“You’re not the only one,” said Suzanne. The two of them went back years together, both at the forefront of the new journalism that harnessed the power of the networks, riding the waves of viral news-chatter, seeding and feeding stories as they went. ‘Herding the waves’ Nikki had termed it, way back.
A new arrival interrupted their reunion.
“Chinwag,” whispered Nikki, as if Suzanne wouldn’t recognise the young journalist who went by that name online.
Right now, she desperately regretted signing an agreement that had included a comms blackout for the duration of this trip. If Nikki, Suzanne, and Chinwag were here, then there must be others, and the ‘nets would be buzzing with rumours about their absence.
She thought back to the message from Charles, and cursed the way she’d weakened like some simpering fool in response to his request. He’d said nothing about exclusivity. He’d just implied it, while laying heavy emphasis on this being a personal thing, a way for him to make up for his bastard past.
It was a job. She should just remind herself of that. A pretty damned big job, if this little gathering was anything to go by.
She could live with that.
“So what’s it all about? Why us? What have they found?”
The same questions, over and over again. That kind of repeated speculation would have been bad enough in the best of circumstances, but in such claustrophobic confines it was the verbal equivalent of the Chinese water torture.
Suzanne cut herself off from the chatter as much as possible, after the first few rounds had been enough to confirm that not one of the journalists squeezed into this cruiser had the faintest idea what was really going on.
The worst of it was all the hanging around and the slow acceleration out of orbit; she was thankful that much of the journey would be spent under sedation in a gel bunk, to protect them all from the heavy acceleration.
She’d gone zero-gee before, so she knew what to expect. She knew the tiredness and nausea would pass, and that eventually she’d regain the knack of controlling the exaggerated movements of her limbs. And she knew that she would even get accustomed to the lack of personal space and boundaries, the touch and smells of so many others in such close confines.
She tried not to dwell on how she might react when she met Charles again. He had been the one man, other than her father, who could break through her barriers. He could be infuriating and charming in the same breath, but he was also rarely less than interesting.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps their relationship had always been destined to break under the strain. She had been drawn to him for the same reasons she was drawn to journalism: she wanted to be inspired, she wanted to see things she had never seen before. Charles had intrigued and fascinated her, and he would not have been Charles if he’d turned down the opportunity to lead a mission to travel farther than any human being had gone before.
Like a comet drawn to the sun, his trajectory must always pull him away again.
At the research station there was a different, almost minty freshness to the air, which Suzanne knew was only in contrast to the rank air of the cruiser. There was room to move around; places where the only sounds were the mechanical, physical sounds of the station: the hum of pipes and fans, unidentifiable clunks and thuds and whistles and background hiss. There was a viewing area that showed them real-time views from outside, the sun merely a bright star from this far out.
She should have been more bowled over by all this, she knew. For all that she was blasé about being an orbital veteran, this was way more than mere orbital: this was ‘we’ve almost left the Solar System’.
All of this should have had far more impact.
But there was Charles, hanging in the viewing gallery to greet the new arrivals, and she was pitched back two years, to when they’d been together. She hated that response. She was not that weak, dependent kind of woman.
You and me... our relationship... it was never going anywhere…
Cameras always add a few pounds. When he’d messaged her he’d looked as if he was carrying a bit more weight, but no, he’d looked after himself out here. You had to; it was all part of the discipline.
There was something about him, though. Something that had changed. A change more significant than the greying at his temples.
“Su.”
He ignored the rest of them, focused only on Suzanne. There was something in his eyes. Fear. Was he scared of how she would treat him?
Then he snapped his attention into a broader focus, gave that charismatic smile of his and spread his arms, welcoming the dozen journalists who had just emerged not-at-all fresh from the cruiser.
“Welcome,” he said. “We really are pleased to have you join us.”
From this point on, everything he said was for public consumption. They would be recording him with retinal cams, sub-voking their own commentaries into storage, all ready for when the media blackout was lifted.
“I know you’ve all been speculating about the reason for this strange invitation,” he went on. “You’re wondering why a multi-billion euro project like this wouldn’t already have a communications plan in place, why we would scrap all that and turn to you guys instead. And I know you’re all going to be incredibly frustrated when I refuse to tell you.”
There was an immediate surge of grumbling voices. All this way, for... well, for what?
Suzanne held back. She knew Charles’ ways, and she had seen him smiling as he delivered that message.
He raised his hands for silence, and went on, “If I was going to merely tell you, there would have been no need to bring you out here. We’re going to show you, instead. We’re going to give you twenty minutes to freshen up and then we’re going to show you why you’re here. We’re going to show you the discovery of a lifetime. Of any lifetime. And then we’re going to ask you to go back to Earth and do all you can to prepare the ground for the breaking of this story. Because when this is made public we have no way of anticipating the response. You’re here because you’re the best, and you have networks and street teams where elements of this story can be seeded and spread so that people are, in some way at least, prepared.”
Only now did Suzanne recognise that look in his eye, the subtext to all of this. Only now did she see that it was fear.
They filed into one of the station’s shuttles, a couple of the less experienced guests in danger of turning the process into a game of zero-gee billiards. Threading her way through the bodies, Suzanne managed to snag herself into a seat up front next to Charles.
“No windows on these things, but you could have rigged up some viewscreens so we could see outside if you wanted us to. What’s going on, Charles? The only time I’ve seen you looking more scared than this was when you were reciting your vows.” A low blow, but she could have delivered better if she hadn’t been holding back. Two years’ worth of better.
He put a hand on hers, where it rested on her knee, and that surprised her so much she let it lie. He really was on edge. She tried not to take too much comfort from his touch.
“You don’t know how much I want to tell you, Su. How much I want to say. Something like this... well, it stops you in your tracks. Makes you reassess your life, everything.”
“It must be big if it’s made you realise what a bastard you were.”
The look in his eyes. It was as if she’d just kicked a puppy.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
A long silence, then: “I... Hell, Su, there just aren’t the words for it. That’s why you guys are here. There just aren’t the words.”
As the shuttle pulled away from the station, briefly pressing them back into their seats, Charles raised a hand for the attention of the other passengers. “This will just be a short hop,” he said. “So don’t make yourselves too comfortable.” There were a few grunts and chuckles in response: nobody was ever going to get comfortable in the cramped passenger hold of one of these tiny crates.
“We are now approaching t
he heliopause, a notional boundary line where the force of the solar wind is counter-balanced by that of the stellar winds of our neighbouring stars. A bow wave, if you like, as our home star ploughs through the interstellar medium.”
“So what are we looking out for?” Chinwag asked.
“According to theory and the most recent readings before this expedition, there should be a number of measurable effects, including changes in the magnetic field and an increased level of cosmic radiation. None of these should affect us within this shuttle.”
“So what are we looking for?” the journalist repeated.
“If I could just beg your patience for a few more minutes,” Charles said, and would say no more.
The end of the shuttle hop was marked with a jolt and a muffled, metallic clank.
Charles had held her hand for the whole fifteen minutes, but now he released his grip and pushed away from his seat’s retainers. Twisting in mid-air, he caught himself against the forward bulkhead and looked around the gathered journalists.
That same scared look again.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” he said. “I am about to say the first of many sentences I never imagined myself saying. Ladies and gentlemen, we have just landed on the heliopause.”
The babble of voices showed no sign of dying down as the journalists bombarded Charles with questions. Even when Charles spoke, the noise barely eased. “Please,” he said. “If you would follow me to the airlock. We’re going outside.”
The journalists exchanged glances. Chinwag said, “Did I hear that right? Outside?”
Charles said, “That’s right. We’re going outside.”
“But aren’t we going to suit up?”
Charles smiled to himself and indicated the airlock.
There was only room for four at a time in the lock, and Charles made sure that Suzanne was among the three to join him. On one wall someone had placed a handwritten sign with a big arrow and the word ‘DOWN’.
Just as she was puzzling over this, and wondering why they didn’t have to wear suits, the outer door hissed open and Charles took her hand and tugged her out – and instantly the meaning of the sign became clear.
Out here... outside the damned shuttle... there was a down.
She fell, expecting to hurt herself. Instead she landed on all fours on a grey, sponge-like substance. She looked around herself in wonder. They were in a tunnel a little wider than the shuttle.
Charles helped her to her feet, studying her reactions. “We’re here,” he said. “Inside the heliopause.”
“That’s another one of those sentences you didn’t think you’d ever say, right?”
“What is it?” That was Nikki, climbing to her feet. She clearly hadn’t understood the notice and had been taken by surprise by the up and down after the zero-gee of the station.
The other journalist, a guy Suzanne vaguely recognised from his online avatar, stayed quiet, as if struck dumb.
“What is this place?” asked Nikki, more forcefully this time.
“It’s what it looks like,” said Charles. “A tunnel. A tunnel through the heliopause.”
The tunnel was about five metres high and wide, with a flat floor and arched walls and ceiling, as if a horse’s hoof had been pushed through the ’pause’s spongy material.
The airlock had cycled again as they spoke, and another batch of four tumbled from the shuttle. When all twelve were out, along with four members of Charles’ team, the project’s director stood before them.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am sorry that we couldn’t have prepared you for this. But how do you prepare people for the inconceivable?” He gave a soft laugh then, before continuing. “Well, that’s why you’re here. All the communications plans in the world couldn’t prepare us. Telling you is not enough. We had to bring you here and show you, and then it’s down to you to work out with us how on Earth we break this to the rest of the human race.”
Voices rose again the moment he paused for breath. As he waved back towards the shuttle, heads turned and the babble eased. “We have just passed through an airlock. It was encrypted, but my team is good: we worked out how to get through. It was a little easier than expected. My own view is that we were meant to find our way through. If we’ve reached this point, maybe we’re smart enough to be entrusted with what lies beyond. If you’d care to follow me, we have a short hike, and then you will see what only a few before you have seen.”
“But… but what is this?”
“It’s a shell,” Charles said. “A great shell around the solar system. It’s clearly an artificial construct. Like the skin around a bubble or balloon; a Dyson sphere, if you like. We don’t know what it’s made of, but we believe that the heliopause itself possesses some form of sentience: enough to constantly manipulate what we could see and measure from Earth. Enough to cast the illusion of the universe as we have understood it up until very recently.”
None of this, Suzanne thought, could be real.
She stood there, trying to let at least some of it sink in. The universe… an illusion. A smart shield around the solar system, manipulating their view of what lay beyond.
“So, Charles,” she said, and somehow her small voice cut through the jabber and everyone turned to look at her. “If everything up until now has been some clever kind of illusion… if we’ve grown up isolated from the real universe… then what is out there? What’s beyond the heliopause?”
*
Bubbles.
Thousands of them. Millions of them. Each with a slightly oily sheen against the darkness of the void.
Like bubbles in a glass of champagne.
Each bubble, another solar system, shut off like their own.
“Nobody could have ever conceived of something like this,” Charles said, standing at her shoulder. They had walked for longer than the shuttle flight had taken, maybe two kilometres, Suzanne guessed. Now they gathered on some kind of viewing platform, a clear blister on the outside of the heliopause. It was as if this had all been set up for them, as if this moment had been orchestrated by some greater intelligence. A rite of passage. Already, the story was shaping in her head, as Charles had known it must.
“I’m so sorry, Su,” he said, and for long seconds she was confused at his abrupt change in tack. “I was a bastard,” he went on. “Worse: a calculated bastard. Back then, I had to make a choice and I chose this. We didn’t know what we’d find back then, of course. Only that it would be world-shattering. Ever since Voyager 1 hit the heliopause back in 2013 we knew things must be very different to what we had, until then, understood. That’s why we had to come out here to see for ourselves, just as the creators of this shell must have intended.”
“You chose this.” How could he not?
“We didn’t know what we’d find. We didn’t know if we’d ever return.”
And so he had been brutal. He had chosen to break her heart rather than leave her pining for a distant love who may never come home.
“You bastard.”
“I know.” He reached down and took her hand once again, and she decided to let him, for now.
The journalists talked. They talked so much it hurt and still they continued, buzzing with speculations and ideas about how to handle this astonishing news. There would be official announcements, of course. Even as the team of journalists headed back to Earth, governments and international agencies were planning how to break the news. But nothing would happen until the ground had been prepared with countless seedings across the ’net. All of those invited out to the heliopause were skilled in this, the new journalism. It was about managing the chatter, herding the waves; it was about building speculation and rumour and discussion until they went viral and then the extraordinary would appear to be the inevitable when the news finally broke.
But first... First, Suzanne had a promise to keep.
The snow had gone now, and the soft Suffolk landscape was blurred with a steady drizzle. Shutting down her implant, she
lost touch with the buzz. As always, it felt like an amputation, particularly at a time like this. In the back seat of the taxi, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
She recalled what Charles had said, before she’d boarded the shuttle home. He was returning to Earth in a couple of months, and he wanted to see her again. Suzanne had been too stunned by his words to work out how she felt about his request; she’d prevaricated, said she needed time to think it over.
But before she made that decision, she had another to consider. She opened her eyes and stared out across the lawn of her father’s house, to where a light glowed in the living-room window.
She wondered how far the disease might have progressed in this short space of time?
“I said, ‘We’re here’.”
The driver.
“One minute?” she said, and closed her eyes again. She had promised her father she would tell him first, but now she was filled with doubt. How would he take the news? Would it be the final nail in the coffin of his faith?
But then... a phrase Charles had used came back to her. That’s why we had to come out here to see for ourselves, just as the creators of this shell must have intended.
There may be no one Creator, but there really was so much more than just this.
She might never be able to renew her father’s faith, but she knew that she would reawaken his sense of wonder.
“Okay,” she told the driver. “Thank you. I’m ready now.”
The Seventh Gamer
Gwyneth Jones
The Anthropologist Returns to Eden
She introduced herself by firelight, while the calm breakers on the shore kept up a background music – like the purring breath of a great sleepy animal. It was warm, the air felt damp; the night sky was thick with cloud. The group inspected her silently. Seven pairs of eyes, gleaming out of shadowed faces. Seven adult strangers, armed and dangerous; to whom she appeared a helpless, ignorant infant. Chloe tried not to look at the belongings that had been taken from her, and now lay at the feet of a woman with long black hair, who was dressed in an oiled leather tunic and tight, broken-kneed jeans; a state-of-the-art crossbow slung at her back, a long knife in a sheath at her belt.
Best of British Science Fiction 2016 Page 6