The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (99 page)

“Sam.” A slightly uncomfortable silence fell. Scrapings of plastic flatware on realistic plates. I gobbled up my tasty beef, placed the empty plate back on my tray, slurped off some more of the stunningly convincing compiled Shiraz, took a bite of a lemon-ginger dessert to die for, decorated with pistachios. “Fermi-53, that’s my considered opinion,” I said with my mouth full. “My tentative, preliminary opinion, naturally.”

“There are no recognizable roses or jonquils or violets or orchids, obviously. But the flowers scattered over the vehicle certainly do appear to be derived from Earth angiosperms, specialized to a range of climates and coevolutionary biomes,” said Natasha Hsai. “So far as we can tell purely from visual inspection.”

“Which rules out Fermi-53 instantly,” Antonio Caetani said. “Blossoms of such complexity and beauty did not evolve on Earth until the Holocene. Probably not until humans deliberately bred the cultivars during the rise of agriculture.”

“Oh, let’s not over-simplify, Tony,” Natasha said. “Pollinator insects and hummers and lizards and all the rest, they speciated along with the angiosperms; they sculpted each other without any help. Yes, I grant you, early humans broke up the soil to an unprecedented extent so they could grow their dinner, and then as a sideline retained and cultivated those blossoms that especially . . . well, made them happy. They’re our botanical pets, now, because flowers make us smile and feel good. They induce positive emotions.”

“They’re scented sex organs,” Caetani said, “doing their job.”

I’d finished eating, for the moment. “The first flowering plants,” I pointed out, “evolved sixty-five million years prior to the Chicxulub catastrophe. Nice symmetry, that.” As far back in time before the extinction of the dinosaurs as we now stood after it. I didn’t need to spell that out; these were, after all, highly trained intellects. But I had to add the obvious, the intolerable, the all-but-unthinkable crux. “Humans, I remind you, were not the only cultivators.” I found I had no appetite for cheese, and pushed back my chair. “Do you allow smoking here? Anyone for cigars and port?”

“No,” said Caetani brusquely. “Sensei Park, we are scientists, not mystagogues. I confess myself bewildered by your presence at Huygens.” Jendayi Shumba pulled at his sleeve; he shook her off. “I am frankly offended that the Imperium invited a quack from the Intelligent Dinosaur Institute here to Titan.” Shumba kicked his leg under the table; I saw and felt the small causal shock of her intention and its manifestation, because that’s who I am, that’s what I do. “I have nothing more to say to you.” He looked away disdainfully, drew his own dessert plate in front of him, scooped up a heaping spoonful of tiramisu and shoved it into his left eye, hard.

I raised one eyebrow, sighed, and rose, gathered my soiled crockery and plasticware on the tray, and walked away from the table. He probably wouldn’t lose the sight in his eye. But what could I do?

Speaking technically, I’m an etiological distortion. Less pompously, there’s something buried deep inside me that screws with cause and effect. I’m a footloose bubble of improbability. Call me a witch or a freak if you’d prefer, it rolls more easily off the tongue. Chances are good, though, that if you do call me nasty names, and I get to hear about it, you’ll trip over the kid’s bike in the dark, or run into an opening door, and break something painful. It’s not that I harbor resentment at name-calling, but my unconscious seems to. As I say, not much I can do about that, sorry.

There were ructions and alarums but I brushed them off, went to bed and slept, as I had done every night for five years, like a damned soul. My gift or curse does not permit me to stand aside from that which wraps me like a shroud. Sorrow eddied in my dreams. My son—

—and as so often, these days, the booming, tolling voices came to me from a century and a half past, voices I have heard only in my head, reading their words on the pages of old books I found in an abandoned library, stinking with the reek of extinguished fires, where I had crept for silence like a heavy old dog with a wound too great to bear. The words were in English, that tongue almost as familiar to me as my own, picked up in the streets, later honed in special classes for promising children. I knew nothing of the writer, save that he was a man of substance in his place and time. His words raised a resonance in my burned soul. He must have known this same agony, and sought some bitter draught of comfort:

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?
“The stars,” she whispers, “blindly run;
A web is wov’n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
“And all the phantom, Nature, stands –
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own, –
A hollow form with empty hands.”

And woke in the morning (by the conventional Earth clock calibrated to Seoul time, GMT+9 hours), as always alone, empty hollow form and all, despite the web wov’n palpably across the sky, and ravenously hungry, as usual.

So I ate a healthy breakfast and went to watch Meagle on closed circuit, a feed from the audiovisual record that military remote viewers are obliged to make for assessment, interpretation, and the archive. Today he sat zazen in a small cell like a non-denominational chapel, if chapels come with voice-activated holography displays (and maybe they do, I’m not a religious man), hands curled upward on his knees. His breathing was slow, regular. Maybe this was what their protocol called cooling down. His blind eyes were open, apparently fixed on the deep blue depths of the holly. Upon his head was a crown of thorns, a tidy maze of squid detectors pulsing to the quantum state of his brain, his brain stem, his meditative consciousness.

“Looking at the vehicle from above,” he murmured. “Still can’t find my way in. Yet.” His lips quirked the smallest amount. Who Dares Wins, I thought. Semper Fi. Rah-rah. Well, it took a lot of quiet confidence in one’s oddball abilities, no doubt. My own kind of disreputable ability just happened to me, or around me.

“Get back to the signal line,” a gravelly voice said. Someone not in the room. His controller, I supposed. His operator, whatever they called the role.

“He’s physically blind, I realise that,” I told the medical officer seated beside me in the observation booth, “but doesn’t knowing the identity of the target sort of pollute his, his guesswork?”

“The viewer does not guess.”

“No offense. I mean, bias him unconsciously with preconceived notions?” Front-loading, they called it; I knew that much. “Like that stasis field thingee? Can we be sure that’s not some scrap of nonsense from a comic strip he read when he was a child?”

“Mr Meagle is well past all such neophyte hazards,” the nurse said, offended by my uppity kvetching. He had gray hair at his close-cropped temples, and a steady gaze. Almost certainly a veteran of the war in – I shut that thought down, hard. “The colonel can afford to depart from the lock-step of traditional protocol. As he does when it suits him.” I nodded, made soothing, conciliatory sounds. Perhaps mollified, he explained, “It contracts the search path polynomially.”

“Um,” I said, and settled back to view the sketched images form, dissolve, reform in the imaginary three-space of the holograms. As Meagle’s fingers moved through the air, unseen lasers tracked the shapes he sketched. It seemed, watching him, that he actually felt his way around the starship out there in the frozen crust of Titan. Kinesthetic imagery. A kind of heightened physicality, perhaps unavailable to a sighted person. Or was that nothing better than my whimsy, my fat man’s sentimentality?

“Moving downward, gravity tugs at me,” the remote viewer murmured. His voice was drowsy. I saw his shoulders spasm, as if he were falling forward and had caught himself.

“Wake up, there, colonel,” the voice said, without reproach. “You’re drifting.”

“He’s sliding into Phase Two. That was hypnic myoclonia,” the nurse commented. “Jactitation.”

“Haven’t slept since yesterday,” Meagle muttered. He shook himself “Okay. Got it. I’m in.”

The screens, trying to emulate whatever it was the psychic was “seeing/ feeling,” bloomed with a burst of visual noise. Were those things sketchy blocks of cells, like the hexagonal innards of a bee hive? They shrank, jittered, smoothed into a kind of curvy passageway. The image was being enhanced by the computer’s analysis, drawing on an archive of Meagle’s private symbols.

“Analytical overlay,” the operator said in a tone of admonition.

“I don’t—No, this’s what I’m actually perceiving. My God, Charley, the place is so fucking old. Millions of years. Tens of millions.”

“Give me some Stage Three.”

“Weirdly beautiful, man. But alien. Not insects, I’m pretty sure.” The overlapping images loped along, as if from a camera mounted on a cartoon’s shoulder. Is this how the blind imagines seeing? Meagle had been sightless from birth, the dossier had informed me. But maybe that shouldn’t be surprising; the blind repurpose the cortical and precortical tissues specialized by evolution for visual capture and registration – the large dedicated occipital lobe, the striate V1 cortex, all the way up the V hierarchy to middle temporal MT, pathways carrying neural trains from the retina to the brain, interpreting, pruning as they flashed their binary code. Yada yada. His sensitive, trained brain had nabbed that spare capacity, retained its function, modified its input channels. The Marvel That Is Your Brain! I overheard my own mocking subliminal commentary and wondered why I was so anxious, suddenly. A kind of curdling in the causal webs . . . I felt more and more uncomfortable, as if I badly needed to take a dump. Maybe I did. Meagle had fallen silent. Dropping off to sleep again? No, the constructed image was sliding past us in the hologram, slurring and breaking up in detail, but it was a corridor he walked along, in his spirit walk or whatever you call it.

Something sitting in a large padded chair. Christ!

“Christ!” Meagle cried, loudly. Small indicator lights went from placid green to blipping yellow on one display. A histogram surfed briefly into the red. The nurse was clicking keys, fast and unrattled.

“Bingo, Colonel,” said the operator, triumph shaking his professional sang-froid.

My etiological sense scrambled. I lurched up, leaned forward, ready to puke. Meagle was doing the same, cable tangled at his neck, contacts pulling from his cropped scalp. In the great chair shown on the screen, as the imaginary viewpoint swung about, the interpretative computer sketched a seated person with a snout and deep-set hooded eyes, clawed hands gripping banked controls on the arm rests.

The image skittered and jittered, revised itself as the causal whirl pool screeched around me. But no, this wasn’t the dragon I was looking for. It was, it wasn’t. The machine image spoke directly to me through Meagle and memory. That dead person, that ancient thing in its ancient warship, it was . . . was . . . Impossible. Delusion and grief Something else. I knew the beloved face beyond denial, of course, like a clumsy pencil drawing on the screen that tore my heart out. Human. Face burned down in places to the bone, gaze suffering, mouth mute, determined even in death. In his stained UN uniform, with Korean Imperium lieutenant flashes at the collar.

“Oh, lord God,” I moaned, and did barf, then, like a puling schoolboy drunk.

From the corner of my leaking eyes, in the window feed from his RV cell, I saw Meagle turn convulsively. He seemed to stare right at me, through the camera, into the display, with his blue, blind eyes.

The main hologram image, too, looked steadfastly back at me – sketched from the Naval remote viewer’s words and speaking hands, his brain rhythms, the archived set of his stereotypical ideograms – looked at me from a grave five years dug in the soil.

Song-Dam. My son. My poor boy. My lost hero child.
I started to cry, wiping at my bitter mouth, and couldn’t stop.

Huygens is not part of the Imperium, of course, being a research agora, like Herschel, the other settlement on Titan, but it is a fiscal affiliate of Korea, as well as of Zimbabwe, the Brazilian Superstate, Camp Barsoom (on, you guessed it, Mars), and a handful of other polises on the Moon and Ganymede. So while the writ of Mr Kim, my sponsor, did not run on Titan, precisely, his paternal hand was heavily in the weighing scales. The Warlord had developed a fondness for the Intelligent Dinosaur paradigm when he studied paleontology as a young student in Antarctica, where all the equivocal evidence was located prior to the Enigma’s excavation, and he carried that interest through into maturity and, some said, senility. He would be pleased as punch.

Dr Caetani, surprise, surprise, was not. Everyone by now had studied the remote viewing session, and more than once. My participation and role could be determined only by inference, since no recorders had been trained on the observation room. But the recording of Meagle’s results showed plainly the results: the alien or saurian and, moments later, the harrowing superimposed image of my late son. For Caetani, I’m sure, my distress, my involvement, was just a piece of hammy theatrics, a shameful way to spray my mark onto an historic event.

“This afternoon, we know nothing more than we did a week ago,” he stated bluntly. “I’m candidly dismayed at the gullibility of some of my colleagues here.”

“The saurian –” began Jendayi Shumba. He cut her off instantly.

“ – the image was no more veridical than the, the disturbed imposition into the colonel’s entangled state of Sensei Park’s tragic fixation on his son’s death. Nobody doubts that Mr. Park is a functioning poltergeist, capable of casting images and interfering with complex electronic systems. It’s why he’s here – over my objections – and isn’t the point.” He took a deep breath, his features flushed behind that pretentious beard. “Our visitor’s martyred son is certainly not aboard that Jurassic artifact, and surely nobody thinks he is. Neither, by the same token, is the dinosaur space captain that Mr Park’s well-prepped imagination also dreamed up and shoveled into the ideospace.”