Forbidden Planets (19 page)
The three of us had attended an evening concert in Midwood Park one summer night. (Machfall had his own date that evening, a woman whose name escapes me now.) Walking back to the rapid transit stop, we came upon a beast tied with a rope to a bench, huddling exhaustedly in the mud.
The animal was a pitiful specimen, some kind of hybrid between a dog and a jallow-bear. About thirty pounds in weight, its coat a dull and dusty auburn, possessed of ears much too long for its head, its tail an accidentally truncated stub, the creature was homely in the extreme. It had plainly been abused, displaying sores on its flanks and gaunt ribs.
We all stopped to examine the abandoned animal. I instantly recognized a chance to learn more about Yardena and Machfall.
Maruta had loved animals.
Machfall made much of the poor beast, while Yardena seemed impatient to move on.
“Take it home, Lu! Nothing enlivens a bachelor’s flat like a four-legged friend!”
“Can’t we hurry on? We’re going to miss the Nemeth Trio’s last set at the Mukti Café!”
As I petted the nervous, smelly male creature, which licked my hand in a pleading manner, I tried to overcome my initial bias in favor of Yardena being Maruta. It was so much easier, after all, to imagine Maruta imprisoned in the female form of my current lover, rather than in the comical male form of my locker-room buddy.
Still contemplating the new data from this encounter, I untied the little dog-jallow, picked it up, and brought it home.
Perhaps the continued presence of the beast in my life would trigger some other, more decisive revelation.
The dog-jallow cleaned up and healed well. I named him Chimbo, after a famous cartoon character.
Whenever Machfall or Yardena visited my apartment, I would gauge their reactions to Chimbo closely.
Once my little pet had come to feel at home and safe, he exhibited a charming personality, full of caprices and sly tricks. I could watch him and play with him for long stretches of time, and he always elicited vivid reactions from any visitors.
Yardena became almost as fond of him as Machfall, rendering my task of deciding even harder.
Months and months drifted by. My old life on Silane became more and more dreamlike. The insistent urge to rescue Maruta began to grow dim and recede into the background of my thoughts. This life I had constructed for myself, even under the suzerainity of the Singularity known as Magister Zawinul, was at least as rewarding as my former existence, and I began to wonder why I was striving to end it.
My only concern was that Magister Zawinul’s patience would come to a halt. Living in the implicate order rather than the explicate order, the Singularity was perhaps constrained from fulfilling whatever ineffable destiny he envisioned for himself. Or was he? Maybe one mode of existence was as good as another to him. Maybe he knew he was endowed with an infinite lifespan, and could afford to indulge my quest indefinitely.
Occasionally, however, I received intimations that Magister Zawinul had not forgotten me. A prominent face in the clouds, unsourceable silent messages left on my communicator, strange shapes in the waves, the curiously patterned flocking maneuvers of pigeons, advertisements for enigmatic products that didn’t exist—reminders that this very world and all it contained was an intelligent superorganism.
A decade passed.
Yardena and I married. Machfall moved to a neighboring city, East Shambles, and we saw each other infrequently.
I was fairly certain by now that Yardena was Maruta. But why should I risk declaring it out loud to the omnipresent Magister? If correct, the two of us would be restored to an existence on Silane no better and perhaps worse than what we already had. If wrong, I lost all.
Countervailing this inertia was only the possibility that Magister Zawinul would grow tired of this game and suck both me and Yardena/Maruta—and every other inhabitant of the planet—back into his composite being, thus ending our familiar ego-driven existence for some unknowable posthuman condition.
But still, nothing inclined me to rock the boat.
One day I arrived home from shopping for groceries. Maruta was still out. I set the groceries down and braced myself for the hurtling eager welcome from Chimbo.
But no such welcome happened.
I tracked down the dog-jallow to its bed. It lay panting and fevered, eyes closed, seriously ill from some contagion or ill-advised meal. Or perhaps just an old age whose arrival had escaped my inattention. When I touched my little friend gently, he opened his eyes and feebly wagged his stumpy tail.
My heart was hurting, and I discovered my eyes tearing up. I picked up bed and pet both and made for the door. Our veterinarian was only two blocks away.
But halfway down the hundred stories, Chimbo died in the elevator, expiring with three labored breaths.
And at that instant, I knew.
“Maruta!” I cried.
The world fell away from me again, and I found myself standing on a bare plain, facing Magister Zawinul.
“Very tragic,” the Singularity intoned. “Very, very tragic. But you had your opportunity.”
I was crying too hard to respond at first. But then a fierce anger overtook me. This anger extended not only to the Singularity but also to myself. I had been blind and selfish and lazy and timid. And now I had lost all I had cherished.
“You—you knew this would happen!”
“With some degree of certainty, yes. Now let me ask you something. Did you ever stop to wonder why I took those women from your world in the first place? Or were you solely consumed with the personal affront?”
This question brought me up short. Surely the Singularity’s motives could have been nothing so simple as sex or companionship.
“No,” I admitted, “I never actually thought about your motives. Tell me why.”
“Because they were all fated to die shortly. Your Maruta, for one, would have perished on her next expedition to Mathspace, her IIM devoured by Mandelbrot Demons. But by radically detouring their lifelines, I saved their potentials. Hosted in me, they continued to add their individual increments to the sum of all that is. The wasteful nature of the dumb cosmos appalls me.”
“But—but you don’t save everyone—”
“How do you know?”
I remained silent then, too ashamed to ask for absolution or favors.
“You realize,” Magister Zawinul said, his shimmering corona wisping out delicately, “the frightened resistance of the Reticulate to the spread of us Singularities is really a last-ditch defense by the forces of entropy. Is that really the side you wish to be on?”
“I—no, of course not. But tell me, what should I do?”
“Go spread the word. And don’t worry—you’ll see Maruta again. Death is not what you believe.”
Back on Silane, Lustron Avouris was as good as his word. I found the administrator to have reproduced, after a decade’s absence, into a half-dozen small segments, none of which had any greater facility with language than their “father” had.
Once I had been vetted by Ess-Cubed and deemed free of Singularity taint, I was awarded a Reticulate Order of Civic Virtue. But the honor was rescinded soon after, once I began preaching my pro-Singularity doctrine. I was both vilified and embraced by different camps, becoming a figure of some notoriety.
My life now consists of journeying from world to world through the instantaneous Indrajal, spreading the gospel of the Singularity’s concern for us and its plans to remake a universe from one that does not have the best interests of sophonts at its uncaring core to a place where uniqueness is preserved and cherished.
And in every living face I encounter, I try to discern a lover’s lineaments.
Dreamers’ Lake
Stephen Baxter
O
n the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days.
n the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days.
By the time dawn broke, we had labeled all the lakes’ stromatolites and had decided on three candidates: Charlie, Hotel, and Juliet, for cognitive mapping. I was tentatively confident that Juliet was the most promising, but I was so dog tired I didn’t trust my judgment anymore.
So I was grateful when Citizen Associate Bisset brought us animists a tray of coffee.
“Thanks.” I took a cup, fixed its spigot to my face-mask, and gulped it down, welcoming the caffeine fix. Bisset stood beside me on the pebble-strewn beach of that lake of fizzing, acidic water.
GC-174-IV was an infant world, its young sun a lamp hanging over jagged hills. The methane-green sky reflected in the lake’s sluggish ripples and glistened on the pillow-like stromatolites. The scene was unearthly, beautiful—and I was grateful that the dawn light hid the swarming dangers of the sky, especially the rogue worldlet called the Hammer.
In the foreground my animist cubs were playing soccer, their shouts the only sound on this silent world. I longed to join in, but they didn’t want little old ladies like me.
“ ‘Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops . . .’ ” Bisset was a lot taller than I was, and under his wide visor his face, turned to the sun, was a mask of wrinkles.
“That’s a cute line,” I said.
“Shakespeare. Of course we’re two hundred light years from England.”
“But there are hills, a lake, a sky here. Things have a way of converging.”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember the first robot landing on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The first images from the surface of the Moon had looked like a pebble beach. Then the Vikings on Mars, and the Soviet probes on Venus—more pebbles, more beaches. And even on Titan, where they use water ice for rock—”
“Pebbles.”
“Yes.”
I eyed him curiously. Evidently he was older than he looked. We hadn’t spoken, but the
Pegasus
carried over fifty people and was roomy enough for twice that number. “I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.”
Pegasus
carried over fifty people and was roomy enough for twice that number. “I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.”
He shook my gloved hand. “Professor Knilans, I’ve read about your work.”
“Susan, please. And you are?”
“Ramone Bisset.”
“Ramone?”
He smiled. “My father named me after his favorite band. I used to be a software engineer, before the software learned to write itself. Now I’m a Citizen Associate. I’m working on the IGWI with Ulf Thoring.”
It took me a minute to decode the acronym. IGWI: the Inflationary Gravity Wave Interferometry experiment, the establishment of a vast interstellar network of gravity-wave detectors designed to map the echoes of the universe’s very first cataclysmic instants. “Interesting project.”
“It sure is. Not that I understand much of it, either the science or the equipment.”
“How do you get on with those IGWI guys?”
He shrugged. “I’m just the dogsbody.”
“Don’t knock it. Umm, do you mind my asking how old you are?’
“A hundred and thirty, to the nearest decade. Born in the 1980s.” That explained his height; many of his generation, fed on ludicrously protein-rich diets, had grown tall. His accent was British, I thought, but softened by time.
“Well,” I admitted, “I’m half your age. So what are you doing here?”
“You mean beside the lake or on GC-IV?”
“Start with the lake.”
“I’m just curious. You’re here to map minds, aren’t you? Minds in those mounds.”
“That’s the idea.”
“I haven’t started my day yet. I thought I may as well be useful. You can never go wrong with a tray of coffees.”
“So what about the deeper question? Why volunteer for GC-IV?”
“Ah. Why are any of us here?”
“To do our jobs.” Captain Zuba had joined us. She was a tough, heavily built New Zealander, aged about fifty. She took one of Bisset’s coffees. “And to earn our pay.”
“Yes, Captain,” Bisset said respectfully. “But why not just sit at home? All humans are restless. Why?” He pointed to the patient stromatolites. “
They
don’t look restless.”
They
don’t look restless.”
“No,” Zuba said, “but it’s a shame they aren’t, because in two days’ time, when the Hammer falls, they’re going to be toast. And speaking of which, the clock is ticking.” She handed back the coffee cup, already drained, and stalked away, competent, efficient, a tick-box list on legs.
Bisset hesitated. “You know—to explore the universe in starships—it’s like something from the kind of science fiction that was out of date even before I was born.”
I wasn’t too sure what “science fiction” was, and I didn’t really want to know. On impulse I said, “Why don’t you come visit again tomorrow? I’ll give you the guided tour. You don’t even need to bring the drinks.”
He nodded like a gentleman. “I’d appreciate that.” And he walked away, tray in gloved hand, boots crunching over the beach.
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