Godlike Machines Read Online Free PDF Page A

make some tea.”
    “Please. Anything hot.”
    I watch her amble into the adjoining kitchen. Her clothes are still those of her early middle age, with allowance for infirmity and the cold. She wears old-looking jeans, several layers of jumpers, a scarf and the drab colored shawl. Even though we’re indoors she wears big fur boots. The clothes give her an illusion of bulk, but I can tell how thin she really is. Like a bird with a lot of puffed-up plumage, hiding delicate bones. There’s also something darting, nervous, and birdlike about the way she negotiates the claustrophobic angles of her apartment. I hear the clatter of a kettle, the squeak of a tap, a half-hearted dribble of water, then she returns.
    “It’ll take a while.”
    “Everything does, these days. When I was younger, old people used to complain about the world getting faster and faster, leaving them behind. That isn’t how it seems to you and I. We’ve left the world behind—we’ve kept up, but it hasn’t.”
    “How old are you?” she asks.
    “Fifty one.”
    “Not what I’d call old. I have twenty years on you.” But her eyes measure me and I know what she’s thinking. I look older, beyond any doubt. The mission took its toll on me, but so did the facility. There were times when I looked in the mirror with a jolt of non-recognition, a stranger’s face staring back at me. “Something bad happened to you out there, didn’t it,” she said.
    “To all of us.”
    She makes the tea. “You think I envy you,” she says, as I sip from my cup.
    “Why would you envy me?”
    “Because you went out there, because you saw it up close, because you went inside it. You cosmonauts think all astronomers are the same. You go out into space and look at the universe through a layer of armored glass, if you’re lucky. Frosted with your own breath, blurring everything on the other side. Like visiting someone in a prison, not being able to touch them. You think we envy you that.”
    “Some might say it’s better to get that close, than not go at all.”
    ‘I stayed at home. I touched the universe with my mind, through mathematics. No glass between us then—just a sea of numbers.” Nesha looks at me sternly. “Numbers are truth. It doesn’t get any more intimate than numbers.”
    “It’s enough that we both reached out, wouldn’t you say?” I offer her a conciliatory smile—I haven’t come to pick a fight about the best way to apprehend nature. “The fact is, no one’s doing much of that anymore. There’s no money for science and there’s certainly none for space travel. But we did something great. They can write us out of history, but it doesn’t change what we did.”
    “And me?”
    “You were part of it. I’d read all your articles, long before I was selected for the mission. That’s why I came to see you, all that time ago. But long before that—I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was a young man when the Matryoshka arrived, but not so young that I didn’t have dreams and plans.”
    “You must be sorry about that now.”
    “Sometimes. Not always. No more than you regret what you did.”
    “It was different back then, between the Soviets. If you believed something, you said it.”
    “So you don’t regret a word of it?”
    “I had it easier than he did.”
    Silence. I look at a photograph on the coffee table—a young woman and a young man, holding hands in front of some grand old church or cathedral I don’t recognize, in some European city I’ll never see. They have bright clothes with slogans on, sunglasses, ski hats, and they’re both smiling. The sky is a hard primary blue, as if it’s been daubed in poster paint. “That’s him,” I say.
    “Gennadi was a good man. But he never knew when to shut his mouth. That was his problem. The new men wanted to take us back to the old ways. Lots of people thought that was a good idea, too. The problem was, not all of us did. I was born in 1975. I’m old enough to remember