Alice could see his reflection in the window glass. Without turning her head, she took the hands with her smaller ones, pulling Thomas's arms tight around her shoulders and chest—
—and the uniformed brother, that man of consequence, whimpered, "Please don't tell!"
"But I will," she promised. "Eventually." Then with one hand holding his arms in place, she took her dress with her free hand, by the hem, and lifted it from behind as she made a second promise, a low, roughened voice telling him, "You're my favorite brother, you always will be.…"
*
The penthouse dissolved into methane. With the perpetual smile and a gently embarrassed laugh, Perfect said, "I know. I paint our sister as conniving and treacherous. A little evil, even. But those aren't her only qualities, and they aren't even her largest. She's done wondrous things for every good reason, and we can only hope that's true of us, too." The incomplete hand touched him again, in a gesture that took hours. And meanwhile, Perfect told story upon story, proving their sister's innate decency, and in turn, perhaps unintentionally, proving too his own undiminished romantic affections.
With the pressure of the central thumb, Ord bristled. "We don't do that kind of thing anymore."
"You mature differently," Perfect agreed. "More slowly. With more help given."
"I've never thought of my sisters… in that way…!"
"But I think you appreciate my circumstances," the ancient man replied. "A profound emotional attachment made in my bedrock years, and I've built on that rock. Too much, I know, but what can I do now?"
Ord struggled to make his legs move faster, accomplishing nothing.
"You should know. Several times, in various cultures, Alice and I have been married. Husband and wife." A long, uncomfortable pause, then he reminded Ord, "Enough time passes, and the unlikely has its way of becoming ordinary. The unthinkable, tiresome."
The boy said nothing, lightning thoughts racing through him.
Perfect respected the silence, holding their pace but never speaking. Never intruding. The sun was dropping, clouds thickening until the air was saturated, a steady slow rain of energy-rich goo beginning, drops bursting on the sea and fish rising to feed, the business achingly slow, yet in its own way, frantic, repeating patterns even older than the Brongg.
There was a moment when Ord felt a sudden pressure, an inexplicable change of directions. But the beach and world looked the same.
Why would Alice need his help? Closure or no closure, how could he accomplish anything worthwhile?
Homesick to tears, Ords closed his eyes and walked blind.
His brother kept his steps true.
And when he couldn't contemplate his situation for another moment, Ord opened his eyes again, discovering that it was early evening and they were just a few steps away from their goal. Almost too late, he asked about the ancient times. About Ian, about his first children. And how the ordinary people had dealt with them, or not.
"Tell me," Ord begged.
Stories flowed from Perfect, genuine and simple, told with words and direct memories, accents made with the occasional slow flourish as the brothers marched across the last few meters of rain-spattered beach.
8
Sometimes Alice joined me on my explorations.
She was more a burden than a help. I was chasing living worlds, and she preferred the dead. We moved too fast for her to accomplish much, but she'd give the dead places little nudges. She warmed their cores or lent their atmosphere a potent gas or two. Another hundred million years, and who knows? Something might grow on them.…
But I wonder:
Are people going to declare those worlds illegal, too?
Will janitors be dispatched, ordered to scrub away all that treacherous prebiotic slime?
—Perfect, in conversation
The Brongg sun was barely visible as it set, shrouded in clouds and mammoth drops of new gasolines. The tall black cylinder was in front of Ord, in easy reach, but when he lifted his arm, it proved to be unreachable, a dreamy, teasing sense of distance only growing.
"Step again," Perfect advised.
When he stepped, at the moment of footfall, the Brongg homeworld evaporated. He was in freefall again, and the cylinder covered half of the sky— a deep blackness against a bottomless void. Ord kicked, cried out. Screamed and made no sound.
He was streaking toward their destination at a fat fraction of lightspeed, yet the final plunge took hours. A piece of him— some new subsystem; a canned memory— measured the target's size, in astonishment, and he pleaded with Perfect for an explanation, or encouragement, or even a few mild lies to mollify him.
Perfect said nothing, and was nowhere to be seen.
The impact was sudden— a brief, bitting pain, brilliant light of no color, then a hard and busy long sleep.
When Ord awoke, he found himself on another beach. He was dressed in his original clothes, including his favorite boots, and his body was his own, unscarred and excited, his heart beating inside its enduring cage of ribs.
"Oh, you're whole again. Thoroughly and genuinely."
The caveman sat beside him, his knapsack serving as a pillow. Again he wore skins and an oversized smile, but the blue eyes seemed distracted, even sad. Calloused feet splashed in a deep, rocky pool. A sourceless warm light made his brother's skin glow, pink with blood and pink with wear. A soft, proud voice asked, "What do you think?"
The pool and the sea beyond were filled with a watery fluid.
But it wasn't water, Ord realized.
The surface wore a thin persistent foam, transparent facets distorting the pool's bottom, water-worn stones overlaid with a matted emerald-brown hair. Life, he knew. And as life went, it was simple. Unsplendid. Even a little disappointing.
"Yet there was nothing like this on my last visit," the brother replied.
"A few protocells, all scavengers. Not one honest photosynthesizer among them."
Ord touched the foam-frosted pool, feeling warmth and a strange lack of wetness.
He rose to his feet, glad to be quick again.
In his body again. Whole and home.
"Look around," Perfect insisted. "Opinions, please."
A rocky beach had been shaped by waves and strong winds. Behind the beach, taller rocks merged into hills, then mountains, then masses too huge and distant to be mere mountains. But at least as astonishing was the sea, every little agitation, every insult, causing the foam to rise, flat and bright, jewel-like bubbles refracting light into every possible color. It was as if the boundaries between liquid and air were vague. Ord's eyes lifted, a general brilliance replacing any sun, the distant sea turning milk-white as each jewel's color blended into one.
"This is a dyson," Ord muttered, interrupting his own thoughts.
"Cylindrical, and spinning. The most ordinary part of the design, to my mind."
Reaching into the air, on his right and left, were hair-thin structures resembling the angle spokes on a crude wheel. Ord imagined they must give support; and in an instant, some subconscious calculation was delivered to him. He remembered the dyson's apparent size, which implied a certain length for the spokes, and a diameter, and their thinness was an illusion, much as a giant star will mimic a simple cold point.
"Nobody builds… on this scale…!"
"You were taught," growled his brother. "You were taught."
The hair-like spokes were thicker than some worlds. And with that revelation, Ord looked inland again, past the ordinary mountains, eyes lifting as the mind told him that the vast plateau was not, that what he saw was the base of the nearest spoke, the rest of it partially obscured by the glare of the sky.
"This little ocean?" Perfect boasted. "It covers an area greater than a hundred thousand earths, and it's a teardrop. Nothing more."
Numbed, Ord felt his legs tremble, his breath quicken.
"Taste the water," his brother insisted. "Here. Have a sip!"
Not water, and not wet. It was like a drink taken
in a dream, the flavor too delicious to recall after the thirst was gone. With a weak, quiet voice, Ord asked, "What is it? Tell me?"
"You guess. Go on."
"You've done something with dark matter." A boy's best guess, correct but too simple by a long ways. "Because this isn't ordinary… it isn't baryonic.…"
"Alice did the magic, mostly. I set guidelines and the fat goals, but she invented the technologies." He pulled a stone from the pool, complete with its shaggy carpet, then tucked it into a new pouch hanging from the knapsack. "What she did was rework some simple, invisible particles. She coerced them into acting like atoms. A positive particle, a negative one. Then she built a new periodic table— a simpler set of elements— out of the lazy atoms. Much of what you see here is dark matter, which is why it barely reacts to the universe around us. And that's why unless you know precisely what you're seeking, this vast dyson is wondrously invisible."
Questions formed.
Ord tried asking all of them, in a rush.
"Oh, people have attempted dark-matter life," Perfect explained. "From scratch, all failures. You can guess some of the problems. But we helped ourselves by inventing our own elements, including a superior version of the honored carbon atom. And the scale of the work helps, some. And, too, we cheated. When we had no choices, we bolstered the system with baryonic matter. A thin but essential scaffolding, if you will."
The boy took a deep breath, wondering what he was inhaling.
"It feels like a warm day, doesn't it?" A laugh and shake of the head. "The truth? We're hovering a few degrees above Absolute. The fire above us is chilly. Interstellar hydrogen is captured as it drifts into the dyson, then it's burned efficiently, taken all the way to iron. Any energy that escapes is masked, given some natural excuse. And the iron ash is nothing in this volume of cold space."
Ord swallowed, then swallowed again. "You wanted to make a better intelligence. But what's here, in this pool… it can't have even a stupid thought."
"I would never, never presume to dictate a final design of what evolves here." A pause, nothing funny for this brief moment. "I set up the broad parameters. Not Alice. I gave life its chance, then broke camp and began walking again."
Ord watched his brother wade into the sea, submerging for a moment, then emerging with another stone and its hair, both different in color from before. Again he stuffed his prize into the pouch, no room for it and yet no difficulty in the task. Then as he straightened, appearing rather pleased, Ord asked him: "How can you know that intelligence will evolve? And that it won't make all our ridiculous mistakes?"
Perfect retrieved his treasured spear, using it to roll a stone on its back. The mud beneath stank with odd rot, implying life. A gob of the mud followed the two mossy stones into the pouch, then he said, "There's nothing like uranium here, for example."
Recalling his own foolish stunt, Ord felt a sudden painful shame.
"And with these-synthetic elements, and with the neurons they can build, thought and action will be in balance, I hope. I hope." The older brother appeared uncharacteristically sober, yet sobriety, in some odd way, betrayed a deep and abiding happiness. He was happy stuffing mud into that impossible pouch. He was happy standing again, wiping his dirty hands against his stomach, squinting at the sky as he asked again, "What was our golden age?"
"After the glaciers melted," Ord recalled. When the world was the universe, the stars unimaginable.…
"This is the universe." A skyward thrust of the spear. "What's born here has no reason or rationale to imagine the stars."
Ord stared at his brother, waiting.
"Whatever prospers— whatever organism can rule this dyson— is free to call itself the master of creation. And why not? It won't sound even a millionth as silly as we do when we make the same boasts."
"But I never have," Ord complained, in a whisper building toward anger. "I've never even thought those words…!"
"Which is possibly, just possibly, why Alice selected you!"
Ord shut his mouth, remaining silent.
"Do you know what I am? What I am most truly?" Perfect asked the question with a calm, almost distracted air, again wiping the stinking mud from his hands, palms and fingers painting his belly. "A master of creation, maybe?" From everywhere came a thunderous, world-shaking laugh, and Perfect said, "Bullshit! I'm just a fucking caveman who got lucky…!"
9
Maybe our universe is as simple as this:
We are built entirely from someone's nearly invisible dark matter. Protons and electrons have been coerced into cooperating, building the baryonic places. We're a tiny bubble drifting through an enormous and brilliant but quite invisible cosmos, lovely pieces of it passing through us unseen. Which implies that this larger universe might itself be dark matter inside some still greater universe… and soon, and on.…
Oh, Ord, I'm sorry. I was mistaken. That doesn't sound simple at all, does it?
—Perfect, in conversation
Hoisting his knapsack to his shoulder, Perfect said, "Stay here."
"Where are you going?" the boy blurted, surprised by his anxieties. Trying for composure, he added, "I want to go with you."
A wink and grin, effortlessly charming.
Then Perfect picked up his spear with his partial hand, remarking, "I've got work, and there isn't time. Stay. Wait. I should be back before too long, I hope."
"But I'm here to help, right? To do some good—?"
"You don't understand. Not yet." Then his brother began to step toward him, and he wasn't there anymore. The step carried him out of sight, in an instant, and Ord spun and dropped to his butt, suddenly feeling chilled. A hundred new questions to ask, the old ones needing to be asked again, and he felt abandoned, cheated, and small.
In a whisper, he said, "I'm tired of this Family."
A lazy little wind blew from the sea, cold as liquid helium but warm against his current skin. Other than the wind, nothing moved. No answers presented themselves. And when Ord grew sick of feeling sorry for himself, he stood again, then began to walk, following the shoreline at his own modest, archaic pace.
*
There was no sun to set, but there were nights.
He learned.
Darkness emerged slowly, exposing the illuminated far side of the dyson, and Ord sat on a different beach, bare feet in the warm facsimile of sand, eyes gazing at that remote, ill-defined terrain. Every world that the Chamberlains had terraformed, if cleaned like animal skins and sewn together, wouldn't carpet this vast place.
He wondered how Alice and Perfect had managed it, and then he knew. It was because the dark matter was so abundant and amiable. Because they took their time, self-replicating robots doing the brunt of the work. And because the dyson's true mass wasn't much greater than Neptune's— a wondrous home of tissue paper, in essence, lit from within by cold candles.
Somewhere within Ord, out of easy reach, were reservoirs of fact, languid explanations, and bottled lectures beyond number.
He practiced, accessing the knowledge as best he could.
There was a text on the Brongg— their immeasurable history, the bulk of it immeasurably dull— but its sheer size and dullness was an event, majestic in its own right, like plate tectonics.
Sitting on that alien beach, in the dark, Ord found himself lost in the intricacies of a Brongg government born in the Triassic and still thriving today.
He barely noticed the dawn.
A feeble glow began nowhere, and everywhere. This was a universe without shadows. The boy blinked and looked skyward, wondering how these qualities would affect the future psyches… and there was a sound, a gentle wrong-pitched splashing, his eyes dropping, focusing on a distinctive beach-comber.
It was Perfect, already back again.
Ord was halfway standing when he noticed the clothes, the posture. The five whole fingers on each open hand.
Hesitating, Ord found that he had no voice.
With a quiet, terrified tone, the other C
hamberlain said:
"Lyman. I'm just Lyman."
"Brother…?"
"You remember me, don't you?" His horror was palpable. "They asked me to come, to talk with you, to tell you… offer you… oh, Ord…! Do you know how much trouble you're in…?"
"Why wouldn't I remember you?"
Lyman straightened, blinked. The answer seemed obvious, thus he moved to greater questions, explaining events from his point of view.
"You vanished. We thought you were in your room… I even spoke to you once, except it wasn't you… you were gone, and a security sweep realized it." Lyman attempted a smile, acting as if he remembered instructions to do just that. "We searched for you." The smile brightened. "I went to the stables.… I thought you might be hiding.…"
"I'm sorry to worry anyone."
The brother took a deep breath, then exhaled.
"When you couldn't find me, what happened?"
"Next?" A pained, prolonged swallow. "The Nuyens came to visit. A high-ranking delegation. They claimed that some old Chamberlain had been living on the estate, in secret—"
"How could they know?"
"The Nuyens have watched us. Better than we watch ourselves, it seems." Lyman glanced at the enormous sea, nothing registering in his eyes. "There were high-level meetings, and accusations— you could feel the tension— then someone broke into a facility in the Oort cloud, and portions of Alice were stolen. Afterward, you could taste the panic—"
"What portions?"
Lyman shuddered, then wrestled himself back into a half-composure. He didn't know what was stolen. "They wanted help from someone you would trust," he admitted. "Which isn't me, I told them that, but you know how the elders can be. They'd already picked me before they asked—"
"Who asked?"
"Everyone. There were Chamberlains, and Nuyens. Even the Sanchexes by then. And even the Sanchexes were scared."
"How would you help?"
"Like this." Isn't it obvious? his face asked. "You and a rogue Chamberlain had taken parts of Alice. It was kept secret from the public, of course. So was the mission to find you, and they asked if I would go with them, and speak with you when it was time."
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future Page 35