Further: Beyond the Threshold Read online

  “With the Voice of the Plenum, Chief Executive Zel, and Maruti Sun Ghekre the Ninth,” the escort corrected. “Yes. I first gained sentience approximately .0208 standard days ago, or roughly a half hour in your method of timekeeping. My subjective experience has been considerably longer, though, as AI nurseries run at highly accelerated clock speeds, and I share the memories of the intelligence from which I was calved, and so my personal recollections extend back far further than my objective age would suggest.”

  I managed to find the simplest and most practical of the options, a featureless and unornamented jumpsuit of dark fabric, similar to the flight suit I’d worn on board Wayfarer One, and completed the ensemble with a pair of soft-soled shoes. When I’d dressed, I stepped back out of the closet and regarded myself in a full-length mirror that dominated one corner of the sleeping chamber.

  An old man looked back at me: hair white and thin against dark skin, a straggle of beard on my chin, ears and nose larger than I remembered, shoulders slumped and knees slightly bent. I appeared to be a man in his late seventies, if not older. Much older than the thirty-one years of life I remembered living. But then, the years can pile on quickly when you sleep for twelve millennia.

  Still, I was the lucky one, wasn’t I? The others had moldered to dust in their sleeper coffins. All but one of the women, the chimpanzee had said, who’d died recently enough to leave a decaying corpse. Who had it been? Beatriz? Eija-Liisa? Amelia?

  Just thinking of the names stung, the last especially.

  The escort must have seen the pain that spread quickly across my features as he waddled up to me, wings folded, and regarded me with a steady metal gaze. “Is there some distress, sir?”

  I straightened, took a deep breath, and cast one last glance at the old man in the mirror.

  “At the moment,” I said, “my principal difficulty is that I haven’t had anything to eat in more than a hundred and twenty centuries, and I’m very, very hungry.”

  THIRTEEN

  There was a kitchen of sorts, but it seemed entirely a dining area, a large table surrounded by straight-backed chairs, with no room for food preparation. It hardly mattered, though, since there didn’t appear to be any food on hand.

  “What would you care to eat, sir?” the silver eagle said, alighting on a countertop beside a box that was roughly a third of a meter tall. “The fabricant can provide you with any food you desire.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat at the table, welcoming the chance to finally get off my feet. “Anything’s fine,” I answered, “so long as it’s meatless.”

  The escort hopped from one foot to another and wagged its silver head from side to side. “As with all products of a fabricant, sir, any foodstuffs will be synthesized from raw matter. The flesh of previously live organisms is eaten exceedingly rarely, typically only in ceremonial observances in anachronistic culture groups.”

  “It’s as much a matter of taste as principle,” I said. “But this fabricant…It’s some sort of…synthesizer?”

  “I suppose you could call it that, sir. A fabricant is a cornucopia machine, containing billions of assemblers. With sufficient energy and raw matter, it can construct anything for which it has a pattern. More complicated objects require greater processing and assembly time, but simple objects—regular structures based on carbon or silicon—can be fabricated on demand. Creating biologics capable of vivification is possible, but is time consuming, incurring an attendant high energy cost.”

  “So…wait. You’re saying it’s possible to create a living being on one of these machines? Could you clone something as complicated as a person?”

  “Certainly,” the escort answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “But to create a duplicate of an existing object—biologic or otherwise—the original must be destroyed. The resultant pattern, however, can be stored indefinitely.”

  “And if a…fabricant had the pattern for a live chicken, and I asked for it to make for me a live chicken…?”

  “It would require a nontrivial expenditure of power, and would take some time, but yes, it could produce a live chicken.” The escort paused and tilted its head while looking at me with an expression that I’d come to regard as confusion. “Would you like for me to request a live chicken for your repast, sir?”

  “No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head and waving my hands, as though warding away the thought of consuming still-living poultry. “That was just a hypothetical. Um…Well, I suppose if it can produce anything, if it could whip up some flat bread, lentils, and greens, it would make for a nice start.”

  “Just a moment, sir,” the escort answered, nodding.

  The cube on the counter chimed as soon as the escort had finished speaking. The escort stepped aside as one side of the cube rose open and a tray slid out. It was piled high with stacks of flat bread, beans, and leafy greens.

  “Would you care for anything to drink with that, sir?”

  I scratched my chin, thoughtfully.

  “I don’t suppose that thing can brew a cup of buna, can it?”

  The meal was fine, the buna better. I’d developed a taste for Ethiopian coffee while at Addis Ababa University, and drank it several times a day whenever I could (though even before boarding Wayfarer One it had been years since I observed the full Ethiopian coffee ceremony). It could have simply been a function of the fact that I’d not had a cup in more than twelve thousand years, but I found it difficult to remember when I’d had better. As for the greens and lentils and bread, if I’d not watched them extrude from a metal cube a few hand spans on a side, I’d never have guessed they weren’t farm fresh.

  When I expressed surprise that the box would have carried the pattern for something as ancient and, I supposed, obscure as Ethiopian coffee, the escort quickly explained.

  “This fabricant, like most of those in operation throughout the Human Entelechy, is tied into the infostructure and is capable of producing anything that anyone in the Entelechy knows how to produce.”

  “I take it that this ‘infostructure’ is a data network of some sort?”

  “Yes.” The escort flapped its wings for a brief moment, launching across empty space and alighting on the surface of the dining table, where it arranged itself directly in front of me. “‘Infostructure’ is a general term for the communication and data networks of the Entelechy. Near-real-time communication across vast light-years is accomplished by relays positioned near thresholds on the inhabited worlds and habitats. Only ships traveling interstellar space are on a time lag, both due to the travel time of the light from the nearest infostructure relay and the relativistic effects of their speed.”

  “Such as the mining ship that found my vessel, then?” I asked. “And that’s why their translated speech was so much less precise and accurate than the way you’re speaking now, or the Amazon and chimp”—the escort raised its beak momentarily, and I quickly corrected before it spoke—“or the way Zel’s and Maruti’s words were translated by that table object?”

  “Their words were actually translated by the intelligence of the room itself, which communicated through elements in the central plinth, but yes, essentially correct. The Pethesilean mining vessel was a sailship. Propelled by the pressure upon their light-reflective sails of photons broadcast from laser arrays in orbit around stars, they are able to reach speeds approaching half the speed of light in one-point-six years. The sailship that found you was in the process of decelerating, after journeying to and from the cosmic string mines, and was still far enough out of communication range that it was operating at a lag. By the time their interlinks were updated with full Information Age English lexicon and grammar, you had been placed in a dormant state while your body recuperated.”

  “And I take it sailships are the fastest thing going?”

  “Yes. There are other methods of propulsion capable of creating greater accelerations in the short run, such as high-impulse fission drives, but they are unable to sustain those accelerations for
more than brief periods. Faster-than-light travel is theoretically possible, whether through a hypothetical underspace or by manipulating the characteristics of the quantum vacuum, but in either case, the manufacture of a superluminal drive is equivalent to the entire energetic output of a developed world for more than a hundred years, and few have ever been willing to commit the necessary resources. The rare superluminal vessels that have actually been constructed, such as the Disocurene exploration vessel the Underspace Ship Phonix, or the ill-fated Endeavor, were invariably lost shortly after their initial launches, without a trace. Some theorize that in surpassing the speed of light, these vessels might violate causality, creating new universes branching off orthogonally from those in which their journeys began, with no way of returning. But no one knows for certain. All that is sure is that sailships are the only practical method for lengthy voyages.”

  I let all that sink in for a moment. Perhaps I’d been wrong? Were there still frontiers in this far future world to be explored, directions in which humanity could still expand?

  I was still mulling over the possibilities when the escort spoke again.

  “Captain Stone, I thought it best to inform you that it is nearly local sunset on the planet Cronos, if you have any desire to accept the invitation of the Anachronists.”

  “Ah, right. Those are the…” I waved my hands, trying to think of the correct word.

  “Historical re-creationists.”

  “Not quite what I was looking for,” I said with a thin smile, “but I suppose that will do.” I glanced around the wide, empty spaces of the diamond house, appointed in ridiculous luxury and comfort, and now that I’d been able to rest for a moment I found that I had no desire to stay put. “Well, I don’t suppose we have anything else on the agenda, do we?”

  “Sir? I’m afraid that I wasn’t aware that we were operating on an agenda. If you would be willing to outline the particulars, I can—”

  “Please,” I said, raising a hand apologetically, “consider it a figure of speech.”

  “Ah.” The silver eagle gave me a sidelong, appraising glance. “In that case, shall we go?”

  “You know, in my day, traveling to another planet typically involved a bit of preparation.”

  The silver eagle took wing, flying up near the lofty ceiling and then spiraling gently down, finally landing gracefully on my shoulder. Folding its wings and regarding me with one silver eye, it said, “I imagine, sir, that is precisely the sort of historical trivia that the Anachronists hope you will share with them.”

  I shrugged, scarcely feeling the weight of the eagle, and made for the door. “I hope I don’t disappoint.”

  FOURTEEN

  As we made our way back to the Central Axis, traveling via slidewalks that carried us back the way we’d come, I asked the escort a question that had been nagging me since I’d awoken to the tender mercies of the dog-people. Namely, whether humanity had ever discovered life of extraterrestrial origin as it had expanded out into the galaxy.

  When Wayfarer One left Sol, bound for the distant light of Alpha Centauri B, our principal mission was one of exploration, to find a habitable world for future colonization. A secondary objective, though, and one for which endless contingency plans had been drafted, was the search for extraterrestrial life.

  By the middle of the 22C, no indication had been found that life had arisen anywhere but on Earth. Which is not to say that life hadn’t been found elsewhere—microbial fossils had been located on Mars, and ice worms thrived in the shadow of Titan’s cryovolcanoes—but in every instance these organisms were likely the descendants of spores blasted from Earth’s surface by prehistoric asteroid impacts. Some adhered to the notion of panspermia, which held that life on Earth itself originated from seeds drifting through the cold vacuum of space from somewhere else, but no definitive proof had been discovered.

  In the long millennia that I had slumbered in my coffin sleeper on board Wayfarer One, it seemed, the proof had finally been found.

  Wherever humanity went, the escort explained, it had encountered life in any environment that was suited to support it. But while life appeared to be ubiquitous, intelligence was not.

  “Since the time of the Diaspora,” the escort said as we continued our tour of the megastructure Earth, “anything more complicated than a monocellular organism is vanishingly rare, and the rare organisms of greater complexity that have been discovered have never risen above the level of sophistication found in a primitive cockroach.”

  “Diaspora?”

  “The migration of sentients of terrestrial origin in the millennia before the first threshold was initiated, linking the worlds of the Entelechy. Contact was lost with many individuals and groups—organics, synthetics, and others of blended provenance—over the millennia. On rare occasions, contact is reestablished with one of these lost groups, as with the Exode, often to the benefit of the Entelechy.”

  “So there is intelligence out there,” I said, “but only that which we brought with us.”

  The silver eagle waggled its head in a shrug.

  “That is the prevailing view, sir. But there are those who believe differently. There are theories of older races that spanned the galaxy before the rise of humanity, and which have now disappeared from view. There is no evidence for their existence, of course, but their proponents see inferences everywhere, from the ‘fine-tuning’ of certain cosmological values to the balance of chemical constituents on certain planetary bodies, which some argue is evidence of ancient terraforming. This is known as the Demiurgist Doctrine.”

  I couldn’t help but be reminded of the antiscientific theories of creationist design, which helped transform my paternal grandfather’s homeland into a benighted backwater. His landmark novel, In the Country of the Blind, warned of the dangers of allowing that sort of antirational thinking to go unchecked, and garnered a Hugo Award for best novel while at the same time earning him few friends among the civic and religious leaders of the country. In the end, the harassment that ensued worsened to the point where he found it easier to leave the country entirely, joining the expatriate community in Bangalore, his wife and young son in tow.

  As I was growing up, my father often spoke of his hope that humanity might one day outgrow the need for religion entirely. My mother, a nonpracticing Hindu, saw value in the cultural traditions of her ancestors, and the disagreement led to more than a few vociferous discussions at family meals. That my mother had relatives in the state of Rajasthan who still had not forgiven her for marrying out of caste—a system that had been forever abolished a generation before, largely due to the efforts of my maternal grandfather—and with a Black American, no less, only served to strengthen my father’s argument.

  This Demiurgist Doctrine, at least, sounded as though it was based in empirical evidence, but I couldn’t help but wonder.

  “Are many of your people religious?” I asked.

  The silver eagle shook its head. “There are few, if any, ‘religions’ in the Entelechy, as the term has historically been used. However, there are adherents to hypotheses that have not, or even cannot, be experimentally proven, commonly referred to as ‘doctrines.’ In addition to the Demiurgists, there is the Ordinator Doctrine, which holds that the universe is a computational mechanism, and the related Recursive Doctrine, which contends that all of existence is an historical emulation of some earlier reality. There are any number of such non-falsifiable hypotheses currently in vogue, and a greater number which have passed in and out of fashion in recent years.”

  “So none of the religions of my era have survived, then?”

  “That would not be a completely accurate statement, sir. But those that have survived have evolved into forms their former adherents likely would not recognize.”

  I glanced around me as the slidewalk carried us through pleasure gardens and towering castles of glass, all constructed of matter that once had been the dirt beneath my feet.

  “I can’t say that I’d blame them.”


  FIFTEEN

  The escort maneuvered us off the slidewalks and back to the grand structure called the Central Axis, the hub of the threshold network of wormholes. From there, reaching the terraformed world of Cronos was a journey of no more than a quarter of an hour as we transited thresholds one after another, each time stepping through the towering metal arch from one axis to another, each smaller and farther from the central hub than the last. Finally, our third transit carried us to the terminus on Cronos itself, and I found myself standing on the surface of another Earth.

  Had I not known better, I would have thought I stood in the center of some major metropolitan city in the western hemisphere, sometime in the early 21C, pre-Impact. But a moment’s examination began to reveal the anachronisms, some subtle and some far less so. Skyscrapers rose on all sides of a broad plaza, in the center of which stood the threshold. A few hundred meters away a crowd milled, though little pockets drifted here and there in all directions. Horse-drawn carriages and early 20C roadsters shared the roadways with bicyclers and hovercrafts, and overhead, a zeppelin drifted, tethered to a spire atop a nearby tower, while biplanes and scramjets cut across the sky at varying speeds.

  The crowd seemed not yet to have noticed our arrival, though one or two heads began to turn our way. I felt a twisting in my stomach, a familiar fight-or-flight reflex, and had to resist the temptation to flee back through the threshold.

  Having been trained in Interdiction Negotiation, I’ve had experience in sizing up the tactical situation of any circumstance and using available resources to my advantage, and I’ve been in more than a few tight spots. I’ve gone ship to ship in complete vacuum wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of pants, I’ve walked unarmed into a hostile mining ship overrun with out-of-control cyborg mining birds, and once I even refused to smoke a bowl with Laurentien Francisca Marcella, princess of Orange-Nassau, queen of the Netherlands Court in exile on Ceres (a mistake I didn’t make twice). But I found myself thinking twice about the situation I found myself in.