FSF, January-February 2010 (7 page)

I complained in a prior column that NASA killed Science Fantasy. But happily technology giveth as well as taketh away. And everything we lost when NASA made Mars boring has been recouped in spades on the VR frontier. Want sword-slinging Amazons riding giant telepathic lizards? You got ‘em—and all at the low, low price of a little painless handwaving about Vingean singularities, Matrioshka arrays, and pocket universes.

Williams has taken full advantage of this technopoetic license to weave together a world that combines the sensual thrill of slumming it in the science fantasy badlands with the more cerebral joys of working out just how those lizard-straddling Amazons got there. Best of all, he has placed at the center of his book a hero uniquely conceived to illuminate the landscape: a “scholar of implied spaces” who charts the
evolution
of artificial universes.

This is where
Implied Spaces
makes the jump from mere space opera (not that there's anything wrong with that!) to full-fledged hard sf. This is new—to the best of my knowledge. And it's important.

One of the great structural weaknesses of most current hard sf is the failure to grasp the true scope of evolution. It's not really anyone's fault, strictly speaking; it's just that sf writers, albeit Very Smart Persons (VSPs), are still members of the human species. And our species still hasn't quite wrapped its collective mind around Darwin. (For more on this, see Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson, Szathmary, and a lot of other VSPs.)

All systems evolve. Including systems of information. Artificial, organic, biosphere, noosphere. It's all information. It all evolves. Even the very cogs and flywheels of evolution itself evolve. (After all, what is natural selection but a marvelously honed system for the transmission and preservation of genetic information?)

The failure to appreciate the arbitrary nature of our habitual division between natural and artificial information systems has resulted in a sort of unspoken notion among many sf writers that post-Singularity minds and bodies will somehow be subject to different rules of evolution—or perhaps not subject to evolution at all. Oh, no one says it. But it is the ghost in the machine—or rather, the absence of a ghost. It is there in the overly tidy political systems, in the static biospheres, in the absence of mosquitoes, in the general sentiment that stuff, including the stuff we're made of, is going to work better in the future.

Hogswaddle!

Life without mosquitoes (or some artificial version thereof) wouldn't work. More to the point, life without mosquitoes—and all their biospheric and noospheric equivalents—would be boring.

Walter Jon Williams grabs this fundamental truth two-fisted—and runs with it. I won't rob you of the pleasure of watching his meditation on artificial evolution unfold through the course of this masterful novel, but I have one word that should perk up the ears of any reader of Gould and Dawkins:

Squinches.

Okay. That's it then. Get off your duff and go read the book.

And happy squinch hunting....

[Back to Table of Contents]

Robin Aurelian, who contributed a handful of stories to our pages in the late ‘90s (including “Proxies” and “Jelly Bones"), returns with an unusual and amusing fantasy.

Navin hugged his daypack to his stomach. Inside it, he had packed his favorite games—the ones that involved casting protection circles and solving puzzles. Unlike most kids in his eighth-grade class, he wasn't interested in piling up a high body count. “Where's the fairy repellent?” he asked.

"Packed,” said Mom.

"Outlaw bait?” Navin said.

"I forgot,” said Dad. He headed for the garage.

"What about the sleeping bags?” asked Navin.

"They're in the station wagon,” said his older sister, Spike. “Will you quit asking questions so we can get this show on the road?"

Navin hated the twice-a-year family hunting trips, and always tried to get out of them. Spike adored and excelled at hunting and fishing. She'd bagged three outlaws, an adolescent river dragon, and an angel last summer, which had kept the housetrolls and brownies and gnomes happily fed for months. Dad was no slouch at hunting, either. Mom was better at rendering whatever game they caught, and she made Navin help her at base camp every year. They brought Navin along so they could hunt his permits.

All Navin brought home was bites. The weirdest things bit him. Last fall, he had caught a fever/chills combo that made dressing difficult, and the spring before that, a water nixie had chewed on his finger and he got bloat. When he was in sixth grade, he'd spent a month with blue skin. No doctor, occult or otherwise, had been able to tell what caused the condition, but he just knew it was the result of some kind of bite.

"Why do I have to taste so good?” he muttered.

Spike heard him. She always heard him when he least wanted her to. “You have to be good for something,” she said. “Maybe we could use
you
for bait."

Navin thought of Spike putting a hook through his stomach and dropping him into a lake. He wondered what she'd catch.

"Stop torturing your little brother and get in the car,” said Mom. It was something she said often. Usually Spike only paid attention to the second half.

Navin had to sit in the back seat with Spike. She spent the drive drawing tiny targets all over his right arm in indelible red and black ink. It hurt a lot less than other things she threatened to do to him.

The enchanted forest Dad drove them to for spring break was near the Superstition Mountains, one of Navin's least favorite locations on Earth. Right now the Ridiculous Trees were in full bloom. Navin sneezed blue pollen onto his shirt. It stained.

They were almost to their reserved campsite when Spike cried, “Stop the car!"

Dad pulled over, the way he always did for Spike. Spike grabbed the big net and the miniharpoon and leapt out of the car. She ran into the trees beside the road, letting loose a hunting cry. She knew so many Navin couldn't keep them straight. Some attracted attention, and others served to terrify. She sometimes used them on him, but he didn't always react correctly, which to Spike was just further evidence that he'd always be a feckless, useless magician, and she would always be a mighty hunter.

The air in the car was stuffy and smelled of the decaying baits Spike had packed. Navin rolled down his window and rested his arm on the sill. One of the lesser gnat fairies flew in, settled on his skin, and plunged its proboscis into the red center of one of Spike's targets. Maybe he could get really sick right away, and be sent home or to the hospital, so he could skip the rest of the trip.

Unfortunately, he didn't have an extreme reaction to the bite—just the normal swollen, itchy bump, this time more decorative than usual thanks to Spike's artwork. The gnat hummed a tinkling song after it had finished, summoning a bunch of other gnat-fairies. Not all of them restricted themselves to the targets. Apparently his undecorated arm was just as tasty, and they liked his face, too. He crossed his eyes to watch three on his nose. Courteously, they didn't bite him in the eyes or mouth.

"Navin, what is
wrong
with you?” asked his mother, spraying clouds of odoriferous repellent over him and stinging his eyes. “It's not like we can use those for anything. Stop wasting blood."

The gnats were undaunted by the repellent. One on his face gave him a kiss before she flew off. He touched the small warm spot on his cheek as Mom got out the fly swatter and swatted away most of the others. “Roll up your window, for heaven's sake,” said Mom.

Navin sighed and obeyed. He was covered with small welts. He peeked into the neck of his shirt and saw a dragonfly pixie nestled against his chest, its little red mouth pressed to his skin. The mild narcotic it secreted as it sucked made the itching from the gnat bites fade, and started him hallucinating. He let his head roll back and watched sunlight twist and dance in sparkling patterns on the ceiling.

Spike whooped, wrenched open the back door, and collapsed onto her seat, the net plump with three stinking, bloody howlet corpses. “Here,” she said, dropping them in Navin's lap. “Make yourself useful.” She wiped her bloody hands on his shirt.

"Good start,” said Dad as he turned the key in the ignition. The car trolls under the hood growled in anticipation of a feast.

Spike whistled her triumph song.

The bodies were still warm, one of them twitching. Navin turned around in his seat and rescued the rendering kit from the snarl of luggage in the back. He fished the first howlet out of the net, opened its belly with a surgical knife, and dumped the internal organs into the collapsible gut bucket. Spike watched to make sure he cleaned out everything that would putrefy fast. He packed salt into the corpse and then worked the other two. Afterward he sat sticky and stinking until they reached the campsite and he could rinse off under the pump.

The campground was full of hunters; it was the first day of the season, and everybody needed food for the household appliances and power trolls. Spike screamed with joy when she discovered that her boyfriend had set up a tent on the site next to theirs. Spike's boyfriend was almost as great a hunter as she was, and he was just as happy to see her as she was to see him. They immediately set up a challenge on who would kill the most game by the following evening.

Spike and Dad geared up in orange vests and loaded themselves with weapons and carry sacks, then rushed off into the forest.

"Catch us some trout for supper,” Mom said. She handed Navin a fishing pole and some bait. She had already skinned the howlets, fed a few cuts to the car trolls, and iced all the other useful parts.

Navin headed for the lake. He settled on a rock and opened his shirt to let out the torpid dragonfly pixie, her abdomen now swollen with his blood. “Hey, handsome,” she whispered, clinging to his finger. “Wanna incubate my eggs?"

"Um, no,” he said.

"Too late! I already laid them!” Her wings buzzed into a frenzy of flight; she took off across the lake. A young dragon broke the surface of the water and snapped her up.

Navin headed home half an hour later with five fish on a string and something the size of a squirrel attached to the small of his back. It had crept into his shirt while he was drowsing, but its bite woke him up, a ring of fire like a brand pressing into him. It had four legs braced against his back, and their claws pierced his skin, anchoring it where it was. When he tried to pull it off, it hurt as though he was trying to tear chunks out of his flesh. He stopped pulling at it, and the pain subsided until all he felt was its weight and the sleek short fur that covered it. He figured Mom would handle it.

A campfire burned in the stone circle at their campsite. Dad and Spike were back, roasting were-rabbit haunches over the flames; three gutted outlaws hung from their seasoning tree, toes tagged with turquoise family hunting permits.

"I got the big one,” Spike said.

Navin spitted the fish and held them over the fire.

"He tried to catch
me
! Jumped down from a tree on top of me, the fool. Had a wallet full of cash, too.” She pulled it out to show them. Four red toe-tags fell out.

"But that's—” Navin said.

Spike threw the tags into the fire. “Whoops,” she said, and smiled.

"I caught something, too,” Navin said, when he could stop thinking about the fact that Spike had killed a hunter, not an outlaw.

"Yeah, some tiny fish. Nice job, nimnull,” said Spike.

"Something else,” Navin said. “I don't know what. It's on my back."

"
Navin
,” said his mother, exasperated. She jerked his shirt up and gasped.

"Uh oh,” said Spike.

"Criminy!” Dad said.

"Why didn't you say something sooner?” Mom said. Her voice squeaked.

"Can we cut it off?” Spike asked.

"It's too late. It's fused with his spine. We'll have to let nature take its course."

"What is it?” Navin asked.

"Something rare,” Mom said. She sounded subdued. “I'll tell you more tomorrow. For now, enjoy your dinner. Better sleep on your stomach.” She gave him not only all the fish he had caught, but two of the were-rabbit haunches, and she kissed his cheek before she bundled him into his tent under three layers of netting.

"Come on, Mom. What is that thing on Navin?” he heard Spike ask Mom while he was drifting off to sleep.

"A cullathoat. A parasite. It comes alive once it colonizes another lifeform. Unless Navin can separate from it using his own power, he doesn't have long before it takes him over.” She sounded sad. Would she miss him? He thought maybe she would. He and his mother shared many tasks; she always appreciated a job well done. His father had never had any use for him.

Finally something had bit him he couldn't walk away from, he thought, and tested his mental temperature. In a way it seemed he'd been waiting for this all his life. If he wouldn't hunt, he would be hunted. This time by something bigger than his finger.

Spike would probably miss using him for target practice.

He raised himself on his elbows, got a glowstick and lit the end with the faintest touch of magic, then rummaged through his pack until he found his protection circle kit. This was a practice kit that had no practical applications, and the parasite was already inside any circle Navin could cast. Still, he pulled out the diagram of the strongest circle in the set and laid it on the floor.

"What does it eat?” Spike asked.

"Children,” Mom muttered. “If he had stronger magic, he might have a chance to detach it, but I don't have high hopes. He doesn't seem to have a fight-back gene. Look at the way he lets things bite him all the time. He should have fought it when it first bit him. I think it might be too late now."

"Poor kid. He's always been kind of puny,” said Dad.

"If the other thing wins, can we use it as bait?” Spike asked. “Or do we hunt it?"

"Sometimes, Spike, you're a horrible child,” said Mom.

"Wait till tomorrow,” Dad said.

Navin had learned his anti-fighting strategy early, from bouts with Spike. When he collapsed into a helpless state, it bored and frustrated her, whereas fighting back got him much worse punishments, and he never could win. The bites of other things interested him. Once something bit him with steroid side effects and he'd bulked up for a week, which had been fun. Another time he'd gained extra sight and could see emotions. Some of the bites had narcotic effects; he enjoyed altered states.