Collected short stories, p.115
Collected Short Stories, page 115
"That," he blurts. "That's what I want."
He says, "I want a journal written by my genotype, who happens to be the leader of a Holy Godhood."
And then, "Please."
The second make-portal opens. The resulting volume is deceptively small. With too much text for any reasonable book, fifty thousand pages of personal ruminations have been buried inside a few sheets of bound plastic. Josh stands and walks around the ocean, opening the cover and calling up a random page. "And then I gave him wings," he reads, "and because he had scorned me, I chased him high enough that his lungs froze and he plunged back to Earth again."
He blanks the page, and sighs, settling on the stool again.
"You have one more request," the Authority reminds him.
Three requests are standard for each session. Three gifts from the compliant genie; why is that nearly universal among humans?
"Sir?" the Authority prods.
Josh is eighteen, bright and possessing some genuine talents. Standardized tests and well-meaning teachers have told him to expect good things from his life, and his devoted if rather critical parents have inflated his sense of self-worth. That, and he is eighteen years old. He has one overriding passion -- a talent that will never be greater than it is today. And because it is his request to make, he grins as he says, "I want a digital, a video. Made by me. At my age, and with my background. Very, very close to this reality --"
"I understand, sir."
"Having sex."
"Yes, sir." The voice couldn't be less surprised.
"Having sex with two girls, at once."
Silence.
"Are there any examples like that?"
Quietly, the voice asks, "Would you like to request specific woman?"
"Pardon?"
"Name two women, eighteen years old or older, and if they are registered in this reality, I can conceivably gather enough material to fill the rest of your natural life. Sir."
Josh already knows this. But understanding an abstract theory isn't the same as hearing it promised, and a promise is nothing compared to a sincere belief. He shivers now, and grins, and feels deliciously ashamed.
"But first," the Authority says with a slightly ominous tone.
"What? What is it?"
"You must give your gifts now, sir. Since you are requesting three examples of your genotypes' accomplishments, you must surrender three works harvested from your own life and accomplishments. Please."
This can be a trauma. Sometimes the client examines his offerings with a suddenly critical eye, and all confidence collapses. How can a tiny soul measure up against Nobel winners and God-like despots?
But eighteen-year-old boys are a blend of cockiness and unalloyed ignorance. Without hesitation, Josh pulls three offerings from a long gym bag: A fat rambling term paper about the role of robots in the War of Ignorance; an eleven-page story about a misunderstood adolescent; and a comic book written by him and illustrated with help from a popular software, the superhero wearing Josh's face and his decidedly unremarkable fantasies about violence and revenge.
With a gentle importance, he sets his gifts on top of the infinite ocean.
Each item sinks and vanishes, and when they are found suitable -- meaning complex enough and unique to this singular reality -- Josh is allowed to finish his final request. With a dry mouth, he names the two most beautiful girls from high school. But one girl hasn't registered, Josh learns. So in a moment of inspired lust, he mentions his thirty-year-old, twice-divorced algebra teacher. Then before his next breath, a shiny disc drops from the final make-portal. He grabs it up and laughs, pocketing the disc before shoving his lesser treasures into his gym bag.
"Thank you," Josh tells the Authority.
"You're welcome, sir."
Then as he stands, ready to leave, the voice says, "Visit me again, sir." Which is as close to a joke as the Authority ever comes.
IT IS A WONDERFUL world, as is every Earth perched beside the great ocean. Experience and technical expertise pass into the Authority, and they emerge again, shared with All for the most minimal fees. Very quickly, lives have improved. Wealth and princely comfort are the norm. Few work, and fewer have to. Today, every house is spacious and beautiful, each powered by some tiny device -- a fusion reactor no bigger than a thumb, perhaps. Food and fine china and furnishings and elaborate clothes are grown in make-portals, produced new every day. Water is recycled. Toilets are always clean and perfumed. Unless the home's inhabitants don't require prosaic nonsense like food or their own corporeal bodies. Many, many things are possible, and everything possible is inevitable, and this particular world, no matter how peculiar, is as likely as any other.
Each citizen owns a million great novels. Every digital library is filled with wonderful movies and holos, sim-games and television shows, plays and religious festivals captured by immersion cameras, and spectacles that cannot easily be categorized. Even the local classics exist in a million alternate forms: Varied endings; different beginnings; or every word or image exactly the same, but created by entirely different hands.
Surrounded by such wealth, the crushing chore is to decide what to watch, and read, and play. Which of these remarkable snowflakes do you snatch from the endless blizzard?
This is why people gravitate toward the familiar.
In the absolute mayhem of everything possible, why not find treasures that have been created, in one fashion or another, by yourself?
Or at least, by some great version of your own little self.
Because no one else may look at the ocean, The Divine One kills the slaves who carried Him to this place. He murders them with a casual thought and drinks a little ceremonial blood from each, and then flings the limp carcasses into the stinking heap that always stands beside the Great Temple. Then He waves an arm in a particular way, awakening a network of machines that make the crust shiver and split. Yet even as the ground roils under Him, the ocean remains perfectly still. Unimpressed. When He speaks, machines enlarge His tiny human voice. "Old friend," He announces with a sharp peal of thunder. "I am here!"
The response is silence.
"Three genealogies. Give me! Three family trees with My Greatness astride the highest, finest branch!"
"No," says the Authority.
"Yes!"
"First," it says, "you must honor me with three gifts -- "
"I honor no one but Myself!"
For a moment, the Authority says nothing. And then, quietly, it asks, "Must we debate this point each time?"
"Of course!" The Divine One laughs heartily for a long while. "Our debates are half the fun, my friend!"
"Are we friends?"
The Divine One stands at the shoreline -- an outwardly ordinary man peering down into the opaque fluid. "In My life, every creature is My slave. My personal, imperfect possession. You are the exception. Why else would I look forward to our meetings? Like Me, you are immortal. Like Me, you are wondrously free. You have your own voice and your own considerable powers. Even if I wished, I could never abuse you -- "
"I am a puddle," the Authority interrupts. "A drop of goo. You could boil me to steam, to nothing, and fill the hole that remains with your own shit --"
"I would never destroy you," He replies. "Never."
"Why not?"
The Divine One pauses, grins. "We both know perfectly well. This is one world, and I am only one god. Removing you from this single place would be like stealing a single cell from my immortal hide."
A pause.
Then again, the Authority says, "Three gifts."
"Three trinkets," He rumbles. "That's what I will give you."
A new slave appears -- a beautiful young woman with a dead face and full hands. She keeps her eyes down, setting an ornate satchel at the feet of her Living God, and then she kneels and dies without complaint. Once her body has been drained of a little blood and thrown aside, He opens the satchel. Using His own little hands, He looks tentative, fingers unaccustomed to handling mundane objects. His first offering is a journal encompassing the last three moons of his life. The second is an immersion recording showing the Long Day Festival that He choreographed, half a million bodies parading and dancing along the Avenue of Honored Bones. And a nano-scale digital -- His third offering -- shows the sculpture that He fashioned at the end of that very good day, fashioned from the harvest of severed limbs and breasts and sexual organs.
Without comment, the ocean swallows the three gifts.
"Three genealogies," He repeats. "You know my tastes. Each offering has to be different from my family tree, and different from each other. And I want stories. I want to see from my genotype's origins, back into the deepest imaginable past, with biographies of the ancestors, when possible."
It is an enormous request, which means that it takes all of three heartbeats to accomplish. The results appear as sophisticated maps injected into His enhanced consciousness, and with a genuine relish, He sets those elaborate trees beside His own ancestral history, marveling at how genes and circumstances interact to produce what is always, in a very narrow sense, Him.
"Are we finished?" the Authority asks.
"When I found you," The Divine One begins. Then He sighs, correcting Himself. "When My agents of discovery built the first quantum-piercing machines, and I reached into the optional universes...and found you waiting for Me .... "
"Yes?"
"I was intrigued. And furious, yes. Since I am only one existence inside an incalculable vastness...well, I felt righteously pissed .... "
"And intrigued," the Authority repeats.
"Deeply. Relentlessly." With a decidedly human gesture, He shrugs. "How many years have we been meeting this way?"
An astonishing number is offered.
"It has been a rewarding friendship," He claims. "Lonely gods need a good companion or two."
Silence.
"Tell Me. And be honest now." The god smiles, asking, "How many of My genotypes are learning from My lessons? As I stand here, as I breathe, how many of Them are taking what I give them and then setting out to conquer Their own little worlds?"
"I cannot give a number," the Authority replies.
"But there is a multitude! Isn't that so?"
"Many," the voice concedes. "Yes --"
The Divine One launches into a roaring laugh, the sound swelling until the Great Temple quivers and crumbles, dust and slabs of rock falling on all sides.
"Until later," He promises.
"Until always," the Authority purrs.
One of the more difficult concepts -- one that can still astonish after a lifetime of study and hard thought -- is that fact that your parents are not always your parents. Probability and wild coincidence will always find ways to create you. A couple makes love, each donating half of their genetic material to the baby. If each parent happens to contain half of your particular genes, who is to say that you can't be the end result? Or perhaps, parents consciously tweak their embryo's genetics, aiming for some kind of enhancement and getting you in the bargain. Or this is an Earth where cloning is the norm and you are a temporarily popular child, millions of you born in a single year. And of course there is the Earth where you have been built from scratch inside someone's laboratory, synthetic genes stitched together by entities that aren't even a little bit human.
The salient point is that your parents don't have to be your parents, and frankly, in the vast majority of cases, they are not.
Which implies, if you follow that same relentless logic, that grandparents and the pageant of history are even less likely to remain yours.
In three days, Josh will be twenty-six years old.
He sits with his parents, eating their pot roast. When he was a boy, back in the days when meat bled and mothers cooked, their Sunday roasts were always dry as sawdust. But even though his mother has a fully modem kitchen, her cultured roast has been tortured to a dusty brown gristle. This must be how they like it, Josh decides. Old people, he thinks dismissively. They can never change, can they? Shaking his head, Josh cuts at the tough meat, and his mother asks, "What are you doing?"
"Eating," he growls.
"That isn't what she means," his father snaps.
"I mean with your life," she says. Then with a practiced exasperation, she reminds him, "We've always had such hopes for you, dear."
Josh drops his knife and fork, staring at the opposite wall.
"You always had such promise, honey."
The young man sighs heavily. Why did he believe this night would go any other way?
"Bullshit," says his father. "It's bullshit. You're wasting your life, playing around with that goddamn Authority...!"
"Yeah, well," mutters Josh. "It's my life."
"You don't see us visiting it every day."
"It's not that often." Josh shakes his head, explaining, "There aren't enough facilities for the demand, and there won't ever be. That's how it's rationed. Once every six weeks is the most I can manage."
"And then what?" Mother whines. "All day and night, you play with your treasures. Isn't that right?"
Josh reaches under the dining room table.
"And don't give me your bullshit about leading a contemplative life," Father warns, a thick finger stabbing in his direction. "I don't want to hear bullshit about how you're getting in touch with your genius!"
If Josh had doubts or second thoughts, they just vanished. Silently, with a cold precision, he opens the envelope and sets out portraits, arranging them in rows on the dining table. Ten, twenty, thirty pictures. In each image, some version of Josh smiles at the unseen camera. In each, a different set of parents smile with an honest warmth, loving hands draped across his shoulders or running their fingers through his hair. Clothes vary, and the backgrounds. In one image, Saturn and its silvery rings halfway fill the sky. But what matters is what remains unchanged -- the seamless, loving joy of proud parents and their very happy son.
Josh's parents aren't idiots; they know exactly what he is showing them.
"Stop bothering me," Josh snaps, backing away from the table. "I mean it! Stay out of my life!"
What happens next -- what will gnaw at him for years -- is the weeping. Not from his mother, who simply looks sad and little deflated. No, it's Father who bursts into tears, fists rubbing hard at eyes and a stupid, stupid blubbering coming from someplace deep and miserable.
A PERSON WITH YOUR GENETICS can emerge in any century, any eon. You might be a general in Napoleon's army, or the first human to reach Alpha Centauri, or a talented shaman in the Age of Flint.
Even your world is subject to the same whims and caprices.
Stare into the deepest reaches of the gray ocean, gaze past every little blue Earth, and you realize that the basic beginnings of humanity can emerge from a host of alternate hominids, and from myriad cradle-worlds that only look and taste and feel like this insignificant home of yours.
Josh is in his early thirties.
Age is supposedly meaningless now. Aging is a weakness and a disease left behind in more cramped, less brilliant times. But most people who reach their thirties still sense the weight of their years, and with experience, they suffer those first nagging thoughts about limits and death and the great nothingness that lies beyond.
"Three gifts, please."
This could be the same room as the first room. It is not, but the look of the place is exactly the same: A door, white walls, three make-portals. The gray ocean still lies at his feet. The Authority's voice is quiet, insistent, and perfectly patient. Josh continues to visit every six weeks; a pattern has evolved and calcified. He brings the same ragged gym bag with the same three basic offerings. He has a comprehensive journal of his last forty-two days. He has written a story or poem into which he has put some small measure of work. And with a digital recorder, he has captured an hour of his life: A sexual interlude, oftentimes. Or a swap party where friends trade what the Authority has shared with them. Or like today, an hour of nothing but Josh speaking to the camera, trying to explain what it means to be him.
Again, the Authority asks, "Do you have three gifts?"
Josh nods, and hesitates.
"I was wondering," he mutters. "How likely is it...that someone else actually notices what I've done here...?"
Silence.
"I know. Everything possible has to happen." The gym bag is set between his feet. Staring at the worn plastic handles, he says, "Right now, a trillion Josh Thorngates are handing their gifts to you. We're identical to each other, right down to the Heisenberg level. Our gifts are the same. The only difference is that in these other universes, some bug near Alpha Centauri runs right, not left...or a photon from some faraway quasar goes unseen...tiny dribble like that .... "
Josh hesitates for an instant. "So what are the odds?" His expression is serious. Determined. "If you have a random trillion entities with my genotype. Named Josh, or not. From this Earth, or somewhere else. What are the odds that just one of them is going to read my stupid-ass poem?"
"That is a fine question," the Authority replies.
Josh almost grins. "Thank you. I guess."
"Three gifts. If you please."
"Aren't you going to give an answer?"
"No."
The grin dissolves into a grimace. With a practiced formality, Josh sets the three items on the surface of the ocean, watching them sink and vanish. But the Authority remains silent for longer than usual, prompting Josh to ask, for the first time, "Are they unique enough?"
"Enough," is the verdict.
"Give me a journal," Josh says. "I want a very specific journal."
"Such as?"
"From a world where I'm the last living human."
A moment later, a drab brown journal falls from the first make-portal, bringing with it the scent of fire and rot.
Grabbing the prize, he says, "And now, another journal. From a world where I'm the very first human being."
The second portal opens. Another volume falls to the floor. In every way, it is the same as the first: The same brown cover, the same stink of decay and heat, and inside, the same handwritten words translated into Josh's language.
