Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

by Dan Simmons

  “Are you continuing with us in deep sleep to our destination?” asked the other green-band, Res Sandre. “To our final Spectrum Helix colony?”

  “Yes,” said Ces Ambre. The single word was a declaration and a challenge.

  “How will we tell the others?” asked Jon Mikail Dem Alem. “Having an Aenean…a potential Aenean…in the colony will change…everything.”

  Dem Lia stood. “In my final moments as your consensus-elected commander, I could make this an order, Citizens. Instead, I ask for a vote. I feel that Ces Ambre and only Ces Ambre should make the decision as to whether or not to tell our fellow Spectrum Helix family about her…gift. At any time after we reach our destination.” She looked directly at Ces Ambre. “Or never, if you so choose.”

  Dem Lia turned to look at each of the other eight. “And we shall never reveal the secret. Only Ces Ambre has the right to tell the others. Those in favor of this, say aye.”

  It was unanimous.

  Dem Lia turned to the standing Ousters and Templar. “Saigyō assures me that none of this was broadcast on your tightbeam.”

  Far Rider nodded.

  “And your recording of Ces Ambre’s contact with the aliens through the Void Which Binds?”

  “Destroyed,” broadcast the four-meter Ouster.

  Ces Ambre stepped closer to the Ousters. “But you still want some of my blood…some of Aenea’s sacramental DNA. You still want the choice.”

  Chief Branchman Keel Redt’s long hands were shaking. “It would not be for us to decide to release the information or allow the sacrament to be distributed…the Seven Councils would have to meet in secret…the Church of Aenea would be consulted…or…” Obviously the Ouster was in pain at the thought of millions or billions of his fellow Ousters leaving the forest ring forever, freecasting away to human-Aenean space or elsewhere. Their universe would never be the same. “But the three of us do not have the right to reject it for everyone.”

  “But we hesitate to ask…” began the True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen.

  Ces Ambre shook her head and motioned to Dr. Samel. The medic handed the Templar a small quantity of blood in a shockproof vial. “We drew it just a while ago,” said the doctor.

  “You must decide,” said Ces Ambre. “That is always the way. That is always the curse.”

  Chief Branchman Keel Redt stared at the vial for a long moment before he took it in his still-shaking hands and carefully set it away in a secure pouch on his Ouster forcefield armor. “It will be interesting to see what happens,” said the Ouster.

  Dem Lia smiled. “That’s an ancient Old Earth curse, you know. Chinese. ‘May you live in interesting times.’”

  Saigyō morphed the airlock and the Ouster diplomats were gone, sailing back to the forest ring with the hundreds of thousands of other beings of light, tacking against the solar wind, following magnetic lines of force like vessels of light carried by swift currents.

  “If you all don’t mind,” said Ces Ambre, smiling, “I’m going to return to my deep-sleep crèche and turn in. It’s been a long couple of days.”

  THE originally awakened nine waited until the Helix had successfully translated into Hawking space before returning to deep sleep. When they were still in the G8 system, accelerating up and away from the ecliptic and the beautiful forest ring which now eclipsed the small white sun, Oam Rai pointed to the stern window and said, “Look at that.”

  The Ousters had turned out to say good-bye. Several billion wings of pure energy caught the sunlight.

  A day into Hawking drive while conferring with the AI’s was enough to establish that the ship was in perfect form, the spin arms and deep-sleep pods functioning as they should, that they had returned to course, and that all was well. One by one, they returned to their crèches—first Den Soa and her mates, then the others. Finally only Dem Lia remained awake, sitting up in her crèche in the seconds before it was to be closed.

  “Saigyō,” she said and it was obvious from her voice that it was a summons.

  The short, fat Buddhist monk appeared.

  “Did you know that Ces Ambre was Aenean, Saigyō?”

  “No, Dem Lia.”

  “How could you not? The ship has complete genetic and med profiles on every one of us. You must have known.”

  “No, Dem Lia, I assure you that Citizen Ces Ambre’s med profiles were within normal Spectrum Helix limits. There was no sign of posthumanity Aenean DNA. Nor clues in her psych profiles.”

  Dem Lia frowned at the hologram for a moment. Then she said, “Forged bio records then? Ces Ambre or her mother could have done that.”

  “Yes, Dem Lia.”

  Still propped on one elbow, Dem Lia said, “To your knowledge—to any of the AI’s knowledge—are there other Aeneans aboard the Helix, Saigyō?”

  “To our knowledge, no,” said the plump monk, his face earnest.

  Dem Lia smiled. “Aenea taught that evolution had a direction and determination,” she said softly, more to herself than to the listening AI. “She spoke of a day when all the universe would be green with life. Diversity, she taught, is one of evolution’s best strategies.”

  Saigyō nodded and said nothing.

  Dem Lia lay back on her pillow. “We thought the Aeneans so generous in helping us preserve our culture—this ship—the distant colony. I bet the Aeneans have helped a thousand small cultures cast off from human space into the unknown. They want the diversity—the Ousters, the others. They want many of us to pass up their gift of godhood.”

  She looked at the AI, but the Buddhist monk’s face showed only his usual slight smile. “Good night, Saigyō. Take good care of the ship while we sleep.” She pulled the top of the crèche shut and the unit began cycling her into deep cyrogenic sleep.

  “Yes, Dem Lia,” said the monk to the now sleeping woman.

  THE Helix continued its great arc through Hawking space. The spin arms and life pods wove their complex double helix against the flood of false colors and four-dimensional pulsations which had replaced the stars.

  Inside the ship, the AI’s had turned off the containment field gravity and the atmosphere and the lights. The ship moved on in darkness.

  Then, one day, about three months after leaving the binary system, the ventilators hummed, the lights flickered on, and the containment field gravity activated. All 684,300 of the colonists slept on.

  Suddenly three figures appeared in the main walkway halfway between the command center bridge and the access portals to the first ring of life pod arms. The central figure was more than three meters tall, spiked and armored, bound about with chrome razorwire. Its faceted eyes gleamed red. It remained motionless where it had suddenly appeared.

  The figure on the left was a man in early middle-age, with curly graying hair, dark eyes, and pleasant features. He was very tan and wore a soft blue cotton shirt, green shorts, and sandals. He nodded at the woman and began walking toward the command center.

  The woman was older, visibly old even despite Aenean medical techniques, and she wore a simple gown of flawless blue. She walked to the access portal, took the lift up the third spin arm, and followed the walkway down into the one-g environment of the life pod. Pausing by one of the crèches, she brushed ice and condensation from the clear face plate of the umbilically monitored sarcophagus.

  “Ces Ambre,” muttered Dem Loa, her fingers on the chilled plastic centimeters above her triune stepdaughter’s lined cheek. “Sleep well, my darling. Sleep well.”

  On the command deck, the tall man was standing among the virtual AI’s.

  “Welcome, Petyr, son of Aenea and Endymion,” said Saigyō with a slight bow.

  “Thank you, Saigyō. How are you all?”

  They told him in terms beyond language or mathematics. Petyr nodded, frowned slightly, and touched Basho’s shoulder. “There are too many conflicts in you, Basho? You wished them reconciled?”

  The tall man in the coned hat and muddy clogs said, “Yes, please, Petyr.”

 
; The human squeezed the AI’s shoulder in a friendly embrace. Both closed their eyes for an instant.

  When Petyr released him, the saturnine Basho smiled broadly. “Thank you, Petyr.”

  The human sat on the edge of the table and said, “Let’s see where we’re headed.”

  A holocube four meters by four meters appeared in front of them. The stars were recognizable. The Helix’s long voyage out from human-Aenean space was traced in red. Its projected trajectory proceeded ahead in blue dashes—blue dashes extending toward the center of the galaxy.

  Petyr stood, reached into the holocube, and touched a small star just to the right of the projected path of the Helix. Instantly that section magnified.

  “This might be an interesting system to check out,” said the man with a comfortable smile. “Nice G2 star. The fourth planet is about a seven point six on the old Solmev Scale. It would be higher, but it has evolved some very nasty viruses and some very fierce animals. Very fierce.”

  “Six hundred eighty-five light-years,” noted Saigyō. “Plus forty-three light-years course correction. Soon.”

  Petyr nodded.

  Lady Murasaki moved her fan in front of her painted face. Her smile was provocative. “And when we arrive, Petyr-san, will the nasty viruses somehow be gone?”

  The tall man shrugged. “Most of them, my Lady. Most of them.” He grinned. “But the fierce animals will still be there.” He shook hands with each of the AI’s. “Stay safe, my friends. And keep our friends safe.”

  Petyr trotted back to the nine-meter chrome-and-bladed nightmare in the main walkway just as Dem Loa’s soft gown swished across the carpeted deckplates to join him.

  “All set?” asked Petyr.

  Dem Loa nodded.

  The son of Aenea and Raul Endymion set his hand against the monster standing between them, laying his palm flat next to a fifteen-centimeter curved thorn. The three disappeared without a sound.

  The Helix shut off its containment field gravity, stored its air, turned off its interior lights, and continued on in silence, making the tiniest of course corrections as it did so.

  Introduction to “The Ninth of Av”

  ...............................

  In the fall of 1999, I was a guest at the Festivaletteratura in Mantua, Italy, and in the process of being interviewed by Italian SF writer Valerio Evangelisti in the courtyard of a 14th Century compound with several hundred people in attendance, when two aliens—serious aliens, with huge heads, space helmets, silver-lamé spacesuits, and only two oversized fingers on each hand—appeared and began walking—lurching, really—toward us behind the raised dais on which Evangelisti and I were carrying out the interview. The audience laughed. Valerio and I turned. The aliens had tricorder-type devices that made small, electronic beeps and the creatures lurched along to the beeps. Since the hour for the interview and discussion was about up anyway, Evangelisti and I jumped down off the platform to greet the aliens, who had an odd bump and grind, hip bounce, and two-fingered high five way of saying hello.

  Good fun. But the conversation the Italian writer and I had been having before the aliens’ arrival had been interesting. Evangelisti was talking about the frustration of so many Italian and French and other European writers in seeing their SF and fantasy and horror bestseller lists dominated by American and British writers translated from English (often translated by the very European novelists who were the local competition), while those same European writers were never—never—translated into English for American readers. The New York publishing scene makes almost no allowance for bringing gifted European and Asian genre writers to the attention of the American reading public and the monolingual status of most of us Americans will keep us ignorant of the existence of these writers. It’s a real problem and a maddening frustration to many gifted writers and I admire both the restraint and generosity of the various European authors who have been so gracious to me and other visiting Americans while acting as interpreters and interviewers and guides in such circumstances as the Salon du Livre in Paris or the Mantua Festival or the Danish Book Fair or whatever.

  So when my good friend and the frequent editor of French editions of my work, Jacques Chambon, got in touch with me to let me know that they were bringing out an anthology of stories by both American and European SF writers, to be released simultaneously in Europe and the United States, I thought it was a great idea and immediately agreed to write something for it. Robert Silverberg was the U.S.-based editor on the project. In addition to rounding up some of the usual American suspects—Scott Card, Greg Benford, Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Bob Silverberg himself—the anthology, christened Destination 3001, also boasted the fiction of many other writers I admire, including Philippe Curval, Sylvie Denis, Jean-Claude Dunyach, Franco Riciardiello, Serge Lehman, Andreas Eschbach, and my fellow Close Encounters survivor, Valerio Evangelisti. As it turned out, Destination 3001 appeared in France from Flammarion in the winter of 2000, but no American publisher was ever found. Too bad for us American readers.

  But in the spring of 2000, my attention was focused on finding an original story idea. The binding premise of the anthology—presumably because of the millennial fever that was still raging when the book was proposed—was that the tales should be set around the year 3001. As any writer of speculative fiction can tell you, a thousand years is a staggering span of time to write anything other than space opera. Imagine, if you will, a writer in the year 1000 A.D. writing a simple short story set in the year 2001. What would the common elements be from that millennium to the projected one? Imagine a contemporary Tom Wolfe-ish story including the themes of race relations, corporate backstabbing, and sexual hanky-panky set in Manhattan.

  Race relations? Meaningless to the author in 1000 A.D. The concept of race, as we are enslaved by it today, didn’t exist then.

  Corporate intrigue? The intrigue part would be immediately understandable to a European from the year 1000, but the very idea of private corporations and modern capitalism had yet to be invented. For the next 500 years, the entire concept of loaning money for interest fell under the heading of mortal sin—usury—and had to be restricted to non-Christians (Jews) who were going to hell (or Limbo) anyway.

  Sexual hanky-panky? Well, yes, that would have been perfectly understood in 1000 A.D. (or 1000 B.C. for that matter) but the leering, smirking, modern fictional obsession with it might not have been.

  Manhattan? An undreamt of city on an undiscovered continent.

  So, I had to ask myself, what common element will bind 2001 and 3001? What eternal human verity—other than sex and intrigue—will survive the erosive winds of a full millennium?

  The answer, when it arrived, hit me with the full nausea of certainty.

  The one constant thread between today and a thousand years from now will be that someone, somewhere, will be planning to kill the Jews.

  CUT to the summer of 2000 A.D. Just after returning from a convention in Hawaii—and missing the Fourth of July waterfight!—I was off to New Hampshire for a week as visiting instructor in Jeanne Cavelos’s Odyssey Writers’ Workshop. Odyssey is an interesting workshop and the adults who attend—at least in that summer of 2000—were interesting people: an astrophysicist, a computer programmer, two lawyers seeking to go straight, people fluent in Russian and German and music, a couple of recent college graduates—mostly serious adult human beings, successful in their respective fields, brought together by a common desire to write publishable SF and fantasy. For a week I would teach in the mornings and join in the critique of the sixteen participants’ fiction through the long, hot afternoons.

  I don’t sit in critique circles without offering work of my own for criticism, so I brought along “The Ninth of Av.” It was critiqued late in the week and the effect was not so dissimilar from tossing a grenade into a sewing circle.

  The Odysseans were nothing if not earnest in their analysis. They did Web searches on the background of the Voynich Manuscript (a topic probably more interesting
than my story); they deeply researched Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition in search of hidden meaning; they sought out the meaning of the name “Moira” and one Odyssean did a comprehensive analysis of the significance of the number 9,114 from the Bible through prime numbers (he found no real significance); others criticized the story’s “vagueness” and “murkiness” and questionable technologies. Most disliked the story. Some were actively irritated. A few defended it.

  No one, I think, understood the thing. No one, for instance, really paid attention to the title—“The Ninth of Av”—or to the Jewish observance of it as Tisha B’Av.

  Titles are important. Sometimes, as in “The Ninth of Av” they carry almost as much freight as the text of the tale. I think of stories like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” or “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” and wonder that titles are so easily tossed off and then ignored these days. In this case, when the French edition of Destination 3001 containing this story was about to come out in the autumn of 2000, I learned that my good friend (and editor) Jacques Chambon and good friend (and translator) Jean-Daniel Breque had changed the title of my story to “Le Dernier Fax” (“The Final Fax”) and I hit the roof, threatening—not idly—to pull the story completely rather than to lose the original title. I understood that the title “meant nothing” in French and, worse, that it would sound like “The Ninth of April” since the French word for April is “Avril,” usually shortened to “Av.” I understood when both my editor friend and my translator friend explained that the average French reader did not know Jewish holidays and would not understand the importance of the Ninth of Av.

  It didn’t matter. To change the title to “The Final Fax” emasculated the story. I would rather burn down my city, burn the rubble, plow it up, and salt the earth so nothing ever grows there again than agree to this kind of benign vandalism of something so central. (This, I confess, is a common reaction of mine to many editorial “improvements.”)

  Jacques and Jean-Daniel changed the title back.