Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013

by Spilogale Inc.

But what's the panic? If you're still working when we arrive, we'll just wait in orbit a while.

  Three hundred people should each put their life's ambition on hold because I couldn't get my job done?

  Em, I know it's important, but we need you here, too. The boys need a mother.

  Is that right? Tell me, when your ancestors landed on the beach at Normandy, was anyone saying, "But why aren't they with their children?" I suppose even on an interstellar spaceship, for women the future is still a long way away.

  Look, I know I'm not being fair.

  Chuck, they're not yet three. They're still babies. They'll be older once we get to Ararat. They'll appreciate the time with me more then.

  They aren't babies anymore, Em. You just haven't been here to realize it. Did you see the mural outside our slot? Boutros did that.

  You mean you did it, and he helped.

  Me? I can't paint.

  Well, neither can I, and I didn't try any augmentation of artistic ability. Where does he get it?

  Gene modification, the old-fashioned way.

  How does he make the paint?

  Hey, I had to have some skills too, to get on this boat.

  Really, Boutros painted that?

  Yes.

  All right. All right. I will figure something out, some way to spend more time with all of you.

  Thanks, Em. I don't mean for you to feel bad, but we miss you. I miss you…. Boys, you're supposed to knock first.

  Mama crying.

  Why?

  Because Mommy needs a hug.

  Mmm, thank you both. Do you know Mama loves you very much?

  Hee-hee-hee, Mama silly.

  Why?

  I HAVEN'T DECIDED whether I'll really transmit this recording when I finish, but just in case, here—here are the murals Boutros did. He kept adding to them for over two years. See? They extend beyond the horizon. Of course, the horizon slants up and it's only twenty meters away.

  Nobody minded some extra color in the corridor. In fact, Boutros started a trend. Half the ship is painted now, even some of the exterior.

  See how it gets even better as you move away from our family's slot? Boutros graduated from simple shapes and animals to complete landscapes. At only four years old. And do you know, it just occurred to me for the first time, he painted this without ever seeing a real landscape. What an artist! No doubt he made a wonderful farmer also, but I wouldn't really know.

  I think Chuck knew I wouldn't be able to keep my promise. That night, we made love for the last time before we reached orbit at Ararat. Two years of hardly seeing my family. That was the second time I chose to desert everyone I knew, and the only one I regret.

  We managed to design the mods we needed by the time the ship arrived. Once the Vanguard reached Ararat and confirmed a habitable surface, we started in with two sets of modification by sonoporation, one to adjust to the Ararat atmosphere, one to reverse the slowdown.

  I take great pride that my assistants and I managed both sets of mods on everyone, working at a furious pace, with only two failures. One little girl I had never met went into system shock from cell damage and died. And one colonist proved totally resistant to further modification—the colonist with cell walls outside the preferred tolerance range. Should have seen that coming.

  I performed the reversal on Chuck and the boys first. By the time we realized it hadn't worked for me, the second time I ever saw Chuck cry, they were already at double my speed.

  I could still talk to Chuck, who spoke as deliberately as possible, but not to Boutros or James. I could barely even track the boys with my eyes, they moved so quickly. And hugging them through all their motion was like trying to hold on to water from a faucet.

  Chuck insisted that I slow the boys and him back to my speed. I refused. But when he threatened to have one of my assistants do the sonoporation to slow them again, I relented and said I would do it.

  No good doctor would ever force treatment on an unwilling patient. But I wasn't a doctor to them, I was a wife and a mother. So with my last three sonoporation procedures, I acted as a wife and mother should, for the final time. I gave them a splice to forever block any genetic slowdown, making it impossible for them to rejoin me at my speed. I would not permit my family to be trapped, to give up their future for me.

  A day later, they were at ten times my speed. I could understand nothing anyone said. Standing right next to each other, Chuck and I communicated by email.

  By the next day, everyone but me was fully accelerated. Chuck continued to try to communicate, but how agonizingly long every conversation must have taken for him.

  Just trying to kiss him was an exercise in frustration. Doubtless he was holding the kiss as long as he possibly could, but to me it felt like a tiny peck.

  I remember I kept lying down to cry, feeling wells of tears pool in my eyes, but someone would always wipe the tears away before they could fall down my cheeks. Did Chuck do that so the boys would not see? Or did it just look uncomfortable to them to have all that water on my face for so long?

  WHEN CHUCK, Boutros, and James took the last one-way shuttle to the surface, I stayed behind. Everyone begged me to come, even though it would be a challenge to keep me alive in that atmosphere, for it would be many years of scratching out a foothold on the planet before they would be able to return to orbit. But I had no wish to live down there, a statue frozen among the living.

  They stripped down the Vanguard as they left, but the remaining equipment was still plenty to keep one woman alive. And I could receive and send messages and pictures. At first, it felt like I was traveling, as if I had gone on a voyage and left Chuck and the boys behind, instead of the reverse.

  I tried to communicate with them every day, but it was hopeless. If I didn't want to miss a day for them (26 hours on Ararat), I couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time. In a few weeks, I became irrational with sleep deprivation. That made me tear up a lot, and a good cry would cost a whole day anyway.

  So I gave up and went to a normal sleep cycle, waking each time with the awful realization that I had missed an entire week. If I stopped to read my family's messages from that week, another day was lost before I could respond.

  I watched my sons mature in a few months, like bean sprouts in a time-lapse film.

  Since Chuck died, since Boutros and James became strangers, I have spent more time watching news and entertainment feeds from the planet. I have seen a whole civilization grow from the tiny seed I helped plant.

  I have become a legend, a sad story my descendants retell for entertainment. Three times they have made flatfilms of my life. Each time the story becomes more melodramatic, and the actress playing me more absurdly beautiful.

  The leaders of the world's young government often consult me. They trust me to consider a proposal's long-term consequences. But then, their long term is so near, for me.

  Every time I step away from the screen, when I return it's the future. I suppose in a way life is like that for everyone, forever rushing into the future. But it is different for me. For me, there is only the future. Other people get to inhabit the present, at least for a time, even if they seldom appreciate it.

  I sit above the world like an impotent god, watching my grandchildren build a new life, a life with no place for me. In the past year, I've seen both my sons die, then the last surviving original colonists.

  They are finally redeveloping spaceflight. If I wait, before long my descendants will arrive here, to marvel at my slow-motion movements and wipe away my tears.

  I have been studying the specs, and the Vanguard really is quite simple to pilot. Soon I will take the ship back into deep space. The systems will surely start to break down before long, and I will be at a loss to make repairs, but at least my grandchildren will first be able to see the torch in the night sky as I leave.

  Back in Alexandria, they were right. I am jabaan. This is a coward's form of suicide, leaving behind all my descendants and the whole world I helped cre
ate, but it carries one comfort.

  No one will stop my tears from falling.

  * * *

  The Trouble with Heaven

  By Chet Arthur | 7047 words

  Since his last appearance in F&SF, Chet Arthur has let on a few details about his shadowy past. He says that as a young soldier stationed in a Bavarian cow town, he recalls nothing whatsoever except that the burg had one cathedral and fourteen breweries. During college, he was sitting next to Allen Konigsberg in Metaphysics when the latter was expelled for cheating on the final exam. Later in life, Mr. Arthur got lost in the Pentagon and had to survive for a week on hot dogs and Smoothies from an enlisted men's mess. His eventual rescue by Navy SEALs was not the stuff of which films are made.

  In regards to this story, your editor would like to say only that he has nothing but respect and admiration for the Gateway City (the one east of the Mississippi, that is) and its current mayor. Opinions to the contrary in this story do not reflect those of management.

  CHARLES ADAMS-MORGAN approached without joy the prospect of dying and going to heaven. That was how he thought about retirement—dying. And everybody down at the Diplomatic Club said Ambrosia was a lot like heaven.

  Charles disagreed. He knew the Minister was sending him there for his last tour of duty only because he didn't want to waste anybody with a future on a post where nothing ever happened. Putting old boys out to pasture on the Earth's poshest residential satellite was so well established that Ambrosia was called a "pre-mortem assignment."

  "You'll enjoy it," the Minister assured him, smiling benignly. "Big desk, no duties. A great chance to decompress after your long, distinguished career."

  "You mean a great chance to learn how to be useless. I've never even known why we have an embassy there."

  "Legally, because it's another world. As a practical matter, because the bunch of snobs who live there have more money than God. They'll love you, Charles, if only because you have a hyphen in your name."

  "What'll I do with my time?"

  "Evenings, go to parties. The Ambrosians spend a lot of time having dinners and balls and receptions. Daytimes? I dunno. The only issue that seems to get them stirred up is the Servant Question, and I don't see why that should concern you. So relax, play a little tennis, take up tai chi, think about your memoirs."

  "When I was a kid," said Charles, "I used to sit in church wondering if heaven could possibly be as boring as it sounded."

  "Soon you'll know." The Minister smiled. He gave the old boy his patented sincere handshake, and put him out of his mind forever.

  In the aisle of the shuttlecraft, Mike Segretti said good morning to a tall, forbiddingly well-groomed old man entering a unit marked DeLuxe. In reply he got a chilly look, and the door closed with unnecessary force.

  Mike shrugged. Life as a journalist had left him almost unsnubbable. He found his own compartment—the type of beige closet the Transport Administration termed Basic—and settled down to sightsee. When the shuttle left the atmosphere and the blind on his porthole retracted, he pressed his nose to the triple transplast and gaped at the oceans, the clouds, the moon over here, dawn breaking over there. The Earth was beautiful, just like travel brochures said—not a hint of all the bad stuff that went on down below, the tedious succession of disasters that journalists called CODO (for Crap of Daily Occurrence).

  Feeling inspired, Mike pulled out his notebook, turned it on, and made the first note for the article he'd been assigned to write. "Below lies the human tragedy," he intoned, "but up here you see only the divine comedy."

  That was exactly the sort of oracular stuff the Editorial Computer liked. He had his article's lead, and now if he could come up with a snappy finish, what lay between would practically write itself. Smiling contentedly, he put away the notebook, closed his eyes to both tragedy and comedy, and began to snore.

  The two travelers arrived simultaneously, yet not together.

  In the VIP Lounge of Ambrosia's shuttleport, Charles Adams-Morgan was met by a delegation of gleaming personages, all of whom turned out to be droids. He endured with the stoicism of long practice a (literally) canned speech of welcome, then entered a limo that rose purringly from the porcelain floor and bore him like a pheasant on a platter down six levels to the palatial embassy. Awaiting him there were champagne, fancy chocolates, hothouse flowers, and two of those annoying cards that talked.

  The first, in a desperately upper-class accent, invited him to dine with the Board of Governors that evening. "Formal attire," it fluted, "decorations will be worn."

  "Monkey suit," Charles translated, "with clinkers."

  The second card in gruff Germanic tones invited him to a costume ball a week hence, with the theme Old Vienna. Oh God, he thought, not one of those, and gestured at a serving bot standing in a niche of the atrium. It rolled up, gathered his luggage, and led the way into a gold-plated elevator and down a gleaming hallway.

  The master bedroom's rococo décor looked as if it had been vacated a few hours earlier by Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine. Here a valet bot took over, explaining as it unpacked his luggage, "I am programmed not merely to obey Your Excellency's commands, but as far as possible to anticipate your every desire."

  "Then you should have anticipated that I prefer to be served in silence," Charles replied in tones that had given frostbite to many a hostile diplomat. After that the unpacking proceeded—mutely.

  Meanwhile, Mike was undergoing Ambrosia's way of greeting non-VIPs. The searching and scanning of his meager form ended only when the Medical Officer stripped off his latex glove and handed Mike a paper towel.

  "Get dressed," he said and walked away, whistling tunelessly. A nurse passed the doorless examining cubicle and glanced in. "Make mine sunny-side up," she said.

  In Passport Control, Mike perched his insulted backside on a very hard chair while his documents were processed. Though now fully clothed, he still felt ghostly fingers prodding him inside and out.

  "Police record," the guard muttered, collating four piles of hardcopy. "Security clearance, retinagraph, DNA, bloodwork, brain scan, sperm sample, rectal smear.… First trip to Ambrosia?"

  "Yeah."

  "Have fun," he said, and waved Mike down a long blank hallway that led to OPAL, the Ordinary Persons Arrival Lounge. He was wondering what new humiliation might await him there, when an elegant young woman held up a sign with his name on it. He pointed at himself and smiled and she smiled back.

  "So you're Mr. Segretti," she said, shaking hands. "What do your friends call you?"

  "Mike," said Mike. "And you are—"

  "You can call me Alice."

  "You live on Ambrosia for long, Alice?"

  "I've been here quite a while," she corrected him. "Technically speaking, I don't live at all."

  Oh Christ, he thought, another one. It was getting harder and harder to tell them from people. At a desk labeled SUPPLIES, he checked out an omni tuned to local channels, retrieved his suitcase, and followed Alice onto a slider ramp that took them down five levels. They emerged into the light of a vagina-pink sky.

  "It's always morning on Senior Level," she explained. "Makes the old folks feel more hopeful. Or so I'm told."

  "Why are they putting me on Senior Level? I'm only twenty-nine."

  "This is where we house most of our visitors. For obvious reasons, units are always coming vacant."

  "So there's death, even on Ambrosia."

  "Our scientists are working on the problem."

  For a few minutes they stood gazing at the scene. Belle époque buildings overlooked parkland with shivering aspens, weeping willows, blooming dogwood, a murmuring brook, and a pool where a rainbow trout leaped and scattered glittering spray. Far off, a line of snow-capped mountains etched the dawn sky, and the snow had faint roseate tints, just like real snow on real mountains on a real morning.

  "Wow," he said.

  People began to appear. Young couples strolled through the park arm in arm, climb
ed an ornamental bridge, stood gazing at the water. Toddlers in immaculate jumpers or rompers or whatever they called those things (Mike had so far avoided the joy of fatherhood) ran laughing from one blossoming copse to another.

  He nodded at the people. "Are they, uh—"

  "Good, aren't they? Senior Level residents like to look at young people, provided they aren't real young people, who are, you know, too noisy."

  She led him into a building that resembled a very large piece of pastry and deposited him in a small apartment on the first floor.

  "I'm sure you'll want to clean up and rest a bit," she said efficiently. "Tonight you'll observe a state dinner. Observe, not partake. We'll have a bite early, or rather you will. Tomorrow A.M. we'll do a grand tour, get you oriented, and I'll set up some interviews. See you at nineteen-thirty in the lounge."

  Mike's new quarters comprised two large rooms with faux antiques, a white carpet, white walls, a white ceiling, and an opulent bath. Music was provided by an audio program called Three Hundred Years of Show Tunes. Mike looked for some way to turn it off, couldn't find any, and told his notebook, "Remind me to ask Alice how to can the goddamn music."

  He dropped his wrinkled clothing into a trapdoor marked Clean and Press, took a hot shower and stretched out on the bed. Immediately it began to massage him. "Stop that," he said. The bed stopped. That gave him an idea, so he added, "Stop the music," and the music stopped too. Mike thought, The room listens. The room hears. The room is at my service. That's better than having to call a bellboy, who'd want a tip.

  In its quiescent state the bed was superb, molding itself to every bone and joint of his body. Fifty-two minutes later he woke, allowed a shaver vac to smooth his face and whisk away the mown bristles, retrieved his now spotless clothes, and dressed. As he exited the room, it assured him, "Henceforth, I will open the door only to your body signature."

  Whatever that might mean.

  Aided by soft-voiced signs hovering in midair, he found the lounge, sat down, and told his chair to stop massaging him even before it started. When the bartender rolled up, he ordered a Gin Apocalypse and had just downed it when Alice arrived. The time was precisely nineteen-thirty, proving again that droids, alone of all creatures in the known universe, were always punctual.