Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  Philby’s eyes widened, and for the first time in Kammer’s presence, he felt a shiver of awe. What did the Chujoans know—what could they do? He slowly turned to survey the shamans, uncaring and implacable in their loose line between the two humans and the bullyboys.

  “Hit him to save him, if he had the brains to know what it was I gave,” Kammer said. “I see he did.” Kammer’s gaze was intense, his eyes seeming darker, more human now. “Perhaps that was when he did the prophet. Bent body, bent mind. Saved from death. Knew, knew.”

  Softly, shivering slightly, Philby said, “We’re going to meet with the God the Physicists, with Carnot. I think it’s important that you talk with him.”

  “Can’t go back and do the human thing,” Kammer said. “Being this. Knew, knew.”

  “If you believe his distortions are dangerous—and you must, Aaron, you must!—you cannot refuse us this. Talk with him, tell him what you know. Try to make him stop this insanity. He could destroy all the Genjians have in the way of … culture, language, independent thought.”

  “Never did them,” Kammer said.

  “Aaron …” Philby stepped forward, hands beseeching. He removed his hydrator, to speak directly with Kammer. The cool dry air felt like dust in his throat and he coughed.

  Two trolls shoved him roughly away and spilled him on the ground. His mask flew high into the air and came down six or seven meters away. A troll loomed over him, baring its teeth, seeming to grin, examining his form as if it might be a long diversion from the troll’s normal mindless boredom.

  Kammer stood back, stick lifted as if to defend himself as well against the trolls, and said nothing.

  The shamans moved in around Philby. He tried to get up, but the troll casually kicked his arm out from under him and he fell back. He prepared himself to die, but first, he triggered the emergency signal in his belt. That would bring Sheldrake and Thompson; they were armed. If he was dead, they would do nothing but try to retrieve his body; but if he were still alive, they would carve their way through trolls and shamans both to save him.

  He considered this for a moment, realized what an ugliness might spread from another such incident—realized that what the Japanese had done, years before, might still linger between Chujoans and humans—and shouted to Kammer, “For God’s sake, Aaron, this is awful! Stop them!”

  He saw part of Kammer’s twisted leg through the parted legs of a troll. The leg moved, then the stick came down with a thud. More snug dropped away from the stick. Fascinated, anesthetized by his terror, Philby watched the fallen patches of growth twist about and crawl along the ground, back to the stick.

  “There isn’t much I can do,” Kammer said. “Lie still.”

  “Damn it, you’re sacred to them! Tell them to stop!”

  “I’m hardly sacred,” Kammer said. The troll stepped aside and Philby saw Kammer clearly. He was standing away from the trolls, who showed their teeth to him with as much apparent enthusiasm as they did to Philby. “That’s what Carnot thought. Doing the Earth and making all like men.

  “I’m an experiment, Philby. I thought you were rational and could know that. An experiment, and nothing more.”

  Scattershot

  In 1979, when James Turner, editor at Arkham House, contemplated buying a collection of my short fiction, he picked out four stories he thought were worthy: “The Wind From a Burning Woman,” “Mandala,” “The White Horse Child,” and “Scattershot.”

  “Scattershot” was bought originally by Terry Carr for his Universe 8 anthology. Terry was a friendly and charming man, but editorially spare with words; it was enough, in those days, that he bought a story. Terry—and Ben Bova at Analog, and Robert Silverberg—made me feel I was making real progress in those years before any of my novels had sold.

  This story features one of my typical strong female characters, and it also shows the influence of James Tiptree, Jr.—an influence I now find slightly peculiar.

  Everyone knows now that Tiptree was actually a woman, Alice Sheldon. She wrote fine short storie s and cut quite a swath through the science fiction world in the nineteen seventies. Her biography is fascinating. Suffice it to say that in her stories, she often gave the masculine sex a hard time. She was not an overt lesbian, to my knowledge, but in her journals and spoken diaries¸ she tells us that the sexual attentions of men made her uncomfortable. She married a much older man, and when he was dying and life to her seemed not worth living, she shot him, and then shot herself. Alice Sheldon was nothing if not pragmatic.

  She seemed to enjoy her run at literature a great deal, and the exchanges of letters her stories provoked. She also enjoyed deceiving people, for a time at least, as to her gender.

  Many writers, perhaps most, adopt likely quirks to work to the market. In “Scattershot,” the quirk I acquired from Tiptree is so small hardly anyone will notice it. But I give the strong male in this story a very hard time, and promote the women characters to almost mythic stature. It seemed right at the time.

  Tiptree was wry, witty, and probably deeply misandric. We all miss her, but I no longer want to write like her.

  Now, when I write strong women characters, I intend that they be natural and believable, not distorted or mythic. It’s tough to beat Alice Sheldon at her own game, and also tough to beat H. Rider Haggard.

  Discerning readers might note that this story bears a similarity to “Hardfought.” The deep structure is the same, in fact, but the endings are very different.

  The teddy bear spoke excellent mandarin. It stood about fifty centimeters tall, a plump fellow with close-set eyes above a nose unusually long for the generally pug breed. It paced around me, muttering to itself.

  I rolled over and felt barbs down my back and sides. My arms moved with reluctance. Something about my will to get up and the way my muscles reacted was out-of-kilter; the nerves didn’t convey properly. So it was, I thought, with my eyes and the small black-and-white beast they claimed to see: a derangement of phosphene patterns, cross-tied with childhood memories and snatches of linguistics courses ten years past.

  It began speaking Russian. I ignored it and focused on other things. The rear wall of my cabin was unrecognizable, covered with geometric patterns that shifted in and out of bas-relief and glowed faintly in the shadow cast by a skewed panel light. My fold-out desk had been torn from its hinges and now lay on the floor, not far from my head. The ceiling was cream-colored. Last I remembered it had been a pleasant shade of burnt orange. Thus tallied, half my cabin was still with me. The other half had been ferried away in the—

  Disruption. I groaned, and the bear stepped back nervously. My body was gradually coordinating. Bits and pieces of disassembled vision integrated and stopped their random flights, and still the creature walked, and still it spoke, though getting deep into German.

  It was not a minor vision. It was either real or a full-fledged hallucination.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  It bent over me, sighed, and said, “Of all the fated arrangements. A speaking I know not the best of—Anglo.” It held out its arms and shivered. “Pardon the distraught. My cords of psyche—nerves?—they have not decided which continuum to obey this moment.”

  “Same for me,” I said cautiously. “Who are you?”

  “Psyche, we are all psyche. Take this care and be not content with illusion, this path, this merriment. Excuse. Some writers in English. All I know is from the read.”

  “Am I still on my ship?”

  “So we are all, and hors de combat. We limp for the duration.”

  I was integrated enough to stand, and I towered over the bear, rearranging my tunic. My left breast ached with a bruise. Because we had been riding at one G for five days, I was wearing a bra, and the bruise lay directly under a strap. Such, to quote, was the fated arrangement. As my wits gathered and held converse, I considered what might have happened and felt a touch of the “distraughts” myself. I began to shiver like a recruit in pressure-drop training.
/>   We had survived. That is, at least I had survived, out of a crew of forty-three. How many others?

  “Do you know … have you found out—”

  “Worst,” the bear said. “Some I do not catch, the deciphering of other things not so hard. Disrupted about seven, eight hours past. It was a force of many, for I have counted ten separate things not in my recognition.” It grinned. “You are ten, and best yet. We are perhaps not so far in world-lines.”

  We’d been told survival after disruption was possible. Practical statistics indicated one out of a myriad ships, so struck, would remain integral. For a weapon that didn’t actually kill in itself, the probability disrupter was very effective.

  “Are we intact?” I asked.

  “Fated,” the Teddy bear said. “I cognize we can even move and seek a base. Depending.”

  “Depending,” I echoed. The creature sounded masculine, despite size and a childlike voice. “Are you a he? Or—”

  “He,” the bear said quickly.

  I touched the bulkhead above the door and ran my finger along a familiar, slightly crooked seam. Had the disruption kept me in my own universe—against incalculable odds—or exchanged me to some other? Was either of us in a universe we could call our own?

  “Is it safe to look around?”

  The bear hummed. “Cognize—know not. Last I saw, others had not reached a state of organizing.”

  It was best to start from the beginning. I looked down at the crea­ture and rubbed a bruise on my forehead. “Wh-where are you from?”

  “Same as you, possible,” he said. “Earth. Was mascot to captain, for cuddle and advice.”

  That sounded bizarre enough. I walked to the hatchway and peered down the corridor. It was plain and utilitarian, but neither the right color nor configuration. The hatch at the end was round and had a manual sealing system, six black throw-bolts that no human engineer would ever have put on a spaceship. “What’s your name?”

  “Have no official name. Mascot name known only to captain.”

  I was scared, so my brusque nature surfaced and I asked him sharply if his captain was in sight, or any other aspect of the world he’d known.

  “Cognize not,” he answered. “Call me Sonok.”

  “I’m Geneva,” I said. “Francis Geneva.”

  “We are friends?”

  “I don’t see why not. I hope we’re not the only ones who can be friendly. Is English difficult for you?”

  “Mind not. I learn fast. Practice make perfection.”

  “Because I can speak some Russian, if you want.”

  “Good as I with Anglo?” Sonok asked. I detected a sense of humor—and self-esteem--in the bear.

  “No, probably not. English it is. If you need to know anything, don’t be embarrassed to ask.”

  “Sonok embarrassed by no thing. Was mascot.”

  The banter was providing a solid framework for my sanity to grab on to. I had an irrational desire to take the bear and hug him, just for want of something warm. His attraction was undeniable—tailored, I guessed, for that very purpose. But tailored from what? The color suggested panda; the shape did not.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked, sitting on my bunk.

  “Sonok not known for quick decisions,” he said, squatting on the floor in front of me. He was stubby-limbed but far from clumsy.

  “Neither am I,” I said. “I’m a software expert. I wasn’t combat-­trained.”

  “Not know ‘software,’” Sonok said.

  “Programming. Instructions for machines,” I explained.

  The bear wrinkled his nose, then got up to peer around the door. He pulled back quickly and scrabbled to the rear of the cabin. “They’re here!” he said. “Can shut port?”

  “I wouldn’t begin to know how—” But then I looked and retreated just as quickly, with a high squeak, to cling to my bunk. A stream of serpents flowed past the hatchway, metallic green and yellow, with spade-shaped heads and dorsal red ovals. The stream passed without even a hint of intent to molest, and Sonok climbed back down the bas-relief pattern.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” I asked.

  “They are crew member, I think,” Sonok said.

  “What else is out there?”

  The bear straightened. “Have none but to seek,” he said solemnly. “Else, we own no right to ask. Not?” The bear walked to the hatch, stepped over the bottom seal, and stood in the corridor. “Come?”

  I let go of my bunk, got up, and followed.

  A woman is a deep, strange pool to slip into at birth. For the first few months of listening and seeing, her infant mind is a huge dark volume that absorbs all and stores it away. Those months lay down a foundation for role acceptance and rough outlines of attitude, as well as the potential for future achievement—if those watching her are tuned to such sensibilities.

  Few are. Most adults, even most parents, just want the girl to fit in and not cause trouble. Listening to adults and observing their actions fills the infant female with hints, preconceptions, borders, and stark warnings: None of the rest of us can see your imaginary companions, darling … . It’s something you have to understand.

  And so, from some dim beginning, not ex nihilo but out of totality, the girl pares away her infinite self. She whittles at this unwanted piece, that undesired trait. She forgets in time that she was once part of All and trims to a simpler tune, narrowing her music from the endless and symphonic before. She forgets those com­panions who danced on the ceiling above her bed and called to her from the dark. Some of them were friendly; others, even in that dim time, were not pleasant. But they were all she.

  For the rest of her life, the woman seeks some echo of that preternatural menagerie; in the men she chooses to love, in the tasks she chooses to perform, in the way she tries to be. After thirty years of cutting, she becomes Francis Geneva.

  And so begins or concludes other phases of loss. When love dies, another piece is carved away, another universe is sheared off, and the split can never join again. With each winter and spring, spent on or off worlds with or without seasons, the woman’s life grows more solid, but smaller.

  Now, on this jumbled ship, the parts are coming together again. Old, forgotten companions return from the dark above the child’s bed. Beware. They’re all the things you lost or let go, and now they walk on their own, out of your control; reborn and indecipherable.

  “Are you understanding?” the bear asked.

  I shook my head to break my steady, baffled glare at the six-bolted hatch. “Do I understand what?” I asked.

  “Of how we are here.”

  “Disrupted. By Aighors, I assume.”

  “Yes, for us, too. But how?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  No one did. We could only observe the re­sults. When the remains of disrupted ships could be found, they al­ways resembled floating garbage heaps—plucked from our universe, rearranged in some cosmic grab bag, and returned. What came back was of the same mass, made of the same basic materials, even—the ultimate perversity!—re­combined with a tendency toward order and viability. But in deep space, even ninety-nine percent viability is tantamount to none at all. If the ship’s separate elements didn’t integrate perfectly—and only one in a hundred thousand instances would—there were no survivors. But oh, how interested we were in the corpses! Most were kept behind a Paper Curtain of secrecy, but word leaked out even so—of ostriches with large heads, blobs covered with blobs of crystalline seawater … All snatched out of Terrestrial ships, but from a huge jumble of alternate universes.

  And now, my own additions: a living Teddy bear, a herd of parti-colored snakes.

  Word also leaked out that of five hundred such incidents, not once had a human body returned intact to our continuum. Terrible odds all around.

  Yet here we were.

  “Some things still work,” Sonok said. “We are heavy the same.”

  The ship’s gravitation was unchanged—I hadn�
�t paid attention to that. “We can still breathe, for that matter,” I said. “We’re all from one world. There’s no reason to think those basics will change.”

  And that meant there had to be standards for communication, no matter how diverse the forms. Communication was part of my expertise, but thinking about it made me shiver. A ship runs on computers, or their equivalent. How were at least ten different computer systems com­municating? Had they integrated with working interfaces? If they hadn’t, our time was limited. We would soon be wrapped in darkness and cold and vacuum.

  I released the six throw-bolts and slowly opened the hatch.

  “Say, Geneva,” Sonok mused as we looked into the corridor be­yond. “How did snakes get through?”

  I shook my head. There were more immediate problems. “I want to find something like a ship’s bridge, or at least a computer terminal. Did you see something like those before you found my cabin?”

  Sonok nodded. “Other way in corridor. But there were … things there. Didn’t enjoy the looks, so came this way.”

  “What were they?” I asked.

  “One like trash can,” he said. “With breasts.”

  “We’ll keep looking this way,” I said by way of agreement.

  The next bulkhead was a dead end. A few round displays studded the wall, filled like bull’s-eyes with concentric circles of varying thick­ness. A lot of information could be carried in such patterns, given a precise optical scanner to read them—which suggested a machine more than an organism, though not necessarily.

  The bear paced back and forth in front of the wall.

  I reached out with one hand to touch one of the round displays. Then I got down on my knees to feel the bulkhead, looking for a seam. “Can’t see it, but I feel something here—like a ridge in the material.”

  The bulkhead, displays and all, peeled away like a heart’s triplet valve, and a rush of air shoved us into darkness. I instinctively rolled into a fetal curl. The bear bumped against me and grabbed my arm. Some throbbing force flung us this way and that, knocking us against squeaking wet things. I forced my eyes open and unfurled my arms and legs, trying to find a grip. One hand rapped against metal or hard plastic, and the other caught what felt like rope. With some fum­bling, I gripped the rope and braced myself against the hard surface. Then I had time to sort out what I was seeing. The chamber seemed to be open to space, but we were breath­ing, so obviously a transparent membrane was keeping in the atmo­sphere. I could see the outer surface of the ship, and it appeared a hell of a lot larger than I’d allowed. Clinging to the membrane in a curve, as though queued on the inside of a bubble, were five or six round nebulosities that glowed dull orange like dying suns. I was hanging on to something resembling a ship’s mast, a metal pylon that reached from one side of the valve to the center of the bubble. Ropes were rigged from the pylon to stanchions that seemed sus­pended in midair, though they had to be secured against the mem­brane. The ropes and pylon supported clusters of head-sized spheres covered with hairlike plastic tubing. They clucked like brood hens as they slid away from us. “Góspodi!” Sonok screeched.