Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “We have a wonderful home,” the woman declared, leaning against one of the native trees. “A long Ice Age has just released this land, giving us a favorable climate. And the northern soils have been bulldozed to the warm south, making the black ground we always name Iowa and Ohio and Ukraine."

  Her praise of their world earned grateful nods from tourists.

  “And we're blessed in having so much experience,” she continued. “Our ancestors learned long ago what to bring and how to adapt. Our culture is designed to grow quickly, and by every measure. Ten centuries is not a long time—not to a world or even to a young species like ours—but that's all the time we needed here to make a home for five billion of us."

  Smiles rode the nodding faces.

  “But we're most blessed in this way,” she said. Then she paused, letting her wise old eyes take their measure of her audience. “We are awfully lucky because this world is extremely weak. For reasons known and reasons only guessed at, natural selection took its sweet time here. These native life forms are roughly equivalent to the First Earth during its long ago Permian. The smartest tomb-tombs isn't smart at all. And as any good Father knows, intelligence is the first quality to measure when you arrive at a new home."

  Kala noticed the adults’ approval. Here was the central point; the woman was speaking to the young men in her audience, giving them advice should they ever want to become a Father.

  One hand lifted, begging to be seen.

  “Yes, sir,” said the lecturer. “A question?"

  “I could ask a question, I suppose.” The hand belonged to an elderly gentleman with the pale brown eyes of the First Father as well as his own thick mane of white hair. “Mostly, I was going to offer my observations. This morning, I was hiking the trail to Passion Lake—"

  “A long walk,” the woman interjected, perhaps trying to compliment his endurance.

  “I was bitten by mosquitoes,” he announced. “Nothing new about that, I suppose. And I saw rilly birds nesting in one of your false-spruces.” The rillies were native to the Second Father's world. “And I'm quite sure I saw mice—our mice—in the undergrowth. Which looked an awful lot like oleo-weed when it's gone wild."

  Oleo-weed was from the First Father's world, and it had been a human companion for the last twenty thousand years.

  The lecturer adjusted her big-brimmed hat as she nodded, acting unperturbed. “We have a few exotics on the reserve,” she agreed. “Despite our rules and restrictions—"

  “Is this right?” the white-haired man interrupted.

  “Pardon me?"

  “Right,” he repeated. “Correct. Responsible. What we are doing here ... is it worth the damage done to a helpless planet...?"

  More than anything, the audience was either puzzled by his attitude or completely indifferent. Half of the tourists turned away, pretending to take a burning interest in random rocks or the soft peculiar bark of the trees.

  The lecturer pulled the mountain air across her teeth. “There are estimates,” she began. “I'm sure everybody here has seen the figures. The First Father was the first pioneer, but he surely wasn't the only one to lead people away from the Old Earth. Yet even if you count only that one man and his wives, and if you make a conservative estimate of how many Fathers sprang up from that first world ... and then you assume that half of those Fathers built homes filled with young people and their own wandering hearts ... that means that by now, millions of colony worlds have been generated by that first example. And each of those millions might have founded another million or so worlds—"

  “An exponential explosion,” the man interjected.

  “Inside an endless Creation, as we understand these things.” She spoke with a grim delight. “No limit to the worlds, no end to the variety. And why shouldn't humanity claim as much of that infinity as he can?"

  “Then I suppose all of this has to be moral,” the white-haired man added, the smile pleasant but his manner sarcastic. “I guess my point is, madam ... you and those like you are eventually going to discover yourselves without employment. Because there will be a day, and soon, when this lovely ground is going to look like every other part of our world, thick with the same weeds and clinging creatures we know best, and exactly the same as the twenty trillion other human places."

  “Yes,” said the woman, her satisfaction obvious. “That is the future, yes."

  The lecturer wasn't looking at Kala, but every word felt as if it had been aimed her way. For the first time in her life, she saw an inevitable future. She loved this alien forest, but it couldn't last. An endless doom lay over the landscape, and she wanted to weep. Even her brother noticed her pain, smiling warily while he asked, “What the hell is wrong with you?"

  She couldn't say. She didn't know how to define her mind's madness. Yet afterwards, making the journey back to the parking lot, she thought again of that wildcat; and with a fury honest and pure, she wished that she had left the creature inside that trap. Or better, that she had used that long stick of hers and beaten it to death.

  * * * *

  4

  The most devoted wives left behind written accounts of their adventures on the new world—the seven essential books in the First Father's Testament. Quite a few churches also included the two Sarah diaries, while the more progressive faiths, such as the one Kala's family belonged to, made room for the Six Angry Wives. Adding to the confusion were the dozens if not hundreds of texts and fragmentary accounts left behind by lesser-known voices, as well as those infamous documents generally regarded to be fictions at best, and, at worst, pure heresies.

  When Kala was twelve, an older girl handed her a small, cat-eared booklet. “I didn't give this to you,” the girl warned. “Read it and then give it to somebody else, or burn it. Promise me?"

  “I promise."

  Past Fathers had strictly forbidden this testament, but someone always managed to smuggle at least one copy to the next world. The First Mother's Tale was said to be a third-person account of Claire, the fifty-year-old widow whose job it had been to watch over the sorority house and its precious girls. Claire was a judicious, pragmatic woman—qualities missing in her own mother, Kala realized sadly. On humanity's most important day, the housemother woke to shouts and wild weeping. She threw on a bathrobe and stepped into slippers before leaving her private ground-floor apartment. Urgent arms grabbed her up and dragged her down a darkened hallway. A dozen terrified voices were rambling on about some horrible disaster. The power was out, Claire noticed. Yet she couldn't find any trace of cataclysms. The house walls were intact. There was no obvious fire or flood. Whatever the disturbance, it had been so minor that even the framed photographs of Delta sisters were still neatly perched on their usual nails.

  Then Claire stepped out the front door, and hesitated. Two long trucks were parked in the otherwise empty street. But where was the campus? Past the trucks, exactly where the Fine Arts building should be, a rugged berm had been made of gray dirt and gray stone and shattered tree trunks. Beyond the berm was a forest of strange willowy trees. Nameless odors and a dense gray mist were drifting out of the forest on a gentle wind. And illuminated by the moon and endless stars was a flock of leathery creatures, perched together on the nearest limbs, hundreds of simple black eyes staring at the newcomers.

  The First Father was sitting halfway down the front steps, a deer rifle cradled in his lap, a box of ammunition between his feet, hands trembling while the pale brown eyes stared out at the first ruddy traces of the daylight.

  Women were still emerging from every door, every fire escape. Alone and in little groups, they would wander to the edge of their old world, the bravest ones climbing the berm to catch a glimpse of the strange landscape before retreating again, gathering together on the damp lawn while staring at the only man in their world.

  Claire pulled her robe tight and walked past the First Father.

  No life could have prepared her for that day, yet she found the resolve to smile in a believable fashion
, offering encouraging words and calculated hugs. She told her girls that everything would be fine. She promised they'd be home again in time for classes. Then she turned her attentions to the third truck. It was parked beside the house, its accordion door raised and its loading ramp dropped to the grass. Claire climbed the ramp and stared at the strange, battered machinery inside. The young woman who had heard the ripper in operation—the only witness to their leap across invisible dimensions—was telling her story to her sisters, again and again. Claire listened. Then she gathered the handful of physics majors and asked if the ripper was authentic. It was. Could it really do these awful things? Absolutely. Claire inhaled deeply and hugged herself, then asked if there was any possible way, with everything they knew and the tools at hand, that this awful-looking damage could be fixed?

  No, it couldn't be. And even if there was some way to patch it up, nobody here would ever see home again.

  “Why not?” Claire asked, refusing to give in. “Maybe not with this ripper-machine, no. But why not build a new one with the good parts here and new components that we make ourselves...?"

  One young woman was an honor student—a senior ready to graduate with a double major in physics and mathematics. Her name, as it happened, was Kala—a coincidence that made one girl's heart quicken as she read along. That ancient Kala provided the smartest, most discouraging voice. There wouldn't be any cobbling together of parts, she maintained. Many times, she had seen the ripper used, and she had even helped operate it on occasion. As much as anyone here, she understood its powers and limitations. Navigating through the multiverse was just this side of impossible. To Claire and a few of her sisters, the First Kala explained how the Creation was infinite, and how every cubic nanometer of their world contained trillions of potential destinations.

  “Alien worlds?” asked Claire.

  “Alternate earths,” Kala preferred. “More than two billion years ago, the world around us split away from our earth."

  “Why?"

  “Quantum rules,” said Kala, explaining nothing. “Every world is constantly dividing into a multitude of new possibilities. There's some neat and subtle harmonics at play, and I don't understand much of it. But that's why the rippers can find earths like this. Two billion years and about half a nanometer divide our home from this place."

  That was a lot for a housemother to swallow, but Claire did her best.

  Kala continued spelling out their doom. “Even if we could repair the machine—do it right now, with a screwdriver and two minutes of work—our earth is lost. Finding it would be like finding a single piece of dust inside a world made of dust. It's that difficult. That impossible. We're trapped here, and Owen knows it. And that's part of his plan, I bet."

  “Owen?” the First Mother asked. “Is that his name?"

  Kala nodded, glancing back at the armed man.

  “So you know Owen, do you?"

  Kala rolled her eyes as women do when they feel uncomfortable in a certain man's presence. “He's a graduate student in physics,” she explained. “I don't know him that well. He's got a trust fund, supposedly, and he's been stuck on his master's thesis for years.” Then with the next breath, she confessed, “We went out once. Last year. Once, or maybe twice. Then I broke it off."

  Here was a staggering revelation for the living Kala: The woman who brought her name to the new world had a romantic relationship with the First Father. And then she had rejected him. Perhaps Owen still loved the girl, Kala reasoned. He loved her and wanted to possess her. And what if this enormous deed—the basis for countless lives and loves—came from one bitter lover's revenge?

  But motivations never matter as much as results.

  Whatever Owen's reasons, women sobbed while other women sat on the lawn, knees to their faces, refusing to believe what their senses told them. Claire stood motionless, absorbing what Kala and the other girls had to tell her. Meanwhile a sun identical to their sun rose, the air instantly growing warmer. Then the winged natives swept in low, examining the newcomers with their empty black eyes. A giant beast not unlike a tortoise, only larger than most rooms, calmly crawled over the round berm, sliding down to the lawn where it happily began to munch on grass. Meanwhile, houseflies and termites, dandelion fluff and blind earthworms, were beginning their migrations into the new woods. Bumblebees and starlings left their nests in search of food, while carpenter ants happily chewed on the local timber. Whatever you believe about the First Father, one fact is obvious: He was an uncommonly fortunate individual. The first new world proved to be a lazy place full of corners and flavors that earth species found to their liking. Included among the lucky colonists were two stray cats. One was curled up inside a storage shed, tending to her newborn litter, while the other was no more than a few days pregnant. And into that genetic puddle were added three kittens smuggled into the sorority house by a young woman whose identity, and perhaps her own genetics, had long ago vanished from human affairs.

  On that glorious morning, two worlds were married.

  Each Testament had its differences, and every story was believable, but only to a maybe-so point. Claire's heretical story was the version Kala liked best and could even believe—a sordid tale of women trapped in awful circumstances but doing their noble best to survive.

  “Hello, Owen,” said Claire.

  The young man blinked, glancing at the middle-aged woman standing before him. Claire was still wearing her bathrobe and a long nightgown and old slippers. To Owen, the woman couldn't have appeared less interesting. He nodded briefly and said nothing, always staring into the distance, eyes dancing from excitement but a little sleepiness creeping into their corners.

  “What are you doing, Owen?"

  “Standing guard,” he said, managing a tense pride.

  With the most reasonable voice possible, she asked, “What are you guarding us from?"

  The young man said nothing.

  “Owen,” she repeated. Once. Twice. Then twice more.

  “I'm sorry,” he muttered, watching a single leather-wing dance in the air overhead. “There's a gauge on the ripper. It says our oxygen is about 80 percent usual. It's going to be like living in the mountains. So I'm sorry about that. I set the parameters too wide. At least for now, we're going to have to move slowly and let our bodies adapt."

  Claire sighed. Then one last time, she asked, “What are you guarding us from, Owen?"

  “I wouldn't know."

  “You don't know what's out there?"

  “No.” He shrugged his shoulders, both hands gripping the stock of the rifle. “I saw you and Kala talking. Didn't she tell you? There's no way to tell much about a new world. The ripper can taste its air, and if it finds free oxygen and water and marker molecules that mean you're very close to the ground—"

  “You kidnapped us, Owen.” She spoke firmly, with a measured heat. “Without anyone's permission, you brought us here and marooned us."

  “I'm marooned too,” he countered.

  “And why should that make us feel better?"

  Finally, Owen studied the woman. Perhaps for the first time, he was gaining an appreciation for this unexpected wild card.

  “Feel how you want to feel,” he said, speaking to her and everyone else in range of his voice. “This is our world now. We live or die here. We can make something out of our circumstances, or we can vanish away."

  He wasn't a weak man, and, better than most people could have done, he had prepared for this incredible day. By then, Claire had realized some of that. Yet what mattered most was to get the man to admit the truth. That's why she climbed the steps, forcing him to stare at her face. “Are you much of a shot, Owen? Did you serve in the military? In your little life, have you even once gone hunting?"

  He shook his head. “None of those things, no."

  “I have,” Claire promised. “I served in the Army. My dead husband used to take me out chasing quail. When I was about your age, I shot a five-point whitetail buck."

  Owen didn't know
what to make of that news. “Okay. Good, I guess."

  Claire kept her eyes on him. “Did you bring other guns?"

  “Why?"

  “Because you can't look everywhere at once,” she reminded him. “I could ask a couple of these ladies to climb on the roof, just to keep tabs on things. And maybe we should decide who can shoot, if it actually comes to that and we have to defend the house."

  Owen took a deep, rather worried breath. “I hope that doesn't happen."

  “Are there more guns?"

  “Yes."

  “Where?"

  His eyes tracked to the right.

  “In that truck?” Claire glanced over her shoulder. “The women checked the doors. They're locked, aren't they?"

  “Yes."

  “To keep us out? Is that it?"

  He shifted his weight, and with a complaining tone said, “I can't see much, with you in the way."

  “I guess not,” Claire responded. Then she pushed closer, asking, “Do you know the combinations of those padlocks?"

  “Sure."

  “Are you going to open them?"

  Silence.

  “All right,” she said. “I guess that's just a little problem for now."