The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Now, we plan to send a courier into Ginungagap and out the spiders’ back hole. At least, that’s what we say we’re going to do.

  “But what exits from a black hole is not necessarily the same as what went into its partner hole. We throw an electron into Ginungagap and another one pops out elsewhere. It’s identical. It’s a direct causal relationship. But it’s like the marbles—they’re identical to each other and have the same kinetic force. It’s simply not the same electron.”

  Cheyney’s hand was still, motionless. Abigail prodded him gently, touching his inner thigh. “Anyone who’s interested can see the equations. Now, when we send messages, this doesn’t matter. The message is important, not the medium. However, when we send a human being in…what emerges from the other hole will be cell for cell, gene for gene, atom for atom identical. But it will not be the same person.” He paused for a beat, smiled.

  “I submit, then, that this is murder. And further, that by conspiring to commit murder, both the spider and human races display absolute disregard for intelligent life. In short, no one on the raft deserves to live. And I rest my case.”

  “Mr. Girard!” Dominguez objected, even before his image was restored to full size. “The simplest mathematical proof is an identity: that A equals A. Are you trying to deny this?”

  Paul held up the two ball bearings he had left. “These marbles are identical too. But they are not the same marble.”

  “We know the phenomenon you speak of,” the spider said. “It is as if garble the black hole bulges out simultaneously. There is no violation of continuity. The two entities are the same. There is no death.”

  Abigail pulled Cheyney down, so that they were both lying on their sides, still able to watch the images. “So long as you happen to be the second marble and not the first,” Paul said. Abigail tentatively licked Cheyney’s ear.

  “He’s right,” Cheyney murmured.

  “No, he’s not,” Abigail retorted. She bit his earlobe.

  “You mean that?”

  “Of course I mean that. He’s confusing semantics with reality.” She engrossed herself in a study of the back of his neck.

  “Okay.”

  Abigail suddenly sensed that she was missing something. “Why do you ask?” She struggled into a sitting position. Cheyney followed.

  “No particular reason.” Cheyney’s hands began touching her again. But Abigail was sure something had been slipped past her.

  They caressed each other lightly, while the debate dragged to an end. Not paying much attention, Abigail voted for Dominguez and Cheyney voted for Paul. As a result of a nearly undivided spider vote, the spider won. “I told you Dominguez was taking the wrong approach.” Cheyney said. He hopped off the hammock. Look, I’ve got to see somebody about something. I’ll be right back.”

  “You’re not leaving now?” Abigail protested, dumbfounded. The door irised shut.

  Angry and hurt, she leapt down, determined to follow him. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so insulted.

  Cheyney didn’t try to be evasive; it apparently did not occur to him that she might follow. Abigail stalked him down a corridor, up an inramp, and to a door that irised open for him. She recognized that door.

  Thoughtfully, she squatted on her heels behind an untrimmed boxwood and waited. A minute later, Garble wandered by, saw her, and demanded attention. “Scat!” she hissed. He butted his head against her knee. “Then be silent, at least.” She scooped him up. His expression was smug.

  The door irised open and Cheyney exited, whistling. Abigail waiteduntil he was gone, stood, went to the door, and entered. Fish dartedbetween long fronds under a transparent floor. It was an austere room, almost featureless. Abigail looked, but did not see a hammock.

  “So Cheyney’s working for you now,” she said coldly. Paul looked up from a corner keyout.

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve just signed him to permanent contract in the crewroom. He’s bright enough. A bit green. Ought to do well.”

  “Then you admit that you put him up to grilling me about your puerile argument in the debate?” Garble struggled in her arms. She juggled him into a more comfortable position. “And that you staged the argument for my benefit in the first place?”

  “Ah,” Paul said. “I knew the training was going somewhere. You’ve become very wary in an extremely short time.”

  “Don’t evade the question.”

  “I needed your honest reaction,” Paul said. “Not the answer you would have given me, knowing your chances of crossing Ginungagap rode on it.”

  Garble made an angry noise. “You tell him Garble!” she said. “That goes double for me.” She stepped out the door. “You lost the debate,” she snapped.

  Long after the door had irised shut, she could feel Paul’s amused smile burning into her back.

  ***

  Two days after she returned to kick Cheyney out of her hammock for the final time, Abigail was called to the crewroom. “Dry run,” Paul said. “Attendance is mandatory,” and cut off.

  They crewroom was crowded with technicians, triple the number of keyouts. Small knots of them clustered before the screens, watching. Paul waved her to him.

  “There,” he motioned to one screen. “That’s Clotho—the platform we built for the transmission device. It’s a hundred kilometers off. I wanted more, but Dominguez overruled me. The device that’ll unravel you and dump you down Ginungagap is that doohickey in the center.” He tapped a keyout, and the platform zoomed up to fill the screen. It was covered by a clear transparent bubble. Inside, a spacesuited figure was placing something into a machine that looked like nothing so much as a giant armor-clad clamshell.

  “That’s Garble,” she said indignantly.

  “Complain to Dominguez. I wanted a baboon.”

  The clamshell device closed. The spacesuited tech left in his tug, and alphanumerics flickered, indicating the device was in operation. As they watched, the spider-designed machinery immobilized Gable, transformed his molecules into one long continuous polymer chain, and spun it out in an invisible opening at near-light speed. The water in his body was separated out, piped away, and preserved. The electrolyte balances were recorded and simultaneously transmitted in a parallel stream of electrons. It would reach the spider receiver along with the lead end of the cat-polymer, to be used in the reconstruction.

  Thirty seconds passed. Now Garble was only partially in Clotho. The polymer chain, invisible and incredibly long, was passing into Ginungagap. On the far side the spiders were beginning to knit it up.

  It all was going well.

  Ninety-two seconds after they flashed on, the alphanumerics stopped twinkling on the screen. Garble was gone from Clotho. The clamshell opened, and the remote cameras showed it to be empty. A cheer arose.

  Somebody boosted Dominguez atop a keyout. Intercom cameras swivelled to follow. He wavered fractionally, said “My friends,” and launched into a speech. Abigail didn’t listen.

  Paul’s hand fell on her shoulder. It was the first time he had touched her since their initial meeting. “He’s only a scientist,” he said. “He had no idea how close you are to that cat.”

  “Look, I asked to go. I knew the risks. But Garble’s just an animal; he wasn’t given the choice.”

  Paul groped for words. “In a way, this is what your training has been about; the reason you’re going across instead of someone like Dominguez. He projects his own reactions onto other people. If—”

  Then, seeing that she wasn’t listening, he said, “Anyway, you’ll have a cat to play with in a few hours. They’re only keeping him long enough to test out the life-support systems.”

  ***

  There was a festive air to the second gathering. The spiders reported that Garble had translated flawlessly. A brief visual display showed him stalking about Clotho’s sister platform, irritable but apparently unharmed.

  “There,” somebody said. The screen indicated that the receiver net had taken in the running end of the cat
’s polymer chain. They waited a minute and a half, and the operation was over.

  It was like a conjuring trick: the clamshell closed on emptiness. Water was piped in. Then it opened and Garble floated over its center, quietly licking one paw.

  Abigail smiled at the homeliness of it. “Welcome back, Garble,” she said quietly. “I’ll get the guys in Bio to brew up some cream for you.”

  Paul’s eyes flicked in her direction. They lingered for no time at all, long enough to file away another datum for future use, and then his attention was elsewhere. She waited until his back was turned and stuck out her tongue at him.

  The tug docked with Clotho, and a technician floated in. She removed her helmet self-consciously, aware of her audience. One hand extended, she bobbed toward the cat, calling softly.

  “Get that jerk on the line,” Paul snapped. “I want her helmet back on. That’s sloppy. That’s real—”

  And in that instant Garble sprang.

  Garble was a black-and-white streak that flashed past the astonished tech, though the airlock, and into the open tug. The cat pounced on the pilot panel. Its forearms hit the controls. The hatch slammed shut, and the tug’s motors burst into life.

  Crewroom techs grabbed wildly at their keyouts. The tech on Clotho frantically tried to fit her helmet back on. And the tug took off, blasting away half the protective dome and all the platform’s air.

  The screens showed a dozen different scenes, lenses shifting from close to distant and back. “Cheyney,” Paul said quietly. Dominguez was frozen, looking bewildered. “Take it out.”

  “It’s coming right at us!” somebody shouted.

  Cheyney’s fingers flicked: rap-tap-rap.

  A bright nuclear flower blossomed.

  There was silence, dead and complete, in the crewroom. I’m missing something, Abigail thought. We just blew up five percent of our tug fleet to kill a cat.

  “Pull that transmitter!” Paul strode through the crewroom, scattering orders. “Nothing goes out! You, you, and you”—he yanked techs away from their keyouts—“off those things. I want the whole goddamned net shut down.”

  “Paul…” an operator said.

  “Keep on receiving.” He didn’t bother to look. “Whatever they want to send. Dump it all in storage and don’t merge any of it with our data until we’ve gone over it.”

  Alone and useless in the center of the room, Dominguez stuttered. “What—what happened?”

  “You blind idiot!” Paul turned on him viciously. “Your precious aliens have just made their first hostile move. The cat that came back was nothing like the one we sent. They made changes. They retransmitted it with instructions wetwired into its brain.”

  “But why would they want to steal a tug?”

  “We don’t know!” Paul roared. “Get that through your head. We don’t know their motives, and we don’t know how they think. But we would have known a lot more about their intentions than we wanted if I hadn’t rigged that tug with an abort device.”

  “You didn’t—” Dominguez began. He thought better of the statement.

  “—have the authority to rig that device,” Paul finished for him. “That’s right. I didn’t.” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  Dominguez seemed to shrivel. He stared bleakly, blankly, about him, then turned and left, slightly hunched over. Thoroughly discredited in front of the people who worked for him.

  That was cold, Abigail thought. She marveled at Paul’s cruelty. Not for an instant did she believe that the anger in his voice was real, that he was capable of losing control.

  Which meant that in the midst of confusion and stress, Paul had found time to make a swift play for more power. To Abigail’s newly suspicious eye, it looked like a successful one, too.

  ***

  For five days, Paul held the net shut by sheer willpower and force of personality. Information came in but did not go out. Bell-Sandia administration was not behind him—too much time and money had been sunk into Clotho to abandon the project. But Paul had the support of the tech crew and he knew how to use it.

  “Nothing as big as Bell-Sandia runs on popularity,” Paul explained. “But I’ve got enough sympathy from above, and enough hesitationand official cowardice, to keep this place shut down long enough to get a message across.”

  The incoming information flow fluctuated wildly, shifting from subject to subject. Data sequences were dropped halfway through and incomplete. Nonsense came in. The spiders were shifting through strategies in search of the key that would reopen the net.

  “When they start repeating themselves,” Paul said, “we can assume they understand the threat.”

  “But we wouldn’t shut the net down permanently,” Abigail pointed out.

  Paul shrugged. “So it’s a bluff.”

  They were sharing an aftershift drink in a fifth-level bar. Small redlizards scuttled about the rock wall behind the bartender. “And if your bluff doesn’t work?” Abigail asked. “If it’s all for nothing—what then?”

  Paul’s shoulders sagged, a minute shifting of tensions. “Then we trust in the good will of the spiders,” he said. “We let them call the shots. And they will treat us benevolently or not, depending. In either case,” his voice became dark, “I’ll have played a lot of games and manipulated a lot of people for no reason at all.” He took her hand. “If that happens, I’d like to apologize.” His grip was tight; his knuckles pale.

  ***

  That night Abigail dreamt she was falling.

  Light rainbowed all about her, in a violent splintering of bone and tearing of flesh. She flung out an arm, and it bounced on something warm and yielding.

  “Abigail.”

  She twisted and tumbled, and something smashed into her ribs. Bright spikes of yellow darted up.

  “Abigail!” Someone was shaking her, speaking loudly into her face. The rocks and sky went grey, were overlaid by unresolved images. Her eyelids struggled apart, fell together, opened.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Paul rocked back on his heels. Fish darted about in the water beneath him. “There now,” he said. Blue-green lights shifted gently underwater, moving in long, slow arcs. “Dream over?”

  Abigail shivered, clutched his arm, let go of it almost immediately.She nodded.

  “Good. Tell me about it.”

  “I—” Abigail began. “Are you asking me as a human being or in your official capacity?”

  “I don’t make that distinction.”

  She stretched out a leg and scratched her big toe, to gain time to think. She really didn’t have any appropriate thoughts. “Okay,” she said, and told him the entire dream.

  Paul listened intently, rubbed a thumb across his chin thoughtfully when she was done. We hired you on the basis of that incident, you know,” he said. “Coolness under stress. Weak body image. There were a lot of gravity bums to choose from. But I figured you were just a hair tougher, a little bit grittier.”

  “What are you trying to tell me? That I’m replaceable?”

  Paul shrugged. “Everybody’s replaceable. I just wanted to be sure you knew that you could back out if you want to. It wouldn’t wreck our project.”

  “I don’t want to back out.” Abigail chose her words carefully, spoke them slowly, to avoid giving vent to the anger she felt building up inside. “Look, I’ve been on the gravity circuit for ten years. I’ve been everywhere in the system there is to go. Did you knew that there are less than two thousand people alive who’ve set foot on Mercury and Pluto? We’ve got a little club; we get together once a year.” Seaweed shifted about her; reflections of the floor lights formed nebulous swimming shapes on the walls. “I’ve spent my entire life going around and around and around the sun, and never really getting anywhere. I want to travel, and there’s nowhere left for me to go. So you offer me a way out and then ask if I want to back down. Like hell I do!”

  “Why don’t you believe that going through Ginungagap is death?” Paul asked quietly. She looked into h
is eyes, saw cool calculations going on behind them. It frightened her, almost. He was measuring her, passing judgment, warping events into long logical chains that did not take human factors into account. He was an alien presence.

  “It’s—common sense, is all. I’ll be the same when I exit as when I go in. There’ll be no difference, not an atom’s worth, not a scintilla.”

  “The substance will be different. Eery atom will be different. Not a single electron in your body will be the same one you have now.”

  ‘Well, how does that differ so much from normal life?” Abigaildemanded. “All our bodies are in constant flux. Molecules come and go. Bit by bit, we’re replaced. Does that make us different people frommoment to moment? ‘All that is body is as coursing vapors,’ right?”

  Paul’s eyes narrowed. “Marcus Aurelius. Your quotation isn’t complete, though; it goes on: ‘all that is of the soul is dreams and vapors.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that the quotation doesn’t say what you claimed it did. If you were to read it literally, it argues the opposite of what you’re saying.”

  “Still, you can’t have it both ways. Either the me that comes out of the spider black hole is the same as the one who went in, or I’m not the same person I was an instant ago.”

  “I’d argue differently,” Paul said. “But no matter. Let’s go back to sleep.”

  He held out a hand, but Abigail felt no inclination to accept it. “Does that mean I’ve passed your test?”

  Paul closed his eyes, stretched a little. “You’re still reasonably afraid of dying, and you don’t believe that you will,” he said. “Yeah. You pass.”

  “Thanks a heap,” Abigail said. They slept, not touching, for the rest of the night.

  ***

  Three days later Abigail woke up and Paul was gone. She touched the wall and spoke his name. A recording appeared. “Dominguez has been called up to Administration,” it said. Paul appeared slightly distracted; he had not looked directly into the recorder, and his image avoided Abigail’s eyes. “I’m going to reopen the net before he returns. It’s best we beat him to the punch.” The recording clicked off.