Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe

by Bill Fawcett

  We Russians are different. Our expertise? We persist. Resist! But with measured, cynical care. And each defeat is simply preparation.

  That truth, I had already known. Only now it filled my soul.

  We are the people who know how to outlast the Coss.

  And so I took my mother by the hand, leading her to the place that I had found, where Cyrillic letters lay deep-incised along the bared trunk of a crystal tree. And I watched her face bloom with sudden hope, with sunlit joy. And I knew, at last, what lesson this place taught.

  To endure.

  David Brin is a scientist, inventor, and New York Times bestselling author. With books translated into twenty- five languages, he has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. A film directed by Kevin Costner was based on David’s novel The Postman. Other works have been optioned by Paramount and Warner Bros. David’s science- fictional Uplift saga explores gene tic engineering of higher animals, like dolphins, to speak. His new novel from Tor Books is Existence. More information is available at his website: www.davidbrin.com/existence.html.

  As a scientist/futurist, David is seen frequently on television shows such as The ArchiTechs, Universe, and Life After People (the most popular show ever on the History Channel)— with many appearances on PBS, BBC, and NPR. An inventor with many patents, he is in demand to speak about future trends, keynoting for IBM, Google, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Mauldin Group, and Casey Research, all the way to think tanks, Homeland Security, and the CIA. See: www.davidbrin.com/speaker.html.

  With degrees from Caltech and the University of California San Diego, Dr. Brin serves on advisory panels ranging from astronomy, NASA innovative concepts, nanotech, and SETI to national defense and technological ethics. His nonfiction book The Transparent Society explores the dangers of secrecy and loss of privacy in our modern world. It garnered the prestigious Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association.

  The Sea of Memory

  GENE WOLFE

  Adele helped George, Mike, Ted, and Sy put up the Putman Shelter. (Not that they needed her help.) Afterward, she left them to stand on a high rock at the edge of the sea and look out over the water. The waves were regular, small, and smooth, the water blue and dark with mystery. A bird flew somewhere overhead, weeping endlessly over an imagined sorrow. Adele looked for it, but never caught sight of it. In her thoughts, it was a gull, white and pearl-gray, lost against the high clouds.

  Behind her, Sy climbed onto the rock. She turned to stare at him. “We’ve got the sleeping places laid out,” Sy told her. “We’re going to draw lots for them. Winner gets first pick. You’ll want to be there.”

  “No. I don’t care. I’ll take whatever’s left. I’m not going to sleep there anyway.”

  “Where are you going to sleep, in that case?”

  Adele smiled. “Why do you care?”

  “I care, all right? The weather’s not always going to be like this. It will rain. Snow in winter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know, that’s all.” Sy was the most patient of the four. “We’ve only been here a few days. We don’t really know what it’s going to be like. This could be the best weather we’ll see all year.”

  Adele decided she would sleep in the ship. “Has it really been just a few days?”

  Sy hesitated. “I think so.”

  “It seems so much longer. Forever.” The wind from the sea played with her auburn hair, so that it streamed toward Sy like two flags. “No, not forever. But a long time.”

  “We haven’t run out of rations yet. We still have food.” It was a weak argument, and Sy’s voice showed he knew it.

  When was the last time she had eaten? Her meal had been of what?

  “Will we? Ever?”

  “Of course we will!”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  Without a word, Sy began to climb back down. Adele watched him until he was safely on the beach again, and then turned back to the sea. Soundless waves washed the foot of her rock, and the unseen bird wept overhead.

  What was on the other side? The silent water was too wide for her to see across. “I’ll sleep on the ship.” She was quoting a thought. The ship had to be near here. She tried to remember where.

  When she tired of watching the waves, she turned to watch the men erecting the Putman Shelter. She counted them and tried to recall their names. The Putman Shelter was already much larger than she had anticipated. Once she had helped two other women erect a Putman Shelter. It took them seventeen minutes the first time, nine minutes the second. Or was that nine hours? She felt quite sure it had not seemed like nine hours, and it had been fun. They had teamed up to pull the stakes, and she had driven ropes with a big wooden mallet. It had been like Girl Scouts, she thought, and smiled.

  There were five men working away now: Ted, Sy, Mike, and two Georges. She wondered where the other George came from. Perhaps he had always been there.

  At least, he looked like George.

  She was climbing down the rock before she realized she was going to investigate.

  “Hello, Adele.” It was one of the Georges. “Glad to see you made it.”

  “I was looking at the sea.” Why should she explain?

  The George nodded. “Glad you were. It’s going to take a great deal of study. That’s your field, isn’t it? Marine ecology?”

  Adele nodded. She recalled lying on the floor in her bedroom with Glenys. Glenys did not understand; thus she strove to explain the game. “Heads marine biology, and tails home economics. Heads interactive world history, and reverse, political science, Queen library science, and lion shield-taming.”

  Or had it been Susan?

  “Hell,” the George said, “we don’t really understand the ecology of the seas of Earth.”

  “Or know their names.” Adele felt confident. When he said nothing, she added, “There’s the Holy Sea. It’s around Italy somewhere.”

  The George laughed. “Come over and have a look at the Shelter. I want to show you the parts I worked on.”

  She nodded, and his hand found hers.

  “This is Entrance Seven. I really didn’t have anything to do with it. Ted, Mike, and Sven put it up before I got here, but it’s how I got in the first time I came. I was impressed by the stitching. Look here.” He ran his index finger along a seam. “Isn’t that great?”

  Dutifully, Adele nodded.

  “And look here.”

  Adele was looking at a chair. She nodded again. It had gilt arms and a velvet back, a comfortable-looking red velvet seat.

  “They used a door eraser. If it gets too cold, there’s no door.”

  She sat as quietly as she could. The George was no longer paying attention to her, so why pay attention to him? There was a different view of the sea from here. The beach gave it perspective. There were no ships, no seagulls, no popcorn bags and beer cans littering the sand. Seashells? She strove to remember.

  “Hello,” a new voice said. “I’m Steve. Who are you?”

  She stared at him. He looked like Sy, she decided. Tall and blond. Blue eyes. But Sy was slender, wasn’t he?

  Steve cleared his throat. “I guess that wasn’t polite, just asking like that. Only I, well, I wanted us to get acquainted right away.”

  “I’m Adele.”

  “Happy to meet you.” He smiled. “Can we be friends?”

  Another question. She decided it would be best to ignore it. Five minutes into every conversation, Glenys wanted to know whether she was still a virgin. It was better to pretend it had not been said.

  “I suppose you’ll want me to cook.” She was a bad cook.

  “Why, no. No, I won’t, I promise.” He looked baffled. “I mean, rations heat themselves when you open the pouch, but if there was cooking that had to be done—I mean, like, suppose there’s animals on this planet and we shot an animal or something. If we had arrows, I mean, and we wanted to cook it. I’d do it. I’d be happy to. I’m a good cook.” />
  “I’m Adele.” She smiled.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I don’t remember my last name. Isn’t that odd? I remember I had one, and that it was the same as my mother’s, but I can’t remember it.”

  He smiled in return. “We left our surnames back on Earth.”

  “I never had a surname, just a last name. I never knew for sure who my father was.”

  Still smiling, this other Sy (who looked, she thought, less like Sy every moment) sat on the carpet. “Same here,” he said. “There was an uncle who lived with us for a while.” He laughed. “One time I asked my mother who he was, and she said he was her brother. Only another time she said he was my father’s brother.”

  “Was he nice?”

  “Sometimes.” The new Sy was no longer smiling. “I think he wanted to molest me, but he never got the nerve.”

  “Nobody ever molested me.”

  “Maybe they did and you forgot it.”

  Adele shook her head.

  “We edit things out. It’s a door eraser. The memory is a door that lets in things we don’t want to remember, so there’s no door.”

  “I need a ‘you’ eraser.” It was too soft, probably, for him to hear. She stood and walked away.

  Mike was in a courtyard driving a stake with a power hammer. He stopped as Adele approached him. “Hi, Adele. Okay if I ask you a question?”

  She nodded.

  “How did we get here? Do you know?”

  “On a ship. Across the sea.”

  Mike smiled, encouraging her. His teeth were large and white and a little too regular. “That’s right, across the sea of space. Did our ship have sails?”

  She nodded, remembering.

  “That’s right again. Mylar sails a thousand miles across to catch the star winds. Where did we sleep?”

  “On the ship.” Did he want her to talk more? She decided he did. “I loved sleeping on the ship. There was this stuffed koala bear, all soft and cuddly. I hugged it in bed and stroked its fur until it fell asleep.”

  “You fell asleep,” Mike said.

  Another Mike came up behind Adele. “I remember this conversation,” he told her. “It upset you badly. Why don’t you go?”

  “I will.” Adele thought for a moment. “Another place than here. Can I go back to the ship? I’d like that.”

  “There isn’t any other place,” the other Mike told her. “Then I can’t go.”

  “I told you this would upset her,” the first Mike said. “No, I told you that.”

  This was the time to leave, Adele decided, but she stayed.

  The Mikes separated, and one tried to take her arm very gently. The Mike on her left said, “I’ve figured this out, or I think I have.”

  “So have I,” the other Mike affirmed.

  “Like, why are there two of me on this planet.” Mike paused, looking thoughtful. At length he said, “There may be more. Hell, there probably are.”

  “You’re going at it wrong,” the other Mike told him. “There are not two of you. Nor are there two of me. I am you and you are me. There is only one Mike, and no time.”

  Adele’s indifference drowned in curiosity. “No time for what?”

  “No time for anything,” the Mike who had tried to hold her left arm said. “Eternity for everything.”

  His twin said, “Eternity means forever.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Forever means endless years, endless centuries. Time piling up, on and on.” Ted had joined them.

  “Eternity means no time, timelessness,” the Mikes said.

  “Without time,” Ted scoffed, “everything would happen at once.”

  “Exactly,” the Mikes said in chorus.

  Adele paid little attention. She was looking across the sand at the girl standing ever so still upon her rock. She had red hair that seemed almost brown, long, straight hair that the wind blew about her.

  “Hi,” a new voice said, “what are you guys up to here?”

  No one answered him.

  “I-I’m Jeff.” He was big, and thick at the waist.

  “Hello, Jeff.” Adele felt sorry for him. She held out her hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  He tried to hold it between his own. He had large hands, medium hard. “I was in the probe. Suspended and frozen. All those things they do, I guess. Only I didn’t feel any of it. I blacked out.”

  Adele looked around for the Mikes, but they had gone.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “And then I was here,” Jeff told her. “This shirt? These pants? These are the kind of things I always wore before I got involved in the probe program.” He pulled three keys on a ring out of a pocket. “See this key here? It’s the key to my old apartment, only where is it? Where’s my old apartment?” He held up the key so that she could see it.

  “Back in time.”

  “You mean we slept for hundreds of years. That’s right; they said we would. Thousands, actually.”

  “No, Jeff.” Adele shook her head, and it moved ever so slightly.

  “We didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. This is hard to explain.”

  “But you can.” Jeff’s voice was raspy, and very serious. “I want to hear your explanation.”

  “I can’t prove it to you, but I know.” Adele turned to walk nearer the girl who stood looking at the sea.

  “I want to hear your explanation,” Jeff said. He sounded more serious than ever. “I may not agree, but I won’t ridicule you. I’ve been wrong before.”

  “All right.” Adele stopped, took a deep breath of sea air, and turned to face him. “Do you understand time?”

  Jeff shook his head. “Einstein said that time was the fourth dimension, but it’s nothing like the other three. A particle physicist I talked to one time said that time was really different things we were lumping together. I think he said five.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Neither do I, Adele. I don’t understand time, and I doubt anybody really does.”

  “I don’t either.” Adele was confident now. “But I know this about it: It’s not everywhere. Sy thinks it may snow here, and I think he may be right. But there are places where it doesn’t snow.”

  She saw that Jeff did not understand her. Another deep breath. “Where’s your watch, Jeff?”

  He stared out to sea, but Adele did not speak again. At last he said, “I think they took it from me before I got into the pod.”

  “If you had it here . . .” She paused, trying to order her thoughts and so make them clear.

  “I don’t.”

  “I think it would still run. It would tick away and the hands would move, but it wouldn’t work.” She repeated, “There are places where it never snows.”

  Jeff nodded. “Sure.”

  “My mother’s boyfriend had a yardstick he kept in the garage. Whenever we got a big snow, he got it out and took measurements. Then he would tell us how deep the snow was.”

  Jeff nodded again.

  “In a place where it never snowed, his yardstick would still work. It could measure how tall a child was or push something out from under his pickup, but it couldn’t measure snow.”

  “Without time . . .”

  “Everything happens at once. Ted said that, and he was right. Anything you do, you do.” Adele pointed. “See that girl over there looking at the sea? I stood there looking at the sea, then I went over to where the guys were putting up a Putman Shelter. Only I’m still there, looking at the sea.”

  Jeff whistled softly.

  “When you got on the ship, did they say you might die? That it would take the ship thousands of years to get there, and you might die right there in the pod?”

  He nodded. “There were things back on Earth that I wanted to get away from. Forever.”

  “I understand.” Adele tried to take his hand. “Kiss me!”

  Jeff tried to put his arms around her. It was like being wrapped in fog. Mist brushed her lips.

&nb
sp; When they parted, he gasped and stared, reached for her, and drew his hand back.

  “We’re dying.” Adele’s tone was flat, neither sad nor happy. “We’re dying one by one in the pods. When we die, we go here.”

  The girl on the rock turned to face them. “I know the name!” Her voice might have been a distant trumpet. “It’s the Sea of Memory!”

  Table of Contents

  SHADOWS OF THE NEW SUN

  Contents

  Foreword

  Frostfree

  A Lunar Labyrinth

  The Island of the Death Doctor

  A Touch of Rosemary

  Ashes

  Bedding

  . . . And Other Stories

  The Island of Time

  The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin

  Snowchild

  Tourist Trap

  Epistoleros

  Rhubarb and Beets

  Tunes from Limbo, But I Digress

  In the Shadow of the Gate

  Soldier of Mercy

  The Dreams of the Sea

  The Log

  The Sea of Memory