The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Mac turned them around, found the pile of gravel—the remains of an aborted mining claim—that marked the side trail’s split from the main, and brought the man to the entrance of the largest cave. Here the man seemed to regain his bearings, and he entered without hesitation, Mac following close behind. The man’s hands began to glow faintly. He held them aloft in front of them, and in the utter blackness of the cave, this was all either of them needed to see.

  They made their way down, and then farther down. Mac had often been in these caves and prided himself that he could never get lost in them, but it was now his turn to lose his sense of direction. Something in the jack-rock was deliberately confusing him. The man had no such problem. He’d obviously burned the path he must follow into his memory, and it was as if the rock remembered him.

  The cave was wet, dank. The rock in the walls was a combination of the hollowed-out black basalt underpinning the valley and later layers of water-deposited silicates which formed a pearly sheen over the darkness beneath. The floor was flat, its surface crazed, the bottom of an ancient fissure.

  Down, through a lightninglike crack in the wall. Turn a corner. Down again.

  And then they followed a tunnel with walls coated with the thick quartzite deposits brought from the valley above within the memory of man. Within this man’s memory. The air was fresher here, a cool breeze wafting from some hidden vent. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, and stalagmites rose from the floor to meet them in enormous columns. The ceiling was high, but the way was narrow. At length they came to a blank wall, a true dead end.

  “Here we are,” said the man.

  “Where?” said Mac. “I thought you said it was in a larger room.”

  “This used to be a larger room. This was where we met the last bubo.”

  Mac looked around. Nothing but stone.

  “So where is it?”

  The man lifted his glowing hand. “Let me just check—”

  He waved it about as if it were a wand, first in one direction, then another. Finally, he ceased looking at where he was pointing and seemed to let the hand choose its own direction. It settled on a particularly large column, thick at the ends and just narrow enough in the middle to suggest the meeting of upper and lower excrescence that had formed it.

  “We’ll need the hammer now,” the man said.

  Mac examined the column, tapped it. It seemed thickly solid. “You want me to just take a swing at it?” he asked.

  “Try for the middle,” the man replied. “That’s where I think you’ll find the weak spot.”

  Mac did as he was told. He sent a mighty swing into the rock. The cavern resounded with the blow.

  Nothing.

  He struck again. And again. He may as well have been hammering on diamond.

  “Hmm,” said the man. He waved his hand in the direction of the column again and its glow grew brighter. “Yes, that’s it.” Then a brighter flash passed down the length of the man’s arm, up his sleeve, and out the other hand. “Ah,” said the man. “Right. The code. My old valence shield code.” He scratched his head with his other hand. “What was that? Oh, yes.” He swept his hand along the column, his fingers gingerly touching it.

  “Hit it again.”

  Mac gathered himself. This time he flung everything he had into the blow—and the column shattered. Chunks of broken limestone showered down and lay in a rough semicircle around where the column had stood, looking like the hatch leavings of a giant egg.

  And there it was, just as the man had described it. The black disk, about the size of a bedroom mirror. It floated motionless, disappeared when looked at from the side or the rear. A single leg protruded, extended like a bar horizontally, at about waist height for an average-sized man. The toes were curled and pointed, the stance of a gymnast, frozen in mid-flight. It was small, muscled, tight. The leg had been encased in the drip stone for all these years, a part of the land. And, just as the man had described it, the disk was uniformly black, its surface unreflective, like roughened ebony. A leg protruding from a nothingness. Macabre.

  And this was the way humankind walked between the stars?

  For a moment, Mac thought that the leg, too, had been turned to stone, but then the man went to stand beside it, touched it reverently. A dusting of stone came away on his fingertip.

  Underneath was flesh. Alive? Mac could not tell. But not decayed.

  The man pointed to a spot opposite him. “You stand here,” he said. “Get ready to catch her.”

  Mac complied, put out his arms.

  The man raised his hand, pointed it toward the disk. Hesitated.

  “What are you waiting for?” Mac said. “Are you afraid you’re going to wake it up?”

  The man lowered his hand slightly, but still held it poised. “This is where I need a brush.”

  Mac was confused for a moment, then he realized what the man was talking about. “My telescope.”

  “It’s up to you, but I think the general idea is to poke it into the bubo, just to the side of her leg.”

  “How do you know that?” said Mac. “How do you know anything?”

  “Seems plausible,” he said. “Got any better ideas?”

  “And you want me to give it to you,” Mac said, “like that?”

  The man shook his head, considered one of his still shining hands. His face glowed a pale white in their light. It was bright enough to cast the man’s shadow on the wall behind him.

  “You’re younger than I am,” the man finally said. “I think you ought to catch her.”

  “You want me to give it to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” said the man. “You should trust your family.”

  Mac shook his head. This is not for you to trade, she’d told him.

  She would be coming in the winter.

  Something had to change. He loved her. The valley had to let him go.

  He couldn’t trade the telescope, but he could give it away.

  “Hell.” He reached behind him, and into the pack. His hand closed on the rough silicate outer surface of the telescope. He withdrew it. For a thing of rock, it weighed little. It felt more like a delicate bird in his hand.

  He put it to his eye and took what might be a last look through it. The vision was as if he were moving in an elevator through carved layers of rock. Up. To the Valley of the Gardens. Higher. Above Moncau. And spreading out. The Extremadura.

  Then back down again in a plunging dive. Down through the caves. Into the hirudinean darkness.

  A long, long passage without light, without sense.

  Finally, past that darkness. Two hands, joined, grasping. Two identical faces, glowing blue-white against the general blackness—the same blue-white as the stone rose.

  Eyes opening, seeing him. Hope.

  He lowered the telescope, handed it to the man.

  “I think it might work,” he said.

  The man smiled, nodded. “We’ll see,” he said. He took a deep breath, reached out with the telescope; it was only a forearm’s length long, but seemed to grow as he pointed it—to telescope itself. He touched the edge of the black bubo disk just to the right of Jasmine’s leg.

  At first, nothing remarkable happened.

  There was no flash of light, no explosion. Then the disk seemed merely to move away, to reduce itself gradually to a point, to dry up and drain away.

  “Something—” said the man.

  As the disk contracted, Jasmine’s body was revealed. First her other leg, bent at the knee, the instep of its foot touching the opposite thigh. Then her hips. Her torso.

  She started to sag, and Mac raised his arms under her, touched her legs—warm, alive—held her steady. Her shoulders. Her neck. Her face. Her open eyes.

  They focused. Blinked. Green.

  Theresa’s were blue. In fact, she looked nothing like Theresa. For some reason, he’d imagined she would.

  He caught her. He caught her, held her, and helped h
er straighten. Set her down on her feet and supported her. Surprisingly heavy. The man must have been brutish strong back then to be able to throw this woman into the hirudinean bubo. Or completely desperate.

  Jasmine looked up at him. A woman. Pretty, but not beautiful. As unknowable as any other person, but not a creature from the beyond.

  “Oh, no.” A moment of terror. “Is it—”

  Behind Jasmine, the bubo suddenly reappeared. And not as the black looking glass it had been, but as something pale white. Like a festering wound in the side of the world. Infected. Enflamed. Ready to disgorge something horrible, like the maw of a dragon.

  The man thrust the telescope deeper into it. It struck with a wet splat, almost as if it were striking flesh. Putrid flesh. He pushed it harder, farther. It sank in smoothly, slowly.

  A horrible shriek filled the cavern, like the sound of a surprised and enraged animal. A very large animal.

  “Band down your frequencies,” the man called out. “It’s trying to blast us before we can do anything to it!”

  Mac ordered his valence to close his ears; he held his hands over the woman’s.

  The shriek went on. Impossibly long—for this was a creature that need draw no breath. Rock cracked, fell about them. A layer of the lustrous mother-of-pearl patina of the cave shook loose and rained down upon them.

  The man drove the scope deeper, deeper. Until his hand disappeared within. When he withdrew his hand, it was without the scope.

  And the bubo went dark. The shriek abruptly fell away to silence, and the walls stopped tumbling down. The hirudinean seemed to tense up, to ripple like a shaken bowl of water. Then its surface was still. Black. Impenetrable.

  “So I guess my telescope is gone.” It took him a moment to realize that the words were his.

  The woman gazed up at Mac. She still seemed bewildered, in shock.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

  Another moment of numbness—and then a wan smile from her. Exhausted.

  She backed away slightly, rubbed her upper arms, kneaded them with her hands. Her skin seemed several shades darker than his own. Where was this new light coming from? He saw that the entire cavern was glowing.

  “You’re the boy,” Jasmine said. Her voice was low, an alto purr. Again, nothing like Theresa’s musical soprano.

  Mac started at her words. How did she know anything about him?

  “In my dream.” Then a moment of hesitation. A look of joy seeped into her expression. A smile of jubilation. “She’s still there!”

  “Who is?”

  “My angel,” said the woman, “my sister!” Her face grew softer. Her eyes lost their focus on him, seemed to be gazing at a distant sight. Or perhaps not so distant. “I can see her. I can hear her. I’m still with her! We’ve kept it choked.” She focused again on Mac. “But how?”

  “I don’t really know.” Mac gestured toward the man who was standing behind her. “He might.”

  Jasmine turned.

  The man stood silently, waiting.

  After a moment, Jasmine took a step toward him. She reached out her hand.

  Mac watched the two embrace. He thought of the valley above. The fence. The desert beyond.

  He wondered if he would find Theresa before winter if he set out tomorrow. Would the desert help him or hinder him on the journey? Would it notice him at all?

  He wondered what it would be like to travel with no destiny but love.

  He’d know as soon as he crossed the fence.

  DIVIDING THE SUSTAIN

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially with Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as “Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Mr. Boy,” “Pogrom,” “Home Front,” and “Undone” (“Undone” in particular has enough space opera tropes and wild conceptualization packed into its short length to fuel many another author’s eight-hundred-page novel), and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did his story “1016 to 1,” in 2000. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look into the Sun. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur, and, most recently, in a new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger. His most recent book is the chapbook novella Burn, and coming up is an anthology coedited with John Kessel, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Born in Mineola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He has a website at www.JimKelly.net,and reviews Internet-related matters for Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  Here he takes us voyaging across the universe with a crew of posthuman immortals who change their shapes and their very natures as casually as we change our clothes—but who find that some changes are a little too radical even for them . . .

  Been Watanabe decided to become gay two days before his one-hundred-and-thirty-second birthday. The colony ship had been outbound for almost a year of subjective time and the captain still could not say when they might make planetfall. Everyone said that dividing the sustain between the folded dimensions was more art than science, but what Been wanted now was a schedule, not a sketch. He couldn’t wait any longer to recast himself as a homosexual because he worried that he might go stale and lose his mind.

  He’d been comfortable—too comfortable—hunkered among the colonists aboard the slipship Nine Ball, two thousand three hundred and forty-seven lumps, not one of whom had an edge sharp enough to cut butter. The lumps were all well under a century old and so had never needed to be recast. In moments of weakness—in line for the sixth lunch seating, say, or toward the yawning climax of the daily harmony circle—Been worried that he was becoming a lump himself. Sometimes as the pacifiers nattered on about duty and diligence, he could almost imagine what it might feel like to pass through Immigration someday and actually be looking forward to planting beans or selling hats or running a botloader. It was an alarming daydream for a soon-to-be hundred-and-thirty-two-year-old mindsync courier carrying a confidential personality transplant to the Consensualist colony on Little Chin.

  Sandor, Nelly, and Zola, his podmates on the ship, did not greet his decision to recast as a homosexual with much enthusiasm. To become full-fledged Consensualists, the colonists had agreed to a personality dampening that would smooth away the sharper edges of their individuality. The treatment chilled passion into fondness, anger into simple annoyance. To get Been a berth on the Nine Ball, his client had provided forged records showing he’d had the treatment, had invented as well a résumé as a genetic agronomist. But poor Sandor had certainly been dampened. In his own diffident way, he made it clear that he had no intention of redirecting what little sex drive he could muster toward Been. And presumably once he was gay, Been would not be spending any time in the sleep hutch that Nelly and Zola shared. The two women in Been’s pod had their own sexual arrangement. They would occasionally invite either Been or Sandor to their hutch, although spending the night with the two of them was more work than swimming the Straits of Sweven in a spacesuit. It took Been hours to recover, while Sandor was usually pale and wobbly for a day afterward. If Been became gay, it would put a fatal kink in the sexual consensus of their pod.

  Which was his plan exactly.

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” said Sandor, “and I want you to consider it in the spirit in which I am posing it, that is, without malice and with a genuine fondness for you as a person.”

  “Are you asking him or making a speech?” Nelly had wrapped herself in her comfort rug so that only her head showed.

  “Did you want to handle
this?” Sandor clutched his mug of coffee as if worried it might wrench itself out of his grasp and fly at someone. “No, I didn’t think so.” Been could tell how upset the others were by the way they were letting their manners slip. The three of them ought to report themselves to their harmony circles, but Been knew they wouldn’t. “Well, then, Been,” said Sandor, “how do you see yourself functioning as a member of our pod if you adopt this new sexual orientation? Because, forgive me for being frank, it seems to me that this unilateral action on your part is not in harmony with the principles of Consensualism.” He took a careful sip from the mug.

  “I don’t understand.” Been pushed off the couch. “I’ve been living with you since we left orbit around Nonny’s Home.” In four quick steps, he had paced from one end of the common room to the other. “Have I been doing something all this time that bothered you?”

  “Beenie,” said Zola, “this pod has as much need for a gay man as we have for a singing kangaroo.” She grinned at him from the tiny food prep bay as she melted her own coffee cup back into the counter. “We just wonder why you aren’t thinking about that.”

  “Is that all I am to you, a hard cock?”

  “No,” said Zola. “You’re also a tongue.”

  “And clever fingers.” Nelly sounded wistful.

  “I do more than just pop into bed whenever you two call,” said Been. “Who asks all the questions? Suggests shows to watch, books to read? Who tells the most entertaining lies?”

  He saw Sandor and Zola exchange glances. They would probably be relieved not to be fooled by any more of Been’s entertaining lies.

  Nelly just sighed. “It isn’t as if you’re about to go stale or anything. What are you, eighty-two? Eighty-three? You’ve got decades before you have to recast yourself.”

  Of course, Been had lied about his age, not merely for entertainment value, but in order to be accepted as a Consensualist. He slumped against the wall, closed his eyes, and tried not to smile. He already knew he’d be leaving the pod. He just needed to make sure that, when his podmates reached consensus, they were the ones to ask him to go. That way Zola would feel obligated to help him find a new place to stay until the Nine Ball reached Little Chin. Been knew that no other pod would take him at this late date. There were two gay pods on the Nine Ball, but one was notoriously overcrowded, and for the last few weeks Been had been busy annoying a key member of the other. Been’s plan required that he move in with Zola’s friend Ilona Quellan, the captain’s ex-wife. Been thought he might be in love with Ilona, even though they had never even been introduced, but becoming a homosexual would solve that problem nicely.