Collected short fiction.., p.125
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 125
I pointed this out to Elena.
"Yes, I noticed. It must be some optical effect in the crystal—the colour depends on the angle of view." "But … look above us! At the same angle to the surface, in the other direction, it still looks green!"
Elena looked up, then shrugged. "I don't know, Khali. I expect it's some trick of the light." She sounded tired and dispirited. None of this had anything to do with the reason she was here; it was all just an annoying, confusing distraction.
I was baffled, but I couldn't think of a serious explanation. I laughed. "Maybe we're exuding the stuff. Maybe our exoskins are leaking—and this is nothing but frozen perspiration." Elena ignored the joke; nothing I could say would cheer her up.
· · · · ·
Soon after that, the emerald green gave way to a stretch of bright cherry red—not remotely like the rusty ferrous colours of the surface rock—and then, in rapid succession, bands of indigo, yellow, a darker green, a startling azure. Each time we stopped to investigate, the probe declared the substance unknown. The tunnel below still looked like bare rock—until we reached it—but above us was a strange mineralized rainbow, vanishing into the darkness.
When the coating changed to a glistening silver, it hardly seemed worth pausing, yet again; I was ready to sail right through, eager to reach the end of the tunnel, still hopeful that the miners, or whoever, might have left some interesting machinery behind.
Then Elena said, "Khali, do you see—?"
I hit the brakes.
The thin silver layer on the tunnel wall was growing before our eyes. Feathery needles appeared on the surface, branching out, thickening and overlapping until they formed a solid substrate, upon which the whole process began again. It was like a crystalline mass coming out of solution—but out of solution from what? I racked my brain for some half-sensible explanation. A transparent organometallic gas filling the tunnel, breaking down and depositing solid magnesium or aluminium? Gas coming from where? Some machine at the bottom of the tunnel, which had just happened to spring a leak as we arrived?
Even as I rotated my harness and reached out to touch the growing encrustation, my next guess was: replicators, after all? The thought came too late for me to pull back, though; before I could think seriously about the perils of coming into contact with an unknown culture's nanoware, I'd grabbed a handful of the fine silver needles, and—
A wave of bittersweet hope flooded through me. Elena's insane pursuit of Chalmer's lode across the multiverse, her need to have this unreachable goal hovering forever on the horizon, suddenly made the most compelling sense.
I understood—
I let the crystals drop from my hand.
And the electrifying clarity of sharing Elena's private logic fell away with them.
I cried out in surprise, but I couldn't speak. My heart raced. I stared at the glittering mass condensing out of the vacuum onto the wall, precisely where we hung, and nowhere else; thickest and fastest around
Elena—What had happened here? Something had struck this version of the Rock. Something much stranger than Chalmer's find. Something more primordial. It had ricocheted eight times within the rock, blasting out the caverns above us, before forming this.
A place where hope could solidify like logic.
And what else? What else within us had been reified? What coated the walls above us? I looked up at the crystalline rainbow we'd left in our wake, chromatograph of our souls.
Elena said, "Khali, we have to move. Quick, take us up!"
I heard her, but I was still in a daze. Our souls? Our brains were matter, nothing more; hope was a property of a system of neural pathways, ultimately explicable in terms of the simplest laws. But … if matter could form such elaborate structures, perhaps logic could too. Levels of explanation corresponding to the emergence of "higher" laws.
I turned and gazed into the depths of the tunnel. Down there, what would be reified? Consciousness? Simpler animal drives? Organic growth? Finally, pure inanimate logic itself?
It was a horrifying prospect—but a strangely seductive one, too. Everything was a thing, after all; everything that made a difference. I said. "Take us up? No, take us down! We don't have to look for the mother lode any more. We can become the mother lode!"
Elena, thankfully, didn't understand what I meant. If she had, she might have found the suggestion tempting.
Instead, she hoisted herself up the cable, hand over hand, grabbed the control from me, and hit the button to winch us up.
· · · · ·
I was hysterical and incoherent most of the way back to the surface. As we passed by the other layers, I tried to reach out and touch them—to discover what they were—but Elena pinned my arms to my side, and talked about abandoned mining replicators; mutated, unpredictable. I tried to tell her what I believed had happened, but I doubt that anything I said made the slightest sense. She hurried me across the floor of each cavern, deftly tugging the cable free and leaving the pulleys behind.
And outside the ship, it finally hit me: we'd left part of ourselves behind, too. Reasons, motives, emotions; whatever the arrangement of neurons inside our skulls, the mental phenomena they gave rise to had taken another—equally tangible—form in the tunnel. If manipulating primitive, solid logic could break the laws of physics, what would happen if we were separated from the reified abstractions of our own minds?
I said. "We have to go back. Scrape it all off. Take it with us."
Elena said, "You're delirious. You're infected." She held me by the wrists, glancing with horror at my right hand.
I laughed. "You think I'm swarming with nanomachines? Then don't take any risks. Leave me here."
"Don't be stupid, Khali. Come into the ship and get treated—"
"It's not worth the risk, is it? I might contaminate everything. Leave me. Go make a jump. Leave me behind. I'll live. Go find Chalmer's lode. If you still want to."
If you still want to.
I was a child. I was thirteen years old. I was in shock. I was hysterical. I didn't know what I was doing—or at least, I could hardly be sure.
I pulled free. ''I'm not getting into the ship. I'm staying." I backed away, but not far. And I didn't turn and run.
Elena said quietly. "Do what I say."
I took a step backwards, not quite out of her reach, then said, "Do you really think you can make me?"
Elena gave no warning—or if she did, I managed to blind myself to it, because I know I didn't flinch. She moved in a blur; punching me in the face, knocking me to the ground. The exoskin over one cheekbone ruptured, spraying red mist in front of my eyes. It must have resealed in less than a second, but by then I'd lost consciousness—and given up any chance of explaining what she'd be leaving behind.
* * * * *
Greg Egan was born in Perth, Australia, in 1961. His first sf novel, Quarantine, is out this month from Century/Legend, although it was preceded by a non-sf novel, An Unusual Angle (Norstrilia Press, 1983), which he wrote when he was in his teens. He was educated at the University of Western Australia, and used to have aspirations as a film-maker—he completed a 65-minute 16mm movie in the early 1980s. However, he is now rapidly making his name as one of the very best sf writers of the 90s. About half his published short stories to date have appeared in this magazine, beginning with "Mind Vampires" in 1986.
Riding the Crocodile
From the online version at the author's website — http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/00/Crocodile.html — First published in One Million A.D., edited by Gardner Dozois; Science Fiction Book Club, New York, 2005.
· · · · ·
This story is set in the same universe as the novel Incandescence, some 300,000 years before Rakesh’s journey to the bulge. It is not a part of the novel itself. Copyright © Greg Egan, 2005. All rights reserved.
* * * * *
1
In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. They had known love, raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring. They had travelled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They had educated themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and abandoned artistic sensibilities and skills. They had not lived in every conceivable manner, far from it, but what room would there be for the multitude if each individual tried to exhaust the permutations of existence? There were some experiences, they agreed, that everyone should try, and others that only a handful of people in all of time need bother with. They had no wish to give up their idiosyncrasies, no wish to uproot their personalities from the niches they had settled in long ago, let alone start cranking mechanically through some tedious enumeration of all the other people they might have been. They had been themselves, and for that they had done, more or less, enough.
Before dying, though, they wanted to attempt something grand and audacious. It was not that their lives were incomplete, in need of some final flourish of affirmation. If some unlikely calamity had robbed them of the chance to orchestrate this finale, the closest of their friends would never have remarked upon, let alone mourned, its absence. There was no aesthetic compulsion to be satisfied, no aching existential void to be filled. Nevertheless, it was what they both wanted, and once they had acknowledged this to each other their hearts were set on it.
Choosing the project was not a great burden; that task required nothing but patience. They knew they’d recognise it when it came to them. Every night before sleeping, Jasim would ask Leila, “Did you see it yet?”
“No. Did you?”
“Not yet.”
Sometimes Leila would dream that she’d found it in her dreams, but the transcripts proved otherwise. Sometimes Jasim felt sure that it was lurking just below the surface of his thoughts, but when he dived down to check it was nothing but a trick of the light.
Years passed. They occupied themselves with simple pleasures: gardening, swimming in the surf, talking with their friends, catching up with their descendants. They had grown skilled at finding pastimes that could bear repetition. Still, were it not for the nameless adventure that awaited them they would have thrown a pair of dice each evening and agreed that two sixes would end it all.
One night, Leila stood alone in the garden, watching the sky. From their home world, Najib, they had travelled only to the nearest stars with inhabited worlds, each time losing just a few decades to the journey. They had chosen those limits so as not to alienate themselves from friends and family, and it had never felt like much of a constraint. True, the civilisation of the Amalgam wrapped the galaxy, and a committed traveller could spend two hundred thousand years circling back home, but what was to be gained by such an overblown odyssey? The dozen worlds of their neighbourhood held enough variety for any traveller, and whether more distant realms were filled with fresh novelties or endless repetition hardly seemed to matter. To have a goal, a destination, would be one thing, but to drown in the sheer plenitude of worlds for its own sake seemed utterly pointless.
A destination? Leila overlaid the sky with information, most of it by necessity millennia out of date. There were worlds with spectacular views of nebulas and star clusters, views that could be guaranteed still to be in existence if they travelled to see them, but would taking in such sights firsthand be so much better than immersion in the flawless images already available in Najib’s library? To blink away ten thousand years just to wake beneath a cloud of green and violet gas, however lovely, seemed like a terrible anticlimax.
The stars tingled with self-aggrandisement, plaintively tugging at her attention. The architecture here, the rivers, the festivals! Even if these tourist attractions could survive the millennia, even if some were literally unique, there was nothing that struck her as a fitting prelude to death. If she and Jasim had formed some whimsical attachment, centuries before, to a world on the other side of the galaxy rumoured to hold great beauty or interest, and if they had talked long enough about chasing it down when they had nothing better to do, then keeping that promise might have been worth it, even if the journey led them to a world in ruins. They had no such cherished destination, though, and it was too late to cultivate one now.
Leila’s gaze followed a thinning in the advertising, taking her to the bulge of stars surrounding the galaxy’s centre. The disk of the Milky Way belonged to the Amalgam, whose various ancestral species had effectively merged into a single civilisation, but the central bulge was inhabited by beings who had declined to do so much as communicate with those around them. All attempts to send probes into the bulge — let alone the kind of engineering spores needed to create the infrastructure for travel — had been gently but firmly rebuffed, with the intruders swatted straight back out again. The Aloof had maintained their silence and isolation since before the Amalgam itself had even existed.
The latest news on this subject was twenty thousand years old, but the status quo had held for close to a million years. If she and Jasim travelled to the innermost edge of the Amalgam’s domain, the chances were exceptionally good that the Aloof would not have changed their ways in the meantime. In fact, it would be no disappointment at all if the Aloof had suddenly thrown open their borders: that unheralded thaw would itself be an extraordinary thing to witness. If the challenge remained, though, all the better.
She called Jasim to the garden and pointed out the richness of stars, unadorned with potted histories.
“We go where?” he asked.
“As close to the Aloof as we’re able.”
“And do what?”
“Try to observe them,” she said. “Try to learn something about them. Try to make contact, in whatever way we can.”
“You don’t think that’s been tried before?”
“A million times. Not so much lately, though. Maybe while the interest on our side has ebbed, they’ve been changing, growing more receptive.”
“Or maybe not.” Jasim smiled. He had appeared a little stunned by her proposal at first, but the idea seemed to be growing on him. “It’s a hard, hard problem to throw ourselves against. But it’s not futile. Not quite.” He wrapped her hands in his. “Let’s see how we feel in the morning.”
In the morning, they were both convinced. They would camp at the gates of these elusive strangers, and try to rouse them from their indifference.
They summoned the family from every corner of Najib. There were some grandchildren and more distant descendants who had settled in other star systems, decades away at lightspeed, but they chose not to wait to call them home for this final farewell.
Two hundred people crowded the physical house and garden, while two hundred more confined themselves to the virtual wing. There was talk and food and music, like any other celebration, and Leila tried to undercut any edge of solemnity that she felt creeping in. As the night wore on, though, each time she kissed a child or grandchild, each time she embraced an old friend, she thought: this could be the last time, ever. There had to be a last time, she couldn’t face ten thousand more years, but a part of her spat and struggled like a cornered animal at the thought of each warm touch fading to nothing.
As dawn approached, the party shifted entirely into the acorporeal. People took on fancy dress from myth or xenology, or just joked and played with their illusory bodies. It was all very calm and gentle, nothing like the surreal excesses she remembered from her youth, but Leila still felt a tinge of vertigo. When her son Khalid made his ears grow and spin, this amiable silliness carried a hard message: the machinery of the house had ripped her mind from her body, as seamlessly as ever, but this time she would never be returning to the same flesh.
Sunrise brought the first of the goodbyes. Leila forced herself to release each proffered hand, to unwrap her arms from around each non-existent body. She whispered to Jasim, “Are you going mad, too?”
“Of course.”
Gradually the crowd thinned out. The wing grew quiet. Leila found herself pacing from room to room, as if she might yet chance upon someone who’d stayed behind, then she remembered urging the last of them to go, her children and friends tearfully retreating down the hall. She skirted inconsolable sadness, then lifted herself above it and went looking for Jasim.
He was waiting for her outside their room.
“Are you ready to sleep?” he asked her gently.
She said, “For an eon.”
2
Leila woke in the same bed as she’d lain down in. Jasim was still sleeping beside her. The window showed dawn, but it was not the usual view of the cliffs and the ocean.
Leila had the house brief her. After twenty thousand years — travelling more or less at lightspeed, pausing only for a microsecond or two at various way-stations to be cleaned up and amplified — the package of information bearing the two of them had arrived safely at Nazdeek-be-Beegane. This world was not crowded, and it had been tweaked to render it compatible with a range of metabolic styles. The house had negotiated a site where they could live embodied in comfort if they wished.
Jasim stirred and opened his eyes. “Good morning. How are you feeling?”
“Older.”
“Really?”
Leila paused to consider this seriously. “No. Not even slightly. How about you?”
“I’m fine. I’m just wondering what’s out there.” He raised himself up to peer through the window. The house had been instantiated on a wide, empty plain, covered with low stalks of green and yellow vegetation. They could eat these plants, and the house had already started a spice garden while they slept. He stretched his shoulders. “Let’s go and make breakfast.”
They went downstairs, stepping into freshly minted bodies, then out into the garden. The air was still, the sun already warm. The house had tools prepared to help them with the harvest. It was the nature of travel that they had come empty-handed, and they had no relatives here, no fifteenth cousins, no friends of friends. It was the nature of the Amalgam that they were welcome nonetheless, and the machines that supervised this world on behalf of its inhabitants had done their best to provide for them.
