Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  The Sun was much larger than Sol—ten thousand times more so—for the fusion fires at its heart were much less vigorous than Sol’s. And Sun-Cloud’s world was a thousand times smaller than Earth, for the electrostatic and degeneracy pressures, which resisted gravitational collapse, were greatly weaker.

  Lightspeed dominated Sun-Cloud’s structure, too. If she had been a single entity, complete and entire, it would have taken too long for light—or any other signal—to crawl through her structure. So she was a composite creature; her mind was broken down into modules of thought, speculation, and awareness. She was a creature of parallel processing, scattered over a thousand fragile corpuscles.

  And Sun-Cloud’s body was constrained to be small enough that her gravitational potential could not fracture the flimsy molecular bonds that held her corpus together.

  Sun-Cloud, forging across the Surface of her Ocean, was just two millimeters across.

  At last, a new light erupted in the bow that embraced her world.

  With an effort, she slowed. The light-bow expanded rapidly, as if the world were unfolding back into its proper morphology. She allowed some of her impeller-corpuscles to run free, and she saw their tiny wakes running across the Surface, determined, red-shifted.

  Now that her monumental effort was done she was exhausted, depleted, her impellers dead, lost, or dying; unless new impellers joined her, she would scarcely be able to move again.

  Ninety-five Cycles.

  Everybody she had known—Cold-Current and the rest—all of them must be gone, now, absorbed into the Song’s unending pulse.

  It remained only for her to learn what mystery awaited, here in the remoteness of the future, and then she could Dissolve into the Song herself.

  . . . From the darkling sky, the new light washed over her.

  Her optic corpuscles swiveled upwards. She cried out.

  Sun-Cloud felt her world shrink beneath her from infinity to a frail mote; the Song decayed from the thoughts of a god to the crooning of a damaged sub-corpus.

  Above her, utterly silently—and for the first time in all history—the stars were coming out.

  To human eyes, the skies of this cosmos would have seemed strange indeed:

  The stars spawned from gas clouds, huge and cold. Hundreds of them formed in a cluster, companions to Sun-Cloud’s Sun. Heat crept from each embryonic star, dispersing the remnant wisps of the birthing cloud.

  It took five billion human years for the light to cross the gulf between the stars.

  And at last—and as one speculative thinker among Sun-Cloud’s people had predicted, long ago—the scattered light of those remote Suns washed over an unremarkable world, which orbited a little above the photosphere of their companion. . . .

  The stars were immense globes, glowing red and white, jostling in a complex sky; and sheets and lanes of gas writhed between them.

  Orange-Dawn had been right. This was wonderful, beyond her imagining—but crushing, terrifying.

  Pain tore at her. Jagged molecules flooded her system; her corpuscles broke apart, and began at last their ancestral war.

  She struggled to retain her core of rationality, just a little longer. Exhausted, she hastily assembled sub-corpora, and loaded packets of information into them, pale images of the astonishing sky. She sent them hailing down into the Ocean, into the Deep, into the belly of the Song itself.

  Soon a new voice would join the Song: a merger of her own and Orange-Dawn’s. And it would sing of Suns, countless, beyond imagining.

  Everything would be different now.

  She fell, gladly, into the warm emptiness of Dissolution.

  INTO GREENWOOD

  JIM GRIMSLEY

  One

  TO VISIT THE DIRIJHI one leaves coastal Jarutan by putter to travel to one of the towns near the forest where they staff a trade mission; there are no roads in Greenwood, only waterways, so one must find a boat that travels one of these routes, in my case the River Silas. One heads into the part of Aramen that the Hormling have, by treaty, excluded from settlement in order not to crowd the forest preserve. The Dirijhi no longer grow all the way to the sea as they used to, stopping about a hundred standard land units north of the coast. They never grew on the rest of Aramen, according to what we have learned since we gave them symbionts and began to communicate.

  Nowadays, Aramenians live in settlements and farms right up to the edge of the Dirijhi preserve. Before entering the forest, I stayed the night in the last village along Silas, at the place where the river emerges from the canopy, a town called Dembut where a lot of early Hormling colonists settled. Though they don’t call themselves Hormling any more, except in terms of ancestry, and they have no loyalty to Senal or the Mage. They’re Aramenian these days, they’ll tell you so stoutly, and most of them are for independence, though they keep quiet about it.

  I had arrived on Aramen during one of the quiet times, when the colonial assembly and the colony’s Prin administrators were getting along with some degree of harmony. I was returning from a decade-long trip to Paska, another Mage colony inside the Cluster, three years’ passage each way on the Hormling Conveyance. On Paska, the independence movement was foundering, as ours was. Like my organization, People for a Free Aramen, the Paskan movement had achieved a certain ceiling of success and been stalled ever since. Their group was twenty-odd years old, ours about twice that. Forty thousand subscriber members and enough committed workers to stage a decent rally every few months. Internal arguments about what mix of sedition and pressure could be used to convince the Mage and the Prin that allowing us self government was a good idea. I learned what I could from four years with the Free Paska Coalition, but I was glad to come home again, though somewhat discouraged, after so long an absence, to find that the colonial administration seemed more entrenched than ever.

  I think we could beat the Hormling, take the planet from them, but I’m not sure about the Prin. Whatever explanation you believe for the powers they exercise, we all know from experience that those powers are very real. They are the key that holds the Hormling empire together. We have seen time and again under the Prin that it is possible to make people happy even when they are not free. The Prin are good at creating contentment, complacency. All over the southern continent the rains fall regularly on the farms, the crops grow, the industries run smoothly, machinery functions, the ships and aircraft land and take off on time. Aramen is the end of the Conveyance line because the gate to Senal is here, and therefore our world is very important to the Mage. On Aramen, the Prin do their jobs carefully, everything works well, nobody goes hungry, sick people get treatment, crime is kept low, smuggling and the black market are marginal, and nearly every crime is justly punished, since nobody can fool a Prin. Hard to fight that. Hard, sometimes, to justify it even to myself, that I think we should be free of their rule.

  The northern continent, Ajhevan, is a different story from the south. The Prin do not administer the weather here, or adjust the growing season, by virtue of the fact that the Dirijhi are a protected species, and this continent is under Dirijhi jurisdiction. The trees have made it clear to the Mage, through the symbionts, that the Prin are not welcome to come to Ajhevan. For some reason none of us have ever understood, the Mage prefers that the Dirijhi be left alone and gives them what they want. So Ajhevan belongs to them, and we humans who live here are truly free, except for Hormling taxes, in a way that nearly no one else can claim. Because we don’t have the Prin here to read our minds whether we like it or not, to look over our shoulders and meddle in our affairs. But even my friends in Ajhevan have become resigned to the notion that independence will only come a long time from now. Since my return, I noticed that some of the people inside the movement had begun to speak in the same terms.

  What we needed, what we had always needed, was an ally. I had hoped to find something like that on Paska. But then, a few days after I returned, a letter arrived from my brother Binam asking me to visit him in Greenwood.

  The
trees don’t care for outsiders, though they make a lot of money running tours into the forest. They rarely grant anyone permission to stay in Dirijhi country for any length of time. But my brother was a symbiont, and I had not seen him since the change. I’d been asking him to allow me to visit for years, to spend time with him but also to sound him out about what the trees might think of independence. All of us with ties to the Dirijhi were making the same request. After many years of refusal, Binam had suddenly agreed. So I was on my way.

  The Dirijhi permit only a certain kind of flat-bottomed boat to travel up-river under the canopy, so I spent the afternoon in Dembut trying to line up transportation. The river guides are all licensed, and there was actually a symbiont on duty to check my pass in the outpost station; the Dirijhi hire human staff to deal with the tourist traffic, though the sym was clearly in charge. He or she must have been melded to one of the nearer trees, though even then it’s an effort for a sym to be apart from the tree for any length of time. I knew that much from Binam, who sent me letters, written ones on paper, from time to time; the only scripted letters I ever got in my life. This sym had a pinched look in the face, eyes of that iridescent silver that is the result of the tree-feeding, the pupils small in the light, though they could dilate completely in the dark, enabling the sym to see as if the world were in full noon. Binam would look like that, I reminded myself. He would still be my brother, but he would be changed.

  Once I cleared my papers and booked passage on one of the riverboats, I found a hotel room for the night. I was tempted to think of the place as primitive or backward, since we were so far from what I had come to think of as civilization, but Dembut had every convenience you could ask for. Uplinks to the whole Hormling data mass, entertainment parlors that were 4D capable, clean VR stalls, good restaurants. The Dirijhi don’t like big power matrices, so everything on Ajhevan runs on portable fusion generators; cold boxes, they’re called, and for a village the size of Dembut, about a dozen were required to power the town. Hormling technology, like nearly everything that works in the Cluster. This and much other interesting information was piped to the screen in my hotel room, the loop playing as I keyed the door and entered. I muted the sound and threw my bag onto the little bed.

  I bought a girl for the night. Her name was Tira and she had a brother who was a symbiont, too. Ajhevanoi are pretty free sexually, and prostitution is considered a nice way to make some extra money, especially in a tourist town, as Dembut is, so there are a lot of people registered with the agencies. People in Ajhevan are not usually hung up about lesbians, though now and then you still get a feeling that they don’t know altogether what to make of us in the smaller towns, so I was apprehensive. Tira was a free spirit, though, and we had a nice dinner and went to the room and she gave me a massage and I returned the favor and then we wrapped round each other and got serious for a while. She had no problem with lesbians, clearly, and I felt worlds better when we were done. We talked about our brothers and I asked if she had seen hers since he made the change. She saw him often, she said; to be near him, she had taken up her trade in Dembut—her trade being rune-reading for tourists in the market, the sex was a sideline. She liked the forest, she liked her brother, she liked the difference since he underwent the change, she had thought about becoming a sym herself. “Beats having to work for a living,” she said.

  In the morning, I met the riverboat on time and waited impatiently to be underway. Today the river station was staffed by two different syms, one who had been a man and the other who had been a woman. The bioengineering that gets done on a symbiont starts with neutering, but sometimes you could tell which had been which. The eyes, though, were so difficult to read. I kept trying to place them in Binam’s face.

  We got underway in the eighth marking. My fellow passengers were tourists, a family from Feidre and two couples from New Charnos, southerners, all of them. They were curious about Ajhevan, so I answered their questions politely, while the pilot was busy. I was born here and grew up here, first on a group farm and then in a girls’ commune. After my parents sold my brother to the sym recruiters, I petitioned the Magistrate’s Court for a separation and was granted it, and lived in the commune after that. To be fair, which I don’t always like to be, that’s my way of looking at what happened. My parents didn’t exactly sell my brother, at least, not against his will. Binam had been begging to join the symbionts since he was eight years old and got lost in Greenwood; and my parents were swayed by the bounty and by what Binam wanted, so fervently, and gave permission. I never forgave them for allowing him to make that choice himself, so young, only twelve. Especially since they were paid enough money to sell the algae farm we worked, that they had come to hate. After I divorced them, they bought a big house in Byutiban, on the southern continent, and both went to work in the Prin administration. We reconciled later, though I never did anything to lift the court decision. By then, even if I had forgiven them for selling Binam, I’d never have understood why they went to work for the Hormling.

  My boat penetrated into the canopy along a string of Dirijhi cities, according to the pilot, an Erejhen who gave his name as Kirith, though since he was Erejhen that was not likely to be his real name. He pointed out how to spot a city: the trees grew closer and denser, the undergrowth was more strictly regulated, the appearance was formal. There was even a foliage pattern along the river, shrubs grown and maintained in a certain sequence by the tree through a complex process that only a fully mature Dirijh could undertake before symbionts. Nowadays, the symbionts work under the direction of the trees to cultivate the Shimmering Garden, which is the name the Dirijhi give to Greenwood.

  Overhead, in the cities, the trees intertwine upper tier branches in one of seven patterns, sometimes a mix of all seven in a large city, like the capital. In the branches now and then we would see a sym, but only once that whole day did we see one on the ground. One of the couples asked if Kirith knew any of the names of the cities, and he answered that the Dirijhi had no spoken language and the symbionts never attempted to trans-literate the speech that passed between sym and host. The only words the syms ever gave us are the name they use for the tree people, “Dirijhi,” coined from a word for tree in one of the old languages of Senal, and the name for the forest, “Shimmering Garden.”

  We were headed for the Dirijhi capital, near the center of the forest. There I would transfer to another flatboat that would carry me along one of the water-channels leading west into the interior, where Binam and his tree lived. We were passing tourist boats all morning as they stopped along the shore, places where the Dirijhi had agreed to allow walking tours for a stiff fee. The tour spots changed from time to time to give the riverfront trees a respite. Since the trees migrate toward the closest river or canal over the course of their extremely long lifetimes, the oldest, longest-lived trees end up along the shore and die there; though trees occasionally refuse to make the migration and many die in the interior before getting all the way to the shore. They migrate slowly, by setting roots carefully and deliberately in one direction and shifting themselves by manipulating the compression and tension of wood in the main bole, and can move as much a full standard unit in about a standard century, about seventy years Aramenian. It takes a person about a half a day to walk that distance; it took the symbionts to tell us the trees could move at all.

  The trees along the river nearly hypnotized me. A lot of them were dead and decaying, since they were the oldest; but their gardens were still maintained by syms in the neighboring trees. The living trees give off all kinds of scents, according to Binam’s letters, the patterns changing with the religious and social calendar, and the effect can be ecstatic. We were getting the tourist spray along the Silas, but even that was heavenly. Some of the Dirijh rise as tall as a thirty story building, if you’ve ever seen one of those. They are massive creatures with a central trunk or bole and a series of buttress roots rising to support a huge upper canopy. The central bole becomes massive and the buttress root
s rise up as far as the lowest branches. All the branching occurs from the central trunk, and these massive branches sometimes drop additional prop roots to the ground for support, till a single Dirijh can look like a small forest. The trees can climb four hundred stades high even in Aramen’s 5-percent higher-than-standard gravity, where nobody expected to find the tallest trees in the known stars.

  Standard years and standard gravities refer to the year and the total gravitic force of Senal, the Mage world. The standard is necessary since there are so many worlds to deal with in the Cluster, all slightly or very different from one another in physical characteristics. I can admit that and still get a little riled that the standard is Senal. Why not a mean year, a mean day, a mean gravity? My parents think that’s a silly argument, that it doesn’t make any difference. That’s no reason to commit acts of sedition, to work for a rebellion, they say. But I disagree.

  I moved for a while to the southern continent, to Avitran, after I got through school in the women’s commune. Trained as a gene-splicer in Genetech, working in a clean lab creating one or another of the seventeen hundred legal variants from standard DNA that define the human race as we know it, three hundred years since the Hormling and their partners the Erejhen began to spread through the local stars, and nearly thirty thousand years since the Hormling themselves arrived on Senal, sent there from Earth to find the Mage, as the Qons Quilian claims. I believe the three-hundred-year proposition, I don’t know about the rest. I know I don’t believe in Earth.

  Two

  We slept on the boat, while it continued upriver on satellite guidance. Firesprays flying overhead, now and then a bit of the moon peeping through the canopy. Some of the Dirijh fold their leaves at night to bring moonlight down to the Shimmering Garden. Aramen’s tiny moon Kep orbits the planet in a geosynchronous loop and is always in the sky over Ajhevan; sometimes you can see its ghost in the day. The southern continent Byutiban, on the opposite side of the planet, never sees that moon at all, though Aramen has a larger, red moon, Sith, that orbits farther out, and it goes through phases and appears in all parts of Aramen.