One Million A.D.

by Gardner Dozois

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION: Exploring the Far Future by Gardner Dozois

  GOOD MOUNTAIN by Robert Reed

  A PIECE OF THE GREAT WORLD by Robert Silverberg

  MIRROR IMAGE by Nancy Kress

  THOUSANDTH NIGHT by Alastair Reynolds

  MISSILE GAP by Charles Stross

  RIDING THE CROCODILE by Greg Egan

  ONE MILLION A.D.

  Edited by

  Gardner Dozois

  One Million A.D.

  Gardner Dozois

  One million years from now. It's a span of time so huge that it's hard for the mind to grasp. Even within science fiction, to conjure up a convincing portrait of what humanity might be like in such a remote future calls for writers with rare breadth of vision. Fortunately, Dozois and Dann have found them.

  Includes longer stories set in "One Million A.D." by:

  Robert Reed

  Robert Silverberg

  Nancy Kress

  Alastair Reynolds

  Greg Egan

  Compilation and Introduction copyright © 2005 by Gardner Dozois

  “Good Mountain,” copyright © 2005 by Robert Reed

  “A Piece of the Great World,” copyright © 2005 by Robert Silverberg

  “Mirror Image,” copyright © 2005 by Nancy Kress

  “Thousandth Night,” copyright © 2005 by Alastair Reynolds

  “Missile Gap,” copyright © 2005 by Charles Stross

  “Riding the Crocodile,” copyright © 2005 by Greg Egan

  All rights reserved.

  First Science Fiction Book Club printing December 2005

  Published by Science Fiction Book Club

  401 Franklin Avenue

  Garden City, New York 11530

  Visit the Science Fiction Book Club online at www.sfbc.com

  Book design by Christos Peterson

  ISBN: 0-7394-6273-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-343-0

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  For Tyler and Isabella,

  who are the future.

  INTRODUCTION:

  Exploring the Far Future

  By Gardner Dozois

  The concept of the “far future” is a relatively new one. Before you can conceive of a time millions of years from now, you first have to have a sense of a past that stretches millions of years behind us, an intuition into what has been called “deep time,” the kind of time, measured out in geological eras, in which mountains rise and fall, rock is laid down in patiently accumulating strata at the bottom of the sea before being thrust up into the air as naked new peaks, continents drift lazily around the globe, whole species of animals die, and new species evolve to replace them.

  The idea of “deep time” didn’t really become part of the intellectual armory of the human species until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when thinkers such as Jean Louis Agassiz, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin began to challenge the church-sanctioned view that Creation had happened at 9:00 a.m. on October 26, 4004 B.C. (according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century), suggesting instead that the Earth was countless millions of years old, rather than a mere six thousand—a span of time so staggeringly huge, so dismayingly vast, that it is difficult for the human mind, used to measuring things on the Mayfly scale of our own eyeblink lives, to even grasp it.

  Once you’ve had this vision of time stretching endlessly away behind us, it’s perhaps inevitable that it will occur to somebody that this means that time will continue on past the current day and keep on going for millions of years to come . . . a concept which, through extrapolation, leads to the realization that changes as sweeping and dramatic and vast as those that took place in remote geological ages past will continue to happen in the future—that the Earth of the far future will be as radically different from the Earth of today as today’s Earth is from the Earth of the Cretaceous or the Mesozoic.

  And thus the concept of the “far future” was born.

  Almost as soon as it was, science fiction writers were writing about it, sailing into the far future on the wings of their imaginations and exploring the strange and terrible wonders they found there. The first such exploration may have taken place in the pages of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1895, written at a time when even the concept that there was such a thing as the far future was radical, Cutting Edge stuff, and the concurrent idea that the Earth was millions of years old rather than six thousand was still fiercely controversial, hotly debated, and denied in both social and scientific circles. Wells was soon joined in visits to the far future by visionaries such as William Hope Hodgson (with his The Night Land and The House on the Borderland), J.B.S. Haldane (with his “The Last Judgment”), Olaf Stapledon (with his Last and First Men), and others—a tradition that enters the hothouse of the genre SF market in the early ’30s via stories such as John W. Campbell’s classic “Twilight” (written under the pseudonym of Don A. Stuart) and the Zothique stories of Clark Ashton Smith. By 1946, we come to the first great “modern” far-future SF novel, Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, and visions of the far-future continue to appear throughout the twentieth century in the work of writers such as Jack Vance, Brian W. Aldiss, Cordwainer Smith, Gene Wolfe, Frederik Pohl, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, and others.

  Here in the early days of the twenty-first century, I decided that it was time to get a twenty-first century take on what the far future was going to be like, and so I challenged a group of daring visionaries to imagine life in One Million A.D.: a time so far ahead that the human race and the Earth itself will have been altered almost out of recognition, and all of our history and culture, everything we are, everything we know and cherish, will have faded to dim and half-forgotten mythology—if it’s remembered at all.

  Even within SF, where most stories are set at least some distance into the future, far-future stories have always been relatively rare—few writers have ever had the imagination, poetic skills, and visionary scope required to write convincingly about what humanity might be like, what radical changes we might have undergone in nature and lifestyles, not just a few decades or even a hundred years from now, but a million years from now (always assuming, of course, that there are humans still surviving by then, or anything we’d recognize as human, anyway—but that’s a different anthology!). To conjure up an evocative and poetically intense portrait of the far future calls for a degree—and a kind—of imagination rare even among science fiction writers.

  I’m pleased to say that the writers gathered here, Robert Reed, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, and Greg Egan, have done a splendid job of meeting that challenge, providing along the way, not at all incidentally, some of the most vivid, evocative, entertaining, and mind-stretchingly imaginative science fiction you’re ever likely to find. Enjoy!

  —Gardner Dozois

  GOOD MOUNTAIN

  By Robert Reed

  Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short-fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And—also like Baxter and Stableford—he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” �
��Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the ’80s and ’90s; many of his best stories were assembled in his first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. Nor is Reed non-prolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the ’80s, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, and Sister Alice. His most recent book is a chapbook novella, Mere. Coming up is a new collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and a new novel, The Well of Stars. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Reed has visited the far future in his Sister Alice stories and in stories such as “Whiptail” and “Marrow,” but here he takes us deeper into the future than he ever has before, to a world whose origin is lost in the labyrinth of time, a world where, as a group of randomly thrown-together travelers is about to learn, everything is about to change—and not for the better.

  ###

  A DOT ON OLD PAPER

  “World’s Edge. Approaching now . . . World’s Edge!”

  The worm’s caretaker was an elderly fellow named Brace. Standing in the middle of the long intestinal tract, he wore a dark gray uniform, patched but scrupulously clean, soft-soled boots and a breathing mask that rode on his hip. Strong hands held an angelwood bucket filled with a thick, sour-smelling white salve. His name was embossed above his shirt pocket, preceded by his rank, which was Master. Calling out with a deep voice, Master Brace explained to the several dozen passengers, “From this station, you may find your connecting trails to Hammer and Mister Low and Green Island. If World’s Edge happens to be your destination, good luck to you, and please, collect your belongings before following the signs to the security checkpoints. And if you intend to stay with this splendid worm, that means Left-of-Left will be our next stop. And Port of Krauss will be our last.”

  The caretaker had a convincing smile and a calm, steady manner. In his presence, the innocent observer might believe that nothing was seriously wrong in the world.

  “But if you do plan to stay with me,” Brace continued, “you will still disembark at World’s Edge, if only for the time being. My baby needs her rest and a good dinner, and she’s got a few little sores that want cleaning.” Then he winked at the passengers and began to walk again, totting his heavy bucket toward the stomach—up where the mockmen were quartered. “Or perhaps we’ll linger here for two little whiles,” the old man joked. “But I don’t expect significant delays, and you shouldn’t let yourselves worry.”

  Jopale sighed and sat back against the warm pink wall. He wasn’t worried. Not through any innate bravery, but because he had been scared for so long now, there was little room left for new concerns. Or so it seemed at that particular moment. Indeed, since his last long sleep, Jopale had enjoyed a renewed sense of confidence. A guarded optimism was taking root. Calculating how far he had come, he saw that most of the world lay behind him now, while it wasn’t too much of a lie to tell himself that Port of Krauss was waiting just beyond the horizon.

  Jopale even managed his own convincing smile, and watching his fellow passengers, he found one other face that appeared equally optimistic.

  A young woman, built small and just a little short of pretty, was sitting directly across from him. She must have come onboard during his last sleep. Maybe at Which-Way, he reasoned. There was a fine university in that ancient city. Perhaps she was a student heading home, now that every school was officially closed. Her bags were few and small. A heavy book filled her tiny lap. Her breathing mask looked as if it had never been used, while a powerful torch rode on her other hip. Her clothes were comfortable if somewhat heavy—wool dyed green with thick leather pads on the knees and elbows. Bare black toes wiggled against a traveling blanket. Her leather boots had tough rubber soles, which was why she didn’t wear them inside the worm. She looked ready for a long journey into cold darkness. But where could a young woman be going, and smiling about her prospects too?

  There was one logical conclusion: Jopale caught the woman’s gaze, nodded and offered a friendly wink. “Are you like me, miss?” he inquired. “Are you traveling to Port of Krauss?”

  She hesitated, glancing at the other passengers. Then she shook her head. “I’m not, no,” she told him.

  Jopale thought he understood.

  “But you’re traveling through Krauss,” he persisted. “On your way to some other destination, perhaps?”

  He was thinking about the New Isles.

  But she shook her head, a little embarrassed perhaps, but also taking some pleasure from his confusion.

  No one else was speaking just then, and the intestine of a worm was a very quiet place. It was easy to eavesdrop and to be heard whenever you spoke. In quick succession, three young men offered possible destinations, picking little cities set on the auxiliary trails—each man plainly wishing that this woman’s destination was his own.

  “No,” she told them. “No. And I’m sorry, but no.”

  Other passengers began to play the silly game, and to her credit, the woman remained cheerful and patient, responding immediately to each erroneous guess. Then the great worm began to shake around them, its muscular body twisting as it pulled off onto one of the side trails. Suddenly there was good reason to hurry the game along. The young men were leaving here; didn’t they deserve a useful hint or two?

  “All right,” she said reasonably. “I’ll remain on this trail until I’m done.” Then she closed her book with a heavy thump, grinning as she imagined her final destination.

  “Left-of-Left?” somebody shouted.

  “We’ve already guessed that,” another passenger complained.

  “Where else is there?”

  “Does anybody have a map?”

  Jopale stood up. When their worm was young and quite small, holes had been cut through its fleshy sides, avoiding the major muscle groups. Each hole was fitted with progressively larger rubber plugs, and finally a small plastic window that looked as if it was carved from a cold fog. Through one of those windows, Jopale could see the tall buildings of the city and their long shadows, plus the high clear sky that was as close to night as anything he had ever known. What a journey this had been, and it wasn’t even finished yet. Not for the first time, Jopale wished he had kept a journal. Then when there was time—once he was living on the New Isles, perhaps—he would write a thorough account of every awful thing that had happened, as well as his final triumphs.

  A dozen travelers were now examining their maps, calling out the names of tiny places and abandoned cities. There was a time when people lived in the Tanglelands and points beyond, but that had been years ago. Only the oldest maps bothered to show those one-time destinations. A young man, very tall and shockingly thin, was standing close to the woman—too close, in Jopale’s mind—and he carefully listed a string of places that existed nowhere but on a sheet of yellowed paper and faded ink that he held up to the window’s light.

  “Yes,” said the woman, just once.

  But the tall man didn’t notice. He kept reading off names, pushing his finger along the black worm trail, and the woman was saying, “No, no, no,” again, smiling pleasantly at his foolishness.

  But Jopale had noticed.

  “Go back,” he said.

  The tall man looked at him, bothered by the interruption.

  Then a stocky old woman reached up high, hitting the fellow between the shoulder blades. “The girl said, ‘Yes.’ Didn’t you hear?”

  Another woman said, “Read backwards.”

  The tall man was too flustered to do anything now.

  So Jopale took the map for himself, and in the dim light, he made his best guess. “What about Good Mountain?”


  Once more, the girl said, “Yes.”

  “What kind of name is that?” the tall man asked, reclaiming his map, taking the trouble to fold it up neatly. “What does that word mean? ‘Mountain’? I’ve never heard it before.”

  But the game was finished. Suddenly the old caretaker had returned, carrying an empty bucket with one bony hand. “This is the station at World’s Edge,” Master Brace called out.

  The worm had come to a stop.

  “My baby needs to breathe and to eat her fill,” he reminded everyone. “So please, you must disembark. With your luggage, and with your tickets.” Then a look of mischief came into the weathered face, and he added, “But if you will, please leave your hopes behind. I’d like to claim a few of them for myself.”

  A few passengers laughed at his bleak humor. But most just shook their heads and growled to themselves, or they quietly spat on the smooth pink floor.

  The young woman was picking up her book and bags and her heavy boots, a joyous smile setting her apart from everyone else.

  About her destination—the enigmatic Good Mountain—she said nothing at all.

  A MOUTHFUL OF HISTORY

  Every homeland was once new land, small and thin, pushed about by the willful winds. But the ground where Jopale grew up was still relatively young, and for much of its life, it had been a free-drifting body.