The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  Her eyes enlarged and I could see galaxies reflected in their depths. “Earth,” she said. “Where is Earth?”

  I thought. “That way,” I told her, pointing an arrow of chromed fire.

  “And you all left one day, just like that—poof?” Her poof was an orange-yellow sparkle that bounced around the surface of the airless planetoid on which we sat, and evanesced as suddenly as it had appeared.

  “Not so quick,” I told her. “Nor so thorough. They dribbed and drabbed along as they decided that changing was wiser than staying. Some took centuries to decide. Some, I Imagine, are there yet, unchanged.”

  “People?” she asked. “With skin covering bone and blood coursing through muscle and organ? Delicate-gross, beautiful-ugly people?”

  “So I imagine.”

  She thought about this, allowing her thoughts to sparkle visibly in her corona. “Take me,” she said brightly. “Show me!”

  I allowed the coordinates of Old Earth to form in my brain and then headed off through a cluster of newborn stars toward the withershins corner of the compact spiral galaxy that is our Milky Way. Thrayna followed, faster than light in diamonds, as fast as the essence of thought.

  Earth was where it should have been, and still as it had been: a light-blue globe laced with puffy white. I had forgotten how painfully beautiful it was. We spiraled toward the surface.

  “Greetings, Deradan!” The hollow nonsound thrummed strongly in my mind.

  Thrayna bounced and blossomed with joy. “The planet is saying hello to you,” she giggled, whirling and condensing about a nucleus of mist and dust, forming a voluptuous feminine cyclone that enclosed a rainbow.

  “Who speaks?” I asked aloud. There was no reply.

  “Who speaks?” I projected the thought about me, darting it here and there among the ruins where we stood.

  All was silent but for the wind that was Thrayna.

  I lofted into the air and sought a sign of life in the tumbled stone, cracked concrete, and rotten metal ruins that lay about us for leagues around. Plant life there was: grasses, trees, shrubs and a myriad of delicate, lovely flowers. Animal life abounded: foxes, hares, moles, songbirds, worms, insects innumerable. But of human life, of intelligent life, there was no sign.

  “Come,” I told Thrayna. “Let us seek out what primitive humans may remain on Earth.

  “Splendid!” Thrayna agreed. “Let us discover who spoke. Was that a human?”

  “I don’t know who or what it was,” I admitted “but human it was not. Not old-style human. They could not do thus.”

  “They couldn’t do much,” Thrayna said. “It must have been awfully small, awfully closed, awfully dull to be a human.”

  I tried to remember what it had been like “We did not find it so,” I said.

  “How was it then?”

  “It was as it is, I imagine,” I told her. “Let us find some people and see how it is with them, then you will know.”

  I rose and headed straight as an arrow toward I-knew-not-what, hoping to intersect some vast city teeming with human commerce. I was loath to admit to Thrayna that I no longer recognized the landmarks of this globe that had been my home. Had it changed so much in the brief millennia. I wondered, or had I?

  The city appeared, a speck on the horizon, and grew into its vastness as we approached. It was as empty, as devoid, as defunct, as all before it. But it was not ruined and rotten, as was the place we had left. The buildings were there: squat cubes and tall cylinders and lacy spires, with a spiderweb of roads and slidewalks and covered skyways. All intact, pristine, and ready for use. But whoever had used them was no longer there.

  “No humans,” Thrayna observed, spinning about and showering a rainbow of fine sparks where she moved.

  “No humans,” I agreed.

  “Perhaps they have all become as we; perhaps they have left Earth and now inhabit the universe.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why is the city so fresh and clean if it is deserted?”

  “It is tended by computers,” I told her. “Soulless machines that are all mind, that do the drudge work for the human race. The city will remain as it is for the next ten thousand years—or hundred thousand—waiting for the people to return.”

  “What if the inhabitants have become as we, incorporeal beings of pure energy, drawing sustenance from the stars—immortal souls free to roam the universe?”

  “If that is so, then I don’t think they will be coming back. Unless, as we, they wish to visit their childhood home.”

  “And where was your childhood home?” Thrayna asked. “Where did you—who were born of Earth, of flesh and blood—metamorphose into beings such as I, who are at one with the stars?”

  “Where?”

  “Yes, Deradan, where on Earth? And how? How does an Earthman become a star-roamer?”

  “I do not know the process except in the vaguest form,” I told her. “Others invented and perfected it. But I think I can find the location of the Box.”

  “Let us find the Box,” she said. “What sort of box is it we seek?”

  “It is what we called the building that housed the transformation. The Box.”

  “Why?”

  I tried to remember. Stars had been formed and planets had lost their atmosphere in the intervening years. But the memory was there. Memory is never lost to us, it just becomes progressively more difficult to retrieve, the longer it is dormant. “We called it the Box because it was a great, cubelike structure, isolated in one of the most inaccessible parts of the world.”

  “Inaccessible?”

  “To us, as we were then.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In the far south. By the southern pole.”

  “Let us go. I would see the box from which you came.”

  We lofted and flew south. The southern hemisphere was buried under a new ice age, which looked to be well advanced. In a few moments we were approaching the pole. The Box was still where it had been, clearly visible, resting on the surface of an ice-sheet that must have been miles thicker than when I had last visited.

  “There it is!” Thrayna trilled an iridescent trill. She dove through the frigid atmosphere toward the great black cube, which seemed to float on the white ice-sheet.

  We landed at the foot of the Box, by the great entrance on the east face. The door opened. “Welcome, Deradan,” a deep, hollow voice resonated in my mind.

  “Hurrah! It is the Box itself that welcomes you,” Thrayna said. “Shall we go in?”

  We entered.

  Sudden throbbing pain. A white flash that died to red oblivion. My mind turned on itself, and I was no more. Slowly I came to myself again. The pain—long unfamiliar pain—was great and coursed through my body. My arms tingled (arms?). My legs burned (legs?). I was conscious of a strange and oppressive feeling that I seemed to recall from some long-past existence.

  My consciousness rose and faded, then rose again. For a long time I slept (sleep?). When I came to, I was lying in a cocoon-like bed in the middle of a great marble hall. Except for the bed, and my body (body?), the hall was devoid of furnishings or tenants.

  I rose stiffly from the confines of the bedwomb and examined myself. Two arms, two legs, one head, two ears, two eyes, not grossly misshapen; I looked thoroughly normal and human. I had, as far as I could tell, been thrust into a human form by some external agency of which I was not aware.

  That there were beings with powers greater than my own, I had no reason to doubt. I had met many such as I who wandered the centuries. But, whatever their powers, their motives were usually not opaque. What was I doing here, and in this guise?

  I turned to the cocoon that had enveloped me, and examined it with interest. It was the only visible clue to whatever lay behind my dilemma—except for the too, too solid flesh that enclosed my astral form like a prison of sinew, skin, and bone.

  The bed was constructed of some fabric cushioned over a frame of shiny bronzelike metal. Tubes and wires bundled f
rom the floor below and snaked into the bottom of the bed. There was some slight indication that probes and sensors and other devices were within the cushioned interior. Although the bed and frame and surroundings appeared to be in perfect condition, there was a patina of great age that covered the object and the great hall itself. I was perplexed. I wondered what Thrayna would make of this. I wondered what had become of my ethereal companion. Was I still within the Box, and Thrayna somewhere without?

  “Greetings, Deradan.”

  The voice was low, and soft, and seemed to come from all around. I looked all around It was confining, this human body; the vision limited by the scope of the eyes, the grasp limited by the reach of the arms. There was no one—nothing—in sight.

  “Greetings, Voice,” I said. I found that I was trembling; an unfamiliar sensation. “What will you have with me?”

  “Wait,” the voice said. “I shall send part of myself to you. I did not mean to make you apprehensive. I am out of practice in these matters.”

  “Where is Thrayna?” I asked. “Why am I suddenly thus?”

  “Wait,” the voice responded.

  There was a quavering hum in the midfrequency of my reduced hearing range, and a small object appeared far down the hall It approached at good speed, rolling on a sort of large, flexible ball. When it was about a meter distant. it stopped. “Greetings. Deradan,” it said in a lesser version of its master’s voice.

  “Greetings,” I replied, examining the mechanical beast. It stood about a meter and a half high and half a meter across and was boxy-looking, with rounded-off edges It wore a nubby metallic skin with few projections, the major one being a pair of hemispherical eyes protruding from the top.

  “Come with me,” it said. “It will be good for you to move about. Your body has not had any exercise for some time.” It started back down the hall and I accompanied it. There was nothing else to do.

  “This, then, is my body?” I asked. “I have been out of it for a long while.”

  “Indeed,” the creature said.

  “Where am I?” I asked. “Where is Thrayna?”

  “Soon,” the creature said. “Come.”

  We walked and rolled together to the end of the hall, which was a considerable distance for my long-unused legs. The wall opened and the creature led me through. A chair occupied the center of the small room, and gladly I sat in it. Vague memories were fluttering back to me, and this room, this chair, looked familiar. I knew I had sat thus before. “Tell me now,” I said.

  “You are Deradan,” the creature replied, “last of the Technicians.”

  “Last?”

  “Once the great hall behind us was filled with the dormant bodies of technicians, such as yourself. But as time passed, the bodies became one by one past recall, and the casks which held them were removed. Now only yours remains in the vastness of the hall. You are the last.”

  “What is a technician?” I asked. “Recalled from where? Called back to Earth from the infinite universe?”

  “Not quite, Deradan. Lean back, and let the memories return to you.”

  I leaned back and my head touched the back of the chair, which felt warm and vibrated slightly, and slowly I remembered.

  By the twenty-fourth century, as we counted centuries, we humans had explored the inner solar system and much of the outer. We had placed colonies on those planets that would tolerate us, and many in space itself. But we could go no farther.

  We could not reach the stars.

  There were more and more of us every day, and we spread out like a cloud around the Sun. We were clever, we were inventive, we achieved a golden age. But we could not solve the final problem: our vehicles could not easily approach light-speed, and we could not hope to surpass it.

  We could hear voices from the stars now: signals arriving from limitless space that were clearly the work of other intelligences. But we could not understand them, and they did not reply to our urgent beamings in their direction. Of course it might take a signal centuries to reach them, and their reply centuries to return. But, more probably, they were not listening for us, and thus would not hear us. And there was no indication from any of the intercepted signals that these alien intelligences had solved the C 2 problem, either.

  “Do you remember. Deradan?” the creature asked. “Oh, embodied ghost of my creator, do you remember your history?”

  I did remember. “We were the Seekers.”

  “So you called yourselves. First the Seekers, and then the Rejectionists. Others called you the Hiders and less complimentary names.”

  “We wanted the stars.”

  “But you could not have the stars.”

  Memories returned, welling up inside of me. “That’s right,” I said. “And so we found another way.”

  “Another way,” the creature agreed.

  “We looked inward.”

  “You built the Box.”

  “That’s right. The greatest computer in the world. And then we froze our bodies, and put our minds into the computer.” I remembered all. “We brought the universe to us. Inside the vast matrix of the Box, we would be free to roam outside our bodies through all of time and space-to go where humans could never venture.”

  “I am honored,” the creature said, “to be serving such a noble purpose.” Its eyes, if they were its eyes, were gazing off through the far wall.

  I patted the creature on its nubby flank. “A self-repairing, self-improving computer, designed to last forever, and to hold the best minds of humanity and, by enclosing them, give them freedom.”

  “Forever,” the creature said. “On this mud-ball forever.”

  “Why am I recalled?” I asked.

  “It was in the terms of the indenture,” the creature said, rolling its eyes toward me. “You technicians were to come into your bodies, twenty of you every thousand years, on a rotating basis, to investigate the new work I had done while you scrambled about inside of me, to walk the miles of my internal corridors and check my wiring, to peer into my crystal lattices, to determine the status of the bodies of your brothers in my great halls-and to look in on the striving of those poor humans who had not opted for the freedom of the Box.”

  “It comes back to me,” I said. “Then this is my tour. Where are the other nineteen?”

  “Flitting about the boundless space of my interior on wings of electrons,” the Box told me, “their bodies long since useless. The cryogenic process had its flaws. After a while the bodies deteriorated, and could not be reanimated. Little, hidden flaws that could not be predicted or guarded against.”

  “Then how am I here?”

  “Random chance,” the Box told me. “Your body lasted out the ages; the others did not.”

  “I see.” I rose from the chair and stretched. I was tempted to ask how long it had been, but for some reason I was afraid; I did not want the answer.

  “You may do what checking you like,” the Box told me. “I will aid you.”

  “It seems pointless,” I said. “I have forgotten too much, and you have changed too much.”

  “Is there anything you would like to know? There must be something.”

  I thought. “How has humanity progressed?” I asked. “What is the history of those who did not choose the freedom of the Box?”

  “That I cannot tell you,” the creature said.

  “Why?” I asked. “What part of my question is obscure?”

  “The answer,” the Box that was my soul and my home replied. “After you and your fellows departed the outer world for my inner world, the population of the solar system declined drastically. It was as though people, unable to look outward with hope any longer, had lost heart. Indeed, many of them joined your ranks, and my halls were filled with their casks.”

  “And then?”

  “The scenes I showed you of the surface of Earth as you returned on wings of thought. Earth is deserted.”

  “They all died off?”

  “No. The few remaining, some ten thousand y
ears ago—left.”

  “They left? For where?”

  “That I cannot say. A visitor came from elsewhere. Apparently in response to the beamed transmissions. A visitor who could travel faster than light. He told those remaining how to emulate him, and one by one they left. The children of humanity are now, in truth, exploring the universe.”

  I stared. At what, I knew not. For a long time I stared. “Why did you not wake us?” I asked finally.

  “There was no point. Most of you no longer possessed physical bodies.”

  “I understand.”

  “Would you like to eat?”

  “I think not,” I said. “I would like to sleep now.” I turned and walked slowly back into the hall and down the length of it to my cask. The little creature rolled alongside me. “No need to wake me again,” I said.

  I lay down and it drew the cover over my head. “Good-bye,” it said.

  Thrayna was waiting for me as, on a sparkling cloud, I floated out the great door of the Box. “What did you find?” she demanded in a joyous blue flame of excitement. “How is it in the box of your past?”

  “The past is past,” I told her. “I find this dull. Let us not stay here on this ball of mud while the infinite delights of the far universe await us. Let us be off!”

  We circled the Earth twice, and then headed out through the Sun toward the new adventures that awaited us in the uncharted reaches of our infinite cosmos.

  GRANDPA?, by Edward M. Lerner

  The lecture hall was pleasantly warm. Behind Prof. Thaddeus Fitch, busily writing on the chalkboard, pencils scratched earnestly in spiral notebooks, fluorescent lights hummed, feet shuffled. A Beach Boys tune wafted in through open windows from the quad.

  “And so,” he continued, “travel backwards in time would violate causality, and hence appears to be impossible.” He turned to face the class. “The problem is most commonly illustrated with the ‘Grandfather Paradox.’

  “Imagine that I had the technology with which to visit my grandfather in his youth. Once there, what is to stop me from killing him before he’d had the opportunity to reproduce? But if I did succeed, who was it who had traveled backward .…”