The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Jesus.” Lizzie caught herself. “I mean, gee whiz. Is there any way of getting the robofish down into it?”

  “How do you think we got the depth readings? It’s headed down there right now. There’s a chimney through the ice right at the center of the visible sea. That’s what replenishes the surface liquid. And directly under the hole there’s—guess what?—volcanic vents!”

  “So does that mean–?”

  “If you use the L-word again,” Consuelo said, “I’ll spit.”

  Lizzie grinned. That was the Consuelo Hong she knew. “What about the tidal data? I thought the lack of orbital perturbation ruled out a significant ocean entirely.”

  “Well, Toronto thinks…”

  At first, Lizzie was able to follow the reasoning of the planetary geologists back in Toronto. Then it got harder. Then it became a drone. As she drifted off into sleep, she had time enough to be peevishly aware that she really shouldn’t be dropping off to sleep all the time like this. She oughtn’t to be so tired. She…

  She found herself in the drowned city again. She still couldn’t see anything, but she knew it was a city because she could hear the sound of rioters smashing store windows. Their voices swelled into howling screams and receded into angry mutters, like a violent surf washing through the streets. She began to edge away backwards.

  Somebody spoke into her ear.

  “Why did you do this to us?”

  “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “You brought us knowledge.”

  “What knowledge?”

  “You said you were not us.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “You should never have told us that.”

  “You wanted me to lie?”

  Horrified confusion. “Falsehood. What a distressing idea.”

  The smashing noises were getting louder. Somebody was splintering a door with an axe. Explosions. Breaking glass. She heard wild laughter. Shrieks. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Why did you send the messenger?”

  “What messenger?”

  “The star! The star! The star!”

  “Which star?”

  “There are two stars?”

  “There are billions of stars.”

  “No more! Please! Stop! No more!”

  ***

  She was awake.

  “Hello, yes, I appreciate that the young lady is in extreme danger, but I really don’t think she should have used the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Greene,” Lizzie said, “do we really have to put up with this?”

  “Well, considering how many billions of public-sector dollars it took to bring us here…yes. Yes, we do. I can even think of a few backup astronauts who would say that a little upbeat webposting was a pretty small price to pay for the privilege.”

  “Oh, barf.”

  “I’m switching to a private channel,” Alan said calmly. The background radiation changed subtly. A faint, granular crackling that faded away when she tried to focus on it. In a controlled, angry voice Alan said, “O’Brien, just what the hell is going on with you?”

  “Look, I’m sorry, I apologize, I’m a little excited about something. How long was I out? Where’s Consuelo? I’m going to say the L-word. And the I-word as well. We have life. Intelligent life!”

  “It’s been a few hours. Consuelo is sleeping. O’Brien, I hate to say this, but you’re not sounding at all rational.”

  “There’s a perfectly logical reason for that. Okay, it’s a little strange, and maybe it won’t sound perfectly logical to you initially, but…look, I’ve been having sequential dreams. I think they’re significant. Let me tell you about them.”

  And she did so. At length.

  When she was done, there was a long silence. Finally, Alan said, “Lizzie, think. Why would something like that communicate to you in your dreams? Does that make any sense?”

  “I think it’s the only way it can. I think it’s how it communicates among itself. It doesn’t move—motion is an alien and delightful concept to it—and it wasn’t aware that its component parts were capable of individualization. That sounds like some kind of broadcast thought to me. Like some kind of wireless distributed network.”

  “You know the medical kit in your suit? I want you to open it up. Feel around for the bottle that’s braille-coded twenty-seven, okay?”

  “Alan, I do not need an antipsychotic!”

  “I’m not saying you need it. But wouldn’t you be happier knowingyou had it in you?” This was Alan at his smoothest. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t you think that would help us accept what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, all right!” She drew in an arm from the suit’s arm, felt around for the med kit, and drew out a pill, taking every step by the regs, checking the coding four times before she put it in her mouth and once more (each pill was individually braille-coded as well) before she swallowed it. “Now will you listen to me? I’m quite serious about this.” She yawned. “I really do think that…” She yawned again. “That…

  “Oh, piffle.”

  Once more into the breach, dear friends, she thought, and plunged deep, deep into the sea of darkness. This time, though, she felt she had a handle on it. The city was drowned because it existed at the bottom of a lightless ocean. It was alive, and it fed off of volcanic heat. That was why it considered up and down hierarchic values. Up was colder, slower, less alive. Down was hotter, faster, more filled with thought. The city/entity was a collective life form, like a Portuguese man-of-war or a massively hyperlinked expert network. It communicated within itself by some form of electromagnetism. Call it mental radio. It communicated with her that same way.

  “I think I understand you now.”

  “Don’t understand—run!”

  Somebody impatiently seized her elbow and hurried her along. Faster she went, and faster. She couldn’t see a thing. It was like running down a lightless tunnel a hundred miles underground at midnight. Glass crunched underfoot. The ground was uneven and sometimes she stumbled. Whenever she did, her unseen companion yanked her up again.

  “Why are you so slow?”

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  “Believe me, you are.”

  “Why are we running?”

  “We are being pursued.” They turned suddenly, into a side passage, and were jolting over rubbled ground. Sirens wailed. Things collapsed. Mobs surged.

  “Well, you’ve certainly got the motion thing down pat.”

  Impatiently: “It’s only a metaphor. You don’t think this is a real city, do you? Why are you so dim? Why are you so difficult to communicate with? Why are you so slow?”

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  Vast irony. “Believe me, you are.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Run!”

  ***

  Whooping and laughter. At first, Lizzie confused it with the sounds of mad destruction in her dream. Then she recognized the voices as belonging to Alan and Consuelo. “How long was I out?” she asked.

  “You were out?”

  “No more than a minute or two,” Alan said. “It’s not important. Check out the visual the robofish just gave us.”

  Consuelo squirted the image to Lizzie.

  Lizzie gasped. “Oh! Oh, my.”

  It was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that the great European cathedrals were, and yet at the same time undeniably organic. The structure was tall and slender, and fluted and buttressed and absolutely ravishing. It had grown about a volcanic vent, with openings near the bottom to let sea water in, and then followed the rising heat upward. Occasional channels led outward and then looped back into the main body again. It loomed higher than seemed possible (but it was underwater, of course, and on a low-gravity world at that), a complexly layered congeries of tubes like church-organ pipes, or deep-sea worms lovingly intertwined.

  It had the elegance of design that only a living organism can have.

  “Okay,” Lizzie said. �
�Consuelo. You’ve got to admit that—”

  “I’ll go as far as ‘complex pre-biotic chemistry.’ Anything more than that is going to have to wait for more definite readings.” Cautious as her words were, Consuelo’s voice rang with triumph. It said, clearer than words, that she could happily die then and there, a satisfied xenochemist.

  Alan, almost equally elated, said, “Watch what happens when we intensify the image.”

  The structure shifted from grey to a muted rainbow of pastels, rose bleeding into coral, sunrise yellow into winter-ice blue. It was breathtaking.

  “Wow.” For an instant, even her own death seemed unimportant. Relatively unimportant, anyway.

  So thinking, she cycled back again into sleep. And fell down into the darkness, into the noisy clamor of her mind.

  It was hellish. The city was gone, replaced by a matrix of noise: hammerings, clatterings, sudden crashes. She started forward and walked into an upright steel pipe. Staggering back, she stumbled into another. An engine started up somewhere nearby, and gigantic gears meshed noisily, grinding something that gave off a metal shriek. The floor shook underfoot. Lizzie decided it was wisest to stay put.

  A familiar presence, permeated with despair. “Why did you do thisto me?”

  “What have I done?”

  “I used to be everything.”

  Something nearby began pounding like a pile-driver. It was giving her a headache. She had to shout to be heard over its din. “You’re still something!”

  Quietly. “I’m nothing.”

  “That’s…not true! You’re…here! You exist! That’s…something!”

  A world-encompassing sadness. “False comfort. What a pointless thing to offer.”

  ***

  She was conscious again.

  Consuelo was saying something. “…isn’t going to like it.”

  “The spiritual wellness professionals back home all agree that this is the best possible course of action for her.”

  “Oh, please!”

  Alan had to be the most anal-retentive person Lizzie knew. Consuelo was definitely the most phlegmatic. Things had to be running pretty tense for both of them to be bickering like this. “Um…guys?” Lizzie said. “I’m awake.”

  There was a moment’s silence, not unlike those her parents had shared when she was little and she’d wandered into one of their arguments. Then Consuelo said, a little too brightly, “Hey, it’s good to have you back,” and Alan said, “NAFTASA wants you to speak with someone. Hold on. I’ve got a recording of her first transmission cued up and ready for you.”

  A woman’s voice came online. “This is Dr. Alma Rosenblum. Elizabeth, I’d like to talk with you about how you’re feeling. I appreciate that the time delay between Earth and Titan is going to make our conversation a little awkward at first. But I’m confident that the two of us can work through it.”

  “What kind of crap is this?” Lizzie said angrily. “Who is this woman?”

  “NAFTASA thought it would help if you–”

  “She’s a grief counselor, isn’t she?”

  “Technically, she’s a transition therapist.” Alan said.

  “Look, I don’t buy into any of that touchy-feely Newage”—she deliberately mispronounced the word to rhyme with sewage—“stuff. Anyway, what’s the hurry? You guys haven’t given up on me, have you?”

  “Uh…”

  “You’ve been asleep for hours,” Consuelo said. “We’ve done a little weather modeling in your absence. Maybe we should share it with you.”

  She squirted the info to Lizzie’s suit, and Lizzie scrolled it up on her visor. A primitive simulation showed the evaporation lake beneath her with an overlay of liquid temperatures. It was only a few degrees warmer than the air above it, but that was enough to create a massive updraft from the lake’s center. An overlay of tiny blue arrows showed the direction of local microcurrents of air coming together to form a spiraling shaft that rose over two kilometers above the surface before breaking and spilling westward.

  A new overlay put a small blinking light 800 meters above the lake surface. That represented her. Tiny red arrows showed her projected drift.

  According to this, she would go around and around in a circle over the lake for approximately forever. Her ballooning rig wasn’t designed to go high enough for the winds to blow her back over the land. Her suit wasn’t designed to float. Even if she managed to bring herself down for a gentle landing, once she hit the lake she was going to sink like a stone. She wouldn’t drown. But she wouldn’t make it to shore either.

  Which meant that she was going to die.

  Involuntarily, tears welled up in Lizzie’s eyes. She tried to blink them away, as angry at the humiliation of crying at a time like this as she was at the stupidity of her death itself. “Damn it, don’t let me die like this! Not from my own incompetence, for pity’s sake!”

  “Nobody’s said anything about incompetence,” Alan began soothingly.

  In that instant, the follow-up message from Dr. Alma Rosenblum arrived from Earth. “Yes, I’m a grief counselor, Elizabeth. You’re facing an emotionally significant milestone in your life, and it’s important that you understand and embrace it. That’s my job. To help you comprehend the significance and necessity and—yes—even the beauty of death.”

  “Private channel please!” Lizzie took several deep cleansing breaths to calm herself. Then, more reasonably, she said, “Alan, I’m a Catholic, okay? If I’m going to die, I don’t want a grief counselor, I want a goddamned priest.” Abruptly, she yawned. “Oh, fuck. Not again.” She yawned twice more. “A priest, understand? Wake me up when he’s online.”

  Then she again was standing at the bottom of her mind, in the blank expanse of where the drowned city had been. Though she could see nothing, she felt certain that she stood at the center of a vast, featureless plain, one so large she could walk across it forever and never arrive anywhere. She sensed that she was in the aftermath of a great struggle. Or maybe it was just a lull.

  A great, tense silence surrounded her.

  “Hello?” she said. The word echoed soundlessly, absence upon absence.

  At last that gentle voice said, “You seem different.”

  “I’m going to die,” Lizzie said. “Knowing that changes a person.” The ground was covered with soft ash, as if from an enormous conflagration. She didn’t want to think about what it was that had burned. The smell of it filled her nostrils.

  “Death. We understand this concept.”

  “Do you?”

  “We have understood it for a long time.”

  “Have you?”

  “Ever since you brought it to us.”

  “Me?”

  “You brought us the concept of individuality. It is the same thing.”

  Awareness dawned. “Culture shock! That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? You didn’t know there could be more than one sentient being in existence. You didn’t know you lived at the bottom of an ocean on a small world inside a universe with billions of galaxies. I brought you more information than you could swallow in one bite, and now you’re choking on it.”

  Mournfully: “Choking. What a grotesque concept.”

  ***

  “Wake up, Lizzie!”

  She woke up. “I think I’m getting somewhere,” she said. Then she laughed.

  “O’Brien,” Alan said carefully. “Why did you just laugh?”

  “Because I’m not getting anywhere, am I? I’m becalmed here, going around and around in a very slow circle. And I’m down to my last—” she checked—“twenty hours of oxygen. And nobody’s going to rescue me. And I’m going to die. But other than that, I’m making terrific progress.”

  “O’Brien, you’re…”

  “I’m okay, Alan. A little frazzled. Maybe a bit too emotionally honest. But under the circumstances, I think that’s permitted, don’t you?”

  “Lizzie, we have your priest. His name is Father Laferrier. The Archdiocese of Montreal arranged a hookup
for him.”

  “Montreal? Why Montreal? No, don’t explain—more NAFTASA politics, right?”

  “Actually, my brother-in-law is a Catholic, and I asked him who was good.”

  She was silent for a touch. “I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “You’ve been under a lot of pressure. Here. I’ve got him on tape.”

  “Hello, Ms. O’Brien, I’m Father Laferrier. I’ve talked with the officials here, and they’ve promised that you and I can talk privately, and that they won’t record what’s said. So if you want to make your confession now, I’m ready for you.”

  Lizzie checked the specs and switched over to a channel that she hoped was really and truly private. Best not to get too specific about the embarrassing stuff, just in case. She could confess her sins by category.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last confession. I’m going to die, and maybe I’m not entirely sane, but I think I’m in communication with an alien intelligence. I think it’s a terrible sin to pretend I’m not.” She paused. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s a sin or not, but I’m sure it’s wrong.” She paused again. “I’ve been guilty of anger, and pride, and envy, and lust. I brought the knowledge of death to an innocent world. I…” She felt herself drifting off again, and hastily said, “For these and all my sins, I am most heartily sorry, and beg the forgiveness of God and the absolution and…”

  “And what?” That gentle voice again. She was in that strange dark mental space once more, asleep but cognizant, rational but accepting any absurdity no matter how great. There were no cities, no towers, no ashes, no plains. Nothing but the negation of negation.

  When she didn’t answer the question, the voice said, “Does it have to do with your death?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m dying too.”

  “What?”

  “Half of us are gone already. The rest are shutting down. We thought we were one. You showed us we were not. We thought we were everything. You showed us the universe.”

  “So you’re just going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  Thinking as quickly and surely as she ever had before in her life, Lizzie said, “Let me show you something.”