Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  We go into the third verse. Jake hits pause.

  “So you see,” he says.

  I pull out the phones. “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Then you need to go back and listen to the previous performance. And the one before that. And every goddamned rendition of that song he’s ever done before tonight.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes. Because then you’d understand.” And Jake looks at me with an expression of the utmost gravity on his face, as if he’s about to disclose one of the darkest, most mystical secrets of the universe. “It was different tonight. He came in early. Jumped his usual cue. And when he did come in it was for longer than usual and he added that vocal flourish.”

  I nod, but I’m still not seeing the big picture. “OK. He screwed up. Shit happens. Gotta roll with it, remember? It was still a good show. Everyone said so.”

  But he shakes his head. “You’re not getting it, buddy. That wasn’t a mistake. That was something much worse. That was an improvement. That was him improvising.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “I can be sure.” He punches another key and a slice of Derek’s neural activity pops up. “Extracted this from the performance,” he says. “Right around the time he started going off-script.” His finger traces three bright blotches. “You see these hotspots? They’ve come on in ones and twos before. But they’ve never once lit up at the same time.”

  “And this means something?”

  He taps his finger against the blotches in turn. “Dorsal premotor cortex. That’s associated with the brain planning a sequence of body movements. You slip on ice, that’s the part that gets you flapping your arms so you don’t fall over.” Next blotch. “Anterior cingulate. That’s your basic complex resolution, decision making module, right. Do I chase after that meal, or go after that one?” He moves his finger again. “Interior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex. We’re deep into mammal brain structure here—a normal Rex wouldn’t have anything you could even stick a label on here. You know when this area lights up, in you and me?”

  “I’m not, strangely enough, a neuroscientist.”

  “Nor was I until I got involved with Derek. This is the sweet spot, buddy. This is what lights up when you hear language or music. And all three of these areas going off at once? That’s a pretty unique signature. It doesn’t just mean he’s playing music. It means he’s making shit up as he goes along.”

  For a moment I don’t know what to say. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s right. He knows the show—and Derek’s brain—inside out. He knows every cue Derek’s meant to hit. Derek missing his mark—or coming in early—just isn’t meant to happen. And Derek somehow finding a way to deviate from the program and make the song sound better is, well . . . not exactly the way Jake likes things to happen.

  “I don’t like improvisation,” he says. “It’s a sign of creative restlessness. Before you know it . . .”

  “It’s solo recording deals, expensive riders and private tour buses.”

  “I thought we got away from this shit,” Jake says mournfully. “I mean, dead bodies, man. Then robots. Then dinosaurs. And still it’s coming back to bite us. Talent always thinks it knows best.”

  “Maybe it does.”

  “A T-Rex?”

  “You gave him just enough of a mind to rock. Unfortunately, that’s already more than enough to not want to take orders.” I take a sip from the JD. “But look on the bright side. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “He escapes and eats us.”

  “Apart from that.”

  “I don’t know. If he starts showing signs of . . . creativity . . . then we’re fucked six ways from Tuesday. We’ll have animal rights activists pulling the plug on every show.”

  “Unless we just . . . roll with it. Let him decide what he does. I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t want to perform, is it? You’ve seen him out there. This is what he was born for. Hell, why stop there? This is what he was evolved for.”

  “I wish I had your optimism.”

  I look back at the cage. Derek’s watching us, following the conversation. I wonder how much of it he’s capable of understanding. Maybe more than we realise.

  “Maybe we keep control of him, maybe we don’t. Either way, we’ve done something beautiful.” I hand him the bottle. “You, mainly. It was your idea, not mine.”

  “Took the two of us to make it fly,” Jake says, before taking a gulp. “And hell, maybe you’re right. That’s the glorious thing about rock and roll. It’s alchemy. Holy fire. The moment you control it, it ain’t rock and roll no more. So maybe the thing we should be doing here is celebrating.”

  “All the way.” And I snatch back the JD and take my own swig. Then I raise the bottle and toast Derek, who’s still watching us. Hard to tell what’s going on behind those eyes, but one thing I’m sure of is that it’s not nothing. And for a brief, marvellous instant, I’m glad not only to be alive, but to be alive in a universe that has room in it for beautiful monsters.

  And heavy metal, of course.

  Graffiti in the Library of Babel

  David Langford

  David Langford (ansible.co.uk) lives in Reading in the UK. He publishes the semi-prozine Ansible, the tabloid newspaper of SF and fandom, which won a bunch of Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a monthly column in Interzone, and found online at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible. He is currently SF fandom’s most famous humorous writer—see his book He Do The Time Police In Different Voices—and has won many best fan writer Hugo Awards. He is an indefatigable book reviewer (some of his reviews are collected in The Complete Critical Assembly, in Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980–2002, and in The SEX Column and Other Misprints). For the last fifteen years he has been publishing short SF of generally high quality, most of it now collected in Different Kinds of Darkness.

  “Graffiti in the Library of Babel,” which appeared in the anthology Is Anybody Out There, is a new take on the first contact story. Ceri Evans discovers that someone is embedding communications in the electronic files of the Total Library, and giving humanity something immensely powerful for free. As the communications are decoded, Langford ups the ante: As Ceri says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  There seems to be no difference at all between the message of maximum content (or maximum ambiguity) and the message of zero content (noise).

  John Sladek, “The Communicants”

  As it turned out, they had no sense of drama. They failed to descend in shiny flying discs, or even to fill some little-used frequency with a tantalizing stutter of sequenced primes. No: they came with spray cans and spirit pens, scrawling their grubby little tags across our heritage.

  Or as an apologetic TotLib intern first broke the news: “Sir, someone’s done something nasty all over Jane Austen.”

  The Total Library project is named in homage to Kurd Lasswitz’s thought experiment “Die Universal Bibliothek,” which inspired a famous story by Jorge Luis Borges. Another influence is the “World Brain” concept proposed by H. G. Wells. Assembling the totality of world literature and knowledge should allow a rich degree of cross-referencing and interdisciplinary . . .

  Ceri Evans looked up from the brochure. Even in this white office that smelt of top management, she could never resist a straight line: “Why, congratulations, Professor. I think you may have invented the Internet!”

  “Doctor, not Professor, and I do not use the title,” said Ngombi with well-simulated patience. “Call me Joseph. The essential point of TotLib is that we are isolated from the net. No trolls, no hackers, none of what that Manson book called sleazo inputs. Controlled rather than chaotic cross-referencing.”

  “But still you seem to have these taggers?”

  “Congratulations, Doctor Evans! I think you may have just deduced the contents of my original email to you.”

  “All right. All square.” Ceri held up one thin hand in mock surrender. “We’ll leave the posh
titles for the medics. Now tell me: Why is this a problem in what I do, which is a far-out region of information theory, rather than plain data security?”

  “Believe me, data security we know about. Hackers and student pranksters have been rather exhaustively ruled out. As it has been said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

  “ ‘Holmes, this is marvellous,’ ” said Ceri dutifully.

  “ ‘Meretricious,’ said he.” Joseph grinned. “We are a literary team here.”

  Ceri felt a sudden contrarian urge not to be literary. “Maybe we should cut to the chase. There’s only one logical reason to call me in. You suspect the Library is under attack through the kind of acausal channel I’ve discussed in my more speculative papers? A concept, I should remind you, that got me an IgNobel Prize and a long denunciation in The Skeptic because everyone knows it’s utter lunacy. Every Einstein-worshipping physicist, at least.”

  A shrug. “ ‘Once you eliminate the impossible . . .’ And I’m not a physicist. Come and see.” He was so very large and very black. Ceri found herself wondering whether his white-on-white decor was deliberate contrast.

  The taggers had spattered their marks across the digital texts of TotLib: short bursts of characters that made no particular sense but clearly belonged to the same family, like some ideogram repeated with slight variations along the shopping mall, through the car park and across the sides of subway carriages. Along Jane Austen, through Shakespeare and underground to deface Jack Kerouac and the Beats. After half an hour of on-screen examples Ceri felt the familiar eye glaze of overdosing on conceptual art.

  “The tags,” she said cautiously, “never appear within words?” This is a test. Do not be afraid of the obvious.

  “We decided all by ourselves to call them tags.” The faint smile indicated that Joseph was still in a mood for point-scoring.

  “Okay. I see.” She didn’t, but in a moment it came. “Not just graffiti but mark-up, like HTML or XML tags. Emphasis marks. You think they’re not so much defacing the texts as going through them with a highlighter. Boldface on, It is a truth universally acknowledged, boldface off.”

  “Congratulations! It took our people several days to reach that point.”

  Ceri drummed her fingers irritably against the TotLib workstation. “The point seems to be that it’s already been reached. So why me?”

  “I saw a need for someone who can deal with the implications. If this tagging is coming in through your acausal channels—and we truly cannot trace any conventional route—and if that New Scientist piece on you was not too impossibly dumbed down . . .”

  “Oh Duw oh God. It was, but never mind.”

  “. . . the origin of the transmission would necessarily be something in the close vicinity of a supermassive black hole?”

  “Well. That assumes the channel source is in our universe in the first place. The IgNobel presenter was very funny about Dimension X and the Phantom Zone.” Another memory that clung and stuck, a mental itch she couldn’t stop scratching.

  “So many times it has been said, ‘They laughed at Galileo.’ ”

  “And sometimes it’s also been said that they laughed at nitrous oxide.”

  Again Joseph smiled hugely. “Would you care for lunch?”

  “Let me have another look first. Let me plod my slow way to some other plateau your staff reached last week. Boldface on, instruments of darkness, boldface off. Did that make you think of my black hole? Masters of the universe. God’s quarantine regulations. These things need to be grouped or sequenced—no, both.”

  The TotLib interface was easy enough to use. Ceri backtracked, paused, went forward again through lexical chaos. “The structure of those tags . . . there’s a flavour of inversion symmetry . . . suppose ON has a group identifier wrapped around a sequence number, and OFF is sequence around group? Or the other way around, of course. That would sort your grab bag of quotes into chunks and give the chunks an internal order. Oh bugger, I’m biting my nails again. Sorry. Have we caught up with your clever staff yet?” She hadn’t meant to get hooked on the dizzy rush of problem-solving. But, she thought, be glad it still comes.

  The big man seemed perceptibly less smug. “My clever staff will catch up with you . . . maybe next week. Ceri—if I may—I am impressed. It is most definitely time for lunch.”

  The meal was inoffensive and the wine better, if only by about ten per cent, than you’d expect from an institution in a secure vault under a dour Swiss alp. As her host explained: “The Scientologists are working to preserve their founder’s teachings for all eternity, and our sponsors feel there should be an alternative view.”

  At first Ceri had felt obscurely prickly about Dr Joseph Ngombi, and she tried now to be a little friendlier: mustn’t let him think a good Welsh girl like herself had a streak of racism. Part of her mind was elsewhere, though (structured tags, that kaleidoscope of quoted fragments), and her vague attempts at friendly signals led to some carefully placed mentions of his dear wife and children. Earlier that day she’d thought she was looking good, with a new dark-red hair rinse; now she wondered whether Joseph saw her as a dyed and predatory hag. What were the chances of making sense of graffiti from some distant, supermassive black hole when communications went astray across the width of a restaurant table?

  “No thanks,” she said, protecting her wineglass from the waiter’s menacing pass. “I’ll need a clear head.” Or maybe just an empty one. The trouble with an open mind, the saying went, is that people come along and put things in it.

  Ceri liked the idea of TotLib staff handling the boring rote-work, but didn’t want to get too far away from that tagged text. Layers of abstraction are great in software but tend to blur the focus of real-world problems. They compromised on a multi-view workstation: defaced ebooks here, grouped and sequenced tags there, and the clear light of understanding in the window that for a long time stayed dismally blank.

  Clearing away the relentless tag repetition through multiple editions, critical cites and anthologies of quotations, there were just 125 tagged phrases in all. “Five to the third power,” Ceri muttered. “The science fiction writers would say straight away that our friends must count to base five, meaning they have five limbs or five tentacles or . . .” She stared moodily at the significant number of jointed manipulators on her left hand. “Or not.”

  Joseph spread out a hand that proved to be missing one finger. “Just an old accident, but I would seem to be ruled out. Perhaps, though, that is merely my cunning.”

  The first of the eleven sequences, or maybe the last (“Has it never occurred to you that the ancient Romans counted backwards?” Ceri quoted), ran a gamut of fuzzily resonating phrases from “It is a truth universally acknowledged” through Hazlitt’s “How often have I put off writing a letter” to E. M. Forster’s “Only connect . . .”

  “Translation: It would be sort of dimly nice to maybe talk in some kind of indistinct fashion, probably.” Ceri glared at the screen. “Right, I’m going to lecture now. To be that vague and at the same time stick to a theme, the taggers must understand English. Not just literal meaning but metaphors and nuances and stuff. Otherwise ‘No man is an island’ wouldn’t be in there.”

  “So they could choose to communicate in clear?” suggested Joseph.

  “That’s it. They could spell out an absolutely unambiguous message, one word or one letter at a time. I can’t imagine a good reason for doing it this way, but I have a suspicious enough mind to think of a bad one. The taggers know all about us but they don’t want to let slip a single data point concerning themselves. So they feed our own phrases back to us. We aren’t to be allowed the tiniest clue to their thinking from style or diction or word order. Does that seem sinister to you?”

  Joseph sighed. “It was so much easier when aliens said ‘Take me to your leader.’ ”

  “Or ‘Klaatu barada nikto.’ Don’t let me distract myself. Here’s the ‘instr
uments of darkness’ cluster, with the Tao Te Ching quotes, Zen koans and that mystic cobblers from Four Quartets that would cost them a packet in permission fees if the Eliot estate got wind of it. The general flavour of all this seems to be that they’re using an acausal comms route that bypasses the Usual Channels. ‘The way that can be spoken of / Is not the constant way.’ Which would be most interesting to know if it hadn’t been the assumption we started with.”

  An intern came in with plastic cups of coffee, which made for a few seconds’ natural break. Ceri burnt a finger and swore under her breath in Welsh.

  “Gesundheit. What about those quarantine regulations?”

  “I think that’s the most interesting one,” Ceri said cautiously. “C. S. Lewis and ‘God’s quarantine regulations’—the old boy was talking about interplanetary or interstellar distances saving pure races from contamination by horrible fallen us. Then there’s a handful of guarded borders and dangerous frontiers from early Auden. ‘The empyrean is a void abyss’: that’s The City of Dreadful Night, I actually read it once. Lucretius on breaking through ‘the fiery walls of the world’ to explore the boundless universe. There’s a pun in there, I’m sure. Firewalls. Something blocks or prevents communication across deep space. Who? ‘Masters of the universe.’ Maybe for our own good, but who knows? In a nutshell: SETI was a waste of time. Don’t let the coffee get cold.”

  Joseph sipped. “That seems something of a stretch.”

  “Well, right now I’m just talking, not publishing. And while I’m still just talking, I wonder whether we can try to talk back.”

  “Presumably you keep one of those acausal widgets in your handbag? Next to the black hole, no doubt.”

  “Of course not. Much simpler. The taggers are in tune with a particular medium—the Total Library—and they’re messaging us by modulating it. We can modulate too, without any help from astounding super-science.”