• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

She frowned. ‘What do you want me to remember?’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘Meg,’ she said brightly. I suspected it was the first name that had popped into her head.

‘What’s the deal here?’ I reached for the channel-zapper. Nothing but white noise and snow.

‘Work and fun,’ she said. She leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette, looking up at me with utter devotion. ‘Come on, I wanna have fun.’

‘What would happen,’ I asked as she twined a leg around my waist and began kissing my throat, ‘if I stubbed out this cigarette on you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Would it hurt you?’

She chuckled like a bad child. ‘If that’s what you like.’

I could do anything to her, absolutely anything, and she’d be back the following night, eager for more. ‘Meg’, I thought as she tugged me to the bedroom, was probably her mind’s allotted amount of disk space. So fuck it, I thought, and fuck it I did.

The bulb of smart matter bulging towards me showed numberless fractal features, tiny chasms of infinite depth, the shapes of ferns and faces. In the tremulous instants before it enveloped my instruments, I felt that I’d already seen a gallery of art whose afterimage would burn in my visual memory forever.

What physically happened next was that the smart matter of the macro directly interfaced with my own computer, so that some of my mind was actually, physically, implemented inside the macro. What I felt was –

The impact of a snowflake on my eye.

And then the awakening, the joy. It made all my past awareness seem like sleep, all past happiness a passing moment of relief. I stood naked on a grassy slope, looking out across forested ranges of blue hills. The sky at the horizon was a pale green; at the zenith, an almost violet blue. The air was cold but comfortable, heavy with the scent of blossoms, sharp with the taste of salt and woodsmoke. I knew the name of every hill, the species of every plant. My body was tall and bronzed and beautiful, with muscles that would have made Conan or Doc Savage envious.

Behind me I heard voices, and turned. I was standing just below the brow of a hill. Beyond it, I could see an ocean whose horizon was about twice as far away as it would have been on Earth. This was a big planet. (I knew all about it, I knew its mass and orbit and the spectrum of the big bright sun above). On the hilltop, just a few metres away, was a shelter built of four upright logs, crossbeams and a roofing of branches. Within it was a wooden table. Three women and two men sat around the table, talking and laughing. They turned to me, smiled, and then jumped up and gave me a welcome that still brings tears to my eyes.

I’d known none of them in my past life, but I knew them now, and they knew me. They’d missed me for a long time, and now I had come home.

We ate the bread and cheese and fruit, and drank the wine, and talked about the great work on which we were all engaged. My part in it, they made sure I knew, was vital and heroic. Hauling matter about in the raw universe! How thrilling! How brave! But it was their part I was eager to hear about, and they told me. I understood all they told me, about the space–time gate, the problems and the progress made. The Malley equations were as easy as arithmetic, as familiar as recipes.

Yet, every so often, when I was talking to one, the others would say something to each other, and I would know it was above my head. I almost understood, but I had to accept that this high table had higher tables above it, tables where my delightful companions were familiar colleagues. There was no condescension in their manner. Some day I too would join them there.

But a thought, a sly strange query crept through my mind: was this place, to them, what my cramped quarters, my cigarettes and succubus, were to me?

The great sun made a sunset that stopped all speech, all thought. Its last green flash brought a collective sigh. Then with one accord all of us, gods and goddesses, leapt from the shelter onto the cool grass. We played like children and fucked like monkeys.

I