The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Confusion due to the churten experience,” Gveter said.

  Sweet Today turned from the console. “I have sent a distress signal,” she said. “I am unable to operate the NAFAL system. The radio—” She cleared her throat. “Radio function seems erratic.”

  There was a pause.

  “This is not happening,” Shan said, or Oreth said, but Oreth had stayed with the children in another part of the ship, so it could not have been Oreth who said, “This is not happening,” it must have been Shan.

  * * *

  A chain of cause and effect is an easy thing to describe; a cessation of cause and effect is not. To those who live in time, sequency is the norm, the only model, and simultaneity seems a muddle, a mess, a hopeless confusion, and the description of that confusion hopelessly confusing. As the members of the crew network no longer perceived the network steadily, and were unable to communicate their perceptions, an individual perception was the only clue to follow through the labyrinth of their dislocation. Gveter perceived himself as being on the bridge with Shan, Sweet Today, Betton, Karth, and Tai. He perceived himself as methodically checking out the ship’s systems. The NAFAL he found dead, the radio functioning in erratic bursts, the internal electrical and mechanical systems of the ship all in order. He sent out a lander unmanned and brought it back, and perceived it as functioning normally. He perceived himself discussing with Tai her determination to go down onplanet. Since he admitted his unwillingness to trust any instrumental reading on the ship, he had to admit her point that only material evidence would show that they had actually arrived at their destination, M-60-340-nolo. If they were going to have to spend the next seventeen years traveling back to Ve in real time, it would be nice to have something to show for it, even if only a handful of slime.

  He perceived this discussion as perfectly rational.

  It was, however, interrupted by outbursts of egoizing not characteristic of the crew.

  “If you’re going, go!” Shan said.

  “Don’t give me orders,” Tai said.

  “Somebody’s got to stay in control here,” Shan said.

  “Not the men!” Tai said.

  “Not the Terrans,” Karth said. “Have you people no self-respect?”

  “Stress,” Gveter said. “Come on, Tai, Betton, all right, let’s go, all right?”

  In the lander, everything was clear to Gveter. One thing happened after another just as it should. Lander operation is very simple, and he asked Betton to take them down. The boy did so. Tai sat, tense and compact as always, her strong fists clenched on her knees. Betton managed the little ship with aplomb, and sat back, tense also, but dignified: “We’re down,” he said.

  “No, we’re not,” Tai said.

  “It—it says contact,” Betton said, losing his assurance.

  “An excellent landing,” Gveter said. “Never even felt it.” He was running the usual tests. Everything was in order. Outside the lander ports pressed a brownish darkness, a gloom. When Betton put on the outside lights the atmosphere, like a dark fog, diffused the light into a useless glare.

  “Tests all tally with survey reports,” Gveter said. “Will you go out, Tai, or use the servos?”

  “Out,” she said.

  “Out,” Betton echoed.

  Gveter, assuming the formal crew role of Support, which one of them would have assumed if he had been going out, assisted them to lock their helmets and decontaminate their suits; he opened the hatch series for them, and watched them on the vid and from the port as they climbed down from the outer hatch. Betton went first. His slight figure, elongated by the whitish suit, was luminous in the weak glare of the lights. He walked a few steps from the ship, turned, and waited. Tai was stepping off the ladder. She seemed to grow very short—did she kneel down? Gveter looked from the port to the vid screen and back. She was shrinking? Sinking—she must be sinking into the surface—which could not be solid, then, but bog, or some suspension like quicksand—but Betton had walked on it and was walking back to her, two steps, three steps, on the ground which Gveter could not see clearly but which must be solid, and which must be holding Betton up because he was lighter—but no, Tai must have stepped into a hole, a trench of some kind, for he could see her only from the waist up now, her legs hidden in the dark bog or fog, but she was moving, moving quickly, going right away from the lander and from Betton.

  “Bring them back,” Shan said, and Gveter said on the suit intercom, “Please return to the lander, Betton and Tai.” Betton at once started up the ladder, then turned to look for his mother. A dim blotch that might be her helmet showed in the brown gloom, almost beyond the suffusion of light from the lander.

  “Please come in, Betton. Please return, Tai.”

  The whitish suit flickered up the ladder, while Betton’s voice in the intercom pleaded, “Tai—Tai, come back—Gveter, should I go after her?”

  “No. Tai, please return at once to lander.”

  The boy’s crew integrity held; he came up into the lander and watched from the outer hatch, as Gveter watched from the port. The vid had lost her. The pallid blotch sank into the formless murk.

  Gveter perceived that the instruments recorded that the lander had sunk 3.2 meters since contact with planet surface and was continuing to sink at an increasing rate.

  “What is the surface, Betton?”

  “Like muddy ground—where is she?”

  “Please return at once, Tai!”

  “Please return to Shoby, Lander One and all crew,” said the ship intercom; it was Tai’s voice. “This is Tai,” it said. “Please return at once to ship, lander and all crew.”

  “Stay in suit, in decon, please, Betton,” Gveter said. “I’m sealing the hatch.”

  “But—all right,” said the boy’s voice.

  Gveter took the lander up, decontaminating it and Betton’s suit on the way. He perceived that Betton and Shan came with him through the hatch series into the Shoby and along the halls to the bridge, and that Karth, Sweet Today, Shan, and Tai were on the bridge.

  Betton ran to his mother and stopped; he did not put out his hands to her. His face was immobile, as if made of wax or wood.

  “Were you frightened?” she asked. “What happened down there?” And she looked to Gveter for an explanation.

  Gveter perceived nothing. Unduring a nonperiod of no long, he perceived nothing was had happening happened that had not happened. Lost, he groped, lost, he found the word, the word that saved—“You—” he said, his tongue thick, dumb—“You called us.”

  It seemed that she denied, but it did not matter. What mattered? Shan was talking. Shan could tell. “Nobody called, Gveter,” he said. “You and Betton went out, I was Support; when I realized I couldn’t get the lander stable, that there’s something funny about that surface, I called you back into the lander, and we came up.”

  All Gveter could say was, “Insubstantial…”

  “But Tai came—” Betton began, and stopped. Gveter perceived that the boy moved away from his mother’s denying touch. What mattered?

  “Nobody went down,” Sweet Today said. After a silence and before it, she said, “There is no down to go to.”

  Gveter tried to find another word, but there was none. He perceived outside the main port a brownish, murky convexity, through which, as he looked intently, he saw small stars shining.

  He found a word then, the wrong word. “Lost,” he said, and speaking perceived how the ship’s lights dimmed slowly into a brownish murk, faded, darkened, were gone, while all the soft hum and busyness of the ship’s systems died away into the real silence that was always there. But there was nothing there. Nothing had happened. We are at Ve Port! he tried with all his will to say; but there was no saying.

  The suns burn through my flesh, Lidi said.

  I am the suns, said Sweet Today. Not I, all is.

  Don’t breathe! cried Oreth.

  It is death, Shan said. What I feared, is: nothing.

  Nothing, they said.


  Unbreathing, the ghosts flitted, shifted, in the ghost shell of a cold, dark hull floating near a world of brown fog, an unreal planet. They spoke, but there were no voices. There is no sound in vacuum, nor in nontime.

  In her cabined solitude, Lidi felt the gravity lighten to the half-G of the ship’s core mass; she saw them, the nearer and the farther suns, burn through the dark gauze of the walls and hulls and the bedding and her body. The brightest, the sun of this system, floated directly under her navel. She did not know its name.

  I am the darkness between the suns, one said.

  I am nothing, one said.

  I am you, one said.

  You—one said—You—

  And breathed, and reached out, and spoke: “Listen!” Crying out to the other, to the others, “Listen!”

  “We have always known this. This is where we have always been, will always be, at the hearth, at the center. There is nothing to be afraid of, after all.”

  “I can’t breathe,” one said.

  “I am not breathing,” one said.

  “There is nothing to breathe,” one said.

  “You are, you are breathing, please breathe!” said another.

  “We’re here, at the hearth,” said another.

  Oreth had laid the fire, Karth lit it. As it caught they both said softly, in Karhidish, “Praise also the light, and creation unfinished.”

  The fire caught with spark spits, crackles, sudden flares. It did not go out. It burned. The others grouped round.

  They were nowhere, but they were nowhere together; the ship was dead, but they were in the ship. A dead ship cools off fairly quickly, but not immediately. Close the doors, come in by the fire; keep the cold night out, before we go to bed.

  Karth went with Rig to persuade Lidi from her starry vault. The navigator would not get up. “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “Don’t egoize,” Karth said mildly. “How could it be?”

  “I don’t know. I want to stay here,” Lidi muttered. Then Karth begged her: “Oh, Lidi, not alone!”

  “How else?” the old woman asked coldly.

  But she was ashamed of herself, then, and ashamed of her guilt trip, and growled, “Oh, all right.” She heaved herself up and wrapped a blanket around her body and followed Karth and Rig. The child carried a little biolume; it glowed in the black corridors, just as the plants of the aerobic tanks lived on, metabolizing, making an air to breathe, for a while. The light moved before her like a star among the stars through darkness to the room full of books, where the fire burned in the stone hearth. “Hello, children,” Lidi said. “What are we doing here?”

  “Telling stories,” Sweet Today replied.

  Shan had a little voice recorder notebook in his hand.

  “Does it work?” Lidi inquired.

  “Seems to. We thought we’d tell … what happened,” Shan said, squinting the narrow black eyes in his narrow black face at the firelight. “Each of us. What we—what it seemed like, seems like, to us. So that…”

  “As a record, yes. In case … How funny that it works, though, your notebook. When nothing else does.”

  “It’s voice-activated,” Shan said absently. “So. Go on, Gveter.”

  Gveter finished telling his version of the expedition to the planet’s surface. “We didn’t even bring back samples,” he ended. “I never thought of them.”

  “Shan went with you, not me,” Tai said.

  “You did go, and I did,” the boy said with a certainty that stopped her. “And we did go outside. And Shan and Gveter were Support, in the lander. And I took samples. They’re in the Stasis closet.”

  “I don’t know if Shan was in the lander or not,” Gveter said, rubbing his forehead painfully.

  “Where would the lander have gone?” Shan said. “Nothing is out there—we’re nowhere—outside time, is all I can think—But when one of you tells how they saw it, it seems as if it was that way, but then the next one changes the story, and I…”

  Oreth shivered, drawing closer to the fire.

  “I never believed this damn thing would work,” said Lidi, bearlike in the dark cave of her blanket.

  “Not understanding it was the trouble,” Karth said. “None of us understood how it would work, not even Gveter. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes,” Gveter said.

  “So that if our psychic interaction with it affected the process—”

  “Or is the process,” said Sweet Today, “so far as we’re concerned.”

  “Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?”

  “You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said.

  “No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”

  “An analogy,” Gveter offered. “The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a crew—you could call it believing in the crew, or just being it—Right? So, maybe, to churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving ourselves as … as transilient—as being in the other place—the destination?”

  “We lost our crewness, certainly, for a—are there whiles?” Karth said. “We fell apart.”

  “We lost the thread,” Shan said.

  “Lost,” Oreth said meditatively, laying another massive, half-weightless log on the fire, volleying sparks up into the chimney, slow stars.

  “We lost—what?” Sweet Today asked.

  No one answered for a while.

  “When I can see the sun through the carpet…” Lidi said.

  “So can I,” Betton said, very low.

  “I can see Ve Port,” said Rig. “And everything. I can tell you what I can see. I can see Liden if I look. And my room on the Oneblin. And—”

  “First, Rig,” said Sweet Today, “tell us what happened.”

  “All right,” Rig said agreeably. “Hold on to me harder, maba, I start floating. Well, we went to the liberry, me and Asten and Betton, and Betton was Elder Sib, and the adults were on the bridge, and I was going to go to sleep like I do when we naffle-fly, but before I even lay down there was the brown planet and Ve Port and both the suns and everywhere else, and you could see through everything, but Asten couldn’t. But I can.”

  “We never went anywhere,” Asten said. “Rig tells stories all the time.”

  “We all tell stories all the time, Asten,” Karth said.

  “Not dumb ones like Rig’s!”

  “Even dumber,” said Oreth. “What we need … What we need is…”

  “We need to know,” Shan said, “what transilience is, and we don’t, because we never did it before, nobody ever did it before.”

  “Not in the flesh,” said Lidi.

  “We need to know what’s—real—what happened, whether anything happened—” Tai gestured at the cave of firelight around them and the dark beyond it. “Where are we? Are we here? Where is here? What’s the story?”

  “We have to tell it,” Sweet Today said. “Recount it. Relate it.… Like Rig. Asten, how does a story begin?”

  “A thousand winters ago, a thousand miles away,” the child said; and Shan murmured, “Once upon a time…”

  “There was a ship called the Shoby,” said Sweet Today, “on a test flight, trying out the churten, with a crew of ten.

  “Their names were Rig, Asten, Betton, Karth, Oreth, Lidi, Tai, Shan, Gveter, and Sweet Today. And they related their story, each one and together.…”

  There was silence, the silence that was always there, except for the stir and crackle of the fire and the small sounds of their breathing, their movements, until one of them spoke at last, telling the story.

  “The boy and his mother,” said the light, pure voice, “were the first human beings ever to set foot on that world.”

  Again the silence; and again a voice.

  “Although she wished … she realized that she really hoped the t
hing wouldn’t work, because it would make her skills, her whole life, obsolete … all the same she really wanted to learn how to use it, too, if she could, if she wasn’t too old to learn.…”

  A long, softly throbbing pause, and another voice.

  “They went from world to world, and each time they lost the world they left, lost it in time dilation, their friends getting old and dying while they were in NAFAL flight. If there were a way to live in one’s own time, and yet move among the worlds, they wanted to try it.…”

  “Staking everything on it,” the next voice took up the story, “because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing’s safe except what we put at risk.”

  A while, a little while; and a voice.

  “It was like a game. It was like we were still in the Shoby at Ve Port just waiting before we went into NAFAL flight. But it was like we were at the brown planet too. At the same time. And one of them was just pretend, and the other one wasn’t, but I didn’t know which. So it was like when you pretend in a game. But I didn’t want to play. I didn’t know how.”

  Another voice.

  “If the churten principle were proved to be applicable to actual transilience of living, conscious beings, it would be a great event in the mind of his people—for all people. A new understanding. A new partnership. A new way of being in the universe. A wider freedom.… He wanted that very much. He wanted to be one of the crew that first formed that partnership, the first people to be able to think this thought, and to … to relate it. But also he was afraid of it. Maybe it wasn’t a true relation, maybe false, maybe only a dream. He didn’t know.”

  It was not so cold, so dark, at their backs, as they sat round the fire. Was it the waves of Liden, hushing on the sand?

  Another voice.

  “She thought a lot about her people, too. About guilt, and expiation, and sacrifice. She wanted a lot to be on this flight that might give people—more freedom. But it was different from what she thought it would be. What happened—what happened wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that she came to be with people who gave her freedom. Without guilt. She wanted to stay with them, to be crew with them.… And with her son. Who was the first human being to set foot on an unknown world.”