Is Anybody Out There Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello

  Residue

  Good News from Antares

  Report from the Field

  Permanent Fatal Errors

  Galaxy of Mirrors

  Where Two or Three

  Graffiti in the Library of Babel

  The Dark Man

  One Big Monkey

  The Taste of Night

  Timmy, Come Home

  A Waterfall of Lights

  Rare Earth

  The Vampires of Paradox

  About the Authors

  About the Editors

  The way out of tatuksha.

  “Tatuksha,” the hypnotist said. “Kekkethet. Estittit. What do they mean to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  She put Brodie under again, took him to the high place and the magic carpet, then flew him back beyond his mother’s womb. It was a smooth and easy ride.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “I . . . I can’t describe it. A familiar place. But I can’t make it hold still. It all flows. In different directions, all at once.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at something.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Tatuksha.”

  “What is tatuksha?”

  “The place you don’t go.”

  “Why don’t you go there?”

  “Can’t get out.”

  “Kekkethet,” she said. “Estittit.” She said the other words.

  He nodded as she said them, like a man remembering.

  “What do they mean?” she said.

  His face brightened. “I have to die.”

  —from “Timmy, Come Home” by Matthew Hughes

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  A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes

  Here are thirteen tales of strong women, armed with weapons they are not afraid to use, as well as fists and feet of fury, from authors such as Tanya Huff, Mickey Zucker Reichert, Jane Lindskold, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Irene Radford, and others. These are urban and paranormal stories certain to appeal to all readers of this most popular genre. So sit back and enjoy as these empowered women take on all challenges with weapons, wit, and skill—and pity the poor monsters and bad guys who’ll need rescuing from them!

  Timeshares, edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg Welcome to timesharing like you’ve never experienced before. This is not your chance to acquire some rental property in the Bahamas. The stories you’ll find within these pages are your tickets to real timesharing—taking a vacation through time. Afraid of flying? The high cost of gas got you down? Want to really get away? Step into your local Timeshares agency office, venture through their time travel device, and you can find yourself in exotic, adventurous locations. Of course, you and your fellow vacationers may also find yourselves caught up in all manner of trouble and mysteries—and definitely in danger. With stories by Kevin J. Anderson, Michael A. Stackpole, Greg Cox, Donald J. Bingle, Chris Pierson and Linda Baker, and others.

  Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer

  Some of the darkest hints in all of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos relate to what will happen after the Old Ones return and take over the Earth. What happens when the Stars Are Right, the sunken city of R’lyeh rises from beneath the waves, and Cthulhu is unleashed upon the world for the last time? What happens when the other Old Ones, long since banished from our universe, break through and descend from the stars? What would the reign of Cthulhu be like, on a totally transformed planet where mankind is no longer the master? It won’t be simply the end of everything. It will be a time of new horrors and of utter strangeness. It will be a time when humans with a “taint” of unearthly blood in their ancestry may come into their own. It will be a time foreseen only by authors with the kind of finely honed imaginative visions as Ian Watson, Brian Stableford, Will Murray, Gregory Frost, Richard Lupoff, and the others of Cthulhu’s Reign.

  Copyright © 2010 by Tekno Books, Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Books Collectors No. 1513.

  DAW Books is distributed by the Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-43460-4

  First Printing, June 2010.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Introduction: Here Comes Everyone,” copyright © 2010 by Paul McAuley

  “The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello,” copyright © 2010 by Alex Irvine

  “Residue,” copyright © 2010 by Michael Arsenault

  “Good News from Antares,” copyright © 2010 by Yves Meynard

  “Report from the Field,” copyright © 2010 by Kirinyaga, Inc. and Lezli Robyn

  “Permanent Fatal Errors,” copyright © 2010 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

  “Galaxy of Mirrors,” copyright © 2010 by Paul Di Filippo

  “Where Two or Three,” copyright © 2010 by Sheila Finch

  “Graffiti in the Library of Babel,” copyright © 2010 by David Langford

  “The Dark Man,” copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “One Big Monkey,” copyright © 2010 by Ray Vukcevich

  “The Taste of Night,” copyright © 2010 by Pat Cadigan

  “Timmy, Come Home,” copyright © 2010 by Matthew Hughes

  “A Waterfall of Lights,” copyright © 2010 by Ian Watson

  “Rare Earth,” copyright © 2010 by Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What

  “The Vampires of Paradox,” copyright © 2010 by James Morrow

  Introduction: Here Comes Everyone

  Paul McAuley

  One summer day in 1950, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, four physicists were discussing flying saucers and the probability of faster-than-light travel as they walked to lunch. One, Edward Teller, put the chance that any kind of object would be observed traveling faster than the speed of light in the next ten years at no more than one in a million; another, Enrico Fermi, said that it was more likely to be one in ten. Although their talk turned to other matters, Fermi was still thinking about space travel and life on other planets, and in the middle of lunch startled his companions by exclaiming, “Where are they?”

  It wasn’t a flippant or trivial question. Fermi was a bona fide genius. He’d won the Nobel Prize at the age of thirty-seven, had helped to design the world’s first nuclear pile, and had made significant contributions to quantum theory and nuclear and particle physics. He was also renowned for his ability to work up quick, accurate estimates from first principles and minimal data—backof-the-envelope calculations dubbed the Fermi Method by his colleagues. During that long-ago lunchtime, Fermi applied his method to the problem of interstellar colonization, and while thinking about the size of the galaxy and life’s tendency to spread everywhere it can, he discovered a provocative and fundamental paradox.

  The galaxy contains between one hundred billion and four hundred billion stars: even if only a small fraction possess planets capable of supporting life, and technological civilizations
arise on only a few of those life-bearing planets, there should still be a large number of civilizations capable of communicating with us. And although the distances between stars are very large, and even if exploration of the galaxy is limited to speeds below that of light, exponential multiplication of interstellar colonies would mean that a determined star-faring civilization would be able to visit or colonize every star in the galaxy within five to fifty million years, a trivial span of time compared to the lifetime of the galaxy. From these basic assumptions and calculations, Fermi concluded that Earth should have been visited by aliens long ago, and many times since. But where was everybody?

  The Fermi Paradox is catnip to science- fiction writers. Not only is it an area of scientific enquiry that’s directly engaged with one of SF’s major tropes, but it’s also a debate about a fundamental question—are we alone in the universe?—in which their guesses can be as legitimate as any made by scientists and philosophers. And any answer to the Fermi Paradox is no more than a guess: not only don’t we know enough about the probability of the emergence and long-term survival of extraterrestrial civilizations, we aren’t capable of predicting with any certainty that life could have evolved elsewhere in the universe.

  A decade after Fermi’s lunchtime eureka moment, Frank Drake worked up his famous equation that, as he put it, organizes our ignorance. It calculates the number of civilizations in the galaxy with which we can communicate by multiplying the rate of star formation in the galaxy by the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of those planets that are habitable, the fraction of habitable planets on which life develops, the fraction of biospheres in which intelligent life evolves and develops the ability to communicate over interstellar distances, and the expected lifetime of communicative civilizations. If we could plug the right numbers into Drake’s equation, we’d be able to derive a solution to Fermi’s Paradox. The problem is, only one of those parameters, the rate of star formation, is known with any degree of accuracy. The rest are wild and hotly contested estimates or best guesses, and the flakiness or absence of hard data is reflected in the wide range of solutions put forward: from Carl Sagan’s optimistic statement that there may be a million alien civilizations in the galaxy, to Drake’s own calculation of just ten civilizations, and the current consensus that the probability of a technological civilization existing at any particular moment in galactic history is less than one.

  We’re still no nearer to knowing which of those estimates, if any, is closest to the truth. On the one hand, we now have strong evidence for the existence of liquid water, an absolute requirement for life as we know it, under the icy crusts of two moons, Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. Other moons may possess subsurface oceans, too: Ganymede, Titan, Triton, and Charon, Pluto’s co-orbital companion. This not only increases the probability that life could have evolved elsewhere in the solar system, it also suggests that life may not be limited to Earth-like worlds, but could be found in oceans beneath the surface of moons of Jupiter-class gas giants or even on rocky, Earth-like moons of extrasolar gas giants that orbit within their stars’ habitable zones. And while no extrasolar planets were known when Drake developed his equation, astronomers have now catalogued almost five hundred, some of them orbiting binary stars, something previously thought unlikely.

  But on the other hand, while extrasolar planetary systems are far more common than once believed—one even orbits a neutron star—none of the planets so far detected are likely venues for the evolution of life. Most are ice or gas giants larger than Jupiter or are orbiting very close to their stars—superheated Jupiters boiling away into space or large rocky planets covered in oceans of molten basalt swept by hurricanes of red- hot pebbles. Many orbit red dwarfs, which are the most common stars in the galaxy but are also prone to flares that could sterilize the surface of any planet in the habitable zone. It’s true that current techniques for planet spotting, based on observations of minute wobbles in the rotation of stars, favor identification of planets that cause the largest wobbles—big planets or planets that orbit close in. But both kinds of planet seem to be very common, and planets in close orbit around their stars must have migrated inwards, and would have perturbed the orbits of any planets in the stars’ habitable zones.

  We’re left with that intractable question, still hanging in the air sixty years after that otherwise ordinary lunch in the sunny clatter and buzz of a laboratory canteen. Attempts to answer it directly, by searching for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations or signs of stellar engineering, have so far come to nothing. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, of course. Perhaps we haven’t been looking for long enough, or perhaps we haven’t yet looked in the right place, or listened in to the right frequency. Perhaps truly advanced civilizations surround their stars with constructs—Dyson spheres of Matrioshka brains—that soak up radiated energy. Perhaps there’s a universal flaw in the development of technological civilizations that inevitably leads to their downfall. Perhaps they haven’t spread to other stars but have evolved into epicurean philosophers uninterested in space travel, or have vanished down the rabbit-hole of virtual reality, or have passed through some kind of rapturous singularity that has rendered them invisible to our slow, meat-bound brains. Perhaps they are deliberately hiding from us. They are out there, but don’t want us to know. We’re in quarantine, or on double secret probation, or preserved as exhibits in a cage, with the sky all around a sophisticated illusion cloaking a galaxy buzzing with intelligent life of every kind. Or if you believe that intelligence implies ruthless and implacable hostility, perhaps some kind of camouflaged first strike is on its way, triggered by the TV and radar signals we’ve foolishly radiated to the local group of stars.

  Perhaps the answer is as simple as the question. Where are they? They’re here. They’re us. We’re all alone: the only game in this particular galaxy. We haven’t found evidence of colonization of the stars because there isn’t any—and there won’t be, unless we get around to doing it. And if we die out before we tinker up some kind of method of traveling to the stars, if we foolishly squander our unique gift and destroy ourselves, it’s extremely unlikely that any other technological civilization will arise.

  There’s no end to speculation. We don’t know if intelligent aliens exist, and if they do exist, it’s impossible to predict with any degree of certainty their history and motivations. Think, for a moment, about the eyes of the octopus. Like our own eyes, they gather and transmit images of the surrounding world to the brain, and they are superficially similar to our eyes: in both cases, light passes through the cornea and pupil, which is surrounded by an iris that can expand or contract, depending on light intensity. And in both cases, light entering the eye capsule is focused by a lens onto a layer of photosensitive cells, the retina. But there are also significant differences; our photosensitive cells are on the outside of the retina, overlain by blood vessels and nerve cells, while those of the octopus are on the inside, with the blood supply and nerves behind them: we have a blindspot, where the nerves are bundled together and pierce the retina; octopuses do not. It’s a wonderful example of convergent evolution, where two unrelated groups of animals or plants independently develop similar structures to solve the same problem. But while human beings and octopuses share a distant common ancestor and hundreds of millions of years of planetary history, anyone who has looked into the eye of an octopus knows that it’s impossible to understand what thoughts or emotions might lie behind its slit-shaped pupils. How much more mysterious, then, must be the thoughts and emotions of aliens with whom we have no common heritage? Even if there are intelligent beings who, by near-impossible accidents of convergent evolution, look exactly like us, they won’t think like us. Fictional representations, from green-blooded elf-eared logicians to hoopy froods who always know where their towels are, or even ambulatory gas clouds or nanobot swarms, are all tainted with our anthropocentric assumptions and expectations.

  We can, in short, take nothing for granted.
The truth is likely to be far stranger than anything we can imagine, and that’s why it’s important to imagine everything we can. What about the imaginary scenarios in the stories collected here? All of them are bound to be wrong to some degree or another, sure, but we can’t ever know exactly how wrong they are until ET finally picks up the phone. Meanwhile, they’re more than mere entertainments: they’re also informed speculations about unknown unknowns; contributions to an ongoing and important debate; and funny, weird, and thought-provoking explorations of all kinds of answers to Fermi’s famous question.

  The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello

  Alex Irvine

  Because we did not have Us, we invented Them. Then, when They weren’t where and when and how They were supposed to be, We castigated Them for it while secretly damning ourselves for fools because We had thought They might be there.

  That’s what Dalton Topolski told his therapist, anyway.

  Dalton’s therapist, one Dr. Arvid Lantz, had brought up the topic of alien races because he thought it might give his client—who had previously evinced an interest in science fiction both written and visual—a way to talk about what Dr. Lantz considered a crippling inability to form intimate connections. A loneliness, self-created and -enforced but no less miserable because of its reflexive origin, pervaded Topolski’s life, his work, his (if you could call them that) relationships. Dr. Lantz did some reading, considered the utility of approaching the patient in his own idiom, and decided on the slightly unorthodox (for a therapist of his theoretical allegiances) tactic of turning his sessions with Topolski into conversations about the deep sources of science fiction’s most enduring tropes.