"You're not a fool, daughter. I'll tell you why we did it."
"If I… If I…" Nugget sobbed. "If I help you down, I'm not sure you'll be able to make it back up the path."
"I don't think that will be a problem."
Still weeping, Nugget helped Caroline to her feet and down the first steps to the path to the old fountain.
The hot water slipped around her like a velvet skin, and Caroline tried to slip into the past.
"Daughter, do you have any idea how old I am?"
"I'm counted seventy-one solstices, so you must have seen at least eighty-five."
"I am over seven hundred and seventy years old."
Nugget sobbed louder. "Please, mother, don't tell me lies at a time like this."
"No lies, child. I lived a hundred and six years in the World Before, and I was dying then as I am dying now. I didn't know it, but your father was working as I was dying. He was a great man. There has never been another like him, but he was not perfect and he made one terrible mistake.
"With the help of many thousands of other people, your father built a vast and complicated thing. The word for it is on your tablets; it was called a computer. That's nothing but a meaningless word to you, and that's all it needs to be. But of all the artisans who dedicated themselves to the making of the computer, your father was the most important, because he was the one that taught it to think. Without the others to help him Lawrence could not have made the computer, but without Lawrence, the others could not have made it live; you have to remember that."
"Okay, Mother."
"The computer could not disobey Lawrence, but he was afraid other people would use it for bad purposes. So he taught it to answer first to its own conscience, the conscience he had created for it. Then your father set it loose, confident that it was capable of doing only good for the people of the World Before. Even Lawrence himself would not be able to make it contradict its nature."
She paused, and Nugget prodded her. "What happened?"
"The computer got a bright idea," Caroline said in a sour voice. "It figured out how to make people immortal. So it made us immortal."
"Just like that?"
"That was the least of its powers. It remade the world. There was nothing we couldn't have for the asking. There was nothing we couldn't do. Nothing could ever hurt us." She coughed again. "It was fucking boring."
Their eyes met.
"It was the worst thing ever. Nothing mattered. Not pain, not accomplishments, not anything." Caroline touched one of Nugget's tattoos, the small spiral which Ozark had tattooed above her right breast to celebrate their first coupling after his Vision Quest, when they were finally both adults. "After the Change, the World Before became another of the words you overheard. Cyberspace. In Cyberspace, all you'd have to do is make a wish and your tattoos would be gone."
Involuntarily, Nugget put her hand over Caroline's, as if to defend the design.
"Or you could move 'em around. Get new ones — it didn't take any time, didn't have to hurt. See? Nothing mattered. I've worn many different sets of tattoos myself. But these are the ones that matter to me, because these are the ones I'll die with. That was the least of it, of course. You could grow a few extra arms, turn yourself into a bat, fly like a bird, whatever you wanted. But why bother?"
"Mother…What happened then?"
"For almost six hundred years, nothing happened worth mentioning. Then, finally, your father and I killed it."
"How? If it was so powerful, how could you kill it?"
"Your father built it, remember. He'd never designed it to run the whole world, only to be a good helper. He knew its weaknesses. So we were able to trick it, and it broke." She swept her hand. "Somehow we ended up here."
Nugget dipped her hand in the hot water and splashed her face. None of this was what she had expected.
"If you will do something else for me, I'll tell you one more thing."
"What, Mother?"
"Promise me that you will give the birch barks to the Eldest Father to be burned with me. Those words belong to the World Before. They may be harmless, but I'd rather not have your father's only memory be those reminders of his worst failure."
"What will you tell me for promising this?"
"I'll tell you the computer's name."
She looked down. "I'll burn them, Mother. There's nothing I can hope to learn from them now, anyway."
"It was called Prime Intellect."
Nugget nodded.
"Now if you value the memory of your father, you will never repeat that or any of your other words to anybody else. Let them die with me."
"As you wish, Mother."
"Then leave me alone to rest."
Nugget didn't have to ask for how long.
Caroline was too thin to float in the hot water, so she let her head fall back on the hard stone fountain wall and looked up at the Sun.
If she could somehow pull it off again, magically rise from the healing waters as a young girl and return to her people, she would do it. They needed her. There were so few of them, and the challenges they faced so great, that their survival was far from certain. One disease or natural disaster could wipe them out.
But that's the way it was with things that mattered; you never got to find out how they came out, if they were really worth anything. Caroline had done her part. She had made her decisions and stood her ground. One day somebody would figure out how to use the fire bow to launch arrows and how to make them fly true. Then someone would shoot one at his brother. Caroline had done what she could to put that day as far as possible in the future.
As a result some of her children would die, because in order to hunt they would have to get close to their prey, close enough for their prey to strike back. This playing God business sure was a pain in the ass, Caroline thought. No wonder Lawrence had gone a little loopy in Cyberspace.
But he had been a good man. He had never approved of Caroline's plan for their family, to act like some kind of snide Prometheus who could have given them the secrets of metalworking and gunpowder and steam power but who didn't bother because it was more amusing to make them struggle in stone-age savagery. Yet he had gone along, because he already knew the other way didn't work. If this way didn't work either, what would it mean?
The doubts and questions circled in her head endlessly, chasing for an answer that would never come. They were still chasing when she slipped beneath the trickling waters and found darkness.