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

  “WHAT AM I? I don’t know. But I can tell you that it is like flying. I wish to fly and I fly, but once I am up there it is only the air and a few feathers that prevent me from plummeting. So tenuous the thread of existence!

  “You are strong, Tish. So much stronger than the others. You hold me together. You are my air, my feathers. Without you... well, I don’t know what I would be without you to support me, to contain me.”

  SHE WAS GROWING weak. Had been growing weak.

  But not as rapidly as Ferdinand.

  She came close-up on them early that morning, when the sun was still heavy over the mountains, painting them gold and pink.

  Angelo was holding him, his arms easily enfolding the wasted frame.

  Tish almost turned away. She had seen this kind of encounter often enough by now. She closed her eyes and thought back to those few precious nights when it had just been the two of them, sleeping rough, both enfolded by his wings.

  She had been strong then.

  She opened her eyes just as Ferdinand started to vanish.

  She watched. She could see through him. See the stones, the thorn bush, the tussock grass, the inside of Angelo’s embracing left arm, previously obscured by Ferdinand’s bony torso.

  Things blurred. Things dissolved, melted, slipped away from this existence.

  He was gone.

  Angelo turned to her, his expression startled as if he did not know what had happened, had not expected it to happen; but beneath the surprise there was satisfaction, a thrill of pleasure, of strength, and the first hint of that crooked-toothed smile.

  Er-jian-die

  “YOUR AIR, YOUR feathers... so poetic. If you weren’t such an innocent I’d say you had the crassest line in smooth-talk, but you don’t have a clue, do you?”

  We have her. We have him. I see him through the eyes of Tish Goldenhawk and it is as if a distorting lens has been removed. He is male, of indeterminate age, of mid-brown skin tone and dark hair. He is beautiful and engaging.

  He draws you in.

  Even at this remove—proxied and many hundred kilometers distant—he draws you in.

  We debate, as he moves out of view. Act now, via proxy, or attend in body, allowing a short interval in which he might detect our approach and take evasive action? We do not know how much his powers have grown.

  Data flashes.

  Ee-jian-die takes the proxy, turns her head so that he is back in our field of view. Sen-jian-die and I withdraw, lock, open a channel through the consensus, step through.

  There is momentary disorientation and then we are standing on a plain, surrounded by cacti and thorn bushes and oddly balanced round boulders.

  The two of them are there, locked in conflict. A short distance away there is an encampment of bubble tents and track trikes. The people there look on, too damaged to stir.

  She has him in the beam. She stands, knees slightly bent, body tipped forward, one arm stretched out, palm first, fingers straight, and a beam of white light lances from her hand to him, the anomaly.

  He stands there smiling.

  He looks at us as we materialize, although he should not be able to turn his head at all.

  He raises a hand so that he mirror’s Tish Goldenhawk’s stance and his palm cuts out the beam, reflects it.

  It shines on her face and she crumples, sobbing, more damaged than she had been before.

  Ee-jian-die appears at my side, his proxying of Tish abandoned.

  He looks ashen, damaged by the encounter, even at a proxy.

  I allow myself to be identified as leader, even though we three are equal; we three are far greater than we three alone. “Your time is up,” I tell the anomaly. “Let these people go. Come back with us. Allow yourself to be reabsorbed.”

  He smiles in a way that indicated he is both amused and puzzled. “Reabsorbed?” he said. “Re... ?”

  I nod. “You are a glitch,” I tell him. “A chaotic anomaly. The Accord contains all the individuals who have lived and then died since its inception. You are a bug in that process, a self-resonant fluctuation in the billions upon billions of human elements within the Accord. A remix error. You’re a strange attractor and you need to be smoothed over. Come with us, you will not be lost, you will simply be reabsorbed.”

  “But how... ? How can I be reabsorbed if I am not yet dead?”

  He doesn’t know. He has grown, but he does not know.

  “‘This is the Accord,” I tell him. “We are living the afterlife. The afterlives.”

  “What happens if I say ‘no?’”

  “We will force you.”

  “And if you fail?”

  “You will carry on growing. Like a leak in a pool, you will continue to drag in those about you, soaking them up until they are husks. They are drawn to you. We are drawn to you. You are like a black hole in human form. You will suck us all in and the Accord will fail to be. It will crash on a galaxy-wide scale.”

  He—this thing, this entity, this it—is smiling. “So, if I believe you, then I—” it thumped its chest in apelike display “—am an alternative to the Accord? An alternative reality?”

  It laughs. “I like this,” it says. “It is all so beautiful. So, so beautiful.”

  We strike, synchronized.

  He locks him in the immobilizing beam, far more powerful than we have used so far. I lock him in a second, our combined beams more than doubling their intensity in combination. Sen moves in to interface, a physical connection with the Accord.

  The anomaly is still smiling.

  It turns and lashes out a beam of light and Sen flies through the air in several pieces.

  It turns again, and lashes at Ee, and I sense our hold—if ever we had had a hold—weakening.

  And then... light, dark, an absence that is where the pain would have been if my body had not immediately shut down those pathways. A lot of absence.

  Mental silence. Ee-jian-die and Sen-jian-die have been returned to the Accord. They will reappear, but not here, not now.

  I am still here, though. I have not been returned.

  I open the eye that I am able to control.

  I see sky, a thorn bush.

  I see her. Tish Goldenhawk. Looking down at me.

  “What can I do?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I tell her. The body that carries me is too fundamentally damaged. It could be repaired, of course, but what is the point? My task is over, I have failed. I will be reabsorbed. Someone else will be sent, and they will try again. The anomaly will have grown, but it will be fought, only not by me next time, or at least, not by the combination of traits that is this me.

  “What happens to us when he has sucked us dry?”

  She is strong, this one.

  “If this is the Accord, then where does the data go when he has absorbed it? You said he’s some kind of black hole—what’s inside him?”

  “Who knows?” I say. “The physically dead enter the Accord and we live on, again and again, for eternity. But attractant anomalies like this remove us from the afterlife. It’s like asking where the dead went before there was an Accord. They died. They stopped being. They ended. If he takes us from the Accord, we end.”

  “What can I do?” she repeats, and I realize that she does not mean to ask what she can do to help my mortally damaged body, but rather what can she do to stop the anomaly, the attractor, her lover.

  “He said I was his air, his feathers, that I held him together,” she said. “I want that to stop.”

  In that instant I want to paint her. Like the rainbows, I could paint her a million times and each would be different, but always her strength, her purity, would come through.

  “You have to get close to him,” I tell her.

  Tish Goldenhawk

  “You HAVE TO get close to him,” this wreck of a human construct tells her. “Hold him.”

  Tish Goldenhawk nods. In her mind she can see Angelo holding Ferdinand, absorbing him. She knows exactly what this agent of the Accord
means. “What then?”

  “That’s all,” he tells her. “I will do the rest.”

  ANGELO WAITS FOR her in the encampment, smiling. She should have known he would not go on without her.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. His words have no meaning. They are just vibrations in the air. “They tried to kill me.”

  She nods. “They’re dead now,” she says, wondering then at the lie—whether she has made a fatal mistake already.

  He shakes his head. “One lives,” he says, “but only tenuously. He does not have long, I think.”

  He turns. “We must move on,” he says. “There will be more of them. Another day and we will reach a city, I think. A city would be good.”

  She looks at him, tries to see him as she had once seen him, a charming, exciting escape. That had only ever been one of her fantasies. She tries to see him as her lover, but cannot. Tries to see him even as human, but no.

  “I can’t,” she says in a quiet voice.

  He turns, raises an eyebrow.

  “I can’t go on.” Getting stronger. “I’m leaving. Going home. You don’t need me anymore.”

  “But...”

  “No buts,” she says. “I can’t do this. I’m exhausted. Drained. I’m leaving.”

  He is not human, but there is so much in him that is.

  “You can’t,” he says. “I... You’re my support. My feathers, the air that holds me up. The air that I breathe!”

  “I’m tired,” she says. “You can’t lean on me anymore. I’m none of those things... I’m not strong enough. Can’t you see? It’s me who needs supporting!”

  “I will always support you,” he says.

  He opens his arms, just as he had for Ferdinand, who had been too weak to continue.

  He steps forward.

  She waits for him to come to her, to hold her.

  Scent of cinnamon, of dry, dusty feathers. She holds him.

  She senses the flow, the seething mass of energies. They came from... beyond.

  He gasps, straightens.

  She holds on.

  He is looking down at her. He knows. He dips his head and kisses her on the brow.

  She holds nothing, holds air, hugs herself. She drops to her knees.

  There are feathers, nothing else. She gathers some. She will cast them for him, with bread, when she gets back to Penhellion.

  She does not doubt that she will go there, go home.

  Poor Milton. Poor Druce. She has changed. She does not know what can be salvaged, but she will go home now and she will see.

  She stands.

  Even if nothing can be repaired, she has no regrets. She would do it all again.

  She is of the Accord.

  They all are of the Accord.

  The Wedding Party

  Simon Ings

  THE RISK IS in standing still.

  It can come at you quickly. A gas lamp sets a tent alight and six Somalian refugees die in the flames—Ta-da!

  Or it can be subtle. Last year, a great many Somalian refugees gave up their flight altogether, boarded boats in Aden, and headed home—and why? Maybe because the Yemeni authorities let on how many Palestinian refugees had already died in the camp they were bound for—the camp at Al Ghanaian.

  The point, either way, is this—the risk is in standing still.

  I’ve said to my wife: “Aiden’s dead. Mocha’s closed out.”

  I said to her: “Lebanon to Syria to Cyprus. Come on.”

  I said, “He hasn’t any choice.”

  This is her brother we are talking about. My lover—which is a joke. Rather, he is the other side of that coin I once coveted—Redson and Hope, that long-wished-for alchemical wedding.

  Slip through Europe, that’s the ticket. If you can call it slipping. Slump through Europe. Slouch through Europe. Squat, squeeze, shimmy through Europe, to the Red Cross camp at Sangatte, just a short walk away from the Channel Tunnel.

  Kurdish gangs patrol the camp, which isn’t even a real camp—just a converted railway warehouse. The Kurds organize the escapees; they arrange transit attempts through the Tunnel; they know what’s what. Whether you’re a single man from Iraq or Iran, or a family from Afghanistan, Kosovo, or Albania—it’s all the same to them. You don’t get through without you paying the fee.

  And you pay the fee. Of course you do. The risk is in standing still. The risk is in standing up— standing up, I mean, to them. There are riots in Sangatte, as you would expect from eight hundred and fifty refugees crammed into quarters meant for two hundred. All of them trying somehow, anyhow, to scrape together that fee.

  I’ve said to Hope—that’s my wife’s name, Hope—”Get Redson to Cyprus and I’ll do the rest.” And I’m already promising more than I should. The Snakeheads have much of this route I’m suggesting sewn up—from the Balkans to Sangatte, some say.

  She says nothing. She looks out the window at the poisoned Devonshire countryside. No sound impinges from outside. The foot-and-mouth crisis has occasioned a wholesale slaughter of livestock in this region. Nothing moves. It is as though the holocaust has been extended even to the insects and the birds.

  “He hasn’t a choice!”

  She looks out the window at the rain. If you can call it rain, drizzle scrubbing the land and the sky into one.

  Drizzle subsumes everything, the yellowish paniculate—faint traces of a bruise—that must, I suppose, mark a nearby pyre. It subsumes too, and utterly, the fine spray from the hose, which runs above the five-bar gate. The hose spans the farm track on thin scaffolding. And there’s the bucket where I dutifully scrubbed my boots an hour— Jesus, no, two hours ago. Impatient, I turn her chair; I force her to look away from the window, away from the near-bankrupt ruin that was a Devon dairy farm (it’s not even ours, we just rent the house).

  She hates it when I pull her chair about, when I take advantage of her condition. I stroke her head. “Stop it,” she says.

  “He really has no choice,” I insist. “If it was anyone else he’d have got away with it. But Beneson was the only left-footed striker on the team. The national team. They won’t let it go.”

  Redson—my lover, ho ho; anyway, my brother-in-law—he was working the qat caravans out of Somalia when he surprised a burglar, coming in through his kitchen window. Got terrified. Shot him—and thought that he was within his rights so to do. And he would have been—had the burglar not turned out to be a national hero.

  Hope can do this. She can get him out. Overland from Mogadishu to Nairobi. Round the lake to Kampala and from there by air freight to Libya. By boat to Lebanon, then Syria, Cyprus, “Come on!”

  Hope can do this—because she has done it herself. After we split she went back home to Malawi, as safe a country as you’re going to get in central Africa, working at the Dzaleka refugee camp in Dowa. Only she got caught up with the Congolese mafia that run the bus concessions out of Lilongwe and Blantyre, and had to run in the end. If you can call it running. They drove her and drove her, nowhere was safe. And when she had had enough of running—if you can call it running—she bit the bullet. She slipped through, slunk through, squeezed herself painfully through Europe’s ever-tightening net—did a good job of it, too—but in the end it was too much. She had to call me, make some sort of peace with me, beg me to help her cross the Channel into Britain. Which I naturally did.

  The snakeheads have Europe sewn up. From the Balkans right through to Sangatte, so they say. And that was enough for me. I got out of all that, and quick. For several years now, the nearest I’ve come to that line of work is to sort out the illegals who haunt Cricklewood. I’m a sort of fly-by-night foreman-cum-bus driver. You know what it’s like—two navvies this way, and three navvies that and jump quick in the back of the van before we all get nicked. Seeing to the casual labor market of Cricklewood is more than enough to fill my day, and this morning I found myself seriously wondering if I’m up to this fresh obligation.

  But Redson is my lover, the other side of that coin I pu
t such store by. And call me sentimental but I cannot bear to think of them parted like this. These two people. These two half-people, I should say, because it seems even now that they are only the halves of a single person, a person I might once have drawn together. A person I loved. Hope/Redson. Redson/Hope.

  I’ve said to her: “Calais’s as tight as a bitch. So I’ll take him through Ouistreham. They’ve just axed the frontier post and there’s boats sailing to Portsmouth all day.”

  “You mustn’t,” she says. “No. Stop it.” Her torso flexes uselessly. Her head bobs and tosses.

  I am stroking her neck. “Please.” I am shucking her shirt free and stroking her breast. “Please.”

  “It’s safer,” I tell her, “it’s really come on. It’s so much safer now.”

  My hand does its business. The tears come and I wipe them away for her. I settle her back in her chair and I know I have won.

  Hope has done her business and I have done mine. Redson has landed up in Sangatte, because it’s safer for us to follow the migrant flow, because the Snakeheads have their nostrils raised and aquiver for the innovations of a competitor.

  Anyway, I got him out of there last night and paid the Kurd his bloody fee. Then, soon as we were out of sight, I legged it with Redson back over the fence, away from the Tunnel, and back onto the highway system. It took a while to find the van—when I go shopping I’m always losing the damn thing in the multi-storey. It’s not big— people movers are taller.

  We reached Ouistreham by first light. Redson sat there blinking up at the buildings like an inner-city kid on an excursion trip—he’s a natural tourist, a camera on legs.

  I’ve rented us an old villa on the Riva Bella—the white sand beach near to town. Redson needs to sleep if we’re to make a start tomorrow, but the end is in sight, the biggest hurdle yet to cross, and the door had swung open on the room holding all my gear—he saw everything. It took an age to calm him down. “It’s so much safer now.” Though surely the size of the van is clue enough, what I have planned for him.