Joe was lifted off his feet and flung backwards from the fireball, as were several of the tank removal workers. It was like a nuclear explosion said an eye-witness: but miraculously, a strike without consequences. Seconds later the fireball had vanished, having consumed the glossy masses so swiftly and so utterly that not a trace remained.
Even Big Joe only lost his eyebrows; sustained a few bruises and later had to endure a moderate debriefing from the police, after the negligent Fuel Service company – with considerable chutzpah – lodged a complaint. There were no other casualties; apart from poor Carnegie.
Lulu mourned the loss to science in the Golden Galleon, in a pleasant session with Adam: and that was the end of that.
Only three of the burnished coppery discs that had arrived one morning in spring, and landed on the pavement of Creek Road, had survived more than a few minutes. Now only one of them remained viable.
ϔ
Linden House roof space was inspected, and pronounced problem free. Stella moved up to proper school. She and Joseph were parted, with many tears, and then joyfully reunited after a term apart. They met a little girl called Olly, child of a passionate, displaced tribe of Arsenal supporters; joined the under-eights soccer squad and became obsessed with football. The yoghurt pot stayed on Stella’s windowsill as a permanent fixture, like a baby toy that just can’t be thrown away.
The seasons passed. One day, when winter was once more coming to an end and the sun returning to her window, Stella, now a big girl of six, happened to notice that the surface of the dried and crumbled soil in the little pot had heaved up again. Her invisible plant had come back to life. Of course she remembered the day when the fuel tanks ‘went up like a nuclear bomb’, and big Joe lost his eyebrows, but she’d never suspected that a sibling of her plant was responsible, so she wasn’t worried. She wondered if a shoot would appear this time, and would it dig into the soil, like a peanut, in the same mad way that the root had shot upwards.
The new growth emerged. For a while it sat on the surface, a pea-sized lump, swelling and changing colour, from white to a rich shade of purple; until it became a clearly defined, tightly folded flower bud. Then it began to rise, visibly wavering at the tip of a shoot like a thread of glass. Stella paid careful attention, and saw that the mad Sellotape root was wavering too. When she held it gently between her finger and thumb, she could feel what was happening. The mad root was heading downward at long last. It was moving down into the pot of soil as the bud was rising up into the air. It was the root moving down that was pushing the bud upwards.
Eventually the purple bud followed the same path as the mad root had taken, when Stella was only four. It squeezed itself into the crack between window-frame and wall, and vanished.
More days and weeks passed. Whenever Stella touched the mad root she could feel that it was still moving. She wondered what was going on in the roof-space. The mad root must be very long, if it had been growing all this time. Miles and miles and miles. How high would it push its bud, when it was all stretched out? Even Stella, a born lover of miracles, would have been astonished at the answer.
ϔ
In the deeps of space, swarms of tiny organisms drifted: algae blooms of a cold, dark, bottomless ocean: dormant until they hit a gas cloud, then feeding on organic particles for a while. Occasionally (once in a billion years or once in a thousand: they were indifferent to any measure of time) one of these swarms might collide with the gravitational field of a solar system. This would trigger the reproductive phase of the colony. Drawn inwards, feeding on the ever-richer mix of gases, the colony would give birth, in a sense, to a generation of specialised individuals: hugely larger than their parent forms, and tough enough to survive entry into an atmosphere. Some of these giants would make it all the way to a planetary surface – like massive ocean-borne seeds tossed up on a beach. If they found the conditions they were programmed to seek, the ‘seeds’ would break open, and feeding threads would emerge.
The burnished discs had made landfall, purged of their outer casing by the final descent, in a narrow arc around the globe of the Earth. Some, as is always the way when seed is sown broadcast, fell upon stony ground: sprang up quickly and just as quickly died. Many others drowned in the planet’s staggering excess of water; or were destroyed by fire; or fell into bad company, and lost the message. A lucky few, but plenty for the parent colony’s blind purposes, ripened and headed for home.
Incredibly long, more than a hundred kilometres apiece, the glassy strands drifted, and rose, and were spun around, and went on rising; until they were so high the Earth itself could hardly be said to hold them in its grip. One night in June, close to the Summer solstice, two and a half years after the morning when Stella picked up her piece of chocolate money, they achieved their final extension – all at the same time.
Stella was asleep and didn’t see the show. Few people did. Impelled by the extraordinary energies of their transport system, threads finer than spider silk and tougher than diamond, the fruiting bodies reached the point of escape. The “flower-buds” burst open, a storm of tiny fireflies catapulted into the deeps, and a new generation of space algae returned to their natural habitat. Here they would drift; sometimes waking, and feeding on the sparse nutrients in the spaces between the stars, for uncounted time. Until one day, meeting another planetary system’s pull, they would encyst, and fall in flame again; and perhaps a few would find fertile ground.
The Flame Is Roses
Written for MIT’s Technology Review anthology 2011(the first in the series called Twelve Tomorrows). Information Space4 often comes up in my fiction. What if thoughts and feelings, flesh and blood, sub-atomic particles and prehistoric tombs, are all made of the same basic stuff, let’s call it ‘information’ – and with the right equipment this stuff can be manipulated? Imagine the possibilities. All time might be eternally present, distances in ‘space’ might vanish. Imagine plugging into that, in some kind of very cool Time Team international televised stunt… Nice, but there’s also a story in here about Tom (T.S) Eliot, and the poem which became the first part of his famous late work ‘Four Quartets’. It just so happens that his musings on the illusory nature of time and space, and the reality of love and redemption are set in the lost rose garden of a vanished house called ‘Burnt Norton’; in Gloucestershire, where he met Emily Hale, the woman he loved and renounced, one day in 1932.
But my story is set in Sussex, because that’s where I live.
Only the images are real: the scraps of video-painting, etched in patterns of firing and partially-firing neurons, each of them ripe with the power to recall a whole world. These are the primary, uncontaminated records. Only these, nothing else. Everyone says I remember it well, but everyone is lying. People who have the innate ability to preserve, and distinguish, what was written in that code of hidden fire, from the tales we tell ourselves, are rare and hard to find. Em was not a natural: her trained brain had to try hard.
A huge, sleek, grey-brown beast, running low, filled the capture frame of her eyes right now. A very minor river on the world’s stage, but, like all rivers, the embodiment of departure; of forgetting, of flowing away. A white egret rose and settled again on the mud. Rivers don’t return, thought Em. Nobody returns. I’m back where I came from, but I’m not the little girl who left – and hopefully, as she mused on this predicament, a flush of emotion enhanced the P response for the receiver: attention!
Tom was telling her a story.
“There was a once a kid who was utterly convinced she could read minds. Not always, but sometimes. She kept this totally secret.”
“Wow. That must have taken its toll.”
Dune grass bent to brush gold-grey sand. Em climbed out of a shifting hollow and there was the English Channel, a cool long horizon-length of it, silver and blue and green; a silk scarf endlessly rolling, folding in on itself and rolling. She sat down, took off her shoes and poured sand back onto sand. What else could she offer to him? The shore was unexp
ectedly featureless, not a rock broke the tide. The sky was cloudless blank: brilliant sun dead overhead.
She was sending images, offering her world to the far away receiver, to test the commercial potential of their research. Why would anyone want an i/space phone? What’s the added value? Because it lets you see the world as it really looks to your lover’s eyes, or your mother’s or your friend’s… It had to be Em who did the sending, and Tom who did the receiving. Nobody had yet figured out how to get anyone to receive, unless they had a weird brain to start with. It was one-way, and even that was flaky. Today nothing was happening at all.
Em was a clumsy seeing-eye puppy, a Martian Rover failing to interface with Mission Control, trying to build neuronal connections that didn’t yet exist by using them. Like a new baby attempting to grab a rattle. Baby flaps her little hands, connects with toy by accident, then feels desire, and figures out how to do it on purpose.
It should work: because it did work, in early development, and the brain retains immense plasticity. But what market would there be, even if it worked like a dream, for new kind of phone that needs you to stick something called a “worm” in your eye? Better change that name. Call it an i/space contact lens. Except contact lenses are reassuringly inert—
There has to be an application, even for the hardest of hard physics – as long as your new explanation of the universe has the status of outsider-art. But right now they couldn’t even get the prototype i/space phone to work. Not even one-way, reliably. Lab conditions are deceptive, and faith is something you call truth until you’ve lost it.
“She grew up, she went to college, and then it was too much. She’d been a quiet girl, staying in the family circle. Trapped among her peers she was getting bombarded and couldn’t hide her distress. They sent her to a therapist, who listened to her, and decided there really was something unusual going on. She ended up agreeing to be tested for genuine telepathy, and she came good.”
“Fantastic for the Paranormal Research guys.”
The silk scarf rolled over and over, bubbles roaring and sunlight scintillating. It was important to talk, behind closed lips: talk and listen, keep those pathways open, and hope the worm does the rest—
“Dynamite. So that meant a lot more tough and tougher testing. She was taken apart, mentally and physically—”
“Not literally.”
“Not literally, and she wore it well. Just when they were breaking out the champagne, something clicked: a stupid possibility that had never been checked. She heard voices, you see, that’s how she received. It turned out she had fantastically acute hearing, to which she’d adapted unconsciously; she was completely unaware of it, and nobody knew. All her life she’d been picking up on people subvocalizing their thoughts, as we all do from time to time: articulating the words, without visibly moving our lips. No telepathy involved. D’you know the punchline?”
“I don’t recall this episode. Was it in the original X Files?”
“No, Em, this was real life.”
She felt a shock, a jolt on the graph—
“Okay, go on, hit me. What happened?”
“Mental breakdown. She went into schizophrenic fugue; never recovered. She may have killed herself in the end, I’m not sure. Ironic, huh? She’d lived with her burden, and even with the scientific scrutiny. She could take it, as long as she was a troubled superhero. When her weird power became a medical condition, shorn of the envelope of miracle, it was simply torture.”
A tiny starburst in the corner of Em’s eye warned that the signal had faded, no longer strong enough for what they were attempting. They both sighed, maybe with relief.
“I was about to log off, anyway,” he said. “Try and get some work done.” Tom’s work was not going well, he was blocked. Writer’s block.
“I have an appointment too. How about late this afternoon, my time?”
“Okay, I guess. Call me.”
Em licked the tip of her little finger, and applied it to the outer corner of her left eye. The worm, beckoned by chemical messengers in her saliva, slipped out obediently and clung to her skin, a bright fluorescent droplet, an exquisitely powerful piece of futuristic tech. She returned it carefully to its nutrient-bath case. But the worm itself was nothing. A cell phone you insert into your eye-socket, a ‘device’ that creeps through bone to pick up phonemes from a centre in the brain, instead of as vibrations in the air… Not yet big business, maybe never more than a marginal toy, even they could get the pictures to work. The science Tom and Em were trying to do was something else. Worlds beyond.
Suddenly she realised (dumb scientist!) that she’d missed the point of his story. She set the worm back in her eye at once and called her mother, the instigator of all this, in New York. She got through (no pictures!) but the boss was dismissive. Em was interrupting her busy day and Tom had left the building. Not that he was ever in the building. The experimental subject didn’t need to be strapped down and hooked up on the premises, no electrodes thrust deep into the grey matter; and he didn’t need a nursemaid. But at least Jane was in the same city.
“Mom, you’re not listening. He told me a story about a pseudo-telepath who committed suicide. Her superhero power was demystified, and she couldn’t take it. I’m certain he was talking about himself. I’ve had a feeling this was getting rough on him. I’m frightened. He’s a poet—”
“He’s a grown man, Emily,” said Jane, as if warning her daughter not to get too fond of a genetically engineered mouse. “He’s not some clinically deranged freak, which makes a pleasant change! He’s a highly respected writer who came to us as a volunteer, of his own free will, out of intellectual curiosity.”
“That’s the problem,” said Em. “I didn’t get it, but now I do.”
“Darling, could this wait? I’m sure Tom is fine. I have a meeting, and you have an important engagement too.”
“Okay,” said Em, defeated. “I’ll call you when we’re done.”
“Whatever time it is. And we’ll talk about Tom, too.”
The tiny English lanes bewildered her; like falling into a tangled ball of yarn. As she drove back to the village she could see the spire of the wrapped church nearly the whole time – a shard of glittering diamond, sometimes ahead, sometimes on her left, sometimes on her right; even glimpsed behind her once, in the rear mirror. As if it couldn’t decide where to settle: in the future or the past, or in some parallel universe. Luckily the hire car had good satnav.
Em was in England to observe an experiment – not directly related to her field trials with Tom, which were ongoing, opportunistic. The archaeologists had sent her away when she arrived, advising her to visit the seaside, which had turned out to be so beautiful; so bleak. The candy floss, donkey rides, fish and chips that Em thought she remembered must be elsewhere. In a theme park, probably… The team had made progress while she was gone. The giant isolation chamber, dulled from diamond to translucent grey by gathering clouds as Em left her car, was peripheral; the Command Shack was now the focus of operations. Final preparations for the descent had begun.
Ralph Dewey, a gaunt professor in a hairy tweed jacket, introduced her to the other ‘neuronauts’ (Ralph liked that word) who’d be making the descent with him: Lesley Hall, high-profile British Science TV presenter, and British i/space expert Chris Jones. Chris and Em were known to each other. Small world. They exchanged smiles with tight lips, across a chasm of opposing interpretation. Then Em had to be scanned, so they’d be able to ‘eliminate her from their inquiries’ later, as Dewey jovially put it. She stood in a tiny booth like a bathtub on end, a makeshift prop for Dr Who – to be captured and copied, stripped down to the 0s and 1s, an Em-diagram of pure information.
The team fizzed with anticipation; technicians fussed. Dewey showed Em the latest results shaken out of the remote-sensing data. The wrapped building, where they stood, was mainly early mediaeval; Eleventh to Twelfth century. The Void – detected deep under St Peter’s Sanctuary, during work on the ancient fo
undations – was some four thousand years older. Thickset shadows stood around her, projected in 3D from the remote imaging feed. Bowed under a weight of darkness they looked over her shoulders, brooding.
“You’re sure it’s a tomb?” asked Em, politely. She really didn’t have a clue about prehistoric underground constructions
“Almost certainly a Megalithic Portal Tomb! Most likely a family grave, so to speak; though as yet there’s no direct evidence of burials. It would have been covered by a mound, visible for great distances. That much we know, and very little more. Imagine the burial rituals. Oracle consultation. This is fantastically important, Emily. We’re on the brink of knowing. Not guessing, not constructing from inference, but knowing what went on in the most enigmatic of European ancient cultures. We’ll be reading their minds!”
The Command Shack was linked to St Peter’s porch by a wobbly umbilical tube. Em left the Brits to their fussing and crossed over. At the west end of the nave the i/bits model, a thousand years of 0s and 1s, danced on its flatbed. It was fascinating to see. Most of what the scan detected was modern, of course: but there were pockets of survival. Wisps of the Eighteenth Century clinging to the roof-tree. Mediaeval murmuring in a chapel alcove. Em thought of knapped flints, calcified sea urchins. Randomly resistant fragments made of the same stuff as the dust that held them, turned up by the plough of the scanning field from a vast silt of information. The material of time and space: endlessly transformed; rearranged—
A skinny, fashionably scruffy post-doc called Flossy had come with her, and stood by, offering commentary. The incredible number crunching that had already been done, the still-puzzling anomalies. “It’s just amazing,” Flossy said. “The model was a test-bed for the Void scan, but we’re leaving it here. The public will have access—”
BIG CAT: And Other Stories Page 6