Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days

by Light Of Other Days (lit)

  Bobby stepped forward cautiously, still clutching Kate. "What is this, Hiram? Why have you brought us here?"

  "Quite a place, isn't it?" Hiram grinned, and slapped the wall confidently. "We borrowed some engineering from the old NORAD base they dug into the Colorado mountains. This whole damn bunker is mounted on huge shock-absorbent springs."

  "Is that what this is for? To ride out a nuclear attack?"

  "No- These walls aren't to keep out an explosion. They're supposed to contain one."

  Bobby frowned. "What are you talking about?"

  "The future. The future of OurWorld, Our future, son."

  Bobby said, "There are others who knew I was com- ing here. David, Mary. Special Agent Mavens of the FBI. They will be here soon. And then I'll be walking out of here. With her."

  Kate watched Hiram's eyes, glancing from one to the other of them, scheming. He said, "You're right, of course. I can't keep you here. Although I could have fun trying. Just give me five minutes. Let me make my case, Bobby." He forced a smile.

  Bobby struggled to speak. "That's all you want? To— convince me of something? That's what this is all about?"

  "Let me show you." And he nodded his head to the goons, indicating that Bobby and Kate should be brought into the bunker.

  The walls were of thick steel. The bunker was cramped, with room only for Hiram, Kate, Bobby and Wilson.

  Kate looked around, tense, alert, overloaded. This was obviously a live experimental lab: there were white- boards, pin boards, SoftScreens, flip charts, fold-up chairs and desks fixed to the walls. At the center of the room was the equipment which, presumably, was the focus of interest here: what looked like a heat exchanger and a small turbine, and other pieces of equipment, white, anonymous boxes. On one of the desks there was a coffee, half-drunk and still steaming.

  Hiram walked to the middle*of the bunker. "We lost the monopoly on the WormCam quicker than I wanted. But we made a pile of money. And we're making more; the Wormworks is still far ahead of any similar facility around the world. But we're heading for a plateau, Bobby. In another few years the WormCams are going to be able to reach across the universe. And already, now that every punk kid has her own private WormCam, the market for generators is becoming saturated. We'll be in the business of replacement and upgrade, where the profit margins are low and the competition ferocious."

  "But you," said Kate, "have a better idea. Right?"

  Hiram glared- "Not that it will concern you." He walked to the machinery and stroked it. "We've gotten bloody good at plucking wormholes out of the quantum foam and expanding them. Up to now we've been using them to transmit information. Right? But your smart brother David will tell you that it takes a finite piece of energy to record even a single bit of information. So if we're transmitting data we must be transmitting energy as well. Right now it's just a trickle—not enough to make a ligmbulb glow."

  Bobby nodded, stiffly, obviously in pain. "But you're going to change all that." ffiram pointed to me pieces of equipment. "That's a wormhole generator. It's squeezed-vacuum technology, but far in advance of anything you'U find on the market. I want to make wormholes bigger and more stable— much more, more than anything anybody's achieved so far. Wide enough to act as conduits for significant amounts of energy.

  "And the energy we mine will be passed through this equipment, the heat exchanger and the turbine, to extract usable electrical energy. Simple, nineteenth-century technology—but that's all I need as long as I have the energy flow. This is just a test rig, but enough to prove the point of principle, and to solve the problems— mainly the stability of the wormholes—"

  "And where," Bobby said slowly, "will you mine the energy from?"

  Hiram grinned and pointed to his feet. "From down there. The core of die Earth, son. A ball of solid nickel- iron the size of the Moon, glowing as hot as the surface of the sun. All that energy trapped in there since the Earth formed, the engine that powers the volcanoes and earthquakes and the circulation of the crust plates.... That's what I'm planning to tap-

  "You see the beauty of it? The energy we humans burn up, here on the surface, is a candle compared to that furnace. As soon as the technical guys solve the wormhole stability problem, every extant power- generating business will be obsolete overnight. Nuclear fusion, my hairy arse' And it won't stop there. Maybe some day we'll leam how to tap the stars themselves. Don't you see, Bobby? Even the WormCam was nothing compared to this. We'll change the world. We'll become rich—"

  "Beyond the dreams of avarice," Bobby murmured.

  "Here's the dream, boy. This is what I want us to work on together. You and me. Building a future, build- ing OurWorld."

  "Dad—" Bobby spread his free hand. "I admire you. I admire what you're building. I'm not going to stop you. But I don't want this. None of this is real—your money and your power—all that's real is me. Kate and me. I have your genes, Hiram. But I'm not you. And I never will be, no matter how you try to make it so.. .."

  And as Bobby said that, links began to form in Kate's mind, as they used to as she neared the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of the most complex story.

  I'm not you, Bobby had said.

  But, she saw now, that was the whole point.

  As she drifted in space, Mary's mouth was open wide. Smiling, David reached out, touched her chin and closed her jaw. •-

  "I can't believe it," she said.

  "It's a nebula," he said. "It's called the Trifid Nebula, in fact."

  "It's visible from Earth?"

  "Oh, yes. But we are so far from home that the light that set off from the nebula around the time of Alexander the Great is only now washing over Earth." He pointed. "Can you see those dark spots?" They were small, fine globules, like drops of ink in colored water. "They are called Bok globules. Even the smallest of those spots could enclose the whole of our Solar System. We think they are the birthplaces of stars; clouds of dust and gas which will condense to form new suns. It takes a long time to form a star, of course. But the final stages— when fusion kicks in, and the star blows away its sur- rounding shell of dust and begins to shine—can happen quite suddenly." He glanced at her. "Think about it. If you lived here—maybe on that ice ball below us—you would be able to see, during your lifetime, the birth of dozens, perhaps hundreds of stars."

  "I wonder what religion we would have invented," she said.

  It was a good question. "Perhaps something softer. A religion dominated more by images of birth than death."

  "Why did you bring me here?"

  He sighed. "Everybody should see this before they die."

  "And now we have," Mary said, a little formally. "Thank you."

  He shook his head, irritated. "Not them. Not the Joined. You, Mary. I hope you'll forgive me for that."

  "What is it you want to say to me, David?"

  He hesitated. He pointed at the nebula. "Somewhere over there, beyond the nebula, is the center of the Gal- axy. There is a great black hole there, a million times the mass of the sun. And it's still growing. Clouds of dust and gas and smashed-up stars flow into the hole from all directions."

  "I've seen pictures of it," Mary said.

  "Yes. There's a whole cluster of stapledons out there already. They are having some difficulty approaching the hole itself; the massive gravitational distortion plays hell with wormhole stability—"

  "Stapledons?"

  "WormCam viewpoints. Disembodied observers, wandering through space and time." He smiled, and in- dicated his floating body. "When you get used to this virtual-reality WormCam exploration, you'll find you don't need to carry along as much baggage as this.

  "My point is, Mary, that we're sending human minds like a thistledown cloud out through a block of space- time two hundred thousand light years wide and a hun- dred millennia deep: across a hundred billion star systems, all the way back to the birth of humanity. Al- ready there's more man we can study even if we had a thousand times as many trained observers—and me boundaries
are being pushed back all the time.

  "Some of our theories are being confirmed; others are unsentimentally debunked. And that's good; that's how science is supposed to be. But I think there's a deeper, more profound lesson we're already learning."

  "And that is—"

  "That mind—that life itself—is precious," he said slowly. "Unimaginably so. We've only just begun our search. But already we know that there is no significant biosphere within a thousand light years, nor as deep in the past as we can see. Oh, perhaps there are microor- ganisms clinging to life in some warm, slime-filled pond, or deep in the crevices of some volcanic cleft some- where. But there is no other Earth.

  "Mary, the WormCam has pushed my perception out from my own concerns, inexorably, step by step. I've seen the evil and the good in my neighbor's heart, the lies in my own past, the banal horror of my people's history.

  "But we've reached beyoncf that now, beyond the clamor of our brief human centuries, the noisy island to which we cling. Now we've seen the emptiness of the wider universe, the mindless churning of the past. We are done with blaming ourselves for our family history, and we are beginning to see the greater truth: that we are surrounded by abysses, by great silences, by the blind working-out of huge mindless forces. The WormCam is, ultimately, a perspective machine. And we are appalled by that perspective."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  He faced her. "If I must speak to you—to all of you— then I want you to know what a responsibility you may hold.

  "There was a Jesuit called Teilhard de Chardin. He believed that just as life had covered the Earth to form the biosphere, so mankind—thinking life—would even- tually encompass life to form a higher layer, a cogitative layer he called the noosphere. He argued that the rough organization of me noosphere would grow, until it co- hered into a single supersapient being he called the Omega Point"

  "Yes," she said, and she closed her eyes. " 'The end of the world: me wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality—' "

  "You've read de Chardin?"

  "We have."

  "It's the Wormwood, you see," he said hoarsely. "That's my problem. I can take no comfort from the new nihilist thinkers. The notion that this tiny scrap of life and mind should be smashed—at this moment of tran- scendent understanding—by a random piece of rock is simply unacceptable."

  She touched his face with her small young hands. "I understand. Trust me. We're working on it."

  And, looking into her young-old eyes, he believed it.

  The light was changing now, subtly, growing signifi- cantly darker.

  The blue-white companion star was passing behind the denser bulk of the parent. David could see the com- panion's light streaming through the complex layers of gas at the periphery of the giant—and, as the companion touched the giant's blurred horizon, he actually saw shadows cast by thicker knots of gas in those outer layers against the more diffuse atmosphere, immense lines that streamed toward him, millions of kilometers long and utterly straight. It was a sunset on a star, he realized with awe, an exercise in celestial geometry and perspective.

  And yet the spectacle reminded him of nothing so much as the ocean sunsets he used to enjoy as a boy, as he played with his mother on the long Atlantic beaches of France, moments when shafts of light cast by the thick ocean clouds had made him wonder if he was seeing the light of God Himself.

  Were the Joined truly the embryo of a new order of humanity—of mind? Was he making a sort of first con- tact here, with a being whose intellect and understanding might surpass his own as much as he might surpass his Neandertal great-grandmother?

  But perhaps it was necessary for a new form of mind to grow, new mental powers, to apprehend the wider perspective offered by the WormCam.

  He thought. You are feared and despised, and now you are weak. / fear you; / despise you. But so was Christ feared and despised. And the future belonged to Him. As perhaps it does to you.

  And so you may be the sole repository of my hopes, as I have tried to express to you.

  But whatever the future, I can't help but miss the feisty girt who used to live behind those ancient blue eyes.

  And it disturbs me that not once have you mentioned your mother, who dreams away what is left of her life in darkened rooms. Do we who" preceded you mean so little?

  Mary pulled herself closer to him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him. Despite his troubled thoughts, her simple human warmth was a great comfort.

  "Let's go home," she said. "I think your brother needs you."

  Kate knew she had to tell him. "Bobby—"

  "Shut up, Manzoni," Hiram snarled. He was raging now, throwing his arms in the air, stalking around the room. "What about me? / made you, you little shit. I made you so I wouldn't have to die. knowing—"

  "Knowing that you'd lose it all," Kate said.

  "Manzoni—"

  Wilson took a step forward, standing between Hiram and Bobby, watching them all.

  Kate ignored her. "You want a dynasty. You want your offspring to rule the fucking planet. It didn't work with David, so you tried again, without even the incon- venience of sharing him with a mother. Yes, you made Bobby, and you tried to control him. But even so he doesn't want to play your games."

  Hiram faced her, fists bunching. "What he wants doesn't matter. I won't be blocked."

  "No," Kate said, wondering. "No, you won't, will you? My God, Hiram."

  Bobby said urgently, "Kate, I think you'd better tell me what you're talking about."

  "Oh, I don't say this was his plan from the beginning. But it was always a fallback, in case you didn't— cooperate. And of course he had to wait until the technol- ogy was ready. But it's there now. Isn't it, Hiram? ..." And another piece of the puzzle fell into place. "You're funding the Joined. Aren't you? Covertly, of course. But it's your resources that are behind the brain-link technol- ogy. You had your own purpose for it,"

  She could see in Bobby's eyes—black-ringed, marked by pain—that he understood at last.

  "Bobby, you're his clone. Your body and nervous structures are as close to Hiram's as is humanly possible to manufacture. Hiram wants OurWorld to live on after his death. He doesn't want to see it dispersed—or, worse, fall into the hands of somebody from outside the family. You're his one hope. But if you won't cooper- ate ..."

  Bobby turned to his clone-parent. "If I won't be your heir, then you'll kill me. You'll take my body and you'll upload your own foul mind into me."

  "But it won't be like that," Hiram said rapidly. "Don't you see? We'll be together, Bobby. I'll have beaten death, by God. And when you grow old, we can do it again. And again, and again."

  Bobby shook off Kate's arm, and strode toward Hiram.

  Wilson stepped between Hiram and Bobby, pushing Hiram behind her, and raised her pistol.

  Kate tried to move forward, to intervene, but it felt as if she were embedded in treacle.

  Wilson was hesitating. She seemed to be coming to a decision of her own. The gun muzzle wavered.

  Then, in a single lightning-fast movement, she turned and slapped Hiram over the ear, hard enough to send him sprawling, and she grabbed Bobby. He tried to land a blow on her, but she took his injured arm and pressed a determined thumb into his wounded shoulder. He cried out, eyes rolling, and he fell to his knees.

  Kate felt overwhelmed, baffled. What now? How much more complicated can this get? Who was this Wil- son? What did she wanH

  With brisk movements Wilson laid Bobby and his clone-parent side by side, and began to throw switches on the equipment console at the center of the room- There was a hum of fans, a crackle of ozone; Kate sensed great forces gatheringHn the room.

  Hiram tried to sit up, but Wibon knocked him back with a kick in the chest.

  Hiram croaked, "What the hell are you doing?"

  "Initiating a wonnhole," Wilson murmured, concen- trating. "A brid
ge to the center of the Earth."

  Kate said, "But you can't. The wormholes are still unstable."

  "I know that," Wilson snapped. "That's the point. Don't you understand yet?"

  "My God," Hiram said. "You've intended this all along."

  'To kill you. Quite right. I waited for the opportunity. And I took it."

  "Why, for Christ's sake?"

  "For Barbara Wilson. My daughter."

  "Who?..."

  "You destroyed her. You and your WormCam. With- out you—"