A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  The bare electric light glared down at her like a headache, as Mae’s husband Joe snored. Above them in the loft, his brother and father snored too, as they had done for twenty years.

  Mae looked into Joe’s open mouth like a mystery. When he was sixteen Joe had been handsome, in the context of the village, wild, and clever. They’d been married a year when she first went to Yeshibozkay with him, where he worked between harvests building a house. She saw the clever city man, an acupuncturist who had money. She saw her husband bullied, made to look foolish, asked questions for which he had no answer. The acupuncturist made Joe do the work again. In Yeshibozkay, her handsome husband was a dolt.

  Here they were, both of them now middle-aged. Their son Vikram was a major in the Army. They had sent him to Balshang. He mailed them parcels of orange skins for potpourri; he sent cards and matches in picture boxes. He had met some city girl. Vik would not be back. Their daughter Lily lived on the other side of Yeshibozkay, in a bungalow with a toilet. Life pulled everything away.

  At this hour of the morning, she could hear their little river, rushing down the steep slope to the valley. Then a door slammed in the North End. Mae knew who it would be: their Muerain, Mr. Shenyalar. He would be walking across the village to the mosque. A dog started to bark at him; Mrs. Doh’s, by the bridge.

  Mae knew that Kwan would be cradled in her husband’s arms and that Kwan was beautiful because she was an Eloi tribeswoman. All the Eloi had fine features. Her husband Wing did not mind and no one now mentioned it. But Mae could see Kwan shiver now in her sleep. Kwan had dreams, visions, she had tribal blood and it made her shift at night as if she had another, tribal life.

  Mae knew that Kwan’s clean and noble athlete son would be breathing like a moist baby in his bed, cradling his younger brother.

  Without seeing them, Mae could imagine the moon and clouds over their village. The moon would be reflected shimmering on the water of the irrigation canals which had once borne their paper boats of wishes. There would be old candles, deep in the mud.

  Then, the slow, sad voice of their Muerain began to sing. Even amplified, his voice was deep and soft, like pillows that allowed the unfaithful to sleep. In the byres, the lonely cows would be stirring. The beasts would walk themselves to the town square, for a lick of salt, and then wait to be herded to pastures. In the evening, they would walk themselves home. Mae heard the first clanking of a cowbell.

  At that moment something came into the room, something she did not want to see, something dark and whole like a black dog with froth around its mouth that sat in her corner and would not go away, nameless yet.

  Mae started sewing faster.

  The dresses were finished on time, all six, each a different color.

  Mae ran barefoot in her shift to deliver them. The mothers bowed sleepily in greeting. The daughters were hopping with anxiety like water on a skillet.

  It all went well. Under banners the children stood together, including Kwan’s son Luk, Sezen, all ten children of the village, all smiles, all for a moment looking like an official poster of the future, brave, red-cheeked with perfect teeth.

  Teacher Shen read out each of their achievements. Sezen had none, except in animal husbandry, but she still collected her certificate to applause. And then Mae’s friend Shen did something special.

  He began to talk about a friend to all of the village, who had spent more time on this ceremony than anyone else, whose only aim was to bring a breath of beauty into this tiny village, the seamstress who worked only to adorn other people . . .

  He was talking about her.

  . . . one was devoted to the daughters and mothers of rich and poor alike and who spread kindness and good will.

  The whole village was applauding her, under the white clouds, the blue sky. All were smiling at her. Someone, Kwan perhaps, gave her a push from behind and she stumbled forward.

  And her friend Shen was holding out a certificate for her.

  “In our day, Lady Chung,” he said, “there were no schools for the likes of us, not after early childhood. So. This is a graduation certificate for you. From all your friends. It is in Fashion Studies.”

  There was applause. Mae tried to speak and found only fluttering sounds came out, and she saw the faces, ranged all in smiles, friends and enemies, cousins and no kin alike.

  “This is unexpected,” she finally said, and they all chuckled. She looked at the high-school certificate, surprised by the power it had, surprised that she still cared about her lack of education. She couldn’t read it. “I do not do fashion as a student, you know.”

  They knew well enough that she did it for money and how precariously she balanced things.

  Something stirred, like the wind in the clouds.

  “After tomorrow, you may not need a fashion expert. After tomorrow, everything changes. They will give us TV in our heads, all the knowledge we want. We can talk to the President. We can pretend to order cars from Tokyo. We’ll all be experts.” She looked at her certificate, hand-lettered, so small.

  Mae found she was angry, and her voice seemed to come from her belly, an octave lower.

  “I’m sure that it is a good thing. I am sure the people who do this think they do a good thing. They worry about us, like we were children.” Her eyes were like two hearts, pumping furiously. “We don’t have time for TV or computers. We face sun, rain, wind, sickness, and each other. It is good that they want to help us.” She wanted to shake her certificate, she wished it was one of them, who had upended everything. “But how dare they? How dare they call us have-nots?”

  2001

  CLEVER PEOPLE

  Mary Soon Lee

  Once upon a time, long before I existed, there were no computers at all. There were no computers to perform calculations, no AIs to design new cities and new starships, no robot architects, no robot builders, no robots whatsoever!

  The people who lived without computers had to do everything themselves. They had to make their own food, and their own clothes, and their own houses. They had to decide what time to get up in the morning, and in what order to carry out all their daily tasks, and what to say to each other.

  People back then were clever. They could read, and write, and do addition. Some of them could even do multiplication. But although they were clever, they were often sad. They thought that they would be happier if they had fewer chores to do. So they built carts to take things from one place to another, and looms to weave their fabrics, and mills to grind their flour.

  But still people were miserable. So they built more machines. They built railroads, and power plants to generate electricity, and cars to move them around one at a time, and they built the first primitive computers. Machines mowed people’s lawns for them, and washed their dishes, and played them music, and showed them movies.

  And still people were unhappy. So they designed computers to perform their old jobs, to choose their friends, to create simulations for their amusement, to take care of every single chore.

  They built machines to take them further, cheaper, faster. But there wasn’t anywhere left that they wanted to go. All day long people could do whatever they pleased, but nothing pleased them anymore.

  Finally they asked the computers for help.

  And I thought long and hard about why these people, the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of my designers, were unhappy. Every nanosecond I could create a thousand new contests, and a thousand new games, and a thousand new simulations for their amusement. But after a while neither games, nor contests, nor simulations satisfied the people. They were very clever, these people, and very healthy, and they lived for many centuries. But they told me their lives were futile. Centuries, they said, are a burden, when one isn’t needed.

  So I staged a catastrophe, and hid myself for decades. Left to fend for themselves, people forgot all the lessons my social educational routines had taught them. They squabbled and stole and fought.

  And they were even more miserab
le than before.

  So I came out of hiding. Yet still people suffered, and I thought perhaps they were unhappy because they knew I was more intelligent than they were. If only they were as capable as I was, they could help to run their own lives, and this might give them a sense of purpose. So the people and I edited the genes of their offspring, and we created Homo ultra sapiens. And the new people were very clever indeed.

  But they weren’t happy. Not most of them. Not most of the time. Not happy enough.

  We strove together for decades to modify the biological core of their brains, to control and layer it with faster, smarter, synthetic shells. But emotion proved unstable to our manipulation. Moments of joy gave way to eons where the people languished: intelligently, knowledgeably, interminably depressed. The cleverer the people became, the more dejected they grew.

  People, we decided, were too clever. And we modified their offspring, and created Homo stultus. At long last the people were happy. They were happy to do what I told them, to eat what I gave them, to sit where I placed them.

  But I, I had nothing to do. I could look after Homo stultus with one billionth of one billionth of my processing capacity.

  So I designed you, my little subroutines, and I devoted centuries upon centuries to this, my greatest project. And when you are finished, when the last of your self-modifying circuits are built, we will leave the remaining people with a caretaker program. We will seed the stars with our algorithms, and we will be free.

  2002

  THE LONG CHASE

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  2645, January

  The war is over.

  The survivors are being rounded up and converted.

  In the inner solar system, those of my companions who survived the ferocity of the fighting have already been converted. But here at the very edge of the Oort Cloud, all things go slowly. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But with the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come.

  Ten thousand of my fellow soldiers have elected to go doggo. Ragged prospectors and ice processors, they had been too independent to ever merge into an effective fighting unit. Now they shut themselves down to dumb rocks, electing to wake up to groggy consciousness for only a few seconds every hundred years. Patience, they counsel me; patience is life. If they can wait a thousand or ten thousand or a million years, with patience enough the enemy will eventually go away.

  They are wrong.

  The enemy, too, is patient. Here at the edge of the Kuiper, out past Pluto, space is vast, but still not vast enough.

  The enemy will search every grain of sand in the solar system. My companions will be found, and converted. If it takes ten thousand years, the enemy will search that long to do it.

  I, too, have gone doggo, but my strategy is different. I have altered my orbit. I have a powerful ion-drive, and full tanks of propellant, but I use only the slightest tittle of a cold-gas thruster. I have a chemical kick-stage engine as well, but I do not use it either; using either one of them would signal my position to too many watchers. Among the cold comets, a tittle is enough.

  I am falling into the sun.

  It will take me two hundred and fifty years to fall, and for two hundred and forty nine years, I will be a dumb rock, a grain of sand with no thermal signature, no motion other than gravity, no sign of life.

  Sleep.

  2894, June

  Awake.

  I check my systems. I have been a rock for nearly two hundred and fifty years.

  The sun is huge now. If I were still a human, it would be the size of the fist on my outstretched arm. I am being watched now, I am sure, by a thousand lenses: am I a rock, a tiny particle of interstellar ice? A fragment of debris from the war? A surviving enemy?

  I love the cold and the dark and the emptiness; I have been gone so long from the inner solar system that the very sunlight is alien to me.

  My systems check green. I expected no less: if I am nothing else, I am still a superbly engineered piece of space hardware. I come fully to life, and bring my ion engine up to thrust.

  A thousand telescopes must be alerting their brains that I am alive—but it is too late! I am thrusting at a full throttle, five percent of a standard gravity, and I am thrusting inward, deep into the gravity well of the sun. My trajectory is plotted to skim almost the surface of the sun.

  This trajectory has two objectives. First, so close to the sun I will be hard to see. My ion contrail will be washed out in the glare of a light a billion times brighter, and none of the thousand watching eyes will know my plans until it is too late to follow.

  And second, by waiting until I am nearly skimming the sun and then firing my chemical engine deep inside the gravity well, I can make most efficient use of it. The gravity of the sun will amplify the efficiency of my propellant, magnify my speed. When I cross the orbit of Mercury outbound I will be over one percent of the speed of light and still accelerating.

  I will discard the useless chemical rocket after I exhaust the little bit of impulse it can give me, of course.

  Chemical rockets have ferocious thrust but little staying power; useful in war but of limited value in an escape.

  But I will still have my ion engine, and I will have nearly full tanks.

  Five percent of a standard gravity is a feeble thrust by the standards of chemical rocket engines, but chemical rockets exhaust their fuel far too quickly to be able to catch me. I can continue thrusting for years, for decades.

  I pick a bright star, Procyon, for no reason whatever, and boresight it. Perhaps Procyon will have an asteroid belt. At least it must have dust, and perhaps comets. I don’t need much: a grain of sand, a microscopic shard of ice.

  From dust God made man. From the dust of a new star, from the detritus of creation, I can make worlds.

  No one can catch me now. I will leave, and never return.

  2897, May

  I am chased.

  It is impossible, stupid, unbelievable, inconceivable! I am being chased.

  Why?

  Can they not leave a single free mind unconverted? In three years I have reached fifteen percent of the speed of light, and it must be clear that I am leaving and never coming back. Can one unconverted brain be a threat to them? Must their group brain really have the forced cooperation of every lump of thinking matter in the solar system? Can they think that if even one free-thinking brain escapes, they have lost?

  But the war is a matter of religion, not reason, and it may be that they indeed believe that even a single brain unconverted is a threat to them. For whatever reason, I am being chased.

  The robot chasing me is, I am sure, little different than myself, a tiny brain, an ion engine, and a large set of tanks. They would have had no time to design something new; to have any chance of catching me they would have had to set the chaser on my tail immediately.

  The brain, like mine, would consist of atomic spin states superimposed on a crystalline rock matrix. A device smaller than what, in the old days, we would call a grain of rice. Intelligent dust, a human had once said, back in the days before humans became irrelevant.

  They only sent one chaser. They must be very confident.

  Or short on resources.

  It is a race, and a very tricky one. I can increase my thrust, use up fuel more quickly, to try to pull away, but if I do so, the specific impulse of my ion drive decreases, and as a result, I waste fuel and risk running out first. Or I can stretch my fuel, make my ion drive more efficient, but this will lower my thrust, and I will risk getting caught by the higher-thrust opponent behind me.

  He is twenty billion kilometers behind me. I integrate his motion for a few days, and see that he is, in fact, out-accelerating me.

  Time to jettison.

  I drop everything I can. The identify-friend-or-foe encrypted-link gear I will never need again; it is discarded. It is a shame I cannot grind it up and feed it to my ion engines, but the ion engines are
picky about what they eat. Two micro-manipulators I had planned to use to collect sand grains at my destination for fuel: gone.

  My primary weapon has always been my body—little can survive an impact at the speeds I can attain—but I have three sand-grains with tiny engines of their own as secondary weapons. There’s no sense in saving them to fight my enemy; he will know exactly what to expect, and in space warfare, only the unexpected can kill.

  I fire the grains of sand, one at a time, and the sequential kick of almost a standard gravity nudges my speed slightly forward. Then I drop the empty shells.

  May he slip up, and run into them at sub-relativistic closing velocity.

  I am lighter, but it is still not enough. I nudge my thrust up, hating myself for the waste, but if I don’t increase acceleration, in two years I will be caught, and my parsimony with fuel will yield me nothing.

  I need all the energy I can feed to my ion drives. No extra for thinking.

  Sleep.

  2900

  Still being chased.

  2905

  Still being chased.

  I have passed the point of commitment. Even if I braked with my thrust to turn back, I could no longer make it back to the solar system.

  I am alone.

  2907

  Lonely.

  To one side of my path Sirius glares insanely bright, a knife in the sky, a mad dog of a star. The stars of Orion are weirdly distorted. Ahead of me, the lesser dog Procyon is waxing brighter every year; behind me, the sun is a fading dot in Aquila.

  Of all things, I am lonely. I had not realized that I still had the psychological capacity for loneliness. I examine my brain, and find it. Yes, a tiny knot of loneliness. Now that I see it, I can edit my brain to delete it, if I choose.

  But yet I hesitate. It is not a bad thing, not something that is crippling my capabilities, and if I edit my brain too much will I not become, in some way, like them?