The Wizard from Earth

by S. J. Ryan

  "Am I hearing correctly? You belittle the ancient texts, yet hold to folk tales?"

  "We're not discoursing on what I believe, but on what the people believe. And there is talk now among them about the fulfillment of prophecy."

  Archimedes stopped stirring. "Now that you mention it, the sailors on that ship said that the exact date of the comet had been foretold in their annals. I assumed that if that were true, then perhaps some ancient astronomer of the south had viewed its prior coming and had calculated its period and time of return, and somehow scientific prediction had taken on the aura of religious prophecy. And that's probably all it is."

  "You've heard the street rumors of last night? The dancing of faeries about Moonstar?"

  Archimedes sniffed, chewed, and said, "This is good porridge."

  Actually, it was all but tasteless, but that was all to the better, because there was no flavor to mask the slightest whiff of poison. Another way to avoid poison was not to eat at the Emperor's table, but to decline the Emperor's hospitality could be almost as fatal as poison.

  "The whole city is babbling," Hadron said. "I know this, because I have informants in the marketplace who listen – "

  "Eavesdrop," Archimedes said with a mouthful.

  " – so that I may know the hearts and minds of the People, so that I can rule more wisely."

  "And, more securely."

  "I have enemies, Archie." Hadron's forehead reddened and pulsed. "You have no idea."

  "I have quite a few ideas on just that subject. General Valarion and his consort-witch, to start."

  "Not that again. Look, I need this apparition investigated scientifically, before the public panics."

  "Investigate what apparition? Generals cavorting with witches? I too would like that investigated."

  "I meant, the celestial apparition that occurred last night, of the dancing of faeries about Moonstar."

  "You have no idea how absurd that phrase sounds upon the tongue of the most powerful man in Rome.”

  “I'm the most powerful man in the world, and still I'm saying it, and as ridiculous as you find it, I want an investigation.”

  “Well, I'm trying to envision how people can see faeries as far as Moonstar. Faeries are supposed to be small, are they not? Yet Moonstar is hundreds of kilometers above our heads."

  "They don't actually see faeries, they just see lights moving about randomly and in their imaginations the lights become faeries engaged in dance. So you see how these things get conflated. Likewise, there was nothing in the prophecy about the comet that mentioned any activity having to do with Moonstar, but as the two events occur together in time, they must be related – so lesser minds think. Confusion of Concurrence with Causality, as you used to say."

  "And still do."

  "And I agree, yours is the right way to think. But the people are coming to believe that the comet and the lights herald the coming of the Star Child – the Mak or Map or whatever he is supposed to be called. And then there are the insurrectionists who will seize upon any old myth as a pretext for divine approval of their aims. For example, what have you heard of the rebellion of Queen Boudica in Britan?"

  "I thought Valarion was supposed to be handling that."

  "And so he is. But that is an example of what I mean. In that case a mentor fable of Aereoth which is applied as prophecy for political ends. And so here at home, before someone takes political advantage of it, I need you to handle the superstition of the Roman people. I need you to convince them that this recent apparition about Moonstar is merely a scientific phenomenon and not the end of the world as we know it."

  "Have you forgotten, my Emperor? You appointed me Chief Scientist of Rome, which means now no one ever listens to me anymore. So how am I to convince anyone of anything?"

  "Don't tell them, show them. Let them plainly see with their own eyes that comets are not 'sky chariots' and moons are not 'space stations.' And so that brings us to the point of this meeting. Now, I do too listen to you, Archimedes. And in fact, I recall you once formally requested funding to build a great lens-work to catalog the skies."

  The spoon plopped into the porridge.

  "The – the big telescope, you mean. Are you saying that you would be willing to fund it now?"

  "If it can be used to deflate public hysteria before an insurrectionist induces panic. You spoke of a public observatory. Build one here in the city, and I will pay for it."

  For a moment, Archimedes was lost in rapturous daydream. Imagine, being able to survey the surfaces of the Moon and planets as never before! To see stars by the million –

  "It – it should be erected in the mountains. To avoid the glare of the lights of the streets and buildings."

  "Build it here in the city, and fast, and I will pay any amount."

  Hadron lifted and opened a small nondescript chest, and took out a stylus and embossed certificate of treasury, which he pushed across the table to Archimedes.

  "Write any amount," the Emperor of the Roman Empire decreed.

  Archimedes met Hadron's stare, but then looked away and smiled impishly. He scribbled a ridiculous number. His smirk faded when, with only a brief glance, Hadron calmly pressed the imperial seal.

  6.

  Matt awoke, choking and coughing and wheezing. His lungs were on fire, his head pounded, his eyes stung. He tried to flail but his arms were rubbery noodles. He tried to speak but his tongue was a bloated dead fish.

  "Ivan!" he subvocalized. "Ivan!"

  "I am here, Matt."

  "Can't breathe. Help!"

  "I cannot help you at this time."

  "Stop pain! Hurts! Stop pain! Please!"

  "I cannot help you at this time."

  Matt tried to scream, but all he managed was a gurgle. He tried to writhe but he seemed paralyzed and the attempt to move only resulted in more pain. He tried to breathe but it was like his lungs were filled with mud.

  "Put . . . me . . . back . . . to . . . sleep!"

  "I cannot help you at this time."

  He tried to look around but he was blind. His ears rang so loud he could hear nothing but ringing.

  He felt like he was forever drowning, and after seeming hours he could take no more. "Bee Three See Seven . . . See Nine Jee Seven Jee . . . ."

  "Euthanasia protocol is unavailable at this time."

  The pain finally become unendurable and he passed out.

  He awoke to a heavy male voice declaring, "I have restored consciousness."

  The pain was gone – most of it. He breathed freely – and was there a greater pleasure?

  He opened his eyes. He was still in the pod, which was drained of biogel. The cover plate had been removed. An old-style medical robot was hovering half a dozen appendages with sharp-pointed accoutrements above his face. The straps on his chest and arms were undone and Matt managed to stiffly bend the upper part of his body so that, had he been in gravity and had there been an 'up,' he would have been sitting up in the pod.

  The pod rested in a cradle inside a chamber so tiny that his hair nearly brushed the roof. The walls of the chamber had numerous holes and slots, but no windows, signage, or controls that a human hand could work. The air that he was unevenly breathing was stuffy and a few degrees too cool – but he had the feeling that he should be glad there was any air at all.

  "Ivan, are you there?"

  "Yes, Matt. However, my systems are in a state of regeneration and I am operating at limited capacity at this time."

  "Is this Tian Orbital Station?"

  "We are in a station, but it is smaller than Tian Orbital Station. Also, Tian Orbital Station is in the Alpha Centauri system and this is the Delta Pavonis system. Therefore I do not believe this is Tian Orbital Station."

  Delta Pavonis, Matt thought. So the conversation with Ivan hadn't been a dream.

  For a long time, Matt said nothing. The medic puttered. Ivan waited.

  "Ivan, is anyone around that we can talk to?"

  "I have not been able to
contact a human or hypothetical alien intelligence. The only advanced AI I have been able to contact is a station keeper, but he is task-oriented."

  'Task-oriented' was almost a derogatory term among neural implant AIs, Matt knew. A 'task-oriented' AI was one who had been specifically programmed not to become an actualized personality. Sure, you could talk to it, and it would use the 'I' pronoun, but it wasn't going to provide the big picture. It didn't care about big pictures. It cared about its assigned tasks.

  Matt hesitated, then blurted The Big Question. "What year is this?"

  "By Standard Calendar, it is 2834."

  "Did you say . . . two . . . eight . . . three . . . four?"

  "Yes, it is the Standard Calendar Year 2834."

  "Is there any chance you're mistaken?"

  "There is always a chance that I am mistaken. However, my internal chronometer never shut down and is in agreement with the pod navigation chronometer and the station keeper chronometer. Therefore, I believe that the probability that I am mistaken about the Standard Year being 2834 is small."

  "That's . . . that's almost seven centuries. All right, I'm going to assume that you are correct, that we are in the Delta Pavonis System and that it is the year 2834. Now, I know you told me, but I was in a daze at the time. So can we review again how we got here?"

  Ivan opened a display window in Matt's vision and downloaded a summary from the pod computer. Matt paged through the graphics, studying them voraciously.

  His trip to Alpha Centauri had been uneventful until the pod had entered the inner layers of the Centauri Oort Cloud. Its course had been intercepted by a cloud of micro-meteoroids that had been too small and moving too fast to have been detected in time by Centauri Mission Control.

  The magsail was made of a molecular film only a few atoms thick. The millions of micro-meteoroids had no trouble punching holes in it. Sail cables and the pod itself presented such small targets that they had not been damaged, but the sail itself received the brunt of the effect of the impacts. In a split second, more than half the sail was lost, and so more than half the sail's ability to interact with the stellar magnetic field and decelerate was lost as well.

  Matt's pod had streaked into the Alpha Centauri system with a retained velocity .06 c – that is, eighteen thousand kilometers per second. That was far too fast for the thorium-propulsion retrieval tugs to capture. Had matters been left at that, the pod would have departed the Alpha Centauri system in a few days to escape into the depths of unknown space, its position calculable to within kilometers though beyond the ability of human technology to retrieve. Matt should have never been seen or heard of again.

  But then in his stupor, he had somehow managed to instruct Ivan to plot a course here instead. Alternately charging and de-charging the remnants of the magsail, Ivan had steered the pod on a hyperbolic passage near the sun that was Alpha Centauri, bending their trajectory so that they headed on toward the sun that was known as Delta Pavonis.

  Then Ivan had utilized the damaged sail to decelerate the pod during its passage out of the Centauri Oort Cloud to a velocity of approximately two and a half percent lightspeed. At the time it must have seemed a prudent measure, for the slower the pod moved, the easier it would have been for a rescue mission to intercept. But no intercept mission had been sent, and the end result of the reduced velocity was that it had taken more than six centuries to cross the sixteen light years between Alpha Centauri and Delta Pavonis.

  Once it had entered the fringes of the Delta Pavonis System, the magsail decelerated against the molecular wisps of the DP Oort Cloud. Entering the realm of the planetary system, the magsail interacted with the natural proton wind and photon flux from the star itself and decelerated further to a velocity sufficiently low enough for tug retrieval – that is, assuming a tug had been launched and outraced him there. Ivan's record of the pod AI's camera telemetry indeed showed the approach of tiny robots and a tug barely larger than the pod. They had made a rendezvous with the pod during its hyperbolic departure from the sun, and detached it from the magsail (which had proceeded outward again on a cometary trajectory into deep space).

  The tug had vectored the pod to this station and, in delicate choreography, robots had inserted it into this very compartment. The pod camera showed the compartment's exterior door closing. Interior lights flickered on. A rustle of tiny particles indicated the pumping of air. Out of a slot came a medical robot, which undid the cover plate . . . .

  Matt punched the virtual display, causing it to vanish.

  "Bottom line," he whispered. "Six hundred and eighty-four years, Delta Pavonis System. I guess I'd better get used to it."

  He waited for Ivan to give a snappy comeback. But Ivan was programmed to give snappy comebacks only in known, safe environments.

  Matt examined his hands. They were encrusted with dried biogel. Was biogel supposed to crust like that? He had never seen it do that in the videos of star traveler revival. Maybe it did crust, after the passage of centuries. Biogel doesn't last forever, after all. And neither do star pods.

  Neither do neural implants, he thought.

  His fingernails were too long. He ran them through his hair. It too was too long, and tangled, and coated with biogel dust. The ventilators were purring, but the whole chamber reeked of the minty stale smell of biogel dust well past shelf life.

  "There have got to be people," Matt said. "But there's nobody contacting us at all?"

  "The station keeper says he has received no contact at this time. I have asked him if he has records of prior contact, and he says no, and that he does not keep long term records."

  "Medical science had extended human life indefinitely, they said," Matt mumbled. "My family should still be alive. My friends too. Especially Synth, she should be fully ascended and all metal and energy by now so at least she would have lasted. My mom . . . nobody left a message?"

  "I don't know if this is relevant," Ivan said, "but it could be argued that the presence of this station in this star system is a message."

  Matt was prepared to technically agree with that, but surely family and friends wouldn't be so cryptically laconic. Unless, over centuries, their post-Singularity trans-humanism had evolved so far that they could no longer relate to the feelings of a scared more-or-less baseline-human kid.

  He remembered then. He reached down to the floor of the pod. He opened the tiny compartment in the middle. The box of mementoes, all that he had been allowed to bring with him from Earth, was there. He opened the box. There should have been a dried flower and blades of grass from Seattle in the bag. There were colorless, withered fragments. The pages of the old-fashioned book of poems were faded into unreadability and crumbled with the slightest touch.

  Daring not to destroy more, Matt put everything back and returned the box to the compartment.

  Bee . . . Three . . . See . . . Seven . . . no, he would find out what was going on first. That was the most important thing he had to do. It was the only thing he had to do.

  He searched for a hatch handle, twisting and flailing as he whirled and stared with futility at one smooth wall after another.

  "Somebody has to be around! Somebody has to be alive! Somebody will talk to me! Somebody will tell me what's going on! I need to get out of here and see what's – "

  The medic had the last words. "Patient is agitated. Revoking consciousness."

  7.

  Hardly anyone noticed the woman leading the litter through the streets of Rome that afternoon. She was tall and thin, attractive without, perhaps, being beautiful. The cut of her dress was middle class, the wife of a merchant or lawyer perhaps. She wore a plain shawl and no jewelry.

  What did distinguish her from the general crowd was her intense stare. Her black eyes did not meet gazes. They sized up targets.

  Behind her a pair of lackeys carried a small litter bearing a windowless black passenger box. They followed her every turn through the streets with precision, though she did not look back and they did not communi
cate.

  At the waterfront she stopped at the foot of a private pier, where a tall man resplendent in a purple fringed robe and flowing cape paced irritably.

  "Damn Inoldia," General Mardu Valarion said. "I have dinner with a prominent senator this evening."

  "No one in the Senate would care about a little lame boy who stuttered if it were not for me," Inoldia replied.

  She gave a curt nod to the litter bearers. The lowered the litter. Out stepped a small female form draped in a black cloak with a black, opaque veil.

  "Follow me," Inoldia said to the hidden figure. She led down the pier to the waiting galley.

  "That's not the point," Valarion said, rushing to catch up. "Our interests are both served if I maintain promptness in my appointments with the prominent members of Roman – "

  "I asked for your boat," Inoldia replied. "Not for your company."

  She boarded the yacht. The veiled figure followed. Valarion huffed aboard and signaled to the captain to loose the moorings.

  "Oh, I'm not going to miss this. A chance to see Cordant Island up close!"

  "We're not going to Cordant Island. We're going to the Island of the Sisters."

  "Well, yes, that's what used to be known as Cordant Island before you moved in."

  Inoldia realized that she had been caught in ignorance. But she covered with, "Now it's the Island of the Sisters of Wisdom."

  They cast off. The rowers gained rhythm and the galley skimmed across the bay. The captains of other boats saw the blue pennant with the white star and steered clear. It was a beautiful morning and the water was smooth, and they made good time passing between channel markers into open waters.

  Inoldia stood at the prow, watching the four pinnacles in the east. Valarion cautiously approached and nodded to the veiled figure. "May I inquire as to the identify of our guest?"

  "That's not for you to know."