Against the Stars

By James Gunn

As the AI-in-a-box of Harry's dead wife, Lisa, says, "Luck is only what we call a turn of events for which we haven't discovered an explanation"--propelling Harry and Lisa on a quest through the late 21st Century to figure out just why there are soooooo many strange coincidences happening in the world...

This novel is the last book that Jim Gunn wrote. He had finished it and split it into pieces for publication in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. He intended that it be published as one novel under the title _Against the Stars_ after it had appeared in Asimov's, along with the essay included here. Unfortunately Jim passed away before it had finished running there. Because Jim was not available to write an introduction or help guide how it would all appear in book form (beyond the original draft he sent us), we have chosen to keep the divisions into separate stories intact, with Jim's introductions from Asimov's included to explain his thought process. Jim was looking forward to this book, and hopefully we have done it the way that would have made him proud. We hope you enjoy it!

--ReAnimus Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005747725

James Gunn

James Gunn (1923–2020) was an award-winning science fiction author of more than twenty books, including The Listeners and Transformation. He was also the author of dozens of short stories such as "The Immortals" and editor of ten anthologies. 

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This novel is the last book that Jim Gunn wrote. He had finished it and split it into pieces for publication in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He intended that it be published as one novel under the title Against the Stars after it had appeared in Asimov’s, along with the essay included here. Unfortunately Jim passed away before it had finished running there. Because Jim was not available to write an introduction or help guide how it would all appear in book form (beyond the original draft he sent us), we have chosen to keep the divisions into separate stories intact, with Jim’s introductions from Asimov’s included to explain his thought process. Jim was looking forward to this book, and hopefully we have done it the way that would have made him proud. We hope you enjoy it!

—ReAnimus Press

PART I:

IN OUR STARS

In Our Stars got its inspiration from another Saturday morning breakfast with Chris McKitterick and Kij Johnson, and it consisted of a single sentence that readers will find in the final scene, but I won’t reveal here because the story is a search for it. I engaged in the writing of this tale with the help of five consultants: the section in India with the help of Kodali Sadasivarao, a retired India Police Service officer who is also a science fiction fan, author, anthologist, and man of letters both in English and his native Indian language; Phillip Baringer, a physics professor who has done research at CERN; Adrian Melott, a professor of biophysics who recently retired; Perry Alexander, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science; and John Symons, a professor of philosophy. The latter four are all from the US. Some of the characters are modeled after them, although the opinions expressed are all mine, with the help of discussions in my living room. The writing of the story had an unusual history as well. After getting started, I fell on the ice in my driveway in late January trying to retrieve a recycling bin from the curb, where a stream of water had frozen. I spent nearly a week in the hospital being examined and treated for cuts on the left upper side of my face, and then nearly four weeks in a rehab center. I was happy to get home and finish the tale.

—James Gunn

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

CHAPTER ONE

The lightning bolt came out of the night clouds as if it were aimed directly at Harry’s head before it struck the house across from him with explosive force. The torrential rain that became blindingly white in the exchange of charges between earth and sky turned black in Harry’s dazzled eyes, and he realized that he had ducked as if the lightning bolt were actually intended for him.

Once his vision recovered, Harry studied the street that had turned into a raging river before he found a high point guarded by stranded cars and struggled across, resisting the current that tugged up past his storm boots and threatened to sweep him away. Only the automatic adjustments in the boots kept him upright. After he reached the other side, he recovered his breath, wiped the rain from his face, and pounded at the front door. The flood already reached halfway up the front steps. The modest home was the last one in the row that he had volunteered to search in case residents hadn’t yet left on their own or been evacuated. The downpour and the forecast of rain to come meant that this section of the city would be ten to a dozen feet under water before the rains stopped. If they ever did.

But there was no answer, and his job was done. Now all he had to do was get back home. Home was a hotel safely on higher ground, and he shed his rain gear on the marble floor of a lobby already puddled with the residue from previous tenants escaping the hurricane-force weather. It was almost half an hour later that he stripped off his sodden clothes and left them in a heap on the bathroom floor while he showered in blessedly still hot water, to emerge to find his clothes on hotel hangers and a hotel bathrobe waiting for him.

Lisa was in the living room of the modest suite. Some vacation, huh? he said.

I should have known you’d wind up charging off to help strangers, she said.

Hard to predict a one-hundred-year hurricane.

But not a fifty-year-old husband.

I know, he said as he lowered himself into a chair in which he could see the torrent of rain outside illuminated by the nearly constant lightning displays accompanied by almost simultaneous claps of thunder. I’ve got to reform.

Lisa laughed. It was a good sound, one that he had cherished over the years. That’s about as likely as an uninterrupted vacation.

One could hardly anticipate a hundred-year event. Especially since they had one just a couple of years ago.

Haven’t you noticed, Lisa said, that hundred-year events are happening all the time?

Harry stopped talking and looked thoughtful. That’s true, he said at last. I wonder what’s the reason. Of course there’s climate change, but that only applies to the weather. There are other remarkable events in the world that are just as unlikely.

Some things just happen that way, Lisa said. Like us getting together on that dating site.

We both put our profiles in their files at the same time, and we found each other before we contacted anyone else and got turned off. I know. Like my grandparents. World War II came along and called up my grandfather in his junior year of college. Otherwise he would have graduated and been gone before my grandmother arrived.

Lisa laughed. And you wouldn’t have been born—or at least not the you that I met twenty-five years ago.

And my grandfather’s parents—they met because my great-grandmother’s family moved in with her father’s sister after her mother died, and a traveling salesman came along and married her father’s old-maid sister and then got the idea of setting up a printing service in the family home, advertised for a printer, and my great-grandfather showed up and met my great-grandmother.

Sometimes it seems like somebody’s planning these things.

I guess it only seems that way in retrospect, Harry said. While it’s happening, it just seems like everyday reality. And of course some people meet as children and marry their high school sweethearts or the guy or girl next door.

It’s like the world itself, Lisa said, teetering on the edge of disaster.

Seems like that’s the way the world has been since the end of the second millennium, Harry said. Not the big things like the two world wars last century, but crises that seem likely to escalate and then revert to a previous condition of individual crazies committing larger and lesser atrocities.

The area conflicts that go on for years of attrition until, after finally getting stomped out, they spring up somewhere else. Same drama, different cast.

Harry got up and drew a cup of hot coffee from the room’s comfort counter. And the mass killings that happened once a week when I was growing up, he said, returning to his seat, and now occur almost every day. A mass psychosis, the psychologists say.

It is like a disease.

Without a source, Harry said. As if the old contagion theories were replaced by the social media spreading insanity to susceptible victims who then get guns and go out to find relief from their symptoms by killing a lot of innocent people.

Or something is using the social media to spread contagion, Lisa said, and then an innate decency in humanity surfaces to ease the symptoms without touching the cause.

You have always had a generous belief in the basic goodness of people, Harry said. But if that’s true, where does the evil come from?

Maybe it’s just chance, and it only looks like evil because we’re the kind of creatures who can’t rest without finding a cause.

You have identified my character flaw.

That’s not a flaw, Lisa said. It’s what I love about you—that intellectual restlessness that demands answers for everything.

And food, Harry said. Shall I order something from room service?

He spoke in the tone that people learned to use when communicating with the ubiquitous mechanical servants of his generation. An eight-ounce sirloin, medium rare, with baked potato and asparagus, and coffee black.

He sat back in his chair to await the delivery from the comfort bar. Lisa, he said, I think we discovered the theme of my next book.

And what is that, dear?

Why everything is going wrong, Harry said.

Yes, dear.

The comfort bar announced that his dinner was ready, but before he could rise to remove it from the drawer, a woman’s voice came out of the air with the urgency of alarm. Fire! Fire alarm! Please stop whatever you are doing and descend by stair to the lobby. Do not use the elevators! Alarm...!

Harry got up from the sofa and went to the table where a small black box was sitting. Lisa, he said, there’s something up there that doesn’t like us.

And he turned off the box, picked it up, and headed for the door.

CHAPTER TWO

The automated airliner was packed with passengers, mostly Indian workers and entrepreneurs returning from lucrative sojourns in the United States, where laborers and risk-takers were scarce after the mechanization of American industry and profit-sharing had made life for permanent residents less work-oriented and more secure. The air in the supersonic plane was thick with the odor of curry, coriander, cinnamon, cumin, chili, ginger, and garlic, Indian cuisine dispensed by shuttles that worked their way up and down the narrow aisles throughout the long night as they raced the sun into the dawn.

On the screen in front of him, turned now to the view outside, Harry could see the Arabian Ocean sweeping below as it lapped against the shore thick with the walls erected to protect Mumbai from being reclaimed by the rising seas as so many less prosperous cities had been. But the battle was uneven, and the nearly melted icecaps had reinforced the power of the oceans.

The tall buildings below began to give way to lower structures and then none at all as the plane came in for a landing at the Mumbai International Airport, one of a line of such closely spaced descending vessels coordinated with precision by automated guidance systems. But Harry noticed brief flashes of light near the airport terminal. Harry had seen enough of these to recognize them as explosions without the sound, like the media reports of one more Kashmir incident expanding into terrorist attacks. But then the jet was landing and taxiing swiftly toward the terminal.

Harry paused inside the terminal with his patched-leather carry-on bag in his hand. Although luggage was automatically shuttled without human intervention between deposit at the curbside of the departing flight to the vehicle picking it up at the other end, Harry believed in traveling light. Some parts of the world still were unmechanized, and Harry felt freer to think about serious matters without possessions.

The terminal area into which the human contents of the airline spilled was crowded briefly before it thinned as individuals and groups met with welcoming friends or family or dispersed to their several destinations without apparent concern about the explosions. It was as if they hadn’t happened; there had been no announcement, no explanation. Maybe such occurrences had become so commonplace as to be no longer worth noticing.

Harry was left like an island surrounded by swift waters of passing strangers. Where was his guide to the swami he had come to India to meet? He tapped his wrist and in a moment heard a voice speaking Hindi.

English, please, he said so softly that, like the voice in his ear, only he could hear.

Your question?

I am meeting a person named Kodali Sadasivarao, he said.

That person does not exist.

I have received communications from him.

That person no longer exists.

In what way has he ceased to exist?

His existence ended two minutes and forty-four seconds ago when it coincided with an explosive device delivered by a single-object air delivery system preceding an entry by unauthorized individuals.

You mean the airport was attacked by bomb-carrying drones and armed terrorists?

There is no reason for alarm. The damage done by the explosive devices is under repair, and the intruders have been rendered unconscious.

Except, Harry said, my guide has been killed.

We are sorry for your inconvenience, the voice said. It was too perfect to be human, but perfectly reassuring in its confident response. If we can be of any assistance in making your stay in Mumbai a pleasant—

Harry cut it off with a tap of his wrist. He would have to figure out how to get to the ashram and his appointment with Swami Sairam Ananda on his own.

The taxi was sleek, air-conditioned against the Mumbai heat even at the approach of winter, and automatic. It said something in Hindi. Harry assumed it was asking for a destination. The Indian Railway terminal, he said.

There are several, it said.

The one that used to be called ‘Victoria.’ I can’t pronounce the Indian name.

It’s very simple, sir—Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, it said, and accelerated away from the passenger-loading area. What train are you boarding?

I don’t know, Harry said. I want to go to the ashram of Swami Sairam Ananda in the foothills of the Himalayas. Spiti, I think it is called.

Kinnaur is the closest terminal. I can arrange that for you, sir, it said.

And as it turned out, it could. A voice in his ear welcomed him as he arrived at the front entrance of the magnificent nineteenth-century structure and directed him to the right platform and the right train and the right compact compartment, where he settled down wearily in comfortable and quiet surroundings. He had considered spending the day resting up in one of the terminus’s air-conditioned dormitories but decided to rest en route. There was no way to know how long the snow would hold off, and the strange sense of urgency that led him to India, and the events that seemed to warn against continuing his journey, made him impatient to continue without delay. It was the same urgency that led him to direct his taxi to take the short way to the terminus after it warned him that this would take them through the poorer section of town where violence was possible. Indeed, they were almost trapped in a checkpoint manned by some kind of gang or informal militia before his taxi sprouted wings and sailed into the sky.

And it took him quickly through the general passenger area where, a quarter century earlier, Pakistani terrorists attacked and killed more than a hundred civilians. Now he sat back with a sigh of relief as the maglev train pulled away from the Victorian-era station, like the future leaving the past behind, and began its super-rapid journey north and east toward the source of ancient wisdom.

Before he closed his eyes and gave himself over to the lulling whispers of the air rushing past the window, he pulled his precious box from his travel bag and turned it on. Hello, Lisa, he said.

About time, too, she said. How would you like being cooped up here all night?

Now, Lisa, you have no sense of time—or place, either.

I know more than you suspect, she said, but her tone softened.

We’re in India, Harry said, on our way from Mumbai to the ashram of the Swami Sairam Ananda in the foothills of the Himalayas.

If all goes well, Lisa said. Which hasn’t been the case so far.

That’s true, Harry said. Maybe our luck is due for a change.

Luck is only what we call a turn of events for which we haven’t discovered an explanation.

Things have a way of evening out, Harry said.

Until recently.

We’ll see then, Harry said, turned off the box, and leaned his head back against a comfortable cushion in the one-person compartment while the supersonic train hurtled through the night.

Until it came to an unexpected stop.

CHAPTER THREE

Harry tapped his wrist and, when the perfect voice spoke in his ear in Hindi, got English when he requested it.

The train has experienced difficulties for which the Indian Railway offers its apology.

What is the nature of the difficulties?

That is unknown at this time, but we assure you that the problem will be resolved within the next hour.

How can you assure me that the problem will be resolved if you don’t know what the problem is? Harry asked.

That is a question for which there is no present answer, the voice replied. But I can assure you—

Harry cut it off and removed Lisa’s box from his carry-on. He passed his hand over the on-switch. What’s going on?

After a moment Lisa replied. The unfortunate A.I. is caught between imperatives, but the problem is that the train has lost power and no one knows why or how to get it back on.

How can that be? Harry asked. Isn’t it broadcast power?

That doesn’t seem to be the problem, Lisa said. "The train has lost the ability to receive it. That has never happened before, and nobody knows how to fix it. So a new engine is on its way from Mumbai, but it will be twelve hours before it