Futures Near and Far (18 page)

A dream. Yes. And only a dream. For months my life as
Annabeth had seemed to be the greatest sort of wakefulness. No more. An
illusion only has power when one can’t see the man behind the curtain. I could
hold firm against my friends’ doubts about the choices I had made, but not
against my own.

It was time to do what I’d decided to do when I’d accessed
the interface. I’d needed this last sliver of an afternoon to savor, but the
clock had run down.

“I love you, Daniel. I love you, Sarah. I love you, Marancy.”

Deep within the compartment of the sleigh, beside the
dwindling warmth of the foot warmer, I clicked my heels three times.

The sleigh ceased to move. The moment was as frozen as the
ground had been: Clouds of breath — human and equine — hung in the air as if
painted. Marancy’s eyelids were poised half down, captured in mid-blink. Sarah
was preserved in the midst of lifting the blanket, curious to learn what I was
doing with my feet. Now she would never find out.

Daniel’s right hand was forever steady on the reins, keeping
our course true.

I closed my eyes. As soon as I opened them, the details of
the room around me grew more distinct, became impossible to ignore: The
equipment, the blinking indicators, the glow of the clock.

Outside, beyond the smartglass and walls programmed to keep
the climate at bay, snow was falling. It was winter, for those who troubled
themselves to notice. I could still hear the tinkle of bells on a horse’s tail.

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Poor Elton Elliott.
In the early 1990s,
Science Fiction Review,
a long-running fanzine helmed by Richard E. Geis, was going to be
re-envisioned as a newsstand publication containing, among other things,
original fiction. Elton had expressed a desire for submissions of stories
exploring nanotechnology, and I yielded to the temptation and sent him an early
draft of “Suicidal Tendencies.” He liked it. Wanted to buy it. But the big
plans for
SFR
fell through before the
first issue could appear. (And before I got paid.) Which was for the best, as
it turned out. Encouraged by the interest, I significantly revised and expanded
the story, sent it to
Full Spectrum 4,
and it was accepted.

Just as that was in process, Elton called to say the
plans for
SFR
were a “go” again, and he
renewed his offer for “Suicidal Tendencies.” I explained the novelette was no
longer available. Hating to leave a supportive editor in the lurch, I agreed to
write a replacement story. That was “A Marathon Runner in the Human Race,”
which Elton would have published except once again, the project failed to get
up and running. The story was soon accepted by Kris Rusch at
F&SF
and was published in that magazine in
early 1994.

Elton was passionate about editing a “nanotech issue”
somehow, though, and soon found a new means of doing so by selling an anthology
to Jim Baen at Baen Books. The title was to be
Nanodreams.
Elton gave me another call. I wrote “Evaporation” for the book, and the third
time was the charm. In the summer of 1995, the book appeared on store
bookshelves across the nation.

As mentioned in the introduction to “Suicidal
Tendencies,” this may be one of my nanotech stories, but it does not fit into
the milieu of the others. The future it imagines is totalitarian. In part, that
is because the plot was already on-hand when Elton commissioned a piece from me
for
Nanodreams.
About four years
earlier, Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister had solicited proposals for
stories for
Deathworlds,
an anthology of
tales of hostile worlds such as the one from Harry’s famous short novel,
Deathworld.
That anthology had not sold, but I
knew I didn’t want to let the outline go to waste.
Nanodreams
turned out to be an ideal opportunity to kill two
birds with one stone.

Glenn Ashwood woke to a fierce sunrise, cracked mud
beneath his naked body.

The stark, antiseptic quarters of the jumpship brig had
vanished. Glenn was outdoors now — out in raw air, looking up at a blue sky
shimmering with heat. A small waning moon he didn’t recognize hung just west of
the zenith, its craters indistinct in the daylight.

He sat up, scanning right and left. No buildings. The only
sign of human presence save himself were the impressions left in the dry
lakebed by the transport. Sand dunes, outcroppings, and bleak, eroded hills
ringed him in every direction, without a single shred of vegetation nor any
trace of cloud. Whatever rain had created the mud beneath him had done so
months, years, even decades earlier.

He shaded his eyes, trying to push away the intensity of the
glare. The closest shore of the lakebed was at least two kilometers away. The
nearest shade was well beyond that and, as far as he could judge, would vanish
as noon approached — long before he could get to it. Meanwhile his exposed skin
was cooking in ultraviolet radiation.

His nanodocs should have protected him. Right now the little
molecular robots should have been deepening his tan, modifying his fluid
retention abilities, and repairing the scrapes on his back — a token of his
escorts, who had obviously thrown him bodily out the hatch. Nanodocs were one
of the great boons of civilization. They healed every minor injury, preserved
youth, enhanced beauty. The only people denied their full beneficence were
convicts.

Over and over echoed the words, in that deep, noxious drawl
Glenn had hated for so many years:

“I sentence you to hell.”

Aaron McCandless. Magistrate and de facto dictator of this
backwater sector. The man who had framed him.

Glenn soberly confronted the knowledge that he and this
world would get to know each other very well. None of his allies — assuming any
still existed — would know where to find him. His location would be a secret
kept by the magistrate and a handful of his toadies. Even Glenn himself had no
idea where he was. The jumpship had bounced at least a dozen times; he could be
anywhere among the ten thousand worlds administrated by McCandless — surely far
from the four that were inhabited.

Glenn had spoken out against the powers-that-be. He had
challenged the wrong people, thinking that law and morality would protect him.

This place had only one purpose: To make him suffer for his
insolence.

The sheer bite of the sun’s rays forced him out of his sour
meditation. It was simply too uncomfortable to indulge in inactivity. He thrust
his fingers into a crack in the mud. A few small grains crumbled away, but the
crust was too rigid to break loose; even a shovel would not have helped.
Burying himself out of the sunshine was not an option.

He stood and began to walk.

The motion cleared his mind. The blueness of the sky and the
oxygen soaking into his lungs took on meaning: The planet was habitable. There
had to be a viable ecosystem here, or had been in the recent past. He could
find it. He
would
find it.

As the sun climbed, it became apparent that he was in the
southern hemisphere. He steered south, away from the equator. That kept the
direct brilliance out of his face, and if the desert proved to be vast, at
least that direction would gradually take him to cooler latitudes.

o0o

Thirst claimed him early, tormenting him even more than
the blistering of his shoulders. His tongue scraped the insides of his cheeks
and adhered to his palate. He would have licked his sweat, except that the heat
evaporated the liquid out of his pores before it could surface. He would have
gulped down his own urine, but his bladder held none.

He saw shimmering areas in the distance that looked
teasingly like water. Mirages. He plodded on, dreaming of swimming pools, ice
cubes, tumblers of lemonade, snow banks. The visions grew acutely realistic — as
real as the cold in the faces of the bureaucrats at his trial, as icy as the
glee of the magistrate. How long had they been scheming to put him away? It
must have taken years in the planning.

At last, after many hours, a sinkhole offered shade. He
collapsed into it, unable to climb down gracefully. Dust roiled up at the
impact, making him cough. But at last he was out of the direct blast of stellar
radiation. He could remain quiescent, conserving his fluids.

An eternity later, night fell. The temperature plummeted. By
then, though his throat resembled sandpaper and his head throbbed, he had the
strength to climb out of the pit. He promised himself to travel only beneath
the stars, as he would have done to start with had McCandless not had him
dropped in an exposed location. He staggered on, keening his ears, hoping to
hear the scurry of tiny feet or the flutter of wings, anything that might
confirm the ability of the planet to support life.

A hot, convection-driven breeze puffed at the sand, its
whisper faint beneath the rasping of his lungs and the scuffing of his
blistered feet.

Somehow he dragged one foot in front of the other. When the
sky to the east turned indigo and the fainter stars blended into the sky, he
found a crevice in a low, south-facing butte and propped himself up where the
sunlight would not touch him.

The increasing light revealed the first hints of a plateau
in the direction he had been heading, no doubt the southern boundary of the
basin. A higher elevation might mean cooler air and a new climatic zone. It was
as good a goal as any.

He died long before he reached it.

o0o

When he revived, stars hung overhead. Cool zephyrs of air
actually produced goose bumps on his limbs. The moon he had seen upon his
arrival was already well above the horizon, indicating that sunrise was only a
few hours away. The light of a second, larger moon gave his body a sickly hue,
but he was not sick. Nor was he dead. Not anymore.

The pain was gone. Lying there in a cleft where he had
dragged himself to die that evening, he was restored to his default morph, that
of a tall, muscular man, seemingly twenty-three years old.

This was the bitterest part of his ordeal: Death was no
escape. His nanodocs had not been entirely deactivated. Stripping him of his
citizen’s right to immortality was beyond McCandless’s authority. Capital
offenses had to be referred back to the quadrant’s central judiciary.
McCandless hadn’t wanted to risk exposure of the conspiracy.

Glenn might die a hundred deaths. No choice. He had control
over one and only one aspect of his existence: whether or not to give in to
despair.

McCandless would like it if Glenn broke down. So Glenn would
not break down.

As he tried to stand, he swayed. That was when the
ghastliness of his situation truly struck home. He was still critically
dehydrated. His docs had the ability to snag water molecules from the air and
soil to incorporate into his body, but there was little for them to borrow, and
they had their limits. They had found enough to revive him, and once life
resumed, their programming cancelled further effort.

He stood again. He ached everywhere, revealing that the
docs, finding little organic matter in the soil, had stolen material from his
muscle tissues to resupply his organs. Hunger gnawed his insides, mitigated
only by thirst. His resurrection had won him a reprieve of a few hours.

Making sure of his direction, he forced himself forward. The
plateau became his marker. As morning broke, the escarpment no longer hid in
the haze of the horizon; it was distinct, rich with detail such as fissures,
deposits of scree, and the striations of sedimentary layers. How many lives
would it take to get to the base of the slope? How many lives to climb it?

o0o

Eighty-nine deaths later, he found water.

Only upon reaching the shore was he certain it was not
another mirage. He had first seen the taunting, glittering surface after he had
struggled across the plateau to its southern cliffs. Gazing down into yet
another vast, desolate basin, he had estimated the small sea’s diameter at
about one hundred fifty kilometers. Here in the flat he could not see the other
side.

Determining how long the trek had taken in clock time was
problematic. On several occasions he had collapsed in open terrain where the
ovenlike noon desiccated his body faster than the nanodocs could restore it overnight.
Mummified, he lay dead until such time as a little extra humidity crept into
the air, providing his microscopic caretakers with the means to ferry his soul
back across the Styx. Months or years might have passed.

The water, now that he had reached it, was forbidding.
Nothing grew at its edges or within its depths. A thick white crust of salt,
hard as metal and razor-edged, filled the beach zone, forcing him to tread with
caution. He knew he would find no source of drink, but he plunged in, eager to recall
the caress of liquid against his skin.

He floundered like a fish atop a gigantic bowl of gelatin.
Eventually he bounced onto the beach, where he gashed open his legs. The sea
was too saline even to swim in!

The trickle of blood from the wounds ate away at his
consciousness. He couldn’t afford the loss of bodily fluid, and he had risked
the daylight in his final push to reach the shore. He would die soon. No
avoiding it. Already the dread was climbing up his gullet like a bloated worm.

He would not be defeated. Would not. Even here, in this
ridiculous situation, he could find something to use to his advantage. For
once, dying would not be a setback. Because as he lay down to wait for the end,
he left his feet in the water.

o0o

Moons’ light greeted him as he revived. His body brimmed
with vigor, thirst and hunger temporarily banished. Accepting the generosity of
the sea, his docs had resupplied his fluids, filtering out excess salt, and
somewhere in those poisonous waves had found enough organic matter to rebuild
his tissues. For the first time since he’d arrived on the planet, he was
totally restored.