Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  “If we go down there. . .,” says Sandy.

  “Not if, but when,” says Chika. “We didn’t actually think this would happen, did we? I confess I didn’t, not in my heart. The planet wouldn’t be habitable, or there would be alien viruses we couldn’t cope with. But it is, and there aren’t.”

  Sophie tries to sound a bright note. “In another hundred years there will be human cities. Networks. People whose grandparents were born on Tee-Cee Two.”

  “For us,” says Sandy, “just work work work. A few days’ hike in any direction for a working holiday if we’re lucky. Lots of trips to the seaside for me. We’ll be sacrificing the best of our lives.”

  “That’s why we came here,” says Mary. “We’re pioneers. Your Jeff especially.”

  “Easy for you to say! You won’t be stuck here. Com Sherwin is bound to take you back through Q-space in the hope of a shortcut through time for anyone aboard. If that can’t be cracked, isn’t six months’ solitary going to be a bit of a disincentive to those who’ll supposedly follow us? Well, isn’t it?”

  “Do you mean. . .you think there might never be another shipload of colonists? Surely not! Even if people are obliged to endure isolation en route, they’ll still come. At least they’ll know they have a secure destination!”

  Eric eyes Mary uneasily. “I wonder if I’ll be taken back. Normally I would have expected to go back to look after the hydroponics, but there can’t be much point if there are eight or so different versions of Pioneer. Com Sherwin is almost bound to take you as ship’s doctor rather than Yukio.”

  “Even if I have nobody to doctor but myself? Talk sense.”

  Eric nods. “Because of your other possibility.”

  The Commander must be haunted by decisions he has yet to make.

  Maybe this is why, after a long and inconclusive interview with Mary months ago, he has not discussed her revelation again with her in any depth. Something new may yet happen to her. Or if not her, then as regards baby James.

  Denise has gone to the surface. From now on her astrophysics will be restricted to the close study of Tau Ceti, which is important, of course. Sunspot cycles, the wind from the new sun. Jay-Jay has deployed an instrument platform in orbit for her to uplink with, but habitat-tending work will occupy much of Denise’s time.

  It’ll be another month until a second habitat-dome is erected, and several more whirlies, time enough one hopes for any teething problems with the first habitat to become apparent. Since a habitat does not need to be sealed off fully from the environment, problems should not be too serious. The air and the water freely available down on Tee-Cee Two are such a boon, as is the soil in which crops can grow. Genetic engineering may not be necessary at all. Unprotected fields of lupins may provide fodder, and some beauty. Frozen embryos of pigs, goats, and rabbits may be quickened and brought to term in the artificial wombs all the sooner. And chickens hatched. And ponds dug for carp and trout—and a network of irrigation channels.

  James will have chicks and bunnies and piglets as part of his nursery experience.

  The pioneers were prepared to provide full protection to the tithe of terrestrial life they brought with them. This would have limited the options. Now, not so.

  Sophie conducts a multi-faith ceremony of thanks and blessing, although God is absent, or at least extremely diminutive, if God is the collective superconsciousness of the whole human race.

  A husband and wife team, Bjorn and Heidi Svenson, vets who will be in charge of husbandry, visit Mary in the clinic. Heidi has brought a urine sample.

  “You’re pregnant. Definitely!” Mary tells Heidi joyfully. “Oh, congratulations!”

  Turns out to be only a week ago that the Svensons engaged in something of a marathon, six times in two days at mid-month in Heidi’s cycle. If James was ever a jinx, that jinx is exorcised now that Tee-Cee promises fertility. In place of a certain apprehension is an eagerness to bear the first child on an alien world. It’s early days yet to be sure how viable the Svensons’ embryo is, but Heidi does not intend to keep quiet about it. Next day, another husband and wife and a pair of Afro-American partners visit Mary for the same test. The former have not conceived, but the latter have succeeded. With luck James will have peers not too much younger than he is.

  Mary and Sophie and Hiroaki and Chika, and inevitably Eric, are taking a coffee break in hydroponics, perching on the sides of plant-troughs, their backs brushing the emerald foliage of carrots and the stalks of tomato plants bowed by bright red globelets.

  Sandy comes in at a pace that risks balance-nausea, James swaddled tightly in her arms as if he might fall and break.

  “He started speaking—!” She displays her child, who gazes at Sophie, then at Mary.

  What the baby says is: “I am a Voice. I answer. Ask me.”

  And Mary asks, “What are you?”

  “I am a Voice of the linking to All-Humanity. The echo of the event in what you call Q-space. I am a Voice left behind.” Sandy’s baby is actually talking to them.

  Its tones are somewhat squeaky.

  “Why were you left behind?”

  “As a Guide to what is and what may be.”

  “Shouldn’t we get the Commander here?” butts in Eric.

  “Not yet, not yet,” says Hiroaki, eager for enlightenment.

  A Guide to what is. . . .

  “Do you mean,” Eric asks, “you can tell us, for example, whether Tee-Cee is as suitable for us to colonize as it seems to be?”

  “Maybe the problems are within yourselves. You are all too special. Specialists, multi-specialists. Over-endowment oozes from your fingertips, from the pores of your skin. Better to have sent here a hundred trained peasants or low-caste laborers for whom the work would mean freedom from the restricting past and who would feel like lords. Tee-Cee is weed, water, dirt. Compel a chess grand master to play nothing but checkers for years.”

  “Pioneer will bring more people here in a couple of years—fewer Ph.D.s, more blue-collar types, I guess.”

  “Sleeping two to a cabin, like animals in an ark? Will you first founders be their superiors, their directors? Even so, the numbers will still be too small.”

  “Another ship will be built—more ships.”

  “Requiring four years each, costing forty billion moneys each? Almost bankrupting the backers? Shall the Earth be taxed dry? Only so, if threatened by certain extinction. If your sun is about to flare. If a dark star enters your solar system. If a big comet passes by and will return in a hundred years and strike your Earth.”

  “We could fire anti-matter at a comet,” says Chika. “Completely destroy it while it’s still far away.”

  Within such a short time-frame what threat could be big enough and certain enough?

  Mary recalls. “You—or the being you represent—told me that other species do manage to set up colonies by sending generation ships or whatever.”

  “Perhaps with thousands of persons on board. Perhaps those species command a much larger energy budget than Humanity. You may be too soon. Premature. Your best effort, not big enough.”

  “I think,” says Sophie, “you’re looking on the gloomy side. You’ve been overhearing people having a few last-minute doubts.”

  A guide to what may be. . . .

  “James, can you foretell the future?” asks Hiroaki.

  “I can tell what may most probably be,” answers the baby. “The most probable paths. Sometime, within infinity, an improbable path becomes actual. How else could the first parent universe arise?”

  “Oh kami kami kami,” Chika exclaims, “he’s a quantum computer. A hand-held quantum computer—and he’s an artificial intelligence too! No, I don’t mean artificial—he’s biological, a biological quantum computer. Of course that’s what we all are in a limited sense if it’s true that quantum effects create our consciousness. . . . But we don’t have access to. . .we aren’t linked. . .we aren’t directly plugged in to the background, the big picture. . . .”


  “What he is,” says Sophie, “is an avatar.”

  “You mean like the face Computer has, if we want to see a face onscreen?”

  “Originally avatar is a Hindu term. For an incarnation of a god, a manifestation.”

  How cautiously Sandy holds on to what is biologically her son, as though maybe she should lay him down among the tomato plants in case her grasp fails her.

  “Does he have powers? Can he make things happen?”

  “Ask him,” says Sophie, compassionate, apprehensive.

  Sandy bows her head over her baby.

  “James, can you do things? Can you. . .can you make a bird appear in here?”

  “Mother, I am a Voice, not a Hand that can pluck a creature from one place to another.”

  “You have hands—two little hands. You do.” Carefully she unswaddles a chubby pink baby arm, little fingers, tiny coral nails.

  “But I am not a Hand.”

  “Could you become a Hand?”

  “That is a very unlikely path. Then I might not be a Voice.”

  “Can you see what is happening with Jeff there down on Tau-Cee?”

  “I am not an Eye.”

  Hiroaki interrupts. “Are there any other beings like you that are Hands or Eyes?”

  James yawns. “I am tired now. This was an effort. I am a baby.” His eyes close.

  “I got to get a message to Jeff! He must come back!”

  “We got to tell the Commander right now,” says Chika.

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Com Sherwin? How do you know?”

  “No. James is asleep.”

  Sherwin Peterson quickly comes in person to hydroponics after Chika’s call.

  “Can you wake him up?”

  “I don’t think we should,” says Mary. “He’s fatigued. Let him wake in his own time.”

  “I can hardly doubt the word of five of you. . . .”

  Not unless this is some weird hoax, and what would that serve?

  The Commander bangs his fist into his palm as if the sudden noise might startle James awake.

  “Let me get this straight. He’s saying that this expedition is too soon and too few and the wrong sort of people.”

  That might be the point of the hoax, is a thought which obviously crosses his mind. Psychological sabotage by a small group of conspirators who wish to avoid effectively being marooned down on Tee-Cee. This feeling might spread like an infection. Let’s just do the science, then let’s pack up and go home in relative comfort. If the baby wakes up and says nothing at all the hoax will be rumbled within a few hours at most. Yet a seed of, yes, mutiny might still have been sown.

  “I am ordering you to say nothing about this until I can talk to the baby myself.”

  How can he enforce his order? A Commander should not issue orders that cannot be enforced.

  “I’m appealing to you to keep quiet for a few hours. How long will it be?” A mother should know. And a doctor should know. Oh yes really, a psychiatrist who claims she met an inhabitant of probability, whose voice this baby now is?

  “His brain is altered,” Mary says. “I don’t know how long he needs to sleep after making a big effort. We might harm him.”

  “This could harm us, Doctor, in ways you mightn’t imagine!”

  “He’s a living quantum computer,” says Chika. “Maybe James can help you pass through Q-space again without the same isolation. Maybe he can pull the time-jumping trick.”

  “And maybe Pioneer will slide off the edge of the universe. This ship vanishes, and that’s the end of star travel. How do you know this baby isn’t some sort of virus that Dr. Nolan’s famous super-being inserted on board? Better the devil of isolation than a devil we don’t know.”

  Paranoia due to the strain of command? The weight of responsibility for human hopes and for forty billion dollars.

  “I think we’ll have ample time to find out,” says Chika.

  The Commander squares himself. “We’ll all wait. Right here.”

  “I have work to attend to, Commander.”

  “What would that be? Reprogramming the computer to accept input from the virus-baby?”

  “Of course not. There’s a lot of data from the surface to process.”

  “No one leaves, and no one enters. Make yourselves comfortable.” True to his word, the Commander parks his butt on the edge of the big tomato trough, plucks a ripe tomato, grins, bites into it, sticks his other hand in his pocket.

  “James should be lying on my bed,” says Sandy. “Wait here? He’s a bit of a weight. Look, I’ll take him to my cabin. I guess we can all fit in there. And that’ll be more private.”

  “I said we wait here.”

  “Com, that’s unreasonable.”

  “In your professional opinion is it lacking in reason?” Sherwin asks Mary. “A sign of insanity? Sufficient grounds for my Second Officer to take over?”

  From his pocket, to their astonishment, the Commander pulls a pistol, which he points at Sandy—or at James.

  Tightly Sophie says, “I didn’t know there were any weapons on Pioneer.”

  “Sure there are. And on the shuttles too. Kept well out of sight, locked away, available in emergency to certain personnel who are sworn to secrecy. What if we encountered actively hostile indigenes on Tee-Cee? What if a hostile alien entity boards the ship? What if that has happened already?”

  It is as if a trapdoor has opened, from which blows a very cold draft.

  Com Sherwin chews and sucks at the tomato, and regards the five, and slumbering James. Hiroaki is standing tensely as if calculating whether he can disarm Sherwin.

  “Commander,” says Mary, “if you put the gun away we agree to stay here and never say anything about this. There might be an accident.”

  “My child,” whispers Sandy.

  “Ah but is he or ain’t he? How much of him is your child if his brain has been tampered with, as you say? Is he even human if he’s actually a bio-computer? Some guns came along with us in case of unforeseen emergency. I think this amounts to something of an emergency putting the mission in peril, admittedly in a peculiar way. I would like to be obeyed without argument.”

  “James may be quite wrong about us being unsuitable settlers.”

  “In that case, Dr. Nolan, would I let it have a say in how this ship operates in Q-space? As you have just suggested, Dr. Suzuki.”

  “He may have powers,” Sandy says.

  “That’s exactly what I’m bothered about. You people really are blind. Indulged. Let’s be patient, let’s not leap to conclusions, let’s keep hush. I’m the Commander. Some weird baby isn’t.”

  This is all very unfortunate. Com Sherwin had seemed steady as a rock. An easy-going rock, you might even say. Ten light years distance from Earth is a long thin thread. Thin threads can snap if tugged unexpectedly. He still sounds composed. Does he not understand that producing a gun to enforce authority seriously devalues his position as well as poisoning the atmosphere aboard? A gun, to confront a mother and baby. He is like a King Herod panicked by rumors of a messiah. It is outside of his scope.

  “Whatever happens,” Mary tells the others, “we mustn’t say anything about this. Understood? This is a can of worms.” Can she persuade the Commander to accept counseling?

  “Perhaps,” suggests Sophie, “I should say a prayer to focus us.”

  No one else wanders into hydroponics. If someone did, would Com Sherwin detain them too at gun point? He whistles to himself monotonously and tunelessly, as if time-keeping, holding the pistol slackly. Occasionally he answers a message on his com. He eats a couple more tomatoes to sustain himself, a breech of proper conduct—hydroponics is not for anyone to sneak into and snack—but in the circumstances Eric does not demur.

  Mary thinks of Commander Bligh and the Bounty. And of isolated Pitcairn Island, where the mutineers marooned themselves, not to be recontacted until many decades later, while Bligh and his few rowed something like four thousand miles by dead reckoning
to regain eventually the bosom of authority. An epic journey, almost equivalent to the crossing of light years. In this case is the Commander the mutineer? On the Pitcairn Island of Tee-Cee does he maroon his crew while the officers make their escape?

  By his own lights the Commander may be right to be holding that gun, in case James is a lot more than they imagine. In case James needs to be killed quickly.

  Err on the safe side.

  After an hour James wakes. With his gun the Commander motions all but Sandy and her baby well out of the way. Hiroaki especially.

  “Hi there, Kid, I’m the Commander. I hear you found your voice. That true?”

  “I am the Voice, Commander.”

  “I’m kind of upset to hear you cast doubts on our chances of settling Tee-Cee.”

  The baby peers at him, focusing. “I am realistic. Too few, too soon, too concerned with individuality.”

  “Pardon me that we aren’t a hive. Maybe this is Earth’s only chance of having our eggs in more than one basket. Question of available resources and politics.”

  “So you feel obliged to try to succeed.”

  “Obliged, right. Now what’s your agenda? Try to dissuade us? Something important about Tee-Cee? In a squillion years might the weedhoppers amount to more than Einstein and Hawking and Mozart? That it?”

  “What are Einstein and Hawking and Mozart?”

  “I guess their fame hasn’t spread much. We aim to remedy that. Any advice about Q-space? How to keep us all together while we’re in transit through your realm? How to speed things up a bit?”

  “Would you prefer that a hundred different journeys are undertaken by everyone? And only one actuality emerges? The wave fronts of all the other ships collapsing, experienced subjectively as catastrophe, shipwreck in void, the dissolving of substance and life?”