Beyond the Farthest Suns by Greg Bear

wanted, what you need?”
    â€œSo soon, and unexpected, but already valuable.”
    â€œHe can help?”
    â€œI do not know,” Roderick said.
    Ont now fixed her gaze on me.
    â€œYou must be very cautious with Roderick Escher,” she warned. “He is a national cleverness, a treasure. It is my duty to sustain him, or to do his bidding, whichever he desires.”
    â€œHow is she?” Roderick asked, hands clasped before him, naked fingers preposterously thin and white against the thick leathern glove.
    Ont replied, “Even this vortex soon spins itself out, and this time I fear the end will be permanent.”
    â€œYou fear … more than you hope?” Roderick asked.
    Ont shook her head sternly. “I do not understand this conceit between you.” With another tip of her head, she walked on, the hall curling ahead of her steps into a corkscrew. Remaining upright, she trod the spiraling floor and vanished around the curve.
    The hall straightened, but she was no longer visible.
    â€œA century ago, I chose to come back into this world refreshed,” Roderick said, “and took from myself a kind of rib or vault of my mind, to make a sister. She became my twin. Now, let me show you how the house works …”
    Roderick gripped me by the elbow and guided me to a steep, winding stair that might have coiled within the largest tower surmounting the house. He gave what he meant to be an encouraging smile, but instead revealed his teeth in a conspiratorial rictus, and climbed the steps before us. I hesitated, palms and upper lip moist with growing dread of this odd time and incomprehensible circumstance.
    Soon, however, as my friend’s form vanished around the first curve in the stair, I felt even more dread at being left alone, and hoped knowledge of whatever sort might ease my apprehension.
    I raced to catch up with him.
    â€œAs a species, in the plenitude of time—a very short time—we have found our success,” Roderick said. “Lacking threat from without, and at peace within, our people enjoy the fruits of the endeavors of all civilizations. All that has been suffered is here repaid.” In the tower, his voice sounded hollow, echoing into the mocking laughter of a far-off crowd.
    â€œHow?” I asked, following on Roderick’s heels. That which might have once winded me now seemed almost effortless. Whatever shortness of breath I felt was due to anxiety, not frailness of body.
    â€œAll work is stationary,” Roderick said, again favoring me with that peculiar grimace that had replaced a once fine and encouraging smile. We had made two turns around the tower.
    â€œThen why do we walk?” I asked.
    â€œWe are chosen. Privileged, in a way. We—my sister and I, Dr. Ont, and now you—maintain the last links with physical bodies. We give a foundation to all the world’s dreams. The entire Earth is like the seed in a peach, all but disposed of. What matters is the sweet pulp of the fruit—communication and expansion along the fiber optic lines, endless interaction, endless exchange of sensations. Some have abandoned all links with the physical, the seed, having bodies no more. They flit like ghosts through the interwoven threads that make the highways and rivers and oceans of our civilization. Most, more conservative, maintain their corporeal forms like shrines, and visit them now and then, though the bodies are vestigial, cold and unfeeling. You were reborn in one such vault, made to hold such as you, and eventually to receive my sister and me—though I have decided not to go there, never to go there. I think death would be more interesting.”
    â€œ I’ve been there ,” I said. “It is not.”
    â€œYes, and I always ask my liches … What do you recall?”
    â€œNothing,” I said.
    â€œLook closely at that excised segment in your world-line. You were dead two and a half centuries, and you