Infinite Fantastika Page 2

  Before science, we were happy. Except when we weren’t. And even then everything was as it was.

  2. AFTER (King’s Lead Hat)

  After science I lived all alone in a fragile, white tower, six miles high with no floors. All my possessions and devices of power hung suspended at various levels. I myself would float from one stratum to another all day long, inspecting and handling those objects which intrigued me according to my mood. The walls of my tower were translucent, and I could see vague shapes constantly flittering outside, like shadows projected on a warped screen. I knew some were my fellows, but most times they did not interest me at all, and I seldom responded to their nebulous gestures. (They were unable to enter, of course, without my permission.) Other shapes represented artificial creations fashioned by those who were so inclined. These living and mechanical beings alternated between postures of menace and allure.

  After science, whenever I was aroused by the suggestive motions of these constructs, I would venture out onto the flat roof of my tower and expose myself to their sexual depredations.

  The sky at this height shaded from blue to indigo, but was empty of Rukhs, who had all died when science came.

  After I had submitted to the mixed hot and moist or cold and oily embraces of the quasi-organic and inorganic mechanisms I would rise to my feet and gaze about, rather bewildered. The view was one of endless towers spiked into a greensward like a flock of javelins hurled from space. Many floating figures speckled the sky, moving here and there, all rather aimlessly.

  After science I dressed entirely in fine copper wire. Wrapping it around my torso occupied much of my day. After I had achieved the precise look I desired, I would immerse myself in a vat of liquid plastic which dried to a certain pliancy, allowing me freedom of motion but preserving my laborious wrappings in their pristine state.

  After science I routinely dried up portions of the sea (by means of focused energies and forces), in order to study the writhings of the creatures thus exposed. If their efforts were not interesting enough, I stimulated them by means of applied probes.

  Once, standing on the sea floor, walls of water rising around me, I picked up a stone that seemed to speak madly to me, but I ignored it.

  After science I ate shards of glass, bricks of rubber and wafers of silicon, washed down with raw protein mix. Each meal required extensive reconstructive surgery of my intestinal tract, which my machines dutifully carried out. Although I did not precisely enjoy such meals, it was both the custom, and all that was available. Or at least, so I was told and believed.

  After science I never had to fear the vagaries of fate. I was master of all I surveyed. No longer could death come unexpectedly in the night from someone’s dream (for no one dreamed) or from the struggles of one’s reluctant food. I had absolute power over the natural world, except where my desires conflicted with those of my peers. Such conflicts provided the main source of excitement in my life. After exerting my destructive talents, I would stand in the middle of burnt and steaming acres as the victor or the vanquished and feel, whether elated or humbled, that I was truly alive.

  After science I reproduced by growing homunculi in kettles. I would decant these wet little duplicates when they were ready and release them into the world by the hundreds. Most perished due to environmental causes, or in the jaws of predators, but one or two survived and grew to self-sufficiency. I never had any contact with these mirror-image adults afterwards, although occasionally I saw them from a distance.

  After science there was no moon. I had used it up during certain experiments and had not thought it worthwhile to create a replacement.

  After science the wind disintegrated whatever manmade object it touched. Only a coating of special molecules kept our towers intact.

  After science all books were written on human skin with ink made of blood. They were stored in a central repository located deep underground. Entrance to the library was guarded by a senile old man who demanded a token donation of either blood or epidermis. It was impossible to refuse him. After paying, I would hastily bandage my wounds and ride the slow elevator down, down, down. The dim and cavernous repository, aisled with shelf after tall shelf, smelled disturbingly of mortality, but I was forced to visit to obtain certain knowledge. I never stayed long.

  After science I was often unsure of who I was. I would wake up from a sleep devoid of dreams convinced that my name was different, that my past consisted of incidents completely alien to my inner self. This feeling usually persisted for several days, my old self gradually returning in bits and pieces, never as strong as I was convinced it had once been, during some past golden era.

  After science all poems were cast in the form of featureless concrete blocks. I frequently attempted to understand them, but succeeded only in abrading the tips of my fingers.

  After science the animals began to war against humanity. In addition to eating my homunculi and those of my competitors, the animals, having gained in cunning thanks to chemical and radioactive mutations, became imbued with malice and possessed of manipulative organs. They fashioned primitive deadfalls and snares. They lurked outside the door of my tower or dived from the skies. They succeeded in killing some people, despite all precautions.

  After science women were indistinguishable from men. Except when they were utterly different.

  After science the more I learned, the less understandable everything was.

  After science the most famous figure in mankind’s history was The Man Who Levelled Mountains. He stood to me and to all my peers as the epitomal archetype of the age, the pinnacle of mankind’s accomplishments.

  The Man Who Levelled Mountains represented all those who were transfigured by some pivotal experience and who in turn left the world remolded in their image.

  One day The Man Who Levelled Mountains—who was not yet called by that honorable title, and was but a humble artificer—was out walking when he stubbed his toe on a pebble. Instantly he stopped in his tracks. Overwhelming rage swept his senses, that he should be made to feel pain by this insignificant bit of rubble. On the spot, he vowed that he would never be humiliated again, by small obstacle or large.

  Retiring to his tower, he embarked on his plan to render the world utterly flat. Although it took him the rest of his life, he succeeded, thanks to his skillful employment of science. To this day, the surface of every continent is completely level and covered with a tough, ubiquitous grass of his devising. Whenever vulcanism or plate tectonics threatens to disturb the work of The Man Who Levelled Mountains, volunteers gather in his name (one of our last vestiges of cooperative effort) and stifle the helpless planet, thereby preserving our equanimity and asserting our supremacy.

  After science there was nothing else.

  I always feel honored and excited when I am asked to contribute to a project. Being invited into an anthology is like getting picked first for a sandlot baseball team, out of the crowd of contenders. One of my favorite editors is Ian Whates, who helms one of the best small presses, NewCon. When he told me that he was putting together a volume concerning Fermi’s Paradox, I grew even more excited. This famous question—if the universe is generally favorable to life, why have we on Earth never seen evidence of it from elsewhere?—is one of the biggest conundrums of the scientific era.

  I can’t say that my answer to the problem is very probable. But I think it offers some emotional resonance.

  The gonzo fiction of Steve Aylett served as a handy roadmap for me here.

  The Trail of the Creator, the Trial of Creation

  Aboard the Final Theophany I had assembled a small but efficient crew consisting of the meanest, deadliest, orneriest, smartest and most embittered set of intergalactic killers I could dredge up during ten years of cruising all the lanes of civilized space and quite a few of the more savage precincts. Out of sheer self-indulgence, I had given them all human names familiar to me so I wouldn’t have to be bothered with trying to recall or pronounce their original exotic monikers. Afte
r all, I was Captain and footing all the bills.

  Maxwell Silverhammer stood three meters tall in his bare green-scaled feet and carried, as if it were a toothpick, a giant mallet whose head was fashioned of purest quark matter from the heart of a neutron star. The portion of his face not taken up by black fangs was filled by one enormous bloodshot eye.

  Jagello appeared at first to be merely a sessile nest of whiplike, besuckered tentacles surrounding a sharp parrot beak of a mouth. But then he would reveal enormous snapping chelae that could propel him at lightning speed and which were capable of snipping a man in half.

  Drumgoole manifested as a grey-complexioned wispy wraith with a mummy’s face, all parchment skin and kite-stick bones, flimsy as a clothes rack. But when he enfolded his victim and began irresistibly tightening, all impressions of fragility vanished.

  Corinthia, barely one meter tall, hailed from a heavy planet and resembled a troll or gnome from Terran legend, down to a complexion full of warts and scars, and a nose like a small cucumber. I had seen her stop a fusillade of shredder flechettes with her formidable chest, leaving her laminate armor like Swiss cheese but her bruised skin intact.

  Myself, I go by the name of Moortgat, and although technically human—whatever that means these days—my kind is divergent from the baseline. I’m the result of inbreeding for survival on a deathworld where every element of the ecosphere was lethal to the human species. My skin exudes toxins, my eyelids are impenetrable, a braid of three of my hairs can serve as a garrote, and my farts are explosive when voluntarily primed. Not a pinup boy.

  Seeing this ugly, fantastical assemblage of beings—and I included myself of course—some ancient, pre-spacefaring Terran might have thought that we represented a good assortment of aliens from around the multifarious galaxy, a panorama of the myriad heterogenous miracles produced by the ingenious Darwinian chemistry and physics of our different worlds.

  But of course, nowadays everyone knew better.

  “Aliens” did not exist. Nowhere in the galaxy could be found a sophont with an utterly exclusive genome.

  Every sentient creature in the universe, no matter how oddball their physiognomy, was genetically related.

  We were all one species, sharing up to ninety-nine percent of our genes, all of which used the universal DNA substrate. Same amino acids, same method of translation into proteins, all the same cellular processes right down the line.

  Had any of us four males onboard the Final Theophany wished to do so, and had it been physically possible in any particular mating to connect genitals, we could have inseminated Corinthia and produced a viable fetus. (Believe me, this was not a fantasy that any of us harbored.) Even without a carnal connection, such a thing could have been easily done artificially with nothing more elaborate than a syringe.

  Just like Terran canines, which ranged from half a kilo in weight to well over one hundred kilos, and exhibited a huge range of appearances, the intelligent population of the galaxy hid cellular uniformity beneath their varying facades. We were a universe of mutts. Admittedly, the analogy was inexact, the situation more bizarre than with dogs, given the anatomical gap between, say, someone like Jagello and the rest of us bipeds. But even if scientists still had their questions about certain aspects of how we remained interfertile despite such large variations (they often rang in embryological morphic resonance), the basic fact was scientifically incontrovertible.

  Every single sophont across a hundred billion star systems was related. Or so we surmised, based on an incomplete expansion across about one-third of that realm.

  Of course, such a finding immediately raised the question of how such consanguinity came to be. Ours was the first interstellar age. No previous FTL empires had ever existed. The archaeological records had been plumbed on a half million inhabited worlds without producing one shred of evidence for any widespread civilization of forerunners. So the scenario where an empire of homogenous beings decayed and, over a few million years, sent its isolated populations down a variety of evolutionary paths proved untenable.

  In the end, the best theoreticians in the whole galaxy were left with only one reasonable hypothesis.

  All the races of the universe had been seeded separately by some individual or small band of individuals, leaving no archaeological traces and employing as root stock the same malleable germplasm.

  In other words, there was a Creator, and He or She or It had populated the galaxy with His or Her or Its designs. (Let’s call that bastard God Him from now on, for convenience.)

  In many individuals, this scientific revelation inspired awe, reverence and bliss.

  In myself and my crew, the notion of a God who had promiscuously fecundated our galaxy with a plethora of intelligent races of all body plans had instead engendered hatred, disdain and rage.

  You see, each of us—Maxwell, Jagello, Drumgoole, Corinthia and yours truly, Captain Moortgat—had belonged each to their own world’s One True Religion which maintained that the Creator had fashioned the dominant species of our “unique” world in His Own Likeness. It was a belief born of primitive planetary isolation, and maintained precariously in the early years after First Contact. But after a few centuries of discovery and correlation, the widespread broadcast about the reality of universal miscegenation had definitely killed it.

  This irrefutable revelation—that all the galactic races issued from the hand of the same mad demiurge who had, in addition to crafting his “chosen” race, spawned equally privileged “monsters” left and right—had sparked suicides and apostasies galore.

  But in us five it had bred only one overwhelming urge.

  To find and assassinate the irresponsibly profligate God who had made us.

  * * *

  For a group of five sentients who hated each other’s guts, we got along pretty well. The fact that each one of us was a living affront to the bedrock theology of the others—an affront each of us longed to bloodily erase—was subsumed in our quest to find and kill God. Of course, my appropriately heavy poison hand of discipline, employed only when necessary, also helped to maintain a surface calm.

  So once we were underway along the navigable labyrinth of the Dark Matter Web that threaded the visible cosmos and provided galactic civilization with its FTL links, I had no hesitation about calling my crew out from their private cabins and assembling them in the refectory of the Final Theophany for a discussion of our plans. I expected them to behave even in those close quarters—or else.

  No chair was big enough for Maxwell, so he just towered by the table’s edge. Corinthia, on the other hand, had to perch atop several pillows on her seat to see over the rim. Resting on the floor, where he left a spreading trickle of scummy brine, Jagello simply extended an eye stalk up to the common level. Drumgoole seemed to float an inch or so off his seat, wafted back and forth by the room’s gentle ventilation.

  “All right, you mooks,” I said, “listen up. Now that we are away from any chance of being overheard by busybodies who might try to stop us, I can reveal our first destination. We are going to make a raid on the Syntelligence Institute on Souring Nine. Our goal is to kidnap one of their boffins, a human named Ilario Mewborn.”

  Jagello’s voice sounded like a toucan crunching an entire stalk of bananas. “What for we take this man?”

  “Because he’s discovered how to track God.”

  If I had closed my eyes, I could have imagined Corinthia’s husky tones emanating from a sexy gal of my own planet, someone whose epidermal toxins would have blended with mine to make an aphrodisiac sweat paste. Of course, the gruesome reality of the dwarf was nowhere near as alluring.

  “You signed us on with the promise that you already had a way to track the Creator. What gives?”

  “It’s true, I do have a stochastic projection of His path. But I just learned that Mewborn’s got something much better.”

  Determined from the fossil record and biological markers, the evolutionary age of every sentient race so far discovered had bee
n precisely calculated and arrayed in a database, then sorted. The oldest race proved to be the Thumraits, aquatics who resembled a cross between a squid, a seahorse and a clam. Their fossil record extended back five million years. The youngest race so far encountered were the Quisqueya, a bunch of plump pancake-shaped things that lived by clinging to the rock faces on their world, absorbing sunlight and licking fermenting moss. Their existence stretched back a mere three-quarters of a million years, and they had not even achieved their full sentience yet. But their sampled “human” genome was unmistakable.

  Now, playing connect-the-dots with the planets of the sentient races in order of their age produced a unidirectional path for the Creator’s malignant life-spawning journey, a path which could be extended out beyond the Quisqueya into the unknown light-years with a certain degree of accuracy, assuming, as we had to, that the Creator was still active some three-quarters of a million years after his last recorded abomination. My plan had been simply to follow the projection, stopping at every likely world.

  I explained all this to my crew.

  Maxwell rumble-lisped a response. (Large fangs did not an orator make.) “And thish Mewborn, what ish hish invention?”

  “He’s discovered that the Creator’s method of travel leaves a distinct signature in the Dark Matter Web. The signature is almost eternal, but fades with time. He’s plotted the traces against the archaeological record and it fits perfectly. We can use Mewborn’s gadget to home in on the Creator’s current whereabouts much faster and with more certainty than by following the stochastics. We’ll just ride His transportation gradient until we come upon His present location. Then—goodbye, God!”

  Drumgoole’s hypnotic voice, one of his tools for taking prey, resembled a ghoulish whisper from another dimension.