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

“He’s right,” interjected Jurriaan. Chiara looked at him in surprise. It was probably the first thing he had said on this voyage that didn’t involve his music.

She was outvoted. Even Orpheus expressed a support for Manuel’s proposal, although the Consortium didn’t give AIs full voting rights.

She left the cabin silently.

It took Manuel several days of an unceasing effort just to prepare the bodies. He filled them with nanobots and went through the results. He kept them under constant temperature and atmosphere. He retrieved what he could from the long dead ship about their medical records.

And then he began performing the procedure. He carefully opened the skulls, exposed the brains, and started repairing them. There wasn’t much useful left after eleven thousand years. But with the help of cutting edge designed bacteria and the nans, there was still a chance of doing a decent scan.

After another week, he started with that.

Chiara finally felt at peace. Since their rendezvous with Sedna, she felt filled with various emotions every day and finally she thought she couldn’t bear it anymore. As she stepped inside Orpheus after the last scheduled visit of the surface of Sedna, she knew it was the time.

Inside her cabin, she lay down calmly and let Orpheus pump a precisely mixed cocktail of modulators into her brain. Then Chiara entered her Dreamland.

She designed this environment herself some decades ago in order to facilitate the process of creating new musical themes and ideas from her emotions and memories as effectively as she could. And Chiara felt that the story of the ancient alien ship, Theodora, Dimitri and Sedna would make wonderful musical variations. Then it will be primarily Jurriaan’s task to assemble hers and Manuel’s pieces, often dramatically different, into a symphony such as the world has never heard. Such that will make them famous even beyond the Jovian Consortium, possibly both among the Traditionalists and the Transitioned. They will all remember them.

Chiara smiled and drifted away from a normal consciousness.

During her stay in the Dreamland, Orpheus slowly abandoned the orbit of Sedna and set on a trajectory leading back to the territory of the Jovian Consortium. Another expedition, triggered by their reports back, was already on their way to Sedna, eager to find out more especially about the alien ship and to drill through the ice crust into the possible inner ocean.

Chiara, Manuel, and Jurriaan had little equipment to explore the ship safely—but they didn’t regret it. They had everything they needed. Now was the time to start assembling it all together carefully, piece by piece, like putting back a shattered antique vase.

Even Manuel didn’t regret going away from this discovery. He had the bodies—and trying to revive their personalities now kept most of his attention. A few days after their departure from Sedna, he finished the procedure.

Chiara was awake again at the time, the burden of new feelings longing to be transformed into music gone. She didn’t mind now what Manuel had done; it would be pointless to feel anything about it after she had already created her part of the masterpiece.

Manuel first activated the simulation of Dimitri’s personality.

“Where am I? Dora… Dora… Dora,” it repeated like a stuck gramophone record.

“His brain suffered more damage than hers after he died,” Manuel admitted. “She had time to go through a fairly common cryopreservation procedure. However…”

“I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down and the ship tore apart. There is too much damage. My husband is dead… But we found something, I have to pass this message on… But I feel disoriented, what have I finished? Where am I? What’s happening?” After a while, the female voice started again: “Have I said this already? I don’t know. I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down…”

“They are both mere fragments, a little memories from before death, a few emotions and almost no useful cognitive capacity. I couldn’t have retrieved more. Nevertheless, this is still a giant leap forward. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have been able to retrieve this much after more than eleven thousand years.”

Chiara listened to the feeble voices of the dead and was suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow. It chimed every piece of her body and her mind was full of it. It was almost unbearable. And it was also beautiful.

“It is great indeed,” she whispered.

She didn’t have to say more. Jurriaan learned her thoughts through the open channel. She knew he was thinking the same. He listened all the time. In his mind and with help of Orpheus , he kept listening to the recordings obtained by Manuel, shifting them, changing frequencies, changing them… making them into a melody.

“Keep a few of their words in it, will you?” Chiara spoke softly. “Please.”

I will. They’ll make a great introduction. They will give the listeners a sense of the ages long gone and of personalities of former humans . And he immersed into his composition once again. She knew better than to interrupt him now. In a few days or weeks, he will be done; he’ll have gone through all her and Manuel’s musical suggestions and come up with a draft of the symphony. Then it will take feedback from her and Manuel to complete it. But Jurriaan will have the final say in it. He is, after all, the Composer.

And after that, they should come up with a proper name. A Symphony of Ice and Dust, perhaps? And maybe they should add a subtitle. Ghosts of Theodora and Dimitri Live On Forever? No, certainly not; far too pompous and unsuitable for a largely classical piece. Voices of the Dead? A Song of the Shipwrecked?

Or simply: A Tribute.

Michael Bishop’s first professionally published work was a Keats-flavored ode, “An Echo through the Timepiece,” in The Georgia Review in 1968, but his first published short story, “Piñon Fall,” appeared in the October/November issue of Galaxy , a sale that nudged him into a genre that his fondness for the work of H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin had perhaps made inevitable, science fiction. Since then, he has been nominated on many occasions in several categories for the Hugo Award and has won two Nebula Awards, the first for his novelette “The Quickening” and the second for his anthropological novel about human origins, No Enemy but Time . Other well-received novels include Transfigurations , recently reissued by Fairwood Press in a revised text with a new introduction by sf scholar and academic Joe Sanders, as well as A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire; Ancient of Days; Count Geiger’s Blues; Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas; and Brittle Innings . His newest original book, Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories (July 2017), gathers fifteen of his best primarily mainstream works of short fiction and is available from Fairwood Press and Bishop’s own imprint there, Kudzu Planet Productions. In November of 2018, Bishop will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Aboard Kalachakra , I open my eyes again in Amdo Bay. Sleep still pops in me, yowling like a really hurt cat. I look sidelong out of my foggy eggshell. Many ghosts crowd near to see me leave the bear sleep that everybody in a strut-ship sometimes dreams in. Why have all these somnacicles up-phased to become ship-haunters? Why do so many crowd the grave-cave of my Greta-snooze?