Tower of Babylon

Tower of Babylon

By Ted Chiang

And at the top, the bricks were laid. One could catch the rich, raw smell of tar, rising out of the heated caldrons in which the lumps of bitumen were melted. It was the most earthy odor the miners had smelled in four months, and their nostrils were desperate to catch a whiff before it was whipped away by the wind. Here at the summit, where the ooze that had once seeped from the earth’s cracks now grew solid to hold bricks in place, the earth was growing a limb into the sky.

Here worked the bricklayers, the men smeared with bitumen who mixed the mortar and deftly set the heavy bricks with absolute precision. More than anyone else, these men could not permit themselves to experience dizziness when they saw the vault, for the tower could not vary a finger’s width from the vertical. They were nearing the end of their task, finally, and after four months of climbing, the miners were ready to begin theirs.

The Egyptians arrived shortly afterward. They were dark of skin and slight of build and had sparsely bearded chins. They had pulled carts filled with dolerite hammers, and bronze tools, and wooden wedges. Their foreman was named Senmut, and he conferred with Beli, the Elamites’ foreman, on how they would penetrate the vault. The Egyptians built a forge with what they had brought, as did the Elamites, for recasting the bronze tools that would be blunted during the mining.

Tower of Babylon. Photo by ElenaB.

The vault itself remained just above a man’s outstretched fingerprints; it felt smooth and cool when one leapt up to touch it. It seemed to be made of fine-grained white granite, unmarred and utterly featureless. And therein lay the problem. Long ago Yahweh had released the Deluge, unleashing waters from both below and above; the waters of heaven had poured through the sluice gates in the vault. Now men saw the vault closely, but there were no sluice gates discernible. They squinted at the surface in all directions, but no openings, no windows, no seams interrupted the granite plain.

It seemed that their tower met the vault at a point between any reservoirs, which was fortunate indeed. If a sluice gate had been visible, they would have had to risk breaking it open and emptying the reservoir. That would mean rain for Shinar, out of season and heavier than the winter rains; it would cause flooding along the Euphrates. The rain would most likely end when the reservoir was emptied, but there was always the possibility that Yahweh would punish them and continue the rain until the tower fell and Babylon was dissolved into mud.

Even though there were no visible gates, a risk still existed. Perhaps the gates had no seams perceptible to mortal eyes, and a reservoir lay directly above them. Or perhaps the reservoirs were huge, so that even if the nearest sluice gates were many leagues away, a reservoir still lay above them.

There was much debate over how best to proceed.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eigth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

The Death Artist

The Death Artist

By Alexander Jablokov

Something moved heavily in the darkness, and a row of chairs overturned with a clatter. Elam turned away from the pool. His heart pounded. A burst of laughter sounded from across the pool. The party was continuing, but the guests were impossibly far away, like a memory of childhood, unreachable and useless.

A head rose up out of the darkness, a head twice the size of Elam’s body. It was a metal egg, dominated by two expressionless eyes. Behind dragged a long, multi-limbed body, shiny and obscene. Elam screamed in unreasoning and senseless terror.

The creature moved forward, swaying its head from side to side. Acid saliva drooled from beneath its crystal teeth, splashing and fizzing on the marble terrace. It was incomprehensibly ancient, something from the long-forgotten past. It swept its tail around and dragged Elam towards it.

For an instant, Elam was paralyzed, staring at the strange beauty of the dragon’s teeth as they moved towards him. Then he struggled against the iron coil of the tail. His body still had traces of oil, and he slid out, stripping skin. He dove between the dragon’s legs, bruising his bones on the terrace.

The dragon is not dead. Photo by Elena

The dragon whipped around quickly, cornering him. With a belch, it sprayed acid over him. It burned down his shoulder, bubbling as it dissolved his skin.

“Damn you!” he shouted, and threw himself at the dragon’s head. It didn’t pull back quickly enough and he plunged his fist into its left eye. Its surface resisted, then popped, spraying fluid. The dragon tossed its head, flinging Elam across the ground.

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling the pain of shattered ribs. Blood dribbled down his chin. One of his legs would not support his weight. The massive head lowered down over him, much pouring out of the destroyed eye. Elam grabbled for the other eye, but he had no strength left. Foul-smelling acid flowed over him, sloughing his flesh off with the sound of frying bacon. He stayed on his feet, trying to push imprecations between his destroyed lips. The last thing he saw was the crystal teeth, lowering his head.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eight annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

The First Since Ancient Persia

The First Since Ancient Persia

By John Brunner

A letter (in Nature) signed by 134 scientists from Argentina’s Center for Animal Virology concluded:” … we feel that our country has been illegally used as a test field for a kind of experiment that is not yet accepted in the countries where the basic research on this vaccine had originated.” (New Scientist, 26 May 1988).

All day the lurching bus trailed its filthy wake of dust and diesel fumes across the drab and level countryside. Throughout this province the reads were no better than tracks, for there was nothing to metal them with, not even gravel, although, as Elsa Kahn had noticed, some attempt was being made to fill the worst of the potholes. Now and then the bus forded (could one say forded when there was no water? Well, then: traversed) one of the rare riverbeds of the region, dry as they would all remain for perhaps another three months, until the onset of the summer rains. Even then they would run no better than knee-deep. This was a land without bridges.

There she saw gangs or ragged men loading rocks on to the backs of burros fitted with saddles like double wooden hods. But they were not numerous, for even the timber had to be, so to say, imported. No trees save those planted by human hands grew closer than the foothills of the mountains that loomed on the western skyline.

Ancient Persia. Photo : Elena

There had been other wood along the road, in the shape of phone poles. They, however, had been rendered obsolete, replaced by line-of-sight microwave relays, cheaper and less vulnerable to sabotage. Near the towns that punctuated the bus’s route they had been torn down; the few that survived, too distant to be worth dragging away, served only to support the curious double-chambered nests of ovenbirds. Even so, passing one constituted an even and a distraction, comparable with the sight of a windmill in the distance, pumping water for an isolated farm, though not a match for an encounter with another vehicle. So far they had met four trucks and a bus plying in the opposite direction. Also they had overtaken sundry burros, pedestrians, and farm carts. Slow though their progress was, nothing had overtaken them

The sluggish changelessness of the landscape seemed to have infected Elsa’s fellow passengers, of whom there were at present eight, including an armed policeman seated behind the driver. He was the sole person on board who had spoken to her, and then only to demand a sight of her passport. The rest had merely glanced at her and retreated into the privacy of their own thoughts.

Now and then she felt the same lethargy was debilitating her. The first time they crossed one of the dry riverbeds she had automatically thought of it as a wadi, having encountered its like in North Africa. Although she had realised at once that that was wrong, it had taken her long minutes to recapture the proper term, arroyo seco.

Not that it was much help. Where she was bound, people might well use an entirely different word, drawn like so much of their vocabulary from the ancient language of the Chichiami.

That, at any rate, was what she had been told.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

Inertia

Inertia

By Nancy Kress

The sociologists hung on longer than anybody else. Journalists have to be timely and interesting, but sociologists merely have to polish. Besides, everything in their cultural tradition told them that Inside must sooner or later degenerate into war zones: Deprive people of electricity (power became expensive), of municipal police (who refused to go inside), of freedom to leave, of political clout, of jobs, of freeways and movie theaters and federal judges and state-administrated elementary-school accreditation – and you get unrestrained violence to just survive. Everything in the culture said so. Bombed-out inner cities. Lord Of The Flies. The Chicago projects. Western movies. Prison memoirs. The Bronx. East L.A. Thomas Hobbles. The sociologists knew.

Only it didn’t happen.

The sociologists waited. And Inside we learned to grow vegetables and raise chickens who, we learned, will eat anything. Those of us with computer knowledge worked real jobs over modems for a few years – maybe it was as long as a decade – before the equipment became too obsolete and unreplaced. Those who had been teachers organized classes among the children, although the curriculum, I think, must have gotten simpler every year. Rachel and Jennie don’t seem to have much knowledge of history or science. Doctors practiced with medicines donated by corporations for the tax write-offs, and after a decade or so they began to train apprentices. For a while – it might have been a long while – we listened to radios and watched TV. Maybe some people still do, if we have any working ones donated from Outside. I don’t pay attention.

Inertia. Photograph by Elena

Eventually sociologists remembered older models of deprivation and discrimination and isolation from the larger culture: Jewish shtetls. French Huguenots. Amish farmers. Self-sufficient models, stagnant, but uncollapsed. And why they were remembering, we had good lotteries, and took on apprentices, and rationed depositary food according to who needed it, and replaced our broken-down furniture with other broken-down furniture, and got married and bore children. We paid no taxes, fought no wars, wielded no votes, provided no drama. After a while – a long while – the visitors stopped coming. Even the sociologists.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

Learning to Be Me

Learning to Be Me

By Greg Egan

At nineteen, also I was studying finance, I took an undergraduate philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently, had nothing to say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as “the jewel”. (Ndoli had in fact called it “the dual”, but the accidental homophonic nickname had stuck). They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St. Agustine and – when feeling particularly modern and adventurous – Sartre, but if they’d heard of Godel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. One of sheer frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human consciousness as “software” that could be “implemented equally well on an organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism: for “software” read soul. My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal, luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in the margin (in vertical, boldface, 20-point Times, with a contemptuous 2 Hertz flash): IRRELEVANT!

I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of optical crystal engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics. I learnt a lot of fascinating mathematics. I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood. A sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost any system – but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated.

Learning to be me. Photo : Elena

“Understanding,” the lecturer told us, “is an overrated concept. Nobody really understands how a fertilized egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set of differential equations?”

I had to concede that she had a point there. It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I craved – and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste time fretting about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I could stop worrying and get on with my life

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)