Paradise Tales (32 page)

So. The lights go on, in someone else’s life.

You’re looking at soil, red soil bare of plants.

You look up, and falling away in layers of tan, ochre, and bronze are the silhouettes of cliffs, one growing out of another, going farther and farther back. There’s a small and misty sunset scattered through dust. The shadows are long and cold.

See the date? See the identifier? JoyAnna Haven. Her physiome shows perfect heart and lung capacity, though her age is thirty-nine. She’s been in training.

This is JoyAnna on Mars.

The sky is the colour of tarnished copper saucepans, and the frozen ground underfoot crackles with a thin noise. That’s the ice as JoyAnna walks. Numbers dance in her eyes; something is feeding data all the time.

Someone else says, right up close to your ear, “You know, we never would have the funding for this without you.”

“Naw,” says JoyAnna. “It’s Assumpta Ciges you want to thank.”

All of you start to walk determinably. You see something like a white tent ahead, but it doesn’t flap.

JAH: “She’s the one who cracked all this for us.”

“We wouldn’t know that but for you.”

“Me? I was just a little info-digger. I didn’t even do the basic Software Archaelogy to retrieve it. All I knew was that she’d done some work on the cylinders. So I got a grant to go through her blogs. I thought I’d just blip through at high speed, see what was there.” JoyAnna’s chuckle sounds pained. “I was very young.”

You come to the entrance of the tent, duck and push aside layers of plastic that seal the entrance. Then you look down in a dimmer light.

A pit has been dug into the Martian surface, its sides supported by plastic battens. A ramp of earth slopes to the floor of the dig, which is perfectly level, though slightly rippled like the floor of a sea. Thousands of tiny objects, a bit like bullets, are arranged in the form of a giant spiral with arms, like a galaxy.

JoyAnna says, “She’d have loved to see this. She died, you know, 2030, right in the middle of the big storm. I’ve got an edited version of her blog stored, if you’d like to go through it.”

The other woman says, “Yes please.” She sits down cross-legged on the mat.

Blip.

You see a street. It’s white: the pavements, the asphalt, the rooftops—everything is white, with seamless blue above it, no clouds.

Numbers dance. That’s the temperature. It’s twenty-nine celsius, a beautiful summer’s day. The air is full of misted light. Find the date. See it? This is 2027. That indicator on the left? JAH to JAH to AC?

That means you’re looking at JoyAnna’s blog from 2073, but she’s looking at her own blog from 2058. And that’s the one who is looking at the lifeblog of Assumpta Ciges.

You’re seeing Manchester, as it was, one hundred years ago. Next to you is some kind of park—grass, trees, all a livid green. The software archaeologists have done a superb job, resolution, colour, 3D, and sound, all just superb. The eye-camera is rocking from side to side. Assumpta Ciges walks with a limp. See? Six physiomes. Yours. Mine. Assumpta’s with her arthritis and replacement hip, two of JoyAnna’s, and of course the woman listening on Mars.

That’s why they call this vortexing. You just spiral down through layers of other people’s lives.

A young voice says, “Trees! Look at those trees, they’re huge!”

The same voice when old says, “This is so embarrassing!”

JAH: “I’m looking at private trees. People had trees of their own. It’s all so green that it hurts my eyes. And the houses, and the roadway, everything, it’s all painted white! I thought it was snow. But access has just told me, it’s paint, they painted everything white, I guess that’s to reflect sunlight, increase albedo. And it’s so clean, everything. Nothing on the pavements, no horse manure anywhere. Ow! What’s that?”

It’s a bus. It roars past you all. There is an interesting sign on its side,
Fueled by biotechnology.
It creaks to a stop and waits rumbling at a shelter.

JAH: “Whatever it is, it looks medieval, like some kind of war machine, only so blue and polished, bluer than the sky. And look at the clothes. I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess stupid extravagance, but these are really nice clothes. I mean if it’s this warm, they’re going to be wearing light stuff, but look, it’s all printed in colours. They’re functional but also so, so pretty. Why shouldn’t things be pretty as well? And all those bicycles, and funny shoes I don’t know what they’re made of, and the white is just blinding, against the blue. Everything white, blue, green and then pink, red, yellow on the people, and all the bells from the bicycles. Oh! She’s getting onto it, it’s like a huge car!”

The eye-cameras lurch and sway, and Assumpta’s hand holds up a blue card. You can see the sleeve of her coat: it looks as thin and light as leaves. She swings round into a seat, and the camera begins a light continual shiver that makes everything shimmer in white light. Rows of old brick buildings jolt past. Biolumescent signs with look in daytime like green lichen. Rows of stalls and carts, and all along the eaves, the rooftops, thousands of tiny buzzing windmills.

The bus stops. The cameras limp off it, one step at a time. An Asian gentleman helps her down.

Assumpta says to him, to his crumpled face and his neat gray beard. “Oh thank you so much!”

JoyAnna old: “All those beautiful people. Dead.”

Blip.

You’re looking at red soil again.

JoyAnna old: “So this is when Assumpta got time with the robot on Mars.”

From Assumpta or one of the JoyAnnas, from someone’s life Handel’s
Water Music
is playing.

JAH: “Outgoing messages to the bot take nine minutes and the answer takes nine minutes so we’re on an eighteen-minute cycle. Right now, Assumpta is waiting for the bot to respond.”

All of you wait looking at soil. Handel adorns.

JAH: “I don’t think Assumpta talks enough. She’s telling us hardly anything, so just to fill you in, this is just over five years since the cylinders were found. A bot took a core sample, baked it as usual, only it turned out to be full of perfect little cylinders. All with marks on them, in a spiral going round it like a piano roll.”

Someone shows you one of them. Inside your eyes, a cylinder turns. It’s tiny, two centimetres long, burned black, flat at both ends. Spiralling round it are recurring patterns, swoops and swirls.

JAH: “They look a bit like Arabic, don’t they? Everybody was hoping that they were a
cultural artifact
.” She has a horrible regional accent and slices those last two words up into precise little tranches.

Something pings, and with a sudden smoothness, the bot on Mars lifts up its head. Inside Assumpta’s eyes, then JoyAnna’s and yours, the image comes to life. Broken rocky ground out to a very near horizon, and looming over that bronze cliffs looking just like Utah, a bronze sky, that’s dust, but deep purple just overhead. The bot rolls toward a small crane, printed from scratch out of poly on Mars. It’s a rough lattice of material.

Assumpta says, “Rendition.”

JAH: “
Chren-dee-shon.
I love the way she talks. I didn’t expect her to sound so Spanish. That’s the order to the bot to scan the excavation site. They’ll make a laser print of it, so it can be printed in poly back on Earth. We won’t begin to see that for eighteen minutes. I hope nobody minds if we skitter ahead.”

JoyAnna old: “Oh no, why would anyone want the experience of walking with a botblog on Mars? We’d much rather hear you, JoyAnna.” Handel skips and jumps; images skitter.

JAH: “It’s a rendition bot. So it will take a laser impression from different angles for the printout. After that, infrared for compositional analysis. Then we’ll get ground-penetrating radar just to confirm that there is nothing else below the one level. Then X-rays to stimulate ultra-violet and other light emissions to help with dating. And EXAFS for structural detail. It’s amazing what they were able to do.”

The bot looks down into the trench at a small intelligent digger. Nothing reenforces the sides; the dig is open to elements. The Spiral opens up its arms to you in natural light. There is a buckling sound from behind the bot, thin in the Martian air.

Suddenly the bot is hoisted up and swings out over the dig. It hangs suspended over it, the cylinders in a neat arrangement, like stars.

There is a blast of light, blanking out the cameras. Colour swirls. Handel plays.

People in those days thought of time as straight. For you now, time spirals.

Blip.

And a room trills suddenly into place.

One of the JoyAnna’s says, “This is Assumpta’s house, that evening.”

Electric lights blaze. They look like miniature suns. Assumpta has a big box,
Refrigerator
access tells you, and the floor is covered in red, fired tiles. Assumpta’s hand pours a whiskey rather unsteadily into a glass and she passes it to a man. He’s her age, and wearing some kind of absorbent sportswear, though he doesn’t look like he runs much.

JAH: “This is just after the botshare with Mars. The gentleman is Assumpta’s client, Tomas Schelling. He paid for the botshare. He’s Director of the University’s Meridiani Crescent project. Assumpta was already Professor Emeritus at this stage; so she’s working for him on a contractual basis.”

Two glasses clink together. Assumpta says, “The surrounding clay has iron it. The cylinders do not. I don’t know if that is significant.”

Assumpta swivels in her chair, to look at a screen on the kitchen table. They were still using terminals. She points to an image of a cylinder, a series of marks at one end of the spiral. Suddenly the marks are highlighted, gold against black.

AC: “Marks like these appear at one end of all the cylinders.”

Schelling: “Some kind of starting point?”

“Assuming that the marks are indeed deliberate. I think they’re numbers.”

“Oh.”

JAH. “He’s sounding so unsurprised. His face is absolutely still.”

AC: “Here, look. They differ each time in a very regular way.”

TS: “You’ve been able to translate them?”

JAH: “That’s a very careful sip of whiskey that Tomas is taking.”

AC: “Well. The first is a single mark of a kind I’ll call a twirl. And another twirl and below that, two twirls close together. It could show us one plus one equalling two. The next cylinder in the sequence should be, and yes it is: two plus two equalling four!”

JoyAnna when young makes a coarse little laugh. “Look at his eyes. It’s love. His risky little commission has just come up trumps.”

TS: “Then they’re not numbering the cylinders?”

AC: “No, but they may be establishing mathematical patterns.”

Tomas Schelling tosses back his head and drains his glass in one.

There is a thin sound of wind and ice. An older JoyAnna says, “I was privileged to live through Assumpta Ciges’s first great mistake. Establishing numerical patterns is what Americans did on the bronze plates on Voyager. That was to show that the plate was a cultural artifact. And because that’s what we’d done, we expected something similar from aliens.”

On the screen the cylinder turns, the marks spiralling.

JAH: “Mysterious little buggers, aren’t they?”

Blip.

The same kitchen, only now with the sound of rain on windows.

JAH old: “After that she worked on them for about seven or eight months. Mostly from home, she wasn’t very mobile. She drank way too much. It’s not a fun blog. I’ll just show you this part. Though it always makes me sad.”

Assumpta is feeding sliced chorizo to a tortoiseshell cat. It winds itself around her legs. She looks up, cuts a slice from the dried sausage for herself. On a plate, mozzarella, some lettuce. She eats with her fingers.

In her eyes a cylinder turns.

JAH: “She’s just called up the forty-seventh cylinder again, turning it over and over in her eyes. Now she’s calling CGIs to help visualize tools that might have made those marks.”

On the kitchen terminal, you suddenly see something like a metal corkscrew.