LONGING FOR EARTH

 

LINDA NAGATA

 

STEADY RAIN FALLING on the cloud forest of the Loysan Escarpment had turned the trail into a rivulet that scoured away leaf litter and soil to reveal a base layer of structural plasteel, cleverly shaped and colored to imitate a basalt of Earth.

Hitoshi appreciated the attention to detail. He’d seen museum biomes where a landslide or a tree-fall exposed the white diamond of the world’s structural bones—glaring wounds to the verisimilitude of an environment, though the damage was always quickly patched by swarms of small maintenance bots that lay senescent in the soil and the leaf litter of every world.

Hitoshi was familiar with most aspects of biome maintenance even though he’d been a bureaucrat and not an engineer. The Age of Architects was long past and the great human engineers gone with it, but there would always be a place for bureaucrats, and he’d been lucky. He’d gotten to serve on the Cherisky management team.

Cherisky was a slowly rotating cylindrical world of vast dimension, built to house a living example of Beringia grasslands. It had been cold and austere but beautiful, a biome that was home to wild horses, musk oxen, and reconstituted mammoths. Like all biome worlds, Cherisky was self-regulating. Only occasional corrections or resource infusions were required and those were handled by bots under the direction of the AIs of the Machine Layer. Hitoshi’s management team had existed only to tend to the human visitors.

Since those days—since leaving Cherisky—he had hiked and explored and marveled at a thousand biome worlds. Literally, a thousand. He kept a detailed journal. His travels were documented. The Loysan Escarpment was his thousandth trek.

Rain pattered the leaves of the dense canopy, made a quick rhythm on his jacket, soaked the sparse white hair on his uncovered head. A chill breeze, infused with a sweet scent, set the tree branches swaying while his trekking poles clacked rhythmically against the artificial basalt.

The trail up the escarpment was winding and long, but Hitoshi was in no hurry. He’d camped two nights already, making a leisurely start each morning. In all that time he had not encountered another person.

Better that way, he told himself.

When Hitoshi had started his wanderings, over a century ago now, tourists had been abundant everywhere he went. But over the ensuing years, more and more people had abandoned the Tangible Layer, emigrating to the security, the convenience, the limitless options of the Virtual Layer. Their absence was evident, especially among peripheral worlds like Loysan, far from the Veiled Sun.

Hitoshi wasn’t troubled by the resulting solitude, but was left unsettled by what he saw as the inexplicable decision of so many to abandon the Tangible Layer long before old age became a burden to them.

Still, an absence of raucous company on the trail was no cause for complaint. Too often in those early days his treks had been marred by the shouts or whoops or whining of strangers, or by the sacrilegious sight of graffiti etched into the bark of trees older than the oldest person still alive within the Tangible Layer.

Trees even older than me, Hitoshi thought sourly.

He was not the oldest person in the Veil—not yet—but he knew he was getting close.

His boots splashed with every careful step, his stability ensured by his trekking poles as he walked slightly bent to balance the modest weight of his expedition pack.

The pack was really just a portable fabricator-recycler, equipped with large pockets for immediate necessities: his tablet, a bivouac bag, protein bars, water bottle—those few things he might require during the day. It was no great burden to carry. He was old, not frail.

Still, the trail was long, the rest houses far apart, and last night he’d hardly slept, kept awake by the hooting, wailing, chirping chorus of calls from the forest’s nocturnal denizens—a wonder to listen to—and by the anxious prospect of making the summit sometime later today.

As he rounded a ridge, the rain eased. Soon only a light mist remained. Small, jewel-like birds darted among the foliage, calling to one another in sharp, peeping voices.

Another half hour and he climbed past the mist into leaf-filtered sunlight. Only a few minutes later, he rounded a bend and spied a mad woman ahead of him.

Hitoshi stopped. He gritted his teeth in distaste. He rolled his eyes “heavenward” as they liked to say in the old stories, with the benefit that on a tethered habitat like Loysan, where an immense shaft connected two distinct worlds, Heaven lay in any and every direction.

Under his breath he muttered a brief prayer—“Oh, spare me”—unsure if he meant it to be heard by a legitimate deity or by the ineffable and omniscient AIs of the Machine Layer, on which all life relied. He did know—he was quite certain—he wanted to avoid any negative encounter that might mar this, his last climb.

Still, there was only one way forward. He resumed his slow rhythmic pace.

At first, the mad woman took no notice of him. She was engrossed in her mad task, using a white stick to poke at the leafy detritus beneath a patch of bracken fern a few steps off the trail. In her other hand she had a white mesh net shaped like a funnel. She held the net close to the ground, moving it in quick gestures timed to the motion of the stick.

Hitoshi consoled himself with the observation that she was, at least, not dressed like a mad woman. No rags or eccentric affectations. Instead, she wore practical expedition gear much like his, color-shifted to a light tan that made her easily visible without the offensive ostentation of blazing orange or screaming pink. She carried no pack, but Hitoshi had consulted his tablet and knew there was a rest house not far ahead, so she’d likely left her gear there.

Fragmented sunlight fell against her smooth white hair. As he drew nearer he was struck by her diminutive size: thin and a little stooped. Worn down by time into something less than what she’d once been. Same as him.

He didn’t want to startle her, so he made an extra measure of noise by scuffing his boots and then he called out a gruff “Good day” in a voice that made no promise of further conversation.

The woman turned, thankfully showing no sign of alarm. A handsome, if well-worn, face. “Well, hello,” she said as she swept the mesh net up and gave it a vigorous shake.

Hitoshi couldn’t help himself. Against all resolve, he stepped close, leaning in to peer over the rim of her net. He counted three insects hopping and crawling inside it. “Crickets?” he asked, suspecting this was further evidence in support of his mad-woman theory.

“Crickets,” she agreed cheerfully, shaking the net again to discourage the intrepid insects from making an escape. Then, as she took a really good look at him, her thinning brows rose. “Hmm,” she said with coy humor. “Can it be you’re even older than I am?”

Forthright and impertinent. He could have been annoyed, but he felt himself warming to her instead, so he answered her banter in kind. “I’m willing to bet I’m the oldest person on this trail.”

Given the absence of other people, this won him a laugh. She had a nice laugh. Maybe that’s what coaxed him to ask, though he knew he shouldn’t. He didn’t want to get caught up in her madness, but neither was he quite ready to move on. So he took the plunge: “Why crickets?”

She smiled knowingly, as if she’d expected this question. “This particular species has been having problems.” She shoved her white stick under her belt, freeing a hand to retrieve a small vial from her pocket. Reaching into the net, she quickly bottled all three crickets, then held the vial up so he could clearly see them. They were a tiny golden-colored species.

“They look fine to me,” Hitoshi said.

“You’re right. These individuals are fine. But populations in different worlds are isolated from one another. They diverge over time, sometimes dangerously. A viral disease cropped up here on the Loysan Escarpment. It knocked back the population for a time, but the species adapted. The same species used to be found in Myrmon Woods—”

“Oh, I’ve been there,” Hitoshi said, swept up by the memory. “Beautiful world.”

She nodded. “The same disease showed up there, probably carried by a trekker who failed to properly clean their equipment.” She cast a critical gaze at his boots.

“Hey,” he objected. “I always clean my equipment before packing it.”

“Good,” she said, though the word was weighted with skepticism. “Unfortunately for the Myrmon Woods crickets, they didn’t possess the same genetic diversity that saved the crickets here at Loysan and the species was wiped out. I’m a weaver. A genetic weaver. It’s my task, my calling, to do something about that.” She gently tapped the vial. “I’ll try to isolate the traits that allow these crickets to survive and weave those into the genetic material preserved from the Myrmon Woods crickets. Then I can introduce individuals reconstituted from original stock.”

Hitoshi had heard of weavers. They were something like a religious organization. Their members worked to ensure that the biomes of different worlds did not diverge so far that they became toxic to one another. Surely an unending task!

“Why don’t you just introduce Loysan crickets to Myrmon Woods and be done with it?” he asked. “Or wipe out the disease altogether—that’d probably be best.”

“Diversity,” she answered, with a sharp smile that dared him to call this absurd. “There are surely genetic variants in the Myrmon Woods crickets that might come in handy someday, and even a virus is a life form that can ultimately enhance a biome’s complexity.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Hitoshi said. “Right now this trekker is going to trek over to the rest house, sit down for a bit, and have some hot tea. Would you care to join me?”

 

 

HER NAME WAS Carol and to his surprise Hitoshi found himself enjoying this chance of conversation with her.

Carol seemed pleased too. “You’ve visited a lot of worlds, haven’t you?” she asked as they walked together the short distance to the rest house. “Trekked a lot of biomes?”

“A few,” he admitted.

She arched a skeptical eyebrow.

He scrunched his wrinkled face and confessed, “Loysan makes one thousand.”

“Wow! That beats me by a long way!”

He shrugged against his pack straps. “I’m persistent.” This was the Age of Abundance, and persistence was all that was required.

The Age of Architects had left Sol System with a vast cloud of artificial worlds and though the means and the knowledge to make such worlds was forgotten, at least by anyone of human origin, it hardly mattered. The build-out had created living space and material wealth far in excess of what people might ever require, and the diligent oversight of the Machine Layer kept it all in harmony. Every world regulated, integrated, with transport between them on demand—far more worlds than anyone could visit even in a lifetime that endured for three centuries or more—with the freedom to go anywhere, everywhere, except to Earth itself.

“What got you interested in trekking?” Carol asked.

He hesitated. In the past when he’d met that question, his answer had been aimed at putting an awkward end to further inquiry:

My marriage drifted into obsolescence and after she and her new partner emigrated to the Virtual Layer, our children followed them. I wasn’t ready to transition. So I decided to travel instead.

Hitoshi did not burden Carol with any of that. Instead, he told her a deeper truth, rarely spoken: “I saw the Earth when I was seventeen.”

“Did you?” She paused in the trail, wide-eyed and suitably impressed. “You’re far from home, then.”

With a cock of his head he invited her to move on again. “I carry my home on my back,” he told her. “You can think of me as a centuries-old tortoise and just as slow. But you’re right. I’ve come a long way. I was born three hundred and one years ago, on a world whose orbit occasionally reached the inner edge of the Sun’s Veil. Just once, that orbital path brought us into the vicinity of Earth.”

The wonder of it was still reflected in his voice. “We could see her easily, blue-white and beautiful with her forest moon.”

He sighed, bittersweet melancholy. “Seventeen! An age when love strikes hard. I fell for her heart and soul, caught in her gravity. The sacred goddess, mother of all. I swore my allegiance.”

“You wanted to emigrate,” Carol guessed.

“It seemed possible, at seventeen.”

Endowed with a young man’s optimism, Hitoshi had promised himself that someday he’d walk on Earth’s shores, swim in her oceans, climb her mountains, lose himself in her forests.

Very soon, the fiercely complex procession of worlds had carried him away from her. He’d never seen her again and he’d never won the emigration lottery.

Eventually, he’d married. Fatherhood had been a joyous consolation, but when time took that away, he’d found solace and some satisfaction in trekking the biomes.

He looked ahead to where the rest house could now be seen between the trees. It stood open, its side walls coiled out of sight within corner columns of dark-purple marble infiltrated with veins of gold. The columns held up a peaked roof with flared eaves, shingled in black-slate.

As they drew closer, he saw that most of Carol’s gear was tumbled in one corner of the gray plasteel platform, with the exception of a bivouac bag that she’d hung over the back of a bench. The bench faced a small table and then a blue vista beyond: a great gulf of atmosphere that appeared planetary in scale.

This was Hitoshi’s first glimpse beyond the trees and awe swept over him. He shrugged out of his pack, set it gently on the platform, and stepped to the edge of the abyss.

White birds. He spied them, tiny with distance, soaring in slow circles beneath him. Raising his gaze, he marveled at an illusion of sea and sky blending into an infinite horizon. He squinted, trying to spot a flaw, a hint of seam or boundary that would reveal the wall of the habitat—he knew it could be no more than twelve kilometers distant—but he could not see it.

Moved by the vastness and the beauty, he sighed deeply, silently acknowledging that the guidebooks were right. Loysan was among the finest imitations of Earth he’d seen and a worthy culmination of his travels.

“And still,” he said aloud, “it is not Earth.”

No artificial world could truly replicate the depth, the complexity, the history, the precarious geological volatility, the very gravity of a planetary body.

“Still, it’s not bad,” Carol said with a note of amusement as she stood with him on the cliff’s edge.

He grunted. “I’ll concede that.” Turning from the abyss, he asked, “Now, would you like tea?”

 

 

THEY SAT AND chatted and drank hot tea. Hitoshi felt easy in her company, surprisingly so, and listened with sympathy as she told him her own story.

Carol had been partnered for decades with another weaver. “I lost him nine years ago. He was exploring off trail when the ground gave way beneath him. He fell a long way.”

Hitoshi was familiar with such devastating accidents from his years on the Cherisky management team. Risk could not be eliminated, even in a well-managed world. “I’m sorry.”

Carol said, “We’d planned to transition together.”

Hitoshi grunted, and asked her, “Is that why you’re still here?”

Elderly folk had become especially rare in the Tangible Layer since most people transitioned at younger ages to avoid the ever-increasing risk of death.

Carol said, “It’s hard to imagine eternity without him. But I’m close to my sisters. We’ll transition together when the time feels right.” She gave him a wry smile. “I don’t think we’ll risk waiting as long as you.”

“I thought I might go for the record,” he joked. “Oldest man in the worlds!”

The truth he left unspoken was that he hadn’t planned to transition at all. He’d been sure that long before he trekked a thousand worlds, he would either win the Earth lottery or die along the way, in a predation accident or a fall like the one that had taken Carol’s partner.

No luck either way.

An alarm trilled. An intrusive electronic noise, a casual profanity amid the birdsong. It shattered the reflective silence that had fallen between them, causing Carol to flinch and Hitoshi to spill his tea on the tabletop.

He set his cup down with a sharp rap as the tabletop absorbed all traces of the spill.

“It’s me,” he confessed in irritation.

Then he corrected himself. “Well, really, it’s my kids.” The alarm kept trilling. “Not that they’re kids anymore. They’re all well into their second century. All of them transitioned a long time ago. Now they think they know better than I do.”

If his kids had remained in the Tangible Layer, they would have had to contend with a light-speed delay to keep in touch with him, but from the Virtual Layer, contact was instant—and incessant.

His irritation poured forth as he explained to Carol, over the alarm’s ever increasing volume, the facts of his situation. “You see, if I don’t ‘check in’”—long wrinkled fingers clawed the air, adding sarcastic quotes around the phrase—“at the ‘agreed upon interval’”—more air quotes—“the local management team gets alerted to a possible emergency.

“I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but I used to be on a management team, and I can tell you, we loved the excitement of a call-out. Any excuse to go into rescue mode. I can also tell you from experience that it’s an embarrassment to find yourself surrounded by ‘rescue personnel’”—those air quotes again—“who are really just bureaucratic button-pushers wanting to look like heroes.”

“So maybe you should check in?” Carol suggested in a teasing voice, boosted in volume so she could be heard over the now-strident alarm.

Hitoshi grunted. He pried himself up off the bench, hobbled on stiff legs to his pack, slipped his tablet out, unfolded it.

His youngest daughter, sweet-faced Kimi, smiled at him from the Virtual Layer.

Kimi had been the last of his kids to transition. She’d waited until she was a hundred twenty years old to make the move. Now she was a young woman again, joy lighting up her eyes every time he saw her and always eager to remind him how grateful she was for the Virtual Layer’s “unlimited options”—this time he only imagined the air quotes—before urging him to make the transition too.

“I’m fine,” he growled at her before she could say anything. “No need to call emergency services for the old man.”

“Hi, Dad,” she said, silent laughter behind her smile. “I love you too.”

He curled his lip, made a noncommittal grunt, and for once Kimi looked a little distressed, a little disappointed. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, her smile gone.

“I’m fine, just fine. I was just enjoying the view and a nice cup of tea, and I could do without the nagging.”

“I’m sorry. But we worry about you, Dad. If you shared your biostatus with us, we’d know you were okay—or we’d know if there was a problem.”

“My biostatus is my own business. I’m not a child, Kimi, and neither are you.”

“Dad, you’re not a child. You’re an old, old man and you don’t seem to realize that every day you’re taking a terrible chance. You need to transition.”

“When I’m ready,” he said. He’d said it a thousand times before.

Her eyes glistened. “If something happens, an accident—”

“Don’t worry.” He made an effort to sound reassuring. There really was nothing to worry about. “I’ve got this.”

She didn’t believe him. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

He cut the connection, folded the tablet, and shoved it back into his pack. Then he turned to look for Carol.

She’d left the rest house, lingering several steps away along a faint trail that ran close to the edge of the cliff. “All clear,” he called to her, pleased that she hadn’t used the interruption as an opportunity to flee his company and return to her cricket-netting occupation.

She came back to the rest house, greeted him with a smile. “Where to from here?” she asked as he gathered the teacups and returned them to the fabricator.

“Onward.” He said it with some regret. “On to the top. I need to do this. I need to finish. Thank you for sharing a cup of tea with me.”

She held her hand out to him, palm up. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

He slid his palm across hers. “An honor,” he said gruffly. And then, without letting himself think too hard about it, he added, “Maybe we’ll meet again sometime... in the Virtual Layer.”

“It’s another phase, isn’t it?” she mused. “A chance to do those things that never quite worked out here in the Tangible Layer.”

“Maybe it is,” he agreed.

He shouldered his pack and set out, resolved to not look back.

 

 

HITOSHI HIKED, ONE foot after another, his thoughts circling.

Some things are not meant to be.

For most of his life he’d longed for Earth. He knew now he would never get there, not in the flesh. But as he followed the winding trail higher and higher through the forest, accompanied by birdsong and the wind-driven rustle of the canopy, he let himself imagine that this was Earth.

And wasn’t it, after all?

The thought came to him with the force of revelation.

All the worlds he’d visited, the diverse biomes he’d trekked through—desert, alpine, grassland, tropical, shoreline, ocean, arctic—all were part of Earth, a flood of Earth-life filling the once lifeless outer reaches of the solar system and slowly claiming the surfaces of the companion planets—the Moon, Venus, Mars.

He found comfort in the thought.

 

 

IT WAS LATE afternoon when Hitoshi finally climbed above the tree line. His breathing grew deeper, but it remained steady as he commenced an alpine section of dark basalt supporting tufts of short, stiff grass, tiny flowers, and snowy white patches of lichen.

Clouds had formed around the lower slope, hiding most of it from his view, but at his altitude the sky was clear—that wondrous blue ocean of atmosphere—and he could see in it now the yellow blaze of a lantern sun. Two suns, he realized as he picked out a second, tiny gleam beyond the first.

“And not a damn bit of heat from either,” he groused, pulling the zipper on his jacket a little higher.

The rustle of wind, the crunch of boots and trekking poles against the rocky soil, the creak of his pack: these sounds framed the silence that followed him.

The air became more rarified. The same thing happened on Earth as climbers ascended to the peaks, but here the gradient was steeper. The effective gravity declined as well and that was like Earth too, although there the scale was so vast the difference went unnoticed.

Hitoshi accepted the lower gravity as a boon, but his aged body did not take well to the thinning air. His chest began to hurt and his head to ache.

From the corner of his eye he glimpsed an aerostat. Just a little thing, a thin ten-centimeter wing with a multitude of flaps to stabilize it in the wind. He was familiar with the devices. Most biomes used them to monitor hikers deemed at risk of keeling over.

“Eh,” Hitoshi growled, making a rude gesture. “Be gone!”

The aerostat ignored this of course and after his moment of indulgence, he ignored it, saving his breath for the climb. One slow step after another. Breathe in, breathe out. He grew aware of one more sound worth noting: the pounding of his heart.

The trail zigzagged, climbing steeply, each switchback shorter than the one before it.

He left the last of the plants behind. Only lichen now. Smooth gray patches on the black artificial basalt.

Air so thin! Deep breaths were no longer enough. He had to stop every few steps, breathe deeply, purposefully, drawing in extra oxygen.

His chest ached, but he didn’t have far to go. He could see the rest house just a few switchbacks above him, marking the apex of the trail.

Night coming on.

I’m not ready.

An intrusive thought, breaking through his fatigue.

He kept on.

Twilight arrived, but not as the epilogue to a sunset. The two lantern suns remained high in the sky while the blue walls of the habitat darkened, reaching a steely blue hue textured with thin cloud shapes that flushed brilliant pink, but only for a minute. The color drained away as the sky shifted to a dark grey pierced with stars and the fading glow of the Lantern Suns. Full darkness imminent.

It comes too fast.

A few more steps and he stopped again. Breathe, he coached himself. It’s not that bad. You’ve been on harder climbs. Of course, he’d been younger then.

He sensed the temperature dropping in parallel with the light. Ice would soon be forming in the few pockets of soil gathered among the exposed basalt.

He coughed gently, imagining he heard the hum of the aerostat drifting closer. “Get moving,” he grumbled to himself. “You set the rules, you idiot. Now finish it.”

Step. Breathe. Step. Breathe. He allowed himself no more long pauses, leaning hard on his trekking poles as he pushed on, breath rasping painfully against a dry throat. He imagined Carol settling in for the night in the kinder climate of the forest rest house.

“Should have stayed there,” he muttered. A few steps later, “Wish I could have.”

So focused was he on each small step of his journey that it came as a surprise when he looked up and found he’d reached the rest house.

Like the others he’d seen, this one had a peaked roof with flared eaves and dark marble pillars. The walls were pushed open to the night sky.

He shed his pack with a sigh of gratitude and sat down on the bench. Groaned. Plumes of welcome heat curled up from open vents. He was played out. His back ached, his head ached, his lungs hurt. Another cough was looming but he resisted it.

In the abyss, a hundred thousand stars, but his gaze skipped over them to look downslope where the clouds were breaking up. Was there a light to mark the site of Carol’s camp?

No. How could there be? Any light would be hidden by the trees.

You’re on your own, he reminded himself. He’d planned it that way.

Hitoshi sat back, eyes closed, cherishing the heat against his legs. Shivering slightly, from exhaustion or cold or lack of oxygen. Maybe all three.

One thousand worlds.

All of them had been beautiful. Wondrous creations. Earth’s children.

But only one thousand... leaving so many more he would never see.

His alarm trilled.

“Rads and toxins,” he swore. “Can’t a man have a moment of quiet contemplation?”

The alarm did not have the capacity to respond to his protests. It just kept trilling, ever louder as the seconds passed.

He reached for his pack, retrieved his tablet, and thumbed it open.

Kimi again. She looked tired, flustered, as if she’d been awakened from a deep sleep. Was it necessary to sleep in the Virtual Layer? The idea bothered him. Granted, it was advertised as “Real life, with options.”

“Are you okay, Dad?” Kimi asked.

She sounded really scared this time. Hitoshi responded to that, answering in a gentler tone than he might have otherwise. “Same as always, sweetheart.”

“You’re not the same. You’ve got elevated heart and respiration rates, and a reduced oxygen level in your bloodstream.”

He scowled. “How do you know that?”

“I got a report from the trail monitor.”

He remembered the aerostat and rolled his eyes, regretting it immediately when he felt the dry bite of cold air against them. “I made the summit,” he told Kimi. “So of course my blood is low on oxygen. There’s not much oxygen anywhere.”

She looked past him, seeming puzzled now as well as worried. “It’s dark there.” Her gaze returned to him. “It must be cold.”

“It’s cold,” he agreed. And then, after an awkward pause, “There’s so much more I’d like to see, to do.”

“Come over,” she pleaded. “And you’ll have forever.”

He smiled a gentle smile. He could close the walls of the rest house, get warm, breathe oxygen from his fabricator until his lungs cleared—but that’s not why he’d come here.

He’d chosen the Loysan Escarpment as his last climb—as many had before him—because it was long, challenging, and beautiful, but also because it was a jumping off point.

In a few more minutes he’d get up again and continue on the trail. It climbed no higher, but it did go on a little farther, winding around the perimeter of the habitat’s massive tether to a transition arch on the other side.

He had only to enter the arch to initiate his transition to the Virtual Layer. On the other side he would be able to walk out onto the Earth—a virtual Earth, true, but still his first love.

“I’ve got a little farther to go tonight,” he told Kimi. “But I’ll be home soon.”