Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Yes. Precisely. If you rupture the stationary shield, who knows what might seep out into the atmosphere.” He gave me a thin-lipped smile. “Fortunately, Sensei, we shall not have to wait three years for an Environmental Impact Study. The Imperium wants this thing opened. Now. It’s why you’re here.”

  “To tell you the truth, sir, I’m more worried about what might seep in. They must have sealed it against Titan’s atmosphere for good reason.”

  “A motive that expired millions of years ago.” He rose. “I’m having a containment dome erected around the locus. There’s no way we can establish blockade underneath the ice as well, but this will meet most likely challenges. Or so I’m assured.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.” I belatedly heaved up my bulk. “When will you want me out there?”

  “You’ll be advised. We have a full scale colloquium scheduled, starting at two. I’ll expect you to be there, Sensei Park, and on your best behavior. No more outbursts, if you please.”

  “More damned chin-wagging. Science used to be an empirical exercise,” I grumbled.

  “Led by theory, as I’m sure you understand.” He was standing at his door, and I went out, biting my lip. Nobody had the faintest starting point for a theory to explain my causal distortions, and not much to account for the photon-entangled portage functor. I could do it, I could show them a method for using it (and had), but I didn’t have a theory-empowered clue how or why. I’m nobody’s mutant superman, that much I do know. (Or is that just a fat man’s self-doubt speaking?)

  Postmodern science, as far as I can tell looking in from the outside, is drunk on the sound of its own voice. But yes, I know: look who’s complaining. I recalled again that Victorian sage, that poet Tennyson. He had it right: I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel; for words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, a use in measured language lies; the sad mechanic exercise, like dull narcotics, numbing pain. I followed Dr. Namgoong along the narrow compiled corridors of Huygens station, so like those awful domiciles on the outskirts of Palo Alto, and went to hear the sad mechanics exercise their tongues and dull their pain, and maybe mine.

  The circulated air was pungent, despite the scrubbers, with the musk of excited animals crowded together. A schematic chart I’d grown familiar with, these last few months, started displaying on the auditorium wall, replacing the magnified image of Saturn’s glorious tilted hat. The Fermi Paradox Solution candidates. My eye bounced off them, falling down a cliff of words and logic with no footing in reality beyond the dragon-haunted thing outside the dome:

  Where are They?

  Fermi 1. They are here among us, and call themselves Koreans.

  That always got a satisfied titter, except from any Hungarians in the crowd.

  Fermi 2. They are here, running things.

  A chance for the Hungarians, and anyone else chafing under the Imperium, to get their own back with a belly laugh. No giggles here, though, I noticed.

  Fermi 3. They came and left.

  Bingo, I thought. They came and left flowers scattered in their wake. Strictly, though, that was Fermi 53, the only choice left. The ancient intelligent dinosaur hypothesis.

  Fermi 6. We are interdicted.

  Fermi 10. They are still on their way here.

  The starship had blown that one, and others like it, clear out of the water. Time to trim the list, methinks.

  Fermi 21. They’re listening, only fools are transmitting.

  Fermi 22. Dedicated killer machines destroy everything that moves, anywhere in space.

  Fermi 28. The Vingean Singularity takes them . . . elsewhere.

  No Singularity back near the end of the Cretaceous, I thought. Judging by the remote viewer’s sketches, that saurian pilot was advanced, but not sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

  Fermi 38. Earth is the optimal place for life, just by chance.

  Could be. And for intelligent life, at that. Hey, look, we’ve seen it twice: the smart dinosaurs and Homo sap.

  Fermi 48. Language is vanishingly rare.

  Ha! Yeah, right. Blah blah blah. Still, maybe so. The skies are awfully silent, which is where we came in . . .

  Fermi 49. Science is a rare accident.

  Not as rare as I am, I thought, touching the etiological chains and vortices all around—and no scientist ever predicted me. Most of them still didn’t even know about me, thanks to all those Above Top Secret restrictions. Damn it.

  Namgoong cleared his throat at the podium. Voices, in clumps and then one by one, fell silent. Hey, maybe that’s it. God tapped His microphone, and the cosmos shut up to listen. And they’re still listening, bent and cowed by the awfulness of what they heard. But not us, we haven’t heard from God yet, despite a thousand revelations claimed and proclaimed. Or if we have, there’s no way to search through the babbling noise and extract the divine signal. Funny way to run a universe.

  I could feel the dinosaur calling to me, even so, through the appalling cold of Titan’s snows and the void of fifty or a hundred million years. And the entwined memory of my son, sacrificed for nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “Those are the classic guesses—most of them wrong.” The Director flicked his finger; the display went to blank gray. “We still have no idea why the galaxy, indeed the universe as a whole, is quiet. Why the stars are still shining, spilling out their colossal energy resources, when intelligence should be collecting it. Calculations you’re all familiar with prove that a single intelligent species arising anywhere in the galaxy within the last billion years would by now have colonized all its trillion stars and associated bodies, turned the sky black with Matrioshka shells—or perhaps obliterated the stars in vast, wasteful wars.”

  I pricked up my ears. A political subtext? Perhaps not; maybe our director was just a tone-deaf drone. I glanced around; several people near me had dropped their eyes, more than one held fists clenched tight. Okay.

  “One of the equally classic Great Filters must screen out potential intelligent life and leave the heavens exactly as they’d have to be if there is no life at all out there. No intelligent, starfaring life, anyway.

  “So now we’re faced with a new paradox. Fermi remains unanswered—and yet we have this old vehicle made by beings not of our own species, but apparently related. The likelihood of that coincidence being due to chance alone is impossibly small. I see only three remaining possibilities.”

  “Barney did it,” someone called, muted but clear across the room. A wave of tittering. I felt my jaw tighten, and a flush creep into my cheeks.

  “A previous civilization sprung from dinosaur stock on Cretaceous Earth, or even earlier, yes,” said Dr. Namgoog evenly. “The opinion represented here today by our guest, Sensei Park.”

  A pattering of polite applause, some even more muted groans.

  “We have evidence in the form of preliminary scans by our Naval remote viewer, Colonel Meagle, that the creature . . . the being, forgive me . . . in charge of the craft has just such an origin. Leaving aside the improbability of parallel evolution. If so, this leaves the earlier and larger Fermi question unanswered: where are its kindred now, why haven’t they conquered the whole galaxy? Tipler and others proved decades ago that this could have been achieved at plausible sub-light speeds within a million years. If they have, why don’t we see them?”

  Hearing it stated so flatly, I was dizzied, as always, by the prospect. Flotillas of starcraft fleeing into the spiral arms at a tenth of light speed, crammed with dragon seed or our own. Or minute nanoscale pods fired toward a hundred million stars by magnetic catapult, or driven on filmy wings by laser light. Yet these, too, were last year’s dreams, last century’s. We had stepped from Earth to Ganymede to Titan entangled on a light beam, and without waiting to be shoved here by sailboat. The moment entangled luminal portage became a reality for my own species, it opened the yawning cavern: why not for them, as well? What the hell
was a starship doing here? Why bother? It was so last week, like finding a steam locomotive under the ice.

  Namgoog was enunciating his other solutions to Fermi, but I didn’t care. I was entranced by the mystery of the sleeping creature, sedate under his bedding of live flowers. It was a hunger like my endless appetite for chow. I wanted to step straight through the damned shell of the ship and look the critter in the eye, man to man. Even if it decided to eat me.

  That’s what dragons do, isn’t it?

  And so to bed. Where I lay in the dark in a lather of fright for fifteen minutes. Fearful and weak. Bleak. Needing a leak. I climbed out and thudded to the sanitary personal. When I got back, after a swab up and down and across with a wet face cloth to dab away the worse of the flopsweat, my door was slightly open. Through it came the never-stopping background clanging and banging of humans and machines keeping the place ticking over. Snapping my fingers, I clicked the room light up to dim. Dr. Jendayi Shumba, chubby string looper, stretched at ease on my bed, clad in sensible pajamas with a mission blaze on the collar. Of course, I jumped and squealed.

  “What the— Is there some—”

  “Hush up, dear man, and come over here.” She grinned.

  “You’re not serious. Are you?”

  In evidence, she slithered out of her pjs and raised her eyebrows.

  “Absurd. I’d crush you like a bug.”

  “Myeong-hui, you don’t weigh any more, here, than my little boy.”

  “You have a—?” I swallowed, and crept closer. “I had a son once.”

  “Let us be in this moment, Sensei,” she said without reproach.

  “I’m disgusting to look upon,” I said frankly. “And I don’t need a pity—”

  She had her fingers across my mouth, and then pulled me down through several clunky jumpy evolutions. “There are other ways to convey one’s . . . intimacy,” she said.

  “Ulp,” I protested.

  “An easy mouth is a great thing on a long journey, is it not, old fellow?” she said, releasing mine and patting my neck.

  “Ex-cuse me?”

  Jendayi burst out laughing, a slightly husky, wonderfully exciting sound. “A quote from an old British classic about a horse. Nineteenth century, I believe. You might have read it as a child. Black Beauty.”

  “You are the black beauty,” I said, noticing a cue when it smacked me between the eyes. I raised my voice and said, “Door close,” and it did.

  “You’ve got a way to break into the ship, don’t you?” she said, after a time without time.

  I was reeling and reckless. “Yes. Probably.”

  “So you really are a poltergeist.” She stroked my contemptible belly, as if it were a friendly animal sharing the bed with us. “Tony nearly poked his damn eye out.” Her laugh was throaty, dirty, a tonic.

  “Don’t blame me,” I said, and found a glass of water, drained it. “It’s like being able to wiggle your ears.”

  In the near-dark, she wiggled hers, and more.

  But before she left, Jendayi said, “Bring me back a sample. A skin scraping, anything with DNA. Just for me, honey, okay?” Oh, so that’s why you’re here? Had to be some reason. Exploitative bitch. But that’s life, right?

  Looking like a well-laid but annoyed and put-upon squat polar bear in my bodyglove, some hellish number of minus degrees on the far side of its skin, I stood gazing down from the edge of the excavation. The spacecraft was unaltered, every bloom precisely where it had been several days before, where it had been, perhaps, several tens of millions of years before. Unless it was salted here recently as a snare for gullible humans. In which case, it might be younger than I. Not so likely, though.

  “Ready when you are, Sensei,” said the political officer, doing Mr. Kim’s bidding, and damn the scientists’ caution.

  I raised one thumb and let myself drift. Cause and effect unbraided, started their long, looping dance of etiological distortion, swirling, curdling. I was the still center of the spinning world. Certainties creaked, cracked. A favorite poem entered my heart, by Ji-Hoon Cho, “Flower petals on the sleeves”:

  The wanderer’s long sleeves

  Are wet from flower petals.

  Twilight over a riverside village

  Where wine is mellow.

  Had this saurian person below me, trapped now in timelessness, known wine? Crushed release and perhaps moments of joy from some archaic fruit not yet grape? I thought, with a wrenching mournfulness:

  When this night is over

  Flowers will fall in that village.

  “Hey!”

  And there went the flowers, drawn up and tossed away from the hull of the starship. They were scattering in the methane wind, lifted and flung by the bitter gusts, floral loveliness snap-frozen, blown upward and falling down in drifts into the alien snow.

  “The stationary shield is discontinued,” said a clipped voice in my ears.

  I stepped forward, ready to enter the ancient, imprisoned place. To meet my dinosaur, who had either died or even now lived, freed from timeless suspension. A hand caught my encased arm.

  “Not yet, Sam. We have a team prepped. Thanks, you’ve done good here today.” I turned, hardly able to see through my tears, and it was not that bastard Tony Caetani groveling his apologies, the universe could not be so chirpy as that. I hadn’t met this one before, although he’d picked up my dining room nickname and used it with a certain familiar breeziness; a beefy functionary of some armed service division, grinning at me in his bluff farmboy way. I nodded, and watched the team of marines go down, and remembered my dear boy and the way he had gone forward fearlessly into darkness and then into the fire falling from the sky. It did not matter one whit that I thought his cause wrong-headed. I remembered a poem in that book I’d found in the ruined library, a poem by an Englishman named Kipling that had torn my heart as I sat before Song-Dam’s closed coffin. There was no comfort this tide, the poem warned me, nor in any tide, save this:

  he did not shame his kind—

  Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

  Without shame, I sobbed, but then drew myself up and turned back to Huygens agora. Perhaps, I told myself, ten or sixty million years ago, another father had laid his son on these cruel snows and bade him farewell. I murmured to that reptilian father, offering what poor borrowed comfort I might to us both, across all that void of space and time: “Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!”

  I looked straight up above me, at the photodiode display before my eyes in the viewmask, swallowing hard, to follow the streaming tide of blossoms on the wind, and there was Saturn, old Father Time, hanging in the orange smoke of the sky, an arrow through his heart. I gave him a respectful nod, and raised one gloved thumb in salute.

  First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 2009.

  About the Author

  Australian writer, editor, futurist, and critic Damien Broderick, a Senior Fellow in the School of Cultural Commincations at the University of Melbourne, made his first sale in 1964 to John Carnell’s anthology New Writings in SF 1. In the decades that followed, he has kept up a steady stream of fiction, non-fiction, futurist speculations, and critical work, which has won him multiple Ditmar and Aurealis Awards. He sold his first novel, Sorcerer’s World, in 1970; it was later reissued in a rewritten version in the United States as The Black Grail. Broderick’s other books include the novels The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, Striped Holes, and The White Abacus, as well as books written with Rory Barnes and Barbara Lamar. His many short stories have been collected in A Man Returns, The Dark Between the Stars, Uncle Bones: Four Science Fiction Novellas, and, most recently, The Quilla Engine: Science Fiction Stories. He also wrote the visionary futurist classic, The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technology, a critical study of science fiction, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction, Scie
nce Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, (written with Paul Di Filippo),edited the non-fiction anthology Year Million: Science at the Far End of Knowledge, as well as editing the SF anthology Earth is But a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future, and three anthologies of Australian science fiction, The Zeitgeist Machine, Strange Attractors, and Matilda at the Speed of Light. His most recent publication is an anthology, edited with John Boston, The Daymakers.

  Laika’s Ghost

  Karl Schroeder

  The flight had been bumpy; the landing was equally so, to the point where Gennady was sure the old Tupolev would blow a tire. Yet his seat-mate hadn’t even shifted position in two hours. That was fine with Gennady, who had spent the whole trip trying to pretend he wasn’t there at all.

  The young American had been a bit more active during the flight across the Atlantic: at least, his eyes had been open and Gennady could see colored lights flickering across them from his augmented reality glasses. But he had exchanged less than twenty words with Gennady since they’d left Washington.

  In short, he’d been the ideal traveling companion.

  The other four passengers were stretching and groaning. Gennady poked Ambrose in the side and said, “Wake up. Welcome to the ninth-biggest country in the world.”

  Ambrose snorted and sat up. “Brazil?” he said hopefully. Then he looked out his window. “What the hell?”

  The little municipal airport had a single gate, which as the only plane on the field, they were taxiing up to uncontested. Over the entrance to the single-story building was the word “Степногорск.” “Welcome to Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady as he stood to retrieve his luggage from the overhead rack. He traveled light by habit. Ambrose, he gathered, had done so from necessity.

  “Stepnogorsk . . . ?” Ambrose shambled after him, a mass of wrinkled clothing leavened with old sweat.

  “Secret Soviet town,” Ambrose mumbled as they reached the plane’s hatch and a burst of hot dry air lifted his hair. “Population sixty-thousand,” he added as he put his left foot on the metal steps. Halfway down he said, “Manufactured anthrax bombs in the Cold War!” And as he set foot on the tarmac he finished with, “Where the hell is Kazakhstan? . . . Oh.”