Phase Space Read online

  It may be you have the entitlement to understand more, before we … The sentience laws aren’t clear in this situation. Do you know where you are?

  He had no answer. If not in orbit, then on Earth, of course. But where? Was this America?

  No. Not America. The misshaped head turned.

  The ceiling turned to glass.

  He could see a sky. But not the sky of Earth. Two stars nestled at the zenith, so close they almost touched, connected by a fat umbilical of glowing gas. One, the larger, was sky blue, the other, small, fierce and bright, carried hints of emerald.

  Around this binary star, a crude spiral of glowing gas had been cast off, and lay sprawled across more distant stars. And before those stars a fainter cloud glowed, bubbles of green light, like pieces of floating forest.

  The bubbles were cities in space, and they turned the starlight green.

  Gagarin shrank within himself. Was he seeing the future of man? How far had he come from Earth? A thousand light years? More? He was, he realized, very far from home …

  And yet, in his awe and wonder, he remembered the laughter. Had he been brought back from the dead to be mocked?

  No. Listen.

  Voices, booming around him:

  … Yuri Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union, would never again fly in space. There have been many monuments to him.

  His ashes were to be buried in the wall of the Kremlin, an enduring mark of his prestige. He would be commemorated by statues, in the cosmonauts’ training ground at Star City, and another on a pillar overlooking a Moscow street called Leninski Prospect.

  The cosmonauts would remember him in their own way, by aping the actions he took on his final day: on each mission they would watch the film he saw the night before his flight – White Sun in the Desert – they would sign the doors of their rooms as he did, they would even pause in their bus transports to the booster rockets to climb outside to urinate, as he did.

  The site where Gagarin crashed his MiG-15 became a shrine, with a memorial and a tablet recording his life. And every spring, the people who looked after this shrine would trim the tops of the trees along the angle of his crashing plane, so that it was possible to stand by his memorial and look up and see through the gap to the sky …

  Mankind has covered the Galaxy. But nowhere away from the Earth has life been found, beyond simple one-celled creatures.

  When Yuri Gagarin was born, Earth was one little world holding all the life there was, to all intents and purposes. And it would have stayed that way if Gagarin and his generation – Americans and Russians – had not risked their lives to enter space in their converted ICBMs and primitive little capsules.

  The destiny of all life, forever, was in their hands. And if they had failed – if they had turned back from space, if war had come and they had turned themselves to piles of radioactive ash – there might now, in this future age, be no life, no mind, anywhere. For every human alive in 1961, there are now billions – perhaps tens of billions. Gagarin’s simple flight in his Vostok spaceship was perhaps the most important event in the history of mankind, our greatest wonder of all …

  The monkey face, looking in at him. Perhaps, he thought, it might once have been human. Do you understand what is being said? This is what we tell people. It is what this – monument – is for. Every day, Gagarin flies again.

  You see that Gagarin will never be forgotten. Gagarin’s actions, heroic and trivial, continue to haunt our present.

  Emotions swirled in him: pride, terror, awe, loneliness.

  He tried to understand how this might have been done. Had they stolen his ashes from the wall of the Kremlin, somehow recombined them to –?

  No. Not that.

  Then what? And what of Valentia, Yelena, Galya? Where they buried under dust millennia deep?

  … Enough. It is time to rest.

  To rest … And when he woke? What would become of Yuri Gagarin, in this impossible year? Would he be placed in a zoo, like an ape man?

  But you are not Gagarin.

  … And now, as he tried to comprehend that, for long seconds his mind was empty of thought.

  But his memories – his wife and daughters, the thrust of the booster, the sweet air of the steppe – were so real. How could it be so?

  You should never have become aware of this.

  Oddly, he felt tempted to apologize.

  There have been more than three thousand of you before without mishap – in fact, you are Poyekhali 3201 …

  His name. At least he had learned his name.

  Think of it this way. Gagarin’s mission lasted a single orbit of the Earth. As long as was necessary to complete its purpose.

  And so, his life –

  … is as long as is necessary for its purpose. We face significant penalties for this malfunction, in fact. Our laws are intended to protect you, not us. But that is our problem, not yours. You will feel no pain. That is a comfort to me. Relax, now.

  There was a fringe of darkness around his vision, like the mouth of a cave, receding from him. It was like the blue face of Earth, as he had seen it from orbit. And in that cave mouth he saw the faces of his wife and daughters turned up to him, diminishing. He tried to fix their faces in his minds, his daughters, his father, but it was as if his mind was a candle, his thoughts guttering, dissolving.

  It seemed very rapid. It was not fair. His mission had been stolen from him!

  He cried out, once, before the blackness closed around him.

  … And now, it was as if the dream continued. Suddenly it was sunrise, and he was standing at the launch pad in his bright orange flight suit with its heavy white helmet, emblazoned ‘CCCP’ in bright red.

  He breathed in the fresh air of a bright spring morning. Beyond the pad, the flat Kazakhstan steppe had erupted into its brief bloom, with evanescent flowers pushing through the hardy grass.

  Yuri Gagarin felt his heart lift.

  Technicians and engineers surrounded him. All around him he saw faces: faces turned to him, faces shining with awe. Even the zeks had been allowed to see him today, to see the past separate from the future.

  Gagarin smiled on them all.

  And they smiled back, as Poyekhali 3202 prepared to recite the familiar words for them.

  DANTE DREAMS

  She was flying.

  She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father.

  Looking back she could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the centre of everything, a ball of water folded over on itself.

  Rising ever faster, she passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through cloud. She saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.

  It was the Moon.

  Philmus woke, gasping, scared.

  Another Dante dream.

  … But was it just a dream? Or was it a glimpse of the thoughts of the deep chemical mind which – perhaps – shared her body?

  She sat up in bed and reached for her tranqsat earpiece. It had been, she thought, one hell of a case.

  It hadn’t been easy getting into the Vatican, even for a UN sentience cop.

  The Swiss Guard who processed Philmus was dressed like something out of the sixteenth century, literally: a uniform of orange and blue with a giant plumed helmet. But he used a softscreen, and under his helmet he bore the small scars of tranqsat receiver implants.

  It was eight in the morning. She saw that the thick clouds over the cobbled courtyards were beginning to break up to reveal patches of celestial blue. It was fake, of course, but the city Dome’s illusion was good.

  Philmus was here to study the Virtual reconstruction of Eva Himmelfarb.

  Himmelfarb was a young Jesuit scientist-priest who had caused a lot of trouble. Partly by coming up with – from nowhere, untrained – a whole new Theory of Everything. Partly by discovering a new form of
intelligence, or by going crazy, depending on which fragmentary account Philmus chose to believe.

  Mostly by committing suicide.

  Sitting in this encrusted, ancient building, in the deep heart of Europe, pondering the death of a priest, Philmus felt a long way from San Francisco.

  At last the guard was done with his paperwork. He led Philmus deeper into the Vatican, past huge and intimidating ramparts, and into the Apostolic Palace. Sited next to St Peter’s, this was a building which housed the quarters of the Pope himself, along with various branches of the Curia, the huge administrative organization of the Church.

  The corridors were narrow and dark. Philmus caught glimpses of people working in humdrum-looking offices, with softscreens and coffee cups and pinned-up strip cartoons, mostly in Italian. The Vatican seemed to her like the headquarters of a modern multinational – Nanosoft, say – run by a medieval bureaucracy. That much she’d expected.

  What she hadn’t anticipated was the great sense of age here. She was at the heart of a very large, very old, spider-web.

  And somewhere in this complex of buildings was an ageing Nigerian who was held, by millions of people, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to be literally infallible. She shivered.

  She was taken to the top floor, and left alone in a corridor.

  The view from here, of Rome bathed in the city Dome’s golden, filtered dawn, was exhilarating. And the walls of the corridor were coated by paintings of dangling willow-like branches. Hidden in the leaves she saw bizarre images: disembodied heads being weighed in a balance, a ram being ridden by a monkey.

  ‘ … Officer Philmus. I hope you aren’t too disconcerted by our decor.’

  She turned at the gravelly voice. A heavy-set, intense man of around fifty was walking towards her. He was dressed in subdued, plain black robes which swished a little as he moved. This was her contact: Monsignor Boyle, a high-up in the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science.

  ‘Monsignor.’

  Boyle eyed the bizarre artwork. ‘The works here are five hundred years old. The artists, students of Raphael, were enthused by the rediscovery of part of Nero’s palace.’ He sounded British, his tones measured and even. ‘You must forgive the Vatican its eccentricities.’

  ‘Eccentric or not, the Holy See is a state which has signed up to the UN’s conventions on the creation, exploitation and control of artificial sentience –’

  ‘Which is why you are here.’ Boyle smiled. ‘Americans are always impatient. So. What do you know about Eva Himmelfarb?’

  ‘She was a priest. A Jesuit. An expert in organic computing, who –’

  ‘Eva Himmelfarb was a fine scholar, if undisciplined. She was pursuing her research – and, incidentally, working on a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy – and suddenly she produced a book, that book, which has been making such an impact in theoretical physics … And then, just as suddenly, she killed herself. Eva’s text begins as a translation of the last canto of the Paradiso –’

  ‘In which Dante sees God.’

  ‘ … Loosely speaking. And then the physical theory, expressed in such language and mathematics as Eva could evidently deploy, simply erupts.’

  Himmelfarb’s bizarre, complex text had superseded string theory by modelling fundamental particles and forces as membranes moving in twenty-four-dimensional space. Something like that, anyhow. It was, according to the experts who were trying to figure it out, the foundation for a true unified theory of physics. And it seemed to have come out of nowhere.

  Boyle was saying, ‘It is as if, tracking Dante’s footsteps, Eva had been granted a vision.’

  ‘And that’s why you resurrected her.’

  ‘Ah.’ The Monsignor nodded coolly. ‘You are an amateur psychoanalyst. You see in me the frustrated priest, trapped in the bureaucratic layers of the Vatican, striving to comprehend another’s glimpse of God.’

  ‘I’m just a San Francisco cop, Monsignor.’

  ‘Well, I think you’ll have to try harder than that, officer. Do you know how she killed himself?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘She rigged up a microwave chamber. She burned herself to death. She used such high temperatures that the very molecules that had composed her body, her brain, were destroyed; above three hundred degrees or so, you see, even amino acids break down. It was as if she was determined to leave not the slightest remnant of her physical or spiritual presence.’

  ‘But she didn’t succeed. Thanks to you.’

  The fat Monsignor’s eyes glittered. He clapped his hands.

  Pixels, cubes of light, swirled in the air. They gathered briefly in a nest of concentric spheres, and then coalesced into a woman: thin, tall, white, thirty-ish, oddly serene for someone with a sparrow’s build. Her eyes seemed bright. Like Boyle, she was wearing drab cleric’s robes.

  The Virtual of Eva Himmelfarb registered surprise to be here, to exist at all. She looked down at her hands, her robes, and Boyle. Then she smiled at Philmus. Her surface was slightly too flawless.

  Philmus found herself staring. This was one of the first generation of women to take holy orders. It was going to take some getting used to a world where Catholic priests could look like air stewardesses.

  Time to go to work, Philmus. ‘Do you know who you are?’

  ‘I am Eva Himmelfarb. And, I suppose, I should have expected this.’ She was German; her accent was light, attractive.

  ‘Do you remember –’

  ‘What I did? Yes.’

  Philmus nodded. She said formally, ‘We can carry out full tests later, Monsignor Boyle, but I can see immediately that this projection is aware of us, of me, and is conscious of changes in her internal condition. She is self-aware.’

  ‘Which means I have broken the law,’ said Monsignor Boyle dryly.

  ‘That’s to be assessed.’ She said to Himmelfarb, ‘You understand that under international convention you have certain rights. You have the right to continued existence for an indefinite period in information space, if you wish it. You have the right to read-only interfaces with the prime world … It is illegal to create full sentience – self-awareness – for frivolous purposes. I’m here to assess the motives of the Vatican in that regard.’

  ‘We have a valid question to pose,’ murmured the Monsignor, with a hint of steel in his voice.

  ‘Why did I destroy myself?’ Himmelfarb laughed. ‘You would think that the custodians of the true Church would rely on rather less-literal means to divine a human soul, wouldn’t you, officer, than to drag me back from Hell itself? – Oh, yes, Hell. I am a suicide. And so I am doomed to the seventh circle, where I will be reincarnated as a withered tree. Have you read your Dante, officer?’

  Philmus had, in preparation for the case.

  The Monsignor said softly, ‘Why did you commit this sin, Eva?’

  Himmelfarb flexed her Virtual fingers, and her flesh broke up briefly into fine, cubic pixels. ‘May I show you?’

  The Monsignor glanced at Philmus, who nodded.

  The lights dimmed. Philmus felt sensors probe at her exposed flesh, glimpsed lasers scanning her face.

  The five-hundred-year-old painted willow branches started to rustle, and from the foliage inhuman eyes glared at her.

  Then the walls dissolved, and Philmus was standing on top of a mountain.

  She staggered. She felt light on her feet, as if giddy.

  She always hated Virtual transitions.

  The Monsignor was moaning.

  She was on the edge of some kind of forest. She turned, cautiously. She found herself looking down the terraced slope of a mountain. At the base was an ocean which lapped, empty, to the world’s round edge. The sun was bright in her eyes.

  A few metres down, a wall of fire burned.

  The Monsignor walked with great shallow bounds. He moved with care and distaste; maybe donning a Virtual body was some kind of venial sin.

  Himmelfarb smiled at Philmus. ‘Do you know where you are? Yo
u could walk through that wall of fire, and not harm a hair of your head.’ She reached up to a tree branch and plucked a leaf. It grew back instantly. ‘Our natural laws are suspended here, officer; like a piece of art, everything gives expression to God’s intention.’

  Boyle said bluntly, ‘You are in Eden, officer Philmus, at the summit of Mount Purgatory. The last earthly place Dante visited before ascending into Heaven.’

  Eden?

  The trees, looming, seemed to crowd around her. She couldn’t identify any species. Though they had no enviroshields, none of the trees suffered any identifiable burning or blight.

  She found herself cowering under the blank, unprotected sky.

  Maybe this was someone’s vision of Eden. But Philmus had been living under a Dome for ten years; this was no place she could ever be at peace.

  ‘What happened to the gravity?’

  Himmelfarb said, ‘Gravity diminishes as you ascend Purgatory. We are far from Satan here … I can’t show you what I saw, officer Philmus. But perhaps, if we look through Dante’s eyes, you will understand. The Divine Comedy is a kind of science fiction story. It’s a journey through the universe, as Dante saw it. He was guided by Virgil –’

  ‘Who?’

  The Monsignor said, ‘The greatest Latin poet. You must have heard of the Aeneid. The significance to Dante was that Virgil was a pagan: he died before Christ was born. No matter how wise and just Virgil was, he could never ascend to Heaven, as Dante could, because he never knew Christ.’

  ‘Seems harsh.’

  The Monsignor managed a grin. ‘Dante wasn’t making the rules.’

  Himmelfarb said, ‘Dante reaches Satan in Hell, at the centre of the Earth. Then, with Virgil, he climbs a tunnel to a mountain in the southern hemisphere –’

  ‘This one.’

  ‘Yes.’ Himmelfarb shielded her eyes. ‘The Paradiso, the last book, starts here. And it was when my translation reached this point that the thing I’d put in my head woke up.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’