The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  His Web site is www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  If you’ve ever had to move to a new town, maybe one just ten miles down the road, maybe one on the other side of the country, you’ll know that the basic things in life don’t change. Traffic keeps to the same side of the street; the supermarkets and chain stores look more or less the same, and sell the same kinds of things; electrical sockets, national holidays, the alphabet, and the price of stamps . . . all of that kind of stuff is the same. Pretty soon you’ve worked out where everything is, made some new friends, and learned all the stories that make one place different from the next; pretty soon it seems like you’ve lived there all your life.

  But suppose you move to another country, on the other side of the world. Maybe the language is different; the money definitely is, and cars are driving on the wrong side of the road, and they’re smaller, too. It’s hotter than you’re used to, or colder and wetter. Christmas is in the middle of summer, and people celebrate it at barbecue parties on the beach. Or it’s in the middle of winter, and people sit around in overheated houses and eat too much and watch too much TV. Well, people can adapt to all kinds of things, even driving on the left instead of the right. It’ll take you a while to settle into your new way of life, but you’ll manage it, in the end.

  Now, suppose you move to a different world . . .

  Science fiction is all about changes as big as moving to a new world—or even bigger. Although it’s firmly grounded in what’s possible (the impossible, such as dragons or magic, is the realm of fantasy), it deals with new ideas and weird and wonderful things capable of creating new worlds or new ways of living or thinking that don’t yet exist. Rhea, the world Jack Miyata has moved to, is real enough. It’s the second-biggest moon of Saturn. On a clear night when Saturn is above the horizon, you can catch a glimpse of it with a good but not especially powerful telescope. NASA robots such as Voyager and Cassini have taken photographs of its surface. But in this story, Rhea and the other moons of Saturn (Saturn has more moons than the Sun has planets, and they’re all different) have been changed because people are living on them. And the people who live on the moons of Saturn have been changed, too. Not only because they live in a place where the gravity is so much less than the earth’s, and anyone who wants to take a stroll in the countryside around the city must remember to take enough air with them, but because their history and their stories are different and new. After all, science fiction isn’t only about the future and new worlds; like this story, it’s also about the people who have to make their homes there.

  POST-IRONIC STRESS SYNDROME

  Tricia Sullivan

  Diego gave me the M-ask at a window booth in Friendly’s. I didn’t look at it right away. It sat on the red formica between us, cushioned by a Friendly’s napkin. It was matte black and virtually featureless. It looked more like a hockey mask than an actual face.

  It was waiting for me to put it on and make it my own.

  “Okay,” Diego said. “Final version. Let’s see how it fits.”

  I glanced over Diego’s shoulder. There was a cute guy with blond dreads two tables away. Maybe a college student, or a senior at Midland Park—they’re allowed to go out for lunch. But it was strange that he was alone. He was sketching left-handed in a notebook, using rapid, intense strokes. He had nice legs, and I wondered what sport he played.

  Diego poked the whipped cream on his sundae with a long-handled spoon, but he didn’t eat. He leaned toward me.

  “It’s costing us a fortune to secure this timespace,” he muttered. “Could you do it, already?”

  “I’m not putting it on here,” I said.

  “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “I’ll do it in private,” I said.

  “I need to see it on you.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not happy.”

  “So spank me,” I said. “I want to put it on in private.”

  “There is no such thing as private, under that M-ask,” Diego said. “Get used to it.”

  I glanced at Cute Blond Guy again and caught him looking back at me. He quickly looked away.

  “Maja!” Diego nudged my foot under the table.

  I took a long breath, like a free diver. I picked up the M-ask. It smelled of apricots and weighed almost nothing. My fingers left greasy sweat marks on it.

  Under the M-ask I stretch like Silly Putty. My awareness shoots across space. All I have to do is think of a location, and I’m there.

  The sensation of freedom is overwhelming, until I remember my training and set about performing the routine assessments that will test the fit of the M-ask. I go to the most distant point of the Scatter to view our current status.

  It could be better. . . . The insurgents have cut a swath across the far side of the Scatter. Long-haul flesh carriers move inward in a steady stream: settlers abandoning the frontier. In recent Battles we lost M-eq control of two moons and a planet, and some stations in Brocas Belt were abandoned. Mining equipment clings like dead spiders to the sides of asteroids.

  My gaze moves effortlessly across distance and between scales. I can go anywhere that we have M-eq stations—and the Scatter is full of them. Some of our equipment was wrecked in the most recent Battle, of course. Yet, in turn, we’ve conquered some of their stations and adapted several of their ships. Their communications are substandard and they have people starving on three worlds because of predictions software errors. At least our infrastructures are still in place, and we are consolidating our gain.

  In sum: on the brink of the latest Battle, we seem to be evenly matched with the enemy.

  As I complete my scan I pick up a new battle cruiser, one of ours. It’s zipping through Broca’s Belt like a hornet on methedrine, bound for Losamo.

  “That’s enough,” said Diego. “Your face looks okay.”

  I changed to Local Mode. There was a little jolt as my awareness of the Scatter retreated, and a second jolt when I turned to the mirrored column beside the table and checked myself out. With the M-ask melded to me, my skin was the same soft brown, my hair still black and straight; but my features were subtly different. I looked older—maybe as old as eighteen.

  I smiled. I had to admit the M-ask was an improvement on nature.

  “Look at me. I want to see your eyes.”

  Dutifully, I looked.

  Diego scrutinized me like I was a zoo exhibit, consulted his Shade, and then nodded slowly.

  “Good. Your visual cortex is well shielded.”

  “Is it?” I said, amused. Shielded from what? I wondered briefly, but didn’t ask. Diego was liable to launch into a long and pedantic explanation about the hardware. But I’d been waiting long enough: twenty months in this timespace, training, while the Project refined the M-ask. Enough already.

  I stood up.

  Diego had his head down and was muttering something to his Shade as he escorted me toward the door to the sunlit street. Nobody but Diego could see his Shade, so he looked weird. I gave an embarrassed little smile as we passed Cute Blond Guy’s table. Cute Blond Guy stood up. Diego steered me away without really looking at Cute Blond Guy. I don’t like being steered, and I resisted for just a second. In that time, Cute Blond Guy held out a sheet of paper to me.

  I took it without thinking. He’d torn it out of his notebook. It was a sketch of my face. My old face. Before the M-ask.

  “Hey!” cried Diego, snapping out of it. He lunged for Cute Blond Guy and missed.

  Cute Blond Guy said, “Just so you remember who you used to be, before you started murdering millions of people in the name of commerce.”

  He dodged Diego again, darted out of the restaurant, and jumped on a bike. It was a kid’s bike, small and maneuverable. It let him slither between two parked cars and then pedal madly against the traffic on Goffle Road before shooting across someone’s lawn and disappearing behin
d a garage.

  Diego hissed and muttered at his personal construct. I caught the phrases, “How’d he get through?” and “Get the bastard.”

  “I thought you said we were secure,” I commented.

  “We’ll find him.”

  “You know him?” I said casually.

  Diego gave a noncommital shrug. “Probably just some romantic loonybird from the Old Skool. Wants us to go back to shootouts and space jockeys. We do that and the opposition fries us out of the Scatter.”

  He glanced sidelong at me. He was worried I’d be influenced by the anti-M-ask faction, that this kind of personal contact with a protester would test my resolve.

  I didn’t say anything. Let him sweat. Let them all sweat. I know what I am.

  I was born a professional. My M-ask was built for me, and I was built to fight in M-space from the time I was conceived. I was younger than my opponent; in fact, I was the youngest ever to do Battle. Started when I was thirteen. Girls mature faster, and our brains adapt better to the new generation M-asks. Back in training, I’d left all the boys my age in the dust. By the time they had reached maturity, their M-asks would have become obsolete. And it’s that little technological edge that keeps us ahead of the enemy.

  See, warfare on an extraplanetary scale is a logistical nightmare. Most of the wars are about the same thing: who will control the M-eq. When you work across vast distances, if you want anything to happen in a coordinated way, you have to work outside the four dimensions that we humans intuitively understand. You have to access M-space, and that’s what the M-eq is for. The M-eq is the equipment that uses M-space to groom timespace and make it behave well enough to take us to other planets or upstream/downstream in the same location. If you control the M-eq, you can do what you want in the galaxy.

  The Project was always examining the best ways of integrating the M-eq. And they concluded that the best natural model of instantaneous and efficient coordination of multiple systems is the human body. Supercomputers couldn’t cut it. The wet and salty human nervous system was an example of parallel processing extraordinaire.

  To control the M-eq across timespace, our leaders knew they needed an executive system governable with the same speed and integration and feedback capabilities as the human body.

  So they designed the M-ask, and the people who wore it.

  Funnily enough, nobody anticipated what would happen next. Insurgents from the Scatter frontier discovered that they could take over the M-eq if they attacked the person whose bodymind was being used to run it. All they’d needed was a M-ask interface and an aggressor who could challenge the M-eq operative on a physical level.

  That was how the Battles had gotten started. They’d evolved into a form of ritualized warfare, which meant there were rules that both sides had to follow.

  I was just the latest model in a long line of M-eq-adapted humans charged with responsibility for protecting the Scatter from the insurgents. My opponent, Jarel (yes, I knew his name. We knew practically everything there was to know about each other, without having actually met), would also wear a M-ask, but the design would be inferior. In terms of response time and richness of perception, the enemy’s M-asks couldn’t compete. The insurgents had originated in a backwater of the M-stream, and their resources were limited. They usually had to copy our designs.

  That didn’t mean I could take victory for granted. Jarel was stronger, tougher, and faster on a physical level. And he was hungry. The enemy hadn’t won control of the M-eq for the past four Battles. They needed to win this one, or be subsumed within our control of the Scatter. I knew that Jarel would stop at nothing. The insurgents had survived harsh conditions in the Scatter frontiers, and they were trained to fight like animals.

  But me, I’d been genetically and developmentally primed for M-ask warfare. The M-ask allowed me to access large-scale data analysis on a subconscious level so that I could fight by intuition. And my brain—any human brain, in fact—could do what artificial intelligence had consistently failed to do: act on its thoughts in a coordinated way, and instantaneously. The integration of systems needed in M-warfare was already present in me, from the cortex right down through the brainstem and out into muscles, tendons, bone. Thanks to the intricate connections between the M-ask and our operational systems, every blow I struck on Jarel would hurt the enemy. Every blow he struck would hit not only me, but thousands or millions of people on my side, via his side’s M-eq weaponry.

  Some targets were vital. Some were equipment. Jarel and I could cripple each other’s transport, communications, energy sources, you name it—all through direct attacks to the body.

  He and I would fight the Battle.

  Like the song said: We are the champions.

  Except, we weren’t like the champions of ancient Greece, who had fought each other so that the innocent need not die. We didn’t fight instead of mass warfare. We were mass warfare.

  Cute Blond Guy had been right, in a way: when the Battle began, I would be responsible for the lives of billions of people.

  After failing to catch Cute Blond Guy, Diego consulted his Shade and then insisted on driving me home from Friendly’s.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow at three fifteen,” he said as the car pulled up outside my house. “We’ll go over the rules formally. Stay in tonight. Get some sleep if you can.”

  He twitched violently and then scratched his neck to disguise the action. He claimed to be allergic to the soap they used in their clothes in 1994; maybe that was why he was always jumping like a cat with fleas. Or it could be that he had programmed his Shade to pinch him every time he was about to say something extemporaneous— something that would give him away as nonnative to 1994—which would be often. He talked openly to his Shade as he was walking down the street, even though this meant that 1994 people thought he had one of their mental diseases. He said there were some comforts he couldn’t give up, even out in the field.

  “You know, I’m a nervous wreck,” he said as I was getting out of the car.

  “Yeah?” I snapped. “And it would be your butt potentially getting kicked out there?”

  I slammed the door before he could answer and ran up the lawn to the front door of the house. I let myself in.

  My foster parents thought I was an Armenian refugee. I kept up a vague accent to support the lie. They were nice to me. Tracey, the mother, had two kids away at college. I guess she missed them. She kept Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi in the fridge door, just for me. But I was so tense there that I always had to turn on the bathroom faucet before I could let myself pee.

  I dropped my backpack in the hall.

  “Hello?”

  At first I thought no one was home. Salsa the cat took one look at me and hid under the sofa. This was not unusual. It saw the M-ask, even if the others didn’t, and on the other side of the M-ask, it must have smelled M-space.

  “Who was that guy?”

  The voice belonged to Dave—that is, Mr. “Call Me Dave. Because I’m a Really Nice Guy” Siebel—my foster father. He was standing in the den looking through the blinds at Diego’s Hyundai as it pulled away.

  “New assistant track coach,” I replied.

  “Why’s he driving you home?”

  “We have a meet tomorrow. He wanted to go over some stuff.” Sniff!

  Dave had a habit of sniffing his breath out through his nose when he was nervous or upset. Especially when he was angry. He made me think of a skinny little bull wanting to charge.

  “I’m staying over at Karen’s tomorrow night. Tracey said it was okay.”

  “Have you seen the remote control for the VCR?” he snapped. Sniff!

  “Not since yesterday. Sorry.” I went to my room and changed into sweats and running shoes. When I came out, Dave was on his hands and knees under the piano looking for the remote.

  “Had it”—sniff—”last night . . . NYPD Blue . . . where?” he muttered. Sniff! “Oh, crapski . . .”

  He only ever said “crapski” under extr
eme duress. Like the time Salsa threw up on his ski jacket.

  “Are you okay, Dave?” I asked in my Armenian accent. Some part of me was hoping he’d say no. No, I lost my job. No, actually, I’m thinking about having a sex change. No, I’ve decided to leave you all and move to Nepal. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Dave or that I wanted something bad to happen to him. It was just that this place, these people, this life, were all so boring.

  He straightened up and looked at me. I had my hand on the knob of the front door, wishing now that I hadn’t asked the question.

  “Well!” he exclaimed. “That is very nice of you to ask, Maja.”

  Sniff! “Actually, I have to give a big presentation at work tomorrow and it’s making me a little . . . stressed out. Nothing for you to worry about.” Sniff! “I took the afternoon off to prepare. I’ll be fine.”

  He smiled without opening his lips.

  I left him tearing the cushions off the sofa and sniffing.

  “You think you’ve got a big day tomorrow,” I muttered, shaking my head.

  Once outside, I went straight into a working run.

  Forgetting Dave was easy. He’d probably forget himself if you gave him half a chance. Forgetting the Battle that was to come wasn’t so easy. This was my third Battle, but my first time fighting Jarel. I had home-court advantage because I had won the last Battle in 2112 on an orbital of Jain’s World. Jarel would have to come to this timespace to fight me, but I had been here for months, acclimating myself to the conditions. When I needed to report for training, I M-folded myself to the simulations facilities, but the rest of the time I was a regular person, 1994-style.