Collected Short Fiction, page 816
I shrank from the cloud.
“Still the skeptic, Dunk?” I heard Pepe chuckle. The diamond atoms burned brighter and his words flowed more freely. “Sandor says their silicon and diamond and gold were never more than vehicles for complexes of electromagnetic energy. Sandor thinks the evolutionary jump took place in the bodies of people dying in space. The nanorobs adapted and lived on, in the charged particles and magnetic forces in the interstellar clouds of dust and gas.”
“If they were doing all that—” I thought of the dead Earth, the ghostly emptiness of the Crown, the mummies we had found at the satellite station. “Why didn’t somebody tell us what was killing all the planets?”
“Nobody knew.” The dance of light slowed for a moment and spun fast again. “The nanorobs were designed to be part of us, Sandor says, but never a conscious part. Never with a voice to tell us anything. One by one, flowing with the cells in our blood or working in our brains, they were nearly nothing. All their strength came from their unity. They had to act in unison to make the change, and never in any conscious way.”
The diamond sparks dimmed a little as he paused.
“So they killed you?” I tried to believe. “Killed everybody? And you like it?”
“They’ve set us free!” His voice quickened. “You should see Casey and Mona! They are splendid! Larger than they were on Earth, with no air drowning them. Changing shape as their feelings change. Spreading wings of light that shine like rainbows. They all glowed with love, and they long for you to join us.”
I pinched my arm and felt the twinge of pain.
“You will, Dunk.” The spinning sparks had paled, his urgent voice speaking faster. “You will believe when you get here. When you find your new senses, test your new perceptions. You can look out to the edge of the Universe and back through time to the big bang that made it. You can feel space expand.”
The cloud was hard to see.
“I felt your shock and sadness.” His fading voice was hard to hear. “I had to try. To tell you what I can. To ease your pain if I can. I’ve stayed too long. Hasta tu muerte.”
“Until I die?”
“Till you live again.” The bright mist contracted, the diamond sparks only a fading point at its heart. “Adios, compadre.” His voice died into a crackle of static as I caught his last words. “Que te vaya bien. “
The cloud was gone, like a blown-out candle.
8.
That glowing cloudlet still haunts me. I hated to believe that the microscopic machines in my blood were going to kill me, but the sting of the spark and the crackle of static had been too real to doubt. Wrestling with dread of it for the rest of that night, I felt desolate. Life all alone was no life, yet I wasn’t ready to die.
A sleek white robot was standing by the bed when I woke, silently ready to massage me, to watch me through the exercises our own ungainly robots had taught us in the big centrifuge on the Moon, to hand me a heated towel when I came out of the shower. Another was waiting in the dining room to pull out my chair and offer a breakfast I failed to enjoy.
I felt glad to get out of the building even into the ruins around it, relieved to feel the morning sun and hear live birds chirping in the trees. I needed the company of anything alive. On my way out to the prairie dog town, I clambered again through that water-worn gap in the pavement and stopped to watch a sparrow flying with a twig to its nest. I felt a faint pleasure in the shimmer of the rising Sun on the clean curves of the slider pod, even if there was nowhere for it to take me. I sat at long time at the table beside it, watching the tiny dogs. They had barked and hidden from me, but soon they were back again, sometimes standing up to watch me, but most of them scurrying about their business in the grass. I envied them.
My time goes on, even though I have no calendar or clock to keep account of it, nor any reason to. I live alone in this magnificent monument to human achievement, now the tomb of its builders. The white robots tend me well. Thanks to the nanorobs flowing in my blood, my health is excellent. Pepe keeps calling in my dreams, begging me to follow him into a finer paradise than any of the old religions ever promised. He says he is rejoicing in the wonders of new sciences, new arts, new philosophies, though I can seldom grasp anything he says about them.
He says his own senses are still expanding with his growing grasp of space and time. The past is fixed, he says. He can explore it, but never change it. He has looked back to watch that great asteroid strike the Earth. He has relived the drama of the escape, when El Chino drew his gun to bring Mona aboard. He has seen his parents alive and watched his own birth. He speaks of Casey and Mona, of Sandor and Lo, of multitudes of happy friends he found.
He says we’ll all of us be merging ourselves in the vast cosmic mind, which will have a place for every intelligence that ever existed, anywhere. That prospect frightens me, but he laughs at my alarm. He says we have no loss to dread, says we will still be ourselves, keeping our own conscious identities, our individual freedoms of thought and action.
Perhaps. I want to deny it, but he insists that that my own Sagittarian nanorobs will grow to convince me. He urges me to hasten the time when I can tell him I am ready. If that is left to me, I want to live forever. Though a desperate loneliness still haunts me, life is far too precious to be surrendered for any dream of eternal enchantment somewhere off in the sky.
I enjoy the birds and squirrels that are old friends now, the little dogs barking around me, the little owls that live with us in our little town. The larger animals seem wary of the ruins, but sometimes on good days I walk out to watch the elephants and impala and zebras trailing toward the waterhole. A sleepy lion is often watching from some high place. A leopard or a cheetah now and then dashes out of cover in pursuit of its next meal, but they all ignore me. Perhaps the nanorobs somehow protect me.
Though the immensity and the strangeness of the building is still overwhelming, I have set out to explore the Earth sector, mapping it as I go. I have begun to learn the simple oral talk of the robots. Electronic speech still baffles me, but now and then a street hieroglyph reveals itself, inviting me to visit a gallery of interstellar art, a lecture on galactic history, a sale of prehistoric antiquities, a symposium on the future of nanorobic technology. My own nanorobs may finally teach me their electronic language. The great building is a world of wonders I can never exhaust. Lonely as I am, I should never be bored.
I have a small telescope I found in a science museum. Sometimes on a clear night I take it outside. When I see the stars of Sagittarius, I find it hard to believe that I have been there among them, and skipped a millennium of time. More often I wait for moonlight for another look at Tycho and the rays spread around it.
I know the station is still there; we saw the mirrored dome on the crater rim from Sandor’s slider pod. It is now asleep, but I know its instruments are still scanning the Earth for evidences of human life. When they warn the master computer that the Earth is empty, we may be cloned once more, to repeople it again.
If that takes place, I may be alive to greet myself, or my clone, arriving from the Moon. Though I feel a certain unease in the contemplation of that possible event, I expect to make him welcome. From the beginning, we have been the station historians. I am leaving this narrative for his information.
It must wait here for his arrival. I have no radio that can reach the Moon. Even preparing this manuscript has been a problem. People in instant contact and endowed with permanent memories have little need for paper or pens. I had to search a vanished artist’s studio for pencils and drawing paper. I will leave the finished document in my room, with the robots instructed to show it to anybody who enters the building. I believe they have understood me.
Living in my own fading recollections, I know Tanya has been dead these thousand years, buried under the gray Moon dust down below the Tycho wall, along with all our other siblings who have died there, and dogs I used to own. Yet I don’t forget her tears, her tight embrace, our last passionate kiss when we had to say good-bye. Sometimes in my dreams she has been cloned again, and returned to Earth again, as fresh and bright and lovely as she always was.
Life has always been uncertain, but it renews itself.
Or so I dream.
Nitrogen Plus
We are delighted to have a new story by Jack Williamson. In his ninety-third year, Mr. Williamson continues to produce remarkable work. A recent novella, “The Ultimate Earth” (Analog, December 2000), is currently a Hugo finalist, and his latest novel. Terraforming Earth, has just been released by Tor Books.
Some optimist in the Star Survey christened the planet New Earth. It was warmed by a Sun-like star. The mass and gravity were only slightly less than Earth’s, the day very slightly longer. The oceans were water, and water ice capped the poles. The surface air pressure was near Earth normal.
“A perfect world!” my uncle boasted. “Except for one odd feature. The atmosphere is nearly pure nitrogen, with a whiff of carbon dioxide but hardly a trace of oxygen. A survey lander discovered that, and never returned. Tough luck for the crew, but good news for me. I got the planet for a song.” He wanted me to terraform it.
“A slice of apple pie,” he scoffed when I shrank from the problems. “Just sow the seas with engineered algae spores. Wait for photosynthesis to release oxygen out of the water.”
“How long would that take?”
“What’s time?” His pudgy fingers snapped the years away. “Fly home for a holiday and back there again. Ninety-seven light-years each way. Two centuries for the spores to work. Only a weekend for you, what with the relativistic time contraction. You’ll have a paradise planet ready to welcome our colonists and get home again with your own ticket to immortality;” Immortality? I wanted to strangle him.
He is immortal, with his own imperial sense of time, but the members of his tight little fellowship are jealous of their secrets and slow to admit outsiders. Not that I’d longed to become his eternal handyman or abandon my own place and time for a life of interstellar adventure.
Yet he is my uncle. He’s a legendary interstellar tycoon, enormously wealthy. His enemies like to paint him as a devouring octopus with a thousand arms writhing though the galaxy. As a child I had dreaded his sudden fits of rage when some unlucky flunky failed to please him. Yet I had learned to tolerate him.
Hard enough to love, he’s a short, shrewd, dynamic man with a round baby face. His fat cheeks are pink and hairless from the precious micro-machines in his blood, which sharpen his wits and preserve him from illness or age. He can seem genial and generous enough, so long as you please him.
My father, two years younger, had been the unlucky brother. A disappointed idealist, a failed artist, an ill-starred lover. When my uncle offered him a chance at immortality, he refused it because he thought people should be equal. His avant-garde art found no buyers. My mother left him for another eternal. He vanished from Earth the year I was five. My uncle adopted me, sent me though expensive schools, promised me a fine future in his companies. When he named me his personal agent on New Earth, I knew I had to go.
I found a crew at the Skipper’s Club. That’s an ancient building inhabited by ancient starmen who run a sort of hiring hall and retirement home for skipship crews. Long halls in the basement crypt are lined with cold lockers labeled with the fading names of men and women who had planned to be back after decades or centuries to open them again.
The pilot I hired was Buzz Bates, a lanky, bald, and ageless veteran of half a hundred flights. His copilot was an anxious young apprentice who had never been beyond the solar system. I spent an evening with them in the bar, listening to his tales of desperate adventure on far-off worlds, and even here on Earth.
Home from his first voyage on the eve of the great New England disaster, he barely got off again before the impact. His birth city, ancient New York, was gone when he got back again, Atlantica standing on the site. The apprentice listened uneasily and drank too much until Bates finally had to help him up to his room.
I rented a cold crypt box for myself and left a few documents and holos I didn’t want to lose. We took off in a little quantum-wave cruiser with a load of engineered algae spores and gear for their dispersal. Our staff biologist was Elena Queler. A lively brunette with a wry wit and a voice I liked. She laughed at my regrets at having to abandon all I had known.
“No grief for me! My own life had gone sour. Wrong guy living with me. Research funds dried up. Thumbs turned down on my nano-nurse project. Nitrogen or spitrogen, New Earth has got to be better than the hell I’ve had here.”
We scanned the planet from space.
“Another Eden!” Excitement lit her piquant face. “Waiting to be created.”
The seas were a pure and brilliant blue, the two great continents rimmed with bare earth in many different shades, but never a hint of green chlorophyll. Most of the land shone with a strange and brilliant white.
“Snow?” I wondered.
“In the tropics?” She laughed at the question and turned serious. “The spectrometer boggles me. Odd signatures of silicon and carbon. Not a trace of free oxygen. I want a closer look.”
As we dropped closer, Pilot Bates discovered a tiny satellite in low orbit. It turned out to be the lost lander. The copilot got into space gear to go aboard. He was gone a long time.
“All dead.”
Back at last, peeling off his gear, he looked sick and shaken.
“The crew. The automatics. Everything.” He shivered and stood silent till Bates made him go on. “I got through the lock with a laser torch. No air inside. The bodies are freeze-dried mummies, brittle as glass. I found a quarter-ton of some queer crystal stuff they’d loaded in the cargo bay. It must have killed them.”
“How?”
“Just a hunch.” He shrugged and went silent for an instant. “If you’d seen the bodies! Mouths gaping open. Oxygen masks still in their hands, but I think they died fighting for breath.
“I found these.”
He tossed a plastic bag that rattled when the pilot caught it.
“Don’t ask where they got them.” He shivered. “Bait, I imagine, to tempt them out of their wits.”
The bag held half a kilo of diamonds. Perfect white octahedral crystals weighing up to a dozen carats, they glittered like a shattered rainbow when he let us see them. The pilot goggled at them and battered him with questions.
“I never touched the white stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to. I did look for records, a logbook, anything. Not a clue. I think all they thought about was how to get away alive. My own luck was better, but I don’t want to stretch it.”
“We have to land,” Bates told me. “If we don’t, your uncle would only send us back.”
The diamonds had captured Elena.
“So many!” She stirred a handful of the great gems with a finely tapered forefinger, her own eyes shining. “So big! So perfect. All almost identical. I’ve got to know how they came to be.”
She wanted to see that strange white stuff for herself. The copilot was still fighting his funk. Bates was cautious, but he set us down on the western shore of a narrow mountain peninsula that ran south across the equator from the largest continent. She ran tests and pronounced the nitrogen harmless, so long as we didn’t try to breathe it.
With oxypacks and breathing masks, we cycled out of the air lock. A breeze off the sea felt warm enough for T-shirts, but the white sand beach sloped up to what looked like banks of snow. Dark cliffs stood beyond them, cut with a sheer-walled canyon that came down from a mountain ridge. The cliffs were topped with something white.
We had come prepared for work outside, with nuclear power for the oxygen generators. To sow the algae, we had brought four light rocket-driven drones. The pilots went to work at once, assembling them. I climbed down to a tidal pool for a sample of the native sea water when Elena wanted to test the spores in it and tramped with her up the beach for a closer look at the white stuff.
“Frost!” She knelt with a pocket lens to study films of it on the rocks. The mask muffled her voice. “But growing like something alive.”
Under the sun, it did glitter like frost.
“Hexagonal crystals,” she said. “Like snowflakes, but—” She leaned closer. “Each one has a bright point at the center. Something that glints like a tiny diamond.”
Higher up the beach it had grown thicker, finally into something like crystal fur, ankle deep. Fascinated with it, she was still disappointed.
“I had a glimpse of something taller, farther inland, as we came down. I’d like to see it.”
“I don’t want you to kill yourself.”
“Not with all these riddles around us!” Dark eyes shining, she shrugged danger away. “I could work here forever.”
In the months we stayed to watch the spores at work, I came to love her. Back on Earth, I’d begun a very modest academic career, planning a historical monograph on my uncle’s interstellar enterprises. No woman had ever held me long, but her fascination with the exotic mysteries of the planet gave Elena herself a bit of its hazardous allure. Perhaps I gave her an escape from too much strangeness. She began to share her cabin with me.
The copilot was jealous; he had dated her before we left Earth. To fend him off, she announced that we were engaged. We made a little ceremony of it. The pilot had brought wine. I had no ring. Instead, I gave her a keepsake coin. A farewell gift from my father before he went away, it was a worn silver dollar minted in ancient America. He told me to carry it for luck, though it had brought no luck to him.
Cheerfully enough, the copilot lifted his glass to us and the future of New Earth.
That did look bright. Testing sea water, Elena found free oxygen. She planted seed in a patch of dry silt by the stream, had us dig an irrigation ditch, took holos for my uncle as they sprouted and grew. She served us a feast of ripe red tomatoes and golden cantaloupe and fresh green com, and begged the pilots to move our ship farther inland.
