Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  “You could fix that, could you, given access to our computer and the Q-drive controls? Excuse my being confrontational, by the way. Commander’s prerogative if a mission seems in danger.”

  “There are ways to arrange different parameters.”

  “I guess no one would ever take another Q-space trip if there’s a ninety-nine percent likelihood of being annihilated.”

  “The one percent that prevails becomes one hundred percent. Nothing is actually lost.”

  “Except that ninety-nine me’s experience termination.”

  “You, who prevail, would not know.”

  “Okay, I’ll take that on board, under advisement. Wouldn’t ninety-nine or whatever number of you go down kicking and screaming also, in ghostland?”

  “Unimportant. Inessential. The survivor survives. Result: unity. You overvalue the idea of the self.”

  “There’s a real cosmic perspective. Dr. Tate, lay the child down by those carrots, will you?”

  “Why should I do that? What’s in your mind?”

  “Thoughts, Dr. Tate. Muchos thoughts. Kindly do it now.”

  “I won’t. You’re mad.”

  The gun points. “Do it, and nothing bad will happen to you.”

  “Not to me, but. . . .”

  “I’ll count to five. At five I pull the trigger.”

  With greatest reluctance Sandy unslings James.

  “Position him so he can see me. Now, back off.”

  She backs off a pace, another pace. She’s tempted to throw herself in between.

  “Okay. Voice, can you see me clearly?”

  “Yes,” says the baby.

  “Do you know what this is I’m holding in my hand?”

  “A tool that I think can kill.”

  “Exactly. It fires a bit of metal called a bullet, very fast with a lot of punch. I’m pointing it at your head, which contains your brains. You’re an alien infestation. I’m going to count to five and then I’m going to fire.”

  “Don’t do this,” begs Sandy. “He needs feeding and changing.”

  “Should we have a short intermission? No, I don’t think so.” Sherwin starts to count. James stares at him, neither begging nor flinching. When Sherwin reaches five, he pulls the trigger.

  Click.

  “Gee, the safety is on. . . .” And immediately, “Now it isn’t. But the test is over. He’s just a Voice, that’s all. Unless he’s telepathic, of course, but he gave no signs so far. All right, all relax. I’m sorry about this bit of theater. Had to be sure he doesn’t have powers.”

  “And what,” asks Sophie, “if he had vanished the gun from your hand? Sent it into the middle of nowhere? What would you have done then, try to strangle him with your bare hands?”

  “No. Been very circumspect. I sincerely apologize, people. Middle of nowhere is where we are, or rather at the other end of nowhere, and that’s where he comes out of, even if he looks like a baby and poos like a baby, a very disarming disguise. I had to be certain what we’re dealing with. Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional reactions. What to ordinary souls may appear to be an irrational reaction, right out of left field, may be inspired and correct.”

  “A commander has to be decisive,” agrees Chika politely.

  “I was quoting Linda Bernstein. This brings us back to the problem of damage to morale, and what if anything we might do about rejigging the Q-drive.”

  “You’re actually entertaining the idea?”

  “How can I ignore it, Dr. Suzuki? I’m not blinkered.”

  No, but maybe he is on the edge of himself.

  “I think we established something important—the baby’s limitations, at least at present.”

  “You were justified,” says James. Healingly, perhaps. Or shrewdly.

  The Commander tucks his pistol away.

  “Okay, Voice, these different parameters that can be arranged. . .can our ship’s personnel all skip ahead through time on the trip back to Earth if we put up with a bit of isolation? Without most versions of us getting extinguished?”

  What a gift to science and star travel this will be. And how much more supportive for the settlement on Tee-Cee. Beats harpooning a gas-whale into a cocked hat.

  “I am tired again,” says the baby.

  “Sandy.” Bonhomie, now. “For the moment I want you to keep the Voice out of the way of everyone other than those here present. Will you promise this?”

  Of course.

  The Commander orders Charm to carry a final habitat down to Kansas, and a load of supplies. Beauty conveys another thirty settlers to the surface. Pioneer is becoming quite empty, and proportionately huger, so it seems. The six, and James, remain aboard as though they are engaged in a covert project. Which of them will be sent down at the last moment? Sherwin must at least already have confided in his Second Officer. He is abridging any planned schedule effervescently. A year at Tau Ceti and all the planetary science work? No, the stay in orbit will be measured in months, maybe as few as two, as though Sherwin is now itching to depart, the sooner to return bringing more settlers and equipment. Colonization is the prime priority. This is proceeding more successfully and speedily than anyone had expected—just so long as no one involved in it hears of the Voice’s doubts, not for a long while yet. Colonization must be buttressed, reinforced, ASAP. The toehold must become a full deep footprint.

  Jeff still does not know about his son’s achievement. Jeff is distant now. Undoubtedly Sandy will stay aboard Pioneer to care for James. Her oceanography can wait, and Jeff will have to wait.

  Conversations with the Voice continue, in Sandy’s cabin. Sophie or Mary frequently stay with James to let Sandy off the leash for exercise and a change of scene, as now. Chika and Hiroaki are also helping baby-sit. The bed-couch is crowded.

  “So we are all tiny parts of a vast species-overmind?”

  “Yes, Mary,” says James.

  “What does the overmind do? What is its aim? What thoughts does it think?”

  “I do not have access to it. I am only the Voice of the Other, left behind.”

  “Is there any way a person can access our speciesovermind directly and comprehensibly?”

  Mary thinks of the angel she once saw. The angel was cobwebs and dew and sunlight.

  “Being enfolded into its psychospace and becoming fully aware: that is a way.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Ceasing your life in ongoing space-time. All the billions of lives that ever were remain embedded in its wholeness. Like true dreams. Can you awake lucidly within the dream that was your life, once it has ended? Can you edit the life that was yours? Can you rewrite it? Can you corrupt the data of your history recorded in the psychosphere? This may compel the attention of the overmind.”

  “Could you help me do this?” asks Mary.

  “Perhaps.”

  “He’s talking about you dying first!” says Sophie. “He isn’t saying that you can report anything at all to the living.”

  “I am talking,” says the Voice, “about myself ceasing along with you after I help hoist your mind.”

  “Hoist my mind? How?”

  “I can hypnotize you and, as it were, change mental settings.”

  “Good thing Com Sherwin isn’t hearing this,” Sophie says. “But anyway, we’re only talking theoretically. Aren’t we, Mary?”

  Mary nods.

  “I would volunteer for this,” Chika says softly.

  “Only Mary Nolan is suitable,” the Voice states, “because her mind already linked in Q-space. And a gap was caused. She went ahead in time.”

  “Oh, kami kami,” murmurs Chika.

  “If I can edit my life-data after I die,” asks Mary, “do I alter the real events that occurred?”

  “Skeins may unravel and reform, within limitations. Threads will shift. A different probability will manifest. The large pattern will remain similar.”

  “It is like time-travel, isn’t it? A sort of time-travel? I go back and I do s
omething a bit differently.”

  “You adjust what already happened and what resulted. Within limits.”

  “And if the overmind does not agree?”

  “It must focus upon you. You who are part of it.”

  “Can I focus it upon what happens in the real world?”

  “I do not know this. My brain heats. I am tired. I must cool.”

  The final shuttle trips come so soon. Pioneer almost empties its stores of supplies. Chika and Yukio, Sophie and Hiroaki are to become settlers.

  Hiroaki hangs himself in his cabin. In the partial gravity his strangulation may have taken a while, and perhaps this was his plan—to approach death more slowly so that the boundary between life and death might become as blurred as his vision, allowing him to slip through, to be both dead and alive at once for a while so that he might enfold into psychospace while still fractionally aware. He too was touched by what transpired in Q-space. To a certain extent Hiroaki’s mental settings had been changed. Or perhaps he could not bear to be exiled on Tee-Cee, away from the Voice, or from Mary who may attain a kind of satori, if not in this life then in the data-dream-stream of her life, the eddies within the vast river of the overmind.

  Hiroaki’s death is a shock. Still: balance of his mind tragically disturbed ever since isolation in Q-space. After a brief service conducted by Sophie, his body joins that of Greg Fox in cold store. Sending bodies down to be buried on Tee-Cee would not be a good omen.

  “What did the Voice tell him?” Com Sherwin wants to know. Has to be something to do with James.

  Mary confesses to the Commander. “I think Hiroaki got the idea that he might be able to contact the overmind by dying, because he was touched by it in Q-space.”

  “Touched, as in loony. . .?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t bear to be separated from. . . .”

  “From his therapist?”

  “No, from what may happen in Q-space the next time.”

  * * *

  Pioneer is outward bound. Farewells have been said. In an entirely literal way: fare extremely well. . . until the starship returns. Which it will, there’s no doubting. Especially, don’t doubt yourselves. Charm has been left in Kansas, almost like an emergency survival hut that can be sealed off, though of course will never need to be. Or like an escape route, admittedly an escape to nowhere. Even so, more reassuring than otherwise: a visible link to space and wider horizons, an earnest of more technology due to come. The settlers will now need to acquire a different mind-set, vigorous yet also patient.

  Jeff could not understand why Sandy was not joining him. There’s one of the settlers already feeling isolated, betrayed as if in tit-for-tat. Although in the end Jeff seemed resigned. Sandy herself cried and needed comforting.

  On board are Mary, Sandy and James, and Eric of hydroponics, Com Sherwin and his Second, Max Muller, Engineer Sam Nakata, Navigator Nellie van Torn, Comp and ship-systems manager Bill Brooks, and shuttle pilot Dan Addison. Ten souls, or nine plus something else.

  Com Sherwin is in several minds.

  The Voice has decided that if Computer reprograms the Q-drive in such and such a way, then each traveler will find himself or herself accompanied by a copy of the Voice.

  How can James be in nine places at once—until, at journey’s end, he becomes a single person again? He is not any ordinary baby. He is a child of reality and probability.

  The journey time can be shortened considerably—not by time-jumping such as benefited Mary, but by “compression,” which James cannot explain in comprehensible words. The result should be a journey time of one month rather than six.

  It may be that James’s entangled presence will permit a limited amount of communication between the otherwise isolated stellanauts, via him, although such messages may be unreliable, even if comforting. Or otherwise.

  Of course, him being an infant, albeit an infant prodigy, his copies will need caring for. How well up on the care of infants are Com Sherwin, Max Muller, Dan Addison. . .?

  The downside is that there will be phantom journeys too, otherwise there would not be enough paths to sum over.

  The voice likens those phantom journeys to you standing between two mirrors and beholding repeated reflections of yourself diminishing and disappearing into the distance. The first five or six reflections certainly seem like authentic representations; thereafter you become increasingly vague and distant. Thus it will feel to the phantoms. Seven or so will feel like you, and will disperse when you—or one of the others—exits from Q-space. Others will not possess enough substance to experience more than a dream-like state, the unraveling of which will hardly be too traumatic.

  So there’s about a one-in-eight chance that you personally will reintegrate. Seven echoes will hope for this but fail to achieve it. Much better odds than one in a hundred—though even so!

  Mary has slightly better odds. If she tosses a dice to decide whether to euthanize herself and James while in Q-space so as to enfold herself into psychospace—by far the best way to choose, namely by chance—and if one of her selves does indeed toss the number for death, then one of her will definitely die but will not have lived in vain, and one of the remainder will survive.

  A link may even endure between her dead self and her living self, so the Voice surmises.

  “So,” says Com Sherwin to those who are all gathered in the restaurant, “do we go for it?”

  Is he recollecting the dive of The Dart into Jupiter and the harpooning of the gas-whale? Do I go for it or do I not?

  “I’d like an advisory show of hands. Purely advisory for the moment.”

  The dissenters are Sam Nakata, Nellie van Tom, and Bill Brooks—engineering, navigation, and computer systems respectively. Com Sherwin may or may not have prevailed previously upon his Second, Max Muller. As a pilot Dan Addison has coped with risks before, and he’s rather too extravert to endure another spell of six months all on his own. Mary and Sandy and Eric are united in going for it, although are their votes quite equal in weight to engineering or navigation?

  “Well,” says Sherwin, “that’s five to three in favor, ignoring myself and the Voice.”

  “Commander,” says Sam Nakata, “we have absolutely no reason to opt for this, this experiment—on the say-so of a baby! It’s our duty to take Pioneer back through Q-space by a route that demonstrably succeeds. If that involves six months alone, we already hacked it once. At least this time we’re forewarned.”

  “Obviously he’s no ordinary baby. But more to the point, if we cut the journey time by five months each way, that’s almost one year sooner we can bring more people and equipment to Tee-Cee. Imagine returning and finding the colony falling apart because we didn’t take the fast route. I think that bears thinking seriously about.”

  “Yes. It does. If.”

  “We shouldn’t worry about some of us not arriving,” says Sandy, “so long as one of each does. We won’t know anything about the ones who don’t arrive.”

  “Plenty of fish in the probability sea, eh?” remarks Nellie van Torn. “I don’t like to think of five of me evaporating, especially if the one who evaporates is me.”

  “It’s an identity problem,” says Bill Brooks surprisingly. “If you could copy your mind into an android, say while you’re unconscious, and if the act of mind-scanning erases your brain, is the android simply continuing your own life? The android will certainly feel as though it’s doing so, indistinguishably. If you were dying of terminal cancer you would opt for this continuation, wouldn’t you?”

  “Are you changing your informal vote?” asks Com Sherwin.

  “I don’t like to think that I may be putting ninety-odd other people in jeopardy just because of qualms about myself, when actually my self will survive intact in one version or another.”

  There is much to mull over. Mary begins giving classes on the medical aspects of infant care, and Sandy on the practical details. James begins hypnotizing Mary.

  The time has come. Nellie and Sam have
agreed under protest. Computer has accepted complex instructions from James who has crawled and is now taking his first precocious steps. He’s also toilet-trained and able to eat mashed pap. In view of his huge linguistic skills he oughtn’t to be much bother to look after. On the contrary, a valuable companion.

  Mary lies in her cabin.

  “Sixty seconds to Q-insertion. . . .”

  “Thirty seconds. . . .”

  “Fifteen. . . .”

  The seconds pass, the cabin ripples, silence from the speakers.

  She is alone with the Voice.

  “Can you contact Sandy, Voice?”

  The Voice’s eyes grow glazed.

  “Hi Mary, Sandy and James here, James and Sandy here, We’re here. I hear you, You already said, You called me just now—”

  Six or seven Sandys are talking through James’s lips one after another, all saying much the same thing, wherever here may be. Certainly isn’t this cabin. A babble of ghosts. These may be difficult conversations to keep up.

  “Can you contact me myself, Voice? I mean, another me?”

  James concentrates.

  Presently: “When are we going to do it?” Commit suicide, and Jamesicide—she knows what she means.

  “Should we all do it at the same time?”

  “Is that really me?”

  “We never got a chance like this to discuss things.”

  “We talked to ourself in Q-space before, but this is very different!”

  “Hey, what about our Hippocratic Oath?”

  Babel, from James’s lips. The nine voices of Mary. Beats schizophrenia any day. This procedure offers very little counsel or comfort, and is perhaps a Bad Idea.

  Q + 3. She needn’t feel isolated in the ship. She can summon up voices—but it is better not to hear them. Better to be alone with James, the better to concentrate her mind, in case it might fly apart. Doubtless her other selves have decided likewise, since they do not call her. Several Com Sherwins do call, wanting status reports. What is the point of them asking for those? Perfectionism? Several Erics also call, wishing her well, better, best. James is with everyone.