Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "Yes, that's what we would like. Wouldn't we, darling?" Galen's wife neither moved nor spoke. Galen's head turned towards her, and Quy caught his expression at last. She'd thought it would be contempt, or hatred; but no; it was anguish. He genuinely loved her, and he couldn't understand what was going on.

  Galactics. Couldn't he recognize an immerser junkie when he saw one? But then Galactics, as Tam said, seldom had the problem—they didn't put on the immersers for more than a few days on low settings, if they ever went that far. Most were flat-out convinced Galactic would get them anywhere.

  Second Uncle and Galen were haggling, arguing prices and features; Second Uncle sounding more and more like a Galactic tourist as the conversation went on, more and more aggressive for lower and lower gains. Quy didn't care anymore: she watched Agnes. Watched the impenetrable avatar—a red-headed woman in the latest style from Prime, with freckles on her skin and a hint of a star-tan on her face. But that wasn't what she was, inside; what the immerser had dug deep into.

  Wasn't who she was at all. Tam was right; all immersers should be taken apart, and did it matter if they exploded? They'd done enough harm as it was.

  Quy wanted to get up, to tear away her own immerser, but she couldn't, not in the middle of the negotiation. Instead, she rose, and walked closer to Agnes; the two men barely glanced at her, too busy agreeing on a price. "You're not alone," she said, in Rong, low enough that it didn't carry.

  Again, that odd, disjointed flash. "You have to take it off," Quy said, but got no further response. As an impulse, she grabbed the other woman's arm; felt her hands go right through the immerser's avatar, connect with warm, solid flesh.

  ***

  You hear them negotiating, in the background—it's tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen's onslaught. It's all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and this body cue, nudging you this way and that—you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband—and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.

  You feel, all the while, the Rong girl's gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won't move away from you; and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn't think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the color of cinnamon—no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a color you've seen all your life.

  "You have to take it off," she says. You don't move; but you wonder what she's talking about.

  Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?

  The immerser.

  Abruptly, you remember—a dinner with Galen's friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears; and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language; that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn't remove it. And then . . . and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed—saw nothing it hadn't tagged and labelled for you. Then . . .

  Then it all slid down, didn't it? You couldn't program the network anymore, couldn't look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen's compartment, wandering in the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself—as if you'd already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then—then the immerser wouldn't come off, anymore.

  ***

  "What do you think you're doing, young woman?"

  Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy—his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. "We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don't mind." It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her—an angry foreigner whose food order she'd misunderstood—whom she'd mock later, sitting in Tam's room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister's musings.

  "I apologize," Quy said, meaning none of it.

  "That's all right," Galen said. "I didn't mean to—" he paused, looked at his wife. "I shouldn't have brought her here."

  "You should take her to see a physician," Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.

  "Do you think I haven't tried?" His voice was bitter. "I've even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can't take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn't . . ." He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. "Who knows if she'd come back?"

  Quy felt herself blush. "I'm sorry." And she meant it this time.

  Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn't think tears were manly, she remembered. "So we're agreed?" Galen asked Second Uncle. "For a million credits?"

  Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavors. "I'm sorry," she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart—with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.

  ***

  "I'm sorry," the girl says—she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don't go, you want to say. Please don't go. Please don't leave me here.

  But they're all shaking hands; smiling, pleased at a deal they've struck—like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you; giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.

  Please don't go.

  It's as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn't know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant's main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalizing smells of food—of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make—you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She's walking fast—you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room; and you follow her inside.

  They're watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

  In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they've been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they'll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

  This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can't think like a Galactic, they'll never ever think like that. You can't think like a Galactic unless you've been born in the culture.

  Or drugg
ed yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

  You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

  "I know about this," you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. "Let me help you, younger sisters."

  Worlds Like a Hundred Thousand Pearls, by Aliette de Bodard

  Exponential: the transcendental number that is the base of Napierian or natural logarithms, approximately equal to 2.71828. The number also has applications in probability theory--symbol e, first referenced in work by John Napier in 1618 AD.

  Shall I tell you a story?

  Not the Buddhist fables in the sutras, about kings and their sons--the cryptic wisdom you stopped believing when war stole your husband from you, leaving you with only a hologram on the ancestral shrine, and your son Hoang, too young to understand, who kept asking you why Daddy wasn't coming home. Not a Daoist story either, full of heroes with peach-wood swords and demon-fights--where the dead can rise, and walk again: the miracles that never happen. For you have stood at too many funerals, watching the coffins covered with a yellow shroud, and no one ever woke up, not even to become the shambling monstrosities that used to frighten Hoang so much.

  No, it is a far, far older tale; older even than Gautama Buddha himself. You might have heard some of it already, in one form or another--the Lotus and the other sutras, for instance, speak of worlds upon worlds, stacked atop each other like Hoang's toys--each awaiting the Honored One's coming, that he might teach them the way to Nirvana.

  Before you ask, I know nothing of Nirvana, or the Honored One. I have never seen them on my travels. But the worlds...

  The worlds are there, scattered like a broken necklace--a hundred thousand pearls ready to be picked up, and the way between them requiring only a thought to be opened.

  A thought. You don't say it, but I hear it all the same. You think it's not a much better story than the ones I mocked. You sit in your deserted house, your hands smelling of dirt--thinking that you should wash them, that you should check the Eight Diagrams mirror above the door of your house, make sure the angry ghost won't find his way home--though you cannot imagine Hoang ever angry, or vengeful: merely lost and bereft, weeping for the descendants he'll never have. You listen to me as you listened to the elders who told you not to mourn--who told you that the old shouldn't break their hearts over the young, that a child's death is a tragedy, but not so great as losing a parent.

  Let me tell you about the worlds. I've walked a hundred thousand of them--under red suns, in deserts strewn with glass, by lakes shining under starlight. I have seen a city so large the sun never set on its gilded pagodas; a world of habitats in the Heavens, where the people released their dead on metal kites that slid down towards the scorched earth; a forest of crystal on a vast sea, where the wind sang songs like fisherman's laments.

  They're the worlds of paths not taken, of choices not made, of outcomes that never came to pass. Everything that happened around you--every direction taken by the myriad aircars in Hanoi's Old Quarter, every brush of a butterfly's wings, held in Hoang's cupped hands--every moment, every gesture, every held or released breath--they all gave rise to universes, the new rising from the debris of the old.

  Your eyes narrow. You watch me--you see me for the first time, standing by your side with my hand outstretched--holding out a piece of crystal that trembles with the weight of our breaths, scattering faint notes in the silence of the room. You see my face--which isn't Viet or Chinese, or Westerner, which is like nothing you have seen before--and for the first time, you realize that this--all of this--might be for real.

  It is.

  Your breath catches in your throat; and the shard of crystal in my hand tightens in answer. You'd ask why; but you know better. There are no reasons in the universe--because, if there were any, you wouldn't be here with the white headband of mourning still coiled on the table.

  So, instead, you ask about the worlds. You ask about the other ones--the ones where the aircar swerved right instead of left; the ones where Hoang didn't cross the street running, excited about showing you the cicada in his hand.

  There is an answer; but it is neither easy nor simple. Bear with me.

  My order is old; old enough for its origins to have been lost. We have opened the gates between worlds for as long as we can remember--on a held breath, on an empty mind, on a single thought spun into nothingness. We take nothing. We own nothing. We decide nothing--not even the destination on which a gate opens. We travel, witnessing the wonders and the horrors; the myriad dreams and fears of the living--the joys and the sorrows, the births and the funerals--the fabric that binds people everywhere, whatever their shape, language, or thoughts.

  So yes, you might see Hoang again, or your husband. I can't foresee where your path might take you. I can, however, give you one warning.

  We cannot hold on to anything. It is a necessary condition: as in the Buddhist tales, it's only detachment that will unlock the world; and you can only leave a world for another if you have nothing to lose.

  You might, perhaps, see them again; but they would be as strangers to you--you would feel nothing, perhaps not even the slight flutter that comes when you walk by an old acquaintance in the street.

  You know all about pain, and having nothing to lose. You think you can pay the price, if only for the slight chance that it offers of seeing Hoang again. But I know about pain, too; and about renouncement; and I can tell you that it is a heavy price to pay.

  I can tell you, too, that in time, the rawness of grief would become dull, like a knife's blade eroded by the sea; that you would walk by Lake Hoan Kiem and think of the time Hoang scraped his knee on the path to the temple--and that your heart would contract a little, with caring and with love, and the remembrance of happy times. That you would find comfort in your elders' words, and in the small chatter of your siblings and cousins at family reunions--and, perhaps, in time, find someone else to love as much as you love your husband and your son.

  In time, you would dismiss me as a sick mind's fancy.

  Shall I tell you a story?

  Like all good stories, it ends with a moral--a question, and a warning. Come with us, and you'll have the whole of space and time spread before you--more wonders and terrors than you can even imagine, to fill the emptiness in your heart. But only if you can accept that you'll never be able to grasp and hold any of it--that you'll never own anything, never master anything. Only if you accept that you will never love anyone ever again.

  Come; tell me your answer.

  The Heartless Light of Stars, by Aliette de Bodard

  Speed of light: a physical constant denoting the speed of light in a vacuum, important in many areas of physics, and valued at 299,792,458 meters per second. It is the maximum speed at which all energy, matter, and information in the universe can travel--symbol c, postulated in Einstein's special theory of relativity in 1905 AD.

  Vu had never been able to speak to Thuy. Even when they were children, he'd had got on well with the rest of his siblings--had chased lizards with them in the courtyard of their house, clung to them as the family scooter, laden with fish and fruit, wove its way through the congested traffic; and had breathed in their dreams, sharing their longings and aspirations as though they were his own.

  Except for Thuy. She was the youngest child of their family, and she'd always been quiet and soft-spoken--almost a girl from another century, deferential to the point of muteness. The only one of her siblings she seemed to speak to was their eldest brother, Loi; but that was before the Exodus, before Loi went up into space--got himself frozen into cold storage and traveled all the way to some distant star Vu couldn't remember the name of, all in the name of spreading the shadow of Viet Nam's dragon among the stars.

  After Loi's departure, Thuy had stopped speaking to Vu altogether.
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  Except that Thuy was there now: she'd bullied her way into Vu's house, telling him it was high time they had a family gathering, and that she would be there whether he wished it or not. And she'd come as promised, and Vu still didn't know what to say. He'd watched her for a while, and she'd stared back, not saying a word either--until sheer embarrassment won, and Thuy busied herself in the kitchen, scrubbing the skin of a chicken with rock salt in preparation for the banquet. She didn't look as though she needed help; and Vu found himself drifting back to the living room, where a blinking light on his console reminded him he had a message from Loi.

  Vu sat down, and called it up with a flick of his fingers. The ghostly image of his elder brother flickered to life in front of the sofa--Loi looked worn, his face pale with some stress he couldn't name.

  "You should see it, little bro. It's so beautiful out there--the ship's looking a bit worse for wear, because we took a section apart for materials, but the view... the view is still breathtaking. There's nothing and nobody but us--"

  In space, distance is time. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the speed of light is finite--and Loi's message, relayed through the satellites into the network, came from so far away it was a glimpse of the past: the station he described would be complete now, glinting in the cold, unblinking light of the stars (there was no atmosphere in space, he'd explained, nothing that would cause starlight to twinkle as it did above the pollution cloud of Ho Chi Minh City). And, unless you could bribe an official for access to the only ansible station in the country--high up north, in Ha Noi--delayed messages were the only thing you ever got back from space.

  Vu could hear Thuy in the kitchen--casseroles were banging together, and there was the familiar, hooting sound of the rice cooker bringing the water to a boil.