Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Page 8
‘I didn’t think it would kill anybody,’ Fortune said weakly. ‘I did mean to smash up Cape Canaveral, though. I wanted to get your attention.’
Freddie asked, ‘Couldn’t you have found some other way?’
Allen said dryly, ‘Such as waggle the solar panels?’
Fortune grinned. ‘Aeolus is compliant. When you have a god at your command, it is terribly tempting to use him.’
‘So you created a storm,’ Allen said, ‘in order to bring somebody up here. Why, Fortune? What do you want?’
‘Two things. One. I want my exile to end. A century is enough, for Christ’s sake, especially when I committed no crime. I’d like some respect too.’ He said to Freddie, ‘Look at me. Do you think I did this to myself? My parents spliced my genes before I was conceived, and engineered my body before I was out of the womb. I haven’t committed any crime. I am a walking crime scene. But it’s me your grandfather punished, Allen. Where’s the justice in that?’ There was a century of bitterness in his voice.
‘And, second. Bella. My sentence, such as my quasi-legal judicial banishment is, clearly wasn’t intended to punish her. She needs to be downloaded into an environment that affords stimulation appropriate for a sentience of her cognitive capacity. Not stuck up here with an old fart like me. As in fact your own namby-pamby sentience laws mandate.’
‘All right,’ Freddie said. ‘But what is Bella? You didn’t create her, did you?’
‘No.’ Fortune smiled at Bella. ‘But I saved her.’
Freddie nodded. ‘A, B, C.’
Allen snapped, ‘What are you talking about?’
Freddie said, ‘There weren’t just two poles of consciousness in the station AI, were there, Fortune? AxysCorp went even further. They created a mind with three poles. A – Aeolus. B – Bella. C – Cal.’
‘Oh, good grief.’
‘B was actually the user interface,’ Fortune said. ‘Charming, for an AxysCorp creation. Very customer-focussed.’
Freddie said, ‘Somehow Fortune downloaded her out of the system core and into this virtual persona.’
‘I had time to figure out how, and nothing else to do,’ Fortune said sternly. ‘I’m extremely capable. In fact I’m wasted up here. And I had motivation.’
‘What motivation?’
‘To save her from Cal…’
Inside AxysCorp’s creation, three centres of consciousness had been locked into a single mind, a single body. And they didn’t get on. They were too different. Aeolus and Bella embodied executive capabilities. Cal, an artefact of basic engineering functions, was more essential. Stronger. Brutal. They fought for dominance. And it lasted subjective megayears, given the superfast speeds of Heroic-age processors.
‘Cal crushed Bella. Tortured her. You could call it a kind of rape, almost. He did it because he was bored himself, bored and trapped.’
‘You’re anthropomorphising,’ Allen said.
‘No, he isn’t,’ Freddie said. ‘You need to read up on sentience issues, Doctor.’
‘I had to get her out of there,’ Fortune said. ‘This isn’t the right place for her, in this shack of a station. But better than in there, in the processor.’
Allen asked, ‘So why did Cal chuck away our shuttle?’
Fortune said, ‘Because you said you would kill Aeolus.’
‘You said they fight all the time.’
‘Do you have a brother, Allen? Maybe you fought with him, as a boy. But would you let anybody harm him – kill him? Cal defends his brother – and indeed his sister if he’s called on.’
Allen clapped, slow, ironic. ‘So, Fortune, even stuck up here in this drifting wreck, you found a way to be a hero. To save somebody.’
Fortune’s face was dark. ‘I am a damn hero. We were told we were special – the peak of the Heroic-Solution age, they said. We were the Singularity generation. A merger of mankind with technology. We would live forever, achieve everything. Become infinite, literally.
‘And, you know, for a while, we grew stronger. We were transported. Rapt. There aren’t the words. But we got lost in our data palaces, while the rest of the world flooded and burned and starved. And we forgot we needed feeding too. That was the great fallacy, that we could become detached from the Earth, from the rest of mankind.
‘In the end they broke into our cybernetic citadels and put us to work. And they made us illegal retrospectively, and imprisoned us in places like this. Now we’re already forgotten. Irrelevant, compared to the real story of our time. AxysCorp and their ugly machines.’
‘That’s life,’ Allen said brutally.
‘This is Aeolus.’ The thin voice spoke out of the air.
Fortune snapped, ‘Aeolus? Are you all right?’
‘I don’t have much time. Cal and I are in conflict. I am currently dominant.’
‘Aeolus –’
‘I restored communications. I contacted your Oversight Panel, Doctor Allen. I received an assurance that a second shuttle will shortly be launched. The shuttle will have grappling technology, so Cal won’t be able to keep it out. But Cal is strong. I can contain him but not subdue him. Mister Fortune.’
‘Yes, Aeolus?’
‘I fear it will be impossible to fulfil further objectives.’
Fortune looked heartbroken. ‘Oh, Aeolus. What have I done?’
‘As you know I have always fulfilled all programme objectives.’
‘That you have, Aeolus. With the greatest enthusiasm.’
‘I regret –’
Silence.
Allen blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’
Bella was wide-eyed. ‘Am I really going to Earth? Is a shuttle really coming? I’m going to go look out for it.’ She ran out of the bridge.
The three of them followed Bella to the observation blister, more sedately.
‘Saved by a god in the machinery,’ Freddie said. ‘How ironic.’
‘What an end,’ Fortune whispered. ‘Two halves of the same mind locked in conflict for a subjective eternity.’ He seemed old now, despite his youthful face. ‘So it’s over. What will become of Bella?’
Allen said, ‘Oh, they’ll find her a foster home. There are far stranger minds than hers in the world, in the trail of tears left behind by AxysCorp and their like. We try to care for them all. The station’s screwed, however. In the short term I imagine we’ll reposition another Tempest to plug the gap. Then we’ll rebuild. And we’ll let this heap of junk fall out of the sky.’
‘But not before we’ve come back to save Aeolus and Cal,’ Freddie said.
‘You’re kidding,’ Allen said.
‘No. As Fortune points out, it’s actually mandatory under the sentience laws, just as it is for Bella.’
‘I’d like to see Aeolus spared that hell,’ Fortune said. ‘As for Cal, though, that deformed savage can rot.’
‘But Cal is the more interesting character, don’t you think?’
‘He locked us up and threw away our shuttle,’ Allen snapped.
‘But there’s an independent mind in there,’ Freddie said. ‘An original one. Aeolus just did what you told him, Fortune. Cal, born in a prison, knowing nothing of the real world, rebelled instinctively. With a mind as independent and strong and subtle as that, who knows what he’d be capable of, if set free?’
Fortune nodded. ‘And what of me? Will your indulgence set me free?’
‘Oh, we’ll take you home too,’ Allen said, sneering. ‘You’ll stand trial for the hurricane. But there are places for creatures like you. Museums of the Singularity. Zoos,’ he added cruelly. ‘After all, there’s plenty of room, now the chimps and tigers are all extinct.’
Bella came running up, her face bright. ‘I saw the shuttle launch. You can see its contrail over the ocean. Oh, Freddie, come and see!’
Freddie and Bella hurried on to the blister, and gazed down at the shining Earth, searching for the spaceship climbing up to save them.
The Children of Time
I
It was the end of the day, and a huge sunset was staining the sky. Alone, restless, he walked a few paces away from the rich smoky pall, away from the smell of broiling racoon meat and bubbling goat fat, the languid talk of the adults, the eager play of the children.
The ice was always there on the northern horizon, always out of reach no matter how far you walked across the scrubby grassland. He knew why. The ice cap was retreating, dumping its pure whiteness into the meltwater streams, exposing land crushed and gouged and strewn with vast boulders. So while you walked towards it, the ice was marching away from you.
And now the gathering sunset was turning the distant ice pink. The clean geometric simplicity of the landscape drew his soul; he stared, entranced.
Jaal was eleven years old, a compact bundle of muscle. He was dressed in layers of clothing, sinew-sewn from scraped goat skin and topped by a heavy coat of rabbit fur. On his head was a hat made by his father from the skin of a whole raccoon, and on his feet he wore the skin of pigeons, turned inside-out and the feathers coated with grease. Around his neck was a string of pierced cat teeth.
Jaal looked back at his family. There were a dozen of them, parents and children, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and one grandmother, worn down aged forty-two. Except for the very smallest children everybody moved slowly, obviously weary. They had walked a long way today.
He knew he should go back to the fire and help out, do his duty, find firewood or skin a rat. But every day was like this. Jaal had ancient, unpleasant memories from when he was very small, of huts burning, people screaming and fleeing. Jaal and his family had been walking north ever since, looking for a new home. They hadn’t found it yet.
Jaal spotted Sura, good-humouredly struggling to get a filthy skin coat off the squirming body of her little sister. Sura, Jaal’s second cousin, was two years older than him. She had a limpid, liquid ease of movement in everything she did.
She saw Jaal looking at her and arched an eyebrow. He blushed, hot, and turned away to the north. The ice was a much less complicated companion than Sura.
He saw something new.
As the angle of the sun continued to change, the light picked out something on the ground. It was a straight line, glowing red in the light of the sun, like an echo of the vast edge of the ice itself. But this line was close, only a short walk from here, cutting through hummocks and scattered boulders. He had to investigate.
With a guilty glance back at his family, he ran away, off to the north, his pigeon-skin boots carrying him silently over the hard ground. The straight-edge feature was further away than it looked, and as he became frustrated he ran faster. But then he came on it. He stumbled to a halt, panting.
It was a ridge as high as his knees – a ridge of stone, but nothing like the ice-carved boulders and shattered gravel that littered the rest of the landscape. Though its top was worn and broken, its sides were flat, smoother than any stone he had touched before, and the sunlight filled its creamy surface with colour.
Gingerly he climbed on the wall to see better. The ridge of stone ran off to left and right, to east and west – and then it turned sharp corners, to run north, before turning back on itself again. There was a pattern here, he saw. This stone ridge traced a straight-edged frame on the ground.
And there were more ridges; the shadows cast by the low sun picked out the stone tracings clearly. The land to the north of here was covered by a tremendous rectangular scribble that went on as far as he could see. All this was made by people. He knew this immediately, without question.
In fact this had been a suburb of Chicago. Most of the city had been scraped clean by the advancing ice, but the foundations of this suburb, fortuitously, had been flooded and frozen in before the glaciers came. These ruins were already a hundred thousand years old.
‘Jaal. Jaal…!’ His mother’s voice carried to him like the cry of a bird.
He couldn’t bear to leave what he had found. He stood on the eroded wall and let his mother come to him.
She was weary, grimy, stressed. ‘Why must you do this? Don’t you know the cats hunt in twilight?’
He flinched from the disappointment in her eyes, but he couldn’t contain his excitement. ‘Look what I found, mother!’
She stared around. Her face showed incomprehension, disinterest. ‘What is it?’
His imagination leapt, fuelled by wonder, and he tried to make her see what he saw. ‘Maybe once these rock walls were tall, tall as the ice itself. Maybe people lived here in great heaps, and the smoke of their fires rose up to the sky. Mother, will we come to live here again?’
‘Perhaps one day,’ his mother said at random, to hush him.
The people never would return. By the time the returning ice had shattered their monocultural, over-extended technological civilisation, people had exhausted the Earth of its accessible deposits of iron ore and coal and oil and other resources. People would survive: smart, adaptable, they didn’t need cities for that. But with nothing but their most ancient technologies of stone and fire, they could never again conjure up the towers of Chicago. Soon even Jaal, distracted by the fiery eyes of Sura, would forget this place existed.
But for now he longed to explore. ‘Let me go on. Just a little further!’
‘No,’ his mother said gently. ‘The adventure’s over. It’s time to go. Come now.’ And she put her arm around his shoulders, and led him home.
II
Urlu crawled towards the river. The baked ground was hard under her knees and hands, and stumps of burned-out trees and shrubs scraped her flesh. There was no green here, nothing grew, and nothing moved save a few flecks of ash disturbed by the low breeze.
She was naked, sweating, her skin streaked by charcoal. Her hair was a mat, heavy with dust and grease. In one hand she carried a sharpened stone. She was eleven years old.
She wore a string of pierced teeth around her neck. The necklace was a gift from her grandfather, Pala, who said the teeth were from an animal called a rabbit. Urlu had never seen a rabbit. The last of them had died in the Burning, before she was born, along with the rats and the raccoons, all the small mammals that had long ago survived the ice with mankind. So there would be no more rabbit teeth. The necklace was precious.
The light brightened. Suddenly there was a shadow beneath her, her own form cast upon the darkened ground. She threw herself flat in the dirt. She wasn’t used to shadows. Cautiously she glanced over her shoulder, up at the sky.
All her life a thick lid of ash-laden cloud had masked the sky. But for the last few days it had been breaking up, and today the cloud had disintegrated further. And now, through high drifting cloud, she saw a disc, pale and gaunt.
It was the sun. She had been told its name, but had never quite believed in it. Now it was revealed, and Urlu helplessly stared up at its geometric purity.
She heard a soft voice call warningly. ‘Urlu!’ It was her mother.
It was no good to be daydreaming about the sky. She had a duty to fulfil, down here in the dirt. She turned and crawled on.
She reached the bank. The river, thick with blackened dirt and heavy with debris, rolled sluggishly. It was so wide that in the dim light of noon she could barely see the far side. In fact this was the Seine, and the charred ground covered traces of what had once been Paris. It made no difference where she was. The whole Earth was like this. All the same.
To Urlu’s right, downstream, she saw hunters, pink faces smeared with dirt peering from the ruined vegetation. The weight of their expectation pressed heavily on her.
She took her bit of chipped stone, and pressed its sharpest edge against the skin of her palm. It had to be her. The people believed that the creatures of the water were attracted by the blood of a virgin. She was afraid of the pain to c
ome, but she had no choice; if she didn’t go through with the cut one of the men would come and do it for her, and that would hurt far more.
But she heard a wail, a cry of loss and sorrow, rising like smoke into the dismal air. It was coming from the camp. The faces along the bank turned, distracted. Then, one by one, the hunters slid back into the ruined undergrowth.
Urlu, hugely relieved, turned away from the debris-choked river, her stone tucked safely in her hand.
The camp was just a clearing in the scorched ground-cover, with a charcoal fire burning listlessly in the hearth. Beside the fire an old man lay on a rough pallet of earth and scorched brush, gaunt, as naked and filthy as the rest. His eyes were wide, rheumy, and he stared at the sky. This was Pala. Forty-five years old, he was Urlu’s grandfather. And he was dying, eaten from within by something inside his belly.
He was tended by a woman who knelt in the dirt beside him. She was his oldest daughter, Urlu’s aunt. The grime on her face was streaked by tears. ‘He’s frightened,’ said the aunt. ‘It’s finishing him off.’
Urlu’s mother asked, ‘Frightened of what?’
The aunt pointed into the sky, at the revealed sun.
The old man had reason to be frightened of strange lights in the sky. He had been just four years old when a greater light had come to Earth.
After Jaal’s time, the ice had returned a dozen times more before retreating for good. After that, people rapidly cleared the land of the legacy of the ice: descendants of cats and rodents and birds, grown large and confident in the temporary absence of humanity. Then people hunted and farmed, built up elaborate networks of trade and culture, and developed exquisite technologies of wood and stone and bone. There was much evolutionary churning in the depths of the sea, out of reach of mankind. But people were barely touched by time, for there was no need for them to change.
This equable afternoon endured for thirty million years. The infant Pala’s parents had sung him songs unimaginably old.
But then had come the comet’s rude incursion. Nearly a hundred million years after the impactor that had terminated the summer of the dinosaurs, Earth had been due another mighty collision.