Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  Perhaps the continued presence of the beast in my life would trigger some other, more decisive revelation.

  The dog-jallow cleaned up and healed well. I named him Chimbo, after a famous cartoon character.

  Whenever Machfall or Yardena visited my apartment, I would gauge their reactions to Chimbo closely.

  Once my little pet had come to feel at home and safe, he exhibited a charming personality, full of caprices and sly tricks. I could watch him and play with him for long stretches of time, and he always elicited vivid reactions from any visitors.

  Yardena became almost as fond of him as Machfall, rendering my task of deciding even harder.

  Months and months drifted by. My old life on Silane became more and more dreamlike. The insistent urge to rescue Maruta began to grow dim and recede into the background of my thoughts. This life I had constructed for myself, even under the suzerainity of the Singularity known as Magister Zawinul, was at least as rewarding as my former existence, and I began to wonder why I was striving to end it.

  My only concern was that Magister Zawinul’s patience would come to a halt. Living in the implicate order rather than the explicate order, the Singularity was perhaps constrained from fulfilling whatever ineffable destiny he envisioned for himself. Or was he? Maybe one mode of existence was as good as another to him. Maybe he knew he was endowed with an infinite lifespan, and could afford to indulge my quest indefinitely.

  Occasionally, however, I received intimations that Magister Zawinul had not forgotten me. A prominent face in the clouds, unsourceable silent messages left on my communicator, strange shapes in the waves, the curiously patterned flocking maneuvers of pigeons, advertisements for enigmatic products that didn’t exist—reminders that this very world and all it contained was an intelligent superorganism.

  A decade passed.

  Yardena and I married. Machfall moved to a neighboring city, East Shambles, and we saw each other infrequently.

  I was fairly certain by now that Yardena was Maruta. But why should I risk declaring it out loud to the omnipresent Magister? If correct, the two of us would be restored to an existence on Silane no better and perhaps worse than what we already had. If wrong, I lost all.

  Countervailing this inertia was only the possibility that Magister Zawinul would grow tired of this game and suck both me and Yardena/Maruta—and every other inhabitant of the planet—back into his composite being, thus ending our familiar ego-driven existence for some unknowable posthuman condition.

  But still, nothing inclined me to rock the boat.

  One day I arrived home from shopping for groceries. Maruta was still out. I set the groceries down and braced myself for the hurtling eager welcome from Chimbo.

  But no such welcome happened.

  I tracked down the dog-jallow to its bed. It lay panting and fevered, eyes closed, seriously ill from some contagion or ill-advised meal. Or perhaps just an old age whose arrival had escaped my inattention. When I touched my little friend gently, he opened his eyes and feebly wagged his stumpy tail.

  My heart was hurting, and I discovered my eyes tearing up. I picked up bed and pet both and made for the door. Our veterinarian was only two blocks away.

  But halfway down the hundred stories, Chimbo died in the elevator, expiring with three labored breaths.

  And at that instant, I knew.

  “Maruta!” I cried.

  The world fell away from me again, and I found myself standing on a bare plain, facing Magister Zawinul.

  “Very tragic,” the Singularity intoned. “Very, very tragic. But you had your opportunity.”

  I was crying too hard to respond at first. But then a fierce anger overtook me. This anger extended not only to the Singularity but also to myself. I had been blind and selfish and lazy and timid. And now I had lost all I had cherished.

  “You—you knew this would happen!”

  “With some degree of certainty, yes. Now let me ask you something. Did you ever stop to wonder why I took those women from your world in the first place? Or were you solely consumed with the personal affront?”

  This question brought me up short. Surely the Singularity’s motives could have been nothing so simple as sex or companionship.

  “No,” I admitted, “I never actually thought about your motives. Tell me why.”

  “Because they were all fated to die shortly. Your Maruta, for one, would have perished on her next expedition to Mathspace, her IIM devoured by Mandelbrot Demons. But by radically detouring their lifelines, I saved their potentials. Hosted in me, they continued to add their individual increments to the sum of all that is. The wasteful nature of the dumb cosmos appalls me.”

  “But—but you don’t save everyone—”

  “How do you know?”

  I remained silent then, too ashamed to ask for absolution or favors.

  “You realize,” Magister Zawinul said, his shimmering corona wisping out delicately, “the frightened resistance of the Reticulate to the spread of us Singularities is really a last-ditch defense by the forces of entropy. Is that really the side you wish to be on?”

  “I—no, of course not. But tell me, what should I do?”

  “Go spread the word. And don’t worry—you’ll see Maruta again. Death is not what you believe.”

  Back on Silane, Lustron Avouris was as good as his word. I found the administrator to have reproduced, after a decade’s absence, into a half-dozen small segments, none of which had any greater facility with language than their “father” had.

  Once I had been vetted by Ess-Cubed and deemed free of Singularity taint, I was awarded a Reticulate Order of Civic Virtue. But the honor was rescinded soon after, once I began preaching my pro-Singularity doctrine. I was both vilified and embraced by different camps, becoming a figure of some notoriety.

  My life now consists of journeying from world to world through the instantaneous Indrajal, spreading the gospel of the Singularity’s concern for us and its plans to remake a universe from one that does not have the best interests of sophonts at its uncaring core to a place where uniqueness is preserved and cherished.

  And in every living face I encounter, I try to discern a lover’s lineaments.

  Dreamers’ Lake

  Stephen Baxter

  On the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days.

  By the time dawn broke, we had labeled all the lakes’ stromatolites and had decided on three candidates: Charlie, Hotel, and Juliet, for cognitive mapping. I was tentatively confident that Juliet was the most promising, but I was so dog tired I didn’t trust my judgment anymore.

  So I was grateful when Citizen Associate Bisset brought us animists a tray of coffee.

  “Thanks.” I took a cup, fixed its spigot to my face-mask, and gulped it down, welcoming the caffeine fix. Bisset stood beside me on the pebble-strewn beach of that lake of fizzing, acidic water.

  GC-174-IV was an infant world, its young sun a lamp hanging over jagged hills. The methane-green sky reflected in the lake’s sluggish ripples and glistened on the pillow-like stromatolites. The scene was unearthly, beautiful—and I was grateful that the dawn light hid the swarming dangers of the sky, especially the rogue worldlet called the Hammer.

  In the foreground my animist cubs were playing soccer, their shouts the only sound on this silent world. I longed to join in, but they didn’t want little old ladies like me.

  “ ‘Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops . . .’ ” Bisset was a lot taller than I was, and under his wide visor his face, turned to the sun, was a mask of wrinkles.

  “That’s a cute line,” I said.

  “Shakespeare. Of course we’re two hundred light years from England.”

  “But there are hills, a lake, a sky here. Things have a way of converging.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember the first robot landing on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The first images from
the surface of the Moon had looked like a pebble beach. Then the Vikings on Mars, and the Soviet probes on Venus—more pebbles, more beaches. And even on Titan, where they use water ice for rock—”

  “Pebbles.”

  “Yes.”

  I eyed him curiously. Evidently he was older than he looked. We hadn’t spoken, but the Pegasus carried over fifty people and was roomy enough for twice that number. “I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.”

  He shook my gloved hand. “Professor Knilans, I’ve read about your work.”

  “Susan, please. And you are?”

  “Ramone Bisset.”

  “Ramone?”

  He smiled. “My father named me after his favorite band. I used to be a software engineer, before the software learned to write itself. Now I’m a Citizen Associate. I’m working on the IGWI with Ulf Thoring.”

  It took me a minute to decode the acronym. IGWI: the Inflationary Gravity Wave Interferometry experiment, the establishment of a vast interstellar network of gravity-wave detectors designed to map the echoes of the universe’s very first cataclysmic instants. “Interesting project.”

  “It sure is. Not that I understand much of it, either the science or the equipment.”

  “How do you get on with those IGWI guys?”

  He shrugged. “I’m just the dogsbody.”

  “Don’t knock it. Umm, do you mind my asking how old you are?’

  “A hundred and thirty, to the nearest decade. Born in the 1980s.” That explained his height; many of his generation, fed on ludicrously protein-rich diets, had grown tall. His accent was British, I thought, but softened by time.

  “Well,” I admitted, “I’m half your age. So what are you doing here?”

  “You mean beside the lake or on GC-IV?”

  “Start with the lake.”

  “I’m just curious. You’re here to map minds, aren’t you? Minds in those mounds.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “I haven’t started my day yet. I thought I may as well be useful. You can never go wrong with a tray of coffees.”

  “So what about the deeper question? Why volunteer for GC-IV?”

  “Ah. Why are any of us here?”

  “To do our jobs.” Captain Zuba had joined us. She was a tough, heavily built New Zealander, aged about fifty. She took one of Bisset’s coffees. “And to earn our pay.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Bisset said respectfully. “But why not just sit at home? All humans are restless. Why?” He pointed to the patient stromatolites. “They don’t look restless.”

  “No,” Zuba said, “but it’s a shame they aren’t, because in two days’ time, when the Hammer falls, they’re going to be toast. And speaking of which, the clock is ticking.” She handed back the coffee cup, already drained, and stalked away, competent, efficient, a tick-box list on legs.

  Bisset hesitated. “You know—to explore the universe in starships—it’s like something from the kind of science fiction that was out of date even before I was born.”

  I wasn’t too sure what “science fiction” was, and I didn’t really want to know. On impulse I said, “Why don’t you come visit again tomorrow? I’ll give you the guided tour. You don’t even need to bring the drinks.”

  He nodded like a gentleman. “I’d appreciate that.” And he walked away, tray in gloved hand, boots crunching over the beach.

  The day on GC-174-IV was near enough to twenty hours long (was; now it’s different, changed by the Hammer Blow). I worked through that day and was dog tired by the end of GC-IV’s short afternoon. As half the complement of the Pegasus wended back to the airlocks, the other shift was suiting up to go out; Zuba ensured we made the most of the time we had left.

  That evening, before I turned in, I looked for Bisset.

  The Pegasus is a tuna can. It sits on four stubby legs, just five meters across, and is only a couple of stories high, externally. But inside it’s the size of a small hotel. A ship that’s bigger inside than out—another gift of the quantum foam technology that so suddenly opened up the stars. Anyhow, the Pegasus is roomy enough for all fifty of its crew to have private cabins, but not big enough to hide in.

  I found Bisset in the lounge with Ulf Thoring and the rest of the IGWI crew. The guys were playing some variant of poker and drinking beer; I could see the pharmacy’s stock of sober-up nano-pills would be called on that night. Bisset sipped his beer and played a few hands, but you could see from the body language what was going on with those smart-ass college boys.

  The Citizen-Associate program of the International Xenographic Agency is aimed squarely at people like Ramone Bisset: his active life extended by decades by the new longevity treatments, his curiosity still bright, his skills long outmoded. Such is the capacity of a quantum-foam-drive starship that there is room for guys like Ramone, whatever they can contribute. It helps the sponsoring nations justify the IXA’s cost to their taxpayers: Anybody can be an explorer, so the slogan goes. But the Associates aren’t necessarily given much respect.

  I’m not in the habit of taking on lame ducks, and I suspected Bisset could look after himself. But I didn’t like to see a thoughtful man treated that way. I don’t blame the IGWI guys, however. All male, none older than thirty-five, all from a university at Stockholm, Ulf and his guys were a tightly bonded bunch, and too young to be empathetic.

  I was glad when, at the start of my next work shift the following morning, Bisset showed up at Dreamers’ Lake.

  My cubs were already at work, wading knee-deep in the scummy pond, attaching floating sensor pods to the cognitive net we’d placed over Juliet. I was standing on the comparative comfort of the beach, before a monitoring station on which the first signals were beginning to be processed.

  Bisset raised his head to the brightening sky. “Nice morning.”

  I murmured, “Perhaps. That makes me uneasy.” I pointed upward.

  That was the Hammer, a worldlet the size of Mars, visible in the bright sky, clearly larger since the end of my last shift.

  “Ah,” Bisset said. “You do get the feeling that it might fall at any moment and smash all of this.”

  “But not today. So, the guided tour. You understand what these mounds are? They occurred on primitive Earth—still do, in places where it’s too salty for the predators, like snails. They are layers of bacterial mats. . . .”

  A mat of blue-green algae will form on the scummy surface of a shallow pond. The mat traps mud, and then another layer forms on top of the first, and so on. With time the mound builds up, and specialized bacterial types inhabit the different layers, until you have a complex, interdependent, miniature ecology.

  “We’ve found bacterial mats everywhere we’ve looked—”

  “Beginning on Mars,” Bisset said.

  “Well, that’s true. And everywhere there is standing liquid, water or perhaps hydrocarbons, you get mounds.”

  “Stromatolites.”

  The pedant in me objected, although I use the word myself. “Strictly speaking, stromatolites are terrestrial forms of blue-green algae. These bacteria are photosynthetic but they’re not algae. You can see they are purplish, not green. They don’t use chlorophyll; their chemistry kit is adapted to the spectrum of their sun. So these mounds are like stromatolites, but—”

  “ ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ ”

  “More Shakespeare?”

  “Sorry. It’s a bad habit.”

  “The mound bugs here are related to us, of course, although we’ve yet to classify them.”

  It would have been a major shock if GC-IV’s bugs hadn’t been a distant relation of our own, their carbon-water chemistry dictated by a kind of skewed DNA. One of the triumphs of the IXA’s exobiology program has been to establish that all the carbon-water life forms we have found are related, apparently descended from an ancestor that came blowing in from outside the galaxy altogether. Subsequent “generations” spread by panspermia processe
s from star to star. But that origin theory is controversial; the family tree of galactic life is still incomplete. Some even believe that the ultimate origin isn’t carbon-water at all but lies in a deeper substrate of reality.

  “And,” Bisset said, “there is mind. There, in those mounds.”

  “Oh, yes. Ramone, even though we have only found microbes—no multicelled life forms like ourselves—there is mind everywhere we look.”

  Everywhere there is a network to be built, messages to be passed, complexity to be explored, you’ll find a mind. Again, Mars was the prototype, with the billion-year thoughts of its microbial mats locked in their permafrost layers.

  “You can see we labeled the mounds with marker dye. For the cognitive mapping we looked for the best specimen—the most intricate structure, the least damaged. We picked her.” I pointed to the larger mound, over which the sensor net had been laid.

  “ ‘Her’?”

  A bit sheepishly I said, “Anthropomorphizing is a bad habit of animists. We call her Juliet. We labeled the mounds—see, that’s Alpha, that’s Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo—”

  “And Juliet. Oh, it’s the old NATO phonetic alphabet, isn’t it? My father was a copper on the streets of London, and they used the alphabet for their call signs. He was Sierra Oscar One Nine. . . .”

  I admit I switched off. Why are old peoples’ anecdotes always so damn dull? It doesn’t seem adaptive, evolutionarily speaking.

  “And you can trace her thoughts,” he said now. “Juliet’s. That’s a question of detecting biochemical impulses, right?”

  “We have an analytic technique called animistic deconvolution. It’s possible to break the characteristic signals of a mind into its component parts. You’d be surprised by the commonalities we find.”

  He surprised me with his next question. “Does she understand death?”

  “Why, I don’t know. Ramone, these minds are not like ours. She doesn’t need to know death. As long as the pond survives, Juliet will always be renewed, by one bacterial layer over another. She’s effectively immortal.”