Last Plane to Heaven (9 page)

She knew that because the evening's east wind was rising, already nibbling into her body warmth and making her wish she'd brought a shoulder blanket.

“East. The root of the word ‘orientation' includes the concept of facing east.” After a brief pause, the Gun added in a smug tone, “For your convenience, Username Here, I have been programmed with an extensive array of help files that far exceed my core design parameters.”

The Girl began to back away, stepping into her own footprints with the automatic caution of anyone who'd survived long enough to be twelve years old. “I don't know who Username Here is, but that's not me.”

The Gun's tone changed. “Please don't go. I have been neglected for so long.” Almost whining now, it said, “I believe you would say I am lonely.”

Pausing in her retreat, the Girl let curiosity get the better of caution. “Where
are
you?”

The east wind whistled into the silence that followed her question. She began backwalking again when the Gun finally answered in a very small, shamed voice. “I am not certain. My last known GPS position was fixed one hundred forty-seven years, five months, three days, two hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds ago. My inertial trackers went into fail mode ninety-three years, eleven months, seventeen days, twelve hours, one minute, and fifty-nine seconds ago. However, I believe I am inside of an oak tree.”

The Girl fastened onto the only part of the Gun's speech she could understand. “Oak tree?” She looked around carefully.

Four oaks stood within a stone's throw of her. They were each knotty and gnarled in the manner of their kind. Their bark was cracked and their trunks were splitting. The Girl had the vague idea that it used to rain a lot more than it did these days, and she assumed the oaks, like everything else under the brassy sun, were saving themselves for water. But no one was sitting in any of the trees, and nothing larger than a bird's nest could have been hidden from her.

“Inside?” she echoed, thinking on the words with more care.

“Perhaps a knothole?” the Gun replied hopefully, meeting her question with a question. “My degree of confidence in my location-finding has asymptotically trended towards zero.”

The Girl knew she should head for her bolthole. She hadn't actually had anyone to talk to since the Other Girl had died last winter, of an infected cut from a barbed-wire fence. The bones in the Parent Cave were good listeners, but they never had anything to say. She'd long ago played out her memories of talking to the Mother, gaunt as leather stretched over cedar posts. The Mother had poured out everything that a Mother could tell a Girl about living in this world, before her words fled with her bones to join all the other Parents three winters past.

She'd seen Men in the distance three times since the Mother had died, but the Girl knew she should only show herself or speak to Women. Except Women never came weaving their way among the rusted mounds down the High Road. Only Men with bows and knives and staves and expressions of such starved intensity that the Girl could not imagine approaching them.

Yet now someone was actually
talking
to her.

She began searching the oaks carefully one by one, studying the splits and knotholes and bear stroppings and rotted bits. The Gun encouraged her with small words, complimenting the Girl on her powers of observation, but something about the flat, toneless echo of the voice meant she couldn't just follow the sound.

Finally she found a dark, hollow nub of metal embedded into a small burl.

“Is this you?” she asked, touching it carefully.

“Yes!” the Gun said, and it sounded so thrilled the Girl could only smile.

“You're, well …
stuck
 … inside the tree.”

“My last user placed me in a hollow for safekeeping.” The Gun's glee had fled once more.

“Username Here?” the Girl asked. “Is she dead now?”

“Everyone I have ever known is dead now.” The Gun had decided not to elaborate on its role in some of those deaths. Over the silent, lonely years, it had begun to question its purposes.

“I'll need to fetch my axe and cut you out,” the Girl said. “And it's getting colder.”

“Please, don't leave me.”

“I cannot stay here at night. Wolves come, and maybe even Men. Besides,” she added with the practicality of a born survivor, “it will be too cold and I don't have blankets or a fire.”

“Fire?” the Gun asked. “I can fire.”

“I don't think we mean the same thing,” the Girl said carefully, wary once again. She scooped up a few more acorns that were scattered close to hand, tucked them into her bark-weave carryall, and turned her back on the oaks. She had decided the Gun was some sort of Man, maybe a ghost or something.

As she walked away, the Gun performed a swift series of ballistic computations. Yes, it could. Firing on the Girl with self-guided munitions had a 94.37 percent accuracy even under current compromised conditions, and was well within the Gun's core design parameters. But no, it did not want to. The Gun was not sure why. Perhaps because the world was full of dead people. Mostly, though, it realized she might come back and talk some more.

“Good-bye,” said the Gun. Only the east wind answered, whistling a lonely tune amid the twilight oaks as the Girl faded to a flitting shadow and the brassy sun retreated to trouble the far side of the world.

 

The Speed of Time

When editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden bought this story for Tor.com, he told me it was like reading a novel packed into a few thousand words. That might have been the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.

“Light goes by at the speed of time,” Marlys once told me.

That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat.

There is no
t
in
e
=
mc
2
.

I'd argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all.

*   *   *

Let me tell you a story about Sameera Glasshouse.

She'd been an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech, certifications from several middle-tier authorities, bouncing from contract to contract in trans-Belt space. Ten thousand women, men, and inters just like her out there during the Last Boom. We didn't call it that then; no one knew the expansion curve the solar economy had been riding was the last of anything. The Last Boom didn't really have a name when it was under way, except maybe to economists.

Sameera had been pair-bonded to a Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the surname long after she'd dropped Roz from her life. For one thing, “Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese grandmother, which was a reward in itself.

She was working a double ticket on the Enceladus Project master depot, in low orbit around that particular iceball. That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded housing allocation and a fatter pay packet for her trouble. The EP got to schlep one less body to push green inside their habitat scrubbers. Everybody won.

Her spare time was spent wiring together Big Ears, to listen for the chatter that flooded bandwidth all over the solar system. Human beings are—were—noisy. Launch control, wayfinding, birthday greetings, telemetry, banking queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out there, multiplied and ramified beyond comprehension by the combination of lightspeed lag, language barriers, and sheer overwhelming complexity.

Some folks back then claimed there were emergent structures in the bandwidth, properties of the sum of all the chatter that could not be accounted for by analysis of the components. This sort of thinking had been going around since the dawn of information theory—call it information fantasy. The same hardwired apophenia that made human beings see the hand of God in the empirical universe also made us hear Him in the electronic shrieking of our tribe.

Sameera never really believed any of it, but she'd heard some very weird things listening in. In space, it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped playing in the bandwidth. When she'd picked up a crying child on a leaky sideband squirt out of a nominally empty vector, she'd just kept hopping frequencies. When she'd tuned on the irregular regularity of a coded data feed that seemed to originate from deep within Saturn's atmosphere, she'd just kept hopping frequencies.

But one day God had called Sameera by name. Her voice crackled out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the three syllables over and over and over in a voice that resonated down inside the soft tissues of Sameera's body, made her joints ache, jellied the very resolve of the soul that she had not known she possessed until that exact moment.

Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down to the master depot's tiny sacramentarium.

Most people who worked out in the Deep Dark were very mystical but not the least bit religious. The sort of spiritual uncertainty that required revelation for comfort didn't mix well with the brain-numbing distances and profound realities of life in hard vacuum. Nonetheless, by something between convention and force of habit, any decent-sized installation found space for a sacramentarium. A few hardy missionaries worked their trades on the EP just like everyone else, then spent their off-shifts talking about Allah or Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path.

It was as good a way as any to pass the time.

Terrified that she'd gotten hold of some true sliver of the Divine—or worse, that the Divine had gotten hold of some true sliver of her—Sameera sought to pray in the manner of her childhood. She was pretty sure the sacramentarium had a Meccascope, to point toward the center of the world and mark the times for the five daily prayers.

She ached to abase herself before the God of her childhood, safely distant, largely abstract, living mostly in books and the minds of the adults around her. A God who spoke from the radio was far too close.

Slipping through the sacramentarium's hatch amid the storage spaces of corridor Orange-F-2, Sameera bumped into a man she'd never seen before.

He was dark skinned, in that strangely American way, and wore a long linen thawb with lacing embroidered around the neck. He also wore the small, round cap of an al-Hajji. In one hand he carried a leather-bound book—actual paper, with gilt edges, worn through long handling.

A Quran, she realized. A real one, like her grandmother's.

The man said something in a language she did not understand, then added, “My pardons” in the broken-toned Mandarin pidgin so commonly spoken in the Deep Dark.

“My mistake,” Sameera muttered in the same language.

“You have come to pray. In search of God?”

“No, no.” She was moved to an uncharacteristic fit of openness. (Her time as Mrs. Glasshouse had left her with an opaque veneer she'd not since bothered to shed.) “I've found God, and now I've come to pray.”

His expression was somewhere on the bridge between predatory and delighted.

“You don't understand,” Sameera told him. “She spoke to me, out of the Deep Dark.”

Another crazy,
his face said, but then he hadn't felt the buzzing in his bones.

*   *   *

It doesn't matter what happened next. All that matters was that she told the imam. Revelation is like that. Put a drop of ink in a bowl of water, in a moment all the water takes on that color. The ink is gone, but the water is irreversibly changed.

That was the beginning of the end.

Or, for a little while, the end of the beginning.

Marlys found it funny, at any rate.

Another thing she used to tell me was that we are all time travelers, moving forward at a speed of one second per second. The secret to time travel was that everyone already does it. The equations balance themselves.

Time has to be more than an experiential matrix—otherwise entropy makes no sense—but there's nothing inherently inescapable about the rate at which it passes. If human thoughts moved with the pace of bristlecone pines, we would never have invented the waterwheel, because rivers flash like steam in that frame of reference. Likewise if we were mayflies—flowing water would be glacial.

So much for the experiential aspect of time. As for the actual pace, well, life goes by at the speed of time. I don't think Marlys was looking for a way to adjust that, it was just one of those things she said, but her words have always stayed with me.

*   *   *

In 1988 the Soviet Union spent a considerable and extremely secret sum of money on a boson rifle. Only the Nazis rivaled the Soviets for crackpot schemes and politically filtered science. America under the Republicans was in its way crazier, but all they truly wanted was to go back to the fifties when middle-aged white men were safely in charge. The Soviets really did believe in the future, some friable concrete-lined version of it where the eternally withering State continued to lead the workers toward a paradise of empty shelves and dusty bread.

Their boson rifle was pointed at the United States, of course. Figuratively speaking. The actual device was buried in a tunnel in Siberia. More accurately, it
was
a tunnel in Siberia, a very special kind of linear accelerator running through kilometer after kilometer of carefully maintained hard vacuum hundreds of meters beneath the blighted taiga.

A casual misreading of quantum mechanics, combined with Politburo desperation for a way out of the stifling mediocrity that had overcome solid Marxist-Leninist thought, had led to it. An insane number of rubles went down that hole, along with a large quantity of hard currency, not to mention the lives of hundreds of laborers and the careers of dozens of physicists.