21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

  She frowned, and said, “But how could that be? Was he saying Cilenia is some sort of underwater city? That’s impossible.”

  Gennady stood up suddenly. “I think he’s saying something else. Come on.” The unpredictable sway of the ship had gotten larger. He and Miranda staggered from wall to wall like drunkards as they left the room and entered one of the lengthwise corridors that transected the row of packets. They passed other workers doing the same, and the Swedes had given up their partying and were all sitting silently, looking slightly green.

  “I’ve been checking on the, uh, other cargo,” said Gennady as they passed someone, “every day. If it’s bound for Vancouver there’ll be a whole platoon of Mounties waiting for it. That had me wondering if they wouldn’t try to unload it en route.”

  “Makes sense,” called Miranda. She was starting to fall behind, and a distant rushing and booming sound was rising.

  “Actually, it didn’t. It’s sealed and near the top of a stack—that’s where they transport the empties. But it’s not at the top, so even if you did a James Bond and flew over with a skycrane helicopter, you couldn’t just pluck it off the stack.”

  They came to some stairs and he went up. Miranda puffed behind him. “Couldn’t they have a trick door?” she said. “Like in ours? Maybe it’s actually got inside access to another set of packets, just like ours but separate.”

  “Yeah, I thought about that,” he said grimly. He headed up another flight, which dead-ended in an empty shipping container that would have looked perfectly normal if not for the stairwell in the middle of its floor. The only light up here was from a pair of LEDs on the wall, so Gennady put his hands out to move cautiously forward. He could hear the storm now, a shuddering roar that felt like it was coming from all sides.

  “One problem with that theory,” he said as he found the inside latch to the rejigged container door. “There’s a reason why they put the empty containers on the top of the stack.” He pushed down on the latch.

  “Gennady, I’ve got a call,” said Miranda. “It’s you! What—” The bellow of the storm drowned whatever else she might have said.

  The rain was falling sideways from charcoal-black clouds that seemed to be skipping off the ocean’s surface like thrown stones. There was nothing to see except blackness, whipping rain and slick metal decks lit intermittently by lightning flashes. One such flash revealed a hill of water heaving itself up next to the ship. Seconds later the entire ship pitched as the wave hit and Gennady nearly fell.

  He hopped to the catwalk next to the door. They were high above the floor of the hold here, just at the level where the container stack poked above deck. It kept going a good forty feet more overhead. When Gennady glanced up he saw the black silhouette of the stack’s top swaying in a very unsettling manner.

  He couldn’t see very well and could hear nothing at all over the storm. Gennady pulled out his glasses and put them on, then accessed the ship’s security cameras.

  He couldn’t make out himself, but one camera on the superstructure showed him the whole field of container stacks. The corners of a couple of those stacks looked a bit ragged, like they’d been shaved.

  He returned the glasses to his shirt pocket, but paused to insert the earbuds.

  “Gennady, are you on-line?” It was Miranda’s voice.

  “Here,” he said. “Like I said, there’s a reason they put the empties at the top. Apparently something like fifteen thousand shipping containers are lost overboard every year, mostly in storms like this. But most of them are empties.”

  “But this one isn’t,” she said. He was moving along the deck now, holding tight to a railing next to the swaying container stack. Looking back, he saw her following doggedly, but still twenty or more feet back.

  Lightning day-lit the scene for a moment, and Gennady thought he saw someone where nobody in their right mind should be. “Did you see that?” He waited for her to catch up and helped her along. Both of them were drenched and the water was incredibly cold.

  Her glasses were beaded with water. Why didn’t she just take them off? Her mouth moved and he heard “See what?” through his earbuds, but not through the air.

  He tried to pitch his voice more conversationally—his yelling was probably unnecessary and annoying. “Somebody on top of one of the stacks.”

  “Let me guess: it’s the stack with the plutonium.”

  He nodded and they kept going. They were nearly to the stack when the ship listed particularly far and suddenly he saw bright orange flashes overhead. He didn’t hear the bangs because suddenly lightning was dancing around one of the ship’s masts, and the thunder was instantaneous and deafening. But the deck was leaning way over, dark churning water meters to his left and suddenly the top three layers of the container stack gave way and slid into the water.

  They went in a single slab, except for a few stragglers that tumbled like match-boxes and took out the railing and a chunk of decking not ten meters from where Gennady and Miranda huddled.

  “Go back!” He pushed her in the direction of the superstructure, but she shook her head and held on to the railing. Gennady cursed and turned as the ship rolled upright then continued to list in the opposite direction.

  One container was pivoting on the gunwale, tearing the steel like cloth and throwing sparks. As the ship heeled starboard it tilted to port and went over. There were no more and the other stacks seemed stable. Gennady suspected they would normally have weathered a heavier storm than this.

  He rounded the stack and stepped onto the catwalk that ran between it and the next. As lightning flickered again he saw that there was somebody there. A crewman?

  “Gennady, how nice to see you,” said Fraction. He was wearing a yellow hard-hat and a climbing harness over his crew’s overalls. His glasses were as beaded with rain as Miranda’s.

  “It’s a bit dangerous out here right now,” Fraction said as he stepped closer. “I don’t really care, but then I’m riding, aren’t I?” As blue light slid over the scene Gennady saw the black backpack slung over Fraction’s shoulder.

  “You’re not from Cilenia, are you?” said Gennady. “You work for somebody else.”

  “Gennady, he’s with sanotica,” said Miranda. “You can’t trust him.”

  “Cilenia wants that plutonium,” said Fraction. “For their new generators, that’s all. It’s perfectly benign, but you know nations like ours aren’t considered legitimate by the attractors. We could never buy the stuff.”

  Gennady nodded. “The containers were rigged to go overboard. The storm made handy cover, but I’d bet there was enough explosives up there to put them over even if the weather was calm. It would have been automatic. You didn’t need to be here for it.”

  Fraction shifted the pack on his back. “So?”

  “You climbed up and opened the container,” said Gennady. “The plutonium’s right here.” He pointed at the backpack. “Ergo, you’re not working for Cilenia.”

  Miranda put a hand on his shoulder. She was nodding. “He was after the rest of it himself, all along,” she shouted. “He used us to track it down, so he could take it for sanotica.”

  Danail Gavrilov’s face was empty of expression, his eyes covered in blank, rain-dewed lenses. “Why would I wait until now to take it?” Fraction said.

  “Because you figured the container was being watched. I’m betting you’ve got some plan to put the plutonium overboard yourself, with a different transponder than the one Cilenia had on their shipping container. . . . Which I’m betting was rigged to float twenty feet below the surface and wait for pickup.”

  Fraction threw the bundle of rope he’d been holding, then stepped forward and reached for Gennady.

  Gennady side-stepped, then reached out and plucked the glasses from Danail Gavrilov’s face.

  The cyranoid staggered to a stop, giving Gennady enough time to reach up and pluck the earbuds from his ears.

  Under sudden lightning, Gennady saw Gavrilov’s eyes for the fir
st time. They were small and dark, and darted this way and that in sudden confusion. The cyranoid said something that sounded like a question—in Bulgarian. Then he put his hands to his ears and roared in sudden panic.

  Gennady lunged, intending to grab Gavrilov’s hand, but instead got a handful of the backpack’s tough material. Gavrilov spun around, skidded on the deck as the backpack came loose—and then went over the rail.

  He heard Miranda’s shout echoing his own. They both rushed to the railing but could see nothing but black water topped by white streamers of foam.

  “He’s gone,” said Miranda with a sudden, odd calm.

  “We’ve got to try!” shouted Gennady. He ran for the nearest phone, which was housed in a waterproof kiosk halfway down the catwalk. He was almost there when Miranda tackled him. They rolled right to the edge of the catwalk and Gennady almost lost the backpack.

  “What are you doing?” he roared at her. “He’s a human being, for God’s sake.”

  “We’ll never find him,” she said, still in that oddly calm tone of voice. Then she sat back. “Gennady, I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that. No, shut up, Jake. It was wrong. We should try to rescue the poor man.”

  She cocked her head, then said, “He’s afraid Oversatch will be caught.”

  “Your son’s been riding you!” Gennady shook his head. “How long?”

  “Just now. He called as we were coming outside.”

  “Let me go,” said Gennady. “I’ll tell them we stowed away below decks. I’m a God-damned interpol investigator, we’ll be fine.” He staggered to the phone.

  It took a few seconds to ring through to the surprised crew, but after talking briefly to them Gennady hung up, shaking his head. “Not sure they believe me enough to come about,” he said. “They’re on their way down to arrest us, though.”

  The rain was streaming down his face, but he was glad to be seeing it without the Oversatch interface filtering its reality. “Miranda? Can I talk to Jake for a second?”

  “What? Sure?” She was hugging herself and shaking violently from the cold. Gennady realized his own teeth were chattering.

  He had little time before reality reached out to hijack all his choices. He hefted the backpack, thinking about Hitchens’ reaction when he told him the story—and wondering how much of Oversatch he could avoid talking about in the deposition.

  “Jake,” he said, “what is Cilenia?”

  Miranda smiled, but it was Jake who said, “Cilenia’s not an ‘it’ like you’re used to, not a ‘thing’ in the traditional sense. It’s not really a place either. It’s just . . . some people realized that we needed a new language to describe the way the world actually works nowadays. When all identities are fluid, how can you get away with using the old words to describe anything?

  “You know how cities and countries and corporations are like stable whirlpools in a flood of changes? They’re attractors—states the network relaxes back into, but at any given moment they might not really be there. Well, what if human beings were like that too? Imagine a driver working for a courier company. He follows his route, he talks to customers and delivers packages, but another driver would do exactly the same thing in his place. While he’s on the job, he’s not him, he’s the company. He only relaxes back into his own identity when he goes home and takes off the uniform.

  “It 2.0 gives us a way to point at those temporary identities. It’s a tool that lets us bring the temporarily real into focus, even while the outlines of the things we thought were real—like countries and companies—are blurred. If there could be an it 2.0 for countries and companies, don’t you suppose there could be one for people, too?”

  “Cilenia?” said Gennady. Miranda nodded, but Gennady shook his head. It wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine it; the problem was he could. Jake was saying that people weren’t even people all the time, that they played roles through much of the day representing powers and forces they often weren’t even aware of. A person could be multiple places at once, the way that Gennady was himself and his avatars, his investments and emails and website, and the cyranoids he rode. He’d been moving that way his whole adult life, he realized, his identity becoming smeared out across the world. In the past few weeks the process had accelerated. For someone like Jake, born and raised in a world of shifting identities, it 2.0 and Cilenia must make perfect sense. They might even seem mundane.

  Maybe Cilenia was the new ‘it.’ But Gennady was too old and set in his ways to speak that language.

  “And sanotica?” he asked. “What’s that?”

  “Imagine Oversatch,” said Jake, “but with no moral constraints on it. Imagine that instead of looking for spontaneous remappings in the healthy network of human relationships, you had an ‘it 3.0’ that looked for disasters—points and moments when rules break down and there’s chaos and anarchy. Imagine an army of cyranoids stepping in at moments like that, to take advantage of misery and human pain. It would be very efficient, wouldn’t it? As efficient, maybe, as Oversatch.

  “That,” said Jake as shouting crewmen came running along the gunwales, “is sanotica. An efficient parasite that feeds on catastrophe. And millions of people work for it without knowing.”

  Gennady held up the backpack. “It would have taken this and . . . made a bomb?”

  “Maybe. And how do you know, Mister Malianov, that you don’t work for sanotica yourself? How can I be sure that plutonium won’t be used for some terrible cause? It should go to Cilenia.”

  Gennady hesitated. He heard Miranda Veen asking him to do this; and after everything he’d seen, he knew now that in his world power and control could be shifted invisibly and totally moment by moment by entities like Oversatch and Cilenia. Maybe Fraction really had hired the IAEA, and Gennady himself. And maybe they could do it again, and he wouldn’t even know it.

  “Drop the backpack in the bilges,” said Jake. “We can send someone from Oversatch to collect it. Mother, you can bring it to Cilenia when you come.”

  The rain was lessening, and he could see that her cheeks were wet now with tears. “I’ll come, Jake. When we get let go, I’ll come to you.”

  Then, as Jake, she said, “Now, Gennady! They’re almost here!”

  Gennady held onto the backpack. “I’ll keep it,” he said.

  Gennady took the glasses out of his pocket and dropped them over the railing. In doing so he left the city he had only just discovered, but had lately lived in and begun to love. That city—world-spanning, built of light and ideals, was tricked into existing moment-by-moment by the millions who believed in it and simply acted as though it were there. He wished he could be one of them.

  Gennady could hear Jake’s frustration in Miranda’s voice, as she said, “But how can you know that backpack’s not going to end up in sanotica?”

  “There are more powers on Earth,” Gennady shouted over the storm, “than just Cilenia and sanotica. What’s in this backpack is one of those powers. But another power is me. Maybe my identity’s not fixed either and maybe I’m just one man, but at the end of the day I’m bound to follow what’s in here, where-ever it goes. I can’t go with you to Cilenia, or even stay in Oversatch, much as I’d like to. I will go where this plutonium goes, and try to keep it from harming anyone.

  “Because some things,” he said as the crewmen arrived and surrounded them, “are real in every world.”

  BRENDA COOPER Brenda Cooper is a futurist, science fiction writer, and the CIO of the city of Kirkland, Washington. She began publishing science fiction in the early years of this century, with a series of collaborations with long-established writer Larry Niven; since then, her solo stories and novels have earned considerable regard from writers and readers in the field.

  Originally published in Analog, “Savant Songs” is an unusual genre combination, hard SF romance, about an autistic woman physicist who does research on multiverses and her former grad student, who gets his Ph.D. and goes on to become her partner. It is told from his
point of view and provides an emotional grounding for the “branching universes” concept that much SF takes for granted. There is perhaps an echo of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “Nine Lives,” but the story is a fresh and new thing.

  SAVANT SONGS

  I loved Elsa; the soaring tinkle of her rare laughter, the marbled blue of her eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose. Her mind. The first, deepest attraction; the hardest challenge. She flew with her mental intensity, taking me places I’d never been before, outdistancing me, searching the mathematical structures of string theory and mbranes, following n-dimensional folds across multiple universes. I loved her the way one loves the rarest Australian black opal or the view from the top of Mount Everest. Elsa’s rarity was its own attraction. There are very few female savants.

  She captured me whole when I was her physics grad student, starting in 2001, nine years before break-through.

  Ten years ago last week, I walked into Elsa’s office. She stood with her back to me, staring out her window. She didn’t move at all as I snicked the door shut and scraped the chair legs. I coughed. Nothing. She might have been a statue. Her straw-colored hair hung in a long braid, just touching her slender hips, fastened with a violet beaded loop, the kind little girls wore. Her arms hung loosely from her pink t-shirt, above faded jeans and Birken-stocks.

  “Hello?” I spoke tentatively. “Professor Hill?” Was she all right? I’d never seen such stillness in anything but a sleeping child.

  Louder. “Professor? I’m Adam Giles, here for an interview.”

  She finally turned and stepped daintily over to her desk, curling up in the big scratched leather chair behind her empty desk. Her gaze fastened on my eyes, as if they were all she saw in that moment. “Do you know what the word atom means?”

  I blinked. She didn’t. A warm breeze from the open windows blew stray strands of her hair across her face.