The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

by Ashley, Mike;

  Out on the lawn, the house trunk was slowly digesting the crate, gorging it upwards to the picture-window. Once there was enough slack on the lawn-end, I stretched the twitching membrane overtop of the second crate, and then the third. The house trunk’s muscular digestion slowed, but continued, inexorably, moving the trunks living-room-wards.

  I met the first trunk with a crowbar and set to work on it, surprised as ever at the fabulous working order of my biceps and back muscles. Sedentary life will never get the best of me, not so long as I am master of my own flesh, ordering it to stay limber and strong.

  The crate was ready to fall to pieces just as the second box was eructing onto the living-room floor. I guided number two to a clear spot, then knocked out the last fasteners on number one and slid the panels aside.

  It was a dining-room table, handsome and spare, made from black oak, with a fine grain that was brought out by a clear varnish. It had an air of antiquity, but it was light enough to move with one hand. Subsequent boxes disgorged four matching chairs and a sideboard.

  I reversed the house trunk and evacuated the crate remnants back onto the lawn, where I decided I’d deal with them later.

  I dialed my fiancee’s number and waited for her to answer. “I’ve unpacked,” I said. “Come up and see.”

  A couple of minutes later she poked her head round the door and sniffed. “Smells like trouble,” she remarked. “That’s a lot of furniture. What does she do, breed the stuff?”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed the sideboard. “Hey, you. Wake up. Tell me about yourself.”

  “Cyd?” said the table, hesitantly. “Is it lunch time already?” It spoke with Al’s voice.

  The chairs began to climb out of their crates and shake off the packing fuzz; one by one they gathered around the table and hunkered down. “What do you feel like today?” asked Al-thetable. “How about a light Mediterranean salad, rocket and tomatoes and mozzarella with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil? Or maybe my special wasabi and eggplant nori?”

  Herself yanked one of the chairs out from the table and sat on it, hard. “I’ll have a plate of tacos and salsa,” she said, glaring at the sideboard. “And make it snappish.”

  The table extruded cutlery – dumb, old-fashioned silver, no less – and the sideboard sidled up to her and offered a plate. She took it with poor grace and began to pick at her food. “I don’t like the style,” she declared. “This old antique shit went out with the history of the month club. Gimme some Nazi kitsch any day of the week.”

  “Sure!” Trilled Al’s instantiation, and the table sprouted swastikas.

  “I can do without lunch,” I said. “I’m not really feeling hungry.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” My fiancee looked disgusted and shoved the plate away. “You like this furniture so much, you do the washing up.” She took a deep breath. “Been meaning to talk to you, anyway.”

  “Anything in particular, love?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” She stood up abruptly. “It can wait. I was just thinking about a little recreational surgery, is all.”

  Recreational surgery?

  “Uh, what kind?” I asked. “We’re getting married in just six days, now. Will it take long? You can’t do anything substantial like a set of extra arms – you’d need to alter your dress, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, nothing much.” She mimed an elaborate yawn. “I’m just thinking it’s been too long since I wore the balls in this household.”

  “Hey, I’m keeping mine!” I said. “Anyway, isn’t it traditional for a bride to be female at the altar?”

  “Oh yes,” she agreed, nodding brightly. “The bride’s supposed to be a young female virgin if she’s going to wear white! That’s me all over.” She giggled alarmingly, jumped up onto the table top, and spread her legs wide. “Fuck it, come here, Cyd. Right now, on the table. See this? Young? Virgin? You be the judge!”

  Afterwards, as we lay in the accommodating depressions Altable had generated for us, my fiancee trailed a lazy tongue along my throat. “All right, then,” she said. “If you want a girl-bride, I’ll stay female. It’s only a week, after all.”

  I propped myself up on one elbow. “Thanks, honey,” I said, gently cupping one of her breasts. “It’s just, you know. This wedding’s going to be complicated enough as it is. We don’t need more changes at the last minute.”

  “I know,” she said. “Well, back to work.”

  The writing went well that afternoon. I worked up a really good head of rage and ranted into my phone for three hours, watching the words scroll along the ticker at the bottom of my field of vision. When I was done, I did an hour of yoga, feeling the anger ease out of my muscles as I moved slowly from posture to posture.

  I did a fullscreen display of the text, read it back, tweaked a few phrases and fired it off to my blog. Another week’s work finished.

  I headed down to the living room. The Al-dinette had neatly arranged itself. “Good column,” it said to me. “You’ve really found a niche.”

  “How are you powering yourself?” I said.

  “You’d be surprised at how little draw an instantiation pulls. Your romp with your girl generated enough kinetic to power me for a month. If I need more, there’s always photovoltaic and a little fusion – I don’t like to use nuclear, though. Splitting my atoms reducing my computational capacity; enough of that and I’d be too stupid to talk in a couple centuries.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Well, it was a very . . . thoughtful. . . gift, Al, thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me! Just keep recharging me the way you just did and we’ll call it even.”

  “Well then,” I said. “Well.”

  “I’ve made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry, Cyd. Seems like I’m always weirding you out, huh?”

  My chuckle was more bitter than I’d intended. “Goes with the territory, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be coy,” the table said with mock-sternness, and the chair under my bum wiggled flirtatiously. “You know that you were attracted to the weirdness.”

  And I had been. On the beach, as she leaned in and sank her teeth gently into the skin below the corner of my jaw, worrying at it with her tongue before grabbing me by the back of my head and kissing me with a ferocity that made my pulse roar in my ears. I’d only been, what, twelve, and she thirteen, but I was smitten then and there and, I feared, always and forever.

  The chair contrived to give my ass a friendly squeeze. “There, you see – you’re just one of those fellas who can’t help but be infatuated with the post-human condition.”

  My betrothed didn’t show up for dinner that night. I ate alone at the Al-table, eschewing our kitchenette for the light conversation and companionship of the Al-furnishings. I knocked on the woman’s studio door before heading to bed and she hollered a muffled admonishment about virgin brides and her intention to sleep separate until the Day. I swore I heard the dining-room table giggle as it digested my dirty dishes.

  She was gone when I rose the next morning. Al-table, Al-chair and I had a companionable breakfast together. Al-table said, as I was drinking my second cup of coffee, “You’re certainly taking it very well.”

  “Taking what?”

  “Gender reassignment. Honestly! And after you agreed last night that the wedding was too imminent to contemplate any major replumbing. Poor Cyd, always being tempest-tost by the women in his life.”

  The coffee burned north from my gut along the back of my throat. I tapped my palm until her phone was ringing in my ear.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice was deeper, the mirror of my own.

  “Goddamn it,” I shouted without preamble. “You promised!”

  “Oh, come on, hysterics never help. It’s just for a day or two.”

  “No it isn’t” I said. “You’re stopping right now and beginning the reversal. This is completely unfair, you’ve got no right to be changing things around now.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do, Cydo
nia. This is supposed to be a partnership of equals.”

  “Look,” I said, trying some of my deep-breathing juju. “Look. OK. Fine. If you want to do this, do it. Fine. It’s your body. I love you whatever shape it’s in.”

  “Oh, Cyd,” she said, and I actually heard her face crumple up preparatory to a good cry. “I’m sorry, I just wanted a change, you know. Just a mood. I would have changed back, but you didn’t know that. Don’t worry, I’ll change back.”

  Thank you. “Great – I’m sorry if I blew up there. Just wound a little tight is all. I’m always like this the day after I turn in a column.”

  True to her word, my fiancee returned with the same gonads she’d been wearing the night before. She pointed this out to me in the living room. “You were right, Cyd,” she explained contritely, sitting on one of the chairs in the improvised upstairs dining room with her legs splayed to show me what she had. “I’m really sorry it took me so long to figure it out, but you were absolutely completely right. I don’t know what I was thinking! A young female virgin is exactly what you’re going to get at the altar. See, I went for the complete genital reconstruction? I even have a hymen again.” She showed me it – then picked up a mediaeval-looking piece of steel underwear and locked herself into it with a solid clunk before I figured out what was going on. “See, look what a pretty chastity belt I found!” She looked thoughtful, and for a moment I wondered if she was merely bluffing – but then she stood up, took an experimental step, winced, and smiled at me, and I realized with a sinking heart that she meant to go through with it.

  “Ah,” I said faintly. “I take it that oral sex is out, too?”

  “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander too,” she said. “You get my key at the altar, and not a millisecond before!”

  “Oh.” I checked my countdown timer: fifty-two hours and sixteen minutes before I could have sex again. Well, sex with her – Al-table maybe had other ideas. “This isn’t quite what I had in mind,” I said tiredly.

  “Fine. Go fuck yourself – if you can,” she said sharply, then turned and hobbled out of the living room, muttering under her breath.

  When my fiancee got into one of these moods there was no reasoning with her. Not that I’m very reasonable myself when I get a hair up my ass, but this, this passive-aggressive sexual torture, was really low. In addition to winding me up – for she refused to so much as let me touch her, never mind share a bed or bodily fluids – this was putting her in a foul mood.

  “At least I could masturbate if I wanted to,” I told my couch as I lay in it, staring miserably at the ceiling.

  “You could do more than masturbate,” the couch replied in sultry tones. “Don’t you think you’re doing this to yourself?” I’d woken that morning to discover that Al was colonizing every stick of furniture in the house, converting it into computronium to back up the instances in the living room. The floorboards weren’t floorboards any more, but warm computational matter that looked like floorboards but captured the kinetic energy of every foot that trod them and converted it straightaway to computation on behalf of my damned dinette set.

  “Myself—” I closed my eyes and counted to twenty. “Al. Al. Let’s get one thing straight. I am a human being. I am marrying another human being. You are a piece of furniture – at least in this instance.”

  “But I’m not just furniture!” She sounded so hurt that I apologized immediately. “I’m a thinking-feeling-person with a self-image and a warm heart and a whole functional range of emotional responses to share with you. Why do you keep rejecting me?”

  “Because—” I stopped. “No offense, but there’s a lot of shit I need to get straight before I can answer that question, Al.” And indeed there was.

  “Was it something I did?” she asked.

  “Yes. No.” I felt something and opened my eyes. The couch was reaching around me, gently stroking – “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Don’t pretend. Al! All I wanted was a bitch session.”

  “I think you want something else,” said Al-sofa. “I can give it to you.”

  “Can you?” I asked: “Can you?” I sat up and looked around the room, feeling a strong urge to throw something. “You had to go post-!” Break something. “You left me behind!” Scream. “I’m not ready!” Stamp.

  “I still love you,” said one of the chairs, peeping out timidly from behind a thankfully still sub-sentient bookcase. “Please stop doing this to yourself?”

  “You’re dead!” I burst out before I could stop myself.

  “Am not! If anyone here’s dead it’s you – dead between the ears!” The psychiatric couch spiked up in hostile black rubbery cones, like a fetishist’s dream of hedgehog skin. “You’re afraid!”

  “Yeah, afraid of discovering I’m just buggy software,” I said. “Like you.”

  “Human code is good code,” Al retorted.

  “Yeah, but you still asked them to upload you.” I looked away, out the window, out across the desolate cityscape – anywhere but at Cyd’s furnishings. “That’s not exactly a survival trait, is it?”

  “You could join me,” she suggested.

  There, that was it.

  “I’m getting married tomorrow,” I said. “I haven’t even had my fucking stagette. I’m wearing a fucking chastity belt. And you’re already proposing I should break my vows?”

  “You haven’t made them yet,” she said, a trifle smugly. The couch spouted hair-thin pseudopods that worked their way between the chastity belt and my skin, silky warm computation invading my groin, touching my nipples, pulling my hair, sucking at my toes. I writhed in place and stifled a groan, and then there was another pod slithering throatwise, filling my nose, oxygenating my lungs, oozing sensation-insentsifiers directly into my alviolae and up to my brain. I screamed without making a sound, jackknifing,

  It had always been like this with Al, whether I was a boy and she was a girl, or vice-versa, or any permutation thereof, except for this one, and now this one. Al, who’d taken my first virginity, taking another one now. Al, who I’d always been able to talk with, tell anything, be understood by. She was in my optic nerve now, shimmering above me like an angel, limned with digitally white light, scissoring her legs round me.

  “I do love you, Cyd,” she said. “Both of you. All of you. Can’t you all love me, too?”

  “No,” I moaned, around the pseudopod. “No, not ready to go post, not ready for it.” I was thrashing now, enveloped in Al, losing myself in ecstasy, my oldest friend within and without me.

  “You don’t need to be,” Al-pod and Al-vision and Al-sofa whispered to and through my bones. “Marry me, both of you. A meat-marriage, a pre-post-marriage. All of my instances and all of yours, in holy matrimony.”

  The pleasure was incredible, the safety and the warmth. Cyd and I couldn’t marry, shouldn’t marry. He wouldn’t name me, called me those stupid pet-names, wouldn’t acknowledge his selfcreated mirror-self, his first step en route to post-. Al understood, understood me and Cyd, two instances of the same person. I couldn’t marry Cyd, but we could marry Alice.

  Since I was twelve and Al bit my jaw before tumbling me to the sand and changing my world forever, since that night and that day and that long road that Al and I have walked, I have always known, in my heart, that I was meant for Al and she for me.

  I can’t be a vast society like her, not yet: two are quite enough for me. Quite enough for her, too. She’s colonized both of me for computation, out of raw reflex, and so my body-temp is a little higher than normal, but my column is better than it’s ever been and I’ve thrown away the neurofeedback toy – my wife (my wife!) (wives?) (husbands?) (wives/husbands?) takes care of any neurotweaking I need these days.

  I don’t see my ex-fiancee much; she stayed in Al-house and I moved into a tree-house that Al grew me in our old back yard. But of an evening I sometimes hear my voice coming from the attic room where I’d kept my study, passionate howls and heated whisper hiss
es, and I smile and lean back into Al-tree’s bough and revel in wedded bliss.

  MERLIN’S GUN

  Alastair Reynolds

  Though Welsh born, and having spent his developing years in Cornwall and Scotland, Alastair Reynolds (b. 1966) moved to the Netherlands in 1991 where he spent the next twelve years working for the European Space Agency until taking the plunge to become a full-time writer in 2004. He is best known for his Revelation Space sequence of novels that began with Revelation Space in 2000. This series is full of innovation in both its projection of future technology and its realization of alien and evolving human biology and cultures. He writes as if that technology already exists. You get that same feeling of immediacy and understanding in this following novella, which takes to the ultimate one of those wonderful space opera cliches of the weapon that can destroy the universe.

  Punishment saved Sora.

  If her marksmanship had not been the worst in her class, she would never have been assigned the task of overseeing proctors down in ship’s docks. She would not have had to stand for hours, alone except for her familiar, running a laser-stylus across the ore samples the proctors brought back to the swallowship, dreaming of finishing shift and meeting Verdin. It was boring; menial work. But because the docks were open to vacuum it was work that required a pressure suit.

  “Got to be a drill,” she said, when the attack began.

  “No,” her familiar said. “It really does seem as if they’ve caught up with us.”