The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (45 page)

I dug in my robe's pocket, found a Mars bar, unpeeled it, and gobbled it down.

Shortly after Song-Dam's eighth birthday—his mother long since escaped back into the whorehouse alleys she and I had both come from—I took him with me on a business trip to Palo Alto. I was the object of the business trip, my absurd gift, my poltergeist prowess with cause and effect. Several Stanford biophysics researchers had somehow picked up trash journalism stories about me as the luckiest/unluckiest man on earth. Funding was limited, but I convinced them that Song was in my sole charge and that I wasn't budging without him.

So we took an exhausting flight from Incheon International across the Pacific and through the absurd indignities of US Homeland Security (despite a graduate student being on hand at the airport to collect us, now cooling his heels in the arrival lounge with a wilting cardboard sign in two languages; I had inadvertently set off various bells and whistles, so of course we were detained pointlessly, until one of the senior professors was persuaded to drive to the airport and vouch for us), and stayed in an anonymous, ugly block of apartments that seemed to have been compiled from polyurethane pretending to be marble. We could hear the dreary TV set next door through the adjoining wall.

I took Song for a long walk so he and I could get a feel for the alien place, this America, as we stretched our weary legs. Within three blocks (trust my causal eddies for once), we found a Korean food store, established that my parents' modest residence in Nangok—back at the turn of the century when it was still a squalid slum in a hilly area of Sillim-dong, Gwanak District—was just spitting distance from the proprietors' familial stamping grounds, and found ourselves dragged happily to a nearby park by Mr. Kwon's wife and three kids to fly dragon kites in the cool afternoon breeze.

I helped Song pay out the string. Our borrowed kite was a scarlet and gold Dragon Diamond (a gift to us both, as it turned out—and thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Kwon!). Our dragon quivered on the middle air a moment, strained against his leash, then suddenly flung himself upward into the deepening blue California sky. The line went taut. Song let it go in fright, but I held tight, and a moment later he put his hands back to the winch reel beside mine. I saw the line stretched between my hand, his small resolute hands, and the high, swooping, flower-bright dragon: a luminous string.

"Daddy, look!" said my son, wild with excitement. "Our dragon is flying on a beam of photons!"

At that moment, as if Buddha had smacked me in the ear, I was enlightened.

"I think I can get in," I told the Director of Operations, a tight jawed fellow named Namgoong, almost certainly a political appointee but in secure possession of a decent scientific reputation with degrees in geology and astrobiology. Earth and sky, I thought, but hid my smile. "I think I can break the shield. The question is, do I dare?"

"Yes. Precisely. If you rupture the stationary shield, who knows what might seep out into the atmosphere." He gave me a thin-lipped smile. "Fortunately, Sensei, we shall not have to wait three years for an Environmental Impact Study. The Imperium wants this thing opened. Now. It's why you're here."

"To tell you the truth, sir, I'm more worried about what might seep
in
. They must have sealed it against Titan's atmosphere for good reason."

"A motive that expired millions of years ago." He rose. "I'm having a containment dome erected around the locus. There's no way we can establish blockade underneath the ice as well, but this will meet most likely challenges. Or so I'm assured."

"I'm relieved to hear it." I belatedly heaved up my bulk. "When will you want me out there?"

"You'll be advised. We have a full scale colloquium scheduled, starting at two. I'll expect you to be there, Sensei Park, and on your best behavior. No more outbursts, if you please."

"More damned chin-wagging. Science used to be an empirical exercise," I grumbled.

"Led by theory, as I'm sure you understand." He was standing at his door, and I went out, biting my lip. Nobody had the faintest starting point for a theory to explain my causal distortions, and not much to account for the photon-entangled portage functor. I could do it, I could show them a method for using it (and had), but I didn't have a theory-empowered clue how or why. I'm nobody's mutant superman, that much I do know. (Or is that just a fat man's self-doubt speaking?)

Postmodern science, as far as I can tell looking in from the outside, is drunk on the sound of its own voice. But yes, I know: look who's complaining. I recalled again that Victorian sage, that poet Tennyson. He had it right:
I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel; for words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, a use in measured language lies; the sad mechanic exercise, like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
I followed Dr. Namgoong along the narrow compiled corridors of Hyugens station, so like those awful domiciles on the outskirts of Palo Alto, and went to hear the sad mechanics exercise their tongues and dull their pain, and maybe mine.

The circulated air was pungent, despite the scrubbers, with the musk of excited animals crowded together. A schematic chart I'd grown familiar with, these last few months, started displaying on the auditorium wall, replacing the magnified image of Saturn's glorious tilted hat. The Fermi Paradox Solution candidates. My eye bounced off them, falling down a cliff of words and logic with no footing in reality beyond the dragon-haunted thing outside the dome:

Where are They?

Fermi 1. They are here among us, and call themselves Koreans.

That always got a satisfied titter, except from any Hungarians in the crowd.

Fermi 2. They are here, running things.

A chance for the Hungarians, and anyone else chafing under the Imperium, to get their own back with a belly laugh. No giggles here, though, I noticed.

Fermi 3. They came and left.

Bingo, I thought. They came and left flowers scattered in their wake. Strictly, though, that was Fermi 53, the only choice left. The ancient intelligent dinosaur hypothesis.

Fermi 6. We are interdicted.

Fermi 10. They are still on their way here.

The starship had blown that one, and others like it, clear out of the water. Time to trim the list, methinks.

Fermi 21. They're listening, only fools are transmitting.

Fermi 22. Dedicated killer machines destroy everything that moves, anywhere in space.

Fermi 28. The Vingean Singularity takes them . . . elsewhere.

No Singularity back near the end of the Cretaceous, I thought. Judging by the remote viewer's sketches, that saurian pilot was advanced, but not sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

Fermi 38. Earth is the optimal place for life, just by chance.

Could be. And for intelligent life, at that. Hey, look, we've seen it twice: the smart dinosaurs and Homo sap.

Fermi 48. Language is vanishingly rare.

Ha! Yeah, right. Blah blah blah. Still, maybe so. The skies are awfully silent, which is where we came in . . .

Fermi 49. Science is a rare accident.

Not as rare as I am, I thought, touching the etiological chains and vortices all around—and no scientist ever predicted me. Most of them still didn't even
know
about me, thanks to all those Above Top Secret restrictions. Damn it.

Namgoong cleared his throat at the podium. Voices, in clumps and then one by one, fell silent. Hey, maybe that's it. God tapped His microphone, and the cosmos shut up to listen. And they're still listening, bent and cowed by the awfulness of what they heard. But not us, we haven't heard from God yet, despite a thousand revelations claimed and proclaimed. Or if we have, there's no way to search through the babbling noise and extract the divine signal. Funny way to run a universe.

I could feel the dinosaur calling to me, even so, through the appalling cold of Titan's snows and the void of fifty or a hundred million years. And the entwined memory of my son, sacrificed for nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

"Those are the classic guesses—most of them wrong." The Director flicked his finger; the display went to blank gray. "We still have no idea why the galaxy, indeed the universe as a whole, is quiet. Why the stars are still shining, spilling out their colossal energy resources, when intelligence should be collecting it. Calculations you're all familiar with prove that a single intelligent species arising anywhere in the galaxy within the last billion years would by now have colonized all its trillion stars and associated bodies, turned the sky black with Matrioshka shells—or perhaps obliterated the stars in vast, wasteful wars."

I pricked up my ears. A political subtext? Perhaps not; maybe our director was just a tone-deaf drone. I glanced around; several people near me had dropped their eyes, more than one held fists clenched tight. Okay.

"One of the equally classic Great Filters must screen out potential intelligent life and leave the heavens exactly as they'd have to be if there is no life at all out there. No
intelligent, starfaring
life, anyway.

"So now we're faced with a new paradox. Fermi remains unanswered—and yet we have this old vehicle made by beings not of our own species, but apparently related. The likelihood of that coincidence being due to chance alone is impossibly small. I see only three remaining possibilities."

"Barney did it," someone called, muted but clear across the room. A wave of tittering. I felt my jaw tighten, and a flush creep into my cheeks.

"A previous civilization sprung from dinosaur stock on Cretaceous Earth, or even earlier, yes," said Dr. Namgoog evenly. "The opinion represented here today by our guest, Sensei Park."

A pattering of polite applause, some even more muted groans.

"We have evidence in the form of preliminary scans by our Naval remote viewer, Colonel Meagle, that the creature . . . the being, forgive me . . . in charge of the craft has just such an origin. Leaving aside the improbability of parallel evolution. If so, this leaves the earlier and larger Fermi question unanswered: where are its kindred now, why haven't they conquered the whole galaxy? Tipler and others proved decades ago that this could have been achieved at plausible sub-light speeds within a million years. If they have, why don't we see them?"

Hearing it stated so flatly, I was dizzied, as always, by the prospect. Flotillas of starcraft fleeing into the spiral arms at a tenth of light speed, crammed with dragon seed or our own. Or minute nanoscale pods fired toward a hundred million stars by magnetic catapult, or driven on filmy wings by laser light. Yet these, too, were last year's dreams, last century's. We had stepped from Earth to Ganymede to Titan entangled on a light beam, and without waiting to be shoved here by sailboat. The moment entangled luminal portage became a reality for my own species, it opened the yawning cavern: why not for them, as well? What the hell was a
starship
doing here? Why bother? It was so last week, like finding a steam locomotive under the ice.

Namgoog was enunciating his other solutions to Fermi, but I didn't care. I was entranced by the mystery of the sleeping creature, sedate under his bedding of live flowers. It was a hunger like my endless appetite for chow. I wanted to step straight through the damned shell of the ship and look the critter in the eye, man to man. Even if it decided to eat
me.

That's what dragons do, isn't it?

And so to bed. Where I lay in the dark in a lather of fright for fifteen minutes. Fearful and weak. Bleak. Needing a leak. I climbed out and thudded to the sanitary personal. When I got back, after a swab up and down and across with a wet face cloth to dab away the worse of the flopsweat, my door was slightly open. Through it came the never-stopping background clanging and banging of humans and machines keeping the place ticking over. Snapping my fingers, I clicked the room light up to dim. Dr. Jendayi Shumba, chubby string looper, stretched at ease on my bed, clad in sensible pajamas with a mission blaze on the collar. Of course, I jumped and squealed.

"
What
the—Is there some—"

"Hush up, dear man, and come over here." She grinned.

"You're not serious. Are you?"

In evidence, she slithered out of her pjs and raised her eyebrows.

"Absurd. I'd crush you like a bug."

"Myeong-hui, you don't weigh any more, here, than my little boy."

"You have a—?" I swallowed, and crept closer. "I had a son once."

"Let us be in this moment, Sensei," she said without reproach.

"I'm disgusting to look upon," I said frankly. "And I don't need a pity—"

She had her fingers across my mouth, and then pulled me down through several clunky jumpy evolutions. "There are other ways to convey one's . . . intimacy," she said.

"Ulp," I protested.

"An easy mouth is a great thing on a long journey, is it not, old fellow?" she said, releasing mine and patting my neck.

"Ex-
cuse
me?"

Jendayi burst out laughing, a slightly husky, wonderfully exciting sound. "A quote from an old British classic about a horse. Nineteenth century, I believe. You might have read it as a child.
Black Beauty
."

"You are the black beauty," I said, noticing a cue when it smacked me between the eyes. I raised my voice and said, "Door close," and it did.

"You've got a way to break into the ship, don't you?" she said, after a time without time.

I was reeling and reckless. "Yes. Probably."

"So you really are a poltergeist." She stroked my contemptible belly, as if it were a friendly animal sharing the bed with us. "Tony nearly poked his damn eye out." Her laugh was throaty, dirty, a tonic.

"Don't blame me," I said, and found a glass of water, drained it. "It's like being able to wiggle your ears."

In the near-dark, she wiggled hers, and more.

But before she left, Jendayi said, "Bring me back a sample. A skin scraping, anything with DNA. Just for me, honey, okay?" Oh, so that's why you're here? Had to be some reason. Exploitative bitch. But that's life, right?