Collected short fiction.., p.14
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 14
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One evening, Underwood came home and switched on the TV news. Pictures and the spoken word could still penetrate his stupefaction, if there was enough colour and movement, and the leading item of the bulletin had plenty of both. Two jets had collided at the airport. Both had been about to take off; evidently one pilot had ignored or misinterpreted the control tower's instructions. Both planes had caught fire. Over four hundred people were dead.
Underwood didn't really want to know. It was tragic, of course, but his sympathy wouldn't bring anyone back to life. He rose to switch off the slow-motion replay of the impact—the airport had recently installed video cameras at strategic points on all runways, paid for by a national TV network—when the pilot's last words were heard in voice over:
The simple things in life are best
That's what my Grandpa said
Like sunrise o'er a golden field
And Grandma's home-baked bread
Though times have changed since then, I know
His words they still ring true
So Western's bread's the one for me
And it's the one for you
Underwood fell to his knees, shaking his head. It wasn't possible. An advertising jingle couldn't kill four hundred people.
Flames billowed on the screen,some technical fault rendering them a strange, unnatural hue. A man dived from an exit, clothes and hair on fire—Underwood thought: he looks just like a movie stuntman—screaming in an artificial baritone from the slowed-down tape.
He couldn't be held responsible—the pilot must have known she was impaired, she should have grounded herself voluntarily! But he knew that was nonsense; she would have dismissed the inane distraction blossoming in her head as no more dangerous than any of the dozens of other scraps of musical garbage which competed for her attention every day; she would have assumed, from past experience, that a little mental discipline would push this one, too, into the background, as soon as she really needed to regain her concentration.
He jumped to his feet, finally galvanised into action. It all had to stop, now. All commercials with ANM tunes had to be pulled off the air, immediately, and the public had to be warned, had to be told how to identify the symptoms so they could take precautions and stay out of harm. Perhaps he would end up in prison—or perhaps he would be lynched—but this was no time to think about that, he had to put an end to the deaths. How many others had there been? Traffic accidents, industrial accidents—there was no way of knowing how many recent fatal human errors had in fact had their roots in Halbright's Music.
Magda was out, working late with a team of sound editors to meet a deadline for a tax concession. Who should he ring first? The papers, the TV stations? The police? Who would be most likely to listen, to understand, to set things in motion? He struggled to concentrate; the pilot's song was growing louder in his head, threatening to blot out everything else; her off-key crooning was even more insidious than the original, professional version—a grotesquely successful chance mutation.
Only Halbright would know enough of the truth to believe him at once, and as the creator of the music, he could spread word of the danger with some kind of credibility—not a lot, perhaps, but more than Underwood would have.
He picked up the phone and tried to recall Halbright's home number. The simple things in life are best / that's what my Grandpa said. He couldn't. No matter; he found it in the address book by the phone. He stared at it, repeated it a few times, then started punching keys. Like sunrise o'er a golden field / And Grandma's home-baked bread. Half-way through, he stopped; he'd already forgotten the last few digits.
He placed the phone on the page, so that he could see both the keypad and the written number at the same time. And Grandma's home-baked bread. He began again, but when he came to the end of the number, the phone remained silent—he'd missed a digit along the way. Like sunrise o'er a golden field / And Grandma's home-baked bread. Sweat was pouring down his face; this was the end: complete dysfunction, insanity. Like sunrise o'er a golden field / And Grandma's home-baked bread. He screamed at the mocking voice to shut up, but his rage only seemed to excite it.
He crossed the living room to his CD player. He wasn't beaten yet. There had to be something that could clear his head, just long enough for him to make the call. He found the disk with 'Song to the Siren', inserted it, and managed to select the right track. But the angelic, ethereal voice that had once moved him to rapture couldn't even begin to drive out the dead pilot's awful drone. He turned up the volume until the speakers shook, but the song remained remote and ineffectual. The track came to an end.
The phone rang, and he staggered over to it. It was Halbright, who asked nervously, "Did you see the news? What are we going to do?"
Underwood screamed, "Ring the TV stations! Ring the papers!"
"Me? I'm no PR expert; I was going to ask you—" Halbright continued speaking, but his words made no sense to Underwood, who put down the phone and grabbed his head moaning. The pilot's song had begun to invade his other senses. It had a strong stench of something sweet and rotten, and a sugary, fermented taste to match. He felt it, too; a thick, lukewarm, syrupy presence, flowing over his skin. Like sunrise o'er a golden field / And Grandma's home-baked bread. He cried out and waved his arms, as if trying to shake himself clean, and then the jingle, at last, appeared to him: a dark, viscous liquid which filled the room to shoulder height and flowed around him, encircling him in a sticky whirlpool. He screamed, and struggled to escape, but then the sweetly stinking black tide reared up and engulfed him completely.
When Magda found him lying by the phone, his eyes were open, but sightless, and all he could do was hum.
· · · · ·
Underwood awoke—nauseous, aching all over, with a terrible throbbing behind his eyes, and a peculiar tightness in his scalp—and yet, without understanding why, he felt extraordinarily calm and happy.
Magda and Halbright stood by the bed. Magda stared at him anxiously, then gave what she hoped was a reassuring smile, and took hold of his hand.
His mouth was dry. "What's going on?"
She said, "Michael … you've been unconscious for nearly two weeks. I gave them permission to operate. Dr Halbright said it was your only chance. And it's worked—hasn't it?"
"Operate?"
Halbright cleared his throat, then spoke, looking straight at him. "We did some scans while you were unconscious. You have … certain atypical structures in the higher levels of the auditory pathways, which don't quite conform to our standard model. I've run some simulations, and several of our tunes, when processed by your kind of circuitry, produce exponentially increasing responses—eventually limited by physiological constraints, but still strong enough to be virtually self-perpetuating—and strong enough to affect other parts of the brain … a bit like a massive, never-ending, epileptic fit."
Underwood stared at him. "And the operation?" He reached up and touched his head. It was shaven and partly bandaged, and he suddenly realized why, in spite of everything, he felt an undercurrent of blissful relief: for the first time in what seemed like forever, there was no ANM music playing in his skull.
Halbright said, "They cut the pathway at a few critical points. It was the only way. You would have been comatose for the rest of your life. There are ten others, just like you were, awaiting surgery right now."
Underwood suddenly remembered the plane crash, and his tranquillity vanished. "So, that pilot was the same as me? She didn't fit your standard model, either. Who were those two thousand volunteers, anyway? Two thousand medical students? No, there wouldn't be that many in the whole state, you must have roped in some vetinary science and dentistry students as well, maybe even a few biochemists! What a broad cross-section that must have been!" He started shaking, sick with guilt and fear. "What's going to happen to us? Are we going to prison?"
Halbright looked away and said angrily, "We didn't break any laws."
· · · · ·
The last track of the last disk came to an end.
The effect had been obvious from the very beginning, but Underwood had played his entire collection, ten hours a day for the past fortnight, to eliminate any doubts. To him, the disks now contained sequences of completely arbitrary sounds; he perceived each note in isolation from everything that had preceded it. For him, there was no longer any such thing as music.
Halbright had been right, of course, there was nothing they could be charged with. A number of civil actions were pending; the lawyers expected to settle out of court. Both men had received death threats, but the police had agreed to provide protection.
Underwood walked over to the window and looked out; the unmarked car was in the usual position. He took off his headphones, and sat in the dark for a while.
Bit Players
From the online version at http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan — Subterranean Press Magazine: Winter 2014. First published at Subterranean Online, Winter 2014 issue, guest edited by Jonathan Strahan.
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Greg Egan www.gregegan.net is the author of more than fifty short stories and eleven science fiction novels. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction—mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes—that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His most recent book, The Arrows of Time (the concluding volume in the Orthogonal trilogy), was published in November 2013 by Gollancz in the UK, and is due out from Night Shade books in the US in Fall 2014.
We take our cues from the world around us. In the powerful and engaging story that follows, Egan turns gravity on its side and takes us through a disorientating landscape as he explores what it means to be a bit player in the near future.
* * * * *
1
She was roused from sleep by a painful twitch in her right calf, then kept awake by the insistent brightness around her. She opened her eyes and stared up at the sunlit rock. The curved expanse of rough gray stone above her did not seem familiar—but what had she expected to see in its place? She had no answer to that.
She was lying on some kind of matting, but she could feel the hardness of stone beneath it. She shifted her gaze and took in more of her surroundings. She was in a cave, ten or twelve feet from the entrance—deep enough that her present viewpoint revealed nothing of the world outside but clear blue sky. As she rose to her feet and started toward the mouth of the cave, sunlight struck her face unexpectedly from below, and she raised an arm to shield her eyes.
“Be careful,” a woman’s voice urged her. “You’ve made a good recovery, but you might still be unsteady.”
“Yes.” She glanced back toward the rear of the cave and managed to discern the woman’s face in the shadows. But she kept walking. With each step she took the sunlight fell on more of her body, warming her chest and abdomen through her grubby tunic, reaching down past the hem to touch her bare knees. This progression seemed to imply that the floor was tilted—that the cave was like a rifle barrel aimed at a point in the sky well above the newly risen sun—but her own sense of balance insisted that she was crossing level ground.
At the mouth of the cave she knelt, trembling slightly, and looked out. She was bent almost horizontal, and facing straight down, but the bare gray rock outside the cave presented itself as if she were standing in a vertical hole, timidly poking her head above ground. The rock stretched out below her in a sheer drop that extended as far as she could see, disappearing in a shimmering haze. When she raised her eyes, in front of her was a whole hemisphere of sky, with the sun halfway between the “horizon” directly below and the blue dome’s horizontal midpoint that in a sane world would have sat at the zenith.
She retreated back into the cave, but then she couldn’t stop herself: she had to see the rest, to be sure. She lay down on her back and inched forward until the cave’s ceiling no longer blocked her view, and she was staring up across the jagged wall of rock that continued on above her, as below, until it blurred into the opposite “horizon”. A cold, dry wind pummeled her face.
“Why is everything tilted?” she asked.
She heard the slap of sandals on stone, then the woman grabbed her by the ankles and slid her back away from the edge. “You want to fall again?”
“No.” She waited for her sense of the vertical to stop tipping, then she clambered to her feet and faced her gruff companion. “But seriously, who moved the sky?”
“Where did you expect it to be?” the woman asked obtusely.
“Er—” She gestured toward the cave’s ceiling.
The woman scowled. “What’s your name? What village are you from?”
Her name? She groped for it, but there was nothing. She needed a place-holder until she could dredge up the real thing. “I’m Sagreda,” she decided. “I don’t remember where I’m from.”
“I’m Gerther,” the woman replied.
Sagreda looked back over her shoulder, only to be dazzled again by the rising sun. “Can you tell me what’s happened to the world?” she pleaded.
“Are you saying you’ve forgotten the Calamity?” Gerther asked skeptically.
“What calamity?”
“When gravity turned sideways. When it stopped pulling us toward the center of the Earth, and started pulling us east instead.”
Sagreda said, “I’m fairly sure that’s something I would have remembered, if I’d come across it before.”
* * *
COMING TO THIS EBOOK IN 2025
or … purchase Instantiation from Amazon Kindle or The Best of Greg Egan from Subterranean Press
or read the story online at Subterranean Online, Winter 2014 issue
Blood Sisters
From The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois; St. Martin's Press, New York, 1992. First published in Interzone #44, February 1991.
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Here’s a haunting glimpse of a crowded, high-tech future that has become perhaps a little too fond of that dispassionate Long View we hear so much about.…
Born in 1961, Greg Egan lives in Australia, and is certainly in the running for the title of Hottest New Writer of the Nineties to date. Although he’s been publishing for a year or two already, 1990 was the year when Egan suddenly seemed to be turning up everywhere with high-quality stories, and he continued the streak in 1991. He is a frequent contributor to Interzone and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, and Eidolon. Several of his stories have appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, including this one; his story “The Caress” and his story “Learning To Be Me” were in our Eighth Annual Collection, and he was good enough to place another two stories in this year’s collection as well. He just sold his first novel, Quarantine, to Legend as part of a package deal that includes a second novel and a collection of his short fiction—a pretty high-powered deal for such a young writer. My guess is that you will be seeing a lot more of Egan as the decade progresses.
* * * * *
When we were nine years old, Paula decided we should prick our thumbs, and let our blood flow into each other’s veins.
I was scornful. “Why bother? Our blood’s already exactly the same. We’re already blood sisters.”
She was unfazed. “I know that. That’s not the point. It’s the ritual that counts.”
We did it in our bedroom, at midnight, by the light of a single candle. She sterilized the needle in the candle flame, then wiped it clean of soot with a tissue and saliva.
When we’d pressed the tiny, sticky wounds together, and recited some ridiculous oath from a third-rate children’s novel, Paula blew out the candle. While my eyes were still adjusting to the dark, she added a whispered coda of her own: “Now we’ll dream the same dreams, and share the same lovers, and die at the very same hour.”
I tried to say, indignantly, “That’s just not true!” but the darkness and the scent of the dead flame made the protest stick in my throat, and her words remained unchallenged.
· · · · ·
As Dr Packard spoke, I folded the pathology report, into halves, into quarters, obsessively aligning the edges. It was far too thick for me to make a neat job of it; from the micrographs of the misshapen lymphocytes proliferating in my bone marrow, to the print-out of portions of the RNA sequence of the virus that had triggered the disease, thirty-two pages in all.
In contrast, the prescription, still sitting on the desk in front of me, seemed ludicrously flimsy and insubstantial. No match at all. The traditional—indecipherable—polysyllabic scrawl it bore was nothing but a decoration; the drug’s name was reliably encrypted in the barcode below. There was no question of receiving the wrong medication by mistake. The question was, would the right one help me?
“Is that clear? Ms Rees? Is there anything you don’t understand?”
I struggled to focus my thoughts, pressing hard on an intractable crease with my thumb. She’d explained the situation frankly, without resorting to jargon or euphemism, but I still had the feeling that I was missing something crucial. It seemed like every sentence she’d spoken had started one of two ways: “The virus…” or “The drug…”
“Is there anything I can do? Myself? To … improve the odds?”
She hesitated, but not for long. “No, not really. You’re in excellent health, otherwise. Stay that way.” She began to rise from her desk to dismiss me, and I began to panic.
“But, there must be something.” I gripped the arms of my chair, as if afraid of being dislodged by force. Maybe she’d misunderstood me, maybe I hadn’t made myself clear. “Should I … stop eating certain foods? Get more exercise? Get more sleep? I mean, there has to be something that will make a difference. And I’ll do it, whatever it is. Please, just tell me—” My voice almost cracked, and I looked away, embarrassed. Don’t ever start ranting like that again. Not ever.
