Shango, the Yoruban war god, called down storms on the museum. Mithra threw armored horsemen. Durga, riding a Tiger across the heavens, transformed into Kali, who took frenzied slashes at the humans with her eternally bloody scythe. Leopard-cloaked Huitzilopochtli called down lightning and thunder. The Christian, Muslim and Hebrew deities called down fires, floods, plagues, earthquakes, swarms of locusts and worms, hurricanes, madness, miscarriages, impotence, blindness. The energy fields that protected the earth from the destruction of the sun shrugged off most of the gods' collective fury, though a gray rain fell on the museum steps for a moment or two, much to the delight of the line of patrons, which now stretched from the museum's door and wrapped around the planet twice.
Then the gods did something unexpected to the humans — they prayed. Being gods already, the humans didn't understand who the gods were praying to. But pray they did, on hands and wings, floating in the air, banging sealskin drums and standing in fire, all the gods humanity had ever dreamed of prayed in unison to something the humans couldn't fathom.
The world rumbled. The sound was muffled by the earth's many protective machines, but noticeable nonetheless. Then the gods began to change. They shrank in both stature and anger. Just when the humans though the gods might shrink to nothing at all, they realized the gods had metamorphosed into hundreds of golden hummingbirds. As if at a signal, the glittering birds rose up in a clatter. With a whoosh, they rose into the sky, climbing higher and higher, far beyond the range of mortal birds. And when they reached the protective shield that surrounded the earth to keep the universe at bay, the birds were vaporized one by one until they were all gone. The only god who remained was Uxmal, the crippled Mayan dwarf who was very good at building, but slow to walk and, apparently, to fly away.
With the loss of most of the gods, humans quickly deserted the museum. Uxmal was raffled off to the family of a patron who took him to his estate in the ruins of a human city that had been built thousands of years earlier under the polar ice cap. Missing the sight of the stars, Uxmal returned to the surface world and built himself a mile-high tower of ice and local stone. Warm in his tower, Uxmal enjoyed the company of children and taught them magic tricks, though he kept the best tricks to himself, so that he would always be asked to perform at the children's birthday parties.
THE END
The Index of Refraction
Traffic was bad all the way out from the city to the airport, and he's afraid he'll be late to meet her plane. After he parks, he's relieved when he checks the information board and sees that her flight is running 20 minutes late. That lost 20 minutes makes him right on time.
It's unseasonably hot. The air in the terminal feels wet and thick. His head swims. The crowd near the arrival gates seems to move in slow motion. Why don't they turn on the air conditioning or a fan or something? He wonders. Like a lot of airports, his hasn't handled new post-9/11 security well, and they've simply packed everyone waiting for arriving passengers into a wide cattle pen at the bottom of the escalators. He walks to the back of the waiting area, hoping he can breathe back there.
He keeps his eyes on the top of the escalator, wondering how long he'll have to wait. A small brunette appears and he looks hopefully, but it isn't her. Traveling at approximately 980,000,000 feet per second (noting that the speed of light is slightly slowed by the atmosphere and suspended particulate matter in the air), the light that carries the brunette's image takes around .0000000005 of a second to travel the distance from her face to his eye.
He looks around at the anxious crowd. A family with a couple of sullen children and bright Happy Birthday Grandma balloons. An older couple who stare up at the rolling escalator, but studiously ignore each other. A handsome long-haired boy in a leather jacket leans against a cement pillar, fidgeting into just the right pose for the pale goth girl slouching down the escalator.
He sees all of them, but is really seeing the past. Light reflects from objects and people, moving through the air until it strike his corneas. The light then passes through the vitreous humor inside his eyes to focus an image on the retinas. From there, an electrical signal moves up his optic nerves to the visual cortex of his brain.
All this activity takes time. Transduction, converting light data into neural information, occurs at the outer segment of the rods and cones in the back of the eye and takes less than a millisecond. Signals propagate along the optic nerve at around 10,000 centimeters per second. The few inches from his eyes to his visual cortex takes another millisecond.
Before that, however, the light slows and bends as it enters his eyes, due to refraction. The index of refraction is the ratio of the phase velocity of light as it moves from one medium (air) to another transparent medium (his cornea and eyeball fluid). If light moves at 1n in a vacuum, it slows to 1.0003n in air. When it hits the lenses in his eyes, the speed of light drops to 1.413n, but picks back up to 1.336n in the vitreous humor. It takes approximately a millionth of a second for light to hit the back of his eye.
He glances back up the escalator, unaware that he's really looking at nothing more than ghost images of the past. He checks his watch. Time crawls, he thinks. A watched pot. He wishes he could have a cigarette. He remembers when you could still smoke in airports. He'd been a kid. How long ago was that?
And then he sees dark hair cresting the top of the escalator. He stands up straight, craning his head over the crowd. Waiting to make sure it's her, preparing to catch her eye, if it is. The woman on the escalator is examining something in her hand. Her hair, transit weary and messy, hangs down, covering her face. The man frowns and repositions himself, trying to get a better look.
The woman is familiar, but not yet identified in his brain as his wife. That he is looking at an illusion, echoes of his wife's image, doesn't occur to him. These fractions of a second for information processing mean nothing to him. It's still in the terminal and he feels as if he's dreaming. Somewhere in the back of his brain an idea from some long forgotten grade-school science class pops into his head: Moving on a microscopic zip-zag course from the core where it was created, a light photon takes 30,000,000 years to reach the surface of the sun.
When the light that's reflecting off the woman and into his eyes was created, the Earth was cooling and seasonal variations were just starting to become common, prompting mass extinctions among animal species that thrived on a year-round tropical steambath. Flowering plants were becoming the dominant plant form on the planet. Mammals were thriving and the first ape-like animals had just appeared. The crust of the Earth was writhing, buckling and cracking in a million places as the Himalayan and Andean mountain ranges rose from what had recently been the ocean floor. Australia was on its own, having broken free of Antarctica. One of the largest predators in history, the Carcharodon Megalodon shark, stretching 80 feet from nose to tail, ruled the seas.
After its journey to the surface, it still took the new light 8 minutes and 19 seconds to get from the sun to Earth.
He's not thinking about any of that right that right now. The woman looks up. Her face, that image, this moment, which has been in transit for roughly 30,000,000 years, 8 minutes and 19.01 seconds, hits him. He sees it's her and smiles.
THE END
The Mad Hatter
They found his body near a dumpster in the alley behind a club called CBGB's. The place had been in the Manhattan Bowery for over a hundred and fifty years and was a kind of shrine to musicians from all the settled planets. People wondered if the dead man had been a musician in some previous life. Maybe he'd chosen to die in the alley as some symbolic act, perhaps of love for music, or as retribution for music having forgotten him.
Between the alcoholism that had killed him and the rats that had been working on him since, the man's body was in bad shape. He was identified through DNA records, and his daughter, a water miner on the dark side of the moon, came down to claim the body.
It shocked the old-timers in the neighborhood to find out that the stories the aged drunk
had been spinning for years, about his being an astronaut and explorer on the edge of the solar system, might have been true. His name matched a name in the old public space registries, and his age was right to be a Mad Hatter — a deep space explorer back before that kind of travel was safe or even reasonable.
Aside from being the first humans to visit the gas giants beyond the asteroid belt, that early group of freelance astronauts was also notable for the absurd doses of radiation and cosmic rays they absorbed. The whole generation had been pretty much wiped out by an variety of exotic bone diseases and cancers. The ones with the more benign growths merely went mad with inoperable brain tumors.
Nagesh Shah, the current owner of CBGB's, had sometimes left coffee in back of the club for the old man. One night, just after New Year's, Nagesh ran into the astronaut's daughter as she was heading back to the moon.
"Is it true what they're saying? Was your father once a space cowboy?" he asked.
The woman reached into an interior pocket of her bulky jacket and removed a small silver case, the size of a prescription pill bottle. She opened the case and poured a pile of glittering white crystals into her hand.
"In the extraordinary pressure of Neptune's atmosphere, methane crystallizes. It rains diamonds all over the planet. Physicists predicted it. My father proved it."
"He was living on leftovers in my alley, and he had diamonds in his pocket?"
"His ship wasn't built for a flight that close to Neptune. None were back then. He killed his entire crew getting these. Then he left my mother and me soon after he got back to Earth. Swore that one of the diamonds had flown through the ship's hull and lodged in his skull. I think that was just the brain tumor talking."
"May I hold one of the stones?" asked Nagesh.
The woman handed him the largest of the diamonds. It was the size of Nagesh's thumbnail. He held it up and looked at the clear winter stars through it. The crystal was an exquisite object.
As he handed the stone back, Nagesh said, "I wanted to go to space when I was a boy."
The astronaut's daughter poured the diamonds into their case and put it back in her pocket. "Space is like anywhere else," she said. "It's full of assholes."
The two of them shook hands briefly and went their separate ways. It was very cold out, and a light snow was starting.
THE END
The Silk Road
While it's not technically illegal to visit the planet Taklamakan, it's also not possible to get there by any ordinary route. This is because on the surface are the Siren Stones, which might be natural formations. Or they might not.
The Siren Stones ring the flat coastline and cap the mountains of the central range on Taklamakan's single, arid supercontinent. When the winds blow in from the ocean at just the right speed and at just the right time of day, the stones begin to sing. When the Stones sing, any visitors on Taklamakan go mad. They begin to climb the stones. This isn't easy. The Siren Stones are a form of volcanic glass, as alien and ragged as the peaks in an Ernst landscape. In the right light, the Stones shine like metal and their towering, cylindrical bodies are full of edges and angles like brilliant knife blades. As the maddened visitors clamber to the top of the Siren Stones, they are slashed and maimed horribly. When they reach the top, the visitors start singing in unison with the Stones. Then, the moment the wind drops and the Stones fall silent, the visitors throw themselves over the edge, to their deaths.
Of the three documented research expeditions that have landed on Taklamakan and the two salvage vessels that followed, all have ended in the same tragic way. It should be remembered that the planet was named Taklamakan for a reason. The Taklamakan desert lies in mainland China's far northwest, along the old Silk Road. Among the nomads who scratch out a living in that parched land, none will enter Taklamakan's open waste. In the rough local tongue, Taklamakan is "The place you can enter, but you cannot leave."
There is some speculation that the Siren Stones are not freakish natural formations, but artifacts built by some superior space-faring race. Whether they are a greeting, a weapon or some extraterrestrial practical joke, we have no way of knowing. There are those on Earth who believe that the Siren Stones are something even older and stranger. They claim that the Stones-or objects like them-are mentioned in certain obscure Gnostic and Egyptian magical treatises. Those who claim to know the purpose of the Stones allege that they are a kind of "desire machine." The deaths captured on video and beamed back to Earth are merely the last moments of men and women who've made some Faustian bargain with unseen powers, and that the deaths are simply the price each person pays to have a last, magnificent wish granted. The fact that all who've died on Taklamakan have left behind enormous and often inexplicable fortunes to their heirs is taken by many as a sign of these mystical bargains.
Over the centuries, no one is sure exactly how many people (or other planet-hopping races) have visited the Singing Stones. We do know this: after each climber plunges to his or her death, a flower-no doubt nourished by the moisture and nutrients in each corpse-blossoms. At the moment, there is a miniature Garden of Eden sprouting at the base of the Stones.
When the Singing Stones were discovered, no religious group or government would officially acknowledge that the stones granted wishes, but security patrols became heavy in that region of space. No one spent much time in orbit around Taklamakan without being told to move along by the local gendarmes.
But time passes and memory fades. While Taklamakan was an object of fascination in my youth, a century later, few remember it. These days, most of the security in that area is handled by Sentinel Satellites, and they're so far away from local traffic lanes, that no one wants the expense of maintaining them. There is talk in certain unofficial and rarified circles, that some of the Sentinels have failed completely. If one were so inclined, a brazen pilot could take a small ship past them and down to the surface without any interference. It would have to be someone with no reason to come back. Someone old. Perhaps ill. But with enough strength left to make the climb. These thing are tricky to time. Going too early means wasted months of precious life. Waiting too long, might mean you land with a body too weak to finish the job.
Not that I'm ready to make that final climb yet. I can still see and the painkillers make the days pass in a pleasant haze that remains me of warm summers from my boyhood. At night, I watch the stars from my roof and peek out over the city. I used to have a fear of heights. Now I can walk along the edge, clamber on top of the faux-gothic gargoyles and waggle my feet over the urban abyss. Sometimes I think about those traders and nomads on the Silk Road, wandering miserable, bored and frightened through some of the worst land in the world. They bravely went out into the wilderness, hoping to come back with riches, but they usually got bandits. Or swindled for their troubles. They sang long-forgotten songs to pass the time and buck up their courage. They risked everything to cross a broiling nothingness and never knew if good fortune was waiting for them at the end of the line. But I do.
I do.
THE END
The Tears of the Moon
Strands of tough river grass grow through the bottom of the flatboat and up through Friar Vicente's exposed ribs. Piranha and candiru swim through the priest's vacant eyes. He's seen the glories of Spain in her prime and the fall of an empire, but he's been blind for so long now.
He had almost made it back to San Mateo with the stolen gold when the boat sprang a leak and foundered. The local indians had taken the opportunity to pin him with a few arrows. The water closed over Friar Vicente like a long, cold night.
The friar had been there when Pizarro took Atahualpa, the Inca's heathen king, almost a god himself. The Spanish demanded the greatest ransom in human history: A room filled with gold, floor to ceiling. The Incas, rich beyond belief with the stuff, had obliged. For their obedience, Pizarro killed their king. Friar Vicente had pronounced sentence on Atahualpa, and stood by while Pizarro's lieutenant strangled the pagans' monarch. But Friar Vicente's mind wa
s elsewhere. There was so much gold. Even God, who sees everything, wouldn't notice if a little of it went missing.
A crow (or some wretched local species that resembled a crow) called three times as Friar Vicente made his way to the boat. Like Pizarro, he was an ambitious man, a man of the world. Like Pizarro, he had presided over the killing of many heathen Indians. He'd looted their Gods and kings for the glory of his own, and then finally for himself, because each man is, in the end, his own lord and savior. Pizarro had said it himself: "I wish only to serve God and to grow rich, as any man." This is what Friar Vicente kept repeating as he loaded sacks of Atahualpa's ransom into the little flatboat and paddled away from the settlement.
Again, the Friar heard a crow call three times, but he dismissed all fear and his mother's superstitions from his mind. Until the river came up through the deck of the overloaded boat and the first arrow flew. As the Rio Santiago swallowed him, Friar Vicente thought of Jesus, Pizarro, and his mother, and he cursed them all. As much as he'd disappointed them, he'd disappointed himself even more.
Now, the silt shifts around him. One day Friar Vicente will make it back to Spain. It may take a hundred million years and a massive tectonic catastrophe, but the dead are certain in their grim tasks. When the current is just right, Friar Vicente's skeletal arms wave over the sunken gold, as if he is pronouncing a benediction.
THE END
Ubiquitous Computing
"Wallace Gerard, you are exceeding the speed limit by fifty miles per hour. The authorities have been alerted," said the car. Wallace "Big Wally" Gerard stomped harder on the accelerator, hoping that if he got down hard enough the car's chip-embedded voice might just start screaming.