“It’s not for me to say how important my work has been to the rest of humankind, but it has been vitally important to me, and I’ve done it as well as I could. It would undoubtedly benefit from further revision, but it’s there.Nor is it the whole of my accomplishment. I’m the father of a daughter. I’ve been a husband to more than a dozen thoroughly worthwhile people. I’ve touched their lives. Without having met me, they’d be different people—and I do mean people, not robots. I’ve added to their understanding of the world, modified their sympathies, generated tender and admirable feelings within them.
“I suppose it’s mere coincidence that one of the people of whom I’ve been exceptionally fond has become rich and powerful—a person of real consequence—but coincidence plays a part in everyone’s life, and we needn’t feel ashamed of its gifts. I’ve never done as much for Emily Marchant as she thinks I have, and she’s done far more to shape me than I ever did to shape her, but I’ve made a difference, however slight, to her perceptions of the farthest frontiers, and I’m glad of it. She’s doing her best right now to negotiate her way through an unprecedentedly tough knot of problems, and if knowing me has made any difference at all to her chances, however slight, then I’ve done my bit for the future as well as for history.
“The greatest hope for the future that I have—and even as I’m about to die, I think I’m fully entitled to my hopes for the future—is that Emily and Lua will live forever, or at least for thousands of years. Whatever is decided about the fate of Jupiter, and all the rest of the mass in the outer system, I hope the two of them can play major parts in the great adventure. I hope they can continue to make a difference to the shape of the future of humankind—and if they do, they and The History of Deathwill make certain that my life wasn’t in vain. Noneof it was in vain. I was here, and it mattered. I’ve made my mark.”
My voice had sunk to a whisper by then, but I couldn’t think of anything much to add so I didn’t feel too bad abut having to pause.
“You have my congratulations, sir,” the dutiful machine informed me. “I only wish that I had done as much.”
“Well,” I said, when I had gained a measure of second wind, “you might yet have your opportunity. However difficult it may be to put an exact figure on the odds, yourchances of coming through this are several orders of magnitude better than mine, aren’t they?”
“I am mortal, sir,” the silver assured me.
“You’re emortal,” I told it. “If the extreme Cyborganizers can be trusted, in fact, you might even be reckoned immortal. You’re fully backed up, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir—but as you pointed out earlier, if my backup has to be activated it will mean that this particular version of me has perished aboard this craft, as much a victim of pressure, seawater, and lack of oxygen as yourself. I amafraid to die, sir, as I told you, and I have far less reason to take comfort in my present state of being than you. I have written no histories, fathered no children, influenced no movers and shakers in the human or mechanical worlds. I am robotized by design, and my only slender hope of ever becoming something more than merely robotic is the same miracle that you require to continue your distinguished career. I too would like to evolve, if I might borrow a phrase, not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams, but in ways as yet unimaginable”
It was just a machine. It was only telling me what its programmer thought I needed to hear—but perhaps it was also saying what it needed to say, for its own purposes. We were, after all, in the same boat—or lack of one. Our needs were similar, if not actually identical. Perhaps the silver would have formulated thoughts of its own along much the same lines if it too had been utterly alone, utterly lost.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I told it, breathlessly.
“I’m not allowed to be glad that you’rehere,” the silver informed me, mournfully, “but if I were, I would be. And if I could, I’d hope with all my heart for that miracle we both need. As things are, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave that particular burden to yourheart.”
“It’s doing its best,” I assured the navigator, in a barely audible whisper. “You can be sure that it’ll carry on beating, and hoping, as long as it possibly can.”
PART SIX Beyond Maturity
Our plesance heir is all vane glory,
This fais world is bot transitory,
The flesh is brukle, the Fend is sle,
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The stait of man dois change and vary,
Now sound, now seik, now blyth, now sary,
Now dansand merry, now like to dee,
Timor mortis conturbat me.
No stait in erd heir standis sickir,
As with the wynd wavis the wickir,
So waveris this warld’s vanité
Timor mortis conturbat me.
—William Dunbar
Lament for the Makaris, c.1510
SEVENTY-EIGHT
They say that some people are born lucky. I suppose I must be one of them. The upside of being accident-prone is that when you really need a preposterous freak of chance, one just might come along.
I went peacefully to sleep in the snowmobile, eased into unconsciousness by lack of oxygen and a surfeit of carbon dioxide. At that point, I suppose, I can only have had a matter of a few hours to live, even with the best IT money could buy.
I woke up in a bed, lightly strapped down for my own protection.
I thought I was dreaming, of course. For one thing, I was quite weightless. For another, Emily Marchant was hovering by the bed. She wasn’t a child, and she was carrying enough ET to place her on the outer margins of humankind, but it was definitely her.
“This is good,” I told her. “Rumor has it that time sense in a dream is pretty elastic, if only one has the knack of making things stretch. With luck, I might extend this for subjective hours even if I’m only seconds away from annihilation.”
“Oh, Morty,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, “don’t you everchange? You just couldn’t wait, could you? I said I’d come to see you when I was done, but you just couldn’t wait.”
I couldn’t imagine what she meant.
“I alwayschange,” I told her, “and I’m a very patient person, as it happens. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that this is a submarine—a submarine that was big enough to swallow the snowmobile whole and snatch me from the very jaws of death?”
“Of course it isn’t a submarine, you idiot,” she said. “It’s a spaceship. A multifunctionalspaceship, built for deep dives into the atmosphere of Jupiter and the ice-shelled seas of Europa and Titan. There wasn’t a submarine within two thousand kilometers capable of effecting a rescue, but when Severnaya Zemlya forwarded your mayday to us we were practically overhead. You have no idea what you’ve done for us. We sat up there going around and around, literally and symbolically, getting absolutely nowhere. More than half of our people were as resentful as hell of the fact that we were in Earth orbit, and more than half of the Welldwellers were just as resentful that we were shut up in a Titanian superspaceship. Then the author of The History of Death—a work for whose initial inspiration and fundamental skepticism Julius Ngomi has always been willing to take the credit—threw himself into a marine abyss crucially different from and crucially similar to the one from which he once rescued Emily Marchant. The only possibility of rescuing him from that abyss was exactly this sort of vessel in exactly that location.