A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “No, it wasn’t a forced landing. The pilot managed to crash the plane.”

  “We believe that it had to do with freak meteorological conditions,” Wing explained.

  “So you’re going to have to settle for two out of three!” Joe said curtly.

  Catharin looked at him, taking in the sling around his arm, his torn and dirtied clothing, the scratches on his face. The man’s ego shrank. He felt like a little boy who had wandered away from home and found himself in some vaguely understood but awful trouble. He felt ashamed, even frightened.

  “Joe,” she said, “I have to ask you this. Do you feel well?”

  Catharin’s search party paid close attention.

  Joe nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Apart from a fractured shoulder and being souped up on painkillers, yes!” he snapped.

  “I can’t believe you, Joe,” she said in a low voice. “You have stasis fever. There’s that—if nothing else.

  “I want both of you to answer this question: Do you think that the other is well?—Carlton?”

  Joe felt his heart pounding out anxiety.

  “On the way down from the ship, he looked haggard,” Wing said thoughtfully. “The stasis fever look. Then the crash injured hint. Afterwards, though, he has been alert and rational. At one point, he speculated that exercise had driven out the fever. From what I have seen, that could well be. He has acted with a sort of pained vigor this evening.”

  She sighed. “Joe?”

  “He’s seemed fit as a fiddle to me.” The doctor smiled slightly. “OK, now I believe you.”

  Catharin’s people relaxed, whispered comments to one another. And Joe was flooded with a sense of relief.

  “Of course, we’ll still have to take certain precautions with you two—” Catharin began.

  “I know. We’ll camp out for a few weeks.”

  “Oh, you won’t have to camp out! They’re setting up a medical isolation room right now. attached to the dome.”

  “No need to go to too much trouble,” said Wing demurely.

  “He’d rather stay outside with the plants!” said Joe. “Found lots of interesting ones tonight—he’d have been sorry if you’d interrupted us on the way up! Can’t say I enjoyed the hike too much, though,” Joe added pointedly.

  “I’m sorry it took us so long to get organized!” she said earnestly. “Initially there was confusion and dismay. Then Manhattan read us your recommendation—about the safety factor for colonizing—and asked for volunteers. The Governor vetoed that idea, he insisted on absolutely stringent precautions, preceding—and if necessary precluding—a search attempt.”

  Joe cursed the Governor under his breath.

  “But he’s on the Ship and we’re here!” someone chimed in.

  “And so,” continued Catharin, “we took a vote on how to search. Not whether, how. It was decided about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “He’s gonna put the base under quarantine,” someone added. “But that won’t last too long, if nothing happens.”

  “Nothing’ll happen!” said Joe.

  And they took his word for it. Catharin’s party began to stray. They moved in different directions, nudging the rocks with their toes, examining the wrecked pines, scratching the itch of curiosity about the place. Unconsciously. though, they fanned out in such a way as to keep their distance from Joe and Wing.

  “So my recommendation struck you people at Unity Base as convincing enough to act on,” said Joe, with satisfaction.

  Catharin gave him a quizzical look. “Well, Manhattan stood one hundred percent behind your scientific conclusions. But really . . .”

  “Really what?”

  “We tend to compare this world to a park. Carlton and I have talked about that . . . All of us are city people with fond memories of our city parks. Central Park. Golden Gate Park. Don’t you have one too?”

  “Centre Island,” Joe said reluctantly.

  “There you are. As far as I can tell, your scientific conclusions are perfectly sound. But the idea that this world is a park made us bold!” she concluded.

  Wing said softly, “Parks do not have blood clouds.”

  “Or wok bogs,” said Joe, and he exchanged an understanding look with Wing.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Catharin.

  “Our pilot taught us a great lesson,” said Wing. “May he rest in—” Wing choked. “—in peace. There is peril here, because this is not the world on which our senses and our minds evolved.” He pointed to the golden dome of Unity Base. “That alone is Earth.”

  Catharin looked back at the dome. A wind from nameless latitudes blew some of the long strands of her hair across her face. “The dome is Earth for now, not forever,” she said calmly. “We’ll adapt to this world and adapt it to our needs. I agree, though, the middle of the night isn’t the best time to explore! Regroup, people!” she ordered in a clear voice that carried. “Let’s go home.”

  Joe said, “Home nev—it never looked so good.” But his voice had betrayed him by breaking. Joe stood there as if rooted to the ground, incapable of taking steps toward the dome. He felt extremely grubby and ashamed to advance into the clear yellow light.

  Smiling, Catharin extended a gloved hand to Wing. “Soon you can go back to study the plants you discovered tonight!” Then she offered her other hand to Joe. Hers closed gingerly around his. Her glove felt dry and cool. She led them toward the dome, the yellow bubble under the strange dense stars.

  DOUBLE YEAR LOST

  Peter Hamilton

  Sharp flurries of hot November rain chased across Stone’s wharfs as I loaded Slowdancer’s bales of polygrass seed. Most people scurried for cover under the branches of gene-tailored ash trees that grew around the edge of the semicircular polyp basin. Me, I kept working. Nottingham and Catherine were fifty-five miles away at the end of the Trent and Mersey canal. If Slowdancer left by noon, we’d be there by tomorrow morning, my berth paid for by the graft of loading.

  I’m not really sure why I kept up the drifter persona after my contract with the Warren ran out. I had enough money now to buy stability, respectability even. I suppose because it was effortless, I’d been drifting for the past five years.

  There were plenty of us doing it. Mid teens kids, disfranchised, bored with our rigidly orthodox communes, coopfarms, cults, city zones; blued out by the Rose parties and their ever more desperate attempts to register voters. The country was alive with different cultures and ideologies. Somewhere, there was bound to be one that suited. It was just a question of looking.

  Now I’d found part of what I was looking for. Catherine. Found her in the oddest place, a set of second hand memories.

  Halson, Slowdancer’s owner, stood on deck catching the bales I slung up at him, stacking them in the forward two holds with an ease and tidiness which betrayed a lifetime’s experience. The barge was twenty yards long, six broad, her structure painted a glossy navy blue with fancy scarlet and yellow trim. Her bioware was standard: sub-sentient processor array, nutrient system in the bilges, eight snail-consanguineous skirts along the portside, and twelve on the bottom of the hull. I could see the portside skirts, glistening blue-green bulbs a yard in diameter, just below the gunwale, sticking to the wharf like limpets.

  She was an elegant craft; been in the family for three generations, Halson told me. He was a nice old boy in his late fifties, about five foot two; UV-proofing had tinted his skin a muddy-bronze.

  We finished the loading just after twelve. Halson’s wife, Lori, had finished filling up Slowdancer’s nutrient reserve bladders from the dock arteries. Lori was a doll, twenty-three, a couple of years older than me, and standing a good seven inches taller than her husband. UV-proofing gave her dark ebony skin a lustrous glimmer.

  For all their disparity, their relationship seemed successful enough. The first thing Lori did was invite me into the little aft cabin to look at baby Andria. Three months old, and sleeping blissfully under a lacy Victorian canop
y.

  Slowdancer cast off, her hull-bottom skirts gurgling softly as they slid us across the bed of the shallow basin. Halson’s eyes were closed as he used his affinity bond with the barge’s processors to steer us towards the deeper water of the canal.

  “I always relish this moment,” Lori said. “Moving on. It gives me a sensation of security. You understand? Docks are an interruption to our life.”

  Slowdancer dipped down into the channel of the Trent and Mersey canal which bisected the crown of the basin, edging into the colourful stream of barge traffic heading towards Nottingham. As the draught grew, Halson angled us in towards the smooth pearl-white polyp wall rising out of the southern end of the basin.

  The portside skirts flared out and stuck to the near-vertical surface of the wall as the canal bed fell away. Slowdancer began to accelerate until we reached the canal standard of three miles an hour.

  “Catherine must be quite something,” Lori ventured quietly. She was sitting on a carved bench just outside the cabin door; Halson had his arm around her shoulders.

  I think she enjoyed the idea of a questing romantic. “A girl who can make a drifter come after her. How come you got split up?”

  I settled on the decking, my back against the taffrail. “We didn’t split. I’ve never actually met Catherine in the flesh.”

  “A girl you’ve heard about?” Her eyes lit with delight.

  “Heard about, seen, smelt, touched. I have two sets of memories for the last twelve months. One of them belongs to Catherine’s lover; ex-lover I should say. He deserted her.”

  “And you’ve fallen for her because of these recollections?” Halson asked.

  “Yes.” How could I convey it? The blind animal longing for agirl who ghosts through my mind. I know how beautiful she is, how kind, tender. I know what makes her laugh, the same things that do me; what makes her sad. I know the foods she can’t resist nibbling, the Sussex rose wine she adores. I know her vulnerabilities, her quiet admirable strengths.

  I love her the way she loved him, and she doesn’t even know I exist.

  “Why did he do it?” Lori asked. “This man, Gilchrist, who left her. If she is so wonderful that even a memory can inflame you like this, why would he leave her?”

  “He was acting out a fantasy. Because she was the right girl in the right place, at the right moment in his life, he deluded himself that he’d fallen in love with her. He hadn’t, of course; he’d fallen in love with the ideal she represented. So when the time came to move on, he could override his pantomime HI death do us part schmaltz. Just cut her out. Bang, no regrets, no remorse even. He was finished, so it was okay.”

  “And he really felt he had to move on so badly?”

  “Oh yes, that’s the way his life is lived.”

  Gilchrist Augustine Philips-Calder. Note the name, because it’s an old one; old name, old family, old money; pre-Warming. The only way he’s survived so long is due to his wealth. He’s a major shareholder in one of the orbital manufacturing companies. And contrary to the propaganda which The Church Of The Lord’s Earth pumps out, the orbital manufacturers are the most consistently prosperous enterprises in existence.

  Gilchrist’s memories had an unbroken lineage stretching back over one hundred and fifty seven years, and thanks to his money they wore a twenty year old body. He was tall, broad shouldered, deep chested; a handsome face with a slightly flat nose. His eyes were grey, his short cut hair was chestnut, he dermal-tailored skin had come out a smooth olive-brown.

  The girls adored him, and not just for his looks; some aspect of his time-refined personality seemed to hover around him. In a land swarming with the boringly phlegmatic, his urbane cosmopolitan style was unique. Small wonder they flocked to his bed.

  He was drifting when he met Catherine. It was late last November, a place called Clumber Park, on the outskirts of Worksop. Clumber’s old trees had been scorched out by the Warming—the pines, oaks, and sycamores—and replaced by gene-tailored varieties. The leaves are glossier, the bark darker, they thrive in the year-round heat and UV saturated sunlight.

  It’s the same the world over; we’ve spread a modified carpet of greenery across every continent, retaining shape but not intent. Their cells have an almost mechanical purpose spliced in. In another century they’ll have replaced the ozone, reduced the carbon dioxide. The date seems to have been sequenced into people’s DNA; we treat the interregnum like a long sunny winter, nothing gets done, there’s no real progress, no technical nor social revolutions; we’re marking time.

  Gilchrist had been drawn to Clumber to recapture the full illusion of youth, of lazy days spent picknicking under mild blue skies. The park alluded to the twentieth century in its layout and atmosphere.

  It was being used by the New Puritans for a fair. They’re a countrywide vagrant cult, whose code prohibits them to use bioware to enhance their bodies or brains. They’ve even got a special shielding gel they rub on so they don’t need to be dermal-tailored against the UV.

  The Park and the Puritans had a double appeal to Gilchrist. Both natural, or as near as you can get in the modern world. He felt curiously at home mingling among them.

  Trading was brisk; Puritans don’t limit themselves to handicraft. Gilchrist saw plenty of bioware, simple units like water cordiators, liquor glands, and cotton spiders. They were mixed among the carvings, and carpets, and pottery, and refurbished hardware modules. Any gypsy from the last five centuries would’ve felt perfectly at home with the loud bustle and colour clashes.

  Gilchrist’s first sight of Catherine was against a backdrop of purple flowing rhododendrons that ringed the fair’s glade, standing behind a stall at the side of her family caravan. The girl looked like she’d been stretched to her present height; she was tall and wafer thin, with wide bony shoulders, but her legs were sensational. He reckoned her age at around seventeen or eighteen. She was wearing a white cheesecloth dress, with long puffy sleeves, and a skirt which swirled just above her knees. Thick, boldly ruffled, raven black hair hung below her shoulderblades, a red leather band keeping windtugged strands out of her hazel eyes.

  An unsullied girl, straight out of his youth.

  He walked over and bought a beer.

  Four hours after we left Stone, Slowdancer was passing Rugeley. The bleached concrete cooling towers town’s antique powerstation had begun to decay; cracks were multiplying, the constructions were buckling, leaning.

  Lori watched the mid-industrial epoch relics slide by. Quiet and contemplative; it’s an age which exerts a dark fascination on all of us. Junk consumerism gone mad. Fast and exciting, though. Gilchrist knew first hand. Occasionally I can animate the hulks with fragments of his earlier memories.

  “So Gilchrist chatted her up?” Halson asked.

  Our view of the powerstation was cut off by leafy willows. The canal was running through an avenue of them. Tall, sturdy trees, with thick boughs curving over the water, they’d obviously been trained, coiling round each other like wrestling snakes at the apex, near-solid arches.

  “Nothing so obvious.” I said. And laughed, not out of respect, but forced admiration. “He kept going back, telling her snippets of his life. Well, the drifter life he’d assumed. He’d been a drifter before; it wasn’t a problem for him.”

  “And she swallowed it?”

  “Yeah. The fair lasted a week; Catherine spent the last two days doing nothing but listening to him. The door into everything she’d ever wondered about.”

  Lori turned from the green wall enclosing Slowdancer. “What about you? Where were you when all this was happening?”

  “Last November? I was getting close to Saturn.”

  It was a sensorium memory. There had been a probe exploring Saturn, forty years ago. Gilchrist and his associates sent it prospecting. A real long term venture for them. It’ll be centuries before we get out to Saturn at any sort of meaningful level. But then, I suppose centuries are the sort of terms people like Gilchrist think in.

 
The probe’s optronics gave me a high-definition image of the gas giant’s cloudscape, capturing the bland brown and yellow storm bands, the pale saffron ribbon around the equator. Both polar regions were uniformly dull, although I could bleed in false-colour definition if I wanted. I’d tried it once, but the result was too artificial, as though some child had been let loose with primary crayons.

  Encounter phase. Starting close enough for the ring system’s concenctric ribbons to appear grooved, then slowly resolving into their myriad component ringlets, non-dimensional threads of light. With the magboom cut in. I could see the colossal energies seething through them, thickly braided streamers of pink and blue fogs, generated by interaction with the planetary magnetic field.

  I’d never ever been abroad before, and now I was being overloaded by silent cosmic wonders. That identical bewitchment Catherine had felt in Gilchrist’s presence.

  Even knowing the fallibility of such fascination, I don’t think either of us would’ve abdicated the past year, despite the heartbreak which lay waiting at its end.

  Some core segment of my personality had already accepted that I would never drift again. Not after this, flitting effortlessly between worlds. Trudging over a few miles of neolithic earth in the hope of encountering an acceptable sociological nexus was profoundly petty. A child’s wish, there’ll be someone out there who’ll welcome you with open arms.

  That year I grew up in classic style. Taking a long trip, an experience to broaden the mind. Even from my lofty synthetic Olympus I thought that was funny. How much further out could you get, how much wiser?

  We passed through Fradley junction after dark, it was another big polyp basin, where the Coventry canal joins the Trent and Mersey. Slowdancer rose out of the canal on her hull-bottom skirts, turning left and slotting into the orderly circular progression of barges.

  Voices spilled out of the night, quiet private talk, amplified by the stillness. Fradley, at least, maintained the image of grand structure, of purpose; the canals giving lie to a cohesive country, disowning the sameness of scrupulous difference practised beyond the water.