A Million Open Doors

by John Barnes

  It hadn't occurred to me until we'd been there for about a week that my mother was hinting about the fact that she and my father could not possibly come to Caledony for the wedding. I thought, for one moment, of saying that after all we had affianced entirely to get Margaret a ticket here—thought about it, and decided it wasn't true.

  It wasn't legally binding, since neither of us was of age under Occitan law, but we had a very pleasant ceremony in my father's garden, looking out across the tomato plants down toward the gray sea, just as Arcturus sank into Totzmare. Garsenda sprang up for it, vowing that she would be at the one in Utilitopia as well, and put out enough energy and noise to constitute the whole bride's side by herself. Pertz came, and a few of my other old jovent friends also, but mostly the occasion was for my parents and their friends.

  The party afterwards was wonderful. I was a little surprised to realize how interesting all my parents' friends were, after all this time. Somewhere in the course of the evening people got the idea that this was also the farewell party, and that night, after getting around to consummating the marriage, Margaret and I agreed that it was time to go back.

  I still did not know what answer I would give to Shan; I could tell that Margaret was getting caught up in the romantic idea of roaming the Thousand Cultures, and the fact that she would be delighted was one more argument in favor of taking the job, but I myself felt somehow past romance.

  Though not at all past happiness, I thought to myself. As I lay there in the utter darkness, facing the big window that faced the sea, Mufrid came into view, yellow and brilliant. It was the brightest star in our sky, just as Arcturus was the brightest in theirs. I slipped my arm further around Margaret, without waking her, and let the warm bed and the deep peace carry me back to sleep.

  THREE

  Garsenda had bought out the contract to operate the Center, with Paul's company as her local management, but it wouldn't be ready until the nanos got done cleaning and clearing its insides, and restoring the structure itself. In any case, there were too many memories there. So we were married in the legislative chamber itself by the President of the newly chartered Caledon Republic—Aimeric's father, who was grinning quite uncharacteristically the whole way through. It figured, somehow, that in Nou Occitan, where social standing was everything, we had had a small, private ceremony with friends and family, and that in much less society- conscious Caledony, we had the President officiating, the Prime Minister as the best man, and an immense array of prominent politicians in the house.

  Valerie was maid of honor at the wedding, and I'm told, but did not stick around to see, that she disappeared from the reception with some attractive male or other, leaving Paul once again in the lurch. I think we'd have been disappointed in her if she'd done anything else.

  Betsy, in her new two-year-old's body, was a perfectly charming flower girl, though it did occur to me that she was a remarkably plain child. Perhaps by the time she hit puberty, there would be adequate plastic surgery available in Caledony, or she would be able to travel to Hedonia or Nou Occitan for a rebuild. "Or perhaps character will tell anyway, and she will be one of those handsome women who are devastatingly attractive through force of character, the sort that only sensible, discriminating men are interested in," I said to Margaret that night as we watched the moon come up over the sea, from the enclosed balcony of the Parton Grand, the first resort hotel on the west coast, the first springer-equipped hotel in Caledony, and the first million utils or so of Paul's indebtedness. Currently it was jammed with archaeologists and paleontologists of every kind, but somehow a suite had been found for us.

  "I'm just glad she didn't trip and fall like she did in the rehearsal. That's all I'd' need, would be my mother having a story like that to tell for years afterwards—the adorable little flower girl that landed on her face and got up saying, 'Goddamn these short legs!' "

  I leaned back and laughed. "Do you ever wonder—if the cat hadn't wrecked, if the expedition had gotten out here on schedule—what might have happened?"

  "Sometimes. It's sort of unknowable, isn't it?"

  "Yap." I took her arm and we went up to our room.

  The last day we were there, Shan" came to see both of us. "Now that your personal decisions are made," he said, "would you both like a job? I'm now in a position to hire you as a couple. Before you answer, let me say that I'm sure you're aware that Aimeric, or for that matter Paul Parton, or any of a dozen others would hire either of you in a minute, and probably for more than the Council of Humanity could afford to pay you. You'd be wealthy eventually. Within a few years you could commute between your home cultures. So I shall tell you up front that I want to make my offer first before you have any idea what you're worth."

  His friendly grin made it easy enough to ask.

  "So, what do you have to offer us? Travel, I assume."

  "To everywhere. We've found that people from frontier worlds tend to work out well on other frontier worlds, so of course we'd use you there. But if you're to function well on behalf of the Council of Humanity, you'll need to understand the Council's problems, which mostly originate in the Inner Sphere, so you'd be spending time there too. Everywhere and anywhere."

  "Doing what?" Margaret asked.

  "Officially," Shan said, leaning back in his chair and accepting the drink I had poured for him, "you will administer and oversee all sorts of functions in Embassies around the Thousand Cultures. Be bureaucrats, if you will. You'll also have a 'secondary contact' job, which only means that we expect you to spend as much time as you can out of the Embassies and in the culture you're visiting."

  "That doesn't sound like anything you need us in particular for," Margaret said. "But you said 'officially,' which is your secret phrase for 'don't believe this.' "

  "Unofficially," he went on, in the same tone of voice, "you would be in the Office of Special Projects. Reporting to me, no matter where you happened to be. My standing in the Office is something I'm not at liberty to discuss, but you'll find the Office itself in the organization chart of the Council of Humanity, reporting only to the Secretary General and the Executive Cabinet."

  "And what does the Office do?" I asked. "I might mention I have very little desire to be a politician or a spy, after having coped with too many of them."

  Shan made a fade. "Not that. If we want to keep humanity together, we have to make sure the bonds are loose enough not to chafe." He sighed. "In a sense we began before we had a purpose; thirty-two stanyears ago when the springer came out of nowhere. You know, at that time there were probably fewer physicists than there had been on the Earth a thousand years ago; it was a solved science. No one and nothing expected the Council to be anything more than a ceremonial body, ever.

  "We had not had a request for a new colony—not that we had anywhere to launch one to—in four hundred years. Humanity was closed in on itself, and we comforted ourselves with the thought that if there were anyone else out there, they no doubt were living in much the same way.

  "But the moment instant travel became possible ... well, have you considered that a robot ship can get its fuel through a springer, so that it can get very close to the speed of light? All the structural problems with handling antimatter in quantity are repealed. And when the ship arrives, another springer on board can bring through a full expedition, and they can send back for anything else they need. In fact, once you get a ship carrying a springer moving outward at light speed, it can drop off probes and expeditions as it goes, so that it need never decelerate. There will be new expeditions in all directions, and in a very short time humanity will be on the move again, expanding outward at the speed of light.

  "Unofficially, we have more than ten thousand proposed new cultures making their way through our review process. Unofficially, it has occurred to us that if we can find the springer, so can anyone else out there, and that we have to be prepared to meet the equivalent level civilization within the near future—indeed, the mystery of where they are and why we haven't met
them yet is all the deeper. And very unofficially, the fact that there are now billions of uncontrolled channels of communication in the form of springer-to-springer contacts means that there is now a tremendous centrifugal force acting on humanity; we are very likely to be pulled apart and scattered, just as we are getting ready to meet other sentient species for the first time. So the Office of Special Projects has in fact just one special project—to bring humanity together, gently and by its own choice if at all possible, but to bring it together." He gestured toward the rise of the Pessimals east of us. "And now we find that the special project is more urgent than ever. Who were they? And where did they go?"

  "And where did they come from?" Margaret echoed.

  "Oh, that we have. At least one quite obscure and unimportant G star, twenty light-years away, seems to be strongly indicated in the carvings; why else would they include so many pointers to it? The first of the new springer ships will be heading that way, from here, in a matter of less than a stanyear. But why did they never come back? And how did a terraformed planet apparently overpower a civilization capable of star travel, and revert to an almost pristine state? You see how much there is to know."

  For a long time, neither of us replied. Shan sipped his drink and watched us intently.

  "Well, I wouldn't object to seeing the rest of the Thousand Cultures," Margaret said at last, "while there are still only around a thousand of them. And if they do find somebody out there, then perhaps a senior, experienced diplomat—which I would be in twenty years—might be among the first to meet them."

  Shan's smile deepened. I got up and went to the window, not sure what I wanted to look at, but needing to rest my eyes on something outside the room. The jagged, cruel peaks of the Pessimals stabbed straight up into the sky. Mufrid was already sinking in the west, and soon Arcturus would rise over the Pessimals, and the moon over the sea.

  "Style and grace," I said, finally, and whether they understood at once, or were just letting me work out the idea, I didn't know, because I did not look around. "The question is not just, 'will humanity be united?' but 'will it be united around anything worthwhile?' You know, of course, that I come from an invented culture, one that was founded by a small group of eccentrics fascinated with the romance of the trobadors, who sought a place far away where their mad romantics could live the life that seemed to them best and most beautiful.

  "But the trobadors themselves, the model from which we were made, were wanderers, bearers of culture, teachers and news carriers. It was they who taught Europe to care for fashion and trend, art and love, style and grace ... for all the ephemera that make us human, and not merely for the politics and economics that are expressions of the needs to fuck and eat.

  "M'es vis, companho, a humanity brought together by bureaucrats and administrators alone will be a humanity made up of petty clerks; a humanity organized only around banks and treasuries would not be one worth meeting or knowing.

  "M'es vis, companho, there is need for a little style and grace among the stars. We are going to have guests, soon, and we must look our best. Ambassador Shan, I would be happy to accept the commission."

  Margaret was beside me then, taking my hand, and behind me I could hear Shan's dry chuckle, which went on for so long that I realized he was really amused, rather than making his usual polite diplomat-noises. "They told us that when we looked for agents for the Office of Special Projects, we were not to recruit merely proficient or talented people, but people who might bring us some vision—for now that humanity is turning its eyes outward again, it will be vision we will need. They added that such people might not seem like ideal employees. I know now I was right to recruit you," he said. "I've already begun to regret it."

  After arrangements had been made over coffee, and Shan had sprung back to the Embassy, we went down to sit. on the balcony over wine, listen to the crowd chatter, and watch the sunset and the ever-changing sea and sky.

  We stayed there a long time, not speaking, smiling to each other at tilings we overheard, looking out into the immense empty spaces around us. "Giraut, do you suppose we'll have time for this sort of evening very often?" Margaret asked at last.

  "Style and grace, companhona. M'es vis, how often we have them will not matter much as long as when we have them they are like this. But here—accept more wine, and give me your hand, and let's make sure that when people look at us, they'll smile at how happy we look."

  We stayed to see the moon come up, but did not linger after that.