The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  The nanocams had arrived. She stopped paddling, knowing she had reached safety. Looking back, she saw only thin wisps of fog, shredding and fading in the wind. No sign of Ivo.

  How had he disappeared? Had there ever been anything weird out there? If so, she hoped he was happy to join his friends – his large, hungry, monster friends.

  But maybe Ivo had just searched for weirdness so hard that finally, in disappearing, he became the mystery that he had longed for.

  Susanna smiled. Certainly she had got one final old-fashioned scoop, an epitaph for the end of strangeness in the nanocams’ world. The mysterious disappearance of Ivo the weird-hunter.

  The Conspiracy Channel would love it.

  CASCADE POINT

  Timothy Zahn

  Here’s the first of the two novellas in this anthology, clocking up close on 20,000 words. First published in 1983, this story went on to win the Hugo Award as that year’s best novella. It was subsequently collected in Cascade Point and Other Stories (1986), but the length of the story means it does not get reprinted that often and it is long overdue for another outing. It takes us far into deep space on ships that are able to travel vast distances by taking advantage of “cascade points”, which allow a leap through hyperspace, but which are also moments of severe danger when individuals can become aware of their alternate selves.

  Timothy Zahn (b. 1951), is probably best known for his contributions to the Star Wars universe that began with Heir to the Empire (1991). His work there has rather distracted him from the wider science-fiction world where, in the 1980s, he was one of the most innovative and inspiring contributors to the magazines. His intriguing concepts will be found in his first novel, Spinneret (1985) and other story collections, Time Bomb and Zahn dry Others (1988), Distant Friends (1992) and Star Song (2002).

  IN RETROSPECT, I suppose I should have realized my number had come up on the universe’s list right from the very start, right from the moment it became clear that I was going to be stuck with the job of welcoming the Aura Dancer’s latest batch of passengers aboard. Still, I suppose it’s just as well it was me and not Tobbar who let Rik Bradley and his psychiatrist onto my ship. There are some things that a captain should have no one to blame for but himself, and this was definitely in that category.

  Right away I suppose that generates a lot of false impressions. A star liner captain, resplendent in white and gold, smiling toothily at elegantly dressed men and women as the ramp carries them through the polished entry portal – forget all of that. A tramp starmer isn’t polished anywhere it doesn’t absolutely have to be, the captain is lucky if he’s got a clean jumpsuit – let alone some pseudo-military Christmas tree frippery – and the passengers we get are the steerage of the star-traveling community. And look it.

  Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against passengers aboard my ship. As a matter of fact, putting extra cabins in the Dancer had been my idea to start with, and they’d all too often made the difference between profit and loss in our always marginal business. But one of the reasons I had gone into space in the first place was to avoid having to make small talk with strangers, and I would rather solo through four cascade points in a row than spend those agonizing minutes at the entry portal. In this case, though, I had no choice. Tobbar, our master of drivel – and thus the man unofficially in charge of civilian small talk-was up to his elbows in grease and balky hydraulics; and my second choice, Alana Keal, had finally gotten through to an equally balky tower controller who wanted to bump us ten ships back in the lift pattern. Which left exactly one person – me – because there was no one else I’d trust with giving a good first impression of my ship to paying customers. And so I was the one standing on the ramp when Bradley and his eleven fellow passengers hove into sight.

  They ranged from semi-scruffy to respectable-but-not-rich – about par for the Dancer – but even in such a diverse group Bradley stood out like a red light on the status board. He was reasonably good-looking, reasonably average in height and build; but there was something in the way he walked that immediately caught my attention. Sort of a cross between nervous fear and something I couldn’t help but identify as swagger. The mix was so good that it was several seconds before it occurred to me how mutually contradictory the two impressions were, and the realization left me feeling more uncomfortable than I already did.

  Bradley was eighth in line, with the result that my first seven greetings were carried out without a lot of attention from my conscious mind – which I’m sure only helped. Even standing still, I quickly discovered, Bradley’s strangeness made itself apparent, both in his posture and also in his face and eyes. Especially his eyes.

  Finally it was his turn at the head of the line. “Good morning, sir,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m Captain Pall Durriken. Welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you.” His voice was bravely uncertain, the sort my mother used to describe as mousy. His eyes flicked the length of the Dancer, darted once into the portal, and returned to my face. “How often do ships like this crash?” he asked.

  I hadn’t expected any questions quite so blunt, but the fact that it was outside the realm of small talk made it easy to handle. “Hardly ever,” I told him. “The last published figures showed a death rate of less than one per million passengers. You’re more likely to be hit by a chunk of roof tile off the tower over there.”

  He actually cringed, turning halfway around to look at the tower. I hadn’t dreamed he would take my comment so seriously, but before I could get my mouth working the man behind Bradley clapped a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Rik – nothing’s going to hurt you. Really. This is a good ship, and we’re going to be perfectly safe aboard her.”

  Bradley slowly straightened, and the other man shifted his attention to me. “I’m Dr Hammerfeld Lanton, Captain,” he said, extending his hand. “This is Rik Bradley. We’re traveling in adjoining cabins.”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding as if I’d already known that. In reality I hadn’t had time to check out the passenger lists and assignments, but I could trust Leeds to have set things up properly. “Are you a doctor of medicine, sir?”

  “In a way,” Lanton said. “I’m a psychiatrist.”

  “Ah,” I said, and managed two or three equally brilliant conversational gems before the two of them moved on. The last three passengers I dispatched with similar polish, and when everyone was inside I sealed the portal and headed for the bridge.

  Alana had finished her dickering with the tower and was running the pre-lift computer check when I arrived. “What’s the verdict?” I asked as I slid into my chair and keyed for helm check.

  “We’ve still got our lift slot,” she said. “That’s conditional on Matope getting the elevon system working within the next half-hour, of course.”

  “Idiots,” I muttered. The elevons wouldn’t be needed until we arrived at Taimyr some six weeks from now, and Matope could practically rebuild them from scratch in that amount of time. To insist they be in prime condition before we could lift was unreasonable even for bureaucrats.

  “Oh, there’s no problem – Tobbar reported they were closing things up a few minutes ago. They’ll put it through its paces, it’ll work perfectly, they’ll transmit the readout, and that’ll be that.” She cleared her throat. “Incidentally . . . are you aware we’ve got a skull-diver and his patient aboard?”

  “Yes; I met – patient?” I interrupted myself as the last part of her sentence registered. “Who?”

  “Name’s Bradley,” she said. “No further data on him, but apparently he and this Lanton character had a fair amount of electronic and medical stuff delivered to their cabins.”

  A small shiver ran up my back as I remembered Bradley’s face. No wonder he’d struck me as strange. “No mention at all of what’s wrong – of why Bradley needs a psychiatrist?”

  “Nothing. But it can’t be anything serious.” The test board bleeped, and Alana paused to peer at the results. Apparently satisfied,
she keyed in the next test on the checklist. “The Swedish Psychiatric Institute seems to be funding the trip, and they presumably know the regulations about notifying us of potential health risks.”

  “Um.” On the other hand, a small voice whispered in my ear, if there was some problem with Bradley that made him marginal for space certification, they were more likely to get away with slipping him aboard a tramp than a liner. “Maybe I should give them a call, anyway. Unless you’d like to?”

  I glanced over in time to see her face go stony. “No, thank you,” she said firmly.

  “Right.” I felt ashamed of the comment, not really having meant it the way it had come out. All of us had our own reasons for being where we were; Alana’s was an overdose of third-degree emotional burns. She was the type who’d seemingly been born to nurse broken wings and bruised souls, the type who by necessity kept her own heart in full view of both friends and passersby. Eventually, I gathered, one too many of her mended souls had torn out the emotional IVs she’d set up and flown off without so much as a backward glance, and she had renounced the whole business and run off to space. Ice to Europa, I’d thought once; there were enough broken wings out here for a whole shipload of Florence Nightingales. But what I’d expected to be a short vacation for her had become four years worth of armor plate over her emotions, until I wasn’t sure she even knew anymore how to care for people. The last thing in the universe she would be interested in doing would be getting involved in any way with Bradley’s problems. “Is all the cargo aboard now?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “Yes, and Wilkinson certifies it’s properly stowed.”

  “Good.” I got to my feet. “I guess I’ll make a quick spot survey of the ship, if you can handle things here.”

  “Go ahead,” she said, not bothering to look up. Nodding anyway, I left.

  I stopped first at the service shafts where Matope and Tobbar were just starting their elevon tests, staying long enough to satisfy myself the resulting data were adequate to please even the tower’s bit-pickers. Then it was to each of the cargo holds to double-check Wilkinson’s stowing arrangement, to the passenger area to make sure all their luggage had been properly brought on board, to the computer room to look into a reported malfunction – a false alarm, fortunately – and finally back to the bridge for the lift itself. Somehow, in all the running around, I never got around to calling Sweden. Not, as I found out later, that it would have done me any good.

  We lifted right on schedule, shifting from the launch field’s grav booster to ramjet at ten kilometers and kicking in the fusion drive as soon as it was legal to do so. Six hours later we were past Luna’s orbit and ready for the first cascade maneuver.

  Leeds checked in first, reporting officially that the proper number of dosages had been drawn from the sleeper cabinet and were being distributed to the passengers. Pascal gave the okay from the computer room, Matope from the engine room, and Sarojis from the small chamber housing the field generator itself. I had just pulled a hard copy of the computer’s course instructions when Leeds called back. “Captain, I’m in Dr Lanton’s cabin,” he said without preamble. “Both he and Mr Bradley refuse to take their sleepers.”

  Alana turned at that, and I could read my own thought in her face: Lanton and Bradley had to be nuts. “Has Dr Epstein explained the reasons behind the procedure?” I asked carefully, mindful of both my responsibilities and my limits here.

  “Yes, I have,” Kate Epstein’s clear soprano came. “Dr Lanton says that his work requires both of them to stay awake through the cascade point.”

  “Work? What sort of work?”

  A pause, and Lanton’s voice replaced Kate’s. “Captain, this is Dr Lanton. Rik and I are involved in an experimental type of therapy here. The personal details are confidential, but I assure you that it presents no danger either to us or to you.”

  Therapy. Great. I could feel anger starting to churn in my gut at Lanton’s casual arrogance in neglecting to inform me ahead of time that he had more than transport in mind for my ship. By all rights I should freeze the countdown and sit Lanton down in a corner somewhere until I was convinced everything was as safe as he said. But time was money in this business; and if Lanton was glossing things over he could probably do so in finer detail than I could catch him on, anyway. “Mr Bradley?” I called. “You agree to pass up your sleeper, as well?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the mousy voice.

  “All right. Dr Epstein, you and Mr Leeds can go ahead and finish your rounds.”

  “Well,” Alana said as I flipped off the intercom, “at least if something goes wrong the record will clear us of any fault at the inquest.”

  “You’re a genuine ray of sunshine,” I told her sourly. “What else could I have done?”

  “Raked Lanton over the coals for some information. We’re at least entitled to know what’s going on.”

  “Oh, we’ll find out, all right. As soon as we’re through the point I’m going to haul Lanton up here for a long, cosy chat,” I checked the readouts. Cascade point in seventeen minutes. “Look, you might as well go to your cabin and hit the sack. I know it’s your turn, but you were up late with that spare parts delivery and you’re due for some down time.”

  She hesitated; wanting to accept, no doubt, but slowed by considerations of duty. “Well . . . all right. I’m taking the next one, then. I don’t know, though; maybe you shouldn’t be up here alone. In case Lanton’s miscalculated.”

  “You mean if Bradley goes berserk or something?” That thought had been lurking in my mind, too, though it sounded rather ridiculous when spoken out loud. Still . . . “I can lower the pressure in the passenger deck corridor to half an atmosphere. That’ll be enough to lock the doors without triggering any vacuum alarms.”

  “Leaves Lanton on his own in case of trouble . . . but I suppose that’s okay.”

  “He’s the one who’s so sure it’s safe. Go on, now – get out of here.”

  She nodded and headed for the door. She paused there, though, her hand resting on the release. “Don’t just haul Lanton away from Bradley when you want to talk to him,” she called back over her shoulder. “Try to run into him in the lounge or somewhere instead when he’s already alone. It might be hard on Bradley to know you two were off somewhere together talking about him.” She slapped the release, almost viciously, and was gone.

  I stared after her for a long minute, wondering if I’d actually seen a crack in that heavy armorplate. The bleep of the intercom brought me back to the task at hand, Kate telling me the passengers were all down and that she, Leeds, and Wilkinson had taken their own sleepers. One by one the other six crewers also checked in. Within ten minutes they would be asleep, and I would be in sole charge of my ship.

  Twelve minutes to go. Even with the Dancer’s old manual setup there was little that needed to be done. I laid the hard copy of the computer’s instructions where it would be legible but not in the way, shut down all the external sensors and control surfaces, and put the computer and other electronic equipment into neutral/standby mode. The artificial gravity I left on; I’d tried a cascade point without it once and would never do so again. Then I waited, trying not to think of what was coming . . . and at the appropriate time I lifted the safety cover and twisted the field generator control knob.

  And suddenly there were five of us in the room.

  I will never understand how the first person to test the Colloton Drive ever made it past this point. The images silently surrounding me a bare arm’s length away were life-size, lifelike, and – at first glance, anyway – as solid as the panels and chairs they seemed to have displaced. It took a careful look to realize they were actually slightly transparent, like some kind of colored glass, and a little experimentation at that point would show they had less substance than air. They were nothing but ghosts, specters straight out of childhood’s scariest stories. Which merely added to the discomfort . . . because all of them were me.

  Five seconds later the sec
ond set of images appeared, perfectly aligned with the first. After that they came more and more quickly, as the spacing between them similarly decreased, forming an ever-expanding horizontal cross with me at the center. I watch – forced myself to watch – knew I had to watch – as the lines continued to lengthen, watched until they were so long that I could no longer discern whether any more were being added.

  I took a long, shuddering breath – peripherally aware that the images nearest me were doing the same – and wiped a shaking hand across my forehead. You don’t have to look, I told myself, eyes rigidly fixed on the back of the image in front of me. You’ve seen it all before. What’s the point? But I’d fought this fight before, and I knew in advance I would lose. There was indeed no more point to it than there was to pressing a bruise, but it held an equal degree of compulsion. Bracing myself, I turned my head and gazed down the line of images strung out to my left.

  The arm-chair philosophers may still quibble over what the cascade point images “really” are, but those of us who fly the small ships figured it out long ago. The Colloton field puts us into a different type of space, possibly an entire universe worth of it – that much is established fact. Somehow this space links us into a set of alternate realities, universes that might have been if things had gone differently . . . and what I was therefore seeing around me were images of what I would be doing in each of those universes.

  Sure, the theory has problems. Obviously, I should generate a separate pseudo-reality every time I choose ham instead of turkey for lunch, and just as obviously such trivial changes don’t make it into the pattern. Only the four images closest to me are ever exactly my doubles; even the next ones in line are noticeably if subtly different. But it’s not a matter of subconscious suggestion, either. Too many of the images are . . . unexpected . . . for that.