Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  It was not the microorganisms Desan feared. It was the AI eight-wheeled transport, maneuvering itself for another attack on the cold-sleep facilities. Prudent to have set themselves inside a locked room with the rest of the scientists and hope for rescue from offworld; but the AI would batter itself against the plastic walls, and living targets kept it distracted from the sleeping, helpless clones—Gothon’s juniormost; Bothogi’s; those of a dozen senior staffers.

  And keeping it distracted became more and more difficult.

  Hour upon hour they had evaded its rushes, clumsy attacks and retreats in their encumbering suits. They had done it damage where they could while staff struggled to come up with something that might slow it . . . it limped along now with a great lot of metal wire wrapped around its rearmost right wheel.

  “Damn!” cried a young biologist as it maneuvered for her position. It was the agile young who played this game; and one aging lord-navigator who was the only fighter in the lot.

  Dodge, dodge and dodge. “It’s going to catch you against the oxy-plant, youngster! This way!” Desan’s heart thudded as the young woman thumped along in the cumbersome suit in a losing race with the transport. “Oh, damn, it’s got it figured! Bothogi!”

  Desan grasped his probe-spear and jogged on—“Divert it!” he yelled. Diverting it was all they could hope for.

  It turned their way, a whine of the motor, a serpentine flex of its metal body and a flurry of sand from its eight-wheeled drive. “Run, lord!” Bothogi gasped beside him; and it was still turning—it aimed for them now, and at another tangent a white-suited figure hurled a rock, to distract it yet again.

  It kept coming at them. AI. An eight-wheeled, flex-bodied intelligence that had suddenly decided its behavior was not working and altered the program, refusing distraction. A pressure-windowed juggernaut tracking every turn they made.

  Closer and closer. “Sensors!” Desan cried, turning on the slick dust—his footing failed him and he caught himself, gripped the probe and aimed it straight at the sensor array clustered beneath the front window.

  Thum-p! The dusty sky went blue and he was on his back, skidding in the sand with the great ballon tires churning sand on either side of him.

  The suit, he thought with a spaceman’s horror of the abrading, while it dawned on him at the same time he was being dragged beneath the AI, and that every joint and nerve center was throbbing with the high voltage shock of the probe.

  Things became very peaceful then, a cessation of commotion. He lay dazed, staring up at a rusty blue sky, and seeing it laced with a silver thread.

  They’re coming, he thought, and thought of his eldest clone, sleeping at a well-educated twenty years of age. Handsome lad. He talked to the boy from time to time.

  Poor lad, the lordship is yours. Your predecessor was a fool—

  A shadow passed above his face. It was another suited face peering down into his. A weight rested on his chest.

  “Get off,” he said.

  “He’s alive!” Bothogi’s voice cried. “Dr. Gothon, he’s still alive!”

  THE WORLD SHOWED no more scars than it had at the beginning—red and ocher where clouds failed. The algae continued its struggle in sea and tidal pools and lakes and rivers—with whatever microscopic addenda the breached dome had let loose in the world. The insects and the worms continued their blind ascent to space, dominant life on this poor, cratered globe. The research station was in function again, repairs complete.

  Desan gazed on the world from his ship: It hung as a sphere in the holotank by his command station. A wave of his hand might show him the darkness of space; the floodlit shapes of ten hunting ships, lately returned from the deep and about to seek it again in continuation of the Mission, sleek fish rising and sinking again in a figurative black sea. A good many suns had shone on their hulls, but this one sun had seen them more often than any since their launching.

  Home.

  The space station was returning to function. Corpses were consigned to the sun the Mission had sought for so long. And power over the Mission rested solely at present in the hands of the lord-navigator, in the unprecedented circumstance of the demise of all five lords-magistrate simultaneously. Their clones were not yet activated to begin their years of majority—“Later will be time to wake the new lords-magistrate,” Desan decreed, “at some further world of the search. Let them hear this event as history.”

  When I can manage them personally, he thought. He looked aside at twenty-year-old Desan Six and the youth looked gravely back with the face Desan had seen in the mirror thirty-two waking years ago.

  “Lord-navigator?”

  “You’ll wake your brother after we’re away, Six. Directly after. I’ll be staying awake much of this trip.”

  “Awake, sir?”

  “Quite. There are things I want you to think about. I’ll be talking to you and Seven both.”

  “About the lords-magistrate, sir?”

  Desan lifted brows at this presumption. “You and I are already quite well attuned, Six. You’ll succeed young. Are you sorry you missed this time?”

  “No, lord-navigator! I assure you not!”

  “Good brain. I ought to know. Go to your post, Six. Be grateful you don’t have to cope with a new lordship and five new lords-magistrate and a recent schism.”

  Desan leaned back in his chair as the youth crossed the bridge and settled at a crew-post, beside the captain. The lord-navigator was more than a figurehead to rule the seventy ships of the Mission, with their captains and their crews. Let the boy try his skill on this plotting. Desan intended to check it. He leaned aside with a wince—the electric shock that had blown him flat between the AI’s tires had saved him from worse than a broken arm and leg; and the medical staff had seen to that: The arm and the leg were all but healed, with only a light wrap to protect them. The ribs were tightly wrapped too; and they cost him more pain than all the rest.

  A scan had indeed located three errant asteroids, three courses the station’s computers had not accurately recorded as inbound for the planet—until personnel from the ships began to run their own observation. Those were redirected.

  Casualties. Destruction. Fighting within the Mission. The guilt of the lords-magistrate was profound and beyond dispute.

  “Lord-navigator,” the communications officer said. “Dr. Gothon returning your call.”

  Goodbye, he had told Gothon. I don’t accept your judgment, but I shall devote my energy to pursuit of mine, and let any who want to join you—reside on the station. There are some volunteers; I don’t profess to understand them. But you may trust them. You may trust the lords-magistrate to have learned a lesson. I will teach it. No member of this mission will be restrained in any opinion while my influence lasts. And I shall see to that. Sleep again and we may see each other once more in our lives.

  “I’ll receive it,” Desan said, pleased and anxious at once that Gothon deigned reply; he activated the com-control. Ship-electronics touched his ear, implanted for comfort. He heard the usual blip and chatter of com’s mechanical protocols, then Gothon’s quiet voice. “Lord-navigator.”

  “I’m hearing you, doctor.”

  “Thank you for your sentiment. I wish you well, too. I wish you very well.”

  The tablet was mounted before him, above the console. Millions of years ago a tiny probe had set out from this world, bearing the original. Two aliens standing naked, one with hand uplifted. A series of diagrams which, partially obliterated, had still served to guide the Mission across the centuries. A probe bearing a greeting. Ages-dead cameras and simple instruments.

  Greetings, stranger. We come from this place, this star system.

  See, the hand, the appendage of a builder—This we will have in common.

  The diagrams: We speak knowledge; we have no fear of you, strangers who read this, whoever you be.

  Wise fools.

  There had been a time, long ago, when fools had set out to seek them . . . In a vast desert of star
s. Fools who had desperately needed proof, once upon a quarter million years ago, that they were not alone. One dust-covered alien artifact they found, so long ago, on a lonely drifting course.

  Hello, it said.

  The makers, the peaceful Ancients, became a legend. They became purpose, inspiration.

  The overriding, obsessive Why that saved a species, pulled it back from war, gave it the stars.

  “I’m very serious—I do hope you rest, doctor—save a few years for the unborn.”

  “My eldest’s awake. I’ve lost my illusions of immortality, lord-navigator. She hopes to meet you.”

  “You might still abandon this world and come with us, doctor.”

  “To search for a myth?”

  “Not a myth. We’re bound to disagree. Doctor, doctor, what good can your presence there do? What if you’re right? It’s a dead end. What if I’m wrong? I’ll never stop looking. I’ll never know.”

  “But we know their descendants, lord-navigator. We. We are. We’ve spread their legend from star to star—they’ve become a fable. The Ancients. The Pathfinders. A hundred civilizations have taken up that myth. A hundred civilizations have lived out their years in that belief and begotten others to tell their story. What if you should find them? Would you know them—or where evolution had taken them? Perhaps we’ve already met them, somewhere along the worlds we’ve visited, and we failed to know them.”

  It was irony. Gentle humor. “Perhaps, then,” Desan said in turn, “we’ll find the track leads home again. Perhaps we are their children—eight and a quarter million years removed.”

  “O ye makers of myths. Do your work, space-farer. Tangle the skein with legends. Teach fables to the races you meet. Brighten the universe with them. I put my faith in you. Don’t you know—this world is all I came to find, but you—child of the voyage, you have to have more. For you the voyage is the Mission. Goodbye to you. Fare well. Nothing is complete calamity. The equation here is different, by a multitude of microorganisms let free—Bothogi has stopped grieving and begun to have quite different thoughts on the matter. His algae-pools may turn out a different breed this time—the shift of a protein here and there in the genetic chain—who knows what it will breed? Different software this time, perhaps. Good voyage to you, lord-navigator. Look for your Ancients under other suns. We’re waiting for their offspring here, under this one.”

  JOHN CROWLEY

  Snow

  John Crowley’s writing has earned comparisons to the epic fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. He is generally regarded as a writer of mythic fantasy who has freely mixed elements of science fiction into his allusive and richly symbolic fiction. His first three novels all develop fantasy plots in nominally science fictional settings. The Deep tells of a medieval power struggle convulsing two feudal households on a planet geographically distinct but historically similar to Earth. Beasts is set in a balkanized near-future America where proponents of totalitarian centralized government struggle to stamp out a war of independence spearheaded by genetically manipulated human/animal hybrids. Engine Summer unfolds a primitive rite-of-passage tale against the backdrop of a postapocalyptic America descended into a new dark age. Crowley’s World-Fantasy Award–winning Little, Big marked his departure from science fiction–accented explorations of the human social structures for modern treatments of traditional high fantasy. Redolent with echoes of classic romantic literature, the tale chronicles an eccentric multigeneration family alive in a reality-skewed modern world who enjoy a rapport with the world of faerie that is eventually threatened by the rise of a president with antipathy to the faerie kind. Considered a landmark of modern fantasy, this inventive novel sets the pattern for Crowley’s subsequent work with its playful depiction of ordinary lives touched by the strange and magical. Aegypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania are the first three in a projected quartet of novels intended to interlock as a single all-encompassing philosophical romance that blends historical fact, imaginary world fantasy, occult mystery, Renaissance metaphysics, alternate history, quest legend, and classic mythology. Crowley’s collection Novelty features four visionary novellas concerned with artistic creation. His fiction has also been collected in Antiquities.

  I DON’T THINK Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

  In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless fight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name fit all around: one of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death, where is thy sting?

  Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it; it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the numbers of other people around her, the level of light, and the tone of her voice. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket.

  It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.

  It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. It went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut in there for days.

  Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. Then one day the maids swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self—all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber, and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her, her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green.

  I MARRIED GEORGIE for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to Gstaad to Bial to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked me in ski clothes.

  Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so lon
g been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as she needed anybody. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls, at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour travels around with it. She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or ambition in her—easily pleased and easily bored and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She cherished things and lost them and forgot them: things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with her; that was her talent and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”

  And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria, she was among the first to get one of those snow leopards, silent beasts as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative, heir to the little she still had, and beneficiary, too, of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately, The Park’s services included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous and made sure I understood how to go about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless: And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: Someone I loved is dead; let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make up for it. I went back to L.A.