NOWHERE
Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod
This collection copyright © 2019 by Ian R. MacLeod
All rights reserved.
Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.
ISBN 978-1-625674-42-5
Cover design by Dirk Berger
“The Chop Girl” first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1991
“The Perfect Stranger” first published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, December 1991
“Hector Douglas Makes a Sale” first published in Hector Douglas Makes a Sale, PS Publishing promotional booklet, 2011
“Isabel of the Fall” first published in Interzone #169, 2001
“Snodgrass” first published in In Dreams, ed. Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman, Gollancz, 1992
“Nevermore” first published in Dying for It: More Erotic Tales for Unearthly Love, ed. Gardner Dozois, Harper Voyager, 1997
“Tirkiluk” first published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, February 1995
“The Visitor from Taured” first published Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2016
“Nina-With-The-Sky-In-Her-Hair” first published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, December 1995
“Starship Day” first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1995
“Second Journey of the Magus” first published in Subterranean, Winter 2010
“Re-Crossing the Styx” first published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, July/August 2010
“On the Sighting of Other Islands” first published in Celebration, ed. Ian Whates, March 2008
“Past Magic” first published in Interzone, September 1990
“The Crane Method” first published in Subterranean, Spring 2011
“The Wisdom of the Group” first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2017
“Well-Loved” first published in Interzone, March/April 1990
“The Discovered Country” first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2013
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
The Chop Girl
Afterword
The Perfect Stranger
Afterword
Hector Douglas Makes a Sale
Afterword
Isabel of the Fall
Afterword
Snodgrass
Afterword
Nevermore
Afterword
Tirkiluk
Afterword
The Visitor from Taured
Afterword
Nina-With-The-Sky-In-Her-Hair
Afterword
Starship Day
Afterword
Second Journey of the Magus
Afterword
Re-Crossing the Styx
Afterword
On the Sighting of Other Islands
Afterword
Past Magic
Afterword
The Crane Method
Afterword
The Wisdom of the Group
Afterword
Well-Loved
Afterword
The Discovered Country
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Ian R. MacLeod
INTRODUCTION
One of my favourite sayings about writing fiction comes from the American writer Richard Ford. He stated that he started writing because “lived life somehow wasn’t enough”. He was describing his early attempts at story-telling, but for me—and I imagine most writers—this basic impulse borne out of a kind of idealistic dissatisfaction with the real world never goes away. I think that one of the reasons Ford’s comment has stuck with me is because the type of fiction I like to write expresses a particularly high divergence from “lived life”.
Am I saying SF is more escapist than other kinds of fiction? No, I don’t think so, although I suspect that a great many readers who are unfamiliar with the genre might, in their ignorance, choose to think this. In a sense, of course, all types of fiction, from crime fiction to historical fiction, and even fiction in the realistic, literary mainstream, offer an escape from our own lives. After all, Charles Dickens would be classed as a largely “realistic” and “mainstream” writer, and so would Marcel Proust and John Updike and F. Scott Fitzgerald, yet although the worlds and the lives they describe were familiar to them, they certainly resemble nothing I’ve ever experienced, much though I enjoy entering them. What all good fiction of every genre does is to hold a distorted mirror up to the real world, which, through its distortions, reveals more about life and the human experience, and far more elegantly and compellingly, than even the best non-fiction prose.
In SF, and its siblings and cousins such as fantasy and alternate history, the distortions—the differences between “lived life” and the world of the story—are particularly pronounced. And both as a reader and a writer, it’s these distortions that continue to fascinate and drive me. The desire we all have to make sense of a real, everyday world that can frequently seem confusing and frustrating is expressed from the far side of a looking glass filled with strange angles, odd visions and otherworldly hues. How, for instance, to take an example from this collection, would a group of people react if they discovered that, together, they could predict the future? Or what would it be like to take a vacation, not only from our everyday lives, but all our memories, worries and obsessions as well? My own very partial responses to these and all the other questions and speculations contained in this collection will, I hope, briefly make you, the reader’s, “life lived” feel slightly closer to being sufficient, and maybe even make a little more sense.
THE CHOP GIRL
Me, I was the chop girl—not that I suppose anyone knows what that means now. So much blood and water under the bridge I heard the lassies in the Post Office debating how many world wars there had been last week when I climbed up the hill to collect my pension, and who exactly it was that had won them.
Volunteered for service, I did, because I thought it would get me away from the stink of the frying pans at home in our Manchester tea room’s back kitchen. And then the Air Force of all things, and me thinking, lucky, lucky, lucky, because of the glamour and the lads, the lovely lads, the best lads of all, who spoke with BBC voices as I imagined them, and had played rugger and footie for their posh schools and for their posh southern counties. And a lot of it was true, even if I ended up typing in the annex to the cookhouse, ordering mustard and HP on account of my, quote, considerable experience in the catering industry.
So there I was—just eighteen and WRAF and lucky, lucky, lucky. And I still didn’t know what a chop girl was, which had nothing to do with lamb or bacon or the huge blocks of lard I ordered for the chip pans. They were big and empty places, those bomber airfields, and they had the wild and open and windy names of the Fens that surrounded them. Wisbeach and Finneston and Witchford. And there were dr
inks and there were dances and the money was never short because there was never any point in not spending it. Because you never knew, did you? You never knew. One day your bunk’s still warm and the next someone else is complaining about not changing the sheets and the smell of you on it. Those big machines like ugly insects lumbering out in the dying hour to face the salt wind off the marshes and the lights and blue smoke of the paraffin lanterns drifting across the runways. Struggling up into the deepening sky in a mighty roaring, and the rest of us standing earthbound and watching. Word slipping out that tonight it would be Hamburg or Dortmund or Essen—some half-remembered place from a faded schoolroom map glowing out under no moon and through heavy cloud, the heavier the better, as the bombers droned over, and death fell from them in those long steel cannisters onto people who were much like us when you got down to it, but for the chances of history. Then back, back, a looser run in twos and threes and searching for the seaflash of the coast after so many miles of darkness. Black specks at dawn on the big horizon that could have been clouds or crows or just your eyes’ plain weariness. Noise and smoke and flame. Engines misfiring. An unsettled quite would be lying over everything by the time the sun was properly up and the skylarks were singing. The tinny taste of fatigue. Then word on the wires of MG 3138, which had limped in at Brightlingsea. And of CZ 709, which had ploughed up a field down at Theddlethorpe. Word, too, of LK 452, which was last seen as a flaming cross over Brussels, and of Flight Sergeant Shanklin, who, hoisted bloody from his gun turret by the medics, had faded on the way to hospital. Word of the dead. Word of the lost. Word of the living.
Death was hanging all around you, behind the beer and the laughs and the bowls and the endless games of cards and darts and cricket. Knowing as they set out on a big mission that some planes would probably never get back. Knowing for sure that half the crews wouldn’t make it through their twenty mission tour. So of course we were all madly superstitious. It just happened—you didn’t need anyone to make it up for you. Who bought the first round. Who climbed into the plane last. Not shaving or shaving only half your face. Kissing the ground, kissing the air, singing, not singing, pissing against the undercarriage, spitting. I saw a Flight Officer have a blue fit because the girl in the canteen gave him only two sausages on his lunchtime plate. That night, on a big raid over Dortmund, his Lancaster vanished in heavy flak, and I remember the sleepless nights because it was me who’d forgotten to requisition from the wholesale butcher. But everything was sharp and bright then. The feel of your feet in your shoes and your tongue in your mouth and your eyes in their sockets. That, and the sick-and-petrol smell of the bombers. So everything mattered. Every incident was marked and solid in the only time which counted, which was the time which lay between now and the next mission. So it was odd socks and counting sausages, spitting and not spitting, old hats and new hats worn backwards and forwards. It was pissing on the undercarriage, and whistling. And it was the girls you’d kissed.
Me, I was the chop girl, and word of it tangled and whispered around me like the sour morning news of a botched raid. I don’t know how it began, because I’d been with enough lads at dances, and then outside afterwards fumbling and giggling in the darkness. And sometimes, and because you loved them all and felt sorry for them, you’d let them go nearly all the way before pulling back with the starlight shivering between us. Going nearly all the way was a skill you had to learn then, like who wore what kind of brass buttons and marching in line. And I was lucky. I sang lucky, lucky, lucky to myself in the morning as I brushed my teeth, and I laughingly told the lads so in the evening NAFFI when they always beat me at cards.
It could have started with Flight Sergeant Martin Beezly, who just came into our smoky kitchen annex one hot summer afternoon and sat down on the edge of my desk with his blonde hair sticking up and told me he had a fancy to go picnicking and had got hold of two bikes. Me, I just unrollered my carbons and stood up and the other girls watched with the jaws of their typewriters dropped in astonishment as I walked out into the sunlight. Nothing much happened that afternoon, other than what Flight Sergeant Beezly said would happen. We cycled along the little dikes and bumped across the wooden bridges, and I sat on a rug eating custard creams as he told me about his home up in the northeast and the business he was planning to set up after the war delivering lunchtime sandwiches to the factories. But all of that seemed as distant as the open blue sky—as distant, given these clear and unsuitable weather conditions, as the possibility of a raid taking place that evening. We were just two young people enjoying the solid certainty of that moment—which the taste of custard creams still always brings back to me—and Flight Sergeant Beezly did no more than brush my cheek with his fingers before we climbed back onto the bikes, and then glance anxiously east towards the heavy clouds that were suddenly piling. It was fully overcast by the time we got back to the base, driven fast on our bikes by the cool and unsummery wind that was rustling the ditches. Already, orders had been posted and briefings were being staged and the groundcrews were working, their arclights flaring in the hangers. Another five minutes, a little less of that wind as we cycled, and they’d have been all hell to pay for me and for Flight Sergeant Beezly, who, as a navigator and vital to the task of getting one of those big machines across the dark sky, would have been shifted to standby and then probably court-marshalled. But as it was, he just made it into the briefing room as the map was being unfolded and sat down, as I imagine him, on the schoolroom desk nearest the door, still a little breathless, and with the same smears of bike oil on his fingers that I later found on my cheek. That night, it was Amsterdam—a quick raid to make the most of this quick and filthy cloud that the weather boffins said wouldn’t last. Amsterdam. One of those that raids that somehow never sounded right even though it was enemy-occupied territory. That night, GZ 3401 with Flight Sergeant Beezly navigating, was last seen labouring over the North Sea enemy coastal barrages with a full load of bombs, a slow and ugly butterfly pinioned on the needles of half a dozen searchlights.
So maybe that was the first whisper—me walking out of the annex before I should have done with Flight Sergeant Beezly, although God knows it had happened to enough of the other girls. That, and worse. Broken engagements. Cancelled marriages. Visits to the burns unit, and up the stick for going all the way instead of just most of it. Wrecked, unmendable lives that you can still see drifting at every branch Post Office if you know how and when to look. But then, a week after, there was Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson, who had a reputation as one of the lads, one for the lassies. All we did was dance and kiss at the Friday hall down in the village, although I suppose that particular night was the first time I was really drawn to him because something had changed about his eyes. That, and the fact that he’d shaved off the Clark Gable moustache which I’d always thought made him look vain and ridiculous. So we ended up kissing as we danced, and then sharing beers and laughs with the rest of his crew in their special corner. And after the band had gone and the village outside the hall stood stony dark, I let him lean me against the old oak that slipped its roots into the river and let him nuzzle my throat and touch my breasts and mutter words against my skin that were lost in the hissing of the water. I put my hand down between us then, touched him in the place I thought he wanted. But Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson was soft as smoke down there, as cool and empty as the night. So I just held him and rocked him as he began to weep, feeling faintly relieved that there wouldn’t be the usual pressures for me to go the whole way. Looking up through the oak leaves as the river whispered, I saw that the bright moon of the week before was thinning, and I knew from the chill air on my flesh that tomorrow the planes would be thundering out again. You didn’t need to be a spy or a boffin. And not Amsterdam, but a long run. Hamburg. Dortmund. Essen. In fact, it turned out to be the longest of them all, Berlin. And somewhere on that journey Petty Officer Charlie Dyson and his whole crew and his Lancaster simply fell out of the sky. Vanished into the darkness.
After that
, the idea of my being bad luck seemed to settle around me, clinging like the smoke of the cookhouse. Although I was young, although I’d never really gone steady with anyone and had still never ventured every last inch of the way, and although no one dared to keep any proper score of these things, I was already well on my way to becoming the chop girl. I learned afterwards that most bases had one; that—in the same way that Kitty from stores was like a mum to a lot of the crews, and Sally Morrison was the camp bicycle—it was a kind of necessity.
And I believed. With each day so blazingly bright and with the nights so dark and the crews wild-eyed and us few women grieving and sleepless, with good luck and bad luck teeming in the clouds and in the turning of the moon, we loved and lived in a world that had shifted beyond the realms of normality. So of course I believed.
I can’t give you lists and statistics. I can’t say when I first heard the word, or caught the first really odd look. But being the chop girl became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Empty wells of silence opened out when I entered the canteen. Chairs were weirdly re-arranged in the NAFFI. I was the chop, and the chop was Flight Sergeant Ronnie Fitfield and Flight Officer Jackie White and Pilot Officer Tim Reid, all of them in one bad late summer month, men I can barely remember now except for their names and ranks and the look of loss in their eyes and the warm bristle touch of their faces. Nights out at a pub; beating the locals at cribbage; a trip to the cinema at Lincoln, and the tight, cobbled streets afterwards shining with rain. But I couldn’t settle on these men because already I could feel the darkness edging in between us, and I knew even as I touched their shoulders and watched them turn away that they could feel it, too. At the dances and the endless booze-ups and the card schools, I became more than a wallflower: I was the petalled heart of death, its living embodiment. I was quivering with it like electricity. One touch, one kiss, one dance. Groundcrew messages were hard to deliver when they saw who it was coming across the tarmac. It got to the point when I stopped seeing out the planes, or watching them through the pane of my bunk window. And the other girls in the annex and the spinster WRAF officers and even the red-faced women from the village who came in to empty the bins—all of them knew I was the chop, all of them believed. The men who came up to me now were white-faced, already teetering. They barely needed my touch. Once you’d lost it, the luck, the edge, the nerve, it was gone anyway, and the black bomber’s sky crunched you in its fists.
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 1