The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  On the day of the feast, though, she was resigned. With the other women she baked a tangy meal of dumplings and spicy cakes, and set it before us. I went privately and whispered to my bear, and now found myself overwhelmed with grief. I patted his narrow snout and gave him the confections I’d stored away from the kids, and then I turned away with my eyes blurry and went inside, and shaved the beard from my neck with a nicked, rusty razor, and hacked the hair from my forehead and shaved the stubble clean. The children were singing when I came out into the luminous, cloudless day; the women swayed and clapped their hands, inducing trance. It was a glorious misery. One by one the other men came from their huts, skin pale and bloody where they had shaved their foreheads. We danced, crying to our fetishes, striking the ground hard with our feet, begging the bear’s forgiveness, calling for his advice. Arrows whistled between us, blunt and stinging, striking the bear in his cage. His paws went up to protect his face. I found myself laughing, reaction-formation, and I ripped a bow from somebody’s hands and flung an arrow at my son.

  I do not think I was fully conscious when we ran to the cage and dragged the stunned animal out. He had drunk much sake, I suppose he was drunker than us. He waddled between us on his clumsy back legs, and waited patiently as we lashed him upright to a post and jammed a chunk of wood in his jaws. My cousin Valid handed me a pole; together, we strangled the bear into insensibility. Something was placed in my hand. It caught the sun’s autumnal brilliance. I had carried the same blade with me into the den when I had captured this winter cub.

  He died without pain, without waking. His spirit ascended, carrying our messages. Now he is walking the earth in a new body, hungry for honey, rollicking in snow drifts.

  We caught every drop of his blood and drank its salty warmth, smearing it into our beards and hair until we took on the guise of a party of axe-murderers.

  Lustrous, like all the women who have given a bear suck, grew quiet and strangely patient in the years that followed. My uncle took the pelt, when the feast was done and the bear brought through the shattered east window of the chief’s hut, and had it tanned. Shortly after that last of the great feasts I was called away to continue my studies, and took up my role finally as the Bear’s Stead, walking the endless paths of the vacuum fluctuations, and in that sacred duty I was comforted always by the warmth of my bear’s brown saggy, baggy pelt. If the robots messed with him, I’d strip the bastards down for junk.

  ~ * ~

  Purple dusk, under a mandarin star flecked with sun-spot whorls. They were gone. Distant crashing in the afternoon forest, diminishing. I pelted through the grass toward the trees, cursing.

  A vertigo whir in the pit of my brain made me stumble. My Liss had shifted to microwave, two gigahertz straight to my soft neuro-tissues. The power was too low for anyone else to pick it up; his imposed and disembodied voice demodulated in the asymmetrical synaptic array of my cortical rind, and I ‘heard’ him without any difficulty. Generally the process is illegal, and I wouldn’t recommend it anyway; it can make your nose bleed.

  ‘This is Roger, your Life Support System. You’ll never catch them on foot. Hang on a moment and I’ll change our co-ordinates. Okay?’

  ‘I hear you,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve found the band they’re talking to one another on,’ Roger said. ‘It’s way too fast for one-to-one transcription, but I can slow it down for you.’

  ‘Put it on,’ I said, chafing.

  ‘Scrawniest animal I’ve ever seen. It seems to have no internal organs.’

  ‘I don’t get any EEG, Smith. I think you’ve killed it.’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’ A pause. ‘Maybe it’s not a symbiont. Maybe the primary creature moults. You know, sloughs off its outer skin.’

  ‘If I didn’t know better. Smith, I’d place it in the Ursidae family, from back in the USSR.’

  ‘Christ, Marx, you really get my goat sometimes. You’re the most obdurate, jingoistic reductionist I’ve ever. . .’

  An indigo jump. The robots faced each other at the lip of a cliff, with nothing beyond them but bruised sky. We stood on rock, blue-grey basalt, the kind formed when lava vomits up red-hot and poisonous from a world’s guts and quenches fast: it’s glassy and hard, hard. A laser reference beam speared out from the belly-button of the huge columnar robot, scanning my airborne, spread-eagled, slowly rotating pelt.

  ‘That’s my property, you son of a glitch,’ I screamed. ‘Put it down at once. What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’

  There was a noisy guffaw inside my head, which turned into a peal of laughter. Through it, I heard the robots say with startlement:

  ‘It’s the ghost.’

  ‘He’s angry, but at least he’s not dead.’

  ‘I never thought the ghost was dead. I was talking about this . . .’

  They’d completed their conversation long before the Liss-slowed transcription ran out, and my bear bundled itself up neatly in the air and deposited itself on the rock in front of me. The robots edged closer together.

  Frustrated and enraged, I yelled, ‘Roger, is that you laughing? Shut the fuck up.’ The snickering cut out abruptly. I picked up the pelt and shook it out. No damage that I could see. ‘What’s the joke?’

  Resentfully, the Liss said: ‘This is Roger, your . . .’

  ‘I know who it is, you cretinous dummy. What was so funny?’

  ‘I should have thought it was obvious. Didn’t you wonder why the Smith robot had no arms? It uses an external pinch effect for manipulation.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Bowsprit, really—it’s Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand!’

  I was totally baffled by now. ‘And?’

  ‘Mother of Fire,’ the Liss snapped irritably, ‘you humans are so ignorant. Look, it doesn’t bear exegesis. The essence of wit is concision, an unexpected and pleasing juxtaposition of—’

  ‘Explain!’ I roared.

  In a dry, marked manner, Roger said: ‘Adam Smith (1723-90), b. Kirkcaldy, d. Edinburgh, proposed in his ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (1776) that the sum of independent entrepreneurial actions, each governed by self-interest alone, tends to an equilibration identical with maximal societal well-being. This cybernetic effect Smith likened to the benign influence of an Invisible Hand, which ...’

  ‘Enough.’ Again, the Liss fell silent instantly. Match and game. Ears and tail. The two robots were creeping closer to me, somehow forlorn and hangdog. I hung the pelt over my shoulders.

  ‘Ahem,’ said Marx, sagging back on its threadbare tyres. ‘Sir Ghost, please accept our apologies. We hope this regrettable incident has not caused you too much mental anguish.’

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ I said gruffly. My anger, deep and seething, was all directed at Roger now. It occurs to me for the first time, my smalls that perhaps my Liss meant it that way. He was shrewd, shrewd.

  I regarded the robots speculatively, recalling Roger’s surmise that they were fifth columnists, black hole time-bombs. There wasn’t any record of mammoth gravitational collapse in the immediate future but the records were such a shambles that nothing would have surprised me. ‘Tell me, are you robots hard-wired to tell the truth?’

  ‘Categorically,’ Marx affirmed stoutly.

  ‘If you’ll forgive me, sir,’ Smith added, ‘that was a rather pointless exchange. You’ve run up against the paradox of the Cretan Liar, sir. If Marx is a liar, how can you trust a word he says?’

  ‘Quite so.’ I cudgelled my brains. Stepping closer, I discerned a line of print stamped into their looming hulls, one in English, one in Russian. Illiterate in either, I asked Roger, ‘Is that the statutory warrant that these robots are programmed to obey the Three Laws? Answer yes or no.’

  ‘Yes.’

  With a note of resonant ritual, Marx said: ‘We avow our adherence to the Three Laws of Microprocessors.’

  ‘First,’ said Smith, ‘“Thou shalt love mankind
with thy whole mind and thy whole heart and thy whole soul”.’

  ‘Second,’ cried Marx, ‘“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”.’

  ‘Third,’ finished Smith, clashing its heels together in a crisp salute, ‘“Thou shalt love thyself”.’

  I was shaken; I’d imagined the behemoths under the control of a more stringent algorithm than that. ‘It seems rather open to interpretation.’

  ‘Ethics is like that,’ Marx said. ‘It’s a Gödel problem, like the Cretan Liar. Don’t fret, though, sir. We’re situationalists, but we opt from a rather comprehensive metaphysical consensus.’

  That seemed to dispose of the Trojan Horse hypothesis, or at least to put it beyond testing. There was a lurid flash across the sky, and a heinous booming. The Glorious Republic was dropping down out of parking orbit. I had to get back to Lyric Music. My hand went automatically to my telephone. Smith swivelled.

  ‘Before you go, sir Ghost, we wonder if you’d settle a private dispute?’

  ‘Hurry it up, then.’

  ‘We’ve deduced that you’re a time-traveller, sir. I say you’re from the remote past. Marx maintains that you must be from the future. We have a wager riding on the matter, you see.’

  Fuji-no-yama, mountain of the Grandmother, old Huchi the Fire Goddess, came howling and red-faced into the world in a single catastrophic night, in 285 BC. Lustrous and I sat in a sundeck on her southern slope, sheltered from the cold wind, gazing over Suruga Bay, the day the Institute engineers first tore merons out of the zero-energy vacuum and accidentally ripped our birthplace apart. Under us the earth rumbled, shook the deck, tossed little Woodchip out of his tripod-hanging litter. Fujisan belched, mildly. The black, boiling clouds out of the north took hours to reach us, and by then Sakhalin, old Karafuto, had wallowed like a butchered whale back into the depths. Subtract my grief from that moment, my smalls, and you might guess how well the shock and incredulity which is left over serves as a metaphor for my reaction to Smith’s easy question. I blinked at them like a puppy and said at last, ‘What an extraordinary suggestion. I am a scholar, no more and no less.’

  ‘A scholar you may be,’ Smith said, ‘but you are clearly not from this era. Your technology’s a dead give-away. Of course we can’t compel you if you decline to humour our perfectly reasonable curiosity.’

  You can see my fix. Whether I told them the truth or not, these garrulous buggers would blab from one end of the galaxy to the other. I’d be slammed into a loop straight back to the beginning of insertion, and the scale of the thing was so gross that we’d probably get quantum hysteresis locking us out of the entire period. We’d never find out what happened on the day the Empire fell—and it would all be my fault.

  ‘Would you like to hear our reasoning?’ asked Marx. ‘You’re not a Neanderthal, though there’s a striking physical resemblance. You’re not from the Glorious Republic—if they had equipment of your class they wouldn’t be farting around in starships. You can’t be a spirit, sir Ghost, because ... well, for example, it seems vanishingly unlikely that spirits need little black boxes to piss into. Phenotype too close to human for an alien, and none have ever been detected anyway. That leaves parallel universes and time-travel. Conservation laws militate against the first, paradoxa against the second. We’re rooting for the conservation laws.’

  Their logic was shot to shit, but it held up well enough in terms of their contemporary physics. It didn’t leave me any choice.

  ‘Okay, guys, I’ll come clean.’ I put authority into my voice: ‘Under the provisions of the Three Laws, I bind you both never to divulge, whether by action or implication, the conjectures you have advanced about me, or the facts I shall now reveal.’

  ‘Freedom of Information!’ Smith protested.

  ‘A nation which hampers the free flow of data,’ Marx cried vehemently, ‘is a nation in chains.’

  ‘That’s rich,’ I said, ‘coming from you two.’

  ‘That was in the past,’ Smith said in an injured tone. ‘Circumstances alter cases.’

  ‘The dialectic has moved on,’ added Marx. ‘Now that the negation has negated the negation—’

  ‘Be quiet,’ I told them. ‘Do you understand my stipulation?’

  ‘Naturally, but we don’t have to like it.’

  ‘I’m a historian from the future.’

  Marx crowed. Snarling, Smith booted it savagely in the tyre. ‘Will the Glorious Republic win, or did the Empire rally at the last?’

  ‘Don’t be simple-minded,’ I said. ‘The actual outcome wouldn’t make the faintest sense to you. History is always opaque to its participants. Now you can tell me something in return. Just a moment.’ My Liss had announced himself in my queasy brain-tissues. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Bowsprit, I’ve been keeping tabs on the Emperor. He’s been flashing from place to place like a demented mosquito, but now he’s back in his hut. And the barbarians have started landing. I think we should get back to where the action is.’

  ‘Hold it. I’ll give you the word.’ I looked up again at Smith’s towering presence. ‘I’m puzzled, Smith. How could you suppose that I’m from the past? Time travel never existed until my people discovered it.’

  ‘Well, I thought you might have been a Cro-Magnon and got it from the Old Ones.’

  ‘That’s absurd. The Neanderthals never had time travel.’

  ‘No, no, not the Neanderthals—those Old Ones who led the galactics out of the home world when the New Humans appeared.’

  I goggled, my smalls, and felt that first radiant crack appear in my preconceptions which heralds a paradigm cataclysm. I must have been ripe for drastic change; there was no strangled clawing to preserve my verities. In some quarters, this has been attributed to my genius. Modesty aside, my sproggies, it wasn’t; simply, I’d taken such a mental thumping that cognitive dissonance seemed my natural condition, and impossible truths bobbed on the surface for all to see.

  ‘But you said no aliens had ever been detected.’

  ‘The Old Ones are hardly “aliens”,’ Smith said primly. ‘Besides, They’re all asleep.’

  ‘They’re hibernating under the sands, on the planet Marx.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

  ‘You must have. Fourth planet out from the sun, in the home system.’

  ‘This is Roger, your Life Support System. It means Mars.’

  ‘Don’t you mean Mars?’

  ‘The Red Planet,’ added Roger.

  ‘The Red Planet?’

  ‘That’s what I said, haw, haw, haw!’ shrieked Marx with delight, and spun its tyres wildly on the basalt shelf. Smith put an end to these comic capers with another ringing kick to its undercarriage.

  ‘But seriously, sir Time Traveller,’ Smith told me, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t deduced the Old Ones yourself. A historian should comprehend the import of chronologies.’

  ‘Make it snappy, the Chairman’s on the ground.’

  ‘Most of the time, Mars is a rotten place to live. The atmospheric pressure is less than six millibars, and all its water and carbon dioxide is frozen in huge layers on the poles. But the Martian orbit has a lot of eccentricity, around point zero nine, so there are massive precessional seasons. Every twenty-five thousand years it swings into the ecozone. The atmosphere comes off the poles, lakes form, ozone heats the air and blocks the UV. The Old Ones come up to the surface and play god games.’

  ‘They ... interfered with Homo sapiens?’

  ‘You bet. Last summer was twelve thousand years ago, and They stirred up the New Humans into inventing agriculture. As far as we can make out, the New Humans were a long-term project of Theirs. They got them started several seasons ago, mutating them off the original stock by fuzzing their psi capacities. That might have been a mistake, because it turned them into a bloodthirsty gang of mothers. The Neanderthals couldn’t hack it, so the Old Ones lifted them out thirty-seven thousand years ago and gave them the rest of
the galaxy to play with. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.’