Gateways (15 page)

All sense of time vanished, dissolved in pain. The little window felt like it was on fire. Using his feet and legs and back, he had to fight a war with
himself, and the instinctive part seemed much more sane! As if he were trying to feed his own eye to a monster.

And then—

Black, floating letters returned. But he could not read the blurs. They clustered around his fovea, jostling for attention, interfering with his ability to concentrate. Wer sobbed aloud, even as the green reflections faded.

“I know! I’m . . .
trying
to hold on!”

Finally, the characters coalesced into a single one that filled every space within his agonized eye.

STOP

Meaning took a few more seconds to sink in. Then, with a moan that filled the little compartment, Wer let own body weight drag him back. He collapsed upon the passenger seat, quivering.

A minute or so passed. He rubbed his left eye free of tears. The right seemed too livid, too raw and damaged, to touch or even try to open. Instead of blindness, though, it seemed filled with specks and sparkles and random half-shapes. The kind that never came into focus, but seemed to hint at wonders and terrors, beyond reality.

Slowly, a few of the dazzles traded formlessness for pattern.

“Leave me alone!” he begged. But there was no way to escape messages that took shape inside your very own eye. Not without tearing it away. Oh, what a tempting thought.

While he cursed technology, clear characters formed. These featured a
brightness
around the edges that they never had before.

Wer, I represent a community

—a smart mob—with members

around the entire world . . .

and we want to help you.

Some small presence of mind was returning. At least, enough to notice a change. More than just the characters’ shape and color were different. Indeed, they felt less like the simple responses of a partial ai. More like words sent by a living person.

He must have subvocalized it as a question, because when they next reconfigured, the figures offered an answer

Yes, Wer, my name is Tor Sagittarius.

I’m pleased to meet you.

Now I’m afraid we must insist.

Please get up and take action.

There is very little—

“I know! Very little time!” He felt on the verge of hysterical laughter.

So many factions. So many petty human groups wanted him to hurry, always hurry.

A groaning mechanical sound. The sea serpaint started to vibrate around him.

We’ve suborned the machine’s software.

Ordered the jaws to stay open.

It may only be temporary.

He didn’t need futher urging. While keeping his right eye closed, Wer bent to slip the worldstone into its carrier, then started crawling forward as the giant robot rocked and convulsed. Keeping the worldstone in front of him, he had to push and squeeze through constrictions, like a throat that kept trying to swallow him back down . . . only to then spasm the other way, as if vomiting something noxious.

Finally, spilling into the snake’s mouth, he found that its head was rising and falling, slapping the water, splashing torrents of spume inside. The jaws kept juttering, as if trying desperately to close. And he knew, at any moment, they might succeed.

Scrambling desperately, Wer grabbed a garish tooth, hauling himself and the satchel toward the welcoming brightness outside—

—only to pause before making the final leap.

Don’t be afraid, Wer . . .

He shouted: “Be quiet!”

And swung the valise with all his might, smashing it against the inner face of the serpent’s left eye casing, which caved in with a satisfying, tinkling sound. He then cried out and did it again to the other one. Those things weren’t going to aim burning lasers at him, once he was outside. Nor was he worried about the worldstone, which had survived deep space and collision with a mountain glacier.

Good thinking!

Now . . .

He didn’t need urging. Not from any band of “smart mob” amateurs, sitting in comfortable homes and offices around the world, equipped with every kind of immersion hardware, software, and wetware that money could buy. Their help was welcome, so long as they shut up.

While the serpent-machine thrashed and its jaws kept threatening to snap shut, Wer heaved with all his might, scrambling like a monkey till he stood, teetering on the lower row of metal teeth—

—then leaped toward the buoy, as if for life itself, hurtling across intervening space—

—only to splash into the sea, just short, with the heavy satchel dragging
him down by one hand. His other one clawed at the buoy, fingers seeking any sort of handhold. . .

. . . and failed, as he sank beneath the floating cylinders, hauled by the weight of his treasure bag, plummeting toward the depths, below.

Yet, Wer never fretted. Nor was he even tempted to let go of the worldstone, to save his life.

In fact, he suddenly felt just fine. Back in his element, at last. Doing his job and practicing his craft. Retrieving and recycling the dross of other days. Hauling some worth out of the salty, trash-strewn mess that “intelligent life” had made of the innocent sea.

His free hand grabbed at—and finally caught—the chain anchoring the buoy to the shoulder of a drowned mountain. Then, as the mechanical serpent thrashed nearby, crippled in its mind and body, but still dangerous as hell, Wer also seized the metal-linked tether with his toes.

Maybe there was enough air in his lungs to make it, he thought, while starting to climb.

If so? Then, once aboard the buoy, he might evade and outlast an angry robot. Possibly.

After that? Perhaps the help sent by his new friends in the “smart mob” would arrive before the snake’s clandestine cabal did. Before the sun baked him. Or thirst or sharks claimed him.

And then?

Clambering awkwardly but steadily up the chain, Wer recalled something that Patri Menelaua said, back at Newer Newport, when the worldstone entity denounced the famous Havana Artifact, calling it a tool of interstellar liars.

“We have got to get these two together!”

Indeed. With the whole world watching. No more cabals and secret societies. Time to have it out, in front of everybody. And this time, Peng Xiao Wer would be in the conversation!

A bit amused by his temerity—the very nerve of such a vow, coming from the likes of him—Wer pondered as he kept climbing, dragging an ancient chain letter toward the light of day.

Yeah, right
.

Just keep holding your breath.

I mused and fretted over what story to offer, for an anthology collected to honor Frederik Pohl. I finally chose “Shoresteading,” in part, because it is about an ordinary man, swept up by extraordinary events—a theme that Fred evoked many times, over the course of an illustrious career.

A career that he spent both creating new worlds and helping others to do the same. Both as a prolifically creative author and as an agent-editor who coaxed other authorial visions into life, Fred Pohl may be responsible for more new “universes” coming into being than any other mortal . . . a point we’ll return to, later.

Sure, they were all universes of the imagination—many of them so ephemeral that they only endured in human thought for the duration of a single monthly issue of
Galaxy
or
If
. Others, like
The Space Merchants
and
Jem
and
Man Plus
may actually divert the path of human destiny, forever, as we modify our policies and creative ambitions, diverting them a little, because of warnings and thought experiments erected by Frederik Pohl.

Even if Fred’s visions had no lasting impact in the real world, there would be another reason for awed respect. I’ll get to it in a moment. But first a personal note, as a longtime fan of Fred’s work.

Wolfbane
was one of the earliest SF novels I read, and at the time it certainly seemed the creepiest! In contrast, some of his other works with Cyril Kornbluth, such as
Gladiator at Law
, though fun adventures, also helped spur my lifelong habit of doubting all ends of the silly, nonsensical, so-called left-right political axis. Provoking people to rethink their own assumptions—now that’s writing.

One nearly forgotten Pohl book ought to tower high on any shrine of modern techno-visionary prophecy.
The Age of the Pussyfoot
was one of the only science fiction stories of the fifties through seventies that envisioned computers becoming common household tools, owned and used, avidly, by nearly everybody. In fact, to my knowledge it is just about the
only
work of prophetic fiction to foresee citizens carrying about portable, computerized assistants that would fulfill all the functions we now see gathering together in our futuristic cell phones. And you can bet I salivate for the even better versions he foresaw. Pohl’s “joy-maker” device is as marvelous an on-target prediction as Jules Verne predicting submarines or trips to the moon.

In
The Cool War
, Frederik Pohl showed a chillingly plausible failure mode for human civilization, one in which our nations and factions do not dare to wage open conflict, and so they settle upon tit-for-tat patterns of reciprocal sabotage, ruining one another’s infrastructures and economies, propelling our shared planet on a gradual death spiral of lowered expectations degraded hopes. It is a cautionary tale that I cite often today, a recommended reading for those at the top of our social order.

I could go on and on, but have no more time or space for details. So let me just make a central point about a man who I am proud to call a colleague, in what may be the highest of all human professions. . . .

Wait a minute. Brin said what? Oh, sure, readers of this book probably like science fiction. But isn’t that taking things a bit too far, calling sci fi writing the highest profession?

Well, in a profound irony that ought to amuse—or perhaps grate on—the many atheists and agnostics who write SF, let me suggest that no other calling, not even that of monk or priest, has a greater claim to sacred status.

After all, what was purportedly God’s greatest act, other than creating the universe?

And what do science fiction authors do, almost every day, but erect new worlds, and characters to inhabit them?

If a father is proud of children who precociously try to pick up the parent’s tools and apprentice in his craft, then whose play is more likely to rouse a smile from the Big Creator?

Oh, sure, Fred Pohl cannot parse Maxwell’s equations very well and when he says “let there be light!” the incantation only flashes briefly, inside the heads of a few hundred thousand readers—a blaring supernova here, a slicing laser flash there, or else a brilliant insight into some small part of the human soul. Sure, that’s small potatoes, on the cosmic scale of things. On the other hand, it is a step. And no human ever did it better.

I suppose that is why I urged the great asteroid-hunter, Dr. Eleanor Helin, to pick a couple of her discoveries and name them after two of the greatest . . . the two “poles” of sci fi . . . Frederik Pohl and Poul Anderson. They are out there now . . . glittering hunks of rock and metal and precious frozen vapors. Just waiting for our heirs to go out and—perhaps—mine those riches and turn them into wondrous things. And when they do, I am sure they’ll hold another festschrift in honor of the dreamers who helped to make it all so.

—D
AVID
B
RIN

Let’s call our explorer Bert. His true designation was long and complicated and included elements vaguely similar to letters and numbers, but insofar as a human mouth could pronounce the first few sounds, they would be something like Bert.

Bert was endlessly curious, as befitted an explorer, and also endlessly patient, which was a good thing, since Bert had been traveling, at a substantial fraction of c, for a very long time, with little to show for the journey but stray hydrogen atoms. Thus, who could blame him for perking up at the first tenuous signals, at a variety of radio frequencies, from
that
direction?

With something potentially interesting waiting for him, there was braking to be done, and a slight course correction, not easy when all you had to work with was the lightly ionized interstellar medium. But at a high fraction of c, it could be done. The slower he went, though, the trickier it became. Fortunately, there was a convenient gas giant on the way, and Bert could use its gravity to swing into the inner system for a closer look at the source of the broadcasts.

Unfortunately, Bert was a trifle off in calculating his trajectory. This was forgivable, for he was, after all, the who-knows-how-many-hundredth generation removed from the first explorers sent out by their creators, and minor replication errors did occasionally occur. He had planned on going into orbit around the source of the broadcasts, data-mining as fully as possible from that vantage, sending information home on the tightbeam, and making a few copies of himself before moving on. Instead, this time, he found himself plunging into a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, sliding deep into the gravity well, and although he was far too sturdy to become a spark in that atmosphere, his vernier impellers were also too weak to escape that gravity field’s grip. He made a crater many times his own size when he struck the surface.