"I live with her."
"She was not in very good shape. She had to be heavily sedated."
"I'm not surprised. Um, how is—how is Charles Worthing?"
"Are you related to him?"
"I … used to live with him. Too."
She flipped through her list. "He's in surgery. But he's stable."
I saw Officer Hawks striding down the hall. I hastily thanked the nurse and a moment later opened the curtain she had indicated a crack and glimpsed Lulu lying pale on the white sheet, shivering.
I stepped back out, saw an open cabinet full of blankets, grabbed three, and went back in. Her lips were blue beneath her lipstick, giving them a purple tinge.
She opened her eyes as I shook the blankets open and settled them over her. "Did you go?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Who?"
"Ambrose."
"I've never heard Ambrose say a word." But he did bark, just then, so I lifted him out of the bag and set him on her chest. The bark did not put a dent in the cacophony of screaming, moaning, and cursing issuing from various other curtained spaces.
"Oh!" She clutched him tightly, and, as usual, Ambrose set to licking her face. "Ambrose, Ambrose, I'm so sorry."
"I know about it," I said. "I called your father."
"You what?"
"And I'll tell you exactly what Ambrose said. 'It's time to let me go. Please.' Or something like that."
"You're lying. Ambrose would never say that." Her teeth chattered, and tears rolled from the corners of her eyes, with predictable results on the part of the dog.
I regrouped immediately, forgetting the entreaties of Dr. Lozano. He hadn't been able to open his daughter's eyes. Why should it be my responsibility?
"Yes. I am. He told me to help you through this. He told me that he loved you always and that you should say hi to your mama and tell her not to drink so much."
She stopped shaking. Then she smiled. "That's better. That's much better."
"It was a long time ago, Lulu."
"Only six years."
"It was an accident."
She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. I shot him. I killed him. The car went into the river. He and Parker died. I lived." She closed her eyes but kept talking. "It took me a while to understand that he was trying to talk to me. We had this puppy. He got out of the truck. He was swimming when the police picked him up. We eloped when we were seventeen. Mama and Papa were furious. But if you'd known him, you would have understood. Ambrose was full of fun. He wasn't headed for college, but I didn't care. He worked at the lumber yard and for builders when there was work. He could do anything. Lay bricks or wire a house." She paused. I was glad she was sedated. I didn't think she would be telling me this otherwise.
"Parker was sitting next to me on the front seat and put his hand up my skirt. My purse was next to me on the left side, and I didn't think, I didn't think, I didn't think at all. He just made me mad as blazes. I pulled out my own gun, and then everything went to hell. For a long time I wanted to believe that he shot Ambrose, but he didn't; I did, by mistake, while he was fighting with me and Ambrose was yelling at me that it was okay, don't do anything, Lulu, don't do anything. But I did. Just like I did tonight. I guess it will be self-defense again. Protecting property with deadly force is not an acceptable defense, despite what some people think. Even if it's Fiestaware."
At least she was talking.
Her father, after I assured him that Lulu was not injured, had told me that Ambrose's injury would not have been fatal, but they were approaching the Lake Pontchartrain bridge. The truck veered off the bridge and into the lake. Only Lulu and their puppy lived.
"And ever since," Dr. Lozano had said, "well, ever since, she has been crazy. There have been psychiatrists. But there are more of these goddamned channelers in the world than you have any idea of. They are everywhere. They are in Louisiana. They are in Miami. I am sure that there are Albanian channelers and Trinidadian channelers. They are probably at the North Pole with their hands out. As you can see, they are in Fort Lauderdale. Her mother and I have decided that there is no way to keep her from them. She will have to decide herself what is real and what is not real."
Lulu stroked Ambrose absently, and the dog put his head down and closed his eyes.
I had no idea what to do or say next. "You were right about Charles."
A mischievous smile played at the edge of her mouth. "Does this mean that you'll give Stuart a chance?"
"Now I think I'm going to have an anxiety attack."
"Give me a hug."
I leaned over her and embraced her and Ambrose. I felt an deeply odd sense of relief, as if I were entering a corridor of light, and thought it nonsense. But, I supposed, my life with Charles had been a deeper form of nonsense; an unsupported belief that I had nurtured and held on to until tonight. Why try and talk Lulu out of her insanity? Obviously, there had been a lot of failed professional attempts to do so.
Besides, I still couldn't remember if I had told Jack about the gun.
"He's here," she said firmly. "I know it."
"Yes," I said, hoping that I would some day have a better explanation for all this luminosity.
KEN MACLEOD
Ken MacLeod (born 2 August 1954), is a Scottish science fiction writer.
He is part of a group of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, and Liz Williams.
His science fiction novels often explore socialist, communist, and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution, and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist, though unlike a majority of techno-utopians, he has expressed great scepticism over the possibility and especially over the desirability of strong AI.
He is known for his constant in-joking and punning on the intersection between socialist ideologies and computer programming, as well as other fields. For example, his chapter titles such as "Trusted Third Parties" or "Revolutionary Platform" usually have double (or multiple) meanings. A future programmers union is called "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The Webblies idea formed a central part of the novel For the Win by Cory Doctorow and MacLeod is acknowledged as coining the term. Doctorow has also used one of MacLeod's references to the singularity as "the rapture for nerds" as the title for his book Rapture of the Nerds. There are also many references to, or puns on, zoology and palaeontology. For example in The Stone Canal the title of the book, and many places described in it, are named after anatomical features of marine invertebrates such as starfish.
Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?, by Ken MacLeod
Hugo Nomination for Best Short Story 2008
When you’re as old as I am, you’ll find your memory’s not what it was. It’s not that you lose memories. That hasn’t happened to me or anyone else since the Paleocosmic Era, the Old Space Age, when people lived in caves on the Moon. My trouble is that I’ve gainedmemories, and I don’t know which of them are real. I was very casual about memory storage back then, I seem to recall. This could happen to you too, if you’re not careful. So be warned. Do as I say, not as I did.
Some of the tales about me contradict each other, or couldn’t possibly have happened, because that’s how I told them in the first place. Others I blame on the writers and tellers. They make things up. I’ve never done that. If I’ve told stories that couldn’t be true, it’s because that’s how I remember them.
Here’s one.
I ran naked through the Long Station, throwing my smart clothes away to distract the Tycoon’s dogs. Breeks, shirt, cravat, jacket, waist
coat, stockings, various undergarments— one by one they ran, flapped, slithered, danced, or scurried off, and after every one of them raced a scent-seeking but mercifully stupid hound. But the Tycoon had more dogs in his pack than I had clothes in my bundle. I was down to my shoes and the baying continued. I glanced over my shoulder. Two dogs were just ten meters behind me. I hurled a shoe at each of them, hitting both animals right on their genetically modified noses. The dogs skidded to a halt, yelping and howling. A few metres away was a jewelry booth. I sprinted for it, vaulted the counter, grabbed a recycler, and bashed at the display cabinet. An alarm brayed and the security mesh rattled down behind me. The dogs, recovered and furious, hurled themselves against it. The rest of the pack pelted into view and joined them. Paws, jaws, barking, you get the picture.
“Put your hands up,” said a voice above the din.
I turned and looked into the bell-shaped muzzle of a Norton held in the hands of a sweet-looking lass wearing a sample of the stall’s stock. I raised my hands, wishing I could put them somewhere else. In those days, I had some vestige of modesty.
“I’m human,” I said. “That can’t hurt me.”
She allowed herself the smallest flicker of a glance at the EMP weapon’s sighting screen.
“It could give you quite a headache,” she said.
“It could that,” I admitted, my bluff called. I’d been half-hoping she wouldn’t know how to interpret the readouts.
“Security’s on its way,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Better them than the dogs.”
She gave me a tight smile. “Trouble with the Tycoon?”
“Yes,” I said. “How did you guess?”
“Only the owner of the Station could afford dogs,” she said. “Besides …” She blinked twice slowly.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “Or serving-girls.”
The stall-keeper laughed in my face. “All this for a servant? Wasn’t it her Ladyship’s bedroom window you jumped out of?”
I shuddered. “You flatter me,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know about—?”
She blinked again. “It’s on the gossip channels already.”
I was about to give a heated explanation of why that time-wasting rubbish wasn’t among the enhancements inside my skull, thank you very much, when the goons turned up, sent the dogs skulking reluctantly away, and took me in. They had the tape across my mouth before I had a chance to ask the stall-keeper her name, let alone her number. Not, as it turned out, that I could have done much with it even if I had. But it would have been polite.
The charge was attempting to wilfully evade the civil penalties for adultery. I was outraged.
“Bastards!” I shouted, screwing up the indictment and dashing it to the floor of my cell. “I thought polygamy was illegal!”
“It is,” said my attorney, stooping to pick up the flimsy, “in civilized jurisdictions.” He smoothed it out. “But this is Long Station One. The Tycoon has privileges.”
“That’s barbaric,” I said.
“It’s a relic of the Moon Caves,” he said.
I stared at him. “No it isn’t,” I said. “I don’t remember”—I caught myself just in time—“reading about anything like that.”
He tapped a slight bulge on his cranium. “That’s what it says here. Argue with the editors, not with me.”
“All right,” I said. A second complaint rose to the top of the stack. “She never said anything about being married!”
“Did you ask her?”
“Of course not,” I said. “That would have been grossly impolite. In the circumstances, it would have implied that she was contemplating adultery.”
“I see.” He sighed. “I’ll never understand the … ethics, if that’s the word, of you young gallants.”
I smiled at that.
“However,” he went on, “that doesn’t excuse you for ignorance of the law—”
“How was I to know the Tycoon was married to his wenches?” “—or custom. There is an orientation pack, you know. All arrivals are deemed to have read it.”
“”Deemed”,” I said. “Now, there’s a word that just about sums up everything that’s wrong about—”
“You can forego counsel, if you wish.”
I raised my hands. “No, no. Please. Do your best.”
He did his best. A week later, he told me that he had got me off with a fine plus compensation. If I borrowed money to pay the whole sum now, it would take two hundred and fifty seven years to pay off the debt. I had other plans for the next two hundred and fifty seven years. Instead, I negotiated a one-off advance fee to clean up Wolf 359, and used that to pay the court and the Tycoon. The experimental civilization around Wolf 359—a limited company—had a decade earlier gone into liquidation, taking ten billion shareholders down with it. Nobody knew what it had turned into. Whatever remained out there had been off limits ever since, and would be for centuries to come—unless someone went in to clean it up.
In a way, the Wolf 359 situation was the polar opposite of what the Civil Worlds had hitherto had to deal with, which was habitats, networks, sometimes whole systems going into exponential intelligence enhancement—what we called a fast burn. We knew how to deal with a fast burn. Ignore it for five years, and it goes away. Then send in some heavily firewalled snoop robots and pick over the wreckage for legacy hardware. Sometimes you get a breakout, where some of the legacy hardware reboots and starts getting ideas above its station, but that’s a job for the physics team.
A civilizational implosion was a whole different volley of nukes. Part of the problem was sheer nervousness. We were too close historically to what had happened on the Moon’s primary to be altogether confident that we wouldn’t somehow be sucked in ourselves. Another part of it was simple economics: the job was too long-term and too risky to be attractive, given all the other opportunities available to anyone who wasn’t completely desperate. Into that vacancy for someone who was completely desperate, I wish I could say I stepped. In truth, I was pushed.
Even I was afraid of Wolf 359.
An Astronomical Unit is one of those measurements that should be obsolete, but isn’t. It’s no more—or less—arbitrary than the light-year. All our units have origins that no longer mean anything to us—we measure time by what was originally a fraction of one axial rotation, and space by a fraction of the circumference, of the Moon’s primary. An AU was originally the distance between the Moon’s primary and its primary, the Sun. These days, it’s usually thought of as the approximate distance from a G-type star to the middle of the habitable zone. About a hundred and fifty million kilometres.
The Long Tube, which the Long Station existed to shuttle people to and from and generally to maintain, was one hundred and eighty Astronomical Units long. Twenty-seven thousand million kilometres, or, to put it in perspective, one light-day. From the shuttle, it looked like a hairline crack in infinity, but it didn’t add up to a mouse’s whisker in the Oort. It was aimed straight at Sirius, which I could see as a bright star with a fuzzy green haze of habitats. I shivered. I was about to be frozen, placed with the rest of the passengers on the next needle ship out, electromagnetically accelerated for months at 30 g to relativistic velocities in the Long Tube, hurtled across 6.4 light-years, decelerated in Sirius’s matching tube, accelerated again to Procyon, then to Lalande 21185, and finally sent on a fast clipper to Lalande’s next-door neighbour and fellow red dwarf, Wolf 359. It had to be a fast clipper because Wolf 359’s Long Tubes were no longer being calibrated—and when you’re aiming one Long Tube across light-years at the mouth of another, calibration matters.
A fast clipper—in fact, painfully slow, the name a legacy of pre-Tube times, when 0.1 c was a fast clip—also has calibration issues. Pushed by laser, decelerated by laser reflection from a mirror shell deployed on nearing the target system, it was usually only used for seedships. This clipper was an adapted seedship, but I was going in bulk because it was actually cheaper to thaw me out
on arrival than to grow me from a bean. If the calibration wasn’t quite right, I’d never know.
The shuttle made minor course corrections to dock at the Long Tube.
“Please pass promptly to the cryogenic area,” it told us.
I shivered again.
Cryogenic travel has improved since then: subjectively, it’s pretty much instantaneous. In those days, it was called cold sleep, and that’s exactly what it felt like: being very cold and having slow, bad, dreams. Even with relativistic time-dilation and a glacial metabolism, it lasted for months.
I woke screaming in a translucent box.
“There, there,” said the box. “Everything will be all right. Have some coffee.”
The lid of the box extruded a nipple towards my mouth. I screamed again.
“Well, if you’re going to be like that …” said the box.
“It reminded me of a nightmare,” I said. My mouth was parched. “Please.”
“Oh, all right.”
I sucked on the coffee and felt warmth spread from my belly.
“Update me,” I said, around the nipple.
My translucent surroundings became transparent, with explanatory text and diagrams floating like after-images. A view, with footnotes. This helped, but not enough. An enormous blue-and-white sphere loomed right in front of me. I recoiled so hard that I hurt my head on the back of the box.
“What the fuck is that?”
“A terraformed terrestrial,” said the box. “Please do try to read before reacting.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought we were falling towards it.”
“We are,” said the box.
I must have yelled again.
“Read before reacting,” said the box. “Please.”
I turned my head as if to look over my shoulder. I couldn’t actually turn it that far, but the box obligingly swivelled the view. The red dwarf lurked at my back, apparently closer than the blue planet. I felt almost relieved. At least Wolf 359 was where I expected it. According to the view’s footnotes, nothing else was, except the inactive Long Tubes in the wispy remnant of the cometary cloud, twelve light-hours out. No solar-orbit microwave stations. Not even the hulks of habitats. No asteroids. No large cometary masses. And a planet, something that shouldn’t have been there, was. I didn’t need the explanatory text to make the connection. Every scrap of accessible mass in the system had been thrown into this gaudy reconstruction. The planet reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Moon’s primary, back when it had liquid water.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 202
