Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘All right,’ Moira said. ‘So sometimes we come through the odd scrape, when things could have been much worse. But that doesn’t—’

  ‘It works on a planetary level, too,’ Ian said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Have you ever realised how many times we’ve come this close to World War Three? The number of times when the button’s almost been pushed? Not just during international flare-ups, but all the other times: when someone mistakes the moon for a salvo of incoming ICBMs; when a flock of geese or a meteor shower almost trigger Armageddon? It’s terrifying, Moira! It keeps happening, over and over again! We’ve no right to have made it this far! It’s already a fucking miracle that we made it out of the twentieth century, and yet it keeps on happening. Forget putting a gun to your head; just check your history. We’ve already proven it works. We’re already on an extremely unlikely branch of the multiverse, whether we like it or not.’

  ‘But we’re not immortal,’ Moira said. ‘The people around us keep dying. Doesn’t that prove—’

  ‘Of course they keep dying. From your perspective. But from their own perspective? Nobody you ever knew has ever died. They just see everyone else dying around them.’

  ‘Then that’s our fate, is it? To live for ever, but to have everyone we ever loved die, slipping away from us like passing traffic?’

  ‘That’s why I have to know,’ Ian said. ‘I never said it was good news. Frankly, I’m hoping I blow my brains out. But if I keep pulling this trigger, and the pin keeps failing to fall on the loaded chamber . . . then I’ll know.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I’ve got a problem. Then we’ve all got a problem.’

  Ian removed the gun from his pocket. He spun the chamber: it made a pleasant, well-oiled whirring sound. He pushed the chamber back into the body of the gun and held the weapon to the side of his head. It looked stupid and toylike, unreal amongst the pizza boxes and Ben Elton novels and the smiling pterodactyl. It’s now or never, Moira thought. She lurched forwards, grasping for the gun across the kitchen table. Her sweater caught on her coffee cup, sending it spilling across the science magazines. Ian jerked back, keeping the barrel tight against his temple.

  ‘Don’t . . .’ she said.

  Ian pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked down on empty space.

  ‘Once,’ he said. Then - hardly removing the gun from his head - he spun the chamber again. He pulled the trigger.

  ‘Twice.’

  He spun the chamber again. Moira pushed back from the table, her sweater sodden with coffee. She stood up, but felt frozen with terror. ‘Please Ian . . .’

  Ian had backed himself against the pile of computer boxes. ‘Don’t come any closer, Moira.’

  ‘Or what, Ian? Or you’ll kill yourself?’

  He pulled the trigger again. ‘Three times.’

  ‘Ian, please.’

  The whirr of the chamber, the click of the trigger. ‘Four times. What do you think are the odds of that, Moira? I think rather a lot of me must have already died.’

  ‘Ian, no.’

  He spun the chamber again, let the hammer fall. ‘Five times. Getting a bit spooky now, don’t you think? We’ll do it up to ten. Then I’ll make us another cuppa.’

  He spun the chamber, pulled the trigger.

  By the time the police and ambulance had arrived, Moira had finished all the other cigarettes in the packet. She waited in the living room until she saw the blue lights of the emergency vehicles, spectrally beautiful in the early morning snowscape. It was still dark. When they knocked, she could barely bring herself to walk through the kitchen to open the door.

  The policeman looked at Ian, swore softly. Behind him, the paramedic slowed his approach perceptibly. She had told them on the phone that Ian was dead, that there could be no doubt about it, but they had rushed here all the same. She was grateful for that: all she wanted to do was get as far away from Ian’s cottage as possible.

  As far away from Ian.

  The policeman took her into the living room. He was about forty-five, with a beer belly and mutton-chop sideboards: she imagined him playing in a country and western band on weekends.

  ‘Can you talk, love?’

  ‘I told you what happened on the phone.’ She smoked, having cadged another cigarette from one of the police.

  ‘It wasn’t me. I just need to know roughly what happened: we can deal with a proper statement later.’

  Moira looked back through the door into the kitchen. She could just see the back of Ian’s chair, with Ian’s left shoulder poking into view. She could hear soft, attentive voices. It was easy to imagine that Ian was being spoken to as well.

  ‘Ian called me,’ she said. ‘We were old friends. He sounded a bit funny, so I decided it was worth driving over.’

  ‘Bit funny in what way?’

  ‘He kept talking about not killing himself.’

  ‘Not killing himself?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to split hairs. I knew something was up. I just wish I’d called someone else first, so that I didn’t come here on my own.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, I doubt that we’d have got here any sooner. Not on a night like this.’ He nodded back towards the paramedics in the other room. ‘Those lads are on a double shift as it is.’

  ‘I should still have tried.’

  ‘What happened when you got here?’

  ‘Ian had me sitting down at the table in the kitchen. Then he started telling me stuff - stuff that was obviously very important to him - about how he’d worked out that he was going to live for ever. Then he showed me the gun.’

  ‘He had it on him?’

  Moira shook her head. ‘It was on the table, hidden. But I didn’t have time to grab it. Ian slipped it into his pocket. He was sitting on the other side of the table, so there was no way I could have made a grab for it. Not without risking it going off, anyway.’

  ‘You were right not to try. Did he stop you phoning for help?’

  ‘He said the phone was cut off.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It wasn’t. He hadn’t even unplugged it. I just assumed he had. He was a clever sod, Ian. He always knew how to get the maximum effect with the minimum effort.’ She hated the way that sounded, but it was true enough.

  ‘And he kept talking?’

  ‘Until he pulled out the gun again. I still didn’t have time to do anything about it. I would have, believe me. But he had it against his head—’

  ‘It’s all right, Miss Curbishley. That’ll do for now. In case you’re wondering, I see no reason to consider you a suspect. Ian wasn’t unknown to us: we knew he had a history of ups and downs. But you are an important witness, and I’m afraid we’ll need a detailed statement. Tonight being tonight, however . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I think it can wait until the weather improves, and we’ve all had a good night’s sleep. Is that your Volvo outside?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moira said.

  ‘Give me the keys and I’ll have one of the boys drive you home. Do you have a friend you can stay with tonight, someone you can talk to?’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Moira said.

  ‘All the same—’

  ‘I can drive myself,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be here for a while, aren’t you? I don’t think I want to wait. It’s not snowing at the moment.’

  ‘I’d much rather you let one of us drive you.’

  ‘It’s kind, but I’d rather go now. I’m coping, honestly.’

  The policeman made sure he had her contact details, then handed her his card. ‘Give us a call in the morning, all right? We’ll get it all sorted out before lunch. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but at least you can start moving on.’

  Moira took the card. ‘Thank you.’

  She walked through the kitchen, keeping her attention fixed on the door. Outside, it was bitterly cold: the stars had come out, cold and clear and perfectly still above the little Nativity Scene of parked vehicles. Moira closed the do
or behind her, trudged to her Volvo, exactly as if she had just said goodbye to Ian after a nice chat over the kitchen table.

  She froze. The thought occurred to her: if Ian was right, then - somewhere out in the infinite sprawl of the ever-expanding multiverse - there was a version of herself doing just that. Another Moira, trudging to her Volvo. A Moira who had just seen the gun fail to kill Ian ten or twenty times, and was still feeling the consequences of that observation slide into place. That there was no death; that there was no mortality. That nothing ever died, and that it was the worst thing imaginable.

  Would that Moira believe? she wondered.

  Did she?

  Moira got into the Volvo. She wound down the driver’s side window before she set off, anxious for some fresh air, no matter how cold. Thankfully, the engine started first time. The headlights threw purple shadows across the snow as she backed out between the police vehicles and the ambulance. She slipped into first gear and crunched slowly down the drive, leaving the cottage behind her. She avoided looking in the rear-view mirror: she did not think she could take it.

  She reached the end of the drive and turned onto the lane. The driving was easier now, and she slipped through the gears into third. Dry branches whisked against the side of the Volvo as she negotiated tight spots. There, ahead, was the humpbacked bridge. Once she had crossed it, there would only be a little more country lane and then she would hit the main road, which she knew had been gritted earlier that night.

  Something flashed out of the night, towards her. She had a photographic flash of a flattened, startled face, framed by soft white feathers. Wings spread, as if pinned wide in an anatomy diagram. Claws grasping toward her.

  Moira swerved. The owl slid past, brushing the windscreen. The car gyred, losing traction. The Volvo slid horizontally, easing off the road, sliding towards the bank of the river. The moment stretched: time oozing uselessly. Moira tried to steer the car back towards the road, but her hands moved in slow motion on the wheel. Moira saw the nearly frozen river: a shallow ribbon of ice, dotted with the grey-black shadows of pebbles. She felt an instant of relief. She was not going to drown. Even if the car smashed through the ice; even if there was running water under that ice, it couldn’t be more than a few inches deep. The car would be a write-off, but...

  Then she saw the tree. It was a dead, wizened old thing. It must have been carried downstream during the torrents of the last heavy storm. Now, planted amongst the rocks, it looked like it had been there for a thousand years.

  The car lurched towards it, tipping onto its right-hand side. The tree loomed larger, and with a horrid inevitability, Moira knew that it was going to push those sharp old branches through the open window of the driver’s side door. She had just enough time to let out a tiny, unheard gasp of terror, and then the car rolled onto the tree. The last thing she remembered was the branches - thick as her arm - ramming through the window, the instant as their cruel edges touched her skin.

  But when the police found her, not much more than an hour later, they could not believe that she had survived with only minor scratches. All the major branches had gone around her, trapping her in place but doing no real harm.

  ‘You’re a very lucky woman,’ the policeman told her.

  This story didn’t make much of a splash when it appeared in the last-ever issue of Interzone to be edited by David Pringle, just before the reins were handed over to the estimable Andy Cox. I’m still quite taken with it, though. It articulates an idea, a consequence of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, that had been nagging me for some time - you can see me coming at it from a slightly different approach in ‘Angels of Ashes’, which was written five or six years before this piece. What I like about ‘Everlasting’ - and which hasn’t, I think, ever been picked up on - is that nothing overtly science fictional happens anywhere in the story. It’s possible to read it as an entirely straightforward piece about someone who just happens to have a very peculiar belief system.

  ZIMA BLUE

  After the first week people started drifting away from the island. The viewing stands around the pool became emptier by the day. The big tourist ships hauled back towards interstellar space. Art fiends, commentators and critics packed their bags in Venice. Their disappointment hung over the lagoon like a miasma.

  I was one of the few who stayed on Murjek, returning to the stands each day. I’d watch for hours, squinting against the trembling blue light reflected from the surface of the water. Face down, Zima’s pale shape moved so languidly from one end of the pool to the other that it could have been mistaken for a floating corpse. As he swam I wondered how I was going to tell his story, and who was going to buy it. I tried to remember the name of my first newspaper, back on Mars. They wouldn’t pay as much as some of the bigger titles, but some part of me liked the idea of going back to the old place. It had been a long time . . . I queried the AM, wanting it to jog my memory about the name of the paper. There’d been so many since . . . hundreds, by my reckoning. But nothing came. It took me another yawning moment to remember that I’d dismissed the AM the day before:

  ‘Carrie, you’re on your own,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘Start getting used to it.’

  In the pool, the swimming figure ended a length and began to swim back towards me.

  Two weeks earlier I’d been sitting in the Piazza San Marco at noon, watching white figurines glide against the white marble of the clock tower. The sky over Venice was jammed with ships, parked hull-to-hull. Their bellies were quilted in vast, glowing panels, tuned to match the real sky. The view reminded me of the work of a pre-Expansion artist who had specialised in eye-wrenching tricks of perspective and composition: endless waterfalls, interlocking lizards. I formed a mental image and queried the fluttering presence of the AM, but it couldn’t retrieve the name.

  I finished my coffee and steeled myself for the bill.

  I’d come to this white marble version of Venice to witness the unveiling of Zima’s final work of art. I’d had an interest in the artist for years, and I’d hoped I might be able to arrange an interview. Unfortunately several thousand other members of the in-crowd had come up with exactly the same idea. Not that it mattered what kind of competition I had anyway: Zima wasn’t talking.

  The waiter placed a folded card on my table.

  All we had been told was to make our way to Murjek, a waterlogged world most of us had never heard of before. Murjek’s only claim to fame was that it hosted the one hundred and seventy-first known duplicate of Venice, and one of only three Venices rendered entirely in white marble. Zima had chosen Murjek to host his final work of art, and to be the place where he would make his retirement from public life.

  With a heavy heart I lifted the bill to inspect the damage. Instead of the expected bill, it was a small, blue card printed in fine gold italic lettering. The shade of blue was that precise powdery aquamarine that Zima had made his own. The card was addressed to me, Carrie Clay, and it said that Zima wanted to talk to me about the unveiling. If I was interested, I should report to the Rialto Bridge in exactly two hours.

  If I was interested.

  The note stipulated that no recording materials were to be brought, not even a pen and paper. As an afterthought, the card mentioned that the bill had been taken care of. I almost had the nerve to order another coffee and put it on the same tab. Almost, but not quite.

  Zima’s servant was there when I arrived early at the bridge. Intricate neon mechanisms pulsed behind the flexing glass of the robot’s mannequin body. It bowed at the waist and spoke very softly. ‘Miss Clay? Since you’re here, we might as well depart.’

  The robot escorted me to a flight of stairs that led to the waterside. My AM followed us, fluttering at my shoulder. A conveyor hovered in waiting, floating a metre above the water. The robot helped me into the rear compartment. The AM was about to follow me inside when the robot raised a warning hand.

  ‘You’ll have to leave that behind, I’m afraid; no recording mate
rials, remember?’

  I looked at the metallic green hummingbird, trying to remember the last time I had been out of its ever-watchful presence.

  ‘Leave it behind?’

  ‘It’ll be quite safe here, and you can collect it again when you return after nightfall.’

  ‘If I say no?’

  ‘Then I’m afraid there’ll be no meeting with Zima.’

  I sensed that the robot wasn’t going to hang around all afternoon waiting for my answer. The thought of being away from the AM made my blood run cold. But I wanted that interview so badly I was prepared to consider anything.