“And you came to tell me this…why?”
“Because you started it. And I thought you’d want to know.”
“No,” I said, sensing a very different message behind her words, “it has to be more than that.”
“It doesn’t have to be anything.”
She turned to walk away.
I jumped to my feet and followed her, dodging the elastic leaves that snapped back in her wake.
“Don’t run from me, Nadia. You always do that—reach out, then push me away. Is that how it’s always been? Is that why you never come out of your suit, because you feel safe in there?”
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” she said, feet crunching heavily through the undergrowth. “I’m not afraid of connecting any more than you’re afraid of being alone. Neither of us would be here if we weren’t.”
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t answer.
We hit the edge of the green zone and followed the curved inner wall to the nearest airlock. The truth was, I didn’t know why I was following her any more than I knew why she’d come to me, but it seemed important to make the attempt. She was on the verge of something, something critical, and as we passed into the human sector of the habitat it came to me what that might be.
“You’re giving up,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re thinking about killing yourself.”
“It wouldn’t be hard. And it’s not illegal.”
“Whether it’s hard or legal isn’t the point,” I said, struggling to find words for why the suggestion filled me with such alarm. “It’s just crazy. There’s so much here. I mean, look around us. Five suns! Aliens! What else do you want?”
“I used to feel that way. Now I’ve changed my mind. And I know that’s not all you want.”
“All right—I’m being simplistic in order to defend my own uncertainties. So sue me. But look at the machine intelligences. They haven’t given up, have they? What makes them different to you? If they haven’t topped themselves, why should anyone?”
“I’ve no idea what they think, and neither do you.”
“That doesn’t make their conclusion invalid.”
“But they think on different scales. Time moves differently for them.”
“So put yourself in cold storage for a bit. See what’s happening in a thousand years. Isn’t that better than death?”
“You’re not saying anything I haven’t said myself.”
“Well, you should listen to yourself. These are pretty persuasive arguments.”
She stopped without warning. “I told you. I changed my mind.”
I stared at her back for a long moment, trying to drill mentally through her armor and see what lay beneath. We were talking about suicide, but I didn’t think I’d reached the heart of what was bothering her. Her suit was in the way.
It was immaculate, as always, but she might as well have been bleeding from every joint.
“You changed your mind when, exactly?” I asked her.
“It’s none of your business.”
She didn’t call me “soldier,” but she might as well have.
“This is to do with Grae Bilwis, isn’t it?”
She half-turned. “He was my partner.”
“So he broke the law and betrayed you. That’s his fault, not yours. You had to do what you did. He had it coming. Right?”
She hung her head. For all the strength and resilience of her alloy shell, she seemed about to sag to the habitat floor and melt away. She actually went down on one knee, so our heads were almost level.
“You’re not listening, Alex. He was my partner.”
I shut up, thinking that at last I understood.
That’s the funny thing about data. A single piece of information can change everything. Like Archimedes and his lever, you just need precisely the right one. Everything else is dross. If I’d known sooner what Grae Bilwis meant to Nadia Ei, I thought, maybe I might have understood her better, maybe even helped her. I certainly understood, now, why leaving Harvester—where he had died—had been an ambiguous prospect for her. But I still didn’t entirely understand their story. Had she killed him or had he killed himself? Had he run from her or had they been traveling together? It didn’t matter. He was gone, and she now wanted to follow him.
Except it’s not dross, all that mass of extra data. It has weight and substance. And so do conclusions based on that mass, not to mention behavior based on those conclusions.…
I don’t know exactly what went through my mind in that moment. It wasn’t a revelation borne out of reasoning or logic. It just came to me in a flash, and for a moment I didn’t believe it. Then I thought of how things could be hidden right out in the open, sometimes. I thought of what a difference it would make, if it were true. I thought of how hard it would be to tell her, and just for a second I seriously considered not telling her at all.
But the thought in my head was too large to keep to myself. I had to do something with this knowledge. I had to share it.
I put one hand on the side of Nadia’s helm—a tiny, soft thing compared to the hard metal—and the other on her left shoulder flange.
“Come with me,” I said.
She said nothing, made no sound at all. Maybe she had shut off her comms so I wouldn’t hear her weeping, or laughing, or screaming. I had no way of knowing what she was doing in there. But she did move. She straightened, and she followed me like a sleepwalker through the habitats.
She broke her silence only when it became obvious where we were going.
“We’ve been here already,” she said. “I’m sure nothing’s changed.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but bear with me.”
“No,” she said, pulling back. “I’m not going back there unless you tell me.”
“Okay. It’s a small thing, so it might not immediately seem like much, but I think it makes a huge difference. Think of the machine intelligences.”
“What about them?”
“Well, they’re conscious, rational beings, like you, Grae, lots of others. But they’re still here. They haven’t given up. Why not?”
There were no easy answers to that question, but there was one really interesting one.
“You’re going to have to spell it out for me,” she said.
“They haven’t committed suicide because they’re like me.”
“You’re blaming their stubbornness on your legacy genes?”
“No. They know it won’t make any difference. Think about it, Nadia. We don’t really know how the wormcaster works, right? We assume it throws us physically from Infall to Outfall, but that’s just a guess based on what we see happening.”
“Someone comes out the Infall who didn’t go in,” she said. “Someone goes in the Outfall and emerges somewhere else.”
“Close. What we actually see from the sending end is someone going into Outfall and not emerging.”
“Splitting hairs, surely?”
“Not at all. The Outfall we have here seems to be working fine, but no one goes anywhere. We stay here. So instead of assuming that we’ve misunderstood the way it works, we assume it’s not working at all—when in fact it might be doing most of its job just fine, just not the one critical part that has led to the problem we see here.”
“Which critical part is that?”
Here, I hesitated. “Did you and Grae take the tour of the disk like we did?”
“No.”
“Then…I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you that everything will be all right, somewhere, but now I can’t.”
“I’ve never thought it would be. Not since we were stuck here, and he…”
She stopped. I could tell the thought had sunk in. Maybe not all of it, and she would probably need time to accept the rest, as I had—but the important part was there. I could tell from the way she turned and hurried with renewed urgency for Outfall.
There was a different tour guide this time, one slightly harder to understand. I managed to convi
nce the uncooperative Uotan that we wanted to go in on our own, and he/she/it acquiesced in the end, simply, I think, to get us out of his/her/its hair. It wasn’t as if we could damage anything, after all. The disk had been sitting there for more years than humanity had existed. Not even time had dented it.
We had barely entered the tunnel when Nadia stopped and crouched down in front of me.
“If you’re right—”
“Then it makes no difference to us. And if I’m wrong, it makes no difference at all.”
“You think the machines really know about this?”
“I suspect they do.”
“Why haven’t they told anyone?”
I thought of Zuzi. She would have greeted the news with the sincere but utterly uniform delight she greeted every occurrence.
“It makes sense that they would keep this quiet,” I said. “After all, they can’t possibly prove it. Not until someone finally goes all the way around the Loop, anyway, or figures out how to make the Outfall work in both ways. It’s a guess, and it might be wrong.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No. That’s why I’m here.”
“Both of us have already been inside once. Won’t that make a difference?”
“To Outfall, we’re just dumb matter.”
“So we can do this as many times as we want?”
“I don’t see why not.” I stared into the suit’s glittering eyes. “Does that make you feel better? Liberated, somehow? I know it shouldn’t but, still…I think it does. To me, anyway.”
She said, “All right, Alex. I’ll go with you, all the way. I wasn’t sure until now. I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea. But I will, if we go together.”
I smiled. “So let’s go.”
“Wait. Not like this. It could be dangerous.”
She stood up. Something whirred and hissed. A panel lifted out from the front of her suit, then several panels beneath that one. I thought something had malfunctioned in the complex fields of the Outfall disk. Then it occurred to me that suit wasn’t falling apart. It was opening.
I stepped back, not fully comprehending until all the layers had peeled and I saw what lay within.
“Grae couldn’t bear the thought of it,” she said. Her voice was unchanged. “The Loop was supposed to bring us together, but the truth of it was that we were as close as we were ever going to be. Nothing I said or did could change the way he was feeling. He didn’t understand himself until we were stuck together in Harvester, and once it was clear we would be stuck here forever, he chose the easy way out. He saw no reason to hope, and after a while, neither did I.”
My head was swimming, and it wasn’t from the forces at work inside the disk.
“When I saw you digging for information on Grae, I thought you were being stubborn again, trying to understand—and you were, but you understood the wrong thing.” She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I swear I wasn’t looking for you to rescue me.”
I stared, thinking of all the times I had misunderstood what Nadia’s suit meant to her.
“This place,” she went on. “It’s like some fucked-up metaphor for life. Sometimes we need to destroy the past so we can move on. Otherwise, we’re stuck. If we can’t shrug off what came before, we can’t leave it behind, can’t move on. But life does move on, even if we don’t always want it to. Even if what lies ahead might be dangerous, or frightening, or whatever. Are you going to say something?”
I didn’t know what to say. Her suit was empty. There was room for a person, with instruments, life support, and black formfit padding that looked beyond comfortable—but there was no one in the seat.
“Where are you?” I asked, thinking absurd thoughts about ghosts in the machine.
“In the armor,” she said. “Spread thin.”
“Biological?”
“Of course, otherwise alcohol would have no effect. If you want the gruesome details—”
“No thanks. But you are human, right?”
“Yes. Would it make a difference if I wasn’t?”
“I think so.” It seemed better not to lie. “You want me to get in?”
“Are you going to?”
“It’s a big step.”
“Don’t get all Freudian on me. This doesn’t have to change anything. You don’t even have to do it, if you don’t want to—”
“I know,” I said, understanding at last that this was how Grae Bilwis had come to Harvester, why the Authorities had never heard of him until she had given them his body. “I think it’s a good idea, though. We don’t know what lies ahead, right?”
“Right. It would be safer this way.”
I still could have backed out. We weren’t going anywhere, after all. We would still be stuck with Harvester, and the celebration, and the memories of everyone we had lost. But that was the other side of the equation, and she knew it.
“Just let’s make it very clear up front,” she said, “that I won’t take your orders. You’re not my pilot. Okay?”
I thought of the complex equations needed to describe the motions of Harvester’s five stars, and extrapolated them out to cover all the beings there, all the people who had ever followed the Loop, all the people back home—including my higher self, who I fully expected never to see again, in this life, and who I would always miss, no matter what substitutes I found…
The easy part would be telling Zuzi I probably didn’t need her apartment anymore.
I said, “Okay.”
She crouches.
I step inside.
She seals up.
We walk to the end of the tunnel, turn around, and come back.
Lna was waiting for us in junction one-sixty-four. Nearly seventy Lnas, to be exact, all pretty much identical apart from the length of time they had spent in Harvester. Most of the population here consists of guides, as a matter of fact. Everybody else who comes through moves on, once they make the break from what they’ve left behind. That’s what the Loop is for, when it works.
We were greeted with delight and excitement, but not surprise. We weren’t the first versions of us to come through. That we understood the situation this time put us in very elite crowd, though. Most people fall through accidentally. The scientists who had done so were uniformly sheepish, and not without reason, given the gaff they’d help perpetuate—that staying in Harvester wasn’t the same thing as not appearing in one-sixty-four.
The erasure mechanism worked fine at the next junction. It was a strange feeling, knowing that the present version of myself was going to be destroyed when we moved on to the next. But the issue of identity and which version was “real” was moot by that point, since we’d already gone through the process so many times and felt authentic enough. It didn’t matter where our atoms came from, or how many of us there were, now. The really unnerving thought was whether any of the links ahead had failed in different ways. Just because our data went forth along the wormcaster, that didn’t mean there was going to be an Infall to receive it at the next stop. What if the last version to be erased was the last ever to exist?
Not knowing was okay. Ignorance loves company.
And besides, there was still Harvester.
Under the dark night skies of junction one-sixty-four, knowing we weren’t going to be there forever, we were the living embodiment of what happened next, and that was all that mattered to us.
#1 New York Times-bestselling Sean Williams is the author of several award-winning space opera series, including Evergence, Geodesica, and Astropolis, plus six novels set in the Star Wars universe. He also writes fantasy novels for readers of all ages, inspired by the dry, flat lands of South Australia, the landscape of his childhood, where he still lives with his wife and family. His latest is Troubletwisters, the first in a kids fantasy series co-written with long-time friend Garth Nix. “The N-Body Solution” is set in the same fiction universe as three previously-published stories: “A Map of the Mines of Barnath,” “Inevitable,” and “A Glimpse of
the Marvellous Structure (And the Threat It Entails).”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to the following:
Jim Minz at Baen Books for publishing this anthology, and for shepherding the book through the publication process.
My agent, Joe Monti, for finding a good home for this project, and for the incredible amount of support he’s provided since taking me on as a client—he’s gone above and beyond the call of duty. To any writers reading this: you’d be lucky to have Joe in your corner.
Kurt Miller, for the amazing cover.
David Barr Kirtley, Andrew Liptak, and Adam Israel for providing feedback on the stories during the editorial process.
Danni Kelly, for being pretty fantastic.
John Steakley and Robert A. Heinlein—if not for their novels Armor and Starship Troopers, this anthology may not exist.
Gordon Van Gelder, my friend and mentor. Without him, this anthology would definitely not exist.
My amazing wife, Christie, and my mom, Marianne, for all their love and support, and their endless enthusiasm for all my new projects.
My dear friends Robert Bland, Desirina Boskovich, Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, Jordan Hamessley, Andrea Kail, David Barr Kirtley, and Matt London, for enduring endless conversations about possible anthology projects and hearing me go on at length about power armor and mecha while I was working on this one.
The readers and reviewers who loved my other anthologies, making it possible for me to do more.
And last, but certainly not least: a big thanks to all of the authors who appear in this anthology.
STORY COPYRIGHTS
Foreword by Orson Scott Card. © 2012 Orson Scott Card.
Introduction by John Joseph Adams. © 2012 John Joseph Adams.
The Johnson Maneuver by Ian Douglas. © 2012 Ian Douglas.
Hel’s Half-Acre by Jack Campbell. © 2012 Jack Campbell.
Jungle Walkers by David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell. © 2012 David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell.
The Last Run of the Coppelia by Genevieve Valentine. © 2012 Genevieve Valentine.
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