The Gentle Seduction (28 page)

The linkage between her mind on Mars and her robot body on Jupiter had delays; to have a completely satisfying experience, she would need a temporary residence that didn't require such a commute.

So a small cylinder, somewhat smaller than a Coke can, was launched at an asteroid that had been parked in orbit around Jupiter for this purpose. As the billions of robots from the cylinder swarmed across the asteroid, transforming it into a marvelous home, she boarded another ship. It seemed silly to spend any of her transit time stuck in the confines of her cabin; she went to Jupiter for the duration. She intended to return to her own body when it arrived in orbit.

But when it arrived, she was busy. She was learning about a new robot designed for the frozen world of Europa, with another whole new set of senses, new novelties to explore. She left her body in storage for a short time longer.

A year passed. And by then, it just didn't seem to matter.

A bubble hung poised on the edge of the solar system, a sphere pockmarked with thousands of holes, each hole the width of a pin. A bolt of light struck the sphere, a bolt powered by kilometers of molecular mirrors near the orbit of Mercury.

The bubble seemed to explode as thousands of needles leaped from their cradles, driven forth by tiny beams of laser light, slivers of the titanic bolt from the Sun. The needles accelerated away from the bubble for years, till their speed reached close to that of light. Thereafter they drifted ever outward.

Upon occasion, a needle approached a star. The needle would shift, to ensure a close passage. If planets or other items of note beckoned, the needle would swoop in, on a tight spiral to oblivion: its billions of nanomachines would break apart at the touch of an asteroid, and build anew. Where once there had been a needle, now there would be a bubble, and a molecular mirror, and thousands of needles that would explode out and travel forever.

But in addition, the nanomachines in that system would continue to build. They would build machines and living flesh well suited to the conditions of the planet. And then the nanomachines would come back together into a single structure—not a needle now, but a communication bubble. Through the bubble and its instantaneous communication she could live across space. She could dwell at home near Jupiter yet roam among the stars.

She was often one of the first humans Called to newly open planets. Her wisdom from Earth, her expertise from Jupiter, these made her invaluable as an explorer and a guide. As she had swam within the methane oceans, so now she swam in carbon dioxide atmospheres, or flew through liquid mercury. She imprinted herself upon organic synapses and silicon circuits light-years from home, and lived in many places.

Mentally she was bigger now than she had been at twenty-five. The meaning of complexity had changed for her; she understood the laws of physics with the same simple clarity with which she understood the rules of checkers. She could build a starship as easily as she could pitch a tent.

Her mind had grown and spilled from the confines of her original body. She could easily dedicate a part of her mind to each of several different tasks. Notably she could lead several different groups, touring several different planets, all at the same time.

But of all her new capacities, it was the boundless singing that filled her with wonder.

She was not an introspective person; she did not often think about her own past, and how strange she might have found her present. But when she did think such thoughts, the singing amazed her most of all. When she was twenty-five she had liked vintage Fleetwood Mac. At one-hundred-five, she had admitted her growing fondness for Beethoven. Pressing two hundred, she had fallen in love with Monteverdi. In later centuries she had come to appreciate the double beat of the Echoes of Saturn and the operas of Ro Biljaan. Patterns so subtle that the unaugmented human mind could not even sense them filled her with ecstasy.

She no longer listened to one or the other of these musical masters at rare opportunities. Rather, they all played, all the time, each in a different subliminal part of her mind. They gave to her a rippling sensation of love that never quite went away. The constant undertone of the singing formed the theme that bound her mind together, no matter how many different things she might do at one time.

As the melodies suffused her mind they intermingled, sometimes playing upon one another in a concordance of point and counterpoint. Once, such a duet evoked from several masterpieces a harmony, which surged to drive the cadence of a grander euphony, that captured and empowered an even greater polyphony, filling her mind with a symphony of symphonies. And on a thousand planets, with a thousand bodies and a thousand voices, she leapt in the air and filled the sky with lilting laughter, a chorus of joy that spanned the arm of a galaxy.

Returning to ground on those scattered planets of distant stars, she felt surprised by her outburst. She marveled at herself. In her childhood she never would have laughed in such a way. She had once been so quiet it had been easy to think she was shy. The millennia had changed her, and she was delighted; how sad it would have been, never to express one s deepest joy!

Still, she was a woman of simple tastes. In earlier times some would have called her sturdy. Others might have called her childlike.

Yet these were not fair descriptions; better to think of her in the terms of ancient mythology. She was an elemental, almost a force of nature, with a core of simplicity that mocked overeager acceptance yet offered adaptability, that rejected panic yet always guaranteed caution.

Her elemental qualities were vital, humanity had come to realize. Though the needles traveling through space never found other intelligent beings, they had found scattered remains of what had once been intelligence. Other species had come up to Singularity and had died there.

Some had died in a frenzy, as the builders of new technologies indulged in an orgy of inventions, releasing just one that destroyed them all. Others had died in despair, as fear-filled leaders beat down the innovators, strangling them, putting the future beyond their grasp. The fear-ridden species settled into a long slide of despair that ended with degenerate descendants no longer able to dream.

Only those who knew caution without fear, only those marked by her elemental form of prudence, made it through. Only humanity had survived.

And humanity had not survived unscathed. Terrible mistakes had been made, many lives had been lost. Even millennia later there still remained a form of death—or perhaps not death, but a form of impenetrable isolation. The dreams could become too strong, so strong that the individual lived in dreams always, never reaching out to touch reality. Many of her friends from the early millennia had lost themselves to these enchanted infinities leading nowhere.

She did not fear such dream-bound death. Seeing the span and deep intensity of her own dreams, she could almost understand those who wrapped themselves within and disappeared. But the new things humanity found every day were just as wonderful. The volume of space touched by the needleships grew at a geometric pace, opening hundreds of star systems. Even on days when few strikingly new systems were found, there were new planets, constructed by artists, awaiting her exploration. And the new things she learned in the realm of the mind matched these treasures and more.

Someday, she believed she, too, would dream an endless dream. She did not want to live forever. But the beginning of that dream was far away.

The new meaning of death was complemented by a new meaning of life. This new meaning was extremely complex, even for her; life dealt with wholes much greater than the sums of their parts. But she understood it intuitively—it was easy to distinguish an engineering intelligence, good only for manufacture, from a member of the community, even though that member might once have been just an engineering intelligence as well. New members of humanity usually came to life this way: an intelligence designed as a machine or an artwork expressed a special genius, a genius that deserved the ability to appreciate itself through self-awareness. When this happened, the psychological engineers would add those elements of the mind needed for life.

In this manner her great-great-grandchildren had been born. Her great-grandchildren had envisioned them, giving them a parent's loving care long before they had even been designed. Only the best characteristics of the minds of her family had been passed on to them. They were very different from her, but not quite alien. With time she learned to love them as they loved her.

The day came to say goodbye to her oldest friend. With her wonderful old Earth-born body, she returned to Earth to hike Rainier one last time: Rainier, whose surface lay so cold and eternal, was boiling within. With dawn, she knew, the boiling fury would break through, in the greatest volcanic event in Earthly centuries. She stood at the summit the day before the end and surveyed the horizon. Her feeling of appreciation grew till she thought she would burst. This was home in a sense few others could now understand.

She descended. A marmot met her on the way down; she swooped him into her arms and carried him to safety, though he fought her and cut her and it seemed her bleeding would never end. Still, the marmot could not prevent her from saving him.

She had considered saving the Mountain itself; she could, she knew. She could lace the Mountain with billions of tiny tubes, capillaries so small no living thing would notice. She could extract the heat, cool the heart.

But to deny the Mountain its moment of brilliance seemed not right: perpetual sameness was never right, though change might often be wrong.

So the next day, she and the marmot watched the eruption from afar. It was as beautiful as she had expected. And though the aftermath was gray and dreary, she knew that in a very short time the marmot's children would return to the Mountain, and a new kind of beauty would grow there.

Nor was the Mountain truly lost. Even as her Earth-born body returned to her asteroid circling Jupiter, she built an exact replica of the Mountain: an image, molecule for molecule, of the Mountain's surface the day before it erupted. When her body returned, she joined the Mountain, to walk there forever, in another part of her eternal dream.

Haikku, her loyal companion, was long dead; but she traced the descendants of his descendants. She arranged a mating. A new pup was born with Haikku's genes, in the image of Haikku. And so Haikku2 came to join her on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, on the orbit of Jupiter.

One day two needleships met in space. This was not uncommon; needles from different launchers often crossed paths and were easy to spot, with the hundreds of kilometers of molecular sensor webs they spun.

But this meeting was special, for one of the needles had no link to a human. It belonged to aliens.

Aliens! Wild hopes and wilder fears rocked the human community. She watched the hysteria calmly, confident it would pass and wisdom would rule.

The needles passed one another, too fast to meet. They swerved in long, graceful arcs to a distant rendezvous.

A sense of calm, and prudence, returned to humanity. They selected a contact team to break off and meet the aliens.

The needles closed. In their last moments they danced in a tight orbit about one another, a dance of creation: for though the needles died, a bubble formed where they met—a communications bubble.

The two communities, human and alien, reached out. They touched—but the touch was jarring. Bafflement ruled. The deadlock of confusion ensued.

She watched with interest. She felt sorrow that it was not going well, but her confidence remained.

Then from the contact team she received a Call. They needed her; they needed her elemental resilience and adaptability.

But in needing her elemental nature, they needed more than she had ever given before. They did not need the thoughts or calculations of her mind: they needed the basic traits of her personality, the very core of her being. To reinforce the team, she would have to expand her communication channels, open them so wide that what she thought, they would also think; there would be no filter protecting her internal thoughts. Far worse, what others thought, she would think; there would be no filter protecting her internal memories. It seemed to her it would be easy for her memories to get scrambled; she would rather die. And so for the first time in millennia, she was afraid. The team asked others of the community that held her special strength to come with them instead; they, too, were afraid.

Meanwhile humanity was failing. The anticipation, the yearning, the hope for contact with new beings developed a tinge of desperation.

They showed her how easy it was to open the channels of her mind—but more, they showed her again and again how easy it was to close them. They did not believe they would need her for long, thousands of milliseconds at most. They guaranteed she would be fine afterward. Reluctantly, she agreed.

She opened her mind; the shock of raw contact stunned her. A moment's near-panic like that of her first exploration of Jupiter returned.

And then she was moving, there within the team, and she grew accustomed. The sensation reminded her of jumping into a mountain lake—the cold plunge that blotted out all thought, the sluggish warmth of her muscles responding, the passing of the coldness from her awareness as she concentrated on the act of swimming. She swam among the members of her team.

Here she found many tasks to perform, the calming and soothing of a myriad of panicked souls as they plunged into the ice-cold lake of alien minds. She became the muscle that supplied the warmth, that allowed the awareness of the team to move beyond the cold, to swim.

As the team responded, the sensation of cold changed to one of warmth, a merry warmth, and she was a bubble floating on a wide, warm ocean, clinging and bouncing with the other bubbles, some friends, some human, some alien. Then they were bubbles of champagne, effervescent, expanding and floating away.

She floated to a greater distance; they no longer needed her; she was free to go. She closed the channels to her mind with slow grace, as would a woman walking from the sea through the sucking motions of the surf. She found herself alone again.