The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

  The station at Virgo black hole is forty light years away, and I don’t dare use the original wormhole to reach it. My spacetime-rotated body must be an elongated snake in this version of space-time, and I do not wish to find out what a wormhole passage will do to it until I have no other choice. Still, that is no problem for me. Even with barely enough fuel to thrust for a few microseconds, I can reach an appreciable fraction of light-speed, and I can slow down my brain to make the trip appear only an instant.

  To an outside observer, it takes literally no time at all.

  “No,” says the psych tech, when I ask her. “There’s no law that compels you to uplink back into your original. You’re a free human being. Your original can’t force you.”

  “Great,” I say. Soon I’m going to have to arrange to get a biological body built for myself. This one is superb, but it’s a disadvantage in social intercourse being only a millimeter tall.

  The transition back to real space worked perfectly. Once I figured out how to navigate in time-rotated space, it had been easy enough to find the wormhole and the exact instant it had penetrated the event horizon.

  “Are you going to link your experiences to public domain?” the tech asks. “I think he would like to see what you experienced. Musta been pretty incredible.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “For that matter,” the psych tech added, “I’d like to link it, too.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  So I am a real human being now, independent of you, my original.

  There had been cheers and celebrations when I had emerged from the wormhole, but nobody had an inkling quite how strange my trip had been until I told them. Even then, I doubt that I was quite believed until the sensor readings and computer logs of Huis Clos confirmed my story with hard data.

  The physicists had been ecstatic. A new tool to probe time and space. The ability to rotate space into time will open up incredible capabilities. They were already planning new expeditions, not the least of which was a trip to probe right to the singularity itself.

  They had been duly impressed with my solution to the problem, although, after an hour of thinking it over, they all agreed it had been quite obvious. “It was lucky,” one of them remarked, “that you decided to go through the wormhole from the opposite side, that second time.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “If you’d gone through the same direction, you’d have rotated an additional ninety degrees, instead of going back.”

  “So?”

  “Reversed the time vector. Turns you into antimatter. First touch of the interstellar medium – Poof.”

  “Oh,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that. It made me feel a little less clever.

  Now that the mission is over, I have no purpose, no direction for my existence. The future is empty, the black hole that we all must travel into. I will get a biological body, yes, and embark on the process of finding out who I am. Maybe, I think, this is a task that everybody has to do.

  And then I will meet you. With luck, perhaps I’ll even like you.

  And maybe, if I should like you enough, and I feel confident, I’ll decide to upload you into myself, and once more, we will again be one.

  The Pen and the Dark

  Colin Kapp

  From one seemingly impossible journey to another. Colin Kapp is not as well known a writer as he should be. His first sf appeared in New Worlds back in 1958 and throughout the sixties and seventies he produced some of the most technologically stunning stories of the period. His best novel remains The Dark Mind (1963) about a psychic superbeing who attempts to take over control of alternate dimensions. My favourite of his stories were those that featured the “unorthodox” engineers. These were a group of lateral-thinking problem solvers who were called in whenever something insuperable arose. They first appeared in “The Railways Up on Cannis” (New Worlds, October 1959) and the stories were collected as The Unorthodox Engineers (1979). The following was one of the most intriguing.

  The scudder slid through candy-floss clouds of cirrus and strato-cumulus so extremely Earthlike in formation that even the scudder’s well-travelled occupants felt a twinge of nostalgia for home. Far below, the green and gilded fields proudly displayed the rich bust of the planet Ithica ripening in the rays of the G-type primary. The occasional sprawl of town or metropolis betrayed the Terran origin of Ithica’s inhabitants and the results of their desire to recreate the image of a far-off homeworld. With a little imagination this could easily have been mistaken for one of the rarer spots on Earth.

  But when the scudder cleared the haze of the cloud formation, the black and fearsome thing which reared above them was decidedly not of Earth.

  Caught on a sudden and curious down-draught, the scudder dived steeply and then went into a mammoth power-climb that took it soaring into a wide and safe helical orbit around and finally above the hideous patch of darkness.

  “So that’s it!” said Lieutenant Fritz Van Noon.

  Dr Maxwell Courtney nodded. “That’s it. That’s what we call the Dark. What you see now is the mushroom dome. It’s all of twenty-five kilometres across, and as near indestructible as anything we’ve ever encountered. We put a nuclear Hell-raiser down on to it and nothing happened at all.”

  Van Noon raised a swift eyebrow. “Nothing?”

  “We know the device exploded, because we were able to detect the start of the priming flash. After that – nothing. The Dark absorbed every quantum of energy released. It swallowed the whole damn lot and never so much as flickered.”

  “And you say that aliens put it there?”

  “So the records read. About two hundred terrayears ago – long before we reestablished contact with Ithica. It would seem some sort of alien vessel made a touchdown on the edge of the city, stayed a night, then vanished as abruptly as it had come. But in its place it left this pillar of darkness, and nobody has ever found out why they left it or what it’s supposed to do. There’s a great many theories about it, but none which completely explains the facts. Some think that it soaks up energy and transmits it elsewhere. Some think it’s contra-terrene. It’s even suggested that an alien colony lives inside it.”

  “And what’s your own opinion?” asked Van Noon.

  Courtney shrugged. “After three years of scientific examination I still don’t know what to think. At some time or another I’ve held most of the current physical theories only to discard them for another.”

  “Is it uniform right the way down?”

  “It’s really shaped like a bolt,” said Courtney. “The shaft proper is about seven kilometres in diameter and about thirty kilometres high. It is capped by the mushroom head here which extends out to about twenty-five kilometres in diameter and apparently defines the region of the Pen.”

  “The Pen?” Van Noon looked up from his notes. “What’s that?”

  Courtney smiled fleetingly. “Sorry! That’s local terminology. I mean the apparent penumbral shadow of reduced effects which surrounds the pillar of Dark. It’s a twilight region about nine kilometres average depth, the outer reaches of which are easily penetrable, and the inner regions connect with the Dark. It has an interesting subclimate too – but you’ll see that for yourself later.”

  Van Noon scowled. “And you have no idea at all what the Dark is made of?”

  Courtney spread his hands. “It’s commonly assumed to be contra-terrene, as I said, but I don’t think the hypothesis holds water in the face of all the evidence. But God-alone knows what it really is. Even the Pen raises some nice problems in physics which don’t have answers in any of the textbooks we know.”

  “All right,” said Van Noon. “I’d like to take a closer look at it first and come back to you when I’ve some idea of what questions to ask.”

  “I rather hoped you’d do it that way,” Courtney said. “We’ve assembled such a mass of data on the Dark that we don’t know if we’ve lost our way in our own erudition. That’s why we asked for some of you Unorthod
ox Engineering chaps to come out to Ithica to supply a fresh approach. The answer may be so damned obvious that we can’t see it for the weight of the maths intervening.”

  “And the primary object of the exercise is what?”

  Courtney glanced from the window at the monstrous column of darkness which reared its head high over the landscape. “I don’t know. Study it, use it, get rid of it – it’s an alien paradox, Fritz, and I don’t think anyone with an ounce of science in his makeup can let it rest there doing nothing but soaking up the sun.”

  “What’s the general topography of the Dark area, Jacko?”

  Jacko Hine of the Unorthodox Engineers unrolled his sheaf of maps. “This is the position of the Dark, and the area I’ve coloured shows the extent of the Pen. As you can see, the whole is centred on the edge of what used to be the city of Bethlem.”

  “Is the city still there?”

  “Its ruins are. The present city of New Bethlem has moved southwards, but in and around the Pen the remains of the old city still exist. Nobody lives there now. If you’d been into the Pen you’d understand why.”

  “You’ve been in, then? What’s it like?”

  “Weird,” said Jacko. “It’s cold and dull, but the sensations aren’t the usual ones of coldness and dullness. This is a different feeling entirely. I can’t quite explain it, but there’s something wrong with the physics of the place.”

  “Then I think I’d better start there. Where’s the rest of the U.E. squad?”

  “Doing some preliminary fact-finding at the edge of the Pen. I suggest we can contact them as we go in, and see what they’ve found.”

  “No,” said Van Noon. “I’d sooner contact them on the way out. I want my first impressions of the Pen to be a direct personal experience. I need to get the ‘feel’ of the thing – because I have a suspicion that this problem is going to be cracked by intuition rather than by observation. Maxwell Courtney’s no fool, and he and his team have been gathering facts for three years now. There’s no sense in repeating what they’ve already done, so I’m going to play it my way.”

  “I was rather afraid of that,” said Jacko, following in his wake.

  The edgeland was an area dominated by the ruins of the old city. The transport took them to the very perimeter of the Pen, and here they dismounted. Van Noon surveyed the phenomenon thoughtfully.

  The termination of the Pen was sharp, precise, and unwavering. At one point the magnificent sunshine of Ithica baked the dust golden and ripened dark berries on the hanks of hackberry-like scrub. A centimetre away the summer changed abruptly to a dark winter, shadowed and uninviting, and such scrub as grew within its bounds was thin and gnarled and bore no fruit at all.

  Above them the wall of shade rose vertically until it disappeared into the cloud-ring which clung stubbornly round the sombre column. Looking into the Pen, Van Noon gained the impression of gradually increasing coldness and bleakness and gloom until, in the centre, he could just detect the absolute blackness of the great pillar of the Dark. Cautiously he extended a hand into the boundary of the Pen and withdrew it, experiencing the strange chill on his skin.

  “Very curious,” he said. “What strikes you most about this, Jacko?”

  “Lack of interaction between the warmth outside and the cold inside.”

  “Precisely. At a guess there’s a temperature fall of fifteen degrees centigrade over a distance of one centimetre. Now there’s plenty of heat capacity available out here, so why doesn’t the warmth penetrate farther into the Pen?”

  “There’s only one answer. The heat is being removed.”

  “Yes, but I don’t see how. Even if you postulate that in the centre of the Pen is an area of absolute zero temperature you would still expect to get a graduated temperature rise at the boundary and not a sharp transition such as you have here.”

  “So?” Jacko looked at him expectantly.

  “So I can see how to achieve the inverse of this situation using, for instance, a collimated beam of infra-red heat. But a collimated shaft of coldness is something very new indeed. As you remarked, Jacko, there’s something wrong with the physics of this place.”

  With swift resolution Van Noon stepped through the perimeter and into the Pen. Jacko pulled up his collar and followed him in. The contrast was staggering. Whereas a few seconds previously the Ithican warmth had been sufficient to bring them to a gentle sweat, they now stood shivering with the curious chill which inhabited the Pen. Van Noon was looking with amazement at the dreary landscape and sub-climate of the Pen interior.

  The bright Ithican sunlight did not penetrate. The internal winter continued sheer up to the outer wall, and such light as there was filtered downwards from a dirty, leaden cloudbase trapped within the Pen itself. Even looking sunward, no sign of the Ithican primary could be seen, though it should have been clearly visible, and its apparent loss was not explicable in terms of haze or diffraction.

  The sun-toasted ruins which stood outside the Pen continued inside as a depressing waste of rotting bricks and slimed timbers, forming forgotten streets on which even the sparse and miserable vegetation had not much cared to grow. A few furred rodents scattered at their approach, with an attitude of resignation, as if self-preservation here was a matter about which one thought twice.

  Van Noon was sampling his surroundings with the detachment of a scientist, yet using his own body in lieu of instrumentation. The process went on for several minutes before he came to a conclusion.

  “What do you feel, Jacko?”

  “Cold.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, dull. I don’t know if it’s physical or psychological, but every action seems to demand too much effort.”

  “You’re right there,” said Fritz. “I found the same thing myself, and I don’t think it’s psychological. It’s almost as if every form of energy here was negated or opposed.”

  He picked up a stone. “Watch! I want to throw it through the window in the old wall over there.”

  He threw the stone with practised ease, having judged its weight to a nicety. But the stone lost speed rapidly and fell in a limp trajectory to the muddied soil several metres short of its intended target.

  “See what I mean?” said Van Noon. “That stone, accelerated to the velocity at which I released it, should at least have hit the wall. But it didn’t. It acted as a lighter body might have done on travelling through these conditions – or as a body of its actual weight might have done had it somehow lost kinetic energy during flight. How do you lose kinetic energy from a body in flight, Jacko?”

  “You can’t lose it,” said Jacko. “You can only react it against something – friction, air-resistance, and so on – in which case the energy leaves the system in some other form, usually heat. The energy itself is never lost, only converted.”

  “But here it wasn’t,” said Van Noon. “I wasn’t throwing against a headwind, and the air in here is no more dense than outside after allowing for temperature and humidity differences. So whatever stopped that stone wasn’t a normal reaction to flight. And I can find no evidence of abnormal gravity or coriolis effects. That stone just progressively lost energy. Mass times velocity doesn’t seem to equal momentum in the Pen – and that’s a hell of a smack at the textbooks you and I were raised on.”

  “Working outside the textbooks never worried you before,” said Jacko. “Let’s get out of this place, Fritz. It’s giving me the creeps.”

  “In a minute, Jacko. I’d like to explore a bit farther in first.”

  They walked together down the remains of a long-forgotten road, treading wearily on the slimed cobbles of the surface. The environment was desolate and forlorn, with an air of perpetual dampness and slow rot and reluctant fungus. As they penetrated to greater depths the gloom grew perceptibly greater, and the cold chill reached a degree where it would have been unwise to remain too long without the protection of additional clothing. Vegetable and animal life were here almost completely absent, and the sl
ime and fungus showed plainly that even the lower life-forms were maintaining their hold only with the greatest difficulty. Even organic decay had not progressed far after two centuries of perpetual winter.

  “What are we looking for, Fritz?”

  “I don’t know, Jacko. It’s the feel of this cold that has me puzzled. I don’t feel I’m cold just because the environment is cold. I feel I’m cold because my body is radiating more heat than it should at these temperatures. To judge from the feel of my skin it’s about five degrees below freezing point here.”

  “Agreed,” said Jacko. “Well below freezing, certainly.”

  “Then just an observation,” said Van Noon. “Why aren’t the puddles of water frozen? It’s my guess that a thermometer wouldn’t give much below ten centigrade. It’s the same effect that we encountered at the perimeter of the Pen – radiant heat being opposed by something only explicable as radiant cold.”

  “I don’t understand that, Fritz. After all, cold is only the absence of heat.”

  “I wonder,” said Van Noon, “if that isn’t a limitation to thinking which we’ve imposed upon ourselves. What happens if we postulate a phenomenon called contra-heat, which we treat as the conventional electromagnetic heat radiation but with the signs reversed?”

  “There’s no such animal,” objected Jacko.

  “No? Fetch some equipment in here and compare the radiant heat loss against temperature and I think you’ll find there is. There has to be. There’s nothing else you could set up in an equation which would go half way to meeting all the facts.”

  Something crackled and spat unexpectedly behind them with a sound like a multiple pistol shot. They whirled round and stopped in quick amazement. Between them and their path out of the Pen was quite the smallest and darkest and lowest thundercloud they had ever seen. The bottom of the cloud hung probably not more than thirty metres above the ground, and its inky-black consistency made them think of vapours other than those of the air, though this was probably a trick of light and circumstance.