“Do it! For the sake of the line!”
I looked at the faces of the other line members. I saw their pain, but also their solemn consent. They were telling me that I had no choice. They were telling me to kill Fescue, and save us all.
I did it.
I willed the floor around the two figures to detach itself from the rest of the balcony. The tiny machines forming the fabric of the floor followed my will with dumb obedience, severing the molecular bonds that linked each machine to its neighbour.
For a heart-rending moment, the floor seemed to hover in place.
The field around Samphire quivered, beginning to lose integrity. Fescue’s generators were running out of power, Fescue running out of concentration . . .
He looked at me and nodded. “Good work, Campion.”
Then they dropped.
It was a long way down, and they were still falling when the revellers surged to the edge of the balcony to look down. The light from the explosion momentarily eclipsed the brightest impacts still raining down on the planet. I nodded at Fescue’s assessment: kilotonne range, easily. He had been right. It would have killed us all, and snapped the spire in two had the balcony not been flung so far out in space. It had been an accidental whim of design, but it had saved us all.
So had Fescue.
###
There was a great space battle that night, but this time it was for real, not staged in memory of some ancient, time-fogged conflict. The real Samphire had been on his ship, and when the construct failed to destroy the island, he made a run for orbit. From orbit, he must have planned to turn the ship’s own armaments on Reunion. But Fescue’s allies had anticipated him, and when his ship moved, so did a dozen others. They made interception above the lacerated atmosphere of my dying world and lit the sky with obscene energies. Samphire died, or at least that version of Samphire that had been sent to infiltrate our gathering. It may or may not have been the final one. It may or may not have been the only impostor in our midst.
After the battle, Vetchling, one of the other Advocates, took me aside and told me what she knew.
“Fescue supported the Great Work,” she said. “But not at any cost. When evidence reached him that an atrocity had been committed in the name of the Work . . . the murder of an entire human culture . . . he realised that not all of us shared his view.”
“Then Fescue knew all along,” I said, dismayed.
“No. He had shards of intelligence—hints, rumours, whisperings. He still had no idea who had committed the crime; how deeply they were tied to Gentian Line. He did not know whether the rest of the Advocates could be trusted.” She paused. “He trusted me, and a handful of others. But not everyone.”
“But Fescue spoke to me about the Great Work,” I said. “Of how we all had to bind together to bring it into being.”
“He believed it would be for the best. But more than likely he was sounding you out, seeing what you thought of it, goading you into an indiscretion.” Vetchling looked to the simmering sea, punctured by hundreds of volcanic vents that had reopened in the planet’s crust. We were looking down on the sea from a dizzy height now: the island had detached itself from Reunion, and was now climbing slowly into space, pushed by the vast motors I must have installed in its foundation rocks. The blast from Samphire’s weapon had shattered the outlying islands, crumbling them back into the sea. The water had rushed into the fill the caldera left after the main island’s departure, and now there was no trace that it had ever existed.
The party was over.
“He suspected Advocate involvement in the crime,” Vetchling continued. “But he could not rule out someone else being implicated: a sleeper, an agent no one would suspect.”
“He must have suspected Purslane and I,” I said.
“That’s possible. You did spend a lot of time associating, after all. If it’s any consolation, the two of you wouldn’t have been his only suspects. He may even have had his suspicions about Samphire.”
“What will happen to the Great Work now?”
“That’s not just a matter for Gentian Line,” Vetchling said. “But my guess is there’ll be pressure to put the whole thing on the back burner for a few hundred thousand years. A cooling-off period.” She sounded sad. “Fescue was respected. He had a lot of friends beyond our line.”
“I hated him,” I said.
“He wouldn’t have minded. All he really cared about was the line. You did the right thing, Campion.”
“I killed him.”
“You saved us all. You have Fescue’s gratitude.”
“How can you know?” I asked.
She touched a finger to her lips. “I know. Isn’t that enough for you?”
###
A little later, Purslane and I stood alone on the highest balcony of the island’s central spire. The island had climbed out of what would have been Reunion’s atmosphere, had the atmosphere remained.
Far below, viewed through the flickering curtain of the containment bubble, my planet writhed in the agonies of its death by stoning. The impacting asteroids struck her like fists, bludgeoning her in furious quick-time. At least two, sometimes three or four, arrived within every minute. Their impact fireballs had dispersed most of the atmosphere by now, and had elevated a goodly fraction of the crust into parabolas of molten rock, tongues of flame that arced thousands of kilometres before splashing down. They reminded me of the coronal arcs near the surface of a late-type star. The ocean was a memory: boiled into a dust-choked vapour. Concussion from the multiple impacts was already unhinging the delicate clockwork of the planet’s magnetohydrodynamic core. Had there been a spot on the planet where it was still night, the auroral storms would have been glorious. For a moment, I regretted that I had not arranged matters so that the aurorae had formed part of the show, somehow, someway.
But it was much too late for second thoughts now. It would be someone else’s turn next time.
Purslane took my hand. “Don’t look so sad, Campion. You did well. It was a fine end.”
“You think so?”
“They’ll be raving about this for a million years. What you did with those whales . . .” She shook her head in undisguised admiration.
“I couldn’t very well let them stay in the ocean.”
“It was lovely. Putting aside everyone else that happened . . . I think that was my favourite bit. Not that this is bad, either.”
We paused a while to watch a succession of major impacts: a long, sequenced string of them. Continent-sized fissures were beginning to open up deep into the planet’s mantle: wounds as bright as day.
“I created something and now I’m ruining it. Doesn’t that strike you as just the tiniest bit . . . infantile? Fescue certainly wouldn’t have approved.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not as if that world ever had any chance of outlasting us. It was created to endure for a specific moment in time. Like a sandcastle, or an ice sculpture. Here, and then gone. In a way, that’s the beauty of it. Who’d marvel at a sandcastle, if sandcastles lasted forever?”
“Or sunsets, I suppose,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t start talking about sunsets again. I thought you got that safely out of your system last time.”
“I have,” I said. “Completely and utterly. I’m thinking of a radically different theme for my tour this time. Something as far removed from sunsets as possible.”
“Oh, good.”
“Something like . . . waterfalls.”
“Waterfalls.”
“They’re pretty universal, you know. Any planet with some kind of atmosphere, and some kind of surface, usually ends up with something vaguely like a waterfall, somewhere. As long as you’re not too fussy about the water part.”
“Actually,” Purslane said, “I quite like waterfalls. I remember one I encountered in my travels . . . ten vertical kilometres of it, pure methane. I stood under it, allowed myself to feel a little of the cold. Just enough to shiver a
t the wonder of it.”
“It’s probably gone now,” I said sadly. ‘They don’t last long, compared to us.”
“But perhaps you’ll find an even better one.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open. I mapped some promising rivers during my tour; places where the geology might have allowed waterfalls to form by now. I think I’ll revisit some of those old places, for old time’s sake.”
“Bring me back a memory.”
“I’ll be sure to. It’s just such a shame you won’t ever see them with your own eyes . . .” I paused, aware that I stood on the thrilling, dangerous threshold of something. “I mean with me, the two of us.”
“You know the line frowns upon planned associations,” Purslane said, as if I needed to be reminded. “Such meetings erode the very spirit of chance and adventure Abigail sought to instil in us. If we meet between now and the next Reunion, it must be by chance and chance alone.”
“Then we’ll never meet.”
“No. Probably not.”
“That’s a silly rule, isn’t it? I mean, given everything else that’s happened here . . . why should we care?”
Purslane was a great while answering. “Because we’re traditionalists, Campion. Line loyalists, to the marrow.” She tightened her grip on the rail as something came streaking up from the molten world below: the last of my aquatics, lingering out of idleness or some instinctive curiosity. The huge field-encased creature was as sleek as night, its under parts highlit in brassy reds from the fires. It paused at the level of the balcony, long enough to scrutinise us with one small, wrinkled, distressingly human eye. Then with a powerful flick of its fluke it soared higher, to the orbital shallows where its fellow were already assembling.
“There is something, though,” Purslane added.
“What?”
“I shouldn’t even mention it . . . but I’ve been less than discreet about my flight plan. That trick I used to break into Burdock’s ship? It worked equally well with yours.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing harmful. Just installed a copy of my flight plan on your ship . . . for your information. Just so you know where I am.”
“You’re right,” I said, wonderingly. “That was spectacularly indiscreet.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“It would be completely improper for us to meet.”
“Utterly,” Purslane agreed, nodding emphatically.
“But you’ll stick to that flight plan?”
“To the letter.” She had finished her wine. She flung the empty glass into space. I watched it fall, waiting for the glint when it impacted the bubble. But before it hit, Purslane took my arm and turned me away from the view. “Come on, Campion. Let’s go inside. They’re still all waiting to hear who’s won best strand.”
“I can’t believe anyone still cares about that, after all that’s happened.”
“Never underestimate the recuperative powers of human vanity,” Purslane said sagely. “Besides: it isn’t just the strand we have to think about. There are two memorials that need to be created. We’ll need one for Burdock, and one for Fescue.”
“One day we might need one for Samphire as well,” I said.
“I think we’ll do our best to forget all about him.”
“He won’t go away that easily. He may still be alive. Or it may be that he was murdered and replaced with an impostor, just like Burdock. Either way, I have a feeling we haven’t finished with him. Or the Great Work.”
“We’ve won this battle, though. That’s enough for tonight, isn’t it?”
“It’ll have to be,” I said.
“Something worries me, though,” Purslane said. “We still haven’t told anyone that my strand wasn’t all it appears to be. They’ll have to find out one of these days.”
“Not tonight, though.”
“Campion . . . if my name comes out of the hat . . . what will I do?”
I feigned concern, suppressing an amused smile. “Do what I’d do. Keep a very straight face.”
“You mean . . . just accept it? That would be a little on the mischievous side, wouldn’t it?”
“Very,” I said. “But worth it, all the same.”
Purslane tightened her grasp on my arm. Together we walked back toward the auditorium where the others waited. Under us, the fires of creation consumed my little world while, far above it, aquatics gathered in squadrons and schools, ready for their long migration.
MISSILE GAP
By Charles Stross
Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a Writer to Watch in the new century ahead (in fact, as one of the key Writers to Watch in the Oughts), with a sudden burst in the last few years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,” “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” “Dechlorinating the Moderator,” “Toast: A Con Report,” and others in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Odyssey, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. Starting in a sequence of frenetic, densely packed stories in what’s come to be known as his Accelerado series—“Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” “Tourist,” “Halo,” “Router,” “Nightfall,” “Curator,” “Elector,” and “Survivor,” each story taking us a jump further into an acceleratingly strange future, and eventually through a Vingian Singularity and out the other side—really cranked up the buzz about him to high volume, as well as getting him on the Hugo Final Ballot several times. Taken together, the Accelerado stories represent one of the most dazzling feats of sustained imagination in science fiction history, and radically up the Imagination Ante for every other writer who wants to sit down at the Future History table and credibly deal themselves into the game.
Recently, Stross has become prolific at novel length as well. He’d already “published” a novel online, Scratch Monkey, available on his website (www.antipope.org/charlie/), and saw his first commercially published novel, Singularity Sky, released in 2003, but he had three novels come out in 2004, The Iron Sunrise, A Family Trade, and The Atrocity Archive (formerly serialized in the British magazine Spectrum SF), with another new novel, The Clan Corporate, hard on their heels in early 2005. Coming up is the long-awaited Accelerando novel, and a sequel to A Family Trade called The Hidden Family. His first collection. Toast, and Other Burned-Out Futures, was released in 2002. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In the sly and visionary story that follows, he takes us to a world where absolutely nothing is as it seems, for a story that’s not going to go anywhere you think it’s going to go, we guarantee it!
BOMB SCARE
Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.
A stoop-shouldered forty-something male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale breadcrumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread, is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he ponders. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air raid sirens start up.
The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path towards him, waving one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”
Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest shelter?”
The constable points towards a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t mak
e it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the east wall—if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks towards the public toilet and goes inside.
It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.
A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the no smoking signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.
Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen often?”
The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of The Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie, he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?”
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