Asaro, Catherine - Aurora in four voices

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Analog - 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

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Analog - Aurora in Four Voices

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

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"Aurora in Four

Voices" by

Catherine Asaro,

by Catherine

Asaro, used by

permission of the

author.

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Analog - Aurora in Four Voices

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.

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Analog - Aurora in Four Voices

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?"

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Analog - Aurora in Four Voices

"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

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Analog - Aurora in Four Voices

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?"

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Analog - Aurora in Four Voices

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.

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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

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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."

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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

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