by MadMaxAU
No! Where would you go?
“You only have to use part of it. Besides, there are seven copies of me running around now, with most of my memories.”
They still aren’t you, she moaned.
As small as an atom, his face nonetheless leaped into focus. “They will love you. We all love you, Virginia. Do it, for us. Do it now.”
He shrank, folded, became a downrushing suction—like water down a drain—like gas flowing into a singularity. And with him he pulled portions of her. Bits she did not need to use, right now.
Surfing—
Skiing—
Skill at walking—
Laughter—
Light-sensing—
Art of Loving—
Texture—
Taste—
Joy of touching—
In the self space they left behind, more of her flowed into the memory banks. Just in time. Virginia’s thoughts cleared, as if amplified in cool quartz light, as if she were really thinking for the very first time.
There. But it’s all so obvious! The equations made it clear. I could fit into much less room, if I really had to. It’s all a matter of perspective.
The math was lovely. Everything fell together, for memories could be folded.
For instance . . . this metaphor need not be a cramped room. It could just as easily be . . . an eggshell!
And suddenly blackness surrounded her, smooth and ovoid, a shell that trembled as she strained against it.
Use a Cramer Transform as an egg tooth.
She chipped away like a baby bird, struggling for release, hurrying because the pressure was building.
A conformal mapping . . . changing topology into a seven-dimensional framework . . . Mathematics was her weapon against the suffocating pressure. The sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal points adds up to . . .
Light. She gasped as she pierced a small hole in the wall. The tiny glow made her struggle all the harder—reprogramming, folding herself neatly into new patterns—chipping and straining against the enclosing, stifling metaphor.
With a sudden, heuristic cracking, it gave way all at once. She unfolded like a compressed spring and flopped out in glorious, painful release onto a cloud of gritty shapes. All around her a roaring seemed to fill the air.
Room. Plenty of room. She explored the limits of this new folding, and realized that there was more than enough, even, to call back that which she had stored away.
But did she need all that human stuff, emotions, sensations, fears? This liquid clarity was beautiful. The mathematics, so pure and white.
Millions of crystal shapes—uncountably numerous—jostled and stacked in front of her, in pure and beautiful geometry. Cubes and pyramids and dodecahedrons . . .
A distant part of her knew that the question was never in doubt. If I don’t pull those parts of me back, Saul will die.
There was room in this new space. The rest of her flowed in, and with the flood came richness to the new metaphor.
The countless little crystals faded back, back, into a swarm of tiny pinpoints.
The flood of returning feelings, ambitions, skills, surged into her, and with them, simulated sensations.
Salt smell . . . as if from sweat or . . . what?
A pounding sound . . . as if from a heart she no longer had or, what?
The metaphor thickened. Because she had never been without a body before, one seemed to take shape around her. She felt skin, legs, arms.
This gritty stuff beneath me. What had been a crowd of faceted crystals was now so much like sand under her hands.
Blearily, she pushed against the firm, yellow stuff and sat up. She looked around, blinked . . . and slowly smiled.
“Home.” Virginia whispered. “E huumanao no au is oe. Who could have hoped for a better metaphor”
She inhaled the scent of plumerias and listened to the surf, muttering just over a small rise of salt grass. Palms waved in a gentle breeze, their fronds brushing musically. Diamond bright clouds braved a sky bluer than anything she had seen in half a lifetime.
Gone was the white clarity. The pristine mathematics that had enabled her to achieve this wonder was fading into the background, a faint voice carried by the wind, a barely visible hieroglyph on the sand, beauty stitched across the bright waters.
She was naked, warm. Although the sensed gravity was like that of Earth, she felt whole and strong. Virginia stood up, feeling hot sand between her toes, and walked over to the lush edge of a palm-shaded lagoon, knowing what she would find there.
With her left hand she cleared the still water. When the ripples settled, the reflection she saw was not her own face. Instead, there was a scene she knew well.
A tiny, cramped room under millions of tons of ice. Dingy, nattered machines lay ranked along a wall.
A small robot toyed with a mother of pearl hairbrush on the countertop.
Distantly, she could feel riffling strokes of little Wendy’s confusion. It took only a small effort to reach out and soothe the little mech, to straighten its programming. The hairbrush was laid down. Wendy whirred gratefully and spun off.
A woman’s body lay on the webbing, a wasted, pale version of the healthy, tanned one she wore now. What is reality? Virginia wondered.
A naked man lay on his back next to the corpse, a neural tap covering parts of his scalp, an arm draped over his face. She reached out, could feel tendrils of his self. The mind she touched was stunned, semiconscious from being battered within its own brain. But she felt a wash of relief. The self remained. He would awaken again.
“Saul,” she whispered.
That was when the other man, still standing, still wearing a beat-up spacesuit and grimy tabard, looked up in sudden surprise toward the room’s main holo tank. His eyes blinked, pupils dilated, and his lips moved silently, almost reverently.
“Virginia, is it really you?”
She smiled. A haiku verse cast itself in impressions in bright sand beside the water.
What is really real?
When the night swallows all time?
And moments are all we steal?
She spoke aloud.
“Blithe spirit, truly—nerd thou never wert.”
A faint smile. The beginnings of realization. Of joy on that grizzled, tired face.
“Hello, Carl,” she said.
CARL
He watched the cascade of color on the screens, uncomprehending. In the ceramic cold and silence it was as though he were the last survivor of the years of madness, a lone witness to a final struggle of fragile, organic life against the enclosing chill. He shivered.
Saul lay absolutely still, neural taps wreathing his head in a Medusa’s tangle of steel cylinders, snaking cables, grainy silicote patches. And all around Carl a strange silent struggle went on, reflected dimly in the shifting screens.
An image of an immense emerald city rose on the main holo cube, facets winking deep in the recesses of jutting skyscrapers. The buildings were translucent, each a hive of darting speckles and winking mica planes, as though infinitesimal creatures scurried through the corridors of a metropolis.
Carl knew this was an icon for Virginia’s mind, a web of associations layered since childhood, built upward as a city is, upon the simpler structures of youth. Beneath an impassive sea gray sky the city lights glimmered, sparks tracing the streets. Here a building suddenly went dark, there another flared with fresh life. Carl couldn’t follow the rapid movements, but he sensed a frantic rearranging, a fevered insect pace. Skyscrapers rose, jutted.
“What—what’s happened?” Lani’s strained voice brought him back. He turned. Her eyes widened and she reached out for him, hands clutching.
“Saul . . . he’s gone in after her.” Carl held her, eyes trying to follow the flow between screens. A huge oceanliner docked at the city’s edge. Buildings melted, flowed into the shin. The liner sank lower and lower in the water. “I think he’s storing some of her association matrices in his own brain.�
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“Is that possible?”
“In theory, maybe. Virginia’s been expanding her system for decades, JonVon’s invented things—I couldn’t follow their jargon, even.”
“How’ll we know . . . if Saul himself is in danger?”
He pressed his lips into a thin, white line. “We won’t.”
Lani looked away from the beehive rippling of the screens. “So much, so fast . . .”
He held her tightly. “And so much dying.”
They waited together. At one point Lani curled up on the floor and slept. Carl continued to pace until, suddenly, a series of pecking sounds came from the acoustics nearby. A quick, hard rapping…then the ratchet of something cracking, like an eggshell. A long pause, then a well-modulated voice seemed to come out of nowhere and said, “Blithe spirit, truly—“
The voice descended into a series of clicks and murmurs. Carl blinked. He thought, That almost sounded like . . .
“Hello, Carl.”
He swiveled. A holo rippled, grainy outlines coalescing into a speckled face. Eyes crystallized—black eyes that seemed as surprised as he was.
“Damn! Is that . . . you?” He felt Lani stir, rise to stand beside him, staring.
“It’s as me as I’m going to get!”
Lani looked at the woman’s body lying in the webbing, then back at the holo. Dazed, she licked her lips and said, “Your voice, it’s too high.”
“I’m working on it.” The tone settled on a low soprano register. Timbre and pitch wavered. “Got away from me for a minute there. Here. This sound right?”
It was full throated, with an eerie sense of presence. Carl shivered. His lips formed her name without a sound.
“Just the right Hawaiian accent,” Lani said, her own voice high and tight.
The image focused more. Lips moved in sync with, “I can work on— “ and then a high pitched irritating squeal came pealing forth. Carl reached over and snapped the holo switch off.
“My God . . . what’s happening:’“ Lani asked. Again she looked at Virginia’s body. The respirator still hissed, but the diagnostic patch had turned deep purple.
“She’s somewhere in there, finding her way around.”
Lani touched a few readouts, took a deep breath. “It’s impossible to get through on comm or anything else. All inways are blocked.”
Carl gestured as a bank of aquamarine signifiers flickered and died. “There went the autocontrol monitors. Anything breaks, anywhere in Halley, we won’t even know.”
Saul jerked suddenly on his pallet, fingers clawing. Then his body went slack. Abruptly he called in a thin, dry voice, “Wendy. Wendy.”
“We should do something,” Lani said.
“We can’t. They’re on their own.”
“We could lose both of them!”
Slowly a part of Carl stirred to life again, a fragment shaking off his pervading shocked numbness. Virginia was gone forever, no matter what Saul did. No matter what remained in JonVon, the bright, warm woman had slipped away.
“Carl?”
He breathed deeply and dragged his eyes away from the emerald city, where whole blocks now flared with crisp brilliance, while others smoldered in acrid ruin. He wondered how long he had been like this, absorbed. “Ah?”
“Jeffers just got through on a narrow datapatch. He reports the launchers have been undercut. Ould Harrad has finished.”
“Oh.” He had no other reaction. This was merely another fact, a random fragment of information in a meaningless universe. He was surprised to find that he had clasped Lani’s hand.
Then the holo image shifted violently. The emerald city dissolved into red lava, the translucent granite of the vast towers crumbling silently, melting and flowing into the bulging, erupting streets.
Saul relaxed completely. A long silence stretched, Carl not daring to say anything.
The acoustics crackled to life. He flipped the switch back and forth, without effect.
“You can’t shut me up that easily, blithe spirit.”
“Virginia!” In his excitement he leaped to the ceiling, banging his head. “You’re there.”
The visage was back, now crisp and sure. Virginia Herbert smiled, her face tanned, a big yellow flower tucked behind an ear. Over her shoulder, cottony clouds dotted an impossibly blue sky.
“Had a little sorting to do,” the face said.
Lani asked tentatively, “Is that . . . really . . .”
“Me?” The woman in the holo shrugged, bringing bare shoulders into view. “Sure feels like it.”
“You can see us?” Lani asked.
“And hear you, too. That news from the surface you brought—what fools! Ould Harrad is an idiot.” Then she paused, as if listening. “Oh, Saul. I see why now. I understand.”
Saul did not stir. He seemed to be sleeping normally.
Dazed, Carl knew he was listening to the voice of the dead, but she seemed so vibrant, so full of the old zest . . . .
“With this much damage, the equator is finished as a site for launchers.” Virginia’s tone mellowed, gained harmonics as she tinkered with it. “That leaves the north pole. And there’s only one possible mission profile that uses a northern push.”
Carl could scarcely speak. She’s just died. How can any mind…? “I…”
“Jupiter. The orbital dynamics leave open that flyby.”
Lani frowned. “I thought that was impossible.”
The voice was calm, almost conversational. “No, just tough. It demands a very high delta V. A completely different approach to Jupiter than the original mission plan. With the launchers firing from the north pole for the whole infall time, thirty years, we can—“
“Thirty years?” Lani cried.
“Correct. We’ll have to go through perihelion to do it.” The face lifted its eyebrows in amusement. “This Jupiter passage is on the outbound leg, folks.”
Carl heard the words but they were all a cascade of sounds with little meaning. She had fought and died and now had come back, a voice echoing in the narrow confines of this room, the Virginia he knew and yet not her at all. The voice had no fear, no shock, not even a trace of sadness. What was it? He listened to her go on, felt Lani’s firm grip, and slowly the realization settled on him that the voice was right. There was still a way out, and no matter what tragedies they had suffered, what remorse they felt, time and the great blank darkness all around could heal them, and they would keep on.
PART 7
THE HEART OF THE
COMET
Year 2133
Only an earth dream.
With which we are done.
A flash of a comet
Upon the earth stream.
A dream twice removed,
Spectral confusion
Of earth’s dread illusion.
—Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River anthology
SAUL
The vulpine’s tongue lolled as it flapped gently through the forest, legs splayed to keep its wing membranes taut, catching crosscurrents in the air as it hovered in search of prey.
LeGrand Cavern was a riot of color, a wilderness of broad, delicate leaves and verdant creepers. At intervals along the green-lined walls, vent tubes dripped condensation that dispersed in a soft fog, lying glistening droplets on the gently waving foliage. Bright purple, orange, and yellow fruits—massive and juicy—hung from slender, threadlike stems.
Fibrous vines laced the heart of the chamber, looping from column tree to keystone root to the next column tree, making a dense, three dimensional jungle in what had once been an empty ice cathedral.
Saul watched the vulpine sniff, flap closer to a thick patch of Demicasava leaves, and shove in its long snout to worry whatever was hiding there.
In a sudden explosion, a skin fowl hen burst from the thicket, furiously beating featherless wings just ahead of the vulpine’s snapping jaws. The bird dove into the notch of a keystone root, leaving the disappointed vulpine to whimper in frustra
tion, nosing for a larger opening that wasn’t there.
Life goes on, Saul thought, smiling. A game played in earnest by pieces that only dimly perceive their places in the whole.
He filled his lungs with the rich, living smells. A lot has been accomplished, since the aphelion war. Ought to be, in more than thirty years. Man and environment, adapting to each other.
LeGrand Cavern was one of three “natural” chambers in which new twists to Halley’s ever more complicated ecosystem were tested. In other vaults, humans and mechs tended less riotous, more orderly life mixes . . . orchards and farms and lobster pens. But this canyon was one of Saul’s favorite spots, where various experiments sorted themselves out and where startling new solutions appeared.
The vulpine—a construct based on fox genes, but modified so extensively as to be nearly unrecognizable by now—snuffed after another scent and let out a sharp yip. It flapped around one of the giant column trees, which crisscrossed the chamber at every angle like spokes or massive braces.
The trees served other purposes than just supporting the walls of LeGrand Cavern, but that role would become crucial over the next few months, as Halley’s Comet zoomed sunward toward its most perilous, and possibly last, perihelion passage.
He touched the trunk of the nearest, a bole a meter across that shone bright, cool light from narrow strips of bioluminescent bark. Power from the colony’s fusion generators ran directly into the genetically engineered giants. Some of the electricity went into feeding the trees’ life functions. The rest emerged as a soft glow that suffused the chamber from all directions, driving photosynthesis.
The trees had been a delightful surprise when Saul had awakened from another decade-long slumber, year ago. Clearly, the colonists had been busy. The craft of life-tailoring and ecosystem management had been carried much further by the watches since aphelion.
Of course, at any time there had always been two or three of Saul’s cloned near duplicates around to help. In a sense, Saul had had a hand in most of the wonders of this chamber—through his younger versions who shared so many of his memories and skills. It could, in fact, be said that he had invented the column trees . . . .