The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Here he shows us that, popular wisdom to the contrary, being visited by an angel may not really be all that good a thing after all . . .

  Imelda leaves her modest family home as the evening shade washes over the front garden, a coy smile lifting her maroon-glossed lips. She’s off to see her lover, a prospect which lifts her heart and enhances her buoyant nature. The sun is slowly sinking behind the gigantic seven-hundred-year-old arcology that dominates the center of her hometown, Kuhmo, casting a shadow which methodically stretches out to darken the town’s outlying districts. It is a sharp eclipse which she has witnessed every evening of her seventeen years. Yet the gloaming it brings does nothing to stifle her mood; she’s a happy, beautiful girl with an enchantingly flat face and pert nose, her auburn hair flowing below her shoulders. Tonight she’s chosen a sleeveless blue and white dress to wear, its semiorganic fabric swirling jauntily around her long legs. Wherever she goes, she attracts wistful glances from the boys who linger along Kuhmo’s boring streets as they search for something to do before the night is out.

  She turns into Rustwith Street, one of the broad thoroughfares which radiate out from the hexagonal base of the tapering arcology. Tall novik trees line this street, as they do all the major routes cutting through the civic center, their woolly blue-green foliage a deliberate counterpoint to the bleak mountainous walls of the arcology. There are vehicles driving down the wide road, primitive vehicles with wheels powered by electric motors. This world of Anagaska has never really benefited from the bountiful wealth flowing among the Greater Commonwealth planets, its citizens seemingly content to bumble along their own slow cautious development route, decades if not centuries behind the more dynamic worlds. And this provincial town is very set in its ways, manacled to the past by the arcology which dominates the local mind-set much as it does the landscape.

  There are some modern regrav capsules in the air above the roads. Shiny colorful ovoids as big as the cars below, skimming silently along at their regulation fifteen-meter altitude, which puts them level with the upper branches of the trees.

  Imelda pays the traffic no attention as she hurries along to the café where she has arranged to meet her lover; like the arcology, the buzz of vehicles is a mere background fixture. So she is completely unaware of the chrome green capsule gliding along at walking pace several hundred meters behind her, maintaining a steady distance. The two Advancer Protectorate members inside are observing her through sensors meshed with the capsule’s metal skin, and a deluge of scrutineer programs they have scattered across the local net. Their organization might not be official, but they have access to police codes, allowing them to pursue their clandestine business undetected within the town’s electronic and physical architecture.

  As Imelda turns into the Urwan plaza with its throng of pedestrians, several wolf whistles and raunchy pings are thrown in her direction. The scrutineers examine the pings for hidden code, but the boys and young men who sent them are intent only on compliments and hopeful for a smile. Imelda does smile breezily, but keeps on walking. She is using virtually none of her Advancer functions, the macrocellular clusters supplementing her nervous system are barely interfaced with the planetary cybersphere. Exoimages and mental icons are folded back into her peripheral vision, untouched by her neural hands. Secondary thought routines operating inside her macrocellular clusters monitor several relevant events. She is pleased to see that Sabine, her younger sister, has finally reached their aunt’s house in New Helsinki; there was a long delay at Inubo station while she waited for the delayed regrav bus connection. Imelda is quietly relieved, she loves her sister dearly, but Sabine is quite a ditzy girl; that kind of foul-up was likely to panic her. Imelda’s other interest is Erik Horovi, who is not merely on time, but well ahead of schedule, waiting for her in the Pathfinder café. An exoimage from the café’s net reveals him to be sitting at a booth table ordering the stewardbot to stand by. Her neural hands grip the exoimage and expand it, sliding the focus in toward his face. His own clusters must be alerting him to the observation for he grins round at the camera. She sends him a tactile ping, hand-squeezing-thigh, and says: “I’ll be there soon, order for me.”

  His grin broadens at the ping, and he calls the stewardbot over.

  It is all manufactured. Erik, his location, his responses, are in fact all being cooked up by a simulacrum program running in a large processor kube on the arcology’s seventy-fifth floor. The same suite of abandoned rooms where Erik’s unconscious body is lying, fastened to a field-medical cot. But the program has fooled Imelda; she hurries on through the plaza.

  Her route takes her out through one of the side paths before turning into a narrow opening between two buildings. The alleys here form a small maze as they link up to the rear of a dozen commercial buildings. But she’s perfectly safe. The walls might be high, and old, and dark; there may be rubbish scattered over the concrete; and there may not be any people about, but this is Kuhmo, and she remains linked to the cybersphere. Imelda is a thoroughly modern child of the Commonwealth; she knows that safety and the police are only the speed of a thought away.

  A lustrous green regrav capsule descends into the alley ahead of her. It’s unusual, but she doesn’t hesitate. She’s mildly puzzled, because it’s a large capsule, and she sees it’s going to be difficult for her to squeeze around. Just how stupid and inconsiderate is the pilot program?

  Her link to the cybersphere falls away. Imelda comes to an uncertain halt, frowning suspiciously at the capsule. She’s never been disconnected since the macrocellular clusters became active the year she reached sexual maturity. The cybersphere and beyond that the all-embracing Commonwealth unisphere are her eternal companions; they are her right, she thinks crossly. Even now, fear is alien to her. This is the Commonwealth.

  A malmetal door expands on the regrav capsule. Paul Alkoff steps out. The Protectorate team’s chief is a tall man, over four hundred years old, and twenty years out of rejuvenation; like just about everyone with an Advancer genetic heritage, his biological age is locked into his early thirties.

  “You’re in the way,” Imelda protests. “And I think your capsule is messing with reception.”

  “Sorry about that,” Paul says. A quick review of his exoimages shows him their kube is producing an optimum digital shadow of Imelda. Friends and family all think she’s still walking along the alley en route to the café. He holds his left hand up toward her, and the smallest weapon he’s wetwired with fires a stun pulse.

  Imelda feels nothing. The world shifts around her, and she realizes she’s fallen to the ground. There is no pain from the impact, though she knows she hit her head and shoulder hard. She heard the crack they made. There is no sensation from anywhere in her body now. She can neither blink nor move her eyeballs. However, her neural hands are not physical, she moves them across icons, triggering every security alert she possesses. There is no response. Shapes appear above her. Men, but out of focus. There is more movement. She is carried into the capsule. It is dark inside. Her mind is screaming, gibbering for help. No one can hear, there is no linkage. She is alone.

  The green capsule rises out of the alley and slips back into the designated travel path above the nearest thoroughfare. It is a brief journey to the base of the arcology, which now lies deep in the monstrosity’s umbra, then the capsule rises up the side until it reaches the seventy-fifth floor and edges its way through a fissure in the outer wall.

  At one time, in the decades after the arcology was built, the apartments up here on the upper levels were all packed to capacity, and the central malls buzzed with activity all day long. But that was seven hundred years ago, following the Starflyer war, when the entire population of Hanko was relocated to Anagaska. People were grateful for any accommodation they were given in the terrible aftermath of their homeworld’s destruction. Once they had recovered their equilibrium, they began to build out from the arcology, covering the fresh open landscape with new suburbs. Families started to drain away out of
the arcology to live in the less confined homes springing up along the new grid of roads. The vision back then was for a town that would continue to grow and establish new industries. Growth, though, proved expensive, and investment on poor old sidelined Anagaska was never abundant. Much cheaper and easier for the town council to refurbish sections of the arcology to keep their community going. In later centuries, even that philosophy stalled, and the whole edifice began to deteriorate from the top downward. Now the giant city-in-a-building is a decaying embarrassment, with no one capable of providing a satisfactory solution.

  Dank water from a slimed ceiling drips on the immaculate green skin of the regrav capsule as it settles on a cracked and buckled concrete floor. The cavernous hall used to be an exemplary mall, with shops, bars, and offices. Today it is a squalid embalmed memory of the comfortable times long gone. The only light comes from rents in the outer walls, while the ancient superstrength structural spars are sagging as they succumb to gravity and entropy. Not even the town’s bad boys venture up to these levels to conduct their nefarious affairs.

  Paul and his team member Ziggy Kare carry Imelda from the capsule into one of the abandoned shops. Its walls are dry, if filthy, and the floor is reasonably level. The stun pulse effect is slowly wearing off, allowing Imelda to move her eyes slightly. She sees signs of the new occupants, plyplastic furniture expanded out to form tables and chairs, red-tinged lights, electronic equipment, power cells—all the elements of a sophisticated covert operation. In one of the small rooms they pass, she sees a field-medical cot. Erik is lying on it. Her eyes widen in consternation, but her throat remains unresponsive as she tries to shout.

  The next room contains a great deal of equipment which she doesn’t understand. There is, however, a face she recognizes. Only a face. Her gorgeous friend’s head is sitting inside a transparent bubble with various tubes and cables impaling its neck. The top of the skull has been removed, allowing an invasion of gossamer-fine filaments to penetrate the exposed brain.

  A terrified whimper gurgles out through Imelda’s numb lips.

  “It’s all right,” Paul says at the sound. “I know you probably won’t believe me, but we’re not going to harm you. And you’ll never remember any of this, we’ll give you a memory wipe.”

  She is placed on a field-medical cot, where plyplastic bands flow over her limbs before solidifying, holding her fast. Tears begin to leak out of her eyes.

  Ziggy brings over a sensor stick, and sweeps it above her abdomen. “Damn it.” He grunts in disappointment. “She’s pregnant all right. Looks like that memory checks out.”

  “How long?” Paul asks.

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “Can you tell if it’s Higher contaminated?”

  Ziggy sighs in reluctance, the sound of someone who is forcing himself to do the right thing. “Not from outside, not with our sensors. We’ll have to run a detailed pathology scan.” His hand indicates a clutter of equipment on a nearby table.

  “Okay,” Paul says, equally sad. “Take it out, and run the exam.”

  Ziggy turns to the collection of medical instruments, and picks up a disturbingly phallic device.

  Imelda finally manages to scream.

  Of all the memories Paul was able to extract, arrival was the clearest.

  The angel clung to the starship’s fuselage as the big commercial freighter emerged from its wormhole a thousand kilometers above the bright blue expanse of Anagaska’s major ocean. Dwindling violet light from the wormhole’s exotic fabric washed across its face, revealing late-adolescent features that were carefully androgynous. With its firm jaw, it would be considered a striking and attractive female rather than classically beautiful, while, as a male, people would think it inclined to the delicate. The baggy white cotton shirt and trousers it wore offered no clue as to its gender orientation.

  As soon as the wormhole closed, the starship began to decelerate, chasing down toward the planet where New Helsinki lurked behind the darkness of the terminator. From its position just ahead of the starship’s engineering section, the angel could see the archipelagos rolling past beneath. The impression of speed was such that it felt there should be a wind blowing its long honey-colored hair back. Instead, it just smiled across the vacuum at the world which awaited it. Advancer senses revealed the dense electronic chatter of the planetary cybersphere ghosting through the atmosphere, with intangible peaks reaching out to connect with Anagaska’s satellite constellation. When the angel accessed the starport’s traffic control, it could find no hint that their flight was subject to any additional audit, security was light, no intelligent scrutineers were probing the starship’s systems. The local Protectorate group didn’t know it was here. Not that there was ever any active presence at the starport; but every visitor to Anagaska was quietly recorded and checked; if it had arrived incognito, there was a small risk their identity-examiner programs would raise a query. This way was safer, it was playing very long odds against detection.

  As soon as the starship fell below orbital velocity, the angel let go. It configured the biononic organelles inside its cells to provide a passive deflective field around itself, one that would surreptitiously warp the active sensor radiation pouring out from the starship’s navigation network. The energy sequence flowing through its biononics was even sophisticated enough to disguise its mass, leaving it completely undetected as the starship raced away.

  The angel began its long fall to the ground. It expanded its integral force field into a lenticular shape over two hundred meters wide. Electric-blue scintillations slithered over the surface as it caught the first wisps of Anagaska’s upper atmosphere, aerobraking in a long curve to subsonic speed. Its descent strategy was simple enough; the majority of its flight was out over the ocean where there would be no one to see the telltale crimson flare of ions against the force field as it sank ever lower, nor hear the continual thunderclap of its hypersonic passage through the air.

  When it reached a three-kilometer altitude, its downward plummet had slowed to less than a hundred kilometers an hour, thanks to the protective force field which was now over three hundred meters wide and acting like a parachute. It was fifty kilometers out from Olhava’s western coastline when it changed the shape of the force field once again, producing the dragonfly-wing planform which contributed to its name.

  An hour and a half later, the angel swooped out of the nighttime sky to step lightly onto a sandy beach. It shut down most of its Higher functions, pulled a pair of soft leather sandals from its shoulder bag, and began to walk up the grassy slope to the coastal road.

  They’d been lucky, Paul acknowledged, as soon as he’d reviewed the arrival. A lone yachtsman had been underneath the angel as it aerobraked, a man sailing out from Olhava to spend a long vacation amid the archipelagos. A true sailor, who knew the seas and the skies. He’d seen the glowing point flashing across the stars and known what it meant; and he had a friend who had a friend who knew a unisphere contact code. Paul and his team had arrived at the coast that morning to begin their tracking operation.

  It had taken them a couple of weeks to corner the sneaky creature as it began its mission in Kuhmo. The fight when they surrounded it had taken out three Protectorate members and created a firestorm in the town’s college campus, but they’d eventually driven it into a force field cage which could contain its Higher energy functions. They loaded it into a big regrav capsule and ferried it over to the arcology as the flames from the art block building roared up into the night sky behind them.

  “I would have just left,” the angel said in its pleasant melodic voice as the capsule negotiated its way through the rent in the wall of the seventy-fifth floor. “There was no need for all this.”

  “That depends whose viewpoint you’re taking,” Paul snapped back. He was still shaken and infuriated by the deaths; they’d left the bodies behind in the flames and now he was worried the heat might damage his colleagues’ memorycells. Once they were re-lifed in replacement clone bodies
they could well lose several hours of memories since they last backed up in their secure stores.

  “The obvious one, of course,” the angel said.

  “That’s it for you, isn’t it? Game over. Shake hands. All go home.”

  The angel’s pale mouth smiled. “It’s the civilized thing to do. Don’t you approve of that?”

  “Ask my three colleagues that you slaughtered back there. They might have an opinion on just how civilized you are.”

  “As I recall, you fired first.”

  “Would you have come quietly?”

  “So that you could perform your barbarisms on me? No.”

  “Just tell us what we need to know. Have you contaminated any of us?”

  “Contaminated! How I curse your corruptors. You could have lived a rich rewarding life; instead they have condemned you to this poverty of existence.”

  “Screw you, pal. You Highers want to condemn us to your nonexistence. We retain the right to choose our destiny. We demand the right.”

  “Two hundred billion people can’t all be wrong. The Central Commonwealth worlds have all embraced biononics—why do you think it is called Higher civilization?”

  Paul gave the angel an evil grin. “Self-delusion? More likely: desperate self-justification.”

  “Why do you resist using biononics?” the angel asked, its beautiful face frowning disparagingly. “You of all people must be aware of the benefits they bring to a human body. Immortality without your crude rejuvenation treatments; a society which isn’t based around industrial economics and its backward ideologies, new vistas, inspiring challenges.”

  “Challenges? You just sit and vegetate all day long. That and plot our downfall. What have you got to look forward to? Really? Tell me. The only thing that awaits a Higher is downloading into Earth’s giant brain library. Why bother waiting? You know that’s where you’re all heading. Just migrate there and plug yourself into that big virtual reality in the sky, go right ahead and play mental golf for the rest of eternity. I know the numbers downloading themselves are increasing; more and more of you are realizing just how pointless your lives are. We’re not designed for godhood, basic human essence cannot be tampered with. We need real challenges to satisfy ourselves with, we need to have our hearts broken, we need to watch our children grow up, we need to look over the horizon for new wonders, we need to build and create. Higher civilization has none of that.”