AFTER BONESTELL, by Jay Lake

How many times can a man wake up in a lifetime?

It occurs to me that question could stand some rephrasing. At the least, to account for certain values of “man” and “lifetime.”

Damn, I hate questions. Every time I instantiate, I seem to come online with a question or ten.

I’ve got eyes again. That’s nice. It has been aeon or two since optical sensors were in fashion. Someone—the Voldrani?—had been towing the Earth extremely long distances at Newtonian speeds. That takes a while, to put it mildly. Even stars eventually notice something that happens that slowly. Not a lot to see sailing between the spiral arms without a primary to light your days, not without some big arrays.

My eyes tell me there’s light. Meaning, widespread electromagnetic radiation between 380 and 780 ångströms. I haven’t had a koniocortex in over a gigayear, measured by my 238U clock, but there’s still something comforting about a sky full of blue light. Even if it is strangely sourceless. There’s still a monkey screaming in the trees, somewhere deep in the simulation which is my consciousness.

Someone’s knocking, too. I don’t wake up just to put out the cat. I don’t seem to have any virtual data streams or neutrino matrices or any of my other billenial gear at the moment, so I use my eyes to look around.

Amazingly, they do.

I see rocks, and slush, and a blue sky with scattered clouds. This could be Montana, if Montana weren’t lost to plate tectonics and the crustal deformations of an Earth in tow longer than the life cycle of a Type K red giant. Not just rocks, buttes even. Mesas. I reach for a whole library of the geology of the dynamic planet so long dead beneath my feet before I realize the network is missing.

Not dormant or silent.

Missing.

And by all the gods of ancient days, I have feet.

Then the planet says, “Hello.”

#

I walk. I am ankle-deep in the slush, which isn’t really snow. Not as some portion of my biological memory understands. It’s white, but it has the consistency of talcum powder. It’s chilly, but not nearly cold enough. I’m pretty sure walking naked in the snow of my childhood would have turned my feet blue. Not to mention the rest of me.

And the air is warm.

Already I am doubting the miracle. Maybe I just think it’s warm. This air could be supercooled helium, but if this body were adapted to it…

I shake the thought off as unworthy.

The planet whines after me like a dog with separation anxiety, but I ignore it. Earth and I have been bedmates for well over a billion years and she’s never spoken to me once. I don’t need to answer her now.

Instead I experiment with kicking the slush, tossing it, spreading the powder like chaff on the desultory wind which seems to have sprung up at my thought. The clouds overhead seem almost painted onto the sky, but the air is moving.

For a moment I stop on some bare rock and contemplate the marvel that is my feet. Long, bony toes, as if evolution were part way through changing its mind about whether I should walk on the ground or spend my life in the trees. Tiny hairs spiraling from the knuckle joints of my toes, save the littlest one which is clean and smooth as a baby’s thighs. The metatarsals are a subtle texture under the thin skin that tops them. At my merest thought, the toes clench and the skin ripples.

Then the weird, warm snow blows sticky smooth across me and I realize none of this is possible. It never was. Just for starters, my feet have been gone almost since time began.

The planet takes that moment to try again. “I know you can hear us,” it says petulantly.

“Of course I can. You brought me back.”

“No…” There is a silence which is somehow filled with the heaviness of thought. Then, in a voice so small it is barely more than the chattering of the wind: “We had believed you brought us back.”

I walk again, feeling the sheer joy of the interplay of bone, muscle and skin, the trick of balance which we bipeds must master simply to rise to our feet, the sense of heaviness and limits and borders which a body brings to a mind. “I never left.” That sounded rude, abrupt, even to me. “I’ve been sleeping.”

“Sleeping?”

“Sleeping,” I say confidently. “The long sleep, on the wrong side of dreams.” The phrase is dredged out of a hazy recollection of some orientation lecture, back when I still had the feet I was born with.

Strangely, I think I can remember being born as well.

Now the planet is plaintive. “Have we also been sleeping?”

Somehow I’d always thought that if Earth had a voice, it would be some majestic Gaian alto that could shatter mountains and force seeds into blossom. Not the whimperings of a tired child.

“Yes,” I say, taking pity now. “We’ve both been sleeping.”

“I don’t remember being awake before.”

“I don’t remember you ei—”

I stop, my voice arrested by the sheer magnitude of the sight which has appeared as I’ve continued to walk. A shift of perspective, maybe, or perhaps it sprang full blown into being before my reconstituted eyes, but there is now a planet in the sky. A gas giant, to be specific, Saturn as seen from Titan.

Except this is no more Saturn than I am on Titan.

(In that moment I know the Earth is real beneath my feet, even if the feet themselves are some new veil of illusion.)

This giant is the dream of a thousand artists of my childhood, men like Bonestell and Paul and Wu and Eggleton, huge and gravid with pulsing storm bands that promise wind whales and aerial cities and lead-foil airships with deathly lances of coruscating viridian energy rays. Its rings are gorgeous, exaggerated, so massive that a dozen Earths would have died to make such a circle in the sky. They gleam like the wreckage of a million million gilded warships, banding the gas giant in some plighting of troth with encroaching universe.

I suddenly feel protective toward my sullen, frightened planet. This world is parent to the whining child that is my Earth.

Adoptive parent, the forced love of gravity and mass, but still, here we are.

“Oh,” I say.

“Didn’t you know?” asks the Earth, whispering in the whippet whine of the snow.

“How could I? Taken in your scale, I am a point of awareness at best.” Though there is a certain subtle thrill to being back in my body, or some body, I am greatly missing my networks and my instruments. That is the real me, now after all this time.

I wonder where I am.

“It frightens us.”

“It should,” I say without thinking, a certain reflexive humor getting in the way of my better judgment. I try for the save. “What do you suppose it wants?” The question didn’t seem as stupid as it might under other circumstances.

Earth is slow in answering. “We think it might be hungry.”

* * * *

I climb one of the little mesas, as if a dozen yards of altitude would bring me meaningfully closer to the giant in the sky. Shouldn’t it be moving, I wonder? Another piece of fakery. I try talking to the not-Saturn for a while.

Cronus, I realize he should be named.

I call him that name as well. “Cronus, why have you remade us?” It seems inconceivable that some casual agency awakened me once more, instantiated in this idiotically limited body, while also giving Earth a voice of its own after five and half billion years of silence.

He is silent. They? Earth seems to be incorrigibly plural, and I am disinclined to embark on a course of therapy in that regard. Still, there is something singular about that vasty presence pinned unmoving in our pale blue sky.

Eventually I tire of the game and find myself falling prey to the vagaries of embodiment. Fatigue, and hunger. I’m not certain if they’re just the hard death of old habits or real needs, but I feel them all the same.

“Earth,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Do you have any food?”

There is a plate of waxy pears beside me, unnoticed before.

“Ah.” So I am dreaming, or dying. Sad, that, because I was beginning to like this place. At least a little. If nothing else, it explained the strange snow.

“We don’t think you’re dying,” the planet tells me. “Because we don’t think we’re dying.”

“Then where are we?”

“Wherever the Voldrani meant to take us.”

Cronus rumbles, something sad and slow like my grandfather mumbling in his sleep.

“We’ve fallen deeper into the dream,” I tell the planets, both of them. Cronus may not be listening, but if I can hear him, by the logic of this place he can hear me.

“What dream?” the planet asks me. My planet. Or perhaps I belong to it.

“The oldest one, of faraway places and distant horizons and the sky another color than the one a man was born under it. The first hairy man who rode a log down the river had that dream, and by God we had it when I was a kid. You and I, my planetary friend, we’ve gone after Bonestell.”

“It took long enough,” muttered the Earth.

“Yet here we are.” I sit, and admire the view. I realize it was worth the wait.