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Most of the other kids around the pond tried to talk me out of signing up for Non-Mandatory Study. They didn’t even give me credit for being rebellious, because, for a trust-kid, real rebellion meant either going deep into neural reprogramming or buying a starship and head for Magellanic Clouds, which in those days were way past the boundaries of the Machine-mind, to find some adventure.
No, my fellow trust-kids just couldn’t process it. For instance, Caroll, whose family had seven shares, grabbed me at his investiture party and took me walking around the lip of the crater and, after I told him what I was gonna do, he said “But what are you going to do? Isn’t it all books? Won’t you be so bored? Surely you’re not really going to pursue a bounty?”
We looked down into the center of the crater, where our year-mates were frolicking about in the pond, shooting sprays of water twenty feet in the air, and I tried to explain to him that I loved him and the Moon and our crater and the life our family had built here over the last few thousand years, but that sometimes when I walked alone through the chest-high grass, I’d feel this, I don’t know, this weird complex feeling inside of me: this sense that everything up til now had just been a vacation, and that my real life was someplace else. And in those moments, I’d look at everything, all our sculpted stone shining white in the Earthlight, and I’d say to myself, dammit, if I only had more time to think then maybe I could figure everything out.
And still he didn’t get it. Caroll was a great guy on the jumping ground or when you needed someone to crew your fastship, but he wasn’t a thinker.
“Don’t you have to pass a test to get into NMS,” Caroll said. “Are you really going to take a test?”
I shrugged, trying to pretend I wasn’t worried. No one from our crater had gone to NMS for a long time. The only way I knew about it at all was from stories that my mom sometimes told about her grandma.
Late that night, though, when I was lying amongst the rushes and staring up at the Earth, I said, “I hope I get in. That’s all I want.”
Then a pair of bright orange eyes opened up between me and the glinting metallic face of the Earth, and I heard a voice.
“You can go if you wish,” said the Machine. “But you won’t be a success there. You are not intelligent enough.”
“Well I’ve never pretended to be a genius. But I’ve got thoughts.”
“Fine. Then it is done.”
We were all sitting in the atrium out on the other side of the crater, where all you can see is mile after mile of grey rock, when my acceptance arrived.
My dad grumbled a little, but my mom smiled at me. She affectionately grabbed me by the back of my neck and shook me a few times, and then hugged me.
“Find a good woman,” she said. “Or man. A good person. Who knows, maybe even someone who can bring us a bounty.”
“Or maybe I’ll win a bounty for myself,” I said.
She smiled and hugged me again. Two of my family’s three shares have been with us for thousands of years, ever since the Machine Corporation’s first decade, back when there weren’t many people in the world, and shares were relatively plentiful. But the third one came just a century ago, when my great-grandmother—a mathematician who had ten years of NMS—won a bounty for deriving some complex proof that’d been vexing the Machine for a thousand years.
“Your great-grandmother was the best thing that ever happened to this family,” my mom said. “Find another one like that, and your whole life will have been worthwhile.”
I looked out at the moonscape and completely disregarded everything my mom had said. I wasn’t meant to marry well and come back here and paint pretty light-sculptures until the Machine told me it was time to die and pass on my shares. No, I was building something inside me. Some beautiful thought that was still too thin and delicate to try to put into words.
• • •
Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, Margery was whipping herself into a righteous anger.
She was, and is, a hundred and ten pounds and four-foot-nine, with all her weight packed into muscles in her thighs and upper arms. Her parents built her that way, so she could wriggle through the maintenance shafts of their generation ship and maneuver the bulky jury-rigged waldos that they used to shift the corpsicles around.
Until the age of twelve Margery thought the purpose of her life was to keep her ship running. It’d left during a bad moment in Earth’s history, when it felt like the world might perhaps be rendered unfit for life. And her parents told her from the very beginning that she was humanity’s last hope. Unless she kept the ship running, then all these cryogenically frozen people would never live again. And if that happened then all life in the universe would be extinguished.
They told her that she was gonna be a Captain, just like her mother and grandmother before her. And that Captains needed to be prepared to make tough decisions, because the entire world relied on their judgment.
Then, poof, AI probes penetrated the ship, took over control, woke everybody up, and deposited them all on a nearby asteroid with a lifetime’s supply of water and with the means to produce as much food as they could ever need. When Margery’s parents asked the Machine to please just let them continue on to their new planet, they were informed that the planet no longer existed: the Machine had dismantled it centuries ago
So instead of fulfilling their grand destiny, they’d live and die on the asteroid. People would mine the rock, build new habitats, get married, have slightly fewer children than they needed to replace themselves, and, when the Machine decided it was time, her people would die out.
But in the meantime Margery scored in the 99.999th percentile on that Fitness for Civilization test that they give to all newly recontacted peoples. Because of her score, the Machine appeared above her while she slept and told her she could go anywhere in the world and do anything she wanted, and she—keep in mind she was just twelve years old at this point—told the Machine that what she wanted most in the world was to figure out a way to stop It from consuming the entire universe.
After that, the Machine was silent for a few years, and whenever someone died or something broke, Margery thought, “This is the Machine taking its revenge.” And who knows, maybe it was.
But when she turned seventeen, she got an acceptance letter from the Non-Mandatory Study program on Mars. And right at the time I was thinking my delicate little thoughts, she was saying to herself, “No matter what anyone says, I’m still a Captain.”
• • •
NMS doesn’t really exist anymore, but back then it was a bunch of caverns that went deep into either side of a Martian gorge. All the machines and power plants and books—billions of books—were stored back there in the airless void, while the students and teachers lived in the center, in rickety structures—they were over a thousand years old—held in place by metal scaffolding.
As in most things, the Machine was right about NMS: I wasn’t suited for life around non-shareholders. They were so brusque and fast-paced. They had no grace to them. No appreciation of life. All they cared about was learning.
And the nons were so stunning. Shareholders tend to look like whatever. For instance, I tend towards pudgy, and I’ve got oily skin. But the girls at NMS were usually tall and had narrow faces and large eyes, and, whenever the mood struck them, they’d have precise, athletic sex in the catwalks and unused lecture basins and outdoor amphitheaters
They treated me fine. I was like a mascot to them. When they came back from class, I’d usually still be hanging out on the catwalks and toying with my own neural programming—I had an obsession with music, then, and I loved reprogramming myself so that even the most asinine, mediocre music would enthrall me. Then I’d sit out there and rock back and forth to the sound of some warbly child and I’d think and I’d think and I’d think and somehow it would almost come together.
But once my classmates joined me, I’d somehow find the strength to put away the music and ask what they’d learned about. I didn’t care about what they said, I just liked the fire in their eyes when they talked. I liked the way their hands moved, and the way they sat forward in their chairs. And, most of all, I loved listening to them. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, most of the time, but there was a tone they had—a kind of music. You hear it sometimes in children who’re too young to know what they’re talking about. It’s almost a whine, but not quite. It’s got the petulance of a whine, but also a hint of unsureness. It annoys you at first, but then it wracks your heart, and all you want is for that voice to get whatever it wants.
One of them, Sherie, took me to bed a few times, which was a terrifying experience. She’d smash her body against mine so hard that my pelvis would ache, and when I told her to slow down, she’d just go faster and faster and grab my hands and put them places and whisper things into my ear. And afterwards, she’d be all sweaty and smiley, and I’d make excuses to leave.
Sleeping with Sherie was completely different from being with Brunhilde, my AI-controlled Self Stimulation Aide. My childhood sessions with Brunhilde were long and slow. We’d wipe out entire days: not really moving or making any sounds, except when I’d whisper ‘faster’ or ‘slower’ into Brunhilde’s audio-receptor port.
But in other ways, Sherie was great. She was a third-gen striver from an Oort Cloud colony whose population halved every five hundred years as the Machine slowly restricted its birth rate. The whole colony had come together to create and nurture her, and she was supposed to work hard and somehow buy a share so her people could continue to exist, but I could already tell she wasn’t ever gonna do that, because what was the point? The only weird thing was that she was how guilty she felt about it.
One day, when she started she sobbing out her guilt over her own selfishness, I said, “Look, Sherie, human life is just a transitional state whose time is over. The real selfishness would be tying up all these resources in order to keep a bunch of useless people alive.”
I remember we were sitting on the catwalk, watching the dust blow in the distance, and her hip was almost touching mine.
“But . . . they’re counting on me,” she said. “When I left, I thought I was saying goodbye forever: after two hundred years in transit, I thought everything recognizable would’ve faded away. But they were smarter than that. They kept my mom and dad and brother in cryogenic sleep and woke them up so I could hear their voices, telling me that the whole world only had twelve babies last year. Telling me that strange beasts have begun to batter their heads against the sides of the habitats. You should see the terrified messages they send: they went to sleep in a cosy city and woke up in a cold, empty village. And they keep asking: Can you do something? Can you talk to someone? Have you gotten any closer to figuring this out?”
“My god, that’s terrible,” I said, because that’s what you say when you hear about a person dying or being in pain. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah,” she said. “How many . . . your dad has some shares, you said . . . ?”
“They’re in a trust,” I said, but the question made me go cold. Because the truth was that I maybe could save her people. Even back then, Machine Corp was a strange and ancient thing, and it wasn’t completely consistent about how it chose to interpret its own charter. Having shares gave you immense control over it, but that control had limits. Sometimes when you tested those limits, it took your shares away without even mentioning it, but other times it let you get away with amazing things.
“I just . . . I want to do something,” Sherie said.
“Well, how’s the bounty list looking?”
That was the main thing at NMS. The Machine might be ungodly powerful, but it was still only one mind, and that mind was mostly occupied with the problem of minimizing the sum total of human suffering in the universe, which meant that there were still plenty of problems for bright human beings to solve. Most of them made no sense to me: they were esoteric problems in math or physics that carried quarter-share or half-share bounties. But the big problems were familiar to everyone: a four-share bounty for figuring out whether the cloud-shapes of Altair III were actually alive; a ten-share bounty for finding proof of non-human-derived intelligent life; and, the big one, a ten thousand share bounty for figuring out how to extend the age of the universe.
Most people at NMS latched onto one problem or another and disappeared into the caverns, frittering away their lives in research. Others joined big groups, directed by old and senior students, that’d agreed to split up any shares they won. And a few, like me, spent our days hanging around the catwalks and trying to figure out if any of these problems really sang to our souls.
“I don’t know,” Sherie said. “I’ve been toying with the Gannon Proposition for years now, but . . . I just keep thinking, if I won a share, then what? Would I really go out and buy up some piddly little planet where my people could eke out a few thousand more years?”
I nodded. The Machine was always looking to buy back your shares. If you were a hard bargainer, you could get something spectacular: an entire planet or solar system. It was crazy, since there were trillions of solar systems in the universe, but only millions of shares, but people still sometimes did it.
“Yeah, you could do that. Or, you know, you could just pass it on to your kids. If you earn it, then it’s yours. Your people aren’t sick or starving. The only thing they’re missing is a future, and I don’t see why you ought to give them yours.”
“Yeah, but . . . no offense, David, but I’ve seen how you and your family live, and it’s depressing. So careful. So controlled. So scared of offending the Machine. I don’t know . . . if I ever got a share, I’d want to go somewhere, do something unexpected, and add something new to the universe.”
“Yeah . . . it’s hard.”
But I guess in the bottom of my heart I looked down on Sherie, because it seemed so silly, all this looking for bounties and trying to acquire shares, when really there were far more important things to think about. I still hadn’t quite gotten ahold of the deep thought that’d brought me to NMS, but I could see its outline. The thought had something to do with shares, I knew. And something to do with the Machine. And something to do with wealth and with the age of the universe and the destiny of mankind. And music was tied up in there too. All of that stuff was connected somehow, and I felt like every second I spent staring into the Martian sands, I got closer and closer to the answer.
“I’m really . . . I’m glad we’re friends,” Sherie said. “Sometimes it feels like you’re the only one I know who really understands the world.”
She reached for me and tried to kiss me, but I told her I was tired. And that night, in my bubble, I prayed to the Machine. I did that sometimes. Praying to the Machine was different when you were a shareholder, because sometimes the Machine answered.
“Make her happy,” I said. “She deserves to be happy.”
Those shining eyes opened up above me, and a voice said, “There is no need to interfere. Her life will mean something, David. Someday, when . . . ”
And I could tell it was about to go into its usual spiel about how all life in the universe would someday be joined in lockstep harmony, and on that day the Universal Spirit would give thanks for the suffering of every human being who’d ever lived, so I said:
“Yeah. But . . . that’s true for everyone. How about the happiness, though?”
“I’m disappointed in you. This is a frivolous request. Your mother and father did not raise you to make frivolous requests.”
It’s a strange, unsettling thing for your God to be disappointed in you. At that moment, all my limbs went weak, and I was about to beg for forgiveness, but the voice said, “Don’t concern yourself further with that girl. She is in my heart now, and I will do what I can.”
The next day, the Machine appeared in Sherie’s lab, told her she was intellectually unfit for NMS, and put her on the next ship back to her colony. She’s dead now, but before she passed they made her the Mayor of her world and the Machine let her have three children. All her messages to me were very wistful, but the Machine has reassured me that her life was actually very happy.
• • •
I didn’t notice Margery until my sixth year of NMS. Almost everyone I’d arrived with was gone. My parents assumed I was engaged in some epic research project: it was the only way they could understand me being gone for so long. My friends from home, the ones who’d grown up around my pond on the moon, had either gone so far down into the hole of neural reprogramming and self-stimulation that they were hardly people anymore, or they’d found life partners and settled down on their family estates and carved out tidy little homes.
And I was . . . I don’t know. I was halfway between. My neural reprogramming had taken a strange turn: I’d destroyed my love of music, and rerouted those channels to focus on mundane sounds. I spent hours listening to the fall of condensation, and, over weeks and months, I developed a half-crazed theory of aesthetics that made no sense to any of my classmates. They—newer, younger, and hungrier—mostly avoided me as a bad thing.
A silence grew up around me, and, in my despair, I’d sometimes I’d babble out incoherent prayers to the Machine. I’d tell it to bless the drops and see the oneness of the drops and to love the drops, but it never answered anymore.
Margery, though, would listen to me. She says that we actually met in my third year, and that she’d met me a dozen times before my sixth year. But the first memory I have of her is during my sixth: we were in our breathmasks and suits and the dust was flying overhead, and I was saying something and she was looking up at me with her bright eyes and nodding and saying, “Yes? Yes. Really? Yes. That’s fantastic!”
And I thought, for a moment: this is what it must feel like to be the Machine.
• • •
And then she was just there, with me, spending every day in my bubble. We didn’t talk about it, but she’d been just as lonely as me. There aren’t many shareholders doing NMS, but there are even fewer recontactees. I don’t know who she spent time with before we found each other, but once I caught a guy glaring at Margery on the catwalks.
“Oh, you have enemies,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Margery said. “Ina and I are still friends, I guess, though, she didn’t take kindly to . . . well, she wasn’t interested in the same things as me.”
I understood. You see, Margery only cared about one thing: Altair III.
I’d heard of it, everyone had. The place with the strange clouds and the strange black mud. People said the clouds and the mud were some primitive life form, and that’s why the Machine hadn’t destroyed the planet yet. But Margery thought differently. She thought that the clouds and the mud were a Machine, or something like one. She thought they were a networked entity, or a pair of entities, that had been created by some long-vanished species in much the same way as humanity had created the Machine.
I didn’t think that was at all likely, but this view of hers didn’t really bother me the way it seemed to bother most of my classmates. I have no idea why it riled them up so much, but I saw it time and again. The moment Margery brought up her research, they’d jump down her throat with argument after argument and summon all sorts of linguistic charts and power consumption graphs, and eventually become red-faced and twitchy over the whole affair.
Eventually, Margery became a joke. Whenever she wasn’t around, the other students would ask how she was doing with her crackpot notions and conspiracy theories. Once, a tenth-year—a very distinguished student who’d later get a quarter-share bounty for solving some problem regarding the elasticity of stellar wave fronts—seriously proposed that we bring her wasteful, pseudoscientific research to the attention of the Machine, because it was such a shame that she was taking up space which could’ve gone to an honest researcher.
Which was a weird thing for them to say to my face, I guess, since who was taking up more space than me? But somehow all of them knew that I was in a different category from them.
I was so disturbed by his threats that I put on a breathmask and hunted up Margery over in the deep caverns, where she was playing around with some canned samples of Altairian gas, and told her, “I don’t understand why they’re so angry with you.”
The walls were gritty red, and the rock wept moisture when the heat was on. She turned around in her lab bench, and nodded at me, and turned back to the greenish sample floating in front of her.
“They’re invested in the system,” she said. “If the Machine isn’t the end-all of the universe’s destiny, then what is it all for? Why did we give up our homes? Our families? Our communities? It’s upsetting.”
“Yes, but . . . I am quite literally invested in the system, and I don’t agree with you at all, but I still don’t get angry about it.”
“Well, you’re special.”
“Hmm . . . tell me more.”
“You’re smarter than them. Wiser. You can suspend judgment.”
I smiled at her. “You are the only person who’s ever called me intelligent. But I’ll take it!”
But when I rubbed my hand across her back, she froze up. Margery looked at me with sad dark eyes and, after I let my hand fall, she said thanks for coming by and keeping her company, but she was gonna be out pretty late so there was no sense in me staying.
It made no sense to me. Margery was obviously the person I should marry. She was short and squat: an outsider. No one here loved her. No one understood her. And she enjoyed being around me! But she always nudged me away right at the moment when I would have kissed her. Sometimes I thought about laying it all out for her and saying look, I already hold one share, and when my parents die, I’ll get two more. You’re not gonna get a better offer than that, are you?
But I didn’t say it. She hadn’t yet told me about the whole Captain thing, but I could sense, somehow, that she would’ve loved the chance to reject an offer like that.
• • •
Year followed year, and I won’t have you think that Margery was the only one who kept busy. I was there too, sitting on those catwalks, watching the kids—I thought of them as kids now—come and try for a while to claim their bounties.
Which they mostly didn’t. Those Martian deserts were bleak and red, and they swallowed up the days without letting you taste them, and when people would leave, they wouldn’t say goodbye, because they were so ashamed of not getting what they’d come for.
And I always stayed behind. Strange and out of place, with my old-young body and my hesitant speech and far-off movements. I could feel something building inside me. I spent my days pacing back and forth on the rickety catwalks, humming to myself in long monotonous tones, and thinking wordless thoughts. I was giving birth to something, I knew, and putting words onto it would be the very last step. But when it finally came out, I knew it’d electrify the entire universe.
Margery had mostly retreated to the far caverns, where she huddled in the chill and took measurements with dead strands of gas. Once, when I crept in quietly, I heard her whispering to the cloud:
“Come on,” she said. “I’m here. I’m listening. Just give me something. Give me anything.”
I stood and listened to her for a long time, because I knew how hard it was to coax an idea into being.
• • •
Our last day at NMS started with a trip to the poles, where we stood on a plain of shattered glass: all the ten-thousand-year-old domes had fallen to pieces. We drove my ship—there’s no way Margery could’ve afforded to come out here on her own—over to the mines where these ancient men and women had dug holes deeper and deeper into the earth in a frantic effort to find more water.
“I can’t remember,” I said. “Did the Machine save these people or not?”
“They died natural deaths,” Margery said.
Margery had some kind of theory about how solar radiation was interfering with her attempts to measure the interaction of Altairian gas molecules, so we dropped down into one of the ice-mines, and as we fell, I ran a finger over the side of the mine. Something about its sheer ancientness was really upsetting to me.
“I feel so grateful to these people,” I said. “For everything they did to try to survive. But . . . I’m also grateful that they failed. There’s . . . it’s . . . what would’ve happened if they’d succeeded?”
“Then there’d be a city here,” Margery said.
“Yeah . . . but . . . why? It’d be completely pointless. But . . . it’s . . . it’s still good that they once existed. Am I making sense? I wouldn’t be happy if they’d never existed at all. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I grew up in a fake world. I’m glad I don’t live there anymore, but I wouldn’t have traded those years for anything.”
She fell silent while the weight of Mars built up over our heads. I wasn’t sure she was talking about the same thing I was talking about, but since I wasn’t really sure what I was talking about, it was hard to respond to her.
When we got to the bottom, she set up some equipment, then let some gas escape into the air. After a few minutes, she looked at her equipment panels. Then she started crying.
On the way up, she put her strong arms around me, and her tiny body shook with sobs. She hadn’t gotten the results she needed. “I’ve ruined my entire life,” she said.
When we got back to the main campus, a shining pair of eyes appeared above the doorway and told her she wasn’t welcome back. Apparently, those samples of gas were priceless and irreplaceable. A ship was coming to take her back to her people.
But when the ship came, I hopped on board right behind her and said, “Excuse me, but could you please drop us off on Altair III instead?”
The Machine said, “This is a mistake. If you travel between the stars, everyone you know will die, and everything you love will fade away. You should go home.”
Even Margery wanted me to stay behind, but I held firm and eventually the Machine gave in.
• • •
On Altair III we slept in a plastic bubble on the edge of a mesa. When I woke up each morning, I’d unseal one of the walls and piss right out into the dark black shapes coagulating at the bottom of the gulch. The shapes need ammonia if they’re ever gonna grow. Or at least that’s what I told Margery whenever she asked if that was really necessary.
I woke up every morning with her arms wrapped around me, but once the day started, she mostly ignored me. She worked the research station, dipping her little flasks and cables down into the shapes while I laid out on a rock and stared at the green-tinged clouds drifting above.
You’ve seen videos of the clouds, but in a way, those videos are a bit too impressive, because the Machine colorizes them with deep blues and greens and golds. I don’t know, maybe those colors map to infrared or ultraviolet or radio waves or something I don’t understand. For all I know, that’s how the clouds actually looked when the Machine saw them.
To my eyes, the clouds were a frothy green. When they were up in the sky, all massed together in their cities, they had a bit of bulk. In fact, the way they used to shimmer and bubble over on each other and sometimes reverse direction, going right into the wind, was something spectacular. Human society is the same, you know: the Machine always says that it’s just the sum total of the actions of all the people who’ve ever lived. But you can’t see the Machine; at least, not the same way you could see the cloud civilization.
But when a cloud came down to the ground, it was pretty unimpressive. The damn thing was just a greenish fume. I usually didn’t even know to look for it until my belt-monitor started beeping.
When that happened, I’d stand up on my rock and flap my arms—for some reason, flapping my arms felt right—and inhale deeply and stare at one spot on the distant, rollicking horizon—the next mesa was almost two hundred miles away, and in between us was only congealed black valley and blooming green sky—until I got dizzy and tired.
I don’t know why I did that. I guess I just felt like maybe the green clouds had things they might say to me that they’d never say to Margery, but nothing ever happened.
Then night would fall, and I’d go and sit by the tent and wait for Margery to heat up something for dinner. While we ate, I’d tell her about the news that’d come in from the rest of the Galaxy, and she’d nod and go through her data.
She never spoke much to me, except when I asked her for the progress report that I felt I, as the expedition’s financier, was owed.
That’s when it would come out. She was lost. She had no idea what she was doing. She’d corresponded with so many scientists on so many planets and collected so many experimental protocols. She’d tried so many approaches. She’d analyzed the data in so many ways. But the problem was too large. When you looked at the gas, it was obvious that it was organized and intelligent. But proving it? That was something else. What made her most afraid, though, was the possibility that the gas was closed and self-contained. Maybe the reason she couldn’t communicate with it was because it didn’t want or need to communicate. Maybe it’d looked deep down into her soul and figured out everything there was to know about her and decided that she was completely insignificant.
“And even that would be fine,” she said. “If only it would give us some kind of sign that the Machine isn’t the only thing that can exist in this universe. If only . . . ”
I didn’t like to see her all hopeless like that, so I’d hold her close, when she’d let me, and I’d tell her she was the most marvelous and intelligent and beautiful creature that I’d ever seen, but that didn’t help her at all.
And afterwards, we’d go to sleep, side by side. I never tried to touch her, even though I wanted to, because I knew she’d have gotten upset. But those nights when I lay awake next to her and stared up into the swirling gas were the closest that I’d yet come to finding the thought that I was supposed to find.
We only had one real fight during the whole time we spent there, and it wasn’t set off by anything in particular. Just one night, after she started crying and told me that she couldn’t believe she’d dragged me out here on this fool’s errand, I wanted her to feel better, so I told her that I felt like my work was going really well, and I felt like I was really on the verge of something.
She sat up straighter on her orb and scrunched up her face. Then she dismissed her data displays and stared deep into my eyes
“Really?” she said.
“Yeah . . . you know how it is. I can feel the insight building up inside me. It’s something about how people are supposed to live.”
“David. Stop being such a complete fool!”
Afterwards the silence was so complete that I could almost pretend I hadn’t heard her shout. But her whole body was quivering.
“Life is extremely simple, David,” she said. “You can either attempt to propagate yourself or you can pursue hedonic satisfaction or you can try to sublimate those urges into some arbitrarily-defined substitution activity. Typically, members of your class have pursued propagation: mindlessly holding onto the same estates and social position for millennia. Most other human beings don’t have that option. They know the Machine will someday end their line. Thus, they either pursue pleasure or they attempt to redirect those drives by deriving some thin satisfaction from the idea that their sacrifice will enable the Machine to, someday, span the entire universe and reunite all matter within itself. That’s it. There’s nothing else!”
I gulped. I thought that if anyone understood me, then Margery did.
“No,” I scratched the inside of my neck. “No, that’s not it. But I’m coming close. I can sense it.”
“You’re an idiot! You have nothing to say: nothing to contribute. The least you could do is shut up! For god’s sake, at least be quiet: I’m tired of letting your drivel crowd out my thoughts.”
I tried to respond, but she kept shouting. Then we stared at each other for a long while until I finally crawled back into the tent and went to sleep. After that, I stopped asking her for progress reports, and I stopped talking to her about my work. After a few weeks, though, she stopped sleeping outside and went back to sleeping next to me. And, sometimes, when I was standing on my rock and flapping my arms, I’d remember the way she’d shouted at me: the way her whole body had expanded. She’d been smiling. All through her harangue, she’d smiled at me.
• • •
When I got the news, I took it in an “Oh, that’s interesting” sort of way; in fact, I didn’t necessarily think it meant anything at all. But still, it was something, so I held onto it all day, until Margery came back and finished laying out the food and cleaning the campsite.
Only after we’d both sat down on our orbs did I finally say, “Guess what? The Machine’s awarded the Altair III bounty. Or well, half of it: two shares.”
Her eyes went really wide and her mouth opened slightly. Then she looked up overhead. Just a glance.
“Yeah,” I said. “To some NMS person. Not anyone we know. This woman used data from survey stations to model interactions between the gas cloud particles, and she determined that the pattern of motion and exchange of information was too limited to be indicative of intelligent life. She’s not sure, though, whether or not they’re alive. So that part is still up in the—”
I stopped. Margery had gone completely still. Her eyes were rolled up into her hand and her fingers were twitching.
“Hey, I can show you the paper if—”
“Shut up!”
I waited a long time for her to come out of her data-access trance, but eventually I put out the fire and piled up the dirty utensils at her feet so she could deal with them later.
That night, I woke up with a start: Margery was putting her arms around me.
“What?” I said.
“Shh, it’s okay. It’s just me.”
“Yeah, but . . . ”
She rubbed her hands over my chest, really slowly, and said, “Is this how Brunhilde did it?” but I shook her off.
“What are you doing?”
Tears were streaming from her eyes. “We belong together.”
Through the slit in the bubble, I saw the boxes assembled at the edge of the tent. She’d packed up most of the campsite and vaporized most of her research apparatus.
“No . . . ” I said. “No, we don’t have to leave.”
“It’s done.”
And even though none of it seemed right to me, she started rubbing her body on top of mine, and, eventually, my hands settled onto her hips.
• • •
A few years later, the Machine turned its attention to Altair III and, using a burst of its immense brainpower, determined that the clouds weren’t alive after all. Those shining eyes appeared to us when we were at dinner in that very atrium—the one where I’d sat with my parents a long time ago—and told us that it was awarding Margery a half-share for the role her data had played in making this discovery.
Then the eyes were up there, hanging over all of us. My mom had chosen to die shortly after I brought Margery home, but my dad was still hanging on, long after when he ordinarily would’ve died, because he couldn’t stand the thought of the estate falling into Margery’s hands.
I looked at him. “You see. Margery’s brought a half-share into the family.”
My father looked at us. We’d accumulated something of a brood by then—three children, with a fourth on its way—and I knew my dad was worried that Margery was going to want to subdivide our shares between them. Equal inheritance is how great families die out, my dad used to say.
But Margery wasn’t looking at either of us. Instead, she stared at the Machine and said, “What are you going to do to Altair III?”
The eyes became different. Narrower and flatter. It took me a moment to realize that they’d turned around. Now that Margery owned a half-share of her own, she finally had some sort of power.
“I’m about to begin the process of disassembling it.”
Margery nodded, and she went back to her food. The eyes hung around above us for a few moments before realizing they weren’t wanted.
That night, during our walk along the side of the pond, I told Margery, “You know, we could buy it. I’d be willing to spend a share on it.”
“What?”
“Altair III. We could buy it.”
Margery blinked three times, and I rushed onwards, because even though I loved her and was happy with her, I thought maybe this would be a way to see the old Margery one more time.
“You don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the Machine is wrong. Or maybe it’s . . . it could be lying. It could. That’s a possibility. And regardless, those clouds were beautiful. They could be ours forever. We could move there. Import people into the system: maybe the people from your old ship. Altair has plenty of mesas. They could live there with us.”
She touched the edge of my arm for a brief moment. Overhead, the Earth shone down on us, throwing out shadows out over the pool. A few people still lived Earthside back then, but not many. The Machine was in the process of relocating the last of them. That was before the Machine drained the oceans and wrapped its glowing filaments around the entire world. Back then, the light from Earth was all blue and white, and in the entire universe, there was no other sight that was quite like it.
The next day, I brought up Altair again, but all she said was “Don’t be silly.”
But after that, she smiled more often. Especially when she was telling the kids: “It’s your duty to bring more shares into the family.”
Over the years her smile got deeper and deeper. When she found the children splashing in the water or playing with fastships, she’d pull them out and tell them that they’d better have their fun now, because as soon as they were of age, they’d go to NMS and figure out some way to bring more shares into the family. And she told them that they shouldn’t take marriage and procreation for granted, because only one of them was going to inherit the family shares.
My father didn’t like it. He said this pressurizing wasn’t decent, and it wasn’t how shareholders were supposed to behave. The children hated it too. They hated her. Still hate her, in fact. And I suppose they hate me as well, because I never spoke out against her.
But I liked that smile of hers.
One night, she asked me, “What would happen if one person accumulated a majority of the outstanding shares.”
I laughed and told her that was the kind of question that only kids ask. But she rolled out of our orb and slapped the wall and said, “Machine! What would happen if one person accumulated a majority of the outstanding shares? Would they control you?”
The eyes appeared over me and said, “Is there something you wish to accomplish?”
But she shouted: “No, I’m the one with the question. And none of your run-around. In fact, walk with me. Let’s take this out into the crater.”
So the eyes floated along next to her, and she hissed low, quiet questions at them.
When she came back to bed, she was shivering. I put an arm around her and brought her body close, even though it was cold as a corpse.
“We’re going to destroy the Machine,” she whispered.
While my wife vibrated under my arm, she laid out her plan for sending our children out into the night like secret agents. For teaching them to acquire, by marriage or merit, as many shares as they could. Over the millennia, they’d use marriage to slowly coalesce their shares, year after year, generation after generation, until control was complete.
I closed my eyes. If there was any moment for my insight to come, surely it’d be this one. My wife had become the person she was going to be. Now it had to be my turn.
But the thought didn’t come on that night or the next or for many years to come. I puttered about on our estate while she went among our neighbors—alienating some and befriending others—and planted strange ideas in the heads of their children. She even went to some of the other craters—places that’ve been silent for centuries—and came back with a pair of elongated shareholders—these women were at least twelve feet tall and spoke in a very slurred, gibberish-laden way—who she proposed to marry to our sons, before the women finally took fright at something and disappeared in the night.
One time, though, I think I came close to fulfilling my destiny:
I was sitting on my chair on the lip of the crater and watching the grass and the pond and the children and thinking my wordless thoughts. It’d become harder, over time. I’d never come as close to putting everything together as I did back on Altair III. But when I thought about things, I still had the sensation of making progress, and that at least was pleasurable.
But as I sat there, my wife bounded up beside me. Even after all these years, her squat, low body hadn’t lost its strength.
And she said, “The clouds have been disassembled. I guess they were nothing after all. I’ve seen the video: the harvesters sucked them in just like any other gas. I can’t believe it. I was such a fool, wasn’t I? To waste all those years? I was so stupid—”
“No,” I said. “Please stop.”
“You know I had no real method? No systematic training? The woman who solved the problem had thirty years of education in mathematical linguistic. Whereas I thought I could just—”
“Please!”
She bared her teeth. My wife wasn’t used to backing down. Her hands formed into tiny fists and her face got all wide, and I knew she was getting ready to scream again.
“Please,” I said, once more, in a quiet voice.
And she lost her rigidity. The explosion didn’t come. Instead, she reached up and ran her fingers across my back, and we sat there for awhile, gazing downslope. Three of our kids were splashing around in the pond, and the fourth was beating his way through the tall grass.