Darwin's Paradox (32 page)

[It’s so hard being misunderstood,]
he said with mock sadness.

Julie’s grin broadened and she swerved to her left into a roll to get a look at what appeared to be a bursting nebula below.
Maybe I came up with that out of convenience. Probably out of...fear. I often wondered why you never took up a shape for me. I never realized it was me holding back. I suppose I was afraid of what I might become...no...of what...

[You already were?]

There you go, finishing my sentences for me again.
She sighed.
Yeah. Scared of what I’d become...a—

[A crazy woman.]

A freak
.

[You were just plain beautiful to me,]
SAM said gently with a smile that tugged at her heart. Then he twirled in front of her, doing a mid-air pirouette.
[So, do you like the way I look?]

Julie laughed.
Of course I do. I came up with the image, didn’t I?

[Not entirely. Remember I’m a part of you and you’re a part of me.]
SAM floated closer, arms reaching out for her.
[As for your earlier question...]

[You cannot keep doing this, Julie Crane,]
Proteus interrupted sternly.
[Not in your present condition. You are too weak. You plunge too deeply and too easily into an ecstatic trance. It will destroy you.]

Alarm surged through her now.
What condition, Proteus?
She looked over at SAM and admitted to herself that she’d been inordinately tired lately, and feeling rather nauseated too.
Am I ill?

[You are ten weeks pregnant.]

Julie plunged and her rump met with a knock on something hard. She hardly felt the impact.
I’m what?
She scrambled up to her hands and knees on the ground and a crazy grin snaked across her face.
Did I hear you right?

[You heard right,]
SAM said, standing next to her, having landed gracefully on his feet.
[You’re pregnant. With child. Expecting. You have a bun in the oven.]

Julie flung her arms around SAM.
Oh, SAM! I’m so happy!

[Your pregnancy interferes with your ability to control your ecstatic trances,]
Proteus continued.
[You and your baby are vulnerable now. You must remove yourself from Icaria for the remainder of your term and possibly for a time after or you endanger both the unborn child and yourself.]

Julie clung to SAM, who didn’t seem to mind. He was squeezing her back. She gazed up at the purple sky and rejoiced in her discovery that she was carrying a child—Daniel’s child—she’d quickly done the math and calculated that they’d likely conceived the last night they’d been together in the heath.

Then she thought of Icaria. How could she help them here if she was out there?
Proteus, you don’t understand
. She let go of SAM and looked up at the glowing sky.
I need to stay in Icaria, to help Victor and Carl and the others. This is a critical time. I can’t turn my back on them now. Not after what they’ve done for me and my family.
She saw SAM give her a look of remorse.

[No, it is you who do not understand, Julie Crane,]
Proteus said, pointedly and SAM nodded grimly.
[If you do not leave Icaria and its environment of machine intelligence, you will continue to fall into ecstatic trances more frequently and so deeply that you will never come out and the child you carry will die. So will you. You must leave at once.]

Daniel
watched Julie grin suddenly, then her eyes rolled back and she abruptly slumped, crashing on her knees and landing face-forward in a heap. He barely took in Angel’s shriek as he leapt to his feet and flung open the door to the adjoining room.

“Julie!”

Daniel brushed past the gawking children and Carl to kneel beside his prone wife. Victor wound through the crowding children to his side as Daniel turned Julie face-up. She lay unconscious, almost smiling, even though her nose was bleeding.

“That’s what she looked like that time in the A.I.-core, when she and I—well when she went into that veemeld trance...” Victor trailed and blushed hard. He scrambled for a cloth and handed it to Daniel.

Daniel dabbed Julie’s bloody nose. “And at the wedding ceremony.” He stroked her cheek with his other hand. “Julie. Wake up. Please,” his voice pleaded.

“Why does she keep doing that, Dad?” Angel said in a squeaky, terrified voice.

“I don’t know, I don’t know...” he whispered, unable to offer her any reassurance.

“You woke her up the first time. What did you say?” Victor suggested.

Daniel sighed, looking for a sign that she was stirring. They’d already done it, he thought. She’d married him again. “Please, don’t leave me now,” he murmured desperately. “Not when I’ve finally found you again.” He curled his arms around her and pulled her limp body up so her head leaned against his chest. She felt so small and frail. He pondered their comings and goings with a long sigh. “Julie, how could I protect you when you kept running off like that?” he whispered into her hair. He’d barely resigned to being parted from her indefinitely as she did her work for Icaria, now this mysterious sickness was threatening to take her away from him in a more permanent way...Lately, he’d caught her several times, stumbling off balance or looking very pale and tired. What was wrong with her?

Sitting on the floor with his wife cradled in his arms, he rocked slowly, thinking of their rich and wonderful years together in the heath, their quiet conversations by the fire, their mirth and banter over mealtimes, making exquisite love to the distant howling of the wolves, the birth of their beautiful daughter...

He stroked her honey-streaked hair and brushed his lips against her soft cheeks, then murmured, “Please come back to me, Julie. I want to father another child with you...”

To his amazement, she stirred and opened her eyes. They glistened as she gazed at him with an intensity that worried him anew. Then her lips quivered into a crooked smile and she said in a barely audible whisper. “You already have.”

Her
face still pale but glowing, Julie sat on Victor’s couch, nestled against Daniel with her legs curled under her. He could feel her conflicting emotions tensing her muscles. Although she was feeling obvious joy at her newly discovered pregnancy, she was also dealing with the consequences of Proteus’s alarming news.

Zane was smoothing his tunic, which didn’t need smoothing. Victor paced the room nervously and Carl stood quietly listening as Julie explained again for the benefit of everyone in the briefing room. “SAM and Proteus explained it to me like this...” She took a deep breath then proceeded, “When I’m pregnant, a whole host of physiological and morphological changes occur in my body. My hormone balance changes to accommodate and feed my growing baby.” Julie gazed from one to the other but seemed to focus on Carl most of the time. “Among them is the secretion of human chorionic gonadotropin by the growing placenta and the production of masses of estrogen and then progesterone to maintain the lining of my uterus among other things. HCG alone has been implicated in ‘morning sickness’. These hormones in combination produce what lots of women describe as a feeling of being ‘off world’. Lots of us become highly emotional and experience fluctuations in moods during pregnancy. We often get irritable, irrational, absent-minded and ‘weepy’.”

She shrugged and smiled crookedly at Daniel. “Proteus explains that while my body is experiencing this unique chemical and electrical surge, my brain is highly susceptible to ecstatic trances. All I have to do is think of veemelding and I’m there. And while I’m there, all I have to do is conjure half-pleasant thoughts and my body sinks into a trance. Proteus says that unless I break the pattern, these occurrences will increase in frequency, length and intensity until I’m in a permanent trance that I can’t get out of.”

She exchanged fleeting glances with everyone before she resumed, “The only way to stop that from happening is to sever part of the equation. Because Proteus is part of me, it has to be the veemelding. So all I have to do is be far enough away from SAM and I break the pattern. That means going outside far enough from the A.I. community that I can’t veemeld.”

“This is amazing!” Zane exclaimed. He wriggled with excitement and flashed Carl a pointed look. “You and I have discussed subtle new arrangements in humanity’s evolutionary process surrounding veemelds and Darwin, but this is a phenomenal change. Maybe we’re looking at a radical evolutionary jump in sympatric speciation involving a co-evolutionary partnership a di-phasic creature that—”

“Hold on, buddy,” Julie interjected. “Creature? We’re talking about me here.”

“Oh,” Zane said, blushing fiercely. “Sorry.” But his moment of self-consciousness passed quickly and he resumed his zealous rant. “What I meant was you seem to represent a new phase in human adaptation, a crea—er, organism—” He blushed again, “which must cycle from one ecosystem to another to perpetuate your species. Not unlike salmon that hatch in freshwater streams but migrate hundreds of miles out to sea to feed and grow, then return to their birth stream to breed.”

“To what purpose?” Julie inquired, wrinkling her nose at the notion of being likened to a migratory fish. Besides, didn’t salmon die after they spawned? “What’s the advantage?”

“This isn’t natural selection or evolution, Julie,” Carl said, inviting an impatient look from Zane. “Evolution occurs over millennia through incremental change as genetic material is passed from generation to generation and stands the test of time. This is something that happened because Vogel created an artificial virus—”

“You’re wrong, Carl,” Zane cut in. “This is evolution,” he said emphatically. “But evolution of a different kind. The kind that happens in leaps and bounds, by a so-called accident in a chaotic soup of opportunity.”

Daniel glanced at Julie, growing taut beside him. He could tell she wanted to end this debate, which was making her very uncomfortable. It was her they were talking about, after all.

“But in order for it to contribute to evolutionary change it must arise by natural means in order to replicate and demonstrate advantage over time. It seems to me—”

“Come on, Carl,” Zane said impatiently. “You’re thinking ancient Darwinian theory. How it arose isn’t as important as how it proceeds. We know that Nature seizes opportunities when so-called accidents happen. But I personally don’t believe in ‘accidents’ where evolution is concerned. What I do believe in is co-adaptive process and change. Veemelds were here for a long time, perhaps always, waiting for Proteus to come along. Vogel knew it. Even Gaia knew it, although they hadn’t even discovered veemelds, yet.”

Julie jerked to her feet. “This is ridiculous. You make it sound like I was just waiting for this virus to come along so I could fulfill my destiny. It’s artificial, Zane. Vogel made it—”

“And if Vogel didn’t make it, someone else would have. Maybe even Nature.”

He’d pushed his intense face close to hers and they stared at one another until she finally blinked and sat down as if she’d been struck. “You’re talking about the whole of our society behaving like an autopoietic system, self-organized, adaptive and evolving...”

Zane leaned back like a teacher proud of his favorite pupil. “How many times have we seen this sort of thing happen? Like the independent formulation of calculus by Newton and Leibniz or the theory of the evolution of species by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Or McFadden and Pocket independently but at the same time coming up with electromagnetic fields being the seat of our consciousness. Multiple, independent discoveries have increased in society a thousand-fold since the nineteenth century. Did you know that? Why? The reason is obvious: the fabric of our society is acting like a neural network, learning, interacting and sharing toward the achievement of a common zeitgeist.

“Julie, you’re father’s model of creative destruction shows how a society can operate as an evolving ‘organism’, interconnected through shared knowledge and thought and cycling through nodes of focused ‘strange attractors’. We’re all part of our own evolutionary story, too all we’ve been missing is the communication. Communication is the vehicle for achieving spontaneous, persistent synchrony. Fireflies communicate with light; planets speak through the force of gravity; heart cells share electric currents. We...” He flung his arms out like Moses on the mountain and a little spittle flew out of his mouth. “Imagine what kind of entity we will be when all our individuals connect with Darwin and the A.I.s!”

“Zane,” Carl said with a tone of mild disgust. “This doesn’t answer Julie’s earlier question about advantage. So it’s a moot “

“But there is an advantage, Carl,” Zane cut in. “We just have to find it. Just like Charles Darwin predicted the existence of a coevolved moth with a long proboscis based on the existence of the long spur of the Angraecum orchid, we can derive many advantages of her existence if we look hard enough.”

Her existence. Daniel felt a spike of discomfort from Julie. Or was it his own discomfort? They were discussing the merits of her existence as though she wasn’t even there in the room with them!

“To take the anadromous salmon example again,” Zane raved on, “the advantage wasn’t obvious. But it then occurred to ecologists that this niche partitioning allowed for more species to co-occur where otherwise they might have to out-compete one another. As for overall advantages to the ecosystems, they also found out that by feeding and growing in the ocean, the salmon brought back with them a wealth of nutrients that were necessary to feed a host of animals that in turn fed on them. Do you see how this works?” Zane’s wild eyes flitted wildly from Julie and Daniel to Carl and Victor. Daniel felt Julie inhale sharply to speak.

“For instance,” he went on as Julie opened her mouth, “in Julie’s di-phasic behavior, perhaps the child is meant to grow up outside, without the A.I. community to prevent overload, or confusion. Or maybe it’s meant to gain during its early development some other arcane value that only the outside has to offer that will be useful to the inside world. As for the mother and father, this provides a season for them to link with the world outside, too. Perhaps this requirement to go outside is just a mirror of the ‘urge’ Julie experienced to return to Icaria to establish a developmental rite, so to speak. The Joining. Either way you look at it, she was meant to happen just this way and Vogel knew it all the time, designed it that way. Chaos, he might have even purposefully designed Proteus to solve the fertility problem. He was a vee-damned genius! And she’s our link to Gaia, the real Gaia. Mother Earth.” Zane was stabbing an excited finger at Julie now. “She’s our prototype for a new race of beings who belong to both worlds—”

“But she won’t be here,” Carl cut in sharply. He’d had enough. So had Daniel.

“What?” Zane looked like he’d been slapped out of a dream.

Carl glanced at Julie and Daniel then at Victor, who had quietly listened the whole time. Carl practically barked at Zane, “Haven’t you been listening to what Julie said? For the sake of her unborn child and her own life, she must leave, and we’re not sure for how long.” There lingered regretful acceptance in his eyes as he gazed back at Julie and Daniel. “I’m sorry you had to listen to this jabbering, but I want you to know that as soon as we heard, I got authorization from the Circle to make arrangements for a transport. A skyship will be at your disposal shortly, equipped with all the supplies you’ll need. Icaria must let you go, for your sake and for our sake.”

“Okay, so she has to go outside for a while to have her baby and fulfill that phase in her development,” Zane persisted, his voice edging with fluster as his mind returned from his distracted rant to what this meant for Icaria. “But she has to come back. There’s still Proteus and the children and our infertility and Icaria’s future,” he ended.

“We’ll just have to wait and see.” Carl gave Zane a stern glare then returned a softer look to Julie. “We’ll assess later if and when you can return.”

“If?!” Zane stomped his foot. “What do you mean by if?” His voice went shrill. “She’s our only chance! She has to come back! She belongs here every bit as much as she belongs out there! She’s our only hope for our children.”

Everyone fell silent and Daniel knew this hurt her. There seemed no other choice...except for...He found himself stealing a glance at his pregnant wife as his mind developed the plan that would likely meet with her disapproval. Had she already thought of it and discarded it?

“We can’t let them just go like that,” Zane continued, his shrill voice rising still more with panic, “What if something happens to Julie in the heath, like she gets eaten by a cougar or something—”

Julie released her pent-up tension in a sharp laugh. “I won’t get eaten by a cougar! Zane, you’re always so dramatic,” she retorted.

Victor spoke for the first time, “He has a point. There could be complications with your pregnancy, Julie. A host of things might happen. You might crash the skyship.”

“Angel will drive,” Daniel said, hoping this would lighten up the group. No one laughed.

Victor shifted his feet and cleared his throat. “I gave the Circle and Aileen my assurances that you would be protected,” he said and his face tightened with apprehension. “I’m sorry,” he gave Julie a conciliatory look. “You’re considered a critical resource to Icaria.” He threw a nervous glance at Carl, the S.I. representative for the Circle. “We can let you go but you’ll have to accept our escort.” He turned to Carl for confirmation. “We’ll escort them back to their destination and establish an effective communication system with frequent visits.”

Carl nodded gravely. Zane remained unconvinced. “That only means that we find out sooner when she gets eaten by a cougar or falls off a cliff.”

“I’m not going to fall off a damned cliff!” Julie exclaimed, her edgy voice matching Zane’s. She’d wound herself into a knot of tense muscle. Daniel thought he could feel her shivering with anger, desperation, and frustration. Wait until she heard his plan...then she’d have a reason to be angry.

“What about having someone live nearby? A medical practitioner, preferably,” Carl suggested. “What do you have to say, Daniel? We haven’t heard from you yet.”

He sighed and glanced at Julie, who’d pressed against him as if hoping to escape from it all. “I know you’re all concerned for her welfare, particularly given her potential role in Icaria’s future, but Julie will be fine. Don’t forget that we’ve been living in the heath for over a decade. Julie had Angel out there with no problems. With some extra supplies from you it’ll be even easier.” He gave Julie a squeeze. “If we need help we’ll ask for it. She’ll have her baby and be back here in no time,” Daniel ended with a faint smile. He felt Julie looking at him intently and wondered what she was thinking. Turning his gaze to her forest green eyes, he said, “Right, darling?”

She looked at him with a strange expression he couldn’t read. “Sure, honey.” Then she placed her head on his shoulder and snuggled closer, as if she’d stopped listening and he felt her finally relax against him. Had she settled something in her mind? Surely she hadn’t guessed his plan? No, he concluded. If she had she’d be furious, not half-asleep on his shoulder.

“All right, then,” Carl said, pacing the room with his hands clasped behind him like a military analyst. “The Circle would be a lot happier if someone stayed there with you, particularly during the latter stages of the pregnancy...”

“I don’t know if that’s necessary,” Daniel said, thinking of Julie’s penchant for privacy. “What do you think, darling?” He glanced down at her. She was gazing at nothing in particular. “Julie? Did you hear what I said?”