by Dan Simmons
So now Daeman was alone in the forest glade, leaning against the hull of the landed sonie and listening to leaves stirring and branches breaking in the dark woods and not liking it one bit. If an allosaurus appeared, he was ready to leap into the sonie—but what then? He didn’t even know how to access the holographic controls, much less how to activate the forcefield bubble or fly away. He’d be an hors d’oeuvre on a plate for the dino.
Daeman considered shouting into the woods, calling for Savi or any of the others to return, but immediately thought better of it. Were dinosaurs and other predators attracted to noise? He wasn’t going to experiment to find out. Meanwhile, he was acutely uncomfortable—not just from the anxiety, but from the need to go to the toilet. The others may have scampered off into the forest with the tissues Savi had provided, but Daeman was a civilized human being; he’d never gone to the toilet without . . . well . . . a toilet, and he wasn’t going to start now. Of course he didn’t know how many hours it would be until they got to Ardis Hall, and Savi was talking as if she wasn’t even going to stop there, just drop off Hannah, Ada, and the preposterous impostor calling himself Odysseus, and then head on to the Mediterranean Basin or wherever it was. Daeman knew he couldn’t wait that long.
He realized that he was discouraged more than frightened. Everyone had seemed surprised yesterday when he volunteered to go with the old woman and Harman on their preposterous expedition, but no one had guessed his real reason for choosing that alternative. First of all, he was afraid of the dinosaurs around Ardis Hall. He wasn’t going back there. Second, all that talk of faxing being a sort of destruction and rebuilding of people had made him extremely nervous. Well, who wouldn’t be, so shortly after waking up in the firmary and knowing that your real body had been destroyed? Daeman had faxed almost every day of his life, but the thought of stepping into a faxportal now, knowing that it was going to break down his muscles, bones, brain, and memory, and then just build a copy somewhere else—if the old woman was telling the truth—well, that idea bothered the hell out of him.
So he’d opted for traveling on the sonie for a few more days, facing neither Ardis dinosaurs nor fax destruction of his atoms or molecules or whatever.
Now he just wanted a toilet and a servitor or his mother to make him supper. Perhaps he would demand that the old woman drop him off at Paris Crater after Ardis. It wasn’t that far away, was it? Even though he’d got a glimpse of Harman’s scribbles—his “map”—Daeman had no concept of the world’s geography. Everything was as precisely as far away as everything else—a faxportal step.
The old woman stepped out of the forest, saw Daeman alone, leaning against the floating sonie, and said, “Where is everyone?”
“That’s what I was wondering. First the barbarian left. Then Hannah went after him. Then Ada and Harman walked off that way . . .” He gestured toward the tall trees on the opposite side of the glade.
“Why don’t you use your palm?” said Savi, and smiled as if something she’d said amused her.
“I already tried,” said Daeman. “On your ice-thingee. At the bridge. Here. It doesn’t work.” He raised his left palm, thought of the finder function, and showed her the blank rectangle of white floating there.
“That’s just the immediate locator function,” said Savi. “Just an arrow-guide once you’re close to something, like inside a library hunting for a volume but in the wrong aisle. Use farnet or proxnet.”
Daeman stared at her. From his first glimpse of the old woman, he had doubted her sanity.
“Ah, that’s right,” said Savi, still smiling that unamused smile. “You’ve all forgotten the functions. Generation after generation.”
“What are you talking about?” said Daeman. “The old functions like reading don’t work anymore. They went away when the post-humans left.” He pointed to the rings crossing in the patch of blue sky above.
“Nonsense,” said Savi. She walked over, leaned against the sonie next to him, and gripped his left arm, turning it palm toward her. “Think three red circles with blue squares in the center of each.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” She continued to hold his wrist.
Idiocy, thought Daeman, but he visualized three red circles with blue squares floating in the center of each.
Instead of the small rectangle of white-yellow light that the finder function generated, a large blue oval of light now floated six inches above his palm.
“Whoa!” cried Daeman, pulling his wrist from her grasp and flicking his hand wildly as if a huge insect had just landed in it. The blue oval flickered with it.
“Relax,” said Savi. “It’s blank. Just visualize someone.”
“Who?” Daeman actively did not like this sensation—his body doing something he did not know it could do.
“Anyone. Someone close to you.”
Daeman closed his eyes and visualized his mother’s face. When he opened his eyes again, the blue oval was busy with diagrams. Street grids, a river, words that he could not read—an aerial view of the black circle that could only be the crater in the heart of Paris Crater. The image zoomed and suddenly he was in a stylized structure, fifth floor, back domi near the crater—not his home. Two stylized human figures, cartoon characters but with real, human faces, were in bed, the female above the male, moving . . .
Daeman closed his hand into a fist, shutting off the oval.
“Sorry,” said Savi. “I forgot that no one’s using trace inhibitors these days. Your girlfriend?”
“My mother,” said Daeman, tasting bile. It had been Goman’s domi-complex across the crater—he knew the layout of the rooms from when he was a boy, playing in the inner rooms while his mother consorted with the tall, dark-skinned man with the wine-smooth voice. Daeman didn’t like Goman, and hadn’t known his mother was still seeing him. According to what Harman had said earlier, it was already night in Paris Crater.
“Let’s try to see where Hannah and Ada and the others are,” said Savi. She chuckled. “Although they may wish they’d activated farnet inhibitors as well.”
Daeman didn’t want to uncurl his fist.
“Recycle it,” said Savi.
“How?”
“How do you get rid of your arrow-finder?”
“I just think ‘off,’ “ said Daeman, mentally adding, “stupid.”
“Do it.”
Daeman thought, the blue oval winked off.
“You activate proxnet by thinking one yellow circle with a green triangle in it,” said Savi. She looked at her own palm and a bright yellow rectangle appeared above it.
Daeman did the same.
“Think of Hannah,” said Savi.
He did so. Both of their palms showed a continent—North America, but Daeman could not identify it—then a zoom to the south-central section, zoom north of the coastline, zoom to a complex series of unreadable words and topographic maps, zoom below stylized trees to a stylized female form with Hannah’s head on the cartoon body, walking alone—no, not alone, Daeman realized, for there was a question mark walking next to her.
Savi chuckled again. “Proxnet doesn’t know how to process Odysseus.”
“I don’t see Odysseus,” said Daeman.
Savi reached into his yellow holographic cube and touched the question mark. She pointed to two red figures at the edge of the cloud. “That’s us,” she said. “Ada and Harman must be off the grid to the north.”
“How do we know it’s Hannah?” asked Daeman, although he’d glimpsed the top of her head
“Think ‘close-up,’ “ said Savi. She showed him her palm cloud, which had zoomed lower, leveled out, and was watching the stylized Hannah with the real Hannah’s face walk between stylized trees, along a stylized stream.
He thought “close-up” and marveled at the clarity of the image. He could see the tree shadows on her features. She was speaking animatedly to the symbol—Savi had called it a question mark—floating next to her. Daeman was glad that he hadn’t found Hannah
in the middle of sex.
Savi must have visualized Ada and Harman, for her yellow palm cloud shifted and showed two figures walking on topographic symbols somewhere north of the stationary red dots that she’d said were Savi and Daeman.
“Everybody’s alive, nobody eaten by dinosaurs,” said Savi. “But I wish to hell they’d get back so we could leave. It’s getting late. If this were the old days, I’d just call them on their palms and tell them to get their butts back here.”
“You can use this to communicate?” said Daeman, holding up his bare palm.
“Of course.”
“Why don’t we know that?” His voice came out sounding almost angry.
Savi shrugged. “You don’t know much of anything anymore, you so-called old-style humans.”
“What do you mean, ‘so-called old-style’?” demanded Daeman. He was angry now.
“Do you really think the lost-age humans, the old-styles, had all this genetically tweaked nano-machinery in their cells and bodies?” asked Savi.
“Yes,” said Daeman, although he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about the Lost Age old-styles, and cared less.
Savi said nothing for a minute. She looked tired to Daeman’s eye, but perhaps all ancient, pre-firmary humans looked this bad—he didn’t know.
“We should go fetch them,” she said at last. “ I’ll take Hannah and Odysseus, you get Ada and Harman. Set your palm on proxnet, activate your finder the usual way, and that’ll lead you to them. Tell them that the bus is leaving.”
Daeman had no idea what “bus” meant, but that wasn’t important. “Are there other functions?” he asked before she could walk off.
“Hundreds,” said Savi.
“Show me one,” challenged Daeman. He didn’t believe her—not hundreds—but even one or two more would make him popular at parties, of interest to young women.
Savi sighed and leaned back against the sonie. A wind had come up and stirred the sequoia branches far above them. “I can show you the function that finally drove the post-humans off the Earth,” she said softly. “The allnet.”
Daeman closed his fist again and pulled his hand away. “Not if it’s dangerous.”
“It’s not,” said Savi. “Not to us. Here, I’ll go first.” She lowered his arm, pulled his fingers open, and touched his palm in a way he found almost exciting. Then she set her own left palm next to his.
“Visualize four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles,” she said softly.
Daeman frowned—that was difficult, the shapes skittered right at the edge of his ability to hold the image—but he managed at last, his eyes closed.
“Open your eyes,” said Savi.
He did so, wildly grabbing the sonie for support with both hands a second later.
There was no palm cloud. No unreadable maps or cartoon figures.
Instead, everything within his sight had been transformed. The nearby trees he had been ignoring except to borrow their shade were now towering complexities—transparent, layer upon layer of pulsing, living tissue, dead bark, vesicules, veins, dead inner material showing structural vectors and rings with columns of flowing data, the moving green and red of life—needles, xylem, phloem, water, sugar, energy, sunlight. He knew that if he could read the flowing data, he would understand exactly the hydrology of the living miracle that was that tree, know exactly how many foot-pounds of pressure it was taking to osmotically raise all that water from the roots—Daeman could look down and see the roots under the soil, see the energy exchange of water from the soil into those roots and the long voyage, hundreds of feet, from roots to the vertical tubules raising that water—hundreds of feet vertically! Like a giant sucking from a straw!—and then the lateral motion of the water, molecules of water in pipelines only molecules wide, out along branches fifty, sixty, seventy feet wide, narrowing, narrowing, life and nutrients in that water, energy from the sun . . .
Daeman looked up and saw sunlight for the discrete rain of energy it was—sunlight striking pine needles and being absorbed, sunlight striking the humus beneath his feet and warming the bacteria there. He could count the busy bacteria! The world around him was a torrent of information, a tidal wave of data, a million micro-ecologies interacting all at once, energy to energy. Even death was part of the complex dance of water, light, energy, life, recycling, growth, sex, and hunger flowing all around him.
Daeman could see a dead mouse almost buried in the humus on the opposite side of the glade, little more than hair and bones now, but still a beacon of red-light energy as the bacteria feasted and the fly eggs incubated into maggots in the afternoon sunlight and the slow unraveling of complex protein molecules continued on the molecular level, and . . .
Gasping, almost gagging, Daeman whirled away, trying to shut off this vision, but everywhere was the complexity—the tagged and streaming ebb and flow of energy being passed, nutrients being absorbed, cells being fed, molecules dancing in the transparent trees, and breathing soil and sky ablaze with its rain and surge of sunlight and radio messages from the stars.
Daeman clasped his hands over his eyes, but too late; he’d looked at Savi—the old woman, but also a galaxy of life. Life nested in the flashing neurons of her brain behind that grinning skull and firing like lightning on the string of shocks along her retinal nerve and in the billions upon billions of living forms in her gut, busy and indifferent all, and—trying to look away, Daeman made the mistake of looking down at himself, into himself, past himself at his connection to the air and ground and sky . . .
“Off!” said Savi; Daeman’s mind echoed the command.
The brilliant midday sunlight bouncing off the trees and needle-strewn soil suddenly seemed as dark as midnight to Daeman. His legs ceased to work. Gasping, Daeman slid along the edge of the sonie and collapsed on the ground, rolling onto his stomach, arms extended, palms pushed flat, face pressed against pine needles.
Savi crouched next to him and patted his shoulder. “It’ll go away in a minute,” she said softly. “You rest here. I’ll go find the others.”
Ada had been hesitant to go when Harman suggested they take a walk —she was afraid that Savi would be angry or alarmed at everyone’s absence when she returned to the glade—but Hannah had already run off in search of Odysseus, and Ada didn’t want to stay there by the sonie alone with Daeman. Besides, she didn’t know if she’d have another chance to speak in private with her new lover before she returned to Ardis and he went flying off to the Mediterwhatsis Basin with Savi.
They walked up a hill, then followed a stream down the other side. The forest was alive with birdsong, but they saw no animals larger than a squirrel. Harman seemed preoccupied, lost in thought, and the only time he touched Ada was when he extended his hand to help her across the stream just above a ten-foot waterfall. She wondered if their night together had been a mistake, a miscalculation on her part, but when they stopped to rest at the base of the waterfall, she saw his eyes focus on her, saw the affection and tenderness in his gaze, and was glad they’d become lovers.
“Ada,” he said, “do you know your father?”
She had to blink at this. The question was not quite shocking—people knew they had fathers, of course, theoretically—but such a thing was rarely asked. “Do you mean know who he was?” she asked.
Harman shook his head. “I mean know him. Have you met him?”
“No,” she said. “My mother told me his name at one point, but I believe he . . . reached his Fifth Twenty some years ago.” She had almost said Ascended to the rings, the most common euphemism for passing on bodily into the heaven of the post-humans. Her heart pounded when she wondered why Harman was asking her this odd question. Did he think there was a chance that he had been her father? It happened, of course. Young women made love with older men who could be their anonymous sperm-fathers—there was no taboo on incest, since there was no chance that a child could be born from such a union, and there were no brothers or sisters since every w
oman could reproduce only once—but it was strangely disturbing to think about it.
“I didn’t know who my father was,” said Harman. “Savi said that at one point in time—even after the Lost Age—fathers were almost as important to children as mothers are now.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” said Ada, still confused. What was he trying to tell her? That he was too old for her? That was nonsense.
“If I’m ever a father,” said Harman, “I want the child to know me. I want to be with the child as he or she grows up . . . just as a mother would.”
Ada was too shocked to speak.
He began walking again and she followed him in under the trees. It was cooler in the shade, but the air was thicker there. The waterfall made a soft noise behind them. Suddenly Ada looked around, alarmed.
“Did you hear something?” asked Harman, stopping next to her.
“No. It’s just . . . something’s wrong.”
“No servitors,” said Harman. “No voynix.”
That was it, realized Ada. They were alone. For the last two days, the absence of omnipresent servitors and voynix had been like a missing background noise, but it was more apparent now that they were alone, just the two of them.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she shivered. “Can you find the way back to the sonie?”
Harman nodded. “I’ve been making notes on the terrain and watching the sun.” He pointed with the branch he was using as a walking stick. “The glade is just over that hill.”
Ada smiled, but she wasn’t totally convinced. She checked her palm-finder, but it was as blank as it had been since they’d left the Antarctic domi. She’d been in the woods before—usually on her Ardis estate—but never without a servitor floating nearby to show the way home or without a voynix for protection. But this was just background tension to the central anxiety about Harman’s odd question and comment.