The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 8

  Y’ang-Yeovil glided to his side. “You are in great distress,” the little man murmured.

  Phillips glared. “Let me be.”

  “Perhaps I could be of some help.”

  “There’s no help possible,” said Phillips. He swung about and plucked one of the vials from a tray and gulped its contents. It made him feel as if there were two of him, standing on either side of Y’ang-Yeovil. He gulped another. Now there were four of him. “I’m in love with a citizen,” he blurted. It seemed to him that he was speaking in chorus.

  “Love. Ah. And does she love you?”

  “So I thought. So I think. But she’s a short-timer. Do you know what that means? She’s not immortal like the others. She ages. She’s beginning to look old. And so she’s been running away from me. She doesn’t want me to see her changing. She thinks it’ll disgust me, I suppose. I tried to remind her just now that I’m not immortal either, that she and I could grow old together, but she—”

  “Oh, no,” Y’ang-Yeovil said quietly. “Why do you think you will age? Have you grown any older in all the time that you’ve been here?”

  Phillips was nonplussed. “Of course I have. I – I—”

  “Have you?” Y’ang-Yeovil smiled. “Here. Look at yourself.” He did something intricate with his fingers and a shimmering zone of mirrorlike light appeared between them.

  Phillips stared at his reflection. A youthful face stared back at him. It was true, then. He had simply not thought about it. How many years had he spent in this world? The time had simply slipped by: a great deal of time, though he could not calculate how much. They did not seem to keep close count of it here, nor had he. But it must have been many years, he thought. All that endless travel up and down the globe – so many cities had come and gone – Rio, Rome, Asgard, those were the first three that came to mind – and there were others; he could hardly remember every one. Years. His face had not changed at all. Time had worked its harshness on Gioia, yes, but not on him.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why am I not aging?”

  “Because you are not real,” said Y’ang-Yeovil. “Are you unaware of that?”

  Phillips blinked. “Not – real?”

  “Did you think you were lifted bodily out of your own time?” the little man asked. “Ah, no, no, there is no way for them to do such a thing. We are not actual time travelers: not you, not I, not any of the visitors. I thought you were aware of that. But perhaps your era is too early for a proper understanding of these things. We are very cleverly done, my friend. We are ingenious constructs, marvelously stuffed with the thoughts and attitudes and events of our own times. We are their finest achievement, you know: far more complex even than one of these cities. We are a step beyond the temporaries – more than a step, a great deal more. They do only what they are instructed to do, and their range is very narrow. They are nothing but machines, really. Whereas we are autonomous. We move about by our own will; we think, we talk, we even, so it seems, fall in love. But we will not age. How could we age? We are not real. We are mere artificial webworks of mental responses. We are mere illusions, done so well that we deceive even ourselves. You did not know that? Indeed, you did not know?”

  He was airborne, touching destination buttons at random. Somehow he found himself heading back toward Timbuctoo. This city is closed. This is not a place any longer. It did not matter to him. Why should anything matter?

  Fury and a choking sense of despair rose within him. I am software, Phillips thought. I am nothing but software.

  Not real. Very cleverly done. An ingenious construct. A mere illusion.

  No trace of Timbuctoo was visible from the air. He landed anyway. The gray sandy earth was smooth, unturned, as though there had never been anything there. A few robots were still about, handling whatever final chores were required in the shutting-down of a city. Two of them scuttled up to him. Huge bland gleaming silver-skinned insects, not friendly.

  “There is no city here,” they said. “This is not a permissible place.”

  “Permissible by whom?”

  “There is no reason for you to be here.”

  “There’s no reason for me to be anywhere,” Phillips said. The robots stirred, made uneasy humming sounds and ominous clicks, waved their antennae about. They seemed troubled, he thought. They seem to dislike my attitude. Perhaps I run some risk of being taken off to the home for unruly software for debugging. “I’m leaving now,” he told them. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” He backed away from them and climbed into his flitterflitter. He touched more destination buttons.

  We move about by our own will. We think, we talk, we even fall in love.

  He landed in Chang-an. This time there was no reception committee waiting for him at the Gate of Brilliant Virtue. The city seemed larger and more resplendent: new pagodas, new palaces. It felt like winter: a chilly cutting wind was blowing. The sky was cloudless and dazzlingly bright. At the steps of the Silver Terrace he encountered Francis Willoughby, a great hulking figure in magnificent brocaded robes, with two dainty little temporaries, pretty as jade statuettes, engulfed in his arms. “Miracles and wonders! The silly lunatic fellow is here, too!” Willoughby roared. “Look, look, we are come to far Cathay, you and I!”

  We are nowhere, Phillips thought. We are mere illusions, done so well that we deceive even ourselves.

  To Willoughby he said, “You look like an emperor in those robes, Francis.”

  “Aye, like Prester John!” Willoughby cried. “Like Tamburlaine himself! Aye, am I not majestic?” He slapped Phillips gaily on the shoulder, a rough playful poke that spun him halfway about, coughing and wheezing. “We flew in the air, as the eagles do, as the demons do, as the angels do! Soared like angels! Like angels!” He came close, looming over Phillips. “I would have gone to England, but the wench Belilala said there was an enchantment on me that would keep me from England just now; and so we voyaged to Cathay. Tell me this, fellow, will you go witness for me when we see England again? Swear that all that has befallen us did in truth befall? For I fear they will say I am as mad as Marco Polo, when I tell them of flying to Cathay.”

  “One madman backing another?” Phillips asked. “What can I tell you? You still think you’ll reach England, do you?” Rage rose to the surface in him, bubbling hot. “Ah, Francis, Francis, do you know your Shakespeare? Did you go to the plays? We aren’t real. We aren’t real. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, the two of us. That’s all we are. O brave new world! What England? Where? There’s no England. There’s no Francis Willoughby. There’s no Charles Phillips. What we are is—”

  “Let him be, Charles,” a cool voice cut in.

  He turned. Belilala, in the robes of an empress, coming down the steps of the Silver Terrace.

  “I know the truth,” he said bitterly. “Y’ang-Yeovil told me. The visitor from the twenty-fifth century. I saw him in New Chicago.”

  “Did you see Gioia there, too?” Belilala asked.

  “Briefly. She looks much older.”

  “Yes. I know. She was here recently.”

  “And has gone on, I suppose?”

  “To Mohenjo again, yes. Go after her, Charles. Leave poor Francis alone. I told her to wait for you. I told her that she needs you, and you need her.”

  “Very kind of you. But what good is it, Belilala? I don’t even exist. And she’s going to die.”

  “You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? You feel, don’t you? You suffer. You love. You love Gioia: is that not so? And you are loved by Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real?”

  “You think she loves me?”

  “I know she does. Go to her, Charles. Go. I told her to wait for you in Mohenjo.”

  Phillips nodded numbly. What was there to lose?

  “Go to her,” said Belilala again. “Now.”

  “Yes,” Phillips said. “I’ll go now.” He turned to Willoughby. “If ever we meet in London, friend, I’ll testify for you. Fear nothing. All will be well, F
rancis.”

  He left them and set his course for Mohenjo-daro, half expecting to find the robots already tearing it down. Mohenjo-daro was still there, no lovelier than before. He went to the baths, thinking he might find Gioia there. She was not; but he came upon Nissandra, Stengard, Fenimon.

  “She has gone to Alexandria,” Fenimon told him. “She wants to see it one last time, before they close it.”

  “They’re almost ready to open Constantinople,” Stengard explained. “The capital of Byzantium, you know, the great city by the Golden Horn. They’ll take Alexandria away, you understand, when Byzantium opens. They say it’s going to be marvelous. We’ll see you there for the opening, naturally?”

  “Naturally,” Phillips said.

  He flew to Alexandria. He felt lost and weary. All this is hopeless folly, he told himself. I am nothing but a puppet jerking about on its strings. But somewhere above the shining breast of the Arabian Sea the deeper implications of something that Belilala had said to him started to sink in, and he felt his bitterness, his rage, his despair, all suddenly beginning to leave him. You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? Would Gioia love what is not real? Of course. Of course. Y’ang-Yeovil had been wrong: visitors were something more than mere illusions. Indeed, Y’ang-Yeovil had voiced the truth of their condition without understanding what he was really saying: We think, we talk, we fall in love. Yes. That was the heart of the situation. The visitors might be artificial, but they were not unreal. Belilala had been trying to tell him that just the other night. You suffer. You love. You love Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real? Surely he was real, or at any rate real enough. What he was was something strange, something that would probably have been all but incomprehensible to the twentieth-century people whom he had been designed to simulate. But that did not mean that he was unreal. Did one have to be of woman born to be real? No. No. No. His kind of reality was a sufficient reality. He had no need to be ashamed of it. And, understanding that, he understood that Gioia did not need to grow old and die. There was a way by which she could be saved, if only she would embrace it. If only she would.

  When he landed in Alexandria he went immediately to the hotel on the slopes of the Paneium where they had stayed on their first visit, so very long ago; and there she was, sitting quietly on a patio with a view of the harbor and the Lighthouse. There was something calm and resigned about the way she sat. She had given up. She did not even have the strength to flee from him any longer.

  “Gioia,” he said gently.

  She looked older than she had in New Chicago. Her face was drawn and sallow and her eyes seemed sunken; and she was not even bothering these days to deal with the white strands that stood out in stark contrast against the darkness of her hair. He sat down beside her and put his hand over hers and looked out toward the obelisks, the palaces, the temples, the Lighthouse. At length he said, “I know what I really am now.”

  “Do you, Charles?” She sounded very far away.

  “In my age we called it software. All I am is a set of commands, responses, cross-references, operating some sort of artificial body. It’s infinitely better software than we could have imagined. But we were only just beginning to learn how, after all. They pumped me full of twentieth-century reflexes. The right moods, the right appetites, the right irrationalities, the right sort of combativeness. Somebody knows a lot about what it was like to be a twentieth-century man. They did a good job with Willoughby, too, all that Elizabethan rhetoric and swagger. And I suppose they got Y’ang-Yeovil right. He seems to think so: who better to judge? The twenty-fifth century, the Republic of Upper Han, people with gray-green skin, half Chinese and half Martian for all I know. Somebody knows. Somebody here is very good at programming, Gioia.”

  She was not looking at him.

  “I feel frightened, Charles,” she said in that same distant way.

  “Of me? Of the things I’m saying?”

  “No, not of you. Don’t you see what has happened to me?”

  “I see you. There are changes.”

  “I lived a long time wondering when the changes would begin. I thought maybe they wouldn’t, not really. Who wants to believe they’ll get old? But it started when we were in Alexandria that first time. In Chang-an it got much worse. And now – now—”

  He said abruptly, “Stengard tells me they’ll be opening Constantinople very soon.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you want to be there when it opens?”

  “I’m becoming old and ugly, Charles.”

  “We’ll go to Constantinople together. We’ll leave tomorrow, eh? What do you say? We’ll charter a boat. It’s a quick little hop, right across the Mediterranean. Sailing to Byzantium! There was a poem, you know, in my time. Not forgotten, I guess, because they’ve programmed it into me. All these thousands of years, and someone still remembers old Yeats. The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees. Come with me to Byzantium, Gioia.”

  She shrugged. “Looking like this? Getting more hideous every hour? While they stay young forever? While you—” She faltered; her voice cracked; she fell silent.

  “Finish the sentence, Gioia.”

  “Please. Let me alone.”

  “You were going to say, ‘While you stay young forever, too, Charles,’ isn’t that it? You knew all along that I was never going to change. I didn’t know that, but you did.”

  “Yes. I knew. I pretended that it wasn’t true – that as I aged, you’d age, too. It was very foolish of me. In Chang-an, when I first began to see the real signs of it – that was when I realized I couldn’t stay with you any longer. Because I’d look at you, always young, always remaining the same age, and I’d look at myself, and—” She gestured, palms upward. “So I gave you to Belilala and ran away.”

  “All so unnecessary, Gioia.”

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “But you don’t have to grow old. Not if you don’t want to!”

  “Don’t be cruel, Charles,” she said tonelessly. “There’s no way of escaping what I have.”

  “But there is,” he said.

  “You know nothing about these things.”

  “Not very much, no,” he said. “But I see how it can be done. Maybe it’s a primitive simpleminded twentieth-century sort of solution, but I think it ought to work. I’ve been playing with the idea ever since I left Mohenjo. Tell me this, Gioia: Why can’t you go to them, to the programmers, to the artificers, the planners, whoever they are, the ones who create the cities and the temporaries and the visitors. And have yourself made into something like me!”

  She looked up, startled. “What are you saying?”

  “They can cobble up a twentieth-century man out of nothing more than fragmentary records and make him plausible, can’t they? Or an Elizabethan, or anyone else of any era at all, and he’s authentic, he’s convincing. So why couldn’t they do an even better job with you? Produce a Gioia so real that even Gioia can’t tell the difference? But a Gioia that will never age – a Gioia-construct, a Gioia-program, a visitor-Gioia! Why not? Tell me why not, Gioia.”

  She was trembling. “I’ve never heard of doing any such thing!”

  “But don’t you think it’s possible?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Of course it’s possible. If they can create visitors, they can take a citizen and duplicate her in such a way that—”

  “It’s never been done. I’m sure of it. I can’t imagine any citizen agreeing to any such thing. To give up the body – to let yourself be turned into – into—”

  She shook her head, but it seemed to be a gesture of astonishment as much as of negation.

  He said, “Sure. To give up the body. Your natural body, your aging, shrinking, deteriorating short-timer body. What’s so awful about that?”

  She was very pale. “This is craziness, Charles. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy to me.”

  “You can’t possibly understa
nd.”

  “Can’t I? I can certainly understand being afraid to die. I don’t have a lot of trouble understanding what it’s like to be one of the few aging people in a world where nobody grows old. What I can’t understand is why you aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that—”

  “No,” she said. “I tell you, it’s crazy. They’d laugh at me.”

  “Who?”

  “All of my friends. Hawk, Stengard, Aramayne—” Once again she would not look at him. “They can be very cruel, without even realizing it. They despise anything that seems ungraceful to them, anything sweaty and desperate and cowardly. Citizens don’t do sweaty things, Charles. And that’s how this will seem. Assuming it can be done at all. They’ll be terribly patronizing. Oh, they’ll be sweet to me, yes, dear Gioia, how wonderful for you, Gioia, but when I turn my back they’ll laugh. They’ll say the most wicked things about me. I couldn’t bear that.”

  “They can afford to laugh,” Phillips said. “It’s easy to be brave and cool about dying when you know you’re going to live forever. How very fine for them: but why should you be the only one to grow old and die? And they won’t laugh, anyway. They’re not as cruel as you think. Shallow, maybe, but not cruel. They’ll be glad that you’ve found a way to save yourself. At the very least, they won’t have to feel guilty about you any longer, and that’s bound to please them. You can—”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  She rose, walked to the railing of the patio, stared out toward the sea. He came up behind her. Red sails in the harbor, sunlight glittering along the sides of the Lighthouse, the palaces of the Ptolemies stark white against the sky. Lightly he rested his hand on her shoulder. She twitched as if to pull away from him, but remained where she was.

  “Then I have another idea,” he said quietly. “If you won’t go to the planners, I will. Reprogram me, I’ll say. Fix things so that I start to age at the same rate you do. It’ll be more authentic, anyway, if I’m supposed to be playing the part of a twentieth-century man. Over the years I’ll very gradually get some lines in my face, my hair will turn gray, I’ll walk a little more slowly – we’ll grow old together, Gioia. To hell with your lovely immortal friends. We’ll have each other. We won’t need them.”