FSF Magazine, August 2007
Page 18
Immense peace, engulfing spiritual quiet.
She listened for footsteps, suddenly terrified.
Abruptly she got up and returned to the entrance, dropped to the floor.
As she closed the field behind her, embarrassed by her moment of panic in there, a black manta ray swooped across the ocean trench dark—ness. Elen yelped, and stared around wildly. The shadow cruised again. Her heart was thumping, my God, what is that thing? What's in here with me?
"Who's there—?"
No answer but the hiss of disturbed air. “Hey! Who's there?"
Sigurt landed beside her with a soft thump, wrapping slippery folds of bat wings around him. “Ah,” he said, with smiling interest. “So it's you, Elen."
She stared, appalled: open-mouthed. “My God! Sigurt! What d'you think you're doing! You can't fly! This is not a game!"
"On the contrary,” said the alien cheerfully. “The whole universe is a game, is it not? A puzzle-mass of tiny units of information, the pattern of which can be changed at will—given the torus, and the fabulous software implanted in a trained, numinous consciousness. Such as yours, Elen. I'm not the expert, but isn't that the whole basis of interstellar ‘navigation?’”
Elen was shaking with horror. “You can't do this! You can't piss around doing impossible things in the transition! Our lives depend, every f-fucking moment—"
"On our conviction that all this is real,” he finished, unrepentant. He showed her the fx controller on his sleeve; and switched it off. The bat wings vanished.
"I can access a toy from the ship's library without damaging the equation, can't I? I was just playing. I'm much lighter than a Blue, and there's not a great deal of gravity in here. I've been jumping off the monuments."
She dropped her head in her hands as relief thundered through her, leaving her spent and hollow. Starfarers live in constant terror, like sailors on the ancient oceans. You don't realize, until you hit a peak, how high the ambient stress is getting—
"Just for the record, Sigurt, there's no software, not the way you mean."
"I know that we maintain all this,” he waved a slender hand, shadow-pale in the dark. “Between us ... I've never been quite sure how it's done. You Blues have all the secrets. Is it true that Starflight Actives have had brain surgery?"
Sigurt's people had stunning cellular regeneration. They treated almost any trauma as a purely medical problem. The sciences of surgery and (worse!) gene manipulation had come as a horrible shock to them. Barbarism.
"No surgery. No implants. It's more like a tissue culture. You have to have the right kind of brain to start with. The reason you can be awake is because you're like us, Sigurt: but you're a straight, a virgin. We've had the training that makes us grow the extra neuronal architecture, which doesn't, er, exist in normal space—"
"Or you would be hydrocephalic Eloi, with heads the size of pumpkins."
She nodded, though she had no idea what an Eloi was.
They sat with their knees folded up, like the figures in the mural—
"I'm sorry I fooled around, Elen. I scared you. I think I'm going stir crazy."
"Or else you're reacting poorly to racist abuse, Batman."
Sigurt laughed, and scratched his ear. “Batman! Half-domino, cute little shoulder cape. Sounds too girly for my taste. If you like comparisons, we are more akin to frilled lizards than bats."
"Nadeem must really annoy you."
"He is something I would scrape off my shoe,” pronounced the alien, with relish. He tipped back his head. “Do you hear that, Commissar? Shoe-Scrapings!"
They started to laugh. The Active Complement lived in each other's heads, accommodating each other as if they'd been workmates for a lifetime. They were a group mind: inhibited, licensed; in constant negotiation. Elen replayed the first remark Sigurt had made. Sigurt had known that someone was visiting the artifacts, but because he was only supercargo, not A/C, he hadn't known who it was.
"I've been visiting the Tomb Wife,” she said. “I'm fascinated by the idea of a ghost on an instantaneous transit. Do you know anything more about her?"
The alien shrugged. “Like what?"
The tomb crouched like a massive, patient animal. Ancient artifacts peered at them from the gloom, carving and shaping blurred into a vague sense of life.
"Was she old? Was she young...? Did she have a lover?"
"Widows are a danger to social cohesion,” said the alien. “The relict of a partnership has to be neutralized, or there'll be mésalliances, inheritance disputes. Therefore the widow must marry again, harmlessly. She must wed the tomb—"
"That sounds very human. Nadeem would be horrified."
Sigurt seemed to think it over. “The ancient Lar'sz’ kept state records,” he said at last. “And accounts. Not much else was written down. I'm afraid we don't know much. There are the bas-reliefs, but they're high art, highly ambiguous. And not of her choosing, of course. They are the memorial her husband ordered."
Elen wanted to ask what was her name, but she was afraid that might be a lapse in taste, a cultural taboo. Another question came to her. “Is it right to call her a ghost? Or did a haunting mean something different to the ancient Lar'sz'?"
"It's different and it's the same, of course."
The constant cry of one numinously intelligent sentient biped to another.
Sigurt grinned, acknowledging the problem. “Let me try to bridge the gap. In my world we believe that people can, how can I put it, leave themselves behind at certain junctures, life events. Someone else goes on. When we speak of a haunting, that's our derivation. Not the, er, spirit of someone physically dead. D'you see?"
"Yes,” said Elen, startled and moved. “Yes, I think I do."
She felt that she knew Sigurt better, after this conversation. There was a bond between them, the celebrated archaeologist and the navigator: unexpected but real.
* * * *
The country of no duration can't be seen from the outside. You can never look back and say there, I was. That's what happened. Everything that “happened” in a transit was doomed to vanish like a dream when they fell back into normal space. As the Pirate Jenny moved, without motion, to the end, without ending, of the paradoxical moment, everyone had a terrible psychic headache. The Active Complement suffered fretful agonies that swamped the ghost, Rafe's nightmares; all their shipboard entanglements. They regarded Sigurt, whose wakefulness was part of their burden, not so much as an exciting famous person, more as a demanding pet. Batman's favorite expression (of course!) set everybody's teeth on edge.
The captain had been interstellar crew for as long as there'd been commercial interstellar traffic, and he could see the writing on the wall. “The Pirate Jenny is a horseless carriage,” he moaned, in mourning for the sunlit green walls, the mossy ground, the polished birchwood. “Soon it will all be gone, all this. Nobody will bother. Passengers will transport themselves, we'll be obsolete."
"Shut up,” muttered Elen, “shut up, shut up, I'm trying to concentrate—"
She was mortally afraid that she'd made a mistake. She scoured the code for a single trace of the ghost (there must be a trace!) found none, and knew she must have missed something. Mistake, mistake. The insensate, visceral memory that she always felt like this in the closing phase was no comfort at all.
"What about freight?” Gorgeous Simone, Chief Engineer, looked up from a game of solitaire. “Who's going to carry the freight, doctor? Hump it through the indefinite void, if not people like us? Fuck, look at the size of that problem."
"Swearbox,” piped Rafe, who had grown chirpy while the others grew morose, and was now a rock, a shoal, an infuriating danger to shipping.
"Go and eat your head."
"They'll paint the crates with essence of consciousness,” explained Carter, doom-laden. “Or some crazy Borgs will break the Convention. They'll create actual supernuminal ‘Artificial Intelligence’ nanotech, and inject it into matter."
"So fucking what. You w
on't be redundant, you're a doctor."
"Ooops! Swearbox again!"
"Does not compute, man! If it's a true AI, it'll have civil rights and they won't be able to make it do anything. We'll unionize it, it will be on our side—"
The alien laid his black velvet head on his slender arms on the tabletop and sighed, very softly. All seven of them took this as an outrageous insult. They'd have fallen on Batman and torn him limb from limb, except that they knew there'd be hell to pay. The navigator quit the saloon and retired to her section. God, let this be the peak. Let us be over the mountain, this is unbearable.
They were over the mountain.
Elen reported their position, news which was greeted with exhausted relief. Now there was nothing for her to do but watch the tumblers fall: watch the numbers cascade into resolution, not a phase-point out of place. She loved this part and hated it—
* * * *
She went down to the hold to visit the Tomb Wife, for the last time. There was a rumor that they'd all be given free passes for the Exhibition, but she didn't think she'd go. The relationship had been formed here, in the dim-lit cavern under a sea-mount. It wouldn't be the same in normal space. The tomb greeted her with its shimmering silence, with the stillness of a grief embraced; set in stone.
"Hello?” she whispered. “I think I'm here to say good-bye."
She was not surprised when Sigurt joined her. They smiled at each other and sat for a while; but the black teardrop beckoned. The alien succumbed first. He hooked his long fingers into twin curves in the carving that she hadn't noticed, and was through the doorway in one movement. There weren't any steps, thought Elen. The entrance is supposed to be like that. She tried to copy his action but couldn't find the handholds. She had to make the same scrambling jump as before; and followed him to the chamber where the partners faced each other, the “wife” poised forever in that gesture of farewell.
Emotion recorded in art was the rosetta stone, the only (and frequently deceptive) common language of the Diaspora. Elen wasn't sure what a rosetta stone had been, originally. Sigurt would probably know. But she felt she understood the message of that unfinished caress; the speech in those bright, half-hidden eyes. The dead are gone. The Tomb Wife stayed with herself. She stayed with the life that had ended, rather than going on, a different person—
How strange, how beautiful.
Sigurt had gone farther into the tomb. At length she heard him coming back. She didn't have to look around, she could clearly picture him leaning in the ancient doorway. She imagined staying with herself, in the country of no duration. As often as she left this homeland and woke into forgetfulness, she never got used to the wrench of parting. Oh, she thought. I need not leave. I can stay. If I hadn't taken this berth, if I had never met Sigurt, I would never have realized that I could do this! With a rush of immense gratitude toward the alien, she knelt, she crept on her knees to the offertory table and settled there, curled against the stone.
"The Tomb Wife was obliged to remain,” said the archaeologist, behind her, in a tone of mild apology. “For all eternity, with the partner to whom she was bound. But in special conditions it might be possible to make, well, a kind of exchange. One ghost for another. I may have lied to you a little. In your terms, it happened long, long ago. In my lifetime, the time I have spent awake, it was not so long ago as all that."
Faintly, in her mind's eye, Elen saw that she had let a transcription error get past her, and what was happening to her now was the consequence. In absolute terms there was no saloon, no eminent alien, no hold full of tombs, there was nothing but the storm, never anything but the storm, the blizzard, and she was falling into it, into the thrilling void of terror that every starfarer knew was waiting—
Emotion can deceive. The sentient bipeds barely knew anything about each other, as yet. Misconceptions abounded, wild mistakes were only found out when it was too late. A family divided by a single language, thought Elen: knowing at the same time that everything, the stone against her cheek, Batman's deception, was a translation, and really there was only the blizzard. Yet in the last paradoxical moment, annoyed that it had to happen, that she would not stay here entirely, she felt herself splitting, giving birth to the person who would go on.
—and saw herself walking away with Sigurt, arm in arm: glimpsed, through the veil of Elen the Navigator's physical form, the Tomb Wife's caped shoulders, the delicate black domino of velvet fur, the gleam of the lovers’ eyes.
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Coming Attractions
Next month we're pleased to bring you a new story by award-winning writer Ted Chiang. His first appearance in F&SF is a lovely novelet set in Baghdad during the Middle Ages. Don't miss “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate."
Also on tap for August is John Langan's grim view of the near future, “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers.” This one's pretty potent.
We've got lots of other stories jostling each other to fit into the next two issues, including fantasies by Fred Chappell, Daryl Gregory, Paul Park, and Michael Swanwick, along with science fiction stories by James Stoddard and Robert Reed ... plus tales from newcomers like M. Ramsey Chapman and Heather Lindsley. Use the reply card in this issue or go to www.fsfmag.com and subscribe so you'll be sure to get all the goodies we're publishing in the next year.
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Curiosities: Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia, by H. G. Wells (1937) by Gwynplaine MacIntyre
The War of the Worlds (1898) is a landmark of science fiction. Yet, in all the history of literature, no other novel of such magnitude has spawned so obscure a sequel by the same author. Star Begotten, written four decades later (and published in America with a hyphenated title: Star-Begotten) must be reckoned as Wells's official sequel to his War of the Worlds. Very briefly in this novel, the characters reminisce about those pesky Martians who invaded London two generations earlier. Star Begotten is a subdued and moody sequel, with much angst and very little action.
Joseph Davis is a respectable Londoner: married, with a young son and a career as an author of popular histories. (He thoroughly resembles an idealized younger version of Wells himself.) Gradually, Davis becomes convinced that the Martians have begun a second, subtler campaign to conquer Earth: this time the Martians are modulating the cosmic rays that bombard Earth, in a manner calculated to cause gradual mutations in humanity's genome, so that humans will eventually evolve into Martians. In his growing certainty—or perhaps it's paranoia—Davis believes he has discovered evidence that his own son is a Martian ... and maybe also his wife ... and perhaps even Davis himself.