Macrolife (20 page)

Standing, he put on his coveralls, then sat down to pull on his boots. For a moment he thought that he understood Anulka and Blakfar. What better way to keep him here than through Anulka? He stood up and put on his jacket, shivering from the drop in temperature. He thought of Anulka's warmth and the luxurious curve of her hip and belly. He missed her so easily, so quickly, he noted.

He turned to the flitter and climbed inside. The call light was on. He did not remember hearing the whistle at all. Sitting down, he opened the link.

“John,” Miklos said, “what happened? I had some free time, so I thought to check with you.”

“I'm fine, just away from the flitter for a while. I met with some of the descendants of the colonists.” John turned on the lights. The growing darkness outside caused him to think of the old starship.

“What's the matter, John?”

“Nothing.” He sneezed.

“You'd better get to a medic.”

“I'll take care of it.” He paused. “What about the starship?”

“The crews are checking it now.”

“Why didn't you tell me it would be so soon?”

“You were more interested in the planet. Anyway, some of the hulk seems to be functioning.”

“Can I go up there in the flitter now?”

“I'd prefer it if you took the shuttle home first. What about your friends?”

“They're going west from here with Blakfar. I think there's a village near the mountains, in the chain that runs east, then south. They're a long way from home.”

“Blakfar? What are you talking about?”

John told him what he had learned from Blakfar. “They're going to
walk
for about a month, until they get home. It seems they do this once a year.”

“Why don't you help them out with the flitter?”

“I'll rejoin them after I see the starship. Expect me; I'm leaving now.” He broke the link before Miklos could answer.

Turning off the cabin lights, he sat back and took the stick in his hands. The canopy came down and the flitter lifted from the dark tabletop.

He rose above the night clouds and released the craft for an automatic return to the mountain valley. The flitter rose higher, slowing the sunset for a few minutes. Below him was a gray-black plain of clouds, and the suns were a fire burning at the edge of the world. The flitter leveled off and continued northwest.

The moonless world grew dark, and stars appeared like stately marchers. He looked for home among them, then realized that it was below the horizon. He thought again of the old starship, circling in the dark through all these centuries. Anulka would miss him tomorrow, but it didn't matter. He would come to her out of the sky, in a few days at most.

He turned on the cabin lights, shutting out the view, turning the canopy into a black mirror for his thoughts. He pictured Anulka on the blanket, remembering his own uncontrollable commitment to her body. Margaret would say that he was a domesticated creature dazzled by the wild, mistaking it for something profound. It was all new, all strange to be on the outside of such a large world. He would need time to judge his experience of it; for the moment Lea was too vivid, too intense for him to believe that she wore a mask.

He turned off the cabin lights and the world expanded around him. Taking the stick, he increased the flitter's speed and altitude, until he saw the first range of mountains extending westward, massive shoulders huddling together on the planet, snowy summits aglow with starlight.

As the shuttle hauler approached home, John observed the progress of reproduction on the forward screen in the passenger module. Miklos had sent him up alone on the automatic return of an ore-filled hauler, refusing to let him use the flitter. During his absence, home had moved out of its two outer shells, reducing itself by about a kilometer over its entire surface. The new egg shape was a twin of the original, except for its three hundred kilometers of open interior. In time a large asteroid would be brought inside, to be mined and hollowed out; once braced at the center, it would provide additional surfaces. Construction would then proceed outward from its surface and inward from the two outer shells. The conic section which had been removed from the forward end of home would be put back to close the space of the new world.

It would take many years to complete the inner levels, but as soon as the human and cybernetic systems were active, the reproductive sequence would be essentially complete. A new macroworld would be born to roam the galaxy, to grow internally, and to reproduce itself when internal pressures became too great.

How many individuals had served macrolife across the centuries, their lives bound by decisions made for them by the founders? Many of the earliest citizens were still alive, precious resources conserved by a system which had given them a chance at immortality. Macrolife was committed to preserving its sparks of intelligence. Its body would reproduce endlessly, attempting all variations, gathering all knowledge, drawn forward by the fate of all things real; but the knowing mind, in whatever form, would always inhabit macrolife's center, seeking, understanding, while time lasted.

He thought of all the human flesh that would be born to fill the new world's innards; he saw all the cloned individuals from the past, alike yet different. The faces would be a living history; the eyes would gaze differently, the brain would perceive clearly and directly, unclouded by struggle, untroubled by defeat, living in a world where the very nature of rebellion had been altered.

Was this why he had gone down to Lea? To see the look of defeat, to taste something of its hardness, perhaps to wear its look in his own face? How could he argue with himself? The ruined city on Lea was an obvious failure. Lea, like all natural worlds, was the back country behind the growing urban culture of macrolife. He thought of roads leading into thick forests, winding around hillsides and down into hidden valleys, where suns were the only light. He was journeying back to the green worlds of humanity's beginnings, origins which were still present in every human being, and could not be denied without falsifying reality. Macrolife's break with planetary life was not a sharp historical discontinuity; it was a widening of nature, a birth from the complex organism of earth, a tumultuous but still legitimate birth. Space-time, with its endless resources and room to grow, was still nature; macrolife was a new kind of cellular life, multiplying in a realm as natural as the one inside the atmospheric membranes of planets.

Looking at the new shape, he wondered where the half-dozen other macroworlds were now and how different they were after a thousand years of isolation from one another. There were so many variables to consider. How many times had each world reproduced? How advanced were the individual propulsion systems? Advanced stardrives might have carried one or more of them out of the galaxy. A million years might pass before any two would meet. It was more likely that some kind of contact might be achieved through tachyon signaling, but that would require a more systematic scan of the heavens than had been attempted to date.

The parent, swimming before him in the black sea of space, seemed not at all diminished by its labor. As he drew nearer, it was almost impossible to see any differences in size. The offspring would inevitably strive to be faster, try to penetrate more deeply into unexplored regions, as it consolidated its rebellion.

He wondered where home would go next, and the thought convinced him that his loyalty was not with the childworld. Lea was suddenly a distant thought.

Home covered the screen and he saw the huge intake bay. Lights were on inside and he could make out the docking cradle. The hauler slipped in and came to rest.

 

“I came to meet you,” Blackfriar said. “We're both going to see the old starship. The salvage team is about finished with it now.”

John followed him down the corridor to the next dock, through a utility area, and into the open muzzle of a small shuttle. The lock closed behind them as they stepped up into the control area and sat down.

The shuttle pulled away, shrinking home until it was again visible next to its twin. The view changed automatically to show Lea.

After a short silence, Blackfriar said, “Tell me about my relative down there.”

“He's a lot like you. Younger, but older…from another time. Maybe we'll learn more in the starship. Frank—they're all our people down there, what we would have been….”

“Does he look like me?”

“Very much so. His name is Tomas. He says Blackfriar as Blakfar. He spends a part of each year exploring the ruins of a city, hoping to master what has been lost. His people are a mountain clan, he told me. It takes a lot of courage for him to leave the tribe and travel to the ruins.”

“Sounds like what happens to a leader, a ship's captain, trying to keep up with the skills of his ancestors.”

“A larger group lives on the plains, raiding the various mountain folk for women and supplies. I think the mountain people do some farming as well as hunting, preferring to stay in one area. Blakfar said that the nomads fight among one another, or they would have destroyed Blakfar's clan a long time ago.”

“You sound as if you want to help them.”

“How much can I help?”

“As much as you can convince Projex to back you.”

“You already know that won't be much—why pretend? I have as much chance of support as Blakfar has in convincing his people that going to the city is a worthwhile activity.”

“Yet he has people with him,” Blackfriar said.

“I think the two men go for personal reasons, because they want to impress Anulka. The girl looks up to Blakfar, though. I think she believes in him, because he looks beyond the kind of life they all live.”

Lea was growing larger on the screen. Blackfriar said, “Consider what you could do. You might want to unify the planet under some kind of benevolent rule. It's underpopulated, so it wouldn't be very hard to bring the scattered peoples together, if you could convince them. You might even succeed…. No, let me finish. Then you'd start teaching programs, engineering and medical projects. When would you leave off building a viable civilization? It might take our presence here for a half century to do it right. Do you want to be here that long? What if their particular obstacle course of development leads to a really original culture? Meddling with their development raises difficult ethical questions.”

I could live here
, John thought as he looked at the planet,
maybe even come to love it
.

“It's not even a growing culture,” Blackfriar continued, “but one that has collapsed. I've seen it more than once.”

John thought of Anulka.

“A vote of Projex might not even be enough,” Blackfriar said. “It might take a referendum of our population to sanction such a chore. Working as closely as we would have to, we might even lose some of our own people—in accidents, and some would inevitably want to stay, if you're any indication.”

“How about material aid?”

“That's easy to approve.”

“How about accepting immigrants?”

“Possible, but you know the laws. Look, there it is!”

The ancient starship was a bright diamond riding in a high polar orbit around Lea. The vessel grew larger, until they saw a massive dumbbell attached to a sluglike hull.

“It's two kilometers long,” Blackfriar said. “The thing up front is the deflector generator, to protect against hard radiation formed by collision with interstellar particles near light speed. There seem to be components missing from the ship.”

“What kind of drive does it have?”

“I've been told it had two—the field-effect pusher to bring them to a significant fraction of light speed and maybe a primitive faster-than-light effect, though at near light alone they could have made it here twice during the last millennium.”

The shuttle docked slowly with the modified lock.

“We can go in without suits,” Blackfriar said. “Wheeler and the crew are inside. They've sealed the ship and restored the air supply. Rob didn't like drifting around in a suit when the ship was opened, but he was too curious to wait.”

He's afraid for his safety
, John thought.

“I'm more curious than afraid myself,” Blackfriar said. “When you've lived more than a few lifetimes in safety, fear becomes a dear friend.”

 

The log tape hissed and crackled from nearly a millennium of static deposits. A voice spoke in archaic English: “…One group after another is abandoning the ship, as fast as the shuttle can make the round trip. The world below is beautiful. The ship's confines have been too much for many of us. A ship is not the world home was….”

“Who was he?” John asked.

“The captain, a Blackfriar,” Rob Wheeler said.

John looked at Frank, who sat listening in the command station.

“…The crew and I have the choice of taking the ship elsewhere or following the colonists down. If we go down, we'll have to take the computers and library to locate them on the surface for future generations….” The ghostly hiss of time grew louder, the stifling sound of a universe which would always envy endurance.

Blackfriar floated around in his seat to look at Wheeler.

Rob nodded. “It's all gone. They ripped it out and ferried it down. But there was an accident; a portion of the ship lost pressure. We found a skeleton and some mummified bodies. We did not find the shuttle.”

“Take me to this skeleton,” Blackfriar said.

Frank pushed himself away from his seat and floated after Wheeler into the passageway. John followed Blackfriar into the darkness.

Wheeler led the way up the center of the vessel, the lamp on his safety helmet casting a bright beam ahead of them. John felt that he was floating upward out of a dark hole; and just as quickly he imagined that he was falling headfirst into a bottomless pit.

In a few moments the dark shapes of Frank and Rob were gone, and he saw light streaming out of the chamber they had entered. He floated to the entrance, looked inside, and pulled himself into what seemed to be an airlock antechamber.

There was an overhead light, attached with its own power pack. John noted the fresh seal on the small hole in the ship's side, but the repair had come centuries too late for the human skeleton which seemed to be attached to the gray metal of the floor.

Wheeler floated near the skull. He reached down and took the crew tag in his hand.

“This was James Blackfriar,” he said, and released the tag to hover on its chain.

Blackfriar approached and floated over the bones, hands open, as if at any moment he would push himself away.

“There are others,” Wheeler said.

“Could this,” Blackfriar said, “have ever answered to the same name as my own?” He reached down and pulled on the chain. The skull loosened and floated up slowly, turning to stare at him. Blackfriar grasped it with both hands and placed it gently near the skeleton's shoulders. “Let's get out of here,” he said. “Have the remains cleared, recorded, and destroyed.”

As he followed Blackfriar and Wheeler back into the passage, John tried to forget the skeleton. Pulling himself along the way they had come, he thought of his own frame, the skull under his flesh, the brain which now tried to see death as a common event outside his world. The bones in the room behind him could not ever have been a real person; they seemed too unlikely for the fact of flesh. A man had died in that squalid corner of the starship, leaving his pitiable remains to wait there all these centuries.

Suddenly John stopped pushing himself forward on the handbar. The skeleton's frailty, and his own, astonished him. Floating in the darkness, he thought of all the accidents awaiting him if he returned to Lea.

“John!” Wheeler called from ahead. He grasped the rail and resumed his forward motion, filled with the sudden wonder of being alive at all.