Geraci said, “Turn on CNN.”
DiBella said pointedly, “Don't you have someplace you should be, Detective?”
“No. Not if this really is happening.”
To which there was no answer.
* * * *
At 9:43 PM, the power grid went down in a city two hundred miles away. “No evident reason,” said the talking head on CNN, “given the calm weather and no sign of any—”
“Henry?” Carrie said.
“I ... I'm all right. But I felt it.”
Jake said, “It's happening farther away now. That is, if it was ... if that was...”
“It was,” Henry said simply. Still stretched full-length on the sofa, he closed his eyes. Geraci stared at the TV. None of them had wanted any food.
At 9:51, Henry's body jerked violently and he cried out. Carrie whimpered, but in a moment Henry said, “I'm ... conscious.” No one dared comment on his choice of word. Seven minutes later, the CNN anchor announced breaking news: a bridge over the Hudson River had collapsed, plunging an Amtrak train into the dark water.
Over the next few minutes, Henry's face showed a rapid change of expression: fear, rapture, anger, surprise. The expressions were so pronounced, so distorted, that at times Henry Erdmann almost looked like someone else. Jake wondered wildly if he should record this on his cell camera, but he didn't move. Carrie knelt beside the sofa and put both arms around the old man, as if to hold him here with her.
“We ... can't help it,” Henry got out. “If one person thinks strongly enough about—ah, God!”
The lights and TV went off. Alarms sounded, followed by sirens. Then a thin beam of light shone on Henry's face; Geraci had a pocket flashlight. Henry's entire body convulsed in seizure, but he opened his eyes. DiBella could barely hear his whispered words.
“It's a choice.”
* * * *
The only way was a choice. The ship didn't understand the necessity—how could any single unit choose other than to become part of its whole? That had never happened before. Birthing entities came happily to join themselves. The direction of evolution was toward greater complexity, always. But choice must be the last possible action here, for this misbegotten and unguided being. If it didnotchoose to merge—
Destruction. To preserve the essence of consciousness itself, which meant the essence of all.
* * * *
FOURTEEN
Evelyn, who feared hospitals, had refused to go to Redborn Memorial to be “checked over” after the afternoon's fainting spell. That's all it was, just fainting, nothing to get your blood in a boil about, just a—
She stopped halfway between her microwave and kitchen table. The casserole in her hand fell to the floor and shattered.
The light was back, the one she'd dreamed about in her faint. Only it wasn't a light and this wasn't a dream. It was there in her mind, and it was her mind, and she was it ... had always been it. How could that be? But the presence filled her and Evelyn knew, beyond any doubt, that if she joined it, she would never, ever be alone again. Why, she didn't need words, had never needed words, all she had to do was choose to go where she belonged anyway...
Who knew?
Happily, the former Evelyn Krenchnoted became part of those waiting for her, even as her body dropped to the linguini-spattered floor.
* * * *
In a shack in the slums of Karachi, a man lay on a pile of clean rags. His toothless gums worked up and down, but he made no sound. All night he had been waiting alone to die, but now it seemed his wait had truly been for something else, something larger than even death, and very old.
Old. It sought the old, and only the old, and the toothless man knew why. Only the old had earned this, had paid for this in the only coin that really mattered: the accumulation of sufficient sorrow.
With relief he slipped away from his pain-wracked body and into the ancient largeness.
* * * *
No. He wasn't moving, Bob thought. The presence in his mind terrified him, and terror turned him furious. Let them—whoever—try all their cheap tricks, they were as bad as union negotiators. Offering concessions that would never materialize. Trying to fool him. He wasn't going anywhere, wasn't becoming anything, not until he knew exactly what the deal was, what the bastards wanted.
They weren't going to get him.
But then he felt something else happen. He knew what it was. Sitting in the Redborn Memorial ER, Bob Donovan cried out, “No! Anna—you can't!” even as his mind tightened and resisted until, abruptly, the presence withdrew and he was alone.
* * * *
In a luxurious townhouse in San Jose, a man sat up abruptly in bed. For a long moment he sat completely still in the dark, not even noticing that the clock and digital-cable-box lights were out. He was too filled with wonder.
Of course—why hadn't he seen this before? He, who had spent long joyful nights debugging computers when they still used vacuum tubes—how could he have missed this? He wasn't the whole program, but rather just one line of code! And it was when you put all the code together, not before, that the program could actually run. He'd been only a fragment, and now the whole was here....
He joined it.
* * * *
Erin Bass experienced satori.
Tears filled her eyes. All her adult life she had wanted this, longed for it, practiced meditation for hours each day, and had not even come close to the mystical intoxication she felt now. She hadn't known, hadn't dreamed it could be this oneness with all reality. All her previous striving had been wrong. There was no striving, there was no Erin. She had never been created; she was the creation and the cosmos; no individual existed. Her existence was not her own, and when that last illusion vanished so did she, into the all.
* * * *
Gina Martinelli felt it, the grace that was the glory of God. Only ... only where was Jesus Christ, the savior and Lord? She couldn't feel him, couldn't find Him in the oneness...
If Christ was not there, then this wasn't Heaven. It was a trick of the Cunning One, of Satan who knows a million disguises and sends his demons to mislead the faithful. She wasn't going to be tricked!
She folded her arms and began to pray aloud. Gina Martinelli was a faithful Christian. She wasn't going anywhere; she was staying right here, waiting for the one true God.
* * * *
A tiny woman in Shanghai sat at her window, watching her great-grandchildren children play in the courtyard. How fast they were! Ai, once she had been so fast.
She felt it come over her all at once, the gods entering her soul. So it was her time! Almost she felt young again, felt strong ... that was good. But even if had not been good, when the gods came for you, you went.
One last look at the children, and she was taken to the gods.
* * * *
Anna Chernov, wide awake in the St. Sebastian's infirmary that had become her prison, gave a small gasp. She felt power flow through her, and for a wild moment she thought it was the same force that had powered a lifetime of arabesques and jetes, a lifetime ago.
It was not.
This was something outside of herself, separate ... but it didn't have to be. She could take it in herself, become it, even as it became her. But she held back.
Will there be dancing?
No. Not as she knew it, not the glorious stretch of muscle and thrust of limb and arch of back. Not the creation of beauty through the physical body. No. No dancing.
But there was power here, and she could use that power for another kind of escape, from her useless body and this infirmary and a life without dance. From somewhere distant she heard someone cry, “Anna—you can't!” But she could. Anna seized the power, both refusing to join it or to leave it, and bent it onto herself. She was dead before her next breath.
* * * *
Henry's whole body shuddered. It was here. It was him.
Or not. “It's a choice,” he whispered.
On the one hand, everything. All consciousness, woven into the very f
abric of space-time itself, just as Wheeler and the rest had glimpsed nearly a hundred years ago. Consciousness at the quantum level, the probability-wave level, the co-evolvee with the universe itself.
On the other hand, the individual Henry Martin Erdmann. If he merged with the uber-consciousness, he would cease to exist as himself, his separate mind. And his mind was everything to Henry.
He hung suspended for nanoseconds, years, eons. Time itself took on a different character. Half here, half not, Henry knew the power, and what it was, and what humanity was not. He saw the outcome. He had his answer.
“No,” he said.
Then he lay again on his sofa with Carrie's arms around him, the other two men illuminated dimly by a thin beam of yellow light, and he was once more mortal and alone.
And himself.
* * * *
Enough merged. The danger is past. The being is born, and is the ship, and is enough.
* * * *
FIFTEEN
Months to identify all the dead. Years to fully repair all the damage to the world's infrastructure: bridges, buildings, information systems. Decades yet to come, DiBella knew, of speculation about what had actually happened. Not that there weren't theories already. Massive EMP, solar radiation, extrasolar radiation, extrastellar radiation, extraterrestrial attack, global terrorism, Armageddon, tectonic plate activity, genetically engineered viruses. Stupid ideas, all easily disproved, but of course that stopped no one from believing them. The few old people left said almost nothing. Those that did, were scarcely believed.
Jake scarcely believed it himself.
He did nothing with the brain scans of Evelyn Krenchnoted and the three others, because there was nothing plausible he could do. They were all dead, anyway. “Only their bodies,” Carrie always added. She believed everything Henry Erdmann told her.
Did DiBella believe Henry's ideas? On Tuesdays he did, on Wednesdays not, on Thursdays belief again. There was no replicable proof. It wasn't science. It was ... something else.
DiBella lived his life. He broke up with James. He visited Henry, long after the study of senior attention patterns was over. He went to dinner with Carrie and Vince Geraci. He was best man at their wedding.
He attended his mother's sixty-fifth birthday party, a lavish shindig organized by his sister in the ballroom of a glitzy downtown hotel. The birthday girl laughed, and kissed the relatives who'd flown in from Chicago, and opened her gifts. As she gyrated on the dance floor with his Uncle Sam, DiBella wondered if she would live long enough to reach eighty.
Wondered how many others in the world would reach eighty.
“It was only because enough of them chose to go that the rest of us lost the emerging power,” Henry had said, and DiBella noted that them instead of us. “If you have only a few atoms of uranium left, you can't reach critical mass.”
DiBella would have put it differently: If you have only a few neurons, you don't have a conscious brain. But it came to the same thing in the end.
“If so many hadn't merged, then the consciousness would have had to...” Henry didn't finish his sentence, then or ever. But DiBella could guess.
“Come on, boy,” Uncle Sam called, “get yourself a partner and dance!”
DiBella shook his head and smiled. He didn't have a partner just now and he didn't want to dance. All the same, old Sam was right. Dancing had a limited shelf life. The sell-by date was already stamped on most human activity. Someday his mother's generation, the largest demographic bulge in history, would turn eighty. And Henry's choice would have to be made yet again.
How would it go next time?
Copyright (c) 2008 Nancy Kress
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: LISTENING FOR SUBMARINES
by Peter Higgins
Peter Higgins lives in Wales. His work can be found in Zahir, Revelation, Fantasy Magazine, Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2007, and Best New Fantasy 2. Of his first tale for Asimov's he says, “very little of this story is made up. I was trying to capture the particular atmosphere of a time and place when it seemed to many people that the world really might end, at any moment. A facility like the one described in this tale did operate for twenty-one years on one of the most ancient, strange, and beautiful stretches of the Welsh coast. Google IUSSCAA—listen to the sound, see the photos."
Lieutenant Christopher Osgerby RN lay in the dark. Listening. The wall between his bedroom and Sara's was flimsy plasterboard. He pulled the bed covers closer and turned over, pressing his face to the wallpaper, tucking his knees up against his stomach, longing for sleep, longing not to hear. Listening.
He had never seen the man, who came to Sara only at night. Every night. Christopher hated the sound of that man's voice: his earnest monotone, too muffled to make out words, flowing relentlessly, long waves grating up and down a beach. It didn't sound like English. Sara said little, using the same alien, submarine language. They never laughed. He could hear every sound they made. Now they were starting to...
Shit.
Christopher sat up suddenly in his bed, sending the guitar crashing to the floor. (An Eccleshall Junior Long Player, mahogany neck and body, rosewood fingerboard, Gotoh machine heads and Double Eagle pickups. Paid for with his first month's Navy pay. Never played since he moved into the cottage.) They must have heard that. He listened in the dark. Nothing changed. They were still...
Shit.
He felt his way across the room, eased back the curtains and opened the window, letting in the cold November air and the quiet smells of the sea. Uncountable stars hung almost within reach like swollen shining fruit. Somewhere across the fields a fox screamed, once.
There was a record on the turntable. He jammed the fat headphones over his ears, set the needle carefully at the beginning, turned the volume high and huddled under a blanket in the grossly overstuffed chair of red leatherette. Side two was one long slowly building track. It opened with echoing sonar pings. The cover showed a human ear, underwater, listening.
* * * *
Waking next morning too late to walk the road way round, Christopher took the cross-country path to the base. A misting drizzle plastered his trousers against his legs. In the watch room at 8:30 AM he found Stone already there, leaning back ostentatiously in his chair. Stone watched him trying to remove the mud from his boots and polish them with a handkerchief. “You could live on base,” he said. “With the rest of the guys.”
Stone was new. He was hard, shiny and ambitious. He didn't shave, he polished his face with pumice twice a day. NAVFAC Maerdy, although located on the wilder shores of West Wales, was a US facility. As Stone was the only other Royal Navy officer attached to Analysis, he and Christopher were expected to work together and share a carrel. On his first day, Stone had fixed an IUSS decal over the desk: In God We Trust, All Others We Track.
Christopher flicked the switch that flooded the watch room with sound feed from the arrays.
“Turn it off,” groaned Stone. “It hurts.”
Christopher shrugged and cut the speakers, but re-routed the feed to the headphone socket on his desk. Yawning, pretending to study the print-outs, he let the sound of the deep oceans wash into his head.
There was no need to listen to live feed. The other analysts never did: all the data you needed was there in the print-outs. Christopher listened because he loved it. It was his passion and his addiction. The most important thing in his life.
NAVFAC Maerdy was a Sound Surveillance monitoring station. She and her North Atlantic sister stations—Keflavik, Antigua, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Newfoundland, Grand Turks—listened for Soviet submarines. Grey steel machines in windowless rooms were connected, via hundreds of miles of cable laid across the ocean floor, to arrays of hydrophones on the edge of the continental shelf. In the watch rooms, automatic pens filled the air with the smell of ozone and the sound of scratching, inscribing endless wavering lines on scrolling paper. Maerdy focused on the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, the S
oviet navy's narrow exit out of the Barents Sea into the world's open oceans. When armageddon from underwater came, that was the route it must take.
Christopher imagined with obscure pleasure the places where the hydrophones lay. He loved to think of the huge weight of water pressing down on those cold, shelterless depths, and he wanted to be there, floating in the dark, far below the thin surface of the oceans, down where sunlight had never reached since the creation of seas. Sea water is four times more efficient than air at carrying sound, but it soaks up light, the longer wavelengths first. As you descend beneath the sunlit surface, the water turns green, then twilight blue, then a thick, inky indigo, and finally black. A hundred meters down you come to the lower border of the euphotic zone. Below that, plants and algae cannot survive. Maerdy's hydrophones lie deeper, between 200 and 300 meters, in total darkness, on the brink of cliffs that plunge kilometers, down into the vast, unreachable, alien, further, waiting dark.
Christopher shut his eyes and listened to the slow, patient whispers on the water.
Stone pulled the headphones abruptly away from his ears.
“Come on, Osgerby,” he said. “Briefing Room.”
“What?”
“9:00 AM. Pirrett. Don't you read the dailies?”
* * * *
The briefing room was bright, warm, airless and over-filled with people. Captain Howard Pirrett was sitting at a table on a slightly raised platform. The window behind him showed empty, dark November sky. Gusts of wind threw rain like handfuls of gravel against the glass. One of Pirrett's aides put an acetate on the overhead projector.
ABLE ARCHER 83
“Gentlemen,” said Captain Pirrett. “And ladies.”
Pirrett's crisp white shirt had short sleeves to show his tanned, muscular forearms. He would have worn exactly the same shirt on the bridge of a cruiser in the Caribbean or behind the desk he had left behind (temporarily) in Pearl Harbor. He waited until he had the attention of the whole room before he began to speak.
“Operation Able Archer 1983,” he said at last, “will be unlike any NATO exercise you may have experienced. There are two new elements. First, high level involvement. Prime Minister Thatcher and Chancellor Schmidt will be taking part. So will Secretary MacFarlane. President Reagan himself will be, ah-ha, playing a cameo.”
Asimov's SF, October-November 2008 Page 11
