* * *
Tuthy awoke sweating. The moon had gone down, and the room was pitch-black. In the office, the hypercone continued its distant, mouse-squeak broadcast.
Pal returned early in the morning, whistling disjointed selections from Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto. Lauren opened the front door for him, and he ran upstairs to join Tuthy. Tuthy sat before the monitor, replaying Pal’s sketch of the four-dimensional beings.
“Do you see them now?” he asked the boy.
Pal nodded. “They’re closer. They’re interested. Maybe we should get things ready, you know—be prepared.” He squinted. “Did you ever think what a four-dimensional footprint would look like?”
Tuthy considered this for a moment. “That would be most interesting,” he said. “It would be solid.”
On the first floor, Lauren screamed.
Pal and Tuthy almost tumbled over each other getting downstairs. Lauren stood in the living room with her arms crossed above her bosom, one hand clamped over her mouth. The first intrusion had taken out a section of the living-room floor and the east wall.
“Really clumsy,” Pal said. “One of them must have bumped it.”
“The music,” Tuthy said.
“What in hell is going on?” Lauren queried, her voice starting as a screech and ending as a roar.
“You’d better turn the music off,” Tuthy elaborated.
“Why?” Pal asked, face wreathed in an excited smile.
“Maybe they don’t like it.”
A bright, filmy blue blob rapidly expanded to a diameter of a yard beside Tuthy, wriggled, froze, then just as rapidly vanished.
“That was like an elbow,” Pal explained. “One of its arms. I think it’s trying to find out where the music is coming from. I’ll go upstairs.”
“Turn it off!” Tuthy demanded.
“I’ll play something else.” The boy ran up the stairs. From the kitchen came a hideous hollow crashing, then the sound of vacuum being filled—a reverse pop, ending in a hiss—followed by a low-frequency vibration that set their teeth on edge.
The vibration caused by a four-dimensional creature scraping across their three-dimensional “floor.” Tuthy’s hands shook with excitement.
“Peter!” Lauren bellowed, all dignity gone. She unwrapped her arms and held clenched fists out as if she were ready to exercise or start boxing.
“Pal’s attracted visitors,” Tuthy explained.
He turned toward the stairs. The first four steps and a section of floor spun and vanished. The rush of air nearly drew him down the hole.
After regaining his balance, he kneeled to feel the precisely cut, concave edge. Below was the dark basement.
“Pal!” Tuthy called out. “Turn it off!”
“I’m playing something new for them,” Pal shouted back. “I think they like it.”
The phone rang. Tuthy was closest to the extension at the bottom of the stairs and instinctively reached out to answer. Hockrum was on the other end, screaming.
“I can’t talk now—” Tuthy said. Hockrum screamed again, loud enough for Lauren to hear. Tuthy abruptly hung up. “He’s been fired, I gather,” he said. “He seemed angry.” He stalked back three paces and turned, then ran forward and leapt the gap to the first intact step. “Can’t talk.” He stumbled and scrambled up the stairs, stopping on the landing. “Jesus,” he said, as if something had suddenly occurred to him.
“He’ll call the government,” Lauren warned.
Tuthy waved that off. “I know what’s happening. They’re knocking chunks out of three-space, into the fourth. The fourth dimension. Like Pal says: clumsy brutes. They could kill us!”
Sitting before the Tronclavier, Pal happily played a new melody. Tuthy approached and was abruptly blocked by a thick green column, as solid as rock and with a similar texture. It vibrated and described an arc in the air. A section of the ceiling a yard wide was kicked out of three-space. Tuthy’s hair lifted in the rush of wind. The column shrunk to a broomstick, and hairs sprouted all over it, writhing like snakes.
Tuthy edged around the hairy broomstick and pulled the plug on the Tronclavier. A cage of zeppelin-shaped brown sausages encircled the computer, spun, elongated to reach the ceiling, the floor, and the top of the monitor’s table, and then pipped down to tiny strings and was gone.
“They can’t see too clearly here,” Pal said undisturbed that his concert was over. Lauren had climbed the outside stairs and stood behind Tuthy. “Gee, I’m sorry about the damage.”
In one smooth, curling motion, the Tronclavier and cone and all the wiring associated with them were peeled away as if they had been stick-on labels hastily removed from a flat surface.
“Gee,” Pal said, his face suddenly registering alarm.
Then it was the boy’s turn. He was removed more slowly, with greater care. The last thing to vanish was his head, which hung suspended in the air for several seconds.
“I think they liked the music,” he said with a grin.
Head, grin and all, dropped away in a direction impossible for Tuthy or Lauren to follow. The room sucked air through the open door, then quietly sighed back to normal.
Lauren stood her ground for several minutes, while Tuthy wandered through what was left of the office, passing his hand through mussed hair.
“Perhaps he’ll be back,” Tuthy said. “I don’t even know…” But he didn’t finish. Could a three-dimensional boy survive in a four-dimensional void, or whatever lay dup—or owwen?
Tuthy did not object when Lauren took it upon herself to call the boy’s foster parents and the police. When the police arrived, he endured the questions and accusations stoically, face immobile, and told them as much as he knew. He was not believed; nobody knew quite what to believe. Photographs were taken.
It was only a matter of time, Lauren told him, until one or the other or both of them were arrested. “Then we’ll make up a story,” he said. “You’ll tell them it was my fault.”
“I will not,” Lauren said. “But where is he?”
“I’m not positive,” Tuthy said. “I think he’s all right, however.”
“How do you know?”
He told her about the dream.
“But that was before,” she said.
“Perfectly allowable in the fourth dimension,” he explained. He pointed vaguely up, then down, then shrugged.
On the last day, Tuthy spent the early morning hours bundled in an overcoat and bathrobe in the drafty office, playing his program again and again, trying to visualize ana and kata. He closed his eyes and squinted and twisted his head, intertwined his fingers and drew odd little graphs on the monitors, but it was no use. His brain was hard-wired.
Over breakfast, he reiterated to Lauren that she must put all the blame on him.
“Maybe it will all blow over,” she said. “They have no case. No evidence … nothing.”
All blow over, he mused, passing his hand over his head and grinning ironically. How over, they’ll never know.
The doorbell rang. Tuthy went to answer it, and Lauren followed a few steps behind.
Putting it all together later, she decided that subsequent events happened in the following order:
Tuthy opened the door. Three men in gray suits, one with a briefcase, stood on the porch. “Mr. Peter Tuthy?” the tallest asked.
“Yes,” Tuthy acknowledged.
A chunk of the doorframe and wall above the door vanished with a roar and a hissing pop. The three men looked up at the gap. Ignoring what was impossible, the tallest man returned his attention to Tuthy and continued, “Sir, it’s our duty to take you into custody. We have information that you are in this country illegally.”
“Oh?” Tuthy said.
Beside him, an irregular, filmy blue blob grew to a length of four feet and hung in the air, vibrating. The three men backed away. In the middle of the blob, Pal’s head emerged, and below that, his extended arm and hand. Tuthy leaned forward to study this apparition. Pal’s finge
rs waggled at him.
“It’s fun here,” Pal said. “They’re friendly.”
“I believe you,” Tuthy said calmly.
“Mr. Tuthy,” the tallest man valiantly persisted, though his voice was a squeak.
“Won’t you come with me?” Pal asked.
Tuthy glanced back at Lauren. She gave him a small fraction of a nod, barely understanding what she was assenting to, and he took Pal’s hand. “Tell them it was all my fault,” he said again.
From his feet to his head, Peter Tuthy was peeled out of this world. Air rushed in. Half of the brass lamp to one side of the door disappeared. The INS men returned to their car with damp pants and embarassed, deeply worried expressions, and without any further questions. They drove away, leaving Lauren to contemplate the quiet.
She did not sleep for three nights, and when she did sleep, Tuthy and Pal visited her and put the question to her.
Thank you, but I prefer it here, she replied.
It’s a lot of fun, the boy insisted. They like music.
Lauren shook her head on the pillow and awoke. Not very far away, there was a whistling, tinny kind of sound, followed by a deep vibration. To her, it sounded like applause.
She took a deep breath and got out of bed to retrieve her notebook.
BRUCE STERLING
The Beautiful and the Sublime
One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist universe, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny and the nature of humanity itself. His acclaimed Shaper/Mechanist story “Swarm” was both a Hugo and Nebula finalist in 1982; “Spider Rose,” another story sharing the same background, was also a Hugo finalist that year. His story “Cicada Queen” was in our First Annual Collection; his “Sunken Gardens” was in our Second Annual Collection; his “Green Days in Brunei” and “Dinner in Audoghast” were in our Third Annual Collection. His novels include Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid. His most recent books are Schismatrix, a novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist future, and, as editor, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, and now lives in Austin with his wife, Nancy.
Here he treats us to a typically quirky and fascinating story, which the author himself describes as “a Wodehousian romantic comedy about the death of the scientific method..…”
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME
Bruce Sterling
May 30, 2070
My dear MacLuhan:
You, my friend, who know so well a lover’s troubles, will understand my affair with Leona Hillis.
Since my last letter to you, I have come to know Leona’s soul. Slowly, almost despite myself, I opened those reservoirs of sympathy and feeling that turn a simple liaison into something much deeper. Something that partakes of the sublime.
It is love, my dear MacLuhan. Not the appetite of the body, easily counterfeited with pills. No, it is closer to agape, the soaring spiritual union of the Greeks.
I know the Greeks are out of favor these days, especially Plato with his computerlike urge toward abstract intellect.
Forgive me if my sentiments take this somewhat over-Westernized expression. I can only express what I feel, simply and directly.
In other words, I am free of that sense of evanescence that poisoned my earlier commitments. I feel as if I had always loved Leona; she has a place within my soul that could never be filled by another woman.
I know it was rash of me to leave Seattle. Aksyonov was eager to have me complete the set design for his new drama. But I felt taxed and restless, and dreaded the days of draining creative effort. Inspiration comes from nature, and I had been too long pent in the city.
So, when I received Leona’s invitation to her father’s birthday gala in the Grand Canyon, the lure was irresistible. It combined the best of both worlds: the companionship of a charming woman, against the background of a natural wonder unrivaled for sublimity.
I left poor Aksyonov only a hasty note over the mailnet, and fled to Arizona.
And what a landscape! Great sweeping mesas, long blasted vistas in purple and rose, great gaudy sunsets reaching ethereal fingers of pure radiance halfway to the zenith! It is the opposite pole to our green, introspective Seattle; a bright yang to the drizzling yin of the Pacific Coast. The air, sharpened by sagebrush and pinyon pine, seems to scrub the brain like a loofah. At once I felt my appetite return, and a new briskness lent itself to my step.
I spoke with several Arizonans about their Global Park. I found them to be sensitive and even noble people, touched to the core by the staggering beauty of their eerie landscape. They are quite modern in their sentiments, despite the large numbers of retirees—crotchety industrial-age relics. Since the draining of Lake Powell, the former floodplain of the reservoir has been opened to camping, sports, and limited development. This relieves the crowding in the Grand Canyon itself, which, under wise stewardship, is returning to a pristine state of nature.
For Dr. Hillis’s celebration, Hillis Industries had hired a modern hogan, perching on the northern canyon rim. It was a broad, two-story dome, wrought from native cedar and sandstone, which blended into the landscape with admirable restraint and taste. A wide cedar porch overlooked the river. Behind the dome, white-barked Ponderosa pines bordered a large rock garden.
Freed of its obnoxious twentieth-century dams, the primal Colorado raged gloriously below the cliffsides, leaping and frothing in great silted billows and surges, flinging rocks and driftwood with tigerlike abandon. In the days that followed, its hissing roar would never be far from my thoughts.
The long drowning beneath the manmade lake had added an eerie charm to these upper reaches of the great canyon. Its shale and sandstone walls were stained a viridian green. In gulfs and eddies amid the canyon’s sinuous turns, old lake sediments still clung in warping slopes, clotted by the roots of cottonwoods and flowering scrub.
On the hogan porch, overlooking the cliffs, I plugged my wrist-ward into the house system and made my presence known. Also on the porch were a pair of old people. I checked their identities with my newly charged ward. But with the typical callousness of their generation, they had not plugged into the house system, and remained unknown to me.
It was with some relief, then, that I saw our old friend Mari Kuniyoshi emerge from the hogan to greet me. She and I had corresponded faithfully since her return to Osaka; mostly about her fashion business, and the latest gossip in Japanese graphic design.
I confess I never understood the magnetic attraction Mari has for so many men. My interest lies in her talent for design, and in fact I find her romances rather heartless.
My ward identified Mari’s companion: her production engineer and chief technician, Claire Berger. Mari was dressed somewhat ahead of the latest taste, in a bright high-throated peach sateen jacket and subtly clinging fluted anklewrap skirt. Claire Berger wore expedition pants, a cotton trek blouse and hiking boots. It was typical of Mari that she would use this gawky young woman as a foil.
The three of us were soon chastely sipping fruit juice under one of the porch umbrellas and admiring the view. We traded pleasantries while I waited for Mari’s obvious aura of trouble to manifest itself.
It emerged that Mari’s current companion, a nineteen-year-old model and aspiring actor, had become a source of friction. Also present at the Hillis birthday fete was one of Mari’s older flames, the globe-trotting former cosmonaut, Friedrik Solokov. Mari had not expected Fred’s appearance, though he had been traveling with Dr. Hillis for some time. Mari’s model friend had sensed the rekindled rapport between Mari and Fred Solokov, and he was extravagantly jealous.
“I see,” I said. “Well, at
some convenient time I can take your young friend aside, for a long talk. He’s an actor with ambitions, you say. Our troupe is always looking for new faces.”
“My dear Manfred,” she sighed, “how well you understand my little problems. You look very dashing today. I admire your ascot. What a charming effect. Did you tie it yourself or have a machine do it?”
“I confess,” I said. “This ascot has pre-stressed molecular folds.”
“Oh,” said Claire Berger distantly. “Really roughing it.”
I changed the subject. “How is Leona?”
“Ah. Poor Leona,” Mari said. “You know how fond she is of solitude. Well, as the preparations go on, she wanders through these great desolate canyons … climbing crags, staring down into the mists of that fierce river … Her father is not at all well.” She looked at me meaningfully.
“Yes.” It was well-known that old Dr. Hillis’s eccentricities, even cruelties, had advanced with the years. He never understood the new society his own great work had created. It was one of those ironic strokes you’re so fond of, my dear MacLuhan.
However, my Leona had paid for his reactionary stubbornness, so I failed to smile. Poor Leona, the child of the old man’s age, had been raised as his industrial princess, expected to master profits and losses and quarterly reports, the blighting discipline of his grisly drudgery. In today’s world, the old man might as well have trained her to be a Spanish conquistador. It’s a tribute to her spirit that she’s done as much for us as she has.
“Someone should be looking after her,” Mari said.
“She’s wearing her ward,” Claire said bluntly. “She’d have to work to get lost.”
“Excuse me,” I said, rising. “I think it’s time I met our host.”
I walked into the dome, where the pleasant resinous tang of last night’s pine fire still clung to the cold ashes of the hearth. I admired the interior: buffalo hides and vigorous Hopi blankets with the jagged look of old computer graphics. Hexagonal skylights poured light onto a floor of rough, masculine sandstone.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 43
