The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “No first contact, then,” Cole said. “Contact was our dream. That was the whole point of exploration, space travel, science fiction – the stories we told. The dream of encountering the Other.”

  “Oh, I guess we encountered the Other,” Kate said. “Only it was here. It was her. ARD.”

  Ard?

  “ARD is Earth’s name for itself. After the Sixth, and the Restoration, a monitoring system was put into place that linked every ecosystem, geological system, and weather system on the Earth. The idea was that never again would we be unaware of the condition of our fellow species on the planet, or of the planet itself.”

  “I know of this,” Cole said. “EarthWatch.”

  “It was self-maintaining and -installing. And, we discovered several thousand years ago, self-aware. After the network had been installed for almost half a millennium, ARD contacted the various governments (social, political, economic, all interlinked and elected) and for the first time humankind contacted a consciousness other than itself.”

  “But one that we had created,” Cole pointed out.

  “Yes and no. ARD is in a sense, I suppose, our child, but she is also our mother. According to her, she had been conscious all along, and we had merely given her the desire and the means to communicate. But then, every consciousness thinks it has always been. These were questions that led to much strife. We had a renaissance of religion, and then of war, for the two are closely linked. But there was a kind of joy in it, too. The universe can be a very lonely place.”

  “Yes,” Cole said, as they climbed the hill of Montmartre. Paris was spread out below, looking neither old nor new but eternal. “So what is ARD like?”

  “We don’t know much about her,” said Kate. “She established contact with us, but never had any interest in us. She will only speak with groups or organizations, never individuals. She is still there, maintaining the systems, as indeed she says she always had – wordlessly – since the emergence of life on the planet and even before. This is her claim. She changed certain things; she has let us know that there are closed areas on the planet where humans must not go. This seems appropriate to us. But she almost never speaks to us, or we to her.”

  They walked down the hill, making a great circle. Back at the restaurant, they found Lee and his three Modernist companions sitting under the trees, drinking absinthe. Kate and Cole ordered a bottle of Bordeaux to catch up.

  Cole had several questions he wanted to ask Lee, now that they could communicate. But Lee was still holding forth on the terrors of the Sixth Extinction. As amazing as it was to hear him speaking eloquently, thanks to the translator, Cole had heard it all before. So he amused himself opening and closing his book, making it large, then small again.

  “Chester Himes,” whispered one of the two men, the white one. “A favorite. Well known in your age?”

  “Our age has hardly heard of him,” Cole said.

  “This visit with you, to your world, is an unexpected gift,” Lee was saying. “We thought the Earth would be a cinder by now. Or a trash midden.”

  “We live more simply now,” Kate said. “In the cities or in the villages, people are more modest in their needs. Everything doesn’t have to get bigger and bigger all the time.”

  “Nonsense!” said one of the men, the African. “Everyone is tired of having to get permission to travel to Paris, or to Lagos. I want to be able to go where I want, when I want.”

  “When you are fifty,” said the other woman, whose name was Michelle. She explained that there were two periods in everyone’s life – between the ages of eighteen and twenty, and between fifty and fifty-five – when they were free to travel anywhere on the planet (anywhere not restricted by ARD, of course) and not required to work. She was twenty-four.

  “What about children?” Lee asked.

  “There is no restriction on the number of children you can have,” said Kate. “Although in fact mortality rates are adjusted for the population limits of the planet.”

  “And what might those limits be?” Lee asked.

  “Approximately six to seven billion. ARD adjusts it, according to some formula that is not revealed to us, and ARD lets us know how many children must be canceled. If you live to be fifteen, you can generally count on living to be seventy-five or eighty, barring accidents.”

  “What do you mean, canceled?” Cole asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Michelle said, looking down into her absinthe as if into a green crystal ball (and giving them another view of her perfect little breasts). Then she looked up with a laugh, tossed her hair back, and ordered another round of the feé vert.

  Cole was relieved when Lee covered his glass with his hand.

  “Our cursor is flashing,” Lee said. “I believe the time has come when we must bid farewell to you all.” He got up from the table, and so did Cole, and everybody kissed them on both cheeks. Kate was last.

  “Where are we going?” Cole asked in a whisper.

  “Onward,” said Lee. “We are being sent on, forward, by these Old Ones.”

  “What about Dear Abbey, and the formula we were sent to get?”

  “Perhaps that’s why,” said Lee. “Perhaps that’s what Los Viejos have for us.”

  The Modernists were all waving goodbye. Or so Cole thought at first. They were actually pointing and reaching for the translators.

  They were tossed – Michelle caught both, one in each hand.

  Cole suddenly realized he had left his Himes on the table, under the trees. But Lee had already hit RETURN, and there they were, the army of mice . . .

  1+

  The booming sound told Cole they were back at the Student Union. He heard the rap music from upstairs (Busta Cap, calling his posse to order) even before the room drew itself in – floor, walls, door, clock . . . 9:17.

  They had only been gone ten minutes? It seemed like days! Cole felt odd, like something was wrong. Then he saw the sleeve of Lee’s safari jacket, and Lee sitting beside him, and he knew, or rather remembered, what it was.

  “Lee, what are we doing back here? I thought we were going forward.”

  Lee looked at Cole. “Home . . .”

  Before he could say more, the door opened and Parker’s big head poked through. He looked displeased, like Elmer Fudd in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “Dr Lee! – Mr Cole? I thought I heard something. What in the world are you doing here this time of night? I mean, are you . . . ?”

  “No problem,” said Lee.

  “I have to start clearing the place out in half an hour!”

  “No problem,” said Lee.

  The door closed with a disapproving click.

  “Why is he always surprised to see us?” Cole asked. “Is this some kind of Groundhog Day thing?”

  “No problem.”

  “No problem? It seems like a problem to me.” Cole yanked his hand free of Lee’s and stood up. “What’s going on here? Who are these Old Ones? Where’s the Dear Abbey formula we were supposed to get?”

  “Hold horses!” Lee’s Texas accent was back. He studied his PalmPC; he started punching in numbers.

  “Lee, talk to me, damn it! What I’m wondering is, maybe we need to reconsider this whole idea. I mean Dear Abbey.”

  “Not for us,” Lee said. “Hold horses!”

  Beep beep. The PalmPC was beeping. The screen was empty except for a blinking cursor, in the exact center.

  “New time slice open now,” Lee said, patting the seat beside him. “Not finish somehow.”

  “You may not be finished,” Cole said, “but I sure as hell am.” He meant to walk away but he didn’t. He just stood there until Lee grabbed his hand and pulled him down onto the glider beside him.

  “Don’t,” Cole said, but Lee did. He hit RETURN, and there they were again:

  The army of mice.

  +100,000

  Falling –

  Spinning –

  Cole was a veteran time traveler, one of the two most experienced (as far as he knew) in all
human history; he knew enough by now to keep his eyes closed. At least he thought they were closed. The colors continued to spin, and when they faded to white, he thought (he hoped) that they were back in Paris. He opened his eyes – or had they been open all along? They were in a bare, wood-floored room lit from outside through French doors. He could hear music in the distance, a strange soft business of strings and drums and bells. The alarm, the panic, all was gone. He was in no hurry to get up from the glider. He seemed to remember that there had been a problem, but what? So what? The air smelled soft and sleepy. He closed his eyes and leaned back and listened to someone muttering in Chinese.

  It was Lee. He was tapping at his PalmPC, his lips in a twist, like a kid trying to get a knot out of a shoelace. “Awaken yourself, Cole,” he said without looking up. “We have completed another slice.”

  “I know,” Cole said. Then he noticed that there was no translator draped across Lee’s shoulder; or his own. “You’re speaking English again!”

  “No, it is you who are understanding Mandarin.”

  It was true. A small, translucent fold appeared in the air next to Lee’s right ear when he spoke. Lee spoke in his own voice (not a simulation, like in Paris) and if Cole watched the fold out of the corner of his eye, he understood Lee’s words, even though Lee was speaking Chinese.

  “Where are we?” Cole asked. “Or I guess the question is, when?”

  “I am trying to puzzle that through. This is an entirely different set of algorithms. In the meanwhile . . .”

  “Meanwhile, we’re alone,” Cole said, “and you’re speaking English, or I’m understanding Mandarin, or you’re understanding English, or . . .”

  “I have always understood English,” Lee said with a smile.

  “Whatever. Anyway. So let’s talk. Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on, for real. Where are we? Where are we going? What about Dear Abbey?”

  Lee nodded. “All that is what I do not know,” Lee said, standing up and replacing his PalmPC in his pocket. “Someone has added to our algorithms, by infrared. A subroutine. But come. First we will see where we are.”

  “You mean when.” Cole followed Lee through the French doors, onto a narrow balcony. The city spread out before them was no Paris. It was a quiet, sprawling, low-rise town where the scratching of palm leaves on window glass was louder than the traffic.

  The second floor (first, in French) balcony on which they were standing overlooked a wide, busy street. Most of the traffic below was on foot. A few machines resembling golf carts wove through idling walkers in loose, bright clothing. The faces, hands and arms that Cole could see ranged from pale to dark brown. The air was tropical – muggy but pleasant. He could smell fish, and smoke, and new wood, and something unrecognizable.

  The future? It looked to Cole rather as if they had slipped into the past – a peaceful, easy past. But he was immune, for the moment, to its charms. “Why are we here?” he asked again. “And more to the point, where is the DNA patch or whatever we were sent to get?”

  “Perhaps we will learn that from the Old Ones,” Lee said. “I am as much in the dark as you.”

  “You are? I thought all this was your idea.”

  “Only the beginnings of it,” said Lee. “Let me tell you a story. It begins in the distant past.”

  He smiled to show that he was joking. Cole smiled back to be polite, even though he wasn’t feeling polite.

  “I was at MIT,” Lee said, “investigating certain mathematical anomalies that I had begun to explore in China: cross-dimensional quantum congruencies, which give mathematics the power to unravel the fabric of space-time, even if ‘only’ temporarily, which is of course the point. In spite of my fugitive status, I was in touch with colleagues in China, who were also what you Europeans so curiously call ‘environmentalists’ . . .”

  You Europeans!? But Cole decided to let it go.

  “. . . clandestine, of course, with links to others around the world. Things in The Realm are both looser and tighter than you Europeans might think. The idea of Dear Abbey appealed to them, to us, as much as to you. We even liked the name – The Monkey Wrench Gang is a favorite in China, though we didn’t perhaps get all the other associations.”

  “And you had no – hesitations?”

  “Of course we did. But the chaos and suffering Dear Abbey would cause didn’t bother us as much as it did you. We had gone through the Cultural Revolution, after all. So we were as disappointed as you when it became clear that the last gene sequence required to engineer the event was, itself, dependent on a cellular inventory that would take at the very least a century to complete and compile. It was frustrating. We knew exactly what was needed, we even knew where it was – a hundred years in our own future. It was as if it were on a shelf, just out of our reach.”

  “And so – this is where you came in.”

  Lee smiled. “It was while I was at MIT working on the quantum anomalies logarithm that I got a message, an e-mail. A most unusual message.”

  “From the future.”

  “More unusual than that. From myself in the future. It was from Paris, although I didn’t find that out until later, when I got there, and the Modernists gave it to me in the garden. I sent it to myself while you were on your tour of les arrondisements. I knew to send it because I knew I had gotten it. What a strange feeling, Cole! Can you imagine the experience of being, briefly, to be sure, the very temporal anomaly your calculations predict: cause and effect coexisting in the same Heisenbergian orbital trajectory!”

  “It was weird, I’m sure,” Cole said. “So if it was Les Modernistes who gave you the Time Travel math, why didn’t they just give you the Dear Abbey patch while they were at it?”

  “They did not have it; they had never heard of it. What they gave me was the algorithms and the coordinates I needed to travel into the future and get it; of course, in quantum-anomaly math the coordinates and the algorithms are the same. That is why when I saw the e-mail from myself I knew immediately what it was, and what it was for.”

  “You got it before you sent it.”

  “Ten thousand years before, Cole. Think of it. I contacted my colleagues, and yours as well, and began to prepare this journey. I had to leave MIT. That was the most difficult part, professionally.”

  “I can imagine,” said Cole. “You left for privacy?”

  “No. It is easier to work at Swick, for certain, since no one knows or cares what you are doing. But actually I moved for location. Time is not site specific, but the loops by which it is accessed are. Anyway, you know the rest, as much as I do. The purpose of our little trip was to enter the loop, get the sequence patch. I assumed we would not be able to actually enter the future, which is why I took the camera. And everything went according to plan, until . . . well, you saw what happened.”

  “I saw,” said Cole. “So who was he, the guy who got shot before he could give us the patch?”

  “I don’t know. One of the Old Ones, perhaps. Someone who wanted us to have the patch. Someone who wanted to make sure Dear Abbey happens.”

  “Who was shot by someone who doesn’t want Dear Abbey to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lee. “All I know is that we don’t have what we came for. And that we are in the future, not just observing it. We are being brought forward, in stages. At every stage my numbers are changed, some times by infrared, some times by other means. These Old Ones, whoever they are, are pulling us deeper and deeper into the future. Perhaps, I hope, to give us the patch.”

  “Maybe they want to warn us,” said Cole. “Maybe they want us to see what Dear Abbey will do before they give it to us. Maybe they . . .”

  Knock! Knock!

  It came from behind them, the rap of knuckles on glass. They turned to see a very tall, very black man in a bright blue robe in the doorway. He rapped on the open door again, politely.

  “Welcome – ” The same small translucent fold in the air appeared beside his ear. “ – Dr. Cole, Dr. Lee. I h
ope your journey was a pleasant one.”

  He spoke a kind of singsong Chinese, or at least so it sounded to Cole, who watched the fold and understood every run-together word.

  “It has its delights,” Lee said, in his own Mandarin. “You have the advantage of us, for you know our names. You are one of the Old Ones we seek?”

  “No, no,” The man smiled apologetically. “I am Amadou Pessoa, your guide, instructed by the Old Ones to meet you, and send you on.”

  “On?” Cole asked. He didn’t like the sound of it. “Can you tell us what year this is?”

  Just hearing it made Cole feel dizzy. He wanted to sit down but he was afraid that might seem rude, so he leaned back against the rail of the balcony and closed his eyes until his head stopped spinning; then he followed Lee and their host down the stairs, into the street. The year was 116,157 (HK), 118,520 (JC). They were a hundred thousand years in their own future.

  Their guide, Amadou, took them around the city, Bahia, somewhere on the eastern coast of South America, which was now a separate continent. They rode around the bumpy streets on a little open car with three fat wheels. The car seemed to drive itself, or maybe Amadou controlled it in some way that Cole couldn’t see. Many of the people on the street wore make-up so bright that they looked like clowns escaped from a circus, though some wore no makeup at all.

  Cole’s fears of the African race disappearing from the human genome were put to rest on the streets of Bahia, where people were all colors from ebony to pale (though mostly dark) and varied in height and hair as well.

  No one seemed to be working, and Lee asked if they were in a holiday center, but Amadou’s “fold” either didn’t translate this or he didn’t want to answer. Lee didn’t press the point. “Maybe we are so far in the future,” Cole whispered to Lee, “that the entire human race has retired.”

  “I think you are joking,” Lee said. He was more interested in the Old Ones. Who were they? What did they want with them?