Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  She shook her head. Her bangs didn’t swing; her hair looked painted on. “He told his staff everything technical they needed to know; he wrote everything down. The problem, Mr. Jasper, is merely that you know of the project at all.”

  He slammed the chair, caught an echo of Kiernan’s stinging fist. “I wouldn’t have known I knew about it if you hadn’t triggered me!”

  She shrugged. “You might have been triggered by something else eventually. It’s a risk we can’t take.”

  “Mad scientists.” It just came out. “I’ve avoided cops and job-sick neurologists and company thugs, and now I’m going to be executed because I have the microfilm with the secret formula on it.”

  Flippancy. Flippancy, when all he wanted to say was Please, please don’t do this, I have a little boy, my wife will never know what happened to me, please—

  She rose and went to the door, her steps a whisper on another century’s cracked linoleum. “You’ve summed up the situation quite well, Mr. Jasper. I’m sorry about this. We don’t have the resources to hold you prisoner, and your talents wouldn’t be of much use to us … unless you have lied about your ability to read minds?”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes burned.

  “Then we have no more to discuss. Understand that the future of this planet is at stake; we’re not a bunch of crazies on some harebrained crusade. You won’t be dying for nothing.”

  “Can’t you just buy me off?” Anything to belay death for one more heartbeat. “Or hold me prisoner just for a little while? Just till your ship has lifted? Or how about—?”

  “We’re a small group, Mr. Jasper.” No regret. Pragmatism. “We have to do things in the most expedient way.”

  It would take only one man with strong hands or a weapon to put an end to him, and all the memories with him.

  She rapped on the door.

  He remembered the most beautiful things ever seen by human eyes: sunrise on Mars like the inside of a rose in first bloom, mountains of fractal teeth, oceans of frozen mercury.

  He remembered exactly what the client remembered when they linked up, but he didn’t have the client’s associations with the memory. The subconscious underpinnings were inaccessible. Where it all came back together was in the client’s mind. Even senile minds: he played back the memories for them, and they made the associations. Their memories would always belong to them, even entrusted into someone else’s keeping.

  He screened his customers. No pedophiles or rapists, no one who’d done something he didn’t want to live with for the rest of his life. But people didn’t tell you everything, and he’d never met an esper who could suck bad memories away.

  He wouldn’t want to lose them all. Most of them were the memories of the dead. Those people lived on in him, for a brief while. He respected that. He cherished it.

  But he had a bunch here that he would give anything—anything but his wife, or his son, or his life—to erase. And he didn’t have any idea which ones they were.

  He squinched his eyes, preparing to run through every memory he possessed. He’d never done that; they came back on their own, free association. He didn’t know if he could do it. But if he couldn’t find anything, by god he would make something up. He would not believe there was no way out. He would not panic.

  Too late. He had already panicked. All right, he thought, use the adrenaline.

  He remembered building the Mars habitats. He remembered Luna Alpha before the explosion. He remembered the day the Thorne lifted off, the first manned mission through hyperspace. Hyperdrive. They were refitting a hyperdrive ship. He dug around in his head, but there weren’t any clear connections, and he didn’t have a search engine. He had never categorized the memories, never attached mnemonics to them. He’d never had to; the people they were meant for triggered them when the time came.

  God damn it. It was in there somewhere—

  Hyperdrive. The biggest development since the A-bomb, but its antithesis: celebrated by a world at peace. The Thorne mission was a success, and in an eyeblink emissaries were on their way to Theron, Bellatrix IX, Incarnatus. Terra would take its place in the universe, among new friends.

  Then one of the ships brought something back, something impossible: something that crashed the unassailable network of quantum prisms that ran the world. The wireless Net could not be killed, but it was composed of artificial intelligence, and the intelligence could go insane. Power grids failed, suborbitals nosedived, banks winked out, comms spouted gibberish, vim fried synapses worldwide. There was no plug to pull. Anachronist groups, quick to jump on the excuse, went on a Calivinist Luddite rampage, smashing whatever tech they could find. But they couldn’t get it all, and the death and chaos ended only when the prisms, in a final agony of madness, shut themselves down.

  For a moment, Jasper thought he knew why. He remembered—a child, a programmer, an architecture of dreams … he didn’t know whose memory it was, couldn’t make sense of it. Was that what they wanted—after all these years, an explanation for what was over and done? You couldn’t reconstruct the Net. Silicon, vacuum tubes—make a computer, and it self-destructed after a period of incomprehensible functioning. The thing was still out there, inexplicable, inexorable.

  Were they looking for a cure?

  The world recovered—was still recovering, slowly—as the Anachronists had dreamed: by retreating to the late nineteenth century. Mechanical things still worked. But it was like starting from scratch. A lot of people died in the riots. A lot of people killed themselves. And those exotic, exciting planets no one else would never see—Theron, Bellatrix IX—recoiled in terror.

  Recoiled and protected themselves. The Sol system was put under quarantine. Ships, beacons, mines hovered at a safe distance, to keep humanity—and whatever caused the Crash—from harming the rest of the galaxy. No one worried about it. Humanity was too busy trying to survive, day by day, in a world devoid of tech. Younger people, who’d never known the near-telepathy of vim communication, the safe and certain world the prisms had tended, accepted the quarantine with a distant shrug. They no longer cared about the stars, or the rivers of quicksilver hyperspace that could carry them there.

  But these people did.

  These people were going to try to run the blockade.

  Without computers.

  He knew it in a moment of perfect clarity, as the fragments of memory swirled and mixed in the neural matrix of his brain. What use, otherwise, in refitting a hypership? But there was no way to navigate, not without tech … and even if you could substitute mechanical devices for electronic, you couldn’t open the gate… .

  There had been eight missions in all, and all but one had gone smoothly.

  All but one …

  He stands in a hospice room, with floral-print wallpaper pasted over the dead wallscreens, a scent of disinfectant pasted over the yeasty odor of incontinence.

  His client lies on the bed. Her body is as small as a child’s under the covers. Her ruined eyes are sunken pits in a face of ethereal beauty.

  Katerina Thaïs, a pilot, was rendered blind, mute, and quadriplegic by an unexplained accident on the eighth manned hyperspace mission. Before the interface was complete for her prosthetics, the Crash wiped out the software, and her family approached him with an idea for communicating with her. She would make a mental event of things she wanted them to know, then give the memory of it to him.

  Although he’s not an empath, he’s hesitant to touch her crushing pain and isolation. But he lays his fingertips on her brow and accepts her memories. They are disjointed, alien … for a moment, before he’s lost his self, he is awed at this otherness… .

  //I’m looking out the forward viewscreen, but not at what the viewscreen shows. I just did that weird thing with my mind, like crossing my eyes. It worked it worked it worked! So beautiful. So beautiful. The shifting patterns. The silver and light not silver not light. I feel home on the other side, I sense the familiar stars in their correct places.

  //The
AI is babbling at me. It has the tone of voice that frightened people have. I think it is like me. I think it is programmed to feign fright it doesn’t feel. “Shut up!” I swat at the interface. “Shut up shut up!” It distracts me with warning lights. Red and green and red and blue. They are daggers in my eyes. The warnings are icepicks in my ears. “I can do this! I am doing this! Shut up!”

  //My concentration is gone. I have to look in, not out, and the machine forces me to pay attention to it.

  //I scream. It is not the right time. I can’t let go …//

  He stumbles away from her, breaking contact before she’s finished. Her mother cries out; she must think it was a memory of intense pain that drove him back. But it isn’t that at all.

  He steps back up to her. He is too small and plain a human shell to absorb what she has to give. His heart pounds at the prospect. But he has a job to do. Her memory of the accident was only preliminary; there are a lot of basic questions her family wants answered. He has to do this.

  He reaches out, closes his eyes, and touches her again. The most alien mind he has ever encountered. He remembers, with her, what she thought as he staggered away:

  //We have to go back I have to go back please tell them to let me go back back back//

  He remembered the white walls of the room. He remembered the hiss of the lights, the chair in front of him. He remembered his eyes seeking some avenue of escape, following every hairline crack in the walls to find somewhere he could dig in his fingernails and tear himself free. He remembered everything his body was doing in a state of visceral panic. His body knew they were coming to kill him.

  His mind had not been there at all. He didn’t know where it went or how long it was gone—but he knew what it was processing, and the synthesis the threat of death had prompted.

  It was a manned mission into the past. He had returned from it whole.

  The bolt was thrown back and the doorknob turned, and he was gasping “I have a proposal for you” as the Filipina came in with two armed men and a guy in a blue onesuit dangling a syringe from his fingertips as if it were a dead rat.

  She took a deep breath: inhaling patience. She said, “Go ahead.”

  “If you do this with what you know now, all you’ll have for your trouble is a melted spaceship and a dead pilot. You have to use the prefab gate, and no matter what telepaths you’ve lined up to cloud the minds of the Protectorate, their automated weaponry is still going to beat your telekinetics. If you want to waste Beth Atherton on a suicide mission, that’s your business. But she’s the only one who can navigate for you without a computer. Her Asperger’s syndrome makes her a spatial savant. You have an alternative to a grand gesture of futility. But if you kill me, I’m not gonna tell you what it is.”

  “Thank you for the pilot recommendation. We’ll make every effort to track her down.” The woman was smiling again, and this time she looked genuinely amused—almost pleased. “If I torture you, you’ll tell me the rest, and then I’ll kill you anyway.”

  Jasper shook his head. “I don’t think so. You folks really do mean well. Malcolm could be a bastard, but he was an idealist: he wouldn’t have worked with you if he didn’t believe in your good intentions. You’re putting on a very good act to try to scare me, Pia Angelica, but I was there when you lost your baby. I was there when the baby was conceived. I know you better than you realize.”

  She blanched—clearly she had believed that Malcolm would never divulge those memories to anyone, though Jasper didn’t think he meant to—but she didn’t waver. “This project is more important than your life or his reputation. Don’t underestimate that.”

  “I don’t,” he said quickly. “But if I’m on your side, and I can prove it with a gesture of goodwill, why not take me on?”

  Pia glanced at the guy in the blue onesuit, who said he didn’t have the time or the stomach for this anyway and slammed the door on his way out. Without dismissing the goons—very large scientists playing dumb, Jasper figured—she sat down and assumed a listening posture, elbow on knee, chin on palm.

  “The pilots know that there’s more than one way into hyperspace. One of them made a human egg of herself trying the alternative way, and she’s dead now. I’m the only person who retains any part of her memories.”

  Deep breath. “Telling you that is my goodwill gesture. If you let me talk to your physicists, if you find Atherton, I can reconstruct it—both the theory the other pilots know, and the experimental data that particular pilot got firsthand. It’ll tell you how to avoid Humpty Dumptying anyone else. She knew what she did wrong. She was ready to go back and do it right.” It was all he had. He had made it as big as he could.

  “We can’t let you go back to your family,” she said. “Not until the ship is under way and the news gets out on its own.”

  He blew air very softly, very shakily, out between his lips. “How long is that going to be?”

  She ran a hand through her smooth bangs, the most human gesture he had seen her make. “Not long, I hope. I’m a little weary myself, Mr. Jasper.”

  “Yeah, threatening people’s lives really takes it out of you.”

  To his relief, she laughed. “But Mr. Jasper, if we hadn’t threatened your life, you would never have come up with your solution, would you?”

  Joey’s memories flooded out freely and joyfully, almost too many to grab and hold. Getting his first trike, the thrill of the wind, his pride in the colorful streamers flowing like captured water from the handlebars. Cuddling his big old bear as his mother sang him a lullaby. Dad teaching him to cast a fly into the trickling brown stream behind the complex, and the astonishing things they’d caught.

  “Did I remember good, Daddy?” he said when they were done, when Jasper found himself once again looking into his son’s sweet face instead of out from behind it.

  This precious endowment of memories was the best reason he could think of for making sure he made it to Joey’s adulthood. He knew what Katerina Thaïs knew, what Pia Angelica’s crew now knew: there was a network of natural hyperspace conduits, like capillaries in the brain of the universe. They weren’t wormholes as those were previously understood. They weren’t measurable. They didn’t leak matter. Particular pilots had the ability—an esper ability not unlike his own—to initiate them. Thaïs was one of those pilots, as was Beth Atherton: both autistic. Jasper felt sorry for the savants. He knew what it was like to have the guys in the lab coats after you.

  But he was pretty sure that he also knew the reason for the Crash, now. What repeated immersions in the mercurial river of artificial hyperspace had done to the shipboard AIs. And when the refitted Thorne lifted, in two months’ time, he was going to be on it, with Beth Atherton. Using the universe’s own capillaries, they would slip past the blockade. They would go to Incarnatus, which the emissaries had never reached, because it, too, was under quarantine. They would hope that together they could find a cure for what the artificial wormholes had done to them, or deduce what caused the immunity the Protectorate was unaware of.

  Or figure out if the Protectorate had done this to them.

  The Thorne’s equivalent of an ancient aeronautical black box, he would bring that cure home, so that Joey might know in his own lifetime a world like the one the Crash had destroyed—or build a better one.

  When he gave him back his childhood then, it would be a memory of steam and gaslight, the vapors of a lost dark age. He felt the vibrant current of Joe’s young life, flowing so quickly into the old. He hugged the child to him against the rush of years, and said, “Yeah, Joey. You made the best memories I ever got from anybody, ever.”

  S. M.Stirling sold his first book in 1984 (Snowbrother, from Signet), and he became a full-time writer in 1988. That was the same year he was married to Janet Cathryn Stirling (née Moore), also a writer, whom he met at a World Fantasy convention in the mid-eighties. His works since then include the “Draka” alternative history trilogy (currently issued in a combined volume under the title The Dom
ination) and the “Islander” series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity) from Roc Books, as well as The Peshawar Lancers, and a sequel to the “Terminator” movies (from HarperCollins). His most recent alternative history novel, Conquistador, was published by Roc in February 2003. He and Janet and the obligatory authorial cats currently live in New Mexico. Steve’s hobbies include anthropology, archaeology, history in general, travel, cooking, and the martial arts.

  THE CRYSTAL METHOD

  S. M. Stirling

  Ka-Rak had divested himself of his pack and cloak as well as most of his armor at the entrance to the wurm’s cavern, and he was cold. Soon, he knew, battle would warm him—if the dragon’s blazing breath didn’t cure him of chills for all eternity. The warrior clutched the amulet that hung around his neck and kissed the leather bag that contained it to ward off the evil thought.

  It was powerful magic; that he still lived was proof of that. But there were limits to what even the strongest talisman could do, especially against a wurm large enough to carry off cattle. Still, it was always prudent to offer respect to the spirits.

  Ka-Rak looked around the rocky immensity of the cave and wondered what kind of spirits might linger here. The dragon had also taken a maiden and her younger brother; their angry souls might linger, crying out for revenge. He felt his scalp tighten as the hair on the back of his neck rose and shuddered.

  Enough! he thought, and forced himself onward.

  Spirits or not, he had taken this task on himself, and he would slay this creature or die trying. Dwelling on ghosts wouldn’t help.

  As he moved cautiously forward, the cave grew darker. He sniffed and smelled nothing. The absence of scent curled his brow; there should be … Suddenly the dry, sour smell of serpent filled the tunnel and grew stronger each moment. His puzzlement eased; clearly he’d been too distracted to notice, or perhaps had grown used to the stench and stopped smelling it until he’d turned his mind to it. Ka-Rak wished he hadn’t done so; the smell was disturbing.