Bear, Greg - Eternity

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file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt
A WARner Communications Company
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Copyright @ 1988 by Greg Bear
All rights reserved
Warner Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10103
OA Warner Communications Company
Printed in the United States of America
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For David McClintock;
friend, fellow admirer of Olaf Stapledon,
and above all, bookseller.
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Only when space is rolled up like a piece of leather
will there be an end to suffering,
apart from knowing God.
---~vet~vatara Upanis. ad, VI 20
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In the end, there is cruelty and death alone over the land. Not in a single
ray of light or grain of sand will you find solace, for all is dark, and the
coM gaze of God's indifferent, heavy-lidded eyes falls on all with equal
disdain. Only in your inner strength is there salvation; you must live just as
a tree must live, or the cockroaches andfleas thatflourish in the land and
ruin of Earth. ~4nd so you live, and feel the sting of knowing you live. You
eat whatever comes to hand, and if what you eat was once a brother or
sister, so be it; God does not care. Nobody carex You whore, and if you
whore with man or woman, nobody cares; for when all are hungry, all are
whores, even those who use the whores. And disease flourishes when all are
whores, for germs must live, and spread across the land and ruin of Earth.
Some say we will climb back to the sky on our own. Some say we all
should have died; should have died, for penance. But that was not to be.
For by time's freak and history's whim, the angels come from the Stone, to
march over the land and offer what solace the land cannot; to push back
the clouds and smoke and let sun pass through, to sow our crops and
harvest our food, then to pass the plows on to us. You marvel at this, and do
not curse the angels in the madness of your guilt;for they are a glory like a
dream, and you do not truly believe.
They minister to your disease, and in time you join them to minister
unto others. Medicine becomes religion; help the sole commandment; healing
the greatest gi~ to God one can imagine.
They bring miracles from out of the Stone. They stay among us, but are
not of us, and a few grumble, but the few are ignored as the chaff is
ignored. What the few grumble about is division and dissatisfaction, for we
are never happy. ~lnd never content, and never satisfied. But the angels do
not listen.
· 4nd then from the Bible Lands and points east, from the Lands of the
Book and out of the People of the Book comes rebellion. For their lands
have not been scorched and they can still find strength in the soil, and they
are ingenious and know the Law of Tree and Flea; Because they are Chosen
of God, they fight these angels who are not angels, but devils to them,'
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2
· GREG BEAR
they fight and they are subdued by miracles and made pacific. And the
People of the Book sleep the sleep of the pacific, building and working but
not fighting. So it is in the land where humankind first opened its eyes
And then in the land sunk in evil at the tip of the Heart of Darkness,
like white dregs in a black bottle, from this land comes speakers of ~4frikaans
and English in their fine uniforms, driving ahead of them their slave
armies, to despoil all the untouched Southern Lands of the Earth. They
fight and they are subdued by miracles and made pacific, in their way.
And they sleep the sleep of the pacific, building and working and not
fighting. So it is at the bottom of the amphora of ~4frica.
Light and learning begin again above the soil, for strength returns to the
soil, and to the flesh. All this we owe to the angels. And if they are only
men, only our own children come back clothed in light, what is that to our
gladness and gratitude?
They lift us from the Law of Tree and Flea, and make us human again.
--Gershom Raphael,
The Book of the Death, Sura 4, Book I.
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ONE
Recovered PA. rth,
Indep-endent Territory- of
New Zealand, A.D. 2046
The New Murchison Station cemetery held only thirty graves. Flat grassland
surrounded the fenced-in plot, and around and through the grassland
a narrow runoff creek curled protectively, its low washing whisper
steady above the cool dry wind. The wind made the blades of grass hiss
and shiver. Snow-ribboned mountains shawled in gray cloud glowered
over the plain. The sun was an hour above the Two Thumb Range to the
east, its light bright but not warm. Despite the wind, Garry Lanier was
sweating.
He helped shoulder the coffin through the leaning white picket fence to
the new-dug grave, marked by a casually lumpy mound of black earth,
his face a mask to hide the effort and the sharp twinges of pain.
Six friends served as pallbearers. The coffin was only a finely shaped
and precisely planed pine box, but Lawrence Heineman had weighed a
good ninety kilos whc.~ he died. The widow, Lenore Carrolson, followed
two steps behind, face lifted, puzzled eyes staring at something just above
the end of the coffin. Her once gray-blond hair was now silver-white.
Larry had looked much younger than Lenore, who seemed frail and
phantasmal now in her ninetieth year. He had been given a new body
after his heart attack, thirty-four years before; it was not age or disease
that had killed him, but a rockfall at a campsite in the mountains twenty
kilometers away.
They laid him in the earth and the pallbearers pulled away the thick
black ropes. The coffin leaned and creaked in the dirt. Lanier imagined
Heineman was finding his grave an uneasy bed, and then dismissed this
artless fancy; it was not good to reshape death.
A priest of the New Church of Rome spoke Latin over the grave.
Lanier was the first to drop a spade of damp-smelling dirt into the hole.
Ashes to ashes. The ground is wet here. The coj~n will rot.
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4
· GREG BEAR
Lanier rubbed his shoulder as he stood with Karen, his wife of almost
four decades. Her eyes darted around the faces of their distant neighbors,
searching for something to ease her own sense of displacement. Lanier
tried to look at the mourners with her eyes and found only sadness and a
nervous humility. He touched her elbow but she was having none of his
reassurances. Karen felt as if she didn't belong. She loved Lenore Carrol-son
like a mother, and yet they hadn't talked in two years.
Up there, in the sky, among the orbiting precincts, the Hexamon conducted
its business, yet had sent no representative from those august
heavenly bodies; and indeed, considering how Larry had come to feel
about the Hexamon, that gesture would have been inappropriate.
How things had changed . . .
Divisions. Separations. Disasters. Not all the work they had done in
the Recovery could wipe away these differences. They had had such
expectations for the Recovery. Karen still had high hopes, still worked
on her various projects. Those around her did not share many of her
hopes.
She was still of the Faith, believing in the future, in the Hexamon's
efforts.
Lanier had lost the Faith twenty years ago.
Now they laid a significant part of their past in the damp Earth, with
no hope of a second resurrection. Hcineman had not expected to die by
accident but he had chosen this death nonetheless. Lanier had made a
similar choice. Someday, he knew, the earth would absorb him, too, and
that still seemed proper, though not without its terror. He would die. No
second chances. He and Heineman, and Lenore had accepted the opportunities
offered by the Hexamon up to a certain point, and then had demurred.
Karen had not demurred. If it had been her under the rock slide,
rather than Larry, she would not be dead now; stored in her implant, she
would await her due resurrection, in a body newly grown for her on one
of the precincts, and brought to Earth. She would soon be as young or
younger than she was now. And as the years passed, she would not grow
any older than she wished, nor would her body change in any but accepted ways. That set her apart
from these people. It set her apart from
her husband.
Like Karen, their daughter Andia had carried an implant, and Lanier
had not protested, something that had shamed him a little at the time;
but watching her grow and change had been an extraordinary enough
experience, and he realized he was far readier to accept his death than
this beautiful child's. He had not overruled Karen's plans, and the Hex
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ETERNITY ·
amon had come down to bless the child of one of their faithful servants,
to give his own daughter a gift he did not himself accept because it was
not (could not be) made available to all the Old Natives of Earth.
Then, irony had stepped in and left a permanent mark on their lives.
Twenty years ago, Andia's airplane had crashed in the eastern Pacific
and she had never been found. Their daughter's chances for a return to
life lay in the silt at the bottom of some vast deep, a tiny marble, untraceable
even with Hexamon technology.
The tears in his eyes were not for Larry. He wiped them and drew his
face into stiff formality to greet the priest, a pious young hypocrite Lanier
had never liked. "Good wine comes in strange glass," Larry had once
said.
He came into a wisdom I envy.
In the first flush of wonder, working with the Hexamon, all had be~n
dazzled; Heineman had after all accepted his second body gladly enough,
and Lenore had accepted youth treatments to keep up with her husband.
She had later dropped the treatments, but now she seemed no more than
a well-preserved seventy . . .
Most Old Natives did not have access to implants; even the Terrestrial
Hexamon could not supply everybody on Earth with the necessary devices;
and if they could have, Earth cultures were not ready for even
proximate immortality.
Lanier had resisted implants, yet accepted Hexamon medicine; he did
not know to this day whether or not that had been hypocrisy. Such
medicine had been made available to most but not all Old Natives, scattered
around a ruined Earth; the Hexamon had stretched its resources to
accomplish that much.
He had rationalized that to do the work he was doing, he needed to be
healthy and fit, and to be healthy and fit while doing that workmgoing
into the deadlands, living amidst death and disease and radiation--he
needed the privilege of the Hexamon's medicine.
Lanier could read Karen's reaction. Such a waste. All these people,
dropping out, giving up. She thought they were behaving irresponsibly.
Perhaps they were, but they--like himself, and like Karenmhad given
much of their lives to the Recovery and to the Faith. They had earned
their beliefs, however irresponsible in her eyes.
The debt they all owed to the orbiting precincts was incalculable. But
lov~ and loyalty could not be earned by indebtedness.
Lanier followed the mourners to the tiny church a few hundred meters
away. Karen stayed behind, near the graves. She was weeping, but he
could not go to comfort her.
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S · GREG BEAR
He shook his head once, sharply, and glanced up at the sky.
No one had thought it would ever be this way.
He still could hardly believe it himself.
In the single-story meeting room of the church, while three younger
women set out sandwiches and punch, Lanier waited for his wife to join
the wake. Groups of two or three gathered in the room, ill at ease, to step
forward as one and pay their respects to the widow, who took it all with a
distant smile.
She lost her first family in the Death, he remembered. She and Larry,
after their retirement from the Recovery ten years ago, had behaved like
youngsters, hiking around South Island, taking up various hobbies, occasionally
going to Australia for extended walkabouts, once even sailing to
Borneo. They had been or had seemed carefree, and Lanier envied them
that.
"Your wife takes this hard," a red-faced young man named Fremont
said, approaching Lanier alone. Fremont ran the reopened Irishman
Creek Station; his half-wild merinos sometimes spread all the way to
Twizel, and he was not considered the best of citizens. His station mark
was an encircled kea, odd for a man who made his living from sheep;
still, he had once been reputed to say, "I'm no less independent than my
sheep. I go where I will, and so do they."
"We all loved him," Lanier said. Why he should suddenly open up to
this red-faced half-stranger, he did not know, but with his eye on the
door, waiting for Karen, his mouth said, "He was a smart man. Simple,
though. He knew his limits. I . ."
Fremont cocked a bushy eyebrow.
"We were on the Stone together," Lanier said.
"So I've heard. You were all confused with the angels."
Lanier shook his head. "He hated that."
"He did good work here and all over," Fremont said. Everybody's
decent at a funeral. Karen came in through the door. Fremont, who
could not have been more than thirty-five, glanced in her direction and
then turned back to Lanier, speculation in his eyes. Lanier compared
himself with this young and vigorous man: his own hair was solid gray,
hands large and brown and gnarled, body slightly bent.
Karen seemed no older than Fremont.
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