It was getting cheaper, but not much. On the other hand, the net continued to mature, so people were getting richer. You could make a very comfortable living while you slept just by allowing your brain to be used while you dreamed. A significant percentage of the population was beginning to be able to afford to stave off cessation of being.
Population pressure, which had been painfully, sometimes horrifically, brought under control during the previous five centuries, began to prowl the future like a dark demon again. Average lifespan, which had been creeping up for hundreds of years, now exploded. No one knew how many times you could re-boot, but it seemed like there was no limit.
Three things saved us from what probably would have been the worst ethical, moral, cultural disaster in history. One of them was astronomy. Since the end of the second millennium we had been finding planets around other stars. By the mid-twenty-first century we could get meaningful images of terrestrial-sized planets within sixty light years. We knew they were out there; we just had to figure out a way to get to them.
That was the second thing. Musadhi developed his graviton filter. This gave us graviton impellers, which made it almost free to climb out of a gravity well, and the Musadhi Discontinuity, which let us ride in ships at any acceleration. Whereas before, even with antimatter torches, boosting at one gee it would take most of a year to reach the vicinity of the speed of light, now we could boost at over a hundred gees and reach it in a matter of days.
The third thing was feminism. All of the starships we could have afforded to build wouldn’t have been able to carry enough people out of the System to make up for the fact that we weren’t ... that we were bringing people into the world but fewer and fewer were leaving it. But women had been concluding from the late twentieth century on that almost anything was more fun than having a human being swell up inside of them and then squeeze out through their most sensitive place. When large numbers of people started re-booting, the last impetus to reproduce—to carry on the line—was removed. And besides, rearing a human from zygote to adult was trying, wearing, and fiendishly expensive. Why spend all that money on offspring when you needed it to pay your medical?
Still, much more wealth needed to be generated if humanity was to overcome this unprecedented disparity between rich and poor, namely that the rich got to keep living and the poor didn’t. The only way we knew how was to keep expanding the sphere of human activity, enlarge the marketplace. We went to the stars.
After our third ’boot my wife and I headed out to the project around Barnard’s Star. This was before freewheeling; the trip took over six years, although it was only a couple of months to us. There was a planet they’d found in much the same condition as Vesper before people came. It had a climate that oscillated around the freezing point of water and it had plenty of water, but it was young. The atmosphere was still largely nitrogen and carbon dioxide; life had not had a chance to establish itself yet. We went there to build a new world for humanity to use. The project was run by a syndicate based in western Eurasia on Earth. They called the project, and the planet, Valhala.
It was only one of a dozen projects around the closest stars to the sun. Tau Ceti had two, as did Epsilon Eridani. Epsilon Indi, Procyon, 61 Cygni, and Alpha Centauri had one each, but would have others in the coming centuries. Wolf 359 and Lacaille 9352 produced viable worlds; the projects around Ross 128 and 154 would eventually fail.
But Valhala was very promising. There was a crushing amount of work to do to get the biosphere established; our techniques were not nearly as sophisticated as they are now. We carried a crew of two hundred, plus enough viable ova and sperm to hatch fifty thousand new people, or newbies. Calling them babies made people uncomfortable, so they didn’t.
That was one of the ironies of the projects. We needed new worlds to create wealth and living space because there were too many people. People on earth needed work. But we couldn’t yet afford to ship thousands of workers across interstellar distances, and most people wouldn’t have gone anyway. So we made our own. We’d already learned that once you had designed, built, and programmed a robotic machine that was as autonomous, intelligent, and flexible as a person, it basically was a person; only people were cheaper to make. And where women were no longer willing to serve as incubators, incubators could be built cheaply. So you get a sperm and an ovum together in a nurturing environment and, bam! You’ve got a zygote. Program it for a couple of decades and you’ve got the end product of four and a half billion years of research and development.
Was it ethical to create people so you could send them out to do hard, grueling, dangerous work? The corps responded by saying that that was the way things had always been, only now they would re-boot their workers at the end of their shifts and give them a life to do with as they pleased. Where individual people no longer had the money or desire to make more people, the corps had both.
A lot of this history I didn’t sing. I’m just recording it for my own benefit, just in case. I was sure they either knew it or weren’t interested. But I sang about the work on Valhala. I thought they would identify with it and they did. They cheered as I sang about seeding the atmosphere and creating the soil, building coral reefs, starting the forests and the veldts, helping the plants adapt to the light of a new star.
The work went on and on. We re-booted a fourth time and never stopped working, it seemed. It was an odd balance: without the technique of re-booting no one would have lived long enough to be interested in projects as extended as terraforming, but without people living so long the projects probably wouldn’t have been necessary.
I then came to the events leading up to the uprising. I stumbled for a moment. I looked at all of them dancing and swaying. I looked at Steel; this was what she had wanted me to talk about coming down the cliff. She and the crew looked back at me; I looked at Matessa. And I bailed. I couldn’t sing about how they—how my wife—why we ... The bastard syndicates. I couldn’t sing about any of it. My fifth ’boot, why I’d had it before ...
We’d been married for over three centuries, and then—then she was just gone. Just ... not around anymore. I was lost. Since I had been thirty-four years old she had been with me. We’d always traveled together, worked together. Even when we were on separate parts of Valhala there had been the net. We were never really apart. But now we were and I would never, ever have her again. Never.
I skipped the trial and the years after the trial. Things were pretty messy during that period, anyway. I could tell my audience knew something was missing, but everyone went along with it. You didn’t really have to sing about anything you didn’t want to. Everybody just kept dancing. The more I stumbled the more they cheered me on.
I wanted them to know that it hadn’t all been free, that it had cost people a lot, everything, to make the world what it was. But in order to do that I would have had to sing things that I couldn’t even think about.
Hell, it was a party, not a lecture. I tried to liven things up again, although I think I was the only one having trouble in that area. My next few ’boots were pretty wild, anyway. I didn’t get married again, nobody was getting married anymore. No one knew what ‘ ’til death do us part’ meant anymore. Not if you were rich.
And after the settlement I was rich. Rich enough that I would never be poor again if I played it smart, and I was determined to play it smart. I invested on both sides of every issue; no matter who lost I always won a little. I didn’t worry about causes anymore, I didn’t worry about poor people, I didn’t worry about anything. I learned to improvise on the voix humaine. I got good enough to join a band, tour around and see some of the new worlds that were opening up. Music sort of took my mind off of things.
That era of my life lasted a long time. A long, long time. I jammed, I traveled. I kept her name alive in my heart.
I wasn’t lonely, or at least I wasn’t alone any time I didn’t want to be. Being in a band was a great way to meet women. Sexual relationships had changed so much that I’m sur
e my father wouldn’t have recognized them. Reproduction was no longer an issue. Life-long fidelity was becoming impossible to visualize, what with everybody’s lives getting longer and longer. Sex had become nothing more or less than an expression of intimacy. Like conversation, or sports, or religion.
The millennium changed and nobody looked back. They’d learned how to freewheel and the great expansion was on. There were so many planetary projects going that unemployment vanished and poverty had to be redefined. No matter who you were or what you were, you could always go into the trades. Of course mentioning the trades brought a chorus of boos from the revelers, but they were good-natured boos. They didn’t blame me personally.
I did lots of different things, keeping myself busy and looking around the galaxy. Things happened. The System expanded along one galactic arm and eventually started to call itself Draco. The worlds of the Pleiades broke away and formed their own political unit, although they were still tied into the net, so they were never really separate. Brainard discovered a planet with an evolved indigenous biosphere on it. The Plague. Most of it affected me in one way or another.
I started to notice that my life was becoming cyclical. I would go through periods of doing something like playing in the band, traveling a lot, having a series of short relationships—from a couple of days to a few years long. Then I would settle down to something and someone for a few decades. But sooner or later it would come time to re-boot, and I never made it through that process with anyone again. I would leave, or I would cause my partner to leave. Something would happen, but by the time I went into the hospital to undergo the process, I was alone. I guess it was the only form of fidelity I had left.
The last time I’d had a normal life was on Scarpus. ’Boots number fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. I really thought I’d adjusted. I came to a kind of peace with it all and had become an ecological engineer, I guess in memory of her. I threw myself into it. By my sixteenth ’boot I’d worked my way up to chief ecologist of the Scarpus project. I’d personally overseen the hardwood invasion of the north temperate zone. I even named one of the forests after her. If you’ve been to Scarpus you can probably figure out which one.
I built a house right after my seventeenth ’boot. I met a woman, Mary. I guess we fell in love; she moved in with me and we lived in that house for over fifty years. I really thought things were going to be all right. The house was on the crest of a ridge just outside a little village that nestled up against a crystal clear river. Oaks, maples, sycamores, and ash rolled away in all directions. It was really very nice.
The atmosphere was stable; the biosphere was self-sustaining, although it would take centuries to reach full maturity. I began to think about taking a sabbatical, a sort of semi-retirement. Just sit on the front porch and watch the seasons change for a few centuries. Become the weird old guy in the woods.
It was funny, I guess. Mary was over a millennium younger than I was, and yet she’d lived several lives. She’d been around the block, as it were. We shared a lot of history, but not all of it, not even most of it. She still had things to do and places to see.
Maybe if I’d met someone my age, but that isn’t easy to do.
As the time to re-boot again came closer Mary grew restless and I grew moody. She eventually left me, probably for good reason. I closed up the house and freewheeled out to Mondoverdi. There was an acting school in Palermo that was teaching the new poetic psycho-realism. I thought I might be able to figure myself out. I don’t know if I did, but I liked acting. I re-booted the last time and eventually joined Shaughnessy’s troupe, bought some scales, got pissed off at the SRS when they didn’t like it, and here I was singing in the middle of the jungle. Cut off from the net, cut off from my money, foot-loose, fancy-free and on the road again.
I like to think they cheered longer for my song than anyone else’s, but I doubt they actually did. Mine was over twice as long as most, but that’s not really that much in an evening full of singing and playing, dancing and drinking, laughing and crying. I’d seen more history than any of them, but I don’t think they were all that impressed by history. They’d all lived long enough, seen enough, lost enough to achieve an almost Zen appreciation of the now. Direction wasn’t as important as balance; status was nothing, intimacy was everything.
Well, maybe status still carried a little weight. As I went over to pay my respects to Matessa I could see in her eyes that I had added something special and unexpected to her going-away party. When I hugged her she grabbed me around the neck and kissed me on the mouth. She was fairly glowing, but not from drink or heat. She had an intensity of spirit, of life, that could scarcely be contained within her corporal body. She swayed to her feet. “You’re my talisman,” she said, smiling joyfully. She placed her hands on either side of my face and gazed fiercely into my eyes. “You connect me to the past, to the future, to everything!” She grabbed my hand, “Let’s go!”
It took me a minute to understand what she meant. I looked around for Steel and said, “I— uh ... I came here with some people—”
“Hey, hey, hey!” She put a finger to my lips. “You had your chance to talk. Now you shut up and get the job done!”
She laughed and pulled me along. Sometimes it’s better not to be the master of your own destiny.
The party went on until midnight when we all moved down to the dock to see her off. The festivities chilled appreciably when the boat with the big Planetary Tectonics logo on the bow appeared around the bend in the river and tied up at the dock. There were only two uniformed reps; I guess they didn’t expect any trouble.
Matessa turned to the crowd just before she got in and blew us all a kiss. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but there was a big smile on her face.
“I love you all!” she said. “Remember me!”
One guy nearest to her raised a fist over his head and shouted, “Frag the freaking trades!” He must have been fairly drunk; he almost fell into the water. Matessa went over to him and gave him a hug. She whispered something in his ear, squeezed him one last time, then turned quickly and got into the boat. The reps cast off and the boat pulled away. She waved to us all until she disappeared around the bend.
The man shouted again, after she had gone, “Frag the freaking, freaking, FREAKING TRADES!” Others moved in to comfort him.
An older man with polychrome geometric designs on his arms and legs saw me taking in the whole scene. He must have remembered me singing, or maybe he could just tell it upset me, because he said, “He’s a politician. He always says things like that.”
“It sounds like he’s going to miss her,” I replied.
“We’ll all miss her,” he smiled, “but Matessa will be all right.”
I thought about the SyndicEnts in ’Burbs place again. “Yeah?”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Sure, Matessa will be fine. She’s no politician. She knows the truth.”
I looked at him, a little incredulously, I suppose. “Oh, yeah? What truth is that?”
He paused for a moment. He regarded me with a kind of ‘You’re not going to get this, but it might be fun to watch you try’ look on his face. He said, “She knows you got to suffer if you wanna sing the blues.”
I think I understood him. I looked down the river where she had disappeared, looked back at the old guy, then went off to find Steel and the crew.
Chapter 8
Yuri found me first. “Hey, party man! Steel told me to come get you. I think she’s jealous.”
I laughed. “What, of me and Matessa?”
“No, no.” Then he paused and seemed to reconsider. “I don’t think so—that is, maybe. I don’t know. I think she’s jealous of you because she’s usually the center of attention.”
“Well, I guess she could have sung if she’d wanted to.”
“Right. Look, if you’re half as tired as I am you’re already asleep.”
“I don’t know. I’m so buzzed I don’t know what I am.”
“Everybo
dy else is back at the inn. What do you say we go log off for ten or twelve hours? We’ve still got a lot of work to do before we leave this crazy orb.”
“Yeah.” Lots of things went through my head. Matessa: life force in the face of adversity. Steel: power and mystery. Mary: comfort and misunderstanding. My wife—my wife who was still irreplaceable, because of her own uniqueness, because of social changes, or because of my own need to keep her alive the only way I could, I didn’t know. I thought about stability. I thought about change. “Yeah,” I put my hand on Yuri’s shoulder, “let’s get some sleep.”
We moved off up the main street of Kindu, two motes in a stream of spent celebrants quietly fading into the night.
We must have slept quite awhile. Normally the inhabitants of Kindu would have gone to bed around eighty-two and slept until midnight, then gotten up for Graveyard, but they’d shifted their schedule around for Matessa’s party. I guess a lot of them just stayed up through the next shift. Graveyard was nearly over when we got up and you could tell the village was getting ready to call it a night. I figured we had twelve or thirteen hours until dawn.
We met in the lobby of the inn. The proprietors gave us a nice breakfast, even though it was dinnertime for them. Steel, Marcus, Yuri, Jemal, Archie and I sat around one large table. They gave Ham an even bigger table and a nice tub of fruit and leaves.
Steel spoke to us as we ate. “I’ve been talking to Tamika. The Lightdancer is ready to go. Our cover is holding—no trouble with traffic control—and the omnicorders have actually gotten some nice footage.”
Yuri said, “That’s good.”
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