The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  It proved an intriguing reminder of evolution’s cruelty.

  I almost felt like myself.

  I took a capsule of neural dimensional tryptamine with water. The remaining capsules I dropped into a locking desk drawer.

  I returned to reading, but anticipation of the NDT’s effect kept my mind racing. Back when I was writing my doctoral thesis I’d become interested in tachyons as a form of faster-than-light communication. A tachyon is a faster-than-light particle, not to be confused with a tardon, a more mundane, slow-moving particle found in everyday life.

  The most fascinating aspect of this bit of theoretical physics is the way time flows for tachyons. If we look at our tardon world, the faster a particle goes the slower time passes, until at the (impossible to reach) speed of light time is standing still. In the tachyon world, the same pattern applies, except that time runs backwards compared with the flow in the tardon world.

  I remembered a conversation with a brilliant young physics student named Randall McCoy—he’d suggested the basic problems associated with communicating across interstellar distances could be solved if we sent bursts of tachyons, instead of sluggish electromagnetic radiation moving merely at the speed of light, from a ‘transmitter’ to a ‘receiver.’ The only snag—you might get the ‘answer’ to your message before you sent it.

  Strange ideas—ideas that had stuck with me, ideas I’d played with, examined, and slowly built into the theoretical concept of the tachyon bio-shift, a theory which had driven my research deeper into the sometimes dangerous realm of psychoactive compounds.

  A tremor went through my body…the NDT was beginning to hit my nervous system. At roughly the same time it occurred to me we are manifestations of a single consciousness—a supermind whose attention flickers across all our lives, making us all different three-dimensional facets of the same ultimate consciousness. I believe there was very likely a distortion of space-time in the culvert. He was just a theory of relativity offering a scientific explanation which looked totally real. Ditto the water beneath his feet. Clairvoyance, astral projection, provided the mirror was right where he’d left it. Gary’s individual consciousness can alter the bio-gravitational field, the mirror gradually filling the screen. He is the observer. I conjecture the distortions can be manipulated, and the hippie from before was at the location of the participator. The hippie’s eyes were saucers, the time-flow at the object being observed and influenced. Differential in the time-flow of the participator and object can in principle be so adjusted that the participator working within his local light cone ‘sees’ into the probable future or past of the object. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. The Shadow reaching out from the Chaos reaching a blood-stained hand toward Man. Strange circumstances. O.I. (Outside Influence). Soft-point bullets. Hard to ID. Ballistic holocaust. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and Gary shook his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of what he was seeing. It happened as he was leaving his room. Memphis. Hippie-zombie’s hand began breaking through the computer. On the balcony outside of his motel room. A single shot breaking through the computer shatters the system. Pronounced dead. The man in the suit with gray hair mouthing words, staring at Gary. Soft thunks of noise. Strange circumstances surrounding the assassination. Gary only later realized must’ve been brain matter. Lyndon B. Johnson declared a day of mourning. The reality expansion image had opened. It kind of…I dunno…unfolded …into reality. There he was, stunned, staring at me from behind his plastic keyboard. It was accomplished. A tachyon bio-shift. My God. I reached out a hand…reached toward the image…pure joy…

  A man sporting a silver crew-cut walked into the lab. He had something in his hand. I frowned. It was a pistol equipped with a silencer. He calmly shut the door behind him. He removed a pair of dark glasses and regarded me sadly with a pair of striking white eyes.

  “Where is it?”

  My eyes betrayed me, glancing at the desk drawer.

  Silver crew-cut gazed, stone-faced, at the boy at the plastic keyboard, at the reality expansion image opened in the center of the room.

  His attention came back to me. The room breathed around him.

  The pistol came up, the silencer level with my head.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  * * * *

  Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

  Total War II.

  Gary’s avatar crawled along the culvert on level twenty-three. He was still impressed with the game’s graphics. The rats still looked totally real. Ditto the water beneath his feet.

  His eyes narrowed.

  The bizarro mirror was right were he’d left it.

  Gary took a deep breath. He moved toward it with caution, the mirror gradually filling his screen. And then it was there, the all too life-like closed-circuit feed. Except it was different now, it was an office or a study or something and the hippie from before was there—

  Gary’s heart threatened to beat through his chest.

  The hippie’s eyes were saucers behind John Lennon specs, crazed saucers focusing on him. And then the hippie raised an arm like some sort of fucked up hippie-zombie, a hippie-zombie hand reaching toward him—

  Gary closed his eyes and shook his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of what he was seeing.

  He opened his eyes.

  Gary’s bladder almost let go when the hippie-zombie hand began pushing against the computer screen, began breaking through the computer screen—

  Then a man with short gray hair wearing a suit walked into the room behind the hippie, the hand disappearing, the hippie turning and the man in the suit mouthing words, and staring at Gary.

  Gary watched in helpless, open-mouthed shock as the man with short gray hair raised a pistol and shot the hippie twice in the head the shots soft thunks of noise the bloody spray flecked with bits of gray Gary only later realized must’ve been brain matter turn off the power and remove the 74LS00 from Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony location 6C, bend pin 243 of the IC out re-install permanent peace. It solves no social problem: if the IC does not make contact with pin 243 of the merely complicated ones. As someone who stands here as a direct and grounded motherboard pin 243 by shorting it. I am a living testimony to the moral force of a non-violent jumper wire. My name is JB Surge. If you’re receiving this—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed of the Muan bicom block. I don’t have much time. A head-of-state is sworn to protect and defend my nation. The Muan Federation’s ‘Kallisti Protocol.’ Beware of The Book. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle. Trust no one. There is no cure. They’ve attempted manufacturing human beings. Make no mistake: evil does exist in the tachyon world, the pattern applies. NDT’s effect kept my mind racing. Back in the flow of the tardon world, I’d become interested in tachyons as a form of communication. Randall McCoy. The basic power moving particles (politics) in everyday life echoes across interstellar distances. They may come as people you know. They have in the past, because they have no past. You are living in a three-dimensional illusion ruled by an abstract and Terran-based concept known as ‘time.’ I too lived under these artificial constraints until this experiment will force the processor to sequentially read everything, including memory-mapped O.I. locations that turn on the drive motor(s)—

  Gary logged out.

  * * * *

  Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 5, 1968. The New York Times headline and subhead:

  MARTIN LUTHER KING SLAIN IN MEMPHIS

  NATIONAL GUARD CALLED OUT

  * * * *

  Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 5, 2009. Wasonica University. M. Deane Harris Library.

  Tall arched windows streamed dusty morning sunlight. The library was a cavernous space flaunting lofty vaulted ceilings, d
ark wood-paneling and dour white faces in ornate frames. There were maybe a dozen students being studious. A few glanced up as he passed, but quickly looked away when they caught his anxious eye and agitated appearance.

  After forty minutes Gary found what he was looking for in a lonely, seemingly forgotten section dedicated to the history of the University and its surrounding region.

  It was a slender volume, a hard cover bearing the curious title, Wasonica: Scandals & Phantoms, written by one Dr. Leland Summers. A cryptic biography above a 1979 copyright said Summers was a historian with a “penchant for parapsychology” who’d worked at the University from 1971 to 1975.

  Gary took the book to a reading area by one of the windows, his hand trembling slightly but uncontrollably as he turned the mouldy pages.

  He was surprised. He’d had no idea his choice in institutions of higher-education harbored such a checkered and colorful history. There’d been unexplained fires in the dorms, strange apparitions in the physics department, a few sex scandals, a murder or two and the author himself had apparently witnessed “something that defied all logic.”

  And there it was among the strange and sordid stories. A photograph of a smiling Dr. Oliver Ross—the hippie who’d been shot in front of him, the hippie who’d lived inside a mirror inside his computer.

  The photograph had a caption and nothing else, just a mere footnote in the extraordinary history of the University.

  Turns out Dr. Oliver Ross was a professor in the Biology Department back in the Sixties. The caption said he’d been shot during a robbery in one of the labs. The caption said his killer had never been caught, which Gary found funny, since the killer was loitering at a bus stop right outside the window.

  CIRCUS, by Alan E. Nourse

  “Just suppose,” said Morgan, “that I did believe you. Just for argument.” He glanced up at the man across the restaurant table. “Where would we go from here?”

  The man shifted uneasily in his seat. He was silent, staring down at his plate. Not a strange-looking man, Morgan thought. Rather ordinary, in fact. A plain face, nose a little too long, fingers a little too dainty, a suit that doesn’t quite seem to fit, but all in all, a perfectly ordinary looking man.

  Maybe too ordinary, Morgan thought.

  Finally the man looked up. His eyes were dark, with a hunted look in their depths that chilled Morgan a little. “Where do we go? I don’t know. I’ve tried to think it out, and I get nowhere. But you’ve got to believe me, Morgan. I’m lost, I mean it. If I can’t get help, I don’t know where it’s going to end.”

  “I’ll tell you where it’s going to end,” said Morgan. “It’s going to end in a hospital. A mental hospital. They’ll lock you up and they’ll lose the key somewhere.” He poured himself another cup of coffee and sipped it, scalding hot. “And that,” he added, “will be that.”

  * * * *

  The place was dark and almost empty. Overhead, a rotary fan swished patiently. The man across from Morgan ran a hand through his dark hair. “There must be some other way,” he said. “There has to be.”

  “All right, let’s start from the beginning again,” Morgan said. “Maybe we can pin something down a little better. You say your name is Parks—right?”

  The man nodded. “Jefferson Haldeman Parks, if that helps any. Haldeman was my mother’s maiden name.”

  “All right. And you got into town on Friday—right?”

  Parks nodded.

  “Fine. Now go through the whole story again. What happened first?”

  The man thought for a minute. “As I said, first there was a fall. About twenty feet. I didn’t break any bones, but I was shaken up and limping. The fall was near the highway going to the George Washington Bridge. I got over to the highway and tried to flag down a ride.”

  “How did you feel? I mean, was there anything strange that you noticed?”

  “Strange!” Parks’ eyes widened. “I—I was speechless. At first I hadn’t noticed too much—I was concerned with the fall, and whether I was hurt or not. I didn’t really think about much else until I hobbled up to that highway and saw those cars coming. Then I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought I was crazy. But a car stopped and asked me if I was going into the city, and I knew I wasn’t crazy.”

  Morgan’s mouth took a grim line. “You understood the language?”

  “Oh, yes. I don’t see how I could have, but I did. We talked all the way into New York—nothing very important, but we understood each other. His speech had an odd sound, but—”

  Morgan nodded. “I know, I noticed. What did you do when you got to New York?”

  “Well, obviously, I needed money. I had gold coin. There had been no way of knowing if it would be useful, but I’d taken it on chance. I tried to use it at a newsstand first, and the man wouldn’t touch it. Asked me if I thought I was the U.S. Treasury or something. When he saw that I was serious, he sent me to a money lender, a hock shop, I think he called it. So I found a place—”

  “Let me see the coins.”

  Parks dropped two small gold discs on the table. They were perfectly smooth and perfectly round, tapered by wear to a thin blunt edge. There was no design on them, and no printing. Morgan looked up at the man sharply. “What did you get for these?”

  Parks shrugged. “Too little, I suspect. Two dollars for the small one, five for the larger.”

  “You should have gone to a bank.”

  “I know that now. I didn’t then. Naturally, I assumed that with everything else so similar, principles of business would also be similar.”

  Morgan sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Well, then what?”

  Parks poured some more coffee. His face was very pale, Morgan thought, and his hands trembled as he raised the cup to his lips. Fright? Maybe. Hard to tell. The man put down the cup and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “First, I went to the mayor’s office,” he said. “I kept trying to think what anyone at home would do in my place. That seemed a good bet. I asked a policeman where it was, and then I went there.”

  “But you didn’t get to see him.”

  “No. I saw a secretary. She said the mayor was in conference, and that I would have to have an appointment. She let me speak to another man, one of the mayor’s assistants.”

  “And you told him?”

  “No. I wanted to see the mayor himself. I thought that was the best thing to do. I waited for a couple of hours, until another assistant came along and told me flatly that the mayor wouldn’t see me unless I stated my business first.” He drew in a deep breath. “So I stated it. And then I was gently but firmly ushered back into the street again.”

  “They didn’t believe you,” said Morgan.

  “Not for a minute. They laughed in my face.”

  Morgan nodded. “I’m beginning to get the pattern. So what did you do next?”

  “Next I tried the police. I got the same treatment there, only they weren’t so gentle. They wouldn’t listen either. They muttered something about cranks and their crazy notions, and when they asked me where I lived, they thought I was—what did they call it?—a wise guy! Told me to get out and not come back with any more wild stories.”

  “I see,” said Morgan.

  Jefferson Parks finished his last bite of pie and pushed the plate away. “By then I didn’t know quite what to do. I’d been prepared for almost anything excepting this. It was frightening. I tried to rationalize it, and then I quit trying. It wasn’t that I attracted attention, or anything like that, quite the contrary. Nobody even looked at me, unless I said something to them. I began to look for things that were different, things that I could show them, and say, see, this proves that I’m telling the truth, look at it—” He looked up helplessly.

  “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing. Oh, little things, insignificant little things. Your calendars, for instance. Naturally, I couldn’t understand your frame of reference. And the coinage, you stamp your coins; we don’t. And cigarettes. We do
n’t have any such thing as tobacco.” The man gave a short laugh. “And your house dogs! We have little animals that look more like rabbits than poodles. But there was nothing any more significant than that. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Except yourself,” Morgan said.

  “Ah, yes. I thought that over carefully. I looked for differences, obvious ones. I couldn’t find any. You can see that, just looking at me. So I searched for more subtle things. Skin texture, fingerprints, bone structure, body proportion. I still couldn’t find anything. Then I went to a doctor.”

  Morgan’s eyebrows lifted. “Good,” he said.

  Parks shrugged tiredly. “Not really. He examined me. He practically took me apart. I carefully refrained from saying anything about who I was or where I came from; just said I wanted a complete physical examination, and let him go to it. He was thorough, and when he finished he patted me on the back and said, ‘Parks, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re as fine, strapping a specimen of a healthy human being as I’ve ever seen.’ And that was that.” Parks laughed bitterly. “I guess I was supposed to be happy with the verdict, and instead I was ready to knock him down. It was idiotic, it defied reason, it was infuriating.”

  Morgan nodded sourly. “Because you’re not a human being,” he said.

  “That’s right. I’m not a human being at all.”

  * * * *

  “How did you happen to pick this planet, or this sun?” Morgan asked curiously. “There must have been a million others to choose from.”

  Parks unbuttoned his collar and rubbed his stubbled chin unhappily. “I didn’t make the choice. Neither did anyone else. Travel by warp is a little different from travel by the rocket you fiction writers make so much of. With a rocket vehicle you pick your destination, make your calculations, and off you go. The warp is blind flying, strictly blind. We send an unmanned scanner ahead. It probes around more or less hit-or-miss until it locates something, somewhere, that looks habitable. When it spots a likely looking place, we keep a tight beam on it and send through a manned scout.” He grinned sourly. “Like me. If it looks good to the scout, he signals back, and they leave the warp anchored for a sort of permanent gateway until we can get a transport beam built. But we can’t control the directional and dimensional scope of the warp. There are an infinity of ways it can go, until we have a guide beam transmitting from the other side. Then we can just scan a segment of space with the warp, and the scanner picks up the beam.”