Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (637 page)

First published in
FutureShocks
, January 2006

My heart pounded as I surveyed the scene. It was a horrific, but oddly appropriate, image: a bright light pulsing on and off. The light was the setting sun, visible through the window, and the pulsing was caused by the rhythmic swaying of the corpse, dangling from a makeshift noose, as it passed in front of the blood-red disk.

“Another one, eh, Detective?” said Chiu, the campus security guard, from behind me. His tone was soft.

I looked around the office. The computer monitor was showing a virtual desktop with a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy as the wallpaper; no files were open. Nor was there any sheet of e-paper prominently displayed on the real desktop. The poor bastards didn’t even bother to leave suicide notes anymore. There was no point; it had all already been said.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, responding to Chiu. “Another one.”

The dead man was maybe sixty, scrawny, mostly bald. He was wearing black denim jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, the standard professorial look these days. His noose was fashioned out of fiber-optic cabling, giving it a pearlescent sheen in the sunlight. His eyes had bugged out, and his mouth was hanging open.

“I knew him a bit,” said Chiu. “Ethan McCharles. Nice guy—he always remembered my name. So many of the profs, they think they’re too important to say hi to a security guard. But not him.”

I nodded. It was as good a eulogy as one could hope for—honest, spontaneous, heartfelt.

Chiu went on. “He was married,” he said, pointing to the gold band on the corpse’s left hand. “I think his wife works here, too.”

I felt my stomach tightening, and I let out a sigh. My favorite thing: informing the spouse.

* * * *

Cytosine Methylation
: All lifeforms are based on self-replicating nucleic acids, commonly triphosphoparacarbolicnucleic acid or, less often, deoxyribonucleic acid; in either case, a secondary stream of hereditary information is encoded based on the methylation state of cytosine, allowing acquired characteristics to be passed on to the next generation
 
…

* * * *

The departmental secretary confirmed what Chiu had said: Professor Ethan McCharles’s wife did indeed also work at the University of Toronto; she was a tenured prof, too, but in a different faculty.

Walking down a corridor, I remembered my own days as a student here. Class of 1998—“9T8,” as they styled it on the school jackets. It’d been—what?—seventeen years since I’d graduated, but I still woke up from time to time in a cold sweat, after having one of those recurring student nightmares: the exam I hadn’t studied for, the class I’d forgotten I’d enrolled in. Crazy dreams, left over from an age when little bits of human knowledge mattered; when facts and figures we’d discovered made a difference.

I continued along the corridor. One thing
had
changed since my day. Back then, the hallways had been packed between classes. Now, you could actually negotiate your way easily; enrollment was way down. This corridor was long, with fluorescent lights overhead, and was lined with wooden doors that had frosted floor-to-ceiling glass panels next to them.

I shook my head. The halls of academe.

The halls of death.

I finally found Marilyn Maslankowski’s classroom; the arcane room-numbering system had come back to me. She’d just finished a lecture, apparently, and was standing next to the lectern, speaking with a redheaded male student; no one else was in the room. I entered.

Marilyn was perhaps ten years younger than her husband had been, and had light brown hair and a round, moonlike face. The student wanted more time to finish an essay on the novels of Robert Charles Wilson; Marilyn capitulated after a few wheedling arguments.

The kid left, and Marilyn turned to me, her smile thanking me for waiting. “The humanities,” she said. “Aptly named, no? At least English literature is something that we’re the foremost authorities on. It’s nice that there are a couple of areas left like that.”

“I suppose,” I said. I was always after my own son to do his homework on time; didn’t teachers know that if they weren’t firm in their deadlines they were just making a parent’s job more difficult? Ah, well. At least this kid had gone to university; I doubted my boy ever would.

“Are you Professor Marilyn Maslankowski?” I asked.

She nodded. “What can I do for you?”

I didn’t extend my hand; we weren’t allowed to make any sort of overture to physical contact anymore. “Professor Maslankowski, my name is Andrew Walker. I’m a detective with the Toronto Police.” I showed her my badge.

Her brown eyes narrowed. “Yes? What is it?”

I looked behind me to make sure we were still alone. “It’s about your husband.”

Her voice quavered slightly. “Ethan? My God, has something happened?”

There was never any easy way to do this. I took a deep breath, then: “Professor Maslankowski, your husband is dead.”

Her eyes went wide and she staggered back a half-step, bumping up against the smartboard that covered the wall behind her.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

“What—what happened?” Marilyn asked at last, her voice reduced to a whisper.

I lifted my shoulders slightly. “He killed himself.”

“Killed himself?” repeated Marilyn, as if the words were ones she’d never heard before.

I nodded. “We’ll need you to positively identify the body, as next of kin, but the security guard says it’s him.”

“My God,” said Marilyn again. Her eyes were still wide. “My God …”

“I understand your husband was a physicist,” I said.

Marilyn didn’t seem to hear. “My poor Ethan…” she said softly. She looked like she might collapse. If I thought she was actually in danger of hurting herself with a fall, I could surge in and grab her; otherwise, regulations said I had to keep my distance. “My poor, poor Ethan …”

“Had your husband been showing signs of depression?” I asked.

Suddenly Marilyn’s tone was sharp. “Of course he had! Damn it, wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t say anything. I was used to this by now.

“Those aliens,” Marilyn said, closing her eyes. “Those goddamned aliens.”

* * * *

Demand-Rebound Equilibrium
: Although countless economic systems have been tried by various cultures, all but one prove inadequate in the face of the essentially limitless material resources made possible through low-cost reconfiguration of subatomic particles. The only successful system, commonly known as Demand-Rebound Equilibrium, although also occasionally called [Untranslatable proper name]’s Forge, after its principal chronicler, works because it responds to market forces that operate independently from individual psychology, thus …

* * * *

By the time we returned to Ethan’s office, he’d been cut down and laid out on the floor, a sheet the coroner had brought covering his face and body. Marilyn had cried continuously as we’d made our way across the campus. It was early January, but global warming meant that the snowfalls I’d known as a boy didn’t occur much in Toronto anymore. Most of the ozone was gone, too, letting ultraviolet pound down. We weren’t even shielded against our own sun; how could we expect to be protected from stuff coming from the stars?

I knelt down and pulled back the sheet. Now that the noose was gone, we could see the severe bruising where Ethan’s neck had snapped. Marilyn made a sharp intake of breath, brought her hand to her mouth, closed her eyes tightly, and looked away.

“Is that your husband?” I asked, feeling like an ass for even having to pose the question.

She managed a small, almost imperceptible nod.

It was now well into the evening. I could come back tomorrow to ask Ethan McCharles’s colleagues the questions I needed answered for my report, but, well, Marilyn was right here, and, even though her field was literature rather than physics, she must have some sense of what her husband had been working on. I repositioned the sheet over his dead face and stood up. “Can you tell me what Ethan’s specialty was?”

Marilyn was clearly struggling to keep her composure. Her lower lip was trembling, and I could see by the rising and falling of her blouse—so sharply contrasting with the absolutely still sheet—that she was breathing rapidly. “His—he … Oh, my poor, poor Ethan …”

“Professor Maslankowski,” I said gently. “Your husband’s specialty …?”

She nodded, acknowledging that she’d heard me, but still unable to focus on answering the question. I let her take her time, and, at last, as if they were curse words, she spat out, “Loop quantum gravity.”

“Which is?”

“Which is a model of how subatomic particles are composed.” She shook her head. “Ethan spent his whole career trying to prove LQG was correct, and …”

“And?” I said gently.

“And yesterday they revealed the true nature of the fundamental structure of matter.”

“And this—what was it?—this ‘loop quantum gravity’ wasn’t right?”

Marilyn let out a heavy sigh. “Not even close. Not even in the ballpark.” She looked down at the covered form of her dead husband, then turned her gaze back to me. “Do you know what it’s like, being an academic?”

I actually did have some notion, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I shook my head and let her talk.

Marilyn spread her arms. “You stake out your turf early on, and you spend your whole life defending it, trying to prove that your theory, or someone else’s theory you’re championing, is right. You take on all comers—in journals, at symposia, in the classroom—and if you’re lucky, in the end you’re vindicated. But if you’re unlucky …”

Her voice choked off, and tears welled in her eyes again as she looked down at the cold corpse lying on the floor.

* * * *

[Untranslatable proper name] Award
: Award given every [roughly 18 Earth years] for the finest musical compositions produced within the Allied Worlds. Although most species begin making music even prior to developing written language, [The same untranslatable proper name] argued that no truly sophisticated composition had ever been produced by a being with a lifespan of less than [roughly 1,100 Earth years], and since such lifespans only become possible with technological maturity, nothing predating a race’s overcoming of natural death is of any artistic consequence. Certainly, the winning compositions bear out her position: the work of composers who lived for [roughly 140 Earth years] or less seem little more than atonal noise when compared to
 
…

* * * *

It had begun just two years ago. Michael—that’s my son; he was thirteen then—and I got a call from a neighbor telling us we just
had
to put on the TV. We did so, and we sat side by side on the couch, watching the news conference taking place in Pasadena, and then the speeches by the U.S. President and the Canadian Prime Minister.

When it was over, I looked at Michael, and he looked at me. He was a good kid, and I loved him very much—and I wanted him to understand how special this all was. “Take note of where you are, Michael,” I said. “Take note of what you’re wearing, what I’m wearing, what the weather’s like outside. For the rest of your life, people will ask you what you were doing when you heard.”

He nodded, and I went on. “This is the kind of event that comes along only once in a great while. Each year, the anniversary of it will be marked; it’ll be in all the history books. It might even become a holiday. This is a date like …”

I looked round the living room, helplessly, trying to think of a date that this one was similar to. But I couldn’t, at least not from my lifetime, although my dad had talked about July 20, 1969, in much the same way.

“Well,” I said at last, “remember when you came home that day when you were little, saying Johnny Stevens had mentioned something called 9/11 to you, and you wanted to know what it was, and I told you, and you cried. This is like that, in that it’s significant … but … but 9/11 was such a
bad
memory, such an awful thing. And what’s happened today—it’s … it’s
joyous
, that’s what it is. Today, humanity has crossed a threshold. Everybody will be talking about nothing but this in the days and weeks ahead, because, as of right now”—my voice had actually cracked as I said the words—“we are not alone.”

* * * *

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
: a highly isotropic radiation with an almost perfect blackbody spectrum permeating the entire universe, at a temperature of approximately [2.7 degrees Kelvin]. Although some primitive cultures mistakenly cite this radiation as proof of a commonly found creation myth—specifically, a notion that the universe began as a singularity that burst forth violently—sophisticated races understand that the cosmic microwave background is actually the result of
 
…

* * * *

It didn’t help that the same thing was happening elsewhere. It didn’t help one damned bit. I’d been called in to U of T seven times over the past two years, and each time someone had killed himself. It wasn’t always a prof; time before McCharles, it had been a Ph.D. candidate who’d been just about to defend his thesis on some abstruse aspect of evolutionary theory. Oh, evolution happens, all right—but it turns out the mechanisms are way more complex than the ones the Darwinians have been defending for a century and a half. I tried not to get cynical about all this, but I wondered if, as he slit his wrists before reproducing, that student had thought about the irony of what he was doing.