The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  One is pale and smooth and well-muscled. One is dark and smooth and well-muscled. They’re bright kids, but a bit too house broken. Everyone is. They are of opposite sex, yet to them this matters less, right now, than the fact that they’ve found a place where no one else has been for centuries.

  ‘What is it?’ Onwa asks. ‘Numbers or letters?’

  ‘It’s the old alphanumeric script. See—zero to nine.’ The key-plate is rather grubby; Ala buffs it clean.

  ‘I shouldn’t think anyone’s been down here since they stopped using the old language.’

  ‘I know what it is, Onwa. It’s a lock.’

  ‘A what?’

  Ala looks smug. ‘A lockenkey. One lot would use them to seal off places from the other lot.’

  ‘What good would do that? The second lot would just ask the Truth Machine to open the door.’

  ‘Stupid. That was before they even had computers!’

  ‘Well, it must have been electronic. They had computers then.’

  ‘Anyway, we need the code to get in.’ Ala strikes the keys embedded on the back of one brown hand, an authorizing code. ‘Machine, would you please open this door for us?’

  There’s no reply. This is ominous. ‘Oh no,’ Ala says. ‘It’s mad at us. I knew we shouldn’t have come this deep.’

  ‘Maybe your key-in is defective.’

  ‘One chance in a billion.’ They stare at one another. ‘Well, it’s your bright idea. Try yours.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fingers rattle. Silence. ‘Machine, can you hear me?’ Continuing silence. Onwa says in a small voice, ‘They can’t both be broken.’

  The implication is obvious. The tunnel is shielding them from the Truth Machine. If something happens to one or both of the kids, that will be it. Finish.

  ‘The ancient cryonics vault.’

  ‘Must be. Then how did we get through their shielding?’

  ‘Seals are breaking down, I suppose. I’m going.’

  ‘Me too.’ Onwa turns, starts to walk back toward the distant open air and light. ‘Listen, we’ve got to tell the Truth Machine.’

  Ala says nothing for a time. Then: ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s not.’

  ‘Are you nuts? It’s our duty.’

  ‘It could be our special place.’

  ‘But we wouldn’t have to come here.’

  ‘No. Come on, let’s go. This place is giving me the creeps.’

  With horrid realization, Ala suddenly stops, reaches for Onwa’s hand. ‘If this is the cryonics vault ... there are real, actual dead bodies in there!’

  The thought is literally chilling in this dank cold tunnel. The kids hunch together for a moment, then break and run.

  ~ * ~

  Here they are again. Same tunnel, same black and white team. It’s one hundred and sixty-seven years later.

  ‘Do you remember now?’ Ala asks.

  ‘Something very vaguely …’

  ‘These old yellow tiles. Some more of the light panels have gone.’

  Onwa is huffy. ‘Ala, that was three rejuvenations ago! I must have allowed it to be edited from my brain.’

  ‘What a rotten thing to do.’

  ‘You can’t cling to every childish memory. The RNA would overflow.’ Onwa laughs at the image. ‘Grief, you’d probably get a high-core brain dump and sit mumbling in the corner, regurgitating everything that’d ever passed through your mind.’

  Ala glances up with interest. ‘Strangely enough, that’s exactly how the jiffybug is going to crack the lockenkey problem.’

  The machine seems ridiculously bulky. It comes from a museum. Of course it will have to do all the work by itself; it cannot patch into the Truth Machine’s processors.

  They locate the lock. Images of cold cadavers make them shiver, but they stiffen their resolve. Ala lifts the jiffybug, anchors it to the alphanumeric pad.

  ‘The door is resisting my probes,’ declares the jiffy’s electronic voice. Simultaneously, a ferocious racket bursts out. A stentorian male voice cries from the door:

  ‘Warning! Warning! This door is armed with an explosive shrapnel device! Unauthorized persons may not enter!’

  ‘Hear this, door,’ says the jiffybug in a firm voice. ‘I am an authorized person. Disarm your defences.’

  The door hesitates. ‘Ambiguity. You have not input the correct code, although I see that you have bypassed my buffers. Please supply further information.’

  ‘Ala,’ the jiffybug says, ‘this is tougher than I expected. Door, the codes are as follows.’ A terabyte transfer occurs in less than ten seconds.

  ‘Recognized,’ the door says apologetically. ‘Stand aside.’

  There’s an enormous grinding as multiple flash-proof gates winch themselves open. A gust of foul air blasts into the kids’ faces. Coughing and spluttering, they pass inside. Outer gates clank shut. Even as they swing about in alarm, an inner portal smoothly hums. Gentle welcoming musak fills the fragrant air of the central redoubt. A lush female voice speaks to them.

  ‘Good evening, sir and madam. Welcome to War Shelter Five. All is in order. External radiation counters read nominal and safe. Internal life support systems are green and active. Would you desire a full report on cryonic and foetus-bank status?’

  ‘Not now, Shelter Five,’ says Ala, and adds absently, ‘Could we have some hot chocolate?’

  ‘At once.’

  Onwa says, ‘I don’t want anything to drink. It’s barbaric. War Zones! Radiation counters! What sort of perverts were they? It makes me feel revolting.’

  ‘It must have been buried here at the end of the Cruel Millennium. Before the Truth Machine was built.’

  ‘Look, let’s leave,’ Onwa says in a whining tone, ‘I really think we should report this.’

  ‘That’s what you said last time.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘You’re boring, do you know that?’

  ‘I’m scared, I know that.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Ala says angrily. ‘I want to find some of those frozen bodies. They must have expected to revive them if there was a nuclear war.’

  ‘Go by yourself then.’ The cloying musak somehow seems sinister. ‘Hey, wait for me . . .’

  There is little enough trouble locating the cryo-tanks. The kids stare into the bubbles, gaze on faces dead for a thousand years.

  ‘He looks as though he’s asleep.’

  ‘He’s not breathing.’

  ‘Jiffybug,’ says Ala on an impulse, ‘can you activate the revival circuits?’

  The machine’s remote tones say at once: ‘That should present no difficulties.’ There is the briefest pause. Gigabytes of data flow back and forth during that interval. ‘Done.’

  Onwa’s face is whiter than ever. ‘Ala, you’ve gone too far this time. The Truth Machine will go berserk.’

  An authentically mechanical voice says in staccato bursts:

  ‘DATAFILE on Subject Hoffmann, Brian Franklin. Competence: primitive computer engineer. Subject was transferred to advanced resurrection equipment after experimental revival and cloning in 2044, old style. Original body was destroyed during reconstruction, but complete memory was accessed and implanted in clone. SPECIAL INTEREST: Subject is currently oldest cryonic survivor. DISPOSITION: No military value. RECOMMENDED USE: Continued experimental study of long-term cryogenic deterioration.’

  The voice gives every indication of continuing, but Onwa is shrieking: ‘Be quiet! Jiffy, shut the vile thing off!’

  ‘I am sorry, Onwa,’ the jiffybug says quietly. ‘Evidently the revival systems were programmed nearly a thousand years ago, before the installation of the Truth Machine.’

  ‘Loathsome. Can you believe it, Ala? Imagine talking like that about a human being.’

  Startling both of them, the bubble of the cryovault slides open. There is no gust of cold air, nothing to reveal the truth that until minutes before the interio
r of the vault was a few degrees above absolute zero. The boys’s eyes open, blind as a puppy’s. From his mouth come inarticulate sounds, smackings and gummings. ‘Um urgh mouf so dry—’

  ‘His eyes are ...’ Ala stops in amazement. ‘Blue!’

  ‘Hello there,’ cries Onwa with false heartiness. ‘Uh, I think you suck that tube. Here ...’

  It is a strange situation, incredibly strange when you think about it. Here is a boy who is really seventy years old, and has been neither young nor old nor alive nor dead for a thousand years, and here are two bright young kids helping him with his food-nipple, two kids on their third rejuvenations, who don’t have a clue what they’re getting into.

  ‘But my wife,’ Brian says, weeping, when he understands where and when he is. ‘My God, they must have killed her too. Alice, Alice. Oh God, Alice is dead.’

  The jiffybug puts him back to sleep, but this time it is just the temporary sort, full of ordinary dreams, the sort where a nightmare simply wakes you up …

  ~ * ~

  The exit from War Shelter Five is made with some trepidation, but the Truth Machine fails to chide them or even acknowledge their existence. No doubt it has better things to do.

  It is the oldest dream in the world: to find yourself young again. Quick on your toes, tastebuds eager and stomach able to cope, none of the griping, the spasms, the hangovers, the back pains, the insomnia, the cuts which won’t heal and the piles which seem to tear you open when you take a crap and the bones leached of calcium which will snap if you slip and tumble in the bath . . .

  On his young, springing toes, Brian leaps from a high board, lets his body remember across fifty years, jack-knifes into the bracing water. They really have made him better than new. He rises through layers of blue light, turns his mouth to the air, gulps, thrusts powerfully through the water. Brown, graceful Ala smiles down at him from the edge of the pool. He reaches up and grasps her arm, pulls her playfully into the clean bubbles.

  ‘Hey!’ It’s not English, not precisely. During the rejuvenation they have imprinted the new words, the shifted grammar, directly on his brain. ‘Not so hard, bully.’

  ‘This is more like it, Ala. Why didn’t you tell me about the pool?’

  ‘We don’t swim much.’

  Bobbing in the water, her body is perfectly dry. Brian gazes incredulously as she sinks, crabs away along the long bottom of the pool. He follows her down. She speaks, but her voice is distorted. In pursuit, he finds the need for air overwhelming. He lets himself go to the surface, drag in oxygen. Still she’s down there, distorted visually now, peering up in puzzlement. Up she comes.

  ‘Ala, you’re not wet!’

  ‘Of course not. Yetch. Where’s your repeller?’

  It is a sort of necklace. It generates what he conceives, with a smothered snort, as a mystical Teflon non-stick surface, next to the skin, shielding out the crisp lapping water. That’s not all; this miracle rips oxygen molecules out of the water, passes them to an invisible pocket around the nose and mouth. Humanity has become selectively aquatic. Brian, despite himself, is aghast. He reaches out, touches Ala’s necklace, spins and has it off her. Water drenches her dark unflawed skin, her coiled dark hair. She splutters in outrage.

  ‘Come on,’ Brian says, ‘keep your face out of the water or you’ll drown.’

  Ala snatches the repeller back, closes it around her neck, blows spray from her nose. She watches him warily. ‘Savage. We should have left you in the freezer.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Brian tells her with no remotest awareness of how pompous, how repulsive he is being, ‘that little machine neatly sums up this brave new world of yours. It’s marvellous, but it defeats the purpose.’

  Basically she trusts him, because she trusts everyone. ‘Why are you putting your clothes back on?’

  From the edge of the pool, he stares back down at her nudity. ‘Because this is the way we did things. It’s called “modesty”.’ He realises how priggish, even insane this is, at this moment, in this place. He crouches again, drying his hair with his shirt. ‘Yes. Point to you. Well, I never claimed that my way of doing things was perfect. Let alone rational. But by God it was alive.’

  With a touch of waspish scorn, Ala says: ‘It’s dead now.’

  Brian sighs, turns away. She is a beautiful, kind, young girl and he cannot help himself, he lusts after her, and she is not Alice. For him it is only days since he and Alice sat at a table with a bunch of boisterous Wunderkinden celebrating the lost genius of their great intellectual ancestor Alan Turing. His mind skirts the paradoxes: if she were alive, she would be old as he is young, as old as his grandmother, long dead; yet surely they would have rejuvenated her as well. Perhaps her youthful body lies even now like a corpse carved in ice, somewhere in the mausoleum of Shelter Five. He has asked, naturally. There is no way to find out. All the identification lists have been lost, during the catastrophic end to the Cruel Millennium.

  Ala comes out of the water and sits wordlessly at his side. He seeks for words.

  ‘Look, surely the reason for swimming is to conquer an alien element. An element we are not meant to be at home in.’

  ‘I just find it exhilarating, like sex. Not as good as sex, though.’

  He will not be deflected now. ‘Exhilarating, yes! Because water is dangerous! You can drown, there’s got to be at least the remote possibility of it. Otherwise, you’re ... cheating yourself.’

  Ala stands up, her mouth drawn back. ‘Bullshit.’ He recognizes in the back of his brain that this is not the word she uses, but the meaning is there. ‘Thank heaven the Truth Machine spares us from people with ideas like yours.’

  ~ * ~

  They make it up, after a while. The kids arrange a simulation for him. Guns bark, smoke coils, men and women in tattered uniforms run past them up a hill. There’s a high shrieking; something dark crashes from the stinking clouds overhead, makes the earth shake and thump, explodes with horrible violence. Shrapnel whines pitilessly through them, rips the limbs and bellies of the soldiers who lurch into the morass of blood and mud and tatters of shredded grass and undulating strands of severed barbed wire. Hammering, endlessly, in the head even when the guns fall silent.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Onwa cries in distress. Abruptly, it is all cut off; it vanishes like a bad dream.

  ‘Horrible,’ Brian says, holding the heaving shoulders of the pale boy. ‘Horrible.’ It has been like standing knee-deep in human blood. ‘When was it filmed?’

  Onwa wipes vomit from his lips, shuddering. ‘Not real, Brian. Machine generated.’

  A fake? Computer graphics? Yet the density of detail, the sounds, screams, thuds, the smells of churned mud and eviscerated flesh, the stench of the explosives …

  ‘It’s a sort of historical lesson,’ Ala tells him.

  He understands perfectly. It is the ultimate in propaganda, in behavioural aversion, in conditioning. It has one goal, over and beyond its overt aim of preventing the recurrence of war. That goal is to impress at the profoundest emotional level a belief in how disgusting and vicious and immoral life had been before the Truth Machine became the world’s custodian. Surely the price has been too great, ‘I can’t stay here any longer,’ Brian says with decision.

  ~ * ~

  To his surprise, the kids make no real objection. With remarkable speed a Mobile Unit is despatched to bear Brian Hoffmann into the august presence.

  ‘Can Onwa and Ala come too?’

  ‘I’m afraid they have been neglecting their duties lately,’ the Mobile explains. No details are forthcoming. He bids them farewell with a horribly hopeless misery in his belly.

  The journey to the Truth Machine is made by gravity train. Monumental tubes have been sunk through the mantle of the world, evacuated of air, strung with great superconducting magnets. Through this alimentary canal—truly the bowels of the earth—the capsule of the gravity train falls at near-orbital speeds, a free energy ride.


  ‘I cannot believe what you say,’ Brian says wearily to the Monitor. His face is drawn. ‘People would never have abdicated power to a machine. I know, I helped invent the bloody things.’

  The Mobile resembles an austere jukebox. It speaks with the calm reasonableness of an expensive psychiatrist. ‘You fail to appreciate the weariness and despair of that era. Science had offered salvation, and been used instead chiefly to glut the greedy and the murderous.’

  ‘They used the bombs?’ There has been no evidence of radiation damage.