Collected short fiction.., p.123
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 123
So for the past week, I’d dragged all the relevant systems in the prosthesis down to three or four. People had become scarcely more interesting to watch than pieces of wood. Now, alone in the shop with this randomly chosen stranger, I slowly turned the controls up. I had to fight against positive feedback; the higher the settings, the more I wanted to increase them, but I’d set limits in advance, and I stuck to them.
By the time she’d chosen two books and approached the counter, I was feeling half defiantly triumphant, half sick with shame. I’d struck a pure note with the network at last; what I felt at the sight of this woman rang true. And if everything I’d done to achieve it was calculated, artificial, bizarre and abhorrent … I’d had no other way.
I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back warmly. No wedding or engagement ring—but I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: to notice someone, to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the hundredth woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.
I said, “Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?”
She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at least slightly pleased to have been asked. And I thought I was prepared for this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a fraction of that had shown on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the nearest vet to be put down.
She said, “That would be nice. I’m Julia, by the way.”
“I’m Mark.” We shook hands.
“When do you finish work?”
“Tonight? Nine o’clock.”
“Ah.”
I said, “How about lunch? When do you have lunch?”
“One.” She hesitated. “There’s that place just down the road … next to the hardware store?”
“That would be great.”
Julia smiled. “Then I’ll meet you there. About ten past. OK?”
I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her, dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple. Anyone in the world can do it. It’s like breathing.
I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager, and she’d discover that in five minutes flat. Or, worse, discover the four thousand grown men in my head offering advice.
I went into the toilet to throw up.
· · · · ·
Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks away. “You’re new at the bookshop, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So what were you doing before that?”
“I was unemployed. For a long time.”
“How long?”
“Since I was a student.”
She grimaced. “It’s criminal, isn’t it? Well, I’m doing my bit. I’m job-sharing, half-time only.”
“Really? How are you finding it?”
“It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m lucky, the position’s well enough paid that I can get by on half a salary.” She laughed. “Most people assume I must be raising a family. As if that’s the only possible reason.”
“You just like to have the time?”
“Yes. Time’s important. I hate being rushed.”
We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the next week. She talked about the shop, a trip she’d made to South America, a sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own long-vanquished tumor, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded too much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phone—not waiting for a call, but watching news broadcasts, to be sure I’d have something to talk about besides myself. Who’s your favorite singer/author/artist/actor? I have no idea.
Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?
But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia, when I could shift a few buttons in my head, anytime, and make those feelings vanish? Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting to touch that dial…
Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone. People make a decision, half-shaped by chance, to get to know someone; everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could anything I discovered about Julia drive me away, now that I’d chosen her? Or even trigger the slightest disapproval? And if, when, she decided to break things off, how would I take it?
We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat, I flipped through sex manuals on the net, wondering how I could ever hope to conceal my complete lack of experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; I’d need six years of gymnastics training just to achieve the missionary position. I’d refused to masturbate since I’d met her; to fantasize about her, to imagine her without consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until dawn trying to comprehend the trap I’d dug for myself, and trying to understand why I didn’t want to be free.
· · · · ·
Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. “That was a nice idea.” she climbed off me and flopped onto the bed.
I’d spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control, trying to keep myself from coming without losing my erection. I’d heard of computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for a stronger glow of intimacy—and when I looked into her eyes, I knew that she could see the effect on me. She brushed my cheek with her hand. “You’re a sweet man. Did you know that?”
I said, “I have to tell you something.” Sweet? I’m a puppet, I’m a robot, I’m a freak.
“What?”
I couldn’t speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. “I know you’re gay. That’s all right; I don’t mind.”
“I’m not gay.” Any more? “Though I might have been.”
Julia frowned. “Gay, bisexual … I don’t care. Honestly.”
I wouldn’t have to manipulate my responses much longer; the prosthesis was being shaped by all of this, and in a few weeks I’d be able to leave it to its own devices. Then I’d feel, as naturally as anyone, all the things I was now having to choose.
I said, “When I was twelve, I had cancer.”
I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror, then growing doubt. “You don’t believe me?”
She replied haltingly, “You sound so matter-of-fact. Eighteen years? How can you just say, ‘I lost eighteen years’?”
“How do you want me to say it? I’m not trying to make you pity me. I just want you to understand.”
When I came to the day I met her, my stomach tightened with fear, but I kept on talking. After a few seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I felt as though I’d been knifed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” I didn’t know whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I kept my eyes fixed on her, but the room swam.
She smiled. “What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose you. It could have been different for both of us. But it wasn’t.” She reached down under the sheet and took my hand. “It wasn’t.”
· · · · ·
Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight. she kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left at six; I walked all the way home, weightless.
I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing the future. I hadn’t spoken to either of my parents for nine years, they didn’t even know about the Durrani treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them now and say: This is your son, back from the dead. You did save my life, all those years ago.
There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived home. I resisted viewing it until I’d started things cooking on the stove; there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait, imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.
I hit the PLAY button. Her face wasn’t quite as I’d pictured it.
I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick. No one’s fault. My explanation hadn’t really sunk in the night before. But now she’d had time to think about it, and she wasn’t prepared to carry on a relationship with four thousand dead men.
I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave of pain crashing over me, or something better, by choice. I knew I could summon up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happy—happy because I was “free” again, happy because I was better off without her … happy because Julia was better off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and all I had to do to attain it was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.
I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables burned. The smell made me think of cauterization, sealing off a wound.
I let things run their course, I didn’t touch the controls—but just knowing that I could have changed everything. And I realized then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said: I’m cured now, take the software away, I don’t want the power to choose any more … I’d never be able to forget where everything I felt had come from.
· · · · ·
My father came to the flat yesterday. we didn’t talk much, but he hasn’t remarried yet, and he made a joke about us going nightclub-hopping together.
At least I hope it was a joke.
Watching him, I thought: he’s there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors, human, proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did four thousand more make? Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. I’d just had to face the details a little more starkly.
And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.
When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony across the crowded suburb, down towards the Paramatta river, where a storm drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter and garden runoff into the water.
He asked dubiously, “You happy with this area?”
I said, “I like it here.”
Reification Highway
From Interzone 64, October 1992 (With original magazine illustrations by Kevin Cullen.) (First publication.)
"It's down there, Khali: the mother lode, the keystone, the reason for everything in crystalline form. Solid logic, just waiting to be mined.''
I gazed sceptically at the asteroid my mother, Elena, insisted on calling Chalmer's Rock: a heavily cratered, reddish-grey oblate lump, one hundred and sixty kilometres wide, orbiting a K0 star unlisted on any of our catalogues—except for the one we'd bought from Chalmer himself, of course. Obscurity itself, made stone.
"The spectral analysis says nickel-iron, and assorted silicates."
Elena nodded, without looking away from the screen—missing my sarcasm, or choosing to ignore it. ''That's right. This is the one. Size, composition, orbital parameters … they all fit."
"More or less. Like how many other pieces of debris in this system? And we might not even have the right star.''
Elena turned to me and laughed. convinced of her good fortune, refusing to be goaded into anger. ''It's the fourth-closest star to the coordinates. The age-corrected spectrum is a near-perfect match. And—" She hit a few keys and brought a contoured radar map of the asteroid's surface onto the screen beside the realtime optical view, then she summoned up Chalmer's own map of his Rock, and had the computer compare them. Aligned and superimposed, they did look similar, for what that was worth. "Seventy per cent of the topography coincides to within fifty metres. There are a couple of hundred craters missing, a couple of hundred extra ones here and there. If this universe contains the same object at all, this is it."
I thought: And one of those missing craters is certain to mean that the logic deposit is missing, too.
It wasn't just adolescent perversity; I had every reason to be pessimistic. Planets of reportedly unsurpassed beauty had turned into grey airless rocks, for me. Entire, allegedly glorious, civilizations had vanished, or collapsed into premature barbarism. One way or another, everything in the galaxy that I'd ever heard lauded had turned out to be a disappointment, once I'd reached a version of it, myself.
That's the catch with FTL: travelling faster than light in one reference frame is the same as travelling backwards in time in another—and you can't travel into your own past, only someone else's alternative. If you speed away from a planet at sub-light relativistic velocity, and then wormhole-jump back towards it, you can arrive before you left … but you don't end up on the same world, with the chance to prevent your own departure. Every would-be closed time-like loop turns out to be a helix instead, winding its way across the multiverse, side-stepping any possibility of causality violation—and it makes no difference whether your intention was to travel back in time, or "merely" to cross a few hundred light-years in an instant. There are no round trips—not even hypothetical ones made by joining up the paths of different travellers. Not only can you not go back, you can't go where anyone you've ever met had been before you met them.
So, even if this "was" Chalmer's Rock, it certainly wasn't the one that the Robert Chalmer we'd done business with had personally visited, and gutted. Which was why the information he'd sold us wasn't—necessarily—worthless. And if he ever chose to "return" to the region, in the hope of making a second fortune, it was highly unlikely—although not quite literally impossible—that he'd arrive to find that Elena and I had been there before him. Which was why he'd been willing to sell her the coordinates and other details for a microscopic fraction of the worth of the deposit he'd found the first time.
As for the likelihood of this particular version of the Rock containing anything of value—let alone the biggest logic deposit I'd heard of in all our travels—that was unknown. We'd made fifteen jumps to the region over a period of five ship years, and this was the first time we'd come across anything bearing even the slightest resemblance to the asteroid in question—so I could understand, begrudgingly, why Elena was hopeful. But the shape of the Rock alone couldn't tell us whether or not a nugget of reified logic was buried here; a few tens of kilometres, a few seconds of orbital motion, could have turned the crucial impact into a near miss, and the prize we were seeking could have sailed on for another ten thousand light-years before encountering ordinary matter again.
Elena said, "It's down there. I'm sure it is."
I said, "I doubt it. But let's go see who's right."
· · · · ·
The Rock had negligible gravity, about a hundredth of a gee—but fortunately, a slow enough spin at forty hours for centrifugal force to be orders of magnitude less. On a body with negative surface attraction we would have used remotes, and although I wasn't expecting to find anything, I was still glad to get out of the ship.
Stalker set down near the first, and most promising, of six suggestive mass anomalies. I followed Elena out onto the fissured red plain. We were on the night side, starlit, many-shadowed. My exoskin thickened in the vacuum, all but blotting out my sense of touch, but walking barefoot across the jagged ground on this space-cold mote, twenty thousand light-years from Earth, still gave me a thrill of vulnerability. Twenty thousand light-years from Earth, if there was an Earth; for all we knew, we might have been the only two humans in this universe.
I didn't feel lonely, though. I'd spent thirteen years crisscrossing the galaxy, leaving everyone but Elena behind with every jump. Nor did I feel intimidated by the void. Space was barren, life was rare, everything of beauty seemed to flee from me—but here I was, standing on this ugly rock, defying the odds with my presence. I opened my mouth, raised my membrane- sealed oesophagus to the stars, and yelled wordless electromagnetic defiance.
Elena set a surveying machine tracking across the surface, bombarding the rock below with neutrons, and looking for the gamma rays that came back in response—or rather, those that didn't. Reified logic wasn't made of atoms, and had no nuclei to absorb the neutrons, then decay. It experienced gravity, and electromagnetism—allowing it to embed in ordinary matter, and making it possible to handle—but it didn't feel the strong force, so neutrons passed right through it. A mixture of metallic nickel and iron in the right proportions might have the same density, but would return a characteristic gamma ray signature.
Elena hummed to herself. The bioelectronics in her lips and pharynx interpreted the action and broadcast the result to me; the receiving organs in the flesh of my ears made their own "acoustic" sense of the signal, giving it distance and direction. If the Rock had had an atmosphere, the effect would have been almost the same.
