Twisted lips parted, revealing a mouth filled with rows of needle-thin teeth surrounding a spiraling void. The mouth opened; it was going to devour them.
Tay threw his arms up and fell against Bomb.
The larger man steadied him. 'Nirvana,' he said.
Tay peeked at the viewer over his forearm. The face was gone, replaced by the spreading abyss.
'Father, why have you forsaken me?' Raize's voice was thick with sobs. She tried to crawl, but her heavy boots pinned her to the floor like an insect half-mashed by a careless giant.
Tay stumbled to her. He buried his face in her hair and felt her shudder.
'Raize, baby, shush. We're all hallucinating.' He held her, breathing her vanilla and cloves perfume.
She went rigid. 'Sinner!' she screamed. She thrust him away, knocking him off balance. Tay sprawled, his feet still plastered to the floor.
'It's because of you that God doesn't love me.' Her eyes were wide, frenzied. A slender data stylus appeared in her hand. 'God won't forgive me!' She launched herself at Tay, the stylus pointed at his groin.
He struggled to roll, but his boots glued him in place.
Bomb was there. He caught Raize mid-air and held her as she kicked and screamed. The stylus clinked to the floor.
Tay dragged himself away with shaking arms. The hatred in Raize's face – he turned his head so he wouldn't have to see it.
In the viewer, the scene had changed, monopolized by a new image. Bursts of lightning rayed out from a woman's face wreathed by a crackle of ozone-limned hair. It was a familiar visage, achingly dear and terrifying; it was Jandi, his wife.
Huge, colorless lips curled into a sneer. 'It's all your fault, you know. I'd still be alive if it weren't for you.'
Tay shook his head. This wasn't, couldn't be real. It couldn't be.
Tears burned his eyes. How could he believe he'd be able to pull this off? The fate of the universe entrusted to him, the junkie, the loser; he hadn't even been able to save his wife.
He pressed his face to the floor. It really was preposterous. More likely that the whole thing – the cause, the calling, everything – was some drug-spawned delusion. After all, that last ride had almost killed him, forty beads of uncut tempt. Maybe he'd never come down. Maybe this was an elaborate fantasy and he was in a med facility, trapped in the dreamscape of his mind.
Bomb hummed a tuneless melody.
Tay lifted his head. The lightning-maned goddess was gone. The black rift was back, cutting across the galactic view.
Around him, the room was in relative calm. Raize sobbed in Bomb's arms while Freeloader writhed against the computer's tactiles. The computer flashed red, erroring from the brutalization. Freeloader was raping it.
The viewer was a sliver of starlight away from complete black emptiness.
Tay closed his eyes. He'd always known, deep down, that Jandi blamed him. If only he could have kept his job. If only the AI industry hadn't gone bust.
She'd been so sick, in so much pain, and they couldn't afford her meds anymore; they could barely afford to eat. The pain had brought her screaming awake at night. His beautiful, fiery Jandi thrashed and shrieked her life away as he stood by, helpless.
And then there'd been the day he'd taken the last of their money and bought tempt, two vials worth. Rec drugs were cheap, cheaper than food. He fed the tiny red pills to her, one by one, and held the water glass to her lips.
She hadn't needed them all. He'd held her in the darkness (no money for light), wrapped his arms around her, inhaled the scent of her skin. Then she was gone and Tay left behind.
If the universe ended, his desolation and grief would stop. Why was he fighting it? He'd yearned for this, slumped in alleys and on park benches, pursued it as he embraced his new love, murderous and merciful tempt.
'Tay.' It was Jandi.
He opened his eyes. His wife's face filled the viewer, but it was no longer terrible. It was just Jandi with her butterscotch hair and the dragonfly tattoo over her cheek.
'Remember our wedding vows?' she asked.
'Yes. No. Darling—'
'I promised to love you forever and ever. Remember?'
He in a silly penguin suit, she in a gossamer white dress by the simulated waterfall with holograms of waving willow trees in the background.
'Yes,' he whispered.
'If the universe ends, so does forever, and without forever, there's nothing left of us.'
'But what if this isn't real? What if this is just some junkie dream?'
'Does it matter? Does it matter more than what we had? We were real.'
'I miss you, Jandi. Every day, every hour, every minute. Oh God, I miss you.'
'We loved as we lived, sweetly and well. It was good. And it ended as all things do. But one day, in another time and place, we will love again.' Jandi's brow furrowed, the way it always did when she was perplexed by one of Tay's rambling treatises. 'Won't we? Or is this truly goodbye?'
Jandi's image disappeared.
Tay screamed. No one paid any attention as he clambered to his feet. He couldn't lose Jandi, even if all he had were memories and a promise of another life's reunion. Even if it was a tempt dream, he wanted the universe back.
'C'mon, think,' he panted.
In millennia past, a tradition passed down from thirty-second millennium to thirty-second millennium, the spells had been spoken, the symbols painted. People, aliens, unimagined consciousnesses had used rituals to set the universe back to rights. And Tay had converted these rituals into equations for the computer.
Tay stared at Bomb. He was the only one unaffected by hallucinations. But maybe they weren't hallucinations, maybe, protected as they were in a dome that contained the only reality, they were being affected by the only things that could touch them – Raize and her shame, Freeloader and his hedonism, and Tay himself with his guilt and grief.
'We're making reality,' he whispered. 'Us. Instead of concentrating on the symbols and words, we're wallowing in the depths of our dysfunctions.'
'Nirvana,' Bomb said.
Tay squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands over his ears. He envisioned Freeloader the ritualist, sane, calm, dressed, maintaining the computer operations like he had in all their simulations. He believed it. For Jandi, he believed it. He thought of Raize as she monitored readings and adjusted sensors, saw her fiddling with dials and buttons.
***
The computer stopped its plaintive distress sequence; the hum of normal processing replaced the high-pitched beeps. Freeloader sat at his station, eyes fixed on the displays. Raize tapped queries into her console.
In the viewer, a glimmer of light – no more than a speck – smoldered at the center of the blackness. As Tay watched, more spots of light began to emerge in a familiar pattern of stars and galaxies.
The universe was coming back.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi (born August 6, 1972) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer.
He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and was nominated for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in newspapers including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune. He was a webmaster for High Country News starting in 2003.
His short fiction has been collected in Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008). His debut novel The Windup Girl, published by Night Shade Books in September 2009, won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards in 2010. The Windup Girl was also named by Time as one of the Top 10 Books of 2009. Ship Breaker, published by Little, Brown in 2010, was awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for best young adult novel and was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
The People of Sand
and Slag, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Hugo Nomination for Best Novelette 2005
"Hostile movement! Well inside the perimeter! Well inside!"
I stripped off my Immersive Response goggles as adrenaline surged through me. The virtual cityscape I'd been about to raze disappeared, replaced by our monitoring room's many views of SesCo's mining operations. On one screen, the red phosphorescent tracery of an intruder skated across a terrain map, a hot blip like blood spattering its way toward Pit 8.
Jaak was already out of the monitoring room. I ran for my gear.
I caught up with Jaak in the equipment room as he grabbed a TS-101 and slashbangs and dragged his impact exoskeleton over his tattooed body. He draped bandoleers of surgepacks over his massive shoulders and ran for the outer locks. I strapped on my own exoskeleton, pulled my 101 from its rack, checked its charge, and followed.
Lisa was already in the HEV, its turbofans screaming like banshees when the hatch dilated. Sentry centaurs leveled their 101s at me, then relaxed as friend/foe data spilled into their heads-up displays. I bolted across the tarmac, my skin pricking under blasts of icy Montana wind and the jet wash of Hentasa Mark V engines. Overhead, the clouds glowed orange with light from SesCo's mining bots.
"Come on, Chen! Move! Move! Move!"
I dove into the hunter. The ship leaped into the sky. It banked, throwing me against a bulkhead, then the Hentasas cycled wide and the hunter punched forward. The HEV's hatch slid shut. The wind howl muted.
I struggled forward to the flight cocoon and peered over Jaak's and Lisa's shoulders to the landscape beyond.
"Have a good game?" Lisa asked.
I scowled. "I was about to win. I made it to Paris."
We cut through the mists over the catchment lakes, skimming inches above the water, and then we hit the far shore. The hunter lurched as its anti-collision software jerked us away from the roughening terrain. Lisa overrode the computers and forced the ship back down against the soil, driving us so low I could have reached out and dragged my hands through the broken scree as we screamed over it.
Alarms yowled. Jaak shut them off as Lisa pushed the hunter lower. Ahead, a tailings ridge loomed. We ripped up its face and dropped sickeningly into the next valley. The Hentasas shuddered as Lisa forced them to the edge of their design buffer. We hurtled up and over another ridge. Ahead, the ragged cutscape of mined mountains stretched to the horizon. We dipped again into mist and skimmed low over another catchment lake, leaving choppy wake in the thick golden waters.
Jaak studied the hunter's scanners. "I've got it." He grinned. "It's moving, but slow."
"Contact in one minute," Lisa said. "He hasn't launched any countermeasures."
I watched the intruder on the tracking screens as they displayed real-time data fed to us from SesCo's satellites. "It's not even a masked target. We could have dropped a mini on it from base if we'd known he wasn't going to play hide-and-seek."
"Could have finished your game," Lisa said.
"We could still nuke him," Jaak suggested.
I shook my head. "No, let's take a look. Vaporizing him won't leave us anything and Bunbaum will want to know what we used the hunter for."
"Thirty seconds."
"He wouldn't care, if someone hadn't taken the hunter on a joyride to Cancun."
Lisa shrugged. "I wanted to swim. It was either that, or rip off your kneecaps."
The hunter lunged over another series of ridges.
Jaak studied his monitor. "Target's moving away. He's still slow. We'll get him."
"Fifteen seconds to drop," Lisa said. She unstrapped and switched the hunter to software. We all ran for the hatch as the HEV yanked itself skyward, its autopilot desperate to tear away from the screaming hazard of the rocks beneath its belly.
We plunged out the hatch, one, two, three, falling like Icarus. We slammed into the ground at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Our exoskeletons shattered like glass, flinging leaves into the sky. The shards fluttered down around us, black metallic petals absorbing our enemy's radar and heat detection while we rolled to jarred vulnerable stops in muddy scree.
The hunter blew over the ridge, Hentasas shrieking, a blazing target. I dragged myself upright and ran for the ridge, my feet churning through yellow tailings mud and rags of jaundiced snow. Behind me, Jaak was down with smashed arms. The leaves of his exoskeleton marked his roll path, a long trail of black shimmering metal. Lisa lay a hundred yards away, her femur rammed through her thigh like a bright white exclamation mark.
I reached the top of the ridge and stared down into the valley.
Nothing.
I dialed up the magnification of my helmet. The monotonous slopes of more tailings rubble spread out below me. Boulders, some as large as our HEV, some cracked and shattered by high explosives, shared the slopes with the unstable yellow shale and fine grit of waste materials from SesCo's operations.
Jaak slipped up beside me, followed a moment later by Lisa, her flight suit's leg torn and bloodied. She wiped yellow mud off her face and ate it as she studied the valley below. "Anything?"
I shook my head. "Nothing yet. You okay?"
"Clean break."
Jaak pointed. "There!"
Down in the valley, something was running, flushed by the hunter. It slipped along a shallow creek, viscous with tailings acid. The ship herded it toward us. Nothing. No missile fire. No slag. Just the running creature. A mass of tangled hair. Quadrupedal. Splattered with mud.
"Some kind of bio-job?" I wondered.
"It doesn't have any hands," Lisa murmured.
"No equipment either."
Jaak muttered. "What kind of sick bastard makes a bio-job without hands?"
I searched the nearby ridgelines. "Decoy, maybe?"
Jaak checked his scanner data, piped in from the hunter's more aggressive instruments. "I don't think so. Can we put the hunter up higher? I want to look around."
At Lisa's command, the hunter rose, allowing its sensors a fuller reach. The howl of its turbofans became muted as it gained altitude.
Jaak waited as more data spat into his heads-up display. "Nope, nothing. And no new alerts from any of the perimeter stations, either. We're alone."
Lisa shook her head. "We should have just dropped a mini on it from base."
Down in the valley, the bio-job's headlong run slowed to a trot. It seemed unaware of us. Closer now, we could make out its shape: A shaggy quadruped with a tail. Dreadlocked hair dangled from its shanks like ornaments, tagged with tailings mud clods. It was stained around its legs from the acids of the catchment ponds, as though it had forded streams of urine.
"That's one ugly bio-job," I said.
Lisa shouldered her 101. "Bio-melt when I'm done with it."
"Wait!" Jaak said. "Don't slag it!"
Lisa glanced over at him, irritated. "What now?"
"That's not a bio-job at all," Jaak whispered. "That's a dog."
He stood suddenly and jumped over the hillside, running headlong down the scree toward the animal.
"Wait!" Lisa called, but Jaak was already fully exposed and blurring to his top speed.
The animal took one look at Jaak, whooping and hollering as he came roaring down the slope, then turned and ran. It was no match for Jaak. Half a minute later he overtook the animal.
Lisa and I exchanged glances. "Well," she said, "it's awfully slow if it's a bio-job. I've seen centaurs walk faster."
By the time we caught up with Jaak and the animal, Jaak had it cornered in a dull gully. The animal stood in the center of a trickling ditch of sludgy water, shaking and growling and baring its teeth at us as we surrounded it. It tried to break around us, but Jaak kept it corralled easily.
Up close, the animal seemed even more pathetic than from a distance, a good thirty kilos of snarling mange. Its paws were slashed and bloody and patches of fur were torn away, revealing festering chemical burns underneath.
"I'll be damned," I breathed, staring at the animal. "It really loo
ks like a dog."
Jaak grinned. "It's like finding a goddamn dinosaur."
"How could it live out here?" Lisa's arm swept the horizon. "There's nothing to live on. It's got to be modified." She studied it closely, then glanced at Jaak. "Are you sure nothing's coming in on the perimeter? This isn't some kind of decoy?"
Jaak shook his head. "Nothing. Not even a peep."
I leaned in toward the creature. It bared its teeth in a rictus of hatred. "It's pretty beat up. Maybe it's the real thing."
Jaak said, "Oh yeah, it's the real thing all right. I saw a dog in a zoo once. I'm telling you, this is a dog."
Lisa shook her head. "It can't be. It would be dead, if it were a real dog."
Jaak just grinned and shook his head. "No way. Look at it." He reached out to push the hair out of the animal's face so that we could see its muzzle.
The animal lunged and its teeth sank into Jaak's arm. It shook his arm violently, growling as Jaak stared down at the creature latched onto his flesh. It yanked its head back and forth, trying to tear Jaak's arm off. Blood spurted around its muzzle as its teeth found Jaak's arteries.
Jaak laughed. His bleeding stopped. "Damn. Check that out." He lifted his arm until the animal dangled fully out of the stream, dripping. "I got me a pet."
The dog swung from the thick bough of Jaak's arm. It tried to shake his arm once again, but its movements were ineffectual now that it hung off the ground. Even Lisa smiled.
"Must be a bummer to wake up and find out you're at the end of your evolutionary curve."
The dog growled, determined to hang on.
Jaak laughed and drew his monomol knife. "Here you go, doggy." He sliced his arm off, leaving it in the bewildered animal's mouth.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 404
