Collected short fiction.., p.139
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 139
I said gently, “No place is safer than any other. It only looks that way in hindsight. They could have caught Silver Fire anywhere at all—and I’m just trying to trace the path of the infection, after the event.”
She nodded slowly. “They always took Phoebe. She loved the villages; she had friends in most of them.”
“Do you know which village they went to, that night?”
“I think it was Herodotus.”
Out in the car, I found it on the map. It wasn’t much further from the highway than the one I’d chosen purely for convenience; I could probably drive out there and still make it to the next motel by a civilized hour.
I clicked on the tiny dot; the information window told me: Herodotus, Catawba County. Population 106, established 2004.
I said, “More.”
The map said, “That’s all.”
· · · · ·
Solar panels, twin satellite dishes, vegetable gardens, water tanks, boxy prefabricated buildings … there was no single component of the village which couldn’t have been found on almost any large rural property. It was only seeing all of them thrown together in the middle of the countryside that was startling. Herodotus resembled nothing so much as a 20th century artist’s impression of a pioneering settlement on some Earth-like—but definitely alien—planet.
A major exception was the car park, discreetly hidden behind the huge banks of photovoltaic cells. With only a bus and two other cars, there was room for maybe a hundred more vehicles. Visitors were clearly welcome in Herodotus; there wasn’t even a meter to feed.
Despite the prefabs, there was no army-camp feel to the layout; the buildings obeyed some symmetry I couldn’t quite parse, clustered around a central square, but they certainly weren’t lined up in rows like quonset huts. As I entered the square, I could see a basketball game in progress in a court off to one side; teenagers playing, and younger children watching. It was the only obvious sign of life. I approached, feeling a bit like a trespasser, even if this was as much a public space as the main street of any ordinary town.
I stood by the other spectators and watched the game for a while. None of the children spoke to me, but it didn’t feel like I was being actively snubbed. The teams were mixed-sex, and play was intense but good-natured. The kids were Anglo-, African-, Chinese-American. I’d heard rumors that certain villages were “effectively segregated”—whatever that meant—but it might well have been nothing but propaganda.
The microvillage movement had stirred some controversy when it started, but the lifestyle wasn’t exactly radical. A hundred or so people—who would have worked from their homes in towns or cities anyway—pooled their resources and bought some cheap land out in the country, making up for the lack of amenities with a few state-of-the-art technological fixes. Residents were just as likely to be stockbrokers as artists or musicians and, though any characterization was bound to be unfair, most villages were definitely closer to yuppie sanctuaries than anarchist communes.
I couldn’t have faced the physical isolation, myself—and no amount of bandwidth would have compensated—but if the people here were happy, all power to them. I was ready to concede that in fifty years’ time, living in Queens would be looked on as infinitely more perverse and inexplicable than living in a place like Herodotus.
A young girl, six or seven years old, tapped my arm.
I smiled down at her. “Hello.”
She said, “Are you on the trail of happiness?”
Before I could ask her what she meant, someone called out, “Hello there!”
I turned; it was a woman—in her mid-twenties, I guessed—shielding her eyes from the sun. She approached, smiling, and offered me her hand.
“I’m Sally Grant.”
“Claire Booth.”
“You’re a bit early for the Event. It doesn’t start until nine thirty.”
“I—”
“So if you want a meal at my place, you’d be welcome.”
I hesitated. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Ten dollars sound fair? That’s what I’d charge if I opened the cafeteria—only there were no bookings tonight, so I won’t be.”
I nodded.
“Well, drop in around seven. I’m number twenty-three.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much.”
I sat on a bench in the village square, shaded from the sunset by the hall in front of me, listening to the cries from the basketball court. I knew I should have told Ms Grant straight away what I was doing here; shown her my ID, asked the questions I was permitted to ask, and left. But mightn’t I learn more by staying to watch the Event? Informally? Even a few crude firsthand observations of the demographics of this unmodelled contact between the villagers and the other local populations might be useful—and though the carrier was obviously long gone, this was still a chance to get a very rough profile of the kind of person I was looking for.
Uneasily, I came to a decision. There was no reason not to stay for the party and no need to make the villagers anxious and defensive by telling them why I was here.
· · · · ·
From the inside, the Grants’ house looked more like a spacious, modern apartment than a factory-built box which had been delivered on the back of a truck to the middle of nowhere. I’d been unconsciously expecting the clutter of a mobile home, with too many mod cons per cubic meter to leave room to breathe, but I’d misjudged the scale completely.
Sally’s husband, Oliver, was an architect. She edited travel guides by day; the cafeteria was a sideline. They were founding residents, originally from Raleigh; there were still only a handful of later arrivals. Herodotus, they explained, was self-sufficient in (vegetarian) staple foods, but there were regular deliveries of all the imports any small town relied on. They both made occasional trips to Greensboro, or interstate, but their routine work was pure telecommuting.
“And when you’re not on holidays, Claire?”
“I’m an administrator at Columbia.”
“That must be fascinating.” It certainly turned out to be a good choice; my hosts changed the subject back to themselves immediately.
I asked Sally, “So what clinched the move for you? Raleigh’s not exactly the crime capital of the nation.” I found it hard to believe that the real estate prices could have driven them out, either.
She replied without hesitation, “Spiritual criteria, Claire.”
I blinked.
Oliver laughed pleasantly. “It’s all right, you haven’t come to the wrong place!” He turned to his wife. “Did you see her face? You’d think she’d stumbled onto some enclave of Mormons or Baptists!”
Sally explained, apologetically, “I meant the word in its broadest sense, of course: an understanding that we need to resensitize ourselves to the moral dimensions of the world around us.”
That left me none the wiser, but she was clearly expecting a sympathetic response. I said tentatively, “And you think … living in a small community like this makes your civic responsibilities clearer, more readily apparent?”
Now Sally was bemused. “Well … yes, I suppose it does. But that’s just politics, really, isn’t it? Not spirituality. I meant …” She raised her hands, and beamed at me. “I just meant, the reason you’re here, yourself! We came to Herodotus to find—for a lifetime—what you’ve come here to find for a few hours, yourself!”
· · · · ·
I heard the other cars begin to arrive while I sat drinking coffee with Sally in the living room. Oliver had excused himself for an urgent meeting with a construction manager in Tokyo. I passed the time with small-talk about Alex and Laura, and my Worst Ever New York Experience horror stories—some of which were true. It wasn’t a lack of curiosity that kept me from probing Sally about the Event, I was just afraid of alerting her to the fact that I had no idea what I’d let myself in for. When she left me for a minute, I scanned the room—without rising from my chair—for any sign of what she might have come here to find for a lifetime. All I had time to take in were a few CD covers, the half-dozen visible ones on a large rotating rack. Most looked like modern music/video, from bands I’d never heard of. There was one familiar title, though: James Springer’s The Cyber Sutras.
By the time the three of us crossed the square and approached the village hall—a barn-like structure, resembling a very large cargo container—I was quite tense. There were thirty or forty people in the square, most but not all in their late teens or early twenties, dressed in the kind of diverse mock-casual clothing that might have been seen outside any nightclub in the country. So what was I afraid was going to happen? Just because Ben Walker couldn’t tell his father about it, and Mike Clayton couldn’t tell his mother, didn’t mean I’d wandered into some southern remake of Twin Peaks. Maybe bored kids just snuck out to the villages to pop hallucinogens at dance parties—my own youth resurrected before my eyes, with safer drugs and better light shows.
As we approached the hall, a small group of people filed in through the self-opening doors, giving me a brief glimpse of bodies silhouetted against swirling lights, and a blast of music. My anxiety began to seem absurd. Sally and Oliver were into psychedelics, that was all, and Herodotus’s founders had apparently decided to create a congenial environment in which to use them. I paid the sixty-dollar entry fee, smiling with relief.
Inside, the walls and ceiling were ablaze with convoluted patterns: soft-edged multihued fractals pulsing with the music, like vast color-coded simulations of turbulent fluids cascading down giant fret-boards at Mach 5. The dancers cast no shadows; these were high-power wallscreens, not projections. Stunning resolution—and astronomically expensive.
Sally pressed a fluorescent-pink capsule into my hand. Harmony or Halcyon, maybe; I no longer knew what was fashionable. I tried to thank her, and offer some excuse about “saving it for later”,but she didn’t hear a word, so we just smiled at each other meaninglessly. The hall’s sound insulation was extraordinary (which was lucky for the other villagers); I would never have guessed from outside that my brain was going to be puréed.
Sally and Oliver vanished into the crowd. I decided to hang around for half an hour or so, then slip out and drive on to the motel. I stood and watched the people dancing, trying to keep my head clear despite the stupefying backdrops, though I doubted that I could learn much about the carrier that I didn’t already know. Probably under 25. Probably not towing small children. Sally had given me all the details I needed to obtain information on Events from here to Memphis—past and future. The search was still going to be difficult, but at least I was making progress.
A sudden loud cheer from the crowd broke through the music—and the room was transformed before my eyes. For a moment I was utterly disorientated, and even when the world began to make visual sense again, it took me a while to get the details straight.
The wallscreens now showed dancers in identical rooms to the one I was standing in; only the ceiling continued to play the abstract animation. These identical rooms all had wallscreens themselves, which also showed identical rooms full of dancers … much like the infinite regress between a pair of mirrors.
And at first, I thought the “other rooms” were merely realtime images of the Herodotus dance hall itself. But the swirling vortex pattern on the ceiling joined seamlessly with the animation on the ceilings of “adjacent” rooms, combining to form a single complex image; there was no repetition, reflected or otherwise. And the crowds of dancers were not identical, though they all looked sufficiently alike to make it hard to be sure, from a distance. Belatedly, I turned around and examined the closest wall, just four or five meters away. A young man “behind” the screen raised a hand in greeting, and I returned the gesture automatically. We couldn’t quite make convincing eye contact—and wherever the cameras were placed, that would have been a lot to ask for—but it was, still, almost possible to believe that nothing really separated us but a thin wall of glass.
The man smiled dreamily and walked away.
I had goose bumps. This was nothing new in principle, but the technology here had been pushed to its limits. The sense of being in an infinite dance hall was utterly compelling; I could see no “furthest hall” in any direction (and when they ran out of real ones, they could have easily recycled them). The flatness of the images, the incorrect scaling as you moved, the lack of parallax (worst of all when I tried to peer into the “corner rooms” between the main four, which “should” have been possible, but wasn’t) served more to make the space beyond the walls appear exotically distorted than to puncture the effect. The brain actually struggled to compensate, to cover up the flaws—and if I’d swallowed Sally’s capsule, I doubt I would have been nit-picking. As it was, I was grinning like a child on a fairground ride.
I saw people dancing facing the walls, loosely forming couples or groups across the link. I was mesmerized; I forgot all thoughts of leaving. After a while, I bumped into Oliver, who was swaying happily by himself. I screamed into his ear, “These are all other villages?” He nodded, and shouted back, “East is east and west is west!” Meaning … the virtual layout followed real geography—it just abolished the intervening distances? I recalled something James Springer had said in his Terminal Chat Show interview: We must invent a new cartography, to rechart the planet in its newborn, protean state. There is no separation, now. There are no borders.
Yeah … and the world was just one giant party. Still, at least they weren’t splicing in live connections to war zones. I’d seen enough we-dance/you-dodge-shells “solidarity” in the nineties to last a lifetime.
It suddenly occurred to me: If the carrier really was traveling from Event to Event, then he or she was “here” with me, right now. My quarry had to be one of the dancers in this giant, imaginary hall.
And this fact implied no opportunity, let alone any kind of danger. It wasn’t as if Silver Fire carriers conveniently fluoresced in the dark. But it still felt like the strangest moment of a long, strange night: to understand that the two of us were finally “connected”, to understand that I’d “found” the object of my search.
Even if it did me no good at all.
· · · · ·
Just after midnight—as the novelty was wearing off, and I was finally making up my mind to leave—some of the dancers began cheering loudly again. This time it took me even longer to see why. People started turning to face the east, and excitedly pointing something out to each other.
Weaving through one of the distant crowds of dancers, in a village three screens removed, were a number of human figures. They might have been naked, some male some female, but it was hard to be sure: they could only be seen in glimpses, and they were shining so brightly that most details were swamped in their sheer luminosity.
They glowed an intense silver-white. The light transformed their immediate surroundings, though the effect was more like a halo of luminous gas, diffusing through the air, than a spotlight cast on the crowd. The dancers around them seemed oblivious to their presence, as did those in the intervening halls; only the people in Herodotus paid them the kind of attention their spectacular appearance deserved. I couldn’t yet tell whether they were pure animation, with plausible paths computed through gaps in the crowd, or unremarkable (but real) actors, enhanced by software.
My mouth was dry. I couldn’t believe that the presence of these silver figures could be pure coincidence, but what were they meant to signify? Did the people of Herodotus know about the string of local outbreaks? That wasn’t impossible; an independent analysis might have been circulated on the net. Maybe this was meant as some kind of bizarre “tribute” to the victims.
I found Oliver again. The music had softened, as if in deference to the vision, and he seemed to have come down a little; we managed to have something approaching a conversation.
I pointed to the figures—who were now marching smoothly straight through the image of the image of a wallscreen, proving themselves entirely virtual.
He shouted, “They’re walking the Trail of Happiness!”
I mimed incomprehension.
“Healing the land for us! Making amends! Undoing the Trail of Tears!”
The trail of tears? I was lost for a while, then a memory from high school surfaced abruptly. The “Trail of Tears” was the brutal forced march of the Cherokee from what was now part of Georgia, all the way to Oklahoma, in the 1830s. Thousands had died along the way; some had escaped, and hidden in the Appalachians. Herodotus, I was fairly sure, was hundreds of kilometers from the historical route of the march, but that didn’t seem to be the point. As the silver figures moved across the dance floor twice-removed, I could see them spreading their arms wide, as if performing some kind of benediction.
I shouted, “But what does Silver Fire have to do with—?”
“Their bodies are frozen, so their spirits are free to walk the Trail of Happiness through cyberspace for us! Didn’t you know? That’s what Silver Fire is for! To renew everything! To bring happiness to the land! To make amends!” Oliver beamed at me with absolute sincerity, radiating pure good will.
I stared at him in disbelief. This man, clearly, hated no one, but what he’d just spewed out was nothing but a New Age remix of the rantings of that radio evangelist, twenty years before, who’d seized upon AIDS as the incontrovertible proof of his own spiritual beliefs.
I shouted angrily, “Silver Fire is a merciless, agonizing—”
Oliver tipped his head back and laughed, uproariously, without a trace of malice—as if I was the one telling ghost stories.
I turned and walked away.
The trail-walkers split into two streams as they crossed the hall immediately to the east of us. Half went north, half went south, as they “detoured around” Herodotus. They couldn’t move among us, but this way, the illusion remained almost seamless.
And if I’d been drugged out of my skull? If I’d embraced the whole mythology of the Trail of Happiness, and come here hoping to see it confirmed? In the morning, would I have half-believed that the roaming spirits of Silver Fire patients had marched right past me?
