The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Meranda Austvro,” Fernando said, pushing the blackened stump of his arm into his chest furs, “I am arresting you on the authority of the Office of Scrutiny. Your resurrection profile will be captured and transmitted into the safekeeping of the Metagovernment. A new body will be quickened and employed as a host for these patterns, and then brought to trial. Please compose your thoughts accordingly.”

  “When they quicken me again, I’ll destroy your career,” she told him.

  Fernando looked sympathetic. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that before.”

  “I should have skinned you twice.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked. They’d have sent a third copy of me.”

  He activated the memory recorder. Amber lights flickered across the hood, stabilizing to indicate that the device had obtained a coherent image and that the relevant data was ready to be committed to the graviton pulse. Fernando issued the command, and a tumbling hourglass symbol appeared on the hood.

  “Your patterns are on their way home now, Meranda. For the moment you still have a legal existence. Enjoy it while you can.”

  He’d never said anything that cruel before, and almost as soon as the words were out he regretted them. Taunting the soon-to-be-destroyed had never been his style, and it shamed him that he had permitted himself such a gross lapse of professionalism. The only compensation was that he would soon find himself in the same predicament as Doctor Austvro.

  The hourglass vanished, replaced by a steady green light. It signified that the homebrane had received the graviton pulse, and that the resurrection profile had been transmitted without error.

  “Former body of Meranda Austvro,” he began, “I must now inform you . . .”

  “Just get it over with.”

  Fernando and Caliph helped her from the recorder. Her body felt light in his hands, as if some essential part of it had been erased or extracted during the recording process. Legally, this was no longer Doctor Meranda Austvro: just the biological vehicle Austvro had used while resident in this brane. According to Metagovernment law, the vehicle must now be recycled.

  Fernando turned on the pearly screen of the dissolution field. He tested it with a stylus, satisfied when he saw the instant actinic flash as the stylus was wrenched from existence. Dissolution was quick and efficient. In principle the atomic fires destroyed the central nervous system long before pain signals had a chance to reach it, let alone be experienced as pain.

  Not that anyone ever knew, of course. By the time you went through the field, your memories had already been captured. Anything you experienced at the moment of destruction never made it into the profile.

  “I can push you into the field,” he told Austvro. “But by all accounts you’ll find it quicker and easier if you run at it yourself.”

  She didn’t want it to happen that way. Caliph and Fernando had to help her through the field. It wasn’t the nicest part of the job.

  Afterwards, Fernando sat down to marshal and clarify his thoughts. In a little while he too would be consumed by fire, only to be reborn in the homebrane. Scrutiny would be expecting a comprehensive report into the Pegasus affair, and it would not do to be woolly on the details. Experience had taught him that a little mental preparation now paid dividends in the long run. The recording and quickening process always blurred matters a little, so the clearer one could be at the outset, the better.

  When he was done with the recorder, when the green light had reported safe receipt of his neural patterns, he turned to Caliph. “I no longer have legal jurisdiction here. The ‘me’ speaking to you is not even legally entitled to call itself Adam Fernando. But I hope you won’t consider it improper of me to offer some small thanks for your assistance.”

  “Will someone come back to take over?” Caliph asked.

  “Probably. But don’t be surprised if they come to shut down Pegasus. I’m sure my legal self will put in a good word for you, though.”

  “Thank you,” the aerial said.

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  Fernando stood from the recorder, and – as was his usual habit – took a running jump at the dissolution field. It wasn’t the most elegant of ends – the lack of an arm hindered his balance – but it was quick and efficient and the execution not without a certain dignity.

  Caliph watched the tiger burn, the stripes seeming to linger in the air before fading away. Then it gathered its spheres into an agitated swarm and wondered what to do next.

  THE WIDTH OF THE WORLD

  Ian Watson

  Ian Watson (b. 1943) is one of those wonderful mavericks of science fiction. He doesn’t follow the rule book – rather he bends the rules to suit his purpose. The ideas in his stories and novels are always radical, frequently bizarre and invariably fascinating. I have wondered, from time to time, whether some of this is because Watson experienced at an early age various other cultures. He worked in Africa and Japan before he began to sell stories to the British SF magazines and produced his first novel, The Embedding in 1973. Amongst his many intriguing novels are such inventive works as Deathhunter (1981), Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986) and the Black Current sequence that began with The Book of the River (1984). Some of his most unusual story ideas will be found in his early collections, The Very Slow Time Machine (1979) and Slow Birds (1985), which included this story.

  THERE WERE FOUR of us in Dave Bartram’s office at GeoGraphics that afternoon: Dave himself, puffing his pipe, Sally-Ann from design, Maggie from marketing, and myself from the computer graphics side.

  After hours of gentle gloomy rain, the sun had finally come out over Launchester. The steeply pitched slate roofs of the town outside were shimmering blue and green as though slicked with oil, while the stone of the cathedral glowed almost golden.

  And I was scrapping with Maggie, as usual.

  This time it was over the idea I’d had that we ought to expand the Mappamundi to include optional programs for maps of imaginary worlds – Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Donaldson’s the Land, that sort of thing. I wasn’t exactly winning the argument, but I had certainly managed to rile Maggie.

  “For heaven’s sake, we’re just about to launch the Mappamundi! The thing’s a surefire bestseller as it is – for the whole educational market, and for the mums and dads. And that’s because it’s an accurate record of what the world was like in the past. Your idea would turn it into” – she searched for a suitable term of abuse – “into a video game!”

  “I’m betting that we could expand the appeal enormously.”

  “No takers, Alan. Mappamundi’s a serious project.”

  A brief reprieve, by buzzer. Dave flicked his intercom, and we heard Dorothy sing out from Reception:

  “Mr MacNamara called from Heathrow, sir. He said not to bother you in conference, but his flight was late from New York. So he won’t be at your house till about seven.” Dan MacNamara was our American marketing agent for Mappamundi; this visit mattered to us.

  “Right,” said Dave. “Call Mrs B, will you? Dinner at eight, to be on the safe side.”

  In a sense, of course, Maggie was quite right. For Mappamundi – as the brochure boasted – was the ultimate teaching aid: a home computer package displaying on your own TV screen the changing map of the world from the Paleozoic through to modern times. You could zoom in on any million-square-kilometer section; that’s roughly the size of France. You could overlay appropriate animated graphics which were just as good as movie footage: of dinosaurs grazing or fighting, of primitive hominids bashing flints together, of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria sailing to discover America, of Napoleon marching on Moscow . . .

  “Apparently a lot of other planes were late, sir.”

  “Tut tut.”

  I myself had been hooked on geography, as a boy, by something much more vulgar: an adventure magazine, long defunct, called Wide World. I still had a stack of these at home, and every once in a while I hauled them out for a nostalgic chuckle. What lurid covers! And wh
at tall tales inside! Seven-foot-long anacondas out-racing galloping horses; six weeks alone on a raft in the shark-infested South Seas . . .

  By the time I grew up, alas, the job of geography was somewhat different. It didn’t involve drawing pirate charts with X marking where the sea chest lay buried.

  Dave was champing impatiently at his pipe, and it seemed to have gone out.

  “Well, Alan?”

  “Look, if we include a stylus and digitizing tablet, and modify the software slightly, we can even let people design their own maps – of their own imaginary worlds . . .”

  “No,” said Maggie flatly.

  “But, Dave, don’t you think we should keep a trick up our sleeves?”

  Our chairman read the auspices in the hot dottle of his pipe bowl.

  “Hmm, hmm, hmm,” he said.

  “I’m willing to work up a presentation in my spare time.” Oh, yes, Sarah should love that . . . I’d been eating and breathing Mappamundi for the best part of two years now . . .

  “Spare time?” said Maggie archly. “I trust you weren’t thinking of taking a holiday right now?”

  “Whatever for? They don’t schedule flights to El Dorado.”

  “What a weird remark.”

  “There be no dragons on our maps.”

  “And a good thing too!”

  “We’d better wind this up,” said Dave, consulting his watch. “Listen, Alan, your idea might have merits. Nothing ventured, eh? So why don’t you go ahead and work up something for us to get our teeth into?”

  Maggie grinned at me, conceding tactical defeat. But she would make sure, by next time, that she had her teeth sharpened.

  It’s a twelve-mile drive home over the moors to Ferrier Malvis. The Volvo always got me back there in just under twenty minutes, and I’d long since stopped paying much conscious heed to the business of steering, or to the sheep grazing amidst heather and bracken.

  But this time, just as I was zipping along smartly past a certain ruined dry-stone barn, an alarm bell went off in my head. Because I had left GeoGraphics exactly as usual . . . and I ought to have been home already.

  A glance at my watch confirmed this; twenty minutes had passed.

  “The world’s been stretched,” I thought ridiculously. “It’s been inflated, like a balloon. The surface looks the same, but there’s farther to go.”

  It didn’t seem very likely.

  I arrived at Ferrier Malvis fifteen minutes late, and Sarah’s green Renault wasn’t parked outside the house. She must be late home too, from the craft shop in Forby.

  En route to the kitchen, I flipped on a Vivaldi cassette. I poured some chilled wine from the fridge, then opened my briefcase on the pine table, to work in the golden light of the westering sun.

  Maybe I was heading for a nervous breakdown? Could the weird stretching of the journey home be a warning sign from my psyche – a shot across the bows?

  Presently a car door thumped outside.

  “Kitchen, love!”

  Silver Sarah looked distraught, as though she had been combing her blond hair with her fingers.

  “Hullo, Silver.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the radio, Alan?”

  “No, I was listening to The Four Seasons. Should I have been?”

  She darted back toward the lounge, presumably to kill the Vivaldi, but checked herself.

  “Faster to tell you, my mappaholic husband! The latest planes from the States are landing up to three hours overdue at Heathrow.”

  “So?”

  “One of them just barely got down at Shannon, out of fuel. A jumbo from Brazil has ditched off Lisbon. It’s the same all over. It took me far too long to drive home.”

  “Oh, my God, I thought it was just me. Hell, I don’t know what I thought it was!”

  “Those planes aren’t leaking, you know. They’re using their fuel. They’re still traveling at the same speed.”

  “And yet there’s farther to go – ”

  “Miles and miles farther.”

  “I’ll get you a drink, love.”

  “Scotch. Neat.”

  As I went through to the lounge for the Famous Grouse, The Four Seasons was just over. The tape ran on for a moment. Then click, and silence. Silver Sarah followed me.

  “So how do you explain it?” She sounded accusatory – as if I had programmed untold square kilometers of blank space into the Mappamundi and these had suddenly sprung into being in the real world.

  I poured a few fingers of the noble bird for both of us.

  “Something must be happening to space,” I said lamely.

  “Space?”

  “I mean the nature of space. The universe is expanding, isn’t it? So space is expanding too. And now the space between places is getting bigger into the bargain. It takes longer to get from A to B.” I laughed.

  Four hours later – after several more fingers of the bird, a scratch meal and much TV-viewing – we knew that space was just the same today as it had been yesterday. The moon hadn’t moved one inch farther away from Earth. Satellite data confirmed that the earth’s circumference was exactly the same as usual.

  Nevertheless, radar and laser fixes from orbit upon jets sent up specially showed that these aircraft certainly weren’t covering the distances as measured by airspeed and fuel consumption. There was much talk that night – to little effect – of lasers and the speed of light and trigonometry, and how photons are massless particles . . .

  When we went to bed eventually, all airports around the world were closed, and all flights grounded. Apparently the “distance effect” was still on the increase.

  Next morning, when the alarm clock grabbed me out of the middle of some silly dream, the radio was repeating the same bulletin – with minor updates – every fifteen minutes.

  The distance effect seemed to have stabilized overnight. Imagine a graph with a curve on it, rising gently at first, then ever more steeply. Distances of up to fifty miles were now doubled. A journey of a hundred miles was in the region of five hundred. And the distance between London and New York, say – measured by radio-wave delays – was something on the order of a hundred thousand miles. It might be as far as a million miles from England to Australia, unless the distance effect followed a bell curve, though no one was certain. The American government, in consultation with the Russians, intended to test-fire an ICBM with an instrument package in place of its warhead from Nevada across the Pacific toward Guam . . .

  “Wouldn’t they just?” exclaimed Silver. “All they can think about is whether they can still fight a nuclear war! Just try flying a B-1 bomber to Russia now – ”

  “Or a Backfire bomber from Russia over here.”

  “Which is why they’re going to test a missile, of course! Because a missile leaves the atmosphere.”

  “It’s just to measure the extent of the phenomenon.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  Power transmission through the National Grid was down by some eight per cent, due to loss over extra distances; so consumers were being asked to be sparing in their use of power . . .

  “I suppose we’d better do without toast, Silver. How about cornflakes?”

  “For goodness’ sake!”

  “Well, we have to eat.”

  “Don’t you realize anything, Alan? What about fuel? Oil! Raw materials. Imported food. What price New Zealand lamb, coming from a million miles away? The ship would have to carry nothing but fuel. The crew would be old men by the time they docked.”

  I worked it out in my head. “No, actually it would take the ship about ten years. But I see what you mean.”

  “I’m glad you do. Oh, we’ll still be able to hear the news, from a hundred thousand miles away. As Japan grinds to a halt. As people die in famines that no one can reach with food aid. People like us, Alan dear.”

  “God, we’ll never see a banana again . . .” Curiously, it was this which popped into my head, rather than the wholesale demise of civilization. Or
perhaps as an example of it.

  “It’ll be like living on Mars. And dying on Mars.”

  The radio advised commuters with journeys of less than thirty miles to proceed to work normally, but allowing extra time and fuel.

  “That’s stupid,” said Silver. “How long is there going to be any fuel in the filling stations?”

  “Do you suggest we walk? I suppose it’s possible. Twelve miles to Launchester? In the old days, some kids used to walk twelve miles to school.”

  “Just what would you be going to Launchester for? Instead of, say, digging up the back lawn quickly – to plant vegetables tout de suite? And getting hold of some good egg-laying hens, before everyone realizes?”

  “Well, for one thing Dan MacNamara’s due at GeoGraphics today.”

  “What for?”

  “The Mappamundi – what did you think?”

  “And you’re going to be able to export this TV toy a hundred thousand miles to the Land of the Free, in time for Christmas?”

  “Look, we shouldn’t assume this distance effect is going to continue. It sprang up in a few hours yesterday. It stabilized overnight. It could fade away just as fast. Still I’d better phone Dave to check that Big Mac made it. Let’s have orange juice rather than coffee, hmm? And it isn’t a TV toy, Silver.”

  Though, come to think of it, with my proposed extras it could come to resemble one . . . Maybe Maggie’s taunt was on target.

  Heading for the phone in my pajamas, I lit a stick of my favorite Algerian camel dung, alias Disque Bleu; and I wondered how far away the factories of the Régie Française de Tabac were today.

  Big Mac had indeed reached Dave’s house – about three hours late – and Dave agreed with me about the sense of coming in to GeoGraphics. So after a rather fraught, cold breakfast I departed, Volvo-borne, toward Launchester, leaving Silver vowing that she was going to dig up the lawn all by herself and sow carrot or cabbage seed or something, if she could get hold of seed packets at the village shop in Hornton, down the road.

  We had all got in to work, but it was a somewhat chastened team which met Big Mac in Dave’s office. Redheaded Dan MacNamara was acting in a bluffly amiable way, though I couldn’t help noticing a persistent line of sweat along his upper lip, which he wiped away frequently.