Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

by Hamilton, Peter F. ; Reynolds, Alastair; Macleod, Ken; Baxter, Stephen; Sullivan, Tricia; di Filippo, Paul; Roberts, Adam; Cadigan, Pat; Tidhar, Lavie; Whates, Ian

  “There was an accident,” I said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

  Larry’s voice issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It seemed to be coming from a long distance away, like a radio tuned to a distant galaxy. He said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

  I ran a hand over my head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

  “How long?” asked that eerie voice.

  “Nearly twenty-five years.”

  Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye…”

  “All dead,” I said. “Delahaye, Warren, Chen, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

  Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex.” He looked at me. “You seem to be doing all right, though.”

  I shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened.”

  Larry emitted that awful laugh again. “My god,” he said, “it’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think maybe I’ve become a superhero, Alex?”

  “That’s an… unusual way of looking at it,” I allowed warily.

  Larry sighed. “You’d think I’d get X-ray vision or something. Not…” he waved his not-quite-hands at me, “… this.”

  “Larry,” I said, “you need help.”

  Larry laughed. “Oh? You think? Jesus, Alex.” He started to pace back and forth. Then he stopped. “Where was I? Before?”

  “Afghanistan. We think you were just trying to find your way back here.”

  Larry shook his head, which was an awful thing to watch. “No. Before that. There was… everything was the wrong… shape…”

  I took a step forward and said, “Larry…”

  “And before that… I was here, and we were having this conversation…”

  “It’s just déjà vu,” I told him. “It’s hardly the worst of your worries.”

  Larry straightened up and his body seemed to gain coherence. “Alex,” he said, “how many times have we done this before?”

  I shook my head. “Too fucking many,” I said, and I plunged my hands into the seething exploding mass of Larry Day’s body and pulled us both back into Hell.

  I still wasn’t sure why I went back after escaping the second time. Maybe I just wanted to know what had happened to me, and there was no way to find out on my own. Maybe I was afraid that if I spent too long there I would forget what it was like to be human.

  The General and his three friends were unavailable. I later discovered that they had been in hospital ever since they saw what I turned the table into; one of them never recovered. In their place, I was assigned two more Generals – one from the Air Force and one from the Army – and an Admiral, and a team of eager young scientists, all looked after by quiet, efficient people from the CIA and the NSA.

  I was questioned, over and over and over again, and the answers I was able to give them wouldn’t have covered the back of a postage stamp. One of the scientists asked me, “What’s it like there? How many dimensions does it have?” and all I could tell him was, “Not enough. Too many. I don’t know.”

  We were unprepared. We knew too little, and that was why he nearly got me that first time. I knew that Point Zero was like a beacon there, a great solid negative tornado, and one of the few useful pieces of advice I was able to contribute was to keep a watch on the SCC for any manifestations. I went back to our old house in Sioux Crossing to wait, because I knew. I knew he was looking for a landmark, a reference point, because that was what I had done. When the manifestations began, I was bustled in great secrecy to the Site, and I saw him appear for the first time. Heard him speak for the first time. Thought, not for the last time, Of course. It had to be Larry.

  He was confused, frightened, angry, but he recovered quickly. I told him what had happened – what we understood, anyway – and he seemed to pull his exploding form together a little. He looked about him and said, “This must be what God feels like,” and my blood ran cold. And then I felt him try to take me apart and remake me, the way I had remade the table.

  I did the first thing that crossed my mind. I grabbed him and went back there with him, and I let him go and came back here.

  The second time he came back, it was the same thing. A few random manifestations, some baffling but relatively minor destruction. Then he found his way to Point Zero, confused, amnesiac. But he came to the same conclusion. This must be what God feels like. And I had to take him back there.

  And again. And again. And again.

  I walked an unimaginable distance. It took me an impossible length of time. Nothing here meant anything or made any sense, but there were structures, colossal things that were almost too small to see: the remains of Professor Delahaye and the other victims of The Accident. There were also the remains of a specially-trained SEAL team, sent in here by the President – not the present one but her predecessor – when he thought he could create a group of all-American superheroes. I, and pretty much every scientist involved in investigating the Accident, argued against that, but when the President says jump you just ask what altitude he wants, so the SEALs remain. There is no life or death there, only existence, so Professor Delahaye and the others exist in a Schrödinger not-quite-state, trying to make sense of what and where they are. If they ever succeed, I’m going to be busy.

  The scientists call this ‘Calabi-Yau space,’ or, if they’re trying to be particularly mysterious, ‘The Manifold.’ Which it may or may not be, nobody knows. The String Theorists, overwhelmed with joy at having eyewitness evidence of another space, named it, even though I could give them little in the way of confirmatory testimony. Calabi-Yau space exists a tiny fraction of a nanometre away from what I used to think of as ‘normal’ space, but it would take more than the total energy output of the entire universe to force a single photon between them.

  Travel between dimensions appears to be, however, more like judo than karate, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, Delahaye’s final shot manipulated those forces in just the wrong way, pitching everything within a radius of five metres into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that won’t be imaged. Someone once told me that the odds of the Accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But here’s the thing about odds and probability. You can talk about them as much as you want, do all the fancy math, but in the end there’s only Either/Or. That’s all that matters. Either you win all the jackpots on The Strip, or you don’t. Either it will happen, or it won’t. It did, and here I am. And here, somewhere, is Larry Day.

  Existing in Calabi-Yau space, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use the insight this gives you to manipulate the ‘real’ world, really is like being a god. Unfortunately, it’s like being one of the gods HP Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the human race is lucky that Larry seems unable to quite get the knack of godhood. None of us can work out why I acclimatised to it so easily, or why it’s still so difficult for Larry, why returning him there screws him up all over again while I can cross back and forth at will, without harm. Larry was one of the biggest brains humanity ever produced, and he can’t get the hang of The Manifold, while I, the world’s most prosaic man, as my ex-wife liked to remind me, took it more or less in my stride. All I can tell them is that every time we meet – and we’ve done this particular little pantomime fifty-two times so far – he seems to recover more quickly. One day he’s going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I won’t be able to take him back there. I’ll have to fight him here, and it�
�ll be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/Or. Either the world will survive, or it won’t.

  Larry is not a nice man. He was a great man, before the Accident, and I liked him a lot, until I found out about him and my wife. But he’s not a nice man. Of all the people in the world you’d want to get bitten by the radioactive spider, he’d probably come close to the bottom of the list.

  And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it is that Larry is not even the Nightmare Scenario. The Nightmare Scenario is that Delahaye and Chen and Morley and the SEAL team and all the animals who got onto the Site despite the billion-dollar-per-annum containment operation somehow drop into a rest state at once, and find their way here. If that happens, it’ll make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. I plan to be somewhere else on that day. I’m happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but I don’t owe these people anything.

  Eventually, I came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone here would recognise. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. I stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

  Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting me, of course, and I had learned long ago how to clothe myself before I came here. People hate it when naked men appear out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought me coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.

  “Mr Dolan,” said the President.

  “Madam President,” I said. I sipped my coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”

  “We noticed,” said one of the scientists, a man named Sierpinski. “The others?”

  “I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I’m not sure I should be checking them out; won’t observing them collapse them into one state or the other?”

  Sierpinski shrugged. We don’t know. Maybe we should make that our company song.

  “You look tired,” said the President.

  “I look how I want to look,” I snapped, and regretted it. She was not an unkind person, and I was tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby, balding, middle-aged man? If I wanted, I could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what I really want is to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, I cannot do.

  I looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how I had saved the world again.

  “Do you think I could have a sandwich?” I asked.

  SWEET SPOTS

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  Paul Di Filippo lives on Rhode Island and describes himself as a ‘Willy Nilly Buddhist,’ in that he adheres to the religion’s spiritual underpinning without necessarily following all its dictates. He also happens to be an extraordinary writer. Paul is the author of more than twenty novels, novellas and collections. He has won a BSFA Award and France’s Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and has been a finalist twice for the Nebula Award and once for the Philip K. Dick Award.

  “Officials were trying to determine on Monday how a man who walked through the wrong door on Sunday afternoon turned the busiest terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport into a human traffic jam on one of the busiest travel days of the year.”

  – James Barron,

  ‘Security Investigation Begins

  at Newark Airport,’

  The New York Times, January 4, 2010

  The way Arpad Stroll discovered his unique ability to identify and utilize universal sweet spots involved the unlikely confluence of his unrequited love for Veronica Kingslake, Mrs. Christelli’s physics class, the apelike antics of Willy Squidgeon, half a raisin bagel, an errant shaft of sunlight, a colored marker, a pair of cheap shoes, and a host of other unqualifiable factors, many of which were unknown to Arpad himself – at least on the conscious level.

  Arpad’s desk in Mrs. Christelli’s class occupied the front row, and stood nearest the door. Thus the teen had, if he so chose, an unrestricted view of one of the corridors of Edward Lorenz High School through the wire-gridded glass panels of the classroom’s exit door.

  Now, generally speaking, Arp enjoyed Mrs. Christelli’s physics lectures, and paid close attention. Science was cool, and offered a lot to occupy Arpad’s ingenious, busy mind.

  But on this grey, changeable, mostly overcast day, his mind was elsewhere. He had absorbed this section on entropy already, reading the textbook at home. The concepts of thermodynamics, intriguing as they were, held no mysteries for him.

  So, slumped in his seat, he was daydreaming about Veronica Kingslake – her long glossy blonde hair, her lush shape, her hypnotic, ass-switching walk, her light-hearted laughter – in short, all the assorted physical and temperamental characteristics which, conjoined into one exotic package, made her so alluring to Arp and to practically every other straight male at the school. How, Arp wondered, could he ever vault to the front of the pack of Veronica’s wannabe boyfriends—

  At that very moment, as dumpling-shaped Mrs. Christelli lectured with her back to the class while scrawling equations on the whiteboard, Arp chanced to look to his right and spotted Veronica herself ambling down the corridor.

  Arp straightened up magnetically, drawn to his beloved. If only he could escape this class and join her on whatever lone errand she pursued! Separated from the clique that normally accompanied Veronica everywhere, he might attain some new relationship with her that transcended mere indifferent tolerance.

  But Mrs. Christelli handed out lavatory passes with a parsimony approaching zero tolerance, especially in these waning minutes of class. If he couldn’t escape within the next few seconds, all was lost.

  What inspired Arp’s next move, he could not say, then or ever. There was no conscious thought, no deliberation or reasoned chain of logic. No calculating assessment of circumstances and possibilities and potentials. Whatever obscure engine of parsing and action that took command dwelled deep below even his subconscious, and transmitted its impulses directly to his muscles.

  Arp turned his head back to the class and caught the eye of Willy Squidgeon, fidgeting and bored.

  Willy was the class clown. It was a role he cherished and seemed positively born to. He resembled a good-natured, shaggy, red-haired Neanderthal with a face of malleable rubber. Once, Willy had legendarily climbed semi-naked to the top of the school’s cupola on a dare, substituting his boxer shorts for the state flag.

  Arp made the silent archetypical suite of chimp gestures – armpit scrabbling with curved hands, pop-eyed duckface hooting – and that was all it took.

  This shorthand semiotic challenge invariably provoked a vivid display of imitation Cheetah behavior from Willy. There was no possibility he would decline a performance if triggered. Even in the midst of memorial services for car-crash senior-prom fatalities, Willy would respond.

  Now he leaped to his feet, scrabbled atop his desk, and began to cavort noisily and exuberantly, with simian grace.

  Everything else fell into place almost simultaneously.

  Of course, the class went wild.

  Mrs. Christelli turned away from the whiteboard, marker in hand, to chastise Willy.

  At the back of the room, Ludmilla Duda instantly choked on the piece of bagel she was surreptitiously eating. Her frantic, panicky gasping for breath distracted the teacher’s reprimand, causing Mrs. Christelli to pivot uncertainly between harmless Willy and the direly choking girl.

  The clouds outside parted just then in a perfectly configured slit, and a blazing hot beam of sunlight, made all the more dazzling by the circumambient gloom, drove down from the heavens to strike square upon Mrs. Christelli’s face. Momentarily blinded, the teacher shuffled awkwardly in place like a tango dancer encountering a banana skin while trying to partner a horse. One shoe of her cheap, overstressed pair of Payless pumps chose that moment to exhibit a structural weakness, and its heel snapped off.

  The hefty Mrs.
Christelli went down like a felled sequoia, but not before she launched the whiteboard marker in her hand directly at Arp.

  The marker struck Arp weakly on the forehead, but without a moment’s surprise or hesitation he spontaneously clapped both hands to his left eye, bellowed wordlessly, and dashed from the room, yelling, “Nurse Miller, Nurse Miller, help!”

  Out in the corridor Arp slowed, lowered his arms, tugged his T-shirt into place, tried to assume a look of nonchalance, and caught up with Veronica.

  “Hi, Ron, what’s up?”

  Veronica, in all her Abercrombie & Fitch finery, bestowed a look upon Arp which, under the most charitable interpretation, might be deemed one of charitably suppressed pity mingled with innate repugnance.

  “Hey, Stroll. Going home early. Severe cramps and wicked PMS. See ya.”

  This intimate datum so disconcerted Arp, engendering a wild welter of stunning mental visuals, that he ground to a halt, mouth open like the bell of a tuba, and let Veronica depart.

  Opportunity blown.

  But – opportunity at least initially secured.

  The stunning reality of his providential escape from Mrs. Christelli’s class suddenly hit him.

  How in hell had all that unlikely stuff come together so perfectly?

  Jason Wardlaw, Arp’s best friend, enjoyed a curious pastime of his own invention, which he had dubbed “urbex skateboarding.” Disdaining professional skateparks as lame, and even turning up his nose at forbidden, police-patrolled municipal venues such as plazas, staircases and promenades, Jason would employ his battered Toy Machine Devil Cat deck only in ruined and abandoned industrial facilities, where dangling wires, cables and chains; rotting planks, detritus-laden floors and roofs; as well as teetering girders, ramps and towers offered the largest challenges to his art.

  Luckily, living in Detroit afforded Jay innumerable such sites.