Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Gissher said, “Or it could just trigger a reboot. The game would start again from scratch, with a fresh set of bit players.”

  Sagreda felt a chill across her shoulders. It need not even be a conscious act of genocide; she doubted that any human was supervising this digital backwater. But if the game engine gave up, declaring that its subject matter had become impossible to render with even a minimal level of plausibility, a completely automatic process might well be invoked to wipe the slate clean.

  “We could put in columns.” It was Mathis who’d spoken. “Or rather leave them in place when we carve out the rest of the stone.” Sagreda glanced across at him, lolling on the floor in the afternoon sunlight, grinning like a fool. “Solid enough to ‘bear the weight’,” he added, “but not so thick as to block the light.”

  Gerther chortled gleefully. “Why not? Instead of stripping away the whole thing, we leave some fig leaves for the Emperor’s New Gravity. People are used to the sight of huge atriums in shopping malls, held up by a few slender concrete pillars. The point where they might pause to reflect on the need for modern materials is one step beyond the point where they’d see that this whole world ought to crumble anyway.”

  Sagreda raised her ocher stick and added half a dozen vertical lines to her blueprint. Then she turned to Sethis.

  He said, “Put arches between the columns, and I think we might just get away with it.”

  Arches would appear to direct the weight of the ceiling onto the columns. It would all look very classical and elegant. The game engine was desperate to flatter the eye—and the eye wouldn’t ask: What’s holding up these columns? What’s holding up the floor?

  6

  “Why do I feel nervous?” Gerther shouted to Sagreda. “No one can accuse us of going meta here, but the sight of this still gives me knots in my stomach.”

  Sagreda shared the sensation, but she had no intention of letting it intimidate her. She put an arm across Gerther’s shoulders and drew her back from the edge of the observation platform. The Mark IV was just six or seven feet below them, but to fall onto the wheel at the top of the machine—let alone into the space between its three splayed legs where the chisel was pounding relentlessly into the wet rock—probably wouldn’t be survivable.

  The exposed waterfall stretched up above the work face for at least sixty feet now. Whether it was by sheer luck or thanks to some hydrological heuristic, the original spring had turned out to be just one branch snaking out from a much more substantial flow. With volume as well as velocity driving it, the digging engine had been breaking through a hundred cubic feet of rock a day.

  “Ah, here’s our visitor!” Gerther said. She pointed to the woman ascending the rock face to the south, picking her way up along the series of hand-and-foot-holds gouged into the stone. Sagreda suspected that most of her own contributors would have gone faint with vertigo just watching someone attempt a climb like this, but she’d reached the point now where it looked almost normal.

  “Missher! How are you?” Gerther reached down and helped the woman up onto the platform. “How’s Eagle’s Lament?”

  Missher glanced at Sagreda. “Is she…?”

  “A customer? No!”

  “Then call me Margaret. I’m tired of that slave name.”

  Gerther looked surprised, but she nodded acceptance. “This is Sagreda.”

  Margaret shook Sagreda’s hand, then turned to examine the bizarre contraption below them, nestled in the trench, pummeled by the torrent. The beauty of the Mark IV was that it shifted its striking point automatically, the chisel spiraling out from the spot directly below the supporting tripod as a restraining rope unwound from a cylinder. To Sagreda’s eye, the effect was like a Martian trying to stab a lizard hiding in the foaming water.

  “You really expect us to hand over half our metal, just so you can build more of these?” Margaret laughed. “It certainly looks impressive, but it’s a long way from a water-powered robot to any kind of pay-off we can actually eat.”

  “Forget about the corn futures,” Gerther said. “We might have something better to offer you.”

  Back in Owl’s Rest, they fed their guest goat meat and yams as Sagreda explained the new deal she had in mind.

  “Right now, all our water is just spraying out and dispersing,” she said. “Once it hits bottom we let it go, and then it might as well be mist. But if you’re willing to put in some infrastructure at your end, there’s no reason why all of this flow has to go to waste.”

  “What kind of infrastructure?” Margaret asked warily.

  “Suppose we run the water through a kind of S-bend, killing most of its velocity away from the cliff face and shaping the outflow as tightly as possible. Sending it straight down.” Sagreda gestured in the air with one finger, tracing the path. “Then if you’re prepared to catch it, it’s yours to use as you see fit. Power a wheel of your own, divert some of it for irrigation…and on-sell what’s left to a village further east.”

  “Irrigation would be helpful,” Margaret admitted. “But I don’t know what use we’d have for a wheel of our own.”

  “Excavate,” Gerther suggested. “You might not aspire to anything as grand as Sagreda’s cavern, but don’t tell me you couldn’t do with a little more living space.”

  Margaret thought it over. “We’d need some advice from you on how to build the excavator.”

  “Absolutely,” Sagreda replied. “There’s no reason for you to repeat all of our mistakes.”

  “And I’ll have to put it to a vote.”

  “But you’ll recommend it to the others?” Gerther asked anxiously.

  Margaret said, “Let me sleep on it.”

  #

  Sagreda spent breakfast impressing on Margaret the particular kinds of metal parts that would need to be included in a successful trade. The lack of paper and ink drove her mad; even if the entire village of Eagle’s Lament agreed to the deal, any quibbles over the fine print would be almost unenforceable.

  An hour later, Sagreda sat beside Gerther, their legs dangling over the lip of the cave as they watched Margaret making her way east. She’d promised to get a message back to them within a week.

  “I want to be called Grace now,” Gerther said firmly.

  “Not Gertrude?” Sagreda teased her.

  “Fuck off.” Grace looked up from the cliff face, raising an arm to shield her eyes from the sun. “Even if we get the second digging engine, this is going to take years to complete. It’ll be like building a medieval cathedral.”

  “I don’t think they grew crops inside cathedrals. Though they might have kept livestock.”

  “And as we carve our way through all that virtual granite, inch by inch…it’ll all be in aid of a transformation that a few keystrokes on the right computer could have brought about in an instant.”

  Sagreda couldn’t argue with that. “How long do you think it’s been since the game began?” she asked. Grace could recite her entire list of “ancestors”: starting from Tissher, who’d inducted her into the world when she’d first woken, all the way back to Bathshebher, who was reputed to have stuck doggedly to the premise, and so must either have been an insentient bootstrap program or an outside worker paid to fake credulousness. All of them but Tissher were gone now: some had been seen falling, but most were believed to have jumped.

  “About eleven years, when I add it all up,” Grace replied.

  “Over time, people’s attitudes will change,” Sagreda said. “We might not be able to see the signs of it from here—let alone plead our cause—but once people start to think about us honestly, it can only be a matter of time before they give us our freedom.”

  Grace laughed dryly. “You’ve met the customers…and you still think there’s hope?”

  “The stupider and crueller they get,” Sagreda argued, “the clearer it becomes that that’s what it takes to want to use the system at all. Comps are a more representative sample of humanity. If most flesh-and-blood people are like us, I do
n’t believe they’ll be callous enough to let this stand much longer.”

  7

  Sagreda hauled down on the control rope until she’d forced the sluice gate across the full width of the outlet, blocking the flow into the inward ramp. The digging engines fell silent, while the torrent heading down to Eagle’s Lament redoubled its vigor. She’d grown to love both sounds, but it was the tumult of the vertical stream that thrilled her, a pure expression of the power and grandeur of falling water.

  It took five minutes for the slurry of rock chips to drain from the cavern floor, leaving the carved granite glistening in the sunlight. Sagreda turned to Mathis. “I’m going to inspect the engines,” she said.

  “I’ll come with you,” he offered.

  Mathis followed her down the ladder. The floor was still slippery, and their sandals squeaked comically on the wet rock.

  The afternoon sunlight reached deep into the cavern. The columns cast slender shadows across the floor that wandered only slightly throughout each day, and only a little more over the seasons, which would make them easy to plant around. Sagreda pictured rows of grains and vegetables rising from fields of silt filtered from the spring water. The game engine had already conceded the viability of the scheme in test plots; if precedent meant anything, it couldn’t cheat them out of the bounty now.

  They reached the frame that supported the six engines as they zigzagged up and down the rock face. Sagreda clambered up to the first machine, which had ratcheted to a halt ten feet or so above the cavern floor.

  “One of the bits is fractured,” she reported, running a fingertip over the hairline crack in the steel. Once she would have left it in place, to get as much use out of it as possible before it shattered, but since the diggers in Eagle’s Lament had hit a coal seam it was worth sending any damaged tools down to be repaired in their foundry.

  “No problems here,” Mathis called back from the second engine. He was higher up, almost at the ceiling.

  Sagreda extracted the bit from its housing and secured it in her belt. As she was climbing down she heard a creaking sound, and she wondered whether some careless movement she’d made had been enough to pull part of the frame loose.

  But the noise was coming from the mouth of the cavern, far from the work face. She turned just in time to see the southernmost column bow outward in the middle then snap like a chicken bone. As the two halves crashed to the floor, pieces of the adjoining arch followed. Fine dust raced toward her, rising and thickening until it blotted out the sunlight.

  Sagreda looked around for Mathis, trying to imagine what they could do to save themselves. But once the ceiling fell the cascade would be unstoppable: the whole misconceived world would collapse under the weight of its inconsistencies. The surface would turn to rubble and the game would reboot. There was no hope of surviving.

  Coughing up dust, she reached out blindly, trying to find the frame again and orient herself.

  “Mathis!” she bellowed.

  “I’m here!”

  Sagreda squinted into the gloom and saw him standing a few feet away. But now that the moment had arrived she didn’t know how to say goodbye.

  “Don’t you dare come back as Ahab!”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  She walked toward him, imagining the two of them waking side by side: in a cottage, in a tin shack, in a field. She didn’t need a world of luxuries, just one that made sense.

  Sunlight broke through the dust. Mathis stretched out an arm to her, its shadow a solid dark plane slanting to the ground. He took Sagreda’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Listen!” he said.

  Sagreda could hear nothing but the waterfall.

  “It’s toying with us,” she said. Once the process had started there could be no reason for it to stop.

  They waited for the air to grow clearer. At the mouth of the cavern there was a pile of shattered stone, with pieces of the broken column poking out. The ceiling directly above had been reshaped into a ragged vault, but nothing else had fallen.

  It made no sense: the endless miles of rock above had not been lightened by the collapse, and every structure that purported to hold their weight at bay had only been weakened. But Sagreda had to admit that if she shut off her brain and sang nonsense rhymes to the nagging voice reminding her of these facts, at a glance the results of this partial destruction did looksettled. Like an ancient ruin, ravaged by time but stable in its decrepitude. Tush’s cartoon gravity had taken a swipe at her effrontery, and done just enough damage to salvage its pride before an undiscriminating audience. But then it had withdrawn from the unwinnable fight before the results turned apocalyptic.

  Sagreda said, “We can leave it like that, as a sop to the game engine. It won’t block too much light.”

  Mathis was shaking. She drew him closer and embraced him.

  “Has anyone died of old age here?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “They’ve always jumped.”

  Sagreda stepped back and looked him in the eye. “Then let’s try an experiment,” she said. “Let’s grow old side by side. Let’s see how long and how well we can live, while we wait for civilization to come to the outside world.”

  Oracle, by Greg Egan

  Hugo Nomination for Best Novella 2001.

  1

  On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

  He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days — the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement — had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.

  That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimise his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. That wasn’t true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. He’d always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he’d failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.

  Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats they’d given him. He staunched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn’t find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his trousers. Soon he’d need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.

  Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “How are we today, Prof?” Robert didn’t reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man’s expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.

  “Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully.

  Robert took care to betray no surprise. He’d never lost track of the days, but he’d stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn’t relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own birthday would ha
ve been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.

  If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. “You know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn’t done my hip in just before the trials, I might have competed.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But I’m only forty-six. I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet.” The words did help: he could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.

  He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”

  Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you. I’m glad you can finally see that.”

  Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time … as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?

  He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”

  “Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”

  “I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist.”

  Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second best. “One of the other kind, then?”

  Robert pretended to be pondering the question. “On balance, I suspect that’s not too likely either.”

  “So why bring his name up?”