Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 31

The audience burst into laughter as I negotiated my way back across the stage. Why I didn't just run home, I don't know. Pride, I guess. Or maybe a death wish. At any rate, on my way back to my seat I saw Terri and Ted. Terri was laughing with everyone else. But Ted was sitting very quiet, with that "hmm" look on his face.

Stevens started tuning the replica. He frowned. Then he tuned it a little longer. It took a while, but finally he seemed satisfied.

The replica violin's performance of "All Through the Night" was, if anything, better. Stevens, subconsciously, no doubt, probably put more feeling into it. Or perhaps the tuning was slightly more fresh. At any rate, he proved my point exactly-but Ted, Terri and I were the only ones in the hall who knew it.

"I hope," Stevens said, "the superiority of the real instrument is obvious and the stupidity..."

"Dr. Stevens," a deep ba.s.s voice echoed from the back of the hall. A hundred heads turned. It was Professor Molar standing there backlit like the stone statue in Don Giovanni, and with, I hoped, a similar purpose. I wilted in relief. "Stevens, a moment please."

Stevens, interrupted in his moment of triumph, looked down his nose. "What do you want?"

"Privately, please, before you say anything else."

"Nonsense! This is my concert and I'll d.a.m.n well say what I please!"

You could have heard a pin drop.

"Very well," Molar said, calmly. "Have you ever heard of carbon-14 dating?"

A few whispers started.

"What?" Stevens said. "Of course I have! What of it?"

"The violin you hold in your hand is less than fifty years old. Perhaps as new as yesterday."

There were a few nervous chuckles.

"Nonsense!"

"I did the test myself. The one you described as the real Stradivarius is, in fact, the replica."

t.i.tters began in the back and rolled forward to the stage in a wave of mirth.

Stevens looked at one violin, then the other, opened his mouth, shut it, then abruptly set the replica down, picked up the real Stradivarius, and held it for a long time. Then he laid it down again and shuffled out a side entrance. Some said there were tears in his eyes. The laughs died and the audience sat in shocked silence.I went back up to the stage and took the new violin the old laughing philosopher had given me, and simply flowed down off the stage. The first claps started as I got halfway up the aisle and by the time I reached the back of the hall, I had to turn and wave. Ted was standing, leading the applause. Terri was nowhere to be seen. Ah, sweet, sweet vindication!

Just to tie this off, the "Democritus Violin," as they're calling our replica-it's quite famous now-was deemed property of the college and is on display in the science building. The debate still rages as to whether it is a real Stradivarius, but we've been enjoined from making any more replicas until some legal dust settles.

Professor Molar, it turned out, was late to the concert because of a long meeting with the College President and Dean of the faculty. Dr. Molar had done more than a.n.a.lyze the violin. He'd compiled a list of grievances from over a hundred students and faculty. Andre Stevens didn't like people disagreeing with his views, it seemed, and expressed his dislike in grades, recommendations and various other ways.

There are advantages to being a private, rather than a state inst.i.tution, and Dear Old Lloyd released Stevens from his contract in time for the disgraced musicologist to take an appointment at Twin Cities A&I for the next semester. He conceded nothing in a bitter final letter to the school newspaper saying that as his talents had declined to the point where he could no longer tell a real Stradivarius from a copy, he would never play again.

While Stevens' promise of an "A" for proving him wrong was not considered an enforceable contract, I was allowed to withdraw, post facto, from his course, and as a result, my grade point was high enough for my scholars.h.i.+p to be renewed-with some help from the athletic department. My penance for all of this will be to throw an aluminum disk as far as I can for the Women of Harlech next spring. A small price to pay; and, in partial compensation, I now have exclusive possession of Ted.

But I carry a secret with me. There was an ambiguity in my victory that makes me fear that Stevens may have won after all, if only in my own mind. When he was about to smash the original Stradivarius, I stopped him.

Now why, if the replica was no different, did I do that?

Fossil Games

TOM PURDOM.

Tom Purdom has been writing solid science fiction since the 1960s. His first story was published in 1957 and his second novel, The Tree Lord of Imeten, was the other side of an Ace Double from a Samuel R. Delany novel. Other novels followed and he was an active writer for a decade or so.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction applies the phrase "unpretentious but competent" to his works of that era. Then he more or less disappeared from SF between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, but he has been back with a vengeance in this decade with some first-rate fiction. His stories, mainly in Asimov's (as this one was), are deeply grounded in setting and have a pleasant complexity of motivation.

Fossil Games is more than competent: its ambitious SF, full of neat ideas, surprises, and interesting twists of plot, and shows Purdom to be in the company of the more exciting writers of contemporary SF. It takes place in a sweeping interstellar future in which humanity is exploring the nearby stars and their solar systems, but human behavior is always an issue, all the old games.

Morgan's mother and father had given him a state-of-the-art inheritance. It was only state-of-the-art-2117 but they had seen where the world was going. They had mortgaged 20 percent of their future income so they could order a package that included all the genetic enhancements Morgan's chromosomes could absorb, along with two full decades of postnatal development programs. Morgan was in his fifties when his father committed suicide. By that time his father could barely communicate withhalf the people he encountered in his day to day business activities.

Morgan's mother survived by working as a low-level freelance prost.i.tute. The medical technology that was state-of-the-art-2157 could eliminate all the relevant physical effects of aging and a hidden computer link could guide her responses. For half an hour-as long as no one demanded anything too unusual-she could give her younger customers the illusion they were interacting with someone who was their intellectual and psychological equal. Morgan tried to help her, but there wasn't much he could do.

He had already decided he couldn't survive in a solar system in which half the human population had been born with brains, glands, and nervous systems that were state-of-the-art-2150 and later. He had blocked his mother's situation out of his memory and lived at subsistence level for almost three decades. Every yen, franc, and yuri he could sc.r.a.pe together had been shoved into the safest investments his management program could locate. Then he had taken all his hard-won capital and bought two hundred shares in an asteroid habitat a group of developers had outfitted with fusion reactors, plasma drives, solar sails, and anything else that might make a small island move at 9 percent the speed of light. And he and three thousand other "uncompet.i.tive," "under-enhanced" humans had crept away from the solar system. And set off to explore the galaxy.

Morgan had lived through three lengthy pairings back in the solar system. Six years after the Island of Adventure had begun its slow drift away from the sun, he established a fourth pairing with a woman he had met through the s.h.i.+p's information system. The s.h.i.+p's designers had endowed it with attractive common s.p.a.ces, complete with parks and cafes, but most of the pa.s.sengers seemed to prefer electronic socialization during the first years of the voyage. Biographies and lists of interests were filed with the system. Pseudonyms and electronic personalities proliferated. Morgan thought of old stories in which prisoners had communicated by tapping on the walls of their cells.

Savela Insdotter was eleven years younger than Morgan but she was a fully committed member of the EruLabi communion. She used pharmaceutical mental enhancers, but she used them sparingly.

Morgan consumed all the mental enhancers his system could accommodate, so his functional intelligence was actually somewhat higher than hers in certain areas.

The foundation of the EruLabi ethos was a revolt against genetic enhancement. In the view of the EruLabi "mentors," the endless quest for intellectual and physical improvement was a folly. Life was supposed to be lived for its own sake, the EruLabi texts declared. Every moment was a gift that should be treasured for the pleasure it brought, not an episode in a quest for mental and physical perfection. The simplest pleasures-touches, languor, the textures of bodies pressed together-were, to the EruLabi, some of the most profound experiences life had to offer.

One of the most important texts in the EruLabi rituals was the words, in ancient Greek, that the Eudoran king had spoken to Odysseus: Dear to us ever are the banquet and the harp and the dance and the warm bath and changes of raiment and love and sleep.

The Island of Adventure had pointed itself at 82 Eridani-a Sol-type star twenty-one light years from the solar system. Eighty-two Eridani was an obvious candidate for a life-bearing planet. A fly-by probe had been launched at the star in 2085-one hundred and eighteen years before Morgan and his fellow emigrants had left their home system. In 2304-just after they had celebrated the first century of their departure-the Island of Adventure intercepted a message the probe was sending back to the solar system.

It was the beginning of several years of gloomy debate. The probe had found planets. But none of them looked any more interesting than the cratered rocks and giant iceb.a.l.l.s mankind had perused in the solar system.

The third planet from the sun could have been another Earth. It was closer to its sun than Earth was but it could have supported life if it had been the right size. Unfortunately, the planet's ma.s.s was only 38 percent the ma.s.s of Earth.

Theorists had calculated that a planet needed a ma.s.s about 40 percent the ma.s.s of Earth if it was going to develop an oxygen-rich atmosphere and hold it indefinitely. The third planet was apparently justa little too small. The images transmitted by the probe were drearily familiar-a rocky, airless desert, some grandiose canyons and volcanoes, and the usual a.s.sortment of craters, dunes, and minor geological features.

The Island of Adventure had set out for 82 Eridani because 82E was a star of the same ma.s.s and spectral type as Sol. The second choice had been another star in the same constellation. Rho Eridani was a double star 21.3 light years from the solar system. The two stars in the Rho system orbited each other at a promising distance-seven light hours. With that much separation between them, the theoreticians agreed, both stars could have planets.

When you looked at the sky from the solar system, Rho was a few degrees to the left of 82 Eridani.

The Island of Adventure was a ma.s.sive, underpowered rock but it could make a small midcourse correction if its inhabitants wanted to expend some extra reaction ma.s.s.

The strongest opposition to the course change came from the oldest human on the s.h.i.+p. Madame Dawne was so old she had actually been born on Earth. All the other people on board had been born (created, in most cases) in the habitats the human race had scattered across the solar system.

The Island of Adventure had been the first s.h.i.+p to embark for 82 Eridani. Thirty-two years after it had left the solar system, a s.h.i.+p called Green Voyager had pointed its rocky bow at Rho. The texts of its transmissions had indicated the oldest pa.s.sengers on the Green Voyager were two decades younger than the youngest pa.s.sengers on the Island of Adventure.

If the pa.s.sengers on the Island of Adventure approved the course change, they would arrive at Rho about the same time the Green Voyager arrived there. They would find themselves sharing the same star system with humans who were, on average, three or four decades younger than they were. Madame Dawne would be confronted with brains and bodies that had been designed a full century after she had received her own biological equipment.

Morgan was not a politician by temperament but he was fascinated by any activity that combined conflict with intellectual effort. When his pairing with Savela Insdotter had finally come to an end, he had isolated himself in his apartment and spent a decade and a half studying the literature on the dynamics of small communities. The knowledge he had absorbed would probably look prehistoric to the people now living in the solar system. It had been stored in the databanks pre-2203. But it provided him with techniques that should produce the predicted results when they were applied to people who had reached adulthood several decades before 2200.

The Island of Adventure was managed, for all practical purposes, by its information system. A loosely organized committee monitored the system but there was no real government. The humans on board were pa.s.sengers, the information system was the crew, and the communal issues that came up usually involved minor housekeeping procedures.

Now that a real issue had arisen, Morgan's fellow pa.s.sengers drifted into a system of continuous polling-a system that had been the commonest form of political democracy when they had left the solar system. Advocates talked and lobbied. Arguments flowed through the electronic symposiums and the face-to-face social networks. Individuals registered their opinions-openly or anonymously-when they decided they were willing to commit themselves. At any moment you could call up the appropriate screen and see how the count looked.

The most vociferous support for the course change came from eight individuals. For most of the three thousand fifty-seven people who lived in the s.h.i.+p's apartments, the message from the probe was a minor development. The s.h.i.+p was their home-in the same way a hollowed out asteroid in the solar system could have been their home. The fact that their habitat would occasionally visit another star system added spice to the centuries that lay ahead, but it wasn't their primary interest in life. The Eight, on the other hand, seemed to feel they would be sentencing themselves to decades of futility if they agreed to visit a lifeless star system.

Morgan set up a content a.n.a.lysis program and had it monitor the traffic flowing through the public information system. Eighteen months after the message from the probe had triggered off the debate, heput a two-axis graph on the screen and examined a pair of curves.

Morgan's pairing with Savela Insdotter had lasted over sixty years and they had remained friendly after they had unpaired. He showed her the graph as soon as he had run it through some extra checks.

The curve that charted the Eight's activities rose and fell in conjunction with the curve that measured Madame Dawne's partic.i.p.ation in the debate. When Madame Dawne's activity level reached a peak, the Eight subsided into silence. They would stop agitating for their cause, the entire discussion would calm down, and Madame Dawne would return to the extreme privacy she had maintained from the beginning of the voyage. Then, when Madame Dawne hadn't been heard from for several tendays, the Eight would suddenly renew their campaign.

"I believe they're supporting the change to a new destination merely because they wish to disturb Madame Dawne," Morgan said. "I've created personality profiles based on their known histories and public statements. The profiles indicate my conjecture is correct."

Savela presented him with a shrug and a delicate, upward movement of her head. Morgan had spoken to her in Tych-an ultra-precise language that was primarily used in written communication.

Savela was responding in an emotion-oriented language called VA13-a language that made extensive use of carefully rehea.r.s.ed gestures and facial expressions.

No one, as far as Morgan knew, had ever spoken VA12 or VA14. The language had been labeled VA13 when it had been developed in a communications laboratory on Phobos, and the label had stuck.

"Madame Dawne is a laughable figure," Savela said.

"I recognize that. But the Eight are creating a serious division in our communal life. We might have reached a consensus by now if they hadn't restimulated the debate every time it seemed to be concluding.

Madame Dawne is one of the eleven wealthiest individuals on the s.h.i.+p. What would happen to us if she decided she had to impose her will by force?"

"Do you really feel that's a serious possibility, Morgan?"

The linguists who had developed VA13 had been interested in the emotional content of music. The speaker's tone patterns and rhythms were just as critical as the verbal text. Savela's word choices were polite and innocuous, but her rhythms communicated something else-a mixture of affection and amus.e.m.e.nt that would have seemed contemptuous if she and Morgan hadn't shared a pairing that had lasted six decades.

To Morgan, Madame Dawne was pathetic, not comic. She spent most of her days, as far as anyone could tell, in the electronic dream worlds she constructed in her apartment. No one on the s.h.i.+p had seen her true face. When she appeared on someone's screens, her electronic personae were impressively unimaginative. She usually imaged herself as a tall woman, with close cropped red hair, dressed in flamboyant boots-and-baggy-s.h.i.+rts style that North Americans had adopted during the third decade of the twenty-first century-the body type and clothing mode that had been fas.h.i.+onable when she had been in her natural prime.

Morgan had put a wargame template on his information system and had it explore some of the things Madame Dawne could do. Savela might smile at the thought that a limited, underdeveloped personality like Madame Dawne might undertake something dangerous. The wargame program had come up with seventy-four weapons systems a wealthy individual could develop with the aid of the information in the databanks. Half the systems were straight-forward modifications of the devices that dug out apartment s.p.a.ces and extracted mineral resources from the rocky exterior of the s.h.i.+p. Most of the others involved an offensive use of the self-replicating machines that handled most of the pa.s.sengers' daily needs.

Madame Dawne couldn't have designed any of the machines the wargame program had suggested.

She probably didn't even know the s.h.i.+p could place them at her disposal. Did she realize she could ask a wargame program for advice? Morgan didn't know.

Morgan's political studies had included an exhaustive module in applied personality profiling. He could recite from memory the numbers that described the kind of person who could become a successfulsmall-community politician. He hadn't been surprised when his profiling program had told him he scored below average on most of the critical personality characteristics. He had made several attempts to enter the course change controversy and the results would have evoked I-told-you-so head shakes from the technicians who had developed the profiling program. The program had been almost cruelly accurate when it had informed him he had a low tolerance for disagreement. He could have given it fifty examples of his tendency to become hot-tempered and defensive when he attracted the attention of aggressive debaters. For the last few months, he had been avoiding the public symposiums and feeding private suggestions to people who could turn his ideas into effective attempts at persuasion. Now he fleshed out the profiles he had been storing in his databanks and started recruiting a six member political team.

Morgan couldn't proselytize prospects and debate verbal brawlers, but he had discovered he could do something that was just as effective: he could win the cooperation of the people who could. Some of the people he approached even enjoyed accosting their fellow citizens and lobbying them on political issues. They couldn't always follow Morgan's logic, but they considered that a minor problem. They were extroverted, achievement-oriented personalities and Morgan gave them suggestions that worked. If he told them a visit to X made good sense at this moment, and a visit to Y would be a waste of time, they approached both prospects the first couple of times he made a recommendation, and followed his advice after that.

Most of the political strategies Morgan had studied could be fitted into three categories: you could be combative and confrontational, you could market, or you could explore the subtleties of the indirect approach. Temperamentally, Morgan was a marketer who liked to use the indirect approach.

Once he had his political organization going, he ran another a.n.a.lysis of the profiles in his databanks and organized a Terraforming Committee. Five engineering-oriented personalities sat down with a carefully selected political personality and began looking at the possibility some of the planets of 82 Eridani could be transformed into livable environments. Eight months after Morgan had established the committee, the first simulated planetary environment took its place in the public databanks. Interested individuals could soar across a planetary landscape that included blue skies, towering forests, and creatures selected from three of Earth's geologic eras and two of its mythological cycles.

It took almost five years, but Morgan's efforts succeeded. An overwhelming consensus emerged.

The s.h.i.+p would stay on course.

Unfortunately, the Eight still seemed to enjoy baiting Madame Dawne. By this time, however, Morgan had constructed detailed profiles of every personality in the octet.

The most vulnerable was a woman named Miniruta Coboloji. Miniruta's primary motivation, according to the profile program, was an intense need for affiliation.

Morgan had known his pairing with Savela Insdotter would end sooner or later. Everything had to end sooner or later. The surprise had been the ident.i.ty of the man who had succeeded him.

Morgan had a.s.sumed Savela would grow tired of his skeptical, creedless outlook and pair with someone who shared her beliefs. Instead, her next partner had been Ari Sun-Dalt-the outspoken champion of a communion that had been founded on the belief that every member of the human race was involved in a cosmic epic: the struggle of matter to become conscious.

Life was not an accident, the advocates of Ari's world-view a.s.serted. It was the purpose of the universe. The idea that dominated Ari's life was the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise-the belief that the great goal of the cosmos was the unlimited expansion of Consciousness.

Ari had been adding organic and electronic enhancements to his brain ever since he was in his thirties.

The skin on the top of his skull concealed an array that included every chip and cell cl.u.s.ter his nervous system would accept. His head was at least 25 percent longer, top to bottom, than a standard male head.

If something could increase his intelligence or heighten his consciousness, Ari believed it would be immoral not to install it.

"We can always use recruits," Ari said. "But I must tell you, my friend, I feel there's something cynical about your scheming."

Morgan shrugged. "If I'm right, Miniruta will be ten times more contented than she is now. And thes.h.i.+p will be serener."

They were both speaking Jor-an everyday language, with a rigidly standardized vocabulary, which had roots in twenty-first century French. Morgan had told Ari he had detected signs that Miniruta would be interested in joining his communion, and Ari had immediately understood Morgan was trying to remove Miniruta from the Eight. Ari could be surprisingly sophisticated intellectually. Most people with strong belief systems didn't like to think about the psychological needs people satisfied when they joined philosophical movements.

Miniruta joined Ari's communion a year after Ari set out to convert her. She lost interest in the Eight as soon as she acquired a new affiliation-just as Morgan's profiles had predicted she would. Morgan had been preparing plans for three other members of the group but Miniruta's withdrawal produced an unexpected dividend. Two of the male members drifted away a few tendays after Miniruta proclaimed her new allegiance. Their departure apparently disrupted the dynamics of the entire clique. Nine tendays after their defection, Morgan could detect no indications the Eight had ever existed.

On the outside of the s.h.i.+p, in an area where the terrain still retained most of the asteroid's original contours, there was a structure that resembled a squat slab with four circular antennas mounted at its corners. The slab itself was a comfortable, two-story building, with a swimming pool, recreation facilities, and six apartments that included fully equipped communication rooms.