2312 (10 page)

But it was Wang who answered her. “It has to do with some funny stories about qubes,” he said carefully. “On Venus and in
the asteroid belt. Those incidents are being looked into by Inspector Genette and his team. So”—he gestured at the doorway—“this may be another part of that. So until they learn more, let us leave that matter alone for now. Also… assuming your internal qube is recording all this? If you could get it to keep the recording locked, that would be best.”

Wahram said to Wang, “Show Swan the image of the system with qube power included.”

Wang nodded and tapped at the table’s image. “This one tries to include both qubes and classical AIs. It hopes to give an image of how much of our civilization is run by artificial intelligence.”

“Qubes don’t run anything,” Swan objected. “They don’t make any decisions.”

Wang frowned. “Some things they do decide, actually. When to launch a ferry, for instance, or how to allot the goods and services in the Mondragon—things like that. Most of the work of the system’s infrastructure, as it turns out.”

“But they don’t
decide
to run it,” Swan said.

“I know what you mean, but look at the image.”

In this version, he explained, red designated human power, blue the power of computers, with light blue marking classical computers, and dark blue quantum computers. A big dark blue ball appeared near Jupiter, and there were other blue dots scattered everywhere, most netted in a single web. Humans appeared as clumps of red, fewer and smaller than the blue dots, with far fewer red lines between them.

“What’s the blue ball around Jupiter?” Swan asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Wang said.

“And so now someone has attacked this rather immense blue ball.”

“Yes.” Wang was frowning heavily as he stared into the table. “But we don’t know who, or why.”

After a silence, Wahram said, “Images like this one were part of
what concerned Alex. She initiated some efforts to come to grips with the situation. Let’s leave it at that for now, please. I hope you understand.”

His froggy eyes popped more than ever with the force of his entreaty. He was sweating.

Swan glared at him for a while, then shrugged. She wanted to argue and realized again that it felt good to find something besides Alex’s death to be angry at. Pretty much anything would do. But in the end it wouldn’t help.

Wahram tried to return the subject to Earth: “Alex said we should think of Earth as our sun. We all revolve around it, and it exerts a huge drag on us. And because of the individual need spacers have for their sabbaticals, we can’t just ignore it.”

“For any number of reasons we can’t do that,” Wang pointed out.

“True,” Wahram said. “So. We are determined to keep her projects going. You can help with that. Your qube now has her contact list. It’ll take a big effort to keep that whole group on board. We could use your help.”

Swan, unsatisfied with this kind of generality, inspected the new image again. Finally she said, “Who did she work with most on Earth?”

Wahram shrugged. “Many people. But her main contact there was Zasha.”

“Really?” Swan said, startled. “My Zasha?”

“Yours in what sense?”

“Well, we were partners once.”

“I didn’t know that. Well, Alex certainly relied on Zasha for a sense of the situation on Earth.”

Swan had been vaguely aware that Zasha did things with the Mercury House in Manhattan, but she had never heard Alex or Zasha speak of each other. It was another new thing to learn about Alex, and it suddenly occurred to Swan that this was the way it would happen from now on; she would not learn things from
Alex, but about her. That was the way Alex would live on, and small though it was, it was better than nothing. Better than the void. And if Zasha had been working with her—

“All right,” Swan said. “When your inspector lets us out of here, I’m going to Earth.”

Wahram nodded uncertainly.

Swan said, “What will you do?”

He shrugged. “I have to go to Saturn and report.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Yes, thank you.” Although he looked a little alarmed at the idea. “I’ll soon be returning to Terminator. The Saturn League council has been contacted by the Vulcanoids, who it turns out also had some verbal agreements with Alex. There are Vulcanoid light transfers out to Saturn in the works, and I am currently the league’s inner planet ambassador. So I’ll see you when you return to Mercury.”

to simplify history would be to distort reality. By the early twenty-fourth century there was too much going on to be either seen or understood. Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians to achieve an agreed-upon paradigm foundered, and we are no different now, looking back at them. It’s hard even to assemble enough data to make a guess. There were thousands of city-states out there pinballing around, each with its presence in the data cloud or absence from same, and all of them adding up to—what? To the same mishmash history has been all along, but now elaborated, mathematicized, effloresced—in the word of the time,
balkanized
. No description can be

instability nodes, when many pressured stresses rupture at once—in this case the withdrawal of Mars from the Mondragon, its counterimperial campaign on Earth, and the return of the Jovian moons to the larger interplanetary scene. As the first settlements beyond Mars, the Jovians were hampered by path dependency on earlier, less powerful settlement technology, also the discovery of life inside Ganymede and Europa, as well as Jupiter’s intense radiation. Later more powerful settlement strategies, and terraforming efforts on Venus and Titan, caused the Jovians to reevaluate their stations, domes, and tented Luxembourgs as inadequate. Even with Io permanently off-limits, the three other Galilean moons constituted together an enormous potential surface area,
and it was the resolution of their inner conflicts and their common commitment to full terraformation that threw the volatiles markets into disarray and triggered the nonlinear breaks of the following two decades

they were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things they had never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long-lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves. But also, despite that individual diminution, finding ways to accumulate knowledge and power, compiling records, also techniques, practices, sciences

possibly smarter therefore as a species than as individuals, but prone to insanity either way, and in any case stuck in the moment—a moment now lost to us—when people lived in the almost-forgotten technology and culture of the Balkanization, the years just before 2312—

except wait: that is yet to tell

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

W
hen 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 irwinii
and 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
aporia
was 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 Dictionary
references a quote from J. Smith’s
Mystical Rhetoric
of 1657, which says
aporia
refers 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—”