Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

SWAN

Swan left Earth feeling considerably pleased with herself for helping the qubical person light out for the territory, and pleased with Zasha too, which mattered to her much more than she had realized it would. She took the space elevator up from Quito and lived through the performance of Satyagrahayet again, and this time it was the peace of the final movement that struck her most, the scale rising in its simple octave over and over, like a meditation chant to lift you right off your feet; and dancing in the ever-lightening g near the end made it a very physical feeling, a kind of euphoria as they were lifted on wings of song.

She returned to Mercury in a terrarium called the Henry David. It was a classic New Englander, with a few small clapboard villages and some pasturage breaking up a hardwood and conifer mixed forest. It was October there, and the maples had gone red, so that there were trees violently yellow, orange, red, and green, all mixed and scattered together over the inside of the cylinder, such that when you looked up at it overhead, it appeared to be a speechless speech in some kind of round color language, trembling on the edge of meaning. Swan wandered through the forest on paths, went from one cleared hilltop to another. One day she took up leaves that had fallen and arranged them across a clearing so that they went from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green, in a smooth progression. This colored line on the land pleased her greatly, as did the wind that blew it away. Another day she spent hours following a black bear and her cub. In the afternoon they came to an abandoned apple orchard, where one ancient crippled tree had nevertheless produced a lot of apples, so many that some branches drooped to the ground. The bears ate a ton of them. There was an upright half barrel next to the tree that had filled with rainwater, and the cub climbed into it and took a bath, its glossy fur going black and pointing in wet tips.

Back on Mercury she settled into her life in Terminator. She woke out on her balcony, breakfasted in the morning cool, did her stretches to the sun, bowing uneasily to Sol Invictus. Looked over the city, registering all the familiar landmarks that had been rebuilt, and the new trees and shrubs, looking a little bigger every day, a little more in place. She had taken a postcard that Alex had had couriered to her long before, and tacked it to the wall over her kitchen sink, where Alex’s handwriting proclaimed daily:

O joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning!

It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,

I will have thousands of globes and all time.

It was autumn now in Terminator too, and the row of Japanese fire maples on the terrace two down from her balcony had gone an incandescent red. Dust had settled on the royal-blue roof tiles she could see below. The new weather program seemed to include more windy days than the old one had, and sometimes there were winds stronger than any she could remember. She liked that. Certain cold gusty winds would pull her loose from whatever she was doing and take her on long walks around the city. It was feeling very much bigger up front than before, the platform extended to provide more park and farm. There were new canals in the flat part of the city and the park. Bridges over canals, bike paths, broad boulevards and esplanades. Her town. Same but different. It occurred to her that the city could be expanded forward even farther into the night; in theory, as the decades and centuries passed they could cover the tracks westward all the way around the nightside of Mercury.

She spent most of her days out in the farm, working on the pond and wetlands. The new estuary was not thriving and there were questions about salinity levels, and a little hydraulic tide they had going. Arguments, really. And she was still trying to understand why the Gibraltar apes didn’t like the caves they had provided in a little hill with a west-facing cliff face. The apes were gorgeous, and usually they didn’t have problems the way people had problems. But there they were, hanging out on the flats under the caves, unwilling to go into them. At some point she might have to climb up there to take a look herself.

While she was out there watching the apes, she thought about her life. Here she was, 137 years old. Body much abused the whole time; it would not last forever, or even necessarily go on much longer. On the other hand, the treatments were doing new things even compared to a few years before, and people were still working at improving them. Mqaret was almost two hundred. So it had to be thought about.

Her close relationships were few, and perhaps no longer so close. She had everything she needed; her life was good. Her surviving child was out there somewhere, living her life in her own manner, not cratering to speak of. Occasionally in touch. Not the issue. Swan was closer to other people, and that was all right. Her young friend Kiran had stayed on Venus, had insisted on it, and was back in the thick of things there and sending her reports on a regular basis. It felt like more of a relationship than many she had, and there were more like that out there to come, no doubt; people were always grabbing her by the arm and pulling her into their lives, it seemed. Her farm crew was tight. She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary? Because now, with Alex gone, though she talked to many people, in the end she was missing someone to tell things to in the way she had always told Alex.

Oh I miss you Hettie Moore

But there’s no one here left to tell—

The world has gone black before my eyes.

In the farm by herself she sang the old ballad, and wondered what would make things right. Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that.

No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape—some place for people to live in for ages to come—then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough.

But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with. Alex had been pleased with her.

She had seen the traveling isolatoes, solitary old spacers who made their own way in the world, who were not partnered in any fashion with other people. That was her crowd; she had been one of them herself for more than half her life. Had they all been on the hunt? She recalled something she had heard people say: I want to meet somebody. Meet; they meant “mate.” I want to mate somebody. “Meet” was the future subjunctive of “mate,” in the mood of desire. And when you looked around, you saw it: pair-bonding kept coming back. It was a future conditional tense, a subjunctive verb: to mate somebody, and then meet them. It was an atavistic thing, as if they were swans, or some other creature with a genetic urge to pair off. “Swan is not a swan,” she told her baffled coworkers in the park. But how did she know?

“I want to meet somebody,” she said to Mqaret experimentally.

Mqaret laughed at her. “You like this guy! This person Wahram from Saturn. So maybe what you mean is ‘I’ve met somebody.’ ”

Swan stared at Mqaret. It still hadn’t fully sunk in to her that it was possible to be loved. Or even to love. “But I met him a long time ago. I’ve known him for years now!”

“Even better,” Mqaret said. “You know him. In fact you had to spend a lot of time with him. What happened in that utilidor? Didn’t something happen?”

“We whistled, mostly,” she said. “But yes. Something happened.”

“Maybe that’s what a marriage is,” Mqaret said. “Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.”

“Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.

At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she?

But wasn’t marriage a promise somehow not to change?

She slogged around in the wetlands and kept on thinking about it. One day a frog the same color as the rocks hopped away from her accidental hand, then sat there staring up at her, alert and curious, calm but ready to leap again. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.” And yet now that she had, it sat there glossier than any rock, alive and breathing.

She went out on a walkabout. Headed to the north of Terminator’s latitude, into the Tricrena Albedo. Out into the garbled chiaroscuro of the terminator, where sidelong rays of sunlight raked suddenly up the tilting land, blazing so violently that the still-shadowed land appeared blacker than matter. Clashing shards of black and white—her eye could scarcely put the landscape back together again. Just the way she liked it, sometimes. Her schizophrenic life space.

She fell into sunwalker mode, oriented herself by the memorized maps inside her. She knew as she trudged blindly westward that she would soon come over the rise north of Mahler, pass some baked ballardian abandoned space plane runways, then find herself at the top of an escarpment, a little bulging crack in the land, very old, the land above overlooking a two-hundred-meter drop to the plains below. Luckily the escarpment sported a system of tilted ledges that served as a neat staircase down. She had been here before. These Ebersbacher Ledges were often trod by sunwalkers using this route, and had been swept clear of dust and rubble many years before. So it was a broken switchbacking path of clean stone tilts that led her down to the plain beyond. On Mercury the horizon was just the right distance away, she felt; not something you could reach out and touch, but something you could walk to and investigate.

Out there now was a little group of sunwalkers, trudging patiently west. Little silver figures reminiscent of Inspector Genette, disappearing over the horizon. They would walk for a spell and then lie down in carts or travois to sleep while being pulled along by the others. Walking together, pulling sleeping people along—how beautiful the sense of trust and care, the playful handing over of your life to strangers—part of being Mercurial. For a long time it had been all she had needed in the way of company. That and her city.

She got to the bottom of the ledges and came onto the flat rubble plain of Tricrena Albedo. Here the trail disappeared, because any way was equally good. Here she could run into the night, gain ground on the dawn, stand on Yes Tor and watch the highest points of ground light like candles, then burn downward from their brilliant tips. To walk in the dawn perpetually, ah, so devoutly to be wished! Who could stand high noon or the wane of day? Leave the dawn behind, run back into the night. Forestall the day—who knew what it would bring? She had no plan, no idea.

For a long time she ran and didn’t think much beyond the rock under her, the lay of the land. Nothing more needed. They could tear the guts out of Mercury, take out every valuable mineral in it, and the surface would not look one whit different. It was already a clinker of a world. The battered face of an old friend. Rock scattered everywhere, rubble, kipple, ejecta. The blanket of dust. Gold in them thar hills. But friends talk. I want to be able to talk to someone and have it mean something to me. I want to hear things that interest me, that surprise me, no matter how impossible I am to surprise. Except in truth I am so easily surprised. How could it be that someone was not there to surprise someone so easily surprised.

The saturnine person. What if there was a person you could depend on, someone who was steady, reliable, predictable, resolute; decisive after due thought; generous; kind. Phlegmatic, and yet prone to little gusts of enthusiasm, usually aesthetic pleasures of one sort or other. Happy in danger, a little drunk in danger. Someone capable of loving a landscape. Someone who liked to watch animals and chase them for a look. Someone who looked at her as if figuring her out was an interesting project and not just a problem to be solved, or part of the backdrop in some other more important drama. And looked at everyone else met with that same regard. Often with a little smile that seemed to express pleasure in the company shared. A reserved but friendly manner. If all our acquaintances were characterized in language only, we would look like collectors of contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons. For every kind of this there was a balance of that. People cut both ways. In someone like him a little cheery laugh began to seem like boisterousness.

She came to one of her most famous goldsworthies, from a time when she had been experimenting with setting slugs of lead and other metals that would melt in the heat of the day on slopes she had cut with channels, so that over the course of a brightside crossing, the slugs of lead or copper or tin would melt into the channels and form pictures or letters, always stretched such that they looked upright to observers on a viewing platform atop a nearby cliff. For this sculpture north of Mahler she had channeled two sets of letters carefully overlapping and intersecting each other, with gates for one word or other equally matched in their weakness. As the metal pigs melted in the sun they would run against the gates until one gate or other would fail, thus draining the reservoir of its molten contents. So, depending on what happened in the gates, the resulting letters of this installation would have spelled either “LIVE” or “DIE.” It was the last of a series of antinomies she had put to the landscape and the sun in those years, including all the seven virtues and vices overlapped, wrestling with each other like Jacob with God. So far the verdict was out; the process looked random. But in this particular instance both gates had broken at once, resulting in a flow insufficient to fill all the channels; some had filled preferentially over others, and the result, made of a bright swirl of silver and copper, had been the word “LIE.”

Now she stood looking at it from the viewing platform. Even at the time it had struck her as apt; and now it was like a command. One could still see the empty troughs of the two overlaid words, the empty Dand V; but certainly the word “LIE,” glowing metallically in the dark land, dominated. Very apt indeed. People said she must have arranged it that way on purpose, but she hadn’t; the dams had been equal, their simultaneous break an act of their own, the letters filled a matter of the first surge, a clinamen. But it told the truth in some sense. They didn’t live or die—they did both—and so lied. You lie and then you lie. So get on with it.

After a while she turned south, to get over to the nearest platform before the city came gliding over the horizon. When she got over the low rim of the ancient crater Kenk , she would be able to see Terminator’s tracks, gleaming faintly in the valley below.

From the top of Kenk , around to its southern side, she saw the tracks, and also a lone figure, toiling up the incline toward her. Round, tall; and she recognized the walk the moment she saw it, oh she knew that walk all right!

She clicked on the common band: “Wahram?”

“ ’Tis I, come hunting for you.”

“You found me.”

“Yes. Were you going to be coming back into town soon? Because I didn’t bring anything to eat.”

“Yes, I was. When did you get in?”

“Yesterday. I’ve just been hiking for a few hours. The city will be along anytime now.”

“Good. Good. Let’s go down to meet it.” She walked down to him and gave him a hug. In their suits she still knew his body well, round and full, a bigger person than her. “Thanks for coming out to get me.”

“Oh, my pleasure, I assure you. I came all the way from Titan.”

“I thought you might have. How is your new leg?”

He gestured down at it. “I keep placing it and finding it’s not quite where I thought it was. Apparently the ghost nerves of the old leg are still speaking to me and messing me up.”

“Just like my head!” Swan said without thinking, and laughed painfully. “Every time I grow a new one it’s not quite where I thought it was.”

Wahram regarded her, smiling. “I’m told it is a quick adjustment.”

“Hmm.”

“In fact, speaking of growing new heads—I was wondering if you had thought about what I said when we were marooned. And also of course on Venus afterward.”

“Yes, I have.”

“And?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

Wahram frowned. “Have you talked to Pauline about it?”

“Well, I suppose.”

In fact this had not even occurred to her.

Wahram regarded her. The sun was going to hit them soon. He said, “Pauline, will you marry me?”

“Yes,” said Pauline.

“Hey wait a minute!” Swan exclaimed. “I’m the one who has to say yes here.”

“I thought you just did,” Wahram said.

“No I did not! Pauline is very much a separate entity in here. That’s why you locked me out of your meetings, right?”

“Yes, but because you two are one. And so we couldn’t let you in without letting her in too. I am not the first to observe that since you were the one who programmed Pauline, and continue to do so, she is a kind of projection of you—”

“Not at all!”

“—or, well, maybe she would be better described as one of your works of art. They have often been very personal things.”

“My rock piles, personal?”

“Yes. Not as personal as sitting naked on a block of ice for a week drinking your own blood, but nevertheless, very personal.”

“Well, but Pauline is not art.”

“I’m not so sure. Maybe she’s something like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Isn’t that art? Some device we speak through. So I am very encouraged.”

“Don’t be!”

But he obviously was. Over time, Swan realized, that would matter—that he believed in Pauline. She walked down toward the nearest platform and he followed her.

After a while he said, “Thank you, Pauline.”

“You’re welcome,” Pauline replied.

Extracts (18)

to form a sentence is to collapse many superposed wave functions to a single thought universe. Multiplying the lost universes word by word, we can say that each sentence extinguishes 10 ⁿuniverses, where nis the number of words in the sentence. Each thought condenses trillions of potential thoughts. Thus we get verbal overshadowing, where the language we use structures the reality we inhabit. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe this is why we need to keep making sentences

texts are written for people to read later. They are a kind of time capsule, a speaking to one’s descendants. Reading this text, you see back to an older time, when the tumult and disorder may be scarcely believable to you. You may be on the other side of a great divide, your life indefinitely long and headed for the stars. Not so we the living, thrashing around in our little solar system like bacteria filling a new rain puddle. This puddle is all we’ve got. Within it some jimmy the doors to the secrets of life; some tend a patch of dirt for enough food to live. You know all that I know; what can we the living say to each other in that situation? In many ways it’s easier to talk to you, generous reader, unborn one. You might live for centuries, this text one tiny part of your education, a glimpse at how it used to be, a little insight into how your world got to be the way it is. Your author however remains stuck in the tail of the balkanization, desperate with hope for the beginning of whatever comes next. It is a very limited view

Who decides when it’s time to act?

No one decides. The moment happens.

No. We decide. How we decide is an interesting question. But even if we don’t know the answer to it, we decide

although the events right before and after the year 2312 were important and signaled changes latent in the situation at the time, nothing tipped decisively then, there was no portal they passed through saying, “This is a new period, this is a new age.” Events set in train were mired and complex, and many took decades more to come to fruition. That the Mondragon would unify much of Earth, that Mars would recover from its qube-inflected withdrawal and rejoin the Mondragon—none of that was clear to us then—things could have shifted into quite different channels and

of course the disparities between individual and planetary time can never be reconciled. “What is to be noted here is less the unification of these disparate temporalities than rather their surcharge and overlap.” It’s the surcharge and overlap that create the feel of any given time. “Out of this jumbled superimposition of different kinds of temporal models History does in fact emerge”—as a work of art, like any other work of art, but made by everyone together. And it doesn’t stop. Things happen, events, accomplishments; wins and losses; Pyrrhic victories, rearguard actions; and though there can be crucial events, the plot does not end in a year like 2312, but rather several decades later, if that

what we see when we contemplate the formation of the triple alliance of Mars, Saturn, and Mercury, or the intervention of the Mondragon Accord into the balkanized Earth, or Mars’s return to the Mondragon, is a kind of unstable interregnum, a shift in the spinning of the great merry-go-round as the weights are redistributed and something new begins, and a shuddering thus torques the system for years, before finally slipping into some newly stabilized rotation

On Venus the backlash against the plot to spin up the planet caused a long and bitter civil war, largely invisible to the rest of the system, fought with knives and depressurization, and only resolved in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century with a general referendum of the entire population, which decisively chose to renew the bombardment of the equator and initiate the spectacularly destructive creation of a hundred-hour Venusian day

the so-called invisible revolutions on Earth led to the recreation of its landscapes both physical and political, all of which followed the Reanimation. In that same period the integration of qube and human existence was another invisible revolution, a struggle vexing the minds of every engineer, philosopher, and qube who ever attacked the problem

on Mars it became clear that a small working group within the official government had been infiltrated and influenced by a cadre of qubed simulacra, who were summarily kidnapped and sent into exile, after which a profound reconsideration of their governance brought them closer to their democratic system as described, and reentry in the Mondragon Accord followed

with majorities on Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Titan, Triton, and even Luna declaring the intention to fully terraform their worlds, all volatiles and nitrogen in particular became much more expensive; inflation struck the entire system at once; and by the end of the twenty-fourth century the Saturn League had amassed a titanic fortune

all the invisible events make the history of that time hard to write. And all the events continued to occur against the most intense resistance of time, material, and human recalcitrance—human fear, in fact, seizing with a desperate grip various imagined props out of the past that were somehow felt to hold the world together. Because of this, there is still and always the risk of utter failure and mad gibbering extinction. There is no alternative to continuing to struggle