The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Read online

  He shoved the curtain aside with a sudden thrust. The main room was empty. Instead of bolting, he stepped gingerly out of the alcove. Had it gone into the bedroom? The door was slightly ajar. He thought he could hear something rustling in there. Then he saw what had made the clattering noise.

  One of the composite floor tiles had been forced up, flipping over like a lid. There was a dark cavity below it. Which was terribly terribly wrong. The homestead had been assembled on a level bed of earth.

  Miran bent down beside it. The tile was a metre square, and someone had scooped out all the hard-packed earth it had rested on, creating a snug cavity. The bottom was covered in pieces of what looked like broken crockery.

  The xenoc. Miran knew instinctively it had dug this. He picked up one of the off-white fragments. One side was dry, smooth; the other was slimed with a clear tacky mucus. It was curved. An egg.

  Rage boiled through him. The xenoc had laid an egg in his homestead. Outsmarting him, choosing the one place Miran would never look, never suspect treachery. Its bastard had hatched in the place intended for his own children.

  He pushed the bedroom door fully open. Candice was waiting for him on the bed, naked and smiling. Miran’s world reeled violently. He grabbed at the doorframe for support before his faltering legs collapsed.

  She was very far away from him.

  “Candice,” his voice cracked. Somehow the room wasn’t making sense. It had distorted, magnifying to giant proportions. Candice, beloved Candice, was too small. His vision swam drunkenly, then resolved. Candice was less than a metre tall.

  “Love me,” she said. Her voice was high pitched, a mousy squeak.

  Yet it was her. He gazed lovingly at each part of the perfectly detailed figure which he remembered so well – her long legs, firm flat belly, high conical breasts, the broad shoulders, over-developed from months spent toiling in the fields.

  “Love me.”

  Her face. Candice was never beautiful, but he worshipped her anyway. Prominent cheekbones, rounded chin, narrow eyes. All there, as delicate as china. Her soft smile, directed straight at him, unforgettable.

  “Love me.”

  Xenoc. The foetus gestating under his floor. Violating his dreams, feeding on them. Discovering his all-enveloping love.

  “Love me.”

  The first post-human-encounter xenoc; instinctively moulding itself into the form which would bring it the highest chance of survival in the new world order.

  Its slender arms reached out for him. A flawless human ribcage was outlined by supple creamy-white skin as it stretched.

  Miran wailed in torment.

  “Love me.”

  He could. That was the truth, and it was a tearing agony. He could love it. Even a pale monstrous echo was better than a lifetime without Candice. It would grow. And in the dark crushingly lonely hours it would be there for him to turn to.

  “Love me.”

  He wasn’t strong enough to resist. If it grew he would take it in his arms and become its lover. Her lover, again. If it grew.

  He put his hands under the bed and tugged upwards with manic strength. Bed, mattress, and sheets cartwheeled. The xenoc squealed as it tumbled onto the floor.

  “Love me!” The cry was frantic. It was squirming across the floor towards him. Feet tangled in the blankets, face entreating.

  Miran shoved at the big dresser, tilting it off its rear legs. He had spent many evening hours making it from aboriginal timber. It was crude and solid, heavy.

  “Love me!” The cry had become a desperate pining whimper.

  The dresser teetered on its front legs. With a savage sob, Miran gave it one last push. It crashed to the floor with a hideous liquid squelch as it landed on the xenoc’s upper torso.

  Miran vomited, running wildly from the bedroom, blind, doubled up in convulsions. His mad flight took him outside where he tripped and sprawled on the soggy ground, weeping and pawing at the soil, more animal than human.

  A strained creaking sound made him look up. Despite eyes smeared with gritty tears, he saw the rock at the top of the grave cracking open. A tiny arm punched out into the air. Thin flakes went spinning. The hand and arm worked at enlarging the fissure. Eventually a naked homunculus emerged in jerky movements, scattering fragments of shell in all directions. Even the xenoc eggs had the ability to conform to their surroundings.

  Miran watched numbly as the homunculus crawled down the pile of sandstone lumps to join the other two humanoid figures waiting at the base.

  In the homestead the safest identity to adopt was a love object, cherished and protected. But outside in the valley survival meant becoming the most ruthless predator of all.

  Between them, the three miniature humans lifted up the laser rifle. “Hate you,” one spat venomously. Then its fist smacked into the trigger.

  Miran couldn’t believe his own face was capable of expressing so much anger.

  The Infinite Assassin

  Greg Egan

  Though younger than either Eric Brown or Peter Hamilton, even if only by a matter of months, Greg Egan (b. 1961), had already been selling fantasy and science fiction in his native Australia for four years before their debut. Since then he has established a reputation as “one of the genre’s great ideas men” as The Times declared. Egan, like Hamilton, always goes for broke – nothing’s too big for his imagination. His novel Quarantine (1992) had the Earth cut off from the rest of the solar system by a massive force field whilst Diaspora (1997) and Teranesia (1999) consider human-kind’s next phase of evolution. Egan’s short fiction, some of which can be found in Axiomatic (1995) and Luminous (1998) take no hostages either as the following, about multi-dimensional realities, shows.

  One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling reality, it’s always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.

  Why? They tell me I’m stable. Reliable. Dependable. After each debriefing, The Company’s psychologists (complete strangers, every time) shake their heads in astonishment at their printouts, and tell me that I’m exactly the same person as when “I” went in.

  The number of parallel worlds is uncountably infinite–infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers – making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that I’m unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.

  How The Company knew this, how they found me, I’ve never been told. I was recruited at the age of nineteen. Bribed. Trained. Brainwashed, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if my stability has anything to do with me; maybe the real constant is the way I’ve been prepared. Maybe an infinite number of different people, put through the same process, would all emerge the same. Have all emerged the same. I don’t know.

  Detectors scattered across the planet have sensed the faint beginnings of the whirlpool, and pinned down the centre to within a few kilometres, but that’s the most accurate fix I can expect by this means. Each version of the Company shares its technology freely with the others, to ensure a uniformly optimal response, but even in the best of all possible worlds, the detectors are too large, and too delicate, to carry in closer for a more precise reading.

  A helicopter deposits me on wasteland at the southern edge of the Leightown ghetto. I’ve never been here before, but the boarded-up shopfronts and grey tower blocks ahead are utterly familiar. Every large city in the world (in every world I know) has a place like this, created by a policy that’s usually referred to as differential enforcement. Using or possessing S is strictly illegal, and the penalty in most countries is (mostly) summary execution, but the powers that be would rather have the users concentrated in designated areas than risk having them scattered among the community at large. So, if you’re caught with S in a nice clean suburb, they’ll blow a hole in your skull on the spot, but here, there’s no chance of that. Here, there are no cops at a
ll.

  I head north. It’s just after four a.m., but savagely hot, and once I move out of the buffer zone, the streets are crowded. People are coming and going from nightclubs, liquor stores, pawn shops, gambling houses, brothels. Power for street lighting has been cut off from this part of the city, but someone civic-minded has replaced the normal bulbs with self-contained tritium/phosphor globes, spilling a cool pale light like radioactive milk. There’s a popular misconception that most S users do nothing but dream, twenty-four hours a day, but that’s ludicrous; not only do they need to eat, drink and earn money like everyone else, but few would waste the drug on the time when their alter egos are themselves asleep.

  Intelligence says there’s some kind of whirlpool cult in Leightown, who may try to interfere with my work. I’ve been warned of such groups before, but it’s never come to anything; the slightest shift in reality is usually all it takes to make such an aberration vanish. The Company, the ghettos, are the stable responses to S; everything else seems to be highly conditional. Still, I shouldn’t be complacent. Even if these cults can have no significant impact on the mission as a whole, no doubt they have killed some versions of me in the past, and I don’t want it to be my turn, this time. I know that an infinite number of versions of me would survive – some whose only difference from me would be that they had survived – so perhaps I ought to be entirely untroubled by the thought of death.

  But I’m not.

  Wardrobe have dressed me with scrupulous care, in a Fat Single Mothers Must Die World Tour souvenir reflection hologram T-shirt, the right style of jeans, the right model running shoes. Paradoxically, S users tend to be slavish adherents to “local” fashion, as opposed to that of their dreams; perhaps it’s a matter of wanting to partition their sleeping and waking lives. For now, I’m in perfect camouflage, but I don’t expect that to last; as the whirlpool picks up speed, sweeping different parts of the ghetto into different histories, changes in style will be one of the most sensitive markers. If my clothes don’t look out of place before too long, I’ll know I’m headed in the wrong direction.

  A tall, bald man with a shrunken human thumb dangling from one earlobe collides with me as he runs out of a bar. As we separate, he turns on me, screaming taunts and obscenities. I respond cautiously; he may have friends in the crowd, and I don’t have time to waste getting into that kind of trouble. I don’t escalate things by replying, but I take care to appear confident, without seeming arrogant or disdainful. This balancing act pays off. Insulting me with impunity for thirty seconds apparently satisfies his pride, and he walks away smirking.

  As I move on, though, I can’t help wondering how many versions of me didn’t get out of it so easily.

  I pick up speed to compensate for the delay.

  Someone catches up with me, and starts walking beside me. “Hey, I liked the way you handled that. Subtle. Manipulative. Pragmatic. Full marks.” A woman in her late twenties, with short, metallic-blue hair.

  “Fuck off. I’m not interested.”

  “In what?”

  “In anything.”

  She shakes her head. “Not true. You’re new around here, and you’re looking for something. Or someone. Maybe I can help.”

  “I said, fuck off.”

  She shrugs and falls behind, but calls after me, “Every hunter needs a guide. Think about it.”

  A few blocks later, I turn into an unlit side street. Deserted, silent; stinking of half-burnt garbage, cheap insecticide, and piss. And I swear I can feel it: in the dark, ruined buildings all around me, people are dreaming on S.

  S is not like any other drug. S dreams are neither surreal nor euphoric. Nor are they like simulator trips: empty fantasies, absurd fairy tales of limitless prosperity and indescribable bliss. They’re dreams of lives that, literally, might have been lived by the dreamers, every bit as solid and plausible as their waking lives.

  With one exception: if the dream-life turns sour, the dreamer can abandon it at will, and choose another (without any need to dream of taking S . . . although that’s been known to happen). He or she can piece together a second life, in which no mistakes are irrevocable, no decisions absolute. A life without failures, without dead ends. All possibilities remain forever accessible.

  S grants dreamers the power to live vicariously in any parallel world in which they have an alter ego – someone with whom they share enough brain physiology to maintain the parasitic resonance of the link. Studies suggest that a perfect genetic match isn’t necessary for this – but nor is it sufficient; early childhood development also seems to affect the neural structures involved.

  For most users, the drug does no more than this. For one in a hundred thousand, though, dreams are only the beginning. During their third or fourth year on S, they start to move physically from world to world, as they strive to take the place of their chosen alter egos.

  The trouble is, there’s never anything so simple as an infinity of direct exchanges, between all the versions of the mutant users who’ve gained this power, and all the versions they wish to become. Such transitions are energetically unfavourable; in practice, each dreamer must move gradually, continuously, passing through all the intervening points. But those “points” are occupied by other versions of themselves; it’s like motion in a crowd – or a fluid. The dreamers must flow.

  At first, those alter egos who’ve developed the skill are distributed too sparsely to have any effect at all. Later, it seems there’s a kind of paralysis through symmetry; all potential flows are equally possible, including each one’s exact opposite. Everything just cancels out.

  The first few times the symmetry is broken, there’s usually nothing but a brief shudder, a momentary slippage, an almost imperceptible world-quake. The detectors record these events, but are still too insensitive to localize them.

  Eventually, some kind of critical threshold is crossed. Complex, sustained flows develop: vast, tangled currents with the kind of pathological topologies that only an infinite-dimensional space can contain. Such flows are viscous; nearby points are dragged along. That’s what creates the whirlpool; the closer you are to the mutant dreamer, the faster you’re carried from world to world.

  As more and more versions of the dreamer contribute to the flow, it picks up speed – and the faster it becomes, the further away its influence is felt.

  The Company, of course, doesn’t give a shit if reality is scrambled in the ghettoes. My job is to keep the effects from spreading beyond.

  I follow the side street to the top of a hill. There’s another main road about four hundred metres ahead. I find a sheltered spot amid the rubble of a half-demolished building, unfold a pair of binoculars, and spend five minutes watching the pedestrians below. Every ten or fifteen seconds, I notice a tiny mutation: an item of clothing changing; a person suddenly shifting position, or vanishing completely, or materializing from nowhere. The binoculars are smart; they count up the number of events which take place in their field of view, as well as computing the map coordinates of the point they’re aimed at.

  I turn one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, and look back on the crowd that I passed through on my way here. The rate is substantially lower, but the same kind of thing is visible. Bystanders, of course, notice nothing; as yet, the whirlpool’s gradients are so shallow that any two people within sight of each other on a crowded street would more or less shift universes together. Only at a distance can the changes be seen.

  In fact, since I’m closer to the centre of the whirlpool than the people to the south of me, most of the changes I see in that direction are due to my own rate of shift. I’ve long ago left the world of my most recent employers behind – but I have no doubt that the vacancy has been, and will continue to be, filled.

  I’m going to have to make a third observation to get a fix, some distance away from the north-south line joining the first two points. Over time, of course, the centre will drift, but not very rapidly; the flow runs between worlds where the centres are close together
, so its position is the last thing to change.

  I head down the hill, westwards.

  Among crowds and lights again, waiting for a gap in the traffic, someone taps my elbow. I turn, to see the same blue-haired woman who accosted me before. I give her a stare of mild annoyance, but I keep my mouth shut; I don’t know whether or not this version of her has met a version of me, and I don’t want to contradict her expectations. By now, at least some of the locals must have noticed what’s going on – just listening to an outside radio station, stuttering randomly from song to song, should be enough to give it away – but it’s not in my interest to spread the news.

  She says, “I can help you find her.”

  “Help me find who?”

  “I know exactly where she is. There’s no need to waste time on measurements and calc –”

  “Shut up. Come with me.”

  She follows me, uncomplaining, into a nearby alley. Maybe I’m being set up for an ambush. By the whirlpool cult? But the alley is deserted. When I’m sure we’re alone, I push her against the wall and put a gun to her head. She doesn’t call out, or resist; she’s shaken, but I don’t think she’s surprised by this treatment. I scan her with a hand-held magnetic resonance imager; no weapons, no booby traps, no transmitters.

  I say, “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” I’d swear that nobody could have seen me on the hill, but maybe she saw another version of me. It’s not like me to screw up, but it does happen.

  She closes her eyes for a moment, then says, almost calmly, “I want to save you time, that’s all. I know where the mutant is. I want to help you find her as quickly as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? I have a business here, and I don’t want to see it disrupted. Do you know how hard it is to build up contacts again, after a whirlpool’s been through? What do you think – I’m covered by insurance?”