The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

  I sigh, sit up, blow my nose into a huge handkerchief.

  ‘Ah, Susie. You’re my friend and I love you, you know? No, I’m not going to die.’ I start to laugh again. ‘Nothing as melodramatic as dying. I’m just going to give birth to my mother. My mother the monster.’

  Susan smiles uncertainly. ‘Well, if you insist, I suppose that’s true enough.’ She fusses with cushions. ‘Keith, I think it’s time you had a sleep. You must be exhausted.’

  ‘Yeah. I wouldn’t want to fall asleep while they’re opening me up, and miss all the fun.’

  The claws, the lobster clicks. What is it that beckons us, up there on the forward margins of time? I am not wholly convinced by Susan’s neat sociobiology of monsters. Why now, at Ragnarok’s Eve? How will life be, rebuilt to Whose appalling Design, when this awful generation comes to maturity amid the strange radioactive salts, the soil splashed into glass, into alligator scales: the midnight flickering of an overloaded aurora australis?

  I pat at my eyes and find myself laughing again, with a kind of genuine glee, and hug Dr Susan Dwyer against me, planning babies. We are a generation damned and redeemed in the same revelation. Perhaps we are all reborn; it is just that none of us has had the benefit of it, until now. But there is a way to ensure survival, and that way is to make monsters built of our own genes and the genes of our gene-bearers. Lay down the lines of future history. The dynasties of karma.

  Ah, shit. If she is telling the truth. If I am not after all due to die when they cut the kid out of me.

  Strange to be making plans again.

  ‘Marry me, doctor,’ I say, romantic, hoisting my belly so I can perch on one knee.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Susan frowns. ‘My daddy always warned me against shotgun weddings.’ But she kisses me and helps me to my feet, and arm in arm we go to yell the news into my own father’s baffled ear.

  Stock up the genetic larders, yes, that’s the imperative. Buy some lifeline insurance between the two of us. After all, we’re going to die soon enough, in the flash and the ash, Susan and I and the rest of us. I want to come back to find out what the future looks like.

  I’ll be there, if I can manage it, clicking my horrid hungry claws.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  RESURRECTION

  I spent my childhood waiting eagerly for the future.

  But when the future arrived it turned out to be more of the same, with small bright lights that bleat, refrigerators that destroy the ozone layer, and fundamentalists who amputate hands and other tender parts.

  Robot assembly-lines build zippier cars so drivers like you and cyclists like me can boil our adrenalin at the lights on city streets too cramped for traffic. Complacent old farts look into books penned by demented visionaries in the desert and think they know how it all works. The way it works, for too many of them, is by mutilating bodies and minds.

  Gifted by sacred knowledge which has no validation beyond its own self-echoing assertion, they turn and turn in creaking circles in their own wind.

  I was born fifteen months before the first nuclear bombs were used to evaporate the skin and flesh off living people. When I was in fourth grade, a teacher mocked me in front of my guffawing fellows for believing that human beings would some day get into orbit. Not the stars. Not the surface of the moon. Just outside the ozone layer, where, despite glasnost, they’re still planning to hang the Star Wars laser mirrors.

  That was then. This is, incredibly enough, now.

  Human beings first walked on the moon so long ago that the parents of some of the children currently enjoying science fiction were themselves not yet conceived on that luminous night.

  We are in the future. In the future.

  But forget the particle beam killer satellites and the head transplants. Muse for a moment on this commonplace scene:

  You step shivering and heavily-coated from the heart of winter into a working model of a—well, I suppose we could call it a Time Machine. After a strange immobile interval, you step outside into scorching brilliance. You’ve found Robert Heinlein’s ‘door into summer’: you’ve been inside a device which slams you through six circadian months in the span of a day.

  At that moment, your shocked body knows the truth about the future, about the way technology has skewed our fantasies and placed them on the table so quietly that we no longer recognize the impossible, because it’s part of the air we... fly through.

  ~ * ~

  They are the last of the guests to leave. Stepping from the warm friendliness of the apartment to the chilly foyer is a jolt, reinforcing Brian Hoffmann’s melancholy. The weather has been bad for days, the news has been worse, the skinhead kids are skulking in pockets of shadows down there, waiting in their resentment to smash store windows, to snatch baubles and glass and mirrors like any bunch of unlettered savages ...

  ‘Sure you’ll be okay?’ asks Martha, kissing Alice on the cheek.

  ‘Grab a coat, honey, and we’ll see them to their car,’ suggests their tired host. It’s obvious that all he wants to do is pile the wreckage into the dishwasher and hit the sack.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Brian tells them forcefully. ‘We’re only parked a block away.’

  Brian’s mind, in truth, is parked more than a block away. His thoughts remain in Cambridge, in those buoyant sunny months when he and Turing and Campernowne and the rest of them had invented, in one fell swoop, the electronic computer, the theory of programming and the prospect of artificial machine intelligence. No, he is getting confused. Turing’s machine was pre-electronic, fed with paper tape. My God. And Alan dead these thirty years. Some anniversary. He would have been nearly seventy-two. Not old, not really. Not much older than me. But those hot-shots tonight, those kids from Silicon Valley.

  ‘Still thinking about Alan?’ asks Alice. He shivers at the sudden renewed awareness of cold night, sees that they’ve descended to the street.

  ‘Mmm. Poor bugger. Still, it was nice of the kids to honour his memory.’

  ‘He was a great man,’ Alice says. She smiles primly. ‘You were all great men, Boson.’ That’s their old academic joke. A boson is an elementary particle not governed by the Fermi Exclusion Principle which keeps protons and electrons in their proper places. A boson is welcome anywhere. You wouldn’t kick a boson out of bed. If there had once been a touch of deep pain in that barb, it had been soothed by the years.

  The bunch of skins are suddenly there on the path. They have every right to be there. It’s a free country, isn’t it?

  ‘Oh Christ, Brian.’

  ‘Come on,’ he says with irritation. ‘They’re just kids.’

  ‘Of course they’re kids, Brian.’ Alice’s voice sounds as if it’s being strained through tight mesh. ‘You’re not allowed to be a juvenile delinquent after you’re grown up.’

  They are stringing themselves out across the path. Pimples. Stubble on the skull. Must they make themselves so ugly?

  ‘Juvenile delinquent! Darling, that expression was put on the pension in 1956. You’ve turned into a nervous nelly in your dotage.’

  Tense with dread on his arm, her hand jerks. Alice’s voice rises: ‘Oh God, I don’t like this.’

  A body moves into the space they are passing through, thumps into him cruelly.

  ‘Watch it, you bastard,’ cries the affronted thug.

  Mildly, Brian recovers his balance. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You walked straight into me. Did you see that, Bill? He walked right into me. Think they own the whole road, these rich shits.’

  From the other side, keeping step with them, a peaky girl asks: ‘Got any change?’

  Too quickly, Alice tells her, ‘We never carry money.’

  ‘You greedy old bitch,’ the thug says in outrage, ‘I’ll fix you.’

  And the horror of it is that Brian understands, haven’t they been talking about it all night? It’s his doing as much as anyone’s; in all the world, he’s crucially
responsible for the machines which have taken their jobs away, taken their souls from them. It paralyses him. He feels the battering on his body, but only as a kind of moral retribution. It hurts, blood tastes in his mouth, he cannot see any longer from his right eye, his heart clenches in dread for Alice, but he knows that at last some payment is being rightly exacted.

  Alice is shouting, ‘Leave him alone, you vicious little . . .’

  ‘Get out of the way, you cow,’ says one of the girls. ‘Get his wallet, Don.’

  They pull roughly at his person. That burst of masochism is passing with the shock of passivity, he is starting to seethe with rage, with fear for Alice, my God, in the middle of the street in a civilized city—

  ‘Twenty bucks! You rotten miserable bastards.’

  So the punishment is going to be renewed. Brian pulls down his head, in against his chest, whimpering. There is nothing else he can do. They jerk at him.

  ‘Stick the knife in, Don,’ the girl says. Her breath is rather sweet. Metal loops swing from her pink ear. Her hair, out of focus, in again, stands like mown hay, pink and gold in the streetlamp light. The other face comes down, and a lash of light from another kind of metal. It enters his body again and again.

  ~ * ~

  The young ambulance attendant looks up into the shadowed face of his colleague. A few unshaved whiskers glint on the older man’s cheek. ‘We can give the siren a rest, Bob. This one’s dead.’

  Bob frowns, jerks his head briefly in the direction of the grey-haired woman speaking quietly with a constable. ‘That’s the wife. Wouldn’t have a sedative. Keep it down, sport.’ A spear of brightness at the dead man’s wattled throat. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter much now, does it? Epileptic, diabetic, something . . .’

  Bob pushes him aside, crouches. The tag states:

  In the event of death, IMMEDIATELY contact the

  Cryogenics Society at this number: 008 1111.

  Please do not delay. A reward will be paid.

  A hard, brittle voice says: ‘Young man, have you rung that number yet? There’s not a minute to lose. Why haven’t you packed my husband’s head in ice?’

  The older man regards her with some confusion. The younger says, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, lady, that’s outside our jurisdiction. The law says we have to take the, uh, deceased straight to hospital for certification of, uh, death. Look, you must be feeling pretty crook, sit down over here, we’ll—’

  Alice Hoffmann stares at them with fierce stern eyes. ‘Understand this, gentlemen. There exists a slender chance that my dead husband can be restored to life. Not now, but in the future. This can only occur if the appropriate treatment is provided instantly.’

  ‘Please, madam, we—’

  She is small and stout, and she towers over them. ‘That treatment will involve, among other techniques, lowering the temperature of his corpse to minus two hundred degrees. Any delay now, prior to crash freezing, will cause irreparable destruction of brain tissue.’ Her voice breaks on the last word.

  The younger man takes his colleague aside. ‘They’ll either boot us out or put us on telly.’

  Bob tightens his mouth. ‘Or both. OK, let’s go.’

  ~ * ~

  For Brian Hoffmann time has all but stopped. Unlike nearly all other dead men, however, his clock is merely stilled; it has not been shattered into useless cogs and springs and bits of glass. For Hoffmann, and the world, time passes.

  It passes more swiftly for the world.

  Some things change. Some things remain the same. Overall, perhaps more things change than remain the same. The principle of exchange through an imaginary medium of equivalence, money, evaporates. Machines do nearly everything important, after a while, because they are cheap, repair themselves, and never go on strike. Their owners have no money, for money is now meaningless, but they have plenty of everything else. In their bombshelter fortresses they eat gloriously, drink superbly, sleep magnificently. They have plenty of time for sentiment. They welcome art and they praise science. As flowers were once piled in profusion on the graves of great scholars, soldiers, leaders, now a more positive ritual has become customary. The promise of immortality is honoured in the care they lavish on the cryogenic mausoleums. The worthy dead go to their suspended life, coiled in frigid tubes of helium.

  The dead do not eat or drink. But they, too, sleep magnificently.

  For a while. But some things change.

  ~ * ~

  Trembling with pleasure, the Head of Biology Team stares one final time at the notification hardcopy in her fingers. Finally the Medical Executive have relaxed their prohibition on attempts to revive deep-cryonics corpses from the Pre-Revolutionary epoch. She key-cues for a menial.

  The door flashes pink. In comes the Technician she cannot stand. Why must it be him, in this moment of her triumph?

  ‘Please bring up three whole-body storage containers from the mausoleum.’

  ‘Any preferences?’

  ‘The earlier the better.’

  The swine smirks. ‘The computer list is no longer reliable, madam. Most of the dating information was dumped from core during the Big Power Shutdown—’

  Walked into it. ‘Then why did you ask?’ I know why. Quickly, before he can come back with some new impertinence: ‘Use your eyes, man. Surely cryonics tanks from the 1980s are distinctive enough.’

  The bodies are fetched. The first is lost in a clumsy error during the unfreezing procedure. The next perishes for a massive number of reasons which interlock. Bringing the third to revival requires lateral thinking, and takes twenty-five years to accomplish. Head of Team is old, exhausted, by the time it has been completed. The aggravating Tech is still getting on her nerves, but there is no doubting his masterful competence.

  They stare at the youthful, sleeping body.

  ‘A beautiful job, madam.’

  ‘Are you mocking me?’

  ‘Heaven forbid. No, just look at him. He’s better than new.’

  So he ought to be. They have sliced Brian Hoffmann’s frozen body into wafer-thin laminates, scanned them under neutrino resonance microscopes, and mapped the location of every brain cell and its interconnections. A microchip memory core now holds every single item of information which once was Brian Hoffmann. They have examined the structure of his DNA and reconstructed it in a fresh embryo, identical in every respect to his own. For twenty years they have tended the clone, watching its growth, massaging its body with instruments and force fields and enzymes. It is unconscious and mindless, though its brain has been force-fed the contents of the Hoffmann microchip. It is mindless because it has never been permitted to waken, shake the sleep from its eyes, stretch, look around at its terrible new home.

  As a solution to freezer damage, the procedure is a tour de force. But it is not a particularly elegant one.

  ‘He certainly seems in the pink,’ the Tech observes. ‘Pity we can’t wake him up for a few moments.’

  ‘Absolutely out of the question.’ If it were not for the constant supervision of the security computers, Head of Team would have done exactly that, many years ago. The urge to speak to her creation is often nearly overwhelming. ‘All right, Technician,’ she says vindictively, ‘return the patient to deep storage and crash him back down to Absolute Zero.’

  They have both known that this is the inevitable, frustrating conclusion to their efforts. But the Hoffmann clone is, after all, merely one of their many projects.

  ‘It’s like killing him all over again, don’t you think?’

  ‘What I think,’ Head of Team shrieks in maternal pain, ‘what I think is that you’re begging to go on report.’ She catches her breath. ‘It’s a political decision. Let the future worry about these deviationists.’

  ‘We only heal their bodies, right?’

  She turns away as the boy is wheeled out.

  ~ * ~

  Time is a green bud blossoming to brilliant bloom. It is
also a corpse rotting to a stench of maggots. For Brian Hoffmann, time is frozen nightmares. His cryogenically stabilized brain is locked in ice, virtually unchanging. Yet small sluggish electric currents run unimpeded through neural channels. His chilled tissues are superconducting conduits for ambling night creatures. In his bad dreams, he clutches endlessly at life, at the blade striking to his heart, clutches for Alice’s warm hand, and loses it, loses it. . .

  ~ * ~

  After a thousand years, here are these two kids in the forbidden tunnels. Something always goes wrong eventually. They got in where they weren’t supposed to.