Quickly they left the trees and crossed a gra.s.sy field rutted by ancient agriculture and p.r.i.c.kly with weeds. On this flat plain he could see that the whole sky worked with twisted light, a colossal electrical discharge leathering into more branches than a gnarled tree. The anxious clouds caught blue and burnt-yellow pulses and seemed to relay them, like the countless transformers and capacitors and voltage drops that made a worldwide communications net, carrying staccato messages laced with crackling punctuations. "The vans," she panted.
Three brown vans crouched beneath a canopy of thin trees, further concealed beneath khaki tents that blended in with the dusty fields. Mrs. Buli yanked open the door of the first one. Her fingers fumbled at the ignition. "The key must be concealed," she said quickly.
"Why?" he gasped, throat raw.
"They are to be always with the vans."
"Uh-huh. Check the others."
She hurried away. Clay got down on his knees, feeling the lip of the van"s undercarriage. The ground seemed to heave with inner heat, dry and rasping, the pulse of the planet. He finished one side of the van and crawled under, feeling along the rear axle. He heard a distant plaintive cry, as eerie and forlorn as the call of a bird lost in fog. "Clay? None in the others."
His hand touched a small slick box high up on the axle. He plucked it from its magnetic grip and rolled out from under.
"If we drive toward the mine," she said, "we can perhaps find others."
"Others, h.e.l.l. Most likely we"ll run into devotees."
Figures in the trees. Flitting, silent, quick.
"But--"
He pushed her in and tried to start the van. Running shapes in the field. He got the engine started on the third try and gunned it. They growled away. Something hard shattered the back window into a spiderweb, but then Clay swerved several times and nothing more hit them.
After a few minutes his heart-thumps slowed, and he turned on the headlights to make out the road. The curves were sandy and he did not want to get stuck. He stamped on the gas.
Suddenly great washes of amber light streamed across the sky, pale lances cutting the clouds. "My G.o.d, what"s happening?"
"It is more than weather."
Her calm, abstracted voice made him glance across the seat. "No kidding."
"No earthquake could have collateral effects of this order."
He saw by the dashboard lights that she wore a lapis lazuli necklace. He had felt it when she came to him, and now its deep blues seemed like the only note of color in the deepening folds of night. "It must be something far more profound."
"What?"
The road now arrowed straight through a tangled terrain of warped trees and oddly shaped boulders. Something rattled against the windshield like hail, but Clay could see nothing.
"We have always argued, some of us, that the central dictate of quantum mechanics is the interconnected nature of the observer and the observed."
The precise, detached lecturer style again drew his eyes to her. Shadowed, her face gave away no secrets.
"We always filter the world," she said with dreamy momentum, "and yet are linked to it. How much of what we see is in fact taught us, by our bodies, or by the consensus reality that society trains us to see, even before we can speak for ourselves?"
"Look, that sky isn"t some problem with my eyes. It"s real. Hear that?" Something big and soft had struck the door of the van, rocking it.
"And we here have finished the program of materialistic science, have we not? We flattered the West by taking it seriously. As did the devotees."
Clay grinned despite himself. It was hard to feel flattered when you were fleeing for your life.
Mrs. Buli stretched lazily, as though relaxing into the clasp of the moist night. "So we have proven the pa.s.sing nature of matter. What fresh forces does that bring into play?"
"Huh!" Clay spat back angrily. "Look here, we just sent word out, reported the result. How--"
"So that by now millions, perhaps billions of people know that the very stones that support them must pa.s.s."
"So what? Just some theoretical point about subnuclear physics, how"s that going to--"
"Who is to say? What avatar? The point is that we were believed. Certain knowledge, universally correlated, surely has some impact--"
The van lurched. Suddenly they jounced and slammed along the smooth roadway. A bright plume of sparks shot up behind them, br.i.m.m.i.n.g firefly yellow in the night.
"Axle"s busted!" Clay cried. He got the van stopped. In the sudden silence, it registered that the motor had gone dead.
They climbed out. Insects buzzed and hummed in the hazy gloom. The roadway was still straight and sure, but on all sides great blobs of iridescent water swelled up from the ground, making colossal drops. The trembling half-spheres wobbled in the frayed moonlight. Silently, softly, the bulbs began to detach from the foggy ground and gently loft upward. Feathery luminescent clouds above gathered on swift winds that sheared their edges. These billowing, luxuriant banks snagged the huge teardrop shapes as they plunged skyward.
"I . . . I don"t. . ."
Mrs. Buli turned and embraced him. Her moist mouth opened a redolent interior continent to him, teeming and blackly bountiful, and he had to resist falling inward, a tumbling silvery bubble in a dark chasm.
"The category of perfect roundness is fading," she said calmly.
Clay looked at the van. The wheels had become ellipses. At each revolution they had slammed the axles into the roadway, leaving behind long scratches of rough tar. He took a step.
She said, "Since we can walk, the principle of pivot and lever, of muscles pulling bones, survives."
"How... this doesn"t..."
"But do our bodies depend on roundness? I wonder." She carefully lay down on the blacktop.
The road straightened precisely, like joints in an aged spine popping as they realigned.
Angles cut their s.p.a.ces razor-sharp, like axioms from Euclid. Clouds merged, forming copious tinkling hexagons.
"It is good to see that some features remain. Perhaps these are indeed the underlying Platonic beauties."
"What?" Clay cried.
"The undying forms," Mrs. Buli said abstractly. "Perhaps that one Western idea was correct after all."
Clay desperately grasped the van. He jerked his arm back when the metal skin began flexing and reshaping itself.
Smooth glistening forms began to emerge from the rough, coa.r.s.e earth. Above the riotous, heaving land the moon was now a bra.s.sy cube. Across its face played enormous black cracks like mad lightning.
Somewhere far away his wife and daughter were in this, too. G"bye, Daddy. It"s been real.
Quietly the land began to rain upward. Globs dripped toward the pewter, filmy continent swarming freshly above. Eons measured out the evaporation of ancient sluggish seas.
His throat struggled against torpid air. "Is ... Brahma ... ?"
"Awakening?" came her hollow voice, like an echo from a distant gorge.
"What happens... to... us?"
His words diffracted away from him. He could now see acoustic waves, wedges of compressed, mute atoms crowding in the exuberant air. Luxuriant, inexhaustible riches burst from beneath the ceramic certainties he had known.
"Come." Her voice seeped through the churning ruby air.
Centuries melted between them as he turned. A being he recognized without conscious thought spun in liquid air.
Femina, she was now, and she drifted on the new wafting currents. He and she were made of shifting geometric elements, molecular units of shape and firm thrust. A wan joy spread through him.
Time that was no time did not pa.s.s, and he and she and the impacted forces between them were pinned to the forever moment that cascaded through them, all of them, the billions of atomized elements that made them, all, forever.
Newton"s Sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN.
W.
HEN THE GOVERNMENT of the Atlantic Union, which had sponsored the SPES Society as a cla.s.sified project, fell in the Leap Year Coup, Maston and his men were prepared; overnight the Society"s a.s.sets, doc.u.ments, and members were spirited across the border into the United States of America. After a brief regrouping, they pet.i.tioned the Republic of California for settlement land as a millenarian cult group, and were permitted to settle in the depopulated chemical marshlands of the San Joaquin Valley. The dometown they built there was a prototype of the Special Earth Satellite itself, and livable enough that a few colonists asked why go to the vast expense of wealth and work, why not settle here? But the breakdown of the Calmex treaty and the first invasions from the south, along with a new epidemic of the fungal plague, proved yet again that Earth was not a viable option. Construction crews shuttled back and forth four times a year for four years. Seven years after the move to California, ten last trips between the launchpad on Earth and the golden bubble hovering at the libration point carried the colonists to Spes and safety. Only five weeks later, the monitors in Spes reported that Ramirez" hordes had overrun Bakersfield, destroying the launch tower, looting what little was left, burning the dome.
"A hairbreadth escape," Noah said to his father, Ike. Noah was eleven, and read a lot. He discovered each literary cliche for himself and used it with solemn pleasure.
"What I don"t understand," said Esther, fifteen, "is why everybody else didn"t do what we did." She pushed up her gla.s.ses, frowning at the display on the monitor screens. Corrective surgery had done little for her severe vision deficiencies, and, given her immune-system problems and allergic reactivities, eye transplant was out of the question; she could not even wear contact lenses. She wore gla.s.ses, like some slum kid. But a couple of years here in the absolutely pollution-free environment of Spes ought to clear up her problems, the doctors had a.s.sured Ike, to the point where she could pick out a pair of 20-20"s from the organfreeze. "Then you"ll be my blue-eyed girl!" her father had joked to her, after the failure of the third operation, when she was thirteen. The important thing was that the defect was developmental, not genetically coded. "Even your genes are blue," Ike had told her. "Noah and I have the recessive for scoliosis, but you, my girl, are helically flawless. Noah"ll have to find a mate in B or G Group, but you can pick from the whole colony-you"re Unrestricted. There"re only twelve other Unrestricteds in the lot of us."
"So I can be promiscuous," Esther had said, poker faced under the bandages. "Long live Number Thirteen."
She stood now beside her brother; Ike had called them into the monitor center to see what had happened to Bakersfield Dome. Some of the women and children in Spes were inclined to be sentimental, "homesick" they said; he wanted his children to see what Earth was and why they had left it. The AI, programmed to select for information of interest to the colony, finished the Bakersfield report with a projection of Ramirez" conquests and then shifted to a Peruvian meteorological study of the Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains filled the screen, while the voice-over, a running English translation by the AI, droned away. "Look at it," Esther said, peering, pushing her gla.s.ses up. "It"s all dead. How come everybody isn"t up here?"
"Money," her mother said.
"Because most people aren"t willing to trust reason," Ike said. "The money, the means, are a secondary factor. For a hundred years, anybody willing to look at the world rationally has been able to see what"s happening: resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government. But to act on a rational understanding, you have to trust reason. Most people would rather trust luck or G.o.d or one of the easy fixes. Reason"s tough. It"s tough to plan carefully, to wait years, to make hard choices, to raise money over and over, to keep a secret so it won"t be co-opted or wrecked by greed or soft-mindedness. How many people can stick to a straight course in a disintegrating world? Reason"s the compa.s.s that brought us through."
"n.o.body else even tried?"
"Not that we know of."
"There were the Foys," Noah piped up. "I read about it. They put thousands of people into like organfreezes, whole people alive, and built all these cheap rockets and shot them off, and they were all supposed to get to some star in about a thousand years and wake up. And they didn"t even know if the star had a planet."
"And their leader, the Reverend Keven Foy, would be there to welcome them to the Promised Land," Ike said. "Pie in the sky and you die... Poor fishsticks! That"s what people called them. I was about your age, I watched them on the news, climbing into those "Foys." Half of them already either fungoids or RMV-positive. Carrying babies, singing. That was not people trusting reason. That was people abandoning it in despair."
The holovid showed an immense dust storm moving slowly, vaguely across the deserts of Amazonia. It was a dull, dark red-gray-brown, dirt color.
"We"re lucky," Esther said. "I guess."
"No," her father said. "Luck has nothing to do with it. Nor are we a chosen people. We chose." Ike was a soft-spoken man, but there was a harsh tremor in his voice now that made both his children glance at him, and his wife look at him for a long moment. Her eyes were a clear, light brown.
"And we sacrificed," she said.
He nodded.
He thought she was probably thinking of his mother. Sarah Rose had qualified for one of the four slots for specially qualified women past childbearing. But when Ike told her that he had got her in, she had exploded. -"Live in that awful little thing, that ball bearing going around in nothing? No air, no room?" He had tried to explain about the landscapes, but she had brushed it all aside. "Isaac, in Chicago Dome, a mile across, I was claustrophobic! Forget it. Take Susan, take the kids, leave me to breathe smog, OK? You go. Send me postcards from Mars." She died of RMV-3 less than three years later. When Ike"s sister called to say Sarah was dying, Ike had been decontaminated; to leave Bakersfield Dome would mean going through decontamination again, as well as exposing himself to infection by this newest and worst form of the rapidly-mutating-virus which had accounted so far for about two billion human deaths, more than the slowrad syndrome and almost as much as famine. Ike did not go. Presently his sister"s message came, "Mother died Wednesday night, funeral 10 Friday." He faxed, netted, vidded, but never got through, or his sister would not accept his messages. It was an old ache now. They had chosen. They had sacrificed.
His children stood before him, the beautiful children for whom the sacrifice was made, the hope, the future. On Earth now, it was the children who were sacrificed. To the past.
"We chose," he said, "we sacrificed, and we were spared." The word surprised him as he said it.
"Hey," Noah said, "come on, Es, it"s fifteen, we"ll miss the show." And they were off, the spindly boy and the chunky girl, out the door and across the Common.
The Roses lived in Vermont. Any of the landscapes would have suited Ike, but Susan said that Florida and Boulder were hokey and Urban would drive her up the wall. So their unit faced on Vermont Common. The a.s.sembly Unit the kids were headed for had a white facade with a prim steeple, and the horizon-projection was of sheltering, blue, forested hills. The light in Vermont Quadrant was just the right number of degrees off vertical, Susan said. "It"s either late morning or early afternoon; there"s always time to get things done." That was juggling a bit with reality, but not dangerously, Ike thought, and said nothing. He had always been a night person anyhow, needing only three or four hours of sleep, and he liked the fact that he could count now on the nights being always the same length, instead of too short in summer.
"I"ll tell you something," he said to Susan, following up on his thoughts about the children and on that long look she had given him.
"What"s that?" she asked, watching the holovid, which showed the dust storm from the stratosphere, an ugly drifting blob with long tendrils.
"I don"t like the monitors. I don"t like to look down."
It cost him something to admit it, to say it aloud; but Susan only smiled and said, "I know."
He wanted a little more than that. Probably she had not really understood what he meant. "Sometimes I wish we could turn it off," he said, and laughed. "Not really. But-it"s a lien, a tie, an umbilicus. I wish we could cut it. I wish they could start fresh. Absolutely clean and clear. The kids, I mean."
She nodded. "It might be best," she said.
"Their kids will, anyhow... There"s an interesting discussion going on now in E.D.Com." Ike was an engineering physicist, handpicked by Maston as Spes"s chief specialist in Schoenfeldt AI; currently the most hi-pri of his eight jobs was as leader of the Environmental Design group for the second Spes ship, now under construction in the Workbays.
"What about?"
"Al Levaitis proposed that we don"t make any landscapes. He made quite a speech of it. He said, it"s a matter of honesty. Let"s use each area honestly, let it find its own aesthetic, instead of disguising it in any way. If Spes is our world, let"s accept it as such. The next generation-what will these pretenses of Earth scenery mean to them? A lot of us feel he had a real point."
"Sure he does," Susan said.
"Could you live with that? No expanse-illusion, no horizon-no village church. Maybe no Astroturf even, just clean metal and ceramic-would you accept that?"
"Would you?"
"I think so. It would-simplify... And like Al said, it would be honest. It would turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future. You know, it was such a long haul that it"s hard to remember that we made it-we"re here. And already building the next colony. When there"s a cl.u.s.ter of colonies at every optimum-or if they decide to build the Big Ship and cut free of the solar system-what relevance is anything about Earth going to have to those people? They"ll be true s.p.a.cedwellers. And that"s the whole idea-that freedom. I wouldn"t mind a taste of it right now."
"Fair enough," his wife said. "I guess I"m a little afraid of oversimplifying."
"But that spire-what will it mean to s.p.a.ceborn, s.p.a.cebred people? Meaningless clutter. A dead past."
"I don"t know what it means to me," she said. "It sure isn"t my past." But the scan had caught Ike"s attention.