Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (33 page)

And as long as the person has the skill to pull it off.

A human being has to be there every time a Door is opened, which means anyone with the skill has guaranteed life-long employment. In theory, anyone can do it, which is what the pro-Door Alfians were counting on. But it requires a certain type of mental focus, what I think of as a twist of the mind. Like most skills, some people can't do it at all, some people are better at it than others, and a proclivity for it seems to run in families.

But in only a few families. The Senguptas. The Akwals. The Balashovs. And most famously—because we had been discovered first—the Fasteins.

There were no Senguptas or Akwals or Balashovs on this planet. But there were twenty thousand other human beings, and the Council was prepared to let each one have a try. The ability to open Doors, it had once been estimated, existed in one out of every ten thousand people in the general population.

Maybe I could risk it.

But as the moons faded beneath the horizon, and the sky went black, I felt that old trapped feeling creeping up on me. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to see your future stretching ahead of you as a thing to be dreaded, to know that the best you could ever hope for was becoming used to dragging yourself through life. To know that there was no way out, nowhere to go, no hope to grasp for.

The absence of the moons made the stars bright and sharp and glittering, as if I could reach out my hand and touch them. I turned my face away from them and began to cry.

With the unraveler humming through my skin, I allow myself to glare at Bella, and see her eyes widen. As if, in that moment, she finally does understand how desperate I am.

Too late. I'm too close for anyone to stop me now.

I arranged to meet Bella in a little coffee shop on Earth Street, a cozy nook with green couches in the corners and outrageously expensive but really good pastries. It was the same place we'd met last, before that Council meeting, where I had made a futile effort to change her mind. It had been a disastrous conversation. Bella's mind is not conducive to change, not when it comes to one of her Ideas.

This time, I didn't bother trying to make her understand. I got straight to the point over a plate of axenberry pie. "I want to be the one who opens the Door."

"As an act of contrition?" Bella's voice was so laden with sarcasm it was amazing she managed to fit the actual words in.

Apparently, I hadn't done as good a job as I thought of pretending we were still friends. In which case, I had nothing to lose, so I didn't bother to keep the sarcasm out of my own voice. I hated Bella as much as I had once hated my mother, but with better cause. "You can sell it that way, if you want. The last retrograde opponent seeing the error of her ways. You could make a lovely speech out of it."

Bella watched me through steely dark eyes. She had colored her hair back then, so her face was an artful shaded palette: eyes almost black, skin medium-brown, golden hair framing her intense expression. "All right, then. Forget why
you
want it. Why on all the planets would
we
let you do it?"

Deep breath. There was no turning back, once I said it. But the Door was going to be completed in two days, and once people had access to Earth libraries, they would find out anyhow. "Because I'm a Fastein."

She looked at me for a moment as if she had not heard me, or not understood. Then she said,
"What?"
And then, before I could answer, "It was
you?"

I shrugged, and she continued looking at me. In the silence, I could hear the murmur of conversations from tables around us: a woman planning a mapping expedition, a teenage couple doing an amateur job of flirting, someone talking about how he missed the blue sky. This was what I had wanted to be, for all of my life: just a normal person, the sort who could sit in a coffee shop unfettered by talent or responsibility, by a skill I hadn't asked for, a skill my parents had used IVF to make sure I was born with. My two older sisters had been duds, Fasteins without the Fastein Skill, and they had wanted to make sure they passed it on to at least one child. Because it was so important.

I had been so tired of being important. And here I was, setting myself up to be important again. To be the most important person on the planet.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you never can escape, even without the Doors. Maybe I've only lulled myself into believing it was the Doors that kept me feeling trapped.

"I can prove it," I said, since Bella still hadn't said anything.

She shook her head. "That won't be necessary. I can see it now. You have the Fastein features."

No, I don't. But people always insist on seeing them, once they know who I am.

"Why?" Bella said finally. "After all your opposition, why would you want to open the Door for us?"

"Because I want to be
gone,"
I spat, and the desperation in my voice was real.

Not that it is truly possible to be gone, of course. Not anymore. Not ever.

I turn away from Bella and stretch my left hand toward the dimension-detangler. The buzz of the unraveler intensifies as it gets closer to the Door. Once I lock it onto the detangler, it will destroy the Door in a blinding flash of light, and—in theory—send this entire area of multi-dimensional spacetime into a tailspin, which will make construction of a new Door next to impossible.

I take a deep breath, close my eyes for just a second, and take the necessary step forward.

The Door buzzes, and a familiar voice says, "Is everything all right on your end?"

I stop moving. My whole body goes hot, and then cold.

"Mom?" I whisper.

When my mother figured out what was behind my conversion to Alfianism, she
did everything in her power to keep me off the ship. She had a judge declare me incompetent, she sued the Alfians for undue influence, she got a celebrity to make it his own personal cause.

I heard about all her efforts later—much, much later—after I awoke from hibernation. Luckily for me, I had managed to keep her from finding out what I was up to until the ship was gone, and I had hidden my identity so well that she couldn't specify which Alfian was really her daughter. Without that information, even she couldn't make them turn the ship around.

But watching the news vids, my blood ran cold, realizing just how close she had come.

I watched them all, every single one of her tearful and pleading and angry interviews, and I still don't know if she ever understood why I had to leave.

In retrospect, my mother probably had claustro-anxiety. It was a new phenomenon when I was young, a fringe psychopathy that got a lot of press but primarily affected the already unstable. By the time I left, it affected a quarter of the population of developed countries. People so used to being able to go anywhere that the fear of being trapped without a Door paralyzed them. Among the more extreme cases, the thought of
any
place without a Door induced anxiety.

It was sufferers of claustro-anxiety who started the Open Doors movement, financing the creation of Doors in underdeveloped countries, making the world a vastly different place.

A larger place, my mother liked to say. A more free society. And maybe, in most ways, it was.

But to me, the world felt smaller every time I opened my eyes.

I was seventeen when I first read an article about the Alfian expedition. I dreamed about it for weeks. About the ship heading far, far away, to a completely new place among the distant stars.

A place that will never be far away again, unless I do what I came here to do and use the unraveler buzzing beneath my skin.

There is silence on the other side of the Door. My heart pounds so hard it hurts more than the buzz in my palm.

A sudden crackle fills the space between the gray-green metal, and then I see her. It's clearly a projected image—it crackles and wavers—and even that shouldn't be possible, with the Door not yet opened, but who knows how technology has advanced back on Earth? The sight of her hits me like a blow. Dark hair coiled above an elegant neck, high tilted cheekbones, large dark eyes. I look into those eyes and feel my breath tighten in my throat.

With one motion of my hand, I can sever this unasked-for connection, reestablish the light years that I tried to put between us.

"Hello, Mother," I say, the words scraping their way out.

She blinks at me and smiles. My mother hasn't smiled at me like that—like I am a truly welcome sight—since the day I tried to tell her how much I hated the Doors.

"They say I look like her," she says, and my brain belatedly kicks into gear to remind me that the last time I saw my mother was seventy years ago in Earth years. "Welcome to Earth, Aunt Sylvana. We've been expecting you."

Not my mother. My mother is long dead. Even on the other side of this Door, she doesn't exist.

What else might have ceased to exist in seventy years? What else might have changed?

I don't know. Possibilities unfurl before me, for the first time since the Council approved construction of the Door.

I clench my fingers around my left palm, lift my other, silent hand, and open the Door.

Once again, now that I'm on Earth, I have to step through a Door to get to the ship. But I have to step through a Door to get anywhere. Seventy years in the future, there is no other way to travel.

I don't go many places. Only two, actually. The second is the office of the highly paid doctor who removed the unraveler from my palm and checks regularly to monitor the damage. With time, he says, I might have almost full use of that hand again.

The exorbitant fee I pay him isn't for the removal or the therapy. He's being paid to keep his mouth shut.

"Another four months, more or less," the ship designer tells me. He has grown used to my weekly visits. It's amazing how quickly people can adjust, and how fast they can work, when you pay triple their usual rate. "Then she'll be ready to fly."

Away, into the dark vastness of space. I can't help but thrill to that thought, even though I know—now—that there is no such thing as distance. Not any more.

When I get to Ariesta, the almost-certainly habitable planet my consultants have recommended, my fellow colonizers will not be Alfians. I've selected a mixed group of idealists, wanderers, and persecuted people. No one with a firm theological objection to Doors.

It doesn't matter how far we go. Once we get there, once we have time to build a Door, Earth will be only a step away.

But it will be a different Earth, because Ariesta is a lot farther away than Simalion. We will wake from hibernation not seventy years in the future, but five hundred. When we do build the Door and step back onto Earth, it will be a completely different place, one I've never seen before. A land strange and new and far removed from anything I have ever known.

And if it isn't, I can do it again. I can't get farther away in space, not in a way that matters. But I can move as far as I want into the future.

I won't fight my fellow colonists, this time, when they decide to make a Door. In fact, I can't wait to stand in front of it.

Ken Liu
is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in
F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed,
and
Strange Horizons,
among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. Ken lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. His latest story is a finely wrought vision of the truth that lies behind...

The old Victorian mansion stood alone in a field, miles from the nearest town. A charity owned it and used it to house those men that the nearby towns didn't want: sex offenders, convicted felons who had done hard time, and those like Penn Claverly, the pre-criminals.

Penn had lived here for twenty years, ever since he left home as a nineteen-year-old to give his parents some semblance of a normal life. He had been the first pre-death-rower, the first to get the vision, the first to be put on the registry.

He still hadn't killed anyone.

Loud knocking shook Penn out of his reverie. He frowned and stared at the door of his single-occupancy unit. No one was supposed to be bothering him. He was done with his chores for the day, and it wasn't time yet for the weekly checkup from the police.

Penn enjoyed his solitude. Inmates had the choice of tending the fields around the house, and Penn liked the work because it got him away from the others. He imagined that his life was like that of an ascetic monk, with few physical possessions, mental peace, and the one thing that mattered the most to him: no innocent people nearby.

But the knocking came again, insistent.

He walked over and opened the door.

"Hello, Mr. Claverly."

She was striking, with long, straight, dark hair that framed her pale face and highlighted her amber eyes. The jacket of her dark suit hugged her curves without being revealing. For a moment, Penn's gaze lingered on the swell of her breasts. Her
makeup was light but expertly applied. She looked like she belonged in a TV show about lawyers.

"I'm Monica Weld. May I come in?"

Penn considered her. Over the years, a stream of women, strangers, had written him passionate letters or sometimes even showed up at his door.

"You're younger than they usually are," he said. "What are you, twenty-five?"

Some of the other men sitting in the common room down the hall craned their necks to ogle Monica.

"Please,
let me in." She looked at him, pleading.

Penn relented and stepped aside. She had most likely looked up his name on the registry and sought him out because she was a woman who loved men who kill. But he couldn't leave her out here, where the men down the hall were watching, hungry.

Even before the Oracle, convicted murderers serving life sentences or waiting on death row received dozens, hundreds of love letters and proposals of marriage. The women visited them in prison, worked tirelessly to free them, and married them, sometimes even consummating such marriages under the watchful eyes of the bribed guards in visiting rooms.

And now, they also chased men like Penn, whose crime was still in the future, still only potential. He represented an opportunity to tempt fate, to court and dance with danger.

Monica looked around his tiny room, furnished only with a twin bed, a small desk, and a folding chair. She gingerly sat down on the edge of the bed.

"I guess I'm a little nervous," she said as she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "Would you like a beer? I've got two in my purse. They're cold."

Penn sat down on the folding chair.

"No, thanks. Listen," he said, his voice kind but resolved. He had given this same speech to many women over the years. "I'm not looking for a girlfriend or a wife. I just want to tend to the vegetables. The best life that I can imagine for myself is to live alone in this room until the inevitable happens. I don't want anyone I might come to like to be hurt."

The Oracle began as an accident. While designing an instrument to measure the activities of neurons with low doses of radiation, scientists discovered that sometimes, as a user wore the helmet, the random decay of radioactive particles would induce a vision of a moment in the user's life, like a waking dream.

A life is like a strand of pearls in the darkness of space-time, with a start and an end that fade into the void. We experience life as a string of discrete moments, each a reduction of infinite possibilities to one. Sometimes one moment, like a particularly lustrous pearl, has echoes up and down the chain. And such echoes can be detected.

The vision shown by the Oracle was always in the future, and never lasted more than a minute. For each user, there was only one vision and it appeared only once. The user couldn't control when the vision would come—and some never got to see anything.

But if they did see something, it always came true.

"You misunderstood," Monica said. "I'm a mitigation specialist with the No Pre-Judgment Project."

Penn had heard of these people. They were dedicated to the impossible: defending those who were certain to be convicted.

For example, there was Lex Woods, a thin, bespectacled accountant from Austin who saw in the Oracle a vision of himself standing in a courtroom, being sentenced to imprisonment for life.

Like many, Lex had tried for years to get a vision without success. And when his vision finally did come, he was overwhelmed by it, and described it to everyone who would listen. This was how most pre-criminals were found out: they could not keep what they saw to themselves.

His friends and family shunned him, and he became consumed with depression.

The No Pre-Judgment Project reached out, and a network of volunteers worked to support him, to prevent him from giving in to his fate.

Some of the volunteers became his friends and shared their own visions from the Oracle to give him courage. A woman told him the horror of seeing a house burn in the darkness and knowing that it was hers, knowing that it held all her possessions and all the people she loved. A man spoke to him of the sorrow of waking up in the morning and knowing that his child was gone forever, knowing that it was his fault. Another man told him that he saw himself consumed with anger, anger at how helpless he felt seeing a stranger slam into his wife by the side of the road only to drive away without stopping.

Later, at his trial, Lex explained that he had burned down the woman's house, that he had kidnapped and killed his friend's child, that he had committed the hit-and-run deliberately, because he believed that he had to fulfill the prophecies, that he was "carrying out God's work."

"They wanted it to be true, don't you see? So I helped them. And you can't kill me," he had cackled. "I know you can't!"

He was deemed too incompetent to be executed and sentenced to life in prison.

Penn looked at Monica. "Haven't you people failed enough?"

"My job is to compile a story of your life," Monica said. "A man isn't defined just by one thing: the moment seen in the Oracle. The moments before and the moments after, millions, billions, have their own meaning."

"But for me, there are no moments beyond."

"You still have a past, a journey that makes you who you are. At your future trial—
if
there's a trial—we'll tell the jury the entirety of your story so that they can see all of you."

"Why waste all the time and effort? We know there
will
be a trial. My guilt won't be relevant. No matter how sloppily the prosecution behaves, how diligently my lawyers work, how many appeals will eventually be filed—we know how it will all end."

"Even if we can't convince your jury, your story will speak to future juries. With enough stories, we can hope to get the barbarism of the death penalty abolished."

Penn imagined the future Monica painted: a world in which the Oracle no longer presented visions of a man lying on a surgical table, his limbs strapped down, a microphone dangling down for his last words as he was consumed with the terror of the darkness beyond.

His would be one in a compendium of stories about men like him, told so that there would no longer
be
men like him, men who spent whole lives in anticipation of the chamber.

"What makes you so sure you'll like my story?"

Monica looked into his eyes. "I saw how you looked at me at the door. You wanted me, and you could have had me easily, if I was the sort of woman you thought I was. Yet you said no, because you didn't want me to be hurt. Your story is worth telling."

For his sixteenth birthday, Penn got four gifts.

The first was from Sarah. At lunch she took him to the room where the Drama Club kept their costumes, and kissed him between a pile of papier-mâché armor and a rack of musty flapper dresses. Then she whispered into his ear, sexy and shy, "Okay. We can do that thing... if you want."

The second was from the world. With three seconds on the clock, the Clearwell Longhorns were down, 78–77. Then the ball was in Penn's hands, and he jumped without thinking, and watched as the ball sailed from his hands on its long, graceful arc toward the basket.

He heard Sarah's elated scream and caught a glimpse of the glitter of her pompoms erupting into the air before his teammates buried him in a celebratory pile. The Longhorns were going to the State Championship Game.

His father handed him the third gift, the keys to his old truck. "You'll have to keep her running on your own," he said, smiling.

Penn hugged his mother and father. This was a responsibility he welcomed.

The last gift was almost an afterthought.

"Don't forget to look into the Oracle tonight," his mother said. "They say birthdays are special, and you might finally see something."

"Maybe you'll see yourself winning the lottery too," his father said, laughing. The news programs were all talking about a woman in California who had seen a vision of herself winning twenty million dollars. Now long-lost relatives were showing up, investors were asking her to sign over her future winnings for a smaller amount right now, and skeptics on TV debated whether she was lying.

Penn chuckled. He didn't really care about the Oracle, which he hadn't touched in four years. He never expected to see anything. He was looking at his truck, and imagining Sarah's long, long legs as she leaned back in the passenger seat and lifted one foot out of the window to enjoy the cool breeze as they sped along a highway in summer.

This moment was perfect, Penn decided. The future was only a myth, as impossible as the Big Bang.

"I haven't thought about that day for a long time," Penn said.

"There are many moments in a life worth remembering," Monica said. This was her second visit. She had dressed more casually, in jeans and a tee that showed off her strong shoulders. Penn was showing her around the farm, and he had warned her that a suit and heels weren't any good for walking in the dirt.

Penn bent down to pick a cracked, ripe heirloom tomato as big as an apple from a vine, wiped it on his shirt tail, and handed it to Monica. She bit into it, and laughed as the juice spilled out of her mouth.

"It's sweet," she said.

Penn stared at her lips and resisted the urge to kiss her. The feeling exhilarated and frightened him.

"You didn't always seek out fated killers," he said. "Tell me about your life before all this."

Tess, Monica's big sister, was the brave one, the one who broke all the rules. She brought home romance novels with scandalous covers and the two girls would hide under one blanket with a flashlight and read, breathless, long after their parents thought they were asleep.

"It would be nice if we lived lives as exciting as these books, wouldn't it?" Tess asked.

Monica nodded.

Then the day came when the Oracle gave Tess her vision.

The sixteen-year-old Tess woke Monica up in the pre-dawn darkness and told her what she had seen: she was in a sparsely furnished bedroom somewhere, rocking in a chair. There were pictures on the walls, but she couldn't see them very well. In her vision, she remembered feeling a kind of mild contentedness, like she had come to the end of a long road but was feeling a bit tired.

"What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" Tess asked, completely bewildered. "I'm going to be such a loser," she wailed.

"I'm going to be old and bored, and that is supposed to be the
defining moment
of my life? What will I have done with my life? I might as well jump off a bridge now."

Tess went wild after that. She drank, she smoked, she dated the most dangerous boys—and men who were ten years older who pretended to believe her when she said she was eighteen. She skipped school and went on road trips on a whim. She never said no to adventure.

"I'm not going to die from
excitement,"
Tess shouted at their parents, laughing. "I know I'll be safe and old." Mom and Dad had no answer for such impeccable logic.

"I'm going to live each moment bolder than the next," Tess said to Monica.
"I
get to pick the moments that define me. We'll see who's going to win, me or the Oracle."

Monica had always worshipped Tess, and she admired Tess even more now. Such bravery, such grace! Tess was not going to bow down to fate without a fight.

"I have such a boring life," Tess said. She was high and in a confessing mood. In the darkness of their room Monica could hear her quiet cries.

"What are you talking about?" Monica sat up. "You can curse in five languages. You know how to ride a motorcycle. You've hitchhiked to Canada
and
Mexico. You've done more in two years than Mom did all her life. I don't know anyone as interesting as you."

"I can't stop," Tess said. "I can't ever stop. The minute I stop running, I think to myself: 'Am I bored? Is this the moment when it all stops and goes downhill?' and then I have to start running again. I'm like a hamster on the wheel, not getting anywhere no matter how hard I run, because I already know how my story will end no matter what I do."