Forbes, who remembered different days, had grown uncomfortable with some of the complacent assumptions of modern times. Was the Wire-delivered hegemony of the Western world really such a good idea? There had been the Gulf War, for instance, in which US marines had used a hidden Wire gateway to storm Saddam’s bunker, deposing him with scarcely a shot and then ‘liberating’ that country… There was no doubt that Saddam had been a monster. But Forbes recalled that rather similar schemes had been hatched by the Nazis. How must such actions look to the average Iraqi?
But such arguments were just excuses, Max said. Once again, she had told him, he was attempting to outrun the future. He really must let go at last, learn to trust the young people, not fear them… and so on. He had stopped listening to all that long ago.
But in the end, he was sorry to lose her. He could not say they were friends, and certainly no longer in love; she was, simply, Max. And increasingly her lined face was overlaid in his mind by images of a bright, excitable young redhead in khakis…
He was becoming, he decided, a sentimental old fool.
Forbes felt a low thrumming, transmitted to him through the frame of his couch. It was smooth, subdued, and yet it inevitably reminded him of the scream of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine, the subterranean rumble of a Mustard’s gigantic liquid-fuel rockets.
The cabin seemed to tip as acceleration built up. The autumn light of Mars faded.
Forbes felt a surge of exhilaration. Bugger old age. He was going to the stars!
2007: Oxford, England
…I go to the seminars when I can—after all, Wire travel is hardly a challenge, even for an old lady like me. In fact the last one I attended was at the University’s new Shaw Library—have you heard of it? A room in the Bodleian is connected, via Wired doors, to rooms on the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, Triton…
But though I religiously turn up, Henry, you probably won’t believe me when I say that the new ideas even leave me behind most of the time! Let me mention some of them to you:
First of all, the Wiring of minds. That may seem rather spooky to you—and to me!—but believe me, it’s a very real possibility, now that we understand the equations that govern consciousness processes—for consciousness itself, of course, is a quantum phenomenon. It’s all an outgrowth of quantum computing. I’m sure you know, Henry, your precious Discovery is guided by a million-quantum-dot Factorisation Engine, no matter how spooky you think it is! And because computational power is combinatorial—oh, dear Henry, I don’t think I have time to explain it all—suffice it to say that two minds are much better than one! And so are three, or four… or a billion. Some commentators feel we’re on the verge of the most dramatic leap in human evolution since Homo Habilis.
What else?
Well, you’ve probably read about the new nanogates—miniature Wire gates, which can transmit an atom at a time… There was a piece in the Lancet outlining medical applications. It would be possible to inject a patient with smart nanogates which could hunt out and radio-transport away toxins, or cancerous cells…! A little too late for me, unfortunately…
And then there is the possibility of faster-than-light travel—there, what do you think of that! It’s all based on something called quantum tunnelling. If you try to contain a photon by a barrier, there is a small but finite probability—because of quantum uncertainty—that you’ll suddenly find it on the far side of the barrier. And if you do, there is no appreciable delay… I’ve been following the theoretical research for decades, but the practical breakthrough came in the ’90s when an Austrian team transmitted a rather scratchy recording of Mozart’s 40th Symphony at 4.7 times the speed of light! And this year, Bell Labs are going to try to send a wooden cube across a few miles—just like our first experiments with the Wire.
Henry, I hope you don’t find that by the time you reach Centauri in your rather lumbering inertial-drive Sopwith Camel, you haven’t been overtaken by a faster-than-light Spitfire!…
So my work continues to absorb me. And, Henry, you must believe me when I say—and I know I repeat myself—these young people are wonderful, so much better than we were, if sometimes a little scary. Do you know, the new Prime Minister wasn’t even born when the first Wire service was opened up! Do you remember that ridiculous affair with the flag? It seems hardly yesterday… Prime Minister: foolish me, I meant the Governor, of course. Dates me, doesn’t it!
They say that for the young in the schools now, even the concept of nation seems absurd. They can’t believe that a mere half-century ago we’d just come out of a war—it seems to them like a hideous human sacrifice… It makes us old folk uncomfortable sometimes, but it’s hard to deny the logic! Our young live in a rich, clean world, and there’s no reason why anyone should go short of the fundamentals of life, not until the Solar System itself starts to run dry—and even then we’ll have the stars, thanks to you and Discovery…
I know it’s hard to accept change. This new world often seems very strange to me, and I sometimes wonder where humanity will be in ten, or twenty, or thirty years time, when even human thought has been Wired. In a way I understand why you’ve continued to flee, my dear—at last, all the way to the stars! But there was nothing to fear. Perhaps if you had had a child of your own, or if we had had one, you might be able to see it…
Now, you mustn’t be distressed by my little bit of news, Henry my dear. I’m not in any pain or discomfort. I’ve been involved in a lot of wizard japes in my time, which is just the sort of thing your old RAF pals used to say, so you see I was paying attention to you after all, even all those years ago! My only regret is I won’t get to see any more of the wonderful future that’s opening up—and I won’t see you again, and, yes, that is important to me…
2017: Between Stars
He lay in his cabin, an old mechanical clock softly ticking. He could smell nothing, taste nothing, every breath hurt, and all he could see was a series of vague blurs. He was a crock and no mistake, and he’d really had enough of this caper…
Somehow he knew today was the day.
It didn’t seem so tragic to Forbes. It was rather like the elephants, he thought. He once knew a chap who had been to India—and this was before the Empire broke up, before the war—and this chap came back with stories of the elephants, and how they would know when it was their time. They would leave their herds and seek out a quiet place, without any fuss…
Perhaps it was true. And perhaps humans shared the same instinct, and if so, it was a remarkable comfort. After all, he’d had a good innings; he might have bought it at any time in the ’40s, and a lot of good men had done just that.
His breath was scratching in his throat. It was a blithering nuisance—
The walls dissolved around him.
He felt a stab of shock—and irritation. He was scared. But what on Earth was the point of his being frightened now?
…But he was suspended in stars, stars above and below and all around him. Ahead, they were tinged the subtlest blue.
…You shouldn’t fear us.
A uniform light came up—just a little, leaving the sky a deep midnight blue, but enough to wash out the stars.
A cramped cabin. A stick in his hand. Something in his ears—he lifted his hand—it was cotton wool…
Good God. He was back in a Vampire, its duck-egg-green hull all around him. There was even a fresh carnation in his buttonhole.
You didn’t have to flee into the dark.
The nose of the Vampire dipped, and the Earth itself was spread out beneath him, curving gently, glowing with a network of light, a Wire continuum.
We are you. You are us. Because of your courage, mankind will live forever. We honour you. We want you to join us.
So they, the young people—or whatever ruddy thing they had become—had brought him all the way home, from the stars. To be able to do such a thing, they were like gods. It occurred to him he ought to be frightened of them, as he always had been, a little.
But they were human chil
dren, all the same.
Perhaps Max had been right. Perhaps it was time, at last, for him to place his destiny in other hands.
There was no Max down there, though. Even they couldn’t reach beyond the grave. Not yet, anyhow.
Welcome home…
He would be safe down there, when he landed. But there was no rush. A few more minutes wouldn’t harm. Perhaps he could take the kite for a couple of turns over London…
He stuffed the Vampire’s nose down and began his long fall back into the atmosphere.
Improving the Neighbourhood
First published in Nature, 4th November 1999
The first science fiction Nature ever published. I wonder how many heart attacks it induced among its more conservative readers.
At last, after feats of information processing that taxed our resources to the limit, we have solved the long-standing mystery of the Double Nova. Even now, we have interpreted only a small fraction of the radio and optical messages from the culture that perished so spectacularly, but the main facts—astonishing though they are—seem beyond dispute.
Our late neighbours evolved on a world much like our own planet, at such a distance from its sun that water was normally liquid. After a long period of barbarism, they began to develop technologies using readily available materials and sources of energy. Their first machines—like ours—depended on chemical reactions involving the elements hydrogen, carbon and oxygen.
Inevitably, they constructed vehicles for moving on land and sea, as well as through the atmosphere and out into space. After discovering electricity, they quickly developed telecommunications devices, including the radio transmitters that first alerted us to their existence. Although the moving images these provided revealed their appearance and behaviour, most of our understanding of their history and eventual fate has been derived from the complex symbols that they used to record information.
Shortly before the end, they encountered an energy crisis, partly triggered by their enormous physical size and violent activity. For a while, the widespread use of uranium fission and hydrogen fusion postponed the inevitable. Then, driven by necessity, they made desperate attempts to find superior alternatives. After several false starts, involving low-temperature nuclear reactions of scientific interest but no practical value, they succeeded in tapping the quantum fluctuations that occur at the very foundations of space-time. This gave them access to a virtually infinite source of energy.
What happened next is still a matter of conjecture. It may have been an industrial accident, or an attempt by one of their many competing organisations to gain advantage over another. In any event, by mishandling the ultimate forces of the Universe, they triggered a cataclysm which detonated their own planet—and, very shortly afterwards, its single large moon.
Although the annihilation of any intelligent beings should be deplored, it is impossible to feel much regret in this particular case. The history of these huge creatures contains countless episodes of violence, against their own species and the numerous others that occupied their planet. Whether they would have made the necessary transition—as we did, ages ago—from carbon- to germanium-based consciousness, has been the subject of much debate. It is quite surprising what they were able to achieve, as massive individual entities exchanging information at a pitiably low data rate—often by very short-range vibrations in their atmosphere!
They were apparently on the verge of developing the necessary technology that would have allowed them to abandon their clumsy, chemically fuelled bodies and thus achieve multiple connectivity: had they succeeded, they might well have been a serious danger to all the civilizations of our Local Cluster.
Let us ensure that such a situation never arises again.
Dedicated to Drs Pons and Fleischmann, Nobel laureates of the twenty-first century.
1 Ealing Studios deny the very plausible rumour that Alec Guiness’s ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ was inspired by these events. It is known, however, that at one time Peter Cushing was being considered for the role of the Reverend Cabbage.
2 Since the 1970s my indefatigable brother Fred Clarke, with the help of such distinguished musicians as Sir Yehudi Menuhin (who has already conducted three performances of Handel’s Messiah for this purpose) has spearheaded a campaign for the restoration of this magnificent instrument.
3 A small portion—two or three gearwheels and what appears to be a pneumatic valve—are still in the possession of the local Historical Society. These pathetic relics reminded me irresistibly of another great technological might-have-been, the famous Anticythera Computer (see Derek de Solla Price, Scientific American, July 1959) which I last saw in 1965, ignominiously relegated to a cigar box in the basement of the Athens Museum. My suggestion that it was the Museum’s most important exhibit was not well received.
4 How D. H. Lawrence ever heard of this affair is still a mystery. As is now well known, he had originally planned to make the protagonist of his most famous novel not Lady Chatterley but her husband; however, discretion prevailed, and the Cabbage Connection was revealed only when Lawrence foolishly mentioned it, in confidence, to Frank Harris, who promptly published it in the Saturday Review. Lawrence never spoke to Harris again; but then, no one ever did.
A Meeting With Medusa Page 30