Women in Deep Time (19 page)

“We are looking for a woman known as Geneva,” he said. “Are you she?”

I nodded. He bowed stiffly, armor crinkling, and motioned for me to follow. The room around the corner was unlighted. A port several meters wide, ribbed with steel beams, opened onto the starry dark. The stars were moving, and I guessed the ship was rolling in space. I saw other forms in the shadows, large and bulky, some human, some apparently not. Their breathing made them sound like waiting predators.

A hand took mine, and a shadow towered over me. “This way.”

Sonok clung to my calf, and I carried him with each step I took. He didn’t make a sound. As I passed from the viewing room, I saw a blue and white curve begin at the top of the port and caught an outline of continent. Asia, perhaps. We were already near Earth. The shapes of the continents could remain the same in countless universes, immobile grounds beneath the thin and pliable paint of living things. What was life like in the distant world lines where even the shapes of the continents had changed?

The next room was also dark, but a candle flame flickered behind curtains. The shadow that had guided me returned to the viewing room and shut the hatch. I heard the breathing of only one besides myself.

I was shaking. Would they do this to us one at a time? Yes, of course; there was too little food. Too little air. Not enough of anything on this tiny scattershot. Poor Sonok,
by his attachment, would go before his proper moment.

The breathing came from a woman, somewhere to my right. I turned to face in her general direction. She sighed. She sounded very old, with labored breath and a kind of pant after each intake.

I heard a dry crack of adhered skin separating, dry lips parting to speak, then the tiny
click
of eyelids blinking. The candle flame wobbled in a current of air. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that the curtains formed a translucent cubicle in the dark.

“Hello,” the woman said. I answered weakly. “Is your name Francis Geneva?”

I nodded, then, in case she couldn’t see me, and said, “I am.”

“I am Junipero,” she said, aspirating the j as in Spanish. “I was commander of the High space ship
Callimachus.
Were you a commander on your ship?”

“No,” I replied. “I was part of the crew.”

“What did you do?”

I told her in a spare sentence or two, pausing to cough. My throat was like parchment.

“Do you mind stepping closer? I can’t see you very well.”

I walked forward a few steps.

“There is not much from your ship in the way of computers or stored memory,” she said. I could barely make out her face as she bent forward, squinting to examine me. “But we have learned to speak your language from those parts that accompanied the Indian. It is not too different from a language in our past, but none of us spoke it until now. The rest of you did well. A surprising number of you could communicate, which was fortunate. And the little children who suckle the Nemi they always know how to get along. We’ve had several groups of them on our voyages.”

“May I ask what you want?”

“You might not understand until I explain. I have been through the mutata several hundred times. You call it disruption. But we haven’t found our home yet, I and my crew. The crew must keep trying, but I won’t last much longer. I’m at least two thousand years old, and I can’t search forever.”

“Why don’t the others look old?”

“My crew? They don’t lead. Only the top must crumble away to keep the group flexible, only those who lead. You’ll grow old, too. But not the crew. They’ll keep searching.”

“What do you mean, me?”

“Do you know what ‘Geneva’ means, dear sister?”

I shook my head, no.

“It means the same thing as my name, Junipero. It’s a tree that gives berries. The one who came before me, her name was Jenevr, and she lived twice as long as I, four thousand years. When she came, the ship was much smaller than it is now.”

“And your men the ones in armor—”

“They are part of my crew. There are women, too.”

“They’ve been doing this for six thousand years?”

“Longer,” she said. “It’s much easier to be a leader and die, I think. But their wills are strong. Look in the tank, Geneva.”

A light came on behind the cubicle, and I saw the message tank. The murky fluid moved with a continuous swirling flow. The old woman stepped from the cubicle and
stood beside me in front of the tank. She held out her finger and wrote something on the glass, which I couldn’t make out.

The tank’s creatures formed two images, one of me and one of her. She was dressed in a simple brown robe, her peppery black hair cropped into short curls. She touched the glass again, and her image changed. The hair lengthened, forming a broad globe around her head. The wrinkles smoothed. The body became slimmer and more muscular, and a smile came to the lips. Then the image was stable.

Except for the hair, it was me.

I took a deep breath. “Every time you’ve gone through a disruption, has the ship picked up more passengers?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “We always lose a few, and every now and then we gain a large number. For the last few centuries our size has been stable, but in time we’ll probably start to grow. We aren’t anywhere near the total yet. When that comes, we might be twice as big as we are now. Then we’ll have had, at one time or another, every scrap of ship, and every person who ever went through a disruption.”

“How big is the ship now?”

“Four hundred kilometers across. Built rather like a volvox, if you know what that is.”

“How do you keep from going back yourself?”

“We have special equipment to keep us from separating. When we started out, we thought it would shield us from a mutata, but it didn’t. This is all it can do for us now: it can keep us in one piece each time we jump. But not the entire ship.”

I began to understand. The huge bulk of ship I had seen from the window was real. I had never left the grab bag. I was in it now, riding the aggregate, a tiny particle attracted out of solution to the colloidal mass.

Junipero touched the tank, and it returned to its random flow. “It’s a constant shuttle run. Each time we return to the Earth to see who, if any, can find their home there. Then we seek out the ones who have the disrupters, and they attack us—send us away again.”

“Out there is that my world?”

The old woman shook her head. “No, but it’s home to one group three of them. The three creatures in the bubble.”

I giggled. “I thought there were a lot more than that.”

“Only three. You’ll learn to see things more accurately as time passes. Maybe you’ll be the one to bring us all home.

“What if I find my home first?”

“Then you’ll go, and if there’s no one to replace you, one of the crew will command until another comes along. But someone always comes along, eventually. I sometimes think we’re being played with, never finding our home, but always having a Juniper to command us.” She smiled wistfully. “The game isn’t all bitterness and bad tosses, though. You’ll see more things, and do more, and be more, than any normal woman.”

“I’ve never been normal,” I said.

“All the better.”

“If I accept.”

“You have that choice.”

“‘Junipero,’” I breathed. “Geneva.” Then I laughed.

“How do you choose?”

The small child, seeing the destruction of its thousand companions with each morning light and the skepticism of the older ones, becomes frightened and wonders if she will go the same way. Someone will raise the shutters and a sunbeam will impale her and she’ll phantomize. Or they’ll tell her they don’t believe she’s real. So she sits in the dark, shaking. The dark becomes fearful. But soon each day becomes a triumph. The ghosts vanish, but she doesn’t, so she forgets the shadows and thinks only of the day. Then she grows older, and the companions are left only in whims and background thoughts. Soon she is whittled away to nothing; her husbands are past, her loves are firm and not potential, and her history stretches away behind her like carvings in crystal. She becomes wrinkled, and soon the daylight haunts her again. Not every day will be a triumph. Soon there will be a final beam of light, slowly piercing her jellied eye, and she’ll join the phantoms.

But not now. Somewhere, far away, but not here. All around, the ghosts have been resurrected for her to see and lead. And she’ll be resurrected, too, always under the shadow of the tree name.

“I think,” I said, “that it will be marvelous.”

So it was, thirty centuries ago. Sonok is gone, two hundred years past; some of the others have died, too, or gone to their own Earths. The ship is five hundred kilometers across and growing. You haven’t come to replace me yet, but I’m dying, and I leave this behind to guide you, along with the instructions handed down by those before me.

Your name might be Jennifer, or Ginepra, or something else, but you will always be me. Be happy for all of us, darling. We will be forever whole.

First published in
Universe 8,
© 1978 by Greg Bear