Wang's Carpets

by Greg Egan

  Elena said, “We can’t lie here forever; the gang’s all waiting to see you.”

  “Where?” Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a real-time image of the Mount Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn’t be the same.

  “I’ll show you.”

  Paolo reached over and took her hand. The pool, the sky, the courtyard vanished – and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again . . . nightside, but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio, to the multi-coloured shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and back-scattered cosmic-ray brems-strahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean’s smoothly tapered thermal glow spelt three-hundred Kelvin instantly – as well as back-lighting the atmosphere’s tell-tale infrared silhouette.

  He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder, one edge of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from zenith to nadir; aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each absorption and emission line, Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more familiar than strange – and he recognized most of the old signposts by colour. He had his bearings, now. Twenty degrees away from Sirius – south, by parochial Earth reckoning – faint but unmistakable: the sun.

  Elena was beside him – superficially unchanged, although they’d both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this environment mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free-fall and vacuum, but it wasn’t set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of flesh and blood. Their new bodies were human-shaped, but devoid of elaborate microstructure – and their minds weren’t embedded in the physics at all, but were running directly on the processor web.

  Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial regression to the ancestral form was a venerable C-Z tradition – and being human was largely self-affirming, while it lasted – but every time he emerged from the experience, he felt like he’d broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory perception, an illusion of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate. The last flesh human had died long before Paolo was constructed, and apart from the communities of Gleisner robots, Carter-Zimmerman was about as conservative as a transhuman society could be. The balance seemed right to Paolo, though – acknowledging the flexibility of software, without abandoning interest in the physical world – and although the stubbornly corporeal Gleisners had been first to the stars, the C-Z diaspora would soon overtake them.

  Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

  “Do you like our humble new meeting place?” Hermann floated by Paolo’s shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense-organs, speaking through the vacuum in modulated infrared. “We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It’s desolate up here, I know – but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface.”

  Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe’s close-up of a typical stretch of dry land, an expanse of fissured red rock. “More desolate down there, I think.” He was tempted to touch the ground – to let the private vision become tactile – but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation was bad etiquette.

  “Ignore Hermann. He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be.” Liesl was a green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized human face stippled in gold on each wing.

  Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken, he’d assumed that his friends must have come to a consensus in favour of the microprobes – and only a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. “What effects? The carpets—”

  “Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as they look, we don’t know what else is down there.” As Liesl’s wings fluttered, her mirror-image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. “With neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in metres, time resolution in seconds. We don’t know anything about smaller lifeforms.”

  “And we never will, if you have your way.” Karpal – an ex-Gleisner, human-shaped as ever – had been Liesl’s lover, last time Paolo was awake.

  “We’ve only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year! There’s still a wealth of data we could gather non-intrusively, with a little patience. There might be rare beachings of ocean life—”

  Elena said dryly, “Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible tides, shallow waves, very few storms. And anything beached would be fried by UV before we glimpsed anything more instructive than we’re already seeing in the surface water.”

  “Not necessarily. The carpets seem to be vulnerable – but other species might be better protected, if they live nearer to the surface. And Orpheus is seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to dump a few cubic kilometres of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals.”

  Paolo smiled; he hadn’t thought of that. A tsunami might be worth waiting for.

  Liesl continued, “What is there to lose, by waiting a few hundred Orphean years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal climate patterns – and we could watch for anomalies, storms and quakes, hoping for some revelatory glimpses.”

  A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia? Paolo’s ambivalence waned. If he’d wanted to inhabit geological time, he would have migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers watched Earth’s mountains erode in subjective seconds. Orpheus hung in the sky beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to be understood.

  He said, “But what if there are no ‘revelatory glimpses?’ How long do we wait? We don’t know how rare life is – in time, or in space. If this planet is precious, so is the epoch it’s passing through. We don’t know how rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpets – and whatever else – could die out before we’d learnt the first thing about them. What a waste that would be!”

  Liesl stood her ground.

  “And if we damage the Orphean ecology – or culture – by rushing in? That wouldn’t be a waste. It would be a tragedy.”

  Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his Earth-self – almost three hundred years’ worth – before composing a reply. The early communications included detailed mind grafts – and it was good to share the excitement of the diaspora’s launch; to watch – very nearly firsthand – the thousand ships, nanomachine-carved from asteroids, depart in a blaze of fusion fire from beyond the orbit of Mars. Then things settled down to the usual prosaic matters: Elena, the gang, shameless gossip, Carter-Zimmerman’s ongoing research projects, the buzz of inter-polis cultural tensions, the not-quite-cyclic convulsions of the arts (the perceptual aesthetic overthrows the emotional, again . . . although Valladas in Konishi polis claims to have constructed a new synthesis of the two).

  After the first fifty years, his Earth-self had begun to hold things back; by the time news reached Earth of the Fomalhaut clone’s demise, the messages had become pure audiovisual linear monologues. Paolo understood. It was only right; they’d diverged, and you didn’t send mind grafts to strangers.

  Most of the transmissions had been broadcast to all of the ships, indiscriminately. Forty-three years ago, though, his Earth-self had sent a special message to the Vega-bound clone.

  “The new lunar spectroscope we finished last year has just picked up clear signs
of water on Orpheus. There should be large temperate oceans waiting for you, if the models are right. So . . . good luck.” Vision showed the instrument’s domes growing out of the rock of the lunar farside; plots of the Orphean spectral data; an ensemble of planetary models. “Maybe it seems strange to you – all the trouble we’re taking to catch a glimpse of what you’re going to see in close-up, so soon. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think it’s jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.

  “There’s been a revival of the old debate: should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the light-speed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems.” Essays, pro and con, were appended; Paolo ingested summaries. “I don’t think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind . . . so we cling to the Earth – looking outwards, but remaining firmly anchored.

  “I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe . . . but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Flesh humans used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’ . . . as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

  “Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find alien life – not just to break the spell of the anthrocosmologists. We need to find aliens who’ve faced the same decisions – and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”

  * * *

  Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets moving in staccato jerks around his dodecahedral room. Twenty-four ragged oblongs drifted above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong which had just fissioned. Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain the whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a critical size. The purely mechanical break-up of a colony – if that was what it was – might have little to do with the life cycle of the constituent organisms. It was frustrating. Paolo was accustomed to a torrent of data on anything which caught his interest; for the diaspora’s great discovery to remain nothing more than a sequence of coarse monochrome snapshots was intolerable.

  He glanced at a schematic of the scout probes’ neutrino detectors, but there was no obvious scope for improvement. Nuclei in the detectors were excited into unstable high-energy states, then kept there by fine-tuned gamma-ray lasers picking off lower-energy eigenstates faster than they could creep into existence and attract a transition. Changes in neutrino flux of one part in ten-to-the-fifteenth could shift the energy levels far enough to disrupt the balancing act. The carpets cast a shadow so faint, though, that even this near-perfect vision could barely resolve it.

  Orlando Venetti said, “You’re awake.”

  Paolo turned. His father stood an arm’s length away, presenting as an ornately clad human of indeterminate age. Definitely older than Paolo, though; Orlando never ceased to play up his seniority – even if the age difference was only twenty-five percent now, and falling.

  Paolo banished the carpets from the room to the space behind one pentagonal window, and took his father’s hand. The portions of Orlando’s mind which meshed with his own expressed pleasure at Paolo’s emergence from hibernation, fondly dwelt on past shared experiences, and entertained hopes of continued harmony between father and son. Paolo’s greeting was similar, a carefully contrived “revelation” of his own emotional state. It was more of a ritual than an act of communication – but then, even with Elena, he set up barriers. No one was totally honest with another person – unless the two of them intended to permanently fuse.

  Orlando nodded at the carpets. “I hope you appreciate how important they are.”

  “You know I do.” He hadn’t included that in his greeting, though. “First alien life.” C-Z humiliates the Gleisner robots, at last – that was probably how his father saw it. The robots had been first to Alpha Centauri, and first to an extrasolar planet – but first life was Apollo to their Sputniks, for anyone who chose to think in those terms.

  Orlando said, “This is the hook we need, to catch the citizens of the marginal polises. The ones who haven’t quite imploded into solipsism. This will shake them up – don’t you think?”

  Paolo shrugged. Earth’s transhumans were free to implode into anything they liked; it didn’t stop Carter-Zimmerman from exploring the physical universe. But thrashing the Gleisners wouldn’t be enough for Orlando; he lived for the day when C-Z would become the cultural mainstream. Any polis could multiply its population a billionfold in a microsecond, if it wanted the vacuous honour of outnumbering the rest. Luring other citizens to migrate was harder – and persuading them to rewrite their own local charters was harder still. Orlando had a missionary streak: he wanted every other polis to see the error of its ways, and follow C-Z to the stars.

  Paolo said, “Ashton-Laval has intelligent aliens. I wouldn’t be so sure that news of giant seaweed is going to take Earth by storm.”

  Orlando was venomous. “Ashton-Laval intervened in its so-called ‘evolutionary’ simulations so many times that they might as well have built the end products in an act of creation lasting six days. They wanted talking reptiles, and – mirabile dictu! – they got talking reptiles. There are self-modified transhumans in this polis more alien than the aliens in Ashton-Laval.”

  Paolo smiled. “All right. Forget Ashton-Laval. But forget the marginal polises, too. We choose to value the physical world. That’s what defines us – but it’s as arbitrary as any other choice of values. Why can’t you accept that? It’s not the One True Path which the infidels have to be bludgeoned into following.” He knew he was arguing half for the sake of it – he desperately wanted to refute the anthrocosmologists, himself – but Orlando always drove him into taking the opposite position. Out of fear of being nothing but his father’s clone? Despite the total absence of inherited episodic memories, the stochastic input into his ontogenesis, the chaotically divergent nature of the iterative mind-building algorithms.

  Orlando made a beckoning gesture, dragging the image of the carpets half-way back into the room. “You’ll vote for the micro-probes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Everything depends on that, now. It’s good to start with a tantalizing glimpse – but if we don’t follow up with details soon, they’ll lose interest back on Earth very rapidly.”

  “Lose interest? It’ll be fifty-four years before we know if anyone paid the slightest attention in the first place.”

  Orlando eyed him with disappointment, and resignation. “If you don’t care about the other polises, think about C-Z. This helps us, it strengthens us. We have to make the most of that.”

  Paolo was bemused. “The charter is the charter. What needs to be strengthened? You make it sound like there’s something at risk.”

  “What do you think a thousand lifeless worlds would have done to us? Do you think the charter would have remained intact?”

  Paolo had never considered the scenario. “Maybe not. But in every C-Z where the charter was rewritten, there would have been citizens who’d have gone off and founded new polises on the old lines. You and I, for a start. We could have called it Venetti–Venetti.”

  “While half your friends turned their backs on the physical world? While Carter-Zimm
erman, after two thousand years, went solipsist? You’d be happy with that?”

  Paolo laughed. “No – but it’s not going to happen, is it? We’ve found life. All right, I agree with you: this strengthens C-Z. The diaspora might have ‘failed’ . . . but it didn’t. We’ve been lucky. I’m glad, I’m grateful. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  Orlando said sourly, “You take too much for granted.”

  “And you care too much what I think! I’m not your . . . heir.” Orlando was first-generation, scanned from flesh – and there were times when he seemed unable to accept that the whole concept of generation had lost its archaic significance. “You don’t need me to safeguard the future of Carter-Zimmerman on your behalf. Or the future of transhumanity. You can do it in person.”

  Orlando looked wounded – a conscious choice, but it still encoded something. Paolo felt a pang of regret – but he’d said nothing he could honestly retract.

  His father gathered up the sleeves of his gold and crimson robes – the only citizen of C-Z who could make Paolo uncomfortable to be naked – and repeated as he vanished from the room: “You take too much for granted.”

  The gang watched the launch of the microprobes together – even Liesl, though she came in mourning, as a giant dark bird. Karpal stroked her feathers nervously. Hermann appeared as a creature out of Escher, a segmented worm with six human-shaped feet – on legs with elbows – given to curling up into a disk and rolling along the girders of Satellite Pinatubo. Paolo and Elena kept saying the same thing simultaneously; they’d just made love.

  Hermann had moved the satellite to a notional orbit just below one of the scout probes – and changed the environment’s scale, so that the probe’s lower surface, an intricate landscape of detector modules and attitude-control jets, blotted out half the sky. The atmospheric-entry capsules – ceramic teardrops three centimetres wide – burst from their launch tube and hurtled past like boulders, vanishing from sight before they’d fallen so much as ten metres closer to Orpheus. It was all scrupulously accurate, although it was part real-time imagery, part extrapolation, part faux. Paolo thought: We might as well have run a pure simulation . . . and pretended to follow the capsules down. Elena gave him a guilty/admonishing look. Yeah – and then why bother actually launching them at all? Why not just simulate a plausible Orphean ocean full of plausible Orphean lifeforms? Why not simulate the whole diaspora? There was no crime of heresy in C-Z; no one had ever been exiled for breaking the charter. At times it still felt like a tightrope walk, though, trying to classify every act of simulation into those which contributed to an understanding of the physical universe (good), those which were merely convenient, recreational, aesthetic (acceptable) . . . and those which constituted a denial of the primacy of real phenomena (time to think about emigration).