“I’m the evidence. Son, I don’t think I actually told you what I experienced.” He leaned closer; involuntarily Eliot leaned back. “It was Zeus, but it was also Odin, was Christ, was . . . oh, let me think . . . was Isis and Sedna and Bumba and Quetzalcoatl. It was all of them and none of them because the images were in my mind. Of course they were, where else could they possibly be? But here’s the thing—the images are unimportant. They’re just metaphors, and not very good ones—arrows pointing to something that has neither image nor words, but just is. That thing is—how can I explain this?—the world behind the world. Didn’t you ever feel in childhood that all at once you sort of glimpsed a flash of a great mystery underlying everything, a bright meaning to it all? I know you did because everybody does. Then we grow up and lose that. But it’s still there, bright and shining as solid as . . . as an end table, or a pig. I saw it and now I know it exists in a way that goes beyond any need to question its existence—the way I know, for instance, that prime numbers are infinite. It’s the world beyond the world, the space filled with shining light, the mystery. Do you see?”
“No!”
“Well, that’s because you didn’t experience it. But if I can find the right mathematics, that’s a better arrow than verbal metaphors can ever be.”
Eliot saw in his father’s eyes the gleam of fanaticism. “Dad!” he cried, in pure anguish, but Dr. Tremling only put his hand on Eliot’s knee, a startlingly rare gesture of affection, and said, “Wait, son. Just wait.”
Eliot couldn’t wait. His English assignment was due by third period, which began, with the logic of high school scheduling, at 10:34 a.m. No late assignments were accepted. His tablet on his knees on the crowded bus, Eliot wrote: Memory is not a room or a bridge or a corn stalk with blight. Memory is not a metaphor because nothing is a metaphor. Metaphors are constructions of a fanciful imagination, not reality. In reality everything is what it is, and that is—or certainly should be!—enough for anybody!
The little boy sitting next to him said, “Hey, man, you hit that thing so hard, you gonna break it.”
“Shut up,” Eliot said.
“Get fucked,” the kid answered.
But Eliot already was.
Dr. Tremling came home three weeks later. He was required to see a therapist three times a week. Aunt Sue bustled over, cooked for two days straight, and stocked the freezer with meals. When Eliot and his father sat down to eat, Dr. Tremling’s eye twitched convulsively. Meals were the only time they met. His father chewed absently and spoke little, but then, that had always been true. The rest of the time he stayed in his study, working. Eliot did not ask on what. He didn’t want to know.
Everything felt suspended. Eliot went to school, took his AP classes, expressed scorn for the jocks and goths who teased him, felt superior to his teachers, read obsessively—all normal. And yet not. One day, when his father was at a therapy session, Eliot slid into Dr. Tremling’s study and looked at his notebooks and, to the extent he could find them amid such sloppy electronic housekeeping, his computer files. There didn’t seem to be much notation, and what there was, Eliot couldn’t follow. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all. And his father appeared to have invented a new symbol for something, a sort of Olympic thunderbolt that seemed to have left- and right-handed versions. Eliot groaned and closed the file.
Only once did Eliot ask, “So how’s it going, Dad?”
“It’s difficult,” Dr. Tremling said.
No shit. “Have you had any more . . . uh . . . incidents?”
“That’s irrelevant, son. I only needed one.” But his face twitched harder than ever.
Three weeks after he came home, Dr. Tremling gave up. He hadn’t slept for a few nights and his face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he was calm when he said to Eliot, “I’m going to have the operation.”
“You are?” Eliot’s heart leapt and then, inexplicably, sank. “Why? When?”
His father answered with something of his old precision. “Because there is no mathematics of a larger conscious entity. On Tuesday at eight in the morning. Dr. Tallman certified me able to sign my own papers.”
“Oh.” For a long terrible moment Eliot thought he had nothing more to say. But then he managed, “I’m sorry about the pig.”
“It’s not important,” Dr. Tremling said, which should have been the first clue.
On Tuesday Eliot rose at 5:00 a.m., and took a cab to the hospital. He sat with his father in Pre-Op, in a vibrantly and mistakenly orange waiting room during the operation, and beside his father’s bed in Post-Op. Dr. Tremling recovered well and came home a week later. He was quiet, subdued. When the new term started, he resumed teaching at the university. He read the professional journals, weeded the garden, fended off his sister. Nobody mentioned the incident, and Dr. Tremling never did, either, since hospital tests had verified that it was gone from his memory. Everything back to normal.
But not really. Something had gone missing, Eliot thought—some part of his father that, though inarticulate, had made his eyes shine at a breakthrough in mathematics. That had made him love pigs. That had led him, in passion, to fling bad student problem sets and blockhead professional papers across the room, as later he would fling furniture. Something was definitely missing.
“Isn’t it wonderful that Carl is exactly the way he used to be?” enthused Aunt Sue. “Modern medicine is just amazing!”
Eliot didn’t answer her. On the way home from school, he got off the bus one stop early. He ducked into the Safeway as if planning to rob it, carrying out his purchase more secretively than he’d ever carried out the Trojans he never got to use. In his room, he locked the door, opened the grocery boxes, and spread out their contents on the bed.
On the dresser.
On the desk, beside his calculus homework.
On the computer keyboard.
When there were no other surfaces left, on the not-very-clean carpet.
Then, hoping, he stared at the toaster pastries until his head ached and his eyes crossed from strain.
Eliot wrote, “Metaphor is all we have.” But the assignment had been due weeks ago, and his teacher refused to alter his grade.
SCALES
Alastair Reynolds
The enemy must die.
Nico stands and waits in the long line, sweating under the electric-yellow dome of the municipal force field.
They must die.
Near the recruiting station, one of the captives has been wheeled out in a cage. The reptile is splayed in a harness, stretched like a frog on the dissection table. A steady stream of soldiers-in-waiting leaves the line, jabbing an electro-prod through the bars of the cage to a chorus of jeers. It’s about the size of a man, and surprisingly androform except for its crested lizard head, its stubby tail and the brilliant green shimmer of its scales. Already they’re flaking off, black and charred, where the prod touches. The reptile was squealing to start with, but it’s slumped and unresponsive now.
Nico turns his head away. He just wants the line to move ahead so he can sign up, obtain his citzenship credits and get out of here.
The enemy must die.
They came in from interstellar darkness, unprovoked, unleashing systematic destruction on unsuspecting human assets. They wiped mankind off Mars and blasted Earth’s lunar settlements into radioactive craters. They pushed the human explorers back into a huddle of defenses around Earth. Now they’ve brought the war to cities and towns, to the civilian masses. Now force shields blister Earth’s surface, sustained by fusion plants sunk deep into the crust. Nico’s almost forgotten what it’s like to look up at the stars.
But the tide is turning. Beneath the domes, factories assemble the ships and weapons to take the war back to the reptiles. Chinks are opening in the enemy’s armour. All that’s needed now are men and women to do Earth’s bidding.
One of the recruiting sergeants walks the line, handing out iced water and candies. He stops and chats to the soldiers-to-be, shaking them by th
e hand, patting them on the back. He’s a thirty-mission veteran; been twice as far out as the orbit of the moon. He lost an arm, but the new one’s growing back nicely, budding out from the stump like a baby’s trying to punch its way out of him. They’ll look after you too, he says, holding out a bottle of water.
“What’s the catch?” Nico asks.
“There isn’t one,” the sergeant says. “We give you citizenship and enough toys to take apart a planet. Then you go out there and kill as many of those scaly green bastards as you can.”
“Sounds good to me,” Nico says.
Up in the fortified holdfast of Sentinel Station, something’s different. The tech isn’t like the equipment Nico saw at the recruiting station, or in basic training back on Earth. It’s heavier, nastier, capable of doing more damage. Which would be reassuring, if it wasn’t for one troubling fact.
Earth has better ships, guns and armour than anyone down there has heard about—but then so do the reptiles.
Turns out they’re not exactly reptiles either. Not that Nico cares much. Cold-blooded or not, they still attacked without provocation.
The six months of in-orbit training at Sentinel Station are tough. Half the kids fall by the wayside. Nico’s come through, maybe not top of his class, but somewhere near it. He can handle the power-armour, the tactical weapons. He’s ready to be shown to his ship.
It’s not quite what he was expecting.
It’s a long, sleek, skull-grey shark of a machine that goes faster-than-light.
“Top secret, of course,” says the instructor. “We’ve been using it for interstellar intelligence gathering and resource-acquistion.”
“How long have we had this?”
The instructor grins. “Before you were born.”
“I thought we never had any ambitions beyond Mars,” says Nico.
“What about it?”
“But the reptiles came in unprovoked, they said. If we were already out there . . . ”
They haul him out after a couple of days in the coolbox. Any more of that kind of questioning and he’ll be sent back home with most of his memories scrubbed.
So Nico decides it’s not his problem. He’s got his gun, he’s got his armour and now he’s got his ride. Who cares who started the damned thing?
The FTL transport snaps back into normal space around some other star, heading for a blue gas giant and an outpost that used to be a moon. The place bristles with long-range sensors and the belligerent spines of anti-ship railguns. Chokepoint will be Nico’s home for the next year.
“Forget your armour certification, your weapons rating,” says the new instructor, a human head sticking out of an upright black life-support cylinder. “Now it’s time to get real.”
A wall slides back to reveal a hall of headless corpses, rank on rank of them suspended in green preservative.
“You don’t need bodies where you’re going, you just need brains.” she says. “You can collect your bodies on the way back home, when you’ve completed your tour. We’ll look after them.”
So they strip Nico down to little more than a head and a nervous system, and plug what’s left into a tiny, hyper-agile fighter. The battle lines are being drawn far beyond conventional FTL now. The war against the reptiles will be won and lost in the N-dimensional tangle of interconnected wormhole pathways.
Wired into the fighter, Nico feels like a god with armageddon at his fingertips—not that he’s really got fingertips. He doesn’t feel much like Nico any more. He cracks a wry smile at Chokepoint’s new arrivals, gawping at the bodies in the tanks. His old memories are still in there somewhere, but they’re buried under a luminous welter of tactical programming.
Frankly, he doesn’t miss them.
They’re not fighting the reptiles any more. Turns out they were just the organic puppets of an implacable, machine-based intelligence. The puppetmasters are faster and smarter and their strategic ambitions aren’t clear. But it doesn’t concern thing-that-was-once-Nico.
After all, it’s not like machines can’t die.
Strategic Command sends him deeper. He’s forwarded to an artificial construct actually embedded in the tangle, floating on a semi-stable node like a dark thrombosis. Nico’s past caring where the station lies in relation to real space.
No one fully human can get this far—the station is staffed by bottled brains and brooding artificial intelligences. With a jolt, thing-that-was-once-Nico realises that he doesn’t mind their company. At least they’ve got their priorities right.
At the station, thing-that-was-once-Nico learns that a new offensive has opened up against the puppetmasters, even further into the tangle. It’s harder to reach, so again he must be remade. His living mind is swamped by tiny machines, who build a shining scaffold around the vulnerable architecture of his meat brain. The silvery spikes and struts mesh into a fighter no larger than a drum of oil.
He doesn’t think much about his old body, back at Chokepoint, not any more.
The puppetmasters are just a decoy. Tactical analysis reveals them to be an intrusion into the wormhole tangle from what can only be described as an adjunct dimension. The focus of the military effort shifts again.
Now the organic matter at the core of thing-that-was-once-Nico’s cybernetic mind is totally obsolete. He can’t place the exact moment when he stopped thinking with meat and started thinking with machinery, and he’s not even sure it matters now. As an organism, he was pinned like a squashed moth between two pages in the book of existence. As a machine, he can be endlessly abstracted, simulated unto the seventh simulation, encoded and pulsed across the reality-gap, ready to kill.
This he—or rather it—does.
And for a little while there is death and glory.
Up through the reality stack, level by level. By now it’s not just machines versus machines. It’s machines mapped into byzantine N-dimensional spaces, machines as ghosts of machines. The terms of engagement have become so abstract—so, frankly, higher-mathematical—that the conflict is more like a philosophical dialogue, a debate between protagonists who agree on almost everything except the most trifling, hair-splitting details.
And yet it must still be to the death—the proliferation of one self-replicating, pan-dimensional class of entities is still at the expense of the other.
When did it begin? Where did it begin? Why?
Such questions simply aren’t relevant or even answerable anymore.
All that matters is that there is an adversary, and the adversary must be destroyed.
Eventually—although even the notion of time’s passing is now distinctly moot—the war turns orthogonal. The reality stack is itself but one compacted laminate of something larger, so the warring entities traverse mind-wrenching chasms of meta-dimensional structure, their minds in constant, self-evolving flux as the bedrock of reality shifts and squirms beneath them.
And at last the shape of the enemy becomes clear.
The enemy is vast. The enemy is inexorably slow. As its peripheries are mapped, it gradually emerges that the enemy is a class of intellect that the machines barely have the tools to recognise, let alone understand.
It’s organic.
It is multi-form and multi-variant. It hasn’t been engineered or designed. It’s messy and contingent, originating from the surface of a structure, a higher-mathematical object. It’s but one of several drifting on geodesic trajectories through what might loosely be termed “space.” Arcane fluids slosh around on the surface of this object, and the whole thing is gloved in a kind of gas. The enemy requires technology, not just to sustain itself, but to propagate its warlike ambitions.
Triumph over the organic is a cosmic destiny the machines have been pursuing now through countless instantiations. But to kill the enemy now, without probing deeper into its nature, would be both inefficient and unsubtle. It would waste machines that could be spared if the enemy’s weaknesses were better understood. And what better way to probe those weaknesses than to create an
other kind of living thing, an army of puppet organisms, and send that army into battle? The puppets may not win, but they will force the adversary to stretch itself, to expose aspects of itself now hidden.
And so they are sent. Volunteers, technically—although the concept of “volunteer” implies a straightforward altruism difficult to correlate with the workings of the machines’ multi-dimensional decision-making matrices. The flesh is grown in huge hangars full of glowing green vats, then shaped into organisms similar but not identical to the enemy. Into those vast, mindless bodies are decanted the thin, gruel-like remains of compactified machine intellects. It’s not really anything the machines would recognise as intelligence, but it gets the job done.
Memories kindle briefly back to life as compactification processes shuffle through ancient data, untouched for subjective millenia, searching for anything that might offer a strategic advantage. Among the fleeting sensations, the flickering visions, one of the machines recalls standing in line under an electric-yellow sky, waiting for something. It hears the crackle of an electro-prod, smells the black char of burning tissue.
The machine hesitates for a moment, then deletes the memory. Its new green-scaled puppet body is ready, it has work to do.
The enemy must die.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England. With a background in math and engineering, he is the author of over fifty novels and over a hundred published short stories. He has collaborated with Sir Arthur C. Clarke and is working on a new collaboration with Sir Terry Pratchett. Among his awards are BSFA awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, and Locus, Asimov, and Analog awards. His latest novel is Stone Spring, first of a new series.
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written four novels, including the New York Times bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.
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