A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  The mass of bodies at his feet stirred. Anander found it hard to believe the huddle consisted of many separate beings. He counted eleven . . .twelve individuals, all with the same pert, furry faces. They were lemur-like in form: tufted ears, long tails.

  A member of the group spoke. “We understand, Anander Flyte. We watch your lives in the visionglass. We know what you desire.”

  “Then you must know—” Anander began.

  “Your viral machines must not infect the iceworlds, inworlder. Life, intelligent life, dwells in the clouds above the lower planets. We have listened to the heavens. We have heard their song.”

  Anander remembered that the Darklings viewed the solar system as a hierarchy. Below, from their perspective, lay the rocky planets: archaic, backward, semibarbaric. Higher up were the gasworlds, numinous and enlightened. Higher still, one came to the heavenly clouds of the greater orbits, full of mystical dust and interstellar wind.

  Like all cosmologies, this one had its superstitions.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” Anander said, “that there are aliens living in the Kuiper Belt—out there in the middle of nothing?”

  The Darklings spoke as a group, many answering at once. “Not aliens. It is the Old Ones who live there. The ancient people, who first flew to the clouds.”

  Anander lifted wondering eyes to Maximilian.

  “It seems to me,” the secretaid said, “that the Darklings believe human beings to be living in the Kuiper Belt. A sort of Lost Tribe legend. It’s a common bit of folklore, even in the gasworlds. The moonfolk of Uranus believe—”

  “I know what they’re saying, Max. But how can I possibly—” Anander turned back to the Darklings. “You have to understand, it’s impossible for anyone to be living out there. There’s so little energy from any natural source. A few drips and drabs of radiation, most of it of the killing kind. Anyone generating the power necessary to sustain human life—it would take engineering on a massive scale. Our surveys would detect it.”

  The Darklings withdrew their hands: a gesture of negation.

  “The Old Ones live. They are superhuman, yes. But your instruments would not have detected them.”

  “But you can’t simply assert this. Violating the treaty, canceling the project . . . trillions of lives are at stake. Without proof—”

  A tremor passed through the huddle of furred bodies. Something moved rapidly through two dozen hands. Anander made out two joined, slim tubes.

  A viewing scroll. He pulled the tubes apart, revealing the screen, and thumbed the switch to a slow speed.

  The contents slid by: thousands of tiny dots.

  “What am I looking at here?” The Darklings were hushed in the presence of their sacred document. Anander looked from face to furry face. “Is this some sort of code? An encrypted signal?” Tentative fingers plucked at his robe. “Am I supposed to understand this?”

  “It is the voice of the Old Ones,” a dozen mouths murmured in response.

  “How can I know that? What does it say? Have you deciphered it? Have you any idea where it came from?”

  Palms patted him, toes poked him, tiny noses tapped his legs. With surprise, Anander realized the Darklings were ushering him toward the door. Reassuring murmurs rose from the group.

  “We have prepared . . .”

  “. . .a presentation . . .”

  “You must meet . . .”

  “. . .the interpreters.”

  “They will . . .”

  “. . .make all clear.”

  As he stumbled to the exit, Anander glanced in alarm at Maximilian. “Are we really going along with this?”

  “It would seem,” said the secretaid, moving to join the group, “that we have little choice.”

  ANANDER AND MAXIMILIAN clambered up a dim, twisting tunnel, fumbling along the sculpted rock walls.

  Far from the friendly climes of the inner worlds, the Darklings were aficionados of subterranean living. Their habitats were typical moonlets, spinning balls of excavated rock. But unlike the dwellers of the Inner Belt, the Darklings made no attempt to simulate greener pastures in their artificial caves. There were no ersatz suns, no lakes or forests. Nothing resembling open sky.

  Only tunnels. Warm, dim, and cozy.

  Somewhere in humanity’s genetic heritage lay a deep-seated instinct for close quarters. Call it a touch of ancestral claustrophilia. With successive tweaks to the human genome, each generation of Darklings had doubled down on those inherited tendencies. Darkling society and Darkling physiology favored the pleasures of intimate contact. They loved to cuddle, to huddle, to nest. A day in their life was like a group massage at an excellent slumber party.

  The tunnels themselves tended toward labyrinthine complexity. After fifteen turns, Anander gave up tracking the route, letting the Darklings guide him with their furry hands.

  “Where exactly is it that we’re going?”

  “Inward,” Maximilian said behind him. “Toward the center of the asteroid.”

  Anander sighed. It didn’t take a genius to notice that the rotational gravity had dropped as they climbed the sloping rock passages. But it hadn’t dropped much by the time they turned and entered a large apartment.

  Like all Darkling habitations the place was dimly lit, roughly hewn, and scattered with glowing niches and pits that simulated the throb of firelight. Anander’s head brushed the ceiling. He was surprised to discover accommodations suited to an inworld habitation: morphifoam furniture, a Martian media box, even the luxury of an old-fashioned bed. The chambers were divided by swinging doors, an extreme gaucherie in Darkling society.

  A door opened, and Anander laughed with delighted surprise.

  “Ojami!”

  She came crabwalking across the dirt floor, supported by the limbs of her waldosuit. She laughed at Anander’s astonishment. Her blind eyes, hidden by the black polymer of a cybervisor, swung toward him.

  “Hello, Anander. How was your trip?”

  He touched her shriveled hand. “Long, wasteful, and to all appearances, fruitless. What are you doing all the way out here? We thought you were on Oberon.”

  “Yes, that’s what I told InterOrbital. Got my travel clearance and said my goodbyes. And then I hacked the pilot, hooked around Uranus, and flew straight here. For five Terran years I’ve been living in this hole. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She tipped her head, ever so slightly. The waldo-suit lifted a carburized limb, waving him toward the far end of the room. Anander’s ‘tome kicked in, heightening his attention. He focused on Ojami’s face. She had no control of her body, hence no body language, but to his heightened perception, the smallest twitch of her cheek was revealing. There was urgency in her manner, he noted. She behaved as if she were on a strict schedule.

  “They must be going frantic back in Operations,” Anander said as he followed her ticking, clicking waldosuit across the room. “You were the best Visualizer they had.”

  “And you were Outreach’s ultimate smooth talker.” Ojami grinned, her facial expressions eerily disconnected from her movements. Her voice, like her body, was a cyborg enhancement, independent of the movements of her lips. Still, it sounded very much like real speech. “That’s why we’re both out here, Anander. We’re both the best at what we do.” She added after a moment, “Anyway, Visualizers don’t get frantic. We just switch to a different perspective.”

  Ojami steered her waldosuit through the open hatch of the media capsule. An import from the inworlds, the machine had been crudely lodged in the contours of Warren’s natural rock. Anander followed Ojami inside. With the hatch shut, the outside world dimmed. They were in the immanent realm of infospace.

  “I’ve been promised a presentation,” Anander said as the walls filled with stochastic fog. “Are you the one who’s going to give it?”

  Ojami smiled in answer. In the foggy walls, an image coalesced. Printed paper, lines and dots. A scan of the Darklings’ sacred document.

  “The Darklings summoned
me eight years ago.” Ojami’s face moved as if tracking images. The walls filled with assorted graphics: chemical equations, orbital paths, charts of the solar system, graphs and tables. “They needed my help to answer a question. I assume you know what that question was.”

  “They wanted you to determine,” Anander said, “whether or not human beings were living in the Kuiper Belt.” He didn’t wait for Ojami to confirm his guess; he could read confirmation in the set of her lips. “And you told them no, I’m sure.” Anander turned in place, admiring the panoramic collage.

  Ojami’s face, aided by the pneumatics of her suit, swung side to side, reviewing the chamber’s riot of images. Now it swung to him.

  “I told them I would think about it.” She twitched a cyborg limb at the surrounding pictures, causing one to expand. A field of dots: rows upon rows. “The Darklings showed you their data?”

  “They showed me a kind of sacred scroll.” Anander shook his head, amazed they were discussing this. Two of InterOrbital’s greatest minds, chasing snatches of local folklore. “Like sheet music. That’s what it resembled.”

  “They’ve been collecting that information for decades. Studying the icy bodies in the belt. The document you saw is highly refined, something of a triumph of signals processing. You’re not wrong to compare it to sheet music. Basically, it’s a record of subtle, unexplained orbital perturbations. Unexpected shifts in the movements of the rocks.”

  Ojami swept aside the Darkling document, drawing forward an animated model of a section of the Kuiper Belt. Tiny dots moved in stately arcs, a model of orbital mechanics.

  “The belt is a giant chaotic system,” Ojami said. “Easy to model at a small level, highly complex at a macro level. Since the q-com revolution, we’ve had the computational resources to track and model its behavior with very high accuracy. That’s what the Darklings have been doing. They watch the rocks, they track the movements, they feed the data into local storage. The core of this habitat is essentially a giant, superdense supercomputer.”

  “As with all Darkling habitats,” Anander said. “I know their ways.”

  Ojami’s waldosuit flexed and settled. “The point is, we don’t expect to see a lot of wacky, wild behavior out there—just as you don’t expect to see billiard balls wiggling and jumping around a pool table. If we do, it’s worth investigating. Even if the anomalies are quite subtle.”

  “How subtle are we talking?” Anander asked.

  Ojami’s waldosuit raised a claw. It took Anander at least three seconds. Then his heightened powers of attention kicked in. He saw that her claw—ever so slightly—was twitching.

  “Just striking enough to be noticeable,” Ojami said. “Of course, we’re talking about a cosmic perspective. But once you know what to look for, the phenomenon begs for explication. The rocks out there aren’t following the patterns we expect. Rotations, revolutions—they’re all jittering in a very strange manner. Those thousands of icy lumps? They’re moving, Anander. Flying. When we graph the orbits, we don’t see lines. We see very complicated waveforms.”

  “Like strings,” Anander said, “plucked and vibrating.” He immediately shook his head. “But that’s silly. I mean, it’s silly to speculate about people living out there. There must be some large mass—some big rock, some undiscovered planet—exerting a gravitational pull, throwing off the calculations.”

  Ojami shook her head. “A hidden planet, just rolling along? Completely hidden from our sensors? C’mon. We’ve charted the place; we’ve mapped the big players. I don’t know if you appreciate how fantastically delicate the sensors are.”

  “Could radiation produce this effect?” Anander asked. “Some kind of space dust? Isn’t there a phenomenon whereby the energy from the sun—?”

  “The heliospheric current,” Ojami interjected.

  “Yes, yes. Isn’t there a place where it hits the background cosmic radiation, creates a kind of electromagnetic storm—?”

  “You’re thinking of the termination shock. All these phenomena have been thoroughly studied. And accounted for. Anander.” She laid a mechanical claw on his arm. “This is why the Darklings called me here. Me, in particular. Do you understand?”

  Anander’s mind lurched into a higher state of concentration, analyzing the social aspects of the situation. Ojami was the solar system’s most accomplished Visualizer. Her brain’s connectome, like his, had been modified for specialized functions. In contrast to his, Ojami’s had been fine-tuned for advanced mathematical analysis. Neural systems that normally processed vision, motion, sound, had been rewired, harnessed, to enable superhuman feats of spatial rotation, Fourier analysis, hyperbolic geometry . . . Inside her head, Ojami saw math, felt math, heard math in a way Anander could never understand.

  The Visualizers served InterOrbital as an elite caste of advisors, interpreting the output of the government’s cyber-oracles. For a Visualizer of Ojami’s status to embark on a frivolous ghost chase, out here on the empty frontier—

  “It’s madness,” Anander said. “An interesting anomaly, yes. An intriguing mathematical mystery. But there simply can’t be human life in the K-Belt. Not under current conditions.”

  “That,” said Ojami, “is what I’ve been trying to determine.”

  She scuttled across the small floor. The media capsule—attuned, like Ojami’s cyborg supplements, to subtle changes within her brain—recomposed its scattered collage, bringing to prominence a set of graphs and tables. They combined, collapsing into a web of linked values. The whole intricate jumble began to flex and evolve, changing according to some set of internal rules, rotated perhaps through the planes of higher dimensions—

  It was a mathematical structure far beyond Anander’s comprehension. He gave up trying to understand what he was seeing and simply waited for Ojami’s explanation.

  “You know,” she said, her cyber-voice blurred by the effort of concentration, “the K-Belt was settled . . .once upon a time . . .”

  “By the Ascetic sects, yes.” Anander nodded. It had taken place many thousands of years ago. Early colonists—a small and eccentric group of trans-faith mystics, inspired by a potent blend of French philosophy and Buddhist doctrine—had fled the riotous affairs of the inner planets to pursue a life of monkish meditation far from the reach of civilization. In the crude ships of the day, they had journeyed into the dust and dark of the outer orbits—and vanished. Within a century, all communications had ceased. The Virtual Wars had drawn attention from their plight. By the time anyone thought to mount a search, all trace of the Ascetic colonists had vanished. Not even the hulks of their ships were found.

  “They died,” Anander said, “and drifted off. They’re gone.”

  “Or,” said Ojami, “they’re not.”

  There had always been rumors. Tales, popular romances, stubborn crackpots insisting that the Kuiper colonists had somehow survived. Only the Darklings took those old stories seriously.

  And, apparently, the mathematical genius at Anander’s side.

  “They’d have to have constructed a large-scale habitat,” Anander said. “They’d be running reactors. There’d be a radiation signature. We’d have detected it.”

  “A moment ago,” Ojami said, “you were prepared to believe in undiscovered planets.”

  “And you were right; it was a ridiculous notion. But dead planets don’t draw attention. Human habitations do.”

  “You forget,” Ojami said, “we’re talking about a group of Ascetics. People who devote their lives to minimizing their energy use. Which is why they flew out there in the first place.”

  “They still have to live. Unless you mean to suggest . . .” Anander’s scalp tingled. “You think they’ve solved the simulation problem?”

  Ojami’s face went eerily still; even with his upgraded attention, Anander found it hard to read her expression. “There are a lot of ways to limit resource consumption,” she said. “You don’t necessarily need to scan your brain into a chunk of silicon. Ancient yogis go
t pretty far with nothing more than mental discipline. Meditation, Anander. No technological aids, no genetic tailoring. Just practice.”

  “Even yogis can’t survive in a vacuum.”

  “I’ve been running the numbers,” Ojami went on. “Taking what we know of metabolic processes, mental states, thermodynamics. It might be possible, with the right modifications . . .” Her crabsuit clicked. “Of course, what we’re talking about would scarcely be recognizable as human. But it would be embodied. It would think like a human. Dream like a human. At a very, very sluggish pace.”

  “You’re talking about hibernating,” Anander said.

  “I’m talking about human modification. Maximizing the efficiency of thought.”

  “Meditating.” Anander laughed. “You might as well freeze yourself.”

  “Freezing is a fast and catastrophically destructive process. This would be like gradually slowing down. Slower and slower, over the millennia. Evolving toward a lower entropic boundary.”

  “Brains in ice cubes.” Anander shook his head.

  He stared into the depths of Ojami’s model. The nodes of his connectome twitched, settling into new patterns of fixation. In the giddy vertigo of a eureka moment, Anander suddenly saw it, the vision Ojami had limned. Brains on ice, refined and reduced, purged of every buzzing distraction. The superfluities of life stripped away, consciousness’s noisy symphony pared to a five-note leitmotif. What Buddhists called the “monkey mind”—screeching, chattering—would have been scientifically tranquilized.

  He could almost believe in them, these orbiting souls, each gripped, dreaming, in a fist of ice.

  Reality smashed the fantasy.

  “But why the perturbations? Even if they’re out there, chasing Nirvana on ice—why not just float in peace?”

  Ojami’s waldosuit flexed. “It wouldn’t break the energy bank to produce the movements we’re seeing. Superconcentrated gases, microreactors, crystalline assemblers . . .With the right techniques, the right computers, a whole heaping lot of patience . . .”