So it is written in the Books of Jordan, anyway.
Genetics
, chapter 3, verse 8.
I woke in a comfortable, if disorderly, bed. Stephan Vrij snored peacefully beside me. We were both naked, and I was under a quilt. I drew the quilt over him and he rolled over in his sleep.
From the angle of the light through the window, it was mid-morning on another fine day. The room was made of something that looked and smelled like pine, but it had never been cut into planks then hammered or glued together (which some people on Earth still do, as I later discovered, and not all of them because they have to but because they can afford the time to indulge such fads). Instead, it had been grown on-site, the walls and floor curving into each other, utility cables emerging like vines from the knotholes. Glossy monochrome pictures—of people, landscapes, seascapes—were stuck to the walls. They looked detailed and precise, just like photographs, apart from the lack of colour. Scattered about, on the low chairs and table or on the floor, was a rather embarrassing quantity and diversity of lingerie. Evidently I had been showing off, or the smart-suit had. My memories of the night were hazy, and warm.
I lay there a few minutes, smiling to myself and hoping I’d got pregnant. Doing so just before a war seemed perverse—it’s traditionally done afterwards—but this war would be over before the pregnancy was noticeable. If we won, I might not be back on Earth for a long time, and we needed all the genes we could get. If we lost … but defeat wasn’t worth thinking about.
I rolled out of bed and gathered the bits and pieces and set them to work reassembling themselves into hiking gear, apart from the one or two items
that would be serviceable as underwear. Not that I actually needed underwear in a smart-matter spacesuit, but they were very nice. So, in their own way, were the shorts and socks, boots and rucksack that came together on the floor. The suit always did have good taste.
The apartment was pretty basic and standard, and the functional logic of it was familiar, so I had no difficulty in finding the makings of breakfast. I brought the breakfast through to Stephan, and we ate it, and made love for a final time. Stephan took some photographs of me, and I promised again to forget him, and we said goodbye.
I suppose he has forgotten me, by now, but I like to think that someone still has the photographs.
Down at ground level it was hot. The sun was high in the sky, enormous, so bright I could see it with my eyes closed and so hot it hurt my skin. Even the air was hot. It’s one of the things they don’t tell you about, like gravity.
Between the base of the tower and the beach were some low buildings. Stores and warehouses of equipment for use by people working in the blue-greens or playing on the beach, refreshment stalls, eating-houses, and so on. I wandered along the shore road, looking for the tourist place.
Naked small children ran about, yelling, racing from the tower to the beach and back. Somewhat older children lolled in shade and listened to adults or adolescents as they talked earnestly in front of a flip-chart or above a machine. Now and again a child would join one of these groups; now and again a child would rise, nod politely to the teacher, and wander off to do something else.
Two such children were minding the tourist place when I found it. The store was easy enough to spot, a rough construction of seacrete and plastic and what looked like driftwood, but was probably scrap synthetic wood. I told myself it must be more solid than it looked, as I ducked under the sea-silk awning and stood blinking in the cool, dim interior.
Inside, the walls were lined with sagging shelves, which were piled with everything a tourist might need. Old tin boxes of gold and silver coins, new plastic boxes of bullets, firearms oiled and racked, hats, scarves, boots. From the ceiling hung a wide range of casual clothing: loose sundresses, seal-fur suits, tee shirts and towelling robes. There seemed to be more possible destinations than the number of possible tourists. I was alone in the store, apart from a boy and a girl sitting on the counter with a chessboard between them.
The boy looked up. ‘Hi,’ he said. He waved his hand. ‘Help yourself. If you want something that isn’t there, let us know.’ He smiled absently then returned to frowning over the chessboard.
I dug through clinking piles of dollars, roubles, marks, pounds, and yen to
make up sixty grams of gold and a hundred of silver, in the smallest coins I could find. From the weapons rack I selected a .45 automatic and a dozen clips of ammunition. Food and other consumables I could get anywhere, and the suit had produced better boots, socks, etc. than anything here. But I couldn’t pass up the chance of an amazing penknife with a red handle marked with an inlaid steel cross within a shield. It had two blades and a lot of ingenious tools. I was sure I’d find a use for most of them.
I said goodbye to the children, promised to pass on anything I didn’t use (with a mental reservation about the knife), and stepped out again into the sunlight. After a few seconds I went back inside and picked up a pair of sunglasses. The girl’s laughter followed me out.
Now that I didn’t have to screw up my eyes to look up, it was easy to work out the location of the airport from the paths of the airships and microlights and helicopters. I followed the coast road for a couple of miles until I reached it. I got several offers of lifts on the way, but I declined them all. Despite the heat, and the gravity, and the moments of disorientation when some conservative part of my brain decided the horizon just
could not
be that far away, I had to get used to walking in the open on the surface of this planet; and soon, to my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it. The sea breeze carried the homely scent of blue-green fields, the distant converters shimmered and hummed, the nearby waters within the artificial reef sparkled, and on them swimmers and boating-parties filled the air with joyous cries.
The airport was on a spit of land that extended a few hundred yards, traversing the reef-barrier. Airships wallowed at mooring masts, ’copters and microlights buzzed between them. High overhead, the diamond-fibre flying-wings used for serious lifting strained at their cables like gigantic kites. I had arrived on one, from the Guiné spaceport, and it looked as if I’d have to leave on one. The thought of an airship passage was appealing, but it would take too long. I didn’t know how much time I had to spare, but the final deadline, the Impact Event, was less than three weeks away. Whatever I did had to be done before that.
Just before the airport perimeter fence I turned and looked back at the Casa Azores. From here it was possible to see it, if not take it all in. A hundred and fifty metres square at the base, tapering in its kilometre height to a hundred at the top. The sides looked oddly natural, covered by climbing plants and hanging gardens, pocked by glider-ports, and by window-bays which shone like ice. Built and maintained by quadrillions of organically engineered nanomachines, it was almost as remarkable as a tree, and a good deal more efficient. The way of life that it and the surrounding aquaculture sustained was not mine, but it was one I was happy to protect. Plenty of interesting work, and plenty of interesting leisure; adventure if you wanted it, ease if you preferred that. Indefinitely extended youth and health. Anything
that you couldn’t get for the asking you could, with some feasible commitment of time and trouble, nanofacture for yourself.
The paucity of broadcast media, and the difficulties of real-time communication, were the only losses from the world before the Fall and the Crash. We had tried to make it an opportunity. All the entertainment and knowledge to be found among thirty billion people was (eventually) available on pipe, and live action provided by the steady, casual arrival and departure of entertainers and researchers and lecturers. The absence of artificial celebrity meant the endless presence of surprise.
Throughout the Inner System—Earth, near-Earth, Lagrange, Luna, Mars, and the Belt—variants of this same way of life went on. Cultures and languages were more diverse than ever, but the system that underpinned them was the same everywhere. In floating cities, in artificial mountains stepped like ziggurats, in towers like this or taller, in towns below the ground, in huge orbital habitats, in sunlit pressure domes, in caves of ice, most people had settled into this lifestyle: simple, self-sufficient, low-impact, and ecologically sound.
It was sustainable materially and psychologically, a climax community of the human species, the natural environment of a conscious animal, which that conscious animal, after so much time and trouble, had at last made for itself. We called it the Heliocene Epoch. It seemed like a moment in the sun, but there was no reason, in principle, why it couldn’t outlast the sun, and spread to all the suns of the sky.
With our solar mirrors we controlled the polar caps. The glaciations and mass extinctions that had marked the Pleistocene were over; the next ice age, long overdue, would never come. With our space-based lasers and nukes, we could shield the earth from asteroid impacts. We could bring back lost species from the DNA in museum exhibits. Soon, any century now, we would control the Milankovitch cycle. We were secure.
No wonder they had so few tourists here: who would want to leave a place like this? I sighed, with a small shiver, and turned to the airport gate.
I got my airship journey, after all. The flying-wing route took me as far as Bristol, a city that was still a port for Atlantic traffic, though no longer for trade. The old city with its docks had been fairly well preserved, but the quays where sugar (exchanged for, and grown by, slaves) had once been landed now sustained only recreational craft. The new town was in the fashionable Aztec-pyramid style, with a projecting air-jetty about halfway up. We landed there at one p.m., having left Graciosa at eleven. I was lucky to catch the day’s second flight to London. It left at around one-thirty in the afternoon, and would reach Alexandra Port about six. This is the sort of thing that happens when you travel inside an atmosphere.
Weather, of course, is another. I stepped out of the lift and on to the roof, to find large drops of water falling from the grey sky, on to me. I dug out of my rucksack a hooded cape—all part of the suit, naturally—and put it on. With the hood to keep water out of my eyes, it was easier to see where I was. The roof had the size and appearance of a small park—apart from the hills in the distance and the curious visual effects the rain made, it could have been under a municipal dome anywhere. I walked across the grass, past dripping trees and bushes, to where a small and gaily coloured dirigible was moored to a central pylon. Other people were also making their way over, a couple of dozen in all when we’d climbed the spiral staircase and crossed the gangway to the airship’s gondola. My fellow passengers were dressed similarly to me, but most carried rather more equipment. From overheard conversations as
we shook out our wet overclothes and took our seats, I gathered that most of them were—at least to themselves—serious eco-tourists, earnestly studying natural history or urban archaeology. But few had resisted the temptation to bring a rod or a rifle. The hunting and fishing in London was reputed to be excellent.
The seating was arranged in a manner more like a room than a vehicle, but I had no difficulty getting a seat by a window. The airship cast off on schedule, rising through the low cloud and then passing beyond it. After staring out the window for half-an-hour at deciduous woodland interrupted only by old roads and new buildings, I got up and wandered around asking people what refreshments they wanted, then went to the galley and prepared them.
While the coffee was brewing I was joined by a woman who introduced herself as Suze. She was small, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, dark-skinned. Very English. I figured her for being about her apparent age.
‘Did you know,’ she said as we poured coffee into mugs and tea into cups, ‘that in the old system, there were people who did this as a full-time occupation?’
‘Did what?’
‘Serve refreshments on aircraft.’
I knew this perfectly well.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Why? Did they … enjoy it or something?’
‘No,’ she said earnestly, ‘they did it because it was a way of getting what they needed to live on.’
I waved a hand at the rack of sandwiches. ‘You mean this was all they had to eat?’
‘No, no, it was because—’
She laughed suddenly. ‘You’re winding me up, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. I started pouring the coffee. ‘Let’s see if we can do the job better than the wage slaves, shall we?’
When we’d finished serving lunch to the other passengers we took our own trays. I saw that she, like myself, was making to sit alone, so I asked her to join me. We talked as we ate.
It wasn’t polite to ask neighbours what they were doing, where they were going, and so on. You had to work around to it, and not pry if they didn’t open up.
‘Why did you tell me that thing about the old system?’ I asked.
‘At the moment,’ Suze said, ‘I’m a sociologist.’
I dragged up the unfamiliar word from old memories.
‘Someone who studies society?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, but there’s not much to study any more!’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Look around you.’ She waved a hand. ‘These days, you want to investigate society, and what do you find?’
It was a rhetorical question, but I really wanted to know her answer.
‘Well,’ she went on, ‘it’s all so
obvious
, so transparent. We all know how things work from the age of about five or so. You go and try to find out, and somebody will just
tell
you! And it’ll be true, there are no secrets, nothing going on behind the scenes. Because there are no
scenes
, know what I mean?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, thinking
Ha! Little do you know, girl!
‘So what society do you study, if not our own?’
‘I study the old system,’ Suze said, ‘and I do learn interesting things. Sometimes I just can’t help telling people about them. And anyway, it’s a way of getting people to talk.’
I snorted. ‘Yeah, it’s a great line,’ I said. ‘Almost anything you’re doing, you can say to someone, “Did—you—know—that under the wages system, some people had to do this every day or
starve to death
?” ’
She laughed at my mock-shocked tone and saucer eyes. For the next few minutes we vied to suggest some activity to which the statement didn’t apply, and found our resources of ribaldry and gruesomeness inadequate to the task.
‘All the same,’ she said when we’d given up, ‘it is fascinating in a way.’ She shot me a glance, as if unsure whether to go on. ‘Capitalism had a sort of … elegance about it. The trouble is, well, the old people, uh, no offence, aren’t very good at explaining it, because they hate it so much, and the old books …’ She sighed and shrugged. ‘They just don’t make
sense
. They have all these equations in them, like real science, but you look at the assumptions and you think, hey, wait a minute, that can’t be right, so how
did
it work?
Anyway
,’ she went on, more firmly, ‘it’s the only interesting sociological question left.’ She looked out of the window, then leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘That’s why I go to London,’ she confided. ‘To talk to people outside the Union.’
Then she leaned back, and looked at me as if defying me to be shocked, unsure that she hadn’t misjudged my broad-mindedness. I didn’t need to feign my response—I was pleased, and interested. We had, of course, a network of agents and contacts in the London area, and the old comrades could always be counted on—but my mission was too secret even for them. Nobody knew I was coming, or what I was looking for, although that information-leakage couldn’t be delayed much longer. I had expected to have to rely on hastily learned, and possibily outdated, background.
Now I had the possibility of a guide. This could be a stroke of luck! Or something else entirely, if I wanted to be paranoid about it. Her earlier comments about there being no secrets were too transparent to be some kind of double bluff; if she were involved in any secrets herself (other than
her—to some—distasteful interests) she would hardly have brought the subject up. And anyway, she was too young …
I studied her face, and tried to hide my second thoughts, my second-guessing of myself. You lose the knack for conspiracy, over the decades and centuries. The Division was not the Union, true enough, but even our politics had weathered and softened into non-lethality, like a rusty artillery piece in a mossy emplacement—all our destructive power was directed outwards.
I decided that, whether her presence was fortuitous, or the outcome of one of those hidden forces whose existence she’d so naively denied, I couldn’t lose. If she was innocent, then I’d gain some valuable contacts and information—if not, the only way to find out was by playing along.
So I said: ‘Hmm, that’s interesting. Do you know many non-cooperators?’ (That was the polite term; the others included ‘parasites’, ‘scabs’, ‘scum’, and—spoken with a sneer and a pretend spit—‘bankers’.) It was considered all right to exchange coins with them for their odd handicrafts and eccentric nanofactures, and to employ them as guides—but most people shrank from any closer contact, as if the non-cos carried some invisible skin disease.
‘A few,’ she said, looking relieved. ‘I’m studying, you know, trade patterns in the Thames Valley.’
‘Trade patterns?’
‘Most people think the non-cos live by scrounging stuff from the Union, but that’s just a prejudice.’ She grimaced; she was still talking in a low voice, as if not wanting the other passengers to overhear. ‘Actually they’re pretty self-sufficient. They make things and swap them among themselves, using little metal weights for indirect swaps. That’s why whenever they offer to do things for tourists, they only do it for metal weights.’ Suze laughed. ‘There I go again. I’m sure you know all this.’
‘Well, in theory,’ I admitted, ‘but it’ll be interesting to see how it works in practice. The fact is, I’m going to London to find—a certain person.’ I thought about risks. I’d be making inquiries after this guy as soon as we landed, among all kinds of people. No matter how discreet I was about it, word would get around. There seemed to be no harm in starting now. ‘His name is Isambard Kingdom Malley.’
‘He’s
alive
?’ Suze sounded incredulous. ‘In London?’ Comprehension dawned on her face.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s a non-co.’
Isambard Kingdom Malley was, or had been, a physicist. He worked out the Theory of Everything. The final equations. When I was as young as I
look, there was a fashion for tee shirts with the Malley equations on them. TOE shirts, we called them. The equations, at least, were elegant.
Malley was born in 2039, so he was six years old at the time of the Fall Revolution. His theory was born in the early 2060s, in the brief surge of new technologies and research advances that marked the period when the US/UN empire had fallen, but the barbarians had not yet won. His last paper was the modest classic
Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter
, Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128 (10), 3182 (2080). It established the theoretical possibility of the quantum-chaotic wormhole and the vacuum-fluctuation virtual-mass drive. Its celebrated ‘Appendix II: Engineering Considerations’ pointed out some practical problems with constructing the Gate and the Drive, notably that it would require about a billion times as much computational power as was currently available.
A week after the article’s publication, the journal was shut down by the gang in charge of its local fragment of the Former United States, for ‘un-Scriptural physical speculation’, ‘blasphemy’, and (according to some sources) ‘witchcraft’. There’s a certain elegiac aptness in the thought that the paper which pointed the road to the stars was published in what turned out to be the journal’s final issue: the West was still soaring when it fell.
Thirteen years later, the Outwarders built the wormhole gate and torched off their interstellar probe, reaching for the end of space and time. That it never did reach the expected end—that it was, in fact, still going strong, still transmitting almost incomprehensible data from an unimaginable futurity—refuted Malley’s Theory of Everything, which had been based on the hitherto impregnable Standard Model finite-universe cosmology. But Malley’s was still the only theory we had. It fitted all the data, except the irrefragable fact of the probe. Within the limits of our engineering, the theory still worked. Nobody had come up with anything to replace it. (This was a sore point with me. I sometimes thought it reflected badly on our society: perhaps, after all, it does take some fundamental social insecurity to sharpen the wits of genius. Perhaps we had no more chance of developing further fundamental physics than the Pacific Islanders had of developing the steam engine. Or—I hoped—it could just be that a Newton, an Einstein or a Malley doesn’t come along very often.)
I suspected that Malley would have been an Outwarder himself, but he never made it to space. America’s last launch sites were already being stormed by mobs who thought rockets damaged the ozone layer, or made holes in the crystal spheres of the firmament. He fled America for Japan, and then quixotically returned to England at the time of the Green Death, where he worked to the best of his growing ability and dwindling resources as a medicine man, dealing out antibiotics and antigeriatrics to superstitious
settlers and nostalgic refugees, administering the telomere hack to frightened adolescents who understood it, if at all, as yet another rite-of-passage ordeal. We knew he’d survived the century of barbarism, and that he’d registered to vote in the elections that formally abolished capitalism and established the Solar Union. Evidently he’d voted against the social revolution, because in the subsequent century of the world commonwealth he had retreated to the wilds of London, a stubborn non-cooperator.
We badly needed his cooperation now.
Malley was apparently following the Epicurean injunction to ‘live unknown’. Suze had never heard so much as a rumour of him.
‘Would you like me to come with you, at least part of the way?’ she suggested. ‘I could help you find your way around, and you could—well, to be honest there are places I’d rather not go on my own.’
‘Yes, I’d like that very much,’ I said. ‘That’s real neighbourly of you, Suze.’
She gave me a full-beam smile and asked, ‘How do you expect to track him down? Do you have any idea where he is? And why do you want to talk to him, anyway? If you don’t mind me asking.’