The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Don’t ask me,” Hawk said bitterly. “I just play the part of Judas Iscariot in this little drama.” He tugged at Wolf’s shoulders. “Let’s go, pilgrim. We’ve got to go down now.” Wolf slowly weaned himself of the support, allowed himself to be coaxed down from the tower.

  There were men in black uniforms at the foot of the tower. One of them addressed Hawk. “Is this the African national?” Then, to Wolf: “Please come with us, sir. We have orders to see you safely to your hostel.”

  Tears flooded Wolf’s eyes, and he could not see the crowd, the Commons, the men before him. He allowed himself to be led away, as helpless and as trusting as a small child.

  ***

  In the morning, Wolf lay in bed staring at the ceiling. A fly buzzed somewhere in the room, and he did not look for it. In the streets iron-wheeled carts rumbled by, and children chanted a counting out game.

  After a time he rose, dressed, and washed his face. He went to the hostel’s dining room for breakfast.

  There, finishing off a piece of toast, was DiStephano.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mbikana. I was beginning to think I’d have to send for you.” He gestured to a chair. Wolf looked about, took it. There were at least three of the political police seated nearby.

  DiStephano removed some documents from his jacket pocket handed them to Wolf. “Signed, sealed, and delivered. We made some minor changes in the terms, but nothing your superiors will object to.” He placed the last corner of toast in the side of his mouth. “I’d say this was a rather bright beginning to your professional career.”

  “Thank you,” Wolf said automatically. He glanced at the documents, could make no sense of them, dropped them in his lap.

  “If you’re interested, the African Genesis leaves port tomorrow morning. I’ve made arrangements that a berth be ready for you, should you care to take it. Of course, there will be another passenger ship in three weeks if you wish to see more of our country.

  “No,” Wolf said hastily. Then, because that seemed rude, “I’m most anxious to see my home again. I’ve been away far too long.”

  DiStephano dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a napkin, let it fall to the tablecloth. “Then that’s that.” He started rise.

  “Wait,” Wolf said. “Mr. DiStephano, I…I would very much like an explanation.”

  DiStephano sat back down. He did not pretend not to understand the request. “The first thing you must know,” he said, “is that Ms. Horowitz was not our first Janis Joplin.”

  “No,” Wolf said.

  “Nor the second.”

  Wolf looked up.

  “She was the twenty-third, not counting the original. The show is sponsored every year, always ending in Boston on the equinox. So far, it has always ended in the same fashion.”

  Wolf wondered if he should try to stab the man with a fork, if he should rise up and attempt to strangle him. There should be rage, he knew. He felt nothing. “Because of the brain implants.”

  “No. You must believe me when I say that I wish she had lived. The implants helped her keep in character, nothing more. It’s true that she did not recall the previous women who played the part of Janis. But her death was not planned. It’s simply something that—happens.”

  “Every year.”

  “Yes. Every year Janis offers herself to the crowd. And every year they tear her apart. A sane woman would not make the offer; a sane people would not respond in that fashion. I’ll know that my country is on the road to recovery come the day that Janis lives to make a second tour.” He paused. “Or the day we can’t find a woman willing to play the role, knowing how it ends.”

  Wolf tried to think. His head felt dull and heavy. He heard the words, and he could not guess whether they made sense or not. “One last question,” he said. “Why me?”

  DiStephano rose. “One day you may return to our nation,” he said. “Or perhaps not. But you will certainly rise to a responsible position within the Southwest Africa Trade Company. Your decisions will affect our economy.” Four men in uniform also rose from their chairs. “When that happens, I want you to understand one thing about your land: We have nothing to lose. Good day, and a long life to you, sir.”

  DiStephano’s guards followed him out.

  ***

  It was evening. Wolf’s ship rode in Boston harbor, waiting to carry him home. Away from this magic nightmare land, with its ghosts and walking dead. He stared at it and he could not make it real; he had lost all capacity for belief.

  The ship’s dinghy was approaching. Wolf picked up his bags.

  Ginungagap

  Abigail checked out of Mother of Mercy and rode the translator web to Toledo Cylinder in Juno Industrial Park. Stars bloomed, dwindled, disappeared five times. It was a long trek, halfway around the sun.

  Toledo was one of the older commercial cylinders, how given over almost entirely to bureaucrats, paper pushers, and free-lance professionals. It was not Abigail’s favorite place to visit, but she needed work and 3M had already bought out of her contract.

  The job broker had dyed his chest hairs blond and his leg hairs red. They clashed wildly with his green cache-sexe and turquoise jewelry. His fingers played on a keyout, brining up an endless flow of career trivia. “Cute trick you played,” he said.

  Abigail flexed her new arm negligently. It was a good job, but pinker than the rest of her. And weak of course, but exercise would correct that. “Thanks,” she said. She laid the arm underneath one breast and compared the colors. It matched the nipple perfectly. Definitely too pink. “Work outlook any good?”

  “Naw,” the broker said. A hummingbird flew past his ear, a nearlyundetectable parting of the air. “I see here that you applied for theProxima colony.”

  “They were full up,” Abigail said. “No openings for a gravity bum, hey?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the broker grumbled. “I’ll find—hello! What’s this?” Abigail craned her neck, couldn’t get a clear look at the screen. “There’s a tag on your employment record.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Let me read.” A honeysuckle flower fell on Abigail’s hair, and she brushed it off impatiently. The broker had an open-air office, framed by hedges and roofed over with a trellis. Sometimes Abigail found the older Belt cylinders a little too lavish for her taste.

  “Mmp” The broker looked up. “Bell-Sandia wants to hire you. Indefinite term one-shot contract.” He swung the keyout around so she could see. “Very nice terms, but that’s normal for a high-risk contract.”

  “High risk? From B-S, the Friendly Communications People? What kind of risk?”

  The broker scrolled up new material. “There.” He tapped the screen with a finger. “The language is involved, but what it boils down to is they’re looking for a test passenger for a device they’ve got that uses black holes for interstellar travel.”

  “Couldn’t work,” Abigail said. “The tidal forces—”

  “Spare me. Presumably they’ve found a way around that problem. The question is, are you interested or not?”

  Abigail stared up through the trellis at a stream meandering acrossthe curved land overhead. Children were wading in it. She counted to a hundred very slowly, trying to look as if she needed to think it over.

  ***

  Abigail strapped herself into the translation harness and nodded to the technician outside the chamber. The tech touched her console, and a light stasis field immobilized Abigail and the air about her while the chamber wall irised open. In a fluid bit of technological sleight-of-hand, the translator rechanneled her inertia and gifted her with a velocity almost, but not quite, that of the speed of light.

  Stars bloomed about her, and the sun dwindled. She breathed in deeply and—

  —was in the receiver device. Relativity had cheated her of all but a fraction of the transit time. She shrugged out of harness and frog-kicked her way to the lip station’s tugdock.

  The tug pilot grinned at her as she entered, then turned h
is attention to his controls. He was young and wore streaks of brown makeup across his chest and thighs—only slightly darker than his skin. His mesh vest was almost in bad taste. But he wore it well, and looked roguish rather than over-dressed. Abigail found herself wishing she had more than a cache-sexe and nail polish on—some jewelry or makeup, perhaps. She felt drab in comparison.

  The starfield wraparound held two inserts routed in by synchronous cameras. Alphanumerics flickered beneath them. One showed her immediate destination, the Bell-Sandia base Arthur C. Clarke. It consisted of five wheels, each set inside the other and rotating at slightly differing speeds. The base was done up in red-and-orange supergraphics. Considering its distance from the Belt factories, it was respectably sized.

  Abigail latched herself into the passenger seat as the engines cut in. The second inert—

  Ginungagap, the only known black hole in the sun’s gravity field, wasdiscovered in 2023, a small voice murmured. Its presence explained the long-puzzling variations in the orbits of the outer planets. The Arthur C. Clarke was

  “Is this necessary?” Abigail asked.

  “Absolutely,” the pilot said. “We abandoned the tourist program a year or so ago, but somehow the rules never caught up. They’re very strict about the regs here.” He winked at Abigail’s dismayed expression. “Hold tight a minute while—” His voice faded as he tinkered with the controls.

  established forty years later and communications with the Proxima colony began shortly thereafter. Ginungagap

  The voice cut off. She grinned thanks. “Abigail Vanderhoek.”

  “Cheyney,” the pilot said. “You’re the gravity bum, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I used to be a vacuum bum myself. But I got tired of it, and grabbed the first semipermanent contract that came along.”

  “I kind of went the other way.”

  “Probably what I should have done,” Cheyney said amiably. “Still, it’s a rough road. I picked up three scars along the way.” He pointed them out: a thick slash across his abdomen, a red splotch beside one nipple, and a white crescent half obscured by his scalp. “I could’ve had them cleaned up, but the way I figure, life is just a process of picking up scars and experience. So I kept ’em.”

  If she had thought he was trying to impress her, Abigail would have slapped him down. But it was clearly just part of an ongoing self-dramatization, possibly justified, probably not. Abigail suspected that, tour trips to Earth excepted, the Clarke was as far down a gravity well as Cheyney had ever been. Still, he did have an irresponsible boyish appeal. “Take me past the net?” she asked.

  Cheyney looped the tug around the communications net trailing the Clarke. Kilometers of steel lace passed beneath them. He pointed out a small dish antenna on the edge and a cluster of antennae on the back. “The loner on the edge transmits into Ginungagap,” he said. “The others relay information to and from Mother.”

  “Mother?”

  “That’s the traditional name for the Arthur C. Clarke.” He swung the tug about with a careless sweep of one arm, and launched into a long and scurrilous story about the origin of the nickname. Abigail laughed, and Cheyney pointed a finger. “There’s Ginungagap.”

  Abigail peered intently. “Where? I don’t see a thing?”

  She glanced at the second wraparound insert, which displayed a magnified view of the black hole. It wasn’t at all impressive; a red smear against black nothingness. In the starfield it was all but invisible.

  “Disappointing, hey? But still dangerous. Even this far out, there’s a lot of ionization from the accretion disk.”

  “Is that why there’s a lip station?”

  “Yeah. Particle concentration varies, but if the translator were right at the Clarke, we’d probably lose about a third of the passengers.”

  Cheyney dropped Abigail off at Mother’s crewlock and looped the tug off and away. Abigail wondered where to go, what to do now.

  “You’re the gravity bum we’re dumping down Ginungagap.” The short, solid man was upon her before she saw him. His eyes were intense. His cache-sexe was a conservative orange. “I liked the stunt with the arm. It takes a lot of guts to do something like that.” He pumped her arm. “I’m Paul Gerard. Head of external security. In charge of your training. You play verbal Ping-Pong?”

  “Why do you ask?” she countered automatically.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Should I?”

  “Do you mean now or later?”

  “Will the answer be different later?”

  A smile creased Paul’s face. “You’ll do.” He took her arm, led her long a sloping corridor. “There isn’t much prep time. The dry run is scheduled in two weeks. Things will move pretty quickly after that. You want to start your training now?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Abigail asked, amused.

  Paul came to a dead stop. “Listen,” he said. “Rule number one. Don’t play games with me. You understand? Because I always win. Not sometimes, not usually—always.”

  Abigail yanked her arm free. “You maneuvered me into that,” shesaid angrily.

  “Consider it part of your training.” He stared directly into her eyes. “No matter how many gravity wells you’ve climbed down, you’re still the product of a near-space culture—protected, trusting, willing to take things at face value. This is a dangerous attitude, and I want you to realize it. I want you to look behind the mask of events. I want you to grow up. And you will.”

  Don’t be so sure. A small smile quirked Paul’s face as if he could read her thoughts. Aloud, Abigail said, “That sounds a little excessive for a trip to Proxima.”

  “Lesson number two,” Paul said. “Don’t make easy assumptions. You’re not going to Proxima.” He led her outward—down the ramp to the next wheel, pausing briefly at the juncture to acclimatize to the slower rate of revolution. “You’re going to visit spiders.” He gesture. “The crewroom is this way.”

  ***

  The crewroom was vast and cavernous, twilight gloomy. Keyoutswere set up along winding paths that wandered aimlessly through the workspace. Puddles of light fell on each board and operator. Dark-loving foliage was set between the keyouts.

  “This is the heart of the beast,” Paul said. “The green keyouts handle all Proxima communications—pretty routine by now. But the blue…” His eyes glinting oddly, he pointed. Over the keyouts hung silvery screens with harsh grainy images floating on their surfaces, black-and-white blobs that Abigail could not resolve into recognizable forms.

  “Those,” Paul said, “are the spiders. We’re talking to them in real time. Response delay is almost all due to machine translation.”

  In a sudden shift of perception, the blobs became arachnid forms. That mass of black flickering across the screen was a spiderleg and that was its thorax. Abigail felt an immediate primal aversion, and then it was swept away by an all-encompassing wonder.

  “Aliens?” she breathed.

  “Aliens.”

  They actually looked no more like spiders than humans looked like apes. The eight legs had an extra joint each, and the mandible configuration was all wrong. But to an untrained eye they would do.

  “But this is—how long have you—why in God’s name are you keeping this a secret?” An indefinable joy arose in Abigail. This opened a universe of possibilities, as if after a lifetime of being confined in a box someone had removed the lid.

  “Industrial security,” Paul said. “The gadget that’ll send you through Ginungagap to their black hole is a spider invention. We’re tradingoptical data for it, but the law won’t protect our rights until we’vedemonstrated its use. We don’t want the other corporations cutting in.” He nodded toward the nearest black-and-white screen. “As you can see, they’re weak on optics.”

  “I’d love to talk…” Abigail’s voice trailed off as she realized how little-girl hopeful she sounded.

  “I’ll arrange an introduction.”

  There was a rustling to Abigail
’s side. She turned and saw a large black tomcat with white boots and belly emerge from the bushes. “This is the esteemed head of Alien Communications,” Paul said sourly.

  Abigail started to laugh, choked it back in embarrassment as she realized that he was not speaking of the cat. “Julio Dominguez, section chief for translation,” Paul said. “Abigail Vanderhoek, gravity specialist.”

  The wizened old man smiled professorially. “I assume our resident gadfly has explained how the communications net works, has he not?”

  “Well—” Abigail began.

  Dominguez clucked his tongue. He wore a yellow cache-sexe and matching bow tie; just a little too garish for a man his age. “Quite simple, actually. Escape velocity from a black hole is greater than the speed of light. Therefore, within Ginungagap the speed of light is no longer the limit to the speed of communications.”

  He paused just long enough for Abigail to look baffled. “Which is just a stuffy way of saying that when we aim a stream of electrons into the boundary of the stationary limit, they emerge elsewhere—out of another black hole. And if we aim them just so”—his voice rose whimsically—“they’ll emerge from the black hole of our choosing. The physics is simple. The finesse is in aiming the electrons.”

  The cat stalked up to Abigail, pushed its forehead against her leg, and mewed insistently. She bent over and picked it up. “But nothing can emerge from a black hole,” she objected.

  Dominguez chuckled. “Ah, but anything can fall in, hey? A positron can fall in. But a positron falling into Ginungagap in positive time is only an electron falling out in negative time. Which means that a positron falling into a black hole in negative time is actually an electron falling out in positive time—exactly the effect we want. Think of Ginungagap as being the physical manifestation of an equivalence sign in mathematics.”

  “Oh,” Abigail said, feeling very firmly put in her place. Three white moths flittered along the path. The cat watched, fascinated, while she stroked its head.

  “At any rate, the electrons do emerge, and once the data is in, the theory has to follow along meekly.”