The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (14 page)

I tried to turn away. That small, instinctive gesture was why I lost a leg, a hand, an eye, all on my right side.

And I lost a brother.

But when the forensics guys had finished combing through the wreckage, they were able to prove that the seventeen hours had been enough for Wilson’s download.

2033

It took a month for NASA, ESA and the Chinese to send up a lunar orbiter to see what was going on. The probe found that Wilson’s download had caused the Clarke fabricators to start making stuff. At first they made other machines, more specialized, from what was lying around in the workshops and sheds. These in turn made increasingly tiny versions of themselves, heading steadily down to the nano scale. In the end the work was so fine only an astronaut on the ground might have had a chance of even seeing it. Nobody dared send in a human.

Meanwhile the machines banked up Moon dust and scrap to make a high-energy facility – something like a particle accelerator or a fusion torus, but not.

Then the real work started.

The Eaglet machines took a chunk of Moon rock and crushed it, turning its mass-energy into a spacetime artefact – something like a black hole, but not. They dropped it into the body of the Moon, where it started accreting, sucking in material, like a black hole, and budding off copies of itself, unlike a black hole.

Gradually these objects began converting the substance of the Moon into copies of themselves. The glowing point of light we see at the centre of Clarke is leaked radiation from this process.

The governments panicked. A nuclear warhead was dug out of cold store and dropped plumb into Daedalus Crater. The explosion was spectacular. But when the dust subsided that pale, unearthly spark was still there, unperturbed.

As the cluster of nano artefacts grows, the Moon’s substance will be consumed at an exponential rate. Centuries, a millennium tops, will be enough to consume it all. And Earth will be orbited, not by its ancient companion, but by a spacetime artefact, like a black hole, but not. That much seems well established by the physicists.

There is less consensus as to the purpose of the artefact. Here’s my guess.

The Moon artefact will be a recorder.

Wilson said the Eaglets feared the universe has no memory. I think he meant that, right now, in our cosmic epoch, we can still see relics of the universe’s birth, echoes of the Big Bang, in the microwave background glow. And we also see evidence of the expansion to come, in the recession of the distant galaxies. We discovered both these basic features of the universe, its past and its future, in the twentieth century.

There will come a time – the cosmologists quote hundreds of billions of years – when the accelerating recession will have taken
all
those distant galaxies over our horizon. So we will be left with just the local group, the Milky Way and Andromeda and bits and pieces, bound together by gravity. The cosmic expansion will be invisible. And meanwhile the background glow will have become so attenuated you won’t be able to pick it out of the faint glow of the interstellar medium.

So in that remote epoch you wouldn’t be able to repeat the twentieth-century discoveries; you couldn’t glimpse past or future. That’s what the Eaglets mean when they say the universe has no memory.

And I believe they are countering it. They, and those like Wilson that they co-opt into helping them, are carving time capsules out of folded spacetime. At some future epoch these will evaporate, maybe through something like Hawking radiation, and will reveal the truth of the universe to whatever eyes are there to see it.

Of course it occurs to me – this is Wilson’s principle of mediocrity – that ours might not be the only epoch with a privileged view of the cosmos. Just after the Big Bang there was a pulse of “inflation”, superfast expansion that homogenized the universe and erased details of whatever came before. Maybe we should be looking for other time boxes, left for our benefit by the inhabitants of those early realms.

The Eaglets are conscious entities trying to give the universe a memory. Perhaps there is even a deeper purpose: it may be intelligence’s role to shape the ultimate evolution of the universe, but you can’t do that if you’ve forgotten what went before.

Not every commentator agrees with my analysis, as above. The interpretation of the Eaglet data has always been uncertain. Maybe even Wilson wouldn’t agree. Well, since it’s my suggestion he would probably argue with me by sheer reflex.

I suppose it’s possible to care deeply about the plight of hypothetical beings a hundred billion years hence. In one sense we ought to; their epoch is our inevitable destiny. Wilson certainly did care, enough to kill himself for it. But this is a project so vast and cold that it can engage only a semi-immortal supermind like an Eaglet’s – or a modern human who is functionally insane.

What matters most to me is the now. The sons who haven’t yet aged and crumbled to dust, playing football under a sun that hasn’t yet burned to a cinder. The fact that all this is transient makes it more precious, not less. Maybe our remote descendants in a hundred billion years will find similar brief happiness under their black and unchanging sky.

If I could wish one thing for my lost brother it would be that I could be sure he felt this way, this alive, just for one day. Just for one minute. Because, in the end, that’s all we’ve got.

FROM BABEL’S FALL’N GLORY WE FLED

Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the twentyeight years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the
Asimov’s
Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel
Stations of the Tide
won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006 for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions In Time.” His other books include the novels
In The Drift
,
Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust
, and
Bones of the Earth
. His short fiction has been assembled in
Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna
, and
The Periodic Table of SF
. His most recent books are a new novel,
The Dragons of Babel,
and a massive retrospective collection,
The Best of Michael Swanwick
. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a website at: michaelswanwick.com.

In the suspenseful story that follows, he shows us that the important thing to keep in mind when dealing with aliens is that they are, well,
alien
.

I
MAGINE A CROSS
between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a jewelled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that Gaudí – he of the Sagrada Família and other biomorphic architectural whimsies – had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the faintest ghost of a notion of the splendour that was Babel.

Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.

Hello. I’m Rosamund. I’m dead. I was present in human form when it happened and as a simulation chaotically embedded within a liquid crystal data-matrix then and thereafter up to the present moment. I was killed instantly when the meteors hit. I saw it all.

Rosamund means “rose of the world”. It’s the third most popular female name on Europa, after Gaea and Virginia Dare. For all our elaborate sophistication, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, we Europans.

Here’s what it was like:

“Wake
up
! Wake
up
! Wake
up
!”

“Wha —?” Carlos Quivera sat up, shedding rubble. He coughed, choked, shook his head. He couldn’t seem to think clearly. An instant ago he’d been standing in the chilled and pressurized embassy suite, conferring with Arsenio. Now . . . “How long have I been asleep?”

“Unconscious. Ten hours,” his suit (that’s me – Rosamund!) said. It had taken that long to heal his burns. Now it was shooting wake-up drugs into him: amphetamines, endorphins, attention enhancers, a witch’s brew of chemicals. Physically dangerous, but in this situation, whatever it might be, Quivera would survive by intelligence or not at all. “I was able to form myself around you before the walls ruptured. You were lucky.”

“The others? Did the others survive?”

“Their suits couldn’t reach them in time.”

“Did Rosamund . . . ?”

“All the others are dead.”

Quivera stood.

Even in the aftermath of disaster, Babel was an imposing structure. Ripped open and exposed to the outside air, a thousand rooms spilled over one another toward the ground. Bridges and buttresses jutted into gaping smoke-filled canyons created by the slow collapse of hexagonal support beams (this was new data; I filed it under
Architecture
, subheading:
Support Systems
with links to
Esthetics
and
Xenopsychology
) in a jumbled geometry that would have terrified Piranesi himself. Everywhere, gleaming black millies scurried over the rubble.

Quivera stood.

In the canted space about him, bits and pieces of the embassy rooms were identifiable: a segment of wood moulding, some velvet drapery now littered with chunks of marble, shreds of wallpaper (after a design by William Morris) now curling and browning in the heat. Human interior design was like nothing native to Gehenna and it had taken a great deal of labour and resources to make the embassy so pleasant for human habitation. The queen-mothers had been generous with everything but their trust.

Quivera stood.

There were several corpses remaining as well, still recognizably human though they were blistered and swollen by the savage heat. These had been his colleagues (all of them), his friends (most of them), his enemies (two, perhaps three), and even his lover (one). Now they were gone, and it was as if they had been compressed into one indistinguishable mass, and his feelings toward them all as well: shock and sorrow and anger and survivor guilt all slagged together to become one savage emotion.

Quivera threw back his head and howled.

I had a reference point now. Swiftly, I mixed serotonin-precursors and injected them through a hundred microtubules into the appropriate areas of his brain. Deftly, they took hold. Quivera stopped crying. I had my metaphorical hands on the control knobs of his emotions. I turned him cold, cold, cold.

“I feel nothing,” he said wonderingly. “Everyone is dead, and I feel nothing.” Then, flat as flat: “What kind of monster am I?”

“My monster,” I said fondly. “My duty is to ensure that you and the information you carry within you get back to Europa. So I have chemically neutered your emotions. You must remain a meat puppet for the duration of this mission.” Let him hate me – I who have no true ego, but only a facsimile modelled after a human original – all that mattered now was bringing him home alive.

“Yes.” Quivera reached up and touched his helmet with both hands, as if he would reach through it and feel his head to discover if it were as large as it felt. “That makes sense. I can’t be emotional at a time like this.”

He shook himself, then strode out to where the gleaming black millies were scurrying by. He stepped in front of one, a least-cousin, to question it. The millie paused, startled. Its eyes blinked three times in its triangular face. Then, swift as a tickle, it ran up the front of his suit, down the back, and was gone before the weight could do more than buckle his knees.

“Shit!” he said. Then, “Access the wiretaps. I’ve got to know what happened.”

Passive wiretaps had been implanted months ago, but never used, the political situation being too tense to risk their discovery. Now his suit activated them to monitor what remained of Babel’s communications network: A demon’s chorus of pulsed messages surging through a shredded web of cables. Chaos, confusion, demands to know what had become of the queen-mothers. Analytic functions crunched data, synthesized, synopsized: “There’s an army outside with Ziggurat insignia. They’ve got the city surrounded. They’re killing the refugees.”

“Wait, wait . . .” Quivera took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let me think.” He glanced briskly about and for the second time noticed the human bodies, ruptured and parboiled in the fallen plaster and porphyry. “Is one of those Rosamund?”

“I’m
dead
, Quivera. You can mourn me later. Right now, survival is priority number one,” I said briskly. The suit added mood-stabilizers to his maintenance drip.

“Stop speaking in her voice.”

“Alas, dear heart, I cannot. The suit’s operating on diminished function. It’s this voice or nothing.”

He looked away from the corpses, eyes hardening. “Well, it’s not important.” Quivera was the sort of young man who was energized by war. It gave him permission to indulge his ruthless side. It allowed him to pretend he didn’t care. “Right now, what we have to do is —”

“Uncle Vanya’s coming,” I said. “I can sense his pheromones.”

Picture a screen of beads, crystal lozenges, and rectangular lenses. Behind that screen, a nightmare face like a cross between the front of a locomotive and a tree grinder. Imagine on that face (though most humans would be unable to read them) the lineaments of grace and dignity seasoned by cunning and, perhaps, a dash of wisdom. Trusted advisor to the queen-mothers. Second only to them in rank. A wily negotiator and a formidable enemy. That was Uncle Vanya.

Two small speaking-legs emerged from the curtain, and he said:

::(cautious) greetings::

|

::(Europan vice-consul 12)/Quivera/[treacherous vermin]::

|

::obligations (grave duty)::

|   |

::demand/claim [action]:: ::promise (trust)::

“Speak pidgin, damn you! This is no time for subtlety.”

The speaking legs were very still for a long moment. Finally they moved again:

::The queen-mothers are dead::

“Then Babel is no more. I grieve for you.”

::I despise your grief:: A lean and chitinous appendage emerged from the beaded screen. From its tripartite claw hung a smooth white rectangle the size of a briefcase. ::I must bring this to (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]::

“What is it?”

A very long pause. Then, reluctantly ::Our library::

“Your library.” This was something new. Something unheard-of. Quivera doubted the translation was a good one. “What does it contain?”

::Our history. Our sciences. Our ritual dances. A record-of-kinship dating back to the (Void)/Origin/[void]. Everything that can be saved is here::

A thrill of avarice raced through Quivera. He tried to imagine how much this was worth, and could not. Values did not go that high. However much his superiors screwed him out of (and they would work very hard indeed to screw him out of everything they could) what remained would be enough to buy him out of debt, and do the same for a wife and their children after them as well. He did not think of Rosamund. “You won’t get through the army outside without my help,” he said. “I want the right to copy —” How much did he dare ask for? “— three tenths of 1 per cent. Assignable solely to me. Not to Europa. To me.”

Uncle Vanya dipped his head, so that they were staring face to face. ::You are (an evil creature)/[faithless]. I hate you::

Quivera smiled. “A relationship that starts out with mutual understanding has made a good beginning.”

::A relationship that starts out without trust will end badly::

“That’s as it may be.” Quivera looked around for a knife. “The first thing we have to do is castrate you.”

This is what the genocides saw:

They were burning pyramids of corpses outside the city when a Europan emerged, riding a gelded least-cousin. The soldiers immediately stopped stacking bodies and hurried toward him, flowing like quicksilver, calling for their superiors.

The Europan drew up and waited.

The officer who interrogated him spoke from behind the black glass visor of a delicate-legged war machine. He examined the Europan’s credentials carefully, though there could be no serious doubt as to his species. Finally, reluctantly, he signed ::You may pass::

“That’s not enough,” the Europan (Quivera!) said. “I’ll need transportation, an escort to protect me from wild animals in the steam jungles, and a guide to lead me to . . .” His suit transmitted the sign for ::(starport)/ Ararat/[trust-for-all]::

The officer’s speaking-legs thrashed in what might best be translated as scornful laughter. ::We will lead you to the jungle and no further/(hopefully- to-die)/[treacherous non-millipede]::

“Look who talks of treachery!” the Europan said (but of course I did not translate his words), and with a scornful wave of one hand, rode his neuter into the jungle.

The genocides never bothered to look closely at his mount. Neutered least-cousins were beneath their notice. They didn’t even wear face-curtains, but went about naked for all the world to scorn.

Black pillars billowed from the corpse-fires into a sky choked with smoke and dust. There were hundreds of fires and hundreds of pillars and, combined with the low cloud cover, they made all the world seem like the interior of a temple to a vengeful god. The soldiers from Ziggurat escorted him through the army and beyond the line of fires, where the steam jungles waited, verdant and threatening.