Year's Best SF 10, page 28
Phil, I wish you could have seen it. The cosm—his term, not mine—was already eight billion years old, relative. What was happening was that time was passing a lot faster in the cosm than it was in Crestview. As I say, it had been up and running for thirty years by then.
You looked into that machine and saw all that and it humbled you. You know what I mean? Sure, it was Abe who figured out how to make it happen, but the magic was in the process. How was it possible that we lived in a place where you could pack up a few grams of earth and come away with a living universe.
And it was living. We zeroed in on some of the worlds. They were green. And there were animals. But nothing that seemed intelligent. Lots of predators, though. Predators you wouldn’t believe, Phil. It was why he’d brought me in. What were the conditions necessary to permit the development of intelligent life? Nobody had ever put the question in quite those terms before, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.
No, we couldn’t see any of this stuff in real time. We had to take pictures and then slow everything down by a factor of about a zillion. But it worked. We could tell what was going on.
We picked out about sixty worlds, all overrun with carnivores, some of them that would have gobbled down a T-Rex as an appetizer. Abe had a technique that allowed him to reach in and influence events. Not physically, by which I mean that he couldn’t stick a hand in there, but we had some electromagnetic capabilities. I won’t try to explain it because I’m not clear on it myself. Even Abe didn’t entirely understand it. It’s funny—when I look back now, I suspect Mac was the real genius.
The task was to find a species with potential and get rid of the local carnivores to give it a chance.
On some of the worlds, we triggered major volcanic eruptions. Threw a lot of muck into the atmosphere and changed the climate. Twice we used undersea earthquakes to send massive waves across the plains where predators were especially numerous. Elsewhere we crashed comets down on them. We went back and looked at the results within a few hours after we’d finished, our time. In most cases we’d gotten rid of the targets, and the selected species were doing nicely, thank you very much. Within two days of the experiment we had our first settlements.
I should add that none of the occupants looked even remotely human.
If I’d had my way, we would have left it at that. I suggested to Abe that it was time to announce what he had. Report the results. Show it to the world. But he was averse.
“Make it public?” he scowled. “Jerry, there’s a world full of busybodies out there. There’ll be protests, there’ll be cries for an investigation, there’ll be people with signs. Accusing me of playing God. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to reassure the idiots that there’s no moral dimension to what we’re doing.”
I thought about that for several minutes and asked him if he was sure there wasn’t.
He smiled at me. It was that same grin you got from him when you’d overlooked some obvious detail and he was trying to be magnanimous while simultaneously showing you what a halfwit you were. “Jerry,” he said, “what have we done other than to provide life for thousands of generations of intelligent creatures? If anything, we should be commended.”
Eons passed. Tens of thousands of subjective years, and the settlements went nowhere. We knew they were fighting; we could see the results. Burned out villages, heaps of corpses. Nothing as organized as a war, of course. Just local massacres. But no sign of a city. Not anywhere.
Maybe they weren’t as bright as we thought. Local conflicts don’t stop the rise of civilization. In fact there’s reason to think they’re a necessary factor. Anyhow, it was about this time that Mac’s plane went down. Abe was hit pretty hard. But he insisted on plunging ahead. I asked whether we would want to replace him, but he said he didn’t think it would be necessary. For the time being, we had all the capability we needed.
“We have to intervene,” he said.
I waited to hear him explain.
“Language,” he added. “We have to solve the language problem.”
“What language problem?” I asked.
“We need to be able to talk to them.”
The capability already existed to leave a message. No, Phil, we didn’t have the means to show up physically and conduct a conversation. But we could deposit something for them to find. If we could master the languages.
“What do you intend to do?” I asked.
He was standing by a window, gazing down at Crestview, with its single large street, its lone traffic light, Max’s gas station at the edge of town, the Roosevelt School, made from red brick and probably built about 1920. “Tell me, Jerry,” he said. “Why can none of these creatures make a city?”
I had no idea…
One of the species had developed a written language. Of sorts. But that was as far as they’d gotten. We’d thought that would be a key, but even after the next few thousand local years, nothing had happened.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Abe said. “They haven’t acquired the appropriate domestic habits. They need an ethical code. Spouses who are willing to sacrifice for each other. A sense of responsibility to offspring. And to their community.”
“And how would you propose to introduce those ideas, Abe?” I should have known what was coming.
“We have a fairly decent model to work with,” he said. “Let’s give them the Commandments.”
I don’t know if I mentioned it, but he was moderately eccentric. No, that’s not quite true. It would be closer to the mark to say that, for a world-class physicist, he was unusual in that he had a wide range of interests. He had women around the lab all the time, although none was ever told what we were working on. As far as I knew. He enjoyed parties, played in the local bridge tournaments. The women loved him. Don’t know why. He wasn’t particularly good-looking. But he was forever trying to sneak someone out in the morning as I was pulling in.
He was friendly, easy-going, a sports fan, for God’s sake. You ever know a physicist who gave a damn about the Red Sox? He’d sit there and drink beer and watch games off the dish.
When he mentioned the Commandments, I thought he was joking.
“Not at all,” he said. And, after a moment’s consideration: “And I think we can keep them pretty much as they are.”
“Abe,” I said, “what are we talking about? You’re not trying to set yourself up as a god?”
The question was only half-joking because I thought he might be on to something. He looked past me into some indefinable distance.
“At this stage of their development,” he said, “they need something to hold them together. A god would do nicely. Yes, I think we should do precisely that.” He smiled at me. “Excellent idea, Jerry.” He produced a copy of the King James, flipped pages, made some noises under his breath, and looked up with a quizzical expression. “Maybe we should update them a bit.”
“How do you mean?”
“ ‘Thou shalt not hold any person to be a slave.’”
I had never thought about that. “Actually, that’s not bad,” I said.
“ ‘Thou shalt not fail to respect the environment, and its creatures, and its limitations.’”
“Good.” It occurred to me that Abe was off to a rousing start.
But he frowned and shook his head. “Maybe that last one’s a bit much for primitives. Better leave it out.” He pursed his lips and looked again at the leather-bound Bible. “I don’t see anything here we’ll want to toss out. So let’s call them the Eleven Commandments.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s try it.”
“For Mac,” he said. “We’ll do it for Mac.”
The worlds had all been numbered. He had a system in which the number included location, age, salient characteristics. But you don’t care about that. The world we had chosen, though, he gave a name. Utopia. Well, I thought, not yet. It had mountain ranges and broad seas and deep forests. But it also had lots of savages. Smart savages, but savages nonetheless.
He already had samples of one of the languages. That first night he showed them to me, slowed down of course. It was a musical language, rhythmic, with a lot of vowels and, what do you call them, diphthongs. Reminded me of a Hawaiian chant.
He called a few people, told them he was conducting an experiment, trying to determine how much data was necessary to break in and translate the text of a previously unknown language. Hinted it had something to do with SETI. The people on the other end were all skeptical of the value of such a project, and he pretended to squirm a bit, but he was offering lots of cash and a bonus for the first correct solution. So everybody had a big laugh and then came on board.
The winner was a woman at the University of Montreal. Kris Edward. Kris came up with a solution in five days. I’d’ve thought it was impossible. A day later she’d translated the Commandments for him into the new language. Ten minutes after he had the transmission, we were driving over to Caswell Monuments in the next town to get the results chiseled onto two stone tablets. Six on one, five on the other. They looked good. I’ll give him that. They had dignity. Authority. Majesty.
We couldn’t actually transport the tablets, the Commandments, physically to Utopia. But we could relay their image, and their substance, and reproduce them out of whatever available granite there might be. Abe’s intention was to put them on a mountaintop and then use some directed lightning to draw one of the shamans up to find them. It all had to be programed into the system because, as I said, the realtime action would be much too quick for anyone to follow. I didn’t think it would work. But Abe was full of confidence that we were on track at last.
We had a flat on the way back with the tablets. Maybe we should have taken that as a sign. Anyhow, by the time we’d arranged to get picked up, and had the car repaired, and ate dinner, it had gotten fairly late. Abe was trying to be casual, but he was anxious to start.
“No, Jerry, we are not going to wait until the morning. Let’s get this parade on the road.”
So we sent the transmission out. It was 9:46 p.m. on the twelfth. The cylinder flashed amber lamps and then green, signaling that it had worked, that the package had arrived at its destination, and that a mystical storm had blown up to draw the shaman into the mountain.
We looked for results a few minutes later. It would have been time, on the other side, to build the pyramids, conquer the Mediterranean, fight off the Vandals, get through the Dark Ages, and move well into the Renaissance. If it had worked, we could expect to see glittering cities and ships and maybe even 747s. What we saw were only the same dead-end settlements.
We resolved to try again in the morning. Maybe Moses had missed the tablets. Maybe he’d not been feeling well. Maybe the whole idea was crazy.
That was the night the quake hit.
That’s stable ground up in that part of the world. It was the first earthquake in Crestview’s recorded history. Moreover, it didn’t hit anything else. Not Charlie’s Bar & Grill, which is at the bottom of the hill on the state road. Not any part of the Adams Ranch, which occupies the area on the north, not any part of the town, which is less than a half mile away. But it completely destroyed the lab.
What’s that? Did it destroy the cosm? No, the cosm was safely disconnected from the state of Colorado. Nothing could touch it, except through the cylinder. It’s still out there somewhere. On its own.
But the whole thing scares me. I mean, Mac was already dead. And two days later Sylvia drove her car into a tree at about sixty.
That’s okay, you can smile about it, but I’m not sleeping very well. What’s that? Why would God pick on us? I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of someone doing minor league creations. Maybe he didn’t want us monkeying around with the Commandments.
Why do you think he didn’t say anything to Moses about slavery? What, you’ve never thought about it? I wonder if maybe, at the beginning, civilization needs slaves to get started. Maybe you can’t just jump off the mark with representative democracy. Maybe we were screwing things up, condemning sentient beings to thousands of years of unnecessary savagery. I don’t know.
But that’s my story. Maybe it’s all coincidence. The quake, the plane crash, Sylvia. I suppose stranger things have happened. But it’s scary, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I know you think I’m exaggerating. I know the God you believe in doesn’t track people down and kill them. But maybe the God you believe in isn’t there. Maybe the God who’s actually running things is just a guy in a laboratory in another reality. Somebody who’s a bit less congenial than Abe. And who has better equipment.
Well, who knows?
The scotch is good, by the way. Thanks. And listen, Phil, there’s a storm blowing up out there. I don’t like to impose, but I wonder if I could maybe stay the night?
Wealth
ROBERT REED
Robert Reed [info site: www.booksnbytes.com/authors/ reed_robert.html] is the only major SF writer who lives in Nebraska. He has been one of the most prolific short story writers of high quality in the SF field for the past sixteen years, with more than one hundred twenty-five SF, fantasy, and horror stories published, and seems, if anything, only to have gotten better in 2004. He has published a novel every couple of years as well. His work is notable for its variety, and for his steady production. His first story collection, The Dragons of Springplace (1999), fine as it is, skims only a bit of the cream from his body of work. Marrow (2000), a distant future large-scale hard SF story, seems to have been a breakthrough in his career. Sister Alice (2003), his next novel, and The Well of Stars (2005), a sequel to Marrow, are far-future large-scale works. His next collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys, is out in 2005. He published at least four other stories in 2004 (“A Plague of Life,” “A Change of Mind,” “Opal Ball,” “Mere”), which we consider good enough to have been in this book, and a fantasy by him, “The Dragons of Summer Gulch,” appears in our companion Year’s Best Fantasy 4.
“Wealth” was published in Asimov’s, which printed a lot of fine SF and fantasy this year, but lost its distinguished and colorful editor, Gardner R. Dozois. Dozois’ successor, Sheila Williams, carries on. This is a story about an AI buying real estate on Mars. But the house for sale has/is an AI too.
One of the biogenesis trillionaires acquired the land, then, with considerable fanfare, built the mansion, and for a moment or two, there was no more famous address in the solar system. An artful array of hemispheres stood on the edge of the wide basin. Woven from cultured diamond, the structures had both strength and a mathematical beauty, and, in the Martian sunshine, they glowed with a charming ruddy light. A larger, less obtrusive dome formed a soaring roof over the entire basin, allowing the maintenance of an enhanced atmosphere. In principle, the trillionaire had resurrected a world that hadn’t existed for three billion years. Precious aquifer water was pumped into the basin, creating a deep saline lake that was allowed to freeze over to a depth of several meters. Fission batteries powered hot springs that fed the tiny streams that opened up little patches of ice along the rocky shoreline. Then a variety of tailored microbes were introduced, each carefully modeled after Martian fossils, and it was that chill prehistoric scene that wowed guests and the invited media as well as a distant and utterly envious public.
But any man’s fortune can prove as frail as that long-ago Martian summer. A skiing accident on Olympus Mons killed the trillionaire before his hundredth Earth-year. Competing heirs and endless tax troubles soon divided his fortune into many little wedges. His youngest daughter ended up with the mansion, living inside it whenever she wasn’t traveling to distant enclaves dedicated to the nearly wealthy.
And all the while, Mars was being remade. The icecaps were melted, the old northern sea was reborn, a serviceable atmosphere was cultured from comet bones, and, after another century, there was no Mars anymore, just a small and chilled and very muddy version of the Earth. No longer needed, the overhead dome was dismantled. The icy lake melted and evaporated until nothing remained but a smelly blue-gray marsh. Then the daughter, in her twelfth decade, found herself broke. To raise capital, she sold the surrounding lands in a piecemeal fashion. The marsh was drained and developed, a little city erupting on her doorstep. Eventually, she owned nothing but the old mansion and the surrounding hectares, and when she died, still broke, her property was sold to a series of unrelated owners, each endowed with energy and limited means and precious little aesthetic taste.
The original structure has been severely, brutally remodeled. A glance tells as much, while the careful stare reveals scars left behind by a parade of robot slaves and human craftsmen, nations of nanofabricators, and at least one clumsy slathering of smart-gels. The diamond hemispheres have been stained to a deeper red and then punctured in dozens of places. Windows have been added. The original airlocks have been replaced with ugly dilating doorways. Someone with an inappropriate fondness for Earthly architecture believed that thick Dorian columns would give a much-needed flourish to the main entrance. My burning temptation is to obliterate this travesty. Before moving inside, I want to give a command and watch while the portico is crushed into an artful pile of slag.
I barely defeat my temptation.
Past the dilating doorway waits an empty room. Spiraling stairs lead upward. Flanking doors lead into other equally empty rooms. From the feel of the place, it is obvious: No one lives here now. But little voices and tiny motions betray the presence of visitors. Which is only reasonable, since this is the first and only day when the old mansion will let itself be placed on public display.
I absorb voices, motions. Quietly, I pass through a series of increasingly spacious rooms. The floors are covered with cultured woods and living—if rather decrepit—rugs. Not a stick of furniture is visible, but indifferent cleaning and constant wear show where heavy chair legs stood for years. Where the first dome ends, I can peer into the neighboring dome—a single chamber encompassing a lake-sized tank meant for swimming humans or pet dolphins, or emancipated dolphins, perhaps. But the pond has been drained, and, judging by the black dust in the bottom, it has been empty for some time.
