For Love and Glory

XIII

Forest had overgrown the ruins of the town, pine and hemlock murky against gray heaven, roaring in the wind. The church had stood near its eastern edge, on a headland where surf clashed and burst. Only bushes, bayberry, blueberry, sumac, and harsh grass grew there. Hebo thought he could trace the foundation; and nearby a few gravestones remained, fallen, lichenous, the names long since weathered away.

Here he had married Julie.

It was as if he could see the white clapboard and high steeple, hear the minister say the words, feel her hand in his. He wondered whether anything survived other than his memories, and whether those weren’t imagination. Nature was what Earthfolk today cared about, living Earth, Gaia Gloriatrix, and that—he supposed— mainly as something to explore and enjoy with the senses, like sex, a pause in their communion with the machine gurus. Should somebody take an interest in something left behind by merely human history, the database could immediately present it in full virtuality: or, better yet, reveal it as it originally was, the Parthenon fresh from the hand of Phidias, Columbus’s ships under sail, Broadway ablaze with lights, Cape Canaveral with a Saturn rocket blasting off for the moon.

And that would be half imagination, too, he thought, guesswork, though by intellects colossally greater and more systematic than his.

“Hey, Julie, girl,” he whispered, “how’re you doing? Where are you now?”

No sense asking, after so many centuries. If she lived, which he hoped, and was still on Earth, she must have been taken up into its oneness, little by little, each renewed youth making her able to learn those new things, think and feel in those new ways, that had been evolving around her. It would have been willingly. Refusal would have left her mighty lonesome.

Or did she also at last say, “Enough” and depart for the stars? Now and then he’d tried to find out, but the galaxy was too vast. Even this fragment of its outer reaches that humans and their fellow spacefarers had some slight knowledge of was.

Each time he came to Earth and found it more strange than before, Hebo had wondered if he might already have been escaping, way back then. The change hadn’t gone very far, but he’d had a sense of walls closing in. Or was it plain restlessness, yes, boredom that drove him yonder? He recalled how, after their first rejuvenations, which were among the first ever, he and Julie had fallen head over heels back in love. For a while it’d been a fire fountain. The kids were grown and off their hands, they had ample money, strength and beauty—her beauty—were theirs already.… He began to chafe and play around, she did, the parting was reasonably amicable. Since, he’d only heard of two or three marriages that lasted more than two or three cycles. Maybe nothing human could be forever.

Fare you well, Julie, always well, and thanks.

The gratitude felt ghostly.

A few gulls wheeled. He couldn’t hear them mewing above the wind they rode. Once upon a time they’d been many, but that was when people lived here, squanderous man, scattering his wastes for the scavengers.

Wolves and bears ruled the woods. They kept the deer down.

Hebo shivered a bit and turned from the sea and the graves toward the little airflitter waiting for him. He ought to stop these sentimental zigzags around the globe and get down to the business of hard thinking.

Face it, his earliest memories, the clearest and most enduring, had left no more behind them than the wind did. It wasn’t just that this church had crumbled away, or the gentle Danish landscape of his childhood was mostly beech forest, or the energy-focusing climate-control satellites he’d helped construct had plunged to their meteoric deaths hundreds of years ago, Earth needing them no more than a recovered invalid needs medicine, or—or any such touchable things.

It was his father lifting him up on a shoulder, he squealing with delight at how suddenly and immensely high above the ground he had risen. It was a hummingbird, a living bit of jewelry, soon after the family moved to America. It was a fiddler in an Irish pub in Santa Fe, of all places, a mug of Guinness, a pretty waitress impulsively joining him in a jig on the sawdust floor. It was tramping through the misty Irish countryside itself, or backpacking in the Rockies, or campfire talk with friends lost when he left the Solar System.

Most of his life was traceless, he realized. Artemis abided, but tamed into almost a New Earth; and maybe Kayleigh, too, lived there yet. That marriage, however, those children, the house in the wilderness, the hunting of the dracosaur—well, yes, some fossils of it were doubtless retrievable if he cared to search them out, but why?

And the other women, more than he could count up—in some cases, had wished for but never won—the times he’d been in love—which did he truly want to keep?

An encounter in a distant spaceyard with his son by Julie? After four hundred Earth years, they discovered they had practically nothing to say to one another. Yet something of her lingered in his face and eyes. Was this a valuable lesson?

The later years, the later enterprises, alien planets, alien beings, those were the memories most apt to blur or drop out of awareness, and those were the ones he most needed. For survival’s sake, they must be recalled, reconstructed, reordered. That was necessarily at the cost of the older. His brain lacked the storage and correlation capabilities of a quantum-net intelligence.

Oh, sure, the kindly mind in the clinic would record everything that it deleted—everything that wasn’t hopelessly garbled or decayed—and turn the crystal over to him, for playback whenever he chose. Some parts of it might be suitable for virtuality; most would doubtless just be words and patchy images. All of it would be abstract to him, narration of events that might as well have happened to somebody else. In fact, the stories would be more vivid if he’d come upon them in a piece of fiction.

How much of the old half-reality must he give up?

How much could he find it in his heart to give up?

Hebo walked slowly back to the flitter.