Godlike Machines Read online

  Godlike Machines

  Edited by Jonathan Strahan

  In memory of the late Charles N. Brown, who read this book and loved it, with great affection and deep gratitude.

  TROIKA

  RETURN TO TITAN

  THERE’S A GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW/NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE

  A GLIMPSE OF THE MARVELLOUS STRUCTURE [AND THE THREAT IT ENTAILS]

  ALONE

  HOT ROCK

  There are a handful of people who require special thanks, who went above and beyond the call to help make this book a reality. First and foremost, my sincere thanks to the book’s contributors, Steve, Cory, Al, Bob, Greg, and Sean, all of whom have shown almost heroic patience and stuck with this book through some fairly long delays-I’ll always be incredibly grateful to them for doing so. Second, my commissioning editor on this book, Andrew Wheeler, who bought it and believed in it. I’d also like to thank John Scalzi, Charles Stross, Gary K. Wolfe, Charles N. Brown, Howard Morhaim, Justin Ackroyd, and Jack Dann. Thanks also to the following good friends and colleagues without whom this book would have been much poorer, and much less fun to do: Lou Anders, Deborah Biancotti, Ellen Datlow, and Gardner Dozois.

  As always, my biggest thanks go to Marianne, Jessica and Sophie. Every moment spent working on this book was a moment stolen from them. I only hope I can repay them.

  Godlike Machines, Machinelike Gods

  Jonathan 5trahan

  The book you are now holding was inspired by a painting.

  Artist Michael Whelan was commissioned to paint a cover for a reissue of the fourth novel in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Foundation’s Edge. The painting, Trantorian Dream, depicts a small male figure standing amongst rubble, framed by enormous rusting ruins and gazing at a glowing spiral galaxy. It is an image that seems to depict, clearly and simply, much of the sense of wonder that we look to science fiction to provide.

  When, back in early 2006, I approached the Science Fiction Book Club with the idea for a new book of original science fiction novellas I had that image in mind: I wanted to come up with a loose idea that would give writers enough space to create something unique, but also give them a clear idea of the kind of story I had in mind, and the kind of book I wanted to do.

  I looked at many of the classic science fiction books and stories that I had loved, and settled on the idea of a book of stories featuring what science fiction critic Roz Kaveney dubbed ‘big dumb objects’. A big dumb object is essentially an extremely large, extremely powerful structure, most likely of extraterrestrial or unknown origin. These megastructures-dyson spheres, alderson disks, matrioshka brains-and other stranger and more unusual objects drive the stories in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Greg Bear’s Eon, and Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. Even in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’, I later realised. There is something intensely science fictional about the very notion of a big dumb object, embodying as it does both the enigmatic sense of wonder of the best SF and the urge to understand, to examine and clarify. After all, while a big dumb object may be alien and enigmatic, it’s also a made object, and therefore is knowable and understandable.

  When I suggested the book to my editor at the SF Book Club, Andrew Wheeler, he was eager, but made it clear I needed a good name for the book. I began to look around for ideas, for inspiration. I was working on another project at the time, and as research was reading Brian Aldiss’s 1974 anthology, Space Opera. In it he explains much of the joy and wonder of space opera. The closing section of the book deals with the great machines-spacecraft and otherwise— that uniquely belong to science fiction. He titled that section of the book, ‘these godlike machines’. I had my title and, at the same time, threw the first variable into the project.

  I wrote to writers whose work I admired and whom I hoped would write for the book-Stephen Baxter, Cory Doctorow, Greg Egan, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, and Sean Williams-and I asked if they’d write a new ‘big dumb object story’ for my book. Writers are funny folk and they sometimes hear what they want to hear. We don’t live in the forties and fifties any more, and when they heard ‘godlike machines’, they began to play with the idea. Did it have to be ‘godlike machines’? Couldn’t it be ‘machinelike gods’? How big did a godlike machine have to be?

  Over the course of editing a number of anthologies I’ve realized that there are times when you need to stick to your original vision, and there are times when you need to get out of the way and let creative people do what they do best. So, I said yes. You could have an enormous enigmatic megastructure drifting in space, or buried beneath the crust of some distant world, or you could have some strange, powerful literally god-like machine. Heck, you could turn the moon into green cheese if you wanted to. All you had to do was tell an amazing science fictional tale, one that spoke to the basic idea I’d started with.

  And slowly, over a period of about eight months, the stories began to drop into my mail box. In one, strange powerful machines battled one another, in others something strange and mysterious happened in a distant corner of our solar system. I don’t know that the book you are about to read is the most definitive addressing of the ‘big dumb object’ theme in science fiction, but I do know you are about to encounter a handful of stories that are made from the pure stuff of science fiction, filled with that sense of wonder many of us look for in the very best science fiction. I hope you like it as much as I do.

  —Jonathan Strahan Perth, Western Australia June 2008/June 2010

  TROIKA

  Alastair Reynolds

  Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland, and the Netherlands, where he spent 12 years working as a scientist for the European Space Agency. He became a full-time writer in 2004, and recently married his long-time partner, Jo-sette. Reynolds has been publishing short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published nine novels: the ‘Inhibitor’ trilogy, British Science Fiction Association award winner Chasm City, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, The Prefect and House of Suns. His most recent novel is Terminal World. His short fiction has been collected in Zima Blue and Other Stories, Galactic North, and Deep Navigation. In his spare time he rides horses.

  By the time I reach the road to Zvezdniy Gorodok acute hypothermia is beginning to set in. I recognize the symptoms from my training: stage one moving into two, as my body redirects blood away from skin to conserve heat-shivering and a general loss of coordination the result. Later I can expect a deterioration of vasomotor tone as the muscles now contracting my peripheral blood vessels become exhausted. As blood surges back to my chilled extremities, I’ll start to feel hot rather than cold. Slipping ever further into disorientation, it will take an effort of will not to succumb to that familiar and distressing syndrome, paradoxical undressing. The few layers of clothes I’m wearing—the pajamas, the thin coat I stole from Doctor Kizim—will start feeling too warm. If I don’t get warm soon they’ll find me naked and dead in the snow.

  How long have I been out? An hour, two hours? There’s no way to tell. It’s like being back on the Tereshkova, when we slept so little that a day could feel like a week. All I know is that it’s still night. They’ll find me when the sun is up, but until then there’s still time to locate Nesha Petrova.

  I touch the metal prize in my pocket, reassuring myself that it’s still there.

  As if invoked by the act of touching the prize, a monstrous machine comes roaring towards me out of the night. It’s yellow, with an angled shovel on the front. I stumble into the path of its headlights and raise a wary hand. The snow-plow sounds its horn. I jerk back, out of the way of the blade and the flurry of dirty snow it flings to one side.

  I think for a moment it’s going to su
rge on past, but it doesn’t. The machine slows and stops. Maybe he thinks he’s hit me. It’s good—a robot snowplow wouldn’t stop, so there must be someone operating this one. I hobble around to the cab, where the driver’s glaring at me through an unopened window. He’s got a moustache, a woolen hat jammed down over his hair and ears, the red nose of a serious drinker.

  Above the snorting, impatient diesel I call: “I could use a ride to town.”

  The driver looks at me like I’m dirt, some piece of roadside debris he’d have been better shoveling into the verge. This far out of town, on this road, it doesn’t take much guesswork to figure out where I’ve come from. The hospital, the facility, the madhouse, whatever you want to call it, will have been visible in the distance on a clear day—a forbidding smudge of dark, tiny-windowed buildings, tucked behind high, razor wire-topped security fencing.

  He lowers the window an inch. “Do yourself a favor, friend. Go back, get warm.”

  “I won’t make it back. Early-onset hypothermia. Please, take me to Zvezdniy Gorodok. I can’t give you much, but you’re welcome to these.” My fingers feel like awkward tele-operated waldos, the kind we’d had on the Progress. I fumble a pack of cigarettes from my coat pocket and push the crushed and soggy rectangle up to the slit in the window.

  “All you’ve got?”

  “They’re American. You know how hard these are to come by now.”

  The driver grunts something unintelligible, but takes the cigarettes anyway. He opens the pack to inspect the contents, sniffing at them. “How old are these?”

  “You can still smoke them.”

  The driver leans over to the open the other door. “Get in. I’ll take you as far as the first crossroad on the edge of town. You get out when we stop. You’re on your own from then on.”

  I’ll agree to any arrangement provided it gets me a few minutes in the warmth of the cab. For now I’m still lucid enough to recognize the hypothermia creeping over me. That state of clinical detachment won’t last forever.

  I climb in, taking deep, shivering breaths.

  “Thank you.”

  “The edge of town, that’s as far as we go,” he says, in case I didn’t get it the first time. His breath stinks of alcohol. “I’m caught giving you a ride, it won’t be good for me.”

  “It won’t be good for either of us.”

  The driver shifts the snowplow back into gear and lets her roll, the engine bellowing as the blade bites snow. “Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, it won’t work. They’ll find you in Zvezdniy Gorodok. It’s not a big place and there’s nowhere else to go. In case no one pointed it out to you, this is the arse end of nowhere. And the trains aren’t running.”

  “I only need to get to town.”

  He looks at me, assessing the shabbiness of my dress, the wild state of my beard and hair. “Wild night ahead of you?”

  “Something like that.”

  3

  He’s got the radio on, tuned to the state classical music channel. It’s playing Prokofiev. I lean over and turn the volume down, until it’s almost lost under the engine noise.

  “I was listening to that.”

  “Please. Until we get there.”

  “Got a problem with music?”

  “Some of it.”

  The driver shrugs-he doesn’t seem to mind as much as he pretends. Panicking suddenly, imagining I might have dropped it in the snow, I pat my pocket again. But—along with Doctor Kizim’s security pass—the little metal box is still there.

  It takes all of my resolve not to take it out and turn the little handle that makes it play. Not because I can stand to hear it again, but because I want to be sure it still works.

  The snowplow’s tail lights fade into the night. The driver has kept to his word, taking us through the abandoned checkpoint, then to the first crossroad inside the old city boundary and no further. It’s been good to get warm, my clothes beginning to dry, but now that I’m outside again the cold only takes a few seconds to reach my bones. The blizzard has abated while we drove, but the snow’s still falling, coming down in soft flurries from a milky predawn sky.

  We’d passed no other vehicles or pedestrians, and at this early hour Zvezdniy Gorodok gives every indication of being deserted. The housing blocks are mostly unlit, save for the occasional illuminated window—a pale, curtained rectangle of dim yellow against the otherwise dark edifice. The buildings, set back from the intersecting roads in long ranks, look drearily similar, as if stamped from the same machine tool-even the party images flickering on their sides are the same from building to building. The same faces, the same slogans. For a moment I have the sense of having embarked on a ludicrous and faintly delusional task. Any one of these buildings could be where she lives. They’ll find me long before I have time to search each lobby, hoping to find a name.

  I’d shown the driver the address I’d written down, pulled from the public telephone directory on Doctor Kizim’s desk. He’d given me a rough idea of where I ought to head. The apartment complex is somewhere near the railway station— I’ll have to search the surrounding streets until I find it.

  “I know where the station is,” I tell the driver. “I was here when it was a sealed training facility.”

  “You had something to do with the space program?”

  “I did my bit.”

  Zvezdniy Gorodok—Starry Town, or Star City. In the old days, you needed a permit just to get into it. Now that the space program is over-it has “achieved all necessary objectives,” according to the official line of the Second Soviet-Zvezdniy Gorodok is just another place to live, work, and die, its utilitarian housing projects radiating far beyond the old boundary. The checkpoint is a disused ruin and the labs and training facilities have been turned into austere community buildings. More farmers and factory workers live here now than engineers, scientists, and former-cosmonauts.

  I’m lucky to have got this far.

  I escaped through a gap in the facility’s security fence, in a neglected corner of the establishment tucked away behind one of the kitchens. I’d known about the breech for at least six months-long enough to reassure myself that no one else had noticed it, and that the break could not be seen from the administrative offices or any of the surveillance cameras. It was good fortune that the fence had that gap, but I still wouldn’t have got far without the help from Doctor Kizim. I don’t know if he expects me to succeed in my escape attempt, but Doctor Kizim—who had always been more sympathetic to the Tereshkova’s survivors than any of the other medics—had turned a conveniently blind eye. And it was his coat that I had taken. It wasn’t much of a coat for blizzards, but without it I doubt that I would have made it as far as the snow-plow, let alone Zvezdniy Gorodok. I just hope he doesn’t get into too much trouble when they find out I took it.

  5

  I don’t expect to get the chance to apologize to him.

  The snow stopped falling completely, and the sun-pink and depleted of heat-is beginning to break through the gloom on the eastern horizon, when I find the railway station. I begin to explore the surrounding streets, trying to find the address. More lights have come on now and I’m noticing the beginning of daily activity. One or two citizens pass me in the snow, but they have their heads down and pay me no special attention. Few vehicles are on the roads, and since the trains aren’t running, the area around the station is almost totally devoid of activity. When a large car—a Zil limousine, black and muscular as a panther- swings onto the street I’m walking down, I don’t have time to hide. But the Zil sails by, tires spraying muddy slush, and as it passes I see that it’s empty. The car must be on its way to collect a party official from one of the better districts.

  I’ve been walking for an hour, trying not to glance over my shoulder too often, when I find Nesha’s building. The apartment complex has an entrance lobby anyone can enter. It smells of toilets and alcohol. Some of the windows in the outer wall are covered by plywood panels, where the glass has broken. It’s dr
aughty and unlit, the tiled floor filthy with footprints and paper and smashed glass. There’s a door into the rest of the building, but it can only be opened by someone inside. In my cold, sodden slippers I squelch to the buzzer panel next to the mailboxes.

  I catch my breath. Everything hinges on this moment. If I’m wrong about Nesha, or if she’s moved elsewhere, or died-it’s been a long time, after all-then everything will have been for nothing.

  But her name’s still there.

  N. Petrova. She lives on the ninth floor.

  It may not mean anything. She may still have died or been moved on. I reach out a numb finger and press the buzzer anyway. There’s no sound, no reassuring response. I wait a minute then press it again. Outside, a stray dog with mad eyes yellows the snow under a lamppost. I press the buzzer again, shivering more than when I was outside.

  A woman’s voice crackles through the grill above the buzzers. “Yes?”

  “Nesha Petrova?” I ask, leaning to bring my lips closer to the grill.

  “Who is it?”

  “Dimitri Ivanov.” I wait a second or two for her to respond to the name.

  “From building services?”

  I assume that there’s no camera letting Nesha see me, if there ever was. “Dimitri Ivanov, the cosmonaut. I was on the ship, the Tereshkova. The one that met the Matryoshka.”

  Silence follows. I realize, dimly, that there’s an eventuality I’ve never allowed for. Nesha Petrova may be too old to remember anything of importance. She may be too old to care.

  I shuffle wet feet to stave off the cold.

  “Nesha?”

  “There were three cosmonauts.”

  I lean into the grill again. “I’m one of them. The other two were Galenka Makarova and Yakov Demin. They’re both dead now. The VASIMIR engine malfunctioned on the way home, exposing them to too much radiation. I’m the only one left.”

  “Why should I believe you?”