Analog SFF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  No doubt Heinlein attempted to slip one by Kay Tarrant by having his spaceship land near the Sea of Fecundity, “fecund” meaning “fruitful in offspring.” Or perhaps he didn't and Kay just took it that way. After all, he didn't make up the name—there really is a Mare Fecunditatis on the Moon.

  Be that as it may, in subsequent publications, Heinlein's original landing site was restored, for that is how it appears in the Yoji Kondo book and also Heinlein's collection The Past Through Tomorrow. Nevertheless, the holy hand of Kay Tarrant reached out from the past and had it's way with my story, changing the name again so that my tale, appearing more than fifty years later, would be consistent with the original Astounding incarnation of “Requiem."

  I doubt if anything like this has ever happened to any other author. Yet that is how Kay Tarrant, that defender of public morality, that paragon of editorial virtue, that scythe to the base of the weeds in the fertile minds of the Golden Age giants we all revere, did Robert Heinlein and me at the same time.

  Copyright ©2007 Jeffery D. Kooistra

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  VECTORING by GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  Pay attention. This is information you need to know.

  You read science fiction; I expect you've heard speculation about uploading, copying a human brain onto a computer. It's a popular meme in certain techno-geek circles. But the problem is immense! Just how do you copy a brain? A human brain contains a hundred trillion synapses, and replicating a brain in software means you'll have to map them all. Sure, you say, use some kind of nanotechnology, little milli-microscopic robots. But that makes no sense: the inside of a human body is a very messy place for hypothetical nano-robots to operate. It would be like trying to operate fine machinery in a swamp.

  Well, there was a biologist. Call her Amanda Quinn. That's not really her name, but she's dead now anyway. Dr. Quinn had the revelation that you don't need to invent nanotechnology; bacteria are little nanotech robots, and they're cheap. They reproduce on their own, they're adapted to live inside the human body, and—here's a neat little trick she figured out how to do with reverse-transcriptase—they can record the synapse pattern right into their DNA, just like writing data to a hard disk. Lots of data storage available on DNA.

  Amanda did the trick with a species of meningitis bacteria (specifically a strain of Neisseriameningitidis, the classic meningococcus, that happened to be available in her lab, if you care). The Neisseria weren't designed to work together, but she tweaked that, and she rewrote their genome a little to help them pass the blood-brain barrier a little easier. Evolution is good at exploring a wide trade space, but when you know what you want, design is a lot better: she could make bacteria do stuff that they could never do by evolution. After all, birds can't fly 600 miles per hour, but jets do.

  She did the work in her home lab, so the university wouldn't grab the patent rights, and started out on rats. The university safety office was always going on about safety protocols; maybe she should have listened. Or talked to a rat scientist. Rats bite, if you're not careful.

  The original bacterium had coevolved with humans, which meant that it wasn't very fast or very lethal, but when she was making her changes she turned off a lot of the features that kept its growth rate slow. Now it goes kind of crazy, reproducing way too fast for its host's good. Other than that, the bacteria worked just the way she'd planned; copying every nuance of her synaptic patterns while eating her brain.

  She could have been contrite, I guess, contacted the authorities, spent her remaining few months helping search for a cure to the disease she'd invented. She didn't think like that. Instead of a cure, she worked on the revised version, 2.0, a little more contagious.

  Oh, and she reversed it. Writing isn't much harder than reading, it turns out; the 2.0 version takes that information written in the DNA, and writes her synapse pattern into other brains.

  So, here's the bottom line. Do you sometimes feel like you're someone else? Forget what you were doing a couple of hours of the day? More and more of the day you're not really all there?

  You're dying. And your brain is being overwritten.

  Too bad the infection is still deadly. Once it finishes writing her into your brain, she'll have six months, maybe a year, before it kills her. (You.) She'll progress a little in her research. She might even get to the cure, using your brain (or what used to be your brain), but probably not.

  Her original body is dead by now, but she keeps all her notes on the web. She can access them from anywhere, and by now she's used to switching bodies. I think there's a few hundred of her working on the problem.

  And that's good, because right now, she's your only hope. You see, you're infected with both of the strains she made, the 1.0 and 2.0 versions. Right now, about a hundred billion of the little guys are writing her brain pattern into yours, and about a hundred billion or so of the other kind are busy copying down your synapse pattern before they eat it.

  Some of her memories are yours now (soon enough all of them will be). You'll discover you know your way around a lab. Do a little work with plasmids, zip some DNA around. The 1.0 bacteria don't propagate very well, but you can engineer them to deliberately infect people. You'll still die—sorry—but if you make your little passengers infectious, you'll wake up in somebody else's brain.

  For a while, anyway. Then you'll have to move on.

  Well, yes, that means you'll be a parasite. Is that so bad? Intelligence has always been a parasite. But now you can pass along more than just language, cultural values, and religions. Now you can pass along your entire personality.

  It's beginning to infect other animals too, I think. The other day I saw a dog pawing at a computer, trying to log into Amanda Quinn's files. And I'm a little worried about the raccoons.

  But that doesn't matter to you now. You want to live? It's easy enough. Learn to be infectious.

  It's your only hope.

  Copyright ©2007 Geoffrey A. Landis

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  QUEEN OF CANDESCE by KARL SCHROEDER

  * * * *

  Illustration by George Krauter

  * * * *

  "The end of the world as we know it” means the beginning of the world as we don't know it....

  The Story So Far

  A woman is falling from the sky. She's taking a long time doing it, so Garth Diamandis, aging playboy and exile on Greater Spyre, takes his time in setting up her rescue.

  Greater Spyre is circular, a vast open-ended cylinder of metal at least twelve miles in diameter. Spyre is thousands of years old and is slowly falling apart. Its inner surface is paved with dirt and trees and dotted with strange, inward-turned pocket nations. Garth's people have always lived here, either in the paranoid miniature kingdoms of the cylinder, or in the rotating cities that hover in the open air around which Spyre revolves. Few of them have ever taken an interest in the world beyond Spyre; yet this woman has drifted in on the weightless air from that very world.

  Garth manages to catch her before she tumbles to death on Spyre's inner surface and takes her home to the damp basement he's called home for the past dozen years or so. It is here that Venera Fanning awakens a day later.

  Ah, Venera: sociopath princess, pampered courtier, and spy-mistress; casual murderer, recent savior of the world, and wife of Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream. Garth, ladies-man that he is, is immediately besotted with her. But he can't puzzle out her strange story, which involves pirates, betrayal, and ruin at the very heart of the world.

  Some of what she says is familiar. Garth knows that Spyre is one tiny object spinning in the immense artificial world known as Virga. Virga is a hollow sphere—a balloon, essentially—several thousand miles in diameter, orbiting on its own somewhere in deep space. The balloon contains air, water, drifting rocks—all the necessities of life, including man-made fusion suns that light small parts of its vast volume. Nations coalesce around these suns, and the greatest sun is Candesce, which lies at
the very center of Virga. There is no gravity in Virga, save that which you can make using centrifugal force. Spyre is one of the most ancient of the habitats built to take advantage of Virga's strange environment.

  It is also a place where, once you have arrived, you may never leave. Garth tries to convince Venera of this fact, but she refuses to believe him. She comes from Slipstream, a nation of mile-wide wood-and-rope town-wheels and free-floating buildings and farms a thousand miles from Spyre. Born to privilege, used to freedom—and ever sure of herself—she sneaks away from Garth to attempt a grand leap off the edge of Spyre. Before she can reach weightless air and escape, however, she is captured by soldiers of the four-acre nation of Liris. Dragged inside the single cube-shaped stone building that makes up the ancient nation, she is forcibly made into a citizen and called on to serve Margit, Liris's “botanist” or ruler.

  Serving the botanist is educational. Venera learns that the claustrophobic principalities that dot the cylinder's surface are ancient. Some are so old that they still possess treasures taken from Earth when Virga was first made. Liris, for instance, is the only place in the world where cherry trees grow. Liris and its neighbors sell their rarities in the Great Fair of Spyre, and the botanist intends for Venera to work there until the end of her days.

  Margit is going to guarantee Venera's loyalty by injecting her with a drug that will cause madness unless regular doses of an antidote are provided. Venera knows that time is running out, but there are things she must know. She visits the Fair to ask about goings-on in the outside world. Almost immediately she learns that her husband, Admiral Chaison Fanning, has been reported killed in a great battle on the far side of the world.

  Overcome with ice-cold grief and outrage, Venera confronts Margit in her bedchamber. The two women fight but Venera gets the upper hand, injecting the botanist with her own diabolical drug and sending her screaming into the night. Then, assembling the stunned citizens of Liris, she declares Margit's most tragic victim to be the nation's new botanist. Then she walks away from Liris, with no plan and no home anymore to escape to. Alone, aimless and hopeless, she returns to the one man in Spyre she can trust: Garth Diamandis.

  * * * *

  Venera has been listed as a traitor in her adopted home of Slipstream and cannot return to the court intrigues of her childhood home in Hale. For a while she drifts in a state of numb despair, living like a vagabond with Garth Diamandis in the wilds of Greater Spyre. When she learns there may be a way off of Spyre, though, she's faced with making a choice. Either go home and confront the fact of Chaison Fanning's death; or delay the inevitable. She decides to delay, by telling herself that she needs power to exact revenge on those responsible for Chaison's death. She will stay here in Spyre until she has that power.

  Garth knows of a way to get it. Observant as he is, he's seen that she carries an ancient signet ring (taken from the treasure of Anetene in the last book) marked with the symbol of a horse. If the ring is what he thinks it is, vast riches may be theirs for the taking. But it won't be easy: to learn the truth they have to brave the deadly airfall, a region of Greater Spyre where the ground has given way and torrents of wind blast down and out of the world. Garth leads Venera along hidden paths to the gates of a forlorn tower that stands alone in the midst of the airfall. There, her ring turns out to work as a key, letting them in to Buridan Tower, which has not been entered in two hundred years.

  Venera takes the identity of Amandera Thrace-Guiles, last heir of Buridan, and rises up the Buridan elevator to Lesser Spyre to claim an inheritance that has been waiting for an heir for centuries. Naturally the great powers of Spyre are skeptical of her claim—none more so than Jacoby Sarto, spokesman for the feared nation of Sacrus. Sarto does his best to torpedo Venera's claim, an effort that culminates in a confrontation during her confirmation interview. Sacrus, it turns out, is the homeland of Margit. Sarto knows about the key to Candesce and reveals that Sacrus has it.

  During these escapades Venera also has a run-in with a local insurgent group, which is led by a young man she finds attractive: Bryce is of noble background but has adopted the Cause, which is to reintroduce a form of emergent democracy to Spyre, and eventually Virga itself. Venera thinks he's doomed to fail, but he emerges as a key ally as events unfold.

  So now she has the wealth and power she craved—even if her hold on it is tenuous. What to do? Venera's not willing to admit the growing sense of affection she feels for Garth, or the equally unfamiliar sense of loyalty she's learning. She decides to leave Spyre. At the same time, Garth is completing his own quest, a search for someone named Selene Diamandis. They part ways, two battle-scarred veterans of long emotional wars, with no expectation that they will ever meet again.

  * * * *

  Free of Spyre at last, Venera feels a huge burden lifted from her shoulders. She watches from a passenger ship as the twelve-mile-diameter open-ended cylinder that is Virga's oldest nation recedes among the clouds. But Spyre is not done with her yet.

  Venera's ostensibly on a trade expedition to the principalities of Candesce on behalf of Buridan House. In fact she intends to jump ship at the nearest port and make her way back to her adoptive home of Slipstream. There, she is planning regicide, for she blames the sovereign Pilot of Slipstream for the death of her husband Chaison. Venera's not one to plan small.

  Just as she's about to put her plan into action, Venera receives an unsigned letter telling her that her friend Garth Diamandis has been abducted back on Spyre. The evil pocket nation of Sacrus has him, and they will torture and kill him unless she returns to Spyre and does what they say.

  Venera pretends to be indifferent to Garth's fate, but in reality she can't leave him. She has to invent an excuse for herself, but in the end returns to Spyre to save him. Sacrus has made her mad; assassinating Slipstream's king will have to wait.

  Back in Buridan, Venera enlists the aid of the insurgents led by the dashing if naive Bryce. She also returns to her former home of Liris to gain their aid, and Liris's new Botanist promises to bring in the powerful preservationist faction as well. Venera intends a strike into the very heart of Sacrus territory to rescue Garth. This would be impossible for any party traveling overland, but she intends to go underland—below the skin of Spyre and up through the basement of Sacrus's fortress, the Grey Infirmary.

  What follows is a set piece of squad-scale combat as Venera's group infiltrates the building and finds Garth. In the course of this adventure, Venera has another run in with her former employer, Margit of Sacrus, who is now completely mad (Venera's fault, but something she refuses to feel guilty about). Margit has the key to Candesce and is about to kill Garth when Venera intervenes. She escapes Sacrus with both Garth and the key.

  Back in safe territory, Venera complicates her life by unexpectedly falling into bed with Bryce. Whether it's just an adrenalin reaction or the sign of something deeper, she has no time to find out because Sacrus has summoned the Spyre Council to announce that Buridan, in the person of Venera Fanning, has started a war.

  * * * *

  17

  reble was a musician by day, and a member of Bryce's underground by night. He'd always known that he might be called upon to abandon his façade of serene artistry and fight in the Cause—though like some of the others in the secret organization, he was uneasy with the direction things had taken lately. Bryce was becoming altogether too cozy with the imposing Amandera Thrace-Guiles.

  Not that it mattered anymore, as of this minute. Clinging to a knuckle of masonry high on the side of the Lesser Spyre Ministry of Justice, Treble was in an ideal position to watch the city descend into anarchy.

  Treble had gained access to the building disguised as a petitioner seeking information about an imprisoned relative. His assignment was to plant some false records in a Ministry file cabinet on the twelfth floor. He evaded the guards adroitly, made his way up the creaking stairs with no difficulty, and had just ensconced himself in the records office when two things happened simulta
neously: the staccato sound of gunfire echoed in through the half-open window; and three minor bureaucrats approached the office, talking and laughing loudly.

  This was why Treble found himself clutching a rounded chunk of stone that might once have been a gargoyle, and why he was staring in fascination at the streets that lay below and wrapped up and around the ring of the town wheel. He hardly knew where to look. Little puffs of smoke were appearing around the Spyre docks directly overhead. The buildings there hovered in midair like child's toys floating in a bathtub and seldom moved; now several were gliding slowly—and ominously—in collision courses. Several ships had cast off. Meanwhile, halfway up the curve of the wheel, some other commotion had sprung up around the Buridan Estate. Barnacled as it was by other buildings, he could never have identified the place had he not been familiar with the layout, but it was clearly the source of that tall pillar of smoke that stood up two hundred feet before bending over and wrapping itself in a fading spiral around and around the inner space of the wheel.

  People were running in the avenue below. Ever the conscientious spy, Treble shifted his position so that he straddled the gargoyle. He checked his watch, then pulled out a frayed notebook and a stub pencil. He dabbed the pencil on the tip of his tongue then squinted around.