Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  Nevertheless …

  Even if he was wrong about these particular individuals, there were Fixes behind him. Following him. He could all but feel their breath on the back of his neck. He utilised all the tricks McWilliam suggested. It made life laborious. It added effort, hindered Speed. It made his travels travails. The worrying did not help. It was hard to build up any sense of progress, of flow, what with constantly having to look over his shoulder, constantly having to second-guess potential saboteurs. He had never felt quite so unlikely to achieve Continuum. If it beckoned, would he be in a fit state of mind—receptive, unpreoccupied—to recognise it?

  After several weeks Stoneham had re-entered the upper levels and was beginning to relax. Nothing untoward had happened. No serious voyaging mishaps. The sense of being hunted had faded. Perhaps he had succeeded in eluding the Fixes (if there had been any Fixes in the first place). Certainly he had not once spotted the girl. Not so much as a glimpse of her. Which per se did not mean anything. Could be she had got better at hiding, at disguising herself. But somehow he was sure he had given her the slip. McWilliam had been right: you can beat her.

  Speed became increasingly easy to obtain. Worrying about Fixes had been a dragging weight attached to his ankle. Unshackled from it, he lurched forwards, stored-up momentum released. Plane became boat. Boat became train. Train became car became plane again. Hotel after hotel after hotel. Another departure lounge, another railway-station waiting room. His Passepartout double-tasking: primed to alert him when his next destination was announced over the tannoy, in the meantime translating the text of a guide book or a newspaper. The incremental improvement in standards of comfort and cleanliness: one country’s second class being the previous one’s first class; one hotel’s extras being the next’s inclusives; every new city boasting tidier, lighter, brighter streets; a heightening of stranger-kindness; a reduction in stranger-hostility. Stoneham unclenched. He was in transit. He was free.

  And then one morning he woke up and he knew. A tingle inside. It was happening.

  A universal languor seemed to have settled in around him. People talking, gesturing, moving, ever so slightly too slowly. Voices out of synch with their mouths, trailing behind, as though the air had grown thicker, impeding the speed of sound. A waiter at breakfast, pouring orange juice as though it were syrup. A cab driver, chauffeuring Stoneham to the airport at a leisurely pace, with no sense that they were going to be late. Nothing seemed wholly real. The world’s tangible certainties were gone. Stoneham found himself laying a hand on things, checking their texture, reassuring himself of their solidity. His plane glided high into the unturbulent blue. The flight attendants smiled as they distributed hot towels and drinks like ministers at mass, calm, beneficent. Everything was unfurling, and would always unfurl, at this gentle, measured rate.

  Stoneham arrived and stayed and left, arrived and stayed and left, and his stopovers clicked into place one after another like the final few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, that one able to fit there, that one with nowhere else to go but there. He marvelled at the orderliness of life. The pattern to it. All of it was meant. Even the bad parts like Joanna’s death. If not for that, he would never have become a Fogg. If not for becoming a Fogg, he would never have attained the sense of perspective he had now. He was above sorrow, climbing up above grief. The hole torn in him by losing Joanna was still there, but he perceived it as not an absence but a doorway. It had enabled him to step through into another kind of existence. Her parting gift to him.

  He was in a city the colour of ivory, steeples and pinnacles and minarets slivering the sky.

  He was in a city that floated a thousand feet in the air, an agglomeration of airships and balloons linked together in graceful symbiotic unity like a jellyfish.

  He was in a city where apartment blocks and office towers were tunnelled out of the trunks of Cyclopean, cloud-piercing trees, an urban forest, thick boughs serving as streets.

  He was in a city whose boroughs were vast, vaulted chambers, lit he could not tell how, their ceilings vanishingly high yet covered, as he saw for himself, with frescoes of remarkable detail.

  He was in a city like the mechanism of an immense clock, houses built in rings atop interlocking brass cogs that revolved gradually throughout the day, pedestrian journeys conditional upon the correct meshing of teeth.

  Nearer and nearer: the knowing, the conviction.

  He was in a city that was carved from an entire mountain, a piece of hand-hewn filigree that had been centuries in the making, a human-scale termitary in effect, with shafts sunk to its lower streets for ventilation and illumination, cool throughout but never cold, every wall revealing a multiplicity of geological strata—veiny layers of quartz, patches of rust-coloured iron ore, glittering black coal seams, even diamonds—and there was a bar on one of its deepest thoroughfares and Stoneham was leaving it after a glass or two of sumptuous wine, and he was making his way to a restaurant his hotel concierge had recommended, and the street was broad and people were walking with that somnambulist gait he was accustomed to seeing now, and there was a copper tinge to the light and a smell like roast almonds in the air, and every face that passed him seemed aglow, filled with some rapturous inner radiance, and it was only a matter of time now, surely only a matter of time before Continuum reached out for him and enfolded him, and whatever it was, whatever form it took, he was ready for it, he was ready to rise up and disappear, he was at peace with himself and the world; and following the concierge’s directions he turned down an alleyway and there were two men here, leaning against a wall, just chatting, idling away the time, and he went by them and nodded to them and they nodded to him, and then he was lying on the ground, rough stone against his cheek and heat searing across the back of his head, and someone was kicking him and someone else was rummaging in his jacket pockets, searching for his wallet, his Passepartout, finding them both, pulling them out, and the person kicking him kept kicking him, trying to break something, and there was pain, altogether too much of it, and he could not understand what this was about, he could not understand why this was happening to him in this hollowed-mountain city, this piece of scrimshaw so large only God could appreciate it in its entirety, why he was being mugged and beaten, and suddenly no one was kicking him any more and he heard scuffling, the sounds of a struggle, and he tried to get up but he was too dizzy and the parts of his body where he had been kicked were stiff and tight, and he looked up and the girl was bending over him, the girl, the Fix girl, she must be the one who had arranged this, but then she was reaching down to him, extending a hand, and she said: “You’re safe now.”

  Stoneham croaked something in reply.

  Then another voice, one he knew but took a moment to place: “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  McWilliam? What was McWilliam doing here?

  The girl helped him to his feet. He did not have much choice but to let her. For someone so slenderly built, she was surprisingly strong. He leaned his weight on her—it was that or collapse—and she supported him with ease.

  At the far end of the alleyway: McWilliam, looking irritated, looking aggrieved. Between him and Stoneham: the two men, the two alleyway-idlers-turned-muggers. Both lay prostrate, injured, one unconscious, the other writhing and gasping. McWilliam regarded them balefully, a master displeased with his servants. Then he directed his gaze at Stoneham.

  “You led us quite a chase, Bob.”

  This was not the McWilliam he had last seen, the sympathetic counsellor in London. This was another McWilliam, with a cruel, surly twist to his mouth. This was not a man concerned over Stoneham’s welfare. This was anything but.

  “I thought we’d never catch up with you.”

  “Chris?” Stoneham scarcely recognised his own voice. A parched thing, scratchy with pain.

  “But then I’m not a bad Fogg. Just an unlucky one. So here we are. And these two useless idiots …” McWilliam sneered at the men on the ground. “Couldn’t even pull off a simple mugging, could t
hey? They told me they’d have no trouble handling it. Take your stuff, a broken rib or leg—no problem. Obviously they overestimated themselves. Or underestimated you.”

  “I didn’t ––”

  “I was watching. You put up quite a fight. Where did you learn moves like that?”

  “But I didn’t ––”

  “Damn it, Bob.” McWilliam stepped around the two men, coming closer. “Couldn’t you take a hint? I told you to postpone starting again. But oh no, you just had to go. Couldn’t wait to be back in transit.”

  Stoneham glanced at the girl beside him. She was staring daggers at McWilliam. He, in return, was ignoring her completely. Whose side was she on?

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” McWilliam said. “You just can’t help yourself. You’re obsessed. You’ll chase Continuum till it kills you. That’s what happens, I reckon. Those Foggs who’ve vanished? They travelled till they dropped; got buried somewhere in the upper levels, somewhere where no one knew them. Somebody’ll find a grave eventually. Maybe even Julian Vernon’s grave. It’ll happen. And then this whole stupid farce will come to an end.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” said Stoneham, finally starting to twig. “That way nobody will have what you couldn’t have. Fucking dog in the manger.”

  McWilliam was now less than half a dozen yards away. “I don’t want anything that’s as worthless as this—this fantasy you’re after.”

  “You need to believe it’s a fantasy. Otherwise you’ll have to accept that you failed.”

  “You’ve failed, Bob. Continuum is a lie.”

  “I know Continuum exists. I’m nearly there.”

  “No, you only think you are. Seven years you’ve been in transit. It’s time to admit defeat. Call it a day.”

  “Just a sidestep away, Chris. I know I’m going to make it this time. And you can’t stop me. You or anyone.”

  McWilliam heaved a sigh. “I had a feeling you might say that. I was really hoping it wouldn’t have to come down to this.”

  Stoneham barely glimpsed the knife being drawn. Suddenly it was in McWilliam’s hand. A local artefact. The handle basalt, intricately carved. He had seen similar carving on display in one of the city’s museums. Similar knives on sale at several craft boutiques.

  McWilliam stepped towards him. A cold glint in his eyes: envy that had curdled into something much worse, a pathological resentment.

  “I hate this,” he said.

  The knife blade stabbed forwards, aimed at Stoneham’s chest.

  Stoneham –

  —reacted a split-second too late. He felt the blade enter him, sheathing itself in him to the hilt. Deep. Cold. Oddly painless.

  Then the girl did become involved. Or someone did. As McWilliam withdrew the knife from Stoneham, pulling it back for a second thrust, hands grabbed his hand. There was a momentary tussle. The knife, vertical, trembling in the air like the needle of a speedometer. Then abrupt acceleration, the knife flattening out. Plunging into McWilliam.

  Shocked and bleeding, the two men reeled apart. Both clutching their wounds, they stared at each other across the width of the alleyway. Then, as if choreographed, both slumped back against opposite walls.

  McWilliam attempted to speak, but only blood came out, not words.

  Stoneham could not speak at all.

  McWilliam’s legs gave way. He crumpled, still not quite able to believe the news his body was sending him.

  Stoneham felt the same. He remained upright, but the information was coming in thick and fast: Things are not working. You’re broken. You’re leaking. You’re a cracked vessel, a burst balloon. Breath is going. Heart surrendering. He looked down at his hands, and the blood that gloved them ignited a tiny spark of déjà vu.

  Where had this happened before? When?

  A death.

  He had known about this moment. Dreamed about it.

  He saw himself in the red-light district in Prihody Mishkarov.

  In the restaurant at Karakuchon.

  Night-clothed on the street outside the burning Grant Roial in Verradon.

  Saw himself as though at one remove, through someone else’s eyes.

  Saw himself now, pitifully soaked in his own blood. Grey-faced, pale-lipped.

  Then the girl.

  She smiled at him.

  “Come with me.”

  Where to?

  It did not matter. An offer to go somewhere—how could a Fogg refuse?

  She walked, he followed, and the city that was also a mountain became as evanescent as a cloud.

  AFTERWORD

  I don’t as a rule go in for afterwords. Effusive acknowledgements at the back of the book, yes. Afterwords, no.

  I have, though, been persuaded by various people that an afterword is a Good Thing, especially with a short-story collection. Readers like to know about the stories—how they came to be, where they first saw print, why they have been arranged in the collection in the particular order they have been arranged in.

  If you are one of those readers, reader, then read on. If not, thanks for picking up Diversifications. Hope you liked it. See you again soon.

  My first collection, Imagined Slights, gathered together every short piece I wrote between 1900 and 1998. Diversifications picks up where that volume left off, being an assemblage of every short piece I wrote and (with one exception) had published between 1999 and 2007.

  The title came about largely because I was looking for a sixteen-letter word or phrase with which to make an quasi-acrostic of the stories’ titles. Chancing upon “diversification” in the dictionary, I realised that not only, when pluralised, did it tot up to the correct number of characters, but that “diversification” pretty much summed up what a short story is. An opportunity to explore new and different fictional avenues. The freedom to experiment and to extend one’s range. And, if we’re being really dictionary-definition-specific here, the adoption of “a variety of operations so as to…lessen risk of failure or loss”. Hmm.

  Once I had the title, the story sequencing all but decided itself. There were a few possible variations to the present combination, but basically only one combination felt right. In the event, I think it worked out rather nicely.

  As for the stories themselves …

  When I’m not bleating on about the imminent end of civilisation as we know it, I’m usually bemoaning the ubiquity and predominance of modern technology. The world isn’t necessarily a better place, you know, just because we’re all Bluetoothed up and Sky-plussed in and satnavved down. Mobile phone? Pah! Who needs one? Really needs one?

  And that, in a nutshell, is what “The Head” is all about. Interzone’s March 2002 issue got first dibs on it, and then the story reappeared, magically translated into Greek, in 9, a supplement given away with the Saturday edition of Hellenic newspaper Eleutherotypia. 9 contains comic strips, SF, interviews with genre authors, articles about comics creators—and it’s published as part of a national periodical. Can you imagine such a thing happening in the UK? Didn’t think so.

  “Carry the Moon in My Pocket” is the first of three stories in this collection which deal in one way or another with space. The reason for this is, principally, that my friend and erstwhile collaborator Peter Crowther happened to edit a series of three anthologies on the themes of the solar system, the stars, and space in general, and commissioned a story from me for each of them. (Favouritism? Who said that? Come on, I know it was one of you. No one’s leaving till whoever it was owns up.)

  The anthology in question here is Moon Shots, Daw, 1999, and for this particular tale I did more background research than I think I have done on any other short story. Primary reference source was Andrew Chaikin’s excellent A Man on the Moon, which is that rarest of things, a readable science book. I also plumbed a little of my own life for the tale, and the setting is recognisably the town I was born and brought up in, Lewes.

  And Mr Crowther immediately rates another mention, in that “Seventeen Syllables” w
as one of the half-dozen tales that appeared in the first issue of his quarterly fiction anthology Postscripts, published in the Year of Our Lord 2004. Getting the haikus right was the most challenging part of writing the story, and the most rewarding, but it was fun, too, writing about the ultimate in downsizing.

  “The Meteor Party” has its origins in an evening my wife and I spent in the back garden one summer, watching the Leonids flash overhead during their annual brush with Earth’s atmosphere. We lay out on deckchairs, maybe had a drink or two. It was a warm(ish) night. The cat prowled around us, curious to know what we were doing out here in the dark when this was her time to be in the garden. It was an enchanting, unforgettable experience, and too good not to fashion a story around. The third of the Crowther space anthologies, Constellations, contained “The Meteor Party” and was published, again by Daw, in 2004.

  “Cutting Criticism” is a nice (nasty) little effort and ended up in Shrouded By Darkness, a charity anthology edited by Alison Davies and published by Telos, benefiting DEBRA, which carries out work on behalf of people with the genetic skin blistering condition Epidermolysis Bullosa. I used to be a fan of slasher flicks, back in my green and salad youth, but repetition and postmodernism have pretty much done for the genre now. Probably best to let it lie. Just be wary of going back to it even if you think it’s dead. It may suddenly rear up at you for one last boo!

  It isn’t hard to see that the inspiration for “The Bowdler Strain” lies in those symbols used in comic books as an alternative to bad language. I don’t know if it’s just me and my dirty mind, but somehow strings of punctuation marks, swirls and dingbats always seem ruder than any words they could possibly be hiding. This is especially the case in the Asterix series, where the technique achieves its artistic zenith. Entire speech bubbles seethe with spirals and stars and skulls and punching fists, and the imagination runs riot, interpolating hideously obscene oaths into the otherwise innocent adventures of everybody’s favourite indomitable Gaul. But again, that could be just me and my dirty mind. At any rate, I thought it worth attempting a story where the swearing takes centre stage and yet not a single profanity actually appears.