“What kind of reactor mishap?” Sarrie asked.
But the fouchian answered, already intimate to the details.
“The-Light-That-Blinds-Generations!”
A nuclear explosion, she understood. The ship’s reactors were sabotaged, or a bomb was hidden somewhere out of reach. Either way, she realized that the rebellion wasn’t too astonishing to catch the Artisans unprepared. How many times in the past had they resorted to booby traps and other outrages?
But she didn’t ask, knowing better.
And Ejy made his first and only true mistake. With a mixture of sadness and burgeoning awe, he told his most loyal organics:
“The blast will vaporize much of this crust. We have very little time to waste.”
Vaporize the ice, then fling it into the sky, Sarrie realized. Creating an enormous, temporary geyser.
She shuddered, in secret.
Then other secret thoughts followed, one chasing after another, the universe changing in an instant.
The stars and the black between made new again.
SEVEN
The buggy stopped beside the capped borehole.
“Your nest-brother has finally surfaced,” Ejy told the driver. “Help him disembark. Help him understand what has happened. And he must, must put on his lifesuit quickly, or what are my choices?”
We will leave your nest-brother behind, thought Sarrie. And you too, if it comes to it.
The fouchian didn’t spell out consequences, much less complain. Opening the pilot’s hatch, he scrambled down and crossed to the airlock, vanishing.
Calmly, quietly, Sarrie observed, “Artisans can tolerate high radiation levels and heat. If we need to remain here a few minutes longer—”
“But I won’t risk you,” Ejy promised.
“I’m willing to take that risk,” she confessed. “If it means saving one or both of my colleagues, I’d do it gladly.”
Silence.
But of course she didn’t own her life, and it wasn’t hers to sacrifice. Was it? Again, she walked to the back of the cabin, watching the doomed ship and the tiny, distant buggy. The buggy was definitely moving toward them, but not fast enough. She imagined its cabin crammed with humans, weighing it down, Navren hunched over his pad, desperately trying to calculate blast strengths and the minimum safe distance.
“What would have happened to us?” she asked.
“What would have happened when?”
“After we put ourselves into cold-sleep.” She didn’t look at the machine, didn’t expose her face to scrutiny. “You wouldn’t have dared allow us to wake again. Am I right?”
Outrage, sudden and pure.
“Sarrie,” said the shrill voice in her headphones, “Artisans do not casually murder. I intended the cold-sleep as a security measure, to give everyone time to prepare—”
“We couldn’t go home again. We might have told the truth.”
“2018CC is a large vessel,” Ejy reminded her. “There are simple, kind ways to sequester.”
With eyes closed, she envisioned such a future. Life in some tiny, secret habitat. Or worse, hidden within the sterile white archives.…
“It’s happened before, hasn’t it?”
“What has?”
“All of this,” Sarrie replied, turning to show Ejy her face. Her resolve, she hoped. Her desperate courage. “A team finds unexpected humans. Then they’re quarantined. Or they rebel against the Artisans.” A moment’s hesitation. “How many times have these tragedies happened, Ejy? To you, I mean.”
Again, silence.
She turned, squinting at the slow buggy. It was a naked fleck beneath the fine bright snows of the Milky Way. With little more than a whisper, she asked, “How many humans are alive today?”
“I have no way of knowing.”
“I believe you,” she replied, nodding. “If they’re so thick that they’ve got to come here to find a home—”
“We may very likely have found an exceptional group,” Ejy speculated.
“Sophisticated agriculture coupled with the lack of radio noise implies an intentional isolation.”
Again, she looked at the machine. “Your telescopes watch the galaxy. You have some idea what’s happening there.”
“Of course.” The old pride flickered. “Judging by radio noise, misaligned com-lasers, and the flash of extremely powerful engines … yes, we have a working model.” His various arms moved apart as if to show how big the fish was that Ejy had caught. “Since the wars, humans have explored the galaxy, and they have colonized at least several million worlds.…”
What astonished Sarrie, what left her numbed to the bone, was how very easily she accepted these impossibilities. Nothing was as she had believed it to be, in life or the universe, and the idea of the Milky Way bursting with her species just confirmed this new intoxicating sense of disorder.
She took a step toward Ejy. “Why lie?” she asked.
Then she answered her own question. “You were instructed to lie. Your human builders ordered you to pretend that the worst had happened, that my species was extinct everywhere but on the Web.”
Ejy had to admit, “In simple terms, that’s true.”
“Can you see any wars now?”
“None of consequence.”
“Maybe humans have outgrown the need to fight. Has that possibility occurred to you?”
A long, electric pause.
Then with a smooth, unimpressed voice, the Artisan told her, “You are a child and ignorant, and you don’t comprehend—”
“Tell me then!”
“These humans aren’t like you anymore. They have many forms, they live extremely long lives. Some possess vast, seemingly magical powers.”
Sarrie was shaking, and she couldn’t stop.
“But they remain human nonetheless,” said Ejy. “Deeply flawed. And the peace you see is temporary. Temporary, and extremely frail.”
With an attempt at nonchalance, the Voice stepped closer to Ejy and closer to one of the buggy’s walls.
“When the peace fails,” the Artisan continued, “every past war will be a spark. An incident. When your species fights again, the entire galaxy will be engulfed.”
Turning again, she glanced at the nearest hatch.
“Is that why you brought the Web out here?” she asked, showing him a curious face. “To escape this future war?”
“Naturally,” he confessed. “We intend to circle the Milky Way, once or twenty times, and the next cycle of wars will run their course. The galaxy will be devastated, and we, I mean your descendants and myself, will inherit all of it.” A pause. “By then, the perfection that we have built—the perfection you embody, Sarrie—will be strong enough to expand across millions of unclaimed worlds.”
She looked straight at Ejy, guessing distances, knowing the machine’s most likely response.
Ejy wouldn’t kill her.
Not as a first recourse, not when she embodied perfection.
But Ejy noticed something in her face, her posture. With a puzzled tone, he asked, “Child? What are you thinking?”
“First of all,” Sarrie replied, “I’m not a child. And secondly, I can save my friends, I think.”
* * *
Servos and adrenaline helped her hand move. And with a sloppy, jarring swat, she caused the rearmost hatch to fly open.
Softly, sadly, Ejy said, “No.”
Sarrie dove through the open hatch, fell to the ice below, then sprinted toward the prefab hut.
She might have meant the fouchians when she said “my friends,” and for as long as possible, Ejy would resist that corrosive belief that his precious Voice—symbol of his goodness—was capable of anything that smelled like rebellion.
Sarrie lived long enough to reach the hut, pausing and turning, hazarding a fast look backward. The Artisan’s body was large but graceful, pulling itself out of the same hatch and scrambling over the open ice, already closing the gap. “No, no, no,” the whispering in her ears kept
saying. “No, no, no, no…!”
She opened both airlock doors, the tiny hut’s atmosphere exploding outward as a blinding fog. Then she was inside, in the new vacuum’s calm, knowing exactly what to do but her hands suddenly clumsy. Inept. Standing over the bank of monitors and controls, she hesitated for perhaps half a second—for an age—before mustering the will to quickly push the perfect sequence of buttons.
Ample reserve power was left in the borehole’s cells, as she had hoped.
She called to the pumps, waking them, then made them pull frigid seawater into the insulated pipes, the utterly reliable equipment utterly convinced that the ship wanted as much of the precious fluid as it could deliver. Now. Hurry. Please.
Through her feet and fingers, Sarrie felt the surging pumps.
More buttons needed her touch. She almost told herself, “Faster,” then thought better of it. What mattered most—what was absolutely essential—was to do nothing wrong for as long as possible, and hope it would be long enough.…
So focused was Sarrie on her task that she was puzzled, then amazed, to find herself being lifted off the floor … and she just managed to give the final, critical command before Ejy had her safely in his grip.
He kept saying, “No, no, no,” but the tone of that one word had changed. Sadness gave way to a machine’s unnatural fury.
Suddenly she was dragged outside, held by several arms and utterly helpless.
Far out on the table-smooth plain of ice, the twin pipelines closed the same key valves. Yet the pumps kept working, faithful to the end, shoving water into a finite volume and the water resisting their coercion, seams upstream from the closed valves bursting and the compressed water escaping, then freezing in an instant—hundreds of metric tons becoming fresh hard ice every second.
It was happening in the distance, without sound, almost invisibly.
But the Artisan had better eyes than Sarrie, and an infinitely faster set of responses.
Quick surgical bursts of laser light killed the main pumps.
Emergency pumps came on-line, and they were harder to kill—smaller, tougher, and set at a safe distance. Redundancies built on redundancies; the Artisans’ driving principle. It took Ejy all of a minute to staunch the flow, killing pumps and puncturing the lines and finally obliterating the tiny hut. But by then a small durable new hill had formed on the plain.
If the buggy could somehow reach that new ice, reach it and use it as a shelter, then some portion of the blast would be absorbed, however slightly, its radiations and fearsome heat muted—
“Why?” cried the Artisan.
She was slammed down on her back—the almost universal position of submission—then again, harder, Ejy drove her into the granitic ice. The impact made her ache, made her want to beg for Ejy to stop. But Sarrie said nothing, and she didn’t beg even with her face, and when he saw that bullying did no good, he let her sit up, then more quietly, almost reasonably, said, “Please explain. Please.”
At last, the fouchians emerged from the capped borehole. They seemed small, hurried, and inconsequential.
“I know the answer,” Sarrie whispered.
No surprise, no hesitation. “What answer?”
“To the xenophobes’ scenario. I know how to succeed.” She let him see her pride, her authority. “It’s simple. They cannot be won over. Never. And it’s the good Voice’s duty to warn you, to tell you as soon as possible that they’re malevolent, and leave you and the other Artisans time to defend the Web—”
“Yes,” said Ejy.
Then he added, “It’s remarkable. A Voice so young has come to that very difficult answer.”
She ignored the praise. Instead she asked quietly, “How many starships have we met, then destroyed?”
“You’ve destroyed nothing,” the Artisan reminded her.
“Responsibility is all yours.”
“Exactly.”
She felt a shudder, a sudden rippling of the ice.
And so did Ejy. He rose as high as possible on the mechanical legs, measuring a multitude of useless factors, then guessing the answer even as he inquired, “What other clever thing have you done, Sarrie?”
“The plasma drills believe that we need a second borehole. Now.”
Crystal eyes pivoted. The laser started hunting for targets.
“You destroyed their control systems,” Sarrie warned. “You can’t stop them.”
Between the scrambling fouchians and Ejy, out of the ancient ice, came a column of superheated vapor, twisting and rising, a wind lashing at everyone in a wild screaming fury.
Sarrie was knocked backward. Knocked free.
She tried to climb to her feet, falling once, then again. Then she was blown far enough that the scorching wind had faded, and she found herself standing, then running, trying to win as much distance as possible.
From her headphones came fouchian squeaks begging for instructions, then Ejy himself calling after her, the voice wearing its own loss.
Sarrie allowed herself to shout:
“Thank you.”
A pause.
Then from out of the maelstrom:
“Thank you for what, child?”
“The butterflies,” she told Ejy, almost crying now. “I liked them best.”
* * *
Later, trying to make sense of events, Sarrie was uncertain when the blast came—moments later, or maybe an hour. And she couldn’t decide what she saw of the blast, or felt, or how far it must have thrown her. All she knew was that suddenly she was half-wading, half-swimming through slush, and the sky was close and dense, fogs swirling and cooling, then freezing into a pummeling, relentless ice, and she staggered for a time, then stopped to rest, perhaps even sleep, then moved again, eating from her suit’s stores and drinking her own filtered urine, and she must have rested two more times, or maybe three, before she saw the tall figure marching along the edge of the fresh pack ice.
She couldn’t make out any details. She wasn’t even certain if it was exactly a human shape, although some part of her, hoping against reason, decided that it was Lilké, that her friend had survived, and everyone else must be somewhere nearby.
But if it was Lilké, would she forgive? Could she forgive Sarrie for everything?
And of course if it wasn’t, then it likely was one of the natives. Whoever they were. Surely they would send someone here to investigate the blast … to see who was trying to shatter their peaceful world.…
Sarrie realized that she could be seeing an immortal, godlike human.
With every last reserve, she started kicking her legs and tossing her arms in the air, thinking: Whoever or whatever they are, they don’t know me.
THE WIND OVER THE WORLD
Steven Utley
Steven Utley’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Universe, Galaxy, Amazing, Vertex, Stellar, Shayol, and elsewhere. He was one of the best-known new writers of the ’70s, both for his solo work and for some strong work in collaboration with fellow Texan Howard Waldrop, but he fell silent at the end of the decade and wasn’t seen in print again for more than ten years. In the last few years he’s made a strong comeback, however, becoming a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, as well as selling again to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and elsewhere. Utley is the coeditor, with Geo. W. Proctor, of the anthology Lone Star Universe, the first—and probably the only—anthology of SF stories by Texans. His first collection, Ghost Seas, will be coming out next year from Ticonderoga Press. His stories have appeared in our Tenth and Eleventh Annual Collections. He lives in Austin, Texas.
In the thoughtful story that follows, he takes us back through time to the dawn of terrestrial life, and shows us what happens when someone gets lost along the way.…
The attendant barely looked up from the clipboard cradled in the crook of his arm when Leveritt came in. The room was devoid of personality, but just as she entered through one door, a second man dressed in a lab c
oat went out through a door directly opposite, and in the instant before it swung shut, she glimpsed the room beyond—brightly lit, full of gleaming surfaces—and heard or thought that she heard a low sound like a faint pop of static or the breaking of waves against a shore. She shuddered as an electric thrill of excitement passed through her.
“Please stretch out on the gurney there.” The man with the clipboard continued writing as he spoke. “You can stow your seabag on the rack underneath.”
Leveritt did as he said. She said, “I feel like I’m being prepped for surgery.”
“We don’t want you to black out and fall and hurt yourself.” He finished writing, came around the end of the gurney to her, and turned the clipboard to show her the printed form. “This,” he said, offering her his pen, “is where you log out of the present. Please sign on the line at the bottom there.”
Leveritt’s hand trembled as she reached for the pen. She curled her fingers into a fist and clenched it tightly for a second, giving the attendant an apologetic smile. “I’m just a little nervous.” She tried to show him that she really was just a little nervous by expanding the smile into a grin; it felt brittle and hideous on her face. “I did volunteer for this,” she told him. I am more excited than scared to be doing this, she told herself.
The attendant smiled quickly, professionally. “Even volunteers have the right to be nervous. Try to relax. We’ve done this hundreds of times now, and there’s nothing to it. Ah!”
His exclamation was by way of greeting a second attendant, so like him that Leveritt felt she would be unable to tell them apart were she to glance away for a moment, who escorted a slight figure dressed in new-looking safari clothes and carrying, instead of the high-powered rifle that would have completed his ensemble, a seabag and a laptop. He stowed the bag and climbed onto the gurney next to Leveritt’s without being told, signed the log with a flourish, and lay back smiling. He turned his face toward Leveritt and said, “Looks like we’re traveling companions—time-traveling companions!” He talked fast, as though afraid he would run out of breath before he finished saying what he had to say. “Allow me to introduce myself—Ed Morris.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 74