The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 3 Read online

  The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3

  Edited by George Mann

  Contents

  Introduction

  Rescue Mission by Jack Skillingstead

  The Fixation by Alastair Reynolds

  Artifacts by Stephen Baxter

  Necroflux Day by John Meaney

  Providence by Paul Di Filippo

  Carnival Night by Warren Hammond

  The Assistant by Ian Whates

  Glitch by Scott Edelman

  One of our Bastards is Missing by Paul Cornell

  Woodpunk by Adam Roberts

  Minya’s Astral Angels by Jennifer Pelland

  The Best Monkey by Daniel Abraham

  Long Stay by Ian Watson

  A Soul Stitched to Iron by Tim Akers

  iThink, therefore I am by Ken MacLeod

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  George Mann

  Have we lost sight of the future?

  WE LIVE IN pessimistic times. The global economy is suffering. The planet - many believe - is overheating, choking on the fumes of industry. Poverty remains a terrible blight on the world’s population and storms wreak havoc on a catastrophic scale. Even on a smaller scale our lives are affected by these world-shaping issues; utility bills go up, gas prices skyrocket, and the regular supermarket run now costs more than it ever has before.

  Is our literature reflecting these difficult times?

  I believe it is. Dystopia is our watchword. Disaster is our form. When we look to the future we see a dirty, fume-soaked, industrialised landscape, or we see humanity imploding, overrunning the cities or eking out a living amongst the detritus of the world. Take the recent Pixar movie, WALL-E, as an example of how this imagery has begun to leak out of the pages of science fiction and into the public consciousness. And whilst WALL-E shows ultimate redemption for humanity, it proves not to be through its own endeavours, but through those of its artificial creations. This is not the literature of a forward-looking, happy society.

  Of course, all of this is only natural, and welcome, and rewarding. After all, isn’t it one of the roles of science fiction to explore alternative visions of the future? Shouldn’t we be challenging readers and viewers, showing them what might become of the world we live in, how our current path to the future may have to be addressed? I honestly believe we should. If we stay on our current path, I regularly read, this is how the future may look.

  What concerns me, though, is that this dystopian view of the future has become so prevalent, so definitive of the current outlook of the genre, that we see it as inevitable. It’s almost as if we have accepted that this terrible environmental, social and humanitarian cataclysm is now unavoidable, and rather than looking at the ways in which we may avoid such a disaster, we’ve started to look at the means by which we cope with the aftermath. As I said earlier, this is in no way a bad thing, provided that it’s balanced. But I fear this type of dystopian future has become shorthand in modern science fiction, a step we feel we need to get over as a civilisation before we can move on. After things have gone to hell, then we can start again...

  So what happened to all the spaceships? Where’s the sense of wonder gone? What of the crowded space lanes and colony worlds blossoming all across the cosmos? Have we finally decided that the future holds no surprises, that the only thing we can see ahead of us is chaos and disaster? Indeed, the resurgence of the pulp adventure genres and steam-punk seem to go hand-in-hand with this giving up of the brighter future. Steampunk, particularly, offers us an alternative past, rather than an alternative future, in which scientific advances that we know did not happen provide us with that same joyful sense of fun and wonder that we used to get from atomic spacecraft and galactic empires. It is a celebration of sense of wonder, of all that was good about the optimism of the past. Yet somehow it feels fresh.

  So would we now rather speculate about a past that didn’t happen than a future that might? Or are we simply more grounded in realism, so downtrodden by the humdrum of daily life and recession and defunct space programmes that we’ve forgotten how to dream of the stars?

  I believe that all of these modes of literature have a place in the modern genre. We should run the entire gamut of science fiction, from steampunk to cyberpunk, from near-future dystopian nightmares to far future space opera. Each of them is as valid as the other. Each of them as enjoyable as the other. Each of them as important as the other. Diversity is the key to keeping our genre vital and alive, and diversity is what, as an editor and a reader, I strive for every day.

  I’m as guilty as anyone else of making assumptions about the future. I’m a huge fan of alternate history, steampunk, military science fiction and pulps. And I read and relish a great deal of near-future dystopian science fiction. But I also miss the spaceships and bright, optimistic futures, those other alternative visions of a time, hundreds or thousands of years from now, in which humanity is braving the stars, exploring new worlds, encountering new peoples and proving their worth amongst the stars. I miss the fun. I miss the adventure.

  Here then, in this third volume of non-themed science fiction stories, I’ve tried to offer up that whole gamut of SF stories. Inside these pages you will find stories of the coming dystopia, but you will also find steampunk adventure, encounters with alien entities, instruction manuals for strange new technologies, super spies, incarcerated wraiths, artificial intelligence... and cleaners.

  Whatever may happen, whatever the future may hold for the human race, let us agree on one thing. Let us agree to have fun getting there and celebrate the diversity of our genre. Let us revel in the apocalypse, but also the alternate past, the sparkling far future, the sense of adventure that we can find in all of these forms of science fiction.

  George Mann

  Nottingham, UK

  September 2008

  Rescue Mission

  Jack Skillingstead

  For Nancy

  MICHAEL PENNINGTON FLOATED in Mona’s amniotic chamber, fully immersed, naked and erect, zened out. The cortical cable looped lazily around him. Womb Hole travelling. His gills palpitated; Mona’s quantum consciousness saturated the environment with a billion qubits, and Michael’s anima combined with Mona’s super animus drove the starship along a dodgy vector through the Pleiades.

  Until a distraction occurred.

  Like a Siren call, it pierced to the center of Michael’s consciousness. His body twisted, eyes opening in heavy fluid. At the same instant Mona, cued to Michael’s every impulse, veered in space. Somewhere, alarms rang.

  MONA INTERRUPTED THE navigation cycle, retracted Michael’s cortical cable, and gently expelled him into the delivery chamber. Vacuums activated, sucking at him. He pushed past them, into the larger chamber beyond, still swooning on the borderland of Ship State. A blurry figure floated toward him: Natalie. She caught him and held him.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Mona spat you out. And we’re on a new course.” She touched his face. “Your eyes are all pupil. I’m going to give you something.”

  “Hmm,” Michael said.

  He felt the sting in his left arm. After a moment his head cleared.

  “Let’s get you properly cleaned up,” Natalie said.

  He was weak, post Ship State, and he let her touch him, but said, “The Proxy can help me.”

  “You want it to?”

  “It’s capable.”

  “You have a thing for the Proxy?”

  The Proxy, a rudimentary biomech, was an extension of Mona, though lacking in gender-specific characteristics.

  “Not exactly.”

 
“We have a thing.”

  “Nat, our ‘thing’ was a mistake. If we’d known we were going to team on this mission we would never have thinged.”

  “Wouldn’t we have?”

  “No.”

  She released him and they drifted apart. Michael scratched his head. Tiny cerulean spheres of amniotic residue swarmed about him. “You can be kind of a bastard, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll send the Proxy.”

  * * *

  MONA TRANSITIONED INTO orbit around the wrong planet. It rolled beneath them, a world mostly green, a little blue, brushed with cloud white.

  “That’s not Meropa IV,” Natalie said, floating onto the bridge with a bulb of coffee.

  “No,” Michael said, not looking away from the monitor.

  “So what is it?”

  “A planet.”

  “Gosh. So that’s a planet.” Natalie propelled herself up to the monitor. “And what are we doing here, when we have vital cargo for the Meropa IV colony?”

  “There’s time,” Michael said, the Siren call still sounding deep in his mind. “This is important.”

  “This is important? What about Meropa IV?”

  Michael pushed away from the console.

  “I’m going down,” he said.

  ONCE HE WAS strapped securely into the Drop Ship, Natalie said:

  “You shouldn’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re acting strange. I mean stranger than usual.”

  “That’s it?” Michael said, going through his pre-flight routine.

  “Also, I have a feeling,” Natalie said.

  “You’re always having those.”

  “It’s human,” Natalie said.

  “So I understand.”

  “Even you had feelings once upon a time. Does New San Francisco ring any bells?”

  “Steeples full. I’m losing my window, by the way. Can we drop now?”

  “Why do I think you and Mona have a secret?”

  “I have no idea why you think that.”

  Natalie looked pained. “Why are you so mean to me?”

  Michael couldn’t look at her.

  “Do you have a secret?” Natalie said.

  He fingered a nav display hanging like a ghostly vapor in front of his face. “I’m going to miss my damn window.”

  She dropped him.

  The Drop Ship jolted through entry fire and became an air vehicle. The planet rushed up. Cloud swirls blew past. Michael descended toward a dense continent-wide jungle.

  Mona said, “I’m still unable to acquire the signal.”

  “I told you: The signal’s in my head.”

  “I’m beginning to agree with Natalie.”

  “Don’t go human on me,” Michael said. “Taking over manual control now.”

  He touched the proper sequence but Mona did not relinquish the helm.

  “Let go,” Michael said.

  “Perhaps you should reconsider. Further observation from orbit could yield—”

  He hit the emergency override, which keyed to his genetic code. Mona fell silent, and Michael guided the ship down to a clearing in the jungle.

  Or what looked like a clearing.

  A sensor indicated touchdown, but the ship’s feet sank into muck. Michael stared at his instrument displays. The ship rocked back, canted over, stopped.

  Mona said: “You’re still overriding me. I can’t lift off.”

  “We just landed.”

  “We’re sinking, not landing.”

  “What’s going on?” Natalie said on a different channel.

  “Nothing,” Michael said.

  Mona cut across channels: “We’ve touched down in a bog! We—”

  Michael switched off the audio for both Mona and Natalie. He released his safety restraints and popped the hatch, compelled, almost as if he were in the grip of a biological urge.

  His helmet stifled him. He didn’t really need it, did he? Michael screwed it to the left and lifted it off. The air was humid, sickly fragrant. He clambered out of his seat, wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped over the side and into the sucking mire and began groping for shore. The more he struggled forward the deeper he sank. Fear and adrenaline momentarily flushed the fog from his mind.

  “Mona, help!”

  But his helmet was off and Mona could not reply.

  Then, strangely, he stopped sinking. The mire buoyed him up and carried him forward toward the shore as several figures emerged from the jungle. His feet found purchase and he walked on solid ground, his flight suit heavy and streaming. The figures weren’t from the jungle; they were part of the jungle—trees that looked like women, or perhaps women who looked like trees. One stepped creakingly forward, a green mossy tangle swinging between its knobby tree trunk legs. It extended a limb with three twig fingers. Irregular plugs of amber resin gleamed like pale eyes in what passed for a face. Michael’s thoughts groped in the drugged fragrance of the jungle. He reached out and felt human flesh, smooth and cool and living, and a girl’s hand closed on his and drew him forth.

  THEY OPENED HIS mind and shook it until the needed thing fell out. Mona was there but wrong. They shook harder and found Natalie:

  New San Francisco, Mars, a scoured-sky day under the Great Equatorial Dome. Down time between Outbounds. The sidewalk table had a view toward Tharsis. Olympus Mons wore a diaphanous veil of cloud, but Michael looked away to watch Natalie approach in her little round glasses, the black lenses blanking her eyes.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the worlds you had to pick mine,” he said; Michael was obsessed with ancient movies.

  She removed her glasses and squinted at him.

  “What?”

  “Old movie reference. Two people with a past meet unexpectedly in a foreign city.”

  “But we don’t have a past. And this was planned, though I guess you could call it unexpected.”

  “I have a feeling we’re about to.”

  “About to what?”

  “Make a past out of this present.”

  She sat down.

  “You’re a strange man, and I don’t mean the gills. Also, this isn’t a foreign city. What are you drinking?”

  “Red Rust Ale.”

  “Philistine. Order me a chardonnay.”

  He did, and the waiter brought it in a large stem glass.

  “I bet this is the part you like best,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “The flirting, the newness, the excitement. Especially because we aren’t supposed to fraternize.”

  “There are good reasons for that non-fraternization rule,” he said, smiling.

  She sipped her wine. He watched her, thinking: she’s right. And also thinking, less honestly: it doesn’t mean anything to her, not really. And hating himself a little, but still wanting her even though he knew in a while he wouldn’t be able to tolerate her closeness. That’s how it always worked with him. Automatic protective instinct; caring was just another word for grieving. But Natalie was a peer, not his usual adventure. An instinct he couldn’t identify informed him he was in a very dangerous place. He ignored it and had another beer while Natalie finished her glass of wine.

  “Did you say you had a room around here someplace?” she said.

  He put his bottle down. “I may have said that, yes.”

  THE NARCOTIC JUNGLE exhaled. Michael, sprawled on the moss-covered, softly decaying corpse of a fallen tree, drifted in and out of awareness. He saw things that weren’t there, or perhaps were there but other than what they appeared to be. Insects like animated beans trundled over his face, his neck, the backs of his hands. He was sweating inside his flight suit. Something spoke in wooden gutturals, incomprehensible. The sounds gradually resolved into understandable English.

  “Kiss me?”

  Michael blinked. He sat up. The steaming jungle was gone. He was sitting in an upholstered hotel chair and a woman was kneeling beside him. He recognized the room. The w
oman looked at him with large shiny amber eyes. The planes of her cheeks were too angular, too smooth.

  Michael worked his mouth. His tongue felt dry and dead as a piece of cracked leather.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  Her mouth turned down stiffly and she rocked back and seemed to blend into the wall, which was patterned to resemble a dense green tangle of vine.

  Michael closed his eyes.

  TIME PASSED LIKE a muddy dream, and there were others.

  THEY ALL CALLED themselves Natalie. One liked to take walks with him in the rain, like that girl he had known in college. Michael, watching from his bedroom window, wasn’t surprised to see it out there with its umbrella. His breath fogged the faux leaded glass, and the tricky molecular structure of the pane, dialed wide to semi-permeable, seemed to breathe back into his face. Internal realities overlapped. This wasn’t New San Francisco or even old San Francisco on Earth. It was his lost home in upstate New York. (As a child Michael used to play with the window, throwing snowballs from the front yard, delighting in how they strained through onto the sill inside his room. His mother had been something other than delighted, though.)

  Michael, staring at the thing waiting for him down there, pulled at his bottom lip. He clenched his right fist until it shook, resisting. But eventually he surrendered and turned away from the window. On the stairs reality lost focus. The walls became spongy and mottled, like the skin of a mushroom. The stairs were made of the same stuff. His boots sank into them and he stumbled downward and out into the light of the foyer. That was wrong, he thought, and looking back he saw an organic orifice, like a soft wound, and then it was simply a stairwell climbing upwards, with framed photographs of his family hung at staggered intervals. Dead people.

  HE OPENED THE front door to the sound of rain rattling through maple leaves. College days, the street outside his dorm, and his first girl. Only this wasn’t a girl, the thing that called itself Natalie.

  Michael stood a minute on the porch. The wrong porch. Inside had been the familiar rooms of his boyhood home (mushroom skin notwithstanding), long gone to fire and sorrow. This porch belonged to his dorm at the University of Washington. After a while he stepped down to the sidewalk and the Natalie-thing smiled.