Beyond singularity, p.4
Beyond Singularity, page 4
Jamul's team lost, three nil. He staggered over to the fountains at the edge of the field and slaked his thirst, shocked by the pleasure of the simple act. Just to be alive was glorious now, but once he felt this way, anything seemed possible. He was back in synch, back in phase, and he was going to make the most of it, for however long it lasted.
He caught up with the others, who'd headed down toward the river. Ezequiel hooked an arm around his neck, laughing. "Bad luck, Sleeping Beauty! You picked the wrong time to wake. With Margit, we're invincible."
Jamil ducked free of him. "I won't argue with that." He looked around. "Speaking of whom—"
Penina said, "Gone home. She plays, that's all. No frivolous socializing after the match."
Chusok added, "Or any other time." Penina shot Jamil a glance that meant not for want of trying on Chusok's part.
Jamil pondered this, wondering why it annoyed him so much. On the field, she hadn't come across as aloof and superior. Just unashamedly good.
He queried the city, but she'd published nothing beside her name. Nobody expected—or wished—to hear more than the tiniest fraction of another person's history, but it was rare for anyone to start a new life without carrying through something from the old as a kind of calling card, some incident or achievement from which your new neighbors could form an impression of you.
They'd reached the riverbank. Jamil pulled his shirt over his head. "So what's her story? She must have told you something."
Ezequiel said, "Only that she learned to play a long time ago; she won't say where or when. She arrived in Noether at the end of last year, and grew a house on the southern outskirts. No one sees her around much. No one even knows what she studies."
Jamil shrugged, and waded in. "Ah well. It's a challenge to rise to." Penina laughed and splashed him teasingly. He protested, "I meant beating her at the game."
Chusok said wryly, "When you turned up, I thought you'd be our secret weapon. The one player she didn't know inside-out already."
"I'm glad you didn't tell me that. I would have turned around and fled straight back into hibernation."
"I know. That's why we all kept quiet." Chusok smiled. "Welcome back."
Perna said, "Yeah, welcome back, Jamil."
Sunlight shone on the surface of the river. Jamil ached all over, but the cool water was the perfect place to be. If he wished, he could build a partition in his mind at the point where he stood right now, and never fall beneath it. Other people lived that way, and it seemed to cost them nothing. Contrast was overrated; no sane person spent half their time driving spikes into their flesh for the sake of feeling better when they stopped. Ezequiel lived every day with the happy boisterousness of a five-year-old; Jamil sometimes found this annoying, but then any kind of disposition would irritate someone. His own stretches of meaningless somberness weren't exactly a boon to his friends.
Chusok said, "I've invited everyone to a meal at my house tonight. Will you come?"
Jamil thought it over, then shook his head. He still wasn't ready. He couldn't force-feed himself with normality; it didn't speed his recovery, it just drove him backward.
Chusok looked disappointed, but there was nothing to be done about that. Jamil promised him, "Next time. OK?"
Ezequiel sighed. "What are we going to do with you? You're worse than Margit!" Jamil started backing away, but it was too late. Ezequiel reached him in two casual strides, bent down and grabbed him around the waist, hoisted him effortlessly onto one shoulder, then flung him through the air into the depths of the river.
Jamii was woken by the scent of wood smoke. His room was still filled with the night's grey shadows, but when he propped himself up on one elbow and the window obliged him with transparency, the city was etched clearly in the predawn light.
He dressed and left the house, surprised at the coolness of the dew on his feet. No one else in his street seemed to be up; had they failed to notice the smell, or did they already know to expect it? He turned a corner and saw the rising column of soot, faintly lit with red from below. The flames and the ruins were still hidden from him, but he knew whose house it was.
When he reached the dying blaze, he crouched in the heat-withered garden, cursing himself. Chusok had offered him the chance to join him for his last meal in Noether. Whatever hints you dropped, it was customary to tell no one that you were moving on. If you still had a lover, if you still had young children, you never deserted them. But friends, you warned in subtle ways. Before vanishing.
Jamil covered his head with his arms. He'd lived through this countless times before, but it never became easier. If anything, it grew worse, as every departure was weighted with the memories of others. His brothers and sisters had scattered across the branches of the New Territories. He'd walked away from his father and mother when he was too young and confident to realize how much it would hurt him, decades later. His own children had all abandoned him eventually, far more often than he'd left them. It was easier to leave an ex-lover than a grown child: something burned itself out in a couple, almost naturally, as if ancestral biology had prepared them for at least that one rift.
Jamil stopped fighting the tears. But as he brushed them away, he caught sight of someone standing beside him, He looked up. It was Margit.
He felt a need to explain. He rose to his feet and addressed her. "This was Chusok's house. We were good friends. I'd known him for ninety-six years."
Margit gazed back at him neutrally. "Boo hoo. Poor baby. You'll never see your friend again."
Jamil almost laughed, her rudeness was so surreal. He pushed on, as if the only conceivable, polite response was to pretend that he hadn't heard her. "No one is the kindest, the most generous, the most loyal. It doesn't matter. That's not the point. Everyone's unique. Chusok was Chusok." He banged a fist against his chest, utterly heedless now of her contemptuous words. "There's a hole in me, and it will never be filled." That was the truth, even though he'd grow around it. He should have gone to the meal, it would have cost him nothing.
"You must be a real emotional Swiss cheese," observed Margit tartly.
Jamil came to his senses. "Why don't you fuck off to some other universe? No one wants you in Noether." Margit was amused. "You are a bad loser."
Jamil gazed at her, honestly confused for a moment; the game had slipped his mind completely. He gestured at the embers. "What are you doing here? Why did you follow the smoke, if it wasn't regret at not saying goodbye to him when you had the chance?" He wasn't sure how seriously to take Penina's lighthearted insinuation, but if Chusok had fallen for Margit, and it had not been reciprocated, that might even have been the reason he'd left.
She shook her head calmly. "He was nothing to me. I barely spoke to him."
"Well, that's your loss."
"From the look of things, I'd say the loss was all yours."
He had no reply. Margit turned and walked away. Jamil crouched on the ground again, rocking back and forth, waiting for the pain to subside.
Jamul sent the next week preparing to resume his studies. The library had near-instantaneous contact with every artificial universe in the New Territories, and the additional lightspeed lag between Earth and the point in space from which the whole tree-structure blossomed was only a few hours. Jamil had been to Earth, but only as a tourist; land was scarce, they accepted no migrants. There were remote planets you could live on, in the home universe, but you had to be a certain kind of masochistic purist to want that. The precise reasons why his ancestors had entered the New Territories had been forgotten generations before—and it would have been presumptuous to track them down and ask them in pers,,.1—but given a choice between the then even-more-crowded Earth, the horrifying reality of interstellar distances, and an endlessly extensible branching chain of worlds which could be traversed within a matter of weeks, the decision wasn't exactly baffling.
Jamil had devoted most of his time in Noether to studying the category of representations of Lie groups on complex vector spaces—a fitting choice, since Emmy Noether had been a pioneer of group theory, and if she'd lived to see this field blossom, she would probably have been in the thick of it herself. Representations of Lie groups lay behind most of physics: each kind of subatomic particle was really nothing but a particular way of representing the universal symmetry group as a set of rotations of complex vectors. Organizing this kind of structure with category theory was ancient knowledge, but Jamil didn't care; he'd long ago reconciled himself to being a student, not a discoverer. The greatest gift of consciousness was the ability to take the patterns of the world inside you, and for all that he would have relished the thrill of being the first at anything; with ten-to-the-sixteenth people alive that was a futile ambition for most.
In the library, he spoke with fellow students of his chosen field on other worlds, or read their latest works. Though they were not researchers, they could still put a new pedagogical spin on old material, enriching the connections with other fields, finding ways to make the complex, subtle truth easier to assimilate without sacrificing the depth and detail that made it worth knowing in the first place. They would not advance the frontiers of knowledge. They would not discover new principles of nature, or invent new technologies. But to Jamil, understanding was an end in itself.
He rarely thought about the prospect of playing another match, and when he did, the idea was not appealing. With Chusok gone, the same group could play ten-to-a-side without Jamil to skew the numbers. Margit might even choose to swap teams, if only for the sake of proving that her current team's monotonous string of victories really had been entirely down to her.
When the day arrived, though, he found himself unable to stay away. He turned up intending to remain a spectator, but Ryuichi had deserted Ezequiel's team, and everyone begged Jamil to join in.
As he took his place opposite Margit, there was nothing in her demeanor to acknowledge their previous encounter: no lingering contempt, but no hint of shame either. Jamil resolved to put it out of his mind; he owed it to his fellow players to concentrate on the game.
They lost, five nil.
Jamil forced himself to follow everyone to Eudore's house, to celebrate, commiserate, or, as it turned out, to forget the whole thing. After they'd eaten, Jamil wandered from room to room, enjoying Eudore's choice of music but unable to settle into any conversation. No one mentioned Chusok in his hearing.
He left just after midnight. Laplace's near-full primary image and its eight brightest gibbous companions lit the streets so well that there was no need for anything more. Jamil thought: Chusok might have merely traveled to another city, one beneath his gaze right now. And wherever he'd gone, he might yet choose to stay in touch with his friends from Noether.
And his friends from the next town, and the next? Century after century?
Margit was sitting on Jamil's doorstep, holding a bunch of white flowers in one hand.
Jamil was irritated. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to apologize."
He shrugged. "There's no need. We feel differently about certain things. That's fine. I can still face you on the playing field."
"I'm not apologizing for a difference of opinion. I wasn't honest with you. I was cruel." She shaded her eyes against the glare of the planet and looked up at him. "You were right: it was my loss. I wish I'd known your friend."
He laughed curtly. "Well, it's too late for that."
She said simply, "I know."
Jamil relented. "Do you want to come in?" Margit nodded, and he instructed the door to open for her. As he followed her inside, he said, "How long have you been here? Have you eaten?"
"No."
"I'll cook something for you."
"You don't have to do that."
He called out to her from the kitchen, "Think of it as a peace offering. I don't have any flowers."
Margit replied, "They're not for you. They're for Chusok's house."
Jamil stopped rummaging through his vegetable bins and walked back into the living room. "People don't usually do that in Noether."
Margit was sitting on the couch, staring at the floor. She said, "I'm so lonely here. I can't bear it anymore."
He sat beside her. "Then why did you rebuff him? You could at least have been friends."
She shook her head. "Don't ask me to explain."
Jamil took her hand. She turned and embraced him,
trembling miserably. He stroked her hair. "Sssh." She said, "Just sex. I don't want anything more." He groaned softly. "There's no such thing as that." "I just need someone to touch me again."
"I understand." He confessed, "So do I. But that won't be all. So don't ask me to promise there'll be nothing more."
Margit took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of wood smoke.
Jamil said, "I don't even know you."
"No one knows anyone anymore."
"That's not true."
"No, it's not," she conceded gloomily. She ran a hand lightly along his arm. Jamil wanted badly to see her smile, so he made each dark hair thicken and blossom into a violet flower as it passed beneath her fingers.
She did smile, but she said, "I've seen that trick before."
Jamil was annoyed. "I'm sure to be a disappointment all round, then. I expect you'd be happier with some kind of novelty. A unicorn, or an amoeba."
She laughed. "I don't think so." She took his hand and placed it against her breast. "Do you ever get tired of sex?" "Do you ever get tired of breathing?"
"I can go for a long time without thinking about it." He nodded. `But then one day you stop and fill your lungs with air, and it's still as sweet as ever."
Jamil didn't know what he was feeling anymore. Lust. Compassion. Spite. She'd come to him hurting, and he wanted to help her, but he wasn't sure that either of them really believed this would work.
Margit inhaled the scent of the flowers on his arm. "Are they the same color? Everywhere else?"
He said, "There's only one way to find out."
Tamil woke in the early hours of the morning, alone. He'd half-expected Margit to flee like this, but she could have waited till dawn. He would have obligingly feigned sleep while she dressed and tiptoed out.
Then he heard her. It was not a sound he would normally have associated with a human being, but it could not have been anything else.
He found her in the kitchen, curled around a table leg, wailing rhythmically. He stood back and watched her, afraid that anything he did would only make things worse. She met his gaze in the half-light, but kept up the mechanical whimper. Her eyes weren't blank; she was not delirious, or hallucinating. She knew exactly who, and where, she was.
Finally, Jamil knelt in the doorway. He said, "Whatever it is, you can tell me. And we'll fix it. We'll find a way."
She bared her teeth. "You can't fix it, you stupid child." She resumed the awful noise.
"Then just tell me. Please?" He stretched out a hand toward her. He hadn't felt quite so helpless since his very first daughter, Aminata, had come to him as an inconsolable six-year-old, rejected by the boy to whom she'd declared her undying love. He'd been twenty-four years old; a child himself. More than a thousand years ago. Where are you now, Nata?
Margit said, "I promised I'd never tell."
"Promised who?"
"Myself."
"Good. They're the easiest kind to break."
She started weeping. It was a more ordinary sound, but it was even more chilling. She was not a wounded animal now, an alien being suffering some incomprehensible pain. Jamil approached her cautiously; she let him wrap his arms around her shoulders.
He whispered, "Come to bed. The warmth will help. Just being held will help."
She spat at him derisively, "It won't bring her back."
"Who?"
Margit stared at him in silence, as if he'd said something shocking.
Jamil insisted gently, "Who won't it bring back?" She'd lost a friend, badly, the way he'd lost Chusok. That was why she'd sought him out. He could help her through it. They could help each other through it.
She said, "It won't bring back the dead."
Mar~f it was seven thousand five hundred and ninety-four years old. Jamil persuaded her to sit at the kitchen table. He wrapped her in blankets, then fed her tomatoes and rice, as she told him how she'd witnessed the birth of his world.
The promise had shimmered just beyond reach for decades. Almost none of her contemporaries had believed it would happen, though the truth should have been plain for centuries: the human body was a material thing. In time, with enough knowledge and effort, it would become possible to safeguard it from any kind of deterioration, any kind of harm. Stellar evolution and cosmic entropy might or might not prove insurmountable, but there'd be aeons to confront those challenges. In the middle of the twenty-first century, the hurdles were aging, disease, violence, and an overcrowded planet.
"Grace was my best friend. We were students." Margit smiled. "Before everyone was a student. We'd talk about it, but we didn't believe we'd see it happen. It would come in another century. It would come for our great-greatgrandchildren. We'd hold infants on our knees in our twilight years and tell ourselves: this one will never die.
"When we were both twenty-two, something happened. To both of us." She lowered her eyes. "We were kidnapped. We were raped. We were tortured."
Jamil didn't know how to respond. These were just words to him: he knew their meaning, he knew these acts would have hurt her, but she might as well have been describing a mathematical theorem. He stretched a hand across the table, but Margit ignored it. He said awkwardly, "This was ... the Holocaust?"
She looked up at him, shaking her head, almost laughing at his naiveté. "Not even one of them. Not a war, not a pogrom. Just one psychopathic man. He locked us in his basement, for six months. He'd killed seven women." Tears began spilling down her cheeks. "He showed us the bodies. They were buried right where we slept. He showed us how we'd end up, when he was through with us."
