Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Very well,’ Mick said. ‘Joe says we were getting two megs this morning. That’s as good as he was hoping for.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain that to me. I know it’s to do with the amount of data you’re able to send through the link, but I don’t know how it compares with what we’d be using for a typical tourist set-up.’

  Mick remembered what Joe had told him. ‘It’s not as good. Tourists can use as much bandwidth as they can afford. But Joe’s correlators never get above five megabytes per second. That’s at the start of the twelve-day window too. It only gets worse by day five or six.’

  ‘Is two enough?’

  ‘It’s what Joe’s got to work with.’ Mick reached up and tapped the glasses. ‘It shouldn’t be enough for full-colour vision at normal resolution, according to Joe. But there’s an awful lot of clever software in the lab to take care of that. It’s constantly guessing, filling in gaps.’

  ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Like I’m looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses.’ He pulled them off his nose and tilted them towards Andrea. ‘Except it’s the glasses that are actually doing the seeing, not my - his - eyes. Most of the time, it’s good enough that I don’t notice anything weird. If I wiggle my head around fast - or if something streaks past too quickly - then the glasses have trouble keeping up with the changing view.’ He jammed the glasses back on, just in time for a seagull to flash past only a few metres from the boat. He had a momentary sense of the seagull breaking up into blocky areas of confused pixels, as if it had been painted by a cubist, before the glasses smoothed things over and normality ensued.

  ‘What about all the rest of it? Hearing, touch . . .’

  ‘They don’t take up anything like as much bandwidth as vision. The way Joe puts it, postural information only needs a few basic parameters: the angles of my limb joints, that kind of thing. Hearing’s pretty straightforward. And touch is the easiest of all, as it happens.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So Joe says. Hold my hand.’

  Andrea hesitated an instant then took Mick’s hand.

  ‘Now squeeze it,’ Mick said.

  She tightened her hold. ‘Are you getting that?’

  ‘Perfectly. It’s much easier than sending sound. If you were to say something to me, the acoustic signal would have to be sampled, digitised, compressed and pushed across the link: hundreds of bytes per second. But all touch needs is a single parameter. The system will still be able to keep sending touch even when everything else gets too difficult.’

  ‘Then it’s the last thing to go.’

  ‘It’s the most fundamental sense we have. That’s the way it ought to be.’

  After a few moments, Andrea said, ‘How long?’

  ‘Four days,’ Mick said slowly. ‘Maybe five, if we’re lucky. Joe says we’ll have a better handle on the decay curve by tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m worried, Mick. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with losing you.’

  He closed his other hand on hers and squeezed in return. ‘You’ll get me back.’

  ‘I know. It’s just . . . it won’t be you. It’ll be the other you.’

  ‘They’re both me.’

  ‘That’s not how it feels right now. It feels like I’m having an affair while my husband’s away.’

  ‘It shouldn’t. I am your husband. We’re both your husband.’

  They said nothing after that, sitting in silence as the boat bobbed its way back to shore. It was not that they had said anything upsetting, just that words were no longer adequate. Andrea kept holding his hand. Mick wanted this morning to continue for ever: the boat, the breeze, the perfect sky over the bay. Even then he chided himself for dwelling on the passage of time, rather than making the most of the experience as it happened to him. That had always been his problem, ever since he was a kid. School holidays had always been steeped in a melancholic sense of how few days were left.

  But this wasn’t a holiday.

  After a while, he noticed that some people had gathered at the bow of the boat, pressing against the railings. They were pointing up, into the sky. Some of them had pulled out phones.

  ‘There’s something going on,’ Mick said.

  ‘I can see it,’ Andrea answered. She touched the side of his face, steering his view until he was craning up as far as his neck would allow. ‘It’s an aeroplane.’

  Mick waited until the glasses picked out the tiny, moving speck of the plane etching a pale contrail in its wake. He felt a twinge of resentment towards anyone still having the freedom to fly, when the rest of humanity was denied that right. It had been a nice dream while it lasted, flying. He had no idea what political or military purpose the plane was serving, but it would be an easy matter to find out, were he that interested. The news would be in all the papers by the afternoon. The plane wouldn’t just be overflying this version of Cardiff, but his as well. That had been one of the hardest things to take since Andrea’s death. The world at large steamrolled on, its course undeflected by that single human tragedy. Andrea had died in the accident in his world, she’d survived unscathed in this one, and that plane’s course wouldn’t have changed in any measurable way (in either reality).

  ‘I love seeing aeroplanes,’ Andrea said. ‘It reminds me of what things were like before the moratorium. Don’t you?’

  ‘Actually,’ Mick said, ‘they make me a bit sad.’

  WEDNESDAY

  Mick knew how busy Andrea had been lately, and he tried to persuade her against taking any time off from her work. Andrea had protested, saying her colleagues could handle her workload for a few days. Mick knew better than that - Andrea practically ran the firm single-handedly - but in the end they’d come to a compromise. Andrea would take time off from the office, but she’d pop in first thing in the morning to put out any really serious fires.

  Mick agreed to meet her at the offices at ten, after his round of tests. Everything still felt the way it had the day before; if anything he was even more fluent in his body movements. But when Joe had finished, the news was all that Mick had been quietly dreading, while knowing it could be no other way. The quality of the link had continued to degrade. According to Joe they were down to one-point-eight megs now. They’d seen enough decay curves to be able to extrapolate forward into the beginning of the following week. The link would become noise-swamped around teatime on Sunday, give or take three hours either way.

  If only they’d started sooner, Mick thought. But Joe had done all that he could.

  Today - despite the foreboding message from the lab - his sense of immersion in the counterpart world had become total. As the sunlit city swept by outside the tram’s windows, Mick found it nearly impossible to believe that he was not physically present in this body, rather than lying on the couch in the other version of the lab. Overnight his tactile immersion had improved markedly. When he braced himself against the tram’s upright handrail, as it swept around a curve, he felt cold aluminium, the faint greasiness where it had been touched by other hands.

  At the offices, Andrea’s colleagues greeted him with an unforced casualness that left him dismayed. He’d been expecting awkward expressions of sympathy, sly glances when they thought he wasn’t looking. Instead he was plonked down in the waiting area and left to flick through glossy brochures while he waited for Andrea to emerge from her office. No one even offered him a drink.

  He leafed through the brochures dispiritedly. Andrea’s job had always been a sore point in their relationship. If Mick didn’t approve of nervelinking, he had even less time for the legal vultures that made so much money out of personal injury claims related to the technology. But now he found it difficult to summon his usual sense of moral superiority. Unpleasant things had happened to decent people because of negligence and corner-cutting. If nervelinking was to be a part of the world, then someone had to make sure the victims got their due. He wondered why this had never been clear to him before.

  ‘Hiya,’ Andrea said, leaning
over him. She gave him a businesslike kiss, not quite meeting his mouth. ‘Took a bit longer than I thought, sorry.’

  ‘Can we go now?’ Mick asked, putting down the brochure.

  ‘Yep, I’m done here.’

  Outside, when they were walking along the pavement in the shade of the tall commercial buildings, Mick said: ‘They didn’t have a clue, did they? No one in that office knows what’s happened to us.’

  ‘I thought it was best,’ Andrea said.

  ‘I don’t know how you can keep up that act, that nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Mick, nothing is wrong. You have to see it from my point of view. I haven’t lost my husband. Nothing’s changed for me. When you’re gone - when all this ends, and I get the other you back - my life carries on as normal. I know what’s happened to you is a tragedy, and believe me I’m as upset about it as anyone.’

  ‘Upset,’ Mick said quietly.

  ‘Yes, upset. But I’d be lying if I said I was paralysed with grief. I’m human, Mick. I’m not capable of feeling great emotional turmoil at the thought that some distant counterpart of myself got herself run over, all because she was rushing to have her hair done. Silly cow, that’s what it makes me feel. At most it makes me feel a bit odd, a bit shivery. But I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have trouble getting over.’

  ‘I lost my wife,’ Mick said.

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry. More than you’ll ever know. But if you expect my life to come crashing to a halt—’

  He cut her off. ‘I’m already fading. One point eight this morning.’

  ‘You always knew it would happen. It’s not like it’s any surprise.’

  ‘You’ll notice a difference in me by the end of the day.’

  ‘This isn’t the end of the day, so stop dwelling on it. All right? Please, Mick. You’re in serious danger of ruining this for yourself.’

  ‘I know, and I’m trying not to,’ he said. ‘But what I was saying, about how things aren’t going to get any better . . . I think today’s going to be my last chance, Andrea. My last chance to be with you, to be with you properly.’

  ‘You mean us sleeping together,’ Andrea said, keeping her voice low.

  ‘We haven’t talked about it yet. That’s okay; I wasn’t expecting it to happen without at least some discussion. But there’s no reason why—’

  ‘Mick, I—’ Andrea began.

  ‘You’re still my wife. I’m still in love with you. I know we’ve had our problems, but I realise now how stupid all that was. I should have called you sooner. I was being an idiot. And then this happened . . . and it made me realise what a wonderful, lovely person you are, and I should have seen that for myself, but I didn’t . . . I needed the accident to shake me up, to make me see how lucky I was just to know you. And now I’m going to lose you again, and I’m not sure how I’m going to cope with that. But at least if we can be together again . . . properly, I mean.’

  ‘Mick—’

  ‘You’ve already said you might get back together with the other Mick. Maybe it took all this to get us talking again. Point is, if you’re going to get back together with him, there’s nothing to stop us getting back together now. We were a couple before the accident; we can still be a couple now.’

  ‘Mick, it isn’t the same. You’ve lost your wife. I’m not her. I’m some weird thing there isn’t a word for. And you aren’t really my husband. My husband is in a medically induced coma.’

  ‘You know none of that really matters.’

  ‘To you.’

  ‘It shouldn’t matter to you either. And your husband - me, incidentally - agreed to this. He knew exactly what was supposed to happen. And so did you.’

  ‘I just thought things would be better - more civilised - if we kept a kind of distance.’

  ‘You’re talking as if we’re divorced.’

  ‘Mick, we were already separated. We weren’t talking. I can’t just forget what happened before the accident as if none of that mattered.’

  ‘I know it isn’t easy for you.’

  They walked on in an awkward silence, through the city centre streets they’d walked a thousand times before. Mick asked Andrea if she wanted a coffee, but she said she’d had one in her office not long before he arrived. Maybe later. They paused to cross the road near one of Andrea’s favourite boutiques and Mick asked if there was something he could buy for her.

  Andrea sounded taken aback at the suggestion. ‘You don’t need to buy me anything, Mick. It isn’t my birthday or anything.’

  ‘It would be nice to give you a gift. Something to remember me by.’

  ‘I don’t need anything to remember you, Mick. You’re always going to be there.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be much. Just something you’ll use now and then, and will make you think of me. This me, not the one who’s going to be walking around in this body in a few days.’

  ‘Well, if you really insist . . .’ He could tell Andrea was trying to sound keen on the idea, but her heart still wasn’t quite in it. ‘There was a handbag I saw last week—’

  ‘You should have bought it when you saw it.’

  ‘I was saving up for the hairdresser.’

  So Mick bought her the handbag. He made a mental note of the style and colour, intending to buy an identical copy next week. Since he hadn’t bought the gift for his wife in his own worldline, it was even possible that he might walk out of the shop with the exact counterpart of the handbag he’d just given Andrea.

  They went to the park again, then to look at the art in the National Museum of Wales, then back into town for lunch. There were a few more clouds in the sky compared to the last two days, but their chrome whiteness only served to make the blue appear more deeply enamelled and permanent. There were no planes anywhere at all; no contrail scratches. It turned out the aircraft - which had indeed been military - that they had seen yesterday had been on its way to Poland, carrying a team of mine-rescue specialists. Mick remembered his resentment at seeing the plane, and felt bad about it now. There had been brave men and women aboard it, and they were probably going to be putting their own lives at risk to help save other brave men and women stuck kilometres underground.

  ‘Well,’ Andrea said, when they’d paid the bill. ‘Moment of truth, I suppose. I’ve been thinking about what you were saying earlier, and maybe . . .’ She trailed off, looking down at the remains of her salad, before continuing, ‘We can go home, if you’d like. If that’s what you really want.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mick said. ‘It’s what I want.’

  They took the tram back to their house. Andrea used her key to let them inside. It was still only the early afternoon, and the house was pleasantly cool, with the curtains and blinds still drawn. Mick knelt down and picked up the letters that were on the mat. Bills, mostly. He set them on the hall-side table, feeling a transitory sense of liberation. More than likely he’d be confronted with the same bills when he got home, but for now these were someone else’s problem.

  He slipped off his shoes and walked into the living room. For a moment he was thrown, feeling as if he really was in a different house. The wallscreen was on another wall; the dining table had been shifted sideways into the other half of the room; the sofa and easy chairs had all been altered and moved.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ Andrea said. ‘I felt like a change. You came around and helped me move them.’

  ‘That’s new furniture.’

  ‘No, just different seat covers. They’re not new, it’s just that we haven’t had them out for a while. You remember them now, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘C’mon, Mick. It wasn’t that long ago. We got them off Aunty Janice, remember?’ She looked at him despairingly. ‘I’ll move things back. It was a bit inconsiderate of me, I suppose. I never thought how strange it would be for you to see the place like this.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. Honestly, it’s fine.’ Mick looked around, tryin
g to fix the arrangement of furniture and de’cor in his mind’s eye. As if he were going to duplicate everything when he got back into his own body, into his own version of this house.

  Maybe he would too.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Andrea said suddenly, reaching up to the top of the bookcase. ‘Found it this morning. Took ages searching for it.’

  ‘What?’ Mick asked.

  She held the thing out to him. Mick saw a rectangle of laminated pink card, stained and dog-eared. It was only when he tried to hold it and the thing fell open and disgorged its folded paper innards that he realised it was a map.

  ‘Bloody hell. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to look.’ Mick folded the map back into itself and studied the cover. It was one of their old hill-walking maps, covering that part of the Brecon Beacons where they’d done a lot of their walks.