"Oh, boo hoo,” she said in a voice I could hardly hear. “I had things to do, places to go. What, I was meant to hang about with you and your dreary damned family until I died of boredom and screeching noise?"
I felt a small shudder pass through my chest, my caught breath, and I let it go, let it all go.
"Of course not. I'm not a fool. It's not every day a girl has a Glorious tapping at her parlor door, offering to bear her off to the underworld.” I straightened in the chair, and it creaked under my weight. “Are you determined to do this thing?"
"Yes."
"Is it dangerous? To us all?"
"Risk provides the sauce. Look—” And she grabbed up a straw broom leaning against the paint-peeled siding, stripped it down to dust and made two, one in each hand. They failed to cavort like the brooms of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, which was, I thought in my mordant terror, a bit of a letdown.
"Handy. A free broom in every storage cabinet,” I said. “How banal you are."
"I will make worlds and world beyond worlds,” Europa told me, rocking contentedly in her hammock, dropping the twins to clatter on the floorboards, “and fling them like bright jewels into the infinite. Galaxies like grains of sand, universes like dust caught in a beam of sunlight—” Glittering, then, the brooms disintegrated into a cascade of eye-dazzling sparks that tore upward in a gout of radiance, cold fire.
"For the fucking bugs,” I said, and stood up, didn't kick over the chair or rub my shocked eyes, and walked away from her, still holding the asphodel posy. “For your damned creepy Bug King."
She did not dispute my words. She did not call me back. I knew there was no way I might induce her to promise to stay her hand. Probably I'd known from the outset.
* * * *
Here's a handy simile, free of charge. Engrave it in your brain or accessory; don't leave home without it.
In cartoons, lightning bolts always are shown as a jagged spear thrust from lowering clouds, sharp tip slamming at a sixth of the speed of light, or thereabouts, toward the ground. It doesn't work that way, quite. You've probably spotted my figure of speech already, right? You smart, smart machines. You keen kids.
The potential tension grows and grows between negatively charged cloud mass high above and positively charged ground ions swarming below. Trickles of current stepladder their hungry way down toward the monstrous globe of the earth—and hot, powerful positive streamers are flung upward to meet their embrace. They fuse; a gout of luminous charge tears from the soil to the sky. The channel boils. Torn air is flung aside, and thunder rolls and booms its godlike voice.
That's how it was when I awakened the Glorious with my feeble, jagged song.
* * * *
The night of the premiere was peak allergy season in central Texas. Pecans bloomed outside every window. Juniper pollen blew in every gust. A dozen or a hundred fruits of the soil scattered their vicious grains on the muggy air. I sneezed; my eyes ran, then clogged up with stinging, itching gloop, supernaturally resistant to antihistamines. Like a bag of overpriced rice dunked in water, the meat of my sinuses swelled and beat a tattoo against my brain. The skin eroded in dry white flakes from between my eyebrows, at my hairline, beside my nostrils. I was a mess. I wanted to stay home. I wanted to lie down and die.
Obviously Europa wouldn't let me.
It wasn't as though I had to don black tie and get my hair cut. Nobody on Yahweh's wide earth had the faintest interest in opening their opera chamber to a performance of an ear-grating avant-garde oratorio (there were jealous mutterings that it was derriere-garde, like the exhausted tricks of Schonberg's twelve-tone row) about the sinking of a mid-Pacific continent that never existed. I'd've had better luck, maybe, in San Francisco or Sydney, but who could afford it? My dumpster diver pal Jules Groznick and a pinch-hit ensemble of kids and blue-haired ladies clutched their ill-rehearsed scores in the sound-proofed garage owned by the Dewey Street dentist father of the president of the College Choristers and sang their hearts out into a decent Roland multi-track home studio digital recorder. Mu sank; blood flowed; the towers toppled, earth opened, sea plunged and gulped. Simultaneously, banally, the performance mixdown flowed straight to YouTube and any iPods careless or eccentric enough to be logged on and tuned in. My score went up to heaven in electronic packets swapped and mixed-and-matched into satellites around the globe, and trickled down again, and alerted the Glorious in its slow, awful billion-year meditations.
If I was sneezing, you can imagine the convulsions in the bowels of the earth as a billion tons of archaeobacteria entrained their distributed intelligence and its entangled, resonant presence in all the microorganisms of all the biosphere's warm bodies, and noticed me and Europa.
You really mustn't blame me for the loss of Indonesia and New Guinea and Hawaii, and like that.
Talk about an allergy reaction.
* * * *
So I became Asterion, under the awakened direction of the ancient Bugs carried into the core of the Earth by the small planet that blew the Moon off from the world's crust, and was sent by them to the Navel of the Worlds, the omphallos island that joins all the infinite realities and unrealities; and my neuroatypical wife locked herself gratefully into communion with the mass consciousness that had smashed into proto-Earth four billion years ago then settled as the iron core in the middle of the roiling planet, bearing its Glorious life from Somewhere Else, who knows where, and she was thus Europa, myth goddess of the underworld, mother, eventually, of our three god-engendered sons. I stood back in throttled rage and secret pride, until at last my off-key Machiavellian calculations persuaded her to decamp, light out for the transfinite territories; rather reign in Tartarus than serve blessed exponentiating Moore's Law machines in post-industrial, near-singularity heaven, reign there, yes, as the Great Mother, over the dead and the infinitely possible, and—
But you know all this, dear cursed soulreaders. Of course you do. So enough of that. And for fuck's sake, call me Isaac, okay?
I'd been back from the Wardrobe three days (risen, if you like, from the dead, good Judaic heresiarch that I am) when the machines of loving grace came to me in my chambers above Ciudad de México. I chafed in frustration, rubbing nanomedicinal unguents into my aching unreplenished limbs. A blustery storm was blowing in across the Bahia de Campeche from the east and south, turbulent night eddies in the air skin of the world shoved about in unaccustomed vectors by the raw new mountains in the center of the Atlantic. Auroras flailed pink and baby-blue silk scarves, some greeny pale, asphodels of light, as plasmas and magnetic ropes from the Sun whipped up the ionosphere still unsettled after the best part of a century. Soon dark clouds heavy with moisture would block their dance, and a hard rain would drum across the city.
Somewhere, a cat wailed.
"I delivered your message,” I said. “My wife was not impressed. She will not return. She will not ditch her plans. I believe she yields to higher authority—or lower, if we're to be literal. Okay, now shoot the messenger.” I struck a martyr's pose, arms outstretched, head thrown heroically to one side.
"There is no fate here to tempt, Isaac,” they told me. Through my flesh and bone, a trillion commensal brainless bacteria and viral particles thrilled to the long hums and waves of the mind of the world, the deeps beneath us, the cavernous cities and continents of ancient life that dreamed its being in our scurrying short lives. The machines, I told myself, were just the latest incarnation of this investiture, this infestation. But is the soul an infection of the tissues? Is spirit and awareness, and music melodic and harmonic alike, nothing better than a plague supervening on our brute and yearning selves? Beats me; I'm an annoying know-it-all, not a philosopher.
"Fix me, or leave me in peace,” I told them, nettled at my own organic restrictions and bounds. “I never asked for any of this."
"No more you did,” a machine told me, and its voice was kindly. “Yet here you are, and here it is. Get some sleep. We shall speak again in the morning."
&nbs
p; I called up a woman I'd known before they finally let my aging bod into the tank for renovation, then ripped it out again untimely. No need to frighten her with my scarecrow impersonation, so I left the visual feeds dark. I could see her, though, not looking too harried, sipping coffee in Paris or Bucharest, hair piled and gleaming in what I supposed to be the newest fashion. I felt a pang, I did.
"Hey, Aahba, Isaac Hersch here. Sorry about the blackout."
There was the smallest lag, on top of the speed of light thing. “Oh, hi, honey. It's been a time. You're not spelunking in Carlsbad Caverns, by any chance?"
"Been away, out of touch with everything. I switching the camera off, didn't want to frighten the horses.” She didn't get the reference, either, never mind. Aahba is an extrasolar exoplanetologist, and spends her time searching for signals of other Glorious in other worlds within viewing distance. Her night has a thousand Eyes. “Found any offworld pals yet?"
Hesitation. Coffee cup clattered faintly as she set it in its saucer. “Uh, you asking as Isaac—or Asterion?"
"Isaac, always, with you.” We'd had some sweet encounters. Reykjavik? Lanzhou? There was one astrobiology conference ... (You can look it up.) I assume she adopted her name as an emblem of her profession, as she didn't look especially Indian; it means “Shine” in Sanskrit. (You can look it up.) “So the world seems to be doing okay, with the machines in charge. But I suspect there are some big changes coming."
Laughter at that, coffee-spitting nervous laughter. “You and your wife should probably stop with those changes already."
That was astute, but maybe self-evident, I don't know, I'm too close to it all. Do people spend their days looking anxiously over their shoulders for the shadow of Europa, of Radamanthus, Minos, Sarpedon? Maybe so.
"It's probably under news embargo, but then the machines assure me that nothing these days is forbidden, so hey. Yeah, she's tearing up the pavement again and making some renovations."
"Look, I'm—It's lovely to hear from you again, Isaac, but I'm married these days, he's an ER doctor from...” She really was flustered, and trailed off. “So I can't see you. I do hope you're—Oh, hell.” And she broke the connection.
I sat there staring at my toes for quite a while, bleak. The gastritis was gnawing down below my heart, or maybe it was just my lonely heart, again. I rose, went out to the platform, looked at the scummy surface of the world. Europa couldn't do any worse than we'd all managed so far, we and the bacterial, vegetable Mind that moved through us in glacial tsunamis. I threw back my head and howled. Far below, on the street, a surprised dog howled back, his throaty call rising faintly in the caverns of glass and steel.
"Just put me back in the tank and let me get young in peace,” I said.
"Very well, Isaac,” the loving machines said, and wrapped me up, and popped me away into the tank. As my awareness drained down the plughole, I fancied I heard your prying questions, soulreaders, soulsuckers, so I've answered them as best I can, as I ebb away in these last microseconds of accelerated memory. Is that thrumming and tearing I hear in the bowels of reality just the anesthesia locking down, or has Europa started her multiplication lessons?
I think that's it. She'll be ripping us up and making every kind of New Atlantis there is. Maybe I'll see you on the other side. Maybe you'll just let me sleep through it. Maybe Europa will come to me again, in our other world, a world just for us and the kids.
Maybe I'll love her, then, and she me.
What power has forgiveness but love?
Copyright © 2009 Damien Broderick
* * * *
—To the memory of Roger Zelazny and William Carlos Williams
[Back to Table of Contents]
Poetry: FOR YE, OF VERY LITTLE FAITH... by W. Gregory Stewart
* * * *
* * * *
...and yet, in whom, there lingers spark—
there is the Nano Testament
that tells us all of Noah's Quark,
that Noah builded Planck by Planck
(and into which his zoo fits),
that was measured out 200,
long, by 40 qbits.
—W. Gregory Stewart
Copyright © 2009 W. Gregory Stewart
[Back to Table of Contents]
Short Story: EROSION by Ian Creasey
Two of Ian Creasey's previous stories for Asimov's, “This Is How It Feels” and “The Hastillan Weed,” have recently been podcasted and are available as audio downloads at Escape Pod. Another Asimov's story, “The Edge of the Map,” has just been reprinted in Mike Ashley's anthology The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF. The author tells us he lives in Yorkshire, England, at a safe distance from the coast.
Let me tell you about my last week on Earth....
Before those final days, I'd already said my farewells. My family gave me their blessing: my grandfather, who came to England from Jamaica as a young man, understood why I signed up for the colony program. He warned me that a new world, however enticing, would have its own frustrations. We both knew I didn't need the warning, but he wanted to pass on what he'd learned in life, and I wanted to hear it. I still remember the clasp of his fingers on my new skin; I can replay the exo-skin's sensory log whenever I wish.
My girlfriend was less forgiving. She accused me of cowardice, of running away. I replied that when your house is on fire, running away is the sensible thing to do. The Earth is burning up, and so we set forth to find a new home elsewhere. She said—she shouted—that when our house is on fire, we should stay and fight the flames. She wanted to help the firefighters. I respected her for that, and I didn't try to persuade her to come with me. That only made her all the more angry.
The sea will douse the land, in time, but it rises slowly. Most of the coastline still resembled the old maps. I'd decided that I would spend my last few days walking along the coast, partly to say goodbye to Earth, and partly to settle into my fresh skin and hone my augments. I'd tested it all in the post-op suite, of course, and in the colony simulator, but I wanted to practice in a natural setting. Reality throws up challenges that a simulator would never devise.
And so I traveled north. People stared at me on the train. I'm accustomed to that—when they see a freakishly tall black man, even the British overcome their famed (and largely mythical) reserve, and stare like scientists at a new specimen. The stares had become more hostile in recent years, as waves of African refugees fled their burning lands. I was born in Newcastle, like my parents, but that isn't written on my face. When I spoke, people smiled to hear a black guy with a Geordie accent, and their hostility melted.
Now I was no longer black, but people still stared. My grey exo-skin, formed of myriad tiny nodules, was iridescent as a butterfly's wings. I'd been told I could create patterns on it, like a cuttlefish, but I hadn't yet learned the fine control required. There'd be plenty of shipboard time after departure for such sedentary trifles. I wanted to be active, to run and jump and swim, and test all the augments in the wild outdoors, under the winter sky.
Scarborough is, or was, a town on two levels. The old North Bay and South Bay beaches had long since drowned, but up on the cliffs the shops and quaint houses and the ruined castle stood firm. I hurried out of town and soon reached the coastal path—or rather, the latest incarnation of the coastal path, each a little further inland than the last. The Yorkshire coast had always been nibbled by erosion, even in more tranquil times. Now the process was accelerating. The rising sea level gouged its own scars from higher tides, and the warmer globe stirred up fiercer storms that lashed the cliffs and tore them down. Unstable slopes of clay alternated with fresh rock, exposed for the first time in millennia. Piles of jagged rubble shifted restlessly, the new stones not yet worn down into rounded pebbles.
After leaving the last house behind, I stopped to take off my shirt, jeans, and shoes. I'd only worn them until now as a concession to blending in with the naturals (as we called the unaugmented). I hid the clothes under some gorse, for collectio
n on my return. When naked, I stretched my arms wide, embracing the world and its weather and everything the future could throw at me.
The air was calm yet oppressive, in a brooding sulk between stormy tantrums. Grey clouds lay heavy on the sky, like celestial loft insulation. My augmented eyes detected polarized light from the sun behind the clouds, beyond the castle standing starkly on its promontory. I tried to remember why I could see polarized light, and failed. Perhaps there was no reason, and the designers had simply installed the ability because they could. Like software, I suffered feature bloat. But when we arrived at our new planet, who could guess what hazards lay in store? One day, seeing polarized light might save my life.
I smelled the mud of the path, the salt of the waves, and a slight whiff of raw sewage. Experimentally, I filtered out the sewage, leaving a smell more like my memories from childhood walks. Then I returned to defaults. I didn't want to make a habit of ignoring reality and receiving only the sense impressions I found aesthetic.
Picking up speed, I marched beside the barbed wire fences that enclosed the farmers’ shrinking fields. At this season the fields contained only stubble and weeds, the wheat long since harvested. Crows pecked desultorily at the sodden ground. I barged through patches of gorse; the sharp spines tickled my exo-skin, but did not harm it. With my botanist's eye, I noted all the inhabitants of the little cliff-edge habitat. Bracken and clover and thistles and horsetail—the names rattled through my head, an incantation of farewell. The starship's seedbanks included many species, on the precautionary principle. But initially we'd concentrate on growing food crops, aiming to breed strains that would flourish on the colony world. The other plants ... this might be the last time I'd ever see them.
It was once said that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrated a man's mind wonderfully. Leaving Earth might be almost as drastic, and it had the same effect of making me feel euphorically alive. I registered every detail of the environment: the glistening spiders’ webs in the dead bracken, the harsh calls of squabbling crows, the distant roar of the ever-present sea below. When I reached a gully with a storm-fed river at the bottom, I didn't bother following the path inland to a bridge; I charged down the slope, sliding on mud but keeping my balance, then splashed through the water and up the other side.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 15