A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Yes, but why? If everything you say is true—tiny hibernating scraps of humanity, wheeling in the sky, sketching waves with chunks of water crystal—why create this peculiar display?”

  “For the answer to that,” Ojami said, “you’ll have to continue your tour.”

  The interview was over. Ojami had told him all she could. Her crab limbs gestured. The hatch to the media capsule opened. Anander stepped out into the mob of waiting Darklings.

  “IT’S AN INTRIGUING theory, certainly,” Anander said to Maximilian, “but it doesn’t make much sense.”

  They were in another tunnel of the Darkling habitat, this one steeply sloped. Anander and his secretaid scrambled up a series of sculpted handholds, the Darklings bustling and scrabbling around them.

  “Do you think she bungled her calculations?” Maximilian paused to wipe sweat from his eyes.

  “Ojami make an error?” Anander laughed. “No, I trust her math. As far as I’m concerned, she’s demonstrated that the scenario is possible. But plausible? Probable? I can hardly call off Project Snowfall for a fanciful hypothesis.”

  Anander paused, mopping his hot face. They had been climbing for some time, deeper into the spinning ball of rock. Their bodies were lighter, but the air had grown warmer, almost oppressively hot. The tunnels in this area were heavily trafficked. Every breeze smelt of furry bodies.

  Anander frowned up the rocky passage. Simulated firelight ruddied the walls. “Let’s say the ancient Ascetics pulled it off. Perfected the art of human hibernation, entered a kind of permanent hypersleep. Why would they cause these strange perturbations? It’s silly.”

  “Come, inworlder.” The Darklings plucked his hands, whispering as they stroked him with their furry limbs. “Listen. You will soon understand.”

  They had come to the end of the tunnel. A small, square metal door gleamed in the rock. One of the Darklings pressed a button. The members of the council were eerily silent, and indeed, this whole section of the habitat had a stillness that made Anander feel, too vividly, the weight of the rock around them. He held his breath as the door opened. The Darklings ushered him through.

  The room beyond was a fever dream of applied geometry. Bladelike shapes and angled shadows studded every surface. Anander recoiled from sharp protrusions jutting on all sides. Pyramidal projections thronged the walls, the ceiling, the floor, leaving only a few thin paths where a person could walk. The chamber was enormous, hellish, like the center of a gigantic cheese grater.

  The door shut. Anander realized with a start that he was alone. He saw that the door, too, was crowded on its interior side with spikes. Inquisitive, he touched one. The formation was abrasive, spongy to the touch. It wasn’t sharp. Pliant, rather. Anander suspected it had been fashioned of some kind of mineral wool.

  “Of all the—” He fell silent. His voice sounded dull, dead, without the ring of latent harmonics that ordinarily enriched human speech. At once, Anander realized where he stood. These foamy shapes were baffles, sound dampeners, angled to capture and absorb acoustic waves. The cave was a giant anechoic chamber.

  The instant he understood the room’s function, Anander guessed at its purpose. He turned.

  A man came toward him along the paths.

  The stranger was tall, lithe, almost elfin, with the tiptoe tread and ethereal mien of a person accustomed to low gravity. He made little sound as he approached. In the carefully architected hush of this cave, even a footstep raised no echo. He gestured toward a set of chairs hung from the ceiling.

  They sat, together, swaying slightly, amid fields of soft spikes, suspended in the supernatural silence.

  “Well,” said the man. The word expired softly on the placid air. He pointed at Anander’s waist. Anander realized that he still held, tucked into his belt, the sacred scroll of the Darklings.

  Anander took out the document and looked again at its rows of dots, arranged like sample points of a wave function. The stranger nodded. “Music,” he said.

  There was a peculiar quality to the man’s voice beyond the unearthly flatness of the air. He spoke with a lilt, not quite singing, but with regular rhythm and definite pitch. His intonation was decoupled from meaning. Though he glided among four pitches in two syllables, lengthening his u into a rich diphthong, Anander couldn’t tell if the man had made a statement or asked a question.

  Looking closer, Anander saw that the man’s ears were plugged. The two black implants weren’t simple inserts, but cyborg structures embedded in the flesh. Wavering between awe and unease, Anander realized he was looking at an Aesthete.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me what this means.” Anander handed over the scroll. The man took it gently, even reverently, but his gaze was abstracted, fixed somewhere on the spike-studded ceiling. Where might he be from, Anander wondered. Titan? Umbriel? Some crazy sky city over Neptune? They did things differently in the gasworld towns. The people, in their cramped habitats, were dreamy, inward-looking. They were connoisseurs of art.

  “Do you . . . understand . . . music?” The Aesthete spoke haltingly, accenting his words in strange places. Their hanging chairs had begun to sway and precess, stirred by effects of the rotating habitat, the carbon tethers flexing to smooth the movements. A pleasant effect.

  “Not the way you do, I imagine,” Anander answered.

  The Aesthete’s attention wandered; he seemed to be listening to some mysterious internal tune. Which, of course, he was. He spoke again:

  “The . . . Darklings brought me here because they say . . . I understand . . . music. Years ago they . . . summoned me. They say I can tell them what this . . .” His eyes dropped to the scroll, the coded dots. “Means.”

  Anander’s chair swung in Foulcaudian arcs. He blinked back drowsiness as he asked, “What does it mean?”

  “Music is . . .” Even the Aesthete’s hesitation had the gift of rhythm. “Everything.”

  Anander leaned forward. The Aesthetes of the moonworlds were savants, artificial geniuses. They received their sensory implants at birth. Music, of course, being structured sound. The black gadgets in the man’s ears were multi-function sonic processors. They tweaked all incoming waves, imparting perfect rhythm and pitch to every auditory vibration. Human speech, the drone of a fan, wind in leaves, a rattle of spilled buttons—all sounds were milled by these little filters into a single lifelong soundtrack, an uninterrupted tune.

  The Aesthete had never heard a single noise that wasn’t music. His world was harmony and rhythm, a ceaseless song. His ears heard music as the eye sees color. He must have been, Anander thought, quite mad.

  “The Darklings tell me this piece of music is . . . important.” The man went on stroking the scroll. “They tell me I must interpret it . . . so you may understand.”

  “Do you know where it comes from? Did the Darklings tell you that?”

  The Aesthete’s eyes roamed the baffles on the walls, perhaps following echoes Anander couldn’t hear. “Do you know why music exists . . . inworlder?”

  Anander was growing tired of the man’s oracular manner. “Why?”

  “Laziness.” For the first time in their conversation, the Aesthete smiled. “Music is the most efficient means of communication. With words, with pictures, I can tell you a . . . fact. With music, I can tell you how it feels to know a fact. Music is code for compressed . . . experience. Music is the lazy man’s . . . mysticism.”

  He laughed. It was like the warble of a bird, the trill of a flute, the wobbling whine of an electric drill. It was the sound of sublime insanity.

  “What the Darklings have asked me to do, inworlder, is impossible. There is no way to interpret . . . music. Music interprets itself—to those who hear. What music explains, nothing else can explain. The Darklings have deluded themselves. Why should I complain? They have given me this beautiful home . . . where I can be at peace. Where sound is pure, silence supreme. Where I enjoy the blessings of utter . . . quiet.”

  Twisting on his swing, Anander strugg
led to follow the man’s melodious speech.

  “Let me see if I understand. You believe these perturbations, these waveforms, are a kind of communication?”

  The man stared as if Anander had spoken gibberish. The Aesthete was a true genius, Anander saw, incapable of understanding how ordinary humans saw the world.

  “When you . . . learn music,” the Aesthete said, “you learn . . . to listen. From accents to syncopation, harmony to dissonance, melody to modulation. There are subtleties it takes decades to learn. There are moods and modes most people never hear.”

  There were perhaps three or four hundred Aesthetes in the entire solar system. Some pursued careers as composers. They wrote works totally inscrutable to most listeners, crashing cascades of jagged sound. The Aesthetes swore there was music in this madness. Ordinary people had to take the claim on faith.

  “Let me try again.” Anander took a breath. “You believe that people living out there, in the Kuiper Belt, are using music to communicate. That they cause the rocks to fly on strange paths, describing subtle waveforms. That others observe the perturbations, produce perturbations of their own. You believe they do this because music is a special form of communication. Am I right?”

  The Aesthete was silent for a long time, smiling like an idiot child. “This song?” He laid a palm to the scroll. “This composition? I have read it, internalized it. I have come to understand. I can tell you it is a work of genius. But I cannot tell you, inworlder . . . what it means.”

  “But you believe it is meaningful. You believe it conveys something. You believe it is the work of intelligent beings, trying to tell us . . . what?” Anander choked on his frustration. What were the Kuiper colonists trying to convey with their music? A message? An aesthetic experience? The mere fact of their existence?

  The Aesthete must have touched a switch. Their hanging chairs descended. The Aesthete dismounted, holding out the scroll. Anander took it reluctantly, thoughts abuzz.

  “If this music,” he asked, “is a method of communication—how do we crack the code?”

  The Aesthete simpered, silent. Anander reminded himself that the man heard all speech as music. Perhaps Anander’s outbursts, to him, were little more than diverting tunes.

  “I cannot tell you what the song means, inworlder. But I can tell you what it is.” The Aesthete was already turning to walk away. Even the man’s footsteps, Anander noted, fit a rhythm. “It is a dance, inworlder. A dance of . . . a million parts.”

  IN THE STIFLING passages of the Darkling habitat, Anander gripped Maximilian’s arm. “A dance. A song. A code. A message. Everyone’s telling me this song is important, Max. But they haven’t told me what I need to know. They haven’t told me what it all means.”

  They were near the center of the habitat, floating with every step. The Darklings formed a furry cloud around them, hurrying from tunnel to tunnel. Branching passages passed on either hand, leading to caverns where huge machines churned.

  “Is this tour almost over? Where are we going now?”

  “Patience, inworlder. One interpreter remains.”

  Another mad genius, Anander thought. Another cryptic interviewee. Another person who would offer tantalizing clues, raise intriguing questions, but offer no answers, no resolution. Anander ground his teeth as the Darklings ushered him through a small door.

  “And who will it be this time? A brilliant violinist? A talented historian? An expert in mechanical engineering? Who’s the third member of this mad trinity?”

  The door was already closing. Anander turned to face his third interpreter.

  And saw nothing.

  The room was small, spare—and completely vacant.

  Anander explored the rough walls. He saw no other exits. No screens, no machines. Only a small vent blowing fresh air.

  He was trapped. Sealed in a room the size of a jail cell. Alone.

  “Hello?” Anander banged on the door, wondering if the Darklings could hear him. “Excuse me? You’ve made a mistake. The third interpreter isn’t here. Am I supposed to wait? Hello?”

  No answer. Anander gave up.

  He turned to the empty cell, fighting frustration. The room happened to be a perfect size for pacing. Anander bobbed around the rough-hewn walls, champing at his fingernails.

  In the absence of external stimulation, his rewired brain settled into obsessive grooves, running through the strange problem he’d been posed. Anander lost track of time. He forgot where he was. He paced, inhaled the fresh air, and thought.

  The ancient Ascetics had come out here, long ago, seeking to limit their energy use while exploring the life of the mind. They had sought the ultimate spiritual transcendence, meditative bliss, the ways of flesh forgotten while the soul dreamed on.

  Ojami said they had encased themselves in the icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt, sleeping sprites, their dreams transcribed in subtle oscillations. Beautiful music, the Aesthete had said. Like a dance with a million participants. The soul’s most efficient form of communication.

  Anander understood the power of music, the rare mental processes triggered by a song. But why not use radio signals to transmit those tunes? Why these orbital variations? Better yet—if the point was to communicate—why not simply send encoded text?

  It might have been an hour, an evening, or a day, before he finally had his answer. And then it was as if he woke from enchanted sleep—and began to pound fiercely on the door.

  “Max? Are you there, Max? Get me in touch with InterOrbital!”

  The door opened promptly. Anander was surprised to see the Darkling council waiting. He had almost forgotten it was they who had summoned him out here.

  “Anander?” His secretaid waited with a worried frown. “Are you all right? What did the third interpreter say?”

  “Only this, Max: time is of the essence. I must contact IO as soon as possible. Get me to the suite. Better yet, is there a terminal nearby?”

  Anander hurried through tangled tunnels, peering into clusters of furry faces, chambers crowded with obscure gadgetry.

  “Is there someone on standby? We have to halt the project. Call in the munchers! Wipe the program! Isn’t there a place in this hive where a man can dash off a carrier wave?”

  The Darklings gathered around his legs, plucking his robe, leading him toward a narrow tunnel with glittering electrics at the end. “Do you understand now, inworlder?”

  “Understand? I’ve had an epiphany! Max, you’ll have to work that recorder. My hands are shaking.”

  Anander’s secretaid looked more worried by the second. “But who . . .? I don’t . . . You say you want to halt the project? What did the third interpreter tell you?”

  Anander took him by the shoulders. “Relax, Max. See? It’s poetry in motion. How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Anander laughed at the man’s puzzlement. “I’ve been asking myself what message the Kuiper Belt inhabitants are sending. These musical signals. What do they mean? What are they telling us? But the real question is: What do such people have to talk about?”

  Anander hurried to the telecommunications station. “They’re Ascetics, Max. Living a simple life. Human snowflakes, spinning and circling. They’re already dancing. And they’ve written a song to accompany their dance. Because music is the way to convey what they know best: the beautiful motions of the heavens.

  “That’s not all.” Anander hurried among the communications equipment. “The perturbations—they’re changing the orbits. Very subtly, over long periods of time. Art imitates life; life imitates art. The dance is the music, and the music is the dance.”

  “But . . .” Maximilian hurried to keep up. “Who told you all this? Who was the third interpreter?”

  “Don’t you see, Max? I’m the interpreter. Me! I’m the key.” Anander found the holographic recorder, opened the recording booth. “The Darklings knew that if they found the right people, three specially modified minds, gathered from throughout the solar system . . . The thing is, we don’t need to halt
Project Snowfall. Only modify it.” Anander closed his eyes, seeing patterns, social connections sketched across worlds. “Ojami can help redesign the munchers. The Aesthete—I never got his name—he can tell us how to program them. We’ll soon be back on schedule. Ahead of schedule, I expect.”

  “You’re saying—”

  Anander didn’t let Maximilian finish. “The munchers are designed to modify the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects. But as we now know, that’s already happening, thanks to these ascetic mystics. We simply need to locate objects that aren’t already inhabited. Then send in our machines . . .” Anander touched his forehead, dizzy with the simple elegance of it all. “And join the dance.”

  He turned back to the machines, already planning what he’d say to InterOrbital. Oh, they’d resist. They’d object. They’d quibble, at first. But Anander would make them see. The scheme—if it worked—would be far more efficient. Project Snowfall, in a sense, was already underway. Had been for thousands of years.

  The beauty of it, the clarity of it, the sheer simple rightness of it—this would be much harder to convey. But Anander could do it. It was why the Darklings had summoned him. He was, after all, the solar system’s most renowned and talented diplomat.

  Anander smoothed his robes, waiting for Maximilian to prepare the transmitter. It would be something, all right, this grand orchestration. The kind of achievement that defines a career.

  As he gazed into the machine, his mind filled with brilliant patterns—as if he were dancing, even now, to the music of celestial spheres, the silver harmonics of the stars.

  WARSHIP MECHANIC

  Ralph Roberts

  Huge and evil looking, the alien battle mauler Gutfrok na Tak’won—“Crusher of those not Tak’won” limped—all three faster-than-light engines inoperative—to a docking with the run-down ellfive satellite known as Frank’s Starship Repair. Two Space Navy tugs assisted getting it in place while other navy warships stood off watchfully. Too large by far for either of the repair bays, Frank’s docking robots locked the ship near the station with tractor beams. Alarms sounded continuously. Every weapons port on the Gutfrok gaped hungrily.