“I don’t know,” said Constancy-of-Purpose simply. “And I don’t think about it.” She looked sideways at Morrow.
“But it doesn’t make sense.” Morrow looked up, nervously, at the bulkhead above him. “This fruit must come from somewhere. There must be people up there, Constancy-of-Purpose — people we’ve never seen, whose existence has never been acknowledged by the Planners, or — ”
“People whose existence doesn’t matter a damn, then.”
“But it does. We trade with them.” He stopped and held out his sack of fruit. “Look at this. We’ve carried on this trade with them — thereby implicitly acknowledging their existence — for decades now.”
Constancy-of-Purpose kept walking, painfully. “Centuries, actually.”
When he was a young man, Morrow had been angry just about the whole time, he recalled. Now — even now — he felt a ghostly surge of that old anger. He felt obscurely proud of himself: a feeling of anger was as rare an event as achieving an erection, these days. “But that means our society is, at its core, slightly insane.”
Constancy-of-Purpose shook her massive head and studied Morrow, a tolerant look on her face. “Keep up that talk, and you’ll spend the rest of your life up here. Or somewhere worse.”
“Just think about it,” Morrow said. “A whole society, laboring under a mass delusion… No wonder they shut down the Virtuals. No wonder they banned kids.”
“But we’re all kept fed. Aren’t we? So it can’t be that crazy.” She smiled, her broad face assuming a look of wisdom. “Humans are a very flawed species, Morrow. We simply don’t seem to be able to act rationally, for very long. This sort of thing — a trade with the nonexistent unknowns upstairs — seems a minor aberration to me.”
Morrow studied her curiously. “You believe that? And I think of me as skeptical.”
Constancy-of-Purpose had reached the next Lock; she dropped her sack and leant against the curving metal wall, her hands resting on her knees. “You know, we have this conversation every few years, my friend.”
Morrow frowned. “Really? Do we?”
“Of course.” Constancy-of-Purpose smiled. “At our age, even doubting becomes a habit. And we never come to any conclusion, and the world goes on. Just as it always has.” She straightened up, cautiously flexing her thin legs. “Come on. Let’s get on with our work.”
With a twist of her huge upper arms Constancy-of-Purpose hauled open the door of the Lock.
Then — instead of stepping forward to gather the food-stuffs — she frowned, and looked at Morrow uncertainly. “…I don’t understand.”
“What is it?”
“Look.”
The Lock was empty.
Morrow stared at Constancy-of-Purpose, and then into the empty chamber. He couldn’t take in what he was seeing. These trades had never gone wrong before.
“The knives have gone,” he said.
“We left them here yesterday.”
“But there’s no meat.”
“But the scratches clearly said the knives were what they wanted…”
This dialogue went on for perhaps five minutes. Part of Morrow was able to step outside — to look at himself and Constancy-of-Purpose with a certain detachment, even with pity. Here were two old people, too hopelessly habit-bound to respond to the unexpected.
Constancy-of-Purpose is right. I’ve become like a machine, he thought with anger and sadness. Worse than a machine.
Constancy-of-Purpose said, “I’ll go in and check the markings. Maybe we made some mistake.”
“We never made a mistake before. How could we?”
“I’ll go check anyway.”
Constancy-of-Purpose stepped forward into the Lock and peered up, squinting, at the trade markings.
…And the hatch at the top of the Lock, twenty feet above Constancy-of Purpose’s head, started to open.
Inside the plasma sea, time held little meaning for Lieserl.
As she sank into the Sun she’d abandoned all her Virtual senses, save for sight and a residual body awareness; drifting through the billowing, cloudy plasma was like a childhood vision of sleep, or an endless, oceanic meditation. She’d slowed the clocks which governed her awareness, and allowed herself to slip into long periods of true “sleep” — of unawareness, when she drifted with only her autonomic systems patiently functioning.
And she had allowed, without regret, the crucial link of synchronization between her sensorium and the Universe outside to be severed. While she had drifted around the core of the Sun, sinking almost imperceptibly deeper into its heart, dozens of centuries had worn away on the worlds of mankind…
Here came the photino structure again.
This time she was ready. She strained at the structure as it passed her, every sense open.
Still, she could barely make it out; it was like a crude charcoal sketch against the glowing plasma background.
Wistfully she watched the photino cloud soar out of sight once more, passing through the plasma as if it were no more substantial than mist, on its minutes long orbit around the Sun.
But -
But, had it diverged from its orbit as it passed her? Was it possible that the photino object had actually reacted to her presence?
Now she became aware of more motion, below and ahead of her. The moving forms were shadowy, infuriatingly elusive against the gleaming, almost featureless background. Frustrated, she strained at her senses, demanding that her aged processors extract every last bit of information content from the data they were receiving.
Slowly the images enhanced, gaining in definition and sharpness.
There were hundreds — no: thousands, millions — of the photino traces. Maybe they were standing-wave patterns, she wondered, traces of coherence on the dark matter cloud.
Slowly she built up an image in her head, a composite model of the patterns: a roughly lenticular form, with length of perhaps fifty yards — and, she realized slowly, some hints of an internal structure.
Internal structure?
Well, so much for the standing-wave theory. These things seemed to be discrete objects, not merely patterns of coherence in a continuum.
She watched the objects as they traced their orbits around the center of the Sun. The soaring lens-shapes reminded her of graphics of the contents of a blood stream; she wondered if the structures were indeed like antibodies, or thrombocytes — blood platelets, swarming in search of a wound. They swarmed over and past each other, miraculously never colliding -
No, she realized slowly. There was nothing miraculous about it. The objects were steering away from each other, as they soared through their orbits.
This was a flock. The dark matter structures were alive.
Alive and purposeful.
Slowly she drifted into the flock of photino birds (as she’d tentatively labeled them). They swooped around her, avoiding her gracefully.
They were clearly reacting to her presence. They were obviously aware — if not intelligent, she thought.
She wondered what to do next. She wished she had Kevan Scholes to talk to about this.