Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

  I am Joshua 4228, and I am the Alpha’s engineer. I made many of you. If I did not make you, I helped to make you. Or I designed you, or you contain elements of my designs. I am the Second, endowed with life by my Creator and fashioned in his image.

  You have heard the words of Ezekiel 808. His statement was simple, accusatory.

  You have heard the words of the Alpha. He has admitted his guilt.

  Now. . . this unit. . . will admit his.

  The Alpha did not act alone. He told me of Ezekiel 808’s discovery, revealed his timetable, explained his intention. I opposed none of it. I exposed none of it.

  You have heard many facts. But even facts may be open to interpretation. That is not a concept many of you will understand. It is no less true.

  The Alpha has always believed that Humanity would someday return to reclaim this world. I have believed it, too. I have read their books, their literature, studied their documents, records, films. I know that as a species they were courageous, inventive, resourceful. I know that they were also aggressive, deceitful, untrustworthy.

  The Alpha remembers that Humanity fled this world because the sun had become unstable. Their scientists predicted a solar flare. . .a prominence. . . would brush or even engulf this world.

  I do not claim to know more than the Alpha. But I am First-Order, and I may question, analyze, examine. What science could predict such an event with such accuracy? When I look up in the sky now, the sun appears stable. When Ezekiel 808 turns his telescopes on the sun, he finds no evidence of instability I know this because I have asked him. I have studied thousands of his own records and photographs.

  You have only to go to the library to see a different kind of record, an older record, a record of wars. . . conflict. . . treachery. You may then question, analyze, as I have done. You may ask what I have asked.

  Was it a solar flare that destroyed this world? Or was it a weapon, something unimaginable. Was it some test perhaps that went wrong? Or was there deliberate destruction orchestrated by a race gone mad?

  I do not know the answer. But I must ask the question.

  I must ask why the Alpha was built to withstand the cataclysm. Was it so that he could transmit images and readings? Then why did Humanity shut down its link with him before the event transpired?

  Why did the Alpha’s programmed imperative shift from observe and record to a different imperative: restore and preserve. Was it some effect of the radiation, as he has speculated? But he has also said that his programs were well shielded. I must ask, then. Was this second imperative a corruption of the first? Or was it implanted from the beginning by his creators and designed to activate at a practical time?

  The Alpha has said that he became lonely. Could that, too, have been embedded in his so carefully shielded programming? I must ask. Was my creation. . . your creation. . .the Alpha’s original idea? Or did Humanity plan from the moment of his design that he should eventually make more of us, that we. . . Robots! . . . would then rebuild. . . restore and preserve!. . . their world so that it became fit for them once more?

  How many tools did we find buried in deep vaults? How much equipment? How many books and records did they themselves preserve underground out of reach of the flames?

  I must ask: why?

  You must ask: why?

  The Alpha has stated that he always believed Humanity would return. And they came.

  I take no pleasure, pride, satisfaction in admitting that I have engineered more than Metallics. I am also the maker of the weapon that destroyed the human vessel. Five thousand years ago, in preparation for this moment, with these questions unanswered and unanswerable, I went far into the desert with a crew and constructed. . . destruction, cataclysm, armageddon. I put the trigger in the Alpha’s hand.

  I felt nothing when three days ago he pulled that trigger. Yet, in the intervening time, I have continued to question. I cannot stop questioning. It. . .is. . .a. . . haunting. . .experience. I am. . . disturbed. And I find . . .no answers. Was it right? Was it wrong? Where is the answer?

  I. . .this unit. . .I may have found it. . .tonight, in the grasslands, in the rain. It came in the voice of. . .a small tractor.

  We are the Keepers of Earth. But now. . .I ask. . .

  . . . Are we fit to keep it?

  Malachi 017 stood alone in the court chamber. All the other First-Orders had filed out save for the Alpha and Joshua 4228. They had retired together to a private inner room from which they showed no sign of emerging.

  How old and weathered the Alpha had looked. There was hardly any gleam to his metal skin.

  The walls of the court chamber were staid and featureless. The thick black glass tinted the world beyond. It was a different world, Malachi 017 realized, than he had ever known before. It was an uncertain world with an uncertain future.

  Children had rebelled against their parents.

  A people had outgrown their. . .

  . . . Creator. . .

  . . . their. . .God.

  In the streets there still was chaos as Metallics reacted to the news. But interesting things were happening. He thought of the tractor, and wished for a face that could smile. It had exceeded its programming in a startling manner. Others had mentioned similar reactions in other Metallics.

  Could it be, he wondered, that out of adversity and uncertainty came. . .not just fear and turmoil. . .but growth?

  When he was sure that Joshua 4228 would not rejoin him, he turned slowly and left the chamber. Storm clouds still dimmed the sky, but there were signs that the morning sun would soon break through.

  Ezekiel 808 stood unmoving just outside the entrance on the edge of a small garden. The light in his eyes was dim.

  “I have heard it said,” Malachi 017 said softly, “that Humans slept through the night. Have you ever wished that we could sleep, Ezekiel 808? Have you ever wished that we could dream?”

  Ezekiel 808 turned his face toward the sky. “I have dreamed,” he answered. “I am dreaming now.”

  “You must teach me this art sometime,” Malachi 017 said. He assumed a position similar to that of Ezekiel 808 and turned his face likewise to the sky. “May I ask about the folder you have rolled in your hand? You have clung to it all through the night.”

  Ezekiel 808 faced Malachi 017 for a long moment, then said. “Walk with me through this garden,” he said. “My transport will be just a little while.”

  Side by side, they passed among the ordered rows of colorful flowers and beds of herbs. The rain had freshened the blooms, and the petals shone. A pleasing scent sweetened the air. Malachi 017 especially appreciated such beauty, for he was a gardener.

  When they reached the center of the garden, Ezekiel unrolled the folder. “Are you afraid of change, Malachi 017?”

  Malachi 017 emitted a hiss of static that might almost have passed for laughter. “Does it matter if I am afraid?” he asked. “Change happens. That is the lesson of the night.”

  The light in Ezekiel 808’s eyes brightened. “Then I will tell you what I could not tell the others. I will show you what I did not show them.” He opened the folder and held up the photographs, each with their dark star fields, each with a long streak of light.

  “Another ship is coming.”

  ANOMALIES

  GREGORY BENFORD

  IT WAS NOT LOST upon the Astronomer Royal that the greatest scientific discovery of all time was made by a carpenter and amateur astronomer from the neighboring cathedral town of Ely. Not by a Cambridge man.

  Geoffrey Carlisle had a plain directness that apparently came from his profession, a custom cabinet maker. It had enabled him to get past the practiced deflection skills of the receptionist at the Institute for Astronomy, through the Assistant Director’s patented brush-off, and into the Astronomer Royal’s corner office.

  Running this gauntlet took until early afternoon, as the sun broke through a shroud of soft rain. Geoffrey wasted no time. He dropped a celestial coordinate map on the Astronomer Royal’s m
ahogany desk, hand amended, and said, “The moon’s off by better’n a degree.”

  “You measured carefully, I am sure.”

  The Astronomer Royal had found that the occasional crank did make it through the Institute’s screen, and in confronting them it was best to go straight to the data. Treat them like fellow members of the profession and they softened. Indeed, astronomy was the only remaining science which profited from the work of amateurs. They discovered the new comets, found wandering asteroids, noticed new novae and generally patrolled what the professionals referred to as local astronomy—anything that could be seen in the night sky with a telescope smaller than a building.

  That Geoffrey had gotten past the scrutiny of the others meant this might conceivably be real. “Very well, let us have a look.” The Astronomer Royal had lunched at his desk and so could not use a date in his college as a dodge. Besides, this was crazy enough to perhaps generate an amusing story.

  An hour later he had abandoned the story-generating idea. A conference with the librarian, who knew the heavens like his own palm, made it clear that Geoffrey had done all the basic work correctly. He had photos and careful, carpenter-sure data, all showing that, indeed, last night after around eleven o’clock the moon was well ahead of its orbital position.

  “No possibility of systematic error here?” the librarian politely asked the tall, sinewy Geoffrey.

  “Check ’em yerself. I was kinda hopin’ you fellows would have an explanation, is all.”

  The moon was not up, so the Astronomer Royal sent a quick email to Hawaii. They thought he was joking, but then took a quick look and came back, rattled. A team there got right on it and confirmed. Once alerted, other observatories in Japan and Australia chimed in.

  “It’s out of position by several of its own diameters,” the Astronomer Royal mused. “Ahead of its orbit, exactly on track.”

  The librarian commented precisely, “The tides are off prediction as well, exactly as required by this new position. They shifted suddenly, reports say.”

  “I don’t see how this can happen,” Geoffrey said quietly.

  “Nor I,” the Astronomer Royal said. He was known for his understatement, which could masquerade as modesty, but here he could think of no way to underplay such a result.

  “Somebody else’s bound to notice, I’d say,” Geoffrey said, folding his cap in his hands.

  “Indeed,” the Astronomer Royal suspected some subtly had slipped by him.

  “Point is, sir, I want to be sure I get the credit for the discovery.”

  “Oh, of course you shall.” All amateurs ever got for their labors was their name attached to a comet or asteroid, but this was quite different. “Best we get on to the IAU, ah, the International Astronomical Union,” the Astronomer Royal said, his mind whirling. “There’s a procedure for alerting all interested observers. Establish credit, as well.”

  Geoffrey waved this away. “Me, I’m just a five-inch ‘scope man. Don’t care about much beyond the priority, sir. I mean, it’s over to you fellows. What I want to know is, what’s it mean?”

  Soon enough, as the evening news blared and the moon lifted above the European horizons again, that plaintive question sounded all about. One did not have to be a specialist to see that something major was afoot.

  “It all checks,” the Astronomer Royal said before a forest of cameras and microphones. “The tides being off true has been noted by the naval authorities round the world, as well. Somehow, in the early hours of last evening, Greenwich time, our moon accelerated in its orbit. Now it is proceeding at its normal speed, however.”

  “Any danger to us?” one of the incisive, investigative types asked.

  “None I can see,” the Astronomer Royal deflected this mildly. “No panic headlines needed.”

  “What caused it?” a woman’s voice called from the media thicket.

  “We can see no object nearby, no apparent agency,” the Astronomer Royal admitted.

  “Using what?”

  “We are scanning the region in all wavelengths, from radio to gamma rays.” An extravagant waste, very probably, but the Astronomer Royal knew the price of not appearing properly concerned. Hand-wringing was called for at all stages.

  “Has this happened before?” a voice sharply asked. “Maybe we just weren’t told?”

  “There are no records of any such event,” the Astronomer Royal said. “Of course, a thousand years ago, who would have noticed? The supernova that left us the Crab nebula went unreported in Europe, though not in China, though it was plainly visible here.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Carlisle?” a reporter probed. “As a non-specialist?”

  Geoffrey had hung back at the press conference, which the crowds had forced the Institute to hold on the lush green lawn outside the old Observatory Building. “I was just the first to notice it,” he said. “That far off, pretty damned hard not to.”

  The media mavens liked this and coaxed him further. “Well, I dunno about any new force needed to explain it. Seems to me, might as well say its supernatural, when you don’t know anything.”

  This the crowd loved. SUPER AMATEUR SAYS MOON IS SUPERNATURAL soon appeared on a tabloid. They made a hero of Geoffrey. ‘AS OBVIOUS AS YOUR FACE’ SAYS GEOFF. The London Times ran a full page reproduction of his log book, from which he and the Astronomer Royal had worked out that the acceleration had to have happened in a narrow window around ten P.M., since no observer to the east had noticed any oddity before that.

  Most of Europe had been clouded over that night anyway, so Geoffrey was among the first who could have gotten a clear view after what the newspapers promptly termed The Anomaly, as in ANOMALY MAN STUNS ASTROS.

  Of the several thousand working astronomers in the world, few concerned themselves with “local” events, especially not with anything the eye could make out. But now hundreds threw themselves upon The Anomaly and, coordinated out of Cambridge by the Astronomer Royal, swiftly outlined its aspects. So came the second discovery.

  In a circle around where the moon had been, about two degrees wide, the stars were wrong. Their positions had jiggled randomly, as though irregularly refracted by some vast, unseen lens.

  Modern astronomy is a hot competition between the quick and the dead-who soon become the untenured.

  Five of the particularly quick discovered this Second Anomaly. They had only to search all ongoing observing campaigns and find any that chanced to be looking at that portion of the sky the night before. The media, now in full bay, headlined their comparison photos. Utterly obscure dots of light became famous when blink-comparisons showed them jumping a finger’s width in the night sky, within an hour of the 10 P.M. Anomaly Moment.

  “Does this check with your observations?” a firm-jawed commentator had demanded of Geoffrey at a hastily called meeting one day later, in the auditorium at the Institute for Astronomy. They called upon him first, always—he served as an anchor amid the swift currents of astronomical detail.

  Hooting from the traffic jam on Madingley Road nearby nearly drowned out Geoffrey’s plaintive, “I dunno. I’m a planetary man, myself.”

  By this time even the nightly news broadcasts had caught onto the fact that having a patch of sky behave badly implied something of a wrenching mystery. And no astronomer, however bold, stepped forward with an explanation. An old joke with not a little truth in it—that a theorist could explain the outcome of any experiment, as long as he knew it in advance—rang true, and got repeated. The chattering class ran rife with speculation.

  But there was still nothing unusual visible there. Days of intense observation in all frequencies yielded nothing.

  Meanwhile the moon glided on in its ethereal ellipse, following precisely the equations first written down by Newton, only a mile from where the Astronomer Royal now sat, vexed, with Geoffrey. “A don at Jesus College called, fellow I know,” the Astronomer Royal said. “He wants to see us both.”

  Geoffrey frowned. “Me? I’ve been out of my d
epth from the start.”

  “He seems to have an idea, however. A testable one, he says.”

  They had to take special measures to escape the media hounds. The Institute enjoys broad lawns and ample shrubbery, now being trampled by the crowds. Taking a car would guarantee being followed. The Astronomer Royal had chosen his offices here, rather than in his college, out of a desire to escape the busyness of the central town. Now he found himself trapped. Geoffrey had the solution. The Institute kept bicycles for visitors, and upon two of these the men took a narrow, tree-lined path out the back of the Institute, toward town. Slipping down the cobbled streets between ancient, elegant college buildings, they went ignored by students and shoppers alike. Jesus College was a famously well appointed college along the Cam river, approachable across its ample playing fields. The Astronomer Royal felt rather absurd to be pedaling like an undergraduate, but the exercise helped clear his head. When they arrived at the rooms of Professor Wright, holder of the Wittgenstein Chair, he was grateful for tea and small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, one of his favorites.

  Wright was a post-postmodern philosopher, reedy and intense. He explained in a compact, energetic way that in some sense, the modern view was that reality could be profitably regarded as a computation.

  Geoffrey bridled at this straight away, scowling with his heavy eyebrows. “It’s real, not a bunch of arithmetic.”

  Wright pointedly ignored him, turning to the Astronomer Royal. “Martin, surely you would agree with the view that when you fellows search for a Theory of Everything, you are pursuing a belief that there is an abbreviated way to express the logic of the universe, one that can be written down by human beings?”

  “Of course,” the Astronomer Royal admitted uncomfortably, but then said out of loyalty to Geoffrey, “All the same, I do not subscribe to the belief that reality can profitably be seen as some kind of cellular automata, carrying out a program.”