The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  30 August. 0945 hours. What a damned fool I am! Serves me right for being a filthy voyeur. Climbed a tree to watch iguanodons mating at the foot of Bakker Falls. At the climactic moment the branch broke. I dropped twenty meters. Grabbed a lower limb or I’d be dead now. As it is, pretty badly smashed around. I don’t think anything’s broken, but my left leg won’t support me and my back’s in bad shape. Internal injuries, too? Not sure. I’ve crawled into a little rock shelter near the falls. Exhausted and maybe feverish. Shock, most likely. I suppose I’ll starve now. It would have been an honor to be eaten by a tyrannosaur, but to die from falling out of a tree is just plain humiliating.

  The mating of iguanodons is a spectacular sight, by the way. But I hurt too much to describe it now.

  31 August. 1700 hours. Stiff, sore, hungry, hideously thirsty. Leg still useless, and when I try to crawl even a few meters, I feel as if I’m going to crack in half at the waist. High fever. How long does it take to starve to death?

  1 September. 0700 hours. Three broken eggs lying near me when

  I awoke. Embryos still alive – probably stegosaur – but not for long. First food in forty-eight hours. Did the eggs fall out of a nest somewhere overhead? Do stegosaurs make their nests in trees, dummy?

  Fever diminishing. Body aches all over. Crawled to the stream and managed to scoop up a little water.

  1330 hours. Dozed off. Awakened to find haunch of fresh meat within crawling distance. Struthiomimus drumstick, I think. Nasty sour taste, but it’s edible. Nibbled a little, slept again, ate some more. Pair of stegosaurs grazing not far away, tiny eyes fastened on me. Smaller dinosaurs holding a kind of conference by some big cycads. And Bertha Brachiosaur is munching away in Ostrom Meadow, benignly supervising the whole scene.

  This is absolutely crazy.

  I think the dinosaurs are taking care of me. But why would they do that?

  2 September. 0900 hours. No doubt of it at all. They bring me eggs, meat, even cycad cones and tree-fern fronds. At first they delivered things only when I slept, but now they come hopping right up to me and dump things at my feet. The struthiomimids are the bearers – they’re the smallest, most agile, quickest hands. They bring their offerings, stare me right in the eye, pause as if waiting for a tip. Other dinosaurs watching from the distance. This is a coordinated effort. I am the center of all activity on the island, it seems. I imagine that even the tyrannosaurs are saving choice cuts for me. Hallucination? Fantasy? Delirium of fever? I feel lucid. The fever is abating. I’m still too stiff and weak to move very far, but I think I’m recovering from the effects of my fall. With a little help from my friends.

  1000 hours. Played back the last entry. Thinking it over. I don’t think I’ve gone insane. If I’m sane enough to be worried about my sanity, how crazy can I be? Or am I just fooling myself? There’s a terrible conflict between what I think I perceive going on here and what I know I ought to be perceiving.

  1500 hours. A long, strange dream this afternoon. I saw all the dinosaurs standing in the meadow, and they were connected to one another by gleaming threads, like the telephone lines of olden times and all the threads centered on Bertha. As it she’s the switchboard, yes. And telepathic messages were traveling through her to the others. An extrasensory hookup, powerful pulses moving along the lines. I dreamed that a small dinosaur came to me and offered me a line and, in pantomime, showed me how to hook it up, and a great flood of delight went through me as I made the connection. And when I plugged it in, I could feel the deep and heavy thoughts of the dinosaurs, the slow, rapturous philosophical interchanges.

  When I woke, the dream seemed bizarrely vivid, strangely real, the dream ideas lingering as they sometimes do. I saw the animals about me in a new way. As if this is not just a zoological research station but a community, a settlement, the sole outpost of an alien civilization – an alien civilization native to Earth.

  Come off it. These animals have minute brains. They spend their days chomping on greenery except for the ones that chomp on other dinosaurs. Compared with dinosaurs, cows and sheep are downright geniuses. I can hobble a little now.

  3 September. 0600 hours. The same dream again last night, the universal telepathic linkage. Sense of warmth and love flowing from dinosaurs to me.

  And once more I found fresh tyrannosaur eggs for breakfast.

  5 September. 1100 hours. I’m making a fast recovery. Up and about, still creaky but not much pain left. They still feed me. Though the struthiomimids remain the bearers of food, the bigger dinosaurs now come close, too. A stegosaur nuzzled up to me like some Goliath-sized pony and I petted its rough, scaly flank. The diplodocus stretched out flat and seemed to beg me to stroke its immense neck.

  If this is madness, so be it. There’s a community here, loving and temperate. Even the predatory carnivores are part of it. Eaters and eaten are aspects of the whole, yin and yang. Riding around in our sealed modules, we could never have suspected any of this.

  They are gradually drawing me into their communion. I feel the pulses that pass between them. My entire soul throbs with that strange new sensation. My skin tingles.

  They bring me food of their own bodies, their flesh and their unborn young, and they watch over me and silently urge me back to health. Why? For sweet charity’s sake? I don’t think so. I think they want something from me. More than that. I think they need something from me.

  What could they need from me?

  6 September. 0600 hours. All this night I have moved slowly through the forest in what I can only term an ecstatic state. Vast shapes, humped, monstrous forms barely visible by dim glimmer, came and went about me. Hour after hour I walked unharmed, feeling the communion intensify. I wandered, barely aware of where I was, until at last, exhausted, I have come to rest here on this mossy carpet, and in the first light of dawn I see the giant form of the great brachiosaur standing like a mountain on the far side of Owen River.

  I am drawn to her. I could worship her. Through her vast body surge powerful currents. She is the amplifier. By her are we all connected. The holy mother of us all. From the enormous mass of her body emanate potent healing impulses.

  I’ll rest a little while. Then I’ll cross the river to her.

  0900 hours. We stand face to face. Her head is fifteen meters above mine. Her small eyes are unreadable. I trust her and I love her.

  Lesser brachiosaurs have gathered behind her on the riverbank. Farther away are dinosaurs of half a dozen other species, immobile, silent.

  I am humble in their presence. They are representatives of a dynamic, superior race, which but for a cruel cosmic accident would rule the earth to this day, and I am coming to revere them, to bear witness to their greatness.

  Consider: they endured for a hundred forty million years in ever-renewing vigor. They met all evolutionary challenges, except the one of sudden and catastrophic climatic change, against which nothing could have protected them. They multiplied and proliferated and adapted, dominating land and sea and air, covering the globe. Our own trifling, contemptible ancestors were nothing next to them. Who knows what these dinosaurs might have achieved if that crashing asteroid had not blotted out their light? What a vast irony: millions of years of supremacy ended in a single generation by a chilling cloud of dust. But until then – the wonder, the grandeur . . .

  Only beasts, you say? How can you be sure? We know just a shred of what the Mesozoic was really like, just a slice, literally the bare bones. The passage of a hundred million years can obliterate all traces of civilization. Suppose they had language, poetry, mythology, philosophy? Love, dreams, aspirations? No, you say they were beasts, ponderous and stupid, that lived mindless, bestial lives. And I reply that we puny hairy ones have no right to impose our own values on them. The only kind of civilization we can understand is the one we have built. We imagine that our own trivial accomplishments are the determining case, that computers and spaceships and broiled sausages are such miracles that they place us at evolution’s pinnacle. But now I
know otherwise. Humans have done marvellous, even incredible, things, yes. But we would never have existed at all, had this greatest of races been allowed to live to fulfill its destiny.

  I feel the intense love radiating from the titan that looms above me. I feel the contact between our souls steadily strengthening and deepening.

  The last barriers dissolve.

  And I understand at last.

  I am the chosen one. I am the vehicle. I am the bringer of rebirth, the beloved one, the necessary one. Our Lady of the Sauropods am I, the holy one, the prophetess, the priestess.

  Is this madness? Then it is madness, and I embrace it.

  Why have we small hairy creatures existed at all? I know now. It is so that through our technology we could make possible the return of the great ones. They perished unfairly. Through us, they are resurrected aboard this tiny globe in space.

  I tremble in the force of the need that pours from them.

  I will not fail you, I tell the great sauropods before me and the sauropods send my thoughts reverberating to all the others.

  20 September. 0600 hours. The thirtieth day. The shuttle comes from Habitat Vronsky today to pick me up and deliver the next researcher.

  I wait at the transit lock. Hundreds of dinosaurs wait with me, each close beside the next, both the lions and the lambs, gathered quietly their attention focused entirely on me.

  Now the shuttle arrives, right on time, gliding in for a perfect docking. The airlocks open. A figure appears. Sarber himself! Coming to make sure I didn’t survive the meltdown, or else to finish me off.

  He stands blinking in the entry passage, gaping at the throngs of placid dinosaurs arrayed in a huge semicircle around the naked woman who stands beside the wreckage of the mobile module. For a moment he is unable to speak.

  “Anne?” he says finally “What in God’s name – ”

  “You’ll never understand,” I tell him. I give the signal. Belshazzar rumbles forward. Sarber screams and whirls and sprints for the airlock, but a stegosaur blocks the way.

  “No!” Sarber cries as the tyrannosaur’s mighty head swoops down. It is all over in a moment.

  Revenge! How sweet!

  And this is only the beginning. Habitat Vronsky lies just one hundred twenty kilometers away. Elsewhere in the Lagrange belt are hundreds of other habitats ripe for conquest. The earth itself is within easy reach. I have no idea yet how it will be accomplished, but I know it will be done and done successfully, and I will be the instrument by which it is done.

  I stretch forth my arms to the mighty creatures that surround me. I feel their strength, their power, their harmony. I am one with them, and they with me. The Great Race has returned, and I am its priestess. Let the small hairy ones tremble!

  INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT

  G. David Nordley

  Here’s our second novella – almost a short novel, at 25,000 words. And I’m sure you’ll find you’ve never read 25,000 words so quickly. Taking its cue from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Nordley considers how explorers are going to survive and escape if they find themselves trapped under the surface of Uranus’s mini-moon, Miranda.

  Gerald David Nordley (b. 1947) trained as an airman, but his subsequent career has been mostly as an astro-nautical engineer, managing satellite operations, engineering, and advanced propulsion research, and rising to the rank of Major. His stories began to appear in the SF magazines, chiefly Analog, in 1991, soon after his retirement. His work is pure hard-tech SF and has included several related stories taking our explorers to some of the most hostile environments of the solar system. But this one beats all. Surprisingly only a handful of Nordley’s stories have appeared in book form, and those were a series involving the colonization of Mars, After the Vikings (2001). This story and the related stories “The Protean Solution”, “Dawn Venus” and “Crossing Chao Meng Fu” are screaming out for a collection, but until that happens, we can enjoy this one.

  I

  THIS STARTS AFTER WE had already walked, crawled, and clawed our way fifty-three zig-zagging kilometres into the Great Miranda Rift, and had already penetrated seventeen kilometres below the mean surface. It starts because the mother of all Miranda-quakes just shut the door behind us and the chances of this being rescued are somewhat better than mine; I need to do more than just take notes for a future article. It starts because I have faith in human stubbornness, even in a hopeless endeavour; and I think the rescuers will come, eventually. I am Wojciech Bubka and this is my journal.

  Miranda, satellite of Uranus, is a cosmic metaphor about those things in creation that come together without really fitting, like the second try at marriage, ethnic integration laws, or a poet trying to be a science reporter. It was blasted apart by something a billion years ago and the parts drifted back together, more or less. There are gaps. Rifts. Empty places for things to work their way in that are not supposed to be there; things that don’t belong to something of whole cloth.

  Like so many great discoveries, the existence of the rifts was obvious after the fact, but our geologist, Nikhil Ray, had to endure a decade of derision, several rejected papers, a divorce from a wife unwilling to share academic ridicule, and public humiliation in the pop science media – before the geology establishment finally conceded that what the seismological network on Miranda’s surface had found had, indeed, confirmed his work.

  Nikhil had simply observed that although Miranda appears to be made of the same stuff as everything else in the Uranian system, the other moons are just under twice as dense as water while Miranda is only one and a third times as dense. More ice and less rock below was one possibility. The other possibility, which Nikhil had patiently pointed out, was that there could be less of everything; a scattering of voids or bubbles beneath.

  So, with the goat-to-hero logic we all love, when seismological results clearly showed that Miranda was laced with substantial amounts of nothing, Nikhil became a minor solar system celebrity, with a permanent chair at Coriolis, and a beautiful, high strung, young renaissance woman as a trophy wife.

  But, by that time, I fear there were substantial empty places in Nikhil, too.

  Like Miranda, this wasn’t clear from his urbane and vital surface when we met. He was tall for a Bengali, a lack of sun had left his skin with only a tint of bronze, and he had a sharp face that hinted at an Arab or a Briton in his ancestry; likely both. He moved with a sort of quick, decisive, energy that nicely balanced the tolerant good-fellow manners of an academic aristocrat in the imperial tradition. If he now distrusted people in general, if he kept them all at a pleasantly formal distance, if he harboured a secret contempt for his species, well, this had not been apparent to Catherine Ray, MD, who had married him after his academic rehabilitation.

  I think she later found the emptiness within him and part of her had recoiled, while the other, controlling, part found no objective reason to leave a relationship that let her flit around the top levels of Solar System academia. Perhaps that explained why she chose to go on a fortnight of exploration with someone she seemed to detest; oh, the stories she would tell. Perhaps that explained her cynicism. Perhaps not.

  We entered the great rift three days of an age ago, at the border of the huge chevron formation: the rift where two dissimilar geologic structures meet, held together by Miranda’s gentle gravity and little else. Below the cratered, dust-choked surface, the great rift was a network of voids between pressure ridges; rough wood, slap-glued together by a lazy carpenter late on a Saturday night. It could, Nikhil thinks, go through the entire moon. There were other joints, other rifts, other networks of empty places – but this was the big one.

  Ah, yes, those substantial amounts of nothing. As a poet, I am fascinated by contradiction and I find a certain attraction to exploring vast areas of hidden emptiness under shells of any kind.

  I fill voids, so to speak. I am an explicit rebel in a determinedly impressionist literary world of artful obscurity which fails to generate recognitio
n or to make poets feel like they are doing anything more meaningful than the intellectual equivalent of masturbation – and pays them accordingly. The metaphor of Miranda intrigued me; an epic lay there beneath the dust and ice. Wonders to behold there must be in the biggest underground system of caverns in the known universe. The articles, interviews, and talk shows played out in my mind. All I had to do was get there.

  I had a good idea of how to do that. Her name was Miranda Lotati. Four years ago, the spelunking daughter of the guy in charge of Solar System Astrographic’s project board had been a literature student of mine at Coriolis university. When I heard of the discovery of Nikhil’s mysterious caverns, it was a trivial matter to renew the acquaintance, this time without the impediments of faculty ethics. By this time she had an impressive list of caves, mountains, and other strange places to her credit, courtesy of her father’s money and connections, I had thought.

  She had seemed a rough edged, prickly woman in my class, and her essays were dry condensed dullness, never more than the required length, but which covered the points involved well enough that honesty had forced me to pass her.

  Now, armed with news of the moon Miranda’s newly discovered caverns, I decided her name was clearly her destiny. I wasn’t surprised when an inquiry had revealed no current relationship. So, I determined to create one and bend it toward my purposes. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked. Worked to the point where it wasn’t entirely clear whether she was following my agenda, or I, hers.