The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “In a manner of speaking,” he says.

  “I doubt anybody else will reproduce what we found,” she says. “This may sound like boasting, but it took a few pretty radical insights—and more than a bit of luck—and it’s not at all the direction that other theoretical physicists are searching. Not the idea of getting energy from the vacuum—plenty of people could think of that. It’s our way to do it that’s the trick.”

  “I disagree. What one person discovers, no matter how esoteric, another will duplicate. Maybe not for a long time, maybe not in our lifetimes, but sooner or later, it will happen.”

  She smiles. “Again, it’s a question of philosophy. I’ve been playing the game long enough to know that real science doesn’t work the way the science books pretend. It’s not like making a map, unless you think of it as creating the land as we map it. The very shape of science is created by the scientists who first make it. We think in their metaphors; we see what they chose to look at. If we let go of this discovery, it won’t be duplicated in our lifetimes, and by then the flow of science will be elsewhere.”

  “In any case,” he says, “there isn’t enough money in the grant for us to do it again.

  “The switch you’re holding breaks the circuit in the superconducting magnets. There’s about a thousand amps running through the coils now. Quench the magnet and the superconductors heat up, transition back into ordinary metal. In other words, they become resistors. All that current…it’ll create a lot of heat. Throw that switch, and ten million dollars’ worth of equipment melts into a puddle of slag.”

  “Not to worry too much, though,” Celia adds cheerfully. “It’s only grant money.”

  Suddenly your lips are dry. You run the tip of your tongue over them. “And you want me to…”

  “We’ve agreed on this much,” she says, exasperated. “If you stop the experiment, we’ll abide by your decision. We won’t publish. Nor even hint.”

  “But why me?” you ask. “Why not bring in an expert?”

  “We are the experts,” he says. “What we need is somebody from outside, somebody with an unbiased opinion.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says, speaking to you. “We wanted somebody who couldn’t understand the details. If we called in a bunch of experts, do you think they could possibly keep it secret, after?”

  “And besides,” he adds, “committees are always conservative. We all know what they’d say: wait, let’s study it some more. Well, damn, we’ve already studied it. If she’d told me we need to have a committee discuss it, I’d have just snuck in one midnight and run it myself. No, we have to do it this way. Whatever you decide, that’s it. No dithering. No second thoughts. We go for it right now, or forget it.

  “If I’m right,” he continues, “then the stars are ours. The universe is ours. Humanity will be immortal. When the sun burns out, we’ll create our own suns. We will have all the energy of creation at our fingertips.”

  “And if he’s wrong,” she says, “then this is the end. Not just the end of us. The end of the universe.”

  “Except that I’m not wrong.”

  “If you are, we’ll never know. Either way.”

  “Still, I’d risk it all. This is the key to the universe. It’s worth the risk. It’s worth any risk.”

  She looks back at you. “So there you have it.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “On the one hand, infinity. On the other, the end of everything.”

  He looks over at the digital readout, and your eye follows his. As you watch, it flicks from 9.8 to 9.9. The handle of the switch is warm, faintly slick with sweat. In your hand it seems to almost vibrate.

  She looks at you. You look at him. He looks at the switch. You look at her. They both look at you.

  “You’d best decide quickly,” he says, softly.

  Two Small Birds

  HAN SONG

  Translated by John Chu

  Han Song (1965– ) is a prominent Chinese writer of science fiction who has won the Yinhe Award multiple times. Han attended Wuhan University (1984–91), studying English and journalism, and eventually graduating with a master of law degree. He subsequently became an editor and contributor to the government-owned journal Liaowang dongfang zhoukan (Oriental Outlook Weekly), for which he often writes on cultural and social dynamics, and new developments in science. Some of these writings saw print as Renzaoren (Artificial Humans, 1997). His continued position as a respected member of a high-profile publication allows him to effectively shrug off the fact that many of his fictional works soon vanish from bookshelves. Embracing science fiction’s subversive potential in a culture that once proclaimed itself to already be a futuristic utopia, Han’s works often run afoul of the official censors but endure in online samizdat form or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or in Japanese translation.

  Han Song’s first notable success, the long story “Yuzhou mubei” (“Gravestone of the Universe”; Huanxiang, 1991) appeared in a Taiwanese magazine and was subsequently unavailable for a decade in the People’s Republic. The story details the memorials and artifacts left behind by astronauts across the universe, and the unusual effects this has on those who come upon them. Similarly, his short story “Wo de zuguo bu zuomeng” (“My Fatherland Does Not Dream”; Zhongguo kexue, 2007), in which an authoritarian state drugs its citizens to both optimize labor and redact memories of atrocities, was swiftly banned.

  Much of Han’s work counterbalances his downbeat or decidedly pessimistic tone with a lyrical style. He prefers ambiguity, even in his description of grand schemes such as the one in “Hongse haiyang” (“Red Ocean,” 2004), which sends genetically engineered humans under the sea to escape ecological disaster on land. His English translation of his own “Gezhanshi de zhuanjingtong” (Kehuan shijie, 2002) for The Apex Book of World SF, under the title “The Wheel of Samsara,” seems to playfully accentuate the story’s inspiration in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), including the Tibetan location and the tone of its apocalyptic ending.

  A recurring theme in Han Song’s work is the rise and possible supremacy of China in contention with the West, which Han often treats with an ambiguity of tone sure to confuse the authorities. Ditie (Subway, 2010), a collection of linked stories, explores the ruins and futurity of the Beijing metro system, held up since the 1970s as a triumph of modernity, but in Han’s fiction reimagined as a Kafkaesque dystopia in which the Chinese pointlessly struggle to emulate the bustle and energy of Western capitalism.

  He has repeated this mode in several other stories, such as “Chengke yu changzaozhe” (Kehuan shijie, 2006; published in English as “The Passengers and the Creator,” Renditions, 2012), a surreal tale in which the entire population of China is forced to live out its existence in a fleet of midair jumbo jets. “Huoxing zhaoyao Meiguo: 2066-nian zhi xixing manji” (“Mars Shines on America: An Account of a Westward Journey in the Year 2066,” first published in 2001 and published in more complete form in 2012) focuses on a balkanized and declining United States in a Sinocentric world, notoriously featuring a terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center several months before reality imitated fiction.

  “Two Small Birds”—translated here for the first time by the Hugo Award–winner John Chu—showcases Han’s lyricism and the agility of his ideas, which often manifest in a surreal way. Although one of the shortest stories in this anthology, “Two Small Birds” contains multitudes.

  TWO SMALL BIRDS

  Han Song

  Translated by John Chu

  I take a colorful magazine down from the bookshelf. I open the magazine and the flock of birds in a photo suddenly flies past me with a crashing noise. Air rushes against my face.

  I’m sitting in the library’s reading room, absentmindedly leafing through a birding magazine. Practically no other readers are here except for two women. They sit at two ends, forming a triangle with me.

  The early morning air pours in like a rising tide. I hear a few birds call outside. They
are sparrows standing on high-voltage power lines.

  Alarmed by something, the sparrows suddenly fly away.

  A young librarian walks towards me. His eyes seem like the muzzle of a shotgun. His entire body gives off the stench of an owl near midnight.

  For a moment, sunlight leaps through the window. On the tabletop, I catch a reflection of me sitting. It’s that of a giant bird.

  I drop the magazine and walk outside.

  The young librarian throws an odd look at me, but the two women don’t move at all. They don’t even spare me a glance. They study with a single-minded devotion the books in their hands.

  It’s a deep, dark night outside. After a hundred thousand years, I know it well. Starlight diffuses here and there across the sky.

  I concentrate like usual and become a slice of dark hovering in the air.

  My silhouette is cast against the sparsely lit city. It’s definitely that of a bird of prey.

  The city, growing smaller and smaller, is tossed behind me. Agitated, I screech. A burning, blazing star gradually grows clearer in my mind.

  My silhouette falls on the background of a resplendent, multicolored universe.

  It’s the background of the magazine that I opened. I firmly believe no humans can understand it.

  Every word and punctuation mark corresponds to nebulas, gravitation, and trace elements. Paragraphs then form laws of mathematics and physics.

  Every day Ozma traverses the magazine in the library, she transmits to me secrets of the universe. When I’m near her, I am not lost.

  The opened universe flaps its pages behind my body. My wings are agitated by magnetic fields. They gradually spread into a sail.

  I’m about to look back on that point in space-time fifty thousand years ago, tirelessly cranking the mechanism that will save Ozma.

  —

  “Ozma, are you okay? It’s me.”

  I land lightly on an unpopulated wasteland as I imagine what it will be like here fifty thousand years from now. This place will be called Peru.

  My image, because energy is focused and thrown across the ground, seems like a totem of the humans of this time. It can’t be wiped away.

  Later humans will be puzzled by this. They’ll think it’s a sign that an alien spaceship has landed here.

  I recover my ability to touch consciousnesses. I sense Ozma, no thought of returning home, nearby panting in pain. Ozma, as a physical presence, no longer exists.

  “Ozma, I’ve been working at this for one hundred thousand years. Perhaps you still want to wait for up to another two thousand. You know there are still several strings whose positions I have no way to determine. They have to be reorganized before you can enter time and space freely.”

  All of this, Ozma understands perfectly. To rescue her from her prison, there’s only one step left. As a result, she’s utterly cooperative.

  Every day, we make progress.

  But, today, something’s bothering her. Usually, a disturbed and distracted Ozma calms down obediently once she smells my breath. But, today, she’s restless instead.

  What troubles her emerges from the Large Magellanic Cloud, which passed through her head. The galaxy expands rapidly as though it were foam. It flickers between yellow and green, like a ghost in the sky.

  “Ozma, what’s wrong? You have to help me in this.”

  Suddenly, the eyes of the librarian from fifty thousand years into the future appear in the cloud. A dreadful fear fills me.

  But they disappear in an instant.

  I decide we won’t have our usual pleasant chat. I decide to forget for now the dangerous and terrifying image that was in the sky. I link my field to that of the universe. They connect to Ozma’s mental world—but not through the magazine. The gathering of forces, bit by bit, breaks down the prison walls that prevent her from leaving.

  Even so, tonight, we don’t really make any headway.

  “Ozma, join me.” Only I can hear my voice.

  The Magellanic Cloud expands again, like a magazine being ripped to shreds. Every string of space-time unfolds out of the cloud. I see on them things that should not be.

  Two birds in the wind peck at their food. Their appearance throws the timeline into disarray. I can’t continue my work.

  A voice penetrates me: Let me go.

  It booms like thunder and lightning. I’m slain. I mumble: “Ozma, it’s been fifty thousand years. I’m not wrong to wait for you. I won’t abandon you. Wait for me. I’ll be back.”

  The two birds have disappeared. The galaxy makes a noise like a flock of birds dispersing. The day arrives, spreading its wings.

  —

  The cover of a new issue of the magazine is a North American condor. Its bearing is powerful, as though it were an overlord of the universe.

  I vacillate over whether to open the magazine.

  Last night, my promise to Ozma surfaced in my heart. Even so, I can’t drive away the silhouettes of the two birds.

  The overcast day outside the window falls on the library’s main reading room. Once again, the table doesn’t have my reflection. Those two women aren’t here today. Besides me, there is just the librarian. He is using a feather duster to slap the dust off a row of bookshelves.

  He walks to the back of the art section and I take that moment to open the magazine. The first article is called “A Discussion of the Bird’s Place in the Ecosystem.” To my surprise, I don’t find the secret code that I know so well between the lines. Ozma has failed to send any information.

  Winter is coming and birds are migrating south. The article says this. As I read, sweat drips off me. I don’t close the magazine before I stand and leave.

  The librarian blocks my way.

  “Why are you leaving so early today?”

  “I’m feeling a little under the weather.”

  “A little under the weather? Be careful. It’s winter. Don’t catch a cold.”

  I shiver. I brush past him, wanting to go outside.

  “Wait.”

  I stop. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, but you violated the reading regulations.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve noticed that every day, you read the same magazine.”

  “And this violates the reading regulations?”

  He shows me the magazine. I’ve underlined key words and paragraphs in red.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll pay whatever fine,” I say fearfully.

  “I’m afraid you can’t afford the fine. Why did you underline these words?”

  “I’m with the Biology Department at B University. My area of research is bird breeding and migration. The article I’m working on has everything to do with this.”

  “However, does it also have something to do with the control of time and space?”

  “What did you say?” My leg starts to shake.

  I know he’s a hunter but how did he find my hiding place so quickly?

  Against these people, resistance is useless.

  “You’re free to do whatever you want,” I say.

  “You have to stop helping Ozma immediately. You’re changing the common established timelines of many people. These timelines have existed for a long time now. They’re like these books, written in black ink on white paper.”

  “I said you’re free to do whatever you want but it’s really a pity. Ozma is no ordinary spaceship. She’s sentient. Because of that, you’ve grounded her.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Why don’t you take a walk with me?”

  —

  On the return trip, I give the hunter a hint. As a matter of fact, last night, I gave up on the rescue I’ve worked on continuously for the past hundred thousand years. There’s no point to capturing me today. I explain those two birds pecking at food in the wind from nowhere to him.

  I doubt they represent another mystical force.

  The hunter listens silently.

  After a moment, I hear him thinking to him
self. “If only they weren’t those two women.”

  “What did you say?” I’m also sending thoughts via brain waves.

  He doesn’t respond again. The light in his heart darkens.

  He’s probably singled out the two gloomy female readers in the main reading room. But I don’t think they’re anyone special.

  The thin air makes the starlight sorrowful. All the free will in the universe now returns to its nest. I have a hunch that this is a good time to escape.

  After one hundred thousand years, I have a lot of experience in hiding.

  The hunter is distracted. I guess, because of what I said, his attention has shifted to the two birds overhead. I sneak away, withdraw from this game of chase and taboo.

  Once again, I see my bird-of-prey body transcend time and space. The pursuer searches despairingly at the other end of the wormhole. He didn’t anticipate that I’d escape.

  Nebulas and dust cleanse my mind and body.

  I discover that my claws grasp the magazine that was exhibited in the library on Earth.

  I let it fall. It quickly dissolves into elementary particles. Let it follow the librarian.

  The textbook that contains the secrets of the natural world and the legislators of a civilized society take the same shape. But what do those two small birds symbolize?

  As the Earth folk say, twenty thousand years pass in the blink of an eye.

  Ultimately, I break my promise. I never return to Ozma’s universe because I begin to doubt whether altering the entire course of evolution is worth it for a sentient spaceship.

  I don’t think through to the result because, afterwards, I have a new goal….

  I see with my own eyes the death of the hunter and the deaths of heavenly bodies.

  A newly born galaxy produces a new generation of hunters and prey as well as the rest of the strange things that go along with them. I have no interest in any of that.