The boy, Pug, was just seven years old when his father went up. “Good-bye, Da,” he said, and understood enough to know that he mustn’t cry in front of family.

Pug had already started his Great Work, much earlier than most boys, so he had a glimmering of how Da must have felt after he had finished his own. “I have done with doing,” said Da, and kissed him on the mouth, and then went up. Pug swallowed and held the tears inside until he was by himself.

Life without his father soon enough came to seem normal. Pug remembered him from time to time, and sometimes when he lay naked and alone on his pad in the dark, he wondered why Da had left. But there was still his mother, and his friends, and his Great Work.

By the time he was twelve, he understood the process much better. He wasn’t even tempted to cry when his mother went up. After all, it was the way of things, and he hardly saw her anymore anyway. He spent most of his time on his Great Work. “Good-bye, Ma,” he said, and pressed her cold hands to his forehead before kissing her one last time and turning away.

Ma had made all the necessary arrangements before she went up, so Pug went to stay with cousins and spent even more time on his Great Work. He had chosen to devote his life to the mysteries of mathematical philosophy. He was the only philosopher in the habitat. His peers had all chosen the usual subjects—genetics, astrophysics, biology, computer design, or other sciences. Being a philosopher was very unusual, but since Pug specialized in logic, which had scientific applications, at least in principle, no one minded very much. He had been teaching courses in sentential logic, rhetoric, and symbolic manipulation since he was just over ten years old. He was odd, everyone agreed, but then prodigies often were. If his peers worried about him at all, they assumed that time would work its normal magic, making Pug more well-balanced as the years went past.

Sylvia, the habitat’s only adult whose Great Work included the training and care of the young, felt humbled and awed by Pug’s raw intelligence, so didn’t try to force him into the common mould. But she was frustrated at the same time, since he didn’t seem to need much of anything from her—or from anyone at all. “You are too self-sufficient,” she told him one day when he was almost thirteen. “You need to spend more time with children your own age, and develop relationships.”

Pug just blinked at her and shrugged. What were other children to him? Useful pawns, sometimes, but otherwise an annoyance. To Pug, who found even the most mature adults to be occasionally childish, actual children were unbearable. All that running about with excited shouts, rages, hopes, impossible projects, demands to reform the world -- silly dreams, all. Wasted energy. When Pug spoke to others his age, he most often said something like “Grow up!” It never occurred to him to wonder where he got this attitude, or whether others considered him an adult. It never occurred to him to wonder what maturity would mean for him. He thought he was already there.

Sylvia went up when Pug was fifteen, and that was the end of his only friendship. In a vague way, Pug missed her. The friendship was lopsided and awkward, but only Sylvia had taken the time to talk to him on a personal level, to try to interest him in things outside his Great Work. Others had long since given up. They would come to him for expert advice in his chosen area, and would dutifully take notes in the classes he still taught from time to time, but when the advice was given, or the class was over, they went on, went back, back to their own lives, their own friends and families, their own concerns. No one spared a thought for strange little Pug, who seemed so self-sufficient.

“Good-bye, Sylvia,” Pug murmured after she’d gone up. He blinked at the cold body for a few minutes, wondering if something else were required. His gaze caught at the coded patch on her wrist, where, in her last moments, she had tapped out the code that shut down her systems and sent her up. He never touched his own patch, was never even tempted to tap out the code. Why had she done it? Her medical chart was available, but knowing Sylvia, Pug doubted she had gone up to escape some disease. No, she had chosen her time, declared her Great Work finished, and gone up without a word. It was her right, of course, but the choice bewildered Pug. Life was sweet for him, in a way he couldn’t explain to anyone else.

At last, he said good-bye again, then quietly left the room, feeling vaguely disturbed in a way he had never experienced before.

Standing at the viewport in his room before sleeptime, Pug gazed out at the Earth. The blue-white globe was visible several times a day, for the habitat rotated rapidly. Pug had never been on a planet, and he decided that one day he would visit Earth. He knew the earthlings had access to the same nets, the same entertainments, and the same educational channels. He knew the common beliefs of the habitat were exaggerated. The earthlings weren’t some kind of primitives, dancing around fires in the night and warring with each other all the time. They were human, with the same hopes and dreams and fears as civilized people. He was fairly proud of his lack of prejudice. If someone had suggested to him that he wanted to visit Earth because Sylvia had been born there, he would have been surprised by the idea.

He turned from the viewport, stripped, and lay down on his pad. Eyes shut, he dismissed Sylvia from his mind and brought up the latest problem presented by his Great Work. Without moving or using any cybernetic enhancements, he manipulated formulas, solved equations, and investigated ideas. Before long, he was satisfied with the results. Still without moving, he drifted into sleep.

Sometime during sleeptime, he woke to find his face wet with tears. He sat up, turned on the light, and demanded of the room, “Why am I crying?” No answer seemed forthcoming, and sleep seemed far away, so he did something he had never done before: he went visiting.

Hanna was a girl his own age, and while he had never paid much attention to her, he was distantly aware that she was attractive and reasonably agreeable. He padded naked through the corridors and knocked on her door.

A boy a little older than Pug opened the door and blinked owlishly at him. “Yes?”

Pug’s courage suddenly failed him. Another new experience. He suddenly remembered that Hanna was involved with someone. Bruce. This must be he. The face was even vaguely familiar. Embarrassed, Pug mumbled something about being lost and started to turn away. From behind the older boy, Hanna called out, “Who’s there? Come on in!”

Bruce shrugged, reached for Pug’s shoulder, and guided the younger boy into the room. Hanna lay on the pad, naked and sweaty, her hair plastered down over her eyes. She pushed the hair away, sat up, and said incredulously, “Pug?”

Pug nodded miserably.

“What in the world are you doing here?” She stopped suddenly. “Oh! I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry. Bruce and I were just, well, you know. And you surprised me.” She paused, not much more sure of how to react than Pug himself. “I just meant... What did you want, Pug?”

Pug shook his head and closed his eyes, mortified. “Nothing.” But then the feelings he’d been suppressing came forward and tears leaked from his tightly-closed eyes. “Sylvia,” he managed to say, and then words were impossible.

“Oh, you poor thing. Of course you’re upset. No one thought to.... You’re so.... We just didn’t think. Come here, Pug.”

Numbly, he stumbled forward. Hanna pulled him down onto the pad and curled around him. She held him tightly while he sobbed, and soothed him, made crooning sounds. Bruce slipped down on the other side of the pad and lay back, his arms crossed behind his head patiently, while Hanna murmured reassurances to their guest. Pug quieted eventually, and almost didn’t notice when her caresses became erotic. Soon, though, he was cooperating enthusiastically, and, for a brief moment, forgot his grief. When Bruce joined in some minutes later, Pug moved over to lie between them.

Long after Hanna had fallen asleep, he found himself whispering with Bruce, speaking of things he had thought didn’t apply to him. He spoke of his parents, of Sylvia, of grief and loss. He realized while talking that he hated the whole idea of going up, that he resented them for leaving him. But he was comforted by Bruce’s quiet reassurances that his feelings were normal, and before long, his mind was clear and calm again. He had never suspected he would find himself in this situation, sandwiched between two loving friends who let him share their joy and peace when he needed it. Eventually, he slept.

He woke to find Hanna already gone. He gently moved Bruce’s hands away and got up without waking the other boy. Last sleeptime already seemed impossible. He couldn’t have shown that much vulnerability, couldn’t have been that open. He wanted to pretend that it had never happened, and at the same time, he wanted it to happen every sleeptime for the rest of his life.

He got the first wish. When he saw Hanna in the corridors the following day, he glanced at her then looked away. No words were necessary; the casual disinterest was enough. She looked hurt, then angry, then simply disgusted. She came up beside him without slowing down, and said just loudly enough for him to hear, “Don’t ever come back.”

He would never even be tempted. Before long, he had convinced himself that the experience had been a case study in interpersonal relationships, that he had no more interest in her than he might have had in a lab rat. The data was everything; the subject was nothing.

Bruce was even easier to ignore. The older boy had been humoring Hanna at first, then simply interested in sex—any sex—as events progressed. At his age and level of maturity, anything warm and compliant was a valid partner. And since he was good looking, intelligent, and as caring as a boy that age could reasonably be expected to be, he had no lack of friends and partners. He didn’t even bother snubbing Pug in the hallways. He just treated him with the same indifference he always had, which suited both boys just fine.

Pug immersed himself in his Great Work even more than before. But when Sylvia had gone up, something had changed forever, whether he could admit it or not. As the long years went by, he found less and less satisfaction with his studies. At age 19, he shocked the habitat by changing Great Works. While the lesser students sometimes changed from field to field trying to find a Great Work, it was unheard of for a master to do so. But Pug’s new field, biochemistry, was as easy for him as sentential logic and differential calculus had been, and he was soon producing new and exciting research with designer biomods. Even the most reluctant elders had to admit that Pug’s new Great Work was a true calling. Pug’s biomods included enhanced eyesight, keener hearing, body restructuring, and his crowning achievement, the self-powered built-in respirator.

In conjunction with a simple force field, the respirator eliminated the need for space suits and increased the amount of time humans could stay in space without external life-support by a factor of a thousand. Even better, he set up his biomods to be self-installing and self-adjusting, so that habitat members could just pick a model out of the catalogue, and minutes later be wearing (or containing) the latest and greatest. People changed out irises to match their apparel. Green dress, green eyes. Next day, go with blue. They could change limbs almost as easily, putting on a hand with extra fingers for jobs requiring fine manipulation, or using powered legs for heavy work.

The habitat expanded beyond its projected growth curves, for they no longer had to pressurize anything but living quarters. The respirator made vacuum a minor inconvenience, no more. Since everyone had a respirator, corridors connecting pods could be as simple as a coded string of lights pointing the way. The force field automatically merged with the fields surrounding the pressurized zones when a pod was entered, and automatically snapped into a personal bubble when going outside.

Pug was pleased with his Great Work, but felt it was only a stopgap on the way to something else. He began exploring other fields of study, and changed his Great Work to physics when he was 29 years old. This time, no one was surprised. They simply waited eagerly to see what miracles Pug would produce.

They would have a long wait.

As always, Pug spent all of his waking time on his Great Work, but unlike before, his work was mostly theoretical. He didn’t teach, didn’t consult with others or share his working notes, and didn’t produce any gadgets. He rarely left his quarters—the same small pod he had shared with his parents long ago. When he did go out, it was always during the habitat’s sleep cycle, and he went out alone, to stand in raw space, swaddled in his force field and supported by his respirator, to stare at Earth, far away.

The thoughts he had then, watching the Earth turn above him, he shared with no one.

Hanna went up when he was 135. In all that time, he had toiled alone on his Great Work, but told no one what he was doing. Hanna’s death, an accident, drew him out of isolation. She had left her Great Work left unfinished. She had become a molecular chemist of no great repute, and the industry hardly noticed her passing. Nevertheless her friends, including Bruce, gathered to honor her memory, for they would miss her. Pug surprised them by showing up. He said nothing, but leaned over to kiss her cold forehead, and then left before anyone could question him. On his way out of the pod, he patted Bruce on the shoulder. Although the people of the habitat didn’t realize it yet, they’d finally gotten their miracle.

Hanna sat up on her pad, looked around, and burst into tears. A wafer-thin metallic disk fell from her forehead, already disintegrating as it fell. By the time it landed in her lap, it was nothing but dust. Hanna had gone up, but come back down, thanks to the disk Pug had put on her forehead when he kissed her.

A short time later Pug went to Earth. He came back six years later with a wife, Milla, and four-year-old son, Edward. As usual, he explained nothing, but all three of them wore tiny metallic disks on their foreheads. Not too long after that, Milla went up while giving birth to Emily, their second child. The disk fell off and disintegrated, and Milla came right back down. Pug outfitted her with another disk, and also put one on his new daughter.

Pug told everyone that the disks were still experimental, but that he would mass-produce them as soon as they were perfected. No one was pleased by this, but lifetimes were long and accidents few—people put off going up, and waited for Pug to deliver his miracle to all.

When Edward was ten and Emily six, Pug called a conference. The entire habitat attended, some in person, but most by vid. Those living on Earth, Luna, and Mars also tuned in. Everyone in the solar system knew Pug’s name, and they eagerly awaited the announcement. Few doubted that Pug had at last perfected the disks.

He did not disappoint them. The special metals in the thin disks, he told them, were expensive and hard to work with, but anyone could reasonably expect to save up enough to buy one or two during a normal lifetime. And since the disk granted a new lifetime, they could save up again and buy more. The process could continue indefinitely, for everyone. “No more going up,” he told them. “No more.”

Then Pug turned away from the cameras and took his family into their little pod. He was exhausted, having worked nonstop for six years to perfect the disks. The people granted him the greatest respect they knew how to give: They left him alone until he should choose to emerge again.

As soon as they were in private, Pug undressed and collapsed onto the sleeping pad. Milla and the children soon joined him. They lay snuggled together, arms and legs entwined, and slept the sleep of the just. It was a happy time for them during the next several days, for Pug shook his mind free from his Great Work, played with the children, made love to his wife, and acted like a normal man for the first time in his life.

When Pug finally emerged from seclusion, he announced that he was finished with Great Works. “I am done with doing,” he said, remembering his father’s words, and would say no more.

People remonstrated with him. Surely no one before him had ever done so Great a Work. Surely the one who provided all these miracles would not be satisfied stopping there. Hanna came to thank him for her life, and had enough dignity to refrain from asking him to continue working. She made a half-hearted gesture toward asking him to come visit, and was clearly relieved when he politely declined. But others had no such compunctions about taking his time. They accosted him by vid, pleaded with him in person, and sent him their own work for his review.

“Vipers!” Pug cried when they cornered him at last. “I have given you the respirator. I have given you designer bodies. I have given you the disks. You no longer have to go up. What more do you want from me?”

“Agriculture,” said one. “If no one goes up, we will soon run out of food. You must apply your mind to agricultural problems.”

“Astronomy,” said another. “If no one goes up, we will soon run out of room, and must find other planets to settle. Only you can help us.”

“Textiles!” shouted a woman. “Over a hundred million babies are being born every day, and not a single one will ever go up. What will they wear?”

“Engineering. We need ark-like space ships to colonize other planets, and new kinds of engines to propel them.”

“Architecture! We must find ways to let such a hugely increased population live without sitting on each other’s laps. We need mile-high cube buildings.”

Pug ran away before he could hear any more. “They’re your problems!” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran. “Solve them yourselves!”

Milla soothed him when he got back to their pod, and he played with the children until sleeptime. Then he and Milla went out into raw space to watch the Earth turning above them. They floated close enough together for their fields to merge, and then for a little while they forgot about the Earth with its teeming trillions, and worked on adding one more.

Later, back on the pad in their pod when he should be sound asleep, Pug lifted Edward off him and sat halfway up, leaning on his elbow. By the dim Earthlight coming through the viewport, he studied his little family. Emily slept on her side, her little fist crammed into her mouth, drooling a bit. Milla lay on her back, with Edward draped across her on his stomach. One of Milla’s hands absently toyed with his hair and she hummed softly to herself; she was only half-asleep. The boy snored and snuggled more deeply against her, one leg straight, the other bent at the knee so his foot lifted up in the air. Pug loved them all, and wondered at the true miracle he had created—becoming a whole person at last, with a family that would never go up. That was a Great Work. The disk on Milla’s forehead glinted as she moved a bit, and Pug smiled to himself, lay down, and went back to sleep.

Early waketime a few weeks later, Edward found his father standing at the viewport, hands clasped behind his back, staring at the stars.

“Da,” said Edward, tugging at Pug’s hands. When Pug turned, Edward continued, with all the seriousness only a ten-year-old can muster: “I need to start my Great Work.”

Pug frowned. “You have plenty of time, baby.” He sat cross-legged on the plates and pulled the boy into his lap. “You don’t have to start your Great Work for years and years. You don’t ever have to start, if you don’t want to.”

Edward squirmed free. “I’m not a baby,” he said. “And I already know what my Great Work will be.”

“Okay, then, what?”

The boy touched the disk on his forehead. “This thing.”

Milla laughed from the far side of the pod where she’d been watching and listening while helping Emily with her studies. “Edward, your da has already finished the disks.” She turned to Emily and said, “No, honey, don’t try to integrate the vector; it’s additive.” She deftly manipulated the screen to show the six-year-old what she had done wrong.

Edward tried to ignore the interruption. “No,” he said seriously to Pug. “You didn’t finish it. You made it so people can come down after they go up, but you didn’t let them remember what up was like so they can choose.”

“Up isn’t like anything, Edward,” said Pug.

“You don’t know that.”

“I....” Pug stopped, perplexed. “I do know, but I’m not sure I know how to explain it. Going up is just a name we use for when life is over.”

“You mean dead?”

“Yes, dead. Look, when your respirator’s power pack runs out, it needs to be replaced. The reactor material is gone, all used. It’s gone up.”

“At school they said it just turns into something else. It’s never really gone.”

“Well, that’s true. But, well, think of the disks. A person has something like a power pack, but much more complicated. When it runs out, the person is gone. But the disk can recharge the power pack, and the person comes back. As long as there’s power, the person is there. When the power is gone, the person is gone.”

“Like your lap,” said Milla, paying attention again. She pulled Emily along and joined them by the viewport.

Pug blinked. “What?”

“When you stand up,” Milla said, “your lap is gone. But you can sit down and it comes back.”

“Well, yes, something like that I suppose. But much more involved.”

“But your lap doesn’t really go away, it just changes into hips and legs. What Edward is asking is what happens when someone goes up. We know matter and energy are never destroyed, so it must go somewhere. Where?”

“Yeah, where?” said Emily.

Pug threw up his hands. “I won’t argue with a six-year-old.”

Edward leaned close to his father and laughed, though his expression was deadly intense. “I’m your son,” he said. “Don’t argue with me, either. I know the stories. I’m just like you were. I’ve found my Great Work—my first one, at least—and I’m going to start on it right away.”

“No,” said Pug. “First I’m going to pin you, then I’m going to tickle you until you scream, and then you can start.” Pug did those things and then forgot about the subject, but Edward did not.

In the following years, Edward worked silently and diligently on his project while also doing his regular schoolwork. He followed his father’s footsteps without knowing it, for in order to answer the question of where people go when they go up, he had to learn philosophy. He was truly his father’s son, for he had an aptitude for sentential logic, and soon discarded most metaphysical theories as wishful thinking. By the time he was sixteen, he had published several carefully thought-out papers, scathing rejections of both ancient and modern theory, and people everywhere were nodding to themselves in satisfaction. Pug’s line had produced another genius.

Edward gave the major religions a cursory examination, then moved on to develop his own metaphysics. It was a curious hybrid of logic, Zen, and experimental psychology, and though he explained his theories at great length, no one seemed to understand him.

Frustrated, Edward tried to involve his father, for he knew of no one else who might be able to help him coalesce his theories into a thematic whole. But Pug would have none of it. He was done with doing, and said that Great Works must be taken on by one person alone, else they were meaningless. But privately, Pug worried about the boy—now a young man—and tried to keep him from repeating Pug’s mistakes. At almost seventeen, Edward was so consumed with his Great Work that he had no friends, no sex partners, and no apparent interest in obtaining either.

Milla was less worried. She knew her son’s mind well enough to know that time would bring his interests full circle soon enough. And she knew that, like his father, when Edward latched onto a task, nothing else existed until the task was complete. She and Pug continued trying to make another child without success, and that was as close to a Great Work as either one got for a long time.

The habitat continued expanding, but more energy was focused on outworld expeditions. An interstellar launch was planned, in an ark that would carry over a million colonists. Overcrowding was an issue on Earth, but not in the habitat, where more cubic was available for the price of a bit of metal, easily mined from asteroids, and air, easily generated from other materials by variations of Pug’s respirator technology. And no one ever went up. Food was not yet a crisis, for others had Great Works of their own, and solved many of the production problems still remaining. For the next hundred years or more, Earth could keep feeding all of her children, both those who remained at home and those who rode the heavens in the habitat or on Luna. The Mars colony remained self-sufficient, but Pug could see that they were on the same path as Earth. A crisis was coming.

He was not the only one to see it. With potentially unlimited lifetimes, scientists and ordinary people around the solar system began to look further ahead than usual, and they worried. If all variables remained the same, and the population continued increasing at its current rate, the Earth would run out of food in 150 years, Mars in 200. The habitat began increasing its hydroponics, but this was at best a stopgap, for essential raw materials still had to be shipped up from Earth.

The ark might succeed in taking humanity to another star, but the drive technology was slow; interstellar food shipments weren’t even being dreamed about. Even if another world could produce the needed food, getting it in 500 or 1000 years would do no one any good. At best, the ark satisfied the pioneering urge while giving humanity a small insurance policy against disaster. Even if all life in the solar system disappeared, the race would continue elsewhere.

This, however, was cold comfort for those who would stay behind. What use to them, having humanity living beside another star? And what use was not going up, if there was no food to eat here? Some trusted that Pug, or another like him, would solve those problems when they arose. Humans had been dealing with the future that way for all of human history. But here and there, in ones and twos, some removed their disks, lay down on their pads, tapped their personal codes into their wrist patches, and went up.

Pug shook his head sadly when he heard this, but Edward and Emily were excited. Emily was only twelve years old then, but she was Pug’s daughter in the same way Edward was Pug’s son. Brother and sister worked together now, and Emily often provided the insights Edward needed to move ahead. But they needed volunteers to help test Edward’s theories. He sent out a call: If you’re going up, talk to us first.

He got his volunteers. He also got his results.

Using sensitive electrodes and sensors of his own design, some of them electronic, some of them squiggles on paper with leads pasted on, he monitored those who chose to go up.

They definitely went somewhere. Where, he couldn’t tell. But it wasn’t oblivion. It wasn’t death, the way a battery dies when the electromotive force is exhausted. In order for his test to show results, however, the volunteers had to go up and stay up. The ones who came back down left the meter banks unchanged.

He published his studies, outlining his methods, theories, and significance calculations. Although parts of his science weren’t the kind of science humanity had known before, his results could be duplicated in any lab, by anyone trained to operate the equipment.

They went up in droves.

No longer was unending life the goal. Rather, people spoke of fulfillment, of becoming, of higher planes, of paradise.

They went up in multitudes.

Science had proven there was something more, something after life, something unknown. A new frontier, or an old religion validated—it didn’t matter what motivation an individual had. It was enough to know that mortal strife was only the first step, that something grander, something larger waited. Edward cautioned them that his results only showed that an individual persisted, not that they went to paradise. But no one listened.

They went up by the millions.

Twenty years later, the ark project was abandoned. Some few still cared about it, but an undertaking that huge required the dedicated support of entire industries—miners, manufacturers, parts jobbers, engineers, welders, cooks, babysitters, architects, handymen, physicists, mathemeticians, and more. Too few specialists cared enough about the project to sustain the progress. The remaining backers quietly went up along with the rest.

Great Works were forsaken half-completed. Bakers left their ovens, famers left their fields, workers left the factories, bankers left their counting rooms. It became an epidemic. A full twenty-five percent of humanity went up, some alone, some in huge going-up parties, some taking unwilling partners with them.

They went up by the billions.

Those who remained paid little attention to practical things, turning inward instead, examining life in light of the sure knowledge that it was but a stepping stone to something else. Those who wanted to keep living had Pug’s disks; those who did not could always take the disks off.

Pug bestirred himself when it became apparent that the habitat would no longer receive deliveries of any sort. There weren’t enough skilled workers left to man the shuttles, and not enough farmers left to harvest crops beyond their own immediate needs. The habitat had supplies for several years, and shuttles of their own, so Pug didn’t worry about his family’s survival. But he was curious about Edward’s Great Work, and came to watch while Edward sent up volunteer after volunteer.

Pug studied the diagrams and circuitry. He read all of the reports, and ran all the statistics through his own computer. Edward and Emily’s work was impressive. Pug understood why people throughout the solar system had chosen as they had. But Pug was Pug, with a brilliant mind and a hunger for answers that surpassed even Edward’s. He worried over the data while more and more people went up, and by the time he was ready to start drawing inferences and conclusions, only Pug and his family were left on the habitat. The others had either gone back to Earth or gone up.

The radio and vids from Earth, Luna, and Mars had been silent for weeks when Pug went to find Edward in his laboratory. Pug assumed there was no longer anyone who cared to man the communications consoles, or to repair and align the huge dish antennas. This disturbed him at a level too deep for words.

Edward was studying the last of his data when Pug entered the laboratory. Pug was carrying a small device with him.

“What’s that, Da?”

“A meter, much like yours. Based on the same principles. I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed your work.”

“I’m flattered. I told you I would do my Great Work, and that this would be it. Are you proud of me, Da?”

Pug passed a hand over his eyes and sat down heavily. “Always,” he said at last. “But not for your Great Work. You made a mistake, son.”

Edward was scientist enough to merely cock an eyebrow and wait. Marketing sells, but information tells. He awaited data.

Pug connected his device to Edward’s meter bank. The indicator on the device immediately lit up, and the number 107553 appeared. In moments, it had become 107552. Then 107551. Then 107550.

Edward crossed his arms and leaned back. “What do the numbers mean, Da?”

“I’ll tell you, but first I must explain something. When someone goes up while connected to your instruments, you can measure a current that persists after the person has gone up, yes?”

“Not exactly a current, more of a pattern, but yes.”

“And if the person comes back down, the pattern disappears from your instruments, right?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“But if the person stays up, you can continue monitoring the pattern for a time, thus leading you to believe the pattern represents the person after going up.”

“Where’s this going, Da? That’s the basic theory that turned the world on end. Proof. Just what I told you I’d find someday.”

“But Edward, you missed something. Look—” he pointed to a part of the circuit diagram on the desk— “These components that do the monitoring, they act like a capacitor. You aren’t watching the patterns of people after they’ve gone up, you’re just capturing a bit of their energy as they go up past you. If you use my disk to bring them back down, the energy is transferred back into the person, just like recharging those power packs we talked about when you were ten. But if the people don’t come back down, the energy stays in your capacitor for a while until it slowly discharges by leakage to the surrounding air.”

“I don’t underst—”

“Instead of proving that they go somewhere after going up, you’ve proved the opposite. Unless captured by your instruments, the energy they had just dissipates into the air. The discharge is faster without your instruments, but it’s the same function.”

“But—”

“Look at the readout.”

The numbers read 106221. While they watched, the display changed to 106220, then 106219.

“I’ve calibrated my device so that each tick represents the stored energy corresponding to one person. The countdown shows the energy leaking away from your capacitor.”

Edward didn’t want to believe. He forced Pug to go through his reasoning again and again, and examined the little meter device carefully. Then he spent several weeks in isolation, reviewing his work, recalculating all of his careful equations. When he emerged, he was haggard and drawn.

“I’ve killed them all,” he said. “But you were wrong, Da. It’s not really acting like a capacitor. I would have caught that myself—it’s too obvious. It’s worse. My device, in the process of measuring them as they go up, actually interferes with the pattern. It’s the interference I’m recording. I now know for certain that if the pattern is measured, the act of measuring destroys it. But we’re back to square one on what happens if I don’t measure it. There’s no reason to assume anything either way. Without my device, they may go somewhere or they may not. The only thing I know for sure is that, with my device, they just...go up.”

Milla hugged him. Emily stood quietly, not knowing what to say. But Pug said, “Maybe it’s not too late. Let’s go to Earth and see what’s left. We’ll have to tell them the truth.”

They piloted the shuttle to Earth, using the last of its fuel pellets to do so. They carried food and water with them, for they had no way to know what conditions they would encounter on the mother planet, and whether or not they could get more fuel. Pug suspected it might take them some time to establish contact with those who remained, and, without telling anyone else, he fashioned several small energy weapons and took them along, too. He feared a return to savagery. They were as prepared as they knew how to be.

They weren’t prepared enough.

The city beside which they landed was deserted. Radios were silent, and vids showed only static. Some records, made by what would-be historian they would never know, showed the madness of the last days. As far as they could tell, everyone in the city had either gone up or gone away. Only animals and insects remained.

They wandered listlessly from city to city, using ground vehicles when they could find them, walking when they could not. There was food here and there, but little that could be preserved without the power plants to run the refrigeration units. They ate their own stores frugally, then, when all else failed, rummaged through the spoiling produce for anything they could find.

The Earth had been transformed. Some places remained thickly inhabited, but others were deserted. The infrastructure required to support billions was gone, and the remaining people wouldn’t listen to Edward’s warnings. More than once, Pug had to use his weapons to keep his family from harm. But by and large, people remained the same as they’d always been—most friendly, some fearful, a few dangerous, and the rest somewhere along that continuum.

Pug got a long-range radio working and re-established contact with the Mars and Luna colonies, only to find the situation was the same in all three places. A few practical-minded people remained out of a sense of duty; the others had either gone up or turned inward.

One day, without discussion, Pug’s little family stopped wandering. It was a nice enough spot, beside a small lake, far from any major cities. There were houses here that they could use, fish in the lake, and wild animals in the small nearby forest. It would do.

They went about the mechanics of life woodenly while considering their options. But one day Emily came up with her own answer. She had grown increasingly moody while they wandered, and hadn’t spoken much at all for a long time. It was clear she suffered from grief and guilt over her part in the destruction of so much of humankind. On a cool summer morning, the guilt became too much. She removed the disk from her forehead, lay down on a carpet of green pine needles, and went up without a word.

Edward found her after she was cold.

Pug and Milla didn’t cry when Edward told them about Emily. But they cried when Edward took off his own disk and laid himself down on the grass.

“I love you,” he said between sobs, his fingers poised over his wrist patch.

“We forgive you,” said Milla, “and we love you always.”

“We love you,” said Pug, “and we forgive you always.”

Edward tapped out his code and went up.

Pug and Milla went on.

They moved from that place to another spot, one less bitter with memories, and lived together for almost two hundred years, growing their own food, keeping each other company. Though they had no more children, in some ways it was the best time Pug ever knew, for he and Milla grew ever closer to each other’s heart. But eventually, Milla tired of life. Her Great Work had been the nurturing of their children, and it was long done. Pug, who wanted nothing more than to live forever, couldn’t understand.

“I have done with doing,” said Milla, knowing that this echo from Pug’s past would disturb him, but unable to formulate a better way of saying it.

She lay on the pad they shared and took the disk off her forehead. “Come with me,” she said, holding out a hand to him.

But Pug could only shake his head, crying, and run from the room. A long time later, Pug returned, kissed her cold lips, and said goodbye in silence.

He took to wandering again. The world was recovering from its madness, and people were rebuilding. But it wasn’t the same for Pug. It never would be. Still, he couldn’t—wouldn’t—consider going up. Life was bitter, but it was life.

He came upon a small community and settled down for a several years. No one knew that he was the inventor of the disks, or that his son was the author of so much death. Pug didn’t find it necessary to tell them. Nevertheless, the people of the community looked on Pug with awe, for among his possessions he had a thousand little disks. Disks were now precious, for the raw materials were hard to find, and the expertise to make them almost gone. They wondered at his supply, but did not jeapordize their chances of getting some by annoying Pug with questions.

While he couldn’t bring himself to marry again, he could, and did, take sex partners from time to time. His favorites were Luara—undemanding, incurious about his past—and John, a tender companion who declined entanglements. And Pug was not infertile; Laura and several others eventually gave birth, and Pug was reasonably sure he was the father of at least three. Yet one day he decided to move on, for when he looked at his partners and offspring, he saw only Milla, Edmund, and Emily, and was not satisfied. And although he treated his partners and children with love and courtesy, it would never be the same for him.

One child, Manumus, begotten by Luara, chased after him in the night, and caught up with him two miles from the village, a tremendous journey for one so young. “Pug, wait,” called the boy, out of breath and near tears.

Pug turned and saw, not Edward who was no more, but Manumus, a living, breathing child, full of life and hope. Pug’s heart turned away from the past, and he held out his arms. The boy leaped up and wrapped himself around Pug. “Don’t leave me, Da,” he said.

The boy’s breath was warm on Pug’s cheek, and his heart beat a pattern against Pug’s chest that Pug recognized and, in that instant, knew he loved. Here was an answer—if not complete, at least sufficient.

Pug fumbled with his pouch, removed a disk, and pressed it against the boy’s forehead.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Manumus, trusting and happy. “Where are we going, Da?”

“I don’t know.” Pug looked up at the stars and saw the gleam of the habitat, still orbiting untended after all these years. “I don’t know.”

“How long will we be gone?” asked the boy. He reached up to touch Pug’s own disk, and his brown eyes glinted warmly in the starlight.

Pug turned and started walking, the child pleasant burden in his arms. “Forever, maybe.”

Manumus snuggled closer and laid his head on Pug’s shoulder. “As long as I can stay with you.”

Pug glanced down at the boy’s face and saw the disk on his forehead. “Yes,” he said, “that long.”

Behind them, as they walked, a hint of peace entwined the night with gentle arms, and Pug was content. It would never be the same, but wasn’t that the glory of it? “Maybe longer,” Pug murmured, but the boy was already asleep.

Story Notes

For some unknown reason, this is one of my favorite stories. As Dave Felts says in his review for SFReader.com, "It's about life, death, hopes and dreams, love, and more...I don't think anyone who has on occasion pondered his or her mortality and the what-is-it-all-about of life, will be left untouched."

Well, yeah. It was never really intended to be read as science fiction. It's just a story about stuff.

"They Went Up" was nominated for the 2000 Best Short Fiction award at Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, but, alas, didn't win. It was also selected by PFLAG's Austin chapter for inclusion in OUR VOICE (pdf), a list of "GLB-positive stories." I hadn't noticed the GLB content. Since this story is set in a fictional future with a completely different set of mores (where folks walk around as people instead of ambulatory bits of protoplasm wearing sexual-orientation labels), I aver there really isn't any GLB content, positive or otherwise.

But that's just me.