Pain!
A spasm along his right arm.
A great ache in his left wrist.
A seizing of his back muscles, a throbbing in his shoulders.
So near, so close, and yet—
And yet he could go no higher. He wasn’t strong enough.
Sadly, Prasp held his arms out straight, keeping the wings flat. He began the slow, long glide down to the grasses, far, far below.
It took a long time for him to come down. As he got closer to the ground, he became aware that a crowd of people had assembled, all of them looking up at him, many of them pointing. As he descended further he could make out their expressions—awe on some the faces; fear on a few of them.
Prasp skidded along the grasses until he was able to stop himself. Kari came running over to him, arriving before the others. She helped him remove the wings, and, once he was free of them, she hugged him tightly. Prasp could feel that her heart was pounding almost as hard as his own; she’d clearly been terrified for him.
Others of the tribe soon arrived. Prasp wasn’t sure how they were going to react to his flight; had he committed a sacrilege? Balant, the tribe’s greatest hunter, was among those who’d been watching. He looked at Prasp for a time, then held a clenched fist high over his head, and gave a great whoop—the tribe’s custom when one of its members had made a spectacular kill during the hunt. The others soon followed Balant’s lead, whooping with excitement as well.
Prasp was relieved that they’d accepted his flying, but he couldn’t join in the shouts of joy.
He had failed.
We, The Uploaded, had no way to monitor what was going on beneath the roof over Copernicus, but we could guess. We knew that the artificial lamps on the underside of the roof would have started at low power during that fateful night, collectively providing no more illumination than the full moon as seen from Earth. But we also knew that they were controlled by a separate computer, and so presumably weren’t affected by whatever had caused Copernicus’s sky to remain perpetually opaque. Those lamps should still flare with light rivaling Sol’s own for sixteen hours per Earth-day day during the lunar night. Our simulations of the ecosystem suggested that some of the plant species under the roof would have died off, unable to get used to fourteen Earth-days of dim light, followed by fourteen more of two-thirds bright light and one-third dimness. But many other kinds of plants, most of the animals, and, yes, the humans, should have adapted without too much trouble.
But as to what those humans might be doing, we had no idea.
Prasp left his wings near his hut. There were some, he knew, who privately ridiculed his attempts at flying, although none would publicly contradict Balant. And certainly none of them would damage the wings. Prasp was known for his cleverness—and that cleverness often yielded extra meat while hunting, meat he shared freely with others. No one would risk being cut off from Prasp’s bounty by wrecking his wings, or allowing their children to do so.
There were people in Prasp’s tribe who had run the entire diameter of the circular valley that was their world, staying directly beneath one of the thin lines that crossed through the center of the roof. Although it was easier to run in the cool semi-darkness of night rather than the heat of day, most people had done it during the day, to avoid hyenas and other nocturnal hunters.
But Prasp had to do the run both day and night—he couldn’t let fourteen sleeping periods go by without repeating the course, for he wasn’t doing this just once to impress a woman or gain status among the men. He wanted to do it over and over and over, back and forth, crossing the valley again and again.
This wasn’t a stunt, after all.
This was training.
One day, as he was about to embark on his run, Prasp found Dalba, one of the tribe’s elders, waiting for him—and that was usually a sign of trouble.
“I saw you fly,” she said.
Prasp nodded.
“And I hear you intend to fly again.”
“Yes.”
“But why?” asked Dalba. “Why do you fly?”
Prasp looked at her as if he couldn’t believe the question. “To find a way out.”
“Out? Out to where?”
“To whatever is beyond this valley.”
“Do you not know the story of Hoktan?” asked Dalba.
Prasp shook his head.
“Hoktan was a foolish man who lived generations ago. He talked as you are now talking—as if one could leave this place. He tried another method, though: he dug and dug and dug, day after day, trying to make a tunnel out through the mountains that encircle our world.”
“And?” said Prasp.
“And one day the gods used wind against him, pulling him out through his tunnel.”
“Where is this tunnel?” asked Prasp. “I would love to see it!”
“The tunnel collapsed, the wind ceased—and Hoktan was never seen again.”
“Well, I do not plan to dig through the roof—but I do hope to find a passage to whatever is beyond it.”
Dalba shook her wizened head. “There’s nothing beyond the roof, child.”
“There must be. Legend says we came from the Old Place, and—”
Dalba laughed. “Yes, Kata Bindu. But it’s not somewhere you can go back to. The trip here is a one-way journey.”
“Why?” asked Prasp. “Why should it be that way?”
“The name of where we came from,” said the elder. “Surely you understand the name?”
Prasp frowned. He’d only ever heard it called Kata Bindu, the Old Place; did it have another name? No, no—that was all it was ever called. But…
“Oh,” said Prasp, feeling foolish. He was a hunter, of course, and a gatherer, too—and this place, this territory, this land that his people knew so well, that fed them and sustained them, was Bindu, the term in their language for place, for territory, for home—but Bindu was also the word for life, the thing the land gave. Kata Bindu wasn’t the Old Place; it was the Old Life.
And this—
“This is heaven,” said the Dalba, simply. “You can’t go back to the Old Life.”
“But if it’s heaven,” said Prasp, “then where are the Gods?”
“They’re here,” said the Dalba, tipping her head up at the sky. “They’re watching us. Can’t you feel that in your heart?”
Prasp flew again—but this time he rose farther than he ever had before. His muscles were stronger, his lungs more capacious. All that running had had the desired result.
Prasp was close enough now to the roof to see the circular lights, each wider than his body was long. Of course, it was night now; the lights were glowing dimly. Only a fool would strap on wings and try to fly toward the lights when they were burning with their daytime intensity.
Still, this close, there was enough illumination to make out things he’d never noticed from the ground. He could see that the roof was slightly curved, slightly concave, arching up and away. He continued to fly along, but everything was the same—massive cords, circular lights, and, supporting them, a thick, clear membrane—and beyond that, he couldn’t say, for all was dark. The lights all faced down toward the ground, far below.
Prasp thought that if there were an exit anywhere, it might be at the very center of the roof—easy enough to spot, for all the radial cords converged at that point. He knew there was no exit around the edges of the roof, for others had long ago climbed the steep, rocky terraces that surrounded the valley, concentric shelves each wider and higher than the one below it. They’d circumnavigated the world, hiking around its edge, examining the entire seal between the roof and the rocky walls—but there was nothing; no break, no passage, no tunnel.
Finally, Prasp reached the exact center—and there was something special there. Prasp’s heart began pounding even faster than it already had been. There was a platform hanging from the roof, a wide square, attached at its four corners by cylinders that rose to the sky. The platform was large, and Prasp was able to glide between t
wo of the cylinders, his belly scraping along the platform’s inner surface. He skidded along, thinking that the skin on his chest would soon be flayed from his ribs, and—
Gods, no!
There was a giant cube in the middle of the platform, a building of some sort as big as a multifamily hut. Prasp wanted to throw his hands up in front of his face to shield it from the crash, but he couldn’t; his arms were strapped to the wings. He continued to skid forward, and he twisted his body sideways, finally slamming into the building.
He lay on the platform, catching his breath, supported from beneath for the first time since he’d taken flight.
Finally, he moved again. The building had a door in its side. Prasp had rarely seen doors before; some members of his tribe had tried to make them for their huts—vertical walls of sticks that articulated on gut ties down one side. This one was simpler and more elegant, but it was a door just the same.
Still, there was no way to get through it without shedding his wings—and he had to go through that door; he had to see what was on the other side of it. Prasp normally had his woman’s help in strapping his wings on before each flight, but surely he’d be able to reattach the wings on his own when it came time to return to the valley. It would be tricky, but he was confident he could do it.
Prasp struggled to divest himself of the great elephant-hide membranes, and at last he was free of them. He rose to his feet and walked toward the door. There was something like a crooked arm attached to it. Prasp grabbed hold of it and pulled, and the door swung open, revealing the inside of the cube.
Prasp’s heart immediately sank. There was no other door in the cube, no opening in its roof. He’d thought for sure he’d found the way out, but clearly that was not the case. Still, the room contained things the likes of which Prasp had never seen before: angled panels made of something that wasn’t wood or stone, with lights glowing upon them. Most were green, but a few were red. He stared at them in wonder.
We had access to the plans for the Copernicus refuge, of course. After all, it was we who had built that habitat prior to taking The Next Step. We’d put the computers controlling the habitat high above the ground, hanging from the center of the roof, where the primitives could never reach them. Indeed, from the ground, some 3.8 kilometers below, the computing room and its surrounding platform would be all but invisible.
We’d tried to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. Our best guess was that the computers had failed when February 28, 3000, had rolled around—certainly, the two-week long lunar day that straddled that Earth date had been the one in which the polarizing film had gone dark for the last time. We’d tested the computers for behavior at leap years, but it hadn’t occurred to us to check millennial years, with their arcane and sometimes conflicting rules about whether the day after February 28 was February 29 or March 1.
We’d called ourselves humane. Every conceivable programming error, every possible bug, every potential infinite loop, had been tracked down in the systems that now hosted us. But somehow the computers that were to look after those not taking The Next Step were given less rigorous testing.
Yes, we’d been humane—and human; all too human, it seemed.
In the cubical structure at the roof of the world Prasp found the most remarkable thing: a vertical rectangular panel that had symbols glowing on it, and, resting on a horizontal surface in front of it, a—something—that looked like packed animal teeth, white and concave.
Prasp counted them; there were 107, divided into one large cluster and four smaller ones. Most of the teeth had single symbols on them. One whole row of them, plus a few others, had two symbols, one above and one below. A few had strings of symbols. He tried to match the symbols glowing on the panel with those on the teeth. Some of them did have matches; others did not. The glowing strings on the panel made no sense to him, although he looked at each one carefully: “System halted. Press Enter to reinitialize.”
On the rack of teeth he could find the S symbol—although why the panel showed it in two different sizes, he had no idea. He also found the P symbol, and the E, and the z, and two teeth marked with circles that might be the o symbol, and two others marked with vertical lines that might be the l symbol. Some of the other symbols had loose counterparts amongst the teeth: the m seemed similar to, but less angular, than one of the tooth markings, for instance. But many of the others shown on the panel—e, h, a, d, r, n, and i—seemed to have no counterparts among the teeth, and—
“Enter.” Right in the middle of the glowing characters was the string “Enter.” And that entire string was reproduced on an extra large tooth at the far right of the main collection; that tooth also was marked by a left-pointing arrow with a right-angle bend in its shaft.
Prasp ran his index finger over that large tooth, and was surprised to find it wobbling, almost like a child’s tooth about to come out. Very strange. He pressed down on the tooth to see just how much play it had, and it collapsed inward, and then, as soon as Prasp pulled his finger back in disgust, it popped back out again.
But the symbols on the screen disappeared! Whatever Prasp had done clearly had been a mistake; he’d ruined everything.
Fourteen sleep periods later, Prasp, his woman Kari, Dalba and the other elders, and the rest of the tribe all watched in awe as something incredible happened. The sky turned clear, and high in the sky, there was a giant blue-and-white light, shaped like half a circle, set against a black background.
“What is that?” asked Kari, looking at Prasp.
Prasp felt his voice catching in his throat, catching with wonder. “What else could it be?” he said. “The Other Place.” He repeated the phrase again, but with a slightly different intonation, emphasizing the double meaning. “The Other Life.”
Someday, perhaps, the hunter-gatherers of Copernicus will develop a technological civilization. Someday, perhaps, they will even find a way out of their roofed-over crater, a way to move out into the universe, leaving their microcosm behind.
But for us, for Those Who Had Been Flesh, for The Collective Consciousness of Earth, for The Uploaded, there would be no way out. Who’d known that The Next Step would be our last step? Who’d known that the rest of the universe would be barren? Who’d known how lonely it would be to become a single entity—yes, we refer to ourselves in the plural as if that sheer act of linguistic stubbornness could make up for us being a single consciousness now, with no one to converse with.
Maybe, after a thousand years, or a million, the men and women in Copernicus will develop radio, and at last we will have someone else to talk to. Maybe they’ll even leave their world and spread out to colonize this empty galaxy.
They might even come here, although few of them will be able to endure Earth’s gravity. But if they do come, yes, they might accidentally or deliberately put an end to our existence.
We can only hope.
We are no longer human.
But we are humane; we wish them well. We are trapped forevermore, but those who are still flesh, and can again see the sky, might yet be free.
We will watch. And wait.
There is nothing more for us to do.
Driving A
Bargain
Although my novels are exclusively hard science fiction, I occasionally write fantasy or horror at short lengths; indeed, to my delight, I’ve been nominated for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award.
My great friend Edo van Belkom is, without doubt, Canada’s top horror writer (and, just to put me in my place, he’s actually won the Stoker). In 2000, he edited a young-adult anthology called Be Afraid! It contained my story “Last But Not Least,” which was reprinted in my collection Iterations.
Be Afraid! was a big hit, and so Edo did a sequel anthology, Be VERY Afraid! This story was my contribution to that book.
Jerry walked to the corner store, a baseball cap and sunglasses shielding him from the heat beating down from above. He picked up a copy of the Calgary Sun, walked to the counter,
gave the old man a dollar, got his change, and hurried outside. He didn’t want to wait until he got home, so he went to the nearest bus stop, parked himself on the bench there, and opened the paper.
Of course, the first thing he checked out was the bikini-clad Sunshine Girl—what sixteen-year-old boy wouldn’t turn to that first? Today’s girl was old—23, it said—but she certainly was pretty, with lots of long blonde hair.
That ritual completed, Jerry turned to the real reason he’d bought the paper: the classified ads. He found the used-car listings, and started poring over them, hoping, as he always did, for a bargain.
Jerry had worked hard all summer on a loading dock. It had been rough work, but, for the first time in his life, he had real muscles. And, even more important, he had some real money.
His parents had promised to pay the insurance if Jerry kept up straight A’s all through grade ten, and Jerry had. They weren’t going to pay for a car, itself, but Jerry had two grand in his bank account—he liked the sound of that: two grand. Now if he could just find something halfway decent for that price, he’d be driving to school when grade eleven started next week.
Jerry was a realist. He wanted a girlfriend—God, how he wanted one—but he knew his little wispy beard wasn’t what was going to impress…well, he’d been thinking about Ashley Brown all summer. Ashley who, in his eyes at least, put that Sunshine Girl to shame.
But, no, it wasn’t the beard he’d managed to grow since June that would impress her. Nor was it his newfound biceps. It would be having his own set of wheels. How sweet that would be!
Jerry continued scanning the ads, skipping over all the makes he knew he could never afford: the Volvos, the Lexuses, the Mercedes, the BMWs.
He read the lines describing a ’94 Honda Civic, a ’97 Dodge Neon, even a ’91 Pontiac Grand Prix. But the prices were out of his reach.
Jerry really didn’t care what make of car he got; he’d even take a Hyundai. After all, when hardly anyone else his age had a car, any car would be a fabulous ticket to freedom, to making out. To use one of his dad’s favorite expressions—an expression that he’d never really understood until just now—“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”