Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (9 page)

I looked at Veronica to see if she could guess the answer. She frowned. "I suppose it would be coming back from the dead."

"But that isn't very hard at all," I said, "not with modern technology. You died inside the black hole, and yet here you are. Anyone can be restored from backup. Everyone in Cockaigne is immortal!"

"So it's not death?"

"There are many forms of death, including stasis," I replied. "But a long time ago, when we were drinking one night, we talked about the hardest possible escape. And we came to the conclusion that it was the escape from utopia."

We'd congregated at an awards banquet: a gathering of peers, a noisy conversation full of ribaldry and rivalry. Implicit in the discussion of the hardest escape was that anyone performing it would become the supreme escapologist, at the pinnacle of our profession. And like any ambitious performer, I wanted to be the best.

Veronica laughed. "Escape from utopia? It's not exactly like escaping from an iron cage or a black hole, is it?"

"Isn't it? There are only two things that def ine escapology: the feat must be possible, but it must be diff icult. And utopia fulf ils those criteria exactly." I raised my hand and checked them off on my fingers. "It isn't utopia if you
can't
leave. So it's possible to escape. But it isn't utopia if you
want
to leave. That makes it diff icult."

I remembered how I'd searched for utopia. I knew it must exist: among inf inite parallel universes, everything exists somewhere. The hard part had been verifying Cockaigne among the multitude of candidates. Yet I'd always been meticulous: as an escapologist, my life depended on it. Half of showmanship is the careful selection of props.

Veronica looked astounded. "So that's why you came to Cockaigne—to perform a
trick?"

"Yes, exactly," I replied.

"But what about me?" she cried. "What does that make me?"

"Well, it wouldn't be utopia without romance," I said. "When I met you, I fell in love. And so I stayed a lot longer than I'd planned."

I'd justif ied that to myself in various ways. It was an adventure. It was a rigorous demonstration of Cockaigne as utopia. It was a chance to break new ground by staging shows on a vast scale. But mostly, it was love.

Love is just one of the ways that utopia sucks you in.

"And now you're leaving?" said Veronica, her voice suddenly cold. "To finish your trick?"

"That's the plan," I admitted. "But I still love you. And so I'm asking you to come with me."

I knew it didn't sound like much of an offer, so I tried to put the best possible spin on it. "Think of it as a challenge! You'd be stepping outside the safe, comfortable world of Cockaigne, where everything you want is there for the taking. You'd be entering a harsher world where accomplishments are hard-earned, and more meaningful...."

My voice trailed off, partly because Veronica didn't look remotely persuaded, and partly because I didn't really believe my spiel anyway. It wouldn't be utopia if you could convincingly denigrate it.

"You don't know how old I am," she said sadly. "If I left Cockaigne, my body wouldn't last for very long."

I'd suspected this. Trying to take Veronica out of Cockaigne would be like trying to take fairy gold out of Elf land. All too soon, there'd only be a few withered scraps, fading on the breeze.

That was why I'd concocted the black hole stunt, with the audience making duplicates of themselves. Now I pointed to the copying booth that Veronica had previously used.

"I'm not asking you to send your original body. You can stay here. Just make a copy of yourself, to accompany me." I grasped her hands, and adopted my courtly mode. "I beg of you, my Queen. Your love is the greatest treasure in all the land of Cockaigne. Without it, I'm bereft. Come with me!"

Since Veronica had already sent a copy of herself to certain death inside a black hole, I figured that she could hardly refuse to send a copy to accompany me outside Cockaigne.

Veronica pursed her lips. "It doesn't seem fair. If you take a copy of me with you, then you'll have my company—but my original self will be left here all alone. Why don't you leave a copy of yours here with me? Then it's symmetrical."

I shook my head. "Unfortunately, I can't do that. If I leave a copy of myself here in Cockaigne, then I haven't really escaped."

Veronica shot me a disgusted look. "So it's the escape that matters, rather than being with me."

"I want you with me!" I protested. "That's why I'm asking you to come."

"But if you're so keen on the purity of your escape, then it won't look good if you bring a copy of me back with you. Everyone outside will think I'm just some kind of sex doll that you're addicted to and can't let go of. They'll say you haven't fully escaped, because you're still chained to your fantasy lover."

This hit me like a punch in the stomach. Veronica was right. How could I say that I'd escaped from utopia, if I insisted on bringing a piece of it back with me?

My love for Veronica had blinded me. I'd schemed to find some way of taking her with me, because living without her was unthinkable.

Yet this was meant to be the hardest possible escapology feat. No clever gimmick could finesse it. If I wanted to complete the stunt I'd plotted for so many years, and reach the pinnacle of my profession, then I had to renounce every single aspect of utopia—including Veronica.

I faced an unavoidable choice: either abandon my cherished ambition, or leave Veronica forever.

Maybe my relationship with Veronica was just a delusion. Was she merely a sex doll, a fantasy crafted to populate my personal utopia?

I didn't want to believe that. I didn't want to be the kind of sophisticated cynic who believed that nothing so wonderful could possibly be real.

And yet... wasn't Cockaigne's perfection in itself rather cloying? Hadn't I had enough, like a child who's eaten too many sweets? Could I stand any more of the endless days?

Veronica knew me well: she could see my doubts. And she didn't want to lose me. "There are always new quests needing a brave knight, even here in Cockaigne."

"Yeah, I know," I said, thinking of the social whirl, the inf inite number of hobbies and sports and arts and games—all the myriad ways to compete and collaborate and interfere and interact. But I'd already tasted that life, and drunk deep from its well.

"There's much more than you realize," Veronica said. "In those memories from my copy who died, I saw something inside the black hole—something ahead of us.

" "It shouldn't have been possible to see anything ahead.

" "Yet we did. We saw the singularity, where the laws of physics transcend themselves. It was like the light of heaven! And it was welcoming us, a shining beacon.... People are living there already. If we'd had a stronger ship, we could have reached them." Eagerness shone in Veronica's face. "There's no need to be restricted by our human bodies and minds, the limitations of physical laws in a normal environment. There's no need to become tired or jaded."

The curtain rose. Behind it, the huge viewscreen showed the black hole, still remorselessly swallowing everything that approached. Veronica pointed to the darkness at its core. "There are whole new universes in there! Come and explore them with me."

It wouldn't be utopia without an inf inite range of possibilities. Yet I shuddered. "That's a bit... irrevocable, isn't it?"

She turned and smiled, her arm still extended. "It doesn't have to be irrevocable." Now she pointed at one of the copying booths.

Indeed, we could copy ourselves. We could simultaneously enter the black hole to join the singularity, and also continue our lives in Cockaigne, pursuing merely ordinary perfection in the dull suburbs of the universe.

Escapologists don't copy themselves. But if I stayed with Veronica, that meant abandoning my dream of accomplishing the ultimate escape. I'd already performed enough routine exploits; there'd be no point in continuing as an escapologist.

Should I abandon my dream? What would make me happier: attaining my ambition, or staying with Veronica?

Achieving my ambition would be a lonely, temporary triumph. Yes, I'd be acknowledged as the top escapologist—for a while, until something else became the ultimate feat to aspire to. I liked my colleagues, but I didn't love them. And after all, they had tried to kill me.

I reached for Veronica and kissed her. Then, arm in arm, we walked toward the copying booth, leaving the empty stage behind.

Half of showmanship is knowing when to stop.

This story is dedicated to Ray Bradbury.

I.

On Friday Bill got a promotion in acknowledgement of his development and marketing plan for
On the Road,
which was a twentieth-century novel by Jack Kerouac that was totally unreadable in its original text-only form. That night he celebrated by trading in his crawlie for the new Honda 37m, and early Saturday morning he took the new machine for a shakedown cruise in the San Gabriel Mountains.

A low-speed run took him silently up the narrow trail in the dawn light, diverting once along the hillside above to avoid a jogger and her German shepherd, neither of whom seemed to notice Bill and his silent exoskeleton. He slithered like a snake over the chaparral, the ultralight suit's 16 legs placing themselves so precisely that they never so much as broke a stem of the rusty buckwheat.

Leaving the trail again, he crossed Little Santa Anita Canyon above the reservoir, frightening one chipmunk, and then pointed himself up the steep shoulder of the ridge, switched to semiautomatic, and squeezed hard on the throttle between his knees. With a heart-pounding burst of gee-forces, his new ride launched him up toward the top of the ridge. His helmet's view showed a red icon for a lone deer, and he steered wide before the safeties could force him to decelerate for it.

It was as he was arrowing through a grove of scrub oak that the message came in. Annoyed, he cut throttle and came to a stop next to the barbed-wire fence surrounding the radio tower at the crest of the ridge. He imagined himself as the Lone Ranger galloping up to the top of a mesa and posing for the camera in silhouette against the sky. (This kind of classical allusion came naturally to him, since his college major had been media studies.) Absently he noticed that he had cut his knee, maybe on a yucca.

"Yes?" This had better be important, he thought, before remembering sheepishly that he himself had set the filtering criteria for what was important enough to interrupt a weekend ride.

Bill's great-grandfather Yuen, from the Guerrero side of the family, had died. All marbles intact, and, if Bill was reading accurately between the lines of Aunt Bonita's text message, the old man had made sure it happened at a place and in a way of his own choosing.

Bill had paid at least twenty or thirty times to watch the scene from
Star Wars
(Episode IV, the only good one) in which Obi Wan Kenobi explained to Luke about The Force. But any more formal religion had been extinct from his family for several generations, so he merely planted himself Indian-style on the crawlie's rack of stilts, faced the smoggy sunrise, and reviewed what few memories he had of Gramp Yuen. There'd been a practical hunting slingshot (of which Bill's mother strongly disapproved) given for his ninth birthday. Appearances at Bill's high school graduation and wedding.

That had been about it, so it was a surprise when he learned that he and his cousin Shona were to split the estate fifty-f ifty. Bill had no idea whether it amounted to much, or why Yuen had picked him and Shona above all other descendants. Bill, unlike Shona, had always been conscientious, so he figured on being the one to go through the drudgery of sorting through Yuen's possessions and packing them up. He and his wife, Fari, dropped a text on Shona's social and by lunchtime were at the old man's cabin in the Colorado Rockies.

"Son of a bitch, look at this." He offered the yellowing little paper notebook across the coffee table to Fari, holding it open to the page he'd just been reading. The cover was marked East Africa Trip—2022.

"I don't know whose mommy is a bitch, but I'll tell you who's a bitch in heat right now." She stepped over the table and landed in her husband's lap.

"Seriously, baby, I need you to put on your lawyer hat. Stop drooling on my ear and read."

"Tease."

"Vixen. Read."

She sighed, and accepted the bound stack of wood-pulp pages, holding it gingerly with the thumb and foref inger of each hand, as if it were a scroll freshly excavated from the tomb of a pharaoh. She touched the ink with a fingertip and checked that it didn't come off with handling.

Moshi, Tanzania, June 16, 2022. Finally found a café that serves real coffee instead of Nescafé—you'd never know they grew the stuff here. Phone stolen. When? Crowd in front of mosque? Good thing they didn't get credit card.

June 17. Bought new phone from street vendor for Tsh 120,000. Loaded with someone else's tunes, plus what looks like tons of porn and books.

"I don't think piracy was such a serious crime back then," she said.

"He was young. Younger than we are now. People make mistakes."

"I hear a young man sometimes knows how to please a woman."

"I'll take care of you later, woman. But he doesn't say how much it is. If it's bulk..."

"He could get the death penalty?"

"Very funny. What do you think a phone did back then?"

"Sounds like it let you read books, listen to music, and look at porn." She slid off his lap and her face got serious again. "You think he still had the files when he died?"

"He wouldn't still have the original phone."

"I know, but the files."

Yuen's little bachelor cabin was well heated, but Bill's skin turned clammy. "It wouldn't let him, would it? He upgrades to a new phone, tries to copy over the files, but he doesn't have a license for any of them. They're licensed to someone in Tanzania."

"Did it work that way then?" She stood up and paced. "I'm not sure the software and hardware were locked down. This was back when people rode around in cars that were dumber than toasters. Steering wheels. My grandma's sister got killed by a car because the driver turned the wrong way."