Michael tried to compose himself. “You mean it’s good enough? I can come in?”

  “Yes, I suppose,” Satan said. “You tried very hard, and it was theft. Yes, go on in. It’s that way, toward the dunes over there,” he said, pointing. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

  Satan adjusted his narrow tie. “These charity cases. I wonder how long it’s going to take before all hell goes to. . . .”

  The intercom on the desk buzzed. “I’ll get it,” Satan said to the clerk. “You go guide our new charge.” The clerk nodded and left.

  “Hello, hell.”

  “This is the middle-of-the-road desk. Another soft job just came in. I’m sending her right over.”

  “Oh . . . fine,” Satan said, wondering about his decision. Sooner or later, he thought, these Michael Browns would have to be put into a clearer category, their status institutionalized, if only to prevent these rule-of-thumb decisions being overturned one day.

  After all, being wishy-washy was a failure, and failure was a crime, wasn’t it? He toyed with the idea of sending them into the nothingness of limbo. Plenty of room there. No, that would be ideologically untidy, as was all non-being. Too much like the atheist’s notion of death. Non-being was and wasn’t a form of existence. Very untidy.

  There was no reason why he shouldn’t get the soft jobs. He needed all the souls he could get. They might as well go to hell as limbo. Their record could be defined as a major transgression in itself, based on a willful refusal to play the game of salvation-damnation. That would be enough to send them to hell in a deserving way. . . .

  On the other hand, shouldn’t hell be reserved for the truly bad? Maybe it would be better to stuff limbo with legions of Michael Browns, thus denying them to heaven while concentrating essential evil in hell.

  He thought about it for a while, and decided against the idea; when all was said and done, it was better to have a crowd on your side.

  He wrote the appropriate memo, replete with subtle argument and elegant logic, and sent it to the other side. It might just work, he thought . . . and it would eliminate the middle-of-the-road desk, which would please the economy-minded front office.

  Proud of himself, Satan sighed, wondering if She would go for it.

  1995

  Between the Winds

  “Many virtual reality stories,” says George, “simply use the idea as an excuse for adventures that could have been set on other planets, in post-holocaust worlds, or in alternate worlds, without having anything to say about the implications of VR. I’ve tried not to do that in this story.”

  The author’s newest novel, written with Charles Pellegrino, is “The Killing Star,” due out in the spring from Avo Nova/Morrow.

  Inside (1)

  The sun was a bloody Portuguese man-of-war sinking into the tar-black sea. Ishbok leaned on the ship’s wooden rail and was suddenly afraid that the world would disappear if he stopped thinking about it.

  The sea sloshed against the horizon as if it were the rim of a bowl. He tried to remember leaving port. Perhaps his memory had been affected by his best friend’s death at the hands of the mad street prophet. What was his friend’s name? The same as the poor soul who had been washed overboard by the storm yesterday. Or had it been the day before?

  Ishbok squinted as the wind struck his face with a million pinpricks, and was grateful for the sudden reality of the sensation. The rain, still some leagues off, dropped a gauzy curtain on the sunset, obscuring something dark moving on the horizon, pushing through an invisible barrier at the edge of the world, as if coming in from the sky.

  A serration of waves cut across the crimson blister of the setting sun. The whale-thing swam closer. Ishbok gripped the rail as he saw black armor plate. Time twitched forward.

  His vessel’s lower deck guns fired; white smoke billowed into the dusk from the lower deck as thunder pulsed in his belly. The iron whale swelled until he could see its great round windows, eyes furious with fire, and he staggered back as it struck the ship. Ripping vibrations shot up through his feet. He swung around, coughing from the smoke, and the deck tilted, pitching him over the rail. He struck the whale-thing, rolled on the metal plates clawing for a handhold, then slipped off and tasted the sea. Surfacing, he saw the whale-thing tear through his ship.

  He cried out to his crew as the current bore him away, and realized they had been trapped below on the gun decks as the ship went down.

  Light drained from the world as the last red sliver of daystar was eclipsed by the horizon, and the sea seemed to boil as if quenching the sun. The sky filled with musing stars. Rock raked his back. He turned around and saw a tower of stone reaching up into the night. Probing with his arms in the water, he crawled forward on the submerged crags, hands and knees slipping on the seaweed as he struggled to stand up into the cool air.

  At last he scrambled out of the water, sat down on the rough rocks and watched the woolly clouds glide in from the north. Stars pierced the overcast for a while, their glitter fading and dying as they were drawn into the net of obscurity.

  I am alive, he said within himself, shivering in the salt spray, searching the gloom, feeling desolate and lost. The world wore a mask, and imposed forgetfulness on his thoughts and suspicions as they arose. He shuddered, slipping toward numbness as chill breezes rushed through him. He looked up and saw a star struggling to penetrate the clouds, burning bright as if hoping to ignite the cottony cumulus.

  I am alive, he repeated within his cavernous self, but the universe has walls.

  Lightning joined sea and sky; thunder tore the air. He rose and saw the echo of the timeship cutting through the clouds, then fading.

  Time tumbled backward, and he almost remembered.

  Outside (1)

  Eighteen thousand years after the mobiles had left Earth, the first to return found a deserted planet, growing back green, except for one large structure plunging deep into the plain of what had once been central North America. They worked all day to open the random molecular locks to enter the inner chamber of worlds inside the pyramid.

  The chamber, a brightly lit sphere at the center of the double pyramid, housed thousands of shining blue globes, stored rigidly against each other in large, skeletal container frames set on a polished floor that cut the chamber in half.

  Gibby, a youth not yet a century old, who had studied with deep fascination the report of the technical team that had been here a week earlier, caressed one of the balls with the palm of his hand. “Every one of these,” he said, “is a world of living, feeling people who have existed in virtual dreams for so long that they accept them as the real world. They’re just as much lost as the people of generation starships we’ve encountered, who no longer know that they exist on a ship or that it has a destination.”

  “And what shall we do, Gibby?” asked Gorrance, the linguist. “Disillusion them?”

  “We can’t do that,” Gibby replied, irritated by the fact that she had already made up her mind. Her millennium of life, he told himself, had not made her infallible, although she sometimes seemed to believe it had.

  “Why not?” Gorrance asked, her dark eyes narrowing. “Why not disillusion them? Mentalities that fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality need our help—if we can even say that we’re dealing with real persons of any kind—to be put out of their misery.”

  “There’s no point in disillusioning them,” said Kateb, the head of the expedition. He was nearly half Gorrance’s age, but she still treated him as a child. “We’ve come here only to observe a noumenal humanity that once had something in common with us.”

  “Yes,” Gorrance said, “before they moved into their dreams!”

  “There’s a control center here,” Gibby said, moving eagerly to a series of round touch-panels, above which stood three large square tanks, each black inside as if filled with a viscous liquid. “Shouldn’t there be bodies stored somewhere?”

  “There was nothing in the technical survey,” Gorrance said. “It seems they moved inside permanently, abandoning their bodies.”

  Gibby was studying the panels, pressing control surfaces and anxiously waiting to see if any of the tank monitors lit up, realizing that there would be stored physical bodies only if anyone wanted to come out. These people might have left a way out only at first, and had then decided to go inside permanently.

  As the three tanks began flickering, Gibby looked around the chamber, feeling almost as if a virtual caretaker might appear. A foolish notion; these systems had certainly been designed to maintain themselves.

  Kateb frowned. “The trouble with sub-creations,” he said, “is that they can’t escape the cosmology of the external world in which they are embedded. A sun may go nova and collapse into a black hole, a planet might be destroyed by collisions—virtuals are vulnerable and can’t do anything to save themselves.”

  Gorrance said, “Yet countless fools have claimed that virtual worlds might be the equal of given reality, and maybe preferable to it. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Once it was a planetary colony, where life got too hard. Another time it was an interstellar vessel, adrift because of some malfunction, with no one left alive except in the virtual banks. It could happen to any culture.”

  Gibby did not want to hear again about the difference between virtual worlds and the reality that impinged on senses and instruments from outside. He had heard enough about genuine, uncreated otherness. It did not mean that virtual insides were necessarily simple creations. That depended on the sophistication of the creators.

  “I wonder,” he said, gazing into the blank noisy holo monitors before him. “Is there really an outside? Have we ever been able to look that far? Maybe the settings of our senses, on which even our best instruments depend, are no different in principle from the settings of virtuals. Perhaps we don’t move through space at all, as we imagine that we did in coming here, but through a vastly rich mental space. We re all inside.” He liked the idea, whether it was true or not.

  “Nonsense!” Gorrance cried. “Which of us would dive into a sun? We are not dreams! Even the insiders must have believed in their own given reality before they entered their hells.”

  “But they also had to believe in the hard won reality of their creations,” Gibby objected, “before committing themselves irrevocably.”

  All three holo-tank monitors lit up suddenly in front of Gibby, casting a blue glow across the chamber. “Now we’ll see how they live,” he said excitedly as Gorrance and Kateb came up, and together they watched the images that began to move inside the center tank. . . .

  Inside (2)

  Ishbok raised his head from the field of battle. Black horsemen searched through the sunset glare, silencing the cries of the wounded with quick lance-thrusts. Thirsty, burning with pain, he lay back on the parched plain and remembered the ages still to come, when an ice-shrouded Earth, cold and clean, would emerge into a flowering green spring. . . .

  “We can’t take anything with us,” he had said in futurity to the love of his life.

  Reproach hid in Aina’s eyes.

  “There’s no room,” he insisted. “The ship will only take people.”

  She tried to look cheerful. “Do you think we’ll ever come back here?”

  “To a later time, perhaps, when our scouts find the end of the ice. Not much may be left here by then. It’s best to go to empty places in the past, so we won’t inconvenience anyone.”

  . . . and a lance struck through a body near him. He looked up at the first evening stars, and the icy Earth trembled in his memory as he waited to be pierced. Black lightning rushed across the whiteness toward the timeship. Deep crevasses opened in the glacier as people struggled to board the black, sluglike vessel to escape the coming ice age. The ship rippled in his eyes, as if already slipping through time, cutting off the line of people trying to board. Then it solidified and stood brutishly on the ice, as if fixed for all eternity, having no need to timeslip.

  The sky began to glow.

  “Aina!” he cried out. Her eyes were wild as she struggled to reach him through the crowd. The moment became infinitely long, refusing to end, and he held onto it desperately as he waited for his time here to expire.

  Outside (2)

  “Such intense feeling,” Gibby said with awe as he peered into the center tank. “He’s dying in one place and reliving his life in another.”

  “Life?” Gorrance asked contemptuously, but with a touch of pity. “These effigies and simulacrums aren’t truly alive.”

  “Inside, you would feel alive,” he answered, “as much as you feel being here and mocking these beings. These spheres are human colonies, living as they have chosen. It has to be so. There could have been no doubt that it was a desired way of life before so many went inside.”

  “We don’t know that,” she said, “and I don’t see how we ever could. As far as we know they’re just recordings, developing along random probabilities in a system that has gone chaotic, from what we see. If they were alive, I’d be for erasing them, to put them out of their pain. They’re living in a mill that cannot ever be as rich as the natural universe, which we will never exhaust. Face it, Gibby, this is what’s left of a cultural disaster.”

  Gibby knew the historical scenario well enough, but felt uncertain about the conclusions and judgments drawn from it. Thousands of years ago, when faced with so-called virtual creation, nanotechnology, and the laying of information highways, branches and offshoots of humankind had succumbed to creative subjectivity. Rather than affecting the reality around them by rebuilding their solar system, or reaching out to the stars in self-reproducing mobiles, these planet-bound folk had moved into their dreams in a fatal way—by linking the output of their minds, through dream generators, to their input, which gave them the experience of omnipotence—believing they could have all they could imagine, all that they had ever lost, for as long as the instrumentalities continued to function and the river of energy did not run dry.

  “All cultures are dreams,” Gibby said, examining the controls more closely, “cysts embedded in a frame of nature, which sets our initial biases through evolution. Why should we not throw nature off and make our own way? Our own mobile culture is also a dream within an indifferent universe. What you call reality is merely one kind of dream.”

  “Come, come, Gibby,” Kateb said. “You sound as if you’d like to live in these nodules. Can’t you see that it’s all gone wrong? It’s incoherent.”

  “Maybe it’s what they wanted,” Gibby said, turning away from his teammates to gaze into the second holo tank, where clouds and human figures were drifting into view. . . .

  Inside (3)

  Ishbok tumbled, drifting above the towers. The wind howled in his ears as the horizon drew him, and the blue sky invaded his eyes and opened the infinity at the back of his mind.

  Countryside appeared below. He slowed, stopping the sun, feeling its light go cold on his face as he recovered his sorrow.

  Then he searched the sky for other survivors. A few motes drifted above him, but he could not see their faces. He tried to pull them toward him, but they resisted, and finally clouds obscured his view.

  He recalled the days of departure, a month after the solar system’s entrance into the deadly cloud of interstellar debris. Meteor trails had crossed the sky like glowing raindrops on a window, becoming larger with each incoming wave, until they broke the glass.

  “It’s hopeless,” he had told Aina. “There are countless larger fragments in the cloud, rushing head-on toward us. At best we’ll have a long winter. At worst, the Earth will be shattered by a large fragment. Nothing to come back to, ever.”

  “Are there big fragments?” she had asked achingly.

  “Yes,” he had answered.

  “But we can jump a billion years!” she had exclaimed, and suddenly he could not remember what else she had said or what had happened to her. Time stopped, trapping him between memories.

  Outside (3)

  “You’re blind, Gibby!” Gorrance said, gesturing with both hands as if fending off a physical attack. “How can you be fooled by all this?”

  Startled by her uncharacteristic vehemence, Gibby frowned and said, “You can have what you want inside. From what we might learn here, we might be able to perfect a new form of existence.”

  “We can’t rewrite physical laws, or abolish the structure of an infinite universe.”

  “Why not? Perhaps if we reach deeply enough, we’ll find the innermost chaos, the ground from which even the outermost may be reshaped.”

  “Delusions!” Gorrance shouted. “You’ve forgotten how all this must have happened, when this culture, like others, simply forgot the difference between amusement and reality. Entertainment gave them their deepest, darkest wishes, without any obvious cost. Violence, brutality, the heartless torment of other human beings, the wringing of every pleasure from power and sexual adventure—all supplied free of conscience and remorse.”

  Gibby felt pride at having provoked her. The issue had to be important for her to react with such intensity. Perhaps she thought something of him after all.

  Gorrance calmed down and looked at him with concern. “Their escapes were crude at first,” she continued. “They had only their games, books, paintings, their dramas, all of which could verge on becoming life itself, or the most important thing in it. No culture can live in both realms for long, without one subverting the other. Too much reality, and creativity dies. Too much imagination, and reality dies.”

  Gibby was silent, knowing that Gorrance would not let him answer until she was finished.

  “The struggle went on, life contending with reinvented life. Every civilization that survives the early threats of tribal warfare will have to contend with the temptation of dreams—and here the lure of wishes has won out, as it did elsewhere. I expect to see it too often, this exile of intelligent life to an inward shore, spreading across hermetic empires, where new generations will accept artificialities as reality— caves on whose walls will creep the shadows of blind and lost humanities, tyrannized by artificial intelligences.” She gazed past him at the tanks. “We can’t even call them generations, really. They are the deathless copies of once living personalities proliferating through the matrix.”