The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “And the figures show that Dirac was right. They also show that Blackett was right. Both magnetism and gravity are phenomena of rotation.

  “I won’t bother to trace the succeeding steps, because I think you can work them out for yourself. It’s enough to say that there’s a drive-generator on board this ship which is the complete and final justification of all the hell you people on the Bridge gang have been put through. The gadget has a long technical name, but the technies who tend it have already nicknamed it the spindizzy, because of what it does to the magnetic moment of any atom – any atom – within its field.

  “While it’s in operation, it absolutely refuses to notice any atom outside its own influence. Furthermore, it will notice no other strain or influence which holds good beyond the borders of that field. It’s so snooty that it has to be stopped down to almost nothing when it’s brought close to a planet, or it won’t let you land. But in deep space . . . well, it’s impervious to meteors and such trash, of course; it’s impervious to gravity; and – it hasn’t the faintest interest in any legislation about top speed limits.”

  “You’re kidding,” Helmuth said.

  “Am I, now? This ship came to Ganymede directly from Earth. It did it in a little under two hours, counting manoeuvring time.”

  Helmuth took a defiant pull at his drink. “This thing really has no top speed at all?” he said. “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Well, we can’t,” Wagoner admitted. “After all, one of the unfortunate things about general mathematical formulas is that they don’t contain cut-off points to warn you of areas where they don’t apply. Even quantum mechanics is somewhat subject to that criticism. However, we expect to know pretty soon just how fast the spindizzy can drive an object, if there is any limit. We expect you to tell us.”

  “I?”

  “Yes, Helmuth, you. The coming débâcle on Earth makes it absolutely imperative for us – the West – to get interstellar expeditions started at once. Richardson Observatory, on the Moon, has two likely-looking systems picked out already – one at Wolf 359, another at 61 Cygni – and there are sure to be hundreds of others where Earth-like planets are highly probable. We want to scatter adventurous people, people with a thoroughly indoctrinated love of being free, all over this part of the galaxy, if it can be done.

  “Once they’re out there, they’ll be free to flourish, with no interference from Earth. The Soviets haven’t the spindizzy yet, and even after they steal it from us, they won’t dare allow it to be used. It’s too good and too final an escape route.

  “What we want you to do . . . now I’m getting to the point, you see . . . is to direct this exodus. You’ve the intelligence and the cast of mind for it. Your analysis of the situation on Earth confirms that, if any more confirmation were needed. And – there’s no future for you on Earth now.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Helmuth said, firmly. “I’m in no condition to be reasonable now; it’s been more than I could digest in a few moments. And the decision doesn’t entirely rest with me, either. If I could give you an answer in . . . let me see . . . about three hours. Will that be soon enough?” “That’ll be fine,” the senator said.

  “And so, that’s the story,” Helmuth said.

  Eva remained silent in her chair for a long time.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Why did you come to me? I’d have thought that you’d find the whole thing terrifying.”

  “Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Helmuth said, with quiet exultation. “But terror and fright are two different things, as I’ve just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “All right, let’s put it this way: the work the Bridge was doing was worthwhile, as I know now – so I was wrong in being frightened of it, calling it a bridge to nowhere.

  “But you no more saw where it was going than I, and you made the Bridge the be-all and end-all of your existence.

  “Now, there’s a place to go to; in fact there are places – hundreds of places. They’ll be Earth-like places. Since the Soviets are about to win Earth, those places will be more Earth-like than Earth itself, for the next century or so at least!’

  She said, “Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace between us?”

  “I’m going to take on this job, Evita, if you’ll go along?”

  She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvellous fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with a jangle of pure horror.

  “Posts!” the speaker above Eva’s bed roared, in a distorted, gigantic version of Charity Dillon’s voice. “Peak storm overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has already topped all previous records, and part of the land mass has begun to settle. This is an A-1 overload emergency.”

  Behind Charity’s bellow, the winds of Jupiter made a spectrum of continuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge was responding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp, percussive tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way through a forest of huge steel tuning-forks. Helmuth had never heard that sound before, but he knew what it was.

  The deck of the Bridge was splitting up the middle.

  After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker said, in Charity’s normal voice, “Eva, you too, please. Acknowledge, please. This is it – unless everybody comes on duty at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour.”

  “Let it,” Eva responded quietly.

  There was a brief, startled silence, and then a ghost of a human sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner’s, and the sound just might have been a chuckle.

  Charity’s circuit clicked out.

  The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in the little room.

  After a while, the man and the woman went to the window, and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the near horizon, where there had always been visible a few stars.

  ANHEDONIA

  Adam Roberts

  Adam Roberts (b. 1965), when not writing books about Dickens, Tennyson, Browning or other literary coves, and when not teaching English Literature and Literary Criticism, somehow finds time to write science fiction and fantasy. His books include such impressively varied novels with thankfully easily memorized titles as Salt (2000), Stone (2002) and The Snow (2004) and the equally memorable parodies The Soddit (2002), The Sellamillion (2004) and The Da Vinci Cod (2005). None of this, though, prepares you for this story, which marks its first appearance here, and which starts with a “bang” and takes you somewhere you didn’t expect to go.

  WRITE IT OUT THREE TIMES. Where are you going? And through this porthole we have – Mars, of course. The view from the MMA base (Mars May Amaze, the crew used to say, and they don’t say that any more). Mars itself, whose oceans of blood have long since coagulated into frozen boulders and desiccated to rust. The window is set in a rough-edged roseate wall, extruded from a paste made of this same dust. The carpet underfoot is a brighter red, for you are special. A solitary bot going through and through its hoovering program: inching forward, head down, as if looking for a contact lens. Where are you going?

  “What’s that?’

  Where are you going, Macro?

  This muffling of all sounds. That’s an unexpected part of it. Walking about Mars with the sound turned down. A sense of insulating foam, or wadding inside the hollow space of my skull. It’s Ann, and she is talking to him, and the polite thing to do is to reply.

  “I’m going to talk to the Hitchers.”

  Again?

  Again.

  And you think that’ll do any good?

  That’s a strange way of putting it, though, isn’t it? Good is a strange word to use. “I’ve got my orders,” he says, padding down the corridor. The
fibres of the carpet tickle his bare feet. There’s no pleasure for him in the sensation. It could be broken glass. It could just as well be vacuum and néant and nothing at all. You’re lying back on the slab, and they’ve put the coins over your eyes, and you think: with a proper flow of tears I could wash these disks quite away. But the tears won’t come. These tears will never now come. Naturally the world continues to think you’re dead. And perhaps you are dead. Perhaps we all are. Nobody lives through their own death. Think of it! That would be a contradiction in terms.

  The aliens, when they came, promised us the technologies to travel from star to star. We believed them. We didn’t properly understand them. But – to the stars? How could we turn down such an offer? Macro’s first experience of interacting with them had been awe-tinged. But awe is a sort of pleasure, and that was long gone. And, you know? It is hard, even, to see them correctly. MMA had built a large dome, deep blue and gold on the inside like an undersea grotto, or like Dante’s vision of heaven – and low ambient light; and a high concentration of methane in the atmosphere, just as they liked it. But to go through the lock into that space was only to find it, at the beginning, empty; or so you thought. You had to find the right spot, and stand still. Only by standing still, often for a long period, could you begin to see them: a bundle of ribbons and spreading for metres, or a flicker of something starfishy, or starbursty, or rah-rah, with a twitch of sudden tightening. I can’t tell you exactly what they’re like. You can look right at them. With eyes or with lenses. And they’re never quite exactly in focus.

  Macro put on the breather and the goggles, and went through the lock. The inside was royal blue that was scratched with gold: deep-evening coloured, and perfectly empty. He went to the middle and sat down crosslegged. Apart from the kit on his head he was naked, because by this stage – you know, why not? I did not realize before, Keedwell once said to me, that the pleasure we took in wearing clothes was not in their external cut or colour, but simply in the logic of what they covered up. Since we now take no pleasure in the naked human body there’s no joy to be had in covering up the nakedness either.

  He sat for a long time, blank-minded. Eventually he began to see them. How they come and go, from their craft (whatever their craft is – if in Mars orbit then we can’t locate it) into the dome and back, we don’t know.

  “Hello,” he said. They speak English, of course. Of course they do: they’re inside our heads. But they speak it in a queer way. It’s as if they’re joking, and at the same time as if they don’t understand what a joke is. They say: “have you come again to discover our techniques of interstellar travel?”

  “Are you ready to give them to us?’

  “Are you ready,” they say, “to take them?”

  “That’s not why I’ve come, actually,” he says. “I’ve come to ask once more about the anhedonia.”

  And then he shifts in my posture, and they vanish from perception. He has to sit perfectly still, and meditate himself back into communication.

  “The anhedonia,” he repeats, to pick up the thread of conversation.

  “What about it?” The voice sounds different now. Who knows why? Maybe it’s a different Hitcher; maybe it’s the same one in a different mood; maybe the difference is entirely in your head.

  “How much longer?” he asks.

  “How much longer?” they echo.

  There have been studies published on the Hitcher habit of repeating what is said to them. Sometimes they simply echo us, and sometimes they spin back what we say with some small alteration.

  Macro had been discussing this very topic with Ann the previous night. “Why do they echo so much of what we say?” he asked her. “Maybe they have nothing original to say for themselves,” she said. “Ever think of that?” The two of them had had sex, but with the usual result. Macro’s penis got hard, but as usual the end of it felt like the end of his thumb. Ann lay there with her legs tucked up and her knees pressed against her breasts and he slammed away for a while. She had on this peculiar expression of intense concentration, as if she were trying to remember exactly where she had mislaid her apprehension of sensual pleasure. He came, and it felt, as it always does, like spitting.

  I know how he felt; it’s how I always feel. It’s how we all feel since the anhedonia.

  “I don’t know why we carry on,” said Ann, afterwards.

  “It doesn’t do any harm,” he said, getting his breath back. “Good to keep in practice.” “In case what?” she said, wearily. “In case what?” In case the Hitchers decide to give us back our ability to feel pleasure, he was going to say; but he didn’t. “In case,” she pressed, “this time it miraculously works?” No, he wanted to say. No. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. It might have been this: in case, by pursuing this most ancient and most intense form of human pleasure, despite knowing that no pleasure could be found that way, we achieved a mental stillness sufficient suddenly to comprehend how the aliens were messing with our heads.

  I know all about the conversation they had that night.

  “Morale is very low in the base,” Macro told the Hitchers. The golden scintillations in the dark blue of the dome twinkled into new constellations, as they have been programmed to do. A domed-ceiling festooned with artificial stars. A decoration. A former version of Macro would have found it pleasurable. “It is not natural for human beings to live without pleasure. Without any pleasurable apprehension at all. Some of the people here are, you know, calling it torture.” You know? They knew.

  “Torture,” says the Hitcher.

  “Torture,” Macro repeats. But the word lacks savour. Existing as it does, here, free of intensities either of pleasure or pain it was a whey-word. A blank.

  “Torture.’

  “You promised us the use of technologies of interstellar travel,” he said, in a grey tone.

  “We were once promised the use of those same technologies,” the Hitcher says.

  “Yes! You promised we could become like you. But – months ago, that was months, and since then all you have done is . . .”

  But he shuffled a little, in his posture, in his exasperation, and he lost them. This wasn’t what he’d come to talk about. This wasn’t what he’d been ordered to tell them.

  Long minutes of settling himself.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  “Hello.” A different voice again: high-pitched.

  “I’ve been ordered to ask you . . .” he said. “How much longer are you going to impose this quarantine on our ability to experience pleasure?”

  “We can end it, if you like,” said the Hitcher.

  “When, though?”

  “End it now if you like. But if we do that,” the merest pause, “then we cannot pass on the technologies.”

  “See,” said Macro, straining inwardly to remain still, to complete the conversation: “that’s what we don’t understand – right there. Why is it one-or-the-other? We’ve been looking into what’s happening. Happening inside our heads I mean. At first we thought it was a dopamine depletion. We thought you’d somehow got into our heads and interfered with the chemistry. But it’s not the chemistry, is it? It’s purely neural.”

  “It’s purely neural, is it?” the Hitchers said.

  “It is,”

  “It is purely neural. Is it?”

  “We’ve all taken a turn at speculating, all through the base,” said Macro. “Can you at least tell us how the interstellar travel be accomplished? I don’t mean the specifics of the technology. I mean the general principle. Is it something to do with hyperspace?”

  “What is hyperspace?” the Hitcher asks.

  Most conversations with the Hitchers went round and round like this. Here’s another. Macro was trying to get at answers. He wanted to know, as we all did: was the faster-than-light travel in some sense neural? Was that why the Hitchers had messed about with our neural capacity? He spoke slowly, and put the sentence together one brick upon another. It was a question we were eager to h
ave answered: “Is it that the technologies of travel are such that our organic neural network needs to be reworked, or reconfigured, before it can operate? Is that it?”

  “It,” trilled the Hitcher. They were behind him now. He snuffed the urge to turn his head and look. “It. It.”

  “I was ordered to ask you,” he said.

  Then the Hitcher said, in a voice like temptation: “Do you want to travel?”

  “Me, personally?” he replied, rapidly. “Or – in the sense of humanity? Of all of us?” And then, to cover the baseness of his initial reaction: “The answer’s the same either way. The answer’s yes – you’re in our heads, you know that.”

  “How much do you want to travel?”

  For a moment he thought he understood. “Like – like – enough to be prepared to sacrifice our sense of pleasure? Is that what it is? That’s what some of the staff think. They think the anhedonia is some kind of test. Okay, Okay, so you’re testing us. You’re seeing if we’re worthy. Okay. Well, and how long until we pass the test? When does it end – when do we get to send some people to other stars, as you promised?” He was actually asking: how long until I get my orgasms back. They knew that. They were inside his head.

  “You are speaking,” the Hitcher said. “You are speaking, perhaps, on behalf of everybody on Earth?”

  “On Mars,” he said, quickly. “Don’t try this on Earth, please. If you enforced anhedonia there as you’ve done here – if you robbed the whole Earth population of – ” Oh God, if that.

  “If?”

  “There would be riots,” he said, although that wouldn’t be the half of it, and he knows that wouldn’t be the half of it.

  “People on Earth would riot?”

  “I think people would push themselves that far, yes.”