The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  When they were through, he was as depressed as ever. Watching her crawl around on her hands and knees made him ache for her. She was so lovely, and he was so lonely. The way her hair fell in long, ashen streams over the gathered materials of her sleeves, the curl of her toes as she knelt to peel off a strip of tape, the elastic give and take of the tendons in her legs . . . all the myriad tiny details he knew so well and didn’t know at all. The urge to reach out and touch her was overpowering.

  “What would you like to do today? she said when they were through with the taping.

  “I don’t know. Everything I can’t do.”

  “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

  “No.”

  “Would you tell me a story?” She crossed her legs nervously. She didn’t know how to cope with him when he got in these unresponsive moods.

  Treemonisha was not subject to the terrors of loneliness that were tearing Jordan apart. She got along quite well by herself, aside from the sometimes maddening sexual pressures. But masturbation satisfied her more than it did Jordan. She expected no problems waiting out the six months until they were rotated back to Pluto. There was even a pleasurable aspect of the situation for her: the breathless feeling of anticipation waiting for the moment when they would finally be in each other’s arms.

  Jordan was no good at all at postponing his wants. Those wants, surprisingly to him, were not primarily sexual. He longed to be surrounded by people. To be elbow to elbow in a crowd, to smell the human smell of them around him, to be jostled, even shoved. Even to be punched in the face if necessary. But to be touched by another human being. It didn’t have to be Treemonisha, though she was his first choice. He loved her, even when he yelled at her for being so maddeningly insubstantial.

  “All right, I’ll tell you a story.” He fell silent, trying to think of one that had some aspect of originality. He couldn’t, and so he fell back on “The Further Exploits of the Explorers of the Pink Planet.” For that one, Treemonisha had to take off all her clothes and lie on her back on the floor. He sat very close to her and put the trio of adventures through their paces.

  Captain Rock Rogers, commander of the expedition, he who had fearlessly led the team over yawning wrinkles and around pores sunk deep into the treacherous surface of the pink planet. The conqueror of Leftbreast Mountain, the man who had first planted the flag of the United Planets on the dark top of that dangerously unstable prominence and was planning an assault on the fabled Rightbreast Mountain, home of the savage tribe of killer microbes. Why?

  “Because it’s there,” Treemonisha supplied.

  “Who’s telling this story?”

  Doctor Maryjane Peters, who single-handedly invented the epidermal polarizer that caused the giant, radioactive, mutated crab lice to sink into the epithelium on the trio’s perilous excursion into the Pubic Jungle.

  “I still think you made that up about the crab lice.”

  “I reports what I sees. Shut up, child.”

  And Trog, half-man, half-slime mold, who had used his barbarian skills to domesticate Jo-jo, the man-eating flea, but who was secretly a spy for the Arcturian Horde and was working to sabotage the expedition and the hopes of all humanity.

  As we rejoin the adventurers, Maryjane tells Rock that she must again venture south, from their base at the first sparse seedlings of the twisted Pubic Jungle, or their fate is sealed.

  “Why is that, my dear?” Rock says boyishly.

  “Because, darling, down at the bottom of the Great Rift Valley lie the only deposits of rare musketite on the whole planet, and I must have some of it to repair the burnt-out de-noxifier on the overdrive, or the ship will never . . .”

  Meanwhile, back at reality, Treemonisha caused her Left Northern Promontory to move southwards and rub itself lightly through the Great Rift Valley, causing quite an uproar among the flora and fauna there.

  “Earthquake!” Trog squeaks, and runs howling back toward safety in the great crater in the middle of the Plain of Belly.

  “Strictly speaking, no,” Maryjane points out, grabbing at a swaying tree to steady herself. “It might more properly be called a Treemonisha-qua – ”

  “Treemonisha. Must you do that while I’m just getting into the story? It plays hell with the plot line.”

  She moved her hand back to her side and tried to smile. She was willing to patronize him, try to get him back to himself, but this was asking a lot. What were these stories for, she reasoned, but to get her horny and give her a chance to get some relief?

  “All right, Jordan. I’ll wait”

  He stared silently down at her. And a tear trembled on the tip of his nose, hung there, and fell down toward her abdomen. And of course it didn’t get her wet. It was followed by another, and another, and still she wasn’t wet, and he felt his shoulders begin to shake. He fell forward onto the soft, inviting surface of her body and bumped his head hard on the deck. He screwed his eyes shut tight so he couldn’t see her and cried silently.

  After a few helpless minutes, Treemonisha got up and left him to recover in privacy.

  Treemonisha called several times over the next five days. Each time Jordan told her he wanted to be alone. That wasn’t strictly true; he wanted company more than he could say, but he had to try isolation and see what it did to him. He thought of it as destructive testing – a good principle for engineering but questionable for mental equilibrium. But he had exhausted everything else.

  He even called up The Humanoid, his only other neighbor within radio range. He and Treemonisha had named him that because he looked and acted so much like a poorly constructed robot. The Humanoid was the representative of Lasercom. No one knew his name, if he had one. When Jordan had asked passing holehunters about him, they said he had been out in that neighborhood for over twenty years, always refusing rotation.

  It wasn’t that The Humanoid was unfriendly; he just wasn’t much of anything at all. When Jordan called him, he answered the call promptly, saying nothing. He never initiated anything. He would answer your questions with a yes or a no or an I-don’t-know. If the answer required a sentence, he said nothing at all.

  Jordan stared at him and threw away his plan of isolating himself for the remainder of his stay at the station.

  “That’s me in six months,” he said, cutting the connection without saying good-bye, and calling Treemonisha.

  “Will you have me back?” he asked.

  “I wish I could reach out and grab you by the ears and shake some sense back into you. Look,” she pointed to where she was standing. “I’ve avoided your tape lines for five days, though it means threading a maze when I want to get to something. I was afraid you’d call me and I’d pop out in the middle of your computer again and freak you.”

  He looked ashamed; he was ashamed. Why did it matter?

  “Maybe it isn’t so important after all.”

  She lay down on the floor.

  “I’ve been dying to hear how the story came out,” she said. “You want to finish it now?”

  So he dug out Rock Rogers and Maryjane and sent them into the bushes and, to enliven things, threw in Jo-jo and his wild mate, Gi-gi.

  For two weeks, Jordan fought down his dementia. He applied himself to the computer summaries, forcing himself to work at them twice as long as was his custom. All it did was reconfirm to him that if he didn’t see something in three hours, he wasn’t going to see it at all.

  Interestingly enough, the computer sheets were getting gradually shorter. His output dwindled as he had less and less to study. The home office didn’t like it and suggested he do some work on the antennas to see if there was something cutting down on the quality of the reception. He tried it, but was unsurprised when it changed nothing.

  Treemonisha had noticed it, too, and had run an analysis on her computer.

  “Something is interfering with the signal,” she told him after studying the results. “It’s gotten bad enough that the built-in redundancy isn’t sufficient. Too many t
hings are coming over in fragmentary form, and the computer can’t handle them.”

  She was referring to the fact that everything that came over the Hotline was repeated from ten to thirty times. Little of it came through in its totality, but by adding the repeats and filling in the blanks the computer was able to construct a complete message ninety percent of the time. That average had dropped over the last month to fifty per cent, and the curve was still going down.

  “Dust cloud?” Jordan speculated.

  “I don’t think it could move in that fast. The curve would be much shallower, on the order of hundreds of years before we would really notice a drop-off.”

  “Something else, then.” He thought about it. “If it’s not something big, like a dust cloud blocking the signal, then it’s either a drop-off in power at the transmitter, or it could be something distorting the signal. Any ideas?”

  “Yes, but it’s very unlikely, so I’ll think about it some more.”

  She exasperated him sometimes with her unwillingness to share things like that with him. But it was her right, and he didn’t probe.

  Three days later Treemonisha suddenly lost a dimension. She was sitting there in the middle of his room when her image flattened out like a sheet of paper, perpendicular to the floor. He saw her edge-on and had to get up and walk around the flat image to really see it.

  “I’ll call it ‘Nude Sitting in a Chair’,” he said. “Tree, you’re a cardboard cutout.”

  She looked up at him warily, hoping this wasn’t the opening stanza in another bout with loneliness.

  “You want to explain that?”

  “Gladly. My receiver must be on the fritz. Your image is only two-dimensional now. Would you like to stand up?”

  She grinned, and stood. She turned slowly, and the plane remained oriented the same way but different parts of her were now flattened. He decided he didn’t like it and got out his tools.

  Two hours of checking circuitry told him nothing at all. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the receiver, and when she checked her transmitter, the result was the same. Midway through the testing she reported that his image had flattened out, too.

  “It looks like there really is something out there distorting signals,” she said. “I think I’ll sign off now, I want to check something.” And with that she cut transmission.

  He didn’t care for the abruptness of that and was determined that she wouldn’t beat him to the punch in finding out what it was. She could only be searching for the source of the distortion, which meant she had a good idea of what to look for.

  “If she can figure it out, so can I.” He sat down and thought furiously. A few minutes later, he got up and called her again.

  “A black hole,” she said, when she arrived. “I found it, or at least a close approximation of where it must be.”

  “I was going to say that,” he muttered. But he hadn’t found it. He had only figured out what it must be. She had known that three days ago.

  “It’s pretty massive,” she went on. “The gravity waves were what fouled up our reception, and now it’s close enough to ruin our transmissions to each other. I thought at first I might be rich, but it looks far too big to handle.”

  That was why she hadn’t said anything earlier. If she could locate it and get a track on it, she could charter a ship and come back to get it later. Black holes were fantastically valuable, if they were small enough to manipulate. They could also be fantastically dangerous . . .

  “Just how big?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet, except that it’s too big to chase. I . . .”

  Her image, already surreal enough from the flattening, fluttered wildly and dissolved. He was cut off.

  He chewed his nails for the next hour, and when the call bell clanged, he almost injured himself getting to the set. She appeared in the room. She was three-dimensional again, wearing a spacesuit, and she didn’t look too happy.

  “What the hell happened? You didn’t do that on purpose, did you? Because . . .”

  “Shut up.” She looked tired, like she had been working.

  “The stresses . . . I found myself falling toward the wall, and the whole station shipped around it like zzzip! And all of a sudden everything was creaking and groaning like a haunted house. Bells clanging, lights . . . scared the shit out of me.” He saw that she was shaking, and it was his turn to suffer the pain of not being able to get up and comfort her.

  She got control again and went on.

  “It was tidal strains, Jordan, like you read about that can wreck a holehunter if she’s not careful. You don’t dare get too close. It could have been a lot worse, but as it is, there was a slow blowout, and I only just got it under control. I’m going to stay in this suit for a while longer, because everything was bent out of shape. Not enough to see, but enough. Seams parted. Some glass shattered. Everything rigid was strained some. My laser is broken, and I guess every bit of precision equipment must be out of alignment. And my orbit was altered. I’m moving toward you slightly, but most of my motion is away from the sun.”

  “How fast?”

  “Not enough to be in danger. I’ll be in this general area when they get a ship out here to look for me. Oh, yes. You should get off a message as quick as you can telling Pluto what happened. I can’t talk to them, obviously.”

  He did that, more to calm himself than because he thought it was that urgent. But he was wrong.

  “I think it’ll pass close to you, Jordan. You’d better get ready for it.”

  Jordan stood in front of the only port in the station, looking out at the slowly wheeling stars. He was wearing his suit, the first time he had had it on since he arrived. There had just been no need for it.

  The Star Line listening post was in the shape of a giant dumbbell. One end of it was the fusion power plant, and the other was Jordan’s quarters. A thousand meters away, motionless relative to the station, was the huge parabolic dish that did the actual listening.

  “Why didn’t they give these stations some means of movement?”

  He was talking into his suit radio. Treemonisha’s holo set had finally broken down and she could not patch it up. There were too many distorted circuits deep in its guts; too many resistances had been altered; too many microchips warped. He realized glumly that even if the passage of the hole left him unscathed he would not see her again until they were rescued.

  “Too expensive,” she said patiently She knew he was talking just to keep calm and didn’t begrudge providing a reassuring drone for him to listen to. “There’s no need under normal circumstances to move the things once they’re in place. So why waste mass on thrusters?”

  “‘Normal circumstances,’” he scoffed. “Well, they didn’t think of everything, did they? Maybe there was a way I could have killed myself. You want to tell me what it was, before I die?”

  “Jordan,” she said gently, “think about it. Isn’t it rather unlikely for a black hole to pass close enough to our positions to be a danger? People hunt them for years without finding them. Who expects them to come hunting you?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “After the passage, I promise. And don’t worry. You know how unlikely it was for it to pass as close as it did to me. Have some faith in statistics. It’s surely going to miss you by a wide margin.”

  But he didn’t hear the last. The floor started vibrating slowly, in long, accelerating waves. He heard a sound, even through the suit, that reminded him of a rock crusher eating its way through a solid wall. Ghostly fingers plucked at him, trying to pull him backwards to the place where the hole must be, and the stars outside the port jerked in dance rhythms, slowing, stopping, turning the other way, sashaying up and down, then starting to whirl.

  He was looking for something to grab onto when the port in front of him shattered into dust and he was expelled with a monstrous whoosh as everything in the station that wasn’t bolted down tried to fit itself through that meter-wide hole. He
jerked his hands up to protect his faceplate and hit the back of his head hard on the edge of the port as he went through.

  The stars were spinning at a rate fast enough to make him dizzy. Or were the stars spinning because he was dizzy? He cautiously opened his eyes again, and they were still spinning. His head was throbbing, but he couldn’t sync the throb-rate with the pain. Therefore, he declaimed to himself, the stars are spinning. On to the next question. Where am I?

  He had no answers and wished he could slip back into that comforting blackness. Blackness. Black.

  He remembered and wished he hadn’t.

  “Treemonisha,” he moaned. “Can you hear me?”

  Evidently she couldn’t. First order of business: stop the spin before my head unscrews. He carefully handled the unfamiliar controls of his suit jets, squirting streams of gas out experimentally until the stars slowed, slowed, and came to rest except for a residual drift that was barely noticeable.

  “Very lonely out here,” he observed. There was what must be the sun. It was bright enough to be, but he realized it was in the wrong place. It should be, now let’s see, where? He located it, and it wasn’t nearly as bright as the thing he had seen before.

  “That’s the hole,” he said, with a touch of awe in his voice. Only one thing could have caused it to flare up like that.

  The black hole that had wrecked his home was quite a large one, about as massive as a large asteroid. But with all that, it was much smaller than his station had been. Only a tiny fraction of a centimeter across, in fact. But at the “surface,” the gravity was too strong to bear thinking about. The light he saw was caused by stray pieces of his station that had actually been swept up by the hole and were undergoing collapse into neutronium, and eventually would go even further. He wondered how much radiation he had been exposed to. Soon he realized it probably wouldn’t matter.