Readings for the Week of December 4:
Geoffrey A. Landis, “Approaching Perimelasma”
James Patrick Kelly, “Bernardo’s House.”
Extra Credit: Jeffrey Ford, "The Empire of Ice Cream."

Geoffrey Landis will be our guest at LACC this week. He is both a NASA scientist and SF writer.

AUDIO

Our two stories from last week deal, obviously, with a future so far ahead of us that human beings and their technologies have changed enormously.

“Little Faces” by Vonda N. McIntyre
In this sensual, violent story we are confronted from the beginning by a series of estrangements from our world. We realize quickly that the two women in bed together each have “companions” growing out of their bellies, the “little faces” of the title. But these are ferocious little faces, and Seyyan’s primary companion has just killed Yalnis’ companion, Zorargul. As the story unfolds the “backgrounded” information becomes clearer. Companions are fierce and sometimes bloodthirsty – “glaring at each other and gnashing their teeth in a great show”--and anxious to give sexual pleasure to the women who contain them. Men in this future have been reduced to the essential qualities that differentiate them from women. Robbed of their dangerous mobility, they cannot leave. The extent of their consciousness is unknown, but it seems rather rudimentary: “They felt no sympathy for her loss, no grief for Zorargul, only the consciousness of opportunity. She felt a moment of contempt for the quartet, each member jostling for primacy.” There is, for once, no question about who is in charge.

But this change, evolutionary or engineered, does not solve all human problems. Yalnis is a young woman of many thousands of years with 25 of them awake, while many of the other women she knows number their years in the millions. During this time, she has received five companions from five lovers and is ready for her sixth from Seyyan, a woman of legendary repute. But a terrible misunderstanding ensues and her primary companion Zorargul is killed:

"'I thought you wanted me,' […] [Seyyan] said. 'You welcomed me—invited me—took me to your bed—'
"Yalnis shook her head, though it was true. 'Not for this,' she whispered.
"'It didn't even fight,' Seyyan said, dismissing Zorargul's remains with a quick gesture. 'It wasn't worthy of its place with you.'
"'Who are you to decide that?'
"'I didn't,' Seyyan said. 'It's the way of companions.'”

The possibility is raised here that perhaps Yalnis is too young and inexperienced to understand. For Seyyan insinuates that the murder of one companion by another is not unprecedented:

"'What did you think would happen,' she said, anger replacing the confusion in her tone, 'when you announced the launch of a daughter? What do you think everyone is coming for? I was just lucky enough to be first. Or unfortunate enough.'”

We do not know yet what “launch of a daughter means.” Finding this out is one of many reasons we keep reading.

The second point of estrangement is the nature of the ship Yalnis lives in. We know there is a close link between Yalnis and the ship as “[t]he ship, responding to Yalnis's wishes, began to resorb the nest into the floor" when Yalnis tells Seyyan to leave. But we may assume this is a technological link, that the ship may be a form of artificial intelligence.

We learn that “[w]ith five companions, she [Yalnis] felt mature enough, wealthy enough, to launch a daughter with a decent, even lavish, settlement. After that, she could grant her ship's need—and her own desire—to set out on adventures and explorations.” This ship has needs! When Yalnis thanks the ship for a service and the ship replies, “True, “ we know that it is a conscious being with whom Yalnis has a good relationship: “Its decisions often pleased her and anticipated her wishes. Strange, for ships and people seldom conversed. When they tried, the interaction too easily deteriorated into misunderstanding. Their consciousnesses were of different types, different evolutionary lineages.” Thus the two species, ship and human, live together with the constant risk of misunderstanding, similar to that which can occur –and here already has occurred-- among human beings.

Another element of estrangement involves the transmission of memory. The companions contain their originators’ memories which they pass on to the “hosts” and which remain accessible as long as they live. Yalnis’ former lover Zorar, “much older than Yalnis, had given her the gift of her own long life of journeys and observations. But once Zorargul is dead, “[a]ll Yalnis had left were her memories of the memories, dissolving shadows of the gift. All the memories left in Zorargul had been wiped out by death.”

Here too we come to see Yalnis’ immaturity and are educated along with her. She had been savoring Zorar’s memories, saving some for later, not accessing them all, and now it is too late. Had she but accessed all the memories, Zorar tells her, she might never have undertaken a liaison with Seyyan, for Seyyan had indulged in her penchant for violence against Zorar too, leaving Zorar’s primary companion “paralyzed. Impotent.”

Years of isolation make it difficult to be with other people: When Yelnis openly challenges Seyyan and reveals her wrongdoing to the others: “[s]he had never been among so many people for so long, and she had never been in such a confrontation. “ Coming from a lineage that craved dominance at any cost, Seyyan betrays and attempts to coerce the ships and people around her, threatening the safety of all. It takes the other women and their ships a dangerously long time to turn against her—perhaps their isolation from each other has made them less wary than they ought to be and perhaps Yalnis is not the only naïve one among them. But Seyyan overplays her hand. She violates the autonomous ship-human unit by attempting to bind other ships to her, but “they tore themselves away from her, one by one, desperately damaging themselves […], but weakening Seyyan as well.”

With Seyyan and her ship imprisoned by layers of ship-silk, Yalnis, who has had a sexual encounter with her newest companion, the shy modest Bahadirgul (not all companions are brutes after all!), sleeps until her daughter is ready to be born. She and Bahadirgul mate once more, thus producing “a copy of Yalnis's memories and the memories of her lover” to give to their daughter. When the daughter is born, “[d]elighted, she showed her to Bahadirgul, wondering, as she always did, how much the companion understood beyond pleasure, satiation, and occasional fear or fury.”

Happily she nurses her newborn, but then, in a departure from present parentign customs, gives “her daughter Karime to her ship's daughter, placing the chubby sleeping creature in the soft nest. She petted the ship-silk surface."

"'Take good care of her,' she said.
"'True,' the new ship whispered.
"In a thousand, perhaps only half a thousand, orbits, Karime would emerge to take her place as a girl of her people," much like her mother before her.

That some remnant of the ancient maternal instincts endures is suggested in the ending of the story: Yalnis wants to stay close to her daughter: "'We could follow,'she tells the ship. 'Rest, recoup …'"

But the equation is different now: "'False,' her ship whispered, displaying its strength, and its desire, and its need. 'False, false.'"

The ship has no need for attachment to its daughter, and Yalnis yields. "'We could go on our adventure.'
"'True,' her ship replied, and turned outward toward the web of space, to travel forever, to feast on stardust."

In this world of the far future, human nature hasn’t changed so much, only its sexuality. Why human life is so solitary has to do with the great distances of space, but also I think with the nature of humankind. Eliminating independent males has not eliminated interpersonal power struggles, betrayals, murders, and all the dangers humans have faced in the ordinary course of history. It’s just that, alone with a sentient ship to take care of one, with subduable companions for sex, the women can avoid other humans –and thus conflict --as often as possible. The women know that they don’t understand their companions or their ships. While the possibility for misunderstanding exists everywhere, the most serious mistakes they make are, as always, with each other.

How did this future world come to be? James Tiptree, Jr. (remember “The Women Men Don’t See”?) wrote Vonda N. McIntyre in l973: “SF has moved on from asking How Do We Get There? And is and has been for some time asking What Do We Do When We Get There?” (Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr. NY: St. Martins, 2006, 330). “Little Faces” is a possible answer to that question. McIntyre has told us the story of the coming of age of a young woman against the backdrop of a satisfying life for women, incredibly long, filled with every kind of pleasure, including the adventures, the “feasts” of “stardust” that women are often deprived of by their attempts to co-exist with men and by the necessity of child-rearing.

”A Dry, Quiet War,” by Tony Daniel
The world presented in “A Dry, Quiet War” is less optimistic and more familiar, or at least it seems familiar at first glance past the first few sentences. Those first two sentences tell us we are not on earth or in our present time: “I cannot tell you what it meant to me to see the two suns of Ferro set behind the dry mountain east of my home. I had been away twelve billion years.” But the sparse human colony on the “backwater” desert planet Ferro echoes the towns of western fiction. The hero, Henry Bone, returns from a war and finds the town terrorized by outlaws from the same war. Like the archetypal gunfighter, Shane, who has foresworn violence, he is put to the test. When outlaws insult the inhabitants, killing those who try to stop them, at first for reasons known only to him, he does not act against them. But when his sweetheart Bex, a tough independent western woman, is violated by the rapacious Marek, he throws his scruples to the wind and avenges her. Like Shane, he must then move on.

But this is not quite it. The war Henry Bone returns from is not the American Civil War; it is the War at the End of Time. Bone’s description of the end of the universe echoes modern physics’ discovery of dark matter. Once physicists speculated that the universe was infinite. Now they believe that dark matter will one day pull the universe apart: “there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night.”

At the end of the universe there are “twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy to galaxy, system to system, fighting until the critical point is reached, when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless, stagnant pools of nothing. No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain [ ...] inherit the dark field. They win.”

But what do they win? This war is fought because it has to be: “If we don't fight at the end, there won't be a beginning. For there to be people, there has to be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that kind of universe, and not another, they told me [….]And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home, come back.”

Time here is circular. The end and the beginning of time –and all the time in between--are inexorably linked. Bone cannot tell his sweetheart Bex who won the war: "Every time a returning soldier tells that answer, he changes everything. Then he has two choices. He can either go away, leave his own time, and go back to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all mean nothing, what he did. Not just who won and who lost, but all the things he did in the war spin off into nothing."

The “outlaws” in this story are a “renegade squad” from the war, known as the Glims or “war-ghosts”: “Soldiers who don't go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they don't want to give it up, or can't. Sometimes they have [ ...] modifications that won't let them give it up. They wander the timeways ¬¬ and since they don't belong to the time they show up in, they're hard to kill. In the early times, where people don't know about the war, or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies.”

Henry himself is no longer quite human. He has been given super human powers so that he can fight. He alone in his town can see into the timelines the Glims inhabit. But even with all his power, he is prohibited from fighting the Glims: “what could possibly be of use against a creature that had survived will survive that great and final war and so must survive now? You can't kill the future. That's how the old sergeants would explain battle fate to the recruits. If you are meant to be there, they'd say, then nothing can hurt you. And if you're not, then you'll just fade, so you might as well go out fighting.”

Like the conflict between the maurading outlaws and the town sheriff in a western, tensions build between the Glim, Marek, and Henry Bone. Also possessing superhuman powers, Marek is intrigued by Bone: "I know what you are, but I can't get a read on who you are, and that worries me." Though Bone styles himself just a “grunt,” Marek quickly senses the difference: "I don't think we've got a grunt here […] I think we've got us a genuine skyfalling space marine."

It is then that Marek realizes what Bone is: "You're some bigwig, ain't you, skyfaller? Somebody that matters to the outcome […]This is your actual and you don't want to fuck yourself up-time so you won't fight." Marek now thinks he has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Bone warns him: "If you hurt her, I don't care about anything. Do you understand? Nothing will matter to me." But Marek doesn’t believe him, and rapes and beats Bek.

As she lies recuperating, Bone now reveals the end of the war to her: "Bex, in the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That's why we're here. That's why we're all here." By telling her he has now altered that future: “ I'll just have to go back up-time and do it again."

He kills Marek “in such a way that he would never come to life again, not in any possible place, not in any possible time [….] Marek is now [i]rrevocably gone from this time line, and that was what mattered. Keeping this possible future uncertain, balanced on the fulcrum of chaos and necessity. Keeping it free, so that I could go back and do my work.”

The people of the town now know he is Colonel Henry Bone who won the war. “They knew what I was, what I was to be.” At the end of the story, he sits drinking: “I sat, and as the suns of Ferro rose in the hard iron sky, I faded into the distant, dying future.”

Has he gone to the future in order to fight again? Or is it already too late and his actions of telling Bex the outcome of the war and killing the Glims have insured that the war will be lost: “If you are meant to be there, they'd say, then nothing can hurt you. And if you're not, then you'll just fade.”

Whatever the alternative, he has chosen to avenge brutality against the woman he loves, to triumph in his own time even at the possible cost of a future victory for the human race. The specificity of love for an individual human being is more important than a generalized victory in a war at the end of time.