The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” somebody asked.

  “That’s an extremely good question. I’m afraid that I can’t adequately answer it without using a lot of very complicated equations. Let’s just say that the past never really goes away, while the future exists only relative to the immediate moment.”

  “If there is no time, then what is there?”

  “Happenstance,” Richard said. “A tremendous amount of happenstance.”

  It was all ludicrously oversimplified to the point of being meaningless, but the reporters ate it up. Richard’s explanations gave them the illusion that they sort-of kind-of understood what was being talked about, when the truth was that they didn’t even have the mathematics to be misinformed. When, eventually, the reporters ran out of questions, packed their equipment, and left, Mariella angrily said, “What the hell was all that about?”

  “Public relations. We’ve just knocked the props out from under one of the few things that everybody thinks they understand. That’s going to get people excited. Some of them are going to hate us for what we’ve done to their world.”

  “The world’s the same as it ever was. The only thing that’ll be different is our understanding of it.”

  “Tell that to Darwin.”

  That was the bad side of fame. The good side was money. Suddenly, money was everywhere. There was enough money to do anything except the one thing Mariella wanted most, which was to be left alone with Richard, her thoughts, a blackboard, and a piece of chalk. Richard acquired a great deal of what was surely extremely expensive equipment, and hit the lecture circuit—“Somebody has to,” he said cheerily, “and, God knows, you won’t”—to explain their findings. So she was alone again, as often as not.

  She used these empty spaces in her life to think about existence without time. She tried not to imagine he was with other women.

  Whenever Richard returned from the road, they had furious reunions and she would share her tentative, half-formed thoughts with him. One evening he asked “What is the shape of happenstance?” and Mariella had no answer for him. In short order he had canceled all his speaking engagements and there was an enormous 3-D visualization tank in his lab, along with the dedicated processing power of several Crayflexes at his disposal. Lab assistants whose names she could never get straight scurried about doing things, while Richard directed and orchestrated and obsessed. Suddenly, he had very little time for her. Until one day he brought her in to show her a single black speck in the murky blue-gray tank.

  “We have pinned down one instantiation of happenstance!” he said proudly.

  A month later, there were three specks. A week after that there were a thousand. Increasingly rapidly, the very first map of reality took shape: It looked like a tornado at first, with a thick and twisting trunk. Then it sprouted limbs, some of them a good third as thick as what Richard dubbed the Main Sequence. These looped upward or downward, it seemed to make no difference, giving birth to smaller limbs, or perhaps “tentacles” was a better word for them, which wound about each other, sometimes dwindling to nothing, other times rejoining the main trunk.

  Richard called it the Monster. But in Mariella’s eyes it was not monstrous at all. It had the near-organic look of certain fractal mathematical formulae. It flowed and twisted elegantly, like branches frozen in the act of dancing in the breeze. It was what it was—and that was beautiful.

  It looked like a tree. A tree whose roots and crown were lost in the distance. A tree vast enough to contain all the universe.

  Pictures of it leaked out, of course. The lab techs had taken snapshots and shared them with friends who posted them online. This brought back the press, and this time they were not so easy to deal with, for they quickly learned that Richard and Mariella were an item. The disparity of age and appearance, which would have been nothing were she male and he female, was apparently custom-made for the tabloids—louche enough to be scandalous, romantic enough to be touching, easy to snark about. One of the papers stitched together two pictures with Photoshop and ran it under the headline BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. There was no possible confusion who was supposed to be what. Another ran what even Mariella thought was an unfair rendering of her face alongside the map of reality and asked WHICH IS THE MONSTER?

  It astonished her how much this hurt.

  This time Richard was not so accommodating. “You bastards crossed a line,” he told one reporter. “So, no, I’m not going to explain anything to you or any of your idiot kind. If you want to understand our work, you’ll just have to go back to school for another eight years. Assuming you have the brains for it.” Furiously, he retreated to his lab, the way another man might have hit the bars, and stared at the Monster for several hours.

  Then he sought out Mariella and asked, “If time is unidirectional in Minkowski space, and there is no time—then what remains?” Initiating another long, sexless, and ecstatic night. After which he left the mapping project for his grad students to run without him. He obtained two new labs—exactly how was never clear to Mariella, who was so innocent of practical matters that she didn’t even have a driver’s license—and began to build another experiment. Half his new equipment went into one lab, which he called the Slingshot, and the rest into the second, on the far side of the campus, which he called the Target.

  “If this works,” he said, “it will change everything. People will be able to travel from and to anywhere in the universe.”

  “So long as there’s the proper machinery to receive them when they get there.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And provided it doesn’t simply blow itself to hell. I have my suspicions about the energy gradient between your two sites.”

  There was that grin again—the grin of a man who knew that nothing could possibly go wrong, and that everything must inevitably work out right. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Richard said. “You’re still the senior partner. I won’t do anything until you assure me that it’s perfectly safe.”

  The next day there was an explosion that shook the entire campus. Mariella ran outside and saw people pouring from all the buildings. A black balloon of smoke tumbled upward over the rooftops.

  It came from the Target.

  Richard had told her he’d be spending the entire day there.

  Somehow, Mariella was running. Somehow, she was there. The entire building had been reduced to smoldering rubble. Parts of what remained were on fire. It smelled like burning garbage.

  A hand touched her arm. It was Dr. Inglehoff. Laura. “Maybe Richard wasn’t in the building,” she said. “I’m sure he’s all right.” Her expression was grotesque with compassion.

  Mariella stared at the woman in perplexity. “Where else would he be? At this time of day? Why would he be anywhere else?”

  Then people whom she had never before appreciated were, if not precisely her friends, at the very least close colleagues, were leading her away. She was in a room. There was a nurse giving her a shot. Somebody said, “Sleep is the best doctor.”

  Mariella slept.

  When she awoke and Richard was not there, she knew her romance was over. Somebody told her that the explosion was so thorough that nothing readily identifiable as human remains had yet been found. That same person said there was always hope. But that was nonsense. If Richard were alive, he’d have been by her side. He was not, and therefore he was dead.

  Q., as he would have said, E.D.

  The ensuing week was the worst period of her life. Mariella effectively stopped sleeping. Sometimes she zoned out and came to herself eight or ten or fifteen hours later, in the middle of frying an egg or sorting through her notes. But you could hardly call that sleep. Somehow she kept herself fed. Apparently her body wanted to go on living, even if she didn’t.

  She kept thinking of Richard, lost to her, swept away further and further into the past.

  But of course there was no past. So he wasn’t even there.

  One night, driven by obscure impulses, sh
e found herself fully dressed and hurrying across the campus at three a.m. Clearly, she was going to Richard’s lab—the surviving of the two new ones, the Slingshot. The building loomed up before her, dark and empty.

  When she threw the light switch, mountains of electronic devices snapped into existence. Richard’s first experiment could have been run on a kitchen table. This one looked like the stage set for a Wagnerian opera. It was amazing how money could complicate even the simplest demonstration proof.

  Mariella began flicking switches, bringing the beast to life. Things hummed and made grinding noises. Test patterns leaped to life on flat screens and then wavered in transient distortions. Something snapped and sparked, leaving the tang of ozone in the air.

  This was not her bailiwick. But because it was Richard’s and because he had wanted her to understand it, she knew what to do.

  There was, after all, no such thing as time. Only the accumulation of consequences.

  But first there was a chore to do. All of Richard’s notes were on a battered old laptop lying atop a stack of reference books on his desk. She bundled them together and then attached the bundle to an email reading simply, “So you will understand what happened.” This she sent to his entire mailing list. Surely someone on it would have the wit to appreciate what he had done. Her own notes were all safe in her office. She had no doubt there would be people looking for them in the wake of what she had to do.

  The experiment was ready to run. All she had to do was connect a few cables and then walk through what looked uncannily like a wrought-iron pergola, such as one might expect to find in a Victorian garden. It was entirely possible that’s what it was; Richard was never one to hold out for proper equipment when some perfectly adequate piece of bricolage was close at hand.

  Mariella connected the cables. Then she checked all the connections three times, not because it was necessary but because that was how Richard would have done it.

  She did not bother to check the setting, however. There was only one possible instantiation of happenstance the apparatus could be set for. And she already knew it would work.

  She walked through the pergola.

  In that timeless instant of transition, Mariella realized that in his own way Richard possessed a genius approaching her own. (Had she really underestimated him all this while? Yes, she had.) Crossing to the far side of the campus in a single step, she felt a wave of she-knew-not-what-energies pass through her body and brain—she actually felt it in her brain!—and knew that she was experiencing a sensation no human being had ever felt before.

  The air wavered before her and Mariella was through. Richard stood, his back to her, alive and fussing with a potentiometer. For the second time in her life, she was absolutely, completely happy.

  “Richard.” The word escaped her unbidden.

  He turned and saw her and in the instant before the inequality of forces across the gradient of happenstance grounded itself, simultaneously destroying both laboratories a sixteenth of a mile and eight days apart and smashing the two lovers to nothing, a smile, natural and unforced, blossomed on Richard’s face.

  Copyright (C) 2011 by Michael Swanwick

  The Sigma Structure Symphony

  Gregory Benford

  Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

  —Galileo (from The Assayer, 1623)

  1

  Andante

  Ruth felt that math was like sex—get all you can, but best not done in public. Lately, she’d been getting plenty of mathematics, and not much else.

  She had spent the entire morning sequestered alone with the Andromeda Structure, a stacked SETI database of renowned difficulty. She had made some inroads by sifting its logic lattice, with algebraic filters based on set theory. The Andromeda messages had been collected by the SETI Network over decades, growing to immense data-size—and no one had ever successfully broken into the stack.

  The Structure was a daunting, many-layered language conveyed through sensation in her neural pod. It did not present as a personality at all, and no previous Librarians had managed to get an intelligible response from it. Advanced encoded intelligences found humans more than a bit boring, and one seldom had an idea why. Today was no different.

  It was already past lunch when she pried herself from the pod. She did some stretches, hand-walks, and lifts against Luna’s weak grav and let the immersion fog burn away. Time for some real world, gal….

  She passed through the atrium of the SETI Library, head still buzzing with computations and her shoes ringing echoes from the high, fluted columns. Earthlight framed the great plaza in an eggshell blue glow, augmented by slanting rays from the sun that hugged the rocky horizon. She gazed out over the Locutus Plain, dotted with the cryo towers that reminded her of cenotaphs. So they were—sentinels guarding in cold storage the vast records of received SETI signals, many from civilizations long dead. Collected through centuries, and still mostly unread and unreadable. AIs browsed those dry corridors and reported back their occasional finds. Some even got entangled in the complex messages and had to be shut down, hopelessly mired.

  She had just noticed the buzzing crowd to her left, pressed against the transparent dome that sheltered the Library, when her friend Catkejen tapped her on the shoulder. “Come on! I heard somebody’s up on the rec dome!”

  Catkejen took off loping in the low grav and Ruth followed. When they reached the edge of the agitated crowd she saw the recreational dome about two klicks away—and a figure atop it.

  “Who is it?” Catkejen asked, and the crowd gave back, “Ajima Sato.”

  “Ajima?” Catkejen looked at Ruth. “He’s five years behind us, pretty bright. Keeps to himself.”

  “Pretty common pattern for candidate Hounds,” Ruth said. The correct staffing title was Miners, but Hounds had tradition on its side. She looked around; if a Prefect heard she would be fined for improper terminology.

  “How’d he get there?” someone called.

  “Bulletin said he flew inside, up to the dome top and used the vertical lock.”

  “Looks like he’s in a skin suit,” Catkejen said, having closeupped her glasses. Sure enough, the figure was moving and his helmet caught the sunlight, winking at them. “He’s…dancing.”

  Ruth had no zoom glasses but she could see the figure cavorting around the top of the dome. The Dome was several kilometers high and Ajima was barely within view of the elevated Plaza, framed against a rugged gray crater wall beyond. The crowd murmured with speculation and a Prefect appeared, tall and silent but scowling. Librarians edged away from him. “Order, order,” the Prefect called. “Authorities will deal with this.”

  Ruth made a stern cartoon face at Catkejen and rolled her eyes. Catkejen managed not to laugh.

  Ajima chose this moment to leap. Even from this far away Ruth could see him spring up into the vacuum, make a full backflip, and come down—to land badly. He tried to recover, sprang sideways, lost his footing, fell, rolled, tried to grasp for a passing stanchion. Kept rolling. The dome steepened and he sped up, not rolling now but tumbling.

  The crowd gasped. Ajima accelerated down the slope. About halfway down the dome the figure left the dome’s skin and fell outward, skimming along in the slow Lunar gravity. He hit the tiling at the base. The crowd groaned. Ajima did not move.

  Ruth felt the world shift away. She could not seem to breathe. Murmurs and sobs worked through the crowd but she was frozen, letting the talk pass by her. Then as if from far away she felt her heart tripping hard and fast. The world came rushing back. She exhaled.

  Silence. The Prefect said, “Determine what agenda
that Miner was working upon.” All eyes turned to him but no one said anything. Ruth felt a trickle of unease as the Prefect’s gaze passed by her, returned, focused. She looked away.

  Catkejen said, “What? The Prefect called you?”

  Ruth shrugged. “Can’t imagine why.” Then why is my gut going tight?

  “I got the prelim blood report on Ajima. Stole it off a joint lift, actually. No drugs, nothing interesting at all. He was only twenty-seven.”

  Ruth tried to recall him. “Oh, the cute one.”

  Catkejen nodded. “I danced with him at a reception for new students. He hit on me.”

  “And?”

  “You didn’t notice?”

  “Notice what?”

  “He came back here that night.”

  Ruth blinked. “Maybe I’m too focused. You got him into your room without me…”

  “Even looking up from your math cowl.” Catkejen grinned mischievously, eyes twinkling. “He was quite nice and, um, quite good, if y’know what I mean. You really should…get out more.”

  “I’ll do that right after I see the Prefect.”

  A skeptical laugh. “Of course you will.”

  She took the long route to her appointment. The atmosphere calmed her.

  Few other traditional sites in the solar system could approach the grandeur of the Library. Since the first detection of signals from other galactic civilizations centuries before, no greater task had confronted humanity than the deciphering of such vast lore.

  The Library itself had come to resemble its holdings: huge, aged, mysterious in its shadowy depths, with cobwebs both real and mental. In the formal grand pantheon devoted to full-color, moving statues of legendary SETI Interlocutors, and giving onto the Seminar Plaza, stood the revered block of black basalt: the Rosetta Stone, symbol of all they worked toward. Its chiseled face was millennia old, and, she thought as she passed its bulk, endearingly easy to understand. It was a simple linear, one-to-one mapping of three human languages, found by accident. Having the same text in Greek II, which the discoverers could read, meant that they could deduce the unknown languages in hieroglyphic pictures and cursive Demotic forms. This battered black slab, found by troops clearing ground to build a fort, had linked civilizations separated by millennia. So too did the SETI Library, on a galactic scale. Libraries were monuments not so much to the Past, but to Permanence itself.