BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  “I hope they’ll be interested,” said Em. “It’s a shame i/bits make such a poor recording medium. There must be way better history books in the local library.”

  Florence stared at her. “But it’s super cool! Hey, you have an eye-worm. Gives a whole new meaning to the word tele-phone, doesn’t it?”

  Causing Em to smile tightly, and nod wryly.

  Nothing was due to happen for a while, so this time she sent herself away. Chris Jones, and jokes about telepathy-phones, was a combination she didn’t need. Leaving her car at the church she walked down to the village, followed a finger-posted path across pasture, and called Tom again. He picked up at once.

  The archaeologists didn’t care. They had a powerful new tool for digging up the past and they were going to use it: like a stick, like a prod, to open the can, stir the jam. It didn’t bother them at all that the science behind the new gadget said the past does not exist. Journalists had asked Em the same questions until she gritted her teeth.

  Is “Information Space” the final Theory of Everything?

  Have we found the ultimate building blocks of the universe?

  Doesn’t it all sound a bit hippy-dippy? Like, everything is one, Man?

  She’d learned– burned by derision – to answer as blandly as was humanly possible. The model seems to work, she would say. Already we’re developing new technologies. We have gadgets based on i/space theory that could soon be ubiquitous as cellphones. As yet we can’t be sure what it all means—

  Sending images by eye-worm was a joke to many. To Em it was huge. If what she did with Tom ever really worked, it would prove that Many-Worlds Superposition was real.

  Imagine the universe as a single, staggeringly convoluted object.

  A diamond as big as the sum of all histories; the state of all states.

  What, hanging in nothingness?

  Hanging in nothing would never be an issue, Em used to explain (two years ago, before she was burned). You’re always inside, everything is always inside. This object is made of many, many times and spaces. Factor-in human consciousness, each mind a world. Think of the superposition as many, many, insanely many interpenetrating worlds. All folded into one, and every i/bit of information in this geometry is contiguous with every other… What’s an i/bit? Oh, it’s just a term we use, like “sub-atomic particle”, for something that isn’t material…

  If the MWS was a good model of reality, tech-mediated ‘telepathy’, sending the stuff the universe is made of from mind to mind, ought to be a no-brainer (excuse the pun). It should fall out of the equations.

  But it didn’t, yet, and to some people that was a great excuse for –

  Tom was letting her bounce her frustrations off him. He was a good listener, and just talking like this, no pressure, no expectations, was reassuring. He sounded relaxed. On the far side of the meadow the grass path took a right angle turn at a barrier of tall iron railings: but there was a gate. It appeared to be unlocked. Em pushed and it shifted easily, rusted metal fitting a groove cut in dark leaf-litter; so she went straight on.

  “I’ll never get on with the Brits. I left England with my mother, when I was a kid, in blissful ignorance of the impending divorce… My dad lives in France with his second family now: we get on okay, I don’t see him much. My parents didn’t tell me, I didn’t know, so forever I hear the accent and I feel betrayed—”

  “I’ll see your irrational racism and raise you. Listen, ever since 9/11, when I was right here, of course, if a guy who looks Arab comes towards me down the street, I flinch. I’m not a good person, Em. I suck up all the shit on the daily news and add my own. That’s what people buy from me. They’ve praised me and got all excited, for years, because I speak with an intellectual accent, through a tasty fat mouthful of shit—”

  Em had invaded a landscaped garden: overgrown, desolate and enticing. She was probably trespassing, but birdsong beckoned onwards.

  “Is that what your writer’s block’s about?”

  “Yeah. I have a blocked toilet in my mouth—”

  “You’re just innately, brutally honest. It’s what we hired you for.”

  “Hired? Did you say hired? I didn’t know I was getting paid!”

  “Oops. Figure of speech, sorry.”

  They laughed together. Laughter arises differently from speech, so what they shared was not the sound but the feeling of laughter: it was beautiful. “Tom, I wanted to tell you… That girl in your story, they shouldn’t have medicalised her, the jerks. They should have told her, you have a right to be terrified, and you’re incredibly talented… You’ve always known. I just realised today that what we’re trying to do is awful. It could drive a person crazy, like you said. Dumb scientist, I missed the big picture. So, I wanted to say, if it’s getting unbearable, if you’ve had enough of playing with fire—”

  Immediately she could have kicked herself.

  Silence from Tom. She passed through a tunnel built of small, densely packed shrubs; into a rose garden. Climbers, once trained along the walls, had fallen and lay in Sleeping-Beauty sheaves. Specimen bushes, vividly in bloom, struggled with massed cohorts of briars. Suddenly she had an intense feeling of presence. Something was in this enclosed space with her, fugitive and enormous. The shadow of massive shoulders, bowed under the overwhelming stood around her and right where the knot of the visual cortex flares: she stared at flame-red roses; she tasted almost, but if she even thought, almost, she knew: it’s here, it’s now—

  It was gone.

  Like a stitch coming undone, an adhesion ripping apart.

  “Tom? Did something just happen?”

  Nothing. Silence so profound she thought the connection had broken.

  “No” he said at last, sounding very tired; sounding terminally disheartened. “Not a thing. What could be terrifying about this, Em? We’re just talking. Collecting a lot of data on coming up empty. Sorry, but I’m logging off now.”

  Em headed back to St Peter’s, pre-empting Ralph Dewey’s summons: which reached her half-way across the buttercup-studded pasture. In the midst of the Command Shack’s boundless excitement she couldn’t stop herself from calling New York. She told her mother she was afraid Tom had decided to quit—

  “He’s done it,” answered Jane, wearily. “He called me and quit, about ten minutes ago. Don’t blame yourself, darling, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”

  Based on the tone of Mom’s voice, Em knew there was more. The moment in the rose garden repeated on her. She wanted to ask had there been a spike, a Wow spike? But she didn’t, because Tom was gone, and they wouldn’t be able to investigate the false positive. They’d have to start again, start hunting for another rare mind.

  So it was true, she had lost him. Shock first, pain would come later.

  Professor Dewey was in front of her, beaming. “We’re ready, Emily!”

  The vertical shaft descended, through layer-cake strata of dark dirt and ancient builders’ spoil, to a surprisingly large excavation. It quickly filled with bodies. The original entrance to the tomb had been located but would not be breached. The neuronauts would enter obliquely, through a narrow slit they’d opened between two of the upright slabs.

  In glaring lamplight at the bottom of the shaft they donned cabled, goggled helmets. There was a reserve helmet for Em, but she turned it down. She’d have to take out her worm to get hooked up for the i/scan, and she was still hoping Tom would call her to explain what he’d done; or at least to say goodbye.

  One after another they crept and stooped into the virgin dark.

  “We are about to make the dive,” intoned Dewey (for the TV crew who had remained packed in the foot of the shaft). “These funky deep-sea diver helmets allow us to plunge into the depths of time. As we stand here our perceptions will be virtually, so to speak, falling through the aeons, collecting data from five thousand years ago—”

  What garbage, thought Em. Time doesn’t exist in i/space, which is the only faint reason this “dive” stun
t makes any kind of sense. Why doesn’t he say so? The tomb was room-sized, roughly circular; the roof a huge table stone supported on five big irregular slabs. Packed earth between the stones. The air was fresh; the tomb was empty. Lamps on the scanning helmets showed a smooth, featureless earth floor; the walls of dark earth punctuated by the paler slabs: no trace of marks or carving. If she reached up, Em could have touched the underside of the table.

  The neuronauts moved around, guided by a helmet display mapping grid that Em couldn’t see. They had an air of ritual awe, as if they were actually seeing their five thousand year old ghosts – though in reality it would take some heavy number crunching to win any ‘pure’ Megalithic traces out of the data. Em kept out of the way, almost struggling with laughter, and then something happened in her brain.

  Her hands move without volition, completely out of her control.

  “My God, look!” shouted Lesley Hall. “Emily! She’s covered in blood!”

  “Fire!” howled Professor Dewey. “Oh, incredible! Sacrificial Fire!”

  Em saw the flame-red petals that filled her outstretched open hands.

  “Not fire,” she gasped, astonished. “No, it’s not fire, it’s roses—”

  Next moment the sending was gone. Em stood there, her mouth stretched by an enormous, helpless grin, her mind a silent babble of triumph, while the neuronauts went nuts. Roses indeed, made of fire indeed, a pattern of firing and partially-firing neurons, oh, what a gift he had sent her, but why the time lag? Was it a time lag? She had no idea. Something new to disentangle, never considered—

  But who cares?

  We did it!

  The Brits, when Em managed to explain what had happened, were desperate to get her and her illicit device out of their tomb. But when the scan was done, and everyone was back on the surface, they reacted generously: breaking out their champagne for the MWS breakthrough. Everyone was full of questions. How big was this? How much bigger than previous US successes with sending small bundles of i/bits across a lab? Em answered as vaguely as possible. Mom would kill her, if she blabbed before the debriefing. She escaped as soon as she could, and called Tom—

  He picked up. “Hi, Em. I guess your mother told you. I’m sorry.”

  “Told me what? I just wanted to say thank you for the roses.”

  Stunned silence reached her, echo of that brilliant explosion in her brain.

  “You got them?”

  “Just now! And wait, it’s better, the Brits got them too. We’re independently verified, by Chris Jones, for God’s sake! Among others. It’s all there, on record!”

  “My God! Fantastic! Em! That moment, you know the moment, I knew, that was it. That, or never, and you didn’t get it, so… Hey, Em, you should’ve had some kind of 3D bio-printer. You could have fed it the i/bits, and had roses to put in a vase!”

  “The i/space 3D bio-printer. Our next project, yeah, we’ll make our fortunes. Tom, it’s fantastic but it’s only a single measurement.”

  “One small step. But we’ve entered the Information Space Age!”

  “I’ll be home in a day or two.” She took the plunge. “How about meeting in the real?” They never had, not alone. “For a coffee?”

  “In the real? That’s a bold idea. But I don’t like coffee.”

  “Have skinny latte decaff with syrup. Or green tea. I won’t judge.”

  “Deal.”

  Rain had come and gone. As she drove away from St Peter’s the ball-of-yarn lanes were awash and shining. She pulled up on the coast road to look out, over saltmarsh, to the river’s mouth and the dunes. The world shivered, it looked pixelated, unreal. Something utterly momentous had happened. Should she be afraid? But this wasn’t the first time a whole communications tech had sprung into being, born from punishingly strange new science. There’d be no transistors without quantum mechanics. Yet still she wondered, did we destroy a universe today? The place we lived in this morning is gone, that humungous, staggeringly convoluted object is folded differently now—

  Is there a lag, will we wink out of existence?

  But everything seemed fine, so she drove on.

  A Planet Called Desire

  Written for George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’s Old Venus, a themed ‘retro Venus science fiction’ anthology. I found the suggestion of a ‘habitable zone’, hidden in Venus’s ancient past, in an article in New Scientist, but I think there are reasons why Venus could never have had plate tectonics, (or a magnetic field) so maybe that’s total fantasy (if the only habitable planet we know of is a good guide).The dying world, overwhelmed by parasites is not exactly fantasy, more of a metaphor. The West African (Mali) Dogons’ ancient, stunning astronomical knowledge of Venus is fact, and the rest is golden, glorious pulp.

  John Forrest, Adventurer

  The laboratory was on an upper floor. Its wide windows looked out, across the landscaped grounds of the Foundation, to the Atlantic Ocean. One brilliant star, bright as a tiny full moon, shone above the horizon; glittering in the afterwash of sunset.

  “My grandfather’s people called her Hawa,” said the scientist.

  “Is that a Dogon term, PoTolo?” asked John Forrest: a big man, fit and tanned, past forty but in excellent shape. He wore a neatly-trimmed beard and moustache, his vigorous red-brown hair was brushed back and a little long; his challenging eyes an opaque dark blue. “You’re Dogon, aren’t you?”

  They were alone in the lab: alone in the building aside from a few security guards. Dr Seven PoTolo, slight and dark; fragile and very young-looking beside the magnate, was uncomfortable with the situation, but there was nothing he could do. Mr Forrest, the multibillionaire, celebrity entrepreneur: philanthropist, environmental-ist; lover of life-threatening he-man stunts, owned the Foundation outright. His billions financed PoTolo’s work, and he was ruthless with any hint of opposition.

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid my ancestry is more mixed: Cameroon is a melting pot. My maternal grandfather spoke a language of the Coast which has now vanished, but ‘hawa’ is a loan-word; I think it’s Arabic, and means desire.”

  “Sensual desire, yes,” agreed Forrest. “The temptation of Eve.”

  He turned to the untried experimental apparatus.

  “What will conditions be like?”

  “Conditions on the surface could be remarkably Earthlike,” said PoTolo. “The Tectonic Plate system hasn’t yet broken down, the oceans haven’t boiled away. Atmospheric pressure hasn’t started to sky-rocket; the atmosphere is oxygenated. Rotation should be speedier too. Much longer than our twenty-four hour cycle, but a day and a night won’t last a local year—”

  Forrest studied the rig. Most of it was indecipherable, aside from the scanning gate and biomedical monitors introduced for his own benefit. A black globe with an oily sheen, clutched in robotic grippers inside a clear chamber, caught his eye: reminding him somehow of the business part of a nuclear reactor.

  “But no guarantees,” he remarked, dryly.

  “No guarantees… Mr Forrest, you have signed your life away. Neither your heirs, nor any other interested parties, will have any legal recourse if you fail to return. But the risks are outrageous. Won’t you reconsider?”

  “Consider what?” Forrest’s muddy blue eyes blazed. “Living out my life in some protected, cutesy enclave of a world I’d rather go blind than see? The trees are dying, the oceans are poisoned. We’re choking on our own emissions, in the midst of a mass extinction caused by our numbers, while sleepwalking into a Third World War! No, I will not reconsider. Don’t tell me about risk. I know about risk!”

  PoTolo nodded carefully. They were alone in the building, and he was more physically intimidated than he liked to admit by this big white man, disinhibited by great power and famous for his reckless temper.

  “My apologies. Shall we proceed?”

  “I take nothing? No helmet full of gizmos, no homing beacon?”

  “Only the capsule you swallowed. There’ll be an interval. I can’t te
ll you exactly how long, the variables are complex. If conditions are as we hope, the probe will be retrieved, bringing you along with it. You can move around, admire the scenery, then suddenly you’ll be back here.”

  “Amusing, if I’m in the middle of a conversation… One more question. You’ve staked your career on this, PoTolo, as much as I’m staking my life. What’s in it for you?”

  “Habitable zones,” said the scientist. “Ancient Venus is, in effect, our nearest exo-planet. If we can confirm the existence in space-time of the Venusian habitable zone we believe we’ve detected, that’s a major confirmation of our ability to identify other, viable alternate-Earths. We may not be able to use this method to send probes across the light years, there may be insuperable barriers to that, but—”

  “Bullshit. Your motive was glory, and the glory is now mine.” Forrest grinned. “You lose, I win. That’s what I do, PoTolo. I see an opportunity, and I take it.”

  “Are you quite ready, Mr Forrest?”

  “I am.”

  He assumed the position, standing in the gate with arms loosely by his sides, and turned his head for a last glance at that bright star. The world disappeared.

  ♀

  He stood in a rosy, green-tinged twilight, surrounded by trees. Most seemed young, but some had boles thicker than his body. Fronds like hanging moss hung around him, the ground underfoot was springy and a little uncertain, as if composed entirely of supple, matted roots. No glimpse of sky. The air was still, neither warm nor cold; the silence was absolute, uncanny. He looked at himself; checked the contents of belt loops and pockets. He was dressed as he had been in West Africa, and still equipped with a suite of sturdy, familiar outdoors kit. This struck him as very strange, suddenly, but why not? What is a body but a suit of clothes, another layer of the mind’s adornment? And his body seemed to have made the trip. Or the translation, or whatever you called it. No pack. PoTolo had told him he couldn’t carry a pack.

  PoTolo!

  The name rang like a bell, reminding him just what had happened. What an extraordinary feat! He took a few steps, in one direction and then another: keeping himself oriented on the drop-zone. Pity he didn’t have a ballpark figure for the ‘interval’. Ten minutes, or ten hours? How far was it safe to stray? Grey-green boles crowded him, the hulk of a dead giant or two lurking, back in the ranks. He wondered if he was dreaming. Yes, probably he was. The PoTolo narrative, the apparatus: the act of standing in that gate, feeling absurd in his wilderness kit: it all folded up like a telescope, became implausible. Only the twilit jungle remained concrete, but how did he get here?