Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (638 page)

The source of all his troubles—of so many people’s troubles—was a planet orbiting a star called 54 Piscium, some thirty-six light-years away. For two years now, it had been constantly signaling Earth with flashes of intense laser light.

Well, not quite constantly: it signaled for eighteen hours then paused for twenty, and it fell silent once every hundred and twelve days for a period just shy of two weeks. From this, astronomers had worked out what they thought were the lengths of the day and the year of the planet that was signaling us, and the diameter of that planet’s sun. But they weren’t sure; nobody was sure of anything anymore.

At first, all we knew was that the signals were artificial. The early patterns of flashes were various mathematical chains: successively larger primes, then Fibonacci sequences in base eight, then a series that no one has quite worked out the significance of but that was sent repeatedly.

But then real information started flowing in, in amazing detail. Our telecommunications engineers were astonished that they’d missed a technique as simple as fractal nesting for packing huge amounts of information into a very narrow bandwidth. But that realization was just the first of countless blows to our egos.

There was a clip they kept showing on TV for ages after we’d figured out what we were receiving: an astronomer from the last century with a supercilious manner going on about how contact with aliens might plug us into the Encyclopedia Galactica, a repository of the knowledge of beings millions of years ahead of us in science and technology, in philosophy and mathematics. What wonders it would hold! What secrets it would reveal! What mysteries it would solve!

No one was arrogant like that astronomer anymore. No one could be.

Of course, various governments had tried to put the genie back into the bottle, but no nation has a monopoly on signals from the stars. Indeed, anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment could detect the laser flashes. And deciphering the information wasn’t hard; the damned encyclopedia was designed to be read by anyone, after all.

And so the entries were made public—placed on the web by individuals, corporations, and those governments that still thought doing so was a public service. Of course, people tried to verify what the entries said; for some, we simply didn’t have the technology. For others, though, we could run tests, or make observations—and the entries always turned out to be correct, no matter how outlandish their claims seemed on the surface.

I thought about Ethan McCharles, swinging from his fiber-optic noose. The poor bastard.

It was rumored that one group had sent a reply to the senders, begging them to stop the transmission of the encyclopedia. Maybe that was even true—but it was no quick fix. After all, any signal sent from Earth would take thirty-six years to reach them, and even if they replied—or stopped—immediately upon receipt of our message, it would take another thirty-six years for that to have an impact here.

Until then at least, data would rain down on us, poison from the sky.

* * * *

Life After Death:
A belief, frequently encountered in unenlightened races, that some self-aware aspect of a given individual survives the death of the body. Although such a belief doubtless gives superstitious primitives a measure of comfort, it is easily proven that no such thing exists. The standard proofs are drawn from (1) moral philosophy, (2) quantum information theory, (3) non-[Untranslatable proper name] hyperparallactic phase-shift phenomenology, and (4) comprehensive symbolic philosologic. We shall explore each of these proofs in turn …

* * * *

“Ethan was a good man,” said Marilyn Maslankowski. We had left her husband’s office—and his corpse—behind. It was getting late, and the campus was mostly empty. Of course, as I’d seen, it was mostly empty earlier, too—who the hell wanted to waste years getting taught things that would soon be proven wrong, or would be rendered hopelessly obsolete?

We’d found a lounge to sit in, filled with vinyl-covered chairs. I bought Marilyn a coffee from a machine; at least I could do that much for her.

“I’m sure he was,” I said. They were always good men—or good women. They’d just backed the wrong horse, and—

No. No, that wasn’t right. They’d backed a horse when there were other, much faster, totally invisible things racing as well. We knew nothing.

“His work was his life,” Marilyn continued. “He was so dedicated. Not just about his research, either, but as a teacher. His students loved him.”

“I’m sure they did,” I said. However few of them there were. “Um, how did you get to work today?”

“TTC,” she replied. Public transit.

“Where abouts do you live?”

“We have a condo near the lake, in Etobicoke.”

We.
She’d probably say “we” for months to come.

She’d finished her coffee, and I drained mine in a final gulp. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

We headed down some stairs and out to the street. It was dark, and the sky seemed a uniform black: the glare of street lamps banished the stars. If only it were so easy …

We got into my car, and I started driving. Earlier, she’d called her two adult children. One, her daughter, was rushing back to the city from a skiing trip—artificial snow, of course. The other, her son, was in Los Angeles, but was taking the red-eye, and would be here by morning.

“Why are they doing this?” she asked, as we drove along. “Why are the aliens doing this?”

I moved into the left lane and flicked on my turn signal.
Blink, blink, blink.

Off in the distance we could see the tapered needle of the CN Tower, Toronto’s—and, when I was younger—the world’s tallest building, stretching over half a kilometer into the air. Lots of radio and television stations broadcast from it, and so I pointed at it. “Presumably they became aware of us through our radio and TV programs—stuff we leaked out into space.” I tried to make my tone light. “Right now, they’d be getting our shows from the 1970s—have you ever seen any of that stuff? I suppose they think they’re uplifting us. Bringing us out of the dark ages.”

Marilyn looked out the passenger window. “There’s nothing wrong with darkness,” she said. “It’s comforting.” She didn’t say anything further as we continued along. The city was gray and unpleasant. Christmas had come and gone, and—

Funny thing; I hadn’t thought about it until just now. Used to be at Christmas, you’d see stars everywhere: on the top of trees, on lampposts, all over the place. After all, a star had supposedly heralded Jesus’ birth. But I couldn’t recall seeing a single one this past Christmas. Signals from the heavens just didn’t have the same appeal anymore …

Marilyn’s condo tower was about twenty stories tall, and some of the windows had tinfoil covering them instead of curtains. It looked like it used to be an upscale building, but so many people had lost their jobs in the past two years. I pulled into the circular driveway. She looked at me, and her eyes were moist. I knew it was going to be very difficult for her to go into her apartment. Doubtless, there’d be countless things of her husband’s left in a state that suggested he was going to return. My heart went out to her, but there was nothing I could do, damn it all. They should let us touch them. They should let us hold them. Human contact: it’s the only kind that doesn’t hurt.

After letting her off, I drove to my house, exhausted emotionally and physically; for most of the trip, the CN Tower was visible in my rearview mirror, as though the city was giving me the finger.

My son Michael was fifteen now, but he wasn’t home, apparently. His mother and I had split up more than five years ago, so the house was empty. I sat on the living-room couch and turned on the wall monitor. As always, I wondered how I was going to manage to hold onto this place in my old age. The police pension fund was bankrupt; half the stocks it had invested in were now worthless. Who wanted to own shares in oil companies when an entry might be received showing how to make cold fusion work? Who wanted to own biotechnology stocks when an entry explaining some do-it-yourself gene-resequencing technique might be the very next one to arrive?

The news was on, and, of course, there was the usual report about the encyclopedia entries whose translations had been released today. The entries came in a bizarre order, perhaps reflecting the alphabetical sequence of their names in some alien tongue; we never knew what would be next. There’d be an entry on some aspect of biology, then one on astronomy, then some arcane bit of history of some alien world, then something from a new science that we don’t even have a name for. I listened halfheartedly; like most people, I did everything halfheartedly these days.

“One of the latest
Encyclopedia Galactica
entries,” said the female reporter, “reveals that our universe is finite in size, measuring some forty-four billion light-years across. Another new entry contains information about a form of combustion based on neon, which our scientists had considered an inert gas. Also, a lengthy article provides a comprehensive explanation of dark matter, the long suspected but never identified source of most of the mass in the universe. It turns out that no such dark matter exists, but rather there’s an interrelationship between gravity and tachyons that …”

Doubtless some people somewhere were happy or intrigued by these revelations. But others were surely devastated, lifetimes of work invalidated. Ah, well. As long as none of them were here in Toronto. Let somebody else, somewhere else, deal with the grieving widows, the orphaned children, the inconsolable boyfriends. I’d had enough. I’d had plenty.

I got up and went to make some coffee. I shouldn’t be having caffeine at this hour, but I didn’t sleep well these days even when I avoided it. As I stirred whitener into my cup, I could hear the front door opening. “Michael?” I shouted out, as I headed back to the couch.

“Yeah,” he called back. A moment later he entered the living room. My son had one side of his head shaved bald, the current street-smart style. Leather jackets, which had been
de rigueur
for tough kids when I’d been Michael’s age—not that any tough kid ever said
de rigueur
—were frowned upon now; a synthetic fabric that shone like quicksilver and was as supple as silk was all young people wore these days; of course, the formula to make it had come from an encyclopedia entry.

“It’s a school night,” I said. “You shouldn’t be out so late.”

“School.” He spat the word. “As if anyone cares. As if any of it matters.”

We’d had this argument before; we were just going through the motions. I said what I said because that’s what a parent is supposed to say. He said what he said because …

Because it was the truth.

I nodded, and shut off the TV. Michael headed on down to the basement, and I sat in the dark, staring up at the ceiling.

* * * *

Chronics:
Branch of science that deals with the temporal properties of physical entities. Although most entities in the universe progress through time in an orthrochronic, or forward, fashion, certain objects instead regress in a retrochronic, or backward, fashion. The most common example …

* * * *

Yesterday, it turned out, was easy. Yesterday, I only had to deal with
one
dead body.

The explosion happened at 9:42 a.m. I’d been driving down to division headquarters, listening to loud music on the radio with my windows up, and I still heard it. Hell, they probably heard it clear across Lake Ontario, in upstate New York.

I’d been speeding along the Don Valley Parkway when it happened, and had a good view through my windshield toward downtown. Of course, the skyline was dominated by the CN Tower, which—

My God!

—which was now leaning over, maybe twenty degrees off vertical. The radio station I’d been listening to went dead; it had been transmitting from the CN Tower, I supposed. Maybe it was a terrorist attack. Or maybe it was just some bored school kid who’d read the entry on how to produce antimatter that had been released last week.

There was a seven-story complex of observation decks and restaurants two-thirds of the way up the tower, providing extra weight. It was hard to—

Damn!

My car’s brakes had slammed on, under automatic control; I pitched forward, the shoulder belt giving a bit. The car in front of mine had come to a complete stop—as, I could now see, had the car in front of it, and the one in front of that car, too. Nobody wanted to continue driving toward the tower. I undid my seat belt and got out of my car; other motorists were doing the same thing.

The tower was leaning over further now: maybe thirty-five degrees. I assumed the explosion had been somewhere near its base; if it had been antimatter, from what I understood, only a minuscule amount would have been needed.

“There it goes!” shouted someone behind me. I watched, my stomach knotting, as the tower leaned over farther and farther. It would hit other, lesser skyscrapers; there was no way that could be avoided. I was brutally conscious of the fact that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were about to die.

The tower continued to lean, and then it broke in two, the top half plummeting sideways to the ground. A plume of dust went up into the air, and—

It was like watching a distant electrical storm: the visuals hit you first, well before the sound. And the sound was indeed like thunder, a reverberating, cracking roar.

Screams were going up around me. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I felt like I was going to vomit, and I had to hold onto my car’s fender for support.

Somebody behind me was shouting, “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I turned, and saw a man shaking his fist at the sky. I wanted to join him, but there was no point.

This was just the beginning, I knew. People all over the world had read that entry, along with all the others. Antimatter explosions; designer diseases based on new insights into how biology worked; God only knew what else. We needed a firewall for the whole damn planet, and there was no way to erect one.