The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  “You should have gone fishing,” Virginia said when she came upstairs to find out why he was so quiet.

  “I know it.”

  “Why didn’t you go?

  “I thought thinking about the diagrams was more important.”

  “You could have thought—”

  “I know. I could have thought about them while I was fishing. I thought of that. But too late.” He sat up so that they were side by side on the bed. “But really I shouldn’t really have gone. Do you realize we’re nearly there? Within inches. Only one more mystery to solve and we’ll remember everything.”

  She did not look at him but watched the trees beyond the window stirred by vagrant breezes. “I wish you’d forget about those plans for a while.”

  “I’ll forget about them when we find them, when we build another gadget and reverse what’s happened.”

  “Is it so important to you, Walter?”

  He looked at her sharply. “Are you telling me again it’s not important to you?”

  “There are other things,” she said tonelessly, still not trusting herself to look at him.

  “Such as?”

  She swung around to face him. “We have to live, don’t we? We don’t stop breathing because we don’t have those plans of yours, do we?”

  “Sometimes,” he said in a strangled voice, “I don’t think you really want to find them.”

  “I know what you think,” she said quietly. “But until we do I think we should try to live like two normal people. If we never find them we may have to live that way anyway.”

  When Sherwood said nothing she went on, “I’m going down to the bank and find out how much money we have and if there isn’t much I’m going to look for a job. I like Merrittville. I like this house. I think we ought to stay here with or without the plans.” She rose so suddenly he was jounced on the bed. She walked from the room.

  Later Mrs. Appleby looked in on him. “You’re young,” she said. “Don’t take it so hard. What’s a day or two?”

  He was about to say something to her when she said, “You should have gone fishing, you know,” and was gone. He thought: everyone thinks I should have gone fishing maybe they’re right maybe I am taking it too hard. Are eleven years so damned important after all?”

  * * * *

  The fishing was over, the trout, baked over a charcoal fire in the back yard, were delicious, and everyone was sitting around in the living room and Sherwood was thinking the fishing and the eating isn’t all that’s over. I can feel it, almost stumble over it here in this house.

  Booey was talking about his work back at Chicago, Ollie had suddenly become impatient with everything and had been called to the phone twice because Gloria Conners was becoming impatient too, and Homer Appleby was talking about the weather “up here in the little finger of Michigan” although it wasn’t quite the little finger, and Mrs. Appleby was telling the Coxes, who had come over, just how she made cherry pie back in Illinois. Through it all Virginia was sitting glum-faced and Sherwood thought my, her face is pale and strained I wonder what’s wrong with her she’s been acting strangely tonight.

  “It shouldn’t be too hard,” Booey was saying.

  “What?”

  “I say, it shouldn’t be too hard duplicating the machine.”

  “Sure,” Sherwood said, seeing Virginia’s round eyes on his. He rose to go over to talk with her, but Ollie interrupted by saying, “I suppose I ought to be shoving off, Doctor. I told Gloria I’d be coming over.”

  “Everybody talking about leaving,” Appleby said, “reminds me we’ve got to go back in the morning. Can’t be away from a farm too long, you know. Like having a baby-sitter; you never quite trust a stranger.”

  Cox said, “What do you think you’ll do, Walt?”

  Sherwood turned to him and thought that is The Question, isn’t it? What do I do now that I can’t find the key? He said, “Frankly, I don’t know, Hamp.”

  “Maybe you ought to try school,” Mrs. Appleby said cheerfully. “It’s not such a bad idea.”

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Appleby,” Sherwood said emptily, weary of thinking about it. He found Virginia’s eyes again and was startled to see how white her face had become. As he looked at her she stood up and he thought for a moment she was going to cry, but she turned, left the room, walked through the hallway to the kitchen.

  No one said anything. They all heard the door close.

  Booey turned to him and said, “You’d better go to her, Walt,” but Sherwood was already halfway across the room.

  He found Virginia, a dark, solitary figure on the bench beneath the back yard beech tree. She did not move when he sat next to her. She was looking at the moon but not seeing it.

  After a while he said, “What’s the matter?”

  When she did not answer he said, “I thought you were happy the way things are. I don’t understand this.”

  She closed her eyes and he was more puzzled than ever.

  She compressed her lips, held her eyes tightly closed. “Virginia…”

  She released her breath, reached for his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m just afraid, that’s all.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Afraid things will change too much.” She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “Things have been fine with us these few days.”

  “Things needn’t change.” He reached for her chin, brought her head around so he could look directly into her eyes. “Things will always be fine with us. There’s no need to think otherwise.”

  “Kitty has told me how you used to be.”

  “How did I used to be?”

  “Seldom home. A walking computer and slide rule and book of formulas. You buried yourself out at the Institute and seldom came up for air. Most of the time I rattled around in the house all by myself.”

  He said levelly, “It won’t be like that.”

  The back door slammed and they turned to see Booey coming toward them. “I’m intruding, I hope,” he said.

  “I’ve been hearing about what a heel I was.”

  Booey grunted. “The typical dedicated man who holes himself up in a laboratory with an eye for knurled knobs. That’s what you were like at Ryerson.” He hunted around, found a lawn chair, dragged it over to them, saying, “I suppose you were just like that at the Institute.”

  “A recluse.”

  “You won’t need to stay that way. After all, you will have all that’s happened recently to remember. That should get you out of the laboratory more often.” He added soberly, “I wanted to talk with you both. I wanted to say that neither of you should sit in judgment on the unremembered part. You’re incomplete persons, both of you.”

  “And,” Sherwood said bitterly, “we’re apt to remain that way.”

  “Think so? I don’t. I know what you’re both thinking. Given the chance, should you go back? Walter, I honestly believe Virginia could convince you to give up the idea, which is good because it is a wonderful thing to think so much of someone you would be willing to forego what once was. And you, Virginia, you’re hardly the perky girl with spirit who had enough energy left over after solving her own problems to help others with theirs. Have you forgotten how to fight? Have you forgotten how you fought to get off the farm because you had a larger vision? Have you. both forgotten how you fought your way this far out of an eleven years’ blindness?”

  “Doctor,” Sherwood said.

  “Virginia,” Booey went on, “you will still have a fight on your hands. You will have had a breather. Now you can go in and compete with Walter’s fascinating mistress—science. Do you have any fight left?”

  “You’re forgetting,” Sherwood said, “that we don’t have that choice to make.”

  Somewhere a cicada sang loud and long and Booey waited until it was through to say, “Something else. Droughts and seasons register on the trees and what we are is the result of our experiences, whether we’re a leaf on that tree or a human being on God’s green earth. What you say to each
other here in your back yard tonight will be as much a part of you as that part that you will suddenly remember when you’re stimulated to remember it all again. Remembering it, you will know how you feel now and you’ll have to compromise with your old personalities. I’m sure it will be a change for the better. In fact, you two people have had an opportunity denied most people. You’ve seen yourselves really objectively.”

  Virginia stood up, walked around Booey, stood looking toward the darkness of the bushes and trees.

  “Lastly,” Booey said, dropping his voice and looking away, “every last human being on this earth is a repository for others. We live in other people. And when one of our friends dies, then that part of us that has lived in him dies, too. By refusing to embrace that part of friends that is hidden in the unremembered part of you, you are killing that part of them that is in you. I’m sure you would not want to do that. It would be very unkind. Wouldn’t it, Virginia?”

  She turned, tears glistening in her eyes. “Yes, it would be most unkind, Doctor.” Suddenly she broke away and started running for the house.

  Sherwood stood up, ready to pursue her.

  “Stay,” Booey said. “Let her go.”

  What is wrong with her?” Sherwood asked, and when Booey said nothing, he went on, “What was all that about? I didn’t understand you.”

  “It’s not Dr. Booey you don’t understand,” Booey said. “It’s Virginia.”

  “Why?”

  Booey turned a grave face to his. “She found the diagrams. They were in the safety deposit box at the bank. She opened it this afternoon and saw them there. Right now they’re upstairs in her dresser underneath her lingerie where I told her to put them until she made up her mind to tell you about them.” He turned his head, looked up at the house to the second floor room now flooded with light. He chuckled, “I fancy she will be down with them in a few moments. Then we shall go to work.”

  DO UNTO OTHERS, by Damien Broderick

  I was ten minutes late because the office teleport was on the fritz again and wouldn’t let me punch in from home, so I had to ’port in to the Ministry of Surveillance and Pre-Emptive Action through the nearest street platform and then run in high heels for half a kilometer. Old Jack stood on a ladder in the foyer, carefully polishing the big brass letters spelling out the Ministry’s motto: DO UNTO OTHERS BEFORE THEY DO UNTO US. He watched skeptically as I swiped my finger against the log-in.

  “When are they going to get the damned teleport fixed, Jack?”

  “Beats me, Lulu. Probably another virus. Aren’t you people meant to screen that stuff out?”

  “We do our best. Can’t ask more than that.” I went down the shaft to Equipment and signed out a Saint Bernard nuke, tucking it onto a two-wheeled dolly. Heavy little thing. Strictly speaking, they’re called “pony nukes,” maybe because you could carry one in the saddle bag on a pony, if there were still any ponies left, but it amused me to picture a large hairy flop-eared hound lolloping through the Swiss snows with its cask of life-preserving brandy, except this time it was a poisoned draft and how. Even more strictly speaking, they’re not just “nukes” in the old-fashioned sense—neither atom or hydrogen bombs, dear me, no. These babies are planet-busters. When we’re in fun mood, we call them “string twangers” or “gluon unstickers.” Light one up and it unpeels everything it’s sitting on until that whole world is a messy ring of asteroids and floating rubble. Whoomp instead of “Smooooth!” Maybe Jimmy’s right and I do have a touch of the sadist in me. Nah, he’s not. The nukes are just a tool, used dispassionately and with discretion.

  Accusing eyes lifted as I came into the Contact cubicle farm. I hate the sharp ping-ding of the elevator coming and leaving, makes it hard to skulk. Trish nodded frostily from her oversight station. I shrugged with an expression of put-upon haplessness and rolled the world-killer behind me to my desk, where I lugged the thing into its cradle, pulled out my ergonomic kneeler chair, and fired up the array of displays, ticklers, command mics, virtual keyboards, and the window itself, which hissed at me.

  I took no offense at that. Just the sound of the quantum processor spinning its imaginary wheels across 10 to the 500 realities in supertime, hunting for my analogues. Far too much data to process any other way. They sniff out our targets of opportunity for us, then it’s up to us public servants to make the final adjudication, hurrah. So many universes, so little overlap. But sufficient. Plenty of room at the edges, as Richard Feynman once famously quipped. Plenty of room to learn new stuff, and to dispose of new foes before they have a chance to do unto us.

  “Meet for lunch at the French Tart?” The gal in the next cubicle was peering over the divider. Today she was wearing Martian Bronze, with her hair all feathered up.

  “Okay, Mary. See you there at twelve thirty. If nothing goes wrong and I have to, you know, blow the heck out of some planet.”

  “Always the pessimist.” Mary grinned, ducked back down to her own links. Her muffled voice added, “Gavin will be there.”

  Made my heart skip a beat. You know the covers on those Gindle hot romances? Not the naked muscle-bound ones, the hyper-wealthy debonair high-cheekboned Mohawk-haired executive bachelors who are only gay on Wednesdays? Gavin didn’t have a bean to his name, but he looked like that, after some face jobs that will have him in hock until he retires. I’ve heard rumors that his entire bod has been reprocessed—not that Mary is a reliable source. Still, a girl can hope. Sorry, Jimmy.

  The processor stopped hunting and opened the window on me, striding along a sidewalk in a rather ratty part of some town that was nothing like mine. “I” wore a rather fetching boiler suit in deep purple, and my hair was shaved to within an inch of its life. Oh, give me a break. Not another separatist utopia of wymyn? I watched and waited, feeling for the vibe. She couldn’t see me yet, of course. When she crossed the street in front of a dray drawn by a small rhino, looked like, I thought of flicking her and her dreary Earth back into the superverse and trying again. But the people upstairs don’t like that. They disapprove of pre-cooked judgements, us operators imposing our own prejudices upon the equivalents of ourselves. Vive la différence, what? That’s the name of the game, after all. Look and learn. Ask and you shall receive. It’s all useful data, endless scads of it. Even in so squalid and unappealing a milieu as this one.

  I sighed, waited until “I” had got to the other side of the badly repaired road, then orally toggled some switches and stepped out of the doorway she was passing. I wore the same stuff I had on. I knew she’d be appalled, but it’s more fun, and sometimes more revealing, than just mimicking the local look.

  “Hey, girl,” I said, clipping her swinging arm. “Nearly took my left tittie off.”

  “Royal Mithras, what the heck!” she yelped. In quite good English, of course—why would the processor pull out locales that make things difficult for us? There’s a trillion trillion Earths where they speak English, even if a lot else is weirdly skewed. And our doppelgangers usually share similar roles, information gathering, usually of a military kind. “Watch it, sis!” She got a look at me, then, and did the mandatory double-take. “What are you doing in town, Debbie? And what in the name of the Sun are you wearing?”

  You get this sometimes. Well, one time in about 50, which is inevitable. That’s the likelihood of a given fertilized ovum splitting early, in the uterus (or in vitro, or whatever) and making identical, monozygotic twins.

  “Not Debbie,” I said. “Keep walking. I’m Lulu, Lulu.”

  “What?” She stayed where she was. A procession of rhinoceroses ambled past, hauling carts and passengers, occasionally dumping rather unpleasant poop on the rutted road.

  “Isn’t your name Lulu? It often is.”

  “Don’t be absurd. I’m Lorelei Branigan.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Me too, but I prefer the nickname. Tony gave it to me when he was two and I was eight.”

  “Who’s Tony?”

  “So you don’t have a baby brother.”

 
“Not one called ‘Tony’. What kind of silly name is that, anyway?”

  “Look, sweetie, can we find a café and sit down for some coffee and a natter? A nice Skybucks would do.”

  Her face showed rather theatrical fright. “Don’t mention that substance out loud, you fool,” she whispered. “Do you want the Proctors down on us?” She was staring in horror at my Steve Madden shoes.

  I sighed. Always local shibboleths and rules and regulations. This lot probably shot up heroin instead of scoffing down caffeine. Not my business.

  “Would it break the law to find somewhere quiet and sit down for a chat?”

  You could tell she was interested. I mean, she had the same brain as me, the same curiosity and basic bad-assedness.

  “Maybe the Temple?”

  “Lay on, MacDuff,” I said encouragingly, and while she looked puzzled at that (blimey, no Shakespeare in this history?), she did a little thing with her head and neck that combined a shrug and a shake, and led the way up a cross street.

  “I can’t spend long on this, Lulu. My boss will croak rotten if I miss turnout.”

  “Understood,” I said. What were a few vernacular details between quasi-siblings?

  * * * *

  The temple was not much like a Christian church, even a Mormon one, nor a mosque or synagogue. If anything, it looked like an open-air stockade, with tall sharpened posts forming a rather scary outer wall, and shields and spears and all that sort of primitive stuff hanging conspicuously inside. A sort of planetary system in miniature hung above the circles of chairs, but it was the wrong kind of orrery, something out of the Dark Ages. A Flat Earth with mountains and plains and seas and an edge all the way around hung suspended in the middle, with planets on golden wires buzzing around it, and a blindingly bright and rather large Sun orbiting at a rather stately pace. And there was the Moon, reflecting its light. So this lot were Sun worshipers, stuck in some backwater of the Roman Empire that had never fallen but just transformed itself into a limited world empire that probably hadn’t found the Americas or Australasia yet. Creepy, and just about pointless for my mission. We had all these post-medieval boondocks psychohistorical vectors locked down pretty tight already. Time to pull out already?