“Mom would go to a new colony. She wants to invent a new way of life. She told me that.”
“Really.”
“Yes, she told me! She really means it.”
Pitar drew a breath within his helmet. “We are, after all, a pioneering people. That is our true heritage, and I’m proud that you are witnessing all this. You’ll live a very long time, my son, so be sure to remember this day, and all it means. This world belongs to you. It was given to you. And don’t you ever forget that.”
Another speaker took the rostrum at the funereal plateau. This elder had to walk with robot assistance, and though he said little enough, he spoke at the droning rate of the very wise. A dreadful thing to hear.
Mario could not keep his peace. “Dad, will there be other boys like me at the South Pole?”
Pitar smiled. “Of course there will. A society with no youth has no future. If the people of Earth had sent their children into space, instead of just foolish astronauts, they would have spread throughout the worlds. Instead, they sank into their mud. That’s not your heritage, because those people have no moral fibre. That’s why they don’t matter now, and we do.”
Mario struggled to scratch his nose through his bubble-helmet. Of course this feat was impossible. “Dad, do Earth people stink? Jimmy says they stink.”
“I’ve never met one personally, but they do have wild germs in their bellies. Earth people can emit some unpleasant odours, and that’s a fact.” Pitar cleared his throat inside his spacesuit. “The Earth people don’t care much for us, either, mind you—they call us ‘termites.’”
“‘Termites’, Dad, what does that mean?”
“Termites are subhuman social beasts. Wild animals. Never properly gardened like our animals.”
“Dad, how big are termites?”
“I really don’t know, about the size of a housecat, I guess. If some man ever calls you a ‘termite,’ you slap his face and challenge him, understand? That puts a swift end to that nonsense.”
“All right, Dad.”
“Stop chattering now, son. This is the climax, this is the great moment.”
Bearing their ceremonial staves and halberds, the male elders retreated, with slow step, from the funeral plateau. Sand rose up in waves below the dead man’s catafalque.
The smartsand formed itself into one grand, pixelated, seething, pallbearing wave.
An impossible liquid, it reverently rolled up the mountain, bearing the dead man.
The catafalque crossed the brilliant twilight zone, into Eternal Light.
The robots shifted their solar reflectors, in unison. The human crowd fell into dramatic, timeless, deep-frozen darkness. Pitar felt his spacesuit shudder, a trembling fit of holy awe.
The catafalque gleamed like a chunk of the unseen sun.
The dead man’s suit ruptured from the brilliant heat. Precious steam burst free. One brief, geyserlike, human rainbow, one visionary burst of glorious combustion, spewing like a solar flare.
Then the ceremony ended. Though the long Mercurian Day had scarcely begun, a spiritual dawn had appeared.
* * *
PITAR SAT ON the rim of a sandbox, within the Great Park of Splendid Remembrance.
To pursue his design labours, Pitar often came to this site, to carefully sip cognition enhancers and contemplate the metaphysical implications of monumentality.
The task of his generation was one of reconciliation, the achievement of a deeper understanding. This park had been the battlefield where the worst mass clashes of the civil war had occurred. Bitter, bloody, hand-to-hand struggles, between the polarised factions.
Some of the colony’s best, most idealistic, most public-spirited men, trapped by harsh moral necessity, had beaten each other to death in this cavern.
Even women had killed each other in here, when it became clear that the great burden of the ice-hunt would impinge on their personal politics. Women fought in feline ambush, and in martyr operations. Women killed efficiently, because they never wasted effort grasping at the honours of combat.
The civil war was the closest that the colony had ever come to collapse. Worse than any natural catastrophe: worse than the blowouts, worse than the toxic poisonings.
The Great Park of Splendid Remembrance was, by its nature, an ancient Mercurian lava tube. This cavern was a natural feature, unplanned by man, untouched by the jaws of machines.
So it was thought, somehow, that this bloodstained space of abject moral failure was best left to wilderness. To living creatures other than mankind.
The original settlers had brought genetic material from their homelands on Earth. These vials of DNA had been preserved with care, but never released inside the world, never instantiated as living creatures.
Today, the Park of Splendid Remembrance was thick with them. These thriving, vegetal entities had exotic shapes, exotic features, and exotic, ancient names. Banyans, jacarandas, palms, ylang-ylang, papayas, jackfruit, teak, and mahogany.
Unlike the homely, useful algae on which the colony subsisted, these woody species took on wild, unheard-of forms. Under the blazing growlights, rising in the light gravity, rooted in a strange mineral soil, they were the native Mercurian forest. Great, green, reeking, shady, twisted eminences. Bizarre organic complexities: flowering, gnarling, branching, fruiting.
This wilderness mankind had unleashed was not beautiful. It was vigorous, but crabbed and chaotic. It was, as yet, merely a colonial tangle, a strange, self-choking complex of distorted traditional forms.
Like all aesthetic issues, thought Pitar, the problem here had its roots within a poor metaphysics. To introduce this ungainly forest, so as to obscure a dark place where human will had failed—that effort was insincere. It had not been thought-through.
The Great Park of Splendid Remembrance had feared to face the whole truth. So it was as yet neither great nor splendid, because it had shirked the hard thinking required by the authentic Mercurian texture of existence.
This was Pitar’s own task.
Sitting in deep thought, Pitar idly drew squares, triangles, circles, within the childish play-box of smartsand. With each stroke of his duelling-club, the smartsand responded and processed. Arcane ripples bounded and rebounded from the corners of the sandbox.
The computational entities, with which mankind shared this planet, were never intelligent. The machinic phylum, which seemed so clever and vigorous to the untrained eye, was neither alive nor smart. The phylum was merely the phylum; it had no will, no pride, no organic lust for survival, no reason to exist and persist. Without human will to issue its coded commands, the phylum would collapse in an eyeblink, returning to the sunblasted, constituent elements of this world.
But although the phylum possessed neither life nor intelligence, it did possess an order-of-being. It was not alive, merely processual, yet it had transcended the natural. The phylum was a metaphysical entity, and worthy of respect. Something like the spiritual respect owed a dead body: a thing, yes, inert, yes, of ashes, yes—yet so much more than mere inert ashes.
The truth, beyond intelligence. There were those who said—the daring thinkers of Pitar’s own generation—that the Sun was self-possessed. Not in the old-fashioned, cranky, archaic, heroic way that visionaries like DeBlakey had once imagined. The Sun was never alive, nor was the Sun intelligent, but the Sun was an entity, metaphysically ordered. The Sun that loomed over tiny Mercury was one Object of the Order of a Star.
And these thinkers speculated—speculating furthermore, just as bravely daring as their ancestors, though in a more modern fashion—that there were many Orders in the cosmos. Life, and, intelligence, and the processual phylum were just three of those countless Orders.
These speculative realists held that the Cosmos was inherently riddled with unnatural Orders. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of independent, extropic Orders, each Order unknown to the next, yet each as real and noble as the next, each as important as life or thought.
Some Orders transpired
in picoseconds, other Orders in unknowable aeons. Orders, each as deep and complex and unnatural as life, or cognition, or computation. Entities, autarchic ontologies, occupying the full panoply of every scale of space-time. From the quantum foam, where space disintegrated, to the forever-unknowable scale of the Cosmos, forever outside the light-cone of any instrumentable knowability.
That was reality.
These were those who called these idle dreams, but reality was neither idle nor a dream. Much scientific evidence had been carefully amassed, to prove the objective existence of extropic Orders. Pitar followed Mercurian science with some care—although he never involved himself in the fierce, bloody duels over precedence and citation.
Pitar understood the implications of modern science for his own creative work. Any true, sincere monument, any place of genuinely splendid remembrance, would be built in a manner that took reality into a full account. An enlightened peak of moral comprehension.
This Awareness would transcend awareness. It would respect that ordered otherness, in all its many forms, and do that Otherness honour.
It might well take him, thought Pitar, centuries to come to workable terms with this professional ambition. But since he had that time, it behooved him to spend his time properly. Such was his duty. This was something that he himself could do, to add to all that had passed before, as a legacy to whoever, or whatever, was to follow.
Pitar glanced up, suddenly, from the writhing sandpit. His wife had arrived. Lucy was on her bicycle.
Pitar mounted his own two-wheeled machine. He rode to join her. Pitar rode smoothly and elegantly, because he’d infested his bicycle’s frame with smartsand.
He hadn’t told his wife about this design gambit; Lucy merely thought, presumably, that he was tremendously good at learning to ride a bicycle. No need to bring up that subject. Enough that he had a bicycle, and that he rode it with her. Deeds, not words.
His wife’s head was fully encased in her black helmet. Her body was almost suitalooned by her black, flowing bicycle garb. Mounted on her bicycle, Lucy scarcely looked like a woman at all. More of a dark, scarcely-knowable, metaphysical object.
But, when Pitar wore his own helmet, he was as anonymous and mysterious as she. So, faceless and shameless, they rode together, tires crunching subtly, on the park’s long grey cinder-path.
“Mr. Peretz, you looked very thoughtful, sitting there in your sandbox.”
“Yes,” said Pitar, forbearing to nod, due to the bulk of his helmet.
“What were you thinking?”
A deadly female question. Pitar found a tactful parry. “Look here, I have created a new bicycle. See, I am riding it now.”
“Yes, I saw that you printed a new bicycle, and it’s more advanced now, isn’t it? What happened to your nice old bicycle? You rode that one so gallantly!”
“I gave that machine to a friend,” said Pitar. “I gave it to Mr. Giorgio Harold DeVenet.”
His wife’s front wheel wobbled suddenly. “What? To him? How? Why? He beat you in a duel!”
“It’s true that Mr. DeVenet is a duellist. And it’s true that I lost that duel. But that was eight years ago, and there’s no reason I can’t be polite.”
“Why did you do that?”
Pitar said nothing.
“Why did you do it? You had some reason for doing that. You should tell me that. He insulted me; I should know this.”
“Let’s just ride,” Pitar suggested.
Pitar had given the gift to the duellist, because he’d known that there would be trouble about the bicycles. This radical innovation—bicycling—it did damage the institution of purdah. Maybe it did not violate the letter of propriety, but it certainly damaged the spirit.
Pitar had been confronted on that issue; politely. So Pitar had, just as politely, referred that matter of honour to Mr. Giorgio Harold DeVenet, also the possessor of a bicycle.
Mr. DeVenet, a brawny and athletic man, was delighted with his new bicycle. As he scorched past mere pedestrians, pedalling in a fury, Mr. DeVenet’s strength and speed were publicly displayed to fine effect.
Skeptics had questioned Mr. DeVenet’s affection for bicycles. He had promptly forced them to retract their assertions and apologise.
In this fashion, the matter of bicycles was settled.
Mr. DeVenet was not so punctilious, however, that he had escaped being seen in the flirtatious, bicycling company of the notorious Widow De Schubert. She was the type who rode through life without a helmet. The widow’s late husband, outmatched and sorely lacking in tact, had already fallen on the field of honour.
To own a bicycle was not the same as understanding its proper use. At the rate that matters progressed these days, it wouldn’t be long before Mr. DeVenet joined the other victims of the Widow De Schubert. The duellist could batter any number of bicycle skeptics, but to defeat a woman’s wiles was far beyond his simplicity.
Men who lived by the club fell by the club, a trouble-story far older than this world. Pitar was at peace with these difficult facts of life. The notorious Widow De Schubert was one his wife’s best-trusted friends—but he did not inquire into that tangled matter. Certain things between men and women were best left unspoken.
His wife lifted her visor by a thumb’s width, so as to be better heard. “Mr. Peretz, I do enjoy these new outings that we have together nowadays. You have given me another gift that I long desired. For that, I am grateful to you. You are a good husband.”
“Thank you very much for that kindly remark, Mrs. Peretz. That’s very gratifying.”
“Are you also pleased by our situation today?”
Given the praise he had just received, Pitar ventured a candid response. “Although modernity has some clear advantages,” he told her, “I can’t say it’s entirely easy. In that very modest bicycle garb, I cannot see your face. In fact, I can’t see anything of you at all. You are a deep mystery.”
“Beneath this black garment, sir, I wear nothing but my beautiful, golden mangalsutra. I feel so free nowadays. Freer than I have ever felt as a modern woman.”
Pitar pondered this provocative remark. It had emotional layers and textures closed to mere men. “That’s an interesting data-point, there.”
“Mr. Peretz, although it was not our own will that united us,” Lucy said, rolling boldly on, “I feel that marriage is an important exploration of a woman’s emotional phase-space. Someday, we two—separated of course—will look back on these years with satisfaction. You in your way, and me in mine, as that must be. Nevertheless, we will have accomplished a crucial joint success.”
“You’re full of compliments this afternoon, Mrs. Peretz! I’m glad you’re in such a good mood!”
“This is not a question of my so-called moods!” his wife told him. “I am trying to explain to you that, now that we possess bicycles, modernity is achieved. It’s time that I faced futurity, and to do what futurity requires from me, I will need your help. It’s time we built another child.”
“Since honour requires that of me as well, Mrs. Peretz, I can only concur.”
“Let’s build a daughter, this time.”
“A daughter would be just and fair.”
“Good. Then, that’s all settled. These are good times. A good day to you, sir.” She bent to heave at her whirring pedals, and she rapidly wheeled away.
Tor Books by David G. Hartwell
NONFICTION
Age of Wonder
EDITOR
Bodies of the Dead
Centaurus
Christmas Forever
Christmas Stars
The Dark Descent
Foundation of Fears
Northern Stars (with Glenn Grant)
Northern Suns (with Glenn Grant)
The Science Fiction Century
The Screaming Skull
Visions of Wonder (with Milton T. Wolf)
The Ascent of Wonder (with Kathryn Cramer)
Spirits of Christmas (with Kathryn Cramer)
The Hard SF Renaissance (with Kathryn Cramer)
The Space Opera Renaissance (with Kathryn Cramer)
Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (with Patrick Nielsen Hayden)
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Widely acclaimed as the most influential SF editor of this age, David G. Hartwell lives in Pleasantville, New York. He has won the World Fantasy Award and multiple Hugo Awards for his editorial work. Visit his website at www.davidghartwell.com.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Old Paint” copyright © 2012 by Megan Lindholm
“The Ghosts of Christmas” copyright © 2012 by Paul Cornell
“Prayer” copyright © 2012 by Robert Reed
“The Battle of Candle Arc” copyright © 2012 by Yoon Ha Lee
“Dormanna” copyright © 2012 by Gene Wolfe
“Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery” copyright © 2012 by Eleanor Arnason
“Electrica” copyright © 2012 by Sean McMullen
“Perfect Day” copyright © 2012 by C. S. Friedman
“Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh” copyright © 2012 by John Barnes
“Liberty’s Daughter” copyright © 2012 by Naomi Kritzer
“Weep for Day” copyright © 2012 by Indrapramit Das
“In Plain Sight” copyright © 2012 by Pat Cadigan
“Application” copyright © 2012 by Lewis Shiner
“A Love Supreme” copyright © 2012 by Kathleen Ann Goonan
“Close Encounters” copyright © 2012 by Andy Duncan
“Two Sisters in Exile” copyright © 2012 by Aliette de Bodard
“Waves” copyright © 2012 by Ken Liu
“The North Revena Ladies Literary Society” copyright © 2012 by Catherine H. Shaffer
“Antarctica Starts Here” copyright © 2012 by Paul McAuley
“Bricks, Sticks, Straw” copyright © 2012 by Gwyneth Jones
“The Sigma Structure Symphony” copyright © 2012 by Gregory Benford
“Glass Future” copyright © 2012 by Deborah Walker
“If Only…” copyright © 2012 by Tony Ballantyne
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