Read Online The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois - Free Book Online Page A

opportunity here, I realize.
    I thaw my voice a little. I speak gently: “You can do that too, you know. Burn out your link. I’ll even let you come back here afterward, if you still want to. Just to—talk. But not with that thing in your head.”
    There is panic in his face, and, against all expectation, it almost breaks my heart. “ Can’t ,” he pleads. “How I learn things, how I train . The mission …”
    I honestly don’t know which of them is speaking, so I answer them both: “There is more than one way to carry out the mission. We have more than enough time to try them all. Dix is welcome to come back when he’s alone.”
    They take a step toward me. Another. One hand, twitching, rises from their side as if to reach out, and there’s something on that lopsided face that I can’t quite recognize.
    â€œBut I’m your son ,” they say.
    I don’t even dignify it with a denial.
    â€œGet out of my home.”
    Â 
    A human periscope. The Trojan Dix. That’s a new one.
    The chimp’s never tried such overt infiltration while we were up and about before. Usually, it waits until we’re all undead before invading our territories. I imagine custom-made drones never seen by human eyes, cobbled together during the long dark eons between builds; I see them sniffing through drawers and peeking behind mirrors, strafing the bulkheads with X-rays and ultrasound, patiently searching Eriophora ’s catacombs millimeter by endless millimeter for whatever secret messages we might be sending one another down through time.
    There’s no proof to speak of. We’ve left trip wires and telltales to alert us to intrusion after the fact, but there’s never been any evidence they’ve been disturbed. Means nothing, of course. The chimp may be stupid, but it’s also cunning, and a million years is more than enough time to iterate through every possibility using simpleminded brute force. Document every dust mote; commit your unspeakable acts; put everything back the way it was, afterward.
    We’re too smart to risk talking across the eons. No encrypted strategies, no long-distance love letters, no chatty postcards showing ancient vistas long lost in the redshift. We keep all that in our heads, where theenemy will never find it. The unspoken rule is that we do not speak, unless it is face to face.
    Endless idiotic games. Sometimes I almost forget what we’re squabbling over. It seems so trivial now, with an immortal in my sights.
    Maybe that means nothing to you. Immortality must be ancient news to you. But I can’t even imagine it, although I’ve outlived worlds. All I have are moments: two or three hundred years, to ration across the life span of a universe. I could bear witness to any point in time, or any hundred-thousand, if I slice my life thinly enough—but I will never see everything . I will never see even a fraction.
    My life will end. I have to choose .
    When you come to fully appreciate the deal you’ve made—ten or fifteen builds out, when the trade-off leaves the realm of mere knowledge and sinks deep as cancer into your bones—you become a miser. You can’t help it. You ration out your waking moments to the barest minimum: just enough to manage the build, to plan your latest countermove against the chimp, just enough (if you haven’t yet moved beyond the need for human contact) for sex and snuggles and a bit of warm mammalian comfort against the endless dark. And then you hurry back to the crypt, to hoard the remains of a human life span against the unwinding of the cosmos.
    There’s been time for education. Time for a hundred postgraduate degrees, thanks to the best caveman learning tech. I’ve never bothered. Why burn down my tiny candle for a litany of mere fact, fritter away my precious, endless, finite life? Only a fool would trade book-learning for a ringside view of the