Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (52 page)

“I’m running out of time and air, so I’ll have to keep this brief. I loaded Pearce into the mainframe as soon as we realized there was no way both of us could go. I’d like to rig some sort of time-delay program to send him once I’ve gone, but that’ll take too long. Hopefully someone else will do that later. Whatever you do, please don’t erase him. Remember: he’s one of only two humans left in the universe to have seen an alien being. And I don’t think we’ll get another chance. Their ship will drift away eventually, or keep on going as the probe reaches Eta-B. Wherever they came from, we’ll probably never find them again. They’ll have to find
us ...

“Lastly, there’s no room left on the mainframe for this message, so I’ve decided to put it in place of the self-destruct program. The file will be almost identical in size—and it seems appropriate, anyway. If you can’t work out for yourself what I’ve done, and you decide to kill yourself this way, then at least this gives you a chance to reconsider. But I guess the real reason why I’m not leaving an obvious message is because taking the LSM back home is risky. I’m already humanity’s first alien-killer; I don’t want human deaths to my credit as well. My only advice to you is,
don’t destroy the probe. Saul-1
deserves to make it to the end of its journey, even if we don’t. The old thing has been through a lot.

“If I haven’t changed your mind, then rambling on isn’t going to help. Suffice it to say that I’m not going to let you blow all my dreams to dust with the flick of a switch. You’re going to have to work a lot harder than that ...”

Lockley ground to a halt, stared at the scanner for a good minute, then nodded to himself.

“The choice is yours, whoever-you-are, and yours alone. This is Chris Lockley, supervisor of the fourth refit crew for
Saul-1,
ident code 7760R8T00, signing off.”

~ * ~

The recording finished and Lockley’s tortured image faded from Hallows’ field of vision. He sat staring into space for a long while before moving along
Saul-1
to the aft end, where Prosilis’ body had once kept watch over the distant star that was Sol, and where the sabotaged dish now pointed nowhere in particular.

Tarasento had been right. The aliens had played a more pivotal role in the drama than Gehrke had surmised. Why, though, they had failed to recognize Lockley’s attempts to communicate with them remained a mystery. Hallows could think of one possible explanation: that the aliens had been a communal mind, maybe of machine origins, possessing no centralized ‘brain’. If so, they might not have realized that humans could constitute intelligent beings in their own right. Furthermore, as the nanos had eaten their way through the alien ship and its crew, the aliens’ gestalt intelligence would have decreased, until perhaps it no longer possessed the ability to think rationally. That would explain why they had not resisted the invasion. And perhaps, also, why they had failed at first to comprehend the existence of the mainframe; they themselves had no need for such a thing. If society had imitated nature in the aliens’ case, then science may well have done so too.

Why, then, no nanomachines of their own? Maybe the individual units of the alien mind had been just that, but on a larger scale. A mind large enough to comprehend a means of independent mass-transportation would have to be huge, at least in capacity, just as the alien ship had been. If it worked on a larger scale than humans, then nanoscopic technology may have seemed irrelevant to it.

Or else the concept was simply alien to them, just as their actions had seemed alien to Lockley and the others. Perhaps they had been simple explorers themselves, differing from the probe only in design and origin.

Even among such grand-scale speculations, Hallows hadn’t missed one other ramification of Lockley’s speech: Gehrke must have viewed the recording. His reason for jumping had been more than simply to kill himself. He had either been afraid of the LSM method of transmission, or trying to reduce the numbers.

“If there are two of you left,” Lockley had said, “only one can live ...” And if there were three, the choice became doubly difficult.

But now Hallows was on his own. Jimmy Tarasento’s accidental death had been fortuitous in that respect. Hallows had only to decide whether or not to take Lockley’s risky route off the probe. His one alternative was to beam himself out the transmit dish—to take the easy way out, as Tarasento himself had put it. The choice truly was his, and his alone.

But there was still one thing left to do before Hallows
had
to decide.

Sniffing cautiously, he tested the air of his suit. Despite the stink of twenty-five days of
him,
it still satisfied his lungs. He had about twenty-four hours left before he was out of time—and all the resources of the probe at his disposal. Radiation shielding was precious, but he figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to rig some sort of teleoperated camera and a primitive EMU. Tarasento would have wanted him to try.

Even if he couldn’t, and he decided not to take the risk himself, he had at least a day left to ponder the view.

~ * ~

AFTERWORD TO:

..........................................................A VIEW BEFORE DYING

I’ve been interested in the instantaneous (or at least electronic) transmission of matter for a long time now. Four short stories and three novels add up to a whole lot of words exploring the subject and its ramifications, and still Hollywood hasn’t caught on to what a cool movie there is waiting to be made on the subject.

The conundrum at the heart of this story arose out of idle speculation about how crewed interstellar space exploration might work in a world with d-mat capabilities. Once a d-mat receiver had been placed at the terminus of the journey, well, it’s easy, but getting to that point would be very difficult. Unless you posit faster-than-light travel as well, getting that receiver in place is going to take a loooong time, and what poor chump is going to sit out the trip to make sure it works when it gets there?

The answer is that no one, chump or otherwise, needs to sit out anything. Sending regular maintenance crews via d-mat makes the process much easier, since the probe has a receiver (the payload) and the crews can bring their own air, food, etc. The probe doesn’t even need extra reaction mass, since it’s not accelerating. Voila.

Unless, of course, something goes wrong—which is the nub of more science fiction stories than you could ever count. A routine job becomes a lot more complex because the universe always finds a way to snafu things up. Cue existential angst, difficult decisions, and what I personally consider to be one of the great pay-offs of this kind of fiction.

If I was in Hallows’ shoes, I’d want the view too. That’s what’d send me out there in the first place. Some things are definitely worth dying for.

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

..................................................................TEAM SHARON

When I first started writing short stories, I experimented a great deal with styles, characterisation, subject matter, theme. This scattershot approach soon revealed my strengths (horror, science fiction, plot) and the many, many failings that needed to be addressed. Some of those failings succumbed to the blunt instrument of persistence. Some required more subtle intervention, often gained through collaboration, close examination of other writers’ works, or plain old luck. I’ve had revelations come through dreams (as in one where I realised that fantasy could be told in Australian settings) or from being unexpectedly challenged.

“Team Sharon” falls into the last category. It wouldn’t exist had I not been invited to contribute to a mainstream, literary anthology focussing on masculinity. Edited by Eva Sallis, the collection aimed to be of the highest literary standard, and would contain people with whom I had never shared a table of contents before. The opportunity was an exciting one, one I knew I couldn’t turn down, but it came with its own set of anxieties too. After all, I’d proven to myself that realist fiction was not my thing ten years earlier. I had zero chance of delivering something that Eva would like.

Challenges are good. To avoid being challenged is to risk stagnation—and for any artist, stagnation is fatal. We need to be constantly pushed out of ourselves, to stray beyond our comfort zones in order to find the spark that drives us to create, and to create well. Otherwise we die on the inside, and our art dies with it.

“Team Sharon” was very hard to write, but it was well worth the effort. Not only did Eva like it, but the list of things I think I can’t do is one item shorter than it might have been.

~ * ~

TEAM SHARON

It was a hot Monday evening, and Stan was bubbling over.

Her unit was the first of six in a cul de sac two blocks away. A short walk, during which he concentrated on projecting the appearance that he was just
Taking the Air
and
Going Nowhere In Particular.
He followed her jogging route automatically. She ran past his house every morning before work at seven-fifteen and went to the gym three nights a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. She was gorgeous, and completely unaware of the effect she had on Stan.

If he got any hotter he’d explode like an unpricked egg in a microwave.

At the entrance to the cul de sac, he stopped to survey the scene. Opposite her unit lay the sort of miniature park local councils sometimes put in as a compensation for the closure of a handy short-cut. There was a children’s playground and plenty of bushes. From the park one could gain a perfect view of the windows of her home. Stan knew this; he had tried during the day when she was out. He had also noted what time she came home from the gym by waiting for her car around the corner. She was due in ten minutes.

This was it. He couldn’t tell if he was excited or terrified. He didn’t know whether to follow The Plan or keep walking past the street. If he went home now, he could pretend he’d never even got this far. If he
did
do it... well, that was the clincher. He would have crossed a line into uncharted territory. What if he never came back?

But he hadn’t had a girlfriend for so long he was starting to forget how it felt to be intimate. He needed to connect, no matter how remotely, to someone
real.
He had been sweating inside, alone, for too long. If this was what it took to make him feel something new—to give him a sort of excitement that didn’t originate within him and wasn’t under his complete control—then maybe he had to do it.

Maybe.

Yes.

He took a step forward into her street, then another. He was doing it! He kept his eyes down on the pavement—
Don’t Mind Me; I’m Just Stretching My Legs
—but tried at the same time to watch the neighbouring houses and parked cars. No-one watering their lawn? No-one seeing off a friend? No-one at all, he hoped.

The park was black and inviting. He slipped into its shadows like an under-sized fish thrown back into the sea. Bushes rustled at him; the grass felt soft beneath his feet. He spied the cover he had chosen—a large, thick bush—out of the corner of his eye and headed for it indirectly, not looking anywhere but at his feet in case someone saw him and read his guilt, as surely they would. His face was burning. His fists were clenched. But he had everything planned. She would be home soon and everything would be perfect. Just perf—

With a muffled thud he bumped into something in the darkness. He put out his arms automatically, and hands grabbed back at him. For one, terrifying instant, all he knew was a blur of limbs and lost balance—then he was helping a middle-aged man upright and stuttering inanely.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the man asked, dusting himself down. “You walked right into me!”

“I—I wasn’t watching—”

“That’s bloody obvious!”

“I mean, it’s dark and I didn’t see you. I didn’t think anyone was in here.” Stan backed away, wondering if he should make a run for it—then realised that the man had been squatting in exactly the same place he himself hoped to occupy.

“Oh, I
see,”
said the man, who by then had recovered enough to be approaching a realisation of his own. The disgruntled look vanished, replaced by one of indulgence. “You’re new.”

“What?” Stan could manage little more than an addled look and vague sounds.

“It’s okay,” said the man, patting Stan on the shoulder. His face was round and his head looked like someone had dusted it with desiccated coconut sprinkles. He looked about the same age as Stan’s father had been when he died. His voice dropped in volume: “I’m sorry I startled you. You weren’t to know I was there.”

“You okay, Reg?” hissed a voice from the shadows, and Stan jumped. A dark figure stepped out from behind a tree, the red eye of a cigarette glinting malevolently in one fist.

“No worries, Tony,” said the old man called Reg. “Just a mistake.”

The figure coalesced into a lean, European man dressed in a singlet and shorts. Tony’s face was black with stubble, Stan noted, his eyes adjusting to the near darkness in the park and latching onto comprehensible details as signs he hadn’t gone completely mad.

“Mistake, huh?” Tony’s voice was low and guttural, hostile in tone. “Why isn’t he moving on, then?”

“I think he wants to stay.” Reg’s eyes darted between them. “Uh.”