No More Shadows
No more shadows is a fork in the story of second nature.
It branches off from chapter 26 part one.
no more shadows
INDEX
Part Two
Reading time: approximately 13 minutes
The storm had been strong but kind, in the way storms occasionally were β all that charged sky and not much to show for it on the ground. K noticed it on the drive over: a branch down across the lower field, the kind of thing that would clear itself in a season if nobody bothered with it, and the orchard trees standing a little disheveled, a scatter of unripe fruit knocked loose and lying in the grass like something had shaken the world gently and then thought better of it.
His own roof had lost nothing. He'd checked before leaving, out of the habit of a man who had once, decades ago, lived somewhere that storms actually meant something, and had never quite unlearned the checking even after the meaning had gone out of it.
He left his own house and walked the short way over to Bastiaan's.
The door opened before he reached it β sensed him coming, the way everything did now, the way he'd never quite stopped finding mildly remarkable even after a lifetime of it β and the robot was standing directly behind the threshold.
He startled. Properly startled, the kind that arrives in the chest before the mind has caught up to explain it was nothing, the kind that left a small residue of adrenaline he could feel dissipating over the next several seconds.
I hate robots that think they are funny, he said, to the room in general, to whatever was listening, which was presumably everything.
The house told him, in the mild, unbothered tone it used for everything, that Bastiaan was in the workshop. The workshop sat apart from the house proper, a low separate building at the end of the path, and K walked there instead β past the disheveled orchard, past the branch down in the lower field β and found the door open and Bastiaan already coming out to meet him.
Bastiaan appeared from the workshop doorway, wiping his hands on a cloth that had given up being clean some years ago, grinning in the unhurried way he grinned at most things.
Your bot scared me, K said.
It does that to me too, Bastiaan said. Coffee's on.
They sat on the terrace, which the morning had decided to make available β the storm's last clouds breaking apart somewhere to the east, the stone still cool underfoot but warming, the cat positioned in a patch of early sun with the specific satisfaction of an animal who had located the best seat before either of the humans had thought to look for one.
Some damage down the valley, Bastiaan said, pouring. Heard from the village this morning. Couple of trees, a fence, the usual. Nothing that needed more than someone with a saw and an afternoon.
Mine's fine, K said. Checked before I drove over. Force of habit.
You always check.
I always check.
Bastiaan didn't push on this, which was one of the things K appreciated about him without ever quite articulating it β Bastiaan let things be what they were without needing to understand the shape of them first. He handed K the coffee and sat, the cat now eyeing the steam rising from both cups with the detached interest of a creature who had no use for either but liked to keep informed.
Strange evening though, Bastiaan said. The aurora. Did you see it?
I saw something, K said. I was inside. The light came through the window wrong and I assumed it was a sunset doing something unusual.
It was the storm. Full aurora, full daylight. The house told me there was a magnetic enhancement coming and then there it was, greenish, moving, the whole business. Hadn't seen it in years. Not like that. He drank. Then the power in the village bar went out, apparently. Whole place dark for a stretch. Hasn't happened in β I don't even know. A long time.
K considered this. That doesn't happen anymore.
No, Bastiaan agreed. It doesn't.
They sat with that for a moment, the way you sit with a fact that's mildly unsettling without being actually alarming β filed somewhere between curiosity and concern, leaning toward curiosity because the morning was pleasant and neither of them had any actual evidence that anything was wrong.
How's the book, Bastiaan asked, in the tone of someone changing the subject toward something he genuinely wanted to know about, not toward something easier.
K made the small gesture he made when the honest answer was complicated. Still circling. Seven months now. I keep arriving at the same question from different doors and none of them open all the way.
Which question.
What meaning is for. Not what it is β I think the theory will eventually tell me what it is, or close enough. What it's for. Why a universe that doesn't seem to need it produces creatures for whom things matter. He paused. And now that it's no longer required for survival β now that wanting and needing have come apart β what's left of it. Whether it gets smaller or larger when you take away the reason it used to exist.
Bastiaan nodded slowly, the nod of a man who was following enough of it to be interested without needing to follow all of it. That's the kind of question that would have driven me up a wall, in the before.
Now I just think: take your time, K said. There's plenty of it.
That's very generous of the man who isn't writing it.
I'm generous about everyone else's work, Bastiaan said. It's my own I'm slow about.
The cat relocated to the warmer half of the terrace. The coffee was refilled. The conversation drifted, the way conversations between old friends drift, touching things without needing to finish them β the village, a piece of furniture Bastiaan was three weeks into and still couldn't categorize, something K had read that he thought Bastiaan might like and immediately forgot to mention properly, circling back to it a few minutes later out of order.
I lost a couple of signals yesterday, Bastiaan said, in the same register he'd used for the furniture, which was how K knew it wasn't, in Bastiaan's mind, a significant thing yet.
Signals.
The drones. Two of the cluster probes β I've been tracking forty-some of them for years now, the ones that went out toward the nearer systems. Two went quiet yesterday. Probably nothing. Equipment ages, even equipment that isn't supposed to age the way ours used to.
K turned his cup slowly, not really looking at it. I still don't understand why you care about that the way you do.
You've said that before.
And I still don't understand it. It's cold out there. Dark. Nothing's happening for unbelievable distances and then very occasionally something is, very far away, and you find this compelling.
I find it compelling precisely because nothing's happening, Bastiaan said. That's the whole of it. You spend your life thinking about what's happening in hereβ he tapped his own temple, lightly, with two fingers β and I like thinking about what's happening in places where almost nothing is, except the very occasional thing that's enormous. I like the scale of it. I like that it doesn't care whether I'm paying attention.
Everything's enormous out there and nothing's enormous in here, K said. That's a fair description of the difference between us.
That's the nicest thing you've said to me all morning.
Don't get used to it.
Bastiaan got up, came back with a tablet that he handed across β not because K had asked, but because Bastiaan liked showing things to people even when he knew, fairly certainly, that the showing would not produce the reaction he privately hoped for.
The display was a map, dense with thin trailing lines radiating outward from a bright central point, dozens of them, color-coded, annotated with numbers K didn't immediately parse.
That's the cluster, Bastiaan said. They launch in groups β laser arrays push them out, and as they pass close to other bodies in their path, some of the cluster peels off, releases its own smaller units, keeps spreading. Like seeds on the wind, except the wind is light and the seeds are going faster than anything's gone before.
And they send data back.
Constantly. Position, what they're seeing, navigation fixes against known stars. He took the tablet back, tapped through to something else. That's the part that should bother nobody and somehow always gets the most interesting reaction when people hear about it for the first time. The communication.
Radio.
No. Radio's too slow and too easily lost over those distances β the signal gets thin, scattered, eaten by everything between here and there. We use gravity instead.
K looked at him properly for the first time in the conversation. Gravity.
There's a β call it weather. A background tide of gravitational waves moving through everything, all the time, from things colliding very far away, things that happened a long time ago and are still arriving. You can't generate a wave like that yourself, not at any scale we have access to. But you can ride one. Modulate it as it passes through the probe, encode the data onto it the way you'd put a flag on a particular wave in the ocean and let the ocean carry the flag.
And that works.
It works remarkably well. No degradation, nothing in the way matters, because nothing's really in the way for gravity. The strange part β and I mean strange in the literal sense, nobody's resolved it β is that once you're riding the tide this way, it doesn't behave like the chaotic background it's supposed to be. It behaves almost like a stable carrier. Clean. Consistent. Like surfing a wave that shouldn't hold a shape and somehow does.
That sounds like it shouldn't be possible.
It shouldn't, by most of what I understand of it, which is admittedly not very much. I asked the AI about it once. Properly asked, wanting the real explanation.
And?
Bastiaan's mouth did something that was trying not to be a grin and was failing. It said: let me explain it to you as if you were five years old. I know you won't grasp it otherwise.
K set his cup down with more deliberateness than the action required. It said that to you.
It did. Cheerfully. No malice in it whatsoever, which somehow made it worse.
Mine has never said anything like that to me.
Yours doesn't need to. You'd understand the real version.
That's not the point. K was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet of a man recalculating his relationship to something. Mine did something similar to me once. Different context. I asked about a structural detail in the unification, something I thought I'd understood and clearly hadn't, and it offered to walk me through it β and I quote β "the way I'd walk a bright child through it."
What did you say.
I said never mind. Condescending bot.
The laugh that came out of Bastiaan was the real one, the one that bent him slightly forward and made the cat look up with brief, unimpressed interest before deciding nothing here required her involvement.
Condescending bot, Bastiaan repeated, delighted. I'm using that.
You may use that.
The whole household's going to hear it today. I promise you.
K allowed himself something close to a smile, which was, for him, a fairly complete expression of amusement. The coffee was nearly gone. The sun had cleared the last of the storm's residue from the eastern sky and the fields were doing the thing they did in clean light after rain β too vivid, slightly unreal, the green almost insistent.
Two signals, K said again, after a moment, returning to it the way you return to a thing that's settled somewhere just under the surface of a conversation. Does that happen often?
Now and then. Equipment fails, signals get lost in noise, sometimes a probe just goes quiet and you never find out why and you stop looking after a while because there's nothing more to find. Bastiaan shrugged, easy, unconcerned. Two in one day's a bit more than usual. I'll keep an eye on it.
You always do.
I always do, Bastiaan agreed, and refilled both their cups, and the conversation moved on to other things β the furniture, the village, a piece of K's book that K hadn't meant to discuss further and discussed further anyway, the morning settling into the unremarkable shape of two old friends with nowhere else they needed to be.
Neither of them mentioned the two signals again.