Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 25

My chemistry teacher back in high school used to collect unusual representations of the Periodic Table. Several of them had been three-dimensional: cubes, pyramids, spirals. The light-sculpture above me looked like a candidate for his collection. And I had a strong feeling that, like the Periodic Table, there was more to it than exotic decoration.

"Where'd the light show come from?" Jack asked.

"d.a.m.ned if I know. I was just sitting here, trying to figure this place out, and the next thing I knew there was this indoor aurora."

I tried to reconstruct the sequence of body movements which might have triggered the illumination.

As my hands gripped the arms of the chair, the display began to rotate. A bit of trial-and-error revealed that the motion and pressure of my fingers varied the speed and angle at which the sphere and its protrusions moved.

My attention was concentrated overhead, so it was Jack who noticed that on each shelf in the room, and on the spine of every book, a pattern of colored stripes had appeared. "Looks like now we can see the call numbers," he said. "Yes, that must be what they are. There's a subtle difference from one book to the next." He walked along the shelves. "And the differences become greater the further I move from the center of the room."

"I think you're right. Can you get some pictures of them? We can run them by a pattern matching program and see if we can't make some sense out of them. And we can compare them with the patterns we find in the book collection itself."

That gave me an idea. "I'll bet I can find at least one significant match without using a computer program," I said.

I walked across the room to the shelf where I had seen a copy of the Dewey Decimal Cla.s.sification and carefully compared its label with the display overhead.

"I think I've found my Rosetta Stone," I shouted to Jack. "Look up there, at the innermost globe of light." He did so. "Now look at this label and tell me what you see."

The resemblance was obvious, despite the convoluted complexity of both label and sphere.

The day after we returned to Port Armstrong, Colonel Rubin sent for me. I found Jack seated across from him, a bottle of Tullamore Dew between them. The Colonel poured me a gla.s.s.

"So there's more to this library than meets the untutored eye?" he inquired.

"A lot more. I think we'll find that it contains the key to an alien race's understanding of the universe and everything within it."

"How's that? All the books are from Earth. There's nothing there to tell us anything about whoever built Metropolis."

"Ah, but there is. Not in the books themselves, but in how they're arranged. You see, a library reflects its cultural origins not only in the books it collects, but in the way in which it catalogs and cla.s.sifies them.

"I'll give you an example. Look at the Dewey Decimal System. Melvil Dewey lived in the UnitedStates during the latter part of the nineteenth century: a time and place in which there was a widespread belief in the cultural superiority of American Protestant Christians."

"At least among American Protestant Christians," the Colonel muttered. With a name like Rubin, I didn't imagine he'd share Dewey's prejudices.

"True enough. So the Dewey Decimal Cla.s.sification was-and for that matter still is-heavily biased toward the relative importance of American literature. And even today it devotes twenty times as much attention to Christianity as to Islam, say, or Hinduism. I'll bet there aren't many libraries in the Muslim world that arrange their books according to Dewey."

"What would they use, then?" asked Jack.

"They might use Sardar's Islamic cla.s.sification. It's biased too, of course, but at least its bias is a sympathetic one. And a lot of them use the Library of Congress system. It's pragmatic, if a bit unwieldy.

A true product of the bureaucratic mind."

"I'd never realized there were so many systems to choose from," said Colonel Rubin.

"Oh, that's just three. I can think of lots more. The Russians used to use a 'Library Bibliographical Cla.s.sification,' which is supposed to be based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Probably worked as well as anything else derived from Marxist-Leninist theory. My favorite is the Colon Cla.s.sification. It was invented by an Indian phi losopher called Ranganathan. It's based on the notion that all subjects, if you strip them down to essentials, are made up of five basic elements: personality, matter, energy, s.p.a.ce, and time. Only a Hindu could have come up with such a scheme. You don't see much of it outside India."

"And what sort of system do our alien visitors use?" asked Colonel Rubin.

"I can't tell you that, not without a lot of study. I've been thinking of how you might design an expert system to a.n.a.lyze their collection. But I've got one or two ideas I can suggest to you.

"How do we arrange books in a library? Most of the time it's by subject, and then by author within each narrow subject category. When we examine a book, we want to know what it's about, and who wrote it, right?

"Maybe the builders of Metropolis don't look at things in the same way. Maybe they aren't all that interested in precisely which individual wrote a particular book. Their basic principle of cla.s.sification seems to involve the distinction between the individual and the collective. That would explain why War and Peace was next to that telephone directory. If we look at our ideas of scholarly disciplines and subject fields through that sort of lens there seems to be a pretty good fit with the way the Metropolitans stock their bookshelves. The correlation is reinforced when you run a citation a.n.a.lysis.

"From the bibliometric evidence, they don't seem to attach the same value as we do to individual creativity. I'm not suggesting that the Metropolitans are a hive-mind, or anything like that. But if they are more collectively oriented than we are, that's got to be something worth knowing."

"It would be a lot more than anyone else has learned about them. I think you may be onto something.

At any rate, you've convinced me that you're the man for this job."

So why had the aliens left this library behind them? There was no shortage of opinions floating around Port Armstrong. Some liked to think that the library represented a quiz, with the builders of Metropolis hovering unseen to grade the exam papers. If mankind pa.s.sed, the human race would be admitted to some sort of cosmic university. (Jack suggested that a cosmic kindergarten might be more like it.) There were several people who thought that we were surrept.i.tiously being watched, as if we were gerbils in a lab habitat or pigeons in a Skinner box, and that all the aliens would ever reveal of themselves would be learned through the stimuli they applied. One cynic claimed that the whole thing was a cosmic joke played on man by an alien race overexposed to Kurt Vonnegut at an impressionable age.

I think it's much too early to speculate on the aliens' motives. There is just too much we need to learn.

It took Champollion more than twenty years to decipher the hieroglyphic script of ancient Egypt. Even with all the resources of twenty-first-century computer technology at my command, it would take decades to work out in detail the principles behind the Metropolitans' cla.s.sification system. I'll need help from cultural anthropologists, social psychologists, linguistics experts, epistemologists, computer scientists-if ever there was a field for interdisciplinary research, this is it.I reckon that we haven't seen the last of our friends from Metropolis. When they come back to visit us, maybe we'll have some idea of what we'll be dealing with. As Rita said, "You can learn a lot about someone by looking at his book-shelves."

An Apollo Asteroid

BRIAN ALDISS.

Speaking of Brian W. Aldiss, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction refers to "the vast, exuberant, melancholy, protean corpus of one of the SF field's two or three most prolific authors of substance, and perhaps its most exploratory." This will serve to introduce one of the great living SF writers. The influence of his works is deep and widespread in SF. I once heard Roger Zelazny tell him that Aldiss' story, "A Kind of Artistry," had been the foundation of Zelazny's own writing.

His Billion Year Spree, in which Aldiss proposed Mary Sh.e.l.ley as the progenitor of SF, is one of the five or six most influential works of criticism ever published about SF. He burst into prominence in the late 1950s, and in particular his collections Galaxies Like Grains of Sand [1960] (The Canopy of Time UK, 1959) and Starswarm [1964] (The Airs of Earth UK, 1963) contain many cla.s.sics of SF. Over five decades, he has published over 300 stories, and a number of fine novels-high points include the cla.s.sics Hothouse, Frankenstein Unbound, and the h.e.l.liconia Trilogy-but he has published very few in recent years. In the last couple of years, Aldiss has published his autobiography (The Twinkling of an Eye) and a book of autobiographical postscript (When the Feast is Finished-about the recent death of his wife, Margaret). He still attends SF conventions all over the world, and is a powerful and entertaining speaker.

"The Apollo Asteroid" was published last year in the excellent original anthology Moon Shots.

It is a wild SF story, somewhere between Philip K. d.i.c.k and Philip Jose Farmer but somehow pure Aldiss, about s.e.x, an asteroid hitting the moon in the 2200s, and reality s.h.i.+fts in perception that allow people individually to s.h.i.+ft locations in the universe.

Everything has changed. Back at human beginnings, perception was locked in a shuttered house. One by one, the shutters snapped open, or were forced open, revealing the real world outside.

We can never be sure if all the shutters have yet snapped open.

At one time, it was well known that the caves of Altamira in northern Spain had been accidentally discovered by a girl of five. She had wandered away from her father. Her father was an archaeologist, much too busy studying an old stone to notice that his daughter had strayed.

It is easy to imagine the fine afternoon, the old man kneeling by the stone, the young girl picking wildflowers. She finds blue flowers, red ones, and yellow. She wanders on, taking little thought. The ground is broken. She attempts to climb a slope. Sand falls away. She sees an opening. She has no fear, but plenty of curiosity. She climbs in. Just a little way. She is in a cave. There she sees on the wall the figure of an animal, a buffalo.

That does frighten her. She climbs out and runs back to her father, crying that she has seen an animal.

He goes to look.

And what he finds is an extensive gallery of scenes, painted by Paleolithic hunters or magicians, or hunter/magicians. The great artistry of the scenes changes human understanding of the past. We came to believe that we comprehended that sympathetic magic when we had in fact failed to do so. We accepted a scientific, mathematical model into our heads, and had to live by it.

Clues to a true understanding of the universe lie everywhere. One after another, clues are found and, when the time is ripe, are understood. The great reptiles whose bones lie in the rocks waited there for millions of years to be interpreted, then to expand greatly humanity's knowledge of duration and the planet's duration. Frequently women are a.s.sociated with such shocks to the understanding, perhapsbecause they contain magic in their own persons. It was a Mrs. Gideon Mantell who discovered the bones of the first reptile to be identified as a dinosaur.

All such discoveries seem little short of miraculous at the time; then they become taken for granted.

So it has proved in the case of Bagreist's Shortcut.

It has been forgotten now, but an accident similar to the Altamira accident brought Joyce Bagreist to understand the signal of the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis. For untold years, the lights had been explained away as the interaction of charged particles from the sun reacting with particles in the upper atmosphere. True, the signal was activated by the charged particles: but no one until Bagreist had thought through to the purpose of this activity.

Joyce Bagreist was a cautious little woman, not particularly liked at her university because of her solitary nature. She was slowly devising and building a computer that worked on the color spectrum rather than on mathematics. Once she had formulated new equations and set up her apparatus, she spent some while preparing for what she visualized might follow. Within the privacy of her house, Bagreist improvised for herself a kind of wheeled s.p.a.ce suit, complete with bright headlights, an emergency oxygen supply, and a stock of food. Only then did she track along her upper landing, along the measured two-point-five meters, and through the archway of her apparatus.

At the end of the archway, with hardly a jolt to announce a revolution in thought, she found herself in the crater Aristarchus, on the Moon.

It will be remembered that the great Aristarchus of Samos, in whose honor the crater was named, was the first astronomer to correctly read another celestial signal now obvious to us-that the Earth was in orbit about the sun, rather than vice versa.

There Bagreist was, rather astonished, slightly vexed. According to her calculations, she should have emerged in the crater Copernicus. Clearly, her apparatus was more primitive and fallible than she had bargained for.

Being unable to climb out of the crater, she circled it in her homemade suit, feeling pleased with the discovery of what we still call Bagreist's Shortcut-or, more frequently, more simply, the Bagreist.

There was no way in which this brave discoverer could return to Earth. It was left to others to construct an Archway on the Moon. Poor Bagreist perished there in Aristarchus, perhaps not too dissatisfied with herself. She had radioed to Earth. The signal had been picked up. s.p.a.ce Administration had sent a s.h.i.+p. But it arrived too late for Joyce Bagreist.

Within a year of her death, traffic was pouring through several Archways, and the Moon was covered with building materials.

But who or what had left the signal in the Arctic skies to await its hour of interpretation?

Of course, the implications of the Bagreist were explored. It became clear that s.p.a.ce/time did not possess the same configuration as had been a.s.sumed. Another force was operative, popularly known as the Squidge Force. Cosmologists and mathematicians were hard put to explain the Squidge Force, since it resisted formulation in current mathematical systems. The elaborate mathematical systems on which our global civilization was founded had merely local application: they did not extend even as far as the heliopause. So while the practicalities of Bagreist were being utilized, and people everywhere (having bought a ticket) were taking a short walk from their home onto the lunar surface, mathematical lacunae were the subject of intense and learned inquiry.

Two centuries later, I back into the story. I shall try to explain simply what occurred. But not only does P-L6344 enter the picture; so do Mrs. Staunton and General Tomlin Willetts, and the general's lady friend, Molly Levaticus.

My name, by the way, is Terry W. Manson, L44/56331. I lived in Lunar City IV, popularly known as Ivy. I was General Secretary of Recreationals, working for those who manufacture IDs, or individual drugs.

I had worked previously for the Luna-based MAW, the Meteor and Asteroid Watch, which was how I came to know something of General Willetts' affairs. Willetts was a big consumer of IDs. He wasin charge of the MAW operation, and had been for the previous three years. The last few months had been taken up with Molly Levaticus, who had joined his staff as a junior operative and was shortly afterward made private secretary to the general. In consequence of this closely kept secret affair-known to many on the base-General Willetts went about in a dream.

My more serious problem also involved a dream. A golf ball lying forlorn on a deserted beach may have nothing outwardly sinister about it. However, when that same dream recurs every night, one begins to worry. There lay that golf ball, there was that beach. Both monuments to perfect stasis and, in consequence, alarming.

The dream became more insistent as time went by. It seemed-I know no other way of expressing it-to move closer every night. I became alarmed. Eventually, I made an appointment to see Mrs.

Staunton, Mrs. Roslyn Staunton, the best-known Ivy mentatropist.

After asking all the usual questions, involving my general health, my sleeping habits, and so forth, Roslyn-we soon lapsed into first names-asked me what meaning I attached to my dream.

"It's just an ordinary golf ball. Well...No, it has markings resembling a golf ball's markings. I don't know what else it could be. And it's lying on its side."

When I thought about what I was saying, I saw I was talking nonsense. A golf ball has no sides. So it was not a golf ball.

"And it's lying on a beach?" she prompted.

"Yes. An infinite beach. Stony. Pretty bleak."

"You recognize the beach?"

"No. It's an alarming place-well, the way infinity is always pretty alarming. Just an enormous stretch of territory with nothing growing on it. Oh, and the ocean. A sullen ocean. The waves are heavy and leaden-and slow. About one per minute gathers up its strength and slithers up the beach."

"Slithers?" she asked.

"Waves don't seem to break properly on this beach. They just subside." I sat in silence thinking about this desolate yet somehow tempting picture which haunted me. "The sky. It's very heavy and enclosing."

"So you feel this is all very unpleasant?"

With surprise, I heard myself saying, "Oh, no. I need it. It promises something. Something emerging...Out of the sea, I suppose."

"Why do you wish to cease dreaming this dream if you need it?"

That was a question I found myself unable to answer.

While I was undergoing three sessions a week with Roslyn, the general was undergoing more frequent sessions with Molly Levaticus. And P-L6344 was rus.h.i.+ng nearer.

The general's wife, Hermione, was blind, and had been since childhood. Willetts was not without a s.a.d.i.s.tic streak, or how else would he have become a general? We are all blind in some fas.h.i.+on, either in our private lives or in some shared public way; for instance, there are millions of Earth-bound people, otherwise seemingly intelligent, who still believe that the Sun orbits the Earth, rather than vice versa. This, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

These sort of people would say in their own defense that they believe the evidence of their eyes. Yet we know well that our eyes can see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. All our senses are limited in some fas.h.i.+on. And, because limited, often mistaken. Even "unshakable evidence" concerning the nature of the universe was due to take a knock, thanks to P-L6344.

Willetts' s.a.d.i.s.tic nature led him to persuade his fancy lady, Molly Levaticus, to walk naked about the rooms of his and his wife's apartment, while the blind Hermione was present. Commentators, confronted by this fact, variously saw Molly either as a victim or as a dreadful predatory female. The question seemed to be whether she had been trapped in her innocence by the power of the general, or whether she had schemed her way into his office and bed.

n.o.body considered that the truth, if there was a unitary truth, lay somewhere between the two poles: that there was an affinity between the two, which is not as unusual as it may appear, between the older man and the younger women. She undoubtedly had her power, as he had his weakness. They played oneach other.

And they played cat-and-mouse with Hermione Willetts. She would be sitting at the meal table, with Willetts seated nearby. Into the room would come the naked Levaticus, on tiptoe. Winks were exchanged with Willetts. She would circle the room in a slow dance, hands above her head, showing her unshaven armpits, in a kind of tai ch'i, moving close to the blind woman.

Sensing a movement in the air, or a slight noise, Hermione would ask mildly, "Tomlin, dear, is there another person in the room?"

He would deny it.

Sometimes Hermione would strike out with her stick. Molly always dodged.

"Your behavior is very strange, Hermione," Willetts would say, severely. "Put down that stick. You are not losing your senses, are you?"

Or they would be in the living room. Hermione would be in her chair, reading a book in Braille. Molly would stick out her little curly pudendum almost in the lady's face. Hermione would sniff and turn the page. Molly would glide to Willetts' side, open his zip, and remove his erect p.e.n.i.s, on which her fingers played like a musician with a flute. Then Hermione might lift her blind gaze and ask what her husband was doing.

"Just counting my medals, dearest," he would reply.

What was poor Hermione's perception of her world? How mistaken was it, or did she prefer not to suspect, being powerless?