“I started in the project around Epsilon Indi;
The desert was empty and the weather was windy!”
The crowd cheered; I think you got extra points for actually rhyming.
“We made the planet and they named it ‘Nirvana’;
They made us work hard, but I sure didn’t wanna!”
Everyone cheered again, and I laughed. He went on like that, sometimes rhyming, but usually not. He sang his lives, one extended verse for each ’boot.
Evidently Interstellar Biosphere had hatched him to help seed Nirvana, but he didn’t have anything nice to say about the company. I wasn’t surprised; the labor involved in starting an ecosystem on a dead globe was grueling, and IB didn’t make its money by taking any longer than absolutely necessary. They worked their newbies as hard as ... well, as hard as they wanted to. I knew the woman who had been the chief ecologist on the project; she’d gotten a nice bonus for bringing it in ahead of schedule.
Of course, they re-booted him at the end of his term. That was the only thing that kept the system distinguishable from out and out slavery. The corp that hatched you basically owned your first life, but they had to give you a second one to do with as you chose. If you worked hard, scrimped and saved, invested wisely and basically got lucky, you could eke your way into a position where you could pay for your medical and not have to go back into the trades. It rarely happened that way.
This guy had managed to do it once. He freewheeled out to the outer arm on his second ’boot, got involved in some mining concern, lost all his money, and indentured with Relativity/SimulComm for his third. That must have been a bad one; he didn’t remember anything about it. But they’d given him his fourth ’boot and sent him on his way. After he’d worked his way back down the arm, doing this and that, he met up with a woman on Himmel around Procyon, a woman he’d known in the mines. She had a friend in the Teamsters who owed her a favor and the friend had gotten them both into crewman’s school. Things were looking up. They studied hard, graduated together and signed on with InterPlanet, hauling between the home worlds and the outlands on various ships.
He was finally paying his medical, but she wanted to buy a house. They’d argued about it. She was adamant; she’d always wanted a place of her own. She saved the money and bought a nice place on Celeste. I’ve been to Celeste; it’s a beautiful world. But on the next trip they’d gotten caught in a solar storm close in around Epsilon Eridani, just half an AU out from the star’s angry surface, closer than Venus is to the sun. They were in an older ship, the Witchwand, and evidently the storm bunker needed to be repaired; everyone on board had picked up a lethal dose of radiation. He was okay, he had medical, but even selling her house wouldn’t have gotten her enough to pay for re-booting. She had to go back into the trades.
He waited for her. He re-booted and went right back to work for InterPlanet, trying to save enough money to pay for both their medicals when she came back. Sixty years he waited. He met other people, had a relationship with two or three other women, but they’d all known he was waiting for someone to return.
He bulleted her as soon as she got out. She was fresh out of the can and he had sixty years on his last ’boot, but the net kept you healthy. He looked great, he felt great, he was good for another twenty or thirty years. And, anyway, he had medical; they’d get back into sync.
But she didn’t remember him. She hadn’t been able to face missing him and the house and her friends for sixty years, so she’d zeroed out. Ignorance is bliss. You can’t miss what you don’t remember.
He’d gone into a tailspin. He lost his job with InterPlanet, lost his crewman’s license, lost his medical, the house, everything. He ended up indenturing to Planetary Tectonics for his sixth ’boot and working right over the hill in Spam-town. One day when he was swimming at Nohili a fishing boat from Kindu had pulled onto the beach. He talked to the fisher folk on board and they’d told him about this place. He fell in love with it without ever having seen it. All that was left to do was work and wait, work and dream about the future, work and grieve about the past, endure, hunker down, put in his time.
When Planetary gave him his seventh ’boot, he climbed down to the beach, made his way down the coast and up the river. He’d lived here the last thirty years, fishing and carving, dancing and thatching, saying goodbye to people as they went into the trades, saying hello to others as they came out.
People cried and cheered when he finished; Matessa held her arms out to him and he went over to her. With all of Matessa’s orgiastic predictions earlier in the evening I expected her to disappear somewhere with him, but she didn’t. He just became the main hugger for a while.
In fact, during the whole evening I only saw her go off twice, once with a woman I hadn’t seen before, and the other time with Bartos. Can you beat that? It made me wonder; was all that stuff down at the dock just white noise and Bartos actually the intergalactic stud-muffin of the universe? Or, in this time of leaving, had Matessa decided that something as fleeting and temporal as sexual technique just wasn’t that important to her?
But I began to understand why she wasn’t more active in that area. Nobody wanted her to leave the party, even for a brief tropical tryst. I mean, you could tell they wanted her to do exactly what she wanted, but they wanted to be close to her, too. Each exit was a fairly elaborate ceremony in itself, cheering on the participants, wishing them good fortunes and happy hunting, but it was always combined with a kind of ‘hurry back’ energy. Nothing explicit, but you could feel it, nonetheless.
The party went on and on. I don’t think everybody sang, that would have taken weeks, but lots of people did. Their stories were all different, but all similar in many ways. One woman had started on Vesper eight centuries ago, when they were first starting the terraforming. Ten ’boots later, here she still was. She’d always indentured to Planetary Tec, and no matter where they sent her (they had projects all over Draco), she’d always come back to Kindu.
Everybody started somewhere. Most of them were between six and ten ’boots old, products of the Great Expansion of the early thirties. They’d all been hatched by the corps or syndicates to be used as labor to hew habitable worlds out of the raw material of creation. And for most of them that’s what they’d done every other life. It’s what they would do.
As they sang their stories I was carried into the ritual nature of it. They were tying Matessa to them by singing their pasts, collective and individual.
Pasts are not something I deal with very well, maybe because I have so much of my own. I may have been drinking more heavily than usual, I don’t know. Miss Bird-tail was awfully attractive (who isn’t, these days?); I was probably just trying to impress her, for the oldest and most mindless of hormonal reasons. Anyway, at one point in the evening, as someone was just being applauded for their poetic efforts, I leaned over to her and said something along the lines of, “I have more verses than anybody here.” I probably put it even more lamely than that, I don’t remember.
She eyed me coyly and said, “Oh, really? How many do you have?”
Crashing the gates where angels fear to have their tickets punched, I said, “Do you count the first one?”
“What?” she replied.
“Never mind,” I said, “Eighteen. Nineteen. A lot.”
She must have been impressed, because her eyes lit up and she said, “Oh, you have to sing! You have to sing!” And suddenly everyone around me was chanting, “Sing! Sing! Sing!” and pushing me toward the band.
How do I get myself into these things? I found myself in front of the orchestra, the musicians vamping coolly, waiting to see where my song took them, Matessa looking at me with a smile full of love and expectation and amusement at my plight, and everyone else pulsing, dancing, encouraging, marking time.
Somebody said, “How many verses?” and I replied, “Nineteen.” A kind of ripple went through the crowd and I looked around to see if I could find Steel or Yuri or Marcus. I spotted them; they wer
e all in one of the gazebos. They’d evidently been following the action, or they’d heard the crowd hush. They were all looking at me.
The music dropped down lower, both in volume and activity. The musicians were looking for me, looking for the groove, trying to match my energy. I realized that, even though I hadn’t said anything yet, I’d already started. My silence was the beginning of my first verse. I saw Matessa smiling at me and I didn’t want her to be lonely before she left simply because I wasn’t in the habit of letting people know who I was. Even so, it was hard to start. What do I tell them, I thought, who are so much younger, who had not experienced the world before the net, before re-booting, before freewheeling, before ...
“I wasn’t started. I was born—”
It burst out of me without volition:
“I grew inside another’s womb
And fought my way into a larger room
On the sands of Mars where my father’s tomb
Lies unattended, weathered and worn.”
I didn’t know how much of this they were getting. Some of the words I hadn’t heard in centuries. I didn’t know if the concepts had any meaning anymore, even in an historical context.
“The woman who bore me raised me up,
And from her body did I sup,
And from my father’s mind I learned
Why bodies bled and fire burned.”
Of course, it didn’t come out smoothly like that. I’d say a line, and then someone would fill in with a lick while I figured out how to make the next one rhyme. I sang about a lot of things, but as I listened to myself I couldn’t help noticing the things I didn’t sing. I sang about my father, a word probably meaningless to them, but I couldn’t use the other word, the one for the woman, my ... my other parent. Too many changes had occurred since she had been alive. For one thing, for a couple of centuries after bearing children had faded out of fashion it was considered very rude to mention that you had had a ... you know, that you had actually been born instead of hatched.
And I didn’t sing about my ... the other one, the—how do you talk about these things? The words are gone. There was another person, born of the same woman, a girl. That’s why I didn’t mention her. After a few times of telling someone that you’d had a ... that you’d had one, and they looked at you with one of those ‘Not only did you start by emerging from someone’s body, but there was someone else who came from the same body, traveled down the same canal, the same area where a person has sex and evacuates waste and I’m trying not to look disgusted but I really am’ expressions on their face, well, you just don’t bring it up anymore.
So, of course, I didn’t sing about how she ... how I lost her. But I sang about the first time the net saved someone, kept him from ... kept him alive until they could reach him. How wonderful and amazing it had been for all of us, storing his mind in our minds, his genome, remembering the structure of his brain so that it could be repaired when they finally got to him. And when they did, all of us knew it, as it was happening. Well, not every one of us, but everyone who could afford to take a nap at the time. How many of us were there then? I remembered the year it happened, 2457. There must have been fourteen or fifteen billion still on Earth, with maybe another billion spread through the solar system. Every one of us saved him.
I sang that that was the moment we truly realized the power of the net. Sixteen billion human minds connected directly to a single system. Even more than the first time I had a live conversation with someone on Earth while I was on Mars, and that had been pretty impressive—no speed of light delay, no loss of signal power or clarity over the millions of kilometers—the time we all saved that man, together, as one instrument, one conscious repository of memory, one processor of data, one giant thinking, believing, willing, acting organism, was the time that I, personally, knew that the world had changed forever.
And yet, what did it mean now? I looked at their faces and tried to ascertain what they thought about all this, but I couldn’t really tell. I mean, how many were on the net now? Seventy billion? Eighty? Keeping people alive who had gotten into trouble somewhere beyond the reach of immediate help was an everyday occurrence. People had conversations across light years.
They gazed back at me as I had been looked at before, but not for many centuries, not since I’d become more careful about who I told what. They looked at me like I was a fossil. Matessa looked ... what? Honored? Like I was a special phenomenon that reflected well on her by raising the status of her party. I wanted to give her a good send-off. I felt guilty and appalled by what she was facing. And yet, what she was facing wasn’t permanent. It was only sixty years. She would come back.
I felt tears in my eyes as I turned from Matessa to Steel and started to sing again:
“In Chryse a man met the love of his life,
A woman so soft, and hard, and bright,
With eyes like water and hair like night,
Her spirit was fire, her soul was light.
And she would consent to become his wife.”
I didn’t know why I was singing about her. I hadn’t intended to. Maybe it was because Steel had mentioned her, coming down Nohili. I know Steel didn’t really know anything about her. She probably just read an article about what I had done on Valhala when she was checking me out on the net, and my wife had been mentioned. She couldn’t know anything specific about her. There was no way she could know the important things.
Maybe it was simply because I was jealous of that townie Steel had been talking to. Stars and feathers and tattoos danced as I sang.
My wife and I had met while involved in a residence project in Chryse on Mars. I was the architect, she was the ecologist. We had gotten into such intense debates over conflicts between structural aesthetics and environmental impact that we’d had to get married to give the conversation room to breathe. We’d traveled all over the System, designing, building—Mars, Earth, Luna, Ceres, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Triton—anywhere people needed integrated living systems.
“She was my heart and my blood and my mind.
She was so gentle and loving and kind,
And bitchy and fiery and stubborn and strong.
If I am the lyric, then she was the song.”
We came up with some ingenious solutions to our original problems, but the debates never stopped. The conversation just kept getting better and better.
“Ahead of us waited the time it would end,
When everything ceases and eyes ever close.
Our loved ones had left us, departed in myths,
And we took our courage in stories of life
That transcended being and breathing and strife.”
But before our health failed us a striking breakthrough was made by a group of people working in the habitat at one of Earth’s LaGrange points. Through the incredible computational ability of the net, they had perfected a method of restoring the human body. The fountain of youth. It consisted of literally trillions of micro-operations. Going into each individual cell and repairing DNA strands, cleaning out accumulated waste products, recalcifying bones, repairing organs, eyes, teeth, everything. Turning back the genetic clock.
It essentially gave you another sixty to a hundred years of life. It gave you a second life, a second adulthood. It was incredibly expensive, and, at that time, took over a year to complete. But my wife and I had been very successful. We had the money and the time.
It changed our lives profoundly. We were getting older, and we had been worried about which one of us would lose the other. Neither of us wanted the other to be alone. We had this romantic hope that we would somehow go together, be involved in an accident or something, but we knew that that was unlikely. We tried not to think about it.
And then we didn’t have to go at all. It was astounding. We emerged from the process looking like snapshots from decades gone by. She looked younger than she had when I first met her, as I must have. But it was not only appearance, we felt young. We thought like young people. We
were filled with drive and energy and restlessness.
That had been the most difficult part of the process to engineer, the actual re-booting. The restructuring of a human mind. You see, you could go in with the information contained in the human genome and restore muscles and organs and skin to pristine condition, but even when a brain is in perfect health it still fills up with an incredible amount of data. Memories of decades: sights, textures, smells, emotions, grocery lists, math problems, where the bathroom is, why your next-door neighbor doesn’t like cats. Short-term memory wasn’t a problem, but long-term memory would get to the point where things would start to blur, become confused. They had to come up with a technique that preserved the structure and continuity of your memory, while paring down the actual volume of data, so there would be room to remember your next life.
We weren’t the first to go through it, but we were among the first. We became famous, in a way. Those people who could afford the process became the center of an intense debate on the net. This was during the twenty-sixth century. Things were still pretty bad on Earth, nothing like the horrors of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, but still pretty bad. People weren’t starving anymore, but lots of people were poor, really poor. It seemed utterly unfair. It still seems unfair to me now, that some could go on living while others had to ... you know. If the process had been perfected twenty years earlier my parents would still be alive. Maybe.
It put a tremendous pressure on those of us who had re-booted to show those that couldn’t that we were worthy of this ultimate gift. My wife and I had gone back to Earth, had redesigned Calcutta, Kinshasa, I forget how many cities, preserving their unique cultural aesthetic while making them hundreds of times more efficient. We had built Marineris on Mars with our own money, and opened it to immigration. We had worked and worked and re-booted again.
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