The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Vol. 1 Part 14

"Made. Grown. The way you grow pretty crystals in a jar of some liquid. Maybe the feathers were all like sensors on the outside of some machine the size of a world. Or not as big-gravity could have been artificial. Maybe the place was a pleasure park for aliens, or like a sculpture garden. But artificial, yes."

"So what does that imply?"

"I don't know." Svelte stares out of the window at houses, streets.

WHAT DOES UNREADY mean? Can the impeds be some sort of benevolent teaching aid? A focus for mental growth? A way of being able to attain the stars and join in, if only we can discover how? Something we might learn to use after ten years or after fifty years? The Varroa didn't mean that it wasn't in the market for a memory stick.

"We'll talk more later about this artificial idea of yours, eh, Svelte?" Oh, I am tempted by her, and I still don't know if it's possible. If only. Just let me not be too impulsive, as I surely was, going to club-night with her, only the two of us and Tony Cullen. In retrospect I was rather foolish. I don't like to be foolish.

One person is unaccounted for, the dead Jacko. Is that because his body was lying beyond the ring of light when it descended? Or because a dead body is more akin to a featherbush than to a living person?

Now THAT WE'VE debussed, Pete is talking urgently to Caz, and I'm a snooper again.

"...meaningless, because Benny helped b.u.g.g.e.r all! He made a phone call; so what? What else does the co-owner of a place do, that loses a couple of hundred people? Pay no attention? It was the Varroa brought us back, no thanks to him!"

"Even so," she says, so sad-sounding, "I did promise." Caz tosses her hair, perhaps to hide tears or dispel them, and wanders toward The Studio.

We all have our cages. But will we ever learn from them?

Jellyfish.

Mike Resnick & David Gerrold.

ONCE UPON A time, when the world was young, there was a man named Dillon K. Filk. The K. stood for Kurvis.

He was insane. But that was okay. The world was insane, so he fitted right in.

Dillon K. Filk also had a serious substance abuse problem, but that was okay too. He was a product of his time, a confluence of historical and mimetic conditions that created substance abuse as a way of life. The entire planet was addicted to a variety of comestibles and combustibles. Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and oil were the primary global addictions; substances injected directly into veins were secondary.

Filk's own chemical adventures were based on what was available and what it would mix well with-marijuana, amyl and butyl nitrates (also known as poppers), ecstasy, peyote, mushrooms, the occasional toad, dried banana skins, cocaine (both powdered and crystallized), heroin (snorted and injected), Quaaludes, Vicodin, horse tranquilizers, PCP, angel dust, cough syrup, amphetamines, methedrine, ephedrine, mescaline, methadone, barbiturates, Prozac, valium, lithium, and the occasional barium enema. And once in a while, airplane glue. But Filk had never taken acid-LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)-because he didn't want to risk destabilizing his brain chemistry.

Whether Filk's mental instability had caused his substance abuse problems or whether his substance abuse had triggered his delusional state is both irrelevant and unknowable. The two conditions were synergistic. They were complementary parts of his being, and essential to his ability to function in this time and in this place.

Filk spent his days sitting alone in a room, talking to himself, having long discussions that only he could understand. A prurient eavesdropper, and there had been an occasional few, some even paid by various governments, would not have been able to follow his verbalized train of thought because most of the time Filk himself did not stay on the tracks.

In any given moment Filk might suddenly realize that, "Hypers.e.x exists only in the trans-human condition." A moment later, he might postulate, "Therefore, the robots will be functionally autistic." And a moment after that, he would conclude, "So the issue of sentience is resolved in favor of hormones." He didn't know quite what it all meant (though he loved the word "Hypers.e.x", which he was sure was spelled with a capital H), but it sounded profound.

Whenever Filk came to a conclusion like that, he would nod to himself in satisfaction and turn to the battered old manual typewriter that sat on a rickety TV tray table next to his bed, and he would start typing slowly and methodically, using only his two index fingers. He often said he had stolen the typewriter from one of his ex-wives. But occasionally he admitted that he had bought it at a p.a.w.nshop because the invisible voices had told him to. But sometimes, he claimed that William Burroughs had given it to him as an act of punishment-punishment for the typewriter, which had taken on the form of a gigantic insect and refused to stop rattling its mandibles at Burroughs. The origin of the typewriter depended on how much blood was coursing through Filk's drugstream.

Dillon K. Filk typed four pages every day, and would not get up until he had typed them. When he got to the bottom of the fourth page, he would stop. He was through for the day. Even if he was in the middle of a sentence, he would not start a fifth page. He would roll the finished page out of the typewriter and lay it face down on the slowly growing stack of pages to the left of the machine on the TV tray.

The next day, without looking at what he had written before, Filk would roll a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter and complete the hanging sentence, then continue until he had filled that day's four pages. And the day after that, four more.

"Hi-ho," Filk would say. "So it goes."

Filk punctuated his monologues with verbal motifs. He would say "Hi-ho" or "See?" or "So it goes." These were conversational s.p.a.cers as he slipped and skidded from one notion to the next- his way of indicating to himself that he was finished with that particular moment.

Sometimes, he would type "Hi-ho" or "See?" or "So it goes" into his pages. Sometimes he needed to separate one idea from another, and "Hi-ho" and "See?" and "So it goes" were just as functional on paper as they were spoken aloud.

Occasionally, Filk needed one more sentence to fill his fourth page, and that was also a good place to type "Hi-ho" or "See?" or "So it goes." And once in a great while, "Of course."

Hi-ho.

See?

So it goes.

Of course.

From one day to the next, Filk paid little attention to what he had already written. No idea was ever worth more than eight hundred words. If an idea took more than eight hundred words to express, it was obviously too complicated for anyone to understand-including the writer. To Filk's mind, the universe was quite simple, it only looked complex. The only way to master the complexity was to understand the many component simplicities.

Many years ago, Filk had counted the words on his finished pages and determined that he averaged two hundred words per page. From that day on, he never typed more than four pages at a time.

Filk also understood that no human being was capable of writing a new idea every eight hundred words. A human being was so simple, he or she could only hold one idea at a time.

But Filk also knew that if he was a different person, then that different person would be holding a different idea in his head. The answer was simple-and it was obvious. Hi-ho. You are a new person every day. See? You are not the person you were the day before. So it goes. You are the person whose experience includes the day before, so you are different from a person whose experience does not include the day before. Of course.

So Filk would carefully type his four pages, consume some chemicals, and lie back down on his dirty sheets until hunger or thirst or the pressing needs of his bladder caused him to rise again. Usually a single diurnal cycle. Although once, after a particularly crucifying experience, it had taken him three days to rise again.

Filk had no loyalty to the past, as he was not that person anymore, so he never picked up a previous train of thought, always starting a new one. As a result, his writing had a peripatetic style and pace that few other authors could match.

Or understand.

Every hundred and twenty days, give or take a few, allowing for the occasional bouts of physical incapacity, Filk would have acc.u.mulated four hundred pages of text, give or take some number divisible by four. On that day, as if blinking awake from a long sleep, Filk would dutifully type a t.i.tle in the center of a blank page and put that at the front of the stack; he would type "the end" in the center of another blank page and put that at the back of the stack. He never made up a t.i.tle until the book was finished; because until it was finished, he did not know what it was about.

Then Filk would put the stack of pages into a box, and take the box to the local office supply store and have two copies made. He would also buy two more reams of paper and a new typewriter ribbon. On his way home, he would stop at the post office and mail one copy to himself as insurance, and another to his publisher in New York.

Filk's publisher was a man named Thorbald Helmholtz, the owner and operator of Helmholtz Publis.h.i.+ng, Ltd. Like most publishers, Helmholtz was a thief. On receipt of the ma.n.u.script, Helmholtz would write a check for $2,500 to Dillon K. Filk and drop it into the mail the very same day. Without actually reading the work for its content, Helmholtz would copy-edit it for spelling and grammar errors. He would pick a cover that he thought would sell, regardless of whether it matched the book or not-and if it had a near-naked girl being ravished by Things, so much the better-and then he would hand both cover and ma.n.u.script to his wife, who would manage the actual process of production.

Approximately six months after the receipt of the ma.n.u.script, copies of the book would arrive in the bookstores. The books would stay on the shelves for three-and-a-half weeks, when they would be removed and replaced by the new books for the following month. The copies that had not sold would have their covers ripped off. The covers would be returned to the publisher as proof that those copies hadn't sold.

A book with Dillon K. Filk's name on it would only sell a paltry 90,000 copies, grossing only a half-million dollars in reported sales. Although Helmholtz always paid Filk a generous two percent of the net (minus the original advance, the cost of production, distribution, advertising, and various miscellaneous expenses called "overheads"), this rarely amounted to more than a few hundred dollars at a time.

Filk understood that Helmholtz was cheating him. Because publishers always cheated authors. But he a.s.sumed that any other publisher would probably cheat him a lot more than Helmholtz. And at least, Helmholtz paid him immediately. Of course, the royalties were always two years late, but Helmholtz a.s.sured Filk that was due to slow reporting by the bookstores and distributors.

So Filk sat alone in his room and talked to himself. And after he finished talking to himself, he typed.

Hi-ho.

See?

So it goes.

ON THE PARTICULAR day that this story begins, Filk was thinking about a planet. He didn't know anything about this planet yet. He wouldn't know anything about it until he found the right name for it.

Whenever Filk had to name a planet, he would pace around his room, speaking deliberately meaningless syllables, a.s.similating the flavors they suggested. The name of an alien planet had to sound exotic to a human ear, and it had to suggest the nature of the people who came from that planet.

Today Filk was saying things like "Tralfadormin" and "Trantilusia" and "Tryspanifam." He didn't like those names. They sounded antediluvian and medicinal.

Eventually, he mumbled, "Tranticleer, Tranquiloor, Trandilor." Trandilor. He repeated it a few times. Then he turned to the typewriter and typed it out to see what it would look like on the page. Trandilor. No, didn't look right.

He considered Trazendilorr and Tra.s.senadilor, but those seemed overburdened.

He finally settled on Tryllifandillor.

The existence of the world of Tryllifandillor, he typed, is impossible. Impossible means that it cannot exist in any domain where existence exists.

Therefore, it can only exist in a domain where existence does not exist. You will find it only where existence is impossible. Because the domain of non-existence can only exist elsewhere than existence, it creates a profound cosmological loophole. Only things that cannot exist, can exist in the domain of non-existence.

Filk was one of the few people on the planet who could think these thoughts without hurting himself. This was his particular superpower. Everybody on Earth has a superpower of some kind or other. Only three people know this. Filk was not one of them.

In other words, because Tryllifandillor is impossible, its existence is inevitable-within the domain of impossibility.

See?

Filk never thought about what he was typing. The moving fingers moved, then moved on, practically of their own volition. Like pink anteater snouts picking busy insects off the keys. Unless the typewriter was clas.h.i.+ng its mandibles, and knock wood, that hadn't happened lately. Today his fingers were little pistons, merely following the loudest orders that the voices shouted inside his head.

Tryllifandillor is a gas giant that failed to ignite. The winds of inevitability blew across its heart for billennia-he loved that word and tried to use it once or twice in every book-but as hard as they blew, nothing ever happened. Because of its condition of impossibility, the embers at its core only smoldered, never erupted. Instead of blazing in ferocious rage, it simply simmered. Instead of becoming a sun to its planets, blasting them with harsh light and killing radiation, Tryllifandillor remained only a large, lonely failure with a scattered handful of frozen oversized satellites. Instead of planets, Tryllifandillor had ice-encrusted moons.

The moons, of this ma.s.sive disappointment, circle in improbable orbits. They keep the huge brown sphere stabilized on its axis. As the moons...o...b..t, they create vast tidal currents and storms in the upper reaches of the planet's turbulent atmosphere. This is where the Jellyfish People of Tryllifandillor live.

Hi-ho.

The Jellyfish People would not be recognized as sentient beings by human beings. A Jellyfish Person begins as a glistening pink seed of possibility, three meters in length. It doesn't hatch, it doesn't sprout; one day it slowly and gracefully unfurls itself to become a soaring umbrella-shaped veil, two or three kilometers in diameter, and trailing many long strands of translucent beads.

A Jellyfish moves by sailing the winds of Tryllifandillor's upper atmosphere, spreading its sail to rise on the warm thermals, crumpling its edges inward to fall again, curling its edges this way and that to catch the various gaseous currents that sweep across the vast troposphere. As it drifts, it filters the warmth of its world for bits of proto-organics, silicates, and various trace metals-not so much feeding on the flying detritus as a.s.sembling itself from the available materials.

The young Jellyfish seed by the thousands. They travel in swarms, and until they are large enough to sustain a self-aware webwork in their umbra, they are feral. They are vicious predators. They will seek out larger Jellyfish and lash their veils with their strings of sharp beads, slas.h.i.+ng the hapless giants and shredding them into fragments. The young will eat their own parents, incorporating bits and pieces of nascent sentience. If there are no parent Jellyfish in their jetstreams, the young will feed upon each other.

Over time, a Jellyfish will reach an extended diameter of hundreds of kilometers. The oldest and wisest of the people are more than a thousand kilometers across.

The veils of a Jellyfish are limned with faint glowing traceries-a webwork of nano-scale ganglia that give the vast creature its impenetrable infinite wisdom. The more intricate the webwork, the more intelligent the creature is-and the more attractive it is to its fellows. Jellyfish communicate and interact by displaying coruscating patterns of shape and color along their vast flanks.

Adult Jellyfish are so large, they function as giant nets. They take in far more energy than they can use. To survive, they must burn off the extra kilocalories. They do this by- Filk hesitated. He always hesitated when he had to make up a word. Finally he half-smiled and uttered an approving grunt.

Frelching.

Frelching is a combination of multiple art forms. The Jellyfish paint themselves with light and color and patterns that match and complement the rippling movements of their veils. At the same time, they sing; they play themselves as magnificent instruments, vibrating the atmosphere around them in intricate harmonies. Moving singly or in groups, they describe complex patterns in time and s.p.a.ce, that describe vast emotional landscapes.

Actually, what they are exploring is hypers.e.xual combinations.

Gender is irrelevant to these combinations. The Tryllifandillorians have invented over a hundred and thirteen different genders and they expect to invent several hundred more before this cycle of frelching completes.

A frelch can last ten or twenty centuries. Or longer. The Tryllifandillorians are as slow and patient as glaciers, and they will continue until they have exhausted all the possibilities of each specific frelch. Then, they will re-invent themselves so as to make new variations and combinations possible. A typical cycle of a hundred and twenty frelches can last as long as three hundred thousand years.

At this moment in not-time, the Tryllifandillorians have made their way halfway through a cycle of ninety-seven complementary frelches. Because every frelch includes, recaps, deconstructs, and comments on all of the previous cycles before expanding into new explorations, each successive frelch is longer than its predecessor. In this way, the Jellyfish People of Tryllifandillor pa.s.s on their heritage to the survivors of each new seeding.

To the Tryllifandillorians, frelching is an exquisitely sensual experience. At its peak, the frelchers will intertwine their tendrils. Adult Jellyfish are likely to have tendrils several thousand kilometers in length. The physical intertwining is so intense that it transcends all concept of s.e.xuality.

Filk stopped typing there. He had reached the bottom of his fourth page and he had typed exactly eight hundred and eighty-five words. There was room for one more line. So he typed, Hi-ho!

And he was done for the day.

He rolled the page out of the typewriter, put it face down on the stack of finished pages, and sat back in his chair.

So it goes.

See?

THE NEXT DAY, without rereading anything he had previously typed, Filk began typing again: Because of their size, the Tryllifandillorians function as vast radio antennae, and they can easily sense the long-wave vibrations of their universe.

Just as jellyfish in the sea are sensitive to the ebb and flow of the tides, so are the Jellyfish of Tryllifandillor tuned into the peaks and troughs of the millennial rhythms of time. They can feel the rise and fall of universal emotion that underlies the existence that does exist-what we would call the universe. The universe of existence is very spa.r.s.ely inhabited. At any given moment, there have never been more than twelve sentient races at a time. This is because there is a limiting factor in the universe. It is called the Law of Conservation of Sentience. Almost every time a new sentient species arises, at least one or more of the older ones self-destructs, or simply dies out from exhaustion.

Because there are so few sentient species in such a vast arena, the emotional radiation from each individual race will stand out in the night like a beacon. Any profound event that happens to any sentient species resonates throughout the Sevagram the same way ripples of sound radiate outward from the violent plucking of a taut violin string. Eventually, as it makes its way from existence to non-existence, the resonance will reach the Tryllifandillorians.

On this particular day, something happened in the realm of existence that was so startling that when the ripples reached non-existence, it unsettled an entire frelch, producing the Tryllifandillorian equivalent of a false note. The false note was immediately recontextualized as the ground-of-being for an entire new frelch, based solely on the moment of discordance.

But this particular moment of discordancy was the essence of discordancy and refused to be recontextualized. Even in its own frelch, in the realm of impossibility, it stood out as an impossible thing.

Apparently, something in the universe of existence had become aware of the universe of non-existence. Even more startling, it had become aware of the existence of impossibility. And in its most astonis.h.i.+ng realization, that thing that had become aware, had also become aware of the existence of the non-existent Tryllifandillorians. The external knowledge of the frelch had soured not only this frelch, but the possibility of all frelching forever after.

For the Tryllifandillorians, this was unthinkable.

Hi-ho!

The result was a moment-actually a century and a half-of unthinkable silence. During that time, three separate seedings came to fruition, fed upon themselves, shredded themselves in hunger, and died without ever approaching sentience. The Tryllifandillorians noted the events with interest, and at some point in the future planned to base a whole cycle of frelching on the tragedy of the three lost generations.

But at the moment, the existence of an external awareness of their non-existence was such an unsettling realization that the entire species was struck with a profound curiosity. Who or what in the entire Sevagram had leapt to such an incisive achievement without traversing any of the necessary steps that should precede such an enlightenment?

It would have to be investigated.

Hi-ho!

Filk stopped. He had typed five hundred and seven words. He had completed two pages and half of a third. He still had a page and a half to go.

He did not know what to type next. He had run out of ideas before he had run out of paper.

This was not an uncommon event. Many of Filk's ideas were simply unable to sustain eight hundred words of examination. He had that in common with E. A. van der Vogel, another advocate of eight-hundred-words-and-out. And if an idea ran short, that was evidence that it wasn't worth the investment of any more time. Nevertheless, if he didn't type four full pages, Filk felt incomplete.

In moments like these, Filk found it useful to stop and boil water. Sometimes a sentence would pop into his head before the water boiled and he would return to the typewriter and resume typing. If the sentence were the first of a long inevitable string of sentences, the kettle would boil itself dry, unnoticed by Filk.

But if a sentence didn't pop into his head, then Filk would end up sipping peppermint-flavored tea or forking noodles out of a Styrofoam cup while he stared at the crack in the opposite wall that looked a little bit like the northwestern coast of Australia.