"It's a nebula," he said. "It's called the Trifid Nebula, in fact."
"It's visible from Earth?"
"Oh, yes. But we are so far from home that the light that set off from the nebula around the time of Alexander the Great is only now washing over Earth." He pointed. "Can you see those dark spots?" They were small, fine globules, like drops of ink in colored water. "They are called Bok globules. Even the smallest of those spots could enclose the whole of our Solar System. We think they are the birthplaces of stars; clouds of dust and gas which will condense to form new suns. It takes a long time to form a star, of course. But the final stages—when fusion kicks in, and the star blows away its surrounding shell of dust and begins to shine—can happen quite suddenly." He glanced at her. "Think about it. If you lived here—maybe on that ice ball below us—you would be able to see, during your lifetime, the birth of dozens, perhaps hundreds of stars."
"I wonder what religion we would have invented," she said.
It was a good question. "Perhaps something softer. A religion dominated more by images of birth than death."
"Why did you bring me here?"
He sighed. "Everybody should see this before they die."
"And now we have," Mary said, a little formally. "Thank you."
He shook his head, irritated. "Not them. Not the Joined. You, Mary. I hope you'll forgive me for that."
"What is it you want to say to me, David?"
He hesitated. He pointed at the nebula. "Somewhere over there, beyond the nebula, is the center of the Galaxy. There is a great black hole there, a million times the mass of the sun. And it's still growing. Clouds of dust and gas and smashed-up stars flow into the hole from all directions."
"I've seen pictures of it," Mary said.
"Yes. There's a whole cluster of stapledons out there already. They are having some difficulty approaching the hole itself; the massive gravitational distortion plays hell with wormhole stability."
"Stapledons?"
"WormCam viewpoints. Disembodied observers, wandering through space and time." He smiled, and indicated his floating body. "When you get used to this virtual-reality WormCam exploration, you'll find you don't need to carry along as much baggage as this.
"My point is, Mary, that we're sending human minds like a thistledown cloud out through a block of spacetime two hundred thousand light years wide and a hundred millennia deep: across a hundred billion star systems, all the way back to the birth of humanity. Already there's more than we can study even if we had a thousand times as many trained observers—and the boundaries are being pushed back all the time.
"Some of our theories are being confirmed; others are unsentimentally debunked. And that's good; that's how science is supposed to be. But I think there's a deeper, more profound lesson we're already learning."
"And that is."
"That mind—that life itself—is precious," he said slowly. "Unimaginably so. We've only just begun our search. But already we know that there is no significant biosphere within a thousand light years, nor as deep in the past as we can see. Oh, perhaps there are microorganisms clinging to life in some warm, slime-filled pond, or deep in the crevices of some volcanic cleft somewhere. But there is no other Earth.
"Mary, the WormCam has pushed my perception out from my own concerns, inexorably, step by step. I've seen the evil and the good in my neighbor's heart, the lies in my own past, the banal horror of my people's history.
"But we've reached beyond that now, beyond the clamor of our brief human centuries, the noisy island to which we cling. Now we've seen the emptiness of the wider universe, the mindless churning of the past. We are done with blaming ourselves for our family history, and we are beginning to see the greater truth: that we are surrounded by abysses, by great silences, by the blind working-out of huge mindless forces. The WormCam is, ultimately, a perspective machine. And we are appalled by that perspective."
"Why are you telling me this?"
He faced her. "If I must speak to you—to all of you—then I want you to know what a responsibility you may hold.
"There was a Jesuit called Teilhard de Chardin. He believed that just as life had covered the Earth to form the biosphere, so mankind—thinking life—would eventually encompass life to form a higher layer, a cogitative layer he called the noosphere. He argued that the rough organization of the noosphere would grow, until it cohered into a single supersapient being he called the Omega Point."
"Yes," she said, and she closed her eyes.
"The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality."
"You've read de Chardin?"
"We have."
"It's the Wormwood, you see," he said hoarsely. "That's my problem. I can take no comfort from the new nihilist thinkers. The notion that this tiny scrap of life and mind should be smashed—at this moment of transcendent understanding—by a random piece of rock is simply unacceptable."
She touched his face with her small young hands. "I understand. Trust me. We're working on it."
And, looking into her young-old eyes, he believed it.
The light was changing now, subtly, growing significantly darker.
The blue-white companion star was passing behind the denser bulk of the parent. David could see the companion's light streaming through the complex layers of gas at the periphery of the giant—and, as the companion touched the giant's blurred horizon, he actually saw shadows cast by thicker knots of gas in those outer layers against the more diffuse atmosphere, immense lines that streamed toward him, millions of kilometers long and utterly straight. It was a sunset on a star, he realized with awe, an exercise in celestial geometry and perspective.
And yet the spectacle reminded him of nothing so much as the ocean sunsets he used to enjoy as a boy, as he played with his mother on the long Atlantic beaches of France, moments when shafts of light cast by the thick ocean clouds had made him wonder if he was seeing the light of God Himself.
Were the Joined truly the embryo of a new order of humanity—of mind? Was he making a sort of first contact here, with a being whose intellect and understanding might surpass his own as much as he might surpass his Neanderthal great-grandmother?
But perhaps it was necessary for a new form of mind to grow, new mental powers, to apprehend the wider perspective offered by the WormCam.
He thought. You are feared and despised, and now you are weak. I fear you; I despise you. But so was Christ feared and despised. And the future belonged to Him. As perhaps it does to you.
And so you may be the sole repository of my hopes, as I have tried to express to you.
But whatever the future, I can't help but miss the feisty girl who used to live behind those ancient blue eyes.
And it disturbs me that not once have you mentioned your mother, who dreams away what is left of her life in darkened rooms. Do we who preceded you mean so little?
Mary pulled herself closer to him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him. Despite his troubled thoughts, her simple human warmth was a great comfort.
"Let's go home," she said. "I think your brother needs you."
Kate knew she had to tell him. "Bobby."
"Shut up, Manzoni," Hiram snarled. He was raging now, throwing his arms in the air, stalking around the room. "What about me? I made you, you little shit. I made you so I wouldn't have to die knowing."
"Knowing that you'd lose it all," Kate said.
"Manzoni."
Wilson took a step forward, standing between Hiram and Bobby, watching them all.
Kate ignored her. "You want a dynasty. You want your offspring to rule the fucking planet. It didn't work with David, so you tried again, without even the inconvenience of sharing him with a mother. Yes, you made Bobby, and you tried to control him. But even so he doesn't want to play your games."
Hiram faced her, fists bunching. "What he wants doesn't matter. I won't be b
locked."
"No," Kate said, wondering. "No, you won't, will you? My God, Hiram."
Bobby said urgently, "Kate, I think you'd better tell me what you're talking about."
"Oh, I don't say this was his plan from the beginning. But it was always a fallback, in case you didn't—cooperate. And of course he had to wait until the technology was ready. But it's there now. Isn't it, Hiram?..." And another piece of the puzzle fell into place. "You're funding the Joined. Aren't you? Covertly, of course. But it's your resources that are behind the brain-link technology. You had your own purpose for it."
She could see in Bobby's eyes—black-ringed, marked by pain—that he understood at last.
"Bobby, you're his clone. Your body and nervous structures are as close to Hiram's as is humanly possible to manufacture. Hiram wants OurWorld to live on after his death. He doesn't want to see it dispersed—or, worse, fall into the hands of somebody from outside the family. You're his one hope. But if you won't cooperate..."
Bobby turned to his clone-parent. "If I won't be your heir, then you'll kill me. You'll take my body and you'll upload your own foul mind into me."
"But it won't be like that," Hiram said rapidly. "Don't you see? We'll be together, Bobby. I'll have beaten death, by God. And when you grow old, we can do it again. And again, and again."
Bobby shook off Kate's arm, and strode toward Hiram.
Wilson stepped between Hiram and Bobby, pushing Hiram behind her, and raised her pistol.
Kate tried to move forward, to intervene, but it felt as if she were embedded in treacle.
Wilson was hesitating. She seemed to be coming to a decision of her own. The gun muzzle wavered.
Then, in a single lightning-fast movement, she turned and slapped Hiram over the ear, hard enough to send him sprawling, and she grabbed Bobby. He tried to land a blow on her, but she took his injured arm and pressed a determined thumb into his wounded shoulder. He cried out, eyes rolling, and he fell to his knees.
Kate felt overwhelmed, baffled. What now? How much more complicated can this get? Who was this Wilson? What did she want?
With brisk movements Wilson laid Bobby and his clone-parent side by side, and began to throw switches on the equipment console at the center of the room. There was a hum of fans, a crackle of ozone; Kate sensed great forces gathering in the room.
Hiram tried to sit up, but Wilson knocked him back with a kick in the chest.
Hiram croaked, "What the hell are you doing?"
"Initiating a wormhole," Wilson murmured, concentrating. "A bridge to the center of the Earth."
Kate said, "But you can't. The wormholes are still unstable."
"I know that," Wilson snapped. "That's the point. Don't you understand yet?"
"My God," Hiram said. "You've intended this all along."
"To kill you. Quite right. I waited for the opportunity. And I took it."
"Why, for Christ's sake?"
"For Barbara Wilson. My daughter."
"Who?..."
"You destroyed her. You and your WormCam. Without you."
Hiram laughed, an ugly, strained sound. "Don't tell me. It doesn't matter. Everyone has a grudge. I always knew one of you bitter arseholes would get through in the end. But I trusted you, Wilson."
"If not for you I would be happy." Her voice was pellucid, calm.
"What are you talking about?... But who gives a fuck? Look—you've got me," Hiram said desperately. "Let Bobby go. And the girl. They don't matter."
"Oh, but they do." Wilson seemed on the verge of crying. "Don't you see? He is the point." The hum of the equipment rose to a crescendo, and digits scrolled over the SoftScreen monitor outputs on the wall. "Just a couple of seconds," Wilson said. "That isn't long to wait, is it? And then it will all be over." She turned to Bobby. "Don't be afraid."
Bobby, barely conscious, struggled to speak. "What?"
"You won't feel a thing."
"What do you care?"
"But I do care." She stroked his cheek. "I spent so long watching you. I knew you were cloned. It doesn't matter. I saw you take your first step. I love you."
Hiram growled. "A bloody WormCam stalker. Is that all you are? How—small. I've been hunted by priests and pimps and politicians, criminals, nationalists, the sane and the insane. Everybody with a grudge about the inventor of the WormCam. I evaded them all. And now it comes down to this." He began to struggle. "No. Not this way. Not this way."
And, with a single, snake-like movement, he lunged at Wilson's leg and sank his teeth into her hamstring.
She cried out and staggered back. Hiram clung on with his teeth, like a dog, the woman's blood trickling from his mouth. Wilson rolled on top of him and raised her fist. Hiram released Wilson's leg and yelled at Kate. "Get him out of here! Get him out..." But then Wilson drove her fist into his bloodied throat, and Kate heard the crunch of cartilage and bone, and his voice turned to a gurgle.
Kate grabbed Bobby by his good arm and hauled him, by main force, over the threshold of the bunker. He cried out as his head hit on the door's thick metal sill, but she ignored him.
As soon as his dangling feet were clear she slammed the door, masking the rising noise of the wormhole, and began to dog it shut.
Hiram's security goons were approaching, bewildered. Kate, hauling on the wheel, screamed at them. "Help him up and get out of here!"
But then the wall bulged out at her, and she glimpsed light, as bright as the sun. Deafened, blinded, she seemed to be falling.
Falling into darkness.
Chapter 28—THE AGES OF SISYPHUS
As two stapledons, disembodied WormCam viewpoints, Bobby and David soared over southern Africa.
It was the year 2082. Four decades had elapsed since the death of Hiram Patterson. And Kate, Bobby's wife of thirty-five years, was dead.
A year after he had accepted that brutal truth, it was never far from Bobby's thoughts, no matter what wonderful scenery the WormCam brought him. But he was still alive, and he must live on; he forced himself to look outward, to study Africa.
Today the plains of his most ancient of continents were covered with a rectangular gridwork of fields. Here and there buildings were clustered, neat plastic huts, and machines toiled, autonomous cultivators looking like overgrown beetles, their solar-cell carapaces glinting. People moved slowly through the fields. They all wore loose white clothes, broad-brimmed hats and gaudy layers of sunblock.
In one farmyard, neatly swept, a group of children played. They looked clean, well dressed and well fed, running noisily, bright pebbles on this immense tabletop landscape. But Bobby had seen few children today, and this rare handful seemed precious, cherished.
And, as he watched more closely, he saw how their movements were complex and tightly coordinated, as if they could tell without delay or ambiguity what the others were thinking. As, perhaps, they could. For he was told—there were children being born now with wormholes in their heads, linked into the spreading group minds of the Joined even before they left the womb.
It made Bobby shudder. He knew his body was responding to the eerie thought, abandoned in the facility that was still called the Wormworks—though, forty years after the death of Hiram, the facility was now owned by a trust representing a consortium of museums and universities.
So much time had elapsed since that climactic day, the day of Hiram's death at the Wormworks—and yet it was all vivid in Bobby's mind, as if his memory were itself a WormCam, his mind locked to the past. And it was now a past that contained all that was left of Kate, dead a year ago of cancer, her every action embedded in unchangeable history, like all the nameless billions who had preceded her to the grave.
Poor Hiram, he thought. All he ever wanted to do was make money. Now, with Hiram long dead, his company was gone, his fortune impounded. And yet, by accident, he changed the world... David, an invisible presence here with him, had been silent for a long time. Bobby cut in empathy subroutines to glimpse David's viewpoint.
...
The glowing fields evaporated, to be replaced by a desolate, arid landscape in which a few stunted trees struggled to survive.
Under the flat, garish sunlight a line of women worked their way slowly across the land. Each bore an immense plastic container on her head, containing a great weight of brackish water. They were stick-thin, dressed in rags, their backs rigid.
One woman led a child by the hand. It seemed obvious that the wretched child—naked, a thing of bones and papery skin—was in the grip of advanced malnutrition or perhaps even AIDS: what they used to call here, Bobby remembered with grim humor, the slims disease.
He said gently, "Why look into the past, David? Things are better now..."
"But this was the world we made," David said bitterly. His voice sounded as if he were just a few meters away from Bobby in some warm, comfortable room, rather than floating in this disregarded emptiness. "No wonder the kids think we old folk are a bunch of savages. It was an Africa of AIDS and malnutrition and drought and malaria and staph infections and dengue fever and endless futile wars, an Africa drenched in savagery... But," he said, "it was an Africa with elephants."
"There are still elephants," Bobby said. And that was true: a handful of animals in the zoos, their seed and eggs flown back and forth in a bid to maintain viable populations. There were even zygotes, of elephants and many other endangered or otherwise lost species, frozen in their liquid nitrogen tanks in the unchanging shadows of a lunar south pole crater—perhaps the last refuge of life from Earth if it proved, after all, impossible to deflect the Wormwood.
So there were still elephants. But none in Africa: no trace of them save the bones occasionally unearthed by the robot farmers, bones sometimes showing teeth marks left by desperate humans. In Bobby's lifetime, they had all gone to extinction: the elephant, the lion, the bear—even man's closest relatives, the chimps and gorillas and apes. Now, outside the homes and zoos and collections and labs, there was no large mammal on the planet, none save man.
But what was done was done.
With an effort of will Bobby grasped his brother's viewpoint and rose straight upward.