The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  Poole asked, “What do you see?”

  “The sky is . . . strange.”

  Miriam was looking puzzled. She turned and looked at Harry. “That’s not all that’s strange. That’s not Bill!”

  “Indeed not,” came the voice from the other side of the hole. “I am Michael Poole.”

  XIV

  Virtual

  So, while a suddenly revived Michael Poole floated around in other-space, the original Poole and his not-lover Miriam Berg engaged in a furious row with Harry.

  Poole stormed over to the GUT engine’s remaining control pack, and checked the memory’s contents. It didn’t contain backup copies of the four of us; it contained only one ultra-high-fidelity copy of Michael Poole himself. I could not decide which scared me more: the idea that no copies of myself existed in that glistening white box, or the belief I had entertained previously that there had. I am prone to existential doubt, and am uncomfortable with such notions.

  But such subtleties were beyond Michael Poole in his anger. “Miriam, I swear I knew nothing about this.”

  “Oh, I believe you.”

  They both turned on the older Poole. “Harry?” Michael snapped. “What in Lethe is this?”

  Disembodied-head Harry looked shifty, but he was going to brazen it out. “As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing to apologise for. The storage available on the Crab was always limited, and it was worse in the gondola. Michael’s my son. Of course I’m going to protect him above others. What would you do? I’m sorry, Miriam, but — ”

  “You aren’t sorry at all,” Miriam snapped. “And you’re a cold-hearted bastard. You knowingly sent a backup of your son, who you say you’re trying to protect, through that wormhole to die!”

  Harry looked uncomfortable. “It’s just a copy. There are other backups, earlier copies — ”

  “Lethe, Dad,” Michael Poole said, and he walked away, bunching his fists. I wondered how many similar collisions with his father the man had had to suffer in the course of his life.

  “What’s done is done,” came a whisper. And they all quit their bickering, because it was Michael Poole who had spoken – the backup Poole, the one recently revived, the one beyond the spacetime barrier. “I know I don’t have much time. I’ll try to project some imagery back . . .”

  Harry, probably gratefully, popped out of existence, thus vacating the available processing capacity, though I was sure his original would be monitoring us from the Crab.

  Poole murmured to Miriam, “You speak to him. Might be easier for him than me.”

  She clearly found this idea distressing. But she said, “All right.”

  Gradually images built up in the air before us, limited views, grainy with pixels, flickering.

  And we saw Virtual Poole’s strange sky.

  The Virtual Crab floated over a small object – like an ice moon, like one of Titan’s Saturnian siblings, pale and peppered with worn impact craters. I saw how its surface was punctured with holes, perfectly round and black. These looked like our hatch; the probe we had dispatched must have emerged from one of them. Things that looked like our spiders toiled to and fro between the holes, travelling between mounds of some kind of supplies. They were too distant to see clearly. All this was bathed in a pale yellow light, diffuse and without shadows.

  The original Poole said, “You think those other Interfaces connect up to the rest of Titan?”

  “I’d think so,” Miriam said. “This can’t be the only deep-sea methane-generation chamber. Passing through the wormholes and back again would be a way for the spiders to unify their operations across the moon.”

  “So the Interface we found, set in the outer curved surface of Titan’s core, is one of a set that matches another set on the outer curved surface of that ice moon. The curvature would seem to flip over when you passed through.”

  This struck me as remarkable, a paradox difficult to grasp, but Poole was a wormhole engineer, and used to the subtleties of spacetime manipulated and twisted through higher dimensions; slapping two convex surfaces together was evidently child’s play to him, conceptually.

  Miriam asked Virtual Poole, “But where are you? That’s an ice moon, a common object. Could be anywhere in the universe. Could even be in some corner of our own System.”

  Poole’s Virtual copy said, his voice a whispery, channel-distorted rasp, “Don’t jump to conclusions, Miriam. Look up.”

  The viewpoint swivelled, and we saw Virtual Poole’s sky.

  A huge, distorted sun hung above us. Planetoids hung sprinkled before its face, showing phases from crescents to half-moons, and some were entirely black, fly-speck eclipses against the face of the monster. Beyond the limb of the sun more stars hung, but they were also swollen, pale beasts, their misshapen discs visible. And the space between the stars did not look entirely black to me, but a faint, deep crimson with a pattern, a network of threads and knots. It reminded me of what I saw when I closed my eyes.

  “What a sky,” Poole murmured.

  “Michael, you’re far from home,” Miriam called.

  Virtual Poole replied, “Yes. Those stars don’t fit our main sequence. And their spectra are simple – few heavy elements. They’re more like the proto-stars of our own early universe, I think: the first generation, formed of not much more than the hydrogen and helium that came out of the Big Bang.”

  “No metals,” observed Miriam Berg.

  “I’ll send through the data I’m collecting — ”

  “Getting it, son,” came Harry Poole’s voice.

  The others let Virtual Poole speak. His words, the careful observations delivered by a man so far from home, or at least by a construct that felt as if it were a man, were impressive in their courage.

  “This is not our universe,” he whispered. “I think that’s clear. This one is young, and small – according to the curvature of spacetime, only a few million light years across. Probably not big enough to accommodate our Local Group of galaxies.”

  “A pocket universe, maybe,” Miriam said. “An appendix from our own.”

  “I can’t believe the things you have been calling ‘spiders’ originated here,” the Virtual said. “You said it, Miriam. No metals here, not in this entire cosmos. That’s why they were scavenging metals from probes, meteorites.”

  “They came from somewhere else, then,” Poole said. “There was nothing strange in the elemental abundance we recorded in the spider samples we studied. So they come from elsewhere in our own universe. The pocket universe is just a transit interchange. Like Earthport.”

  The Virtual said, “Yes. And maybe behind these other moons in my sky lie gateways to other Titans – other sustained ecologies, maybe with different biological bases. Other experiments.”

  Miriam said, “So if metals are so essential for the spiders, why not have supplies brought to them through the interchange?”

  “Maybe they did, once,” the Virtual said. “Maybe things broke down. There’s a sense of age here, Miriam. This is a young cosmos maybe, but I think this is an old place . . .”

  The real Poole murmured, “It makes sense. The time axis in the baby universe needn’t be isomorphic with ours. A million years over there, a billion years here.”

  The Virtual whispered, “Those spiders have been toiling at their task on Titan a long, long time. Whoever manufactured them, or bred them, left them behind a long time ago, and they’ve been alone ever since. Just doing their best to keep going. Looking at them, I get the impression they aren’t too bright. Just functional.”

  “But they did a good job,” Miriam said.

  “That they did.”

  “But why?” I blurted out. “What’s the purpose of all this, the nurturing of an ecology on Titan for billions of years – and perhaps similar on a thousand other worlds?”

  “I think I have an idea,” Virtual Poole whispered. “I never even landed on Titan, remember. Perhaps, coming at all this so suddenly, while the rest of you have worked through stages of
discovery, I see it different . . .

  “Just as this pocket universe is a junction, so maybe Titan is a junction, a haven where different domains of life can coexist. You’ve found the native ammono fish, the CHON sponges that may originate in the inner system, perhaps even coming from Earth, and the silanes from Triton and beyond. Maybe there are other families to find if you had time to look. All these kinds of life, arising from different environments – but all with one thing in common. All born of planets, and of skies and seas, in worlds warmed by stars.

  “But the stars won’t last forever. In the future the universe will change, until it resembles our own time even less than our universe resembles this young dwarf cosmos. What then? Look, if you were concerned about preserving life, all forms of life, into the very furthest future, then perhaps you would promote — ”

  “Cooperation,” said Miriam Berg.

  “You got it. Maybe Titan is a kind of prototype of an ecology where life forms of such different origins can mix, find ways of using each other to survive — ”

  “And ultimately merge, somehow,” Miriam said. “Well, it’s happened before. Each of us is a community with once-disparate and very different life forms toiling away in each of our cells. It’s a lovely vision, Michael.”

  “And plausible,” his original self said gruffly. “Anyhow it’s a hypothesis that will do until something better comes along.”

  I sneered at that. This dream of cosmic cooperation struck me as the romantic fantasy of a man alone and doomed to die, and soon. We all project our petty lives upon the universe. But I had no better suggestions to make. And, who knows? Perhaps Virtual Poole was right. None of us will live to find out.

  “Anyhow,” I said, “charming as this is – are we done now?”

  Miriam snapped, “We can’t abandon Michael.”

  “Go,” whispered Virtual Poole. “There’s nothing you can do for me. I’ll keep observing, reporting, as long as I can.”

  I gagged on his nobility.

  Now Harry intruded, grabbing a little of the available Virtual projection capacity. “But we’ve still got business to conclude before you leave here.”

  XV

  Resolution

  Poole frowned. “What business?”

  “We came here to prove that Titan is without sentience,” Harry said. “Well, we got that wrong. Now what?”

  Miriam Berg was apparently puzzled we were even having the conversation. “We report what we’ve found to the sentience oversight councils and elsewhere. It’s a major discovery. We’ll be rapped for making an unauthorised landing on Titan, but — ”

  “Is that the sum of your ambition?” I snapped. “To hope the authorities will be lenient if you reveal the discovery that is going to ruin you?”

  She glared at me. “What’s the choice?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I looked at her, and Poole, who I think was guessing what I was going to say, and Harry, who looked away as he usually did at moments of crisis. Suddenly, after days of pointless wonders, I was in my element, the murky world of human relationships, and I could see a way forward where they could not. “Destroy this,” I said. I waved a hand. “All of it. You have your grenades, Miriam. You could bring this cavern down.”

  “Or,” Harry said, “there is the GUTdrive. If that were detonated, if unified-field energies were loosed in here, the wormhole Interface too would surely be disrupted. I’d imagine that the connection between Titan and the pocket universe would be broken altogether.”

  I nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I like your style, Harry. Do it. Let this place be covered up by hundreds of kilometres of ice and water. Destroy your records. It will make no difference to the surface, what’s going on in the atmosphere, not immediately. Nobody will ever know all this was here.”

  Harry Poole said, “That’s true. Even if methane generation stops immediately the residual would persist in the atmosphere for maybe ten million years. I venture to suggest that if the various multi-domain critters haven’t learned to cooperate in that time, they never will. Ten megayears is surely enough.”

  Miriam looked at him, horrified by his words. “You’re suggesting a monstrous crime,” she breathed. “To think of destroying such a wonder as this, the product of a billion years – to destroy it for personal gain! Michael, Lethe, leave aside the morality, surely you’re too much of a scientist to countenance this.”

  But Poole sounded anguished. “I’m not a scientist any more, Miriam. I’m an engineer. I build things. I think I sympathise with the goals of the spider makers. What I’m building is a better future for the whole of mankind – that’s what I believe. And if I have to make compromises to achieve that future – well. Maybe the spider makers had to make the same kind of choices. Who knows what they found here on Titan before they went to work on it? . . .”

  And in that little speech, I believe, you have encapsulated both the magnificence and the grandiose folly of Michael Poole. I wondered then how much damage this man might do to us all in the future, with his wormholes and his time-hopping starships – what horrors he, blinded by his vision, might unleash.

  Harry said unexpectedly, “Let’s vote on it. If you’re in favour of destroying the chamber, say yes.”

  “No!” snapped Miriam.

  “Yes,” said Harry and Poole together.

  “Yes,” said I, but they all turned on me and told me I didn’t have a vote.

  It made no difference. The vote was carried. They stood looking at each other, as if horrified by what they had done.

  “Welcome to my world,” I said cynically.

  Poole went off to prepare the GUT engine for its last task. Miriam, furious and upset, gathered together our equipment, such as it was, her pack with her science samples, our tangles of rope.

  And Harry popped into the air in front of me. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You wanted me to make that suggestion, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I hoped you would. If I’d made it they’d have refused. And Michael would never have forgiven me.” He grinned. “I knew there was a reason I wanted to have you along, Jovik Emry. Well done. You’ve served your purpose.”

  Virtual Poole, still in his baby universe, spoke again. “Miriam.”

  She straightened up. “I’m here, Michael.”

  “I’m not sure how long I have left. What will happen when the power goes?”

  “I programmed the simulation to seem authentic, internally consistent. It will be as if the power in the Crab lifedome is failing.” She took a breath, and said, “Of course you have other options to end it before then.”

  “I know. Thank you. Who were they, do you think? Whoever made the spiders. Did they build this pocket universe too? Or was it built for them? Like a haven?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Michael, I’m sorry. I — ”

  “Don’t be. You know I would have chosen this. But I’m sorry to leave you behind. Miriam – look after him. Michael. I, we, need you.”

  She looked at the original Poole, who was working at the GUT engine. “We’ll see,” she said.

  “And tell Harry – well. You know.”

  She held a hand up to the empty air. “Michael, please — ”

  “It’s enough.” The Virtuals he had been projecting broke up into blocks of pixels, and a faint hiss, the carrier of his voice, disappeared from my hearing. Alone in his universe, he had cut himself off.

  The original Poole approached her, uncertain of her reaction. “It’s done. The GUT engine has been programmed. We’re ready to go, Miriam. As soon as we’re out of here — ”

  She turned away from him, her face showing something close to hatred.

  XVI

  Ascension

  So, harnessed to a spider oblivious of the impending fate of its vast and ancient project, we rose into the dark. It had taken us days to descend to this place, and would take us days to return to the surface, where, Harry promised, he would have a fresh balloon waiting to pi
ck us up.

  This time, though I was offered escape into unconsciousness, I stayed awake. I had a feeling that the last act of this little drama had yet to play itself out. I wanted to be around to see it.

  We were beyond the lower ice layers and rising through two hundred and fifty kilometres of sea when Miriam’s timer informed us that the GUT engine had detonated, far beneath us. Insulated by the ice layer, we felt nothing. But I imagined that the spider that carried us up towards the light hesitated, just fractionally.

  “It’s done,” Poole said firmly. “No going back.”

  Miriam had barely spoken to him since the cavern. She had said more words to me. Now she said, “I’ve been thinking. I won’t accept it, Michael. I don’t care about you and Harry and your damn vote. As soon as we get home I’m going to report what we found.”

  “You’ve no evidence — ”

  “I’ll be taken seriously enough. And someday somebody will mount another expedition, and confirm the truth.”

  “All right.” That was all he said. But I knew the matter was not over. He would not meet my mocking eyes.

  I wasn’t surprised when, twelve hours later, as Miriam slept cradled in the net draped from the spider’s back, Poole took vials from her pack and pressed them into her flesh, one by a valve on her leg, another at the base of her spine.

  I watched him. “You’re going to edit her. Plan this with Dad, did you?”

  “Shut up,” he snarled, edgy, angry.

  “You’re taking her out of her own head, and you’ll mess with her memories, with her very personality, and then you’ll load her back. What will you make her believe – that she stayed up on the Crab with Harry the whole time, while you went exploring and found nothing? That would work, I guess.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  But I had plenty to say to him. I am no saint myself, and Poole disgusted me as only a man without morality himself can be disgusted. “I think you love her. I even think she loves you. Yet you are prepared to mess with her head and her heart, to serve your grandiose ambitions. Let me tell you something. The Poole she left behind in that pocket universe, the one she said goodbye to, he was a better man than you will ever be again. Because he was not tainted by the great crime you committed when you destroyed the cavern. And because he was not tainted by this.