The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We got on with our work, and I tried to put the whole letter business behind me. Roy did not help, as far as this went. He was acting stranger and stranger; simpering at me, and when I queried his expression (“what? What is it?”) scurrying away—or scowling and saying, “nothing, nothing, only…” and refusing to elaborate.

  The next thing was: he moved one of the computer terminals into his room. These were 1980s terminals; not the modern-day computers the size and weight of a copy of Marie-Claire; so it was no mean feat getting the thing in there. He even cut a mousehole-like ∩ in the bottom of his door, to enable the main cable to come out into the hall and through into the monitor room.

  “What are you doing in there?” I challenged him. “That’s not standard policy. Did you clear this with home?”

  “I’m working on something,” he told me. “I’m close to a breakthrough. SETI, my friend. Solving Fermi’s paradox! You should consider yourself lucky to be here. You’ll get a footnote in history. Only a footnote, I know: but it’s more than most people get.”

  I ignored this. “I still don’t see why do you need to squirrel yourself away in your room?”

  “Privacy,” he said. “Is very important to me.”

  One day he went out on the ice to (he told me) check the meteorological datapoints. It seemed like an odd thing—he’d shown precious little interest in them up to that point—but I was glad he was out of the base, if only for half an hour. As soon as I saw his torch-beam go, wobbling its oval of brightness away over the ice, I hurried to his room. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I told myself. I was just checking the identity of the letter’s author. Maybe have a quick glance at its contents. I wouldn’t steal it back (although, I told myself, I could. It was my letter after all. Roy was being an idiot about the whole thing). But once my itch was scratched, curiosity-wise, then everything would get easier about the base. I could wait out the remainder of my stint with equanimity. He need never even know I’d been poking around.

  No dice. Roy had fitted a padlock to his door. I rattled this uselessly; I could have smashed it, but then Roy would know what I’d been up to. I retreated to the common room, disproportionately angry. What was he doing, in there, with a whole computer terminal and my letter?

  I had enough self-knowledge to step back from the situation, at least some of the time. He was doing it in order to wind me up. That was the only reason he was doing it. The letter was nothing—none of my letters, if I looked back, contained any actual, substantive content. They were just pleasant chatter, people I knew touching-base with me. The letter Roy bought must be the same. He bought it not to have the letter, but in order to set me on edge, to rile me. And by getting riled I was gifting him the victory. The way to play this whole situation was to be perfectly indifferent.

  However much I tried this, though, I kept falling back. It was the not knowing!

  I tried once more, during the week. “Look, Roy,” I said, smiling. “This letter thing is no big deal, you know? None of my letters have any really significant stuff in them.”

  He looked at me, in a “that’s all you know” sort of way. But this was, I decided, just winding me up.

  “I tell you what I think,” I said. “You can, you know, nod, or not-nod, depending on whether I’m right. I think the letter you bought was from my girlfriend. Yeah?”

  “No comment,” said Roy, primly. “One way or the other.”

  “If so, it was probably full of inane chatter, yeah? Fine—keep it! With my blessing!”

  “In point of fact,” he corrected me, holding up his right forefinger, “I do not need your blessing. The transaction was finalised with the fiduciary transfer. Contract law is very clear on this point.”

  I lost my temper a little at this point. “You know how sad you are, keeping a woman’s letter to another man for your own weird little sexual buzz? That’s—sad. Is what it is. I don’t think you realise how sad that is.”

  “Oh Anthony, Anthony,” he said, shaking his head and smirking in that insufferable way he had. “If only you knew!”

  I swore. “Suit yourself,” I said.

  Then the airstrip lights failed. I assumed this was an accident, although the fact that every one of them failed at the same time was strange. Diamondo came through on the radio: “fellows!” he declared, through his thick accent. “I cannot land if there are no lights to land!”

  “Don’t know what’s happened to them,” I replied. “Some manner of malfunction.”

  “Obviously that!” came Diamondo’s voice. “Can you fix? Over.”

  Roy suited up and went outside; he was back in minutes. “I can’t do anything in the dark, with a torch, in a hurry,” he complained. “Tell him—no. Tell him to toss the package out and we’ll fix the lights for next time.”

  When I relayed this message, Diamondo said “breakables! There are breakables in the package! I cannot toss! Over.” Then, contradicting his last uttered word, he went on. “I can take out the breakables and toss the rest. Wait—wait.”

  I could hear the scrapysound of the plane in the sky outside. Then, over the radio: “is in chute.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Where are you dropping it? If there’s no lights—I mean, I don’t want to go searching over a wide area in the dark with…” There was a terrific crash right overhead, as something smashed into our roof.

  “You idiot!” I called. “You could have broken our roof!”

  Static. And, through the walls, the sound of the plane’s engines diminishing. Roy looked and me, and I at him. “I think it rolled off,” Roy said. “You go out and get it.”

  “You’re already suited!”

  “I went out last time. It’s your turn now. Fair’s fair.”

  It was on the edge of my tongue to retort: stealing my letter—is that fair? But that would have done no good; and anyway I was hoping that there would be a new letter from Lezlie in the satchel, and if so I certainly wanted to get to that before Roy did. So I pulled on overclothes and took a torch and went outside.

  It was extraordinarily cold—sinus-freezingly cold. The air was still. The sound of Diamondo’s plane, already very faint, diminished and diminished until it vanished altogether. Now the only sound was the whir of the generator, gently churning to itself with its restless motion. I searched around in the dark outside the main building for ten minutes or so, and spent another five trying to see into the gap between the main prefab and the annex, which was half-full of snow. But I couldn’t find it.

  When I went back to the main door it was locked. This was unprecedented. For a while I banged on the door, and yelled, and my heart began blackly to suspect that Roy was playing some kind of prank on me—or worse. I was just about to give up and make my way round to try the side entrance when Roy’s gurning face appeared in the door’s porthole, with the graph-paper pattern woven into the glass. He opened it. “What the hell were you playing at?” I demanded, crossly. “Why did you lock the door?”

  “It occurred to me that the lights might have been sabotaged,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “I thought: security is valour’s better part. Obviously I was going to let you back in, once I was sure it was you.”

  “Have you had a nervous breakdown?” I yelled. “Are you high? Who else could possibly be out there? We’re three hundred miles from the nearest human settlement. Did you think it was a ghost?”

  “Calm down,” Roy advised, grinning his simpering grin and still not looking me in the eye. “Did you get the package?”

  I sat down with a thump. “Couldn’t find it,” I said, pulling off my overboots. “It may still be on the roof. Seriously, though, man! Locking the door?”

  “We need to retrieve it,” said Roy. “It has my medication in it. My supplies are running low.”

  This was the first I had heard of any medication. “Seriously? They posted you down here, even though you have medical problems?”

  “Just some insomnia problems. And some allergic reaction problems. But I need
my sleeping pills and my antihistamines.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “What is there to be allergic to, down here?”

  He gave me a pointed look. But then he said: “come and have a drink,” he said. “I’ve got some whisky.”

  Now, I knew the base was not supplied with whisky. Beer was the most they allowed us. I should, perhaps, have been suspicious of Roy’s abrupt hospitality, doubly so since I knew he hardly ever drank. But I was cold, and cross, and a whisky—actually—sounded like a bloody good idea. “How have you got any of that?”

  “I brought it with me. My old tutor at Cambridge gave it to me. Break it out when you’ve solved the SETI problem, he said. He never doubted me, you see. And solve it, I have.”

  And then a second thought occurred to me. It came to me like a flash. I could get Roy drunk. Surely then he would be more amenable to telling me what was in the letter he’d snaffled from me. I couldn’t think that I’d ever seen him drunk; but my judgment was that he would hold his liquor badly. He’d be a splurger. OK, I thought: butter him up, some, and get some booze in him.

  “I’ll have a dram,” I told him. Then: “kind of you to offer. Thanks. I didn’t mean to … you know. Yell at you.”

  He ignored this overture. “You didn’t go to Cambridge, I think?” he asked, as we went through to the common room. “Reading University, isn’t it?”

  “Reading born and bred,” I replied, absently. I half-leaned, half-sat on one of the heaters to get warmth back into my marrow whilst Roy went off to his room to get the whisky. He was gone a while. Finally he came back with a bottle of Loch Lomond in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He handed me the former.

  I retrieved two tumblers from the cupboard, but Roy said: “I’ll not have the whisky, thank you anyway. I don’t like the taste.”

  This was about par, I thought, for the weirdo that he was—bringing a bottle of scotch all the way to the end of the world, only not even to drink it. On the other hand the seal was broken, and about an inch was missing, so perhaps he had tried a taster and so discovered his animadversion. I honestly didn’t care. I poured three fingers, and settled myself in one of the chairs.

  “Cheers!” I said, raising a glass.

  “Good health,” he returned, propping his bum on the arm of the sofa.

  “So,” I said, smacking my lips. “The fact that we’re drinking this means you’ve solved the Fermi paradox?”

  “We’re not drinking it,” he said, with a little snorty laugh of self-satisfaction. “You are.”

  “You’re such a pedant, Roy,” I told him.

  “Take that as a compliment,” he said, smirking, and making odd little snorty-sniffy noises with his nostrils.

  “So? Does the fact that I’m drinking this mean you’ve solved it?”

  “The answer to your question is: yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I took another sip. “Congratulations!”

  “Thank you.”

  “And?”

  He peered blankly at me. “What?”

  “And? In the sense of: what’s your solution?”

  “Oh. The Fermi Paradox.” He sounded almost bored. “Well, I’ll tell you if you like.” He seemed to ponder this. “Yeah,” he added. “Why not? It’s Kant.”

  “Of course it is,” I said, laughing. “You complete nutter.”

  He looked hurt at this. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—the best part of a year of our lives, millions of pounds sunk into this base, probably billions spent worldwide on SETI, and all we needed to do was open a seventeenth-century book of philosophy!”

  “Eighteenth-century,” he corrected me. “And the kit, here, certainly has its uses.”

  “Glad to hear it! But—Kant? Really?”

  Roy took the smallest sip from his beer bottle, and then rubbed his own chin with his thumb. “Hard to summarise,” he said. “Start here: how do we know there’s anything out there?”

  “What—out in space?”

  “No: outside our own brains. Sense data, yes? Eyes, ears, nerve-endings. We see things, and think we’re seeing things out there. We hear things, likewise. And so on. But maybe all that is a lie. Maybe we’re hallucinating. Dreaming. How can we be sure there’s anything really there?”

  “Isn’t this I think therefore I am?”

  “The cogito, yes,” said Roy, with that uniquely irritating prissy inflection he used when he wanted to convey his own intellectual superiority. “Though Kant didn’t have much time for Descartes, actually. He says I think therefore I am is an empty statement. We never just think, after all. We always think about something.”

  “You’re losing me, Roy,” I said, draining my whisky, and reaching for the bottle. Roy’s eye’s flashed, and I stopped. “Do you mind if I have another?” “No, no,” he urged me, bobbing forward and back in an oddly bird-like way. “Go right ahead.”

  “So,” I said. “You’re saying: we can’t be sure if the cosmos is a kind of hallucination. Maybe I’m a brain in a vat. So what? I’ve got to act as if the universe is real, or,” I directed a quick look at Roy, “they’d lock me in the loony bin. So? Does this hallucination also include ET, or not?”

  “Quite right. Well, Kant says: there is a real world—he calls it the ding-an-sich, the thing as it really is. There is such a reality. But our only access to that real world is through our perceptions, our senses and the way our thoughts are structured. So, says Kant, some of the things we assume are part of the world out there are actually part of the structure of our consciousness.”

  “Such as?”

  “Quite basic things. Time and space. Causality.”

  “Wait, Kant is saying that time, space and causality aren’t ‘really’ out there? They’re just part of our minds?”

  Roy nodded. “It’s like if we always wore pink-tinted contact lenses. Like we’d always worn them, ever since birth. Everything we saw would have a pink tint. We might very well assume the world was just—you know, pink. But it wouldn’t be the world that was pink, it would be our perception of the world.”

  “Pink,” I repeated, and took another slug. I was starting to feel drowsy.

  “We’re all like that, all the time, except that instead of pink contact lenses on our eyes, we’re wearing space-and-time contacts on our minds. Causality contacts.”

  “Space and time are the way the universe is. Just is.”

  “That’s not what Kant says. He says: we don’t really know the way the universe just is. All we know is how our perceptions and thoughts structure our understanding.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Kant says that cause and effect are just in our heads?”

  “That’s right”

  “That’s nonsense,” I said. “If space and time and causality are just inside my head, then what’s my head in? It takes up space, my brain. It takes time to think these thoughts.”

  “There’s something out there,” Roy agreed. “But we don’t know what it is. Here’s a thought-experiment, Kant’s thought-experiment. You can imagine an object in space, can’t you?”

  I grunted.

  “OK,” said Roy. “And you can imagine the object being taken away. Yes? Then you have empty space. But you can’t imagine space and time being taken away. You can’t imagine no space, no time.”

  I grunted again.

  “That shows that space, time, causality and some other things—they’re part of the way the mind perceives. There’s no getting behind them. Is the ding-an-sich itself structured according to that logic? We cannot know. Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Ding,” I said, my eyelid slipping down my eyeballs, “like a microwave oven?”

  “We’re looking for aliens with visual telescopes and radio telescopes,” said Roy, standing up and putting his beer bottle down. “But whatever tools we use, we’re looking for aliens in space and time, aliens that understand causality and number. But maybe those things are not alien. Those things are th
e way our minds are built. And that means we’re looking in the wrong place. We should not be looking in space, or time. We should be looking in the ding-an-sich.”

  “Sick,” I said, My eyes were shut now. I didn’t seem to be able to open them. Such muscular operation was beyond my volitional control. “I feel a bit sick, actually.”

  “Ding,” I heard him say, at the other end of a very long corridor. “You’re done. Let’s open the microwave door, now, shall we?”

  I suppose I was asleep. I tried to shift position in bed, but my arms were numb. Sometimes you lie on an arm and it goes dead. But this was both my arms. They were up over my head. A scraping sound. Distantly. I tried to pull my arms down but they were already down. This is the chance, somebody was saying, or muttering, or I don’t know. Perhaps I was imagining it. We’ve never had this chance before. Because although human consciousness is structured by the Kantian categories of apperception, there’s nothing to say that computer perception needs to suffer from the same limitations. It’s all a question of programming! A programme to sift the Centauri data so as to get behind the limitations of consciousness.

  I was moving. Everything was dark, dark, dark. My arms were trailing behind me, I thought; and something was pulling my legs, I thought; and I was sliding along on my back. Was that right? Could that be right?

  We look out from our planet and see a universe of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability—and we forget that what we’re actually seeing are the ways our minds structure the ding-an-such according to the categories of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability. We look out and we see no aliens, and are surprised. But the real surprise would be to see aliens in such a vista, because that would mean the aliens are in our structures of thought. Sure there are aliens. Of course there are! But they don’t live in our minds. They live in the ding-an-sich.