Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  As the ship surged through the empty dimensions, three-space became as liquid as a dream. Leaves smeared and buildings ran together. Owen’s face swirled.

  "They want criticism," said Mada. "They like to think of themselves as artists but they’re insecure about what they’ve accomplished. They want their audience to engage with what they’re doing, help them make it better—the comments they both seem to expect."

  "I see it now," said the ship. "But is one person in a backwater worth an undo? Let’s just start over somewhere else."

  "No, I have an idea." She began .owing more fat cells to her breasts. For the .rst time since she had skipped upwhen, Mada had a glimpse of what her duty might now be. "I’m going to need a big special effect on short notice. Be ready to reclaim mass so you can resubstantiate the hull at my command."

  * * *

  “First listen to some of my poetry.”

  “Go ahead.” Mada folded her arms across her chest. “Say it then.”

  Owen stood on tiptoes to declaim:

  “That spring you left I thought I might expire

  And lose the love you left for me to keep.

  To hold you once again in my desire

  Before I give myself to death’s long sleep.”

  He illustrated his poetry with large, flailing gestures. At “death’s long sleep” he brought his hands together as if to pray, moved them to the side of his head, rested against them and closed his eyes. He had held the pose for just a beat before Mada interrupted him.

  “Owen,” she said. “You look ridiculous.”

  He jerked as if he had been hit in the head by a shovel.

  She pointed at the ground before her. “You’ll want to take these comments sitting down.”

  He hesitated, then settled at her feet.

  “You hold your meter well, but that’s purely a mechanical skill.” She circled behind him. “A smart oven could do as much. Stop fidgeting!”

  She hadn’t noticed the ant hills near the spot she had chosen for Owen. The first scouts were beginning to explore him. That suited her plan exactly.

  “Your real problem,” she continued, “is that you know nothing about death and probably very little about desire.”

  “I know about death.” Owen drew his feet close to his body and grasped his knees. “Everyone does. Flowers die, squirrels die.”

  “Has anyone you’ve ever known died?”

  He frowned. “I didn’t know her personally, but there was the woman who fell off that cliff in Merrymeeting.”

  “Owen, did you have a mother?”

  “Don’t make fun of me. Everyone has a mother.”

  Mada didn’t think it was time to tell him that she didn’t; that she and her sibling batch of a thousand revolutionaries had been autoflowed. “Hold out your hand.” Mada scooped up an ant. “That’s your mother.” She crunched it and dropped it onto Owen’s palm.

  Owen looked down at the dead ant and up again at Mada. His eyes filled.

  “I think I love you,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Mada.” She leaned over to straighten his cape. “But loving me would be a very bad idea.”

  all that’s left

  Mada was surprised to find a few actual books in the library, printed on real plastic. A primitive DI had catalogued the rest of the collection, billions of gigabytes of print, graphics, audio, video, and VR files. None of it told Mada what she wanted to know. The library had sims of Egypt’s New Kingdom, Islam’s Abbasid dynasty, and the International Moonbase—but then came an astonishing void. Mada’s searches on Trueborn, the Utopians, Tau Ceti, intelligence engineering and dimensional extensibility theory turned up no results. It was only in the very recent past that history resumed. The DI could reproduce the plans that the workbots had left when they built the library twenty-two years ago, and the menu The Devil’s Apple had offered the previous summer, and the complete won-lost record of the Black Minks, the local scatterball club, which had gone 533–905 over the last century. It knew that the name of the woman who died in Merrymeeting was Agnes and that two years after her death, a replacement baby had been born to Chandra and Yuri. They named him Herrick.

  Mada waved the screen blank and stretched. She could see Owen draped artfully over a nearby divan, as if posing for a portrait. He was engrossed by his handheld. She noticed that his lips moved as he read. She crossed the reading room and squeezed onto it next to him, nestling into the crook in his legs. “What’s that?” she asked.

  He turned the handheld toward her. “Nadeem Jerad’s Burning the Snow. Would you like to hear one of his poems?”

  “Maybe later.” She leaned into him. “I was just reading about Moonbase.”

  “Yes, ancient history. It’s sort of interesting, don’t you think? The Greeks and the Renaissance and all that.”

  “But then I can’t find any record of what came after.”

  “Because of the nightmares.” He nodded. “Terrible things happened, so we forgot them.”

  “What terrible things?”

  He tapped the side of his head and grinned.

  “Of course,” she said, “nothing terrible happens anymore.”

  “No. Everyone’s happy now.” Owen reached out and pushed a strand of her hair off her forehead. “You have beautiful hair.”

  Mada couldn’t even remember what color it was. “But if something terrible did happen, then you’d want to forget it.”

  “Obviously.”

  “The woman who died, Agnes. No doubt her friends were very sad.”

  “No doubt.” Now he was playing with her hair.

  ~Good question,~ subbed the ship. ~They must have some mechanism to wipe their memories.~

  “Is something wrong?” Owen’s face was the size of the moon; Mada was afraid of what he might tell her next.

  “Agnes probably had a mother,” she said.

  “A mom and a dad.”

  “It must have been terrible for them.”

  He shrugged. “Yes, I’m sure they forgot her.”

  Mada wanted to slap his hand away from her head. “But how could they?”

  He gave ger a puzzled look. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Trueborn,” she said without hesitation. “It’s a long, long way from here.”

  “Don’t you have libraries there?” He gestured at the screens that surrounded them. “This is where we keep what we don’t want to remember.”

  ~Skip!~ Mada could barely sub; if what she suspected were true. . . ~Skip downwhen two minutes.~

  * * *

  ~minutes two downwhen Skip~ . . . true were suspected she what if sub barely could Mada ~!Skip~ "remember to want don’t we what keep we where is This" .them surrounded that screen the at gestured He "?there libraries have you Don’t" ".here from way long ,long a It’s" hesitation without said she ",Trueborn" "?anyway, from you are Where" .look puzzled a her gave He "?they could how But" .head her from away hand his slap to wanted Mada ".her forgot they sure I’m, Yes" .shrugged He ".them for terrible been have must It" "dad a and mom A" ".mother a had probably Agnes" next her tell might he what of afraid was Mada .moon the of size of the was face Owen’s"?wrong something Is" .~memories their wipe to mechanism some have must They" .ship the subbed; ~question Good~ hair her with playing was he Now ".doubt No" ".sad very were friends her doubt no, Agnes, died who woman The" ".Obviously" ".it forget to want you’d then ,happen did terrible something if But" .was it color what remember even couldn’t even Mada

  She wrapped her arms around herself to keep the empty dimensions from reaching for the emptiness inside her. Was something wrong?

  Of course there was, but she didn’t expect to say it out loud. "I’ve lost everything and all that’s left is this."

  Owen shimmered next to her like the surface of Rabbit Lake.

  "Mada, what?" said the ship.

  "Forget it," she said. She thought she could hear something cracking when she laughed.

  * * *

  Mada
couldn’t even remember what color her hair was. “But if something terrible did happen, then you’d want to forget it.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Something terrible happened to me.”

  “I’m sorry.” Owen squeezed her shoulder. “Do you want me to show you how to use the headbands?” He pointed at a rack of metal-mesh strips.

  ~Scanning,~ subbed the ship. “Microcurrent taps capable of modulating post-synaptic outputs. I thought they were some kind of virtual reality I/O.”

  “No.” Mada twisted away from him and shot off the divan. She was outraged that these people would deliberately burn memories. How many stubbed toes and unhappy love affairs had Owen forgotten? If she could have, she would have skipped the entire village of Harmonious Struggle downwhen into the identity mine. When he rose up after her, she grabbed his hand. “I have to get out of here right now.”

  She dragged him out of the library into the innocent light of the sun.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. She continued to tow him up Ode Street and out of town. “Wait!” He planted his feet, tugged at her and she spun back to him. “Why are you so upset?”

  “I’m not upset.” Mada’s blood was hammering in her temples and she could feel the prickle of sweat under her arms. ~Now I need you,~ she subbed. “All right then. It’s time you knew.” She took a deep breath. “We were just talking about ancient history, Owen. Do you remember back then that the gods used to intervene in the affairs of humanity?”

  Owen goggled at her as if she were growing beans out of her ears.

  “I am a goddess, Owen, and I have come for you. I am calling you to your destiny. I intend to inspire you to great poetry.”

  His mouth opened and then closed again.

  “My worshippers call me by many names.” She raised a hand to the sky.

  ~Help?~

  ~Try Athene? Here’s a databurst.~

  “To the Greeks, I was Athene,” Mada continued, “the goddess of cities, of technology and the arts, of wisdom and of war.” She stretched a hand toward Owen’s astonished face, forefinger aimed between his eyes. “Unlike you, I had no mother. I sprang full-grown from the forehead of my maker. I am Athene, the virgin goddess.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” He shivered and glanced away from her fierce gaze. “I used to live in Maple City, Mada. I’m not some simple-minded country lump. You don’t seriously expect me to believe this goddess nonsense?”

  She slumped, confused. Of course she had expected him to believe her. “I meant no disrespect, Owen. It’s just that the truth is. . .” This wasn’t as easy as she had thought. “What I expect is that you believe in your own potential, Owen. What I expect is that you are brave enough to leave this place and come with me. To the stars, Owen, to the stars to start a new world.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, grasped the hem of her moss-colored top, pulled it over her head and tossed it behind her. Before it hit the ground the ship augmented it with enough reclaimed mass from the empty dimensions to resubstantiate the command and living mods.

  Mada was quite pleased with the way Owen tried—and failed—not to stare at her breasts. She kicked the gripall loafers off and the deck rose up beneath them. She stepped out of the baggy, black pants; when she tossed them at Owen, he flinched. Seconds later, they were eyeing each other in the metallic light of the ship’s main companionway.

  “Well?” said Mada.

  duty

  Mada had difficulty accepting Trueborn as it now was. She could see the ghosts of great cities, hear the murmur of dead friends. She decided to live in the forest that had once been the Green Sea, where there were no landmarks to remind her of what she had lost. She ordered the ship to begin constructing an infrastructure similar to that they had found on earth, only capable of supporting a technologically advanced population. Borrowing orphan mass from the empty dimensions, it was soon consumed with this monumental task. She missed its company; only rarely did she use the link it had left her—a silver ring with a direct connection to its sensorium.

  The ship’s first effort was the farm that Owen called Athens. It consisted of their house, a flow works, a gravel pit and a barn. Dirt roads led to various mines and domed fields that the ship’s bots tended. Mada had it build a separate library, a little way into the woods, where, she declared, information was to be acquired only, never destroyed. Owen spent many evenings there. He said he was trying to make himself worthy of her.

  He had been deeply flattered when she told him that, as part of his training as a poet, he was to name the birds and beasts and flowers and trees of Trueborn.

  “But they must already have names,” he said, as they walked back to the house from the newly tilled soya field.

  “The people who named them are gone,” she said. “The names went with them.”

  “Your people.” He waited for her to speak. The wind sighed through the forest. “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know.” At that moment, she regretted ever bringing him to Trueborn.

  He sighed. “It must be hard.”

  “You left your people,” she said. She spoke to wound him, since he was wounding her with these rude questions.

  “For you, Mada.” He let go of her. “I know you didn’t leave them for me.” He picked up a pebble and held it in front of his face. “You are now Mada-stone,” he told it, “and whatever you hit. . .” He threw it into the woods and it thwocked off a tree. “. . .is Mada-tree. We will plant fields of Mada-seed and press Mada-juice from the sweet Mada-fruit and dance for the rest of our days down Mada Street.” He laughed and put his arm around her waist and swung her around in circles, kicking up dust from the road. She was so surprised that she laughed too.

  Mada and Owen slept in separate bedrooms, so she was not exactly sure how she knew that he wanted to have sex with her. He had never spoken of it, other than on that first day when he had specifically said that he did not want her. Maybe it was the way he continually brushed up against her for no apparent reason. This could hardly be chance, considering that they were the only two people on Trueborn. For herself, Mada welcomed his hesitancy. Although she had been emotionally intimate with her batch siblings, none of them had ever inserted themselves into her body cavities.

  But, for better or worse, she had chosen this man for this course of action. Even if the galaxy had forgotten Trueborn two-tenths of a spin ago, the revolution still called Mada to her duty.

  “What’s it like to kiss?” she asked that night, as they were finishing supper.

  Owen laid his fork across a plate of cauliflower curry. “You’ve never kissed anyone before?”

  “That’s why I ask.”

  Owen leaned across the table and brushed his lips across hers. The brief contact made her cheeks flush, as if she had just jogged in from the gravel pit. “Like that,” he said. “Only better.”

  “Do you still think my breasts are too small?”

  “I never said that.” Owen’s face turned red.

  “It was a comment you made—or at least thought about making.”

  “A comment?” The word comment seemed to stick in his throat; it made him cough. “Just because you make comment on some aspect doesn’t mean you reject the work as a whole.”

  Mada glanced down the neck of her shift. She hadn’t really increased her breast mass all that much, maybe ten or twelve grams, but now vasocongestion had begun to swell them even more. She could also feel blood flowing to her reproductive organs. It was a pleasurable weight that made her feel light as pollen. “Yes, but do you think they’re too small?”

  Owen got up from the table and came around behind her chair. He put his hands on her shoulders and she leaned her head back against him. There was something between her cheek and his stomach. She heard him say, “Yours are the most perfect breasts on this entire planet,” as if from a great distance and then realized that the something must be his penis.

  After that, neither of them made much comment.

 
; nine hours

  Mada stared at the ceiling, her eyes wide but unseeing. Her concentration had turned inward. After she had rolled off him, Owen had flung his left arm across her belly and drawn her hip toward his and given her the night’s last kiss. Now the muscles of his arm were slack, and she could hear his seashore breath as she released her ovum into the cloud of his sperm squiggling up her fallopian tubes. The most vigorous of the swimmers butted its head through the ovum’s membrane and dissolved, releasing its genetic material. Mada immediately started raveling the strands of DNA before the fertilized egg could divide for the first time. Without the necessary diversity, they would never revive the revolution. Satisfied with her intervention, she flowed the blastocyst down her fallopian tubes where it locked onto the wall of her uterus. She prodded it and the ball of cells became a comma with a big head and a thin tail. An array of cells specialized and folded into a tube that ran the length of the embryo, weaving into nerve fibers. Dark pigment swept across two cups in the blocky head and then bulged into eyes. A mouth slowly opened; in it was a one-chambered, beating heart. The front end of the neural tube blossomed into the vesicles that would become the brain. Four buds swelled, two near the head, two at the tail. The uppermost pair sprouted into paddles, pierced by rays of cells that Mada immediately began to ossify into fingerbone. The lower buds stretched into delicate legs. At midnight, the embryo was as big as a her fingernail; it began to move and so became a fetus. The eyes opened for a few minutes, but then the eyelids fused. Mada and Owen were going to have a son; his penis was now a nub of flesh. Bubbles of tissue blew inward from the head and became his ears. Mada listened to him listen to her heartbeat. He lost his tail and his intestines slithered down the umbilical cord into his abdomen. As his fingerprints looped and whorled, he stuck his thumb into his mouth. Mada was having trouble breathing because the fetus was floating so high in her uterus. She eased herself into a sitting position and Owen grumbled in his sleep. Suddenly the curry in the cauliflower was giving her heartburn. Then the muscles of her uterus tightened and pain sheeted across her swollen belly.