Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

  Eric works overtime putting the hydroponics area to rights. Naturally his own Q-space version was maintained in apple pie order. Sad to see it become so chaotic.

  “I should have done more,” Mary says ruefully.

  “Then this would have been two percent tended. It wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference.”

  “And I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Do you think that announcing your experience straight away was the best course?”

  “If I waited longer. . .”

  “. . . the more difficult it would become?”

  “By the way, you guys, I happen to have been contacted by a Higher Entity—but I didn’t feel like mentioning this until now. Also by the way, I traveled through time.”

  “You’re probably right. Though now some people are a bit wary of you.”

  “Does that include you, Eric?”

  “Of course not. This must be such a strain for you.”

  “And you are loyal to your friends. Do you truly believe me?”

  “That’s an unfair question, Mary. If I had experienced what you experienced—what you undoubtedly experienced. . . .”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind, but that’s only my mind.”

  “Is your experience repeatable—I mean, by someone else?”

  “We aren’t in Q-space any longer.”

  “On the way back if we all meditate the way you did maybe we can all take a short cut. Or many of us can. That would be a blessing.”

  “Shall I start up classes in meditation?”

  “Ah. . .but we might begin colonizing the second planet, depending on what we find.”

  If that happens, eventually only the flight crew will return Pioneer to Earth to bring more material and colonists and frozen embryos and such. Mary’s experience may be of no use to the majority of those presently on board. It can be set aside for a long time yet, unconfronted.

  Offers flood in to time-share James, but Sandy will have none of them.

  Chika Suzuki gives a lecture on his idea of what may have happened, and how it might be avoided in future if only a starship’s computer itself could be a quantum computer.

  Sum over Paths. Some Overpaths.

  “I’d say we experienced traveling a hundred possible paths between the solar system and Tau Ceti. A myriad other paths got explored at the same time, but since those were absurd we could not experience them. If only we could experience the sum over paths collectively together, not separately the way it turned out! Yet that might have been an experience the individual human mind couldn’t cope with. All of us experiencing each other’s experience. . . .”

  Not everyone wishes to marginalize Mary’s revelation as something at once too huge and too fugitive to contemplate. Dr. Yukio is fascinated. As an insight into a situation where the specialist in afflictions of mind has herself become afflicted? Chika Suzuki is also enthralled. What Mary says about the multi-million-year mind of all Humanity whenever processing information through its myriad units dead and living and yet unborn—this stirs his programmer’s soul, whether he gives her credence or not. Likewise, astrophysicist Denise. And a biologist, Maxim Litvinov. And Sophie Garland, another cybernetics person who is an ordained pastor of the Ecumenical Church. Last but not least—perhaps last yet least as regards stability—there is Hiroaki Horiuchi, the chemist who flipped during solitude but who is now responding quite well to mental stabilizers and is coherent in English once again.

  Eric, alas, remains ambivalent. In a sense he’s a glorified gardener who values neatness and order, nature methodized, not rampant across the eons and imbued with some kind of transcendent mentality, at least as regards the human species. Furthermore, Eric is a no-frills evolutionist. For him life has no goal other than life itself in its many forms during all of its eras. Not that Mary claims that Humanity writ large has any particular goal, yet now that the Higher Entity has intervened—retrospectively as well as in the now and in the henceforth!—it certainly seems as if some kind of destiny is implied, or at least an upgrade to a higher level of existence or state of awareness.

  Mary’s supporters hold study sessions with her, and Hiro’s presence seems therapeutic for him. Exploring Mary’s experience helps Hiro come to terms with his own phantoms and demons—though he might be imprinting on Mary emotionally, as his sensei of sanity, or the opposite.

  Three of Mary’s co-explorers are Japanese. Yukio remarks that his own people feel a strong sense of themselves as a unique collective entity, so they can empathize with the concept of Overlife, Pan-being, or whatever.

  The interest of these six does indeed support Mary, otherwise she might be as lonely now as she was during those initial weeks of isolation in Q-space—she might be the specter at the feast of renewed companionship. Even so, sometimes she feels like screaming out to the entity that shifted her through time, Come back! Please show yourself to more than merely me!

  Meanwhile, Sandy puts a brave face on being mother to a baby who is evidently abnormal, although bursting with health. It’s as though a perfectly normal baby has been overwritten by a program that cannot yet run in him—not until he matures a bit more—yet which nevertheless keeps trying to express itself, and testing its environment. . . maybe modifying its environment as it does so, tweaking developmental pathways? Jeff does his best to help nurture their son, frequently taking James off Sandy’s hands—to the botany area and to the rec room. Just as he ought to. Fair dooze, sport. No other couples have yet conceived. Potential parents are awaiting what James may become.

  Weeks later, Pioneer enters orbit around Tau Ceti 2, eighty kilometers above what is basically a world-ocean girding half a dozen scattered and mottled distorted Australias, all but one of them situated in the temperate zones. The odd one out straddles the north pole and wears an ice cap. River systems are visible, and mountains, one of which is smoking vigorously, an eruption in progress. Elsewhere, a typhoon is blowing. The planet seems lively; not overly so, it’s to be hoped. The signatures of vegetation are down below, so at least there is botany. Where there is botany, zoology too? Very likely marine biology at least, but no moon pulls any tides ashore.

  After three weeks of intensive global survey work Jay-Jay will pilot Shuttle One, Beauty, down to the land mass already dubbed Pizza, the result of a random computer selection from a list of names suggested by all personnel and okayed by Com Sherwin. In time, hopefully, people will be able to feed upon Pizza if its soil proves amenable. Accompanying pilot-geologist Jay-Jay will be Maxim Litvinov, Jeff Lee, and John Dolby, representing life sciences and climate.

  To gaze upon an alien world, from the bridge or on-screen, is riveting. Those warped Australias are like presents under the Christmas tree. What exactly is in them? What is the topping on Pizza?

  The answer, three weeks later, proves to be weed— thongs, tangles, ribbons, bladders, variously jade-green and rusty-red, bright orange and emerald in the light of Tau Ceti. Suited and helmeted, Maxim describes the scene that is onscreen everywhere throughout Pioneer. (The three passengers on Beauty had tossed the only coins within light years for the honor of being first-foot on the new world. Pilot excluded. Mustn’t risk him.) Beauty rests upright on an apron of flat rock amidst assorted vegetation, a vista that looks somewhat like an offshore domain that has been emptied of its water. The actual shore is a couple of kilometers away. Shouldn’t be hard to hike there. Some of the weed piles a meter deep but whole stretches are as flat as a pancake.

  Cautiously Maxim pokes around with a probe. Amidst a larger mass of weed he soon comes across a number of little hoppers and scuttlers—“they’re a bit like fleas and tiny crabs—” and even captures some specimens, before he cuts samples of weed, then bags soil that is variously gritty and sludgy, inhabited by some wriggly tendrils and purple mites.

  John descends from Beauty to join Maxim, carrying an atmosphere analyzer to confirm orbital readings. This done, Jeff comes bearing a white mouse in a transparent light-weight habitat.
Mice are biologically very similar to men. Will the mouse, Litmus, turn virulently red or blue because of hostile microorganisms? Even if nothing obvious happens, in another few days once back on Pioneer Litmus will be sacrificed and dissected.

  After a day of intensive investigation of the vicinity, next day Maxim and Jeff set off for the seaside under gray clouds. Rain will move in later, though nothing torrential. What will they find? Leviathans cruising offshore like mobile islands? Torpedos with flippers and goggly eyes nursing pups on the beach?

  No. No.

  “Weed and sand. Pebbles and boulders.” As is seen onscreen while Maxim pans his camera.

  Some great thongs of weed emerge from the breeze-rippled sea, right across the shore and beyond, like vast creepers that the ocean has rooted upon the land. No wildlife bigger than hoppers and scuttlers and sliders, and nothing in the empty and now melancholy sky.

  Presently Jeff fires nets into the sea, one to trawl, the other weighted to dredge. What comes back are floaters and wrigglers and squirmers, none bigger than a little finger.

  Back on Beauty in its resealed habitat Litmus the mouse is still perky and white.

  * * *

  The day after, Shuttle Two, Charm, lands half a world away in a broad river valley on the huge island or mini-continent christened Kansas, somewhat further inland than Beauty landed. Weed webs its way from the river over the terrain, yielding to flexible dwarf ribbon-trees and inflated lung-plants. More little hoppers and scuttlers and variations, nothing big.

  All in all this is wonderful, if a bit bleak. Here on Tee-Cee, as the planet is coming to be called, is an ecology, primitive but functional. Years ago it was decided that biological contamination of the Tee-Cee environment is of much less consequence than the chance of inhabiting a whole new world, if at all possible. After all, the expedition had cost its partners upward of forty billion dollars. Agronomy experiments get under way, a range of seedlings transplanted directly into the local soil and also into heat-sterilized grit and sludge under protection.

  All of this rather puts Mary’s revelation and baby James to the back of people’s minds, except for the members of the support group consisting of Yukio, Chika, Denise, Hiroaki, and Sophie. Plus an apprehensive Sandy with James in a head-supportive carry-sling. Jeff being down on the surface has robbed her of his help, an unavoidable repeat of his earlier failure to be present. And there’s Eric too, although in his case simply out of loyalty. But no Maxim. He’s on the surface of Tee-Cee. The eight—or nine, if James is counted—meet in the hydroponics section, like conspirators or members of a cult. Maybe their infant messiah is in their midst, albeit inarticulate as yet.

  “We are each other,” says Hiroaki. “That is the meaning. The unity of all human life.”

  Sophie asks him gently, “Were Adolf Hitler and a rabbi in an extermination camp united? What about people waging ruthless war on each other throughout history?”

  “If our immune system goes wrong, it can attack our own bodies. But I am talking about lives going way back and stretching far ahead. I am my ancestor and my distant descendant! If we could know the lives of the future! Pan-Humanity already includes those future lives.”

  “Future lives haven’t yet been lived!” protests Denise. “If we could dip into them now, why, everything is fixed in advance unalterably. It would only be because of our blindness to the future that we bother to do anything at all in the present. No, wait: we couldn’t even choose to do, or not to do, something if all is foreordained. Pan-Humanity can’t be calculating or thinking or dreaming or doing whatever it does across the millennia unless genuine changes happen within it! Otherwise it would be just one big super-complicated thought, a four-dimensional abacus forever in the same state.”

  “What is its purpose?” asks Mary. “What does it do, what does it dream?”

  “Maybe it merely exists,” says Eric. “Maybe that’s all it does.”

  “Surely it must come to conclusions. The computing power it has! Using all our billions of brains!”

  “Conclusions? Final extinction is conclusion enough. The tree grows, the tree dies.”

  “Maybe,” suggests Chika, “it avoids extinction by being closed in upon itself. Its end and its beginning join together. So it always exists, even though time moves on beyond the epoch of its physical existence.”

  “Contacting the probability-being must have caused a change—”

  “As soon as this happened, it had already happened long ago too—”

  “We don’t have the minds to understand this—”

  “Only the overmind possesses the overview—”

  “It must understand existence. Not just experience existence, but understand as well—as part of its process of existing—”

  “We are all part of God,” Sophie declares. “Any highly evolved species is a God in total. Yet we cannot follow God’s thoughts. All of us are just little bits of those thoughts.”

  “The probability-being was a bit more forthcoming!”

  “Because you weren’t a part of it, Mary. Because you were its modem to our God, our species. It had to exchange signals through you.”

  “And then it went away, because chatting to me was probably as interesting as talking to an ant.”

  “At least it lifted you from one end of the branch to the other.”

  “So effortlessly. If only our God would do the same for us.”

  “Maybe,” Sophie suggests, “you should pray real strongly, Mary. Sort of meditation with a punch to it.”

  “What should I pray for?”

  “For James,” says Sandy. “Let him be—”

  “—normal?” asks Sophie. “Or gifted with tongues, real soon? So that the babe begins to speak instead of just gurbling at you?”

  “I think. . . normal.”

  “Normal would be a waste, don’t you think?”

  Sandy sobs. “How long’s Jeff going to be down there?”

  “It’s why we’re here.”

  “Let me take James off your hands for a few hours,” offers Sophie, not for the first time.

  “No. . . .” Only Jeff is permitted to share her baby, because it is his duty to.

  Whatever happens, Sandy seems very unlikely to harm her baby. If she does so in any way, then that is Mary’s responsibility. Mary feels she cannot intervene too intrusively, having, as it were, a vested interest.

  Some of the seedlings fail, but most survive, even quite a few of those which are fully exposed to the Pizza environment. Some even thrive. Monitor cameras record efforts by hoppers to snack, and one definite quick fatality, although most nibblers quickly hop away into weed. In a bottle of formaldehyde the dead hopper is an amulet of hope. Perhaps. Supposing that hope equates with the superiority, or at least resilience, of organisms from Earth.

  Litmus remains perky. Beauty returns to Pioneer. Time for intensive lab work, and confirmation of results by Computer.

  Many tests have been performed, many protocols faithfully obeyed, but there comes a time when a volunteer must personally dip his toe into the bathwater. In the middle of Kansas, Jeff removes his helmet. Computer has approved, although approval is merely advisory. Despite Jeff’s best efforts at child-sharing, maybe he is betraying Sandy yet again by being a hero.

  The supporters’ group join hands in hydroponics and pray for Jeff, even though by now they remember that they are perhaps no longer part of the processes of humanity, being altogether too far away.

  “It smells sort of sweet. . .and sort of musty too, a bit like rotting wood.”

  Jeff breathes for five minutes. No sudden sneezes. Resuming the helmet, he wears it inside Charm for three boring hours. Nothing untoward happens to him, so he unsuits. Saliva and mucous swabs and a blood sample taken by Gisela seem normal under the microscope.

  “We appear to be lucking out in a big way,” Com Sherwin tells everyone.

  Charm is the ideal isolated quarantine facility. Jeff and Gisela and tubby agronomist Marcel Reynard and pi
lot-geologist Werner Schmidt take turns working and exploring outside fully suited. Aboard Charm Gisela mixes a fecal sample with a sample of local soil and organisms; some of the organisms die. After a week Jeff ventures outside to breathe the air of Kansas for several hours.

  Three days later Jeff drinks boiled, filtered Kansas water. Gisela tests and retests his urine. Two days afterward, he is wearing a coverall rather than a suit when outside. Ungloved, he has already handled samples of vegetation inside the shuttle, and no rashes resulted. Now he handles living vegetation. On the soil he deposits a fecal sample he brought in a bag, marking the spot with a day-glo flag. What may the hoppers and scuttlers and sliders make of this offering if they had any glimmering of true consciousness rather than mere programmed instincts? Evolutionarily speaking, the equivalent of God-like beings have descended from the sky. Next day, inert hoppers and sliders lie nearby—the food of the Gods, or rather the waste products, were too much for them.

  James’s developmental pathways must indeed have altered; his larynx is descending early. Beware of the risk of him choking. Connections in his brain may be proceeding more rapidly—he looks alert, bright-eyed, on the verge of what exactly? No longer does he attempt in vain to vocalize, as if he has come to some understanding with himself, or of himself. What a patient, amenable baby he is now, and still so young. He stares at his mother, and at Mary too, and at the members of the supporters’ club, which is his supporters’ club as much as it is Mary’s.

  The third shuttle, Color, has gone down to join Charm, to erect a habitat-dome for thirty persons along with a solar power plant and a number of wind-power whirlies.

  Only now, perhaps, are many potential colonists beginning to appreciate the full implications of a whole future spent on Tee-Cee. Sure, there will be much scientific stimulation. Sure, there will be a wealth of human cultural resources on tap for entertainment. Sure, more colonists will arrive from Earth within, say, two years at the most, counting in time for mission assessment and the turn-around of Pioneer. But oh, the comparative barrenness of Kansas. . .!