Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2) Page 8

  “That’s spacious for that number of people,” Paul said. “Is the population increasing?”

  “Slowly,” Rhazes said. “I’m one of the youngest.” He almost smiled as the lift door opened and he stepped out in front of them. “You’re on the fifth floor,” he said, pointing to two doors. ‘The doors are keyed for you. If you like, I’ll be back in an hour and we can continue your tour.”

  “Yes,” Josepha said, eager to continue right away; but she saw that Paul seemed a bit tired. “We’ll be ready,” she added as Voss Rhazes turned back toward the elevator.

  Paul was at his door when she turned back to him. He touched the plate. “I must lie down,” he said with a sigh as it opened. He went inside, and the door closed.

  Josepha touched her door open—and stepped into an old-fashioned sitting room, with chair, sofa, and small side tables, as she might have found in a well-furnished apartment in New Vatican. Light streamed in through the open windows, whose gauzy curtains had been pulled back. She went to the windows, stepped out on the small balcony, and smiled to see flowered vines covering the railing.

  She breathed deeply of the warm air, and gazed out across the vista of widely spaced buildings, blue sky, and what seemed to be a hidden horizon. This, she realized, was due to the distant upward curve of the level as it continued for fifty kilometers to the forward docks, then wrapped around to the other side of the central core, which she knew was somewhere above her head, two levels away.

  She turned back inside and found a bedroom and bath off the sitting room: one good-sized old-fashioned bed, and a bath with what seemed to be a shower inside a clear enclosure.

  She turned and went out to the sitting room. Something in her wanted to laugh as she sat down in the big chair, as if she had just awakened from a bad dream into a happy one….

  Clearly, these rooms had been selected, if not prepared, to make her feel more comfortable, and could not be typical of this world.

  But there was one disturbing implication that she had to face: She had to seem vastly ignorant and backward in the eyes of these people; that was probably why Voss was so polite and distant with her. He reminded her a little of the priests she had known. They too had seemed immune to her physical presence. They were obeying their vows and doctrines, but they also knew—though at the time she didn’t—that she was protected by Bely. The bishops and cardinals usually took their mistresses from the Sisters of Martha—her mother had been one—but no cleric had ever cast an eye on Lesa’s daughter. Josepha had once thought that might be because she was the daughter of a suicide; but now that she knew Josephus Bely to be her father, she wondered how many in the hierarchy had guessed that secret, how many might have avoided her because she was the Pontiff’s daughter. Paul had tried to shield her from the whispered stories of her mother’s death, but he had failed. Now she found herself thinking of the mother she had never known, whom she recalled only as a vague but comforting presence, and the father who had done so well at severing any connection with Lesa.

  The women of this mobile world, she was sure, could not be like those of her world, content with a lesser place while hoping for greater blessings beyond the grave. She wondered whether Voss Rhazes could look upon her as a woman, or whether he had looked and seen the hopelessness of her ignorance and origins.

  Josepha rested for a while, then explored the rooms. The furniture was familiar, but there were silver panels on some of the surfaces, and mirrored rectangles on the walls. She sat down at one end of the sofa, wondering if she was being observed.

  “May I come in?” a voice asked from the door, and she knew it was Voss Rhazes.

  “Please do,” she replied, and the door slid open.

  He came into the room and stood in front of her. She got up from the sofa, feeling uncertain on her feet.

  “Feel free to ask questions,” he said gently.

  “What do most people do here?” she asked.

  He looked at her as if puzzled, then said, “With a link, your question would have been answered routinely.”

  “How?” she asked. “Does it speak to you? Paul mentioned this to me, but I don’t quite understand.”

  “It’s located in my head, and speaks to me directly,” Rhazes said. “Sometimes it speaks as you and I do. At other times, information is imparted swiftly. We each carry a bioengineered implant unique to every individual. If you had asked your question subvocally, the Link would have asked you how many activities and interests you would like listed.”

  “Do your people work?” she asked. “Do they have crafts and professions?”

  He waited a moment, then said, “No one has to labor at unpleasant or brutal work. No one works to live, in the old sense. That’s given.”

  “Given?” she asked.

  “As a legacy from those who created our way of life, our basic framework of economy and energy use.”

  “So your people study and learn?” she asked.

  “Not as you mean it. No one learns information beyond the short term. All knowledge is available to all by asking.”

  “Through a link,” she said, then paused. “Am I speaking only to you?”

  He nodded, almost with a smile. “You are speaking only to me, but I am getting language and reference help as I need it. I can keep that function open all the time, or I may restrict it. Many people leave it open all the time.”

  “So you are monitored?” she asked, thinking that Sister Perpetua would have called the Link a guardian angel.

  “Yes, as a servant follows his master around to pick up after him.”

  “So what do people here do?” she asked.

  “Most pursue their interests, as these have grown from early life. They participate in the dialogue of study in their area of interest. We have scientists in every area of study, from basic physics to social science and history. We have storytellers, even poets, who reach their audience directly through the visual and auditory centers of the brain.”

  “How long is education?”

  “A century to start, then as long as the person lives.”

  “And you?” she asked. “You’re not a century old, are you?”

  “No,” he said, “a little more than a third.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Right now I’m part of the contact project with your world.”

  “So this was planned?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She looked at him carefully. He smiled slightly, but again she felt that she could not see into him as she could into Paul, or Ondro, or any of the people she had known in her life. They all gave clues about what was inside them. But Voss Rhazes seemed impenetrable. The only clear perception she had of him was his obvious physical perfection, and the sense of what stood behind him. And the Link. It was a ghost inside him, a kind of caretaker that whispered to him.

  For a moment she realized that she had not thought of Ondro for some time now, and felt pangs of sorrow and guilt.

  “Our people are always busy,” Rhazes was saying. “Their interests and researches contribute to the store of our knowledge, and deepen the judgment of our Link intelligence. But we must know more. So we seek.”

  “Including knowledge of my world?” she asked.

  He nodded. “You are part of the humanity that continues outside the increasing mobiles. We should know where it is, to better understand what has happened.”

  “And to help?” she asked.

  “Depending on the circumstances,” he said.

  “But there is a big difference between the people of my world and yours,” she said, taking a step toward him and noting that he was only half a head taller than her; somehow, she had imagined him taller. “Can you tell me the difference?”

  He was silent for a moment. “Perhaps the best way to understand them is to spend some time among us, which you are welcome to do. In some ways we’re not so different, Josepha.”

  He had called her by her Christian name. “May I call you Voss?” she asked, f
eeling it was only fair.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, still with his half-smile, and she stepped back, realizing that she was alone in the room with a man. When a woman was alone with a man, the nuns of Saint Elizabeth used to say, the devil is always present. She had no idea of what Voss Rhazes regarded as appropriate behavior between men and women in such a situation.

  She steadied herself, remembering that he was his people’s equivalent of a diplomat and unlikely to treat her crudely.

  “The difference between my people and yours,” he continued with no sign that he had noticed her apprehension, “was foreseen on Earth. Our average citizen is what an outstanding individual was during the centuries to the year two thousand. From fifteen hundred to two thousand, humanity on Earth expanded rapidly, using large amounts of irreplaceable energy in the form of natural resources. What was gained in this time was a body of knowledge that freed humanity from its natural, planetary roots, through a series of crises that produced a better average human being—highly intelligent and cooperative, now sharing through macrolife an open-ended cultural expansion.”

  “And you have no problems?” Josepha asked.

  “We have different problems. Freedom from planets and scarcities of resources and energy, and from the psychological weight of short lives, have not liberated us from the nature that we find in the Galaxy, or from the inner need to find worthy goals to pursue.”

  “Have you visited other planetary colonies?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Yours is the first for us. It is an event that is being much discussed through our Link.”

  “And how is it being seen?” she asked.

  “There is no one view, and there won’t be until there is more contact between our peoples. Do you and Paul Anselle wish to see the other levels?”

  “Are they all much like this one?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “but they differ in landscape and architecture, and are larger as we move outward to the second engineering level.”

  She stepped back and sat down in the chair. He stood awkwardly before her for a moment, then moved back and sat down on the sofa. He might have been one of the healthy farm boys who sometimes came into New Vatican, except for what lived behind his eyes.

  “Can I try the Link?” she asked.

  He waited a moment, then said, “That would take some training and preparation, a few weeks at least. A lifetime, as you measure it, would be needed for you to feel proficient.”

  “But you—” she started to say.

  “I have never known otherwise,” he said. “The Link is a world in itself, a mind, a universe that one might live in to the exclusion of the outer universe.”

  “And how do you live in it?” she asked.

  “I use it as a tool, a helper, not as an alternative to reality. In this I was taught by my mentors and exemplars.”

  He talks like a priest, Josepha thought, and speaks to a god of some kind, and gets help and answers.

  “Would you like to go?” he asked.

  She shook her head in sudden confusion. “Why are you here? To tell us how backward we are? We are, you know. And when they find out about you down there, they’ll be afraid. Do you think you can help us?”

  “Perhaps,” he said with no hint of judgment in his face. “We’re here to learn first.”

  She thought of Ondro again, searched for her feelings about him, and for an instant could not find them. Her world had never existed. She had awakened in this room only a short time ago, and was now recalling a bad dream, in which the man she loved was still suffering, and may have never existed….

  “Are you all right?” Voss asked, getting up from the sofa.

  She stood up from the chair and tried to smile. “Yes, I’ll be fine.”

  They went up the levels, Josepha, Voss, and Paul, stopping at each. She saw—

  —a blue sea and a hundred sails—

  —a desert growing strange trees and plants, where squat towns sat, and where it seemed to her that people thought long thoughts—

  —green forested hills, where no one seemed to live, but Voss explained that these people loved solitude, even from the Link—

  —grassy plains, with lonely trees and herds of strange animals—

  —and mountains where people hid in the valleys.

  Worlds were infolded within this hundred-kilometer-long egg-shape, and minds extended into inner dream realms. Were there any self-made hells? she wondered.

  “Every landscape,” Voss said, “that has ever existed on Earth is here, because someone or some group has looked back and wanted it. To have it physically, to know the difference, separates us from those who create imaginary realms in the Link’s mental spaces.”

  “But theirs is also a way of life,” Paul said.

  “Yes,” Voss said, “and they are free to follow it.”

  “And nothing will ever disturb them?” Paul asked.

  “Nothing can,” Voss said. “They see and feel what they imagine. They can have what they wish.”

  “But you disapprove?” Josepha asked.

  “It’s a disagreement,” Voss said, “that cannot be resolved.”

  “Oh, why?” she asked.

  “Because our inner worlds are not clearly separated from the primary universe, with which all minds are continuous.”

  “But you do not choose that way,” Josepha said. “Why?”

  “Because to truly find satisfaction, one must forget, at least for a timed period, that it is only a creation of one’s own desires.”

  “And you can’t do that?”

  “No.”

  On the third level, they circled the mobile’s equator over an ocean. Large islands appeared below them, and Paul was reminded of the Celestine Archipelago, where Ondro and Jason languished.

  These people don’t simply live, he thought as dozens of green gems rushed by in the blue water. They play at godhood. He knew that Josephus would think this, and fear the devil’s paradises.

  Yet as he looked at Voss Rhazes sitting next to him, Paul saw no pride or arrogance. If anything, he saw a modest desire to learn, to see beyond both himself and his own world, even to share his world with others. If he had met the young man in New Vatican, Paul would have judged him to have the makings of a good parish priest, one who might have cared more for his flock’s mental health than for the politics of his order.

  As the islands flashed by below the flyer, Paul felt regret for his world, but wondered whether his regret was wasted. Voss Rhazes, Paul realized, had many of the attributes of an angel—but Josephus whispered to him that all the devils had been angels before their expulsion from paradise, and that hell was the paradise they had built for themselves.

  Josepha touched his arm and smiled at him. But the shadow that crossed her face told Paul that Ondro might already be dead in Bely’s island hell. The atheist’s death, he realized, had one quality in common with theological hell. Death and hell were both forever.

  Voss brought the flyer low to race over the sparkling water.

  “How deep is the sea?” Paul asked.

  “It varies from fifty meters to five hundred,” Voss said, “to permit a variety of lifeforms, including our own sea people.”

  “Sea people?” Josepha asked.

  “Humanity with gills,” Voss said. “They chose their way a long time ago.”

  On the second level, the last before outward engineering, Voss showed them a low-gravity world of winged people who flew through a blue heaven.

  “How beautiful!” Josepha cried as the flyer passed over a town where the homes were accessible to their inhabitants from the air.

  Flying devils, Paul knew Bely would say while fearing that they might very well be angels, and this a heaven he had somehow missed. Paul could almost hear him shout, “These are not people! These are false creations from the inner hells of the faithless, secular reason attempting the work of God without his guidance!”

  Paul imagined how he might answe
r this narrow view, which gave his old friend such a small range of choices between his God, humanity, angels, and devils. “Mind has many shapes,” Paul said to the Pontiff within himself, “but it is all mind.”

  “The devil’s mind!” Bely’s voice shouted back. “These monstrosities have neither the wisdom of nature or of God.”

  Paul wanted to reply that nature had only martyred man, and that an infinite all-powerful God could only reduce man to infinite unimportance. But here, in this mobile and in many others, the voice of humanity and mind was strong, speaking for itself with love, courage, and reason, against blind nature. If ever the word God would find meaning, it would be in the fact that nature already had its God, in the form of evolving minds that had only to grow toward one another, away from nature’s cross of blood and death, toward the grace and the light of knowledge.

  “How wonderful!” Josepha cried out, and in her voice Paul heard the music of redemption.

  18

  Paul stood on the small balcony outside the window of his guest apartment and reminded himself of what he had learned on the tour of the mobile-—that the inwardmost urban level on which he and Josepha had been given quarters curved away gently toward the forwards of the world, enabling him to see over what would have been the horizon on his planet. The same was true of views left and right, across the shorter distance of the egg-shape, but he could not see the curvature. Residential structures stood nearby, rising most of a kilometer to touch the night glow of the sky, each a column connecting with the upper and lower levels—the lower levels becoming larger shells, he reminded himself with wonder, until one reached the engineering level. Parks, walkways, educational and recreational centers clustered around the massive columns. The same warm air that circulated outside caressed him indoors. He smiled, and again imagined bringing Bely to the low-gravity level, where he would have seen a heavenly host winging its way across the vast spaces.

  Paul had come out on the small balcony according to his habit of taking a walk around the palace at night; but that bodily form of worrying his dilemmas was not the same here. Deep inside him a voice suggested that he was at home now, having found the place of wonders that his studies had told him existed but which he had never expected to see. This may be your heaven, and you deserve to enter it, he told himself.