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

  “Didn’t you hear me calling?” she asked.

  No, he was too busy dreaming.

  “We’re going to wander along with Barry for now,” she explained. “We need to find the rest of the Fifty. Come now! Everyone is needed.”

  Needed for what?

  But he didn’t ask. There had to be some rationale at work here, and he was tired of asking obvious questions, supplying the comedic relief for their slowly growing herd.

  They walked.

  In a useless attempt to measure the passage of time, Kelvin counted his strides, a thousand at a time. Once all of his fingers were extended, ten thousand steps had been taken, and he carefully looked around, trying to gain some feel for navigational cues. But they didn’t seem to have gained any distance, even after a hundred thousand long patient steps. Suddenly Barry announced his hunger, causing a great droplet of Precambrian pond water to appear. While the other two ate their little meals, the microbe swam back and forth inside that bacteria-rich treat.

  “What’s wrong with me, Sandra?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know quite a bit more than I know,” Kelvin complained. “I can’t figure out what direction we’re heading, or even find a single usable landmark. What you tell me about this birthday party feels true, but that could mean that I’m highly suggestible, nothing more.”

  His companion bent her head down, tearing the raw meat from a chunk of white bone.

  “I feel like I’m broken,” he whispered. “Compared to you, at least.”

  Kelvin fully expected her to gloat.

  But instead the little T. rex brushed her tail against his leg, the gesture apparently meant to reassure. Then with a sober tone, she mentioned, “We aren’t expensive items, I’m afraid. Manufactured quickly and with no eye for details.”

  “I’m what? Just a trinket?”

  A sympathetic look filled her face. “Perhaps you came out of the factory wearing a few more flaws than usual. Perhaps.”

  “But look at what’s right about me,” he said. “And look at yourself. Both of us have good strong minds. I’m full of guts and lungs that work, and a heart, and other important things.” He came close to mentioning his male organ, but balked. “I’m also holding memories of some life that seems real and rich to me. And when I sleep, I dream about my prehistoric existence.”

  “I dream in the same ways,” she confided.

  “And we’re just cheap pieces of crap? Is that reasonable?”

  “In a future where miracles are ordinary, it is reasonable. And more importantly, it is inevitable. Why shouldn’t the humblest toys have souls and dreams?”

  “Because that would be cruel.”

  Sandra had nothing to offer. She glanced at the shape that was Barry, watching him swim furiously inside that rich, green, blimp-sized wealth of water.

  Finally Kelvin asked, “What do you know about the prince? What kind of creature is it?”

  “A sentient plasmoid,” she said softly.

  “And what’s that?”

  She squinted. “At this moment, the plasmoids are the undisputed rulers of our home world.”

  “And exactly how old is our birthday boy?”

  She hesitated.

  Kelvin guessed, “He must be huge, and he’s very old. By our pedestrian standards, I mean.”

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “Just look around,” he argued. “This room, whatever it is… it dwarfs everything that I can remember, and there’s such a powerful sense of the ages here…”

  With a careful tone, she said, “No.”

  Then she touched him with the two claws of a hand, gently explaining, “The plasmoid is smaller than any bacterium, as it happens. And this huge home is not much larger than a dinosaur’s heart. And when you think about turning fifty, think tiny bites of time. Imagine fifty one-millionths of a second, and you won’t be too far from the mark.”

  Kelvin carefully held her little hand.

  “And we are fifty party favors,” she concluded, “waiting patiently to be found by our prince.”

  They walked again. Apparently there were vibrations and a dim but worthwhile odor that could be followed. But then Barry couldn’t sense any presence besides the three of them, and Sandra had lost any scent worth a deep breath. What would be best, they decided, was to stop for now, to rest and wait until someone else happened along.

  Kelvin fell into a deep, dreamy sleep.

  He woke on the narrow hard bed in his dorm room, looking out the window at the sun as it passed behind high cottony clouds. With a groan, he sat up. Then he dressed and paused before the room’s little mirror, considering the problem of what was real and what was madness. Even when he knew the truth, he couldn’t escape his day. He found himself walking to lunch and to class and back to his room to wash and change before heading out to dinner; and then with the evening, there was some very hard drinking.

  Events swept him along to the karaoke bar where his crotch got drenched by the spilled drink. Could he dry himself in time? It was a game among his drunken friends, everybody handing him napkins and coarse suggestions. Kelvin was beginning to make progress with the mess. Then the master of ceremonies strode up on stage to announce the next victim.

  “Is it me?” Kelvin groaned.

  But it wasn’t his turn, no. The next song was the love ballad from a Twentieth Century movie that nobody had heard of, and the young woman performing it happened to be named Sandra.

  Kelvin couldn’t stop his frantic cleaning of his jeans. But he had the power to look up, to watch the very pretty red-haired woman with little hands and a prominent, perfect rear end.

  Sandra had a beautiful voice.

  A professional voice.

  By the end of the song, everybody was listening. Applause erupted, and the audience leaped to its feet. Even Kelvin stood. But as he clapped and cheered, he carefully looked around the entire room.

  Including Sandra and himself, fifty celebrants were visible.

  Of course.

  Barry was gone.

  Sandra woke Kelvin with the sorry news. He had slipped away while they slept, she reported, and then she threw some hard curses at their onetime companion. “I knew he would leave us. I knew it.”

  “How could you?”

  “Because he prefers to be alone. Didn’t you see that in his nature?”

  Not particularly. But Kelvin shrugged agreeably, asking, “So what do we do now? Chase after him?”

  “Forget him,” was her advice.

  Kelvin was glad to have company, and he said as much.

  Sandra absorbed the news with a faint, hopeful smile. “Let’s try this direction next,” she decided.

  They marched along what seemed to be a straight line.

  “So was I ever real?” Kelvin wondered aloud.

  His companion seemed ready for the question. “You’re asking if there was a genuine Kelvin who had a father and attended classes and drank alcohol on the night of his birthday?”

  “A model to base me on, maybe.”

  “There might well have been,” she allowed. “Who knows what kinds of databases survive from those times?”

  The random columns, so tall and perfect, had all at once formed a distinct pattern. For the first time, Kelvin had the strong impression that he had stood on this ground before.

  “And what about you?” he asked.

  Those nonsensical lips pulled in tight to the mouth.

  No, there wouldn’t be databases for dinosaurs. She was something dreamed up from scratch, and it plainly bothered her.

  Kelvin changed topics. “So what does our sentient plasmoid look like? If we saw our creator up close, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” she allowed. “Theresa claimed that it’s a cold purple flame, and when it appears, everything else vanishes.”

  “And it’s looking for us now?”

  She gave a nod, her mouth becoming even grimmer.

  Kelvin glanced back over his
shoulder, thinking hard with his cheaply rendered mind. Then with a low voice he asked, “Sandra? Do you know one of the traits shared by every cheap trinket and do-dad?”

  She had no clue how to answer him. She was a dinosaur and had never owned anything in any life.

  But then he made himself tell her, “Never mind.” Kelvin didn’t want to be cruel. He didn’t want to be the one to explain how everything shoddy usually ends up lost and forgotten. But knowing that could be their fate gave him an unexpected strength, and with the strength came a fresh, reassuring sense of freedom.

  In the end, Kelvin had tied a spare shirt around his waist and bravely stepped up onto the raised platform. From a list of several thousand popular songs, he chose one about luck being a lady tonight. Maybe it was the liquor, or maybe the contrived nature of the moment. Either way, he discovered a rich deep voice and the courage to belt out the lyrics to the increasing approval of the forty-nine in his audience.

  Holding the community microphone to his mouth, he could smell the perfume that Sandra was wearing.

  Later, in the midst of a congratulatory march around the room, he spotted the girl sitting alone at the bar. Approaching her seemed entirely natural.

  Without a shred of doubt, he told her that her singing was beautiful and so was she. That brought laughter and a measure of suspicion. Then Kelvin asked if the stool beside her was taken, and she gestured with her small, long-nailed hand, offering it to him while admitting, “There was somebody else, but he’s gone now.”

  Above the din of bad music, they tried to converse.

  Later they went outside to find quiet and a little privacy. She seemed sweet and drunk but not sloppy or out-of-control. More than once, she told Kelvin she seemed to know him from somewhere, and wasn’t that peculiar?

  Eventually they found their way to the front seat of her car.

  And later, the back seat.

  Kelvin woke with a start. He didn’t want to leave the dream. It felt rude to have slipped away from his new love. But try as he might, he couldn’t force himself back to sleep. He went as far as covering his head with a spare shirt and one arm, eyes closed as his mind replayed every tiny detail of what probably had never been real in the first place.

  Slowly, he realized that a noise was keeping him from sleeping.

  A scratching sound, abrasive and obsessive.

  Kelvin finally threw off the shirt and sat up, startled to find his dinosaur companion dragging her feet across an unexpected mound of dirt. Sandra smiled as she worked. But where had the dirt come from? From the same place that platypuses came from, he realized. And for some reason she had to shape it into a rough bowl before suddenly hunkering down and looking hard at him, the smile saying everything.

  With an effortless ease, the first egg emerged.

  Ten more eggs followed first, and all the while the happy father danced around the nest, singing the one song that he knew by heart.

  Mason’s Rats: Black Rat

  Neal Asher

  Mason leant against the sun-heated wall of the barn and groped in his pocket for a couple of environmentally friendly shotgun cartridges. When he remembered that what he held in his other hand was a walking stick, he instead leant the stick against the wall, pulled out his tobacco tin, and rolled himself a cigarette.

  He’d seen it disappearing round the corner of the barn. It was that big black bastard Smith had been having trouble with; the one that had led Smith’s nice shiny new cybernetic ratter into the path of a combine. Yes, it was over here now, where the pickings were easier. No cybernetic ratters here, nor any automatic lasers. Mason drew on his cigarette and frowned.

  His own rats hadn’t done this, for he had an agreement with them, of sorts. It worked out at about one percent of his total harvest, which was certainly cheaper than the products of Traptech. There was also the advantage that he knew precisely where their food was coming from and was able to lace it with birth control chemicals. He peered down at the hole through the alloy wall. The black rat was certainly clever, he’d give it that, for the hole had been cut with a file or a hacksaw.

  With a sigh Mason pushed himself away from the wall and headed back to his house. It looked like war again. As he stepped back out onto the track he noticed the chief brown rat watching him from a round bale of wheat straw. It wore its tool-belt and had a small sack slung over one shoulder. Mason pointed at the hole in the wall and in response the brown rat held up its paw, twitched its nose, and shrugged. Mason spat the remains of his rollie on the ground as the brown rat disappeared over the other side of the bale.

  It might have been possible for him to push the agreement further, but communicating with rats was a difficult thing at the best of times. Last time he had done it with pictures: one of a rat eating grain nailed over the entrance to an old tin shed in which he put their one percent, and pictures of rats being blown apart with shotguns on the doors to the storage barns. After the violent demise of about ten rats, the rest only took grain from the tin shed, but Mason had to wonder if the pictures had helped them to come to a decision at all. And anyway, how could he convey with pictures his displeasure at the depredations of the black rat and his kin? No, there was only one solution: splatter the bastard.

  The shotgun closed with a satisfying click and Mason hoiked it up under his arm before setting out from his house. Two hundred acres of alpha-wheat had to be brought in today and he needed to get this problem sorted. He’d sealed the first hole only to find another behind a patch of stinging nettles, almost as if the first had been a decoy. This second hole led into the rapeseed storage barn, from which the rat had somehow managed to steal a quarter of a ton of seed overnight. As he had thought: it was here with its kin, and probably here to stay.

  “Right, you little shit head,” said Mason as he stepped out of his house. “Show one whisker today and you’re rat burgers.”

  He surveyed the yard before him like a Tommy about to go over the top, then with firm purpose in his stride he set out for the combine garage. The black rat didn’t show itself as he crossed the yard, nor when he hit the lock pad to Garage Two and the door slid open. He surveyed the yard again with deep suspicion before turning back to the garage and addressing the immense harvester before him.

  “Combine Bertha, access code seven three two, Mason - respond.”

  A low humming issued from the machine and its lights glimmered reluctantly.

  “Code confirmed - instructions,” responded the silky voice of the combine.

  “Fields G27 through to G31 are ready for alpha-wheat harvesting. Run a diagnostic and if you’re within parameters proceed to harvest.”

  The humming from the combine increased and its lights glared bright then went out. Its diesel engine started, blasting out a cloud of acrid black smoke. Various mechanical sounds issued from its mysterious chambers. Its cutters swished together, its reel turned, and its augers chuntered to themselves. Mason nodded to himself in satisfaction: one of the best investments he had ever made.

  “I am unable to proceed,” said Bertha.

  “What?”

  ‘“I am unable to proceed.”

  The combine groaned as it went into reverse gear and withdrew further into the garage.

  “Why are you unable to proceed?” Mason asked through grinding teeth.

  “It’s too big out there.”

  The brown rat came close, very close, for against the light background of the bales it had appeared black. Mason kept it in his sights just to make a point and watched it as it backed up to the wall of straw as if walking on broken glass. At length it dropped its sack and raised its paws above its head. Mason lowered his shotgun.

  “Your lucky day, punk.”

  He turned away and stomped back to his house. Watching him go the brown rat lowered its paws and shook its head. Had it sweat glands it would have wiped its brow. It hadn’t. It picked up its sack and with a degree of determination in its scamper headed for its home. Mason stepped inside his own home, aban
doning his shotgun in the porch, and with much reluctance picked up his phone. About half an hour later he ended up speaking to a real person.

  “What do you mean, ‘not till Saturday?’ There’s a belt of rain on its way!”

  The voice on the other end of the phone said something reassuring.

  “I paid good money for that harvester and I expect service!”

  The voice deferred responsibility.

  “Then put him on!”

  The voice was apologetic.

  “Majorca!”

  The voice tried to cover all points.

  Mason slammed the phone down.

  As he picked up his shotgun and stamped outside he swore with staccato regularity.

  Three of the bastards, black rats certainly, but not the one, not the boss. He was bigger, had a bit of a limp and scars on his back from that encounter with Smith’s ratter. Mason raised his shotgun and carefully rested it across the cowling of the old Fergussen. Now, all he had to do was wait until they were in line. They hadn’t seen him yet. The little cart they were harnessed to was occupying all of their attention. Wait. Wait…

  Mason let rip with both barrels. One rat disintegrated and another one leapt about, without the benefit of directions from its head, and tangled itself up in its harness. The third one hurriedly tried to unhook itself.

  “Gotcha!”

  Mason cackled as he cracked open his gun, but in his excitement he did it too high and the hot end of a spent cartridge hit him on the nose and sizzled.

  “Fuck!”

  The remaining rat was free and dragging itself away.

  “Bugger!” Mason thunked in two new cartridges. His eyes were watering so much it took him a moment to locate the remaining rat over by the dung hill, which it was struggling to ascend. Mason took aim, then after a pause he lowered the gun. At the top of the hill stood the brown rat, its miniature crossbow held steadily on the black rat. Finally the black rat saw the brown, and froze.

  “Go on, shoot,” said Mason, wiping at his eyes.

  Slowly, carefully, the black rat pulled itself upright and raised its paws into the air. The brown rat lowered its crossbow and watched as the black rat dragged itself away.