The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The system received data through a radio link with the sonar probes. Some probes were anchored to the sea bottom, while others could be piloted—almost like unmanned mini-subs—by the computer system, into areas from which data was desirable.

  The system had no permanent link to those on the mainland. However, through a disk antenna one of the polar orbiting satellite systems could be accessed for computer communication. There was also a link to the mainland by way of the meteorological station at Herwig Port.

  It was a rather fancy computer system. But it was a considerably less expensive way of collecting information than test drilling. Perhaps the Soviets also would have chosen this alternative if it had been open to them, but the system in the bunker at Cape Levin was certainly on the embargo list of the US Department of Commerce. It was not possible for the Soviets to establish something similar. And this well-equipped bunker was the place where the invisible Owl had arrived, from a planet beyond the curtain of northern lights.

  —

  Obviously, it was to use this equipment that the Owl had chosen the bunker. It must be possible for the equipment to squeeze out information from the sonar probes. I did not know what it might be, except in rough outlines.

  When the Owl had ridden me throughout days of polar night, I came to in an exhausted body. My tongue was dry and thick like a stopper in my throat, my eyes were red and swollen. The Owl showed little consideration for the fact that static electricity in the terminal screen gathered dust from the atmosphere of the electrically heated bunker, and that this concentration of dust irritated the mucous membranes in the eyes and prompted symptoms of allergy. The Owl used my body as long as necessary. It rode me, day after day, and let me recover only sufficiently to endure another ride—impatient with me, irritated by my bodily needs.

  Perhaps I was too exhausted to revolt. I nursed myself back to some semblance of health time after time, though I knew that as soon as I became strong, the claws would grip my thoughts and I would be ridden through a new unconscious period.

  I noticed the evidence of what had been done, read the log from the computer, and knew that new programs had been written, probes activated, new data collected. Several of the mobile probes frequently went into the gray zone. From time to time they crossed the territorial border to the Soviets. It was probably not out of respect for human agreements or the danger of creating an international incident that the Owl refrained from penetrating deeper into Soviet territory—but rather just because the radio signals became too weak to be received so far from the installation.

  I tried to read the programs. They were, of course, written in FORTRAN or SIMULA—the Owl had to make do with what to him would seem naive languages. But I did not understand the programs, though I was a passable programmer myself.

  It could not be oil resources that interested the Owl. I could only guess what he—and I, in my unconscious and feverish working periods—really was looking for. I guessed it would have something to do with the nodules, the bulbs of manganese covering great areas of the sea bottom.

  And, of course, even manganese could not be the interesting thing. Next to iron, it is the heavy metal most common in the Earth’s crust, though the fraction is no higher than 0.77 percent. Manganese is also identified in meteorites and in the spectrum of stars, so it could not be the scarcity of this metal that made an extraterrestrial interested in the cold sea far in the north of the Earth.

  But laboratory analysis of the nodules shows that they contain a profusion of other minerals, among these at least forty different metals, for instance iron, copper, nickel, and cobalt. I thought it might be a trace element that the Owl looked for. Perhaps his search related to the fact that the nodules were so far north, where temperature, magnetic fields, or the strong cosmic radiation had acted to catalyze an unknown process. Or perhaps the solution was to be found in some prehistoric volcanic catastrophe creating the core of the bulbs.

  An unknown trace element…or an alloy, a chemical compound…

  —

  It was not the only riddle of the Owl.

  I did not understand why it operated in secrecy. The other reported incidents of “possession” of which I had heard had taken the host directly to Hawaii, where the bosses haggled among themselves in some sort of stock exchange of Babel, where terrestrial goods and services were traded on behalf of clients light-years away—who probably would not be able to enjoy the goods or services for many slow decades. In some way the Owl participated in this game, perhaps collecting secret information on natural resources.

  I believed he operated outside the rules of the game. That’s why he had selected the lonely Bear Island, therefore had selected me…a lonely man in a wintery bunker at the shore of the Barents Sea.

  I believed there might also be another reason.

  My boss hated sunlight. It was perhaps for that reason I had dubbed him the Owl. He worked only at night. The long polar night allowed him to work without being disturbed by daylight—until my body failed.

  From time to time I thought of his home planet. A waste-world, at the edge of a solar system. Perhaps the white wings of the Owl slid through an atmosphere of methane? Or perhaps his planet was covered by eternal clouds? Or perhaps it was tied in rotation to its sun, where the Owl and his kind inhabited the night side?

  In my nightmares the Owl became a figure from fairy tales, and his home planet a magic forest. It felt nearly logical that he should share the predilection of the trolls from Norwegian fairy tales, by hiding from the sun.

  And soon the polar night would be at an end.

  There were long periods each day when I was free of the Owl. At last there were only a few hours each night when it dared to sink its claws into my subconscious.

  But I understood that it had done something to me. I did not fully have free will. I contacted the meteorological station and declared that I would like to stay another winter. And that I did not really need a summer holiday.

  They grew very concerned. I could count on a visit from a psychologist—at least a radio interview with one on the mainland. I would have liked to break my isolation—but I was controlled, guided by the rules the Owl had constructed in my subconscious.

  But the polar night has its reflection in the polar summer. From April 30 till August 12, the sun never sets over Bear Island. The midnight sun burns in the north each night, and the shadows pivot like the pointers of a watch across the whole dial. The landscape explodes in seductive colors under melting snow. The air is light and transparent in white sunshine.

  And for the whole of this period, more than three months, the Owl would stay away from me—though it still controlled my subconscious. During this period I had to take countermeasures to break out of my psychological jail. In the May sun I looked for the key to the barred door.

  —

  I found it. At least I thought so then.

  The computer system at the bunker was quite advanced. It had access to, among other programs, a version of PROSPECTOR, one of the most successful examples of expert systems constructed. PROSPECTOR exploits the results of research in artificial intelligence and the knowledge from a large number of experts in geology and petrochemistry. This knowledge is structured in a large set of rules. And this rule system could assist another expert—for instance, myself. The results of analyses could be presented to PROSPECTOR, which at once would suggest that supplementing information should be collected, until it arrived at a conclusion on whether the geological structure described by the information was promising or not.

  PROSPECTOR could become the key.

  The version of PROSPECTOR to which I had access was a self-instructing program. Through use, the program learned more about the one using it, and about what it was being used for. It automatically constructed supplementing rules, constantly refining its expertise.

  Of course, the Owl would not himself start using PROSPECTOR, or my special version, the OWLECTOR. I used the summer to hide the program in the operating sys
tem to the computer. It was a sort of extra layer in the program, rather like a hawk floating in the air and keeping an eye on what was happening below. This is how I saw OWLECTOR, like a hunting hawk programmed with a taste in owls. The more the Owl used the system, the more OWLECTOR would learn of the Owl. It would learn enough to take control from the Owl, fight the Owl. And the more the Owl fought to keep in control, the more OWLECTOR would learn of its opponent.

  There was a fascinating justice in the scheme. Neither I nor any other human could fight the Owl or any of his galactic colleagues. We had not sufficient knowledge nor capacity in a brief human life to learn what we needed. But a computer does not have our limitations. It can learn as long as there is somebody to teach. It can learn until it knows as much as the teacher.

  It can tap knowledge from the Owl until it becomes an owl itself.

  And the computerized owl is loyal to humans. That is the way I have programmed it. And this loyalty will last as long as the program.

  There will not be much time. Perhaps only a few hours, a few days. Who knows how soon the Owl will discover the hunting hawk somewhere above, like a dot against the sky?

  But perhaps it does not expect such an attack. Perhaps the Owl is arrogant and impatient with weak humans, who fail from thirst and exhaustion. And then it will perhaps not search the sky for a hunting hawk in the form of a computer program, which studies the Owl as prey until it is ready to strike the bustling white bird and liberate me for all future time….

  I do not know whether to believe in this or not. But I no longer dream of spectral owls in strange dark forests, but of white owls in snow, owls killed by birds of prey, blood splashing the snow. In my sleep I hear the seabirds cry: they dive and circle through the sunny nights, and I seem to hear the owls hoot.

  It will soon be August 12. The sun already touches the horizon at midnight. Soon the Owl will be back, and I will know the answer….

  Readers of the Lost Art

  ÉLISABETH VONARBURG

  Translated by Howard Scott

  Élisabeth Vonarburg (1947– ) is an award-winning French-born Canadian teacher, editor, critic, and writer considered by many to be one of the finest science fiction writers of her generation. Vonarburg’s work is often associated with both the New Wave and the rise of feminist science fiction; certainly, her themes and structural experimentation express sympathies with both approaches. Her fiction shares some commonalities with the work of both Leena Krohn and Ursula K. Le Guin. Vonarburg is a very deliberate writer who brings great care and thought to the depiction of characters and settings. Her themes are often uniquely societal and environmental in scope.

  She has won the Aurora Award, Canada’s top science fiction honor, more than ten times, for both her stories and her novels. She has also received seven Prix Boréal and a Philip K. Dick Award special citation (runner-up) for her novel In the Mothers’ Land (1992). In addition to writing fiction, Vonarburg has served as fiction editor (1979–90) and editor (1983–85) of the magazine Solaris.

  Vonarburg’s first science fiction story, “Marée haute,” appeared in Requiem in 1978 and was translated under the title “High Tide” for the influential anthology Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (1979), edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Many of her stories have been collected in L’oeil de la nuit (“The Eye of Night,” 1980), Janus (1984), and (in English) Blood out of a Stone (2009). Some of the stories collected therein form part of her Baïblanca/Mothers’ Land series, in which a semidecadent society in a far-future Europe sees the gradual appearance of shape-shifting mutants (the “métames”). The series continues in Le silence de la cité (1981; published in English as The Silent City, 1988). In the novel, a young female protagonist leaves her underground home and travels to the surface, with its wild tribes, where she begins to transform the blighted world. Revelations of the artificial nature of the feminist governance of Mothers’ Land sharpens the rite-of-passage story at the heart of Chroniques du pays des mères (1992). A one-off, Les voyageurs malgre eux (1992; published in English as Reluctant Voyagers, 1995), in a sense grounds her first series (and her subsequent work as well) through its depiction of a teacher/writer whose travels to alternate worlds are engineered through the stories she writes.

  The Tyranaël series—the main sequence of which begins with Tyranaël 1: Les rêves de la mer (1996; published in English as Dreams of the Sea, 2003) and ends with Tyranaël 5: La mer allée avec le soleil (1997)—is a planetary romance set on the eponymous Living World, though it may be that only the circumambient ocean is sentient. The large cast—some reincarnations of earlier protagonists—gains through telepathy and other means a gradually intensifying symbiosis with their planet.

  “Readers of the Lost Art” is a uniquely transgressive, hypersymbolic piece of science fiction about ritual and creativity. Both chilling and transformative, the story won the Aurora Award when first published as “La carte du tendre” in Aimer: 10 nouvelles par 10 auteurs quebecois (1986) and was first published in English in Tesseracts 5 (1996).

  READERS OF THE LOST ART

  Élisabeth Vonarburg

  Translated by Howard Scott

  The Subject presents itself as a block, slightly taller than it is wide, set vertically on a round central stage that is slowly revolving. The colour of the block, a very dark green, does not necessarily make one think of stone (it could be plasmoc), especially since it glistens with a strange opalescence under the combined laser beams. Its rough texture and irregular shape, however, tell the audience what the voice of the invisible Announcer, floating over the room, now confirms: the Subject has chosen to appear in a sheath of Labrador amphibolite.

  As murmurs commenting on this strategy go back and forth at a few tables, the Operator enters, a silhouette at first glance consisting of reflections from a scattered brightness. All the instruments required for his task, which are mostly metal, are held to his body by strongly magnetized chips and small plates inserted under his skin. The Operator does not wear any clothing except for the armour made up of these tools, all of different shapes and sizes but designed to fit together like the segments of some exoskeleton to the glory of technology. Of course, a black hood fits tightly over his head, though not over his face, which contrasts with the smooth, shiny material and seems like a simple, abstract outline—geometrical planes arbitrarily linked together rather than a recognizable countenance.

  The amphitheatre falls silent after some scattered, rather condescending applause. Everyone knows there will be no subtlety in the first approach, in accordance with the obvious wishes of the Subject: a direct assault, almost naive, on the primitive material surrounding it. The Operator circles the block, steps up to it, steps away from it, touches it here and there, then steps back two paces and stands there a few moments with his head lowered. He emerges from his meditation only to take two unsurprising instruments from his tool-armour: a hammer and a chisel.

  He needs to find the areas of least resistance: briefly returned to its original plasticity through heat and pressure before enclosing the Subject, then cooled, the metamorphic rock provides clues to its schistosities in the infinitely divergent orientations of its amphiboles, as the rounded reflections playing on the surface of a still river reveal to the practised eye the contours of the bottom, and the twists and turns of the current. The plagioclase opalescence of the material will apparently not delay the operation; a section of rock falls off the block after the first blow is delivered by a sure, firm hand. The Operator is experienced. We will soon get to the heart of the Subject.

  In the room, up in the tiers, the alcoves are gradually filling up, the small lamps on the tables are being turned on, and jewels are throwing furtive sparkles. Buyers and merchants sit down, ready after the day’s work for work of another sort. With slow elegance, the hostesses parade along the tiers, their eyes falsely distant, like panthers pacing their cages pretending to be unaware that they were long ago torn away from their secret jungle paths. Now and then, a hand is raised, nonchala
ntly or urgently, and yet another captive goes and sits close to the client whom she will, for the evening, be pleasing.

  On the central stage (noiselessly—the floor where the rock fragments fall is covered with a thick elastic carpet), the Operator is almost finished with the first phase and those the show is intended to entertain grant a little discreet applause when a whole section of rock comes off the upper part of the block, indicating finally what is in store for the second phase of the operation. In the deep layer revealed, indistinct masses can barely be seen, a glassy gleam.

  The Operator puts the chisel and hammer into the box provided for them. It is a medium-sized box, a declaration of principle that does not escape the seasoned spectators: the Operator is no novice and fully intends to get through the Subject without having to use all his instruments. As usual, the lid only opens one way. The tools that are put in the box cannot be taken out again. If Operators dared to try—something that is unthinkable—they would be immediately electrocuted by the powerful current running through every metal object the instant it is placed in one of the compartments of the box.

  A murmur runs through the amphitheatre as the Subject is completely extricated from the rock sheath: its crystalline prisms scatter the coherent laser light into myriads of geometric rainbows that both reveal and hide the thickness of the material. The Operator moves away and again circles the Subject to the discreet clickings of his tool-armour (in which the absence of the hammer and chisel has opened two gaps). Meditatively, he paces around the perimeter of the stage. Brute force is no longer enough. Getting close to the Subject by shattering the prisms would be in rare bad taste, and the audience would be right to show their displeasure by pushing the buttons that link them to the Manager of the establishment. The Operator carefully chooses his next tool, creating a new gap in his tool-armour. A probe, of course.