The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  Nah, in for a pfennig, in for a gulden. I activated the memory stick and led Lorelei through the usual questionnaire, sipping a rather bitter herbal brew she bought us from a female penitent in rags. Not that I actually drank it, you understand, since I wasn’t actually there, but these are meaningless distinctions, is it not so?

  “Think of me as a traveler from a distant shore,” I said. “Atlantis, if you will. You know of Plato’s writings, I assume?”

  “Plato the pagan philosopher? Of course. Didn’t he mention a lost island called Atlantis, beyond the pillars of Gibraltar?”

  “He did, and let’s now forget Plato, because I want to ask you about some other stuff, if you wouldn’t mind helping me out with this course I’m studying? A project? For this semester thing?”

  It all sounded pretty fishy to her, I could tell, but she was a sport. “Fire away.” She dropped a small coin in the bowl of another beggar, a fellow with no nose, and waited for me to do the same. I made the motion, and they both saw what they expected. Judging from the gasp and the bow from the beggar, rather more than he’d anticipated. Most of the beggars were presumably military veterans, and had lost a limb or two, or bore disfigurements. It was unkind to trick people like this, but what could I do, since I really wasn’t there?

  “Okay. I have to write a paper on the best way to live. You know, ethics?”

  “Live by the Rule of Mithras,” she said automatically, and lowered her head and eyes.

  “Well, yes, naturally. But I’m more concerned about the…the metaphysical underpinnings, if you follow me? The role of representative government versus the unforced exercise of choice by citizens? Like, should there be taxes, and if so how much, or should everything be done by free trade in the open market, and any slack taken up by charity freely given? Or is it better, speaking of Plato, to have wise rulers who shape and command a polity of dutiful comrades? Who gets to control the flow of information? And like what about slavery, and crime and punishment, should there be a death penalty or brainscrubbing? Gee, I guess I’ve opened up a whole can of worms there.”

  “You keep worms in cans in Atlantis?” Lor said, wide-eyed.

  “Only metaphorically,” I said hastily.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” my doppelganger said. “These are matters for the learned.” But she gave me a sly look, and the beginnings of a grin. “Of course, I do have some opinions, if that would help.”

  I nodded with every indication of enthusiastic gratitude, and hid my sigh. The thing is, people in every variant Earth share the delusion that they are special, individual, having nothing important in common with most others except the doctrines they hold dear either on evidence or faith. In fact, they are almost entirely cookie-cutter replicas of each other. Call it ethos. It swamps all the delicate little deviations and alternatives available in their models of reality. In the history of my own world, antagonists fought with demented zeal over the question of central political control versus the rule of the plutocracy who are “elected” every few years, in rotation, by a media-numbed citizenry with almost zero attention span and less memory. Yet none of them practiced cannibalism, or ritual child marriage, or public nudity, or sexual amputation (well, except for the ones who did). They counted to ten in units of one, not leaping at random from one to 13.092 and back to seven. The Earth, they agreed, was an oblate spheroid, like a slightly squashed ball, but none of them thought it was flat like the portrait hanging above us, or a cosmic cube of ice, or a jellyfish inside the Sun, or the alphabet recited backwards. The sheer immensity of possible ways of doing stuff and constructing the world utterly outweighed the minimal differences between them. Yet they couldn’t see it.

  But then, most of them don’t have my job. They don’t spend every day except Thor’s day peering into the teeming multiplicity of the superverse, and chatting to their shadow selves and deciding whether or not to exterminate them. It’s enough to drive a girl nuts. Or sane.

  “Well, it’s a matter of balance, isn’t it?” Lor was explaining. “Every single one of us is a beloved of Mithras, who was born of a virgin and rose on the third day, blessed be his name and cause, but each is also enlisted from conception in the Army of the One True. So all citizens are free, and so are the slaves, in a spiritual sense, and we must provide for ourselves through the pay we get for satisfying the demands of the market place. Certainly none has any claim on the wealth of another, which you seemed to be implying.”

  “I see. So who pays for the soldiers who worship in this handsome temple?”

  Lor’s brows darkened. “Pays? The community of believers, and we are all believers. Do you doubt? Is that what you are implying, visitor from lost Atlantis?”

  “Oh my gosh, no, no. Wouldn’t dream of doubting. But isn’t there a role for…” I sought the words. Not often you come across a theocratic culture this deeply established (well, except in the places where you do). “For scientific speculation? For attempts to test current dogmas—scientific dogmas, I mean, naturally—and thus clarify more fruitful paths of enquiry?”

  One of the beggars overheard me, and started to creep away, affecting total lack of interest. This specimen was missing the fingers and half the thumb of his right hand. Not me, sir, no idea what that strange woman was taking about.

  My double said, “What do you mean by ‘scientific’?”

  “Oh, a systematic understanding of the world we live in. You know, why is the sky blue? Where does the flame go when you blow out a candle?” That seemed about the right technological level. “Does everyone see the same rainbow, no matter where they’re standing? Why do children look like their parents? Why do they sometimes not look like their parents? Does the Sun really go around the world, or does the world go around the Sun?”

  “Shut up, you fool! Do not voice that accursed heresy, not within these sacred walls! I’ll discuss sensible matters if you like, but I’m not about to play dangerous word games with you, Miss Worms-in-Jars.”

  I tried to steer the questions back to something informative, but she kept evading me. It was a horrible world, that’s what I concluded. Not dangerous, in no way a threat to the Home Earth, so I could relax my hand from the gluon unsticker in its cradle. But I was bored, so I wrapped up the proceedings as quickly as possible.

  “This has been really super fascinating and helpful,” I said, standing up and straightening my chair. Heavy thing, carved out of oak or some barbaric tree admired by the Romans. “You’ve been very kind. I hope I haven’t taken too much of your time. You won’t get in trouble at work, will you?” We made our way through the martial impedimenta to the bright sunny morning outside. Sol Invictus, indeed! “That reminds me, Lor, I didn’t ask you what you do for a living?”

  “No, I noticed that. You’re a smug little self-centered bitch, aren’t you?”

  I blinked, stopped in my tracks, and stared. “Excuse me?” For a moment I almost feared she was about to hit me, until I remembered that I was in reality sitting behind the window in my cubicle, with a pony nuke at my fingertips.

  Lor seized my right arm and pulled it up behind me. It hurt. I certainly felt as if I was there. No fun. Abort, abort, I thought, but before the words were out of my mouth she’d slapped some kind of stinky goop across my lower face. I choked, and tried to breathe through my nostrils, which were only just clear. Rhino droppings in the road mixed with the smell of the goop.

  “What’s my job, you belatedly ask? Well, dearie, let me set you straight on that. My job is waiting for pests like you to try to inveigle your way into the Freedom of Mithras. My job is to shut you little creeps down. By the way, since you never got around to asking properly, my name is Centurion Tribune Lorelei Branigan the Fifth, lately of Carthage Polis.”

  It was impossible. I tried to get loose, yelp for help from Mary or even Gavin, or if everything else failed just cave in and call for an intervention by Trish at the master console. Couldn’t get a word out. I felt my face burning with frustration and rage. Like bein
g trapped in a bad dream.

  “Oh, come on, Loo Loo,” she said satirically, somehow guessing my thoughts. “The first resort of the stupid: It’s a nightmare, I’m stuck in a nightmare, oh please let me wake up. You’re not, and it isn’t. I’ve seen too many of you dull clones. I wonder what it is about our genome or connectome or whatever it is you babblers babble about. We’re special, I know. I’ve always known I was special. I am a Chosen of Mithras. I am a Holy Virgin of the Purple. And here you come, traipsing in from some Hell World, all kitted out in your pretty frippery, looking for easy answers to your stupid survey. And if we fail your pretentious, blasphemous test, what then? What’s your plan then, Loo Loo?”

  I stared and made muffled noise. If the goopy gag wasn’t blocking my speech, I’d be giving her an earful. Listen lady, you think you’re such hot stuff, with your laughable military title and your can of mouth slop? I’ve got a live planet buster in my cradle, with my hand poised over it to send it through the window and blow your disgusting little variant Earth back to quarks and leptons and a few stray gluons. Maybe some dark matter.

  If I could just get my arm loose.

  You’re not really there, I shouted at myself. It’s a consensual illusion. To her, you’re nothing more substantial that a current of sluggish ionic electrochemicals in her cortex. And vice versa. She can’t be holding you in this excruciating arm lock. Just relax. Wish her away. Sit back quietly in your ergonomic chair and have a cup of forbidden coffee, strong and dark, with cinnamon on the top, and fumes rising into your face. Not this stink of goop…

  Unless her clueless medieval Flat Earth knows more about the Many Worlds than we do. Oh my god. This is the kind of Earth we are supposed to identify and stop, the one that will do unto us. And I’ve blown it. All her faux-surprise when we met the first time, all that “Wait, you’re not my twin sister!” fake startle. Just her sticky web to keep me in place while she sussed out my own world’s capabilities. No! No! Say it ain’t so!

  “Enough of this,” said Centurion Tribune blah blah the Fifth of Hannibalville. “Time to say night-night, blasphemous traitor,” and she spun me by my trapped arm so that the crummy run-down city whirled past me, and with her other hand she ripped off the hardening goop gag, taking what felt like half an inch of flesh with it, and I started to scream in fury and activate my desk systems. I got one hand free and plunged it into the console, found the Saint Bernard gluon unsticker, and toggled it on. Twenty seconds. I started to shunt it into the window launcher and Lorelei’s hand gripped my wrist. Impossible. It doesn’t work that way. It’d be like someone stepping out a hologram display and grabbing you by the throat. Except that was wrong, this isn’t a screen or a display, it really is a window, dummy, ten seconds, and in principle there’s no reason why a superior technology can’t, you know, reverse the polarity, but how likely is it that a culture of Sun-worshiping pagan soldiers could master quantum multiverse supertime technology, for god’s sake, but they have, they have, and if I don’t get shot at dawn for my carelessness I’ll certainly be fired from my job, one second, help me Jimmy, get me out of this Gavin, and Lorelei’s hand releases me, and I scream and shove the abort button, and it’s too late, too late, too late for my entire world. Deafening white light.

  KEEP OUT, by Fredric Brown

  Daptine is the secret of it. Adaptine, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt.

  They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars.

  “You’re home, children,” the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.

  And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet.

  “Children,” he said, “you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors.

  “Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians.

  “It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.”

  Then he told us.

  Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.

  * * * *

  For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away.

  It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others.

  And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given, but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation.

  It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually.

  Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have killed one of its parents within minutes.

  Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those conditions.

  “Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions.

  “From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater.

  “Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you.

  “In another ten years, at maturi
ty, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you.

  “It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.”

  Of course we had known a lot of those things already.

  * * * *

  The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

  The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right.

  Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet.

  Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day.

  And tomorrow is the final day.

  Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.