Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 16

"Did you wish to notify anyone in the city about your new destination?" Com asked Clancy.

"Hmm," said Clancy, with an odd smile, "that's an interesting question. And the answer, interestingly, is no. Take another note, Com, for the book."

He leant back with his hands behind his head.

"Ten thousand kilometres out," he dictated, "I changed my destination so no one could find me if anything went wrong. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to dispense with the safety net, to get a sense of what it must have been like for those settlers in the fourth millennium, setting out on their one-way journey out into the unknown."

He considered, then shrugged.

"Right, Com. At this point add a chapter about the Aristotle Complex. What we know of the early settlers, their motives, their desire to escape from decadence... and so on. Themes: finality, no turning back, taking risks, a complete break with the past."

"Neo-romantic style?" "Neo-romantic stroke factual hard-boiled. Oh and include three poetic sharp-edge sentences. Just three. Low adjective count."

"Okay. Shall I read it through to you?" said Com, having composed a chapter of 2,000 words without causing a gap in the conversation.

"Not now," said Clancy. "I'm not in the mood. Get me a dinner fixed will you, and something to watch on screen. How long will it be till we reach the Complex?"

"The distance is about five pa.r.s.ecs. It'll take three days."

It was not the first voyage of this kind that Clancy had made. This was his career. He travelled alone to the "lost worlds," he got to know them: their way of life, their myths, their beliefs. And then he returned with a book.

Returning with the book was his particular trademark. The completed book went on sale, in electronic form, at the exact same moment that he stepped out of his sphere. It had become a publis.h.i.+ng event. He sold a million within an hour and became the city's most talked-about celebrity. The literary s.p.a.ceman: brave, elegant, alone. He attended all the most fas.h.i.+onable parties. He invariably embarked on a love affair with at least one beautiful and brilliant woman.

And when the love affair grew cold-as it always did, for there was a certain emptiness where his heart should be- and when he sensed that he had reached the end of the city's fickle concentration span, he would go off once more into s.p.a.ce.

He had a fear of being trapped, of being tied down, of becoming ordinary.

"The first approach to a settled planet," said Clancy, "is a uniquely humbling experience. Here are human beings whose ancestors have gone about their lives without any reference to the universe outside for 30 generations. Invariably, in the absence of the vast pyramid of infrastructure on which modern society rests, their technology has become very basic. Invariably the story of their origins has been compacted into some legend. They have had more practical things to worry about for the last thousand years. My arrival, however it is managed, is inevitably a cultural bombsh.e.l.l. Their lives will never be the same again."

He considered. They had reached the Aristotle Complex an hour ago. Sphere was now using the short cut of non-Euclidean s.p.a.ce to leap from star to star and planet to planet, looking for inhabited worlds, very quickly but mechanically, like Com searching the Cosmopolitan Encyclopedia for a single word.

"Some say that for this reason I should not disturb them. This is surely poppyc.o.c.k. On that argument no human being would ever visit another's home, no one would talk to another, let alone take the risk of love. Not that I ever do take that risk of course."

He frowned. "Delete that last sentence."

"Deleted. Sphere has found an inhabited planet."

A fisher king was fis.h.i.+ng in his watery world when the sphere came through the sky. Standing in the prow of his fine longboat, the tall, bearded upright king watched a silver ball, like a tiny, immaculate moon, descending towards his island home. And his household warriors, sitting at their oars, groaned and muttered, watching the sphere and then turning to look at him to see what he would do.

Aware of their gaze and never once faltering as he played his hereditary role, he ordered them to cut away the nets and row at once for the sh.o.r.e.

When Clancy emerged, his sphere perched on its tripod legs on the top of a tall headland, it was mainly women and children who were standing round him. Most of the men were out at sea.

He smiled.

"I won't harm you," he said, "I want to be your friend."

The words didn't matter much of course. After all this time these fisher-people had evolved a completely new language. It was salty as seaweed, full of the sound of water."Iglop!" they said. "Waarsha slees.h.!.+"

Clancy smiled again. They were pleasant-looking people, healthy-looking and well fed. Men and women alike went bare from the waist up, and wore kilts of some seal-like skin.

"Sky!" said Clancy pointing upwards.

"Sea!" (he pointed) "Man!"

It took them a while to grasp the game, but then they did so with gusto, drawing closer to the strange man in his rainbow clothes, and to his strange silvery globe.

"Eyes," said Clancy. "Nose. Mouth."

"Erlash," they called out. "Memaarsha. Vroom."

Hidden in Clancy's pocket, Com took all this in, comparing every utterance with its database of the language of the settlers before they set out a thousand years ago.

Com knew that there are regularities in the way that languages change. Sounds migrate together across the palate like flocks of birds. Meanings s.h.i.+ft over the spectrum from particular to general, concrete to abstract, in orderly and measurable ways. Com formed 5,000 hypotheses a second, tested each one, discarded most, elaborated a few. By the time the fisher king arrived with his warriors and his long robe, Com was already able to have a go at translating.

It was as the king approached that Clancy first became really aware of the ma.s.sive presence of the moon.

"I was on a rocky promontory of the island. Beyond the excited faces, beyond the approaching king, was a glittering blue sea dotted with dozens of other islands. But all this was dwarfed by the immense pink cratered sphere above, filling up a tenth part of the entire sky.

"What is our moon in Cosmopolis? A faint smudge in the orange gloom above a ventilation shaft? A pale blotch behind the rooftop holograms? We glance up and notice it for a moment, briefly entertained perhaps by the thought that there is a world of sorts outside our own, and then turn our attention back to our more engrossing surroundings.

"But this was truly a celestial sphere, a gigantic ball of rock, hanging above us, dominating the sky. I had known of its size before I landed but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of it.

"I had yet to experience the t.i.tanic ocean tides, the palpable gravity s.h.i.+fts, the daily solar eclipses, but I knew this was a world ruled over by its moon."

Clancy paused and took a sip of red wine, seated comfortably in his impregnable sphere where he had retired, as was his custom, for the night. He had declined an invitation to dine with the King, saying that he would do the feast more justice the following evening. The truth was the first encounter was always extremely tiring and he needed rest. And alien food always played havoc with his digestion the first time round, guaranteeing a sleepless night.

"Com," he said, "prepare me a database of lunar myths."

He considered.

"And one on lunar poetry, and one on references to unusual moons round other inhabited worlds."

"Done. Do you want me to...?"

"No, carry on with dictation."

"The King is a genuinely impressive individual. His voice, his posture, his sharp grey eyes, everything about him speaks of his supreme self-a.s.surance. He has absolutely no doubt at all about either his right or his ability to be in charge. And why should he? As he himself calmly told us, he is the descendant of an ancient union between sky and sea. He greeted me as a long-lost cousin..."

Clancy hesitated. A shadow crossed his mind.

"I pin them out like f.u.c.king b.u.t.terflies!" he exclaimed. "I dissect them and pin them out! Why can't I let anything just live?"

Com was sensitive to emotional fluctuations and recognized this one, not from the inside of course but from the outside, as a pattern it had observed before.

"The first day is always extremely tiring," Com suggested gently. "In the past we've found that acortical relaxant, a warm drink and sleep..."

"Yes, whatever we do, let's not face the emptiness," growled Clancy, but he seemed to acquiesce at first, collecting the pill and the drink dispensed by Sphere, and preparing to settle into the bed that unfolded from the floor...

Then "No!" he exclaimed, tossing the pill aside. "If I can't feel at least I can f.u.c.king think. Come on, Com, let's do some work on the theme. Listen, I have an idea..."

Lying with two of his concubines in his bed of animal skins, the fisher king was also kept awake by a hectic stream of thoughts. His mind was no less quick than Clancy's but it worked in a very different way. Clancy thought like an acrobat, a tightrope walker, nimbly balancing above the void. But the king moved between large solid chunks of certainty. Annihilation was an external threat to be fought off, not an existential hole inside.

He thought of the power of the strange prince in his sphere. He thought about his own sacred bloodline and the kingdom which sustained it. All his life he had deftly managed threats from other island powers, defeating some in war, making allies of others through exchanges of gifts or slaves, or bonds of marriage. But how to play a visitor who came not from across the sea in the long-boat but down from the sky in a kind of silver moon?

He woke one of the concubines. (He was a widower and had never remarried).

"Fetch me my chamberlain. I want to take his advice!"

"There are three kinds of knowledge," Clancy said, "let's call them Deep Knowledge, Slow Knowledge and Quick Knowledge. Deep Knowledge is the stuff which has been hardwired into our brains by evolution itself; the stuff we are born with, the stuff that animals have. It changes in the light of experience, like other knowledge, but only over millions of years. Slow Knowledge is the acc.u.mulation of traditions and traditional techniques pa.s.sed down from generation to generation. It too changes, evolving gradually as some traditions fade and others are slowly elaborated. But, at the conscious level, those who transmit Slow Knowledge see themselves not as innovators but as preservers of wisdom from the past. Quick knowledge is the short cut we have latterly acquired in the form of science, a way of speeding up the trial-and-error process by making it systematic and self-conscious. It is a thousand, a million times quicker than Slow Knowledge, and a billion, billion times speedier than Deep Knowledge.

But unlike them it works by objectivity, by stepping outside a thing.

"Deep, Slow and Quick: we could equate them to rock and sea and air. Rock doesn't move perceptibly at all. Sea moves but stays within its bounds..."

He laughed, "More wine, Com, this is good. Get this: Cosmopolitans are creatures of air, a.n.a.lytical, empirical, technological; lost-worlders are typically creatures of the sea. They all are, but these guys here are literally so. So here's the book t.i.tle: The Meeting of Sea and Sky. See? It ties in with the king's origin myth!"

"That was a marriage of sea and sky," observed Com.

Clancy had retired for the night atop a headland overlooking a wide bay, where a coastal village of wattle huts squatted near the water's edge. But in the morning there was no sea in sight. A plain of mud and rocks and pools stretched as far as the horizon and groups of tiny figures could be seen wandering all over it with baskets on their backs.

The moon was on the far side of the planet, taking the ocean with it. The sky was open and blue.

And when he climbed down the steps (watched by a small crowd which had been waiting there since dawn) Clancy found that he was appreciably heavier than he had been the previous day.

Followed closely by the fascinated crowd-made up mainly of children and old people-Clancy went down from the headland to what had been the bay. A group of women were just coming off the mud flats with their baskets laden with sh.e.l.lfish. He smiled at them and started to walk out himself onto the mud.

Behind him came gasps and stifled incredulous laughs. Clancy stopped.

"Is there a problem?" Clancy had Com ask. (Everyone was diverted for a while by the wondrous talking egg). "Is there some danger that I should be aware of?"

"No, no danger," they answered.

But why then the amazement? Why the laughter? They stared, incredulous.

"Because you are a man!" someone burst out at length. Clancy was momentarily nonplussed, then he gave a little laugh of recognition.

"I've got it, Com. Their reaction is exactly the one I would get if I headed into the women's toilets in some shopping mall."

He addressed the crowd.

"So men don't go on the mud when the tide is out?"

People laughed more easily now, certain that he was merely teasing them.

"These things are different where I come from," said Clancy. "You're telling me that only women here go out on the mud?"

A very old woman came forward.

"Only women of course. That is a woman's realm. Surely that is obvious?"

"And a man's realm is where?"

The woman was irritated, feeling he was making a fool of her.

"To men belongs the sea under the moon," she snapped, withdrawing back into the crowd.

"Sea and sky, sea and sky," muttered Clancy to Com, "it's coming together nicely."

The book was the thing for him. Reality was simply the raw material.

That night the king piled the choicest pieces of meat on Clancy's plate and filled his mug again and again with a thick brew of fermented seaweed. Clancy's stomach groaned in antic.i.p.ation of a night of struggling to unlock the unfamiliar proteins of an alien biological line, but he acted the appreciative guest, telling tales of Cosmopolis and other worlds, and listening politely as the king's poets sang in praise of their mighty lord, the "moon-tall whale-slayer, gatherer of islands, favoured son of sky and sea."

As he lay in the early hours, trying to get rest if not actual sleep, Clancy became aware of a new sound coming from outside-a creaking, snapping sound-and he got up to investigate.

He emerged from his sphere to an astonis.h.i.+ng sight. Over at the eastern horizon, the enormous moon was rising over a returning sea. Brilliant turbulent water, luminous with pink moonlight, was sweeping towards him across the vast dark s.p.a.ce where the women had yesterday hunted for crabs.

But the creaking, snapping sound was much nearer to hand.

"What is that?" Clancy asked.

The king had posted a warrior as guard-of-honour to Clancy's sphere and the man was now sleepily scrambling to his feet.

"What is that sound?" Clancy asked him, holding out Com, his yellow egg.

The sound was so ordinary to the man that he could not immediately understand what it was that Clancy meant. Then he shrugged.