Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Lists (3)

alcohol, fasting, thirsting, sweat lodges, self-mutilation,

sleep deprivation, dance, bleeding, mushrooms, immersion in ice water,

kava, flagellation with thorns or animal teeth, cactus flesh, tobacco,

exposure to the elements, long-distance running, hypnosis,

meditation, rhythmic drumming and chanting, jimsonweed, nightshade,

Salvia divinorum, pungent or aromatic scents, toad sweat, tantric sex,

spinning in circles, amphetamines, sedatives, opioids, hallucinogens,

nitrous oxide, oxytocin, holding one’s breath, jumping off cliffs,

nitrites, kratom, coca leaves, cocoa, caffeine, entheogens—

ethylene, a entheogenic gas, escapes from the ground under Delphi

SWAN IN THE DARK

When they were free to leave Io Station, Swan headed to Earth.

It turned out that the first transport heading downsystem was a blackliner. Feeling the blackness of Alex’s absence inside her, Swan decided to take it. Wahram saw her off with his now characteristic expression of alarm.

Inside the blackliner, darkness reigned. It was as black as could be, the black one would find inside a cave deep inside the earth. The terrarium was just barely rotating, so there was very low g throughout. People therefore floated in the dark, naked or dressed in clothes or spacesuits. Around buildings and floating pods a blind society bounced carefully, living in a world of sound. Bat people. Sometimes there were interactions, conversations, embraces; sometimes one heard cries for help, and there were sheriffs on patrol to provide aid, using infrared goggles to see what was going on. But for most passengers the point was to be blind for a while. It could be a penance, it could be a bit of mental voyaging; it could be a new kind of sex. Swan didn’t know what she wanted out of it. It had sounded right for the way she felt.

Now she floated in pure and complete blackness. Her eyes were open and yet she didn’t see a thing: not her hand before her face, not a glint of light anywhere. The space she was in seemed as infinite as the cosmos itself, or else just a bag around her head. There were voices here and there, coming from various distances. They all sounded hushed, as if in the dark people naturally whispered—although forward along the centerline, it seemed by the faint pull of the g, there was some kind of game or sport being played, with whistles and beeps and shouts of laughter. From another direction came the sounds of guitar and oboe, playing a baroque duet. She jetted toward it cautiously, hoping to hear it better. Halve the distance, double the sound. On the way she passed the paired breath of a couple having sex, or so it seemed. This was a noise that could draw a crowd as much as music or sport. There had been assaults in blackliners; people had done unspeakable things, or so one heard. In fact it was hard to believe anyone would care enough to impinge so drastically on anyone else. Why care that much? What would it do?

The continuous pure dark soon began to be marked in her vision by blotches of color, then by memories of sights that seemed to be there in her eye. She closed her eyes, and colored bars redoubled. Color everywhere; it reminded her of that time years before when she had ingested the Enceladan suite of aliens, a crazy act which she usually managed not to remember. The votaries sitting around lit candles; Pauline, newly inside her, warning her not to do it; the little chalice full of Enceladusea irwiniiand other Enceladan microscopic life-forms; the votary giving it to her and saying, “Do you understand?” and Swan replying that she did, the biggest lie of her life; the taste of the infusion, like blood; the heave in her stomach; the way after a moment of blackout the candlelight returned and grew too bright to look at; the waves-on-the-beach roar all through her, everything becoming brilliantly stuffed with color, Saturn looking like a confection of mint and cantaloupe. Yes, a period of synesthesia, with all her senses on fire; and at one point she had had the sudden realization that she would never be the same. Infecting herself with an alien, was it wise? No, it was not! Crying out then as if poisoned, trapped in a kaleidoscope, a roaring in her ears, exclaiming over and over, But I was—I was Swan—I was—I was Swan—

Now she did her best to throw the vivid memory into darkness away from her. She spun weightlessly with the effort, which had caused her to wrench her body into a knot. As she spun, it began to seem that the guitar and oboe she heard were actually at quite a distance from each other. Was it really a duet at all? How would that work if the two of them were half a kilometer apart? There would be a distinct time lag, each for the other. She tried to focus on them, hear if they were in concert or not. In the pure black she would never know.

Miserably she realized that this was going to go on for as long as she was in here. No face to cling to with one’s gaze, nothing at all to see—her memory and imagination would run riot, her starved senses left to spin hungrily, making things up—nothing but her unhappiness for company. Pure being, unadulterated thought, revealing what the phenomenal world could hide but not change: the blank at the heart of things.

Her stomach grumbled and she ate part of her belt. She relieved herself in a bag inside her suit and cast the sealed bag toward the ground; janitorbots would sniff it out and take it away. She kept seeing images of Alex’s face, and she clung to them as precious memories she would need to hold to forever, but they made her groan too. She mewed like a hurt beast, she couldn’t help it.

“You are perhaps experiencing an episode of hypotyposis,” Pauline said aloud. “The visionary imagination of things not present before the eyes.”

“Shut up, Pauline.” Then, after a while, she said, “No, I’m sorry. Go on, please.”

“An aporia in some rhetorics is a pretended dubitation before coming back to the attack, as in Gilbert on Joyce. But Aristotle has it as an insoluble problem in an inquiry, arising from equally plausible but inconsistent premises. He writes that Socrates liked to reduce people to aporia to show them they didn’t really know what they thought they knew. The plural that Aristotle uses in his book on metaphysics is ‘aporiai.’ ‘We should first review the things about which we need from the outset to be puzzled,’ he writes. The word aporiawas later adapted by Derrida to mean something like the blank spots in our understanding that we don’t even know are there, with the idea we should try to see these. It is not quite the same idea, but joins a constellation of meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionaryreferences a quote from J. Smith’s Mystical Rhetoricof 1657, which says aporiarefers to the problem of ‘what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing.’ ”

“Like now.”

“Yes. Listen further. The Greek comes from a, ‘not,’ and poros, ‘passage.’ But in the Platonic myth, Penia, the child of poverty, chooses to become impregnated by Poros, the personification of plenty. Their child is Eros, who combines the attributes of its parents. Pointed out as strange here is the vision of Penia as resourceful, and prosperity as drunk and passive—”

“That’s not strange.”

“So that although Penia is not Poros, she is also not a-poria. She has been called neither masculine nor feminine, rich or poor, resourceful or without resources. And so aporiabecomes even more an untranslatable term.”

“I am an aporia. And I am in an aporia. This blackliner.”

“Yes.”

All very well, to talk and think—“Thank you, Pauline”—but at the end of it, there was still a week more to live through, and Alex’s death never gone away. She was floating in the bardo, trying to think like someone unborn would think. Full of dubitation, child of a poverty. Would be reborn some other Swan.

But then later—it seemed much later, there in the suspended space of no-time, banging around in her thoughts as they looped over and over—later she came to understand that when the chime in her suit rang and signaled that this trip was over, they would decant the same Swan that went in. There was no escape.

“Pauline—tell me more. Talk to me. Please talk to me.”

Pauline said, “Max Brod once had a very interesting conversation with Franz Kafka, which he later recounted to Walter Benjamin….”

Extracts (3)

Homo sapiensevolved in Terran gravity and it is still an open question what effects time spent in less than one g will have on the individual

decrease in bone strength from 0.5 percent to 5 percent per month in 0–.1 g

repeated exposure to gravity incidents greater than 3 g has been shown to create micro-strokes and raise the incidence of major strokes

the biomedical research community has changed its mind about these questions more than once through the years

aerobic and resistance exercise partially compensates for physiological effects of long-term residence in moderate low g (defined as between Luna’s .17 g and Mars’s .38 g) but there are problems left unaddressed

maintaining a vigorous physical life substantially mitigates

below Luna g, physical etiolation occurs in some organs and tissues no matter how much exercise

statistically very significant results in actuarial tables suggest longevity beyond historical norms is impossible without frequent return not just to a one-g environment, but to Earth itself. Why this should be so is a matter of dispute, but the fact itself is very clear in the data. We propose to show

one year in every six spent on Earth, with no time away longer than ten years, greatly increases longevity. Neglect of this practice leads to a high risk of dying many decades before

oversterile environments cannot

the famous or notorious sabbatical has been proposed as an example of hormesis or Mithridatism, in which brief exposure to toxins strengthens the organism against greater

Earth’s continuing clutch on space-dwelling humans is physiological and will not go away unless it is fully characterized and all components of it effectively ameliorated

inoculations of helminths (ringworm), bacteria, viruses, etc., impossible to catalog and yet

possible psychological effects also, which means extreme difficulty in defining causation or treatment

not dissimilar to other five-hundred-year projects in intrinsic difficulty

effects are cumulative and lead to dysfunction

increase in longevity is a statistical fact but no guarantee for any particular individual. Life choices shift the probabilities of

regenerative therapies continue to improve

the biggest jump in the longevity graphs came at the start of the Accelerando, and many feel this was not a coincidence. There is a surge of energy that comes when you realize you may live much longer than you had thought possible. Problems that later complicate the picture don’t become evident until

the statistics are suggestive but the causes are not yet

life is a complex

STD, sudden traumatic death, insoluble

people should minimize their time in the lowest and highest gs if they want to maximize their chance at newly normative extended lifetimes, which keep getting longer

no real sense of what might be possible if improvements continue

could we live for thousands of

people compromise, they cut corners. They want to do things, they indulge their desires, their love of adventure

to have to return to Earth, so dirty and old, so oppressive, such a failure. So much the sad planet

they swore they would live by accident, but they were young at the time

most older spacers go home to Earth as advised, one year every seven, because these are the ones living the longest and the effect is self-reinforcing

the hunt continues for a fuller explanation

SWAN AND ZASHA

Earth’s thirty-seven space elevators all had their cars full all the time, both up and down. There were still many spacecraft landings and ascents, of course, and landings of gliders that then reascended on the elevators; but all in all, the elevators handled by far the bulk of the Earth-space traffic. Going down in the cars were food (a crucial percentage of the total needed), metals, manufactured goods, gases, and people. Going up were people, manufactured goods, the substances common on Earth but rare in space—these were many, including things animal, vegetable, and mineral, but chiefly (by bulk) rare earths, wood, oil, and soil. The totals came to quite a flow of physical mass up and down, all powered by the counterbalanced forces of gravity and the rotation of the Earth, with a bit of solar power to make up the difference.

The anchor rocks at the upper ends of the elevator cables were like giant spaceliners, as very little of their original asteroidal surfaces were left visible; their exteriors were covered with buildings, power units, elevator loading zones and the like. They were in effect giant harbors and hotels and, as such, extremely busy places. Swan passed through the one called Bolivar and settled into one of the hotel cars without even noticing it; to her it had just been a complicated set of doors and locks and corridors, getting her into yet another set of rooms. She was resigned to the long ride down to Quito. It was an irony of their time that the trip down the elevator cable was going to take longer than many interplanetary voyages, but that’s the way it was. Five days stuck in a hotel. She spent the days attending performances of Glass’s Satyagrahaand Akhnaten, also dancing hard in a grueling class designed to get people toughened up for one g, which sometimes hit her pretty hard. Looking down through the clear floor, she got familiar again with the great bulge of South America, gaining definition below them: blue oceans to each side; the Andes like a brown spine; the little brown cones of the big volcanoes, bereft of all their snow.

It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn’t be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance. So they bubbled their ship wakes with surfactants to create a higher albedo, and had tried various levels of sulfur dioxide injected into the stratosphere, imitating volcanoes; but that had once led to disaster, and now they couldn’t agree on how much sunlight to block. Much that people advocated, and many of the smaller projects that were in action already, cut against other proposed or ongoing projects. And there were still powerful nation-states that were also corporate conglomerates, the two overlapping in Keynesian disarray, with the residual but powerful capitalist system ruling much of the planet and containing within it its own residual feudalism, there to fight forever against the serfs, meaning also against the horizontalized economy emerging within the Mondragon. No, Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real.

In Quito Swan took the train to the airport and got on an airplane flight to New York. The Caribbean’s cobalt and turquoise and jade were brilliantly vivid; even the brown underwater outline of drowned Florida had a jasper sheen. The stunning gloss of Earth itself.

A much steelier ocean crashed whitely into Long Island as they descended over it, bumping and slipping in the air. Then they were landing on a runway somewhere on the mainland north of Manhattan, and at last she was out of the various travel containers, the rooms and vehicles and corridors and hallways, and under the open sky.

Simply to be outdoors in the open air, under the sky, in the wind—this was what she loved most about Earth. Today puffy clouds were massed overhead at about the thousand-foot level. Looked like a marine layer rolling in. She ran out into some kind of paved lot filled with trucks and buses and trolley cars, and jumped around screaming at the sky, then kneeled and kissed the ground, made wolf howls, and, after she had hyperventilated a bit, lay on her back on the pavement. No handstands—she had learned long before that handstands on Earth were really hard. And her rib still hurt.

Through gaps in the cloud layer she could see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds—she reached up for it—although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it—one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact they very seldom looked at it.

She collected herself and walked over to the dock. A big grumbling water ferry took on her and many others, and after negotiating a crowded canal, they were out in the Hudson River and going down to Manhattan. The ferry moved into a dock on Washington Heights, but Swan stayed on it as it plied its way down the Hudson side to midtown. A few parts of Manhattan’s ground still stood above the water, but most of it was drowned, the old streets now canals, the city an elongated Venice, a skyscraper Venice, a super Venice—which was a very beautiful thing to be. Indeed it was an oft-expressed cliché that the city had been improved by the flood. The long stretch of skyscrapers looked like the spine of a dragon. The foreshortening effect as they got closer made the buildings look shorter than they really were, but their verticality was unmistakable and striking. A forest of dolmens!

Swan got off the ferry at the Thirtieth Street Pier and walked on the broad catwalk between buildings to the High Line extension, where people filled the long plazas stretching north and south. Manhattan on foot: workers pushing narrow handcarts on crowded skyways, connecting island neighborhoods suspended between skyscrapers at differing heights. The rooftops were garnished with greenery, but the city was mostly a thing of steel and concrete and glass—and water. Boats burbled about on the water below the catwalks, in the streets that were now crowded canals. All the aerial plazas and catwalks were jammed with people. As crowded as ever, people said. Swan dodged between the bodies of the crowd, working the border between the two directions of traffic, glorying in all the faces. They were just as heterogeneous as any spacer crowd, but the people were very much closer to an average size—rather short at that—with many fewer smalls and talls. Asian faces, African, European—everyone but Native Americans, as she always thought in Manhattan. Talk about invasive biology!

A building she passed had pumped out its old floor and now operated down there in a kind of big bathtub of air. She had heard that submarine and intertidal real estate was booming. Some spoke of pumping out the subway system, which still worked wherever it had run aboveground. Below her the slop of water threw up a big ambient sound. Human voices, and water splashing, and the cries of gulls back on the docks, and the rush of wind through the canyons of buildings; these were the sounds of the city. The water below was completely chopped up with intersecting wakes. Behind her, down the avenue to the west, mirrorflakes of broken sunlight bounced on the big river. This was the thing she loved—she was outdoors, truly in the open. Standing on the side of a planet. In the greatest city of all.

She hopped down some stairs and got on a vaparetto going down Eighth Avenue. The ferry was a long low-slung thing, with seats for about fifty people and room for another hundred to stand. It stopped every few blocks. She hung over the rail and gazed up and down the canal: a river canyon, with buildings for canyon walls. Very Futurismo in appearance. She got off at Twenty-Sixth Street where it was bridged by a long esplanade, extending east all the way to the East River. Lots of the east-west streets had overhead platforms like this, and the crowded canals under them were shaded almost all day long. When the sunlight slanted through slots, it laid a bronze glaze on things, and the blue water turned pewter. The New Yorkers did not seem to notice this effect, but on the other hand, there were twenty million people living here despite the flood, and Swan thought that beauty was not completely irrelevant to the phenomenon, even if people chose to keep mum about it. Tough guys, it made her laugh. Swan was not a tough guy, and not a New Yorker, and this place was astonishing and she knew the locals knew it. Talk about landscape art! “ ‘The geography of the world is unified only by human logic and optics,’ ” she chanted, “ ‘by the light and color of artifice, by decorative arrangement, by ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful!’ ” You could sing Lowenthal’s entire oratio on the catwalks of Manhattan, and no one would care.

She moved into the sun whenever she could. That was the direct radiation of Sol, slamming into her naked skin. It was amazing to stand in the light of the sun without dying of it. This was the only place in the solar system where that could happen; the bioshell surrounding a star was as thin as a soap bubble. Thickening the life bubble—maybe that was the human project. That they had pulled the bubble out around Mars was a remarkable thing. If they pulled it inward to Venus, even more so. This, however, would always be the sweet spot. No wonder the mystics of this old world, stunned by all life’s changes. Metamorphosis suited Earth, and never stopped. The great flood had become a fortunate fall, had brought on an exfoliation into a higher state. The world had been watered. Flowers popping out of the leafy branch. She was back.

The Mercury House was down by the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the museum’s paintings were now on Mercury, only copies left behind, and in an unusual gesture, a room here was devoted to Mercurial art. The Group of Nine was prominently displayed, of course. It was a little too much sun and rock for Swan. And she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or other antique exotica. When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper? It was peculiar, but as a result perhaps interesting as well. Alex and Mqaret had held a reception for the Nine once, and Swan had met many of them and enjoyed talking to them.

Up on the roof patio of the Mercury House building, maybe thirty stories above the water, she found a number of Mercurials gathered at the bar. Most of them wore exoskeletons or body bras, which, whether hidden by clothing or not, were evident to Swan by the way the people wearing them stood, resting comfortably slightly off true, as if in water. The ones without were more or less heroically erect, holding off the weight of the Earth with a strained look. Swan felt a little that way herself. No matter what you did, one g imposed itself on your attention for a while.

Their New York office was headed by an ancient Terran named Milan, who had a sweet smile for everyone. “Swan, darling, so good of you to come.”

“Oh my pleasure, I loveNew York.”

“Well, bless your ignorance, child. I’m glad you like it. And I’m glad you’re here. Come meet some of my new people.”

So Swan met some of the local team and endured their condolences about Alex, and gave them a brief inaccurate account of her trip to Jupiter. They had ideas about the Mondragon above and beyonds that they shared with her.

When they were done, Swan said to Milan, “Is Zasha still around?”

“Zasha will never leave this town,” Milan said. “You must know that. Haven’t you been to Z’s latest scheme? It’s on one of the Hudson piers.”

So Swan took the ferry back up Eighth Avenue, got off, and climbed stairs until she reached a catwalk she could take west.

With all the old piers eleven meters underwater, a new set had had to be built. Some were old ones salvaged and stilted; others had been built anew, sometimes using the drowned ones as foundations. Smaller floating docks filled gaps and were attached to piers or nearby buildings at what used to be their fourth floors. Some of these docks were mobile and became like barges as they moved around. It was a tricky shoreline.

Some of the submerged docks now held aquaculture pens, and Swan’s old partner Zasha apparently now ran a pharm on one of these piers, growing various piscean drugs and bioceramics while also doing things for the Mercury House—and for Alex.

Swan had called ahead, and Zasha appeared at the fence that cut a floating dock off from the big plaza complex west of Gansevoort Street, at the south end of the High Line. After a brief hug, Z led her to the end of the dock and then out on the Hudson River in a boat, a smooth little hummer that soon had them midriver.

Everything on the water moved at a watery pace, including the water itself. The Hudson River here was wide; the entire city of Terminator would have fit in New York Harbor. Bridges were visible all over the place, including one on the distant southern horizon. There was so much water Swan could hardly believe it; even the open sea did not seem to have so much; and yet it was not even a very big river, compared to the really big ones. Earth!

Zasha was observing the scene with a contented expression. Banks of windows at the tops of the highest skyscrapers blazed with reflected sunlight, and all the buildings glowed. Skyscraper island: it was the classic Manhattan look, unlikely and superb.

“How are things with you?” Swan asked.

“I like this river,” Zasha said, as if it were a reply. “I motor up to the top of the island, or even to the Palisades, and then just float on down. Throw a line over. Hook the most amazing stuff sometimes.”

“And at Mercury House?”

Zasha frowned. “Spacers are getting blamed for a lot these days. The people down here are resentful. The more we help, the more resentful they get. However, their capital funds keep on investing in us.”

“As always,” Swan said.

“Yes, well, perpetual growth. But nothing lasts forever. The solar system is just as finite as Earth.”

“Do you think it’s filling up? Hitting carrying capacity?”

“More like investment return peak. But people may be feeling pinched by it. Anyway, they’re acting like they’re pinched.”

Zasha’s boat drifted in the ebb tide until it passed the Battery, and the view to the Brooklyn shore opened up. The skyscrapers at the foot of Manhattan looked like a cluster of giant swimmers, gathered knee-deep to charge into cold water. Between buildings the water sheeted like glass, and the canals were filled with little boats; the harbor bay too, although not as densely. At any given moment hundreds of watercraft were visible. They could see up both rivers, the Hudson and the East, and between those ran the smaller, straighter rivers of the streets, all under a cloudy sky. A Canaletto vision. Cloud reflections whitened the bay’s watery sheen. It was so beautiful that Swan felt like she had been cast into a dream, and she reeled a little with the boat’s rocking.

“Feeling the g?” Zasha asked.

“I am kind of.”

“Want to spend the night at my place? I’m getting kind of hungry.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Zasha piloted the boat west across the river to a channel on the Jersey side that led west. It was hard to tell if it was a canal or a creek. Inland the waterway opened up to the north, and Zasha turned up that way and docked at a wooden pier sticking into what looked like a shallow lake. Whole neighborhoods sloped right down into water. The east side of North America had always been a drowned coastline, but now more than ever.

A walk up a rise under a violent sunset sky, which was tastelessly mashing orange and pink together. At times like these it was the eastern sky that really put on a show, subtler but more glorious. But no one looked that way.

Zasha’s place was a tiny squat next to a line of trees, as handmade and run-down as any favela or shantytown Swan had ever seen.

“What is this place?”

“Part of the Meadowlands.”

“And you’re free to make your own home here?”

“As if! Actually my rent is stupendous, but Mercury House gives me a little supplement to keep me out here away from them.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Anyway, it’s fine. I like my commute.”

Swan sat gratefully in a beat-up armchair and watched her old partner putter about in the gloom. It had been a long time since they had banged around the solar system, building terraria and raising Zephyr; it had even been a long time since Zephyr had died. And they had never gotten along very well, separating soon after Zephyr went off. Still, Swan recognized the way Zasha hovered over the stove, waiting for the teapot to boil, harboring a secretive knowing look she also recognized.

She said, “So did you work with Alex?”

“Well, sure,” Zasha replied, glancing at her briefly. “She was my boss. So you know how that goes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she loved you and took care of you, and you did exactly what she wanted you to.”

Swan had to laugh. “Well, yes.” She thought it over, ignoring the pain. “Somehow she conformed herself to what you needed. Helped you to get what you needed.”

“Uh-huh. I know what you mean.”

“But listen—now she’s gone, and she left me a message. Basically she used me as a courier to Wang, on Io, and also dumped something into Pauline. It was all in case something happened to her, she said.”

“What do you mean?”

Swan described the visitation from Alex’s ghost—the envelopes—her trip out to Jupiter, and the interloper on Io.