“Carver, you need to look at the data. This isn’t accidental, and it isn’t local. We have the greatest catastrophe in the history of our species.”
He said more, but it was much the same, except for a request that I meet with him, secretively, in a week’s time.
A week. Time to research, to sift through the mountain of data on that drive. Time to think, and decide.
So … I looked. I slept perhaps three hours a night, barely eating or drinking, drunken with terror.
The data was incontrovertible.
For reasons no one understood, the Traveler effect was growing. Human beings were becoming more attracted to the aliens than we were to each other. Once you opened your eyes, the whole thing was obvious. I guess it was just that they were so … far beyond ugly that the idea they were some kind of competitive threat was absurd. You just couldn’t take the notion seriously. But something had functioned like cosmic beer goggles.
And another terrible thing: my brain said to scream what I’d learned from the rooftops, to find some way to stop this, to crush them all. But another part of me felt (and I know how sick this sounds) protective of the Travelers. More so than I did of actual human children. Just as the data suggested. Show me a picture of one of the gelatinous oozing masses, and I felt like I had a lapful of warm kittens. Look at a picture of a bubbly brown-skinned baby, and all I could see was Louis Armstrong dipped in 30-weight.
I blinked, and shook my head and considered.
I couldn’t talk to Rhonda. Dared not. Our bank account suggested she had paid almost a quarter million dollars to be part of an exclusive “friendship” club, getting serviced once a week. On what world could I trust her?
Certainly not this one.
The phone rang.
“So have you read through everything?” Dr. Watanabe asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
* * *
I had been welcomed into a circle of rebels, all men and women Watanabe trusted. We met secretly in the professor’s home, and discussed our quandary. Did we publicize, and risk losing our window of opportunity? Careful overtures to seats of power had been attempted, and rebuffed. We decided upon action.
There was a central media node in central Dallas where alien music and images were inserted in television, vids, and neural feeds. You’ve probably read the reports, or saw the trial, one of several triggered by similar actions around the globe. Ours was merely the first. I won’t drag you through the overly familiar details, but here are the most critical:
The node was the repository of a vast river of information constantly streamed over multiple channels, probably including those ripples in space-time, the secrets we had coveted enough to ignore the risks of unknown technology. Watanabe reasoned that if we could destroy it, perhaps people would awaken from the trance we had helped induce.
As you know if you watch the news, we were successful getting in, planting our devices. The bomb exploded, killing Professor Watanabe, a woman named Courtney Pickett and two watchmen. But … the brain, the core of the facility itself, survived.
The police swooped in, loyal to their Traveler masters. There was no place to hide. We never had a chance to get away. The police had us before we could reach our nests or hidey-holes. It was almost as if they had known in advance, as if they wanted a terrorist act to use as an example. As if …
Rhonda.
She had hacked my computer. Rhonda, my loving wife. Wearing makeup that made her skin shimmer with translucence, revealing the succulent meat beneath.
My wife. My love. My betrayer.
The trial was short and sensational. My lawyers were the best that Traveler money could buy. I got the death penalty. Rhonda testified against me, her face a fish tank of gliding paramecium. The human judge wore silvery Traveler makeup, so that the inside of her head looked like a jar of winking cat’s eyes.
I was screwed.
When Rhonda left the courthouse on that last day, she never looked back.
That’s really all there is to say. They’re coming now. I thought I’d have more time. Everyone does.
* * *
Two guards and a sad-faced minister in dark pants and shirt escorted Carver Kofax from his cell. He had been afraid for so long that he now felt only emptiness, as if the extreme emotion had hollowed him out.
“Are you ready, my son?” the priest asked. “Our father, who art in heaven, vanguard of our Traveling friends and saviors…”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered.
The death chamber was steel walls and a steel seat with clamps for his legs and arms. “Any last words?” the executioner asked after the shackles were snapped into place. On his neck, a Traveler tattoo crawled and beckoned lasciviously. Kofax swallowed back a sour taste. All the fear that had been hiding somewhere in the back of his head exploded to life, and he bucked against his restraints.
“This isn’t right,” Carver screamed. “You’re making a mistake. We’re all making a mistake—”
The executioner had left the chamber, sealed the door behind him. Vents at the floor level began to hiss, and greenish wisps of gas puffed out, pooled around his feet, and began to rise. He coughed, vomited, made one final convulsive push against the shackles, and then collapsed.
His vision slid to black.
And then … nothing.
* * *
I can’t believe I’m writing this. It shouldn’t be possible, but then, so many things have changed in what used to be “our” world.
Sparkles of light. I blinked. And opened my eyes.
White walls, humming machines of unknown design. But the humans standing over the bed, an East Indian and a coarse, chunky-looking pale blond woman, both wore medicinal white. “Where am I?” My throat felt dry and raw. It hurt even to whisper. Was this hell? Wasn’t I dead?
“Wrong question,” the doctor said. His skin and subcutaneous fat were translucent, his organs sparkling in his meat bag. Some kind of light-bending makeup, no doubt.
“What’s the right question?”
“When are you?”
That made no sense, but I played along. “All right. When am I?”
“It is 2105. You’ve been gone for fifty years.”
My mind went blank. “What the hell…? I … I…”
“I know. You thought you were dead. But you can thank the Travelers for that. They don’t kill, even when you transgress against them. They just … put you aside for a time.”
* * *
After I checked out of the hospital, I discovered that my bank account had been gaining interest for half a century, and now contained more than I could ever spend. There were also fewer people to help me spend it. The decrease in population was noticeable. The streets were almost empty, as if everyone was indoors watching a parade. The few human beings I saw scuttled along the concrete like lonely crabs, ancients in young bodies, morbidly afraid of their good health, of the vibrancy that would turn into sudden death without warning. That was what the Travelers promised, yes? Perfect health until death.
And of course, they didn’t lie.
I saw no children at all.
Quietly, without any fuss, the Travelers were taking over the world. Not a shot fired.
* * *
Rhonda still lived in our penthouse. When she appeared on the vid screen she was … strange. She had aged another fifty years, but other than tight shiny skin and eyes drowned in fear and fatigue, on first look she hadn’t changed much. The second and third looks told a different story. It was difficult to put my finger on precisely what was disturbing. Was it makeup? Surgery? Not sure. But it was almost as if she was some alien creature pretending humanity, as if there was nothing left of Rhonda at all.
“Carver?” she said, and in that moment her shock and surprise gave human animation to the mask of gelid flesh surrounding those mad eyes. “But … you’re dead!”
Damn. No one had told her? I explained what had happened to me. At f
irst she was in shock, but in time, guilt and relief mingled on her face. “You … you’re so ugly.” She cried for a moment, then wiped the tears away. I was hideous to her. Because I looked human. But so did she, at least on the surface. So some part of her had fought to remain human, even as another part had grown increasingly repulsed by that very thing.
Suddenly, the impact of what had happened really hit me. My knees buckled, and the world spun and darkened before I regained my balance. “I … oh, God. What did you do?”
“I … I’m old, Carver, but I still want to be touched. I’m too human for most people now. I should have had more operations, more implants, but I just couldn’t.” Her face twisted with self-loathing and something else, the barest touch of hope. “Has it been a long time for you? We could … I have virtual lenses I could wear. It would make you look … we could…”
“Fifteen-spice tuna roll,” I said.
“What?” Her mouth hung slack, and beneath the mask of youth, I saw an old, old woman.
“Sometimes,” I said, “you just have to know when to quit.”
I hung up.
I had the money and time to travel, and did. It didn’t matter what I said or did, not any longer. I wasn’t censored or inhibited in any way. Things had progressed too far. Whatever the Travelers had done to humanity had taken hold. What few young people stumbling through the cities seemed pale, genderless ghosts floating through a concrete graveyard. Earth’s cities were clean but sparsely occupied, and in the country, one could drive for miles and never glimpse a human face.
I did see human couples from time to time. One or two a month. It was good to know that whatever the Travelers had done was not 100 percent effective. Just … 99.9 percent.
I found myself laughing for no apparent reason. A lot.
I think I was afraid that if I ever stopped, I’d kill myself.
* * *
On leaving the hospital, I’d been given a plastic bag containing my possessions, along with a key to a storage locker where Rhonda had sent the majority of my possessions. One day after returning from one of my lonely trips, I wandered to the fenced facility and spent a few hours digging through the detritus of a remarkable, accursed life. Here was a bit of my childhood … there a photograph from our Barbados honeymoon. There a set of notes from some college assignment I could no longer remember. And bundles of old clothes. I rifled the pockets of a coat, and out fell a business card.
I bent, picked it up, and read it. Twice. And then, almost as if my lips were moving by themselves, I spoke the number and a circuit opened. The conversation was short, but enthusiastic. Within seconds a car hovered down from the sky and its door slid open.
The ride took about twelve minutes, and covered the distance from Los Angeles to a two-story white mansion in Whitehaven on the outskirts of Memphis. The airdrone deposited me on the lawn. I rang the doorbell, finger shaking.
Elvis answered the front door. He was as recognizable as ever, an amoeba in a rhinestone suit.
“Howdy there, Carver. How’s it shakin’?” His translation equipment had not only improved, but had mastered the local drawl.
“I uh … I guess I’m a little surprised…” so he, or It (or they. What the hell did I really know?), had purchased The King’s cottage. Hardly surprising. Travelers could pretty much have anything they wanted.
“That ah like this form? You thought ah was kidding?”
“No,” I said. I felt like my bones were made of sand. “I guess I don’t.”
“We don’t lie.”
“No, you don’t.” There was something so ridiculous, so cosmically absurd about the gelatinous form in the white sequins, gliding on a mucous trail through a pop-culture mausoleum, that the occasion was almost solemn. “You fit here,” I said. “I guess you learned from us, too.”
“It goes both ways,” Elvis said. “A little.”
Videos of Jailhouse Rock and Viva Las Vegas, a garage filled with vintage cars and halls swathed in platinum records. Elvis talked non-stop, as if he had memorized a billion factoids about a singer dead for more than a century, someone whose hip-shaking melodies must have traveled a trillion miles before reaching whatever the Travelers used instead of ears. The tour ended in a den dominated by an empty fireplace pointing out this or that artifact or that, including a certificate signed by Richard Nixon and the head of the DEA, presented to Elvis Aaron Presley on December 21, 1970, authorizing him as a “Federal Agent at Large,” whatever the hell that meant.
I shook myself out of my trance. “How many times have you done this?” I said in the smallest voice I had ever heard emerge from my throat.
“Toured people through Graceland?”
“No.” I gestured vaguely. “This. What you did to us.”
“What you did to yourselves. Oh, no one really knows. You call us Travelers, but we’re really more like traders. Sex isn’t universal. But there’s always something people want. Your media images showed you to be both attracted and repelled by sex, and by strangeness, and that gave us our opportunity.”
I plopped down on the couch, finally feeling the weight of my frozen years. At least I thought it was a couch. It didn’t molest me, anyway. “So it’s … just over for us? For the human race?”
“Not totally,” Elvis said, and somehow a twitch of his protoplasm resembled a sneering lip. “The creches will keep pumping you guys out. Humans are fun. Entertaining. I mean … we don’t hate you or anything. So please, live out the rest of a long, long life. What wonders you will see! You’re walking history, you know. And … we owe it all to you.” The creature turned, the organelles floating within the transparent sack very much like a swarm of anxious eyes. They even narrowed in something I interpreted as regret, or concern. “You’re angry. I can tell. I understand,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
Elvis paused. “Say: I know,” he brightened. “Want to fuck?”
I stared in disbelief, sputtering and trying to … trying to …
“Oh,” I finally sighed. “What the hell.”
Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Alastair Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years, but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Century Rain, and Pushing Ice, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and a chapbook novella, The Six Directions of Space, as well as three collections, Galactic North, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and Deep Navigation. His other novels include The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, Terminal World, and Sleepover, and a Doctor Who novel, Harvest of Time. Upcoming is a new book, Slow Bullets.
Here he follows a scientist whose struggle to stay involved with a project that will take thousands of years to complete eventually transforms her into something more than human.
What first drew you to the problem?
She smiles, looking down at her lap.
She is ready for this. On the day of her thesis defence she has risen early after a good night’s sleep, her mind as clean and clear as the blue skies over Ueno Park. She has taken the electric train to Keisei-Ueno station and then walked the rest of the way to the university campus. The weather is pleasantly warm for April, and she has worn a skirt for this first time all year. The time is hanami—the shifting, transient festival of the cherry blossom blooms. Strolling under the trees, along the shadow-dappled paths, families and tourists already gathering, she has tried to think of every possible thing she be might asked.
“I like things that don’t quite fit,” she begins. “Problems that hav
e been sitting around nearly but not quite solved for a long time. Not the big, obvious ones. Keep away from those. But the ones everyone else forgets about because they’re not quite glamorous enough. Like the solar p-mode oscillations. I read about them in my undergraduate studies in Mumbai.”
She is sitting with her hands clenched together over her skirt, knees tight together, wondering why she felt obliged to dress up for this occasion when her examiners have come to work wearing exactly the same casual outfits as usual. Two she knows well: her supervisor, and another departmental bigwig. The third, the external examiner, arrived in Tokyo from Nagoya University, but even this one is familiar enough from the corridors. They all know each other better than they know her. Her supervisor and the external advisor must have booked a game of tennis for later. They both have sports bags with racket handles sticking out the sides.
That’s what they’re mainly thinking about, she decides. Not her defence, not her thesis, not three years of work, but who will do best at tennis. Old grudges, old rivalries, boiling to the surface like the endless upwelling of solar convection cells.
“Yes,” she says, feeling the need to repeat herself. “Things that don’t fit. That’s where I come in.”
When you touched the Chatterjee Anomaly, the object that bore your name, what did you feel, Doctor?
Fear. Exhilaration. Wonder and terror at how far we’d come. How far I’d come. What it had taken to bring me to this point. We’d made one kind of bridge, between the surface of the Sun and the Anomaly, and that was difficult enough. I’d seen every step of it—borne witness to the entire thing, from the moment Kuroshio dropped her sliver of hafnium alloy on my desk. Before that, even, when I glimpsed the thing in the residuals. But what I hadn’t realised—not properly—was that I’d become another kind of bridge, just as strange as the one we drilled down into the photosphere. I’d borne witness to myself, so I ought not to have been so surprised. But I was, and just then it hit me like a tidal wave. From the moment they offered me the prolongation I’d allowed myself to become something I couldn’t explain, something that had its inception far in the past, in a place called Mumbai, and which reached all the way to the present, anchored to this instant, this point in space and time, inside this blazing white furnace. In that moment I don’t think there was anything capable of surprising me more than what I’d turned into. But then I touched the object, and it whispered to me, and I knew I’d been wrong. I still had a capacity for astonishment.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 50