Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Already, though, a dozen Selenite vessels had passed beyond range of Drake's light-cannon in an Earthward direction. Lumen was correct. Given the difficulty of maneuvering the ether-ships, somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred were likely to come through that first encounter, and the chances of Drake's ships being able to give chase to them were very slim indeed, even if Drake still had fifty or a hundred ships of his own to make the attempt.

  The Selenites had not won yet, though, for they had two barriers yet to overcome: the friction of the atmosphere and the intense affinity drawing them to the Earth's surface. The fleshy crews and cargoes they contained had doubtless been designed with all the alchemical skill at the Selenites’ disposal, but the Selenites could not have tested their personnel and products in the field.

  Francis knew how foolhardy it would be to hope that the Selenites might simply have made mistakes in designing intelligent insects that could operate successfully in the grip of Earthly affinity; the Arachnids were their superiors in that kind of science, but if the Arachnids could do it, then the Selenites could do it too. Friction was the ally he needed—and, in truth, the only ally he had, for he too could not transport the powers that he now had to the Earth's surface, deep in the punishing well of affinity. When he returned to his native environment, he would have to do so as his ordinary self, with all its limitations.

  Until then, however, he was at least half a Shadow, with abilities that exceeded those of an ethereal in the matter of creating storm-winds.

  The Selenite vessels were still approaching the Earth on very similar trajectories, but some were slowing down, in order that they could enter the atmosphere at very different points, and fall along a line that would wind twice or three times round the globe, displaced sideways on each circuit. In free fall, they might land anywhere between the tropics, and perhaps some little way outside, on any of the major continents.

  Their fall was, however, far from free. Francis could not embrace the globe—or even a tiny fraction of its atmosphere—directly, but he could initiate chain reactions between the molecules of the atmosphere that whipped up winds and whirlpools in the upper strata of the air and the etheric plenum with which it mingled at such heights. He could not act directly upon all the Selenite vessels at once, or even a few at a time, but the time they took to complete their own staggered orbits gave him the time he needed to send deadly ripples after each and every one.

  By comparison with the delicacy with which Lumen had plucked attacking insects away from their human victims on the orbital platform, the work that Francis did was very clumsy indeed. Even Lumen could not have played the consummate artist in this enterprise, exercising fine control over every individual action and reaction, but Lumen would not have been a mere child splashing recklessly in the shallows of a placid lake, as Francis regretfully imagined himself to be. Even that clumsy splashing was adequate to its task, however.

  One by one, the Selenite vessels descended into the Earth's atmosphere, and were torn apart, one by one, by the angry air. Some burned up entire, others fell apart and became showers of smoking debris. Some got much closer to the ground than others—some, perhaps, close enough for their cargoes to stand a chance of reaching the ground without being burned up—but none escaped unscathed. That, Francis was sure, would be enough to ensure that none of them could successfully complete their mission.

  There would be no second Armada, he knew; the Fleshcores would see to that, if the rogue machines and the Arachnids could not. The entire galaxy would know before very long what a bone of contention the Earth was, and that it would not lack defenders if it were attacked again. Once the system of hyperetheric links was properly restored, the Selenite blockade would be over, and the Selenites themselves would be dispersed into the vast corpus of the True Civilization.

  Francis continued to stir up storms until he was certain that the last of the Selenite vessels had been accounted for; only then did he spare time and attention to rue the residual havoc that might reach the surface, in the form of hurricanes and tornadoes, and the casualties that humankind might suffer as a result—perhaps as many as the casualties suffered by Drake's fleet, whose surviving vessels were now beginning to complete the long loops that would direct them homeward.

  Francis waited for the remainder of the fleet, but resisted the temptation to manifest himself in Drake's flagship for a second time. The important task he now had before him was to calm the ether, and then the Earth's atmosphere, in order to smooth the homeward journey of the heroes who had extracted the Armada's sting.

  That work was more difficult by far than the work he had already done; destruction, as he was well aware, is invariably easier to sow than harmony, chaos easier to create than order. He was still an infant splashing awkwardly, but he was determined to do what he could. He was no creator, but he knew now what the work of creation entailed, and how valuable intricate chains of cause and effect might be. Against the odds, perhaps, he succeeded in calming the ether and the air alike, sufficiently to permit Drake's survivors to descend safely to the surface.

  In all, some eighty-seven vessels came safely back to Earth, out of two hundred that had set out. That was a better ratio than Dee and Digges had dared to count on, and a better one than they had promised their crewmen when calling for recruits. More than six hundred men had been lost in the battle—but there was no way to count the number of lives that might have been sacrificed, along with the human species’ prerogative of self-development, had the Armada not been thwarted.

  All in all, Francis was not dissatisfied.

  * * * *

  13

  Before surrendering his borrowed abilities, as he was bound to do, Francis made one last rendezvous with Lumen, in the placid etheric ocean a few million miles from the gentle turbulence associated with the orbits of the Earth and Moon.

  “Digges and Drake got safely home with the others,” the ethereal told him. “Poor doubting Thomas did not have time to forgive me, but I think he will look back with gratitude, in time—if you can help him to understand.”

  “I shall need to understand myself before I can do that,” Francis said. “I feel, at present, that the understanding I desire is at the command of my whim, but I doubt that I will feel the same when I am only myself again. All this will seem to have been a dream, no matter how convinced I am of the fact that it was all reality.”

  “Material memories are so fragile and confused,” the ethereal told him, “that I thank God continually for having been born an ethereal.”

  “Will Aristocles concede defeat in your game when you confront him?” Francis asked, acidly, “or will he claim that the intervention of the Shadow rendered the contest null and void?”

  “Even if it were still no more than a game,” Lumen said, “Aristocles and I would reckon that the matter of who won was far less important than the quality of the contest—and in that respect, neither of us could be disappointed. The intervention of the Shadow was, from that viewpoint, something of a coup. The ancients will pretend to be uninterested, and will declare in shocked tones that, had we mastered the Memory, we would never have been so foolish, but they will not be able to hold that opinion for long. In any case, this is not goodbye. You will doubtless hear from me again—and Kelley will doubtless hear from more than one of us, if he can withstand the pressure of madness.”

  “Easier said than done, apparently,” Francis said. “He has half a dozen apprentice seers in training, but they have all had their difficulties.”

  “Arachnid alchemy will doubtless help with that,” the ethereal relied. “Thomas Muffet is back in England now, and Patience will make a perfect apprentice. You do not need me to warn you, I suppose, to be a little wary of Raleigh—and of Low's golem too, if it chooses to return or is ordered to do so.”

  “None of these interferers seem to have done us overmuch harm, as yet,” Francis said, although he could not yet forgive the Selenite Armada and those who had set in train the chain
of causality leading to its launch, “but now we know the extent to which we have been led, I think we will be more determined in future to see to our own guidance.”

  “And so you should,” Lumen said. “The only way, in the final analysis, to avoid being relegated to the status of pieces in other entities’ games, is to become players yourselves. You might be able to do that now—provided that the next universal transubstantiation is long enough delayed to grant you the time, or that your species is preserved during the metamorphosis. I shall need to discover the Shadows’ purpose, if I can; there may be strange and turbulent times ahead, and not merely for the True Civilization.”

  “I wish you luck with that,” Francis said. “At least you have had the advantage of meeting one, and sharing in its borrowed powers. Let me know what you discover, if you can.”

  “It's not impossible,” Lumen told him, although Francis knew that it was mere flattery, and probably absurd, “that I shall be the one seeking enlightenment from you.”

  After that, Francis’ return to Earth was swift. Before he went to make his reports to John Dee and Queen Jane, he called in on his brother—who was, remarkably enough, in Stephen Batman's house, completing the task that Francis had begun and then left incomplete.

  “I did not know whether I would see you again,” Anthony explained. “I thought you might have returned to the heart of the galaxy, or taken up permanent residence on the Moon. Now that you can walk through walls and fly through the ether without the need of a ship, London must seem a very narrow arena in which to extend your career as a magician. A task like this is surely far beneath you.”

  “I have shrunk to my former three dimensions,” Francis assured him. “I have not an atom of magic left in me—less than Ned Kelley, for sure. I am a humble scholar again, and painstaking tasks like sorting Stephen's notes are not beneath me, any more than they are beneath you. You have been outside the Earth as well, and know by sight how tiny it really is.”

  “But my firebird was only a giant parrot, after all,” Anthony replied, “and Low's golem was only some monstrous slug. Even Raleigh is nothing more than a man who has grown an elephant's hide and a little extra hair. Wonders I have certainly seen, but I cannot help feeling that the world seems a little less magical than it did before—all the more so if you are again no more than my little brother, the bane of my existence.”

  “It was you, was it not,” Francis said, “who tried to shield me from the insects when we were taken by surprise, and made sure that I escaped?”

  “Mere instinct,” Anthony assured him. “The same instinct that guided me in support of de Vere's heroism when we took the platform back. In any case, I could not have saved you the first time without Faust's help, any more than I could have held the platform the second time without de Vere and Marlowe. Faust was the one acting out of duty, and it cost him his life. Kit intends to write a play about him, you know, to celebrate his part in the salvation of the world. Rumor has it, though, that every playwright in London has some similar subject in mind. De Vere says that his will be a comedy, with himself as the hero—although he will have to borrow another man's name for a signature if he does that.”

  “It was a comedy,” Francis said. “For which we should all be truly thankful. Had it been a tragedy, as it might so easily have become, it would not be a suitable subject for drama for at least five hundred years. The plays are bound to be dishonest, though—the society to which Marlowe and de Vere belong still exists, even if its figurehead is presently absent; it will be all the more determined to keep its secrets.”

  “There are no secrets,” Anthony told him. “Given the way that the ladies of the court are swarming around Drake, in spite of his antiquity, and Sidney, in spite of his marriage, and even humble Tom Digges, in spite of his being a mathematician, every last moment of what occurred will be common knowledge within a week.” He did not mention any attention he might have received himself from the ladies of the court, but he had not been able to make the general point without blushing.

  “Oh, there are secrets still,” Francis told him. “There will always be secrets—but how insipid would life be, if there were not puzzles to solve, secrets to penetrate, and games to play? How could there be change, let alone transubstantiation, without secrets to pursue, and sometimes capture?”

  Copryight © 2009 Brian Stableford

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  * * *

  Short Story: TRUE FAME

  by Robert Reed

  Robert Reed tells us “Thirteen, fourteen years ago, my future bride and I were vacationing in the Muskoka region of Ontario. At an outdoor restaurant beside one of the countless scenic lakes in the region, we spotted a familiar face. I thought it was ‘him,’ and Leslie thought so too. Then we decided it wasn't. He was eating at the other end of the patio, alone, and he left alone, walking with a swagger, jumping into a boat and speeding away. Immediately, from every other table, people were asking, ‘Was that Kurt Russell?’ We found out later that yes, he and Goldie vacationed there that summer—hence, the nucleus of a story about facial recognition software."

  This is the prettiest restaurant they've seen in quite a while. He says so, and she tells him to please not look at the waitresses, and he responds with a smile and the reflexive promise to be good. His girlfriend has no reason for concerns, and she knows it. Laughing and sitting back, she continues studying the closest faces. He looks past the ornate iron rail, down at the lake, watching the boats tied to the floating docks and the blue-gray water and the various islands sitting between here and the horizon. This lake is much better than their lake. Its water is deeper and colder, roads forbidden everywhere but inside this one tiny resort town. His portal-glasses reach past the horizon, blending views from a variety of easy sources. Second homes stand on the lakeshore and every island. Some might be third or fourth homes, and every last one resembles a tiny palace. But the real mark of wealth is the extravagant distance between front doors. These days, just the illusion of solitude is a treasure. The two of them have invested a year's savings for the privilege of sleeping six nights in a retrofitted trailer that sits beside a shallow and muddy body of water, and they are not poor people. Yet it's easy to feel destitute in a setting like this. Even the boats are impressive. One vessel looks like an ordinary twelve-meter cabin cruiser, but its design doesn't match any popular model, and the hull shows signs of morphing capacities. The license number is a phony, but that isn't a difficult problem. A reliable savant in Sri Lanka makes useful suggestions, and he focuses on the door behind the cockpit, his glasses teasing out the first twenty-eight digits of a code that leads a few seconds later to the boat's builder and its specifications, and then to its present owner. Sure enough, the machine can transform into any of five different shapes, including a spacious deep-water submarine. “Neat,” he says, and she asks, “What is?” But he's already searching the tables scattered across the pink granite patio, finding the neurosurgeon sitting with his youthful third wife and a slightly younger, thoroughly bored son left over from his first wife: The great mariner on vacation, enjoying his green salad and an enormous glass of cold green tea.

  “What's neat?” she asks again.

  He mentions the boat, letting her discern the rest for herself.

  Then he asks in turn, “Find anybody?”

  She offers three names. In principle, they wield identical recognition software and portal-glasses, and they know the same savants and coyotes and misfits. But the girlfriend has always been a little quicker when it comes to digesting faces. That bothered him for the first month or two. But he eventually realized that he had her beat when it comes to prying secrets from behind the Privacy Acts of ‘17 and ‘39. Each of them has strengths, and they compliment each other quite nicely, and what more can you ask from a couple?

  She repeats the second name. He spots a sixty-one-year-old male with his back to them but his craggy, once-handsome face reflected in the restaurant's long window. He makes a few
queries, and while waiting for the coyotes to track down interesting treats, they study the menu, discussing the relative merits of cultured burgers and yogurt shakes. At these inflated prices, they decide, it means one or the other, but probably not both.

  “So did you find his movie?” she finally asks.

  As a twenty-eight-year-old, their subject made a video showing him and a young woman doing the nasty in the woods, and like a lot of people in those days, he posted his work on a marginally anonymous site. The old man probably believes that the embarrassing data was lost ages ago, or that the commercial software for Web-wide purges has real value. But that isn't how it works. The two of them smile silently, investing the next thirty seconds watching a bawdy, amateurish show. Then their waitress appears, asking with a clipped, marginally friendly voice, “So are you ready to order?”

  It's a coincidence just how much the waitress resembles the girl in that old sex show. She's small and blonde and not quite pretty, but far from homely. She doesn't wear a nametag, but there isn't a trace of surprise when they say in the same moment, “Hello, Tina.”

  Tina looks at their faces. She smiles. Then because they mentioned her name, she can now politely use theirs.

  He opts for the burger.

  The girlfriend wants a yogurt shake, chocolate and with two spoons.

  They have rules when it comes to pretty young things. But he takes the risk, watching their waitress for the next few minutes. Everywhere but here, he studies her. He finds a birth announcement from sixteen years ago. He uncovers school grades and family portraits buried in enduring servers. But her presence is a fraction of what her parents once made available to the Web. People who are now middle-aged and elderly citizens would throw everything up on those early sites, and they would blog obsessively about every tiny drama and embarrassing fart, and photographs would be shared, and videos would be crafted—the more outrageous, the better—and like everything foolish, it all seemed fresh and fun. By contrast, the most explicit piece of Tina's life is some interesting, edgy poetry that she reads for him now, two months in the past and sitting alone in her little bedroom, surrounded by a small nation of semi-intelligent, big-eyed stuffed animals.