The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “You did say you wanted to know more about what I study?”

  “I was just…” I scratched my head. “Curious. All I do know is that astrophysics is about more than simply looking up at the night sky and giving names to things. That isn’t even astronomy, is it?”

  “You’re not just being polite?” His soft, granite-grey eyes remained fixed on me.

  “No. I’m notĩabsolutely.”

  “I could show you something here.” He waved at the stars on his walls, the stuff spinning on his desk. “But maybe we could go out. To be honest, Lita, I could do with a break, and there’s an experiment I could show you up at the Clearbrite that might help explain what I mean about other worlds… But I understand if you’re busy. I could get my avatar to talk to your avatar andĩ”

  “No, no. You’re right, Rob. I could do with a break as well. Let’s go out. Seize the day. Or at least, what’s left of it. Just give me…” I waved a finger toward the bathroom. “… five minutes.”

  Then we were outside in the sideways-blowing drizzle, and it was freezing cold, and I was still wet from my hurried shower, as Rob slipped a companionable arm around mine as we climbed the hill toward the Otley Road tram stop.

  Kids and commuters got on and off as we jolted toward the strung lights of the city, their lips moving and their hands stirring to things only they could feel and see. The Clearbrite looked more than even like some recently arrived spaceship as it glowed out through the gloom, but inside the place was just like any other campus building, with clamouring posters offering to restructure your loan, find you temporary work, or get you laid and hammered. Constant reminders, too, that Clearbrite was the only smartjuice to communicate in realtime to your fingerjewel, toejamb or wristbracelet. This souk-like aspect of modern unis not being something that Sebastian Flyte, or even Harry Potter in those disappointing sequels, ever had to contend with.

  We got a fair few hellos, a couple of tenured types stopped to talk to Rob in a corridor, and I saw how people paused to listen to what he was saying. More than ever, I had him down as someone who was bound to succeed. Still, I was expecting to be shown moon rocks, lightning bolts or at least some clever virtual planetarium, but instead he took me into what looked like the kind of laboratory I’d been forced to waste many hours in at school, even if the equipment did seem a little fancier.

  “This is the physics part of the astro,” Rob explained, perhaps sensing my disappointment. “But you did ask about other worlds, right, and this is pretty much the only way I can show them to you.”

  I won’t go too far into the details, because I’d probably get them wrong, but what Rob proceeded to demonstrate was a version of what I now know to be the famous, or infamous, Double Slit Experiment. There was a long black tube on a workbench, and at one end of it was a laser, and at the other was a display screen attached to a device called a photo multiplierĩa kind of sensor. In the middle he placed a barrier with two narrow slits. It wasn’t a great surprise even to me that the pulses of light caused a pretty dark-light pattern of stripes to appear on the display at the far end. These, Rob said, were ripples of the interference pattern caused by the waves of light passing through the two slits, much as you’d get if you were pouring water. But light, Lita, is made up individual packets of energy called photons. So what would happen if, instead of sending tens of thousands of them down the tube at once, we turned the laser down so far that it only emitted one photon at a time? Then, surely, each individual photon could only go through one or the other of the slits, there would be no ripples, and two simple stripes would emerge at the far end. But, hey, as he slowed the beep of the signal counter until it was registering single digits, the dark-light bars, like a shimmering neon forest, remained. As if, although each photon was a single particle, it somehow became a blur of all its possibilities as it passed through both slits at once. Which, as far as anyone knew, was pretty much what happened.

  “I’m sorry,” Rob said afterwards when we were chatting over a second or third pint of beer in the fug of an old student bar called the Eldon which lay down the road from the university, “I should have shown you something less boring.”

  “It wasn’t boring. The implications are pretty strange, aren’t they.”

  “More than strange. It goes against almost else we know about physics and the world around us—us sitting here in this pub, for instance. Things exist, right? They’re either here or not. They don’t flicker in and out of existence like ghosts. This whole particles-blurring into wave business was one of the things that bugged me most when I was a kid finding out about science. It was even partly why I chose to study astrophysics—I thought there’d be answers I’d understand when someone finally explained them to me. But there aren’t.” He sipped his beer. “All you get is something called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is basically a shoulder shrug that says, hey, these things happen at the sub-atomic level, but it doesn’t really have to bother us or make sense in the world we know about and live in. That, and then there’s something else called the many worlds theory…” He trailed off. Stifled a burp. Seemed almost embarrassed.

  “Which is what you believe in?”

  “Believe isn’t the right word. Things either are or they aren’t in science. But, yeah, I do. And the maths supports it. Simply put, Lita, it says that all the possible states and positions that every particle could exist in are realĩthat they’re endlessly spinning off into other universes.”

  “You mean, as if every choice you could make in a virtual was instantly mapped out in its entirety?”

  “Exactly. But this is real. The worlds are all around us—right here.”

  The drink, and the conversation moved on, and now it was my turn to apologise to Rob, and his to say no, I wasn’t boring him. Because books, novels, stories, they were my other worlds, the thing I believed in even if no one else cared about them. That single, magical word, Fog, which Dickens uses as he begins to conjure London. And Frederic Henry walking away from the hospital in the rain. And Rose of Sharon offering the starving man her breast after the Joab’s long journey across dustbowl America, and Candide eating fruit, and Bertie Wooster bumbling back across Mayfair…

  Rob listened and seemed genuinely interested, even though he confessed he’d never read a single non-interactive story or novel. But, unlike most people, he said this as if he realised he was actually missing out on something. So we agreed I’d lend him some of my old paperbacks, and this, and what he’d shown me at the Clearbrite, signalled a new phase in our relationship.

  4.

  IT SEEMS TO me now that some of the best hours or my life were spent not in reading books, but in sitting with Rob Holm in my cramped room in that house we shared back in Leeds, and talking about them.

  What to read and admire, but also—and this was just as important—what not to. The Catcher in the Rye being overrated, and James Joyce a literary show-off, and Moby Dick really wasn’t about much more than whales. Alarmingly, Rob was often ahead of me. He discovered a copy of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges in a garage sale, which he gave to me as a gift, and then kept borrowing back. But he was Rob Holm. He could solve the riddles of the cosmos, and meanwhile explore literature as nothing but a hobby, and also help me out with my mek, so that I was finally able produce the kind of arguments, links and algorithms for my piece on Madame Bovary that the ais at An Lit actually wanted.

  Meanwhile, I also found out about the kind of life Rob had come from. Both his parents were engineers, and he’d spent his early years in Aberdeen, but they’d moved to the Isle of Harris after his mother was diagnosed with a brain-damaging prion infection, probably caused by her liking for fresh salmon. Most of the fish were then factory-farmed in crowded pens in the Scottish lochs, where the creatures were dosed with antibiotics and fed on pellets of processed meat, often recycled from the remains their own breed. Which, just as with cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease a century earlier, had resulted in a small but significant species leap. Rob’s
parents wanted to make the best of the years Alice Holm had left, and set up an ethical marine farm—although they preferred to call it a ranch—harvesting scallops on the Isle of Harris.

  Rob’s father was still there at Creagach, and the business, which not only produced some of the best scallops in the Hebrides, but also benefited other marine life along the costal shelf, was still going. Rob portrayed his childhood there as a happy time, with his mother still doing well despite the warnings of the scans, and regaling him with bedtime tales of Celtic myths, which was probably his only experience before meeting me of linear fictional narrative.

  There were the kelpies, who lived in lochs and were like fine horses, and then there were the Blue Men of the Minch, who dwelt between Harris and the mainland, and sung up storms and summoned the waves with their voices. Then, one night when Rob was eleven, his mother waited until he and his father were asleep, then walked out across the shore and into the sea, and swam, and kept on swimming. No one could last long out there, the sea being so cold, and the strong currents, or perhaps the Blue Men of the Minch, bore her body back to a stretch of shore around the headland from Creagach, where she was found next morning.

  Rob told his story without any obvious angst. But it certainly helped explain the sense of difference and distance he seemed to carry with him. That, and why he didn’t fit. Not here in Leeds, amid the fun, mess and heartbreak of student life, nor even, as I slowly came to realise, in the subject he was studying.

  He showed me the virtual planetarium at the Clearbrite, and the signals from a probe passing through the Oort Cloud, and even took me down to the tunnels of a mine where a huge tank of cryogenically cooled fluid had been set up in the hope of detecting the dark matter of which it had once been believed most of our universe was made. It was an old thing now, creaking and leaking, and Rob was part of the small team of volunteers who kept it going. We stood close together in the dripping near-dark, clicking hardhats and sharing each other’s breath, and of course I was thinking of other possibilities—those fractional moments when things could go one of many ways. Our lips pressing. Our bodies joining. But something, maybe a fear of losing him entirely, held me back.

  “It’s another thing that science has given up on,” he said later when we were sitting at our table in the Eldon. “Just like that ridiculous Copenhagen shoulder-shrug. Without dark matter, and dark energy, the way the galaxies rotate and recede from each other simply doesn’t make mathematical sense. You know what the so-called smart money is on these days? Something called topographical deformity, which means that the basic laws of physics don’t apply in the same way across this entire universe. That it’s pock-marked with flaws.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “Of course I don’t! It’s fundamentally unscientific.”

  “But you get glitches in even the most cleverly conceived virtuals, don’t you? Even in novels, sometimes things don’t always entirely add up.” “Yeah. Like who killed the gardener in The Big Sleep, or the season suddenly changing from autumn to spring in that Sherlock Holmes story.

  But this isn’t like that, Lita. This isn’t...” For once, he was in danger of sounding bitter and contemptuous. But he held himself back.

  “And you’re not going to give up?”

  He smiled. Swirled his beer. “No, Lita. I’m definitely not.”

  5.

  PERHAPS INEVITABLY, ROB’S and my taste in books had started to drift apart. He’d discovered an antique genre called Science Fiction, something which the AIs at An Lit were particularly sniffy about. And even as he tried to lead me with him, I could see their point. Much of the prose was less than luminous, the characterisation was sketchy, and, although a great deal of it was supposedly about the future, the predictions were laughably wrong.

  But Rob insisted that that wasn’t the point, that SF was essentially a literature of ideas. That, and a sense of wonder. To him, wonder was particularly important. I could sometimes—maybe as that lonely astronaut passed through the stargate, or with those huge worms in that book about a desert world—see his point. But most of it simply left me cold.

  Rob went off on secondment the following year to something called the Large Millimetre Array on the Atacama Plateau in Chile, and I, for want of anything better, kept the lease on our house in Headingley and got some new people in, and did a masters on gender roles in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Of course, I paid him virtual visits, and we talked of the problems of altitude sickness and the changed assholes our old uni friends were becoming as he put me on a camera on a Jeep, and bounced me across the dark-skied desert.

  Another year went—they were already picking up speed—and Rob found the time for a drink before he headed off to some untenured post, part research, part teaching, in Heidelberg that he didn’t seem particularly satisfied with. He was still reading—apparently there hadn’t been much else to do in Chile—but I realised our days of talking about Proust or Henry James had gone.

  He’d settled into, you might almost say retreated, a sub-genre of SF known as alternate history, where all the stuff he’d been telling me about our world continually branching off into all its possibilities was dramatised on a big scale. Hitler had won World War Two—a great many times, it seemed—and the South was triumphant in the American Civil War. That, and the Spanish Armada had succeeded, and Europe remained under the thrall of medieval Roman Catholicism, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had grazed past President Kennedy’s head. I didn’t take this odd obsession as a particularly good sign as we exchanged chaste hugs and kisses in the street outside the Eldon, and went our separate ways.

  I had a job of sorts, thanks to Sun-Mi my fellow An Lit student from Korea, teaching English to the kids of rich families in Seoul, and for a while it was fun, and the people were incredibly friendly, but then I grew bored, and managed to wrangle an interview with one of the media conglomerates which had switched physical base to Korea in the wake of the California Earthquake. I was hired for considerably less than I was getting paid teaching English, and took the crowded commute every morning to a vast half-real, semi-ziggurat high-rise mistily floating above the Mapo District, where I studied high res worlds filled with headache-inducing marvels, and was invited to come up with ideas in equally headache-inducing meetings.

  I, an Alice in these many virtual wonderlands, brought a kind of puzzled innocence to my role. Two, maybe three, decades earlier, the other developers might still have known enough to recognise my plagiarisms, if only from old movies their parents had once talked about, but now what I saying seemed new, fresh and quirky. I was a thieving literary magpie, and became the go-to girl for unexpected turns and twists. The real murderer of Roger Ackroyd, and the dog collar in The Great Gatsby. Not to mention what Little Father Time does in Jude the Obscure, and the horror of Sophie’s choice. I pillaged them all, and many others. Even the strange idea that the Victorians had developed steam-powered computers, thanks to my continued conversations with Rob.

  Wherever we actually were, we got into the habit of meeting up at a virtual recreation of the bar of Eldon which, either as some show-off feat of virtual engineering, or a post-post-modern art project, some student had created. The pub had been mapped in realtime down to the atom and the pixel, and the ghosts of our avatars often got strange looks from real undergrads bunking off from afternoon seminars. We could actually order a drink, and even taste the beer, although of course we couldn’t ingest it. Probably no bad thing, in view of the state of the Eldon’s toilets. But somehow, that five-pints-and-still-clear-headed feeling only added to the slightly illicit pleasure of our meetings. At least, at first.

  It was becoming apparent that, as he switched from city to city, campus to campus, project to project, Rob was in danger of turning into one of those ageing, permanent students, clinging to short-term contracts, temporary relationships and get-me-by loans, and the worst thing was that, with typical unflinching clarity, he knew it.

  “I reckon I was either bo
rn too early, or too late, Lita,” he said as he sipped his virtual beer. “That was even what one of the assessors actually said to me a year or so ago when I tried to persuade her to back my project.”

  “So you scientists have to pitch ideas as well?”

  He laughed, but that warm, Hebridean sound was turning bitter. “How else does this world work? But maths doesn’t change even if fashions do. The many worlds theory is the only way that the behaviour of subatomic particles can be reconciled with everything else we know. Just because something’s hard to prove doesn’t mean it should be ignored.”

  By this time I was busier than ever. Instead of providing ideas other people could profit from, I’d set up my own consultancy, which had thrived, and made me a great deal of money. By now, in fact, I had more of the stuff than most people would have known what to do with. But I did. I’d reserved a new apartment in a swish high-res, high-rise development going up overlooking the Han River, and was struggling to get the builders to understand that I wanted the main interior space to be turned into something called a library. I showed them old walk-throughs of the Bodleian in Oxford, and the reading room of the British Museum, and the Brotherton in Leeds, and many other lost places of learning. Of course I already had a substantial collection of books in a secure, fireproofed, climate-controlled warehouse, but now I began to acquire more.

  The once-great public collections were either in storage or scattered to the winds. But there were still enough people as rich and crazy as I was to ensure that the really rare stuff—first folios, early editions, hand-typed versions of great works—remained expensive and sought-after, and I surprised even myself with the determination and ruthlessness of my pursuits. After all, what else was I going to spend my time and money on?