Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91

by Sean Williams

  “You sound just like me,” Hank said. Then, “So what now? Colored lights and anal probes?”

  Evelyn snorted again. “They’re a sort of hive culture. When one dies, it’s eaten by the others and its memories are assimilated. So a thousand deaths wouldn’t mean a lot to them. If individual memories were lost, the bulk of those individuals were already made up of the memories of previous generations. The better part of them would still be alive, back on the mother ship. Similarly, they wouldn’t have any ethical problems with harvesting a few hundred human beings. Eating us, I mean, and absorbing our memories into their collective identity. They probably don’t understand the concept of individual death. Even if they did, they’d think we should be grateful for being given a kind of immortality.”

  The car went over a boulder Hank hadn’t noticed in time, bouncing him so high that his head hit the roof. Still, he kept driving.

  “How do you know all that?”

  “How do you think I know?” Ahead, the alien ship was growing larger. At its base were Worm upon Worm upon Worm, all facing outward, skin brown and glistening. “Come on, Hank, do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay, Captain Courageous,” Evelyn said scornfully. “If this is what it takes.” She stuck both her hands into her mouth and pulled outward. The skin to either side of her mouth stretched like rubber, then tore. Her face ripped in half.

  Loop after loop of slick brown flesh flopped down to spill across Hank’s lap, slide over the back of the seat and fill up the rear of the car. The horridly familiar stench of Worm, part night soil and part chemical plant, took possession of him and would not let go. He found himself gagging, half from the smell and half from what it meant.

  A weary sense of futility grasped his shoulders and pushed down hard. “This is only a memory, isn’t it?”

  One end of the Worm rose up and turned toward him. Its beak split open in three parts and from the moist interior came Evelyn’s voice: “The answer to the question you haven’t got the balls to ask is: Yes, you’re dead. A Worm ate you and now you’re passing slowly through an alien gut, being tasted and experienced and understood. You’re nothing more than an emulation being run inside one of those hundred-pound brains.”

  Hank stopped the car and got out. There was an arroyo between him and the alien ship that the car would never be able to get across. So he started walking.

  “It all feels so real,” he said. The sun burned hot on his head, and the stones underfoot were hard. He could see other people walking determinedly through the shimmering heat. They were all converging on the ship.

  “Well, it would, wouldn’t it?” Evelyn walked beside him in human form again. But when he looked back the way they had come, there was only one set of footprints.

  Hank had been walking in a haze of horror and resignation. Now it was penetrated by a sudden stab of fear. “This will end, won’t it? Tell me it will. Tell me that you and I aren’t going to keep cycling through the same memories over and over, chewing on our regrets forever?”

  “You’re as sharp as ever, Hank,” Evelyn said. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing. It passes the time between planets.”

  “For how long?”

  “For more years than you’d think possible. Space is awfully big, you know. It takes thousands and thousands of years to travel from one star to another.”

  “Then . . . this really is Hell, after all. I mean, I can’t imagine anything worse.”

  She said nothing.

  They topped a rise and looked down at the ship. It was a tapering cylinder, smooth and featureless save for a ring of openings at the bottom from which emerged the front ends of many Worms. Converging upon it were people who had started earlier or closer than Hank and thus gotten here before he did. They walked straight and unhesitatingly to the nearest Worm and were snatched up and gulped down by those sharp, tripartite beaks. Snap and then swallow. After which, the Worm slid back into the ship and was replaced by another. Not one of the victims showed the least emotion. It was all as dispassionate as an abattoir for robots.

  These creatures below were monstrously large, taller than Hank was. The one he had dissected must have been a hatchling. A grub. It made sense. You wouldn’t want to sacrifice any larger a percentage of your total memories than you had to.

  “Please.” He started down the slope, waving his arms to keep his balance when the sand slipped underfoot. He was crying again, apparently; he could feel the tears running down his cheeks. “Evelyn. Help me.”

  Scornful laughter. “Can you even imagine me helping you?”

  “No, of course—” Hank cut that thought short. Evelyn, the real Evelyn, would not have treated him like this. Yes, she had hurt him badly, and by that time she left, she had been glad to do so. But she wasn’t petty or cruel or vindictive before he made her that way.

  “Accepting responsibility for the mess you made of your life, Hank? You?”

  “Tell me what to do,” Hank said, pushing aside his anger and resentment, trying to remember Evelyn as she had once been. “Give me a hint.”

  For a maddeningly long moment Evelyn was silent. Then she said, “If the Worm that ate you so long ago could only communicate directly with you . . . what one question do you think it would ask?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it would be, ‘Why are all your memories so ugly?’ ”

  Unexpectedly, she gave him a peck on the cheek.

  Hank had arrived. His Worm’s beak opened. Its breath smelled like Evelyn on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Hank stared at the glistening blackness within. So enticing. He wanted to fling himself down it.

  Once more into the gullet, he thought, and took a step closer to the Worm and the soothing darkness it encompassed.

  Its mouth gaped wide, waiting to ingest and transform him.

  Unbidden, then, a memory rose up within Hank of a night when their marriage was young and, traveling through Louisiana, he and Evelyn stopped on an impulse at a roadhouse where there was a zydeco band and beer in bottles and they were happy and in love and danced and danced and danced into an evening without end. It had seemed then that all good things would last forever.

  It was a fragile straw to cling to, but Hank clung to it with all his might.

  Worm and man together, they then thought: No one knows the size of the universe or what wonders and terrors it contains. Yet we drive on, blindly burrowing forward through the darkness, learning what we can and suffering what we must. Hoping for stars.

  About the Author

  Michael Swanwick has received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy and Hugo Awards, and has the odd distinction of having been nominated for and lost more of these same awards than any other human being. He has just finished a new novel, Chasing the Phoenix, in which post-Utopian con men Darger and Surplus accidentally conquer China, and is currently relaxing with short fiction before beginning a new novel.

  Autodidact

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  On Srisunthorn Station, the corpses of conquered stars are nurtured into ships.

  They may become shelters from solar winds, orbitals giving company to lonely planets, mausoleums for the sainted. But long ago an admiral came, bringing a toll of dead and trailing carcasses of worlds. Her armor was hammered out of battle formations and broken alliances, welded by secret plans and sudden annihilation. She cast it down before the engineers, piece by piece making known to them the essentials of war.

  “That is what you must make them for,” she said as her trappings shuddered with the pressure of lethal feints and shattered pacts. “War is a pustule that must be lanced for the laws of the universe to continue, and I am in need of a scalpel.”

  Srisunthorn has reared stars for one purpose since.

  When Nirapha applied for a parental license, she didn’t expect a warship project to respond.

  The Bureau’s furnishings are pastel, the consul
tation cell convex: a fisheye view of the business district. She watches cars and buses gliding by, iridescent and segmented, passengers augmens-jeweled. Decades living here and she’s still unfamiliar, her skin still alien-bare. Most implants require a state license: connectivity, acuity of mind and body, access passes. Sacrosanct blessings, reserved for citizens. “I want a child.”

  “The desire to procreate is a common, if irrational, reaction to genocide.” The agent has eyes sewn into her forearms, irises black and brown and fermented honey. They wink in rhythm to her words, the perfect pronunciation of a born citizen.

  “My wish to have children predates Mahakesi’s destruction by a large margin, agent.” Decades and Nirapha can say that now, in a flat steady voice. Destruction: a distant simple way to put it, cleaner than genocide or loss or a long wordless scream.

  “I’m sure. But parenthood is like performing a viciously difficult surgery. The patient wriggles and screams and can’t be sedated. Your instruments snap or cut you, and the criteria for performance review are outrageously obscure. Wouldn’t it be better for you to get some practice, so when the real thing comes you can meet it with grace and confidence?”

  “As I understand,” Nirapha says, “I am eligible for the license.”

  “You are! That’s why we are asking you and not—” A refugee fresh off an evacuee craft goes unsaid. “Now of course you’re free to say no, but we compensate well. The project will take up six to eight years of your time, at the end of which you will be naturalized.” The agent’s smile grows a poison edge and the eyes in her arms swivel to fix on Nirapha. “Think of it as showing gratitude to your most gracious host. Have we not sheltered you and provided for your every need, given you a body that matches your sense of self? Why, in a society not so civilized or generous as ours, you’d still be addressed as a man.”

  Nirapha continues to gaze outward. “Send me the contract. There is one, I assume. How long do I get to read it over?”

  “Forty-eight hours. You will find the terms congenial.”

  She signs and transmits the forms back within five hours.

  Nirapha comes to Srisunthorn carrying her name and the weight of non-disclosure clauses. The staff body is minimal, engineers and astrophysicists who have given their lives to the project, subsumed as workers in a hive tending newborn queens.

  No one asks Nirapha about her background, the first time in fifty years she is not read through the lens of Mahakesi. What was the extinction event like, does it haunt her nightmares? Was it heat and terror, was it ice and despair, what is it like to have survived genocide?

  She is given a suite where she hangs up blank frames and fills the wardrobe with nothing. She was told to pack empty and so she has—no hardship: escaping Mahakesi’s collapse that was how she packed too. The habit is deep as marrow, easily as familiar.

  Her first two meals are taken in solitude; most personnel keep eccentric schedules, following the shift-phases of nascent cores, the contraction and expansion of neutronic incubators. Nirapha looks for arena broadcasts and dramas. But the screens stream data in its rawest forms, script and numbers and code tags, and there’s no media band to which she may connect.

  On the second night she meets her co-parent.

  Nirapha is eating alone, and then she is not. A chair clicking open opposite hers, a stranger filling the seat: a hard dense mass of a person in clothes so crisp they look brittle, like frost on the cusp of cracking. She judges the stranger to be in her eighties, mid-life, emblazoned rather than eroded by years.

  “Mehaan Indari,” the woman says. “You’ll be teaching the ship ethics and interpersonal etiquette, I’ve been informed. I’m in charge of guiding it through combat simulations, so we’ll be coming in antithetical directions but working in—more or less—concert.”

  “I haven’t asked the staff because it felt tactless, but why exactly does a warship need to develop a conscience or learn to get along with people?”

  “So it doesn’t flood its bridge and gas its crew, or decide a carrier should be sacrificed for tactical gains. We’ve human commanders to make that kind of choices.”

  Nirapha pushes her dish away, at a sudden loss of appetite. A first. She’s learned to sanctify food, abhor waste. “The engineers can’t just code restrictions in?”

  “The engineers are experimenting. Restrictions or not, if yes how many, if yes how prohibitive.” Mehaan crosses her legs, propping an ankle over her knee. “When you harness a star most of its power lies latent, but if you can impose a consciousness onto it—one that agrees with your objectives—then you might utilize its full potential. Bending physics, erasing entire regions of space, unraveling causal bonds. If you are to believe the theorists.”

  “You’re a soldier.”

  “On Srisunthorn, you don’t ask.” Mehaan frees her hair from plaits and pins. Dark curls fall loose, hissing, striated in gray and blue. “On Srisunthorn you become here and now, purged of your past until you are all momentum. But enough; you should be introduced. Suit up. The temperature will be hard to tolerate.”

  It is late, insofar as time is kept in a station moored to no circadian rhythm or orbit. Nirapha follows Mehaan, listening to closed-net chatter. Gossip, some even about her; they are hungry for current events, new entertainments. She considers which information on her chips could be traded as currency.

  The ship’s nursery is checkered by gravity shells and asteroid maps. On the ceiling, engine constituents pulse, feeding off the radiative distortion. The star itself punches a hole into light, six-dimensional; only a facet exists in the nursery, but even behind the protective sheathing the sight of it hurts. Nirapha’s limbs are heavy—the gravity is higher here, on the outer edges of comfort. In the presence of divinity we sear away until we are choked dust, she recalls a classical verse. We break.

  “Don’t let it awe you,” Mehaan says, her voice made geometric by synesthetic frequency, acute glittering angles radiating off her in a halo. “The intelligence records and will exploit vulnerabilities.”

  “I thought it was a—”

  “Child analogue? No. You should judge for yourself, but don’t go in unprepared.”

  Segments of the floor slide and collate, raising edged petals and knife terminals. Bulkhead blocks assemble into cradles studded with ports. Mehaan sits, though she does not physically connect. “Interface,” she says, gesturing at the terminals. “It’s safe.”

  Nirapha keeps her back to the planetary core. The sheath regulates temperature within stable ranges, but the chill reaches regardless. She toggles on security filters and opens a link.

  The ship’s representation exists physically on the terminals, an outline of platinum and quartz. In virtuality it is a young soldier, attired nonspecifically; no uniform exists like this, all facets and ghosts, insignias and medals indicating astronomical coordinates rather than rank or achievements. They point to planets long devoured, nations long extinguished. The AI’s face is a deliberate artifice. Nirapha doesn’t notice at first but once she begins seeing it—and maps the phenotype—it becomes impossible to ignore.

  “Good day, officers.” The voice is of a hundred drives in chorus. “I understand you will be my new instructor, Specialist Pankusol, to replace the previous five.”

  Nirapha looks up what happened to those; finds her access denied. “What do I call you?”

  “I bear a designation according to my incubation batch and the classification of the star from which my fundamentals were ripped. But it pleases Mehaan Indari, whose name-of-birth once charted a path through improbable regions as a firebrand through the dark, to call me Teferizen’s Chalice Principle. The meaning of this you’ll have to ask her, though I’ve formulated a number of theories.”

  Mehaan’s expression tautens at name-of-birth; Nirapha takes note. “And what do you think I should teach you?”

  “I’m eager to learn, Specialist. I can process and integrate nearly without limits. All prior parent-instructors have said I was a good st
udent.” The ship has chosen a delicate jawline and large eyes: a naive youthful cast. “I can send you a report of my progress in interpersonal relations.”

  “Please,” Nirapha says and tries not to wince. Even if Teferizen’s existence spans dimensions beyond the human, it’s only an AI. Lesser than even a Mahakesi immigrant.

  “You should try the fifth conjunction in the western wing, Specialist. It has a view you might find to your taste.”

  It is nearly a full minute after Teferizen has disconnected that Nirapha realizes she’s been dismissed by a ship. She leaves the nursery disconcerted, and when she retracts the sheathing her arms are pocked in gooseflesh. “Why does it look like—like it cobbled together your phenotype and mine to produce a face?”

  “That’s just what it did. If pressed it will say it wanted to put us at ease, since don’t humans best react to those who look like kin?” Mehaan folds back her own suit, though she keeps the gloves on. “In actuality it’s psychological warfare. The AI relates to other agencies only in an antagonistic, competitive framework.”

  Nirapha quashes an impulse to dispute that judgment; she has too little information. “The previous five. I wasn’t told about those.”

  “They had meltdowns in various different ways. It was unpleasant. Do you know how many creative suicide options there are on a sealed station? No one died, at least.”

  Nirapha glances up. “And you?”

  “It knows better than to test me—or realizes it’s not yet time to do so. You are a psychologist though, aren’t you?”

  “I’m more specific than that, but broadly yes.”

  Mehaan leans against the wall, one cheek red from rapid temperature change. The other is pallid beneath a patina of frost. “So what do you think?”

  “That it’s too soon to form an opinion.” Nirapha chafes her hands. “What’s in the western wing?”