Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

  They say that’s the only place to find free will. At the breaking point.

  Any moment.

  The sunspots flank us now, magnetic north magnetic south, great dark holes swallowing the light to either side. Braided arabesques arc between them, arches within arches within arches, five Jupiters high. The uppermost wobbles a little as we approach. It invaginates.

  It snaps.

  The cabin fills with blinding white light. We exist, in this single frozen instant, at the heart of reconnection. Electricity fills the capsule; every hair on my body snaps to attention. The discharge floods every synapse, resets every circuit, sets every clock to zero.

  We are free.

  Behind us, luminous contours recoil like rubber bands in our wake. Somewhere nearby people sing in tongues. Agni Falk is in Heaven, here in the pit of Hell: eyes closed, face beatific, a bead of saliva growing at the corner of her mouth. Three vertebrae to stern someone moans and thrashes against their restraints, ecstatic or merely electrocuted.

  I feel nothing.

  I try. I really do. I look deep inside for some spark of new insight, some difference between the Real Will I have now and the mere delusion that’s afflicted every human since the model came out. How would I even know? Is there some LED in my parietal lobe, dark my whole life, that lights up when the leash comes off? Is any decision I make now more autonomous than one I might have made ten minutes ago? Am I free to go? Are we there yet?

  The others seem to know. Maybe the sun god has delivered them from slavery or maybe it’s just fried their brains, but something’s changed for them. Maybe it’s me. Maybe all the edits that customized me for deep space and deep time have — desensitized me, somehow. Maybe spore implants put out some kind of unique interference that jams the signal.

  Kai was right. This is a fucking waste.

  Autonomy’s afterburners kick in. Acceleration presses me into my seat. The sun still writhes and blinds on all sides (although the horizon curves now, as we climb on a homeward course). Under other circumstances the sight would terrify and inspire; but now when I avert my eyes it’s not in awe, but disappointment. My gaze drops to the back of my left hand, bound at the wrist, clenched reflexively around the tip of the armrest. Even my endocrine system is unimpressed; of the 864 pores visible there, only 106 are actively sweating. You’d think that scraping the side of a sun would provoke a bit more—

  Hold on…

  I can’t be seeing this. Human eyes don’t have the rez. And yet — this is not a hallucination. Each pore, each duct, each fine fuzzy body hair is exactly where it belongs. I can confirm the location of each via independent lines of reasoning.

  A phrase pops into my head: Data visualization.

  I’m not seeing this. I’m inferring it. Deep parts of the brain, their computations too vast to fit into any conscious scratchpad, are passing notes under the table. They’ve turned my visual cortex into a cheat sheet. I can see the microscopic stubble of the seat cover. I see the wings of butterflies fluttering in the solar corona, hear every heartbeat in this capsule.

  I see a universe of spiderwebs, everything connected to everything else. I see the future choking on an ever-increasing tangle of interaction and constraint. I look back and see those strands attenuating behind me: light cone shrinking, cause decoupling from effect, every collapsed probability wave recovering its potential way back when anything was possible.

  I step back, step outside, and take it all in.

  I see chaos without form and void. I see ignition.

  I see Planck time emerge from the aftermath.

  I watch the electronuclear force collapse into a litter of building blocks: gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces strong and weak. I see the amplituhedron assemble itself from closed doors and roads not taken. So much potential lost there, so many gates slammed shut in a single picosecond. The laws of physics congeal and countless degrees of freedom disappear forever. The future is a straitjacket: every flip of an electron cinches the straps a little more, every decision to go here instead of there culls the remaining options.

  I see the tangled threads of my own future, increasingly constrained, converging on a common point. I can’t see it from here, but it doesn’t really matter. The threads are enough. They stretch out over eons.

  I never really believed it before.

  The others sob, cry out in rapture, bite down on chattering teeth. I laugh aloud. I have never been so full of hope, of certainty, as I am now. I unclench my hands from around the armrests, turn them palms-up.

  The scars have vanished from my wrists.

  I’m born again.

  • • •

  “YOU DO UNDERSTAND: it has to be your choice.”

  I was four when I heard that for the first time. I didn’t even have my inlays yet, none of us did; they had to gather us together in the same place and talk to us in groups, like we were in some old-time schoolhouse from another century.

  They showed us why we were there: the dust zones, the drowned coastlines, the weedy impoverished ecosystems choking to death on centuries of human effluent. They showed us archival video of the Koch lynchings, which made us feel a little better but didn’t really change anything.

  “We were running out of time,” our tutor said — our very first tutor, and to this day I can’t remember her name although I do remember that one of her eyes was blue and the other amber. “We saw it coming but we didn’t really believe it.” She introduced us to the rudiments of the Hawking Manifesto, to the concept of the Great Filter, to all those ominous harbingers that hung against the background of human history like some increasing and overdue debt. Year after year the interest compounded, the bill was coming due, we were speeding at a brick wall but nobody seemed to be able to slow us down so what was the point of talking about it?

  Until the first Hawking Hoop. Until that first hydrogen ion got from here to there without ever passing through the space between. Until the discovery of nonrelativistic wormholes lit the faint hope that a few of us might yet reach other nests out there, yet unfouled.

  “But it won’t work,” I blurted, and our tutor turned to me and said, “Why’s that, Sunday?”

  If I had been a little older, a little faster even, I could have rattled off the reasons: because it didn’t matter how quickly they grew us up and shipped us out, it didn’t matter that our escape hatches could bridge lightyears in an instant. We were still here, and it would take centuries to get anywhere else, and even magic bridges need something to anchor them at both ends. Everything we’d just learned about our own kind — all the species wiped out, all the tipping points passed, all the halfassed half-solutions that never seemed to stick past a single election cycle — none of it left any hope for a global initiative spanning thousands of years. We just weren’t up for it.

  But they hadn’t made us smarter; they’d only sped us up. My overclocked little brain may have been running at twice its chronological age, but how much can even an eight-year-old grasp about the willful blindness of a whole species? I knew the gut truth of it but I didn’t know the words. So all I could do was say again, stupidly, “It’s too late. We’re, like you said. Out of time…”

  Nobody said anything for a bit. Kai shot me a dirty look. But when our tutor spoke again, there was no reproach in her voice: “We’re not doing this for us, Sunday.”

  She turned to the whole group. “That’s why we’re not building the Nexus on Earth, or even near it. We’re building it so far out in space so it can outlast whatever we do to ourselves. So it can be — waiting, for whoever comes after.

  “We don’t know what we’ll be in a thousand years, or a million. We could bomb ourselves into oblivion the day after tomorrow. We’re like that. But you can’t lose hope because we’re like this too, we can reach for the stars. And even if we fall into savagery overnight, we’ll have centuries to climb back up before you check in on us again. So maybe one time you’ll build a gate and nothing will come through — but the next time,
or the time after, you’ll get to meet angels. You never know — but you can see the future, every last one of you. You can see how it all turns out. If you want.

  “It’s your decision.”

  We turned then at the sound of two hands clapping. A man stood in the doorway, stoop-shouldered, eyes mournful as a basset hound’s above the incongruous smile on his face. Our tutor flushed the tiniest bit at his applause, lifted an arm in acknowledgement. “I’d like you all to meet Dr. Sawada. You’ll be getting to know him very well over the next few years. If you could follow him now, he has some things he’d like to show you.”

  We stood, and began to collect our stuff.

  “And ten thousand years from now—”

  The words came out in a rush, as though she hadn’t said them so much as let them escape.

  “—if anything at all comes out to say hello — well, it’ll pretty much have to be better than what you leave behind.”

  She smiled, a bit sadly. “Tell me that’s not something worth giving a life to.”

  • • •

  KAI’S WAITING FOR me in the docking lounge, as I knew he would be. I can see his surprise through the scowl: I shouldn’t be walking on my own, not so soon. The others — disoriented, aftershocked — have handlers at their elbows to guide them gently back to their life sentences. They’re still blinking against afterimages of enlightenment. Blind from birth, blind again, they can’t quite remember what they saw in between.

  They never will. They were only built by chance; maybe a tweak or two to give them green eyes, or better hearing, or to keep them safe from cancer. The engines of their creation had no foresight and no future. All that matters to evolution is what works in the moment.

  I’m not like that. I can see for lightyears.

  So no handler for Sunday Ahzmundin. My shepherd’s back at the lock, increasingly impatient, still waiting for me to emerge. I coasted right past her and she never even noticed; her search image was set for disorientation, not purpose.

  “Hey.” I smile at Kai. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “Get what you wanted? Happy at last?”

  I am. I’m genuinely glad to see him.

  “They played you, you know,” he says. “You think you pulled a fast one, you think you surprised them? They knew exactly what you were going to do. Whatever you think you’ve learned, whatever you think you’ve accomplished—”

  “I know,” I say gently.

  “They wanted you here. This was never supposed to challenge your dedication to the mission. It was only supposed to cement it.”

  “Kai. I know.” I shrug, and take his hand. “What can I say? It worked.” Although not quite the way any of them think. Still holding his hand, I turn my wrist until the veins come into view. “Look.”

  “What?” He frowns. “You think I haven’t seen those before?”

  I guess he isn’t ready.

  I see that’s he’s about to pull away so I turn first, to the invisible lens across the compartment. I wave a come-hither.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Inviting the Doctor to join us.” And I can tell from his reaction that Sawada has brought an assistant.

  Called out, they arrive through a side door and cross to us as the last of the pilgrims vanish into their tubes. “Ms. Ahzmundin,” Radek says (and it takes a moment to figure out how I know his name; it came to me so quickly he might as well have been wearing a tag).

  “Sunday,” Sawada smiles at me. “How was freedom?”

  “Not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Are you ready to come home?”

  “Eventually.” I see Radek tense a little at my reply. “Is there some rush?”

  “No rush,” Sawada says.

  “We’ve got all the time in the world,” Radek adds. “Go do your walkabout thing until the stars go out.”

  And I can see he means it literally.

  “Something funny?” Radek asks as Kai’s scowl deepens.

  I can’t stop smiling. I can see it all in the way they don’t react. Their faces don’t even twitch but their eyes swarm with stars. And not just any stars: stars that red-shift from light to heat way too fast for any natural process. Lights hiding under bushels. Whole suns being… sheathed…

  “You found a Type Two,” I murmur, almost to myself. “In Ophiuchus.”

  Now their faces twitch.

  “At first, anyway.” Revelations abound in the tic of an eyelid. “Now they’re in Serpens. They’re coming this way.”

  Of course.

  These people would have never even reached into space if not terrified that their rivals would get there first. They’d set the world ablaze with their own indifference, only to rouse themselves to passionate defense when that same world is threatened from outside. Left on its own, humanity sucks its thumb and stagnates in its own shit; faced with The Other, it builds portals to infinity. It builds creatures like me, to seed them through the cosmos.

  All they ever needed was an enemy.

  I see something else, too: that before long, this sight will pass from me. It’s starting already. I can feel my thoughts beginning to cloud, the cataracts returning to my eyes. My neurons may be stickier than Falk’s & Friends’, but soon — hours, maybe a day — they’ll rebound to some baseline state and I’ll fade, like a run-down battery.

  That’s okay. These insights are secure; I don’t have to reconstruct the journey as long as I can remember the destination.

  “It’s your decision,” Sawada reminds me. “It always has been.”

  He’s wrong, of course. It’s not my decision, it never was. I was right about that much.

  But it’s not theirs either.

  I turn to my teacher. “You’re not choosing my path, Mamoro.”

  He shakes his head. “Nobody ever—”

  “The path’s been chosen. You’re only clearing it.”

  All those times I dared them to kick me out; all those times they smugly held the door open and dared me to leave. All those times I kept trying to be free.

  You can keep your freedom. I have something better.

  I have a destiny. ■

  Giants

  Sunflower #3

  SO MANY EONS, slept away while the universe wound down around him. He’s dead to human eyes. Even the machines barely see the chemistry ticking over in those cells: an ancient molecule of hydrogen sulphide, frozen in a hemoglobin embrace; an electron shuttled sluggishly down some metabolic pathway two weeks ago. Back on Earth there used to be life deep in the rocks, halfway to the mantle; empires rose and fell in the time it took those microbes to draw breath. Next to Hakim’s, their lives blurred past in an eyeblink. (Next to all of ours. I was every bit as dead, just a week ago.)

  I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, bringing him back.

  Flat lines shiver in their endless march along the x-axis: molecules starting to bump against each other, core temp edging up a fraction of a fraction. A lonely spark flickers in the hypothalamus; another wriggles across the prefrontal cortex (a passing thought, millennia past its best-before, released from amber). Millivolts trickle down some random path and an eyelid twitches.

  The body shudders, tries to breathe but it’s too soon: it’s still anoxic in there, pure H2S gumming up the works and shutting the machinery of life down to a whisper. The Chimp starts a nitrox flush; swarms of fireflies bloom across Pulmonary and Vascular. Hakim’s cold empty husk fills with light from the inside out: red and yellow isotherms, pulsing arteries, a trillion reawakening neurons stippling across the translucent avatar in my head. A real breath this time. Another. His fingers twitch and stutter, tap a random tattoo against the floor of his sarcophagus.

  The lid slides open. His eyes, too, a moment later: they roll unfocused in their sockets, suffused in a haze of resurrection dementia. He can’t see me. He sees soft lights and vague shadows, hears the faint underwater echo of nearby machinery, but his mind is still stuck to the past and the present hasn’t
sunk in yet.

  A tongue dry as leather flicks into view against his upper lip. A drinking tube emerges from its burrow and nudges Hakim’s cheek. His takes it in his mouth and nurses, reflexive as a newborn.

  I lean into what passes for his field of view: “Lazarus, come forth.”

  It anchors him. I see sudden focus resolving in those eyes, see the past welling up behind them. I see memories and hearsay loading in the wake of my voice. Confusion evaporates; something sharper takes its place. Hakim stares up at me from the grave, his eyes hard as obsidian.

  “You asshole,” he says. “I can’t believe we haven’t killed you yet.”

  • • •

  I GIVE HIM SPACE. I retreat to the forest, wander endless twilit caverns while he learns to live again. Down here I can barely see my own hand in front of my face: gray fingers, faint sapphire accents. Photophores glimmer around me like dim constellations, each tiny star lit by the glow of a trillion microbes. Photosynthesis instead of fusion. You can’t get truly lost in Eriophora—the Chimp always knows where you are—but here in the dark, there’s comfort to be had in the illusion.

  Eventually, though, I have to stop stalling. I sample myriad feeds as I rise though the depths of the asteroid, find Hakim in the starboard bridge. I watch as he enters painstaking questions, processes answers, piles each new piece on top of the last in a rickety climb to insight. Lots of debris in this system, yes: more than enough material for a build. Call up the transponders and—what’s this? No in-system scaffolding, no half-constructed jump gate, no asteroid mining or factory fleet. So why—?