Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 41

I knelt down, gesturing to indicate that he should follow suit. He hesitated, but he obeyed the instruction eventually. His suitskin was easily capable of digesting any dirt that got on its knees, and would probably be grateful for the piquancy.

"Do you know what this is?" I asked, fondling a crinkled leaf.

"Not exactly," he replied. "Some kind of engineered hybrid, mid-twenty-first-cee vintage, probably disembARked fifty or sixty years ago. The bit you eat is underground, right? Carrot, potato-something of that general sort-presumably gee-ee augmented as a whole-diet crop."

He was smarter than he looked. "Not exactly whole-diet," I corrected. "The manna-potato never really took off. Even when the weather went seriously bad, you could still grow manna-wheat in England thanks to megabubbles and microwave boosters. This is headstuff. Ecstasy c.o.c.ktail. Its remotestancestor produced the finest melange of euphorics and hallucinogens ever devised-but that was a hundred generations of mutation and insect-led natural selection ago. You crush the juice from the tubers and refine it by fractional distillation and freeze-drying-if you can keep the larvae away long enough for them to grow to maturity."

"So what?" he said, unimpressed. "You can buy designer stuff straight from the synthesizer, purity guaranteed. Growing your own is even more pointless than growing lettuces and courgettes."

"It's an adventure," I told him. "It's my adventure. It's the only kind I'm interested in now."

"Sure," he said. "We'll be careful not to take you away for too long. But we still need you, Professor Neal, and our Adventure is the one that matters to us. I came here to make a deal. Whatever it takes.

Can we go inside now?"

I could see that he wasn't to be dissuaded. The young can be very persistent, when they want to be.

I sighed and surrendered. "You can come in," I conceded, "but you can't talk me 'round, by flattery or black-mail or salesmans.h.i.+p. At the end of the day, I don't have to do it if I don't want to." I knew it was hopeless, but I couldn't just give in. I had to make him do the work.

"You'll want to," he said, with serene overconfidence.

The aim of the project on which we were supposed to be working, way back in the twenty-first, was to place a ring of satellites in orbit between Earth and Mars to keep watch for stray asteroids and comets that might pose a danger to the Earth. The Americans had done the donkey-work on the payloads before the plague wars had rendered Canaveral redundant. The transfer brought the European s.p.a.ce Program back from the dead, although not everyone thought that was a good thing. "Why waste money protecting the world from asteroids," some said, "when we've all but destroyed it ourselves?" They had a point.

Once the plague wars had set the dominoes falling, the Crash was inevitable; anyone who hoped that ten percent of the population would make it through was considered a wild-eyed optimist in 2080.

The age of manned s.p.a.ceflight had been over before I was born. It didn't make economic sense to send up human beings, with the incredibly elaborate miniature ecospheres required for their support, when any job that needed doing outside the Earth could be done much better by compact clever machinery. n.o.body had sent up a payload bigger than a dustbin for over half a century, and n.o.body was about to start. We'd sent probes to the outer system, the Oort Cloud, and a dozen neighboring star systems, but they were all machines that thrived on hard vacuum, hard radiation, and eternal loneliness.

To us, there was no Great Adventure; the Theseus Project was just business-and whatever Astolpho was, it certainly wasn't an Adventure. It was just business of a subtly different kind.

Despite the superficial similarity of their names, there was nothing in our minds to connect Astolpho with Apollo. Apollo was the glorious G.o.d of the sun, the father of prophecy, the patron of all the Arts.

Astolpho was a character in one of the satirical pa.s.sages of the Orlando Furioso who journeyed to the Moon and found it a treasure-house of everything wasted on Earth: misspent time, ill-spent wealth, broken promises, unanswered prayers, fruitless tears, unfulfilled desires, failed quests, hopeless ambitions, aborted plans, and fruitless intentions. Each of these residues had its proper place: hung on hooks, stored in bellows, packed in trunks, and so on. Wasted talent was kept in vases, like the urns in which the ashes of the dead were sometimes stored in the Golden Age of Crematoria. It only takes a little leap of the imagination to think of a crater as a kind of vase.

The target picked out by the clandestine Project Astolpho was Endymion, named for the youth beloved of the Moon G.o.ddess Selene whose reward for her divine devotion was to live forever in dream-filled sleep.

Even in the days of Apollo-or shortly thereafter, at any rate-there had been people who liked the idea of burial in s.p.a.ce. Even in the profligate twentieth, there had been dying men who did not want their ashes to be scattered upon the Earth, but wanted them blasted into s.p.a.ce instead, where they would last much longer.

By 2080, when the Earth itself was dying, in critical condition at best, those who had tried hardest to save it-at least in their own estimation-became determined to save some tiny fraction of themselves from peris.h.i.+ng with it. They did not want the relics of their flesh to be recycled into bacterial goo thatwould have to wait for millions of years before it essayed a new ascent toward complexity and intellect.

They did not want their ashes to be consumed and recycled by the c.o.c.kroaches which were every book-maker's favorite to be the most sophisticated survivors of the ecoholocaust.

They knew, of course, that Project Astolpho was a colossal waste of money, but they also knew that all money would become worthless if it were not spent soon, and there was no salvation to be bought. Who could blame them for spending what might well have proved to be the last money in the world on ashes and tombstones?

Were they wrong? Would they have regretted what they had done, if they had known that the human race would survive its self-inflicted wounds? I don't know. Not one member of the aristocracy of wealth that I could put a name to came through the worst. Perhaps their servants and their mistresses came through, and perhaps not-but they themselves went down with the s.h.i.+p of Fools they had commissioned, captained, and navigated. All that remains of them now is their legacies, among which the payloads deposited by illicit Theseus launches in Endymion might easily be reckoned the least-and perhaps not the worst.

Dennis Mountjoy was right to describe me as a very small cog in the Engine of Fate. I did not plan Astolpho and I did not carry it out, but I did distribute the bribes. I was the bagman, the calculator, the fixer. Mathematics is a versatile art; it can be applied to widely different purposes. Math has no morality; it does not care what it counts or what it proves. Somewhere on Astolpho's moon, although Ariosto did not record that he ever found it, there must have been a hall of failed proofs, mistaken sums, illicit theorems, and follies of infinity, all neatly bound in webs of tenuous logic.

Had I not had the modest wealth I took as my commission on the extra Theseus shots, of course, I could not have been one of the survivors of the Crash. Had it not been for my brokerage of Project Astolpho, I could not have been, by the time that Dennis Mountjoy came to call, one of the oldest men in the world: the founder of a prolific dynasty. I, too, would have been nothing but ash, without even a tombstone, when the New Apollonians decided that it was time to rea.s.sert the glory and the G.o.dhood of the human race by duplicating its most magnificent folly: the Great Adventure.

I had never had any part in the first Adventure, and I wanted no part in the second. I had worked alongside men who had launched rockets into outer s.p.a.ce, but the only things I ever helped to land on the Moon were the cargoes provided by the Pharaohs of Capitalism: the twenty-first century's answer to Pyramids.

I was companion to Astolpho, not Apollo: whenever I raised my eyes to the night sky, I saw nothing in the face of the Moon but the wastes of Earthly dreams and Earthly dreamers.

"None of that is relevant," Dennis Mountjoy told me, when I had explained it to him-or had tried to (the account just now set down has, of course, taken full advantage of l'espirt de l'escalier). He sat in an armchair waving his hands in the air. I had almost begun to wish that I'd offered him a cup of tea and a slice of cake, so that at least a few of his gestures would have been stifled.

"It's relevant to me," I told him, although I was fully cognizant by then of the fact that he had not the least interest in what was relevant to me.

"None of it's ever going to come out," he a.s.sured me. "You can forget it. You may be two-hundred-and-some years old, but that doesn't mean that you have to live in the past. We have to think of the future now. You should try to forget. That's what a good memory is, when all's said and done: one that can forget all the things it doesn't need to retain. There's no need for you to be hung up on the differences between Apollo and Astolpho in a world which can no longer tell them apart. As you said yourself, ninety percent of the people alive today are under forty. To them, it's all ancient history, and the names are just sounds. Apollo, Ariane, Theseus-it's all merged into a single mythical mishmash, including all the sidelines, official and unofficial. From the point of view of the people who believe in the New Adventure, and the people who will believe, once we've captured their imagination, it's all part of the same story, the one we're starting over. Your presence at the launch will confirm that. All that anyone will see when they look at you is a miracle: the last survivor of Project Theseus; the envoy of the First s.p.a.ce Age, extending his blessing to the Second.""Do you know why Project Theseus was called by that name?" I asked him.

"Of course I do," he replied. "I know my history, even though I refuse to be bogged down by it.

Ariane was the rocket used in the first European s.p.a.ce Program, named for the French version of Ariadne, daughter of Minos of Crete. Theseus was one of seven young men delivered to Minos as a tribute by the Athenians, along with seven young women; they were to be sacrificed to the minotaur-a monster that lived in the heart of a maze called the labyrinth. Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and gave him a thread which allowed him to keep track of his route through the maze. When he had killed the minotaur, he was able to find his way out again. Theseus was the name given to Ariane's successor in order to signify that it was the heroic project which would secure humankind's escape from the minotaur in the maze: the killer asteroid that might one day wipe out civilization."

"That's the official decoding," I admitted. "But Theseus was also the betrayer of Ariane. He abandoned her. According to some sources, she committed suicide or died of grief-but others suggested that she was saved by Dionysus, the ant.i.thesis of Apollo."

"So what?" said Mountjoy, making yet another expansive gesture. "Whatever you and your crazy pals might have read into that back in 2080, it doesn't matter now."

"Crazy pals?" I queried, remembering his earlier reference to the Astolpho launches as "crazy shots."

Now I was beginning to wish that I had a cup of tea; my own hands were beginning to stir as if in answer to his.

"The guys who gave you the money to shoot their ashes to the Moon," the young man said. "The Syndicate. The Captains of Industry. The Hardinist Cartel. Pick your cliche. They were crazy, weren't they? Paying you to drop those payloads in Endymion was only the tip of the iceberg. I mean, they were the people with the power-the people who had steered the world straight into the Crash. That has to be reckoned as causing death by dangerous driving-manslaughter on a ma.s.sive scale. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, wouldn't you say?"

"They didn't see it that way themselves," I pointed out mildly.

"They certainly didn't," he agreed. "But you're older and wiser, and you have the aid of hindsight, too. So give me your considered judgment, Professor Neal. Were they or were they not prime candidates for the straitjacket?"

I granted him a small laugh, but kept my hands still. "Maybe so," I said. "Maybe so. Can I get you a drink, by the way?"

He beamed, thinking that he'd won. One crack in the facade was all it needed to convince him.

"No thanks. We know how bad things were back then, and we don't blame you at all for what you did. The world is new again, and its newness is something for us all to celebrate. I understand why you've tried so hard to hide yourself away, and why you've built a maze of misinformation around your past. I understand how the thought of coming out of your sh.e.l.l after all these years must terrify you-but we will look after you. We need you, Professor Neal, to play Theseus in our own heroic drama. We need you to play the part of the man who slew the minotaur of despair and found the way out of the maze of human misery. I understand that you don't see yourself that way, that you don't feel like that kind of a hero, but in our eyes, that's what you are. In our eyes, and in the eyes of the world, you're the last living representative of early humanity's greatest adventure-the Adventure we're now taking up. We need you at the launch. We really can't do without you. Anything you want, just ask-but I'm here to make a deal, and I have to make it. No threats, of course, just honest persuasion-but I really do have to persuade you. You'll be in the news whether you like it or not-why not let us doctor the spin for you? If you're aboard, you have input; if not...you might end up with all the s.h.i.+t and none of the roses."

No threats, he'd said. Funnily enough, he meant it. He wouldn't breathe a word to a living soul-but if he'd found out about Astolpho, others could, and once the Great Adventure was all over the news, the incentive to dig would be there. Expert webwalkers researching Theseus would be bound to stumble over Astolpho eventually. The only smoke screen I could put up now was the smoke screen he was offering to lend me. If I didn't take it, I hadn't a hope of keeping the secret within the secret.

"Are you sure you wouldn't like something to drink?" I asked tiredly. His semaphoring arms had begun to make my newly-reconditioned eyes feel dizzy.He beamed again and almost said, "Perhaps I will," but then his eyes narrowed slightly. "What kind of drink?" he said.

"I make it myself," I told him teasingly.

"That's what I'm afraid of," he said. "I've nothing against happy juice, but this isn't the time or the place- not for me. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I could trust the homegrown stuff. You said yourself that it's been subject to generations of mutation and selection, and you know how delicate hybrid gentemplates are. Meaning no offense, but that garden is infested-and not everything that came out of Cade Maclaine's souped-up Trojan c.o.c.kroaches was a pretty pollen-carrier."

"Why should I help out in your Adventure," I asked him lightly, "if you won't help out in mine?"

He looked at me long and hard. It didn't need a trained mathematician to see the calculating clicking over in his mind. Whatever it took, he'd said. Anything I wanted, just ask.

"Well," he said finally, "I take your point. Are we talking about a deal here, or what? Are we talking about coming to an understanding? Sealing a compact?"

"Just the launch," I said. "One day only. You can make as much noise as you like-the more the merrier-but I only come out for one day. And everything you put out is Theseus, Theseus, and more Theseus. What's lost stays lost, from here to eternity."

"If that's what you want," he said. "One day only-and we'll give them so much Theseus they'll drown in it. Astolpho stays under wraps-n.o.body says a word about it. Not now, not ever. The records are ours, and we have no interest in letting the cat escape the bag. If we thought anyone would blow the whistle, we wouldn't want you waving us off. This is the Adventure, after all: the greatest moment so far in the history of the new human race. So far as we're concerned, the ashes of Endymion can stay buried for another two hundred years-or another two million. It doesn't matter; come the day when somebody stumbles over the tombstones, they'll just be an archaeological find: a nine day wonder. By then, we'll be out among the stars. Earth will be just our cradle."

I had thought when the first confronted me that he didn't have anything I wanted, just something he could threaten me with. I realized now that he had both-but he didn't know it. He and his crazy pals thought that they needed me at their launch, to give the blessing of the old human race to the new, and I needed them to be perfectly content with what they thought they had, to dig just so far and no farther. It had been foolish of me to refuse to return his calls, without even knowing what he had to say, and exactly how much he might have discovered.

"All right," I said, with all the fake weariness that a 40 percent synthetic man of two hundred and eighteen can muster. "You've worn me down. I give in. I do the launch, and the rest is silence. I appear, smile, disappear. Remembered for one brief moment, forgotten forever. Once I'm out of the way, your guys are the only heroes. Okay?"

"There might be other inquiries from TV," he said guardedly, "but as far as we're concerned, it's just the one symbolic gesture. That's all we need. I can't imagine that there'll be anything else that you can't reasonably turn down. You're two hundred and eighteen years old, after all. n.o.body will get suspicious if you plead exhaustion."

"If you're so utterly convinced that you need it," I said, "who am I to deny you? And you're right-whatever other calls come in, I can be forgiven for refusing to answer on the grounds of creeping senility. I'll program my answer-phone to imply that I really couldn't be trusted not to wet myself if I were face-to-face with a famous chat show host. Now do you want a drink? Nothing homemade, if you insist-for you I'll make an exception. I'll even break the seal in front of you, if you like."

"There's no need," he said, with an airy wave of his right hand. His voice was redolent with relief and triumph. "I trust you."

Theseus betrayed Ariadne; of that much the voice of myth is as certain as the voice of myth can ever be. If she did not die, she was thrust into the arms of Dionysus, the G.o.d of intoxication. If grief did not kill her, she gave herself over to the mind-blowing pa.s.sion of the Bacchae.

"Ashes and tombstones" were the names that the Pharaohs of Capitalism gave to the payloads which they paid my a.s.sociates to deposit in Endymion, near the north pole of the Moon. Ashes to ashes, dust todust...but the remnants of their flesh that they sent to Endymion, actual vases to be placed within a symbolic vase, were not the remains of their dead. The "ashes" were actually frozen embryos: not their dead, but their mult.i.tudinous unborn children.

The "tombstones" carried aloft by valiant Astolpho were not inscribed with their epitaphs but with instructions for the resurrection of the human species, so deeply and so cleverly ingrained that they might still be deciphered after a million or a billion years, even by members of a species which had evolved a million or a billion light-years away and had formulated a very different language.

Like the Pharaohs of old, the Pharaohs of the End Time fully intended to rise again; their pyramids were not built as futile monuments but as fortresses to secure themselves against disaster.

Against all disaster, that is.

My "crazy pals" had believed that the world was doomed, and humankind with it. There was nothing remotely crazy in that belief, in 2080. The Earth was dying, and nothing short of a concatenation of miracles could have saved it. Perhaps the Pharaohs of Capitalism had been crazy to have let the world get into such a state, but they were not miracle workers themselves; they were only men. They thought that the only hope for humankind was to slumber for a million or a billion years in the bosom of the Moon, until someone might come who would recognize the Earth for the grave it was, and would search for relics of the race whose grave it was in the one place where such relics might have survived the ravages of decay: hard vacuum.

The disaster they had feared so much had not, in the end, been absolute. The human race had come through the crisis. Cade Maclaine's c.o.c.kroach-borne omnispores and the underground Arks had enabled them to resuscitate the ecosphere and ma.s.sage the fluttering rhythm of its heart back to steadiness.

By now, of course, the game had changed. The Repopulation was almost complete, and the Adventure had begun again. The New Human Race believed that its future was secure, and that the tricentennial launch of the mission to the Era of Tranquillity would help to make it secure.

Well, perhaps.

And perhaps not.

I knew that if the new Adventurers found the vases of Endymion, they would be reckoned merely one more Ark: one more seed-deposit, to be drawn on as and when convenient. The children of the Pharaohs would be disembarked at the whim and convenience of men like Dennis Mountjoy, who believed with all his heart that the minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth of fate was dead and gone, and every ancient nightmare with him.

That, to the crazy men who had paid my prices in order to deposit their heritage in Endymion, would almost certainly have seemed to be a disaster as great as the one that had been avoided. The Pharaohs had not handed down fortunes so that their offspring could be reabsorbed into the teeming millions of the New Human race, but in order that they should become the human race: a unique marvel in their own right.

Perhaps they were crazy to want that, but that is what they wanted. "Ashes and tombstones" was a smoke screen, intended to conceal a bid for resurrection, immortality, and the privilege of uniqueness in a universe where humankind was utterly forgotten-and nothing less.

My motives were somewhat different, of course, but I wanted the same result.

At two hundred and eighteen years of age, and having lived through the Crash, I could never convince myself that it could not happen again-but even if it never did, I wanted the vases of Endymion to rest in peace, not for a hundred years or a thousand, but for a million or a billion, as their deliverers had intended.

I did not want the "ashes and tombstones" to become an archaeological find and a nine day wonder.

I wanted them to remain where they were until they were found by those who had been intended to find them: nonhuman beings, for whom the task of disembArkation would be an act of reCreation. It did not matter to me whether they were the sp.a.w.n of another star or the remotest descendants of the ecosphere of Earth, remade by countless generations of mutation and selection into something far stranger than the New Human race-but I, too, wanted to leave my mark on the face of eternity. I, too, wanted to have gouged out a scratch on the infinite wall of the future, to have played a part in making something thatwould last, not for seventy years or two hundred, or even two thousand-which is as long as any man might reasonably expect to live, aided by our superbly clever and monstrously chimerical technologies of self-repair-but for two million or two billion.

All I had done was to calculate the price, but without me, none of it would have happened. The Moon would have been exactly as Astolpho found it: a treasury of the lost and the wasted, the futile and the functionless.

Thanks to me, it is more than that. In a million or a billion years, the time will come for the resurrection, and the new life. I do not want it to be soon: the longer, the better.

I thoroughly enjoyed the launch. I enjoyed it so tremendously, in fact, that I was glad I had allowed myself to be persuaded to take my place among its architects, to give their bold endeavor the blessing of all the billions of people who had died while I was young.

I was unworthy, of course. Who among us is not? Nor can I believe, even now, that Dennis Mountjoy was correct in thinking that his heroes needed me to set the seal of history on their endeavor-but the sight of that rocket riding its pillar of fire into the deep blue of the sky brought back so many memories, so many echoes of a self long-buried and half-forgotten, that I almost broke down and wept.

"I had forgotten what a sight it was," I admitted to the young man, "and I thought that I had lost the capacity to feel such deep emotions, along with the fleshy tables of my first heart."

He did not recognize the quotation, which came from Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians: an epistle, according to the text, "written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living G.o.d; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart." All he had to say in reply was: "I told you that you'd want to be here. This is Apollo reborn, Theseus reborn. This is what all the heroes of the race were made to accomplish. This time, we'll go all the way to the stars, whatever it costs."

Astolpho, your creator had not the least idea what truth he served when he sent you to the Moon, to discern its real nature and its real purpose.

Ancient Engines

MICHAEL SWANWICK.

Michael Swanwick wrote The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993) and Jack Faust (1997) and is working on another novel. If it is fantasy, that will be three fantasy novels in a row for this award-winning SF writer. But in between the novels, he still writes short stories. His short fiction in recent years has been about as often fantasy as science fiction, but his prolific output in 1998 yielded a record three Hugo nominees in the best short story category, and his first Hugo Award. And a few more appeared in 1999. Swan-wick then announced that he had better get back to novel writing, so we can expect another comparative dry spell before the next wave of Swanwick stories. Other than that, we do not know what to expect, except excellence. "The most telling thing to say about MS is that he is fiercely contemporary," said the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

This story, about the prospects of immortality for a humanoid robot, appeared in Asimov's.

"Planning to live forever, Tiktok?"

The words cut through the bar's chatter and gab and silenced them.

The silence reached out to touch infinity, and then, "I believe you're talking to me?" a mech said.

The drunk laughed. "Ain't n.o.body else here sticking needles in his face, is there?"

The old man saw it all. He lightly touched the hand of the young woman sitting with him and said, "Watch."

Carefully, the mech set down his syringe alongside a bottle of liquid collagen on a square of velvet cloth. He disconnected himself from the recharger, laying the jack beside the syringe. When he looked upagain, his face was still and hard. He looked like a young lion.

The drunk grinned sneeringly.

The bar was located just around the corner from the local stepping stage. It was a quiet retreat from the aggravations of the street, all bra.s.s and mirrors and wood paneling, as cozy and snug as the inside of a walnut. Light s.h.i.+fted lazily about the room, creating a varying emphasis, like clouds drifting overhead on a summer day, but far dimmer. The bar, the bottles behind the bar, and the shelves beneath the bottles behind the bar were all aggressively real. If there was anything virtual, it was set up high or far back, where it couldn't be touched. There was not a smart surface in the place.

"If that was a challenge," the mech said, "I'd be more than happy to meet you outside."