Phase Space (29 page)

To impose such defects seemed hardly fair. But this was not a game. Fairness was not a factor. Given this level of gadgetry, even multiple defects must have been common.

Of course, it might not have been quite like this. Perhaps more sacrifice was necessary. If that oxygen fire had occurred before a launch, for instance, subsequent generations of spacecraft might have been rebuilt for greater safety. The beings who performed these flights did not think logically, in an orderly fashion. Logically, they should never have flown into space at all! Perhaps they needed some such catastrophe as this to occur, regularly, to guide them on their path.

But it was really quite remarkable. These hydrate creatures were really not up to this. Not yet; perhaps, in the end, not ever. They just were not smart enough. Why, they must even have navigated by eye, by the stars! And yet they persisted. There was something to admire, in this grandiose, doomed enterprise.

Well, I felt tired but happy. My simulations had converged. A mission to the Moon with chemical rockets, so I had proven, was foolish but feasible, given supportive historical logic. Already I had sufficient documentation; it was not necessary to adjust the parameters once more, to follow the sequence through to its conclusion.

I could allow the simulation to dissolve.

Yet I lingered.

I basked in my triumph.

But I felt –

Complicated.

Guilty
?

Perhaps. Those simulacra were fully sentient, of course. It was necessary for verisimilitude.

But in the end they were distressed. Well, of course they were distressed. Believing their world to be real, their lives and memories to be genuine, they had undergone a cessation of consciousness. Still, I meant to honour them – their ingenuity and bravery – not cause them harm.

Perhaps, I reflected, I should reconsider. Complete the exercise.

But after all, they were only simulacra.

Yes. Only simulacra. But of beings who once took halting steps in Moon dust …

…
Moon dust which seemed to crunch beneath Slade’s feet, like a covering of snow. His footprints were miraculously sharp, as if he’d placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He took a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it would persist here for millions of years, he realized, like the fossilized footprint of a dinosaur.

Or, he thought vaguely, not.

He felt dreamlike.

He was floating over this bright landscape. The tug of gravity was so gentle he couldn’t tell which way was vertical. And when he closed his eyes he
saw
things: a bleeding boy, a bitter old man, a fire –

It was probably the low G. Yeah, that was it. The low G.

He looked around.

The LM, standing in a broad, shallow crater, was a glistening, filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminium. Low hills shouldered above the close horizon. There were craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the sunlight deepening their shadows.

Bado came loping out of a shallow crater, towards Slade. Bado had one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connected his backpack to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit was covered in dust splashes. His gold sun visor was up, and inside his white helmet Slade could see Bado’s face, with its four-day growth of beard.

Bado said, ‘Hey, buddy. Look up.’

Slade tipped back on his heels and looked at the sky.

The sky was black, empty of stars. In the middle of the sky the Earth was a fat crescent, four times the size of a full Moon. And there, crossing the zenith, was a single, brilliant, unwinking star: the orbiting
Sun God,
with Pond, their Command Module Pilot, waiting to take them home.

It was July, 1969.

Holy shit, Slade thought. I really am here. I made it. Holy shit.

He felt a rush of affection for his buddy, the glowing reality of him, here on the Moon. Those fragmentary visions fled, leaving him with a sense of here and now and
rightness.

This was his place. This was where he was meant to be.

He tilted forward and eyed Bado. ‘Pretty sight. But we got to hustle, boy; we got a fat checklist to get through. We’re going for a full-up mission here, and don’t you forget it.’

Through his visor, Bado grinned. ‘Yes, sir!’

To human eyes, the system would have been extraordinary:

The single, giant sun was so vast that its crimson flesh would have embraced all of Sol’s scattered planets. Across its surface, glistening vacuoles swarmed, each larger than Sol itself.

There was a planet.

It was a ball of rock no larger than a small asteroid. It skimmed the sun’s immense photosphere, bathed in ruddy warmth. It was coated with air, a thick sea.

The world-ocean teemed with life.

Beyond the sun’s dim glow, the sky was utterly dark.

She rose to the Surface. Thick water slid smoothly from her carapace.

She let her impeller corpuscles dissociate briefly; they swam free of her main corpus in a fast, darting shoal, feeding eagerly, revelling in their brief liberty.

She lifted optically sensitive corpuscles to the smoky sky. The sun was a roof over the world, its surface pocked by huge dark pits.

She was called Sun-Cloud: for, at her Coalescence, a cloud of brilliant white light had been observed, blossoming over the sun’s huge, scarred face.

Sun-Cloud was seeking her sister, the one called Orange-Dawn.

Sun-Cloud raised a lantern-corpuscle. The subordinate creature soon tired and began sending quiet chemical complaints through her corpus; but she ignored them and waited, patiently, as her sphere of lantern light rolled out, spreading like a liquid over the oleaginous Surface.

The light moved slowly enough for a human eye to follow.

Sun-Cloud’s people were not like humans.

Here, people assembled from specialized schools of corpuscles: mentalizers, impellers, lanterns, structurals, others. Obeying their own miniature imperatives of life and death, individual corpuscles would leave the aggregate corpus and return to their fish-like shoals, to feed, breed, die. But others would join, and the pattern of the whole could persist, for a time.

Still, Sun-Cloud’s lifespan was finite. As the cycle of corpuscle renewal wore on, her pattern would degrade, mutate.

Like most sentient races, Sun-Cloud’s people sustained comforting myths of immortality.

And, like most races, there was a minority who rejected such myths.

Sun-Cloud returned to the Ocean’s deep belly.

The light here was complex and uncertain. Above Sun-Cloud the daylight was already dimming. And below her, from the Deep at the heart of the world, the glow of a billion lantern-corpuscles glimmered up, white and pure.

Sun-Cloud watched as Cold-Current ascended towards her.

They were going to discuss Sun-Cloud’s sister, Orange-Dawn. Orange-Dawn was a problem.

Cold-Current was a lenticular assemblage of corpuscles twice Sun-Cloud’s size, who nevertheless rose with an awesome unity. The ranks of impellers at Cold-Current’s rim churned at the thick waters of the Ocean, their small cilia vibrating so rapidly that they were blue-shifted.

The Song suffused the waters around Sun-Cloud, as it always did; but as Cold-Current lifted away from the Deep the complex harmonics of the Song changed, subtly.

Sun-Cloud, awed, shrank in on herself, her structural corpuscles pushing in towards their sisters at her swarming core. Sun-Cloud knew that she herself contributed but little, a few minor overtones, to the rich assonance of the Song. How must it be to be so grand, so powerful, that one’s absence left the Song – the huge, world-girdling Song itself – audibly lacking in richness?

Cold-Current hovered; a bank of optic corpuscles swivelled, focusing on Sun-Cloud. ‘You know why I asked to meet you,’ she said.

‘Orange-Dawn.’

‘Yes. Orange-Dawn. I am very disturbed, Sun-Cloud. Orange-Dawn is long overdue for Dissolution. And yet she persists; she prowls the rim of the Song, even the Surface, intact, obsessed. Even to the extent of injuring her corpuscles.’

‘I know that Orange-Dawn wants to see out another hundred Cycles,’ Sun-Cloud said. ‘Orange-Dawn has theories. That in a hundred Cycles’ time –’

‘I know,’ Cold-Current said. ‘She believes she has Coalesced with ancient wisdom. Somehow, in a hundred Cycles, the world will be transformed, and Orange-Dawn will be affirmed.’

‘But it’s impossible,’ Sun-Cloud said. ‘I know that; Orange-Dawn must see that.’

But Cold-Current said, absently: ‘But it
may
be possible, to postpone Dissolution so long.’ Sun-Cloud, intrigued, saw a tight, cubical pattern of corpuscles move through Cold-Current’s corpus; individual corpuscles swam to and fro, but the pattern persisted. ‘Possible,’ Cold-Current said. ‘There
is
old wisdom. But such a thing would be – ugly. Discordant.’ Perhaps that cubical pattern contained the fragment of old knowledge to which Cold-Current hinted.

Cold-Current rotated grandly. ‘I want you to go and talk to her. Perhaps you can say something … Nobody knows Orange-Dawn as well as you.’

That was true. Orange-Dawn had helped Sun-Cloud in her earliest Coalescence, as Sun-Cloud struggled towards sentience. Orange-Dawn had hunted combinations of healthy corpuscles for her sister, helped her coax the corpuscles into an orderly shoal. Together the sisters had run across the Surface of the Ocean, their out-thrust optic corpuscles blue-tinged with their exhilarating velocity …

Cold-Current began to sink back into the glimmering depths of the Ocean, her disciplined impellers beating resolutely. ‘You must help her, Sun-Cloud. You must help her put aside these foolish shards of knowledge and speculation, and learn to embrace true beauty …’

As Cold-Current faded from view, the light at the heart of the world brightened, as if in welcome, and the Song’s harmonies deepened joyously.

The world was very old. Sun-Cloud’s people were very old. They had accreted many fragments of knowledge, of philosophy and science.

A person, on Dissolution, could leave behind fragments of
insight, of wisdom, in the partial, semi-sentient assemblies called sub-corpora. Before dissolving in their turn into the general corpuscle shoals, the sub-corpora could be absorbed into a new individual, the knowledge saved.

Or perhaps not.

If they were not incorporated quickly, the remnant sub-corpora would break up. Their component mentation-corpuscles would descend, and become lost in the anaerobic Deep at the heart of the world.

Sun-Cloud returned to the Surface of the Ocean.

She saw that the sun had almost set; a last sliver of crimson light spanned one horizon, which curved sharply. Above her the sky was clear and utterly black, desolately so.

Her corpuscles transmitted their agitation to each other.

She raised a lantern; cold light bloomed slowly across the sea’s oily meniscus.

She roamed the Ocean, seeking Orange-Dawn.

At last the creeping lantern light brought echoes of distant motion to her optic corpuscles: a small form thrashing at the Surface in lonely unhappiness.

With a rare sense of urgency Sun-Cloud ordered her impeller corpuscles into motion. It didn’t take long for her to accelerate to a significant fraction of lightspeed; the impellers groaned as they strained at relativity’s tangible barrier, and the image of the lonely one ahead was stained with blue shift.

Wavelets lapped at her and air stroked her hide; she felt exhilarated by her velocity.

She slowed. She called softly: ‘Orange-Dawn?’

Listlessly Orange-Dawn raised optic corpuscles. Orange-Dawn was barely a quarter Sun-Cloud’s size. She was withered, her corpus depleted. Her corpuscles lay passively over each other, tiny mouths gaping with obvious hunger.