21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

  “Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission!”

  The chimp says nothing.

  “For the sake of argument,” I say, after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?”

  “A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”

  My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.

  • • • •

  We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion increments of a life’s moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling each other into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.

  And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works, and what doesn’t. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.

  But I believe in the Island, because I don’t have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can’t help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.

  I believe in the Island. I’ve gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.

  I may yet.

  In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

  • • • •

  Final approach.

  Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerising infinite regress of bull’s-eyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

  Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.

  Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically-displaced mass.

  I turn to the drone’s-eye view relayed from up ahead. It’s a window into history—even now, there’s a timelag of several minutes—but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly-minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, re-enlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it’s cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

  A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

  At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

  I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.

  Angels do not speak to ants.

  Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past any more, I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

  Tactical beeps at us.

  “Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?

  But—

  “It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

  Two minutes.

  “Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”

  “We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

  “Still in front of us!

  Look at the sun!” “Look at the signal,” I tell him.

  Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

  Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

  We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

  The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

  I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

  • • • •

  “Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

  “We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

  DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

  So far, though, nothing’s come out.

  “Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

  Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

  I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a . . .

  I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.

  “Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

  “Maybe it didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe it thought those coordinates were empty.”

  Why would you think that?, I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

  My son is trying to comfort me.

  I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing
did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

  But I’m better now.

  It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.

  I still have so much to learn.

  At least my son is here to teach me.

  JO WALTON Born in Aberdare, Wales, Jo Walton now lives in Montreal, Canada. She worked as a bookseller and a writer of role-playing game scenarios before publishing her first novel, The King’s Peace, in 2000. She won the 2002 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2004 she won the World Fantasy Award for her fourth novel, Tooth and Claw. Her 2011 novel, Among Others, described as “a novel about a science-fiction reader with a fantasy problem,” won the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 2012, making her one of only two people whose careers include Best Novel wins in the Nebula, the Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards.

  Although best known as a fantasist, between Tooth and Claw and Among Others she wrote a trilogy of alternate-history novels—Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown—set in the postwar England of a world in which pro-fascist elements of the British upper classes overthrew Churchill and made a separate peace with Berlin. “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” is a short story set in the America of that same world.

  ESCAPE TO OTHER WORLDS WITH SCIENCE FICTION

  In the Papers (1)

  NATIONAL GUARD MOVES AGAINST STRIKERS

  In the seventh week of the mining strike in West Virginia, armed skirmishes and running “guerrilla battles” in the hills have led to the Governor calling in

  • • • •

  GET AN ADVANCED DEGREE BY CORRESPONDENCE

  You can reap the benefits with no need to leave the safety of your house or go among unruly college students! Only from

  • • • •

  EX-PRESIDENT LINDBERGH REPROACHES MINERS

  • • • •

  ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION

  April issue on newsstands now! All new stories by Poul Anderson, Anson MacDonald and H. Beam Piper! Only 35 cents.

  • • • •

  SPRING FASHIONS 1960

  Skirts are being worn long in London and Paris this season, but here in New York the working girls are still hitching them up. It’s stylish to wear a little

  • • • •

  HOW FAR FROM MIAMI CAN THE “FALLOUT” REACH?

  Scientists say it could be a problem for years, but so much depends on the weather that

  • • • •

  You hope to work

  You hope to eat

  The work goes to

  The man that’s neat!

  BurmaShave

  Getting By (1)

  Linda Evans is a waitress in Bundt’s Bakery. She used to work as a typist, but when she was let go she was glad to take this job, even though it keeps her on her feet all day and sometimes she feels her face will crack from smiling at the customers. She was never a secretary, only in the typing pool. Her sister Joan is a secretary, but she can take shorthand and type ninety words a minute. Joan graduated from high school. She taught Linda to type. But Linda was never as clever as Joan, not even when they were little girls in the time she can just remember, when their father had a job at the plant and they lived in a neat little house at the end of the bus line. Their father hasn’t worked for a long time now. He drinks up any money he can bully out of the girls. Linda stands up to him better than Joan does.

  “They’d have forgiven the New Deal if only it had worked,” a man says to another, as Linda puts down his coffee and sandwich in front of him.

  “Worked?” asks his companion scornfully. “It was working. It would have worked and got us out of this if only people had kept faith in it.”

  They are threadbare old men, in mended coats. They ordered grilled cheese sandwiches, the cheapest item on the menu. One of them smiles at Linda, and she smiles back, automatically, then moves on and forgets them. She’s on her feet all day. Joan teases her about flirting with the customers and falling in love, but it never seems to happen. She used to tease Joan about falling in love with her boss, until she did. It would all have been dandy except that he was a married man. Now Joan spends anguished hours with him and anguished days without him. He makes her useless presents of French perfume and lace underwear. When Linda wants to sell them, Joan just cries. Both of them live in fear that she’ll get pregnant, and then where will they be? Linda wipes the tables and tries not to listen to the men with their endless ifs. She has enough ifs of her own: if mother hadn’t died, if she’d kept her job in the pool, if John hadn’t died in the war with England, and Pete in the war with Japan.

  “Miss?” one of them asks. She swings around, thinking they want more coffee. One refill only is the rule. “Can you settle a question?” he asks. “Did Roosevelt want to get us to join in the European War in 1940?”

  “How should I know? It has nothing to do with me. I was five years old in 1940.” They should get over it and leave history to bury its own dead, she thinks, and goes back to wiping the tables.

  In the Papers (2)

  WITH MIRACLE-GROW YOU CAN REGAIN YOUR LOST FOLLICLES!

  In today’s world it can be hard to find work even with qualifications. We at Cyrus Markham’s Agency have extensive experience at matching candidates to positions which makes us the unrivaled

  • • • •

  NEW TORPEDOES THAT WORK EVEN BETTER

  Radar, sonar and even television to

  • • • •

  AT LAST YOU CAN AFFORD THE HOUSE OF YOUR DREAMS

  • • • •

  LET SCIENCE FICTION TAKE YOU TO NEW WORLDS

  New books by Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein for only

  • • • •

  ANOTHER BANK FOUNDERS IN PENNSYLVANIA

  • • • •

  WE HAVE NOT USED THE WORD “SECEDE,” SAYS TEXAS GOVERNOR

  Why do Canadians act so high and mighty? It’s because they know

  In the Line (1)

  When Tommy came out of the navy, he thought he’d walk into a job just like that. He had his veteran’s discharge, which entitled him to medical treatment for his whole life, and he was a hero. He’d been on the carrier Constitution, which had won the Battle of the Atlantic practically singlehanded and had sent plenty of those Royal Navy bastards to the bottom of the sea where they belonged. He had experience in maintenance as well as gunnery. Besides, he was a proud hard-working American. He never thought he’d be lining up at a soup kitchen.

  In the Papers (3)

  TIME FOR A NEW TUNE

  Why are the bands still playing Cole Porter?

  • • • •

  SECRETARY OF STATE LINEBARGER SAYS THE BRITS WANT PEACE

  • • • •

  ATOMIC SECRETS

  • • • •

  DO THE JAPANESE HAVE THE BOMB?

  Sources close to the Emperor say yes, but the Nazis deny that they have given out any plans. Our top scientists are still working to

  • • • •

  NYLONS NYLONS NYLONS

  • • • •

  DIANETICS: A NEW SCIENCE OF THE MIND

  Getting By (2)

  Linda always works overtime when she’s asked. She appreciates the money, and she’s always afraid she’ll be let go if she isn’t obliging. There are plenty of girls who’d like her job. They come to ask every day if there’s any work. She isn’t afraid the Bundts will give her job away for no reason. She’s worked here for four years now, since just after the Japanese War. “You’re like family,” Mrs. Bundt always says. They let
Olive go, the other waitress, but that was because there wasn’t enough work for two. Linda works overtime and closes up the cafe when they want her to. “You’re a good girl,” Mrs. Bundt says. But the Bundts have a daughter, Cindy. Cindy’s a pretty twelve-year old, not even in high school. She comes into the cafe and drinks a milkshake sometimes with her girlfriends, all of them giggling. Linda hates her. She doesn’t know what they have to giggle about. Linda is afraid that when Cindy is old enough she’ll be given Linda’s job. Linda might be like family, but Cindy really is family. The bakery does all right, people have to eat, but business isn’t what it was. Linda knows.

  She’s late going home. Joan’s dressing up to go out with her married boss. She washes in the sink in the room they share. The shower is down the corridor, shared with the whole floor. It gets cleaned only on Fridays, or when Joan or Linda do it. Men are such pigs, Linda thinks, lying on her bed, her weight off her feet at last. Joan is three years older than Linda but she looks younger. It’s the make-up, Linda thinks, or maybe it’s having somebody to love. If only she could have fallen in love with a boss who’d have married her and taken her off to a nice little suburb. But perhaps it’s just as well. Linda couldn’t afford the room alone, and she’d have had to find a stranger to share with. At least Joan was her sister and they were used to each other.

  “I saw Dad today,” Joan says, squinting in the mirror and drawing on her mouth carefully.

  “Tell me you didn’t give him money?”

  “Just two dollars,” Joan admits. Linda groans. Joan is a soft touch. She makes more than Linda, but she never has any left at the end of the week. She spends more, or gives it away. There’s no use complaining, as Linda knows.

  “Where’s he taking you?” she asks wearily.

  “To a rally,” Joan says.

  “Cheap entertainment.” Rallies and torch-lit parades and lynchings, beating up the blacks as scapegoats for everything. It didn’t help at all; it just made people feel better about things to have someone to blame. “It’s not how we were brought up,” Linda says. Their mother’s father had been a minister and had believed in the brotherhood of man. Linda loved going to her grandparents’ house when she was a child. Her grandmother would bake cookies and the whole house would smell of them. There was a swing on the old apple tree in the garden. Her father had been a union man, once, when unions had still been respectable.