Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Meitner’s mathematician is here, too. She is a tiny, vivacious Thai woman—quick and thin, with long, silver hair. I am intimidated by her brilliant reputation, but her smile and her hug wipe all that away in an instant. She says, “Meitner has told me a lot about you,” and we fall into a long, healing conversation about my sister and the years during which she was lost to me.

  Despite such outbreaks of serious, quiet discussion, there is a festive air. People are gathering all over the world in parks, stadiums, and living rooms, and it seems that many animals are behaving differently as well, though that angle is pooh-poohed by the media. Still, there is news of the same communication bracelets we wear having been dropped, in pellet form, over great swathes of wild areas, which has caused environmentalist uproar. My father has an odd glint in his eyes and something like joy on his face.

  Many of us rise in the dark for Zen meditation at the hale, and then we wait for dawn. The lovely cacophony of parrots, macaws—a sliding, whooping, trilling music—fills my mind, taking me back to my childhood.

  They stop vocalizing, as if cut off by a switch.

  In that deep silence, a ray of sunlight shoots over the ridge. My father, listening to his earpiece, says, “The parrots have dropped.”

  But I know without his saying so. We all do, and we rise.

  Parrot music bursts forth once more, but I gradually realize that I am hearing a new kind of speech, which I also hear as music.

  My movements are beyond thought. Perhaps they are like flight. My feeling is one of pure delight in an odd sort of work.

  My father says, “Oh.” He is the only person who speaks the entire time, as we human-parrots dance the mathematics of nonlocal emergence.

  That was the last time he spoke. And that was the instant the ship vanished, to everyone’s astonishment, except, perhaps, his.

  And that was when something new emerged.

  I’ve seen the parrot ballet, of course, many times now. I know that Meitner said, “Emergent Nonlocality: Going Home,” and then movement began.

  Because I experienced it, and still do, I am endlessly fascinated by watching Meitner’s flock perform, in space, their three-dimensional dance of Meitner’s proof, ten short pages of symbols that they make real. That reality moves, via our communication bracelets, into us and into other living creatures.

  Like others, I study the first movements of humans and other creatures around the Earth that sunrise as we dance the pattern, which, once begun, continues to emerge in science, behaviors, art, politics, policies, and law.

  But I am an amateur in this study, where others are serious, and brilliant. To me it is simply beautiful.

  All living creatures have one goal, communicated, understood, and shared on a broad bandwith: the survival of all of us. With joy.

  We flock.

  My father still spends all his time at the hale or on the beach. He is completely functional and appears to be thinking. He just does not speak, not in words, not in writing. But he speaks in other ways.

  He writes code: a form of speech, but not one I can cipher. I have not found anyone who really can, though I have been told both that it is gibberish and that it is profound. No one can say what its purpose might be, so it is probably art. In my opinion, art is communication on a spectacular range of wavelengths.

  I believe his art describes the strange new place he inhabits now, which I think is wherever that ship is. His mind is nonlocal, in two places at once, two places that communicate, part of the human-machine world he sought to create his entire life. Like art, it is its own purpose.

  I visit him every few months, between stretches at The Hague where my family now lives and where I work on litigation and legislation with international teams of lawyers, ethicists, and scientists. When I need respite from the Pandora’s box we have opened, I am drawn home to the place I hid from for so many years, and to my father.

  I seek him at the hale, climbing that haunting, lightswept trail limned with bracts of wild ginger. Or I look for him at the beach, where waves pound their infinite dance and the blue Pacific stretches half the world before me, charged with lives I can now protect, lives that interact with mine in a new dimension that is like an ineluctable flavor, a previously impossible shape, or a tone that infuses all of my senses. I am immeasurably enriched; deeply changed.

  My father smiles at me quite often. His eyes glow with intense peace.

  “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” copyright © 2014 by Kathleen Ann Goonan

  The Day the Dam Broke, by Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Of course James Thurber was from Columbus but I don't think he was Italian. The information meant to tempt someone to Colum bus for post-doc study-intervention in the plague zone emphasized an Italian neighborhood. I imagined being able to buy fresh buffalo mozzarella every morning, bundles of fragrant green basil, fresh bread, and Reggiano cheese cut from a jealous wheel, crumbling deliciously at the edges into shards I could gobble from stiff paper or nibble between sips of cappuccino or pale wine.

  Dream on, Julia. Maybe before the millennium, but not now. The information I latched onto in the L.A. dome was, shall we say, a bit out of date.

  One of my grandfathers was actually born in Columbus, which was a point in its favor. Now when he leaps from my cabin wall for a chat--nobody else to chat with up here in the Canadian Rockies, though I do wait for You--brief auras, fleeting pic tures, of old Ohio eddy from him, corridors of time which shimmer back to the great forests, cool, slow-moving Indian rivers, and then pre-history when the great land swelled and moved without regard to how we felt about it, fleas upon its shuddering thin skin.

  Well, that's what I wanted. Good food. Additional personal depth. The opportunity to make my mark as one of the hot-shot nanplague meds of the time.

  And a chance to get out of the dome.

  Those pure enclaves dotted the world like the plastic bub bles they put over smallpox vaccinations in the nineteen fifties so the kids wouldn't pick the scabs off too soon. I hypered into that odd little tidbit while researching plagues. I felt like part of a vaccine against the nanotech disasters of the recent past, the disasters which still had not ended. As we were to learn. I ached to be able to help make everything safe enough so that we could remove the goddamned domes, those sad ellipsoidal barriers to the sky and stars and to what I saw as Life.

  Fine they said go. You think medicine is all G.E. That's genetic engineering and I did. Inhalants in which DNA rode to the rescue on viral steeds. Wait till you get out in the sticks. Far from us. Far from the Links--communication was touch and go at that point but better than now! I must tell you that I am an old woman. That depends on your definition of old of course but I was born pre-mil, 1999, and it is now . . . can it be? Oh, I'm just teasing you it is, it is truly, twenty. Ninety-three. 2093. And this took place when I was a young whippersnapper, as Thurber's grandfather might say, caught up in the RWF, Radio Wave Fibrillation, and the Great Panic, and there I was, alone without medical backup (or willing patients either so it didn't really matter) and no fresh mozzarella either, if there ever had been any. At least I have the latter now. Maybe that's what I wanted most all along.

  I don't digress; press your ears to what must now pass for my heart--the radio. If the technology is the same as now, and fibrillation has briefly ceased, use the purple infrabar. That will give you the correct screen; then program in the code CT2.1 for automatic fine tuning. I don't know what color or even what form access to radio waves may take further down the road and therefore I have prepared this in airborne nan form as well--doubtful, doubtful that it would ever be breathed by other humans, given my remoteness but if so you will learn how I battled the Great Midcentury Plague and how I lost, like everyone else I presume. And, if it's not too far past now for you (this might bounce forever through the aether), at the end of the broadcast file I'll give you directions on how to find me, and a map if it is breathed, for I do enjoy visitors. I truly do. At least Ithink I
do. Please, please come visit me. I toss this into the air frequently, straight up, without regard for possible vandals for after all I know more than you do and if I don't surely you are more kind than those who know less, for I believe that information grows compassion. Allow a young-old woman her fantasies. I grow basil, by the way, in a little plot outside my cabin door, and cilantro, and masses of poppies which thrive in the long cool summer. More clues later. Proceed. Beep! (Sorry, but one gets silly with only a dog for company, genetically engineered though he may be.)

  And speaking of silly, those satellites rained information down upon us like silly rain, let me tell you, silly because one

  couldn't count on them. But you can count on me. Real sourdough bread, and I grow and grind and boil my own soybeans and make tofu so you see I am the real article. Protein ahead! Hurry! Turn up the gain and maybe that will help.

  At any rate--back to the trip from L.A. to Columbus--my maglev arrived at your station a week late and I was happy and relieved to get there at all since the last maglev had been blown up somewhere in eastern Kansas (I learned after I had left L.A.) and then they gave me the wrong sheets.

  They? No. That's imprecise. Yes, I know, and you know that I do, and you will know more if you continue. But for the benefit of other listeners . . . for posterity, you know . . .

  Oh I know it sounds like a nightmare, what we all dreaded at the time, the wrong sheets, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. They pumped me full of Midwesternism. Those gorgeous clear nansheets with blinking infolights taught me how to grow corn when the flood tide on the Great Miami River receded and other information more applicable to my present situation than anything I ever learned in L.A. no matter how accelerated, and so I can't complain. Those erroneous sheets helped me survive out here and were I not so cynical might have made me a mystic. They upped my empathy with the strange outcast population I was coming to help though the people of Columbus damn well didn't want any help, not from the likes of me, the nanotech enemy. The sheet-empathy was particularly interesting after living domed all my life with all the cultural depth of your typical AI, intelligence incestuous and terribly inward-pointing. So you can see why I love the sky so much, and why I perch just below a ridgetop, south-facing, away from the fiercest, coldest winds. My synaptic code was one or two bits off, out of a billion, but I was sick that day, with a runny nose, so I thought that virus had something to do with my little history lesson, why I learned about corn and how my ancestors survived in the deep woods, and the basics of building one's own radio in the attic as if I were a boy in midcentury Ohio. At least that's what I thought at the time, and that's why I thought Thurber's vignettes were suddenly a part of my mind. Now, of course, we know differently. And one of us knew differently at the time it happened. It all worked out for the best, though; I don't mind!

  But I see that you want real people, real settings, real things happening, not an old lady's rumination (truth to tell I look even younger than I did, now, and so of course do you, all new and unwrinkled, emerging from your cocoon. The wild buffalo would call me medicine woman and bow on their shaggy knees and the Puritans would call me witch and the pomos would call me visionary genius. I know this because when the blizzards wrap me round with whiteness I sometimes call up my grandfather, and we discuss such weighty matters and wish he still had a mouth with which to eat my very good buffalo-buttermilk cornbread).

  Perhaps I like it here so much because it's all edges--the edge of a survivable climate; the edge of myself, quite sharp; perhaps sharper than you bargained for. A different edge is not far from you, either, I'm afraid. Yes, yes, the plague. Allow me to stuff another log into the stove. (Crunch of embers, rain of orange sparks flying upward.) I buffaloed this log in, up and over the high pass, snagged last month from the Pointed Fir Lodge, a guestless retro-hotel in ski country. It has a stone fireplace big enough to hold this entire cabin. Perhaps we could meet there some day, at dawn, when the blue clean lake is still and the geese rise suddenly, with wild cries, from the reeds on the far shore. There is an enormous shed there, filled with logs surrounded with various mechanical aids to help move them. The guests had to have their show, and the lodge had laid in about a hundred such logs. This giant is aged and perfect like all of them, unrotted, requiring only cutting to twenty-four inch lengths and splitting. Only, I say, but I've devised interesting mechanical solutions to that problem. Wedges help.

  As it burns I am reminded of the first log, which was in side, ready for the fireplace in the almost-deserted lodge. I pulled just-liberated Mildred balking up the stone steps, the hollow clomp of her hooves in the deserted lobby echoing from the peeled log rafters three stories above. Golden light poured in the many windows. I felt so alive as I tied the log, secured it to her harness, shouted Hyah! and she headed out the door. Behind the hotel at the log shed was the big winch they used to handle the logs, and I got it onto the wagon. Sure, my cabin is surrounded by forest, heavy, mature forest but it's more work to fell a tree than you might think. Besides, this log is always the same log, the first one. When I burn it, I burn that lonely trip from Columbus on the empty train. I cried a lot on that trip. The vacant town was the last stop the robot train made when I fled crazed Columbus and I have an anniversary dinner there once a year, April 23rd, with G.E. lying at my feet as I look out on the azure lake, drink a priceless bottle of wine as candlelight winks off the etched pine on the wine glass, and wish for You to step off the train which is still in good working order. It arrives annually on that night (except for one irregu lar year when it was probably sitting on a siding repairing itself) at 9:28. You get my drift?

  Of course I might have stayed there at the retro resort but the lodge was quite drafty since the windows were not self- healing and it was simply far too big. The sunsets were glorious though and I wished for You to share them with. So after search ing the town I discovered Mildred lowing in a field, lonely but with plenty to eat. She had evidently pulled a sleigh for tour ists; I found it in a barn. Of course G.E. got in the way whe never possible and ran off with the first harness I found; she was still a floppy adolescent at the time. I was surprised that there was only one dead person in town, a young woman whose badge read Alice Stamhall who was slumped behind the check-in desk, dead, though somewhat preserved by the cold. I think she owned the Lodge. The license was in her name. It seems that all the tourists decided to hurry home to die or go insane and the locals just vanished.

  The next morning our company of three left town. Mildred pulled a wagon heaped with supplies, tools, and the log. At dawn, the air smelled of lake and the pines were deep green, and their wind-stirred shadows danced on the damp dirt road. I heard small creatures rustle away over dry needles as we passed.

  We took the road north out of town--see, I am not stingy about clues--and moved along toward home, what has come to be home, as if this unlikely target was somehow imprinted in me and called me through deep forest and over outrageously high mountain passes--hurry, hurry please! Sunsets are peach and gold, the sky behind sometimes brilliant green as Venus catches fire from the sun. There. The stove is hot now, I am satisfied, for the moment. I ice fish in winter, on Lake Passo, pike. I am well set up and here we can live quite well. I do.

  I should warn you, however, I am well-armed and have sent a few yous packing, unfortunately . . . but they were not the True You, and I never killed any of them (except one) only sufficient ly frightened them. Believe me, You. Never. Not a one. Well, only that one, who was very far from being a true you. I have a weapon which does not kill. Unless . . .

  Ah, you are thinking . . . never mind. Trust me please. Yes.

  Dear. You. As usual, as always, there is an Ancient Cul ture and how we long for it. We can't quite believe it gone, we try and linger in it, touch its dying fire. Ours was not as ancient nor as long as Chinese Dynasties; ours was a mere blip. But in intensity, in the flashing light of what-humans-can-know and really what else is there? we were glorious. I was and now you are packed tight wit
h information, with true inforam, and therefore believe me believe me, You. My ancestors were peasants in Ireland and on the vast forested Indianed plains of Ohio, and our DNA is sharp, so believe me, You; I spring from the land. There is intensity here. So do make the attempt. I love you and I truly know what love is. It is not always just for people, you know. Sometimes it is just for Life.

  Here it is.

  #

  I was terrified and exhilarated the instant my train car slipped from L.A. through the dome membrane. A missionary for medicine, out into the fray, heading out from we who were so civilized, with our G.E., our Happiness, our pollen-held informa tion and pheromonal receptors with which to perfectly and preci sely transmit information. Sometimes the receptors are terribly hungry out here. After all they could absorb most information much more precisely, and more quickly, than any other method. Still I don't consider returning, though something must remain of the domes. I think.

  I was leaving L.A. to minister to the primitive folks we had left behind on our conversion to Flower-Cities. How magnanimous of me! I'd caught hints that they didn't want help, but ignored them like any good missionary. Outside the domes nanplagues long outlawed, remnants of the Information Wars, drifted about in clouds, sluiced down occasionally in rainfall. The plagues twisted unpredictably those who refused to come in from the rain and gather in the Flower-Cities, those who refused our admittedly limited inoculations to try and keep them half-safe, to protect the germ line just a bit. What fell was a real rain of stories as it were. Einstein could flower within you, Fermat's Last Theorem could unfold in breathtaking clarity, hurtling you straight down a swirling tunnel into the eye of the hurricane of Reality but without support you would, at the very least, forget to eat. And it could be worse. Plagues of violence had, of course, been much more popular than plagues of deep thought, but how was I to know that there was a plague of Bemused Midwestern ism abroad, wherein Thurber skewered Salvador Dali by contrasting Dali's upbringing with his own, where that stratum of interested yet detatched observation and acceptance and trust in some essen tial goodness of life would render the victim practically help less, though perpetually deeply amused?