Malêverse 2100: For Those Who Still Dream
Karl Mwila was bargaining with a customer for a swarm of fireflies when he saw Daliso walking toward his stall.
His eyes flashed to her for only a second, but they still betrayed him: the customer sensed his distraction, heard the new urgency in his bargaining, and bore in for the kill. The contract was settled at a price that was profitable but well below what Karl had hoped to get, and when the customer took his leave, he walked off with a swagger.
Daliso was smiling when she came into the stall; she, too, had seen what happened. She ignored the chairs, sat on a wrecked sidewalk-cleaning bot that Karl was tinkering with, and kept smiling.
Half a minute of that was all Karl could take. “All right,” he said at last. “You obviously know you cost me eight hundred marks, so will you do me the courtesy of telling me why you cost me eight hundred marks?”
Daliso still had the smile on her face. “Come have lunch and all will be revealed.”
She got up and made to leave. For a moment, Karl thought of not following her. But he was hungry, and when someone from the Consistory Space Section came calling, it wasn’t in his nature just to let her walk away. He stood up, set his alarms, and followed in Daliso’s path.
She led the way through the warrens of the gear market, past the piles of parts, the jobbers bargaining over custom machines, the smell of solder and welding fumes, the muttered curses over impromptu repairs, the tourists looking wide-eyed at a place where they could have anything made but that they couldn't quite call polite. Karl almost understood the last of those: he’d studied in Berlin and spent his Wanderjahre in Shanghai and Dakar, and in all those places, they hid their machines behind walls and lived in the carefully-fashioned illusion that their world operated itself. But only almost. The Bazembe didn’t care for that illusion – they liked to see their machines work, to see inside them, to take them apart and put them back together – and Karl was a Muzembe to the core.
The labyrinth opened into a small plaza, and they bought fish with ndiwo from one stall, German cucumber soup from another, shake-shake beer from a third – street food was another taste the Bazembe still had. A family was vacating a table nearby, and they seized it before anyone else could and took the edge off their hunger. For a few moments, Karl sipped his beer and gazed up at the thousand-meter towers of the center city and the High Gardens strung like spiderwebs between them. That neighborhood had been Kanini once; now it was called Mutanda after the world of Chishimba’s imagination [1], and not for the first time, he wondered how consciously the architects of the previous century had had that world in mind.
Daliso saw where he was looking. “At least that far,” she said. “Maybe farther.” Karl looked down and saw that she’d unwrapped the datacloth from her wrist and laid it on the table, and that the circuits woven into its fibers were pulsing.
She made a pass with her hands and an image of the solar system appeared between them; another pass and it zeroed in on a speck of light outside the orbit of Mars; a third and the speck resolved to an irregular object hurtling through space.
“I’ve seen asteroids before,” said Karl. “Pretty, but not worth eight hundred marks.”
“If it were an asteroid, I might agree. But it’s in hyperbolic orbit – it came from outside the solar system. And when we matched its vector of origin against our stellar-trajectory database, it came from…” – she made another pass, and the image above the table was replaced by an F9 sun with six planets – “here.”
Now, Karl leaned in and touched the star with a hesitant hand. Yes, he knew that system. They’d discovered it when he was a child, with two terrestrial planets in the habitable zone and a gas giant in just the right place to send water to them. And at the memory of water, something else flashed through his mind about the image he’d just seen.
“It’s rock, not ice,” he said.
“Yes. It’s an inner-system object. And that’s what I need you for.”
“A probe? I’m flattered, Daliso, but you know I don’t work on that kind of scale…”
“No, not a probe. A component. Something to tell what’s dead from what was never alive.”
Karl put his beer down. “You think there might be living material on that object – fossils.” He didn’t know what the odds of that were – a fraction of one percent would be his guess – but the Kazembe branch of the Space Section dealt in probabilities of that order on a daily basis. “But surely you can already find organic material, DNA... And if you need something custom, you have contractors for that. I’m not a biologist…”
“Yes, yes, and I know. And we have more… traditional components to do exactly that. But if there are life forms on that object, they might not resemble anything we know. They might not be carbon-based. They might code with something other than DNA. Maybe a traditional component wouldn’t recognize them – maybe it would destroy them while it’s looking for something more promising.”
“So you want something non-traditional,” said Karl. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact; at some point during the conversation, without quite knowing it, he’d become fully committed.
“Yes. Something from the gear market – something from you.” Daliso was smiling again, but it wasn’t the same smile as before; she was no longer the cool Space Section mission planner but the neighbor who’d gone on bamwana cha chembe encampments [2] with him when they were both children. “Something that defines life from first principles and looks for its traces.”
“And how should it do that?”
“It’s up to you. Design something, build it, test it. Let us know when you’re done.” She dispelled the star and its planets with a wave and put her hand on the datacloth, and he put his own hand next to hers, sealing the contract. “You’re on a draw and expense account as of now, and I’ve added eight hundred marks for your trouble.”
Daliso’s smile was back to what it had been at the beginning, and Karl flushed. “Don’t worry about it. The man didn’t get the better of me nearly as much as he thought he did.”
“I’m sure he didn’t.” She looked at him with frank curiosity. “What did you sell him?”
Karl pulled a small, buzzing thing of metal from his pocket, and Daliso saw that it had been fitted with jerry-built wings. “A thousand of these – to fly around and flash colors, make scenes in the air, act out stories. He says they’re for his daughter, but I suspect he’ll use them more than she will.”
“He never grew out of imagining?” Daliso nodded. “A true Muzembe. Build me something that imagines life.”
#
Between customers – the Space Section didn't pay that much, and there were things that citizen sharing credit couldn't buy – Karl made one machine and then another. When he was finished, two weeks after the meeting with Daliso, he rented a motor-wagon and took them to the wilderness.
The wagon drove him out of Ndola on the main Barotseland road, through the southern and western suburbs and the fringing farmland. He turned off the highway a hundred kilometers from town, where the farms had long since given way to miombo woodland, and soon afterward the road was nothing but a dirt track.
He had to drive himself the rest of the way; the off-road trails weren't on most rental vehicles' maps. He hadn't driven in years, but the skill returned quickly and the joy even more so, and he took the rutted track slowly, making way for migrating impalas and listening to the vervets' chirping calls. He came to a stretch of broken pavement by a watering hole and a herd of brown cattle whose ancestors might have belonged to his, and two kilometers further up the road, a village that the woodland had spent the past fifty years reclaiming.
He grounded the wagon at the village’s edge and prepared to make camp. It was far from the first such ruin he’d seen, and they never failed to put him in an elegiac mood. There were a million fewer people in Kazembe now than there’d been a hundred years ago, and unlike the Basotho or the Boers, the Bazembe didn’t cling to the countryside. Once, villages like this had dotted the country, but nearly all of them were gone, and that part of the country not devoted to agriculture or mining was a wildlife preserve. We owe it to the animals, Karl supposed – the elephants’ and big cats’ recovery from their brush with extinction at mid-century was painfully slow – but there were houses here that nobody tended and stories that no one remembered anymore.
He wondered sometimes if humanity even needed the stars – if an aging and dwindling race filled less of the earth every year, what need had it of the worlds beyond? He’d met plenty of people who thought that way during his Wanderjahre. But he was a Muzembe, and the Bazembe still dreamed of the stars and always would. There was a reason why, despite being one seventh of one percent of the people who lived on earth, they were nineteen percent of those who’d left it.
With that thought still in mind, Karl unloaded his machines from the wagon bed and began setting them to their tasks. The first, which he had somewhat blasphemously named Lesa, was equipped with as many definitions of life as he could find, but had been carefully wiped clean of all knowledge of any specific life form. The second, Luchyele, was the opposite: it was trained to know and recognize all living things known to science, but knew nothing of life as a category. Could any of the concepts known to Lesa enable it to pick out living things unerringly, or could Luchyele, by examining life forms, find the things that all life had in common?
There was only one way to learn, and with a word of command, he sent them on their way. From the shade of a miombo tree, he watched them at their work, adjusting their instructions to ensure that they wouldn't disturb or harm the living things they analyzed. They were soon out of sight and by evening they were hundreds of meters away, but Karl stayed the night to confirm that they were working and reporting as designed. In the morning he went out and found them – Lesa was examining a blade of grass, and Luchyele contemplating a cane-rat burrow – and, content, he drove home.
It was two weeks before he called on Daliso. This time, he rented a fiacre and it drove him the whole way; the Space Section offices were at Chilengwa na Lesa lake, and the road between there and Ndola had been traveled for hundreds of years. At the near end of the lake were the inkunka – the huts – where the Wandervögel and the eagle-children, the bamwana cha chembe, had camped for the better part of two centuries, and at the far end, near the place where Kazembe had launched its first sounding rocket, were the low buildings of the Consistory campus.
The Space Section had other offices and larger ones. Karl had been to the vast complex in Paris that managed the installations in near-earth orbit and the facility at Kismayo that supplied the Moon and Mars colonies, and there were also the bureau in Washington that licensed asteroid mining and registered claims and the buildings in Singapore where the entities with interests in space kept their embassies. But Chilengwa na Lesa was the domain of the dreamers. Here were the outer-system probes with lifetimes measured in centuries; the missions planned on thousand-year calendars; the teams searching for technologies that might take centuries to develop if they ever did; the scale models of cloud cities on Venus and self-sustaining Titan habitats. Here were datacloths hung like tapestries on the walls, patterned like stylized lukasa memory-boards or scenes from the Starwind Cycle; here were engineers and visionaries walking quietly through corridors, moved to silence by the weight of time.
At the end of one such corridor was a door that bore the legend "Daliso Chibanda," and beyond the door an airy workroom. Daliso herself was at a table, tinkering with the image of a spacecraft – the probe, Karl was sure, that the Consistory would send to the extra-solar object.
"Your component will go here, if you have one," she said, indicating a space between two sensor suites. "Do you have one?"
"Yes. I'm not sure how much good it will do, but I have one."
Daliso perched on the back of a chair – smiling, this time, like the Mona Lisa – and motioned him to the sofa. "So tell me."
"Lesa and Luchyele cross-referenced well enough," Karl said. "They each found what the other knew. But the commonalities they found all had to do with what life does, not what it is. Growth, metabolism, reproduction – if there's something on that object that doesn't have anything we would recognize as cells or organs, and if we can't trace its parts through any known evolutionary line, how would we know if it did any of those things?"
Daliso nodded. "But?"
"There are ways that might work in some cases. Evolution, for instance – if there's more than one type of possible life, we can look for signs that one evolved from the other. And if there isn't more than one, or we can't find common threads… Luchyele thinks that all life has to have some kind of coding mechanism. It didn't come up with any certain way to tell coding from random complexity, but there are some kinds of patterns that it thinks are more likely than not. I'm not sure if it's what you asked for, but it's better than nothing."
"Better than nothing, yes. And better than I'd hoped for. Can you have a finished component for me in ten days?"
"So soon?" Karl asked. If he'd known that the launch timetable was so close… but no, maybe it was better that Daliso hadn't told him. She'd obviously been prepared to do without the component if necessary, and a rush job would have been worse than nothing. So, rather than waiting for an answer, he nodded.
"Good," she said. "And when you have time, keep working. I'll continue your contract, and maybe we can have something better for the next object we find. There will be one, sometime between now and forever."
#
It was six months before Karl heard from Daliso again. He'd gone to bargain for some antique computer parts, and the message was waiting when he returned to his stall: "meet me at home."
He had to unfold his datacloth to find where home was for her: they'd lived next door to each other when they were children on the Northrise, but he'd long since lost track of where she lived. The address that came up was in Mutanda, and an hour later, Karl joined the crowd of returning commuters waiting for the elevators at Mailo Tower.
Daliso had four rooms on level 122 with a panoramic window looking out at the mountains – space wasn't at a premium in Ndola and hadn't been for decades, so the rooms were spacious and comfortably furnished. All the same, they didn't stay long. "It's too nice an evening to stay inside," she said, not brooking dissent. "We'll go up to the garden."
Go up they did, to the highest of the High Gardens, set on a bridge eight hundred meters above the city. It was laid out formally in a style that suggested Asia, with acacias and imported flowers adding scent to the mild breeze. There were other scents too, and they followed one to a stall where they bought glasses of Riesling and skewers of beef; the beef didn’t come from a cow, but it was crafted, as carefully as any machine in the gear market, to taste like the meat that villagers might have cooked in the days of Kazembe's first kings.
They sat, looking down to the northern suburbs and the hills beyond, and Karl waited to learn Daliso's news. She would tell him in her own time, he knew, and after they had spoken of inconsequential things for a while, she did. "There was nothing," she said - she spoke lightly, but the disappointment was plain. "Nothing that even might have been alive, or else life so far beyond what we can imagine that it might as well not be."
"It was always a small chance…"
"It was. And the next time, we'll know more."
"Next time," Karl repeated. "But this time…" He reached into his pockets and cast a double handful of the metal fireflies into the air, and then two more handfuls after that. They glowed and swarmed, forming an image of the object from beyond the sun, flashing with patterns that Luchyele and Lesa had thought might carry the codes for life. One pattern followed another, creatures growing and changing and evolving into forms beyond fantasy. They stood – Daliso smiling like a child now – and the swarm encircled them, and they remained until the lights faded and it disappeared into the unknown.
________
[1] See post 6033.
[2] See post 4746.
Art: Julie Dillon, The Future of Human Aging (2014)
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