For Love and Glory

IX

Coming out of hyperjump and moving inward through the Solar System, Torsten Hebo’s little ship chanced to pass near enough to the Enigma that it showed as a star-twinkle in a viewscreen. He’d heard about this construct, orbited in the asteroid belt a couple of centuries ago. Curious, he magnified the image and amplified the light, until the thing should have been plain to his eyes. It still wasn’t. A bewildering geometry of—what, slender girders and braces, complexly curved?—surrounded a core of ever-changeable, softly opalescent glow. No more identifiable now than it was in pictures he’d seen, taken by other visitors and released on the interstellar communication webs.

Not a secret. Merely incomprehensible. Earth didn’t issue news releases, but the questions of outsiders got polite, if rather brief and formal, answers. This was an instrumentality for fundamental research. That alone had, at first, been startling enough. Weren’t the basic equations of physics written down several hundred years ago? Well, maybe there really was more to be discovered. Unfortunately, said the responses, the principles behind this thing were not explainable, in any meaningful sense of the word, to any organic brain—including unreinforced Earth-human—or any artificial intelligence developed on any other planet. Whatever the results of its investigations, they would be made as public as possible.

The rest was silence.

Well, Hebo thought, I suppose they’re working on it yet, and maybe getting nowhere. And maybe I ought to resent the claim that I and every organic being, human or nonhuman, haven’t the brains to understand what’s going on. But, hell, the universe is full of things I can’t understand, like women or affine geometry or Arzethian politics, and so what? My ego isn’t tied that hard to my intellect.

It is kind of eerie, though, that Earth seems to be the only planet that everybody thinks of as speaking with a single voice, like a single entity.

The Enigma passed from view, and soon into the bottom of his mind. After all, knocking about in space, he’d encountered plenty of different weirdnesses. And ahead of him was no threat but, he hoped, release and renewal.

He turned his attention to the waxing radiance ahead and presently its silvery companion. It seemed to take a long while, and then it seemed to have taken almost no time, before he was there.

Seen from the outside, Earth had changed little since the last few of his visits. The same white-marbled blue beauty shone athwart crystalline darkness, bearing the same heraldry of continents. The polar caps kept their same modest size, a few dun spots of desert remained, no city lights clustered and sprawled across the nighted side. Fewer solar-power collection fields glimmered on the moon, but he’d known about that change. Information did diffuse starward, news, images, borne more by transients than by direct communication, and less and less often, but apparently nothing kept deliberately secret. Apparently. Maybe, he thought again, it was just that nothing much was going on anymore that his kind of people could follow.

Procedures for approach, orbiting, descent, and such-like matters had certainly gotten streamlined. He especially appreciated not having to lie several hours abed while nanoprobes swarmed through him checking for pathogens; now a scanner did the job in about one minute. Nevertheless, the feeling of being moved along in a huge, smooth-running machine was unexpectedly lonesome.

A robotic flitter set him and his meager baggage down at one of the two hostels kept for humans from outside. The rest had gradually been shut down as demand for them dwindled. He’d picked the one on Oahu, mostly because he’d been recalling youthful days—his first youth—sailing a knockabout around among the Islands and beachcombing on them with a delightful young woman.

Whatever became of her? Had he been a fool to lose touch? Or, he wondered, had wistful memory colored those days brighter than they’d really been and put in happenings that never really happened? He couldn’t bring her name to mind.

From the air, he’d seen that Honolulu and the other cities were completely gone. A few low, sleek buildings lay scattered amidst gardens and stands of tropical wildwood. But beyond Diamond Head, Hanauma Bay was about the same as ever and the diving was, if anything, better now when he had it to himself and the coral had been so well rehabilitated. Some congenial company would have been nice, though. He walked back up to the hostel in a mood less happy than the scenery deserved.

It affected an ancient style. That made sense. What its guests chiefly had in common was the history of this world before their forbears—or, in a few cases like his, they themselves—departed. When Hebo came down from his room casually dressed for a drink before dinner, he was shown to a covered deck open to the breezes and the sight of sea and cliffs. A bewildering richness of birds soared, dipped, and cried. He’d heard that some were of native species long extinct, recreated on the basis of records equally old.

The drink was served by an unobtrusive machine. The food, when it came, was good but nothing he recognized; a really first-chop wine came with it. Still, he was glad when another man appeared, and invited him to his table.

Seiichi Okuma spoke no language Hebo could handle. The servitor brought a translator and they were soon in conversation. The other man turned out to be from Akiko, in the Beta Centauri region, which was somewhat off Hebo’s usual beat. He was here as part of a small team of—anthropologists? His fellows were currently scattered over the globe. Their sponsors hoped they could gain a somewhat better understanding of present-day Earth, experiencing its life in more detail and with less predictability than verbals, visuals, and virtuals offered.

“And how’ve you been doing?” Hebo asked.

“None of us are sure yet,” Okuma admitted, “but already it’s rather discouraging. We knew, of course, the human population is down to only about fifty million. That’s anomalous enough. But I, at least, I had not guessed how remote that population has become.”

“People aren’t friendly?”

The question was of more than academic interest to Hebo. He hadn’t yet spoken at any length with anyone but a space traffic control officer, and that was by beamphone and she was modified-human—not ugly, but not his type. Her words had been polite, no more. He’d wondered why she cared to do something so routine, when it could easily and more efficiently be cybered. Maybe fleeting encounters with yokels like him amused her. As for the utility of it, he supposed a live person was meant as a courtesy to newcomers.

Unless, of course, she too was a virtual.

“Oh, those I have sought out have been ready enough to talk, if not very forthcoming,” Okuma said. “Some have actually extended hospitality of an austere sort. But I have never felt their attention was really on me.”

“Most of their awareness in linkage.” A slight shiver passed through Hebo. “The world-mind. Yeah.”

Okuma shook his head. “That is a misnomer. It is—forgive me, sir—a common misconception. My group had learned that much beforehand. Consciousness on Earth—human, parahuman, quantum-net—is not joined in one entity. Relationships are more subtle and changeable than that.”

“I know, I know. Sort of, anyway. I’m just not sure how far the business has, uh, evolved.”

“That is a major part of what we are trying to discover. I suspect increasingly that we’ll get answers we cannot quite comprehend.”

Okuma paused. Surf beyond the reefs murmured, wind whispered, bird-cries began to die away as the sun went low.

“In a sense,” he mused, “we who live among the stars, we whose ancestors moved there and founded what they imagined were new societies, are the relics, the archaic life-forms. We remain in our old human ways because we are suited to them. Longevity, rejuvenation, reinforces this basic conservatism, but our children grow into it likewise. Ours is, after all, a rich, infinitely diverse and exciting environment—from the old human viewpoint. But so, no doubt, is yonder sea to the sharks in it. They have scarcely changed for many millions of years. Yet for the past millennium, they have survived on human sufferance.”

“Hey!” exclaimed Hebo. “You don’t mean we’re in that situation?”

“No, no, not precisely. Earth poses no threat to us. The life on it, including the synthetic and machine life, has passed us by. It has other interests than spreading out into a material universe.”

Hebo relaxed. “Well, maybe that’s how it sees the matter. But look, why hasn’t the same development overtaken—or transfigured, or whatever word you want—any nonhumans?”

“They are too unlike us. You probably know better than I how vastly their psychologies, instincts, drives, capabilities differ from ours, and from each other’s. Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I think we interact with them, and they with us, only on a rather superficial level. Partnership is possible between human and alien, yes. Sometimes even what the human feels as friendship. But how does the alien feel it? That may be ultimately unknowable, on either side.”

Hebo rubbed his chin. “M-m, yes, in a way I have to agree. Kind of like a—a falcon and a dog. Men used to hunt with them.”

Okuma’s eyes widened. “Indeed? When?”

“Before my time. But I do go far enough back to’ve read about it and seen historical shows.”

“Fascinating,” the scientist breathed. “As, I am sure, is all of your long experience.”

Hebo sighed. “Too long, maybe.”

“I would be glad to hear something about it,” said Okuma eagerly.

Talk went on while clouds crossed the horizon. When Hebo explained why he had come back, Okuma assured him, “I am certain you will be well treated at the clinic, not merely with competence but with consideration, sympathy, and, yes, warmth. Good practice calls for it.”

“Sure, they’ve got excellent interactive programs,” Hebo said cynically.

Okuma shook his head. “True, but I expect that you will deal with living humans, too, if only because you will interest them as you do me. And their feelings for you will be perfectly genuine. A person on Earth today can at any instant attain any chosen emotional state.” After a moment: “I have an idea that this is a major factor in making them foreign to us.”

When at last Hebo said goodnight and returned to his room, he could have had whatever virtual surroundings he wanted; but his wish was only for sleep.

He didn’t drift off at once, though. For a while he lay wondering whether maybe the Forerunners had gone the way of Earth and that was why they were no longer around and what they might have become by now.

Oh, sure, strictly speaking, there was no such thing as simultaneity when you looked at interstellar distances. He’d heard about experiments with sending a hyperbeam signal into the past. But nobody had managed to boost a spacecraft to speeds high enough that the effect amounted to anything you didn’t need ultrasensitive instruments to detect. Energy considerations and friction with the interstellar medium seemed to forbid. Besides, didn’t theory say the effect was necessarily limited? A causal loop… you can’t rewrite what God’s already written.… Leave the philosophy to the physicists. For practical purposes, when he got home he’d have lived just about as many seconds, minutes, days, months as the folks who’d stayed there. Meanwhile, he could call them on a hyperbeam if he had some reason for taking the trouble to arrange it. He might as well think of them as they were at “this moment.”

Forerunners reminded him… how was Lissa Windholm getting along? Quite a girl, that…