Implied Spaces (34 page)

The eyebrows lifted another millimeter. “Hell?”

“Not Hell, just very dull. To eat there are mainly tubers and cruciferous vegetables, which the adventurous can supplement with the odd squirrel or monkey.”

“How many people have you sent there?”

“A few dozen over the centuries. Very few women, so I doubt there is a breeding population.”

“The people there grow old and die?”

“Yes. But then when they go missing on this side, they’re reincarnated sooner or later.”

“And come after you again?”

“Oddly enough, most of them don’t.”

Vindex frowned. “Where was I? Oh, yes.” He straightened, and stepped out from behind his armchair. “I was telling you that you seem to know me very well. We think alike. Right to the point where you’re always able to anticipate me and step into my path.” His grey eyes glittered with amusement. “Why do you think that is?”

Aristide looked at him. “Do we know each other?”

Vindex smiled. “We do.”

Aristide tried to see behind the appearance of smirking youth to the old soul that must lie beneath.

“I’ve met a lot of people,” he said. “Are you someone I’d remember?”

“We go back a long time. Back to the beginning.”

“You’re not Lombard!”

Vindex shook his head. “No. But close.”

“You’re damn well not Betty Liu. But—” He paused, his mouth open. Then he closed it.

“Ah,” he said. “You’re the one who died.”

“Except I didn’t.”

“You’re one of the Pablos,” Aristide said. “You’re me, back from Epsilon Eridani.”

“From ten light-years away,” said Pablo Monagas Pérez, eyes dancing, “I bring great tidings.”

18

“I’m going to have Courtland change your tweaks,” said Pablo, “because I want you to shut up for a while and listen. You can talk all you want later.”

“It’s not as if you’re giving me a choice.”

“No.”

Pablo looked abstracted for a moment, chatting with Courtland no doubt, and then looked at Aristide.

“To begin with,” Pablo said. “I was bored.” He had returned to his chair, and leaned forward, his hands again laced around one knee. “I had fame and honors, and enough money to be comfortable until such time as we all became so perfect we no longer needed money. I had a woman I thought I loved. But my life was random and pointless, with no surprises and no excitement, and the only adventures I allowed myself were those I intended ahead of time to write poetry about. The Existential Crisis had set in with a vengeance.

“And so I calved myself off from you, booked passage for another star, and left you to your bland existence. I took a duplicate of our girlfriend along with me. Epsilon Eridani was a prime candidate for settlement—a young star with planets, and one that was surrounded by a cold dust cloud which, in the fullness of time, would have congealed into an inner solar system of rocky bodies much like Sol’s own. But we had plans for that dust cloud—what joy our little micro-machines would have, rounding up all that matter and turning it into a giant processor!

“Plus, of course, there was a chance we could find evidence of the Lost Expedition, the first group that had tried to settle the system, and who vanished eighteen years out. With luck we could find what had happened to them, but without sharing the same fate.

“The unknown fate of the Lost Expedition provided an additional little charge of fear. There was a possibility that we could all actually die! Of course we were backed up at home, but any changes, any discoveries or excitements that happened to us on our journey would be lost forever.

“There were other unknowns. Details of our destination escaped us, partly because of the dust cloud and partly because the star, spinning furiously and in the turbulence of its early adolescence, had wild fluctuations in its energy output. It was difficult to tell if intermittent dimming and flaring was caused by the interfering presence of planets and planetesimals, or by the stormy young star itself.

“Our ship was only slightly longer than the
Santa Maria
of Christóbal Colón, seemingly a frail bark for such a long journey across the ocean of night. A hardened exoskeleton surrounded billions of processors, drawn through the heavens by thousands of square kilometers of sails filled with photons fired from lasers in Sol orbit. On board we had a very smart AI called Doria, and forty million downloaded humans, volunteers, almost all of whom would remain inactive until being reassembled at our destination.

“But not all. Because the Eridanus system was not fully understood, it was decided that a terraforming team would remain awake for the duration of the trip, to make observations of our new home and to make final plans. I volunteered—perhaps I hoped to be the first to discover the fate of the Lost Expedition. At any rate, I was eminent enough so that the team welcomed me, even if privately they might have doubted my qualifications.

“For those of us doomed to remain awake on the journey, no expense had been spared to divert us with virtual environments in which to live and interact. From businesslike workrooms to game worlds to sybaritic pleasure-domes of the senses, we were embarrassed by the choices available. We could have spent lifetimes exploring all those environments, and when that was done created our own to suit our own peculiar tastes.

“But I had not come to play in simulated worlds. I had work and study to divert myself from such diversion. I had a good grasp of astronomy from the days when I was demolishing most of the inner solar system, and likewise a knowledge of molecular machinery and terraforming; but the task ahead demanded up-to-the-instant information. For this I turned to a virtual tutor, and to my fellow crew.

“The crew, it must be said, were a wild and wilful lot. They had left their staid, everyday selves at home, and felt free to discover new instincts, new selves. They were pioneers in the wilderness of the stars, and pioneering is an act of discovery.

“I was liberated as well. I was free to break every chain, to explore every aspect of a new self. And Daljit explored along with me.

“Daljit! Do my eyes shine when I mention her name? Is there a special smile on my face when I think of her? I believe there must be.

“Your face is very solemn, my unwilling guest. Perhaps inwardly you are laughing at me. To me it matters not—I know your history, I have done my research. There have been many women sharing your life. Not counting casual encounters, you’ve had on average a new partner every seventeen years—over fourteen hundred years of that!—and Daljit did not last even the average number of years.

“Yet, between the stars, we found the passion that you could not. We were free. You were tied to Sol, and memories.

“(Do the women grow bored with you, I wonder? For all the poetry and mock-swordfights, I fear you must be very dull. Certainly I was, when I was you.)

“As for me, I learned again how to love. You have had no one since Antonia, and I, since Antonia, have had only Daljit. Here she has done some good work, proving Professor Chiau’s Theory of Everything while trying to disprove it. That was
not
what she did at Epsilon Eridani, but I digress… fondly, in all senses of the word.

“So—fondly—shall I describe her? I would like you to see her. The body in which she chose to incorporate—and her virtual avatar, most of the time—was cinnamon of skin, Titian of hair, with eyes the pale green of a cenote deep in the Central American rain forest. She had the long, lean body of a pantheress combined with the mind of a Hawking. To observe her stalking through the shimmering electronic corridors was to see an image of purpose married perfectly to flesh. As for her temperament—well, she was as mutable as the ocean, tranquil as a warm swell beneath a tropical sun, or as fierce as a black squall in the dead of night. Of the terraforming crew, she alone was not in search of a new self. She
became
all selves. One crossed her at one’s peril. She did not indulge one’s native stupidity.

“My comparison with Hawking, by the way, is not idle. Her mind longed to embrace the universe. Though the practical necessities of her mission diverted her, her primary interest was cosmology. She grappled daily with Professor Chiau’s vision of the universe. Something in it stirred her, like my phantom touch on her fine dorsal hairs. She sensed there was a flaw somewhere in those flawless figures.

“On that long voyage we explored together the virtual, if sterile, spheres of the senses. We became more than the sum of our parts, became a kind of mythic, dual entity. The other crew sensed it. We had become a kind of royalty. When we kissed, it was an exchange of kingdoms. When we raged, the castle trembled.

“And we longed for our incarnation. Despite the fantastic variety and fluidity of our surroundings and selves, we soon hungered for the realm of the real. (Is that too much alliteration? You’re the poet, you can twitch your nose at me if that’s the case.)

“The voyage to Epsilon Eridani took twenty-three years. We never found any trace of the Lost Expedition, but then the odds had never been good. Probably they just ran smack into a brown dwarf or something. Plenty of them out there.

“Once in the system, we eagerly began building our new paradise. Most of our sails were cast loose and put into an orbit that kept them in the dust cloud. Any dust that adhered to them was snagged by molecular machines and clumped together to form a body calculated to attract more dust unto itself. The sails created nodules, the nodules then made meteors, the meteors built asteroids, and these formed planetoids.

“In the meantime our own craft was zooming about the system with the little atomic-powered motor that had lain dormant through our long journey. We sewed molecular machines throughout the dust cloud, then sat back and watched them work.

“For a hundred and sixty-three years we labored! Tens of thousands of human beings were awakened from their electronic slumbers to aid in the great work. A great array of processors was constructed out of the matter we sifted from the cold dust, and the AI Doria moved his primary personality to his new home. From the embrace of the planet once unimaginatively called c but now renamed Cimmeria, we wrested an Earth-sized moon, which we now terraformed as a test of our powers, a planet-sized experiment on which we seeded the flora and fauna which would populate the universe-to-be. It served another purpose as well—to make a pleasant place for the planetary engineers to rest and recharge between labors. It was this world, Pleasaunce, where we could safely incarnate, and where I first beheld Daljit in new, shining, glorious flesh, and walked with her over the green meadows and beneath the shade trees of our new creation.

“As for me, I incarnated in the form in which you see me now. It was the form desired and partly designed by Daljit. I wear this body now in her memory.

“In time a new pocket universe was spawned from the dark side of Doria, and named Riverside after the constellation in which we now dwelt, Eridanus the River. Once created and seeded with life, millions now rose from the silver pools of creation, and took their place in the universe that had been spawned for their delectation and livelihood. We, the creators, viewed the new arrivals with a certain condescension. They had not labored to create this whole universe out of dust and photons and pieces of drifting sailcloth. To these interstellar tourists, Riverside was a way-station—only to us was it a
world
, a world that we had simultaneously created and discovered. We looked down on the others as gods look over mere mortals.

“As the pocket was created messages were sent to Sol alerting its billions that a new universe was ready to be populated. Billions of new arrivals were expected in time—and now that we had the experience, we planned more AI arrays, more pocket universes, more astonishing acts of creation.

“Now that the primary work was done, Daljit returned to her primary interest. She was interested in cosmology not only as a science but as an investigation into
purpose
. For her, the universe was not simply a source of data from which to draw theories, but a grand curtain of stars behind which lurked the spectre of meaning.

“She had taken the Existential Crisis to heart. Our AIs could perform vast acts of calculation, but what was the calculation
for?
We could create whole universes, but
why?
We could create life, and duplicate ourselves to infinity, but what was the purpose of
that?
If we didn’t know the answers, then we were nothing more than automata, blindly following the imperatives of our biological programming.

“Daljit sensed a teleological truth lurking behind Professor Chiau’s formula, and her instincts were good. Because she had performed good work on the terraforming team, she was given permission to divert an amount of resources to her project. Some of the little clumps of matter, still clotting in the cloud of dust, were to be re-created into detectors that would search the universe for traces of meaning.

“But the nanomachines that were turning wisps of dust into quantum processors did not know how to make the detectors she desired. Daljit, uploaded into a ship the size of a teacup, flew to the outermost limits of the cloud to reprogram, or in many instances re-create, the micro-machines in order to make that which she desired.

“For nearly two hundred years she had pondered the cosmos and made her plans. So focused was her search that her questions were answered before she had even finished the reprogramming job. With a mixture of utter triumph mixed with deep despair, she sent me the data she had harvested, along with her conclusions.

“My acknowledgment didn’t have time to reach her before forty million died.

“On my return to Sol I was surprised and disgusted to learn that what occurred has entered the popular mind as the Big Belch. I know that humanity is now distanced from true death; I know that they take such things lightly. But even from our degraded contemporaries I would have expected more compassion for those who had led separate lives for nearly two hundred years, who had over a century of memories and passions and glories in their minds, minds now burned to dust.