by Dan Simmons
Wide, frightened eyes stared back. Far above, gray security uniforms burst from the farcaster.
Damn. I looked around. The treesails surged and billowed overhead.
Radiant gossamers, beautiful even in daylight, flitted among tropical vegetation of a hundred hues. Sunlight danced on blue ocean. The way to both portals was blocked. The security guard leading the group had drawn a weapon.
I was to the first hawking mat in three strides, trying to remember from my own ride two decades earlier how the flight threads were activated. I tapped designs in desperation.
The hawking mat went rigid and lifted ten centimeters off the beach. I could hear the shouts now as security guards reached the edge of the crowd. A woman in gaudy Renaissance Minor garb pointed my way. I jumped off the hawking mat, gathered up the other seven mats, and jumped aboard my own. Barely able to find the flight designs under the tumble of rugs, I slapped the forward controls until the mat lurched into flight, almost tumbling me off as it rose.
Fifty meters out, thirty meters high, I dumped the other mats into the sea and swiveled to see what was happening on the beach. Several gray uniforms were huddled around the burned remains. Another pointed a silver wand in my direction.
Delicate needles of pain tingled along my arm, shoulders, and neck. My eyelids drooped and I almost slid off the mat to my right. I gripped the far side with my left hand, slumped forward, and tapped at the ascent design with fingers made of wood. Climbing again, I fumbled at my right sleeve for my own stunner. The wristband was empty.
A minute later I sat up and shook off most of the effects of the stun, although my fingers still burned and I had a fierce headache. The motile isle was far behind, shrinking more each second. A century ago the island would have been driven by the bands of dolphins brought here originally during the Hegira, but the Hegemony pacification program during the Siri Rebellion had killed off most of the aquatic mammals and now the islands wandered listlessly, carrying their cargo of Web tourists and resort owners.
I checked the horizons for another island, a hint of one of the rare mainlands. Nothing. Or, rather, blue sky, endless ocean, and soft brushstrokes of clouds far to the west. Or was it to the east?
I pulled my comlog off my belt lock and keyed in general datasphere access, then stopped. If the authorities had chased me this far, the next step would be to pinpoint my location and send out a skimmer or security EMV. I wasn’t sure if they could trace my comlog when I logged in but I saw no reason to help them. I thumbed the comm-link on standby and looked around again.
Good move, Brawne. Poking along at two hundred meters on a three-century-old hawking mat with who knows how many… or how few!… hours of charge in its flight threads, possibly a thousand klicks or more from land of any sort. And lost. Great. I crossed my arms and sat back to think.
“M. Lamia?” Johnny’s soft voice almost made me jump off the mat.
“Johnny?” I stared at the comlog. It was still on standby. The general comm frequency indicator was dark. “Johnny, is that you?”
“Of course. I thought you’d never turn your comlog on.”
“How did you trace me? What band are you calling me?”
“Never mind that. Where are you headed?”
I laughed and told him that I didn’t have the slightest idea. “Can you help?”
“Wait.” There was the briefest second of pause. “All right, I have you on one of the weather-mapping sats. A terribly primitive thing. Good thing your hawking mat has a passive transponder.”
I stared at the rug that was the only thing between me and a long, loud fall to the sea. “It does? Can the others track me?”
“They could,” said Johnny, “but I’m jamming this particular signal. Now, where do you want to go?”
“Home.”
“I’m not sure if that’s wise after the death of… ah… our suspect.”
I squinted, suddenly suspicious. “How do you know about that? I didn’t say anything.”
“Be serious, M. Lamia. The security bands are full of it on six worlds. They have a reasonable description of you.”
“Shit.”
“Precisely. Now where would you like to go?”
“Where are you?” I asked. “My place?”
“No. I left there when the security bands mentioned you. I’m… near a farcaster.”
“That’s where I need to be.” I looked around again.
Ocean sky, a hint of clouds. At least no fleets of EMVs.
“All right,” said Johnny’s disembodied voice. “There’s a powered-down FORCE multi-portal less than ten klicks from your present location.”
I shielded my eyes and rotated three hundred and sixty degrees. “The hell there is,” I said. “I don’t know how far away the horizon is on this world, but it’s at least forty klicks and I can’t see anything.”
“Submersible base,” said Johnny. “Hang on. I’m going to take control.”
The hawking mat lurched again, dipped once, and then fell steadily. I held on with both hands and resisted the urge to scream.
“Submersible,” I called against the wind rush, “how far?”
“Do you mean how deep?”
“Yeah!”
“Eight fathoms.”
I converted the archaic units to meters. This time I did scream. “That’s almost fourteen meters underwater!”
“Where else do you expect a submersible to be?”
“What the hell do you expect me to do, hold my breath?” The ocean rushed toward me.
“Not necessary,” said my comlog. “The hawking mat has a primitive crash field. It should easily hold for a mere eight fathoms. Please hang on.”
I hung on.
Johnny was waiting for me when I arrived. The submersible had been dark and dank with the sweat of abandonment; the farcaster had been of a military variety I’d never seen before. It was a relief to step into sunlight and a city street with Johnny waiting.
I told him what had happened to Queue. We walked empty streets past old buildings. The sky was pale blue fading toward evening. No one was in sight. “Hey,” I said, stopping, “where are we?” It was an incredibly Earthlike world but the sky, the gravity, the texture of the place was like nothing I’d visited.
Johnny smiled. “I’ll let you guess. Let’s walk some more.”
There were ruins to our left as we walked down a wide street. I stopped and stared. “That’s the Colosseum,” I said. “The Roman Colosseum on Old Earth.” I looked around at the aging buildings, the cobblestone streets, and the trees swaying slightly in a soft breeze. “This is a reconstruction of the Old Earth city of Rome,” I said, trying to keep the astonishment out of my voice. “New Earth?” I knew at once that it wasn’t. I’d been to New Earth numerous times and the sky tones, smells, and gravity had not been like this.
Johnny shook his head. “This is nowhere in the Web.” I stopped walking.
“That’s impossible.” By definition, any world which could be reached by farcaster was in the Web.
“Nonetheless, it is not in the Web.”
“Where is it then?”
“Old Earth.”
We walked on. Johnny pointed out another ruin. “The Forum.” Descending a long staircase, he said, “Ahead is the Piazza di Spagna where we’ll spend the night.”
“Old Earth,” I said, my first comment in twenty minutes. “Time travel?”
“That is not possible, M. Lamia.”
“A theme park then?”
Johnny laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, unself-conscious and easy.
“Perhaps. I don’t really know its purpose or function. It is… an analog.”
“An analog.” I squinted at the red, setting sun just visible down a narrow street. “It looks like the holos I’ve seen of Old Earth. It feels right, even though I’ve never been there.”
“It is very accurate.”
“Where is it? I mean, what star?”
“I don’t know the number,” said J
ohnny. “It’s in the Hercules Cluster.”
I managed not to repeat what he said but I stopped and sat down on one of the steps. With the Hawking drive humankind had explored, colonized, and linked with farcaster worlds across many thousands of light-years.
But no one had tried to reach the exploding Core suns.
We had barely crawled out of the cradle of one spiral arm. The Hercules Cluster.
“Why has the TechnoCore built a replica of Rome in the Hercules Cluster?” I asked.
Johnny sat next to me. We both looked up as a whirling mass of pigeons exploded into flight and wheeled above the rooftops. “I don’t know, M. Lamia. There is much that I have not learned… at least partially because I have not been interested until now.”
“Brawne,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Call me Brawne.”
Johnny smiled and inclined his head. “Thank you, Brawne. One thing, though. I do not believe that it is a replica of the city of Rome alone. It is all of Old Earth.” I set both hands on the sun-warmed stone of the step I was sitting on.
“All of Old Earth? All of its… continents, cities?”
“I believe so. I haven’t been out of Italy and England except for a sea voyage between the two, but I believe the analog is complete.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
Johnny nodded slowly. “That may indeed be the case. Why don’t we go inside and eat and talk more about this? It may relate to who tried to kill me and why.”
“Inside” was an apartment in a large house at the foot of the marble stairs. Windows looked out on what Johnny called the “piazza” and I could see up the staircase to a large, yellow-brown church above, and down to the square where a boat-shaped fountain tossed water into the evening stillness. Johnny said that the fountain had been designed by Bernini but the name meant nothing to me.
The rooms were small but high-ceilinged, with rough but elaborately carved furniture from an era I did not recognize. There was no sign of electricity or modern appliances. The house did not respond when I spoke to it at the door and again in the apartment upstairs. As dusk fell over the square and city outside the tall windows, the only lights were a few streetlamps of gas or some more primitive combustible.
“This is out of Old Earth’s past,” I said, touching the thick pillows. I raised my head, suddenly understanding.
“Keats died in Italy. Early… nineteenth or twentieth century. This is… then.”
“Yes. Early nineteenth century: 1821, to be precise.”
“The whole world is a museum?”
“Oh no. Different areas are different eras, of course. It depends upon the analog being pursued.”
“I don’t understand.” We had moved into a room cluttered with thick furniture and I sat on an oddly carved couch by a window. A film of gold evening light still touched the spire of the tawny church up the steps.
Pigeons wheeled white against blue sky. “Are there millions of people… cybrids… living on this fake Old Earth?”
“I do not believe so,” said Johnny. “Only the number necessary for the particular analog project.” He saw that I still did not understand and took a breath before continuing. “When I… awoke here, there were cybrid analogs of Joseph Severn, Dr Clark, the landlady Anna Angeletti, young Lieutenant Elton, and a few others. Italian shopkeepers, the owner of the trattoria across the square who used to bring us our food, passersby, that sort of thing. No more than a score at the most.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were probably… recycled. Like the man with the queue.”
“Queue…” I suddenly stared across the darkening room at Johnny. “He was a cybrid?”
“Without doubt. The self-destruction you described is precisely the way I would rid myself of this cybrid if I had to.”
My mind was racing. I realized how stupid I had been, how little I had learned about anything. “Then it was another AI who tried to kill you.”
“It seems that way.”
“Why?”
Johnny made a gesture with his hands. “Possibly to erase some quantum of knowledge that died with my cybrid. Something I had learned only recently and the other AI… or AIs knew would be destroyed in my systems crash.”
I stood, paced back and forth, and stopped at the window. The darkness was settling in earnest now. There were lamps in the room but Johnny made no move to light them and I preferred the dimness. It made the unreality of what I was hearing even that much more unreal. I looked into the bedroom. The western windows admitted the last of the light; bedclothes glowed whitely.
“You died here,” I said.
“He did,” said Johnny. “I am not he.”
“But you have his memories.”
“Half-forgotten dreams. There are gaps.”
“But you know what he felt.”
“I remember what the designers thought that he felt.”
“Tell me.”
“What?” Johnny’s skin was very pale in the gloom. His short curls looked black.
“What it was like to die. What it was like to be reborn.”
Johnny told me, his voice very soft, almost melodic, lapsing sometimes into an English too archaic to be understood but far more beautiful to the ear than the hybrid tongue we speak today.
He told me what it was like to be a poet obsessed with perfection, far harsher toward his own efforts than even the most vicious critic. And the critics were vicious. His work was dismissed, ridiculed, described as derivative and silly. Too poor to marry the woman he loved, loaning money to his brother in America and thus losing the last chance of financial security… and then the brief glory of growing into the full maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to the “consumption” which had claimed his mother and his brother Tom. Then sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly “for his health” while knowing all the while it meant a lonely, painful death at the age of twenty-six. He talked of the agony of seeing Fanny’s handwriting on the letters he found too painful to open; he talked of the loyalty of the young artist Joseph Severn, who had been chosen as a traveling companion for Keats by “friends” who had abandoned the poet at the end, of how Severn had nursed the dying man and stayed with him during the final days. He told of the hemorrhages in the night, of Dr Clark bleeding him and prescribing “exercise and good air,” and of the ultimate religious and personal despair which had led Keats to demand his own epitaph be carved in stone as: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Only the dimmest light from below outlined the tall windows. Johnny’s voice seemed to float in the night-scented air. He spoke of awakening after his death in the bed where he died, still attended by the loyal Severn and Dr Clark, of remembering that he was the poet John Keats the way one remembers an identity from a fast-fading dream while all the while knowing that he was something else.
He told of the illusion continued, the trip back to England, the reunion with the Fanny-who-was-not-Fanny and the near mental breakdown this had engendered.
He told of his inability to write further poetry, of his increasing estrangement from the cybrid impostors, of his retreat into something resembling catatonia combined with “hallucinations” of his true AI existence in the nearly incomprehensible (to a nineteenth-century poet) TechnoCore, and of the ultimate crumbling of the illusion and the abandonment of the “Keats Project.”
“In truth,” he said, “the entire, evil charade made me think of nothing so much as a passage in a letter I wrote… he wrote… to his brother George some time before his illness. Keats said:
“May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine.
By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine—This is the very thing in which consists po
etry.”
“You think the… Keats Project… was evil?” I asked.
“Anything which deceives is evil, I believe.”
“Perhaps you are more John Keats than you are willing to admit.”
“No. The absence of poetic instinct showed otherwise even in the midst of the most elaborate illusion.”
I looked at the dark outlines of shapes in the dark house. “Do the AIs know that we’re here?”
“Probably. Almost surely. There is no place that I can go that the TechnoCore cannot trace and follow. But it was the Web authorities and brigands from whom we fled, no?”
“But you know now that it was someone… some intelligence in the TechnoCore who assaulted you.”
“Yes, but only in the Web. Such violence in the Core would not be tolerated.”
There came a noise from the street. A pigeon, I hoped. Wind blowing trash across cobblestones perhaps. I said, “How will the TechnoCore respond to my being here?”
“I have no idea.”
“Surely it must be a secret.”
“It is… something they consider irrelevant to humanity.”
I shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. “The re-creation of Old Earth… the resurrection of… how many?… human personalities as cybrids on this re-created world… AIs killing AIs… irrelevant!” I laughed but managed to keep the laughter under control.
“Jesus wept, Johnny.”
“Almost certainly.”
I moved to the window, not caring what sort of target I would afford anyone in the dark street below, and fumbled out a cigarette. They were damp from the afternoon’s chase through the snowdrifts but one lighted when I struck it. “Johnny, earlier when you said that the Old Earth analog was complete, I said, “Why, for God’s sake?” and you said something like “That may be the case.” Was that just a wiseass comment or did you mean something?”
“I mean that it might indeed be for God’s sake.”
“Explain.”
Johnny sighed in the darkness. “I don’t understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence.”