Lightspeed Magazine Issue 4 Read online

  Kerang’s body slumps on the couch. Shiron leaves it there.

  For the first time in a long time, she is leaving Blackwheel Station. What she does not carry she can buy on the way. And Blackwheel is loyal because they know, and they know not to offend her; Blackwheel will keep her suite clean and undisturbed, and deliver water, near-freezing in an elegant glass, night after night, waiting.

  Kerang was a pawn by his own admission. If he knew what he knew, and lived long enough to convey it to her, then others must know what he knew, or be able to find it out.

  Kerang did not understand her at all. Shiron unmazes herself from the station to seek passage to one of the hubworlds, where she can begin her search. If Shiron had wanted to seek revenge on Arighan, she could have taken it years ago.

  But she will not be like Arighan. She will not destroy an entire timeline of people, no matter how alien they are to her.

  Shiron had hoped that matters wouldn’t come to this. She acknowledges her own naïveté. There is no help for it now. She will have to find and murder each child of Arighan’s line. In this way she can protect Arighan herself, protect the accumulated sum of history, in case someone outwits her after all this time and manages to take the Flower from her.

  In a universe where determinism runs backwards—where, no matter what you do, everything ends in the same inevitable Ω—choices still matter, especially if you are the last guardian of an incomparably lethal gun.

  Although it has occurred to Shiron that she could have accepted Kerang’s offer, and that she could have sacrificed this timeline in exchange for the one in which neither Arighan nor the guns ever existed, she declines to do so. For there will come a heat-death, and she is beginning to wonder: if a constructed sentience—a computer—can have a soul, what of the universe itself, the greatest computer of all?

  In this universe, they reckon her old. Shiron is older than even that. In millions of timelines, she has lived to the pallid end of life. In each of those endings, Arighan’s Flower is there, as integral as an edge is to a blade. While it is true that science never proves anything absolutely, that an inconceivably large but finite number of experiments always pales beside infinity, Shiron feels that millions of timelines suffice as proof.

  Without Arighan’s Flower, the universe cannot renew itself and start a new story. Perhaps that is all the reason the universe needs. And Shiron will be there when the heat-death arrives, as many times as necessary.

  So Shiron sets off. It is not the first time she has killed, and it is unlikely to be the last. But she is not, after all this time, incapable of grieving.

  Ω

  Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Farrago’s Wainscot, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, and Sybil’s Garage. She’s also appeared in the anthologies Twenty Epics, Japanese Dreams, In Lands That Never Were, The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Fantasy #6, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2002. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as Jabberwocky, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Mythic Delirium, and Goblin Fruit. Learn more at pegasus.cityofveils.com.

  Author Spotlight: Yoon Ha Lee

  Jordan Hamessley

  The concept of the four guns each having a different effect on the target is unique. How did you come up with it?

  The original version of this story was inspired by the TV show Burn Notice. (No, really!) I had this notion that if you swapped out all the spy tech (I have no idea whether any of it works the way they describe it, but it sure sounds cool) and replaced it with magic you could have a fun spy story. So I figured I needed something for the guns, and at this point I got stuck because all I could think of were guns based on the elements, whether you go with something like the Chinese elements or the Japanese elements or something sideways of that. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about doing elemental blasts. But you know, if you’re going to go with fantastic guns, why not go for broke? And so I ended up first with Arighan’s Flower, because I figured wiping out whole ancestral lines would be a pretty big threat.

  I also knew from the beginning that I wanted the gun to be one of a set. I had some idea of trying to do this in comic form, just as an experiment, and so the protagonist would have this set of guns to deal with in her adventures, one by one, but obviously I decided against doing the story in that format. One of my beta readers actually wanted this story to be about five times as long as it is right now, and to follow that kind of structure, detailing Shiron’s adventures with each gun. Quite probably it would have been a good story, but it wouldn’t have been the story I wanted to tell.

  Shiron discovered that Arighan was a prisoner rather than an honored guest in the empire she served. Have you given much thought as to why Arighan was a prisoner? Was it because of her weapon-making skills?

  Definitely her weapon-making skills. I knew from the very beginning that Arighan’s weapons had a sting, that they were created out of revenge, and that in order for the story to be set up the way it was, Shiron’s ancestors lured her to their court and then trapped her. I don’t actually know how they accomplished this. My best bet is that Arighan was good at making weapons but a lousy shot?

  Ancestry in speculative fiction is always an interesting idea to play with. Many time travel stories deal with the possibility of upsetting your timeline by interfering with an ancestor. What drew you to create a world where entire lineages could be wiped out?

  I’ve definitely read my share of those stories, although the thing that attracted me to the idea in this case was Confucianism. I have a book of Korean folktales that we picked up when I was a kid, and I swear, every other story in there is about filial piety. I remember my dad taking us to his mother’s grave when we were little, and having to bow to the grave, and you know, just the way that reverence for your ancestors is inculcated in a Confucian society, it gives the whole “your lineage goes poof!” aspect a different kind of ouch.

  The opening section implies that there are multiple universes at work in the story. What are the results of Shiron’s relationship with Arighan’s Flower? Obviously she cannot return to her home. Is she creating a new universe each time she uses the gun?

  Yes: each time she fires the gun, a new universe branches off and she gets propelled into it.

  Shiron acknowledges that if she were to use the Flower on one of Arighan’s descendants in her timeline, she would no longer be in exile, but cannot return to her original timeline either. Is it possible that she would no longer exist in her current timeline because the gun never would have been created? It’s quite a paradox she would create.

  I am reminded of my 8th grade social studies teacher telling us about Gilgamesh being two-thirds god and one-third man, and wondering how the heck that even happened. Although I guess if you have deities in your ancestry anything is possible? Let’s see: she wipes out Arighan’s line, which means the guns never were forged, but which means that the whole situation never happened in the first place. What a messy situation! I personally suspect that she would be hanging around with the Flower, and they would be these two weird anomalies in the universe, things that shouldn’t exist but do.

  Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your story or the ideas behind it?

  I have to thank Daniel Dennett’s philosophy book Freedom Evolves, even though I still haven’t finished reading it, because his thoughts on evitability and inevitability really helped pull this story together.

  Jordan Hamessley is a children’s book editor at Penguin Books for Young Readers where she edits the Batman: TheBrave and theBold and Chaotic publishing programs. In addition to developing original series, she occasionally writes books for children and performs voiceover work for promotional materials. She is also blogger for Tor.com and can be found on Twitter as thejordache.

  Future Weapons

  Jeff Hecht

  Ray guns! Death rays!

  The terms conjure image
s of the golden era of space adventurers—Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon. But in truth, future weapons have been a crucial aspect of science fiction since H. G. Wells armed his Martian invaders in War of the Worldswith heat rays that ignited everything in their path.

  Wells concocted his future weapon by combining the idea of searchlights with infrared technology, but scientists at the time were already working with all sorts of new radiation—X rays and gamma rays. By the 1920s a few of them, notably Nikola Tesla in the U.S. and Harry Grindell Matthews in Britain, made the somewhat dubious claim that, indeed, a death ray could be built. Pulp science-fiction readers may have willingly suspended their disbelief, but top scientists certainly didn’t, and after World War II, a high-level review panel proclaimed death rays to be an impossibility.

  And unfortunately, the killjoys were right. Even nuclear radiation doesn’t kill instantly on contact.

  Just fifteen years later, however, the first laser fired bright pulses of red light, and popular science writers began envisioning applications for “The Incredible Laser”—applications ranging from eye surgery to laser cannons. But real scientists were, once again, more skeptical. So skeptical that laser pioneer and future Nobel laureate Arthur Schawlow posted an “Incredible Laser” article from the Sunday supplement This Week on his laboratory door at Stanford along with the note: “For credible lasers, see inside.” Needless to say, nothing inside was anything like the wildly overenthusiastic—although nominally factual—newspaper piece.

  Half a century later, though, the landscape has changed again. We certainly have the laser eye surgery part down and, surprisingly, we’ve even come a bit closer to the cannons as Northrop Grumman demonstrated last year by firing a 100-kilowatt laser beam steadily for more than five minutes. That’s an impressive achievement by laser standards. The bad news, though, is that this laser doesn’t come in a pretty, prêt-a-porter-sized package.

  No, for one thing, this laser has no beam-directing optics, so it can’t target. A bit of a drawback for a weapon. It also has never been operated outside the controlled environment of a laboratory, draws five-hundred kilowatts of electricity, and is rather inconveniently housed in a shiny metal box about the size of six McMansion-sized refrigerators. Even Godzilla would have a hard time lifting that.

  So the question of the day is this: In this age of microminiaturization and nanotechnology, why don’t we have laser pistols, damn it?

  Blame this one on the laws of physics.

  Lasers don’t generate energy; they convert energy from other sources into light, and in the process, much of the input energy is lost as heat, hampering the amount of damage it can inflict. And what about a power source? Batteries wouldn’t work. A laser gun drawing the 5000 watts of power needed to produce a kilowatt of laser light would need more than a 30-ampere, 120-volt line could deliver, and again, that sort of beam wouldn’t do much damage.

  Now, what makes old-fashioned bullets deadly is their momentum. The explosion of gunpowder in a .45-caliber pistol propels the bullet out of the barrel with only 500 joules of energy and the bullet’s momentum keeps it going when it hits a soft target, so it rips through flesh, often with deadly consequences.

  Laser light, however, can cause damage only by delivering energy that heats the target. So, say, zapping a mosquito would be no problem—if you could get it to stay still. People, however, are much bigger, and usually try to get out of the way if they feel parts of themselves burning. So in order to kill a human (or an alien) as convincingly as a bullet does, the laser would have to burn a hole through their body by vaporizing tissue, and at the cellular level, that means evaporating water.

  As you might recall from 7th grade science, our bodies are mostly made up of water, and evaporating enough of it to make the kind of through-the-body hole we’re talking about would take about 50,000 joules. Now, that’s only about 100-times more energy than the bullet carries. But because the evaporating water would block the beam and dissipate its energy, it would actually take many times more energy than that to truly finish the job.

  Lasers may not be able to kill, but they can cause blindness by burning the eye’s light-sensitive retina. However, staring at the sun can do the same, and, sorry folks, the Geneva Convention has been modified to ban blinding lasers. Staring at the sun like an idiot, however? Still allowed. (And, sadly, wouldn’t even get you a Darwin Award these days.)

  One thing lasers can do effectively is destroy important military targets, such as rockets, artillery shells, or robotic aircraft which carry fuel or explosives. No evaporating water to interfere there. Just point and track. The laser energy heats the target until it ruptures the fuel tank, or heats the explosive to its ignition temperature and boom! There goes the Death Star. Or, somewhat more mundanely, bang goes the unexploded bomblet lying in an Afghan battlefield before it can kill somebody, a thing that’s actually been done.

  Bottom line, however? Lasers just aren’t cut out for killing people.

  Still, we do love our sidearms, and if our 25th century heroes and villains aren’t going to be strapping on nifty ray guns or clunky blasters or cellphone-sized phasers, then what sort of weapons could we realistically expect the 25th century to provide?

  Well, one possibility would be to adapt a concept originally conceived during the Reagan era “Star Wars” program called “Brilliant Pebbles.” Back then, “Star Wars” researchers were studying a variety of far-out laser weapon ideas, cool stuff like orbiting laser battle stations and X-ray lasers powered by nuclear bombs. But they also looked at slightly less spectacular weapons prospects such as firing high-speed projectiles that would destroy nuclear warheads with the energy of their impact. In other words, hitting a bullet with a bullet.

  The idea was called “Smart Rocks,” projectiles that, when fired, could home-in on their targets. Lowell Wood of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory then expanded the idea, proposing to use advances in computer technology to build a fleet of satellite-based “Brilliant Pebbles” with sophisticated guidance systems, although, in truth, his “pebbles” were really watermelon-sized missiles.

  While that project was shelved after the Cold War ended, the technology trends that inspired Wood have endured and evolved. Computer chips have continued to shrink in size and increase in power, and the sensors needed to recognize targets and guide missiles have likewise become more powerful. So instead of ray guns, why not shrink those watermelon-sized missiles designed for patrolling outer space down to the size of the pebbles they were originally named for and fire them from portable weapons?

  The resulting “Brilliant Bullet” would be much more than a lead slug. And much cooler. For instance, it would probably contain a nano-scale propulsion system to guide it along its course and an imaging sensor to photograph people and compare them to an image of the target stored in its memory. (Or, even better, some way to match the person’s genome with that of the target.) It might even unfold wings after emerging from the barrel.

  But of course a really “Brilliant Bullet” wouldn’t even require a gun. It could be made larger, the size of a ball-point pen, say, with lightweight wings and a tiny engine that would push it silently through the air. It could be coated with an optical metamaterial, science’s version of an invisibility cloak that bent light around it, making the bullet itself almost impossible to see. It would flicker past people fast enough that they would catch only a ripple in the air, but would move slowly enough to check each person in the area to identify the target. Once it had, it would then ignite its propellant, accelerate to lethal velocity and, bango, good night Seattle. Not as satisfying as firing a gun, maybe, but it would certainly be more accurate. And more deadly.

  So, fledgling evil overlords take heart, laser guns may not be possible or practical, but other deadly options are in the works, and the future looks bright for conquest. Optical metamaterials are real. Unmanned aerial vehicles are real. And as for brilliant bullets? Who knows how long before they’re real as well.

 
; All we can say is watch out, Buck Rogers, cause we’re gunning for you.

  Jeff Hecht is a science-fact writer who contributes regularly to New Scientist magazine and Laser Focus World. His specialties range from lasers and fiber optics to paleontology. His books include Understanding Lasers, Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, Understanding Fiber Optics, and Beam Weapons: The Next Arms Race. He has had short fiction published in venues ranging from Analog and Asimov’s to Nature. More at his web site: http://www.jeffhecht.com

  The Long Chase

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  2645, January

  The war is over.

  The survivors are being rounded up and converted.

  In the inner solar system, those of my companions who survived the ferocity of the fighting have already been converted. But here at the very edge of the Oort Cloud, all things go slowly. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But with the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come.

  Ten thousand of my fellow soldiers have elected to go doggo. Ragged prospectors and ice processors, they had been too independent to ever merge into an effective fighting unit. Now they shut themselves down to dumb rocks, electing to wake up to groggy consciousness for only a few seconds every hundred years. Patience, they counsel me; patience is life. If they can wait a thousand or ten thousand or a million years, with patience enough the enemy will eventually go away.

  They are wrong.

  The enemy, too, is patient. Here at the edge of the Kuiper, out past Pluto, space is vast, but still not vast enough. The enemy will search every grain of sand in the solar system. My companions will be found, and converted. If it takes ten thousand years, the enemy will search that long to do it.