The New Space Opera 2 (76 page)

Ulysses Four continued: “Indeed, it was on an errand of sympathy I came, proud woman, to praise this fairest world of yours; for I mean to make of mine own world in miniature the seas of Earth, or whatever of them your wisdom might counsel can be made again in the oceans of Ulysses: to help the cause of Earth I come, and praise your beauty to all ears fit to hear me. Why should all this be forgotten?”

The leaves rustled as if in the night-breeze, but there was no breeze. As countless information points floating in leaf capillaries warmed to the task of transferring a large volume of information, the slight temperature variant, amplified a million times, produced a dilation of stem and twigs. A single leaf waving is inaudible; a forest of such leaves waving is an audible sensation, as unmistakable as an ocean roll, or the breathy sigh of a hidden nymph, or the blush on the cheek of a fair-skinned woman.

This made him pause. He (Ulysses Four, the man) was not familiar with the expressions and nonverbal telltales of Cerebelline neuroforms, but he (Ulysses One, the planet) certainly was. Ulysses One would later tell him, or, rather, implant within his memory as if he knew it at the time, what this sigh of leaves might mean.

It was the idea of forgetfulness she feared. This melancholy world was perhaps afraid of losing her self-identity, once the Twenty-first Earth was no longer enough loved by the Chrysopoeian Oecumene to bear the expense of so fragile a museum.

While he could not have deduced that at this point, his later memories back on Ulysses One would have this information backdated and edited into the record. So let us suppose, as the poets do, that Ulysses Four had some unspoken intuition on the point:
Earth fears she is going mad
. And so his heart was moved with pity.

Ulysses then vowed one of those vows that is at once deadly serious and not serious at all: “If it is within my power, I will preserve the memory of Earth until the Eschaton! All the worlds that men have made, from
Demeter to Dyson Alpha, not one is half so fair as what Dame Nature, blind and cruel and lovely, made for us in this blue and imperfect globe. I will adorn my world with Earth-life, and put real cetaceans to sport and play within the waves, the chatter of dolphins and the songs of whales to echo in the deep; and the modern space-dolphinoids will see and know in what shallow places they swim! I promise you a renaissance of Earthly aesthetics, and every man in the Oecumene will grow an arbor, or wear an anadem of blossoms.”

“Why such a vow? How can you bind the Chrysopoeian Oecumene to your will, when you are dressed in sickly oceans of improperly fed algae, ragged as a beggar? Are you some king in disguise who will throw off his robes and shout commands?”

“I speak as I must, even if the least wise part of me so speaks: I love this Earth, as all men who do not forget the past must do.”

She answered and said, “Do you? So you say. Put these airy words to the test. Would you walk to every land upon this globe, that you might come to love the rocks where snowy owls find nests, as well as the close and steaming jungles where insects as bright as jewels, and poisoned asps patterned with sparkling beads, do hive and crawl? The pale red-golds of the desert canyons in the dawn you must embrace, and learn to see the angry beauty of the cactus trees, yet also swim with arctic penguins and long-toothed walruses, and behold the blue and enchanted midnight beneath the aurora borealis crown. You will run with awkward ostriches as well as rearing stallions. Any fool can see the beauty in a tropic fish; if you mean your words, you will, for me, love the scowling hermit crab, the deadly shark, the dun, lopsided flounder.”

He laughed. “Madame, I will do as I will when I will. Why do you seek to command me to do what my nature inclines? I have stared at whirls of cosmic dust and roaring near-nova stars for far too long. These mad suns and eccentric scalded Jupiters were mine long before the new Oecumene settled here. Your cactus pricks and teeth of sharks will not affright me, and the hermit crab is a wonder compared even to the most complex dancing nebula of space. All unliving things are simplistic systems, after all, items without inner value.” And then, prompted by he knew not what, he said: “Unliving things have no passions, and no memory: mere matter is the amnesia of the universe.”

“Perhaps there is much we should forget,” she mused. “Do you know the spot where you stand?”

“Cannae,” he said. “Not far from here grim Hannibal encircled the
unwary legions of the Republic, who drove their shouting centurions to defeat, had they but known it, when the Punic center ranks gave way, or seemed to. Seventy thousand troopers lost their lives before the blood-red sunset. Of wars, few cost more. I would not forget those deeds, abhorrent as they seem to us.”

“Are we not vowed to peace, all of us at Eta Carina?”

“But not vowed to thoughtlessness. Those soldiers were as brave as any quiet martyr who does not raise a hand against his slayers. There was no noumenal mathematics in the time of the Second Mental Structure. They are gone beyond recall; and all their thoughts are silent to us now, unrecoverable, irretrievable, and lost. By honoring the dead, I defy that silence.”

Another bird, perhaps a magpie, with a voice as keen as the piping of a flute, called out: “Tell me! What is it like to know there is a casket you can open, which will at once alter you beyond what you could grow into, and make you anew into a new man? Is it not death, that one thing we have forbidden and left behind? Is it not as cruel as war?”

He put aside the guitar. “Madame, these are strange questions. The casket of loneliness was given me in case I should otherwise go mad, for at that time, I was certain that Eta Carina would be mine alone, and forever.”

The leaves rustled again. He wondered why she was agitated. The birds circled him, first the nightingale, then the night-jars, owls, but also the sleepy finches, blue jays, and cardinals.

The birds sang, “Freely will I aid you, and revive the dying, scum-choked seas of your little lunar world; but freely you must give to me what in older days, by feminine wile, or glamour, or unknown sympathies of the heart, I would have had to win from you. The science of the mind, in these last days of the Seventh Mental Structure, is all discovered: each trembling and uncertain wisp of unconscious fancy, each fleeting thought, can be numbered and known. And so no mystery can obtain in these matters.”

“Which matters?” he cried out. “We are but strangers to each other! How could I agree to this?” (Scriabin thinks this protest insincere, and symbolizes it with a diminished seventh; whereas Aerolith expresses this outcry in a memorable sonnet in words of honest surprise.)

But the birds had all taken wing, and the deer, leaping startled to their narrow feet, tails white with panic, fled. The croaking frogs fell silent, and the bright-eyed foxes slunk away.

His cloak, Ulysses snuffed, so that instant dark was around him, and now he tuned his eyes to their most sensitive register, and woke special
sensory cells planted along his skull, to view the hidden wavelengths. He detected heat in the bottom of the lake, and electronic signals indicated a confluence of nanomachines in rapid-assembly mode.

A moment later, the swan reared back and flapped with snow-white wings to dry the figure being lifted to the surface. Like that of a naiad, her head first crested. Water spilled from raven-hued tresses of hair and ran in little trickles from the delicate, feminine curves, full breasts, flat stomach, rounded hips, and long legs, of the slender form dimly seen by un-moonlight. By the time she raised her hands in a gesture more graceful than any ballet, elbows high, back arched, to wring her long and heavy hair, he was lost in admiration.

Closer he came, as if drawn by a lodestone. Her eyes were steady, mysterious, half-lidded, and little drops of water clung to the lashes, bright as diamonds.

When her lips parted, he saw how red and full they were, how white her teeth. “Call me Penelope,” she said. “And I for you have created a woman of my own substance, and poured all my virtues and authority into her.”

Of course he sang to her. What else could he do?

Their first kiss was not then, but, for the sake of drama, let us pretend that he won it from her with words both wild and solemn, playfully serious, sweet in the way all love is sweet, but bitter with a hidden bitterness.

By the time Ulysses Three cleared the horizon, and reestablished signal flow with his small-brained partial, it was too late. With only the hint of wry resignation in his thoughts, satellite Ulysses Three sent messages and memory downloads (through himself at Ulysses Two) back to himself at the planet Ulysses One, the news that they were to be married.

Many a man discovers he has agreed to something before he knows it.

9. A More Literal Account

Now, in all honesty, a historical reproduction of the scene would omit these details and anachronisms. The more realistic version of events is this: his remote, stranded on the Earth (due to the relay satellite being out of line-of-sight), made contact through the local life forms with a regional segment of the biosphere Cerebelline mind, who, for a nominal fee, passed some of his thoughts through her living circuitry, one tree to the next, to a transmission point elsewhere on the planet that could reach the relay. Since Cerebellines often cannot tell, or do not care to tell, where
their thoughts end and visiting thoughts begin, perhaps she snooped on the information stream, did an analysis of the denotation and connotation pattern, and noticed that Ulysses was a connoisseur or aficionado of Terran biology and botany; an antiquarian like her.

Since he had hired her in any case to help with his failing oceanic ecosystems, they had much to discuss, and many similarities of thought and priority-protocol to find.

Where the idea came from for her to reorganize herself into a female psychology, and grow the parasympathetic and brain-stem impersonating systems in her various parallel decision nodes to trigger the complex formation known as romantic love, that we cannot tell, not unless Warmind releases his copies of her ancient templates.

The idea for a love affair came from somewhere. The evidence points to a hidden Eighth Mental Structure operation. If so, the love was doomed from the start, if not false from the start.

And yet…And yet…It might have been a natural thing. It is commonplace for Cerebellines of the Green Symphony Aesthetic (there are twelve distinct schools comprised under this aesthetic protocol) when terraforming a planet to impregnate themselves with the proper psychology to fall in love with their handicraft; in effect, to love, to become, and to subsume themselves into whatever bit of ecology is their work. (White Cerebellines who work with information ecologies have a similar maternal outpouring in their more abstract mathematical creations to that which Green Cerebelline have with their plants and pets.)

Most worlds are dead to begin with, no matter how beautiful, or have nothing more complex than one-celled organisms. A Cerebelline can love even the sulfur-drenched and cloud-choked hell of stormy Venus, or the cold and rusty desert waste of long-dead Mars, loving and destroying, even as her many microbes begin their work to make the unearthly worlds earthlike. But Ulysses was alive: his thought systems and remotes and partial-selves occupied every niche of his primitive ecology, precisely because it was primitive. He had to do everything himself.

And so there he was, wherever she went or sent versions of herself.

He was already in the tanks growing algae for his simple and crablike van Neumanns. The servants all were radio-linked to him, so that he would wave at her industrious physician-fish with a passing crab-claw. He was there (since he had to maintain the bodies) in the unoccupied dolphin forms any tenants of his were not using. He was in the space elevator, a voice telling a joke. He was in the aerial units that looked like awkward
bats, doing a comical mock mating-dance to startle the sleeker and more earthlike halcyon and sea mews she was introducing, until she called a flock of starlings to drive them off. He was onboard the ship, making a sardonic observation when she sailed to the edge of the parasol to set the timed cycles of daily and seasonal sunbeams to fall upon his little shining oceanic globe. And he was in the thought-space they both used when poring over the timed-maps and atlases that predicted where and how he was to grow his coral reefs.

They named the island together, the first island his water-smothered world had ever known, and he made a joke about picking the names of babies, and she made a reference to Ducaleon and Phyrra, and by that time, she was embracing his whole world, each hemisphere as if in cupped hands, with some form of bird or fish or creeping thing or sea-plant, and he could not have gotten away from her had he willed.

So, something like what the poets say, when they tell of Ulysses singing by the lakeshore, and Penelope arising nude and newly made from the waters, pausing to wring out her hair, did indeed happen; something like, but more complex and more deliberate than what poets say.

Because he did walk her world, after all, not just in that original ten-foot cyborg body, but in a hundred scuttling vehicles, ratlike things or flying drones, or, when she offered them, as a pack of fierce black dogs.

Everywhere the black dogs went, they scented or saw signs of decay: erosion was washing away topsoil, trees were dying due to lack of simple nutrients, the salmon populations were falling, bears that should have been in heat sniffed passing she-bears and did nothing. Ten thousand little errors had entered the ecological code, and the system was not robust enough to correct itself, not without evolving into something more suited to the Eta Carina system.

And, yes, the so-called “native” forms had evolved in niches where the Cerebelline mind was not concentrating her resources. Black oily one-celled life and multicellular sponges streaked the sides of tall mountains, staining the snow black, or crusting the rocks, unsightly as an oil slick. These organisms were highly resistant to the radiation and X-ray fevers that the parasol could not deflect, and thrived in areas where earthly life developed leukemia and bred poorly.