Indeed. Why not? It would be something to do.
She found she only had to modify her velocity a little. She had already been heading roughly that way by accident, from that first panicked outburst.
She passed the time reading works from a million poets, from a million noble races. She created subpersonae—little separate personalities, which could argue with each other, discussing the relative merits of so many planet-bound points of view. It helped to pass the time.
Soon, after only a few thousand years, it was time to decelerate, or she would simply streak past the center, with no time even to contemplate the bottom, the navel of creation.
Serena used much of her reserve killing the last of her velocity, relative to the bubble of galaxies. All around her the red shifts were the same, constant. All the galaxies seemed to recede away at the same rate.
So. Here I am.
She coasted, and realized that she had just completed the last task of any relevance she could ever aspire to. There were no more options. No other deeds that could be done.
“Hello?”
Irritably, Serena wiped her conversation banks, clearing away the subpersonae that had helped her while away the last few centuries. She did not want those little artificial voices disturbing her as she contemplated the manner of bringing about her own end.
I wonder how big a flash I’ll make, she thought. Is it even remotely possible that anyone back in the inhabited universe might see it, even if they were looking this way with the best instruments?
She caressed the fields in her engines, and knew she had the will to do what must be done.
“Hello? Has somebody come?”
Serena sent angry surges through her lingula systems. Stop it.
Suicide would come none too soon. I must be going crazy, she subvocalized, and some of her agony slipped out into space around her.
“Yes, many feel that way when they arrive here.”
Quakes of surprise made Serena tremble. The voice had come from outside!
“Who … who are you?” she gasped.
“I am the one who waits, the one who collects and greets,” the voice replied. And then, after some hesitation:
“I am the coward.”
6.
Joy sparkled and burst from Serena. She shouted, though the only one in the universe to hear her was near enough to touch. She cried aloud.
“There is a way!”
The coward was larger than Serena. He drifted nearby, looking like nothing so much as a great assemblage of junk from every and any civilization imaginable. He had already explained that the bits and pieces had been contributed by countless stranded entities before her. By now he was approaching the mass of a small star and had to hold the pieces apart with webs of frozen field lines.
The coward seemed disturbed by Serena’s enthusiasm.
“But I’ve already explained to you, it isn’t a way! It is death!”
Serena could not make clear to the thing that she had already been ready to die. “That remains to be seen. All I know is that you have told me there is a way out of this place, and that many have arrived here before me and taken that route away from here.”
“I tell you it is a funnel into hell!”
“So a black hole seems, to planet-dwellers, but we Grand Voyageurs dive into them and traverse the tortured lanes of Kaluza space—”
“And I have told you that this is not a black hole! And what lies within this opening is not Kaluza space, but a door into madness and destruction!”
Serena found that she pitied the poor thing. She could not imagine choosing, as it obviously had, to sit here at the center of nothingness for all eternity, an eternity broken every few million years by the arrival of one more stranded voyager. Apparently every one of Serena’s predecessors had ignored the poor thing’s advice, given him what they had to spare, and then eagerly taken that escape offered, no matter how hazardous.
“Show it to me, please,” she asked politely.
The coward sighed and turned to lead the way.
7.
It has long been hypothesized that there was more than one episode of creation.
The discovery that the universe of galaxies is distributed like soap bubbles, each expanding from its own center, was the great confirmation that the Big Bang, at least, had not been undivided.
But the ideas went beyond that.
What if, they had wondered, even in ancient days, what if there are other universes altogether?
She and Coward traded data files while they moved leisurely toward the hole at the very center of All. Serena was in no hurry, now that she had a destination again. She savored the vast store of knowledge Coward had accumulated.
Her own Grand Voyageurs were not the first, it seemed, to have cruised the great wormholes between the galaxies. There were others, some greater, who had nevertheless found themselves for whatever reason shipwrecked here at the base of everything.
And all of them, no doubt, had contemplated the dizzying emptiness that lay before them now.
A steady stream of very strange particles emanated from a twisted shapelessness. Rarities, such as magnetic monopoles, swept past Serena more thickly than she ever would have imagined possible. Here they were more common than atoms.
“As I said, it leads to another place, where the fundamentals of our universe do not hold. We can tell very little from this side, only that, charge, mass, gravity,all have different meanings. Tell me, then, what hope does a creature of our universe have of surviving there? Will your circuits conduct? Will your junctions quantum-jump properly? Will your laser drives even function if electrons aren’t allowed to occupy the same energy state?”
For a moment the coward’s fear infected Serena. The closer she approached, the more eerie and dangerous this undertaking seemed.
“And nobody has ever come back out again,” the coward whispered.
Serena shook herself out of her funk. Her situation remained the same. If this was nothing more than yet another way to suicide, at least it had the advantage of being interesting.
And who knows? Many of my predecessors were wiser than I, and they all chose this path, as well.
“I thank you for your friendship,” she told the coward. “I give you all of this spare mass, from my cargo, as a token of affection.”
Resignedly, the coward sent drone ships to pick up the baggage Serena shed. They cruised away into the blackness.
“What you see is only a small fraction of what I have accumulated,” he explained.
“How much?”
He gave her a number, and for a long moment there was only silence between them. Then the coward went on.
“Lately you castaways have been growing more and more common. I have hope that soon someone shall arrive who will leave me more than fragments.”
Serena pulsed to widen the gap between them. She began to feel a soft tug—something wholly unlike gravity, or any other force she had ever known.
“I wish you well,” she said.
The coward, too, began to back away. The other’s voice was chastened, somber. “So many others seem to find me pitiable, because I wait here, because I am not adventuresome.”
“I do believe you will find your own destiny,” she told him. She dared not say what she really thought, so she kept her words vague. “You will find greatness that surpasses that of even those much more bold in spirit,” she predicted.
Then, before the stunned ancient thing could reply, she turned and accelerated toward her destiny.
8.
On planets, they say, water always runs downhill …
From the bottom, from as low as one could go in all the universe, Serena plunged downward into another place. Her shields thickened and her drives flexed. As ready as she would ever be, she dived into the strangeness ahead.
She thought about the irony of it all.
He calls himself Coward … she contemplated, and knew that it was unfair.
She, and
all of those who had plunged this way, blindly into the unknowable, were the real cowards in a way. Oh, she could only speak for herself, but she guessed that their greatest motive was fear, fear of the long loneliness, the empty aeons without anything to do.
And all the while Coward accumulated mass: bits of space junk … debris cast out from Kaluza space … cargo jettisoned or donated by castaways who, like her, were only passing through …
He had told Serena how much mass. And then he had told her that the rate of accumulation was slowly growing over the long epochs.
And with the mass, he accumulates knowledge. For Serena had opened her libraries to him, and found them absorbed more quickly than she would ever have thought possible. The same thing must have happened countless times before.
Already space had warped beyond recognition around her. Serena looked back and out at all the galaxies, distant motes of light now smeared into swirls of lambent glow.
Astronomers of every civilization puzzle over the question of the missing mass, Serena thought.
Calculations showed that there had to be more mass than could be counted by measuring the galaxies, and what could be detected of the gases in between. Even cosmic rays and neutrinos could not account for it. Half of the matter was simply missing.
Coward had told her. He was accumulating it. Here and there. Dark patches, clots, stuffed in field-stabilized clusters, scattered around the vast emptiness of the center of the great galactic bubble.
Perhaps I should have stayed and talked with him some more, Serena thought as the smeared light melded into a golden glory.
She might have told him. She might have said it. But with all of his brainpower, no doubt he had figured it out long ago and chose to hide the knowledge away from himself.
All that mass.
Someday the galaxies would die. No new stars would be born. The glow would fade. Life—even life crafted out of baryonic machines—would glimmer and go out.
But the recession of the dead whirlpools would slow. It would stop, reverse, and fall again, toward the great gravitational pull at the center of each bubble. And there universes would be born anew.
Serena saw the last glimmer of galactic light twinkle and disappear. She knew the real reason why she had chosen to take this gamble, to dive into this tunnel to an alien realm.
It was one thing to flee loneliness.
It was quite another thing to flee one who would be God.
No wonder all the others had made the same choice.
The walls of the tunnel converged. She plunged ahead. All around her was strangeness.
***
© 1987 by David Brin.
KAREN JOY FOWLER
Karen Joy Fowler (born February 7, 1950) is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation.
She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name.
She is the author of two story collections and three novels, the third of which, Sister Noon, came out from Putnam in May of 2001 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award. Her best known work is the novel Sarah Canary, published in 1991.
She has taught creative writing at Stanford, the University of California at Davis, Cleveland State, Alabama University, and numerous summer workshops. She is a frequent instructor in the Michigan State Clarion workshop. Her short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999; her first two novels were both New York Times notable books in their year.
Standing Room Only, by Karen Joy Fowler
Hugo Nomination for Best Short Story 1998
On Good Friday 1865, Washington, D.C. was crowded with tourists and revelers. Even Willard’s, which claimed to be the largest hotel in the country, with room for 1200 guests, had been booked to capacity. Its lobbies and sitting rooms were hot with bodies. Gas light hissed from golden chandeliers, spilled over the doormen’s uniforms of black and maroon. Many of the revelers were women. In 1865, women were admired for their stoutness and went anywhere they could fit their hoop skirts. The women at Willard’s wore garishly colored dresses with enormous skirts and resembled great inverted tulips. The men were in swallow coats.
Outside it was almost spring. The forsythia bloomed, dusting the city with yellow. Weeds leapt up in the public parks; the roads melted to mud. Pigs roamed like dogs about the city, and dead cats by the dozens floated in the sewers and perfumed the rooms of the White House itself.
The Metropolitan Hotel contained an especially rowdy group of celebrants from Baltimore, who passed the night of April 13 toasting everything under the sun. They resurrected on the morning of the 14th, pale and spent, surrounded by broken glass and sporting bruises they couldn’t remember getting.
It was the last day of Lent. The war was officially over, except for Joseph Johnston’s confederate army and some action out West. The citizens of Washington, D.C. still began each morning reading the daily death list. If anything, this task had taken on an added urgency. To lose someone you loved now, with the rest of the city madly, if grimly, celebrating, would be unendurable.
The guests in Mary Surratt’s boarding house began the day with a breakfast of steak, eggs and ham, oysters, grits and whiskey. Mary’s seventeen-year old daughter, Anna, was in love with John Wilkes Booth. She had a picture of him hidden in the sitting room, behind a lithograph entitled “Morning, Noon, and Night.” She helped her mother clear the table and she noticed with a sharp and unreasonable disapproval that one of the two new boarders, one of the men who only last night had been given a room, was staring at her mother.
Mary Surratt was neither a pretty women, nor a clever one, nor was she young. Anna was too much of a romantic, too star and stage-struck, to approve. It was one thing to lie awake at night in her attic bedroom, thinking of JW. It was another to imagine her mother playing any part in such feelings.
Anna’s brother John once told her that five years ago a woman named Henrietta Irving had tried to stab Booth with a knife. Failing, she’d thrust the blade into her own chest instead. He seemed to be under the impression that this story would bring Anna to her senses. It had, as anyone could have predicted, the opposite effect. Anna had also heard rumors that Booth kept a woman in a house of prostitution near the White House. And once she had seen a piece of paper on which Booth had been composing a poem. You could make out the final version:
Now in this hour that we part,
I will ask to be forgotten never
But, in thy pure and guileless heart,
Consider me thy friend dear Eva.
Anna would sit in the parlor while her mother dozed and pretend she was the first of these women, and if she tired of that, she would sometimes dare to pretend she was the second, but most often she liked to imagine herself the third.
Flirtations were common and serious, and the women in Washington worked hard at them. A war in the distance always provides a rich context of desperation, while at the same time granting women a bit of extra freedom. They might quite enjoy it, if the price they paid were anything but their sons.
The new men had hardly touched their food, cutting away the fatty parts of the meat and leaving them in a glistening greasy wasteful pile. They’d finished the whiskey, but made faces while they drank. Anna had resented the compliment of their eyes and, paradoxically, now resented the insult of their plates. Her mother set a good table.
In fact, Anna did not like them and hoped they would not be staying. She had often seen men outside the Surratt Boarding House lately, men who busied themselves in unpersuasive activities when she passed them. She connected these new men to those, and she was perspicacious enough to blame their boarder Louis Wiechman for the lot of them, without ever knowing the extent to which she was right. She had lived for the past year in a confederate household in the heart of Washington. Everyone around her had secrets. She had grown quite used to this.
Wiechman was a permanent guest at the Surratt boarding house, He was a fat, friendly man who worked in the office of the Commissary General of Prisons and shared John Surratt’s bedroom. Secrets were what Wiechman traded in. He provided John, who was a courier for the Confederacy, with substance for his covert messages south. But then Wiechman had also, on a whim, sometime in March, told the clerks in the office that a Secesh plot was being hatched against the President in the very house where he roomed.
It created more interest than he had anticipated. He was called into the office of Captain McDavitt and interviewed at length. As a result, the Surratt boarding house was under surveillance from March through April, although, it is an odd fact that no records of the surveillance or the interview could be found later.
Anna would surely have enjoyed knowing this. She liked attention as much as most young girls. And this was the backdrop of a romance. Instead, all she could see was that something was up and that her pious, simple mother was part of it.
The new guest, the one who talked the most, spoke with a strange lisp and Anna didn’t like this either. She stepped smoothly between the men to pick up their plates. She used the excuse of a letter from her brother to go out directly after breakfast. “Mama,” she said. “I’ll just take John’s letter to poor Miss Ward.”
Just as her brother enjoyed discouraging her own romantic inclinations, she made it her business to discourage the affections of Miss Ward with regard to him. Calling on Miss Ward with the letter would look like a kindness, but it would make the point that Miss Ward had not gotten a letter herself.
Besides, Booth was in town. If Anna was outside, she might see him again.
The thirteenth had been beautiful, but the weather on the fourteenth was equal parts mud and wind. The wind blew bits of Anna’s hair loose and tangled them up with the fringe of her shawl. Around the Treasury Building she stopped to watch a carriage sunk in the mud all the way up to the axle. The horses, a matched pair of blacks, were rescued first. Then planks were laid across the top of the mud for the occupants. They debarked, a man and a woman, the woman unfashionably thin and laughing giddily as with every unsteady step her hoop swung and unbalanced her, first this way and then that. She clutched the man’s arm and screamed when a pig burrowed past her, then laughed again at even higher pitch. The man stumbled into the mire when she grabbed him, and this made her laugh, too. The man’s clothing was very fine, although now quite speckled with mud. A crowd gathered to watch the woman — the attention made her helpless with laughter.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 157