The Starry Rift Part 1

The Starry Rift.

Jonathan Strahan.

For Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie, who make every day a joy.

and For Sharyn, who understood the adventure that this book could be, and gave me the chance to take it.

INTRODUCTION.

Jonathan Strahan.

If anyone ever lived a science fictional life, it was the writer Jack Williamson. He was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in April 1908, almost exactly one hundred years ago, and died in Portales, New Mexico, in 2006. During his lifetime, the world changed unimaginably. As a young boy, he and his family traveled in a covered wagon from western Texas to their new homestead in New Mexico in 1915. It was just twelve years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk; commercial radio broadcasts in the United States were still five years away (and television decades away); and women were still denied the right to vote. The twentieth century-sometimes called the "American Century" because of its love for technology, and because of America's growing economic and political dominance of the world's stage-had hardly begun, and yet in less than twenty years, Williamson would become an active partic.i.p.ant in the evolution of modern science fiction. He and his contemporaries spun tales of interstellar adventure where galaxies collided, worlds exploded, brave heroes won out against incredible odds, and beautiful damsels were rescued from the clutches of terrible aliens-tales of pioneers and far frontiers from a man who had been a pioneer and traveled to at least one frontier himself. By the time his career was over, mankind would have split the atom, walked on the moon, ventured into outer s.p.a.ce using robotic probes, invented devices smaller than the eye could see, slowed light itself to a standstill, and created a worldwide web of information and communications that reached into almost every household.

The story of Jack Williamson's life, his particularly science fictional life, is also the story of science fiction itself. Although people think that science fiction is about the future, it's not. Like all fiction, it's about its own time. It's about the world we live in-what we think and feel about it, and how we think or fear it might change in the coming years. The stories that Williamson and other writers like him (E. E. "Doc" Smith, A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp) wrote before 1945 were published in cheap magazines1 that were garish and brash but very much of their time.

Golden Age science fiction,2 as it is known, reflected the att.i.tudes of the first half of the American Century. It was forward-looking, confident, ultimately optimistic writing that put its faith in technology and the abilities of practical people to solve problems. It was also unlike other popular fiction of the time-particularly Westerns and adventure stories, both of which grew out of a similar pulp tradition-because it made heroes out of thinkers and scientists.

Traditionally, engineers and scientists have always been avid science fiction readers in their youth.

All this changed at the end of World War II. The Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on j.a.pan-the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare-thus ending the war and inaugurating what became known as the Cold War.3 Technology and the people who created it became things to be feared, more likely to destroy our world than to save it.

People began to worry that progress might come at a high price. Nuclear power meant cheap electricity, but the threat of ma.s.sive destruction always loomed. Computers could vastly increase our ability to learn and make decisions, but what if they decided to take over the world? New medical procedures could extend our lives, but what about overpopulation? Even everyday technologies like automobiles and manufacturing plants could provide jobs and prosperity but also lead to global warming.

By the mid-1960s, questions like these began to appear in darker, more pessimistic science fiction stories like John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Philip K. d.i.c.k's The Man in the High Castle, and J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World. And by the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher had become the prime minister of England and Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States, science fiction writers also seemed to have become much more aware that the political decisions we make today can radically affect our possible futures.

It was around this time that British writers like M. John Harrison and Iain M. Banks began to rethink the whole genre, retaining its bright, s.h.i.+ny surface while adding depth, complexity, and more critical political and economic themes to the mix4. Books like Harrison's 1975 novel The Centauri Device, which was intended to "end s.p.a.ce opera,"5 and Banks's 1987 novel Consider Phlebas, which reinvigorated it, are prime examples. In the United States, writers like William Gibson, with his cla.s.sic 1984 novel Neuromancer, and Bruce Sterling, with 1985's Schismatrix and his Shaper/Mechanist stories, were taking a different tack, exploring the dark, gritty world of cyberpunk, where technology was hijacked by the street and the first glimmerings of the Internet were imagined. Science fiction readers, who once showed up at conventions in skinny ties and sport jackets, were now more likely to be outfitted in black leather and mirrored shades.

Today science fiction continues to change. It is, after all, an ongoing conversation about what's happening in the world we live in and where we're going. It's often been said that we can choose where we live but not when we live-the future is where we're all going to end up together, and it's a future that we're creating right now, with every decision we make.

If that's true, then it's important that we hear the stories science fiction has to tell now. At a time when a major American city was only recently almost destroyed by an enormous hurricane, when international political and religious unrest seems to be spiraling ever more out of control, and when technology is getting stranger and more mysterious, we need to hear tales written today that ask serious questions about the world we are living in and the world we might face.

I turned to a handful of the best writers in the field, asking them to write stories that would offer today's readers the same kind of thrill enjoyed by the pulp readers of over fifty years ago. The futures we imagine today are not the same futures that your grandfather's generation imagined or could have imagined. But some things in science fiction remain the same: the sense of wonder, of adventure, and of fearlessly coming to grips with whatever tomorrow may bring. Some of the stories here are clearly the offspring of those grand old s.p.a.ce adventure tales, but others imagine entirely new and unexpected ways of living in the future. The Starry Rift is not a collection of manifestos-but it is both entertainment and the sound of us talking to tomorrow.

Jonathan Strahan.

Perth, Western Australia.

November 2007.

a.s.s-HAT MAGIC SPIDER.

Scott Westerfeld.

Four hours before takeoff I was in the gym. Two T-s.h.i.+rts to catch the sweat, a plastic slicker over that, and a hoodie on top of everything. I was the only person in that corner of the gym-the one with floor-to-ceiling windows-and the aircon was hardly denting the sunlight streaming in.

Of course, the sun wasn't hitting my skin, all covered up like that. Direct sunlight keeps you from sweating, which is why desert nomads wear long robes.

There on that stair-climber, I imagined myself a Bedouin crossing the Sahara, looking for somewhere to fill my canteen. But I guess there aren't too many stairs in the desert, and I bet Bedouins don't wear black hoodies, and I knew it was about a 100 percent certain I'd never see the Sahara.

Of course, Tau IV has its own deserts, and we can name them whatever we want. The New Sahara. The a.s.s-hat Desert. That Big Sandy Place Over There.

That morning I'd weighed myself, hoping that I'd mystically shed four and a half pounds while I'd slept. (Or, as I was supposed to start saying once we got to Tau IV, two kilos.) No such luck. Me and Charlotte were still seventeen hundred grams overweight.

c.r.a.p.

So I cursed the extra three inches I'd grown that year, then sat down to a hearty breakfast of one tablespoon (oops, eight grams) of peanut b.u.t.ter. For dessert I gargled with water. Sweet, sweet water. Source of life, and three-quarters of my horrible, unlosable weight.

(Here's a trick: If you gargle, your throat won't know you're dehydrated. Just make sure you spit the water out.) Next, I put some sunscreen on my lips to keep them from cracking; if the colony-s.h.i.+p docs thought I'd been cutting too much weight before the launch, they'd hook me up to an IV and pump me back to hydration. Maybe add as much as half a kilo of water and sugar to my ma.s.s.

And that would mean leaving Charlotte behind.

Two hours before the weigh-in, I checked myself again. The scale at the gym was mega-sensitive, almost as precise as the machine I'd be facing at the weigh-in. It showed me still four hundred grams over, even after I'd stripped down to shorts. Of course, about a hundred grams of that was the sweaty shorts, but that was almost exactly what Charlotte weighed, so the two balanced out.

I was still screwed. The hair had to go.

Now, as you know from pictures, a lot of colonists were shaving their heads. (And shaving a lot more, which, at thirteen, thankfully wasn't an issue for me.) A few of them had even plucked their eyebrows so they could bring another gram of diamonds or private diary storage or hundred-year-old whiskey along. But those first few weeks on Tau were going to include a lot of hard physical labor, everyone knew, and evolution put those eyebrows up there to keep the sweat out of your eyes. Remove them at your own risk.

By that time I hated the sauna, for smelling like chlorine and desperation, and for curling up all my books as I read them for the last time. So I did the deed in the shower, clumsily chopping at my shoulder-length hair with scissors, then shaving the rest. From the mirror, a horrible fish-boy stared back at me, an appalled expression on his face. Blood oozed from a few spots, which grossed me out until I realized that blood must weigh something.

Clever me, bleeding.

And the whole time I was thinking about how my mom was going to freak. She'd made me promise not to do this. But what was she going to do, ground me? I was stuck inside a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p for the next two subjective years anyway, not to mention being a Popsicle.

After the hair ma.s.sacre, on went fresh T-s.h.i.+rts and plastic pullover and hoodie (the hood of which now rubbed freakily against my bare and sweating head), and I climbed more stairs until it was time for my appointment. The whole time my imagination ran rampant with feasts of potatoes and toast covered with jam, cheeseburgers and apple pie. Anything but peanut b.u.t.ter, plain lettuce, and salt-free pickles.

And for dessert, giant gla.s.ses of water, swallowed all the way down to the cracking desert at my core.

But on my last trip to the scale, I found I'd hit the target, and pulled Charlotte out of my bag for a little victory dance.

For those last weeks, I remembered this golden rule: every bite of food was actually ma.s.sive amounts of rocket fuel.

Here's how it works: Every gram that goes to Tau requires five grams of fuel to get it up to light speed. This is one-fifth Isaac Newton's fault, and the rest is because of the inefficiency of the colony s.h.i.+p's engines.

But it doesn't end there. You see, the s.h.i.+p doesn't burn its fuel all at the beginning of the trip. So the fuel it's burning, say, halfway there has to be brought along. Which means the s.h.i.+p needs more fuel to push that fuel that far in the first place, see? On top of which, you need fuel to move the fuel that carries the fuel . . .

And then when finally you get halfway to Tau IV, you're going to need the same amount of fuel to slow you down, so you don't whip past your goal. So you have to count on all the extra fuel to get that fuel halfway there . . . and all the infrastructure to move all this fuel around, and spare parts and crew to fix all this infrastructure when it breaks, all of which need more fuel to push them all the way to Tau System.

Every gram of pa.s.senger or luggage turns into kilos and kilos of fission stuff, and that's why I was cutting weight.

When you see pictures of the Santa Maria, you'd think it would be so huge and luxurious inside. Guess what? It was one big fuel tank, with a tiny box attached full of short, skinny, hungry, hairless colonists.

After much debate, the weight limit was fixed per person: your body weight and any luggage combined, no matter what size you are. Everyone has the same number of genes, they said, and that's all that counts when it comes to long-term survivability. Tall and fat people need not apply.

So most of the colonists were short. My mom's really short, and I was too back when we took our emigration tests. Didn't count on growing three inches (seven point five centimeters, excuse me for living) in the year since then. And every centimeter I grew meant throwing away one more thing from my personal allowance: my Sennheiser earbuds, my pen and paper diary, even the old chemical photo of my (tall-gened) father, all of them cut.

All I had left was Charlotte.

I would have been sweating, if there'd been any H2O left in me.

The guy looked like a wrestler, with no neck and a body that was way over the colonist limit. He must have hated us; at his size, he was never getting any closer to Tau IV than this shuttle pad.

He looked at me, naked and clutching Charlotte to my chest, and scowled.

"d.a.m.n, you're skinny."

I tried to shrug. "I grew a lot this year."

"Let me see your hand, kid."

I reached out, not quite sure what he was up to and trying to ignore the fact that my fingers were shaking. He gripped the webbing between my thumb and forefinger and pinched brutally.

"Ow!"

"Shut up." He peered at the webbing, which had turned a horrible pale color in the weigh-in room's bright lights. It took several long seconds to turn pink again.

"You're dehydrated," he p.r.o.nounced.

"Am not!"

He snorted and pulled a plastic cup from the stand beside the scale. "You want to pee in this for me, kid?"

I swallowed. After a week of seriously cutting weight, you don't pee a lot. And when you do, it's yellow and nasty and burns like Tabasco coming out. "I just went. You know, didn't want to be over." I said this casually, like the whole weight thing had only occurred to me five minutes ago, though my bald and scabby head was kind of a giveaway.

He let out a long hiss through his teeth. "You colonists. Luckiest people on the planet, and still you got to steal."

"Steal? I'm not stealing anything."

"Think about it, kid. You're going to eat like a pig when you wake up. And that food is weight that had to be carried there, more fuel that us on Earth had to pay for."

"Yeah, well." I hadn't thought about it that way. Or rather, I had, but then my mom had explained why she was dieting to bring another few grams of diamonds. "Everyone's doing it. It's kind of, like, built into the formula."

He snorted. "If you weren't just a kid, I'd call the docs and have you hooked up." He gestured at Charlotte. "Then you'd have to leave that . . . what the h.e.l.l is that, anyway?"

I didn't react, and he snapped his fingers. Slowly, and with a horrible feeling that he was going to get finger-grease all over Charlotte and make her slightly heavier, I handed her over.

He let out a laugh. "An old book?"

"Yeah," I said. "I used to have hundreds of them. That's the last one."

"Collector, huh?"

"Reader. Familiar with the concept?"

He laughed again. "Hey, don't get all tough on me, kid. I might get scared and have to snap your dehydrated little a.s.s in half. Kind of like a pretzel stick. Or would you be all chewy inside, like beef jerky?" He rifled through the pages. "Come on, kid. You're all smart and stuff, pa.s.sed all those tests. What do you think dehydrated guts would look like?"

"I think you're an a.s.s-hat," I said.

He looked straight at me, a faint smirk on his face. I held his stare, which was pretty tricky, what with me being naked and hairless and trying to steal from humanity.

But I won the staring contest, and finally he let out a sigh, handing back Charlotte. "On the scale, kid."

He wasn't going to bust me. I swallowed, my parched throat crinkling like wrapping paper inside me, and stepped on. The red numbers spun in front of my eyes for a second, then steadied . . .

Fifteen grams over.

"What? But the scale at the gym said . . ."

He sighed. "Yeah. Been hearing that one all day."

"But that's not fair!"

"Hmm, I suppose not. But you know what? This scale is calibrated to the one that the universe uses. The one that will decide whether you lucky colonists will wake up on Tau or just float like Popsicles for eternity. So if I were you, I'd be glad this scale was a little better than the one in the gym."

"But what am I supposed to do?" I cried.

He handed me a plastic cup. "Spit. Or pee, I don't care. Fifteen grams ain't much."

I tried to spit, but my mouth was as dry as the a.s.s-hat Desert.

"You want me to make you cry, kid? Tears must weigh something."

I scowled at him, realizing that my eyes were in fact burning. But I was too dehydrated to turn my anger and shame into salt water. Salt traps water weight, and I hadn't eaten anything salty in a month.

"I can't spit."

He shrugged. "Why you need that book, anyway? It'll be in the s.h.i.+p's memory, even if it's p.o.r.n."

"It's not p.o.r.n. And it's not the same in memory."

He pulled it from me again and flipped through the pages. "Must be some book. What's it about, anyway?"

"A spider," I said. "And a pig."