Isaac Asimov - Aurora in Four Voices

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Catherine Asaro: Aurora in Four Voices
First appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 1998. Nominated for Best Novella.
Part I: The Dreamers of Nightingale
He missed the sun. The planet Ansatz boasts one city, Nightingale, a gem that graces
eternal night. Just as a diamond sparkles because light that ventures into its heart is
captured, bouncing from face to face, so Jato Stormson was trapped in Nightingale. Unlike
the light inside a faceted diamond, however, he could never escape. After a few years, his
memories of home faded. He could no longer picture the sun-parched farm on the planet
Sandstorm where he had spent his boyhood. It was always dark in Nightingale.
The Dreamers–the artistic geniuses who created Nightingale–were also mathematical
prodigies. That was why they named their planet Ansatz. It referred to a method of solving
differential equations. Guess an answer, an ansatz, and see if it solved the equation. If it
didn’t, make another guess. Another ansatz. Jato felt as if he were trapped on a guess of
a world. One night he went to the EigenDome, an establishment for dancing. He sat at a
table and waited for the drink server, but the server never came to his table. That was why
he rarely visited the Dome. The artist who had designed the place considered it aesthetic
to have humans serve the drinks and the humans in Nightingale ignored him. But that
night he was lonelier than usual and even the icy Dreamers were better than no company
at all. Made from synthetic diamond, the Dome resembled a truncated soccer ball. Jato
had looked up its history in the city library and found a treatise on how the Dome’s shape
mimicked the molecule buckyball. Its holographic lighting evoked the quantum
eigenfunctions that described a buckyball. He didn’t understand the physics, but he
appreciated the beauty it produced. Tonight Dreamers were everywhere, dancing, talking,
humming. Centuries of playing with their genes and living in perpetual night had bleached
their skin almost to translucence. Their hair floated around their bodies like silver smoke.
Light from lamps outside the Dome refracted through the diamond walls, gracing the
interior with rainbows that collected on the Dreamers in pools of color. They glistened like
quantum ghosts.
Across the Dome, the doors opened. A spacer stood in the doorway, her body haloed by
the rainbow luminance. This was no Dreamer. She looked solid. Sun-touched. She must
have come in on one of the rare ships that visited Nightingale; rare, because the
Dreamers allowed no immigration and most sun-dwellers found a city of unrelieved night
depressing anyway. The only reason people usually came to Ansatz was to trade for a
Dream.
Ah, yes. The Trade.
Dreamers make a simple offer; give one a pleasant dream and in return the Dreamer will
give you a work of art. They allow you ten days to try. After that, you must leave
Nightingale, trade or no trade. Considering the prices Dreamer art claims throughout the
Imperialate, that trade seems astoundingly one-sided, the offer of great treasure for no
more than a nice dream.
Jato had let the lure of that promise fool him. He spent years saving for the ticket to
Ansatz. But how do you give a dream? It was harder than it sounded, particularly given
how sun-dwelling humans revolted the Dreamers. The same husky build and rugged looks
that had won him such admiration back home repelled the Dreamers. Considering their
disdain for ugliness, he feared they wouldn’t even let him stay the ten days.
They never let him go.
So now he sat by himself and watched the spacer walk to a table across in the Dome.
She wore dark pants tucked into boots and a white sweater with gold rings decorating the
upper arms. Her clothing looked familiar, but Jato couldn’t place why. She had no jacket;
Nightingale’s weather machines aided the planet’s natural convection to keep the climate
pleasant, free from the fierce winds the tore at the rest of Ansatz. Her hair was a cloud of
black curls with gold tips, and dark lashes framed her eyes–green eyes, the color of a leaf
in the forest. Her skin had a dusky hue, full of rosy blooming health. None of the Dreamers
spared her a second look, but Jato thought she was lovely.
She sat down–and the server showed up to take her order. Irked, Jato got up and headed
for the laser bar, intending to insist they serve him. Reaching it, however, was no simple
feat. The Dome’s floor consisted of nested rings, each slowly rotating in one direction or
the other. The text he had found in the library described some business about "mapping
coefficients in quantum superpositions onto ring velocities." All he knew was that it took a
computer to coordinate the motion so patrons could step from one ring to another without
falling. Dreamers carried it off with grace, but he had never mastered it.
He managed to reach the dance floor, a languid disk turning in the Dome’s center.
Dancers drifted away from him, slim and willowy, silver-eyed works of art. On the other
side, he ventured into the rings again and was soon being carried this way and that. Each
time he neared a hovertable occupied by Dreamers, it floated away on cushions of air. He
wished just once someone would look up, admit his presence, give a greeting. Anything.
Meanwhile, the server brought the spacer her drink, which was a LaserDrop in a wide-
mouthed bottle. Tiny lasers in the glass suffused the drink with color: helium-neon red,
zinc-selenium blue, sodium yellow. Drink in hand, she settled back to watch the dancers.
Jato quit pretending it was the bar he wanted and headed for the spacer. But whenever
he neared the ring with her hovertable, people and tables that had been drifting away
suddenly blocked his path. The spacer meanwhile finished her drink, slid a payment chip
into the table slot, and headed for the door. He started after her–and the drink server
appeared, blocking the way, his back to Jato, his tray of laser-hued drinks held high.
Jato scowled. He had always been long on patience and short on words. But even the
most stoic man could only take so much. He put his hand against the server’s back and
pushed, not hard, just enough to make the fellow move. The server stumbled and his tray
jumped, rum splashing out of the jars in plump drops. Even then, no one looked at Jato,
not even the server.
He made it to the door without pushing anyone else. Outside, lamps lit the area for a few
meters, but beyond their radiance, night reigned under a sky rich with stars. Jato strode
away from the Dome, his fists clenched. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of
seeing their treatment provoke him.
The Dome was on the city outskirts, near the edge of a large plateau where the Dreamers
had built Nightingale. The Giant’s Skeleton Mountains surrounded the plateau, falling
away from it on three sides and rising in sheer cliffs on the fourth, here in the north. The
northern peaks piled up higher and higher in the distance, until they become a jagged line
against the star-dazzled sky.
The Dreamers claimed they built Nightingale as a challenge: can you create beauty in so
forbidding a place? This was the reason they gave. Jato had heard others put forth, but
the Dreamers denied them.
Although his past attempts at convincing spacers to smuggle him offplanet had failed, he
never gave up. In the distant shadows, he saw the spacer climbing the SquareCase, a set
of stairs carved into a cliff. The first step was one centimeter high, the second four, the
third nine, and so on, their heights increasing as the square of integers. The first twenty
ran parallel to the cliff, but then they turned at a right angle and stepped into the
mountains, rising taller and taller, until they became cliffs themselves, too high, too dark,
and too distant to distinguish.
By the time he reached the first step of the SquareCase, the spacer was climbing the
tenth, about the height of her waist. She sat on it, half hidden in the dark while she
watched him. He approached slowly and stopped on the ninth step. "Can I do something
for you?" she asked.
"I wondered if you wanted a guide to the city." It sounded unconvincing, but it was the
best introduction he could think of.
"Thank you," she said. "But I’m fine." The conversation screeched to a halt.
He tried again. "I don’t often get a chance to talk to anyone from offplanet."
Her posture eased. "I noticed my ship was the only one in port."
"Did you come to trade for a Dream?"
"No. Just some minor repairs. I’ll be leaving as soon they’re done."
Behind her, Jato caught sight of a globe sparkling with lights in a fractal pattern. As it
floated forward, it resolved into a robot drone over a meter in diameter, its surface
patterned by delicate curls of the Mandelbrot set, swirls fringed by swirls fringed by swirls
in an unending pattern of ever more minute lace.
Following his gaze, the woman glanced back. "What is that?"
"A robot. It watches this staircase."
She turned back to him. "Why does that make you angry?"
"Angry?" How had she known? "I’m not angry."
"What does it do?" she asked.
"I’ll show you." Jato strode forward and hauled his bulk onto the tenth step. Although he
towered over the spacer, she seemed unperturbed, simply scooting over to let him pass.
That self-confidence impressed him as much as her beauty.
As he approached the eleventh step, the globe whirred into his face. When he tried to
push it away, it rammed his shoulder so hard he fell to one knee.
"Hey!" The woman jumped up and grabbed for him, as if she actually thought she could
stop someone his size from falling over the edge. "Why did it do that?"
He stood up, brushing rock dust off his trousers. "As a warning."
That’s when she did it. She smiled. "Whatever for?"
Jato hardly heard her. All he saw was her smile. It dazzled.
But after a moment, her smile faded. "Are you all right?" she asked.
He refocused his thoughts. "What?"
"You’re just staring at me."
"Sorry." He motioned at the globe. "It was warning me not to go past the city border,
which crosses the cliff here." Having the drones watch him up here was almost funny. As if
he could actually escape Nightingale by climbing a staircase that grew geometrically.
"Why can’t you leave the city?" she asked.
He discovered he couldn’t make himself tell her, at least not yet. Why should she believe
his story? Eight years ago, the Dreamers had showed up at his room in the Whisper Inn
and locked his wrists behind his back with cuffs made from sterling silver Möbius strips.
He had no idea what was happening until he found himself on trial. They convicted him of
a murder that never happened and sentenced him to life in prison.
Supposedly, years of treatment had "cured" him, and he no longer posed a danger to
society. So the Dreamers let him out of his cell, which had never been a cell anyway, but
an apartment under the city. For a giddy span of hours he had thought they meant to send
him home; if he was no longer dangerous, after all, why keep him under sentence?
He soon found out otherwise.
For the Dreamers who believed in his guilt, which was most of them, it would take a
lifetime for him to atone. One of their most renowned artists, Crankenshaft Granite, had
argued–with truth–that to Jato it would be almost as much a punishment to spend his life
confined to Nightingale as to his apartment. But by making the city his jail, they showed
their compassion for a criminal who had turned away from his violent nature. Jato saw
why that logic appealed to the Dreamers, who for some reason had a driving need to see
themselves as kind, yet who in truth considered all sun-dwellers flawed, deserving neither
freedom nor friendship.
But he knew the truth. Crankenshaft’s motives had nothing to do with compassion. The
only reason Jato had a modicum more freedom now was because it made Crankenshaft’s
life easier.
Jato didn’t want to see that wary look appear on this woman’s face, the one spacers
always wore when they learned his story. Not yet. He wanted to have these few minutes
without the weight of his conviction pressing on them.
So instead of telling her, he pointed at his feet and made a joke. "This is where I live.
These are my coordinates."
"Your what?"
So much for scintillating wit, he thought. "Coordinates. This staircase is the plot of a non-
linear step function."
She laughed, like the sweet ringing of a bell. "Why would anyone go to all this work just to
make a big plot?"
"It’s art." He wished she would laugh again. It was a glorious sound.
"This is some art," she said. "But you haven’t told me why your people won’t let you
leave."
His people? She thought he was a Dreamer? It wasn’t only that he bore no resemblance
to them. Dreamers were gifted at both art and mathematics, neither of which he had talent
for. Yet this beautiful woman thought he was both. He grinned. "They like me. They don’t
want me to go."
She stared at him, her mouth opening.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
She closed her mouth. "What?"
"You’re just staring at me."
"I–your smile–" She flushed. "My apologies. I’m afraid I’m rather tired." She gave him a
formal nod. "My pleasure at your company." Then she turned and headed down the stairs.
He almost went after her, stunned by her abrupt leave-taking. But he managed to keep
from making a fool of himself. Instead, he stood in the shadows and watched her descend
the SquareCase.
When Jato turned into the underground corridor that dead-ended at his apartment, he
saw a Mandelbrot globe waiting at the door. Given that he lived nowhere near
Nightingale’s perimeter, only one reason existed for its presence. Crankenshaft had sent
it. With Jato no longer confined to his apartment, Crankenshaft could have him brought
wherever he wanted instead of the Dreamer having to come down here.
Jato spun around and ran, his boots clanging on the metal floor. If he could find a side
passage too narrow for the globe to follow, he might evade capture. It was a stupid game
Crankenshaft played; if Jato escaped the drones, Crankenshaft let him have the day off.
A whirring sound came from behind him. The drone hit his side and he stumbled into the
wall, bringing up his arms to protect his face. An aperture opened on the robot and an air
syringe slid out, accompanied by the hiss of its firing.
His view of the hall wavered, darkened, faded. . . .
Jato opened his eyes. A face floated above him, an aged Dreamer with eyes like ice.
Gusts of wind fluttered her silver hair around her cheeks. He knew that gaunt face. It
belonged to Silicate Glacier. Crankenshaft’s wife.
Crankenshaft was standing behind her. Tall for a Dreamer, he had a well-kept physique
that belied his one-hundred and six years of age. Black hair covered his head in bristles.
He had two-tone eyes, grey bordered by red, like old ice in ruby rings.
Jato spoke in a hoarse voice. "How long?"
"You have slept several hours," Crankenshaft said.
"I meant, how long do you need me for?"
"I don’t know. We will see."
As Jato pulled himself into a sitting position, Silicate stepped back, avoiding contact with
him. He swung his legs over the stone ledge where he had been lying and looked around.
Crankenshaft had chosen the big studio. The ledge jutted out of the west wall, an
otherwise blank plane of grey stone. On the left, the south wall was a window looking over
Nightingale, which lay far below. The east and north "walls" were holoscreens, sheets of
thermoplastic that hung from the ceiling. Holos rippled in front of them, swaths of color that
trembled as breezes shook the screens.
It always disoriented Jato, that wind. Moving air didn’t belong inside a house. For that
matter, neither did Mandelbrot globes. But two floated here, one hovering behind
Crankenshaft and another prowling the studio.
The major feature in the room was a round pool. A glossy white cone about two meters
tall rose out of the water. A second cone stood next to it, its top cut flat in a circular cross-
section. The three other cones in the pool were cut at angles, giving them elliptical,
parabolic, and hyperbolic cross-sections.
"Circle today," Crankenshaft said. Then he headed across the drafty studio to a console
in the corner where the two holo-walls met.
Jato looked at Silicate and she looked back, as cool and as smooth as stone. Then she
too walked away, leaving the studio via a slit in a thermoplastic wall.
A gust rumpled Jato’s hair and he shivered, wrapping his arms around his body. "Do you
have a jacket?" he asked.
Crankenshaft didn’t answer, he just stooped over his console and went to work. So Jato
waited, trying to clear out the haze left in his mind by the sedative.
A globe nudged his shoulder. When he stayed put, it pushed harder. "Flame off," he
muttered.
A syringe extended out of the globe.
Still intent on his console, Crankenshaft said, "It shoots a heat stimulant. A strong
specimen such as yourself might tolerate it for ten minutes before going into shock."
Jato scowled. Where did Crankenshaft come up with this sick stuff? He looked at the
globe, at Crankenshaft, at the globe again. With Crankenshaft he used care in choosing
his battles. This one wasn’t worth it.
He took off his boots and went to the pool. The knee-deep water was cool today, but at
least no ice crusted the surface. He waded to the truncated cone and climbed up onto it,
then sat cross-legged, hugging his arms to his chest for warmth.
"Move ten centimeters to the north," Crankenshaft said.
Jato moved over. "Can you warm it up in here?"
Crankenshaft sat down at his console, concentrating on whatever he was doing. So Jato
moved to the south side of the cone.
Crankenshaft looked around. "Move to the other side."
"Turn on the heat," Jato said.
"Move."
"After you turn on the heat."
Stalemate.
Reaching back to the console, Crankenshaft touched a panel. A globe whirred behind
Jato and he heard a syringe hiss. Heat flared in his biceps, spreading fast, up his shoulder
and down his arm.
"Hot enough?" Crankenshaft asked.
It was excruciating, but Jato had no intention of letting on how much it bothered him. He
simply shrugged. "What will you do? Put your model into shock because he objects to
freezing?"
A muscle under Crankenshaft eye twitched. He went back to work, ignoring Jato again.
However, the room warmed and the burning in Jato’s muscles cooled. Either
Crankenshaft had lied or else the drone had delivered an antidote with the poison,
probably in a bio-sheath that dissolved after a few minutes in the blood.
Over the next few hours the wind dried Jato’s clothes. Silicate came in once to bring
Crankenshaft a meal on a stone platter. Jato wondered about her, always attentive,
always silent. Did she create her own art? Most Dreamers did, even those who worked
other jobs. Silicate’s only occupation seemed to be waiting on Crankenshaft. But then,
Jato doubted Crankenshaft would tolerate artistic competition in his own household.
Finally Crankenshaft stood up, rolling his shoulders to ease the muscles. "You can go,"
he said, and left the studio.
Just like that. You can go. Get out of my house. Clenching his teeth, Jato slid off the cone
and limped across the pool, sore from sitting so long. After coaxing his boots on under his
wet trousers, he went to a door in the corner of the studio where the window-wall met one
of the thermoplastic walls.
Icy wind greeted him outside. He stood at the top of a staircase that spiraled down the
cliff Crankenshaft owned. The city glimmered far below, and beyond it ragged mountains
stretched into the darkness. Millennia ago a marauding asteroid had struck the planet,
distorting it into a blunt teardrop that lay on its side, its axis pointed at Quatrefoil, the star it
orbited. Although Ansatz was almost tidally locked with Quatrefoil, it wobbled enough so
most of its surface received at least a little sunlight. Night reigned supreme only here in
this small region around the pole.
Crankenshaft’s estate was high enough to touch the transition zone between the human-
made pocket of calm around Nightingale and the violent winds that swept Ansatz. Yet
despite the long drop to the plateau, the staircase had no protection, not even a rail.
Another of Crankenshaft’s "quirks." After all, he never used these stairs.
Jato grimaced. When he came willingly, Crankenshaft always had a flycar waiting to take
him home. Today he would have to go back inside and ask for a ride, a prospect he found
as appealing as eating rocks.
So he went down the stairs, stepping with care, always aware of the chasm of air. Around
and around the spiral he went, never looking around too much, lest it throw off his
balance. He wondered how he would appear to someone down in the city. Perhaps like a
mote descending a stone DNA helix on the face of a massive cliff.
The helix image caught his mind. It would make an intriguing sculpture. He could go to
the library and find a text on DNA. It would have to be a holobook, though, rather than
anything on the computer.
Before Jato had come to Ansatz, his computer illiteracy hadn’t mattered. As the oldest
son of a water-tube farmer on Sandstorm, he hadn’t been able to afford web access, let
alone a console. Although everyone here in Nightingale had access to the city web, it did
him little good. However, he had figured out how to tell a console in the library to print
books.
He doubted he would try the helix sculpture, though. Reading could only give information,
not talent. One thing he had to say for Crankenshaft: the man was brilliant. Jato could
never imagine him giving away his stratospherically-priced work for a Dream. Besides,
what Dream would he find pleasant? Pulling wings off bugs, maybe.
Jato scowled. A few Dreamers high in Nightingale’s city government knew Crankenshaft
had set him up. They framed him for a crime so brutal it would have meant execution or
personality reconfiguration anywhere else. Imperialate law was harsh: an escaped convict
fleeing into a new jurisdiction could be resentenced there for his crime. That often-
摘要：

CatherineAsaro:AurorainFourVoicesFirstappearedinAnalogScienceFictionandFact,December1998.NominatedforBestNovella.PartI:TheDreamersofNightingaleHemissedthesun.TheplanetAnsatzboastsonecity,Nightingale,agemthatgraceseternalnight.Justasadiamondsparklesbecauselightthatventuresintoitsheartiscaptured,bounc...

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