Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  Keitel decided to chance a direct statement. —You wanted a cure, and couldn’t afford cryogenics on Earth.

  Said Bright, —And isn’t that where the service gets half its men? But not me. The pain of consciousness, which death does not abate, is what I want a cure for.

  —Are you dead, Jack?

  —I’m a memory. See, that’s how I know. I always had a dreadful memory, Will, but now everything is coming back—why, I’ve remembered a dream I had when I was five, two hundred years ago. In the dream I wake up before morning, the house is dark, and I try to put on lights. But they come on only faintly, and as I jiggle the switches it gets darker and darker. Then the shadows come alive. And I even remember that I told my brother this dream once, and he said seriously, I have a flashlight under my bed, and you can use that; it always works. And you know, it did. I never had that dream again. And I remember too when I was in school studying literature this line from a story: mirrors and copulation are abominable because they duplicate entities. Now what is that from? It was on an upper-right hand page.

  —I don’t know.

  —You ought to know, Will. And ... I never had a woman.

  —Jack, that’s not true.

  —Even before, I never had a woman who wasn’t contracepted. Never a chance to, to. . . . Suicide missions. I feel them thrashing there in the dark.

  Bright then covered his head with his arms. When he looked out he said, —What was that?

  —Was what?

  —What I was saying. Did I fall asleep?

  —No. I think we’re done for today. Try to get some rest.

  —Yes. Let the dead bury the dead.

  ~ * ~

  2. A Game of Chess

  —Wulf? said Koster. —This is it?

  —Oh yes. Concatenation of narrow-band signals at one megawatt. No mistaking it.

  —So where the hell’s the antenna? The power supply?

  —Underground.

  —Ridiculous. Why hide it?

  —Sir, the best guess was that this is an automated station. I think that’s right. This planet is long dead.

  —And it’s been transmitting for what, three hundred years? Without maintenance? Without power?

  —Tides, possibly. Planet this size has a lot of kinetic energy even turning slow as it does.

  The dwarf sun was now threatening the horizon. They stood at the threshold of the building.

  —We go in singly. Each take a room. Keep your recorders running. Twenty minutes if you don’t find anything.

  They went in.

  ~ * ~

  Violet shimmer in the air. Keitel turned. A purple sphere circled him and colored through the spectrum to red, then vanished. He ceased to turn. Then in front of him a diffuse orange glow condensed into a sphere large as himself and turned milky. The milk pulled itself into galactic spirals, which commenced to swirl so rapidly they disappeared. Then the sphere was blue, brown, and green. Keitel circled it and saw it was a globe with one land mass. A faint blue halo extended nearly an inch from its surface. Broad estuaries slowly cracked the continent. He ran his hand over a brown area and felt a roughness like unfinished wood. The blue area was wet; his finger penetrated it to a depth of a millimeter and then encountered the same roughness.

  Now there were four distinct continents on the globe, or perhaps five. In the slanting light, microscopic mountains cast shadows. On the night side of the globe he fancied brief red pinpricks. The continents pulled apart, making six, two of them bound by a slender isthmus, another two roughly abutted. Cold white pulsed regularly down from the pole. For hours he was rapt as a child with a kaleidoscope. Occasionally he sat on the floor with his eyes shut for a few minutes and returned to find the continents inches farther apart. When the configuration grew familiar, he commenced to scan the globe closely. He found, in a favorable light, a line no thicker than a blond hair snaking up the east of Asia. On the night side he hunted for faint yellow glows.

  It seemed to him the white wisps of galaxies were becoming more distinct, and the continents now moved imperceptibly, as if the time scale of the model was slowing.

  His hand was resting on Japan when he felt a stab of pain. On his palm were two charred dots, equivalent to burns from a powerful laser pulsed for a nanosecond. He backed away. Almost at once there was a constellation of white flashes across Asia and America. He covered his eyes with his burned hand.

  When he looked up he saw a fading streak like a vapor trail, clearly diagrammatic and not part of the model; it circled Earth twice and extended tangentially through a wall of the room. He peered closer, his eyes weak from much seeing, but now granted it seemed a second precision from fatigue, and saw glinting motes like dust moving in blurry circles two inches above the globe. After many minutes more he saw a considerable silver speck, the size of a comma, hanging in synchronous orbit over America. As he watched, it vanished, leaving the same diagrammatic vapor trail he had seen before. With this the model came to rest. The milk coalesced into clouds and stood still. The orbiting motes stopped. Keitel knew without doubt that he had just witnessed the launch of Daedelus 7, the first mile-long, manned interstellar craft to leave Earth in 2082.

  ~ * ~

  Whine overhead. Jobes hunched like a dog. The tone descended in pitch, until the entire room throbbed like an organ loft. Jobes clapped his hands to his ears, and the pitch went lower still, loosening his sphincters. When he came to himself he was kneeling in a pool of urine. His nose bled. A drop of blood struck the tile and vanished into it. Then, in a red glow over the tile, Joves saw a sudden shifting of images, resolving into a gelatinous sphere enclosing a smaller sphere of deeper hue. He studied this, and at last said: —A red corpuscle.

  The image blurred and twisted itself. Jobes took a breath.

  —Deoxyribonucleic acid.

  The image changed again. Jobes confronted himself, naked, six inches tall.

  —Oh my God.

  The image waited. Jobes said: —Homo sapiens.

  There was a pause. Then the image flickered rapidly. Barely able to keep up, Jobes said: —Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, pithecanthropus, australopithecus, ramapithecus, proconsul, p, propliopithecus, amphipithecus . . . Christ! He left off. Another minute passed in silence. At last the image rested. Said Jobes: —Chaos chaos, I believe.

  In a moment the image reversed itself and, like a maturing tree, created branches, first dozens, then hundreds and thousands, filling the tiles, turning the room into a menagerie. At his feet Jobes saw his own image emerge unchanged.

  —Do that again, he said.

  The room complied, and this time he watched some of the beasts evolve. Each had a characteristic movement, which generally repeated a number of times and terminated in a green splash of dissolution. He observed the great lizards, and the amphibians, and was startled again when the tree shrew scampered to its feet and grew, in thirty seconds, to the image of himself. But this time the room went on, and he saw, almost before it happened, the abrupt disappearance of genus homo. Cetaceans frolicked a moment, then the room was filled with a polyphonic glissade of membranous wings; his hands flailed through the holographic swarm. Then a barrage of green flashes left the room blank.

  He turned, and saw his body again, life size. A speedy and deft dissection followed. The major systems were left standing in single file, unsupported. Another image detailed the articulation of the hand. Another detailed the brain, shrinking and expanding parts in orderly fashion. The gray dome was shot through with rivers of phosphorescence. It dizzied him to watch, and so he left.

  ~ * ~

  In Roeg’s room a restless hum. It had thickness, and a constantly shifting overtone structure.

  —What is this? murmured Roeg.

  The timbre of the sound slid slightly, as if rocks had been moved in a fast-running brook.

  Roeg repeated: —I said, what is this?

  The timbre of the stream shifted again and began to stutter. Suddenly Roeg recognized the sound: it was
a set of vowels, changing rapidly and at random.

  —You’re listening to me. Trying to learn to speak:

  Again the babel of vowels changed. There began scattered stops and plosives, and Roeg could now distinguish discrete phonemes.

  —How far can this go? Is it possible you can extract meaning? First you’d want a hierarchy of rules, what sounds can and can’t go together, then some assumptions about grammar, and finally a vocabulary of words that can’t be defined from context.

  The stream broadened, slowed, and the sounds became more prolonged.

  —Personally I don’t believe it. You may be a deft mimic, but. . . .

  The sound abruptly stopped. In the silence Roeg stopped as well. Then he heard: —What is mimic?

  ~ * ~

  —Well I’ll be damned, said Wulf.

  A small table, loaded to groaning with platters, carafes, bowls, in the center of the room. He approached the buffet.

  —Koster would have a fit if I ate any of this.

  He lifted covers, bathing his face in steam.

  —Damned if that’s not Mongolian beef. And here? Rijstaflel, carré d’agneau, artichoke and aioli, zabaglione, saumon béarnaise, calamari, and a Caesar salad. And I am very much mistaken if this is not a Château Margaux. Wulf tipped a decanter and nibbled a crouton.

  —Well, it must be a hallucination, and I surely can’t die from it.

  He arranged the dishes in his mind: the lighter first, the fishes, then the sauced and sautéed meats, finally the hot Indonesian and Szechwan, with breaks to clear the palate with salad and wines, and last the sweets and fruits.

  —Fall to, old man.

  He spent a good three hours at it, after which the table folded into itself in midair and vanished. He flipped his empty port glass at the spot, and it vanished too.

  —Four-star, gentlemen. Service exemplary. I thought I detected an excessive enthusiasm for cilantro in the moussaka, but perhaps not. No bill? Well, twenty percent of nothing is nothing, I fear. Many thanks.

  ~ * ~

  When Koster entered his room the temperature dropped forty degrees. He extended a hand back through the entrance. Outside the air was normal. As he stood there the temperature rapidly ascended, and he yanked his hand back inside. Once he broke a sweat the temperature plummeted. He hunched over for warmth, and after twenty seconds was roasted once more. The next time it grew cold, he passed out.

  He awoke in fetal posture with two memories of awakening superimposed: when, as a boy, he had fallen from a rooftop and, coming to, found everything strange and new; and when, as a trainee, he had been taken from a sense-deprivation tank after eight hours. He imagined the sterile vaseline scent of the lab. He began to open his eyes, then clamped them shut again: he smelled wisteria. After a moment it was gone, and a heavy hydrogen sulfide funk was in the room. He coughed, and the odor was replaced by a faint perfume. Tears of longing sprang to his eyes, but the scent was gone before he could recognize it. Then, rapidly: cut grass, gasoline, rain on hot tar, rotting mulch, cold stone, distilled alcohol, deep jungle, grape must, sharp nullity of Freon, menstrual blood, sawdust, old books, musk, chlorine, the heavy sweet of yeast, and each of these carried its freight of memory, till he could not bear it, and cried out: —Stop! Stop it! and all sank in windless air. Like a man half-drowned he staggered up, coughing long strings of mucus from his nose. He wept and went from there, not seeing the others in their rooms.

  ~ * ~

  That night the computer prescribed a game of dollar-ante poker. Keitel lost a year’s wages, nearly eight hundred fifty dollars.

  ~ * ~

  3. The Fire Sermon

  Keitel was outside when the sky turned red. There was a sound like a deep insensible bell, and his ears popped. Above him the air boiled. Rose rivers of flux wiped out the stars and bitter brick sun. Under this inverted bowl of lava he ran to the ship. He had to try three combinations before the airlock opened. The pressure outside was so lowered that the warm push from within almost knocked him backward. He went in and swallowed furiously as the lock shut and filled.

  In the common room Bright was lazing in a chair. Koster stood by, dull with fury. Roeg and Jobes were sipping coffee. Wulf stared into space.

  —This bastard depolarized the field.

  —I was outside, said Keitel.

  —Four times. Four times he’s tried to kill us.

  —Koster, he doesn’t know. He thinks he’s dead. He thinks we’re all dead.

  —If he does this once more, he won’t be wrong. Lock him up, Keitel! Koster worked controls to let the last of the ship’s air into the restored field.

  Outside there was a faint thunder.

  —Now what the hell?

  A monitor showed dust from the building. A weakened wall had collapsed under the renewed air pressure.

  ~ * ~

  —What is life? asked Bright. —We would never have known of them or they of us but for a certain progression of materials. Transfer of information. For them the earth was barren before radio.

  —And for us? said Keitel. —Five million years of slime and blood before we had shelter and food when we needed it. That’s not life?

  —Preparation. No life till after death. That’s what I learned on the way out. It almost came to me on the Sirius flight, coming out of the sleep, but they kept us doped and I lost the meaning of it. You see, we are material. Life is techtu. We stripped the planet, poisoned it, and only then did our cosmic life begin, when we had depleted all our resources, transformed them, and pushed outward. Radio was a birth cry. We are living now on the outer margin of depletion. That’s why we’re out here, seeking.

  —Seeking what?

  —A way of living, Will, of living past depletion. We’ve depleted physical, discursive, and spiritual resources. Life . . . you reach a physical age of about twenty-five, and you begin to break down, bit by bit. A glide pattern. Probably most races, by the time they achieve space flight, are too depleted to find a new perspective. But we’re lucky, Will. We found one close by. We may have a chance. But we can’t do it in the usual ways. We can’t expect to bring anything back from here.

  Though Bright could not have known it, this was quite true. All recorders had come out of the building blank. The crew met at the Andrew’s-cross table in the common room, Koster at the head and the other four in the crotches. Keitel recalled that the last ship he had served on had a table formed like a stellated hexagon.

  Roeg read from notes he had taken shorthand.

  —Then at last God called the human embryo to the throne, and it said, “Please, God, I think you have made me in the best form possible, and it would be rude to change. If I must choose, I will stay as I am, a defenseless embryo, doing my best to make myself a few poor tools from whatever you put before me.” “Well done,” said God, smiling. “Here, all you embryos with your bills, gills, wings, and whatnot, come look upon genus homo. He is the only one to have guessed Our secret. He will look like an embryo till he dies, but the rest of you will be embryos before him. Eternally undeveloped, he will remain ever potential, and able to see some of Our own joys and sorrows. We are partly sorry for you, homo, but partly hopeful. Go and do your best to survive.” Asked homo timidly, “And if I succeed?” God ceased to smile.

  Roeg said: —This is like a story I read once, but the point is that the building made it up. In less than an hour it advanced from random sounds to esthetic discourse. This violates every tenet of information theory I’ve ever heard.

  —Did you bother to ask it what it was?

  —I don’t think it understood me. I asked who its makers were, where they lived, I asked what its purpose was, and how long it’s been here. I asked if it was a form of life. It seemed happy to affirm any possibility I advanced.

  Koster turned to Keitel. —Did you get anything?

  —Blank tape. It showed me the history of Earth up to our departure. I saw the globe, and touched it. But no image recorded. Unconsciously, Keitel rubbed two fi
ngers against his burned palm.

  Said Wulf: —I think it was taking measurements. It was pushing the outer limits of our senses, each of us.

  —And we have nothing for it. Just Roeg’s fairy tale. What are we supposed to do, tear the damned thing apart to get to its guts? We were scheduled to spend two weeks here. Bright has cut that in half. Gone two hundred years, and we come home empty-handed. They’ll like that.

  —I was thinking, said Keitel. —Since nothing records, it must be reaching our brains directly. We could use an oneiranalysis rig, hook it to someone to get a record.