The New Space Opera 2 Read Free Page A

the time, I wasn’t even sure what a “galaxy” was, so I dropped the subject, except to ask him if I could see what it looked like—the destruction of the Earth, I meant. At first, Erasmus didn’t want to show me; but after a lot of coaxing, he turned himself into a sort of floating TV screenand displayed a view “looking back from above the plane of the solar ecliptic,” words that meant nothing to me.
    What I saw was…well, no more little blue planet, basically.
    More like a ball of boiling red snot.
    â€œWhat about my mother? What about Dan-O?”
    I didn’t have to explain who these people were. The Fleet had sucked up all kinds of data about human civilization, I don’t know how. Erasmus paused as if he was consulting some invisible Rolodex. Then he said, “They aren’t with us.”
    â€œYou mean they’re dead?”
    â€œYes. Abby and Dan-O are dead.”
    But the news didn’t surprise me. It was almost as if I’d known it all along, as if I had had a vision of their deaths, a dark vision to go along with that ghostly visit the night before, the woman in a white dress telling me go fast .
    Abby Boudaine and Dan-O, dead. And me raptured up to robot heaven. Well, well.
    â€œAre you sure you wouldn’t like to sleep now?”
    â€œMaybe for a while,” I told him.
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    Dan-O’s a big man, and he’s working himself up to a major tantrum. Even now, Carlotta feels repugnance at the sound of his voice, that gnarl of angry consonants. Next, Dan-O throws something solid, maybe a clock, against the wall. The clock goes to pieces, noisily. Carlotta’s mother cries out in response, and the sound of her wailing seems to last weeks.
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    â€œIt’s not good,” Erasmus told me much later, “to be so much alone.”
    Well, I told him, I wasn’t alone—he was with me, wasn’t he? And he was pretty good company, for an alien machine. But that was a dodge. What he meant was that I ought to hook up with somebody human.
    I told him I didn’t care if I ever set eyes on another human being ever again. What had the human race ever done for me ?
    He frowned—that is, he performed a particular contortion of his exposed surfaces that I had learned to interpret as disapproval. “That’s entropic talk, Carlotta. Honestly, I’m worried about you.”
    â€œWhat could happen to me?” Here on this beach, where nothing ever really happens, I did not add.
    â€œYou could go crazy. You could sink into despair. Worse, you could die.”
    â€œI could die ? I thought I was immortal now.”
    â€œWho told you that? True, you’re no longer living , in the strictly material sense. You’re a metastable nested loop embedded in the Fleet’s collective mentation. But everything’s mortal, Carlotta. Anything can die.”
    I couldn’t die of disease or falling off a cliff, he explained, but my “nested loop” was subject to a kind of slow erosion, and stewing in my own lonely juices for too long was liable to bring on the decay that much faster.
    And, admittedly, after a month on this beach, swimming and sleeping too much and eating the food Erasmus conjured up whenever I was hungry (though I didn’t really need to eat), watching recovered soap operas on his bellyvision screen or reading celebrity magazines (also embedded in the Fleet’s collective memory) that would never get any fresher or produce another issue, and just being basically miserable as all hell, I thought maybe he was right.
    â€œYou cry out in your sleep,” Erasmus said. “You have bad dreams.”
    â€œThe world ended. Maybe I’m depressed. You think meeting people would help with that?”
    â€œActually,” he said, “you have a remarkable talent for being alone. You’re sturdier than most. But that won’t save you, in the long run.”
    So I tried to take his