The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

—

  She had already read more than ten books to learn about the universe: Creation of the Universe, Development of the Stars, Types of the Galaxies, Types of the Stars, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Quasars, Double Stars. Many a word she had not known even existed before was now as familiar to her as mundane items on the grocery lists she less and less frequently wrote.

  “Was it a Big Bang that started this universe in the box?” she asked herself while reading one of the books.

  The phone rang persistently. Reiko idly picked up the receiver. It was a woman she didn’t know.

  “Give me Ikutarō, please.” The husky female voice referred to her husband by his first name. Reiko absently told her that he wasn’t home yet.

  “Is this the wife, Reiko-san?” the mystery woman asked in a challenging tone.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Reiko confirmed nonchalantly.

  “Oh, it’s nothing important.” She hung up with a violent click. Reiko also hung up, glad to get back to the astronomy book, and promptly forgot the call. The sultry-voiced woman had been correct.

  Ikutarō came home very late that night. When he found his wife sitting in the dark, staring as if hypnotized into the universe box, he said nothing to her. She thought vaguely that although she and her husband sat together, their minds were far apart. With her thoughts in the universe box, they might as well have been farther away than the width of the infinite universe. To Ikutarō, the universe box was less than useless: it was ridiculous. He couldn’t see the glorious auroral sheets of galaxies, starfields, nebulae, and solar systems flocking in his wife’s mind. She just looked like some slack-faced drug addict.

  Still in his Burberry mac, he smoked a few cigarettes, not bothering to hide his irritation and contempt. Maybe he had something to say. But, in the end, he went to bed without saying a word. They talked about nothing that night. Reiko was not angry. She cared nothing about the girl on the telephone. She just made it clear to herself that she was not depending on anybody.

  It was just because she had nothing that she wanted to talk about with her husband. That night there was only silence in their universe box.

  —

  Sunday morning.

  “What’re you doing every day!?” Ikutarō cried out in angry surprise. He was looking in the refrigerator. “It’s empty!”

  Oh, I haven’t been cooking lately, she thought. She’d been eating whatever breads and pastries she could buy in the convenience store on the ground floor of their apartment tower.

  “You haven’t done the laundry in days, and I can see cobwebs and dust bunnies everywhere! What are you doing at home!?” he shouted.

  Reiko didn’t answer or face her husband. She just gazed into the universe box. Her husband only sounded like a dog barking in the distance.

  He had put on his Burberry mac and was standing behind her.

  “I’m going out for a walk,” he growled, and slammed the door on the way out.

  Within the universe box, all the planets were about to line up.

  With Ikunōsuke as the leader, the planets were moving into a straight line, Tarō, Jirō, Saburō, and the others, extending to her right from the near side of the box. A solar conjunction. Reiko sighed with awe. This fascinating dance of the many-colored, jewel-like planets in this tiny universe was only for her to appreciate.

  It was a breathtaking view!

  Reiko stood up to close the curtains for more darkness. This way, the illusion that she was floating in the universe box was more complete. As she sat watching the lined-up planets, a curious thought came to her.

  Do any of the planets around Ikunōsuke have inhabitants like on Earth? It was a naive question, but…Maybe. And maybe there are some intelligent creatures there like the human race?

  There should be, she concluded.

  Then, maybe there’s someone like me who is gazing into her own universe box, within which there may be a planet like the Earth, on which someone may be looking into her universe, within which…Maybe I’m in someone else’s universe box and she’s wondering about me and whether I might be here…!

  She went on mumbling about the infinite regression of universe boxes wheeling through her head.

  Ikutarō came home very late that night. His rage exploded when he found Reiko still at the universe box. He threw a matchbook on the table in front of her, which showed the name of a notorious hotel.

  “I was there until just a little while ago,” he said ominously. Reiko contemplated the multiple universe boxes that seemed to have expanded all about her. Ikutarō thundered, “Don’t you FEEL anything?”

  She felt nothing at all. Everything was remote from her. What was that noise coming from the funny cartoon character confronting her?

  “You’ve been like this for months! That freaking universe box is more important to you than me, isn’t it!? Why don’t you fight me? How can you be so indifferent to me when I’m screwing another woman!? Wanna hear the details? God! I should have thrown that box away that first night!”

  She showed no sign that she’d heard a word he’d said.

  “Look at me when I talk to you!” he shrieked.

  Nothing.

  “To hell with this!” Hysterically, Ikutarō hammered the universe box with a single blow from the side of his fist. It flew off the table, banged onto the floor, and skidded almost to the wall. There was an actinic flash from the box like a camera strobe going off.

  This was the first time he had ever shown any violence to her. What was that all about? Reiko calmly picked up the box and held it closely, without noticing that the dial on the box had been turned during the incident. The flow of time in the universe box had accelerated drastically. As if caring for her own baby, she looked closely into the universe.

  Ikunōsuke, the white giant, was not shining, or rather, it had dimmed to the point of invisibility.

  “The universe box seems to be broken,” Reiko observed tonelessly.

  “Good!” Ikutarō roared.

  “Everything is over,” she said without emotion. She knew it. Everything around her had fractured into disconnected frames of images like jostling panes of glass.

  Ikutarō didn’t say a word. He dropped heavily into the other chair with a huff, and they just sat there wordlessly, facing each other across the kitchen table.

  He chain-smoked several cigarettes with quick puffs. Reiko looked into the dead darkness in the universe box. All the planets around Ikunōsuke were somewhere within that darkness. This universe box that she and Ikutarō lived in was in its own darkness.

  Then, a slight change took place. She thought she saw one of the planets that used to orbit the star disappear into the darkness where the star used to be. The darkness guttered like a dim ember. She could see the other planets speeding towards the dark spot, which began to glow redly, and then some nearby stars appeared that were clearly moving towards the spot. She set the box on the table to get a clearer look.

  “The universe box is still alive!” she joyously exclaimed. “It’s just that Ikunōsuke became a black hole! The star must have shrunk smaller than the Schwarzschild radius!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Ikutarō groaned. And began to look dangerous.

  Reiko remembered this topic from the book about black holes. Normally, such a process would take a vast amount of time, but in this universe box, where time had been accelerated by the turned dial, planets, asteroids, comets, and even some nearby stars were attracted to it with amazing speed. Hundreds of thousands of years seemed to be passing with each instant.

  Ikutarō looked like he was about to do something violent again, when the hotel matchbook on the kitchen table went skittering into the box through the transparent panel with a gush of air. Whoosh!

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he cried out in surprise.

  The cigarette he was smoking jerked from his fingers and shot after the matchbook. The kitchen table started to tremble. Small articles like the newspaper, towels, and clock went into the box as if
by magic. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

  With the progress of time accelerated, Ikunōsuke, the white giant, had turned into a major black hole in nearly no time relative to their universe. With its tremendous mass, it started to attract nearby stars, gaining more mass and attraction. Now, the black hole had begun to attract articles outside the cube. Ikutarō was clinging to the table leg, crying.

  He had no understanding of what was happening, and his eyes were wide with terror. Now, larger items like the TV set, stereo, and toaster oven went into the small cube. Ikutarō finally lost his grip and his throat-ripping cry of terror was cut off as he was sucked headfirst into the cube. Bones cracked like he was being munched.

  Reiko was not frightened at all. She felt like she was outside it all, looking in. Maybe she was. She’d been in there for a long time anyway, but outside looking in at the same time, and wondering if someone was watching her. Maybe that someone was her, and maybe this was the revenge of the universe box against her husband. Her universe, collapsing on them both. Her gaze fell on the inscription Ikutarō had scrawled so many months ago on the base with such irritation—almost like a prediction, now—“In memory of our wedding…Ikutarō & Reiko.”

  That’s the way she took it. Her universe box, her revenge.

  With a joyful shriek, she dived after her husband.

  Swarm

  BRUCE STERLING

  (Michael) Bruce Sterling (1954– ) is an influential US science fiction author often cited as a founder of the cyberpunk genre, along with William Gibson. In collaboration, Gibson and Sterling could be said to have jump-started the steampunk genre as well, with their novel The Difference Engine. Sterling set parameters for cyberpunk in his polemical fanzine Cheap Truth (1984–86), making his case in part by criticizing Humanists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Since that time, both writers have made major contributions to our understanding of modern life, in vastly different ways. Robinson has arguably become the most important climate change fiction writer in the world and Sterling has been invaluable as a ceaseless critic and analyst of the postcapitalist Baudrillardian world.

  Sterling’s fiction has won two Hugo Awards in addition to the Hayakawa Book Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the Campbell Award. However, Sterling has been equally fascinating and adroit in his perceptive nonfiction, while his work editing the seminal Mirrorshades anthology (1986) helped define cyberpunk for a generation of readers. Sterling cofounded the legendary Turkey City writer’s workshop in Austin, Texas, and famously coined the term slipstream (1989, in the magazine Science Fiction Eye) to describe cross-genre fiction that did not easily fit into a particular category. Other terms coined by Sterling include Wexelblat disaster (1999), for when a natural disaster triggers a secondary failure of human technology, and buckyjunk, in a 2005 issue of Wired, which refers to future, difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes.

  Sterling’s novels include Islands in the Net (1988), Heavy Weather (1994), and The Caryatids (2009). Stand-alone stories like the oft-reprinted “We See Things Differently” in the legendary Semiotext(e) anthology (1989) amply demonstrate Sterling’s versatility in his short fiction.

  But he is perhaps best known for his stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, featuring a colonized solar system caught between two major warring factions: the Mechanists, who use computer-based mechanical tech, and the Shapers, who deploy species-wide genetic engineering. Over time, this binary opposition is complicated by the arrival of different alien civilizations and the splintering of humanity into many posthuman subspecies. The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collections Crystal Express and Schismatrix Plus.

  “Swarm” is a brilliant example of these stories, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1982 and nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. In the story, Captain Simon Afriel is tasked with researching a little-known life-form called the Swarm, initially thought to be unintelligent. What ensues is unpredictable, exciting, and thought-provoking—like all of Sterling’s fiction. It’s also undeniably “post cyberpunk.”

  SWARM

  Bruce Sterling

  “I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,” the alien said.

  Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. “I regret it also, ensign,” he said in the alien’s own hissing language. “Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.”

  “But that was only information,” the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. “We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.” The alien lifted the long ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.

  “No doubt you are right,” Afriel said, despising him. “We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.” Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.

  “You have not done badly,” the alien said magnanimously. “You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.”

  “Things are different now,” Afriel said. “We’ll make you rich.”

  “Indeed,” the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. “Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.”

  Afriel was annoyed. As a member of the Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. “Don’t put too much stock in mere technical expertise,” he said. “Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike.”

  The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had appealed to the alien’s personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors consistently, using the same programmed routines each time. They lacked imagination.

  Something would have to be done about the Mechanists, Afriel thought. Something more permanent than the small but deadly confrontations between isolated ships in the Asteroid Belt and the ice-rich Rings of Saturn. Both factions maneuvered constantly, looking for a decisive stroke, bribing away each other’s best talent, practicing ambush, assassination, and industrial espionage.

  Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel was a past master of these pursuits. That was why the Reshaped faction had paid the millions of kilowatts necessary to buy his passage. Afriel held doctorates in biochemistry and alien linguistics, and a master’s degree in magnetic weapons engineering. He was thirty-eight years old and had been Reshaped according to the state of the art at the time of his conception. His hormonal balance had been altered slightly to compensate for long periods spent in free fall. He had no appendix. The structure of his heart had been redesigned for greater efficiency, and his large intestine had been altered to produce the vitamins normally made by intestinal bacteria. Genetic engineering and rigorous training in childhood had given him an intelligence quotient of 180. He was not the brightest of the agents of the Ring Council, but he was one of the most mentally stable and the best trusted.

  “It seems a shame,” the alien said, “that a human of your accomplishments should have to rot for two years in this miserable, profitless outpost.”

  “The years won’t be wasted,” Afriel said.

  “But why have you chosen to study the Swarm? They can teach you nothing, since they cannot speak. They have no wish to trade, having no tools or technology. They are the
only spacefaring race that is essentially without intelligence.”

  “That alone should make them worthy of study.”

  “Do you seek to imitate them, then? You would make monsters of yourselves.” Again the ensign hesitated. “Perhaps you could do it. It would be bad for business, however.”

  There came a fluting burst of alien music over the ship’s speakers, then a screeching fragment of Investor language. Most of it was too high-pitched for Afriel’s ears to follow.

  The alien stood, his jeweled skirt brushing the tips of his clawed birdlike feet. “The Swarm’s symbiote has arrived,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Afriel said. When the ensign opened the cabin door, Afriel could smell the Swarm’s representative; the creature’s warm yeasty scent had spread rapidly through the starship’s recycled air.

  Afriel quickly checked his appearance in a pocket mirror. He touched powder to his face and straightened the round velvet hat on his shoulder-length reddish-blond hair. His earlobes glittered with red impact-rubies, thick as his thumbs’ ends, mined from the Asteroid Belt. His knee-length coat and waistcoat were of gold brocade; the shirt beneath was of dazzling fineness, woven with red-gold thread. He had dressed to impress the Investors, who expected and appreciated a prosperous look from their customers. How could he impress this new alien? Smell, perhaps. He freshened his perfume.

  Beside the starship’s secondary air lock, the Swarm’s symbiote was chittering rapidly at the ship’s commander. The commander was an old and sleepy Investor, twice the size of most of her crewmen. Her massive head was encrusted in a jeweled helmet. From within the helmet her clouded eyes glittered like cameras.

  The symbiote lifted on its six posterior legs and gestured feebly with its four clawed forelimbs. The ship’s artificial gravity, a third again as strong as Earth’s, seemed to bother it. Its rudimentary eyes, dangling on stalks, were shut tight against the glare. It must be used to darkness, Afriel thought.

  The commander answered the creature in its own language. Afriel grimaced, for he had hoped that the creature spoke Investor. Now he would have to learn another language, a language designed for a being without a tongue.