Part 41 (1/2)
You must look frightening. Wild-eyed. Disheveled. Grace backs up a few paces.
”Don't you see?” you say, panting, shoving the easy chair aside. ”I'm not the man you lost! I'll never be him again.” You collapse onto the bench opposite, knuckles gripping like a sailor on a lifeline. ”I can't do this anymore.”
”Elliott...”
You don't know what to make of this new, strange, broken life, but you know one thing: You don't want it to become a sham. So you look into your wife's eyes and tell her what you've been afraid to say out loud all along.
”I don't love you, Grace. I want to, but it's gone. Everything I felt for you. It's all gone.”
You thought she would crumple, but she's made of sterner stuff than you expected. She stands still for a long time, looking at you. The bedroom floats in chaos around her. It looks like it's been hit by a meteor shower.
”We've been doing this all wrong,” she says finally, and leaves the room.
You stare after her, perplexed. Hurting. Yes, it finally hurts-a dull, throbbing ache in your chest. The air seems suddenly darker.
Sheepishly, you drag your old bones into motion and begin to put the place back together. Grace's voice echoes up from downstairs, talking on the phone, perhaps. You're too far away to make out the words.
Fifteen minutes later she's back, rummaging in her closet and vanis.h.i.+ng into the bathroom for an unbearably long time. You wonder if you should start packing a suitcase to take back to the rest home. Just as you decide you probably should, the bathroom door opens, and yet another stranger stands in the rectangle of light.
It takes you a while to realize that it's Grace. You're so used to seeing her in nightgowns or fraying sweaters worn over baggy jeans. The chic, brightly colored s.h.i.+rt she's now wearing sits well beneath the jacket, dignified and feminine. She's done something with her hair, and the glittering confidence in her eyes reminds you-suddenly, painfully-of the woman in the photograph next to your bed.
”Hi,” she says, and reaches out a hand. ”I don't believe we've been properly introduced. I'm Grace. It's very nice to meet you.”
You gape, dumbstruck. You want to say it's nice to meet her, too, but fear it might be a lie. Grace's arm is still outstretched, though, so you accept the handshake. ”Elliott,” you manage. And then, after a hesitation. ”Would you like to join me for breakfast?”
Grace smiles. You walk together to a nearby cafe, where you discover that you both like breakfast burritos, even though neither of you have tried them before. Grace is energetic, vibrant-like a teenager on a first date, very much hoping to make a good impression. You find yourself responding in kind, dredging up the few coherent memories you possess. Many of them involve floor plans for buildings in nearby cities, but that doesn't seem to matter.
Your side of the conversation is halting, hesitant, but that doesn't seem to matter, either. Grace produces a startling array of childhood confessions, many of them embarra.s.sing, none of which she expects you to already know about. You tell her that you were once a civil engineer and discover, through a sequence of intent and interested questions, that you would like to consult on construction ventures, if anyone will still have you.
It's a game, pretending to be two people who've only just met, but in many ways, the game is more honest than the truth. Grace smooths over occasional awkward pauses with questions or humorous anecdotes, listening alertly to your replies. You marvel at how beautiful she is when she laughs.
For two hours, there is no talk of ”remember this” or ”you used to love that.” No one expects to you conform to the mirror of the past. There is only Grace, vibrant and energetic and clearly interested in getting to know you better. Or perhaps, interested in helping you get to know yourself better. It doesn't really matter which.
You find yourself thinking again of the spiderweb, ravaged by the curious swipe of a little boy's stick, and wonder: If one could just find the two or three most important strands-the ones upon which everything else depends-and somehow weave them anew ... Would everything else begin to fall into place?
You leave the restaurant and stroll together along the pavement, admiring the wildflowers. Halfway home, Grace checks her wrist.w.a.tch and says, ”My granddaughter's celebrating her birthday up the canyon today. I'd love to introduce you to some of the people there.” She looks at you, oddly intent. ”Would you like to come?”
You feel your mouth hang open in surprise, and discover that it would not be dishonest to say ”yes.”
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS.
Doug Beason is the author of eleven novels-eight with collaborator Kevin J. Anderson, including Ignition-as well as two nonfiction books, including The E-Bomb: How America's New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Future Wars Will Be Fought. A Nebula Award finalist, Doug has published more than a hundred short stories and other work in publications as diverse as a.n.a.log and Amazing Stories to the Wall Street Journal and Physical Review Letters. Doug has a doctorate in physics, is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and is also the retired a.s.sociate laboratory director at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Doug has worked for a former presidential science advisor as the key White House staffer for s.p.a.ce, and was recently the chief scientist of the Air Force s.p.a.ce Command.
Doug first learned of the nuclear-driven steam piston concept behind ”Thunderwell” during a lunch discussion with the late Dr. Edward Teller in 1998 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You may learn more about Doug's work at .
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007, he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His 1999 a.n.a.lysis of what endures, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, has been widely read. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, he continues his research in astrophysics, plasma physics, and biotechnology. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape.
Aliette de Bodard was born in New York City and now resides in Paris. She holds a master of science in applied mathematics and computer science and works as a systems engineer. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and Interzone. She has won a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and a British Science Fiction a.s.sociation Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her latest work is the Vietnamese s.p.a.ce opera novella On a Red Station Drifting. She blogs at , where she relates her struggles with writing and Vietnamese cooking.
The science in ”A Slow Unfurling of Truth” is based on probabilities, and in particular on multidimensional density estimation, which aims to fit a vast series of observations to a complex model. It also touches on problems of robust authentication, which require independent sources to verify someone's ident.i.ty (in the story, an AI and a human).
Ben Bova is the author of more than 130 novels, story collections, and nonfiction books. President emeritus of the National s.p.a.ce Society and a past president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005 ”for fueling mankind's imagination regarding the wonders of outer s.p.a.ce.” His 2006 novel t.i.tan received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. In 2008, he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award ”for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature,” and in 2012 he received a s.p.a.ce Pioneer Award from the National s.p.a.ce Society. He has also won six Hugo Awards.
”Old Timer's Game” is an examination of how breakthroughs in biomedical research will inevitably affect the performance of athletes in professional sports, and how professional sports will be forced to change as a result. As an eighty-some-year-old tennis player, he can hardly wait for the improvements!
Eric Choi was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in a.n.a.log Science Fiction and Fact, Far Orbit, Rocket Science, The Astronaut from Wyoming and Other Stories, Footprints, Northwest Pa.s.sages, s.p.a.ce Inc., Tales from the Wonder Zone, Northern Suns, Tesseracts6, Arrowdreams, Science Fiction Age, and Asimov's Science Fiction. With Derwin Mak, he coedited the Aurora Awardwinning anthology The Dragon and the Stars, the first collection of science fiction and fantasy written by authors of the Chinese diaspora. An aeros.p.a.ce engineer by training, Eric has a bachelor's degree in engineering science and a master's degree in aeros.p.a.ce engineering, both from the University of Toronto, and an MBA from York University. His Web site is at bines the author's love of science, ultimate Frisbee, and Was.h.i.+ngton, DC.
David DeGraff teaches physics and astronomy at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. In addition to the usual cla.s.ses in physics and astronomy, he has also taught cla.s.ses on superheroes, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, science in science fiction, life in the universe, and the physics of s...o...b..arding. His grandfather, with help from Captain Kirk and Neil Armstrong, taught him to love science and science fiction at an early age. After majoring in physics at St. Lawrence University, he received his PhD in astrophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His previously published fiction includes a short story in Polaris: Tales from the Wonder Zone, edited by Julie E. Czerneda. He has discovered three asteroids, of which two are named for colleagues (31113 Stull and 96344 Scott weaver) and one for his grandfather (152641 Fredreed).
t.i.tan is a fascinating place, with a landscape of mountains, streams, rivers, and lakes. The liquid flowing there is a mixture of methane and ethane, while the water is a mineral locked into solid rock. Robotic exploration of alien worlds is frustratingly slow at the moment. It would be much more efficient if probes were more like ”SIREN of t.i.tan” and could make their own decisions.
Carl Frederick is theoretically a theoretical physicist. After a postdoc at NASA and a stint at Cornell University, he left astrophysics and his first love, stochastic s.p.a.ce-time quantum relativity theory (a strange first love, perhaps), in favor of the hi-tech industry. He attended the 2000 Odyssey Writers Workshop and subsequently took a quarterly first place in the Writers of the Future contest. Although he has written novels, he considers himself predominately a short story writer. He has sold a couple of stories each to Asimov's and Baen's Universe and more elsewhere, and over forty to a.n.a.log. His Web site is at .
Relativity physicist that he is, the author has long felt ashamed of needing to invoke faster-than-light travel in his stories. So before writing ”Ambiguous Nature,” he tried to come up with an FTL mechanism that would (arguably) not violate relativity theory. This story marks its first appearance, an idea he now calls the ”stochastic trajectory drive.” He has since returned to his aforementioned first love.
Nancy Fulda is a Hugo and Nebula nominee, a Phobos Award winner, and a Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award recipient. She is the first (and so far only) female recipient of the Jim Baen Memorial Award. Nancy was born in Livermore, California, and resides with her husband and children in northern Germany. She holds a master's degree in computer science and her graduate work in artificial intelligence has been presented at several IEEE conferences.
”Recollection” was inspired by current research into the role of tau malformations and beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease. If a cure for Alzheimer's is discovered, then recuperating dementia patients may face challenges like those portrayed in the story.
Gabrielle Harbowy is an editor for such SF publishers as Pyr, Circlet, and Dragon Moon Press, as well as coeditor of the award-nominated When the Hero Comes Home anthology series with Ed Greenwood. She has a degree in clinical psychology from Rutgers University and is a trained cla.s.sical musician. Her short fiction has been a finalist for the Pa.r.s.ec Award and has appeared in such anthologies as Beast Within: 2, Metastasis, Cthulhurotica, and others. Gabrielle's most recent publication is ”Inheritance,” a shared-world story for Pathfinder Tales that is free to read at . She can be found in real life in the San Francis...o...b..y Area and on the Internet ator on Twitter as @gabrielle_h.
”Skin Deep” was inspired by a number of recent scientific advancements, including an autonomous diagnostic and treatment ”biocapsule” developed by Dr. David Loftus at the NASA Ames Research Center and a disease detecting skin patch invented by Dr. Michael McAlpine of Princeton University. Leah and Gabrielle's story takes these new medical technologies and examines what happens when lifesaving advances meet the darker side of human nature.
Howard Hendrix was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and earned his BS in biology from Xavier University there. He earned his MA and PhD degrees from University of California, Riverside. Howard currently teaches English literature and writing at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of six novels and, after a long hiatus, has just finished his seventh. In 1985, he won a Writers of the Future Award and in 2010 won a Dwarf Stars Award from the Science Fiction Poetry a.s.sociation. He is also a literary critic of science fiction, and was lead editor on Visions of Mars. With his wife, Laurel, he is currently editing The Encyclopedia of Mars.
Of the science in ”Habilis,” Howard says, ”I've long been fascinated by chirality, by the 'handedness' that prevails on scales ranging from the subatomic to the cosmic. That the human brain is also chiral, in many ways, just made this story all the more enjoyable to write.” His Web site is atand he can also sometimes be found on Facebook.
Liu Cixin was born in Beijing, China, and now resides in the city of Yangquan in Shanxi province, where he works as a senior engineer in the specialized field of power plant computing. Cixin's first science fiction story was published in 1999. Since then, he has published seven novels and nine collections of short fiction as well as a number of critical essays. Between 1999 and 2006 his works won the Galaxy Award-China's highest literary prize for speculative fiction-an unprecedented eight consecutive times. In 2012 he won the People's Literature Short Story Award, and in 2013 he won the Chinese Writers a.s.sociation's Outstanding Children's Literature Award. He maintains a blog (in Chinese) at blog.sina.com.cn/lcx.
In ”The Circle,” which is based on a concept from his novel The Three-Body Problem, Cixin imagines a computing ”machine” based on modern computer design principles but constructed from individual humans acting as logic gates. An English version of The Three-Body Problem translated by Hugo and Nebula winner Ken Liu was published by Tor in 2014.