“What happened to you?”
“He beat me up. Bisset.”
“You deserved it, you little prick,” Zuba murmured. “Knilans. Fix this so we can get out of here.”
I stepped toward the water. I noticed that many of the mounds looked damaged—scarred, stitched by straight-line wounds. “Ramone? Are you OK?”
He didn’t reply.
I racked my brains for some way to get through to him. “Umm—‘Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.’ ”
I thought I saw him relax, subtly. “Shakespeare.”
“Talk to me, Ramone.”
“Ask him.” He gestured with the laser at Thoring.
Hastily, sketchily, Ulf told me what had happened.
The IGWI team had completed their station on the surface of GC-IV. This is simple in principle, just a network of nodes connected by laser light; perturbations of the laser echoes can be used to detect the passage of gravity waves. The ancient waves the IGWI boys seek are stretched, attenuated, and overlaid, and it is taking an interferometer, a supertelescope made up of many stations across interstellar distances, to map them.
Their work done, the IGWI boys dismantled their gear. But on a whim, probably motivated by Ulf’s overhearing my conversation with Bisset, they stopped by Dreamers’ Lake, unpacked their lasers, and enjoyed a little target practice.
Bisset said, “These are
minds
, Ulf. You burst them like balloons.”
Thoring sounded aggrieved. “But it was only a bit of a laugh. For God’s sake—” He gestured at the sky. “In twelve hours none of this will survive anyhow.”
I turned back to Bisset. “You punished him, Ramone. You made your point. So what are you doing out there?”
“I’ve been thinking about what we said. Juliet.”
I felt a deep knot of dread gather in my stomach. For the first time I began to get the feeling that this might all be my fault. “What do you mean?”
“You showed me the signal of her mind. She is afraid.
She knows
, Susan.”
“How can she?”
“The Hammer is the size of Mars. Perhaps the mounds can sense the tides. It’s at least possible, isn’t it? Even I can feel the quakes. Juliet faces extermination, yet she has never known death. What a terrible thing.”
“OK. Even supposing that’s true, what are you going to do? Put her out of her misery? Finish the job Ulf and his thugs started?”
“You don’t understand.” He sounded offended. “
I’ve
known death. I lost my wife, my daughter. I’ve had to live with that.” I knew little about his past. “Maybe if I can teach Juliet what I’ve learned, it will help her, and her kin, accept what is to come.”
Then I saw it. “Shit. You’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?”
“Knilans, Zuba. This is a secure line; Bisset can’t hear us. I don’t think this has anything to do with the mounds. It’s all about the bullying and the bullshit from the IGWI boys. Bisset wants to make a statement—to rise above them on his own terms.”
“Nice theory,” I replied. “But I can’t use it. I think I have to deal with him in his own framework. Unless you have a better idea, Captain.”
Zuba hesitated for one second. “You know him better than I do. You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Get this resolved.”
I cut back to the open comms and struggled to make Bisset understand. “Ramone—it can’t work. There’s no interface between the two of you. Not even a cognitive net. If you die now,
she will never know.
”
“But nobody even knew that mounds like this could be sentient before the discoveries on Mars. You say she won’t know.
Are you sure?
”
I was lost.
Zuba took over. “Citizen Associate, it’s at least a fair bet Knilans is right. This mound will understand nothing. If you slit open your suit—have you ever seen a suffocation?—it will take longer to die than you might think. And in all those long seconds the seed of doubt will grow in your mind:
I have thrown my life away for nothing.
”
I could see Bisset’s uncertainty. “Then I’ll just stand here until my air runs out.”
“That’s your privilege,” Zuba said mildly. “And it will be my privilege to stand here with you.”
Bisset seemed genuinely puzzled. “Why?”
“Call it my own brand of xenoethics.” She turned to Ulf Thoring. “Have you told the Citizen Associate about the results of the IGWI program?”
“No.” Ulf said defensively. “They’re not published. And besides—”
“Tell him now.”
Structure has been detected in the signals from the beginning of time. No, not just structure—
life
, its unmistakeable signature, with traces of mind susceptible to standard animistic deconvolution. Even in those very first instants, as cosmic energies raged, life flourished, blossomed, died, and was aware. The study of this primordial life is the whole purpose of the IGWI program—though, as nothing has yet been published, it is still a matter of gossip on academic sites.
This stunning discovery has led to a revision of our theories of life’s origin. Perhaps the essence of life was born in those first instants. Or perhaps, some speculate, it was
injected
into our infant universe, from—somewhere else.
“OK,” Zuba said. “Here’s what I take from all of that, in my simple way. Everywhere we have traveled we have found life and mind. But
it is not like us
. It exists on utterly different scales from us—hugely more extensive in space, and in time.”
She was right. At best multicelled forms like us are an episode in the long dream of bacterial life. Away from Earth, we’ve found a few fossils; that’s all.
Zuba said, “There are similarities in the cognitive maps of your pet stromatolite, Bisset, and the antique minds from the inflationary period.
Similarities
. But we are different; we are nothing but transient structures that soon dissolve back into the mush. You’re right, Citizen Associate; only we humans know death. And in a universe that teems with life, we humans are still alone, in a way Juliet has never been alone.
That
is why I will wait for you, Citizen Associate, until that damn moon hammers me into the ground like a tent peg. Because all we humans have is each other.”
You have to admit she was impressive.
Bisset thought it over. “I should get out of this pond.”
“Good idea,” I said fervently.
Bisset glanced once more at Juliet. She was unharmed, save for a slight scarring from our cognitive net. He dropped the laser, which sank out of sight into the water, and began to wade toward us. ‘Tell me one more thing, Captain.”
“Yes?”
“So we humans work for each other. But why are we
here
? We spoke about this, Susan. Why explore, why go on and on?”
Zuba said, “We don’t know what we might find. We humans are lost now, but not forever. There’s a place for us.”
Bisset laughed softly. “Like the movie song.”
“What movie?” I wondered.
“What
is
a movie?” Ulf Thoring asked.
“You might want to hurry it along.” Zuba glanced up.
The Hammer was an inverted landscape sliding over the dreaming stromatolites. Bisset splashed to the edge of the water, and we hurried forward to help him.
Eventide
Chris Roberson
I
t was while burying Dobeh that Serj first caught my attention. In the strange twilight of Eventide, he seemed a walking shadow, his skin coded so dark it was almost the shade of a starless sky, his amber eyes reflecting back the faint sunlight, like gems lit from within. He smiled, lips pulled back just enough to reveal startling white teeth, and I knew then that we’d be paired.
Under normal circumstances it might have seemed inopportune to initiate a new pair-bond with someone laying his late partner to rest, but nothing about our circumstances since leaving underspace could be called normal, so I could scarcely fault him. Serj’s own partner had not made it off of the
Phonix
, or if he had escaped, he’d not done so in our pod, so I certainly had no monopoly on grief. But a Disocurene cannot long conscience being alone, unless he or she is a singleton . . . which, of course, neither of us was, gods forbid. It is as my mothers always said: “Once buried, sooner married.”
I finished covering Dobeh’s shallow grave with my makeshift shovel, a bit of flooring panel prized from the escape pod’s interior, and when I straightened, Serj was at my side.
“Zihl,” he said, with a voice that rumbled like distant thunder, “I am sorry for your loss.”
He took my hand in his, and that was that.
There were ten of us on board the escape pod when it detached from the
Underspace Ship Phonix
, shortly after our reinsertion into normal space, but only seven of us survived long enough to set foot on the planetoid we named Eventide, all of us substantially organic. Kloster theorized that something about the region of space surrounding the planetoid disrupted the electro-photonic processes of the synthetics among us—such as Tamsin’s late partner, an artificial intelligence housed in a bipedal body of ferroceramics—or, indeed, any organics with a large percentage of synthetic augmentations—such as my own Dobeh, who’d long before substituted a kernel of thinking crystal for a significant portion of his organic brain.
Kloster’s theory seemed to be born out by the death of Nayrami’s partner soon after landfall, since Farise’s cardiovascular system had been replaced years before by porous tubing and a synthetic pump governed by a semisentient artificial intelligence; but Kloster’s quick action was able to preserve Farise past the death of his body. Cobbling together a functioning synthetic Mind, assembled from bits and pieces from the pod’s guidance system, which had gone dark before the crash, the Engineer rigged a device to perform an emergency scan of Farise’s thoughts and memories moments before his death. The patterns stored and active in the theretofore blank Mind, the ghost of Farise was able to use the low power diagnostic projectors to animate a miniature holographic representation of his former body.
In this way, Nayrami and Farise could remain pair-bonded, even with only one of them still living. Once we were able to return to civilization, Nayrami assured us, she planned to use what was left of their fortune, and her own influence as Ambassador Extraordinary, to have a new body vat-grown for her partner, so that they could be together again, in body as well as soul.
The Ambassador Extraordinary and her attaché, though, were the only pair-bond to survive the crash of the
Phonix
intact. The remaining five of us paired off quickly, comprising pair-bonds of two men—myself and Serj—and two women, Tamsin and Phedra. This left only the Engineer unattached.
Kloster seemed hardly bothered by the death of his partner, and less so that he was left on this strange twilit planetoid without prospects. If he had not mentioned picking up a working knowledge of emergency medicine from his late partner, the ship’s physician, one might have supposed that the Engineer had always been a singleton. In truth, I don’t know that Kloster realized just how uncomfortable the presence of a singleton made the rest of us, as the days wore on; but his attentions were elsewhere. That he was often away, exploring the caves and hidden recesses of the planetoid for hours, even days, at a time, came as a relief to us, I must confess.
“Kloster,” I asked the engineer, shortly after our arrival, “does it not strike you odd that this planetoid would be so constituted as to support human life so perfectly? The mix of elements in the atmosphere, the gravity, the warmth—all seem perfectly suited to sustain life.”
“Zihl,” Kloster said, an unaccustomed smile on his lean face, the corners of his mouth almost touching his prominent cheekbones, “I never took you for a Demiurgist.”
I had no notion what the engineer meant by this, and I’m sure my expression showed it.
“Surely you’ve heard the stories about ancient aliens, Assistant Astrogator?” Kloster asked, his tone like that of a teacher addressing a small child.
“Oh,” I said, after mulling it over for a time, “you mean the Old Ones? Such as are portrayed in the pseudo-rationalist dramas?”
Kloster blinked slowly, as if in sudden pain, and shook his head sharply. “Yes.” He took a long sigh. “Well, one who holds to the Demiurgist doctrine believes that these ancient intelligences existed in actual fact, and not just in the fanciful writings of dramatists. There is no evidence for these ancients, as there is none for sentient beings from any source but Old Earth, but the proponents of Demiurgism see inferences everywhere, from the ‘fine-tuning’ of certain cosmological values to the balance of chemical constituents in some planetary bodies, which they argue is proof of ancient terraforming.”
“And you think that this planetoid proves the Demiurgist doctrine?”