Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.

Angels do not speak to ants.

Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri ’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past anymore; I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

Tactical beeps at us.

“Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?

But—

“It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

Two minutes.

“Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”

“We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

“Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”

“Look at the signal,” I tell him.

Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky . It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop .

We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

“Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

So far, though, nothing’s come out.

“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart . To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon , to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…

I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.

“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

“Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

Why would you think that? I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

My son is trying to comfort me.

I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

But I’m better now.

It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora , an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.

I still have so much to learn.

At least my son is here to teach me.

“The Deeps of the Sky” by Elizabeth Bear. © 2012 by Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in Edge of Infinity , edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Twenty Lights to “The Land of Snow”” by Michael Bishop. © 2012 by Michael Bishop. Originally published in Going Interstellar , edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Jar of Goodwill” by Tobias S. Buckell. © 2010 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Clarkesworld , May 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Three Bodies at Mitanni” by Seth Dickinson. © 2015 by Seth Dickinson. Originally published in Analog , June 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Glory” by Greg Egan. © 2007 by Greg Egan. Originally published in New Space Opera , edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Voyage Out” by Gwyneth Jones. © 2008 by Gwyneth Jones. Originally published in Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures , edited by Lynne Jamneck. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Wreck of the Godspeed” by James Patrick Kelly. © 2004 by James Patrick Kelly. Originally published in Between Worlds , edited by Robert Silverberg. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress. © 2004 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Between Worlds , edited by Robert Silverberg. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Permanent Fatal Errors” by Jay Lake. © 2010 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. Originally published in Is Anybody Out There , edited by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“Mono no aware” by Ken Liu. © 2012 by Ken Liu. Originally published in The Future is Japanese , edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Firewall and the Door” by Sean McMullen. © 2013 by Sean McMullen. Originally published in Analog , March 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Symphony of Ice and Dust” by Julie Novakova. © 2013 by Julie Novakova. Originally published in Clarkesworld , October 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Travelling into Nothing” by An Owomoyela. © 2016 by An Owomoyela. Originally published in Bridging Infinity , edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.