“Not necessarily,” I say. “In any event, I mean to try.”
“Why can’t you wait for the promised time? Surely, then, SUM will re-create you two in the same generation.”
“I’d have to live out this life, at least, without her,” I say, looking away also, down to the highroad which shines through shadow like death’s snake, the length of the valley. “Besides, how do you know there ever will be any resurrections? We have only a promise. No, less than that. An announced policy.”
She gasps, steps back, raises her hands as if to fend me off. Her soul bracelet casts light into my eyes. I recognize an embryo exorcism. She lacks ritual; every “superstition” was patiently scrubbed out of our metal-and-energy world, long ago. But if she has no word for it, no concept, nevertheless she recoils from blasphemy.
So I say, wearily, not wanting an argument, wanting only to wait here alone:
“Never mind. There could be some natural catastrophe, like a giant asteroid striking, that wiped out the system before conditions had become right for resurrections to commence.”
“That’s impossible,” she says, almost frantic. “The homeostats, the repair functions—-”
“All right, call it a vanishingly unlikely theoretical contingency. Let’s declare that I’m so selfish I want Swallow Wing back now, in this life of mine, and don’t give a curse whether that’ll be fair to the rest of you.”
You won’t care either, anyway, I think. None of you. You don’t grieve. It is your own precious private eonsciousnesses that you wish to preserve; no one else is close enough to you to matter very much. Would you believe me if I told you I am quite prepared to offer SUM my own death in exchange for It releasing Blossom-in-the-Sun?
I don’t speak that thought, which would be cruel, nor repeat what is crueller:
my fear that SUM lies, that the dead never will he disgorged. For (I am not the All-Controller, I think not with vacuum and negative energy levels but with ordinary begotten molecules; yet I can reason somewhat dispassionately, being disillusioned) consider— The object of the game is to maintain a society stable, just, and sane. This
requires satisfaction not only of somatic, but of symbolic and instinctual needs. Thus children must be allowed to come into being. The minimum number per generation is equal to the maximum: that number which will maintain a constant population.
It is also desirable to remove the fear of death from men. Hence the promise:
At such time as it is socially feasible, SUM will begin to refashion us, with our complete memories but in the pride of our youth. This can be done over and over, life after life across the millennia. So death is, indeed, a sleep.
—in that sleep of death, what dreams may come— No. I myself dare not dwell on this. I ask merely, privately: Just when and how does SUM expect conditions (in a stabilized society, mind you) to have become so different from today’s that the reborn can, in their millions, safely be welcomed hack?
I see no reason why SUM should not lie to us. We, too, are objects ui the world that It manipulates.
“We’ve quarreled about this before, ‘fhrakia,” I sigh. “Often. Why do you bother?”
“I wish I knew,” she answers low. IlaIf to herself, she goes on: “Of course I want to copulate with you. You must be good, the way that girl used to follow you about with her eyes, and smile when she touched your hand, and— But you can’t be better than everyone else. That’s unreasonable. There are only so many possible ways. So why do I care if you wrap yourself up in silence and go off alone? Is it that that makes you a challenge?”
“You think too much,” I say. “Even here. You’re a pretend primitive. You visit wildcountry to ‘slake inborn atavistic nnpulses’ . . . but you can’t dismantle that computer inside yourself and simply feel, simply be.”
She bristles. I touched a nerve there. Looking past her, along the ridge of fiery maple and sumac, brassy elm and great dun oak, I see others emerge from beneath the trees. Women exclusively, her followers, as unkempt as she; one has a brace of ducks lashed to her waist, and their blood has trickled down her thigh and dried black. For this movement, this unadmitted mystique has become Thrakia’s by now: that not only mcii should forsake the easy routine and the easy pleasure of the cities, and become again, for a few weeks each year, the carnivores who begot our species; women too should seek out starkness, the better to appreciate civilization when they return.