Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction
Page 9
The doctor said nothing, only directed Brightsharp to a door that opened on a garden. But Brightsharp could still feel the unflashed disappointment.
Of course you can be alone, his prosthetic reflected his own thought back at him. It is being with another that you have never managed.
#
In the small hospital garden, Brightsharp paced and probed the deep well of bitterness that had grown up inside him in the past cycles without his even being aware of it. When had his love for Deepshine turned into hatred? Or had he come to despise himself so deeply that now he was willing to drag her down with him just to have the pleasure of destroying himself? His prosthetic had not tempered the hidden knots of in his wounded pride, it had only amplified them. He laughed bitterly at himself. A slight flaw in the design, no doubt – but was the flaw in the prosthetic or in himself?
Tufted herbs tickled him with their soft, vegetative pitter-patter. He let the meaningless flashes drift over him, gradually calming his agitation. He kept still for a long time.
Out of nowhere, he suddenly found a mathematical solution to the problem he had been working on before his binge of self-sabotage. There it was, the exact calculation for the next period of effective complexity. Like a tufted flower, the solution bloomed in his mind, simple, elegant, complete. He could predict within a period of 10 x 3015 seconds exactly when intelligent life would evolve.
In the same stunning moment, it hit Brightsharp that the only way his species would meet with another sentient species was if the Project worked. Any sentient species that arose within its window of opportunity was destined to spread so quickly through the universe that it usurped any potential competition. Only if a civilization found a way to cross the empty ocean between islands of opportunity would a conference of sentient minds be possible.
Perhaps they will not like us; perhaps they will despise or hate us. Or perhaps we will find that they have been as lonely as we. Perhaps they have answers we have not dreamed of, or perhaps they are baffled by the same questions as we are. But no matter what they are like, just to meet them, just to know them, it would be worth it….
Just to meet her, just to know her, it would be worth it, his prosthetic echoed him back to himself.
He felt something tip-tap-tip-tap at him, and realized that a small tube burrower had mistaken him for a tuft.
"I’m sorry, my friend," Brightshine smiled. "I’m not ready to rejoin the garden just yet."
He returned to the room where his retwin awaited him.
And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd
Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour.
(The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)
Comments on A Thousand Blossoms With the Day
I know a lot of you finished this story thinking, "You know what this story needs? More physics." Well, you can have your wish.
This is very much an idea piece. Although I’m a liberal arts major, I like to read physics papers. I skip the math and just read the words. (My brother, a physicist, reads the same papers, but he skips the words and reads just the math.) One day I chanced to be enjoying Freeman Dyson’s infamous paper, "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe," (Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, No. 3, July 1979) along with several other papers debating the problems with it. For instance, Katherine Freese and William H. Kinney, at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Michigan, argued in their paper, "The ultimate fate of life in an accelerating universe," that life cannot go on indefinitely in a universe dominated by a cosmological constant. The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity, by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, was another book that intrigued me.
That’s when the story idea hit me. Of course, my idea was for a novel (as always), but divided into short stories about each major "era" in the life of the universe. The novel would also have humans.
Here’s the key passage from Dyson’s paper:
(i) Is the basis of consciousness matter or structure? …Let me spell out more explicitly the meaning of question (i). My consciousness is somehow associated with a collection of organic molecules inside my head. The question is, whether the existence of my consciousness depends on the actual substance of a particular set of molecules or whether it only depends on the structure of the molecules. In other words, if I could make a copy of my brain with the same structure but using different materials, would the copy think it was me?
… Since I am a philosophical optimist, I assume as a working hypothesis that the answer to question (i) is "structure". Then life is free to evolve into whatever material embodiment best suits its purposes.
The first consequence is that the appropriate measure of time as experienced subjectively by a living creature is not physical time t but the quantity
u(t) = f INT(0,t) theta(t') dt',
where theta(t) is the temperature of the creature and f = (300 deg sec)^(-1) is a scale factor which it is convenient to introduce so as to make u dimensionless. I call u "subjective time". The second consequence of the scaling law is that any creature is characterized by a quantity Q which measures its rate of entropy production per unit of subjective time. If entropy is measured in information units or bits, and if u is measured in "moments of consciousness", then Q is a pure number expressing the amount of information that must be processed in order to keep the creature alive long enough to say "Cogito, ergo sum". I call Q the "complexity" of the creature. For example, a human being dissipates about 200 W of power at a temperature of 300 K, with each moment of consciousness lasting about a second. A human being therefore has Q = 10^23 bits.
Basically, creatures with a great deal of energy (heat) available to them would think and live at a much more accelerated pace than humans. Creatures with a great deal less energy (colder) would operate slower. In theory, however, life could exist long after the stars had all burned themselves into cold, distant black holes. By the same token, it could exist at the extremely high temperatures that existed right after the Big Bang, when more than 99% of the matter and antimatter particles in the universe interacted and annihilated one another. Hundreds of exotic particles, which today exist only in particle accelerators, swam in a hot soup. In this story, I hypothesize that the matter-antimatter "bursts" are as suns to the creatures who regard the end of the bursts with the same horror that we regard the death of all the stars.
Originally, this story had the mischievous subtitle, "a historical romance."
I wrote this story in 2003, and I realize research into the early universe has marched on. Also – liberal arts major here. If I’ve flubbed the science or there’s some updated theory I should know about, feel free to email me and let me know: tara (at) taramayastales (dot) com. I’m still working on the novel, so I welcome the chance to make corrections and improvements.
This story is also available as an independent short under the title, “Burst.”
You Have Not Forgotten How To Fly
You place the glop of scratchy mush onto your first and second fingers and wiggle it on a flight path toward the toddler.
"Here comes the faery, flying into your mouth! Zo-zo-zoooooomza!"
He watches you with a wide-open O of a mouth until the moment you are about to stick the fingerlick of food in his mouth. Then his jaws clamp shut, sealed by a thin line of pressed lips.
You are trying to persuade the baby of the merits of corn mush. This is all the more difficult because you have your doubts about corn mush yourself. In fact, you have profound reservations about corn mush. You can’t stand the texture – you prefer smooth purées to mushes or mashes of any sort – and frankly, the color repels you. Food ought not to be such a bright yellow. Deep orange like squash, yes, or a regal green like spinach, certainly. And why is it that every kind of food made from corn must be scratchy? Corn bread is scratchy, corn mash is scratchy, even popped corn is scratchy
. You never used to eat corn, and you still aren’t too fond of it. This is difficult, because corn is the staple of your husband’s people. They eat corn with every damn thing.
While you are musing about your loathing for the food you’re trying to feed the baby, he reaches up and knocks the glop of corn right off your hand. It lands on the floor.
"No want eat!" He waves little fists to emphasize his resolve.
"Never mind," you tell him. "It doesn’t matter. There’s more. I have a whole bowl. See?"
You show him the bowl as you set it down on the adobe platform beside the mat where he sits – out of his reach, so he doesn’t spill any more.
The floor is adobe, whitewashed frequently to fight the smoky residue from the beehive shaped oven in the corner of the room. The bright yellow glop shows up startlingly bright against the white. You hurry to find a broom, to sweep away evidence of the spill, before your husband sees it.
Unfortunately, this is when your husband pushes aside the tapestry of painted and plaited reeds to enter the doorway to the kitchen. His eyes are immediately drawn to the spilled bite of corn on the floor, as a vulture would be drawn to carrion.
His face purples with rage. "Boy! Did you throw food again?"
"No want eat!" the toddler shouts back. No doubt about it, he’s his father’s son.
Agonized by this squander, your husband bends down and carefully scoops up the corn mush from the floor. No, you tell yourself, he won’t, but he does. He tries to shovel the corn from the floor into your son’s mouth.
The toddler will have none of it. Although he is only a third the size of the man trying to feed him, the baby seems endowed with the strength of ten men and the stubbornness of twenty. He thrashes his head side to side, his whole face scrunched shut, so even his cheeks and eyebrows and bright red ears appear to help his mouth repel the rejected food.
"Do you know how lucky you are to have this food!" bellows your husband. "Do you know how many good people could have survived the famine if they’d had the food you just threw away!"
"NO WANT EAT!" your son screams back.
The minute his mouth is open, your husband thrusts the food in. "Fa! No one under my roof will waste food!"
The baby spits the corn mush back into his father’s face. You marvel at the ghastly revelation that spit up corn mush looks exactly the same as regular corn mush. But you can see that having corn spit in his face has pushed your husband past the boundary of sage thought. He heaves himself up, wipes the corn from his face, still careful to save as much of it as he can in the shelter of his palm, and says in a terrible voice, "YOU WILL EAT THIS!"
He is about to try to shove the much-abused mush into the toddler’s mouth when you fling yourself between man and baby.
"Stop it!" you shout. You don’t want to shout, but you have to, just to make yourself heard. "Leave him alone! He doesn’t have to eat the wretched stuff if he doesn’t want it."
Your husband is about to hit you. He will smack you out of the way and then attack your son, shoving the hated mush down his throat. But he meets your eyes, and some part of him remembers you are not an ordinary mortal woman, resigned to such treatment. You are a faery. You have wings, and though you have folded them behind you, out of use, you have not forgotten how to fly. Some part of him remembers that he is the hero who overthrew a tyrant, and being a true hero, he is not the kind of man who hits his wife or child. Or perhaps he is thinking something else entirely, but either way, he lowers his raised fist. His whole body snaps back. He’s still angry, so he leaves the room.
You sag next to your son. Because of the oven, the kitchen is always sweltering; the fumes sting your eyes. You want to leave the room yourself, to fly away on a cool breeze and release the tension in your body. Maybe shed a tear or two. It’s been a long day, and you realize you hate this kitchen, which always smells of burnt corn. But someone has to stay with the baby.
"Mommy!"
You ignore him. You are on the floor next to the adobe platform where your son sits. With your wings folded behind you, you can lean back against the dais. You’re too tired to fight with your chubby baby over food. You don’t care if he eats. It won’t bring back the dead. Does your husband think he is the only one who has lost family? You lost your entire race. You are the last. Does he ever remember that?
"Mommy! Mommy!" Your toddler tugs at your wing, which is all he can reach from where he sits on the adobe dais. "Mommy! I want eat."
You crick your neck. "What?"
"I want eat!"
You hand him the bowl, and watch in amazement as he happily shovels the whole bowl of yellow mush into his mouth.
Comments on You Have Not Forgotten How To Fly
This piece is an extract from my twelve-book epic fantasy series, The Unfinished Song. You can read the first book for free and right now, if you sign up for my newsletter, you can get the latest book in the series free as well: tara (at) taramayastales. You can read an excerpt at the end of this book.
Don’t worry—or don’t get your hopes up, depending on how exotic your tastes are—the main story line is written in third person, past tense; but there are several storylines at work in each book, intertwined. At one point in the series, we encounter a faery, immensely old and powerful, who has married a mortal. She has been Cursed by Lady Death, and is slowly losing her memories, so she desperately tries to hold on to them by reminding herself of the important moments in her life, told in second person, present tense. Meanwhile, the heroine, Dindi, is trying to save her, but the tribes who need to stand united against Lady Death are busy fighting a war against one another.
The Unfinished Song series began as a book called The Rainbow Dancer. I started it in 2000, when I worked night shifts at the homeless shelter. As I mentioned in the comments on Ghosts on Red Strings, I joined the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. My great opus, Avatars of the Archons, had been rejected (by one publisher) and I took this as a Sign that my writing sucked. I needed to learn how to write, I decided. The solution: write a "practice" novel. It would be a standard fantasy, with standard tropes, nothing special. Its only purpose in existing would be for me to hone my craft. I expressly forbade myself to fall in love with the story, as I had fallen in love with my epic, or to waste five years on it, as I had wasted five years on my epic.
I did fall in love with the story, and I ended up spending ten years on it.
There is one advantage in writing a book/series over a long period, which is that the work grows with you. This tale braids together several intertwined plotlines. The main story line, which I wrote first, is a Coming of Age story. It follows a fairly conventional fantasy trope of a young person coming into her power and falling in love. Another strand of the story, however, follows another couple (a generation older), and their story serves as a counterpoint to the main story. It is about Coming of (Older) Age, about marriage rather than courtship, and about learning, sometimes, to give up power.
It’s probably no accident that in the intervening decade since I began the story, I settled down, married, and started a family.
Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Stoic, I think. My character needs to be stoic.
I wrote half the scene on my laptop but to finish it I must email it to myself on my main computer. For some reason, each time I Send, I end up with a Delivery Status Notification (Failure). In the middle of my third Delivery Status Notification (Failure), my mother calls.
"What's going on with the swim lessons?"
I've put off this conversation two days. I try to explain about the cost of gas, the distance to her house, the other pool option. She doesn't want to hear it.
"He just doesn't want your kids to spend time with their grandmother," she complains.
I email the attachment to a different address. This time it works. My file fills my screen. I put my cell on speakerphone so I can type without interrupting my mother. She is working out a number of different al
ternative schedules. Tuesdays and Thursdays or Wednesdays and Fridays, eight or ten o'clock, private or class lessons. I surf the net while she talks. From Epictetus, via Wikipedia, I learn to be stoic is to be "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy." How should I show this in my character? Show, don't tell, show don't tell.
The half-written scene is a mess, a number of mutually conflicting scenelets, bits of possible dialogue. Should I put in a flashback? Or would that drag the pace? I realize I don't know if my character has parents or is an orphan. It's always easier to deal with a character who is an orphan. Parents just complicate fiction. Parents, like flashbacks, seldom move the plot forward.
"Are you listening to me or are you on the computer?" my mother asks.
"I'm trying to work."
"I know you're trying to work," she says, "but we need to get these swim lessons taken care of. Why do they need to be at the same time?"
"What?" I realize she must have asked me a question before, and I must have given her an answer that has made her imagine I require something to be at the same time. "I don't know. I'm trying to work while the baby is still asleep. He'll be up from his nap soon."
"You're really annoying to talk to when you get like this," she says. "It's rude."
There's definitely a scenelet missing, a bit I wrote last night around two in the morning, while nursing the baby. I was sleepy, but I distinctly remember writing it, on my laptop. Damn. I emailed myself the wrong draft. I've been working on the wrong draft this whole time. I go back to my laptop to email myself the right draft.