The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “So what exactly is their gift?”

  “Maybe it’s a blessing, and they’re offering us a portion of their enormous power. Or maybe it’s some kind of elaborate, horrible curse. At this point, I don’t have opinions, one way or the other.”

  Again, I touched the glassy flat surface.

  Simple controls appeared, and it happened so quickly that my mind half-believed they had always been there, begging to be noticed. The display showed me a specific date and hour, and a location that I recognized immediately. I did the math, and my belly tightened into a knot. Then almost as a reflex, I touched the broad green button, and when I looked up I discovered that from my perspective, the black sphere had vanished. In its place I could see my mother, exceptionally alive and young, lying naked in a rumpled bed, while my father, wearing only a sweaty T-shirt, lay panting beside her, muttering something like, “Okay,” and then, “That was pretty nice.”

  The newly pregnant woman coughed into a tiny fist. Then she pulled the covers over herself, and with a voice that I knew better than my own asked, “By the way, did you remember to lock the front door?”

  The front door of my childhood home was latched and securely locked. But fat good that does when you’re trying to stop voyeuristic entities that exist outside time and space.

  Entities such as me.

  Peck muttered gibberish in my direction. I turned toward him, my expression perplexed and enthralled.

  “Human history,” he said to me, his face betraying a humbled, undiminished astonishment. “From this vantage point, you and I can observe everything that has ever happened to our species. I’ve watched the first Homo sapiens running across an African valley, and I’ve seen pyramids built on two continents, and I’ve seen wars and concentration camps and nuclear blasts. Wherever humans have stood, we can stand. We can witness every act that people have unleashed and hear every sound that we have made, and there’s even an effective translator function.” He pushed closer, whispering, “Languages no living man has heard . . . they can be turned into functional, mid-century American . . .”

  I stepped back away from the doughnut, legs shaking. My postcoital parents lingered, but their features softened and their spent voices fell away into soft, incoherent murmurs.

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “Thirteen days.”

  “Nobody else – ?”

  “No.”

  So I offered the obvious question: “Why me?”

  “Because you’ve got experience with the world, and you seem skeptical by nature. And most important, you aren’t genuine military.” Whispering again, he asked, “Can you imagine what kind of intelligence weapon this would make? Armed with a tool of this magnitude, a person or government would have an open window over everybody’s life.”

  I nodded, imagining possibilities both grim and wondrous.

  “I don’t really know you, Craig. But what I’ve seen of you . . . it tells me that I can trust you to help . . .”

  “What have you seen of me?”

  Peck hesitated, his crooked smile wavering.

  “Have you watched my life?”

  “It’s remarkably easy, picking up a person’s existence, following it through its high points.”

  I was embarrassed and I was thrilled. It took me several moments to find my voice again, warning him, “They’ll learn what you’re doing here. Tomorrow or next week, one of your colleagues down in Alpha or Beta is going to figure this puzzle out. Or the General’s going to follow through with his threats, curbing your little freedoms.”

  “Oh, everybody’s suspicious,” he admitted. “I’ve been keeping close tabs on their conversations. I doubt if I have two days left to work however I want.”

  “So what were we talking about here?”

  “Telling the world what we know. Obviously. Otherwise, there will be people who will shut a heavy lid over this place. Button it up and keep it to themselves. For decades, maybe for centuries.”

  “And maybe that would be best,” I allowed.

  Panic took hold. With a quick worried voice, he tried to sweeten the prospects. “Imagine, Craig. A world where the past is just as visible and immediate as the present is. Sure, I agree. It’s going to cause a huge upheaval. Twenty upheavals, maybe. People are going to lose all their ancient ideas about human origins and God and our mythic heroes. But after a few years . . . in a generation or two, at the very most . . . we’ll find ourselves with a new society. An honest, enlightened society. There won’t be any awful secrets anymore. And this will be the only holy site: scholars from every nation will come to the Castle to study and learn, and the lessons of a 100,000 years will be shared equally with every citizen. Or at least that’s how it should be.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “So do you have a plan here, Dr Visionary?”

  “With your help.” Using a conspirator’s voice, Peck said, “Every message I send home is being vetted. And it’s the same for you. Did you know that? They don’t trust either one of us. But if we can get our news to the other bases on the moon, or even just the civilian-run US settlement – ”

  “And how do we manage that?”

  He grinned, thrilled by my interest. “Almost everything I’ve seen here, plus my explanations for the Castle . . . several hundred hours of files in all . . . I’ve them copied into a dozen null-sink hard-drives.” From a food bin, he pulled out a camera that actually worked, then handed me one of the bullet-shaped devices. “They’re very durable and wonderfully small. But what I can’t do and you can . . . since you’re an engineer and all . . . you can step outside and play with the hardware that’s scattered on the surface. The stuff we used trying to crack the Castle’s walls. My plan . . . and you’ll appreciate this, Craig . . . is to cobble together a railgun. I’ll supply the plausible excuse. I’ll want you to shoot a hole in this panel, maybe. But instead of using it down here, you’re going to wrap my hard-drives inside iron slugs and mark them with alarm beacons, then launch them in five carefully calibrated suborbital arcs.”

  “Clever,” I offered.

  “It’s an elegant solution,” Peck agreed, shamelessly applauding his scheme. “People will eventually find one or all of those hard-drives. And do you think that China or the French will let our Pentagon hold the Castle for themselves?”

  I had to admit, “It might work.”

  “And if you want, launch the extra hard-drives toward the earth. The biggest railguns have enough kick, and if we wrap the iron inside ceramic envelopes to serve as heat shields . . .” He hesitated before admitting, “This is your expertise more than mine, Craig. I should leave it in your capable hands to decide.”

  I nodded, saying nothing.

  Peck glanced at my controls. “I’m going to walk back up and help my staff with their little experiment. I’ll be gone two hours. As soon as you hear the airlock cycling through again, blank everything. That red button at the bottom should do the trick. At least that’s how mine works.”

  Just to make sure, I kicked the button, replacing my parents with the plain black ball.

  “And what do you want me to do until then?” I asked.

  “Play,” Peck told me, as if nothing could be plainer. “Go whenever and wherever you want. Walk your life. Eavesdrop on the great moments in history. But whatever you do, I promise this much: after the first hour, you’ll be an expert. That’s how well built this system is.”

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  Then with a voice unaccustomed to trusting words, Peck told me, “I’ve got my faith in you.” And he let me keep the hard-drive, showing me his hopeful smile before he turned and bounced toward the airlock.

  I needed less than an hour to see everything I needed to see. Another twenty minutes, and I was finished with my work. Pushing the red button, I cleared the last scene; I pulled a fresh hard-drive from the camera and put the camera back in its hiding place; then I sealed my gloves and helmet, and with two hard-drives hidden inside a pocket, I passed thr
ough the airlock and marched up the long unlit hallway.

  Fortunately Peck was where he had promised to be, working on the balky machine with his back toward me. Nobody noticed my presence until I was past, and except for a casual wave with my hand, I didn’t signify their presence.

  A supply rover carried me back to base.

  I didn’t bother trying to seem at ease. In a rush, I pulled off the suit and hurried underground, and at a certain door, I paused and knocked, wishing for a small measure of luck.

  Katherine said, “Yes?”

  I entered her small cabin and set the lock.

  She was in uniform, minutes away from going on-duty. Something about my mood and looks alarmed her. “Sit,” she advised. And then with a mixture of tenderness and revulsion, she asked, “Are you sick?”

  I produced the fresh hard-drive and plugged it into her notebook. There was only one file on it, but before I punched PLAY, I stared at her while saying, “Peck has the mystery solved. And he wants to tell the world before he tells you.”

  Her surprise was far from total. She sat up in her chair, nodded for a moment while coming to terms with some old suspicions. And then very quietly, she said, “Thanks for coming forward – ”

  “Don’t thank me,” I interrupted.

  She glanced at the glowing screen, curious now.

  In the briefest possible terms, I outlined what I had just learned. Then I told her, “If you want, report both of us. Do it this minute. Or you can sit there for the next fifteen minutes and watch your daughter while she plays in a dirty little sandbox. She’s six years old, and I know for a fact she won’t make seven.”

  Katherine shrank down.

  I hit PLAY and let the video run for nearly ten minutes. Then Peck was at the door, knocking on it while saying our names over and over, his voice tense and urgent, trying hard not to sound desperate but moving very much in that direction.

  I froze the image of a pretty child burying her own legs under brown sand. Then I leaned close to her weeping mother, saying, “This isn’t just a video. It’s a piece of your daughter’s entire life. Good and not, her whole life is waiting for you. But ask yourself this: if you report what you know now, what are the odds that you’ll see any more of this girl? Ask yourself that, Katherine. And now, make up your mind.”

  I’m not the biggest name in this story. Peck made the discovery, after all. And Katherine effectively ended her career when she used her rank to evade the normal vetting procedures, uploading Peck’s hard-drive straight home to the Internet – in effect, announcing this unexpected news to a thoroughly unprepared species. But people still have to ask me, “Why didn’t you just do what Peck suggested? Why not use a railgun and send off the hard-drives like bullets?”

  Because you’re never sure where a bullet will end up, and you can’t know what the person who finds it will actually do. What if another base or its government simply decided to take the Castle for itself? A war would break out on the moon, hundreds dying for a prize like none other . . . and who could envision what miserable future that would bring . . . ?

  No, I tell people. I did what I thought was quickest and safest, and more than most ways, smartest.

  “But Katherine was a believer,” people like to remind me. “And the Castle has made a lot of Believers crazy.”

  The ugly upheavals are still gaining momentum, sure. Every faith feels threatened by the Castle, as well it should be. But I didn’t approach Katherine with her God. I brought her daughter to her. And I would argue that when given the chance, people believe mostly in people. Gods and souls are inventions to make us feel better about those we have lost . . . but what if nobody is truly lost, if every who is born is always alive . . . if only in a different slice of time . . . ?

  “And where did you figure that out?” people have to ask.

  My final epiphany occurred after Peck left me alone. “What do I want to watch?” I asked myself. Then my mind jumped back to that long-dead friend and the horrible suffering that he must have endured on his last night. When I started playing with the controls, I meant to watch the tragedy: Donnie would come to my house and get turned away. Then somehow his depressed mother would manage to coax everyone into the car. Between her prayers and threats, what did she say to the older boys to keep them calm and compliant? How long did it take for the fumes to build up and for everyone to lose consciousness? Did Donnie weep? Did he call for me? And what was I doing at that moment when his little body turned into nothing but mindless, lost meat?

  Yet when I had my chance, I found myself searching out a different moment.

  Death is a very small part of life. And if you have only a little time to look at anyone’s existence – yours or some shy kid from third grade – you would have to be pretty sick to seek out that kind of nightmare.

  I spent an hour doing nothing but watch Donnie playing with me in my bedroom. I stared at that little black-haired boy, and I cried hard, and somewhere in the midst of that bland normalcy and those pleasantly wasted minutes, I realized nothing dies because nothing ever ceases.

  To me, that’s what the Castle means.

  I saw this child that was once me pushing a toy battleship across the shag carpeting while his best friend maneuvered a thousand-foot robot over the ocean’s golden surface, each making those silly little sounds of cannons and ray guns blazing away . . . Those boys are there now, safely contained in that impregnable, eternal moment . . . and if you ever have the chance to see my old self watching that scene, here is all that you need to know:

  I told myself that if a mother didn’t want to risk her rank and career for the chance to see her daughter again, then she was never much of a mother. And we probably wouldn’t be much of a species, either. And if I were wrong about Katherine, I decided that we surely deserved our ignorance and idiocy, now and to the last of our sorry, perishable days . . .

  THE HOLE IN THE HOLE

  Terry Bisson

  Terry Bisson (b. 1942) caused quite a stir with his short story “Bear Discovers Fire” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1990) which went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It’s a deliberate tongue-in-cheek satire with chilling overtones about the discovery that bears have evolved to master fire. The story will be found in Bear Discovers Fire (1993). Although Bisson has written a number of novels, including the alternate world Fire on the Mountain (1988), he remains best known for his idiosyncratic and often anarchic short stories. “The Hole in the Hole”, first published in Asimov’s in February 1994, was the first of three stories he wrote about the brilliant but socially challenged Wilson Wu and his friends, which has fun with one of science fiction’s basic concepts – the space-time portal. All three stories were collected as Numbers Don’t Lie (2005).

  TRYING TO FIND Volvo parts can be a pain, particularly if you are a cheapskate, like me. I needed the hardware that keeps the brake pads from squealing, but I kept letting it go, knowing it wouldn’t be easy to find. The brakes worked okay – good enough for Brooklyn. And I was pretty busy, anyway, being in the middle of a divorce, the most difficult I have ever handled, my own.

  After the squeal developed into a steady scream (we’re talking about the brakes here, not the divorce, which was silent), I tried the two auto supply houses I usually dealt with, but had no luck. The counterman at Aberth’s just gave me a blank look. At Park Slope Foreign Auto, I heard those dread words, “dealer item”. Breaking (no pun intended) with my usual policy, I went to the Volvo dealer in Bay Ridge, and the parts man, one of those Jamaicans who seems to think being rude is the same thing as being funny, fished around in his bins and placed a pile of pins, clips, and springs on the counter.

  “That’ll be twenty-eight dollars, mon,” he said, with what they used to call a shit-eating grin. When I complained (or as we lawyers like to say, objected), he pointed at the spring which was spray-painted yellow and said, “Well, you see, they’re gold, mon!” Then he spun on one heel to enjoy the laughs of his co-workers, and I left. Th
ere is a limit.

  So I let the brakes squeal for another week. They got worse and worse. Ambulances were pulling over to let me by, thinking I had priority. Then I tried spraying the pads with WD-40.

  Don’t ever try that.

  On Friday morning I went back to Park Slope Foreign Auto and pleaded (another legal specialty) for help. Vinnie, the boss’s son, told me to try Boulevard Imports in Howard Beach, out where Queens and Brooklyn come together at the edge of Jamaica Bay. Since I didn’t have court that day, I decided to give it a try.

  The brakes howled all the way. I found Boulevard Imports on Rockaway Boulevard just off the Belt Parkway. It was a dark, grungy, impressive-looking cave of a joint, with guys in coveralls lounging around drinking coffee and waiting on deliveries. I was hopeful.

  The counterman, another Vinnie, listened to my tale of woe before dashing my hopes with the dread words, “dealer item”. Then the guy in line behind me, still another Vinnie (everyone wore their names over their pockets) said, “Send him to Frankie in the Hole.”

  The Vinnie behind the counter shook his head, saying, “He’d never find it.”

  I turned to the other Vinnie and asked, “Frankie in the Hole?”

  “Frankie runs a little junkyard,” he said. “Volvos only. You know the Hole?”

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  “I’m not surprised. Here’s what you do. Listen carefully because it’s not so easy to find these days, and I’m only going to tell you once.”

  There’s no way I could describe or even remember everything this Vinnie told me: suffice it to say that it had to do with crossing over Rockaway Boulevard, then back under the Belt Parkway, forking onto a service road, making a U-turn onto Conduit but staying in the centre lane, cutting a sharp left into a dead end (that really wasn’t), and following a dirt track down a steep bank through a grove of trees and brush.