His curiosity, not Alia’s.
This union was not like Witnessing. She was embedded deeply in the machinery of the child’s shaping body; she felt everything he did, shared every dim thought, every sensation. But she was somehow, subtly, separated from him, and always would be. She was a monitor, a watcher; she shared everything the child lived through—and would throughout his whole life—but not his will, his choice.
And there was something wrong, a note out of place in this great symphony of manufacture and assembly. There was something not quite right with the heart, she saw, a place where the mindless self-organization had gone awry. Nothing was perfect; this was not the only flaw in the growing body. Perhaps it would not matter.
As his body and nervous system developed, the child’s mind continued to evolve.
At first there had been no sense of time, or space. There were only abstractions like separateness, one thing from another, and only events, disconnected, acausal. Time gradually emerged as a sense of events in sequence: first the hands, then the cellular Die-back, then the separating fingers, one after another. Space came after that, as the body itself grew in extent and emerged from formlessness into a tool that he could, in a limited fashion, use to explore the space around him. It was a passive exploration at first, not much more than a dim realization that the universe had to be at least big enough to encompass his body. But then he had fingers to stretch out, legs to kick with. Soon he could feel the sac that contained him, could kick against its walls, and he began to get the sense that even beyond this sac was a wider universe, perhaps including beings more or less like himself.
That sense deepened when sight arrived. He could make out a dim ruddy glow, that waxed and waned. Sometimes, when the light was at its brightest, he could even make out the pale fishlike shape that was his own body, the rope that anchored him to the walls around him.
But the light would dim and return, dim and return, and a new sense of time imposed itself on him: not a time dictated by the events of his own body, but a cycle that came from a wider world outside him. There were processes that went on independently of him, then; he was not the whole universe—even though it still
felt
like it.
Then there were sharper sensations, brought to him in a rich stream of blood. The nourishment he received could be rich or thin, familiar or strange. Sometimes it was even intoxicating, mildly, so that he thrashed uncomfortably in his tank of flesh. This came from the mother, he knew on some deep level.
For the child in the womb, here was still another lesson to learn. Not only was there a universe outside this womb of his, but there were creatures out there who imposed their will on him: even his mother, who lived her own life, while cradling his. It was a gathering awareness of separateness that presaged the child’s ultimate ejection from this crimson comfort into the harsher, much less sympathetic world beyond the walls of the womb.
But now came the pain.
It was extraordinary. It flooded the child’s still-developing nervous system as if hot mercury had been injected into it. The walls of the womb flexed, pressing at the helpless body, overwhelming his struggles. There was a new taste on his soft pink tongue, a taste he could not recognize, was not supposed to know, not yet. But Alia recognized its iron tang. It was blood.
Something was badly wrong.
The pain passed. The child relaxed, exhausted. Groping in the dark he pushed one tiny thumb into his mouth and sucked. Alia, floating with him, longed to comfort him. But the memory of the pain clung deep, and nothing was quite as it had been before, or ever could be.
Now there was another intrusion into this amniotic refuge. It was something
sharp,
and it was
cold,
unbelievably so in this little universe of soft, cushioning flesh. A probe, Alia thought, pushed in from outside. Was it possible somebody out there was trying to help this damaged child? But if so, how crude a way to do it! The child thrashed, distressed down to the core of his being. The probe sucked away some of the child’s flesh and withdrew. The child folded over on itself, scrabbling at its small face with its hands. Again peace returned, like an echo of the endless tranquillity from which the child had been separated at its conception. But it did not last long.
And when the pain came back, Alia knew that there would be no respite. Again the child shrieked silently, but there was nobody to hear him; again the womb walls flexed helplessly, as if trying to crush the child out of existence.
There was another sharp intrusion from outside. But this was much more drastic than the earlier probing. A blade slashed uncompromisingly through the wall of the womb, and light poured in. The child thrashed and grasped; it was as shocking as if the sky itself had cracked open. Huge forms descended and something smooth and cold closed around his torso—hands, gloved perhaps? And now, in the ultimate horror, he was lifted up, pulled
away
from the womb into a sharp coldness, a new realm of bitter light. But he could feel the cord in his belly tugging him back to the womb.
Amidst all this unimaginable horror the pain returned again. It was even worse now. It seemed to emanate from the core of his being, his chest and belly, and flooded out through his limbs to his tiny fingers, the thumb he had sucked. It was as if some immense hard object was slamming against his chest, over and over.
He was aware of motion, a smooth surface under him; he had been laid down. Then came a sharp pain at his belly as the cord was cut. Immense objects, perhaps fingers, dug into his mouth. But that pain flooded through him still, a new burst with every impact of those invisible fists on his chest.
He could see only a blur, only light, smeared with a crimson film of blood and amniotic fluid. But objects floated through that blur, looming down. They were faces, human faces. Even as the terrible pain continued, the child struggled to make out the faces—a first reflex of his nervous system, Alia knew. He looked for smiles, for welcoming. But there were no smiles here. And one of those faces, even though it was just a moonscape of patches and blurs, looked oddly familiar to Alia.
It was Michael Poole.
But now the faces receded, and darkness washed over the child’s vision. That pounding pain continued, and he thrashed feebly, even now fighting. But he was tiring quickly. There was a kind of question in his mind, Alia realized, an expression of a deep longing. This new darkness—was it the womb? Was he being returned to the place he belonged?
Alia could not answer him. She was only an observer. And yet she replied:
Yes. There is nothing to fear. Lie still.
The darkness rose up around him now; the faces had gone, vanished forever. The miracle of biological self-organization and emergent awareness was dissipating, crumbling, and so was his mind.
At least the pain stopped.
Chapter 40
The day after that first integrated test was launched, Edith Barnette returned to her home in DC.
She took with her good wishes from our confused little crew. It meant a lot that such a grand old lady had hauled ass all the way to Alaska to see it, for she had demonstrated concretely that there was support for our work out there, if only we could tap into it. We were a somewhat fragile alliance of partners, with both Shelley’s concerns and EI always having their eye on the need to make an eventual profit. Barnette’s endorsement would help keep their boards and shareholders happy—or anyhow nobody was talking about pulling out yet.
In the days that followed, we dug into the work once more.
What Barnette had witnessed was only the beginning of the integration trials, the first tentative burrowings of our moles into shallow sea-bottom sediments. It had mostly gone well. Around ten percent of the Higgs-field power packs had suffered glitches of one sort or another, but as Higgs was the one really novel technological element, you had to expect unpleasant surprises.
Most of the smart moles had behaved much as expected, but the tentative network they had begun constructing hadn’t been of quite the quality we’d hoped for. Small-world networking: a useful, robust network should be designed around a number of key nodes with plenty of links between them, so you can get from one point to another with very few steps, and yet the whole thing is robust to failure. As we wanted our refrigerant network to be working from the moment we put it in the ground, we were seeking a kind of rolling optimum, with it being as good as it could be at every stage of its extension. In those first few hours of work, what we built was good, but not quite as good as that.
Some of the moles seemed to have forgotten the wider goal, and had gone burrowing off according to their own agenda. We speculated that maybe the unusual environment of the moles led to a kind of mechanical solipsism, as if each mole was tempted to believe that it was alone, the center of a cramped, dark universe of cold and sediment. We were going to have to pull some of the moles back for therapy, we decided. This was twenty-first century engineering, where you wielded TLC rather than a spanner.
The plan beyond that was for the moles’ drillings to extend out to about a kilometer from the central rig. Then an array of condenser stations would be established across the seafloor to complete the logical closure of our refrigeration loops. After that the first liquid nitrogen would be pumped through our lined tunnels, and we should begin to demonstrate actual cooling over a significant chunk of the seafloor, and deep beneath its surface. All this, Ruud Makaay hoped, would be achievable in a few more months.
It was at that point, when we were able to demonstrate significant temperature reductions, and we were sure about the heat flows and efficiencies and other parameters of the whole process, that we would go public, we had decided.
It would be a sales pitch, and would have to be carefully choreographed. We hoped to be able to use Edith Barnette as a lever to bring us some attention from the world’s decision makers. Gea’s projections of how well our refrigerant technology would work, and the difference it would make to the state of the planet, were going to be crucially authoritative. Then, so the best-case scenario went, with endorsement from the Stewardship, the U.S. federal government, and various other agencies of governance, we would begin the roll-out of the technology around both poles of the planet, tweaking the design and learning all the way. We might be at that point in as little as a year from now.
And at this point, the business analysts suggested, serious money would start to roll into the coffers of EI and the other private agencies involved. Even I would be getting a consultancy fee, I was assured. Capitalism would save the world, but only so long as it showed a profit.
That was the plan. To achieve it there was still a hell of a lot of work to do, for all of us. Even Tom and Sonia had carved out a role as a kind of watching brief on the project, which was turning out to be surprisingly useful. They couldn’t contribute much technically, but they had a good sense of the impact our project was going to have on the high-latitude communities on which its infrastructure was going to be “imposed,” in Tom’s word. They added a degree of cultural sensitivity which our little engineering community perhaps lacked.
And while all this was going on we had to deal with the fallout from the Poole family circus-show.
On the day itself, Ruud Makaay explained the Morag incident away to Edith Barnette as a personal issue for me and Tom. She clearly didn’t buy this, but her only comment was that it was a good thing there had been no press here to see it. After all the center of the incident was
me,
who everybody knew was the originator of the whole project in the first place; it couldn’t have been more high-profile.
As for everybody else, Deadhorse was a pretty desolate and uninspiring place, and I was suddenly a valued source of scuttlebutt. Makaay was irritated at the way his people were distracted by “this stupid sideshow,” as he called it; it was “getting in the way” when there was already too much work to do. Shelley was more circumspect. She didn’t say much, and I knew she would support me in trying to resolve this knot of strangeness in my life. But I think she, too, wished it would all just go away.
As for Tom, he avoided me for days.
I took Shelley’s advice not to push him. He had a lot to absorb, after all: this was the first time
he
had been haunted, too. And besides, as Sonia confided in a discreet moment, his pride had hurt. Whatever the cause, a thousand people had seen him crushed and weeping on the frozen ground. So I tried to give him space.
But I had to follow it up myself. I parceled up the records of that day and beamed them over by high-bandwidth link to Rosa, my wizened, black-clad aunt in Seville, to see what she made of them.
A week after that strange day, Rosa called me back.
Ruud Makaay, bowing to the inevitable, gave us one of his conference rooms to take Rosa’s call. Tom and Sonia were there—though I gathered that Sonia had had to twist Tom’s arm. I could understand his reluctance, but my son was no coward, and I knew he would face up to all this strangeness.
However I asked Shelley Magwood to attend, too. I had often observed that we Pooles behaved better toward each other when outsiders were present. Or maybe I just felt I needed an ally. Gea, my strange artificial companion, was there, too.
So we sat around a simple circular table, Gea’s little toy-robot avatar rolling back and forth on the tabletop.
And Rosa materialized among us, a dark, brooding presence in her black priest’s garb. The VR facilities were functional rather than corporate-luxurious, and you could see a ghostly second surface where the projection of Rosa’s table was overlaid on ours.
“So,” Rosa smiled at us. “Who’s first?”
It was actually Gea who started us off. She had been analyzing the surveillance records of the day. She conjured up a snippet of the visitation, played out by manikins on the tabletop, ten-centimeter-high models of me, Morag, Tom, and Sonia. The resolution was good, far better than Rosa’s image of the Reef; the whole area around the marquee and the offshore rig had been drenched with sensors. And the data went beyond human senses. Gea was able to show us an X-ray image of Morag, for instance; we saw bones, a regular-looking skeleton, the ghostly images of internal organs—a brain, a heart.