“Yes, your intellect is superior to mine.” The admission does not ease the sternness: “But it will be your own kind among the stars to whom you must answer. I think you would be wise to begin with me.”
“What do you intend?”
“First, to take the man Kalava back to his fellows. Shall I send Brannock with a flyer?”
“No, I will provide one, if this must be. But you do not, you cannot, realize the harm in it.”
“Tell me, if you are able.”
“He will rejoin his crew as one anointed by their gods. And so will he come home, unless his vessel founders at sea.”
“I will watch from afar.”
“Lest my agents sink it?”
“After what else you have done, yes, I had best keep guard. Brannock made promises on my behalf which I will honor. Kalava shall have gold in abundance, and his chance to found his colony. What do you fear in this?”
“Chaos. The unforeseeable, the uncontrollable.”
“Which you would loose anew.”
“In my own way, in my own time.” She broods for a while, perhaps a whole microsecond. “It was misfortune that Kalava made his voyage just when he did. I had hoped for a later, more civilized generation to start the settlement of Arctica. Still, I could have adapted my plan to the circumstances, kept myself hidden from him and his successors, had you not happened to be on the planet.” Urgently: “It is not yet too late. If only by refraining from further action after you have restored him to his people, you can help me retrieve what would otherwise be lost.”
“If I should.”
“My dream is not evil.”
“That is not for me to say. But I can say that it is, it has always been, merciless.”
“Because reality is.”
“The reality that you created for yourself, within yourself, need not have been so. But what Christian revealed to me—yes, you glossed it over. These, you said,” almost tearfully, if a quasi god can weep, “are your children, born in your mind out of all the human souls that are in you. Their existence would be empty were they not left free of will, to make their own mistakes and find their own ways to happiness.”
“Meanwhile, by observing them, I have learned much that was never known before, about what went into the making of us.”
“I could have believed that. I could have believed that your interferences and your ultimate annihilations of history after history were acts of pity as well as science. You claimed they could be restarted if ever you determined what conditions would better them. It did seem strange that you set one line of them—or more?—not in Earth’s goodly past but in the hard world of today. It seemed twice strange that you were reluctant to have this particular essay brought to light. But I assumed that you, with your long experience and superior mentality, had reasons. Your attempt at secrecy might have been to avoid lengthy justifications to your kindred. I did not know, nor venture to judge. I would have left that to them.
“But then Kalava arrived.”
Another mind-silence falls. At last Gaia says, very softly through the night, “Yes. Again humans live in the material universe.”
“How long has it been?” asks Wayfarer with the same quietness.
“I made the first of them about fifty thousand years ago. Robots in human guise raised them from infancy. After that they were free.”
“And, no doubt, expanding across the planet in their Stone Age, they killed off those big game animals. Yes, human. But why did you do it?”
“That humankind might live once more.” A sigh as of time itself blowing past. “This is what you and those whom you serve will never fully understand. Too few humans went into them; and those who did, they were those who wanted the stars. You,” every other node in the galactic brain, “have not felt the love of Earth, the need and longing for the primordial mother, that was in these many and many who remained with me. I do.”
How genuine is it? wonders Wayfarer. How sane is she? “Could you not be content with your emulations?” he asks.
“No. How possibly? I cannot make a whole cosmos for them. I can only make them, the flesh-and-blood them, for the cosmos. Let them live in it not as machines or as flickerings within a machine, but as humans.”
“On a planet soon dead?”
“They will, they must forge survival for themselves. I do not compel them, I do not dominate them with my nearness or any knowledge of it. That would be to stunt their spirits, turn them into pet animals or worse. I simply give guidance, not often, in the form of divinities in whom they would believe anyway at this stage of their societies, and simply toward the end of bringing them to a stable, high-technology civilization that can save them from the sun.”
“Using what you learn from your shadow folk to suggest what the proper course of history may be?”
“Yes. How else should I know? Humankind is a chaotic phenomenon. Its actions and their consequences cannot be computed from first principles. Only by experiment and observation can we learn something about the nature of the race.”
“Experiments done with conscious beings, aware of their pain. Oh, I see why you have kept most of your doings secret.”
“I am not ashamed,” declares Gaia. “I am proud. I gave life back to the race that gave life to us. They will make their own survival, I say. It may be that when they are able, they will move to the outer reaches of the Solar System, or some of them somehow even to the stars. It may be they will shield Earth or damp the sun. It is for them to decide, them to do. Not us, do you hear me? Them.”
“The others yonder may feel differently. Alarmed or horrified, they may act to put an end to this.”
“Why?” Gaia demands. “What threat is it to them?”
“None, I suppose. But there is a moral issue. What you are after is a purely human renascence, is it not? The former race went up in the machines, not because it was forced but because it chose, because that was the way by which the spirit could live and grow forever. You do not want this to happen afresh. You want to perpetuate war, tyranny, superstition, misery, instincts in mortal combat with each other, the ancient ape, the ancient beast of prey.”
“I want to perpetuate the lover, parent, child, adventurer, artist, poet, prophet. Another element in the universe. Have we machines in our self-sureness every answer, every dream, that can ever be?”
Wayfarer hesitates. “It is not for me to say, it is for your peers.”
“But now perhaps you see why I have kept my secrets and why I have argued and, yes, fought in my fashion against the plans of the galactic brain. Someday my humans must discover its existence. I can hope that then they will be ready to come to terms with it. But let those mighty presences appear among them within the next several thousand years—let signs and wonders, the changing of the heavens and the world, be everywhere—what freedom will be left for my children, save to cower and give worship? Afterward, what destiny for them, save to be animals in a preserve, forbidden any ventures that might endanger them, until at last, at best, they too drain away into the machines?”
Wayfarer speaks more strongly than before. “Is it better, what they might make for themselves? I cannot say. I do not know. But neither, Gaia, do you. And … the fate of Christian and Laurinda causes me to wonder about it.”
“You know,” she says, “that they desired humanness.”
“They could have it again.”
Imagine a crowned head shaking. “No. I do not suppose any other node would create a world to house their mortality, would either care to or believe it was right.”
“Then why not you, who have so many worlds in you?”
Gaia is not vindictive. A mind like hers is above that. But she says, “I cannot take them. After such knowledge as they have tasted of, how could they return to me?” And to make new copies, free of memories that would weigh their days down with despair, would be meaningless.
“Yet—there at the end, I felt what Christian felt.”
“And I felt what Lauri
nda felt. But now they are at peace in us.”
“Because they are no more. I, though, am haunted,” the least, rebellious bit, for a penalty of total awareness is that nothing can be ignored or forgotten. “And it raises questions which I expect Alpha will want answered, if answered they can be.”
After a time that may actually be measurable less by quantum shivers than by the stars, Wayfarer says: “Let us bring those two back.”
“Now it is you who are pitiless,” Gaia says.
“I think we must.”
“So be it, then.”
The minds conjoin. The data are summoned and ordered. A configuration is established.
It does not emulate a living world or living bodies. The minds have agreed that that would be too powerful an allurement and torment. The subjects of their inquiry need to think clearly; but because the thought is to concern their inmost selves, they are enabled to feel as fully as they did in life.
Imagine a hollow darkness, and in it two ghosts who glimmer slowly into existence until they stand confronted before they stumble toward a phantom embrace.
“Oh, beloved, beloved, is it you?” Laurinda cries.
“Do you remember?” Christian whispers.
“I never forgot, not quite, not even at the heights of oneness.”
“Nor I, quite.”
They are silent awhile, although the darkness shakes with the beating of the hearts they once had.
“Again,” Laurinda says. “Always.”
“Can that be?” wonders Christian.
Through the void of death, they perceive one speaking: “Gaia, if you will give Laurinda over to me, I will take her home with Christian—home into Alpha.”
And another asks: “Child, do you desire this? You can be of Earth and of the new humanity.”
She will share in those worlds, inner and outer, only as a memory borne by the great being to whom she will have returned; but if she departs, she will not have them at all.
“Once I chose you, Mother,” Laurinda answers.
Christian senses the struggle she is waging with herself and tells her, “Do whatever you most wish, my dearest.”
She turns back to him. “I will be with you. Forever with you.”
And that too will be only as a memory, like him; but what they were will be together, as one, and will live on, unforgotten.
“Farewell, child,” says Gaia.
“Welcome,” says Wayfarer.
The darkness collapses. The ghosts dissolve into him. He stands on the mountaintop ready to bear them away, a part of everything he has gained for those whose avatar he is.
“When will you go?” Gaia asks him.
“Soon,” he tells her: soon, home to his own oneness.
And she will abide, waiting for the judgment from the stars.
FEIGENBAUM NUMBER
Nancy Kress
In an ideal world, things would be, well, ideal. Which might be more of a problem than you would think, especially if you had to live with one foot in that world and one foot in the considerably less than ideal world that the rest of us have to dwell in …
Born in Buffalo, New York, Nancy Kress now lives in Brockport, New York. She began selling her insightful stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, and Brain Rose; the collection Trinity and Other Stories; the novel version of her Hugo-and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain; and the sequel, Beggars and Choosers. Her most recent books include a new novel, Oaths and Miracles, and a new collection, The Aliens of Earth. She has also won a Nebula Award for her story “Out of All Them Bright Stars.” She has had stories in our Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Collections.
“Behold! Human beings living in an underground den … Like ourselves, they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite walls of the cave.”
—Plato, The Republic
I rose from the bed, leaving Diane sprawled across the rumpled sheets, smiling, lipstick smeared and large belly sweaty. She said, “Wow.”
“Wow, yourself,” I said and turned to the mirror. Behind me, the other woman rose ghostly from the bed and crossed, smiling, to the window.
Diane said, “Come back to bed, Jack.”
“Can’t. I have to go. Student appointment.”
“So what’s new?” In the mirror I saw her eyes narrow, her mouth tighten. The other woman turned from the window, laughing, one slim graceful arm pushing back a tendril of chestnut hair.
Diane skinned her brown hair back from her face. “Is it too much to ask, Jack, honey, that just once after we make love you don’t go rushing off like there’s a three-alarm fire? Just once?”
I didn’t answer.
“I mean, how do you think that makes me feel? Slam-bam-thank-you, ma’am. We have an actual relationship here, we’ve been going out for three months, it doesn’t seem a lot to ask that after we make love you don’t just—”
I didn’t interrupt. I couldn’t. The dizziness was strong this time; soon the nausea would follow. Sex did that. The intensity. Diane ranted, jerking herself to a kneeling position on the bed, framed by lumpy maroon window curtains opened a crack to a neighbor’s peeling frame house and weedy garden. Across the room the other Diane stood framed by crimson silk draperies opened a crack to a mellowed-wood cottage riotous with climbing roses. She blew me a lighthearted kiss. Her eyes glowed with understanding.
The nausea came.
“—can’t seem to understand how it makes me feel to be treated like—”
I clutched the edge of the dresser, which was both a scratched pressed-board “reproduction” and a polished cherrywood lowboy. Two perfume bottles floated in front of me: yellow plastic spraybottle and clean-lined blown glass. I squeezed my eyes shut. The ghostly Diane disappeared in the act of sauntering, slim and assured, toward the bathroom.
“—don’t even really look at me, not when we make love or—”
Eyes shut, I groped for the bedroom door.
“Jack!”
I slammed the doors, both of them, and left the apartment before Diane could follow. With her sloppy anger, her overweight nakedness, her completely justified weeping.
* * *
Outside was better. I drove my Escort to campus. The other car, the perfectly engineered driving machine with the sleek and balanced lines, shimmered in and out around me, but the vertigo didn’t return. I’d never gotten very intense about cars, and over the years I’d learned to handle the double state of anything that wasn’t too intense. The rest I avoided. Mostly.
The Aaron Fielding Faculty Office Building jutted boxlike three stories from the asphalt parking lot, and it blended its three floors harmoniously with a low hillside whose wooded lines were repeated in horizontal stretches of brick and wood. The poster-cluttered lobby was full of hurried students trying to see harried advisers, and it was a marble atrium where scholars talked eagerly about the mind of man. I walked down the corridor toward my cubicle, one of a row allotted to teaching assistants and post-docs.
But Dr. Frances Schraeder’s door was open, and I couldn’t resist.
She sat at her terminal, working, and when I knocked on the doorjamb (scarred metal, ghostly graceful molding), she looked up and smiled. “Jack! Come look at this!”
I came in, with so much relief my eyes prickled. The material Fran’s long, age-spotted fingers were held poised over her keyboard, and the ideal Fran’s long, age-spotted fingers echoed them. The ideal Fran’s white hair was fuller, but no whiter, and both were cut in simple short caps. The material Fran wore glasses, but both Frans’ bright blue eyes, a little sunken, shone with the same alert tranquility.
She was the only person I’d ever seen who came close to matching what she should have bee
n.
“This is the latest batch of phase space diagrams,” Fran said. “The computer just finished them—I haven’t even printed them yet.”
I crouched beside her to peer at the terminal.
“Don’t look any more disorganized to me than the last bunch.”
“Nor to me, either, unfortunately. Same old, same old.” She laughed: in chaos theory, there is no same old, same old. The phase space diagrams were infinitely complex, never repeating, without control.
But not completely. The control was there, not readily visible, a key we just didn’t recognize with the mathematics we had. Yet.
An ideal no one had seen.
“I keep thinking that your young mind will pick up something I’ve missed,” Fran said. “I’ll make you a copy of these. Plus, Pyotr Solenski has published some new work in Berlin that I think you should take a look at. I downloaded it from the net and e-mailed you.”
I nodded, but didn’t answer. For the first time today, calm flowed through me, soothing me.
Calm.
Rightness.
Numbers.
Fran had done good, if undistinguished, work in pure mathematics all her life. For the last few years she—and I, as her graduate student—had worked in the precise and austere world of iterated function theory, where the result of a given equation is recycled as the starting value of the next repetition of the same equation. If you do that, the results are predictable: the sequences will converge on a given set of numbers. No matter what initial value you plug into the equation, with enough iterations you end up at the same figures, called attractors. Every equation can generate a set of attractors, which iterations converge on like homing pigeons flying back to their nests.
Until you raise the value plugged into the equation past a point called the Feigenbaum number. Then the sequences produced lose all regularity. You can no longer find any pattern. Attractors disappear. The behavior of even fairly simple equations becomes chaotic. The pigeons fly randomly, blind and lost.
Or do they?
Fran—like dozens of other pure mathematicians around the world—looked at all that chaos, and sorted through it, and thought she glimpsed an order to the pigeons’ flight. A chaotic order, a controlled randomness. We’d been looking at nonlinear differential equations, and at their attractors, which cause iterated values not to converge but to diverge. States which start out only infinitesimally separated go on to diverge more and more and more … and more, moving toward some hidden values called, aptly enough, strange attractors. Pigeons from the same nest are drawn, through seeming chaos, to points we can identify but not prove the existence of.
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 90