The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “The Central Commonwealth is our race’s greatest creation. To misquote an ancient lyric: do you think we don’t love our children too?”

  “I’m sure you do. But not enough to give them a choice. To be born Higher is to stay Higher, they can’t escape.”

  “They could, they just don’t want to. Yet tens of millions of ordinary Advancer humans convert to Higher every year. Does that tell you anything?”

  “Yes. It’s simply the last step in their adventure. They’ve lived first, they know there are different ways to exist. Only then do they go in for your defeatist digital dreaming; they’ve decided that they want to die then anyway, so what have they got to lose?”

  “Is that what you’ll do, Paul? Give in and download your memories into Earth’s repository?”

  “When I’m finally tired of life, then I might just. But don’t expect it for another millennium or ten; it’s a big galaxy.”

  “I am always saddened by how ignorant your views are.”

  “Is that: my type, by any chance?”

  “Yes, Paul. Your type indeed, all you reactionary Advancers. Advanced genes have shown you how far you can extend human evolution and abilities; you’ve extended your life span, you’re virtually immune to disease, you’re naturally integrated with the unisphere, and a lot more besides; all those abilities have brought you halfway toward us, yet still you refuse to take the final step. Why?”

  “Reactionary, my arse! Biononics are not part of us, they are not derived from the genome and cannot be added to it, they are machines. They infect the cells of your body; that is why you have to be born with them to be truly Higher. They have to multiply in tandem with an embryo’s natural growth. Only then can they be incorporated by every cell. It’s impossible for every cell to be corrupted in an adult. That’s the difference, the crucial one. They are alien, imposed.”

  “Listen to yourself: infect. Corrupt. Impose. Alien. How small your mind is, how closed.”

  “I am what I am. I like what I am. You will not take that away from me, nor my children. I have that right to defend myself. If what you are doing is an act of kindness and charity, then why did you arrive here the way you did? Why not be open about it? Every person on this planet can travel to the Central Commonwealth should they wish. Why are you here to spread your culture by deceit?”

  “The lies and prejudice you sustain leave us no choice. You’re condemning generations unborn to suffering they do not deserve. We can save them from you.”

  Paul tilted his head to one side, and gave the angel a superior grin. “Listen to yourself,” he said with soft mockery. “And the best thing is, I know that you’re in a minority among Highers. You disgust the majority as much as you do me.”

  “And yet they do not stop us.”

  “The price of true democracy. Now, are you going to tell me what I need to know?”

  “You know I cannot do that.”

  “Then this is going to get very unpleasant. For you.”

  “That’s something your conscience will have to carry.”

  “I know. But this isn’t the first time I’ve had to break one of you. And I don’t suppose you’ll be the last.” Paul maneuvered the cage into place at the center of the hastily prepared interrogation room. Equipment modules began to clamp themselves across the outside of the restraining force fields. Eventually there was no sign of the angel beneath the dull metal segments. Paul gave Ziggy a weary glance. “Let’s get on with it.”

  It took nine days to defeat the angel’s biononics. Nine days of negative energy spikes pounding away at the force field which its biononics produced. Nine days of draining out its power reserves. Nine days spent denying it food, water, and oxygen. Nine days smothered inside a sarcophagus of machinery designed to wreck its body and all the Higher functions it was capable of generating. Nine days to send invasive filaments into its brain, preserving the neurones while its ordinary body cells were burned and destroyed one layer at a time. Nine days to kill it.

  Eventually, the inert head was removed from the charred remains and artificially sustained on the cusp of life. The filaments linked Paul’s thoughts to the angel’s undead neurones, allowing him to access memories as if the angel were now a subsidiary brain, nothing more than a recalcitrant storage system grafted onto his own gray matter. Burrowing through the stranger’s thoughts was difficult, and not even modern biochemicals could sustain the neurones indefinitely. Decay gave them a very short time scale to work in. There was no neat index. Human sensory experiences were very different from electronic files, their triggers were unique, hard to guess. But Paul persevered, extracting the missing days since its arrival in confused fragments. Piecing together what had happened.

  The angel had reached Kuhmo the day after it landed, renting a modest apartment on the arcology’s fifteenth floor. It merged easily into the lives of the town’s adolescents, signing on at the college, joining several clubs. For two days, it studied potential targets.

  Ziggy takes less than an hour to confirm the presence of biononics in every cell of the tiny fetus.

  “Son of a bitch,” Paul grunts.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Ziggy says. “It means what we did was right.”

  Paul gives Imelda a guilty glance. The girl is crying silently, her face sticky with tears. Occasionally, she lets out a small piteous snivel. Traumatized though she is, he still cannot grant her the comfort of oblivion. There is one question he still has to ask. “I don’t like being forced to do what’s right,” Paul says. “Not this.”

  “Right,” Ziggy says. He slides the dead fetus into a flash furnace, eradicating the last trace of the angel’s attempt to subvert their world.

  Paul leans over Imelda. “One final thing,” he says, “and this will all be over.”

  Fear squeezes yet more tears from her eyes.

  “Did you know you were pregnant?”

  The distraught girl opens her mouth and cries out in anguish. “Yes,” she sobs.

  Studying her face, Paul knows she is telling the truth. There will be no need to use drugs or other stronger methods of inquiry. “Thank you,” he says. At last he activates the sleep inducer, and her weary eyes flutter shut.

  “We’ll need a replacement fetus,” Paul says. “I can wipe tonight’s memories from her, but if we take away that entire week she spent screwing Erik and the angel she’s going to know something happened; that kind of gap can’t be covered up. A doctor will find our tampering.”

  “Not a problem,” Ziggy says. “We’ve got both of them; I can fertilize one of her eggs and reimplant before morning. She’ll still have lover boy’s baby. There’ll be nothing for anybody to be suspicious about.”

  “Apart from their new friend vanishing.”

  Ziggy shrugs. “Kids their age, it’s hardly unusual. They all have a dozen relationships a year, more if they can. Erik was desperate to bring more girls back to the angel’s apartment. You said he was always going on about it; he wanted to bed Imelda’s sister for a start. Horny little devil.”

  “Yeah,” Paul says. “It’s about time Erik learned he has responsibilities.”

  Erik Horovi was a perfect opportunity for the angel. Quite a good-looking lad, but still mildly introverted, which left him susceptible to any girl who befriended him. The angel shifted over into full female mode and spent half a day talking to Erik, who was first nervous, then delighted that such a beauty could show any interest in him. He screwed up his courage and asked her out for a date, trying desperately to disguise his surprise when she readily said yes.

  The beer and mild aerosol narcotics legitimately available in Kuhmo’s bars had a big effect on Erik’s inexperienced bloodstream, making him pleasantly inebriated early on in the evening. He talked more easily than he really should have about the Viatak sisters, especially Imelda, the eldest, and how he’d worshipped her from afar. But his alluringly gorgeous new date didn’t seem to mind talking about another girl; she was, she said with an eager smile, very
liberal when it came to her own sexuality. The haze of subtle chemicals in Erik’s head did nothing to dampen his arousal as they both smiled at each other knowingly.

  Imelda met the angel the very next day; its memory of the event comprised a confused montage of faces flitting across the main quad in the college campus, bursts of conversations, scent of the nearby roseyew bushes that decorated the quad. The scent of flowers in full bloom was a strong one, leading Paul onward through the memories until he was somehow walking through a city of soaring towers and delightful parks with vegetation that was sweetly reminiscent of Kuhmo’s public gardens. Silver-white regrav capsules slipped silently overhead as the pink-tinged sun shone at the apex of a cloudless purple sky. It was Teleba, one of the earliest planets to be settled, now nestling right at the heart of the Central Commonwealth. A world of Higher culture, where there were no urban areas decaying like the entirety of Kuhmo, no economic hardship or market fluctuations to perturb the population, no crime, for little was forbidden or withheld—except for the angel’s own purpose, but even that was open to its peers. It strode along a boulevard lined by semiorganic treesculptures whose prismatic ever-shifting leaves were modeled on New York’s unique ma-hon tree. Information and thoughts from the superdense planetary cybersphere whirled into its mind like particles of a multicolored snowstorm to be modified or answered, its own questions and suggestions administered into the pervasive flow of knowledge, arguing its ideal and ethic to those who showed an interest. Agreement and disagreement swirled around it as it crossed a plaza with a great fountain in the center. It felt invigorated by the debate, its own resolution hardening.

  The enlightened informed process was the democratic entitlement of all Highers. People didn’t have to strive, with their material requirements supplied by Neumann cybernetics and their bodies supported by biononics, they could devote themselves to their uniqueness. Human thought was the pinnacle of terrestrial evolution, Earth’s most profound success. Now each mind was yoked into the Commonwealth unisphere, collecting, arranging, and distributing information. Whole districts of the city were given over to institutes that delved into science and art, multiplying into thousands of subdisciplines. Their practitioners communed in mental harmony. Higher culture was reaching for the Divine. Can you not see the rightness of it, the inevitability? The comfort?

  Paul had to wrench his thoughts away from the guileful desire Trojan. Even in its crippled state, the angel’s brain was dangerous. There were many elaborate traps that remained empowered amid the waning neurones, quite capable of ensnaring the unwary. He pushed his own mind back into the memories of Imelda and Erik.

  There were long lazy evenings spent in the angel’s secluded apartment. Bottles and aerosols were imbibed leisurely, their contents complemented by a chemical designed to neutralize any standard female contraception troche. The lights were dimmed, the lovers’ thoughts sluggish and contented, bodies inflamed. Paul experienced Erik in congress, his youthful body straining hard against the angel. There were loud, near-savage cries of joy as he climaxed successfully.

  Deep inside the angel’s complicated sexual organs, Erik’s spermatozoon were injected with a biononic organelle.

  Imelda’s smiling, trusting face as she rolled across the jellmattress underneath the now very male angel, unruly hair spreading across the soft pillows. Her sharp gasp of delight at the impalement. Wicked curl of her mouth at the arousal, and piercing cry of fulfillment. A fulfillment greater than she knew as the modified semen was released inside her.

  Under the angel’s tutelage, the eager youngsters experimented with strenuous and exciting new positions night after night. Bodies writhed against it, granting each other every request that was whispered or shouted before granting its single wish. Each time it focused their arousal and ecstasy to one purpose, the creation of its beloved changeling.

  Imelda arrives home in the dead of night after staggering some unknown distance along the street outside. The house recognizes her and opens the front door. She has clearly had a lively evening, her movements lack any real coordination; she squints at most objects, unable to perceive what they are; her electronic emissions are chaotic, nonsensical. Every now and then, she giggles for no reason. At the bottom of the stairs her legs fold gracelessly under her, and she crumples into a heap. She begins snoring.

  This is how her parents find her in the morning. Imelda groans in protest as they rouse her; she has a hangover which is surely terminal. Her parents fuss, and issue a mild chastisement about the state she is in; but they are tolerant liberals, and understand the impulses which fire all adolescents. They are not worried; after all, this is the Greater Commonwealth, citizens are safe at night even in dear old worn-down Kuhmo. Imelda is helped upstairs to her bed, given water and some vitamins, and left to sleep off her night of youthful excess.

  When she wakes up again, around midday, she quickly calls Erik, who himself is still recovering from his narcotic sojourn. Their questions are almost identical: “What did we do?” As are their answers: “I don’t remember.”

  “I think we met up in the Pathfinder,” Imelda says uncertainly. “I remember going there, but afterward I don’t know . . .”

  Erik jumps on this, relieved that one of them has some memory of the evening. “We must have struck a bad aerosol,” he claims immediately.

  “Yeah, right,” Imelda agrees, even though the voice of doubt is murmuring away inside her head. But accepting that easy explanation is so much more comfortable than examining ideas that may have unpleasant outcomes. “You want to meet up again tonight?” she asks.

  “Sure, but maybe at my house. I thought we could have a quieter time. And we need to talk about the baby, we’ll have to tell our parents.”

  “It’s early days,” Imelda says carelessly; she sends him a tactile ping of a very personal nature. “Maybe not too quiet, huh?”

  Erik grins in disgraceful delight, last night already forgotten.

  Nine months later, Erik is grinning in an altogether different fashion as he is present at the birth of his daughter. The little girl is perfect and beautiful, born at the Kuhmo General Hospital with an ease that only modern Commonwealth medical technology can provide. Afterward, Imelda lies back on the bed in the airy delivery room, and cuddles the newborn, lost in devotion.

  “We have got to decide on a name,” she says dreamily.

  Erik idly brushes her mane of auburn hair away from her shoulders. “How about Kerry?” he suggests tentatively. It is the name he knew the angel as; he often wonders where she is now.

  “No,” Imelda says. There is still some association about Kerry and his abrupt disappearance that she can’t shake off.

  “Okay, well, there’s no rush. I’d better go out and see everyone.”

  The respective families are waiting outside. Imelda’s parents are polite; happy that the birth has gone without a hitch, and, of course, delighted that they have another grandchild. However, there is a certain degree of strain showing in their outwardly civil attitude toward Erik. His own parents are less formal, and hug him with warm excitement. He goes over to Sabine and kisses her.

  “Congratulations,” she says.

  Erik tenderly brushes Sabine’s thick auburn hair. “This doesn’t change anything,” he says sincerely. Sabine smiles back, grateful for the reassurance, especially right now. She is Imelda’s younger sister by forty minutes, and so genuinely doesn’t want their special sibling bond soured by any jealousy.

  As Erik confessed to Kerry, bedding the sisters was his fantasy since the first moment he saw them. Identical twins is a common enough desire in a hormonally active teenager; and Kerry of course made that particular wish come true readily enough. Even today, Erik still has trouble telling his lovers apart, and his memories of them during those wonderful long erotic nights in that apartment on the arcology’s fifteenth floor are completely indistinguishable.

  Now Inigo wakes up and loudly starts to demand his afternoon feed. Sabine is immediately busy
with their infant son who was born in the very same hospital two weeks earlier.

  She too rejected the name Kerry.

  WHO’S AFRAID OF WOLF 359?

  KEN MACLEOD

  Here’s a fast-paced, freewheeling, frenetic romp that demonstrates that if life hands you lemons, make lemonade—no matter who gets in your way or what extremes you have to go to get the lemons out of it.

  Ken Macleod graduated with a B.S. in zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research in biomechanics at Brunel University, he worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh. He’s now a full-time writer, and widely considered to be one of the most exciting new SF writers to emerge in the nineties, his work featuring an emphasis on politics and economics rare in the New Space Opera, while still maintaining all the wide-screen, high-bit-rate, action-packed qualities typical of the form. His first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award. His other books include the novels The Sky Road, The Cassini Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, Engine City, and Newton’s Wake, plus a novella chapbook, The Human Front. His most recent books are the novel Learning the World and a collection, Strange Lizards from Another Galaxy. He lives in West Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and children.