Year's Best SF 11, page 8
In any case, it had been enough to bring the mycoids a place at the table of whatever Galactic Club had set up the wormhole nexus. Perhaps they too had found a wormhole nexus on the edge of their solar system. Perhaps they too had puzzled over the alien intelligences it connected them to. If so, they showed little sign of having learned much. They pulsed their electrophoretically controlled molecular gradients into the soil near the Station’s portal, but much of it—even assuming the translations were correct—was about strictly parochial matters. It was as if they weren’t interested in communicating with the humans.
Donald determined to make them interested. Besides his pastoral duties—social as well as spiritual—he had an allotted time for scholarship and study, and he devoted that time to the work of the mycoid research team. He did not explain his purpose to the scientists. If the mycoids were sinners, he had an obligation to offer them the chance of salvation. He had no obligation to offer the scientists the temptation to scoff.
Time passed.
The airlock door slammed. Donald stepped through the portal and on to the surface. He walked forward along an already-beaten track across the floor of the copse. Here and there, mushroom-like structures poked up through the spongy, bluish moss and black leaf-litter. The bulges of their inch-wide caps had a watery transparency that irresistibly suggested that they were the lenses of eyes. No one had as yet dared to pluck a fungus to find out.
A glistening patch of damp mud lay a couple of hundred meters from the station. It occupied a space between the perimeters of two of the underground mycoids, and had become a preferred site for myco-linguistic research. Rainbow ripples of chemical communication between the two sprawling circular beings below stained its surface at regular intervals. Occasional rainstorms washed away the gradients, but they always seeped out again.
Donald stepped up to the edge of the mud and set up the apparatus that the team had devised for a non-intrusive examination of the mycoids’ messages: a wide-angle combined digital field microscope and spectroscope. About two meters long, its support frame straddled the patch, above which its camera slowly tracked along. Treading carefully, he planted one trestle, then the other on the far side of the patch, then walked back and laid the tracking rail across them both. He switched on the power pack and the camera began its slow traverse.
There was a small experiment he had been given to perform. It had been done many times before, to no effect. Perhaps this variant would be different. He reached in to his thigh pocket and pulled out a plastic-covered gel disc, about five centimeters across, made from synthesized copies of local mucopolysaccharides. The concentric circles of molecular concentrations that covered it spelled out—the team had hoped—the message. We wish to communicate. Please respond.
Donald peeled off the bottom cover and, one knee on a rock and one hand on a fallen log, leaned out over the multicolored mud and laid the gel disc down on a bare dark patch near the middle. He withdrew his hand, peeling back the top cover as he did so, and settled back on his haunches. He stuffed the crumpled wrappings in his pocket and reached in deeper for a second disc: one he’d covertly prepared with a different message.
Resisting the impulse to look over his shoulder, he repeated the operation and stood up.
A voice sounded in his helmet: “Got you!”
Qasim stood a few meters away, glaring at him.
“I beg your pardon,” said Donald. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“You’ve placed an unauthorized message on the mud,” said Qasim.
“What if I have?” said Donald. “It can do no harm.”
“That’s not for you to judge,” said Qasim.
“Nor for you either!”
“It is,” said Qasim. “We don’t want anything…ideological or controversial to affect our contact.” He looked around. “Come on, Donald, be a sensible chap. There’s still time to pick the thing up again. No harm done and no more will be said.”
It had been like this, Donald thought, ever since the East India Company: commercial and military interests using and then restricting missionaries.
“I will not do that,” he said. “I’ll go back with you, but I won’t destroy the message.”
“Then I’ll have to do it,” said Qasim. “Please step aside.”
Donald stayed where he was. Qasim stepped forward and caught his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Donald pulled away, and took an involuntary step back. One foot came down in the mud and kept on going down. His leg went in up to the knee. Flailing, he toppled on his back across the tracking rail. The rail cracked in two under the blow from his oxygen tanks. He landed with a huge splash. Both pieces of the rail sank out of sight at once. Donald himself lay, knees crooked, his visor barely above the surface.
“Quicksand,” said Qasim, his voice cutting across the alarmed babble from the watching science team. “Don’t try to stand or struggle, it’ll just make things worse. Lie back with your arms out and stay there. I’ll get a rope.”
“Okay,” said Donald. He peered up through his smeared visor. “Don’t be long.”
Qasim waved. “Back in seconds, Donald. Hang in there.”
The science team talked Donald through the next minute, as Qasim ran for the portal, stepped into the airlock, and grabbed the rope that had already been placed there.
“Okay, Donald, he’s just—”
The voice stopped. Static hiss filled the speaker. Donald waited.
“Can anyone hear me?”
No reply.
Five more minutes passed. Nobody was coming. He would have to get himself out. There was no need to panic. He had five hours’ worth of air supply, and no interruption to the portals had ever lasted more than an hour.
Donald swept his arms through the mud to his side, raised them above the mud, flung them out again, and repeated this laborious backstroke many times, until his helmet rested on solid ground. It had taken him half an hour to move a couple of meters. He rested for a few minutes, gasping, then reached behind him and scrabbled for something to hold. Digging his fingers into the soil, kicking now with his feet—still deep in the mud—he began to lever himself up and heave his shoulders out of the bog. He got as much as the upper quarter of his body out when the ground turned to liquid under his elbows. His head fell back, and around it the mud splashed again. He made another effort at swimming along the top of the mud on his back. His arms met less resistance. Around him the sludge turned to slurry. Water welled up, and large bubbles of gas popped all across the widening quagmire.
He began to sink. He swung his arms, kicked his legs hard, and the increasingly liquid mass closed over his visor. Writhing, panicking now, he sank into utter darkness. His feet touched bottom. His hands, stretched above his head, were now well below the surface. He leaned forward with an immense effort and tried to place one foot in front of the other. If he had to, he would walk out of this. Barely had he completed a step when he found the resistance of the wet soil increase. It set almost solid around him. He was stuck.
Donald took some slow, deep breaths. Less than an hour had passed. Fifty minutes. Fifty-five. At any moment his rescuers would come for him.
They didn’t. For four more hours he stood there in the dark. As each hour passed he realized with increasing certainty that the portal had not reopened. He wondered, almost idly, if that had anything to do with his own intrusion into the bog. He wondered, with some anguish, whether his illicit message had been destroyed, unread, as he fell in on top of it.
The anguish passed. What had happened to the message, and what happened to him, was in a quite ultimate sense not his problem. The parable of the sower was as clear as the great commission itself. He had been in the path of duty. He had proclaimed, to the best of his ability, the truth. This was what he had been sent to do. No guarantee had been given that he would be successful. He would not be the first, nor the last, missionary whose mission was to all human reckoning futile. The thought saddened him, but did not disturb him. In that sense, if none other, his feet were on a rock.
He prayed, he shouted, he thought, he wept, he prayed again, and he died.
At last! The aliens had sent a communications package! After almost a year of low-bandwidth disturbances of the air and the electromagnetic spectrum, from which little sense could be extracted, and many days of dropping tiny messages of blurry resolution and trivial import, they had finally, finally sent something one could get one’s filaments into!
The mycoid sent long tendrils around the package, infiltrating its pores and cracks. It synthesized acids that worked their way through any weak points in its fabric. Within hours it had penetrated the wrapping and begun a riotous, joyous exploration of the vast library of information within. The mycoid had in its own genetic library billions of years of accumulated experience in absorbing information from organisms of every kind: plant or animal, mycoid or bacterium. It could relate the structure of a central nervous system to any semantic or semiotic content it had associated with the organism. It probed cavities, investigated long transportation tubes, traced networks of neurons and found its way to the approximately globular sub-package where the information was most rich. It dissolved here, embalmed there, dissected and investigated everywhere. In an inner wrapping it found a small object made from multiple mats of cellulose fiber, each layer impregnated with carbon-based markings. The mycoid stored these codes with the rest. Seasons and years passed. A complete transcription of the alien package, of its neural structures and genetic codes, was eventually read off.
Then the work of translation and interpretation, shared out across all the mycoids of the continent, began.
It took a long time, but the mycoids had all the time in the world. They had no more need—for the moment—to communicate with the aliens, now that they had this vast resource of information. They, or their ancestors, had done this many times before, under many suns.
They understood the alien, and they understood the strange story that had shaped so many of the connections in its nervous system. They interpreted the carbon marks on the cellulose mats. In their own vast minds they reconstructed the scenes of alien life, as they had done with everything that fell their way, from the grass and the insects to the trees. They had what a human might have called a vivid imagination. They had, after all, little else.
Some of them found the story to be:
Affirmation-marker
GOOD
Information-marker
NEWS
Spores spread it to the space-going trees, and thence to the wormhole network, and thence to countless worlds.
Not quite all the seeds fell on stony ground.
Toy Planes
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
Tobias S. Buckell (www.tobiasbuckell.com) lives in Bluffton, Ohio. His website biographical information includes such fascinating tidbits as “Tobias was born in Grenada in 1979, just as a semi-Marxist government took over the country. By 1983 the government began executing members of its own party, and thus his earliest memories are of nervous adults, not being allowed near windows, and of the American Intervention/Invasion,” and “Tobias grew up on a boat in Grenada, and also lived aboard boats in the British Virgin Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands when his family moved away from Grenada after the war. In 1995 Hurricane Marilyn destroyed the boat he lived on in St. Thomas. His family moved to Ohio where his stepdad grew up.” He went to college at Bluffton University and still works there. He has published more than twenty-five stories and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002. His first novel, The Crystal Ship, publishes in 2006.
“Toy Planes” was published in Nature. It is a charming story about a Caribbean space program, sort of a joke, eh?—with a pleasantly memorable political point. It’s the same kind of fiction as Fred Pohl’s little jewel, “The Day the Martians Came.”
My sister Joanie’s deft hands flicked from dreadlock to dreadlock, considering her strategy. “You always leaving,” she said, flicking the razor on, and suddenly I’m five, chasing her with a kite made from plastic bags and twigs, shouting that I was going to fly away from her one day.
“I’m sorry. Please, let’s get this done.”
I’d waited long enough. I’d grown dreads because when I studied in the United States I wanted to remember who I was and where I came from as I began to lose my Caribbean accent. But the rocket plane’s sponsor wanted them cut. It would be disaster for a helmet not to have a proper seal in an emergency. Explosive decompression was not something a soda company wanted to be associated with in their customers’ minds. It was insulting that they assumed we couldn’t keep the craft sealed. But we needed their money. The locks had become enough a part of me that I winced when the clippers bit into them, groaned, and another piece of me fell away.
In the back of the bus that I had pick me up, I hung on to a looped handle swinging from the roof as the driver rocketed down the dirt road from Joanie’s. My sister had found a place out in the country, a nice concrete house with a basement opening up into a sloped garden on the side of a steep hill. She taught mathematics at the school a few miles away, an open-shuttered building, and this would have been my future too, if I hadn’t been so intent on “getting off the rock.”
The islands always called their children back.
We hit asphalt, potholes, and passed cane fields with machete-wielding laborers hacking away at the stalks, sweat-drenched shirts knotted around their waists. It was hot; my arms stuck to the plastic covered seats. The driver leaned into a turn, and looked back. “I want ask you something.” I really wished the back seats had belts.
“Sure.”
“All that money you spending, you don’t think it better spent on getting better roads?” He dodged a pothole. “Or more school funding?”
Colorful red and yellow houses on stilts dotted the steep lush green mountainsides as I looked out of the tinted windows. “Only one small part of the program got funded by the government,” I explained. “We found private investors, advertisers, to back the rest. Whatever the government invested will be repaid.”
“Maybe.”
I had my extra arguments. How many people lived on this island? Tens of thousands. Most of our food was imported, leaving us dependent on other food-producing nations, who all used satellites to track their farming. What spin-off technologies might come out of studying recycling in space? Why wait for other nations to get to it first? Research always produced good things for the people who engaged in it.
But I was tired of arguing for it, and I had only sound bites for him, the same ones I’d given the media who treated us like kids trying to do something all grown up.
The market surrounded me in a riot of color: fruit, vegetables, full women in dresses in bright floral patterns. And the noise of hundreds constantly bargaining over things like the price of fish. Teenagers stood around the corners with friends. I wandered around looking for something, as we needed to fill the craft with enough extra weight to simulate a passenger and we still had a few extra ounces to add.
I found a small toy stall. And standing in front of it I was five years old again, with no money, and a piece of scrap metal in the triangular shape of a space plane. I would pretend it was just like the real life ones I’d read about in the books donated to the school after the hurricane. And at night, when the power would sometimes flicker out, I’d go out and stand on the porch and look up at the bright stars and envy them.
The stall had a small bottle, hammered over with soda-can metal, with triangular welded-on wings, and a cone stuck to the back. It was painted over in yellow, black and green, and I bought it.
The rest of the day was a blur. Getting to the field involved running the press: yes I’d cut my hair for “safety” reasons, yes I thought this was a good use of our money, not just first-world nations deserved space, it was there for everyone.
There were photos of me getting aboard the tiny rocket plane with a small brown package under my arm. The giant balloon platform that the plane hung from shifted in the gentle, salty island breeze. Not too far away the waves hit the sand of the beach. Inside, suited up, door closed, everything became electronic.
It was the cheapest way to get to orbit. Balloon up on a triangular platform to save on fuel, then light the rocket-plane up and head for orbit. We’d scavenged balloons and material from several companies, one about to go out of business. The plane chassis had once been used by a Chinese corporation during trials, and the guidance systems were all open-source. Online betting parlors had our odds at 50%. We weren’t even the first, but we were the first island.
The countdown finished, my stomach lurched, and I saw palm trees slide by the portholes to my right. I reached back and patted the package, the hammered-together toy, and smiled.
“Hello out there, all of you,” I whispered into the radio. “We’re coming up too.”
Mason’s Rats
NEAL ASHER
Neal Asher (www.nealasher.com) lives in Chelmsford, England. Since 2000 he has published six novels: Gridlinked, a kind of James Bond space opera, was published in the UK in 2001; The Skinner, in 2002; then Line of Polity, Cowl, Brass Man (a sequel to Gridlinked), and Voyage of the Sable Keech (a sequel to The Skinner). All but Cowl are set in the same future, the “runcible universe,” where matter transmitters called runcibles link the settled worlds. Other books out in 2006 include The Engineer ReConditioned and a novella, Prador Moon. His short fiction is appearing with some frequency in UK and U.S. magazines in recent years.
