Collected short fiction.., p.67
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 67
When a throbbing that was an abstract notion alights deep inside my skull, I try to retreat back into sleep, but the pain is too great. I open my eyes and try to move, and then I remember.
A tunnel of pain and fear, stretching back for what seems like eternity. The width of the tunnel is the width of my shoulders, the width of the harness that holds me to the bed, but its depth is striated with light and darkness, with noise and confusion, with loneliness and the coldest misery. A dream of suffocation, infinitely prolonged.
It takes me forever, ten minutes at least, to instruct the orderly to release me. I’m too weak to leave the bed, but I can move my arms, I can roll onto my stomach, I can start trying to rid myself of the nightmare burnt into my flesh.
When I finally succeed in raising my head, I find the rest of the crew still strapped to their beds. Most have their eyes open, but are staring listlessly at the ceiling or the walls.
I squint at my watch for the date, and then struggle with memory and arithmetic. Eighteen days. I feel a surge of elation. I may not have conquered the virus—perhaps this is nothing but a temporary remission—but every extension of the time scale on which the disease is operating brings us closer to home, and the chance of a cure.
I switch on the broadcast from Earth. They’re playing a loop at us that says little more than: “Cyclops, please respond.” I make a brief report, then sag back onto the bed, all my strength drained.
Later, I have the orderly fetch me a wheelchair, and I check each of my patients. I remove all their harnesses; nobody is in any condition to leap from their bed and assault me. Greta has somehow managed to half-turn onto her side, pinning her right arm, and she whimpers horribly as I free her. The skin of her forearm is soft and gray. I anesthetize her and inspect it. A few more days, and nothing would have saved her from amputation. I pump her full of antibiotics and tissue-repair nanomachines; she’ll need a graft, eventually. but for now all I can do is hold the necrosis in check.
It finally occurs to me to worry about Cyclops itself, but the drive computer’s error log is empty of all but the most trivial complaints, and the navigation system reports that we are holding precisely to the flight plan.
Where are we? Still further from home than we were when the mission was canceled, but at least now we’re headed in the right direction.
The flight plan is a blue trace on the screen of the terminal, a plot of distance versus time. The U-turn is an upside-down parabola—minutely distorted by relativistic effects, but not enough for the eye to tell. The blue line itself is pure theory, but at regular intervals along the curve are small green crosses, marking estimates of our actual location computed by the navigation system. It’s the most natural thing in the world for the eye to leap across the curve and read off the time at which Cyclops was last at the same position as it is right now.
That was eighteen days ago. The day I succumbed.
I feel an almost physical shock, even before I consciously make the connection: Lidia may have been right. Perhaps there is something out here. I look around, in vain, for someone to argue me back to my senses.
It could easily be a coincidence. One isolated piece of data means nothing. I set the computer to work at once, analyzing the records of every instrument inside and outside the hull of Cyclops, searching for some evidence that the region of space from which we are now emerging is in any way distinctive.
The task is trivial, the answer is produced with no perceptible delay. Apart from a steady and predictable decline in the faint remnants of the solar wind—nothing. And so far as the instruments inside the shielded hull are concerned, we might have spent the last three weeks standing still, on the surface of a planet with gravity of 1.3 gees.
I’d be willing to believe that interstellar space might hold some dangerous surprise—I’d admit the possibility of some peril inexplicable in terms of current astrophysics, maybe even current physics itself—but to believe in a phenomenon that has absolutely no effect on any one of the hundreds of delicate instruments we’re carrying, and yet can somehow cause a subtle dysfunction of the human nervous system, would be anthropocentric to the point of insanity.
I go back over the infirmary’s log, and find the moment when Lidia last spoke to me. I check the flight plan; in ten hours’ time, we’ll pass through the same location.
The orderly starts feeding the patients, but I interrupt it and take over myself. Eighteen days of confinement has knocked the aggression out of all of them. The docility with which they accept the food makes the job easy, but it shakes me up. Half a day ago, I was just like this. There goes the vanity that supposedly keeps me sane; my brain is the same machine as everyone else’s, my precious intellect can be switched off, and switched on again, by nothing more profound than the stages in a virus’s life cycle.
It’s still too soon for a response from Earth to my message. I leave the infirmary and move around the ship in my wheelchair. Everything is as we left it, of course. I’m still horribly weak and aching all over, from being bedridden for so long, but the gravity as such no longer seems oppressive. The cabins all look so familiar, so mundane, that the idea that we are, even now, further from Earth than anyone has ever been before, seems preposterous.
As the ceiling panels slowly dim in their mimickry of dusk, I can’t help myself; I sit by Lidia’s bed and wait for the magic time, certain as I am that nothing is going to happen. She’s asleep, but makes small, unhappy noises every now and then.
The coincidence of the onset and departure of my symptoms keeps nagging at me, but there’s no getting around it; the precision, the specificity, of the effect screams out the word adaptation. The only cause that makes sense is one that can be traced back to the Earth’s biosphere.
Lidia cries out. I check my watch; the time has passed. I pat her hand and start to wheel myself away. She opens her eyes, and suddenly bursts into tears, sobbing and shaking. I pause, momentarily unable to move or speak. She turns her head and sees me.
Her voice is slurred, but her words are unmistakable. “David? Are we home?”
I lean over and hold her in my arms.
· · · · ·
I wouldn’t call it a theory yet; we have no mechanism, no clear hypothesis. Kay speculates that some kind of quantum correlation effect may be involved; every human being contains thousands of genes that are, ultimately, copied from the same common ancestors, and like the polarized photons of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, there may be some indelible link established by this history of microscopic intimacy. There are at least two problems with this; the EPR effect is supposedly incapable of communicating anything but random quantum noise; and in any case, it ought not to diminish at all with distance. Kay is undaunted. “Any theory that predicts an effect that works at infinity is nonsense,” she says. “In flat, empty spacetime, maybe, but not in the real universe. And just because you can pronounce the word ‘random,’ don’t kid yourself that you know what it means.”
What’s special, about being ten billion kilometers from Earth, as opposed to ten thousand or ten million? Distance, that’s all. We didn’t just evolve on a planetary surface, with air and water and gravity. We evolved in the presence of each other. It seems that the refinement of human consciousness made use of that fact. Relied on that fact.
The media releases back on Earth have mentioned none of this; mission control is keeping quiet about the rantings of eight people who have been through an ordeal. The mystery disease has mysteriously spared us, and no doubt we will be quarantined while the experts diligently hunt for the non-existent virus. The truth, though, won’t stay buried for long.
Will genocide still be thinkable, in a world where every human being relies for their humanity on every other?
I hope not.
In the Ruins
From the online version at the author's website — http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/RUINS/Ruins.html (First publication.)
* * * * *
"You’ll never get tenure. You don’t have the abs.”
Emma waited for Jacob’s mask of bemusement to give way to the hint of wounded pride that she’d been aiming for. They both knew that she was speaking the truth. Jacob was nimble enough — even graceful at times — but he just didn’t put in the hours in the gym. No one would vote to grant permanent immunity to a dancer with a pudgy, childlike belly and toneless upper arms.
“It’s not that we didn’t have fun,” she continued, glancing across Briggs Field, wondering if any of her followers had come to witness the break-up in person. “But we’re headed for different fates, and it’s better to acknowledge that now than spend years together fooling ourselves that it could ever work out in the end.”
Jacob took a moment to gather his thoughts. “I’m sure you’ll get tenure yourself,” he said. “You might be a one-shtick pony, but for stand-up that’s all they require.”
“Ouch. If that’s the best heckle you’ve got, I wouldn’t advise switching to comedy.”
“Goodbye, Emma.” Jacob turned and walked away.
Emma watched his receding figure, annoyed; she’d expected him to make much more of a scene. Her PR app had been nagging her for weeks to break up with him, and it had shown her convincing projections for retentions and new followers if she managed to get some fireworks out of the event. But she’d pulled her punches: she hadn’t goaded him anywhere near enough.
“The sex was terrible!” she shouted after him. “I’ve had more orgasms from my ringtone!”
* * *
COMING TO THIS EBOOK IN 2025
or … read online at Greg Egan's website
http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/RUINS/Ruins.html
Induction
From Year's Best SF 13, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer; Harper/Eos, New York, 2008. First published in Foundation 100, edited by Farah Mendlesohn and Graham Sleight; Science Fiction Foundation, Summer 2007.
· · · · ·
Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) lives in Perth in Western Australia. A recluse whom few people in SF have met, he is one of the most respected writers of Hard SF in the last twenty years. He is also a programmer, and his website prominently features his mathematical computer animations. One of the most significant aspects of his fiction is the characterization. He tends to write what we sometimes call neuropsych hard sf, treating character as a scientific problem and writing about people based on how action and feeling are determined by the biochemistry of the brain. He has two books coming out in 2008: his fourth collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories, and his seventh SF novel, Incandescence.
“Induction” appeared in Foundation 100, the first fiction issue of the British SF Foundation’s journal, celebrating one hundred issues of publication. Here Egan explores what it really takes to colonize other planets, and what kind of person might want the job.
* * * * *
1
Ikat spent three of the last four hours of 2099 out on the regolith, walking the length of her section of the launch gun, checking by eye for micrometeorite impacts or any other damage that the automatic systems might improbably have missed.
Four other junior engineers walked a few paces ahead of her, but Ikat had had enough of their company inside the base, and she kept her coms tuned to Earth, sampling the moods of the century’s countdown.
The Pope had already issued a statement from Rio, imploring humanity to treat “Christianity’s twenty-first birthday” as an opportunity to embrace “spiritual maturity”; the Council of Islamic Scholars in Brussels, surrendering to the ubiquity of the Gregorian calendar, had chimed in with a similar message of their own. In the pyrotechnic rivalry stakes, Sydney was planning to incinerate the decommissioned Harbour Bridge with artificial lightning, while Washington had arranged for no less than twenty-one ageing military satellites to plunge from the sky into the Potomac at the stroke of midnight.
There was no doubt, though, that Beijing had stolen the lion’s share of global chatter with the imminent launch of the Orchid Seed. You could forget any purist’s concept of lunar midnight; the clocks on Procellarum had been set to the easternmost of Earth’s time zones ever since the construction of the base two decades before, so the official zeroing of the digits here would precede celebrations in all of the globe’s major cities. The PR people really had planned that far ahead.
As she paced slowly along the regolith, Ikat kept her eyes diligently on the coolant pipes that weaved between the support struts to wrap the gun barrel, although she knew that this final check was mostly PR too. If the launch failed, it would be down to a flaw that no human eye could have detected. Six successful but unpublicised test firings made such a humiliation unlikely. Still, the gun’s fixed bearing rendered a seventh, perfectly timed success indispensable. Only at “midnight” would the device be aimed precisely at its target. If they had to wait a month for a relaunch, hundreds of upper-echelon bureaucrats back on Earth would probably be diving out of their penthouse windows before dawn. Ikat knew that she was far too low in the ranks to make a worthwhile scapegoat, but her career could still be blighted by the ignominy.
Her mother was calling from Bangkok. Ikat pondered her responsibilities, then decided to let the audio through. If she really couldn’t walk, talk and spot a plume of leaking coolant at the same time, she should probably retire from her profession straight away.
“Just wishing you good luck, darling,” her mother said. “And Happy New Year. Probably you’ll be too busy celebrating to talk to me later.”
Ikat scowled. “I was planning to call you when it reached midnight there. But Happy New Year anyway.”
“You’ll call your father after the launch?”
“I expect so.” Her parents were divorced, but her mother still wanted harmony to flow in all directions, especially on such an occasion.
“Without him,” her mother said, “you never would have had this chance.”
It was a strange way of putting it, but it was probably true. The Chinese space program was cosmopolitan enough, but if her mother hadn’t married a Chinese citizen and remained in the country for so long, Ikat doubted that she would have been plucked from provincial Bangkok and lofted all the way up to Procellarum. There were dozens of middle-ranking project engineers with highly specific skills who were not Chinese born; they were quite likely the best people on the planet for their respective jobs. She was not in that league. Her academic results had secured her the placement, but they had not been so spectacular that she would have been head-hunted across national borders.
“I’ll call him,” she promised. “After the launch.”
She cut the connection. She’d almost reached the end of Stage Nine, the ten-kilometre section of the barrel where the pellets would be accelerated from sixteen to eighteen per cent of light speed, before the final boost to twenty per cent. For the last three years, she had worked beneath various specialist managers, testing and re-testing different subsystems: energy storage, electromagnets, cooling, data collection. It had been a once-in-a-lifetime education, arduous at times, but never boring. Still, she’d be glad to be going home. Maglev railways might seem anticlimactic after this, but she’d had enough of sharing a room with six other people, and the whole tiny complex with the same two hundred faces, year after year.
Back inside the base, Ikat felt restless. The last hour stretched out ahead of her, an impossible gulf. In the common room, Qing caught her eye, and she went to sit with him.
“Had any bites from your resumé?” he asked.
“I haven’t published it yet. I want a long holiday first.”
He shook his head in dismay. “How did you ever get here? You must be the least competitive person on Earth.”
Ikat laughed. “At university, I studied eighteen hours a day. I had no social life for six years.”
“So now you’ve got to put in some effort to get the pay-off.”
“This is the pay-off, you dope.”
“For a week or so after the launch,” Qing said, “you could have the top engineering firms on the planet bidding for the prestige you’d bring them. That won’t last forever, though. People have a short attention span. This isn’t the time to take a holiday.”
Ikat threw up her hands. “What can I say? I’m a lost cause.”
Qing’s expression softened; he was deadly serious about his own career, but when he lectured her it was just a kind of ritual, a role play that gave them something to talk about.
They passed the time with more riffs on the same theme, interleaved with gossip and bitching about their colleagues, but when the clock hit 11.50 it became impossible to remain blasé. Nobody could spend three years in a state of awe at the feat they were attempting, but ten minutes of sober contemplation suddenly seemed inadequate. Other probes had already been sent towards the stars, but the Orchid Seed would certainly outrace all those that had gone before it. It might yet be overtaken itself, but with no serious competitors even at the planning stage, there was a fair chance that the impending launch would come to be seen as the true genesis of interstellar travel.
As the conversation in the common room died away, someone turned up the main audio commentary that was going to the news feeds, and spread a dozen key image windows across the wall screens. The control room was too small to take everyone in the base; junior staff would watch the launch much as the public everywhere else did.
The schematics told Ikat a familiar story, but this was the moment to savour it anew. Three gigajoules of solar energy had already been packed into circulating currents in the superconducting batteries, ready to be tapped. That was not much, really; every significant payload launched from Earth had burnt up far more. One third would be lost to heat and stray electromagnetic fields. The remainder would be fed into the motion of just one milligram of matter: the five hundred tiny pellets of the Orchid Seed that would race down the launch gun in three thousandths of a second, propelled by a force that could have lofted a two-tonne weight back on Earth.
