The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1 Read online

  “What’s that?”

  “A Romanian toast. It means: here’s to a drink and a fuck.”

  “Look,” says Tony, “it’s inconvenient for me to get excited—not to mention unprofessional.”

  Svelte doesn’t know about Tony’s groin truss. She’s so exotic, Svelte is, though doubtless not to herself. Probably she’s hetero. Not necessarily, though. Time will tell. Or will it? I really must keep my head clear.

  Let’s take a look in the vast marquee first, where things are warming up—as in hot bodies and hot lights fanning through aroma-mists. However, the music playing from big speakers right now is like cool liquid, kind of distanced rather than intimate. What’s playing at the moment are recordings. On stage a quartet of machines wait, for later on. Digi-keyboard, drum machine, hypersynth, and a whatnot—I’ve no idea which is which, or what, though Svelte does.

  “Nice backward reverb setting off the vocal line,” she comments loudly, and I think I understand. “Just don’t overdo it! Aw shit, there we go. That’ll excite the bats,” sneers Svelte.

  Now a different remix rivets me. Sighs and cries over a pulsing bass line—kosher kore, the piece I heard in the office:

  Ev-ery-thing you

  Ev-ery-thing you do

  You do, you do, you do, you do...

  Youngsters waggle their arms overhead and shuffle and shimmy, frantic to enjoy. Lip-rings, nose-studs, belly-button trinkets make the impeds seem like huge exotic piercings. The white girl in black bra and panties, boots, and cowboy hat smooches with a black girl in white bra, et cetera. I approve. A huge Hawaiian garland of bright plastic flowers hangs upon another girl’s brief blue cocktail dress. A bloke’s T-shirt reads KISS MY ARSE, SEXY, although the bum-cage bulking under his oversize jeans makes this unlikely. Why doesn’t he wear a kilt? Similarly impeded chaps favor kilts. Older people are in the crowd too, so I don’t feel far out of place. We have two or three hours before QE perform live, plenty of time to nose around independently.

  I spy a midget, a very little man indeed with a large head, a bit more than knee-high to me. He’s wearing a string vest and very brief yellow shorts, showing off his bandy, hairy, muscular legs—no, showing off the absolute absence of any imped! He’s immune because of his extreme shortness. In the land of the impeded the diminutive midget is king, and he does show off, struttingly. He must think he’s sexy these days; maybe he knows it for a fact.

  A FRECKLY GINGER-HAIRED man of forty-odd, brown leather bomber jacket hung on his shoulders—a cage enclosing his right hand—is nattering fairly urgently to a thin tall guy in baggy shorts and a T-shirt showing a cunt, a cage upon his right foot. Cunt T-shirt’s cadaverous face and wild shoulder-length hair fit the website picture I saw of Sean of QE.

  I scoop the snoop from my pocket to my ear. Looks like a tiny flesh-tone hearing-aid, if anyone even notices. The directional mic in my pocket is radio-linked.

  “... could easily be a real word, exprisonment.”

  “Like Bjork thinking ‘homogenic’ was a real word? Until someone told her it was bullshit. But she stuck with it.”

  The thin fellow intones, “The way you stick with me, though I’ll never be free... Needs pulling apart. The way you, the way you, stick with me, stick with me...”

  “Don’t take the piss, Sean! Is Caz going to show?”

  “Dancing’s the candle, she’s the moth.” Just at this moment, a gorgeous blonde teeny-girl wearing green hot-shorts and a gauzy off-the-shoulder top comes by, her left foot caged, the other in a green fetish boot. Sean pivots toward her and jiggles his imped. “Hi jewel, we’re a pair, you and I. I live in The Studio—want to see inside?”

  She eyes him then says, “Foosh off.”

  Ginger says appeasingly, “Kids can be Puritans. They just don’t look or act it.”

  “So why come to a fucking Kore gig? Are you a Puritan yourself these days, Pete, if you can’t shag Benny’s treasure?”

  “I don’t like the word ‘shag’.”

  “I need some Heineken Ice. Want to come in The Studio?”

  “I’ll hang around here for a bit.”

  “Hell, Benny can’t go anywhere.” Benny, the co-owner. “And he’s getting fatter every day. No exercise, and overeating.”

  Let me get this straight—Pete has screwed Caz, who is co-owner Benny’s girlfriend or wife or whatever. Pete is hoping to see Caz tonight, so Pete isn’t resident in The Studio—or not anymore? Benny may have found out about Caz and Pete and had him expelled from the community. Presumably Pete can’t be entirely non grata with the other co-owner, Trev, otherwise those guys on the gate wouldn’t have let Pete in at all. I already noticed a couple of bouncers in jeans and bright orange T-shirts—security, first aid, whatever. Both have head-cages as impeds. Like visored helmets convenient for head-butting if the need arises. If Pete’s blacklisted, doubtless they’d know about it. I keep Pete in sight as he wanders alone through the huge, ever more crowded marquee.

  Benny can’t go anywhere; Benny gets no exercise. Does that mean he’s severely impeded, more so than most people? That might explain opportunity and motive for infidelity by Caz.

  AHA. A TALL, slim dark-haired woman dressed in a long green skirt and lace blouse has arrived—and Pete is heading her way. Maybe she’s forty or more, and she has a black patch over her left eye. Assuming that she’s Caz, has Benny got angry and punched her in the eye? Presumably not if he’s immobilized.

  PETE AND CAZ talk for a good five minutes, while I eavesdrop on them. Pete wants her to come away with him, but she can’t. Not won’t—how she yearns for that—but she can’t. Not yet.

  —Caz, can’t you abscond with Contessa? And anyway, it’s all just bullying bluster. And how could he manage to torture...

  I expected Pete to say—a child. But he says:

  —a cat?

  Contessa must be the name of a cat, Caz’s cat. Like a child to her. Benny has threatened Caz’s cat, if she misbehaves.

  —I don’t have a cat basket.

  —Hell, I’ll buy you one!

  —How would I explain it?

  —He’s all hot air.

  —Can I risk that?

  ON THE ONE hand, Benny’s threat seems real to Caz, and horrible. Yet from the way Caz talks about Benny, she seems to care for the man and feel sorry for him. She’s unwilling to abandon him.

  —Pete, I need to show him soon...

  Show him what?

  AT LAST I cotton on. As if in compensation for immobilizing Benny, the hoops swapped one of Benny’s eyes for one of Caz’s. If and when Caz raises her eye-patch, Benny can see what she’s seeing. And vice versa? I’ve no idea. Caz must need to close her own eye whenever she raises the patch, otherwise there would be a hopeless jumble of double vision, two different scenes eyed simultaneously.

  Benny’s eye is Caz’s impediment. Yet Benny can’t hear or feel or smell, only see—otherwise how could Pete and Caz have succeeded in making love? I imagine Caz’s patch coming loose one time as she tossed her head to and fro upon a pillow, her noise of pleasure suddenly changing to a cry of fright.

  —You still jerking him off, Caz?

  —It seems only fair—how can I refuse?

  Does this wound Pete?

  —I do love you, Pete. I think about you every night—

  is the last thing I hear her say to him.

  Reluctantly Pete moves away from her, disappearing into the crowd. Caz dances on her own, not straying from the same spot—for now she shuts her right eye and raises the patch to her brow. Her right eye was green, but her left eye is brown. Hoops can join part of a living cat to a person’s arm in direct proximity. Hoops can also connect an eye remotely to a brain. This needs reporting. Investigators will descend upon Benny and Caz.

  I WATCH CAZ as she dances, keeping Benny’s eye masked, or stands still with it exposed. She’s relaxed, yet wary. Periodically she and Pete coincide again for two or three minutes at a time. It’s noisy and several times Pete has to as
k Caz to repeat herself. Quite often she’s looking away as she talks to him.

  Most of their chat is about trivialities, or acquaintances. After that first encounter Pete doesn’t implore or beg. No matter how frustrated he is, he mustn’t want to spend their precious stolen time whining or cajoling, but companion-ably. Caz seems well able to hide her feelings, but she must love Pete otherwise she wouldn’t take risks at all.

  I’m fascinated with what seems to be the situation between them, and with the idea of the Eye of Another in one’s head.

  By itself that threat to torture the cat seems absurd and histrionic—yet at the same time ingenious, I suppose. Benny knows how to press Caz’s buttons and scare her. Maybe there are other threats too. Personally I don’t think she’ll ever run off with Pete, no matter how much she may wish to, at least in her dreams. Pete almost realizes this. Before the coming of the Varroa I read a statistic that only about twenty percent—or was it less?— of wives actually leave their husbands as the result of an affair. I wonder if Pete and Caz manage to meet away from The Studio, and for how long? That spying eye, it’s worse than a photophone.

  AFTER A GOOD hour and a half Svelte returns to me. In the interval I’ve hobnobbed with Tony Cullen a few times. The first thing I ask Svelte is, “Have you been inside The Studio?” I’m remembering Sean’s invitation to that blonde girl—my God, I’m having a jealous thought about Svelte.

  “Sure,” she says.

  “How?”

  “Got chatted up.”

  “Did anything happen?”

  She grins. “Just led her on a bit. Can’t do much surveillance if you’re in bed.”

  Did Svelte go with a her by coincidence, or by design?

  I tell Svelte about Benny and Pete and Caz.

  “Wow, that’s heavy surveillance, jealous guy’s eye looking out of your own face. Needs a lot of composure to take that in your stride! I got a glimpse of Alan and June. They aren’t fused or chained together, though I guess you couldn’t perform too well like that. Fancy dancing a bit?”

  Me, with my knee cage? Svelte’s invitation excites me. Is she playing with me, being innocently friendly, thinking protective coloration, or what? Her eyes sparkle. I wonder if she did a line of coke in The Studio with her, on duty too. I mustn’t seem nothing-venture, especially not here, so I give dancing a go.

  All the while, other bodies are dancing in a slow demented euphoric way to the thump and pulse of tekky. A girl in long boots with a crimson crop-top and golden bangle piercing her belly button has what I can only call a cunt-cage. How on earth does she get her panties on? The penny drops—she painted them onto already de-haired flesh, unattainable now except by the touch of a brush. Two young fellows clash hand-cages together, triumphing over affliction.

  AT LONG LAST the head-caged bouncers and some helpers lower one wall of the marquee, exposing the event to the night, and the night to the event. And now the four members of QE come to their music machines, facing across the crowd toward the canvas wall-that-was, now a big darkness plus silhouettes of trees.

  Sean, I’ve already seen. Daniel is a big black man with a shaved head, his imped a huge shoulder-cage adorned with an equally huge red epaulet. The cage cramps his upper arm but he can use his lower arm well enough. June dresses Goth-like, white face, lurid red lips, purple hairpieces entwined with her own jet hair. A dark gown swells at her belly—that’ll be her cage. Beak-nosed, coal-eyed Alan has long white hair, presumably bleached, spilling from a head cage, and he wears a white robe with a scarlet pentacle on his chest. He’s like a Wicca priest with his head in a birdcage.

  Most of the lights go out, apart from spots illuminating the music machines.

  It’s Alan who addresses the crowd. He gestures beyond them at the night.

  “Oh ye aliens who exprison us! We’ve deconstructed your humming and now we’ll hum a new tune for you big bees! We’re gonna pipe you back to oblivion like the Piper of Hamelin did, only he never had a hypersynth. You feeling caged, people? Hum along, come along! Welcome to Exprisonment.”

  June lifts a mic, and to begin with starts to hum.

  A BEE-HUM can become a banshee-howl, almost drowning what June is singing with abandoned, sweating passion—Fuckyou Varroa forfucking-withus...cometo theVarroafuck...comecomecome... comefuckcome... fuckingcome fuckinggo...

  Double-beats from the drum machine are loudening and lessening like a disordered heart. Heterodyning, is that the word?

  Is that the Varroa hum played backward now?

  A LIGHT GLOWS silver, a hoop in the night. Sweet Christ, has this noise actually brought a hoop here? The players are gesturing, dancers are all turning to face the darkness and the ring of silver light which poises upright upon the lawn. Tony is pointing his phony imped, the digicam. “Oh dude,” cries Svelte. I have to get a full team here— I shout into my mobile but I can’t damn well make out the replies. Svelte bellows into my ear the words, resonant frequency.

  The hoop is expanding. We’ve never known a hoop behave this way before. The base of it is below ground invisibly, so what I’m seeing is a kind of archway rather than a circle.

  In place of the nighttime that was beyond, now a shimmer of blues and greens and rose fills the area inside the hoop. It’s like the membrane of some huge soap bubble about to be blown. I’m wondering if a sudden wind from beyond might in a moment propel a floating sphere out into our world—when of a sudden the space inside the hoop becomes a view. Yes, an opening into a landscape—of bushes and trees that are white ostrich plumes and tails of peacocks and adornments of birds of paradise and sulfur crests of cockatoos growing upward from ground that sparkles kaleidoscopically, ground resembling a mosaic of tiny crystals. The source of light is somewhere in a pale blue sky, unseen.

  Otherworldly, strange, beautiful—we’re seeing into another world. Never before have we seen elsewhere through a hoop.

  Already us club-nighters are heading toward that magical scene—a surge of audience.

  “Dude!” cries Svelte, and Tony Cullen knows that he needs to get closer too, and so do I, yammering into my mobile at Combi-Intel to come immediately, and so do priestly Alan and big black Daniel elbowing past us. In the forefront of flesh and glad rags of all kinds for a moment I glimpse Pete hustling Caz along with him toward that archway to elsewhere—he’s seizing his chance to kidnap Caz no matter to where, and they’re through, a half-dozen kids capering alongside them, and they aren’t stifling or choking in some toxic alien atmosphere, or at least not yet. They’re amongst the lovely alien vegetation. More and more of the audience follow.

  I think the noise from the speakers has gone into a loop. QE were recording their live performance; the recording’s replaying now. The stretched hoop seems to wobble. Before, it was precise.

  “Hurry up!” from Svelte. She grabs me strongly from my good side so that I shan’t risk falling over on account of my knee-cage, propelling me with her, for of course I must go through to see. This is like an assault by some motley children’s crusade on some city with a breached wall, as people stream through. As when the Pied Piper reached the mountain that opened up for all the enchanted boys and girls...

  “Tony, stay to brief the team that gets here—”

  “Bollocks, I’m not missing this. Enough impeds’ll be left behind to tell—”

  What I’m about to do may be madness, but I shall be adventuring with Svelte—oh, what am I thinking? It’s my duty to investigate as fully as I can. What will we eat and drink, how will we ever get back again?

  Just as we pass through, that midget chap pushes past. Almost immediately he stumbles, sprawling upon the sparkly soil. More like a beach of multi-hued mica, which his impact grooves. He doesn’t roll or scramble up. Air smells faintly of burnt toast and vanilla.

  “Wait, Svelte!” Stoop and press the pulse in the midget’s neck. None there. Check his wrist. “He’s dead.”

  “Too much excitement.”

  “No, why is he dead?”

>   An almighty pop, and there’s no hoop anymore. Nor loudspeaker noise from any marquee, nor oval of nighttime, nor marquee, nor nothing of where we came from. The bright yellow-white sun dazzling high above the feathertrees looks smaller than... well, it’s a different sun.

  How many people are wandering about, with bugger all in the way of supplies or equipment? Two hundred of us? All impeded, too.

  Why did the midget drop dead?

  A couple of hundred of us, and no means of getting back. I know why we rushed through the archway—after the utter frustration that everyone has felt ever since the hoops arrived, an almost orgasmic release of tension, a sense of exaltation. The prettiness of this—um, paradise?—contributed. People desired to cavort.

  Orange T-shirt with head-cage kneels by the midget, turns him over, tries some first aid.

  “Svelte, the midget didn’t have any cage. And he died as soon as he came through.”

  “You mean having cages lets us into here? Why? No, he had a heart attack or a stroke.”

  “Maybe he had one of those because he didn’t have a cage.”

  “Like, as a ticket? Or to protect him? Lot of excitement tonight. Small chap, he overdid himself.”

  “Jacko’s definitely dead,” announces the head-cage, and he stares at me hard.

  “Look,” I say to him, “you’re security, right?” When he nods, “We have to organize all these people.”

  “What’s it to you?” Behind the visor, blue eyes, chaotic sandy hair—quite hard to comb!

  Deep breath. “My name’s Sally Adamson. I’m from Combined Intelligence. We were keeping an eye on your musical experiment tonight.”

  Tony Cullen is by my side to back me up, as is Svelte.

  “I’m Bryce. There are more of you back at The Studio?”

  Alas, no, at least not yet. I’m hoping that my yammering into the mobile raised the alarm. Nobody ever could have reasonably expected this result from tonight’s techno caper.

  Why, pray, did I stage what amounts to a private surveillance, all on my own say-so? I ought to be for the high jump. Exactly how far have we jumped away from Earth?