Nebula Awards Showcase 2003

by Nancy Kress

  “What do we do now?” asked the ship.

  Mada wondered what she should say to it. Scan for hostiles? Open a pleasure sim? Cook a nice, hot stew? Orders twisted in her mind, bit their tails and swallowed themselves.

  She considered—briefly—telling it to open all the air locks to the vacuum. Would it obey this order? She thought it probably would, although she would as soon chew her own tongue off as utter such cowardly words. Had not she and her sibling batch voted to carry the revolution into all ten dimensions? Pledged themselves to fight for the Three Universal Rights, no matter what the cost the Utopian brain clans extracted from them in blood and anguish?

  But that had been two-tenths of a spin ago.

  bean thoughts

  “Where are you going?” said the ship.

  Mada floated through the door bubble of the command mod. She wrapped her toes around the perch outside to steady herself.

  “Mada, wait! I need a mission, a course, some line of inquiry.”

  She launched down the companionway.

  “I’m a Dependent Intelligence, Mada.” Its speaker buzzed with self-righteousness. “I have the right to proper and timely guidance.”

  The ship flowed a veil across her trajectory; as she approached, it went taut. That was DI thinking: the ship was sure that it could just bounce her back into its world. Mada flicked her claws and slashed at it, shredding holes half a meter long.

  “And I have the right to be an individual,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  She caught another perch and pivoted off it toward the greenhouse blister. She grabbed the perch by the door bubble and paused to flow new alveoli into her lungs to make up for the oxygen-depleted, carbon-dioxide-enriched air mix in the greenhouse. The bubble shivered as she popped through it and she breathed deeply. The smells of life helped ground her whenever operation of the ship overwhelmed her. It was always so needy and there was only one of her.

  It would have been different if they had been designed to go out in teams. She would have had her sibling Thiras at her side; together they might have been strong enough to withstand the Utopian’s panic . . . no! Mada shook him out of her head. Thiras was gone; they were all gone. There was no sense in looking for comfort, downwhen or up. All she had was the moment, the tick of the relentless present, filled now with the moist, bittersweet breath of the dirt, the sticky savor of running sap, the bloom of perfume on the flowers. As she drifted through the greenhouse, leaves brushed her skin like caresses. She settled at the potting bench, opened a bin and picked out a single bean seed.

  Mada cupped it between her two hands and blew on it, letting her body’s warmth coax the seed out of dormancy. She tried to merge her mind with its blissful unconsciousness. Cotyledons stirred and began to absorb nutrients from the endosperm. A bean cared nothing about proclaiming the Three Universal Rights: the right of all independent sentients to remain individual, the right to manipulate their physical structures and the right to access the timelines. Mada slowed her metabolism to the steady and deliberate rhythm of the bean—what Utopian could do that? They held that individuality bred chaos, that function alone must determine form and that undoing the past was sacrilege. Being Utopians, they could hardly destroy Trueborn and its handful of colonies. Instead they had tried to put the Rights under quarantine.

  Mada stimulated the sweat glands in the palms of her hands. The moisture wicking across her skin called to the embryonic root in the bean seed. The tip pushed against the seed coat. Mada’s sibling batch on Trueborn had pushed hard against the Utopian blockade, to bring the Rights to the rest of the galaxy.

  Only a handful had made it to open space. The brain clans had hunted them down and brought most of them back in disgrace to Trueborn. But not Mada. No, not wily Mada, Mada the fearless, Mada whose heart now beat but once a minute.

  The bean embryo swelled and its root cracked the seed coat. It curled into her hand, branching and rebranching like the timelines. The roots tickled her.

  Mada manipulated the chemistry of her sweat by forcing her sweat ducts to reabsorb most of the sodium and chlorine. She parted her hands slightly and raised them up to the grow lights. The cotyledons emerged and chloroplasts oriented themselves to the light. Mada was thinking only bean thoughts as her cupped hands filled with roots and the first true leaves unfolded. More leaves budded from the nodes of her stem, her petioles arched and twisted to the light, the light. It was only the light—violet-blue and orange-red—that mattered, the incredible shower of photons that excited her chlorophyll, passing electrons down carrier molecules to form adenosine diphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleo . . .

  “Mada,” said the ship. “The order to leave you alone is now superseded by primary programming.”

  “What?” The word caught in her throat like a bone.

  “You entered the greenhouse forty days ago.”

  Without quite realizing what she was doing, Mada clenched her hands, crushing the young plant.

  “I am directed to keep you from harm, Mada,” said the ship. “It’s time to eat.”

  She glanced down at the dead thing in her hands. “Yes, all right.” She dropped it onto the potting bench. “I’ve got something to clean up first but I’ll be there in a minute.” She wiped the corner of her eye. “Meanwhile, calculate a course for home.”

  natural background

  Not until the ship scanned the quarantine zone at the edge of the Trueborn system did Mada begin to worry. In her time the zone had swarmed with the battle asteroids of the brain clans. Now the Utopians were gone. Of course, that was to be expected after all this time. But as the ship re-entered the home system, dumping excess velocity into the empty dimensions, Mada felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the command mod.

  Trueborn orbited a spectral type G3V star, which had been known to the discoverers as HR3538. Scans showed that the Green Sea had become a climax forest of deciduous hardwood. There were indeed new mountains—knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets—that had upthrust some eighty kilometers off the Fire Coast, leaving Port Henoch landlocked. A rain forest choked the plain where the city of Blair’s Landing had once sprawled.

  The ship scanned life in abundance. The seas teemed and flocks of Trueborn’s flyers darkened the skies like storm clouds: kippies and bluewings and warblers and migrating stilts. Animals had retaken all three continents, lowland and upland, marsh and tundra. Mada could see the dust kicked up by the herds of herbivorous aram from low orbit. The forest echoed with the clatter of shindies and the shriek of blowhards. Big hunters like kar and divil padded across the plains. There were new species as well, mostly invertebrates but also a number of lizards and something like a great, mossy rat that built mounds five meters tall.

  None of the introduced species had survived: dogs or turkeys or llamas. The ship could find no cities, towns, buildings—not even ruins. There were neither tubeways nor roads, only the occasional animal track. The ship looked across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and saw nothing but the natural background.

  There was nobody home on Trueborn. And as far as they could tell, there never had been.

  “Speculate,” said Mada.

  “I can’t,” said the ship. “There isn’t enough data.”

  “There’s your data.” Mada could hear the anger in her voice. “Trueborn, as it would have been had we never even existed.”

  “Two-tenths of a spin is a long time, Mada.”

  She shook her head. “They ripped out the foundations, even picked up the dumps. There’s nothing, nothing of us left.” Mada was gripping the command perch so hard that the knuckles of her toes were white. “Hypothesis,” she said, “the Utopians got tired of our troublemaking and wiped us out. Speculate.”

  “Possible, but that’s contrary to their core beliefs.” Most DIs had terrible imaginations. They couldn’t tell jokes, but then they couldn’t commit crimes, either.

  “Hypothesis: they deported the entire population, scatte
red us to prison colonies. Speculate.”

  “Possible, but a logistical nightmare. The Utopians prize the elegant solution.”

  She swiped the image of her home planet off the screen, as if to erase its unnerving impossibility. “Hypothesis: there are no Utopians anymore because the revolution succeeded. Speculate.”

  “Possible, but then where did everyone go? And why did they return the planet to its pristine state?”

  She snorted in disgust. “What if,” she tapped a finger to her forehead, “maybe we don’t exist. What if we’ve skipped to another timeline? One in which the discovery of Trueborn never happened? Maybe there has been no Utopian Empire in this timeline, no Great Expansion, no Space Age, maybe no human civilization at all.”

  “One does not just skip to another timeline at random.” The ship sounded huffy at the suggestion. “I’ve monitored all our dimensional reinsertions quite carefully, and I can assure you that all these events occurred in the timeline we currently occupy.”

  “You’re saying there’s no chance?”

  “If you want to write a story, why bother asking my opinion?”

  Mada’s laugh was brittle. “All right then. We need more data.” For the first time since she had been stranded upwhen, she felt a tickle stir the dead weight she was carrying inside her. “Let’s start with the nearest Utopian system.”

  chasing shadows

  The HR683 system was abandoned and all signs of human habitation had been obliterated. Mada could not be certain that everything had been restored to its pre-Expansion state because the ship’s database on Utopian resources was spotty. HR4523 was similarly deserted. HR509, also known as Tau Ceti, was only 11.9 light-years from Earth and had been the first outpost of the Great Expansion.

  Its planetary system was also devoid of intelligent life and human artifacts—with one striking exception.

  Nuevo LA was spread along the shores of the Sterling Sea like a half-eaten picnic lunch. Something had bitten the roofs off its buildings and chewed its walls. Metal skeletons rotted on its docks, transports were melting into brown and gold stains. Once-proud boulevards crumbled in the orange light; the only traffic was windblown litter chasing shadows.

  Mada was happy to survey the ruin from low orbit. A closer inspection would have spooked her. “Was it war?”

  “There may have been a war,” said the ship, “but that’s not what caused this. I think it’s deliberate deconstruction.” In extreme magnification, the screen showed a concrete wall pockmarked with tiny holes, from which dust puffed intermittently. “The composition of that dust is limestone, sand, and aluminum silicate. The buildings are crawling with nanobots and they’re eating the concrete.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “At a guess, a hundred years, but that could be off by an order of magnitude.”

  “Who did this?” said Mada. “Why? Speculate.”

  “If this is the outcome of a war, then it would seem that the victors wanted to obliterate all traces of the vanquished. But it doesn’t seem to have been fought over resources. I suppose we could imagine some deep ideological antagonism between the two sides that led to this, but such an extreme of cultural psychopathology seems unlikely.”

  “I hope you’re right.” She shivered. “So they did it themselves, then? Maybe they were done with this place and wanted to leave it as they found it?”

  “Possible,” said the ship.

  Mada decided that she was done with Nuevo LA, too. She would have been perversely comforted to have found her enemies in power somewhere. It would have given her an easy way to calculate her duty. However, Mada was quite certain that what this mystery meant was that twenty thousand millennia had conquered both the revolution and the Utopians and that she and her sibling batch had been designed in vain.

  Still, she had nothing better to do with eternity than to try to find out what had become of her species.

  a never-ending vacation

  The Atlantic Ocean was now larger than the Pacific. The Mediterranean Sea had been squeezed out of existence by the collision of Africa, Europe and Asia. North America floated free of South America and was nudging Siberia. Australia was drifting toward the equator.

  The population of Earth was about what it had been in the fifteenth century CE, according to the ship. Half a billion people lived on the home world and, as far as Mada could see, none of them had anything important to do. The means of production and distribution, of energy-generation and waste disposal were in the control of Dependent Intelligences like the ship. Despite repeated scans, the ship could detect no sign that any independent sentience was overseeing the system.

  There were but a handful of cities, none larger than a quarter of a million inhabitants. All were scrubbed clean and kept scrupulously ordered by the DIs; they reminded Mada of databases populated with people instead of information. The majority of the population spent their bucolic lives in pretty hamlets and quaint towns overlooking lakes or oceans or mountains.

  Humanity had booked a never-ending vacation.

  “The brain clans could be controlling the DIs,” said Mada. “That would make sense.”

  “Doubtful,” said the ship. “Independent sentients create a signature disturbance in the sixth dimension.”

  “Could there be some secret dictator among the humans, a hidden oligarchy?”

  “I see no evidence that anyone is in charge. Do you?”

  She shook her head. “Did they choose to live in a museum,” she said, “or were they condemned to it? It’s obvious there’s no First Right here; these people have only the illusion of individuality. And no Second Right either. Those bodies are as plain as uniforms—they’re still slaves to their biology.”

  “There’s no disease,” said the ship. “They seem to be functionally immortal.”

  “That’s not saying very much, is it?” Mada sniffed. “Maybe this is some scheme to start human civilization over again. Or maybe they’re like seeds, stored here until someone comes along to plant them.” She waved all the screens off. “I want to go down for a closer look. What do I need to pass?”

  “Clothes, for one thing.” The ship displayed a selection of current styles on its screen. They were extravagantly varied, from ballooning pastel tents to skin-tight sheaths of luminescent metal, to feathered camouflage to jumpsuits made of what looked like dried mud. “Fashion design is one of their principal pastimes,” said the ship. “In addition, you’ll probably want genitalia and the usual secondary sexual characteristics.”

  It took her the better part of a day to flow ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus, cervix, and vulva and to rearrange her vagina. All these unnecessary organs made her feel bloated. She saw breasts as a waste of tissue; she made hers as small as the ship thought acceptable. She argued with it about the several substantial patches of hair it claimed she needed. Clearly, grooming them would require constant attention. She didn’t mind taming her claws into fingernails but she hated giving up her whiskers. Without them, the air was practically invisible. At first her new vulva tickled when she walked, but she got used to it.

  The ship entered Earth’s atmosphere at night and landed in what had once been Saskatchewan, Canada. It dumped most of its mass into the empty dimensions and flowed itself into baggy black pants, a moss-colored boat neck top and a pair of brown, gripall loafers. It was able to conceal its complete sensorium in a canvas belt.

  It was 9:14 in the morning on June 23, 19,834,004 CE when Mada strolled into the village of Harmonious Struggle.

  the devil’s apple

  Harmonious Struggle consisted of five clothing shops, six restaurants, three jewelers, eight art galleries, a musical instrument maker, a crafts workshop, a weaver, a potter, a woodworking shop, two candle stores, four theaters with capacities ranging from twenty to three hundred and an enormous sporting goods store attached to a miniature domed stadium. There looked to be apartments over most of these establishments; many had views of nearby Rabbit Lake.
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br />   Three of the restaurants—Hassam’s Palace of Plenty, The Devil’s Apple, and Laurel’s—were practically jostling each other for position on Sonnet Street, which ran down to the lake. Lounging just outside of each were waiters eyeing handheld screens. They sprang up as one when Mada happened around the corner.

  “Good day, Madame. Have you eaten?”

  “Well met, fair stranger. Come break bread with us.”

  “All natural foods, friend! Lightly cooked, humbly served.”

  Mada veered into the middle of the street to study the situation as the waiters called to her. ~So I can choose whichever I want?~ she subvocalized to the ship.

  ~In an attention-based economy,~ subbed the ship in reply, ~all they expect from you is an audience.~

  Just beyond Hassam’s, the skinny waiter from The Devil’s Apple had a wry, crooked smile. Black hair fell to the padded shoulders of his shirt. He was wearing boots to the knee and loose rust-colored shorts, but it was the little red cape that decided her.

  As she walked past her, the waitress from Hassam’s was practically shouting. “Madame, please, their batter is dull!” She waved her handheld at Mada. “Read the reviews. Who puts shrimp in muffins?”

  The waiter at The Devil’s Apple was named Owen. He showed her to one of three tables in the tiny restaurant. At his suggestion, Mada ordered the poached peaches with white cheese mousse, an asparagus breakfast torte, baked orange walnut French toast and coddled eggs. Owen served the peaches, but it was the chef and owner, Edris, who emerged from the kitchen to clear the plate.

  “The mousse, Madame, you liked it?” she asked, beaming.

  “It was good,” said Mada.

  Her smile shrank a size and a half. “Enough lemon rind, would you say that?”