. Jagged peaks stretched to the horizon, a line of sharp rocks ripped out of the ground by some titanic plow. The shuttle dropped lower, revealing snow on the cloud-wrapped summits; green valleys nestled like moss.

  “There’s a pass ahead,” Miklos said, “and our base is in the valley.”

  Slowly the shuttle passed between two mountains and entered the valley. The vertical screen went on. John looked up and saw a stream cutting through mossy vegetation as the shuttle landed.

  “We can go right out,” Miklos said. “Don’t worry. You’ve been protected against possible disease. The open space above is something you’re not used to, but it’s not so different that you’ll be disoriented.”

  Anastasian turned and went down the ramp leading from the observation area to the airlock area below.

  John lingered before following. He looked out at the stream, the sky and clouds, the snow on the peaks, and he felt that to go out there would change him forever. Anastasian’s indirect jibes had nothing to do with it.

  He went down the ramp into the airlock chamber, determined to show Miklos that he was not afraid. Anastasian gave him a warm green jacket and a pair of boots. John dressed and followed him into the lock. The door slid shut behind them, and the outer door opened.

  As John followed Miklos down the exit ramp, he noticed the wind blowing from his left, carrying unfamiliar smells and a sharp, watery freshness. The wind crept into the sleeves of his jacket, whispered in his ears, and slipped through his hair as if the planet were examining him before he stepped off the ramp. The suns were warm on his face, and he looked up briefly to see their massed light almost overhead. He noticed his shadow as he stepped onto the ground. The soil was soft and he could almost taste its smell. Worms and crawling things lived in it; he felt uneasy.

  The shuttle hauler had landed near the stream that ran down the middle of the valley from the west. The three other shuttles had landed farther upstream. Miklos was walking toward the figures coming out of them.

  The air was cool, despite the sunlight. John put his hands in his jacket pockets and started slowly toward the stream.

  “Don’t move around too fast until you’re sure of your feet,” Miklos shouted back at him, without stopping.

  John ignored him, continuing toward the stream.

  He came to the water and gazed into the flow. The air was chilly over the liquid. He looked at the sky, an inverted blue plain covered with clouds, hiding the stars as well as any artificial shroud.

  Miklos was coming back toward him. Behind him, the three haulers suddenly seemed out of place. Anastasian stopped a few feet away and John saw that the man was grinning.

  “Yes, I know,” Miklos said. “If your tongue were thunder, you’d shake the planet to throw me off. I couldn’t resist taking pokes at you. Forgive me. But you’ll be more careful.”

  “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “First let me get you set.” Miklos pointed. One of the larger hatches on the shuttle was open, and a small black flitter was rising out of the hold. When the craft was high enough, it glided toward them and settled to the ground.

  “Blackfriar said you should have it.”

  The canopy in the center of the ova
l disk rose and two men got out. They were tall and dark, dressed in close-fitting green coveralls.

  “Ibram and Aric are mining engineers. They’re in charge of the mining camp in the range, between those peaks behind them.”

  John nodded in greeting. They turned and walked back toward the shuttle. As he watched them stride away, John again felt distant from their world. Their genetic heritage was continuous for more than a thousand years, combining and recombining in new and subtle ways, while he was a skipstone from the past, unchanged, living beyond his time. In one sense he was Samuel Bulero, but without his lost brother’s memories. He was that exact throw of the genetic dice, the image of his other self, thrown into play again.

  Clouds covered the suns. The wind died suddenly, as if the planet were holding its breath.

  “It’s an eclipse,” Miklos said.

  Slowly the light began to drain out of the world. The snow on the peaks took on a blue glow. The sky darkened as the larger sun covered its brighter companion.

  “I measure a more than half drop in light,” Miklos said.

  John felt a breeze. He looked up at the clouds hiding the suns and saw one disk wheeling through gray ashes.

  He turned to Miklos. “What’s the flitters range?”

  “More than you’ll need. Let me show you.”

  John followed him to the craft and up the footholds into the cabin under the canopy. He climbed down inside and sat next to Miklos in front of the controls.

  “The automatic coordinates are set for this valley and for home, so the craft will bring you back quickly if you need it. Just press this area. But don’t try leaving the planet on manual. You shouldn’t have to. This is the stick. Use it to maneuver or hover; accelerate by pressing on top. If you let go, automatic will take over. So if you can’t do something yourself, let go, so the Humanity II routine can do its job for you. Any practical speed is possible in the atmosphere. You won’t feel any acceleration in the gravitic field, and you won’t be able to go faster than design limits. Good luck.”