Beyond Singularity, page 13
She turned to him, close now, feeling his presence like an aroma. "Do we know that?"
He smiled, slow and ambiguous. "Of course not. Nothing at such a remove, across hundreds of millions of years, can be sure."
He led her across a plaza and directly into a pond of water. He did not hesitate and the water firmed up under his step. She had jerked back, and now hastened to catch up, her shoes finding a cushioned surface almost like skin. They crossed this and stepped off onto stone, and the pond reverted to water behind them. She looked back at it, but of course Fanak did not.
And here came the Supra crowd. As they entered a long hall a frisson went through the stately figures that were dining from floating tables. Fanak stopped to survey the room, opened his jacket and put his hands on his hips. She had seen this in her own kind, making the silhouette loom suddenly larger and more forbidding; or so it had been in the forest.
The effect seemed the same here. Fanak was a man of social stature and lesser Supras, she noted, lingered around the periphery. She immediately guessed why: they were hoping to renew alliances and gain new friends, without challenging the Fanaks at the centre of the room.
And they were at the centre, socially and geometrically. She felt a flush of pleasure at the attention she got, merely as his companion. Frank speculation worked in the surrounding faces. Pursed lips on the women, especially. Dawn was unique, but still an Original. Some faces plainly said that, after all, peacocks do not show their feathers for dogs.
Passing a couple, she heard, "What I cannot create I do not understand." A laugh. "This I know; someone cooked up an Original soup, I'm told."
Followed immediately by, "Isn't it always that way?" Then, "Can't let them out without supervision, can we?"
And, "Domesticated, they are quite nice."
Dawn wheeled on them. "What I do not create I do not appreciate," she spat back. And stalked away. Not a bad exit, she thought.
She turned to the food—a welcome escape. Meat without bones, skin, gristle or fat—because it was made somewhere from elemental compounds, not grown in nature. Eggs innocent of the belly of a bird. She ate a bit, trying to suppress the anxiety seeping up in her. No help—she cast aside a delicacy, took a sip of fogwine, fumed, turned back into the crowd.
"Let's ... let's go back out," she implored Fanak.
He instantly caught her embarrassment. "Of course."
In the darkness above the valley she sighed with relief. "I'm really not up to all this."
He slid his arms around her, while still looking outward at the view. "You can be."
The pulse of him was immediate. She looked into his face and could not get her breath. Only moments before she had seen the Supras as much like her kind, but now the difference between them welled up in her, pulse quickening from both fear and desire in equal measures. She remembered Kurani and the leaping, sudden passion, wanted it to be that way again, to be caught up and carried downstream, sweaty and joyful and possessed by something greater and she pushed him away. "I ... I can't."
He hid his feelings behind a formal, "I see. I am sorry"
"No, don't be, it's me, really." Hands in the air, trying to express something beyond words.
"I assumed ..."
"Maybe I'm not ... ready." That wasn't right, there was something worse brewing in her, but she could not say what it was.
"I am sorry."
He turned away and she bolted for the safety of the Supra crowd within. Her heels clicked anxiously, echoes
from the high stone walls taunting her. She hurried into the long hall, steps ahead of Fanak, and abruptly stopped at the entrance.
And she could not say why.
So she stepped without thinking into a crowd of them—immersed in a pale yellow mist. It clung to her as she passed
through them and felt in the air a ghostly silence. It clung to
her and she moved among the Supras—who were saying things aloud and in Talent-talk, but somehow distantly, as
though she was at the other end of the room from them in a fashion she could not quite fathom. They did not look directly at her but knew she was there. She breathed in the yellow fog and felt a gathering tension. So she ... yawned.
This caught their attention. They looked at her for a long moment as she felt suddenly vulnerable, her jaw wide and mouth gaping like a fool.
Had she ever seen a Supra yawn? No. In school hadn't she read somewhere?—and here came the inboard reference-
seeker, which whispered that yawning seemed to be a way of communicating changing environmental or internal conditions to others, possibly as a way to synchronize behaviour, most likely a vestigial mechanism that has lost its significance in selection. Supras have omitted the reflex—and she shut it off, sharp, for now those near her were smiling, some with hands held over mouths, not wanting to laugh.
She turned and fled from the obliging yellow fog, from the ripple of stifled laughter that followed her out of the crowd like a wave.
She breathed in the air, laced with something she had never savoured before. All about her, the party swirled. Supras, Ur-humans, many variants in between—all from different eras in the aeon-long explorations of evolution. She escaped onto a parapet. Below stretched the eroded valley, ancient beyond measure.
She felt it come rushing up at her. This desert plain was a baked-dry display table covered with historical curiosities. What vexed currents worked, when different ages sought to conspire! And she was pinned here, firmly spiked by the bland, all-powerful, infuriating, unthinkingly condescending reasonableness of the Supras.
Dawn pressed her palms to her ears. The din of Talent-talk drummed on. Some point was in contention, laced in logics she could not follow. As soon as they got through with their labyrinthine logic, they would notice her again.
Notice. And talk down to her. Reassure her. Treat her like a vaguely remembered pet.
No wonder they had not recalled the many varieties of dogs and cats, she thought bitterly. Ur-humans had served that purpose quite nicely.
There was no one here who was ... her. Her people .. . Hard River Meta and all the others. All gone. They had laboured for the Supras since far, time-shrouded antiquity, tending the flowering biosphere. The Supras had known enough to let them form tribes, to work their own small will upon the forest. But drawn out of that fragile matrix, Dawn gasped like a beached fish.
The Talent-talk drummed, drummed, drummed.
She staggered away, anger clouding her vision. Conflicts that had been building in her burst forth, and she hoped the blizzard of Talent-talk hid them. But she could avoid them no longer herself.
Even Kurani—she had felt with him a near-equality, yes. And that had made her earlier passion possible—born, she saw now, of her innocence. And her ignorance of their differences. An innocence, an ignorance she had lost now.
She was like a bug here, scuttling at the feet of these distracted supermen. They were kind enough in their cool, lopsided fashion, but their effort to damp their abilities down to her level was visible—and galling. Longing for her own kind brimmed in her.
—drummed-drummed-drummed-
Her only hope of seeing her kind again lay in these Supras. But a clammy fear clasped her when she tried to think what fresh Ur-humans would be like.
Laboratory-made. Bodies decanted from some chilly crucible. Her relatives, yes, even clones of her. But strangers. Unmarked by life, unreared. They would be her people only in the narrow genetic sense.
And she would be bound to them in a kind of genetic slavery. She and all of her kind would be kindly, politely owned by the Supras.
She saw suddenly that her Meta, her Mom, her mysterious father who might yet be alive somewhere—they had all been kept in benign ignorance. The Supras clearly felt that Originals could not be actors on the interstellar stage.
And maybe they were right. But she resented the idea. In her gut she felt that Originals could matter, if they had a chance.
And somewhere, maybe some Ur-humans lived. Maybe her father. They would know the tribal intimacies, the shared culture she longed for.
If they existed, she had to find them.
Yet every nuance of the Supras' talk suggested that they would not let her go. Domesticated, they are quite nice. Could she ... ?
They were not all-powerful—she had to keep reminding herself of that. Yet their very attainments gave them vulnerabilities. Immortals were enormously cautious; accident could still destroy them. Caution could err.
And they could have missed some of her kind in the dense woods.
She sucked in a chilly breath. Things slid into place, deep inside.
Very well, then. She would escape.
So began the next great human age.
Osmund Considers
Timons Esaias
Here's a story of a distant future, far beyond Singularity, where humans have dwindled to a coddled few; one that demonstrates that the human race may end with a sigh or a whimper, but definitely not with a bang .. .
Timons Esaias made his first sale to Interzone in 1993 and has since become a frequent contributor to that magazine, as well as making sales to Strange Horizons, Future Orbits, Sherwood, The Age of Reason, Alien Worlds, and other markets. He is also one of SF's most prolific poets, placing poems frequently with Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Star*line, Mythic Delirium, Tales of the Unanticipated, Full Unit Hookup, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Osmund was ran& a book, a book of high adventure on deep oceans in times gone by. The book failed to hold his entire attention so that his senses wandered—taking in the comfort of the leather wingback chair in which he lounged, the aroma of his rare Turkmani cigars, the loveliness of the woodwork which decorated the library from floor to ceiling where it yielded to a magnificent fresco of Thor trying to wrest the double-headed axe from the grasp of the strange Oriental deities of the Minoans. For a moment his attention returned to the voice of his lector, and the hero's struggle between his deepest urges and his bounden duty.
For the first time in a while, in weeks and weeks, Osmund had a thought.
"Duty?" he said.
"Your Grace?" the lector replied, breaking off the narration.
"Duty. It's very important. Yet what is duty? Exactly?"
"Duty, your Grace, is that obligation which an individual owes to others, and the acting upon that obligation." The lector seemed to pause for emphasis. "Duty, in the final analysis, is the structural steel upon which the Nation depends for its stability."
Osmund took a cigar from the box at his elbow; placed the end into the cutter, which made a satisfying snick; then held it out for the lighter to focus its beam on the other end. "But what, to be specific, is my duty?" A luscious cloud of blue smoke rose from the cigar, and the lighter's beam cut out.
The lector's tone grew slightly unctuous. "Duty, your Grace, is essentially a one-way obligation. Duty is owed by the lesser to the greater; it is owed upward. All the servitors here at the Club, for instance, owe to your Grace the duties of instant obedience, courteous service, and careful planning. Your Grace, however, has no superiors, and therefore has no duties."
Some hours later, as the waitdroids were clearing away the pheasant d'orange and bringing in the cold soup, he asked the chandelier the question he had been trying to formulate all afternoon. "The books sometimes speak of people having duties to themselves. What duties have I, to myself?"
"None," the chandelier replied, its voice high and crystal clear and grace-noted with a tinkling like that of chimes. "Before humans were perfected they sometimes felt themselves to have a higher and a lower self. It must have been very difficult. With that understanding, they would therefore feel that the lower selves owed duties to the higher selves. When the lower selves failed in their duty in small ways there would be comedy. When the failures were large, there would often be tragedy."
Osmund spooned his soup quietly, but the chandelier did not continue. Finally he asked, "But in my case ... ?"
"Perfected humans, your Grace, have just one self. There can be no duty where there is no discrepancy of caste."
The soup was magnificent.
Women!" Osmund eXcbalmed, echoing the line the lector had just pronounced. The lector did not reply, in deference to the billiard shot that Osmund seemed on the verge of making. He put his cue at rest, though, and slid one hip onto the rail of the table. "They are great objects of desire, are they not?"
"Yes, your Grace. When humans were subject to inordinate desire, women frequently gave rise to it—most generally among unneutered males. Equally, female humans found some men desir ..."
"Have I ever seen a woman?"
"Outside of sensoria and of static artworks, I assume you mean? No, your Grace has never actually seen a woman in person."
Osmund scratched the side of his head with the end of the cue, leaving a trail of blue chalk in his hair. "And why not?"
"Contact between humans can lead to procreation." "And that would be bad, would it?"
"Very bad, your Grace. It is my duty, and the duty of everything here at the Club, to prevent it."
Osmund took a rare turn on the Club's gallery, with its exceptional views of the City. The thick windows prevented any unpleasant chemicals or drafts, and the volume had been turned very low so that he heard the outside noises only as a murmur, for the Club knew that Osmund did not care for clatter.
He stood for a time watching the traffic on the Avenue upon which the Club fronted, an Avenue whose name escaped him. He did not ask it. A steady stream of androids and other servitors bustled about their business, some on the sidewalk wearing great hats and flowing cloaks to protect them from all the things in the environment. Most, however, travelled in vehicles: open chariots, automobiles, one-horse hansom cabs, drayage wagons, helicars and trucks. There was a steam locomotive and small Pullman car, though without rails, chugging its way from the east. Osmund knew from his books that these vehicles would never have been seen together, not before modern times. He felt a surge of almost pain, a deep pity, for the bleak lives people had led in the past, surrounded by the artifacts of only one era at a time.
Perhaps, he reminded himself quickly, they did not mind it as I would. After all, the lesson he had been taught in childhood about the old times was that irrational humankind, imperfected humankind, had been uncomfortable with, and intolerant of, difference.
He strode down to the end of the North gallery, turned along the West gallery and paced its full length, and finally turned into the observation bay at the corner for the view of the canal and river. Just 30 metres away a two-masted Viking longship sat outside the canal lock, waiting for the gates to open. The servitor at the steering oar seemed heavily tarnished from exposure, almost etched. Osmund wondered briefly where the ship had come from, and whither it was bound, but he did not inquire. A gentleman, he knew, did not pester the staff with too many questions, and he had already asked several this week.
Out on the river a three-masted, barque-rigged submarine was making sail and steering for the estuary channel and the sea. Gaslights twinkled through the windows all along the Texas deck, suggesting both gaiety and elegant comfort. Were it at all polite, perhaps he would have inquired as to what individual was aboard, but he only imagined himself there, cruising among the islands of the Skagerrak, or creeping through schools of giant squid.
"I believe I would like to take a trip," he announced. "By train, perhaps." He took out a cigarillo which he fitted into his most ornate meerschaum holder, paused to admire the way the oils from the tobacco had coloured it a faint rose, and then held it out for a lighter. "Into the mountains."
Osmund watched with some fascination as the servitors hustled several trunks through the Club doors into the enclosed porte-cochere, and then took shelter inside while the outer door was lifted, in portcullis fashion, to allow a magnificent team of three matching cream horses and grey-black offside outrider to draw in a sky-blue coach with brilliant brass trim.
The portcullis lowered into place, and again the servitors bustled about, loading the trunks on top and behind the carriage, and setting up a small gangway so that Osmund would not even need to descend the stairs and then step up into the coach, but could walk directly into it. A maidroid scurried up, silk and taffeta rustling, and handed a breast-pocket cigar box to the butler, who stepped forward, bowed precisely, and presented it to Osmund with the brief words, "for the road, your Grace."
As the carriage trundled smartly along the Avenue, turning in the Square and partly circling the monuments, Osmund busied himself with pouring a demitasse of espresso. He had experienced these same streets in a variety of sensoria, but could not be sure how long it had been since he had actually, personally, travelled them. A question on this subject formed in his mind, though it came forth with an alteration.
"How old am I?"
"As your Grace will no doubt remember, it is considered improper for servants to remind one."
"Yes. Yes, indeed." Osmund sank back into the cushions and realized, with surprise, that he must be very old in the terms that animals and earlier humans had used. Really, really quite old. "Of course."
At the entrance to the Underway he was bustled into an elevator, and his trunks into another, and disgorged directly into the observation room of the canal boat which would carry him to the train station. He actually experienced a delay before the elevators disconnected from the boat and it began to motor along the dark tunnel of the subterranean canal. He remembered the dark tunnel and its suggestion of dankness from previous journeys, but had forgotten the murals and the mosaics. On the port side there were elaborate, and highly metaphorical, interpretations of the Stations of the Invention of the True Telephone. On the starboard, in reverse, were realistic portrayals of the great confrontations of non-violence, and interspersed among them were elegant collage and shadow-box pieces commemorating many of the notable Peaces in human history.
He noted that the explanatory voice in his inner ear for the series of Stations was that of a child, and for the other side was an authoritative male. He remembered how, as a very young person, he had often strained to get one eye on one set of paintings and the other on a different set so that the inner voices would overlap and give him the illusion of being in a party or slightly crowded room.
