The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

As he spoke, Antti became aware that the other voices telling their tales of their Marses were fading; the figures, though still pressed close as far as he could see into the white, were becoming less distinct. They became whispers, shadows, until all that remained with any clarity was the Indian youth, confessing his hopes and dreams for the world he was building, a world for all the dispossessed; with trains! Trains! Antti smiled. The construction worker smiled back and, like the cat in that English children’s story he never liked, faded too, the white of the smile lingering. Back to his future, his universe, his incomplete solution to Mars. Now Antti was alone with the ragged little woman, the saint, the angel, the artificial intelligence.

“Will this do?” he asked. “It’s all I have.”

“This will do very well,” she said, turned, and was gone, too.

Antti was alone in the featureless white, and, as if held in abeyance, the cold rushed in.

Time, he knew, had restarted somewhere. And space. Space! The compass. He flipped it open. The needle quested, then settled firmly on north. Antti tapped it. No lie. As if in confirmation, he heard a dog barking, muffled, but closing with every yap. It came bowling out of the white, breath steaming, curling up in itself, wagging its tail furiously in its delight to have found him. It made to jump up, Antti stepped back.

“Enough of that!” It cringed. “Here! Hutttt! Heel!”

Too much to expect of such a creature, but it did draw close, looking up at him, and together they followed the way the compass said to home, man and mongrel.

Before the train has even come to a halt the roof-riders are swinging down over the doors and windows, hitting the platform at a run, some slipping and falling, some hitting into people waiting for the train out. Racing to beat the crowd. Racing to get home. Work. Home. Sleep. Work.

Every other evening, Ashwin would have been among the first of the first. Tonight, he waits for the roof to empty around him. He looks up at the fragmented station dome. The memories of the time that was not a time in that other place that was not a place are less clear now. In time they will fade. All such encounters with the numinous, the miraculous must. It is written.

Quantum interference, they said in the medical center. A random superposition of states. Less than a second, no permanent damage done. But in that second, he had flat-lined. Brain-dead. Mind… elsewhere. Elsewhen. The corporada doctors ran their diagnostics and did their tests and pronounced him fit to work and travel. It would have cost too much money to have pronounced him anything else.

New passengers are scrambling up as Ashwin climbs down from the train. He passes through the ceaseless, changeless bustle of the station in a state of beatification.

I’ve seen you all, over there, in the new world. I told them about you, what you needed, what you dreamed. It may be your future, it may be someone else’s future, but I spoke for you. And somebody listened.

In the square a great crowd has gathered, all attention turned to the street where the holy woman has buried herself alive. The kids have got off their scooters and are peering, questing over the heads, What’s happening, what’s going on? The band is playing like a pack of maniacs and over the general hubbub Ashwin can hear the sadhus proclaiming loudly that a miracle has taken place, a miracle, a sign for corrupt, materialist days. This woman! This holy woman! For five days she has mortified the flesh in the earth, she has practiced the fiercest of asceticisms, she has come forth and she has achieved samadhi.

From the top of the station steps, Ashwin catches sight of her. She is smaller than he had imagined and, despite five days fasting in the earth, plumper. Her hair is wound in a long greasy pigtail, and a circle of sadhus surrounds her, proclaiming her virtues to the crowd, who thrust out their hands to be touched, to take some of her spirituality. But something stops her. Something turns her head. She looks up. She seeks out Ashwin on the far side of the crowd. Their eyes lock.

I saw you, there, Ashwin thinks. And you saw me. We know each other. We know what we have done.

Self-mortification as a quantum state? What are the physics of the soul?

He nods. The holy woman smiles, then goes back to her adoration. Ashwin skirts the crowd, then the smell stops him. It has been a long, strange day of hard work, he could eat the beard of the sadhu. He might trouble the datarajah for another of his chapatis, he thinks.

The thing ate like a pig. Worse, for a pig, despite its lack of grace, has some utility. He had put his life on the line out there on the ice (and beyond, something whispers) and it hadn’t even the grace to look up from its food bowl.