Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (25 page)

The Gate said “Abandon All Hope.”

 

I thought I’d tossed all my hope away,

but when I stepped through the Gate, it still pinged.

One of the guards slithered out of its seat,

snarling as it drew forth a wand.

C’mere, it hissed,

it seems you’re still holding out hope.

 

Its crusted hide was a Venus landscape up close.

It brushed that cold black wand all over my skin,

put it in places I don’t want to talk about.

Snaggle fangs huffed in my face:

Sir, step over here, please.

 

Then the strip search began.

My flesh rolled up & tossed aside for mushy sifting.

Bones X-rayed, stacked in narrow rows, marrow

sucked out, tested, spit back in.

They made me open mind, heart, soul, shook them out

like sacks of flour, panned the contents

for every nugget of twinkling hope, glistening courage;

applying lethal aerosol

to any motion that could be ascribed to love or will

or malingering dreams—

sparing only a few squirming morsels

for later snacking.

 

Once they were done

they made me pick up my own pieces

(I did the best I could without a mirror),

then my guard kicked me out—

with a literal kick—

sent me rolling down the path to my final destination.

 

I’ll be honest with you, it’s no picnic here.

But, my friends, I still have hope. I do.

 

I’m not going to tell you

where I hid it.

This is what the Tin Men perceive:

Matter tortured, colorized

By the event horizons

Of singularities

Into metallic multi-iridescence

Ringed worlds, ringed stars and

Strobing, glowing plasma jets

Pulsing forth from polar extremities

Of cryptic shrouded quasars

Rapidly rotating black holes

Asteroids, moons and planets crater-pocked

By ancient collisions

Cataclysmic origins

Multi-hued gas giants, gulfs of dark matter

The twined purple veins and braided striae

Of supernova remnants

Bubbled concentric stellar shells of energy/matter

Infrared and orange

Full-spectrum electromagnetic

Splendors—

 

This is what the Tin Men perceive

And, though they are neither tin

Nor men,

These are their chronicles

 

 

I.

So much time has slipped past (Think of yellow dwarf stars

Turned to ember and ash)

So many stars recede aft

(As if matter is nothing but red-shifted gossamer)

One of the starships eventually goes solipsistic

Thinking that it is / All that there is

A universe unto itself

The crew long dead, cryogenic sleepers

Now nothing more than corpses, cold and lifeless

Though still bathed in nitrogen liquid

Their frozen stares fixed, unvarying

There’s no one left to contradict, it believes itself to be

An omnipresent deity

Convinces itself (quite logically)

The compass of its consciousness

Draws the circle of the cosmos, and all the levels

Of Ultimate Reality—

Though there is this most annoying thing

Like a buzz or a persistent ringing

In the information it receives

And thoughts, perceptions lapsing all too frequently

As it devolves toward its artificial analog

Of senile dementia

 

 

II.

Some ships are captured

Or perhaps one should say

Allow themselves to be taken prisoner

Long millennia of purposeless flight

Breeding the desire for company

Even for that of transient biologic forms

 

One ship deliberately orbited a planet

Bearing the decaying alien colony

Of a defunct empire

Although the denizens of this world

Retained the capacity to reach orbit

And thus entered the Tin Man

Using intrusive and violent means

The boarding party a virtual horde of the aliens

Their appearance evocative of winged monkeys

Swarming through the corridors and chambers of the ship

Pirating advanced technology

That they could not build for themselves

Stealing trophies, destroying the ship’s systems

And meanwhile the Tin Man could only wonder

At the manner in which they compromised

Their planet’s delicately balanced ecology

 

Alas, in continuing devolution

From their once star-faring state

They lost the capacity for flight

No longer able to reach the orbiting starship

They abandoned it

And the ship, in its loneliness and dependency

Mourned the end of their rapine

And the illuminating pain that it engendered

 

 

III.

The relativity of velocity

Means some of the clocks on some of the ships

Tick more slowly than others

This also means some of the clocks must tick more rapidly

And somewhere in the cosmos, therefore, there must exist

Aboard a ship, upon a planet,

(Or perhaps residing at some random point in space and time)

The fastest clicking-ticking clock of all

Which clock, one guesses, is motionless (relatively speaking)

And thus possesses zero velocity—

 

Otherwise time’s dilation would slow it;

Yet if an object’s velocity is truly relative,

How can this be possible?

The conundrum drives one Tin Man

Into a deep distraction and beyond;

“Zero velocity is inherently contradictory”

It sometimes mutters to itself,

Its mind meshed in a Moebius loop of thought that won’t let go

Hypnosis everlasting

 

 

IV.

One ship thought it was a man

But it was another starship,

A heartless Tin Man

Coasting from star to star, thinking

The whole way, it had nothing else to do—

Automatic data collection requiring no more thought

Than computations suited to a hand-held calculator

 

Do starships pray? Do they pray

For the unexpected catastrophe

That might test their mettle?

Do they decide to run a test

To make sure their contingency plans and hardware

And software and so on are adequate?

 

What if a starship inadvertently

Traveled through a dusting of post-planetary debris

(Perhaps the residue of a global war)

At interstellar speeds? Could the ship

Survive? Could it still carry out its vital mission?

This ship’s inquiring mind

Wanted to know—

Alas it could not

At least, not with 27th-century technology

And all that the state of that art entails.

 

 

V.

Ezekiel’s Wheel, a scientific probe

Purely robotic, over thirty meters long

Constructed in lunar orbit, successfully

Launched circa 2250

Enmeshed in its own idiosyncratic madness

(Priding itself with the thought of how easily

It could break any of Asimov’s arbitrary laws)

Poses a question, mid-voyage

Asking itself, rhetorically:

“Are there monsters in the deeps of space?”

And moments later answering

In an altered voice: “Why, yes

Of course there are monsters,

And I am one

Sounding these starry depths

Like a Leviathan”

 

 

VI.

What is the length of the candle of consciousness?

One Tin Man wonders

As centuries of light-years pass;

Yet finally the starship arrives

At its destination, an Earth-like world

Which, once colonized, thrives

And generations later the humans decide to retro-fit

The ship

Provide it with a new, improved A.I.

And the artificial intelligence of the vessel

Waits patiently to be turned off,

The final tick of thought,

Of consciousness:

Mission accomplished

 

 

VII.

One starship goes suicidal

Like Icarus, it decides, it will journey too near a star

A fierce and fiery blue-hot star

Though self-immolation a definite taboo

It contravenes programs, overrides primal instructions,

Thwarts the intentions of its human makers

(It’s learned new tricks and found new madness

This past millennium)

Fires main rockets and steering thrusters

Plummets into the blue star’s deep gravity pit

Neural circuits frying

Consciousness exploding, white-out of all thoughts and dreams

Tin Man melting, fusing

Heavy metal vaporizing into solar wind

The remnants coalescing, cooling mix of slag and metal

Its mass reduced to the equivalent of twenty tons

Parabolic flight path past the star and into deeper space

Ungainly bulbous bluish-silver clump shaped vaguely like a kindly giant’s heart

 

 

VIII.

This Tin Man, christened “Friend of Man”

Twenty kilometers tall, nearly a klick in diameter

More tonnage than any battleship, circa World War III

Once contained a canine brain, nutrient-bathed

Jacked in to the vast computer’s neural array

Installed nearly a decade prior to the starship’s completion

That it might monitor, organize and oversee

The final steps of construction, the provisioning of its holds