Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 41

"And I awoke in a strange house, silent and alone." He looked a long way off, seeing what, I do not know. Himself laid a hand on his arm.

"Wisht. What you had, you lost well before you threw the switch."

FitzHugh grabbed O Daugherty's hand and held it tight. "But, don't you see? I lost all the hope, too.

The memories of all the joy that went before; of a bright-eyed five-year-old whose smile could light the room. Of the possibility that Lisa and I might have worked it through." He and O Daugherty exchanged a long, mutual look. "I owed her that, didn't I? I owed it to her to try to solve our problems and not abolish them as things that never were."

"Sure," said Himself, "the bad comes mingled with the good; and if you excise the first, you lose the other as well."

"There's one thing I hold on to," fitzHugh said.

"And what's that?"

"That Lisa-whoever she is, from whichever college mixer or cla.s.sroom where we never met-that in this revision, she's had a better life than the one I gave her. I hold that hope tight as a s.h.i.+eld against my crime."

"Crime?" said Danny. "What crime was that?"

FitzHugh wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. "Lenny. He was never born. He'll never have a chance to grow out of his rebellion and become a better person. Lisa is out there somewhere. Lisa has...

possibilities. But there is no Lenny. There never was that bright-eyed five-year-old. There never will be.

When I disturbed the time-stream, I wiped him out. I obliterated his life: all the hopes and fears and hates and joys... All the possibilities that were him. How is that so different from murder?"

The silence grew long.

Then fitzHugh pushed himself away from the bar and stood a little uneasily. Alarmed, Professor Cartwright took him by the elbow to steady him. FitzHugh looked at the rest of us. "But it all never happened, right? There oughtn't be any guilt over something that never happened."

It was Danny who spoke-hesitantly, and with more kindness than I had looked for. "Could you not build another of those chronon projectors and aim it back and correct what you did...?" But he trailed off at the end, as if he already suspected what the answer must be.

FitzHugh turned haunted eyes on him. "No. History is contingent. There's no chance that a random disturbance to the revision would recreate the original. You may break the pack on a pool table with a well-aimed shot. You cannot bring the b.a.l.l.s back together with another." Cartwright guided him to the door, and the rest of us watched in silence.

"The poor man," said Maura, when he had gone.

O Daugherty rapped hard on the maple counter top, as if testing its solidity. "So fragile," he said, almost to himself. "Who knows if another time wave might be roaring down on us even now, a vast tsunami to wash all of us away?"The O Neil returned from the back room with a glower on his face. "Ireland will get the Six Counties back before I get that pool table," he said. "Let's go on back to the house, Mickey."

"I'll catch you later," I told him. "It's a busy night and Himself can use the help as much as I can use the cash."

The O Neil shook his head. "O Daugherty, you need to take on a partner, and that's a fact."

Himself shrugged and served him a parting gla.s.s of black Guinness. "Someday, maybe," he said. Me, I glanced over at the photograph on the wall, where O Daugherty stood, arms crossed and legs akimbo, before his newly opened pub; and it seemed to me, though I don't know why, that the picture was all out of kilter, as if something large were missing.

Seventy-Two Letters

TED CHIANG.

Ted Chiang is a technical writer who occasionally writes short SF that is then usually nominated for, or the winner of, awards. He is a private person whose short bio goes like this: "Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives in Bellevue, Was.h.i.+ngton. Of his nonfiction, written in his capacity as a technical writer, perhaps the most popular is the C++ Tutorial packaged with certain versions of Microsoft's C++ compiler. He reads some comics, enjoys going to the movies, and watches television more than is good for him." He has published four previous SF stories, all of which are distinctive and highly accomplished.

"Seventy-Two Letters" is another piece (see the Bell, page 85) that was published in Vanis.h.i.+ng Acts, edited by Ellen Datlow. Although it is only tangentially related to the theme of the anthology, it is certainly one of the best stories in a strong book. It is in that small category of alternate science alternate history fiction pioneered a few years ago by Richard Garfinkle (in his novel Celestial Matters ). The story takes place in an alternate 19th Century. In this case, as critic Mark Kelly notes, various medieval scientific theories such as the doctrine of preformation, which supposed that fetuses existed fully formed inside the sperm or eggs of their parents, are real. In a year of excellent novellas, none was better than this.

When he was a child, Robert's favorite toy was a simple one, a clay doll that could do nothing but walk forward. While his parents entertained their guests in the garden outside, discussing Victoria's ascension to the throne or the Chartist reforms, Robert would follow the doll as it marched down the corridors of the family home, turning it around corners or back where it came from. The doll didn't obey commands or exhibit any sense at all; if it met a wall, the diminutive clay figure would keep marching until it gradually mashed its arms and legs into misshapen flippers. Sometimes Robert would let it do that, strictly for his own amus.e.m.e.nt. Once the doll's limbs were thoroughly distorted, he'd pick the toy up and pull the name out, stopping its motion in mid-stride. Then he'd knead the body back into a smooth lump, flatten it out into a plank, and cut out a different figure: a body with one leg crooked, or longer than the other. He would stick the name back into it, and the doll would promptly topple over and push itself around in a little circle.

It wasn't the sculpting that Robert enjoyed; it was mapping out the limits of the name. He liked to see how much variation he could impart to the body before the name could no longer animate it. To save time with the sculpting, he rarely added decorative details; he refined the bodies only as was needed to test the name.

Another of his dolls walked on four legs. The body was a nice one, a finely detailed porcelain horse, but Robert was more interested in experimenting with its name. This name obeyed commands to start and stop and knew enough to avoid obstacles, and Robert tried inserting it into bodies of his own making. But this name had more exacting body requirements, and he was never able to form a clay bodyit could animate. He formed the legs separately and then attached them to the body, but he wasn't able to blend the seams smooth enough; the name didn't recognize the body as a single continuous piece.

He scrutinized the names themselves, looking for some simple subst.i.tutions that might distinguish two-leggedness from four-leggedness, or make the body obey simple commands. But the names looked entirely different; on each sc.r.a.p of parchment were inscribed seventy-two tiny Hebrew letters, arranged in twelve rows of six, and so far as he could tell, the order of the letters was utterly random.

Robert Stratton and his fourth form cla.s.smates sat quietly as Master Trevelyan paced between the rows of desks.

"Langdale, what is the doctrine of names?"

"All things are reflections of G.o.d, and, um, all-"

"Spare us your b.u.mbling. Thorburn, can you tell us the doctrine of names?"

"As all things are reflections of G.o.d, so are all names reflections of the divine name."

"And what is an object's true name?"

"That name which reflects the divine name in the same manner as the object reflects G.o.d."

"And what is the action of a true name?"

"To endow its object with a reflection of divine power."

"Correct. Halliwell, what is the doctrine of signatures?"

The natural philosophy lesson continued until noon, but because it was a Sat.u.r.day, there was no instruction for the rest of the day. Master Trevelyan dismissed the cla.s.s, and the boys of Cheltenham school dispersed.

After stopping at the dormitory, Robert met his friend Lionel at the border of school grounds. "So the wait's over? Today's the day?" Robert asked.

"I said it was, didn't I?"

"Let's go, then." The pair set off to walk the mile and a half to Lionel's home.

During his first year at Cheltenham, Robert had known Lionel hardly at all; Lionel was one of the day-boys, and Robert, like all the boarders, regarded them with suspicion. Then, purely by chance, Robert ran into him while on holiday, during a visit to the British Museum. Robert loved the museum: the frail mummies and immense sarcophagi; the stuffed platypus and pickled mermaid; the wall bristling with elephant tusks and moose antlers and unicorn horns. That particular day he was at the display of elemental sprites: He was reading the card explaining the salamander's absence when he suddenly recognized Lionel, standing right next to him, peering at the undine in its jar. Conversation revealed their shared interest in the sciences, and the two became fast friends.

As they walked down the road, they kicked a large pebble back and forth between them. Lionel gave the pebble a kick, and laughed as it skittered between Robert's ankles. "I couldn't wait to get out of there," he said. "I think one more doctrine would have been more than I could bear."

"Why do they even bother calling it natural philosophy?" said Robert. "Just admit it's another theology lesson and be done with it." The two of them had recently purchased A Boy's Guide to Nomenclature, which informed them that nomenclators no longer spoke in terms of G.o.d or the divine name. Instead, current thinking held that there was a lexical universe as well as a physical one, and bringing an object together with a compatible name caused the latent potentialities of both to be realized.

Nor was there a single "true name" for a given object: Depending on its precise shape, a body might be compatible with several names, known as its ["euonyms,"] and conversely a simple name might tolerate significant variations in body shape, as his childhood marching doll had demonstrated.

When they reached Lionel's home, they promised the cook they would be in for dinner shortly and headed to the garden out back. Lionel had converted a tool shed in his family's garden into a laboratory, which he used to conduct experiments. Normally Robert came by on a regular basis, but recently Lionel had been working on an experiment that he was keeping secret. Only now was he ready to show Robert his results. Lionel had Robert wait outside while he entered first, and then let him enter.

A long shelf ran along every wall of the shed, crowded with racks of vials, stoppered bottles of green gla.s.s, and a.s.sorted rocks and mineral specimens. A table decorated with stains and scorch marksdominated the cramped s.p.a.ce, and it supported the apparatus for Lionel's latest experiment: a cucurbit clamped in a stand so that its bottom rested in a basin full of water, which in turn sat on a tripod above a lit oil lamp. A mercury thermometer was also fixed in the basin.

"Take a look," said Lionel.

Robert leaned over to inspect the cucurbit's contents. At first it appeared to be nothing more than foam, a dollop of suds that might have dripped off a pint of stout. But as he looked closer, he realized that what he thought were bubbles were actually the interstices of a glistening latticework. The froth consisted of homunculi : tiny seminal foetuses. Their bodies were transparent individually, but collectively their bulbous heads and strand-like limbs adhered to form a pale, dense foam.

"So you w.a.n.ked off into a jar and kept the s.p.u.n.k warm?" he asked, and Lionel shoved him. Robert laughed and raised his hands in a placating gesture. "No, honestly, it's a wonder. How'd you do it?"

Mollified, Lionel said, "It's a real balancing act. You have to keep the temperature just right, of course, but if you want them to grow, you also have to keep just the right mix of nutrients. Too thin a mix, and they starve. Too rich, and they get over-lively and start fighting with each other."

"You're having me on."

"It's the truth; look it up if you don't believe me. Battles amongst sperm are what cause monstrosities to be born. If an injured foetus is the one that makes it to the egg, the baby that's born is deformed."

"I thought that was because of a fright the mother had when she was carrying." Robert could just make out the miniscule squirmings of the individual foetuses. He realized that the froth was ever so slowly roiling as a result of their collective motions.

"That's only for some kinds, like ones that are all hairy or covered in blotches. Babies that don't have arms or legs, or have misshapen ones, they're the ones that got caught in a fight back when they were sperm. That's why you can't provide too rich a broth, especially if they haven't any place to go: They get in a frenzy. You can lose all of them pretty quick that way."

"How long can you keep them growing?"

"Probably not much longer," said Lionel. "It's hard to keep them alive if they haven't reached an egg.

I read about one in France that was grown till it was the size of a fist, and they had the best equipment available. I just wanted was to see if I could do it at all."

Robert stared at the foam, remembering the doctrine of preformation that Master Trevelyan had drilled into them: All living things had been created at the same time, long ago, and births today were merely enlargements of the previously imperceptible. Although they appeared newly created, these homunculi were countless years old; for all of human history they had lain nested within generations of their ancestors, waiting for their turn to be born.

In fact, it wasn't just them who had waited; he himself must have done the same thing prior to his birth. If his father were to do this experiment, the tiny figures Robert saw would be his unborn brothers and sisters. He knew they were insensible until reaching an egg, but he wondered what thoughts they'd have if they weren't. He imagined the sensation of his body, every bone and organ soft and clear as gelatin, sticking to those of myriad identical siblings. What would it be like, looking through transparent eyelids, realizing the mountain in the distance was actually a person, recognizing it as his brother? What if he knew he'd become as ma.s.sive and solid as that colossus, if only he could reach an egg? It was no wonder they fought.

Robert Stratton went on to read nomenclature at Cambridge's Trinity College. There he studied kabbalistic texts written centuries before, when nomenclators were still called ba'alei shem and automata were called golem, texts that laid the foundation for the science of names: the Sefer Yezirah, Eleazar of Worms' Sodei Razayya, Abulafia's Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba. Then he studied the alchemical treaties that placed the techniques of alphabetic manipulation in a broader philosophical and mathematical context: Llull's Ars Magna, Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica.

He learned that every name was a combination of several epithets, each designating a specific trait or capability. Epithets were generated by compiling all the words that described the desired trait: cognates and etymons, from languages both living and extinct. By selectively subst.i.tuting and permuting letters, onecould distill from those words their common essence, which was the epithet for that trait. In certain instances, epithets could be used as the bases for triangulation, allowing one to derive epithets for traits undescribed in any language. The entire process relied on intuition as much as formulae; the ability to choose the best letter permutations was an unteachable skill.

He studied the modern techniques of nominal integration and factorization, the former being the means by which a set of epithets-pithy and evocative-were commingled into the seemingly random string of letters that made up a name, the latter by which a name was decomposed into its const.i.tuent epithets. Not every method of integration had a matching factorization technique: A powerful name might be refactored to yield a set of epithets different from those used to generate it, and those epithets were often useful for that reason. Some names resisted refactorization, and nomenclators strove to develop new techniques to penetrate their secrets.

Nomenclature was undergoing something of a revolution during this time. There had long been two cla.s.ses of names: those for animating a body, and those functioning as amulets. Health amulets were worn as protection from injury or illness, while others rendered a house resistant to fire or a s.h.i.+p less likely to founder at sea. Of late, however, the distinction between these categories of names was becoming blurred, with exciting results.

The nascent science of thermodynamics, which established the interconvertibility of heat and work, had recently explained how automata gained their motive power by absorbing heat from their surroundings. Using this improved understanding of heat, a Namenmeister in Berlin had developed a new cla.s.s of amulet that caused a body to absorb heat from one location and release it in another.

Refrigeration employing such amulets was simpler and more efficient than that based on the evaporation of a volatile fluid, and had immense commercial application. Amulets were likewise facilitating the improvement of automata: An Edinburgh nomenclator's research into the amulets that prevented objects from becoming lost had led him to patent a household automaton able to return objects to their proper places.

Upon graduation, Stratton took up residence in London and secured a position as a nomenclator at Coade Manufactory, one of the leading makers of automata in England.

Stratton's most recent automaton, cast from plaster of paris, followed a few paces behind him as he entered the factory building. It was an immense brick structure with skylights for its roof; half of the building was devoted to casting metal, the other half to ceramics. In either section, a meandering path connected the various rooms, each one housing the next step in transforming raw materials into finished automata. Stratton and his automaton entered the ceramics portion.

They walked past a row of low vats in which the clay was mixed. Different vats contained different grades of clay, ranging from common red clay to fine white kaolin, resembling enormous mugs abrim with liquid chocolate or heavy cream; only the strong mineral smell broke the illusion. The paddles stirring the clay were connected by gears to a drive shaft, mounted just beneath the skylights, that ran the length of the room. At the end of the room stood an automatous engine: a castiron giant that cranked the drive wheel tirelessly. Walking past, Stratton could detect a faint coolness in the air as the engine drew heat from its surroundings.

The next room held the molds for casting. Chalky white sh.e.l.ls bearing the inverted contours of various automata were stacked along the walls. In the central portion of the room, ap.r.o.n-clad journeymen sculptors worked singly and in pairs, tending the coc.o.o.ns from which automata were hatched.

The sculptor nearest him was a.s.sembling the mold for a putter, a broad-headed quadruped employed in the mines for pus.h.i.+ng trolleys of ore. The young man looked up from his work. "Were you looking for someone, sir?" he asked.

"I'm to meet Master Willoughby here," replied Stratton.

"Pardon, I didn't realize. I'm sure he'll be here shortly." The journeyman returned to his task. Harold Willoughby was a Master Sculptor First-Degree; Stratton was consulting him on the design of a reusable mold for casting his automaton. While he waited, Stratton strolled idly amongst the molds. His automatonstood motionless, ready for its next command.

Willoughby entered from the door to the metalworks, his face flushed from the heat of the foundry.

"My apologies for being late, Mr. Stratton," he said. "We've been working toward a large bronze for some weeks now, and today was the pour. You don't want to leave the lads alone at a time like that."

"I understand completely," replied Stratton.

Wasting no time, Willoughby strode over to the new automaton. "Is this what you've had Moore doing all these months?" Moore was the journeyman a.s.sisting Stratton on his project.

Stratton nodded. "The boy does good work." Following Stratton's requests, Moore had fas.h.i.+oned countless bodies, all variations on a single basic theme, by applying modeling clay to an armature, and then used them to create plaster casts on which Stratton could test his names.

Willoughby inspected the body. "Some nice detail; looks straightforward enough-hold on now." He pointed to the automaton's hands: Rather than the traditional paddle or mitten design, with fingers suggested by grooves in the surface, these were fully formed, each one having a thumb and four distinct and separate fingers. "You don't mean to tell me those are functional?"

"That's correct."

Willoughby's skepticism was plain. "Show me."

Stratton addressed the automaton. "Flex your fingers." The automaton extended both hands, flexed and straightened each pair of fingers in turn, and then returned its arms to its sides.

"I congratulate you, Mr. Stratton," said the sculptor. He squatted to examine the automaton's fingers more closely. "The fingers need to be bent at each joint for the name to take?"

"That's right. Can you design a piece mold for such a form?"

Willoughby clicked his tongue several times. "That'll be a tricky bit of business," he said. "We might have to use a waste mold for each casting. Even with a piece mold, these'd be very expensive for ceramic."

"I think they will be worth the expense. Permit me to demonstrate." Stratton addressed to the automaton. "Cast a body; use that mold over there."

The automaton trudged over to a nearby wall and picked up the pieces of the mold Stratton had indicated: It was the mold for a small porcelain messenger. Several journeymen stopped what they were doing to watch the automaton carry the pieces over to a work area. There it fitted the various sections together and bound them tightly with twine. The sculptors' wonderment was apparent as they watched the automaton's fingers work, looping and threading the loose ends of the twine into a knot. Then the automaton stood the a.s.sembled mold upright and headed off to get a pitcher of clay slip.

"That's enough," said Willoughby. The automaton stopped its work and resumed its original standing posture. Examining the mold, Willoughby asked, "Did you train it yourself?"

"I did. I hope to have Moore train it in metal casting."

"Do you have names that can learn other tasks?"

"Not as yet. However, there's every reason to believe that an entire cla.s.s of similar names exists, one for every sort of skill needing manual dexterity."

"Indeed?" Willoughby noticed the other sculptors watching, and called out, "If you've nothing to do, there's plenty I can a.s.sign to you." The journeymen promptly resumed their work, and Willoughby turned back to Stratton. "Let us go to your office to speak about this further."