I am not.
(Laughter) Oh, please,
How do you know my name? Who told you?
I knew you from the moment you spoke. I heard you. When I heard you, I knew you. I was there the day you were born. Your mother was terrified and radiant. She was a girl pretending to be a woman. As you are a baby pretending to be a man. You have not learned to love. Or forgive. You presume to understand people, but you are a mystery to yourself.
I can’t sustain this. This is intolerable.
It was really wonderful meeting you, I doubt we’ll meet again. Let me advise you: after you make your report, do not tell anyone. They will find out. They will harm you. It is what they do best.
Hastily, I packed my briefcase. I could feel all the blood rushing to my face. I am a blusher, but I have to say it had been years since I blushed. I was walking out of the museum when the security guard whispered something as I passed.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"I said, ‘Relax. Nobody gets her.’"
"Her?" I don’t think I really looked at him before, but he was a middle-aged black man in a gray uniform. He had a very pleasant air about him as if he enjoyed any contact with people.
"She freaks most folks out. Don’t take it so hard."
"I’m not, it’s just…"
"Don’t worry about it. She’s a freak."
"You say, you say: There, there have been others?"
"Oh, yeah. They got an army trying to crack that code. Last night, some woman professor left in tears. Poor lady. I tried to tell her not to—"
"I have to be somewhere."
The moment I stepped out into the warm night, I noticed the world looked different. The smell of tar wafted into the air. The L.A. haze was lit by the warm copper glow of the grid of streetlights that crisscrosses the valley. Why copper? Why that color? I wondered. Why that smell? Why anything? It was as if I were looking at the world for the first time.
I realized I had been holding my breath. I told myself to breathe. Just breathe.
Then I recalled his laughter. That awful lost laugh. A laugh that could never be shared. Whose frame of reference was so beyond anyone else that true community would never happen, true companionship was but a dream, true connection—impossible. I did not know and still do not know what that creature was. All I knew was that I would never understand it. And I was in the understanding business.
What surprised me then and haunts me now is that I could not wait to get out of its presence. I felt as if being within its proximity compromised any boundaries I may have constructed for my psyche. I felt violated. I’m not sure if the violation was intentional or just a by-product of its uncanny insight, but it felt like a psychic rape.
Was this a weapon that we were trying to disarm or create? A sample of a race so evolved they presented an intolerable threat? Or merely a fantastically advanced chess program whose only moves were intended to corner its prey and watch it squirm? Or was it, perhaps, just a trap—a black hole that could snatch anything and swallow it down?
I will never know. But I recorded this so that perhaps, someday, you might.
If you forget everything else about this story, please, remember one thing. Remember its laughter. Remember that, please.
A laugh no one else could share.
No one should ever have to laugh like that.
(2009)
ZEN AND THE ART OF STARSHIP MAINTENANCE
Tobias S. Buckell
Called "violent, poetic and compulsively readable" by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work. His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and over fifty stories, his works have been translated into 18 different languages. He has been nominated for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow-up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will "give you the shivers." He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs.
After battle with the Fleet of Honest Representation, after seven hundred seconds of sheer terror and uncertainty, and after our shared triumph in the acquisition of the greatest prize seizure in three hundred years, we cautiously approached the massive black hole that Purth-Anaget orbited. The many rotating rings, filaments, and infrastructures bounded within the fields that were the entirety of our ship, With All Sincerity, were flush with a sense of victory and bloated with the riches we had all acquired.
Give me a ship to sail and a quasar to guide it by, billions of individual citizens of all shapes, functions, and sizes cried out in joy together on the common channels. Whether fleshy forms safe below, my fellow crab-like maintenance forms on the hulls, or even the secretive navigation minds, our myriad thoughts joined in a sense of True Shared Purpose that lingered even after the necessity of the group battle-mind.
I clung to my usual position on the hull of one of the three rotating habitat rings deep inside our shields and watched the warped event horizon shift as we fell in behind the metallic world in a trailing orbit.
A sleet of debris fell toward the event horizon of Purth-Anaget’s black hole, hammering the kilometers of shields that formed an iridescent cocoon around us. The bow shock of our shields’ push through the debris field danced ahead of us, the compressed wave it created becoming a hyper-aurora of shifting colors and energies that collided and compressed before they streamed past our sides.
What a joy it was to see a world again. I was happy to be outside in the dark so that as the bow shields faded, I beheld the perpetual night face of the world: it glittered with millions of fractal habitation patterns traced out across its artificial surface.
On the hull with me, a nearby friend scuttled between airlocks in a cloud of insect-sized seeing eyes. They spotted me and tapped me with a tight-beam laser for a private ping.
"Isn’t this exciting?" they commented.
"Yes. But this will be the first time I don’t get to travel downplanet," I beamed back.
I received a derisive snort of static on a common radio frequency from their direction. "There is nothing there that cannot be experienced right here in the Core. Waterfalls, white sand beaches, clear waters."
"But it’s different down there," I said. "I love visiting planets."
"Then hurry up and let’s get ready for the turnaround so we can leave this industrial shithole of a planet behind us and find a nicer one. I hate being this close to a black hole. It fucks with time dilation, and I spend all night tasting radiation and fixing broken equipment that can’t handle energy discharges in the exajoule range. Not to mention everything damaged in the battle I have to repair."
This was true. There was work to be done.
Safe now in trailing orbit, the many traveling worlds contained within the shields that marked the With All Sincerity’s boundaries burst into activity. Thousands of structures floating in between the rotating rings moved about, jockeying and repositioning themselves into renegotiated orbits. Flocks of transports rose into the air, wheeling about inside the shields to then stream off ahead toward Purth-Anaget. There were trillions of citizens of the Fleet of Honest Representation heading for the planet now that their fleet lay captured between our shields like insects in amber.