Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (32 page)

People were crying and singing (and drinking, of course) and taking pictures and cheering.

At some point a group of West Germans about my age climbed up on top of the Wall; this seemed like a good idea and both Meg and I scrambled up with them. A group of East Germans climbed up to join us. Someone had music and we all danced together in an amazing party of joy and freedom, and I knew: even if I failed every class and my parents disowned me,
this moment was worth it.

I looked at Meg, to tell her so, and I noticed that she was craning her neck to look for someone, her face dark with worry. Then the clouds cleared as she seized hold of a young man who'd been dancing a few feet away. "Come," she said to him in German clear enough that even I could understand. "Let's go somewhere in West Berlin, an all-night cafe, maybe. I'll buy us a midnight snack."

His name was Gregor, he was an East Berliner, and he spoke English, although it was halting and heavily accented. He was nineteen, like me, and he wanted to ask me questions about the U.S. and what I was doing in Germany, which would have been difficult to explain even without the language barrier.

Meg didn't talk much. Mostly, she stared at Gregor. I couldn't quite unpack the look on her face, but she was gripping her hands together very tightly as he ate. (He was ravenous, actually; he'd been about to eat a late dinner when the news came on, and he'd headed to the border crossing without food. He'd been stuck there in the crowd for hours.)

"Gregor," Meg said abruptly, as he was finishing his sandwich. "I need you to make me a promise."

"Oh?"

"Promise me that you will never take up smoking."

It was such a random request that I started laughing, and Gregor looked at me and said, in English, "Who
is
this? Is she your mother?"

"She's from the future," I said. "She makes predictions."

Gregor didn't seem to entirely understand this but he gave her a bemused look and said, "Can you make a prediction?"

"Yes," she said, sharply. "East and West Germany will unify on October 3rd, 1990. And if you start smoking, you will be dead before you're forty-five." She stood up abruptly. "Excuse me." She strode off toward the bathroom.

Gregor gave me a look of wide-eyed hilarity. "Thank you very much for the meal," he said. "If the border stays open and I can come again, I would like to see you but I am not so sure about your friend!"

"I can't say I blame you," I said.

He scribbled down his address in East Berlin on a napkin and then asked, "Can I look for you here at this restaurant? Tomorrow night? How long are you staying in Germany?"

"I have a ticket to go home on Sunday. I'll come here tomorrow night," I said. "I'll wait for you."

"Yes," he said, an incandescent smile lighting his face. "You wait for me. Your friend, try to persuade her to see the sights!"

"That's a really good idea," I said, grinning.

Meg came back a few minutes later, red-eyed, and silently paid the bill. We walked back to our hotel in silence.

In our room, I said, "You know him."

"Yes."

"He's the person you came back to find."

She was staring at the wall of the hotel room, her face fixed. "Yes."

"All
of this—talking me into coming, paying for my ticket—was really about Gregor."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to see him. One last time."

They'd met when they were forty. Too late for kids, she said, and when I made a face she laughed softly and didn't pursue it. They'd met at work, at the public health non-profit she'd mentioned; she'd been in policy, he was doing some sort of research. It had been a wild and intense romance, and they'd married just four months after their first meeting. "Mom had a
conniption,
of course," she said, "but I did learn to just ignore those at some point."

But then Gregor died, at forty-four, of lung cancer. Meg was
certain
it was due to the cigarettes.

"So what if introducing us now was a mistake?" I said. "What if, by throwing us at each other here, now, today, we annoy the
piss
out of each other and we don't want anything to do with each other when we meet at forty, if we even do?"

"I thought about that," Meg said. "But I decided if I could talk him into not smoking, if he could have a long life... it would be worth it. Even if he had that life with someone else."

I thought about Gregor, and that brief glimpse we'd had of each other. I could certainly imagine
sleeping
with him. It was hard to imagine
marrying
anybody, but not any harder than it was to imagine myself as old as Meg.

"We used to fantasize about meeting... here," she said, waving her hand at West Berlin, out our window. "I mean, I really
did
have a premonition that the Wall was going to fall. Everyone else said 'maybe someday!' and I was thinking,
It's going to happen. It's going to happen really soon.
I thought about coming... but I didn't. Because of the money, because of Mom... He was here, of course, and he told me about it: waiting those dark hours at the gate, dancing on the wall, how
hungry
he was! I knew that if I could find him, all I'd have to do was offer him some dinner and he'd follow me anywhere. I didn't think much... past that."

"And so that's what you did."

"It wasn't like I imagined," she said, her voice a little hollow. "It's him, and it's not him, and seeing him like this..."

"Especially since he looks at you, and sees someone the age of his mother."

"Well, yes and no. He looks at
you
and he sees..."

"Just stop," I said. "Don't mess with my head any more than you've already done."

She fell silent.

"Where did you get the time machine, anyway?" I said. "Meddling with the past can't possibly be legal."

"Well, it doesn't change anything for us, you know. My Calculus grade will always be a D."

"And Gregor will stay dead for you?"

"Yes. He's dead in my world."

"You came all this way..."

She shrugged. "It was Gregor who built it. His last project. It seemed fitting... to use it to go to him." She gave me a crooked smile. "This is my last visit. You won't see me again until you see me in your mirror."

"There's
a terrifying thought."

She walked over to the door, but then turned back, her hand on the knob. "Your future is
yours,
you know. Whatever you make of it. With whomever you choose." She hoped I'd choose Gregor, and have him for longer; I could see it in her eyes, but she managed to keep from saying it out loud, and just gave me a final bright-eyed smile. She closed the door behind her.

I waited a few minutes—I wanted to give her time to get a quarter-mile away. Then I put my coat on, and went back out to party at the Wall.

No matter how fast our ability to travel between two points, some emotional divides will remain "Distant Like the Stars." Leah Cypess
wrote the first draft of this story in 2008. She tells us "about fifteen words from that draft survive in the version published here, mostly 'and's and 'the's." Leah would like to thank Tina Connolly for the insight that finally made the story work. In addition to short stories, the author has also published two young adult fantasy novels:
Mistwood
and
Nightspell.

Every important moment of my life has happened in front of a Door.

That's not true, of course. But right now it feels that way.

The Door in front of me is more primitive than any I've seen for years, a gray-green rectangle with the dimension-detangler thrumming on its left side, a jumble of cords and chips and tiny flashes of light. But it will work. As soon as I open the Door, it will unwind the extra dimensions of spacetime between this Door and the Door on Earth. All I'll have to do is step through, and I'll be back.

The purple-grass plain where they built the Door is crowded with spectators, a solid line of eager faces pushing up against the electronic barrier. The few people on this side of the barrier—Bella and three other councilors—are silent and composed. The clouds sweep by overhead, pushed swift and free by the southern wind. The familiar itch crawls beneath my skin, as if I am so trapped that my own body is part of the cage. My legs tremble with the need to run, to run and run until I am far away and free.

But there is nowhere to run. There never is, not any more.

The unraveler is a faint buzz in the palm of my left hand. This part, too, will work simply. All I have to do is touch the unraveler to the correct cord, and the Door will be gone.

Rage and desperation swirl through me, and I know this isn't going to be as hard as I thought it might be. It isn't going to be hard at all. I am a cornered animal, and it amazes me that no one here sees it.

That they honestly think I'm going to open their Door.

I was six years old the last time I stood in front of a Door this clunky. Back then, it was the latest version, and, of course, my parents were the first to have the newest model installed.

There were so many people watching me—a dozen executives from the company
that had invented Doors, some foreign leaders, and hundreds of members of the press. My mother led me to the Door and then let go of my hand. When I looked up, waiting for her to activate it, she said, "You do it, Sylvana."

The tension of the watchers was palpable. Even the confused but trusting child I had been could feel it, coiling through the air. I can't remember if I sensed that it was also coiling around
me,
trapping me into a narrow tube of a life, with only one possible future.

It still amazes me that they let it happen that way. My mother let her love of publicity overcome her better judgment. Skill or not, how likely was it that a nervous six-year-old could focus enough to open a Door for the first time, on her first try?

What she didn't know was that it wasn't my first try. Despite my parents' firm admonitions against it, I had been opening Doors for almost a year, ever since I first figured out how to make them work by turning the handle with my brain as well as my hand. I couldn't resist the thrill of stepping through that twisted metal frame into a vast desert or a snow-covered city or a tropical beach and feeling the distant air filling my small body.

I could open the Doors, but I didn't know how to set their coordinates, so I always ended up following the coordinates of whoever had used that Door before me. And when I stepped through the Door on the other side, and discovered where I was, and how far from where I had been a second ago, I would first take a deep breath and then laugh aloud in delight.

When I was home, it was as if I only pretended to breathe. As if the air in that spacious mansion pressed down on me from all sides, constricting my ribcage, making me itch with the desire to get away. Back then, I thought the Doors were an escape, not a part of the trap. Back then there had only been a few hundred Doors in the world, a few hundred places I could reach simply by setting the coordinates and taking a few steps.

So I smiled up at my mother with precocious confidence as I placed one hand on the side of the Door and focused. It had taken me a while to get it right, that little twist of the mind, but by now I could do it without half trying.

As always, the Door responded to my mental push, and I felt something vast and incomprehensible unfurl and twist away. The space inside the Doorway went clear and bright. Through it I could see—we could all see—rough golden cobblestones beneath a fiercely blue sky.

"Care to have lunch in Jerusalem?" my mother said, and the watchers burst into applause. I was the twenty-seventh member of the Fastein family to demonstrate an ability to open Doors. Outside of my family, there were less than a hundred people from the entire human population who had proven they could do it.

I grinned so hard my face hurt, proud of my skill, glorying in the attention, and most of all, eager to step through the Door. I had never been to Jerusalem before.

That was before I realized that there was nowhere I couldn't go—and that no matter where I went, I was never far away from home at all.

It feels the same now, the weight of the people watching me. Their hushed expectation, their held breaths.

What's different is the startling intensity of my hatred for them, for each and every hypocritical one of them.

They
promised.
And they stand here without shame, waiting for me to break their promise for them.

Rage flares within me. I am not six years old anymore. This time, I know exactly how I would be trapping myself if I open that Door. And I'm not about to let it happen. Not when I've finally discovered what it feels like to be free.

***

The year I started high school there was a rash of teenage suicides, spanning every country where Doors had become commonplace. One famous suicide note, the first to go viral, explained the reason: "I can't take knowing that I can never get far away from this town, that there
is
no such thing as far away."

At fourteen, I was attuned to trends. I locked myself in the bathroom and held a kitchen knife to my wrist. I tried pressing down and sliding it against my skin, but it
hurt.
I covered the tiny cut with a bandaid, returned the knife to the cabinet, and never tried again.

In retrospect, I'm not sure even a suicide attempt would have convinced my mother of how desperately trapped I felt. She laughed off my bouts of depression as a typical teenage phase. And maybe she was right, but I couldn't see through to the other end of it.

A popular song by the Leptons, "Death is the Only Away," was banned after a group suicide at a dance club. It became more insanely popular than before. I played that song over and over, locked in my room, its urgent desperate rhythms the only thing that calmed me. It was as if the same discordant pulse ran through my blood, as if I couldn't stand being inside my own body. I needed to burst out of my skin, I needed to run, and there was absolutely nowhere to go. I could fly to the other side of the world, and I still wouldn't be any farther from my home than I ever was.

My mother didn't worry about me, not even for a second. She went on installing new Doors, creating our famous international home: the living room in Tokyo, the kitchen in Rome, my bedroom in New York City, our front porch in Costa Rica. With every Door, she told me, she expanded our horizons. And with every Door, I felt my cage growing smaller and smaller. Every time I turned around, the bars were a little bit closer.

I tried explaining that to my mother, once. The conversation didn't go well.

Someone begins to clap, prematurely, and is hushed. I squash the urge to look at the crowd, and keep my eyes focused on the Door.

Until they built the ship, the Alfians had never been more to me than a weird fringe religious group. But after they announced they would not allow Doors on the planet they were headed to, I formally converted, and then I spouted religious convictions until the moment the ship's hibernation gas silenced me.

But it's always dangerous hitching a ride with people whose agendas are not your own. The Alfians did not, like some other religious groups, consider the Doors an abomination—at least, most of them didn't. They just liked the idea of separating themselves from the values that had become part of the majority culture on Earth. It's not easy being a minority in a society with instantaneous communication and transportation. Seventy light years seemed to them like just the right amount of separation.

A noble goal, or a ridiculous one, depending on your point of view. In any case, it lasted all of four years. When we landed, the first thing we discovered was that Earth now had instantaneous communication, and could use the technology already on our ship to send us real-time messages. The pressure to build a Door began immediately. We were promised luxuries shipped from Earth, supplies to help us in case of emergency, refuge in case we had to evacuate. Words like "safety" and "trapped" and "mutual benefit" were used over and over.

The Council debated the Door for a year, deciding whether to even submit it to the people for a vote. That was illegal and undemocratic, and the ruckus over it was still going on.

The last meeting, before the final vote, lasted two days. Some people gave up and went home, but not me, nor any of the other diehards. I gave the last speech, but all my carefully prepared arguments fell away under Bella's hard barbs, and finally, almost in tears, I said, "Some of us came here to get
away
from Doors."

They all just looked at me, faces blank.

I didn't stay to watch the votes counted. The next morning I set out on an expedition to map the southern portion of the continent, and when I came back five months later, the Door was almost finished.

The night I returned I got drunk, drunker than I had ever gotten since the day I determined that I was going to be on the Alfian ship. The next morning I logged onto the intranet using a passcode nobody knew about, and started searching for people who would hate the Door as much as I did.

I take a second step toward the Door and raise my hand. The unraveler hurts, a constant tremor beneath my skin. I made sure no one else will be harmed when I use it, but I didn't ask whether it was safe to imbed it in my hand. I don't want to know the answer.

Besides, it's a good reminder. My whole body once tingled like this, with the need to get out from my stifling life, to run until I was out of breath, until I was somewhere I had never been before. I would have done anything to get away. To make a place that
was
far away, now that there wasn't anyplace like that left on Earth.

I finally found that place, a world with lavender grass and unexplored continents and three bright red moons. And now all these people want to take it away.

Ironically, back on Earth, I had to step through a Door to get to the Alfian ship. We all did. There were a few anti-Door diehards—the cultist who gave me the unraveler was one of them—who tried to fly. But there were very few planes left, and passage on them was extremely expensive.

I had flown once.
Expensive
was not a problem for my family. It was a thrill, lifting up away from the earth, watching everything below get smaller and more distant. Soaring above the clouds, speeding over a blanket of white. It was the best feeling. Eleven hours, and then we touched down in a distant land, where huts were raised on stilts above turquoise water and palm trees were framed by distant blue mountains.

But I recognized it. I had been to Bora Bora many times before, as a child. I had stepped through the Door and out of one of those huts, onto the graceful series of bridges that stretched into the sea. The palm trees and the raised bungalows were familiar to me. I just hadn't known what the place was called.

I can still taste it, as if it were yesterday: my vast disappointment upon realizing that all the distant lands I dreamed of visiting were places I had already been.

That there was no such thing as a distant land, or a distant anything. Not when every single place in the world was only a few steps away.

Someone steps up next to me, and out of the corner of my eye I see a solid mass of bushy black hair. Bella. I turn to stare at her, and she smiles at me. But not for me. Her smile is for the cameras to capture. Bella never misses a photo op.

Bella thinks we are still friends, even after she stood up in Council and made the winning argument for opening the Door. I haven't bothered to disillusion her, because being friends with Bella is really not much different from
not
being friends with her.

Bella has random weird ideas that get into her mind and stick like burrs, becoming beliefs of which she is strenuously convinced. Alfianism is one of those ideas. The
value of the Door later became another. Another of her weird ideas is that since the two of us shared a double hibernation chamber on the journey over, we have a connection that even our mutual anger can't sever.

It's a good thing I never tried to talk her out of that one. In the end, it came in useful.

After I made contact with a separatist cult, allied myself with people who made my skin crawl—and who, I reminded myself, still didn't share my agenda—I spent the night on the roof of my home, watching two of the three red moons arc across the sky, trying to decide if I was really going to do this. Trying to convince myself that I didn't have to. That maybe, if I didn't open the Door, no one else would be able to.

Door technology has one significant limitation, one that used to get beaten to death every night on the religiou channels. No preacher or rabbi or ascetic could get through a speech without pausing to revel in the fact that manipulating the hidden dimensions of spacetime is something no machine can do. It takes machines to
do
it, of course, but the machines can't run on automatic. No theoretical reason why they shouldn't, they just don't. A person has to be there, doing whatever it is he or she does—push a button, pull a lever, it makes no difference as long as it's being done by a person and not a machine.