Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 26

But he was equally blind, disregarding the signals from MAW, urging immediate decision on what to do to deflect or destroy the oncoming P-L6344.

Willetts was preoccupied with his private affairs, as I was preoccupied with my mentatropic meetings with Roslyn. As our bodies went on their courses, so, too, did the bodies of the solar system.

The Apollo asteroids cross the Earth/Moon orbit. Of these nineteen small bodies, possibly the best known is Hermes, which at one time pa.s.sed by the Moon at a distance only double the Moon's distance from Earth. P-L6344 is a small rock, no more than one-hundred-and-ninety meters across. On its previous crossing, the brave astronaut, Flavia da Beltrau do Valle, managed to anchor herself to the rock, planting there a metal replica of the Patagonian flag. At the period of which I am speaking, the asteroid was coming in fast at an inclination of five degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Best estimations demonstrated that it would impact with the Moon at 23:03 on 5/8/2208. But defensive action was delayed because of General Willetts' other interests.

So why were the computers not instructed by others, and the missiles not armed by subordinates?

The answer must lie somewhere in everyone's absurd preoccupation with their own small universes, of which they form the perceived center. Immersed in Recreationals, they were, in any case, disinclined to act.

Perhaps we have a hatred of reality. Reality is too cold for us. Perceptions of all things are governed by our own selves. The French master, Gustave Flaubert, when asked where he found the model for the central tragic figure of Emma in his novel, Madame Bovary, is said to have replied, "Madame Bovary?

C'est moi." Certainly Flaubert's horror of life is embodied in his book. The novel stands as an example of a proto-recreational.

Even as the Apollo asteroid was rushing toward us, even as we were in mortal danger, I was looking-under Roslyn's direction-to find the meaning of my strange dream in the works of the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Husserl touched something in my soul, for he rejects all a.s.sumptions about existence, preferring the subjectivity of the individual's perceptions as a way in which we experience the universe.

A clever man, Husserl, but one who said little about what things would really be like if our perceptions turned out to be faulty. Or, for instance, if we did not perceive the crisis of an approaching asteroid soon enough.

Running promptly on timetable, P-L6344 struck. By a coincidence, it impacted in Aristarchus, the very crater in which Joyce Bagreist had emerged on the Moon.The Moon staggered in its...o...b..t.

Everyone fell down. Hermione, groping blindly for her stick, clutched Molly Levaticus' moist and hairy little pudendum and shrieked, "There's a cat in here!"

Many buildings and careers were ruined, including General Willetts'.

Many lunarians took the nearest Bagreist home. Many feared that the Moon would swan off into outer s.p.a.ce under the force of impact. I had my work to do. I disliked the squalid cities of Earth. But primarily I stayed on because Roslyn Staunton stayed, both she and I being determined to get to the bottom of my dream. Somehow, by magical transference, it had become her dream, too. Our sessions together became more and more conspiratorial.

At one point I did consider marrying Roslyn, but kept the thought to myself.

After the strike, everyone was unconscious for at least two days. Sometimes for a week. The color red vanished from the spectrum.

One strange effect of the asteroid strike was that my dream of the golf ball lying on its side faded away. I never dreamed it again. Oddly, I missed it. I ceased visiting Roslyn as a patient. Since she no longer played a professional role in my life, I was able to invite her out to dine at the Earthscape Restaurant, where angelfish were particularly good, and later to drive out with her to inspect the impact site when things had cooled down sufficiently.

Kilometers of gray ash rolled by as the car drove us westward. Plastic pine trees had been set up on either side of the road, in an attempt at scenery. They ceased a kilometer out of town, where the road forked. Distant palisades caught the slant of sun, transforming them into spires of an alien faith. Roslyn and I sat mute, side by side, pursuing our own thoughts as we progressed. We had switched off the radio. The voices were those of penguins.

"I miss Gauguins," she said suddenly. "His vivid expressionist color. The b.l.o.o.d.y Moon is so gray-I sometimes wish I had never come here. Bagreist made it all too easy. If it hadn't been for you..."

"I have a set of Gauguin paintings on slides. Love his work!"

"You do? Why didn't you say?"

"My secret vice. I have almost a complete set."

"You have? I thought he was the great forgotten artist."

"Those marvelous wide women, chocolate in their nudity...the dogs, the idols, the sense of a brooding presence..."

She uttered a tuneful scream. "Do you know 'Vairaumati Tei Oa'? The woman smoking, a figure looming behind her?"

"...And behind them a carving of two people copulating?"

"G.o.d, you do know it, Terry! The sheer color! The sullen joy! Let's stop and have a screw to celebrate."

"Afterward. His sense of color, of outline, of pattern. Lakes of red, forests of orange, walls of viridian..."

"His senses were strange. Gauguin learned to see everything new. Maybe he was right. Maybe the sand is pink."

"Funny he never painted the Moon, did he?"

"Not that I know of. It could be pink, too...."

We held hands. We locked tongues in each others' mouths. Our bodies forced themselves on each other. Craving, craving. Starved of color. Cracks appeared in the road. The car slowed.

My thoughts ran to the world Paul Gauguin had discovered and-a different matter-the one he opened up for others. His canvases were proof that there was no common agreement about how reality was. Gauguin was Husserl's proof. I cried my new understanding to Roslyn. "Reality" was a conspiracy, and Gauguin's images persuaded people to accept a new and different reality.

"Oh, G.o.d, I am so happy!"

The road began to hump. The tracked vehicle went to dead slow. In a while, it said, "No road ahead," and stopped. Roslyn and I clamped down our helmets, got out, and walked.No one else was about. The site had been cordoned off, but we climbed the wire. We entered Aristarchus by the gap which had been built through its walls some years previously. The flat ground inside the crater was shattered. Heat of impact had turned it into gla.s.s. We picked our way across a treacherous skating rink. In the center of the upheaval was a new crater, the P-L6344 crater, from which a curl of smoke rose, to spread itself over the dusty floor.

Roslyn and I stood on the lip of the new crater, looking down. A crust of gray ash broke in one place, revealing a glow beneath.

"Too bad the Moon got in the way..."

"It's the end of something..."

There was not much you could say.

She tripped as we made to turn back. I caught her arm and steadied her. Grunting with displeasure, Roslyn kicked at what she had tripped on. A stone gleamed dully.

She brought over her handling arm. Its long metal fingers felt in the churned muck and gripped an object-not a stone. It was rhomboidal-manufactured. In size, it was no bigger than a thermos flask.

Exclaiming, we took it back to the car.

The P-L6344 rhomboid! Dating science showed it to be something over 2.5 million years old. It opened when chilled down to 185.333K.

From inside it emerged a complex thing which was, at first, taken for a machine of an elaborate if miniature kind. It moved slowly, retracting and projecting series of rods and corkscrewlike objects.

a.n.a.lysis showed it to be made of various semimetal materials, such as were unknown to us, created from what we could have called artificial atoms, where semiconductor dots contained thousands of electrons.

It emitted a series of light flashes.

This strange thing was preserved at 185.333K and studied.

Recreationals got in on the act because research was funded by treating this weird object from the remote past as a form of exhibition. I was often in the laboratory area. Overhearing what people said, as they shuffled in front of the one-way gla.s.s, I found that most of them thought it was pretty boring.

At night, Roslyn and I screamed at each other about "the tourists." We longed for a universe of our own. Not here, not on the Moon. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were the most intelligent I ever sucked. And not only there.

Talking to Roslyn about this strange signaling thing we owned, I must admit it was she who made the perception. "You keep calling it a machine," she said. "Maybe it is a kind of a machine. But it could be living. Maybe this is a survivor from a time when the universe did not support carbon-based life. Maybe it's a prebiotic living thing!"

"A what?"

"A prelife living thing. It isn't really alive because it has never died, despite being two million years in that can.... Terry, you know the impossible happens. Our lives are impossible. This thing delivered to us is both possible and impossible."

My instinct was to rush about telling everyone. In particular, telling the scientists on the project.

Roslyn cautioned me against doing so.

"There must be something in this for us. We may be only a day or two ahead of them before they, too, realize they are dealing with a kind of life. We have to use that time."

My turn to have a brain wave. "I've recorded all its flashes. Let's decode them, see what they are saying. If this little object has intelligence, then there's a meaning awaiting discovery...."

The universe went about its inscrutable course. People lived their inscrutable lives. But Roslyn and I hardly slept, slept only when her sharp little hips had ground into mine. We transformed the flickering messages into sound, we played them backward, we speeded them up and slowed them down. We even ascribed values to them. Nothing played.

The stress made us quarrelsome. Yet there were moments of calm. I asked Roslyn why she had come to the Moon. We had already read each other, yet did not know the alphabet.

"Because it was easy just to walk through the neighboring Bagreist, in a way my grandparents couldnever have imagined. And I wanted work. And."

She stopped. I waited for the sentence to emerge. "Because of something buried deep within me."

She turned a look on me that choked any response I might make. She knew I understood her.

Despite my job, despite my career, which hung on me like a loose suit of clothes, I lived for distant horizons.

"Speak, man!" she ordered. "Read me."

"It's the far perspective. That's where I live. I can say what you say, 'because of something buried deep within me.' I understand you with all my heart. Your impediment is mine."

She threw herself on me, kissing my lips, my mouth, saying, "G.o.d, I love you, I drink you. You alone understand-"

And I was saying the same things, stammering about the world we shared in common, that with love and mathematics we could achieve it. We became the animal with two backs and one mind....

I was showering after a night awake when the thought struck me. The prebiotic semilife we had uncovered, buried below the surface of the Moon for countless ages, did not require oxygen, any more than did Roslyn's and my perceptions. What fuel, then, might it use to power its mentality? The answer could only be: Cold!

We sank the temperature of the flickering messages, using the laboratory machine when the place was vacated during the hours of night. At 185.332K, the messages went into phase. A degree lower, and they became solid, emitting a dull glow. We photographed them from several angles before switching off the superfrigeration.

What we uncovered was an entirely new mathematical mode. It was a mathematics of a different existence. It underpinned a phase of the universe which contradicted ours, which made our world remote from us and from our concept of it. Not that it rendered ours obsolete: far from it, but rather that it demonstrated by irrefutable logic that we had not understood how small a part of totality we shared.

This was old gray information, denser by far than lead, more durable than granite. Incontrovertible.

Trembling, Roslyn and I took it-again at dead of night, when the worst crimes are committed-and fed its equations into the Crayputer which governed and stabilized Luna. It was entered and in a flash-

Groaning, we climbed out of the hole. Here was a much larger Bagreist. As we entered into the flabby light, we saw the far perspective we had always held embedded in us: that forlorn ocean, those leaden waves, and that desolate sh.o.r.e, so long dreamed about, its individual grains now scrunching under our feet.

Behind us lay the ball which had been the Moon, stranded from its old environment, deep in its venerable age, motionless upon its side.

We clasped each other's hands with a wild surmise, and pulled ourselves forth.

100 Candles

CURT WOHLEBER.

Curt Wohleber lives in Columbia, Missouri and is an instructor and online news producer at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. His nonfiction has appeared in Omni, American Heritage and other magazines, and he is a regular book reviewer for the webzine Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifiweekly.com). He is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and used to belong to the SF writing workshop run by Mary Soon Lee. This is his first story in a professional publication. It appeared in Transversions, the Canadian magazine that revolutionized its production and design in 1999, and became one of the handsomest of SF publications in the world . Transversions is part of the worldwide trend toward attractive, upscale, literary magazines of speculative fiction, little magazines of high editorial standards that pay their contributors, that published some of the best SF, fantasy, and horror short fiction of the 1990s in England,Australia, Canada, and the USA (other fine examples include Eidolon, On Spec, Crank!, Century).

This story is a charming piece about a tough and somewhat depressed old lady and her AI house.

From her bedroom she heard skyhoppers landing out front. Familiar voices came from the living room: the Smiths from Canberra, Archbishop Ichiro, and some old friends, reality dropouts awakened from the dream tanks for the occasion. Geneva sat up in her bed and stroked Salem's silky black fur.

Time for the birthday girl to put on her happy face. "Some loving mother I am," she told the purring cat.

"I'm just a mean old witch."

Within his frame above the fireplace, the animated oil painting rolled his eyes. "We both know you love your children very much," said House with a precisely modulated note of exasperation in his voice.

"Who asked you?"

"You directed me to counter your negative statements as a prophylactic against another bout of depression. You currently score 25 on the Revised Beck Depression Inventory and-"

"Yeah, yeah."

The cat dashed to the window to stare at a sparrow perched on the sycamore outside. He thumped his tail against the sash.

"Might I suggest a synaptic regulator?" said House.

"No."

"As you wish. Anyway, if you give them a chance, I think you will enjoy this visit with Lauren and Ben."

She had been avoiding the kids since shortly after their arrival that morning. "I think it will suck, as they said in my day."

House pursed his lips, making the end of ends of his mustache droop. His visage belonged to that of Geneva's great-grandfather Florenz. Geneva gave House her ancestor's face because she always thought Florenz looked like he'd make a good butler.

"Aren't you the least bit curious to see what the Explorer Swarm found at Barnard's Star?" he said.

"Are you?"