The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Predictably, the truce did not endure. By the summer solstice, the tumors had become tyrants again. Whips were applied, rations withheld, water supplies appropriated.

  “Let us have no illusions,” Inez told her fellow citizens. “Whether we slake their lust or not, they remain the gods of Atoll K, and we the mere mortals.”

  “A pox upon them all,” said Meredith.

  “Amen,” said Barry.

  Amen. So be it. And so it was. On the first day of September, having been repeatedly suffused with intelligible cells, Inez’s glioblastoma fell ill. Seventy-two hours later, the wretched thing died. Suspecting foul play, its fellow squids vowed vengeance, but these threats came to nothing, for by now all the other tumors were sick, too weak to lift a tentacle. By the end of the month, each malignancy had devolved into a putrescence suggestive of the title character’s fate in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

  The cancer survivors lost no time drawing up their plans for escape. They agreed to construct a raft from the wooden food crates, using four of the 55-gallon drums as pontoons, mobility to be supplied by human muscles working tofu paddles. If Atoll K was indeed in Long Island Sound, then by following a steady northern course, using sun, moon, and stars as navigation instruments, they were certain to hit southern Connecticut within a day.

  An excellent plan, Inez thought, foolproof in fact, and yet it bore only bitter fruit. Wrapped in eternal murk, the raft remained waterborne for a week, two weeks—a whole month—without making landfall. In time the weather turned as deadly as a crab monster, contriving a chronic hurricane that one by one took hold of the Atoll K refugees and dragged them into the turbulent bay. When at last the storm abated and the raft ran aground on a shrouded shore, Inez was the only passenger still on board.

  Salt-stained, sun-blistered, she staggered across the white sands that hemmed the fogbound coast. She reached a hedge of kelp marking the tide line, and there she collapsed, weary and dehydrated. For several minutes she lay prone on the beach, gasping and grieving, and then, as inevitably as if inhaling Philoghast’s ether, she descended into sleep.

  Awakening, Inez found herself attended by a dozen muzzy figures bearing Smartwater and mozzarella sticks. She drank eagerly, feasted greedily. In a matter of minutes her mind cleared, and she surveyed her benefactors.

  “Welcome to Atoll X,” said the man who’d pressed the water bottle to her lips.

  “Carpe diem,” said the woman who’d fed her cheese.

  Briefly Inez imagined that she’d died and gone to heaven, though the afterlife hypothesis had never seemed credible to her. The twelve members of the rescue party all wore white, hooded robes, the sort of attire an angel might favor, though she saw neither wings nor halos. If not of seraphic descent, she reasoned, then perhaps these people constituted a religious order—for they specifically evoked the gentle and ascetic Essenes, proprietors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as depicted in various TV miniseries about the formative years of Christianity.

  “When I left Atoll K, there were nine of us,” said Inez. “All the others died.”

  “How sad,” said the water man.

  “‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,’” the cheese woman quoted.

  Bizarre and surprising as her life on Atoll K had been, none of those experiences had prepared her for what occurred next. A majestic female inhabitant of Atoll X approached, threw back her hood, and allowed the setting sun to cast her handsome features in bronze. The two sisters embraced for a protracted interval, their kisses moistened by tears of joy.

  “Atoll X,” said Inez, pulling away. “I don’t understand,” she added, but in fact she did. “Let me guess. We’re talking about the second half of the equation.”

  “The second half, exactly,” said Alexis. “For weeks on end, months on end, the fact of your cure made me ecstatic. But then one day those sentiments turned against me. My beloved sister’s brain tumor was gone, but her vulnerability remained—and so did mine. I don’t remember coming to this island, but here I am.”

  The water man said, “Unless one can shake off that awful sense of impending oblivion…”

  The cheese woman said, “Unless one can find refuge in some illusion or other…”

  “Then sooner or later one ends up on Atoll X,” said the water man.

  “Even illusions are less effective than commonly supposed,” Alexis noted. “Simone de Beauvoir said it well. Immortality is no consolation for death.”

  “Then I belong here,” said Inez. “I never shook it off. I knew I was cured of cancer, but not of the other thing. Briefly I confused the two, but—”

  “We all confuse the two,” said the water woman.

  “Otherwise we would go mad,” said the cheese man.

  “There must be a lot of you,” Inez said.

  “We’ve never counted,” said Alexis. “Eventually, I suspect, Philoghast himself will come to live among us.”

  Inez asked, “Room for me, too?”

  “Of course, sweetie. You’ll receive your robe tomorrow.”

  Alexis clasped Inez’s hand and guided her along the tide line. The trek took the sisters past numerous creatures, all oblivious to their tragic transience: a colony of barnacles clinging to a rock, a starfish recently cast into a tide pool, a maundering snail, a soaring heron, an iridescent dragonfly. Even the sun, Inez had read, would one day die.

  Exploiting her distracted state, a seagull swooped down, opened its beak, and snatched the remaining mozzarella stick from Inez. Both sisters laughed hysterically, and they continued laughing long after the incident had ceased to be amusing. When Alexis reported that such exuberance was common on Atoll X—though not so common as rage—Inez took comfort in the news, though she could not decide why. Instead of further pondering the problem, she fixed on the thieving gull, imagining what it might be like to have wings, but then the bird vanished, a creature without consolation and needing none, reveling in its brittle freedom, savoring the unmerited morsel, swallowed by the mist.

  Copyright (C) 2011 by James Morrow

  The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree

  Michael Swanwick

  She was not a pretty child. Nor did her appearance improve with age. “You’d better get yourself a good education,” her mother would say, laughing. “Because you’re sure not going to get by on your looks.” Perhaps for this reason, perhaps not, her father demonstrated no discernible fondness for her. So, from a very early age, Mariella Coudy channeled all her energies inward, into the life of the mind.

  It took some time for first her parents and then the doctors and psychiatrists they hired to realize that her dark moods, long silences, blank stares, and sudden non sequiturs were symptomatic not of a mental disorder but of her extreme brilliance. At age seven she invented what was only recognized three years later as her own, admittedly rudimentary, version of calculus. “I wanted to know how to calculate the volume defined by an irregular curve,” she said when a startled mathematician from the local university deciphered her symbols, “and nobody would tell me.” A tutor brought her swiftly up to postgraduate level and then was peremptorily dismissed by the child as no longer having anything to teach her. At age eleven, after thinking long and hard about what would happen if two black holes collided, she submitted a handwritten page of equations to Applied Physics Letters, prompting a very long phone call from its editor.

  Not long thereafter, when she was still months shy of twelve years old, some very respectful people from Stanford offered her a full scholarship, room and board, and full-time supervision by a woman who made a living mentoring precocious young women. By that time, her parents were only too happy to be free of her undeniably spooky presence.

  At Stanford, she made no friends but otherwise thrived. By age sixteen she had a PhD in physics. By age eighteen she had two more—one in mathematics and the other in applied deterministics, a discipline of her own devising. The Institute for Advanced Study offered her a fellowship, which she accepted and which w
as periodically renewed.

  Twelve years went by without her doing anything of any particular note.

  Then one day, immediately after she had given a poorly received talk titled “A Preliminary Refutation of the Chronon,” a handsome young man fresh out of grad school came to her office and said, “Dr. Coudy, my name is Richard Zhang and I want to work with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I heard what you had to say today and I believe that your theories are going to change the way we think about everything.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, why should I let you work with me?”

  The young man grinned with the cocky assurance of a prized and pampered wunderkind and said, “I’m the only one who actually heard what you were saying. You were speaking to one of the smartest, most open-minded audiences in the world, and they rejected your conclusions out of hand. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You need a bench man who can devise a convincing experiment and settle the matter once and for all. I may not be able to generate your insights but I can follow them. I’m a wizard with lab equipment. And I’m persistent.”

  Mariella Coudy doubted that last statement very much. In her experience, nobody had a fraction of the persistence she herself possessed. She’d once heard it said that few people had the patience to look at a painting for the length of time it took to eat an apple, and she knew for a fact that almost nobody could think about even the most complex equation for more than three days straight without growing weary of it.

  She silently studied Zhang for as long as it would take to eat an apple. At first he tipped his head slightly, smiling in puzzlement. But then he realized that it was some sort of test and grew very still. Occasionally he blinked. But otherwise he did nothing.

  Finally, Mariella said, “How do you propose to test my ideas?”

  “Well, first…” Richard Zhang talked for a very long time.

  “That won’t work,” she said when he was done. “But it’s on the right track.”

  It took a year to devise the experiment, debug it, and make it work. Almost fourteen months of marathon discussions of physics and math, chalkboard duels, and passionate excursions up side issues that ultimately led nowhere, punctuated by experiments that failed heartbreakingly and then, on examination, proved in one way or another to be fundamentally flawed in their conception. Occasionally, during that time, Richard gave brief talks on their work and, because he met all questions with courteous elucidation and never once replied to an objection with a derisive snort, a blast of laughter, or a long, angry stare, a sense began to spread across the campus that Dr. Coudy might actually be on to something. The first talk drew four auditors. The last filled a lecture hall.

  Finally, there came the night when Richard clamped a 500-milliwatt laser onto the steel top of a laser table with vibration-suppressing legs, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay, I think we’re ready. Goggles on?”

  Mariella slid her protective goggles down over her eyes.

  Richard aimed a 532-nanometer beam of green laser light through a beam splitter and into a mated pair of Pockels cells. The light emerging from one went directly to the target, a white sheet of paper taped to the wall. The light from the other disappeared through a slit in the kludge of apparatus at the far side of the table. Where it emerged, Richard had set up a small mirror to bounce it to the target alongside the first green circle. He adjusted the mirror’s tweaking screws, so that the two circles overlapped, creating an interference pattern.

  Then he flipped the manual control on one of the cells, changing the applied voltage and rotating the plane of polarization of the beam. The interference pattern disappeared.

  He flipped the control back. The interference pattern was restored.

  Finally, Richard slaved the two Pockels cells to a randomizer, which would periodically vary the voltage each received—but, because it had only the one output, always the same to both and at the exact same time. He turned it on. The purpose of the randomizer was to entirely remove human volition from the process.

  “Got anything memorable to say for the history books?” Richard asked.

  Mariella shook her head. “Just run it.”

  He turned on the mechanism. Nothing hummed or made grinding noises. Reality did not distort. There was a decided lack of lightning.

  They waited.

  The randomizer went click. One of the overlapping circles on the target disappeared. The other remained.

  And then the first one reappeared. Two superimposed circles creating a single interference pattern.

  Richard let out his breath explosively. But Mariella touched him lightly on the arm and said, “No. There are too many other possible explanations for that phenomenon. We need to run the other half of the experiment before we can begin celebrating.”

  Richard nodded rapidly and turned off the laser. One circle of light disappeared immediately, the other shortly thereafter. His fingers danced over the equipment. Then, methodically, he checked every piece of it again, three times. Mariella watched, unmoving. This was his realm, not hers, and there was nothing she could do to hurry things along. But for the first time she could remember, she felt impatient and anxious to get on with it.

  When everything was ready, the laser was turned on again. Twin splotches of green overlapped.

  Richard switched on the apparatus. One light blinked off briefly, and then on again. (Richard’s mouth opened. Mariella raised a finger to silence him.) The randomizer made no noise.

  The interference pattern disappeared. Three seconds later, the randomizer went click. And three seconds after that, the interference pattern was restored again.

  “Yes!” Richard ripped off his goggles and seized Mariella, lifting her up into the air and spinning her around a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Then he kissed her.

  She should have slapped him. She should have told him off. She should have thought of her position and of what people would say. Richard was six years younger than her and, what was even more of a consideration, every bit as good-looking as she was not. Nothing good could possibly come of this She should have looked to her dignity. But what she did was to push up her goggles and kiss him back.

  When finally they had to stop for air, Mariella pulled her head away from his and, more than a little stunned, managed to focus on him. He was smiling at her. His face was flushed. He was so, so very handsome. And then Richard said the most shocking thing she had ever heard in her life: “Oh, God, I’ve been wanting to do that for the longest time.”

  That night, after they’d gone to Mariella’s apartment and done things she’d known all her life she would never do, and then babbled about the experiment at each other, and agreed that the title of the paper should be “The abolition of time as a meaningful concept,” and then went through the cycle all over again, and her lips were actually sore from all the kissing they did, and Richard had finally, out of exhaustion no doubt, fallen asleep naked alongside her…after all that, Mariella held the pillow tightly over her face and wept silently into it because for the first time in her life she was absolutely, completely happy, and because she knew it wouldn’t last and that come morning Richard would regain his senses and leave her forever.

  But in the morning Richard did not leave. Instead, he rummaged in her refrigerator and found the makings of huevos rancheros and cooked her breakfast. Then they went to the lab. Richard took pictures of everything with a little digital camera (“This is historic—they’ll want to preserve everything exactly the way it is”) while she wrote a preliminary draft of the paper on a yellow pad. When she was done, he had her sign it on the bottom and wrote his name after hers.

  Mariella Coudy and Richard M. Zhang. Together in eternity.

  Mariella and Richard spent the next several weeks in a blissful mix of physics and romance. He bought her roses. She corrected his math. They both sent out preprints of their paper, she to everybody whose opinion she thought worth having, and he to ev
eryone else. No matter how many times they changed and laundered them, it seemed the bed sheets were always sweat-stained and rumpled.

  One night, seemingly out of nowhere, Richard said “I love you,” and without stopping to think, Mariella replied, “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a mirror. I know what I look like.”

  Richard cradled her face in his hands and studied it seriously. “You’re not beautiful,” he said—and something deep inside her cried out in pain. “But I’m glad you’re not. When I look at your face, my heart leaps up in joy. If you looked like”—he named a movie star—“I could never be sure it wasn’t just infatuation. But this way I know for sure. It’s you I love. This person, this body, this beautiful brain. You, here, right now, you.” He smiled that smile she loved so much. “Q.E.D.”

  Their paradise ended one morning when they encountered a clutch of cameramen standing outside Mariella’s office. “What’s all this?” she asked, thinking that there’d been a robbery or that somebody famous had died.

  A microphone was thrust at her face. “Are you the woman who’s destroyed time?”

  “What? No! Ridiculous.”

  “Have you seen today’s papers?” A copy of the New York Times was brandished but she couldn’t possibly read the headlines with it waving around like that.

  “I don’t—”

  Richard held up both hands and said, “Gentlemen! Ladies! Please! Yes, this is Dr. Mariella Coudy, and I’m her junior partner on the paper. Dr. Coudy was absolutely right when she denied destroying time. There is no such thing as time. There’s only the accumulation of consequences.”

  “If there’s no such thing as time, does that mean it’s possible to travel into the past? Visit ancient Rome? Hunt dinosaurs?” Several reporters laughed.

  “There’s no such thing as the past, either—only an infinite, ever-changing present.”