The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  I may yet.

  In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

  Final approach.

  Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerizing infinite regress of bull’s-eyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

  Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.

  Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically displaced mass.

  I turn to the drone’s-eye view relayed from up ahead. It’s a window into history—even now, there’s a time-lag of several minutes—but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, reenlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it’s cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

  A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

  At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

  I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.

  Angels do not speak to ants.

  Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past anymore; I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

  Tactical beeps at us.

  “Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?

  But—

  “It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

  Two minutes.

  “Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”

  “We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

  “Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”

  “Look at the signal,” I tell him.

  Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

  Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

  We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

  The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

  I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

  “Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

  “We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

  DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

  So far, though, nothing’s come out.

  “Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

  Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

  I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…

  I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.

  “Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

  “Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

  Why would you think that? I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

  My son is trying to comfort me.

  I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

  But I’m better now.

  It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.

  I still have so much to learn.

  At least my son is here to teach me.

  JOHN KESSEL

  EVENTS PRECEDING THE HELVETICAN RENAISSANCE

  Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American Literature and the director of the Creative Writing program at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel, Good News from Outer Space, was released in 1988 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which have been assembled in collections such as Meeting in Infinity and The Pure Product. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his novella Another Orphan, which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991, and his novella Stories for Men won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2003. His other books include the novels Corrupting Dr. Nice, Freedom Beach (written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly), Ninety Percent of Everything (written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly and Jonathan Lethem), and an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, coedited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His most recent books are two anthologies coedited with James Patrick Kelly, Feeling Very Strange
: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and a new collection, The Baum Plan For Financial Independence and Other Stories.

  When my mind cleared, I found myself in the street. A god spoke to me then: The boulevard to the spaceport runs straight up the mountain. And you must run straight up the boulevard.

  The air was full of wily spirits, and moving fast in the Imperial City was a crime. But what is man to disobey the voice of a god? So I ran. The pavement vibrated with the thunder of the great engines of the Caslonian Empire. Behind me the curators of the Imperial Archives must by now have discovered the mare’s nest I had made of their defenses, and perhaps had already realized that something was missing.

  Above the plateau the sky was streaked with clouds, through which shot violet gravity beams carrying ships down from and up to planetary orbit. Just outside the gate to the spaceport a family in rags—husband, wife, two children—used a net of knotted cords to catch fish from the sewers. Ignoring them, prosperous citizens in embroidered robes passed among the shops of the port bazaar, purchasing duty-free wares, recharging their concubines, seeking a meal before departure. Slower, now.

  I slowed my pace. I became indistinguishable from them, moving smoothly among the travelers.

  To the Caslonian eye, I was calm, self-possessed; within me, rage and joy contended. I had in my possession the means to redeem my people. I tried not to think, only to act, but now that my mind was rekindled, it raced. Certainly it would go better for me if I left the planet before anyone understood what I had stolen. Yet I was very hungry, and the aroma of food from the restaurants along the way enticed me. It would be foolishness itself to stop here.

  Enter the restaurant, I was told. So I stepped into the most elegant of the establishments.

  The maître ‘d greeted me. “Would the master like a table, or would he prefer to dine at the bar?”

  “The bar,” I said.

  “Step this way.” There was no hint of the illicit about his manner, though something about it implied indulgence. He was proud to offer me this experience that few could afford.

  He seated me at the circular bar of polished rosewood. Before me, and the few others seated there, the chef grilled meats on a heated metal slab. Waving his arms in the air like a dancer, he tossed flanks of meat between two force knives, letting them drop to the griddle, flipping them dexterously upward again in what was as much performance as preparation. The energy blades of the knives sliced through the meat without resistance, the sides of these same blades batting them like paddles. An aroma of burning hydrocarbons wafted on the air.

  An attractive young man displayed for me a list of virtualities that represented the “cuts” offered by the establishment, including subliminal tastes. The “cuts” referred to the portions of the animal’s musculature from which the slabs of meat had been sliced. My mouth watered.

  He took my order, and I sipped a cocktail of bitters and Belanova.

  While I waited, I scanned the restaurant. The fundamental goal of our order is to vindicate divine justice in allowing evil to exist. At a small nearby table, a young woman leaned beside a child, probably her daughter, and encouraged her to eat. The child’s beautiful face was the picture of innocence as she tentatively tasted a scrap of pink flesh. The mother was very beautiful. I wondered if this was her first youth.

  The chef finished his performance, to the mild applause of the other patrons. The young man placed my steak before me. The chef turned off the blades and laid them aside, then ducked down a trap door to the oubliette where the slaves were kept. As soon as he was out of sight, a god told me, Steal a knife.

  While the diners were distracted by their meals, I reached over the counter, took one of the force blades, and slid it into my boot. Then I ate. The taste was extraordinary. Every cell of my body vibrated with excitement and shame. My senses reeling, it took me a long time to finish.

  A slender man in a dark robe sat next to me. “That smells good,” he said. “Is that genuine animal flesh?”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  “Ah, brother, calm yourself. I’m not challenging your taste.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  “But I am challenging your identity.” He parted the robe—his tunic bore the sigil of Port Security “Your passport, please.”

  I exposed the inside of my wrist for him. A scanlid slid over his left eye and he examined the marks beneath my skin. “Very good,” he said. He drew a blaster from the folds of his cassock. “We seldom see such excellent forgeries. Stand up, and come with me.”

  I stood. He took my elbow in a firm grip, the bell of the blaster against my side. No one in the restaurant noticed. He walked me outside, down the crowded bazaar. “You see, brother, that there is no escape from consciousness. The minute it returns, you are vulnerable. All your prayer is to no avail.”

  This is the arrogance of the Caslonian. They treat us as non-sentients, and they believe in nothing. Yet as I prayed, I heard no word.

  I turned to him. “You may wish the absence of the gods, but you are mistaken. The gods are everywhere present.” As I spoke the plosive “p” of “present,” I popped the cap from my upper right molar and blew the moondust it contained into his face.

  The agent fell writhing to the pavement. I ran off through the people, dodging collisions. My ship was on the private field at the end of the bazaar. Before I had gotten halfway there, an alarm began sounding. People looked up in bewilderment, stopping in their tracks. The walls of buildings and stalls blinked into multiple images of me. Voices spoke from the air: “This man is a fugitive from the state. Apprehend him.”

  I would not make it to the ship unaided, so I turned on my perceptual overdrive. Instantly, everything slowed. The voices of the people and the sounds of the port dropped an octave. They moved as if in slow motion. I moved, to myself, as if in slow motion as well—my body could in no way keep pace with my racing nervous system—but to the people moving at normal speed, my reflexes were lighting fast. Up to the limit of my physiology—and my joints had been reinforced to take the additional stress; my muscles could handle the additional lactic acid for a time—I could move at twice the speed of a normal human. I could function perhaps for ten minutes in this state before I collapsed.

  The first person to accost me—a sturdy middle-aged man—I seized by the arm. I twisted it behind his back and shoved him into the second, who took up the command. As I dodged through the crowd up the concourse, it began to drizzle. I felt as if I could slip between the raindrops. I pulled the force blade from my boot and sliced the ear from the next man who tried to stop me. His comic expression of dismay still lingers in my mind. Glancing behind, I saw the agent in black, face swollen with pustules from the moondust, running toward me.

  I was near the field. In the boarding shed, attendants were folding the low-status passengers and sliding them into dispatch pouches, to be carried onto a ship and stowed in drawers for their passage. Directly before me, I saw the woman and child I had noticed in the restaurant. The mother had out a parasol and was holding it over the girl to keep the rain off her. Not slowing, I snatched the little girl and carried her off. The child yelped, the mother screamed. I held the blade to the girl’s neck. “Make way!” I shouted to the security men at the field’s entrance. They fell back.

  “Halt!” came the call from behind me. The booth beside the gate was seared with a blaster bolt. I swerved, turned, and, my back to the gate, held the girl before me.

  The agent in black, followed by two security women, jerked to a stop. “You mustn’t hurt her,” the agent said.

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “It’s against everything your order believes.”

  Master Darius had steeled me for this dilemma before sending me on my mission. He told me, “You will encounter such situations, Adlan. When they arise, you must resolve the complications.”

  “You are right!” I called to my pursuers, and threw the child at them. />
  The agent caught her, while the other two aimed and fired. One of the beams grazed my shoulder. But by then I was already through the gate and onto the tarmac.

  A Port Security robot hurled a flame grenade. I rolled through the flames. My ship rested in the maintenance pit, cradled in the violet anti-grav beam. I slid down the ramp into the open airlock, hit the emergency close, and climbed to the controls. Klaxons wailed outside. I bypassed all the launch protocols and released the beam. The ship shot upward like an apple seed flicked by a fingernail; as soon as it had hit the stratosphere, I fired the engines and blasted through the scraps of the upper atmosphere into space.

  The orbital security forces were too slow, and I made my escape.

  I awoke battered, bruised, and exhausted in the pilot’s chair. The smell of my burned shoulder reminded me of the steak I had eaten in the port bazaar. The stress of accelerating nerve impulses had left every joint in my body aching. My arms were blue with contusions, and I was as enfeebled as an old man.

  The screens showed me to be in an untraveled quarter of the system’s cometary cloud; my ship had cloaked itself in ice so that on any detector I would simply be another bit of debris among billions. I dragged myself from the chair and down to the galley, where I warmed some broth and gave myself an injection of cellular repair mites. Then I fell into my bunk and slept.

  My second waking was relatively free of pain. I recharged my tooth and ate again. I kneeled before the shrine and bowed my head in prayer, letting peace flow down my spine and relax all the muscles of my back. I listened for the voices of the gods.

  I was reared by my mother on Bembo. My mother was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. One day, Akvan, looking down on her, was so moved by lust that he took the form of a vagabond and raped her by the side of the road. Nine months later, I was born.

  The goddess Peri became so jealous that she laid a curse on my mother, who turned into a lawyer. And so we moved to Helvetica. There, in the shabby city of Urushana, in the waterfront district along the river, she took up her practice, defending criminals and earning a little baksheesh greasing the relations between the Imperial Caslonian government and the corrupt local officials. Mother’s ambition for me was to go to an off-planet university, but for me the work of a student was like pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill. I got into fights; I pursued women of questionable virtue. Having exhausted my prospects in the city, I entered the native constabulary, where I was reengineered for accelerated combat. But my propensity for violence saw me cashiered out of the service within six months. Hoping to get a grip on my passions, I made the pilgrimage to the monastery of the Pujmanian Order. There I petitioned for admission as a novice, and, to my great surprise, was accepted.