Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction Read online

  Redshifting.

  I am running because only one thing could redshift our sky that much and leave us alive to wonder why our mobile phones don’t work. What passed by has to have been a previously theoretical class of black hole with a relatively small planet-sized mass—compressed into a singularity potentially as small as a pinprick. Some postulate that these entities are starving black holes that have crossed intergalactic space and shrunk over the billions of years with nothing to feed on. Another theory, possibly complementary, is that they are random crumbs tossed away during the violence of the big bang.

  Perez in the next cubicle said I should call them “black marbles,” which is inaccurate on several fronts. In my papers, I chose instead to call them pinprick-size black holes. Although Perez and I disagreed on the issue of nomenclature, our research efforts brought consensus on one calculation: that the phenomenon would always travel in clusters.

  Where there is one, more will follow.

  Tornado sirens begin to wail as I careen through my suburban neighborhood. The woman on the radio just frantically reported that something has happened to Mars. The planet crust is shattered. Astronomers are describing a large part of the planet’s mass as simply missing. What’s left behind is a cloud of expanding dirt and rapidly cooling magma, slowly drifting out of orbit and spreading into an elliptical arc.

  She doesn’t say it out loud, but it’s dawning on her: we are next.

  People are standing in their yards now, on the sidewalks and grass, eyes aimed upward. The sky is darkening. The wind outside the car window is whispering to itself as it gathers occasionally into a thin, reedy scream. A tidal pull of extreme gravity must be doing odd things to our weather patterns. If I had a pen and paper, I could probably work it out.

  I slam on the brakes in my driveway to avoid hitting the nanny.

  She is standing barefoot, holding a half-empty sippy cup of milk. Chin pointed at the sky. Stepping out of the car, I see my first pinprick-size black hole. It is a reddish dot about half the intensity of the sun, wrapped in a halo of glowing, superheated air. It isn’t visibly moving so I can’t estimate its trajectory. On the southern horizon, the crystallized plume of atmosphere caused by the near-miss still dissipates.

  It really is beautiful.

  “What is it?” asks the nanny.

  “Physics,” I say, going around the car and opening my trunk. “You should go home immediately.”

  I pull out a pair of old jumper cables and stride across the driveway. Marie is standing just inside the house, her face a pale flash behind the glass storm door. Inside, I lift my daughter off the ground. She wraps her legs around my hip and now I am running again, toys crunching under my feet, my daughter’s long hair tickling my forearm. The nanny has put it into a braid. I never learned how to do that. Depending on the trajectory of the incoming mass, I may not ever have the chance.

  “What did you do today?” I ask Marie.

  “Played,” she says.

  Trying not to pant, I crack open a few windows in the house. Air pressure fluctuations are a certainty. I hope that we only have to worry about broken glass. There is no basement to hide in here, just a cookie-cutter house built on a flat slab of concrete. But the sewer main is embedded deep into the foundation. In the worst case, it will be the last thing to go.

  I head to the bathroom.

  “Wait here for just a second,” I say, setting Marie down in the hallway. Stepping into the small bathroom, I wind up and violently kick the wall behind the toilet until the drywall collapses. Dropping to my knees, I claw out chunks of the drywall until I have exposed the main sewer line that runs behind the toilet. It is a solid steel pipe maybe six inches in diameter. With shaking hands, I shove the jumper cable around it. Then I wedge myself between the toilet and the outside wall and I sit down on the cold tile floor, the jumper cables under my armpits anchoring me to the ground. This is the safest place that I can find.

  If the black hole falling toward us misses the planet, even by a few thousand miles, we may survive. If it’s a direct hit, we’ll share the fate of Mars. At the sonic horizon, sound won’t be able to escape from it. At the event horizon, neither will light. Before that can happen we will reach a Lagrange point as the anomaly cancels out Earth’s gravity. We will fall into the sky and be swallowed by that dark star.

  The anomaly was never detected, so it must have come from intergalactic space. The Oort cloud is around a light year out, mostly made of comets. The Kuiper-Edgeworth belt is on the edge of the Solar System. Neither region had enough density to make the black hole visible. I wonder what we were doing when it entered our Solar System. Was I teaching Marie the names of dead planets?

  “Daddy?” asks Marie.

  She is standing in the bathroom doorway, eyes wide. Outside, a car engine revs as someone speeds past our house. A distant, untended door slams idiotically in the breeze. Marie’s flowery dress shivers and flutters over her scratched knees in the restless calm.

  “Come here, honey,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “Come sit on my lap.”

  Hesitantly, she walks over to me. The half-open window above us is a glowing red rectangle. It whistles quietly as air is pulled through the house. I tie the greasy jumper cable cord in a painfully tight knot around my chest. I can’t risk crushing her lungs, so I wrap my arms around Marie. Her arms fall naturally around my neck, hugging tight. Her breath is warm against my neck.

  “Hold onto your daddy very tight,” I say. “Do you understand?”

  “But why?” she asks.

  “Because I don’t want to lose you, baby,” I say and my sudden swallowed tears are salty in the back of my throat.

  Whips are cracking in the distance now. I hear a scream. Screams.

  A gust of wind shatters the bathroom window. I cradle Marie closer as the shards of glass are sucked out of the window frame. A last straggler rattles in place like a loose tooth. The whip cracks are emanating from loose objects that have accelerated upward past the speed of sound. The crack-crack-crack sound is thousands of sonic booms. They almost drown out the frightened cries of people who are falling into the sky. Millions must be dying this way. Billions.

  “What is that?” asks Marie, voice wavering.

  “It’s nothing, honey. It’s all right,” I say, holding her to me. Her arms are rubber bands tight around my neck. The roof shingles are rustling gently, leaping into the sky like a flock of pigeons. I can’t see them but it occurs to me that the direction they travel will be along the thing’s incoming trajectory. I watch that rattling piece of glass that’s been left behind in the window frame, my lips pressed together. It jitters and finally takes flight straight up.

  A fatal trajectory. A through-and-through.

  “What’s happening?” Marie asks, through tears.

  “It’s the stars, honey,” I say. “The stars are falling.”

  It’s the most accurate explanation I can offer.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Look at Daddy,” I say. I feel a sudden lightness, a gentle tug pulling us upward. I lean against the cables to make sure they are still tight. “Please look at your daddy. It will be OK. Hold on tight.”

  Nails screech as a part of the roof frame curls away and disappears. Marie is biting her lips to keep her mouth closed and nodding as tears course over her cheeks. I have not consulted the child development books but I think she is very brave for three years old. Only three trips around the sun and now the sun is going to end. Sol will be teased apart in hundred-thousand-mile licks of flame.

  “My darling,” I say. “Can you tell me the name of the planet that we live on?”

  “Earth.”

  “And what is the planet with a ring around it?”

  “S-Saturn.”

  “What are the rings made of?”

  “Mountains of ice.”

  Maybe a sense of wonder is also a heritable trait.

  “Are the stars—”

  Something big crashes outside.
The wind is shrieking now in a new way. The upper atmosphere has formed into a vortex of supersonic air molecules.

  “Daddy?” screams Marie. Her lips are bright and bitten, tear ducts polishing those familiar brown eyes with saline. A quivering frown is dimpling her chin and all I can think of is how small she is compared to all this.

  “Honey, it’s OK. I’ve got you. Are the stars very big or very small?”

  “Very big,” she says, crying outright now. I rock her as we speak, holding her to my chest. The cables are tightening and the sewer main is a hard knuckle against my spine. Marie’s static-charged hair is lifting in the fitful wind.

  “You’re right again. They look small, but they’re very big. The stars are so very, very big.”

  A subsonic groan rumbles through the frame of the house. Through the missing roof I can see that trees and telephone poles and cars are tumbling silently into the red eye overhead. Their sound isn’t fast enough to escape. The air in here is chilling as it thins but I can feel heat radiating down from that hungry orb.

  Minutes now. Maybe seconds.

  “Daddy?” Marie asks.

  Her lips and eyes are tinged blue as her light passes me. I’m trying to smile for her but my lips have gone spastic. Tears are leaking out of my eyes, crawling over my temples, and dripping up into the sky. The broken walls of the house are dancing. A strange light is flowing in the quiet.

  The world is made of change. People arrive and people leave. But my love for her is constant. It is a feeling that cannot be quantified because it is not a number. Love is a pattern in the chaos.

  “It is very late, my darling,” I say. “And the stars are in the sky.”

  They are so very big.

  “And that means it’s time for me to give you a kiss. And an Eskimo kiss.”

  She leans up for the kiss by habit. Her tiny nose mushing into mine.

  “And now…”

  I can’t do this.

  “And now I will lay you down…”

  Swallow your fear. You are a good father. Have courage.

  “And tuck you in, nice and tight, so you stay warm all night.”

  The house has gone away from us and I did not notice. The sun is a sapphire eye on the horizon. It lays gentle blue shadows over a scoured wasteland.

  And a red star still falls.

  “Good night, my darling.”

  I hold her tight as we rise together into the blackness. The view around us expands impossibly and the world outside speeds up in a trick of relativity. A chaotic mass of dust hurtles past and disappears. In our last moment together, we face a silent black curtain of space studded with infinite unwavering pinpricks of light.

  We will always have the stars.

  A SLOW UNFURLING OF TRUTH

  Aliette de Bodard

  * * *

  What makes you you?

  In Aliette de Bodard’s complex, carefully crafted story, people can change the bodies they inhabit, memories can be erased or falsified, physical and mental traits can be altered until it takes a trained authenticator to verify that a person is actually who he or she claims to be.

  What makes you you?

  A powerful, tyrannical government can inflict pain and fear, trying to bend you to its overbearing will, yet that germ of you might remain: cowering in terror, racked with agony, yet still there, not defiant but persistent. You might want to bow to the torturers’ demands, to stop the pain if for no other reason, yet that ineradicable you remains.

  “A Slow Unfurling of Truth” delves into the complexities of human existence in a beautifully-realized future setting of orbital cities and interstellar travel. Yet the story is really about eternal verities, about evil and the painful search for goodness, about fear and anger and the one thing that makes us human—love.

  * * *

  Huong Giang was putting away her trays of instruments when Thoi walked into the room. “Elder sister.” He was out of breath, his youthful face flushed with what seemed like anger or trepidation: Thoi had been in his body for less than a year, and he was sometimes hard to read.

  But, new body or not, he still should have known better. “Thoi, you’re not meant to come here,” Huong Giang said. “I made it clear—”

  “I know,” Thoi said. “But you need to come, elder sister. Now.” And, after a pause that was rife with implications, “There’s a man that has come here to Celestial Spires—a Galactic.”

  “And?” It was hardly usual, to be sure—Galactics remained in the areas that appealed to them, the central parts of the cities and the planetside attractions—but it wasn’t as though it should concern her.

  “He says his name is Fargeau. Simalli Fargeau.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.” The government had sent people to Celestial Spires for years after the purges: they pretended they were from the Poetry Circle’s lost members—Simalli, or Vu, or Thanh Ha. They dropped hints; told her how frustrating it was that, decades after the Galactic masters had departed, the government continued to indulge them, continued to strip its land and people bare to bow down to Galactic wishes. Huong Giang, who’d learned her lessons in six bitter weeks of jail and re-education sessions, never said anything, and the people would always leave after a few weeks. The attempts had ceased many years ago, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be back.

  “You don’t understand,” Thoi said. “He really is a Galactic.”

  “They could always find a Galactic to do their dirty work for them.” Huong Giang turned away from Thoi. She only had her monitor to switch off before she could go back home to stare at herself in the mirror—seeing herself drained and rootless—wondering why, no matter how many years she put between herself and the purges, the memories she’d sealed away still seemed to suffuse her whole being; still filled her with a sense of loss so frightening she found it hard to breathe.

  “It’s more than that.” Thoi hesitated. “Elder sister … I really think it’s Simalli.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I can’t be sure,” Thoi said. “But…”

  But he thought he knew. And he was the most observant among them, the only one of the Poetry Circle who’d avoided time in jail, because he’d successfully gauged his interrogators’ moods.

  Simalli. In the flesh.

  “Did he say anything?” she asked. She hadn’t thought anything could make her feel this cold and hot at the same time—adrift in space, in some rootless vacuum that held no comfort or no enlightenment.

  “No. Only that he’s been here a while.”

  “Where did you put him?”

  “I left him in one of our guest rooms,” Thoi said.

  “Did he…” She meant to ask whether he’d mentioned Dao, but that was a silly, selfish thought—the repercussions of Simalli’s return went far beyond her niece’s fate. What she needed to do … she needed to make sure it was him. She needed to recover his key-fragment. She forced herself to breathe, to drag her thoughts back from the frenzied panic that had overtaken them. “Call the Identity Keepers. Tell them I want an authenticator. Kieu specifically, if she’s available.”

  The Identity Keepers’ services did not come cheap, but it was the only way she knew to be sure. During the purges, they had taken no sides—performing their services whether it was the government or the families of the disappeared paying for them. Rumor had it that it had cost them dearly, but of course even the government couldn’t do without some kind of authentication.

  “Are you sure?” Thoi asked.

  She’d never been surer of anything in her life.

  Celestial Spires hadn’t changed: the same old holos on the walls, the same smell of fish sauce wafting through the corridors like a memory of childhood. A group of people in crude bodies bypassed Kieu—the men had fingers curled into thin claws, the women were flat-chested with carp-scales adorning their cheekbones and the back of their hands. It was all … so tame, so symptomatic of Tai Menh, a backward planet clinging to outmoded traditions
. At least the capital—where Kieu lived—had all the modern Galactic amenities, and access to the latest optical-stims and some of the most radical body-change technologies; though it still was nothing compared to the vibrancy of Prime or Cygnus.

  “You haven’t told me why I’m here,” Kieu told Huong Giang.

  “For an authentication—what else?” Kieu’s mindship partner, The Sea and Mulberry, had left his physical body at the docks—of course, he wouldn’t have fit in anywhere on the orbital—and projected only a small hologram of himself, hovering at the height of Kieu’s shoulder—he would have looked like a pet bot, save that bots didn’t pack a billionth of the processing power of The Sea and Mulberry.

  Huong Giang grimaced. She looked much the same as Kieu remembered her. Her new body was a little wider perhaps, a little older, but there were never any surprises with her choices—of course, the keeper of the traditions on Celestial Spires wouldn’t bother being creative, or open-minded. “A while ago, there was a man named Simalli who lived here.”

  Kieu shrugged. She’d never felt any of her future lay in the gutted Celestial Spires orbital, or even planetside. She’d become an authenticator because it was the fast, easy way to earn money; to buy herself passage away from the dump of Tai Menh, into one of the myriad glittering planets of Galactic society, where she could at last have access to the best of everything. “So?”

  “He’s come back. He … we entered a contract with him, a long time ago. I need to be sure it’s him before fulfilling that contract.”

  “I see.”

  “There might be … associated issues.” Huong Giang’s voice was slow, careful, as if treading a path within a mountain fog. “There’s … a possibility chunks of his memories might be missing. He’d remember most things about his life on Celestial Spires, but there might be the … odd detail missing?”