Solaris Rising 1.5

by Ian Whates

  If you do not come for us, we will surely come for you.

  These were the words that he fell asleep with in the pain of his hospital bed. They followed him, too, into his dreams.

  HE COULD UNDERSTAND well enough why he had become involved with the Organisation.

  They paid him the kind of money he could never earn from his writing, and he had an ex-wife and two snotty-nosed kids to support through school.

  He even had some sympathy with their ideals.

  In a world where money sheltered behind reinforced glass scrapers and where workers were slaves, it was not hard to feel something had to be done.

  He had thought about it, in a desultory, on and off kind of way, for several years. Another book, though, had become his default setting. This will be the one, he said to himself over and over, like a mantra. He had been writing his last book, Sex and the Salamander of Seoul, when he had lost three fingers of his left hand. He told himself he had deserved this castration as a punishment for the prostitution of his writing talent. He would write no more.

  He knew someone who knew someone else who had access to the Organisation.

  He showed them his left hand; hell, he even showed them his shrivelled fingers that he kept in a box in his jacket pocket.

  They said, “You’ve come to the right place, Joe.”

  WHEN HE AWOKE, drenched in sour sweat, he heard the scratchy voice of the man in the bed to his right.

  He turned his head as far as possible, feeling the unused muscles in his neck stretching and protesting with pain, cursing the thick swathes of bandages around his head and upper body.

  What was it the old fool was saying?

  The man’s voice was like a small bird’s, sing-song, sing-song, like a sparrow that has fallen from his nest and been taken from the ground by a larger, fiercer bird with claws and beak, still sing-song, but more sad-song, more accepting of fate.

  Something about a bargain, doing a deal.

  He twisted his body as best he could to make it easier to hear.

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said, “I couldn’t help but hear.”

  “What?”

  “You were talking, talking in your sleep.”

  He could see the old man now, skinny, his hospital shirt unbuttoned at the chest to display a gathering of wiry white hairs, like a crowd of elderly friends at some college reunion, his nose stubby and broken at some point in the past; a boxer, Joe thought, a featherweight champion, his fights recorded in The Ring.

  “You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you?”

  THAT WAS ALSO what they said at the Organisation.

  “Everybody that walks through these doors is in some kind of trouble, my friend.”

  There were two of them behind the desk, black-suited with red rose buttonholes. Strange, he remembered, the way they looked, like some film star gangsters from the previous century. The woman on the left said her name was Bonnie and the other one, he couldn’t recall her name, but one was black and the other white, and there was a guy with an automatic standing on a box, just behind the women. He looked mean and poised for action as well as beaten-up in a mature kind of way.

  “Okay, Joe,” said the black woman, “we’ll take you on.”

  “AND NOW THEY want me back,” he said to the old man with the boxer’s nose in the next bed.

  “It’s a good story, Joe.”

  “After all I’ve done for them; all this, I mean,” and he gestured at his broken body.

  The old man shook his head in sympathy and there was spittle climbing down from the corner of his mouth.

  “I could help,” he said, sing-song, like a bird’s voice, one that’s just escaped from a predator’s mouth.

  “You?” he said, “how could you help?” and there was a bitter taste in his mouth as the words slid from the back of his throat.

  “Well, Joe,” he said, “I could write your story for you.”

  There was something in the old man’s breath behind the words, something confident, something smiling, and something strong that stopped the sneering words from coming. Joe waited for the old man to continue.

  “Yes, I could maybe do that.”

  Still he paused, seeing now something he recognised in the remains of the old man’s day; behind the mask of illness that had reduced him to this tin can hospital bed.

  “It’s a good story, after all, and it would have to be my last one too.”

  He knew now who the old man was, and was about to express some inept platitude, some expression of privilege at finding himself in a bed next to the Great Man, when he was stopped in his tracks by the next words uttered by the Great American Writer.

  “Or,” he said, “we could just swap places and you could write the story yourself.”

  “HERE’S WHAT WE want you to do, Joe,” said Bonnie, the white woman with pale, unlit skin.

  “What do you mean?”

  He was suspicious now, thinking the Grand Old Man of American Letters was maybe taking the piss, taking advantage of his disabled state.

  “Well, you’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  He nodded as far as the bandages about his neck would allow.

  “You’re Joe Hilfiger, aren’t you? Creator of Zane Zee, one of the most underrated dicks in late-twenty-first-century crimelit?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, his grin beneath the bandages so wide it made him wince with the pain of jarring bones, “but I was also responsible for Honey Sweet, Spacegirl Supreme, not to mention Van Haartsing, the zombie vampire hunter.”

  “I know, I know.”

  He saw the old man had raised himself into a half sitting position and was rocking to and fro in his bed with uncontrollable laughter.

  “You know?”

  “Over the years, Joe, I’ve made it my business to know.”

  HE HAD DONE his homework on the Organisation.

  The friend of a friend had already told him the basics. “Bim, bam, bomb,” he had said, as casually as if he were revealing the title of the book he was currently reading.

  “What do you mean?” he had asked.

  “I said what I said,” the friend of the friend replied, and was gone, his beer only half-finished.

  “LOOK, JOE,” THE old man said. “I’m dying.”

  He gestured as best he could to indicate disbelief, dismay, with a hint of a dismissive wave of his arm to suggest the Grand Old Man should refuse to accept such an unfair medical assessment.

  “It’s true, Joe, this old bag of bones and gristle is raddled with cancer. I got days if I’m lucky.”

  He did not know what to say. One of his characters, even the cowgirl whose name he had forgotten, would have had something to say, but he was not in one of his stories now.

  “If I’m honest, Joe, I guess I couldn’t write your story for you now, I don’t have the strength, I don’t have the words any more, but that’s not really the deal I’m offering you.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Let me tell you my story first, and then you can decide if you want it to be your story too.”

  HE WAS DESPERATE; he had lost his wife and his children and his fingers.

  He was about to be given his commands by Bonnie of the Organisation; he knew there was no way back.

  “It’s only a story,” he said to himself, “only a fucking story.”

  He looked at the lightless sickness in the white woman’s face as she told him what he had to do, and told himself he could no longer believe what he had just said to himself, that he was just a character in a story.

  “YOU’RE STILL YOUNG,” the old man said. “You’re broken now, but you’ll mend.”

  He nodded; carry on, his eyes spoke for him.

  “The letter you received, Joe; if you do as I say, they’ll come for me and not for you.”

  EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED.

  His instructions were in his head and now there was no possibility of a return to innocence, to writing, or to the path of love, or peace
.

  The orders were in his memory, the money was in his bank account, the implant was in his blood.

  He was an Organisation man, for good or ill, forever.

  “I WAS YOUNG once, Joe.”

  The Great American Writer looked wistful, his memories old friends, relations come to pay their last respects.

  “I was a struggling writer once, married, with kids here, there, and on their way, churning out the words, sometimes even ten thousand in a day, the poor white trash of fiction.”

  The old man paused, as if questioning his commitment to telling his story.

  “People thought it had come from nowhere, The Great White Novel, thought it was the most brilliant debut in fiction since Totem’s Body Politic, Body Erotic, or even as far back as Heller’s Catch 22 or Lovecraft or Poe.”

  A sigh escaped his lips, air from a punctured balloon.

  “What they did not understand was the price I had to pay.”

  HE GRINNED AT the old writer in the next bed and told him the story of how it was on his third mission that he was taken.

  The bomb, this time, was concealed within a book he was to carry with him into the heat and heartlands of the enemy.

  He smiled now at the thought that it had been his new friend’s follow-up novel, Supremacy, which had enclosed both the device and the code that would detonate the explosive.

  He wondered whether the price the Grand Old Man had been forced to pay was the unpleasant opinions mouthed in his novels.

  He looked about him, as he rode the moving walkways, at the citadels of capital, the monuments to greed, celebrated in his companion’s fiction.

  Of course, the old man’s writing was startling in its originality, and he knew only too well that his own political principles were not so secure as to resist the lure of money or fame.

  The walkway stopped a distance from the main entrance of the Manhattan Finance House and he paused to admire the glory of the impenetrable glass shell of the scraper. Sunlight rebounded from the building and fragmented into the colours of the spectrum that fell like shards of glass upon the arid concrete. It was as if the gods themselves were falling from the heavens in their rainbows, to be with mortal man, and it was this strange beauty that he was charged to bring down.

  He was no longer Joe Hilfiger, failed writer, but Joseph Hilfigger, banker to the gods.

  Security scanned each neuron of his brain, each pore of his skin, his rectal passage, and his briefcase.

  “Good book you’re reading, sir.”

  Fear momentarily creased his face but it was clear from the guard’s smile that he was merely engaged in social pleasantry, demonstrating to the visitor the efficiency of the new technology at his disposal.

  “For my lunch break.”

  “Better than jam donuts, sir!”

  “Yes, have you read it?”

  He was moving on and through glass gates when he called back to the guard with his trite question, and instantly regretted doing so. It was unnecessary and increased the risk of detection or delay; it betrayed his inexperience and a desire to flout his own organisation’s technology and its success in masking the existence of the tiny bomb.

  “I have, sir, and good on him, too, sir, for telling it like it is.”

  He waved in the direction of the security officer and said not another word until he reached the ninth floor where the Finance House’s computer block and data bank was housed. It was there he asked a white coated technician the way to the nearest rest room.

  HE COULD SEE them waiting for him before the glass elevator had completed its descent.

  There was no time to think about how they had detected him, although he could see the smiling face of the literary security guard amongst the soldiers and police and all their guns.

  Okay, he thought, I’ll take you bastards with me.

  He took the copy of Supremacy from his jacket pocket and saw the security guard pointing, his jowls shaking with excitement or fear, his brow furrowed. The scooped-out inside of the book where the bomb had nestled was now an empty shell, but pasted onto the inside front cover was the ignition code for the explosive device that would rip through the hard heart of the Manhattan empire. It was the last sentence of the Great American Writer’s final novel.

  And so, Good shall triumph over Evil, always.

  He tapped the letters of the code into his palmtop as they were coming for him. He wished the ignition sequence had been shorter. He wished his hospital friend’s last thoughts had been more succinct.

  IT HAD, THOUGH, he thought, not been the worst of deals.

  The device had not exploded, lives had been saved, including his own. He had been beaten until it was no longer possible to be revived for another beating, but he was safe from the Organisation, as his implant had been removed via a transfusion of blood.

  That was until the nurse he had never seen before had brought the letter to him this morning.

  If you do not come for us, we will surely come for you.

  IT HAD SPOOKED him, there was no doubt about that, but now the old man, the greatest novelist America had ever produced, was offering him a deal he did not yet understand, and was telling him about his early years as a failed writer, telling him enough, certainly, for him to earn a fortune by selling his exclusive story to the press, if only he could provide some kind of proof.

  “Yes,” he could hear the old man say in that characteristic throaty whistle of his, “those old stories were dear to my heart, I loved them even if they were bad, I loved and cared for every one of my characters like they were my children.”

  He nodded as best he could. “Go on,” he said in his own half strangled voice.

  “I did the deal, though, and they killed every one of my books, and all those trashy one-dimensional characters that I loved so much. It hurt me, Joe, it hurt me so bad, but in return I got The Gift.”

  He still did not understand.

  “I’m dying, Joe, and now I’m offering you that same gift.”

  SO, WHEN THE Organisation finally broke into the hospital, they found the man they thought was Joe Hilfiger, and pumped him just as full of lead as one human being could take.

  They only realised their mistake when they noticed the dead man still had all his fingers on his left hand.

  The pale white girl called Bonnie was mad as hell and some kind of civil war broke out in the Organisation along racial lines: blacks against whites.

  AS FOR JOE, he became the Next Big Thing in the American literary canon, and he won a Pulitzer this and a Nobel that, and his ex-wife took him to the cleaners for alimony, and his children grew up to be brats and the subjects of his last Great Novel, and still he could never find real happiness.

  HE TOLD ME, as he lay dying, just before he passed me The Gift, that he still missed Honey Sweet and the cowgirl whose name he could never remember.

  IT

  TANITH LEE

  Tanith Leewas born in 1947, didn’t learn to read until she was nearly 8, and started to write aged 9. Since becoming a fulltime writer in 1974, she has written some 100 books, about 270 short stories, 4 radio plays, and 2 episodes of Blake’s 7. Her latest publications include the novels To Indigo, L’Amber, and Killing Violets (Immanion), and the short story collection Cold Grey Stones (NewCon Press). She lives on the Sussex Weald with husband, writer/artist John Kaiine, in a house full of books, stained glass, plants and cat fur.

  IT BEGAN—LET me rephrase that: the occurrences began—early in March of 20 (see Ref. File 906 AC).

  Calder started to notice what was happening about mid-March, but quite negligently, as one would (and as, indeed, one did), and put it down to the usual incompetence of type-setters, scanners, and/or computers. At this point nobody else referred to it in his hearing, let alone spoke to him in person on the matter. This, of course, was while the—shall we say, for want of a better term—Interference was, or seemed, mostly confined to printed material, i.e. books, magazines, newspapers and journals, circulars, and o
ther paper hardcopy of this sort. The problem entailed merely a constant recurrence of a single word, generally out of place, and having no relation to the surrounding text.

  Presently, however, the Interference spread. Calder was himself astonished one morning when, typing up a memo on his personal Securist L.T., what he took for an invading (and unwanted) advert popped up, not to one side but at the centre of the screen. As a rule various security provisos on these machines eradicate the chance of any advertising getting through. The very occasional rogue intruder was thrown out by the latent S and D systems. Calder, having activated the more aggressive S and D response, watched as the Interference duly vanished. He resumed work. Yet ten minutes later, as so many of us have similarly experienced, the interruption reappeared, this time rather larger, and flashing in an annoying and palsied way. Now, too, Calder found he was unable to get rid of it. Accordingly he left the Search and Destroy system active, but otherwise put his memo to bed, filling the remainder of the shift with other duties. The following day, at 10 a.m., on re-awakening the machine, Calder saw that not only had the S and D failed to expunge the intruder, the thing now occupied the entire screen. Nor was it to be ousted.

  The Interference comprised, as almost everyone in possession of any sort of up-to-date technology and employing the English language was by now witnessing, the single letters I. and T. in bold black, and caps, on a blank white background. As Calder, and most of us, immediately named it, the word IT.