Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (27 page)

"Jason and the others are on their way in," said Tina.

He glanced over to where she was pointing and watched the approaching ATV, with its train of enclosed trailers, worming its way down the rough coast road. Jason Fitch and the other seventeen he had woken had finished relocating mining equipment to a copper deposit up the coast. The stats looked good and hopefully that operation was the last tweak they needed. He grimaced, turned away.

The lander lay half a kilometer from the base. Saul gazed at the huge chunk of hardware and again wondered why he hadn't had it taken apart and used, and why he kept the mainframe there rather than relocating it to the base. It wasn't as if there was anywhere they could fly to from Malden now. The wreckage of the
Vardelex
still created the occasional meteor shower. After a moment he realized he was procrastinating and set out at a vigorous pace for the lander, Tina hurrying to catch up with him.

The lander smelt of time, nostalgia, regret. With Tina dogging his footsteps Saul walked through the cargo bay, then the passenger compartment, to the control room located behind the cockpit. He entered, gazed around the interior for a moment, remembering his last time in here when he had nearly died, when the medic undertaking Tina's present duties had needed to restart his heart. He walked over and plumped himself down in a chair before the main console, paused reflectively, then reached underneath to flick on the power switch, remembering a time long ago when he had thought he would never need to touch a button or a switch again. His mind had been vast back when he had been able to individually program a thousand robots all at once or calculate the vectors of every piece of rubble in a solar system. He had been a demigod who had mastered both mind and matter, who at will could build anything, including human bodies and minds. Now he was an old dying man. How the mighty had fallen.

The computers booted up all around him, the screen before him scrolling code he had once been able to run in his mind, in fact build in his mind in fractions of a second, but it was now just a blur to him.

"You don't have to do this," Tina warned.

"Yes," he said, "but any other way would require me waking up twenty more people and a further hundred days of computer time."

Was that really the truth? Surely that was better than risking his life like this? No, he realized why he did this, why he could never leave it alone: he wanted it back; he wanted back everything he had lost. There was always a chance that the bio-interface in his skull had made new connections, that some of the hardware had self-repaired, that he could once again be the godlike Alan Saul he had been. That was worth the risk; in fact, everything else was worth zero in comparison. He reached up and dug a fingernail into the nub of synthetic flesh covering the teragate socket in his skull, then eyed the coil of optic cable already plugged in at one end to the console before him.

"Get your drugs," he instructed.

While he sat patiently she connected up a saline drip and then began injecting a specially designed cocktail of drugs into the line. The balance had to be just right, the enhancers and consciousness expanders to help him deal with what had once been so easy, and drugs for the shock, the inevitable cerebral bleeds, and his reaction to the odd compounds his damaged cerebral hardware issued when it powered up. Tina also began to attach monitoring pads, skin-stick scanners, and then to set up her induction cauterizer and heart stimulator. He hoped she would have no need of these, but knew it likely he would suffer near terminal or very final damage this time.

The drugs kicked in and suddenly the code on the screen began to make perfect sense. Sure, that was the feed from Base Two, where a million species of genetically modified insects were held in chemical stasis. He was ready.
Time to plug in.
He inserted the optic into the socket in his skull.

It opened to him, all eight bases, all the automated factories, all the robots, all the artificial womb houses, the recombinant factories, the cams and scanners and the assessors of life. He saw it whole, entire, knew there was enough redundancy in the system and that it would work. In a hundred years' time, when sleepers here woke again they would be able to walk outside and breathe the air, flowers would be in the process of pollination by bees, whole ecosystems of rotifers and nematodes would be building soil, and the planter robots, undergoing an automatic reconfiguration, would be releasing the first land-going reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals.

Every sparrow that falls...

Then there was something else focusing its attention on him, something numinous just out of reach, immense and possessing a complexity he couldn't fathom. He had sneeringly asked Tina if she believed in God, yet now in this moment he felt the presence of God was something he could not deny. He remembered in this moment that every time he had done this before he had experienced the same feeling, and then, on his return to his failing body, forgotten it all. No... no, there is no God. This was just an artifact, just electro-stimulation of those parts of the brain related to religious experience. This was something people had learned about more than a thousand years ago back on Earth.

"All good," he croaked, holding up his thumb to Tina, then found he couldn't get his breath.

The next thing he knew the world died and he was back in a suffering old body with Tina leaning over him to cut his throat, pushing in a tracheotomy tube. He breathed, wished he hadn't, wished she hadn't enabled him to, and then he faded.

Please no, don't let me be alive.

But there was no doubt because Saul recognized the feel of the pads and straps holding him upright in a cold coffin, the bite of the tubes into his arms, the horrible ache of a body stabbed with a hundred needles, pumped of antifreeze, and filled with warm blood, and the saccharin taste the drugs left in his mouth. He opened gummy eyes but couldn't see out of the glass, whose exterior seemed to be crusted with some layer. However, enough light was being admitted for him, to gaze down at his withered body. No one was here to open the door for him, so that meant the automatics had woken him. Something must have gone wrong that required his attention.

He flexed his hands and when he at last felt confident enough, he took a couple of coag plasters from the dispenser, pulled the tubes from his arms, and pressed the plasters into place. Next he turned his attention to the straps, which he struggled with because the easy releasers were jammed. Also the support pads hadn't retracted and he needed to manually wind them back. He slumped in the coffin, grabbing for the door handle on his way down, and then spilled out onto the floor.

Something was badly wrong.

The floor was filthy—brown and red debris crunched under his hands, and then his fingers closed on something solid, which he picked up and peered at. It took him a little while to register what he held.

A twig?

Next, with his vision clearing, he gazed with complete puzzlement at the surrounding drifts of leaves, then in astonishment at a creature like a chinchilla peering at him with beady black eyes before nonchalantly bouncing its back legs off a wall and speeding away. He heaved himself to his feet, and on autopilot walked over to a locker, kicking aside leaves that seemed bewilderingly of a familiar shape to expose the white mycelia of fungi. He struggled to open the door, meanwhile observing that the coag patches weren't working so well because his arms were bleeding. Finally managing to get the locker open, he pulled out his clothing and it crumbled in his hands.

How long?

No screens of consoles were lit in here and the only sign of any power was a dim light inside the cold coffin, and that was fading. He headed over to the door, pulled it further open, then stepped out into a corridor strewn with more debris and gazed along it to the airlock, which stood open. At least a hundred years had to have passed, else he would have suffocated by now. He advanced, but then stubbed his toe against something and paused to peer down at a human skull.

"They had everything," said an eerily familiar voice. "They had the technology, they had the resources, and they had the world I gave them."

"Who is that?" he snapped, checking behind him.

No one nearby, but then it seemed he was now playing a game with himself, because he just knew the voice lay inside his skull, and it was his own. He walked to the airlock and stepped out, and saw that old ginkgo trees now blocked the view of the sea. He paused for a moment and glanced back into the base, but did not have the heart to search it, for he knew it would be empty, and so stepped out into dappled sunlight.

The sky had changed; now pink striated with blue, great puffy blimps of clouds sailing overhead. The walk to the shore was not so far, but by the time he reached it he was wheezing and his body felt as if someone had beaten it from head to foot. A nail of pain jabbed at his temple, his teeth ached. He was old.

"At first they left you on ice because they thought you might not survive another waking," said the voice. "They decided to wait until their medical technology had improved, until they could make you a clone body and then figure out the wiring in your skull so as to download you into it. They got there with that tech, but by then they were already breaking into factions who were building up their populations with clones programmed for obedience, and maneuvering for power. It started with the robots, which they sent against each other, then the clones, and finally a nasty brain-rotting virus. After that the survivors just couldn't pick themselves back up."

"They died?" Saul asked, wearily lowering himself to a flat rock to gaze out over the beach and across the ocean.

"No, there's a scattering of tribes in the area," replied the voice. "And one of those tribes has even reinvented the bow and arrow."

Saul's head nodded, he dozed then abruptly snapped awake again. How had time passed so quickly? The sea now lay under twilight before him and the stars were coming out above. He glanced aside at a figure standing just along the beach from him: instantly recognizable with his acid white hair, red eyes, and black vacuum combat suit. But of course, this was as much the real item as old Saul sitting here on his rock. A man, or rather a demigod, who could make a clone of himself and load some portion of his mind to it to serve some specific end, did not himself need to travel down to the surface of the world. He would be there, in that steel sphere on the ocean horizon—that vast ship poised in orbit about Malden.

"So my memories of the Grazen destroying the
Vardelex
are false," said Saul, gesturing to that distant ship.

"Of course," replied the projection of the real Alan Saul, "we dealt with the Grazen long ago, but you and the others here with you needed the motivation for success, and succeed you did." The projection waved a pale hand at their surroundings.

Old man Saul, on the beach, glanced around at the trees, down at the strand now scattered with handfuls of glittery shells, out at the sea where something swirled and splashed. Yes, they had succeeded in building a living world, and then just fucked up, as ever.

"Were they clones too?" the old man asked.

"No, they were the original crew who wanted to get away from me and start something new. I adjusted their memories to give them a greater chance of success."

What arrogance,
thought the old man, recognizing it as his own.

"What now?" he asked.

"You are dying," replied the projection, "it's time for you to come home."

"I'm a piece of you that you want back."

"In essence."

Old Saul felt too tired to be angry about that. "Okay," he said.

The figure strode toward him, stretching out a hand. The old man reached out to clasp that hand—a symbolic act as his body died and his mind transferred. He immediately found himself falling into the twilight, far and deep, hauled in by something numinous, and dissolving in it.

On the horizon the giant sphere of the
Vardelex
seemed to blink like a steel eye, and receded.

WHEN THE RAIN COMIN

Ian McHugh
| 1519 words

Ian McHugh's stories have appeared in professional and semipro magazines and anthologies in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Many, including his past stories for
Asimov's
and
Analog,
are available for free at
ianmchugh.wordpress.com.
Ian's first short-story collection, tentatively titled
Angel Dust,
will be out from Ticonderoga Publications in 2014. His latest tale takes a quiet look at a people who seem both familiar and yet utterly alien, and describes what happens...

Gamman smelled rain. Through a meter of hard red clay, through the tough membrane of her cocoon, she felt the clouds building.

And she smelled rain.

Slowly, she stirred from the deep torpor her body had sunk into over the long years of the dry. Warmth spread, as her heart began to pump faster. Her eyelids fluttered. She drifted into a shallower sleep. Fingers and toes, half-webbed, flexed.

The rigid shell of the cocoon had been secreted from the glands in her wrists, to harden as her body cooled and stilled. It began to break down now with her rising heat, filling the burrow with clean air.

Gamman awoke, sucking in deep breaths and holding them. With eyes, nostrils, lips, and gills clamped firmly shut, she pressed her hands and feet around the walls of the cavity. Gamman turned herself over onto her knees and began to pull at the hard earth with fingernails like stout spades. She'd filled the burrow's tunnel in behind her as she'd dug down into the earth. The years of the dry had compacted the loose dirt. The clay resisted, but her hands and forearms were strong. She dug steadily upward.

Her fingertips found a trace of moisture. She shoved upward and her hands broke free into cool air. Gamman shouldered her way through the surface layer of clay and pulled herself from the burrow.