The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (57 page)

“Door.” This time the voder’s tones implied an emphatic conclusion. The exogen shut down, sinking into a quietude that took it across the border from life into art. The sense of light and life which had skimmed across it like yellow fog on a sulfuritic lake was gone.

I had acquired my very own statue. Walking, talking, likely intelligent, and certainly fantastically wealthy.

For a test, I poked one tip of the Achaean axe into its chest. About where the sternum would be on the human plan. It was like poking a boulder. The exogen’s skin had no give, and the sense of weightiness was downright planetary.

Door. What in all the baroque hells of the Mbazi Renaissance did it mean by door?

You know perfectly well that while the Earth is dying, it’s nowhere near dead. Even a corpse on the forest floor isn’t dead. Intestinal flora bloom in the madness of a sudden, fatal spring. Ants swarm the massive pile of loosening protein. Patient beetles wait to polish bones until they gleam like little fragments of lost Luna embedded in the soil.

So it is with this world. I can tell by the cut of your suit that you’re from offworld, but I can tell by the quality that you didn’t ship in from across the Deep Dark. A patient man with an unlimited air supply and a wealth of millennia in his hand can almost walk from here to Proxima Centauri by station-hopping, but anyone terrestrial planning to move between the stars on anything like the scale of a human standard lifetime is very, very wealthy. And you are plainly terrestrial in origins, and just as plainly from those boots are not so wealthy.

I’m sorry. Did I offend? Take it from me, after you’ve riven open the graves of a million generations, you find your sense of tact has evaporated with all the rest of time’s detritus. I’m poor, poor as a chuck moose, so I see no shame in anyone else’s poverty.

Besides, this story I’m telling you may save your life some day. Surely that’s worth an unintentional insult or two. Not that I’m planning another, mind you, but Dog the Digger is famously plainspoken as any of his kind, for all that he’s not on the human plan.

Here we are, a collection of mortally wounded peoples on a mortally wounded planet, but we yet live. No matter the elevation of our estate. I may be a beetle polishing the bones of the world rather than a bright explorer at the morning of all civilizations, but still I draw breath. (Metaphorcally speaking, of course.)

And so it fell to me to search for meaning in the exogen’s request. After a month had gone by, his skin was cooled to the color of cold iron, and no one might ever have believed him to be alive. He stood like a man marking his own grave and stared sightlessly at the spot where I happened to have been positioned that night.

At least I understood now how he passed between the stars. The exogen had no life support requirements, and was immune to boredom. He wasn’t so much undying as unliving.

I went to my friend Pater Nostrum. A man very nearly on the human plan, as so few of us were in these terribly late days, Pater Nostrum lived in a cathedral he’d built himself as an agglutination of debris, donations and some downright thievery. He dowsed for his cathedral one shard at a time, using a rod made of Gerrine Empire hullmetal wrapped in sable manskin. A time or ten I’d dug and hauled great, broad-beamed members for him, fetched by some unseen-to-me holy mandate from the dank rust-grained soil.

The genetics in that rod’s leather grip were worth more than all of Pater Nostrum’s earthly accumulations, but as a priest, he was beyond caring of such things. Or so he told himself, me, and everyone else who would listen.

This day I claimed back from him one of the favors owed.

“Pater,” I said. It was the season for my third body, which was generally the most comfortable for those with whom I spoke. Not that the exogen would have cared, or truly, even Pater Nostrum.

He smiled, resplendent in his robes of rich vinyl trimmed with donkey fur. “Digger, my . . . son. Welcome.”

We met in his cathedral’s Second Sanctuary, a round-walled room with a ceiling line that very nearly described a hyperbolic curve. Armor cladding off some ancient starship, with a look like that. The walls were relieved with 10,432 notches (I am incapable of not counting such things in my first glance), and each notch held a little oil lamp wrought from some old insulator or reservoir or other electromechanical part. They all burned, which argued for some extremely retarded combustion characteristics. The scent map of the room confirmed that well enough.

“I would ask something of you, Pater Nostrum. I cannot yet say whether it is a remembering or a scrying or just some keyword research in the deep data layers.”

Information flows everywhere on this earth. It is encoded in every grain of sand, in the movements of the tumbling constellations of microsatellites and space junk above our heads, in the very branching of the twigs on the trees. Knowing how to reach that information, how to query it and extract something useful – well, that was one reason why the world had priests.

Prayer and sacrifice invoked lines of communication which remained obdurately shut to most of us most of the time.

“I will do this thing for you gladly,” Pater Nostrum said. “But you must first cross my palm with slivers, to make our bargain whole and place you under my hieratic seal.”

This I knew as well, and so had brought a cluster of shattered beast-ivory from a sand-filled sea cave recently explored beneath the Hayük Desert. I scattered it over his open hand in a brittle mist.

Pater Nostrum closed his fist and grimaced. I knew with skin like his that the ivory would cut, burn, slice. When he opened his hand, the usual small miracle had occurred. A tooth with four twisted roots lay whole on the bloody palm.

“Well brought, Digger,” the priest said. He smiled. “And of course my debt to you is long-incurred. So speak plainly and tell me what you seek.”

I closed my eyes a moment and let my skin tell me the story of the point-source warmth of ten thousand little flames. The framing of this question had been much on my mind of late, with me working at great length to tease it out. Still, no matter what I said, I’d be wrong. Clearly enough the only choice was to address the moment and trust my friendship with this old priest.

“There is a client. A difficult one. It has charged me with finding the door into death. I would know if ever there was such a thing outside the sliding walls of metaphor. If so, where might I find this door, or evidence of its former existence?”

“A door into death.” The priest stared up at his hyperbolic ceiling, his eyes following the receding curve into some dark infinity. “I will scry,” Pater Nostrum muttered. The air began to swirl around him, dust motes orbiting his upturned face like swallows around a charnel house chimney. His eyes rolled inward until nothing remained within his lids but a silvery glowing sliver. One by one, the flames on the wall niches began going out in tiny pops as the priest drew from their energy in some pattern known only to him.

I settled to watch. The brilliant dust of a thousand millennia of nano-technology meant the world could describe itself, if like any competent priest one only knew how to ask the questions.

So he scried. The flames carried Pater Nostrum inward on a wave of information, a palimpsest of infinitely successive and fractal functional languages, protocols, handshakes, field-gestalts and far stranger, more curious engineering dead ends. I knew there had once been information systems which stored data in the probabilistic matrices of quantum foam, extracting it again in a fractional femtosecond as observational dynamics collapsed the informational field to null. Likewise I knew there had once been information systems which relied upon the death of trees to transmit data at a bit rate so low it could be measured in packets per century.

Pater Nostrum could reach them all. At least on his best days. Each little lamp was a channel into some dead language, some time-hoared data protocol, some methodology which had once swept the world so hard that its fingerprints remained in the noösphere.

One by one, 10,432 flames went out. Slowly we passed through shadow before being cast into darkness. I don’t measure time on the human plan myself, and so hunger, micturation, joint fatigue and the like tend not to impinge overmuch on my situational experience, but Pater Nostrum experienced all those and more, until blood ran gelid-dark from his nose and ears as the last of the lights winked away to leave the two of us alone in lightless splendor demarcated only by the priest’s breathing and my scent map of his body’s sudden advancement into further decay.

Finally he came back to me.

“Well.” Pater Nostrum picked his way through his words with an exaggerated care. “It has not been so in more de cades than I care to admit to.”

“You scry well, Father,” I said politely.

“I should not think to scry so well again. Not as I value my own health.”

“Surely the gods forfend.”

“Gods.” He snorted. “I am a priest. What does my work have to do with gods?”

“I can’t say, Father.” After that I waited for him to find the thread of his thoughts.

Finally Pater Nostrum spoke. “There was a movement during the era of the Viridian Republic. Religious, scientific, cultural.”

A long pause ensued, but that did not seem to require an answer, so I did not answer him.

He gathered himself and continued. “They called themselves Lux Transitum. This movement believed that life is a waveform. So long as you do not collapse the waveform, life continues. Death was viewed not as a biological process but as an unfortunate event within the realm of some very specialized physics.”

“Life is . . . life,” I replied. “Antientropic organization in chemical or electromechanical systems which, when left unattended, tends to metastatize into computers, people, starships, catfish and what have you.”

Lighting a candle from the inner pocket of his vinyl robes, Pater Nostrum shook his head. “As the case may be. I only reflect what I have been told. I do not believe it. Sooner argue with the dead than contend with the noösphere.”

“Wise policy, every bit of it.”

“At least for those of us on the human plan.” He tried another grin, but this one failed.

More silence followed, as if Pater Nostrum was now determined to subdivide his attention into short tranches interspersed by gaps of inertia.

Finally I stepped into the conversation again. “Did Lux Transitum have a laboratory or a temple? Is there some place where they addressed this uncollapsed waveform?”

“Hmm?” Pater Nostrum looked at me as if noticing me for the first time. “Oh, well, yes.”

“Father.” I imbued my voice with infinite patience, something this body was fairly good at. “Where might I find their holy place?”

He woke to my question with a non sequitur. “How long have you been alive, Digger?”

“Me?” I stopped and considered that. “At least 7,313 years, by the most conservative view. Counting since the last cold restart of my cognitive processes.”

“How long have I been alive?”

“I shouldn’t know with any certainty,” I said, “but we met shortly after the Andromachus strike. Which was 4,402 years ago the second Thursday of next month.”

“You are not on the human plan, but I am.” He leaned close, almost touching me. “Do you think the human plan called for four thousand year old priests? When was the last time you saw a child?”

I tried to remember when I’d last encountered a juvenile of any species. Not just human. “Surely people must breed somewhere.”

“Surely,” said Pater Nostrum. “But not here on Earth, it seems.”

“This would not come naturally to my attention,” I pointed out. “But you might have noticed it somewhere along the way.”

“You know,” the priest said vaguely. “The days are bathed in almost endless red light. There is always something to do. So few people roam the world . . .”

“A thought-block,” I said sympathetically.

He seemed shocked. “On the entire human race?”

“What human race?”

We walked outside under the dying sun and argued long over whether Lux Transitum had the right of it, and what had been done with people. Most of all, whether to wake them up.

You’re wondering now, aren’t you? How long ago did this happen? What did Dog the Digger do next? Did I wake the exogen and what did I tell him when I did?

Look around you. What do you see? Quiet place we’ve got. That line of hills over there is a linear city from the Vitalist Era. Bury it in a quarter million years of rain and three major eruptions due west of here, and there’s nothing left but low hills covered with scrub. Until you go digging.

Now beneath your feet. The red sand dusting your boots is rust accumulation from when teratons of asteroidal iron were brought down by the Wolfram Bund to clad the world in an impermeable metal shell.

Feel how the air tickles your throat when you breathe? You’d be appalled at how much processing power goes into your lungs, and what percentage of that crosses through the alveoli into your bloodstream. There’s a reason that access to this damned planet is so heavily restricted.

So we live here in our lowtowns and our cathedrals and our shanties and caverns and buried mansions, and nothing ever changes. That was the big secret the exogen was searching for. You can transcend death, but only through stasis. The whole point and purpose of life on the human plan is death. Otherwise you are us, grubbing in the ruins of a million years of dreaming.