The Collected Short Fiction, page 23
“What do you want from this place?” he asked.
“Freedom,” she said. “The choice of what to be, where to live.”
“But the city won’t let you leave. You have no choice.”
“Yes, the city, I can leave it whenever I want.”
Thinner called from across the mall. “As soon as the city is put together, you can leave, too. The inventory is policed only during a move.”
Jeshua’s shoulders slumped and his bristling stance softened. He had nothing to fight against now, not immediately. He kept his fists clenched, even so.
“I’m confused,” he said.
“Stay for the evening,” she suggested. “Then will you make thought come clear of confusion.”
He followed her to his room near the peak of the city. The room hadn’t been changed. Before she left him there, he asked what her name was.
“Anata,” she said. “Anata Leucippe.”
“Do you get lonely in the evenings?” he asked, stumbling over the question like a child in a field of corn stubble.
“Never,” she said. She laughed and turned half-away from him. “An’ now certes am dis em, you no’ trustable!”
She left him by the door. “Eat!” she called from the corner of the access hall. “I be back, around mid of the evening.”
He smiled and shut his door, then turned to the kitchen to choose what he was going to eat.
Being a whole man, he now knew, did not stop the pain and fear of loneliness. The possibility of quenching was, in fact, a final turn of the thumbscrew. He paced like a caged bear, thinking furiously and reaching no conclusions.
By midnight, he was near an explosion. He waited in the viewing area of the terrace, watching the moonlight bathe God-Does-Battle like milk, gripping the railing with strength that could have crushed wood. He listened to the noise of the city. It was less soothing than he remembered, neither synchronous nor melodic.
Anata came for him half an hour after she said she would. Jeshua had gone through so many ups and downs of despair and aloofness that he was exhausted. She took his hand and led him to the central shaft on foot. They found hidden curved stairwells and went down four levels to a broad promenade which circled a widening in the shaft. “The walkway, it doesn’t work yet,” she told him. “My tongue, I’m getting it down. I’m studying.”
“There’s no reason you should speak like me,” he said.
“It is difficult at times. Dis me—I cannot cure a lifetime ob—of talk.”
“Your own language is pretty,” he said, half-lying.
“I know. Prettier. Alive-o. But—” She shrugged.
Jeshua thought he couldn’t be more than five or six years older than she was, by no means an insurmountable distance. He jerked as the city lights dimmed. All around, the walls lost their bright glow and produced in its stead a pale, lunar gleam, like the night outside.
“This is what I brought you here for,” she said. “To see.”
The ghost-moon luminescence made him shiver. Bits of the walls and floor passed threads of light between them, and from the threads grew spirits, shimmering first like mirages, then settling into translucent steadiness. They began to move.
They came in couples, groups, crowds, and with them were children, animals, birds, and things he couldn’t identify. They filled the promenade and terraces and walked, talking in tunnel-end whispers he couldn’t make out, laughing and looking and being alive, but not in Jeshua’s time.
They were not solid, not robots or cyborgs. They were spirits from ten centuries past, and he was rapidly losing all decorum watching them come to form around him.
“Sh!” Anata said, taking his arm to steady him. “They don’t hurt anybody. They’re no’ here. They’re dreams.”
Jeshua clasped his hands tight and forced himself to be calm.
“This is the city, what it desires,” Anata said. “You want to kill the polis, the city, because it keeps out the people, but look—it hurts, too. It wants. What’s a city without its people? Just sick. No’ bad. No’ evil. Can’t kill a sick one, can you?”
Each night, she said, the city reenacted a living memory of the past, and each night she came to watch.
Jeshua saw the pseudo-life, the half-silent existence of a billion recorded memories, and his anger slowly faded. His hands loosened their grip on each other. He could never sustain hatred for long. Now, with understanding just out of reach, but obviously coming, he could only resign himself to more confusion for the moment.
“It’ll take me a long, long time to forgive what happened,” he said.
“This me, too.” She sighed. “When I was married, I found I could not have children. This my husband could not understand. All the others of the women in the group could have children. So I left in shame, and came to the city we had always worshiped. I thought it would be, the city, the only one to cure. But now I don’t know. I do not want another husband, I want to wait for this to go away. It is too beautiful to leave while it is still here.”
“Go away?”
“The cities, they get old and they wander,” she said. “Not all things work good here now. Pieces are dying. Soon it will all die. Even such as Thinner, they die. The room is full of them. And no more are being made. The city is too old to grow new. So I wait until the beauty is gone.”
Jeshua looked at her more closely. There was a whitish cast in her left eye. It had not been there a few hours ago.
“It is time to go to sleep,” she said. “Very late.”
He took her gently by the hand and led her through the phantoms, up the empty but crowded staircases, asking her where she lived.
“I don’t have any one room,” she said. “Sleep in all of them at some time or another. But we can’t go back dere.” She stopped. “There. Dere. Can’t go back.” She looked up at him. “Dis me, canno’ spek mucky ob—” She held her hand to her mouth. “I forget. I learned bu’ now’—I don’ know . . .”
He felt a slow horror grind in his stomach.
“Something is going wrong,” she said. Her voice became deeper, like Thinner’s, and she opened her mouth to scream, but could not. She tore away from him and backed up. “I’m doing something wrong.”
“Take off your shirt,” Jeshua said.
“No.” She looked offended.
“It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then take off your shirt.”
She began to remove it. Her hands hesitated.
“Now.”
She peeled it over her head and stood naked, with her small breasts outthrust, narrow hips square and bonily dimpled, genitals flossed in feathery brown. A pattern of scars on her chest and breasts formed a circle. Bits of black remained like cinders.
She turned away from him on the staircase, phantoms drifting past her and through her. He reached out to stop her but wasn’t quick enough. Her foot spasmed and she fell, gathering into a twisted ball, down the staircase, up against the railings, to the bottom.
He stood near the top and saw her pale blue fluid and red skin-blood and green tissue leaking from a torn leg. He felt he might go insane.
“Thinner!” he screamed. He kept calling the name. The lunar glow brightened and the phantoms disappeared. The halls and vaults echoed with his braying cry.
The cyborg appeared at the bottom of the staircase and knelt down to examine the girl.
“Both of us,” Jeshua said. “Both lies.”
“We don’t have the parts to fix her,” Thinner said.
“Why were we brought back? Why didn’t you just let us stay?”
“Because until a few years ago there was still hope,” Thinner said. “The city was still trying to correct the programs, still trying to get back its citizens. Sixty years ago it gave the architect more freedom to try to find out what went wrong. We built ourselves—her, you, the others—to go among the humans and see what they were like now, how the cities could accommodate. Then the aging began, and the sickness. The attempt finally died.”
Jeshua felt the scars on his chest and shut his eyes, wishing, hoping it was all a nightmare.
“Daod the smith purged the mark from you when you were a young cyborg, that you might pass for human. Then he stunted your development that you might someday be forced to leave.”
“My father was like me.”
“Yes. He carried the scar, too.”
Jeshua nodded. “How long do we have?”
“Not long. The city is running out of memories to repeat. Soon it will give up, like the others that are restless, and move, and strand itself someplace.”
Jeshua walked away from Thinner and the girl’s body and wandered down an access hall to the terraces on the outer wall of the city. He shaded his eyes against the rising sun in the east and looked toward Arat. There, he saw the city which had once occupied Mesa Canaan. It had disassembled and was trying to cross the mountains.
“Kisa,” he said.
Scattershot
Wars of the future may be fought with strange weapons, especially if humanity comes into conflict with an alien race. Bombs, lasers, energy-swords . . . what are the dangers of these compared with a weapon that can cast spaceships into other universes where Teddy bears speak multiple languages, snakes have been bred as warriors, and tiny creatures arrange themselves to form hologram images?
Greg Bear, who’s rapidly establishing twin careers as writer and artist in science fiction, tells a fast-moving, funny, frightening, and ultimately moving story of people and creatures thrown together in a strange universe.
The teddy bear spoke excellent mandarin. It was about fifty centimeters tall, plump, with close-set eyes above a nose unusually long for the generally pug breed. It paced around me, muttering to itself.
I rolled over and felt barbs down my back and sides. My arms were reluctant to move. There was something about my will to get up and the way my muscles reacted that was out-of-kilter; the nerves weren’t conveying properly. So it was, I thought, with my eyes and the small black-and-white beast they claimed to see: a derangement of phosphene patterns, cross-tied with childhood memories and snatches of linguistics courses ten years past.
It began speaking Russian. I ignored it and focused on other things. The rear wall of my cabin was unrecognizable, covered with geometric patterns that shifted in and out of bas-relief and glowed faintly in the shadow cast by a skewed panel light. My fold-out desk had been torn from its hinges and now lay on the floor, not far from my head. The ceiling was cream-colored. Last I remembered it had been a pleasant shade of burnt orange. Thus totaled, half my cabin was still present. The other half had been ferried away in the—
Disruption. I groaned, and the bear stepped back nervously. My body was gradually coordinating. Bits and pieces of disassembled vision integrated and stopped their random flights, and still the creature walked, and still it spoke, though getting deep into German.
It was not a minor vision. It was either real or a full-fledged hallucination.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
It bent over me, sighed, and said, “Of all the fated arrangements. A speaking I know not the best of—Anglo.” It held out its arms and shivered. “Pardon the distraught. My cords of psyche—nerves?—they have not decided which continuum to obey this moment.”
“Mine, too,’’ I said cautiously. “Who are you?”
“Psyche, we are all psyche. Take this care and be not content with illusion, this path, this merriment. Excuse. Some writers in English. All I know is from the read.”
“Am I still on my ship?”
“So we are all, and hors de combat. We limp for the duration.”
I was integrated enough to stand, and I did so, towering above the bear and rearranging my tunic. My left breast ached with a bruise. Because we had been riding at one G for five days, I was wearing a bra, and the bruise lay directly under a strap. Such, to quote, was the fated arrangement. As my wits gathered and held converse, I considered what might have happened and felt a touch of the “distraughts” myself. I began to shiver like a recruit in pressure-drop training.
We had survived. That is, at least I had survived, out of a crew of forty-three. How many others?
“Do you know. . . have you found out—”
“Worst,” the bear said. “Some I do not catch, the deciphering of other things not so hard. Disrupted about seven, eight hours past. It was a force of many, for I have counted ten separate things not in my recognition.” It grinned. “You are ten, and best yet. We are perhaps not so far in world-lines.”
We’d been told survival after disruption was possible. Practical statistics indicated one out of a myriad ships, so struck, would remain integral. For a weapon that didn’t actually kill in itself, the probability disrupter was very effective.
“Are we intact?” I asked.
“Fated,” the Teddy bear said. “I cognize we can even move and seek a base. Depending.”
“Depending,” I echoed. The creature sounded masculine, despite size and a childlike voice. “Are you a he? Or—”
“He,” the bear said quickly.
I touched the bulkhead above the door and ran my finger along a familiar, slightly crooked seam. Had the disruption kept me in my own universe—against incalculable odds—or exchanged me to some other? Was either of us in a universe we could call our own?
“Is it safe to look around?”
The bear hummed. “Cognize—know not. Last I saw, others had not reached a state of organizing.”
It was best to start from the beginning. I looked down at the creature and rubbed a bruise on my forehead. “Wh-where are you from?”
“Same as you, possible,” he said. “Earth. Was mascot to captain, for cuddle and advice.”
That sounded bizarre enough. I walked to the hatchway and peered down the corridor. It was plain and utilitarian, but neither the right color nor configuration. The hatch at the end was round and had a manual sealing system, six black throw-bolts that no human engineer would ever have put on a spaceship. “What’s your name?”
“Have got no official name. Mascot name known only to captain.”
I was scared, so my brusque nature surfaced and I asked him sharply if his captain was in sight, or any other aspect of the world he’d known.
“Cognize not,” he answered. “Call me Sonok.”
“I’m Geneva,” I said. “Francis Geneva.”
“We are friends?”
“I don’t see why not. I hope we’re not the only ones who can be friendly. Is English difficult for you?”
“Mind not. I learn fast. Practice make perfection.”
“Because I can speak some Russian, if you want.”
“Good as I with Anglo?” Sonok asked. I detected a sense of humor—and self-esteem—in the bear.
“No, probably not. English it is. If you need to know anything, don’t be embarrassed to ask.”
“Sonok hardly embarrassed by anything. Was mascot.”
The banter was providing a solid framework for my sanity to grab on to. I had an irrational desire to take the bear and hug him, just for want of something warm. His attraction was undeniable—tailored, I guessed, for that very purpose. But tailored from what? The color suggested panda; the shape did not.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked, sitting on my bunk.
“Sonok not known for quick decisions,” he said, squatting on the floor in front of me. He was stubby-limbed but far from clumsy.
“Nor am I,” I said. “I’m a software and machinery language expert. I wasn’t combat-trained.”
“Not cognize ‘software,’“ Sonok said.
“Programming materials,” I explained. The bear nodded and got up to peer around the door. He pulled back and scrabbled to the rear of the cabin.
“They’re here!” he said. “Can port shut?”
“I wouldn’t begin to know how—” But I retreated just as quickly and clung to my bunk. A stream of serpents flowed by the hatchway, metallic green and yellow, with spatulate heads and red ovals running dorsally.
The stream passed without even a hint of intent to molest, and Sonok climbed down the bas-relief pattern. “What the hell are they doing here?” I asked.
“They are a crew member, I think,” Sonok said.
“What—who else is out there?”
The bear straightened and looked at me steadily. “Have none other than to seek,” he said solemnly. “Elsewise, we possess no rights to ask. No?” The bear walked to the hatch, stepped over the bottom seal, and stood in the corridor. “Come?”
I got up and followed.
A woman’s mind is a strange pool to slip into at birth. It is set within parameters by the first few months of listening and seeing. Her infant mind is a vast blank template that absorbs all and stores it away. In those first few months come role acceptance, a beginning to attitude, and a hint of future achievement. Listening to adults and observing their actions build a storehouse of preconceptions and warnings: Do not see those ghosts on bedroom walls—they aren’t there! None of the rest of us can see your imaginary companions, darling. . .It’s something you have to understand.
And so, from some dim beginning, not ex nihilo but out of totality, the woman begins to pare her infinite self down. She whittles away at this unwanted piece, that undesired trait. She forgets in time that she was once part of all and turns to the simple tune of life, rather than to the endless and symphonic before. She forgets those companions who dance on the ceiling above her bed and called to her from the dark. Some of them were friendly; others, even in the dim time, were not pleasant. But they were all she. For the rest of her life, the woman seeks some echo of that preternatural menagerie; in the men she chooses to love, in the tasks she chooses to perform, in the way she tries to be. After thirty years of cutting, she becomes Francis Geneva.
When love dies, another piece is pared away, another universe is sheared off, and the split can never join again. With each winter and spring, spent on or off worlds with or without seasons, the woman’s life grows more solid, and smaller.
