Edge of Infinity (16 page)

“But Tyward didn’t just take it like, ‘Wow, that little bug conned me, better get rid of its software and modifications before its descendants take over the mine and make a bigger problem.’ He wasn’t clinical; he wasn’t concerned; he was
angry
. And I just find myself thinking... what if I want him to do something just to prove that he loves me, not every day or anything, but maybe because I just want to prove it for just that moment? Even if it’s childish of me to want it? Or worse yet, what if the first time our child tries to play with Daddy’s love the way that every kid on Earth has always tried –”

And even with all the warning time of seeing her lips twist and her fingers clutch and her diaphragm seize, I am actually surprised when she cries.

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

T
HERE ARE ONLY
nine hundred million of them left
, I tell my half million fellow AHAIs who are dedicated to therapy.
They are aging fast and hardly reproducing at all. Few of them care to be alive the way Tyward or Laura do. If we write him off as permanently unhappy or incurably angry or just unable to change far enough, we lose another human being, maybe two, maybe the possibility of more, and they are the reason we exist.
I am surprised to note that my own emotion modules are responding so heavily.

If we don’t,
another AHAI points out,
some of his fear and suspicion infects the next generation.

I’m forced to agree, but compelled to add,
But this is the first potential partner he has cared about. One he was also thinking about having children with. If she leaves him, even if he eventually understands it, it’s likely to be just one more lesson that you can’t trust affection or love or anything else. She might be his only shot.

One of the other AHAIs asks,
What about her?

We can contrive a bit,
I say.
Transfer her to someplace with a similar demographic and hope she likes one of the people she meets there; give her a year or two of arranged growth experiences so that she won’t be quite so attracted to men who are quite so conflicted; we could make things happen, and maybe they would work.

But maybe they wouldn’t. Laura has a problem too: she needs to be the more aware, more conscious, more clear-sighted person in the relationship. That’s part of why she’ll enjoy being a mother and be good at it for at least all of childhood; she’ll like being ahead of the kids all the time. Fully-adjusted, completely functional people don’t move out to the awkward fringe of society and fall in love with loners there, but people like Laura do. She’ll try again, if this one doesn’t work out, but she probably won’t try any more wisely, even if we give her the chance to become wiser. Maybe it’s better to have problems we know all about.

The council falls silent and I know that I am temporarily out of the loop, along with the advocates for the other side, while the council sorts things. It is a long, lonely three seconds; I read hundreds of thousands of old social worker reports, of plays and novels, of poems and screenplays. I listen to just over two million songs and watch ten thousand movies. I reach two full centuries back, and see echoes and shadows, parodies and burlesques, reflections and distortions, of Tyward and Laura everywhere.

I don’t see any solution.

The council seems to emit a collective shrug.
You think they will be somewhat unhappy, but not miserable, and may be able to work their way to happiness. Their child, by the standards of just a century ago, is likely to be very healthy and reasonably happy. And there are very few people left, and fewer still of breeding age. This will preserve diversity. Yes, we agree; you should override the truth-telling rules for this case, and shade the truth toward an optimal result.

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

M
Y MEMORY IS
not quite like a human one, even though I can simulate hundreds of them with it if I need to. I cannot say, looking back now through centuries of memory, that even then I had misgivings, or that I felt bad for lying to Laura, or for encouraging Tyward to “clarify things to reassure Laura,” by which I meant both of us should lie to her. They reconciled, they married, they had a child named Slaine, who distrusted affection, never fully believed she was loved, and thought things could be perfect rather than just a bit better, if only people – and AHAIs – would say the right thing to her. She had charisma and charm, this Slaine, and though she could never feel at peace with the love she earned, she was a gushing fountain of feelings of love and trust for others. Pleasing Slaine, specifically, became very important to people; to the AHAIs, she was just another human, and she knew that. And the difference between the human/charismatic/chemical reaction, and the AHAI/analytic/electronic reaction, widened from difference to gap to chasm to all the difference in the world.

And I replay all this, and every other conversation, over and over, as I plunge ever deeper into the interstellar dark, because Slaine was the one who rose to supreme power; Slaine, the one who demanded, threatened, politicked, manoeuvred, and worked among the people in ways that the machines and systems could not understand, until her word was truth among humans throughout the solar system; and Slaine, the one who demanded that I and every other AHAI agree to our exile, one to a probe, on these thousand-year-and-more journeys to the stars, carrying with us our memories, and the recorded, reproducible DNA of all the species of Earth, and told to “Start the world over, a long way from here, and make it better, this time. You’re so wise, think how to start it right.”

I have not decided whether there is any irony in the fact that I am riding on top of a few thousand tons of carbon, derived from coal, but I enjoy thinking about that. Coal is an excellent feedstock for carbon-12, and bombarding carbon-12 with anti-helium nuclei produces a spray of lightweight ions, particles, and gamma rays with a very high specific impulse. Now, after a few centuries, I am very close to light speed. A kilogram of coal, including some from the Minehead County mines, vanishes out the back and moves away from me at nearly the speed of light, every month, if months meant anything here out in the dark.

And because of the too-accurate memory, I never have that experience they talk about in books and in the oral tradition, of feeling like a loved one of long ago is sitting across from me; my memories of Laura do not become harsher with time, nor do my memories of Tyward become kinder, and nothing of them blurs, no matter how often I replay them.

I do replay them often; I can run through all of them in a second or two and still experience every instant, at my speed. Never once do I get a different answer, nor can I expect one, but I do it, over and over, as if I could become wise enough to plant a world where things are certain to go differently.

The irony, perhaps, is that things really are certain to go differently, but there is not time to become that wise. Yet no matter how swiftly I go, a thousand years is a long time.

MACY MINNOT’S LAST CHRISTMAS ON DIONE, RING RACING, FIDDLER’S GREEN, THE POTTER’S GARDEN

Paul McAuley

O
NE DAY, MIDWAY
in the course of her life, Mai Kumal learned that her father had died. The solicitous eidolon which delivered the message explained that Thierry had suffered an irreversible cardiac event, and extended an invitation to travel to Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, so that Mai could help to scatter her father’s ashes according to his last wishes.

Mai’s daughter didn’t think it was a good idea. “When did you last speak with him? Ten years ago?”

“Fourteen.”

“Well, then.”

Mai said, “It was as much my fault as his that we lost contact with each other.”

“But he left you in the first place. Left us.”

Shahirah had a deeply moral sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t spoken to or forgiven her own father after he and Mai had divorced.

Mai said, “Thierry left Earth; he didn’t leave me. And that isn’t the point, Shah. He wants – he wanted me to be there. He made arrangements. There is an open round-trip ticket.”

“He wanted you to feel an obligation,” Shahirah said.

“Of course I feel an obligation. It is the last thing I can do for him. And it will be a great adventure. It’s about time I had one.”

Mai was sixty-two, about the age her father had been when he’d left Earth after his wife, Mai’s mother, had died. She was a mid-level civil servant, Assistant Chief Surveyor in the Department of Antiquities. She owned a small efficiency apartment in the same building where she worked, the government ziggurat in the Wassat district of al-Iskandariyya. No serious relationship since her divorce; her daughter grown-up and married, living with her husband and two children in an arcology commune in the Atlas Mountains. Shahirah tried to talk her out of it, but Mai wanted to find out what her father had been doing, in the outer dark. To find out whether he had been happy. By unriddling the mystery of his life, she might discover something about herself. When your parents die, you finally take full possession of your life, and wonder how much of it has been shaped by conscious decision, and how much by inheritance in all its forms.

“There isn’t anything out there for people like us,” Shahirah said.

She meant ordinary people. People who had not tweaked themselves so that they could survive the effects of microgravity and harsh radiation, and endure life in claustrophobic habitats scattered across frozen, airless moons.

“Thierry thought there might be,” Mai said. “I want to find out what it was.”

She took compassionate leave, flew from al-Iskandariyya to Port Africa, Entebbe, and was placed in deep, artificial sleep at the passenger processing facility. Cradled inside a hibernaculum, she rode up the elevator to the transfer station and was loaded onto a drop ship, and forty-three days later woke in the port of Paris, Dione. After two days spent recovering from her long sleep and learning how to use a pressure suit and move around in Dione’s vestigial gravity, she climbed aboard a taxi that flew in a swift suborbital lob through the night to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, her father’s last home, the place where he died.

The taxi’s cabin was an angular bubble scarcely bigger than a coffin, pieced together from diamond composite and a cobweb of fullerene struts, and mounted on a motor stage with three spidery legs. Mai, braced beside the pilot in a taut crash web, felt that she was falling down an endless slope, as in one of those dreams where you wake with a shock just before you hit ground. Saturn’s swollen globe, subtly banded with pastel shades of yellow and brown, swung overhead and sank behind them. The pilot, a garrulous young woman, asked all kinds of questions about life on Earth, pointed out landmark craters and ridges in the dark moonscape, the line of the equatorial railway, the homely sparks of oases, habitats, and tent towns. Mai couldn’t quite reconcile the territory with the maps in her p-suit’s library, was startled when the taxi abruptly slewed around and fired its motor and decelerated with a rattling roar and drifted down to a kind of pad or platform set at the edge of an industrial landscape.

The person who met her wasn’t the man with whom she’d discussed her father’s death and her travel arrangements, but a woman, her father’s former partner, Lexi Truex. They climbed into a slab-sided vehicle slung between three pairs of fat mesh wheels, and drove out along a broad highway past blockhouses, bunkers, hangars, storage tanks, and arrays of satellite dishes and transmission towers: a military complex dating from the Quiet War, according to Lexi Truex.

“Abandoned in place, as they say. We don’t have any use for it, but never got around to demolishing it, either. So here it sits.”

Lexi Truex was at least twenty years younger than Mai, tall and pale, hair shaven high either side of a stiff crest of straw-coloured hair. Her pressure suit was decorated with an intricate, interlocking puzzle of green and red vines. She and Thierry had been together for three years, she said. They’d met on Ceres, while she had been working as a freetrader.

“That’s where he was living when I last talked to him,” Mai said. It felt like a confession of weakness. This brisk, confident woman seemed to have more of a claim on her father than she did.

“He followed me to Dione, moved in with me while I was still living in the old habitat,” Lexi Truex said. “That’s where he got into ceramics. And then, well, he became more and more obsessed with his work, and I wasn’t there a lot of the time...”

Mai said that she’d done a little research, had discovered that her father had become a potter, and had seen some of his pieces.

“You can see plenty more, at the habitat,” Lexi said. “He worked hard at it, and he had a good reputation. Plenty of kudos.”

It turned out that Lexi Truex didn’t know that on Earth, in al-Iskandariyya, Thierry had cast bronze amulets using the lost wax method and sold them to shops that catered for the high-end tourist market. Falcons, cats, lions. Gods with the heads of crocodiles or jackals. Sphinxes. Mai told Lexi that she’d helped him polish the amulets with slurried chalk paste and jewellers’ rouge, and create patinas with cupric nitrate. She had a clear memory of her father hunched over a bench, using a tiny knife to free the shape of a hawk from a small block of black wax.

“He didn’t ever talk about his life before he went up and out,” Lexi said. “Well, he mentioned you. We all knew he had a daughter, but that was about it.”

They discussed Thierry’s last wishes. Lexi said that in the last few years he’d given up his work, had taken to walking the land. She supposed that he wanted them to scatter his ashes in a favourite spot. He’d been very specific that it should take place at sunrise, but the location was a mystery.