The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It’s as if we have to write down all the numbers and add them up, one by one. Second by second, atom by atom, quantum event by quantum event, we simply have to wait and see what is going to happen next.

  That was when I understood the sadness in Professor Kuhl’s voice. He was mourning the end of the Enlightenment, the end of the great dream of using reason as a tool to understand all that lies in Heaven and Earth.

  Later, in the library, I discovered that the idea of an algorithmically incompressible universe was not new. Two sixteenth-century Polish clerics, brothers living in Rome, suggested that God was omnipotent, but not omniscient. These Sozinian brothers argued that God was growing in knowledge and understanding while His creation unfolded. They were excommunicated and the Sozinian doctrine declared heretical.

  Wrongly. Mathematics has proven that the Sozinians were right.

  But the important thing to realize is that, as I said, God knew nothing when the universe was young. Release 2.0 of the Monkey was another case of garbage in, garbage out.

  * * *

  I was spending a lot of time in the library, thinking about things like this. I discovered that Evelyn and I were not the first to wonder about random texts. The earliest known writings on the subject were the work of the fourteenth-century scholar, Lulio. The philosopher John Stuart Mill had also written about them. Strangely, Mill was concerned with the idea of random music, not words, and worried that melody was exhaustible. Later, Kurd Lasswitz, an obscure nineteenth-century German sciencefiction writer, explored some of the possibilities of random texts.

  And then I discovered Borges, the Argentinean minimalist. In Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” a librarian describes the infinite library where he toils endlessly. In this library everything that has been written, will be written, has never been written, and will never be written is stored on the bookshelves of an endless library of hexagonal rooms. Unfortunately, the books are not shelved in any order and almost all of them are nothing but meaningless streams of letters with a word or a phrase scattered here and there in the jumble. The librarian spends his life searching for a single comprehensible text. The Holy Grail, of course, is the text which is the catalog of the library. It must be somewhere on the shelves. At the end of the story the librarian escapes from the library.

  I have a copy of Borges on my bookshelf. Here, take it.

  * * *

  Evelyn graduated with a doctorate in nuclear physics. She went to work for Pantex, in Amarillo, and I went to visit her. Have you ever been to Amarillo, Pete? Outside the town there is a sign that says:

  AMARILLO

  We know who we are.

  Now there’s a town of lucky people.

  You know when you’re getting close to Pantex. First there’s nothing but desert, then you come to the razor wire that marks the perimeter of the sixteen-thousand-acre site, then you see one of the Chevrolet Suburbans with its roof cut off for the swivel-mounted M-60.

  Sounds scary. Evelyn met me at the first gate. Pantex was the final assembly point for nuclear warheads, she told me. “Detonators, timers, altimeters, parachutes are packed around what we call the physics package,” she said. “What a lovely euphemism. But now we’re into disassembly.”

  That’s why I got a tour. Even The New York Times had got a tour. At that time Pantex was trying to reinvent its image.

  While Evelyn was helping me into a protective suit she told me that there were six thousand parts in a typical thermonuclear weapon and the cost of demilitarizing a single weapon was about $500,000.

  We waddled robotically into a disassembly shop, a gravel Gertie, a bunker with thirty tons of dirt on its roof. If there’s an explosion, the Gertie collapses, containing the radioactive material and crushing everything inside.

  We watched two men easing an electromechanical device from a complex mechanism of wires, printed circuits, and relays. One man read instructions line by line from a manual while the other unscrewed the subassembly from its mounting and exposed the shiny surface of what looked like a metal bowling ball.

  “That’s plutonium,” she said. “We call it a pit. Right now we have five thousand pits stored safely here at Pantex.”

  We saw some of them in another bunker, stored in thirty-gallon steel drums, stacked in rows in the dim cool air. “We monitor for radiation leaks. We’ve never had any, of course.”

  I listened carefully to the hiss from the Geiger counter.

  * * *

  In 1991 I finished graduate school and moved to Waxahachie, Ellis County, Texas. Back in ’79 the high-energy physics community had asked the federal government for “a multi-TeV accelerator to elucidate the physics of electroweak symmetry binding necessary for continued progress in high-energy physics.” In other words, they wanted to find the basic building blocks of matter and they needed a machine that was twenty miles in diameter. In fact, to get down to the level of quarks they would need a machine several light-years across, but they didn’t tell that to Congress.

  This is how the argument went. The superconducting supercollider would prove, maybe, the existence of the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that existed shortly after the Big Bang and may have given matter the important property of mass. The Higgs boson, if it is ever found, will be a step on the road to unifying the electroweak and strong forces of nuclear physics, bringing us closer to unifying these forces with gravity, closer to a grand unification theory, a so-called theory of everything. The mathematical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote, “If we do discover a complete theory … we should know the mind of God.”

  Higgs boson first, mind of God next. Get the picture?

  In October, 1993, seventeen shafts had been sunk two hundred feet under the chalk of east Texas and eleven of the proposed forty-two miles of tunnel had been dug. Two billion taxpayer dollars had been spent. That’s real progress toward knowing the mind of God. That month a congressman from Ohio said, “Finding basic building blocks of the universe won’t change the way people live.” Many other congressmen were feeling pressure from their constituents. One voter commented, “If I want to know the mind of God, I pray.”

  Congress canceled the project.

  What would Professor Kuhl have said?

  But he had died in 1991.

  * * *

  At the time of the cancellation I was working at the SSC’s Particle Detection Simulation Facility, which represented one hundred million of the taxpayers’ two billion dollars.

  We were running at twelve billion instructions per second (that’s twelve thousand million instructions per second, or twelve thousand MIPS) and had on-line storage measured in terabytes. There was nothing else like the PDSF in the world.

  Ten of our staff of thirty were laid off and my boss began to scramble to find a use for the twelve-thousand-MIPS PDSF, another two thousand MIPS in the iPS/860 Intel hypercube, a 550,000-square-foot facility, eight million dollars of network infrastructure, thirteen million dollars of personal computers, and fourteen million dollars of UNIX workstations.

  My boss was a sharp guy. While the SSC consortium was renting tunnels to local mushroom growers my boss got the PDSF transferred to the state of Texas. The state renamed it and told him to earn his keep by renting computer time to the scientific community. I prepared a homepage for the World Wide Web, sort of an advertisement focused at well-heeled academics with generous funding from the National Science Foundation. I remember the first page:

  High Performance Computing Center

  [At this point there were two images of large rooms full of equipment.]

  High Performance Computing Center

  Available at no cost to User until further notice.

  Get acquainted with the capabilities of the HPCC during this limited-time offer.

  If you are interested in using the High Performance

  Computing Center at no cost please define your requirements and query caxton@texas.ssc.gov.

  Now you have to put yourself in my situation, sitting at my Su
n SPARC 10 workstation with no application to run. Imagine, an aficionado of random text sitting there with twelve thousand MIPS of idle processing power literally at my fingertips. All I needed was to write a few lines of C++ code to create an updated Motorola Monkey.

  Release 3.0.

  Oh, and I needed a suitable source of random numbers.

  * * *

  Professor Kuhl had shown me the only real random-number generator in the universe. I was watching the dust dance in the sunbeams while he was describing the quantum dance of particles.

  “Quantum events are truly without cause. There is a veil through which we cannot pass, an ephemeral, flimsy veil, a barrier more mental than physical, yet totally impenetrable.”

  He paused, giving us time to absorb what he was saying. “If there were a cause for the radioactive decay of an atom, that cause would be what has been called a ‘hidden variable’ in the equations. Within the mathematics of quantum mechanics there is proof that there are no hidden variables. The chain of cause and effect comes to an end. The quantum event is an effect without a cause.”

  Later I imagined this veil to be like a curtain blowing in an open window on a summer night. God was the warm dark breeze making the quanta dance.

  Needing effects that had no causes, I called Evelyn. Yes, she could supply a billion truly random digits per second. Five thousand pits could supply a lot more, but that was all the PDSF could handle. Using all the power of my texas.ssc.gov Internet address I commandeered enough bandwidth on the Net’s high-speed backbone. Soon I was pumping a billion random Pantex digits per second into the PDSF. That translates to over a hundred million characters per second. That’s thirty times more text every second than Shakespeare wrote in his entire life.

  I could have used any other quantum phenomenon to generate randomness. But I knew Evelyn and so that was the easiest way for me.

  Of course, I needed some help to scan it all. I uploaded the CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary, wrote a little more C++ code, an algorithm to recognize texts with English or almost-English words—sort of a reverse spell-checker looking for words that were misspelled, but still could be words—and I was in business.

  What was I looking for?

  Well, you remember I said my style was mystical?

  I wanted God to whisper to me through the quantum veil. I knew He was there. All I had to do was listen with all my attention and He would tell me what I needed to know.

  The God who would be whispering to me was the God who is alive today. Not the infant God whose mewling still echoes through the universe as cosmic background radiation. No, the God behind the quantum veil is still at work, crafting the growing universe, solving for the first time the great puzzle of the cosmos. Just like us, He is eager to find out what will happen next.

  * * *

  Pete, your wife is Mexican, right? Perhaps you’re wondering: Suppose the secret of the universe is written in Spanish instead of English?

  It doesn’t matter. The beauty of searching through an infinity of random text is that the secret of the universe will be written in Spanish, and English, and all other human languages, and all nonhuman languages too. In fact, there will be an infinite number of documents that reveal the secret of the universe. All I needed to do was to find one written in English. It could be the original scientific paper that will one day win the Nobel Prize, it could be a news story about that paper, a philosophical criticism of the work, a chapter from a textbook, a children’s version of the Theory of Everything, anything would do.

  So I got all my equipment set up, the feed from God’s random ticking in the plutonium, the translation into text, the automatic flagging of documents that were mostly English, and I churned out the equivalent of a thousand Shakespeare plays a second.

  One day I am sitting, stunned, at my workstation, and my boss comes in and sees the random text scrolling across the screen. He takes the printout I am clutching in my hand, and reads:

  the chance against you receiving this message of 372 characters from the rafters from behind the veil is a number far greater than all the protons in the universe so you know this is not an accident by way of confirmation let me tell you that you were right mith thmith was wrong the six is there and yes the sixth ith thilent the secret of the universe is I dont know yet

  Immediately, you will notice that the message exhibits both internal and external consistency. But remember, truth is not the same as meaning.

  * * *

  My boss discovered the feed of random digits and the sequestration of twelve thousand Texas MIPS for my own devices.

  Misappropriation of government resources was the phrase they used in the indictment. When the dust settled they sent me here instead of jail, saying I was crazy.

  * * *

  Ah! There goes your beeper.

  But wait a moment. Do you see those headlights, there on the road, behind the trees? Someone is parking outside the East Gate.

  My story took longer than I thought. It’s almost seven o’clock and the sun has risen.

  I am sane, and I am ready to leave.

  Look outside. Like lightning drawn to a lightning rod, the night’s dew has condensed on the very tip of each blade of grass. The laws of physics are written so that the dew must collect as tiny globes of water on each blade’s tip, not as a film of moisture smeared over the whole lawn. Each drop will scatter the low light of the rising sun. While I am walking to the gate the lawn will look as if someone has thrown away a million diamonds. Why should it be so beautiful? I can’t explain it, and that’s how I know I’m sane. Reason is only the sixth sense, the silent sixth sense, no more reliable than the other five. As imperfect, and as capable of causing pain or ecstasy.

  So maybe the message was truly random. Or maybe there is a God who takes an interest in things, dazzling us with the morning dew and sending us messages. But don’t forget that some religions have trickster gods.

  And on that note, Pete, it’s clearly time for me to go.

  THE COST TO BE WISE

  Maureen F. McHugh

  Maureen F. McHugh made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world of the ’90s with a relatively small body of work, becoming a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, Killing Me Softly, and other markets. In 1992, she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, and which was named a New York Times Notable Book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her most recent book is Half the Day Is Night. Upcoming is a new novel, Mission Child, set on the same world as “The Cost to Be Wise.” She has had stories in our Tenth, Eleventh (in collaboration with David B. Kisor), Twelfth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. She lives in Twinsburg, Ohio with her husband, her son, and a golden retriever named Smith.

  In the quiet but powerful tale that follows, she tells the story of a young woman who learns the painful lesson that wisdom has a price. And that sometimes that price is more than you were willing to pay.…

  i

  The sun was up on the snow and everything was bright to look at when the skimmer landed. It landed on the long patch of land behind the schoolhouse, dropping down into the snow like some big bug. I was supposed to be down at the distillery helping my mam but we needed water and I had to get an ice ax, so I was outside when the offworlders came.

  The skimmer was from Barok. Barok was a city. It was so far away that no one I knew in Sckarline had ever been there (except for the teachers, of course) but for the offworlders the trip was only a few hours. The skimmer came a couple of times a year to bring packages for the teachers.

  The skimmer sat there for a moment—long time waiting while nothing happened except people started coming to watch—and then the hatch opened out and an offworlder stepped ginge
rly out on the snow. The offworlder wasn’t a skimmer pilot though, it was a tall, thin boy. I shaded my eyes and watched. My hands were cold but I wanted to see.

  The offworlder wore strange colors for the snow. Offworlders always wore unnatural colors. This boy wore purples and oranges and black, all shining as if they were wet and none of them thick enough to keep anyone warm. He stood with his knees stiff and his body rigid because the snow was packed to flat, slick ice by the skimmer and he wasn’t sure of his balance. But he was tall and I figured he was as old as I am so it looked odd that he still didn’t know how to walk on snow. He was beardless, like a boy. Darker than any of us.

  Someone inside the skimmer handed him a bag. It was deep red and shined as if it were hard, and wrinkled as if it were felt. My father crossed to the skimmer and took the bag from the boy because it was clear that the boy might fall with it and it made a person uncomfortable to watch him try to balance and carry something.

  The dogs were barking, and more Sckarline people were coming because they’d heard the skimmer.

  I wanted to see what the bags were made of so I went to the hatch of the skimmer to take something. We didn’t get many things from the offworlders because they weren’t appropriate, but I liked offworlder things. I couldn’t see much inside the skimmer because it was dark and I had been out in the sun, but standing beside the seat where the pilot was sitting there was an old white-haired man, all straight-legged and tall. As tall as Ayudesh the teacher, which is to say taller than anyone else I knew. He handed the boy a box, though, not a bag, a bright blue box with a thick white lid. A plastic box. An offworlder box. The boy handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” the boy said in English. Up close I could see that the boy was really a girl. Offworlders dress the same both ways, and they are so tall it’s hard to tell sometimes, but this was a girl with short black hair and skin as dark as wood.

  My father put the bag in the big visitors’ house and I put the box there too. It was midday at winterdark, so the sun was a red glow on the horizon. The bag looked black except where it fell into the red square of sunlight from the doorway. It shone like metal. So very fine. Like nothing we had. I touched the bag. It was plastic too. I liked the feeling of plastic. I liked the sound of the word in lingua. If someday I had a daughter, maybe I’d name her Plastic. It would be a rich name, an exotic name. The teachers wouldn’t like it, but it was a name I wished I had.