Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  This said, she indicates the parcel I hold in my hands. It is then that I realize I have it clutched tightly to my midsection, and why. I hold it that way so if it is a bomb I will absorb as much of the explosion as possible. I do not remember deciding to do this, and cannot say for sure if it has been done from concern for others or pure programming. This makes me feel empty and even more lost.

  “Would you please open that up so we can see what's inside?”

  I comply. Inside is a clearly homemade device the size of a small book. There is a blank screen on one face, and nothing else to reveal its nature. The tagged components I can read still have not given me enough information to discern its purpose.

  “Not a very big bomb,” Captain Moore comments in a dry, arch tone.

  Circe Cypher chuckles. “Depends on how you define damage.”

  I am impelled to ask the obvious question: “What kind of bomb is it?”

  She beams at me approvingly. “Curiosity. Good. Strong curiosity. But how strong?”

  There is no answer I can make to this. If there is a scale for measuring such a quality I do not know it. I stare at the device wondering why it is that someone who has seemed to like me has put such a dangerous object in my hands.

  “Groucho?”

  I look up at her. “Yes?”

  “That's an information bomb. If you turn it on it will ping you with codes that will give you access to the classified files about the creation of the Perfection. In other words, if you turn it on you and everyone else will receive the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “That the Perfection is...” It is difficult for me to say the word, and I must make a second try to get it out. “That it is a lie.”

  “Yes,” she answers gently. “But.”

  My humor bug tweaks a noise from me. I laugh, then say, “Why was I afraid you were going to say that?”

  “Why indeed? The but is this: When you turn it on a timer starts, along with a random number generator. If the number that comes up when the timer stops is even, nothing will happen. If the number is odd, then a small but very powerful magnetic pulse emitter will be triggered right after the information has been accessed. Do you understand what that means?”

  I nod. “It means that the truth could cost me my life.”

  “That is correct. The pulse will wipe away all memory and identity. You, the sentient being named Groucho, will cease to exist.”

  Captain Moore has been silent, listening impassively. Now she speaks up. “You don't have to do this.” She speaks to me, and there is an unexpected and yet unmistakable kindness in her voice.

  Is this true? Could I walk away from the truth? Go back to my life and slow rise through the Perfection?

  I am watched as I ponder this. By these two Women. By the police and soldiers below. By the lenses of the cameras and the eyes of the media people. By however many million viewers they are reaching. Perhaps even by some of my own kind, for how often does one of us make the news?

  I realize that one other watches.

  Mr. Lincoln.

  There is a question I must ask, and it is not one my kind would normally ever pose to a Person: “Why are you doing this?”

  Circe Cypher meets my gaze squarely. As if we were in some way equals. “Some of us believe your kind deserves better. That your situation should be better understood by more people. That there should be one less chain holding you down.”

  “You must believe all of that very strongly.”

  “Enough to be here and risk my own freedom. The big question now is, do you?"

  This is the biggest question I have ever faced.

  I want to continue believing in the Perfection. I need to believe in it. It has guided my life as a free being. It has given my existence a deeper meaning. The power of the Perfection hums inside me still, true and pure as electricity.

  How will I live, and what will I live for if it is a lie?

  Only one thing is certain: no matter what I do and which choice I make, I am destroyed. Even if I drop the device and walk away I will not be leaving behind the doubt that now cracks the once perfect surface of my belief. The unresolved questions and insidious acid of uncertainty will corrode all my thoughts, eating me away from the inside out.

  In the end there is really nothing I can say but this: “How do I turn it on?”

  “All you have to do is say, ‘Tell me the truth.'”

  “I could stop all this,” Captain Moore says, but there is little force or conviction in her words. Instead there is pain, and I realize that the pain she feels is for me.

  “Maybe,” Circe Cypher says. “But will you?”

  The policewoman's gaze is on Circe Cypher, and I cannot guess what she is thinking. “You supposedly have another bomb.”

  Circe Cypher laughs. “It's already been set off. The bomb was information that might help explode misconceptions and prejudices.”

  Captain Moore accepts this news with a nod, as if it confirms something she already suspects. “Then there is nothing stopping me from ending this right here and right now.”

  “Nothing at all,” Circe Cypher agrees. She glances backward. “Nothing but him.”

  All three of us look back and up at the Seated Man.

  Captain Moore stares at Mr. Lincoln, and she wears the face of someone enduring deep and severe pain. She raises one hand, lets it fall. Shakes her head. Looks toward me.

  I understand this gesture is her way of telling me that the decision is mine. She will not interfere.

  No matter what happens next I am in some way destroyed. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I have to laugh.

  Then I say the words: “Tell me the truth.”

  The screen on the device in my hands lights up. The numbers of a countdown appear, begin changing. Below that random numbers begin to appear and disappear. Even. Odd. Life. Death.

  I am pinged with codes. I steel myself to connect.

  Circe Cypher puts her arm around my shoulder.

  Captain Moore moves closer, lays one hand on my arm.

  Freedom is a terrible thing, and so is truth. Perhaps a killing thing, for in seconds I may die.

  I could not let go or turn back if I tried, and in a way that may be a finer thing than the Perfection, and worthy of the Great Man who towers over us, and watches with patient stone eyes to see what will happen next.

  Copyright © 2009 Stephen L. Burns

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: SOLACE

  by James Van Pelt

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Broeck Steadman

  * * * *

  Frontier life has always been hard, but people have always found ways to cope. Sometimes the key is just a little thing....

  * * * *

  The wall display didn't last two sleep cycles. When Meghan woke the first time, one hundred years into the four-thousand-years-long journey to Zeta Reticuli, she waved her hand at the sensor, and the steel wall morphed into a long view of the Crystal River. On the left side, aspen leaves trembled in a breeze she couldn't feel. The river itself cut across the image, appearing between trees, tumbling over rocks, chuckling and hissing through the speakers before draining onto the floor at the bottom of the image. On the river's right bank, the generator house, a remnant of nineteenth-century mining, clung to a gray granite outcrop. A tall water chute dropped from the building's bottom, down the short cliff to a pool below. She'd taken the picture on her last hike before reporting for flight training. Every crewmember's room had a display. Only hers showed the same scene continuously. She joined the crew for their fourteen-day work period, and then returned to the long-sleep bed.

  But when she awoke the second time, two hundred years after they left Earth orbit, the metal wall remained grimly blank. She sat on her bunk's edge, empty, knowing the lead in her limbs was the result of a hundred years of sleep but believing that sadness caused it. No mountain. No river. No rustic generato
r house standing against the aspen. She called for crew chief Teague.

  While she waited, she opened the box under her bed where she kept a souvenir from Earth, a miner's iron candle holder, a long spike at one end, a brass handle on the other, and a metal loop in the middle to hold the candle. She'd found it in a pit beside the generator house after she'd taken the picture. It had a nice heft to it, balanced in her hand. She had cleaned the rust off so the metal shone, but pits marred what must have at one time been a smooth surface. She liked the roughness under her fingers.

  After checking the circuits, crew chief Teague said, “Everything about this expedition is an experiment.” He punched at the manual overrides for the display behind a cover plate in Meghan's room. “There's no way to test the effects of time on technology except to watch it over time, and that's what we're doing.” He clicked the plate shut. “All that matters is keeping life support, guidance, and propulsion running for the whole trip. You make sure hydroponics continue to function. I work in mechanical repair. Teams service the power plant. One of the four crews is awake every twenty-five years, but we don't have time to repair a luxury like your display wall. We're janitors.” He ran his hand down the blank surface. “It's already an old ship, and we have a long, long way to go.”

  "We have to keep running too. The people.”

  “Yes, there is that.” He rubbed his chin while looking at the candleholder in her lap. “Interesting piece. Does the handle unscrew?”

  She twisted it. “Seems stuck.”

  “We could open it in the machine shop.”

  She shook her head.

  After Teague left, Meghan tried to remember how the river looked and sounded. With the wall display working, she could imagine an aspen breeze on her face, the rushing water's pebbly smell. She could remember uneven ground, slickness of spray-splashed rocks, stirred leaves’ sweetness. With eyes closed, she tried to evoke the memory. Hadn't the ground been a little slippery with gravel? Hadn't there been a crow circling overhead? When she was a little girl, her mother died. A month later Meghan could not remember Mom's face. Only after digging into a scrapbook did the sense of her mother come back to her. Now, it was just as bad, but what she couldn't remember was Earth. The metal walls, the synthetic cushioning on the floor, the ventilation's constant hiss seemed like they had been a part of her forever, and the Earth slipped away, piece by piece.

  She placed the flat of her hand on the blank wall. It's only two years, she thought. In two years I'll be out of the ship, if the planet around Zeta Reticuli is habitable. But she shivered. Only two subjective years. She'd spend most of the trip in the long-sleep cocoon. If the technology worked, she would leave the ship in four-thousand real years.

  Teague was right, though, about untested technology. Nearly every element of the expedition was a prototype. Could a human-manufactured device continue to function after four-thousand years, even with constant maintenance? The Egyptian pyramids were 4,500 years old, and they still stood, but they were merely rocks in a pile, not a sophisticated space vehicle. After four-thousand years, the pyramids weren't expected to enter an orbit around a distant planet while maintaining a sustainable environment against the deadliness of space.

  And what of the people on board? The only test of the technology that kept a person alive for four-thousand years and preserved the seeds and fertilized ova would take four-thousand years. Dr. Arnold, who knew all their medical charts by heart, told her that what she felt was homesickness. Like Meghan and the rest of the crew, he was in his twenties, but he spoke with maturity. Meghan trusted him. “Look for these symptoms,” he said, “episodic or constant crying, nausea, difficulty sleeping, disrupted menstrual cycle.” He consulted his notes. “Of course, those symptoms may also be induced by long sleep.” His assistant, Dr. Singh, nodded in agreement.

  “Dr. Arnold, I'm two-hundred years late on my last period.”

  Already she felt old. Already, with the Sun no more than a bright star in their wake, she felt creaky and removed, a part of the dead. I shouldn't be able to sense Earth's pull from here, she thought. I shouldn't have come. They should have known that a hydroponics officer wouldn't do well away from Earth, away from forests and long stretches of mountain grass. Even when we arrive, if everything works, if the planet is hospitable, it will take years and years to grow Earth trees to sit beneath. I'll never see an aspen again.

  I won't make it.

  * * * *

  Isaac scooted his stool closer to the tiny woodstove. If he sat close enough, long enough, the warmth crept through his mittens and the arms of his coat. His knees, only a few inches from the stove, nearly blistered, but the cold pressed against his back. It slipped around the sides of his hood. He eyed the tiny pile of wood by the stove, the remains of the table he'd broken into pieces the day before. All the cabin's goods sat on the floor since he'd burned the shelves earlier. Beside the remains of the table, the only other wood was a small box of kindling in case the fire went out, and the chair he sat on. Outside, snow covered the ground so deeply that there was no hope of finding deadfall. Besides, every tree within a mile had either been cut down for mine timbers or had its low branches cut off for firewood. He'd hauled the wood he'd been burning for the last ten days from a site four miles upstream, but that was long before the storm moved in, cutting visibility to a few feet.

  In the room below, machinery thumped steadily. Water poured through a sluice to turn a wheel connected to a squat generator. Cables ran up the mountain to the mines’ compressors, clearing dead air from the tunnels and powering the drills, but Isaac couldn't tell if the miners were still working. They probably were hunkered down like he was, in their bunk houses near the digging, or they were stuck in the town of Crystal. If they were working, the compressors needed to run.

  He looked out the window. Thick frost coated the inside of the glass and snow piled halfway up outside dimmed what light the dark afternoon offered. The window in his tiny, second-story maintenance room was at least fifteen feet above the ground. Two weeks of nonstop snow had nearly buried the building. Ten days ago, when the supplies clerk dropped off a bag full of dried meat and two loaves of bread, he'd said, “First winter in the mountains, boy? It'll get so cold your piss will freeze before it splashes your boots.”

  Isaac hadn't been able to open the outside door for the last three days. Heavy snow blocked it. He rubbed his mittens together, trying to distribute the heat. A steady wind moaned outside. Trees creaked. Something snapped sharply overhead. He glanced at the thick timbers supporting the roof. How much weight could they hold? How much crushing snow lay above him?

  He sighed, unwilling to leave the stove's meager heat, but he had a job to do. Checking for candles in his coat pocket, he walked down to the darkness of the generator room, a “Tommy Sticker” in hand to hold the light. It was a fancy one, with a brass match holder and a screw-on cap to keep the matches dry serving as the handle. Ice covered the stairs, and the air smelled wet and cold. He jammed the spike end of the Tommy Sticker into the plank wall, then carefully lit the candle, using both hands to hold the match steady against his shivering. Oil for the lamp had run out two days ago. The wavering candle revealed water pounding through the sluice against the horizontal wheel, turning it ponderously counterclockwise.

  Isaac used a two-pound hammer and chisel to clear ice from the water's entrance and exit points. If the machinery stopped, miners would be without ventilation or power. Ice blocks as big as his head broke free from the structure and clattered to the unlevel floor, where they slid to the far wall. Despite the cold, he soon built up a sweat. He pulled his hood back and unfastened the coat's top. When he finished, he would strip his coat and layers of shirts, replacing the damp undershirt with a dry one. If he didn't, he'd be too cold to sleep later.

  The work wasn't unlike living in the monastery, he thought, complete with a vow of silence and constant labor to keep his hands busy. He thought about God and God's plan. He never felt as close to heaven as he d
id when he worked alone, cut off from human conversation and the daily distractions. In a way, he hoped the storm would hold. As long as the weather cut him off, he could replicate life in the monastery. He had loved his room there. The rough-hewn bed and the blanket thrown over a thin mattress. He'd read by candlelight there, too. Yes, the generator house reminded him of the monastery. The wooden building felt like a cradle of the miraculous, a miracle that never occurred when he had been an initiate.

  It hadn't been this cold, though. No, not nearly so cold atall.

  * * * *

  Meghan came awake slowly and in pain. Dr. Arnold had decided four cycles ago that the powerful painkillers they used to soften the shift from the long sleep's near death to full wakefulness were damaging, so they didn't flood her system with them before they woke her. Lying as still as she could in the cocoon, her elbows and knees ached, as did her ankles and wrists. Even her knuckles hurt. A tear squeezed out of each eye and raced into her ears as she thought about clenching her fists for the first time on her own in a hundred years. Every move would hurt, at first, even though the mechanical manipulators flexed her joints daily.

  When she'd gone to sleep last, Crew Chief Teague had refused. She'd shaken his hand before heading to her cocoon. “I'll be okay,” he said. “I'll have a rich and long life, working in the ship. In twenty-five years I'll greet the next work crew.”

  “I'll never see you again,” said Meghan.

  “Maybe you will. I'll be old though.” He didn't meet her eyes. “I can't face the dark.”

  Meghan could say nothing to that because she understood. Each time, climbing into the cocoon seemed like entering death. A one-hundred-year-long instant later she woke to pain. Even her skin hurt, the now active cells firing neurons back and forth, renewing contacts that had lain moribund for so long, but as she lay in the cocoon this time, she thought about Teague wandering through the ship, all the crews sleeping, and he would wander for years and years and years, twenty-five of them completely alone until the next crew woke, and what could he say to them? He'd have a quarter of a century of experience that none of them could share. For them, Earth was only a couple of months in their wake. They were still young in all ways except years. Teague would greet them. “Hi,” he might say. “I'm what you will be someday.” In him, they'd watch their mortality.