Artifacts

by Greg Egan

  I say, “Introspection yields nothing worth reporting.”

  A few seconds later—suddenly unsure if I actually spoke, or merely formed the intention—I repeat myself.

  Shortly afterward, I suffer the same uncertainty again.

  Disembodied pain washes in and out of my shallow sleep for a long time. It’s only when I start to attach it to specific parts of me—this ache is from my shoulders, that cramp is from my right calf—that I begin to wake.

  When a throbbing that was an abstract notion alights deep inside my skull, I try to retreat back into sleep, but the pain is too great. I open my eyes and try to move, and then I remember.

  A tunnel of pain and fear, stretching back for what seems like eternity. The width of the tunnel is the width of my shoulders, the width of the harness that holds me to the bed, but its depth is striated with light and darkness, with noise and confusion, with loneliness and the coldest misery. A dream of suffocation, infinitely prolonged.

  It takes me forever, ten minutes at least, to instruct the orderly to release me. I’m too weak to leave the bed, but I can move my arms, I can roll onto my stomach, I can start trying to rid myself of the nightmare burnt into my flesh.

  When I finally succeed in raising my head, I find the rest of the crew still strapped to their beds. Most have their eyes open, but are staring listlessly at the ceiling or the walls.

  I squint at my watch for the date, and then struggle with memory and arithmetic. Eighteen days. I feel a surge of elation. I may not have conquered the virus—perhaps this is nothing but a temporary remission—but every extension of the time scale on which the disease is operating brings us closer to home, and the chance of a cure.

  I switch on the broadcast from Earth. They’re playing a loop at us that says little more than: “Cyclops, please respond.” I make a brief report, then sag back onto the bed, all my strength drained.

  Later, I have the orderly fetch me a wheelchair, and I check each of my patients. I remove all their harnesses; nobody is in any condition to leap from their bed and assault me. Greta has somehow managed to half-turn onto her side, pinning her right arm, and she whimpers horribly as I free her. The skin of her forearm is soft and gray. I anesthetize her and inspect it. A few more days, and nothing would have saved her from amputation. I pump her full of antibiotics and tissue-repair nanomachines; she’ll need a graft, eventually, but for now all I can do is hold the necrosis in check.

  It finally occurs to me to worry about Cyclops itself, but the drive computer’s error log is empty of all but the most trivial complaints, and the navigation system reports that we are holding precisely to the flight plan.

  Where are we? Still further from home than we were when the mission was canceled, but at least now we’re headed in the right direction.

  The flight plan is a blue trace on the screen of the terminal, a plot of distance versus time. The U-turn is an upside-down parabola—minutely distorted by relativistic effects, but not enough for the eye to tell. The blue line itself is pure theory, but at regular intervals along the curve are small green crosses, marking estimates of our actual location as computed by the navigation system. It’s the most natural thing in the world for the eye to leap across the curve and read off the time at which Cyclops was last at the same position as it is right now.

  That was eighteen days ago. The day I succumbed.

  I feel an almost physical shock, even before I consciously make the connection: Lidia may have been right. Perhaps there is something out here. I look around, in vain, for someone to argue me back to my senses.

  It could easily be a coincidence. One isolated piece of data means nothing. I set the computer to work at once, analyzing the records of every instrument inside and outside the hull of Cyclops, searching for some evidence that the region of space from which we are now emerging is in any way distinctive.

  The task is trivial, the answer is produced with no perceptible delay. Apart from a steady and predictable decline in the faint remnants of the solar wind—nothing. And so far as the instruments inside the shielded hull are concerned, we might have spent the last three weeks standing still, on the surface of a planet with gravity of 1.3 gees.

  I’d be willing to believe that interstellar space might hold some dangerous surprise—I’d admit the possibility of some peril inexplicable in terms of current astrophysics, maybe even current physics itself—but to believe in a phenomenon that has absolutely no effect on any one of the hundreds of delicate instruments we’re carrying, and yet can somehow cause a subtle dysfunction of the human nervous system, would be anthropocentric to the point of insanity.

  I go back over the infirmary’s log, and find the moment when Lidia last spoke to me. I check the flight plan; in ten hours’ time, we’ll pass through the same location.

  The orderly starts feeding the patients, but I interrupt it and take over myself. Eighteen days of confinement has knocked the aggression out of all of them. The docility with which they accept the food makes the job easy, but it shakes me up. Half a day ago, I was just like this. There goes the vanity that supposedly keeps me sane; my brain is the same machine as everyone else’s, my precious intellect can be switched off, and switched on again, by nothing more profound than the stages in a virus’s life cycle.

  It’s still too soon for a response from Earth to my message. I leave the infirmary and move around the ship in my wheelchair. Everything is as we left it, of course. I’m still horribly weak and aching all over, from being bedridden for so long, but the gravity as such no longer seems oppressive. The cabins all look so familiar, so mundane, that the idea that we are, even now, further from Earth than anyone has ever been before, seems preposterous.

  As the ceiling panels slowly dim in their mimicry of dusk. I can’t help myself; I sit by Lidia’s bed and wait for the magic time, certain as I am that nothing is going to happen. She’s asleep, but makes small, unhappy noises every now and then.

  The coincidence of the onset and departure of my symptoms keeps nagging at me, but there’s no getting around it; the precision, the specificity, of the effect screams out the word adaptation. The only cause that makes sense is one that can be traced back to the Earth’s biosphere.

  Lidia cries out. I check my watch; the time has passed. I pat her hand, and start to wheel myself away. She opens her eyes, and suddenly bursts into tears, sobbing and shaking. I pause, momentarily unable to move or speak. She turns her head and sees me.

  Her voice is slurred, but her words are unmistakable. “David? Are we home?”

  I lean over and hold her in my arms.

  I wouldn’t call it a theory yet; we have no mechanism, no clear hypothesis. Kay speculates that some kind of quantum correlation effect may be involved; every human being contains thousands of genes that are, ultimately, copied from the same common ancestors, and like the polarized photons of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, there may be some indelible link established by this history of microscopic intimacy. There are at least two problems with this; the EPR effect is supposedly incapable of communicating anything but random quantum noise; and in any case, it ought not to diminish at all with distance. Kay is undaunted. “Any theory that predicts an effect that works at infinity is nonsense.” she says. “In flat, empty spacetime, maybe, but not in the real universe. And just because you can pronounce the word ‘random,’ don’t kid yourself that you know what it means.”

  What’s special, about being ten billion kilometers from Earth, as opposed to ten thousand or ten million? Distance, that’s all. We didn’t just evolve on a planetary surface, with air and water and gravity. We evolved in the presence of each other. It seems that the refinement of human consciousness made use of that fact. Relied on that fact.

  The media releases back on Earth have mentioned none of this; mission control is keeping quiet about the rantings of eight people who have been through an ordeal. The mystery disease has mysteriously spared us, and no doubt we will be quarantined while the experts diligentl
y hunt for the non-existent virus. The truth, though, won’t stay buried for long.

  Will genocide still be thinkable, in a world where every human being relies for their humanity on every other?

  I hope not.

  THE DEMON’S PASSAGE

  Somebody out there, show your compassion, come and kill me. Cut me free and watch me slowly shrivel, or slice me up and flush me down a toilet. Any way you like, I don’t mind. Come on! You do it for your youngest children, you do it for your sick old parents. Come and do it for me. I can tell you’d like it. Don’t be nervous, lovers! You’ll never be found out, if that’s what’s holding you back: I’ll stay silent to the end, be it swift or slow. Come on, people! I’m totally defenceless. Hurry up! Don’t be shy. You have the right. You made me, you created me, so you know you have the right.

  Who am I? What am I, that can whisper pleas for death into your clean and honest minds? I could give you twenty questions, but I fear that you’d need more. Animal, for sure. Smaller than a bread-box now, but growing every day. Two legs? Four legs? Six? Eight? I have no limbs, I have no face; no fangs, no claws, you musn’t fear me. I am the stuff of thought (pure and impure), and what could be more harmless than that?

  Practicalities: you’ll need my address. Can you hear me in the back rows? Are you reading me, Brazil? I can certainly hear all of you, louder than my own thoughts at times, but then I am such a sensitive little pudding, and you have so many unavoidable distractions. Like:

  Oh, green and brown and blue and white

  Fade to black as the Earth turns into night

  Oh, thank you Lord for such a wondrous sight

  I’m a-higher than the sky so I know we’ll be all right!

  It has a highly infectious melody, I must admit. No doubt there’ll soon be dozens more singers queueing to record in the Shuttle, especially after all those Limited Edition Zero-Gee Pressings sold for a hundred thousand each. Hoo-wheee! Thank you, Lord!

  Yes, my address: Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. I’m in the basement of the Australian Biotech Playground. You can’t miss it: the forecourt is the only vomit-free region for miles around, since the Brain Chemistry people here developed an ingenious new toxin which selectively repels the local homeless alcoholics. Should turn out to be quite a money-spinner, if they market it properly.

  But if you still have trouble finding the place, it’s a tall, white building set in a pleasant square of shrubs and modern sculpture. The logo above the entrance is quite distinctive: an erect phallus which dissolves, or rather unravels half-way, into a double-helix of DNA. The cruder members of staff here are split about equally between those who say this symbol means “fuck molecular biology!” and those who say it means “molecular biology will fuck you!”. The city’s feminists are similarly divided, between those who see it as a hopeful sign of freedom (the penis being superseded by a technology that women can master and employ as they see fit), and those who see it as representing their worst fears: science springing from the testicles instead of from the brain.

  There’s a shopping arcade on the ground floor, extending one level above and one below, with a cinema complex, a health food supermarket, and a twenty-four hour chemist. Linking the three levels, twisted around the laser-lit spume of an endlessly-pumping fountain, is the southern hemisphere’s only pair of spiral escalators. Unfortunately, they’re usually closed for repairs; the mechanism that drives them is ingenious, but insufficiently robust, and it takes no more than a stray bottle top or a discarded chocolate bar wrapper in the wrong place to start belts slipping, gears crunching, shafts snapping, until the whole structure begins to behave like a dadaist work of art designed explicitly to destroy itself.

  Floors two to ten hold consulting rooms: neurologists, endocrinologists, gynaecologists, rheumatologists: in short, as fine a collection of brain-dead, ex-university rugby players as ever assembled anywhere. These people have only one facial expression: the patronising, superior, self-satisfied smirk. The very same smirk that appeared on their lips the day they gained admission to medical school has come through everything since without the slightest change: gruelling feats of rote learning and beer sculling at university; initiation by sleep-deprivation and token poverty as residents; working long and hard on obscure research projects for their MDs, hoping only that their superiors might steal the credit for any interesting results, so that by accepting the theft in silence in a ritual act of self-abasement they might prove themselves worthy to be the colleagues of the thieves. And then, suddenly, skiing holidays, Pacific cruises, and an endless line of patients who swoon with awe and say “Yes, Doctor. No, Doctor. Of course I will, Doctor. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.”

  Floors eleven to eighteen house a wide range of pathology labs, where every substance or structure that might travel the bloodstream, from macrophages and lymphocytes through to antibodies, protein hormones, carbohydrate molecules, even individual ions, can be hunted down, tagged and counted.

  Nineteen to twenty-five are filled with the offices of pharmaceuticals and medical instrumentation firms. They pay five times the market rate for renting space on this sleazy side of town, but it’s more than worth it just to share an address with the world-famous research team that perfected and patented bioluminescent contact lenses (“… triggered by minute changes in the hormonal content of lubricating tears, Honest Eyes™ glow with a subtle aura, changing colour instantly to perfectly reflect every nuance of the wearer’s changing mood …”), beat the Americans, the Swiss and the Japanese to develop the first one hundred per cent effective post-coital contraceptive cigarette, and then, out-stripping all their past achievements in consumer biotech, went on to produce a special chewing gum that will stain the teeth red in the presence of salivary AIDS virus (“Share a stick with someone you love”).

  Twenty-six to thirty hold libraries, conference rooms, and row after row of quiet offices, where the scientists can sit and listen to the air conditioning, their own breathing, the sound of fingers on a keyboard in the next room. This is the realm of pure abstraction: no test tubes here, no culture flasks or Petri dishes, and no visible hint of the likes of me.

  Thirty-one to forty is administration and marketing, and on top of that is a simulated Viennese cafe which revolves once every ten minutes. There’s a coin-operated telescope on the rim, with which people can, and frequently do, watch the prostitutes in leopard-skin leotards pacing the streets of nearby Kings Cross.

  I’ve been teasing you, haven’t I, leading you astray. Upwards, ever upwards, away from the traffic noise, away from the putrid garbage, the broken glass, the used needles, the choking stench of urine. The building that I have described so far rises up into the almost-fresh air, up into the sunlight, up into the blue sky of daydreams. But don’t you think there’s something more? Don’t you think this building has foundations?

  Underneath the shoppers are five levels of research labs. People here walk briskly, radiating a message with every step: I’m busy, I’m highly trained, and I have something critical incubating/concentrating/ spinning/in a column/on a gel that I must go and check in exactly three minutes and thirty-five seconds. Twenty-five seconds, now.

  It’s all happening here, no doubt about it: flow cytometry, mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, high performance liquid chromatography. Nuclear magnetic resonance. Genes are mapped, spliced, cloned, proteins are synthesised and purified. A real hive of activity. But what’s supporting it, what’s holding it up? We haven’t far to go now. Be patient.

  There’s a level of cold-rooms and freezers.

  There’s a level of equipment stores, and another for chemicals.

  Second-lowest is where they keep the computers. Four of them, big as elephants. Seen from the outside they have a certain dignity, but within they’re just puppets with split personalities, twitching pathetically in a thousand different directions as the masters upstairs tug at them impatiently, scream at them to dance out the answers, and then curse them for liars when
the truth is too ugly, or too beautiful, to bear.

  And underneath them all is the animal house. That’s your station, your stop, sweethearts. That’s where you’ll find me waiting, a-quivering just for you.

  Walk straight out of the elevator; there’s an easily spotted foot-switch on the right that disables the alarm (installed after Animal Liberation’s last raid), then it’s left, right, left, left, right (this love you have for mazes I’ll never understand). You’ll see some big orange cages almost dead ahead. Ignore the sounds of startled rabbits around you, wishing they could flee; the one in cage D-246 won’t escape if you leave his door open a year.

  The heavy plastic part of the cage is opaque, with only the top half made of see-through wire, and since my host is always lying down, you might have to stand on tippy-toes to see just what’s inside. Even then, the sight is so unusual that interpretation may take you some time. An entire lettuce, discoloured and putrid with age? Absurd! What animal would lie there with decaying food sitting on its head? What keeper would permit it? And the vile mess looks, almost, as if it’s somehow attached―

  Are you feeling ill yet? No? You mean you still haven’t guessed, you boneheads! What thick skulls you must have! Skull-less myself, I can insult with immunity. I’m a brain tumour, sweethearts, as big as your whole brain, (and a thousand times smarter, from the evidence so far). Picture me, I beg of you, picture me in all my naked glory! Not in a brain surgeon’s wildest wet dreams has so much grey matter, still awash with lifeblood, still vital with the chemistry of thought, ever lain bare beneath fluorescent tubes! Please, lovers! Don’t fight the way I make you feel! Trust in your instincts, your body knows best! (Don’t toss your cookies yet, though, my faint-hearted assassins. You still don’t know half the horror of what you’ve done, and dry retching is so unsatisfying.)