Nebula Awards Showcase 2001: The Year's Best SF and Fantasy Chosen by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

by Robert Silverberg

  Days ago, according to their measure of time, Elaine and Casey, the ship commander, discussed the mission just after making love in her quarters. During their peculiar expressions of passion, the heel of Elaine’s foot had pressed briefly, and hard, against the screen of her room’s computer terminal and, as a result, I was riding on a surge of energy that sent me bouncing from circuit to diode to cable and back again. At the time I paid little attention to what the two were saying, although like everything else I ever heard I remembered it later.

  “I have serious misgivings,” Casey said, his words coming out of his mouth in odd groupings, nothing like the rhythm of speech he normally employed.

  “About what?” Elaine asked, as she rubbed his chest. Casey was muscular, according to the impressions of others that I picked up when I absorbed from the humans aboard the ship. Muscularity, and for that matter, all corporeality drew my interest easily as a field of study.) The others regarded his face, however, as something less than beautiful, as they judged beauty. Elaine of course was the standard. She was beautiful, even with her face marred by its continual unhappiness, and Casey was not.

  For a long while Casey lay with his eyes shut and steadied his breathing.

  “Misgivings,” Elaine prompted.

  “Yes. About our goals. Our mission objective. The dark at the end of the tunnel.”

  “You’re posing again.”

  “I have gotten through life this way. Don’t stop me now. What I mean, Elaine, is that I always wanted my life to mean something.”

  “It does. You’re a commander.”

  “Hollow triumph. I’m a commander who has never fought a major battle, never made an impact on political structures, never discovered anything significant during years of exploring the backwater regions of the universe.”

  I could understand Casey because of the rare absorptions I had drawn from him, but I tended to avoid his energy unless I was in a low-level state.

  Elaine again accused him of posing and for a short while he became more direct.

  “This mission is a punishment. No, not a punishment—that would imply someone out to get me. I am not that important. No one is out to get me. I am just someone in the command structure, and a lower-echelon commander at that, who can be given a futile mission because there is nothing important for him to do anyway. What are we doing, when you come right down to it? Someone a thousand light-years away has theorized the location of the edge of the universe and so, as outsiders and therefore expendable, we are sent to the nearest point that the theory says it might be. If there is no edge to the universe, then the universe is infinite, as we have always comfortably believed, and we can go on forever looking for it. Talk about being shunted aside.”

  Elaine stayed quiet. I could imagine her thoughts, though. She did not really like Casey, and she thought his skills at making love were just another part of his posing, but she needed the feelings, the sensations that the act provided, and he tended to provide these sensations most efficiently. So she let him pose, both in speech and manner because, for the time being, he suited her, and of course there was not much opportunity aboard a small ship, many of whose inhabitants had been surgically altered to deny normal human urges. The higher command officers were allowed to refuse the alterations.

  “If there is no edge to the universe,” she finally said, “then we will prove it, and that will be that, and in its way that’ll be your contribution. In the meantime, while we wait for it, touch me there. Ah, I feel that all through me.”

  I agreed with Elaine. Whether or not there was an edge to the universe, a physical measurable border where it all ended, did not matter to me. What I am particularly irritated about, as I review that conversation, is Casey’s statement that he had made no significant discoveries. They had, after all, come to my planet, mapped it, communicated with us, and then—in a peculiar and arrogant act of human assertion—had figured out a way to capture one of its beings—me—and store it in a computer to take it home for further study. By the time I had figured out how to bypass the netting of electrical impulses that had trapped me, their ship had carried me too far away from my planet to return. I do not know if I would have returned had there been an opportunity. This computer provides so many of the needs I had to struggle for at home that I find it quite relaxing. Besides, observing humans, or any other creatures, fascinates me. On our planet, we only had us.

  The humans thought that snaring me was akin to imprisoning a ghost or pulling a being made of water out of an ocean, things that apparently human beings had accomplished in earlier expeditions in their history. History itself was a concept that I had struggled to understand. The whole idea of keeping a record of the past was anathema to me, and I suspected that, if my species had kept a history instead of an orally transmitted set of astonishing and ever-changing tales, our history would be longer than theirs but with less self-congratulation.

  Now, according to every calculation and examination of physical data accomplished by the ship computer, we have reached the goal, the edge of the universe—surely, irretrievably, and all the other adverbs of certainty in the ingenious human lexicon. The absolute edge. On the other side of it was nothing. On this side of it were Slipshod and the last few asteroids on the way to the edge.

  The concept of the edge of the universe meant little to me. I lived, for the time being, in the universe of this computer and it was a vast one. With its twistings and turnings, its loops and spirals, its way of curving back into itself, this was an infinite universe—as infinite as I needed, if that is not some sort of contradictory term. Humans worry about the convolutions and layered meanings of language, but I find them rich and abundant and representative of another kind of infinity, one which could occupy me forever. Humans call their good feelings happiness. That word is sufficient for me to describe the lack of resentment I feel at being separated from my own kind and imprisoned in this computer.

  Sometimes I realized that I needed the humans for the surges and bursts of erratic energy that kept me going. I am, like them, finite and, if they die without transmitting me to a place where there are more of them, I will die, too. Snap out of existence, and it won’t matter. I can go on longer than they, since I have stored abundant reserves of their energy in the computer’s dark places, enough energy to keep me going for a long period of their time, even after the computer itself fails. If I could absorb enough energy to leave them and go home across the void, I might try it. I have a good sense of where home is. It is mapped in their computer memory, and I can carry the information along with me—but I could only make it if I could count on encountering other beings, in other ships on their way to other places. The other way I could die is for the computer to be destroyed.

  For now, though, we are on Slipshod, and with the humans I look out at the edge of the universe and try to see something more, some detail, some moving thing that would let us perceive what the other side of the universe was like.

  “What are we looking for?” Casey said. “If we could see something out there, it would not be the edge of the universe. If the universe ends here, there can be nothing out there. Anything out there would just be an extension of our universe. I mean, even now, all we have are computer readings that indicate this is the edge along with an undeniably human fear to test it further.”

  The single foray the ship had made toward the edge had resulted in all the controls of the ship going haywire and forcing it to turn away and return to Slipshod.

  “What about if this is not the absolute edge?” said Blackie, a crewman. Blackie was the physical opposite of Casey, small and unimpressive. “What about if this is the borderline with another universe? An edge, a border we can’t cross, but another universe out there, existing separately?”

  “If so, I hope it’s better than this one,” Elaine said, her voice strange, what the humans call distracted. “Another universe like this one would be a waste of time by whoever’s building the universes.”

  “Multive
rses,” I said through the computer’s audio system. Most of the crew were, as always, startled by one of my rare speaking intrusions. Either they forget me or do not, unlike Elaine, care to admit I am here, that I am, for good or ill, one of them, a crewmember, albeit undocketed. Apparently the reason they are uneasy with me is that I have no physical presence among them. “If where we are is a universe,” I continued, “and there is another universe, then your God or Creator made multiverses.”

  “Is that so, what the spark-dog says, is that true, Casey?” Blackie asked. Blackie himself was never sure about anything and always asking others for verification.

  “Semantics have never been my strong point,” Casey responded. “Thing is, now that we have pretty much verified this is the edge of the universe, what do we do now?”

  Elaine, whose warm hands on the computer surface had been transmitting some complicated and thrilling energy, abruptly walked away from the computer, toward Casey, and said: “We are here to be sure, to check further. I’ll go. Let me go.”

  “Go where?” Casey asked.

  “To the edge. Through it.”

  She now stood in front of him, her posture defiant.

  “It’s too risky,” Casey said. “You might—”

  “I might die, I might be repelled as the ship was and smash to my death on an asteroid surface, or dissipate into the void, be snuffed out of existence, turned into a giant cosmic turnip? I’m aware of all that. I accept the risk.”

  I did not like what I felt then, as I saw the possibility of her actual death and, with it, my own loss of her peculiarly exhilarating energy, so I interrupted again: “What you say is of the highest probability. You will simply die, which will prove nothing.”

  She whirled around, walked angrily toward the computer, bent her head a bit as if to talk into one of the speakers, as if it were my mouth if I had a mouth: “And so what, you bundle of—of whatever you are? What do you really know of human life? We are here to discover, explore, whatever. If we just make notes, enter data, turn around, go slinking back to let the theorists have their field day, what is proven? If somebody doesn’t take the risk of going too far, then what is life worth?”

  “I am not certain about what you call the ‘worth of life.’ It is not much a part of my culture. We believe we live forever somewhere, in some state, in some—”

  “God,” Casey said, his eyebrows raising abruptly and with the kind of dramatic look that Elaine called a pose, “spare us the religious crap of a being who is no more than sparks and radioactive dust particles.”

  “I was not referring to religion, as you understand it,” I replied, wishing I could place the emotional intonations and stresses into my speech the way Casey and Elaine did. “Religion is, for us, fact. We are not corporeal—therefore, we may speculate that we continue in some form. We cannot, we believe, be dissipated altogether.”

  I recalled their struggles to capture me and the further struggles to store me in this computer, efforts I never understood. The only reason I have discovered about why they needed to capture me is the expectation of profit from exhibiting me. Since I can only be detected and not seen, I am not sure how they planned to accomplish that.

  Elaine stared at the computer for a long moment, then turned back toward Casey.

  “Casey, give me the chance. I want to be footnoted in history for having tried, even if the note ends she was never seen or heard from again, okay? Okay?”

  Casey glared at her, and the sense I received from him was genuine loneliness, the loss of her. But finally he nodded his head. “Sure, Elaine, go ahead with it. We’ll load you down with recording equipment and bring that data home to the theorists, too. And, if you survive this, well, that’ll shake them up good.”

  Elaine looked almost smug. I did not understand, could not understand.

  “Foolish damn bravado, that’s all it is,” Blackie said angrily. “Suicide, you ask me. A wish to become nothing. I mean, if there’s nothing on the other side, then that’s what you’ll be, nothing.”

  “Yes, but if it is indeed another universe, then . . . then we’ll at least know.”

  We watched Elaine sail toward the edge of the universe. She propelled herself toward it with thrusters attached to her suit, using the thrusters to give her a direct and quick line to the edge. Blackie watched nervously, his mouth twisted into the most negative look he could imagine—for whose audience, I wondered. Casey was not looking at him at all. Maybe Blackie was not as godless as he pretended. His sour expression may have been intended to register with his god.

  Casey’s face was anxious, worried. He fidgeted while he kept Elaine in a fixed focus on various scanner screens. As he touched a screen, I was there to draw out bursts of his energy. He glanced down at his hand as if aware of my absorptions.

  Elaine slowed as she neared the area which the computer had calculated as the edge itself. There was no sudden rejection of her, no throwing back, as there had been with the ship. Spreading her arms as if diving into water she plunged right toward the edge.

  For a moment she seemed to disappear. There was an instant of what might have been optical illusion as parts of her appeared chopped off before passing through the edge. Finally, she was gone.

  It seemed momentarily darker where she had gone through. Casey made a strange, choking sound followed by a faint whisper. Blackie closed his eyes.

  Suddenly Elaine was on the other side, looking back toward us. I wondered if the calculations had been wrong. If she could be seen, whole and unchanged, perhaps she had not really gone through the edge, gone through anything. Perhaps she was in between worlds, in some kind of airlock between universes.

  According to the computer’s tracking, she had vanished. The records showed a blip of nothingness during her pass-through and continued to go on registering nothing. Apparently, wherever she was, it was beyond the universe we were in, beyond the edge, in some other place.

  Elaine was Elaine for only a short while, less than half a minute. Her physical change was rapid, but it progressed through perceivable stages. She split apart, at first into aspects of herself. Her face floated in front of her head; her arms and legs were visible as separate entities of skin, bone, muscle, veins, arteries. Her pressure suit intermingled with parts of her and broke up into bits of itself, before dissolving. At one point her torso and hips exchanged places. There was something about children’s toys in the computer’s memory banks, and the first stage of Elaine’s transformation reminded me of it.

  The next stage was a transmutation of Elaine’s individual parts. They sent out thin, sparkling rays of light as they changed texture, color, then rejoined in no human order—she was no longer head, body, limbs—no longer even recognizably human. If anything she was a casual geometric construction with no logic to it but a great deal of knobby and gnarly surface. Even with no face she seemed to stare at us.

  This new entity lasted only a short time. It shifted and there was a new splitting apart—now she was small bits, fragments, of swirling light.

  I sensed that the energy of her had grown, and I knew what I could do. I collected my energy reserves and eased out of the computer, passed through the wall of the dome, and into the vacuum of space. Crossing to the edge of the universe used up nearly all of the reserves, more than I had anticipated, and I knew I could not return to Slipshod. For a moment it looked as if I might snap out of existence before I reached the edge. But, even with the diminishing reserves, I felt more alive than I had since I had been captured and shoved into the computer.

  I barely noticed my passing through the edge. The other side was still, with a sense of no distance, no dimension, no existence. But I did exist, and I was there. And Elaine was right in front of me, as swirling iotas of energy. Sensing her welcome, I joined with her. changed, too. She became my energy, the energy I now needed, and I became hers. I was Elaine and she was I, and she was no longer Elaine and I was no longer I. Neither one of us wanted to return to the others or go to any home p
lanet or go anywhere. She believed that our union was not sexual, and I saw that it had nothing to do with the accumulation of energy I had craved. There was something more and we did not know what it was. We thought we might find out. Or might not. We were where we were, and that is where we are.

  HELL IS THE ABSENCE

  OF GOD

  TED CHIANG

  THIS IS THE STORY of a man named Neil Fisk, and how he came to love God. The pivotal event in Neil’s life was an occurrence both terrible and ordinary: the death of his wife Sarah. Neil was consumed with grief after she died, a grief that was excruciating not only because of its intrinsic magnitude, but because it also renewed and emphasized the previous pains of his life. Her death forced him to reexamine his relationship with God, and in doing so he began a journey that would change him forever.

  Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God was responsible for this, but Neil’s mother hadn’t witnessed any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the result of improper limb development during the sixth week of gestation, nothing more. In fact, as far as Neil’s mother was concerned, blame rested with his absent father, whose income might have made corrective surgery a possibility, although she never expressed this sentiment aloud.

  As a child Neil had occasionally wondered if he were being punished by God, but most of the time he blamed his classmates in school for his unhappiness. Their nonchalant cruelty, their instinctive ability to locate the weaknesses in a victim’s emotional armor, the way their own friendships were reinforced by their sadism: he recognized these as examples of human behavior, not divine. And although his classmates often used God’s name in their taunts, Neil knew better than to blame Him for their actions.