George always said he was pleased I was working on Kuiper, even if it was just a small-scale design study. He found the Anomaly particularly fascinating, because, he told me, its discovery in the first decade of the century had come at a strange time in his own life. His father had just died, he had gone looking for a sister he had never known he had, and the discovery of Kuiper and the great philosophical transformation it had brought had seemed to him to parallel the upheavals going on in his own heart.
Also, he told me once, it was particularly appropriate that
I
should work on Kuiper. He didn’t elaborate. George could be a bit mysterious at times. Well, he was a Poole.
As we sat there talking about Kuiper a toy robot came rolling into the room. It was a real antique, all shaped tin and plastic and little glass eyes, and as it rolled along a flywheel sent friction sparks shooting from a grill in its belly.
George snapped at the robot, “What do you want?”
“Well, George, you aren’t following your routines. Normally you take a walk to the shops this time of day. I wondered if you’d forgotten.” The robot’s voice was comically melodramatic, intended to intone interplanetary dangers, devoted to domestic trivia.
George said to me, “You see what I mean? They turn your home into a nursery.” He barked at the robot, “No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m just not a chuffing robot like you. I have free will.”
The robot said, “Well, so do I, George, but we can discuss philosophy later. Wouldn’t you like to take your walk? Perhaps your new friend could go with you.”
“It’s not a friend, it’s a nephew. And we’re drinking beer and talking. So clear off.” He aimed a kick at the robot. His foot passed clean through it, scattering it to pixels that quickly coalesced. The robot, grumbling, rattled out of the room. “Little prick,” said George.
The design turned out to be a VR copy of a toy from George’s long-gone childhood, a representation of a robot from some forgotten TV show.
“I never imagined you as a nostalgia buff, George.”
“Well, you have to have a
personal care assistant,
” George said, spitting out the words. “You should have seen the other designs. But if it didn’t play a mean game of chess I’d have scrambled it long ago. Little prick.”
As we talked, and George made me lunch—a light Italian dish of pasta with baked fish, good if a little heavy on the garlic—the house and its contents continued to fuss around him. George responded to most of this with a cheery curse, but he took his pills and obeyed the rules.
He only had to live like this because the family,
I,
wasn’t around to look after him any better.
The population of the elderly had hugely expanded during George’s lifetime. He liked to say that the commuters who had once journeyed daily out of here had all come back in their old age, “like a flock of elderly gulls returning to their nesting cliff.” But there weren’t enough youngsters around to look after them all, even if our hearts had been in it. So it was up to the robots. Without artificial sentience, if the machines hadn’t been able to fulfill the state’s duty of care to its citizens, George said he didn’t know how we would all have coped. “Maybe put us all to work, in the Sunny Vales Gulag of the Twilight Years. Although euthanasia would be simpler.”
I was silently thankful for the empathetic intelligence of the designers who had made George’s mandatory companion a chess-playing, bickering toy robot rather than a bland, soulless nurse.
After lunch we took a walk. George said he would show me the new managed forest that was growing up on the outskirts of town. “Off the Stockport Road,” he said. “Only a mile or so. Used to be a golf course. Nobody plays golf anymore.”
So we walked. The day was mild, the sunlight hazy and washed out. The air seemed reasonably fresh, with only a faintly polluted tinge to it, an acidic smell like crushed ants.
The hike wasn’t that easy. The road surface was mostly silvertop to allow the pod buses and rickshaws to pass, but the sidewalks, or pavements, as George called them, were little used: cracked and weed-infested, you had to watch where you stepped. George had been supplied with exoskeletal supports, but he said he had locked the “clanking splinty things” in a spare bedroom. He walked with a stick well enough, however.
That robot tailed us, grumbling to itself.
As we walked our talk gradually spiraled out from my work on Kuiper. I began to tell George about Tom and his accident. Actually George had known all about it. He used his house’s resources to follow news about Tom and other family members; in a wired-up world nobody is far from a camera.
I tried to tell him how we’d got together in that dismal hotel in Heathrow. George listened, and though he didn’t say much he seemed to understand.
He dug into the issue of the waterspout and the gas hydrates. “How are these gases stored? Is there a critical temperature at which they will be released?
How
much is there exactly? . . .”
He asked smart questions, having once been an engineer himself. He had worked in software, until he had been made redundant by Moore’s Law, he liked to say, the relentless expansion of computer capacity. His career had spanned the milestone time when the first human-level sentience systems came on the market at a budget an average household could afford. Now, nobody designed software anymore; for many of its generations it had designed itself. And there were no more analysts, programmers, or software engineers; instead there were “animists” and “therapists” who sought to understand the strange new kinds of minds that permeated the world. George had been too old for any of that. But there had been plenty of work for him to see out his career on the “legacy suites,” some decades old, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, and were now threatening us with the digital millennium. As George said, the present is built on the past, even in software; he said he finished his career feeling more like an archaeologist than an engineer.
Soon his questioning about the hydrates exposed the limits of my knowledge. But he agreed with me that Tom’s experience might be a bellwether warning about more serious dangers.
“Michael, if you’re concerned about this, you should go find out what the implications are. I find it hard to believe nobody’s thought of this before.”
“Find out from who?”
He could be sarcastic sometimes. “Forgive me for stating the obvious. But maybe you could start with the Center for Climate Modeling. You’d think
they
would have some handle on it all since it is their job. They’re based in Oklahoma, aren’t they? We can check it out back at the house.”
“They’ll never listen to me.”
“Oh, I bet I can find a way in. I still have contacts with the Slan(t)ers.” This was a dubious old conspiracy-theory organization, scattered around the planet like a terrorist network, with whom George had had dealings long ago. “Small-world networks,” he would say. “Whoever you’re trying to reach, there is a Slan(t)er who knows another who knows somebody, and so forth. The Slan(t)ers are a bunch of old nuts. But then so am I.”
“But even if the climate modelers are mapping the hydrate issue, if the whole polar ocean is going to blow its lid, what is there to do about it?”
He snorted. “You design chuffing starships. Can’t you think of anything?”
“Not offhand,” I said heavily, “no.”
“Then start thinking. If you do dig into this business of the gas hydrates,
if
there’s a significant threat and
if
there is some way to stop it, you might do some good.” He winked at me. “And of course you will be building up a connection between you and Tom. But, you know, I think you ought to find some way of talking to your son other than through mega-engineering . . . In here.”
We had come to a gate in an iron fence. Beyond lay a park, with trees scattered over a lawnlike expanse.
We walked in, stepping onto the grass. George sighed with a stiff pleasure at the softness of the ground.
Small black shapes moved purposefully through the grass at my feet. They looked like ants, but I saw the flash of metal jaws and even the spark of tiny lasers; they were miniature bots, nano-gardeners, patiently tending the forest of grass around them.
I pointed them out to George. “Nobody cuts the lawn nowadays,” he said. “Pity. I always enjoyed the smell of freshly cut grass. . . .”
We came to the shade of a tree, a sycamore. I helped George to the ground so we could sit for a while, leaning on the bark. George was breathing hard, and I realized with a pang of guilt that the kilometer or so we had walked was a long journey, for him. My feeling wasn’t lightened by the accusing glare of the robot.
The prospect was attractive, just trees and some low bushes and the grass. But further away I saw what looked like fencing, lines of rectangular panels turned to the sun. They were engineered trees. We controlled genomes so exquisitely that we no longer bothered to grow a tree and cut it down and chop it up; we just grew panels that could be snapped off, taken away, and used immediately. I’d read that in Sweden they had developed living houses, just sprouting from the ground with saunas attached. And in one Chinese lab they were growing whole books on trees, complete with text, like bundles of leaves.
When George got his breath back he sang a few lines from a plaintive song.
“All the leaves are brown / And the sky is gray . . .”
“That sounds pretty.”
He shrugged. “This whole place is totally transformed from when I was a kid. See all these trees? They’re sycamore. And the undergrowth is rhododendron and Japanese knotwood.” He pointed with his stick. “There used to be a big old oak tree over there. Edge of the fifteenth green.” There was nothing left now but a hollow in the ground, faintly shadowed. “As a kid I started coming out here to meet a girlfriend who lived nearby. I’d cycle over and sneak in and read in the shade of that old tree. Sometimes I’d pinch golf balls that came sailing by and sell them back to the punters, but that’s another story.
“Well, I came back—Christ, I must have been in my fifties, your age—to clear up some last bits of business after my father’s death. I took a walk out here. And that old tree was dying. I always thought it would live forever, or at least outlive me. But it actually looked like it was bleeding; there was this awful tarry sap leaking out of cankers on its trunk. All the leaves were brown.
“Later I found out what it was.
Sudden oak death,
they called it. It was a kind of fungus that kills by cutting off the flow of nutrients in the trunk. You get these fungi all over the world, and where they come from they don’t usually do that much harm. But back then we were shipping plants and trees all over the planet, and bringing their pathogens with them. Now you only see oak trees in hothouses in Kew Gardens.” He waved a hand at the sycamore above him. “Instead we have this spindly crap. And all the wildlife you used to get with the old stuff has gone, too, woodpeckers and butterflies and toads. The world seems emptied out.”
I knew what he meant. Monocultural and silent, England was like an abandoned theater stage, the actors all gone. Much of America was the same.
“But when I first noticed that poor bleeding tree all I could think of was that silly old song.
All the leaves are brown.
But there is no warm L.A. sunshine to escape to, is there?”
“I guess not.”
George leaned back against the tree trunk and sighed. “Listen, Michael. I hate to sound like an old man, but you ought to know this. I’ve been thinking of getting myself written into a tree. . . .”
I’d heard of this. The idea was you would embed a coded version of George’s genome into the DNA of a sycamore, say. It would make no difference to the tree: there were ways to do this without changing the length of the tree gene, or the protein it spelled out. But the tree as it grew would be a kind of living memorial, with every one of its trillions of cells carrying a genetic echo of George himself.
The robot said sourly, “He’s put it in his will.”
“I never thought you’d be so sentimental, George.”
“Sentimental? Maybe. I don’t have any kids, you know.”
That was the selling point, of course. Across Europe and North America childbirth rates were falling, and an increasing number of people faced the prospect of dying childless. So they were being sold other “ways” of having their heritage live on.
“I think it’s some deep genetic thing,” George said, his voice fading a bit. “I don’t have any regrets about not having kids—not for the sake of the kids themselves, because they never existed, and even if they had they’d probably have turned out to be arseholes. But behind me there is a queue of grandmothers and grandfathers going all the way back to some low-browed
Homo erectus.
Why should that long line end with
me
? It doesn’t feel responsible that I should let it all just go without a fight.”
On impulse I touched his hand; the flesh was papery, liver-spotted, but warm. “We share a lot of genes, George,” I said. “What, a quarter? You live on through me. And through Tom. But if you want the tree, I’ll make sure you get your tree.”
“Thank you,” George said.
The robot, standing beside us, whirred softly. I wondered what it made of our talk.
“So anyhow,” George said carefully, “it isn’t just Tom and gas hydrates that’s on your mind, is it?”
Immediately I understood what he meant. “John called you, too, didn’t he? He told you about Morag. That asshole.”
“He means well,” George said, a bit dubiously. “At least I think he does. That’s family for you. They can lift you up and smack you in the mouth with the very same gesture.”
“And what about you? Do you think I’m crazy too?” The robot looked at me warningly, and I realized I’d snapped. “Sorry,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said. “I believe you. Why not? The world’s a strange place; I haven’t lived so long and not figured that out. And you always seemed sensible to me. I have some advice, though. Go see Rosa.”
“Rosa?”
“My sister, your aunt. Look, her background is—odd.” He’d once told me how she’d been taken away from home to be brought up by a holy order in Rome, a peculiar, introverted society of matriarchs of some kind; he’d called it a “Coalescence.” “She left it all behind years ago. By the time she got back in touch with me she was ordained, and working as a Catholic priest in Spain.”