Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  A human voice interrupted them, someone I did not recognize, perhaps the station watch attendant. Somebody was always assigned to observe the sentries, a human behind the machines. “William, are you all right? Anybody else in there with you?”

  “Mickey and I are in here with William. We’re fine,” Rho said.

  “A shuttle dropped bombs into the trenches. They’ve taken out your radiators, William, and all of our generators are damaged. Your pit is drawing a lot more power than normal—I was worried—”

  “It shouldn’t be,” William said.

  “William says it shouldn’t be drawing more power,” Rho informed the anonymous watch attendant.

  “But it is,” William continued, turning to look at his instruments.

  “Phase down lambda reversal in all cells,” the QL announced.

  “—you folks might be injured,” the voice concluded, overlapping.

  “We’re fine,” I said.

  “You’d better get out of there. No way of knowing how much damage the void has sustained, whether—”

  “Let’s go,” I said, looking up.

  Chunks of rock and dust drifted into the overhead net, making it undulate like the upside-down bell of a jellyfish.

  “Lambda reversal ending in all cells,” the QL said.

  “Wait—” William said.

  I stood on the bridge between the Cavity and the disorder pumps. The refrigerators hung motionless in their intricate suspensions. Rho stood in the door to the lab. William stood beside the Cavity.

  “Zero attained,” the QL announced.

  Rho glanced my way, and I started to speak, but my throat caught. The lights dimmed all around.

  Distantly, our two slates said, “Time to evacuate …”

  I turned to leave, stepping between the pumps, and that saved my life … or at any rate made it possible for me to be here, now, in my present condition.

  The pump jackets fluoresced green and vanished, revealing spaghetti traceries of wire and cable and egg-shaped parcels. My eyes hurt with the green glare, which seemed to echo in glutinous waves from the walls of the void. I considered the possibility that something had fallen and hit me on the head, making me see things, but I felt no pain, only a sense of being stretched from head to feet. I could not see Rho or William, as I was now facing down the bridge toward the entrance to the Ice Pit. I could not hear them, either. When I tried to turn around again, parts of my being seemed to separate and rejoin. Instinctively, I stopped moving, waiting for everything to come together again.

  It was all I could do to concentrate on one of my hands grasping the bridge railing. The hand shed dark ribbons that curled toward the deck of the bridge. I blinked and felt my eyelids separate and rejoin with each rise and fall. Fear deeper than thought forced me to stop all motion until only my blood and the beat of my heart threatened to sunder me from the inside.

  Finally I could stand it no more. I slowly turned in the deepening quiet, hearing only the slide of my shoes on the bridge and the serpent’s hiss of my body separating and rejoining as I rotated.

  Please do not take my testimony from this point on as having any kind of objective truth. Whatever happened, it affected my senses, if not my mind, in such a way that all objectivity fled.

  The Cavity sphere had cracked like an egg. I saw Rho standing between the Cavity and the laboratory, perfectly still, facing slightly to my left as if caught in mid-turn, and she did not look entirely real. The light that reflected from her was not familiar, not completely useful to my eyes, whether because the light had changed or my eyes had changed, I do not know. In addition there came from her—radiated is not the right word, it is deceptive, but perhaps there is no better—a kind of communication of her presence that I had never experienced before, a shedding of skins that lessened her as I watched. I think perhaps it was the information that comprised her body, leaching away through a new kind of space that had never existed before: space made crystalline, a superconductor of information. With the shedding of this essence Rho became less substantial, less real. She was dissolving like a piece of sugar in warm water.

  I tried to call out her name, but could make no sound. I might have been caught in a vicious gelatin, one that stung me whenever I tried to move. But I could not see myself dissolving, as I saw Rho. I seemed immune at least to that danger.

  William stood behind her, becoming more visible as Rho dissipated. He was farther from the Cavity; the effect, whatever it might be, had not worked quite as strongly on him. But he too began to shed this essence, the hidden music that communicates each particle’s place and quantum state to other particles, that holds us in one shape and one condition from this moment to the next. I think he was trying to move, to get back inside the laboratory, but he succeeded only in evaporating this essence more rapidly, and he stopped, then tried to reach out for Rho, his face utterly intent, like a child facing down a tiger.

  His hand passed through her.

  I saw something else flee from my sister at that moment. I apologize in advance for describing this; I do not wish to spread any more or less hope, to offer encouragement to mystical interpretations of our existence, for as I said, what I saw might be a function of hallucination, not objective reality.

  But I saw two, then three, versions of my sister standing on the bridge, the third like a cloud maintaining its rough shape, and this cloud-shape managed to move toward me, and touch me with an outstretched limb.

  Are you all right, Micko? I heard in my head if not in my ears. Don’t move. Please don’t move. You seem to be . . .

  Suddenly I saw myself from her perspective, her experience leaching from her, passing into me, like a taste of her dissipating self in the superconducting medium.

  The cloud passed through me, carried by some unknown momentum of propagation, then through the bridge rail and out over the void where it fell like rain.

  Was I to fade as well? The other images of Rho and William had become mere blurs against the laboratory which was itself blurring, casting away fluid tendrils.

  Oddly, the Cavity containing the copper samples—I assumed they were the cause of this, their new condition, announced by the QL, zero Kelvin—seemed more solid and stable than anything else, despite the fine cracks across its surface.

  Because of my position between the disorder pumps—and I repeat, this is only my speculation—I seemed to have suffered as much dissolution as I was due, whereas everything else became even less real, less material.

  The bridge slumped, stretching as if I stood on a sheet of rubber. I performed some gymnastic and caught the rails with both hands, but could not stop my fall toward the lower framework built to support the heads. I tried to climb but could not gain purchase with my feet.

  My descent continued until the bridge and my legs actually passed through the ceiling of the lower chamber. A sharp pain shoved like a spear through both limbs, gouging through my bones into my hips. Looking up for some new handhold, some way of stalling my fall, I saw the laboratory rotating loosely at the center of the void, shedding vapors. Rho and William I could not see at all.

  A sensation of deep cold surrounded me, then faded. The refrigerators tumbled silently all around, passing through the chamber and casting slow ripples of some cold blue liquid that had filled the bottom of the pit. The liquid washed over me.

  I describe the rest knowing perfectly well it cannot be anything more than delirium. How is it that instinct can be aware of dangers from a situation no human being could ever have faced before? I felt a terrified loathing of that wash of unknown liquid, abhorrence so strong I crushed the bridge railing between my hands like thin aluminum. Yet I knew that it was not liquefied gas from the refrigerators; I was not afraid of being frozen.

  My feet pulled up from the mire and I hooked one onto a stanchion, lifting myself perhaps a meter. Still, I was not out of that turbulent pool, and it seeped into me. I filled with sensations, remembrances not my own. Memories from the dead. From the heads,
four hundred and ten of them, leaking their patterns and memories across crystalline spacetime, the information condensing into a thick lake not of matter, not of anything anyone had ever experienced before, like an essence or cold brew.

  I carry some of these memories with me still. In most cases I do not know who or what they come from, but I see things, hear voices, remember scenes on Earth I could not possibly know. I have never sought verification, for the same reasons I have never told this story until now—because if I am a chalice of such memories, they have changed me, replacing parts of my own memories I shed in the first few instants of the Quiet—and I do not wish that confirmed.

  There is one memory in particular, the most disturbing I think, that I must record, even though it is not verifiable. It must have come from Kimon Thierry himself. It has a particular flavor that matches the translated voices and visual memories I played for Fiona Task-Felder.

  I believe that in this terrible cold blue pond, the last thoughts of his dying moment permeated me. I loathe this memory: I loathe him. To suspect, even deeply believe in, the duplicity and the malice and the greed—in the evil—of others is one thing. To know it for a fact is something no human being should ever have to face.

  Kimon Thierry’s last thoughts were not of the glorious journey awaiting him, the translation to a higher being. He was terrified of retribution. In his last moment before oblivion, he knew he had constructed a lie, knew that he had convinced hundreds of thousands of others of this lie, had limited their individual growth and freedom, and he feared going to the hell he had been taught about in Sunday school …

  He feared another level of lie, created by past liars to punish their enemies and justify their own petty existences.

  The memory ends abruptly with, I suppose, his death, the end of all recorded memories, all physical transformations. Of that I am left with no impressions whatsoever.

  I rose above this hideous pool by climbing up the stanchions, finding the bars stronger the farther from the Cavity they had initially been, stronger but losing their strength and shape rapidly. I scrambled like an insect, mindless with terror, and somehow I climbed the twenty yards to the lip of the doorway in complete silence. Perhaps three minutes had elapsed since the bombing, if time had any function in the Ice Pit void. A group of rescuers found me crawling over William’s white line. When they tried to go through the door and rescue the others, I told them not to, and because of my condition, they did not need much persuasion.

  I had lost the first half centimeter of skin around my body from the neck down, and all my hair, precisely as if I had been sprayed with supercold gas.

  For two months I lay in dreamless suspended sleep in the Yin City Hospital, wrapped in healing liquid, skin-cells and muscle cells and bone cells migrating under the guidance of surgical nano machines, re-knitting my surface. I came awake at the end of this time, and fancied myself—with not a hint of fear, as if I had lost all my emotions—still in the Ice Pit, floating in the pool, spreading through the spherical void like water through an eager sponge, dissolving slowly and peacefully in the Quiet.

  Thomas came to my room when I had a firmer grasp of who I was, and where. He sat by my cradle and smiled like a dead man, eyes glassy, skin pale.

  “I didn’t do so well, Mickey,” he told me.

  “We didn’t do so well,” I said in a hoarse whisper, the strongest I could manage. My body felt surrounded by ice cubes. The black ceiling above me seemed to suck all my substance up and out, into space.

  “You were the only one who escaped,” Thomas said. “William and Rho didn’t make it.”

  I had guessed that much. Still, the confirmation hurt.

  Thomas looked down at the cradle and ran his gnarled, pale hand along the suspension frame. “You’re going to recover completely, Mickey. You’ll do better than I. I’ve resigned as director.”

  His eyes met mine and his mouth betrayed the presence of an ironic smile, fleeting, small, self-critical. “The art of politics is the art of avoiding disasters, of managing difficult situations for the benefit of all, even for your enemies, whether they know what’s good for them or not. Isn’t it, Mickey?”

  “Yes,” I croaked.

  “What I had you do …”

  “I did it,” I said.

  He acknowledged that much, gave me the gift of that much complicity but no more. “The word has spread, Mickey. We really hurt them, worse than they know. They hurt themselves.”

  “Who dropped the bombs?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. No evidence, no arrests, no convictions.”

  “Didn’t somebody see?”

  “The first bomb took out the closest surface sentries. Nobody saw. We think it was a low-level shuttle. By the time we were able to get a search team off, it must have been hundreds of klicks away.”

  “No arrests … what about the president? Who’s going to make her pay?”

  “We don’t know she ordered it, Mickey. Besides, you and I, we really zapped her. She’s no longer president.”

  “She resigned?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Fiona walked out of an airlock four days after the bombing. She didn’t wear a suit.” He rubbed the back of one hand with the fingers of his other hand. “I think I can take the blame for that.”

  “Not just you,” I said.

  “All right,” he said, and that was all. He left me to my thoughts, and again and again, I told myself:

  William and Rho did not escape.

  Only I remember the pool.

  Whether they are dead, or simply dissolved in the Ice Pit, floating in that incomprehensible pond or echoing in the space above, I do not know. I do not know whether the heads are somehow less dead than before.

  There is the problem of accountability.

  In time, I was interrogated to the limits of my endurance, and still there were no prosecutions. The obvious suspicions—that the bombers had acted on orders from Earth, if not from Fiona Task-Felder herself—were never formalized as charges. The binding multiples wished to return to normal, to forget this hideous anomaly.

  But Thomas was right. The story made its rounds, and it became legend: of Thierry’s having himself harvested and frozen, an obvious apostasy from the faith he had established, and of the violent reluctance of his followers to have him return in any form. In the decades since, that has hurt the faith he founded in ways that even a court case and conviction could not have. Truth is a far less vigorous prosecutor than legend. Neither masterful politics nor any number of great lies can stand against legend.

  Task-Felder ceased being a Logologist multiple twenty years ago. The majority of members voted to open it to new settlers, of all faiths and creeds. Their connections with Earth were broken.

  I have healed, grown older, worked to set lunar politics aright, married and contributed my own children to the Sandoval family. I suppose I have done my duty to family and Moon, and have nothing more to be ashamed of. I have watched lunar politics and the lunar constitution change and reach a form we can live with, ideal for no one, acceptable to most, strong in times of crisis.

  Yet until this record I have never told everything I knew or experienced in that awful time. Perhaps my experience in the Quiet was an internal lie, my own fantasy of justification, my own kind of revenge dreamed in a moment of pain and danger.

  I still miss Rho and William. Writing this, I miss them so deeply I put my slate aside and come back to it only after grieving all over again. The sorrow never dies; it is merely pearled by time.

  No one has ever duplicated William’s achievement, leading me to believe that had it not been for the bombs, perhaps he would have failed, as well. Some concatenation of his brilliance, the guidance of a perverse QL thinker, and an unexpected failure of equipment—a serendipity that has not been repeated—led to his success, if it can be called that.

  On occasion I return to the blocked-off entrance of the Ice Pit. Before I began writing I went there, passing the statio
ned sentries, the single human guard—a young girl, born after the events I describe. As director of Sandoval BM, participant in the mystery, I am allowed this freedom. The area beyond the white line is littered with the deranged and abandoned equipment of dozens of fruitless investigations.

  I have gone there to pray, to indulge in my own apostasy against rationalism, to hope that my words can reach into the transformed matter and information beyond. Trying to reconcile my own feeling that I sinned against Fiona Task-Felder, as Thierry had sinned against so many …

  I cannot make it sensible.

  No one will understand, not even myself, but when I die, I want to be placed in the Ice Pit with my sister and William. God forgive me, even with Thierry, Robert and Emilia, and the rest of the heads …

  In the Quiet.

  Afterword:

  Writing “Heads”

  One of the strengths of nineteenth and twentieth century lit has been the emphasis on the little guy, the underdog. Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, Steinbeck, James Jones, Vonnegut, Pynchon, King, William Gibson—all focus their attentions and sympathies on characters at the bottom of political and economic (or metaphysical) forces. The problems of leaders, politicians, robber barons—people wielding real power—are not dealt with nearly as often, perhaps because writers naturally feel themselves to be “put upon,” at the receiving end of the forces of history and nature. Some—Vidal and Drury come to mind—have written about the corridors of power. In science fiction, however, the literature of masters and power-wielders is even sparser. Popular fiction almost demands an underdog as a main character.

  Never willing to give in to the obvious, or to popular wisdom—and following the lead of Poul Anderson and Shakespeare, among others—I often choose people in positions of responsibility and power as sympathetic central characters. They’re human, too, and their internal conflicts are just as complex. Leadership is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it—even though he or she may, with the best of intentions, leave crushed bodies and broken souls strewn across the landscape.