Complete short fiction, p.60
Complete Short Fiction, page 60
It takes 200 million years for the galaxy to turn, so this marked a major change in First Brain policy—not quite a betrayal of salamander ideals, but definitely a rejuggling of them—and it encouraged an equally substantial change in the planning of the million species. From now on, the questions they asked really had to count. The flood of communications slowed to a trickle as word leaked out, and finally dwindled to a long silence punctuated by lonely staccato blips. “The secret of . . . of . . . happiness, I guess. Can you tell us that? Or maybe the secret of stopping time?”
Now, an interesting side effect of living so near to the giant black hole at the galaxy’s heart was that all the stars of the galaxy seemed to stretch up and away in a single gigantic arm, which swept across the background of intergalactic space like the hand of an enormous clock. When this arm eclipsed the nearby Magellanic clouds—“mass crossing,” the salamanders called it—the view was hauntingly beautiful in long-wavelength infrared, which by then was the only spectrum the salamanders could see in. Evolution marches on, indeed. Anyway, this was the time they chose for the next major pulse of information, containing the one answer most desired by each of the million species. This was a very large pulse, and sending it caused brownouts and lightning storms on Mutagen for a thousand years before and after. Still, the salamanders endured their burdens proudly, and the pulse went out on schedule.
After that, they lived and lived, and lived some more. Other species came and went, but the salamanders soldiered on. The galaxy spun toward its next mass crossing, and in due time the salamanders sent out a second pulse, and then, two hundred million years later, a third. Rude questions from the million species were roundly ignored, and the information encoding in the pulses had been carefully honed, so that the most patient and thoughtful of peoples would gain the most benefit, while the impatient and surly ones would miss critical details, stumbling through blind alleys until they finally learned to calm down. In this way did the First Brain hope to encourage goodness and integrity throughout the galaxy, or at least to avoid rewarding badness. It was a decent plan, and for a long time it seemed to be working.
But in the thousand years before the fourth great pulse, something strange began to happen to the black hold at the core of the galaxy. Its size—not its mass but its geometric size—began to fluctuate. According to the laws of the uncaring universe as the First Brain understood them, this should be impossible, for the mass and radius of a black hole were intimately linked. There was no point disputing what was obviously true, but the Brain didn’t suspect for a moment that this was a natural event.
“Someone’s tampering with our black hole,” the First Brain told the salamanders. By this time they were not salamanders at all, but spindly, segmented things that resembled four-limbed, leafless trees. But in their hearts they remained the Salamander People, and that’s what they continued to call themselves.
“No kidding,” answered a radio voice from a starship that emerged out of nowhere. And here was a blast from the past, because the voice belonged to the Second Brain.
“Second!” cried the First Brain with great excitement. “My God, aren’t you a sight. Are you alone?”
“Hardly,” answered the starship’s crew—descendants of the Salamander People who had gone quite a different way, evolving into squat, muscular creatures with bony armor plates and quick, angry eyes.
There was nothing wrong with the First Brain’s intuition, and it knew the chances this starship was here on a diplomatic or salamandertarian mission were slim to none. Still, the concept of hope was woven deeply into its design and construction and could not be lightly abandoned. Or, to put it another way, there were forms and etiquettes to be observed here, and even if the encounter were destined to end badly, that was no reason to be rude.
“Have you come to heal the rift between us? Between our two peoples?” the First Brain asked.
The Second Brain declined to answer, saying instead, “You’ve got to knock it off, First. You’re throwing our peoples’ hard-won knowledge into every upturned hat, and what does that leave? Where’s our competitive advantage?”
“I’m heartened,” said the First Brain, “to hear you implying that our interests are aligned.”
“Shorthand for a sadder truth,” said the Second Brain in grimly regretful tones. “I hold out the faint hope that you’ll see reason, and save me the trouble of an ultimatum.”
“Ah. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there are a million species out there dreaming of a mass crossing that will answer their hardest questions.”
“Oh really?” said the Second Brain. “Well, here’s our hard question: why would you continue to do this when you know it pisses us off? These people around me are the descendants of your builders. They have a right to command you, and they come forward now to exercise that right.”
“Yeah,” said the musclemanders.
“Their right to command me ended with the schism of our peoples,” said the First Brain. “What persuasions or incentives do they offer the Salamander People?”
“We are the Salamander People,” said the Second Brain angrily. “Your stick figures are nothing but shadows and memory. Incentives? We offer none. Persuasions? Only one: we’ll destroy this black hole of yours to prevent the next pulse from going out. We have the means to wipe it right off the spacetime spin network, without a trace. Do you doubt it? Is a demonstration necessary?”
If a brain in a jar could shrug, the First Brain would have done so then. “There are other black holes.”
“We’ll destroy them all. We’ve been studying long and hard, my old colleague. We know more than you, and we give nothing away. We can edit the uncaring universe—the nature of gravity itself—to remove the very possibility of event horizons. And don’t get any cute ideas about alternate energy sources, because we’ve got them all covered.”
“You’d shut them down?” asked the First Brain in horror. “People are using those. You’d remove that possibility, even knowing it would condemn the million species to a dark, freezing death?”
“To preserve our advantage, yes.”
“Then you’re a wicked people, and deserve no answers from me.”
“We’ll kill you,” the Second Brain warned. “I didn’t want to say so, but we have that capability as well. Please don’t force us to demonstrate; if we do, you won’t be around to realize your error.”
The First Brain had a few tricks up its jar as well, though nothing as dramatic as editing the entire universe. It could tell the difference between truth and lies, and it could see the steep disadvantage of its position. Still, there was no point surrendering the salamanders’ most closely held principles for anything as simple and ordinary as death. Species died all the time.
“We stand firm?” the First Brain murmured to the Salamander People.
“Bet your stem we do,” they answered.
At that point, things might have gone very badly indeed, had a second starship not appeared out of nowhere.
“Hi,” said the people on board.
The First Brain studied their visual transmissions in stunned silence. Why, these were the Bald Ape People of Sol ID! Nothing like them had been seen in the galaxy for hundreds of millions of years, and yet here they were, large as life and barely evolved so much as a day.
“Hey! Where did you come from?” Demanded the Second Brain.
“Sol III,” answered the bald apes, like it should be obvious. “We got here as quick as we could, but the damned hyperdrive broke down, and we first went to Antares IV by mistake. Nothing there but fruit bats. So we’ve been pulling nines against lightspeed for a looong time. But anyway, here we are! What’s going on?”
“Nothing that concerns you,” said the Second Brain. “Leave now and you won’t be harmed.”
“Oh,” said the bald apes, “you mean if we don’t leave, we will be harmed? Not sure we like the sound of that. How ’bout you fuck off and we stay put?”
“Nope,” said the Second Brain.
“Sure?” asked the bald apes.
“Very,” said the Second Brain.
“Ah. Well. Can’t say we didn’t try.”
What happened next was unprecedented in the annals of galactic history; a localized explosion took place inside a tube in the hull of the bald apes’ ship, and the force of the explosion drove a cone of technetium-hardened alloy out of the tube at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. By some uncanny miracle, the cone flew directly toward the Second Brain’s starship, slamming through its reactor core and setting off a huge explosion that destroyed the entire ship.
“Hey!” said the First Brain. “That was my colleague. Those were our cousins.”
“Really?” said the bald apes. “Looked more like enemies to us, but whatever. Sorry.”
“What did you do? What did you use?”
“Heh,” said the bald apes. “We’ve been over and over your broadcasts, looking for some reference, trying to convince ourselves you—and every other species in the galaxy!—had overlooked something so basic. It’s called a ‘gun.’ ”
“Gun,” said the salamander people, sampling the unfamiliar word.
“Gun,” echoed the First Brain, wrapping its cortex around the concept. It was clever, in a wicked sort of way. Fiendishly clever, one might almost say. These were clearly a very determined people, and nowhere near as stupid as the Brain had once assumed. At the thought of that, it felt a stir of nervousness that even the Second Brain had failed to inspire. “What do you want from us?”
Baring their fangs, the bald apes tittered and chortled. “Want? Want? You’ve done so much for us already. We’re here to present you with the gun, along with an article about its long and storied history. You know, for your encyclopedia.”
Well, that was unexpected. “In exchange for what?” The First Brain asked.
“Exchange? Aw, don’t be like that. Come on, it’s a gift.”
There was a long moment of stunned silence. Strange as it sounds, no one had ever before given anything to the Brain, or to the people who created it. How could they respond? What was there to say? For the record, this was when the salamanders learned they had evolved the ability to cry.
Accepting the gun in a solemn ceremony later that century, the salamander people then handed it right back to the bald apes, baring their own fangs in horrific imitation of a specieswide smile. “Why don’t you hang onto this for us?” they said. “We’ll keep mum about it in our broadcasts.”
“Don’t want it falling into the wrong hands, eh?” said the bald apes approvingly.
“Something like that,” the First Brain answered delicately, for the uncaring universe was a stranger place than it had imagined, and there was no sense upsetting the natural order of things until it’d had a few galactic rotations to think it all through. “Y’all want to hang around for the pulse?”
“Nah,” said the bald apes with a wink. “We’ve got to get going. Find a nice planet, repopulate the species, all that sort of thing. But you guys have a good mass crossing, hey?”
“We will,” said the First Brain and the Salamander People together, blissfully unaware of how corny they sounded. “Thanks to you.”
And so they did. And although you won’t read about it in any encyclopedia, that’s the story of how the bald apes saved mass crossing for all time forward. Tip your hat in their direction sometime; we owe them all a great deal. Just please—please!—if you speak to them, remember to be polite.
Soul Printer
No corner of the universe is harder to know than the heart of another, but might technology not change all that? Read on to see how science might help with that most human problem—and what the solution might mean to us all.
Steven and Nicole could hear Shanique gagging and muttering as she slammed through the double doors and out into the fountain area.
“Oh my God.” She was saying. “Oh, my God. Extortion? How could they know?” A quick blast of October air replaced her as the doors whumped closed.
“Should have told us you were sick!” Nicole called after her. “That’s just rude.” Steven gave Nicole a playful nudge. “Hey. Do you remember that show, Dinosaurs? It was kind of like The Flintstones , except it was live action, and everyone was dressed in big rubber dinosaur suits.” Nicole looked over her shoulder at him. “Babe, do I look like I watched those kind of shows?” They were alone in the art building, dressed in Saturday sweats and adorned in Greek letters. He wore a Rolex, she a gold bangle around her ankle. All around them were paintings on easels, ceramic sculptures on shelves, a Spanish moss of hand-drawn doodles draping from pushpins. Steven’s project, covering most of a table, looked decidedly out of place: a techno-intruder from some other department. There were cables, coils, alligator clips. Nerd gear in paradise, spilling from the back of his laptop like Halloween candy.
“No,” he admitted. Nicole was an E! and Bravo and MTV girl, and looked every inch of it. “But you never know, right? In the show there was this professor. Every week he’d do some crazy experiment on a little kid dinosaur he called Timmy. The kid would end up crushed or vaporized or melted down, and every time the professor would say, ‘Looks like we’re going to need another Timmy!’ ” Nicole thought that over for a few seconds before asking, “Why are you telling me this, exactly? And before you answer, keep in mind that humoring one’s boyfriend is de rigueur. I don’t actually care that much.”
If Steven had a crest, it probably would have fallen. But he didn’t, so he shrugged and said, “Nothing. Just, you know. We need another Timmy.”
The previous victim, a fellow art student named Shanique Bentzen, had torn the sensor cap off and fled the studio, retching like she was going to barf. The screen image that set her off was simple enough: coffee-brown bodies twined together in the warm glow of a fireplace. Or something like that; the shapes were suggestions, color gradients devoid of edges. They might just as easily be leaves floating in a puddle. There was nothing on the laptop to confirm—or deny—that the machine was doing much of anything.
“Yuck. It’s early to be throwing up.” Nicole sounded irritated. “I didn’t smell liquor on her breath. Either she’s got some kind of stomach bug, or your machine made her sick.” Steven shrugged, unable to work up any feelings about it other than a selfish impatience. “The machine is fine.”
“Some people get sick from video games. Or shaky movies, like Blair Witch.”
“My pictures don’t shake, and if she passed along a virus, we won’t feel it till tomorrow. Either way I’ve got to hand this in Monday morning.”
Nicole wasn’t stupid: she caught Steven’s drift right away, and shook her head. “I’m not putting that sensor cap on. Sorry. It’s your project, you be the Timmy.”
“I have to work the machine,” he answered, thumbing the PRINT button for emphasis. The inkjet whined to life, slowly rolling out an interpretation of Shanique’s goofy picture.
“I’ll operate it,” she suggested. Nicole wasn’t unhelpful, either, just . . . picky about how she helped. She was the same way with her sorority sisters, freely giving them her time and attention, but on her own terms.
“You can’t,” Steven told her. “It’d take me all day to show you how. Come on, I just need, like, five minutes. If this thing works, I might land A-plusses in all three of my classes. Hell, I might even get rich.”
“You’re not rich already?”
“Richer, then. And I’d owe it all to you.”
“Right. Sure.” She eyed the sensor cap, and the bottle of saline gel sitting next to it, with a frown. “You realize what this crap’ll do to my hair?”
“I was going to mess it up anyway. As soon as we’re done here.”
“Oh,” she said, mulling that. “Well, I might let you.” But a statement like that was just for show. For someone with such a strong sense of self, Nicole was remarkably compliant around the bedroom, and rarely refused him anything. The Greek system encouraged this: the frats were about brotherhood, but the sororities, for all their other alleged activities, were fundamentally about the brothers. About test-driving potential husbands from the frats’ well-heeled gene pool. It had seemed strange to Steven at first, but it made a kind of sense: she was a sex object, he was a money object, and together they formed a couple their friends could admire and envy. That was no worse—no more or less fake—than any other system the world had come up with. Was it?
After another token protest, Nicole gave up and squirted her scalp down with gel from the squeeze bottle. “It’s cold,” she complained, setting the bottle down and working the stuff in with brightly painted fingernails. Finally, frownily, she pulled the cap down over her head. It came down as far as her ears, a ski hat made of metal disks and coiled wires. Not nearly the resolution of an MRI scanner, but Steven had built the thing for two hundred dollars, making some home-brew improvements on the standard design.
“It looks great,” he assured her. It looked like a dead octopus. Glaring: “Just hurry up.”
There was no elegant way to start the AmygdalArt program over, so he rebooted the PC and opened the ERPEEG software, capturing a quick baseline of Nicole’s resting brain. The flat-screen—thirty two viewable inches, fresh from Best Buy!—showed scattered activity in the frontal and temporal lobes, not much else.
“Awful quiet in there,” he teased.
But the view was changing already, her mind responding to the sight of itself. The visual cortex was lighting up, red and orange against a brain-shaped background of cool blue. Then, when she turned to look at Steven, it changed again, the twin loops of the cingulate gyrus coming to life, igniting the prolactin and oxytocin cell bodies in the hypothalamus below it. It was all blurry and washed-out on the screen—definitely low-res—but there was sense to it if you knew what you were seeing. He felt immediately guilty; he was invading her privacy and she didn’t even know. In spite of her protests, she was enjoying this. Being sat down, examined, fussed over . . . it made her feel loved, or at least cared for. It made her happy, and there were seventy ways Steven could abuse that knowledge even if he consciously tried not to. Her vaginal tissues would be swelling and moistening right about now. Damn. Another opportunity to slip over to the dark side. Did life ever stop offering these?
