The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  I don’t suppose Macro was really any different, and yet he and Ann persevered in their relationship. The anhedonia did not kill it, or if it killed it then they refused to let go of it. They did this not because their love for one another was so elevated as to transcend pleasure. Rather they did so because they were military. They had been trained up in the logic of discipline, and to have abandoned their relationship simply because neither party was enjoying it very much would have seemed to them a failure in discipline. With me it was different. There was, it transpired, nothing to my feelings for Ann apart from self-pleasure. I am not saying, here, that it was envy that made me hate Macro. It was something else. Because, after all, discipline, military or otherwise, is only a manifestation of a deeper, or larger, human impulse – impulse in the “science of mechanics” sense of the word, as something that imparts momentum. The word for this is will. I did not envy Macro his intimacy with Ann. I envied him his strength of will.

  Sometimes I spoke to the Hitchers. I told nobody about this. I spoke to the Hitchers through the com-system. They were capricious, and sometimes they tuned themselves into one or other com. I listened to them, and they listened to me – only sometimes. “Give us back our pleasure,” I begged. I asked them once. “Are you ready for it?” they replied.

  I stared at the plastic-coated wall on the other side of my desk. I might have been looking at a canvas by Rubens, or a superb dust-filtered strawberry sunset, or a sheet of pale blue plastic-covered dividing wall. It was all the same.

  “Please,” I said. “Please – put an end to the anhedonia.”

  “Should you even be talking to us?” they replied. They liked this sort of exasperating statement. “Should you? Isn’t Macro the ambassador.”

  So I thought of Macro. I had him on a screen – I was looking right of him. I thought of the capacity of pleasure in his cranium, blocked by the Hitchers. I thought of him going through the motions of fucking Ann, as if it were a strenuous and rather dull exercise routine. “Please,” I asked, for the third time. “Please: give him back his ability to feel pleasure.”

  “Him? Macro?”

  “He’s the one.”

  Either I said this to them, or I fantasized about saying it, or I dreamt it, in a moment of sheer wish-fulfillment. There was no pleasure in dreaming any more. Had there ever been?

  The next thing that happened was that Macro got his pleasure back.

  This is how he described it: “one minute I was listening to some music as I exercised in the tension rack. And the next thing I felt a tingle in my scalp, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I almost fell over with astonishment. I had forgotten what it was to take pleasure in a piece of music. I rushed to a larderspout and drank some chocolate milkshake, and it tasted fucking delicious.”

  The first thing he did was to go straight to Ann. She was in her room staring blankly at her screen, doing some work without enthusiasm or resentment. “Can you feel it?” he asked her. “Is it back for you too?”

  It wasn’t back for her. Nor for me neither, and I was watching them both.

  In her anhedonic state, lacking highs or lows, Ann could not feel overly disappointed; but she felt, she later said, a little disappointed for all that. They fucked on her bed. Macro came – a shuddery siphoning of joy through mind and penis – and she lay beneath him almost motionless. He kept apologizing to her, but couldn’t keep the laughter from his voice. He was laughing with sheer pleasure.

  Word spread through the village, of course. Mars amazes again. A command meeting was convened. Macro was tested immediately; the usual dopamine pathways in the brain were functioning as before, although nobody seemed to know how the change had been effected. It was, I heard, an awkward debrief, because Macro kept bursting into laughter.

  “They’ve done this,” Keedwell said with a sour face.

  This also struck Macro as wonderfully funny. The unadulterated pleasure of being with these people. These guys!

  “I mean,” Keedwell announced, to a meeting of all key personnel. His face was grey. “It’s not a malfunction, or the end of the phenomenon’s natural term or anything. They have chosen, for whatever reason, to do this to you. They took away, they gave back.”

  It was reported to Earth, of course; and the fact that Earth had placed us in effective quarantine, and had held back permission – for three months now – for any of the station staff to return home after their stint, rankled in me for the first time. Macro announced that he found himself angry at their irrational fear – as if we were polluted? We were not polluted. He was having, he said, difficulty, in fact, holding onto his anger. He was like a toddler.

  We had questions: why Macro? Were they now going to rescind the anhedonia from all of us? Some of us? Just him? Why him?

  So Macro went to talk to them once more. It was harder than usual to concentrate. The dome was now a space of wonder and glory to him: a womb of delight. The gold shone like happiness itself. The Hitchers manifested like angels, or starbursts.

  “I don’t understand why you did it,” he said to the empty chamber. “But I’m sure glad you did.”

  Eventually he settled himself, and the extraordinary filaments of an alien form of life – a being from the other side of the galaxy! Imagine it! – came into view. There were tears in his eyes, and the words they spoke, at first, didn’t register fully. The weight of them. The importance of them didn’t register, not at first.

  This is what these glorious beings, these spirits, these demigods, were saying: “we shall take you to another star. We shall punch you through the cowl of dark matter that hoods this portion of the galaxy and show you the cosmos as it truly is.”

  He wept.

  It was everything he had ever wanted, tumbling upon him now, now, now. “Thank you,” he gabbled. “Thank you.” Do you know what he thought? He thought to himself: this has been a test.

  This is what he realized: they came to our solar system, and saw that humanity, mostly, was a slave to pleasure. Our hedonism had kept us low, at the level of beasts. We shall test them, quoth the Hitchers. We shall deprive them of their sense of pleasure for three months and see if they can become higher beings – see how they survive, see what they do. They were testing us, and we have passed the test. And now the reward will be ours, and – Macro thought – mine first of all.

  He had never known a purer joy. “What must I do?” he begged. “Tell me what to do!”

  “Let your people know how you feel.”

  “Just that?”

  “Just that.”

  But nothing was easier than this, because as a matter of course all his communications with the Hitchers were recorded. I was the communications officer; I had set it up. A catch-all was set into the skin of his scalp, just above the hairline over my left ear. Everything he said, and everything that was said to him, was recorded. The Hitchers knew this, of course, because they were inside our heads.

  He found the faces of his colleagues a joy, and a bliss in his eyes; and we looked wearily and dolefully back upon him. “They’ve rescinded my anhedonia,” he reminded everybody. “It won’t be long before they do the same for you all. I believe it to have been a test, you see.”

  “What did they mean – punching through?” Keedwell asked.

  “Punching through?”

  “Punch you through the cowl of dark matter that hoods this portion of the galaxy,” I quoted, for I had the video transcript right there.

  “Dark matter does clump,” said Beyman. “We all know about that. There are areas of relative baryonic density, and areas of attenuation. But I’m not sure what it means to suggest that our system is hooded by it. Baryonic matter in a – hood?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “We don’t know what matters.”

  We fitted him with a new range of catch-alls and instruments; some embedded in his skin, some worn about him on belts and in pockets. A running feed, open mike, visuals, electrographic and so on. Then we gave him back to th
e Hitchers. He was to be the first human to travel between the stars. He was suitably excited. He was excited enough for all of us.

  “You hope to decode the mystery of the method of travel itself,” said a Hitcher. Because of course it was exactly why we had festooned him with such a wealth of scientific instrumentation. “This won’t help you,” the Hitcher added.

  “I’ll keep up a running commentary,” he said.

  Of course.

  And here. He asked the Hitchers how he should prepare himself – what to wear, whether safety gear was needful – a hard shell? a supply of oxygen? food? – but they were as playfully evasive as ever they are; so we covered our bases. “I am wearing an elastic vacuum-suit, with a pack on my back the size of a laptop computer, and a belt around my hips containing supplies and water.” For the record.

  He went to the meeting area, but the Hitchers didn’t seem to be there. After an hour of meditative sitting he gave up and wandered the corridors of the base. The underpowered Martian gravity gave a spring to his step. He teetered on the edge of anticlimax. The buzz, the buzz, the intense pleasure of anticipation. “I am going to another star.”

  “Having experienced the anhedonia,” he told Ann, sipping a little ceramic thimble of ersatz coffee, very dark brown, very sweet, “and now having recovered my capacity for pleasure again . . .”

  “Bully for you,” said Ann, passionlessly.

  “I know! I’m sorry! But having lost it and recovered it, I find I am a more anxious person than I was before.”

  They were in the mess. Small porthole windows gave out over desert sown only with stone conkers that would never seed or sprout. The sky was pink.

  “You’re anxious,” she suggested, “that the Hitchers might take away your ability to feel pleasure again.”

  “That,” he conceded. “But also, there’s a more general non-specific anxiety.” He drained his coffee. “For instance, an anxiety that I might find myself stalking uselessly about the base for days, dressed up like a vacuum cowboy. They said they’d take me to the stars; but maybe that was just another example of their caprice. You know? Anxiety,” he said, understanding belatedly why he felt that way, “about my looking foolish, you know?”

  “I used to be very self-conscious,” said Ann, sitting opposite him in a low soft chair naked, unwashed, with her legs apart. “That doesn’t seem to be a problem any more.”

  “I’m going to the stars!” he declared, with a whoop. “I’m going all the way!”

  “We might . . .” she began.

  “It’s all to do with – ” he interrupted her. But then there was an alien in the mess. The place was deserted except for Macro, and Ann, and for me, and then this spread of brilliance and ribbony force. They had never before been seen outside the blue-gold dome. It was astonishing. For Macro there was a leaven of sheer pleasure – of excitement – in his astonishment.

  “Where would you like to go?” asked the alien.

  “I,” he said, caught off-guard. “I don’t know. Centauri?”

  “Do you think that’s far enough?”

  “Galactic centre!” he sang. “Or would the black hole swallow us?”

  “No,” said the Hitcher, in a different voice. “It won’t do that.”

  And down he went.

  He was plumbed in, wired up, and we followed him the whole journey. Travel is effected by a sort of process of elaboration. He is in the middle, and two Hitchers are on either side. They are making a first – I’m tempted to call it a jump, but jump is not the right word at all. Our imaginations have been infected by science fiction in that respect. They didn’t step through a door into hyper-space, or subspace, or anything like that. The relationship is not really spatial. It is, rather, a circumvention of the logic of dimensionality. No, not that. So, it is not an instantaneous journey, and nor is it a journey constrained by Einstein. If a diver comes up from the deep deeps she is constrained by the physics of decompression, and must stop, and wait, and delay. But if those chemical constraints were circumvented, then the distance from the bottom of the ocean to the top is only a few miles. You can run a few miles in minutes. That’s what they are doing. He understands this. You don’t need to shrink space to change the relationship between the ocean bed and the surface from days to minutes. You don’t need to step into a rival dimension.

  He says to them: I can’t see anything.

  They say: you’re not looking.

  And that’s right, because now he looks, and he can see. He sees hundreds of thousands of stars. He sees them feelingly, as it were, like luminiferous Braille on a black page. White, amber, sherry-coloured, scarlet like a car’s backlights, brown as timber, more blue than oceans and deeper. A profound blue in which we might easily lose ourselves. Life, it’s beautiful. God, it’s beautiful!

  Because now he looks and he can see this rapidly spinning star is mottled in jewel-white and turquoise, and it is rotating with sublime rapidity. A sensual jet of molten matter spears from its two poles. We slip past. Clouds, or densities, or clumps of obscurity pool, spill, and suddenly we – as the Hitchers promised we would – we punch through. Hundreds of thousands of stars are suddenly millions of stars.

  Dark matter clumps and stretches, says the Hitcher. There’s a new tone to its voice. It takes him a moment to realize that it is sorrow. He had not realized they were capable of that emotion.

  Dark matter, Macro repeats.

  From your position in the galaxy it is hard for you to understand the extent to which you are cowled-about with it, said the Hitcher.

  He can barely concentrate upon these words. My God it’s beautiful. My Life it’s beautiful. The range of stars! The variety. The gorgeous intricacy of this galactic flank. Its vastness. He can feel it pregnant with movement, Will itself in material form, Force on an inhumanely beautiful scale. And the colours! A paprika of the heavens. Fireworks and sparks in every millimetre of its stretching light years above, below, before, behind, left-hand, right-hand. The quality of the light; the wavefront superb turbulence of it. The excess of it. My Life it’s beautiful. My God it’s beautiful.

  A small black sun, darker than any vacuum-black. And a great ring of shining matter light-years in circumference. Glitter, glitter.

  An eminence front of forty million stars, fixed in staggering profusion and range and glory.

  “There’s a fantastic . . . superb . . . throb in the texture of things,” Macro says, and his voice is recorded for us all to wonder about for years afterwards. “Not a throb exactly, not a physical sensation, but a brimming intensity, or a kind of . . . tranquillity of Sublime . . . there’s a piercing quality . . .”

  Here is a rush of stars, and the rustling of background static like all the dead leaves in all the world’s forests. Black, black, blue, searing white. This pulsar spins 40,000 times a second; to call it a blur would understate it comically.

  And here we are, through the vast hanging tapestry of pearlescent stars, and spacetime itself bows under, or stretches inward on itself, at the central mass of the galaxy. Macro’s words are failing him. It is no longer appropriate to talk in terms of colour, or dimension, or quality: this is a sphere thousands of light-years across that draws the principle of extension and attribute and even thought down – or along – or in upon itself. He doesn’t seem to be able to articulate what he is seeing. “It’s amazing,” he is saying. “The size of it! The size! The colours have all gone away, but light is still . . .”

  The visuals here are of a drop of ink the size of infinity. The visuals are of a perfect sphere trillions of trillion-trillion kilometres across. It is so dense that the conventional mathematical descriptions of spherical matter (four-thirds? r? and so on) no longer apply. “It’s,” Macro is saying, as if breathing is hard for him. The stars all about it! Suns enormously more massive than our sun and enormously more numerous than can be seen from any Earthly sky, reduced to a foggy incandescence about this vast central black-hole sun. A mist rising behind the infinite equator. A
curve so huge it is a straight line.

  Then Macro’s last words, recorded for us all to ponder afterwards: Its. Ah! It is. It’s –

  Ah!

  Then, this: only shield from full intensity of.

  That’s all that’s left now; the reedy, almost inaudible voice of – we assume – one of the two attendant Hitchers. There’s nothing more from Macro. There are some images. We’ve downloaded a whole bunch of really interesting images from his machinery. Some of these do seem to show aspects of the cosmos from radically new angle. It seems true what the Hitchers say, that by chance the solar system exists in a semisphere of space, perhaps a thousand light years across, that is arced about by a curving wall of fairly densely accumulated dark matter. This protects us from, as the Hitcher puts it, the full intensity.

  We picked up all this stuff after they returned, of course. We piece the elements together. Macro was no better than a child. No better? Much worse. He was a broken-down consciousness. He eats, he sleeps, he stares at the wall. The only thing the camp doctors are agreed upon is that, whilst it’s possible the psychotropic pharmacies of Earth might be able to help him, the limited facilities available here on Mars are not up to the job.

  A whole bunch of vocal outrage from various Earthly individuals about how the Hitchers sucked out Macro’s brain – or poisoned his consciousness – that they made war upon us, in effect, by depriving us of the two things that make us human: viz., our ability to experience pleasure, and our ability to think cogently. Not that there’s anything we can do about it. Even the most hawkish of hawks knows that launching a strike against the Mars base, whilst it is certain to kill the human staff, will leave the Hitchers unharmed. They would blip away just before the missiles fell, to who knows where.