Heavy Water and Other Stories

1

POP JONES WAS TELLING the child why he couldn’t watch the news that day.

“Special regulation, Ash. You have to be eighteen. It’s like an X-certificate.”

“I want to see the Martian.”

“Well you can’t. And he’s not strictly speaking a Martian. They think he must be some sort of robot.”

“He’s the man on Mars.”

“He, or it, is the janitor on Mars.”

And Pop Jones was the janitor on earth—more specifically, the janitor of Shepherds Lodge, the last nonprivatized orphanage in England. Remote, decrepit, overcrowded, and all male, the place was, of course, a Shangri-La of pedophilia. And Pop Jones was, of course, a pedophile, like everybody else on the staff. To use the (rather misleading) jargon, he was a “functional” pedophile—which is to say, his pedophilia didn’t function. Pop Jones was an inactive pedophile, unlike his hyperactive colleagues. He had never interfered with any of the boys in his care: not once.

The child, Ashley, a long-suffering nine-year-old, said, “They’re taking us to the beach. I want to stay and see the robot.”

“To the beach! Remember to take your starblock.”

“But I want to starbathe.”

“You’ll get starstroke out there.”

“I want a startan.”

“A startan? You’ll get starburn!”

No one called it the sun anymore: the nature of the relationship had changed. It was 25 June, 2049, and every television on earth would soon be featuring the live interview with the janitor on Mars.

Outside, the boys were being marshaled into queues under the awning as the first electric bus pulled up. Each of them clutched his white umbrella. Pop Jones was pleased to see that Ashley was wearing his starglasses and his starhat. All the children were flinching up at the sky. Each mouth wore a wary sneer.

The thing had been building for nine months.

On 30 September, 2048, at 12:45 P.M., West Coast time, Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume, the most frankly glamorous of CNN’s main newscasters, received an encrypted message on her PDA. Incarnacion’s computer failed to recognize the cipher but then quickly cracked it. The message was written in the Blacksmith Code, unused for a century and considered obsolescent in World War II. It began, CKBIa TCaAIa-CaBTKaCa: Dear Incarnacion. Decoded, the message said:

FORGIVE THE INTRUSION, BUT I‘M GOING TO BE COMING IN ON YOUR AIRTIME TONIGHT. I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU. I’M THE JANITOR ON MARS. TALK TO PICK AROUND FIVE-THIRTY.

Pick was Pickering Hume, Incarnacion’s husband, who, noncoincidentally (it was soon supposed), worked in the public-relations and fund-raising departments of SETI—or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Incarnacion called Pick right away at his office in Mountain View. They discussed the transmission: which of their friends, they wondered, was responsible for it? But at 17:31 Pick called back. In a clogged whisper he told her that they were receiving a regularly repeated radio signal on the hydrogen line from the Tharsis Bulge on Mars, in straight Morse. The Morse from Mars was saying: PICK—CALL INCARNACION.

It was five-forty in Los Angeles. Within fifteen minutes the sat links were engaged and the floor of Incarnacion’s studio was filling up with astronomers, cosmologists, philosophers, historians, science-fiction writers, millennarians, Rapturists, UFO abductees, churchmen, politicians, and five-star generals, gathered for a story that just kept on breaking—that went twenty-four hours and stayed that way. On the stroke of six o’clock the screen turned a rusty red.

Pop Jones himself was watching, on that day, along with every other adult in the building, called to the Common Room by the Principal, Mr. Davidge. The screen went red, then white. And the message appeared, unscrolling upwards, B-movie style, in heroic, backward-leaning capitals. It said:

GREETINGS DNA, FROM HAR DECHER, THE RED ONE, AS YOUR EGYPTIANS CALLED OUR WORLD, OR NERGAL, AS YOUR BABYLONIANS HAD IT: THE STAR OF DEATH. GREETINGS FROM MARS. OUR TWO PLANETS HAVE MUCH IN COMMON. OUR DIURNAL MOTION IS SIMILAR. THE OBLIQUITY OF OUR RESPECTIVE ECLIPTICS IS NOT VERY DIFFERENT. YOU HAVE OCEANS, AN ATMOSPHERE, A MAGNETOSPHERE. SO DID WE. YOU ARE LARGER. YOU ARE CLOSER IN. WE COOLED QUICKER. BUT LIFE ON OUR PLANETS WAS SEEDED MORE OR LESS COINSTANTANEOUSLY—A DIFFERENCE OF A FEW MONTHS, WITH EARTH TAKING TECHNICAL SENIORITY. OUR WORLDS, AS I SAY, ARE SIMILAR, AND WERE ONCE MORE SIMILAR. BUT OUR HISTORIES RADICALLY AND SPECTACULARLY DIVERGE.

IT’S GONE NOW, VANISHED, ALL MARTIAN LIFE, AND I’M WHAT REMAINS. I AM THE JANITOR ON MARS. AND I HAVE BEEN WATCHING YOU, TRIPWIRED TO MAKE CONTACT AT THE APPROPRIATE TIME. THAT TIME HAS COME. LET’S TALK.

I’LL BE IN TOUCH WITH NASA ABOUT LAUNCH WINDOWS. ALSO SOME TIPS ABOUT CLIMBING YOUR GRAVITY WELL: A FUEL THING. AND A SUGGESTION ABOUT YOUR COSMIC-RAY PROBLEM AND WAYS OF REDUCING PAYLOAD. DUPLICATES OF ALL COMMUNICATIONS WILL GO TO CNN AND THE NEW YORK TIMES. LET’S PLAY THIS ONE STRAIGHT, PLEASE.

YOU NEVER WERE ALONE. YOU JUST THOUGHT YOU WERE. AND HOW COULD YOU EVER HAVE THOUGHT THAT? DNA, MAKE HASTE. I AM IMPATIENT TO SEE YOU WITH MY OWN EYES. COME.

Under his dirty white umbrella Pop Jones limped quickly across the courtyard. He glanced up. Although his flesh wore the pallor of deep bacherlorhood, Pop’s face often looked childish, tentative; this, plus his pertly plump backside, his piping yet uneffeminate voice, and his chastity, combined to earn him his nickname. His nickname was Eunuch. (His forename, moreover, was Enoch.) The children he treated with bantering geniality. But with his fellow adults Pop Jones was a janitor, through and through; he was all janitor, a janitors’ janitor, idle, disobliging, truculent, withdrawn. And, in his person, defiantly unclean. Overhead the star wriggled goopily in the sky, with slipped penumbra, like one of the cataracts it so prolifically dispensed. The sun hadn’t changed. The sky had. The sky had fallen sick, but everybody said it was now getting better again. Pop limped on up the steps to the Sanatorium. He turned: a square lawn supporting two ancient trees, both warped and crushed by time into postures of lavatorial agony. Shepherds Lodge looked like an Oxford college as glimpsed in the dreams of Uriah Heep. Pop Jones, taking pride in his profession, maintained the place as a sophistical labyrinth of sweat and shiver, the radiators now raw, now molten, the classrooms either freezers or crucibles, the taps, once turned, waiting a while before hawking forth their gouts of steam or sleet. The plumbing clanked. Locks stuck. All the lights flickered and fizzed.

He passed the medical officer’s nook and glanced sideways into the old surgical storeroom, now a mini-gym, where two male nurses were talc-ing their hands for the bench press. They glanced back at him, pausing. Pop Jones could feel the hum of isolation in his ears. Yes, he thought, a dreadful situation. Quite dreadful. The whole moral order. But someone has to… The patient he had come to see was an eleven-year-old called Timmy. Timmy suffered from various learning disabilities (he was always injuring himself by falling over or walking into walls), and Pop Jones felt a special tenderness for him. Many of the boys at Shepherds Lodge, it had to be said, were somewhat soiled and complaisant, if not thoroughly debauched. Indeed, on warm evenings the place had the feel of an antebellum bordello, with boys in pyjamas straddling windowsills—training their hair, reading mail-order magazines—to the sound of some thrummed guitar… Timmy wasn’t like that. Sealed off in his own mind, Timmy had an inviolability that everyone had respected. Until now. Pop and Timmy were chaste—they were the innocents! That was their bond… To be clear: it is not youth alone that attracts the pedophile. The pedophile, for some reason, wants carnal knowledge of the carnally ignorant: a top-heavy encounter, involving lost significance. So far as the child is concerned, of course, that lost significance doesn’t stay lost, but lingers, forever. On some level Pop Jones sensed the nature of this disparity, this preemption, and it kept him halfway straight. The merest nudge or nuzzle, every now and then. His use of the bathhouse peepholes was now strictly rationed. In any given month, you could count his rootlings in the laundry baskets on the fingers of one hand.

“How are you this morning, my lad?”

“Car,” said Timmy.

Timmy was alone in the six-bed ward. A TV set roosted high up on the opposite wall: it showed the planet Mars, filling half the screen now, and getting ever closer.

“Timmy, try to remember. Who did this to you, Timmy?”

“House,” said Timmy.

The boy was not in San for one of his workaday injuries, something like a burn or a twisted ankle. Timmy was in San because he had been raped: three days ago. Mr. Caroline had found him in the potting shed, lying on the duckboards, weeping. And from then on Timmy had lapsed into the semi-autistic bemusement that had marked his first two years at Shepherds Lodge: the state that Pop Jones, and others, liked to think they had coaxed him out of. The flower had partly opened. It had now closed again.

“Timmy, try to remember.”

“Floor,” said Timmy.

Rape—nonstatutory rape—was vanishingly rare at Shepherds Lodge: rape flew in the face of everything its staff cherished and honored. Intergenerational sex, in that gothic mass on the steep green of the Welsh border, was of course ubiquitous, but they had a belief system which accounted for that. Its signal precept was that the children liked it.

“Who did this, Timmy?” persisted Pop, because Timmy was perfectly capable of identifying and, after a fashion, naming every carer on the payroll. The Principal, Mr. Davidge, he called “Day.” Mr. Caroline he called “Ro.” Pop Jones himself he called “Jo.” Who did this? Everyone, including Pop, was edging toward a wholly unmanageable suspicion: Davidge had done it. It seemed inescapable. The last time something like this happened (in fact a much milder case, involving the “inappropriate fondling” of a temporary referral from Birmingham), Davidge had pursued the matter with Corsican rigor. But the investigation into the attack on Timmy seemed oddly stalled: three days had passed without so much as an analdilation test. Davidge’s shrugs and prevarications, by a process of political trickledown, now threatened a general dissolution, Pop sensed. The janitor was on his own here. Already he felt at the limit of his moral courage. The only whispers of support were coming from a confused and indignant eleven-year-old called Ryan, Davidge’s current regular (and, therefore, the cynosure of B Wing).

“Was it… ‘Day’?” he asked, leaning nearer.

“Dog,” said Timmy.

The two male nurses—the two reeking sadists in their sleeveless T-shirts—were snorting rhythmically under their weights. Pop called out to them:

“Excuse me? Excuse me? Mr. Fitzmaurice, if you please. You will be turning this television off, I hope. The boys are not permitted to watch the news today. It’s an OO. An official order. From the Department Head.”

The male nurses leered perfunctorily at each other and made no response.

“This television will have to be disconnected.”

Fitzmaurice sat up on his bench and shouted, “If I do that the whole fucking system goes down. Every TV in the fucking gaff.”

Pop Jones, as a janitor, had to bow to the logic of that. He said, “Then he’ll have to be moved. It may be quite unsuitable for children. There may be some bad language.”

With a cheerful squint Fitzmaurice said, “Bad language?”

“You can turn the sound down at least. Nobody knows what’s going to happen up there. Anything could happen up there.”

Fitzmaurice shrugged.

“Car,” said Timmy.

Pop looked at the TV. Mars now filled the screen.

This day many questions would be answered. Not the least pressing (many felt) was: why now? What was the “tripwire”? How did you explain the timing of the Contact from the janitor on Mars?

It seemed significant, or perverse, for two reasons. As recently as 2047, after many a probe and flyby, NASA had successfully completed the first manned mission to Mars. The Earthling cosmonauts spent three months on the Red Planet and returned with almost half a ton of it in sample form. Preliminary analysis of this material was completed and made public in the autumn of 2048. The findings seemed unambiguous. True, the layer of permafrost proved that water had once flowed on the Martian surface, and in stupendous quantities, as was already clear from the flood tracks in its gorge and valley systems. But otherwise the Sojourner 3 mission could come up with nothing to puncture the verdict of ageless sterility. So the question remained: why wasn’t Contact made then? In the interim 1,500 new telecommunications satellites had gone into orbit; as the janitor on Mars himself pointed out, in of one his earlier communiqués, Earth had practically walled itself up with space junk. Five hundred units had to be blown out of the sky to clear a lane for Sojourner 4.

The second coincidence had to do with ALH84001. ALH84001 was the fist-sized, green-tinged lump of rock found in Antarctica in 1984, analyzed in 1986, and argued about for over half a century. But its history was grander, weirder, and above all longer than that. About 4.5 billion years ago ALH84001 was an anonymous subterranean resident of primordial Mars; 4,485,000,000 years later something big hit Mars at a shallow angle and ALH84001 was part of its ejecta; for 14,987,000 years it followed a cat’s-cradle solar orbit before crashlanding on Earth. Then, 13,000 years later still, a meteorite-hunter called Roberta Star tripped over it and the controversy began. Did ALH84001 bear traces of microscopic life? The answer came, finally, in April 2049—two months before the janitor on Mars made his move. And the answer was No. ALH84001’s organic compounds (magnetite, gregite, and pyrrhotite) were proven to be mere polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—i.e., they were nonbiological. Apparently Mars couldn’t even support a segmented worm one-hundredth the width of a human hair. That was how dead Mars seemed.

Let me remind you that these images… from the camera in the nose cone of the trailing vessel. Lacking an ozone layer… effectively sterilized by solar ultraviolet radiation. The atmosphere… thinner than our best laboratory vacuums. We can see Phobos, the larger… a mere 3,500 miles distant as compared to our moon’s… Deimos, the second satellite, is overhead… as bright to the eye as Venus.

The TV-viewing armchair in Pop Jones’s terrible old Y-front of a bedroom (with its Bovril tins and clouded toothmugs) had become steeped in his emanations, over the years. Anyone else, settling into it, would have instantly succumbed to projectile nausea, and would have shot up out of it, as from an ejector seat. But not Pop: in his armchair he felt fully alive. Look at him now, his tongue idling on his lower teeth, as he watched the screen with the kind of awe he usually reserved for only the most sincere and accurate pedography, freely available from many an outlet in Shepherds Lodge (and quite regularly starring its inmates). He had seen this image before—everyone had: a Colorado made of rust before a strangely proximate horizon. But the planet was now in some sense a living Mars, and life invested it everywhere with menace. The thin mist looked like fat on the meaty crimson of the regolith, and shapes seemed to form and change in the shadows of the sharp ravines…

For a second the picture was lost. Then the voice of Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume—warmly aspirated, extravagantly human—continued:

In some ways Mars is a small world. Its surface area is only a third of ours, and its mass only a thousandth. But in other ways Mars is a big world. Its canyons… than ours, its peaks far higher. One of its gorges, the Valles… Grand Canyon to shame. And—yes: we’re approaching it now. This is Olympus Mons, sixteen miles high—three Everests—but sloping so gradually that it casts no shadow. It resembles the shield volcanoes in… I have just been told that this vessel is no longer under our control. He’s bringing us in. We… We…

And you saw it: in utter silence but with sky-shaking effort, the mountain was opening—its segmented upper flanks now bending backwards like a nest full of titanic chicks with their beaks open wanting food. The leading vessel, Nobel I, strained above these battlements, and plummeted. Nobel 2, the POV vessel, followed. During its descent Pop felt that he was riding an elevator downwards, the innards of the edifice thrumming past you in the dark, but much too quickly: with all the avid acceleration of free fall.

Every screen on Earth stayed black. Then these numerals appeared in a pale shade of green: 45:00. And started going 44:59, 44:58, 44:57…

In fact it was twice that many minutes before anything happened.

A weak light came up and the camera jerked around in consternation, as if violently roused from deep slumber. There were shadows, figures. You could hear mumbling and coughing. And one of their number was calling out in a strained and self-conscious voice: “Hello!… Hello?… Hello!… Hello?”

Everything is fine here. We’ve been waiting in this… room. The vessels docked smoothly and we just followed the arrowed signs. One of the Laureates fell over a moment ago, but was unhurt. And for a moment Miss World had a minor problem with her air supply. We are wearing filament-heated mesh suits with…

There had of course been enormous controversy about who would go, and who would not go, to meet the janitor on Mars. Everyone on Earth was up for it. After all, there was no longer anything frightening or even exotic about space travel. In the Thirties and Forties, before the satellites really thickened up, lunar tourism expanded to the extent that parts of the moon’s surface now resembled a wintry Torremelinos. Granted, the moon was a mere 250,000 miles away, and Mars, at the current opposition, was almost two million. But everyone was up for it. No ticket had ever been hotter. There were sixty-five seats. And seven billion people in the queue.

They had to contend not just with each other but also with the janitor on Mars, who, in a number of communications, had proved himself a brisk and abrasive stipulator. For example he had at the outset refused to countenance any clerics or politicians. Later, when pressed by massive referenda to find a couple of seats for the Pope and the U.S. President, the janitor on Mars caused far more hurt than mirth when he sent the following E-mail to the New York Times (forcing that journal to break an ancient taboo: “print the obscenity in full,” he cautioned, “or I switch to the Post”): “Don’t send me no fucking monkeys, okay? Monkeys no good. Just send me the talent.” He wanted scientists, poets, painters, musicians, mathematicians, philosophers “and some examples of male and female pulchritude.” He wanted no more media than Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume (and her camera operator. She was also allowed to bring Pick). The haggling continued well into the countdown at Cape Canaveral. In the end there were twenty-eight hard-science Laureates on board Nobels 1 and 2, as well as several fashion models, Miss World, some NASA personnel, and various searchers and reachers from various branches of the humanities. The janitor on Mars had been particularly obdurate about Miss World, even though the contest she had won was by now an obscure affair, disputed between a couple of hundred interested onlookers in the Marriott at Buffalo Airport.

This weakness of the janitor’s—for harsh language and harsh sarcasm—was the focus of much terrestrial discussion, and much disquiet. Even those who shared this weakness seemed to sense a breach of fundamental cosmic decorum. The pop psychologist Udi Ertigan put many minds at rest with the following suggestion (soon adopted as the consensus view): “I see here a mixture of high and low styles. The high style feels programmed, the low style acquired. Acquired from whom? From us! Our TV transmissions go out into space at the speed of light. What we’re dealing with is a robot who’s watched too many movies.” Make no mistake, though: the janitor on Mars was for real. At first, the doubters doubted and the trimmers trimmed. But the janitor on Mars was definitely for real. His brief introductory tips about fuel-gelation had revolutionized aeronautics. And every couple of weeks he stirred up one discipline after the other with his mordant memos on such things as protein synthesis, the Coriolis force, slow-freeze theory, tensor calculus, chaos and K-entropy, gastrulation in developmental biology, sentential variables, butterfly catastrophe, Champernowne’s number, and the Entscheidungsproblem. The janitor on Mars had promised to disclose a formula for cold fusion (“I’m no expert,” he wrote, “and I’m having some trouble dumbing down the math”) and a cure for cancer (“Or how about prevention? Or would you settle for remission?”). “Your gerontology, he noted, “is in its infancy. Working together, we can double life expectancy within a decade.” On cosmological issues—and on Martian history—he usually refused to be drawn, saying that there were “some things you [couldn’t] talk about on the phone”; and, besides, he didn’t want “to cheapen the trip.” “But I will say this,” he said:

The Big Bang and the Steady State theories are both wrong. Or, to put it another way, they are both right but incomplete. It pains me to see you jerk back from the apparent paradox that the Universe is younger than some of the stars it contains. That’s like Clue One.

Iain Henryson, Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University, described the mathematics that accompanied this memo as “ineffable. In every sense.” The janitor on Mars was often petulant, insensitive, facetious and sour, and not infrequently profane. But Earth trusted his intelligence, believing, as it always had, in the ultimate indivisibility of the intelligent and the good.

It was in any case a time of hope for the blue planet. The revolution in consciousness during the early decades of the century, a second enlightenment having to do with self-awareness as a species, was at last gaining political will. None of the biospherical disasters had quite gone ahead and happened. Humankind was still bailing water, but the levels had all ceased rising and some had started to fall. And for the first time in Earth’s recorded history no wars were being contested on its surface.

Pop Jones settled back into his armchair, then, with all the best kinds of thoughts and feelings. If things did start to get rough he would go and see Davidge about getting Timmy moved at half-time—during the intermission demanded by the janitor on Mars.

We are wearing filament-heated mesh suits with autonomous air supply, but according to Colonel Hicks’s instruments the air is breathable and the temperature is rising. It was close to freezing at first but now it’s evidently no worse than chilly. And damp. I’m removing my headpiece… now. Yup. Seems okay… Gravity is at 1 g. I have no sense of lightness or hollowness. We seem to be in some kind of reception area, but our lights don’t work and until a minute ago we’ve had only the faintest illumination. I can hear…

You could hear the squawk of tortured rivets or hinges, and high on the wall was abruptly thrown a slender oblong of light, which briefly widened as a shadow moved past its source. Then the door closed on the re-established gloom. Pop Jones nodded in sudden agreement. Whether or not the janitor on Mars was a genuine Martian (and there had been much speculation earlier on: a hoax, no, but was he maybe a lure?), the janitor on Mars, in Pop’s view, was definitely a genuine janitor. Now kill the light again, thought Pop, and turn off the heat. He listened expectantly for the clank of buckets, the skewering of big old keys in cold damp locks. But all he heard was the slow clop of footsteps. Then, causing pain to the dark-adapted eye, the lights came on with brutal unanimity.

“Welcome, DNA. So this is the double helix on the right-handed scroll. DNA, I extend my greetings to you.”

When you could focus you saw that the janitor on Mars sat at a table on a raised stage: an unequivocal robot wearing blue-black overalls and a shirt and tie. His face was a dramatically featureless beak of burnished metal; his hands, clawlike, intricate, fidgety. The accent was not unfamiliar: semieducated American. He sounded like a sports coach—a sports coach addressing other, lesser sports coaches. But he had no mouth to frame the words and they had a buzzy, boxy tone: an interior sizzle. The janitor on Mars tossed an empty clipboard on to the table and said,

“Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the condition of these modest furnishings. This room is something I threw together almost exactly a century ago, on 29 August, 1949: the day it became clear that Earth was featuring two combatants equipped with nuclear arms. I kept meaning to update it. But I could never be fucked… Human beings, don’t look that way. Miss World: don’t crinkle your nose at me. And dispense, in general, with your expectations of grandeur. There is such a thing as cosmic censorship. But the universe is profoundly and essentially profane. I think you’ll be awed by some of the things I’m going to tell you. Other emotions, however, will predominate. Emotions like fear and contempt. Or better say terror and disgust. Terror and disgust. Well. First—the past.”

By now two cameras were established back-to-back at the base of the podium. You saw the janitor on Mars; and then you saw his audience (seated on tin chairs in an ashen assembly hall: wood paneling, drab drapes on the false windows; a blackboard; the American and Soviet flags). In the front row sat Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume and her husband, Pickering. Tentatively Incarnacion raised her hand.

“Yes, Incarnacion.”

She blushed, half-smiled, and said, “May I ask a preliminary question, sir?”

The janitor on Mars gave a minimal nod.

“Sir. Only two years ago there were human beings on your doorstep. Why—?”

“Why didn’t I make myself known to you then? There’s a good reason for that: the tripwire. Patience, please. All will become clear. If I may revert to the program? The past… To recap: Earth and Mars are satellites of the same second-generation, metal-rich, main-sequence yellow dwarf on the median disk of the Milky Way. Our planets seized and formed some four and a half billion years ago. Smaller, and further out, we cooled quicker. Which you might say gave us a head start.”

With a brief snort of amusement or perhaps derision the janitor on Mars leant backwards in his chair and thoughtfully intermeshed his slender talons.

“Now. We two had the same prebiotic chemistry and were pollinated by the same long-periodical comet: the Alpha Comet, as we called her, which visits the solar system every 113 million years. Life having been established on Earth, you then underwent that process you indulgently call “evolution.” Whereas we were up and running pretty much right away. I mean, in a scant 300 million years. While you were just some fucking disease. Some fucking germ, stinking up the shoreline. And I can promise you that ours was the more typical planetary experience: self-organizing complexity, with remorseless teleological drive. Martian civilization flourished, with a few ups and down, for over three trillennia, three billion years, reaching its (what shall I say?)—its apotheosis, its climax 500 million years ago, at which time, as they say, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Forty-three million years later, Martian life was extinguished, and I, already emplaced, was activated, to await tripwire.”

Miss World said, “Sir? Could you tell us what your people looked like?”

Nicely framed though this question was, the janitor on Mars seemed to take some exception to it. A momentary shudder in the thick blade of his face.

“Not unlike you now, at first. Somewhat taller and ganglier and hairier. We did not excrete. We did not sleep. And of course we lived a good deal longer than you do—even at the outset. This explains much. You see, DNA isn’t any good until it’s twenty years old, and by the time you’re forty your brains start to rot. Average life expectancy on Mars was at least two centuries even before they started upping it. And of course we pursued aggressive bioengineering from a very early stage. For instance, we soon developed a neurological integrated-circuit technology. What you’d call telepathy. I’m doing it now, though I’ve added a voice-over for TV viewers. Can you feel that little nasal niggle in your heads? Thoughts, it might please you to learn, are infinity-tending and travel at the speed of light.”

The janitor on Mars stood—with a terrible backward-juddering scrape of his metal chair that had Pop Jones frowning with approval as he reached for the tin of Bovril and the spoon. At this stage, Pop’s feelings for his Martian counterpart touched many bases: from a sense of solidarity all the way to outright hero worship. The air of brusque obstructiveness, the grudge-harboring slant of his gaze; and there was something else, something subtler, that struck Pop as so quintessentially janitorial. Alertness to the threat of effort: that was it. The day has come, he thought. The day when at last the janitors—

“Now I don’t have all afternoon,” said the robot, rather unfeelingly, perhaps (his audience having spent four-and-a-half months in transit). In his black crepe-soled shoes the janitor on Mars was no more than five feet tall. Yet he filled his space with formidable conviction—a metallic self-sufficiency. He moved like a living being but he could never be mistaken for one, in any light. And while the face had an expressive range of attitudes and elevations, there was nothing human, nothing avian, nothing remotely organic in its severity. He approached the edge of the stage, saying,

“Let’s not have this degenerate into Q and A. I have a program to get through here. We’ll go thumbnail and examine our respective journeys in parallel. So: 3.7 billion years ago, life is seeded. 3.4 billion years ago, Martians, as I say, are up and running: ‘hunter-gatherers’ is your euphemism but ‘scavengers’ is closer to the truth. At this stage, of course, you’re still a bubble of fart gas. Goop. Macrobiotic yogurt left out in the sun. Five centuries go by: Mars is fully industrialized. Another five, and we entered what I guess you’d call our posthistorical phase. We called it Total Wealth. All you’re managing to do, at this stage, is stink up the estuaries and riverbeds, but meanwhile, over on Mars, we’re into quantum gravity, tired light, chromo power, trace drive, cleft conformals, scalar counterfactuals, wave superposition, and orthogonics. We were the masters of our habitat, having gotten rid of all the animals and the oceans and so forth, and the tropospherical fluctuations you call weather. In other words, we were ready.”

“Ready for what?” came a voice.

“Now I’m just a janitor, right? I’m just a, uh, ‘robot.’ At the time of my manufacture, there was on Mars no distinction between the synthetic and the organic. Everyone was a mix, semi-etherealized, self-duplicating. The natural/mechanical divide belonged to ancient memory. But what you see before you here is a robot. Of the… crudest kind. It’s as if, on Earth, in 2050, an outfit like Sony produced a gramophone with a dishful of spare needles and a tin bullhorn.” The janitor on Mars paused, nodding his lowered head. Then he looked up. “And yet my makers, in their wisdom… However. In the last five hundred million years I’ve had access to an information source that was not available to the former denizens of this planet. And with that perspective it’s quite clear that Mars was an absolutely average world of its class. A type-v world, absolutely average, and it did what type-v worlds invariably do in the posthistorical phase.”

“Sir?” said Incarnacion. “Excuse me, but is this a grading system? What’s a type-v world?”

“A world that has mined its star.”

“What type world is Earth?”

“A type-y world.”

“What are type-z worlds?”

“Dead ones. But I digress. You go posthistorical and the question is: now what? As I say, three billion three million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand years ago, Martians were lords of all they surveyed. They were ready. Ready for what? Ready for war.”

The robot let this ripple out through the moist air, over the ranked metal seats.

“Yes, that’s right. Mars, the Planet of War. Congratulations. The only time you ever get anywhere is when you follow the artistic pulse. You even got the moons. I quote: ‘Two lesser stars, or satellites, revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of its diameters, and the outermost five.’ That’s not one of your early Mars watchers, some chump like Schiapperelli or Percival Lowell. That’s Gulliver’s Travels. Phobos and Deimos. Just so. Fear and Panic. Hitherto, there had never been any disharmony on Mars. Firm but wise world government was proceeding without friction. There was never any of that brawling and scragging that you went in for. Mars had tried peace, but now the time felt right. What else was there to do? We divided, almost arbitrarily, into two sides. We were ready. One called the other People of Fear. The other called the one People of Panic. There wasn’t a dissenting voice on the whole planet. Everyone was absolutely all for it. Imagine two superfuturistic Japanese warrior cults, with architecture by Albert Speer. I guess that’ll give you some idea.

“We fell into a rhythm. Arms races followed by massive conflicts. We’d pepper each other with all kinds of superexotic weaponry in delightfully elaborate successions of thrusts and feints and counters. But in the end nothing could match the hit of central thermonuclear exchange. We always ended up throwing everything we had at each other, in arsenal-clearing deployments. After the devastation, we rebuilt toward another devastation. No complaints. Shelter culture had come on a long way. Casualties could be patched up good as new. And fatalities were simply resurrected—except, of course, in cases of outright vaporization. They took their nuclear winters like Martians. The lulls lasted centuries. The battles were over in an afternoon.

“It doesn’t make a lot of obvious sense, does it? Later on they tended to argue that it was a necessary stage in their military development. They felt that they were… rich in time. They didn’t know—as I do—that this happens to all type-v worlds in the posthistorical phase. Without exception. They go insane.

“The Hydrogen War of the Two Nations lasted for 112 million years, and was followed, six months later, by the Seventy Million Years War, in which the use of quantum-gravity weapons exponentially increased the firepower of both sides. By this time another factor was preying on Martian mental health. Immortality. That’s actually not a very useful word. Put it this way. Everyone on Mars was looking at a future-endless worldline. And in a type-v context that always messes with your head. There was one more great war, the War of the Strong Nuclear Force, which dragged on for 284 million years. When they came out of that, there was a general feeling that Mars was in something of a rut. So they decided to stop fucking around. You, at this stage, by the way, were still doing your imitation of a septic tank. Well, and why not? It was a very good imitation of a septic tank.

“First there were matters to attend to in our own backyard. People of Fear and People of Panic united to face a common enemy. One found near by.”

The janitor on Mars fell silent; his head, with its steel arc, was interrogatively poised. Vladimir Voronezh, one of the Russian Laureates (his field was galaxy formation), spoke up, saying,

“My dear sir, I feel you are now going to tell us that life thrived elsewhere in the solar system, once upon a time.”

“Certainly. You’ve got to lose this habit of thinking about the ‘miracle’ of life, the stupendous ‘accident’ of intelligence, and so on. I can assure you that in this universe cognition is as cheap as spit. Being a type-v world, Mars was extremely insular in its Total Wealth phase. There was no interest in space exploration, despite adequate technology. But we were perfectly well aware of the coexistence of two type-w worlds: Jupiter and—”

“Jupiter?” This was Lord Kenrick Douglas (quasars): tall, bearded, famous. “Sir, we do know something about the solar system. Jupiter is a gas giant. It is wreathed in freezing clouds six hundred miles deep on a shell of liquid hydrogen. Our suicide probes tell us that there are no solid surfaces on this planet. Would you tell us what the Jovians looked like? Jellyfish with powerpacks? Wearing scuba suits, no doubt?”

This last drollery aroused some anxious laughter. The janitor tensed himself to the sound, not with umbrage but with concentration, with efficient curiosity. He said,

“Can I ask you a question?” He seemed to be addressing Miss World. “Did they laugh just now because they thought he was funny or because they thought he was full of shit? No. Never mind. Let me tell you, Lord Nobel Laureate, that Jupiter wasn’t always a gas giant. Originally it was much smaller and denser. Rock mantle on an iron silicate core. But that was before they fucked with Mars.

“The storm system that you call the Great Spot? The Earth-sized zit in its southern tropic? That was ground zero for an NH4 device we sent their way.”

“Ammonia?” asked Voronezh, with a glint in his eye.

“Right. It’s something we were very proud of, for a while. We turned their place into a colossal stink bomb without altering its mass. To avoid perturbation problems further down the line. Some said at the time that the War with Jupiter might have been bypassed quite easily. Mars overreacted, some said. I mean, a type-w planet, hundreds of millions of years away from posing any plausible threat. Whatever, the War with Jupiter was wrapped up in six months. But then we faced perceived disrespect from another quarter, and turned our attention to—”

“Don’t tell me,” said Lord Kenrick. “Venus.”

“Wrong direction. No, not Venus. Ceres.”

The janitor on Mars waited. Fukiyama (superstrings) said dutifully, “Ceres isn’t a planet. It’s the biggest rock in the asteroid belt.”

Calmly inspecting the tips of his talons the janitor on Mars said, “Yeah, right. They wanted to play rough and so…” He shrugged and added, “It was as our expeditionary force was returning from Jupiter that it picked up the ambiguous transmission from Ceres, another type-w world, though well behind Jupiter. It’s possible that in the heat of the moment the Martian commander mistakenly inferred an undertone of sarcasm in the Cerean message of tribute. The War with Ceres, in any case, ended that same afternoon. Then for several weeks, on the home planet, there reigned an uneasy peace. Plans were drawn up for a preemptive strike against Earth. Some Martians sensed aggressive potential there. Because—hey. Action on the blue planet. Photosynthesis. Photochemical dissociation of hydrogen sulphide, no less. Light energy used to break the bonds cleaving oxygen to hydrogen and carbon. Bacteria becomes cyanobacteria. Gangway. Where’s the fire? But then something happened that changed all our perspectives. Suddenly we knew that all this was bullshit and the real action lay elsewhere.

“In the year 2,912,456,327 B.C., by your calendar, the Scythers of the Orion Spur sent a warning shot across our bows. They compacted Pluto. Pluto was originally a gas giant the size of Uranus. And the Scythers scrunched it. Without a care for mass-conservation—hence the perturbations you’ve noticed in Neptune. You thought Pluto was a planet? You thought Pluto was supposed to look like that? In the Scythers of the Orion Spur I suppose you could say that Mars had found an appropriate adversary. A type-v world. Same weaponry. Same mental-health problems. Rather superior cosmonautics. The War with the Scythers of the Orion Spur—the combatants being separated by twenty kiloparsecs—was, as you can imagine, a somewhat protracted affair. Door to door, the round trip took 150,000 years: at even half-lightspeed, achievable with our scoop drives, relativistic effects were found to be severe. Still, the great ships went out. Wave after wave. The War with the Scythers of the Orion Spur was hotly prosecuted for just over a billion years. Who won? We did. They’re still there, the Scythers. Their planet is still there. The nature of war changed, during that trillennium. It was no longer nuclear or quantum-gravitational. It was neurological. Informational. Life goes on for the Scythers, but its quality has been subtly reduced. We fixed it so that they think they’re simulations in a deterministic computer universe. It is believed that this is the maximum suffering you can visit on a type-v world. The taste of victory was sweet. But by then we knew that interplanetary war, even at these distances, was essentially bullshit too. Oh and meanwhile, in that billion-year interlude, all hell has been breaking out on Earth. Oxygen established as an atmospheric gas. Cells with nuclei. All hell is breaking out.

“The Scyther War broadened our horizons. Martian astronomers had become intensely interested in a question that you yourselves are still wrestling with. I mean dark matter. The speed with which galaxies rotate suggests that 98.333 percent of any given galactic mass is invisible and unaccounted for. We went through all the hoops you’re going through, and more. What was the dark matter? Massive neutrinos? Failed stars? Slain planets? Black holes? Resonance residue? Plasma fluctuation? Then we kind of flashed it. The answer had been staring us in the face but we had to overcome a mortal reluctance to confront its truth. There was no dark matter. The galaxies had all been engineered, brought on line. Including our own. Many, many cycles ago.

“With cosynchronous unanimity it was decided that this subjection was not going to be tolerated. Despite the odds against. It was believed that we were up against a type-n world or entity—maybe even type-m. I now know that we were actually dealing with a type-q world, though one obscurely connected to a power of the type-j order. Apart from the bare fact of their existence, incidentally, nothing is known—in this particle horizon—about worlds -a through -i.

“Our idea was to launch a surprise attack on the galactic core. We figured that our small but measurable chance of success was entirely dependent on surprise—on instantaneity. None of that Scyther shit was going to be any help to us here. There was no question of idling coreward at ninety thousand miles per second—we’d just have to be there and hit them with absolutely everything we had. Now. To be clear. In your technological aspirations, on Earth, you are restricted by various inadvertencies like lack of funds but also by your very weak grasp of the laws of physics. We were restricted by the laws of physics. Period. So take a guess. How were we going to do it?”

“Wormholes,” said Paolo Sylvino (wormholes).

“Wormholes. Evanescent openings into hyperspace—or, more accurately, into parallel universes with different curvatures or phase trajectories. Ultraspace was the word we preferred. In crude form the idea’s been knocking around on Earth since Einstein. Though I venture to suggest that you have a way to go on the how- to end of it. For us of course it was largely a stress-equation problem. You fish a loop out of the quantum foam and then punch a tunnel in spacetime, flexibilizing it with the use of certain uh, exotic materials. We worked on this problem for seven and a half million years.

“Here was the setup. We knew that at the core there lay a black hole of some 1.4237 million solar masses, and we knew it had been ringed and tapped. As you’re aware, the energy contained within the black-hole inswirl is stupendous, but it’s wholly insufficient to drive a galaxy. The true energy source was something other. And that was the prize we sought. While fitting out the initial strike force we sent recon probes to the galactic core at roughly million-year intervals. Many missions were lost. Those that returned did so with wiped sensors. One way or another, preparations for the strike consumed 437 million years. Then we made our play. On Earth, around now, let it be noted, what do we get but the emergence of organisms visible to the naked eye.”

The janitor on Mars sat down and leaned backwards and folded his claws behind his head. Ruminatively he continued, “No one ever thought of this move as a—as a ‘mistake’ exactly. Everybody was deeply convinced that this was something we absolutely had to do. But the consequences were somewhat extreme. So long in preparation, the Involvement of the Initial Strike Force with the Core Power was over in nine seconds.

“Our fleet was… sent back. Not by wormhole either. The long way around. We knew we’d lost, but we had to wait 300,000 years to find out why. This was an anxious time. We expected intricate reprisals—daily, hourly…

“As military units our ships had been neutralized in the first nanosecond of their appearance at the core, but their sensors were intact and had picked up a great deal of information. Much of it exceedingly depressing, from a Martian point of view. The galactic core had indeed been ringed and tapped. The artificial Loopworld surrounding it had been in place, by our best estimates, for approximately 750 billion years. There was kind of an outpost force guarding the Loopworld. Nothing more. A, uh—a janitor force. Stationed there by entities we would later come to call the Infinity Dogs. Their energy source lay beyond the doorway of the black hole. They were using dead-universe power. Tapping closed universes in which, during contraction, the Higgs field couples to the gravitational shear. Also, we detected beyond Loopworld what I can only describe as a comet depot. Our equipment identified the signature of our own Alpha Comet among the comets parked there.

“Morale was generally low. Almost nihilistic. Martians started to believe, with varying degrees of conviction, that they were mere simulations in a deterministic computer universe. They divided up again. People of Fear. People of Panic. The planet was wracked by spasm wars, random, unending. Certain information began to be made available to us. We learned that the Infinity Dogs had seeded life on Mars—and on Earth, Jupiter and Ceres—for a purpose. We were middens. That’s all. Middens.”

“Middens, sir?” This was Incarnacion.

“Yeah, middens. Down on Earth, in Africa, the male rhinos all take a dump beyond the waterhole? On Columbus’s island of Hispaniola the squinting Carib lines shells on the bank of the riverbed? To demarcate territory? That’s a midden. And that’s all we were: a message from the Infinity Dogs to a type-r power called the Core Raiders, saying: Keep Out. I have since learned that both Infinity and Core are merely the errand boys of the type-l agency called the Resonance. Which in turn owes tribute to a type-j imperium called the Third Observer. Which…”

Trailing off, the janitor on Mars let his sicklelike head drop to his chest. Then it reared up again, catching the light, and he said, “Everybody knew that the only honorable or even dignified course was planetary self-slaughter. Such in fact is the usual destiny of type-v worlds in this phase. Then bolder voices started to be heard. This had never been a thing about winning or losing. This had always been about the glorious autonomy of Martian will. As it turned out, Mars’s next battle plan involved kamikaze forces and was itself not easily distinguishable from suicide.

“We came up with a ruse du guerre. We faked auto-annihilation and moved our whole operation underground. It had to look good, though: we blew off our atmosphere and paralyzed our core, which also spelt goodbye to our magnetosphere. What you see out there—the red plains and valleys, the rocks and pocks on that carpet of iodized rubble: it’s just set-dressing. We went underground, and waited.

“We undertook an arms build-up in a series of five-million-year plans. Morale was high: ringingly idealistic. Just one shot. Just one shot: that was the chant we worked to. We were going to turn that wormhole into a gun barrel. And what was the bullet? We started working on a strictly illegal type of weaponry based on the void-creating yield of false vacuum. A bubble of nothingness expanding at the speed of light. The great voids, the great starless deserts that so puzzle you: they’re the sites of incautious false-vacuum deployment. Or false-vacuum accident. Hence also the numberless void universes that populate the Ultraverse. If we could detonate this weapon within the event horizon of the core black hole—well, we felt confident of creating quite an impression when the time came for our second rendezvous with Infinity. Such a deed would rearrange the entire Ultraverse. Conceivably to Martian advantage.

“False-vacuum harnessing, we knew, was in itself exquisitely perilous: the field would be appallingly vulnerable to runaway. It was at this time that I was constructed and emplaced, here, in a shell of pure ultrium (an element not to be found in your periodic table), awaiting activation and eventual tripwire. It was as well that I was. For I would remain here alone to ponder the appalling prepotence of the i-power. Forget Infinity and Core. Forget the Resonance and the Third Observer. This came from much higher up.

“The device was ready. All that remained to be done was the addition of the final digit of its algorithm. The planet held its breath. In this instant the war would begin. Preparations that had lasted half a trillennium would now bear fruit… The Martian Slave Rebellion, as I came to call it, was over in a trillionth of the time it takes the speed of light to cross a proton. That was how long it took for all life on this planet to be extinguished. You see, the i-power had imposed cosmic censorship on matter. Poised to form the forbidden configuration, matter was instructed to destroy itself. This was 570 million years ago. You’d just gone Cambrian. I settled down for the wait.

“But that’s enough about Mars. Let’s talk about Earth. Before we do that, though—how about our intermission? There are… facilities in the rear there. No soap, I’m afraid. Or towels. Or hot water. I suggest you fortify yourselves. After the break we’ll do tripwire. I’ll give you the bad news first. Then I’ll give you the bad news.”

Pop Jones came out of the rear door, flexed his face in the weak starshine, and skirted the south lawn in his brisk, busy waddle. Keys jounced in the sagging pockets of his black serge suit. It was important, he thought, to walk as quickly as you could… Pop felt deafened, depersonalized. How quiet the place was: no boys on the benches, smoking, grooming, grumbling, coughing, yawning, scratching, gaping. Pop passed through the doors of the Rectory and trotted up the stairs.

He wasn’t normally allowed in the Common Room. His public space was the Pantry, a blighted nooklet between the bathhouse and the bikeshed, where he could, if he wished, consume a mug of cocoa among wordless representatives of the catering and gardening staff. Pop Jones knocked on the oak and entered.

The room received him in sudden silence. All you could hear was a stray voice somewhere: the wallscreen TV with somebody saying, One way out of the faint-young-star paradox lies in radiative transfer calculations, suggesting that the presence of CO₂ on early Mars which… Smells of brewery and ashtray, ginger tea, ginger biscuits, ginger hair, and the dead soldiers of many beer cans. And Mr. Davidge, flanked by Mr. Kidd and Mr. Caroline, turning and saying in his tight Welsh voice:

“What is it, Jones?”

“It’s about Timmy, sir. Timmy Jenkins.”

He felt the silence rise another notch. Mr. Davidge waited. Then he said, “What about him?”

“He’s in San, sir, as you know. And Fitzmaurice says they can’t turn the television off, sir. Without disconnecting the whole—”

“So what’s your solution, Jones?”

“The directive from the Department Head about the news, sir. I—”

“So what’s your solution, Jones?”

“Request permission to move him to the Conservatory, sir.”

Mr. Davidge glanced at Mr. Kidd and said, “That’s okay by you, isn’t it? Yes, Jones, I think we can leave Timmy to your tender mercies.”

Everyone was smiling with just their upper lips. For a moment Pop Jones felt with frightening certainty that he was in a room full of strangers. He dropped his head and turned.

Largely disused, the Conservatory led off the south end of the main building, a few meaningless twists and turns from Pop Jones’s own quarters. He wheeled Timmy in and established him there, warmly wrapped, on a settee. The child lent his limp cooperation. Pop thought back. Three days ago, when Timmy was found… That bright morning, the air had glittered with such possibility—possibility, coming up out of the lawn. In all the newspapers and on TV they were analyzing the Martian “key” to the aging process: so elegant, so easily grasped. And everyone was laughing and feeling faint… Pop put his hands on his rounded hips and said,

“Dear oh dear, who did this to you, Timmy? It was ‘Day,’ wasn’t it? Dear oh dear, Timmy.”

“Floor,” said Timmy.

And what becomes of the moral order? he thought, settling back between the jaws of his gray armchair. The screen said: 03.47, 03.46, 03.45.

2

“In the Ultraverse there is an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of planets, and in infinity everything recurs an infinite number of times. That’s a mathematical fact. But it hasn’t panned out in your case. Among the countless trillions of type-y worlds so far cataloged, none, I can confidently divulge, presents a picture of such agonizing retardation as Mother Earth. To be clear: type-y planets that have been around as long as you have are, without exception, type-x planets or better. Earth has other peculiarities. DNA, I have known you since before you were children. I am the witness of all your excruciations! I have watched you hopping along the savannah and hooting around your campfires. I have watched you daub shit on the walls of your caves. I have watched you stumble, grope, err, miscarry, flop, dither, blunder, goof off. I have watched you trying, straining, heaving. I feel… I sometimes feel that I, too, have become partly human, over these many, many years.”

The conference room was now but feebly illumined. You saw the milky outlines of the listeners and the fumes of their milky breath, shapes of heads, Incarnacion with Pickering’s hand on her lap, Lord Kenrick flexing his shoulders, Zendovich hunched forward with his chin on his palm, Miss World chewing gum and not blinking. On stage the robot moved among shadows, tracked by the glint of its face. It came forward, and sat. The janitor on Mars had changed clothes. That serge coat had been discarded: in its place, a rust-red smoking jacket of balding velvet. At first you thought it was a trick of the light, but no: there were two black rivets, like eyes, on the curved axe of the face.

“What was it with you, O double helix? What kept you back? Most salient, no doubt, was the failure of your science. The utter failure of your science. Your Einsteins and Bohrs, your Hawkings and Kawabatas—they’d have been down on their lousy knees, licking the lab floors on Mars. Only now are you receiving your first whispers from the higher dimensions. On Mars, they always thought in ten dimensions. The Infinity Dogs are believed to think in seventeen, the Resonance in thirty-one, the Third Observer in sixty-seven, the higher entities in a number of dimensions both boundless and finite. But you think in four. As do I. They made me like that. I had to be something that you could understand.

“Next: terrestrial religion and its scarcely credible tenacity. Everywhere else they just kick around a few creation myths for a while and then snap out of it when science gets going. But you? One of your writers put it succinctly when he said that there was no evidence for the existence of God other than the human longing that it should be so. An extraordinary notion. What is this longing? Everyone else wants ‘God’ too—but from a different angle. For us, ‘God’ isn’t top-down. He’s bottom-up. Why yearn for a power greater than your own? Why not seek to become it? Even the most affable and conciliatory Martian would have found your Promethean urge despicably weak. Okay, on Mars we had to face—and maybe we never truly faced it—our actual position in the order of being. It goes beyond the Third Observer, on and on and up and up. And what do you reach? An entity for whom the Ultraverse is a game of eight ball. And maybe he’s just a janitor—the Ultrajanitor. This entity, through his surrogate the Third Observer, created life on Mars. And what am I supposed to do about Him? Worship Him? You must be out of your fucking mind. That’s your thing. When all is said and done, you are very talented adorers.

“Earth would be a curiosity of much interest to cosmoanthropologists if there were any, but the Ultraverse has never concerned itself with information that does no work. In my own musings I adopted the obvious homeostatic view that your science and politics were naturally though brutally depressed in order to foreground your art. Because your art… Art is not taken very seriously elsewhere in this universe or in any other. Nobody’s interested in art. They’re interested in what everybody else is interested in: the superimposition of will. It may be that nobody’s interested in it because nobody’s any good at it. ‘Painters’—if you can call them that—never get far beyond finger smears and stick figures. And, so far as ‘music’ is concerned, the Ultraverse in its entirety has failed to advance on a few variations on ‘Chopsticks.’ Plus the odd battle hymn. Or battle chant. Likewise, ‘poets’ have managed the occasional wedge of martial doggerel. There are at least a dozen known limericks. And that’s about it. I suppose nobody was trying very hard. Why would they? Art and religion are rooted in the hunger for immortality. But nearly everyone already has that. On type-y planets, generally speaking, they soon advance to a future-indefinite worldline. Eighty years, ninety years? What use is that going to be? Oh yeah. The other thing that slowed you down was the unique diffuseness of your emotional range. Tender feelings for each other, and for children and even animals.

“I like art now. It takes a while to get the hang of it. What you’ve got to do is tell yourself ‘This won’t actually get me anywhere’ and then you don’t have a problem. It’s strange. Your scientists had no idea what to look for or where to look for it, but your poets, I sometimes felt, divined the universal… Forgive me. My immersion in your story, particularly over these last ten thousand years, while often poisoned by an unavoidable—an obligatory—contempt, has caused me to… Why do I say that: ‘Forgive me’?”

And indeed the force field propagating from the janitor on Mars seemed to weaken: the metal he was made of had lost the sheen of the merely metallic. His dropped, prowed head was briefly babyish in its curve.

“Tell me something, O DNA. Human beings, go ahead, disabuse the janitor on Mars. I have this counterintuitive theory. I can tell it’s bullshit but I can’t get it out of my head. It goes like this… Now I know I’m halfway there on religion. Surely this has to be how it is. It’s like a tapestry sopping with blood, right? You had it do it that way: for the art. But tell me. Tell me. Does it go further? Like Guernica happened so Picasso could paint it. No Beethoven without Bonaparte. The First World War was to some extent staged for Wilfred Owen, among others. The events in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s were set in motion for Primo Levi and Paul Celan. Etcetera. But I’m already getting the feeling it isn’t like that. It isn’t like that, is it, Miss World?”

“No, sir,” said Miss World. “It isn’t like that.”

“I didn’t really think so. Well in a way,” said the janitor on Mars interestedly, “this makes my last job easier. I’m glad we met. You know, it took me the longest time to get the hang of the way you people do things. As, technically, a survivor on a chastened type-v world, I had automatic access to certain information sources. Like I was on a mailing list. From my studies I came to think of other worlds as always swift and supple—as always responsive, above all, in their drive toward complexity. But not you. You always had to do it at your own speed. A torment to watch, but that was your way. And whenever I tried to liven things up it was usually a total dud.”

“Sir? Excuse me?” This was Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume. “Are you saying you influenced events on Earth?”

“Yeah and I’ll give you an example. Yeah, I used to try and soup things up every now and then. For example, take this gentleman Aristarchus. Almost exactly twenty-three centuries ago there’s this Greek gentleman working on the brightness fluctuations of the planets. I put it to him that—”

“You put it to him?”

“Yes. On the neural radio. When your scientists talk about their great moments of revelation—a feeling of pleasant vacuity followed by a ream of math—they’re usually describing a telepathic assist from Mars. This Aristarchus happens on a completely coherent heliocentric system. He spreads the word around the land. And what happens? Ptolemy. Christianity. You weren’t ready. So we all had to sit and wait two thousand years for Copernicus. Stuff like that happened all the time.”

Murmurs died in the dark chill. Pioline (solar neutrino count) gave an emphatic and breathy moan which had in it elements of anger but far more predominantly elements of grief. As the silence settled the janitor on Mars gave a light jolt of puzzlement and said, “You’re uncomfortable with that? Come on. That’s the least of it. Welcome to middenworld.”

“But some things took?” said Lord Kenrick. “You shaped us? Is that what you’re saying?”

“…Yeah I fucked with you some. Sure. Hey. I was programmed to do that. I had—guidelines. Some things worked out. Others didn’t. Slavery was all me, for instance. Yes, slavery was my baby. That worked out. All worlds dabble with it, early on. It’s good practice for later. Because slavery’s what the Ultraverse is all about. Okay, on Earth, you could argue that it got out of hand. But on a nonculling planet it seemed like a necessary development. Even in its decadent phase slavery had many distinguished though often irresolute advocates. Locke, Burke, Hume, Montesquieu, Hegel, Jefferson. And there’s an influential justification for it in the holy book of one of your Bronze Age nomad tribes.”

“Which?”

“The Bible. Any last questions?”

“Just what the hell is this tripwire thing?”

“Again, part of the program. Contact with Earth could not be established until you went and tripped that wire. Which you did on June nine: the day I buzzed Incarnacion here.”

“What was it about June nine?” asked Montgomery Gruber (geophysiology). “We looked into it and nothing happened.”

“You mean you looked into it and you think nothing happened. Plenty happened. Some asshole of an otter or a beaver sealed off a minor tributary of the River Lee in Washington State… along certain latitudes a critical fraction of microbal life committed itself to significant changes in its respiratory metabolism… the forty-seven billionth self-cooling cola can burped out its hydrocarbons… and there was that mild forest fire in Albania. And there you have it. You wouldn’t know how these things are connected, but connected they are. All this against a background of mobilized phosphorus, carbon burial, and hydrogen escape. The necessary synergies are all locked in.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the amount of oxygen in your atmosphere is starting to climb. At last irreversibly. It won’t feel any different for a while. But by the end of the Sixties it’ll hit twenty-seven percent. Yes I know: a pity about that.”

Incarnacion and Miss World turned to each other sharply. Because the scientists were now shouting out, gesturing, interjecting. Miss World said, “Please, sir. I don’t understand.”

“Well. It means you’ll have to be very, very careful with your heat sources, Miss World. At such a concentration, to light a cigarette and throw a match over your shoulder would spark a holocaust. It’s all a great shame, because this is the kind of problem that’s easy to fix if you catch it early on. In the coming years you’ll have to work awful hard on volcano-capping and storm control. To no avail, alas. Here’s another thing. It seems, anyway, that the solar system is shutting down. There’s a planetesimal out there with your name written on it. An asteroid the size of Greenland is due to ground zero on the Iberian peninsular in the unseasonably torrid summer of 2069. At ninety miles a second. Now. There might have been a window of a couple of days or so at the beginning of the decade: you could have duplicated your feat of 2037 when you saw off Spielberg-Robb. But the thing is you’ll need your nuclear weapons this time. A mass-driver won’t do the trick, not with the English this asteroid’s got on it. Unfortunately, though, there’s now a tritium hitch with your nukes that you’d have needed to start work on much earlier to have any hope of rearming them in time. Obviously a body this size moving at sixteen times the speed of sound will have considerable kinetic energy: to be released as heat. And it’ll rip through the mantle and the crust, disgorging trillions of tons of magma. It’s all very unfortunate. Mars itself may be lightly damaged in the blast.”

Zendovich said, “That was the tripwire? You’re saying you couldn’t act until it was already too late to make any difference?”

“Affirmative. That was the lock.”

“Sir?” asked Miss World. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s something I have to say. I think you’re a despicable person.”

“Nugatory. I’m not a person, lady. I’m a machine obeying a program.”

Zendovich got to his feet. So did the janitor on Mars, who leaned forward and cocked his beak at him.

“Then God curse whoever put you together.”

“Oh come on. What did you expect? This is Mars, pal,” said the janitor as the lights began to fade. “The Red One. You hear that? Nergal: Star of Death. Now get the hell out. Yeah. Go. Walk out of here with your eyes on the fucking floor. Exit through the left hall. Follow the goddamned signs.”

Pop Jones slipped into the conservatory and opened the back door. Dusk was coming. Across the lawn were the lit windows of the Common Room (he could see Kidd and Davidge, staring out). The children wouldn’t return from the beach for another hour. Later, after they’d been fed, Pop Jones would make his rounds with his bucket and his keys. Make his rounds? Pop shrugged, then nodded. Yes, it would be important to try to go on just as before. But could you do that?

The star was dropping over the steep green. Starset! Stardown! And already a generous, a forgiving moon; it carved a penumbra of golden grime in the cirrus, and the face saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Pop Jones turned.

“Floor.”

“Timmy?”

He could see the moisture in the child’s eyes.

“Timmy, Timmy. Who did this to you, Timmy?”

At one remove, it seemed, Pop Jones felt astonishment gathering in him. How entirely different his own voice sounded: thick, mechanical. In this new time, when he, in common with everyone else on Earth, was submitting to an obscure and yet disgustingly luminous reaffiliation, Pop Jones found that thing in himself that had never been there before: the necessary species of self-love.

“Day,” said Timmy clearly. And he said it again, quite clearly, like an English teacher. “Day… Day done it.”

Darkness increased its hold on the room of glass. Pop Jones’s new voice said that night was now coming. He moved toward the boy. Hush there. Hush.

1997