The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1 Page 26

  Redson is younger than Hope by two years. They have a Malawian mother, dead of AIDS. They have a Scottish father, a lapsed minister who vanished as soon as they got of an age to start asking about passports and paternity. There is another brother, a half-brother, through whom I first met them—Olaf, a surgeon at the hospital where I did my placement. It was him who taught me how to fillet skin flaps for the scores of amputees we were dealing with then. Malawian roads, for all that they are practically empty, are some of the most dangerous in the world.

  Hope’s skin is as dark as Olaf’s—she’s as dark as any pure-bred African. Dad’s pallid genes kept out of sight, dwelling instead, deep in the bone, narrowing and tightening her features as she grew, lengthening her neck and her back. Dad’s seed made her magically beautiful—people imagine she’s desert stock, from Namibia or even further north. A regal Saharan beauty. They’d never guess the wet and windy truth.

  Redson, though, he’s the other side of the coin. Dad’s seed floats on Redson’s surface like a rash. It has gingered his hair and freckled his hands. Rough, blotched skin hangs off his heavy features like an old dog blanket. Stocky, hairy, unpleasure-giving. Until you understand the nature of my desire, my choice of lover seems ludicrous. You see, I was only half in love with him, just as I was only half in love with Hope. I loved the person they might be. But love’s all done with now. Unsa-tiated, love gnarls itself into something else, something nameless.

  He is saying things to me like, “Leave me alone.” “I want to stay in France.” “I can speak French.” Only he is a murderer—in the law’s eyes, if not his own. And where might he procure a faster, more reliable change of identity than from me, with all my contacts—and all of them on the other side of that maddeningly narrow strip of water, that Channel?

  And I am sitting here holding his hands, reassuring him for what seems like hours, is hours—2pm now, and you can see the panic and the exhaustion battling it out through that mottled, gingerish skin of his as he slides down in his seat. I stir him, lift him, urge him to the room I have laid out for him—dark, cool, looking landward, in an upper storey overlooked by no one.

  It is hard to let go of his hand, hard not to bring it to my face. It is hard to face tomorrow.

  So after a catnap I walk into town and have an early dinner at a seafood restaurant done out like a Thirties Parisian metro. I order smoked cod and cider and though the food is excellent I realize I have made a very bad choice. I must not drink because of tomorrow, and without a drink, and surrounded by this decor, how can I not fill my head with thoughts of metros and train tunnels, nets closing in, of narrowing doorways and lids coming down—?

  I am back before Redson wakes. Carefully, I let myself into his room. He sleeps nude, as usual. It is a warm night, so he has pushed the blankets back and made do with a sheet. I ease it down, past his shoulders, his flank, his knees. I resist the temptation to touch, to map his body with my hands, to relent. He has no choice; nor have I.

  You can deaden nerves by acupuncture—that’s the principle behind the blanket I’m laying over him. It’s faster than gas anesthetics and safer too. Except that it sounds unnervingly like a fire as it crackles and crinkles, tucking itself around his sleeping flesh.

  Ta-da!

  Dawn breaks and I’m detaching the muscles from his right shoulder blade, rolling the shoulder girdle opposite to the direction of the cut to get the angle. It’s still not light enough that I can douse the lamps I brought along, though the heat they give off is wicked, and I need still more light to safely free and divide the neurovascular bundle, where it emerges just beneath the serratus. Once the clavicle’s free it’s just a matter—or it should be—of closing the skin flaps over suction drains. Only it’s the same problem with this arm as the last; in my hurry I’ve made the flaps too short. So I do what I did last time and saw off the acromion process parallel to the scapula, to make the wound more flat.

  By now I’m exhausted and it’s light outside, so I take another catnap, then I go back in and turn the lights out and open the curtains. There’s a table under the window and I stand there, luxuriating in the cool coming in through the top of the sash, while I work on his arms, first one, then the other—disarticulating the elbows.

  The bags I’m using are the cleverest, the scylliated insides sucking round and close over each body part. Pink goo runs across the seam like a cartoon smile.

  In the afternoon I start on his legs and it’s back-breaking work—I forgot how back-breaking. He’s tall for the tank, and after careful measurement, I’ve plumped for pelvectomy. Work this radical is not without its sublime moments. Once the iliac vessels are out the way you can see the sacral nerve roots deep within the pelvis. But for the most part it’s pure butchery, hacking the muscles of his back from the wing of the ilium.

  And on with his blanket again. And a catnap for me.

  It’s dark again by the time the pelvis starts to open.

  For two days, the drains do their work. For two days, Redson looks up at me, wide-eyed, his expression no different to the one he wore when we drove through Ouistreham. Mouthing. Trying to speak.

  For two days, I hunt out things to distract him. Music for him to listen to. Things to read to him. But sound does not touch his spirit, and never has. He was born all eyes.

  Even with all this equipment I cannot for the life of me jerry-rig the mirror he asks me for, so that he might look out of the window at the sky—”The sky, at least!”

  Of course he cannot be moved.

  “It was a long time ago.” I am back to my reassurances. I really should have made a tape. A recorded lecture in an authoritative voice—Tom Baker or Leonard Nimoy. I’ve done this so many times now I’m starting to whinge. “We didn’t know as much, then.” “Hope had really bad luck.” As soon as I opened the bags I knew it was hopeless, though I tried, God knows I tried. In that Calais motel room, the seams had closed so tight and pink around Hope’s limbs, there was no hint of trouble. But when we got to England and I opened the bags to reassemble her—the seams had gone the brown of a pineapple cut through and left to the air. Some seams had parted altogether and dark little puckers had formed round each breach.

  There was no smell. It all looked fresh enough. But there’s fresh and then there’s fresh. As Hope and I discovered.

  “It’s so much safer now.”

  At last, he begs me to put him to sleep. So we sleep. Our last night in Ouistreham, our last night in France. I haven’t the energy to leave his side, so I shuck off my shoes and my shirt and my shorts and I curl up beside him, under the sheet.

  Lay your hand on a man’s chest, on his belly. There is so much bone and muscle in the way of the true treasures—the miracles of liver, kidneys, spleen, and heart. But touch his back, below the rib cage—and they are tantalizingly close.

  Like this, Redson is a chest indeed, a box of clever treasures. Sea creatures dream away their incarceration inside him. Wrapped up in each other, joined together mouth-to-anus by slick bonds only Crohn’s disease can reveal and eventually break, they are utterly dependent upon each other. And yet they are so different, each organ so utterly unlike its neighbor—how could they dream that they are One? Where does this dream of Oneness come from? When must we let it go?

  In June of the millennium year, 2000—a Dutch lorry driver called Perry Wacker entered Britain in a rapid transit TIR lorry crammed with fifty-eight Chinese immigrants. He remembered to shut the lorry’s sole ventilation flap, so as not to arouse the suspicions of customs officers. But he forgot to open it again.

  All but two of his cargo asphyxiated to death.

  But it’s the fine levied on the lorry firms— £2,000 per head—that’s done most to curb human trafficking by lorry. That and the technology, as even a well-insulated TIR rig is no defense against infrared and ultrasound.

  The trend now is to shift fewer people in smaller vehicles. As the technology improves and the political climate hardens, it’s a trend that can only cont
inue.

  I just have time for a quick breakfast at a brasserie outside the ferry port. Its Seventies decor reminds me of Portsmouth, which is at once my home town and our destination today. Even the name of this restaurant—the Britannia—points toward closure.

  Then up the ramp onto the ferry.

  The checks on this side of the Channel are cursory, much less stringent since the French decided to pull out their specialist unit. Portsmouth, on the other hand, bristles with every piece of tech going.

  So this is how it’s done—

  Natural gas hasn’t caught on as a fuel in this country as yet, and no one knows what an engine that runs on both gas and diesel actually looks like. The engine is largely fake, but all the parts are genuine and professionally assembled, and who in their right mind is going to take an engine apart? So the bags sit in metal casings, many of them in plain view, and never get spotted. And because the bags are cold-blooded, relying for their primitive metabolism on heat from the actual engine (it’s in there somewhere under all the Meccano) nothing very remarkable ever shows up on infrared.

  So we arrive—if not intact, then at least undiscovered.

  Even Hayling Island is becoming gentrified now, though the softest of the creek beds have so far resisted development. I’m out the van, tinkering with the engine; taking the bags from their hiding places, stowing them in carriers. “Carrefour.” “Lafayette.”

  There are old moorings among the reed beds, the wood all rotted away so only the holes are left—holes with a petrolish sheen over them where nothing grows. But who would notice them among all these reeds? What fills these holes is an essence of rotted wood and the microscopic carcasses of whatever fed on it, all mingled with the deliquescent remains of whatever fed on them. And so on—who knows how long a food chain? Though water covers the holes for much of the day, what fills the holes has very little to do with water.

  The holes are something like the consistency of porridge and dogs have been known to disappear into them. One or two children.

  So I am careful, and I resist the temptation to carry too much at one go, and within about fifteen muddy minutes I have found what I am looking for.

  Two more trips and I’m done. In they go, one after another, and the colors released, as the oily sheen closes over each bag, are the same as you find on those maps, which pick out countries in different pastel colors.

  Is the hole deep enough?

  The risk is in running, if you can call it running.

  The risk is in moving, and in being moved.

  Each moonless night, hulks registered in Cambodia ply the seaways from Lebanon to Syria to Cyprus. Fishing boats from Somalia run aground on the beaches of Mocha; they run aground, or they sink.

  Snakeheads throw women into the sea after their children, a mile from the Spanish shore. Then they torch their own ship.

  Dozens of would-be migrants drown off the coasts of Italy and Spain each year as they attempt the crossing from the Balkans or North Africa.

  So much horror, so much desire—sooner or later it stalls, bottlenecked at the Red Cross camp at Sangatte.

  One hundred and fifty people a night are caught trying to travel illegally through the Channel Tunnel. Some hide inside goods wagons, breathing through hosepipes in a hopeless attempt to evade the carbon dioxide detectors. Others ride on the outside of the trains, wrapped in foil to keep them warm. Still others cram themselves into tiny compartments beneath the floors of passenger coaches, barely inches above the live rails.

  February this year. An Iraqi Kurd dies after leaping twenty feet from a bridge onto the roof of a goods train—only to slip and fall across an electrified rail.

  19th June 2001. Six Russians steal a speedboat in Calais, discover that the engine’s missing, and elect to set out anyway, paddling it across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

  31st July 2001. Two Lithuanian refugees cross the Channel on children’s air mattresses. More than ten hours pass before they’re picked up. They even have luggage.

  The gates are swinging shut around Europe. The nets are tightening—meshes of infrared and ultrasound. Dogs. Carbon dioxide wands.

  The traffic through Portsmouth was lighter than I expected, which means I’ve made it home before sunset.

  “Home.” Not Devon; that can wait till tonight. I mean the house I rent in Ferring, a little seaside town in West Sussex, a stone’s throw from Brighton. I get in and already, within minutes, I’m picking up the ends of my life, I’m washing up dirty dishes, changing the sheets. Putting CDs back into boxes.

  It’s a big house.

  I enter the garage and dig out the valves and gauges that will free Redson from his high-pressure prison.

  The van—like I said, it runs on both petrol and natural gas. The gas tank is mounted in the back of the van. I’ve had customs officers want me to pull up the hardboard housing to reveal the tank— but beyond that they do not go. Maybe a few raps on the outside with a torch. But it’s not a good idea to go peeking inside a pressurized container.

  This is how it’s done, you see: where the carbon dioxide detectors cannot go; where infra-red and ultrasound are blind—this is where the truly, irreducibly living part of Redson, head and torso, lives and breathes.

  In the footwell of the passenger seat, I lay out freshly laundered blankets to make a nest for him.

  It’s important to have hold of all the parts during the crossing, in case you get caught. With all accounted for, you have some shred of defense, as you can argue that you meant no lasting harm to your charge.

  But what would be the point in reassembling him? Hope and Redson reflect each other.

  Redson/Hope—I cannot allow one half to mock the other.

  The acid slew in the old post-hole must surely have eaten through the bags by now; must already be stripping Redson’s arms and legs down to the bone, chewing through the bone, I don’t doubt, given time.

  In the back of the van, I check on my charge. He mustn’t depressurize too fast, or the bends will take him. But the math you need in order to do this safely—it’s easy enough; and I have done this before, many times.

  I look at my watch, calculating the air he’s got left.

  Plenty, enough that I could leave him in there, unconscious, until we are all three met again, a wedding party, in that house among the pyres and the rain. Already in my mind’s eye I am drawing the blinds on that bankrupt, poisoned countryside. I am rolling them together, torso to torso. Inevitable, irresistible, a contact more intimate than any embrace. I am blessing them, telling them, “Kiss!”

  But no. It has been a long day. I am exhausted. It’s over two hundred miles to Devon, and that union I have for so long desired to bring about.

  I shall tilt the rearview mirror so Redson can look out. And he will help me stay awake.

  Third Person

  Tony Ballantyne

  THE STEAM BOMB was a perforated metal shell the size of a tennis ball, filled with water and loaded with an F-Charge. On detonation it squirted needles of pressurized steam that drilled through anything within a radius of half a meter and left anything at a radius of one meter slightly damp. The bomb that landed in the hot street tore apart Bundy’s upper thighs, punctured his stomach, and left his forehead covered in a refreshing pink mist. “It came from up there, sergeant,” murmured Chapelhow into his headset, pointing to the roof of a nearby house. Mitchell fired his rifle with a muffled crack and an overweight woman slumped forward and fell from the roof. No contest. Mitchell was a regular, she was just a conscript, flushed and confused by the hot Spanish sun. Mitchell lowered his black rifle and resumed his patient scanning of the surrounding area, black gloved hands ready on his gun, black booted feet planted wide.

  Bundy was screaming without seeming to notice it. He was fumbling at his rifle with blood-slicked hands, trying to reload. Sergeant Clausen shook his head.

  “He’s done,” he said. “Chapelhow, finish him.”

  Chapelhow felt his stoma
ch churning; nonetheless he raised his cheap conscript’s rifle to his shoulder and shot Bundy through the head, silencing his screams. The brass-bound round the wounded man had been trying to load slipped from his fingers and rolled across the road. Chapelhow was rubbing his shoulder through his thin silk shirt, the kick of the rifle too much for his thin frame.

  “Take his gun,” chided Sergeant Clausen impatiently, “we’re going to need it.”

  Despite his thick black uniform, Mitchell looked cool. Just like the sergeant. They weren’t sweating like the conscripts. They didn’t have dark patches beneath their armpits from their exertions, nor did they have beads of moisture on their upper lips. They moved like lazy cats, turning this way and that to scan the dusty street.

  “There’ll be more, sarge,” said Mitchell. “SEA always try for the pincher.”

  “I know. Chapelhow, Hamblion, go back toward the seafront. Singh, Reed, up toward the town. See if you can spot anyone else.”

  Chapelhow knew what it meant, to be paired with Hamblion. Hamblion was grossly overweight. He was expendable. If Hamblion was going back to the seafront, then that was were the sergeant was expecting the attack to come from.

  Most of the buildings were shut up for the midday siesta. The only sign of activity came from a man in a white shirt, carrying little round-topped tables and setting them out in the shade just in front of his bar. The expendable Hamblion waddled past him, staying in the shade where he could, his arms burnt bright red from the sun, like sore corned beef, his podgy hand making his rifle look like a stick of liquorice. Chapelhow limped along on the opposite side of the street. The thin soles on his expensive leather slip-on shoes were coming loose, more suitable for a night out clubbing than for a conscripted soldier on a sortie. The sound of the sea and the shouts of the few children left playing on the beach could be heard up ahead. There was a scraping noise as a door opened in a house on the shady side of the street. Chapelhow jumped, he and Hamblion turning their guns toward it. Two middle-aged women walked out, chattering., in Spanish. They wore floral print skirts, their hair permed in short curls. Both carried smart leather handbags.