Infinite Dreams (15 page)

Inside a mountain of crystal under a mountain of rock, a tiny piezoelectric switch, sixty-four molecules in a cube, flipped over to the
OFF
position and the following transaction took place at just less than the speed of light:

and came back again just like that. Jacob stood up and looked around. The same old sun-baked plain, but everybody but him seemed to be dead. Then he checked and the ones that weren’t obviously zeroed were still breathing a bit. And, thinking about it, he knew why. He chuckled.

He stepped over the collapsed archers and picked up Melford’s bleedy skull-cap. He inserted the blade of a knife between the helmet and the hair, shorting out the induction tractor that held the helmet on the head and served to pick up and transmit signals. Letting the helmet drop to
the ground, he carefully bore the grisly balding bowl over to the enemy’s crapper. Knowing exactly where to look, he fished out all the bits and pieces of crystal and tossed them down the smelly hole. Then he took the unaugmented brain back to the helmet and put it back the way he had found it. He returned to his position by Melford’s body.

The stricken men began to stir and a few of the most hardy wobbled to their hands and knees.

Jacob threw back his head and laughed and laughed.

This story started with a leaky fountain pen, took a side trip to the moon, and ended up with my brother. Flying somewhere on a plane without too much pressurization, I read a story in
The New Yorker.
The story was otherwise unremarkable—I don’t even remember the author’s name—but it had a neat first-person viewpoint trick that I thought might one day come in handy. I found a scrap of paper and made a note. The note was rather messy, as was my pocket, since the lack of pressure in the cabin had given my fountain pen a new sense of freedom. I lost the note, probably before I left the airplane, but remembered taking it.

The second scene is perhaps a year later, stopping by the
Analog
office to bother Ben Bova. Ben was ready for me: On a large lunar colony, he asked, what would they do with all the dead bodies? I said they d recycle them, the conventional answer; grind ’em up and sprinkle ’em over the north forty. No, he said, the elements in a human body are an insignificantly small fraction of the total biomass needed for a large colony, so they could do anything they wanted with the bodies. He suggested that many people
would elect to be “buried at space,” jettisoned in a funerary capsule. He also suggested that I write him a story about it. I said I would, some day, too busy now.

My brother Jack is also a writer, and a good one. Ben called and said he’d bought a story from Jack, so he
had
to have one from me for the same issue, lest the readers become confused. I had to bow to his logic.

Actually, I’d been thinking about writing a short story anyhow, about time travel. Natural languages, it says here, can’t deal directly with time travel, because their tense structures are geared to time as a one-way street. I wasn’t about to make up a new set of tenses to accommodate time travel, which would be incomprehensible to every reader, including myself. But I did see a way to take that
New Yorker
trick and twist it in a Moebius way, to at least imply the complexity of the situation
.

There was even a way to get Ben’s funerary capsules into the act, as well as pay homage to two of my favorite science fiction stories: “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “All You Zombies,” both by Robert Heinlein.

The Man Who Owns the Moon, they called him while he was alive, and The Man Who Owned the Moon for some time thereafter. Dr. Thorne Harrison:

Born 1990 in a mean little Arkansas strip-mining town. Formal education terminated in 2005, with his escape from a state reformatory. Ten years of odd jobs on one side of the law or the other. Escalating ambition and power; by the age of thirty-five, billionaire chairman of a diversified, mostly legitimate, corporation. Luck, he called it.

One planet was not enough. About a week before his fortieth birthday, Harrison fired his board of directors and liquidated an awesome fortune. He sank every penny of it into the development and exploitation of the Adams-Beeson drive. Brought space travel to anyone who could afford it. Bought a chunk of the Moon to give them someplace to go. Pleasure domes, retirement cities, safaris for the jaded rich. Made enough to buy the votes to initiate the terraforming of Mars.

As the first trickle of water crawled down the Great Rift Valley, Harrison lay in his own geriatrics hospital, in Copernicus City, in his hundred and twentieth year. The excitement may have hastened his passing.

“Move it move it
move
it!” Down the long white corridor two orderlies pushed the massive cart, drifting in long skips in the lunar gravity, the cart heavy with machines surrounding a frail wisp of a human body: dead cyborg of D. Thorne Harrison. Oxygenated fluorocarbon coursing through slack veins, making the brain think it still lived.

Through the bay doors of the cryonics facility, cart braked to a bumpy stop by the cold chamber, tubes and wires unhooked and corpse slid without ceremony inside. Chamber locked, pumped, activated: body turned to cold quartz.

“Good job.” Not in the futile hope of future revival.

The nuts had a field day.

Harrison had sealed his frozen body into a time/space capsule, subsequently launched toward the center of the Galaxy. Also in the capsule were stacks of ultrafiche crystals (along with a viewer) that described humankind’s nature and achievements in exhaustive detail, and various small objects of art.

One class of crackpots felt that Harrison had betrayed humanity, giving conquering hordes of aliens a road map back to Earth. The details of what they would do to us, and why, provided an interesting refraction of the individual crackpot’s problems.

A gentler sort assumed
a priori
that a race of aliens able to decipher the message and come visit us must necessarily have evolved away from aggression and other base passions; they would observe; perhaps help.

Both of these groups provided fuel for solemn essays, easy master’s theses, and evanescent religions. Other opinions:

“Glad the old geezer got to spend his money the way he wanted to.”

“Inexcusable waster of irreplaceable artistic resources.”

“He could have used the money to feed people.”

“Quixotic gesture; the time scale’s too vast. We’ll be dead and gone long before anybody reads the damned thing.”

“I’ve got more important things to worry about.”

None of the above is true.

Supposedly, the miniature Adams-Beeson converter would accelerate the capsule very slowly for about a century, running out of fuel when the craft had attained a small fraction of the speed of light. It would pass the vicinity of Antares in about five thousand years.

The capsule had a preprogrammed signal generator, powered by starlight. It would accumulate power for ten years at a time, then bleat out a message at the 21-centimeter wavelength. The message lasted ninety minutes and would be repeated three times; any idiot with a huge radio telescope and the proper ontological prejudices could decode it: “I am an artifact of an intelligent race. My course is thus and so. Catch me if you can.”

Unfortunately, the craft carried a pretty hefty magnetic field, and ran smack-dab into Maxwell’s Equations. Its course carried it through a tenuous but very extensive cloud of plasma, and through the years it kept turning slowly to the right, decelerating. When it came out of the cloud it was pointed back toward the Earth, moving at a very modest pace.

In twenty thousand years it passed the place where Earth had been (the Sun having wandered off in the natural course of things) and continued to crawl, out toward the cold oblivion between the galaxies. It still beeped out its code every decade, but it was a long time before anybody paid any attention.

I woke up in great pain, that didn’t last.

“How do you feel?” asked a pretty young nurse in a starched green uniform.

I didn’t answer immediately. There was something wrong. With her, with the hospital room, the bed. The edges were wrong. Too sharp, like a bad matte shot at the cubies.

“How do you feel?” asked a plain, middle-aged nurse in a starched green uniform. I hadn’t seen the change. “Is this better?”

I said it didn’t make much difference. My body, my body was a hundred years younger. Mind clear, limbs filled with springy muscle. No consciousness of failing organs. I am dead, I asked her; told her.

“Not really,” she said and I caught her changing: shimmerclick. Now a white-haired, scholarly-looking doctor, male. “Not any more. You were dead, a long time. We rebuilt you.”

I asked if he/she would settle on one shape and keep it; they pulled me out of a capsule, frozen solid?

“Yes. Things went more or less as you planned them.”

I asked him what he meant by more or less.

“You got turned around, and slowed. It was a long time before we noticed you.”

I sat up on the bed and stared at him. If I didn’t blink he might not change. I asked him how long a time?

“Nearly a million years. 874,896 from the time of launch.”

I swung to the floor and my feet touched hot sand.

“Sorry.” Cold tile.

I asked him why he didn’t show me his true form. I am too old to be afraid of bogeymen.

He did change into his true form and I asked that he change back into one of the others. I had to know which end to talk to.

As he became the doctor again, the room dissolved and we were standing on a vast plain of dark brown sand, in orderly dunes. The vague shadow in front of me lengthened as I watched; I turned around in time to see the Milky Way, rather bright, slide to the horizon. There were no stars.

“Yes,” the doctor said, “we are at the edge of your galaxy.” A sort of sun rose on the opposite horizon. Dim red and huge, nebulous at its boundaries. An infrared giant, my memory told me.

I told him that I appreciated being rebuilt, and asked whether I could be of some service. Teach them of the ancient past?

“No, we learned all we could from you, while we were putting you back together.” He smiled. “On the contrary, it is we who owe you. Can we take you back to Earth? This planet is just right for us, but I think you will find it dull.”

I told him that I would very much like to go back to Earth, but would like to see some of his world first.

“All of my world is just like this,” he said. “I live here for the lack of variety. Others of my kind live in similar places.”

I asked if I could meet some of the others.

“I’m afraid that would be impossible. They would refuse to see you, even if I were willing to take you to them.” After a pause he added, “It’s something like politics. Here.” He took my hand and we rose, his star shrinking to a dim speck, disappearing. The Galaxy grew larger and we were suddenly inside it, stars streaming by.

I asked if this were teleportation.

“No, it’s just a machine. Like a spaceship, but faster, more efficient. Less efficient in one way.”

I started to ask him how we could breathe and talk, but his weary look cut me off. He seemed to be flickering, as if he were going to change shape again. But he didn’t.

“This should be interesting,” he said, as a yellow star
grew brighter, then swelled to become the familiar Sun. “I haven’t been here myself in ten, twelve thousand years.” The blue-and-green ball of Earth was suddenly beneath us, and we paused for a moment. “It’s a short trip, but I don’t get out often,” he said, apologetically.

As we drifted to the surface, it was sunset over Africa. The shape of the western coast seemed not to have changed much.

The Atlantic passed beneath us in a blur and we came to ground somewhere in the northeastern United States. We landed in a cow pasture. Its wire fence, improbably, seemed to be made of the same shiny duramyl I remembered from my childhood.

“Where are we?” I asked.

He said we were just north of Canaan, New York. There was a glideway a few kilometers to the west; I could find a truck stop and catch a ride. He was flickering very fast now, and even when he was visible I could see the pasture through him.

“What’re you talking about?” I said. “They wouldn’t, don’t, have truck stops and glideways a million years in the future.”

He regarded me with fading scorn and said we were only five or ten years in my future; after the year of my birth, that is. Twenty at the outside. Didn’t I know the slightest thing about relativity?

And he was gone.

A fanner was walking toward me, carrying a wicked-looking scythe. There was nothing in the pasture to use it on, but me.

“Good morning,” I said to him. Then saw it was afternoon.

He walked to within striking distance of me and stopped, grim scowl. He leaned sideways to look behind me. “Where’s the other feller?”

“Who?” I’d almost said I was wondering that myself. “What other fellow?” I looked back over my shoulder.

He rubbed his eyes. “Damn contacts. What’re you doin’ on my propitty anyhow?”

“I got lost.”

“Don’t you know what a fence is?”

“Yes, sir, I’m sorry. I was coming to the house to ask directions to Canaan.”

“Why you out walkin with a funny costume on?” I was wearing a duplicate of the conservative business suit Harrison was buried in.

“It’s the style, sir. In the city.”

He shook his head. “Kids. You just go over that fence yonder,” he pointed, “and head straight ’til you get to the road. Mind you don’t touch the fence an’ watch out for my God damn beans. You get to the road and Canaan’s to the left.”

“Thank you, sir.” He had turned and was stumping back to the farmhouse.

In the truck stop, the calendar read 1995.

It’s not easy to stay penniless in New York City, not if you have a twenty-year-old body and over a century’s worth of experience in separating people from their money.