The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  I can tell you, it was a real skin-burning experience. At the time I accepted the invitation, I had believed that we would at most take quick drags from a common cylinder of treated air. The others spent a good half hour convincing me that it was actually possible to survive with all the valves open on my face mask. “This is what it was like!” they said to me. “The twentieth century unplugged!” Air-to-air communication too, no radios, no sound processors. When I finally picked up the courage to take in my first drag, I almost passed out. That air was so foul, so grainy, sooty, and dense, that I choked and gagged, my eyes bulged, my skin poured with sweat. I had to take long deep draughts from a handheld aerosol kit for at least ten minutes before I could try again. And even then, I never got the hang of just breathing with my mouth gaping open in front of all those other people.

  Intoxication? Forget it. I mean, it’s true there was a mild drowsy something I felt, right at the edge of consciousness, but I wouldn’t call it intoxication. More like bleary with a touch of pleasurable panic, like when you’re in a simulator and there’s a meteor flaming down towards your tiny vulnerable space shuttle or something. I was too damn conscious all the time: of what we were doing, the sheer mindless risk of it all, and the fact that any moment we might be found out. But the other toxies weren’t worried. It was amazing. They were talking to each other across bare air as if they’d been doing it all their lives. Then our host began to take his face mask off completely and that’s when I had to look away. Fortunately, not many others followed his example. I was relieved not to be the only one who knows that there’s a point past which risqué becomes risky.

  Or just downright disgusting. Inevitably, someone or the other pulled out an ancient videocassette, upgraded to 3-D, and projected it. It was garbage. I took art appreciation courses in school, so I’ve seen these things before, but they only confirm my belief that all generations prior to the era of individual vital supplies were entirely depraved. They breathed one another’s air for goodness’ sakes! Recycling all their airborne germs, their waste products, their cast-off bronchial ceils, every kind of organic junk. Water was delivered via miles of unsterilized piping from distant sources, sometimes even just up from the polluted earth itself! And as for energy, they took whatever they could get. No wonder their gadgets were so crude and lifeless—they had only the most brutish, unrefined forms of electricity to run on.

  Everyone else was bloated with sentimental reverence for that time of “freedom,” as they called it. “Free dirt!” I shouted. “That wasn’t freedom, that was depravity!” They really turned on me then and everyone was talking at once, their real voices sounding squeaky and hollow in the open air. They talked about the repression of our times, the regimentation of all our public and private activities to serve the common good. “Oh yeah?” I said. “So it was better then? When they were free to pollute our planet’s atmosphere, killing virtually all plant and animal life? That was freedom? No! It was slavery to the temple of the Self!” They argued that what we had now was worse than nothing because it was life without any of the pleasures of life. I said, “Pleasures for the few, ill health for the many!” They said that our ancestors savoured types of bliss that we had no conception of. They exposed their skin to the sun. They bathed in the rain. They had natural reproduction—no incubators, no fertility drugs. “Selfish!” I screamed. Maybe the air had gone to my head after all. I lost all inhibition. “They were spoilt! They were weak!”

  Then one person said, “No, just suicidal. Our ancestors were manic-depressives. It’s been confirmed—sharing air causes depression. They destroyed the ecosystem because they despised themselves. They wanted to save the universe from their own presence within it. Self-hate was their prime directive, not self-love!” These remarks caused a profound silence to fall upon the company. Shortly after that, I left. Back in my life-support unit, I thought about that wild and wasteful era as I tended my oxygen plant, arranged my protein capsules attractively for the day, and played with my pet amoebae in their petri dish. I looked at the label on my “Five Cities” atmo-cylinder: Mexico City, New Delhi, Bombay, Bangkok, Cairo. The picture on the label was a simple hologram showing a trillion people in multi-D. And today we have less than two million! All concentrated in the few remaining areas where the atmosphere is thick enough that the stars don’t show through during daylight. But I don’t care. I have my pick of fragrant airs. I own a brood of virtual children whom I share with other members of my thought-group. Through the mirror-processor I can travel to any dimension of my choice. The only thing I miss—or think I miss, having never seen any real ones—is trees. They sound nice. Friendly. If you come across a small one being sold, no matter what the price, do inform me. I’ll keep it by my sleeping pad and stroke it gently through the night.

  Schwarzschild Radius

  CONNIE WILLIS

  Connie Willis (1945– ) is an influential US science fiction writer who has won more combined Hugo and Nebula Awards (eighteen) than any other writer. Willis holds degrees in English and elementary education from the University of Northern Colorado. After receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1982, she left a teaching job to become a full-time writer, though she has been published since 1970. Associated with the Humanist SF movement of the 1980s and 1990s, Willis often uses so-called soft science to illuminate the human condition. She is also known for her humor, especially in a comedy-of-manners or satirical style. She has been inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame (2009), and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her a grand master in 2011.

  Time travel features prominently in three of her Hugo Award–winning novels: the stand-alone Doomsday Book (1992) and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), and the long novel published in two volumes, Blackout/All Clear (2010). Blackout/All Clear is set in London during the Blitz and describes in great detail the travails of three visitors from 2060. They are afraid that their temporary inability to return home is linked to their frequent involuntary transgressions against the proper flow of reality at a time of fragility in the world. As with Doomsday Book, Willis writes with a sense of reverence about the world; in this case, her clear, attentive love for 1940s England comes through as some very well-known aspects of life then are presented as newly discovered. Both novels reaffirm Willis’s commitment to the basic humanity and Humanism of her storytelling.

  “Schwarzschild Radius” (1987) is classic Willis; the science is foregrounded more than usual for her, but as in her time-travel stories there is a sharp emphasis on the human impact of that science. It’s an impactful story, written with a precision and clarity that show the author at the top of her form.

  SCHWARZSCHILD RADIUS

  Connie Willis

  “When a star collapses, it sort of falls in on itself.” Travers curved his hand into a semicircle and then brought the fingers in. “And sometimes it reaches a kind of point of no return where the gravity pulling in on it is stronger than the nuclear and electric forces, and when it reaches that point, nothing can stop it from collapsing and it becomes a black hole.” He closed his hand into a fist. “And that critical diameter, that point where there’s no turning back, is called the Schwarzschild radius.” Travers paused, waiting for me to say something.

  He had come to see me every day for a week, sitting stiffly on one of my chairs in an unaccustomed shirt and tie, and talked to me about black holes and relativity, even though I taught biology at the university before my retirement, not physics. Someone had told him I knew Schwarzschild, of course.

  “The Schwarzschild radius?” I said in my quavery, old man’s voice, as if I could not remember ever hearing the phrase before, and Travers looked disgusted. He wanted me to say, “The Schwarzschild radius! Ah, yes, I served with Karl Schwarzschild on the Russian front in World War I!” and tell him all about how he had formulated his theory of black holes while serving with the artillery, but I had not decided yet what to tell him. “The event horizon,” I said.

  “Yeah.
It was named after Schwarzschild because he was the one who worked out the theory,” Travers said. He reminded me of Muller with his talk of theories. He was the same age as Muller, with the same shock of stiff yellow hair and the same insatiable curiosity, and perhaps that was why I let him come every day to talk to me, though it was dangerous to let him get so close.

  —

  “I have drawn up a theory of the stars,” Muller says while we warm our hands over the Primus stove so that they will get enough feeling in them to be able to hold the liquid barretter without dropping it. “They are not balls of fire, as the scientists say. They are frozen.”

  “How can we see them if they are frozen?” I say. Muller is insulted if I do not argue with him. The arguing is part of the theory.

  “Look at the wireless!” he says, pointing to it sitting disemboweled on the table. We have the back off the wireless again, and in the barretter’s glass tube is a red reflection of the stove’s flame. “The light is a reflection off the ice of the star.”

  “A reflection of what?”

  “Of the shells, of course.”

  I do not say that there were stars before there was this war, because Muller will not have an answer to this, and I have no desire to destroy his theory, and besides, I do not really believe there was a time when this war did not exist. The star shells have always exploded over the snow-covered craters of No Man’s Land, shattering in a spray of white and red, and perhaps Muller’s theory is true.

  —

  “At that point,” Travers said, “at the event horizon, no more information can be transmitted out of the black hole because gravity has become so strong, and so the collapse appears frozen at the Schwarzschild radius.”

  “Frozen,” I said, thinking of Muller.

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact, the Russians call black holes ‘frozen stars.’ You were at the Russian front, weren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “In World War I.”

  “But the star doesn’t really freeze,” I said. “It goes on collapsing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Travers said. “It keeps collapsing in on itself until even the atoms are stripped of their electrons and there’s nothing left except what they call a naked singularity, but we can’t see past the Schwarzschild radius, and nobody inside a black hole can tell us what it’s like in there because they can’t get messages out, so nobody can ever know what it’s like inside a black hole.”

  “I know,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

  He leaned forward. “What was it like at the front?”

  —

  It is so cold we can only work on the wireless a few minutes at a time before our hands stiffen and grow clumsy, and we are afraid of dropping the liquid barretter. Muller holds his gloves over the Primus stove and then puts them on. I jam my hands into my ice-stiff pockets.

  We are fixing the wireless set. Eisner, who had been delivering messages between the sectors, got sent up to the front when he could not fix his motorcycle. If we cannot fix the wireless, we will cease to be telegraphists and become soldiers, and we will be sent to the front lines.

  We are already nearly there. If it were not snowing, we could see the barbed wire and pitted snow of No Man’s Land, and the big Russian coal boxes sometimes land in the communication trenches. A shell hit our wireless hut two weeks ago. We are ahead of our own artillery lines, and some of the shells from our guns fall on us, too, because the muzzles are worn out. But it is not the front, and we guard the liquid barretter with our lives.

  “Eisner’s unit was sent up on wiring fatigue last night,” Muller says, “and they have not come back. I have a theory about what happened to them.”

  “Has the mail come?” I say, rubbing my sore eyes and then putting my cold hands immediately back in my pockets. I must get some new gloves, but the quartermaster has none to issue. I have written my mother three times to knit me a pair, but she has not sent them yet.

  “I have a theory about Eisner’s unit,” he says doggedly. “The Russians have a magnet that has pulled them into the front.”

  “Magnets pull iron, not people,” I say.

  I have a theory about Muller’s theories. Littering the communications trenches are things that the soldiers going up to the front have discarded: water bottles and haversacks and bayonets. Hans and I sometimes tried to puzzle out why they would discard such important things.

  “Perhaps they were too heavy,” I would say, though that did not explain the bayonets or the boots.

  “Perhaps they know they are going to die,” Hans would say, picking up a helmet.

  I would try to cheer him up. “My gloves fell out of my pocket yesterday when I went to the quartermaster’s. I never found them. They are in this trench somewhere.”

  “Yes,” he would say, turning the helmet round and round in his hands, “perhaps as they near the front, these things simply drop away from them.”

  My theory is that what happens to the water bottles and helmets and bayonets is what has happened to Muller. He was a student in university before the war, but his knowledge of science and his intelligence have fallen away from him, and now we are so close to the front, all he has left are his theories. And his curiosity, which is a dangerous thing to have kept.

  “Exactly. Magnets pull iron, and they were carrying barbed wire!” he says triumphantly. “And so they were pulled in to the magnet.”

  I put my hands practically into the Primus flame and rub them together, trying to get rid of the numbness. “We had better get the barretter in the wireless again or this magnet of yours will suck it to the front, too.”

  I go back to the wireless. Muller stays by the stove, thinking about his magnet. The door bangs open. It is not a real door, only an iron humpie tied to the beam that reinforces the dugout and held with a wedge, and when someone pushes against it, it flies inward, bringing the snow with it.

  Snow swirls in, and light, and the sound from the front, a low rumble like a dog growling. I clutch the liquid barretter to my chest, and Muller flings himself over the wireless as if it were a wounded comrade. Someone bundled in a wool coat and mittens, with a wool cap pulled over his ears, stands silhouetted against the reddish light in the doorway, blinking at us.

  “Is Private Rottschieben here? I have come to see him about his eyes,” he says, and I see it is Dr. Funkenheld.

  “Come in and shut the door,” I say, still carefully protecting the liquid barretter, but Muller has already jammed the metal back against the beam.

  “Do you have news?” Muller says to the doctor, eager for new facts to spin his theories from. “Has the wiring fatigue come back? Is there going to be a bombardment tonight?”

  Dr. Funkenheld takes off his mittens. “I have come to examine your eyes,” he says to me. His voice frightens me. All through the war he has kept his quiet bedside voice, speaking to the wounded in the dressing station and at the stretcher bearers’ posts as if they were in his surgery in Stuttgart, but now he sounds agitated, and I am afraid it means a bombardment is coming and he will need me at the front.

  When I went to the dressing station for medicine for my eyes, I foolishly told him I had studied medicine with Dr. Zuschauer in Jena. Now I am afraid he will ask me to assist him, which will mean going up to the front. “Do your eyes still hurt?” he says.

  I hand the barretter to Muller and go over to stand by the lantern that hangs from a nail in the beam.

  “I think he should be invalided home, Herr Doktor,” Muller says. He knows it is impossible, of course. He was at the wireless the day the message came through that no one was to be invalided out for frostbite or “other non-contagious diseases.”

  “Can you find me a better light?” the doctor says to him.

  Muller’s curiosity is so strong that he cannot bear to leave any place where something interesting is happening. If he went up to the front, I do not think he would be able to pull himself away, and now I expect him to make some excuse to stay, but I have forgotten that he
is even more curious about the wiring fatigue. “I will go see what has happened to Eisner’s unit,” he says, and opens the door. Snow flies in, as if it had been beating against the door to get in, and the doctor and I have to push against the door to get it shut again.

  “My eyes have been hurting,” I say, while we are still pushing the metal into place, so that he cannot ask me to assist him. “They feel like sand has gotten into them.”

  “I have a patient with a disease I do not recognize,” he says. I am relieved, though disease can kill us as easily as a trench mortar. Soldiers die of pneumonia and dysentery and blood poisoning every day in the dressing station, but we do not fear it the way we fear the front.

  “The patient has fever, excoriated lesions, and suppurating bullae,” Dr. Funkenheld says.

  “Could it be boils?” I say, though of course he would recognize something so simple as boils, but he is not listening to me, and I realize that it is not a diagnosis from me that he has come for.

  “The man is a scientist, a Jew named Schwarzschild, attached to the artillery,” he says, and because the artillery are even farther back from the front lines than we are, I volunteer to go and look at the patient, but he does not want that either.