Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “And you know, Thea…” Northover finds he’s actually laughing. “You know what the biggest joke is? Haru didn’t even realise. He could read music quicker than I can read words, and play like Chopin and Chick Corea, and to him it was all just this lark of a thing he sometimes did with this mad old git up on the fortieth floor…

  “But he was growing older. Kids still do, you know, back on Lifeside. And one day he’s not there, and when he does next turn up, there’s this girl downstairs who’s apparently the most amazing thing in the history of everything, and I shout at him and tell him just how fucking brilliant he really is. I probably even used the phrase God-given talent, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. But anyway…”

  “Yes?”

  Northover sighs. This is the hard bit, even though he’s played it over a million times in his head. “They become a couple, and she soon gets pregnant, and she has a healthy baby, even though they seem ridiculously young. A kind of miracle. They’re so proud they even take the kid up to show me, and he plongs his little hands on my piano, and I wonder if he’ll come up one day to see old Northy, too. Given a few years, and assuming old Northy’s still alive, that is, which is less than likely. But that isn’t how it happens. The baby gets sick. It’s winter and there’s an epidemic of some new variant of the nano flu. Not to say there isn’t a cure. But the cure needs money— I mean, you know what these retrovirals cost better than anyone, Thea—which they simply don’t have. And this is why I should have kept my big old mouth shut, because Haru must have remembered what I yelled at him about his rare, exceptional musical ability. And he decides his baby’s only just starting on his life, and he’s had a good innings of eighteen or so years. And if there’s something he can do, some sacrifice he can make for his kid… So that’s what he does…”

  “You’re saying?”

  “Oh, come on, Thea! I know it’s not legal, either Lifeside or here. But we both know it goes on. Everything has its price, especially talent. And the dead have more than enough vanity and time, if not the application, to fancy themselves as brilliant musicians, just the same way they might want to ride an expensive thoroughbred, or fuck like Casanova, or paint like Picasso. So Haru sold himself, or the little bit that someone here wanted, and the baby survived and he didn’t. It’s not that unusual a story, Thea, in the great scheme of things. But it’s different, when it happens to someone you know, and you feel you’re to blame.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Do you think that’s enough?”

  “Nothing’s ever enough. But do you really believe that whatever arm of the resistance you made contact with actually wanted me, Thea Lorentz, fully dead? What about the reprisals? What about the global outpouring of grief? What about all the inevitable, endless let’s-do-this-for-Thea bullshit? Don’t you think it would suit the interests of Farside itself far better to remove this awkward woman who makes unfashionable causes fashionable and brings attention to unwanted truths? Wouldn’t they prefer to extinguish Thea Lorentz and turn her into a pure symbol they can manipulate and market however they wish? Wouldn’t that make far better sense than whatever it was you thought you were doing?”

  The sea heaves. The whole night heaves with it.

  “If you want to kill me, Jon, you can do so now. But I don’t think you will. You can’t, can you? That’s where the true weakness of whoever conceived you and this plan lies. You had to be what you are, or were, to get this close to me. You had to have free will, or at least the illusion of it…”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m sorry. You might think you’re Jon Northover—in fact, I’m sure you do—but you’re not. You’re not him really.”

  “That’s—”

  “No. Hear me out. You and I both know in our hearts that the real Jon Northover wouldn’t be here on Farside. He’d have seen through the things I’ve just explained to you, even if he had ever contemplated actively joining the resistance. But that isn’t it, either. Not really. I loved you, Jon Northover. Loved him. It’s gone, of course, but I’ve treasured the memories. Turned them and polished them, I suppose. Made them into something realer and clearer than ever existed. This afternoon, for instance. It was all too perfect. You haven’t changed, Jon. You haven’t changed at all. People, real people, either dead or living, they shift and they alter like ghosts in reflection, but you haven’t. You stepped out of my past, and there you were, and I’m so, so, sorry to have to tell you these things, for I fully believe that you’re a conscious entity that feels pain and doubt just like all the rest of us. But the real Jon Northover is most likely long dead. He’s probably lying in some mass grave. He’s just another lost statistic. He’s gone beyond all recovery, Jon, and I mourn for him deeply. All you are is something that’s been put together from my stolen memories. You’re too, too perfect.”

  “You’re just saying that. You don’t know.”

  “But I do. That’s the difference between us. One day, perhaps, chimeras such as you will share the same rights as the dead, not to mention the living. But that’s one campaign too far even for Thea Lorentz—at least, while she still has some control over her own consciousness. But I think you know, or at least you think you do, how to tune a piano. Do you know what inharmonicity is?”

  “Of course I do, Thea. It was me who told you about it. If the tone of a piano’s going to sound right, you can’t tune all the individual strings to exactly the correct pitch. You have to balance them out slightly to the sharp or the flat. Essentially, you tune a piano ever so marginally out of tune, because of the way the strings vibrate and react. Which is imperfectly… Which is… I mean… Which is…”

  He trails off. A flag flaps. The clouds hang ragged. Cold moonlight pours down like silver sleet. Thea’s face, when he brings himself to look at it, seems more beautiful than ever.

  The trees of Farside are magnificent. Fireash and oak. Greenbloom and maple. Shot through with every colour of autumn as dawn blazes toward the white peaks of the Seven Mountains. He’s never seen such beauty as this. The tide’s further in today. Its salt smell, as he winds down the window and breathes it in, is somehow incredibly poignant. Then the road sweeps up from the coast. Away from the Westering Ocean. As the virtual Bentley takes a bridge over a gorge at a tyrescream, it dissolves in a roaring pulse of flame.

  A few machine parts twist jaggedly upward, but they settle as the wind bears away the sound and the smoke. Soon, there’s only sigh of the trees, and the hiss of a nearby waterfall. Then, there’s nothing at all.

  Afterword

  One of the things I’ve become conscious of as I put this collection together, and especially as I’ve reviewed what I’ve said and written over the years about writing, is how unsettled I’ve become about the issue of genre. Most often, when people ask me what I write, I’ll say SF and perhaps add that I also write fantasy, but the reality is that I’m not remotely happy with either of these labels. Of course, that’s what much of my work is, at least in the sense that that’s how it’s categorised, and it’s hard to imagine how a story such as “The Discovered Country”, which is set in the future, and involves downloaded personality and virtual reality, could be thought of as anything other than SF. But still, when I tell people I what write, I want to say, yes, a lot of it’s SF, but I do wish I could call it something else.

  I’m well aware that this is a drift of loyalties that many writers who become “pigeon-holed”, as they might see it, into a certain area of literature, experience as they get older and more pompous. Writers of thrillers who think their latest work is “more than” a thriller. Or, indeed, so-called mainstream writers who’d very much like their works to be thought of a beach-book material, with matching sales figures. Still, as far as I’m concerned, there was a time when SF, or at least a certain kind of SF, was genuinely at the cutting edge of what could be achieved in literature. I grew up, or grew into, reading writers like Ballard and Aldiss and Silverberg and Priest, as well as Fowles
and Pynchon, when they were at their most ambitious and experimental, and had a vision of a time when SF wouldn’t so much be absorbed into the literary mainstream as become the way ahead for it.

  Of course, that didn’t happen. Neither did I ever want to become the kind of writer who takes great stylistic and structural risks—the biggest risk of all always being that you become unreadable. But what I did want to become, and still want to be, is a writer who can tell a story which incorporates strangeness and wonder—and, sure, addresses the past, the present and the future—but also writes with some style, and creates a vivid sense of place and character, and, above all, engages the reader’s emotions. And, if there is a template for that aim, it’s “Weihnachtabend” by Keith Roberts. Which is the story I set out to try to emulate—or, indeed, copy—when I wrote “The Discovered Country”.

  I can well remember sitting on a coach on a rainy daytrip to Bourton on the Water in the Cotswolds on what must have been my sixteenth birthday, with Hawkwind’s Silver Machine riding surprisingly high in the charts, and first reading “Weihnachtabend”. The premise is an alternate Britain which has succumbed to Hitler, and in it a man and a woman arrive through a snowy landscape at a Christmas house party in a grand stately home where they find their loyalty to the regime, and each other, tested. Lamborghinis are offered. A love affair resurfaces. The children of the privileged families of the British Reich are sent on a scary midnight hunt for presents whilst being stalked by the demon Hans Trapp. The Boxing Day hunt gains a horrible new twist.

  Roberts wasn’t a writer who surprised with his intellectual or technological insights. He was also often weak on plot, although not in the case of “Weihnachtabend”, which is probably why it’s one of his most fondly remembered works. But he had an artist’s eye for words, and, at his best, a Hardy-esque insight into both the small tragedies of the human condition and, especially, into his female characters. When it came to depicting women, his later work often veered towards the sort of objectification to which many great male writers, from Hardy himself to John Updike, are prone, but at his best he could make them both mysterious and empathetic, incredibly other, yet amazingly real. Which is, I suppose, what all people, other than frail illusion of ourselves that we strive to maintain inside our own heads, truly are. I’ll leave you to judge which side of the line I fall with Thea in “The Discovered Country” and in my other works. As many characters in this collection, from Dottie in “Re-Crossing the Styx” to Claire in “Past Magic” to Elanore in “Nevermore” demonstrate, I certainly write a great deal about beautiful, fateful women.

  “Weihnachtabend” ends with the main male character turning against the regime and, effectively, committing suicide. When I re-read the story now, I’m still struck by the sense of brooding glamour and menace, and the power of Roberts’ descriptive insights; a whole, different, world captured as if in a snowy glass ball. But the style, which I once so loved, creaks in places with a misguidedly thrillerish, Ian Flemingish, tone, and, at the end of the day, it is just another story about a Britain overcome by fascism—a premise so stale and yet so fascinating that I wrote a novel, The Summer Isles, using a variation of it. But there’s one particular passage of “Weihnachtabend” which sings to me as much now as when I first read it. It describes the two main characters falling asleep in each other’s arms after making love, and they drift toward a perfected world where “spires reared gold and tree leaves moved and dazzled and white cars sang”. Wow, I thought, and still think. It’s one of those miracles of prose, like Fitzgerald’s description of the guests arriving at Jay Gatsby’s party, or the last paragraph or so of A Canticle for Leibowitz, or the end of Proust’s Swann’s Way, which thrill me and made me want to try to write in the first place, and still make me, even after all these years, want to write now.

  About the Author

  Ian R. MacLeod is the author of The Light Ages, The House of Storms, The Great Wheel and a host of short stories and novellas. His 2008 novel, Song of Time, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His latest novel, Red Snow, was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel.

  ALSO BY IAN R. MACLEOD

  NOVELS

  The Great Wheel*

  The Light Ages*

  The House of Storms*

  The Summer Isles*

  Song of Time*

  Wake Up and Dream*

  Red Snow*

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod*

  Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod*

  Voyages by Starlight

  Breathmoss and Other Exhalations

  Past Magic

  Journeys

  Snodgrass and Other Illusions

  Frost on Glass

  *available as a JABberwocky ebook

  THANK YOU FOR READING

  This ebook has been brought to you by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Did you enjoy this JABberwocky ebook? Please consider leaving a review! To see what other ebooks we have available, visit us at http://awfulagent.com/ebooks/.

  Help us make our ebooks better!

  If you find any spelling, formatting, or other issues, please let us know! We'll send you a free physical book of your choice from what we currently have in the office, by any of our clients, and do our best to correct the errors quickly. Send us an email at ebooks@awfulagent.com.

  Keep up-to-date with our client news by signing up for JABberwocky's newsletter!

  Sincerely,

  The JABberwocky Team