The New Space Opera 2 Read Free

never been to a real beach, a beach on the ocean.
    â€œAlone, or in the company of others?”
    â€œSeriously?” All around me people were sobbing or gibbering in (mostly) foreign languages. Pretty soon, fights would start to break out. You can’t put a couple of billion human beings so close together under circumstances like that and expect any other result. But the crowd was already thinning, as people accepted similar offers from their own Fleet avatars.
    â€œAlone,” I said. “Except for you .”
    And quick as that, there I was: Eve without Adam, standing on a lonesome stretch of white beach.
    After a while, the astonishment faded to a tolerable dazzle. I took off my shoes and tested the sand. The sand was pleasantly sun-warm. Salt water swirled up between my toes as a wave washed in from the coral-blue sea.
    Then I felt dizzy and had to sit down.
    â€œWould you like to sleep?” Erasmus asked, hovering over me like a gem-studded party balloon. “I can help you sleep, Carlotta, if you’d like. It might make the transition easier if you get some rest, to begin with.”
    â€œYou can answer some fucking questions , is what you can do !” I said.
    He settled down on the sand beside me, the mutant offspring of a dragonfly and a beach ball. “Okay, shoot,” he said.
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    It’s a read-only universe, Carlotta thinks. The Old Ones have said as much, so it must be true. And yet, she knows, she remembers , that the younger Carlotta will surely wake and find her here: a ghostly presence, speaking wisdom.
    But how can she make herself perceptible to this sleeping child? The senses are so stubbornly material, electrochemical data cascading into vastly complex neural networks…is it possible she could intervene in some way at the borderland of quanta and perception? For a moment, Carlotta chooses to look at her younger self with different eyes, sampling the fine gradients of molecular magnetic fields. The child’s skin and skull grow faint and then transparent as Carlotta shrinks her point of view and wanders briefly through the carnival of her own animal mind, the buzzing innerscape where skeins of dream merge and separate like fractal soap bubbles. If she could manipulate even a single boson—influence the charge at some critical synaptic junction, say—
    But she can’t. The past simply doesn’t have a handle on it. There’s no uncertainty here anymore, no alternate outcomes. To influence the past would be to change the past, and, by definition, that’s impossible.
    The shouting from the next room grows suddenly louder and more vicious, and Carlotta senses her younger self moving from sleep toward an awakening, too soon.
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    Of course, I figured it out eventually, with Erasmus’s help. Oh, girl, I won’t bore you with the story of those first few years—they bored me , heaven knows.
    Of course “heaven” is exactly where we weren’t. Lots of folks were inclined to see it that way—assumed they must have died and been delivered to whatever afterlife they happened to believe in. Which was actually not too far off the mark, but, of course, God had nothing to do with it. The Fleet was a real-world business, and ours wasn’t the first sentient species it had raptured up. Lots of planets got destroyed, Erasmus said, and the Fleet didn’t always get to them in time to salvage the population, hard as they tried—we were lucky , sort of.
    So I asked him what it was that caused all these planets to blow up.
    â€œWe don’t know, Carlotta. We call it the Invisible Enemy. It doesn’t leave a signature, whatever it is. But it systematically seeks out worlds with flourishing civilizations and marks them for destruction.” He added, “It doesn’t like the Fleet much, either. There are parts of the galaxy where we don’t go—because if we do go there, we don’t come back.”
    At