21st Century Science Fiction (62 page)

“We’ve got to try!” shouted Gennady. He ran for the nearest phone, which was housed in a waterproof kiosk halfway down the catwalk. He was almost there when Miranda tackled him. They rolled right to the edge of the catwalk and Gennady almost lost the backpack.

“What are you doing?” he roared at her. “He’s a human being, for God’s sake.”

“We’ll never find him,” she said, still in that oddly calm tone of voice. Then she sat back. “Gennady, I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that. No, shut up, Jake. It was wrong. We should try to rescue the poor man.”

She cocked her head, then said, “He’s afraid Oversatch will be caught.”

“Your son’s been riding you!” Gennady shook his head. “How long?”

“Just now. He called as we were coming outside.”

“Let me go,” said Gennady. “I’ll tell them we stowed away below decks. I’m a God-damned interpol investigator, we’ll be fine.” He staggered to the phone.

It took a few seconds to ring through to the surprised crew, but after talking briefly to them Gennady hung up, shaking his head. “Not sure they believe me enough to come about,” he said. “They’re on their way down to arrest us, though.”

The rain was streaming down his face, but he was glad to be seeing it without the Oversatch interface filtering its reality. “Miranda? Can I talk to Jake for a second?”

“What? Sure?” She was hugging herself and shaking violently from the cold. Gennady realized his own teeth were chattering.

He had little time before reality reached out to hijack all his choices. He hefted the backpack, thinking about Hitchens’ reaction when he told him the story—and wondering how much of Oversatch he could avoid talking about in the deposition.

“Jake,” he said, “what is Cilenia?”

Miranda smiled, but it was Jake who said, “Cilenia’s not an ‘it’ like you’re used to, not a ‘thing’ in the traditional sense. It’s not really a place either. It’s just . . . some people realized that we needed a new language to describe the way the world actually works nowadays. When all identities are fluid, how can you get away with using the old words to describe anything?

“You know how cities and countries and corporations are like stable whirlpools in a flood of changes? They’re
attractors
—states the network relaxes back into, but at any given moment they might not really be there. Well, what if human beings were like that too? Imagine a driver working for a courier company. He follows his route, he talks to customers and delivers packages, but another driver would do exactly the same thing in his place. While he’s on the job, he’s not
him,
he’s the company. He only relaxes back into his own identity when he goes home and takes off the uniform.

“
It 2.0
gives us a way to point at those temporary identities. It’s a tool that lets us bring the
temporarily real
into focus, even while the outlines of the things we
thought
were real—like countries and companies—are blurred. If there could be an
it 2.0
for countries and companies, don’t you suppose there could be one for people, too?”

“Cilenia?” said Gennady. Miranda nodded, but Gennady shook his head. It wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine it; the problem was he
could.
Jake was saying that people weren’t even people all the time, that they played roles through much of the day representing powers and forces they often weren’t even aware of. A person could be multiple places at once, the way that Gennady was himself and his avatars, his investments and emails and website, and the cyranoids he rode. He’d been moving that way his whole adult life, he realized, his identity becoming smeared out across the world. In the past few weeks the process had accelerated. For someone like Jake, born and raised in a world of shifting identities, it 2.0 and Cilenia must make perfect sense. They might even seem mundane.

Maybe Cilenia was the new ‘it.’ But Gennady was too old and set in his ways to speak that language.

“And sanotica?” he asked. “What’s that?”

“Imagine Oversatch,” said Jake, “but with no moral constraints on it. Imagine that instead of looking for spontaneous remappings in the healthy network of human relationships, you had an
‘it 3.0’
that looked for disasters—points and moments when rules break down and there’s chaos and anarchy. Imagine an army of cyranoids stepping in at moments like that, to take advantage of misery and human pain. It would be very efficient, wouldn’t it? As efficient, maybe, as Oversatch.

“That,” said Jake as shouting crewmen came running along the gunwales, “is sanotica. An efficient parasite that feeds on catastrophe. And millions of people work for it without knowing.”

Gennady held up the backpack. “It would have taken this and . . . made a bomb?”

“Maybe. And how do
you
know, Mister Malianov, that you don’t work for sanotica yourself? How can I be sure that plutonium won’t be used for some terrible cause? It should go to Cilenia.”

Gennady hesitated. He heard Miranda Veen asking him to do this; and after everything he’d seen, he knew now that in his world power and control could be shifted invisibly and totally moment by moment by entities like Oversatch and Cilenia. Maybe Fraction really had hired the IAEA, and Gennady himself. And maybe they could do it again, and he wouldn’t even know it.

“Drop the backpack in the bilges,” said Jake. “We can send someone from Oversatch to collect it. Mother, you can bring it to Cilenia when you come.”

The rain was lessening, and he could see that her cheeks were wet now with tears. “I’ll come, Jake. When we get let go, I’ll come to you.”

Then, as Jake, she said, “Now, Gennady! They’re almost here!”

Gennady held onto the backpack. “I’ll keep it,” he said.

Gennady took the glasses out of his pocket and dropped them over the railing. In doing so he left the city he had only just discovered, but had lately lived in and begun to love. That city—world-spanning, built of light and ideals, was tricked into existing moment-by-moment by the millions who believed in it and simply acted as though it were there. He wished he could be one of them.

Gennady could hear Jake’s frustration in Miranda’s voice, as she said, “But how can you know that backpack’s not going to end up in sanotica?”

“There are more powers on Earth,” Gennady shouted over the storm, “than just Cilenia and sanotica. What’s in this backpack is one of those powers. But another power is
me.
Maybe my identity’s not fixed either and maybe I’m just one man, but at the end of the day I’m bound to follow what’s in here, where-ever it goes. I can’t go with you to Cilenia, or even stay in Oversatch, much as I’d like to. I will go where this plutonium goes, and try to keep it from harming anyone.

“Because some things,” he said as the crewmen arrived and surrounded them, “are real in every world.”

B
RENDA
C
OOPER
Brenda Cooper is a futurist, science fiction writer, and the CIO of the city of Kirkland, Washington. She began publishing science fiction in the early years of this century, with a series of collaborations with long-established writer Larry Niven; since then, her solo stories and novels have earned considerable regard from writers and readers in the field.

Originally published in
Analog,
“Savant Songs” is an unusual genre combination, hard SF romance, about an autistic woman physicist who does research on multiverses and her former grad student, who gets his Ph.D. and goes on to become her partner. It is told from his point of view and provides an emotional grounding for the “branching universes” concept that much SF takes for granted. There is perhaps an echo of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “Nine Lives,” but the story is a fresh and new thing.

I
loved Elsa; the soaring tinkle of her rare laughter, the marbled blue of her eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose. Her mind. The first, deepest attraction; the hardest challenge. She flew with her mental intensity, taking me places I’d never been before, outdistancing me, searching the mathematical structures of string theory and mbranes, following n-dimensional folds across multiple universes. I loved her the way one loves the rarest Australian black opal or the view from the top of Mount Everest. Elsa’s rarity was its own attraction. There are very few female savants.

She captured me whole when I was her physics grad student, starting in 2001, nine years before break-through.

Ten years ago last week, I walked into Elsa’s office. She stood with her back to me, staring out her window. She didn’t move at all as I snicked the door shut and scraped the chair legs. I coughed. Nothing. She might have been a statue. Her straw-colored hair hung in a long braid, just touching her slender hips, fastened with a violet beaded loop, the kind little girls wore. Her arms hung loosely from her pink t-shirt, above faded jeans and Birken-stocks.

“Hello?” I spoke tentatively. “Professor Hill?” Was she all right? I’d never seen such stillness in anything but a sleeping child.

Louder. “Professor? I’m Adam Giles, here for an interview.”

She finally turned and stepped daintily over to her desk, curling up in the big scratched leather chair behind her empty desk. Her gaze fastened on my eyes, as if they were all she saw in that moment. “Do you know what the word atom means?”

I blinked. She didn’t. A warm breeze from the open windows blew stray strands of her hair across her face.

I struggled for the right answer, pinned by her gaze. She was an autistic savant. Literal. “Indivisible.”

“Why?”

I thought about it. Atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and ever-infinitely smaller things. “It means they didn’t know any better when they named them. They couldn’t see anything smaller yet.”

“It means they were scared of anything smaller. They tried to make the word a fence. They thought that if they called atoms indivisible, they could make them indivisible.” Her gaze still hadn’t wavered. Her voice was high and firm, a soprano song even when she talked. I’d researched autistics, researched Elsa herself on the web. In physics, she was brilliant. She threw ideas right and left, half silly and wrong, half cutting-edge breakthroughs. If she accepted me, I would help the University winnow, feed her ideas to people who would follow them for years. One of her interviewers had summed her up by saying, “Talk to Elsa about physics, and all you see is the savant. The autistic exists over dinner.”

No grad student had lasted more than three months with her. I needed to last with her; my dissertation was based on her ideas. Whether she screamed or cried or just made me work, however strange she might be, I wanted—needed—to explore what she explored.

She kept going. “Scientists make fences with ideas. Accidentally. Do you like to jump fences?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll do.” She stood.

“Don’t you want to know about my dissertation?”

“You’re working on multiverses. It’s the only reason you can possibly have chosen me.”

She had a point. But multiverses was a rather broad subject. Mtheory: the latest plausible theory of everything, the current holy grail of physics. We live in universes made of 11 dimensions, called (mem)branes. We can render them with math, but settle for flat representations like folded shapes and balls full of air when we try to draw them in the few dimensions we can actually see. If you look at our pitiful drawings, we appear to live as holograms on flat sheets of see-through paper.

From that strange interview, I spent the next year near her every day, pounding away on my dissertation late at night, only giving myself Saturday nights for beer and chat with friends.

It was hard at first. Some days she talked endlessly about her most recent obsession, only not to me. She talked to herself, to the walls, to the windows, to the printers. I might as well have been inanimate. I wandered the lab behind her, taking notes. It was like following a six-year-old. She mumbled of memories from multiple universes, alternate histories, alternate futures. The first time I really understood her, months into following her, she stopped suddenly in the middle of one of her monologues, looking directly at me, as if today she saw me, and said, “Memory is a symphony call answered by the infinite databases on all the brane universes. We just need to hear the right notes, or make the right notes in an out-call, like requesting a certain table from a cosmic database.”

I learned she cared little for food, or weather, or even holidays. I learned never to change the location of anything in the lab, and that if she changed it, she never forgot the change. Even pencils had places. I had to hold her coat out to her when she left, trail it along her arm so she’d notice it, and then she’d shrug into it, safe from the New England weather until she made it across campus to the little brownstone apartment the University provided for her.

I didn’t care whether she ignored me or made me the center of her focus. Months passed when she worked with me by her side, when she seemed astoundingly normal, and guided me to new levels of understanding. But even when she fell into herself, when she wandered and talked to walls, I loved to watch her. Elsa had a dancer’s grace, flowing easily, absently, around every physical obstacle while her mind played in math jungle gyms and her hair glowed in the overhead lights. She was the fairy queen of physics, and I stayed with her, became her acolyte, her Watson, her constant companion.

Scientific dignitaries visited her, and reporters, and the Physics Chair, and I translated. “No, she thinks it is a music database. Or something like that. Related to Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields? A little. To Jung? She says he was too simple—it’s not a collective unconscious. It’s a collective database, a hologram, keyed to music. A bridge between eleven dimensions. Yes, some dimensions are too small to see. Elsa says size is an illusion.” I illustrated it the way she illustrated it to me once; plucking a hair from my head. “There are a million universes in here. And we are in here, too. Perhaps.” Whoever I was talking to would look puzzled, or awed, and angry at this, and I would shake my head. “No, I don’t fully understand it.”