Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  Then I tumbled her to the cot, and we began undressing each other. She ripped off three buttons tearing my shirt from me.

  Melusine made a lot of noise, for which I was grateful. She was a demanding, self-centered lay, who let you know when she didn't like what you were doing and wasn't at all shy about telling you what to do next. She required a lot of attention. For which I was also grateful.

  I needed the distraction.

  Because while I was in his tent, screwing the woman he didn't want, Hawkins was somewhere out there getting killed. According to the operational report that I'd write later tonight, and received a day ago, he was eaten alive by an old bull rex rendered irritable by a painful brain tumor. It was an ugly way to go. I didn't want to have to hear it. I did my best to not think about it.

  Credit where credit is due -- Melusine practically set the tent ablaze. So I was using her. So what? It was far from the worst of my crimes. It wasn't as if she loved Hawkins, or even knew him for that matter. She was just a spoiled little rich-bitch adventuress looking for a mental souvenir. One more notch on her diaphragm case. I know her type well. They're one of the perks of the business.

  There was a freshly prepared triceratops skull by the head of the bed. It gleamed faintly, a pale, indistinct shape in the darkness. When Melusine came, she grabbed one of its horns so tightly the skull rattled against the floorboards.

  Afterwards, she left, happily reeking of bone fixative and me. We'd each had our little thrill. I hadn't spoken a word during any of it, and she hadn't even noticed.

  * * * *

  T. rex wasn't much of a predator. But then, it didn't take much skill to kill a man. Too slow to run, and too big to hide -- we make perfect prey for a tyrannosaur.

  When Hawkins' remains were found, the whole camp turned out in an uproar. I walked through it all on autopilot, perfunctorily giving orders to have Satan shot, to have the remains sent back uptime, to have the paperwork sent to my office. Then I gathered everybody together and gave them the Paradox Lecture. Nobody was to talk about what had just happened. Those who did would be summarily fired. Legal action would follow. Dire consequences. Penalties. Fines.

  And so on.

  It was two a.m. when I finally got back to my office, to write the day's operational report.

  Hawkins's memo was there, waiting for me. I'd forgotten about that. I debated putting off reading it until tomorrow. But then I figured I was feeling as bad now as I was ever going to. Might as well get it over with.

  I turned on the glow-pad. Hawkins' pale face appeared on the screen. Stiffly, as if he were confessing a crime, he said, "My folks didn't want me to become a scientist. I was supposed to stay home and manage the family money. Stay home and let my mind rot." His face twisted with private memories. "So that's the first thing you have to know -- Donald Hawkins isn't my real name.

  "My mother was kind of wild when she was young. I don't think she knew who my father was. So when she had me, it was hushed up. I was raised by my grandparents. They were getting a little old for child-rearing, so they shipped me back-time to when they were younger, and raised me alongside my mother. I was fifteen before I learned she wasn't really my sister.

  "My real name is Philippe de Cherville. I swapped table assignments so I could meet my younger self. But then Melusine -- my mother -- started hitting on me. So I guess you can understand now -- " he laughed embarrassedly -- "why I didn't want to go the Oedipus route."

  The pad flicked off, and then immediately back on again. He'd had an afterthought. "Oh yeah, I wanted to say . . . the things you said to me today -- when I was young -- the encouragement. And the tooth. Well, they meant a lot to me. So, uh . . . thanks."

  It flicked off.

  I put my head in my hands. Everything was throbbing, as if all the universe were contained within an infected tooth. Or maybe the brain tumor of a sick old dinosaur. I'm not stupid. I saw the implications immediately.

  The kid -- Philippe -- was my son.

  Hawkins was my son.

  I hadn't even known I had a son, and now he was dead.

  * * * *

  A bleak, blank time later, I set to work drawing time lines in the holographic workspace above my desk. A simple double-loop for Hawkins/Philippe. A rather more complex figure for myself. Then I factored in the TSOs, the waiters, the paleontologists, the musicians, the workmen who built the station in the first place and would salvage its fixtures when we were done with it . . . maybe a hundred representative individuals in all.

  When I was done, I had a three-dimensional representation of Hilltop Station as a node of intersecting lives in time. It was one hell of a complex figure.

  It looked like the Gordian knot.

  Then I started crafting a memo back to my younger self. A carbon steel, razor-edged, Damascene sword of a memo. One that would slice Hilltop Station into a thousand spasming paradoxical fragments.

  Hire him, fire her, strand a hundred young scientists, all fit and capable of breeding, one million years B.C. Oh, and don't father any children.

  It would bring our sponsors down upon us like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands -- retroactively. Everything connected to it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Hilltop Station would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of thousands of dedicated scientists would vanish from human knowing. My son would never have been conceived or born or sent callously to an unnecessary death.

  Everything I had spent my life working to accomplish would be undone.

  It sounded good to me.

  When the memo was done, I marked it PRIORITY and MY EYES ONLY. Then I prepared to send it three months back in time.

  The door opened behind me with a click. I spun around in my chair. In walked the one man in all existence who could possibly stop me.

  "The kid got to enjoy twenty-four years of life, before he died," the Old Man said. "Don't take that away from him."

  I looked up into his eyes.

  Into my own eyes.

  Those eyes fascinated and repulsed me. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime's accumulation of wrinkles. I've been working with my older self since I first signed up with Hilltop Station, and they were still a mystery to me, absolutely opaque. They made me feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.

  "It's not the kid," I said. "It's everything."

  "I know."

  "I only met him tonight -- Philippe, I mean. Hawkins was just a new recruit. I barely knew him."

  The Old Man capped the Glenlivet and put it back in the liquor cabinet. Until he did that, I hadn't even noticed I was drinking. "I keep forgetting how emotional I was when I was young," he said.

  "I don't feel young."

  "Wait until you're my age."

  I'm not sure how old the Old Man is. There are longevity treatments available for those who play the game, and the Old Man has been playing this lousy game so long he practically runs it. All I know is that he and I are the same person.

  My thoughts took a sudden swerve. "God damn that stupid kid!" I blurted. "What was he doing outside the compound in the first place?"

  The Old Man shrugged. "He was curious. All scientists are. He saw something and went out to examine it. Leave it be, kid. What's done is done."

  I glanced at the memo I'd written. "We'll find out."

  He placed a second memo alongside mine. "I took the liberty of writing this for you. Thought I'd spare you the pain of having to compose it."

  I picked up the memo, glanced at its contents. It was the one I'd received yesterday. "'Hawkins was attacked and killed by Satan shortly after local midnight today,'" I quoted. "'Take all necessary measures to control gossip.'" Overcome with loathing, I said, "This is exactly why I'm going to bust up this whole filthy system. You think I want to become the kind of man who can send his own son off to die? You think I want to become you?"

  That hit home. F
or a long moment the Old Man did not speak. "Listen," he said at last. "You remember that day in the Peabody?"

  "You know I do."

  "I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart -- all your heart -- that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn't going to happen. That some things could never be."

  I said nothing.

  "God hands you a miracle," he said, "you don't throw it back in his face."

  Then he left.

  I remained.

  It was my call. Two possible futures lay side-by-side on my desk, and I could select either one. The universe is inherently unstable in every instant. If paradoxes weren't possible, nobody would waste their energy preventing them. The Old Man was trusting me to weigh all relevant factors, make the right decision, and live with the consequences.

  It was the cruelest thing he had ever done to me.

  Thinking of cruelty reminded me of the Old Man's eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn't tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, I still couldn't tell if those were the eyes of a saint or of the most evil man in the world.

  There were two memos in front of me. I reached for one, hesitated, withdrew my hand. Suddenly the choice didn't seem so easy.

  The night was preternaturally still. It was as if all the world were holding its breath, waiting for me to make my decision.

  I reached out for the memos.

  I chose one.

  THE GRAVITY MINE

  Stephen Baxter

  Call her Anlic.

  The first time she woke she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine.

  At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole's gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.

  The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. And they could race as fast as they dared.

  As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of spacetime. "Just like the old days!" they called, excited. "Just like the Afterglow. . . !"

  Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to blue or red.

  That was when it happened.

  This Community was just a small tributary of the Conflux: isolated here in this ancient place, the density of mind already stretched thin. And now, as lightspeed neared, that isolation stretched to breaking point.

  . . . She budded off from the rest, her consciousness made discrete, separated from the greater flow of minds and memories.

  She slowed. The others rushed on without her, a dazzling circular storm orbiting the exhausted black hole. It felt like coming awake, emerging from a dream.

  Her questions were immediate, flooding her raw mind. "Who am I? How did I get here?" And so on. The questions were simple, even trite. And yet they were unanswerable.

  Others gathered around her-curious, sympathetic-and the race of streaking light began to lose its coherence.

  One of them came to her.

  Names meant little; this "one" was merely a transient sharpening of identity from the greater distributed entity that made up the Community.

  Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

  ". . . Anlic?"

  "I feel-odd," she said.

  "Don't worry."

  "Who am I?"

  "Come back to us."

  He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

  She snapped, "No!" And, willfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin walls of the tunnel.

  At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through layers of structure.

  Here was the tight electromagnetic cage that had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses that had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole's ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned.

  She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

  Geador was here. "What do you see?"

  "Nothing."

  "Look harder." He showed her how.

  There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

  "They are the remnants of stars," he said.

  He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. "It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it began. The universe was very young. It has swollen some ten thousand trillion times in size since then. . . . Nevertheless, it was in that gaudy era that humans arose. Us, Anlic."

  She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

  She looked back at the gravity mine.

  At its center was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.

  It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

  "This is Mine One," Geador said gently. "The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy-the galaxy from which humans first emerged."

  "The first galaxy?"

  "But it was all long ago." He moved closer to her. "So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on . . ."

  But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

  Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted-like this one-but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of something.

  The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

  It was the Conflux.

  Its source was far upstream.

  The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man's biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

  Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.

  Nobody but Anlic.

  ". . . Come back," Geador said.

  Her defiance was dissipating.

  She understood nothing about herself. But she didn't want to be different. She didn't want to be unhappy.

  There wasn't anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn't that the purpose of existence?

  So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.

  The universe would grow far older before she woke again.

  ". . . Flee! Faster! As fast as you can. . . !"

  There was turbulence in the great rushing river of mind.

  And in that turbulence, here and there, souls emerged from the background wash. Each brief fleck suffered a moment of terror before falling back into the greater dreaming whole.

  One of those flecks was Anlic.

  In the sudden dark she clung to herself. She slithered to a stop.

  Transient identities clustered around her. "What are you doing? Why are you staying here? You will be harmed." They sought to absorb her, but fell back, baffled by her resistance.
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  The Community was fleeing, in panic. Why?

  She looked back.

  There was something there, in the greater darkness. She made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve it, a mesh of neat regular triangles covering the sky. Visible through the interstices was a complex, textured curtain of grey-pink light.

  It was a structure that spanned the universe.

  She felt stunned, disoriented. It was so different from Mine One, her last clear memory. She must have crossed a great desert of time.

  But-she found, when she looked into her soul-her questions remained unanswered.

  She called out: "Geador?"

  A ripple of shock and doubt spread through the Community.

  ". . . You are Anlic."

  "Geador?"

  "I have Geador's memories."

  That would have to do, she thought, irritated; in the Conflux, memory and identity were fluid, distributed, ambiguous.

  "We are in danger, Anlic. You must come."

  She refused to comply, stubborn. She indicated the great netting. "Is that Mine One?"

  "No," he said sadly. "Mine One was long ago, child."

  "How long ago?"

  "Time is nested . . ."

  From this vantage, the era of man's first black hole empire had been the spring time, impossibly remote. And the Afterglow itself-the star-burning dawn-was lost, a mere detail of the Big Bang.

  "What is happening here, Geador?"

  "There is no time-"

  "Tell me."

  The universe had ballooned, fueled by time, and its physical processes had proceeded relentlessly.

  Just as each galaxy's stars had dissipated, leaving a rump that had collapsed into a central black hole, so clusters of galaxies had broken up, and the remnants fell inward to cluster-scale holes. And the clusters in turn collapsed into supercluster-scale holes-the largest black holes to have formed naturally, with masses of a hundred trillion stars.

  These were the cold hearths around which mankind now huddled.

  "But," said Geador, "the supercluster holes are evaporating away-dissipating in a quantum whisper, like all black holes. The smallest holes, of stellar mass, vanished when the universe was a fraction of its present age. Now the largest natural holes, of supercluster mass, are close to exhaustion as well. And so we must farm them.