Lifehouse Lifehouse
Prologue The Tar Baby's alarm caught them making
love, or the whole emergency might never have happened.
It might seem odd that they let something
as frivolous as sex distract them even momentarily from their responsibilities. They were
as dedicated, motivated and committed to their work as any guardians in history, as
responsible as it was possible to be. And they had, after all, been married to each other
for over nine centuries at that point.
But then, theirs was--even for their
kind--one of the Great Marriages. They had mutually agreed on their five hundredth
anniversary that in their opinion, things were just getting really good, and as their
millennial approached, both still felt the same. And perhaps even we mortals can dimly
understand that any hobby which endures over such a span of time must have within it
certain elements of obsession. They had long since taken into their lovemaking, as into
their marriage itself, the spirit of the Biblical injunction, "Whatsoever thy hand
findeth to do, do it with all thy might," and they were good at finding things to do.
The precise timing of the alarm, moreover,
was more than diabolical: it was Murphian. For several hours they had been constructing a
complex and beautiful choreography of ecstasy together, a four-dimensional structure of
pleasure and joy extending through space and time. A DNA double-helix would actually be a
fairly accurate three-dimensional model of it. It was itself part of a larger, more
complicated structure that had been under creation for nearly a week, a sort of interwoven
pattern of patterns of pleasure and joy, of which this particular movement was meant to be
the capstone. The tocsin sounded in both their skulls just as, in the words of Jake
Thackray, "They were getting to a very important bit . . ." and for two whole
seconds, both honestly mistook it for a hyperbole of their imaginations. By the time they
understood it was real, a necessity at once emotional, biological and artistic urged them
to ignore it--just for a moment.
This, in their defense, they did not do.
Their responsibility was too much a part of who they were. Orgasm may be the source of all
meaning--but it needs a universe in which to mean. The instant they realized the alarm was
not a shared hallucination they stopped doing what they were doing (or more precisely,
stopped paying attention to the fact that they were doing it), queried the Tar Baby,
downloaded a detailed report of the situation, and studied it, fully prepared to leap out
of bed and hit the ground running if the emergency seemed to warrant it.
It did not. Indeed, it seemed to be
practically over. Only one sophont appeared to be involved--and not a sophisticated one.
It carried only a single (pathetic) weapon, and no data transmission gear of any kind. The
Tar Baby reported no difficulty at all in investing it, and was even now reprogramming it.
There was another higher lifeform of some kind present, about fifty meters away from the
Egg, but it did not display sentience signatures and thus could not be a significant
threat. To top it all off, the whole nonevent was taking place less than two thousand
meters away, a distance they could cover in seconds.
Yes, doctrine did mandate a
suspenders-and-belt physical visit to the site to obtain eyeball confirmation of all data.
But doctrine did not (quite) say that it absolutely had to be done this instant . .
. not unless there were complicating factors present. They both double-checked, and there
were not. They very nearly triple-checked. They concluded, first separately and then in
rapport, that a delay of as much as fifteen minutes in the on-site follow-up inspection
could not reasonably pose a serious or even a significant risk. They ran their logic past
the Tar Baby, which concurred. It agreed to notify them at once if the situation were to
degenerate, and to preserve all data.
This whole process had taken perhaps three
seconds, a total of five seconds since the alarm had gone off. The weeklong work of art
was still salvageable. Sighing happily, they returned to their erotic choreography, and in
under ten minutes brought it to a conclusion satisfactory in every sense of the word, the
brief hiatus actually improving it trivially, both as sensation and as art. They spent an
additional five minutes on breath recovery and afterglow, and were just about to
get up, less than fifteen minutes after the Tar Baby's first call--when suddenly it called
again.
And this time it shrieked.
* * *
They came that close to
being vigilant enough. Less than fifteen minutes late on a pointless backup. Less than one
minute too late.
Unfortunately, they were not playing
horseshoes.
And so the whole universe very nearly
ceased to ever have existed. . . .