Egan, Greg - Wang' s Carpets

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WANG'S CARPETS

Greg Egan

Here's another story by Australian writer Greg Egan, whose "Luminous"

appears elsewhere in this anthology. Nineteen ninety-five was a good year

for Egan in short fiction, and, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert Reed, he

published four or five different stories this year that might well have

made the cut for a best-of-the-year anthology in another year; the story

that follows, though, would be hard to match anywhere for the bravura sweep

and pure originality of its conceptualization, as Egan provides us with a

First Contact story unlike any you've ever read before . . .

Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million

cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial

bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked

with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at

first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly

eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in

an instant, by decree—but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual

of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical

cause and effect.

As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the

courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and

Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the

lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the

surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects,

rodents and small reptiles—decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a

more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone

observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of

viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they

wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it

or not.

The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless,

isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen

possible fates.

An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted.

One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anti-climax,

certainly—but there would have been advantages to compensate for that.

Everyone who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis,

but not all of them had chosen to take part in the diaspora to the same

degree; his Earth-self would have lost no one. Helping to ensure that the

thousand ships were safely dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And

remaining a member of the wider Earth-based community, plugged into the

entire global culture in real-time, would have been an attraction in

itself.

Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached

a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticated—but

non-sapient— self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those

conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren, had seemed

likely to be an enriching experience for him—with the distinct advantage

that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate

precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Z's population would

have fallen by more than half—and many of his closest friends would have

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been absent—but he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.

Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five,

a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.

Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous

signs of life—and that was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the

moment of the pre-launch cloning—a subjective instant before the chimes had

sounded—no reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. There'd been no

guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it.

Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the

declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the

information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This

clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target

stars, twenty-seven light-years from Earth. Paolo closed his eyes and

visualized a star map with a thousand lines radiating out from the sun,

then zoomed in on the trajectory which described his own journey. It had

taken three centuries to reach Vega—but the vast majority of the polis's

twenty thousand inhabitants had programmed their exoselves to suspend them

prior to the cloning, and to wake them only if and when they arrived at a

suitable destination. Ninety-two citizens had chosen the alternative:

experiencing every voyage of the diaspora from start to finish, risking

disappointment, and even death. Paolo now knew that the ship aimed at

Fomalhaut, the target nearest Earth, had been struck by debris and

annihilated en route. He mourned the ninety-two, briefly. He hadn't been

close to any of them, prior to the cloning, and the particular versions

who'd willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar space seemed as

remote as the victims of some ancient calamity from the era of flesh.

Paolo examined his new home star through the cameras of one of the scout

probes—and the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In

traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with

prominences. Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as

hot, sixty times as luminous. Burning hydrogen fast—and already halfway

through its allotted five hundred million years on the main sequence.

Vega's sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to the best lunar

interfer-ometers; now Paolo gazed down on its blue-green crescent, ten

thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was terrestrial,

a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly warmer—a

billion kilometers took the edge off Vega's heat—and almost drowning in

liquid water. Impatient to see the whole surface firsthand, Paolo slowed

his clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in

twenty subjective seconds, daylight unshrouding a broad new swath with each

pass. Two slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines

bracketed hemispheric oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered

both poles—far more so in the north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated

out from the midwinter arctic darkness.

The Orphean atmosphere was mostly nitrogen—six times as much as on Earth;

probably split by UV from primordial ammonia—with traces of water vapor and

carbon dioxide, but not enough of either for a runaway greenhouse effect.

The high atmospheric pressure meant reduced evaporation—Paolo saw not a

wisp of cloud— and the large, warm oceans in turn helped feed carbon

dioxide back into the crust, locking it up in limestone sediments destined

for subduction.

The whole system was young, by Earth standards, but Vega's greater mass,

and a denser protostellar cloud, would have meant swifter passage through

most of the traumas of birth: nuclear ignition and early luminosity

fluctuations; planetary coalescence and the age of bombardments. The

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library estimated that Orpheus had enjoyed a relatively stable climate, and

freedom from major impacts, for at least the past hundred million years.

Long enough for primitive life to appear—

A hand seized Paolo firmly by the ankle and tugged him beneath the water.

He offered no resistance, and let the vision of the planet slip away. Only

two other people in C-Z had free access to this environment—and his father

didn't play games with his now-twelve-hundred-year-old son.

Elena dragged him all the way to the bottom of the pool, before releasing

his foot and hovering above him, a triumphant silhouette against the bright

surface. She was ancestor-shaped, but obviously cheating; she spoke with

perfect clarity, and no air bubbles at all.

"Late sleeper! I've been waiting seven weeks for this!"

Paolo feigned indifference, but he was fast running out of breath. He had

his exoself convert him into an amphibious human variant—biologically and

histori-cally authentic, if no longer the definitive ancestral phenotype.

Water flooded into his modified lungs, and his modified brain welcomed it.

He said, "Why would I want to waste consciousness, sitting around waiting

for the scout probes to refine their observations? I woke as soon as the

data was unambiguous."

She pummeled his chest; he reached up and pulled her down, instinctively

reduc-ing his buoyancy to compensate, and they rolled across the bottom of

the pool, kissing.

Elena said, "You know we're the first C-Z to arrive, anywhere? The

Fomalhaut ship was destroyed. So there's only one other pair of us. Back on

Earth."

"So?" Then he remembered. Elena had chosen not to wake if any other version

of her had already encountered life. Whatever fate befell each of the

remaining ships, every other version of him would have to live without her.

He nodded soberly, and kissed her again. "What am I meant to say? You're a

thousand times more precious to me, now?"

"Yes."

"Ah, but what about the you-and-I on Earth? Five hundred times would be

closer to the truth."

"There's no poetry in five hundred."

"Don't be so defeatist. Rewire your language centers."

She ran her hands along the sides of his ribcage, down to his hips. They

made love with their almost-traditional bodies—and brains; Paolo was amused

to the point of distraction when his limbic system went into overdrive, but

he remembered enough from the last occasion to bury his self-consciousness

and surrender to the strange hijacker. It wasn't like making love in any

civilized fashion—the rate of information exchange between them was

minuscule, for a start—but it had the raw insistent quality of most

ancestral pleasures.

Then they drifted up to the surface of the pool and lay beneath the radiant

sunless sky.

Paolo thought: I've crossed twenty-seven light-years in an instant. I'm

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orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And I've

sacrificed nothing—left nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too

good. He felt a pang of regret for his other selves—it was hard to imagine

them faring as well, without Elena, without Orpheus—but there was nothing

he could do about that, now. Although there'd be time to confer with Earth

before any more ships reached their destinations, he'd decided—prior to the

cloning—not to allow the unfolding of his manifold future to be swayed by

any change of heart. Whether or not his Earth-self agreed, the two of them

were powerless to alter the criteria for waking. The self with the right to

choose for the thousand had passed away.

No matter, Paolo decided. The others would find—or construct—their own

reasons for happiness. And there was still the chance that one of them

would wake to the sound of four chimes.

Elena said, "If you'd slept much longer, you would have missed the vote."

The vote? The scouts in low orbit had gathered what data they could about

Orphean biology. To proceed any further, it would be necessary to send

microprobes into the ocean itself—an escalation of contact which required

the approval of two-thirds of the polis. There was no compelling reason to

believe that the presence of a few million tiny robots could do any harm;

all they'd leave behind in the water was a few kilojoules of waste heat.

Nevertheless, a faction had arisen which advo-cated caution. The citizens

of Carter-Zimmerman, they argued, could continue to observe from a distance

for another decade, or another millennium, refining their observations and

hypotheses before intruding . . . and those who disagreed could always

sleep away the time, or find other interests to pursue.

Paolo delved into his library-fresh knowledge of the "carpets"—the single

Or-phean lifeform detected so far. They were free-floating creatures living

in the equatorial ocean depths—apparently destroyed by UV if they drifted

too close to the surface. They grew to a size of hundreds of meters, then

fissioned into dozens of fragments, each of which continued to grow. It was

tempting to assume that they were colonies of single-celled organisms,

something like giant kelp—but there was no real evidence yet to back that

up. It was difficult enough for the scout probes to discern the carpets'

gross appearance and behavior through a kilometer of water, even with

Vega's copious neutrinos lighting the way; remote observations on a

microscopic scale, let alone biochemical analyses, were out of the

question. Spectroscopy revealed that the surface water was full of

intriguing molecular de-bris—but guessing the relationship of any of it to

the living carpets was like trying to reconstruct human biochemistry by

studying human ashes.

Paolo turned to Elena. "What do you think?"

She moaned theatrically; the topic must have been argued to death while he

slept. "The microprobes are harmless. They could tell us exactly what the

carpets are made of, without removing a single molecule. What's the risk?

Culture shock?"

Paolo flicked water onto her face, affectionately; the impulse seemed to

come with the amphibian body. "You can't be sure that they're not

intelligent."

"Do you know what was living on Earth, two hundred million years after it

was formed?"

"Maybe cyanobacteria. Maybe nothing. This isn't Earth, though."

"True. But even in the unlikely event that the carpets are intelligent, do

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you think they'd notice the presence of robots a millionth their size? If

they're unified organisms, they don't appear to react to anything in their

environment—they have no predators, they don't pursue food, they just drift

with the currents—so there's no reason for them to possess elaborate sense

organs at all, let alone anything working on a sub-millimeter scale. And if

they're colonies of single-celled creatures, one of which happens to

collide with a microprobe and register its presence with surface receptors

. . . what conceivable harm could that do?''

"I have no idea. But my ignorance is no guarantee of safety."

Elena splashed him back. "The only way to deal with your ignorance is to

vote to send down the microprobes. We have to be cautious, I agree—but

there's no point being here if we don't find out what's happening in the

oceans, right now. I don't want to wait for this planet to evolve something

smart enough to broadcast biochemistry lessons into space. If we're not

willing to take a few infinitesimal risks, Vega will turn red giant before

we leam anything."

It was a throwaway line—but Paolo tried to imagine witnessing the event. In

a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be

debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans—or would they all

have lost interest, and departed for other stars, or modified themselves

into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?

Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut clone had

been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk in the

Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its data

backed up to all the far-flung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable

just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the

moment—or they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and

forget that they'd ever made the journey.

Paolo recalled the honest puzzlement of a friend from Ashton-Laval: Why go

looking for aliens? Our polis has a thousand ecologies, a trillion species

of evolved life. What do you hope to find, out there, that you couldn't

have grown at home?

What had he hoped to find? Just the answers to a few simple questions. Did

human consciousness bootstrap all of space-time into existence, in order to

explain itself? Or had a neutral, pre-existing universe given birth to a

billion varieties of conscious life, all capable of harboring the same

delusions of grandeur—until they collided with each other? Anthrocosmology

was used to justify the inward-looking stance of most polises: if the

physical universe was created by human thought, it had no special status

which placed it above virtual reality. It might have come first—and every

virtual reality might need to run on a physical computing device, subject

to physical laws—but it occupied no privileged position in terms of "truth"

versus "illusion." If the ACs were right, then it was no more honest to

value the physical universe over more recent artificial realities than it

was honest to remain flesh instead of software, or ape instead of human, or

bacterium instead of ape.

Elena said, "We can't lie here forever; the gang's all waiting to see you."

"Where?" Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of

friends had always met in a real-time image of the Mount Pinatubo crater,

plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn't be

the same.

"I'll show you."

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Paolo reached over and took her hand. The pool, the sky, the courtyard

vanished—and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again . . . nightside,

but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything

from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio, to the multi-colored

shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and back-scattered cosmic-ray

bremsstrahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about

the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean's smoothly tapered

thermal glow spelt three-hundred Kelvin instantly—as well as backlighting

the atmosphere's telltale infrared silhouette.

He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder, one edge of a vast

geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and

saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from

zenith to nadir; aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each

absorption and emission line, Paolo could almost feel the plane of the

galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the

view was more familiar than strange—and he recognized most of the old

signposts by color. He had his bearings, now. Twenty degrees away from

Sirius—south, by parochial Earth reckoning—faint but unmistakable: the sun.

Elena was beside him—superficially unchanged, although they'd both shrugged

off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this environment

mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free-fall and vacuum,

but it wasn't set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of

flesh and blood. Their new bodies were human-shaped, but devoid of

elaborate microstructure—and their minds weren't embedded in the physics at

all, but were running directly on the processor web.

Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial regression to the

ancestral form was a venerable C-Z tradition—and being human was largely

self-affirming, while it lasted—but every time he emerged from the

experience, he felt as if he'd broken free of billion-year-old shackles.

There were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present

structure almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory

perception, an illusion of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate.

The last flesh human had died long before Paolo was constructed, and apart

from the communities of Gleisner robots, Carter-Zimmerman was about as

conservative as a transhuman society could be. The balance seemed right to

Paolo, though—acknowledging the flexibility of software, without abandoning

interest in the physical world—and although the stubbornly corporeal

Gleisners had been first to the stars, the C-Z diaspora would soon overtake

them.

Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall

acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake

sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

"Do you like our humble new meeting place?" Hermann floated by Paolo's

shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense-organs, speaking through

the vacuum in modulated infrared. "We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It's

desolate up here, I know— but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of

caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface."

Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe's close-up of a typical stretch of

dry land, an expanse of fissured red rock. "More desolate down there, I

think." He was tempted to touch the ground—to let the private vision become

tactile—but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation

was bad etiquette.

"Ignore Hermann," Liesi advised. "He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien

machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be." Liesi was a

green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized human face stippled in gold

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on each wing.

Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken, he'd assumed that his

friends must have come to a consensus in favor of the microprobes—and only

a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. "What

effects? The carpets—"

"Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as they look, we

don't know what else is down there." As Liesl's wings fluttered, her

mirror-image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. "With

neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in meters, time

resolution in seconds. We don't know anything about smaller lifeforms."

"And we never will, if you have your way." Karpal—an ex-Gleisner,

human-shaped as ever—had been Liesl's lover, last time Paolo was awake.

"We've only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year! There's still a

wealth of data we could gather non-intrusively, with a little patience.

There might be rare beachings of ocean life—"

Elena said dryly, "Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible tides, shallow

waves, very few storms. And anything beached would be fried by UV before we

glimpsed anything more instructive than we're already seeing in the surface

water.

"Not necessarily. The carpets seem to be vulnerable—but other species might

be better protected, if they live nearer to the surface. And Orpheus is

seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to dump a few

cubic kilometers of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals."

Paolo smiled; he hadn't thought of that. A tsunami might be worth waiting

for.

Liesi continued, "What is there to lose, by waiting a few hundred Orphean

years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal climate

patterns— and we could watch for anomalies, storms and quakes, hoping for

some revelatory glimpses."

A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia? Paolo's

ambivalence waned. If he'd wanted to inhabit geological time, he would have

migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers

watched Earth's mountains erode in subjective seconds. Orpheus hung in the

sky beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to be

understood.

He said, "But what if there are no 'revelatory glimpses'? How long do we

wait? We don't know how rare life is—in time, or in space. If this planet

is precious, so is the epoch it's passing through. We don't know how

rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while

we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpets—and

whatever else—could die out before we'd leamt the first thing about them.

What a waste that would be!"

Liesi stood her ground.

"And if we damage the Orphean ecology—or culture—by rushing in? That

wouldn't be a waste. It would be a tragedy."

Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his Earth-self—almost

three hundred years' worth—before composing a reply. The early

communications in-cluded detailed mind grafts—and it was good to share the

excitement of the dias-pora's launch; to watch—very nearly firsthand—the

thousand ships, nanomachine-carved from asteroids, depart in a blaze of

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fusion fire from beyond the orbit of Mars. Then things settled down to the

usual prosaic matters: Elena, the gang, shameless gossip,

Carter-Zimmerman's ongoing research projects, the buzz of inter-polis

cultural tensions, the not-quite-cyclic convulsions of the arts (the

perceptual aesthetic overthrows the emotional, again . . . although

Valladas in Konishi polis claims to have constructed a new synthesis of the

two).

After the first fifty years, his Earth-self had begun to hold things back;

by the time news reached Earth of the Fomalhaut clone's demise, the

messages had become pure audiovisual linear monologues. Paolo understood.

It was only right; they'd diverged, and you didn't send mind grafts to

strangers.

Most of the transmissions had been broadcast to all of the ships,

indiscriminately. Forty-three years ago, though, his Earth-self had sent a

special message to the Vega-bound clone.

"The new lunar spectroscope we finished last year has just picked up clear

signs of water on Orpheus. There should be large temperate oceans waiting

for you, if the models are right. So ... good luck." Vision showed the

instrument's domes growing out of the rock of the lunar farside; plots of

the Orphean spectral data; an ensemble of planetary models. "Maybe it seems

strange to you—all the trouble we're taking to catch a glimpse of what

you're going to see in close-up, so soon. It's hard to explain: I don't

think it's jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.

"There's been a revival of the old debate: should we consider redesigning

our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands

of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale

of the light-speed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local

contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems." Essays, pro and con,

were appended; Paolo ingested summaries. "I don't think the idea will gain

much support, though—and the new astronomical projects are something of an

antidote. We have to make peace with the fact that we've stayed behind ...

so we cling to the Earth—looking outwards, but remaining firmly anchored.

"I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't

guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and

respect the universe . . . but in what form? On what scale? With what kind

of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all—and that space

of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our

way? Flesh humans used

to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to 'conquer' Earth, to steal their

'precious' physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of 'competition'

... as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the

power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological

imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would

do—knowing no better, having no choice.

"Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That's

why we need to find alien life—not just to break the spell of the

anthrocosmologists. We need to find aliens who've faced the same

decisions—and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand

what it means to inhabit the universe.''

Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets moving in staccato

jerks around his dodecahedral room. Twenty-four ragged oblongs drifted

above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong which had just fissioned.

Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain the

whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a

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Egan, Greg - Wang' s Carpets

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