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 D and 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 10n universes, where n is 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
Epilogue
Descending to Mars on its Pavonis space elevator, you look down through the clear floor at the red planet rising to meet you. The three prince volcanoes topping the Tharsis bulge bulk in a line, like mounds built by a mound-building tribe of red people. Off to the west Olympus Mons rears like a round continent all its own, its encircling ten-kilometer cliff from this vantage no more than a beveled line around its foot. All the rest of the planet is cut into enormous red polygons by the many green lines crisscrossing the planet—the famous canals, incised into the landscape in the first days of terraforming. They used orbiting Birch solettas that focused sunlight like a magnifying glass on the land, creating temperatures so high that the rock both vaporized and melted. Quite a bit of Mars had to be thus burned to get all the air and heat they wanted; so to distribute that burn they had decided to use the Lowell maps of the late nineteenth century as inspiration, and platted the burn accordingly. Having gone that far, they also adopted the old nomenclature for these canals, a witches’ brew of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Egyptian, and other ancient languages, so that you now descend to places with names like Nodus Gordii, Phaethontis, Icaria, Tractus Albus, Nilokeras, Phoenicis Lacus. The greened strips crossing the red land are about hundred kilometers wide, and are only threaded by their actual canals. The strips sometimes run in pairs across the red desert. They meet at vaguely hexagonal angles, and the nodes are lush oases, with elegant cities clustered around complexes of waterways and locks, ponds and fountains. Thus a nineteenth-century fantasy forms the basis for the actual landscape currently existing. Some call it bad taste. But they were in a hurry, back in the beginning, and this is what they had to show for it.
North of Olympus Mons the wedding party walked out of the doors of a train station into the open air, just as if they had been on Earth. It was early in the morning, cool and breezy. The sky was a Maxfield Parrish blue; the trees scattered about in small groves were enormous sequoia, eucalyptus, valley oak. The canal ran across the plain below the hill they were on, one side of it lined with cypress trees. Between its levees the canal’s water looked as if it stood a little higher than the land around it. In many places the levee tops were broad high boulevards, green and crowded with buildings and people. Lower on the sides of the levees it could sometimes be seen that they were composed of endless mounds of black glass.
Along the top of one levee they rode a tram, headed for Olympus Mons. Wide streets angled out into the green fields that flitted by below them. These grassy boulevards were flanked by blocky buildings that were often faced with ceramic murals and had an Art Deco look. They passed white plazas under palm trees and remarked to each other the lush beauty, also the uniformity of style, with its hexagonal suggestion of a hive mind. A green and pleasant land. They trammed from oasis to oasis, in a regular flashing of light and shadow created by the long rows of cypress trees by the tracks. Gardens in the desert. The hyperterran look combined with the Mercury-light gravity created a dreamscape feel. Mercury would never look like this. Nowhere else could look like this.
Inspector Genette, standing on the chair by the window and looking out intently at the passing scene, said, “I lived there once,” gesturing down at one swiftly passing town square. “I think it was in that building right there.”
Their tram stopped in a train station in Hougeria, where they were going to transfer to a maglev train to ascend the northeast side of Olympus Mons. While they waited for their train, they took a walk out of the station and around the city center. All the canals were iced over here, and people were out ice-skating, hands behind their backs. It was sunny but chill.
Swan complained about the trip up the great volcano: “What’s the point of coming to Mars if we go right up out of the atmosphere and have to stay in a tent again? Up there we could be anywhere.”
This was regarded by her companions as a rhetorical question, as they were all quite sure she remembered they were attending the epithalamion. Wahram shaded his eyes and looked south, up the side of the great volcano. They were at the only part of the circumference of Olympus Mons that was not guarded by an immense escarpment, a circular cliff ten kilometers high that was remarkably uniform all the way around the mountain; but here a flood of lava late in the volcano’s active life had poured down and over the escarpment—had fallen in a ten-kilometer firefall, which Wahram was now attempting to imagine—ten thousand meters of free fall, cooling on the way no doubt, from red to orange to black, while the spill at the bottom piled up on itself and rose higher and higher, until the cliff was entirely erased under lava, after which the molten rock continued to flow northeast, leaving in the end a broad and gentle ramp extending all the way from the upper slopes of the volcano down to the plain. Thus the land under them now, its fiery past.
“After this we can tour the lowlands,” Wahram said. “Honeymoon at the beach, so to speak.”
“Good. I want to go swimming in the Hellas Sea.”
“Me too.”
When the time came, they got in one of the pressurized cars of their maglev train, along with many other wedding parties, and the train headed up the ramp toward the summit. It was a long lift, and took them through a Martian-red sunset, and then a night of parties and troubled sleep. At dawn they woke to find the train entering the station on the southeast slope of the volcano’s broad summit. Here on the apron of little Crater Zp a big cle
ar tent covered the planet’s traditional festival space. They had arrived on the first morning of the epithalamion.
From the inside, the tenting could scarcely be seen; it was much less visible than Terminator’s dome, and it seemed as if they stood in the open air, which was warm and aromatic. A black roof of starry space stood overhead, turning blue only just over the horizon; the atmosphere was almost entirely below them. They had to be inside a tent, and knowing that, one could just make it out here and there, prisming against the border of blue-and-black sky. Olympus Mons was so big that the distant horizon to the east and south was still part of the mountain; they could not see the Tharsis volcanoes over the horizon to the east, nor any of the planet below the encircling escarpment. All the land they could see was as bare and red as it had been in the beginning, with only the blue rind of air over the horizon to reveal what they had done to this world.
All the tented land of the festival space was on a mild tilt, and had been terraced, therefore, to make flat surfaces. The result looked like certain terraced hillsides in Asia: a few hundred bands of level land ran down the slope, the terrace walls between them curving like contour intervals on a map. Three broad low-angled staircases cut up through these terrace walls, and some of their wedding party remarked at how this reminded them a bit of the Great Staircase in Terminator; but these staircases extended for four or five kilometers each and spanned a vertical reach of perhaps three hundred meters—it was hard to judge, given the vastness of the volcano outside the tent.
The epithalamion was the wedding day for Mars and for visitors from all over the system. Now the festival space was busy with movement, and loud with voices, as a few hundred couples moved up and down the staircases with their groups, finding the terraces reserved for them. The three staircases were heaped with flowers for the day. One could not avoid stepping on flowers, and their bright colors stained the big quartzite flagstones covering the risers.