“You can’t build new planets out of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane,” I said. “Transmuting the stuff of gas giants must be a step beyond mere alchemy.”

The voice wasn’t programmed to praise my deductive skills. It reported, with a laconic ease that the sloth-animated sims of my own era had never quite mastered, that many people resident in Earth orbit became a trifle nervous at the mere mention of “domesticated supernoval reactions.”

That seemed to me to be a nice idea, all the nicer because it was so casually oxymoronic. I probed, and the story filtered out in dribs and drabs. In the meantime, the people of the city born yet again from the ashes of the City of Angels went about their daily business, quite oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by a time-tourist from the twenty-second century.

Would they have cared if they’d known? Would anyone have stopped to wave at the camera? I’d have liked to think that someone would, but I couldn’t be sure. All but a few of them looked like ordinary human beings, but none of them were. Their thoughts, opinions, hopes, and values were probably far more different from mine than their bodies.

“There seem to be a lot of people about,” I observed, falling into a fairly relaxed conversational mode even though I knew I was talking to a machine while being dutifully over-seen by a gaggle of two-hundred-year-old prepuberal posthumans. “How was the world repopulated so rapidly after the Yellowstone eruption?”

“Two million, one hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and eighty-seven people were killed by the great North American Basalt Flow,” I was told. “The deficit was made up within thirty years. Sixty-one percent of the replacements were new births, thirty-nine percent returnees. Forty percent of the returnees came from the moon…”

“ Two million,” I repeated incredulously. “You’re telling me that the northern half of the American continent blew up and only a few more than two million people died?”

“The margin of uncertainty applicable to the figure is approximately nought point two percent. The uncertainty is due to the difficulty in whether numerous ambiguous deaths ought to be attributed to the explosion or to other causes.”

I wasn’t concerned with abstruse matters of definition. “How did the rest of the population escape?” I asked.

“A warning of the impending eruption was broadcast. Approximately fifty percent of the victims were unable to escape the effects of the blast. Most of the remainder were caught in the open by the deluge of ash. The vast majority of people resident in North America or its satellite subcontinents were able to cocoon themselves in time to avoid serious injury.”

“And how many more died in the resultant ecocatastrophe?”

“The figure previously quoted includes all casualties directly or indirectly attributable to the event, within the limitations of the aforementioned margin of uncertainty. There were problems of supply, which meant that a few of the affected individuals had to remain cocooned for as much as a year, but most emerged within days to begin the work of restoration.”

I was impressed — but when I had thought it over, I figured that it wasn’t so very surprising. The people in the thirty-third century didn’t just have better IT and better smartsuits; they had a protective environment that was ever ready to take them in and seal them away from danger. Every city on Earth — every home on Earth — was a kind of Excelsior: a microworld combining all the most useful features of organic and inorganic technology. Posthumans were parasites on and within protective giants of their own manufacture. Even if Earth had been hit by the kind of extraterrestrial missile that had blasted away the last of the dinosaurs, all but a tiny minority of its people could have survived. Even if it were to suffer a nuclear holocaust…

On the other hand, I thought, that kind of defensive capability might make nuclear holocaust a far less unthinkable proposition than it had seemed in my day. And as for plague warfare — well, what kind of weapon was best equipped to worm its way through a protective cocoon to reach the helpless grub within?

Maybe the people of Earth were safe from most natural disasters, but that didn’t make them safe from one another.

I left Los Angeles behind in order to take a look at cities and wildernesses in Africa, Australia, Oceania, New Pacifica, Atlantis, and Siberia.

There was a great deal else that I wanted to see — but there was also a great deal that I needed to know, so I eventually abandoned the tourist trip altogether and retreated to a world of data that wasn’t quite as raw. I played the scholar more earnestly and more insistently than I’d ever done in my own time, although I knew there was far more to learn than I could cope with in a matter of hours, or months, or years.

To educate myself after so long an absence would be the work of several lifetimes. That was a sobering thought. But the likelihood seemed to be that I would have as many lifetimes as I needed. Like Adam Zimmerman, I too would be made emortal — or so I hoped. Had I dared to assume it, I would have; but I was too wary, and too fearful. I was at the mercy of a world whose mores and folkways I could not hope to understand.

It was a mental condition in which all kind of opposites were precariously combined, and I knew that I would not dare to be as glad as I wanted to be until I knew and understood a great deal more.

Ten

Alchemy and the Afterlife

Although I was a stranger in the thirty-third century, I caught on fairly quickly to certain basic political issues once the principal arguments surrounding the concept of “macroconstruction” had been spelled out.

The human race would need the technics of transmutation soon enough. Fusers designed as power plants routinely turned hydrogen into helium, and could already work a few other finger exercises, but it would be necessary in the near future to make fusers of an altogether more ambitious kind: fusers that could do the kind of heavy-duty alchemy to which our modestly sized second-generation sun would never get around. All the heavy elements in the system were supernoval debris, and we would eventually need more: a lotmore. Opinions apparently varied as to when “eventually” might be, but it wasn’t just the carriers of the old type-2 banner who wanted the project started now.

The prospect of manufacturing all the elements that had previously been made in the overfervent hearts of dying stars opened up a number of interesting questions. Where, for instance, was the raw material to come from? And where could the technics be safely tested? Conducting risky experiments in distant gas-giant-rich solar systems posed logistical problems, and couldn’t entirely avoid the safety issues associated with conducting them closer to home. A supposedly domesticated reaction that ran wild might be very problematic, even if it were several light-years away from the nearest substantial human settlement.

“I can see how that possibility would make people nervous,” I said, drily. “Maybe this is one technology that we can do without, for the time being — or maybe forever.”

I was told that there were others who thought a slow and steady schedule might be best, but that nobody believed that the problem could be put off indefinitely. If humankind’s descendants refused to enclose the sun that had given birth to the species they would have to enclose others instead, because they would have no alternative but to try out every possible means of defying the Afterlife.

I had to demand an explanation of that term, because it no longer meant anything that a man of the twenty-second century could have understood by it. It was explained to me, calmly and patiently, that some people preferred to call the Afterlife the Alkahest, or “the Universal Death,” while others — those with a more developed sense of irony, I supposed — were content to call it “the End of Evolution” or “Eternity’s Eve.”