The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  —

  I wrote out the semagrams for “process create-endpoint inclusive-we,” meaning “let’s start.” Raspberry replied in the affirmative, and the slide shows began. The second display screen that the heptapods had provided began presenting a series of images, composed of semagrams and equations, while one of our video screens did the same.

  This was the second “gift exchange” I had been present for, the eighth one overall, and I knew it would be the last. The looking-glass tent was crowded with people; Burghart from Fort Worth was here, as were Gary and a nuclear physicist, assorted biologists, anthropologists, military brass, and diplomats. Thankfully they had set up an air-conditioner to cool the place off. We would review the tapes of the images later to figure out just what the heptapods’ “gift” was. Our own “gift” was a presentation on the Lascaux cave paintings.

  We all crowded around the heptapods’ second screen, trying to glean some idea of the images’ content as they went by. “Preliminary assessments?” asked Colonel Weber.

  “It’s not a return,” said Burghart. In a previous exchange, the heptapods had given us information about ourselves that we had previously told them. This had infuriated the State Department, but we had no reason to think of it as an insult: it probably indicated that trade value really didn’t play a role in these exchanges. It didn’t exclude the possibility that the heptapods might yet offer us a space drive, or cold fusion, or some other wish-fulfilling miracle.

  “That looks like inorganic chemistry,” said the nuclear physicist, pointing at an equation before the image was replaced.

  Gary nodded. “It could be materials technology,” he said.

  “Maybe we’re finally getting somewhere,” said Colonel Weber.

  “I wanna see more animal pictures,” I whispered, quietly so that only Gary could hear me, and pouted like a child. He smiled and poked me. Truthfully, I wished the heptapods had given another xenobiology lecture, as they had on two previous exchanges; judging from those, humans were more similar to the heptapods than any other species they’d ever encountered. Or another lecture on heptapod history; those had been filled with apparent non sequiturs, but were interesting nonetheless. I didn’t want the heptapods to give us new technology, because I didn’t want to see what our governments might do with it.

  I watched Raspberry while the information was being exchanged, looking for any anomalous behavior. It stood barely moving as usual; I saw no indications of what would happen shortly.

  After a minute, the heptapod’s screen went blank, and a minute after that, ours did too. Gary and most of the other scientists clustered around a tiny video screen that was replaying the heptapods’ presentation. I could hear them talk about the need to call in a solid-state physicist.

  Colonel Weber turned. “You two,” he said, pointing to me and then to Burghart, “schedule the time and location for the next exchange.” Then he followed the others to the playback screen.

  “Coming right up,” I said. To Burghart, I asked, “Would you care to do the honors, or shall I?”

  I knew Burghart had gained a proficiency in Heptapod B similar to mine. “It’s your looking glass,” he said. “You drive.”

  I sat down again at the transmitting computer. “Bet you never figured you’d wind up working as an army translator back when you were a grad student.”

  “That’s for goddamn sure,” he said. “Even now I can hardly believe it.” Everything we said to each other felt like the carefully bland exchanges of spies who meet in public, but never break cover.

  I wrote out the semagrams for “locus exchange-transaction converse inclusive-we” with the projective aspect modulation.

  Raspberry wrote its reply. That was my cue to frown, and for Burghart to ask, “What does it mean by that?” His delivery was perfect.

  I wrote a request for clarification; Raspberry’s reply was the same as before. Then I watched it glide out of the room. The curtain was about to fall on this act of our performance.

  Colonel Weber stepped forward. “What’s going on? Where did it go?”

  “It said that the heptapods are leaving now,” I said. “Not just itself; all of them.”

  “Call it back here now. Ask it what it means.”

  “Um, I don’t think Raspberry’s wearing a pager,” I said.

  The image of the room in the looking glass disappeared so abruptly that it took a moment for my eyes to register what I was seeing instead: it was the other side of the looking-glass tent. The looking glass had become completely transparent. The conversation around the playback screen fell silent.

  “What the hell is going on here?” said Colonel Weber.

  Gary walked up to the looking glass, and then around it to the other side. He touched the rear surface with one hand; I could see the pale ovals where his fingertips made contact with the looking glass. “I think,” he said, “we just saw a demonstration of transmutation at a distance.”

  I heard the sounds of heavy footfalls on dry grass. A soldier came in through the tent door, short of breath from sprinting, holding an oversize walkie-talkie. “Colonel, message from—”

  Weber grabbed the walkie-talkie from him.

  —

  I remember what it’ll be like watching you when you are a day old. Your father will have gone for a quick visit to the hospital cafeteria, and you’ll be lying in your bassinet, and I’ll be leaning over you.

  So soon after the delivery, I will still be feeling like a wrung-out towel. You will seem incongruously tiny, given how enormous I felt during the pregnancy; I could swear there was room for someone much larger and more robust than you in there. Your hands and feet will be long and thin, not chubby yet. Your face will still be all red and pinched, puffy eyelids squeezed shut, the gnomelike phase that precedes the cherubic.

  I’ll run a finger over your belly, marveling at the uncanny softness of your skin, wondering if silk would abrade your body like burlap. Then you’ll writhe, twisting your body while poking out your legs one at a time, and I’ll recognize the gesture as one I had felt you do inside me, many times. So that’s what it looks like.

  I’ll feel elated at this evidence of a unique mother-child bond, this certitude that you’re the one I carried. Even if I had never laid eyes on you before, I’d be able to pick you out from a sea of babies: Not that one. No, not her either. Wait, that one over there.

  Yes, that’s her. She’s mine.

  —

  That final “gift exchange” was the last we ever saw of the heptapods. All at once, all over the world, their looking glasses became transparent and their ships left orbit. Subsequent analysis of the looking glasses revealed them to be nothing more than sheets of fused silica, completely inert. The information from the final exchange session described a new class of superconducting materials, but it later proved to duplicate the results of research just completed in Japan: nothing that humans didn’t already know.

  We never did learn why the heptapods left, any more than we learned what brought them here, or why they acted the way they did. My own new awareness didn’t provide that type of knowledge; the heptapods’ behavior was presumably explicable from a sequential point of view, but we never found that explanation.

  I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods’ worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as they must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life. But that will never come to pass. I will continue to practice the heptapod languages, as will the other linguists on the looking-glass teams, but none of us will ever progress any further than we did when the heptapods were here.

  Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and not
e every detail.

  From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?

  These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.

  Craphound

  CORY DOCTOROW

  Cory Doctorow (1971– ) is an award-winning and bestselling Canadian science fiction writer, critic, and public speaker born in Toronto who serves as coeditor of the website Boing Boing. In the 1990s he founded the free software corporation Opencola. Later, he relocated to London and worked as the European affairs coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before becoming a full-time writer in 2006. Doctorow was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright chair for public diplomacy; the position included a one-year residency at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

  In the context of science fiction, Doctorow attended the 1992 Clarion writers’ workshop and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. He has won multiple other awards, including the Locus Award in 2004 for his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003); the Sunburst Award (2004); and two Prometheus Awards (2009 and 2014). He has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and his career has at times been intertwined with that of Charles Stross, with whom he has collaborated on fiction.

  Doctorow as writer and activist is highly aware of the transformations the human race is facing. Much of his work consists of nonfiction advocacy, as collected in Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (2008) and Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (2014). He has complex views on the relationship of the information-dense world we now inhabit and the free flow of information within this network, where (he feels) we now essentially live and work. His most influential novel is Little Brother (2008), which was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Ontario Library Association White Pine Award, as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in independent bookstores. The novel is also the most consciously near-future of his science fiction work. Prior to Little Brother, much of Doctorow’s science fiction was fairly far-future in its approach. A sequel to Little Brother, Homeland, was published in 2013.

  Doctorow first came to wide attention in the science fiction community for his story “Craphound,” reprinted here, in which aliens turn out to conceive of the marks and detritus of our human passage over the planet as collectible. It is a fascinating exploration of the modern “culture of things” and also deeply funny and wise.

  CRAPHOUND

  Cory Doctorow

  Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him—respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

  So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.

  Craphound spotted the sign—his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing eighty kilometers per hour on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC’s summer-Saturday programming—eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: The Shadow; Quiet, Please; Tom Mix; The Crypt-Keeper with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of The African Queen. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound’s breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said, “Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!”

  When Craphound gets that excited, it’s a sign that he’s spotted a rich vein. I checked the side-mirror quickly, pounded the brakes, and spun around. The transmission creaked, the wheels squealed, and then we were creeping along the way we’d come.

  “There,” Craphound said, gesturing with his long, skinny arm. I saw it. A wooden A-frame real-estate sign, a piece of hand-lettered cardboard stuck overtop of the Realtor’s name:

  EAST MUSKOKA VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPT

  LADIES AUXILIARY RUMMAGE SALE

  SAT 25 JUNE

  “Hoo-eee!” I hollered, and spun the truck onto the dirt road. I gunned the engine as we cruised along the tree-lined road, trusting Craphound to spot any deer, signs, or hikers in time to avert disaster. The sky was a perfect blue and the smells of summer were all around us. I snapped off the radio and listened to the wind rushing through the truck. Ontario is beautiful in the summer.

  “There!” Craphound shouted. I hit the turn-off and downshifted and then we were back on a paved road. Soon, we were rolling into a country fire station, an ugly brick barn. The hall was lined with long, folding tables, stacked high. The mother lode!

  Craphound beat me out the door, as usual. His exoskeleton is programmable, so he can record little scripts for it like: move left arm to door handle, pop it, swing legs out to running board, jump to ground, close door, move forward. Meanwhile, I’m still making sure I’ve switched off the headlights and that I’ve got my wallet.

  Two blue-haired grannies had a card-table set up out front of the hall, with a big tin pitcher of lemonade and three boxes of Tim Horton assorted donuts. That stopped us both, since we share the superstition that you always buy food from old ladies and little kids, as a sacrifice to the crap-gods. One of the old ladies poured out the lemonade while the other smiled and greeted us.

  “Welcome, welcome! My, you’ve come a long way for us!”

  “Just up from Toronto, ma’am,” I said. It’s an old joke, but it’s also part of the ritual, and it’s got to be done.

  “I meant your friend, sir. This gentleman.”

  Craphound smiled without baring his gums and sipped his lemonade. “Of course I came, dear lady. I wouldn’t miss it for the worlds!” His accent is pretty good, but when it comes to stock phrases like this, he’s got so much polish you’d think he was reading the news.

  The biddie blushed and giggled, and I felt faintly sick. I walked off to the tables, trying not to hurry. I chose my first spot, about halfway down, where things wouldn’t be quite so picked-over. I grabbed an empty box from underneath and started putting stuff into it: four matched highball glasses with gold crossed bowling pins and a line of black around the rim; an Expo ’67 wall-hanging that wasn’t even a little faded; a shoe box full of late sixties O-Pee-Chee hockey cards; a worn, wooden-handled steel cleaver that you could butcher a steer with.

  I picked up my box and moved on: a deck of playing cards copyrighted ’57, with the logo for the Royal Canadian Dairy, Bala, Ontario, printed on the backs; a fireman’s cap with a brass badge so tarnished I couldn’t read it; a three-story wedding-cake trophy for the 1974 Eastern Region Curling Championships. The cash register in my mind was ringing, ringing, ringing. God bless the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary.

  I’d mined that table long enough. I moved to the other end of the hall. Time was, I’d start at the beginning and turn over each item, build one pile of maybes and another pile of definites, try to strategise. In time, I came to rely on instinct and on the fates, to whom I make my obeisances at every opportunity.

  Let’s hear it for the fates: a genuine collapsible top hat; a white-tipped evening cane; a hand-carved cherry-wood walking stick; a beautiful black lace parasol; a wrought-iron lightning rod with a rooster on top; all of it in an elephant-leg umbrella stand. I filled the box, folded it over, and started on another.
/>
  I collided with Craphound. He grinned his natural grin, the one that showed row on row of wet, slimy gums, tipped with writhing, poisonous suckers. “Gold! Gold!” he said, and moved along. I turned my head after him, just as he bent over the cowboy trunk.

  I sucked air between my teeth. It was magnificent: a leather-bound miniature steamer trunk, the leather worked with lariats, Stetson hats, war bonnets, and six-guns. I moved toward him, and he popped the latch. I caught my breath.

  On top, there was a kid’s cowboy costume: miniature leather chaps, a tiny Stetson, a pair of scuffed white-leather cowboy boots with long, worn spurs affixed to the heels. Craphound moved it reverently to the table and continued to pull more magic from the trunk’s depths: a stack of cardboard-bound Hopalong Cassidy 78s; a pair of tin six-guns with gun belt and holsters; a silver star that said “Sheriff”; a bundle of Roy Rogers comics tied with twine, in mint condition; and a leather satchel filled with plastic cowboys and Indians, enough to reenact the Alamo.

  “Oh, my God,” I breathed, as he spread the loot out on the table.

  “What are these, Jerry?” Craphound asked, holding up the 78s.

  “Old records, like LPs, but you need a special record player to listen to them.” I took one out of its sleeve. It gleamed, scratch-free, in the overhead fluorescents.

  “I got a seventy-eight player here,” said a member of the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary. She was short enough to look Craphound in the eye, a hair under five feet, and had a skinny, rawboned look to her. “That’s my Billy’s things, Billy the Kid we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy. Couldn’t get him to take off that fool outfit—nearly got him thrown out of school. He’s a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the sale, and you know what? He didn’t know what I was talking about! Doesn’t that beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy.”