Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others—still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene—were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone inductor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped convulsively. Then a collective sigh as his muscles eased and his spasms ceased.

  “There,” the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the couch.

  She pushed through the people (and a small voice in the back of her head marveled: A crowd! How strange,) and knelt before Tory, cradling his head in her arms.

  He shivered, eyes wide and unblinking. “Tory, what’s the matter?”

  He turned those terrible eyes on her. “Nichevo.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Landis said. “Or maybe ‘it doesn’t matter,’ is a better translation.”

  A wetware tech had taken control, shoving the crowd back. He reported to Landis, his mouth moving calmly under the interplay of green and red. “Looks like a flaw in the programming philosophy. We were guessing that bringing the ego along would make God such an unpleasant experience that the subject would let us deprogram without interfering—now we know better.”

  Elin stroked Tory’s forehead. His muscles clenched, then loosened, as a medtech reprogrammed the body respondes. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” she demanded.

  “Take a look,” Landis said, and patched her into the intercom. In her mind’s eye, Elin could see dozens of wetware techs submitting program after program. A branching wetware diagram filled one channel, and as she watched minor changes would occur as programs took hold, then be unmade as Tory’s mind rejected them. “We’ve got an imagery tap of his Weltanschauung coming up,” some nameless tech reported.

  Something horrible appeared on a blank channel.

  Elin could only take an instant’s exposure before her mind reflexively shut the channel down, but that instant was more than enough. She stood in a room infinitely large and cluttered in all dimensions with great noisome machines. They were tended by malevolent demons who shrieked and cackled and were machines themselves, and they generated pain and madness.

  The disgust and revulsion she felt could not be put into words—no more than could the actual experience of what she had seen. And yet— she knew this much about wetware techniques—it was only a rough approximation, a cartoon, of what was going through Tory’s head.

  Elin’s body trembled with shock, and by slow degrees she realized that she had retreated to the surface world. Tory’s head was cradled in her arms. A wetware tech standing nearby looked stunned, her face gray.

  Elin gathered herself together, said as gently as she could, “Tory, what is that you’re seeing?”

  Tory turned his stark, haunted eyes on her, and it took an effort of will not to flinch. Then he spoke, shockingly calmly.

  “It is—what is. Reality. The universe is a damned cold machine, and all of us only programs within it. We perform the actions we have no choice but to perform, and then we fade into nothingness. It’s a cruel and noisy place.”

  “I don’t understand—didn’t you always say that we were just programs? Wasn’t that what you always believed?”

  “Yes, but now I experience it.”

  Elin noticed that her hand was slowly stroking his hair; she did not try to stop it. “Then come down, Tory. Let them deprogram you.”

  He did not look away. “Nichevo,” he said.

  The tech, recovered from her shock, reached toward a piece of equipment. Landis batted her hand away. “Hold it right there, techie! Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  The woman looked impatient. “He left instructions that if the experiment turned out badly, I was to pull the terminator switch.”

  “That’s what I thought. There’ll be no mercy killings while I’m on the job, Mac.”

  “I don’t understand.” The tech backed away, puzzled. “Surely you don’t want him to suffer.”

  Landis was gathering herself for a withering reply when the intercom cut them all off. A flash of red shot through the sensorium, along with the smell of bitter almond, a prickle of static electricity, the taste of kimchi. “Emergency! We’ve got an emergency!” A black and white face materialized in Elin’s mind. “Emergency!”

  Landis flipped into the circuit. “What’s the problem? Show us.”

  “You’re not going to believe this.” The face disappeared, was replaced by a wide-angle shot of the lake.

  The greenish-black water was calm and stagnant. The thrust-cone island, with its scattered grass and weeds, slumbered.

  And God walked upon the water.

  They gawked, all of them. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her face serene. The pink soles of her bare feet only just touched the surface.

  I didn’t believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Halfway through her gesture, the Jesuitical wetware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.

  “Hans,” the priest said, “push the button.”

  “No!” Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.

  For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condensor units, harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.

  Bits of the sky were blown away.

  Elin turned, twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground, and threw her arms around Tory.

  The air was in turmoil. The holes in the dome roof—small at first—grew as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it was designed not to take. An uncanny whistling grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompassing whoomph and the dome shattered.

  Elin was flung upward, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rocks tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.

  The screaming died—the air was gone. Elin’s ears rang furiously, and her skin stung everywhere. Pressure grew within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.

  A quiet voice said: This must not be.

  Time stopped.

  Elin hung suspended between Moon and death. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became … not misty, actually, but apositional. Both it and she grew tentative, possibilities rather than actual things.

  Come be God with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.

  Tory’s presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there was a change within him, a sloughing off of identity, and he seemed to straighten, to heal.

  All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory’s presence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.

  Yes.

  With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.

  Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lakefront. She passed by two guards at the foot of the stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.

  She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.

  Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, until she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung onto a ledge, wedging herself between strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.

  “Now what the hell am I doing here?” sh
e mumbled to herself. She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: “Being piss-ass drunk.” She cackled. There was something she didn’t have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed, and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.

  Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey-island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance one at the other—they just sat. Being Gods.

  Elin squinted down at the two. “Like to upchuck all over you,” she muttered. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!

  Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory’s face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly.

  A hand closed around her arm, and she looked up into the stern face of a security guard. “You’re drunk, Ms,” he said, “and you’re endangering property.”

  She looked where he pointed, at a young yam plant she had squashed when she sat down, and began to laugh. Smoothly, professionally, the guard rolled up her sleeve, clamped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. “Time to go,” he said.

  By the time the guard had walked Elin up four terraces, she was nearly sober. A steady trickle of her blood wound through the bracelet, was returned to her body cleansed of alcohol. Sacrilegious waste of wine, in her opinion.

  In another twenty steps, the bracelet fell off her wrist. The guard snapped it neatly from the air, disappeared. Despair closed in on her again. Tory, my love! And since there was no hope of sleep, she kept on trudging up the terraces, back toward Hans’s rathskeller, for another bellyful of wine.

  There was a small crowd seated about the rock that served Hans as a table, lit by a circle of hologram-generated fairy-lights. Father Landis was there, and drinking heavily. “Tomorrow I file my report,” she announced. “The Synod is pulling out of this, withdrawing funding.”

  Hans sighed, took a long swig of his own wine, winced at its taste. “I guess that’s it for the Star Maker project, huh?”

  Landis crossed her fingers. “Pray God.” Elin, standing just outside the circle, stood silently, listening.

  “I don’t ever want to hear that name again,” a tech grumbled.

  “You mustn’t confuse God with what you’ve just seen,” Landis admonished.

  “Hey,” Hans said. “She moved time backwards or something. I saw it. This place exploded—doesn’t that prove something?”

  Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. “Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully small concept of God.” Several of the drinkers laughed.

  He blushed, said, “No, really.”

  “Well, I’ll try to keep this—” she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, “fill this up again, hey?—keep it simple. We had analysts crawl up and down Coral’s description of the universe, and did you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an amalgam of substrates, supraprograms, and selfmetaediting physics. Now what makes God superior is not just intellect—we’ve all known some damn clever bastards. And it’s not power, or I could buy an atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.

  “No, by definition God is my moral superior. Now I myself am but indifferent honest—but to Coral moral considerations don’t even exist. Get it?”

  Only Elin noticed the haunted, hopeless light in Landis’ eyes, or realized that she was spinning words effortlessly, without conscious control. That deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Hans scratched his head. “I’d still like to know just what happened between her and Tory there at the end.”

  “I can answer that,” a wetware tech said. The others turned to face her, and she smirked, the center of attention. “What the hell, they plant the censor blocks in us all tomorrow—this is probably my only chance to talk about it.

  “We reviewed all the tapes, and found that the original problem stemmed from a basic design flaw. Shostokovich should never have brought his ego along. The God-state is very ego-threatening; he couldn’t accept it. His mind twisted it, denied it, made it into a thing of horror. Because to accept it would mean giving up his identity.” She paused for emphasis.

  “Now we don’t understand the why or how of what happened. But what was done is very clearly recorded. Coral came along and stripped away his identity.”

  “Hogwash.” Landis was on her feet, belligerant and unsteady. “After all that happened, you can’t say they don’t have any identity! Look at the mess that Coral made to join Tory to her—that wasn’t the work of an unfeeling, identity-free creature.”

  “Our measurements showed no trace of identity at all,” the tech said in a miffed tone.

  “Measurements! Well, isn’t that just scientific as all get-out?” The priest’s face was flushed with drunken anger. “Have any of you clowns given any thought to just what we’ve created here? This gestalt being is still young—a new-born infant. Someday it’s going to grow up. What happens to us all when it decides to leave the island, hey? I—” She stopped, her voice trailing away. The drinkers were silent, had drawn away from her.

  “’Scuse me,” she muttered. “Too much wine.” And sat.

  “Well.” Hans cleared his throat, quirked a smile. “Anybody for refills?”

  The crowd came back to life, a little too boisterous, too noisily, determinedly cheerful. Watching from the fringes, outside the circle of light, Elin had a sudden dark fantasy, a waking nightmare.

  A desk-tech glanced her way. He had Tory’s eyes. When he looked away, Tory smiled out of another’s face. The drinkers shifted restlessly, chattering and laughing, like dancers pantomiming a party in some light opera, and the eyes danced with them. They flitted from person to person, materializing now here, now there, surfacing whenever an individual chanced to look her way. A quiet voice said, “We were fated to be lovers.”

  Go away, go away, go away, Elin thought furiously, and the hallucination ceased.

  After a moment spent composing herself, Elin quietly slipped around to where Landis sat. “I’m leaving in the morning,” she said. The new persona had taken; they would not remove her facepaint until just before the lift up, but that was mere formality. She was cleared to leave.

  Landis looked up, and for an instant the woman’s doubt and suffering were writ plain on her face. Then the mask was back, and she smiled. “Just stay away from experimental religion, hey kid?” They hugged briefly. “And remember what I told you about stubbing your toes.”

  There was one final temptation to be faced. Sitting in the hut, Tory’s terminal in her lap, Elin let the soothing green light of its alphanumerics wash over her. She thought of Tory. Of his lean body under hers in the pale blue Earthlight. “We were meant to be lovers,” he’d said. She thought of life without him.

  The terminal was the only artifact Tory had left behind that held any sense of his spirit. It had been his plaything, his diary and his toolbox, and its memory still held the Trojan Horse programs he had been working with when he was—transformed.

  One of those programs would make her a God.

  She stared up through the ivy at the domed sky. Only a few stars were visible between the black silhouetted leaves, and these winked off and on with the small movements of breathing. She thought back to Coral’s assertion that Elin would soon join her, merging into the unselfed autistic state that only Tory’s meddling had spared her.

  “God always keeps her promises,” Tory said quietly.

  Elin started, looked down, and saw that the grass to the far side of the hut was moving, flowing. Swiftly it formed the familiar, half-amused, half-embittered features of her lover, continued to flow until all of his head and part of his torso rose up from the floor.r />
  She was not half so startled as she would have liked to be. Of course the earlier manifestations of Tory had been real, not phantoms thrown up by her grief. They were simply not her style.

  Still, Elin rose to her feet apprehensively. “What do you want from me?”

  The loam-and-grass figure beckoned. “Come. It is time you join us.”

  “I am not a program,” Elin whispered convulsively. She backed away from the thing. “I can make my own decisions!”

  She turned and plunged outside, into the fresh, cleansing night air. It braced her, cleared her head, returned to her some measure of control.

  A tangle of honeysuckle vines on the next terrace wall up moved softly. Slowly, gently, they became another manifestation, of Coral this time, with blossoms for the pupils of her eyes. But she spoke with Tory’s voice.

  “You would not enjoy Godhood,” he said, “but the being you become will.”

  “Give me time to think!” she cried. She wheeled and strode rapidly away. Out of the residential cluster, through a scattering of boulders, and into a dark meadow.

  There was a quiet kind of peace here, and Elin wrapped it about her. She needed that peace, for she had to decide between her humanity and Tory. It should have been an easy choice, but—the pain of being without!

  Elin stared up at the Earth; it was a world full of pain. If she could reach out and shake all the human misery loose, it would flood all of Creation, extinguishing the stars and poisoning the space between.

  There was, if not comfort, then a kind of cold perspective in that, in realizing that she was not alone, that she was merely another member of the commonality of pain. It was the heritage of her race. And yet—somehow—people kept on going.

  If they could do it, so could she.