Analog SFF, October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Of course,” Norwich said, taking the disk from him. “I will start making calls this evening. Only—I have to apologize. Twice now I have accused you of having hallucinations. That may have been glib. I want you to consider a possibility very seriously. What if Dr. Joyce was correct? What if you are completely sane?”

  * * * *

  What if you are completely sane? Pelerin sat in his darkened apartment contemplating the question. If he was sane, the work he had turned in that afternoon was probably valid. The comforting determinism of the Newtonian universe would be shattered and gone, not just in some Planck constant sized indeterminacy, but on the everyday macro level as well. Free will was loose in the universe, and not necessarily the sole property of human beings or even of the living.

  If he was sane, then there was no escape from responsibility when callousness and inattention drove someone to suicide. You could not say that the molecules just lined up that way because they had to line up that way.

  If he was sane, then the ghosts he was seeing were real.

  “I'm sorry.” It was astonishing how much that hurt. It wasn't just guilt. It was allowing himself to remember how, for a brief time, he had been unbelievably happy. That a girl like Terri could be at all interested in him was a source of continual astonishment to everyone. That she would stay with him for a year and a half had been nothing short of miraculous. But then...

  He had not grown tired of her. She had not walked out on him. But as his doctorate project took more and more of his time, Terri seemed to fade into the background. One of his classmates had once said that he was borderline autistic. It was certainly true that mathematics was simpler and less messy than dealing with people.

  Terri had complained that he was ignoring her. He remembered that later. At the time, it was like the meaningless buzzing of a fly against a window. Even the tears and the slammed door made little impression. The intricacy of his thesis project took all his attention.

  It was only when he answered the telephone and learned that her car had plunged off a bridge and into an icy river that the haze of concentration was broken. He was back in the real world, and alone.

  The scent he had noticed the day before had returned. There was a gentle pressure on his shoulders. He knew that if he turned his head, he would recognize the polish on the fingernails.

  “Why are you sorry?” The voice was hardly more than a whisper, the breath warm in his ear.

  “I'm sorry...” It had been hard to tell Heisenberg that he was dead. This was exponentially more difficult. “I'm sorry I forced you to kill yourself.”

  The silvery laughter, even tinged as it was with sadness, was as familiar as it was surprising. And infuriating. The ghost of someone driven to suicide should demand vengeance. Those long, cool fingers should be clamped around his throat. Laughter under those circumstances was patronizing.

  “You know me better than that. I never wanted to kill myself. I was just angry that you had tuned me out. I got in the car to let off steam. The black ice on the bridge was invisible. The wheels slipped, the car spun, and I had less than a minute to lament my stupidity.”

  “If this isn't about punishment, then what?” Pelerin asked.

  “You contributed to my death. Now you live without me. That should be punishment enough.”

  It was, he realized. Beneath all the guilt and fear, there was a loneliness he had never allowed himself to feel until now.

  “There will be more,” she continued. “Many will hate the implications of the work you will do. Insanity is one of the least accusations you will face.”

  The fingers moved up from his shoulders, brushed the sides of his throat, and came to rest on his temples.

  “Will it be accepted?”

  “When you are long dead. And not by all even then.”

  He stood and turned. He was alone in an empty room.

  Professional respect was once the only thing he had wanted, perhaps because it had seemed the only thing he could have. Now, if he could believe a ghost, he would lose that.

  It did not matter. He had been given a wider universe than he could ever have imagined, one filled not only with physicists and mathematicians but also with poets and mystics—and a ghost of a woman he had never really known.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Robert R. Chase

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  * * *

  Short Story: STARSHIP DOWN

  by Tracy Canfield

  Illustration by John Allemand

  * * * *

  Rules are intended to maximize chances that things will work. But sometimes....

  * * * *

  The mobile medstation doorlight buzzed, and Okalani Yee opened the door without setting the viewscreen to the outside camera feed. It was a bunny, of course. The nearest nonbunny was at Aoi Station, currently six hundred kilometers away.

  “A bunny tripped by the orchard wall and broke its ankle,” said the visitor. Bunnytongue had no greetings.

  “How far away?”

  The bunny spoke a single word, which the translator bud in Yee's ear rendered as “Two to six kilometers.”

  “Wait a minute.” Yee grabbed the medkit and pulled on a lightweight mask with a portable aerator that clipped on her belt. The Myosotis atmosphere was breathable enough—a bit high in CO2, a trifle light in O2—but on long brisk walks she preferred to breathe Earthmix. The mask was comfortable. With the temperature and humidity regulation, she'd forget she was wearing it.

  The bunny loped off over a blue hill. It wasn't even Genius Bunny, who was the only MyosotianYee could tolerate anymore.

  * * * *

  Looking at the bunnies clumped on the blue hills around the medstation, Yee wouldn't have known there was an emergency. They were sitting placidly, mating vigorously, grooming their “ears,” chasing their round little children away from the stone walls, and playing the copycat game. This was one of the few bunny recreations that did not involve mating. The rules were simple: two bunnies faced off and imitated each other's gestures. Yee had been refusing to play for six months now.

  She trotted on the springy blue mat of grass—in an Earth year on Myosotis, she'd lost the mental quotation marks—and dodged between orrum trees heavy with orange bulbs: the orchard. The bunnies did not tend or plant the orrums. The orchard had sprouted from discarded rinds the bunnies had left after scavenging outside their pastures and bringing back foods they liked.

  Myosotians—bunnies—were technically sentient, the only such race on Myosotis. They were “herbivores"—evolution on Myosotis had never erected the rigid barriers between plant and animal that Earth had, but the term conveyed an accurate approximation of the bunny ecology. Everything bunnies ate was sessile. They were not hunters.

  There was the wall, a precarious stone heap built by the bunnies to keep other herbivores out of their pastures. Yee knew she had reached the scene of the accident when she saw a circle of bunnies squatting so they faced outward. The injured one would be at the center—a hard-wired defense mechanism against a long-extinct predator.

  The defenders were so close together that Yee had to step on a shimmering blue-scaled knee to get to the gap between their shoulders. The bunny patted her ponytail but made no move to help or hinder her.

  In their usual resting posture, sitting on their hind legs, bunnies presented an egg-shaped silhouette three meters high, not including the waving “ears,” a bifurcated ornamental crest that could add another fifty centimeters. A slit in the chest between the forelimbs concealed the sex organs. The vrith, one of the two bunny sexes, also had a white or pink stripe down their backs and small white nipples under their armpits.

  Yee clambered down into the enclosed circle and took a look at her patient.

  * * * *

  Humans had invented FTL technology—and never used it.

  The first test of the Slominski Drive had inspired an immediate outburst of optimism that completely drowned out the voices droning about rocky planets where no on
e could live, the possible lack of Van Allen belts and consequent frying by cosmic radiation, the prohibitive cost of colonization. Then the Kairians made contact.

  Yee had been old enough to read the headlines and understand the significance of the enormous fonts and sidebars overflowing with unanswered questions. And she had been young enough to find a mandatory class on Coalition history waiting for her when she reached high school.

  The Kairians had been watching Earth via never-noticed ansible-enabled satellites. (Or, more likely, some other member of the Coalition of Planets had been watching, and reported to the Kairians when the Slominski drive became feasible; interstellar security guards working in exchange for some piece of Kairian technology—cold fusion, weather control, the ansible itself.)

  The Kairians had had FTL for over five thousand Earth years and considered themselves to be running this part of the galaxy. It could have been a lot worse. They had a hands-off approach. They appreciated it if sentient races joined their Coalition of Planets (and what the Kairians appreciated, everybody did.) They discouraged interplanetary war and interspecies exploitation (and what the Kairians discouraged, nobody even considered doing). They handed out technology generously. But there was a catch. Advanced species had to help less advanced species adapt.

  The bunnies were not, by even the broadest definition, advanced.

  * * * *

  Yee recognized the downed bunny. She called it Baron von Bunny, though she would have had to query the translation database to know how that came out in bunnytongue. One of the Baron's hind ankles was clearly twisted. The Baron writhed in evident pain, though Yee still saw little in its faceted black eyes except stupidity.

  In the safety of the circle the Baron's thumb claws had retracted, as if for locomotion. Yee stuck an analgesic pad over its breathing orifice to let it inhale the drug, then straightened the ankle and tied a splint on with slow-dissolving bandages. Bunnies’ hind legs were larger copies of their upper limbs. The thumb claw on all four limbs, which had presumably evolved for dealing with food, provided an opposable digit. Bunnies usually moved by bounding on their hind legs. On rough terrain they dropped to all fours. They did not build roads.

  The flesh around the injury was seriously abraded. Yee wiped up the clear bunny blood and covered the wound with a strip of synthflesh, which immediately let out a puff of ozone and began to fuse to the Baron's scaly skin. She sprayed the outer layer with a fixative to prevent the Baron from finding itself fused to the wrong side of its dressing.

  She waited for the Baron to get up and take a few tentative hops on its splinted ankle. With unnecessary slowness, the circled bunnies came to the realization that there was no injured comrade to protect and they could disperse. Yee trudged back to the medstation, allowing herself to contemplate her usual futile plan for bunny education.

  By Kairian standards, bunnies were intelligent. They used language and made tools—well, they built ramshackle stone walls, and long ago they had made weapons. Their language, as Yee had just observed, let them refer to things that were distant in space and time; they could say A bunny tripped by the orchard wall. But it was weak in other areas. Many, many other areas.

  Yee still had an old Intro to Xenobiology file about bunnytongue. At first she had assumed it was a joke, like the file on “Sex Life of the Caobotes” (which was empty; the Caobotes were parthenogenetic.) The bunnytongue file was intended to be used as an insight into Myosotian thought, not as a phrasebook. No humans could actually speak bunnytongue—the sounds were too unsuited for the human vocal apparatus. Yee's portable, wireless translator synthesized bunnytongue words for her.

  Bunnytongue had three numbers: “one,” “two,” and “many.” (Desperately bored medstation biologists had programmed numerous synonyms for this last into the translator, from “a lot of” to “veritable metric shitloads.” Yee preferred not to enable them, but there were ... many.)

  Bunnies were good about expressing time, especially past and present. (The future was often hazy.) They weren't bad at aspect—whether an action was in progress or completed. They were hopeless at counterfactuals. Statements like If I were hungry, I would eat were beyond them. This made it improbable that Yee's plans for founding the first Myosotian school of medicine would succeed.

  The flocking on the medstation walls looked grubby, but installations on Myosotis couldn't have shiny metallic walls or even reflective windows. Bunnies would spot their reflections and play the copycat game with them until they fell over from exhaustion.

  Speaking of the copycat game, there was Genius Bunny, playing it with another bunny—Flora Bunny, Yee thought. Genius Bunny was toting an empty orrum rind. Flora reacted to something—Yee was too far away for the translator to pick up its words, but it had doubtless lost in a way that seemed stupid even by bunny standards. Flora retracted its claws and began cuffing Genius Bunny's face. Genius Bunny dropped the rind and shielded its eyes.

  Yee felt a pang. She liked Genius Bunny and, she admitted to herself, probably encouraged it to follow the medstation on its circuit through the bunny pastures. Like so many scientists-to-be she herself had been, or at any rate had felt, excluded by others as a child because of her brains. Here, far from Earth or humanity, the same pattern played out for her daily as farce.

  Flora finally gave up abusing Genius Bunny and ran off to mate. Yee noticed that Flora had very long ears. Long-eared stong were very desirable to vrith.

  The two bunny sexes could be mapped onto “male” and “female,” if you stretched, but no one on Myosotis ever did. Stong produced eggs internally, and vrith fertilized them. After mating the stong would immediately lay the fertilized egg and give it to the vrith, who would carry the offspring to term in a pouch and then care for it until it was old enough to graze on its own. Offworld biologists considered the stong female, but no human who had seen a group of vrith nursing their infants could quite bring themselves to call them “male.” Bunnytongue itself didn't mark gender. Much as Japanese can indicate plural, but usually doesn't, bunnytongue didn't have separate pronouns for vrith and stong. The automatic translator handled both pronouns as “it,” since there usually wasn't enough context to disambiguate the two, and humans followed suit.

  Yee reeled the collapsible bunny dummy she used for practice out of the medstation and laid it on the waving blue grass. This time it will work, said the optimistic part of her brain. She was doing this solely to shut that part up for another few days.

  “Come here,” she said to a nearby bunny, Yoshihisa. She would rather have tried this with Genius Bunny, but Genius Bunny was so little respected by other bunnies that they might not have let it try this on them for real.

  Yoshihisa bounced over and faced Yee. It took no interest in the dummy. Yee held up a splint.

  “If a bunny had a broken leg, you would fix it like this.” The Kairians discouraged exploitation and manipulation of client species, but this technology sharing was the whole point.

  “A bunny has a broken leg?” Yoshihisa tapped its hind feet. Yee knew that meant the onset of panic.

  “No, no bunny has a broken leg.” Yoshihisa looked relieved. It had abandoned the unwelcome idea so quickly that it wasn't even mad at her for lying. Bunnies never lied, after all.

  “If this bunny had a broken leg, you fix it like this.” She held up the splint again.

  “That's not a bunny.”

  “If this was a bunny, you could help it.”

  “This isn't a bunny.”

  Yee gave up again and took the dummy back inside. In her opinion you didn't need a star chart to find Myosotis: it was smack in the gap between sentience and intelligence.

  * * * *

  Yee checked the biologists’ forum for messages. Due to a loophole that excepted the forum from the normal technology regulations, it tended to be chatty. Unfortunately most of the new squirts were in Bengali.

  The first English post was an update from Sirinen Station on Pythagoras Bunny, who was something of a S
irinen mascot for its ability to perform the Lo rock-counting test for numbers up to fourteen. Pythagoras had been killed by a collapsing wall.

  Yee sent her condolences. Genius Bunny could do the Lo Test up to ten more often than could be accounted for by chance, but it seemed insensitive to mention it.

  The other English post was a new overlay for the translation database, promising one hundred and five new synonyms for “to mate.” There were dozens of user-created overlays for this single term, but Yee never enabled them. Given the preeminence of the subject in bunnies’ conversation, the cruder forms made a crowd of them sound like sailors on leave.

  According to Yee's old Applied Xenolinguistics prof, machine translation was one of those computational linguistics proposals that, on Earth, had never really been persuaded to work—human languages have too many ambiguities of the “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana” variety. Bunnytongue, though, was simple enough to model, and if you were careful to restrict your speech to things bunnies understood, it could handle it. The bunnytongue translator was based on Kairian technology—they'd been looking after the bunnies for centuries, after all, and had compiled the definitive corpus of bunny utterances—but it hadn't been necessary to build dams or design highway systems on some backward Coalition world to earn it. It was so trivial a human grad student could have built it.

  A centralized database allowed the translator to be consistent about words, especially proper names. If a human slipped and used a word with no bunnytongue equivalent, the translator would generate a legal sequence of sounds that did not collide with an existing word and store it. The neologism would at least come out the same way every time. The translator's attempt to overlay prosody to simulate perceived emotion was much dicier. As with the synonym inserter, Yee preferred to disable the feature and figure out bunny emotions from context. To her the default bunny voices sounded pleasant and emotionally neutral. Admittedly, this probably made them sound even stupider. Individual bunnies could be tagged with distinctive voices—Yee had set Genius Bunny's to a simulation of movie star Rui-Lian Ducrot, who specialized in adorable nerds.