Solaris Rising 1.5

by Ian Whates

  AN EXLUSIVE EBOOK

  OF NEW SCIENCE FICTION

  SOLARIS RISING1.5

  EDITED BY

  IAN WHATES

  Solaris Books

  SOLARIS RISING1.5

  AN EXCLUSIVE EBOOK OF NEW SCIENCE FICTION

  EDITED BY

  IAN WHATES

  INCLUDING STORIES BY

  Paul di Filippo

  Paul Cornell

  Sarah Lotz

  Gareth L. Powell

  Adam Roberts

  Mike Resnick

  Tanith Lee

  Aliette de Bodard

  Philip Vine

  First published 2012 by Solaris an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-442-4

  ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-443-1

  Cover Art by Pye Parr

  ‘Introduction’ © Ian Whates 2012

  ‘What Did Tessimond Tell You?’ © Adam Roberts 2012

  ‘Two Sisters in Exile’ © Aliette de Bodard 2012

  ‘Another Apocalypse’ © Gareth L. Powell 2012

  ‘The Second Civil War’ © Mike Resnick 2012

  ‘Charlotte’ © Sarah Lotz 2012

  ‘The Gift’ © Phillip Vine 2012

  ‘IT’ © Tanith Lee 2012

  ‘A New Arrival at the House of Love’ © Paul Cornell 2012

  ‘A Palazzo in the Stars’ © Paul di Filippo 2012

  The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Designed by Rebellion Publishing

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, Ian Whates

  What Did Tessimond Tell You? Adam Roberts

  Two Sisters in Exile, Aliette de Bodard

  Another Apocalypse, Gareth L. Powell

  The Second Civil War, Mike Resnick

  Charlotte, Sarah Lotz

  The Gift, Phillip Vine

  IT, Tanith Lee

  A New Arrival at the House of Love, Paul Cornell

  A Palazzo in the Stars, Paul di Filippo

  BUILDING BRIDGES:

  AN INTRODUCTION

  IAN WHATES

  I WAS DELIGHTED when Solaris commissioned me to compile and edit a second volume of Solaris Rising (set to appear in 2013). When they subsequently contacted me with the notion of putting together a ‘mini-anthology’ for e-book release only, to bridge the gap between Solaris Rising and Solaris Rising 2, I was initially intrigued and then regretful. I had to explain to them that, sadly, it couldn’t be done; there simply wasn’t enough time.

  Asking big-name authors to produce top-notch stories with a submission deadline that was only a few months away...? I mean, these are busy people, with commitments stretching far into the future... And I certainly wasn’t prepared to compromise on quality. So no, out of the question; SR1.5 was a nice idea, but utterly impossible.

  So... here it is.

  Paul Cornell is an author I’ve almost published on a number of occasions, but somehow other commitments and circumstance have always conspired against us. When Paul told me early in 2012 that he was working on a short story or two and could guarantee me one for Solaris Rising 2, I was sceptical. Something would intervene and prevent this from happening. It didn’t, and Paul duly delivered an excellent piece called ‘Tom,’ which will debut in next year’s book. Pushing my luck a little, I turned around and said, “Paul, thanks for this; now, how do you fancy writing me another...?”

  I chose, you see, to interpret Solaris’ brief of the e-book as a bridge between SR1 and SR2 literally, and determined to feature one or two of the authors from the first book alongside some from the second; which would still leave room, of course, for others who weren’t in either but may yet feature in future volumes, who knows? Paul provides a perfect link to SR2.

  I’m very proud of the first book and would happily work with any of the authors again. On this occasion, I approached Adam Roberts and Paul di Filippo. Once I received their submissions, I was delighted that I had. Paul’s Wellsian-flavoured scientific romance is a joy, while Adam’s clever tale of bitter-sweet scientific discovery must rate among his best shorts yet.

  Mike Resnick’s contribution arrived almost by accident. We were in e-mail discussion about something else entirely when Mike mentioned that he’d just written an alt-history piece for a planned anthology that was no longer happening. Would I be interested in seeing it? Would I heck!

  Sarah Lotz is a quiet, demure, softly-spoken... Oh, who am I kidding? Sarah is a friend of Lauren Beukes (the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Zoo City), which puts paid to that description. Sarah seems hell-bent on establishing some sort of a record for the number of collaborative pseudonyms an individual can be simultaneously published under; but, whatever the name, the quality of her work remains consistently high.

  Gareth L. Powell has been busily building a reputation for himself over the past few years. I attended the London launch of his first collection, The Last Reef, in 2008, and he has since contributed well-received stories to two of my NewCon Press anthologies. Gareth was a natural to approach regarding SR1.5. His story here is set in the same universe as his novel The Recollection.

  I was first introduced to Phillip Vine by mutual friend and author Eric Brown. Phillip is now part of a small cadre of us literary types who gather at a pub in Cambridge from time to time to... ahem... discuss science fiction. Phillip has been writing professionally for many years, though not necessarily within the genre.

  Aliette de Bodard is one of the rising stars of European science fiction. She has won the BSFA Award for best short story and has seen her work shortlisted for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Aliette contributed one of the stand-out pieces to my recent anthology Dark Currents, and I didn’t hesitate in approaching her regarding this project.

  Tanith Lee is... Tanith Lee. Really, that ought to say enough, but for anyone who requires a little more: Tanith is one of the finest sculptors of prose that genre fiction has ever known. Renowned for her dark fantasy, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time Tanith earned recognition for her science fiction. One evening in January, as we sat in yet another cosy pub in her beloved Hastings, I said, “What I’d really like to see from you is a new science fiction story.” I was delighted when Tanith’s eyes lit up and she replied, “Ooh, I haven’t written SF in ages. I’d love to!”

  Tanith and I have occasionally locked horns (in a genial and purely amicable fashion) over my editorial stance (formulated in cahoots with sometimes collaborator Ian Watson) that authors occasionally rely a little too heavily on that small, unspecific and often superfluous word ‘it.’ It is therefore wholly appropriate and entirely Tanith that her contribution to this anthology should bear the title... ‘It.’

  So, here we are: Solaris Rising 1.5. I hope you enjoy, and I trust this volume will provide a suitable appetiser for the forthcoming Solaris Rising 2.

  Ian Whates

  June 2012

  WHAT DID TESSIMOND TELL YOU?

  ADAM ROBERTS

  Adam Roberts was born two-thirds of the way through the last century; he currently lives within thirty miles of where “What Did Tessimond Tell You?” is set, with his wife and family. His most recent novels are By Light Alone (Gollancz 2011) and Jack Glass (Gollancz 2012).

  :1: />
  THE NOBEL WAS in the bag, and we were only a fortnight from our public announcement, when Niu Jian told he was quitting. I assumed it was a joke. But Niu Jian had never been a practical joker; and of course he wasn’t kidding now. The sunlight picked out the grain of his tweed jacket. He was sitting in my office with his crescent back to the window, and I kept getting distracted by the light coming through the glass. Morningtime, morningtime, and all the possibilities of the day ahead of us. The chimney of the boilerhouse was as white and straight as an unsmoked cigarette. The students wandered the paths and dawdled on the grass with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Further down the hill you could see the cars doing their crazy corpuscle impressions along the interchange and away along the dual carriageway. “You want to quit—now?” I said. “Now is the time you want to quit?”

  He nodded, slowly, and picked for a while at the skin of his knuckles.

  “Three weeks, we present. You know the Nobel is—look, hey!” I said, the idea occurring suddenly to me like the spurt of a match lighting. “You think you won’t be sharing? You will! I don’t know what Sleight has told you, but we’ll all be cited. He’s a kidder. You, me, Prévert and Sleight, we will all be cited. Is that what you think?” Storming out in a huff wouldn’t have been very characteristic of Niu Jian, either: for a more stolidly dependable individual never walked the face of this, our rainy, stony earth. But, you see, I was struggling to understand why he was quitting.

  “It is not that,” he said,

  “Then—?” I grunted. I coughed. P-O-R didn’t like that; the unruly diaphragm of it. There was a scurry of motion inside, as she readjusted herself.

  He looked at me, and then, briefly, he glanced at my belly—I had pushed my chair away from the desk and my whole torso was on display, Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator in all her bulging glory. Then he looked back at my face. For the strangest moment my heart knocked rat-tat at my ribs, like it wanted out, and I felt the adrenal flush along my neck and in my cheeks. But that passed.

  Niu Jian said: “I have never been to Mecca.”

  “The Bingo?” I said. I wasn’t trying to be facetious. I was genuinely wrongfooted by this.

  “No,” he said.

  “You mean, in”—I coughed—“like, Arabia?”

  Nod.

  “What’s that go to do with anything?”

  “I want,” said Niu Jian, “to go.”

  “OK,” I said. “Why not? It’s like the Taj Mahal, right? I’m sure it’s a sight to see. So go. Wait until the press conference, and then take the next available flying transport from Heathrow’s internationally renowned port-of-air.” But he was shaking his head, so I said: “Jesus, go now if you like. If you must. Miss the announcement. That doesn’t matter—or it only matters a little bit. But if it’s like, urgent, then go now. But you don’t have to quit! Why do you have to quit? You don’t have to quit.”

  His nod, though wordless, was very clearly: I do.

  “OK, you’re really going to have to lay this out for me, step by baby-step,” I said. “Blame my baby-beshrunken brain. Walk me through it. Why do you want to go to Mecca?”

  “To go before I die.”

  “Wait—you’re not dying, are you? Jesus on a boson, are you ill?”

  “I’m not ill,” said Niu Jian. “I’m in perfect health. So far as I know, anyway. Look: I’m not trying to be mysterious. All Muslims must visit Mecca once in their lives.”

  I thought about this. “You’re a Muslim? I thought you were Chinese.”

  “It’s possible to be both.”

  “And that bottle of wine you shared with Prévert and myself last night?”

  “Islam is perfect; individuals are not.” His picked more energetically at the skin on the back of his knuckles.

  “I just never knew,” I said, feeling stupid. “I mean, I thought Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol.”

  “I thought pregnant women weren’t supposed to drink alcohol,” he returned, and for the first time in this whole strange conversation I got a glimpse of the old Niu Jian, the sly little flash of wit, the particular look he had. But then it was gone again.

  “Yesterday, in the Elephant, you were talking about the suit you would wear for the press conference. You were all, ‘oh, my mother will be watching the television, the whole world will be watching the—oh, I must have a smart suit. Oh I must go to a London tailor.’ What happened to the London tailor?”

  He said: “I spoke to Tessimond.”

  I believe this was the first time I ever heard his name. Not the last; far from the last. “Who?”

  “Prévert’s friend.”

  “Oh—the doleful-countenance guy? The ex-professor guy from Oregon?”

  “Yes.”

  “You spoke to him—when?”

  Niu Jian looked at the ceiling. “Half an hour ago.”

  “And he told you to quit the team? C’mon, Noo-noo! You’re listening to him? You don’t even know him!”

  “He didn’t tell me to quit the team.”

  “So he told you—what?”

  “He told me about the expansion of the universe,” said Niu Jian. “More specifically, he put the increase in the rate of expansion of the universe in... uh, context. After he did that, I realised that I had to quit the team and go to Mecca.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. At that precise moment my little Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator gave a little kick and thwunked my spleen—or whatever organ it is, down in there, that feels like a sack of fluid-swelled nerves. I grunted, shifted my position in my chair. “He told you about the expansion of the universe? You mean you told him! He’s not a shoe-in for the Nobel—you are.” When he didn’t reply, I started to lose my temper. “What did he tell you about the expansion of the universe, precisely?”

  You need to understand: the increasing rate of the expansion of the universe was the essence of what we did. The Nobel was in the offing because of what we’d done. What Niu Jian said was akin to a world-class mathematician, about to receive the Fields Medal, quitting because a stranger had told him “you know that two plus two equals four, don’t you?” It made no sense at all. At all, at all.

  For the second time Niu Jian’s glance went to my belly. Then he stood up, his knees making drawn out little bleating noises as they were required to assume his weight. “Ana, goodbye,” he said. “You know how it is.”

  “Do not.”

  “I don’t want to give the wrong impression. In fact, I wouldn’t even say he told me anything. He pointed out the obvious, really. You know how it is, Ana, when somebody says something that completely changes the way you see the cosmos, but that afterwards you think: that’s so obvious, how could I not have noticed it before?”

  “That’s what he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it made you want to quit the team? Rather than wait a few weeks and receive the Nobel Prize for Physics?”

  Nod.

  “So what was it? What did he say? What could he possibly say that would provoke that reaction in you? You’re the least flaky of the whole team!”

  For the third time, the glimpse towards my belly. Just a little downward flick of the eyes, and then back to my face. “I’d prefer not to say,” he replied, and then he shook my hand with that weird manner he’d picked up from Jane Austen novels, or I don’t know wherefrom, and he left. I saw him the next morning, pulling his suitcase across the forty-metre sundial that looks like a giant manhole cover outside the Human Resources Building. I called to him, and waved; and he waved back, and then he got into the taxi he had called and was driven away, and I never saw him again.

  :2:

  NATURALLY I WANTED to talk to this Tessimond geezer, to find out why he was spooking my horses. I had taken pains to assemble the very best team; intellectual thoroughbreds. I texted Prévert to come to my office, and when he neither replied nor came I hauled myself, balanced Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator as well as I could over m
y hips and did my backward-leaning walk along the corridor to his office. I didn’t knock. I was the team leader, the ring-giver, the guardian of the treasure. Knocking wasn’t needful.

  Prévert was inside, and so was Sleight, and the two of them were having a right old ding-dong. Prévert was standing straight up, and he was half-way through either putting on or taking off his coat.

  “Niu Jian just quit the team,” I said, lowering myself into a chair with the cumbrous grace unique to people in my position. “He just came into my office and quit,”

  “We know, boss,” said Sleight. “Prévert too.”

  “Jack, he said it was your friend who persuaded him.” Prévert’s first name was not Jack; it was Stephane. But naturally we all called him Jack. “This Tessimond guy. Where did y—wait a minute, Sleight: what do you mean Prévert too?”

  “He means,” said Prévert, “that I too am leaving the team, Ana. I apologise. I apologise with a full heart. It is late in the day. If I had known earlier I would have not inconvenienced you in this fashion—and with your...” and like Niu Juan had done, he cast a significant look at Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator, and then returned his gaze to my face.

  “You are kidding me,” I said.

  “I regret to say, Ana, that I am not kidding you.”

  “But we just got your ths to come out right.” Prévert’s English was more-or-less flawless, and his accent was somewhere in between David Niven and a BBC newsreader, but he had held stubbornly to that French trick of pronouncing th as t or z, variously.

  “I am sorry, as I say.”