Universe 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  “Oh, Carlo… it’s all right. They take those things all over the world and put them up and say this is from Venice, the greatest city in the world.”

  “They should be here.”

  “Here, here, come in and lie down for a few hours. I’ll go see if Giuseppe will go to Torcello with you to bring back those bricks.” She arranged him on their bed. “Let them have what’s under the water, Carlo. Let them have it.” He slept.

  He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife.

  “Wake up, it’s late. You’ve got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they’ve got your scuba gear.”

  Carlo groaned.

  “Maria says Giuseppe will go with you; he’ll meet you with his boat on the Fondamente.”

  “Damn.”

  “Come on, Carlo, we need that money.”

  “All right, all right.” The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. “I’ll do it; don’t pester me.”

  He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s good-byes and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.

  Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had sat down in one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weight belts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling somewhat foolish—but not entirely—he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around this Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom…

  The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.

  Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.

  <>

  * * * *

  Carter Scholz’s first contribution to Universe (“The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs, “ in #7) was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and Scholz himself was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award as “best new writer.’’ Last year he appeared in both Universe and New Dimensions, with “The Johann Sebastian Bach Memorial Barbecue and Nervous Breakdown” and “Amadeus”—both stories, like the first in Universe, being about famous composers (though much different in plot and tone).

  This new story is totally unlike those earlier ones. It tells of an exploration team visiting a planet circling a faraway star . . . and of humanity ‘s first contact with an alien race, raising disturbing questions about our view of life and species evolution.

  Scholz is another Clarion alumnus and has also distinguished himself in the fields of art and music. His other stories have appeared in Orbit, Alternities, Clarion, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  ~ * ~

  IN RETICULUM

  Carter Scholz

  1. The Burial of the Dead

  They came down out of the long night and set their rocket on cool evening sands. Wind blew the smoke away in shreds, and the metal creaked under strain of weight and temperature. Dust devils played around the landing legs.

  Not far off stood a fragile sandstone building. How much had been carved by hand, and how much by wind, was impossible to judge. The wind had made or enlarged windows. Walls joined around tear-shaped gaps, where the thin wind abraded endlessly, and the building had ceded with grace.

  They had come across an inconceivable amount of space for reasons equally inconceivable. Each had a network of personal reasons that had driven him to the irrevocable loneliness of space flight, and these they would not, or could not, discuss. Then there were the larger reasons of government and industry which had sent them here, and those they were not privy to. The immediate, the putative, reason was the building.

  After a time they emerged.

  There were five in all. Bright, the sixth, was in a sling in the ship. There the gravity varied in hour-long pulses from zero to one sixth that of Earth. Two days from planetfall, after their torturous awakening, Bright had been afflicted with the commonest of spacemen’s psychoses, the Berkeleian conviction that nothing outside oneself is real. In Bright this had taken a nasty turn: he believed himself dead, and everything else illusions of torment. Therapy made it worse. Twice he had tried to swing the ship out of orbit, and finally he had broken into the reactor room. Then he had been restrained. Keitel had wanted to postpone the landing, fearing the effects of gravity on Bright: the irrefutable proof of an external force would, he feared, shatter Bright’s defenses. Koster had said that was too damned bad. They had compromised and brought the ship down with negative gravity in Bright’s cabin only.

  They blinked under the strange sun. Here was a frozen twilight, for the planet was so old that the tides of its moon had slowed its rotation to twice a year. The moon itself was long gone. The sun was a bitter and brutal orange, a hands-breadth over the horizon.

  Koster and the others approached the building in a rough arc. They were space-suited and they carried meter-high spindles of metal. These they arranged around the building, and then attached cables between them. The ship itself formed the sixth point on the perimeter enclosing the building. Keitel observed Jobes with the control box, waving the others away from the ring of spindles.

  The field leaped, and at once a bubble of interference formed on the slope nearest Koster. Rainbows slid down the bubble, faster and faster, and within a second the field broke.

  Koster’s voice came on the intercom without preamble.

  —Keitel, move your spindle back ten meters.

  On the second try, the field held for five seconds, until a dimple formed on the slope near Wulf and pulled it apart in a vortex. Wulf s voice came on:

  —There’s a ferrous deposit here. Keitel, five meters back. Roeg, ten meters forward.

  This time the field held, and after Jobes had made flux measurements, Keitel and Roeg returned to the ship to release the tinned atmosphere. During the hundred-year flight, the small hydroponics farm on board had processed their cold exhalations and stored two thousand tons of oxygen. Harvesters had plowed the uneaten crops into nutrient vats and waste sinks, whence came their monthly injections and inert gases stored against planetfall. Waste from engines and batteries was likewise stored, and the legumes were periodically stripped of nitrogen. These tanks now vented an atmosphere into the force bubble in a long polyphonic hiss; as much air again was held in reserve. The air smelled like Los Angeles on a summer day. Condensation set streams free on the invisible skin of the field.

  The field was extravagant, but necessary. Men could not come out of a century’s cold sleep and be asked to function in space suits. They needed the illusion of sky, freedom, unimpeded movement.

  The building had six rooms. The largest was tiled in monochrome hexagons; at the moment of entrance Roeg had taken them, impossibly, for heptagons. The floor was half obscured by a fine red dust. Jobes scooped a sample into a small plastic sack.

  The strange shapes thrown into twilit relief reminded one man of reefs he had seen in the Bahamas; another recalled mesas in Arizona; another thought of Mars; another was stirred as if the figures were from his own dreams; but none spoke. After the void, and the fierce screaming hour of descent, all voice for the moment had left them.

  The danger of the field breaking was greatest in its first twelve hours, so they spent their first night in the ship. Jobes punched four figures into the lock, which changed its entrance combination every twenty-four hours by a cesium clock that kept Earth time, and the outer door
swung back. There was a brief aseptic pulse of hard ultraviolet which blackened their visors momentarily. After the pressure cycle, the inner door opened; they desuited and went in.

  Keitel checked on Bright, who slept. Three dreams had been recorded. From a sense of responsibility rather than interest, he played them back. The interpreter had boggled at the first dream, and offered twenty-two different visuals. Keitel reflected that if it was going to be that complicated he would rather not know about the dreams. By now Earth likely had a machine that not only recorded dreams accurately, but supplied interpretation and therapy, and in extreme cases administered euthanasia on the spot. Of course that was the kind of thinking that had got him into the space services in the first place.

  Jobes relaxed in his cabin after depositing his sample in the bioanalytic computer. A few microbes, perhaps. But at this end of a planet’s life-cycle there could be no surprises. He allowed himself half of his computer memory space to begin a painting on the four-foot viewscreen.

  Roeg, in his cabin, worked on the fifth dimension of his chess program. Interesting problem with knight moves in the odd dimensions. He thought he had a handle on a general algorithm for n-dimensional chess. He did not play the game.

  Wulf played solitaire with a deck of Bicycle playing cards, brought at great cost. The deck weighed 70.6 grams. By leaving the jokers on Earth he had saved enough energy to light New York for a day.

  Of them all, only Koster worried about the purpose of the flight.

  In the year 2040 there had commenced, from a point in the constellation Reticulum, a history of radio on Earth. A repeater station was amplifying and replaying every signal from Earth it could pick up. Radio astronomers at Jodrell Bank, Green Bank, Arecibo, RA-TAN-Gorki, and at the Very Large Array in New Mexico were receiving television broadcasts, navigational beacons,, and so on—all a hundred years old.

  The frequencies of the original broadcasts had been raised by a factor of pi.

  By the act of repetition this far point was indicating that it had seen Earth. There was no attempt to send data, hence no problems with language or coding—just the standing if ambiguous invitation: Here.

  First ships had gone to nearer stars: Proxima, Sirius, Barnard’s, Wolf 359, Ross 154. Some Jupiter-class planets were found, void of life. The transmissions from Reticulum continued. By 2230 the agency was prepared to send a ship there. Only the state of microelectronics caused the delay: cosmic radiation destroyed silicon substrates over long exposures, and a flight to Reticulum would take over a hundred years each way. In 2240 this problem was solved, and the ship Janus commissioned.

  The lander, heart and brain of the ship, large as it was, was one-thousandth the mass of the whole. The shell and bulk were still in orbit, comprising two remaining thrusters, immense hemispherical reaction chambers ringed by fuel tanks, in which half a million tons of deuterium and tritium would be ignited on the trip back, hundreds of bombs per second for twenty years, until the coasting velocity of .7 c was reached. The last twenty years of the flight would be a like deceleration.

  What worried Koster was that he did not know the purpose of the flight.

  ~ * ~

  Prepared they were, within limits. But no simulation could prepare a man for the return from cold sleep. This explained the presence of Keitel and the oneiranalytic devices. Emerging from that long suspension, where the blood was near freezing and the pulse a daily tick, the brain rebelled. After the first few waking days it began to cut corners; routinely these were dreams in which the dreamer was forced back into cold sleep. Regarding significant content, these dreams were void: they were so explicit as to suggest nothing, expressing only a deep feral terror that surpassed any psychotic response to death or sex.

  The first morning on the planet only Bright was undisturbed by dreams. Keitel had a particularly bad one, in which unseen hands pushed him face first into a black door. He was crushed and finally smeared into the material of the door, which he knew was dense as a dark star. There was nothing at all on the other side.

  He prescribed, against his conscience, Thorazine for the whole crew.

  Jobes’s bioanalysis was negative, as expected, and after bathing the enclosed area in ultraviolet for the proscribed hour, he went out unsuited. The air under the field was warm, and fresher than yesterday. Twenty meters from the ship he dug a water hole, lined it with polystyrene, and filled it from the ship’s water. Then he stripped and jumped in, yelling.

  —Rubber men! he shouted up hoarsely. —Stretch out those relativistic kinks! Come out of that god damned meat locker!

  Placid Wulf emerged, yawning. Then came Keitel, still worrying over Bright, and Roeg holding a steaming coffee, and lastly sour Koster, who wandered toward the building. While the first three were still in the pool, Roeg reentered the ship and came out naked, strapped in a hopper. He soared in four-meter leaps on the negative-gravity pulses, stretched out as if to touch the sky field.

  —How’s this for rubber! he shouted.

  —Shut it off! yelled Koster. He ran to intercept Roeg, who turned a high somersault and came down by the edge of the pool.

  Koster reached them, scowling. —It’s bad enough we have a basket case inside. Do you know how much power that uses?

  —Ten thousand watts a jump, sir, said Roeg, unbuckling the device.

  Wulf said ingenuously, —Sir, could we turn on the sunlamp for a spell?

  Koster relented. —All right. Damn it, you could have broken a leg, Roeg. He walked into the ship.

  Wulf directed Roeg a look of mock contrition. Keitel said, —That’s all very nice, but now he’ll make me take Bright out of the sling.

  —Oh, all right, William. Christ’s sake, said Roeg.

  —How is Jack? Wulf asked.

  —I don’t know. I ought to check on him.

  —Can’t you sun a bit first? asked Jobes.

  Keitel looked at the plate warming red on the lander’s side against the black sky. —Better not. I, I have to . . . He left them without finishing.

  ~ * ~

  —Narcosynthesis? said Bright as Keitel entered the cabin.

  —That’s right, Jack.

  —Don’t think I need it today. The drugs, I mean. I’ve been dreaming anyway. Dreaming that I’m here.

  Keitel looked at his hands for a minute. —All right. We’ll see how it goes. Why did you enter the service, Jack?

  —They’d been taking me a piece at a time, said Bright pleasantly. —Cancer of the testicles, of the lungs, of the larnyx, of the stomach. Never a metastasis, always piecemeal, and the doctor, an ethical son of a bitch, the last time I was in asked me seriously if I wanted to go on that way. That was for the lungs. He said, you won’t have any feeling there. The Teflon sac will work like a lung, but you won’t feel it working. Well, I wondered. You knew I had an artificial larnyx, Will. It was a chore getting used to it; I literally had to learn to talk again. So I wondered about that lung. About being cut off that way. Damned son, I said to myself, let them. Let them take liver, lights, and endocrine glands. The seat of your soul, if you have one, is surely your brain, worse luck, and that they can’t replace, not yet. So I told the doctor, just leave the brain. Take out the whole damned diaphragm and bumgut if you have to, but don’t touch the brain.

  —Why did you join, Jack?

  —By then of course they didn’t call it cancer, no, cancer was licked. Instead we had this, a kind of lupus, used to be called noli-metangere, this whatever the hell it is, thoroughgoing viral internal leprosy. But I called it cancer. I knew well enough what they were up to. Any cancer they couldn’t cure was lupus, you see.

  —But tell me why.

  —One time, I’ll tell you, one time I hiked up Half Dome in California, and at that time they hadn’t hewn the steps or sunk the railings in the last approach to the brow. You had to climb cables, and I went, nervous, I’ll tell you, right after the snows had melted, and not knowing were the cables sound or not. Well, halfway up I looked over my shoulder.
Two thousand feet to a pine-and-granite floor, and I wondered, why not? Hell yes, this is what you came for, why not, sick son? And I turned cold, not from fear of death, not exactly. I feared I would die yet not be extinguished. If I could have known that all profit of experience, all laborious mental roads, would be effaced by death, I would have dropped, then and there. But I imagined a trap waiting for me, just this side of death. An anteroom. Not a spiritual state, but a state of prolonged physical torment, in which my damned brain just would not give up the ghost. I saw myself like a sack of rotten vegetables on the valley floor and the damned brain still trying to get up. You see, my instincts for self-preservation were too damned good. I didn’t trust my brain to know when it was licked.

  —Yes?

  —Odd thing is, it makes you immune to other diseases. The body’s very systematically burning itself and it wants no outside interference. Whole damned field crew in Venezuela caught malaria, but not me. Well, this is ideal for interstellars, you see; you don’t have to worry about your man kicking off suddenly.