A New World
Daniel Slabodar — rewrite, 2026 (after the 2000 draft)
In the old world there was always the possibility of turning public opinion in a negative direction, with the help of our faithful media and not only through it — on the basis of a proven factual foundation, on the basis of defined and lengthy life experience; it was all only a matter of definition. Everything was a matter of defined time, though time too played no part — who knows how decisive a part.
They lived in a state of perpetual madness, out of sheer boredom and frustration; they became people who were alike, yet far from the truth. Everyone wanted to live inside beauty, wealth, and happiness; they forgot the element of surprise, the element of continuity, because they wanted to live safe lives. They lived only seventy-five years and died of disease, of aging, of idleness — they could do nothing about it, because they had decided that this was how it must be. Whoever wished to change the situation was eliminated morally, and afterward physically as well. They used up every possibility the star had given them; they killed the star as they had killed themselves; the purpose of life dissolved out of fear and despair, and they were extinguished. Once again there was nothing — time stopped walking, and ended.
— 1 —
It all began from the beginning. In the beginning there was a point, and from it everything started — a point, as an ordinary point can be: without size, without mass, without color — simply a point. That point was, in fact, nothing, yet everything. And just as this point could have carried great meaning, it carried no meaning at all; the one who decided that the point did, after all, matter was the observer looking at the point. The observer decided to make the point grow, expand, and develop — the observer could just as easily have done the opposite, but decided what he decided. He laid out multidimensional tables of time according to initializing patterns: eras, levels — a kind of preparation for the developing point, a clear preparation, exactly as the observer had imagined it to himself. The observer knew, and he was a man.
The dream held me in a state of forgetting for a long while, until I could open my eyes and see the light of the young morning. It took me time to understand that the hour was late and that I had to get up. The air conditioner worked quietly, releasing pleasant streams of air to breathe; I barely lifted myself from the electric bed, which at that very moment vanished into the floor. From the ceiling a thin plasma screen descended, and across it, in large figures, the hour was written like a screensaver. The screen operated by thought. I turned my head away from thoughts, concentrated a little — the clock vanished, and on the plasma there appeared a calming sea, blue skies, a quiet lagoon on a lonely island. The three-dimensional animation, almost realistic, revolved around that imaginary island, and from the blue skies a framed image fell into place: Enter username and password. I hadn’t the strength to go on.
I stood a long time inside the shower, trying to rinse away the heaviness, but my head was still very heavy. Maybe we really did sit a long time yesterday? I asked myself. I was one of a group of people chosen to save the world — which is funny, really; so many have tried and failed, so what is new in yet another group trying to save the world? It is clear to us that it is possible only in a state of absolute utopia and fanatic optimism, which is impossible under present conditions. But the truth is, no — that was not our purpose. The group’s purpose was to try to instill into humanity’s consciousness the new Array of the late Professor Martin Wobles: an Array that included a new operating system, various modes of distribution, and an automatic management system with a learning intelligence. The Array, in a certain sense, was meant to save the situation. That is no easy task, especially for beings such as we are — human. Yesterday’s session lasted some two and a half hours, after which Alik took me home; on the way we stopped at a pub and drank too much, I think.
I went over to the kitchen. I missed the era when there were normal espresso machines, and not a flat magnetic plate with buttons and a selection of different drinks. You don’t even need to set down a cup. You just press the button — my thoughts slid into a conversation with myself; the war against this strange habit had gone on for many years without success. Out of nowhere the cup appeared, full of clear, fresh coffee, a pleasant smell rising from the simulated brew. A sip of the strong drink began to wake me from my sleep. The watch beeped: on the thin plasma display on my wrist a line appeared — Call from Alik Global, accept? I thought: Yes.
“Good morning!” Alik’s voice was rather hoarse, and his face looked somewhat tired, though he tried to hide it. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like I’ve been run over by a train,” I confirmed.
“Same here. We must have drunk too much yesterday.” Alik smiled.
“Yes. Too much.”
“Tell me.” His face turned serious. “The distribution Array we talked about yesterday — is it with you?”
“No, it should be with you, unless you forgot it yesterday in the conference room.” I chuckled. “You need to drink coffee.”
“I’m serious, I can’t find it. Yesterday we were in the conference room, and I remember it clearly, because I took the Array with me, and now it’s gone,” said Alik.
“Don’t worry, it must be somewhere,” I tried to calm him.
“Yes, it must be somewhere. But not with me.”
“We’ll find it. Don’t worry.”
“All right, we’ll talk later, I’ll keep looking on my end. Over.”
Alik Global was a man of delicate spirit, and because he was so, he fell into anxiety easily, over nonsense. I had worked with him for more than two years at the Supreme Shield, and for as long as I have known him he was always being pressed by small and foolish things — a very responsible man, intelligent, holding a doctorate in philosophy, and a physician by profession. He never married, though his great age would have allowed it. He always said, “I’ll always have the chance to meet someone in this life, and if not, then afterward.” I never agreed with him. Opportunities don’t wait, I told him; you have to seize them the moment they form. Alik had worked many years at the hospital as a surgeon of holograms and imaging at the rehabilitation institute; his astonishing skill let him rise there, and three months ago he became my superior. It did not damage our friendship, though it cooled it a little. He was no longer the man I had known; he had become a Sisyphus. Many thoughts troubled his mind, and he was occupied with everything and with nothing. I think I tried to explain this to him yesterday, while we sat together, but I cannot remember whether I managed to get the message across in a way that was kind.
The pub At Arni’s had been full of people the night before — a home pub for the workers of the Supreme Shield. Arni, the barman and the manager of the place, had worked hard; he never had the time to wipe away the sweat that gathered in small drops on his forehead. I remember it, because I sat with Alik at the bar and we talked a great deal about matters connected to the Array, and yet I could not recall whether Alik took the Array with him when we left. I raised an eyebrow. “Connect to Arni.”
A recorded message: “Hello, this is the pub At Arni’s. We can’t answer right now. Leave your name and we’ll try to get back to you soon.”
“Arni, good morning — you’re probably asleep. This is Franz Kluger; I was at your place last night with Alik. Please check whether we left a red bag by the bar. Call me back soon. Over.”
I finished the simulated espresso, and the conversation with Alik had pulled me back to myself. I opened the lower lock of the curtain, and the view unfolded slowly before my eyes. The artificial dome that sealed our town off from the outside had taken on the colors of morning some time ago. The light is too strong, I thought — or maybe it only seems so to me; I should ask the technicians. The disk was already high in its first quarter, a sign that it was almost eight, and that it was time to begin working.
The Meteor was inhabited mostly by people of science and the professions, and a few tourists — though I have never understood what a tourist hopes to find on a barren world like ours. Most of the tourism went to the Orchard, where there were living gardens, cultivated and wild at once, and the living forest raised its royal grove by its own strength. Here there is nothing to find — except smuggling, perhaps: cigarettes, hard liquor, the things the law forbids. What set the Meteor apart was the thing it circled. We did not orbit a sun. We fell around the dark mass at the heart of the galaxy — a black hole, old beyond counting and turning on its own axis, so vast that a hundred million suns would not have filled it — and we fell at nearly nine-tenths the speed of light. The light we lived by was not a star’s; it was the glow of the matter spiralling down into the dark, a disk of fire wound around nothing. We called it our star out of habit, or out of mercy.
The orbit was not a circle but a long ellipse, and so the world breathed. At the near pass we ran fastest and deepest, and the dark mass took hold of us — its pull uneven across the body of the world, stronger on the near face than the far, so that the crust flexed and cracked once with every turn, and a man could feel himself heavier on one side of his body than the other; each near pass brought a nausea and a dizziness that no one had ever quite learned to name. The leading face of the world, the one that met the direction of our flight, was scoured smooth and then scarred again, for at such a speed even the dust between the stars arrives as a kind of slow fire. Landing was possible only at the far pass, when the world slowed and the grip loosened — and even then the orbit never closed upon itself but turned a little each time, a flower drawn by a hand that never lifts from the page, so that the windows for landing returned but never on the same hour. The first settlers raised their laboratory against all of this, at great cost, solving as they lived; only after the scientists perfected the simulation did the matter grow easy. In a certain sense the world was an electron, racing around its atom and never falling in. Inside the spheres they kept the gravity close to that of the late planet Earth, but the keeping was imperfect, and at certain hours you felt the truth of where you were.
There was a price for living so near the speed of light, and the price was time. Beyond the dome the universe ran fast, and it ran bent. We never saw the sky as it was, only its image — folded around the dark mass and dragged sideways by our own speed: the shadow of the hole hung in the middle of everything, a hole within the sky, and the fire of the disk was lensed up and over its rim, so that the far side of it arched above the dark like a halo no one was ever meant to see from beneath. Ahead of us, in the direction of our falling, all the light of the outside crowded together and turned blue and burning, the whole of the heavens pressed into a single forward arc; behind us those same heavens thinned and reddened and fell quiet, a long wake of dim and dying stars. And all of it flickered past as though on fast-forward, the outside aging in a patient blur before our eyes. A year inside the spheres was years out there, and more than years; Earth, the late planet Earth, had lived and died many times over while we kept our short and ordinary lives. We did not feel old. The galaxy did the aging for us. And at the far pass, when the world slowed and the dark mass loosened its hold, the engineers said the geometry went thin — that there, and only there, where the tides relaxed enough that a throat could be held open without being torn apart, the old wormholes could be persuaded to carry a man. They did not carry him forward; nothing carried anyone forward. They carried him back, into the long-spent past of Earth, to some morning when the people he had lost were still alive to be visited — for the same slow clock that had buried Earth had also set the door, and the door opened only onto what was already gone.
I stepped out of the cabin toward the institute, the fate of the Array still troubling my mind, and at that moment a siren sounded, and a voice came over the address system: “The world is coming to the far pass. All crew to the spheres.” I began to run. There was not much time before the geometry would thin, and once it did I would no longer be sure where — or when — I was. The last time I had been caught outside the spheres at a pass, only a swift trace by the technicians had brought me back. I ran like a madman toward the institute, but for some reason the institute drew further from me, and I understood that it had already begun. The dome above me stretched into a thin line; the buildings drew themselves out, long and narrow; the whole town gathered into a wide moving band and folded away into dimensions that had no business existing. I felt nothing. A waking dream — images, thoughts, a friendly word between me and Arni, whom I had asked after only yesterday over a cup of coffee — and then more images, a swift flight across the face of the world, maps, faces, everything turning.
I found myself standing on the face of my own watch. I knew it at once by the enormous, familiar dial. I began to walk, and the second hand swept past with a noise so great I could not shut it out, so that every sixty seconds I had to duck beneath it. I had become a small man inside the watch, and I had the distinct sense that someone was watching me. After a while I looked up and saw myself, far above, gazing down into the dial — only my face was vast, the way the faces are in the advertisements at the interstellar crossings. Indoors this never happened to me; inside the spheres, when the pass came every other hour, I was at my desk, working, and the walls held the geometry off. But now I was outside, with nothing between me and the fold, and it had turned me inward upon myself. For long minutes I circled inside the watch. I could not get out, and I could not grasp the meaning of my being there. There was nothing to do — to circle inside a watch bears no fruit — and I could only wait for someone, perhaps, to draw me out. Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. I sat down on the dial, near the center, and tried to think what, exactly, had happened. After a while I understood that I had to reach the outside world; and with a motion I had not meant to make, I lifted my arm to check the time, and was stunned to find I was looking at the very watch I sat inside, only small. And stranger still: I saw myself seated within that little watch, and the small man inside it was lifting his arm to look. I raised my eyes, and the large me was looking at his watch, and seeing me. “I wonder where my consciousness is now,” I asked myself, in a voice of thunder — and in those exact words, in my own intonation, the question came back from above in an echo, the great self speaking together with me, and, I suppose, the small self below.
The feedback. I knew what it was; I did not know how to leave it. No one did — after a time it lets you go of its own accord, and the scientists never learned why, a band of enchantment, easy to enter and hard to leave. The engineers court this same thinning on purpose, at the far pass, when the geometry goes soft enough to hold a throat open; it is how they pry their doors back to Earth. But they do it with their instruments and their long preparation, and what is a marvel in their hands is only a trap for a man caught in it bare. The first time it took me was four years ago, when I had only just begun, and I tangled myself in the mirrors of the restroom; I have no idea how long I was in there before I found the way out, and when I told the others they laughed for days, and it is a good joke to this day. I had no wish to laugh now. I wanted to weep. I knew it was all an illusion, a thing that does not exist — that even the time was not real, a pit without air and without hours — and that I was shut inside it with myself.
— 2 —
“Nona.”
“Yes, Larry?”
“Call Franz Kluger, please. He was to be in my office at nine, and he still has not come.”
“I’m reaching him now.”
Larry Wobles, the son of the late Professor Martin Wobles — the post of director general suited him to the last decimal. A precise man, and a serious one, fond of work, who did not care to be kept waiting. His punctuality was something close to a marvel, and he asked the same of everyone around him. I had not come to the meeting, for reasons that were mine alone, and it vexed him; one can understand that.
“Larry, I can’t reach him. He must be on his way.”
Nona — Larry’s right hand, and a remarkable woman. I had met her before any of it began, at a gathering of friends at Alik’s house; we were sitting together when she came in, and Alik presented her to us all and said, “She will be working with us on the project.” Later I learned that Nona was a widow. Her husband had been a celebrated pilot — it was he who flew the relief mission to Phobos — and he died in the line of duty, when a great asteroid turned toward the world and he went out alone to meet it. He was alone in his craft, and by the time he came into the world’s orbit the pass had closed against him, and there was no window left to land. So he made his decision, and flew straight at the asteroid, and burst apart together with it, and in that way he saved the inhabited center, more than a thousand souls, and the world along with them. She was a woman in her thirties, tall and slight, her face giving off a grace and an intelligence at once. She had scarcely made her peace with it — it was perhaps two years past — when they offered her a place among us, and she agreed, of course.
“This is no way to work.” Larry glanced at his watch, annoyed. The hour was 9:02, sphere time.
— 3 —
I opened my eyes in a room with no windows and no doors. The furniture was very old; cabinets stood to the ceiling, filled with books. I had never in my life seen a real book — only in the old catalogs of Earth, in the institute’s archives, had I so much as seen a picture of one — and it seemed a marvel that I might rise and touch them, and look from close up at how a book was made. I looked down. An enormous carpet lay on the floor, worked in oriental patterns, and in the corner a fire was burning; and when I saw that it was real wood burning there, I understood at once that something was wrong.
A figure appeared before me without warning — a man in his sixties, bald, with a white beard, his face giving off a great gentleness. He smiled, and said:
“Hello to you. We found you outside, almost without the breath of life. I am very glad you have come round, and that you feel better. Do not try to speak, or to move; your body is in our care, and you are now within a computerized simulation we have shaped to your human needs. Everything you see is not real, and will pass when the treatment is done. Make yourself free here. It will be over very soon.”
The figure vanished — expired, rather than left — and I was alone again. It was all so real. I looked down, searching for myself, and did not find my body; it was as though only my eyes and my thoughts moved through the room. I went toward the cabinets. The first book to leap to my eye was Lewis Carroll — Alice in Wonderland. Why that one, I wondered. I reached to draw it out, and remembered I had no hand to do it with in the ordinary way; but the lessons in telepathy from the Orchard Star served me now, and I gathered myself and concentrated, and the book flew out to me and dropped to the floor. I felt a kind of channel changing, a glitch, as if something in the broadcast had been altered — and in the space of half a second everything was gone.
I woke into a new world, all of it radiance. The light blinded me at first, and yet it was a pleasant light, one that could even be touched. A glow like that cannot be set down in words; it was a consciousness that described it to me, and not even a dream — a dream is only the smallest particle of what I saw in that light.
Slowly the light thinned, and things began to appear, and what I saw was very strange — the kind of thing only the most extravagant of architects might draw. Around me stood forms that looked at first like square wafers, except that their parts flowed through the air, like the figures of Japanese origami, in a way that nothing could govern. I looked for faces on them and found none. A thin voice spoke from somewhere around me: “Trans-analytic translation now proceeding — stage two, vocal.”
“Hello?” My own voice came out strange.
“Hello to you, Mr. Franz. We are the Dogmat that tended you. How do you feel?” The voice was several voices woven together, an intonation pitched in quarter-tones — the voice of something computed, perhaps.
I tried to rise, this time with a body, and found that physically I was not unwell. I looked at my hands and felt them — the bones in place, sound, the head turning on its neck.
“Is everything well, Mr. Franz?” the computed voice asked again.
“Everything is fine.” I felt faintly strange. I watched the wafers drifting through the air in their disorderly way.
“Where am I?”
“You are in Laudritav, where the healing is done. You will be released now. Here is the Dogmat.” And the wafers crumbled away into the air, as if they had never been there at all. Alone again, dressed in a white silk robe, as on the day I was born. I looked about me. Beneath me I felt a surface, firm and soft at once, but I could see nothing under me, and when I tried to feel for it with my hands, the hands felt nothing. The white, lit room — if a room is what it was — was not quite a room, for when I looked steadily toward one wall it would dissolve on the way to it. The place had even had a door, I was sure I had seen one; I looked for it now, and it was no longer where it had been, and only when I ran my eyes quickly from side to side did the door appear again. I tried to fix its place in my mind and walk to it, but a few short paces along the way there was no door there at all. I stopped, and looked about me, and everything was white and soft, a pleasant fog that was not damp.
A voice came from above this time, and it was very familiar. “Franz — how are you?” And all at once the voice took the shape of a man I knew well: the same man who had been with me in the room of the simulation. He smiled his good smile and said, “Welcome to Sarsilipus, Franz.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Ah — that we have known for hundreds of years. I have a great deal to tell you, and you, I am sure, have a great many questions to ask. Come with me to our garden, and we’ll sit; we have breakfast laid out, and you must be hungry. We can talk there.” The old man spoke in a voice that calmed me, the way a sweet child’s tale calms, and in his voice and his eyes was a man of great intelligence and great wisdom. But I wanted to eat, and the hunger won out over the intelligence and the wisdom both, so I said at once, “Yes — it wouldn’t hurt to put something in my stomach,” and smiled a slightly foolish smile. I waited for an indulgent answer and was given what I’d hoped for: the old man smiled again, raised his right hand, and pressed two fingers together — and in that instant we were already somewhere else.
