Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

She’d seen Men in the distance three times since the Mother had died, but the Girl knew she should only show herself or speak to Women. Except Women never came weaving their way among the rusted mounds down the High Road. Only Men with bows and knives and staves and expressions of such starved intensity that the Girl could not imagine approaching them.

Yet now someone was actually talking to her.

She began searching the oaks carefully one by one, studying the splits and knotholes and bear stroppings and rotted bits. The Gun encouraged her with small words, complimenting the Girl on her powers of observation, but something about the flat, toneless echo of the voice meant she couldn’t just follow the sound.

Finally she found a dark, hollow nub of metal embedded into a small burl.

“Is this you?” she asked, touching it carefully.

“Yes!” the Gun said, and it sounded so thrilled the Girl could only smile.

“You’re, well… stuck … inside the tree.”

“My last user placed me in a hollow for safekeeping.” The Gun’s glee had fled once more.

“Username Here?” the Girl asked. “Is she dead now?”

“Everyone I have ever known is dead now.” The Gun had decided not to elaborate on its role in some of those deaths. Over the silent, lonely years, it had begun to question its purposes.

“I’ll need to fetch my axe and cut you out,” the Girl said. “And it’s getting colder.”

“Please, don’t leave me.”

“I cannot stay here at night. Wolves come, and maybe even Men. Besides,” she added with the practicality of a born survivor, “it will be too cold and I don’t have blankets or a fire.”

“Fire?” the Gun asked. “I can fire.”

“I don’t think we mean the same thing,” the Girl said carefully, wary once again. She scooped up a few more acorns that were scattered close to hand, tucked them into her bark-weave carryall, and turned her back on the oaks. She had decided the Gun was some sort of Man, maybe a ghost or something.

As she walked away, the Gun performed a swift series of ballistic computations. Yes, it could. Firing on the Girl with self-guided munitions had a 94.37 percent accuracy even under current compromised conditions, and was well within the Gun’s core design parameters. But no, it did not want to. The Gun was not sure why. Perhaps because the world was full of dead people. Mostly, though, it realized she might come back and talk some more.

“Good-bye,” said the Gun. Only the east wind answered, whistling a lonely tune amid the twilight oaks as the Girl faded to a flitting shadow and the brassy sun retreated to trouble the far side of the world.

“Light goes by at the speed of time,” Marlys once told me.

That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat.

There is no t in e = mc 2.

I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all.

Let me tell you a story about Sameera Glasshouse.

She’d been an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech, certifications from several middle-tier authorities, bouncing from contract to contract in trans-Belt space. Ten thousand women, men, and inters just like her out there during the Last Boom. We didn’t call it that then; no one knew the expansion curve the solar economy had been riding was the last of anything. The Last Boom didn’t really have a name when it was under way, except maybe to economists.

Sameera had been pair-bonded to a Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the surname long after she’d dropped Roz from her life. For one thing, “Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese grandmother, which was a reward in itself.

She was working a double ticket on the Enceladus Project master depot, in low orbit around that particular iceball. That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded housing allocation and a fatter pay packet for her trouble. The EP got to schlep one less body to push green inside their habitat scrubbers. Everybody won.

Her spare time was spent wiring together Big Ears, to listen for the chatter that flooded bandwidth all over the solar system. Human beings are—were—noisy. Launch control, wayfinding, birthday greetings, telemetry, banking queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out there, multiplied and ramified beyond comprehension by the combination of lightspeed lag, language barriers, and sheer overwhelming complexity.

Some folks back then claimed there were emergent structures in the bandwidth, properties of the sum of all the chatter that could not be accounted for by analysis of the components. This sort of thinking had been going around since the dawn of information theory—call it information fantasy. The same hardwired apophenia that made human beings see the hand of God in the empirical universe also made us hear Him in the electronic shrieking of our tribe.

Sameera never really believed any of it, but she’d heard some very weird things listening in. In space, it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped playing in the bandwidth. When she’d picked up a crying child on a leaky sideband squirt out of a nominally empty vector, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. When she’d tuned on the irregular regularity of a coded data feed that seemed to originate from deep within Saturn’s atmosphere, she’d just kept hopping frequencies.

But one day God had called Sameera by name. Her voice crackled out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the three syllables over and over and over in a voice that resonated down inside the soft tissues of Sameera’s body, made her joints ache, jellied the very resolve of the soul that she had not known she possessed until that exact moment.

Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down to the master depot’s tiny sacramentarium.

Most people who worked out in the Deep Dark were very mystical but not the least bit religious. The sort of spiritual uncertainty that required revelation for comfort didn’t mix well with the brain-numbing distances and profound realities of life in hard vacuum. Nonetheless, by something between convention and force of habit, any decent-sized installation found space for a sacramentarium. A few hardy missionaries worked their trades on the EP just like everyone else, then spent their off-shifts talking about Allah or Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path.

It was as good a way as any to pass the time.

Terrified that she’d gotten hold of some true sliver of the Divine—or worse, that the Divine had gotten hold of some true sliver of her—Sameera sought to pray in the manner of her childhood. She was pretty sure the sacramentarium had a Meccascope, to point toward the center of the world and mark the times for the five daily prayers.

She ached to abase herself before the God of her childhood, safely distant, largely abstract, living mostly in books and the minds of the adults around her. A God who spoke from the radio was far too close.