ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES
Born in Stroud, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.
Like his friend and colleague Stephen Baxter, McAuley has a foot in several different camps of science fiction writing, being considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modern and stylistic sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as “radical hard science fiction,” but he also writes Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, and he also is one of the major young writers who are producing that revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Baroque Space Opera, reminiscent of the Superscience stories of the thirties taken to an even higher level of intensity and scale (wait a minute! how many feet does he have, anyway?). His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, one of the earliest examples of the New Space Opera, was published in 1988, and won the Philip K. Dick Award. It was followed by sequels, Secret Harmonies and Eternal Light, and by one of the most vivid of the recent spate of Martian novels, Red Dust. With his next novel, Pasquale’s Angel, he put yet another foot down in yet another camp, producing an ingenious and gorgeously colored Alternate History where Leonardo di Vinci brings modern technology to Europe centuries before its time. His next novel, 1996’s Fairyland, perhaps his best-known novel and perhaps also his best performance to date at novel length, took us to a troubled future Europe thrown into chaos by fractional politics and out-of-control biotechnology, only a few years into the next century; it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award. With his next novel project, though, he is plunging back into Space Opera territory, on an even more ambitious scale, with a major new trilogy, Confluence, set ten million years in the future, the first volume of which, Child of the River, has just been published.
McAuley is not as prolific at shorter lengths as Baxter, having built most of his reputation to date on his novels, but has produced some memorable short work over the last fourteen years, with stories such as “The Temporary King,” “Jacob’s Rock,” “Exiles,” “Inheritance,” “Karl and the Ogre,” “Gene Wars,” and others. In the last couple of years, his stories seem to have increased in impact and complexity, and recent stories such as “Slaves,” “Children of the Revolution,” “Prison
Dreams,” “Recording Angel,” “Second Skin,” “17,” and “Sea Change, With Monsters” strike me as being even better than his already distinguished previous work, and I look forward with anticipation to see what he produces in the years to come.
A wide range of influences can be seen in McAuley’s work, from Cordwainer Smith and Brian Aldiss to Roger Zelazny and Larry Niven, topped off with a dash of Samuel R. Delany, with perhaps some H. G. Wells to give a bottom to the mixture. All of which and more are evident in the evocative, supercharged, and intense little story that follows, packed with enough new ideas to fuel many another author’s six hundred-page novel, that takes us far into the future and thousands of light-years from home for a very odd sort of family reunion … .
McAuley’s other books include two collections of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country, and an original anthology coedited with Kim Newman, In Dreams.
And with exactly a year left before the end of the century-long gathering of her clade, she went to Paris with her current lover, racing ahead of midnight and the beginning of the New Year. Paris! The Premier Quartier: the early Twentieth Century. Fireworks bursting in great flowers above the night-black Seine, and a brawling carnival which under a multicolored rain of confetti filled every street from the Quai du Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe.
Escorted by her lover (they had been hunting big game in the Pleistocene–era taiga of Siberia; he still wore his safari suit, and a Springfield rifle was slung over his shoulder), she crossed to the Paleolithic oak woods of the Ile de la Cite. In the middle of the great stone circle naked druids with blue-stained skins beat huge drums under flaring torches, while holographic ghosts swung above the electric lights of the Twentieth Century shore, a fleet of luminous clouds dancing in the sky. Her attentive lover identified them for her, leaning against her shoulder so she could sight along his arm. He was exactly her height, with piercing blue eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard.
An astronaut. A gene pirate. Emperor Victoria. Mickey Mouse.
“What is a mouse?”
He pointed. “That one, the black-skinned creature with the circular ears.
She leaned against his solid human warmth. “For an animal, it seems very much like a person. Was it a product of the gene wars?”
“It is a famous icon of the country where I was born. My countrymen preferred creatures of the imagination to those of the real world. It is why they produced so few good authors.”
“But you were a good author.”
“I was not bad, except at the end. Something bad always happened to all good writers from my country. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but without exception.”
“What is it carrying?”
“A light saber. It is an imaginary weapon that is authentic for the period. They were obsessed with weapons and divisions. They saw the world as a struggle of good against evil. That was how wars could be called good, except by those who fought in them.”
She didn’t argue. Her lover, a partial, had been modelled on a particular Twentieth Century writer, and had direct access to the appropriate records in the Library. Although she had been born just at the end of the Twentieth Century, she had long ago forgotten everything about it.
Behind them, the drums reached a frenzied climax and fell silent. The sacrificial victim writhed on the heel stone and the chief druid lifted the still beating heart above his head in triumph. Blood that looked black in the torchlight ran down his arms.
The spectators beyond the circle clapped or toasted each other. One man was trying to persuade his companion to fuck on the altar. They were invisible to the druids, who were merely puppets lending local color to the scene.
“I’m getting tired of this,” she said.
“Of course. We could go to Cuba. The ocean fishing there is good. Or to Afrique, to hunt lions. I think I liked that best, but after a while I could no longer do it. That was one of the things that destroyed my writing.”
“I’m getting tired of you,” she said, and her lover bowed and walked away.
She was getting tired of everything.
She had been getting tired of everything for longer than she could remember. What was the point of living forever if you did nothing new? Despite all her hopes, this faux Earth, populated by two billion puppets and partials, and ten million of her clade, had failed to revive her.
In one more year, the fleet of spaceships would disperse; the sun, an ordinary G2 star she had moved by the pressure of its own light upon gravity tethered reflective sails, would go supernova; nothing would be saved but the store of information which the Library had collected and collated. She had not yet accessed any of that. Perhaps that would save her.
She returned to the carnival, stayed there three days. But despite use of various intoxicants she could not quite lose herself in it, could not escape the feeling that she had failed after all. This was supposed to be a great congress of her own selves, a place to share and exchange memories that spanned five million years and the entire Galaxy. But it seemed to her that the millions of her selves simply wanted to forget what they were, to lose themselves in the pleasures of the flesh. Of course, many had assumed bodies for the first time to attend the gathering; one could perhaps excuse them, for this carnival was to them a genuine farewell to flesh they would abandon at the end of the year.
On the third day she was sitting in cold dawn light at a green café table in the Jardin des Tuileries, by the great fountain. Someone was sculpting the clouds through which the sun was rising. The café was crowded with guests, partials and puppets, androids and animals—even a silver gynoid, its face a smooth oval mirror. The air buzzed with the tiny machines which attended the guests; in one case, a swirling cloud of gnat-sized beads was a guest. After almost a century in costume, the guests were reverting to type.
She sipped a citron pressé, listened to the idle chatter. The party in Paris would break up soon. The revelers would disperse to other parts of the Earth. Except for a clean-up crew, the puppets, partials and all the rest would be returned to store. At another table, a youthful version of her erstwhile lover was talking to an older man with brown hair brushed back from his high forehead and pale blue eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his spectacles.
“The lions, Jim. Go to Afrique and listen to the lions roar at night. There is no sound like it.”
“Ah, and I would love that, but Nora would not stand it. She needs the comforts of civilization. Besides, the thing we must not forget is that I would not be able to see the lions. Instead I think we will drink some more of this fine white wine and you will tell me about them.”
“Aw hell, I could bring you a living lion if you like,” the younger man said. “I could describe him to you and you could touch him and smell him until you got the idea.” He was quite unaware that there were two lions right there in the park, accompanying a naked girl child whose feet, with pigeon’s wings at the ankles, did not quite touch the ground.
Did these puppets come here every day, and recreate a conversation millions of years dead for the delectation of the guests? Was each day to them the same day? Suddenly, she felt as if a cold wind was blowing through her, as if she was raised up high and naked upon the pinnacle of the mountain of her millions of years.
“You confuse the true and the real,” someone said. A man’s voice, soft, lisping. She looked around but could not see who amongst the amazing people and creatures might have said such a thing, the truest realest thing she had heard for … how long? She could not remember how long.
She left, and went to New Orleans.
Where it was night, and raining, a soft warm rain falling in the lamplit streets. It was the Twentieth Century here, too. They were cooking crawfish under the mimosa trees at every intersection of the brick-paved streets, and burning the Maid of New Orleans over Lake Pontchartrain. The Maid hung up there in the black night sky—wrapped in oiled silks and shining like a star, with the blue-white wheel of the Galaxy a backdrop that spanned the horizon—then flamed like a comet and plunged into the black water while cornet bands played “Laissez le Bon Temps Rouler.”
She fell in with a trio of guests whose originals were all less than a thousand years old. They were students of the Rediscovery, they said, although
it was not quite clear what the Rediscovery was. They wore green (“For Earth,” one said, although she thought that odd because most of the Earth was blue), and drank a mild psychotropic called absinthe, bitter white stuff poured into water over a sugar cube held in silver tongs. They were interested in the origins of the clade, which amused her greatly, because of course she was its origin, going amongst the copies and clones disguised as her own self. But even if they made her feel every one of her five million years, she liked their innocence, their energy, their openness.
She strolled with her new friends through the great orrery at the waterfront. Its display of the lost natural wonders of the Galaxy was derived from records and memories guests had deposited in the Library, and changed every day. She was listening to the three students discuss the possibility that humans had not originally come from the Earth when someone went past and said loudly, looking right at her, “None of them look like you, but they are just like you all the same. All obsessed with the past because they are trapped in it.”
A tall man with a black, spade-shaped beard and black eyes that looked at her with infinite amusement. The same soft, lisping voice she had heard in the café in Paris. He winked and plunged into the heart of the white-hot whirlpool of the accretion disc of the black hole of Sigma Draconis 2, which drew matter from the photosphere of its companion blue-white giant—before the reconstruction, it had been one of the wonders of the Galaxy. She followed, but he was gone.
She looked for him everywhere in New Orleans, and fell in with a woman who before the gathering had lived in the water vapor zone of a gas giant, running a tourist business for those who could afford to download themselves into the ganglia of living blimps a kilometer across. The woman’s name was Rapha; she had ruled the worlds of a hundred stars once, but had given that up long before she had answered the call for the gathering.
“I was a man when I had my empire,” Rapha said, “but I gave that up too. When you’ve done everything, what’s left but to party?”
She had always been a woman, she thought. And for two million years she had ruled an empire of a million worlds—for all she knew, the copy she had left behind ruled there still. But she didn’t tell Rapha that. No one knew who she was, on all the Earth. She said, “Then let’s party until the end of the world.”
She knew that it wouldn’t work—she had already tried everything, in every combination—but because she didn’t care if it worked or not, perhaps this time it would.
They raised hell in New Orleans, and went to Antarctica.
It was raining in Antarctica, too.
It had been raining for a century, ever since the world had been made.
Statite sails hung in stationary orbit, reflecting sunlight so that the swamps and cycad forests and volcanic mountain ranges of the South Pole were in perpetual day. The hunting lodge was on a floating island a hundred
meters above the tops of the giant ferns, close to the edge of a shallow viridescent lake. A flock of delicate, dappled Dromiceiomimus squealed and splashed in the shallows; great dragonflies flitted through the rainy middle air; at the misty horizon the perfect cones of three volcanoes sent up threads of smoke into the sagging clouds.
She and Rapha rode bubbles in wild loops above the forests, chasing dinosaurs or goading dinosaurs to chase them. Then they plunged into one of the volcanoes and caused it to erupt, and one of the hunters overrode the bubbles and brought them back and politely asked them to stop.
The lake and the forest were covered in a mantle of volcanic ash. The sky was milky with ash.
“The guests are amused, but they will not be amused forever. It is the hunting that is important here. If I may suggest other areas where you might find enjoyment …”
He was a slightly younger version of her last lover. A little less salt in his beard; a little more spring in his step.
She said, “How many of you have I made?”
But he didn’t understand the question.
They went to Thebes (and some of the hunting party went with them), where they ran naked and screaming through the streets, toppling the statues of the gods. They went to Greenland, and broke the rainbow bridge of Valhalla and fought the trolls and ran again, laughing, with Odin’s thunder about their ears. Went to Troy, and set fire to the wooden horse before the Greeks could climb inside it.
None of it mattered. The machines would repair everything; the puppets would resume their roles. Troy would fall again the next night, on schedule.
“Let’s go to Golgotha,” Rapha said, wild-eyed, very drunk.
This was in a bar of some Christian–era American town. Outside, a couple of the men were roaring up and down the main street on motorcycles, weaving in and out of the slow-moving, candy-colored cars. Two cops watched indulgently.
“Or Afrique,” Rapha said. “We could hunt man-apes.”
“I’ve done it before,” someone said. He didn’t have a name, but some kind of number. He was part of a clone. His shaved head was horribly scarred; one of his eyes was mechanical. He said, “You hunt them with spears or slings. They’re pretty smart, for man-apes. I got killed twice.”
Someone came into the bar. Tall, saturnine, black eyes, a spade-shaped beard. At once, she asked her machines if he was a partial or a guest, but the question confused them. She asked them if there were any strangers in the world, and at once they told her that there were the servants and those of her clade, but no strangers.
He said softly, “Are you having a good time?”
“Who are you?”
“Perhaps I’m the one who whispers in your ear, ‘Remember that you are mortal.’ Are you mortal, Angel?”
No one in the world should know her name. Her true name.
Danger, danger, someone sang in the background of the song that was playing on the jukebox. Danger, burbled the coffee pot on the heater behind the counter of the bar.
She said, “I made you, then.”
“Oh no. Not me. You made all of this. Even all of the guests, in one way or another. But not me. We can’t talk here. Try the one place which has any use in this faux world. There’s something there I’m going to take, and when I’ve done that I’ll wait for you.”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Perhaps I want to kill you.” He smiled. “And perhaps you want to die. It’s one thing you have not tried yet.”
He walked away, and when she started after him Rapha got in the way. Rapha hadn’t seen the man. She said the others wanted to go to Hy Brasil.
“The gene wars,” Rapha said. “That’s where we started to become what we are. And then—I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to party to the end of the world. When the sun explodes, I’m going to ride the shock wave as far as I can. I’m not going back. There’s a lot of us who aren’t going back. Why should we? We went to get copied and woke up here, thousands of years later, thousands of light-years away. What’s to go back for? Wait! Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and walked out.
The man had scared her. He had touched the doubt which had made her organize the gathering. She wanted a place to hide so that she could think about that before she confronted him.
Most of the North American continent was, in one form or another, modeled after the Third Millennium of the Christian Era. She took a car (a red Dodge as big as a boat, with fins and chrome trim) and drove to Dallas, where she was attacked by tribes of horsemen near the glittering slag of the wrecked city. She took up with a warlord for a while, poisoned all his wives, grew bored and seduced his son, who murdered his father and began a civil war. She went south on horseback through the alien flower jungles which had conquered Earth after humanity had more or less abandoned it, then caught a pneumatique all the way down the spine of Florida to Key West.
A version of her last lover lived there, too. She saw him in a bar by the beach two weeks later. There were three main drugs in Key West: cigarettes, heroin, and alcohol. She had tried them all, decided she liked alcohol best. It helped you forget yourself in an odd, dissociative way that was both pleasant and disturbing. Perhaps she should have spent more of her long life drunk.
This version of her lover liked alcohol, too. He was both lumbering but shy, pretending not to notice the people who looked at him while he drank several complicated cocktails. He had thickened at the waist; his beard was white and full. His eyes, webbed by wrinkles, were still piercingly blue, but his gaze was vague and troubled. She eavesdropped while he talked with the
barkeep. She wanted to find out how the brash man who had to constantly prove himself against the world had turned out.
Badly, it seemed. The world was unforgiving, and his powers were fading.
“I lost her, Carlos,” he told the barkeep. He meant his muse. “She’s run out on me, the bitch.”
“Now, Papa, you know that is not true,” the young barkeep said. “I read your article in Life just last week.”
“It was shit, Carlos. I can fake it well enough, but I can’t do the good stuff any more. I need some quiet, and all day I get tourists trying to take my picture and spooking the cats. When I was younger I could work all day in a café, but now I need … hell, I don’t know what I need. She’s a bitch, Carlos. She only loves the young.” Later, he said, “I keep dreaming of lions. One of the long white beaches in Afrique where the lions come down at dusk. They play there like cats, and I want to get to them, but I can’t.”
But Carlos was attending to another customer. Only she heard the old man. Later, after he had gone, she talked with Carlos herself. He was a puppet, and couldn’t understand, but it didn’t matter.
“All this was a bad idea,” she said. She meant the bar, Key West, the Pacific Ocean, the world. “Do you want to know how it started?”
“Of course, ma’am. And may I bring you another drink?”
“I think I have had enough. You stay there and listen. Millions of years ago, while all of what would become humanity lived on the nine worlds and thousand worldlets around a single star in the Sky Hunter arm of the Galaxy, there was a religion which taught that individuals need never die. It was this religion which first drove humanity from star to star in the Galaxy. Individuals copied their personalities into computers, or cloned themselves, or spread their personalities through flocks of birds, or fish, or amongst hive insects. But there was one flaw in this religion. After millions of years, many of its followers were no longer human in form or in thought, except that they could trace back, generation upon generation, their descent from a single human ancestor. They had become transcendents, and each individual transcendent had become a clade, or an alliance, of millions of different minds. Mine is merely one of many, but it is one of the oldest, and one of the largest.
“I brought us here to unite us all in shared experiences. It isn’t possible that one of us could have seen every wonder in the Galaxy, visit every world. There are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy. It takes a year or two to explore the worlds of each star, and then there is the travel between the stars. But there are ten million of us here. Clones, copies, descendants of clones and copies. Many of us have done nothing but explore. We have not seen everything, but we have seen most of it. I thought that we could pool all our information, that it would result in … something. A new religion, godhead. Something new, something different. But it seems that most just want to party, and I wonder how much I have changed, for they are so little like me. Many of them say that they will not return, that they will stay here until the
sun ends it all. Some have joined in the war in China—a few even refuse regeneration. Mostly, though, they want to party.”
“There are parties every night, ma’am,” the barkeep said. “That’s Key West for you.”
“Someone was following me, but I lost him. I think he was tracing me through the travel net, but I used contemporary transport to get here. He frightened me and I ran away, but perhaps he is what I need. I think I will find him. What month is this?”
“June, ma’am. Very hot, even for June. It means a bad hurricane season.”
“It will get hotter,” she said, thinking of the machine ticking away in the core of the sun.
And went to Tibet, where the Library was.
For some reason, the high plateau had been constructed as a replica of part of Mars. She had given her servants a lot of discretion when building the Earth; it pleased her to be surprised, although it did not happen very often.
She had arrived at the top of one of the rugged massifs that defined the edge of the vast basin. There was a shrine here, a mani eye painted on a stone pillar, a heap of stones swamped with skeins of red and blue and white and yellow prayer flags raveling in the cold wind. The scarp dropped away steeply to talus slopes and the flood lava of the basin’s floor, a smooth, lightly cratered red plain mantled with fleets of barchan dunes. Directly below, nestling amongst birches at the foot of the scarp’s sheer cliff, was the bone-white Library.
She took a day to descend the winding path. Now and then pilgrims climbed past her. Many shuffled on their knees, eyes lifted to the sky; a few fell face-forward at each step, standing up and starting again at the point where their hands touched the ground. All whirled prayer wheels and muttered their personal mantra as they climbed, and few spared her more than a glance, although at noon while she sat under a gnarled juniper one old man came to her and shared his heel of dry black bread and stringy dried yak meat. She learned from him that the pilgrims were not puppets, as she had thought, but were guests searching for enlightenment. That was so funny and so sad she did not know what to think about it.
The Library was a replica of the White Palace of the Potala. It had been a place of quiet order and contemplation, where all the stories that the clade had told each other, all the memories that they had downloaded or exchanged, had been collected and collated.
Now it was a battleground.
Saffron-robed monks armed with weaponry from a thousand different eras were fighting against man-shaped black androids. Bodies of men and machines were sprawled on the great steps; smoke billowed from the topmost ranks of the narrow windows; red and green energy beams flickered against the pink sky.
She walked through the carnage untouched. Nothing in this world could touch her. Only perhaps the man who was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged beneath the great golden Buddha, which a stray shot from some energy weapon had decapitated and half-melted to slag. On either side, hundreds of candles floated in great bowls filled with water; their lights shivered and flickered from the vibration of heavy weaponry.
The man did not open his eyes as she approached, but he said softly, “I already have what I need. These foolish monks are defending a lost cause. You should stop them.”
“It is what they have to do. They can’t destroy us, of course, but I could destroy you.”
“Guests can’t harm other guests,” he said calmly. “It is one of the rules.”
“I am not a guest. Nor, I think, are you.”
She told her machines to remove him. Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes. He said, “Your machines are invisible to the puppets and partials you created to populate this fantasy world. I am invisible to the machines. I do not draw my energy from the world grid, but from elsewhere.”
And then he leaped at her, striking with formal moves millions of years old. The Angry Grasshopper, the Rearing Horse, the Snapping Mantis. Each move, magnified by convergent energies, could have killed her, evaporated her body, melted her machines.
But she allowed her body to respond, countering his attacks. She had thought that she might welcome death; instead, she was amused and exhilarated by the fury of her response. The habit of living was deeply ingrained; now it had found a focus.
Striking attitudes, tangling in a flurry of blows and counterblows, they moved through the battleground of the Library, through its gardens, moved down the long talus slope at the foot of the massif in a storm of dust and shattered stones.
At the edge of a lake which filled a small, perfectly circular crater, she finally tired of defensive moves and went on the attack. The Striking Eagle, the Plunging Dragon, the Springing Tiger Who Defends Her Cubs. He countered in turn. Stray energies boiled the lake dry. The dry ground shook, split open in a mosaic of plates. Gradually, a curtain of dust was raised above the land, obscuring the setting sun and the green face of the Moon, which was rising above the mountains.
They broke apart at last. They stood in the center of a vast crater of vitrified rock. Their clothes hung in tatters about their bodies. It was night, now. Halfway up the scarp of the massif, small lightnings flashed where the monks still defended the Library.
“Who are you?” she said again. “Did I create you?”
“I’m closer to you than anyone else in this strange mad world,” he said.
That gave her pause. All the guests, clones or copies or replicants, were of her direct genetic lineage.
She said, “Are you my death?”
As if in answer, he attacked again. But she fought back as forcefully as before, and when he broke off, she saw that he was sweating.
“I am stronger than you thought,” she said.
He took out a small black cube from his tattered tunic. He said, “I have what I need. I have the memory core of the Library. Everything anyone who came here placed on record is here.”
“Then why do you want to kill me?”
“Because you are the original. I thought it would be fitting, after I stole this.”
She laughed. “You foolish man! Do you think we rely on a single physical location, a single master copy? It is the right of everyone in the clade to carry away the memories of everyone else. Why else are we gathered here?”
“I am not of your clade.” He tossed the cube into the air, caught it, tucked it away. “I will use this knowledge against you. Against all of you. I have all your secrets.”
“You say you are closer to me than a brother, yet you do not belong to the clade. You want to use our memories to destroy us.” She had a sudden insight. “Is this war, then?”
He bowed. He was nearly naked, lit by the green light of the Moon and the dimming glow of the slag that stretched away in every direction. “Bravo,” he said. “But it has already begun. Perhaps it is even over by now; after all, we are twenty thousand light-years above the plane of the Galactic disc, thirty-five thousand light-years from the hub of your Empire. It will take you that long to return. And if the war is not over, then this will finish it.”
She was astonished. Then she laughed. “What an imagination I have!”
He bowed again, and said softly, “You made this world from your imagination, but you did not imagine me.”
And he went somewhere else.
Her machines could not tell her where he had gone; she called upon all the machines in the world, but he was no longer on the Earth. Nor was he amongst the fleet of ships which had carried the guests—in suspended animation, as frozen embryos, as codes triply engraved in gold—to the world she had created for the gathering.
There were only two other places he could be, and she did not think he could have gone to the sun. If he had, then he would have triggered the machine at the core, and destroyed her and everyone else in the subsequent supernova.
So she went to the Moon.
She arrived on the farside. The energies he had used against her suggested that he had his own machines, and she did not think that he would have hidden them in full view of the Earth.
The machines which she had instructed to recreate the Earth for the one hundred years of the gathering had recreated the Moon, too, so that the oceans of the Earth would have the necessary tides; it had been easier than
tangling gravithic resonances to produce the same effect. It had taken little extra effort to recreate the forests which had cloaked the Moon for a million years, between the first faltering footsteps and the abandonment of the Earth.
It was towards the end of the long Lunar night. All around, blue firs soared up for hundreds of meters, cloaked in wide fans of needles that in the cold and the dark had drooped down to protect the scaly trunks. The gray rocks were coated in thin snow, and frozen lichens crunched underfoot. Her machines scattered in every direction, quick as thought. She sat down on top of a big rough boulder and waited.
It was very quiet. The sky was dominated by the triple-armed pinwheel of the Galaxy. It was so big that when she looked at one edge she could not see the other. The Arm of the Warrior rose high above the arch of the Arm of the Hunter; the Arm of the Archer curved in the opposite direction, below the close horizon. Star clusters made long chains of concentrated light through the milky haze of the galactic arms. There were lines and threads and globes and clouds of stars, all fading into a general misty radiance dissected by dark lanes which barred the arms at regular intervals. The core was knitted from thin shells of stars in tidy orbits concentrically packed around the great globular clusters of the heart stars, like layers of glittering tissue wrapped around a heap of jewels.
Every star had been touched by humankind. Existing stars had been moved or destroyed; millions of new stars and planetary systems had been created by collapsing dust clouds. A garden of stars, regulated, ordered, tidied. The Library held memories of every star, every planet, every wonder of the old untamed Galaxy. She was beginning to realize that the gathering was not the start of something new, but the end of five million years of Galactic colonization.
After a long time, the machines came back, and she went where they told her.
It was hidden within a steep-sided crater, a castle or maze of crystal vanes that rose in serried ranks from deep roots within the crust, where they collected and focused tidal energy. He was at its heart, busily folding together a small spacecraft. The energy of the vanes had been greatly depleted by the fight, and he was trying to concentrate the remainder in the motor of the spacecraft. He was preparing to leave.
Her machines rose up and began to spin, locking in resonance with the vanes and bleeding off their store of energy. The machines began to glow as she bounded down the steep smooth slope towards the floor of the crater, red-hot, white-hot, as hot as the core of the sun, for that was where they were diverting the energy stored in the vanes.
Violet threads flicked up, but the machines simply absorbed that energy too. Their stark white light flooded the crater, bleaching the ranks of crystal vanes.
She walked through the traps and tricks of the defenses, pulled him from
his fragile craft and took him up in a bubble of air to the neutral point between the Moon and the Earth.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why you came here. Tell me about the war.”
He was surprisingly calm. He said, “I am a first generation clone, but I am on the side of humanity, not the transcendents. Transcendent clades are a danger to all of the variety within and between the civilizations in the Galaxy. At last the merely human races have risen against them. I am just one weapon in the greatest war ever fought.”
“You are my flesh. You are of my clade.”
“I am a secret agent. I was made from a single cell stolen from you several hundred years before you set off for this fake Earth and the gathering of your clade. I arrived only two years ago, grew my power source, came down to steal the memory core and kill you. Although I failed to kill you before, we are no longer in the place where you draw your power. Now—”
After a moment in which nothing happened, he screamed in frustration and despair. She pitied him. Pitied all those who had bent their lives to produce this poor vessel, this failed moment, although all the power, the intrigues and desperate schemes his presence implied were as remote from her as the politics of a termite nest.
She said, “Your power source is not destroyed, but my machines take all its energy. Why did your masters think us dangerous?”
“Because you would fill the Galaxy with your own kind. Because you would end human evolution. Because you will not accept that the Universe is greater than you can ever be. Because you refuse to die, and death is a necessary part of evolution.”
She laughed. “Silly little man! Why would we accept limits? We are only doing what humanity has always done. We use science to master nature just as man-apes changed their way of thinking by making tools and using fire. Humanity has always striven to become more than it is, to grow spiritually and morally and intellectually, to go up to the edge and step over it.”
For the first time in a million years, those sentiments did not taste of ashes. By trying to destroy her, he had shown her what her life was worth.
He said, “But you do not change. That is why you are so dangerous. You and the other clades of transhumans have stopped humanity evolving. You would fill the Galaxy with copies of a dozen individuals who are so scared of physical death that they will do any strange and terrible thing to themselves to survive.”
He gestured at the blue-white globe that hung beneath their feet, small and vulnerable against the vast blackness between galaxies.
“Look at your Earth! Humanity left it four million years ago, yet you chose to recreate it for this gathering. You had a million years of human history on Earth to choose from, and four and a half billion years of the history of the planet itself, and yet almost half of your creation is given over to a single century.”
“It is the century where we became what we are,” she said, remembering
Rapha. “It is the century when it became possible to become transhuman, when humanity made the first steps beyond the surface of a single planet.”
“It is the century you were born in. You would freeze all history if you could, an eternity of the same thoughts thought by the same people. You deny all possibilities but your own self.”
He drew himself up, defiant to the last. He said, “My ship will carry the memory core home without me. You take all, and give nothing. I give my life, and I give you this.”
He held up something as complex and infolded as the throat of an orchid. It was a vacuum fluctuation, a hole in reality that when inflated would remove them from the Universe. She looked away at once—the image was already burned in her brain—and threw him into the core of the sun. He did not even have a chance to scream.
Alone in her bubble of air, she studied the wheel of the Galaxy, the ordered pattern of braids and clusters. Light was so slow. It took a hundred thousand years to cross from one edge of the Galaxy to the other. Had the war against her empire, and the empires of all the other transcendents, already ended? Had it already changed the Galaxy, stirred the stars into new patterns? She would not know until she returned, and that would take thirty-five thousand years.
But she did not have to return. In the other direction was the limitless Universe, a hundred billion galaxies. She hung there a long time, watching little smudges of ancient light resolve out of the darkness. Empires of stars wherever she looked, wonders without end.
We will fight the war, she thought, and we shall win, and we will go on forever and ever.
And went down, found the bar near the beach. She would wait until the old man came in, and buy him a drink, and talk to him about his dream of the lions.