by Greg Egan
Inoshiro had been right, there was nothing ve could do; the bridgers would bury their dead, treat the injured, repair their damaged city. Even in a world where the darkness at noon could blind them, they’d find their own ways to survive. Ve had nothing to offer them.
The link to Konishi was still down, but ve wasn’t prepared to wait any longer. Yatima stood motionless in the street, listening to the cries of pain and mourning, preparing verself for extinction. To forget this would be nothing but a sweet relief; vis Konishi self would be free to remember the bridgers in happier times.
Then the sky roared, and the lightning descended like rain.
The street became a sequence of dazzling staccato images bathed in blue and white, shadows jumping wildly with each new jagged arc of light. Buildings began exploding one after another, a relentless cascade of sudden orange flashes spraying sparks and fist-sized lumps of burning wood. People appeared, ducking and screaming, panicked out of their vulnerable shelters. Yatima watched, helpless but transfixed. The dying stratospheric plasma had found a way to reach down to Earth, its radio frequency pulses pumping vast quantities of ions through the lower atmosphere, inducing a massive voltage difference between the stormclouds and the ground. But now the voltage had crossed the breakdown threshold of the dust-filled air below, and the whole system was short-circuiting, rapidly and violently. Atlanta just happened to be in the way. Local damage, insignificant on a global scale.
Yatima moved slowly through the actinic blaze, half hoping for a lightning strike and the mercy of amnesia, but unable to abandon the bridgers now by choice. Driven from their homes, people were cowering beneath the onslaught, many of them burnt, torn, bloodied. A woman strode past with her arms stretched wide and her face to the sky, shouting defiantly: “So what? So what?”
A child, a half-grown girl, sat in the middle of the street, the side of her face and one exposed arm a raw pink, weeping lymphatic fluid. Yatima approached her. She was shivering.
“You can leave all this behind. Come into the polises. Is that what you want?” She stared back, uncomprehending. One of her ears was bleeding; the thunder might have deafened her. Yatima delved into the instructions for the gleisner’s maintenance nanoware, and had it rebuild the lost delivery system in vis left forefinger. Then ve commanded the surviving Introdus doses to move into place.
Ve raised vis arm and aimed the delivery system at the girl, shouting “Introdus? Is that what you want?” She cried out and covered her face. Did that mean no, or was she just bracing herself for the shock?
The child began sobbing. Yatima backed away, defeated. Ve could save fifteen lives, ve could drag fifteen people out of this senseless inferno, but who could ve be sure even understood what ve was offering?
Francesca. Orlando. Liana.
Orlando and Liana’s house wasn’t far. Yatima steeled verself and pushed on through the chaos, past the shattered buildings and the terrified fleshers. The lightning was finally dying away — and the fireproof buildings had only burnt when directly hit — but the city had been transformed into a scene from the age of barbarism, when bombs had rained from the sky.
The house was partly standing, but unrecognizable; Yatima only knew ve’d found the right place because of the gleisner’s navigation system. The top story was gutted, and there were holes in the ceiling and walls of the ground floor.
Someone was kneeling in the shadows, picking away debris at the edge of a vast heap where the ashes of most of the top story seemed to have landed. “Liana?” Yatima broke into a run. The figure turned toward ver.
It was Inoshiro.
Inoshiro had half-exposed a corpse, all black dessicated flesh and white bone. Yatima looked down at it, then recoiled, disoriented. This charred skull was not a symbol in some jaded work of polis art; it was proof of the involuntary erasure of a living mind. The physical world could do that. The death of a cosmic mayfly could do that.
Inoshiro said, “It’s Liana.”
Yatima tried to absorb this, but ve felt nothing, the idea meant nothing. “Have you found —?”
“Not yet.” Inoshiro’s voice was expressionless.
Yatima left ver, and began scanning the rubble in IR, wondering how long a corpse would remain warmer than its surroundings. Then ve heard a faint sound from the front of the house.
Orlando was buried beneath pieces of the ruptured ceiling. Yatima called Inoshiro, and they quickly uncovered him. He was badly injured; both his legs and one arm had been crushed, and a gash in his thigh was spurting blood. Yatima checked the link to Konishi — ve couldn’t even guess how to treat such wounds — but either the stratosphere was still ionized, or one of the drones had been lost in the storm.
Orlando stared up at them, ashen but conscious, eyes pleading for something. Inoshiro said flatly, “She’s dead.” Orlando’s face contorted silently.
Yatima looked away and spoke to Inoshiro in IR. “What do we do? Carry him to a place where they can treat him? Fetch someone? I don’t know how this works.”
“There are thousands of injured people. No one’s going to treat him; he’s not going to live that long.”
Yatima was outraged. “They can’t leave him to die!”
Inoshiro shrugged. “You want to try finding a communications link and calling for a doctor?” Ve peered out through the broken wall. “Or do you want to try carrying him to the hospital, and see if he survives the trip?”
Yatima knelt beside Orlando. “What do we do? There are a lot of people hurt, I don’t know how long it will take to get help.”
Orlando bellowed with pain. A weak shaft of sunlight had appeared, coming through a hole in the ceiling and illuminating the skin of his broken right arm. Yatima glanced up; the storm was over, the clouds were beginning to thin and drift away.
Ve moved to block the light, while Inoshiro crouched behind Orlando, half-lifted him under the arms, and dragged him over the rubble into the shade. The wound in his thigh left a thick trail of blood.
Yatima knelt beside him again. “I still have the Introdus nanoware. I can use it, if that’s what you want.”
Orlando said clearly, “I want to talk to Liana. Take me to Liana.”
“Liana’s dead.”
“I don’t believe you. Take me to her.” He was struggling for breath, but he forced the words out defiantly.
Yatima stepped back beneath the hole in the ceiling. In ordinary light the sun appeared as a meek orange disk through the stratosphere’s brown haze, but in UV it shone fiercely amidst a blaze of scattered radiation.
Ve left the room, and returned carrying Liana’s body one-handed by the collar bone. Orlando covered his face with his unbroken arm and wept loudly.
Inoshiro took the corpse away. Yatima knelt by Orlando a third time, and put vis hand on his shoulder clumsily. “I’m sorry she’s dead. I’m sorry that hurt you.” Ve could feel Orlando’s body shaking with each sob. “What do you want? Do you want to die?”
Inoshiro spoke in IR. “You should have left when you had the chance.”
“Yeah? So why did you come back?”
Inoshiro didn’t reply. Yatima swung around to face ver. “You knew about the storm, didn’t you? You knew how bad it would be!”
“Yes.” Inoshiro made a gesture of helplessness. “But if I’d said anything when we arrived, we might not have had a chance to speak to the other fleshers. And after the convocation, it was too late. It would have just caused panic.”
The front wall creaked and lurched forward, breaking loose from the ceiling in a shower of black dust. Yatima sprang to vis feet and backed away, then fired the Introdus into Orlando.
Ve froze. The wall had struck an obstacle; it was tilted precariously, but holding. Waves of nanoware were sweeping through Orlando’s body, shutting down nerves and sealing off blood vessels to minimize the shock of invasion, leaving a moist pink residue on the rubble as flesh was read and then cannibalized for energy. Within seconds, all the waves converged to form a gray mask over
his face, which bored down to the skull and then ate through it. The shrinking core of nanoware spat fluid and steam, reading and encoding crucial synaptic properties, compressing the brain into an ever-tighter description of itself, discarding redundancies as waste.
Inoshiro stooped down and picked up the end product: a crystalline sphere, a molecular memory containing a snapshot of everything Orlando had been.
“What now? How many do you have left?”
Yatima stared at the snapshot, dazed. Ve had violated Orlando’s autonomy. Like a lightning bolt, like a blast of ultraviolet, ve had ruptured someone else’s skin.
“How many?”
Yatima replied, “Fourteen.”
“Then we’d better go use them while we can.”
Inoshiro led ver out of the ruins. Yatima shot everyone they came across who looked close to death, and had no one to care for them — reading the snapshots immediately, piping the data in IR into vis gleisner’s memory. They’d taken twelve more bridgers when a mob led by the border guards found them.
They started cutting up Yatima first. Ve passed the snapshot data to Inoshiro, then followed.
Before they’d finished destroying vis old body, the link to Konishi returned. The drones had survived the storm.
* * *
6
–
Divergence
« ^ »
Konishi polis, Earth
24 667 272 518 451 CST
10 December 3015, 3:21:55.605 UT
Yatima looked down on the Earth through the window of the observation bay. The surface wasn’t entirely obscured by NOx, but most of it appeared in barely distinguishable shades of muted, rust-tinged gray. Only the clouds and the ice caps stood out, back-lighting the stratosphere impartially to reveal it as a vivid reddish-brown. Spread over the clouds, spread over the snow, it looked like decaying blood mixed with acid and excrement: tainted, corrosive, rotten. The wound left by Lacerta’s one swift, violent incision had festered for almost twenty years.
Ve and Inoshiro had constructed this scape together, an orbital way station where refugees could wake to a view of the world they’d left behind as surely as if they’d physically ascended beyond its acid snow and its blinding sky; in reality, they were a hundred meters underground in the middle of a wasteland, but there was no point confronting them with that claustrophobic and irrelevant fact. Now the station was deserted; the last refugees had moved on, and there’d be no more. Famine had taken the last surviving enclaves, but even if they’d hung on for a few more years, plankton and land vegetation were dying so rapidly that the planet would soon be fatally starved of oxygen. The age of flesh was over.
There’d been talk of returning, designing a robust new biosphere from the safety of the polises and then synthesizing it, molecule by molecule, species by species. Maybe that would happen, though support for the idea was already waning. It was one thing to endure hardship in order to go on living in a familiar form, another to be reincarnated in an alien body in an alien world, for the sake of nothing but the philosophy of embodiment. The easiest way by far for the refugees to re-create the lives they’d once led was to remain in the polises and simulate their lost world, and Yatima suspected that in the end most would discover that they valued familiarity far more than any abstract distinction between real and virtual flesh.
Inoshiro arrived, looking calmer than ever. The final trips they’d made together had been grueling; Yatima could still see the emaciated fleshers they’d found in one underground shelter, covered in sores and parasites, delirious with hunger. They’d kissed their robot benefactors’ hands and feet, then vomited up the nutrient drink which should have healed their ulcerated stomach linings and passed straight into their bloodstreams. Inoshiro had taken that kind of thing badly, but in the last weeks of the evacuation ve’d become almost placid, perhaps because ve’d realized that the horror was coming to an end.
Yatima said, “Gabriel tells me there are plans in Carter-Zimmerman to follow the gleisners.” The gleisners had launched their first inhabited fleet of interstellar craft fifteen years before, sixty-three ships heading out to twenty-one different star systems.
Inoshiro looked bewildered. “Follow them? Why? What’s the point of making the same journey twice?”
Yatima wasn’t sure if this was a joke, or a genuine misunderstanding. “They’re not going to visit the same stars. They’ll launch a second wave of exploration, with different targets. And they’re not going to mess about with fusion drives like the gleisners. They’re going in style. They plan to build wormholes.”
Inoshiro’s face formed the gestalt for “impressed” with such uncharacteristic purity and emphasis that any inflection hinting at sarcasm would have been redundant.
“The technology might take several centuries to develop,” Yatima admitted. “But it will give them the edge in speed, in the long run. Quite apart from being a thousand times more elegant.”
Inoshiro shrugged, as if it was all of no consequence, and turned to contemplate the view.
Yatima was confused; ve’d expected Inoshiro to embrace the plan so enthusiastically that vis own cautious approval would seem positively apathetic. But if ve had to argue the case, so be it. “Something like Lac G-1 might not happen so close to Earth again for billions of years, but until we know why it happened, we’re only guessing. We can’t even be sure that other neutron star binaries will behave in the same way; we can’t assume that every other pair will fall together once they cross the same threshold. Lac G-1 might have been some kind of freakish accident that will never be repeated — or it might have been the best possible case, and every other binary might fall much sooner. We just don’t know.” The old meson jet hypothesis had proved short-lived; no sign of the jets blasting their way through the interstellar medium had ever shown up, and detailed simulations had finally established that color-polarized cores, although strictly possible, were extremely unlikely.
Inoshiro regarded the dying Earth calmly. “What harm could another Lacerta do, now? And what could anyone do to prevent it?”
“Then forget Lacerta, forget gamma-ray bursts! Twenty years ago, we thought the greatest risk to the Earth was an asteroid strike! We can’t be complacent just because we survived this, and the fleshers didn’t; Lacerta proves that we don’t know how the universe works — and it’s the things we don’t know that will kill us. Or do you think we’re safe in the polises forever?”
Inoshiro laughed softly. “No! In a few billion years, the sun will swell up and swallow the Earth. And no doubt we’ll flee to another star first ... but there’ll always be a new threat hanging over us, known or unknown. The Big Crunch in the end, if nothing else.” Ve turned to Yatima, smiling. “So what priceless knowledge can Carter-Zimmerman bring back from the stars? The secret to surviving a hundred billion years, instead of ten billion?”
Yatima sent a tag to the scape; the window spun away from the Earth, then the motion-blurred star trails froze abruptly into a view of the constellation Lacerta. The black hole was undetectable at any wavelength, as quiescent in the region’s high vacuum as the neutron stars had been, but Yatima imagined a speck of distorted darkness midway between Hough 187 and 10 Lacertae. “How can you not want to understand this? It’s just reached across a hundred light years and left half a million people dead.”
“The gleisners already have a probe en route to the Lac G-1 remnant.”
“Which might tell us nothing. Black holes swallow their own history; we can’t count on finding anything there. We have to look further afield. Maybe there’s another, older species out there, who’ll know what triggered the collision. Or maybe we’ve just discovered the reason why there are no aliens crisscrossing the galaxy: gamma-ray bursts cut them all down before they have a hope of protecting themselves. If Lacerta had happened a thousand years ago, no one on Earth would have survived. But if we really are the only civilization capable of space travel, then we should be out there warning the others, protecting the ot
hers, not cowering beneath the surface —”
Yatima trailed off. Inoshiro was listening politely, but with a slight smile that left no doubt that ve was highly amused. Ve said, “We can’t save anyone, Yatima. We can’t help anyone.”
“No? What have you be doing for the last twenty years, then? Wasting your time?”
Inoshiro shook vis head, as if the question was absurd.
Yatima was bewildered. “You’re the one who kept dragging me out of the Mines, out into the world! And now Carter-Zimmerman are going out into the world to try to keep what happened to the fleshers from happening to us. If you don’t care about hypothetical alien civilizations, you must still care about the Coalition!”
Inoshiro said, “I feel great compassion for all conscious beings. But there’s nothing to be done. There will always be suffering. There will always be death.”
“Oh, will you listen to yourself? Always! Always! You sound like that phosphoric acid replicator you fried outside Atlanta!” Yatima turned away, trying to calm down. Ve knew that Inoshiro had felt the death of the fleshers more deeply than ve had. Maybe ve should have waited before raising the subject; maybe it seemed disrespectful to the dead to talk so soon about leaving the Earth behind.
It was too late now, though. Ve had to finish saying what ve’d come here to say.
“I’m migrating to Carter-Zimmerman. What they’re doing makes sense, and I want to be part of it.”
Inoshiro nodded blithely. “Then I wish you well.”
“That’s it? Good luck and bon voyage?” Yatima tried to read vis face, but Inoshiro just gazed back with a psychoblast’s innocence. “What’s happened to you? What have you done to yourself?”
Inoshiro smiled beatifically and held out vis hands. A white lotus flower blossomed from the center of each palm, both emitting identical reference tags. Yatima hesitated, then followed their scent.