Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

by James Alan Gardner

  Well, it isn't entirely unfounded, ma'am. On one previous occasion when Laughing Dragon's business was running into setbacks, it's believed the Narukis set off sunward and—

  Running into setbacks, ma'am. It isn't public knowledge, but the prince, you know, Prince, uhh, who's suing Laughing Dragon over the construction deaths—he seems to have come into some information. We aren't exactly sure what he knows, but the word is it's extremely powerful leverage that should…yes, we can try to find out. I'll write that down, shall I? Action Item One: find out what the prince knows.

  Other setbacks, yes, ma'am, I'm getting to them. Uhh, it seems the, uhh, construction teams have all evacuated.

  Gone home, ma'am. All of them.

  Our guess is the prince told them something. Although maybe they just left on their own because of all the accidents. The accidents. Four since the original one that killed the prince's workers. Apparently there have been quakes on Heaven's surface which ruptured a number of domes…oh no, there's no suggestion of sabotage. It says here Laughing Dragon security personnel investigated each incident with all the…of course, there was insurance. We insist on insurance. We're a bank.

  Our own investigators, ma'am? Well, perhaps you don't, uhh, understand the level of security Mrs., uhh, Mr. Naruki has imposed on Heaven. No photographs, no close approach from space, no unauthorized visits from…good Lord, no, she wasn't trying to hide anything from us. How could she hide something from us? We audit her books every six months.

  The security was because Mrs. Naruki was worried about terrorists. Terrorists, ma'am. Well, no, an amusement park one hundred and six million kilometers from Earth is not an obvious political target, but caution is always—

  Oh, now, Miss Verhooven, uhh, Ms…. we've made a substantial number of investigations, yes, a substantial number, let me…oh…no…this is the, uhh…we call it the, uhh, nut file. From earlier inquiries. You recall Laughing Dragon categorically refused to discuss how the body of Heaven was constructed? Well, we did some digging to find out…asked around on all the planets, did anyone see something huge and strange in space…well, we got some wild stories, ma'am, you'd be amused. No, there's nothing of interest here, I personally checked each and every…yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. I'll leave the file with you.

  About the Narukis, ma'am…if they're, uhh, gone, there could be serious…well, I was talking to Legal, and they say if Laughing Dragon were to default on the loan, Heaven would, uhh…become ours.

  The bank's.

  Presumably we'd sell it to someone, ma'am.

  There must be…uhh…I mean, it's a nice big, uhh…I should think there'd be a buyer somewhere, ma'am. All those energy cells, the scrap value alone…no, I don't think we've calculated the cost of reclamation. No, ma'am, I wouldn't be qualified to venture an opinion in that area. Not at present. I'll make that another Action Item, shall I?

  Maybe we'll just work up a full report on this, yes? I mean, Heaven's a great big…it's very big. There's always someone who'll buy something that's big. In my experience. Any time the bank has repossessed something before, we've never had any trouble selling it off…not when it was something, uhh, big.

  No, ma'am. We didn't think ahead. We're sorry.

  VARIATION M: TOTEM

  (TRANQUILLO CON SPIRITO)

  (SERENELY, WITH SPIRIT)

  CONTACT: JANUARY 2079

  The smoke rises to heaven.

  The sound of the rattle rises to heaven.

  Let my song rise to heaven,

  For I have dreamed a true dream.

  Come here, Celeste.

  You're wondering what your animal will be, right?

  When I was a boy your age, I wanted the shaman to tell me I'd been chosen by the eagles. I dreamt of flying with them…or a bear, that seemed like a good animal too. I'd seen a bear once in a zoo—it seemed wise and kindly. Now that I know more about bears, I realize I overlooked important aspects of the bear personality. Its claws, for example.

  But no, your animal will not be the bear. Or the eagle. Or the wolf or the whale or any of those totems young people usually hope for.

  I know. You're disappointed. I was disappointed when the shaman told me my bed would lie in the rabbit lodge. I wanted to be…oh, something more heroic. I thought rabbits were timid and foolish. But really, when a rabbit runs from a fox, it isn't being foolish, is it? It's just being sensible. And a rabbit has the heart of a wolverine at times—when being brave is the least foolish alternative. A rabbit is always watching, always listening, always sniffing the air. That's a good way for a shaman to live.

  But no, you won't be a rabbit either.

  The spirits have built a new lodge. They've sensed a new creature. Not human, not an animal they've known in the past. It comes from far away. This animal is your totem.

  I don't know its name. You're the first of its clan. It has no name in any human tongue. You can ask for its secret name when you meet it.

  To meet it, you'll have to journey off-planet. At present, the creature is several million kilometers inside the orbit of Mercury, and—

  No, I'm not crazy. Or lying. The animals spoke. I dreamed a true dream.

  Are you saying the truth is only true when you can understand it?

  You're wrong.

  When I went to university many decades ago, I enrolled in mathematics because I wanted to tell truth from falsehood. I believed mathematics was the one pure source of truth because it was the only discipline entirely divorced from subjectivity. But that was before I began studying. At school, I learned all mathematics starts with "Let's pretend this is true and see where it leads." That is mathematics' great joy and strength: it dares to stand on nothingness. It dares to see it's standing on nothingness, yet it's still brave. Can you tell me its magic isn't strong?

  You want to argue with me, I see that. Don't you want to be a shaman, Celeste? Don't you want to have magic in your heart? Well, I'll tell you a secret about magic: it refuses to be what you want it to be. Demand something of magic and it will choose to be something else.

  One quiet wintry Sunday while I was at the university, I woke at dawn and went for a walk. I suppose you'd like me to give some mystic explanation for walking at that hour, but the truth is, my roommate was snoring so loudly I couldn't sleep, so I got angry and left. I walked nowhere in particular, and because I was angry, I paid little attention to the world around me: the cardinals whistling in the trees, the squirrels running across the snow. I was in no magical mood, I assure you.

  But. As I passed one of the university parking lots, I saw a spirit.

  It was the Thunderbird, I think: a man's body with the head of a bird of prey. It was at the far end of the lot, walking away from me toward the science complex; I could only see its back, a long distance off.

  I stood frozen for two full minutes until the spirit disappeared behind the Chemistry building.

  Now, girl, was that magic?

  The spirit was a long way off and in the shadow of some buildings. It could have been nothing more than someone wearing an odd hat. I tried to convince myself I was imagining things, because the incident didn't fit with how I thought the world should work. Why would a great spirit be walking across a parking lot? A parking lot! Not a field, not a forest, a parking lot. And if a spirit chose to show itself to me, why didn't it talk or do something miraculous? Why would it just walk away and disappear?

  Was that magic? Or was it only my imagination?

  Since then I've met the Thunderbird several times in my dreams of the Other World, but it's always refused to say whether it really showed itself to me that day.

  That's the way of true magic, Celeste. It's slippery. It's always open to question. My dreams of the Other World, well, maybe they're just dreams, right? There's always a logical explanation somewhere if you want it.

  And there's always magic if you want it. Everywhere. In the forest, in the city, in a lodge, in a factory.

  In space, several million kilometers inside the
orbit of Mercury.

  That's the magic you've been offered, Celeste. You don't get a choice what your magic will be; your choice is whether you will let it be magic.

  Will you?

  Yes, we can get you there. A woman named Verhooven is bringing people to see the new creature. She's become curious about it; she's gathering those with knowledge of its travels. It won't be hard for you to join this group. You belong to the creature's clan—you have to speak for it. The spirits will make sure you get where you belong.

  Are you willing to accept this magic, young shaman? Are you willing to say, "Let's pretend this is true and see where it leads"?

  Then let the drums sound.

  The music of the drums rises to Heaven.

  FUGUE: ORGANISM

  (ALLEGRO CON TUTTI)

  (AT GOOD SPEED, WITH THE ENTIRE ORCHESTRA)

  CONTACT: MARCH

  According to the laws of the League of Peoples, the boundary of a single-sun solar system is that set of points where the gravitational attraction of the primary exactly equals the gravitational attraction of the rest of the universe. Humans might claim determining this line is impossible, maybe even in violation of quantum physics; but the laws of the League have taken precedence over the laws of physics so long, physics no longer contests the issue.

  A few meters outside the boundary of Sol's system, the Outpost prepared for action. Sensors had recorded a steady increase in the Organism's mass over the past months as it drank in Sol's energy; within minutes, the Organism would have enough energy to open a wormhole out of the system. Wormholes were a haphazard way to travel—the hole's outlet might open as much as a light-year off target—but species without true FTL flight found wormholes a convenient shortcut whenever they wanted to leapfrog a parsec or two.

  Of course, wormholes had an unfortunate tendency to suck in every particle of matter for kilometers around….

  The Outpost of the League of Peoples watched and waited. The odds were good that humans would become an interstellar race much sooner than they expected.

  [Leviathan] On Heaven, the environment domes and dormitory pods were slowly being shaken apart by twitches in the Organism's skin; but a new dormitory had been built in space, floating some five kilometers above the surface. In this dormitory's cafeteria, Colleen O'Neil stood before a giant viewscreen, watching a crack grow across the surface of one of Heaven's domes as the creature shrugged. Colleen had no idea which heavenly environment was dying…Valhalla perhaps, crumbling into Götterdämmerung. Good riddance.

  She hated the sight of her grandfather's magnificent Leviathan reduced to this decrepit clown. But at the farthest ranges of vision, she could see the creature's wings spread wide to the sun: a clear, clean black, darker than the night sky behind them. Valhalla and Nirvana and the Sunboat Fun ride were just barnacles on Leviathan's hide; they'd be scraped off soon enough.

  [Nessie] Stitch Ashworth entered the cafeteria and nearly left again immediately. The only other person he saw there was a fellow Martian, but dressed in laborer's khaki, her red hair braided with the gritty twine that miners called sand-string. Stitch's family were Olympians, residents of the heights of Olympus Mons, where the corporate executives lived. As a boy he'd been beaten up by miners' children whenever he ventured out of the Olympian safe areas; he'd become a pilot to get away from the mines, the miners, and everyone associated with the desolation of Mars.

  The woman must have heard him come in, for she turned and nodded without smiling. "Hello."

  "H'lo," he answered carefully. "Anything doing out?"

  "Heaven is warring with itself," she said. "The idols are crashing down."

  "Oh." He looked at the wreckage shuddering across the surface. A concrete tower toppled soundlessly across a cluster of roller-coaster tracks. The windows in the distant tower's observation deck shattered; the air inside burst outward, its humidity turning to a spray of white. Stitch couldn't remember if the white was steam because of the low pressure or frost because of the cold. "Wild, isn't it?" he said.

  "Yes," said the woman, sounding very satisfied.

  "I was thinking of driving down," Stitch said suddenly, surprising himself he'd revealed this to a stranger. "I'm licensed for minishuttles, and there are dozens in the docking bay. I'd like to see…" But there was something too intense in the woman's expression to let him tell the truth: that he was hoping to find some huge chalk letters his grandfather had scribbled decades earlier. "I'd like to see it close up," he said.

  The woman looked down at the surface again. She seemed to be smiling at the continuing destruction. "I'd like to see it close up too."

  [Angel] Dr. Simon Esteban met two of his fellow passengers in the corridor: Martians, both of them, a laborer built like a she-bear and a shy dandy dressed like he was heading for Club Olympia. No, Esteban corrected himself, it was wrong to pigeonhole people so quickly. As soon as a psychiatrist labeled a patient, he started treating the label instead of the person.

  Esteban had repeated that axiom to himself so often it was like a mantra. Jogging around the track at the gym, he sometimes caught himself muttering, "Treat the person, not the label," over and over and over and over.

  "We're going for a closer look at the surface," the she-bear said. "Interested?"

  "Certainly," Esteban said, smiling his professional smile. In fact, he'd heard that vicious quakes rocked the surface from time to time, scattering rubble into the air. Getting too close was dangerous…but his first patient Rachel had hesitated to approach her angel, and for that cowardice, she'd gone mad.

  No, he corrected himself, she'd succumbed to delusional paranoia brought about by unresolved guilt.

  No, he corrected himself again. She'd gone mad.

  [Bogey] In the docking bay, Jenny Harrington slid into the shadows of an inactive minishuttle storage tube when she heard approaching footsteps. Not that Jenny was afraid to be caught here—Ms. Verhooven said guests could go where they liked. But Jenny didn't want to talk to anyone now, didn't want the pointless rituals of making conversation with strangers. In her hand was a bouquet of daisies, hard-grown in Mars's sterile soil…well, to be honest, grown in spite of Mars's soil, because it had been necessary to add so much: fertilizer, water, several strains of bacteria.

  Jenny didn't want any of Verhooven's other guests to see the flowers in her hand. They'd all heard her story. They'd think she was going to drop the flowers on the spot where her father had died because she loved him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her father had been a militaristic blockhead who died trying to kill some harmless hulk…and it was all pointless, wasn't it, because the hulk was still here and all that was left of her father was a dent in the hulk's side. Love was for people who deserved it, and her father had never ever deserved it.

  The flowers were an exorcism, nothing more. A way to close off the past, once and for all.

  Three people passed her hiding place and entered another minishuttle tube. Soon the blast door shut and the mini blasted off.

  Jenny clutched her flowers fiercely and headed for the next active shuttle.

  [Daemon] Gregor Petrozowski did nothing as the first shuttle emerged from the dormitory. His yacht hovered above the dormitory, several kilometers sunward; he could see everything, with little chance of being detected himself, just a fleck in the fireball's face. When the second shuttle took off, the old man gave his computer a single soft command. "Down."

  The sound of the sun was loud static over his radio speakers. In his years of isolation, he'd developed a distaste for both music and the human voice. Staying in contact with humanity had been impure, in a way he couldn't explain. If he was to become worthy to rediscover his daemon, he had to cut himself off from the mundane world. Now the only voice he could stand was the sun's.

  Obviously, other people had discovered the daemon while he was searching alone in space. They'd tried to build something on it—temples, maybe; he couldn't tell now that everything was in ruins. If he'd been listening
to human broadcasts, he would have come here much earlier.

  But he was here now. He had found the daemon, unaided, in the vast depths of space. And he could feel in his bones that he'd arrived just in time.

  "Down," he whispered. "Down."

  [Boojum] "That's Petrozowski's yacht," Emil Mayous told his son Yorgi. "Petrozowski himself."

  The boy hauled himself off his acceleration couch with a great ripping of Velcro and floated over to the viewscreen. "Yacht looks like shit," he said after a moment's inspection.

  The boy Yorgi thought he was an expert on yachts now that he owned one himself. Emil didn't want to know where the boy got enough money to buy the ship. Emil hadn't wanted to come to Heaven either, but Yorgi thought the Verhooven woman might pay big money to hear about his father's boojum hunt.

  "Petrozowski's probably been in space ever since he abandoned the company," Yorgi said. "I bet he hasn't—Jesus Christ!"

  A jet-black wing swept past the viewscreen like a flapping chunk of night. Proximity alarms blared throughout the ship.

  "You stupid flea!" Emil shouted at his son, for no reason except his fear.

  [Titan] The last maxishuttle to Heaven was en route to the main dormitory when the Organism lifted its wings to full height. Suddenly, the shuttle found itself in a trough six kilometers deep, the walls and floor so black they were nearly invisible. Overhead, the wide face of the sun burned down into the chasm; but it was far, far away, like a glimpse of sky to a child trapped in a well.

  "Ooooo," said Beatrice Mallio, age four.

  "Wow," said Benedict Mallio, age five.

  "Something nice on the viewscreen?" their mother asked. Like the other adults on board, Juliet Mallio was tired of looking outside after days of travel; but she dutifully prepared herself to admire whatever piece of space debris her children were watching now.

  Her eyes widened as she saw the deep black of the Organism's skin towering over both sides of the ship, the wings forming massive walls of starless night. At first she thought the shuttle had entered some sort of landing bay; but as she watched, dim flecks of blue-tinged light flickered into life against the blackness.