Women in Deep Time

by Greg Bear

  —So she went out and fought and died. They never even made fibs about her. This killed her?

  I don’t think so. She fought well enough. She died like other hawks died.

  —And she might have lived otherwise.

  —How can I know that, any more than you?

  They we met again, you know. I met a Clevo once, on my ship. They didn’t let me stay with him long.

  —How did you react to him?

  There was so little time, I don’t know.

  Let’s ask….

  In thousands of duty stations, it was inevitable that some of Prufrax’s visions would come true, that they should meet now and then. Clevos were numerous, as were Prufraxes. Every ship carried complements of several of each. Though Prufrax was never quite as successful as the original, she was a fine type. She

  —She was never quite as successful. They took away her edge. They didn’t even know it!

  —They must have known.

  Then they didn’t want to win!

  —We don’t know that. Maybe there were more important considerations.

  —Yes, like killing history.

  Aryz shuddered in his warming body, dizzy as if about to bud, then regained control. He had been pulled from the mandate, called to his own duty.

  He examined the shapes and the human captive. There was something different about them. How long had they been immersed in the mandate? He checked quickly, frantically, before answering the call. The reconstructed Mam had malfunctioned. None of them had been nourished. They were thin, pale, cooling.

  Even the bloated mutant shape was dying; lost, like the others, in the mandate.

  He turned his attention away. Everything was confusion. Was he human or Senexi now? Had he fallen so low as to understand them? He went to the origin of the call, the ruins of the temporary brood chamber. The corridors were caked with ammonia ice, burning his pod as he slipped over them. The brood mind had come out of flux bind. The emergency support systems hadn’t worked well; the brood mind was damaged.

  “Where have you been?” it asked.

  “I assumed I would not be needed until your return from the flux bind.”

  “You have not been watching!”

  “Was there any need? We are so advanced in time, all our actions are obsolete. The nebula is collapsed, the issue is decided.”

  “We do not know that. We are being pursued.”

  Aryz turned to the sensor wall—what was left of it—and saw that they were, indeed, being pursued. He had been lax.

  “It is not your fault,” the brood mind said. “You have been set a task that tainted you and ruined your function. You will dissipate.”

  Aryz hesitated. He had become so different, so tainted, that he actually hesitated at a direct command from the brood mind. But it was damaged. Without him, without what he had learned, what could it do? It wasn’t reasoning correctly.

  “There are facts you must know, important facts—”

  Aryz felt a wave of revulsion, uncomprehending fear, and something not unlike human anger radiate from the brood mind. Whatever he had learned and however he had changed, he could not withstand that wave.

  Willingly, and yet against his will—it didn’t matter—he felt himself liquefying. His pod slumped beneath him, and he fell over, landing on a pool of frozen ammonia. It burned, but he did not attempt to lift himself. Before he ended, he saw with surprising clarity what it was to be a branch ind, or a brood mind, or a human. Such a valuable insight, and it leaked out of his permea and froze on the ammonia.

  The brood mind regained what control it could of the fragment. But there were no defenses worthy of the name. Calm, preparing for its own dissipation, it waited for the pursuit to conclude.

  The Mam set off an alarm. The interface with the mandate was severed. Weak, barely able to crawl, the humans looked at each other in horror and slid to opposite corners of the chamber.

  They were confused: which of them was the captive, which the decoy shape? It didn’t seem important. They were both bone thin, filthy with their own excrement. They turned with one motion to stare at the bloated mutant. It sat in its corner, tiny head incongruous on the huge thorax, tiny arms and legs barely functional even when healthy. It smiled wanly at them.

  “We felt you,” one of the Prufraxes said. “You were with us in there.” Her voice was a soft croak.

  “That was my place,” it replied. “My only place.”

  “What function, what name?”

  “I’m…I know that. I’m a researcher. In there. I knew myself in there.”

  They squinted at the shape. The head. Something familiar, even now. “You’re a Clevo…”

  There was noise all around them, cutting off the shape’s weak words. As they watched, their chamber was sectioned like an orange, and the wedges peeled open. The illumination ceased. Cold enveloped them.

  A naked human female, surrounded by tiny versions of herself, like an angel circled by fairy kin, floated into the chamber. She was thin as a snake. She wore nothing but silver rings on her wrists and a narrow torque around her waist. She glowed blue green in the dark.

  The two Prufraxes moved their lips weakly but made no sound in the near vacuum. Who are you?

  She surveyed them without expression, then held out her arms as if to fly. She wore no gloves, but she was of their type.

  As she had done countless times before on finding such Senexi experiments—though this seemed older than most—she lifted one arm higher. The blue green intensified, spread in waves to the mangled walls, surrounded the freezing, dying shapes. Perfect, angelic, she left the debris behind to cast its fitful glow and fade.

  They had destroyed every portion of the fragment but one. They left it behind unharmed.

  Then they continued, millions of them thick like mist, working the spaces between the stars, their only master the overness of the real.

  They needed no other masters. They would never malfunction.

  The mandate drifted in the dark and cold, its memory going on, but its only life the rapidly fading tracks where minds had once passed through it. The trails writhed briefly, almost as if alive, but only following the quantum rules of diminishing energy states. Finally, a small memory was illuminated.

  Prufrax’s last poem, explained the mandate reflexively.

  How the fires grow!

  Peace passes

  All memory lost.

  Somehow we always miss that single door,

  Dooming ourselves to circle.

  Ashes to stars, lies to souls,

  Let’s spin round the sinks and holes.

  Kill the good, eat the young.

  Forever and more,

  You and I are never done.

  The track faded into nothing. Around the mandate, the universe grew old very quickly.

  Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, © 1983 by Greg Bear.

  Scattershot

  The teddy bear spoke excellent mandarin. It stood about fifty centimeters tall, a plump fellow with close set eyes above a nose unusually long for the generally pug breed. It paced around me, muttering to itself.

  I rolled over and felt barbs down my back and sides. My arms moved with reluctance. Something about my will to get up and the way my muscles reacted was out of kilter; the nerves didn’t conveying properly. So it was, I thought, with my eyes and the small black and white beast they claimed to see: a derangement of phosphene patterns, cross tied with childhood memories and snatches of linguistics courses ten years past.

  It began speaking Russian. I ignored it and focused on other things. The rear wall of my cabin was unrecognizable, covered with geometric patterns that shifted in and out of bas relief and glowed faintly in the shadow cast by a skewed panel light. My fold out desk had been torn from its hinges and now lay on the floor, not far from my head. The ceiling was cream colored. Last I remembered it had been a pleasant shade of burnt orange. Thus tallied, half my cabin was still with me. The other
half had been ferried away in the

  Disruption. I groaned, and the bear stepped back nervously. My body was gradually coordinating. Bits and pieces of disassembled vision integrated and stopped their random flights, and still the creature walked, and still it spoke, though getting deep into German.

  It was not a minor vision. It was either real or a full fledged hallucination.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  It bent over me, sighed, and said, “Of all the fated arrangements. A speaking I know not the best of-Anglo.” It held out its arms and shivered. “Pardon the distraught. My cords of psyche-nerves?-they have not decided which continuum to obey this moment.”

  “Same for me,” I said cautiously. “Who are you?”

  “Psyche, we are all psyche. Take this care and be not content with illusion, this path, this merriment. Excuse. Some writers in English. All I know is from the read.”

  “Am I still on my ship?”

  “So we are all, and hors de combat. We limp for the duration.”

  I was integrated enough to stand, and I towered over the bear, rearranging my tunic. My left breast ached with a bruise. Because we had been riding at one G for five days, I was wearing a bra, and the bruise lay directly under a strap. Such, to quote, was the fated arrangement. As my wits gathered and held converse, I considered what might have happened and felt a touch of the “distraughts” myself. I began to shiver like a recruit in pressure drop training.

  We had survived. That is, at least I had survived, out of a crew of forty three. How many others?

  “Do you know…have you found out”

  “Worst,” the bear said. “Some I do not catch, the deciphering of other things not so hard. Disrupted about seven, eight hours past. It was a force of many, for I have counted ten separate things not in my recognition.” It grinned. “You are ten, and best yet. We are perhaps not so far in world lines.”

  We’d been told survival after disruption was possible. Practical statistics indicated one out of a myriad ships, so struck, would remain integral. For a weapon that didn’t actually kill in itself, the probability disrupter was very effective.

  “Are we intact?” I asked.

  “Fated,” the Teddy bear said. “I cognize we can even move and seek a base. Depending.”

  “Depending,” I echoed. The creature sounded masculine, despite size and a childlike voice. “Are you a he? Or—”

  “He,” the bear said quickly.

  I touched the bulkhead above the door and ran my finger along a familiar, slightly crooked seam. Had the disruption kept me in my own universe—against incalculable odds—or exchanged me to some other? Was either of us in a universe we could call our own?

  “Is it safe to look around?”

  The bear hummed. “Cognize—know not. Last I saw, others had not reached a state of organizing.”

  It was best to start from the beginning. I looked down at the creature and rubbed a bruise on my forehead. “Wh where are you from?”

  “Same as you, possible,” he said. “Earth. Was mascot to captain, for cuddle and advice.”

  That sounded bizarre enough. I walked to the hatchway and peered down the corridor. It was plain and utilitarian, but neither the right color nor configuration. The hatch at the end was round and had a manual sealing system, six black throw-bolts that no human engineer would ever have put on a spaceship. “What’s your name?”

  “Have got no official name. Mascot name known only to captain.”

  I was scared, so my brusque nature surfaced and I asked him sharply if his captain was in sight, or any other aspect of the world he’d known.

  “Cognize not,” he answered. “Call me Sonok.”

  “I’m Geneva,” I said. “Francis Geneva.”

  “We are friends?”

  “I don’t see why not. I hope we’re not the only ones who can be friendly. Is English difficult for you?”

  “Mind not. I learn fast. Practice make perfection.”

  “Because I can speak some Russian, if you want.”

  “Good as I with Anglo?” Sonok asked. I detected a sense of humor—and self esteem-in the bear.

  “No, probably not. English it is. If you need to know anything, don’t be embarrassed to ask.”

  “Sonok hardly embarrassed by anything. Was mascot.”

  The banter was providing a solid framework for my sanity to grab on to. I had an irrational desire to take the bear and hug him, just for want of something warm. His attraction was undeniable tailored, I guessed, for that very purpose. But tailored from what? The color suggested panda; the shape did not.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked, sitting on my bunk.

  “Sonok not known for quick decisions,” he said, squatting on the floor in front of me. He was stubby limbed but far from clumsy.

  “Nor am I,” I said. “I’m a software and machinery language expert. I wasn’t combat trained.”

  “Not cognize ‘software,’” Sonok said.

  “Programming materials,” I explained. The bear nodded and got up to peer around the door. He pulled back and scrabbled to the rear of the cabin.

  “They’re here!” he said. “Can port shut?”

  “I wouldn’t begin to know how—” But I retreated just as quickly and clung to my bunk. A stream of serpents flowed by the hatchway, metallic green and yellow, with spade-shaped heads and red ovals running dorsally.

  The stream passed without even a hint of intent to molest, and Sonok climbed down the bas relief pattern. “What the hell are they doing here?” I asked.

  “They are a crew member, I think,” Sonok said.

  “What—who else is out there?”

  The bear straightened and looked at me steadily. “Have none other than to seek,” he said solemnly. “Elsewise, we possess no rights to ask. No?” The bear walked to the hatch, stepped over the bottom seal, and stood in the corridor. “Come?”

  I got up and followed.

  A woman’s mind is a strange pool to slip into at birth. It is set within parameters by the first few months of listening and seeing. Her infant mind is a vast blank template that absorbs all and stores it away. In those first few months come role acceptance, a beginning to attitude, and a hint of future achievement. Listening to adults and observing their actions build a storehouse of preconceptions and warnings: Do not see those ghosts on bedroom walls—they aren’t there! None of the rest of us can see your imaginary companions, darling…. It’s something you have to understand.

  And so, from some dim beginning, not ex nihilo but out of totality, the woman begins to pare her infinite self down. She whittles away at this unwanted piece, that undesired trait. She forgets in time that she was once part of all and turns to the simple tune of life, rather than to the endless and symphonic before. She forgets those companions who danced on the ceiling above her bed and called to her from the dark. Some of them were friendly; others, even in the dim time, were not pleasant. But they were all she. For the rest of her life, the woman seeks some echo of that preternatural menagerie; in the men she chooses to love, in the tasks she chooses to perform, in the way she tries to be. After thirty years of cutting, she becomes Francis Geneva.

  When love dies, another piece is pared away, another universe is sheared off, and the split can never join again. With each winter and spring, spent on or off worlds with or without seasons, the woman’s life grows more solid, and smaller.

  But now the parts are coming together again, the companions out of the dark above the child’s bed. Beware of them. They’re all the things you once lost or let go, and now they walk on their own, out of your control; reborn, as it were, and indecipherable.

  “Do you have understanding?”‘ the bear asked. I shook my head to break my steady stare at the six bolted hatch.

  “Understand what?” I asked.

  “Of how we are here.”

  “Disrupted. By Aighors, I presume.”

  “Yes, they are the ones for us, too. But how?” />
  “I don’t know,” I said. No one did. We could only observe the results. When the remains of disrupted ships could be found, they always resembled floating garbage heaps—plucked from our universe, rearranged in some cosmic grab bag, and returned. What came back was of the same mass, made up of the same basic materials, and recombined with a tendency toward order and viability. But in deep space, even ninety percent viability was tantamount to none at all. If the ship’s separate elements didn’t integrate perfectly—a one in a hundred thousand chance there were no survivors. But oh, how interested we were in the corpses! Most were kept behind the Paper Curtain of secrecy, but word leaked out even so—word of ostriches with large heads, blobs with bits of crystalline seawater still adhering to them…and now my own additions, a living Teddy bear and a herd of parti colored snakes. All had been snatched out of terrestrial ships from a maze of different universes.

  Word also leaked out that of five thousand such incidents, not once had a human body been returned to our continuum.

  “Some things still work,” Sonok said. ‘We are heavy the same.”

  The gravitation was unchanged I hadn’t paid attention to that. ‘We can still breathe, for that matter,” I said. ‘We’re all from one world. There’s no reason to think the basics will change.” And that meant there had to be standards for communication, no matter how diverse the forms. Communication was part of my expertise, but thinking about it made me shiver. A ship runs on computers, or their equivalent. How were at least ten different computer systems communicating? Had they integrated with working interfaces? If they hadn’t, our time was limited. Soon all hell would join us, darkness and cold, and vacuum.

  I released the six throw bolts and opened the hatch slowly.

  “Say, Geneva,” Sonok mused as we looked into the corridor beyond. “How did the snakes get through here?”