The New Space Opera 2 (9 page)

“Look what you've made of him. He's great at conditional if/thens. Can't be beat on number-crunching and do loops. But he can't
think
. Can't make the simplest intuitive jumps. You're like one of those—” I remember an earthly myth, from the days when
reading
did not seem like such an obscene waste of life span—“one of those wolves, trying to raise a human child. You can teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach him about pack dynamics, but you can't teach him how to walk on his hind legs or talk or be
human
because you're
too fucking stupid,
Chimp, and you finally realized it. And that's why you threw him at me. You think I can fix him for you.”

I take a breath, and a gambit.

“But he's nothing to me. You understand? He's
worse
than nothing, he's a liability. He's a spy, he's a spastic waste of O
₂
. Give me one reason why I shouldn't just lock him out there until he cooks.”

“You're his mother,” the chimp says, because the chimp has read all about kin selection and is too stupid for nuance.

“You're an idiot.”

“You love him.”

“No.” An icy lump forms in my chest. My mouth makes words; they come out measured and inflectionless. “I can't love anyone, you brain-dead machine. That's why I'm out here. Do you really think they'd gamble your precious never-ending mission on little glass dolls that needed to bond?”

“You love him.”

“I can kill him any time I want. And that's exactly what I'll do if you don't move the gate.”

“I'd stop you,” the chimp says mildly.

“That's easy enough. Just move the gate and we both get what we want. Or you can dig in your heels and try to reconcile your need for a mother's touch with my sworn intention of breaking the little fucker's neck. We've got a long trip ahead of us, Chimp. And you might find I'm not quite as easy to cut out of the equation as Kai and Connie.”

“You cannot end the mission,” it says, almost gently. “You tried that already.”

“This isn't about ending the mission. This is only about slowing it down a little. Your optimal scenario's off the table. The only way that gate's going to get finished now is by saving the Island, or killing your prototype. Your call.”

The cost-benefit's pretty simple. The chimp could solve it in an instant. But still it says nothing. The silence stretches. It's looking for some other option, I bet. It's trying to find a workaround. It's questioning the very premises of the scenario, trying to decide if I mean what I'm saying, if all its book-learning about mother love could really be so far off-base. Maybe it's plumbing historical intrafamilial murder rates, looking for a loophole. And there may be one, for all I know. But the chimp isn't me, it's a simpler system trying to figure out a smarter one, and that gives me the edge.

“You would owe me,” it says at last.

I almost burst out laughing.
“What?”

“Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him.”

“Go ahead.”

“You don't want him to know.”

“I don't care whether he knows or not. What, you think he'll try and kill me back? You think I'll lose his
love?
” I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.

“You'll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.”

“Oh, right.
Trust
. The very fucking foundation of this mission!”

The chimp says nothing.

“For the sake of argument,” I say, after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I
owe
you, exactly?”

“A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”

My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.

 

We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps toward us in the
stop-motion increments of a life's moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling one another into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.

And hanging like a curtain between
it
and
us
shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works and what doesn't. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.

But I believe in the Island, because I don't
have
to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can
see
it: massive, mind-boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can't
help
but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.

I believe in the Island. I've gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.

I may yet.

In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

 

Final approach.

Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerizing infinite regress of bull's-eyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.

Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target.
Eriophora
falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically displaced mass.

I turn to the drone's-eye view relayed from up ahead. It's a window into history—even now, there's a time-lag of several minutes—but past and
present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, reenlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it's cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

At least we've spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.

Angels do not speak to ants.

Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel.
Eri
's incidental time machine barely looks into the past anymore; I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that
then
needs to overtake
now
. Still on target, according to all sources.

Tactical beeps at us.

“Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?

But—

“It's
ahead
of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

Two minutes.

“Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn't move the gate far enough.”

“We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

“
Still in front of us!
Look at the
sun
!”

“Look at the
signal
,” I tell him.

Because it's nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we've followed
over the past three trillion kilometers. It's almost—random, somehow. It's spur-of-the-moment, it's
panicky
. It's the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present;
Eriophora
dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

I wonder if you'll notice the corpse we left behind.

 

“Maybe we're missing something,” Dix says.

“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole's online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We'll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it'll do any good.

So far, though, nothing's come out.

“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

Our numbers were right. An hour doesn't pass when I don't check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was
smart
. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a
weapon,
to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…

I guess
flyswatter
is as good a word as any.

“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

“Maybe didn't
know,
” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

Why would you think that?
I wonder.
Why would you even care?
And then it dawns on me: he doesn't, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He's not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

My son is trying to comfort me.

I don't need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

But I'm better now.

It's over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn't matter how successful we are. It doesn't matter how well we do our job.
Mission accomplished
is a meaningless phrase on
Eriophora
, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.

I still have so much to learn.

At least my son is here to teach me.

Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American Literature and the director of the Creative Writing program at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel,
Good News from Outer Space
, was released in 1988 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which have been assembled in collections such as
Meeting in Infinity
and
The Pure Product
. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his novella
Another Orphan
, which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991, and his novella
Stories for Men
won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2003. His other books include the novels
Corrupting Dr. Nice, Freedom Beach
(written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly),
Ninety Percent of Everything
(written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly and Jonathan Lethem), and an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called
Intersections
, coedited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His most recent books are two anthologies coedited with James Patrick Kelly,
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
and
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology
, and a new collection,
The Baum Plan For Financial Independence and Other Stories
.