Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  But the teenage boy would accept none of that. “You know, don’t you? That these aliens are just lying to us? They’re afraid of human beings, because they know we’re the toughest, meanest things in the universe. And we’re going to take them on.”

  For a long moment, Dr. Smith held silent.

  Then the boy continued his game, and into the mayhem of blasters, the father mouthed a single dismissive word: “Children.”

  Eighteen months later, the fledging Web network declared bankruptcy, and a small consortium acquired its assets, including Invasion of a Small World. Eager to recoup their investment, the new owners offered all eight episodes as a quick-and-dirty DVD package. When sales proved somewhat better than predicted, a new version was cobbled together, helped along by a genuine ad budget. The strongest initial sales came from the tiny pool of determined fans—young and well-educated, with little preference for nationality or gender. But the scientists in several fields, astronomy and paleontology included, were the ones who created a genuine buzz that eventually put Invasion into the public eye.

  The famous sixth episode helped trigger the interest: That weak, rambling tale of Dr. Smith, his family and students, was temporarily suspended. Instead, the full fifty-three minutes were dedicated to watching a barren world spinning silently in deep space. According to corporate memos, the last three episodes arrived via the Web, bundled in a single package. But it was this episode that effectively killed the series. There were no explanations. Nothing showed but the gray world spinning, twenty minutes before the point-of-view gradually pulled away. The world was just a tiny speck of metal lost in the vastness of space. For astronomers, it was a fascinating moment—a vivid illustration that the universe could be an exceedingly boring place. Stars were distant points of light, and there was only silence, and even when millions of years were compressed into a nap-length moment, nothing was produced that could be confused for great theatre.

  But what the astronomers liked best—what got the buzz going—were the final few minutes of the episode. Chance brought the tiny starship into the solar system, and chance guided it past a younger Saturn. The giant moon, Titan, swung close before the ship was kicked out to Neptune’s orbit. Then it drifted sunward again, Mars near enough to reveal its face. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Titan was bathed in a much denser atmosphere, while Mars was a temporarily wet world, heated by a substantial impact event. Experts in those two worlds were impressed. Only in the last year or two, probes had discovered what Invasion predicted on its own, including pinpointing the impact site near the Martian South Pole.

  In much the same way, episode seven made the paleontologists crazy.

  With its long voyage finished, the tiny starship struck the Earth’s upper atmosphere, quickly losing its momentum as well as a portion of its hull. The great southern continent was rendered accurately enough to make any geologist smile, while the little glimpses of Permian ecosystems were even more impressive. Whoever produced the series (and there was a growing controversy on that matter), they had known much about protomammals and the early reptiles, cycads and tree ferns. One ancient creature—lizard in form, though not directly related to any modern species—was the only important misstep. Yet five months later, a team working in South Africa uncovered a set of bones that perfectly matched what a vanished dramatic series had predicted … and what was already a cultish buzz grew into a wild, increasingly public cacophony …

  At least forty thousand sites—chat rooms and blogs and such—were dedicated to supporting the same inevitable conclusion.

  By means unknown, aliens had sent a message to earthlings, and it took the form of Invasion of a Small World.

  The eighth episode was a genuine treasure.

  Dr. Smith reappeared. Several years older, divorced, and with his belly fat stripped off by liposuction, he was shown wandering happily through a new life of endless celebrity. His days and long evenings were spent with at least three mistresses as well as a parade of world leaders. Accustomed to the praise of others, he was shown grinning confidently while offering his interpretations of the ancient message. The universe was almost certainly sprinkled with life, he explained. But despite that prolificacy, the cosmos remained an enormous, very cold, and exceptionally poor place. The gulfs between living worlds were completely unbridgeable. No combination of raw energy and questing genius could build a worthy stardrive. Moreover, even direct communication between local species was rarely worth its considerable cost, since civilizations rarely if ever offered each other anything with genuine worth.

  “Technology has distinct limits,” he warned the starlets and world leaders that he met at cocktail parties. “Humans are already moving into the late stages of scientific endeavor. What matters most, to us and to any wise species, is the careful shepherding of energy and time. That is why we must care for our world and the neighboring planets inside our own little solar system. We must treasure every day while wasting nothing, if only to extend our histories as far as into the future as possible.”

  “That strikes me as such depressing news,” said one prime minister—a statuesque woman blessed with a starlet’s beautiful face. “If there really are millions and billions of living worlds, as you claim, and if all the great minds on all of those worlds are thinking hard about this single problem, shouldn’t somebody learn how to cheat the speed of light or create free energy through some clever trick?”

  “If that were so,” Dr. Smith replied, “then every world out there would be alive, and the giant starships would arrive at our doorstep every few minutes. But instead, human experience has discovered precisely one starfaring vessel, and it was a grain of metallic dust, and to reach us it had to be exceptionally lucky, and, even then, it had to wait a quarter of a billion years to be noticed.”

  The prime minister sipped her virgin mary while chewing on her lower lip. Then with a serious tone, she said, “But to me … there seems to be another reasonable explanation waiting for our attention …”

  “Which would be what, madam?”

  “Subterfuge,” she offered. “The aliens are intentionally misleading us about the nature of the universe.”

  Bristling, he asked, “And why would they do such a thing?”

  “To cripple our future,” she replied. “By convincing us to remain home, they never have to face us between the stars.”

  “Perhaps you’re right to think that, madam,” said the old astronomer, nodding without resolve. Then in his final moment in the series’ final episode, he said, “A lie is as good as a pill, if it helps you sleep …”

  For years, every search to uncover the creative force behind Invasion of a Small World came up empty. And in the public mind, that single mystery remained the final, most compelling part of the story.

  Former executives with the doomed network had never directly met with the show’s producers. But they could recount phone conversations and teleconferences and e-mails exchanged with three apparent producers. Of course, by then, it was possible to invent a digital human face and voice while weaving a realistic mix of human gestures. Which led some to believe that slippery forces were plainly at work here—forces that no human eye had ever witnessed.

  Tracking down the original production company produced only a dummy corporation leading to dusty mailboxes and several defunct Web addresses. Every name proved fictional, both among the company’s officers and those in the brief credits rolling at the end of each episode. Surviving tax forms lacked any shred of useful information. But where the IRS might have chased down a successful cheat, the plain truth was that whoever was responsible for Invasion had signed away all future rights in exchange for a puddle of cash.

  The few skeptics wondered if something considerably more ordinary was at play here. Rumors occasionally surfaced about young geniuses working in the Third World—usually in the Indian tech-cities. Employing pirated software and stolen equipment, they had produced what would eventually become the fifth most successful media event
in history. But in the short-term, their genius had led nowhere but to obscurity and financial ruin. Three different candidates were identified—young men with creative minds and most of the necessary skills. Did one of them build Invasion alone? Or was it a group effort? And was the project’s failure the reason why each of them committed suicide shortly after the series’ cancellation?

  But if they were the creators, why didn’t any trail lead to them? Perhaps because the consortium that held all rights to Invasion had obscured the existing evidence. And why? Obviously to help feed this infectious and delicious mood of suspicion. To maintain an atmosphere where no doubts could find a toehold, where aliens were conversing with humans, and where the money continued to flow to the consortium like a great green river.

  The most durable explanation was told by one of the series’ most devoted fans—a Nobel laureate in physics who was happy to beat the drum for the unthinkable. “Invasion is true everywhere but in the specifics,” he argued. “I think there really was an automated starship. But it was bigger than a couple grains of rice. As big as a fist, or a human head. But still small and unmanned. The ship entered our solar system during the Permian. With the bulk of it in orbit, pieces must have landed on our world. Scouts with the size and legs of small cockroaches, maybe. Maybe. And if you take the time to think it through, you see that it would be a pretty silly strategy, letting yourself become a tiny fossil in some enormous bed of mudstone. What are the odds that you’d survive for 250 million years, much else ever get noticed there?

  “No, if you are an automated starship, what would be smart is for that orbiting mothership to take a seat where nothing happens and she can see everything. On the moon, I’d guess. She still has the antennas that she used to hear the scouts’ reports. She sleeps and waits for radio signals from the Earth, and when they arrive, she studies what she hears. She makes herself into a student of language and technology. And when the time is ripe—when she has a product to sell—she expels the last of her fuel, leaving the moon to land someplace useful. Which is pretty much anywhere, these days.

  “Looking like a roach, maybe, she connects to the Web and offers her services at a cut-rate price.

  “And that is how she delivers her message.

  “Paraphrasing my fictional colleague, ‘A lie is as good as a truth, if it leads you to enlightenment.’”

  The final scene in the last episode only seemed anticlimactic. The one-time graduate student, Mary, had been left behind by world events. From the beginning, her critical part in the research had been downplayed. But the series’ creator, whoever or whatever it was, saw no useful drama in that treachery. The woman was middle-aged and happy in her obscurity, plain as always and pregnant for at least the second time.

  A ten-year-old daughter was sitting beside Mary, sharing a threadbare couch.

  The girl asked her mother what she believed. Was the universe really so empty and cold? And was this the way it would always be?

  Quietly, her mother said, “I think that’s basically true, yes.”

  The girl looked saddened.

  But then Mary patted her daughter on the back of a hand, smiling with confidence. “But dear, I also believe this,” she said. “Life is an invasion wherever it shows itself. It is relentless and it is tireless, and it conquers every little place where living is possible. And before the universe ends, all the good homes will know the sounds of wet breathing and the singing of glorious songs.”

  © 2006 Robert Reed.

  Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Robert Reed is the author of more than 200 short stories, which have been published in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Daily SF, and Tor.com. Much of his short work has been collected in three volumes: The Dragons of Springplace, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas. Reed is a Hugo Award winner (and an eight-time nominee), and he has also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and John W. Campbell awards. His latest novel, The Well of Stars, is part of his Great Ship milieu, in which he is currently writing a new trilogy.

  PauseTime

  Mary Soon Lee

  Twenty minutes into the transatlantic flight, Connor started wailing. Pauline cradled him in her arms. Then she rocked him, she offered him her breast, she sang to him; Connor continued to cry.

  The man sitting on her right gave her a thin smile. “Did you forget the baby’s pauser code?”

  “No,” Pauline mumbled, wishing she could sink through the floor into the cargo hold. “I’ve never used the pauser.”

  Connor quieted just long enough for her words to carry to the neighbouring rows. Indignant heads swivelled to glare at her.

  “Unbelievable,” said a woman with a Bronx accent, pretending to talk to her husband, but making sure Pauline heard. “Travelling with an unpaused infant should be illegal.”

  Her cheeks burning, Pauline stood up with Connor. She contorted her way along the aisle to the restroom. Inside, she checked Connor’s forehead. He didn’t feel warm, but maybe the pressure change had affected his ears, even though she had inserted AirEase discs before take-off.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she told Connor, trying to sway him from side to side without touching the sink or the toilet. He was eight weeks old, and she’d managed not to pause him once, not even when she was exhausted after the delivery. As soon as she had learned she was pregnant, she had resolved never to use the pauser except in a medical emergency. She knew that most parents used PauseTime without a second thought, but she couldn’t persuade herself to join them. Not after how she had grown up.

  But Connor looked so devastated, she couldn’t bear it. She cuddled him a minute longer, then pulled down his blanket, and tapped the four-digit code into the pauser-belt round his waist. He vanished, replaced by a baby-shaped darkness, neither cold nor warm, that she couldn’t press her finger into. His little outfit clung to the edge of the darkness.

  Pauline stepped out of the restroom, telling herself she had made the right decision. A stewardess whisked the paused bundle from her before she could say anything, and stowed it in the rack with the other infants.

  Pauline found Connor’s third month the hardest yet. She had paid for a nurse to stay with her the first week, and then she had hired a home help to come three hours a day. Unfortunately she couldn’t afford long-term help, so now she and Connor were entirely on their own. Whenever Connor napped, she struggled with chores and a huge backlog of work.

  Pauline worked mainly from her two-room flat, designing reactive pictures for people with digital walls. During her pregnancy, she had imagined Connor playing happily in the corner while she sat at the computer. Connor had other ideas. He liked to be held. Unless he was sound asleep, he roused when she laid him in his crib.

  On good days, he snoozed in her lap as she programmed. On bad days, he craved motion. She switched to data-shades and a voice interface so that she could walk around as she worked, carrying Connor in a sling. But it took twice as long to design even simple animates, and after she tripped over a trash can—too absorbed by the digital overlay to notice where she was actually walking—she abandoned that idea.

  Laundry piled up everywhere: Connor spat up on his clothes, on her clothes, on the sheets, on the sofa; his self-cleaning nappies leaked.

  A dozen times a day, Pauline was tempted to use the pauser for the second time. But the nights, which she had dreaded, proved easier. When Connor woke up in his crib, she lifted him into the bed beside her. His mouth would open and close in a blind search for her nipple before he latched on, his body a warm snuggle against hers.

  It took her brother’s visit to break Pauline’s resolve. Harold phoned up one afternoon to say he was in London for a business meeting, and planned to drop by for breakfast at nine the next morning.

  Pauline panicked. Sh
e called every cleaning service in the city, but none could come at such short notice. She carried Connor around the flat while she bagged the dirty laundry. She walked him to the baker’s where she paid a ridiculous sum to have fresh croissants delivered by seven the next day. But when she started vacuuming the floor, Connor howled—and she reached for the pauser-belt and tapped in the code.

  Furious with herself, she tidied up in a frenzy, while Connor’s silent silhouette lay motionless on the sofa. She barely saw her brother anymore. All her life, she’d been trying to catch up with Harold, to be even half as witty, half as successful, half as confident as he. But Harold lived in a mansion in an exclusive suburb of Paris with three children, a devoted wife, and a team of top-of-the-line robot servitors. However clean her rented flat, she’d hardly manage to impress him.

  She told herself Connor wasn’t suffering, wasn’t feeling anything at all. She remembered being paused herself: the brief dislocation as the world flicked ahead—seeing her father wearing a different suit, or finding the lights on and the curtains drawn instead of morning sunlight—nothing more than that. PauseTime itself hadn’t hurt at all, her body skipping past the intervening minutes without a single breath, heartbeat, thought. And surely Connor was too young to understand or mind that he had been paused.

  She had no reason to feel guilty, no reason at all. Many parents used pausers regularly, some of them only unpausing their children at the weekends. Maybe people like that should join a Pauser Help Circle or seek professional counselling, but she had only used the pauser twice. It was ridiculous to fret about it.

  Harold phoned at eight thirty in the morning. “I’m so sorry, Paulie, something came up. I promise I’ll see you and …” a hesitation while he must have checked his wrist-computer “… Connor next time I’m passing through. Must dash.”