Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (8 page)

As soon as he said this, I knew that the pseudo-doppelgänger def initely wasn't a copy of me. He didn't know the reason I'd originally come to Cockaigne: to attempt a stunt far more diff icult than escaping from a black hole. I'd been postponing it for years, but now it loomed before me. As soon as I completed this exploit, my next and far more diff icult feat would be to walk away... if only I could persuade Veronica to come with me.

The impersonator must be one of my rivals, or perhaps one of their secret backups. I could imagine some of my less scrupulous rivals—Perplexo, or Baron Bonne-Bouche—creating a duplicate who grew weary of his secret existence, impatient to return to public life. Rather than deposing his progenitor, he might prefer to replace a rival performer.

I shivered. No wonder life had become so dangerous behind the curtain, with so much escalating sabotage!

I didn't bother to refuse the offer. I simply pressed the red button. The star grew closer still, filling my camera's field of vision, and turning my adversary into a mere shadow outlined against the brightness.

He yelled with rage, and withdrew the drill. A rush of pure relief made me giddy, as I assumed that he was giving up and retreating.

The respite lasted only for one and a half seconds, the time it took for the drill to transform into a pulse-gun. He fired at the pod, targeting the weak point where the drill had pierced through most of the casing. The pod shuddered under the impact. I knew that a few more blasts would shatter my protective shell.

Frenziedly, I hopped across universes. The immensity of space had never been more vivid to me. If you hop at random, your chance of materializing inside a star is inf initesimal. Even when you find a star nearby, homing in on it still requires a converging series of hops—

The pulse-gun blazed again, and this time the smell of melting plastic filled the pod.

Then the blue-white star swallowed us.

Within my pod, an alarm alerted me that external conditions surpassed the design specs. The interior of a star is a harsher environment than a quiescent black hole. The brightness was overwhelming, saturating my camera's external view into a featureless blur. The infernal heat registered only as a number on the control panel; the pod maintained its temperature by dissipating heat into other universes, but I nevertheless sweated with fear.

If I hadn't been strapped down, I would have been smashed to pieces as the pod was thrown in all directions by the writhing, roiling plasma inside the star. It was the ultimate bumpy ride. Yet despite everything—despite the danger of the star and the threat from my antagonist—a fierce exhilaration rose within me. This was escapology at its purest: an elemental struggle. To be the best, I must master every test.

The pod could barely withstand such a furnace. The thick, rugged exterior was boiling away, second by second. Yet surely my assailant was worse aff licted. Even the magical technology of utopia couldn't manufacture a spacesuit that would last long here.

My coffin shuddered under another jolt from the pulse-gun, but the shot only glanced off the bottom corner. An immensely strong gust from the stellar wind tumbled the pod end over end. The external camera still showed nothing, whited out in the glare of the star. I had no way of knowing whether my enemy still clung on.

The star's plasma was threatening to burst through the drill-hole, the weak point in the pod's shell. Desperate for a respite, I punched the red button. The pod materialized in the empty vastness of another universe.

My passenger had gone. He'd either retreated, or been vanquished: borne away on the stellar gales, if not atomized by the intense heat. The euphoria of survival—of triumph—f illed me.

I wondered who my enemy had been, but I didn't want to find out. We escapologists have our own curtain, veiling the heart of the performance, creating an aura of mystery. We'd collectively created the figure of Death as our antagonist, to spice up our shows and bolster our egos as death-defying performers. But Death must always remain a sinister shadow, never quite def ined, a protean peril ever lurking in the wings....

My adversary might have been one of my rivals, or one of their illicit backups. Maybe he was a creature of the Blight, trying to slink into utopia. He could have been a carefully crafted simulacrum, programmed with a plausible spiel—perhaps I'd secretly constructed him specif ically to become my dark side, sabotaging stunts rather than performing them.

To complete this particular stunt, I needed to collect one last item. The shuttle in which I'd entered the black hole had, throughout its journey, been transmitting the passengers' sense-feeds to their originals in the auditorium. Although the direct link had ended when we crossed the event horizon, the shuttle also routed the signals into an alternate universe. I hopped into that universe and sent a code to the receiving station. The beacon squirted back to me all the transmissions it had received from the shuttle—right until the ship stopped broadcasting, having met its doom at the heart of the black hole.

Finally, I sent a message to my compère, telling him to begin the build-up to the stunt's conclusion. While I'd been battling behind the curtain, the audience had been watching some pre-recorded material. Now it was time to give them their true desire.

I hopped back to the universe I'd started from, arriving within the black hole's accretion disc. A nudge from my thrusters propelled me out of the purple halo, into the clear space beyond.

Over the com channel, I heard gasps and applause from inside the auditorium. I knew how it must look. My escape pod's exterior was blistered and melted. The drill-hole and the pulse-gun scars might not be apparent at first glance, but if the compère had any skill—and I'd hired him for his skill—he would zoom in for a close-up, to show exactly how close to death I'd come.

Although I could have returned to the auditorium using the pod's thrusters, I wished to seem helpless and spent after my ordeal. Half of showmanship is making it look like hard work. A standby spaceship therefore scooped me up. The compère delivered some blurb about a supposed lack of signal from the pod, the com antenna having been burnt off, and so forth. He gave his spiel an ominous, ambiguous note, maintaining tension as to whether I'd survived.

My transport ship docked with a deliberate jolt, creating a deep
clang
that reverberated in the auditorium like a death knell. Mechanical conveyors carried my pod onstage. Now the audience could see its battered surface, and smell the charred casing. It gave them a more visceral sense of the ordeal I'd endured.

A murmur of whispered comments and nervous laughter rippled around the auditorium. I waited for silence. Then I activated the pod's exit mechanism. A side panel exploded outward, crashing onto the floor of the stage.

Sometimes we performers deal in primitive effects: darkness, a sudden loud noise. We manipulate elemental fears—and death is the most primitive fear of all.

I stepped out. After so long strapped into the pod, I was unsteady on my feet, but I let myself stagger forward. It contributed to the impression of adversity, by hinting that I'd gone through unimaginable trauma.

In a quiet, conversational tone, I said, "I have looked into the eyes of Death. I have faced his gaze, fought with him, fended off his scythe."

The audience thought I spoke metaphorically, of course. But I remembered battling my doppelgänger, and the emotion of that encounter fueled my voice, infusing my words with absolute conviction. My audience sensed the core of truth.

"He is not easily withstood," I continued. "Although I rebuffed him, I still bear the taint of his touch. I bring it with me. I have returned here, laden with the blight of mortality.

"It is my gift to you." I raised my arms and raised my voice. "Behold—your own Death!"

And I transmitted the signals I'd retrieved, via the beacon, from the shuttle falling into the heart of the black hole. I sent the final segment, the last minutes before the ship and its passengers were utterly destroyed.

Earlier, the audience had experienced the cut-off as their disposable duplicates fell beyond the event horizon. Now they received far more: the visitation of true death, with all its confusion and terror, as the ship succumbed to the atom-crushing forces deep within the black hole.

I extinguished the spotlights, smothering the auditorium in darkness. I was no longer the center of the performance. For a timeless moment, the audience absorbed the final signals transmitted by their copies as they plunged to their doom.

Screams rang out, echoing across the blackness.

Then silence.

I brought up the house lights, allowing me to see the audience. Some of them had collapsed in their seats, flopping awkwardly at odd angles; one person had died in sympathetic shock, and would need restoring from backup. Others stared at me, looking aghast—or strangely sated. Veronica's eyes were open, but she didn't see me. She had a distant, yearning expression, as though she gazed inwardly at some phantom allurement.

When most of the audience showed signs of recovery, I began my closing patter. "I trust you've all been invigorated by your encounters with Death. It's electrifying, isn't it? It certainly gives us a renewed appreciation of our everyday pleasures, our comfortable lives. But I hope it'll be a long time before you think about returning for another dance with the Jolly Reaper. Leave that to the professionals! We're on intimate terms with Death, and we dance with him so that you don't need to. So, until my next performance... goodnight!"

That was as much of a lecture as a live audience could stand at the end of a show. I wanted to say more about the unconscious death wish that leads immortals to live in volcano craters and earthquake zones, and by which utopia tolerates the Blight, but I'd have a better chance to say it later. When this performance was edited into a video for release to the wider public, I would add some commentary about the sociological context.

The audience applauded; I delivered a final bow. Then I re-entered the pod. The pod disappeared offstage as the curtain fell.

There was an after-show party, of course. You can't bring people to a black hole, give them a taste of Death, and then just send them home. No, they expect a decent buffet and a wide selection of drinks. It's all part of the experience. The brush with extinction sharpens the palate, making the food and wine all the more piquant.

I never attend the parties. An illusionist must maintain a certain distance; his absence creates a space for the audience to discuss the show, and for the show to grow larger in their minds. If the performer attends, he is suddenly a diminished figure, vulnerable to having his costume stained with stray canapés. He risks being buttonholed by audience members who demand to know how the trick was accomplished, or who complain about their agonizing deaths.

In any case, I was in no mood to appear in public. I felt tired and def lated. The escape had been an ordeal, particularly the encounter with my false doppelgänger. He could have killed me: our sabotage pranks had gotten way out of hand. If I wanted to be the best, I needed to move on from such petty rivalries. I needed to complete the exploit I'd planned for so long.

I took a nap and a shower. By the time I emerged, the audience had dispersed. Only Veronica remained.

She looked at me and smiled. "Most impressive," she said. "Most... stimulating."

I wanted to bask in my triumph. I wanted to take Veronica in my arms, and enjoy my moment of glory. We would talk and laugh and look back upon the day, and look forward to the next. Then tomorrow it would be her turn to shine, and she would show me all manner of wonders. And then the next day, we'd attend some friend's concert or exhibition, and find ourselves pleasantly diverted. And so the time would pass: each day a shimmering jewel, unique as snowf lakes... yet somehow all the same.

For too long I'd succumbed to that temptation: just one more day, week, month, year. Just another day to enjoy another dose of happiness, and prove yet again that Cockaigne really was utopia.

If I was ever going to complete my plan, it had to be now. I had to stop postponing the conclusion of my grand scheme.

"Would you like to be part of my next trick?" I asked.

"Of course," Veronica replied, laughing. "What, right now?"

"Yes, right now." I walked through the backstage corridors, Veronica trailing behind me. We entered the auditorium's main chamber: the seats empty, the spotlights off, the curtain still draped across the stage. I immediately felt a vast nostalgia for everything I was about to leave behind. Here in Cockaigne, I could build an auditorium orbiting a black hole, and use it for a single performance. Life was not so straightforward elsewhere.

"The audience have all gone home," Veronica said. "Is this a private show, just for me?"

She thought it would only be a little joke: just another of the surprises that we sometimes sprang upon each other to keep our love fresh, to keep the days sparkling diamond bright.

"Let's sit down," I said, and we sat in the front row.

"We've known each other a long time," I began. In truth, it was longer than I wanted to think about. "You know I wasn't born in Cockaigne. I came here from outside."

Lots of people arrive in Cockaigne every year. It wouldn't be utopia if you couldn't get in.

"I was already an escapologist. When I arrived, I took the opportunity to expand my repertoire, and perform grander exploits. But technology is a two-edged sword. It lets you perform all kinds of stunts, yet it makes them too easy. If we want genuine danger, we have to add it ourselves: sabotage behind the curtain, and whatnot. That's just a way of performing more diff icult feats. Escapology is about the challenge—we have to find that challenge somewhere.

"There's a lot of rivalry among escapologists," I went on, "but we're also colleagues and friends. We talk about what kinds of shows are the best, the ones that put you at the top of your profession. Is it those that most impress the audience? Or is it about the technicalities of the feat itself: the pure escape? What's the hardest possible escape that anyone can perform?"