Collected short stories, p.286
Collected Short Stories, page 286
Somehow, Ravleens anger found the strength to swell again, her rage clean, and brilliant, and sweet, and perfect.
With a wild screech, with all of her carefully sequestered energies, she spat at her nemesis, gutting herself in the process a great numbing pain surging through an evaporating body her last few eyes watched in horror as Ord, knowing exactly when she would fire, leaped aside, allowing the fantastic cake of gamma radiations and plasmas to pass by and enter the new hole, vanishing, then impacting on an invisible target set at the orbs exact center
Xos great ship was destroyed, at least.
And Ravleen discovered that she was still alive. Barely conscious, but able to crawl back into the protection of the umbra. With a weak, happy voice, she told the Chamberlain, Youre still fucked deep inside the Core, your ship left as shit !
The dense dusts began to glow in the infrared, absorbing a wild array of unexpected, unexplainable radiations.
A voice, warm and much too close, whispered, Vacuum fluctuations.
It told her, From the wormhole, theyre coming.
It explained, Your hammerblow uncapped it, and now every photon that enters the hole is magnified. Doppler effects. Doubling effects. All the ugly feedback dangers that make this work nearly impossible
Again, Ord leaped sideways.
Then he dove into that little, little hole.
With a wary delight, Xo said to Ravleen, Thank you. We could have done this ourselves, but you made it easy.
Ravleen lashed out with her last hands, grabbing nothing.
The Nuyen plunged into the same gap in the dust.
Ravleen wasnt too stupid to know that she was stupid. She had been a fool from the beginning, and for a slender delicious moment, she was glad to be dying. But then some little talentmore instinct than conscious thoughtfound a simple, workable answer to this damning mess.
In a wild instant, she stripped herself to nothing.
She peeled away her exhausted limbs and charred flesh and all of her surviving senses. But she wasnt tiny enough yet. She wouldnt be fast enough. Nothing remained of her but her soul and some minimal talents, plus that great blue-black hatred, and without hesitation, she abandoned what she loved most. She left her heart behind. Suddenly as simple and small as a newborn, she aimed by memory, flinging herself forward, and she pulled herself into the tiniest possible shape, accelerating into that shriveling hole, too blind to see even the searing white light that was climbing up to meet her.
Thirteen
I know stories.
Of course I cant feel certain which of these stories are true. Or if anything I say has the tiniest toehold on fact. What matters is that you believe me. What matters is that I believe me. What mattersmore than anything, this mattersthat the universe Itself, in some important fashion or another, believes what it hears bubbling out of my little mouth, and acts accordingly !
Alice, in conversation
THE DENSE SPHEREof hyperactive, ultraloyal dusts fulfilled its crude purpose, absorbing the furious radiations as they boiled out of the freshly uncapped wormhole. What the ball couldnt absorb, it transmuted into more benign forms. Then the engineered limits were reached, and the sphere abruptly split wide, the explosion brighter and far hotter than any supernova, and thankfully, quicker to fall away again. Alice and her phantom friends rode out the blast, then watched gratefully as the sky darkened again, returning to the blood-tinged glow that was, in her friends eyes, a warm, reassuring presence.
Little remained to be done.
Alice was free to walk the edge of the continent, following the beaches and low cliffs, quietly speaking to her two hundred billion companions. She was a shadow and a whisper floating amidst their gossipy chatter. Ignoring the gossip, she would tell the entire glorious story, from its arbitrary beginnings to that obligatory final scene. Then she would begin again, knowing the ghosts wouldnt remember her words after just one telling, or twenty. Perhaps they would never learn. But simple pride and the sturdy sound of her own familiar voice served to keep her company, and perhaps more important, it helped fill this sudden and unnerving wealth of time.
I took our ships helm and moved us, she reported. At the very last moment, I spent the last of our fuel, slowing us as we approached the wormhole. Since before the Core exploded, the wormhole has been moving daisy fashion, skimming past suns and genuine black holes in order to remain in the Core. Hiding. Then I opened the barricade in its bow, engulfing the wormhole, and I forced our dark little world to dance with it, the wormholes apparent mass helping fling us off in an entirely new direction.
Weve moving perpendicular to the galaxy, my friends. My friends. Racing into the ultimate cold. Our stardrives and other machinery are ruined, left behind. We have only the barest residual capacity to make energy. But then, how much power does a world of ghosts require?
Asking the question, Alice always paused, giving her audience the opportunity to offer answers. Right answers or wrong, it didnt matter. She only wanted some sign that some other mind was finally, in some pitiful form, awakening.
She ended her silence, always, with a bold warning.
Were doomed, my friends. Utterly, eternally doomed. If the baby Chamberlain is successful, our very existence could evaporate. Depending on your personal reading of quantum gravity and the true nature of time, we might very well have already been erased. And everything you see here is what nonexistence looks like. Dim and peaceful, with an occasional fish for the eating.
She laughed, then continued.
But if things go wrong for poor Ord, we will continue on. Well leave the Milky Way entirely, haunting the deepest regions of space until finally, as our meager energies fail and our false molecules fall to pieces, well perish.
Together, we shall perish. I promise you!
Then, for a brief while, Alice would stop walking, staring at the vague faces and bodies, unable to remember even one of their names.
At that point, the same furious insights would pounce on her.
Suddenly she would ask herself: What if the universethis glorious and inflated and utterly spellbinding creationwas the same as this little ghost world? What if Reality was some clever souls device built with whatever tools were on hand, its creator trying to model something much grander, but in some great tragedy, lost? That would explain why so much of the universe was dark and simple, and why the universe, given all this space and its great reaches of time, insisted on repeating the same few building blocksthe protons and galaxies, the stars and the twisted, tragic souls.
That would explain everything.
Just contemplating the possibility made Alice shiver.
Then as Alice began to walk again, telling her story again from its arbitrary beginning, the second insight would attack. She would wonder if this was how the Creator lived: A lonely soul whispering to ghosts of her own making, trying to force their dim little minds to accept what couldnt be more obvious or important?
But Alice was too small and stupid to answer such a grand question.
She always had been too limited to comprehend such matters, and for that she was thankful, and for that she had always felt infinitely, perfectly blessed.
Brother Perfect
One
Bless the dead!
Perfect, in conversation
IT WAS THEultimate toastBless the dead!and despite every appearance, the toastmaster was human. His scaly hand clasped hold of a ceremonial mug carved from cultured granite. As he said the word dead, he lifted the mug up high, his wide mouth managing both a smile and supreme bitterness. He was a beautiful man, brightly colored and vigorously ancient. His angry voice lingered in the dense, damp air. Long teeth flashed in the very dim light. Then golden viper eyes skipped from face to face, looking hard for something unmentioned.
The patrons repeated his blessing with sloppy, communal voices.
No one needed to ask, Which dead?
Opposite the taverns bar was a universal wall. Tonight, like every night, it was showing another light-speed feed from the Core, from another doomed world. People watched a new city lying beneath a night sky that should have held a hundred thousand suns, bright and dazzling; but instead of suns, there was only a single blistering smear of white light, every lesser glow washed away by the brilliance. Energies from the baby universe were still seeping into its tired old mother. A thousand supernovas couldnt match its amoral violence. The explosions scorching heat and withering radiations were expanding at a near-light velocity, melting worlds and evaporating every form of life, a century of inexorable growth barely diminishing its absolute fury.
Invisible against that withering light, people were being slaughtered.
And people watched them diepeople here on the Earth and throughout the inner reaches of the galaxy. For some viewers this was a new hobby, a grisly but fascinating entertainment: A world at a time, they watched distant skies fill with that terrible light. With a reliable horror, the local colonists would panic. With few starships in port, only the rich and the vicious could escape in time. Although there were moments when luck and charity saved a few good souls, too. Then those left behind would take pitiful steps to brace themselves, or they launched into a wild orgy of rioting and sexthe human animal betraying itself after ten million years of seamless, unrelenting civilization.
But others watched the carnage and felt no thrill. For them, the victims werent strangers, and the misery was a burning they felt inside themselves.
The tavern was tucked deep in the Earths crust, in one of the poorer, more crowded districts. Its patrons were a local racehuman frames embellished with reptilian features and physiologies, a calculated cold-bloodedness allowing them to thrive on impoverished, sporadic meals. Yet they were far from simple people. They had a long and durable and thoroughly shared history. Pooling their meager savings, once they had sent their best to the Core. The Core was still a wilderness, empty and free for the taking. Terraformers built a floating continent on a sunless jupiter, then designed a climate specifically for thema lizardly eden that these same patrons used to observe with a fond relish. But the jupiter was barely eighty light-years from the explosions source, and it was obliterated in a single evening. A great world and a greater people were turned into a single long streamer of enchanted plasmas and highly charged particles, swirling and merging with a murderous storm that wasnt going to end soon, or maybe ever.
Many of these patrons had watched the cataclysm from this tavern, and out of that awful night came this ritual, this new custom, several minutes of each evening devoted to blessing the dead.
Now, finally, the golden viper eyes found what they were hunting.
The toastmasters head locked in place, and he took a slow deep breath, a wry little smile emerging gradually.
To Alice! he shouted.
Now the wall changed feeds, suddenly showing what looked like a plainly dressed woman sitting alone in a white-walled prison cell. She was an archaic human, traditional skin topped with short red hair. Otherwise, she was the most ordinary creature imaginable.
In a single ringing voice, the tavern cried out, To Alice!
Give the bitch a long small horrible life, the toastmaster roared. And with that, he drained his mug, enjoying the raucous approval of his mates.
Others, in drunken tones, roared, Kill the bitch !
It was a delicious, much-practiced game.
But the toastmaster broke tradition by taking a slow step forward, wading into the crowd, and lifting his emptied mug as a clear, almost songful voice shouted, To the Families!
The Families! people roared, in mocking admiration.
From the back, a shrill voice cried out, Kill them, too!
Nobody repeated those dangerous words, but there was a pause, glacial and tense, where no one rose to defend the Families. All the good they had done for humanity, in its myriad forms and not so much as a kind word was offered. Not as a whisper, not even as a weak reflex.
In this one obscure location, the Ten-Million-Year Peace tottered on the brink of collapse.
Standing among the tightly packed bodies, the toastmaster fixed his gaze on a single man. The man was a strangerdull black scales fringed with red; a crimson forehead merging with a sharp golden crest; and a small orange throat pouch that implied youth, or an old man trying to look young. Using his free hand, the toastmaster touched the young man, cool fingertips dancing across the short nose and long lower jaw, finally tickling the little pouch.
The young man barely flinched.
The Families will pay, the toastmaster hissed. For every crime, they will pay.
Every crime, was the chorus. Make the fuckers pay!
The young man whispered his response, a half syllable slow.
The toastmaster appeared amused, but his voice was like ice, slowly saying, Make them weak. Weak and poor. Make them the same as us.
In an instant, the tavern went silent.
The young man straightened his back, the orange plumage along his spine growing stiff as knives. He glanced at the universal wall and Alice, his viper eyes blue and shiny, and sad. Then with a flat voice, he muttered, Yes.
Yes, what?
Make the Families weak, and poor
And give us their god-talents, the toastmaster added.
With a phrase, he had crossed into heresy. There was no other word for it. Dismantling the evil Families was a justice, but demanding their powers and talents was against every convention, every old law and a multitude of good, honorable judgments.
The young man said nothing.
Long ago, just once, I had a child, the toastmaster explained. One child, because how can a poor man afford two in a crowded world like this? She was a beautiful bright girl, and do you know where she went? Can you guess where she made her nest and gave me five grandchildren? His eyes remained open, coldly staring at the face before him. Every night, I watched my daughter and grandchildren from this place. Because I am too poor to afford my own universal wall, of course. The eyes closed and remained shut. I was standing here, exactly here, when I watched my entire family die.
Softly, with feeling, the young man said, I am sorry.
A claw-shaped blade struck him from behind, piercing his skin at the neck, effortlessly cutting between the long scales but with no trace of pain. No blood spurted from the surgical wound. The young man felt the pressure and spun around, slapping the knife from the assailants hand. But more blades appeared, and picks of scrap diamond, each slicing at his legs and butt and back; and despite strength enough to shatter a hundred arms, Ord stopped resisting, going rigid, standing like a statue while his false skin and the cool meat were peeled away, falling in wet heaps around his ankles.
His archaic body was naked. His true face was suddenly exposed, a hundred little cuts healing in a moment. The Chamberlain face was obvious. The red hair was plastered flat with perspiration, and the warm blue eyes watched the world with amazement and a palpable pity.
No face in the galaxy was better known.
A baby Chamberlain, the patrons muttered, in horror and shock and with a rising visceral rage.
Ord lifted his left hand.
With remorse, he cried out, I am sorry.
They rushed him. Using knives and picks, stone mugs and teeth, they hacked away at his genuine flesh, ripping it loose from his strong bright bones. Then, with an idiots purpose, the mob soaked the still-living bones and brain with the taverns inventory, and they sabotaged the fire-suppression system, setting a blaze that was a thousand times too cold to murder the weakest Chamberlain. But it didnt matter. For years and years that tavern would lie gutted, left as a monument, and people who hadnt been there would claim otherwise, boasting about how on that night, in a small but significant way, they had helped mete out justice, butchering and cooking one of Alices own little brothers !
Two
Oh, I can explain your sister to you
Every human hope and historic truth, every foible and foolishness you can name, plus even the greenest prehuman emotions all of them, without exception, have enormous homes inside our Alices dear soul !
Perfect, in conversation
FIRST, SAID AChamberlain voice. Before anything else, tell me why this happened.
The voice had no source. It rose from the warm blackness, sounding a little angry and thoroughly stern. Ord barely heard his own voice replying. Its because I left the estates, he muttered. Thats why.
You did, but thats an inadequate answer. Think again.
Lyman? Is that you?
Try again, boomed the voice. Why did this happen?
Ord remembered the attack and his brief, manageable pains. They saw through my disguise. I must have made a mistake.
Many mistakes, but none of consequence. Your costume was accurate enough, and you were well prepared to wear it.
Then what went wrong?
Im asking you. Think now.
Ord tried to swallow, but he had no mouth. He assumed that he was home again. An attack on him would have caused alarms to sound, and it would have been a simple matter for a brother to recover his parts. Yet what if the alarms had failed? His comatose mind could have been pirated away to someplace secure, unlikely as that seemed. This could be the beginning of a lengthy interrogation, a Chamberlain enemy wanting to pull the Family secrets out of him. But of course, he knew next to nothing. More likely, their enemy simply wished to torture him.
How did that gruesome drunk find you, Ord?
He wasnt gruesome, the boy countered. And I think he was sober
