Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  She knew - they knew - that the virus could never transfer more than a fraction of a per cent of what they had become, and that what they had become was still very far from life. But the child, the girl, would contain their shadows. Like a canvas overpainted many, many times, said the artist in her. And the girl would carry ghosts of their past selves until the day she died. But before then her own personality and force of will would sublimate, subsume. She would carry the dead as trinkets, as the machine had carried them in the air.

  Later in the winter she found Kodaira’s family, camped near a water-hole. She had stopped flying by then and it was all she could manage to leave the child where they - sterile Kodaira and his ill wife - would find it, before something made the sky darken to a shade of black she had never imagined before, and the voices in her were suddenly, calmly silent. But she dreamed that part from afar.

  Lucky was awoken by her uncle, sitting gently by the side of her bed. She could tell that he had been there a while. Just looking at her, a doting silhouette against the dawn sky, purple washed over by tangerine.

  ‘You were restless,’ he said. ‘I came to see you. But when I got here you were sound asleep. Guess I just wanted to sit and watch you sleeping.’

  ‘I had the bad dream again,’ she said.

  ‘You were sleeping like a log.’

  ‘It’s only a bad dream in the beginning,’ she said. ‘Then the people all get to live again, after being in the air for so long.’ Realising as she said it that it sounded dumb, baby language. But how could she explain a dream like that? Especially when she had dreamed it so many times before, though perhaps - now that she thought about it - not so frequently this summer.

  She raised herself up in bed, onto her elbows. ‘Uncle,’ she said. ‘You said the Enolas were a bad thing, didn’t you? The same thing that the people in the skyscrapers say. But I don’t know why . . . What did the Enolas do to make them bad?’

  He smiled. ‘Well, that’s a long story, isn’t it? And look - I can see the sky getting brighter. Soon the birds’ll be singing. Don’t you think you should go back to sleep?’

  She shook her head defiantly. ‘Tired of sleeping.’

  He shrugged. ‘All I know is what the Pastmasters tell me, darling. If I could read, maybe I’d find a few books that didn’t fall to pieces as soon as you opened them. Maybe I’d be able to guess if the old ones were right or wrong. For now, though, I only know what they tell us all. About the past, about the Hour and the Enolas. How they came from space, at the end of the longest peace the world had known. How there were two great cities in the islands to the north, and how, within a few days of each other, Enolas appeared over the cities and made them disappear in silver light. How the people were blinded, how they became shadows on the walls where they stood. How, when the light faded, there was nothing, just a flatness where the cities had stood.’

  He reached out and took her wrist, opened her palm and began to draw spirals on the skin with his finger. ‘The Enolas came again, yet without the element of surprise. The Makers defended us, fighting against the Enolas during the Hour. Shooting them from the sky - they weren’t invincible, you see. A great city like this - much of it still as it was before the Hour, because the Enolas couldn’t get close enough to shine their silver light. The years passed and the Enolas grew less frequent. They were vulnerable as well.’

  ‘Someone should tell the old people,’ she said. ‘Tell them that they’ve gone away and they don’t have to sew those balloon skins anymore.’

  Kodaira was silent for several moments. ‘Old people have to have something to live for, darling. But it shouldn’t give you nightmares, not any more.’ He grinned; she could see his crooked teeth in the half-light. ‘When’s the last time you had a bad dream about a dinosaur, I wonder?’

  She giggled at the thought of it.

  He tickled her palm, then knelt closer to kiss her on the cheek. ‘Darling, once Enola was a girl’s name. A lovely name, not one for a demon of terror. When you were born, no one had seen one of the sky machines for many years, no one that you really believed. Now, our friends all call you Lucky, and that’s what you were, very lucky for me to have found you in the sands before the night came. But when we returned to the city, we called you Enola, to give back the name to something we cherished. Maybe you’ll never call yourself by that name, I don’t know. But I know one thing, here and now. You’re too beautiful by far to have any nasty dreams, my little princess Enola.’

  He left her then, as the dawn sun began to pick out the golden threads of the balloons, kilometres across the city. She slept peacefully, dreaming of the coming day, of the smell and noise of Cockatoo’s Crest, of the music of the syrinx-boxes, of the rainbow-shimmering faces of the dead people, of the empty sky.

  ‘Enola’ was my third sale to Interzone in a relatively short space of time. I’d placed my first and second professional sales there, and with ‘Enola’ I got my name onto the front cover for the first time. The story appeared at the end of the magazine, graced by some fine illustrations. I thought it augured well for my future as a regular contributor to the magazine.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. The stories I submitted after ‘Enola’ turned out to be very much not to Interzone’s liking, and it was to be almost four years before I appeared in the magazine again. When one invests so much energy and time into breaking into a market, it can be disheartening to hear the door slam shut and find oneself standing outside in the cold again. Even more so in my case, where I felt that the stories Interzone was now bouncing were in all respects superior to those it had already bought. What was the problem? I wondered. In hindsight, having looked over some of those rejected stories, I can see it all too clearly. They were leaden and ponderous, inflated with their own self-importance. It was only when I kicked back and wrote something fast and furious (‘Byrd Land Six’, not included here) that the door creaked open again. As for ‘Enola’, the story I’d hoped would herald the next phase of my career, it sank without a trace once it was published. I’ve always been rather fond of it, though, all the more so because it encapsulates many themes that turn up elsewhere in my work. A German translation of this story, incidentally, helpfully directed readers to the fact that ‘Enola’ was an anagram of ‘Alone’. Quite what bearing this has on the story, I’ve never learned.

  SIGNAL TO NOISE

  FRIDAY

  Mick Leighton was in the basement with the machines when the police came for him. He’d been trying to reach Joe Liversedge all morning, to cancel a prearranged squash match. It was the busiest week before exams, and Mick had gloomily concluded that he had too much tutorial work to grade to justify sparing even an hour for the game. The trouble was that Joe had either turned off his phone or left it in his office where it wouldn’t interfere with the machines. Mick had sent an e-mail, but when that had gone unanswered he decided there was nothing for it but to stroll over to Joe’s half of the building and inform him in person. By now Mick was a sufficiently well-known face in Joe’s department that he was able to come and go more or less as he pleased.

  ‘Hello, matey,’ Joe said, glancing over his shoulder with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand. There was a bandage on the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He was hunched over a desk covered in laptops, cables and reams of hardcopy. ‘Ready for a thrashing, are you?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Mick said. ‘Got to cancel, sorry. Too much on my plate today.’

  ‘Naughty.’

  ‘Ted Evans can fill in for me. He’s got his kit. You know Ted, don’t you?’

  ‘Vaguely.’ Joe set down his sandwich to put the lid back on a felt-tipped pen. He was an amiable Yorkshireman who’d come down to Cardiff for his postgraduate work and decided to stay. He was married to an archaeologist named Rachel who spent a lot of her time poking around in the Roman ruins under the walls of Cardiff Castle. ‘Sure I can’t twist your arm? It’ll do you good, you know, bit of a workout.’

  ‘I know. But
there just isn’t time.’

  ‘Your call. How are things, anyway?’

  Mick shrugged philosophically. ‘Been better.’

  ‘Did you phone Andrea like you said you were going to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should, you know.’

  ‘I’m not very good on the phone. Anyway, I thought she probably needed a bit of space.’

  ‘It’s been three weeks, mate.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you want the wife to call her? It might help.’

  ‘No, but thanks for suggesting it anyway.’

  ‘Call her. Let her know you’re missing her.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. You should stick around, you know. It’s all go here this morning. We got a lock just after seven o’clock.’ Joe tapped one of the laptop screens, which was scrolling rows of black-on-white numbers. ‘It’s a good one too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Come and have a look at the machine.’

  ‘I can’t. I need to get back to my office.’

  ‘You’ll regret it later. Just like you’ll regret cancelling our match, or not calling Andrea. I know you, Mick. You’re one of life’s born regretters.’

  ‘Five minutes, then.’

  In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe’s basement. As solid as Mick’s own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds of researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedge laboratory.

  In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. You couldn’t go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, but Mick knew that, and he’d been careful to remove all metallic items before he came down the stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten tonne bar of ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe liked to wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magnetic field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter-six earthquake, and the bars wouldn’t feel the slightest tremor.

  Joe called it the call centre.

  The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while two were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing was cold-calling: dialling random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waiting for someone to answer on the other end.

  In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum state. By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron - what Joe called the back-chirp - the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto another strand of quantum reality - another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating with its counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.

  Once that lock was established - once the cold-calling machine had achieved a hit - then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influence it but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those taps. It meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.

  ‘This is the boy,’ Joe said, patting one of the active machines. ‘Looks like a solid lock too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think this might be the one that does it for us.’

  Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe’s neck. ‘You’ve had a nervelink inserted, haven’t you?’

  ‘Straight to the medical centre as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was nervous - first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was up and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea biscuit.’

  ‘Ooh. A Rich Tea biscuit. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it? You’ll be going through today, I take it?’

  Joe reached up and tore off the bandage, revealing only a small spot of blood, like a shaving nick. ‘Tomorrow, probably. Maybe Sunday. The nervelink isn’t active yet, and that’ll take some getting used to. We’ve got bags of time, though; even if we don’t switch on the nervelink until Sunday, I’ll still have five or six days of bandwidth before we become noise-limited.’

  ‘You must be excited.’

  ‘Right now I just don’t want to cock up anything. The Helsinki boys are nipping at our heels as it is. I reckon they’re within a few months of beating us.’

  Mick knew how important this latest project was for Joe. Sending information between different realities was one thing, and impressive enough in its own right. But now that technology had escaped from the labs out into the real world. There were hundreds of correlators in other labs and institutes around the world. In five years it had gone from being a spooky, barely believable phenomenon to an accepted part of the modern world.

  But Joe - whose team had always been at the forefront of the technology - hadn’t stood still. They’d been the first to work out how to send voice and video comms across the gap to another reality, and within the last year they’d been able to operate a camera-equipped robot, the same battery-driven kind that all the tourists had been using before nervelinking became the new thing. Joe had even let Mick have a go on it. With his hands operating the robot’s manipulators via force-feedback gloves, and his eyes seeing the world via the stereoscopic projectors in a virtual-reality helmet, Mick had been able to feel himself almost physically present in the other lab. He’d been able to move around and pick things up just as if he were actually walking in that alternate reality. Oddest of all had been meeting the other version of Joe Liversedge, the one who worked in the counterpart lab. Both Joes seemed cheerily indifferent to the weirdness of the set-up, as if collaborating with a duplicate of yourself was the most normal thing in the world.

  Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to something even better.

  ‘Think about it,’ he’d said. ‘A few years ago, tourists started switching over to nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly foreign city when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can move around and pick stuff up, but they can’t give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat, the contact with other people.’

  ‘Mm,’ Mick had said noncommittally. He didn’t really approve of nervelinking, even though it essentially paid Andrea’s wages.

  ‘So we’re going to do the same. We’ve got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of piss. All we need now is a solid link.’

  And now Joe had what he’d been waiting for. Mick could practically see the Nature cover-article in his friend’s eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking that long train ride to Stockholm.

  ‘I hope it works out for you,’ Mick said.

  Joe patted the correlator again. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’

  That was when one of Joe’s undergraduates came up to them. To Mick’s surprise, it wasn’t Joe she wanted to speak to.

  ‘Doctor Leighton?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘There’s somebody to see you, sir. I think it’s quite important.’

  ‘Someone to see me?’

  ‘They said you left a note in your office.’

  ‘I did,’ Mick said absentmindedly. ‘But I also said I wouldn’t be gone long. Nothing’s that important, is it?’

  But the person who had come to find Mick was a policewoman. When Mick met her at the top of the stairs her expression told him it wasn’t good news.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he said.

  She looked worried, and very, very young. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk, Mister Leighton?’

  ‘Use my office,’ Joe said, showing the two of them to his room just down the corridor. Joe left them alone, saying he was going down to the coffee machine in the hall.

  ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ the policewoman said, when J
oe had closed the door. ‘I think you should sit down, Mister Leighton.’

  Mick pulled out Joe’s chair from under the desk, which was covered in papers: coursework Joe must have been in the process of grading. Mick sat down, then didn’t know where to put his hands. ‘It’s about Andrea, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid your wife was in an accident this morning,’ the policewoman said.

  ‘What kind of accident? What happened?’

  ‘Your wife was hit by a car when she was crossing the road.’

  A mean little thought flashed through Mick’s mind. Bloody Andrea: she’d always been one for dashing across a road without looking. He’d been warning her for years she was going to regret it one day.

  ‘How is she? Where did they take her?’

  ‘I’m really sorry, sir.’ The policewoman hesitated. ‘Your wife died on the way to hospital. I understand that the paramedics did all they could, but . . .’