Asimov's SF, October-November 2009
Page 33
I said, “So what then? You all disappear?"
She laughed, “No one can see through that particular event horizon, dear Mr. Zed. Its wave function will not collapse."
* * * *
At last, we were alone, in a cavern under Venus.
It was the real Venus, real as it could be, cavern deep in the Maxwell Montes of Ishtar Terra, buried under a hundred atmospheres of thousand-degree carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid rain. At least, that was what the Goddess Ylva Johanssen told us, before that one last, forlorn salute, before the final hyperdoor oozed shut, crackled, and went dark.
Oddny, dark eyes wide and spooky looking, put a hand to her mouth, as if afraid, then she said, “It was only static, nothing I could understand, nothing that spoke to me, but the silence..."
Alone again, I thought.
I suppose I will never know what that must be like.
We are, most of us, alone forever in the vault of our skulls.
The cavern was huge, and obviously artificial, stacked with boxes, big, rounded tanks, things like buildings on springs, dim faraway walls, smooth and polished, nearly flat. And cool, too. Venus's crust has had billions of years to heat through to parity with the atmosphere, so you can imagine the technology to make this place livable, and keep it so for however long...
I said, “You have to wonder why they did it."
"Who?"
"Whoever built this place."
"You don't think Ylva made it, just for us?"
"No."
She shrugged then. “Does it matter? It's here, and I'm sure it holds every thing and every bit of knowledge necessary to accomplish the goals she outlined for us."
Ah, yes. The Goals.
In the kaldanes’ timelines, history was muddled and muddied by the existence of paratime travel, ideas, people, places, crossing from one thread to another, until you couldn't tell one cusp from another, causal chains tangled beyond unraveling. But one thing they all had in common: no one could travel faster than light. That transmittal of information between immediately adjacent probabilities restricted them to paratime travel, weaving them together into an impenetrable skein.
In the very best of timelines, she told us, humanity joined the slowtime conflict between empires calling themselves the Spinfellows and Starfish, and fought in an eternal, ravening war that burned down the sky. Mr. Zed lived on and on in that universe, and never came home.
The alternative, she said, was the one in which the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise, already having discovered the secret of the field modulus device, would use it to project the energies necessary for FTL travel. The starships would fly and, in flying, weave a wall between the universes over which no kaldane could climb, through which no goddess could see.
"You'll be free then,” she'd said, “to find your own way."
After that only, “Good-bye, Mr. Zed. And good luck!"
"Do you think we'll do it?” I said. “Will we meet her expectations?"
Oddny turned away then, frowning, eyes far away. Is she thinking about it? Thinking about what those goals mean to her? Or does she want to go the other way, seeking immortality through anschluss with the Goddess?
Her eyes closed. Then she lifted a hand, as if for silence, and said, “I can hear them."
"Uh..."
Her eyes opened, full of bright awareness, a look of ... renewal? Hope? I don't know. She said, “I'm picking up decodable standard radio traffic from the Chinese research station in orbit. It's passing overhead now, I..."
"Oddny..."
"Wait...” Then she said, “Got it!” She relaxed, turning toward me again, smiling.
Terrible concern, a sense that my options were turning on an axis I didn't control, that a thousand doors were creaking shut. “What did you do?"
She said, “I put a private message into the ERSIE network via one of the active repeater comsats orbiting in the inner solar system. It'll take a few hours for it to get to Ylva's main node out at Nereid, but then she'll come for us. Most of the parts for Benthodyne III have already been delivered to the Chinese station."
I said, “So that's it? Ylva comes for us and we toddle on home? We build the starships and fly away into a future written from the Goddess's script?"
Would we? I wonder how this Ylva Johanssen will feel about it, when she knows that other path will make her a deity, kaldanes or no kaldanes? Knowing that, what would I do? Damn. I ask myself that question a lot, and I never can come up with a satisfactory answer.
Then I said, “You know, a part of me is sorry we're home. Though I know the outcome will be better for you, the human in me has come to love the human in you. I'll miss that."
There. Said it at last. Whatever happens, at least she'll know.
Oddny's face softened, looking at me. “I'm not going to wear out and die anymore, Mr. Zed. I'm the real Ylva now, at least as much as the AI in the machine. And as my upgrades spread, the other Body Doubles will become real as well. It's the Goddess's gift back through time to all of us."
What to say?
Nothing.
She said, “When the link is restored, Ylva will know. In time, we'll all know."
Know what? I was afraid to ask.
She said, “It'll be a while before we can be picked up. In the meantime, one last little time we can be alone together, if that's all right with you."
One last little time. “And then what? We go out, we build the starships and fly away into a future without kaldanes and goddesses, a future unknown and unknowable?"
She gave me a long, penetrating dark look. Then she said, “That's up to you, Mr. Zed. Ylva won't take that choice away. It's yours, and yours alone."
I said, “What do you mean?"
She said, “Somewhere there's a universe where Sarah lived, and you did not, where she's pining away for you, as you so obviously are for her. If you want, we can find that spacetime, that somewhere, that somewhen..."
"But only if the starships never fly."
She said, “Yes."
I wondered, for just a moment, how long I would live, and how much I would get to see.
Copyright © 2009 William Barton
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Department: NEXT ISSUE
DECEMBER ISSUE
Stories both sweet and savory await you in our piquant December issue—and something for almost every taste. The more sophisticated palates among us often prefer both flavors intertwined, and Brian Stableford posits, in his newest novelette for us, that “Some Like It Hot.” Don't fear—there will be no sign of either Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon dressed as not-so-lovely ladies (and sadly no sign of Marilyn, either), but, instead, we offer a sophisticated fictional treatise on the future of commercial environmentalism, global warming, and the role Mother Nature herself must play in the mediation of the climate change conflict. It's a fine story, and it may cause some consternation as to which houseplants you'll have to choose from for your home in the near-future.... As you'll find, the rest of the December tales are no less tasty:
ALSO IN DECEMBER
Jeff Carlson returns with a sprightly tale in which two intrepid bug-hunters must dampen the holiday spirit of some “macho” termites as they all make an unholy mess of the holiest of Christian holidays in “A Lovely Little Christmas Fire.” It would be a challenge to calculate a “gender score,” as some critics are doing online, when one considers Sara Genge's new tale, “As Women Fight,” a Tiptree-esque examination of a society of gender-changing tribespeople that is sure to turn heads and appear on next year's award ballots; Nick Wolven returns with a frightening examination of the evils men do and the desperate situations women are then forced to endure in “Angie's Errand"; John Shirley, after too long an absence, tells of two higher beings locked in eternal “Spy vs. Spy” conflict through the ages in “Animus Rights"; Mike Resnick retells the story of “The Bride of Frankenstein” in a sweet and sour fashion that is sure to surprise you; enter Jim Aikin's curiosity shop
where a new proprietor seeks to lure a friendly ghost into “Leaving the Station"; and Benjamin Crowell does my job for me, offering a story with “A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime."
OUR EXCITING FEATURES
Robert Silverberg, in his Reflections column, completes his how-to survey in “Building Worlds III"; Peter Heck brings us “On Books"; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for our December issue on sale at your newsstand on October 6, 2009. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in classy and elegant paper format or those new-fangled downloadable varieties, by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available on Amazon.com's Kindle!
COMING SOON
new stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Reed, Carol Emshwiller, Allen M. Steele, Geoffrey A. Landis, Bruce McAllister, Felicity Shoulders, Steve Rasnic Tem, Brenda Cooper, Chris Roberson, Damien Broderick, Peter Friend, Derek Zumsteg, and many others!
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Department: ON BOOKS: THE FOLK OF THE FRINGE by Norman Spinrad
* * * *
SON OF MAN
by Robert Silverberg
Pyr, $15.98
ISBN: 978-1591026464
—
BUTCHER BIRD
by Richard Kadry
Night Shade Books, $14.95
ISBN: 978-1597800860
—
THE BLADE ITSELF
by Joe Abercrombie
Pyr, $15.00
ISBN: 978-1591025948
—
BEFORE THEY ARE HANGED
by Joe Abercrombie
Pyr, $15.00
ISBN: 978-1591026419
—
LAST ARGUMENT OF KINGS
by Joe Abercrombie
Pyr, $15.98
ISBN: 978-1591026907
—
NEUROGENESIS
by Helen Collins
Speculative Fiction Review, $15.95
ISBN: 978-0978523244
—
THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND
by Michel Houellebecq
Vintage, $14.95
ISBN: 978-0307275219
—
THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
by Michel Houellebecq
Vintage, $14.95
ISBN: 978-0375727016
* * * *
My apologies to Orson Scott Card for using the title of his collection of novellas as the title of this essay, but it seems to be quite relevant to the matter at hand. By my lights it is still in a way Card's most interesting work, all the stories set in the same consistent post-American fall future, all concerned with the stories of Mormon survivors of one sort or another, all of them “folk of the fringe” of that latter day society of Latter Day Saints, and all the more interesting for being so rather than inhabiting the psychic, theological, and social center thereof. And the argument of this essay is that at least for the past five or ten years or so, and more recently even more so, much of the most interesting literary action has been taking place on the fringes of SF publishing. or, to put it the other way around, the folks who have been writing it have tended to be pushed away from the commercial publishing centers and toward various species of fringe publication, willingly or not.
"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” wrote William Butler Years in his poem Second Coming.
Well, maybe.
Or not.
It is certainly characteristic of powers that be—political, theological, economic, literary, commercial—to do their damned-est to converge on the center in the usual foredoomed attempt to hold it together when things are manifestly falling apart.
As I write this at the beginning of 2009, things have certainly fallen apart in the globalized world financial system and economy. The macroeconomy has been flimflammed by so-called “financial engineers” who created Ponzi schemes so deliberately arcane and convoluted that even they couldn't quite understand that transmuting debts—liabilities—into “collateralized debt obligations” that could be palmed off as a form of “assets,” amounted to packaging shit and selling it as shinola.
Or as the positive version of the old Hollywood joke definition of producing has it, transforming drek into gelt.
But the other Hollywood definition of a producer is someone who turns gelt into drek, and in the end that's what these wise guys accomplished—as I wrote in Greenhouse Summer long before the fact, “writing the greatest rubber check in history and passing it off on themselves."
As I write this, the mainstream politicians and economists on both sides of the liberal/conservative Democratic/Republican divide have converged on the obsolescent center policies as the way out of this mess rather like passengers on the Titanic debating how many of the deck chairs on the pro-menade deck should be positioned to port and how many to starboard, unwilling to face the fact that the ship has hit the iceberg, that the old economic paradigm was riddled with singularities all along, and has become a center that cannot hold any longer..
A new economic paradigm is going to be the only way out, and it's not going to arise from consensus thinking, but from somewhere out there on the fringes. Ditto for publishing in general and SF publishing in particular, for the publishing business had been heading slowly south long before the macroeconomic shit hit the fan, like the canary in the coal mine.
As the publishing industry imploded into fewer and fewer and larger and larger conglomerates, it was inevitable that ultimate decision-making powers would gravitate away from literary editorial personnel and into the hands of corporate mavens accustomed to relying upon the abstract book-keeping numbers, the crunchers thereof, and the crunchers’ computer programs—not that much different from the reliance of the financial system on the “financial engineering” that was to thoroughly tank it.
And in our corner of the current catastrophe, the business powers also seem to be cleaving desperately to the center as things fall apart.
This sort of behavior is inevitable when the decision-making gravitates away from folks who understand and have emotional involvement with the actual product—automobile designers and workers, bank loan approval officers, editors, and so forth—and into the province of financial engineers whose expertise is in the abstract “derivative” economics, aka the Sacred Bottom Line.
The economic superstructure several levels of abstraction above the actual product is all they really know, not the product itself—therefore not what's gone wrong with it, or even that something has, and therefore not how to improve it sufficiently to rescue it.
In the current publishing realm, that's a big reason why so much of the best and most interesting stuff written by many of the most adventurous, courageous, and talented writers is out there on the economic fringes. Though it has to be admitted that while this situation has gotten more extreme of late, it has always been the case to some extent, and probably always will be.
Because you can't get paradigm shifts, even desperately needed ones, from the center, from the current consensus, since a paradigm shift requires an acknowledgment that the consensus map of a reality no longer describes it, that therefore conventional wisdom can no longer be relied upon to prescribe cures for its dysfunctionality, and that therefore only a radical perceptual shift coming from outside the central consensus will be able to present a clear analysis of that reality, and only action based on that analysis can really work.
Visionary thinking outside the box of consensus reality leading to visionary action.
Does this sound something like the proper and necessary social function of speculative fiction in a reasonably healthy progressive civilization?
Well, there you have it.
Or not.
Time was that down the middle science fiction performed that function very well. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, Fredrick Pohl and Poul Anderson, and so forth, creating fictional science and technologies that inspired later iterations in the real world, and exploring the political, social, and persona
l consequences thereof before the fact.
SF itself taken as a whole was a self-contained fringe fiction commercially and literarily. Specialty magazines with limited circulation among the already convinced, minor book houses and specialty imprints of major ones targeting a well-defined and limited readership.
Pulp adventure fantasies, but also the creative freedom for those with the talent and will to seize it that came from conceiving science fiction as an elite literature appealing to a scientifically literate readership with I.Q.s well above the mean that was therefore never going to achieve fame and fortune outside the walls of the gilded ghetto. A visionary fringe literature, and to a great extent its creators and readership snobbishly and aggressively proud of it.
But in the 1960s the times they were a-changing, and on both sides of the Culture War, whether you were for the counterculture or against it, no one could deny that there was a paradigm shift going on. SF, being the literature that explored all sorts of paradigm shifts before they happened and hardly existing in a commercial or cultural vacuum, could not help but be one of the instigators of the paradigm shift on the one hand, while being mutated by it on the other.
On the dark side, Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land was taken up as a lifestyle model by the hippies at large, but also by Charlie Manson and his Dune Buggy Death Commandos as a rationale for their sanguinary discorporations.
On the positive side, there is the story of Frank Herbert's Dune. Serialized in many installments in John W. Campbell's Analog in the early 1960s, it was unable to secure book publication except by an extremely minor house for an advance amounting to peanuts. The later paperback reissue became a slow-motion best-seller after it was taken up by a countercultural readership far larger and far broader than the circumscribed readership for SF in general at the time because of the centrality of a psychedelic drug to its story line and the masterful portrayal of the chemically enhanced prescient consciousness of its central viewpoint character.