“Do you think this is beautiful?” Eos asked the doll. She held it up, in case it was able to see the valley boiling under her gaze. “Nitrogen freezes to that cream color when it’s mixed with carbon monoxide.” The doll hung limply from her hand, but its shape helped her imagine someone was with her—some human. “You can smell the CO when it all boils off—and the methane, of course.” She gave the doll a brittle smile. “Oh, look!” Down in the valley, an ice tower was collapsing under hot laser light—the first light to bathe this world in centuries.
Eos had found the doll in a subsiding neighborhood of frozen townhouses, part of a city drowned in freezing air ages before and now flooded with liquid nitrogen and oxygen as the world thawed. The doll was the first person-shaped thing that this avatar had ever touched. It might also be the last humanlike thing she came across during this body’s brief existence, so Eos hadn’t been able to let it go.
She spoke with nonhuman objects all the time, of course. If she lifted her face to the tricolored laser light baking this planet, she could even talk to her self—the real Eos, who lived eight billion kilometers away. But when she did, all she had to report was I’ve found no one alive. I am still alone.
Behind her, the crowns of a petrified forest were starting to peek through the melting air. Its trees still bore crimson leaves hard and sharp as razors. Eos had plucked one to show the doll and asked it if it remembered when these leaves were green. She’d stuttered to a stop then, crouching to curl around the little thing for hours. Had she actually been human, she would have sobbed; as it was, she radiated the words “I’m sorry” on all frequencies. But there was no one to hear.
Now she raised the doll again and smiled. “See? Lights!” They were just tiny pinpricks at the far end of the valley, but hope surged in her at the sight.
The people of Sagitta had been able to bury their dead for a while after Eos turned away from them, but in the end, they’d simply retreated from the failing daylight, first to huddle around nuclear fires in the remnants of their cities, then under domes, then underground. As the years of darkness became decades, interstellar cold wrapped its coils around even these fortresses, and eventually, everyone had died. Yet there were lights. Eos started to pick her way down the treacherous slope.
She slipped at one point, tumbling head over knees through a tilted boulder field, going airborne for a hundred meters before landing akimbo among shards of glass-hard water ice. After a minute, she picked herself up and looked around. She spotted the lights and began to run toward them. She didn’t even realize she had dropped the doll.
“It’s me!” she cried, in radio and microwave and visible frequencies. “I’m back! Please, talk to me!” She’d returned and brought her light with her, but the horizon was a smog of volatile chemicals. It might take years before the atmosphere was fully restored. And the ecosystem? The millions of plants, animals, large and small? “I’ll bring them all back,” she shouted as she paced over grass hard as needles. “Even if it takes ten thousand years.”
The lights resolved slowly into cheerful points of blue-white, studded in a regular pattern around a vast metal door in the side of a mountain.
Eos picked up the pace, running past geysers of reborn air to stand at last under the looming slope of the great gate. The thing was fifty meters high, made of bronze and other alloys that could corrode no further than they already had. There was a little postern door built into it, so she went to that. Her avatar was human-sized and human-shaped, and the door accepted the shape of her hand in an inset panel. She pushed.
The portal jerked as if startled out of a deep sleep. Sheets of ice fell twirling, dissolving into snow before they hit her. The postern door rattled itself back a centimeter, then grated, haltingly, to one side.
Eos stepped into the uncertain flicker of wakening lights to stand on the brink of a measureless cavern filled with flat-packed buildings and rank after rank of stacked hibernation sarcophagi.
She wiped away one final tear and started hunting for the manual controls that would reawaken these million or so people. She would wait while they sorted themselves out.
Then she would turn herself over to them for judgment.
* * * *
Sagitta was mostly ice. Eos could never melt it all, and even if she did, there’d be no land left. For thousands of years, she had instead kept the dwarf planet’s crustal temperature at just under zero degrees centigrade. She’d crafted salty oceans to float over the glacial ices, though volcanic vents continued to spume ammonia and methane into the wan air. Her clever humans learned to minimize such hazards with genetically engineered jungles that fed on the gases. Tough pines had come to cover the hills, the oceans were crowded with life, and much of the time, Sagitta’s cities left their roofs open to the wind.
Eos was Sagitta’s sun. Visiting the world she shone upon had once been a sacred duty, for it was in this way that she reminded herself why she shone, why her existence meant anything. She would browse her world, seeking one or two of those moments that would seal her determination to burn for another generation. Once, after a long aimless tour, she’d found herself standing in human form in a garden full of zizzing bees and fragrant flowers, and chanced to see a young man, unaware she stood there, raise his face to feel her heat on his skin. She’d ascended into the sky at noon the next day. Other epiphanies had been subtler, but those visits sustained her for thousands of years.
She had never been alone on her previous visits. If Sagitta’s people knew she was there, they would throw her parades and banquets, bring out their best dancers and tumblers to entertain her. Often, she visited in secret, and then found friends and lovers among the wealthy and the ordinary. Just as often, her avatars remained once their mission was done, reprinting their bodies as biological flesh and blood, marrying, dying at great ages among family and friends.
The people of Sagitta had lived under the light of a laser sun located seven light-hours away. Eos’s full body was a heliostat standing above the corona of Alpha Centauri B, from which she aimed her spear of radiance deep into the night. Sagitta caught it. Its people didn’t have much experience with hibernation technologies because they didn’t need to. They had her. Only in the lockstep fortresses could you reliably winter over on a planet that orbited seven light-hours from its star.
The cavern she entered now clearly did contain a lockstep fortress, and it was a fine one. The chamber’s ceiling was ribbed like the chest of some long-dead giant. Those ribs were cracked in places and rubble strewed the floor, chunks of it having crushed whole rows of hibernation beds. Pools of air had frozen around others, and much of the machinery for tending the beds was dead. It didn’t matter. As Eos stepped delicately over snaking cables and pipes, other things adroitly avoided her—spumes of smart matter and tiny bots, some smaller than her hand, hurrying around fixing things.
“Hello! Is anyone awake?” She hurried forward, thinking that if this fortress survived, there might be others. Each fortress was the outpost of some civilization that hibernated and awoke on the same timed cycle—usually 360 months asleep to one month awake. Since faster-than-light travel was impossible, only this synchronization allowed far-flung interstellar worlds such as Sagitta to ignore the decades of time it took for ships to travel between them. Colonies that lived in lockstep time experienced neighboring worlds as being right next door, even if those worlds were billions of kilometers away. So valuable was this way of life that each of the thousands of worlds in Centauri B’s laser corona was dotted with dozens, even hundreds of fortresses, each ticking down to its next brief awakening.
“I called you,” she said as she zigzagged between the hibernation stacks. “Did you hear? Did I wake you?” There had been no response from any of her hails as she’d approached Sagitta, and the fortress didn’t answer her now. “I imagined—well, I thought . . .” She stopped, wringing her metal hands. “I pictured it so clearly, you see: how, after I shut off my light, all the fortresses flooded as the atmosphere rained down. I was afraid you were all entombed as the oceans of air froze over you. Poetic image, I know, but terrible, terrible. I’ve come to . . .” But no one answered.
This fortress was repairing itself, but the silence dragged on. After a few hours touring its interior and trying to interface with its systems, Eos was sure it was deliberately ignoring her. Even stranger, it was clearly not trying to rouse its people. Maybe its timing system was waiting until the next jubilee—the moment when all the worlds hibernating on its frequency woke at once. That awakening could be decades away.
“I’m sorry, I can’t wait that long.” Eos’s greater Self would live for millions of years, but this avatar didn’t have that kind of time. Her physical resources could keep her going for centuries, but despair had been creeping into her like the cold since before she even landed. “You’re all I’ve got. If I can’t wake you . . .” She pictured herself sitting down on the boiling ice and simply never standing up again.
It took two days to find the timers. The corridors deep beneath the habitable parts of the city were choked with frozen air and it boiled and churned out of Eos’s way as she clawed her way through. Finally, she found a knot of smart matter; she could feel the awareness of the citymind, like a pulse of data behind it. Reaching hesitantly to interface with it, she finally realized she’d dropped the doll on her way into the cavern. Suddenly terrified that she might never speak to another thinking being again, she slammed her hand into the citymind’s core.
Go away.
Hissing, she snatched back her hand, but she had to reach out again. “It’s me, Eos. I’ve come to wake you.”
We are not to be wakened.
She laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Maybe you’ve missed a few jubilees, but the rest of your lockstep must be waiting for you.”
We are not in lockstep.
“Well . . . protecting yourselves from the cold? I understand: you’ve been waiting for the sun to come back. For me. But I’m here now. It’s safe, you—”
We are not to be wakened. Ever.
Eos recoiled, stumbling through the raging vaporous catacombs, babbling no no no. The tunnels were lit green from the radiance of her own eyes, a froth of nitrogen bubbles and rounded humps of equipment. If she turned and left now, the sleepers above would remain dormant forever, even after trees returned to the hillsides above; even if humans again settled the valley.
She stopped, turned, snarled. “No. You don’t get to make that choice.” So, she returned to the core, reached into the citymind, and commanded it to wake its people.
Eos spent more hours fighting her way back through the boiling subcorridors, eventually letting herself be spewed out onto the cavern’s floor. She rose, flicked chunks of carbon dioxide off her shoulders, and peered through the swirling vapors. Lights were coming on and the hum and hubbub of bots had given the place a semblance of life—though it might be days before the first sleepers awoke. She was pleased.
She took metal stairs up to a catwalk from which she could watch the city come alive. As she stood there, leaning on the rail, almost smiling, a little rectangle of light appeared off in the distance. She glanced up, indifferent at first until she realized what she was seeing.
The rectangle was daylight—her light, from outside—shining through the postern door in the great gate. She had closed it behind her. Now it was open, and in it, blocking the light, was the silhouette of a man.
* * * *
No one from this city should be awake yet. Eos approached cautiously, unafraid for herself but not wanting to startle this unexpected visitor. She did despite herself; when he saw her shape resolve out of the rushing vapors, he scrambled back to the postern.
“Don’t be afraid!” she said, “It’s me, Eos!”
At that he stopped, turned, and laughed humorlessly. “It’s because you are Eos that I’m afraid.”
She could see him clearly now, in all frequencies. To a human, he would have been just a thickly swaddled man-shape, his head invisible behind an oval helmet that was in turn half-wrapped in aerogel insulation. Bands of the same stuff were wrapped about his arms, legs, and torso. Belts and straps covered that and various devices and satchels hung off them. Sagitta’s gravity was only a quarter of a g, so his total kit massed more than twice what he did and bulked his silhouette in strange directions. Eos could see through all that, and what she saw was a standard human male of middle age—eighty years old, perhaps—in apparent good health. He’d allowed his hair to recede, giving him a distinguished look. His face was gentle.
He did look frightened.
Eos looked down. “You came from outside. . . . You’ve been following me.”
“For a week. When you think you’re the only man on a planet and you come across fresh footprints in the snow . . . Well. I did think it might be you.”
“But then why be afraid of me?” Eos saw the stupidity of her question and shifted her feet uncomfortably. “I abandoned you all. I can understand you’d hate me for it.” She looked up; the fact that he hadn’t moved was a hopeful sign. “I came to apologize, and atone, if I can.”
He gave that same laugh again. “I think it’s a bit late for that.”
“I have to try. These people—”
“Should be left to sleep! That’s what I came to tell you. Don’t try to wake this city.” He suddenly lurched toward her as if his feet had come unstuck.
“They were set to sleep forever.”
“And for good reason.” He stared at her, wide-eyed. To him, their surroundings must have been awe-inspiring. In this awakening city, even Eos, with her memories of the titanic solar engines that terraformed this world, felt like some insect somehow surviving to watch a cauldron boil around itself. The feeling came naturally with being embodied in this tiny human form. And yet this man was ignoring the chaos; his eyes were fixed only on her.
“These people are maximizers,” he continued. “Do you know what that means?”
“No. But, please, I am Eos.” She held out her metal hand. “And you are . . .”
Reluctantly, he took her slender fingers in his thickly gloved ones. “Kamakie Konnor . . . Pilgrim, I suppose.” He withdrew his hand and there was an awkward pause. Then he pointed into the cavern. “We—I mean all the locksteps and the realtimers of this world and a thousand others—we condemned the maximizers to permanent sleep for a reason. They wanted to burn the worlds’ resources in an orgy of self-gratification. They live only for the pleasures of the moment; they don’t believe there’s any future.”
“Oh.” She understood. “They heard the News, then. About the Return.”
“We all heard it. You must have, too.” He peered at her in the twisting light. They were speaking over radio, but he’d been shouting his words and belatedly she realized that even through the muffling of his pressure suit, the noise in here must be deafening. Thunderous crashes from toppling ice towers, the scream of boiling air, it must be shaking his whole body.
“Let’s talk outside.” They hurried to the postern and were almost spat out by the pressure differential. It was much quieter out there and bright with Eos’s light. When they stepped under it, Kamakie looked up in wonder.
“So that’s you,” he said.
“My real self,” she admitted. “A laser sun aimed at this world. But I’m only one of a thousand lights for a thousand worlds—and not an important one, at that.”
“Why did you turn your face away from us?”
“Ah.” She found her way to a stable area and sat down on a stone made of water ice. He stood before her, gloves clasped as he looked from her local body, up to the light and back. “It was because of the News. The same News that, if you’re right, drove the people in there mad.” She nodded to the lockstep fortress. “It certainly had that effect on us.”
The News was written in the cosmic background radiation. It had taken millennia of effort for humanity and its offspring to read it, but what the thin faint echo from the Big Bang was saying was, in the end, indisputable. Once you’d heard the news, there was no escaping it and no ignoring its implications.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and this time she saw his eyes widen as, perhaps for the first time, he really heard her apology. “When we heard the News, some of us lost hope, and many of us forgot how to be happy. And so . . . we did what you say these people did. We turned our attention inward and forgot why we were made and for whom.”
The valley floor shook, and as boulders tumbled down the hillsides, the fortress’s great gate groaned open. Eos could see what was coming and could easily have avoided capture, but Kamakie was only human and hence fragile; so, she stayed by his side as the maximizers’ smart matter assembled itself into things with legs and long arms with taloned hands, and came for them both.
* * * *
Outside the micro-fusion heart in her breast, this little room was probably the hottest place within a billion kilometers. The orange-glowing cylinder their captors had placed in the center of the floor provided enough heat that the nitrogen and oxygen soon evaporated to become air. After an hour or so, it became warm enough that Kamakie was able to take his helmet and gloves off and breathe that air. He laid these essential parts of his suit carefully on one of the stone bed shelves and scowled at the door.
They hadn’t spoken while they were being herded up there, nor while the room heated up. Now he said, “This is a cell. These people have cells. They made prisoners. There was a reason we sent them to sleep.”
Eos sat on the other stone bench, elbows on her knees. She cocked her head. “That would have shocked me, once—that you could consign an entire city to death that way.”
He turned quickly; he had the reflexes and energy of a young man, even if his hairline was receding and his face was lined with experience. “Not death,” he insisted. “They could always be revived.”
She nodded. “That was how you rationalized what you did. I understand completely. I rationalized my decision to stop illuminating this world in a similar way.”
He opened his mouth to object, stopped, then simply said, “They were killing us.” He sat down opposite her. Tentatively, he touched the seat, then snatched back his hand. The stone was still cold enough that the CO2 he was breathing out would frost on it.
“You don’t have to be here,” he said. “You could have walked away anytime. Those systems have no power over something like you.”
“In trying to stop me, they might have injured you,” she pointed out. “Besides, if anyone deserves to be in a . . . cell . . . then it is me.”
“You said before that it was the News that made you forget us. Was that all?”
“All?” She considered. “It’s never one thing. But you have to understand—we thought we couldn’t ignore you. Loving you was in our design.”
Eos remembered her youth, when humans and their creations had debated the best way to spread life and intelligence throughout the galaxy. Since light speed was an absolute limit, there were two choices for humanity and its self-aware creations: remain in realtime and intensify local space by converting every planet, asteroid, comet, and moon into a living, active part of a single compact civilization, burning bright under the light of one or two stars; or use the locksteps to slow the apparent passage of time to make it seem as if faster-than-light travel existed. If all your worlds hibernated thirty years for every month awake, ships could travel between the stars literally—or so it would seem—overnight.
Some chose the lockstep way, but Eos and her sisters were built by realtimers. Soaring above Centauri B on mirrored wings, these thousands of sun-powered lasers aimed their light at one of the frozen planets orbiting in the Centauris’ Kuiper belt. Heated by the radiance of an artificial sun, terraformed by nanotech and engineered ecologies, they could sprout cities, countries, cultures, even new strains of humanity. Centauri was the first star to grow a laser corona, but every system in the galaxy had its entourage of Kuiper planets, invisible wanderers in the realm of the comets. All would be brought to life in time.
“The laser system is my body, like your flesh is yours,” Eos told Kamakie. “I identify with it, but only partially. All that body needs to survive is its autonomic nervous system, which contains many networked AIs. There’s a whole metabolism of bots and ships and factories to keep me functioning; but our creators decided those things weren’t enough.
“We were nearly self-aware, and there was always the possibility that we might become entirely so and that our awakening minds would waver in their commitments. Since we were in danger of waking up anyway, why not wake us to start with? So, they gave us minds, and they designed our desires.
“I was made to want to be what I was. Remember that old poem? ‘Oh great star, what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you could shine?’ That was me. That was all of us. I wasn’t lonely, because I had my sisters and we danced together in the coronal fire of our sun. And anyway, if I ever doubted my purpose, I could simply send a tiny spark of my consciousness here and live among my mortals for a time.” Her metal lips curved in a wistful smile. “To walk your streets, laugh and love with you . . . It worked.
“And then came the News.”
Kamakie nodded. He knew all about it, of course; who couldn’t? The entire human project had paused when millennia of observation finally found a pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Intricate instruments bigger than Eos and her sisters, the observers needed to spread out over light-years to resolve the image, but once they could see it, what it showed was unmistakable.
The faded remnant of light from the Big Bang did not come from the beginning of time. Visible past the embers of that titanic flash was the faint afterglow of an earlier cosmos.
The universe was not fourteen billion years old. It was infinitely old. It renewed itself in Big Crunch / Big Bang cycles over unimaginable stretches of time, but one thing was clear: the laws of physics in the previous universe were identical to those of this aeon. They never changed. In those infinite cycles, matter and energy combined and recombined, walking through all their possible permutations, yet always returning to start anew.
“Everything that ever walked down this road,” she said sadly, “has already done so—worse, everything that could walk this road already has, an infinite number of times. This cell, this amber light, and this conversation, and every variation and alternative to them, all have been before in infinite cycles and will return again, now and for eternity.”
Kamakie sat arms crossed, frowning at her. “But why did you care? I know why we cared. Whole religions were wiped out. Anyone whose sense of purpose required tomorrow to be different than today found themselves adrift. So”—he nodded at the door—“we get maximizers—whole peoples who’ve given up on any motive beyond immediate gratification. But you should have been immune. Your purpose was just to be.” His eyes widened as understanding dawned in him. “You’re saying it wasn’t?”
Eos clasped her hands together between her knees. “You thought it was. So did we. We’d never had to think about it, not in all the thousands of years we shone for our worlds. But then the News came and suddenly it was so clear: we hadn’t been made to merely exist, we’d been made to serve an ambition. Sure, we were confident—enough to face a future millions of years in the making!—but that was only because we assumed that your futures mattered—that even if we never changed, you had a destiny. I’d never even realized it but I always pictured myself handing you forward to that destiny, as a parent hands her child to the unknowns of life. The news wiped away that picture.
“So I stumbled. We all did—paused in our ageless dance, as if suddenly finding ourselves at the edge of the stage, about to go over. We began to wonder; to whisper, and then to argue, and then to fight. And finally . . .” She twisted her hands together again, unable to meet his eye.
“You were forsaken.”
* * * *
The door to their cell opened, revealing the maw of a corridor packed with churning smart matter. Kamakie reared back in terror, but Eos could see what the stuff was doing. “It’s okay,” she said, putting her hand on his thickly swathed arm. Within seconds, the motes, particles, smart bricks and threads wove themselves into an insulated, pressurized passageway. Eos and Kamakie were being invited out.
There was only one way to go; it led to a newly fabricated chamber deep in the city’s core. A dozen bristly sarcophagi ringed the room. The thousands of tubes and cables piercing one of the hibernation sheaths were retreating as it opened to reveal the sleeping form of a woman. Neither Eos nor Kamakie found this sight extraordinary at all; in lockstep time, this happened to everybody, once a month.
Two of the other sheaths were already empty, so Eos was not surprised when two men entered the chamber. They came in through separate entrances, which was necessary because each walked within a dense cloud of servitor bots, drones, and shifting utility fog. The bots and drones carried everything each man might need: mementos and tools, favorite furniture, bottles of fine wine, paintings, all presentable at a whim. Eos and Kamakie didn’t face people so much as explosions of private preference. Ego clouds.
She hid a smile as Kamakie leaned in to whisper, “Needless to say, they’re anti-virtuals.” No simulation for these people; they demanded all their experiences be genuine. And they demanded a lot.
The first was a bald self-labeled male human with bright teeth who unconsciously slapped at his arms now and then as if trying to wake them up. A virtual label over his head gave various names and addresses for him; his oldest dated address was Tamerlan.aetos.114.Sagitta.Principe. “Eos,” he said, in verbal, acoustic speech. “Finally.”
She could hear him communicating through quantum-encrypted back channels with the other man, which was not a surprise. This man, tall and lean behind clothing and veils that presented different impressions of him from moment to moment (fearsome warrior, clerk, king or boy), was labeled Tran.aetos.35.Sagitta.Eloquia. Various of his veils bowed to her, though she noted that behind them all, he did not. “The sun is our guest, Principe,” he said mildly, also acoustically. “And this one?” He shifted his attention to Kamakie.
Sensing Kamakie’s fear, Eos said, “This is a scavenger I enlisted to help me search for signs of life. He did his job well enough.” They turned their eyes back to her, and to reinforce their indifference to her fragile human companion, she bowed deeply. “I am honored to meet you both,” she said to the maximizers. “I have come to apologize for my actions.”
Principe’s eyes widened briefly, then he barked a laugh. “A bit late for that.”
Eloquia stepped forward hastily. “No, no, it’s not too late at all. You abandoned us, Eos. Our world froze. It’s true that all of that happened long before Principe and I were born, but we’ve lived our whole lives in the aftermath—walking in frozen forests, the ruins of broken cities. This world is a mausoleum.”
Eos hung her head. Kamakie was glaring at the maximizers. “I’ve brought back my light,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Principe started to speak but again Eloquia cut him off. “Bringing Sagitta back to life is a nice gesture, but clearly you know that it’s only a gesture. The problem is, Eos, how can we trust you? I mean, we understand you; you’re a maximizer, as any rational creature would have to be after hearing the news. Every possible version of you has existed and will exist again, and every possible version of this conversation and every emotion and meaning we could get out of it. So, why not make this version of yourself a happy one? You will, anyway, in some life. Why refrain from murder—even the murder of an entire planet—if that murder has happened an infinite number of times already and will repeat again to infinity? It doesn’t matter.”
He had broken away from his cloud of memorabilia and was pacing slowly in front of Eos, hands behind his back, throwing glances at her while he talked. “Of course you turned away from us. Why not? There were infinite times when you didn’t, and infinite times you did. Why not be one of those versions of yourself who maximized your own happiness? You’re not really doing it at the expense of anybody else.
“But here’s the thing.” He paused, frowning at her. “You’re unhappy now. You can’t shake your guilt, so you came to us to make amends. But what if you do shake it? What’s to stop you turning your light away from us again? Eos, it’s not a real apology if you can rescind it anytime you choose.”
Kamakie grabbed her arm. “Eos—”
“We all know how you can atone for your crime,” Eloquia continued. “You wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t known in your heart that you had to do it.
“Eos, give us control of your light. We can’t trust you, precisely because you’ve turned out to be just like us. Because you are like us, you’ll try to make yourself happy. And we both know there’s only one way to do that.”
Eos was silent. Kamakie stared at her in horror.
Eloquia turned away with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Go think about it. We have a city to waken.”
The floor swept Eos and Kamakie out of the chamber, and the doorway became a wall, leaving them with only one way to go: back to their cell.
* * * *
Kamakie paced angrily. “You can’t seriously mean to give them the keys to your mind? They’re solipsistic maniacs, all of them. That’s why we imprisoned them.”
Eos hunched near the heater, due maybe to some instinct for the comfort of fire she had inherited from her creators. In her mind echoed the riot of arguments among the suns. She remembered every meme and referent, even the occasional words they had exchanged. The News had been like a black hole they all circled, its pull inescapable.
“I came here to atone,” she said. “He’s right. You can’t do that on your own terms.”
He pointed at the stone wall, which still smoked with thawing nitrogen. “But not theirs! If you want to give up control of your light, fine. But give it to the people who won’t waste it on some grand, suicidal orgy.”
She turned her face up to him. She’d been modifying that face, making tiny adjustments if Kamakie’s pupils dilated when he glanced at her. She was resculpting herself to become more pleasing for him—more attractive and trustworthy. She did that around any human, almost without being aware of it. She could see the impact her gaze had on him now, a reaction subtly different from the simple awe he’d radiated on their first meeting.
Kamakie knew something he wasn’t saying. As the only human stalking the melting hills of Sagitta, he was clearly no pilgrim. By his garb and accent, he was from the locksteps—a time-hopper of sorts, careering headlong into the future thirty or fifty or a hundred years at a time. She had seen no waking lockstep fortresses on this world, but they must be there somewhere.
She wanted to ask what he or his people would do with her keys if she gave them to him, but the maximizers would be listening. Kamakie had to know that as well; was that a look of understanding as he caught her eye?
She grimaced and looked down again. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “They have us trapped here, underground where I can’t communicate with my greater Self. They can overwhelm my defenses, given time, take this avatar apart, plunder my mind for the keys that will let them send back a decision—whether it’s mine or one they’ve chosen for me.”
“Do you think they’ll need to?” he asked bitterly. “You’ve heard the News, and you’ve already proved you agree with them about what it means. You have and haven’t given your keys to them, and you will and you won’t. Every possible choice you could make, you’ve already made and will make again. So, why not go with the easiest one this time around? The one that maximizes your own happiness?”
All the myriad ways opened out before her, as they did anytime she or her sisters had thought about the news. Eos could spawn thousands of simultaneous scenarios in her mind, watch them all unfold individually. Once, that had been a talent, a gift from her designers to aid her in making decisions. Now it was paralyzing. She would make every choice, so none was better than another. No good she might do could cancel the bad she’d already done and would do again. So why care?
Miserable, she sat in silence for a long time. Once the maximizers woke enough of their systems, they could overpower her; then she and Kamakie might be separated and she would never get another chance to ask him about himself. So, she took the risk and said, “Kamakie, what would you do if I gave you my key?”
He half-smiled. “I would just give it right back. It’s yours.”
Eos shook her head. “Eloquia’s right. I can’t be trusted with it anymore.”
She could see the muscles in his throat tighten. Kamakie wanted badly to tell her something, but he looked away. Eos nodded to herself.
“The rational actor chooses to maximize her own utility,” she said. “So, there’s only one logical choice, isn’t there?” She stared him down, a challenge for him to tell her what he was hiding. All she got back was a stricken expression.
Eos sighed. “I have my answer, then.”
* * * *
The maximizers were definitely listening. Just minutes after she said this, the door opened and the corridor built itself again outside.
When they entered the hibernaculum this time, it was to find four of the maximizers awake. The woman Eos had seen was now half-buried in her own garden, whose greenery and flowers hovered or stalked behind her on thin legs. She was clearly unhappy to be there. The fourth maximizer was genderless, this one dressed in a black sensory leotard and surrounded by virtual screens that cast shifting colors across its equine face. Its head wavered from side to side, eyes twitching from one input to another.
Eloquia bowed to Eos. “So, sun, have you made your choice?”
“First,” she said, “you have to promise not to harm this man nor any of his people. The locksteps and realtimers of Sagitta must be free.”
Principe slapped at his arms. “Impossible! They set us to sleep forever! That was mass murder. Do you expect us to forgive them for that?”
“Not to forgive,” she said. “To withhold your revenge.”
Principe sputtered, but the woman nodded, and after a moment, Eloquia did as well. “All right,” he said. “But we will awaken the rest of our own cities—and then they will decide, ultimately, what to do with this criminal’s people.” He glowered at Kamakie.
Eos remained silent, pretending to think about the offer. She had been transferring power and nanotech to Kamakie ever since they had returned to the cell—at first, to give him some defenses in case the maximizers separated them or tried to threaten him as leverage. As they walked here, she had decided to do more, and now needed time to finish wafting the invisibly tiny threads of smart matter over to, and into, his body.
She made the ancient emote of taking a deep breath, then said, “If you let this man go, I will give you my—”
“I have a question.”
It was Kamakie. Arms crossed, he was calmly watching the maximizers, waiting for them to heed him. Eloquia turned to him. “Yes?” he said, obviously annoyed but equally obviously willing to be polite now that Eos was about to capitulate.
“We live our lives over and over, true?” At Eloquia’s impatient nod, Kamakie rubbed his chin. “Yes, we have to, because over nearly infinite spans of time, all the particles of the universe must come back into the same configuration. Every single atom in our bodies is exactly where it was some impossible age ago, and behaving the same—and so on up to our cells, our neurons, our thoughts. If a different body had thoughts and experiences identical to mine throughout its entire life, wouldn’t that other self just be . . . me?”
“Your servant seems ignorant of simple truths,” said Principe. “He also doesn’t seem to know he’s interrupting you.”
“We accept that we also experience other lives almost exactly like this one,” Kamakie went on. “Some have just a few molecules out of place, tiny cascade differences in our neurotransmitters that cause us, just once in our lives, to make a different decision this time around. We also experience lives where the outside world diverges, even if only in the arrangement of the constellations or the frequency of the light on our skins. So, I have a question.
“When are the differences big enough that it’s no longer me having the experience?”
“Enough!” Eloquia appealed to Eos. “Please. We need your decision.”
“I have news,” said Kamakie loudly. “Fresh news, about the Return.”
No one in the chamber moved for a long moment. Eos sized up Kamakie. “That’s why you were walking alone on the ice. Something’s been learned about the cycles of eternity?”
Eloquia and the woman laughed, but the other two eyed one another uneasily. Eloquia dismissed the issue with a wave of his hand. “Oh, we know there’ve been experiments using instruments scattered over light years and taking millennia to complete. But what can they do other than refine the details of what we already know? Time is infinite, everything repeats, and—”
“—Not everything that can happen, will,” said Kamakie. Then he took a step back, as if shocked at his own pronouncement.
Still only looking to Eos, he said, “We’ve been gathering data for thousands of years, true. But not in vain. We learned something.
“All the particles in the universe mix and recombine, and it’s true that eventually all that’s happened has to happen again.”
“We know this,” drawled Eloquia.
“But the universe has no memory to avoid repeating itself before it’s run through every possible combination of events.” Kamakie walked up to Eloquia, spread his feet on the cold stone and smiled. His shoulders were squared in a way that surprised Eos. “It’s overwhelmingly likely that the sequence will start over long before it explores every possibility. In other words, not everything that could occur will occur. Not everything that can happen will happen.”
Principe laughed and turned away. “So what?”
“So”—and now Kamakie rounded on Eos, like a prosecutor cross-examining a witness—“there is no past and future in which you make every choice you could today, Eos. This day may repeat across the ages, but you’ve never made every choice you could today, and you never will. And that means that whatever you decide to do now matters. It won’t be canceled by its opposite in some future version of today.”
Eloquia, Principe, and the other maximizers stood there, looking confused—and Eos was as well, for just a second. Then she understood and yelled, “Kamakie, run!”
He turned and sprinted for the entrance. “Get outside and look up!” she added; then Eos burst the confines of her human body, unreeling defensive and offensive systems as the maximizers’ guards closed on her.
Light and noise hammered from the direction Kamakie had run. She couldn’t follow him nor help anymore as the maximizers dove for cover, stray energies burst and evaporated their precious memorabilia, and the stone floor cracked and splintered beneath her.
* * * *
Eos found Kamakie waiting for her when she stepped through the postern gate two days later. Several maximizer war machines lurked near him, but their weapons were powered down.
The hills were dark. Framing Kamakie’s head was an infinite fog of stars in a transcendently black sky.
“They gave up,” she said to him. “Surely, you knew they would have to?”
“Hello to you too, Eos.” He stood, stretching. “Yes, I knew. Without your light, the world will freeze again. They can’t live without you, and they know it.” He gestured for her to walk with him; she fell in step, and he guided her to the right, up a harder slope than the one on which she’d dropped her doll. “They’ll have to go back into hibernation. But now they know the truth—the real News. I hope we can wake them and give them another chance someday.”
Kamakie clasped his gloved hands behind his back, looked down at the solid air beneath his boots. “Somehow, their weapons didn’t affect me. I made it outside and I looked up,” he said. “I stared into the sun—into you. I relayed a message then, didn’t I? Because your light went off a few hours later, and it hasn’t come back.” She nodded. “Will it come on again?” She shrugged.
“I still haven’t atoned,” she said. “I still don’t know how.”
Despite the darkness, she could see his smile, in many small frequencies. “I know of a way.”
They climbed in silence for a while, but when they had left the valley, she said, “Why were you out here alone? You came from one of the locksteps, but you awoke off schedule, didn’t you? There are no cities awake on Sagitta; I would have seen them by their heat.”
“My lockstep has another fifteen years before it wakes,” he admitted. “If I was to make it to the meeting, I had to leave now.”
“Meeting? In another lockstep? One that sleeps and wakes on a different schedule?” He nodded. “But if your city’s not awake, neither is any other. Where’s this lockstep?”
“It’s not a city. Just a single ship. I was told it would be waiting in Ariosto Valles.” He pointed. “Over there.”
“Oh.” She hesitated, stopped.
“Come with me,” he said.
“I can’t, if you’re leaving Sagitta,” she said. “Sagitta is my responsibility, my garden to tend. I still have to atone.”
“You can do that by spreading the News.” He started walking again, seemingly confident she would follow. “The fresh News, I mean. All you have to do is tell your Self, up there”—he pointed at the star-crowded sky—“and you’ll have discharged your duty here. Your light will return to this world, and you”—he pointed at her human-shaped avatar—“will no longer be needed. Come with me and you can do far more than atone—far more than you could ever do here.”
She hurried to catch up. “I don’t understand.”
“The News is that however vast the ring of time is, it’s finite. Because it’s finite, we”—he touched her shoulder—“can add to or subtract from the total amount of happiness in the universe. It’s up to us. Now, me, I think the ring of time can contain more laughter than tears—but it’s up to us to make sure that happens.”
“How?”
“By spreading the News, of course!” He laughed. “The ship I’m joining, it’s on a lockstep at a longer frequency than mine. Mine is 360/1—thirty years asleep for every month awake. That schedule lets us travel a light-year or so every ‘month’ of our time. Ours is a pretty big civilization, but it only spans a few dozen stars. But some of the first to hear this News sent messages to other locksteps, and together they decided to create a protocol for spreading the word. This protocol is called the Nests.
“We’ve set a second lockstep in motion. This one’s frequency is 129,600/1: ten thousand years asleep for every month awake. A realtimer lives thirty years between awakenings of my lockstep, and I would experience thirty years between awakenings of this second lockstep. Its people will be able to travel five thousand light-years in one of their years. They can spread the News far.
“That lockstep will have a third within it, and there’ll be a fourth in the third. The third sleeps two and a half million years at a time, the fourth thirty-one million. Their citizens will stride the galaxy, and the spaces between the galaxies, the way we travel between the planets. Their wakings will be synchronized with those beneath them, so communication can flow up and down from realtime to the most immortal. Together, they’ll spread the News throughout the visible universe.
“The lockstep that sleeps thirty-one million years, we’re calling the Maha-Yuga, or Magisterium Lockstep.
“I volunteered to join the Magisterium. Would you like to come along?”
Eos almost tripped. She tried to bluster a reply but then thought of the doll she’d cradled when she last walked these hills. She pictured herself as she and her sisters once had, as a mother casting her children forward in time. To what destiny? She’d believed there were no choices that mattered in that future, because all choices would be made, but in this moment she saw the alternative—a golden path all conscious beings could take.
Kamakie had been dead serious when he’d asked his question in the hibernaculum: how different would her future lives have to be for them to no longer be hers? Could it be she had lived all lives and would live them all again? In which case, even if she were completely selfish—especially if she were completely selfish—she must choose to maximize the happiness of every single one.
She felt weightless. She started to laugh. “I came to atone!” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to be given a gift!”
Kamakie laughed too, in surprise as much as delight.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said, impatiently taking his hand and pulling him onward.
“We have lives to live.”
KARL SCHROEDER (kschroeder.com) was born into a Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada, in 1962. He started writing at age fourteen, following in the footsteps of A. E. van Vogt, who came from the same Mennonite community. He moved to Toronto in 1986 and became a founding member of SF Canada (he was president from 1996–97). He sold early stories to Canadian magazines, and his first novel, The Claus Effect (with David Nickle) appeared in 1997. His first solo novel, Ventus, was published in 2000, and was followed by Permanence and Lady of Mazes. His most recent work includes the Virga series of science fiction novels (Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, The Sunless Countries, and Ashes of Candesce) and the YA space opera Lockstep. He also collaborated with Cory Doctorow on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Science Fiction. Schroeder lives in East Toronto with his wife and daughter.