The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  So Tom finally got sufficient funds and bluff together to set up his own specialized SETI project, and then settled on France for reasons he couldn’t now quite remember, except that it was a place he hadn’t been to where they still spoke a language which wasn’t English, and then chose the karst area of the Massif Central because it gave the sort of wide flat planes which fitted with the technology of his tripwire receivers, and was high up and well away from the radio babble of the cities. The choice was semi-symbolic – as well as the tripwires, he planned to borrow and buy-in as much useful data as he could from all possible sources, and process it there with whatever equipment he could borrow or cannibalize. Then he saw the waterhole, a tiny blue dot on the map of this otherwise desolate mountain-plateau above a small place called St. Hilaire, and that settled it. He hadn’t even known that the place was a flying resort, until he’d signed all the necessary legal papers and hitched his life to it. And even that, in its way – those rainbow butterflies and beetles, those prismatic famine victims clustering around their smart bars and expensive shops, queuing with their wings whispering to take the cable lifts to the high peaks in the sunstruck south each morning – seemed appropriate. It made him think of Terr, and how her life had been, and it reminded him – as if he’d ever forgotten – of his, of their promise.

  But it had never happened. There’d never been a reason to let her know.

  Tom wrestled with the memories, the feelings, as Terr touched him, and closed her hands around his with fingers which seemed to have lost all their flesh. She was tunneling down the years to him, kissing him from the wide sweep of some incredible distance. He tried closing his eyes, and felt the jagged rim of teeth and bone beneath her lips. He tried opening them, and he saw her flesh streaked and lined against the stars, as if the Terr of old was wearing a mask made of paper. And her eyes had gone out. All the storms had faded. She touched him, briefly, intimately, but he knew that it was useless.

  She stood back from him and sighed, scarecrow figure in her scarecrow dress, long hair in cobwebs around her thin and witchy face.

  “I’m sorry, Tom – ”

  “ –No, it isn’t – ”

  “ –I was making presumptions.”

  But Tom knew who and what was to blame. Too many years of searching, too many years of drink. He sat outside his hut, frozen in his chair with his tripwires glimmering, and watched as Terr wandered off. He heard the clink of bottles as she inspected his Dumpster. He heard the shuffle of rubbish as she picked her way around indoors. He should have felt ashamed, but he didn’t. He was past that, just as he was past, he realized, any approximation of the act of love.

  When Terr came out again into the starlight, she was carrying a bottle. It was the absinthe.

  “Is this what you want?” she said, and unstoppered it. She poured a slug of the stuff out into her own empty wineglass, and raised it to her thin lips, and sipped. Even under this starlight, her face grew wrinkled, ugly. “God, it’s so bitter . . .”

  “Perhaps that’s why I like it.”

  “You know, you could get rid of this habit, Tom. It’s like you said to me – if there’s something about yourself you don’t like, all you need do is take a vial.”

  Tom shrugged, wondering whether she was going to pour some absinthe out into his glass or just stand there, waving the bottle at him. Was he being deliberately taunted? But Terr was right, of course. You took a vial, and you were clean. The addiction was gone. Everything about you was renewed, apart from the fact that you were who you were, and still driven by the same needs and contradictions which had given you the craving in the first place. So you went back to the odd drink, because you knew you were clean now, you were safe. And the odd drink became a regular habit again, and you were back where you started again, only poorer and older, and filled with an even deeper self-contempt. And worse headaches. Yes, Tom had been there.

  “It’s like you say, Terr. We are as we are. A few clever chemicals won’t change that.”

  “You’re going to be telling me next that you’re an addictive personality.”

  “I wouldn’t be here otherwise would I, doing this?”

  She nodded and sat down again. She tipped some absinthe into his glass, and Tom stared at it, and at the faintly glowing message cards which he still hadn’t read which lay beside it on the table, allowing a slight pause to elapse before he drank the absinthe, just to show her that he could wait. Then the taste of anise and wormwood, which was the name of the star, as he recalled, which had fallen from the heavens and seared the rivers and fountains in the Book of Revelation. It had all just been a matter of belief, back then.

  “You still haven’t told me how things have been for you, Terr.”

  “They’ve been okay. On and off . . .” Terr considered, her head in shade and edged with starlight. Tom told himself that the skull he could now see had always been there, down beneath Terr’s skin that he had once so loved to touch and taste. Nothing was really that different. “With a few regrets.”

  “Did you really get into flying? That was how I always pictured you, up in the skies. Like the kids you see now down in this valley.”

  “Yes! I was a flyer, Tom. Not quite the way they are now – I’m sure they’d think the stuff we used then was uselessly heavy and clumsy. But it was great while it lasted. I made a lot of friends.”

  “Did you ever go back to your studies?”

  She gave that dry chuckle again; the rustle of wind though old telephone wires. “I don’t think I ever had studies, Tom. No, I got a job. Worked in public relations. Built up this company I was involved in very well for a while, sold other people’s projects and ideas, covered up other people’s mistakes – ”

  “ – We could have used you for SETI.”

  “I thought of that, Tom – or of you, at least. But you had your own life. I didn’t want to seem patronizing. And then I got sick of being slick and enthusiastic about other people’s stuff, and I got involved in this project of my own. Basically, it was a gallery, a sort of art gallery, except the exhibits were people. I was . . .”

  “You were one of them?”

  “Of course I was, Tom! What do you expect? But it plays havoc with your immune system after a while. You hurt and ache and bleed. It’s something for the very fit, the very young, or the very dedicated. And then I tried being normal and got married and unmarried, and then married again.”

  “Not to the same person?”

  “Oh no. Although they made friends, funnily enough, did my two ex’s. Last time I heard from one of them, they were both still keeping in touch. Probably still are. Then I got interested in religion. Religions, being me . . .”

  “Any kids?”

  “Now never quite seemed the time. I wish there had been a now, though, but on the other hand perhaps I was always too selfish.”

  “You were never selfish, Terr.”

  “Too unfocussed then.”

  “You weren’t that either.” Tom took another slug of absinthe, and topped up the glass. He could feel the bitter ease of it seeping into him. It was pleasant to sit talking like this. Sad, but pleasant. He realized he hadn’t just missed Terr. These last few years up on his mountain, he’d missed most kinds of human company. “But I know what you mean. Even when I used to dream about us staying together, I could never quite manage the idea of kids . . .”

  “How can two people be so different, and so right for each other?”

  “Is that what you really think?”

  “I loved you more than I loved anyone, Tom. All the time since, I often got this feeling you were watching, listening. Like that afternoon when I jumped with my wings from that tower in Aston and then got arrested. And the body art. You were like a missing guest at the weddings. I was either going for or against you in whatever I did – and sort of wondering how you’d react. And then I went to the Moon, and your ghost seemed to follow me there, too. Have you ever been off-planet?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t
– or at least not in the obvious physical sense, although he’d traveled with Kubrick over the Moon’s craters a thousand times to the thrilling music of Ligeti.

  “Thought not. It was the most expensive thing I ever did.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “That’s just about it with the Moon, Tom – it’s expensive. The place you stay in is like one of those cheap old Japanese hotels. Your room’s a pod you can’t even sit up in. Who’d ever have thought space could be so claustrophobic!”

  “All these things you’ve done, Terr. They sound so fascinating.”

  “Do, don’t they – saying them like I’m saying them now? But it was always like someone else’s life that I seemed to be stuck in. Like wearing the wrong clothes. I was always looking for my own. And then you get older – God, you know what it’s like! And there are so many choices nowadays. So many different ways of stretching things out, extending the years, but the more you stretch them, the thinner they get. I always knew that I never wanted to live to some great age. These one-and-a-half centenarians you see, they seem to be there just to prove a point. Tortoises in an endless race. Or animals in a grotty zoo. Minds in twisted rusty cages . . .”

  “I’d never really thought – ”

  “ – You’ll just go on until the bang, won’t you Tom? Until the booze finally wrecks some crucial organ or busts a capillary in your head. Or until the Venusians land over there on those funny wires in a flying saucer and take you away with them. Although you’d probably say no because they aren’t quite the aliens you expected.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, Tom. It’s just the way you are. And you’ve been lucky, really, to have managed to keep your dream intact, despite all the evidence. I read that article you did, years ago in that funny little paper with all the flashing adverts for body-changing. “New Light on the Drake Equation.” I had to smile. You still sounded so positive. But don’t you think we’d have heard from them by now, if they really were out there? Think of all the millions of stars, all these millions of years, and all those galactic civilisations you used to read about. It wouldn’t be a whisper, would it, Tom, something you needed all this fiddly technology to pick up on? It would be all around us, and unavoidable. If the aliens wanted us to hear from them, it would be an almighty roar . . .”

  The stars were just starting to fade now at the edge of the east; winking out one by one in the way that Tom had always feared. Taurus, Orion . . . The first hint of light as this part of the planet edged its face towards the sun was always grey up here on the karst, oddly wan and depressing. It was the color, he often felt as the night diluted and the optimism that the booze inspired drained out of him in torrents of piss and the occasional worrying hawk of bloody vomit, that his whole world would become – if he lost SETI. And the argument which Terr had so cannily absorbed, was, he knew, the most damning of all the arguments against his dream. The odd thing was, it lay outside the Drake Equation entirely, which was probably why that dumb article of his had avoided mentioning it. What Terr was saying was a version of a question that the founding father of the nuclear chain reaction Enrico Fermi had once asked in the course of a debate about the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence nearly a century and half – and how time flew! – ago. The question was simply this: “Where are they?”

  There were these things called von Neumann machines; perhaps Terr knew that as well. They’d once been a theory, and stalwarts of the old tales of the future Tom had loved reading, but now they were out working in the asteroid belt and on Jupiter’s lesser moons, and down in deep mines on earth and the sea trenches and on Terr’s moon and any other place where mankind wanted something but didn’t want to risk its own skin by getting it. They were robots, really, but they were able to manufacture new versions of themselves – reproduce, if you wanted to make the obvious biological comparison – using the available local materials. They were smart, too. They could travel and adapt to new environments. They could do pretty much anything you wanted of them. So surely, went the argument which sometimes crept along with the depression and the morning hangover into Tom’s head, any other intelligent lifeform would have come up with a similar invention? Even with the staggering distance involved in travel between the stars, all you had to do was launch some into space, wait a few million years – a mere twitch of God’s eye, by any cosmological timescale – and the things would be colonizing this entire galaxy. So where were they?

  The answer was as simple as Fermi’s question: They aren’t here. And mankind was a freak; he and his planet were a fascinating outrage against all the laws of probability. The rest of the universe was either empty, or any other dim glimmerings of life were so distant and faint as to be unreachable in all the time remaining until the whole shebang collapsed again. Better luck next time, perhaps. Or the time after that. By one calculation of the Drake Equation Tom had read, life of some kind was likely to appear somewhere in the entire universe once in every 1010 big bangs, and even that was assuming the physical laws remained unchanged. The guy hadn’t bothered to put the extra spin on the figure which would involve two communicating intelligences arising at the same time and in the same corner of the same galaxy. Probably hadn’t wanted to wreck his computer.

  Half the sky was greying out now. Star by star by star. At least he’d soon get a proper look at Terr, and she’d get a proper look at him, although he wasn’t sure that that was what either of them wanted. Perhaps there was something to be said for the grey mists of uncertainty, after all.

  “I always said – didn’t I, Tom? – that I’d bring you a message.”

  “And this is it? You saying. I should give up on the one thing that means something to me?”

  “Don’t look at it like that, Tom. Think of it as . . .” A faint breeze had sprung up, the start of the wind that would soon lift the flyers as the temperature gradients hit the valley. Tom thought for a moment that they must still have a candle burning on the table between them, the way Terr seemed to flicker and sway beyond it. She was like smoke. Her hair, her face. He poured himself some more absinthe, which he decided against drinking. “The thing is, Tom, that you’ve got yourself into this state when you imagine that whether or not you listen in itself proves something. It doesn’t, Tom. They’re out there – they’re not out there. Either way, it’s a fact already isn’t it? It’s just one we don’t happen to know the answer to . . . And wouldn’t it be a pity, if we knew the answer to everything? Where would your dreams be then?”

  “Science is all about finding out the truth – ”

  “ – And this life of yours, Tom! I mean, why on earth do you have to go down to the village to pick up those messages? Can’t you communicate with people from up here? It looks like you’ve got enough equipment in that hut to speak to the entire world if you wanted to. But I suppose that doesn’t interest you.”

  “I find personal messages . . .” He gazed at the hills in the east as a questing spear of light rose over them, then down at the cards she’d brought up to him. “I find them distracting.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I don’t want to distract you.”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” There he went again. Terr in tears, just the way she’d been, in a memory he’d suppressed for so long, in his bed in Erdington on that night of the Mars landing when the booze first started to get the better of him. But this was different. Terr was different. She was twisting, writhing. And the wind, the dawn, was rising.

  “And I always felt responsible for you in a way, Tom. It was probably just a sort of vanity, but I felt as if I’d given you some final push along a path down which you might not otherwise have taken. You were charming, Tom. You were handsome and intelligent. You could have made a fortune and had a happy life doing anything other than SETI. Is that true Tom? Does that make any sense to you?”

  He didn’t reply, which he knew in itself was a positive answer. The truth was always out there in any case, with or without him. What was the point in
denying anything?

  “And that promise I made you make, that last day when we were standing outside the law courts with all those stupid flyer friends of mine. It seemed clever, somehow. I knew how much you still loved me and I wanted to leave my mark on you, just to prove it. I’m sorry, Tom. It was another one of my stupid, stupid projects . . .”

  “You can’t hold yourself responsible for someone else’s life, Terr.”

  “I know, Tom. It didn’t even feel like I was responsible for my own.”

  Tom looked away from Terr, and back at his ragged hut. But for the fine-spun silver of his field of tripwires, but for the faint glow of his computers, but for the bottle-filled Dumpster and the old Citroen beside it, it could have been the dwelling of a medieval hermit. He sighed and looked down the slope of his mountain. In this gathering light, the whole world looked frail as a spiderweb. And down there – he could just see it – lay his waterhole, and the flickering movement of the shy mountain ibex who gathered dawn and dusk to drink there.

  “The sun’s coming up, Tom. I’ll have to be going soon . . .”

  “But you” The words froze in his mouth as he looked back at Terr. Even as the light strengthened, the substance was draining from her. “. . . can’t you stay . . . ?”

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I’ve said all there is to be said . . .”