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

by David G. Hartwell

  When each codex has accomplished its task, it loses all vitality and drifts inertly wherever it ends up. The Iothal are very long-lived, but even they do not always survive to this fate.

  Distant civilizations are well accustomed to the phenomenon of drifting Iothal vessels, but so far none of them have deciphered the trail of knowledge that the Iothal have been at such pains to lay down.

  The Dancers

  To most of their near neighbors, they are known as the dancers. It is not the case that their societies are more interested in dance than the norm. True, they have their dances of metal harvest, and dances of dream descending, and dances of efflorescent death. They have their high rituals and their low chants, their festivals where water-of-suffusement flows freely for all who would drink, where bells with spangled clappers toll the hours by antique calendars. But then, these customs differ from their neighbors’ in detail rather than in essential nature.

  Rather, their historians like to tell the story of how, not so long ago, they went to war with aliens from a distant cluster. No one can agree on the nature of the offense that precipitated the whole affair, and it seems likely that it was a mundane squabble over excavation rights at a particular rumor pit.

  The aliens were young when it came to interstellar war, and they struggled greatly with the conventions expected of them. In order to understand their enemy better, they charged their masters of etiquette with the task of interpreting the dancers’ behavior. For it was the case that the dancers began each of their battles in the starry deeps with the same maneuvers, and often retreated from battle—those times they had cause to retreat—with other maneuvers, carried out with great precision. The etiquette masters became fascinated by the pirouettes and helices and rolls, and speculated that the dancers’ society was constricted by strict rules of engagement. Their fabulists wrote witty and extravagant tales about the dancers’ dinner parties, the dancers’ sacrificial exchanges, the dancers’ effervescent arrangements of glass splinters and their varied meanings.

  It was not until late in the war that the aliens realized that the stylized maneuvers of the dancers’ ships had nothing to do with courtesy. Rather, they were an effect of the stardrive’s ordinary functioning, without which the ships could not move. The aliens could have exploited this knowledge and pushed for a total victory, but by then their culture was so enchanted by their self-dreamed vision of the dancers that the two came instead to a fruitful truce.

  These days, the dancers themselves often speak admiringly of the tales that the aliens wrote about them. Among the younger generation in particular, there are those who emulate the elegant and mannered society depicted in the aliens’ fables. As time goes on, it is likely that this fantasy will displace the dancers’ native culture.

  The Profit Motive

  Although the Kiatti have their share of sculptors, engineers, and mercenaries, they are perhaps best known as traders. Kiatti vessels are welcome in many places, for they bring delightfully disruptive theories of government, fossilized musical instruments, and fine surgical tools; they bring cold-eyed guns that whisper of sleep impending and sugared atrocities. If you can describe it, so they say, there is a Kiatti who is willing to sell it to you.

  In the ordinary course of things, the Kiatti accept barter for payment. They claim that it is a language that even the universe understands. Their sages spend a great deal of time to attempting to justify the profit motive in view of conservation laws. Most of them converge comfortably on the position that profit is the civilized response to entropy. The traders themselves vary, as you might expect, in the rapacity of their bargains. But then, as they often say, value is contextual.

  The Kiatti do have a currency of sorts. It is their stardrives, and all aliens’ stardrives are rated in comparison with their own. The Kiatti produce a number of them, which encompass a logarithmic scale of utility.

  When the Kiatti determine that it is necessary to pay or be paid in this currency, they will spend months—sometimes years—refitting their vessels as necessary. Thus every trader is also an engineer. The drives’ designers made some attempt to make the drives modular, but this was a haphazard enterprise at best.

  One Kiatti visionary wrote of commerce between universes, which would require the greatest stardrive of all. The Kiatti do not see any reason they can’t bargain with the universe itself, and are slowly accumulating their wealth toward the time when they can trade their smaller coins for one that will take them to this new goal. They rarely speak of this with outsiders, but most of them are confident that no one else will be able to outbid them.

  The Inescapable Experiment

  One small civilization claims to have invented a stardrive that kills everyone who uses it. One moment the ship is here, with everyone alive and well, or as well as they ever were; the next moment, it is there, and carries only corpses. The records, transmitted over great expanses against the microwave hiss, are persuasive. Observers in differently equipped ships have sometimes accompanied these suicide vessels, and they corroborate the reports.

  Most of their neighbors are mystified by their fixation with this morbid discovery. It would be one thing, they say, if these people were set upon finding a way to fix this terrible flaw, but that does not appear to be the case. A small but reliable number of them volunteers to test each new iteration of the deathdrive, and they are rarely under any illusions about their fate. For that matter, some of the neighbors, out of pity or curiosity, have offered this people some of their own old but reliable technology, asking only a token sum to allow them to preserve their pride, but they always decline politely. After all, they possess safe stardrive technology of their own; the barrier is not knowledge.

  Occasionally, volunteers from other peoples come to test it themselves, on the premise that there has to exist some species that won’t be affected by the stardrive’s peculiar radiance. (The drive’s murderousness does not appear to have any lasting effect on the ship’s structure.) So far, the claim has stood. One imagines it will stand as long as there are people to test it.

  One Final Constant

  Then there are the civilizations that invent keener and more nimble stardrives solely to further their wars, but that’s an old story and you already know how it ends.

  —for Sam Kabo Ashwell

  HANNU RAJANIEMI Born in Ylivieska, Finland, Hannu Rajaniemi completed his national service for the Finnish Defense Forces as a research scientist, and then moved to Great Britain, where he earned advanced degrees in math and science at Cambridge and Edinburgh. While in the latter city, he began to write and sell a small number of SF stories, the consistently high quality of which led a major British publisher to sign up a three-novel series based on just a few pages of typescript. The first of those novels, The Quantum Thief, appeared to widespread praise in 2010; the second, The Fractal Prince, was published two years later.

  Rajaniemi’s fiction has been described as “post-Strossian”; he gives the strong impression of having assimilated all the challenges and dilemmas posited by the SF of his immediate predecessors, and of impatience to get on to the next big questions. But for all his intellectual pyrotechnics, his storytelling is rooted in venerable, tried-and-true elements—blackmail, revenge, a caper plot, a tale from The Arabian Nights. “His Master’s Voice” asks and answers questions that haven’t even begun to occur to many of Rajaniemi’s contemporaries. It is also a story about a heroic dog and his sidekick cat.

  HIS MASTER’S VOICE

  Before the concert, we steal the master’s head.

  The necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog bubble attached to the steep southern wall of the nunatak, the ice valley.

  The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite confidence.

  “Get ready,” I tell it. “We don’t have all night.”

  It gives me a mildly offended look and dons its armour. The quantum dot fabric envelops its striped body
like living oil. It purrs faintly and tests the diamond-bladed claws against an icy outcropping of rock. The sound grates my teeth and the razor-winged butterflies in my belly wake up. I look at the bright, impenetrable firewall of the city of the dead. It shimmers like chained northern lights in my AR vision.

  I decide that it’s time to ask the Big Dog to bark. My helmet laser casts a one-nanosecond prayer of light at the indigo sky: just enough to deliver one quantum bit up there into the Wild. Then we wait. My tail wags and a low growl builds up in my belly.

  Right on schedule, it starts to rain red fractal code. My augmented reality vision goes down, unable to process the dense torrent of information falling upon the necropolis firewall like monsoon rain. The chained aurora borealis flicker and vanish.

  “Go!” I shout at the cat, wild joy exploding in me, the joy of running after the Small Animal of my dreams. “Go now!”

  The cat leaps into the void. The wings of the armour open and grab the icy wind, and the cat rides the draft down like a grinning Chinese kite.

  It’s difficult to remember the beginning now. There were no words then, just sounds and smells: metal and brine, the steady drumming of waves against pontoons. And there were three perfect things in the world: my bowl, the Ball, and the Master’s firm hand on my neck.

  I know now that the Place was an old oil rig that the Master had bought. It smelled bad when we arrived, stinging oil and chemicals. But there were hiding places, secret nooks and crannies. There was a helicopter landing pad where the Master threw the ball for me. It fell into the sea many times, but the Master’s bots—small metal dragonflies—always fetched it when I couldn’t.

  The Master was a god. When he was angry, his voice was an invisible whip. His smell was a god-smell that filled the world.

  While he worked, I barked at the seagulls or stalked the cat. We fought a few times, and I still have a pale scar on my nose. But we developed an understanding. The dark places of the rig belonged to the cat, and I reigned over the deck and the sky: we were the Hades and Apollo of the Master’s realm.

  But at night, when the Master watched old movies or listened to records on his old rattling gramophone we lay at his feet together. Sometimes the Master smelled lonely and let me sleep next to him in his small cabin, curled up in the god-smell and warmth.

  It was a small world, but it was all we knew.

  The Master spent a lot of time working, fingers dancing on the keyboard projected on his mahogany desk. And every night he went to the Room: the only place on the rig where I wasn’t allowed.

  It was then that I started to dream about the Small Animal. I remember its smell even now, alluring and inexplicable: buried bones and fleeing rabbits, irresistible.

  In my dreams, I chased it along a sandy beach, a tasty trail of tiny footprints that I followed along bendy pathways and into tall grass. I never lost sight of it for more than a second: it was always a flash of white fur just at the edge of my vision.

  One day it spoke to me. “Come,” it said. “Come and learn.”

  The Small Animal’s island was full of lost places. Labyrinthine caves, lines drawn in sand that became words when I looked at them, smells that sang songs from the Master’s gramophone. It taught me, and I learned: I was more awake every time I woke up. And when I saw the cat looking at the spiderbots with a new awareness, I knew that it, too, went to a place at night.

  I came to understand what the Master said when he spoke. The sounds that had only meant angry or happy before became the words of my god. He noticed, smiled, and ruffled my fur. After that he started speaking to us more, me and the cat, during the long evenings when the sea beyond the windows was black as oil and the waves made the whole rig ring like a bell. His voice was dark as a well, deep and gentle. He spoke of an island, his home, an island in the middle of a great sea. I smelled bitterness, and for the first time I understood that there were always words behind words, never spoken.

  • • • •

  The cat catches the updraft perfectly: it floats still for a split second, and then clings to the side of the tower. Its claws put the smart concrete to sleep: code that makes the building think that the cat is a bird or a shard of ice carried by the wind.

  The cat hisses and spits. The disassembler nanites from its stomach cling to the wall and start eating a round hole in it. The wait is excruciating. The cat locks the exomuscles of its armour and hangs there patiently. Finally, there is a mouth with jagged edges in the wall, and it slips in. My heart pounds as I switch from the AR view to the cat’s iris cameras. It moves through the ventilation shaft like lightning, like an acrobat, jerky, hyperaccelerated movements, metabolism on overdrive. My tail twitches again. We are coming, Master, I think. We are coming.

  • • • •

  I lost my ball the day the wrong master came.

  I looked everywhere. I spent an entire day sniffing every corner and even braved the dark corridors of the cat’s realm beneath the deck, but I could not find it. In the end, I got hungry and returned to the cabin. And there were two masters. Four hands stroking my coat. Two gods, true and false.

  I barked. I did not know what to do. The cat looked at me with a mixture of pity and disdain and rubbed itself on both of their legs.

  “Calm down,” said one of the masters. “Calm down. There are four of us now.”

  I learned to tell them apart, eventually: by that time Small Animal had taught me to look beyond smells and appearances. The master I remembered was a middle-aged man with greying hair, stocky-bodied. The new master was young, barely a man, much slimmer and with the face of a mahogany cherub. The master tried to convince me to play with the new master, but I did not want to. His smell was too familiar, everything else too alien. In my mind, I called him the wrong master.

  The two masters worked together, walked together and spent a lot of time talking together using words I did not understand. I was jealous. Once I even bit the wrong master. I was left on the deck for the night as a punishment, even though it was stormy and I was afraid of thunder. The cat, on the other hand, seemed to thrive in the wrong master’s company, and I hated it for it.

  I remember the first night the masters argued.

  “Why did you do it?” asked the wrong master.

  “You know,” said the master. “You remember.” His tone was dark. “Because someone has to show them we own ourselves.”

  “So, you own me?” said the wrong master. “Is that what you think?”

  “Of course not,” said the master. “Why do you say that?”

  “Someone could claim that. You took a genetic algorithm and told it to make ten thousand of you, with random variations, pick the ones that would resemble your ideal son, the one you could love. Run until the machine runs out of capacity. Then print. It’s illegal, you know. For a reason.”

  “That’s not what the plurals think. Besides, this is my place. The only laws here are mine.”

  “You’ve been talking to the plurals too much. They are no longer human.”

  “You sound just like VecTech’s PR bots.”

  “I sound like you. Your doubts. Are you sure you did the right thing? I’m not a Pinocchio. You are not a Gepetto.”

  The master was quiet for a long time.

  “What if I am,” he finally said. “Maybe we need Gepettos. Nobody creates anything new anymore, let alone wooden dolls that come to life. When I was young, we all thought something wonderful was on the way. Diamond children in the sky, angels out of machines. Miracles. But we gave up just before the blue fairy came.”

  “I am not your miracle.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “You should at least have made yourself a woman,” said the wrong master in a knife-like voice. “It might have been less frustrating.”

  I did not hear the blow, I felt it. The wrong master let out a cry, rushed out and almost stumbled on me. The master watched him go. His lips moved, but I could not hear the words. I wanted to comfort him and made a little sound,
but he did not even look at me, went back to the cabin and locked the door. I scratched the door, but he did not open, and I went up to the deck to look for the Ball again.

  • • • •

  Finally, the cat finds the master’s chamber.

  It is full of heads. They float in the air, bodiless, suspended in diamond cylinders. The tower executes the command we sent into its drugged nervous system, and one of the pillars begins to blink. Master, master, I sing quietly as I see the cold blue face beneath the diamond. But at the same time I know it’s not the master, not yet.

  The cat reaches out with its prosthetic. The smart surface yields like a soap bubble. “Careful now, careful,” I say. The cat hisses angrily but obeys, spraying the head with preserver nanites and placing it gently into its gellined backpack.

  The necropolis is finally waking up: the damage the heavenly hacker did has almost been repaired. The cat heads for its escape route and goes to quicktime again. I feel its staccato heartbeat through our sensory link.

  It is time to turn out the lights. My eyes polarise to sunglass-black. I lift the gauss launcher, marvelling at the still tender feel of the Russian hand grafts. I pull the trigger. The launcher barely twitches in my grip, and a streak of light shoots up to the sky. The nuclear payload is tiny, barely a decaton, not even a proper plutonium warhead but a hafnium micronuke. But it is enough to light a small sun above the mausoleum city for a moment, enough for a focused maser pulse that makes it as dead as its inhabitants for a moment.