The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  ***

  There was a small crowd seated about the rock that served Hans as a table, lit by a circle of hologram-generated fairy lights. Father Landis was there, and drinking heavily. “Tomorrow I file my report,” she announced. “The Synod is pulling out of this, withdrawing funding.”

  Hans sighed, took a long swig of his own wine, winced at its taste. “I guess that’s it for the Star Maker project, huh?”

  Landis crossed her fingers. “Pray God.” Elin, standing just outside the circle, stood silently, listening.

  “I don’t ever want to hear that name again,” a tech grumbled.

  “You mustn’t confuse God with what you’ve just seen,” Landis admonished.

  “Hey,” Hans said. “She moved time backward or something. I saw it. This place exploded—doesn’t that prove something?”

  Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. “Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully small concept of God.” Several of the drinkers laughed.

  He blushed, said, “No, really.”

  “Well, I’ll try to keep this—” she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, “fill this up again, hey?—keep it simple. We had analysts crawl up and down Coral’s description of the universe, and did you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an amalgam of substrates, supra-programs, and self-metaediting physics. Now what makes God superior is not just intellect—we’ve all known some damn clever bastards. And it’s not power, or I could buy and atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.

  “No, by definition God is my moral superior. Now I am myself but indifferent honest—but to Coral moral considerations don’t even exist. Get it?”

  Only Elin noticed the hunted, hopeless light in Landis’s eyes, or realized that she was spinning words effortlessly, without conscious control. That deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Hans scratched his head. “I’d still like to know just what happened between her and Tory there at the end.”

  “I can answer that,” a wetware tech said. The others turned to face her, and she smirked, the center of attention. “What the hell, they plant the censor blocks in us all tomorrow—this is probably my only chance to talk about it.

  “We reviewed all the tapes, and found that the original problem stemmed from a basic design flaw. Shostokovich should never have brought his ego along. The God-state is very ego-threatening; he couldn’t accept it. His mind twisted it, denied it, make it into a thing of horror. Because to accept it would mean giving up his identity.” She paused for emphasis.

  “Now we don’t understand the why or how of what happened. But what was done is very clearly recorded. Coral came along and stripped away his identity.”

  “Hogwash!” Landis was on her feet, belligerent and unsteady. “After all that happened, you can’t say they don’t have any identity! Look at the mess that Coral made to join Tory to her—that wasn’t the work of an unfeeling identity-free creature.”

  “Our measurements showed no trace of identity at all,” the tech said in a miffed tone.

  “Measurements! Well, isn’t that just scientific as all get-out?” The priest’s face was flushed with drunken anger. “Have any of you clowns given any thought to just what we’ve created here? This gestalt being is still young—a newborn infant. Someday it’s going to grow up. What happens to us all when it decides to leave the island, hey? I—” She stopped, her voice trailing away. The drinkers were silent, had drawn away from her.

  “Scuse me,” she muttered. “Too much wine.” And sat.

  “Well.” Hans cleared his throat, quirked a smile. “Anybody for refills?”

  The crowd came back to life, a little too boisterous, too noisily, determinedly cheerful. Watching from the fringes, outside the circle of light, Elin had a sudden dark fantasy, a waking nightmare.

  A desk tech glanced her way. He had Tory’s eyes. When he looked away, Tory smiled out of another’s face. The drinkers shifted restlessly, chattering and laughing, like dancers pantomiming a party in some light opera, and the eyes danced with them. They flitted from person to person, materializing now here, now there, surfacing whenever an individual chanced to look her way. A quiet voice said, “We were fated to be lovers.”

  Go away, go away, go away, Elin thought furiously, and the hallucination ceased.

  After a moment spent composing herself, Elin quietly slipped around to where Landis sat. “I’m leaving in the morning,” she said. The new persona had taken; they would not remove her facepaint until just before the lift up, but that was mere formality. She was cleared to leave.

  Landis looked up, and for an instant the woman’s doubt and suffering were writ plain on her face. Then the mask was back, and she smiled. “Just stay away from experimental religion, hey kid?” They hugged briefly. “And remember what I told you about stubbing your toes.”

  Elin nodded wordlessly. She realized now that she had returned to the rathskeller looking for the priest’s advice and comfort. She had wanted to say, “Look. For a moment there I thought I could get Tory back, the same way he got Coral back. But when I tried to raid the computer, I found out they’ve jacked their security way up. So it’s only now hitting me that Tory is actually gone, and I want you to talk me out of doing something stupid.” But Landis was in bad shape, and one more emotional burden might break her. And Elin would not be the one to do that to her.

  She went back home to Tory’s hut.

  ***

  There was one final temptation to be faced. Sitting in the center of the hut, Tory’s terminal in her lap, Elin let the soothing green light of its alphanumerics wash over her. She thought of Tory. Of his saying, “We were meant to be lovers,” of his lean body under hers in the pale blue Earthlight. She thought of what life would be like without him.

  The terminal was the only artifact Tory had left behind that held any sense of his spirit. It had been his plaything, his diary, and his toolbox, and its memory still held the series of Trojan Horse programs he had been working with when he had—been transformed.

  One of those programs would make her a God.

  She stared up through the ivy at the domed sky. Only a few stars were visible between the black silhouetted leaves, and these winked off and on with the small movements breathing imparted to her body. She thought back to Coral’s statement that Elin would soon join her, merge into the unselfed autistic state that only Tory’s meddling had spared her.

  “God always keeps her promises,” Tory said quietly.

  Elin started, looked down, and saw that the grass to the far side of the hut was moving, flowing. Swiftly it formed the familiar, half-amused, half-embittered features of her lover, continued to flow until all of his head and part of his torso rose up from the floor.

  She was not half so startled as she would have liked to be. Of course the earlier manifestations of Tory had been real, not phantoms thrown up by her grief. They were simply not her style.

  Still, Elin rose to her feet apprehensively. “What do you want from me?”

  The loam-and-grass figure beckoned. “Come. It is time you join us.”

  “I am not a program,” Elin whispered convulsively. She backed away from the thing. “I can make my own decisions!”

  She turned and plunged outside, into the fresh, cleansing night air. It braced her, cleared her head, returned to her some measure of control.

  A tangle of honeysuckle vines on the next terrace wall up moved softly. Slowly, gently, they became another manifestation, of Coral this time, with blossoms for the pupils of her eyes. But she spoke with Tory’s voice.

  “You would not enjoy Godhood,” he said, “but the being you become will.”

  “Give me time to think!” she cried. She wheeled and strode rapidly away. Out of the residential cluster, through a scattering of boulders, and into a dark meadow.

  There was a quiet kind of peace here, and Elin wrapped
it about her. She needed that peace for she had to decide between her humanity and Tory. It should have been an easy choice, but—the pain of being without!

  Elin stared up at the Earth; it was a world full of pain. If she could reach out and shake all the human misery loose, it would flood all of Creation, extinguishing the stars and poisoning the space between.

  There was, if not comfort, then a kind of cold perspective in that, in realizing that she was not alone, that she was merely another member of the commonality of pain. It was the heritage of her race. And yet—somehow—people kept on going.

  If they could do it, so could she.

  Some slight noise made her look back at the boulder field. Tory’s face was appearing on each of the stones, each face slightly different, so that he gazed upon her with a dozen expressions of love. This strange multiple manifestation brought home to Elin how alien he had become, and she shivered involuntarily.

  “Your desire is greater than your fear,” he said, the words bouncing back and fourth between his faces. “No matter what you think now, by morning you will be part of us.”

  Elin did not reply immediately. There was something in her hand—Tory’s terminal. It was small, and weighed hardly at all. She had brought it along without thinking.

  A small bleak cry came from overhead, then several others. Nighthawks were feeding on insects near the dome roof. They were too far, too fast, and too dark to be visible from here.

  “The price is too high,” she said at last. “Can you understand that? I won’t give up my humanity for you.”

  She hefted the terminal in her hand, then threw it as far and as hard as she could. She did not hear it fall.

  “Good-bye, Tory,” she said. “I still love you, but—good-bye.” She turned and walked away.

  Behind her, the rocks smiled knowingly.

  A Midwinter’s Tale

  Maybe I shouldn’t tell you about that childhood Christmas Eve in the Stone House, so long ago. My memory is no longer reliable, not since I contracted the brain fever. Soon I’ll be strong enough to be reposted offplanet, to some obscure star light years beyond that plangent moon rising over your father’s barn, but how much has been burned from my mind! Perhaps none of this actually happened.

  Sit on my lap and I’ll tell you all. Well then, my knee. No woman was ever ruined by a knee. You laugh, but it’s true. Would that it were so easy!

  The hell of war as it’s now practiced is that its purpose is not so much to gain territory as to deplete the enemy, and thus it’s always better to maim than to kill. A corpse can be bagged, burned, and forgotten, but the woundedneed special care. Regrowth tanks, false skin, medical personnel, a long convalescent stay on your parents’ farm. That’s why they will vary their weapons, hit you with obsolete stone axes or toxins or radiation, to force your Command to stock the proper prophylaxes, specialized medicines, obscure skills. Mustard gas is excellent for that purpose, and so was the brain fever.

  All those months I lay in the hospital, awash in pain, sometimes hallucinating. Dreaming of ice. When I awoke, weak and not really believing I was alive, parts of my life were gone, randomly burned from my memory. I recall standing at the very top of the iron bridge over the Izveltaya, laughing and throwing my books one by one into the river, while my best friend Fennwolf tried to coax me down. “I’ll join the militia! I’ll be a soldier!” I shouted hysterically. And so I did. I remember that clearly but just what led up to that preposterous instant is utterly beyond me. Nor can I remember the name of my second-eldest sister, though her face is as plain to me as yours is now. There are odd holes in my memory.

  ***

  That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my seachanging memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future.

  The house was abustle, the five families all together for this one time of the year, and outlying kin and even a few strangers staying over, so that we had to put bedding in places normally kept closed during the winter, moving furniture into attic lumber rooms, and even at that there were cots and thick bolsters set up in the blind ends of hallways. The women scurried through the passages, scattering uncles here and there, now settling one in an armchair and plumping him up like a cushion, now draping one over a table, cocking up a mustachio for effect. A pleasant time.

  Coming back from a visit to the kitchens where a huge woman I did not know, with flour powdering her big-freckled arms up to the elbows, had shooed me away, I surprised Suki and Georg kissing in the nook behind the great hearth. They had their arms about each other and I stood watching them. Suki was smiling, cheeks red and round. She brushed her hair back with one hand so Georg could nuzzle her ear, turning slightly as she did so, and saw me. She gasped and they broke apart, flushed and startled.

  Suki gave me a cookie, dark with molasses and a single stingy, crystalized raisin on top, while Georg sulked. Then she pushed me away, and I heard her laugh as she took Georg’s hand to lead him away to some darker forest recess of the house.

  Father came in, boots all muddy, to sling a brace of game birds down on the hunt cabinet. He set his unstrung bow and quiver of arrows on their pegs, then hooked an elbow atop the cabinet to accept admiration and a hot drink from Mother. The larl padded by, quiet and heavy and content. I followed it around a corner, ancient ambitions of riding the beast rising up within. I could see myself, triumphant before my cousins, high atop the black carnivore. “Flip!” my father called sternly. “Leave Samson alone! He is a bold and noble creature, and I will not have you pestering him.”

  He had eyes in the back of his head, had my father.

  Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire.

  Forgive me. So little of my childhood remains; vast stretches were lost in the blue icefields I wandered in my illness. My past is like a sunken continent with only mountaintops remaining unsubmerged, a scattered archipelago of events from which to guess the shape of what was lost. Those remaining fragments I treasure all the more, and must pass my hands over them periodically to reassure myself that something remains.

  So where was I? Ah, yes: I was in the north bell tower, my hidey-place in those days, huddled behind Old Blind Pew, the bass of our triad of bells, crying because I had been deemed too young to light one of the yule torches. “Hallo!” cried a voice, and then, “Out here, stupid!” I ran to the window, tears forgotten in my astonishment at the sight of my brother Karl silhouetted against the yellowing sky, arms out, treading the roof gables like a tightrope walker.

  “You’re going to get in trouble for that!” I cried.

  “Not if you don’t tell!” Knowing full well how I worshiped him. “Come on down! I’ve emptied out one of the upper kitchen cupboards. We can crawl in from the pantry. There’s a space under the door—we’ll see everything!”

  Karl turned and his legs tangled under him. He fell. Feet first, he slid down the roof.

  I screamed. Karl caught the guttering and swung himself into an open window underneath. His sharp face rematerialized in the gloom, grinning. “Race you to the jade ibis!”

  He disappeared, and then I was spinning wildly down the spiral stairs, mad to reach the goal first.

  ***

&
nbsp; It was not my fault we were caught, for I would never have giggled if Karl hadn’t been tickling me to see just how long I could keep silent. I was frightened, but not Karl. He threw his head back and laughed until he cried, even as he was being hauled off by three very angry grandmothers, pleased more by his own roguery than by anything he might have seen.

  I myself was led away by an indulgent Katrina, who graphically described the caning I was to receive and then contrived to lose me in the crush of bodies in the common room. I hid behind the goat tapestry until I got bored—not long!—and then Chubkin, Kosmonaut, and Pew rang, and the room emptied.

  I tagged along, ignored, among the moving legs, like a marsh bird scuttling through waving grasses. Voices clangoring in the east stairway, we climbed to the highest balcony, to watch the solstice dance. I hooked hands over the crumbling balustrade and pulled myself up on tiptoe so I could look down on the procession as it left the house. For a long time nothing happened, and I remember being annoyed at how casually the adults were taking all this, standing about with drinks, not one in ten glancing away from themselves. Pheidre and Valerian (the younger children had been put to bed, complaining, an hour ago) began a game of tag, running through the adults, until they were chastened and ordered with angry shakes of their arms to be still.

  Then the door below opened. The women who were witches walked solemnly out, clad in hooded terrycloth robes as if they’d just stepped from the bath. But they were so silent I was struck with fear. It seemed as if something cold had reached into the pink, giggling women I had seen preparing themselves in the kitchen and taken away some warmth or laughter from them. “Katrina!” I cried in panic, and she lifted a moon-cold face toward me. Several of the men exploded in laughter, white steam puffing from bearded mouths, and one rubbed his knuckles in my hair. My second-eldest sister drew me away from the balustrade and hissed at me that I was not to cry out to the witches, that this was important, that when I was older I would understand, and in the meantime if I did not behave myself I would be beaten. To soften her words, she offered me a sugar crystal, but I turned away stern and unappeased.