by Dan Simmons
It was after the Big Mistake but before everything grew uninhabitable. Mostly we occupied the estate during what we quaintly called “periods of remission”—stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the Kiev Team’s goddamn little black hole digested bits of the Earth’s center and waited for its next feast During the “Bad Times,” we vacationed at Uncle Kowa’s place out beyond the moon, on a terraformed asteroid brought there before the Ouster migration.
You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies. After three thousand years of dabbling with democracy, the remaining Old Earth families had come to the realization that the only way to avoid such riffraff was not to allow them to breed. Or, rather, to sponsor seedship fleets; spinship explorations, new farcaster migrations … all of the panicked urgency of the Hegira … as long as they bred out there and left Old Earth alone. The fact that the homeworld was a diseased old bitch, gone in the teeth, didn’t hurt the riffraff’s urge to pioneer. No fools they.
And like the Buddha, I was almost grown before I saw my first hint of poverty. I was sixteen standard years old, on my Wanderjahr, and backpacking through India when I saw a beggar. The Hindu Old Families kept them around for religious reasons, but all I knew at the time was that here was a man in rags, ribs showing, holding out a wicker basket with an ancient credit diskey in it, begging for a touch of my universal card. My friends thought it was hysterical. I threw up. It was in Benares.
My childhood was privileged but not obnoxiously so. I have pleasant memories of Grande Dame Sybils famous parties (she was a great-aunt on my mother’s side). I remember one three-day affair she threw in the Manhattan Archipelago, guests ferried in by drop-ship from Orbit City and from the European arcologies. I remember the Empire State Building rising from the water, its many lights reflecting on the lagoons and fern canals; the EMVs unloading passengers on the observation deck while cooking fires burned on the overgrown island mounds of lower buildings all around.
The North American Preserve was our private playground in those days. It was said that about eight thousand people still resided in that mysterious continent, but half of these were rangers. The rest included the renegade ARNists who plied their trade by resurrecting species of plants and animals long absent from their antediluvian North American haunts, the ecology engineers, licensed primitives such as the Ogalalla Sioux or the Hells Angel Guild, and the occasional tourist. I had a cousin who reportedly backpacked from one observation zone to the other in the Preserve, but he did so in the Midwest where the zones were relatively close together and where the dinosaur herds were much scarcer.
In the first century after the Big Mistake, Gaea was mortally injured but slow in the dying. The devastation was great during the Bad Times—and these came more often in precisely plotted spasms, shorter remissions, more terrible consequences after each attack—but the Earth abided and repaired itself as best it could.
The Preserve was, as I say, our playground but, in a real sense, so was all of the dying Earth. Mother let me have my own EMV when I was seven and there was no place on the globe farther than an hour’s flight from home. My best friend, Amalfi Schwartz, lived in the Mount Erebus Estates in what had once been the Antarctic Republic. We saw each other daily. The fact that Old Earth law forbade farcasters did not bother us in the least; lying on some hillside at night looking up through the ten thousand Orbiting Lights and the twenty thousand beacons of the Ring, at the two or three thousand visible stars, we felt no jealousy, no urge to join the Hegira that even then was spinning the farcaster silk of the Worldweb. We were happy.
My memories of Mother are oddly stylized, as if she were another fictional construct from one of my Dying Earth novels. Perhaps she was. Perhaps I was raised by robots in the automated cities of Europe, suckled by androids in the Amazon Desert, or simply grown in a vat like brewers yeast. What I recall is Mothers white gown sliding ghostlike through the shadowed rooms of the estate; infinitely delicate blue veins on the back of her thin-fingered hand as she poured tea in the damask and dust light of the conservatory; candlelight caught like a gold fly in the spiderweb sheen of her hair, hair done up in a bun in the style of the Grandes Dames. Sometimes I dream that I remember her voice, the lilt and tone and turn-in-the-womb centerness of it, but then I awake and it becomes only the wind moving lace curtains or the sound of some alien sea on stone.
From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be—should be—a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race’s thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.
I had a tutor whose name was Balthazar, human but ancient, a refugee from ancient Alexandria’s flesh-scented alleys. Balthazar all but glowed blue-white from those crude, early Poulsen treatments; he was like an irradiated mummy of a man, sealed in liquid plastic. And randy as the proverbial goat. Centuries later, when I was in my satyr period, I felt that I finally understood poor don Balthazar’s priapic compulsions, but in those days it was mostly a hindrance to keeping young girls on the estate’s staff. Human or android, don Balthazar did not discriminate—he poinked them all.
Luckily for my education, there was nothing homosexual in don Balthazar’s addiction to young flesh, so his escapades evidenced themselves either as absences from our tutorial sessions or an inordinate amount of attention lavished on memorizing verses from Ovid, Senesh, or Wu.
He was an excellent tutor. We studied the ancients and the late classical period, took field trips to the ruins of Athens, Rome, London, and Hannibal, Missouri, and never once had a quiz or test. Don Balthazar expected me to learn everything by heart at first encounter and I did not disappoint him. He convinced my mother that the pitfalls of “progressive education” were not for an Old Earth family, so I never knew the mind-stunting shortcuts of RNA medication, datasphere immersion, systemic flashback training, stylized encounter groups, “higher-level thinking skills” at the expense of facts, or preliterate programming. As a result of these deprivations, I was able to recite all of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey by the time I was six, compose a sestina before I could dress myself, and think in spiral fugue-verse before I ever interfaced with an AI.
My scientific education, on the other hand, was something less than stringent. Don Balthazar had little interest in what he referred to as “the mechanical side of the universe.” I was twenty-two before I realized that computers, RMUs, and Uncle Kowa’s asteroidal life-support devices were machines and not some benevolent manifestations of the animas around us. I believed in fairies, woodsprites, numerology, astrology, and the magic of Midsummer’s Eve deep in the primitive forests of the NAP. Like Keats and Lamb in Haydon’s studio, don Balthazar and I drank toasts to “the confusion of mathematics” and mourned the destruction of the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton’s prying prism. The early distrust and actual hatred of all things scientific and clinical served me well in later life. It is not difficult, I have learned, to remain a pre-Copernican pagan in the postscientific Hegemony.
My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. My mother remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel lying around the house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken llama. Don Balthazar never commented on my work; primarily, I assume, because I never showed him any of it. Don Balthazar thought that the venerable Daton was a fraud, that Salmud Brevy and Robert Frost should have hanged themselves with their own entrails, that Wordsworth was a fool, and that anything less than Shakespeare’s sonnets was a profanation of the language. I saw no reason to bother don Balthazar with my verse, rife with budding genius though I knew it to be.
I p
ublished several of these little literary turds in the various hardcopy journals then in vogue in the various arcologies of the European Houses, the amateur editors of these crude journals being as indulgent of my mother as she was of me. Occasionally I would press Amalfi or one of my other playmates—less aristocratic than I and thus with access to the datasphere or fatline transmitters—to uplink some of my verses to the Ring or to Mars, and thus to the burgeoning farcaster colonies. They never replied. I assumed they were too busy.
Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality … and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
My mother died with Old Earth. About half the Old Families stayed during that last cataclysm; I was twenty years old then and had made my own romantic plans to die with the homeworld. Mother decided otherwise. What concerned her was not my premature demise—like me, she was far too self-centered to think of someone else at a time like that—nor even the fact that the death of my DNA would mark the end of a line of aristocrats which stretched back to the Mayflower, no, what bothered Mother was that the family was going to die out in debt. Our last hundred years of extravagance, it seems, had been financed through massive loans from the Ring Bank and other discreet extraterrestrial institutions. Now that the continents of Earth were crashing under the impact of contraction, the great forests aflame, the oceans heaving and heating themselves into a lifeless soup, the very air transforming itself into something too hot and thick to break and too thin to plow, now the banks wanted their money back. I was collateral.
Or, rather, Mother’s plan was. She liquidated all available assets some weeks before that phrase became a literal reality, deposited a quarter of a million marks in long-term accounts in the fleeing Ring Bank, and dispatched me on a trip to the Rifkin Atmospheric Protectorate on Heaven’s Gate, a minor world circling the star Vega. Even then, that poisonous world had a farcaster connection to Sol System, but I did not farcast. Nor was I a passenger on the single spinship with Hawking drive which put into Heavens Gate each standard year. No, Mother sent me to this hack end of the outback on a Phase Three ramship, slower than light, frozen with the cattle embryos and orange juice concentrate and feeder viruses, on a trip that took one hundred and twenty-nine shipboard years, with an objective time-debt of one hundred and sixty-seven standard years!
Mother figured that the accrued interest on the long-term accounts would be enough to pay off our family debt and perhaps allow me to survive comfortably for a while. For the first and last time in her life, Mother figured wrong.
Notes for a sketch of Heaven’s Gate:
Mud lanes which run back from the station’s conversion docks like a pattern of sores on a leper’s back. Sufrus-brown clouds which hang in tatters from a rotten burlap sky. A tangle of shapeless wooden structures half decayed before they were ever fully constructed, their paneless windows now staring sightlessly into the gaping mouths of their neighbors. Indigenies breeding like … like humans, I suppose … eyeless cripples, lungs burned out with air rot, squiring a nest of a dozen offspring, the children’s skin scabrous by age five-standard, their eyes watering incessantly from the sting of an atmosphere which will kill them before they’re forty, their smiles carious, their oily hair rife with lice and the blood bags of dracula ticks. Proud parents beaming. Twenty million of these doomed schmucks, crowded into slums overflowing an island smaller than my family’s west lawn on Old Earth, all of them fighting to breathe the only breathable air on a world where the standard is to inhale and die, crowding ever closer to the center of the sixty-mile radius of survivable atmosphere which the Atmospheric Generating Station had been able to provide before it began to malfunction.
Heaven’s Gate: my new home.
Mother had not taken into account the possibility that all Old Earth accounts would be frozen—and then appropriated into the growing Worldweb economy. Nor had she remembered that the reason people had waited for the Hawking drive to see the spiral arm of the galaxy is that in long-term cryogenie sleep—as opposed to a few weeks or months of fugue—chances of terminal brain damage were one in six. I was lucky. When I was uncrated on Heaven’s Gate and put to work digging out acid canals beyond the perimeter, I had suffered only a cerebral accident—a stroke. Physically, I was able to work in the mud pits within a few local weeks. Mentally, there was much left to be desired.
The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language—but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.
A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased.
All in all, it was enough.
I will not say that I remember my three years in the mud pits and slime slums of Heaven’s Gate with fondness, but it is true that these years were at least as formative as—and probably more so than—my previous two decades on Old Earth.
I soon found that among my intimate acquaintances—Old Sludge, the scoop-shovel foreman; Unk, the slumyard bully to whom I paid my protection bribes; Kiti, the lice-ridden crib doxy whom I slept with when I could afford it—my vocabulary served me well. “Shit-fuck,” I would grunt, gesticulating. “Asshole cunt peepee fuck.”
“Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?”
“Goddamn poopoo,” I would grin back at him.
The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered. My three local years on Heaven’s Gate, almost fifteen hundred standard days, allowed me to see, to feel, to hear—to remember, as if I literally had been born again. Little matter that I had been born again in hell; reworked experience is the stuff of all true poetry and raw experience was the birthing gift of my new life.
There was no problem adapting to a brave new world a century and a half beyond my own. For all of our talk of expansion and pioneering spirit these past five centuries, we all know how stultified and static our human universe has become. We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable—and operable!—to our great-grandfathers. So while I slept the Hegemony became a formal entity, the Worldweb was spun to something close to its final shape, the All Thing took its democratic place among the list of humanity’s benevolent despots, the TechnoCore seceded from human service and then offered its help as an ally rather than a slave, and the Ousters retreated to darkness and the role of Nemesis … but all these things had been c
reeping toward critical mass even before I was frozen into my ice coffin between the pork bellies and sherbet, and such obvious extensions of old trends took little effort to understand. Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
My life was Heaven’s Gate and the minute-to-minute demands of survival there. The sky was always an eternal yellow-brown sunset hanging like a collapsing ceiling mere meters above my shack. My shack was oddly comfortable: a table for eating, a cot for sleeping and fucking, a hole for pissing and shitting, and a window for silent staring. My environment mirrored my vocabulary.
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and Heaven’s Gate was no exception. The Atmospheric Protectorate owned my body but my mind—or what was left of it—was mine.
On Old Earth, my poetry was composed on a Sadu-Dekenar comlog thought processor while I lounged in a padded chaise longue or floated in my EM barge above dark lagoons or walked pensively through scented bowers. The execrable, undisciplined, limp-wristed flatulent products of those reveries already have been described. On Heaven’s Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
Thus, on Heaven’s Gate, as I dredged bottom scum from the slop canals under the red gaze of Vega Primo or crawled on hands and knees through stalactites and stalagmites of rebreather bacteria in the station’s labrynthine lungpipes, I became a poet.
All I lacked were the words.
The twentieth century’s most honored writer, William Gass, once said in an interview: “Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.”