Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “So go ahead. Bring me here. It’s your turn to make me into what you want. Or end it all. I deserve it.”

  Esa laughed softly. “And why would I do that, to an old man?” He sighed. “You know, I’m old too now. Let me show you.” He touched Kosonen’s shoulder gently and

  Kosonen was the city. His skin was stone of and concrete, pores full of the godplague. The streets and buildings were his face, changing and shifting with every thought and emotion. His nervous system was diamond and optic fibre. His hands were chimera animals.

  The firewall was all around him, in the sky and in the cold bedrock, insubstantial but adamantine, squeezing from every side, cutting off energy, making sure he could not think fast. But he could still dream, weave words and images into threads, make worlds out of the memories he had and the memories of the smaller gods he had eaten to become the city. He sang his dreams in radio waves, not caring if the firewall let them through or not, louder and louder—

  “Here,” Esa said from far away. “Have a beer.”

  Kosonen felt a chilly bottle in his hand, and drank. The dream-beer was strong and real. The malt taste brought him back. He took a deep breath, letting the fake summer evening wash away the city.

  “Is that why you brought me here? To show me that?” He asked.

  “Well, no,” Esa said, laughing. His stone eyes looked young, suddenly. “I just wanted you to meet my girlfriend.”

  #

  The quantum girl had golden hair and eyes of light. She wore many faces at once, like a Hindu goddess. She walked to the pier with dainty steps. Esa’s summerland showed its cracks around her: There were fracture lines in her skin, with otherworldly colours peeking out.

  “This is Säde,” Esa said.

  She looked at Kosonen, and spoke, a bubble of words, a superposition, all possible greetings at once.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kosonen said.

  “They did something right when they made her, up there,” said Esa. “She lives in many worlds at once, thinks in qubits. And this is the world where she wants to be. With me.” He touched her shoulder gently. “She heard my songs and ran away.”

  “Marja said she fell,” Kosonen said. “That something was broken.”

  “She said what they wanted her to say. They don’t like it when things don’t go according to plan.”

  Säde made a sound, like the chime of a glass bell.

  “The firewall keeps squeezing us,” Esa said. “That’s how it was made. Make things go slower and slower here, until we die. Säde doesn’t fit in here, this place is too small. So you will take her back home, before it’s too late.” He smiled. “I’d rather you do it than anyone else.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kosonen said. He squinted at Säde. She was too bright to look at. But what can I do? I’m just a slab of meat. Meat and words.

  The thought was like a pine cone, rough in his grip, but with a seed of something in it.

  “I think there is a poem in you two,” he said.

  #

  Kosonen sat on the train again, watching the city stream past. It was early morning. The sunrise gave the city new hues: purple shadows and gold, ember colours. Fatigue pulsed in his temples. His body ached. The words of a poem weighed down on his mind.

  Above the dome of the firewall he could see a giant diamond starfish, a drone of the sky people, watching, like an outstretched hand.

  They came to see what happened, he thought. They’ll find out.

  This time, he embraced the firewall like a friend, and its tingling brightness washed over him. And deep within, the stern-voiced watchman came again. It said nothing this time, but he could feel its presence, scrutinising, seeking things that did not belong in the outside world.

  Kosonen gave it everything.

  The first moment when he knew he had put something real on paper. The disappointment when he realised that a poet was not much in a small country, piles of cheaply printed copies of his first collection, gathering dust in little bookshops. The jealousy he had felt when Marja gave birth to Esa, what a pale shadow of that giving birth to words was. The tracks of the elk in the snow and the look in its eyes when it died.

  He felt the watchman step aside, satisfied.

  Then he was through. The train emerged into the real, undiluted dawn. He looked back at the city, and saw fire raining from the starfish. Pillars of light cut through the city in geometric patterns, too bright to look at, leaving only white-hot plasma in their wake.

  Kosonen closed his eyes and held on to the poem as the city burned.

  #

  Kosonen planted the nanoseed in the woods. He dug a deep hole in the half-frozen peat with his bare hands, under an old tree stump. He sat down, took off his cap, dug out his notebook, and started reading. The pencil-scrawled words glowed bright in his mind, and after a while he didn’t need to look at them anymore.

  The poem rose from the words like a titanic creature from an ocean, first showing just a small extremity but then soaring upwards in a spray of glossolalia, mountain-like. It was a stream of hissing words and phonemes, an endless spell that tore at his throat. And with it came the quantum information from the microtubules of his neurons, where the bright-eyed girl now lived, and jagged impulses from synapses where his son was hiding.

  The poem swelled into a roar. He continued until his voice was a hiss. Only the nanoseed could hear, but that was enough. Something stirred under the peat.

  When the poem finally ended, it was evening. Kosonen opened his eyes. The first things he saw were the sapphire antlers, sparkling in the last rays of the sun.

  Two young elk looked at him. One was smaller, more delicate, and its large brown eyes held a hint of sunlight. The other was young and skinny, but wore its budding antlers with pride. It held Kosonen’s gaze, and in its eyes he saw shadows of the city. Or reflections in a summer lake, perhaps.

  They turned around and ran into the woods, silent, fleet-footed and free.

  #

  Kosonen was opening the cellar door when the rain came back. It was barely a shower this time: The droplets formed Marja’s face in the air. For a moment he thought he saw her wink. Then the rain became a mist, and was gone. He propped the door open.

  The squirrels stared at him from the trees curiously.

  “All yours, gentlemen,” Kosonen said. “Should be enough for next winter. I don’t need it anymore.”

  Otso and Kosonen left at noon, heading north. Kosonen’s skis slid along easily in the thinning snow. The bear pulled a sledge loaded with equipment. When they were well away from the cabin, it stopped to sniff at a fresh trail.

  “Elk,” it growled. “Otso is hungry. Kosonen shoot an elk. Need meat for the journey. Kosonen did not bring enough booze.”

  Kosonen shook his head.

  “I think I’m going to learn to fish,” he said.

  His Master’s Voice, by Hannu Rajaniemi

  (Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in Interzone #218. It is available in other formats, but Redstone SF is pleased to present the full text of this Sturgeon Award finalist online for the first time.)

  Before the concert, we steal the master’s head.

  The necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog bubble attached to the steep southern wall of the nunatak, the ice valley.

  The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite confidence.

  “Get ready,” I tell it. “We don’t have all night.”

  It gives me a mildly offended look and dons its armor. The quantum dot fabric envelopes its striped body like living oil. It purrs faintly and tests the diamond-bladed claws against an icy outcropping of rock. The sound grates my teeth and the razor-winged butterflies in my belly wake up. I look at the bright, impenetrable firewall of the city of the dead. It shimmers like chained northern lights in my AR vision.

  I decide that it’s time to ask the Big Dog to bark.My helmet laser casts a one-nanosecon
d prayer of light at the indigo sky: just enough to deliver one quantum bit up there into the Wild. Then we wait. My tail wags and a low growl builds up in my belly.

  Right on schedule, it starts to rain red fractal code. My augmented reality vision goes down, unable to process the dense torrent of information falling upon the necropolis firewall like monsoon rain. The chained aurora borealis flicker and vanish.

  “Go!” I shout at the cat, wild joy exploding in me, the joy of running after the Small Animal of my dreams. “Go now!”

  The cat leaps into the void. The wings of the armor open and grab the icy wind, and the cat rides the draft down like a grinning Chinese kite.

  * * *

  It’s difficult to remember the beginning now. There were no words then, just sounds and smells: metal and brine, the steady drumming of waves against pontoons. And there were three perfect things in the world: my bowl, the Ball, and the Master’s firm hand on my neck.

  I know now that the Place was an old oil rig that the Master had bought. It smelled bad when we arrived, stinging oil and chemicals. But there were hiding places, secret nooks and crannies. There was a helicopter landing pad where the Master threw the ball for me. It fell into the sea many times, but the Master’s bots — small metal dragonflies — always fetched it when I couldn’t.

  The Master was a god. When he was angry, his voice was an invisible whip. His smell was a god-smell that filled the world.

  While he worked, I barked at the seagulls or stalked the cat. We fought a few times, and I still have a pale scar on my nose. But we developed an understanding. The dark places of the rig belonged to the cat, and I reigned over the deck and the sky: we were the Hades and Apollo of the Master’s realm.

  But at night, when the Master watched old movies or listened to records on his old rattling gramophone we lay at his feet together. Sometimes the Master smelled lonely and let me sleep next to him in his small cabin, curled up in the god-smell and warmth.

  It was a small world, but it was all we knew.

  The Master spent a lot of time working, fingers dancing on the keyboard projected on his mahogany desk. And every night he went to the Room: the only place on the rig where I wasn’t allowed.

  It was then that I started to dream about the Small Animal. I remember its smell even now, alluring and inexplicable: buried bones and fleeing rabbits, irresistible.

  In my dreams, I chased it along a sandy beach, a tasty trail of tiny footprints that I followed along bendy pathways and into tall grass. I never lost sight of it for more than a second: it was always a flash of white fur just at the edge of my vision.

  One day it spoke to me.

  “Come,” it said. “Come and learn.”

  The Small Animal’s island was full of lost places. Labyrinthine caves, lines drawn in sand that became words when I looked at them, smells that sang songs from the master’s gramophone. It taught me, and I learned: I was more awake every time I woke up. And when I saw the cat looking at the spiderbots with a new awareness, I knew that it, too, went to a place at night.

  I came to understand what the Master said when he spoke. The sounds that had only meant angry or happy before became the word of my god. He noticed, smiled, and ruffled my fur. After that he started speaking to us more, me and the cat, during the long evenings when the sea beyond the windows was black as oil and the waves made the whole rig ring like a bell. His voice was dark as a well, deep and gentle. He spoke of an island, his home, an island in the middle of a great sea. I smelled bitterness, and for the first time I understood that there were always words behind words, never spoken.

  * * *

  The cat catches the updraft perfectly: it floats still for a split second, and then clings to the side of the tower. Its claws put the smart concrete to sleep: code that makes the building think that the cat is a bird or a shard of ice carried by the wind.

  The cat hisses and spits. The disassembler nanites from its stomach cling to the wall and start eating a round hole in it. The wait is excruciating. The cat locks the exomuscles of its armor and hangs there patiently. Finally, there is a mouth with jagged edges in the wall, and it slips in. My heart pounds as I switch from the AR view to the cat’s iris cameras. It moves through the ventilation shaft like lightning, like an acrobat, jerky, hyperaccelerated movements, metabolism on overdrive. My tail twitches again. We are coming, master, I think. We are coming.

  * * *

  I lost my ball the day the wrong master came.

  I looked everywhere. I spent an entire day sniffing every corner and even braved the dark corridors of the cat’s realm beneath the deck, but I could not find it. In the end, I got hungry and returned to the cabin. And there were two masters. Four hands stroking my coat. Two gods, true and false.

  I barked. I did not know what to do. The cat looked at me with a mixture of pity and disdain and rubbed itself on both of their legs.

  “Calm down,” said one of the masters. “Calm down. There are four of us now.”

  I learned to tell them apart, eventually: by that time Small Animal had taught me to look beyond smells and appearances. The master I remembered was a middle-aged man with graying hair, stocky-bodied. The new master was young, barely a man, much slimmer and with the face of a mahogany cherub. The master tried to convince me to play with the new master, but I did not want to. His smell was too familiar, everything else too alien. In my mind, I called him the wrong master.

  The two masters worked together, walked together and spent a lot of time talking together using words I did not understand. I was jealous. Once I even bit the wrong master. I was left on the deck for the night as a punishment, even though it was stormy and I was afraid of thunder. The cat, on the other hand, seemed to thrive in the wrong master’s company, and I hated it for it.

  I remember the first night the masters argued.

  “Why did you do it?” asked the wrong master.

  “You know,” said the master. “You remember.” His tone was dark. “Because someone has to show them we own ourselves.”

  “So, you own me?” said the wrong master. “Is that what you think?”

  “Of course not,” said the master. “Why do you say that?”

  “Someone could claim that. You took a genetic algorithm and told it to make ten thousand of you, with random variations, pick the ones that would resemble your ideal son, the one you could love. Run until the machine runs out of capacity. Then print. It’s illegal, you know. For a reason.”

  “That’s not what the plurals think. Besides, this is my place. The only laws here are mine.”

  “You’ve been talking to the plurals too much. They are no longer human.”

  “You sound just like VecTech’s PR bots.”

  “I sound like you. Your doubts. Are you sure you did the right thing? I’m not a Pinocchio. You are not a Gepetto.”

  The master was quiet for a long time.

  “What if I am,” he finally said. “Maybe we need Gepettos. Nobody creates anything new anymore, let alone wooden dolls that come to life. When I was young, we all thought something wonderful was on the way. Diamond children in the sky, angels out of machines. Miracles. But we gave up just before the blue fairy came.”

  “I am not your miracle.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “You should at least have made yourself a woman,” said the wrong master in a knife-like voice. “It might have been less frustrating.”

  I did not hear the blow, I felt it. The wrong master let out a cry, rushed out and almost stumbled on me. The master watched him go. His lips moved, but I could not hear the words. I wanted to comfort him and made a little sound, but he did not even look at me, went back to the cabin and locked the door. I scratched the door, but he did not open, and I went up to the deck to look for the Ball again.

  * * *

  Finally, the cat finds the master’s chamber.

  It is full of heads. They float in the air, bodiless, suspended in diamond cylinders. The tower executes the comman
d we sent into its drugged nervous system, and one of the pillars begins to blink. Master, master, I sing quietly as I see the cold blue face beneath the diamond. But at the same time I know it’s not the master, not yet.

  The cat reaches out with its prosthetic. The smart surface yields like a soap bubble. “Careful now, careful,” I say. The cat hisses angrily but obeys, spraying the head with preserver nanites and placing it gently into its gel-lined backpack.

  The necropolis is finally waking up: the damage the heavenly hacker did has almost been repaired. The cat heads for its escape route and goes to quicktime again. I feel its staccato heartbeat through our sensory link.

  It is time to turn out the lights. My eyes polarise to sunglass-black. I lift the gauss launcher, marvelling at the still tender feel of the Russian hand grafts. I pull the trigger. The launcher barely twitches in my grip, and a streak of light shoots up to the sky. The nuclear payload is tiny, barely a decaton, not even a proper plutonium warhead but a hafnium micronuke. But it is enough to light a small sun above the mausoleum city for a moment, enough for a focused maser pulse that makes it as dead as its inhabitants for a moment.

  The light is a white blow, almost tangible in its intensity, and the gorge looks like it is made of bright ivory. White noise hisses in my ears like the cat when it’s angry.

  * * *

  For me, smells were not just sensations, they were my reality. I know now that that is not far from the truth: smells are molecules, parts of what they represent.

  The wrong master smelled wrong. It confused me at first: almost a god-smell, but not quite, the smell of a fallen god.

  And he did fall, in the end.

  I slept on the master’s couch when it happened. I woke up to bare feet shuffling on the carpet and heavy breathing, torn away from a dream of the Little Animal trying to teach me the multiplication table.

  The wrong master looked at me.

  “Good boy,” he said. “Ssh.” I wanted to bark, but the godlike smell was too strong. And so I just wagged my tail, slowly, uncertainly. The wrong master sat on the couch next to me and srcratched my ears absently.