So had circumstances and memories been adjusted. It was an instance of Gaia directly interfering with the circumstances and events in an emulation. Christian wondered how frequently she did.
“Eccentricity is almost expected in the upper classes,” Laurinda said. “But when you lived you could simply be yourself, couldn’t you?”
In the hour that followed, she drew him out. His birth home was the Yukon Ethnate in the Bering Federation, and to it he often returned while he lived, for its wilderness preserves, mountain solitudes, and uncrowded, uncowed, plain-spoken folk. Otherwise, the nation was prosperous and progressive, with more connections to Asia and the Pacific than to the decayed successor states East and South. Across the Pole, it was also becoming intimate with the renascent societies of Europe, and there Christian received part of his education and spent a considerable amount of his free time.
His was an era of savage contrasts, in which the Commonwealth of Nations maintained a precarious peace. During a youthful, impulsively taken hitch in the Conflict Mediation Service, he twice saw combat. Later in his life, stability gradually became the norm. That was largely due to the growing influence of the artificial intelligence network. Most of its consciousness-level units interlinked in protean fashion to form minds appropriate for any particular situation, and already the capabilities of those minds exceeded the human. However, there was little sense of rivalry. Rather, there was partnership. The new minds were willing to advise, but were not interested in dominance.
Christian, child of forests and seas and uplands, heir to ancient civilizations, raised among their ongoing achievements, returned on his vacations to Earth in homecoming. Here were his kin, his friends, woods to roam, boats to sail, girls to kiss, songs to sing and glasses to raise (and a gravesite to visit. He barely mentioned his wife to Laurinda. She died before uploading technology was available). Always, though, he went back to space. It had called him since first he saw the stars from a cradle under the cedars. He became an engineer. Besides fellow humans he worked closely with sapient machines, and some of them got to be friends too, of an eerie kind. Over the decades, he took a foremost role in such undertakings as the domed Copernican Sea, the Asteroid Habitat, the orbiting antimatter plant, and finally the Grand Solar Laser for launching interstellar vessels on their way. Soon afterward, his body died, old and full of days; but the days of his mind had barely begun.
“A fabulous life,” Laurinda said low. She gazed out over the land, across which shadows were lengthening. “I wonder if … they … might not have done better to give us a cabin in your wilderness.”
“No, no,” he said. “This is fresh and marvelous to me.”
“We can easily go elsewhere, you know. Any place, any time that Gaia has generated, including ones that history never saw. I’ll fetch our amulets whenever you wish.”
He raised his brows. “Amulets?”
“You haven’t been told—informed? They are devices. You wear yours and give it the command to transfer you.”
He nodded. “I see. It maps an emulated person into different surroundings.”
“With suitable modifications as required. Actually, in many cases it causes a milieu to be activated for you. Most have been in standby mode for a long time. I daresay Gaia could have arranged for us to wish ourselves to wherever we were going and call up whatever we needed likewise. But an external device is better.”
He pondered. “Yes, I think I see why. If we got supernatural powers, we wouldn’t really be human, would we? And the whole idea is that we should be.” He leaned forward on his chair. “It’s your turn. Tell me about yourself.”
“Oh, there’s too much. Not about me, I never did anything spectacular like you, but about the times I lived in, everything that happened to change this planet after you left it. …”
She was born here, in England. By then a thinly populated province of Europe, it was a quiet land (“half a-dream,” she said) devoted to its memorials of the past. Not that creativity was dead; but the arts were rather sharply divided between ringing changes on classic works and efforts to deal with the revelations coming in from the stars. The esthetic that artificial intelligence was evolving for itself overshadowed both these schools. Nevertheless Laurinda was active in them.
Furthermore, in the course of her work she ranged widely over Earth. (By then, meaningful work for humans was a privilege that the talented and energetic strove to earn.) She was a liaison between the two kinds of beings. It meant getting to know people in their various societies and helping them make their desires count. For instance, a proposed earthquake control station would alter a landscape and disrupt a community; could it be resited, or if not, what cultural adjustments could be made? Most commonly, though, she counseled and aided individuals bewildered and spiritually lost.
Still more than him, she was carefully vague about her private life, but he got the impression that it was generally happy. If childlessness was an unvoiced sorrow, it was one she shared with many in a population-regulated world; he had had only a son. She loved Earth, its glories and memories, and every fine creation of her race. At the end of her mortality she chose to abide on the planet, in the wholeness that was to become Gaia.
He thought he saw why she had been picked for resurrection, to be his companion, out of all the uncounted millions who had elected the same destiny.
Aloud,
