Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

longer or shorter with the twist of a knob.

  No pull-string to make him mope. This latter

  comes natural. If you leave him long enough,

  his head simply declines, chin and chest grow

  intimate. It's not as if he wants to be this.

  It's not even, really, a matter of choice.

  Nor can one say he's sad. He was made

  this way, pre-packaged. Or perhaps you only

  assume, knowing what you know of poets.

  It says it right here, on the back of the box,

  weapon of choice: Morbid Rumination.

  * * * *

  —Bryan D. Dietrich

  Copyright © 2009 Bryan D. Dietrich

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novella: THE SEA OF DREAMS by William Barton

  William Barton's science-fictional career began with the publication of Hunting on Kunderer in 1972, and has continued on through dozens of novels and short stories into the impossible-sounding years of the twenty-first century. Of his latest story, he says, “In the multiverse that may or may not exist all around us, you have an infinite number of doppelgangers living an infinite number of lives. And among them, there must exist at least one who, willy-nilly, will live on forever. Are you the one? Of course you are. Who else...?"

  I first saw the real Uranus about a hundred years ago, saw it on a cheap television set, while sitting on a ratty couch in the concrete bungalow where I lived alone. It was a time of despair tinted with hope for me, perhaps for the world at large.

  I was rid of my troublesome wife at last, but found being the male single parent of an autistic child more difficult than I could have dreamed. Glorious Project Apollo was long gone, but Voyager was showing incredible worlds beyond, the Space Shuttle was flying regular missions, and now here was Uranus, subtle blue featureless perfection on my TV...

  A little more than a week later, Challenger exploded in the sky over Florida. And that tint of hope faded from the despair.

  From orbit, all you can see of Uranus is the deep, cold, empty blue. Sky blue with a faint aura as of haze. Beautiful blue, the color of a perfect summer sky, the sort of sky Earth hadn't had for most of that long hundred years. No smog, no clouds, no nothing. Just blue.

  I sat in the left-hand command pilot's chair of my spacecraft, this time the brand spanking new Benthodyne II, fresh from the ERSIE shipyards at L1SE, where my company had its headquarters.

  Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise. The name had started as a joke, a generation ago. It fit me. It fit the company, whose stock in trade was the super-secret field modulus device, the magic of inertialess space drives, the magic of antigravity. Hardly anybody knew we hadn't invented it, had found it in a derelict alien spacecraft in the Fore Trojan Asteroids thirty-five years ago.

  Seen through the main freeze frame, picture window, Uranus's limb was a hump of horizon, looking a little like Earth seen from a low-orbiting space station. Blue, yes, with a faint suggestion of white haze, but unlike Earth, you couldn't tell where you were or where you were going, or even if you were moving at all, except when the terminator comes over the horizon and swallows you in night.

  Ylva's cameo floated to my left, a little staticky, somewhat time-lagged as she was orbiting Ariel, as ever the beautiful, vivacious blonde turn-of-the-century TV star I'd known since she was merely the computer command subsystem of a little scoutship I'd flown on prospecting missions for Standard ARM. Computer command subsystem incorporating “human CNS tissue."

  An innocent dead woman brought back to life as the operating system of a soulless machine. Well, it had a soul now, and the people who'd done this to her had cause to regret it, the ones who were still alive to regret anything. Quite a few of them had come to a bad end over the past twenty years or so. The Bastards, she liked to call them.

  Ylva Johanssen was running my company, and had a share of two Nobels, one for the field modulus device itself, another for the theory of Quantum Holotaxial Dynamics to explain how it worked.

  My contribution to that had been to resurrect the word aetherium to describe the dark fluid making up all but a tiny fraction of the universe around us. A universe in which matter and light were merely trace imperfections.

  Ylva's Body Double was in the flight engineer's seat to my right, hands on controls, eyes on instruments. I believe Ylva only created them so she could have sex with me, but they make handy dexterous manipulators as well, and she breeds them by the dozen in laboratory vacuoles back at ERSIE-HQ.

  They're real women cloned from donated egg cells using nuclei from surviving bits of Ylva's living tissue deep in the heart of that old spaceship computer, connected to her by hardware embedded in their forebrains, never independent of her supervision, imbued with her personality, animated by her awareness.

  Sometimes, when the radio link is a little tenuous, you can see a spark of separate awareness in their eyes.

  Ylva's been studying me for decades, studying to make my life better, studying to make me what she thinks of as happy. She breeds them to match my hormones, to match my desires, to be specially responsive to me. This one was terrific in bed.

  Ylva's cameo made a staticky laugh. “I can tell what you're thinking by the way you look at her, Mr. Zed. I'm sorry there's no time for that now."

  "We've got all the time in the world, sweetie.” And it was true. Someday we'll die, someday the odds will beat us, but that inevitable, unavoidable death that hung like a cloud over my first life had been swept away.

  The Body Double turned and looked at me, that little spark brightening for just a moment, and flashed a bright smile before looking away. I wonder what she's thinking? I wonder what she sees? Humanoid with shiny, beaded lizardskin in a tight, transparent spacesuit sitting beside her, talking to a picture of a beautiful woman hanging in the air. Ylva says when we make love the lizardskin feels “nice.” No idea what that means.

  My second wife Sarah, the wife of my heart, liked what she called my “fur,” the long, soft black hair I used to have growing most everywhere. Wonder what she'd make of me now? Christ, she'd laugh! Lizardman me, love-slave to a machine? Hah.

  "I'm powering up Benthodyne's DaMNeX system now.” This was the second such ship we'd built, the first one tested on Titan, the next one for use on Venus. If they worked, we'd build a fourth to fly the deadly skies of Jupiter and Saturn. Then we'd start to sell them.

  "Do an overlay, will you?"

  "Okay.” The Body Double reached out and fiddled with some of the controls. The Dark Matter Neutrino eXchange “radar” system was another ERSIE product to come out of the aetherium. Money piled on money, and with it, you could look halfway through a planet.

  "There, Mr. Zed.” The Body Double was pointing into the realtime freeze frame, where a bright bead was coming over Uranus's limb. Just a yellow dot, some ways below the horizon, something the size of a small yacht the research team on Ariel had spotted floating a few hundred kilometers down in the atmosphere. Something impervious to aetheric waves.

  What would that be? Neutronium? A Nivenesque stasis canister? Christ, finding a three-million year old derelict firefox spaceship had been bad enough. Finding a billion year old Slaver artifact would be too damn much.

  "Well. Are we ready to go?"

  The Body Double whispered, “Ready as we'll ever be.” Ylva has told me the cloning process shortens their lifespans, that a Body Double accelerated to adulthood will only last five or ten years before going into “irreversible decline.” Don't worry though, she'd said. I can make as many as we need.

  I put my own hands on the controls, felt a little thrill of anticipation, then cranked up the firefox drive. Blue light guttered outside, flickering around the edges of the freeze frame view, and we began to descend.

  I came to the pilot side of flying late in life, taking the controls of my first spacecraft when I was in my sixties, not piloting an atmospheric vehicle until I was past a hundred and had gotten down on Titan. When I can, I like to
fly in Earth's atmosphere, reveling in a sense of freedom and history.

  You know what's really cool? People have started calling them “aeroplanes” again, like the people in all those children's books I inherited from my grandfather. I remember as a kid seeing an aeroplane mentioned in the first tattered Bobby Blake story I read, picturing a 1960s jetliner, realizing with a start he was talking about some old-time motorized box kite.

  Benthodyne II wasn't an aeroplane, more like a flying bathyscaphe with gravity control and a field modulus device for a spacedrive, but it handled like one as we sailed down from starry black space, down into the cool blue skies of Uranus. I could bank and soar, slipping through the haze, and something was making the ship's artificial gravity field tip and twist just so, giving it a reality all that blue nothing in the external freeze frame couldn't make come true. That something was most likely Ylva, who knew what I liked in bed and out.

  Her cameo blurred and threw off an image of toppling black bars for a moment, then cleared with a faint grain of static, and she said, “I've started moving Thermopylae in from Ariel. I'll take up a synchronous orbit over the artifact so we get a better signal."

  The Body Double looked up from her controls, dark eyes on me, and said, “The updated overlay has finished downloading. Secure for loss of signal."

  Ylva's cameo cleared abruptly, becoming hard edged and unnaturally sharp. “Twenty kilometers to rendezvous. We'll start matching velocity now. Vertical vector minus five.” On the live-action freeze frame, the artifact, whatever it was, appeared as a bright smudge in the deep, empty blue.

  The Body Double said, “I've got it on optical."

  I dropped the displays and there it was, a glimmering speck not so far away, growing slowly in the frame. “I don't think I expected it to look like a spaceship."

  Ylva smiled, “No way to predict these things. Since we passed ‘Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe’ through the latest version of Dramaturge, I've been wanting to design ships like those."

  Flying flatirons? I'd created Dramaturge in my spare time when I was in my seventies, a “dramatic script processor” I'd been dreaming about since I was a boy, software that could make a theatrical-release quality 3D movie out of a production script. It'd been the source of the second fortune I'd lost, and been the basis for a flowering of creativity around the world while I was in prison. A regiment of lawyers retrieved my copyrights and patents from the bastards in the early 2050s, making them pay and pay before Ylva started killing them.

  The thing in the freeze frame wasn't like any of Flash Gordon's spaceships, not the crude and silly-looking old ones from the movie serials, nor the highly artistic ones Ylva and I had brought forth from Dramaturge 8.0.

  But it was a fantasy spaceship nonetheless, with eight stubby vanes around the back end, and a sleek, silvery forebody. No windows, though, and as we did a flyaround, I could see there weren't any rocket engine bells poking out, just a honeycomb pattern opening on darkness.

  Down in the cargo bay, the Body Double and I got into armored jimsuits, the kind originally designed for use on Titan, designed from deep-sea diving suits used on the abyssal plains of Earth. These were beefed up to the limits of ERSIE technology. Good enough for where we were now, though if the equilibrimotors failed, you'd implode long before you fell to the center of Uranus.

  Outside, it was like hanging in the sky, like being in a dream, the two ships floating side by side, Body Double in her spacesuit floating beside me at the end of a safety line, Ylva's little cameo glimmering on the inside of my helmet. She said, “I estimate a hundred meters long. Not much smaller than Benthodyne."

  Not much detail, either. The hull had a vaguely yellowish quality, but it was also highly reflective, now that it had something to reflect, us and our ship, reflective enough it picked up a blue tinge from the all-around sky.

  Ylva said, “Nothing on my end, nothing from the ship's sensors. Highly radar reflective. Impervious to DaMNeX. Ambient temperature at its visible surface."

  And floating here how? Benthodyne was held in position by active application of its modulus fields. Since this thing had no emissions, maybe it was just buoyant. No point in asking that other question: Floating here why?

  When we were close enough, doing the flyaround a few meters out, there were details after all. Thin outlines like hatches in the metal, if metal it was, faint etchings that looked like a cross between Chinese ideographs and Sumerian cuneiform. I said, “If it's writing, it's nothing like the firefox writing."

  That was an assumption as well. We'd never managed to decode that either. Not enough examples. Not enough context. I suppose the firefoxes were like us, storing most of their knowledge in non-durable media. On Earth, you saw little text any more, just Pay Attention signs and the occasional You're Not Lost placard. One of the patches of maybe-writing had a thin line around it, one spot on the line dimpled as if with a fingerhole, though it was a little small, fit only for a baby's finger.

  Ylva said, “Move back to the end of the safety line. I'll have the Body Double try to open it.” A Body Double is expendable. Mr. Zed is not.

  I had the freeze frame subsystem make her helmet seem transparent, had it create the image of the Body Double's head, created from data sensors inside. She was looking at me, face expressionless, eyes dark and unreadable. The little hatch opened easily, and there was a lever inside. “Pull it."

  Ylva's cameo frowned. “Is that wise?"

  "Why else are we here?"

  "I wish you weren't. We have thousands of employees to choose from."

  But they aren't me. I'm going on fifty years past the end of my natural lifespan, fifty years on borrowed time. I like to think I've borrowed it for a reason. “Pull the lever."

  When she did, a section of hull about four meters square detached and swung open on darkness. I laughed, and said, “After you, my dear!"

  We turned on our helmet lights and floated into the little chamber beyond the hatch, and pulled the obvious lever that looked like it would close the hatch.

  Ylva, staticky face alarmed, said, “We may not be able to communicate..."

  When the door shut all the way, a dim, ruddy light came on, barely perceptible against the yellowish glare of our helmet lights. I turned mine off, looked around at what was clearly an airlock, and said, “Kryptonians, maybe?"

  Ylva's cameo had turned to a dark swirl of dull metallic glitter for a few moments, but now cleared, and she said, “The hull's no longer impervious to some portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, at the airlock door."

  I grunted. As with the firefox ship we'd found on Hector, the technology wasn't dissimilar from ours. Real human technology, what was available outside ERSIE and its chance bequest of alien space goodies. Toggle switches on the walls. Things like hoses and air tanks. A vent here, a vent there. A glassy thing like an old-fashioned flatscreen monitor.

  Ylva's cameo was still a little blurry and distorted, growing steadily better. “Suit instrumentation seems to confirm the ship is mostly open space.” Which would make it like a modern ERSIE/firefox ship. Before that, human spacecraft had been mostly fuel. “It seems as though the radiation hardening is starting to change throughout."

  I murmured, “Welcome home, whoever you are..."

  The Body Double said, “Looks like the atmospheric pressure is dropping."

  "Constituents?"

  The constructed image of her head looked in my direction. “It appears the Uranian atmosphere is being pumped out and displaced by a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, helium, and some trace gasses. We're down below 15psi already."

  "Breathable?"

  She said, “If the percentage of oxygen in the mix remains constant, it'll reach Earth-normal partial pressure when the total is around 10psi."

  With an alarmed look, Ylva's cameo said, “Stay in your suit, Mr. Zed!"

  I thought, Do I look stupid? Wait. Don't answer that. I've gotten in an awful lot of trouble over the years. Trouble that's gotten some
very good friends hurt or killed. I said, “Yes, ma'am."

  The Body Double said, “Pressure has stabilized. There's an ongoing gas flow probably intended to flush the last outside air away."

  I pointed to another lever, beside what could only be an inner hatch. “Might as well get to it."

  She nodded, and Ylva said, “Be careful."

  The hatch opened as easily as the other one, opening on a dark space beyond. I started to think my helmet light on, hesitated, then felt along the wall beyond the hatch frame. There was a toggle switch there, though much lower than I expected, maybe a foot or so off the deck, and when I flipped it, there was dim red light in what turned out to be a passageway. Some of the other hatches I could see were open, whatever was on the other side still dark.

  Another grunt from me, seemingly the extent of my current vocabulary. “Maybe the last guy out the door turned off the lights?"

  Voice subdued, Ylva said, “We still had light switches when I was alive."

  Ylva had been killed in a train accident in 2038, almost forty-five years ago, by which time I was on Callisto, doing dangerous, dirty work for Standard ARM. I said, “Still plenty of light switches on Earth. Lots of old houses around."

  When I keyed the equilibrimotor and floated out of the airlock, my helmet made a muffled thud on the overhead. I stretched my feet down and realized the corridor was no more than five feet high, maybe the same wide. “Were they little?"

  Ylva said, “Or quadrupeds? The firefox wasn't bipedal."

  The dead firefox had been an elongated animal shape, with six legs in the places you'd expect, a long, prehensile tail, and ears that had somehow evolved into a cross between arms and elephant trunks with fingers. I floated to the nearest open hatch and flipped on the lights. Some kind of bedchamber, with things like short sleeping bags hanging on the walls. Assuming they were little. If not, maybe those things were just storage containers. The Body Double said, “It looks like they might not have had artificial gravity."

  Ylva said, “Or didn't like using it."

  I always wonder how much is Ylva speaking through the radio link, and how much originates in that stifled clone brain. I'd always wanted to ask Ylva to shut down the link some time and let me make love to a Body Double alone, but it seemed selfish enough I was embarrassed to ask. I kept hoping she'd guess what I wanted and volunteer, but no luck so far.