My memories of Mother are oddly stylized, as if she were another fictional construct from one of my Dying Earth novels. Perhaps she was. Perhaps I was raised by robots in the automated cities of Europe, suckled by androids in the Amazon Desert, or simply grown in a vat like brewer’s yeast. What I recall is Mother’s white gown sliding ghostlike through the shadowed rooms of the estate; infinitely delicate blue veins on the back of her thin-fingered hand as she poured tea in the damask and dust light of the conservatory; candlelight caught like a gold fly in the spiderweb sheen of her hair, hair done up in a bun in the style of the Grandes Dames. Sometimes I dream that I remember her voice, the lilt and tone and turn-in-the-womb centerness of it, but then I awake and it becomes only the wind moving lace curtains or the sound of some alien sea on stone.
From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be—should be—a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race’s thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.
I had a tutor whose name was Balthazar, human but ancient, a refugee from ancient Alexandria’s flesh-scented alleys. Balthazar all but glowed blue-white from those crude, early Poulsen treatments; he was like an irradiated mummy of a man, sealed in liquid plastic. And randy as the proverbial goat. Centuries later, when I was in my satyr period, I felt that I finally understood poor don Balthazar’s priapic compulsions, but in those days it was mostly a hindrance to keeping young girls on the estate’s staff. Human or android, don Balthazar did not discriminate—he poinked them all.
Luckily for my education, there was nothing homosexual in don Balthazar’s addiction to young flesh, so his escapades evidenced themselves either as absences from our tutorial sessions or an inordinate amount of attention lavished on memorizing verses from Ovid, Senesh, or Wu.
He was an excellent tutor. We studied the ancients and the late classical period, took field trips to the ruins of Athens, Rome, London, and Hannibal, Missouri, and never once had a quiz or test. Don Balthazar expected me to learn everything by heart at first encounter and I did not disappoint him. He convinced my mother that the pitfalls of “progressive education” were not for an Old Earth family, so I never knew the mind-stunting shortcuts of RNA medication, datasphere immersion, systemic flashback training, stylized encounter groups, “higher-level thinking skills” at the expense of facts, or preliterate programming. As a result of these deprivations, I was able to recite all of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey by the time I was six, compose a sestina before I could dress myself, and think in spiral fugue-verse before I ever interfaced with an AI.
My scientific education, on the other hand, was something less than stringent. Don Balthazar had little interest in what he referred to as “the mechanical side of the universe.” I was twenty-two before I realized that computers, RMUs, and Uncle Kowa’s asteroidal life-support devices were machines and not some benevolent manifestations of the animas around us. I believed in fairies, woodsprites, numerology, astrology, and the magic of Midsummer’s Eve deep in the primitive forests of the NAP. Like Keats and Lamb in Haydon’s studio, don Balthazar and I drank toasts to “the confusion of mathematics” and mourned the destruction of the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton’s prying prism. The early distrust and actual hatred of all things scientific and clinical served me well in later life. It is not difficult, I have learned, to remain a pre-Copernican pagan in the postscientific Hegemony.
My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. My mother remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel lying around the house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken llama. Don Balthazar never commented on my work; primarily, I assume, because I never showed him any of it. Don Balthazar thought that the venerable Daton was a fraud, that Salmud Brevy and Robert Frost should have hanged themselves with their own entrails, that Wordsworth was a fool, and that anything less than Shakespeare’s sonnets was a profanation of the language. I saw no reason to bother don Balthazar with my verse, rife with budding genius though I knew it to be.
I published several of these little literary turds in the various hardcopy journals then in vogue in the various arcologies of the European Houses, the amateur editors of these crude journals being as indulgent of my mother as she was of me. Occasionally I would press Amalfi or one of my other playmates—less aristocratic than I and thus with access to the datasphere or fatline transmitters—to uplink some of my verses to the Ring or to Mars, and thus to the burgeoning farcaster colonies. They never replied. I assumed they were too busy.
Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality … and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
My mother died with Old Earth. About half the Old Families stayed during that last cataclysm; I was twenty years old then and had made my own romantic plans to die with the homeworld. Mother decided otherwise. What concerned her was not my premature demise—like me, she was far too self-centered to think of someone else at a time like that—nor even the fact that the death of my DNA would mark the end of a line of aristocrats which stretched back to the Mayflower; no, what bothered Mother was that the family was going to die out in debt. Our last hundred years of extravagance, it seems, had been financed through massive loans from the Ring Bank and other discreet extraterrestrial institutions. Now that the continents of Earth were crashing under the impact of contraction, the great forests aflame, the oceans heaving and heating themselves into a lifeless soup, the very air transforming itself into something too hot and thick to break and too thin to plow, now the banks wanted their money back. I was collateral.
Or, rather, Mother’s plan was. She liquidated all available assets some weeks before that phrase became a literal reality, deposited a quarter of a million marks in long-term accounts in the fleeing Ring Bank, and dispatched me on a trip to the Rifkin Atmospheric Protectorate on Heaven’s Gate, a minor world circling the star Vega. Even then, that poisonous world had a farcaster connection to Sol System, but I did not farcast. Nor was I a passenger on the single spinship with Hawking drive which put into Heaven’s Gate each standard year. No, Mother sent me to this back end of the outback on a Phase Three ramship, slower than light, frozen with the cattle embryos and orange juice concentrate and feeder viruses, on a trip that took one hundred and twenty-nine shipboard years, with an objective time-debt of one hundred and sixty-seven standard years!
Mother figured that the accrued interest on the long-term accounts would be enough to pay off our family debt and perhaps allow me to survive comfortably for a while. For the first and last time in her life, Mother figured wrong.
Notes for a sketch of Heaven’s Gate:
Mud lanes which run back from the station’s conversion docks like a pattern of sores on a leper’s back. Sufrus-brown clouds which hang in tatters from a rotten burlap sky. A tangle of shapeless wooden structures half decayed before they were ever fully constructed, their paneless windows now staring sightlessly into the gaping mouths of their neighbors. Indigenies breeding like … like humans, I suppose … eyeless cripples, lungs burned out with air rot, squiring a nest of a dozen offspring, the children’s skin scabrous by age five-standard, their eyes watering incessantly from the sting of an atmosphere which will kill them before they’re forty, their smiles carious, their oily hair rife with lice and the blood bags of dracula ticks. Proud parents beaming. Twenty million of these doomed schmucks, crowded into slums overflowing an island smaller than my family’s west lawn on Old Earth, all of them fighting to breathe the only breathable air on a world where the standard is to inhale and die, crowding ever closer to the center of the sixty-mile radius of survivable atmosphere which the Atmospheric Generating Station had been able to provide before it began to malfunction.