She cocked her head to one side and smiled, filling the room with sunshine. “I think so, Wally. Anyway, this is the girl you’ve been dreaming about.”
“My … dreams.”
Funny thing. Usually when your mouth goes dry, it just is dry, all at once, or maybe before you notice it. This time, I felt my spit absorbed by my tongue, like water sucked into a dry sponge.
She said, “Yes, Wally.”
What was the name of that story? Silverberg, was it? In the Seventh Galaxy Reader or maybe Best From F&SF, Seventh Series. The one where the telepath sees people’s thoughts as run-on sentences connected by ampersand characters.
“You can … read my mind.” Flat. Nervous. Sick.
She stood slowly, stretching like a real human, as though stiff from sleep, hips slim, just the littlest bit of fine blonde pubic hair in a patch above that little pink slit.
Eleven years old, I thought. I remembered most of the girls in junior high started to grow tits when they were in seventh grade.
She saw where I was looking and smiled, then said, “Sort of. Not as well as I’d like to.” Then gave me a funny look. “How do you think I learned to speak English? From listening to you chatter?”
I snatched my eyes away, feeling my face heat up. Yes. That’s exactly what I’d thought.
“Uh. Does that bother you? My talking all the time?” It bothered a lot of people, including my parents. I think it even bothered Murray, though most of the time he was willing to listen.
She said, “Oh, no, Wally! I love talking to you!” Eyes brightening. I suddenly remembered Tracy’d said that to my eleven-year-old self, once upon a time. Then this Tracy—Robot, a hard voice in my head snarled—said, “This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me!”
Ever happened to Tracy? Or to Robot? I said, “Yeah, me too.” I curled myself into a seated ball, knees against my chest, heels pressed together, wishing the God-damned hard on would go away. Bathroom. You just need to take a piss, that’s all.
Tracy … No! For Christ’s sake. Robot! Robot’s bright blue eyes were on my face, filled with something that could pass for empathy. The empathy in a story, anyway. She came over to where I sat, kneeling down, put a warm gentle hand on one of my knees, leaning so she could look right into my eyes.
It. It, not her.
I don’t think there’s a word for how scared I was, right then.
She said, “Would you like to try the thing you’ve been dreaming about, Wally? There’s not enough detail in your dreams for me to work with, but your genetic matrix may have contributed enough X-chromosome-based hardware and instinctual behaviors to get us started.”
I flinched, aghast, at Robot, at myself. Stuttered hard, finally got out, “But … you’re still a child!” The real Tracy, my Tracy, would be sixteen right now, more or less grown. This … thing …
She sank back on her heels, looking sad, just the way the real Tracy had looked sad, sad and serious. “I’m sorry, Wally. I didn’t know that would matter.”
For breakfast, Robot managed something a lot like bland French toast, with a lemon-yellow glob of something I suppose you could call wallybutter, though nothing like maple syrup, not even the imitation nasty Mrs. Butterworth’s crap my sisters demanded, just so they could see the bottle and repeat the “when you bow down this way!” line from the commercial.
Every time they did that, I’d remember my own infatuation with the Log Cabin tin less than a decade earlier. It seemed different, somehow.
Robot brought the plate to me as I soaked in the tub, chirping, “See, Wally? I’ll figure out a way to make you real bread yet!” Then she stepped over the rim of the tub and sank down at the opposite end with a cozy little grin, chin barely clearing the surface of the water.
“Uh.” I looked at the pile of sticky squares, steam rising, yellow butter-stuff slumping as it melted. “Is some of this yours?”
She took a square, dipped one corner in the butter, and took a bite. “Mmmmm ….”
Afterward, clean and dry after a fashion, Robot’s hair clean anyway, since it was brand new, we set out, I in my grubby shoes and socks because Robot insisted, though she herself was barefoot, feet slapping quickly on the pavement to match my pace. I’d thought about putting on my clothes, but they were still draped over the railing, so weathered and stiff now I suppose they would’ve felt like crumpled newspaper on my skin.
I settled for keeping my eyes to myself as I followed her down the road. “Where’re we going, Robot?”
She turned suddenly, stopping before me in the street, looking up at my face, eyes bigger still, going back to looking … not sad. Wistful? Maybe that was the way Tracy had looked, not sad, not serious, and the eleven-year-old me just hadn’t known any better?
Softly, she said, “I’d like it if you call me Tracy.”
Thunderstruck, I thought, This is a robot. Not a little girl. Not Tracy. Tracy, my Tracy, is sixteen years old, somewhere on Earth, probably still in Texas, and I … that other voice, dark voice that sounded to me like my dad’s voice, whispered, It’s just a robot. And if it’s just a robot, what difference does it make if …? I slammed the door on that one.
Then I said, “I’m sorry. Tracy.”
She smiled. Brightening the day.
“So. Where’re we going?”
She pointed to the dome of the museum, not far away in the middle of the town, where all the radial streets came together.
Inside, she led me right to the big blue-white-red spiral galaxy hanging under the dome, standing beside it with hands on hips, head tipped back, looking up. I wondered briefly where the bobby pins had come from, other than my memory, my dreams. From the hemoglobin in my blood? And what about the brassy color? Shouldn’t they be steely-looking? Tracy’s bobby pins had been brassy, though. Maybe there were copper molecules in the tissue sample.
Tracy started manipulating a panel of sequins down by the pedestal, and the galaxy vanished, replaced by a shapeless, irregular splash of light and dark that looked almost like an explosion.
She looked up at me. “This is what your culture has just begun to conceptualize as a supercluster, Wally. It’s a map of the entity you’ve been referring to as the Lost Empire.”
My scalp prickled briefly at that reminder, but … hell. I was used to the idea of telepaths. Maybe that’s what made it more all right for me than it would have been for somebody else. I imagined my mom thinking someone could look into her head.
It didn’t look like anything I remembered hearing about. Still, if she knew the term, it had to be in my head, somewhere. Some article in Scientific American, maybe? I’d always been glad the Prince William County Public Library took it. “How big?”
She said, “Oh, it’s about three hundred million light years across, maybe.” Off to one side, a pinpoint sparkled, catching my eye. “That’s where we are right now.”
“And … Earth?”
She said, “You don’t know enough about the structure of the universe for me to tell.”
“Uh. Sorry.”
She grinned, then made another pinpoint twinkle, way off to the other side, pretty much outside the edge of the great splash of light. “Your Local Group might be right there. There are five galaxies matching what you know as the Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, and the Magellanic Clouds, in roughly the right positions, though you’re awfully hazy about where they really are, and exactly how big.”
“Sorry.”
“And there are at least twenty other galaxies mixed in with them that your astronomers must have noticed.”
“But not me.”
“No, Wally.”
“Well, even if that was Earth, there’s no way ….”
She made a third spot sparkle, this time deep ruby-red, deep in the heart of the Lost Empire Supercluster. “There’s a research facility here, at one of the Empire’s main educational institutions, where we can … figure it out, one way or another.”
“But ….”
&nb
sp; She said, “If we could get a starship, we could get there in just a few weeks, Wally.”
I suddenly felt odd. “And … Earth?”
That wistful look. “If that’s really your Local Group, not much longer.”
“Where else would Earth be?”
She said, “Wally, the thing you were on was an automated space probe, just like you thought. We’d been exploring the other superclusters for a long time.”
“So Earth could be anywhere?” For some reason, that made me feel … I don’t know. Lighter. More carefree?
She said, “Yes.”
“What if it’s somewhere on the other side of the universe?”
She laughed. “There’s no ‘other side,’ Wally.”
“Very far away, anyhow. Your ships seem so fast.”
She said, “If Earth’s not somewhere nearby, we may never find it. You seem to have no idea how big the universe really is.”
“One of your probes found it.”
“Yes. And that may be our only hope. The probes didn’t have infinite range.”
“Anyway, we don’t have a starship.”
She turned away from me then, looking out through the dome of the museum, up at the deep green sky. “I don’t know where everyone’s gone, or why, but the communication network is running just fine. I’ve been able to wake up some sleeping nodes here and there, send out program code, get a few things moving. Our ride will be here soon.”
Then she looked at me and laughed again, I suppose, at the expression on my face.
And so the empty world of the dark green skies was gone, never to be seen again, Tracy and I now camped out by a bubbling stream in the soft garden wilderness of a pale orange spome, pale orange landscape separated by broad stripes of blue velvet hyperspace sky. There were no dinosaurs here, and I was, in a way, sorry for that, because I’d liked them, liked the idea of them, but red-silver butterfly-bats floated through the air overhead, perched in the pale orange trees, while spidermice crept through the pale orange grass, speaking to us in gentle whispers.
Only little things, gentle things, safe things.
Arriving here, we’d walked away from the field of saucers, this one without fence or razor wire, while the Green Planet shrank away to nothing in the starry sky, and Tracy said to me, “No, look, you got it all wrong, Wally. Thrintun was the name of their planet. The Slavers just called themselves Thrint.”
“Are you sure?”
She smiled. “That’s what’s in your long-term memory. Your short-term memory just reloaded it wrong. Of course, I can’t guarantee it’s what was really in the story.”
“Um.”
She’d led me to a long, low, warehouse-like building, where we picked up magic toys, then walked away into the woodland, while the starship groaned off into hyperspace and the windows above us turned soft blue, in perfect contrast to the landscape, both around us and overhead. Eventually, we came to a meadow, orange grass, widely separated orange trees, kind of like gnarly little crabapple trees, complete with little orange fruit, a scattering of ruddy yellowish flowers, tiny creek chuckling over bits of round brown stone.
We set up the tent, spread our picnic blanket, and one of the magic toys Tracy had taken turned out to be something like a hibachi, complete with built-in burgers, already smoky hot, smell making my mouth water.
I touched one, and found it cool enough to pick up, the perfect temperature for eating. “What are these things?”
She said, “I don’t know. But they’re chemically compatible with our bodies.”
When you looked close, they weren’t really hamburgers. Bready disks of some kind, nicely toasted. I took a little bite. “Ukh ….”
A fleck of concern lit in her eyes. “Not good?”
I took another, bigger bite, chewed and swallowed. “Weird. Mustard and cinnamon don’t really go together.”
She smiled. “I notice it’s not stopping you, though.”
“No.” I finished it, and took another. “Can this thing make hot dogs?”
“Probably.”
Hot dogs with integrated buns. Great. In what book did I read the phrase, societé anonyme d’hippophage? I gave my head a shake, trying to banish nonsense. If possible. Christ. Me. Anyway, I’m not eating wally anymore. Good enough.
I said, “Who used to live in this place, Tracy? I mean, orange grass and all …?”
She said, “Nobody ever lived in these things, Wally. They were part of an automated transport system, and I think what happened is, the sample ecologies spread out in here. The spomes have been wandering around on their own for a very long time.”
“How long?”
A thoughtful look. “Well, from the time the first star-faring civilization got started to my manufacture date, something like a billion of your years.”
My mouth got that familiar dry feeling. “That’s not what I meant.”
She said, “Based on astronomical evidence, I think I was asleep in storage for a significant fraction of that. Perhaps a hundred million years?”
“From before the end of the Cretaceous, and whatever killed off the dinosaurs?” And clearly why the robot spomes could have them in their possession. I remember some scientists theorized about a supernova.
She said, “I don’t think there was any relationship. Wherever Earth is, it must be outside the range of the event that … got rid of everyone.” A momentary look of intense brooding in the eyes of a china doll, quickly banished.
“And you have no idea how the Lost Empire got lost.”
“Not yet. It’s illuminating that only the organic intelligences were lost.”
“It’s hard for me to believe this,” I waved my hand around the spomey landscape, “all this, all the stuff on all the planets, has survived, intact, for a hundred million years or more.”
Another smile. “Not unattended, Wally. Just unpeopled.”
“Oh. Right.”
I lay back and looked at the sky again, staring at blue hyperspace, wondering what would become of me. What if we find Earth? What then? Just go home? I tried picturing that, imagined myself appearing, bareass, back in Dorvo Valley, with a naked little blonde girl holding my hand: Hi, Mom! Sorry I’m late! Hey, look what I found!
Tracy said, “You have an erection again, Wally.”
I rolled away from her, curling up around myself, facing down slope, toward the trees and little creek. “Sorry.”
She said, “Look, I know we can’t do the thing you’ve been dreaming about, not without risking damage to some components of this immature body, but I can still help with those other things.”
I thought, What about damage to me?
After a long moment, she reached out and touched my back softly, making me flinch. Then she said, “I will grow up, you know. This body is as real as your genome could make it.”
I said, “You’re eleven, Tracy. It’ll be a while before you’re all grown up.”
She said, “I’ll be physically mature enough for successful intercourse in no more than twelve to eighteen months, if you really want to wait.”
I looked over my shoulder at her, baffled. “I can’t believe I’m talking about this stuff with a little girl.”
Softly, she said, “I’m not a little girl, Wally. I’m a robot, remember?”
I looked away again, remembering she’d wanted to be called Tracy, rather than Robot.
Another girlish sigh. “It’s so hard for me to know what’s right, Wally. Your memories of your real cultural surround are all mixed up with what was in those stories you loved. As if your culture itself were somehow confused. As if it couldn’t distinguish between dream and reality.”
That made me laugh. Really laugh.
To Tracy’s disappointment, what she called the Master Planet seemed to lie in ruins. And what ruins!
Ruins, real ruins, are thin on the ground for an American boy in the 1960s. I remember Murray and I used to argue about that, as we tried to write stories about our imaginary Venus, Murray
wanting ruins to be like Pompeii, like the Coliseum, seen in books, in movies, on TV. Like one of Burroughs’s African lost cities, or like Koraad on Barsoom. Murray’d never seen a real ruin, having traveled so little, having lived only in New York City and the suburbs of Washington, DC. I’d lived in the Southwest, and my parents had taken me to see Mesa Verde, to visit Chaco Canyon.
Real ruins, of real abandoned cities, sitting out in the weather for hundreds of years, are different from maintained ruins, like the Coliseum, or cities preserved under volcanic ash for thousands of years. Burroughs was in the Army in the 1890s and served in the Southwest. Why didn’t he know that?
The cityscapes of the Master Planet were like that. Stumps of buildings with their foundations exposed. Crumbled, fallen walls. A sense of haze and dust everywhere.
We stood by our flying saucer, and Tracy said, “Whatever happened, happened here. And there was nothing left behind to keep things up.”
Keep things up, I thought, awaiting the owners’ return.
In the end, a few days later, we wound up on something Tracy referred to as a “sub-station,” some adjunct of the Master Planet, one of many apparently scattered round the Lost Empire. From space, seen out the saucer window, it looked like a little blue moon, hardly a planet at all, a little blue moon surrounded by ghostly white radiance, and, though I looked and looked, nothing else nearby. No sun. Not even an especially bright star. No gas giant for it to orbit. No nothing.
On the ground … well, no. Not ground. The place was like a cityscape, but the buildings were made of something like sheet metal, tin, copper, zinc, varicolored anodized aluminum, streets paved with sheets of rolled gold, nothing but metal everywhere but the sky.
From under the saucer’s rim, I just stood there, looking up, at a pitch black sky flooded with so many stars it lit up the landscape, making a million little shadows in every dark corner.
“Man ….”
Every now and again, there’d be the quick yellow streak of a meteor.
“Where the hell are we?” Up in the sky, it was as if there were some shapes hiding behind the stars, faint washes of light that disappeared when I looked at them.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 12