Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  What was I doing getting involved with a woman who owned a throne room?

  I wished Yuri were there. Or Archie, or even Marcus. Or that I was with them, with the crew, getting stupid in Paris. I looked at the sky, waiting for it to get dark.

  I thought: if I were back in ’Burbs’ place getting drunk, trading insults with the regulars and generally avoiding going home to Sheila, I wouldn’t have had the courage or imagination to even dream of being trapped in a castle like this with a woman as beautiful as Steel, and yet there I was—wishing I were someplace else.

  Steel was a beautiful woman. And Yuri was right—I couldn’t figure her out. Why she sought me out for emotional companionship I didn’t know. I didn’t know why it mattered to me that she did. I gazed down over the parapet, seeking vertigo. The foreshortened cylinder of the upper spire grew like a cone-capped asparagus out of its octagonal, crenellated stalk. Crowns of fir trees stabbed up at me from a dizzying distance below. The balcony wrapped around the spire like one of Jean-Léon’s lace cuffs, suspending me between earth and sky.

  Between Earth and Space.

  The sky was getting darker. The first stars were already out. Sunsets were a lot faster on Earth than they were on Vesper, just a little faster than they were on Mars. I walked around to the east side of the tower. Mars had been a hundred million klicks from Earth when we came in; it was in opposition. It would be rising as the sun set. The sun was in Leo so Mars would be in Aquarius. I waited.

  Why would Steel risk everything, everything, to go to Brainard’s Planet? I’d spent almost two weeks with her crew on the Lightdancer trying to figure it out and I was no closer to an answer. Potential fortunes to be made—all right, but how much fortune did she need? She was already the princess of her own fairytale. Was she really interested in social change? What could she have gone through that would have convinced her it was important enough to possibly destroy herself, her perspective, permanently and irretrievably?

  What had she lost that she needed to do this to regain it?

  The sky in the east had turned indigo. Sagittarius’ whimsical teapot poured to the south. Capricorn, less picturesque but just as recognizable, swam next to it. On the eastern horizon Aquarius reigned with an extra star, a blue star. The baleful eye of war no longer glared in the skies of Earth. It had been turned to water.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” Steel emerged from the small wooden door and stepped up beside me.

  “No,” my voice tore like paper. Thoughts of home filled my throat.

  “What are you looking at?” She rested her hand on my bicep, hooked through my elbow. My nostrils expanded to encompass her smell.

  “Just looking. Your home is beautiful.”

  She smiled up at me, then followed my gaze. “So is yours,” she said.

  “Hmm.” Rolling Bavarian fields twinkled here and there with hearth lights. Alpine shoulders bulked deepening blue, gnawing at the fading sky. “How did your meeting go?”

  “Well ... meetings,” she leaned her head on my shoulder. You’d think I’d learn, but that voice ...

  I asked her, “Is everything all right?”

  She hooked her other hand over my elbow, nesting, pulling closer. “I’ll probably have to meet with him again before we leave, so things could be better. But, yes, they’re moving along.”

  “How long do you figure to be here?”

  “On Earth?”

  I nodded.

  “Just long enough to refit the Lightdancer. About a week.”

  I nodded again.

  “Not long enough for you to get home to Mars, I’m afraid.”

  I allowed a small, comfortable chuckle to acknowledge her insight. We stared at the sky for a while. Then she asked:

  “Would you like to go home?”

  “I don’t know.” The last bruise of daylight was leaving the sky. The ragged southern horizon was a velvet silhouette.

  “You’ve already helped me a great deal. I don’t know how we would have gotten back to Earth without you.”

  This sort of language always embarrasses me. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. She continued:

  “I paid off your back taxes this afternoon.”

  And I wondered how I felt about that. My chest expanded. My spine lengthened. Weight was removed. On the other hand, I hadn’t really won, they’d gotten their money. Even though Steel had paid them it was money I had earned. Was earning.

  And I thought about that. I guessed Steel knew that I was thinking of leaving the crew. Jumping ship. Mars was right there. I could see it. I still knew people there.

  “You can get back on the net now if you want to.” Her voice caressed the deepest parts of me.

  “I—thanks,” I said. What was she doing?

  “I guess I just want to say ...” she paused and looked at the night, “thank you for all you’ve done. Not just crewing. Talking to me. When I ... When ...”

  “It’s okay. Really. I—”

  “You’ve been very good to me. In ways you didn’t need to—”

  “No. No, I ...” What did I want to say to her?

  “I just—You’d be, have been, a wonderful part of the crew. I hope you’ll—No. What I wanted to say is—”

  “They’re a great crew. I love working with them.”

  “Yes. I know. I mean, I’ve seen.”

  On the other hand—“I think they’re all a bunch of psycho mutants,” I said, “I mean, I have to tell you, I still don’t see why—”

  “That’s what I wanted to say,” she turned me to her, looked up into my eyes. I could feel her gaze in the soles of my feet, and my heart turned sideways in my chest. “You can leave if you want to. It’s—it will be—I’ll understand. I’ll pay you for the jump from Vesper. That should be a tidy sum right there. And I’ll throw in the back taxes as a token of my appreciation. For a job well done. Above and beyond the call—”

  “No. Wait.” What was I saying? Starlight reflected in her huge green eyes. Were they ingenuous or ingenious? “I don’t want to go any place.” Was I nuts? I breathed and teetered and my mouth opened and this is what came out of it: “I’m in. For the whole trip. I said I was and I am.” I’ll just check my brain at the door, I thought. I’m obviously not using it.

  Her eyes moistened. “Good,” she smiled, “Good. I’m so glad you’ll be with us. I know it must seem crazy, but it really is for a good cause. I—”

  I think, right then, in that flushed moment of relief and happiness, she almost told me what was really going on. But then she didn’t:

  “I could have found a replacement, but it would have taken time and we really don’t have any to spare.” She hugged me. She put her arms under mine and slid her hands up either side of my spine and laid her cheek and breasts on my chest. And inhaled. “We have so much to do and so little time.”

  Yeah, I thought. Let’s all race off helter skelter to the Planet of Doom. We only live forever. Wouldn’t we feel silly if we got there late and all the good Doom had already been taken?

  I took a chance: “What’s the rush?” It was a good move. She was still hugging me so I could feel in her body when her mind checked out the option ‘candor’ and immediately filed it away for possible later use. Or not. But she was smooth, she didn’t pull away from me. She kept holding onto me as she spoke:

  “Well, the Lightdancer has to be refitted—”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “And we have to get new ultra-lights. Check out the skyhook—it wasn’t really designed to withstand hydrogen fireballs, you know.”

  “I admit that hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “I need to get my genome reworked. And yours.”

  Oh?

  “And we have to come up with a strategy for dealing with this new behavior.”

  “What new behavior?”

  “The creatures. What happened to Drake. I don’t want it to happen to anyone else.” She hugged me a little harder, unconsciously, I think.


  I hugged her back. “Any ideas how we’ll do that?”

  “I’ve got Yuri working on it.”

  “I thought he was in Paris.”

  I could feel her smile. “Yuri works best when he’s got a lot to distract him.” That sounded right.

  Her breasts really felt nice against my ribs, rising and falling with her breathing. We stayed that way for a while. I thought about a lot of things; I’m sure she did too.

  She, of course, hadn’t answered my question; she hadn’t told me why she was in such a hurry.

  That night I tried to get back on the net and found that, even though the System Revenue Service was through with me, Steel evidently wasn’t. The SRS flag was off my address, but I still couldn’t access it—security considerations, no doubt. So, no mail for me, and no way to communicate with the outside world.

  To alleviate my feelings of cybernetic isolation I did a little more research. I’d been wondering why plague victims hadn’t been able to upload and wait for new bodies to be grown for them, like that guy I’d met in the bar. Even if re-booting exacerbated the effects of the plague they should have been able to give up their infected bodies and store their minds on the net.

  The short answer was—they could. Over five thousand people had survived the plague by doing just that. After that the net simply became overloaded with storage demands. Too many people, too little capacity. Brainard and most of his party had elected not to, wanting to gather as much information as they could from their own destruction, and, perhaps, not wanting to live in a world where they had unleashed such misery.

  But many, many people had. They’d had to do it in the very early stages, when symptoms first became apparent, because soon after that the cellular interface between the medulla and the bio-chip became too degraded to function. But they’d done it.

  That left me with one question, the question I had been afraid I was going to be left with. Re-booting had simply accelerated the effects of the plague, and the plague had spread so fast the net had been unable to handle everyone wanting to upload. Almost two billion perspectives had been lost.

  Almost two billion.

  It was the magnitude of the disaster that had turned it into a disaster.

  So.

  So why hadn’t Drake uploaded?

  Anna visited my room that night, billowing bosoms and all. I was feeling so confused and manipulated that I took her up on her offer.

  Chapter 15

  I spent the next few days climbing up and down the trail that begins behind the Schloss and goes to the top of the Tegelberg. Steel was busy lining things up. There was really nothing I could do to help her, and she had intimated there would be some heavy climbing work involved in this job, something having to do with getting on and off Brainard’s Planet, I guessed, so I figured I better keep the edge I had developed on Vesper. Climbing also helps me think, and I needed to.

  It’s a very pretty trail that starts out by crossing a beautiful gorge and waterfall on an airy footbridge that’s supposed to be even older than the castle. It then grinds its way up the mountainside in a series of steep switchbacks through open alpine forest. It has some nice views—a couple of which are right on the edge of the cliff overlooking the Schloss. At one of these I saw an ancient wrought-iron cross and plaque that had been placed there in memory of someone who had fallen. The date on it was 1957.

  Only on Earth.

  The trail finally ends up at an old Jagerhut—you can see most of Bavaria from it and they serve a great lunch. Three hours up and an hour and a half down—it was a good workout. Steel’s system was keeping me in shape, but, like sex, nothing beats the real thing. It felt wonderful to leave all the intrigue behind and just pull pine-scented air into my lungs as I labored up the mountain. The higher I got, the larger the world became; finding my problems in it became increasingly difficult as expanding perspective shrank them.

  My first lunch at the hut was glorious. The sun shone electric out of a neon-blue sky. The air was so clear I could pick out individual stones in the facade of the Schloss, which looked like a trophy fifteen hundred meters below. I sat at a rough table on the wooden deck outside the hut, chewing on rustic cuisine delivered by a flaxen-haired Fräulein (I thought of her as a Fräulein even though she spoke Systemic like everyone else. Everyone but Jean-Léon, that is). Location is everything in dining—a simple sandwich was transformed into one of the best meals I’d ever had.

  I don’t know why, but when I was finished eating I pulled my medicine bag off my belt and emptied it out on the table in front of me. My lives lay scattered across the rough wood in a little constellation, sparkling in the sun. There was the lock of Mary’s hair I had kept, there a music crystal my band had made on Helios, there a vivid branch of coral from a reef I had designed on—which planet? The one I did before Scarpus. It has a Chinese name—Singing Garden, something like that.

  A fragment of etched double-carbon from Marineris, a tiny foam-steel model of the habitat I’d built at First Landing, an eagle talon I picked up somewhere out in the outer arm. Little things. Little pieces of pieces.

  And there was the thimble computer with my wife’s genome stored on it. It was one of the last computers ever made, just before the net took over all those tasks. I picked it up and rolled it between my thumb and fingers. I hadn’t put it on in—a long time.

  I had never even fleetingly entertained the idea of cloning her—it would have been silly. It wouldn’t have been her. The genetic material would have been the same but her appearance and even her personality would have been the product of what she ate, what she learned, how she was treated by those around her. Her perspective would have been unique, as different from my wife’s as Steel’s was, or Yuri’s. Or mine.

  I just felt better having the information close to me, the information that had resulted in her.

  At that moment, however, I was thinking the thimble might serve another purpose. I put it on my finger to check for unused memory. It still had a couple hundred million giga-bytes left. Not much, but it would be enough.

  Steel was being so careful with security that it made me wonder how far she’d go. I was still cut off from the net. It didn’t look like she was planning to let me back on any time soon. Reasonable, under the circumstances, but then, the circumstances were rather unique. It occurred to me that her offer to re-boot me at the end of the trip might play right into her security needs. Particularly if things didn’t turn out the way she hoped. Particularly if she ’booted me herself, on the Lightdancer, independent of the net. I’d always been very careful about re-booting. If you go to just anyone you can end up like ’Burbs, adrift in the universe with big holes in your past.

  I was betting that she wouldn’t think to look through my medicine bag, and, even if she did, that she wouldn’t know what a thimble computer was.

  I started recording this memoir. Just in case.

  Memoirs are always suspect. I wonder how much I am improving myself, how much credit I am conveniently taking, how much blame I am conveniently spreading around.

  The third day started out much as the previous two, sunny and vibrant, but a cold front moved through while I was up on top, and weather socked in quickly, as it only does in the mountains. The temperature dropped and wind started whipping spitting gusts of rain sideways and even upwards. I watched my step coming down.

  The storm had really started to kick it up when Steel bulleted me on her system: [Mo, where are you?]

  I grabbed onto a tree, “About half-way down the Tegelberg trail. Why? What’s up?”

  [I need you down here. Please hurry.] And she signed off.

  It’s hard to hurry when rock is wet and everything that had been dirt has turned to mud, but I did my best. The wind had knocked some dead-fall across the trail about a quarter klick above the gorge. It wouldn’t have been a problem except that the stripped trunk was slick and I was moving pretty fast. I bunged up my ankle.

  I was hobbling down the last part
of the trail when I heard her voice. I thought she had bulleted me again until I realized it was echoing off a bluff beside me:

  “Get off me!”

  I started running. As I came into the cut in the rock above the gorge I saw her on the footbridge—an insignificant ribbon spanning the chasm a hundred meters above the top of the falls. There were two men with her, one tall and fragile, the other, huge. Great, bulging muscle mass turned arms into thighs, thighs into tree trunks. Meaty pectorals rippled with frustration. His traps seemed to grow directly out of his head. I hadn’t seen that sort of hyper-testosterone genome work in a thousand years. At least not on anybody who wasn’t in the trades.

  Ham was with her, too. He had interposed himself between Steel and the behemoth, but the wood deck of the bridge was slick. He was having trouble keeping his footing. Muscle-boy lunged at her again. Steel backed out of range but had to lean backwards over the rail to do it. The tall, wispy man was trying to calm things down, to no great effect.

  The hulk managed to catch one of her wrists just as I reached the bridge. Ham stood up under his arm, tore him away and kind of tossed him back toward the center of the bridge, but Steel collapsed, holding the arm he had grabbed. There was an unnatural curve in it. I rushed into the fray not sure what I was going to do, shouting colorful phrases like “What the hell—?” and things like that.

  The bridge wasn’t very wide, but I managed to step over Steel and around Ham to confront the thug. He didn’t even look at me. His attention was riveted on his target. I yelled at him, “HEY! Calm down! Calm down—” He stood up, grabbed my shoulder and punched me in the chest. I heard a rib crack, but I managed to catch one of his ankles as I fell. This slowed him down enough for Ham to get a bear-hug (a gorilla-hug?) on him and keep him from reaching Steel again. He was struggling to get free and I was holding onto his foot for all I was worth when he suddenly drew his leg up to his chest and kicked it into the air—with me on it. This guy was really strong. I came down on the bridge railing with my legs and lower torso on the wrong side. A scarlet spear of fire flashed through my chest. He kicked again and I was dangling from his foot, nothing under me but a lot of air and rushing water. The railing came up at me and I caught it, but my chest was killing me. I couldn’t pull myself up. I managed to wrap my arms around two struts and hang there, elbows on the deck, my body swinging below it. The foot I’d let go of slammed into my face. He would have kicked me again if Ham hadn’t been getting control of the situation. He wrapped his legs around the legs of our meaty friend and was squeezing the breath out of him with his arms. His ape mouth opened amazingly wide and feral jaws closed on the guy’s cranium; a big canine punctured a temple. It didn’t take the guy long to settle down.