The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2 Read online

  “Are you okay?” His hand moving restlessly in his pocket, Bishop Beesley looked yearningly across the road at a new sweet and tobacconists called Yummy Puffs. “Would you mind?”

  Jerry watched him cross the road and emerge shortly afterwards with his arms full of bags of M&Ms. Where, he wondered absently, were the chocolate bars of yesterday? The Five Boys? He could taste the Fry’s peppermint cream on his tongue. Dairy Milk. Those Quakers had known how to make chocolate. As a lad he had wondered why the old Underground vending machines, the Terry’s, the Rowntree’s, the Cadbury’s, were always empty, painted up, like poorly made props meant only to be glimpsed as the backgrounds of Ealing comedies. The heavy cast-iron machines had been sprayed post office red or municipal green and there was nothing behind the glass panels, no way of opening the sliding dispensers. They had slots for pennies. Signs calling for 2d. They had been empty since the war, he learned from his mum. When chocolate had been rationed and prices had risen. Yet the machines had remained on tube train platforms well into the late 1950s, serving to make the Underground mysterious, a tunnel into the past, a labyrinth of memory, where people had once sought sanctuary from bombs. Escalators to heaven and hell. The trains, the ticket machines, the vast escalators, the massive lift cages had all functioned as well as they ever had, but the chocolate machines had become museum pieces, offering a clue to a certain state of mind, a stoicism which perceived them as mere self-indulgence, at odds with the serious business of survival. Not even the most beautiful, desireable machines survived such Puritanism. How many times as a little boy had he hoped that one sharp kick would reward him with an Aero bar, or even a couple of overlooked pennies? And then one day, in the name of modernization, they were carried off, never to be replaced. It was just as well. They had vanished before they could be turned into nostalgic features.

  Brands meant familiarity and familiarity meant repeated experience and repetition meant security. Once. Now they had achieved the semblance of security, at the very moment when real protection from the fruits of their greed was needed. The Underground had been a false shelter, too, of course. They had poured down there to avoid the bombs, to be drowned and buried. Yet he had loved the atmosphere, the friendship, as he had played with his toy AA gun, his little battery-powered searchlight hunting the dusty arches for a miniature enemy. Portobello began to fill with the yap of colons settling their laptops and unfolding their Independents, pushing up their sweater sleeves as they sauntered into the pubs, familiar with their favourite spots as any Germans who had so affectionately occupied Paris.

  “They defeated the Underground,” he said. “Captured our most potent memories and converted them to cashpoints. They’re blowing up everything they don’t like. And anything they don’t understand, they don’t like.”

  Beesley was looking at him with a certain concern, his lower face pasted with chocolate so that he resembled some Afghan commando. With a plump, dainty finger he dabbed at the corner of his mouth. “Ready?”

  Mournfully, Jerry whistled the Marseillaise.

  4. LES BOUDINS NOIRS

  Blood-spurting martyrs, biblical parables, ascendant doves-most church windows feature the same preachy images that have awed parishioners for centuries. But a new stained-glass window in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, to be completed in August, evokes technology and science, not religion and the divine.

  -Wired, August 2007

  “Are you familiar with torture, Herr Cornelius?” Karen von Krupp hitched up her black leather miniskirt and adjusted his blindfold, but he could still see her square, pink face, surrounded by its thick blonde perm over the top, her peachy neck ascending above her swollen breasts. When she reached to pull the mask down he was grateful for the sudden blindness.

  “How do you mean ‘familiar?’”

  “Have you done much of it?”

  “It depends a bit on how you define it.” He giggled as he heard her crack her little whip. “I used to be able to get into it. Between consenting adults. In more innocent days, you know. You?”

  “Oh!” She seemed impatient. Frustrated. “Consent? You mean obedience? Obedient girls?”

  He was beginning to understand why he was back in her dentist chair after so many years and wearing a tart’s costume. “It’s Poland all over again, isn’t it?”

  He heard her light a cigarette, smelled the smoke. A Sullivan’s.

  She added: “I believe I ask the questions.”

  “And I respect your beliefs. Did you know that the largest number of immigrants to the US were German? That’s why they love Christmas and why they have Easter bunnies, marching bands, and think black cats are unlucky.” He settled into his bonds. It was going to be a long night.

  “Of course. But now I want you to tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I can still see some light.”

  “We’ll soon put a stop to that.”

  Again, she cracked the whip.

  “Are we on TV?”

  “Should we be?”

  “These days, everything’s on TV. Don’t you watch Guantanamo Dailies? Or is it too boring?”

  “We don’t have cable. Just remember this, Mr. Cornelius. There’s more than one way of cooking a canary.”

  5. LES BOUDINS BLANCS

  The railway from Nairobi to Mombasa is a Victorian relic. But it’s the best way to see Kenya.

  -New Statesman, 25 June 2007

  “I GOT these rules, see.” Shakey Mo looked carefully into the mirror. “That’s how I keep on top of things. You can’t survive, these days, without rules. Set yourself goals, yeah? Draw up a flow chart. A yearly planner. And then you stick to it. OK? Religiously. Rules is rules. It’s survival. It’s Mo’s survival, anyway.” He had begun talking about himself in the third person again. Jerry guessed he was in a bad way.

  “Fun?” Jerry stared at the cabinets on Mo’s walls. He kept a neat ship, he had to admit. Each cabinet held a different gun, with its clips, its ammunition, its instruction manual; the date it was acquired, whom it had shot, and when.

  “Clubbing,” Mo told him. “Whenever you get the chance. Blimey, Jerry, where have you been?”

  “Rules.” Jerry wiped his lovely lips. “The jugged hare seemed a bit bland today. Out of season, maybe?”

  “There aren’t any seasons these days, Jerry. Just seasoning. Man, you’re so retro!” Mo rearranged his hair again. He guffawed. “That’s the nineties for you. You want au naturelle, you gotta pay for it.”

  “It wasn’t always like this.”

  “We were young and stupid. We almost lost it. Went too far. That costs, if you’re lucky enough to survive. AIDS and the abolition of controlled rents. A high price to pay.”

  Jerry regarded his shaking hands. “If this is the price of a misspent youth, I’ll take a dozen.”

  Mo wasn’t listening. “I think I need a new stylist.”

  6. HOW TO DEAL WITH A SHRINKING POPULATION

  There’s a lot of hot air wafting around the Venice Biennale. But one thing is for sure: the art world can party.

  -New Statesman, 25 June 2007

  “Hi, hi, American pie chart.” Jerry sniffed. A miasma was creeping across the world. He’d read about it, heard about it, been warned about it. A cloud born of the dreadful dust of conflict, greed, and power addiction, according to old Major Nye. It rose from Auschwitz, London, Hiroshima, Seoul, Jerusalem, Rwanda, New York, and Baghdad. But Jerry wasn’t sure. He remarked on it. Max Pardon buttoned his elegant gray overcoat, nodding emphatically:

  “J’accord.” He resorted to his own language. “We inhale the dust of the dead with every breath. The deeper the breath, the greater the number of others’ memories we take into ourselves. Those wind-borne lives bring horror into our hearts and every dream we have, every anxiety we feel, is a result of all those fires, all those explosions, all those devastations. Out of that miasma shapes are formed. Those shapes achieve substance resembling bone, blood, flesh and skin, creating monsters, some of them in
human form.”

  That was how monsters procreated in the heat and destruction of Dachau, the Blitz, and the Gaza strip; from massive bombs dropped on the innocent; from massacre and the thick, oily smoke of burning flesh. The miasma accumulated mass the more bombs that were dropped or bodies burned. The monsters created from this mass, born of shed blood and human fright, bestrode the ruins of our sanctuaries and savoured our fear like connoisseurs. “Here is the Belsen ‘44; taste the subtle flavours of a Kent State ‘68 or the nutty sweetness of an Abu Ghraib ‘05, the amusing lightness of a Madrid ‘04, a London ‘06. What good years they were! Perfect conditions. These New York ‘01s are so much more full-bodied than the Belfast ‘98s. The monsters sit at table, relishing their feast. They stink of satiation. Their farts expel the sucked-dry husks of human souls: Judge Dread, Lord Horror, Stuporman. Praise the great miasma wherever it creeps. Into TV sets, computer games, the language of sport, of advertising. The language of politics, infected by the lexicon of war. The language of war wrapped up in the vocabularies of candy-salesmen, toilet sanitisers, room sprays. That filth on our feet isn’t dog shit. That city film on our skins is the physical manifestation of human greed. You feel it as soon as you smell New Orleans.”

  That whimpering you heard was the sound of cowards finding it harder and harder to discover sanctuary.

  “Where can you hide? The Bahamas? Grand Cayman? The BVAs? The Isle of Man or Monaco? Not now you’ve melted the icebergs, called up the tsunamis and made the oceans rise. All that’s left is Switzerland with her melting glaciers and strengthened boundaries. The monsters respond by playing dead. This is their moment of weakness when they can be slain, but it takes a special hero to cut off their heads and dispose of their bodies so that they can’t rise again. Some Charlemagne, perhaps? Some doomed champion? There can be no sequels. Only remakes. Only remakes. But, because we have exhausted a few of the monsters, that doesn’t mean they no longer move amongst us, sampling our souls, watching us scamper in fear at the first signs of their return. We are thoroughly poisoned. We have inhaled the despairing dust of Burundi and Baghdad.”

  “Well, that was a mouthful.” The three of them had crossed the Seine from the Isle St. Louis. It was getting chilly. Jerry pulled on his old car coat and checked his heat. His resurrected needle-gun, primed and charged, was ready to start stitching up the enemy. “Shall we go?”

  “What’s he saying?” asked Mo, staring with some curiosity at Max Pardon who had exhausted himself and stood with his back to a gilded statue, a small, neatly-wrapped figure wearing an English tweed cap. “You know what my French is like.”

  “His taxes are too high,” said Jerry.

  7. PUMP UP YOUR NETWORK

  “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht!”

  -Albert Einstein

  “Now look here, Mr. Cornelius, you can’t come in here with your insults and your threats. What will happen to the poor beggars who depend on their corps for their healthcare and their massive mortgages? Would you care to have negative equity and be unemployed?” Rupert Fox spread his gnarled antipodean hands, and then mournfully fingered the folds of his face, leaning into the mirror-cam. His new facelift had not taken as well as he had hoped. He looked like a partially rehydrated peach. “Platitudes are news, old boy.” He exposed his expensive teeth to the view overlooking Green Park. In the distance, the six flags of Texas waved all the way up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. “We give them reality in other ways. The reality the public wants. Swelp me. I should know. I’ve got God. What do you have? A bunch of idols.”

  “I thought idolatory was your stock in trade.”

  “Trade makes the world go round.”

  “The great idolator, eh? All those beads swapped with the natives.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this crap.” Rupert Fox made a show of good humor. “You enjoy yourself with your fantasies while I get on with my realities, sport. You can’t live in the past forever. The Empire has to grow and change.” He motioned towards his office’s outer door. “William will show you to the elevator.”

  8. IS HE THE GREATEST FANTASY PLAYER OF ALL TIME?

  One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief… My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade… if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it…

  -George W. Bush to Mickey Herskowitz, 1999

  Banning never really changed. Jerry parked the Corniche in the disabled parking space and got out. A block to the east, I-10 roared and shook like a disturbed beast. A block to the west, and the town spread out to merge with the scrub of semi-desert, its single-storey houses decaying before his eyes. But here, outside Grandma’s Kitchen, he knew he was home and dry. He was going to get some of the best country cooking between Santa Monica and Palm Springs. The restaurant was alone amongst the concessions and chains of Main Street. It might change owners now and again, but never its cooks or waitresses. Never its well-advertised politics, patriotism and faith. Grandma’s was the only place worth eating in a thousand miles. He took off his wide-brimmed Panama and wiped his neck and forehead. It had to be a hundred and ten. The rain, roaring down from Canada and up from the Gulf of Mexico had not yet reached California. When it did, it would not stop. Somewhere out there, in the heavily irrigated fields, wetbacks were desperately working to bring in the crops before they were swamped. From now on, they would probably be growing rice, like the rest of the country.

  He pushed open the door and walked past the display of flags, crosses, fish, and Support Our Troops signs. There was a Christmas theme, too. Every sign and ikon had fake snow sprayed over it. Santa and his sleigh and reindeers swung from every available part of the roof. There was an artificial tree in the middle of the main dining room. Christmas songs were playing over the speakers. A few rednecks looked up at him and nodded a greeting. A woman in a red felt elf hat, who might have been Grandma herself, led him through the wealth of red and white checkered tablecloths and wheel-backed chairs to a table in a corner. “Can I get you a nice glass of iced tea, son?”

  “Unsweetened. Thanks, ma’am. I’m waiting for a friend.”

  “I can recommend the Turkey Special,” she said.

  Twenty minutes went by before Max Pardon came in, removing his own hat and looking around him in delight. “Jerry! This is perfect. A cultural miracle.” The natty Frenchman had shaved his moustache. He had been stationed out here for a couple of months. Banning had once owed a certain prosperity, or at least her existence, to oil. Now she was a dormitory extension for the casinos. You could have bought the whole place for the price of a mid-sized Pasadena apartment. M. Pardon had actually been thinking of doing just that. He ordered his food and gave the waitress one of his charming, sad smiles. She responded by calling him “Darling”.

  When their meals arrived, he picked up his knife and fork and shrugged. “Don’t feel too sorry for me, Jerry. It’s healthy enough, once you get back from the interstate aways.” He spoke idiomatic American. He leaned forward over his turkey dinner to murmur. “I think I’ve found the guns.”

  Jerry grinned.

  As if in response to M. Pardon’s information, from somewhere out in the scrubland came the sound of rapid shooting. “That’s not the Indians,” he said. “The locals do that about this time every day.”

  “You’ll manage to get them to the Dine on schedule?”

  “Sure.” Max raised his eyebrows as he tasted the fowl. “You bet.”

  Grandma brought them condiments. She turned up her hearing aid, cocking her head. “This’ll put Banning on the map.” She spoke with cheerful satisfaction. “Just in time to celebrate the season.”

  Jerry sipped his tea.

  Max Pardon always knew how to make the most of Christmas. By the time the Dine arrived, Banning would be a serious bargain.

  9. THEY WANT TO MAKE FIREARMS OWNERSHIP A BURDEN-NOT A FREEDOM!

  In A
ugust most upscale Parisians head north for Deauville for the polo and the racing or to the cool woods of their country estates in the Loire or Bordeaux… Paris’s most prestigious hotel at that time of the year is crawling with camera-toting tourists and rubberneckers.

  -Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles, 2007

  “Welcome to the Hotel California,” Jerry sang into his Bluetooth. The beautiful violet light winked in time in his long, dark hair as the ruins sped past on either side of I-10 - wounded houses, shops, shacks, filling stations, churches, all covered in Day-Glo blue PVC, stacks of fallen trunks, piles of reclaimed planks, leaning firehouses, collapsed trees lying where the hurricane had thrown them, overturned cars and trucks, collapsed barns, flattened billboards, flooded strip malls, mountains of torn foliage, state and federal direction signs twisted into tattered scrap, smashed motels and roadside restaurants, mile upon mile of detritus growing more plentiful the closer they got to New Orleans.

  In the identical midnight blue Corniche beside him, connected by her own Bluetooth, Cathy joined in the chorus. The twin cars headed over cypress swamps, bayous, and swollen rivers on the way to where the Mississippi met the city.

  Standing in the still, swollen ponds on either side of the long bridges, egrets and storks regarded them with cool, incurious eyes. Crows hopped along the roadside, pecking at miscellaneous corpses; buzzards cruised overhead. It looked like rain again.