The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  “You sure did, you arrogant sonuvabitch!” shouted Chinh-Herrera, but I think the comlink was only working one way.

  “What happened?” I asked Doc Swainsea. She seemed more restrained than the others, as if she didn’t quite believe that this was the victory everyone else seemed to think that it was.

  “They’re not real,” she said. “He was right, Rahul.” The doctor is the only person who calls me by my true name.

  “Not real? But they blew up our ships! And just now…he pushed one of them!”

  “Oh, they’re real enough—they have weight and mass. But they’re constructs. They’re not real people, any more than a child’s toy soldiers are real.” She frowned. She looked very tired, like it was taking all her energy just to keep talking to me. “No, that’s a bad analogy. They’re not that kind of toys, they’re puppets. This was all a show.”

  “A show? They killed people! Hundreds of shipmen! What kind of show is that?”

  But before she could answer me I heard Balcescu’s voice and turned back.

  “This looks like it, don’t you think?” he asked, as if having a conversation with an old friend. “Time to make a little trouble for the local repertory company, I think.” George Sanders, maybe even Cary Grant—I have to admit, the superior bastard did have style. He seemed to be standing in a large chamber, one that was even more intestinal than the passageway, if such a thing was possible. At the center of it floated a huge, shifting transparency, a moving gob of glass-clear gelatin as big as a jumbo jet. Balcescu walked toward it, then stopped and held up his comm wand, thumbed it. A deep rasp of sound echoed through the room and the jelly rippled. Then a vast pseudopod abruptly reached out toward Balcescu and engulfed him. I must have cried out, because Chinh-Herrera turned to me and said, “Nah, don’t worry. He was right again, damn him. Look, it understood!”

  The pseudopod was lifting him as gently as a mother with her child. Balcescu’s point of view rose up, up, up until he was at the top of the gently swirling jelly, up near the roof of the intestinal, cathedral-size room. He stepped onto a platform that emerged from the bumps and swirls of the wall, then held up his comm wand again. A single sound, loud and rough as a tree pulling up its roots as it fell, then Balcescu and the rest of us waited.

  Nothing happened.

  “Maybe I’m being too polite,” he said. Balcescu still sounded like he was on a day-hike in the hills. Even I had to admire him—me, who’d seen him drunk and feeling sorry for himself. I can’t tell you how annoying that was.

  He lifted the comm wand and thumbed it again, and another wash of sound rolled out, this one harsher and more abrupt. We waited.

  The jelly thing abruptly shrank away beneath him like water down a drain. Then the lights faded all through the vast room. Everything was black. A moment later, Balcescu’s helmet light flicked on, but the view now was almost all shadows, the chamber’s far walls a distant, ghostly backdrop.

  “Mission accomplished, Captain Watanabe,” he said. “It’s turned off.”

  The bridge erupted in cheers, some of them almost hysterical. I still didn’t really understand what I’d just seen, or why I was even there, but when Pim appeared a few moments later with something that looked as near as damnit to champagne, I took a glass. God knows everyone else was having some, even the captain.

  I was taking my second sip when I noticed someone standing over me.

  “I’ve got something for you, Rahul,” said Doc Swainsea. She showed me her ring with its glowing spot. I let her touch mine so the data could transfer. “He asked me to make sure you got it.”

  “He?” I asked, but I knew who she meant. It was just something to say as I watched her walk away and out of the conference room. She was the only one besides me who didn’t seem happy, and I wasn’t sure I understood my own reasons.

  I stayed on the bridge a little while, but I wanted to see what he’d left for me. Anyway, I never liked champagne much. Any alcohol, in fact. Too many people over the years have thought it was funny to try to get the little guy drunk, and I used to be stubborn and stupid enough to try to prove them wrong.

  “Hello, Mr. Jatt. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye properly, but the last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, getting ready for this thing we’re trying. But I did want to say good-bye. I’m glad I got a chance to know you, even a little bit. I intend no joke, by the way.”

  Balcescu was wearing an exosuit. The message looked like it had been recorded just before he left, which explained why he was talking like he wasn’t coming back.

  “But I owed you, of all people, an explanation, because you were the one that gave me the idea. I guess you must know by now whether I was right or not.”

  Like you ever really doubted it, you arrogant s.o.b., I thought. But then I wondered, hang on, if he was so sure of himself, why did he leave me this message?

  “I should have suspected something right away—or at least as soon as I translated the message,” he went on. The Balcescu of half a day ago was putting on his exosuit gloves. “I mean, really—‘The Outward-Reaching Murder Army will spit upon the stars that give you life’? ‘Only black ash will show that you ever lived.’ A bit over the top, isn’t it? But I didn’t see it. I took it at face value.

  “Then you asked what else I could figure out about the aliens. I began to wonder. As you said, we knew what they’d said—but not why. Were they just roving the universe like Mongol horsemen, conquering and slaughtering? But why? What was the plan? Why leave a ship with immensely superior firepower to defend a Visser ring when they could have wiped out every ship in the vicinity in minutes? But it was the way they talked that really puzzled me. Bloody melodrama, that’s what it was. It was like something out of one of those ancient movies you told me you like so much…”

  “Those aren’t the kind of movies I like,” I told the recording. “Not that John Wayne crap—well, except for Stagecoach…and maybe The Quiet Man. I like characters.”

  “…but I still couldn’t figure out what was making me itch. Then Diana…Dr. Swainsea…came in with her wide-spectrum audio analysis of the sounds that we hadn’t noticed at first, the ones that were largely out of our hearing range. Think about it. Behind those overly dramatic words they were pumping out a huge range of sounds—higher, lower, faster, slower—not exactly synchronized to the words, but emphasizing them, heightening the effect. What does that sound like?”

  It hit me like a blow. “A soundtrack,” I whispered. “Like a movie.”

  “Right,” the recording said. “A score—as in an opera. As in Don Giovanni.” The recorded Balcescu had closed all his seals and sat calmly, as if we were in the same room at the same time, having an ordinary conversation “So I kept thinking, Mr. Jatt—why would someone go to such lengths, write an entire space opera, so to speak, just to kill innocent people? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But then I started thinking that maybe they didn’t know they were killing anyone? But how could that be?” He smiled that infuriating smile of his. “Because maybe they didn’t think there was anyone left to kill. Remember, this thing came to us through the Rainwater Hub, the most compromised wormhole in known space. Who’s to say they even came from our galaxy? Remember, I only found traces of their languages in some of the very oldest civilizations we know out near the galactic rim. Maybe the originals that spoke those languages are long gone—at least in physical form.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and I was about to run the recording back when he picked his helmet up off the clean pad where it had been sitting. The mirrored visor made a brief infinity loop with the recording wall screen—a million helmets strobed. “Look, if you saw this by itself, up close, you would assume someone was in it, right?” He slid the visor up to show the empty interior. “My guess is, these people—let’s call them the Company, like an opera company, have left their physical forms behind long ago. They might even be dead and gone, but that’s another libretto.” Again, that irritating grin. “But
what they haven’t done is given up art. Just as our operas often imitate the past in which they were written, the Company’s art mimics the time when they had bodies. Entire constructs that perform acts of aggression and destruction and who knows what else? Programmed, operating in empty space at the edge of a distant galaxy, for the nostalgic pleasure of bodiless alien intelligences. Of course, they would violently destroy what they come into contact with—because they’re pretending to be the kind of ancient savages that would do that. But that’s why I’m guessing that the Company are no longer wearing bodies: they assumed that anything they came in contact with would be more of their own lifeless constructs, part of this art form of theirs that we can’t hope to understand…yet.

  “So that’s my idea, and in an hour or so we’ll find out if it’s true. I’ve convinced the captain it’s worth a try, and she’s brought in the other Confederation ships, so at the very least I will be the center of a fairly expensive little drama of my own.” Balcescu stood then, his helmet under his arm as though he were some kind of antique cavalier. “Sorry I couldn’t explain this to you in person, but as I said, it’s been a busy last forty-eight hours or so, putting together my hypothesis and then getting ready to test it.” He turned toward the door. “But I did want to thank you, Mr. Jatt. You opened my eyes in a couple of ways, and that doesn’t happen very often.”

  I’ll bet it doesn’t, I thought, but suddenly I wished I’d told him my first name.

  “And now one of two things are going to happen,” the recorded Balcescu said. “Either I’m wrong somehow—about the purpose of that ship, or about how realistic and thorough its defenses are, in which case by the time you see this I’ll have been delatticed, as Diana puts it. Or, I’ll be right, and I’ll be able to use the little bit of Company language I’ve put together, along with some useful algorithms from Dr. Swainsea, to override the programming and cancel the show, as it were.” He moved to the door of his cabin, so that he stood just at edge of the recorded picture. “And if I succeed with that, then I’m going to start looking for some kind of emergency return pod. You see, the Confederation are welcome to the ship itself. I don’t give a damn about how it works or how far it came to get here or anything of the things they want to know. I just want to go where the show is happening—where the opera, or religious passion play, or children’s game, or whatever this thing represents, is really going on. I’m hoping that the Company has some kind of recoverable module—like a ship’s black box—and that it will return to their space, wherever that might be. I intend to be on it.

  “How could I miss that chance? A whole new culture, language, and even more important, a whole new art form! Nine muses aren’t going to be enough anymore, Mr. Jatt. So that’s why this recording, my friend. Either way, I wanted to say thank you—and good-bye.” And with that, the recorded Balcescu held out his comm wand and the recording went black.

  Maybe he hadn’t guessed how soon I’d watch the recording—maybe he was still on the alien ship. I commed the captain’s cabin, but she was on the observation deck with everyone else, celebrating. I rushed up, but before I could say a thing to Captain Watanabe or any of the other officers, I spotted Dr. Swainsea leaning against the biggest view-portal looking out at the jellyfish ship, so strange, so large, so distant.

  “Doc…Doc…!” I called as I ran up.

  “I know, Rahul,” she said without turning. “Look—there it goes.” She pointed. I thought I could see a dim streak of light moving away from the alien ship—but not toward the Visser ring, I was surprised to see. “God only knows what kind of path those things travel,” she said. “Well, Stefan will find out soon enough.”

  “You knew what he was going to do?”

  “Of course. I helped him.” She looked at me. “Oh, Rahul, what else was I going to do? Beg him to stay? We had…maybe the beginning of something. How could that compete against a Big Idea, especially for a man who lived for big ideas? No, I couldn’t have asked him and he couldn’t have agreed—we both would have hated ourselves. You’ll understand someday.”

  I understand now, I wanted to say, but everyone needs to tell their own story their own way. You don’t have to be six feet tall to know that. “It was just…” I shook my head. “At first I didn’t like him. But then, I kind of thought he and I might be…we might…”

  “It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” she asked. Something in my expression must have amused her, because she laughed. “You don’t think you’re the only one who watches old pictures, do you?”

  “I guess not.” I frowned. “I think Balcescu’s crazy, anyway. We’ve already got music and art and Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hawks—do we even need a tenth muse?”

  “I need a drink,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll feel a little bit less like Ingrid Bergman.”

  We walked across the observation deck, threading our way through the happy crew members, many of whom were already well into the champagne. She still looked sad, so I reached up and took Doc Swainsea’s hand…Diana’s hand. Lose a friend, make a friend. Sometimes life does imitate art, I guess.

  “Well,” I told her—my best Bogart—“whatever else happens, we’ll always have Rainwater Hub.”

  JUSTINA ROBSON

  CRACKLEGRACKLE

  Here’s the strange and troubling tale of a man who must confront bizarre forces in which he doesn’t believe—even though they’re swirling all around him.

  Justina Robson is a relatively new writer who has succeeded in making a big splash in a fairly small number of years. She has several times been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the British Science Fiction Award, as well as for John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her stories have appeared in Fast Forward, Constellations, Nature, The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, and elsewhere. She is perhaps best known for the Quantum Gravity series, which includes Keeping It Real, Selling Out, and, most recently, Going Under, but she has also published well-received novels such as Silver Screen, Mappa Mundi, Natural History, and Living Next Door to the God of Love. She lives in Leeds, England.

  Many times Mark Bishop read the assignment, but it never made more sense to him. He was to interview the Greenjack Hyperion, make an assessment of the claims made for it, and return his report. That part was simple. But after it, the evidence supplied by the Forged and human witnesses…this he couldn’t manage more than a line or two of. Panic rose and the black-and-white print became an unknown language. He could see it hadn’t changed, but simply by moving his eyes across it his mind redshifted and all meaning sped away from him.

  He poured the one-too-many scotch from the concession bottle by his elbow just as the hostess was about to whisk it away, and drank it down. The burn was impersonal and direct. It did exactly what it always promised, and shot the pain where it hurt. He rubbed his eyes and tried again.

  He disliked the sight of the document on his screen. It struck him suddenly that the paragraphs were too long. The white spaces between them loomed in violent stripes. Missing things were there. All of the unknown inlets holding the truth that the print struggled to express. The punctuation was a taunt, an assault that declared in black-and-white that the subject’s defeat of his reason was absolute. Even the title was loathsome: “Making a Case for the Intuitive Interpretation of Full Spectrum Data in Unique Generative Posthuman Experience.” Usually he had no trouble with jargon, or any scientific melee, but what the hell did that mean? What did it mean to the person it referred to? Had they titled it or was it just the bureaucrat’s pedantic label for something they could read but not comprehend?

  A final slug of scotch ended his attempt. He only understood that there was no escape from meeting the Greenjack, as he had promised, as his job demanded: meet, interview, assess, report. That was all. It was easy. He’d done it a hundred times. More. He was an expert. That’s why the government had hired him and kept him on the top payroll all these years. They trusted him to judge
rightly, to know truth, to detect mistakes and delusions, to be sure.

  Bishop tried to read the document once more. His eyes hurt and finally, after a forced march across the first few paragraphs, he felt a cluster headache come on and halt them with a fierce spasm of pain as if something had decided to drill invisible holes into his head via the back of his eyeballs. He lay back in the recline seat of the lift launcher and closed his eyes. The attendants circled and took away his cup, secured his harness, and spoke pleasantly about the safety of the orbital lift system and the experience of several g’s of force during acceleration—a song-and-dance routine he already knew so well he could have done it himself. He briefly remembered being offered a ride up on one of the Heavy Angels and explaining to the secretary that he didn’t want it. She couldn’t understand his reluctance. Then in the background she heard some colleague whisper, “Mars.” She’d gone red, then white.

  But it wasn’t just the difficulty of talking to the Forged now, he’d never liked the idea of being inside a body. It was too much like being eaten, or some form of unwilling sex. So he’d made his economy-excuse, a polite no, a don’t-want-to-be-a-bother smile and now he was waiting for takeoff, no time left, unprepared for the big meeting, his mouth dry with all the things he’d taken to avoid doing anything repulsively human, like being sick.

  The lift was moved into position by its waldos, attached to the cable, tested. The slight technicalities passed him in a blur of nauseating detail and then there was the stomach-leaving, spine-shrinking hurl of acceleration in the back of his legs. The headache peaked. Weightlessness came as they soared above the clouds into the blue and then the black. He felt like lead. When the time came to unclip and get out, he half-expected that he’d be set in position, a statue, and surprised himself by seeing his hands reach out and competently move him along the guide rails. He didn’t hit anyone. The other passengers were all busy talking to each other or into their mikes. Then the smell filled his nostrils.