Nature Futures 2 (24 page)

“Which would be an anagram of … of…”

“I have not researched that aspect. What it is, though, is a galactic modem. An interstellar access point. We've identified thousands of stations, nodes, channels, whatever. A fire-hose blast of information.”
[gesture]

“But surely all in a ghastly foreign lingo?”

“Up to a point, Minister. Some communications are sheer Library of Babel — or babble. Many, though, seem designed for transparency. They begin with helpful language lessons, visual teaching aids.”
[explanatory gestures]

“Nasty tic you have there. So, Exercise One goes: ‘Take me to your leader?'”

“A little more sophisticated than that, Sir. So much more so, indeed, that there are built-in pitfalls.”

“One has heard rumours.”

“Our interface software is now blocking channels #207 and #855, which produce undesirable symptoms in most people exposed to the message content. Convulsions, death, that kind of thing. Also #1,023, whose researcher came through in good health but with her former language skills overwritten. Apparently she now thinks in fluent Vegan or Arcturan and is finding it hard to relearn English. In fact…”
[several agitated gestures]

“Interesting, but can we be more focused? Less pantomime and more valuable scientific insights that will advance the frontiers of knowledge and turn a whacking profit.”

“Well, #89 is quite intriguing. It claims to offer the secrets of cheap interstellar travel. Some kind of light-pressure drive that relies on destabilizing the local sun.”

“That is, our local Sun?”

“In effect, yes.”
[gestures]

“Good lord. Better not tell NASA about that … Something more practical, please.”

“The payload of #387 is allegedly a total-spectrum antibiotic. We didn't care to investigate too closely, but this would seem to be a replicating catalyst that persists in the environment and is incompatible with carbon-based life. One of those SF fans in our crew thought the target users might be silicon intelligences.”
[gestures]

“
Caveat emptor
. Onward!”
[gesture]

“Just for balance, #388 promises the same for semiconductors. No computer viruses, because no surviving computers: the catalysts roll us back to Ohm's law technology … Now #1,599 has a certain fascination. All-purpose solution to any energy crisis.”
[gestures]

“There will, I presume, be a catch.”

“The summary claims that it's a simple technique of reprogramming the space-time attributes of matter to generate antimatter in arbitrary quantities. 100% conversion efficiency and zero CO
2
footprint.”

“The boffins already make that stuff, don't they? At CERN and suchlike places.”
[gesture]

“Exceedingly tiny amounts, Minister, at a rate of billions of years per gram. We are offered the opportunity to make antimatter by the kilogram, with a total energy release of
circa
43 megatonnes when that mass encounters normal matter and annihilates. Just as easy to make a tonne for a yield of around 43,000 megatonnes. And it's supposed to be simple.”
[gestures]

“One detects a pattern. Dangerous toys.”

“Yes, Minister. We decided not to unpack full details, just in case it really is simple, but I lost no time putting a block on that channel too. The #1,599 message header, by the way, includes a slogan that seems to translate as ‘MAKE ENERGY FAST!'”

“Likewise, no doubt, ‘Information wants to be free.' Pray continue your most interesting narrative.”
[gestures]

“Of course we don't know that the actual contents will match the instructions on, as it were, the tin. It may be significant that many of these communications take the general form of #214, which offers immunization against invasive memes, which are allegedly liable to reconfigure one's entire culture as an ansible broadcasting bot that exists only to relay the original memetic message.”

“That, at least, sounds useful … Ah, maybe not. One has heard of Trojan horses. The benefits of a classical education.”
[gestures]

“Yes, Minister. I should have mentioned that our girl who lost her English managed to infect three other people with whatever she's now speaking, before we isolated everyone concerned …
[gestures]
There's a wide range of suspected Trojan channels, mostly rather less ingenious than #214. To paraphrase a typical specimen: ‘Greatly enlarge your species potential!'”

“Or conversely, ‘There's one born every minute'.”

“The final disappointment, I'm afraid, is that we don't seem to be detecting any real-time communication out there. Just endlessly repeated broadcasts, most likely from zombie networks.
[numerous gestures]
Maybe it would have been different if we'd accessed the galactic net thousands of years ago, back when some UFO tourist presumably overflew the Old Kingdom and dropped his mobile phone.”

“You fear the original broadcasters are all gone?”
[gestures]

“I am trying my best to be optimistic. In fact I'm working hard to convince myself that although the ansible network may be choked with this junk, a genuine extraterrestrial contact is still possible.”
[gestures]

“You mean …
[multiple gestures]
Go on: I'm beginning to understand.”

“Yes, Minister. We need to learn the trick of listening with another technology that we haven't invented yet.”
[multiple complex gestures]

NOTE: exchange continues solely in nonstandard sign language. Both subjects now segregated as carriers of contagious memetic dactylology tentatively associated with channel #419. Prognosis uncertain.

David Langford edits the online
SF Encyclopedia
and the long-running genre newsletter
Ansible
. He has received 29 Hugo Awards for his fiction, non-fiction and editorial work.

Stay Special

Susan Lanigan

Merlin's stepmother Alison looks like the girl in the huge wall-to-wall infomercials that flash and reload in the city's shopping centres. All the girls look like her, allowing for differences in hair and skin colour.

“Love you too,” she says to her girlfriend on the phone. “Stay special.”

“What does that mean?” Merlin asks when she hangs up.

She glares at him. “What?”

“When you say ‘stay special'?”

“You shouldn't listen to other people's phone conversations.”

He's known he would get into trouble for asking. Alison, like his mother, does not like to be asked the wrong questions. Where do babies came from? What's the Deterioration?

“Don't ask Alison questions like that,” his father always says.

*   *   *

Three years ago, when his mother was still alive, she disappeared one day and Merlin wandered into the nearest Women's Municipal Powder Room in search of her. He remembers passing through a long, tiled vestibule into the main room, where jets of fragrant fog came out of holes placed high up in the walls. To his left and right, in long aisles, stood line after line of dressing-room tables; all along these aisles, women looked into long mirrors, patting their skins with lavender-smelling creams in opaque glass jars, some crying. Eventually, he saw his mother over in the far corner. She was guiding his sister though a similar routine. “See … like this.” And then she leaned over and whispered: “Stay special, darling, always … stay special.”

“Stay special,” his sister echoed, her thumb in her mouth.

“Mama!” he cried out. His mother turned around, her face darkening. Quickly she picked him up and marched him outside, Lena running along behind, and murmured the same word again and again under her breath:
Deterioration
.

*   *   *

Alison has taken him shoe-shopping. “Merlin!” she shouts. “Stop wandering off!”

But Merlin has seen something odd in the mall's atrium. Alongside the fountain and palm trees, a hunched figure drags its body towards the café near the entrance. It looks like nothing Merlin has ever seen before. It looks barely human.

“Alison,” he calls.

“Can't it wait? I'm kinda busy here.”

“There's a funny person in the mall!”

Alison leaps to her feet and races to the window. When she sees the bent figure, she lets out a sudden shriek that sets Merlin's heart racing even before she grabs him and pulls him away, almost causing him to pee in his pants as she drags him to the car.

“What's going on?” he says, as she floors it down the highway.

“Shut up, Merlin.”

He shrinks into the seat.

“A real-life Degraded woman,” she wonders out loud. “I didn't think there were any left.”

“What's ‘Degraded'?”

“Degraded is when the Deterioration isn't caught in time and it progresses to a stage when — a stage when you look like that.”

“But what's the —”

Alison switches on the radio to stop him asking any more questions. On comes a crooning, mellifluous voice announcing a new face cream.
Life can be tough
, it says.
We all know that changes can occur. But today's woman can stay safe for longer.
Then it chants the chemical compounds:
idebenone, dibenzoylmethane, dithiolane-3-pentanoic acid
. Then the wrap:
Women of the world, remember! Stay special.

*   *   *

Later, in his room, Merlin hears a gentle knock. He opens the door: it is his father with Alison behind him.

“I hear you had a little trouble earlier,” Merlin's father says.

“What's the Deterioration?” Merlin blurts out. There is a silence, but he continues. “No, really, what is it? Everyone talks about it and I don't know what it means. I don't know why she's mad at me.” Merlin is tearful.

His father tightens his arm around Alison's shoulders. “The Deterioration,” he says heavily, “is a name given by women to the condition of senescence. Simply put, growing older.”

“So does that mean I'll get it?”

His father sighs. “Merlin, older age in men is seen as normal. As you can see, I…” His voice trails off. He takes a gulp of his drink.

“They — women — have this rough rule that it starts at the first sign of deep lines around the female mouth. About early-to-mid-thirties. Now I think that's an obscene way of looking at it. Obscene.” The ice cubes in his father's glass clatter with his indignation. For the first time, Merlin sees how wrinkled his hand is on Alison's shoulder.

“In the last few years of her life, your mother was severely pressured by the Sisters of her group. I told her not to listen, of course. But she wouldn't hear of it. One day she snuck out of the house early with Lena and presented them both to the Women's Municipal Powder Room — on a suitable day.” His father's eyes water.

“Suitable?” Merlin asks.

“Weren't you paying attention when you sneaked off to that Powder Room without permission?” Alison is harsh as a saw. “It's not just nice, sweet-smelling stuff they pump in through those little holes.”

“Come with me, Alison,” his father murmurs, moving away. Alison turns to look at her stepson, trying to smile — but it is a rictus grin, her eyes like glass.

*   *   *

On his bedroom windowsill, a photograph of Merlin's mother and sister looks down at him. Merlin puts his hand on the picture. The glass is gathering dust.

Slowly, reverently, he wipes it off with his fingers and looks again: first at the woman who has stopped Deteriorating forever, then at the little girl who never started.

“Stay special, Mama. Stay special, Lena. Love you both, stay special.”

Susan Lanigan is the author of two short stories in
Nature
and her debut novel,
White Feathers
, is due for publication on 25 August. Her website is at
susanlanigan.wordpress.com
.

Dead Yellow

Tanith Lee

This was my wedding dress. At the time people remarked on my choice of colour, but with my hair the way I had it then, it worked. I remember there were daffodils blooming. But I won't show you the photographs. No point now, is there?

When did it start? Officially in 2036. But the papers had been reporting curious anomalies for years before that. And people spotting things. Thinking at first the fault was in them and getting frightened — so many medical case-notes.

And I? Oh, I think I first properly
noticed
that day when we walked in the park. We often did that, then. It was a nice park, lots of trees, wild areas. But I heard a child — it's funny, isn't it, the way children always ask the truly awful question? — this child said to some adult, “Why are all the trees going brown?” And it was late May, you understand, early summer, and the leaves flooding out and the grass high and everything lush. What did the adult reply? I can't recall. But as we walked on, the scales, as they say, dropped from my eyes. I wish they hadn't. I began to see it too.

It wasn't like it is nowadays. Then it was only just establishing itself, the — what did they call it? — The
Phenomenon
.

It was almost like looking through a photographic lens. Except, obviously, this lens didn't completely change everything, as normally it would.

Neither of us said anything to the other. But I realized he, my husband, had also in those moments begun to see. We kept talking and joking, we even stopped for coffee and a doughnut at the park café. But an uneasy shadow was settling on us, and a silence.

We didn't actually discuss anything for several weeks. One evening we were making dinner, and — I remember so vividly — he was suddenly staring at the counter and he said, “What colour is that pepper, would you say?”