Brute Orbits (26 page)

“And the old fears, hatreds, and impulses,” she said. “I’m not surprised by the historical hatred for the theory of evolution among our ancestors. Natural selection was a horror, a needed evil…unless you were willing to replace it. They didn’t know how to do it, and feared it when the possibility came up. We came from that violence, and feared the thing in us that would be taking over the old nature. We still have the vitality of that violence with us, and the need to practice it.”

She paused, then said, “I could sometimes strangle More.”

“Let’s agree not to,” he said. “More has his pride in being useful.”

“Which he forgets as soon as he leaves the chamber for his personal life.”

“What does he do?” Ibby asked, touching Justines’s hand gently. “Do you know?”

She smiled. “I think he goes VR fishing—for sharks—but sets the level of difficulty too low, or so I’ve heard.”

“He sets it himself?” Ibby asked.

She nodded and laughed. “And then he wipes the memory of doing it.”

“But…he does this repeatedly? Some kind of general memory of his procedure must remain with him.”

“No,” she said. “I’m told he discovers his enjoyment afresh each time.”

“Still,” Ibby said, “it seems that he may forget the particular act but knows the general approach.”

“Who knows, who cares?” she said, looking at Ibby’s hand as it covered her own.

As humankind’s left hand shaped the tools with which it would break space-time’s quarantine of worlds, the right hand preferred to play with its interior mental landscapes. Human hearts continued to war with themselves, and with each other, and craved to keep their dilemmas. They were proud of the wild, contrary beasts in their breasts, the struggling armies in their brains, which kept their deep eyes open to the clash of truth against truth. Far-travelers had always known the perversity of the infinite regress, of the truth known by inspection but unprovable, and that the opposite of a profound truth might sometimes be another great truth. For truth had colors, flavors, and textures that clashed with each other, yet were not diminished or made false by the struggle.

Justine and Ibby saw quantum drives installed in the first fifteen Rocks, and this brought the habitats together in one quadrant of the northern sky. The gathering took twenty-five years. Meanwhile, groups from Earthspace and the fifteen Rocks reclaimed the empties.

Justine’s mind drifted outward. Ibby felt left behind.

“The last century and a half of trying to make a better world,” she said to him one day, “has brought rigidities to our Earthspace societies—rigidities of will and planning, and exclusion. Maybe something should always be left wild, in the very heart of stability, rather than let go, as we are letting the Rocks go.”

She sat up in the grass of Rock Fifty-three, and looked at Ibby, who was standing a few meters away. Above him was projected the entire matrix of human history, as constructed according to his project—a huge red sphere, transparent and filled with smaller spheres, each linked by seemingly solid lines of force. Each smaller sphere repeated the structure, down to a hundred levels of repetition, and each contained arrays of fact that could be accessed with enhancement.

“There’s so little to add now,” Ibby said, “trivial bits of the past beyond which we cannot penetrate, short of developing time travel.” He turned and looked back at where she lay. “There’s nothing left to do.”

They had come here to secure the systems of the engineering level, and to learn what they could of the people who had died, as Ibby and she had done in every Rock, by playing back a century of recorded fragments.

The panoptic records were never perfect, because the equipment had not been designed to enter every dwelling or follow every individual. It was the kind of record that idle gods might have made, picking up individuals at random, sweeping across larger gatherings with a blind eye, and occasionally noting the dead as an accountant might grimace at a penny error.

Here, as in many habitats where reproduction had been possible, capable couples had turned away from parenthood. This refusal had been most trenchant in populations that knew they would never return, or had discovered that they had not returned at the appointed time. Still others had been too old, or infertile at the time of incarceration, and the few births that had occurred had not been sufficient to set generations in motion.

Ibby had pitched an old-fashioned tent in the grass, and after some weeks Justine had come to appreciate the desolate beauty of the basic design that she had now seen so often. The grass she linked in her mind with yellow suns—the grass of the universe. The soft, clay-like soil was a comfort to her feet as she walked on it. Once in a while she would come upon human bones in the grass, and remind herself how common a sight it had been throughout human history; and then she would wonder how common dead civilizations might be in the starry grass of the universe.

Ibby blinked his big display off, and came to sit at her side.

“What will we do,” he asked, “when they are all gone?”

One by one, the renovating Rocks were making the decision to leave rather than return to the inner solar system. Several had already gone, accelerating to relativistic speeds that would carry them dozens of light-years, for a start. How far would they have to go, from system to system, before they stopped looking back to the Sun?

Great Clarke had once said that “no man will ever turn homeward from beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth.” But he had been thinking in shorter lifespans and of travelers who were coming out from Earth for the first time, not peoples who had prepared for a starhopping way of expansion, in which each solar system became a source of raw materials and a colony base for further exploration, leaving secure what was gained and moving outward.

“What will we do,” he asked again, “when they are all gone?”

“Oh, go with—after them,” she said with resolve, then saw the look of dismay on his face. “Not right away, of course,” she added to anticipate his response.

“I don’t think I could,” he said sadly.

She looked at him with feigned surprise.

“Surely you suspected,” he said.

She wanted to say no, that it was a complete surprise, as if somehow that would make it so.

“Why not?” she asked, convinced that he could give no good answer.

“I’ve lived too long with this human history. I don’t think I could start with another—not now, when it’s been so well organized and made so accessible, so well classified even to sources a thousand times removed. I’m a point-center in my big display, and I don’t have the heart to remove myself.”

“But you won’t be removing yourself. We’ll take it with us. We’ll need it!”

He smiled at her. “This vast split in humanity that is coming will decide more than anyone can guess. No other division will ever equal it. The deferment of decision about our own kind may finally be at an end. We may be at an end.”

“But we’ve always changed, diverged…”

“Not in the way that is coming. These changes will have no continuity with the past. To keep it with us will only weigh down and confuse the new lessons that will have to be learned. The past may never again have as much importance as it had during the centuries of human beginnings.”

“You seem so certain, Ibby.”

He shrugged with what she would later describe as the weariness of histories, and said, “I’ve had my say about my own kind. My reactions have gone from hopeful to critical optimism, from disappointment to bitter hatred, hatred of the kind we found in Tasarov’s writings—and more often now to laughter. Between hatred and laughter, I prefer the laughter. And I feel most for the fools at home who are at an end.”

“Why laughter, Ibby?”

“Oh, it’s not mockery—but a kind of divine understanding that we achieve ourselves. There’s a lot of reason in laughter.”

She touched his hand and held it. “You’ve tied yourself in a knot, and I did not see it.”

“A knot which should not be untied. I’ve spent a long time tying it, and the problems it represents cannot simply be dissipated by untying it. This knot has unsolvable character, because it can’t even be cut. There would be nothing left. A man is best known, understood, measured, even valued, not by his settled conclusions, but by the dilemmas he keeps. They are the best markers of fleeting truth on the perverse road of time. My problem, Justine, is that I no longer have any dilemmas. And worse, I don’t want any new ones. I am a finished piece of work.”

“Oh, Ibby, that can’t be!”

“But it is. You must let me go.”

“How can I?”

“You can,” he said, “and you will—because you cannot bear to give up what is to come.”

“And you can give it up?” she asked.

“I can’t give up what was—because it stands within me like some massive foundation stone. Oh, I know it is cracking, but it holds me up, and will until my mind is full, and I will either forget or perish.”

“Ibby…” she started to say.

But he said, “If in some far futurity, we meet again, all new with forgetfulness, it will not be me, and it will not be you.”

The hundred habitats formed an expanding shell around the solar system during the next century—and again they were a reminder: The sky in every direction was now peppered with venturesome, relativistically flung humanity. The expanding shell of skylife became a source of grudging pride, even among those who would never go themselves; but although the old sense of responsibility was gone, new insecurities arose about the nature of the previous, biologically unchanged form of humankind that persisted in the habitats.

Occasionally, additional habitats joined the shell. Back and forth traffic in fast ships continued for some years; people came and went under the pressure of second thoughts, and this growing familiarity disarmed many suspicions. The young coming to maturity were faced with the choice of a frontier.

Judge Overton voiced his last suspicions before becoming a new personality. “They’re growing their own AIs out there,” he said, “and not sharing them with us! Some visitors say that they’ve learned something about raising AIs and are deliberately hiding the knowledge, which worries me. We do need a step up from man, no doubt. Not much, just a step or two in the genome, so it will run cleaner—not much more than separates us from the apes. But this AI news is disturbing…”

Justine Harre deleted the beloved memory of Ibby Khaldun from herself, but placed it in storage—between two lines of verse in her favorite book—where she knew she would come upon it from time to time and puzzle over what it might be. The memory was timed to expire after three warnings, one decade apart, and would then be irretrievable even with her best internal enhancements.

At first, Ibby had not set his memories of Justine to expire. He lived with what was left of her within himself, however painful it became at times; but there came a day when it ceased to be painful and became disturbing, as he tried to understand the mystery of personal affinities, sympathies, attractions, and especially unconditional love.

Love was simply there, as easily perceived within one’s self as one perceived a color; one saw it or one didn’t. And love could die, he admitted, without pushing it into the grave, as he began to feel that Justine had done with her affections. Had she told him, by her action, that he should do no less?

He had come here to the habitat monitoring facility on the Moon for a specific purpose—to see how he would feel about Justine before the memory of her expired, and how he would feel immediately after about the great enterprise to which she had given herself for the indefinite future.

He had drifted away from the HIP project that had been his life to the pursuit of historical miniatures. He selected particularly attractive periods of history and spent VR time in them. The HIP project’s vast database worked wonders in recreating the romance of past times as they had never been lived. He accepted this antiquarian longing, and resolved that one day he would study its origins in himself; but by then he might well be moving on to another pursuit. The miniatures, he knew, were also a form of love, not essentially different than his love of Justine’s character. He wished to live in them just as he had become part of Justine’s inner landscape in their time together.

“I want to look outward into the universe as it is,” she had told him after their return to Earth, “and as it will be. You want to make it over out of the accumulation of historical fact that you have gathered, and then live in that.”

“I do love it so,” he had told her. “The breezes of times that are gone, the skies and landscapes, the people who in their time could hope to know all that could be known. If I could travel into the past in any other way, I would.”

“Romance,” she had said. “Don’t you find it a bit grotesque to love it?”

“We have the past in our hands now,” he had replied, “as much of it as we will ever have short of direct retrieval of information from the past. Why should we not do something with this vast mass of information for our delight? It’s nothing new to do so—historical dramas began the process, and later novels of all kinds. Paintings, sculptures, movies, and VRs. I may be able to shape new experiences that will give great pleasure.”

“And be unreal.”

“Reality is overrated,” he had said.

She had nodded and said, “A very old phrase.”

“Reality is given to us against our will,” he added. “Imposed. A game not of our choosing, even though we remake ourselves.”

Now as he stood in the great display chamber which showed the shimmering galaxy, he tried to tell himself that she had never cared enough for him even with full memory. He gazed up at the shell of green points set in the starry ways, and wondered which habitat was hers. Not one of them had made much of an inroad into stellar distance, not even much of a light-year, despite twenty-five years of acceleration; but each worldlet had been making vast progress within itself, bringing all of humankind’s gains with it, standing on the shoulders of countless dreaming dead and preparing…for what? To become unrecognizable to the past?