The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  I took another pull from the bottle and tried to loosen my tie. Since I had a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other – and since I was unwilling to surrender either – loosening my tie was difficult. I used the gun hand, working the knot with a finger looped through the trigger guard, cold steel brushing my throat. I felt the muzzle under my chin – fingers numb and awkward, curling past the trigger.

  It would be so easy.

  I wondered if people have died this way – drunk, armed, loosening their ties. I imagined it was common among certain occupations.

  Then the tie opened, and I hadn’t shot myself. I took a drink from the bottle as reward.

  The waves rumbled in. This place was nothing like the dunes of Indiana, where Lake Michigan makes love to the shoreline. Here in Gloucester, the water hates the land.

  As a child, I’d come to this beach and wondered where all the boulders came from. Did the tides carry them in? Now I knew better. The boulders, of course, were here all along – buried in soft soils. They are left-behind things. They are what remains when the ocean subtracts everything else.

  Behind me, near the road, there is a monument – a list of names. Fishermen. Gloucestermen. The ones who did not come back.

  This is Gloucester, a place with a history of losing itself to the ocean.

  I told myself I’d brought the gun for protection, but sitting here in the dark sand, I no longer believed it. I was beyond fooling myself. It was my father’s gun, a .357. It had not been fired for sixteen years, seven months, four days. Even drunk, the math came quickly.

  My sister Mary had called it a good thing, this new place that was also an old place. A new start, she’d said. You can do your work again. You can continue your research.

  Yeah, I’d said. A lie she believed.

  You won’t call me, will you?

  Of course I’ll call. A lie she didn’t.

  I turned my face away from the wind and took another burning swig. I drank until I couldn’t remember which hand held the gun and which the bottle. I drank until they were the same.

  During the second week, we unpacked the microscopes. Satish used a crowbar while I used a claw hammer. The crates were heavy, wooden, hermetically sealed – shipped in from some now-defunct research laboratory in Pennsylvania.

  The sun beat down on the lab’s loading dock, and it was nearly as hot today as it was cold the week before.

  I swung my arm, and the claw hammer bit into the pale wood. I swung again. It was satisfying work. Satish saw me wipe the perspiration from my forehead, and he smiled, straight white teeth in a straight dark face.

  “In India,” he said, “this is sweater weather.”

  Satish slid the crowbar into the gash I made, and pressed. I’d known him for three days, and already I was his friend. Together we committed violence on the crates until they yielded.

  The industry was consolidating, the Pennsylvania lab the latest victim. Their equipment came cheap. Here at Hansen, it was like Christmas for scientists. We opened our boxes. We ogled our new toys. We wondered, vaguely, how we had come to deserve this. For some, like Satish, the answer was complicated and rooted in achievement. Hansen was more than just another Massachusetts think tank after all, and Satish had beaten out a dozen other scientists to work here. He’d given presentations and written up projects that important people liked. For me it was simpler.

  For me this was a second chance given by a friend. A last chance.

  We cracked open the final wooden crate, and Satish peered inside. He peeled out layer after layer of foam packing material. It was a big crate, but inside we found only a small assortment of Nalgene volumetric flasks, maybe three pounds weight. It was somebody’s idea of a joke – somebody at the now-defunct lab making a statement of opinion about their now-defunct job.

  “The frog is in the well,” Satish said, one of his many opaque expressions.

  “It certainly is,” I said.

  There were reasons for moving here. There were reasons not to. They were the same reasons. Both had everything, and nothing, to do with the gun.

  The lab gates are the first thing a person sees when driving up on the property. From the gates, you can’t see the building at all, which in the real estate sector surrounding Boston, speaks not just of money, but money. Everything out here is expensive, elbow room most of all.

  The lab is tucked into a stony hillside about an hour upcoast of the city. It is a private, quiet place, shaded by trees. The building itself is beautiful – two stories of reflective glass spread over the approximate dimensions of a football field. What isn’t glass is matte black steel. It looks like art. A small, brick-paved turnaround curves up to the main entrance, but the front parking lot there is merely a decorative ornament – a small asphalt pad for visitors and the uninitiated. The driveway continues around the building where the real parking, the parking for the researchers, is in the back.

  That first morning, I parked in front and walked inside.

  A pretty blonde receptionist smiled at me. “Take a seat.”

  Two minutes later, James rounded the corner and shook my hand. He walked me back to his office. And then came the offer, like this was just business – like we were just two men in suits. But I could see it in his eyes, that sad way he looked at me, my old friend.

  He slid a folded sheet of paper across the desk. I unfolded it. Forced myself to make sense of the numbers.

  “It’s too generous,” I said.

  “We’re getting you cheap at that price.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not.”

  “Considering your patents and your past work—”

  I cut him off. “I can’t do that anymore.”

  “I’d heard that. I’d hoped it wasn’t true.”

  “If you feel I came here under false pretenses—” I began climbing to my feet.

  “No, no.” He held his hand up to stop me. “The offer stands. We can carry you for four months.” He leaned back in his leather chair. “Probationary researchers get four months to produce. We pride ourselves on our independence; so you can choose whatever research you like, but after four months, it’s not up to me anymore. I have bosses, too; so you have to have something to show for it. Something publishable, or on its way to it. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “This can be a new start for you,” he said, and I knew then that he’d already talked to Mary. “You did some great work at QSR. I followed your publications; hell, we all did. But considering the circumstances under which you left . . .”

  I nodded again. The inevitable moment.

  He was silent, looking at me. “I’m going out on a limb for you,” he said. “But you’ve got to promise me.”

  That was the closest he’d come to mentioning it.

  I looked away. His office suited him, I decided. Not too large, but bright and comfortable. A Notre Dame engineering diploma graced one wall. Only his desk was pretentious – a teak monstrosity large enough to land aircraft on – but I knew it was inherited. His father’s old desk. I’d seen it once when we were still in college a dozen years ago. A lifetime ago.

  “Can you promise me?” he asked.

  I knew what he was asking. I met his eyes. Silence. And he was quiet for a long time after that, looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Weighing our friendship against the odds this would come back to bite him.

  “All right,” he said finally. “You start tomorrow.”

  There are days I don’t drink at all. Here is how those days start: I pull the gun from its holster and set it on the desk in my hotel room. The gun is heavy and black. It says Ruger along the side in small, raised letters. It tastes like pennies and ashes. I look into the mirror across from the bed and tell myself, If you drink today, you’re going to kill yourself. I look into my own gray eyes and see that I mean it.

  Those are the days I don’t drink.

  There is a rhythm to working in a research laboratory. Through the glass doors by 7:3
0, nodding to the other early arrivals, then sit in your office until 8:00, pondering this fundamental truth: even shit coffee – even mud-thick, brackish, walkin’-out-the-pot shit coffee is better than no coffee at all.

  I like to be the one who makes the first pot in the morning. Swing open the cabinet doors in the coffee room, pop the tin cylinder and take a deep breath, letting the smell of grounds fill my lungs. It is better than drinking the coffee, that smell.

  There are days when I feel everything is an imposition – eating, speaking, walking out of the hotel room in the morning. Everything is effort. I exist mostly in my head. It comes and goes, this crushing depression, and I work hard not to let it show, because the truth is that it’s not how you feel that matters. It’s how you act. It’s your behavior. As long as your intelligence is intact, you can make cognitive evaluations of what is appropriate. You can force the day to day.

  And I want to keep this job; so I do force it. I want to get along. I want to be productive again. I want to make Mary proud of me.

  Working at a research lab isn’t like a normal job. There are peculiar rhythms, strange hours – special allowances are made for the creatives.

  Two Chinese guys are the ringleaders of lunchtime basketball. They pulled me into a game my first week. “You look like you can play,” was what they said.

  One is tall, one is short. The tall one was raised in Ohio and has no accent. He is called Point Machine. The short one has no real idea of the rules of basketball, and for this reason, is the best defensive player. His fouls leave marks, and that becomes another game – a game within a game – to see how much abuse you can take without calling it. This is the real reason I play. I drive to the hoop and get hacked down. I drive again.

  One player, a Norwegian named Umlauf, is six feet eight inches. I marvel at the sheer size of him. He can’t run or jump or move at all, really, but his big body clogs up the lane, huge arms swatting down any jump shot made within reach of his personal zone of asphalt real estate. We play four-on-four, or five-on-five, depending on who is free for lunch. At thirty-one, I’m a few years younger than most of them, a few inches taller – except for Umlauf, who is a head taller than everyone. Trash is talked in an assortment of accents.

  Some researchers go to restaurants on lunch hour. Others play computer games in their offices. Still others work through lunch – forget to eat for days. Satish is one of those. I play basketball because it feels like punishment.

  The atmosphere in the lab is relaxed; you can take naps if you want. There is no outside pressure to work. It is a strictly Darwinian system – you compete for your right to be there. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself, because everyone knows that the evaluations come every four months, and you’ve got to have something to show. The turnover rate for probationary researchers hovers around 25 percent.

  Satish works in circuits. He told me about it during my second week when I found him sitting at the SEM. “It is microscopic work,” he said.

  A scanning electron microscope is a window. Put a sample in the chamber, pump to vacuum, and it’s like looking at another world. What had been flat, smooth sample surface now takes on another character, becomes topographically complex. Using the SEM is like looking at satellite photography – you’re up in space, looking down at this elaborate landscape, looking down at Earth, and then you turn the little black dial and zoom toward the surface. Zooming in is like falling. Like you’ve been dropped from orbit, and the ground is rushing up to meet you, but you’re falling faster than you ever could in real life, faster than terminal velocity, falling impossibly fast, impossibly far, and the landscape keeps getting bigger, and you think you’re going to hit, but you never do, because everything keeps getting closer and sharper, and you never do hit the ground – like that old riddle where the frog jumps half the distance of a log, then half again, and again, and again, and never reaches the other side, not ever. That’s an electron microscope. Falling forever down into the picture. And you never do hit bottom.

  I zoomed in to 14,000X once. Like God’s eyes focusing. Looking for that ultimate, indivisible truth. I learned this: there is no bottom to see.

  Satish and I both had offices on the second floor.

  Satish was short and thin. His skin was a deep, rich brown. He had an almost boyish face, but the first hints of gray salted his mustache. His features were balanced in such a way that he could have been the fine, prodigal son of any number of nations: Mexico, or Libya, or Greece, or Sicily – until he opened his mouth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, all those possible identities vanished, and he was suddenly Indian, solidly Indian, completely, like a magic trick; and you could not imagine him being anything else.

  The first time I met Satish, he clamped both hands over mine, shook, then clapped me on the shoulder and said, “How are you doing, my friend? Welcome to research.” He smiled so wide it was impossible not to like him.

  It was Satish who explained that you never wore gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. “Make a point of it,” Satish said. “Because the gloves will get you burned.”

  I watched him work. He filled the SEM’s reservoir – icy smoke spilling out over the lip, cascading down to the tile floor.

  Liquid nitrogen doesn’t have the same surface tension as water; spill a few drops across your hand and they’ll tend to bounce off harmlessly and run down your skin without truly wetting you – like little balls of mercury. The drops will evaporate in moments, sizzling, steaming, gone. But if you’re wearing gloves when you fill the reservoir, the nitrogen could spill down inside and be trapped against your skin. “And if that happens,” Satish said while he poured. “It will hurt you bad.”

  Satish was the first to ask my area of research.

  “I’m not sure,” I told him.

  “How can you not be sure?”

  I shrugged. “I’m just not.”

  “You are here. It must be something.”

  “I’m still working on it.”

  He stared at me, taking this in, and I saw his eyes change – his understanding of me shifting, like the first time I heard him speak. And just like that, I’d become something different to him.

  “Ah,” he said. “I know who you are now. You are the one from Stanford.”

  “That was eight years ago.”

  “You wrote that famous paper on de-coherence. You are the one who had the breakdown.”

  Satish was blunt, apparently.

  “I wouldn’t call it a breakdown.”

  He nodded, perhaps accepting this; perhaps not. “So you still are working in quantum theory?”

  “No, I stopped.”

  “Why stop?”

  “Quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview after a while.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The more research I did, the less I believed.”

  “In quantum mechanics?”

  “No. In the world.”

  There are days when I don’t drink at all. On those days, I pick up my father’s .357 and look in the mirror. I convince myself what it will cost me, today, if I take the first sip. It will cost me what it cost him.

  But there are also days I do drink. Those are the days I wake up sick. I walk into the bathroom and puke into the toilet, needing a drink so bad my hands are shaking. I look in the bathroom mirror and splash water in my face. I say nothing to myself. There is nothing I would believe.

  It is Vodka in the morning. Vodka because vodka has no smell. A sip to calm the shakes. A sip to get me moving. If Satish knows, he says nothing.

  Satish studied circuits. He bred them, in little ones and zeroes, in a Thomlin’s Field Programmable Gate Array. The array’s internal logic was malleable, and he allowed selective pressure to direct chip design. Genetic algorithms manipulated the best codes for the task. “Nothing is ideal,” he said. “There’s lots of modeling.”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea how it all worked.

  Satish was a gen
ius who had been a farmer in India until he came to America at the age of twenty-eight. He earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT. After that, Harvard, and patents, and job offers. “I am just a simple farmer,” he liked to say. “I like to challenge the dirt.”

  Satish had endless expressions. When relaxed, he let himself lapse into broken English. Sometimes, after spending the morning with him, I’d fall into the pattern of his speech, talking his broken English back at him, an efficient pidgin that I came to respect for its streamlined efficiency and ability to convey nuance.

  “I went to dentist yesterday,” Satish told me. “He says I have good teeth. I tell him ‘Forty-two years old, and it is my first time at dentist.’ And he could not believe.”

  “You’ve never been to the dentist?” I said.

  “No, never. Until I am in twelfth grade in my village back home, I did not know there was special doctor for teeth. I never went because I had no need. The dentist says I have good teeth, no cavities, but I have stain on my back molars on the left side where I chew tobacco.”

  “I didn’t know you chewed.”

  “I am ashamed. None of my brothers chew tobacco. Out of my family, I am the only one. I try to stop.” Satish spread his hands in exasperation. “But I cannot. I told my wife I stopped two months ago, but I started again, and I have not told her.” His eyes grew sad. “I am a bad person.”

  Satish stared at me. “You are laughing,” he said. “Why are you laughing?”

  Hansen was a gravity well in the tech industry – a constantly expanding force of nature, always buying out other labs, buying equipment, absorbing the competition.

  Hansen labs only hired the best, without regard to national origin. It was the kind of place where you’d walk into the coffee room and find a Nigerian speaking German to an Iranian. Speaking German because they both spoke it better than English, the other language they had in common. Most of the engineers were Asian, though. It wasn’t because the best engineers were Asian – well, it wasn’t only because the best engineers were Asian. There were also simply more of them. America graduated four thousand engineers in 2008. China graduated more than three hundred thousand. And Hansen was always hungry for talent.