The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

by George Mann

  “No,” Kelvin managed.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.” Hurriedly jacking up his pants, he managed to add, “And how can you talk?”

  “You’re talking.”

  “But you don’t have a real voice,” the human maintained. “Screeches, maybe. But you can’t make actual words.”

  Not only could the mouth produce speech, but it could also laugh. And those widely spaced eyes were capable of a decidedly mocking expression. “So you’re the human being? The greatest, goriest murderer in history? I was wondering when I’d trip over your old bones.”

  A flock of new questions demanded to be asked. Kelvin offered the most obvious. “What do you mean? Who’s a murderer?”

  “Humans were.”

  “Were?”

  “As ruthless as any asteroid, except their mayhem was for profit. For fun. For sport, and in the service of ignorance and laziness.”

  Kelvin was too stunned to react.

  “Humans,” his companion repeated. “Yes, I know all about your notorious kind.”

  “And I know about you,” Kelvin managed. “You’re a dinosaur. With a tiny, smooth brain and no lips-”

  “Is that what I am?”

  Embarrassed, Kelvin admitted, “Or maybe you’re something else.”

  “Thank you for noticing.”

  “But what are you?”

  “Whatever I am, it happens to be similar to what you are,” the creature warned. “Each of us is a representative. You and I correspond to two species. And each of us enjoys a glancing resemblance to our namesakes. Which implies that you aren’t truly human, if you see my point.”

  “Then what am I?”

  That question earned another laugh, long and high-pitched. “Do you know anything at all, human?”

  “My name’s Kelvin.”

  “Sandra,” the dinosaur said instantly.

  “What?”

  “My name is Sandra,” it said. She said. “Do me the favor of using it, please.”

  “Sandra.”

  “Hello, Kelvin. How are you today?”

  He sat down, exhausted in so many ways.

  “You haven’t met anybody else, have you? Since you were deposited inside this extraordinary place, I mean.”

  “Nobody,” Kelvin muttered. Then he added, “Wait. I saw a big brontosaur around here somewhere.”

  “Orange, was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s no dinosaur. Not even a pretend one.”

  Those words only sounded simple. Kelvin couldn’t understand: What was this apparition telling him? And could he believe anything that came out of that unlikely mouth?

  “The orange beast stems from an even more ancient era.”

  “More ancient than when?”

  “Our times, of course.”

  The little T. rex had worked her way closer to him, and now Kelvin realized that her chest was decorated with a symbol that shared no resemblance to human writing. Yet he understood that the mark meant 28.

  “So I’m your first association. What an honor that is.”

  Kelvin shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “How many ‘associations’ have you made?”

  “Fourteen,” Sandra the dinosaur boasted. Then with a razor-toothed smile, she added, “For me, you are number fifteen. Which leaves me with how many more to meet?”

  “Thirty-four,” Kelvin blurted.

  “And how did you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  “And are you a genuine authentic and official human being?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “But you wear your body well,” Sandra reported, reaching out with one of her tiny arms, a single claw resting in the dimple on his robin’s-egg blue cheek.

  They walked together, managing a steady pace. Eventually the T. rex made inquiries about Kelvin’s present life. How much ground had he covered; how many times had he slept? And had he ever found any edge to this landscape of randomly positioned gray columns? The human felt sure only about his last answer: No, the bizarre forest was endless. Then Sandra winked at him with one of her bright, hawk-like eyes, wondering aloud, “What do you remember about your past life?”

  Past and present were separate subjects, a rigid line of demarcation standing between this bland existence and his familiar, reassuring history.

  “What do you want to know?” asked Kelvin.

  “Did you have parents?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Describe your father to me.”

  “Tall,” he blurted. “And old, particularly in the face and hands.”

  “Could you tell your father from any other tall old men?”

  “I would hope so,” he reasoned.

  “So what color is Daddy’s hair?”

  He wasn’t sure.

  “What clothes did he like to wear?”

  Kelvin closed his eyes, concentrating.

  “And what was his first name?”

  Placing both hands against the sides of his head, Kelvin pressed until he felt an ache, that mild discomfort helping him believe that he must be real. “His name was Kelvin.”

  “Now is that true?”

  The human believed his words when he said them. But hearing the dinosaur’s doubt made him feel like a liar caught at the worst possible moment.

  “So do you remember your father?” he asked Sandra.

  “Why would I? My mother raised me as well as my three nest-mates. She fed us and defended us until we were old enough to hunt on our own.”

  “What was her name?”

  “She didn’t need a name, little human. She was only a dinosaur.”

  “But you have a name,” he pointed out.

  “A set of sounds that cling to my present skin.”

  Kelvin nodded, pretending to understand.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  They had been following the scent trail of that great orange beast. At least that’s what Sandra claimed they were doing. Kelvin shook his pack, reassured by the weight of fresh food waiting for his stomach.

  “I’m ravenous too,” she confessed. And with that, she suddenly danced off to the side, tilting her head expectantly, her big eyes studying a random patch of black ground. Suddenly a low-built, platypus-like creature blinked into existence. Sandra calmly pinned it with one foot, removing its head with a surgical bite. Two gulps, and the snack vanished.

  Contemplating those jaws, Kelvin felt uneasy.

  Did she sense his nervousness? Somewhere in his former life, he had learned that meat-eaters could taste fear in others.

  His companion smiled amiably, and winked. “Of course you don’t realize this. How could you, since you’ve never met anyone else? But each of us gets to eat and drink through whatever route is most natural.”

  Kelvin hadn’t considered the issue.

  “When Reggie’s hungry, the floor sprouts stromatolites covered with bacterial mats. With Theresa, a convenient electrical plug appears.”

  “Reggie?”

  “A trilobite.”

  The image of a hard-shelled undersea bug came to mind. “And what was the other name? Theresa?”

  “A Lyttle-Tang AI hard-drive,” Sandra mentioned. “When your deadly species fell into its well-earned obscurity, the hard-drives inherited the earth as well as the nearby cosmos.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Make a guess.”

  “Theresa told you.”

  “She told me all about her machine world. Which was decorated, she mentioned, with a lot of freshly-killed humans.”

  Kelvin glanced over a shoulder.

  “Theresa’s not back there.”

  Maybe not. But for just a moment, he thought he could make out a shape in the distance - something passing slowly and soundlessly between two of the towering pillars.

  “So what is this place?” he asked again.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  He spoke about the forest o
f smooth gray pillars and the black floor and the soothing white light that felt as distant as the stars.

  The dinosaur seemed to listen, nodding thoughtfully. And then her rubbery lips twisted, producing a wide smile. “You know, most descriptions of the universe are similar to what you are describing to me. The cosmos is a vast, nearly empty room built upon a few repeating elements, and most locations are desperately similar to every other. Isn’t that a fair stereotype? Giant galactic structures strewn like walls across the black cold void. And from a distance, everything looks to be rather boring.”

  Kelvin shrugged.

  “By contrast,” she mentioned, “what we see here is quite tiny.”

  “Tiny?”

  “In human terms, yes.”

  “It doesn’t feel small.”

  But Sandra didn’t wish to explain herself. The smile was mysterious and, despite the bright long teeth, there was no sense of menace. The golden eyes revealed nothing beyond her benign amusement. Suddenly a burp emerged, wet and warm, and then she turned abruptly and began to march on, her nose dipping to absorb another trace of whatever creature they were following together.

  Kelvin jogged to match her pace.

  “How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

  Without hesitation, he said, “Twenty-one.”

  “A young man, are you?”

  “I guess.”

  “So, Kelvin. What about that day when you turned twenty-one? Do you remember anything in particular?”

  He recalled all of it.

  Easily and perfectly, yes.

  With considerable pleasure, Kelvin described how he had slept late on his birthday, missing every morning class, and then rolled out of bed and dressed in yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt before marching off to the cafeteria to eat lunch. He sat with friends; he could recall everyone’s face, everyone’s clothes. He knew their manners and habits and favorite phrases. Young masculine voices came back to him in detail. With everybody talking at once, the gang made plans for the evening. “You’re legal tonight,” they told Kelvin. He remembered being happy and excited. Then the young men got a round of cold sweet ice cream cones and sat watching the girls pass by. With the crass certainty of youth, they critiqued every breast and leg and wiggling rear end.

  Kelvin paused.

  After a moment’s reflection, he asked, “How do I remember this? My father’s face and name are gone, but not the butt of a nineteen year-old blonde.”

  “That is a very reasonable question,” the dinosaur agreed.

  “And I know my friends’ names, and half the faces on campus. I was a junior. It was spring. There was sun that day, and then clouds, and then sun again. When I was walking to my afternoon class I saw a robin on the sidewalk, picking up a chunk of worm.” He hesitated for a moment, and then smiled. “Birds are dinosaurs, you know.”

  “I am not,” said Sandra.

  “But you are. Avians are only survivors from the dinosaur line. I learned that from Vertebrate Zoology.”

  With scorn, his companion stared back at him. Then she looked ahead, asking, “Was that your afternoon class? Liar’s Zoology?”

  “No, it was-”

  “Don’t tell me,” she interrupted, bumping him with her strong yellow tail. “It was a computer class, and you were learning about thinking machines.”

  He nodded, impressed.

  “It wasn’t much of a trick,” she confessed. “Since each of us is tied together in some little way or another.”

  “Each of whom?”

  “The Fifty, of course.”

  “And who does the tying?”

  Focusing on a distant point, she grinned.

  “You’re sure there are fifty of us?” he asked.

  “Tell me about your computer class,” Sandra persisted.

  Kelvin remembered sitting up front in the lecture hall. After a few minutes of reading from notes, their grumpy little professor had announced a special guest. Moments later, the prototype of a new AI rolled in from the hallway. The machine was tiny and very simple in appearance - a plastic box with wheels and little jointed arms and electrical leads and an assortment of plug-ins. But the voice that spoke to them was decidedly female.

  Pausing, he asked, “What does Theresa look like?”

  “Take a guess,” the dinosaur advised.

  He knew. And that’s when Kelvin accepted that his intuitions were rock-solid, at least when it came to his clearest memories.

  Again he asked, “Who does the tying? Who’s in charge here?”

  But Sandra steered him back to his birthday. “Perhaps you’ll find an insight lurking here. Yes? The one slice of your life that is important enough to remember in full. Your parents are minimally rendered, like the rest of your childhood. But here stands that luminous day when you officially and forever moved from youth into full adulthood.”

  He shivered, though he wasn’t sure why.

  “What was the word?” she asked. “‘Legal,’ was it? What does that mean, Kelvin?”

  “Alcohol,” he replied.

  “Which is what? Explain it to me.”

  The yeasty taste of beer instantly filled his mouth, and his good friends were leading him from one crowded bar, to another, then to a third, and in that realm of bright lights and shouts and painfully loud music, the newly created man graduated to some peculiar drink called a “slam-dunk.” His happy mood turned into a buoyant fearlessness. He was certain that he was badly drunk, yet his memories remained whole. Indeed, his recall seemed to be improving. A box that resembled Theresa was propped on a little stage at one end of a very long room, and drunken patrons were happily signing up, begging for the honor of singing badly while pieces of recorded music played in the background.

  Sandra was sniffing the air again, and she was walking faster.

  Maybe she wasn’t listening anymore. But Kelvin found himself explaining how his friends had put his name on the list to sing, and with just one person ahead of him, he fumbled his slam-dunk, dropping it into his lap and leaving his crotch soaked through.

  The dinosaur paused suddenly.

  Distracted, Kelvin continued walking, speaking in a low obsessed voice until he felt the sharp tips of teeth grabbing him from behind, piercing his shirt in a dozen places.

  “Wait,” she whispered.

  Ahead of them stood a creature that looked familiar, except it wasn’t. The orange was the same shade he had seen earlier, and something about the roundness of the body was exactly as he had expected. But there were no legs, just hundreds of cilia, a portion of them woven together to create four pillar-like ropes that carried the rounded body. What he had assumed was a neck and a tail were nothing but flagella emerging from the same end of the beast, long and stiff but capable of being twisted to the front and back again - rigid propellers devised by nature to push a microbe through the viscous heart of a pond or tidal pool.

  “Quiet,” Sandra advised.

  “What is it?”

  But she preferred answering a different question. “Imagine that you are a very important entity. You are a powerful wise and brilliant soul on the brink of becoming a full-fledged adult. I’m not talking about being human. Or being even a tyrannosaur, for that matter. And instead of reaching twenty-one years of age, our prince is achieving that rich sweet age of fifty.”

  “Half a century?”

  “Hardly,” she said. “In this kingdom, years do not matter.”

  “What does matter?”

  “A celebration has been planned in the great prince’s honor, Kelvin. And for the fun of it, the souls responsible for this happy event have created fifty party favors. Fifty representatives pulled from prehistory. The fifty most important rulers known to the earth and its little corner of the universe.”

  “Fifty dinosaurs,” Kelvin muttered.

  “Three dinosaurs and two hairy primates,” the little T. rex corrected. Then she winked at him, adding, “But mostly microbes and machines. As it happens, those are the characters
that dominate any authentic story about life. Slime and wires; bacteria and batteries.”

  Kelvin spent a moment contemplating the vastness around them.

  “The two of us, my human dear… my sweet Kelvin… we are little more than transitional forms swimming between what really matters…”

  The giant microbe had no eyes, but it must have sensed the vibrations of footsteps and quiet conversation.

  It had no mouth, but a vacuole near the flagellum served that purpose nicely.

  “I feel two bodies lurking,” it claimed.

  “Not lurking,” Sandra replied. “We are admiring you, friend.”

  “As you should,” the entity rumbled. “As is right.”

  Perhaps they were nothing but party favors, Kelvin reflected. But oversized egos seemed mandatory.

  Sandra introduced the two of them, giving names and numbers. “And what do we call you, glorious sir?”

  “I am Barry,” the vacuole replied.

  Kelvin nearly laughed, then thought better of it.

  “I am Nine,” Barry reported. “The first eukaryote.”

  “You are an astonishment,” the dinosaur called out. Then she winked at Kelvin, as if to say, “Play along with me.”

  “Step close,” their new friend told them. “Let me feel your tiny bodies.”

  It took courage to walk up to the building-sized creature, but the cilia proved soft and soothing to the touch. Kelvin found the experience to be nothing but a pleasure.

  Barry asked whom else they had met in their wanderings.

  Knowing nothing about any others, Kelvin sat and opened his pack, drinking his bottle dry and eating heartily. By then, the orange microbe was listing the names and species of the other entities that he had caressed during his travels, and he repeated each of their long stories - a business that took long enough so that the ignored human could change clothes and relieve himself behind the nearest pillar and still have time for a quick nap.

  He woke to discover himself alone.

  Jumping up, he called out for Sandra. “Where are you? Where have you gone?” But she was just a little way behind him, looking back with her tail high in the air, eyes mischievous, something about his panic worth a long, teasing giggle.