Year’s Best SF 15 (18 page)

I strode out toward the distant waves. My steps squelched as I neared the waterline, and I had to pick my way between clumps of seaweed. As I walked, I crunched the plastic chip to shreds in my palm, my exo-skin easily strong enough to break it. When I reached the spume, I flung the fragments into the sea.

“Goodbye,” I said, “and God rest you.”

I shivered as I returned to the upper beach. I felt an irrational need to clamber up the rocks to the cliff-top path, further from the hungry sea.

I'd seen my own future. The exo-skin and the other augments would become more and more of me, and the flesh less and less. One day only the augments would be left, an electronic ghost of the person I used to be.

As I retrieved my clothes from where I'd cached them, I experienced a surge of relief at donning them to rejoin society. Putting on my shoes proved difficult, since I lacked a right foot. I had to reshape my exo-skin into a hollow shell, in order to fill the shoes of a human being.

Tomorrow I would return to the launch base. I'd seek medical attention after we lifted off, when they couldn't remove me from the colony roster for my foolishness. I smiled as I wondered what similar indiscretions my comrades might reveal, when it was too late for meaningful punishment. What would we all have left behind?

What flaws would we take with us? And what would remain of us, at the last?

Now we approach the end of my story, and there is little left. As I once helped a shadow fade, long ago and far away, I hope that someday you will do the same for me.

Gwyneth Jones
(homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann/)
is a speculative fiction writer and Young Adult author who lives in Brighton in the UK. Her YA books are written under the name Anne Halam, and her SF and fantasy is written under her real name, Gwyneth Jones. Gwyneth Jones writes ambitious, feminist science fiction and fantasy, and criticism. She has won a number of awards for fiction, and the Pilgrim Award of the Science Fiction Research Association for her achievements in SF and fantasy criticism. She writes in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ. Her major SF includes
Divine Endurance
(1984), the Bold as Love sequence of novels, and the White Queen trilogy and its associated stories, of which this is one.

“Collision” was published in Geoff Ryman's anthology
When It Changed,
a book of stories based on real science and including commentary on the science involved in each of them (see Ryman story note, later in this book). This story fills in a crucial moment in the White Queen future history, and elucidates a unique mode of interstellar transportation, as well as questions of gender.

D
oes size matter? You can build a particle accelerator on a desktop, but the Buonarotti Torus was huge, its internal dimensions dwarfing the two avatars who strolled, gazing about them like tourists in a virtual museum. Malin had heard that the scale was unnecessary, it was just meant to flatter the human passion for Big Dumb Objects: a startling thought, but maybe it was true. The Aleutians, the only aliens humanity had yet encountered, had never been very good at explaining themselves.

Nobody would have been allowed to keep the Buonarotti on a desktop on Earth, anyway. The voters were afraid an Instantaneous Transit Collider might rend the fabric of reality and wanted it as far away as possible. So the aliens had created the Torus, and set it afloat out here in the Kuiper Belt as a kind of goodbye present—when they'd tired of plundering planet Earth, and gone back from whence they came.

Wherever that was.

But the Aleutians had departed before Malin was born. The problem right now was the new, Traditionalist government of the World State. A fact-finding mission was soon to arrive at the Panhandle station, and the Torus scientists were scared. They were mostly Reformers, notionally, but politics wasn't the issue. Nobody cared if Flat-Earthers were in charge at home, as long as they
stayed
at home. The issue was survival.

Malin and Lou Tiresias, the Director of Torus Research,
were checking rad levels after a recent gamma burst, using high-rez medical avatars. There was a gruesome fascination in watching the awesome tissue damage rack up on their eyeball screens…Luckily the beast needed little in-person, hands-on maintenance. Especially these days, when it was so rarely fired-up.

No transiters would ever take any harm, either. They weren't flesh and blood when they passed through this convoluted way-station.

‘At least they're scientists,' said Lou. ‘My replacement, the Interim Director, is a high-flying gold-medal neurophysicist,
and
a media star.'

‘Huh. I bet she's a Flat-Earther of the worst kind,' growled Malin. ‘What d'you think's going to happen, Lou?'

The World Government was supposed to leave the Panhandle scientists alone.
That was the deal
. In return, it must be admitted, for past services the researchers would rather forget—

‘I'm afraid they're going to shut us down, my child.'

Lou gave a twirl, and a crooked grin. Hir avatar wore a draped white gown, a blue-rinsed perm, rhinestone wingtip glasses and a pantomime beard: an ensemble actually quite close to the Director's real world appearance. With some members of the Torus station community, you had to ask them if they preferred ‘he,' ‘she' or the unisex pronoun. Lou, the funky, reassuringly daft, all-purpose parent figure was obviously a ‘hir.'

‘It's a question of style,' he explained, ruefully.

There were few of Malin's colleagues who hadn't fooled around most
un
-traditionally with their meat-bodies, and few who respected the boring notion of mere male or female sex.

Malin digested the thought that Lou was to be replaced by some brutal, totalitarian, politicised stranger.

‘Will we be black-listed?'

‘Not at all! They'll send us home, that's all.'

Malin had glimpsed movement, on the edge of her screen: sensed a prick-eared scampering, a glint of bright eyes. Who was that, and in what playful form? People often came to the
Torus: just to hang out in the gleaming, giant's cavern, just to delight in the sheer improbablity of it…They say deep space is cold and bare, but Malin lived in a wild wood, a rich coral reef, blossoming with endless, insouciant variety. It thrilled her. She loved to feel herself embedded in the ecology of information, set free from drab constraint: a droplet in the teeming ocean, a pebble on the endless shore—

‘I don't want to go home,' she said. ‘
This
is home.'

 

To the Deep Spacers, mainly asteroid miners, who used their sector of the Panhandle as an R&R station, the Torus was a dangerous slot machine that occasionally spat out big money. They didn't care. The scientists were convinced their project was doomed, and terrified they'd never work again once the IT Collider had been declared a staggering waste of money. The night before the Slingshot was due to dock they held a wake, in the big canteen full of greenery and living flowers, under the rippling banners that proclaimed the ideals of Reform,
Liberté Egalité Amitié
…They toasted each other in the Semillion they'd produced that season, and talked about the good times. It all became very emotional. Dr. Fortune, of the DARPA detector lab, inveterate gamer and curator of all their virtualities, had arrived already drunk, attired in full Three Kingdoms warrior regalia. He had to be carried out in the end, still wildly insisting that the Torus staff should make a last stand like the Spartans at Thermopylae and sobbing—

‘An army of lovers cannot lose!'

Nobody blamed him. The DARPA bums (the lab teams were all nicknamed after ancient search engines) had switched off their circadians and worked flat out for the last 240 hours, gobbling glucose and creatine, trying to nail one of those elusive
turnaround
results that might save this small, beloved world; and they had failed.

 

The ‘fact-finders' arrived, and immediately retired to the visitors' quarters, where they could enjoy stronger gravity and conduct their assessment without bothersome personal contact. The Interim Director herself, alas, was less tactful.
The science sector was a 4-spaced environment, permeated by the digital: Dr. Caterina Marie Skodlodowska didn't have to signal her approach by moving around in the flesh. You never knew when or where she would pop up—and her questions were casual, but merciless.

She asked Lou could ‘he' envisage building
another
Torus. (Dr. Skodlodowska didn't buy unisex pronouns.)

‘Of course! Eventually we'll need a whole network.'

Lou was wise, but ‘he' lacked cunning.

‘Eventually. Mm. But you've analysed all those esoteric Aleutian materials, and you can synthesise? Strange that we haven't been told.'

‘We don't have to synthesise, we can
clone
the stuff. Like growing a cell culture, er, on a very large scale.'

‘So you don't yet know what the T is made of?'

‘But we know it
works
! Hey, you use Aleutian gadgets you don't understand all the time on Earth!'

 

She asked Lemuel Reason, the fox-tailed, clever-pawed technical manager of the Yahoo lab, exactly how many lives had been lost.

‘Very few!' said Lemuel, glad to be on safe ground. ‘Er, relatively. We don't fire-up unless we're pretty sure the destination is safe.'

The Deep Spacers were volunteer guinea pigs, in a lottery sanctioned and encouraged by the World Government. They could apply for rights to a sector of Local-Space, and transit out there to see what they could find. Some went missing, or returned in rather poor shape, but a respectable minority hit paydirt: an asteroid rich in gold or exotics; an exploitable brown dwarf. These sites couldn't yet be exploited, but they were already worth big bucks on the Space Development futures market.

‘I was thinking of the so-called Damned, the political and Death Row prisoners shipped out here for so-called Transportation. I believe you'll find the losses were 100%, and the numbers run into many hundreds.'

Skodlodowska was referring to a sorry episode in the Panhandle's history. The ‘Damned' had been dispatched to
supposedly Earth-type habitable planets, the nearest of them thousands of light years ‘away' by conventional measure. They'd been told that their safe arrival would be monitored, but that had been a soothing lie, for only consciousness, the
information
that holds mind and body together, can ‘travel' by the Buonarotti method. Did Lemuel have to explain the laws of neurophysics?

‘The mass transits were recorded as successful!' cried the Yahoo.

Dr. Skodlodowska smiled sadly.

‘The operation was successful, but the patient died, eh?'

 

They did their best to look busy, to disguise the fact that the great Collider had been more or less in mothballs for years. It was useless, Skodlodowska knew everything, but they had to try. Malin was a JANET, a wake-field analyst. She worked on her core task, sifting archived bit-streams for proof that non-Local transiters had actually arrived somewhere: but she couldn't concentrate. She was poking around in an out-of-bounds area, when her screen flagged a warning and switched to the Buonarotti video, digitised from analogue, that she was using as a safety net…One of the few records of the real Buonarotti to have survived, and quite possibly her only media interview.

‘You're going to break the speed of light this way?' asks the journalist.

‘Break the what?' says the direly dressed, slightly obese young woman, in faux 4D: twisting her hands, knitting her scanty brows, speaking English with a pronounced, hesitant European accent. ‘I don't understand you. Speed, or light, neither is relevant at all. Where there is no duration there is no
speed
.'

Coming over as both arrogant and bewildered—

‘Terrible combination,' muttered Malin, shaking her head.

‘The shiny blue suit and the hair? Or the genius and the journalist?'

The new boss was at Malin's shoulder. Dr. Caterina Marie in the flesh, slender yet voluptuous in her snow-white labsuit and bootees, and (you betcha) absolutely darling lingerie
underneath. The female lead for a C20 sci-fi movie: brave, maverick, beautiful lady scientist.
But there's a Y chromosome in there somewhere
, thought Malin, malignly. She didn't have the genemod for detecting precise shades of sexual identity, but she had friends who did, and something must have rubbed off—

‘The format.' Shame at her secret rudeness made Malin more open. ‘Imagine how it sounded. Kirlian photography. Auras. Breaking the mind-matter barrier. All those ideas, totally bizarre to the general public of the time. But TV interviews aren't everything. Give her a smartboard, let her turn her back on the audience, she'd dazzle you.'

‘I think you like her,' remarked Caterina, in a voice like dark honey.

‘What I know of her, I think I like. But Buonarotti is ancient history and we don't have her notes. The important thing is that our Torus
works
.'

‘I keep hearing that. The Torus does
something
,' corrected the Director, ‘It makes people disappear,
very
expensively. I grant you that.'

Malin forced a smile: it hurt her face. The Transportation episode had been before her time, but she still felt that guilt. So now it was Malin's turn to get fried, or to win the boss over. Ten seconds to save the world—

They didn't have Buonarotti's notes. Everything had been lost in the chaos of the Gender Wars: all they had were fragments and the prototype ‘device' that had been rescued by the Aleutians from the wreckage of battle. To Malin the truth was still self-evident: but Skodlodowska and her bosses might well feel differently. They were Flat-Earthers, after all—

‘Peenemunde Buonarotti invented a means of sending human beings, translated into code by her scanner-couches, around a big collider buried under the rocks of Europe. She split those transcendental packets of code into two, and ramped up the energies so that when they collided, they broke the mind-matter barrier. Nobody understood her, but the Aleutians
did
, and that's how we got the Torus. For an instant, transiters are where speed, time, duration, distance don't exist.
If they've been programmed with a 4-space destination, then
instantly
that's where they'll be. No matter how far—'

She took a deep breath.

The Torus was a black box that seemed, fairly definitely, to take people instantaneously across light years. But proof was elusive.

‘You can't shut us down!' Malin began to babble, unnerved by Dr. Skodlodowska's silence. ‘This is the gateway to the stars! We have gas giant moons, asteroid areas, planetoids, where the prospects for mining are
fabulous
. We have the habitable planets, where you could move in next week. Okay, okay, it's all in need of development, but what we do isn't magical, it's
proven
. There's absolutely no doubt that instantaneous transit happens. We see the event. The only thing we don't have—'

She was out of breath, out of time.

‘Is a repeatable experiment,' said Caterina, dryly. ‘Isn't that what divides science from pseudoscience? Oh, don't look like that—' She laid a hand on Malin's arm, and the touch was a shock, warm and steady. Her dark eyes glowed. ‘Your enemies are back on Earth.
I'm on your side
.'

Yeah, right, thought Malin. That's why you're asking all the awkward questions, and sending our stupid babbling straight back to Earth. But when Caterina had gone she thought it over, staring at the movie of Buonarotti: and then, with sudden decision, opened the file she'd been working on before the boss appeared. Not exactly
secret
, but a little hard to explain.

The DARPA team, as their nickname suggested, were all about destination coordinates: how the linkage between consciousness and specific 4-space location happened. The Yahoos and the Googles studied the human element, the transiters themselves. The possible JANETs (named for a long ago academic and science network) looked for news from nowhere, postcards from Botany Bay…Somewhere in the wake of the monstrous energies of collision, there should be buried fragments of sense-perceptions from the other side. The S-factor, the physical organism, had arrived in another place. Eyes had opened on alien scenes, skin
had felt the touch of another planet's air. There must be some irefutable trace of that landfall, leaking back from the future. The JANETs hadn't found it yet but they lived in hope.