Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  People, people—under the command of Commander Sherwin Peterson. Mary knows those with whom she was in quarantine quite intimately by now, many others rather well to varying degrees, and none of the others are exactly strangers; besides which, she can screen all available data about them. No excuse, after the first few days of waiting in Earth orbit, for not matching names to faces instantly.

  The official language of Pioneer is English, but she hears occasional German and French and Japanese too. The four co-operating powers behind the expedition are America, the Euro-Union, Australia, and Japan. If a foothold can be established on Tau Ceti 2, the Chinese plan their own independent ship. No one can argue with that.

  Here’s John Dolby, the climatologist, John James Pine, geologist and one of the three shuttle pilots, Eric Festa, nutrition, botany, and hydroponics, Denise Dubois, astrophysics, Carmen Santos, engineering, Chikahiro Suzuki, computer systems, navigator Nellie van Torn. . . .

  Two months later, Pioneer has passed the realm of Saturn (although its be-ringed monarch is far away) and no failures have occurred, neither of machine nor man, nor woman, aside from various minor ailments, swiftly diagnosed and cured. Mary and her two medical colleagues monitor everyone’s health, making sure that sodium and iron levels do not rise. In liaison with Eric Festa they supply mineral supplements where required. An Australian pair of partners, Sandy Tate and Jeff Lee, oceanography and life science respectively, are pregnant—or rather, Sandy herself is. She must have conceived before entering quarantine, either accidentally or irresponsibly. Their child will be born toward the end of the six-month transit through Q-space, a first for the human race. Mary will keep a careful eye on Sandy. By now almost everyone is on first name terms. Pilot Pine is Jay-Jay; Dr. Suzuki is Chika. The ship is a family. How appropriate that a family should have a baby. A few other pairings are occurring, Jay-Jay and Denise, for instance. Mary is feeling a growing fondness and shoots of desire for Eric Festa, who reciprocates her feelings. Eric, from Dortmund, is a nourishing person to know. The two often sit in the botany section and talk amidst the orchids—for beauty—and tomatoes and carrots and soy beans for a nutritious diet.

  On the evening, ship-time, preceding Q-day there’s a feast in the restaurant from the ample store of varied vacuum-packed reduced sodium and iron gourmet meals.

  “Compliments to the chef!” someone calls out.

  “Chef’s back on Earth!” dietitian Eric declares, prompting laughter and applause. Spirits are high.

  Afterward, Com Sherwin reminds everyone of procedures. When the time comes to switch on the Q-drive, all personnel other than those on the bridge must be in their cabins tethered to their bed-couches. Probe encountered no visible problems when entering Q-space. Nevertheless, err on the safe side. Transient side effects that rats and monkeys could not report might affect human beings. Psychological or perceptual glitches, akin to the mild imbalance caused by Coriolis force.

  Com Sherwin has an Air Force background, back in his younger days where backgrounds should be, his route from daring test pilot to astronaut training. He piloted the first hazardous antimatter-asteroid reconnaissance. Later, famously, he had risked his life taking The Dart on a flythrough the clouds of Jupiter, en route ramming a gas-whale and carrying it back into space with him spitted on The Dart, indeed draped around The Dart, its collapsed quick-frozen carcass almost enfolding his ship, a gift to science although a cause of some controversy. Of the numerous probes that had dropped into Jupiter only two had ever spotted gas-whales.

  Interviewed on Systemwide: “Aren’t the gas-whales very rare?”

  Peterson: “Not in that huge volume of atmosphere. Not necessarily.”

  “Weren’t you risking your ship and your life on a sudden impulse?”

  Peterson: “I had several seconds to think. I reckoned I had a good chance.”

  “Apparently your pulse rate didn’t even rise.”

  Peterson had merely grinned, engagingly.

  “So what’s your favorite book then, Moby-Dick?”

  “No, actually it’s Linda Bernstein’s Be Your Own Leader at Peace with Yourself. I read a page a night.”

  Peterson was solid. Capable of split-second decisiveness, yet possessing a balanced serenity, and also a folksy touch if need be.

  Mary is lying abed dressed in mission multipocket-wear, green for medic, in the cabin that by now seems as familiar and homelike as her girlhood room in Michigan, listening to the calm tones of Com Sherwin from her comp speakers as Sherwin talks through the Q-sequence, only partly understood by her. She remembers doing her best to understand a lecture at Mission Control, given as part of the year-long training schedule.

  “Fundamentally,” a dapper, bearded Physics Professor had said, “the Q-drive functions as a quantum computer that is given the problem of translating a ship from Sun-space to Tau Ceti space. Your actual ship’s computer for everyday use is a super-duper Turing-type machine. When you access your ship’s computer, it may sound to you like an artificial intelligence—the software’s designed to be user-friendly—but we’re still twenty years away from genuine AI.

  “Aw, sixty years ago people were saying the same, and AI hasn’t happened yet, so I ain’t making any prophecies.

  “Anyway, if you set a Turing machine a really big task—for example, tell it to factorize a 500-digit number—it’ll tackle solutions one after another, and that will take ages, even if the machine is really fast. In a quantum computer, on the other hand, all the possible answers are superposed. Superimposed simultaneously, as it were. Bingo, the wrong answers cancel each other out, and you get the right one. Not that this happens instantaneously—it still takes time. In the case of determining a route to Tau Ceti all routes are considered including going via Sirius or Andromeda or even by way of a quasar at the far side of the universe. Quantum theory sums over all paths between two points, as we say, and that means all possible paths.”

  “Does this mean,” someone asked, “that we might end up in another galaxy?”

  “No no, Probe proved that won’t happen. The nonsense routes cancel out. Now a quantum device such as the drive is very specialized and needs to be kept as isolated as possible. It’s entangled with the ship, but regular computing on board still has to be done by your Turing machine.”

  Some wit had stuck up his hand. “I’d say that the Q-drive is the real touring machine!”

  “Very droll. I was referring to computer pioneer Alan Turing, who unbelievably was hounded to suicide because he was differently sexed.” Evidently a cause of anguish and anger to this lecturer.

  Sum over paths, Mary muses.

  Some Over-Paths. Ways of jumping from here to there. Or perhaps of burrowing.

  Samovar Paths, in view of the shape of the Q-drive unit. . . .

  Summer Paths, the bright way to the stars. However, the appearance of Q-space as recorded by Probe’s cameras was an ocean of gray frogspawn. . . .

  * * *

  “Initiating primary power uptake. . . .We have four green balls. . . . Sixty seconds to Q-insertion. . . .”

  “Thirty seconds. . . .”

  “Fifteen. . . .”

  The seconds pass. The cabin quivers and shimmers and is the same again. Same photos of family and friends and scenery sticky-tacked to the walls. Same dream-catcher mobile of feathers and knots. Same everything.

  Except for the silence, silence apart from the softest hum from the speakers.

  Has communication failed? In Q-space can no one hear you make announcements over electronic equipment?

  “Uh, testing?” she queries the silence, and she hears her own voice clearly enough.

  Mary untethers and sits up, goes to her door, slides it open. The corridor is empty; other cabin doors remain closed. Evidently she’s the first to emerge. Gisela’s cabin is only three doors down.

  Mary knocks, then slides the door open.

  Gisela’s cabin is empty apart from her personal possessions.

  Likewise Carmen�
��s cabin, likewise Denise’s. . . .

  All the cabins Mary tries are empty. It seems impossible that everyone can have untethered before her and gone to the bridge to look at the viewscreens, impossible. But what else could they have done? Mary must have suffered a lapse of consciousness, a gap in awareness.

  To the bridge, then! Though without running or rushing.

  The bridge is deserted, instruments and controls untended. Lights glow on boards, equipment purrs. On the viewscreens is the mottled gray of Q-space. No stars, just endless dimensionless frogspawn. Exactly as expected.

  “Where’s everyone? Will somebody answer me!”

  No answer comes.

  Has everyone hidden in the rec room or in the hydroponics section to play a joke on her. . .? She’ll go to the rec room and ninety-nine voices will chorus, Boo. Oh really, at this momentous moment, the first entry of the first crewed ship into Q-space? And why pick on her?

  Nevertheless, she does go to the rec room, which is deserted, then to the empty restaurant, then to the botany area where only plants are to be seen.

  A type of hysterical blindness and deafness is afflicting her—people are here yet she is failing to hear and see them.

  This has to be nonsense.

  “Gisela! Eric! Yukio! Com Sherwin! Where are you?”

  They are gone, all gone. She is alone on Pioneer.

  The reason for this mass disappearance must be something to do with the nature of Q-space—an effect of the Q-drive as regards conscious intelligences such as human beings. So Mary reasons.

  Why did Probe’s cameras not show monkeys and rats as missing? Ah, but the test animals were all caged separately from one another. Conceivably they did not experience the presence of their fellows in the other cages. But they could not report their experience, or lack of it.

  Can it be that each conscious observer on board the Pioneer has given rise to a copy of the ship, each of which contains only one person? Right now one hundred copies of the Pioneer are heading through Q-space toward Tau Ceti. When all of these arrive and switch off their drives, will all the copies reintegrate and become once more one single ship with a hundred people aboard it?

  Collapse of the wave function . . . that’s the phrase, isn’t it? Something to do with multiple probabilities becoming one concrete reality, as Mary recalls. Surely that stuff happens at the subatomic level, not to an entire ship massing thousands of tonnes.

  Still, it’s a lifeline to cling to: in six months time everyone will come together.

  During so many months the hundred ships can hardly remain identical. Mary will consume certain supplies; absent colleagues will account for different supplies. She remembers the ripple that occurred as she entered Q-space. On emergence, will the merging ships adjust so that there are no discrepancies?

  What if two people happen to be in exactly the same place? Is one of them displaced? Does that happen gently or violently?

  The more she thinks about it, the more iffy the idea of reintegration becomes.

  The deserted ship subtly menacing. Random noises might be phantom footfalls. A reflection or trick of light and shadow could be a glimpse of someone moving out of sight. Her vanished colleagues may, in their own copies of the ship, be experiencing minor psychotic episodes or hallucinations.

  Suppose someone monkeys with the controls. Suppose that a copyship re-enters normal space prematurely, or is disabled. Reintegration might never be able to occur. Pioneer might fly onward forever.

  She mustn’t let this notion obsess her. She has hundreds of years’ worth of food and drink if consumed by one person alone. She shan’t starve!

  If each ship is similarly stocked this seems a bit like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. How can reality multiply in such a way? Maybe Mary’s is the only ship. Maybe only one conscious observer could remain in existence. By sheer chance this happened to be her.

  No, no, remember all the rats. And all but one of the monkeys.

  * * *

  “Talking to yourself, are you, Mary?”

  “Nothing wrong with that. People do talk to themselves. That’s how we monitor what’s going on. Helps us plan what to do next. Evolution didn’t give us fast random-access memories—so we tell ourselves a story, the story of our self. That’s how we remember things. It reinforces short-term memory.”

  “Adults generally talk to themselves silently, not aloud.”

  “Well, there’s no one around to take offense. There’s just me.”

  “Just you, eh? After a while, if you talk aloud to yourself, it’s as if there are two of you—the talker, and the person you talk to. You can become the audience, hearing words which simply seem to emerge. In that case who is doing the talking? Listen: when we all come together again maybe we might re-enter any of a hundred different universes.”

  “Surely a star very like Tau Ceti has to be in the same location, otherwise how could we emerge from Q-space?”

  “Ah, but maybe we would pick up no ten-year-old radio signals from the solar system, supposing we had a powerful enough receiver. In that other universe the human race may never have evolved. Pioneer may be the only abode of life. Tau Ceti 2 may not be habitable.”

  “Thanks a bundle.”

  “Look, why don’t you talk to the computer more?”

  “Because the computer only simulates having a mind of its own. That’s why it has no name. A woman’s voice, yes, and a woman’s avatar-face if we want one, but no name so we won’t be fooled. A psychiatrist seeking aid and counsel from a program is absurd. However sophisticated the program is, it cannot know. It merely listens and responds as appropriately as possible. After a while, that’s maddening. Ask it how to repair a solar power plant or remind you how to fix a ruptured spleen, fine and good. It goes through its repertoire. If we did have true artificial intelligence, I dunno, maybe there would be some magic quantum link between the AIs in all the ships and we could all communicate. But we don’t, and there isn’t.”

  Of course she already asked Computer what is happening. Pioneer is transiting through Q-space, Mary. Do you want a full status report? No, just where is everybody else? Where is the Commander? I don’t know, Mary. She may as well ask herself. She doesn’t wish to confuse Computer. Just take us to where we’re going and carry on with the housekeeping.

  Playing her favorite arias by Puccini throughout the ship turns out to be a bad idea. The music seems to mask rustlings and whispers.

  When Mary was sixteen she thought she saw an angel. Most likely she was dazzled by sunlight while hiking through woodland. A tiny lake was a silver mirror, and bushes were covered and linked by innumerable bedewed spiders’ webs. She saw a being with wings, sparkling bright. Of a sudden bird-song seemed to combine in a single rhapsody of musical counterpoint the meaning of which only just eluded her. She felt called. A few centuries earlier she might have become a nun. In the event she specialized in psychiatry after earning her medical qualifications.

  Her parents were both practicing Catholics, who confessed and went to mass regularly. They always denied themselves some treat during Lent—generally, in her Dad’s case, drinking with the fellows on a Saturday night. None of the fellows were Catholics, nor was the town a Catholic one—her Mom and Dad needed to drive twenty miles to attend mass—so Dad had adopted a jokey, ironic front for his faith. “Next year I might give up fast food for Lent.” “Oh we don’t need to worry about what to believe—we’re told what to think.” He did good works, quietly, simple kindnesses to neighbors and colleagues. Mary had already begun lapsing into agnosticism by the age of fourteen, and she encountered no pressure or reproach from her parents, but where it came to good works, Dad was a beacon to her.

  Without the medical attention provided by herself or Gisela or Yukio or Howard, what if others fall ill during the next six months? No longer quite six months—by now a week of that stretch has passed. Just one damn week!

  Personally she’s rather more bothered right now about the hydroponics. F
luids and nutrition are automated, but the care of carrots and tomatoes and bean sprouts is not her field at all.

  What about Sandy’s pregnancy? Sandy is on her own, expecting a child, and knowing now that she will have to give birth to it unassisted. What if Sandy develops toxemia? How will she control that? What if she suffers a difficult delivery? What if she cannot deliver until reintegration?

  How can Sandy be alone if a fetus is growing inside her, four months old by now? Did the separation-event treat her and her child as one unit—or did the event rip the fetus untimely from its mother’s womb, aborting it into yet another copy of the ship, perishing on Sandy’s bedcouch? This is too awful to contemplate.

  Something else is aboard with Mary. Something quite unlike an angel, and besides she doesn’t believe in those.

  “What are you?” she cries. “Where are you?”

  Armed with a kitchen knife, she ranges around the great doughnut, searching and finding nothing. It’s as though she, the reluctant would-be observer of the Enigma, is always where there’s a low probability of finding whatever it is. Where it is, she is not. She can sense a sort of semi-absent presence, never enough for actuality.

  Isn’t there something called an exclusion principle?

  “Maybe you should put yourself on tranquilizers.”

  “No, you must stay alert!”

  Maybe she arouses the curiosity of whatever it is yet it wants to avoid harming her. Alternatively, it finds her daunting and, although in a sense summoned by her, it keeps out of her way, sniffing and tasting where she has been.

  “All right, you’ve been alone for a fortnight now. Twenty-two more weeks to go. People have spent far longer periods on their own without all the amenities you enjoy!”