World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  When they were done he was sweating hard, panting hard, aching all over in a generally pleasurable way. ‘When will you bring in that skipping rope you promised?’

  ‘Keep reminding me.’ Bartholomew rolled up the mats. ‘Shower time for you, a rub-down with an oily rag for me.’ He always made some such joke, but again, at least the gags varied day to day. ‘Another few days, Malenfant, and I might start trusting you to do this by yourself.’

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  ‘Your blood pressure was a little high yesterday. When you’re done put your bangle back on.’ He made for the door with a grin. ‘See you at breakfast . . .’

  The Greggsons’ home was a rough dome, a structure based on long tree trunks somehow treated so they bent smoothly to meet at the dome’s apex, and anchored at their bases in a trench of rubble, evidently smashed-up brick, taken from that big old ruin of a cooling shaft maybe. The exterior was a kind of sheeting, brilliant white to reflect the sunlight.

  Inside, partitions of wood sheets or the ubiquitous pale ceramic sliced the space up into rooms, domains that could be reconfigured easily. Thus Malenfant’s room had been quickly put together, adjacent to one of three bathrooms. He’d learned on his second day that a similar room to his own had been assembled for Bartholomew, who hadn’t been expected as a guest when Mica and Deirdra had gone to fetch Malenfant from London. Malenfant hadn’t checked if the android’s room was attached to a bathroom also.

  The geometric centre of the hemispherical dome, under the apex, was also the social centre of the house. Over a ceramic floor that somehow never felt too cool to bare feet, or indeed too warm, there were scattered throws, chairs. Screens hung on the walls, usually blank. And a big table, next to a doorway to a kitchen space, was where the little family and any guests gathered for meals, for games, for socialising.

  When Malenfant arrived this morning, Mica was sitting at the table – she smiled at Malenfant, with the same stiff courtesy with which she greeted him every day – while Deirdra and Bartholomew hauled plates and bowls from the kitchen. Malenfant took his turn with the chores; some mornings he served, some he cleared up.

  Deirdra waved Malenfant to a seat, slapped a tray in front of him, and sat down herself. Seventeen years old and growing fast, she spooned in healthy mouthfuls of her favoured breakfast, some kind of rice cereal, while waving her cutlery at Malenfant’s tray. ‘Your usual. Pancakes, syrup, bacon, strong coffee. Look, you must just say if you want something different. It’s easy enough. I have to go to the store this morning anyhow. Maybe you could come along if—’

  ‘This is perfect,’ he said around a mouthful of bacon. He had already started in on the coffee too. Perfect it was. It had taken a few iterations, a few mornings, to get it exactly right – everything in this new age had tasted bland to Malenfant, he eventually suspected because he was used to food dosed with additives – but the food printers at the store, and the cooking devices here at home, were smart, and more importantly good listeners. So now the bacon was just the right side of crisp, the coffee just this side of tongue-burning, the way he liked it. Just the way, he thought a little bleakly, he used to make it for Emma, and then for himself and Michael, and then himself alone. He put the thought aside and glanced at Bartholomew. ‘I mean, if you can’t have comfort food for breakfast, when can you have it?’

  Bartholomew shrugged. ‘As the printers wouldn’t give you anything harmful, I’m not going to intervene.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mica said, ‘but your breakfast wouldn’t have been so comforting for the pigs slaughtered for your bacon, back in your day. Or even the cows in the milking machines, so that you could have your coffee white.’

  Deirdra snorted. ‘Not very polite to trip-guilt your guest over breakfast, Mother.’ She glanced at Malenfant uncertainly.

  The translator functions embedded in their bangles and the fabric of this smart house were complex, but not perfect; he could always tell when Deirdra was trying to work in some new bit of twenty-first-century slang. Guilt-trip, he mouthed.

  She nodded back.

  He had quizzed Bartholomew about how the bangles worked. The technology turned out to be a remote descendant of the functional magnetic resonance imager technology of his own time, which had required a machine bigger than his coldsleep pod to take a kind of snapshot of the blood surges within a human brain. Those surges were a physical reflection of the thoughts curdling in that brain – thoughts the bangles could now read, effectively, by smart-analysing MRI images in real time. Not only that, by using powerful but very precise electromagnetic fields, the bangles could write to selected portions of the brain.

  What Malenfant thought he ‘heard’ of Deirdra’s speech was massively edited, then, not so much through a voice whispering in his ear but an adjustment of the cognition going on inside his head. And adept users of the bangles, like Deirdra, could interface with them directly, as if telepathically, mind to gadget. They called it ‘looking stuff up’. This technology was how Karla had spoken to him as he emerged from his centuries-long sleep on the Moon.

  Malenfant had asked Bartholomew if he could read his, Malenfant’s, mind. Bartholomew had just winked.

  A thought struck Malenfant now. ‘Pigs, though.’

  Mica raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Just thinking it through. So you gave up farming.’

  Mica snorted. ‘We’ve been through this. Not us. Our ancestors, centuries ago. The way your ancestors gave up the covered wagon and the mule train. You seem to think every generation after your own existed at the same time, in one big overlapping lump—’

  ‘I get it. But what happened to all the animals? The domesticated breeds, the pigs, the cattle, the sheep – the goats even.’

  ‘Oh, they’re still around,’ Deirdra said brightly. ‘Sustainable populations anyhow. I know what you’re getting at, Malenfant. We couldn’t let them go extinct. There are big reservations, even a few model farms, without the slaughtering and stuff. My dad took me to one on Baffin Island, once – the far north, where it isn’t too warm for the animals – but I was too little to remember much. They say the sheep and goats are breeding back to their ancestral forms.’

  ‘Makes you think. You know what was the most common bird on planet Earth in my day? The chicken, that’s what. And it became an endangered species?’

  ‘Not any more.’ Deirdra grinned. ‘Eat up, Malenfant. I’m looking forward to my walk to the store.’

  Before they left, Malenfant took his turn cleaning up and tidying away. There were machines to help – like magic dishwashers, super-efficient in terms of water and power usage, and the recycling was somewhere near a hundred per cent, with big underground pipes taking waste and sewage back to the matter-printer centres – but in the house itself there were few housework automata. People cleaned up after themselves, and for each other. Malenfant found these domestic routines satisfying, or comforting, maybe. Another stray echo of his lost life with Emma.

  And, four hundred years out of time or not, washing up was something he could do, that he could contribute. Maybe this society, which struck him as rather bland – like the food – had its own wisdom after all.

  But by the time he and Deirdra had set off for the store, an hour later, his mood had crashed again.

  13

  To the store was a journey of around three kilometres, due east. It was a fine day, the Sun bright but low in their eyes – midsummer heat under an early spring sky – so they elected to walk, rather than ride. Malenfant now customarily wore a loose white tunic and trousers, and a floppy white hat, like everybody else. They both had empty packs on their bags, to bring home the matter-printed groceries.

  At first the road surface itself had been unfamiliar to Malenfant – a kind of roughened glass, it looked like – but it had proved easy to walk on. And you could scarcely get lost, as the road itself knew where you were going, and even who you were, and whispered to let you know. Good morning, Deirdra. To the store, another forty minutes at your cur
rent pace . . .

  The track they followed stretched through what felt like parkland, or managed forest: thick grass, a lot of shady trees, a few fenced-off zones that had been toxic for centuries and would be for centuries more, and scattered buildings, all boxy white. Malenfant could see how the architecture was adapted to the heat of the age, with reflective white and silver, plenty of shade, grassy surfaces. Here and there were splashes of blue colouring, a vivid contrast to all the white, just for decoration. The aesthetic reminded him more of some Mediterranean island than England.

  He heard birdsong, but there were rarely any animals to be seen in this recovered forest, aside from pet dogs. Not during the day. But at night he would hear snuffling and shuffling sometimes, as creatures like hedgehogs came out to feed, even foxes. And one night he could have sworn he heard a wolf howl.

  He had learned, from Deirdra, that during the crowded centuries a lot of wild animals, mostly in small relic populations, had adapted to nocturnal living. They were like the little squirrelly mammals that had survived at the feet of the dinosaurs; they had been nocturnal too, seeking in the night some distance from the big monsters, a distance in time if not in space. Around the human world even animals like bears and lions had adapted this way. And so in the new British forests there were nocturnal deer, wild boar, wolves. For now it was too soon for them to have lost the adaptation – even though the humans, like the dinosaurs, had mostly gone.

  As they went on, tributary roads met the main drag, and as usual they joined a ragged flow of more people heading the same way, some familiar to Deirdra, some not. She nodded to strangers, and exchanged a few words with friends, mostly on matters that Malenfant had no idea about, and often expressed in vocabulary he was still utterly unfamiliar with, despite the prompting of the translator function in his bangle. But Deirdra made a point of introducing him to everybody they met, and he smiled, and he spoke when spoken to, and tried to remember the names of their kids. He might be spending the rest of his life among these faces, and he didn’t want to make a bad first impression.

  The rest of his life. Somewhere in that thought was the root of his problems this morning, he mused.

  At one point they joined a group of walkers discussing plans for the funeral of a mutual friend. It sounded more like plans for a barbecue to Malenfant, some kind of open-air gathering where you would just show up with your memories, maybe a few souvenirs. No mention of church services. Maybe, he thought, it would be a little like the roasts the astronauts used to give each other and their families.

  A discreet question to Deirdra later and he learned that most people were buried simply, out in the forest, with no more marker, usually, than a tree planted over them. ‘We have other ways of remembering people, Malenfant. The Codex is one way.’

  That was a slip, and he knew better than to push her on it. This ‘Codex’ was on a list of stuff he apparently wasn’t supposed to know about yet.

  He distracted himself by studying the few road vehicles they came across. There were still recognisable cars and trucks, and such words had still survived in the language. But the vehicles were all bland, white-shelled, round-cornered pods of ceramic that trundled along, sometimes at a respectable speed, on big balloon tyres. Whatever engines they had were silent save for the faintest purr, whatever energy source they had invisible – he guessed super-efficient batteries fed by solar cells, or maybe a feed from the road itself. And they were all old, as you could see by the scuffs and the wear, and the all but seamless repair jobs visible on those hulls. It was just like the first modes of transport he’d come across when he’d emerged from the sleep-pod bay – the London boat, the flyer that had brought him here: scraps of perfected technology, handed down from one generation to the next.

  Deirdra walked steadily beside him. ‘What are you thinking?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe I’m thinking that I could have walked along this road a century ago, maybe more, and seen exactly the same scenery. The road, the people, the trucks and cars – maybe the same trucks and cars.’

  ‘Is that a good thing? Or bad?’

  ‘Just strange, that’s all. To me.’

  ‘I wish I could see things as you see them.’

  ‘No,’ he said fervently, ‘you don’t.’

  ‘But to me this is all ordinary.’ She looked at him cautiously. ‘If I were you I’d be missing the people. The great swarms of them when the population was at its peak.’

  ‘Good point,’ he mused. ‘You would think I’d miss that. But I was an astronaut, remember, or in the military, or . . . I was relatively privileged. Relatively rich. Though it didn’t feel like it, back then. I lived in places, mostly, where there weren’t so many people, not to the square kilometre.’

  ‘It’s hard for us to imagine what it was like,’ Deirdra said. She waved a hand. ‘Before, the world must have been more like this. People spread out. And after, it’s like this again. Those centuries in the middle, when you lived – all those people, filling everything up. Like Earth was a different planet altogether for a while. And now it’s normal again.’

  Normal. He knew that in fact there were less than a billion human beings on the planet these days.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but to me that different planet was home.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be distracting you. Ask me about something else. Anything you see.’

  He pointed to a blocky building set back from the road, a white windowless slab that looked as if it was the top of a much bigger structure dug into the ground. ‘So what’s that? I see them everywhere. I know my bangle will tell me, but—’

  ‘I think there’s supposed to be one every few square kilometres – I forget the number. It’s an old aircon refuge. If the heat gets excessive, you can just go in there and cool down, and there’s medical stuff on hand. Volunteer nurses . . .’ She frowned. ‘I’m not sure where that word, aircon, comes from.’

  ‘I know. Air conditioning. Artificially cooling the air – or heating it, but that’s probably not necessary around here. A refuge, you say?’

  ‘They’re pretty old, I think.’

  ‘Well, they would be. A relic from the emergency days, right? When the heat pulse really took off.’

  ‘Yes. Of course when it stayed hot everything got rebuilt.’

  He glanced around. ‘Sure. They used to build houses to keep heat in; now you build them to keep heat out.’

  ‘That’s it. And the aircon refuges are still there in case.’

  Malenfant grunted. ‘When I was a kid we had neighbourhood bomb shelters.’

  They were approaching the store now.

  The store was in, not a town centre exactly, Malenfant thought, more a knot of amenities, including a medical centre, a theatre, a headquarters of some kind for Morrel’s Prefects. Further out, he knew, there were sports facilities: indoor running tracks, a swimming pool. And a school, though he didn’t understand the attendance rules; the kids seemed to come in to socialise, but did much of their learning at home – and not solely through some automated facility, he’d been surprised to discover, but with the help of home tutors, and their families.

  Yet further afield, he had learned, there were more significant facilities – most of them in those big cruciform structures they called Pylons. The universities were there. Teaching hospitals. Major art colonies. And facilities of other sorts – cultural, political, medical, that he hadn’t worked out yet. Such as, in some cases, an access point to this thing they called the Codex – the nearest was at Chester, a couple of hours from here. From the name and references he’d heard, mostly from slips by Deirdra, he vaguely imagined the Codex as some kind of reference source on family history and such. And there were other information facilities called ‘Answerers’, something else Deirdra and others had let slip. Facilities to which, evidently, he was being denied access, for now anyhow. No doubt for his own good, he thought sourly.

  Patience, Malenfant. You can’t handle it all
at once.

  They joined a line of people waiting to get to the store. The queue wasn’t long but was slow-moving, and people talked, laughed, and shaded their eyes from the still-rising Sun. Malenfant figured there were about thirty people here this morning, lining up, clustering around the store and offices, or just gathering in the public spaces. There were shady spots under trees and canopies, with dispensers of food and drink: simple printers, Malenfant had learned.

  After a few weeks of living here, he had concluded the total community that used this hub amounted to about a hundred and fifty. Call it a small town, a village. He vaguely remembered reading, back in the day, that a hundred and fifty was about the right size of group for an animal as smart as a human, enough that you got to know most people, not so many you were overwhelmed. He wondered if some subtle social programming lay behind the layout of this place – and, presumably, clones of it across England, all across the planet. One hell of a shift from the urbanisation of his own day.

  In among the service buildings there was a polling booth, he saw, where, this morning, people were waiting in another line to identify themselves, speak into a grille, and thus take part in the latest referendum. This wasn’t unusual.

  ‘Every time I come here,’ Malenfant said, ‘they’re voting over something.’

  Deirdra frowned. ‘It’s what we do. Participatory democracy, my mother calls it . . .’

  Malenfant knew this was true. Through the bangle, and a TV-like screen facility in his room, he had learned about the governance of this latter-day society. There were no more nations, but there were neighbourhoods, regions, zones, and a hierarchy of councils, parliaments and congresses: talking shops, all the way up to some kind of world-government council. This system was what they called the Common Heritage. He wondered vaguely if this had evolved from a form of emergency organisation in the refugee days – the ‘Chaos’ – maybe built on some elements of the old UN.