The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (85 page)

We need a body to bury,
I said to his memory.

It doesn’t make any difference; nobody in this family will mourn. They have too many worries of their own. You’ll have to take care of yourself now. You don’t have your younger brother to watch out for you.

The sun set, everyone else inside the house. I wanted to climb up onto a roof, or sit astride the wall. I plugged the mobile phone into the laptop, but in the depths of our slough I could not get a signal. I went into our hot unlit hall and pulled out the books, but they were unreadable without Raphael. Who would laugh for me as I did not laugh? Who would speak my mind for me as I could never find my mind in time? Who would know how to be pleasant with guests, civil in this uncivil world? I picked up our book on genetics and walked up to the top of the hill, and sat in the open unlit shed of a church and tried to read it in the last of the orange light. I said, Patrick, you are not civil and can’t make other people laugh, but you can do this. This is the one part of Raphael you can carry on.

I read it aloud, like a child sounding out words, to make them go in as facts. I realized later I was trying to read in the dark, in a church. I had been chanting nonsense GATTACA aloud, unable to see, my eyes full of tears. But I had told myself one slow truth and stuck to it. I studied for many years.

Whenever I felt weak or low or lonely, Raphael spoke inside my indented head. I kept his books in order for him. The chemistry book, the human genetics book. I went out into the broken courtyard and started to lift the iron bags with balls of concrete that he had made. Now I look like the muscular champion on his netbook. Everything I am, I am because of my brother.

I did not speak much to anyone else. I didn’t want to. Somewhere what is left of Raphael’s lead and mercury is entwined with reeds or glistens in sand.

To pay for your application for a scholarship in those days you had to buy a scratch card from a bank. I had bought so many. I did not even remember applying to the Benue State Scholarship Board. They gave me a small stipend, enough if I stayed at home and did construction work. I became one of the workmen in the shallows.

Ex-colleagues of my father had found Matthew a job as a clerk in a bank in Jos. Matthew went to live with uncle Emmanuel. Andrew’s jaw set, demanding to be allowed to go with him. He knew where things were going. So did Mamamimi who saw the sense and nodded quietly, yes. Matthew became Andrew’s father.

We all lined up in the courtyard in the buzzing heat to let Matthew take the SUV, his inheritance. We waved goodbye as if half the family were just going for a short trip back to the home village or to the Chinese bakery to buy rolls. Our car pulled up the red hill past the church and they were gone. Mamamimi and I were alone with the sizzling sound of insects and heat and we walked back into the house in the same way, shuffling flat-footed. We stayed wordless all that day. Even the TV was not turned on. In the kitchen, in the dark, Mamamimi said to me “Why didn’t you go with them? Study at a proper university?” and I said, “Because someone needs to help you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. Not long afterward she took her rusty green car and drove it back to Kawuye for the last time. She lived with Uncle Jacob, and the elders. I was left alone in this whispering house.

*     *     *

We had in our neglected, unpaid, strike-ridden campus a mathematician, a dusty and disordered man who reminded me of Raphael. He was an Idoma man called Thomas Aba. He came to Jide and me with his notebook and then unfolded a page of equations.

These equations described, he said, how the act of observing events at a quantum level changed them. He turned the page. Now, he said, here is how those same equations describe how observing alters effects on the macro level.

He had shown mathematically how the mere act of repeated observation changed the real world.

We published in
Nature.
People wanted to believe that someone working things out for themselves could revolutionize cosmology with a single set of equations. Of all of us, Doubting Thomas was the genius. Tsinghua University in Beijing offered him a Professorship and he left us. Citations for our article avalanched; Google could not keep up. People needed to know why everything was shifting, needing to explain both the climate-change debacle and the end of miracles.

Simply put, science found the truth and by finding it, changed it. Science undid itself, in an endless cycle.

Some day the theory of evolution will be untrue and the law of conservation of energy will no longer work. Who knows, maybe we will get faster than light travel after all?

Thomas still writes to me about his work, though it is the intellectual property of Tsinghua. He is now able to calculate how long it takes for observation to change things. The rotation of the Earth around the Sun is so rooted in the universe that it will take 4000 years to wear it out. What kind of paradigm will replace it? The earth and the sun and all the stars secretly overlap? Outside the four dimensions they all occupy the same single mathematical point?

So many things exist only as metaphors and numbers. Atoms will take only fifty more years to disappear, taking with them quarks and muons and all the other particles. What the Large Hadron Collider will most accelerate is their demise.

Thomas has calculated how long it will take for observation to wear out even his observation. Then, he says, the universe will once again be stable. History melts down and is restored.

My fiancée is a simple country girl who wants a Prof for a husband. I know where that leads. To Mamamimi. Perhaps no bad thing. I hardly know the girl. She wears long dresses instead of jeans and has a pretty smile. My mother’s family know her.

The singing at the church has started, growing with the heat and sunlight. My beautiful suit wax-printed in blue-and-gold arches reflects the sunlight. Its glossy mix of fabrics will be cool, cooler than all that lumpy knitwear from Indonesia.

We have two weddings; one new, one old. Today, the families officially agree to the marriage. Next week the church and the big white dress. So I go through it all twice. I will have to mime love and happiness; the photographs will be used for those framed tributes: “Patrick and Leticia: True Love is Forever.” Matthew and Andrew will be there with their families for the first time in years and I find it hurts to have brothers who care nothing for me.

I hear my father saying that my country wife had best be grateful for all that I give her. I hear him telling her to leave if she is not happy. This time though, he speaks with my own voice.

Will I slap the walls all night or just my own face? Will I go mad and dance for workmen in a woman’s dress? Will I make stews so fiery that only I can eat them? I look down at my body, visible through the white linen, the body I have made perfect to compensate for my imperfect brain.

Shall I have a little baby with a creased forehead? Will he wear my father’s dusty cap? Will he sleepwalk, weep at night or laugh for no reason? If I call him a family name, will he live his grandfather’s life again? What poison will I pass on?

I try to imagine all my wedding guests and how their faces would fall if I simply walked away, or strode out like Raphael to crow with delight, “No wedding! I’m not getting married, no way José!” I smile; I can hear him say it; I can see how he would strut.

I can also hear him say,
What else is someone like you going to do except get married? You are too quiet and homely. A publication in
Nature
is not going to cook your food for you. It’s not going to get you laid.

I think of my future son. His Christian name will be Raphael but his personal name will be Ese, which means “Wiped Out”. It means that God will wipe out the past with all its expectations.

If witchcraft once worked and science is wearing out, then it seems to me that God loves our freedom more than stable truth. If I have a son who is free from the past, then I know God loves me too.

So I can envisage Ese, my firstborn. He’s wearing shorts and running with a kite behind him, happy clean and free and we the Shawos live on the hill once more.

I think of Mamamimi kneeling down to look into my face and saying, “Patrick, you are a fine young boy. You do everything right. There is nothing wrong with you.” I remember my father, sane for a while, resting a hand on the small of my back and saying, “You are becoming distinguished.” He was proud of me.

Most of all I think of Raphael speaking his mind to Matthew, to Grandma, even to Father but never to me. He is passing on his books to me in twilight, and I give him tea, and he says as if surprised
That’s nice. Thank you.
His shiny face glows with love.

I have to trust that I can pass on love as well.

A RESPONSE FROM EST17

Here’s an ingenious First Contact scenario, told mostly from the perspective of the aliens being contacted, as two competing probes from Earth enter into a complicated and ultimately dangerously confrontational series of negotiations with the natives as to whom they’re going to be in contact with, negotiations which may eventually determine the future survival of both the alien civilization and of Terran civilization itself.

Tom Purdom made his first sale in 1957, to
Fantastic Universe,
and has subsequently sold to
Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Star,
and most of the major magazines and anthologies. In recent years, he’s become a frequent contributor to
Asimov’s Science Fiction.
He is the author of one of the most unfairly forgotten SF novels of the 1960s, the powerful and still-timely
Reduction in Arms,
about the difficulties of disarmament in the face of the mad proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as such novels as
I Want the Stars, The Tree Lord of Imeten, Five Against Arlane,
and
The Barons of Behavior.
Purdom lives in Philadelphia, where he reviews classical music concerts for a local newspaper. Many of his short works have recently been made available at the Barnes & Noble Nookstore, Amazon’s Kindle store, and through Fictionwise.

T
HE BETZINO-RESDELL EXPLORATION
Community received its first message from Trans Cultural 5.23 seconds after it settled into orbit around the planet designated Extra-Solar Terranoid 17.

“I am the official representative of the Trans-Cultural Institute for Multi-Disciplinary and Extra-Disciplinary Interstellar Exploration and Study,” Trans Cultural radioed. “I represent a consortium of seventy-three political entities and two hundred and seventy-three academic, research, and cultural institutions located in every region of the Earth. You are hereby requested to refrain from direct contact with the surface of Extra-Solar Terranoid 17. My own contact devices have already initiated exploration of the planet. You will be granted access to my findings.”

The eighteen programs included in the Betzino-Resdell Community were called “alters” – as in “alter-ego” or “alternate personality” – but they were not self-aware. They were merely complicated, incredibly dense arrangements of circuits and switches, like every machine intelligence the human species had ever created. But they had been sponsored by seven different sets of shareholders and they had been shaped by the goals and personalities of their sponsors. They spent the first 7.62 seconds after their arrival testing the three copies of each program stored in their files so they could determine which copies had survived the journey in the best shape and should be activated. Then they turned their attention to the message from Trans Cultural.

Betzino and Resdell had been the primary sponsors of the expedition. Their electronic simulations controlled 60 of the 95 votes distributed among the community. Their vote to reject the demand settled the matter. But the other five concurred. The only no vote came from the group of alters tasked to study non-human sexuality. One member of that group cast one vote each way.

22.48 seconds after its arrival, the Betzino-Resdell Exploration Community initiated its exploration routine. The programs housed in Trans Cultural noted that Betzino-Resdell had failed to comply with their orders. Trans Cultural activated its dominance routine and the routine initiated activity. The first human artifacts to reach EST17 entered the first stages of the social phenomenon their creators called “microwar”.