The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1

by George Mann

  “You have a radio with you?” Bryce demands. “Or a phone?”

  “Do you seriously expect—?”

  “Have you tried?”

  He’s right, so I pull out my phone.

  “No signal.”

  “Dial anyway, see what happens.”

  Dee-du-doo-doo-du-do... followed by silence.

  “Now you know for sure, don’t you?”

  “Why did you come through, Bryce?”

  “Somebody in charge had to.” Looked at from that point of view, I suppose he’s more in charge than me. “Seeing as they already know me, the kids might pay some attention. You’d best stick to advising, hmm?” He eyes Tony and Svelte. “Got guns?”

  No, and no.

  He laughs shortly. “All you got is combined intelligence. Pretty disconnected right now.”

  People have spread out among the featherbushes, feathertrees. Partly concealed by ostrich plumes, two kids seem to be fucking. Getting to the kore of the problem, eh? That’s unfair—they’re true pioneers, the first human beings to have sex on an alien world. That’s one defiant one for the record book.

  Svelte exclaims, “Look, how do we know this place is actual? Why not a virtual reality, and cages admit you into it? That’s why Jacko couldn’t take part, not his mind anyhow. Maybe the Varroa belong to some super-evolved combi-intelligence that hangs out in mind-space.”

  “Yeah,” sarcastically from Bryce, “like this thing dumps millions of tons of solid fucking cages onto Earth? And it’s virtual?”

  “Okay, just a thought. No birds or insects anywhere in sight, you’ll notice. No ecology.” Svelte’s right, at least regarding the area nearby. “You mightn’t expect birds as such, but there oughta be something besides a bunch of fancy feathers.” Svelte really is very acrobatic in her thinking.

  COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE. COMMUNICATE with the club-nighters, to get ourselves organized. Mustn’t wander off chaotically. Food, drink, explore, communicate. Communicating with home is impossible. Or is it... ? I’m looking at Caz and Pete standing hand in hand, that black patch over her left eye, while Bryce and Svelte rally people...

  If Benny can see through her eye back home— and Caz through his?—when they’re apart from each other... How does it happen, what’s the link? Advanced alien science, some sort of instant linked vision-at-a-distance, quantum stuff, a shortcut through spacetime? How distant does distant have to be before it’s too far?

  My phone can display four lines of memo or text on its screen the size of my thumb.

  “YOU’RE CAZ. I’M Sally, from Combined Intelligence—you understand?” Caz does. “And you’re Pete. Caz, I know you and Benny can see what the other sees.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was snooping. That’s my job. We appear to be marooned here, wherever here is. You may be a way to communicate with home...”

  PETE DOESN’T WANT her to co-operate. Small wonder. They’ve escaped together, and almost at once here’s me asking her to let Benny see everything, supposing it’s possible.

  “Realistically,” I say, “with no food or water we’re probably going to die here, unless something different kills us first.”

  Pete hugs his Caz, as if he can preserve the two of them by pure wish and willpower. Wishes don’t rule the real world.

  I’m going to die too. Me and Svelte. I’ll think about that later. The important thing is that Caz understands this. I know she heeds duties and obligations even if those frustrate her dreams. Only fair, isn’t it? Wasn’t that what she said?

  “Caz, this is the first ever information we have about anything regarding where our invaders come from. Back home nobody will know anything unless...”

  She nods miserably. Or bravely. There are different sorts of bravery. Women understand much more about self-sacrifice than men do.

  Pete sits down with his back to us. Doesn’t want to watch this. Or doesn’t want to be noticed by Caz’s Benny-eye? If Caz looks round, Pete’s ginger hair will be very visible.

  WELL, IT WORKS. It works. We’re connected. Phone screen and Benny’s displaced eye reading it at this end, Caz’s eye in Benny’s head at the other end perceiving a notepad he writes on. Hallelujah. But... I couldn’t believe any man would exploit this situation for blackmail. Benny uses it. Oh he uses it. Benny won’t tell anyone else a fucking thing unless Caz promises, promises, swears on the memory of her mother, to return to him. Obviously forget about torturing the cat—seems that wasn’t sufficient to hold her. Oh and forget the extreme unlikelihood of her being able to return—unless, I suppose, when Combi-Intel gets its act together, they manage to control a hoop by the same method as CE used. My god, I must grill those two, the priest and the big black guy. Alan and June on their own may be able to give Combi-Intel enough guidance to re-open the hoop. Hey, there’s hope, a possibility—why am I so blind and slow? Too much to think about, that’s why. The same hope didn’t enter into Bryce’s head, or Svelte’s. Or if so, they didn’t say. That’s because we aren’t desperate yet. Only just got here. Novelty value still prevails.

  Caz opens her right eye, and tears jerk from it. Tiny discs of water fly as if she’s expelling contact lenses one after another. I’ve never seen anyone cry quite like that, projectile tears, tears so pent up that they don’t trickle but fly for a few seconds at least. Then she shuts her own eye tight.

  “I can’t see the phone now,” she reminds me. “Write: I promise.” And I peck at the keys with my fingernail.

  Pete tells her fiercely, “You can break any promise extorted by a threat.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s a personal thing. A promise is a promise.”

  “A shitty vicious threat to keep knowledge from the whole world unless he can hang onto you like a dog in the manger!”

  “You can’t really blame him. We have so much personal baggage, him and me. What would become of him?”

  Is Caz a coward, or is she very brave, able to sacrifice the hope of personal happiness for the sake of many other people who will never even realize?

  “Shit.” Pete doesn’t try to interfere as I hold the phone screen up to Benny’s brown eye.

  “Varroa—!”

  A hum coming closer. Soon we’re being inspected.

  BEFORE LONG A second Varroa comes. As us club-nighters stare up, many chattering to each other, the mutual hum of the Varroas modulates, seeming to search through a spectrum of sound. Soon I think I’m hearing thrumming echoes of human words, words that evade meaning as if played backward, half-words.

  “Fucking hell,” says big black Daniel, “they’re sampling us. I’ll swear it.” Indeed he has already sworn.

  “Or like they’re tuning in,” says Svelte.

  A comprehensible sentence emerges:

  Why you bring child must die without zzzwzz without without cage? This is the only time a Varroa has ever communicated anything. But no child is here...

  “It thinks Jacko’s a child. The dead body isn’t a child!” I shout out at the Varroa. “The dead body is a very short adult, too short to receive a cage!”

  How you open zzzwzz open open hoop?

  Daniel prods one finger upward defiantly at the Varroa. “With our music, that’s how! You want to buy a memory stick?”

  Unready.

  “Yeah, don’t have no memory sticks here, do I?”

  Unready.

  I have a sense that the Varroa are lower-level intelligences compared with whatever may have created them. Bred them. Assembled them. I think sheepdogs—times ten as regards capabilities.

  Above us, the two Varroa begin to circle. No, that circle is spiraling outward.

  Very soon they’re racing around, dodging the tall feathertrees, looping around all of us. Their hum is loud, MUM-UM-MUM-UM. A curving line of bright light begins to follow each now like contrails, two lengthening arcs of light, which soon join up. Those Varroa are guiding the huge horizontal hoop encompassing all of us—suddenly intensifying as it flashes toward the ground, w
hich is of rough short moonlit grass, and I do keep my footing while a fair few around me are tumbling because of impeds or disorientation. As the afterimage of the ring of light fades, an expanse of flat concrete stretches into the distance where I’m making out large low buildings and silhouettes of big parked planes, passenger jets. And a half-full Moon’s in the sky amidst clouds and stars. Already people are struggling up or being helped. We’ve been dumped unceremoniously at a huge airport near an unlit runway, though further off are a fair number of lights. We conserve power nowadays where possible. Someone’s whimpering about their ankle, twisted or broken.

  “It’s Heathrow!” shrills a girl.

  Airports are anonymous, yet that could easily be Western Avenue over there on the perimeter, where any hotels remaining open won’t have many guests these days. This may well be London’s Heathrow, nowhere near so busy as used to be.

  Of a sudden the runway lights come on—on account of us arriving? Shall we pretend to be a planeload of passengers, newly descended from Sirius or some other star? Please proceed to passport control—what, no baggage? People begin heading toward the illuminated runway but Bryce bellows, “Stay here, everyone! The runway’s dangerous. A plane’ll be landing.”

  “There’s no plane—”

  “Idiot, they don’t switch the lights on at the very last moment. Plane’ll be ten minutes’ away.” Of course he’s right.

  Svelte’s shining a slim torch, here, there.

  “Lost something?” Tony asks her.

  “Looking for feathers.”

  I see none in the beam from Svelte’s torch. The Varroa or the big hoop must have retained any alien vegetation in the process of returning us—to a big empty flat space where we wouldn’t collide with anything.

  “Everybody stay right here,” I call out. “I’ll have us collected, bussed back to The Studio.”

  Now there’s a signal for my phone. Dee-du-doo-doo-du-do... ring ring.

  “THAT PLACE WAS artificial,” Svelte insists to me as our crowded coach, the foremost of three, finally nears Lambeth. Combi-Intel persons on each coach are busy doing preliminary interviews of the club-nighters. There’ll be a lot more interrogation by and by, especially of Daniel and Sean and Alan and June, although I suspect that neither QE nor anyone else will be able to control a hoop again by that same method. For we are unready.

  “Made. Grown. The way you grow pretty crystals in a jar of some liquid. Maybe the feathers were all like sensors on the outside of some machine the size of a world. Or not as big—gravity could have been artificial. Maybe the place was a pleasure park for aliens, or like a sculpture garden. But artificial, yes.”

  “So what does that imply?”

  “I don’t know.” Svelte stares out of the window at houses, streets.

  WHAT DOES UNREADY mean? Can the impeds be some sort of benevolent teaching aid? A focus for mental growth? A way of being able to attain the stars and join in, if only we can discover how? Something we might learn to use after ten years or after fifty years? The Varroa didn’t mean that it wasn’t in the market for a memory stick.

  “We’ll talk more later about this artificial idea of yours, eh, Svelte?” Oh, I am tempted by her, and I still don’t know if it’s possible. If only. Just let me not be too impulsive, as I surely was, going to club-night with her, only the two of us and Tony Cullen. In retrospect I was rather foolish. I don’t like to be foolish.

  One person is unaccounted for, the dead Jacko. Is that because his body was lying beyond the ring of light when it descended? Or because a dead body is more akin to a featherbush than to a living person?

  Now THAT WE’VE debussed, Pete is talking urgently to Caz, and I’m a snooper again.

  “...meaningless, because Benny helped bugger all! He made a phone call; so what? What else does the co-owner of a place do, that loses a couple of hundred people? Pay no attention? It was the Varroa brought us back, no thanks to him!”

  “Even so,” she says, so sad-sounding, “I did promise.” Caz tosses her hair, perhaps to hide tears or dispel them, and wanders toward The Studio.

  We all have our cages. But will we ever learn from them?

  Jellyfish

  Mike Resnick & David Gerrold

  ONCE UPON A time, when the world was young, there was a man named Dillon K. Filk. The K. stood for Kurvis.

  He was insane. But that was okay. The world was insane, so he fitted right in.

  Dillon K. Filk also had a serious substance abuse problem, but that was okay too. He was a product of his time, a confluence of historical and mimetic conditions that created substance abuse as a way of life. The entire planet was addicted to a variety of comestibles and combustibles. Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and oil were the primary global addictions; substances injected directly into veins were secondary.

  Filk’s own chemical adventures were based on what was available and what it would mix well with—marijuana, amyl and butyl nitrates (also known as poppers), ecstasy, peyote, mushrooms, the occasional toad, dried banana skins, cocaine (both powdered and crystallized), heroin (snorted and injected), Quaaludes, Vicodin, horse tranquilizers, PCP, angel dust, cough syrup, amphetamines, methedrine, ephedrine, mescaline, methadone, barbiturates, Prozac, valium, lithium, and the occasional barium enema. And once in a while, airplane glue. But Filk had never taken acid—LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)—because he didn’t want to risk destabilizing his brain chemistry.

  Whether Filk’s mental instability had caused his substance abuse problems or whether his substance abuse had triggered his delusional state is both irrelevant and unknowable. The two conditions were synergistic. They were complementary parts of his being, and essential to his ability to function in this time and in this place.

  Filk spent his days sitting alone in a room, talking to himself, having long discussions that only he could understand. A prurient eavesdropper, and there had been an occasional few, some even paid by various governments, would not have been able to follow his verbalized train of thought because most of the time Filk himself did not stay on the tracks.

  In any given moment Filk might suddenly realize that, “Hypersex exists only in the trans-human condition.” A moment later, he might postulate, “Therefore, the robots will be functionally autistic.” And a moment after that, he would conclude, “So the issue of sentience is resolved in favor of hormones.” He didn’t know quite what it all meant (though he loved the word “Hypersex”, which he was sure was spelled with a capital H), but it sounded profound.

  Whenever Filk came to a conclusion like that, he would nod to himself in satisfaction and turn to the battered old manual typewriter that sat on a rickety TV tray table next to his bed, and he would start typing slowly and methodically, using only his two index fingers. He often said he had stolen the typewriter from one of his ex-wives. But occasionally he admitted that he had bought it at a pawnshop because the invisible voices had told him to. But sometimes, he claimed that William Burroughs had given it to him as an act of punishment—punishment for the typewriter, which had taken on the form of a gigantic insect and refused to stop rattling its mandibles at Burroughs. The origin of the typewriter depended on how much blood was coursing through Filk’s drugstream.

  Dillon K. Filk typed four pages every day, and would not get up until he had typed them. When he got to the bottom of the fourth page, he would stop. He was through for the day. Even if he was in the middle of a sentence, he would not start a fifth page. He would roll the finished page out of the typewriter and lay it face down on the slowly growing stack of pages to the left of the machine on the TV tray.

  The next day, without looking at what he had written before, Filk would roll a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter and complete the hanging sentence, then continue until he had filled that day’s four pages. And the day after that, four more.

  “Hi-ho,” Filk would say. “So it goes.”

  Filk punctuated his monologues with verbal motifs. He would say “Hi-ho” or “See?”
or “So it goes.” These were conversational spacers as he slipped and skidded from one notion to the next— his way of indicating to himself that he was finished with that particular moment.

  Sometimes, he would type “Hi-ho” or “See?” or “So it goes” into his pages. Sometimes he needed to separate one idea from another, and “Hi-ho” and “See?” and “So it goes” were just as functional on paper as they were spoken aloud.

  Occasionally, Filk needed one more sentence to fill his fourth page, and that was also a good place to type “Hi-ho” or “See?” or “So it goes.” And once in a great while, “Of course.”

  Hi-ho.

  See?

  So it goes.

  Of course.

  From one day to the next, Filk paid little attention to what he had already written. No idea was ever worth more than eight hundred words. If an idea took more than eight hundred words to express, it was obviously too complicated for anyone to understand—including the writer. To Filk’s mind, the universe was quite simple, it only looked complex. The only way to master the complexity was to understand the many component simplicities.

  Many years ago, Filk had counted the words on his finished pages and determined that he averaged two hundred words per page. From that day on, he never typed more than four pages at a time.

  Filk also understood that no human being was capable of writing a new idea every eight hundred words. A human being was so simple, he or she could only hold one idea at a time.

  But Filk also knew that if he was a different person, then that different person would be holding a different idea in his head. The answer was simple—and it was obvious. Hi-ho. You are a new person every day. See? You are not the person you were the day before. So it goes. You are the person whose experience includes the day before, so you are different from a person whose experience does not include the day before. Of course.