Collected Short Fiction, page 814
Towering at the end of the avenue, the building was farther away than it had looked, even more colossal. We took most of an hour to reach the jungle-clotted gardens around it. Weeds and brambles filled a long crescent pool below the entrance. A gigantic golden figure towered out of it, one great arm lifted to hurl a wheel-shaped ship into space.
We stopped again and again to gaze in awe at the topless columns, the great animals marching around the dome, the fire in the diamond spire. Their immense dimensions and the sense of death and long decay hit me with a sudden ache of longing for our safe little digs in the Moon, but Casey plunged doggedly on.
We followed him around the end of the crescent pool and up a ramp of something like white marble to a monumental doorway. The door was an enormous golden slab, deeply engraved with another gigantic figure, this one lifting a planetary globe toward the sky.
The globe held me hypnotized.
An island of life on this ocean of death, it glowed with vivid color. Spinning, it glowed with cloudless blue seas and green continents patterned with what I thought must be roads and cities, sometimes a flash of polar ice. It changed as it turned. The hemispheres that vanished never came back. With every rotation, it revealed another world.
I stood gawking at it till a narrow panel opened at the bottom of the door. A bone-white robot stepped out to meet us, a human-shaped figure so graceful in form and motion that for an instant I took it to be alive. It stopped to block the entrance, stood still for a moment to inspect us, raised a silent arm to beckon us away.
Pepe and I backed off uneasily, but Casey stood his ground, calling out something that echoed the intonations of Sandor’s speech. The robot stood frozen for half a minute, then glided aside and beckoned us to enter.
5.
Emptiness met us. Emptiness, darkness, silence. Yet the great building still had a life of its own. Light brightened around us. Another bone-white robot came noiselessly toward us across a vast vacant floor. It stopped when Casey uttered some command he must have learned from Mona, and we stood peering around us.
We had come into a lofty hallway that curved around the building’s outer wall. Holo murals were lighting along it, panel after panel. Windows into worlds beyond the Earth, they showed alien landscapes and monumental buildings, spaceports and spacecraft, strange plants and stranger animals, figures and faces of human beings that sometimes looked nearly as strange.
Casey gestured at them.
“The colonized planets. They all had people here. Delegations, traders, tourists, what have you. The Nexus united interstellar civilizations. Centers like this held them together.”
Pepe stood frowning at a rugged landscape as red and lifeless as Mars. A huge blue balloon rolled across it on a wide roadway that led into dusty distance. Three smaller blue globes bounced along behind it.
“It looks alive,” Pepe said.
“It was.” Casey made a stoic shrug. “But Mona found no evidence of any contact later than two hundred forty years ago. She was afraid that meant the whole human enterprise was over. But yet—” He frowned and shook his head. “Toward the end, she did seem happier. I don’t know why.”
The robot had stood waiting. Casey spoke to it now. Its answer echoed the accents we had first heard from Sandor when we were children on the Moon. He nodded as if he understood, and it beckoned us along the endless curve of that hushed and empty hall. Wide archways were spaced along its inner wall, signs above them glowing with symbols as strange as cuneiforms. Pepe held back, hesitant to follow the robot.
“They know us,” Casey assured him. “Mona introduced me.”
It turned to lead us through a tall arch, into darkness. We had to wait for lights to come on to fill another great hall, which ran toward the center of the building. Far along it, a robot was pushing some silent device that must have been sweeping the floor. I heard no sound, saw nothing alive.
“There really were people here?” Pepe asked uneasily. “Not just machines?”
“Thousands,” Casey said. “Many thousands. From nearly two thousand planets.”
“If they died here—” Staring down the empty corridor, he must have recalled the shriveled mummies we found on the satellite. “What happened to them?”
Casey grinned at his unease and nodded at the robot.
“The robotic caretaker staff removed them.”
The robot led us through a door into an elevator that surged silently upward.
“I want you to see the Earth section, and the sector from Lo’s planet, where Mona grew up. Just a tiny fraction of the Crown, but as likely as any, she thought, to tell us why they died.”
We spent a long day trudging along empty corridors and through empty halls, trying to understand anything we saw. These centers were built, Casey told us, to unify the cultures and share the arts and sciences of all the scattered planets. Such interests as tourism and trade had supported them.
“You have to admire the interstellar trader.” I caught a note of envy in his voice. “He had to swallow the risks of packing up his goods and flying off to some far star, knowing he would never get back to anything he knew. What a great adventure, if he could make friends and find a market for his cargo. Without such luck—”
He shrugged.
Casey was our guide through the Crown. He could give the robots simple commands and understand simple replies. I caught a sense of the eager purpose that drove him, but understood nothing of what he tried to show us. We walked through laboratories devoted to sciences I’d never heard of, museums filled with artifacts that were hopeless riddles, libraries filled with information in a hundred tongues I didn’t know.
We looked into splendid theaters without players, great lecture halls without speakers, enormous stadiums where many thousand empty seats looked down on bare arenas. There were endless galleries of art that left only cold confusion in my mind, great empty music halls that greeted us with cacophanies of shrieks and thunder, shops filled with tantalizing enigmas. We walked though universities where we might have mastered all the arts and crafts and sciences of all the worlds, if our nanorobs had been timed to teach us. We took holo tours of worlds where evolution had created what looked like nightmare madness, and worlds that had known no life at all before the survey teams set down.
We found no promise of anything left alive.
“¡Fantasmas!” Pepe shivered.
Ghosts. We glimpsed no actual apparitions, but the silence and the emptiness had begun to people my own imagination with the phantoms of all the thousands who had lived and worked here, died and disappeared. Footsore and exhausted, I felt relieved when Casey finally said he had showed us enough.
Next day we let Casey go back alone.
The robots admitted us to spacious apartments that took my breath. The magnificent lobby was walled with vivid holos of the long Terran history since our last clones came down from the Moon. A forest of live floral plants perfumed the air in the great dining room. Our private chambers must have been intended for celebrity guests.
Always waiting alertly to serve us, the white robots opened a pool where they taught us to swim, a gym where they massaged us, a game room where they waited to watch us play. They were expert chefs, ready to obey any orders we could make them understand. Under Pepe’s coaching, they were finally able to serve him a fair copy of the huevos rancheros his father used to make on the Moon.
I don’t know how long we were there. Never outside, we never saw the Sun. Pepe’s gift timepiece had settings for many hundred planets, but he had lost the one for Earth. Casey became our clock. His days were long, spent wandering through the labyrinths around us in search of any thread of meaning he could recognize.
“I’m learning,” he insisted. “I think my nanorobs are beginning to kick in. “Sometimes I understand something in a holo lecture or find an inscription I think I’ve read correctly.”
“But what’s the use?” Pepe asked him. “If nobody foresaw the extinction, what could they have left to tell us anything about it?”
“Mona had a theory.” We were still at the breakfast table. Frowning, he pushed back an unfinished dish of some odd-odored brown stuff he said he had come to like. “A notion she got out of ancient history. The story of a revolt against the nanorobs, back when they were new. The rebels felt that they were stealing human freedom, turning us into machines.”
Pepe was nodding. Looking across the table into the unwinking lenses of the robot standing behind his chair, I couldn’t help a shudder. Its silent stare reminded me of the microscopic robots flowing in my own blood and multiplying in my brain. I lived in terror of them.
Sandor said they had saved our lives on the Sagittarian planet. Certainly they gave me no aches or pains. Perhaps they had made me immortal. Perhaps they would kill me tomorrow. I shrank from that haunting uncertainty, afraid they might steal my mind.
Grinning when I shivered, Casey continued.
“The conflict became a sort of religious war. Most of the rebels died. The survivors seized spacecraft and fled to settle new worlds on the star frontier. Mona was searching exploration records, looking for any evidence that some of them might be still alive, somehow striking back.”
Pepe shrank back from the robot clearing the table.
“Striking? How?”
“That’s what she wanted to know.” Casey shrugged. “Perhaps in some way through the nanorobs themselves. Perhaps something that killed their carriers when it killed then. She was searching the reports of later explorers. Surveying every planetary system within ten thousand light-years, they found several planets where the rebels had landed, but none of them alive. Without nanorobs of their own, they failed to adapt to new environments. Their efforts at terraforming efforts had failed. She found no proof of anything, yet she never gave up looking.”
“Whatever it was that killed them and everybody else,” Pepe muttered, “I don’t think I want to know.”
One morning Casey came in late for breakfast. Still in the silklike blue-striped night wear the robots provided, he hadn’t let them shave him. He ate nothing, but took coffee when the robots offered it, a better brew than we had ever tasted on the Moon. When they had cleared the table, he spoke abruptly.
“I dreamed last night.” He pushed his empty cup away, and paused to scowl in bafflement. “A dream I can’t explain or understand. It seemed too real to be just a dream, yet too strange to believe. I thought—it’s hard to explain, but I thought I had a sort of infinite vision. I could see everything that ever happened.”
He squinted to see if we suspected his sanity.
“I saw Mona’s clone mother, Mona Lisa Live, back when she really was alive.” He sat staring past us, as if searching some remote infinity. “She was a singer in a Medellin hot spot. My clone father was there as a hired guard for a drug lord called El Matador. Maybe high on his own merchandise, Matador tried to rape her. When he wouldn’t lay off, my father shot him down.
“Matador had gunmen all around him, but my father got away with Mona in Matador’s armored car. Got off the ground in Matador’s private jet. Skirted the Pacific coast from Colombia to Baja.
Found friends there. In the dream I was with them all way, though they never knew it.”
His dark face quivered with emotion.
“I was proud of my father. He had cunning. He had guts. The Matador cartel had men waiting in Baja, hired to kill him, but he beat them. Escaped with Mona to el Norte. Got another job as a guard at DeFort’s White Sands Moon base. With the asteroid coming in, he got Mona on the escape plane. Got her to the Moon. Got DeFort to let them stay, and save their cells in the cryostat. They were very much in love. I’ve always longed to live a life with her the way he did.
“But now—”
He sat in silence till Pepe said, “I’m sorry for you, Case.”
“I know she’s dead.” His voice had fallen low. He gazed away again, till I saw a dazed smile breaking over his face. “Or maybe she isn’t. The dream went on.” He looked back at us, his eyes lit with wonder. “You remember those blue balloons rolling across the desert? I was there with the explorers who got the holos, and I got closer than they ever did.
“I could touch the minds of the balloon beings, though they never felt me. One of the babies was lost from its mother, frightened and bouncing across those dunes trying to find her. She was searching for it, but rolling in the wrong direction. I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t.
“That was the strangest thing in the dream. I could feel the baby’s terror and the mother’s fear. I could understand their cries. I tried to guide them toward each other, but they were deaf and blind to me. Thinking about it since I woke, I think I understand. It was all happening in the past, light-years away from Earth. I think the past is fixed. I could somehow sense it, but never change a thing.”
“Happening, you say?” Pepe’s eyebrows had risen. “Really?”
“I’d like to know.” Casey shook his head, staring off at nothing. “I can’t expect you to believe—but it did seem terribly real. And there was still more.” Abruptly, he stood up from the table. “Before I woke up, Mona was with me. The clone Mona, born with us back at the station. The Mona called Tling when we found her at Sandor’s memorial. The Mona we burned on the wood-pile. Alive again!” An eager smile wiped the pain from his face. “She was calling me from somewhere out in space. She’s real! I don’t know how or where, but I want to find her.”
6.
Casey drained another cup of coffee, went back to his room, and returned in the work togs the robots had provided, a snug-fitting jumpsuit cut of some sleek, bright-orange stuff. We were still at the breakfast table.
“You think I’m crazy?” He grinned when Pepe looked up at him. “Could be, but I’m going to look for Mona.” Pepe asked where.
“Where else?” He shrugged. “Toward the end, she thought she was on the trail to something more than those anti-nanorob rebels. She never said what it was. She was frightened at first, trying to deny it and afraid to say. Toward the end, it seemed to make her hopeful.”
“Casey, please.” Pepe raised an anxious hand. “I’m not calling you crazy, but we’ve all been through hell. Let’s take a break and look at the odds.”
“If we knew the odds—”
“We know enough. The Crown’s too big. A great haystack. You’ll be looking for a needle you wouldn’t know when you found it. I doubt it’s there at all. Better eat your breakfast. Let the robots rub you down. Sleep tonight. Wait for Mona to come back in another dream, with maybe more to say.”
“Thank you, Pep.” Casey came around the table to shake his hand. “It’s true I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I can’t stop now. Maybe Mona was wrong to fear the nanorobs. Maybe they can help us. We carry those we picked on the Sagittarian planet. I think mine are still working their way into my system.”
“Huh?” Pepe blinked in alarm. “Doing what?”
“I think they’re getting into my brain.”
“Driving you mad?”
“If I am.” He shrugged. “But they’ve begun to teach me facts I never learned. Mona was speaking Sandor’s language in the dream, but still I understood her. I hope she’ll help me find her now.” When he moved to leave, Pepe asked if we could come with him.
“Okay.” He shrugged, with an ironic grin. “If you think I need looking after.”
“I do.” Pepe nodded soberly. “If your nanorobs are waking up, I’m afraid they’ll kill you.”
He waited for us to dress. We followed him though the jungle-grown rubble back to the Crown. The robots let us in. We tramped after him all day, through endless corridors that lit as we entered, and countless empty rooms that depressed me with the hush of death. Now and again he stopped to watch a blank holo wall come to life, to question a robot for an answer I never understood, or to stand waiting as if expecting inspiration that never seemed to come.
Yet he blundered on, finally through a bewildering maze of offices that he said had been the administrative complex. We came out at last on a balcony that looked into a pit of darkness. I shrank back from a railing that seemed too low. Pepe caught his breath and shouted, his voice a little quavery.
“¡Viva! ¡Viva! ¡Viva!”
We stood waiting a long time in silence before the faint echo whispered back. His voice woke stars overhead. Faint at first, they blazed into constellations brighter than any we had seen in space. They revealed an enormous hollow space at the center of the building. The immense curve of its wall was lined with balconies like ours, rising level after level toward the dome, and falling level after level below us, so far that I caught a giddy grip on the railing. Peering down, I found a circular floor, vast and bare, ringed with row upon row of desks on a slope that rose to the wall.
“¿Qué grande?” Pepe murmured in awe. “The council of the stars! Imagine the leaders of two thousand worlds gathered here, with all their science and wisdom, debating the future of the Universe!”
“Wisdom?” Casey grunted. “They never knew they were about to die.”
He shrugged and led us off the balcony, back into the labyrinth. Grimly determined, he watched holos that spoke in silence if they spoke at all, queried robots for replies that were only noise to me, paused again and again to listen for a voice he never seemed to hear. Worn out, we stopped at last to say we’d had enough.
“We’re going home for supper,” Pepe told him. “If we can call it home. Better come with us.”
Stubbornly, he shook his head.
We ate a meal I hardly tasted, our robot servers standing behind us, Casey’s empty chair across the table. The holo wall shone with scenes I hardly saw, landscapes on other worlds, far away and long ago. I was asleep before Casey came in. At breakfast his chair was empty again.
“He was here,” Pepe said. “I heard him speaking to the robots, but now I just looked in his room. He isn’t there.”
