The Collected Short Fiction, page 100
“Yes! How long after . . . were you stored?”
“A century, maybe more,” she answers. With some wonder, she says, “Who could have laiown we would live forever?”
“When I saw you last, we loved each other. We had children . . .
“They died with the Libraries,” she says.
I do not feel physical grief, the body’s component of sadness and rage at loss, but the news rocks me, even so. I retreat to my gray cubicle. My children! They have survived all this time, and yet I have missed them. What happened to my children, in my time? What did they become to me, and I to them? Did they have children, grandchildren, and after our divorce, did they respect me enough to let me visit my grandchildren . . .? But it’s all lost now, and if they kept records of their ancient selves—records of what had truly been my children—those are gone, too. They are dead.
Elisaveta regards my grief with some wonder, and finds it sympathetic. I feel her warm to me slightly. “They weren’t really our children any longer, Vasily. They became something quite other, as have you and I. But this you—you’ve been kept like a butterfly in a collection. How sad.”
She seeks me out and takes on a bodily form. It is not the shape of the Elisaveta I knew. She once built a biomechanical body to carry her thoughts. This is the self-image she carries now, of a mind within a primitive, woman-shaped soma.
“What happened to us?” I ask, my agony apparent to her, to all who listen.
“Is it that important to you?”
“Can you explain any of this?” I ask. I want to bury myself in her bosom, to hug her. I am so lost and afraid I feel like a child, and yet my pride keeps me together.
“I was your student, Vasily. Remember? You browbeat me into marrying you. You poured learning into my ear day and night, even when we made love. You were so full of knowledge. You spoke nine languages. You knew all there was to know about Schopenhauer and Hegel and Marx and Wittgenstein. You did not listen to what was important to me.”
I want to draw back; it is impossible to cringe. This I recognize. This I remember. But the Elisaveta I knew had come to accept me, my faults and my learning, joyously, had encouraged me to open up with her. I had taught her a great deal.
“You gave me absolutely no room to grow, Vasily.”
The enormous triviality of this conversation, at the end of time, strikes me and I want to laugh out loud. Not possible. I stare at this monstrous Elisaveta, so bitter and different . . . and now, to me, shaded by her indifference. “I feel like I’ve been half a dozen men, and we’ve all loved you badly,” I say, hoping to sting her.
“No. Only one. You became angry when I disagreed with you. I asked for more freedom to explore . . . You said there was really little left to explore. Even in the last half of the twenty-first century, Vasily, you said we had found all there was to find, and everything thereafter would be mere details. When I had my second child, it began. I saw you through the eyes of my infant daughter, saw what you would do to her, and I began to grow apart from you. We separated, then divorced, and it was for the best. For me, at any rate; I can’t say that you ever understood.”
We seem to stand in that gray cubicle, that comfortable simplicity with which I surrounded myself when first awakened. Elisaveta, taller, stronger, face more seasoned, stares at me with infinitely more experience. I am outmatched.
Her expression softens. “But you didn’t deserve this, Vasily. You mustn’t blame me for what your tributary has done.”
“I am not he . . . it. It is not me. And you are not the Elisaveta I know!”
“You wanted to keep me forever the student you first met in your classroom. Do you see how futile that is now?”
“Then what can we love? What is there left to attach to?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t much matter, does it? There’s no more time left to love or not to love. And love has become a vastly different thing.”
“We reach this peak . . . of intelligence, of accomplishment, immortality . . .”
“Wait.” Elisaveta frowns and tilts her head, as if listening, lifts her finger in question, listens again, to voices I do not hear. “I begin to understand your confusion,” she says.
“What?”
“This is not a peak, Vasily. This is a backwater. We are simply all that’s left after a long, dreadful attenuation. The greater, more subtle galaxies of Libraries ended themselves a hundred million years ago.”
“Suicide?”
“They saw the very end we contemplate now. They decided that if our land of life had no hope of escaping the Proof—the Proof these teachers helped fix in all our thoughts—then it was best not to send a part of ourselves into the next universe. We are what’s left of those who disagreed . . .”
“My tributary did not tell me this.”
“Hiding the truth from yourself even now.”
I hold my hands out to her, hoping for pity, but this Elisaveta has long since abandoned pity. I desperately need to activate some fragment of love within her. “I am so lost . . .”
“We are all lost, Vasily. There is only one hope.”
She turns and opens a broad door on one side of my cubicle, where I originally placed the window to the outside. “If we succeed at this,” she says, “then we are better than those great souls. If we fail, they were right . . . better that nothing from our reality crosses the Between.”
I admire her for her knowledge, then, for being kept so well informed. But I resent that she has advanced beyond me, has no need for me. The tributaries watch with interest, like voyeurs.
(“Perhaps there is a chance.” My descendant self speaks in a private sending.)
“I see why you divorced me,” I say sullenly.
“You were a tyrant and a bully. When you were stored—before your heart replacement, I remember now . . . When you were stored, you and I simply had not grown far apart. We would. It was inevitable.”
(I ask my descendant self whether what she says is true.
“It is a way of seeing what happened,” it says. “The Proof has yet to be disproved. We recommended no attempts be made to do so. We think such attempts arefutile.”
“You taught that?”
“We created patterns of thought and diffused them for use in creation of new tributaries. The last students. But perhaps there is a chance. Touch her. You know how to reach her.”)
“The Proof is very convincing,” I tell Elisaveta. “Perhaps this is futile.”
“You simply have no say, Vasily. The effort is being made.” I have touched her, but it is not pity I arouse this time, and certainly not love— it is disgust.
Through the window, Elisaveta and I see a portion of the plain. On it, the experiments have congealed into a hundred, a thousand smooth, slowly pulsing shapes. Above them all looms the shadow of the Coordinator.
(I feel a bridge being made, links being established. I sense panic in my descendant self, who works without the knowledge of the other tributaries. Then I am asked: “Will you become part of the experiment?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are the judgment engine.”)
“Now I must go,” Elisaveta says. “We will all die soon. Neither you nor I are in the final self. No part of the teachers, or the Coordinator, will cross the Between.”
“All futile, then,” I say.
“Why so, Vasily? When I was young, you told me that change was an evil force, and that you longed for an eternal college, where all learning could be examined at leisure, without pressure. You’ve found that. Your tributary self has had billions of years to study the unchanging truths. And to infuse them into new tributaries. You’ve had your heaven, and I’ve had mine. Away from you, among those who nurture and respect.”
I am left with nothing to say. Then, unexpectedly, the figure of Elisaveta reaches out with a nonexistent hand and touches my unreal cheek. For a moment, between us, there is something like the contact of flesh to flesh. I feel her fingers. She feels my cheek. Despite her words, the love has not died completely.
She fades from the cubicle. I rush to the window, to see if I can make out the Coordinator, but the shadow, the mercury-liquid cloud, has already vanished.
“They will fail,” the We-ness says. It surrounds me with its mind, its persuasion, greater in scale than a human of my time to an ant. “This shows the origin of their folly. We have justified our existence.”
(You can still cross. There is still a connection between you. You can judge the experiment, go with the Endtime Work Coordinator.)
I watch the plain, the joined shapes, extraordinarily beautiful, like condensed cities or civilizations or entire histories.
The sunlight dims, light rays jerk in our sight, in our fading scales of time.
(Will you go?)
“She doesn’t need me . . .” I want to go with Elisaveta. I want to reach out to her and shout, “I see! I understand!” But there is still sadness and self-pity. I am, after all, too small for her.
(You may go. Persuade. Carry us with you.)
And billions of years too late—
Shards of Seconds
We know now that the error lies in the distant past, a tendency of the Coordinator, who has gathered tributaries of like character. As did the teachers. The past still dominates, and there is satisfaction in knowing We, at least, have not committed any errors, have not fallen into folly.
We observe the end with interest. Soon, there will be no change. In that, there is some cause for exultation. Truly, We are tired.
On the bubbling remains of the School World, the students in their Berkus continue to the last instant with the experiment, and We watch from the cracked and cooling hill.
Something huge and blue and with many strange calm aspects rises from the field of experiments. It does not remind us of anything We have seen before.
It is new.
The Coordinator returns, embraces it, draws it away.
(“She does not tell the truth. Parts of the Endtime Coordinator must cross with the final self This is your last chance. Go to her and reconcile. Carry our thoughts with you. “)
I feel a love for her greater than anything I could have felt before. I hate my descendant self, I hate the teachers and their gray spirits, depth upon depth of ashes out of the past. They want to use me to perpetuate all that matters to them.
I ache to reclaim what has been lost, to try to make up for the past.
The Coordinator withdraws from School World, taking with it the results of the student experiment. Do they have what they want—something worthy of being passed on? It would be wonderful to know . . . I could die contented, knowing the Proof has been shattered. I could cross over, ask . . .
But I will not pollute her with me anymore.
“No.”
The last thousandths of the last second fall like broken crystals.
(The connection is broken. You have failed.)
My tributary self, disappointed, quietly suggests I might be happier if I am deactivated.
Curiously, to the last, he clings to his imagined cubicle window. He cries his last words where there is no voice, no sound, no one to listen but us:
“Elisaveta! YES!”
The last of the ancient self is packed, mercifully, into oblivion. We will not subject him to the Endtime. We have pity.
We are left to our thoughts. The force that replaces gravity now spasms. The metric is very noisy. Length and duration become so grainy that thinking is difficult.
One tributary works to solve an ancient and obscure problem. Another studies the Proof one last time, savoring its formal beauty. Another considers ancient relations.
Our end, our own oblivion, the Between, will not be so horrible. There are worse things. Much
1996
The Fall of the House of Escher
Imagine a world where technology allows everyone to perform seemingly impossible feats with great case. Imagine this same world to be a place where you eat what you want by thinking it, even create people by thinking them. Then hypothesize that boredom has set in and the search is on for some new and unique diversionary entertainment. Add to that another complication: death is impossible. Along comes a magician, trained and experienced in stage illusion and legerdemain, one who is too “young” a member of this society to control anything but his own abilities. Who, in such a world, would be king?
—DC
“HOC EST CORPUS,” said the licorice voice. “Lich, arise.”
The void behind my eyes filled. Subtle colors pinwheeled against velvet. Oiled thoughts raced, unable to grab.
The voice slid like black syrup into my ears.
“Once dead, now quick. Arise.”
I opened my eyes. My fingers curled across palm, thumb touched pinkie, tack of prints on skin, twist and pull of muscles in wrist, the first things necessary. No pain in my joints. Hands agile and strong. Tremors gone.
I shivered.
“I’m back,” I said.
“Quick and quick,” the voice said.
I turned to see who spoke in such lovely black tones. My eyes focused on a brown oval like rich fine wood, ivory eyes with ruby pupils, face square and stern but unmarred by age.
“How does it feel to be inside again, and whole? I am a doctor. You can tell.”
I opened my mouth. “No pain,” I said. “I feel . . . oily, inside. Smooth and slick.”
“Young,” the face said. I saw the face in profile and decided, from the timbre of the voice and general features, that this was a woman. The smoothness of her skin reminded me of the unlined surface of a painting. She wore long black robes from neck to below where I lay on an elevated bed or table. “Do you have memories?”
I swallowed. My throat felt cool. I thought of eating and remembered one last painful meal, when swallowing had been difficult. “Yes. Eating. Hurting.”
“Your name?”
“Something. Cardino.”
“Cardino, that’s all?”
“My stage name. My real name. Is. Robert . . . Falucci.”
“That is right. When you are ready, you may stand and join them for dinner. Roderick invites you.”
“Them?”
“Roderick suggested you, and the five voted to bring you back. You may thank them, if you wish, at dinner.”
The face smiled.
“Your name?” I asked.
“Ont. O-N-T.”
The face departed, robes swishing like waves. Lights came up. I rolled and propped myself on one elbow, expecting pain, feeling only an easeful smoothness. I suspected that I had died. I surmised I had been frozen, as I had paid them to do, the Nitrogen Fixers, and that . . .
Licit, she had called me. Body, corpse. In one of my flashier shows I had reanimated a headless woman. Spark coils and strobes and a big van de Graaf generator had made the hair on her free head stand on end.
I slipped my naked legs down from the table, found the coolness of a tessellated tile floor. My fumbling fingers found the robe on the table as I stared at the floor: men and women, each a separate tile perfectly joined, in a flow of completion advanced to the far wall: courtship, embracing, copulating, birth.
I felt a sudden floating happiness.
I’ve made it.
On a heavy black oak table, I found clothes set out that might have come from a studio costume department—black stiffly formal suit out of a 1930s society movie, something for Fred Astaire. To my chagrin, I tended to corpulence even in this resurrected state. I put the robe aside and stuffed myself into the outfit and poured a glass of water from a nearby pitcher. A watercress sandwich appeared, and I nibbled it while exploring the room.
I should be terrified. I’m not. Roderick . . .
The table on which I had been reborn occupied the center of the room, spare and black and shiny, like a .stone altar. It felt cold to my touch. A yard to the right, the heavy oak table supported my sandwich plate, the pitcher and glass of water, the discarded robe, and a pair of shoes.
Licit, she Joad called me.
I stood in bright if diffuse illumination. No lights were visible. The room’s corners lay in shadow. Armless chairs lined the wall behind me. A door opened in the next wall. Paintings covered the wall before me.
The room seemed square and complete, but I could not find a fourth wall. No matter which direction, as I made a complete turn, I counted only three walls. The decor seemed rich and fashionable, William Morris and the restrained lines of classic Japanese furniture.
Obviously, not the next decade, I thought. Maybe centuries in the future.
I walked forward, and the illumination followed. Expertly painted portraits covered the wall, precise cold renderings of five people, three pale males and two dark females, all in extravagant dress. None of them were Roderick—if Roderick was who I thought he might be—and Ont did not appear, either. The men wore tights and seemed ridiculously well endowed, with feathers puffed on their shoulders and immense fan-shaped hats rising from the crowns of their close-cropped heads; the women in tight-fitting black gowns, reddish hair spread like sunbursts, skin the color and sheen of rubbed maple.
I wondered if I would ever find employment in this future world. “Do you like illusions?” I asked the portraits rhetorically.
“They are life’s blood,” answered the male on the left, smiling at me.
The portrait resumed its old, painted appearance.
Assume nothing, I told myself.
Startling patterns decorated the wall behind the portraits. Flowers surrounded and gave form to skull-shapes, eyes like holograms of black olives floating within petaled sockets.
“Where is dinner?” I asked.
The portraits did not answer.
The room’s only door opened onto a straight corridor that extended for a few yards, then sent me back to the room where I had been reborn. I scowled at the unresponsive portraits, then looked for intercoms, doorbells, hidden telephones. Odd that I should still feel happy and at ease, for I might be stuck like a mouse in a cage.
