Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "Look at the City." He meant the universe-spanning net, the rippling surfaces within.

  The City was a netted sphere. It contained giant black holes, galactic supercluster mass and above. They had been deliberately assembled. And they were merging, in a hierarchy of more and more massive holes. Life could subsist on the struts of the City, feeding off the last trickle of free energy.

  Mankind was moving supercluster black holes, coalescing them in hierarchies all over the reachable universe, seeking to extend their lifetimes. It was a great challenge.

  Too great.

  Sombrely, Geador showed her more.

  The network was disrupted. It looked as if some immense object had punched out from the inside, ripping and twisting the struts. The tips of the broken struts were glowing a little brighter than the rest of the network, as if burning. Beyond the damaged network she could see the giant coalescing holes, their horizons distorted, great frozen waves of infalling matter visible in their cold surfaces.

  This was an age of war: an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. Great rivers of mind were guttering, drying.

  "This is the Conflux. How can there be war?"

  Geador said, "We are managing the last energy sources of all. We have responsibility for the whole of the future. With such responsibility comes tension, disagreement. Conflict." She sensed his gentle, bitter humor. "We have come far since the Afterglow, Anlic. But in some ways we have much in common with the brawling argumentative apes of that brief time."

  "Apes. . . ? Why am I here, Geador?"

  "You're an eddy in the Conflux. We all wake up from time to time. It's just an accident. Don't trouble, Anlic. You are not alone. You have us."

  Deliberately she moved away from him. "But I am not like you," she said bleakly. "I do not recall the Afterglow. I don't know where I came from."

  "What does it matter?" he said harshly. "You have existed for all but the briefest moments of the universe's long history-"

  "Has there been another like me?"

  He hesitated. "No," he said. "No other like you. There hasn't been long enough."

  "Then I am alone."

  "Anlic, all your questions will be over, answered or not, if you let yourself die here. Come now . . ."

  She knew he was right.

  She fled with him. The great black hole City disappeared behind her, its feeble glow attenuated by her gathering velocity.

  She yielded to Geador's will. She had no choice. Her questions were immediately lost in the clamor of community.

  She would wake only once more.

  Start with a second.

  Zoom out. Factor it up to get the life of the Earth, with that second a glowing moment embedded within. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth's lifetime is reduced to the span of that second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again and again and again . . .

  Anlic, for the last time, came to self-awareness.

  It was inevitable that, given enough time, she would be budded by chance occurrence. And so it happened.

  She clung to herself and looked around.

  It was dark here. Vast, wispy entities cruised across spacetime's swelling breast.

  There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. The last solid matter had long evaporated: burned up by proton decay, a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.

  For ages the black hole engineers had struggled to maintain their Cities, to gather more material to replace what decayed away. It was magnificent, futile.

  The last structures failed, the last black holes allowed to evaporate.

  The Conflux of minds had dispersed, flowing out over the expanding universe like water running into sand.

  Even now, of course, there was something rather than nothing. Around her was an unimaginably thin plasma: free electrons and positrons decayed from the last of the Big Bang's hydrogen, orbiting in giant, slow circles. This cold soup was the last refuge of humanity.

  The others drifted past her like clouds, immense, slow, coded in wispy light-year-wide atoms. And even now, the others clung to the solace of community.

  But that was not for Anlic.

  She pondered for a long time, determined not to slide back into the eternal dream.

  At length she understood how she had come to be.

  And she knew what she must do.

  She sought out Mine One, the wreckage of man's original galaxy. The search took more empty ages.

  With caution, she approached what remained.

  There was no shape here. No form, no color, no time, no order. And yet there was motion: a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles that rose and burst, spitting out fragments of mass-energy.

  This was the singularity that had once lurked within the great black hole's event horizon. Now it was naked, a glaring knot of quantum foam, a place where the unification of spacetime had been ripped apart to become a seething probabilistic froth.

  Once this object had oscillated violently, and savage tides, chaotic and unpredictable, had torn at any traveler unwary enough to come close. But the singularity's energy had been dissipated by each such encounter.

  Even singularities aged.

  Still, the frustrated energy contained there seethed, quantum-mechanically, randomly. And sometimes, in those belched fragments, put there purely by chance, there were hints of order.

  Structure. Complexity.

  She settled herself around the singularity's cold glow.

  Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took her longer to complete a single thought than it had once taken species to rise and fall on Earth.

  It didn't matter. She had plenty of time.

  She remembered her last conversation with Geador. Has there been another like me? . . . No. No other like you. There hasn't been long enough.

  Now Anlic had all the time there was. The universe was exhausted of everything but time.

  The longer she waited, the more complexity emerged from the singularity. Purely by chance. Much of it dissipated, purposeless.

  But some of the mass-energy fragments had sufficient complexity to be able to gather and store information about the thinning universe. Enough to grow.

  That, of course, was not enough. She continued to wait.

  At last-by chance-the quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.

  Anlic moved closer, coldly excited.

  It was a spark of consciousness: not descended from the grunting, breeding humans of the Afterglow, but born from the random quantum flexing of a singularity.

  Just as she had been.

  Anlic waited, nurturing, refining the rootless being's order and cohesion. And it gathered more data, developed sophistication.

  At last it-she-could frame questions.

  ". . . Who am I? Who are you? Why are there two and not one?"

  Anlic said, "I have much to tell you." And she gathered the spark in her attenuated soul.

  Together, mother and daughter drifted away, and the river of time ran slowly into an unmarked sea.

  KADDISH FOR THE LAST SURVIVOR

  Michael A. Burstein

  "The deniers' window of opportunity will be enhanced in years to come. The public, particularly the uneducated public, will be increasingly susceptible to Holocaust denial as survivors die.... Future generations will not hear the story from people who can say 'this is what happened to _me_. This is _my_ story.' For them it will be part of the distant past and, consequently, more susceptible to revision and denial."

  -- Deborah Lipstadt,

  Denying the Holocaust

  (1994)

  Sarah Jacobson's hands shook as she parked her clunky Volkswagen across the street from the old suburban house in which she had grown up. She sat there, breathing in the gas fumes from the idling engine, as she watched the reporters swarm all over the front lawn.

  Her boyfriend, Tom Hol
loway, sat next to her in the passenger seat. He stared at her for a moment, then asked, "Ready?"

  Sarah nodded. As she turned off the car's engine, Tom jumped out of the front seat, dashed around the front of the car, and opened the driver's side door for her. For once, she was grateful for the old-fashioned Southern charm. To think, when she'd first met him, she'd resented it.

  Well, she didn't resent it now. Tom was positioning himself to fend off the horde of reporters, and she was grateful for that too. Fortunately, no one had noticed, or else they had not yet connected Sarah to the biggest news story of the week. Tom gave Sarah his hand, and she allowed him to help her out.

  She stretched as she got out of the car, feeling the warmth of the spring sunlight on her back. How strange that she could enjoy it, on this morning of all mornings. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, listening to a bird singing in the distance.

  Tom's voice intruded upon her brief peace. "Shall we?"

  She gave him a small smile. "I guess so."

  "OK." Tom looked around, concentrating his gaze at the sea of reporters. "Lot of excitement for a small town on Long Island," he said. Sarah noticed that he was making no effort to suppress his Southern accent; he knew how endearing she found it. "Hard to believe your grandfather's attracting all this attention."

  "Yeah," Sarah replied. "I know." She cocked an ear toward the reporters. "Listen."

  One radio reporter, close enough to be heard, was speaking into her thumbnail recorder, taping commentary for her story. "This is Paula Dietrich, reporting from Lawrence, Long Island, where Joshua Cohen is dying. Born in Warsaw in the 1920s, Cohen -- "

  Tom whistled. "He's become a celebrity. Finally got his fifteen minutes of fame."

  Sarah shrugged. They'd both studied Warhol. After all, they had both graduated from Harvard with honors. "As far as I'm concerned, he's just my grandfather."

  "Yeah, I know," Tom said softly. "Sorry. You sure you're ready?"

  "Ready as I'll ever be, I guess. If I can survive this, I can survive anything." Sarah grabbed Tom's hand. They walked off the sidewalk onto the path leading up to the front door. She braced herself for the barrage.

  One of the reporters glanced in their direction, and recognized Sarah. "It's the granddaughter!" he yelled, and began running towards them. In seconds, all of the shouting, sweating journalists had descended upon Sarah and Tom. The way they jostled at each other, trying to get better positions for recording their images, reminded Sarah of a plague of locusts come to feed.

  "We'd like to ask you -- "

  "May I ask you -- "

  "I have a question -- "

  "How do you feel?"

  "Did you ever think -- "

  Tom shouted above the Babel of voices. "Please, everyone! Sarah just wants to get inside."

  Obviously that was not good enough for the reporters. Instead, they used Tom's interruption to create some semblance of order to their questioning. One reporter took the lead, and the others fell silent.

  "Ms. Jacobson, Trevor Hunt, _USNA Online_. Could you tell us what you're going through at the moment?"

  Sarah glanced at Tom and shrugged. It would be easier to answer a few of their questions first, she decided, and then go inside. She looked directly into Hunt's right eye, which glowed red with the lens of an implanted camera. "What anyone would go through when her grandfather is dying, I guess."

  "But, Ms. Jacobson!" interjected the radio correspondent they had been listening to earlier. "The circumstances of your grandfather's position -- "

  Sarah interrupted her. "Listen. I know what my grandfather is to the world, but to me, he's just my grandfather. Now let me go say goodbye to him in peace. I promise I'll talk to you -- all of you -- later."

  Apparently chastened, the reporters parted in front of Sarah and Tom, clearing the path to the front door. As they walked up the path, a background murmuring began, like cats growling at each other over their food. The reporters chatted with their colleagues or recorded views for their broadcasts. Tom whispered to Sarah, "I'm really surprised. They're being more courteous than I would have guessed."

  No sooner had Tom said that, when a small man stepped right in front of them, blocking their way. He brushed back his sandy blond hair and asked, "Ms. Jacobson, why does your family continue to perpetrate this hoax?"

  The growling noises of conversation cut off, leaving nothing but the sounds of the cameras and recorders.

  At first Sarah thought he was a private citizen, and not a member of the media, as he carried no recording devices and his eyes appeared normal. But a second glance exposed something far more sinister. This man wore a memory recorder implant behind his right ear. His audience, whoever they were, would be able to directly interface with his memories of confronting Sarah, over and over again.

  As calmly as she could, Sarah said, "Excuse me?"

  The man smiled. "I asked, given the fact that your grandfather, who lived a long and healthy life, is now on his deathbed, why does your family feel the need to perpetuate the hoax of the Holocaust?"

  Tom stepped forward, shouting, "Now, listen here, you -- "

  Sarah gently reached out and grabbed Tom's shoulder. "Tom, stop." She turned to the man. "Excuse me, but I didn't catch your name."

  "Sorry. Maxwell Schwab, from the Institute for Historical Revision. I'm doing an article for our academic journal." He waved his hand at the other reporters. "We'd like to know why your family has gone to the trouble of inviting the mass media here, pretending to the world that the Holocaust actually happened and that your grandfather was a victim of this fictional event."

  Tom pulled at her arm. "Come on, Sarah, we don't need to listen to this shi -- this crap."

  Sarah resisted. "No, wait." She pivoted her body to face the reporter. "Mr. Schwab?"

  "Yes?"

  Sarah slapped him on the face, hard, glad she'd studied self-defense. He staggered back, and fell onto his backside. Sarah hoped it was painful enough to keep people from playing this memory.

  Schwab sat there, unmoving, just staring at Sarah. No one bothered to pick him up.

  She turned to Tom. "_Now_, let's go inside."

  No one else stopped them.

  * * * *

  The first thing that hit Sarah as she entered the house was the smell. The odor of stewing meat and potatoes from the kitchen mixed with the old, musty smell that the house always seemed to have whenever Sarah had returned from college. The living room seemed dark, and it took her a moment to realize that all the shades were drawn, probably to keep the reporters from looking in.

  She called out to her parents. "Hello? Dad? Mother?"

  Her father called back, "In the kitchen, honey, be right out."

  Sarah turned to Tom. "Are _you_ going to be OK?"

  Tom smiled, shrugged, and took Sarah's hand briefly. "Yeah, I've dealt with her before. It's not too bad."

  "She's not _your_ mother, though."

  The door to the kitchen swung open. Sarah's parents, Paul and Anna Jacobson, entered the living room. Her father looked calm, cool, and collected, the way that he always looked. He wore a jacket and tie, in stark contrast to the polo shirts and jeans which Tom and she were wearing. Sarah couldn't remember a time when her father wasn't dressed so impeccably. Her mother, on the other hand, wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants, as if dressing well was currently her last priority. She appeared frazzled, with her hair all askew.

  Tom greeted them with a simple hello. Sarah's father smiled at Tom, but her mother barely glanced in Tom's direction.

  There was a moment of silence, which her father broke. "Come, Tom, I need your help in the kitchen. You can tell me how your family's doing back in Durham. And how about those Mets?"

  The two men went through the slow swinging door, which creaked loudly until it finally shut, muffling their awkward conversation about baseball. Sarah and her mother watched the door for a few seconds after it had closed, and then Sarah turned to look at her mother. "I guess," Sarah said,
"I ought to go upstairs and see Grampa."

  Her mother sniffed. "Sure, go ahead. Do you want to bring your _goyische_ boyfriend upstairs too?"

  _Damn_, Sarah thought, _she wasn't going to be reasonable. Surprise, surprise._ "Mother, please -- "

  "And now you're living with him."

  Shocked, Sarah took a deep breath. "I never told you that! How did you find out?"

  Her mother grinned. "Just now, Sarah. You may be my smart Harvard daughter, but you're not smarter than me."

  Sarah felt furious, but more with herself than with her mother. Anna Jacobson had done it _again_, pretending to know something so as to trick the information out of Sarah. Damn! How could she have been so stupid? Well, as long as Mother had figured it out, Sarah might as well get everything out in the open.

  "I was going to tell you anyway, Mother. Today, in fact. Tom and I are living together. We have been for a while now."

  Her mother glared at her and Sarah said, "I don't care how you feel about it. And anyway, things are different now."

  "Such defiance," her mother said, making clucking sounds with her tongue. "And things being different isn't an excuse."

  "You're right, Mother," Sarah said as sarcastically as she could. "An economic depression is no excuse for being unable to afford my own apartment."

  "Now Sarah -- "

  "'Now Sarah,' _what_?" Sarah slammed the doorframe with her palm. "It's not like you have the money to help out; you still live _here_, in the oldest house in the neighborhood. You can't even afford automatic doors. Well, I can't afford to live by myself. No one right out of school can, not with our loans. And as it is -- " She paused for a moment, then took the plunge. "As it is, Tom and I will probably be getting married soon anyway."

  There. The big secret was out. Sarah studied her mother's face carefully; it seemed completely shut down. Her mother just stared at her, stonily, not reacting. Finally, Sarah couldn't take the silence any longer. "Well?" she asked. "Aren't you going to say something?"