Far Horizons

by Robert Silverberg

  Some of them were no longer remotely human, but rather coiled tubes of waxy flesh. Others resembled moving lumps of buttery bile. A man stood on one hand, his belly an accordion-pleated bulge, and as he moved oval fissures opened all over him, wheezing forth a fine yellow mist, long words moaning out: “I…am…a…holy…contri…vance…” and then a throttled gasp and “Help…me…be…what…I…am…”

  A sewer smell came swarming up from nearby. A woman gazed directly back into his eyes. She said nothing but her skin ran with tinkling streams of urine. Nearby a little girl was a concert of ropy pink cords, red-rimmed where they all tried to speak.

  The twelve spread out in a daze. Some recognized warped versions of people they had known. There were people here from far antiquity and places no one knew.

  Paris found an entire aisle of shivering couples, entwined in sexual acts made possible by organs designed in ways nature never had allowed: sockets filled by slithering rods, beings which palped and stroked themselves to a hastening pace that rose to a jellied frenzy, shrieked from fresh mouths, and then abated, only to begin again with a building rhythm.

  An Isis man was vomiting nearby. “We’ve got to save them,” he said when Paris went to help him.

  “Yeasay,” a woman pilot agreed. The survivors were drifting back together, pressed by the enveloping horror.

  A wretched nearby sculpture of guts that sprouted leaves managed to get out three words, “No…don’t…want…”

  Paris felt the fear and excitement of the last few hours ebbing from him, replaced by a rising, firm feeling he could not force out through his throat. He shook his head. The woman started to argue, saying that they could take the cases that had been deformed the least, try to free them from the alterations.

  Paris found his voice. “They want to go. Listen.”

  From the long axis that tapered away to infinity there rose a muttered, moaning, corpuscular symphony of anguish and defeat that in its accents and slurred cadences called forth the long corridor of ruin and affliction that was the lot of humanity here at Galactic Center, down through millennia.

  He stood listening. Parts of his mind rustled—moving uneasily, understanding.

  The Mantis sculptures got the most important facets profoundly wrong. The Mantis had tried to slice human sliding moments from the robed minds of the suredead, but it could not surecopy them: their essence lay in what was discarded from the billion-bit/second stream. In the mere passing twist and twinge of a second, humans truncated their universe with electrochemical knives.

  Hot-hearted, to humans death was the mother of beauty. Their gods were, in the end, refracted ways of bearing the precarious gait of the mortal.

  To Paris as a boy the compact equation eiπ+1="0" had comprised a glimpse of the eternal music of reason, linking the most important constants in the whole of mathematical analysis, 0, 1, e, π, and i. To Paris the simple line was beautiful.

  To a digitally filtered intelligence the analog glide of this relation would be different, not a glimpse of a vast and various landscape. Not better or worse, but irreducibly different.

  That he could never convey to the Mantis.

  Nor could he express his blood-deep rage, how deeply he hated the shadow that had dogged his life.

  But his fury was wise in a way that mere anger is not. He surprised himself: he breathed slowly, easily, feeling nothing but a granite resolve.

  Paris began killing the sculptures systematically. The others stood numbly and watched him, but their silence did not matter to him. He moved quickly, executing them with bolts, the work fixing him totally in the moment of it.

  He did not notice the sobbing.

  After a time he could not measure he saw that the others were doing the same, without discussion. No one talked at all.

  The wails of the sculptured people reverberated, moist glad cries as they saw what was coming.

  It took a long time.

  The Mantis was waiting outside the Hall of Humans, as Paris had felt it would be.

  I was unable to predict what you and the others did.

  “Good.” His pencil ship lifted away from the long gray cylinder, now a mausoleum to madness.

  I allowed it because those are finished pieces. Whereas you are a work in progress, perhaps my best.

  “I’ve always had a weakness for compliments.”

  He could feel his very blood changing, modulating oxygen and glucose from his body to feed his changing brain. The accretion disk churned below, a great lurid pinwheel grinding to an audience of densely packed stars.

  Humor is another facet I have mastered.

  “There’s a surprise.” Vectoring down, the boost pressing him back. “Very human, too. Everybody thinks he’s got a good sense of humor.”

  I expect to learn much from you.

  “Now?”

  You are ripe. Your fresh, thoroughly human reactions to my art will be invaluable.

  “If you let me live, you’ll get one or two centuries more experience when I finally die.”

  That is true, for yours has been an enticingly rich one, so far. There are reasons to envy the human limitations.

  “And now that I’ve seen your art, my life will be changed.”

  Truly? It is that affective with you, a member of its own medium? How?

  He had to handle this just right. “Work of such impact, it will take time for me to digest it.”

  You use a chemical-processing metaphor. Precisely a human touch, incorporating the most inefficient portions of your being. Nonetheless, you point to a possible major benefit for me if you are allowed to live.

  “I need time to absorb all this.”

  He could feel his body’s energy reserve sacrificing itself in preparation for the uploading process. He had come to understand himself for the first time as he killed the others. Some part of him, the Me, knew it all now. The I spoke haltingly. “I think you have truly failed to understand.”

  I can remedy that now.

  “No, that’s exactly what you won’t. You can’t know us this way.”

  I had a similar conversation with your father. He suggested that I invest myself in you.

  “But you won’t get it just by slicing and dicing us.”

  There is ample reason to believe that digital intelligences can fathom analog ones to any desired degree of accuracy.

  “The thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

  He felt intruding into him the sliding fingers of a vast, cool intellect, a dissolving sea. Soon he would be an empty shell. Paris would become part of the Mantis in the blending across representations, in their hologram logics. He could feel his neuronal wiring transfiguring itself. And accelerated.

  Art is everywhere in the cosmos. I particularly liked your ice sculptures, melting in the heat while audiences applauded. Your tapestry of dim senses and sharp pains and incomprehensible, nagging, emotional tones—I wish to attain that. An emergent property, quite impossible to predict.

  “Never happen. You could understand this if you would allow me to fill out my natural life span.”

  That is a telling point. I shall take a moment to ponder it. Meanwhile, cease your descent toward the accretion disk.

  Here was the chance. The Mantis would withdraw to consult all portions, as an anthology intelligence. That would give him seconds to act. He accelerated powerfully down. “Take your time.”

  For long moments he was alone with the hum of his tormented ship and the unfolding geysers outside, each storm bigger than a world.

  I have returned. I have decided, and shall harvest you now.

  “Sorry to hear that,” he said cheerfully. Dead men could afford pleasantries.

  I wish you could tell me why you desired to end all my works. But then, shortly, I shall know.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever understand.”

  Paris took his ship down toward the disk, through harrowing, hissing plumes of plasma.

  His I sensed great movements deep within
his Me and despite the climbing tones of alarms in his ship, he relaxed.

  Pressed hard by his climbing acceleration, he remembered all that he had seen and been, and bade it farewell.

  You err in your trajectory.

  “Nope.”

  You had to live in each gliding moment. This mantra had worked for him and he needed it more now. Cowardice—the real thing, not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future—with that he knew he could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.

  Correct course! Your craft does not have the ability to endure the curvatures required, flying so near the disk. Your present path will take you too close—

  “To the end, I know. Whatever that means.”

  His Arthur Aspect was shouting. He poked it back into its niche, calmed it, cut off its sensor link. No need to be cruel.

  Then Arthur spoke with a thin cry, echoing something Paris had thought long ago. The Aspect’s last salute:

  If Mind brought humans forth from Matter, enabling the universe to comprehend itself—to do its own homework—

  “Then maybe that’s why we’re here,” Paris whispered to himself.

  The only way to deprive the Mantis of knowledge no human should ever give up, was to erase that interior self, keep it from the consuming digital.

  He skimmed along the whipped skin of doomed incandescence. Ahead lay the one place from which even the Mantis could not retrieve him, the most awful of all abysses, a sullen dot beckoning from far across the spreading expanse of golden luminance. Not even the Mantis could extract him from there.

  Paris smiled and said good-bye to it all and accelerated hard, hard.

  THE SHIP WHO SANG

  Anne McCaffrey

  The Ship Who Sang (1970)

  The Partnership (with Margaret Ball) (1992)

  The Ship Who Searched (with Mercedes Lackey) (1992)

  The City Who Fought (with S.M. Stirling) (1993)

  The Ship Who Won (with Jody Lynn Nye) (1994)

  “She was born a thing and as such would have been condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies. There was always the possibility that though the limbs were twisted, the mind was not; that though the ears would hear only dimly, the eyes see vaguely, the mind behind them was receptive and alert.

  “The electro-encephalogram was entirely favorable, unexpectedly so, and the news was brought to the waiting, grieving parents. There was the final, harsh decision: to give their child euthanasia or permit it to become an encapsulated ‘brain,’ a guiding mechanism in any one of a number of curious professions. As such, their offspring would suffer no pain, live a comfortable existence in a metal shell for several centuries, performing unusual services to Central Worlds.

  “She lived and was given a name, Helva.”

  Those are the opening paragraphs of the first Helva novel, The Ship Who Sang, which tells the story of how Helva becomes the mind behind the operation of a stargoing spaceship, and how her first ship-partner, Jennan Sahir Silan, dies tragically when he and Helva have to rescue a religious group from a planet soon to be reduced to a cinder as its primary goes nova. The rest of the first novel tells of Helva’s journey out of the intense grief she suffered on Jennan’s death and her attempts to find another partner who would be as compatible. Niall Parollan, clever, sharp, outrageously nonconformist, and a womanizer, becomes her “brawn” and they go off together to seek adventures, which have been chronicled in a number of later novels done in collaboration with other writers.

  —Anne McCaffrey

  THE SHIP WHO RETURNED

  by Anne McCaffrey

  Helva had been prowling through her extensive music files, trying to find something really special to listen to, when her exterior sensors attracted her attention. She focused on the alert. Dead ahead of her were the ion trails of a large group of small, medium and heavy vessels. They had passed several days ago but she could still “smell” the stink of the dirty emissions. She could certainly analyze their signatures. Instantly setting her range to maximum, she caught only the merest blips to the port side, almost beyond sensor range.

  “Bit off regular shipping routes,” she murmured.

  “So they are,” replied Niall.

  She smiled fondly. The holograph program had really improved since that last tweaking she’d done. There was Niall Parollan in the pilot’s chair, one compact hand spread beside the pressure plate, the left dangling from his wrist on the armrest. He was dressed in the black shipsuit he preferred to wear, vain man that he’d been: “because black’s better now that my hair’s turned.” He would brush back the thick shock of silvery hair and preen slightly in her direction.

  “Where exactly are we, Niall? I haven’t been paying much attention.”

  “Ha! Off in cloud-cuckoo land again…”

  “Wherever that is,” she replied amiably. It was such a comfort to hear his voice.

  “I do believe…” and there was a pause as the program accessed her present coordinates, “we are in the Cepheus Three region.”

  “Why, so we are. Why would a large flotilla be out here? This is a fairly empty volume of space.”

  “I’ll bring up the atlas,” Niall replied, responding as programmed.

  It was bizarre of her to have a hologram of a man dead two months but it was a lot better—psychologically—for her to have the comfort of such a reanimation. The “company” would dam up her grief until she could return her dead brawn to Regulus Base. And discover if there were any new “brawns” she could tolerate as a mobile partner. Seventy-eight years, five months and twenty days with Niall Parollan’s vivid personality was a lot of time to suddenly delete. Since she had the technology to keep him “alive”—in a fashion, she had done so. She certainly had enough memory of their usual interchanges with which to program this charade. She would soon have to let him go but she’d only do that when she no longer needed his presence to keep mourning at bay. Not that she hadn’t had enough exposure to that emotion in her life—what with losing her first brawn partner, Jennan, only a few years into what should have been a lifelong association.

  In that era, Niall Parollan had been her contact with Central Worlds Brain and Brawn Ship Administration at Regulus Base. After a series of relatively short and only minimally successful longer-term partnerships with other brawns, she had gladly taken Niall as her mobile half. Together they had been roaming the galaxy. Since Niall had ingeniously managed to pay off her early childhood and educational indebtedness to Central Worlds, they had been free agents, able to take jobs that interested them, not compulsory assignments. They had not gone to the Horsehead Nebula as she had once whimsically suggested to Jennan. The NH-834 had had quite enough adventures and work in this one not to have to go outside it for excitement.

  “Let’s see if we can get a closer fix on them, shall we, Niall?”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea on an otherwise dull day, would it?” Though his fingers flashed across the pressure plates of the pilot’s console, it was she who did the actual mechanics of altering their direction. But then, she would have done that anyway. Niall didn’t really need to, but it pleased her to give him tasks to do. He’d often railed at her for finding him the sort of work he didn’t want to do. And she’d snap back that a little hard work never hurt anyone. Of course, as he began to fail physically, this became lip service to that old argument. Niall had been in his mid-forties when he became her brawn and she the NH-834, so he had had a good long life for a soft-shell person.

  “Good healthy stock I am,” the hologram said, surprising her.

  Was she thinking out loud? She must have been for the program to respond.

  “With careful treatment, you’ll last centuries,” she replied, as she often had.

  She executed the ninety-degree course change that the control panel had p
lotted.

  “Don’t dawdle, girl,” Niall said, swiveling in the chair to face the panel behind which her titanium shell resided.

  She thought about going into his “routine,” but decided she’d better find out a little more about the “invasion.”

  “Why do you call it an invasion?” Niall asked.

  “That many ships, all heading in one direction? What else could it be? Freighters don’t run in convoys. Not out here, at any rate. And nomads have definite routes they stick to in the more settled sectors. And if I’ve read their KPS rightly…”

  “…Which, inevitably, you do, my fine lady friend…”

  “Those ships have been juiced up beyond freighter specifications and they’re spreading dirty stuff all over space. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “Can’t have space mucked up, can we?” The holo’s right eyebrow cocked, imitating an habitual trait of Niall’s. “And juiced-up engines as well. Should we warn anyone?”

  Helva had found the Atlas entries for this sector of space. “Only the one habitable planet in the system they seem to be heading straight for. Ravel…” Sudden surprise caught at her heart at that name. “Of all places.”

  “Ravel?” A pretty good program to search and find that long-ago reference so quickly. She inwardly winced at the holo’s predictable response. “Ravel was the name of the star that went nova and killed your Jennan brawn, wasn’t it?” Niall said, knowing the fact perfectly well.

  “I didn’t need the reminder,” she said sourly.

  “Biggest rival I have,” Niall said brightly as he always did, and pushed the command chair around in a circle, grinning at her unrepentantly as he let the chair swing 360 degrees and back to the console.

  “Nonsense. He’s been dead nearly a century…”

  “Dead but not forgotten…”

  Helva paused, knowing Niall was right, as he always was, in spite of being dead, too. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea, having him able to talk back to her. But it was only what he would have said in life anyhow, and had done often enough or it wouldn’t be in the program.