Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  I am in an environmental containment suit of a vintage half a millennium old. I don’t feel well. My skin is clammy. I realize with a start in the Mohandas part of my brain that it isn’t sweat on my skin; I am producing the seeds of my own destruction. I can see Brainard and the rest of the party ahead of me, brushing through fat lavender sausages that wave in the thick breeze. Above the sea of undulating tubes the top stories of a colony can be seen. We break out of the field onto a broad sort of path that winds toward the structure. There are creatures moving on the path; they don’t notice us. I am not surprised.

  The sides of the creatures are not beige at all. They are no particular color, but change color all the time like the skin of an octopus. Sometimes sudden changes of overall hue, other times complex patterns scrolling and swirling. We think this is how they communicate with each other. Our recordings of them have revealed structures and repetitions, but of course the code is unbreakable because it’s not a code, it’s a language. It must be a language. If we can only get them to pay attention to us, perhaps we can begin to understand what they are saying.

  We enter the colony through a long circular passage that twists and climbs before opening onto a large area surrounded by flowing structures. Their sense of shape and proportion is exquisite; the lines are clean and elegant. As colorful as their bodies are, their buildings are drab and uniform in shade, the brown of fired pottery, of old iron, of earth.

  We set up our light screen. We don’t know where their eyes are—if they have eyes—but we can’t believe they would display such patterns on their skin without being able to detect them somehow. We set up the screen beside a major traffic artery and hope they will respond.

  Brainard is excited, though his voice is hoarse. He has not been feeling well either. We suspect we have picked up something from the biosphere, although we can’t see how; our E-suits are in good working order. He directs the assembly with his usual enthusiasm and good humor. We are optimistic we will obtain results from our experiment.

  The power packs are ready. We connect the screen and begin to play back the patterns we have recorded on our previous sorties to the surface. No response. We turn the screen to see if it makes any difference; it doesn’t. We try different patterns, patterns we recorded in the colony, the very courtyard where we now stand. Still nothing. Brainard, through his unflagging optimism, is showing the effects of the repeated disappointments. We know there is some key we are missing, some overlooked behavior, some ancillary stimulus that tells them to pay attention, but we can’t think what it is. We go on and on. We turn the omnicorder on one of the creatures and feed it directly into the screen. The echo is immediate and accurate but still gets no response. It gets dark and we still keep at it, trying different patterns, different lengths, different intensities of light, anything we can think of. We know this will be our last trip to the surface. We are running out of supplies, so we drive ourselves past exhaustion.

  In the end, nothing works. Nothing. So far as we know they aren’t even aware that they have been visited by beings from another world. The contact that we have looked forward to for so many centuries remains an unfulfilled dream, a frustrated, unrequited overture. We are defeated.

  We are out of time, out of supplies, out of energy. We pack our equipment, trudge dispiritedly back to the lander and lift off. It has been an exhilarating time, an amazing success, but ultimately baffling. Home calls to us across the light years, and we know we have a long wait in quarantine when we get there.

  I pulled out of the Reality and back into my cabin, logging off for a moment. It was emotionally difficult to even spend time with this information again. It had been so terrifying for everyone when things kept getting worse on Elysium, and when we started to lose people on Paraiso and then Cielo we really didn’t know if this might not be the end of humanity, of every terrestrial life form.

  We essentially wiped out primitive biospheres on several worlds during the great expansion. Brainard was still the only person to have discovered a truly evolved, integrated ecosystem, but there had been ten or twenty planets where primitive life had existed. Scientists and many other people had howled when those worlds were terraformed, but the corps had grown powerful and the need for wealth and living space was universally accepted. How could you advocate saving a few smears of self-replicating slime if it meant that some people couldn’t afford to re-boot? Terraforming was so colossally expensive even when you started with an earth-like planet—and finding earth-like planets was no picnic—that asking them to leave a world alone once they had located it was deemed unreasonable and economically unsound. The corps were given free rein. It was an open question whether anyone could have stopped them anyway.

  When the plague had started the collective guilt of our rapaciousness had resounded like the knell of the Grand Inquisitor. Ancient religions that had withered away when re-booting had replaced funerals were revived with the fervor of the condemned. The twilight of the gods had arrived.

  And then it didn’t spread beyond Cielo. Draco lived up to its name and quarantined the three planets by force, at one point shooting down starships that were attempting to flee the inescapable horror. Nothing that had touched the three doomed planets was allowed to enter any inhabited star system. Almost two billion people were destroyed. Three entire biospheres. Draconian measures, indeed.

  There was a hew and cry to raze Brainard’s Planet too, but cooler heads prevailed. We still had no idea what the plague was, how it had interacted with us, anything. We needed Brainard’s Planet to study, even if we could only look at it from orbit. And ultimately, to my own personal pride in my species, we couldn’t bring ourselves to annihilate an entire complex of living beings, even if it meant leaving a horrible danger extant in the universe.

  The aftermath of the experience resounded for centuries. I suppose it’s still going on. We had seemed invincible. We had conquered space, we had conquered time, we had learned to live forever. We had even learned to conquer ourselves. War and murder and rape had become incomprehensible aberrations fading into the misty past of alchemy and superstition. Why try to terminate a person’s perspective when all that happens is they get re-booted and you have to go into the trades to pay for it? How do you rape someone when all the victim has to do is log on? Suddenly you’re not raping one person but sixty to eighty billion people and all of them are pretty upset about it. Our very language had changed to fit our new perception of the cosmos and our place in it. We seemed destined to be the perfect reflection of the divine thought, conversant with the face of God.

  Then Brainard had discovered his race of city-building walrus-crab-slugs who seemed to talk to each other but didn’t even notice us, and something from their planet mowed us down like we would inconvenient bacteria. All we had been able to do was cut and run, leaving our fallen to their horrifying fate.

  And I was going to that planet.

  Chapter 11

  We didn’t have much to do until we refueled. Travel within an inhabited system is largely automated. Marcus and Tamika divided the piloting chores, which weren’t much. They didn’t even have to stand their watches in control if they didn’t want to, but usually they did.

  I spent the work shifts helping to re-fit the Lightdancer and the evenings doing research on the net. The more I learned about the two expeditions to Brainard’s Planet, Brainard’s and Steel’s, the less sense the whole enterprise made. There was an urgency about it that I didn’t understand. Why rush into the most dangerous place in the galaxy? As far as I could tell, there weren’t any other corps sniffing around. If Yuri’s E-suits were still a secret—and it certainly looked like they were—then no one else would want to go anywhere near Brainard’s Planet.

  The various housekeeping chores required to prepare the ship for an interstellar hop gave me a chance to get to know the crew better. As I had presumed it would, my singing at Matessa’s party had created more questions than it had answered; they were as curious about me as I was abou
t them. They wanted to know what it was like in the old days; I wanted to know—well, I guess I wanted to know what the hell I was doing on this crazy ship and whether or not I was going to live through the voyage.

  They were an interesting group, very individualistic, yet highly integrated and, apparently, committed to the project. Marcus was the iron man, quiet, determined, “The Slave of Duty.” Archie—more philosophical and dry, did her work bearing a weight that seemed greater than just her failure to save Drake. Yuri was the clown genius, wry and mercurial, manic and creative. Tamika, whom we didn’t see as much because she was busy piloting the ship, had a quick, agile mind and an eclectic curiosity. Jemal was an open book, and Alice, more of a closed one.

  Then there was the enigma leading us all—tall and beautiful, warm yet unavailable. Or maybe just unattainable.

  I could feel the tension of Drake’s impending fate weighing on everyone—it weighed on me—but Yuri’s fatalistic optimism seemed to keep us moving forward, and when that lagged, Marcus’ iron professionalism picked us up by the scruff of the neck. Still, Drake was in his pod, already apart from us, a silent pilgrim awaiting a journey untaken in five centuries.

  It was very odd. All we could do was talk about it. We, as a species, had forgotten what it was like to be faced with inescapable fate. Aside from a brutal reminder five centuries ago, we had successfully deleted inescapable fate from the vocabulary of our experience. But the eight of us—cocooned in our tiny technological womb, a microscopic needle driving through the ungraspable distances of Prime’s planetary system, distances that were dwarfed to nothing by our coming interstellar voyage—were staring into the eyes of the greatest distance of all. One of our number would be diving into a star soon, to be reduced to plasma, sub-atomic particles, energy. Memories. I don’t suppose it had ever been easy, even back when it was accepted as inevitable. Back then it happened to everyone sooner or later. You were always hearing about it happening to someone, sometimes large groups of people. Sometimes someone close to you, sometimes someone hundreds or thousands or, after we settled Mars, even millions of miles away. It was always happening. But these days it didn’t happen to anyone. Only now it was happening to Drake.

  It was hardest at mealtimes. When we were working, cleaning, re-fitting, when we had concrete tasks in front of us, we could push Drake into the same corner to which humanity had consigned the entire experience of Brainard’s expedition: off, away, not present. When we ate, though, there I was where Drake had been, consuming what he would have consumed, breathing what he would have breathed, and by his absence he returned to us, asking the unaskable. We’d try to answer, but it was difficult. It was a struggle between our need to talk about it and an equally urgent need to avoid talking about it.

  “Didn’t they used to think,” Jemal asked me one evening, “that a person’s perspective didn’t stop when their body did? That it, you know, went somewhere else? It was still out there, it just wasn’t on the net anymore?”

  I twirled my pasta around my fork for a while and thought of many things. “Well,” I said looking around the room, “they didn’t actually ‘think’ it, not the way we think things now.” Steel’s eyes were on me, and Archie’s. Alice’s weren’t. “They ... believed it.”

  “Heaven.” Alice didn’t look up from her food as she spoke.

  “Alice ...” There was a reproving tone in Steel’s voice and manner that I didn’t understand. Alice looked at her, then back at her meal again.

  “What about it?” Jemal asked. When Alice didn’t answer he turned back to me. “They don’t still think that on Heaven, do they? I’ve been there. I don’t remember any—”

  “Not the planet,” I said. “Heaven used to be a—kind of mythological place, where people went when, you know, when they weren’t alive anymore. Some people believed that, anyway.”

  “Right, right,” Yuri chuckled. “It was kind of like warp drive, or hyper-space, or the fifth dimension.”

  Marcus shook his head. “You need another hobby, Yuri. Those old movies are rotting your brain.”

  “Hey,” Yuri shot back, “Annette Funicello is my dream woman.”

  “Who,” Marcus looked reluctant to ask, “is Annette Funicello?”

  “Don’t get him started,” Archie said.

  He was already started. “Who’s Annette Funicello? Beach Party, man! Beach Blanket Bingo! Back To The Beach! She was Frankie Avalon’s chick! Oh, man. Kowabunga!”

  “What language is he speaking?” Marcus asked.

  Archie shook her head and took another bite. I, for one, was glad we’d wandered onto another subject.

  “Frankie was the Big Kahuna,” Yuri was informing me now. “They’d break up because he’d go gaga over some other chick, but they’d always get back together again. But, you know?” he leaned in conspiratorially, “They never had sex. Not once. No matter how glad they were to be back together. That’s how I know she’s secretly in love with me.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “And if her perspective is still floating around out there somewhere, all I have to do is rig up a net gate that can bullet her, and there I am!” And there was the subject again, waiting patiently. But we were deft at avoiding it.

  “I saw a movie once,” Alice said. “I don’t see how you can watch them. Everything is reduced down to this little, flat rectangle. When things are outside the movie they just cease to exist. You can’t turn your head to look for them or anything. They’re just gone until they pop back in again. No wonder people were crazy back then. It’s solipsistic.”

  “That’s what made them great!” Yuri would not be swayed. “Where are the artistic limits in a Reality? It’s the infinite cage. When you can do anything, what’s worth doing?”

  “I like Realities,” Jemal said. I got the impression that Jemal didn’t feel like he had that much to contribute to most of the conversations on board. He tended to be careful and offer only what he felt sure of.

  “I called one up last night,” Alice said. “It was really good. Contact Binary, have you done that one?”

  She was looking at me, so I shook my head.

  “Bellalinda is in it. She’s fantastic. Say, you’re an actor. Do you know her?”

  “No.” I laughed. “I didn’t get many chances to make Realities. I was mostly a theater actor.”

  Her interest slumped. “Oh.” She shouldered her disappointment and moved on. “Anyway, I think she’s beautiful.”

  “I suppose everyone does,” I said.

  “I’d like to look like her someday.”

  “Why?” was drawn from me without thinking. Alice had her own face, clear blue eyes, an inquisitive nose, a pugnacious set to her jaw, and a full mouth that could be soft enough to sleep on or hard enough to wrest answers from the sphinx.

  “Because she’s beautiful,” she replied, as though I had questioned the most remedially self-evident tautological premise ever uttered.

  But you’re beautiful, too, I started to say; and then, What is beauty? and a few other worthless homilies before I settled on, “Well, I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked around a mouthful of salad.

  I could see Steel in my peripheral vision, checking me out, watching me like—what? I didn’t get it. Like she was waiting to see how I performed. I said, “She’ll sue you. All the big Reality stars have their genomes copyrighted now. Don’t you remember—” and then I thought, maybe they didn’t, “a few centuries back they did this big biographical Reality about, who was it? Estella, or Excella, or something like that.”

  “The Extasya Story,” Yuri filled in.

  “Right,” I said, “Extasya. It was a really big deal at the time. Extasya was a huge star who’d been making Realities for—I don’t know—a couple of centuries, anyway.”

  “She’d also had sex with all the richest people in Draco,” Archie inserted with the mildly judgmental envy of a person who hadn’t.

  “Who was
that actress who played her?” I asked.

  “Arcadia,” Yuri replied.

  “Right,” I continued, “There was a huge row between Extasya and the studios about who was going to get to play her. Extasya, the Greatest Star Who Ever Lived.”

  Marcus said, “I think she wanted to play herself.”

  “Right,” I said, “a lot of people did. Other people thought it was all a big publicity campaign.”

  “Which it no doubt was,” Steel added.

  “So what happened?” Alice asked me.

  “Well, either Extasya or her publicity people, or both, considered her to be the most beautiful woman in the known universe. They said that anyone else would be a disappointment to her fans. But the studio wanted someone who could bring some objectivity to the part. I think they convinced her that it would be more titillating to the public, more ‘real,’ if someone else played her. But the studio had to agree that Arcadia would have her genome altered so she would look exactly like Extasya in all the phases of her life.”

  “And then Arcadia turned out to be twice the actor Extasya had ever dreamed of being,” Yuri interjected.

  “Right,” I answered, “it was all over the net for years, it seemed like. Arcadia won all kinds of awards for her portrayal and she basically went on to eclipse Extasya completely.”

  “What did Extasya do?” Alice asked.

  “Didn’t she try to make Arcadia get her genome re-altered?” Archie replied.

  “The courts ruled against her,” Steel said from the end of the table. “They said that no one could force another person to undergo surgery.”

  “But, I mean, what did she do?” Alice asked again. “Did she keep being a star?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Yuri looked quizzical. “What did she do?” he asked.

  Archie said, “I think she made a few more Realities. The scandal gave her quite a bit of pull at the outlets.”