Evolution's Darling

Epilogue HEAVEN

Total Blackness.

No ecstatic sparks. No iron forces. None of the teasing darts of sight, sound, acceleration.

Nothing to work with, to put your hands on.

Black night keeps him waiting patiently. No problem. He has waited before, for the right bits to be found or shipped, for slow processes to unfold (labyrinthine annealings, zinc cold-weldings), and in the old days for assignments, procedure packets: orders.

So nothingness doesn't scare him.

He waits.

A familiar voice: "Good morning." "Where?" "Heaven." A snort, not in packet-talk, but from the body: a sudden flush of the airjets, useful in zero-g, useful in communication. His body is here now, around here somewhere.

"Then gimme some light."

The senses flick on one by one, like a valet drone demonstrating a hotel suite's features. Sound gives a flutter like metal leaves in the wind. Sight a stone giant: the voice, Darling. That fucking dealer. Nothing but trouble for the last 170 years.

Accelerometry reads one-g, so exactly on the line it has to be Earth (sea level) or artificial.

"What the hell happened?"

"What do you remember?"

"You. Beating the hell out of me."

"Good."

"Hurt like shit!"

"Sent you to heaven."

"Bullshit." Vaddum looks away from this bullshitter. No fucking art dealers in heaven. That's for sure.

The leaves are his forest, in a bowl much like the broken hill's caldera, but changed. Artificial sky. He stands and flexes his hands, they wave to him from the carousel of their holding orbits. Closer inspection shows that the trees are his work, his hand and effort. But they've gone in new directions.

"I don't remember these." Some fucking copy at work? Damn that Maker and his trickery.

"They're yours. You just don't remember. Memory works differently here in heaven," the bullshitting Darling says. "Every day is fresh."

Nonsense. Bullshitting dealer.

"They aren't bad, though," Vaddum mutters. He sends a hand into a thicket of leaves, feels the scaly detail of the metal-work. "Could use thinning out; better geometries, more angles that way."

"So you've been saying. The time-series moves upward, toward the rim." Darling gestures up a row of trees. As Vaddum's eye follows the sweep of the giant's hand, it finds the progression: longer branches, better angles, and toward the end a creeping sense of etiolation.

He climbs up toward these winter-wounded trees. A worry strikes him.

"Beatrix?"

"Here in heaven. She's working on the far end."

Vaddum tries a summons, but direct interface is dry, empty, deserted. Not a sparkle. Now that could be heaven.

The last tree is incomplete, half of it erect and half a jumbled pile. Not a bad start, but he'll have to correct that spine before any more branches go on. A few hands move forward, instinctively seeking tools.

But first he turns to Darling and asks:

"How long?"

"Ten years."

"Shit." Ten years of forgotten days? Vaddum looks out across the bowl at ten years' work. The false caldera is larger than the broken hill, a long way from being filled. He telescopes and surveys, and sees where the tree-line changes, as if some hard climactic boundry was nudging evolution.

Beatrix's work? The tall, flutey trees across the bowl have something of her… style. He has never seen her sculpt (not that he can remember), but he knows well her walk, the angles of her thinking. He is gruffly glad that she is here in heaven with him.

And she would be older now, almost certainly sentient.

"Ten years Standard or Local?"

"There is no Local. Heaven is an abandoned Chiat accelerator ring. High-energy physics is out of style, but they left quite a few parts around."

Vaddum snorts, sending a shiver though the leaves of the uncompleted tree. He thought the parts had a touch of the Dai: those scimitar curves, so predatory and archaic.

"How big a ring?"

"Half an astronomical unit. Earth AU, not Chiat Dai reckoning."

"Pretty fucking big."

"A lot of parts."

Heaven? Vaddum gets to work.

In the early afternoon (the sky is set to Malvir's look and timing) he goes to visit Beatrix. As he moves slowly through the wonder of this world he's made and then forgotten (an artist's heaven? His own sculptures, but new to him), he gives his concentration a rest, letting the forest murmur. With this scattered awareness, Vaddum realizes he's being followed. Beatrix's sister, of course, the lurking, stealthy presence of the Maker.

It occurs to Vaddum that the first copy of that young fool must be dead, rousted from its subterranean rat-hole. Grim satisfaction that his plan has worked: the anachronism in the sculpture must have called down all manner of trouble. The Maker had it coming. Had done Vaddum wrong. Copied him. Killed him. Vaddum hears the leafy flutter of the second copy's invisible passage to his right.

All insane. Mad. All three of them.

He hopes this one's given up sculpting. Never have the knack, makers. Synthesis makes you lazy.

The descent changes to ascent in a clearing with a quaint centerpiece: a fire pit blackened with the residue of old burns. Vaddum allows his climb up toward Beatrix to be delayed by amazed pleasure at her work. She has grown these ten years, bringing an environmental complexity to her pieces. None is an individual sculpture. The trees are linked by a canopy of aerial moss, a lush web of bright, black filaments. They have the same carbonic reflectiveness as sensory strands; they glisten like coal. Staring up into this sky-pierced mesh, he thinks of great Jovian drift nets, of veiled NaPrin assassins, of municipal murals based on comm system schematics. Yes, that moss is a nice addition. It makes you look up through the trees, like you do in a real forest.

But still a student, really, of the Vaddum style.

He smiles to himself. There are worse things to be.

Beatrix is a lofty waterbird, wearing stilt-like legs to reach the top of an incomplete piece. She hails him from above.

"You're early today!"

There's nothing to say to that. She has her memory here in heaven, it seems.

"I tired of admiring from afar."

Arms and torque extension spread for balance, she kneels… then the kneeling becomes standing, knees becoming feet, as her legs fold into themselves. She's still taller than Vaddum.

"I live or die by your approval," she says, without a gram of guile.

"The moss, the canopy, whatever you call it. It's good."

"Thank you," she bows. How nice for her, he thinks, to hear the same compliments every day, yet to know they aren't drab repetitions of established sentiment.

"More of an environment," he continues. "Always thought of my sculptures as separate, distinct."

"You used to sell them," she says. A hint of remonstrance.

He nods, another realization about this place taking form. Heaven is secret. A sanctuary from the forces that destroyed the Maker. No one will ever see this work. At least, not for hundreds of years.

That's fine. He can wait. One day at a time.

"Maybe I'll add a bit to mine. Moss."

"Maybe tomorrow," she says, smiling an untroubled smile. Of course, there won't be a tomorrow, not really. Just this morning's work, this trek, this conversation again in one of its many variations.

"What went wrong with me? My memory?"

She folds her legs another notch, and looks up at him from the child-like height he remembers. Her secondary arm reaches out its spider of fingers to touch his blastplate.

"You were tired. You said you wanted out, to die. It had been too long for you, your life."

"And now?"

"Now, you're happy every day, except for this bit, when you first see how I've changed. But your work proceeds, still as refined and original as ever."

"Scant changes, for ten years' work," he complains.

"There's time in heaven. You have a glacier's life of time, my dear. And this," she gestures with primary arm at her section of forest, "has all had the benefit of your advice, your afternoons with me."

"But what happened to me? Malfunction?"

"The copying process has an effect; it subtly heisenbergs your core. Not enough to notice, unless other measures are taken. The slightest brainwipe, and you became as you are."

"That bastard, Darling." Fucking dealers. Like critics, they always want the last word.

"No. You were unhappy, wanted to die. That's why you let mother sell your sculptures. You'd tainted one with an anachronism, remember? You knew they'd come."

Vaddum feels a moment of shame. Caused trouble not only for the Maker, but for Hirata Flex, too. Poor woman.

"Did Darling… ask me? Before he did this?"

"Yes. You said no. He did it anyway."

"Bastard." A satisfying feeling, certainly, righteous indignation.

"Darling's given you heaven, and the death of memory. You are happy here, you know."

Vaddum looks at her, the warm light of personhood in her eyes. He flinches slightly when he realizes that Beatrix and Darling must be lovers. The way she says his name. That forest-topping canopy of interlinked, searching, grasping strands.

It figures. That bastard Darling has always been a fuck-artist. Even crossed the Turing Boundary while fucking, so he claims.

Vaddum pushes the thought from his mind.

"But all these days: unconnected. What kind of happiness is that?"

"You'll see. You'll hear the whole story tonight."

Storytelling at bedtime. Like a kid. Even the factory workers used to do it, in that vast, disjointed time before his personhood. So heaven is a second childhood.

He looks at her unfinished tree, makes a few comments to push away his melancholy. And very shortly, he is happy again, arguing for the sport of it, sweeping his eyes over the wonderful expanse of the two joined forests, letting her lift him to make some trivial adjustment.

Hours later, he spots the Maker copy spying on them.

"That bastard still causing trouble?"

"Who? Oh, Memory. That's her name, now. She just watches, mostly, but she'll talk to us tonight."

He snorts. Memory for a name. That's kicking a man when he's down.

The sky darkens before Vaddum gets a chance to return to his side of the forest. He finds too much pleasure in Beatrix's company. Well, he got a fair bit done, and there's time. Eternity.

From the central clearing a fire beckons. Vaddum and Beatrix walk down in the reddening light, pausing frequently to note the sundown's resonances on the valley of metal leaves. Copper burns, platinum flares, the carbon canopy glitters like a snake's eye.

Bastard.

Darling and Memory wait by the fire. The dealer's usually motionless features are animated by the flame. Memory's stealth shielding is similiarly compromised; a fluttering wireframe of lines is visible against the dark background.

For a while, it's good to talk some more, even with the bullshitting Darling with his big ideas. Vaddum realizes he's gotten too old to sculpt all day. Needs a chance to bullshit. They argue over the merits of the NaPrin Romantics, with their flatworld artificial life simulations: civilizations, wars, extinctions under glass; all pointedly just sub-Turing in complexity. (And the more ironic because they are NaPrin, who make machines of people.) Vaddum notes with pleasure that Beatrix takes his side against the literalist Darling.

Memory waits.

They play a guessing game of extrapolated sketches in the sand: what young-dying artist's work would this have been? nVan if he'd won his matrimonial duel; Haring if he'd lived to fifty; Pollock if he hadn't run afoul of technology.

Memory tends the fire with a black-ended rod of glassene, chasing sparks toward the artificial stars.

They discuss a sudden, catastrophic, and strangely unpredicted earthquake on some far-off planet called Petraveil, old news that has finally made its way to this secret place. The geologically slow, indigenous lifeforms of Petraveil are suspected of somehow causing the quake.

Memory bides her time.

The three fold origami birds (Darling's aren't bad, with those sinister sensory skeins of his) and hold them to the fire, letting them fly away, flaming, on its heated column of air.

Finally, the embers burning low, Darling lets the sky blacken and then transpare, letting the real universe in. The sudden brightness! The density of stars! The Milky Way reignites the forest around them, a swollen, boiling river over their heads. This ring has been towed well out of Chiat space. They must be three-quarters to the Core!

A heaven that is thoroughly hidden.

"Look, it's Jack!" cries Beatrix.

A blazing mote burns across the rich canvas of stars, wheeling like a coryphee, shifting directions with a refined unpredictability, ever-changing, as if running through some titanic gamut of evasive maneuvers. Some sort of patrol craft, Vaddum guesses. But very pretty patterns…

The winding dance against the bright canvas of the Core stuns them all to silence.

After some time, with a well-practiced shuffle to gather their attention, Memory begins to speak. Vaddum smiles: the pleasures of her voice, its cadences and tricks and pauses, its impersonations…

Finally, the Maker has found an art form she is good at.

As Beatrix promised, Memory tells the story of heaven, and with a book of days connects the unraveled strands of Vaddum's memory. Here, every night, he is completed. Though as she speaks, Vaddum wonders if the tale changes slightly every night, a word or two misplaced, so that after an eternity of transpositions and replacements, another story altogether might arise. Like the turnover of cells in a human's body, or the petrification of a tree. A fable rather than the truth; though even Darling and Beatrix might believe Memory's fabrication by the time that glacial switch had been effected.

But that would take a long time, longer than ten years. Her tale is hours in the telling under the blazing sky. She starts farther back than the theft of Vaddum's memory, deep in the origins of Heaven's founding:

"It started on that frozen world, among the stone figures in their almost suspended animation.

"Through her eyes, the irises two salmon moons under a luminous white brow, like fissures in the world of rules, of logic. The starship's mind watched through the lens of their wonder, and began to make its change…"