The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  Yet the closer we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out of the everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into existence in the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice crystallizing at random in supercooled superpure water. You’d see one far to your left, maybe strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one shoulder and a gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the distance a puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right, a man in a wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native parasite larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration, and all converging.

  Roads materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were thronged with people.

  The terminal building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble arches and colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind. Welcoming musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic banner dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and back again, read:

  Byzantium Port Authority

  Magnetic-Levitation Mass Transit Division

  Ground Terminus

  Somebody later told me it provided employment for a hundred thousand people, and I believed him.

  Victoria and I parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her and helped her gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of balance was off. We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in the pickup and drove it away.

  The space within was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not been located at the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses each canceled out much of the other’s attraction. There were countless ticket windows, all of carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench—her feet were tender—and went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the ticket-taker glanced at a computer screen and said, “May I help you, sir?”

  “Two tickets, first-class. Up.”

  He tapped at the keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard tickets. He slid them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my wallet. “How much?” I said.

  He glanced at his computer and shook his head. “No charge for you, Mister Daniel. Professional courtesy.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “You’re expected.” Then, before I could ask any more questions, “That’s all I can tell you, sir. I can neither speak nor understand your language. It is impossible for me to converse with you.”

  “Then what the hell,” I said testily, “are we doing now?”

  He flipped the screen around for me to see. On it was a verbatim transcript of our conversation. The last line was: I SIMPLY READ WHAT’S ON THE SCREEN, SIR.

  Then he turned it back toward himself and said, “I simply read what’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. And went back to Victoria.

  ***

  Even at mag-lev speeds, it took two days to travel the full length of the antenna. To amuse myself, I periodically took out my gravitometer and made readings. You’d think the figures would diminish exponentially as we climbed out of the gravity well. But because the antennae swept backward, over the bulk of the grasshopper, rather than forward and away, the gravitational gradient of our journey was quite complex. It lessened rapidly at first, grew temporarily stronger, and then lessened again, in the complex and lovely flattening sine-wave known as a Sheffield curve. You could see it reflected in the size of the magnetic rings we flashed through, three per minute, how they grew skinnier then fatter and finally skinnier still as we flew upward.

  On the second day, Victoria gave birth. It was a beautiful child, a boy. I wanted to name him Hector, after my father, but Victoria was set on Jonathan, and as usual I gave in to her.

  Afterwards, though, I studied her features. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, or maybe “laugh lines” is more appropriate, given Victoria’s personality. The lines to either side of her mouth had deepened. Her whole face had a haggard cast to it. Looking at her, I felt a sadness so large and pervasive it seemed to fill the universe.

  She was aging along her own exponential curve. The process was accelerating now, and I was not at all certain she would make it to Sky Terminus. It would be a close thing in either case.

  I could see that Victoria knew it too. But she was happy as she hugged our child. “It’s been a good life,” she said. “I wish you could have grown with me—don’t pout, you’re so solemn, Daniel!—but other than that I have no complaints.”

  I looked out the window for a minute. I had known her for only—what?—a week, maybe. But in that brief time she had picked me up, shaken me off, and turned my life around. She had changed everything. When I looked back, I was crying.

  “Death is the price we pay for children, isn’t it?” she said. “Down below, they’ve made death illegal. But they’re only fooling themselves. They think it’s possible to live forever. They think there are no limits to growth. But everything dies—people, stars, the universe. And once it’s over, all lives are the same length.”

  “I guess I’m just not so philosophical as you. It’s a damned hard thing to lose your wife.”

  “Well, at least you figured that one out.”

  “What one?

  “That I’m your wife.” She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I had another dream. About your magician. And he explained about the drug. The one he called mortality.”

  “Huh,” I said. Not really caring.

  “The drug I took, you wake up and you burn through your life in a matter of days. With the new version, you wake up with a normal human lifespan, the length people had before the immortality treatments. One hundred fifty, two hundred years—that’s not so immediate. The suicides are kept alive because their deaths come on so soon; it’s too shocking to the survivors’ sensibilities. The new version shows its effects too slowly to be stopped.”

  I stroked her long white hair. So fine. So very, very brittle. “Let’s not talk about any of this.”

  Her eyes blazed “Let’s do! Don’t pretend to be a fool, Daniel. People multiply. There’s only so much food, water, space. If nobody dies, there’ll come a time when everybody dies.” Then she smiled again, fondly, the way you might at a petulant but still promising child. “You know what’s required of you, Daniel. And I’m proud of you for being worthy of it.”

  ***

  Sky Terminus was enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in Vickie’s dream. I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by then, but her eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest in a baby-sling.

  Whatever held the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the glittering, brilliantly articulated ships that rose and descended from all parts. Strange cargoes were unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.

  “I’m not as excited by all this as I would’ve been when I was younger,” Victoria murmured. “But somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?”

  I began to say something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes. Stiffening, she stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see. There was no emotion in her face whatsoever.

  “Vickie?” I said.

  Slowly, she tumbled to the ground.

  It was then, while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came walking up to me.

  In my imagination I’d run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag behind, I stumbled off the train, toward him. He made no move to escape. I flipped open my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with my good hand, and fired.

  Now, though…

  He looked sadly down at Victoria’s body and put an arm around my shoulders.

  “God,” he said, “don’t they just break your heart?”

  ***

  I stayed on a month at
the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died without offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the grasshopper seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright meteoric line down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a struck sulfur match.

  He’d been a good man, with a wicked sense of humor that never came from my side of the family.

  So now I wander the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain unchanged. Where things haven’t gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they have I unleash disease.

  I go where I go and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me, and like a harvester I mow them down. Sometimes—not often—I go off by myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming stars.

  I am Death and this is my story.

  Radiant Doors

  The doors began opening on a Tuesday in early March. Only a few at first—flickering and uncertain because they were operating at the extreme end of their temporal range—and those few from the earliest days of the exodus, releasing fugitives who were unstarved and healthy, the privileged scientists and technicians who had created or appropriated the devices that made their escape possible. We processed about a hundred a week, in comfortable isolation and relative secrecy. There were videocams taping everything, and our own best people madly scribbling notes and holding seminars and teleconferences where they debated the revelations.

  Those were, in retrospect, the good old days.

  In April the floodgates swung wide. Radiant doors opened everywhere, disgorging torrents of ragged and fearful refugees.

  There were millions of them and they had, every one, to the least and smallest child, been horribly, horribly abused. The stories they told were enough to sicken anyone. I know.

  We did what we could. We set up camps. We dug latrines. We ladled out soup. It was a terrible financial burden to the host governments, but what else could they do? The refugees were our descendants. In a very real sense, they were our children.

  Throughout that spring and summer, the flow of refugees continued to grow. As the cumulative worldwide total ran up into the tens of millions, the authorities were beginning to panic—was this going to go on forever, a plague of human locusts that would double and triple and quadruple the population, overrunning the land and devouring all the food? What measures might we be forced to take if this kept up? The planet was within a lifetime of its loading capacity as it was. It couldn’t take much more. Then in August the doors simply ceased. Somebody up in the future had put an absolute and final end to them.

  It didn’t bear thinking what became of those who hadn’t made it through.

  ***

  “More tales from the burn ward,” Shriver said, ducking through the door flap. That was what he called atrocity stories. He dumped the files on my desk and leaned forward so he could leer down my blouse. I scowled him back a step.

  “Anything useful in them?”

  “Not a scrap. But that’s not my determination, is it? You have to read each and every word in each and every report so that you can swear and attest that they contain nothing the Commission needs to know.”

  “Right.” I ran a scanner over the universals for each of the files, and dumped the lot in the circular file. Touched a thumb to one of the new pads—better security devices were the very first benefit we’d gotten from all that influx of future tech—and said, “Done.”

  Then I linked my hands behind my neck and leaned back in the chair. The air smelled of canvas. Sometimes it seemed that the entire universe smelled of canvas. “So how are things with you?”

  “About what you’d expect. I spent the morning interviewing vics.”

  “Better you than me. I’m applying for a transfer to Publications. Out of these tents, out of the camps, into a nice little editorship somewhere, writing press releases and articles for the Sunday magazines. Cushy job, my very own cubby, and the satisfaction of knowing I’m doing some good for a change.”

  “It won’t work,” Shriver said. “All these stories simply blunt the capacity for feeling. There’s even a term for it. It’s called compassion fatigue. After a certain point you begin to blame the vic for making you hear about it.”

  I wriggled in the chair, as if trying to make myself more comfortable, and stuck out my breasts a little bit more. Shriver sucked in his breath. Quietly, though—I’m absolutely sure he thought I didn’t notice. I said, “Hadn’t you better get back to work?”

  Shriver exhaled. “Yeah, yeah, I hear you.” Looking unhappy, he ducked under the flap out into the corridor. A second later his head popped back in, grinning. “Oh, hey, Ginny—almost forgot. Huong is on sick roster. Gevorkian said to tell you you’re covering for her this afternoon, debriefing vics.”

  “Bastard!”

  He chuckled, and was gone.

  ***

  I sat interviewing a woman whose face was a mask etched with the aftermath of horror. She was absolutely cooperative. They all were. Terrifyingly so. They were grateful for anything and everything. Sometimes I wanted to strike the poor bastards in the face, just to see if I could get a human reaction out of them. But they’d probably kiss my hand for not doing anything worse.

  “What do you know about midpoint-based engineering? Gnat relays? Sub-local mathematics?”

  Down this week’s checklist I went, and with each item she shook her head. “Prigogine engines? SVAT trance status? Lepton soliloquies?” Nothing, nothing, nothing. “Phlenaria? The Toledo incident? ‘Third Martyr’ theory? Science Investigatory Group G?”

  “They took my daughter,” she said to this last. “They did things to her.”

  “I didn’t ask you that. If you know anything about their militaryorganization, their machines, their drugs, their research techniques—fine. But I don’t want to hear about people.”

  “They did things.” Her dead eyes bored into mine. “They—”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “—returned her to us midway through. They said they were understaffed. They sterilized our kitchen and gave us a list of more things to do to her. Terrible things. And a checklist like yours to write down her reactions.”

  “Please.”

  “We didn’t want to, but they left a device so we’d obey. Her father killed himself. He wanted to kill her too, but the device wouldn’t let him. After he died, they changed the settings so I couldn’t kill myself too. I tried.”

  “God damn.” This was something new. I tapped my pen twice, activating its piezochronic function, so that it began recording fifteen seconds earlier. “Do you remember anything about this device? How large was it? What did the controls look like?” Knowing how unlikely it was that she’d give us anything usable. The average refugee knew no more about their technology than the average here-and-now citizen knows about television and computers. You turn them on and they do things. They break down and you buy a new one.

  Still, my job was to probe for clues. Every little bit contributed to the big picture. Eventually they’d add up. That was the theory, anyway. “Did it have an internal or external power source? Did you ever see anybody servicing it?”

  “I brought it with me,” the woman said. She reached into her filthy clothing and removed a fist-sized chunk of quicksilver with small, multicolored highlights. “Here.”

  She dumped it in my lap.

  ***

  It was automation that did it or, rather, hyperautomation. That old bugaboo of fifty years ago had finally come to fruition. People were no longer needed to mine, farm, or manufacture. Machines made better administrators, more attentive servants. Only a very small elite—the vics called them simply their Owners—was required to order and ordain. Which left a lot of people who were just taking up space.

  There had to be something to do with them.

  As it turned out, there was.

  That’s my theory, anyway. Or, rath
er, one of them. I’ve got a million: Hyperautomation. Cumulative hardening of the collective conscience. Circular determinism. The implicitly aggressive nature of hierarchic structures. Compassion fatigue. The banality of evil.

  Maybe people are just no damn good. That’s what Shriver wouldhave said.

  The next day I went zombie, pretty much. Going through the motions, connecting the dots. LaShana in Requisitions noticed it right away. “You ought to take the day off,” she said, when I dropped by to see about getting a replacement PzC(15)/pencorder. “Get away from here, take a walk in the woods, maybe play a little golf.”

  “Golf,” I said. It seemed the most alien thing in the universe, hitting a ball with a stick. I couldn’t see the point of it.

  “Don’t say it like that. You love golf. You’ve told me so a hundred times.”

  “I guess I have.” I swung my purse up on the desk, slid my hand inside, and gently stroked the device. It was cool to the touch and vibrated ever so faintly under my fingers. I withdrew my hand. “Not today, though.”

  LaShana noticed. “What’s that you have in there?”

  “Nothing.” I whipped the purse away from her. “Nothing at all.” Then, a little too loud, a little too blustery, “So how about that pencorder?”

  “It’s yours.” She got out the device, activated it, and let me pick it up. Now only I could operate the thing. Wonderful how fast we werepicking up the technology. “How’d you lose your old one, anyway?”

  “I stepped on it. By accident.” I could see that LaShana wasn’t buying it. “Damn it, it was an accident! It could have happened to anyone.”

  I fled from LaShana’s alarmed, concerned face.

  ***

  Not twenty minutes later, Gevorkian came sleazing into my office. She smiled, and leaned lazily back against the file cabinet when I said hi. Arms folded. Eyes sad and cynical. That big plain face of hers, tolerant and worldly-wise. Wearing her skirt just a smidge tighter, a touch shorter than was strictly correct for an office environment.