The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  “So we inadvertently caused the codes to multiply,” she says lamely. “Certainly explains a few things, anyway.”

  “Like?”

  “Platforms themselves are sentient. We know that Beta was contaminated during primary build-up to sentience after landing. While I was poking around in the matrix, I could have.…well.…I thought.…”

  “You thought what?”

  “Well, I could have sworn the thing giggled!”

  “Uh-huh,” says Cruz. “Well in the meantime we need to figure out what exactly is in those pseudo-paragenes. And Karlyn.…”

  Her skin flushes cold, knowingly. “What?”

  “We’ll have to destroy the stock. I’ll need that signature, Karlyn.”

  She shakes slightly. “I don’t concur.”

  “You called a third-party inquest. It’s no longer your decision.”

  Her heart sinks into her stomach. She sees another error made.

  You give that little bitch a good one last night? Made it special, so to finish what you started? Trying to go all the way up the ranks, Cruz? Need me out of the way, first? My vote, which always counts against you? You emptied my life, my career. You want my committee seat empty, too? This might do it for you. Glad I could help.

  “You hear? It’s not your decision.”

  She stares at her idle hands, at her trembling fingers, impassively, trapped. Her voice wanders absently from her lips: “I wonder whose, then?”

  She watches the little creatures spin around and begin dipping into the forest, disappearing one by one. She watches them go. The solemn one sits for a moment before getting up. It turns to face her and, before vanishing into the dense growth, sticks its tongue out.

  * * * *

  And now a word from our sponsors.…

  The aboriginals are busy gathering water and food, the soft fruits that hang low on the dripping trees. They pass the water bowls and food back down a line toward the larger group that lay huddled with the coming darkness under an umbrella tree, touching each others’ faces softly while working. The solemn one sits off a ways by the nodules where she had been working for some time, like a solitary watchman.

  Cruz has had no luck deciphering any biosequencing the paragenes might contain. The elusive alien life codes that they harbour remain shrouded in confusion. And with the stock’s authenticity in question, the committee has made its decision.

  “That’s funny. My interface is having trouble linking with Beta,” Cruz says. “I can’t hear her biorhythms.”

  “Oh?” she whispers to herself.

  “Have you downloaded the toxin into the Platform?”

  “Yes,” she lies. “Yes, I have.”

  The mouldings have burst into small flower-trees; nodules nested carefully among the large pink petals, waiting for the final coding sequence that would let them begin their new life.

  At least they’d have a fair chance, fairer than any stellar dweller could hope, of that she is certain. Roots. Roots from which to grow.…

  The bug’s primer chimes, signalling the craft’s readiness for launch. She waits at the hatch, her eyes swallowing the final picture as hard as they could. Gripping the interface controls around her helmet she logs on and links to Beta’s digilandscape. The induction flow appears stable, despite the strange whooping sound it makes. The program buoy holds.

  This will be her last action as a farmer. With a strange calmness, she keys in the final coding sequence from her wrist pad. She strains to hear the biomatrix flutter and hum in her earpiece. At first the algorithms scatter, then twirl like a cyclone. Piece by piece they fall into place, creating a new, yet familiar landscape.

  With the system fully automated, she disengages the link.

  “I can’t get a reading,” Cruz says. “Termination complete?”

  “Oh yes,” she says. “Yes it is.”

  Over the distance the solemn one’s voice booms a deep-throated tune, thick in the air. This is the first time she’s ever heard anything like this spring forth from their alien mouths. She finds something alluring about the song, something rich with deep, yet obscured meaning. She thinks to hit the recorder, but for no reason known to her she doesn’t move. Maybe it doesn’t seem important in the greater scheme of things.

  I wish you well. Whoever you are. Whoever, whatever you might become. You, who are rooted and set in your lives to come.…

  She palms the wall panel. The hatch closes like a flower at sunset. She returns her suit and equipment to the locker, folding it neatly, placing the devices correctly in their holding slots, directly beneath that fully loaded pulse gun. She strokes its transparent sheath; a finger tracing the weapon’s every curve, eyes locked on the trigger. She grips the gun’s handle firmly…

  “Countdown begun. Twenty minute ETA,” Cruz remarks. “See you soon.”

  “Yeah,” she says, placing the cold weapon in her belt and covering it with her shirt. “See you real soon.”

  As night falls hard the condensation on the bubble begins to crystallize. The view becomes hazy, discordant, and her heart feels a strange release, an unwanted wave of contentment filling the void once there.

  “System nominal,” says Cruz. “Run a diagnostic on—”

  And although I know you will not, could not, ever hope to know me, remember me. I, in my envy, shall remember you.

  Cruz’s voice cracks over the speakers. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Clear as ice,” she says, distantly. “Clear as ice.”

  TABULA RASA, by Ray Cluley

  I met Jo in a bookshop, I remember that much. I’ve always thought it an excellent place to meet the woman I fell in love with. Neither of my previous girlfriends had liked to read much and so our relationships didn’t last long. What can you talk about if not books? I’d picked up an Austen and was browsing through its pages, looking for annotations, when she spoke to me.

  “Oh, I love that one. I can’t believe he dumps her.”

  I looked up and there she was, somehow resplendent in a hoody and jeans: Joanne. She was beautiful, and something of my reaction to that must have shown, although she misinterpreted it.

  “Oh God. You’ve not read it.”

  I was able to recover by then. “I don’t think so.”

  “Seen the movie?”

  “Nope.”

  “And now I’ve ruined it for you. I’m so sorry.”

  I was in love. The smooth-talking type would have said, “Have dinner with me and all’s forgiven.” I said, “No problem.”

  “Forget I said it.”

  “Good idea. I’ll sell the memory.”

  “Yeah, right, who’d buy a ‘spoiled book’ memory?”

  Looking at the person who’d spoiled it, I figured just about anyone with a sexual interest in women.

  “You’d be surprised what people buy,” I said instead.

  “Not really. I work in a charity shop. Sold a painting of a goldfish this morning. Watercolour, naturally.” And she smiled.

  That’s how we met.

  * * * *

  I wasn’t joking about the memory selling thing, I really do work for Lucid. Yeah, it’s hard to get on their books, but sell something big and they keep you on for the little stuff. To get through uni I sold something big. Obviously I’m not sure what, but I strongly suspect it was winning a regional swim because I have the trophy at home with my name on. After that I made a little extra reading classic literature and selling the experience on; it’s popular with students. Twain said a classic is something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read, and it seems he was right. I have well thumbed copies of Dickens, Joyce, and funnily enough some Twain. That year was Austen. Shakespeare’s popular as well, of course. Pays more, too.

  But that was just a little extra to tide me over. For a proper job, when I met Jo, I worked at the university where I used to study. After my degree I couldn’t find anywhere to use it, so I taught others how to get my degree. Not very different from what I do fo
r Lucid, really.

  Jo, she volunteered at a charity place but she also worked as a florist. She’d come home smelling like camellia and carnations and forget-me-nots and I’d take deep breaths of her hair to get the scent that was hers.

  “Weirdo,” she’d say, but she said it smiling and she always kissed me afterwards.

  When Jo moved in we celebrated with takeout pizza and bottles of beer. She folds her pizza pieces before eating them so nothing falls off and I love her for it. One of her funny little ways.

  “When are you going to read something good?” She was picking mushrooms out of the box. They must have fallen from one of my pieces.

  “I always read something good.”

  “You always read the same something good. Try Chandler or Christie or Crais for a change.”

  “No one buys crime fiction. Those who want it, read it themselves. To work it out.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, read it for you.”

  “Novel idea,” I said, and drank to my own pun.

  She slapped my arm. “You used to read all the time.”

  “I still do.”

  “Sense and Sensibility again? Law books? The fucking Highway Code?”

  The truth was, money was tight and we needed the extra from Lucid. With Jo moved in, things would get easier. Then I’d read again. I told her this.

  “Fine. But the first thing I’m buying, my contribution to the place, is a proper bookshelf.”

  I looked to where we had boards stacked on blocks, each curving under the heavy load of books. “What about living the cliché?”

  That earned me another same slap to the arm but with a bit of tickling afterwards and then we were rolling around amidst empty beer bottles and boxes full of her things waiting to be unpacked.

  Good memories.

  * * * *

  “What would we do if I was pregnant?”

  We were in bed, having just made love for the second time that lazy Sunday, and without missing a beat I said, “Well obviously I’d want a paternity test.”

  She straddled me with a mock cry of outrage and before long we were at it for a third time.

  * * * *

  I sold my first memory of us when the boiler went. After nearly two weeks of our breath clouding the air, I went to Lucid and sold the time we went to the park for a picnic. We’d said “I love you” by then, but so recently that everything else we said was still a sense-heightened echo of it. Hands that touched when reaching for paper plates held a charge between them, and lips that kissed tasted for stories yet to be shared. We made shapes out of the clouds like you’d expect, fed the ducks like we were supposed to, and everything felt like we were the only ones who were ever really in love.

  That’s what her diary tells me anyway.

  Later, when I sold them the memory of our first holiday, it was because I thought Jo was pregnant. She wasn’t. But she was furious.

  “Why would you sell that? It was personal!”

  “All memories are.”

  (Yeah, I know; it was pathetic.)

  “But Greece! Our first holiday? Come on. We went snorkelling, took that cruise around the island—”

  “We have pictures.”

  “—had sex in the fucking surf. Pictures?”

  “Well not of that.”

  “Jesus. And now someone else has those memories. Some emotional retard loser who can’t get a girlfriend remembers fucking me in the sea and drinking cocktails every night.”

  I wanted to tell her it doesn’t work that way, but she knew. She was just angry. They don’t give the memory whole, they can’t. When you buy a memory you buy the sensations of recall, the feelings, the emotional experience. Think back to a memory of your own; it’s hazy, right? Sense impressions and big gaps, a spliced movie reel of images. Well with Lucid there are no images except the ones they give you after some tinkering, and maybe there’s some token souvenirs they rustle up for an extra cost. I also wanted to tell her that if we drank cocktails every night I was surprised she could remember much of it herself.

  “I thought we were having a baby,” I said. “I thought we’d need the money. I teach. You arrange flowers into pretty patterns and sell junk to help old people. We’re not exactly swimming in cash right now.”

  “We swam in the Med, but of course you wouldn’t remember that.”

  “Actually, we’ve been to Turkey, too. I remember the Med.”

  “Twat,” she said, and threw my Rubik’s Cube at me. I ducked and it smashed against the wall. I didn’t care. I could never do the fucking thing.

  We weren’t having a baby, so I took her back to Greece with the money. We had a great time, fixed things, made love to repair what we had. Made new memories. On a balcony eating salad and feta cheese we decided Jo would go on the pill. Just for a while.

  * * * *

  We had a lot of good times. I know because I still have the receipts. We were in love, and people always want that. It’s in demand, you could say, and it’s a seller’s market. For every roll around in a tangle of bed sheets, every romantic dinner, every walk along the beach I do remember, I’m sure I’ve sold just as many. I was careful, though. Or thought I was, anyway.

  At first the extra money was great. We were able to do more things together, enjoy ourselves, snuggle deeper into our love as we decorated the flat, ate out, saw the newest films and pulled them apart over drinks in cosy bars. The more things we did, the more I could sell one or two of them so we could have more. But it wasn’t long before it started to show. Jo would make jokes I didn’t understand or I’d ask questions I should’ve known the answers to, things like that. Once, as she stripped off her shirt for another bout in the bedroom, I noticed she had a tattoo hooked around her belly-button, a curl of ivy with little green hearts for leaves. It freaked me out a bit, that one, because I didn’t know she had it. Luckily her shirt was up over her head at the time, caught on her ponytail, and she didn’t see my surprise. I helped her undress with a shaky laugh and we rolled around together. I kissed her tattoo a lot and as she traced patterns on the back of my shoulder I realised I had one too.

  But on the whole, things were good.

  * * * *

  Lucid Ltd is a large building, new and expensive but otherwise modest about its identity. There are no signs outside except for an engraved panel of glass. Inside it’s all thick carpet and huge photographs of weddings, newborns, children on swings, graduations, acceptance speeches, other stuff. The pair on the front desk wear their smiles like it’s part of the uniform, but I know from experience they’re nice enough really. If they still have the same staff there.

  The man on the front desk was called David and he told me they couldn’t divulge the sort of information I required. I offered him money, but they must give the desk staff training or something because he turned it down. And it was a lot.

  “Please. I need to remember.”

  “Sales are non-returnable,” he said. “Come on, you know this.”

  I was a regular by then. I no longer got the “sir” treatment.

  The woman he shared the desk with was looking on with interest. She was new. I should have tried her.

  “Jenny, can you go and tell Martin to come to the front please?”

  Her eyes widened just a little and she picked up the phone. Martin was security.

  “No, go get him personally. It’ll hurry him up.”

  She nodded obediently and went. David took the cash I still held out and pocketed it quickly.

  “I’ll email you,” he said. “And you’ll delete it immediately afterwards, ok?”

  I nodded. Delete it. I could do that.

  * * * *

  Jo and I ate the rest of our meal in silence. I’d reminisced about the time we ate here last, me relishing every mouthful of rainbow trout and she nearing orgasm with every forkful of truffle-topped risotto.

  “What did I look like?” she asked eventually, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. She never dabbed at her mouth w
ith a napkin. She put her hands flat on the table and looked at me. “Did I have red hair, maybe? Blonde? Blue eyes? Maybe I had bigger tits.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I was pretty sure she hadn’t changed her hair in a while, and I was certain she hadn’t had any surgery. Whatever the trap was, I was missing it.

  “The girl you came here with last time, what did she look like?” She smiled, but it was her quick one, sharp like a paper cut. “When we came, you and me, for our anniversary, the place was a sushi bar.”

  I had no reply. I didn’t need to explain.

  “You said you wouldn’t go there anymore. You promised me no more Lucid. We’re doing fine now. We don’t need the money.”

  “I promised I wouldn’t sell anything else.” I sounded whiny even to me. “I bought something this time. I bought back our anniversary but they must have tinkered with it, changed some things.”

  “No shit.”

  That was when the waiter turned up to ask if everything was alright. He meant with our meal. We both told him yes, and Jo ordered dessert as if nothing had happened in that way women can do. As soon as he was gone she was back in combat mode.

  “They ‘tinkered’ with it so the dick who bought it wouldn’t see me in the street and say hi.”

  I tried to speak but she held up a finger and continued, anticipating my comeback.

  “No doubt they tinkered me back in for you. What did you do, take them a photo? And they must have tinkered the food too, or not tinkered it, or whatever, because I fucking. Hate. Risotto.”

  She pushed away from the table and left.

  I ate her sorbet when it came and paid the bill. The sorbet tasted of frozen nothing.

  * * * *

  I stopped selling anything to Lucid for a while then, except for the occasional Great Expectations. We got back to normal again, and eventually normal wasn’t bickering and making up; normal was only good stuff. We visited family, that’s how serious we were, and one day in January, when the air was so crisp it hurt your nose to breathe it and the sky was such a frosted blue you thought it would break if you could throw a rock high enough, I proposed. We’d moved from our dingy flat above the pet shop to a rented house that had cycle routes into the country. We’d pedalled our way through leafless woods and over tiny streams that crackled their ice beneath our wheels and when we stopped at a kissing gate I refused to let her pass until she’d said yes. I’m not making any of this up or reading it from her diary. I remember. It hurts the same way the wind did as it bit our hands and faces going downhill. We sped our way down to the nearest pub and celebrated our engagement with mulled wine and a ploughman’s lunch, of all things.