Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  Movies, if desired. The hustle and bustle of actors. Any number of computer games. Virtual reality sight-seeing, VR adventures. Whatever, whatever.

  She tried to watch The Sound of Music as a safe choice in the rec room, but she couldn’t concentrate. She dares not enter a virtual reality—the Enigma might creep up on her while she is immersed.

  “All those people who spent time alone: they still knew that other people existed in the same world as them. I know the contrary!”

  “Mary, Mary, how contrary, how does your garden grow?”

  “So many bean sprouts already! Do I harvest them? I hate bean sprouts. Give me the deluxe meals any day.” More than enough of those to make every day a special occasion. “Why shouldn’t I hog on those?”

  “Why not cook something special for yourself?” The frozen food store contains a wealth of raw ingredients in case the vacuum-packed foods somehow fail, or pall.

  “Since when was I a chef? It’s stupid cooking for one.”

  “Cook for me too.”

  “This sensation of something unseen sharing the ship with me—I can’t tolerate it for months on end!”

  “Even if the sensation may be preferable to total isolation?”

  “Show yourself to me! In a mirror, if you can’t manage anything more substantial.”

  And there the Enigma is, in her cabin’s mirror.

  But it is herself that she sees.

  Maybe the Enigma is floating directly behind her back, tucked out of sight. Abruptly she shifts aside. Oops, a little surge of nausea. Oh the Enigma is too quick for her by far.

  She cannot catch it full-frontally. She must seek it by indirect means. Mary must practice a sort of Zen art of not-looking, not-seeing.

  As a psychiatrist Mary understands the principles of meditation and she has even practiced a bit in the past. The silent, empty ship is an ideal focus of vacancy. Session by session—interspersed by more mundane tasks—she blanks her personality. After each session she surfaces to rediscover herself, the only consciousness hereabouts, a mind amidst a void.

  Is there a risk that she may remain in tune with the void until her motionless body starves to death? Grumbling guts recall her to activity—so far, at least.

  After many days of annulling herself. . . .

  A perception emerges from the medium through which the Pioneer travels.

  <>

  Well yes, she does.

  < >

  Such is the perception that scrutinizes her.

  <>

  A many-billion-fold being?

  <>

  Why is she being told this? Does it help, or is some godlike entity inspecting her coolly? Alternatively, is she hallucinating?

  <>

  “Tell me more.”

  <>

  This is big stuff. Is she capable of imagining all this on her own? Quite possibly. Why should a godlike entity bother to communicate with her?

  Ah, but an answer comes.

  <
  <
  < >

  Mary has had a vision. What is she to make of it?

  Is she and is everyone else who ever lived, or who will live, only so many iotas in a single entity spanning millions of years? By traveling through Q-space, has she encountered a higher entity—and caused Humanity to be contacted in the past and the present and the future? On this, um, higher level of metaconsciousness, to which individual persons only ever have fleeting and partial access at best?

  If Pioneer had never been built, nor some similar Q-space ship in the future, humanity would probably have remained isolated and uncontacted. Yet because contact occurs now, contact also applies retroactively. Total-Humanity may understand this paradox, but it fazes Mary. No individual human being has ever or will ever be aware of more than a jot of the communication between Pan-Humanity and the Probability Entities. This will elude mere people, much as the betting on a tortoise race eludes the tortoises. Or perhaps that should be: a race between fireflies.

  Mary feels she is like a single brain-cell present during a few moments of a symphony.

  If the hundred copies of the Pioneer do reintegrate successfully in another five months’ time, and if she announces her revelation, will psychiatrist Mary be for the funny farm?

  The air in her cabin smells musty. Surfaces look dusty.

  Quite nimbly, in the circumstances, she rises from her lotus position. With a fingertip she traces a line across her com-console.

  God almighty, the date display. . . .

  The date, the date.

  Q + 178.

  Q + 178.

  A hundred and seventy-eight days, very nearly six months, have passed since the Pioneer entered Q-space and she found herself isolated. Mary has been advanced through time itself. She has been extracted and reinserted later, abridging her lonely journey from months to days.

  “Oh thank you!” she cries into the silence. “Thank you so very much!”

  Yet now there’s no sense of Another on the ship with her.

  Full of wonder and gratitude, she sets off to check on hydroponics. What a riot of life and death she finds there—rot and fecundity, the air so heady and reeking. Is it possible that Gisela and Eric and all of her colleagues may also have been advanced through time?

  Including Sandy, no longer condemned to give birth all alone?

  Mary muses, in the dispensary. If the hundred Pilgrims do reintegrate successfully, and if her ninety-nine colleagues have not been blessed as she has been, what may the medical team need to provide quickly in the way of sedatives or stimulants or vitamin supplements?

  Of a sudden the warning siren blares automatically, whoop-whoop-whoop, such a shocking hullabaloo that her heart races.

 
; Thank god for it, though, thank god. She has fifteen minutes to return to her cabin and tether herself. Should she bother to do so, or simply stay here? If Gisela or Yukio are in this dispensary she might bump into them, disastrously. Her cabin is safer.

  The cabin writhes, as before. Every surface shimmers. It’s as if her eyes are watering. Then all is clear and sharp again, herphotos, her mobile, her terminal.

  Com Sherwin’s voice comes briskly. “All hear me. Re-emergence from Q-space achieved. Pioneer has acquired Tau Ceti space.”

  Acquired, acquired! Pioneer has acquired a whole new solar system. And rejoice, Mary has regained her fellow human beings!

  “Tau Ceti 2 is visible at 9.8 A.U.”

  Have her fellows arrived here with a skip and a jump, or the slow way?

  “Fellow pioneers, we were all separated—for which there may be various explanations.”

  Yes? Yes?

  “I hope we are all together again. I see that the main bridge team is with me, at least. All non-flight personnel proceed to the restaurant right away for rollcall. Dr. Suzuki is to be in charge of rollcall. Back-up is Major Pine. Second backup is Dr. Santos. Preliminary debrief to follow later. Do not close your cabin doors after you leave. Medical team, check all cabins.”

  Good thinking. If Chika is not available, Jay-Jay will tally numbers. And if Jay-Jay is not present, Carmen will coordinate. Some people may not be able to leave their cabins. How long has Com Sherwin had to think about contingencies?

  “Proceed. Bridge out.” He has not said whether he himself spent months in Q-space—or only a single month followed by a couple of days.

  People emerging into the corridor. Heartfelt greetings. Some tears of relief.

  “Denise,” Mary calls out, “how long were you in Q-space?”

  They embrace. “Oh Mary, it felt like forever! Six long months.”

  “Were you alone all that time?”

  “Entirely.”

  “You, Carmen, how long?”

  “Six shitting months. I must get to the restaurant, Mary.”

  “Of course.”

  Babble, babble as people proceed as instructed. Eric’s cabin is further away around the doughnut out of sight. Be methodical: check inside each cabin even if a door is wide open. There’s Gisela in the distance, opening a door and popping inside. Despite instructions a few people may have shut their doors unthinkingly behind them. Here’s a door that is closed, belonging to: Sandy Tate. Sandy, Sandy! Mary knocks, calls her name.

  Freckled, ginger-haired Sandy is sitting on her bed-couch, a swaddled baby held in her arms. She hugs it to herself protectively. Protectively?—no, it looks more as if Sandy is restraining her baby—and it barely a week or two old.

  “Mary, thank god, I’m going crazy—”

  “You did give birth! All on your own—that must have been utterly grueling and scary. But you did okay?”

  “I managed—I read up all I could beforehand.”

  “Well done, Sandy! I’ll examine you and your baby as soon as—”

  “Mary, this baby is trying to talk to me!”

  “To talk?”

  “I don’t understand him, but he’s trying to.”

  Is Sandy suffering, understandably, from delusions?

  “He can’t talk, Sandy. A baby’s brain isn’t fully grown. Learning to speak simply can’t clock in so soon, and would be totally pointless because it’s physically impossible for a baby to vocalize. You see, its larynx is in the wrong position. For the first nine months the larynx is high up, locked into the nose, so that a baby can drink and breathe at the same time without choking.”

  “I’m telling you he’s trying! I didn’t say he can manage it.”

  The months of loneliness, the fear and worry, the need for another person to communicate with. . . .

  “Sandy, you’re misinterpreting the noises he makes.”

  “I am not misinterpreting.”

  “Let me see him, Sandy.”

  As Mary sits on the bed-couch beside her, Sandy flinches. Then she reveals her child, a bundle of feeble struggle which, at presumably blurred sight of a person new to its world, produces sounds that are indeed unlike any regular infantile crying or red-faced bawling. It’s as if a strangled voice, using an unknown language, is heard through distorting filters and muffles.

  “Sandy, I should tell you something—” How can Mary take time out just now to tell about her own relevation, and her translation through time? “He does sound different, Sandy, I agree! At a quick glance there doesn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with either of you. . . .Do you think you can get to the restaurant?”

  “I’m his restaurant,” she says. “If he had teeth, he’d bite.”

  The baby certainly does seem assertive.

  “What have you called him?” Mary asks gently.

  “He calls me—but I don’t know what he wants to say.”

  “You must have thought of a name beforehand. Boy or girl, whichever.”

  “James.”

  “Hi, James.”

  Those strange noises, as if in reply.

  “How about bringing him to the restaurant? I think that’s important. Important, yes. And you need to mingle again.”

  “Where’s Jeff? Why isn’t he here? That’s why I waited. Is he dead?”

  “You heard Com Sherwin’s instructions. Jeff will be waiting for you at the restaurant.”

  “Why didn’t he come here so we could both go together?”

  “Maybe he expected to find you at the restaurant. Come on, Sandy, chin up.”

  “I can’t take my baby there—he’s a monster.”

  Post-natal depression? Not necessarily.

  “If James seems a bit odd, Sandy, I might—just might—know the reason, but I need to explain to all the others too. You’ve coped splendidly so far. Come on, it’s okay.”

  All is not quite okay. An American physicist, Greg Fox, is dead. Appendicitis, says Gisela. Must have been agonizing. Did Greg manage to lay his hands on morphine, maybe an overdose? Post-mortem will tell. He has been dead a couple of months. Unpleasant corpse to find. And one of the Japanese is deeply disturbed, mumbling in his native language, English now eluding him. How shall Mary cope with him? With appropriate drugs and with Yukio’s help as translator, she hopes.

  The assembled crowd, not least Jeff, are delighted to see a baby born on board. People mob Sandy, causing her to hide James from curious eyes. Jeff definitely ought to have gone to her cabin first. Now Sandy seems ambivalent toward him. She feels betrayed by him—which he cannot understand. Maybe she feels betrayed by what his seed wrought in her.

  “Listen up,” Com Sherwin calls out to the assembly. “We came through.” And he has maintained his grizzled crewcut between whiles. “We sustained one fatality. Six months’ surprise solitary was tough on us all, right?”

  “Wrong,” Mary interrupts. “Not on me.”

  Sherwin grins; his blue eyes twinkle. He’s effervescent. “Dr. Nolan, we cannot all be psychiatrists.”

  “That is not what I mean. . . .”

  When she has finished speaking, her colleagues stare at her in a silence that continues for quite a while.

  “And there’s one other thing,” Mary adds, moving closer to Sandy and child. “Sandy believes that her baby is trying to speak already, and I think she may be right. . . .”

  Two bombshells, the second less appreciated than the first, at least to begin with. Has Mary flipped? is what people are visibly thinking. Eric eyes her with particular concern.

  “Do you have any hard proof of this?” Com Sherwin asks. “Not that I’m doubting what you experienced. Still, it’s a large claim.”

  “I can’t prove it, although it’s true. Little James here may throw some light on this, as time goes by, when his larynx shifts. And maybe not.”

  “Mary, why didn’t you tell me this right away?”

  “Yeah, why not?” Jeff joins in on Sandy’s complaint, to exonerate himself for not t
hinking to be with her as soon as possible.

  “If we could harness this effect—” says someone else. Mary can’t see who.

  “I don’t know that it’s something we can harness,” she tells whoever. “It was granted to me.” “Granted” sounds a bit messianic.

  “And to no one else,” she hears. “Why not?”

  “Maybe it’s because of the way I meditated. I emptied myself. Then it was able to communicate.”

  “And to jump you through time.” Resentfully: “Why not us? Didn’t you ask the same on our behalf?”

  “I didn’t ask it to jump me. I never imagined such a thing was possible.”

  What Mary has said is at once overwhelming and embarrassing. She’s distanced from everyone else, as sole recipient of a revelation and a boon.

  Although what strange gift might Sandy have received, in the shape of James?

  “I think for the time being we must take what Dr. Nolan says at face value,” Sherwin declares judiciously. Quite! Suspicion of lunacy mustn’t deprive them of a key medical person. “No doubt what Dr. Nolan has told us will fit into context sooner or later. We’ll talk about this at greater length once everything’s less confused. Meanwhile, we should inventory the ship, calculate what we each used and work out how much has come together again—try to get a practical handle on what happened. Something measurable.”

  Of those present, it transpires that only Sherwin himself and Chika and John the climatologist thought to log every last item they used by way of food and drink.

  “Is that information still in the ship’s memory?” asks Chika.

  Indeed, what data is, from a hundred separate journeys, fifty years’ worth of overlapping auto-logs plus whatever data individuals may have entered?

  Pioneer continues inward toward the position which the second planet of Tau Ceti will occupy many weeks hence.

  The ship’s log contains backup after backup of status data that seem to vary in only minor respects, occupying megabytes of memory. Computer has no explanation for this massive redundancy. It runs diagnostic checks, and megabytes are dumped into cache. Could Computer be in any way compromised by an encounter with Dr. Nolan’s supposed probability-entity? Apparently not.