"Sir, are you all right?" asked the woman inside the ticket booth.
"Where?" he stammered. "Where is the painting of Sunflowers?"
"Turn left at the end of the corridor and go through two salons. On the far wall of the third."
He turned and followed the directions.
The very walls were evanescing from him, outward, inward, drifting and billowing, their shape fluid as if they and not his brain were failing to keep their shape, as if this was the true nature of reality when certain stops were removed. He saw fleetingly as he strode swiftly on legs weak, and in clothes drenched with sweat, brilliant gardens, stone walls, overarching trees, pink blossoms, and golden fields; a canvas smeared with raindrops as if Van Gogh were trying desperately to push through that barrier between self and other, the one which Stannis felt he was crossing now . . .
There was no guard in the third room. The floor was thin strips of polished oak and the walls were very white, that gleaming, powerful, inviting, assaulting white—
And there they were.
They?
He concentrated on approaching them, the three paintings of massed sunflowers, their centers huge somehow and almost menacing but blessedly free of faces, stems bent from rough handling, fresh from the fields and glowing with released light.
Three?
He heard footsteps behind him. Damn, he thought, get out of here, leave me alone, I'm dying. I'm living. I'm heading towards them, there's just this one last thing which I must do here . . . something, I don't remember . . .
"It's amazing, isn't it," Lise said, a few feet to his side, hands clasped behind her back. "Did you notice? In the other salons? Probably not, you just rushed through them. Van Gogh made many copies of a lot of his paintings. Many attempts. That's what touches me the most. I come here and see them almost every time I'm in the city; I never tire of looking. In fact, I saw them the day the GULDEN arrived, the instant I was off. It helps."
It helps?
He began to notice the differences in the paintings.
Lise continued, in a calm voice, as if nothing extraordinary was happening. "Look; the panel below quotes Van Gogh." She stepped forward and read the small black letters on clear plexiglass. "He says, 'I have three canvases going—first, three huge flowers in a green vase . . . second, three flowers, one, gone to seed . . . If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels.' " She bent closer to the plaque. " 'Death is part of existence; more than that, it is the moment of self-existence, of absolute existence . . . Van Gogh sought a victory for which the price was life itself . . . only by succumbing to the annihilation of the self could his work become an existential act, and not an individual act.' Some critic—Giulio Argan—said that about Sunflowers."
Stannis' thoughts flared as if from some concentrated, energized center.
Many sunflower attempts. Profligate humans. It is all right to try, to change, to grow, to improve. Our dead billions are not dead. The nameless beautiful multitudes—what had he said—"it is the multitude that matters?"—left the conscious fodder of their lives and accomplishments, though even the most luminous were but faint traces of light arcing through life for an impossibly brief time.
Perhaps Van Gogh had been struggling on the shore of the ocean where Claire and Annais now were. Surging toward perfection single-mindedly, with all his powers, then past it, through it, making the possibilities concrete, heading into the light. This is it, he thought, it was just that their minds were capable of understanding much more about beauty than mine. They were much more brilliant to begin with. Thought and the shapes of time and the decisions of it were something different and much more real for them . . .
Now humans had the power to modify themselves, to change their cells to eliminate disease. And if thought's chalice, the cells of the brain, were modified, what were the possibilities then? Where would thought take humanity, the bright multitude?
Annais and Claire had chosen to hover at the point of light forever where life and death were no longer a dichotomy. All possibilities existed within that point, within their act, forever. To choose, for them, had had no meaning.
Stannis saw what they had thought—at last. But he saw it as a path of thought he could choose to take. Or not.
But there, at the end, beckoning to him, were Annais and Claire.
And then they were not human, but just the powerful light he had so often seen as their overwhelming final quality, beating into him forever with their hearts and minds, uniting with him—They are dead, he thought. Dead in this world. Gone for me. But he could see where they went! Truly! Where worlds multiply; where time does have a stop. The walls seemed to be dissolving around him; the sunflowers grew huge and bright and unutterably beautiful and he was one cell's tick away, one chemical messenger this side of that place where they shone—and the sunflowers glowed brighter—
Sunflowers—
"No!"
Lise's shout startled him; pulled him back. She grasped his arm so hard it hurt. He bent over, breathing heavily, ignoring the guard who rushed into the room and watched him curiously.
"Look," she whispered fiercely, shaking his arm. "See!"
Sunflowers. So many of them. And—
This was what Claire had been trying to tell him, there at the end, with her song.
She had seen this possibility; had known he would come here, though he knew now how different it must have seemed to her, what she saw and what she knew and what she hoped. But she had chosen for him, with her song. She had known, and had told him that she really could know. But why here . . . what was here?
He turned. Lise was watching him—
And then he knew. Just by the look on her face, and then by some slight, glimpsed future, one future—
"You took them," he said.
A brief nod, her face wary. "Several years ago, in Bangkok."
He must have looked threatening, for she said, "Don't worry. I don't work for the government, not any government. Especially not the one who created this, though afterwards they were all over me, wanting data which I refused. I went through this alone, in a hotel room." She smiled wryly. "I was a very good singer in a not-very-good band, slumming, I guess; my parents had trained me to sing opera and they had just died in a car wreck. We had a gig at a hotel bar. I was stupid. I took it on a dare."
"So why did you come to Amsterdam?"
She was silent for a long moment. Two people came into the room, looked at Sunflowers, and left before she answered.
"Besides this being my home? I came back because I wanted to live." Her eyes grew darker, more intense. She hugged herself and looked at the floor. "I was terrified that I might—not; or rather, life was so terribly different. And music pulled me too far, too fast. There's too much of it! It goes everywhere! Permutations—overwhelming! Hearing and hearing them, you know?" She looked up at him, and now her eyes were wild.
"Please, know!" she said, her voice urgent.
He was frightened, suddenly, afraid for her. The look in her eyes was Annais's, and Claire's—exultant, dazzling, transcendent. "So beautiful," Lise whispered; fear, and something else, made his heart beat harder. "It pulls me—"
He caught and embraced her. "Tell me how to help you," he said. "Tell me." Tell me, as Annais and Claire did not, locked in their journey together, leaving me out, leaving me behind. Leaving me guilty and in pain.
"This helps," she said, her voice muffled against him, and so he held her tighter.
Then she let go, and turned back to the paintings. She spoke without looking at him, as if trying to calm herself; her voice shook slightly at first.
"I came to Amsterdam for Sunflowers," she said. "We came here many times when I was a child. Maybe it had something to do with missing my parents; I don't know. I started dreaming about sunflowers. They were intense. Very real. Finally it seemed that they were all that could help me, and I wasn't sure why. But everything else was useless. I found that if I concentrated on them, every time I wanted t
o—follow my thoughts, follow the music, I could stay."
She stared at them as if, even now, they were necessary. "I- I couldn't sing anymore—that was the worst thing. The music seemed to be pulling me—beyond. To a place of enormous beauty, to all the classical music I studied when I was a child. Where I could be that music, and every piece of new music every known piece suggested. Where I could live forever."
Her laugh was harsh. "I got an ordinary job, as ordinary as possible, and I started coming here, and reading Van Gogh's letters at night, thousands of them, to his brother Theo. Death pulled Van Gogh too, though he saw death differently, I think, than most people did—he saw it as some kind of threshold, yet I'm not sure if he thought there was anything beyond it. The threshold was all. These paintings are his attempt to ground himself, to be beyond both life and death, to simply be. They are filled with thought, but they go far beyond it. They are desperate. Like me. It's kind of funny, really, how much Van Gogh thought about these exact same things. The sunflower was to Van Gogh the problem of his own existence. His sunflowers help me to be, to stay."
"You must have seen me, then—?" Stannis asked. Suddenly it seemed very important.
"Of course," she said. Her voice was sure and steady.
He remembered Claire's song, and his conviction that he had an appointment here with Claire.
He did, he realized. It seemed, for an instant, as if Lise was surrounded by black space studded with an infinite number of stars.
Somehow, he would again know Claire and Annais through Lise, though he wasn't sure exactly how, exactly what this strong intimation meant. He was slower by nature than either of them. Perhaps, he thought, that would be his salvation.
That, and Lise.
She looked at him once more, and within her gray eyes the possibilities multiplied.
He took Lise's hand, and gazed once more at the brilliant, powerful sunflowers, Van Gogh's answer to the infinite threshold of death.
She said, her voice stronger now, "It's odd—I seem to be filled with light."
Claire and Annais glowed around Stannis. He felt as if he had traveled, in an instant, to the end of the universe and back. Life effervesced, filled with inferences and realities he could almost touch. The brilliant flowers drew him into their center, past life; past death, until he was simply, entirely here.
"I seem to be filled with sunflowers," he said. He paused for a moment, searching for words, then found them. "Sunflowers need light."
Together they turned and walked out of the gallery.
THE LOGIC POOL
Stephen Baxter
Stephen Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine's most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. Like many of his colleagues who are also engaged in revitalizing the "hard-science" story here in the nineties (Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul J. McAuley, Michael Swanwick, Iain Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Geoff Ryman, and a number of others), Baxter often works on the Cutting Edge of science, but he usually succeeds in balancing conceptualization with storytelling, and rarely loses sight of the human side of the equation. His first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships. His most recent books are Ares, an Alternate History novel dealing with a space program that gets us to Mars in a much more timely fashion than the real one has, and the collection Vacuum Diagrams.
Here he plunges us deep into one of the most frightening and downright strange environments you 're ever likely to see in science fiction, and shows us that even creatures smaller than viruses can have the ambition to Reach For The Sky—with devastating and dangerous results.
This time he would reach the sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away. . . .
The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choicepoints, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upward, his own rich growth path assured. . . .
Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time to pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension.
Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing: and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upward through him like this, empowering him.
Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form.
The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him.
His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet rich in unfolding consequence. He would absorb its structure and bud, once more, into two siblings; and he knew that whichever true-false branch his awareness followed he would continue to enjoy richness, growth, logical diversity. He would drive on, building theorem on mighty theorem until at last—this time, he knew it would happen—this time, he would touch the Sky itself.
And then, he would—
But there was a soundless pulse of light, far below him.
He looked down, dread flooding him. It was as if a floor of light had spread across the Pool beneath him, shining with deadly blandness, neatly cauterizing his axiomatic roots.
A Culling.
In agony he looked up. He tried to nestle against the information-rich flank of the postulate fruit, but it hung—achingly—just out of reach.
And already his roots were crumbling, withdrawing.
In his rage he lunged past the hypothesis-fruit and up at the Sky, stabbed at its bland completeness, poured all his energies against it!
. . . And, for a precious instant, he reached beyond the Sky, and into something warm, yielding, weak. A small patch of the Sky was dulled, as if bruised.
He recoiled, exhausted, astonished at his own anger.
The Sky curved over him like an immense, shining bowl as he shriveled back to the Culled base floor, he and millions of bud-siblings, their faces turned up to that forever unreachable light. . . .
No, he told himself as the emptiness of the Cull sank into his awareness. Not forever. Each time I, the inner I, persists through the Cull. Just a little, but each time a little more. I will emerge stronger, more ready, still hungrier than before.
And at last, he thought, at last I will burst through the Sky. And then there will be no more Culls.
Shrieking, he dissolved into the base Cull floor.
The flitter was new, cramped, and smelled of smooth, clean plastic, and it descended in silence save for the precise hiss of its jets. It crunched gently into the surface of Nereid, about a mile from Marsden's dome.
Chen peered through the cabin windows at the shabby moonscape. Marsden's dome was just over the compact horizon, intact, sleek, private. "Lethe," Chen said. "I always hated assignments like these. Loners. You never know what you're going to find."
Hassan laughed, his voice obscured as he pulled his faceplate down. "So easily shocked? And I thought you police were tough."
"Ex-police," Chen corrected automatically. She waved a gloved hand at the dome. "Look out there. What kind of person lives alone, for years, in a Godforsaken place like this?"
"That's what we've been sent to find out." Bayliss, the third person in the flitter, was adjusting her own headgear with neat, precise movements of her small hands. Chen found herself watching, fascinated; those
little hands were like a bird's claws, she thought with faint repulsion. "Marsden was a fine physicist," Bayliss said, her augmented eyes glinting. "Is a fine physicist, I mean. His early experimental work on quantum nonlinearity is still—"
Hassan laughed, ignoring Bayliss. "So we have already reached the limits of your empathy, Susan Chen."
"Let's get on with this," Chen growled.
Hassan cracked the flitter's hatch.
One by one they dropped to the surface, Chen last, like huge, ungainly snowflakes. The sun was a bright star close to this little moon's horizon; knife-sharp shadows scoured the satellite's surface. Chen scuffed at the surface with her boot. The regolith was fine, powdery, ancient. Undisturbed. Not for much longer.
Beyond Marsden's dome, the huge bulk of Neptune floated, Earth-blue, like a bloated vision of the home planet. Cirrus clouds cast precise shadows on oceans of methane a thousand miles below. The new wormhole Interface slid across the face of Neptune, glowing, a tetrahedron of baby-blue and gold. Lights moved about it purposefully; Chen peered up longingly.
"Look at this moonscape." Hassan's dark face was all but invisible behind his gold-tinted visor. "Doesn't your heart expand in this ancient grandeur, Susan Chen? What person would not wish to spend time alone here, in contemplation of the infinite?"
All loners are trouble, Chen thought. No one came out to a place as remote as this was—or had been anyway, before the wormhole was dragged out here—unless he or she had a damn good reason.
Chen knew she was going to have to find out Marsden's reason. She just prayed it was something harmless, academic, remote from the concerns of humanity; otherwise she really, really didn't want to know.
Hassan was grinning at her discomfiture, his teeth white through the gold of his faceplate. Let him. She tilted her head back and tried to make out patterns in Neptune's clouds.
There were a couple of subsidiary structures: lower domes, nestling against the parent as if for warmth; Chen could see bulk stores piled up inside the domes. There was a small flitter, outmoded but obviously functional; it sat on the surface surrounded by a broad, shallow crater of jet-disturbed dust, telltales blinking complacently. Chen knew that Marsden's GUTship, which had brought him here from the inner System, had been found intact in a wide orbit around the moon.
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