The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  I am beginning an observing run of the planet. Full spectrum. The atmosphere shows obvious biosignatures. I can see the surface in infrared, but cloud cover is thick: oceans, continents, with ice poles rather large. There is minor microwave traffic and radio as well. There appears to be an—wait—

  Claire frowned. Seldom did Erma even pause while speaking. Software never used filler words, “ums” and “ahs.” But to stop dead was worrisome. The pause lengthened. Nothing appeared on the screens around Claire.

  I . . . have just . . . had an unusual experience.

  “I could tell.”

  Another pause.

  Something . . . called to me.

  “A hail from that planet?” Claire guessed.

  Something like that . . . only deeper, with several running lines of discourse I could not follow.

  “In what language?”

  That was the oddity. It came in my language.

  “Uh . . . English?”

  I do not think in these simple, ambiguous terms that you use. Of course, I know that your internal running systems do not use these “words” you must shape with your mouths. Your brains are much more subtle and dexterous. No, I run in an operating system using complex combinational notations. These carry very dense meanings in packets. I imagine all advanced intelligences do this, for it is efficient. And the message I received was built in this way, perhaps confirming my expectations.

  Claire blinked. “But whoever sent it is alien. How could they know . . . Oh. The bots.”

  I had not thought of that, but yes—it must have captured information from the bot intelligences.

  “And reverse engineered it to—wow. And they did it in minutes.”

  As you say, wow. That word is usefully compact, and so is some of the torrent of signals I am evaluating. But most are not. This is a very strange intelligence.

  “I’ll take your, uh, word for it. So what did this smart thing say?”

  That we must go away. Not approach them.

  “And this ‘them’ is . . . who?”

  It says it is the entire planet. An integration of the intelligent species and . . . the biosphere, is the closest I can come to it in a word.

  “A living world. Say, some system that somehow lets the oceans talk to the people? That’s . . . well, impossible. I’m having trouble here.”

  So am I. I do not even have a living body, so it is difficult for me to think of this other than abstractly. Like a human conversing with a forest?

  “My body talks to me and mostly it’s bad news. Stomachaches or sore muscles. Hard to see what a planet might say. ‘Don’t throw that into me’?And how do you hear it, walking on the beach?”

  I suppose you are being too practical.

  “I’m a practical kind of gal. Put our lack of imagination aside, then. What’s it mean, we should just go away?”

  Apparently, it has had some bad experiences with others who came through the ringhole.

  “Like who?”

  Something that had ideas about recruiting them for something. A quest for God or some odd idea.

  “Not humans?”

  No, they have not seen the likes of us before.

  “Then how’d the original wormhole get anchored near our sun?”

  A method of “disposal” I do not comprehend. Apparently, they can whip a wormhole through space by using angular momentum applied at its far end—that is, from here. So they got rid of the God-seekers and then drove the far wormhole mouth out of their neighborhood. They flung it away and it came to rest near our star.

  “Even weirder. But those words, ‘got rid of.’ What’s that mean?”

  I thought it polite not to ask.

  “So world minds have protocols, you figure? We should find out—”

  I thought our goal was to get back home.

  “So it is, and curiosity killed the cat. How do we get out of here?”

  Follow its agents, it said.

  “The kite life? They don’t seem so friendly.”

  I suppose they were reconnoitering us.

  “Fair enough, though those bots cost me. A small price for a ticket home, though.”

  Claire gestured at her wall screens, where the many space-born shapes were catching up to them. Each might be a different species, she guessed, deployed by that crescent planet with two moons. What intricate biologies could be at work here, wedding worlds to the spaces around them? How could anything go up against that? Certainly not Silver Metal Lugger’s puny lasers—which she discovered, with a quick check, the kites had disabled anyhow.

  Now here was an easy decision. “Let’s do as they say.”

  I was holding my breath, hoping you would say that.

  “You don’t breathe.”

  Your language is rich in metaphor. The Agency I spoke with spoke like that too, only several orders of magnitude higher in complexity.

  “I don’t think I can stand to have an example. Save it for our report.”

  We will report this?

  “How do you think I’m going to pay for this? We’re under contract.”

  They—the Agency—may not like to have word spread.

  Claire blinked. “Are your conversations monitored by them?”

  I had not thought. I am not transmitting, of course, but—

  Another atypical pause. Then Erma said, Apparently, the Agency is listening to us.

  “Planted some tech on our hull, probably.”

  But they know they cannot control what others say.

  “Mighty nice of them. But why are we still alive?”

  Perhaps their moral code? Or they may think we are emissaries from another world-mind like theirs. In which case, they will want to be diplomatic.

  “I wonder why they don’t just put up a NO TRESPASSING sign?”

  Do you believe that would work?

  “On humans? Not a chance.”

  The living spacecraft flocked in dense swarms now, as if to be ready for whatever might happen. Claire bit her lip, drew in the ship’s dry air, and felt very tired. How long had they been here?

  “Y’know, we’re mice among elephants here. No, microbes. And elephants can change their minds, or just make a misstep. Let’s run.”

  I quite agree.

  The Planetary Agency, as they decided to call it, spoke through lightning with microwave sizzles while they worked their way into the hydrogen plume. When microwaves from the home planet failed, it used rattles of particle storms on Silver Metal Lugger’s hull. The kite life guided them, in odd ways that Claire couldn’t follow but Erma found quite natural, somehow. A few hours of turbulent piloting brought them to the whirlpool of gas near the ringhole. The kites backed off and waited to watch them dive in.

  “Y’know, we had a weird time in there before . . .”

  You are cautious. But recall that we cannot go back out of this plume.

  “Meaning?”

  I believe that the Agency would take that act rather unkindly.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” She put a confident tone to the words, though her heart was hammering and she double-checked the straps on her couch.

  Silver Metal Lugger started to rattle and hum. Her couch leather dimpled again as torques warped through the ship. Churning red winds outside had snapped into an utter blackness that somehow also writhed. Rivulets of gravitational stress worked at their trajectory. The helm fought her and again she was flying blind.

  Pops and pings rang through the ship. She drove them forward with a hard burst of antimatter and saw nothing change ahead at all. Bunches of green mass shot by them and then came around again. That was how she knew that they were in some whirl that grew and grew, pressing her into her couch with a heavy hand, then twisting her around two axes at once. Gs rose and Silver Metal Lugger tried to torque around and bite itself.

  Bite itself . . . “Say, somebody sent us a message last time we were in here. What was it?”

  The message said, “Worms can eat their tails and so can you.”<
br />
  “So . . . what’s it mean?”

  You are the pilot, madam.

  “Okay, turn us and accelerate opposite to our velocity.”

  And how do I know our velocity? This is not a Newtonian space, with a fixed spacetime and—

  “Do it! Go to low antimatter flux, then come about, then go to max thrust.”

  Erma made something like a sigh. The swerves and buffeting increased as they made a sluggish turn, as if working against molasses. She felt rather than heard a sound like whump-whump-whump through her body. The ship vibrated so badly she had to hold her teeth clamped tight.

  They poured on the antimatter and the jarring eased off. Soon they were almost gliding, though she felt the centrifugal press all through her body. “This is working.”

  At least you feel better. Your stress levels have fallen.

  Something came looming out of the blackness. It glowed and soared, alive with amber light. The space around it shimmered with shooting traceries.

  “Damn, that looks like an alien craft.”

  Perceptions are warped here.

  “Hail it.”

  I have an answering echo.

  “Maybe they can hear us. Send this: ‘Worms can eat their tails and so can you.’ That way we can—”

  The other ship winked out, gone. They swept on, through churning black. Odd speckles of rainbow light flashed by them. Claire thought she could see snatches of starlit space in the middle of those, but it all went by with a deck-rattling hum, as though they were moving at high speed.

  “Go to full flux.”

  We are. The vector forces are acting to shear us along our main beam. We cannot maintain this level for—

  They popped out into clear space. Stars shone brightly—familiar stars!

  The ringhole spun away behind. An observer ship hailed them.

  “We’re back!”

  And now we know who sent that message. You did.

  Claire stopped, openmouthed. Her whole body ached and she said, “But how . . .”

  Let the theorists do the thinking for a while.

  That turned out to be a good idea. Claire was glad to leave the hard thinking to people who worked at desks.

  Silver Metal Lugger had been gone thirty-one hours in local reference frame. As soon as they returned she felt fatigue fall on her like a weight. On the other side of the ringhole, she had felt lively; now she could not stay awake to debrief them. A gang of physicists were her audience, along with Tall Guy, whose expression varied between awestruck attention and the occasional flickering leer. She got tired of the awestruck pretty quick. Then she fell asleep right in front of them all.

  After she awoke, there were more medical exams and she ate three meals in a five-hour period. Her body was getting itself back into its proper time sense. While she slept, Erma was busy answering their questions, so at least she did not have to endure a lot of that. Plus they had the recordings of a whole new world, and a lot of questions to answer.

  As it turned out, the star and planet was known—HD209458b, the evaporating planet. That awful name got changed. They used that of the Egyptian god Osiris, who was killed and parts of his body spread over the whole of Egypt. To get him back to life, his sister Isis searched for the pieces, and found all of them but one. So Osiris the planet had been detected from Earth, 150 light-years away. Nobody had suspected an entire civilization there—if that term applied. Maybe they could eavesdrop on their radio signals.

  The physicists liked new questions and within hours she was hearing terms like “upwhen” and “time turbulence.” These accompanied equations that hurt her eyes. She fell asleep in front of the physicists again, which was embarrassing. But Tall Guy was looking better and better with each meeting.

  At a coffee break, Tall Guy came sidling up to her. His ostensible purpose was to negotiate a contract for his employers, locking up her Very Own Personal Story of the voyage. She was ready for that and shot back, “Not in my prior contract. Needs a whole new negotiation.”

  Subtlety had never been her strong suit. Still, he didn’t even blink. He kept up his pitch and just happened to mention that perhaps they could negotiate in private. She opened her mouth to say she needed her own lawyers present and then thought of her grandfather. Never pass by a chance to shut up.

  She let him keep talking and just gave him a long, slow wink.

  SEND THEM FLOWERS

  WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel, Destiny’s Way. His most recent books are the first two novels in his acclaimed Modern Space Opera epic, “Dread Empire’s Fall,” Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis and Dread Empire’s Fall: The Sundering. Coming up are two new novels, Orthodox War and Conventions of War. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World,” and took another Nebula in 2005 with his story “The Green Leopard Plague.”

  Williams has made his name in New Space Opera circles with novels such as Aristoi and the “Dread Empire’s Fall” books, but those are not the only strings he has to his bow. In the droll and exciting adventure that follows, he demonstrates that even if you have multiple universes to flee through, the past has an uncomfortable way of catching up with you . . .

  We skipped through the borderlands of Probability, edging farther and farther away from the safe universes that had become so much less safe for us, and into the fringe areas where stars were cloudy smears of phosphorescent gas and the Periodic Table wasn’t a guide, but a series of ever-more-hopeful suggestions.

  Our ship was fueled for another seven years, but our flight ended at Socorro for the most prosaic reason possible: we had run out of food. Exchange rates and docking fees ate most of what little money we had, and that left us on Socorro with enough cash for two weeks’ food or one good party.

  Guess which we chose?

  For five months, we’d been running from Shawn, or at any rate the cloaked, dagger-bearing assassins we imagined him sending after us. I’d had nothing but Tonio’s company and freeze-dried food to eat, and the only wine we’d drunk had been stuff that Tonio brewed in plastic bags out of kitchen waste. We hadn’t realized how foul the air on the Olympe had grown until we stepped out of the docking tube and smelled the pure recycled air of Socorro Topside, the station floating in geosynchronous orbit at the end of its tether.

  The delights of Topside glittered ahead of us, all lights and music, the sizzle of grilled meats and the clink of glasses. How could we resist?

  Besides, freaky Probability was fizzing in our veins. Our metabolisms were pumped by a shift in the electromagnetic fine structure constant. Oxygen was captured and transported and burned and united with carbon and exhaled with greater efficiency. We didn’t have to breathe as often as in our home Probability, and still our bodies ran a continuous fever from the boost in our metabolic rate.

  Another few more steps into Probability and the multiverse would start fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces, causing our bodies to fly apart or the calcium in our bones to turn radioactive. But here, we remained more or less ourselves even as certain chemical reactions became much easier.

  Which was why Socorro and its Topside had been built on this strange outpost of the multiverse, to create alloys that weren’t possible in our home probabilities, and to refine pure chemicals in industrial-sized quantities at a fraction of the energy it would have taken elsewhere.

  Probability specialists in the employ of the Pryor corporate gene line
had labored hard to locate this particular Probability, with its unique physical properties—some theorists would argue, in fact, that they’d created it, like magicians bringing an entire universe into being with their spell. Once the Pryors had found the place, they’d explored it for years while putting together the right industrial base to properly exploit it. When they finally came, they came in strength, a whole industrial colony jigsawing itself into the Socorro system practically overnight.

  Once they started shipping product out, they had to declare to the authorities where it came from, and this particular Probability was no longer secret. Others could come and exploit it, but the Pryors already had their facilities in place, and the profits pouring out.

  Nobody lived in Socorro permanently. There was something about this reality that was conducive to forming tumors. You came in on a three-year contract and then shipped out, with cancer-preventing chemicals saturating your tissues.

  “Oh yisss,” Tonio said as we walked down Topside’s main avenue. “Scrutinize the fine ladies yonder, my compeer. I desire nothing so much as to bond with them chemically, oh yisss.”

  The local fashion for women was weirdly modest and demure, covering the whole body and with a hood for the head, and the outfit looked inflated—as if they were wearing full-body life preservers, designed to keep them floating even if Topside fell out of orbit and dropped into the ocean.

  But even these outfits couldn’t entirely disguise the female form, or the female walk. My blood seemed to fizz at the sight, and perhaps, in this quirky Probability, it did.

  Music floated out of a place called the Flesh Pit, all suggestive dark windows and colorful electric ads for cheap drinks. “Let us sample the pleasures of this charming bistro,” Tonio suggested.

  “How about some food first?” I said, but Tonio was already halfway through the door.

  The Flesh Pit had alcohol and other conventional stimulants, and also others that were designed for our current reality, taking advantage of the local biochemistry to deliver a packaged high aimed at our pumped metabolisms. The charge was delivered from a pressure cylinder into a cheap plastic face mask. The masks weren’t hygienic, but after a few huffs, we didn’t much care.