Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “At one point they did.”

  “Huh.” I remembered underwear, but I couldn’t figure out how burning it could be taken as a political gesture. That’s the thing about history, I guess. If you learn enough about any culture that you haven’t actually lived in, sooner or later it just seems silly.

  But Lys was speaking: “Communication. It was the net that brought down the old hierarchy—their desire to increase the power of the net. They needed us to do that.”

  “The more minds that were connected—”

  “Exactly. The ‘Third World,’ as it was called, didn’t have much, but it had a great many people.

  “It was really the greatest achievement of the age, integrating the entire human race into one informational system, but they had to know it would change everything—economics, politics, social structures. It certainly gave us the ability to communicate quickly and cheaply. Can you imagine the first time a woman in purdah in, say, Afghanistan, communicated directly with another in Eritrea or Iraq?”

  I was trying to remember where those places were. I knew they were on Earth, but that was all. She went on:

  “Perhaps if we’d had time to get used to it before we were given open-ended longevity, we could have avoided some of the turmoil.” She glanced at another display as we passed it. “Some of the tragedy.”

  I hadn’t thought about it, but it was kind of ironic. The net gave us re-booting, a gift horse that was hard to look in the mouth, but the two of them together were a pretty big package of change for any culture to absorb.

  We were passing a holo of one of the prison camps on Alcyone IV. It was near the end of the war, when all political and military goals had seemed to be reduced to nothing more than sadism and sexual anger. It was as if every rejection, every betrayal, every slight and humiliation throughout history was being avenged in one terminal paroxysm of rage. The things women and men had done to each other in that conflict were practically beyond imagining. The rules had broken down. The very concept of inter-gender warfare was so horrific that when it actually happened people just went insane.

  I gestured toward the image, “You’re saying that re-booting caused ... caused this?”

  Lys was somber as she studied the scene. She shook her head, “No. Misguided ambition and diplomatic incompetence, unforgivable diplomatic incompetence, caused the war. But re-booting laid the foundation for it.”

  I didn’t get it. “How? I mean—how?”

  Lys stopped walking and turned to me. She started to form an answer and then stopped. She didn’t seem impatient, it was more like she felt we had strayed from the purpose of our meeting.

  I said, “I’m sorry, you don’t have to—I mean, I know we’re here for some other—These displays are just so ... so ...”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “They were designed to provoke a reaction. A conversation. It’s important to discuss these things,” she gazed at the holo, “very important.” She seemed lost for a moment. “And your question is legitimate. Quite pertinent, in fact. I’ll try to answer it, although historians have been chewing on it for centuries.”

  We started walking again. She thought for a moment and then said, “The net profoundly altered all economic, political, and large-scale social structures in a very short period of time—a matter of decades, perhaps even of years.” She thought a moment more, “But the most basic social unit, the ‘family,’ was still intact. It had changed a great deal, to be sure, but it still survived. The main purpose of the family was—”

  “To raise children,” Alice said.

  Lys turned to her, “That’s right, Alice. To raise children.” She put a hand on Alice’s shoulder and went on, “But even as far back as the end of the twentieth century children were starting to be thought of as more of an inconvenience than a blessing. It’s always seemed odd to me that this came about in the wealthy nations first, where the financial burden of child rearing could be borne most easily. But after analysis, it makes perfect sense.”

  It did? I couldn’t wait to find out how.

  “You see, one had to be rich enough to be concerned with the quality of life, rather than mere survival, to consider not having offspring. Overpopulation and the environmental degradation it caused were only concerns to those with the wealth and leisure to be able to sit back and enjoy the view. To someone living in a dirt-floored hut scratching a living out of a small patch of earth procreation was one of the very few creative joys of life. To the wealthy, other options were open. Why be a parent when one could be a lawyer, an advertising executive, an entertainer? Or fill some other, equally essential social function?”

  She had a very subtle irony about her. I was liking her more and more.

  “And how did this lead to the war?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I’m sorry. Digression is one of the hazards of being a museum curator. Too much information, not enough direction.” She pondered. “The war, yes. Re-booting, as you call it—you wouldn’t believe where that term originally came from—re-booting gave us open-ended longevity and that very gift took away two things: the need to carry on the family and the chance of a better life after this one was done. The heavenly reward, the wheel of karma, joining one’s honored ancestors, these were given up in exchange for not having to lose loved ones, not having to face the pain and uncertainty of one’s own physical cessation. In these two ways it struck at the core of the one social adhesive that the net hadn’t really touched.”

  “Religion.”

  “Yes. And it wasn’t as if one moment everyone lived their three score and ten and the next, everyone lived forever.”

  “Certainly not. Those were long, tough centuries before everyone could afford it.”

  “And it took even longer to gain the power and techniques to deal with accidental trauma in remote areas, longer still to be able to handle large numbers of people in a short time. If the wreck of the Karachi occurred today, no one would perish, even if there were twice as many people aboard. But during those centuries the forces tearing at the structure of societies were colossal, and the more fundamentally religious a culture was, the more wrenching was the displacement. Religious groups splintered, some grappling with the new set of circumstances, others becoming violently reactionary. Many cultures started oscillating between directionless permissiveness and crushingly orthodox theocracies. You see? If the purpose of life was no longer to ‘make a better world for our children,’ nor to prepare our souls for the next life, what was left? To make a better world for ourselves? To serve only ourselves and nothing greater? To acquire endlessly bigger houses and better gadgets? More and more toys? More and more wealth?”

  “Things got pretty existential there, for a while, didn’t they?” I shook my head at the memories. “I guess it was quite a bit easier on Mars. All the social structures there were new anyway. A lot less tradition to fight against.”

  “Yes. It was the fight against tradition that was so disruptive, so painful for everyone. The Yin rose from the last, most extreme cycle of orthodoxy. It was our fight to end our roles as subservient chattels and vessels of reproduction that ultimately led to the war.”

  We came at last to the administration area, leaving the horrors behind us. We entered a plush reception room. Floor to ceiling windows looked out to the north, reminding us how high we were. Far below the rolling Serendipity Mountains crowded the coastline clad in golden grasses, sensually folding into branching gullies and narrow valleys lined with sparse groves of acacia trees. Clouds were moving in from the west, their bases close enough to touch. The overcast bathed everything in pewter.

  Lys offered Steel and me seats in her office and then took Alice through another door. “This shouldn’t take long,” she said.

  We sat uncomfortably for a moment before I asked, “What’s happening in there?” referring to where they’d just disappeared.

  “Probably just some tests,” she answered, not looking at me. I don’t know if it was the lack of fur or just the
situation, but Steel seemed very naked, very vulnerable.

  “Probably?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand. We traveled all the way to the Pleiades so someone could ‘probably’ do some tests? What tests?”

  “Well,” she kept getting quieter, “we didn’t expect to be gone so long, you know, the time dilation. Lys is hoping they’ve made some progress.”

  And that was it.

  “Progress in what?” seemed to be the next logical question.

  “Let’s wait until they come back.”

  “Okay.” We waited. Then I said, “That’s quite an exhibition they have. About the war.”

  “Yes. I wanted you to see it.” And she looked at me as if to say, ‘I guess you understand now.’

  I suppose I must have looked back at her with an ‘Uh, nope’ expression on my face because she went on, “We just want to make the world a better place, that’s all. We just want to make the world better.”

  Maybe I’m slow, but I still didn’t get the connection. “Well,” I said, trying to keep the conversation going, to fill time if nothing else, “She had some interesting ideas.”

  “Lys is a crazy old bird. Re-booting didn’t cause the war.”

  Oh. “I thought she had a pretty odd take on—”

  “Hubris caused the war. The war happened because nobody believed it could happen. Men couldn’t believe that they’d ever go off with the purpose of deliberately killing large numbers of women, and the Yin, the freaking Yin were so goddamned convinced war was a purely masculine failing that they refused to see it coming. Even after they built their ‘defense’ system. Even after the Karachi. It was stupid. Just stupid.”

  Passion always takes a moment to absorb. I pondered what to say: “Maybe that’s what she meant by—by unforgivable diplom ... unforgivably bad diplomacy—what did she call it?”

  “Yes. Probably.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I’ll be fine. I didn’t mean to ...”

  Then it struck me, “Did you fight in the war?”

  “What? No. No.” She thought. “Why, did you?”

  “No, Valhalla was enough for me. I never wanted to see anything like that again. I spent the whole Pleiadean Wa— I mean, the War of Liberation, drunk in the outer arm somewhere.”

  “Hmm.” She seemed distracted. We waited for a while.

  They finally came back.

  “All right, Alice. Thanks for your patience,” Lys smiled.

  “Sure,” Alice replied. She had a small bandage on her right shoulder.

  Steel stood up so I did, too. “Alice,” she said, “why don’t you go join Tamika and Yuri? I just bulleted them, they’re in the—”

  “I know,” Alice replied, “And I want to do the pandimensional interactive ride, too.” She smiled, “Since we’re here.”

  “All right. We’ll see you in a little bit.”

  And off she went.

  Steel turned to Lysistrata. Expectation? Hope? No, no hope. If there had been, Lys took no time disabusing it. She shook her head: “It’s still getting the better of us. We were hoping to have made some significant advances, but it’s still just too time intensive. We just take too long.”

  “I guess I didn’t really expect anything else.”

  “I’m sorry. I hope you don’t feel that you made the trip for nothing.”

  “No, we had to get the new equipment anyway. And, there was a chance. It was worth finding out.”

  “Um ...” I said.

  Steel turned to me. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mo. Lys, would you mind explaining this to him? I don’t think I have it in me.”

  Lys looked at me, surprised, “Oh, I thought you already knew. Of course. Let’s sit down.”

  Steel walked over to the window and gazed out at the mountains and the ocean. The wind was rising. Fistfuls of fat raindrops spattered against the glass. Lys and I sat facing each other.

  “We took some tissue samples from Alice to run some tests on. We were hoping that our procedures had progressed enough to give us positive results, but I’m afraid we were disappointed.”

  “Why? Is there something wrong with her?”

  “Put quite simply,” she gathered herself, her feather crest lay back on her head, “if we can’t find a way around it, Alice is going to die.”

  She said it just like that, ‘Alice is going to die,’ like Alice was an old battery, or a houseplant, or a bad joke. I didn’t know what to say. And then an adrenaline rush of panic hit me: “Does she have the plague?”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. Nothing that’s contagious. It’s a genetic condition. A condition that prevents her from undergoing longevity treatment. Re-booting.”

  “Does she need to re-boot?”

  “She will eventually.”

  Of course. “Well, uh, how long does she—How long till—I mean ...” My head was swimming in soup. And not doing a very good job, at that.

  “That depends. She’s in fine shape. If nothing happens to her she shouldn’t need to re-boot for another five or six decades. Maybe more.”

  “But what’s wrong with her? Is this something new, or, or ... I mean, is it a mutation, or something?”

  “Well, it’s a sort of mutation, yes.” She turned to Steel. “Alice tells me you’re planning to go back to Eden.”

  Eden? What did Eden have to do with this? I seemed to remember something ... something at Neuschwanstein. Maybe that’s why we got re-worked.

  Steel said simply, “Yes.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  I didn’t think it was a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, going to Eden is practically a misdemeanor compared with going to Brainard’s Planet, but there’s a really good reason why it’s off limits.

  “The trip back took so long ... this may be the last chance she has to see her ... parents. It’s been three decades—a little more.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “You’re saying Alice is from—she was born on—I mean, Alice was ... was born?”

  Lys nodded solemnly. Alice wasn’t a newbie, she’d never been a newbie. Alice had been a baby. She’d had a father and a … a ... She was from Eden? “But, but Eden’s a—the people there, they’re a ... a suicide cult.” I turned to Steel. “You were there before? You—you took Alice from Eden?”

  “Alice. And her brother.”

  Lys intervened, “I think suicide cult might be too strong a term.”

  “Well, whatever you want to call them. They don’t re-boot—Wait. Alice has a brother?” This was a lot of information to absorb all at once.

  Steel started, “She had—had a …” but could get no further.

  “Perhaps I should bring you up to date,” Lys interjected. “I was under the impression that you had all the pertinent information. Steel, didn’t you brief him when you brought him on board?”

  “She didn’t bring me on board. She picked me up in a bar.”

  “I see. Well.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Steel asked, her voice fiery and defensive. “I needed a replacement for Drake. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere, the engine was out of balance, and we couldn’t get home. We were running out of time. We’re still running out of time.” She turned back to the window, obviously very upset.

  “I understand,” Lys said soothingly, “I understand. I still think we should fill him in now. Don’t you?”

  Steel didn’t say anything. She didn’t nod, she didn’t do anything; she just kept staring out the window.

  Lys turned back to me, “I’m afraid Steel’s gotten a bit attached to Alice. We knew that would be a hazard, doing this sort of research.”

  “You were doing research on Eden?” I asked. “I mean, it’s illegal—you’re not supposed to ...”

  “I know. It was because of our conflict with Draco that Eden was allowed to go off the net, to become isolated from the rest of humanity. The price that was paid to keep the Pleiades integ
rated was far too high.”

  “But,” I started, “but what did you want to know about Eden? Aren’t they just a bunch of fanatics? I mean—zealots, religious extremists ...” It was starting to make a weird kind of sense to me.

  “A half-century ago we were planning to celebrate our millennial,” Lys replied. “We made funds available for various projects that would help us bring more depth and meaning to the observance. Archie submitted this proposal. Using her background in bio-engineering and social dynamics, she wanted to study the only remaining example of a mortal society, with its religious rites and beliefs—it’s social structures and traditions—and contrast it with our own.”

  Things were falling into place. “So the skyhook was her idea?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, “that was part of her proposal. The project would have to be carried out covertly because of the legal situation, and she figured out a way to get down to the surface. It was quite ingenious, really.”

  “Yeah, it sure was,” I agreed, but my mind was racing ahead. “So—so you guys funded this project?”

  Lys shook her head, “It was far too expensive for us to support on our own. We would have had to abandon many other equally meritorious ideas. So we contacted Steel and she agreed to become involved.”

  “Hmm,” I nodded, “how’d you know Steel?”

  “Well—”

  “We’d known each other for a long time,” Steel said, turning toward us.

  Lys stopped saying whatever it was she had started to say and said instead, “That’s right. You must understand that this project was very intriguing to us. They still practice child-bearing on Eden. Marriage. Funeral rites. There is murder there, and rape. Spousal and child abuse. It was a chance to re-acquaint ourselves with where we had come from, why we had gone through all that we had.”

  Chapter 17

  I cornered Yuri in his compartment when we got back to the Lightdancer. “Did you know we were going to Eden?” I asked.

  “Eden?”

  “Yeah. You know, religious freaks. Nobody ’boots. Everybody goes to heaven. That sort of thing.”