Yarun waited for Imbra to regain some measure of composure.
“We still have to decide what to do with you,” it said softly.
“All … dead?”
“Your system?” Yarun checked the file. “Well, mostly. But there’s a continent on one of the planets, Nov, that was already pretty volatile. Says here that Allegiance didn’t bother destroying its settlements, because ‘their existence seemed squalid enough’—sorry. Just reading the file. Tough people, though, I imagine, to survive at all out there.”
Imbra was silent. At first he humored thoughts of his garage still standing, and Palo ma and Ren having started a family that stretched out over the lost century, and Biggs and Tripp and Hurley having made some sort of decent postwar life for themselves before the valley did them in. But no— the landscape was too fickle, too restless for the sort of feel good story that those who believed in Her Loving Embrace might desire. So he imagined a supervolcano instead, washing the whole mess of the continent’s peoples away. But that was too easy, too. A conceit of the Path, restless to be done with an unforgiving world.
Imbra’s emotions, left to their own devices, lurched from one extreme to the other for the first time in months—and a century. Still, he knew his own path lay somewhere in the middle of the gospels, or maybe an eternity re moved from both. He remembered the recovery ward in the courts, and how, as the urgent need for more crystal bled from his system, a sudden calmness rose instead: a drug unto itself. The joke had always been on the courts after that day, for the declaw only gave him more of what he wanted—only made it harder, despite his all-too-human inclinations, to remain addicted to anger, fear, and grief.
“You play dead in the valley to survive,” said the ancient Novuni man at last. “Dead in your heart, dead in your veins, and eventually, when they catch you doing what everyone does, dead in your brains. But there’s another kind of stillness in the Universe, isn’t there?”
“Well—yes,” said Yarun. “All kinds, I’d imagine.”
“Good. Then that’s where I’ll start.”
While Yarun attempted a hesitant reply, involving the possibility of placement on a science vessel soon to be passing by, Imbra turned with great effort to the nearest porthole, which revealed a series of stars unknown to him— each with its own peoples, and their own notions of inner peace. He knew then that he couldn’t defeat the Allegiance, an empire that went to such lengths to complete itself through domination sport: the complete distortion of other worlds and cultures to suit its idlest wants and needs. Nevertheless, Imbra knew he could at least try to find and name them—all the forms of detachment through which a man might yet go unconquered, though every fiber in his being longed to cry out and give in.
The center of my sky no longer boasts a native sun.
Imbra turned the words over and over in his restless mind, a new sort of Novuni proverb in the making, and set his sights on a day when he might almost believe them, too.
Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels. He has won a Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Permutation City. His most recent novel is Dichronauts, set in a universe with two time-like dimensions.
UNCANNY VALLEY
Greg Egan
1.
I n a pause in the flow of images, it came to him that he’d been dreaming for a fathomless time and that he wished to stop. But when he tried to picture the scene that would greet him upon waking, his mind grabbed the question and ran with it, not so much changing the subject as summoning out of the darkness answers that he was sure had long ago ceased to be correct. He remembered the bunk beds he and his brother had slept in until he was nine, with pieces of broken springs hanging down above him like tiny gray stalactites. The shade of his bedside reading lamp had been ringed with small, diamond-shaped holes; he would place his fingers over them and stare at the red light emerging through his flesh, until the heat from the globe became too much to bear.
Later, in a room of his own, his bed had come with hollow metal posts whose plastic caps were easily removed, allowing him to toss in chewed pencil stubs, pins that had held newly bought school shirts elaborately folded around cardboard packaging, tacks that he’d bent out of shape with misaligned hammer blows while trying to form pictures in zinc on lumps of firewood, pieces of gravel that had made their way into his shoes, dried snot scraped from his handkerchief, and tiny, balled-up scraps of paper, each bearing a four- or five-word account of whatever seemed important at the time, building up a record of his life like a core sample slicing through geological strata, a find for future archaeologists far more exciting than any diary.
But he could also recall a bleary-eyed, low-angle view of clothes strewn on the floor, in a bedsit apartment with no bed as such, just a foldout couch. That felt as remote as his childhood, but something pushed him to keep fleshing out the details of the room. There was a typewriter on a table. He could smell the ribbon, and he saw the box in which it had come, sitting on a shelf in a corner of a stationers, with white letters on a blue background, but the words they spelled out eluded him. He’d always hunted down the fully black ribbons, though most stores had only stocked black-and-red. Who could possibly need to type anything in red?
Wiping his ink-stained fingers on a discarded page after a ribbon change, he knew the whole scene was an anachronism, and he tried to follow that insight
