Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (23 page)

Through the screen door I see the brightly lit interior, with its metal tub positioned under grow-lights. I go inside. The tub holds a gelatinous mass, speckled with black spots. Eggs, toad or frog or one of the snakes that does not give live birth. I don't touch it. This mass, plus whatever booby trap remains on the roof, are the only proofs of what I will have to tell the cops.

Who probably will not believe me. There are no bodies; I have a psychiatric history; possibly nobody but me ever saw Silas. How many crazy people go to the authorities every year claiming to have met aliens? But I must try, because what Silas said made actual sense to me. Or maybe it was what Sally said: "Childs, not like parents, no?"

There are no deformed frogs, and way too many normal frogs, in this swamp because this is the end result of Sally's people's experimentation with swamps. This is where they got the ingredients right, the correct mix to nurture their strange young without damaging further what humans have already done to wetlands ecology. This is where Silas's people, whoever they are, tried to stop it. Maybe they're cops, with a good cop's firm ideas about not taking other people's property. How would I know?

I turn off all the lights and head toward my cabin for the car keys. But something makes me turn around to look over my shoulder. In the slanting red light of the setting sun, there is a brief sparkle from Sally's steps.

The gelatinous mass of eggs is moving. From this distance, I can barely see it. It inches down the concrete-block steps, falls the height of the last, steepest one onto the mud, then slowly begins to move again. There is maybe fifty yards between it and the non-creek.

I wrap my arms around myself, despite the heat, and whimper. I tell myself that the eggs will die in the swamp, an environment never intended for them. Or that the larvae—tadpoles, nymphs, whatever—will die or be eaten by turtles or snakes or frogs.

I tell myself that no more ships will come, because the deaths of both Silas and Sally will have proved that Earth is not a good choice for them.

I tell myself that aliens, too, can be crazy, and these two were just outliers, not proof of anything, not the advance guard of a civilization—or civilizations—capable of using an entire planet as a petri dish to create just the ecology they want.

But then I think of all the frog extinctions from diseases that scientists have never seen before and cannot explain. I think of how different this swamp—and only this swamp—is, at least according to the FrogWatch data. I think of the hidden lake behind the rushes and cattails, deeper than the swamp, maybe deep enough to shelter growth.

I think of real-estate developers, killing off native species as they take their habitats.

But most of all, I think of what grows within me, that I didn't even know existed until a few weeks ago. That I talk to when I'm alone, that I've already named, given up Scotch and coffee for, done my back taxes for, resumed eating regular meals for. The books from the library say that Jason Jr., conceived the night before his father was shot, is now tadpole-shaped, amphibious, a secret swimmer in my secret sea.

The mass of alien eggs must have moved faster than before. By the time I have run home to my cabin, grabbed plastic garbage bags, and pulled on my waders, the mass is gone. But it has left a trail of slime, into the creek, out the other side, and into the reeds. It is much larger than the few inches of water that covers the mud; it will stick up above it. I have a powerful flashlight, and soon the moon will rise.

Around me frogs croak and sing and grunt and click and trill.

I head into the swamp.

Beyond violet there's ultraviolet; beyond red, infrared. My eyes are wide; flowers glow long past dusk While in the dark of night lovers shine hotly. Reality has other dimensions hidden orthogonally (as it's called) away from the customary four. So I began to paint in subyellow and suprablue, Colors perpendicular to the visible spectrum. At a further right angle is my famous
J series
In jed, jellow, jreen, jlue, jndigo, and jiolet. Visitors to this gallery may perceive blank canvases Although they will feel disconcerted Since I depict my dreams and nightmares Which can be sensed unseen as absent presences. Some very challenging paintings seem invisible; Obviously those ones cost the ultramost.

—Ian Watson

Some years ago, when I still toted the print edition of the New York
Times
around the city, there was a cheap little cafeteria/grill hidden away in my local YMCA. Here, I could grab scrambled eggs on a bagel or hamburgers with curly fries and feed my starving children for prices that seemed impossibly low for Manhattan. One morning'as I negotiated the paper and breakfast, while waiting for the Y's summer day camp to start'my daughter and I were approached by a frantic couple. They demanded to know what the day was and refused to believe me when I said it was Wednesday the 14th. Even after I showed them the date at the top of the
Times
' front page, they continued to ask me if I was sure. Couldn't it be Tuesday? Wasn't it the 13th?

They were clearly unconvinced by my assertions to the contrary.

I'm certain there were plenty of mundane explanations for this unusual behavior, but only one theory came immediately to mind. As the man and woman left the cafeteria, I leaned over and whispered to my daughter, "Do you know who
they
are?" When she shook her head, "no," I stated the obvious:

"Time travelers."

Now, it could be argued that they were confused tourists who, having seen as much of America as they could in two or three weeks, had just missed their flight home'but what would be the fun of that?

Meeting time travelers was not my first interaction with the science fictional side of life in New York City. And I'm not talking about the guy with glitter in his hair who played
Twilight Zone
theme music on his saxophone while panhandling on the subway. I'm talking about those moments when reality seems to shift and the SF explanation begins to make more sense than any commonplace rationalization.

In the eighties and early nineties, my husband and I frequented a lovely Mexican restaurant called Tequila's on Columbus. After fifteen years as loyal customers, we were surprised and dismayed to suddenly discover a new restaurant in the same spot called the American Café on Columbus. The Mexican décor was gone, but all the waiters looked the same. Shortly after that, Tequila's on Columbus returned to the exact same place! With the same waiters! Alternate-universe slipping portal, anyone?

Now maybe I should believe the white-haired gentleman who told us the owner had always dreamed of running an American-style café, but really, doesn't that seem like a cover-up to you? It's a lot of work to change restaurants every few weeks! Much more likely that we had chanced upon a location where parallel universes intersected. For years now, the restaurant seems to have stabilized as Cafe Frida's, but I keep an eagle-eyed watch lest it start shifting ground again.

The list goes on. Not long ago, I was crossing 86th Street when I heard the unmistakable pneumatic whine of a time machine. I could have assumed that one of New York's accordion busses was stopping to discharge passengers, but at that very moment I also heard a nervous young woman shout into her cell phone, "Doctor, doctor who?" The bus explanation just does not cover all the variables here.

I am an editor. I know the difference between fact and fiction. I know that if I meet someone on the street who lets me know that he is a citizen of the multiverse and that he's been visited by aliens or time travelers, it is almost certain that he is either telling me a story or is in need of more help than I can give him. Still, sometimes I can't help pretending that the craziest explanation is the best one.

Generally, though, I leave my tin-foil cap at home and navigate the waters of reality with cool, clear-headed logic. Like all adept science fiction readers, I reserve my capacity to suspend disbelief for those times when I am ensconced with a good book or story. A skillful author will immediately convince me that the next-door neighbor has been replaced by a pod person, the monster lurks behind the rock that blocks the path, and the detective is a robot. In the hands of the artist, it doesn't strike me as incredible that a man shrinks, becomes invisible, or ventures to the center of the Earth. I can't imagine why anyone would question aliens who change gender, students who time travel, or children who are gengineered to be sleepless.

I'm happy that my ability to depart for Arrakis, to bridge the mist at Nearside, or to think like a dinosaur has given me the opportunity to inhabit so many different universes. Of course, I also enjoy works set during ordinary days on Earth. But, no matter how much pleasure I get from reading Jonathan Lethem, Lee Smith, or Toni Morrison, I respond best when they bend genres, ghosts drop in, or an author like Shirley Jackson ensures that my ordinary days come with peanuts.

I love living in a science fictional universe. I love being the zany parent who embarrasses her kids with outrageous explanations for why the world works the way it does and I love being a reader of fantastic literature. I never want to completely trade the possibility of a science fictional universe for an utterly humdrum vision of reality. Scientists have claimed that the universe might be a hologram, that they've identified the elusive Higgs boson, and that the universe we inhabit is, indeed, only one of billions. None of these claims is any less weird than most science fictional assertions, but the last one makes me the happiest. Maybe someday I'll rediscover the portal that brings me back to a universe where I can once again dine at Tequila's on Columbus.

A decade ago'it was the column published in the January 2004
Asimov's
-I wrote an essay titled "Neque Illorum Ad Nos Pervenire Potest," which is Latin for "None of us can go to them, and none of them come to us." The phrase was that of the twelfth-century philosopher Guillaume de Conches, writing about the supposed inhabitants of the Antipodes, the lands that lay beyond the fiery sea that was thought to cut Europe off from the as yet unexplored Southern Hemisphere. I used it to express my belief that we are never going to have any close encounters with the inhabitants of other solar systems. They're just too far away. Despite the best efforts of such people as my friends, the brothers Jim and Greg Benford, who even now are working to drum up interest in an interstellar voyage, the distance even to the nearest star is so great that only by magical means (a faster-than-light drive, for instance) are we likely to get to an extra-solar planet and return.

"It's disheartening," I wrote back then. "I've spent five decades [six, now] writing stories about other worlds and other intelligent life-forms, and I don't like the idea that I've simply been peddling pipe dreams all this time. I
do
believe... that the universe is full of populated worlds. I
do
want to know what those alien races look like, how they think, what kind of cities they live in. I'd love to read alien poetry and look at alien sculptures. I might even want to risk dinner at a five-star alien restaurant. But none of that is going to happen... The speed of light is going to remain the limiting velocity not just for us, but for all those lively and interesting people out there in the adjacent galaxies, and that puts the kibosh on the whole concept of a galaxy-spanning civilization."

That there are worlds out there for the finding, plenty of them, if only we could find a way of getting to them, and that those worlds are inhabited, is something I have never doubted. The comic books I read as a small boy, seventy-plus years ago, were full of gaudy tales of "Martians" and "Venusians." Then, in 1948, when I discovered such pioneering collections of science fiction as the great Healy-McComas anthology
Adventures in Time and Space
and Groff Conklin's splendid
A Treasury of Science Fiction,
such stories as Eric Frank Russell's "Symbiotica," A.E. van Vogt's "Black Destroyer," and Arthur C. Clarke's "Rescue Party" lit up my adolescent mind with visions of galaxy upon galaxy filled with an infinite number of intelligent non-human beings. The thought of those infinities still stirs me, so many decades and so many stories later, whenever I look toward the night sky.

In my 2004 essay I calculated just how many inhabited worlds were likely to be out there. I figured there were twelve billion stars in our local galaxy alone that were neither too big nor too small to provide the energy that life-forms of our sort require. "If half of these have planets," I wrote, "and half of those planets lie at the correct distance to maintain water in its liquid state, and half of those are large enough to retain an atmosphere, that leaves us with a billion and a half potentially habitable worlds in our immediate galactic vicinity. Say that a billion of these must be rejected because they're so large that gravity would be a problem, or because they have no water, or because they're in some other way unsuitable. That still leaves 500 million possible Earths in the Milky Way galaxy. And there are millions of galaxies."