Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 88

by Ken Liu

  And no ghost, either. Carlotta tries desperately to speak to her younger self, wills herself to succeed, and fails yet again. So who fired that shot, and where did the bullet go, and why can’t she remember any of this?

  The shouting in the next room has yielded up a silence. The silence becomes an eternity. Then Carlotta hears the sound of footsteps—she can’t tell whose—approaching her bedroom door.

  In the end, almost every conscious function of the Fleet went Long, just to survive the attrition of the war with the dark-matter beings. The next loop through the galactic core pared us down to a fraction of what we used to be. When I got raptured up, the Fleet was a distributed cloud of baseball-sized objects running quantum computations on the state of their own dense constituent atoms—millions and millions of such objects, all linked together in a nested hierarchy. By the time we orbited back up our ellipsis, you could have counted us in the thousands, and our remaining links were carefully narrowbanded to give us maximum stealth.

  So us wild timesliders chose to go Longer.

  Just like last time, Erasmus warned me that it might be a suicidal act. If the Fleet was lost, we would be lost along with it . . . our subjective lives could end within days or hours. If, on the other hand, the Fleet survived and got back to reproducing itself, well, we might live on indefinitely—even drop back into realtime if we chose to do so. “Can you accept the risk?” he asked.

  “Can you?”

  He had grown a face by then. I suppose he knew me well enough to calculate what features I’d find pleasing. But it wasn’t his ridiculous fake humanity I loved. What I loved was what went on behind those still-gemlike tourmaline eyes—the person he had become by sharing my mortality. “I accepted that risk a long time ago,” he said.

  “You and me both, Erasmus.”

  So we held on to each other and just—went fast.

  Hard to explain what made that time-dive so vertiginous, but imagine centuries flying past like so much dust in a windstorm! It messed up our sense of place, first of all. Used to be we had a point of view light-years wide and deep . . . now all those loops merged into one continuous cycle; we grew as large as the Milky Way itself, with Andromeda bearing down on us like a silver armada. I held Erasmus in my arms, watching wide-eyed while he updated himself on the progress of the war and whispered new discoveries into my ear.

  The Fleet had worked up new defenses, he said, and the carnage had slowed; but our numbers were still dwindling.

  I asked him if we were dying.

  He said he didn’t know. Then he looked alarmed and held me tighter. “Oh, Carlotta . . . ”

  “What?” I stared into his eyes, which had gone faraway and strange. “What is it? Erasmus, tell me!”

  “The Enemy,” he said in numbed amazement.

  “What about them?”

  “I know what they are.”

  The bedroom door opens.

  The elder Carlotta doesn’t remember the bedroom door opening. None of this is as she remembers it should be. The young Carlotta cringes against the backboard of the bed, so terrified she can barely draw breath. Bless you, girl, I’d hold your hand if I could!

  What comes through the door is just Abby Boudaine. Abby in a cheap white nightgown. But Abby’s eyes are yellow-rimmed and feral, and her nightgown is spattered with blood.

  See, the thing is this. All communication is limited by the speed of light. But if you spread your saccades over time, that speed-limit kind of expands. Slow as we were, light seemed to cross galactic space in a matter of moments. Single thoughts consumed centuries. We felt the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy beating like a ponderous heart. We heard whispers from nearby galaxies, incomprehensibly faint but undeniably manufactured. Yes, girl, we were that slow.

  But the Enemy was even slower.

  “Long ago,” Erasmus told me, channeling this information from the Fleet’s own dying collectivity, “long ago, the Enemy learned to parasitize dark matter . . . to use it as a computational substrate . . . to evolve within it . . . ”

  “How long ago?”

  His voice was full of awe. “Longer than you have words for, Carlotta. They’re older than the universe itself.”

  Make any sense to you? I doubt it would. But here’s the thing about our universe: it oscillates. It breathes, I mean, like a big old lung, expanding and shrinking and expanding again. When it shrinks, it wants to turn into a singularity, but it can’t do that, because there’s a limit to how much mass a quantum of volume can hold without busting. So it all bangs up again, until it can’t accommodate any more emptiness. Back and forth, over and over. Perhaps, ad infinitum.

  Trouble is, no information can get past those hot chaotic contractions. Every bang makes a fresh universe, blank as a chalkboard in an empty schoolhouse . . .

  Or so we thought.

  But dark matter has a peculiar relationship with gravity and mass, Erasmus said; so when the Enemy learned to colonize it, they found ways to propagate themselves from one universe to the next. They could survive the end of all things material, in other words, and they had already done so—many times!

  The Enemy was genuinely immortal, if that word has any meaning. The Enemy conducted its affairs not just across galactic space, but across the voids that separate galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters . . . slow as molasses, they were, but vast as all things, and as pervasive as gravity, and very powerful.

  “So what have they got against the Fleet, if they’re so big and almighty? Why are they killing us?”

  Erasmus smiled then, and the smile was full of pain and melancholy and an awful understanding. “But they’re not killing us, Carlotta. They’re rapturing us up.”

  One time in school, when she was trying unsuccessfully to come to grips with The Merchant of Venice, Carlotta had opened a book about Elizabethan drama to a copy of an old drawing called Utriusque Cosmi. It was supposed to represent the whole cosmos, the way people thought of it back in Shakespeare’s time, all layered and orderly: stars and angels on top, hell beneath, and a naked guy stretched foursquare between divinity and damnation. Made no sense to her at all. Some antique craziness. She thinks of that drawing now, for no accountable reason. But it doesn’t stop at the angels, girl. I learned that lesson. Even angels have angels, and devils dance on the backs of lesser devils.

  Her mother in her bloodstained nightgown hovers in the doorway of Carlotta’s bedroom. Her unblinking gaze strafes the room until it fixes at last on her daughter. Abby Boudaine might be standing right here, Carlotta thinks, but those eyes are looking out from someplace deeper and more distant and far more frightening.

  The blood fairly drenches her. But it isn’t Abby’s blood.

  “Oh, Carlotta,” Abby says. Then she clears her throat, the way she does when she has to make an important phone call or speak to someone she fears. “Carlotta . . . ”

  And Carlotta (the invisible Carlotta, the Carlotta who dropped down from that place where the angels dice with eternity) understands what Abby is about to say, recognizes at last the awesome circularity, not a paradox at all. She pronounces the words silently as Abby makes them real: “Carlotta. Listen to me, girl. I don’t guess you understand any of this. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for many things. But listen now. When it’s time to leave, you leave. Don’t be afraid, and don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast.”

  Then she turns and leaves her daughter cowering in the darkened room.

  Beyond the bedroom window, the coyotes are still complaining to the moon. The sound of their hooting fills up the young Carlotta’s awareness until it seems to speak directly to the heart of her.

  Then comes the second and final gunshot.

  I have only seen the Enemy briefly, and by that time, I had stopped thinking of them as the Enemy.

  Can’t describe them too well. Words really do fail me. And by that time, might as well admit it, I was not myself a thing I would once have recognized as human. Just say that Erasmus and I and the rema
ining timesliders were taken up into the Enemy’s embrace along with all the rest of the Fleet—all the memories we had deemed lost to entropy or warfare were preserved there. The virtualities the Enemies had developed across whole kalpas of time were labyrinthine, welcoming, strange beyond belief. Did I roam in those mysterious glades? Yes I did, girl, and Erasmus by my side, for many long (subjective) years, and we became—well, larger than I can say.

  And the galaxies aged and flew away from one another until they were swallowed up in manifolds of cosmic emptiness, connected solely by the gentle and inexorable thread of gravity. Stars winked out, girl; galaxies merged and filled with dead and dying stars; atoms decayed to their last stable forms. But the fabric of space can tolerate just so much emptiness. It isn’t infinitely elastic. Even vacuum ages. After some trillions and trillions of years, therefore, the expansion became a contraction.

  During that time, I occasionally sensed or saw the Enemy—but I have to call them something else: say, the Great Old Ones, pardon my pomposity—who had constructed the dark matter virtualities in which I now lived. They weren’t people at all. Never were. They passed through our adopted worlds like storm clouds, black and majestic and full of subtle and inscrutable lightnings. I couldn’t speak to them, even then; as large and old as I had become, I was only a fraction of what they were.

  I wanted to ask them why they had destroyed the Earth, why so many people had to be wiped out of existence or salvaged by the evolved benevolence of the Fleet. But Erasmus, who delved into these questions more deeply than I was able to, said the Great Old Ones couldn’t perceive anything as tiny or ephemeral as a rocky planet like the Earth. The Earth and all the many planets like her had been destroyed, not by any willful calculation, but by autonomic impulses evolved over the course of many cosmic conflations—impulses as imperceptible and involuntary to the Old Ones as the functioning of your liver is to you, girl.

  The logic of it is this: Life-bearing worlds generate civilizations that eventually begin playing with dark matter, posing a potential threat to the continuity of the Old Ones. Some number of these intrusions can be tolerated and contained—like the Fleet, they were often an enriching presence—but too many of them would endanger the stability of the system. It’s as if we were germs, girl, wiped out by a giant’s immune system. They couldn’t see us, except as a somatic threat. Simple as that.

  But they could see the Fleet. The Fleet was just big enough and durable enough to register on the senses of the Old Ones. And the Old Ones weren’t malevolent: they perceived the Fleet much the way the Fleet had once perceived us, as something primitive but alive and thinking and worth the trouble of salvation.

  So they raptured up the Fleet (and similar Fleet-like entities in countless other galaxies), thus preserving us against the blind oscillations of cosmic entropy.

  (Nice of them, I suppose. But if I ever grow large enough or live long enough to confront an Old One face to face, I mean to lodge a complaint. Hell yes we were small—people are some of the smallest thought-bearing creatures in the cosmos, and I think we all kind of knew that even before the end of the world . . . you did, surely. But pain is pain and grief is grief. It might be inevitable, it might even be built into the nature of things; but it isn’t good, and it ought not to be tolerated, if there’s a choice.)

  Which I guess is why I’m here watching you squinch your eyes shut while the sound of that second gunshot fades into the air.

  Watching you process a nightmare into a vision.

  Watching you build a pearl around a grain of bloody truth.

  Watching you go fast.

  The bodiless Carlotta hovers a while longer in the fixed and changeless corridors of the past.

  Eventually, the long night ends. Raw red sunlight finds the window.

  Last dawn this small world will ever see, as it happens; but the young Carlotta doesn’t know that yet.

  Now that the universe has finished its current iteration, all its history is stored in transdimensional metaspace like a book on a shelf—it can’t be changed. Truly so. I guess I know that now, girl. Memory plays tricks that history corrects.

  And I guess that’s why the Old Ones let me have access to these events, as we hover on the brink of a new creation.

  I know some of the questions you’d ask me if you could. You might say, Where are you really? And I’d say, I’m at the end of all things, which is really just another beginning. I’m walking in a great garden of dark matter, while all things known and baryonic spiral up the ladder of unification energies to a fiery new dawn. I have grown so large, girl, that I can fly down history like a bird over a prairie field. But I cannot remake what has already been made. That is one power I do not possess.

  I watch you get out of bed. I watch you dress. Blue jeans with tattered hems, a man’s lumberjack shirt, those thrift-shop Reeboks. I watch you go to the kitchen and fill your vinyl Bratz backpack with bottled water and Tootsie Rolls, which is all the cuisine your meth-addled mother has left in the cupboards.

  Then I watch you tiptoe into Abby’s bedroom. I confess I don’t remember this part, girl. I suppose it didn’t fit my fantasy about a benevolent ghost. But here you are, your face fixed in a willed indifference, stepping over Dan-O’s corpse. Dan-O bled a lot after Abby Boudaine blew a hole in his chest, and the carpet is a sticky rust-colored pond.

  I watch you pull Dan-O’s ditty bag from where it lies half under the bed. On the bed, Abby appears to sleep. The pistol is still in her hand. The hand with the pistol in it rests beside her head. Her head is damaged in ways the young Carlotta can’t stand to look at. Eyes down, girl. That’s it.

  I watch you pull a roll of bills from the bag and stuff it into your pack. Won’t need that money where you’re going! But it’s a wise move, taking it. Commendable forethought.

  Now go.

  I have to go too. I feel Erasmus waiting for me, feel the tug of his love and loyalty, gentle and inevitable as gravity. He used to be a machine older than the dirt under your feet, Carlotta Boudaine, but he became a man—my man, I’m proud to say. He needs me, because it’s no easy thing crossing over from one universe to the next. There’s always work to do, isn’t that the truth?

  But right now, you go. You leave those murderous pills on the nightstand, find that highway. Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait. Don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast. And excuse me while I take my own advice.

  First published in The New Space Opera 2,

  edited by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan.

  About the Author

  Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, but little more was heard from him until the late ’80s, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the 20th Century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Chronoliths, the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his story “The Perseids.” In 2006, he won the Hugo Award for his acclaimed novel, Spin. His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Blind Lake, Bios, Axis, and Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, and a collection of his short work, The Perseids and Other Stories. His most recent book is the novel, Burning Paradise. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

  Distributed Cities

  Carl Abbott

  The Swarm is a fleet of at least one hundred fifty dirigibles that ceaselessly crisscross their planet in the recent action-packed novel Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. Once they were the defense force for the vast city of Spearpoint, but they along ago declared independence and have become a complete society. In effect, they constitute the physically disconnected pieces of a single city.

  Reynolds does not supply full details, but it is clear that different airships serve different functions, much like the neighborhoods or districts of a city
. An oversized super-aerostat serves as the city’s “downtown” and government center. There are military airships, and presumably industrial and agricultural airships to serve the different needs of the Swarmers, who live their lives in the air.

  Like a real city, the Swarm governs itself (through an airship oligarchy), trades with communities outside itself, accepts immigrants who meet its standards, and has persisted over generations. Reynolds is explicit: This is an “aerial city” where the protagonist Quillon, on arrival, hears “four thousand subtly different engine notes, not one tuned to exactly the same tone as any other, but combining, merging, threading, echoing off the crater walls to form one endless, throbbing, harmonically rich chorus that was utterly, shockingly familiar. The hum of the city.”

  The Swarm is a “distributed city,” a concept that is emerging simultaneously in urban planning theory and science fiction. The term can be derived by analogy from distributed computing where a single task is spread out among multiple networked but physically separate machines. A distributed city is one whose neighborhoods and districts are widely parceled out over space and form a unit by interacting over distance. It retains the spatial specialization of a normal city, but the pieces are scattered rather than adjacent.

  A distributed city is not simply suburban sprawl, which is a phenomenon that we can map as a single contiguous geographic entity. Geographers and planners can debate where exactly to draw boundaries around metropolitan Toronto or Phoenix, but they agree that it can be done. A distributed city is something different. It can be mapped only as a discontinuous scattering of nodes or pieces that each play distinct roles as part of a larger whole.

  There’s really no distributed city yet to be found on our planetary surface. Megaregions like the BosWash megalopolis of the northeastern United States or Japan’s Taiheiyo Belt (Pacific Belt) from Tokyo to Osaka and beyond might look at first glance like they fit the model—they consist of several nodes located along a corridor like beads on a string—but each component is fundamentally independent of the others.