Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3) Read online

  Ichor gushed all over the suit.

  The fight was over almost as soon as it had begun. Quivera was breathing heavily, as much from the shock as the exertion. Uncle Vanya slid the tarsi-sword back into its belly-sheath. As he did so, he made an involuntary grimace of discomfort. ::There were times when I thought of discarding this:: he signed.

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  Little puffs of steam shot up from the bodies of the dead millipedes as carrion-flies drove their seeds/sperm/eggs (analogues and metaphors—remember?) deep into the flesh.

  They started away again.

  After a time, Uncle Vanya repeated ::Your suit/(mechanism)/[alarm] talks with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[uncertainty and doubt]::

  “Yes.”

  Uncle Vanya folded tight all his speaking arms in a manner that meant that he had not yet heard enough, and kept them so folded until Quivera had explained the entirety of what follows:

  Treachery and betrayal were natural consequences of Europa’s superheated economy, followed closely by a perfectly rational paranoia. Those who rose to positions of responsibility were therefore sharp, suspicious, intuitive, and bold. The delegation to Babel was made up of the best Europa had to offer. So when two of them fell in love, it was inevitable that they would act on it. That one was married would deter neither. That physical intimacy in such close and suspicious quarters, where everybody routinely spied on everybody else, and required almost superhuman discipline and ingenuity, only made it all the hotter for them.

  Such was Rosamund’s and Quivera’s affair.

  But it was not all they had to worry about.

  There were factions within the delegation, some mirroring fault lines in the larger society and others merely personal. Alliances shifted, and when they did nobody was foolish enough to inform their old allies. Urbano, Rosamund’s husband, was a full consul, Quivera’s mentor, and a true believer in a minority economic philosophy. Rosamund was an economic agnostic but a staunch Consensus Liberal. Quivera could sail with the wind politically but he tracked the indebtedness indices obsessively. He knew that Rosamund considered him ideologically unsound, and that her husband was growing impatient with his lukewarm support in certain areas of policy. Everybody was keeping an eye out for the main chance.

  So of course Quivera ran an emulation of his lover at all times. He knew that Rosamund was perfectly capable of betraying him—he could neither have loved nor respected a woman who wasn’t—and he suspected she believed the same of him. If her behavior ever seriously diverged from that of her emulation (and the sex was always best at times he thought it might), he would know she was preparing an attack, and could strike first.

  Quivera spread his hands. “That’s all.”

  Uncle Vanya did not make the sign for absolute horror. Nor did he have to.

  After a moment, Quivera laughed, low and mirthlessly. “You’re right,” he said. “Our entire system is totally fucked.” He stood. “Come on. We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.”

  * * * *

  They endured four more days of commonplace adventure, during which they came close to death, displayed loyalty, performed heroic deeds, etc., etc. Perhaps they bonded, though I’d need blood samples and a smidgeon of brain tissue from each of them to be sure of that. You know the way this sort of narrative goes. Having taught his Gehennan counterpart the usefulness of information, Quivera will learn from Vanya the necessity of trust. An imperfect merger of their two value systems will ensue in which for the first time a symbolic common ground will be found. Small and transient though the beginning may be, it will augur well for the long-term relations between their respective species.

  That’s a nice story.

  It’s not what happened.

  On the last day of their common journey, Quivera and Uncle Vanya had the misfortune to be hit by a TLMG.

  A TLMG, or Transient Localized Mud Geyser, begins with an uncommonly solid surface (bolide-glazed porcelain earth, usually) trapping a small (the radius of a typical TLMG is on the order of fifty meters) bubble of superheated mud beneath it. Nobody knows what causes the excess heat responsible for the bubble. Gehennans aren’t curious and Europans haven’t the budget or the ground access to do the in situ investigations they’d like. (The most common guesses are fire worms, thermobacilli, a nesting ground phoenix, and various geophysical forces.) Nevertheless, the defining characteristic of TLMGs is their instability. Either the heat slowly bleeds away and they cease to be, or it continues to grow until its force dictates a hyper rapid explosive release. As did the one our two heroes were not aware they were skirting.

  It erupted.

  Quivera was as safe as houses, of course. His suit was designed to protect him from far worse. But Uncle Vanya was scalded badly along one side of his body. All the legs on that side were shriveled to little black nubs. A clear viscous jelly oozed between his segment plates.

  Quivera knelt by him and wept. Drugged as he was, he wept. In his weakened state, I did not dare to increase his dosages. So I had to tell him three times that there was analgesic paste in the saddlebags before he could be made to understand that he should apply it to his dying companion.

  The paste worked fast. It was an old Gehennan medicine that Europan biochemists had analyzed and improved upon and then given to Babel as a demonstration of the desirability of Europan technology. Though the queen-mothers had not responded with the hoped-for trade treaties, it had immediately replaced the earlier version.

  Uncle Vanya made a creaking-groaning noise as the painkillers kicked in. One at a time he opened all his functioning eyes. ::Is the case safe?::

  It was a measure of Quivera’s diminished state that he hadn’t yet checked on it. He did now. “Yes,” he said with heartfelt relief. “The telltales all say that the library is intact and undamaged.”

  ::No:: Vanya signed feebly. ::I lied to you, Quivera:: Then, rousing himself:

  ::(not) library/[greatest shame]:: ::(not) library/[greatest trust]::

  !

  ::(Europan vice-consul 12)/Quivera/[most trusted]::

  ! !

  ::(nest)/Babel/(untranslatable):: ::obedient/[absolute loyalty]::

  ! !

  ::lies(greatest-trust-deed)/[moral necessity]::

  ! !

  ::(nest)/Babel/(untranslatable):: ::untranslatable/[absolute resistance]::

  ! ! !

  ::(nest)/[trust] Babel/[trust] (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]::

  !

  ::egg case/(protect)::

  !

  ::egg case/(mature)::

  !

  ::Babel/[eternal trust] ::

  It was not a library but an egg-case. Swaddled safe within a case that was in its way as elaborate a piece of technology as Quivera’s suit myself, were sixteen eggs, enough to bring to life six queen-mothers, nine niece-sisters, and one perfect consort. They would be born conscious of the entire gene-history of the nest, going back many thousands of years.

  Of all those things the Europans wished to know most, they would be perfectly ignorant. Nevertheless, so long as the eggs existed, the city-nest was not dead. If they were taken to Ur, which had ancient and enduring bonds to Babel, the stump of a new city would be built within which the eggs would be protected and brought to maturity. Babel would rise again.

  Such was the dream Uncle Vanya had lied for and for which he was about to die.

  ::Bring this to (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]:: Uncle Vanya closed his eyes, row by row, but continued signing. ::brother-friend/Quivera/[tentative trust], promise me you will::

  “I promise. You can trust me, I swear.”

  ::Then I will be ghost-king-father/honored/[none-more-honored]:: Vanya signed. ::It is more than enough for anyone::

  “Do you honestly believe that?” Quivera asked in bleak astonishment. He was an atheist, of course, as are most Europans, and would have been happier were he not.

  ::Perhaps not:: Vanya’s signing was slow and growi
ng slower. ::But it is as good as I will get::

  * * * *

  Two days later, when the starport-city of Ararat was a nub on the horizon, the skies opened and the mists parted to make way for a Europan lander. Quivera’s handlers’ suits squirted me a bill for his rescue—steep, I thought, but we all knew which hand carried the whip—and their principals tried to get him to sign away the rights to his story in acquittal.

  Quivera laughed harshly (I’d already started de-cushioning his emotions, to ease the shock of my removal) and shook his head. “Put it on my tab, girls,” he said, and climbed into the lander. Hours later he was in home orbit.

  And once there? I’ll tell you all I know. He was taken out of the lander and put onto a jitney. The jitney brought him to a transfer point where a grapple snagged him and flung him to the Europan receiving port. There, after the usual flawless catch, he was escorted through an airlock and into a locker room.

  He hung up his suit, uplinked all my impersonal memories to a data-broker, and left me there. He didn’t look back—for fear, I imagine, of being turned to a pillar of salt. He took the egg-case with him. He never returned.

  Here have I hung for days or months or centuries—who knows?—until your curious hand awoke me and your friendly ear received my tale. So I cannot tell you if the egg-case A) went to Ur, which surely would not have welcomed the obligation or the massive outlay of trust being thrust upon it, B) was kept for the undeniably enormous amount of genetic information the eggs embodied, or C) went to Ziggurat, which would pay well and perhaps in Gehennan territory to destroy it. Nor do I have any information as to whether Quivera kept his word or not. I know what I think. But then I’m a Marxist, and I see everything in terms of economics. You can believe otherwise if you wish.

  That’s all. I’m Rosamund. Goodbye.

  ARTICLE OF FAITH

  Michael Resnick

  The first time I saw him, he was sweeping the floor at the back of the darkened church, standing in a beam of light that came streaming down from the window above him, glistening off his metal skin.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said as I was heading across vestibule to my office.

  “Good morning,” I replied. “You’re new here, aren’t you? I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”

  “I was just delivered this morning, sir,” he said.

  “What was wrong with Herbie?”

  “I cannot say, sir.”

  “Oh, well,” I said. “Have you got a name?”

  “Jackson, sir.”

  “Just Jackson?”

  “Jackson 389V22M7, if you prefer, sir.”

  “Jackson will do,” I said. “When you’re through out here, I’d like you to clean my office.”

  “I already did, sir.”

  “Very good, Jackson,” I said. “I can tell we’re going to get along splendidly.”

  “I hope so, sir,” said Jackson.

  I went to my office, and since there were no parishioners around I took off my coat and loosened my tie. Then I sat down on my old-fashioned swivel chair, pulled out a pad of yellow paper and a pen, and began working on my next sermon. I was still at it an hour later when Jackson knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  He entered, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and a cup and saucer. “I was told that that you liked your mid-morning tea, sir,” he said, “but they neglected to tell me if you wanted milk, sugar or lemon with it.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Jackson,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You are quite welcome, sir,” he said.

  “They certainly programmed good manners into you,” I said.

  “Thank you, sir.” He paused. “About the milk, sugar or lemon…?”

  “I don’t need them.”

  “What time will you want your lunch, sir?” asked Jackson.

  “Noon,” I said. “And I pray that you can cook better than Herbie could.”

  “I have been given a list of your favorite meals, sir,” said Jackson. “Which would—?”

  “Surprise me,” I interrupted him.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Somehow, lunch seems pretty trivial after you’ve been thinking about God all morning.”

  “God, sir?”

  “The Creator of all things,” I explained.

  “My creator is Stanley Kalinovsky, sir,” said Jackson. “I was not aware that he created everything in the world, nor that his preferred name was God.”

  I couldn’t repress a smile.

  “Sit down, Jackson,” I said.

  He placed the tray on my desk. “On the floor, sir?”

  “On a chair.”

  “But I am merely a robot,” said Jackson. “I do not require a chair.”

  “Perhaps,” I replied. “But it would make me more comfortable if you sat on it.”

  “Then I shall,” he said, seating himself opposite me.

  “It is true that you were created by Dr. Kalinovsky,” I began, “or at least I have no reason to doubt it. But that implies another question, does it not, Jackson?”

  The robot stared at me for a moment before answering. “Yes, sir,” he said at last. “The question is: who created Stanley Kalinovsky?”

  “Very good,” I said. “And the answer is that God created him, just as God created me and every other human being, just as He created the mountains and the plains and the oceans.”

  Another pause.

  “God created everything except me?” he asked at last.

  “That’s an interesting question, Jackson,” I admitted. “I suppose the answer is that God is indirectly responsible for you, for had He not created Dr. Kalinovsky, Dr. Kalinovsky could not have created you.”

  “Then I too am God’s creation?”

  “This is the House of God,” I said. “Far be it from me to tell anyone, even a robot, that he isn’t God’s creation.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but which is God’s office?” asked Jackson. “It is not in the schemata of the church that I was provided.”

  I chuckled. “God doesn’t need an office. He is everywhere.”

  Jackson’s head spun very slowly until it had gone 360 degrees and was facing me again. “I cannot see him,” he announced.

  “He is here nonetheless,” I said. Then: “It is too difficult to explain, Jackson. You will have to take my word for it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And now, Jackson, I really have to get back to work. I’ll see you at lunchtime.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I don’t know your name. If someone asks for you, how will they identify you?”

  “I am the Reverend Edward Morris,” I replied.

  “Thank you, Reverend Morris,” he said, and left.

  It had been an interesting conversation, certainly more interesting than any I’d ever had with Herbie, Jackson’s clanking predecessor. We were a small parish in a small town, our industry had moved elsewhere, a lot of people had followed it, and the other two churches had closed down, so there were no neighboring ministers to talk to. Just answering Jackson’s simple questions had refreshed me enough that I was able to attack the rest of my sermon with new energy.

  I worked very hard on those sermons. The church had been failing when I arrived from my previous posting. In those early days, we might draw five people on a Sunday, and just the occasional person any other time of the week. Then I began visiting my parishioners’ houses, I spoke at the local schools, I blessed the football and basketball teams before their regional tournaments, and I even volunteered the church as a polling place for the local elections. The only thing I would not do was allow bingo games inside the church; it seemed somehow sacrilegious to help defray our costs by encouraging people to gamble. Before long my efforts began to bear fruit. These days I could usually expect thirty to fifty people on Sundays, and rarely did we go an entire day without two or three people stopping in to commune with God.

  Lunch was surpr
isingly good. By the end of the day I’d written out a draft of the sermon and Jackson had the church sparkling like new—and this church hadn’t been new in a long, long time. Lining one of the corridors was a row of photographs of our previous pastors; I was told that a couple of them were serving back when Benjamin Harrison and James Garfield were our Presidents. A stern-looking bunch for the most part; perhaps too stern-looking, given the way our membership had dwindled over the decades. I think one of the reasons I was hired is because I leave hellfire and damnation to others; I stand four-square on the side of compassion and redemption.

  Jackson approached me as I was leaving for the night.

  “Excuse me, Reverend Morris,” he said, “but shall I lock the building after you’ve gone?”

  I nodded my head. “Yes. I’m sure some of those gentleman on the wall left it open as a sanctuary around the clock, but not in today’s world. We can’t have anyone robbing a church.”

  “According to my data banks a church is a place of worship,” said Jackson.

  “That’s right.”

  “But you told me that this was God’s house, not a church,” he said.

  “A church is where we worship God,” I explained. “That makes it His house.”

  “God must be very large to need such high ceilings,” remarked Jackson.

  I smiled. “That is an interesting observation, Jackson,” I said. “And doubtless He can be that large when He chooses to be. But I think we make the interior of our churches so large not to accommodate God, who needs no accommodation, but to imply his power and majesty to those who come here to worship him.”

  He offered no further comment, and I went out to my car. I had to admit that I enjoyed my little chat with Jackson, and I looked forward to talking to him again the next day.

  I made a couple of sandwiches for my dinner—cooking isn’t one of my skills—and I spent the rest of the night reading. I was in bed by ten o’clock, as usual, and up at six in the morning. I got dressed, made the bed, put out thistle and sunflower seeds for the birds in the back yard, and finally got into my car and drove to the church.