by Dan Simmons
“All right,” said Johnny’s disembodied voice. “There’s a powered-down FORCE multi-portal less than ten klicks from your present location.”
I shielded my eyes and rotated three hundred and sixty! degrees. “The hell there is,” I said. “I don’t know how far away the horizon is on this world, but it’s at least forty klicks and I can’t see anything.”
“Submersible base,” said Johnny. “Hang on. I’m going to take control.”
The hawking mat lurched again, dipped once, and then fell steadily. I held on with both hands and resisted the urge to scream.
“Submersible,” I called against the wind rush, “how far?”
“Do you mean how deep?”
“Yeah!”
“Eight fathoms.”
I converted the archaic units to meters. This time I did scream. “That’s almost fourteen meters underwater!”
“Where else do you expect a submersible to be?”
“What the hell do you expect me to do, hold my breath?” The ocean rushed toward me.
“Not necessary,” said my comlog. “The hawking mat has a primitive crash field. It should easily hold for a mere eight fathoms. Please hang on.”
I hung on.
Johnny was waiting for me when I arrived. The submersible had been dark and dank with the sweat of abandonment; the farcaster had been of a military variety I’d never seen before. It was a relief to step into sunlight and a city street with Johnny waiting.
I told him what had happened with Queue. We walked empty streets past old buildings. The sky was pale blue fading toward evening. No one was in sight. “Hey,” I said, stopping, “where are we?” It was an incredibly Earthlike world but the sky, the gravity, the texture of the place was like nothing I’d visited.
Johnny smiled. “I’ll let you guess. Let’s walk some more.”
There were ruins to our left as we walked down a wide street. I stopped and stared. “That’s the Colosseum,” I said. “The Roman Colosseum on Old Earth.” I looked around at the aging buildings, the cobblestone streets, and the trees swaying slightly in a soft breeze. “This is a reconstruction of the Old Earth city of Rome,” I said, trying to keep the astonishment out of my voice. “New Earth?” I knew at once that it wasn’t. I’d been to New Earth numerous times and the sky tones, smells, and gravity had not been like this.
Johnny shook his head. “This is nowhere in the Web.”
I stopped walking. “That’s impossible.” By definition, any world which could be reached by farcaster was in the Web.
“Nonetheless, it is not in the Web.”
“Where is it then?”
“Old Earth.”
We walked on. Johnny pointed out another ruin. “The Forum.” Descending a long staircase, he said, “Ahead is the Piazza di Spagna where we’ll spend the night.”
“Old Earth,” I said, my first comment in twenty minutes. “Time travel?”
“That is not possible, M. Lamia.”
“A theme park then?”
Johnny laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, unself-conscious and easy. “Perhaps. I don’t really know its purpose or function. It is … an analog.”
“An analog.” I squinted at the red, setting sun just visible down a narrow street. “It looks like the holos I’ve seen of Old Earth. It feels right, even though I’ve never been there.”
“It is very accurate.”
“Where is it? I mean, what star?”
“I don’t know the number,” said Johnny. “It’s in the Hercules Cluster.”
I managed not to repeat what he said but I stopped and sat down on one of the steps. With the Hawking drive humankind had explored, colonized, and linked with farcaster worlds across many thousands of light-years. But no one had tried to reach the exploding Core suns. We had barely crawled out of the cradle of one spiral arm. The Hercules Cluster.
“Why has the TechnoCore built a replica of Rome in the Hercules Cluster?” I asked.
Johnny sat next to me. We both looked up as a whirling mass of pigeons exploded into flight and wheeled above the rooftops. “I don’t know, M. Lamia. There is much that I have not learned … at least partially because I have not been interested until now.”
“Brawne,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Call me Brawne.”
Johnny smiled and inclined his head. “Thank you, Brawne. One thing, though. I do not believe that it is a replica of the city of Rome alone. It is all of Old Earth.”
I set both hands on the sun-warmed stone of the step I was sitting on. “All of Old Earth? All of its … continents, cities?”
“I believe so. I haven’t been out of Italy and England except for a sea voyage between the two, but I believe the analog is complete.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
Johnny nodded slowly. “That may indeed be the case. Why don’t we go inside and eat and talk more about this? It may relate to who tried to kill me and why.”
“Inside” was an apartment in a large house at the foot of the marble stairs. Windows looked out on what Johnny called the “piazza” and I could see up the staircase to a large, yellow-brown church above, and down to the square where a boat-shaped fountain tossed water into the evening stillness. Johnny said that the fountain had been designed by Bernini but the name meant nothing to me.
The rooms were small but high-ceilinged, with rough but elaborately carved furniture from an era I did not recognize. There was no sign of electricity or modern appliances. The house did not respond when I spoke to it at the door and again in the apartment upstairs. As dusk fell over the square and city outside the tall windows, the only lights were a few streetlamps of gas or some more primitive combustible.
“This is out of Old Earth’s past,” I said, touching the thick pillows. I raised my head, suddenly understanding. “Keats died in Italy. Early … nineteenth or twentieth century. This is … then.”
“Yes. Early nineteenth century: 1821, to be precise.”
“The whole world is a museum?”
“Oh no. Different areas are different eras, of course. It depends upon the analog being pursued.”
“I don’t understand.” We had moved into a room cluttered with thick furniture and I sat on an oddly carved couch by a window. A film of gold evening light still touchcd the spire of the tawny church up the steps. Pigeons wheeled white against blue sky. “Are there millions of people … cybrids … living on this fake Old Earth?”
“I do not believe so,” said Johnny. “Only the number necessary for the particular analog project.” He saw that I still did not understand and took a breath before continuing. “When I … awoke here, there were cybrid analogs of Joseph Severn, Dr. Clark, the landlady Anna Angeletti, young Lieutenant Elton, and a few others. Italian shopkeepers, the owner of the trattoria across the square who used to bring us our food, passersby, that sort of thing. No more than a score at the most.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were probably … recycled. Like the man with the queue.”
“Queue …” I suddenly stared across the darkening room at Johnny. “He was a cybrid?”
“Without doubt. The self-destruction you described is precisely the way I would rid myself of this cybrid if I had to.”
My mind was racing. I realized how stupid I had been, how little I had learned about anything. “Then it was another AI who tried to kill you.”
“It seems that way.”
“Why?”
Johnny made a gesture with his hands. “Possibly to erase some quantum of knowledge that died with my cybrid. Something I had learned only recently and the other AI … or AIs knew would be destroyed in my systems crash.”
I stood, paced back and forth, and stopped at the window. The darkness was settling in earnest now. There were lamps in the room but Johnny made no move to light them and I preferred the dimness. It made the unreality of what I was hearing even that much more unreal. I looked into the bedroom. The western windows adm
itted the last of the light; bedclothes glowed whitely. “You died here,” I said.
“He did,” said Johnny. “I am not he.”
“But you have his memories.”
“Half-forgotten dreams. There are gaps.”
“But you know what he felt.”
“I remember what the designers thought that he felt.”
“Tell me.”
“What?” Johnny’s skin was very pale in the gloom. His short curls looked black.
“What it was like to die. What it was like to be reborn.”
Johnny told me, his voice very soft, almost melodic, lapsing sometimes into an English too archaic to be understood but far more beautiful to the ear than the hybrid tongue we speak today.
He told me what it was like to be a poet obsessed with perfection, far harsher toward his own efforts than even the most vicious critic. And the critics were vicious. His work was dismissed, ridiculed, described as derivative and silly. Too poor to marry the woman he loved, loaning money to his brother in America and thus losing the last chance of financial security … and then the brief glory of growing into the full maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to the “consumption” which had claimed his mother and his brother Tom. Then sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly “for his health” while knowing all the while it meant a lonely, painful death at the age of twenty-six. He talked of the agony of seeing Fanny’s handwriting on the letters he found too painful to open; he talked of the loyalty of the young artist Joseph Severn, who had been chosen as a traveling companion for Keats by “friends” who had abandoned the poet at the end, of how Severn had nursed the dying man and stayed with him during the final days. He told of the hemorrhages in the night, of Dr. Clark bleeding him and prescribing “exercise and good air,” and of the ultimate religious and personal despair which had led Keats to demand his own epitaph be carved in stone as: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Only the dimmest light from below outlined the tall windows. Johnny’s voice seemed to float in the night-scented air. He spoke of awakening after his death in the bed where he died, still attended by the loyal Severn and Dr. Clark, of remembering that he was the poet John Keats the way one remembers an identity from a fast-fading dream while all the while knowing that he was something else.
He told of the illusion continued, the trip back to England, the reunion with the Fanny-who-was-not-Fanny and the near mental breakdown this had engendered. He told of his inability to write further poetry, of his increasing estrangement from the cybrid impostors, of his retreat into something resembling catatonia combined with “hallucinations” of his true AI existence in the nearly incomprehensible (to a nineteenth-century poet) TechnoCore, and of the ultimate crumbling of the illusion and the abandonment of the “Keats Project.”
“In truth,” he said, “the entire, evil charade made me think of nothing so much as a passage in a letter I wrote … he wrote … to his brother George some time before his illness. Keats said:
“May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fail into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine—This is the very thing in which consists poetry.”
“You think the … Keats Project … was evil?” I asked.
“Anything which deceives is evil, I believe.”
“Perhaps you are more John Keats than you are willing to admit.”
“No. The absence of poetic instinct showed otherwise even in the midst of the most elaborate illusion.”
I looked at the dark outlines of shapes in the dark house. “Do the AIs know that we’re here?”
“Probably. Almost surely. There is no place that I can go that the TechnoCore cannot trace and follow. But it was the Web authorities and brigands from whom we fled, no?”
“But you know now that it was someone … some intelligence in the TechnoCore who assaulted you.”
“Yes, but only in the Web. Such violence in the Core would not be tolerated.”
There came a noise from the street. A pigeon, I hoped. Wind blowing trash across cobblestones perhaps. I said, “How will the TechnoCore respond to, my being here?”
“I have no idea.”
“Surely it must be a secret.”
“It is … something they consider irrelevant to humanity.”
I shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. “The recreation of Old Earth … the resurrection of … how many? … human personalities as cybrids on this recreated world … AIs killing AIs … irrelevant!” I laughed but managed to keep the laughter under control. “Jesus wept, Johnny.”
“Almost certainly.”
I moved to the window, not caring what sort of target I would afford anyone in the dark street below, and fumbled out a cigarette. They were damp from the afternoons chase through the snowdrifts but one lighted when I struck it. “Johnny, earlier when you said that the Old Earth analog was complete, I said, ‘Why, for God’s sake?’ and you said something like ‘That may be the case.’ Was that just a wiseass comment or did you mean something?”
“I mean that it might indeed be for God’s sake.”
“Explain.”
Johnny sighed in the darkness. “I don’t understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence.”
“The Ultimate Intelligence,” I said, exhaling smoke. “Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to … what? … to build God.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“There is no simple answer, Brawne. Any more than there is a simple answer to the question of why humankind has sought God in a million guises for ten thousand generations. But with the Core, the interest lies more in the quest for more efficiency, more reliable ways to handle … variables.”
“But the TechnoCore can draw on itself and the megadatasphere of two hundred worlds.”
“And there still will be blanks in the … predictive powers.”
I threw my cigarette out the window, watching the ember fall into the night. The breeze was suddenly cold; I hugged my arms. “How does all this … Old Earth, the resurrection projects, the cybrids … how docs it lead to creating the Ultimate Intelligence?”
“I don’t know, Brawne. Eight standard centuries ago, at the beginning of the First Information Age, a man named Norbert Wiener wrote: ‘Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?’ Humanity dealt with this inconclusively with their early AIs. The Core wrestles with it in the resurrection projects. Perhaps the UI program has been completed and all of this remains a function of the ultimate Creature/Creator, a personality whose motives are as far beyond the Core’s understanding as the Core’s are beyond humanity’s.”
I started to move in the dark room, bumped a low table with my knee, and remained standing. “None of which tells us who is trying to kill you,” I said.
“No.” Johnny rose and moved to the far wall. A match flared and he lighted a candle. Our shadows wavered on the walls and ceiling.
Johnny came closer and softly gripped my upper arms. The soft light painted his curls and eyelashes copper and touched his high cheekbones and firm chin. “Why are you so tough?” he asked.
I stared at him. His face was only inches from mine. We were the same height. “Let go,” I said;
Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. His lips were soft and warm and the kiss seemed to last for hours. He’s a machine, I thought. Human, but a machine behind that. I closed my eyes. His soft hand touched my cheek, my neck, the back of my head.
“Listen …” I whispered when we broke apart for an instant.
Johnny did not let me finish. He lifted me in his arms and carried me into the other room. The tall bed. The soft mattress and deep comforter. The candlelight from the other room flickered and danced as we undressed each other in a sudden urgency.
We made love three times that night, each time responding to slow, sweet imperatives of touch and warmth and closeness and the escalating intensity of sensation. I remember looking down at him the second time; his eyes were closed, hair fell loosely across his forehead, the candlelight showing the flush across his pale chest, his surprisingly strong arms and hands rising to hold me place. He had opened his eyes that second to look back at me and I saw only the emotion and passion of that moment reflected there.
Sometime before dawn we slept and, just as I turned away and drifted off, I felt the cool touch of his hand on my hip in a movement protective and casual without being possessive.
They hit us just after first light. There were five of them, not Lusian but heavily muscled, all men, and they worked well together as a team.
The first I heard them was when the door to the apartment was kicked open. I rolled out of bed, jumped to the side of the bedroom door, and watched them come through. Johnny sat up and shouted something as the first man leveled a stunner. Johnny had pulled on cotton shorts before going to sleep; I was nude. There are real disadvantages to fighting in the nude when one’s opponents are dressed, but the greatest problem is psychological. If you can get over the sense of heightened vulnerability, the rest is easy to compensate for.
The first man saw me, decided to stun Johnny anyway, and paid for the mistake. I kicked the weapon out of his hand and clubbed him down with a blow behind the left ear. Two more men pushed into the room. This time both of them were smart enough to deal with me first. Two others leaped for Johnny.
I blocked a stiff-fingered jab, parried a kick that would have done real damage, and backed away. There was a tall dresser to my left and the top drawer came out smooth and heavy. The big man in front of me shielded his face with both arms so that the thick wood splintered, but the instinctive reaction gave me a second’s opening and I took it, putting my entire body into the kick. Number two man grunted and fell back against his partner.