Table of Contents
HUMAN FUTURES
PART ONE The ROBOT’S GIRL
SAVANT SONGS
RIDING in MEXICO
The WAR of the FLOWERS
TRAINER of WHALES
STAR of HUMANITY
MY FATHER’S SINGULARITY
PART TWO The TRELLIS
SECOND SHIFT
BLOOD BONDS
PART THREE The HEBRAS and the DEMONS and the DAMNED
The STREET of ALL DESIGNS
PART FOUR MY GRANDFATHER’S RIVER
TEA with JILLIAN
FOR the LOVE of MECHANICAL MINDS
ENTROPY and EMERGENCE
ALIEN GRAVEYARDS
A HAND and HONOR
MIND EXPEDITIONS
PART FIVE FOR the LOVE of METAL DOGS
CRACKING the SKY
STORY NOTES
PUBLICATION NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRENDA COOPER
Award-winning author Brenda Cooper’s first science fiction only collection treats readers to human stories about the future. Meet a physicist who searches across timelines in a desperate attempt to travel across them herself, a young woman who tried to re-cover the magic of a trip on a river with her grandfather, a young couple who suspect their neighbor child is being raised by robots, and many more…
Also by Brenda Cooper
Edge of Dark
Beyond the Waterfall Door
The Creative Fire
The Diamond Deep
Mayan December
The Silver Ship and the Sea
Reading the Wind
Wings of Creation
Building Harlequin’s Moon (with Larry Niven)
CRACKING THE SKY
A Fairwood Press Book
August 2015
Copyright © 2015 Brenda Cooper
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Fairwood Press
21528 104th Street Court East
Bonney Lake, WA 98391
www.fairwoodpress.com
Cover and book design by Patrick Sweson
ISBN: 978-1-933846-50-7
First Fairwood Press Edition: August 2015
Printed in the United States of America
eISBN: 978-1-62579-465-9
Digital version by Baen Ebooks
Dedicated to all of the editors out there. I appreciate those of you who bought these stories, and also every rejection. Together, your choices influence who we become.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Every book is ultimately created by one person, held up on the hands of a willing crowd of helpers. For this collection, I want to first and foremost thank Patrick Swenson for suggesting it and for pushing me along until I actually did it.
I also want to thank Joy Adiletta, who read through the ARC and hunted down mistakes.
As always, I’m grateful for my family. I also want to thank every one of my readers. You are the most important people in every way.
HUMAN FUTURES
by James Van Pelt
Every year, Brenda Cooper attends a writers retreat at the Rainforest Writers Village in Lake Quinault, Washington. The rainforest is an excellent venue for writing. Cell phone reception is spotty, and the sole internet connection is slow and unreliable. The environment stands as a challenge to the high-tech, connected world that most of us live in. But it is in this throwback, slow-paced venue that Brenda’s writing soars into possible futures where robot dogs compete with flesh and bone ones on the battlefield, electronic nannies raise a little girl, an autistic physics genius communes with parallel universes, and brain to brain remote viewing brings to life the reality of third world lives.
Of course, the rainforest retreat is only a few days of the year. As far as I can tell, Brenda writes all the time, whether it’s at a writers retreat, or after work for the City of Kirkland, Washington, where she’s the city’s Chief Information Officer (doesn’t that sound like a Star Trek bridge officer position?), or in between gigs as a public speaker, or when she’s not blogging in her role as a futurist. Brenda has a free-range mind. I don’t think what’s going on around her, whether it’s the hiss of a rainforest afternoon shower, or the bustle of a busy city office, impacts what’s going on inside her head.
Happily for us, she shares her head, as she has in the outstanding collection of pure science fiction short stories you are holding right now. Here’s what you get with Brenda Cooper short stories: rigorous, interesting extrapolations about our possible futures. One of this genre’s greatest gifts is in its capacity to ask “what if?” For Brenda, some of the what-ifs include a way we might care for special needs children that enriches their lives, how life in an underwater city might present unusual challenges (and unusual allies—there’s this great bit about whale sentience . . . whoops! Almost got into a plot spoiler there), what a life-threatening tragedy on Pluto might feel like, and how a truly long distance relationship between an earthbound woman and an isolated astronaut might play out.
Brenda “gets” the exploratory nature of science fiction. Her stories are intrinsically about their science fictional settings. They aren’t stories with tired, traditional, familiar science fiction tropes. I think you can read Brenda’s stories just for the ideas. There’s a reason that part of her day job is being a futurist.
But Brenda’s speculations about the future are not the sole payoff by a long shot. The second gift in these stories is their heart. Each story paints a picture about human relationships that are emotional, passionate and vital. One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Blood Bonds.” I’m not going to spoil any part of it, but I can tell you that I haven’t read a story that tied so closely intricate and fascinating scientific speculation about consciousness and artificial intelligence with such a delicately rendered portrait of a pair of sisters.
She does this in all of the stories! If you want a quick taste, skip straight to “My Grandfather’s River.” Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute.
Back so soon? See what I mean?
So much in literature lately seems tied up in the long form. Big, fat fantasies fill the bookstore’s shelves. Multi-book series are the rage. However, science fiction’s roots lie in the short story. I think of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Alice Sheldon writing as James Tiptree Jr., Zenna Henderson, and so many others who lured young minds with short stories. Remember those great, old magazines: Galaxy, Worlds of If, Omni, and Fantastic Stories? Brenda would be at home between any of their covers. Oh, Brenda’s written her share of novels too (I particularly like Creative Fire). She knows narrative forms, but we’re lucky readers because Brenda can go short, too.
What you’ll find here is Brenda’s masterful blend of hard-edged speculation tied to insightful evocations of the human spirit.
You are all so fortunate: you get to read these stories for the first time.
PART ONE
On a Future Earth
The ROBOT’S GIRL
The door’s silent slide still surprised me, even after Aliss and I’d been moving boxes into our new garage and piling them in unruly heaps for two days. Hair stuck to my neck as sweat ran down the small of my back and the backs of my knees. Our real estate agent had told me it never got hot here, but apparently she lied about the weather as easily as she lied about the closing costs. So we were too broke for household help and hot from humping boxes. But we were here.
Home.
And done working f
or the evening.
I gathered up a cold beer from the gleaming fridge, which opened and closed for me the same way the front door did, eerily quiet and efficient. I’d grown up with doors you opened and closed with human muscle. My last house had been built-green when that meant saving energy instead of producing it. Trust humanity not to waste anything free when you can use a lot of it.
The high ceilings and three tall stories made the house seem like it yearned to join the cedar and fir forest. It made me feel like a pretender. We’d bought here, across the lake from Seattle, with returns from a few good investments and a dead aunt. The sliding door opened for me (of course). It allowed me outside onto a deck that glowed honey-colored in a late afternoon sun-bath. No matter how pretty the deck and the house and the forest around us, the woman on the deck was prettier than all of it. Aliss’d caught her dark hair up in a ponytail that cascaded almost to her waist, thick as my wrist both top and bottom. Sweat shined her olive skin, and she smelled like work and coffee and the rich red syrah she held in her right hand. She pointed at the neighbors, a good three house-lengths away from us. “In five minutes, I’ve seen two humanoid bots over there.”
“So they’re rich. Maybe we can borrow one for gardening.” Not that I minded gardening; dirty nails felt good.
“There’s another one.”
The curiosity in her voice demanded I stop and look. A silver-skinned female form bent over a row of bright yellow ceramic flowerpots on the deck outside the three-story house, plucking dead pink and purple flower-heads from a profusion of living color, dropping her finds into a bucket as silver as her hands. I sucked down half the beer, watching. Counting. Three bots. One outside. Two or three little ones moving around the house, the ones that didn’t look like people. Families in our newly acquired income bracket might have one of the big humanoid ones, but only if they needed a nanny more than flashy cars or designer clothes. Maybe a handful of robovacs and robodisposers and robowashers, like the ones sitting on a pallet in our garage right now.
“I haven’t seen any people,” Aliss mused.
“Maybe they work.”
Her eyes stayed narrow, her jaw tight and jumping a little back by her ear, and she rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. I knew what that meant. “Guess we’re talking a walk.”
“Got to meet the neighbors, right?”
I’d actually been thinking about sliding into the hot tub naked and having another beer. But this was our first house together, and I wanted her to be happy. “Let’s go introduce ourselves.”
Our driveway gave under our feet, the heat drawing up a hint of its origin as old tires, but not so much it overwhelmed the loamy forest dirt spiced with cedar. Aliss and I turned onto the road, hand in hand. Meeting the neighbors felt like a picket fence choice, like something my mom would do. We turned off the road onto their driveway.
Red light lasered across our bare shins. “Stop now.”
Aliss drew in a sharp breath and squeezed my hand before letting it go and freezing in place.
“State your business.” I followed the voice to a spot about fifteen feet in front of me, and about knee-high. The guard-bot was the same pebbly-dark color as the driveway, cylindrical, with more than two feet, and not standing still, which is what kept me from counting feet. This bot was neither pretty nor humanoid. In fact, a bright blue circle with a red target stickered in its side screamed weapons.
I talked soft to it. “We’re the new neighbors. We came to introduce ourselves.”
Its voice sounded cheerfully forced, like a slightly tinny villain in a superhero movie. “Aliss Johnson and Paul Dina. Twenty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively. You have been here for precisely sixty-seven hours . . .”
I waved it silent before it got around to checking our bank balance and running us off entirely. “So, then you know we’re harmless. We’d like to meet your owners.”
“They are not home.”
Aliss still hadn’t moved, but she asked it, “When will they come back?”
It turned a full 360, as if someone else might have snuck up behind it, and then said, “Please back up until you are off the property line.”
We backed, all the nice warm fuzziness of being in a new home turned sideways. After we’d turned away from the house and the bot, my back itched. I whispered in Aliss’s ear, “Not very nice neighbors.”
She grunted, her brow furrowed.
“Maybe we should jump in the hot tub.”
She gave me a pouty, unhappy look. “They were watching us.”
I didn’t remind her she’d been watching them. I just hugged her close, still whispering, “This is our first night here. Let’s enjoy it.”
She stopped me right there in the middle of the road, at the edge of our own property line, and nuzzled my neck. When she looked up at me, the slight distraction in her gaze told me I wouldn’t have all of her attention easily. I made a silent vow to figure out a way to get it all, and started my devious plot by sliding my hand down the small of her back and pulling her close into me. We walked home with our hips brushing each other.
The next morning, warmth from her attention still lingered in the relaxed set of my shoulders and the way my limbs splayed across the bed like rubber. Birds sang so loudly they might have been recorded. I tried to separate them, figure out how many species must be outside.
“Honey?” she called. With some reluctance I opened my eyes to find Aliss standing on the small deck outside the bedroom, one of my shirts her only clothing. Fog enveloped the treetops outside our third-story window, tinting the morning ghostly white and gray. “Will you come here?”
Since she was wearing my shirt, I pulled on my jeans and joined her, drinking in a deep whiff of us smelling like each other. Although we couldn’t see the house from any of our windows, the deck had a nearly direct view into the robot house’s kitchen, the fog and one thin tree trunk the only obstructions. Three silvery figures moved about inside of a square of light that shone all the more brightly for the fog.
I put a hand on Aliss’s shoulder, leaning into her. “Since robots don’t need food, there must be people there.”
“Don’t you see her?”
I squinted. At the table, a girl sat sideways to us, spooning something from her bowl into her mouth. She wore a white polo shirt and brown shorts, and her blond hair was curled back artfully behind her ears and tied with a gold bow. She belonged in a commercial. Across from her, one of the robots appeared to be holding an animated conversation with her.
“How old do you think she is?” Aliss asked.
She still had a child’s lankiness and a flat chest, but she was probably near as tall as Aliss. “Ten? Twelve?”
“She’s alone.”
“You don’t know that.” Although her observations were often uncanny.
“It explains the nasty-bots. They were protecting her. But it’s not right.”
“Her mom or dad will show up any second.”
Aliss crossed her arms over her chest and gave me the look. “No cars, still. No movement except the girl. No other lights on. She’s alone. It’s a crime to leave a girl that age alone.”
I glanced back at the window, where one robot was clearly conversing with the girl and another was bringing her a fresh glass of juice. “She’s not alone.”
All I got for that was the look again. I tugged her close to me. “Come on, let’s eat. She must have parents.”
“I hope so.” Aliss let me pull her gaze away from the bright square of window and its even brighter occupants.
Days later, we sat on new recycled-sawdust Adirondack chairs we’d ordered for the bedroom deck. The table between us held two coffee cups and two pairs of binoculars and a camera. Aliss hadn’t moved from her chair for two hours. She worried at her beautiful lower lip. “No parents. No people. Not for five days.”
“They’ll come.” Not that I believed it any more. “Maybe there’s someone living there who never comes into the kitchen.”
“That’s lame.”
“I’m reaching. I want my girl back.”
“Don’t be selfish.”
At least she had a little tease in her voice when she said it.
We met the neighbors—not at the robot house, but across the street. William and Wilma Woods. Really. They were at least eighty. Their kids hired bot-swarms to clean up their yard for them, but obviously did nothing for the inside of the house. The Woods probably couldn’t see well enough to tell if there was a purple people eater living in the robot house, and when we asked about it, William pulled his lips up into his hollow cheeks and said, “The new house? I dunno who lives there. We don’t get out much.”
He meant us. We lived in the new house.
The house on the other side of us from the robot house stood empty-eyed and vacant, with a traditional security system that included signs and warnings of proximity detectors. Forest took over for half a mile on the far side of the robot before it yielded a barn-shaped house next to a barn with a corral and three swaybacked horses. The offbeat collection of direct neighbors made me wonder if we’d picked the right house to buy. The robot house was clearly our problem, at least in the world according to Aliss. And since she was my world, it mattered to me. In fact, after days of watching the little girl play ball with robots and eat with robots and study at the kitchen table with the help of robots, I was beginning to worry all on my own. Surely the kid needed a mom or a brother or a dog or something. Something warm.
I have some skill with the nets, but all that got me was frustrated. A holding company owned the house. A public company owned that company and a few hundred more. It spread wealth—a lot more than this house—through thousands of shareholders. Not a very unique tax dodge for second or third homes. All it told me was the girl—or her family—or the freaking robots—had money. Which I already knew. I grit my teeth and kept plugging while Aliss brought me coffee and rubbed my neck. We saw the girl bent over the table studying every day, but I couldn’t find her in public school, online or offline. No kids of her description had been reported missing anywhere in the country.
Cracking the Sky Page 1
