The Light of Other Days

of information processing, if you like: layered over my central nervous system, the way the CNS is layered over older networks, like the biochemical. My memories are still mine. Does it matter if they are stored in somebody else’s head?”

“But this isn’t just some kind of neat mobile phone network, is it? You Joined make higher claims than that. Is there a new person in all this, a new, combined you. A group mind, linked by wormholes, emergent from the network?”

“You think that would be a monstrosity, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think about it.”

He studied her, trying to grasp Mary within the shell of Joinedness.

It didn’t help that the Joined had quickly become renowned as consummate actors — or liars, to be more blunt. Thanks to their detached layers of consciousness, each of them had a mastery over their body language, the muscles of their faces — a power over communication channels that had evolved to transmit information reliably and honestly — that could beat out the most expert thespian. He had no reason to suppose Mary was lying to him, today; it was just that he couldn’t see how he could tell if she was or not.

She said now, “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”

Disturbed, he said, “Very well. Mary — how does it feel?”

She said slowly, “The same. Just… more. It’s like coming fully awake — a feeling of clarity, of full consciousness. You must know. I’ve never been a scientist. But I’ve solved puzzles. I play chess, for instance. Science is something like that, isn’t it? You figure something out — suddenly see how the game fits together — it’s as if the clouds clear, just for a moment, and you can see far, much farther than before.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve had a few moments like that in my life. I’ve been fortunate.”

She squeezed his hand. “But for me, that’s how it feels all the time. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Do you understand why people fear you?”

“They do more than fear us,” she said calmly. “They hunt us down. They attack us. But they can’t damage us. We can see them coming, David.”

That chilled him.

“And even if one of us is killed — even if I am killed — then we, the greater being, will go on.”

“What does that mean?”

“The information network that defines the Joined is large, and growing all the time. It’s probably indestructible, like an Internet of minds.”

He frowned, obscurely irritated. “Have you heard of attachment theory? It describes our need, psychologically, to form close relationships, to reach out to intimates. We need such relationships to conceal the awful truth, which we confront as we grow up, that each of us is alone. The greatest battle of human existence is to come to terms with that fact. And that is why to be Joined is so appealing.

“But the chip in your head will not help you,” he said brutally. “Not in the end. For you must die alone, just as I must.”

She smiled, coldly forgiving, and he felt ashamed.

“But that may not be true,” she said. “Perhaps I will be able to live on, survive the death of my body — of Mary’s body. But I, my consciousness and memories, will not be resident in one member’s body or another, but — distributed. Shared amongst them all. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

He whispered, “And would it be you? Could you truly avoid death that way? Or would this distributed self be a copy?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. And besides the technology is some way away from realizing that. Until it does, we will still suffer illness, accident, death. And we will always grieve.”

“The wiser you are, the more it hurts.”

“Yes. The human condition is tragic, David. The greater the Joined becomes, the more clearly I can see that. And the more I feel it.” Her face, still young, seemed overlaid by a ghostly mask of much greater age. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

•

Kate couldn’t help but jump, snatch her hand away.

She finessed her involuntary gasp into a cough, extended the motion of her hand to cover her mouth. Then, delicately, she returned her hand to where it had been, resting on the top sheet of her bed.

And that gentle touch came again, the fingers warm, strong, unmistakable despite the SmartShroud glove which must cover them. She felt the fingers squirm into her palm, and she tried to stay still, eating the peach.

Sorry shocked you. No way warn.

She leaned back a little, seeking to conceal her own handspelling behind her back. Bobby?

Who else??? Nice prison.

In Wormworks right?

Yes. DNA trace. David helped. Refugee methods. Mary helped. All family together.

Shouldn’t have come, she signed quickly. What Hiram wants. Get you. Bait in trap.

Not abandon you. Need you. Be ready.

Tried once. Guards smart, sharp…

She risked a glimpse to her side. She could see no sign of his presence, not so much as a false shadow, an indentation in the bedcover, a hint of distortion. Evidently SmartShroud technology was improving as rapidly as the WormCam itself.

I might not get another chance, she thought. I must tell him.

Bobby. I saw David. Had news. About you.

His signing now was slower, hesitant. Me what me?

Your family… I can’t do it, she thought. Ask Hiram, she signed back, feeling bitter.

Asking you.

Birth. Your birth.

Asking you. Asking you.

Kate took a deep breath.

Not what you believe. Think it through. Hiram wanted dynasty. David big disappointment, out of control. Mother a big inconvenience. So, have boy without mother.

Don’t understand. I have mother. Heather mother.

She hesitated. No she isn’t. Bobby, you’re a clone.

•

David settled back and fixed the cold metal Mind’sEye hoop over his head. As he sank into virtual reality the world turned dark and silent, and for a brief moment he had no sense of his own body, couldn’t even feel Mary’s soft, warm hand wrapped around his own.

Then, all around them, the stars came out. Mary gasped and grabbed at his arm.

He was suspended in a three-dimensional diorama of stars, stars spread over a velvet black sky, stars more crowded than the darkest desert night — and yet there was structure, he saw slowly. A great river of light — stars crammed so close they merged into glowing, pale clouds — ran around the equator of the sky. It was the Milky Way, of course: the great disc of stars in which he was still embedded.

He glanced down. Here was his body, familiar and comfortable, clearly visible in the complex, multiply sourced light that fell on him. But he was floating in the starlight without enclosure or support.

Mary drifted beside him, still holding on to his arm. Her touch was comforting. Odd, he thought. We can cast our minds more than two thousand light years from Earth, and yet we must still grasp at each other, our primate heritage never far from the doors of our souls.

This alien sky was populated.

There was a sun, planet and moon here, suspended around him, like the trinity of bodies that had always dominated the human environment. But it was a strange enough sun — in fact, not a single star like Earth’s sun, but a binary.

The principal was an orange giant, dim and cool. Centred on a glowing yellow core, it was a mass of orange gas, growing steadily more tenuous. There was much detail in that sullen disc: a tracery of yellow-white light that danced at the poles, the ugly scars of grey-black spots around the equator.

But the giant star was visibly flattened. It had a companion star, small and bluish, little more than a point of light, orbiting so close to its parent it was almost within the giant’s scattered outer atmosphere. In fact, David saw, a thin streamer of gas, torn from the parent and still glowing, had wrapped itself around the companion and was falling to its surface, a thin, hellish rain of fusing hydrogen.

David looked down to the planet that hovered beneath his feet. It was a sphere the apparent size of a beachball, half-illuminated by the complex red and white light of its parent stars. But it. was obviously airless, its surface a complex mesh of impact craters and mountain chains. Perhaps it had once had an atmosphere, even oceans; or it might have been the rocky or metallic core of a gas giant, an erstwhile Neptune or Uranus. It was even possible, he supposed, that it had harboured life. If so, that life was now destroyed or fled, every trace of its passing scorched from the surface by the dying sun.

But this dead, blasted world still had a moon. Though much smaller than its parent, the moon glowed more brightly, reflecting more of the complex mixed light of the twin stars. And its surface appeared, at first glance, utterly smooth, so that the little worldlet looked like a cue ball, machined in some great lathe. When David looked more closely, however, he could see there was a network of fine cracks and ridges, some of them evidently hundreds of kilometres long, all across the surface. The moon looked rather like a hard-boiled egg, he thought, whose shell had been assiduously if gently cracked with a spoon.

This moon was a ball of water ice. Its smoothed surface was a sign of recent global melting, presumably caused by the grotesque expansion of the parent star, and the ridges were seams between plates of ice. And perhaps, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, there was still a layer of liquid water somewhere beneath this deep-frozen surface, an ancient ocean that might serve as a harbour, even now, for retreating life…

He sighed. Nobody knew. And right now, nobody had the time or resources to find out. There was simply too much to do, too many places to go.

But it wasn’t the rocky world, or its ice moon — not even the strange double star itself — but something much grander, beyond this little stellar system, which had drawn him here.