The Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String

The Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String

(by Lavie Tidhar)

“It’s technology,” Mrs. Pongboon says, importantly, employing the English word, which is one of the few she knows. The girl looks impressed – as well she should, Mrs Pongboon thinks. “Here,” sher says. “Try,” she says. She un loops a second locket from hem ample bosom – not the one with all her misery inside it, but the sampler, the holy sampler – she had once confused the two with a potential customer and the results were… less than beneficial, in fact there had been a complaint, and since then she is extra careful, though she cannot bear to put her own, personal locket away – “Try and see for yourself, my darling little girl”.

The locket is encoded with a Generic Spring Day, The Lovers, River Bank – it could be anywhere, it could be any two young people in any country in the world, Generic Sample Number Two, version oh three point five six, and when Mrs. Pongboon pops the lock she can adjust the setting.

Encode: Laothian-specific. Encode: Boy-Girl (she takes a hunch, you’d be surprised how often it doesn’t pay off) – “Here, give me your palm, little miss, little madam, close your fingers, close your eyes – can you feel it?” (but of course she can)…

There will always be knots. That is called - she had memorized it in English - it is called the spontaneous knotting of an agitated string. That is a scientific fact…

The Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String. Illustration by Elena

The Peacock Cloak

The Peacock Cloak

Chris Beckett

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The other man nodded.

“Well, yes. Of course, there is a sense in which I am a copy of Fabbro as you are, since this body is an analogue of the body that Fabbro was born with, rather than the body itself. But the original Fabbro ceased to exist when I came into being, so my history and his have never branched away from each other, as yours and his did, but are arranged sequentially in a single line, a single story. So yes, I am Fabbro. All that is left of Fabbro is me, and I have finally entered my own creation. It seemed fitting, now that both Esperine and I are coming to a close.”

Tawus considered this for a moment. He had an impulse to ask about the world beyond Esperine, that vast and ancient universe in which Fabbro had been born and grown up. For of course Fabbro’s was the only childhood that Tawus could remember, Fabbro’s the only youth. He was naturally curious to know how things had changed out there and to hear news of the people from Fabbro’s past: friends, collaborators, male and female lovers, children (actual biological children: children of Fabbro’s body and not just his mind).

“Aren’t those moments a distraction?” the cloak asked him through his skin. “Isn’t that stuff his worry and not yours?”

The Peacock Cloal. Illustration by Elena

Tawus nodded.

“Yes”, he silently agreed, “and to ask about it would muddy the water.” It would confuse the issue of worlds and their ownership.”

He looked Fabbro in the face.

“You had no business coming into Esperine,” he told him. “We renounced your world and you in turn gave this world to us to be our own. You’ve no right to come barging back in here now, interfering, undermining my authority, undermining the authority of the Five.”

(It was Five now, not Six, because of Cassandra’s annihilation in the Chrome Wars.)

Fabbro smiled.

“Some might say you’d undermined each other’s authority quite well without my help, with your constant warring, and your famine and your plagues and all of that.”

“That’s a matter for us, not you.”

“Possibly so,” said Fabbro. “Possibly so. But in my defence, I have tried to keep out of the way since I arrived in this world.”

“You let it be known you were here, though. That was enough.”

Fabbro tipped his head from side to side, weighing this up.

“Enough? Do you really think so? Surely for my mere presence to have had an impact there would have had to be something in Esperine that could be touched by it. There had to be a me-shaped hole, if you see what I mean. Otherwise, wouldn’t I just be some harmless old man up in the mountains?”

He sat down on the log again.

“Come and sit with me, Tawus.” He patted a space beside him. “This is my favourite spot, my grandstand seat. There’s always something happening here. Day. Night. Evening. Morning. Sun. Rain. Always something new to see.”

“If you’re content with sheep and ducks,” said Tawus, and did not sit.

The Sultan of the Clouds

The Sultan of the Clouds

By Geoffrey A. Landis

The pilot-monk rolled the barque back, and then pointed, forward and slightly to the right. “There. See it?”

I didn`t know what to see. “What?”

“There”.

I saw it know, a tiny point glistening in the distance. “What is it?”

“Hypatia. The jewel of the clouds”.

As we coasted closer, the city grew. It was an odd sight. The city was a dome, or, rather, a dozen glistening domes melted haphazardly together, each one faceted with a million panels of glass. The domes were huge, the smallest nearly a kilometer across, and as the barque glided across the sky, the facets caught the sunlight and sparked with reflected light. Below the domes, a slender pencil of rough black stretched down toward the cloudbase like taffy, delicate as spun glass, terminating in an absurdly tiny bulb of rock that seemed far too small to counterbalance the domes.

A Sultan of the Clouds. Painting by Elena

“Beautiful, you think, yes?” Like the wonderful jellyfishes or your blue planet`s oceans. Can you belief that half a million people live here?”

The pilot brought us around the city in a grand sweep, showing off, not even bothering to talk. Inside the transparent domes, chains of lakes glittered in green ribbons between boulevards and delicate pavilions. At last, he slowed to a stop, and then slowly leaked atmosphere into the vacuum vessel that provided the buoyancy. The barque settled down gradually, wallowing from side to side now that the stability given by its forward momentum was gone. Now it floated slightly lower than the counterweight. The counterweight no longer looked small, but loomed above us, a rock the size of Gibraltar. Tiny fliers affixed tow-ropes to hard-points on the surface of the barque, and slowly we were winched into a hard-dock.

“Welcome to Venus”, said the monk.

The surface of Venus is a place of crushing pressure and hellish temperature. Rise above it though, and the pressure eases, the temperature cools. Fifty kilometres above the surface, at the base of the clouds, the temperature is tropical, and the pressure the same as Earth normal. Twenty kilometres above that, the air is thin and polar cold.

The Things

The Things

By Peter Watts

Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves. I knew they couldn`t hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myself twinning around Palmer`s motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tiny currents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behind Blair’s eyes.

Imagination, of course. It’s all reflex that far down, unconscious and immune to micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was still time. I’m used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them.

This, this compartmentalization was unprecedented. I’ve assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met the spark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?

I was being three men by now. The world was growing wary, but it hadn’t noticed yet. Even the tumors in the skins I had taken didn’t know how close I was. For that I could only be grateful – that Creation has rules, that some things don’t change no matter what shape you take. It doesn’t matter whether a soul spreads throughout the skin of festers in grotesque isolation; it still runs on electricity. The memories of man still took time to gel, to pass through whatever gatekeepers filtered noise from signal – and a judicious burst of static, however indiscriminate, still cleared those caches before their contents could be stored permanently. Clear enough, at least, to let these tumors simply forget that something else moved their arms and legs on occasion.

Dreams. Soon, though, the dreams dried up. Image: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

At first, I only took control when the skins closed their eyes and their searchlights flickered disconcertingly across unreal imagery, patterns that flowed senselessly into one another like hyperactive biomass unable to settle on a single shape. (Dreams, one searchlight told me, and a little later, Nightmares). During those mysterious periods of dormancy when the men lay inert and isolated, it was safe to come out.

Soon, though, the dreams dried up. All eyes stayed open all the time, fixed on shadows and each other. Men once dispersed throughout the camp began to draw together, to give up their solitary pursuits in in favor of company. At first I thought they might be finding common ground in a common fear. I even hoped that finally, they might shake off their mysterious fossilization and take communion.

But no. They’d just stopped trusting anything they couldn’t see.

They were merely turning against each other.

My extremities are beginning to numb, my thoughts slow as the distal reaches of my soul succumb to the chill. The weight of the flamethrower pulls at its harness, forever tugs me just a little off-balance. I have not been Childs for very long; almost half his tissue remains unassimilated. I have an hour, may be two, before I have to start melting my grave into the ice. By that time I need to have converted enough cells to keep the whole skin from crystallizing. I focus on antifreeze production.

It’s almost peaceful out there. There’s been so much to take in, so little time to process it. Hiding in these skins takes such concentration, and under all those watchful eyes I was lucky if communion lasted long enough to exchange memories: compounding my soul would have been out of the question. Now, though, there is nothing to do but prepare for oblivion. Nothing to occupy my thoughts, but all these lessons left unlearned.

MacReady’s test sample, by example. His thing detector, to expose imposters posing as men. It does not work nearly as well as the world thinks; but the fact that it works at all violates the most basic rules of biology. It’s the center of the puzzle. It’s the answer to all the mysteries. I might have already figured it out if I had been just a little larger. I might already know the world, if the world wasn’t trying so ahrd to kill me.

MacReady’s test.

Either it is impossible or I have been wrong about everything.

Return to Titan

Return to Titan

By Stephen Baxter (excerpt)

The days are very long on Titan, and by the time we got back to the gondola nothing seemed to have changed about the landscape or the sky, not a diffuse shadow had shifted. We found Poole and Dzik happily fixing big balloon wheels to axis slung beneath the crumpled hull.

When they were done, we all climbed back aboard. Poole had reset some of the interior lamps so they glowed green, yellow, and blue; it was a relief to be immersed once more in bright Earth light.

We set off in our gondola-truck for the next part of our expedition. We were making, I was told, for an impact crater believed to hold liquid water, which itself was not far from a cryovolcano, another feature of interest for the expedition. This site was only perhaps a hundred kilometres from where we had come down.

Miriam transferred her samples to cold stores, and ran some of them through a small onboard science package. She jabbered about what she had discovered. Poole encouraged here more than Dzik did, but even that wasn’t much.

Dzik and Poole were more interested in that moment with Playing with the gondola. Like overgrown boys they sat at an improvised driver’s console and fussed over gear ratios and the performance of the big tyres. Poole even insisted on driving the bus himself, though Titan was so flat and dull for the most part he could easily have left the chore to the onboard systems. That proved to me the fallacy of not bringing along specialist biologists on a jaunt like this. It was only Miriam who seemed to have a genuine passion for the life systems we were supposed to be here to study: Dzik and Poole were too easily distracted by the technology, which was, after all, only a means to an end.

Return to Titan. Peinture by Elena

They had however rearranged the interior to make it feel a little less cramped. The couches had been separated and set up around the cabin, so you could sit upright with a bit of elbow room. The cabin was pressurised, so we could remove room for one at a time to shuck off his or her exosuit. Poole ordered us to do so; we had already been inside the suits for a few hours, and the suits, and ourselves, needed some maintenance. Poole had set up a curtained-off area where we could let our discarded suits perform their self-maintenance functions while we had showers – of water recycles from our urine and sweat, which was deemed a lot safer than melt from the ice moon. Pool himself used the shower first, and then Miriam. She was hasty, eager to get back to her work, and kept talking even while she cleaned up.

After Miriam was out of the shower I took my turn. It was a miserable drizzle and lukewarm at that, but it was a relief to let my skin drink in the water. I was quick, though; with the unknown dangers of Titan only centimetres away beyond the gondola’s fragile metal walls, I didn’t want to spend long outside the security of the suit.

After me, Bill Dzik followed, and it was an unlovely stink his suit released. I was spitefully glad that for all this bluster his reaction to the terrors of our landing must have been just as ignoble as mine.