The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1

by George Mann

  I indicate the brown leather chair facing my desk, and she lounges in it.

  “So what exactly is Kore?” I ask her.

  According to the file still on screen, Svelte is half-Serbian, half-Romanian. Her birth name was Svetlana but she uses the name Svelte from her time as a... turbo-folk singer. Her job description at Combi-Intel is Analysis Eastern Europe—she graduated in Politics and Economics from the University of Belgrade. Most economies in Eastern Europe are in a mess because of the hoops coming so soon after the upheavals of uniting with the West.

  Outside my tinted window, the Thames is as gray as my clothing. At rooftop level above Kensington and Chelsea, hoops hang leadenly in their dozens. If the sun were shining on this June morning, how the hoops would glitter, like huge bangles from boutiques.

  “Kore is tekky that samples and remixes the sounds of love-making,” says Svelte.

  “Hang on. Tekky. Samples. Remixes.” This Serbian-Romanian seems to have a bigger English vocabulary than I do.

  “Tekky is neo-techno music,” she explains. “You sample other bits of music or noise, using a synthesizer to distort. Take a source sound and make it something it never was. Kore uses fucking and coming as the source sounds.” Helpfully she spells source. Not sauce, no.

  From a crimson breast pocket emerges a memory stick, which I plug into the computer. An album cover comes on screen, depicting a dancing woman surrounded by flames. A fox mask hides the woman’s face. Groping, caressing hands of a multitude of hues, detached from their owners, cover most of the woman’s body. A patch of pubic hair and a nipple are exposed.

  “Oh, I see,” say I. “Kore as in hard-core.”

  “Isn’t digitized—hands are all painted on her.”

  “So it’s art. Patient woman. Must have taken ages.”

  The title of the album is Sighs and Cries. From Quantum Entanglement, the very group! Svelte is extremely well organized, and at only a half-hour’s notice. Her slimness, her extra height, her dark hair, just as Miriam was, till she left my life. Not that Miriam died, merely our relationship.

  THE MUSIC IS slick and smooth as sweaty skin but with a pulsing bass line, climax a long time coming, wailings looping around and around, wave after wave, sighs like choirs of angels in ecstasy:

  Ev-ery-thing you

  Ev-ery-thing you do

  You do, you do, you do

  Everything you say

  To me, to me, to me

  Everything you do to me

  Say to me do to me

  Is perfect perfect perfect

  Do to me say to me

  Perfect perfect perfect...

  “Sounds like a steal from Marlene Dietrich,” is my opinion. “‘You Do Something To Me.’“

  “No, someone really said those words while making love. The voice is like filtered, disguised, high-pitched. Sometimes gets overdone. Voice winds up six octaves like breathing pure helium, like almost ultrasonic, like something to get bats off on.”

  Could I even dream of phrasing anything of the sort in Serbo-Croatian or Romanian? Not even in English!

  Minimize the album cover away, resume CV. In her youth, Svelte was a favorite of the Milosevic regime. Turbo-folk was mystical nationalist music originally supportive of Milosevic and his gangsters, a primitivist blend of pop and folk and oriental sounds. Strong allegations of crime and drug trafficking—Svelte must have been obliged to get out of Serbia. She tidied up her act and dusted off her university degree and became one of our experts on Eastern European. Not to mention our expert on the music scene.

  “Do you know why I’m asking about Kore?”

  “Web chat says Quantum Entanglement gonna do a big Exprisonment gig. They’ll sample the noise the alien bees make, fuck about with the big bees’ hum and blast the mix at hoops or at the bees. Like, the Varroa fucked with us, so let’s fuck ‘em with music. That’s the idea.”

  Succinctly put. Pretty much what I was alerted to, fresh out of a meeting about the nuke the Chinese had set off. So far as satellite imaging can tell, the solitary alien hoop, which the Chinese nuked in the Gobi, was merely hurled several kilometers upward. Maybe some blast got through to the other side of the hoop.

  First shot in an interstellar war? Considering the size of a hoop, about a thousandth of a megaton may have got through, if any blast at all. No repercussions from the aliens, at least not as yet. We needed to do more than nuke a hoop? Damn the Chinese—they might have provoked anything.

  Svelte shrugs. “Only just found out. Can’t follow everything.”

  “You’re fast.”

  WHEN WE SPEAK of the aliens, precisely what do we mean? Precision is vital in intelligence. It’s important to regularly re-analyze what we think we know in case of some new interpretation. It can be fatal to make assumptions then stick to them.

  First of all, from nowhere, came the hoops. They appeared worldwide during a single day, tens of millions of them. Next came the Varroa, who—or which—used the hoops to arrive and exit. Is anyone—or anything—else involved about whom we know sod all?

  It only took a week for the myriads of hoops to bestow impediments upon the world’s population. A hoop would swoop. Of a sudden the targeted person found a cage around some part of their body. I need to keep my own left leg stretched out beneath my desk on account of my knee-cage.

  A transfixing bar holds an imped in place. In itself this doesn’t hurt, but woe betide anyone who has an imped removed by surgery or by DIY sawing. They’ll experience agony until a hoop gets round to renewing the affliction, maybe next day, maybe a week later.

  Hoops don’t swoop upon someone who’s up a ladder, say—they wait for a more suitable moment. Smart hoops. If you shut yourself up tight in your home, a hoop will appear as if by magic. Hoops are about a meter in diameter.

  Nothing we do affects them. Exotic substance, say scientists. Might be made of strings.

  Ah, I have just cottoned on: Exprisonment, the title of Quantum Entanglement’s proposed gig, is the opposite of imprisonment. We’re all confined by our impeds, all constrained, but at the same time we’re free to walk about. We’re exprisoned.

  “So,” I say to Svelte, “do we butt in on Quantum Entanglement and take charge of this hum-mix event? All sorts of measuring equipment on site? Or do we limit ourselves to observing? In which case,” as I appraise her clothing, “just how do we dress?”

  “Or undress.”

  “You mean literally?”

  “Some kids’ll go nude or scanty. Not most.”

  “Glad to hear it. Is this only for young people?”

  She shakes her head. “You get worked up by Kore with a friend of any age, or even on your own. It’s non-discriminatory, like sex for the disabled. Impeds looked like fucking the club and dance scene, like how do you dance with a box on your foot? Kore says fuck off to impeds.”

  “You mean there’ll be some sort of orgy?”

  “Some micro-orgies maybe, not mass writhing. There’s like a spiritual dimension, like an orgasm reaching heaven. Transcending the body, flying free.”

  “And Sighs and Cries was a response to impeds?”

  “No, Sighs and Cries came out a few months before the hoops. What QE are planning right now is their response to the hoops. They must’ve been sampling and mixing for months.”

  “High time to stick our noses in.”

  “Party time? Dude!”

  So THE VARROA come through the hoops. They look like giant bees, size of an electric toaster. Varrr-oh-aah, varrr-oh-aah—that’s the sound they make. A bit loud for wing beats. The noise suggests some kind of protective energy field, whatever that might be. Bee-ing as how we can’t catch a Varroa nor harm them in any way.

  There’s a terrestrial parasite named Varroa, which sucks the blood of our terrestrial bees. This enfeebles the bees. So they collect less pollen. So less honey gets made. After a few months, bye-bye hive. The Varroa and their hoops certainly impair human beings, so the name sticks.

 
The Varroa could be robots made by aliens (hitherto unseen), sent through the hoops to impair us and assess the effects.

  Those hypothetical aliens might be:

  softening us up for the real invasion—however, some ethics committee of alien races disapproves of brutal methods and awards Brownie points for ingenuity;

  making sex difficult so we’ll slowly go extinct; the birth rate is scarily down, vacant planet in another couple of centuries at the present rate (see invasion scenario, above);

  hampering us so that we don’t get above ourselves by suddenly making some scientific breakthrough such as developing interstellar travel and causing mayhem;

  practicing an art form;

  fill in your own guess.

  Many countries have sent smart little spy-flyers through hoops, though here in London we know of none that ever returned or transmitted any data back. SETI specialists—Searchers for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—try in vain to analyze the Varroa noise and communicate. Everything’s guesswork. Now here’s a different tack—the Kore people are going to carry out an innovative and maybe confrontational musical experiment. If they strike gold, wow. Let’s not spoil the spontaneity of the experiment. Sometimes there can be too much consultation. We’ll simply observe it, me and my Serbian who intrigues me—and of course we’ll need someone to video unobtrusively so we have audiovisual for the record. This’ll be on my own initiative. Hell, it’s only a music group. Nothing might come of this, then I’d be wasting resources, right?

  Before the hoops came and my left knee was caged, I was mainly liaising with the French security service about the Islamic terrorist threat. That’s how I met Miriam Claudel, six years ago now. That ended, and for the past two years there’s been no one else. I much prefer relationships to arise in the natural course of events rather than to go hunting.

  “THE STUDIO” IS the name for a nineteenth-century vicarage in Lambeth, converted and extended into a nursing home, which subsequently went bankrupt. With mucho money from American and Euro tours and a zillion sales, Benny Wallace and Trev Tate bought the place before the aliens arrived.

  It’s going to be club night there tonight—anything to keep our spirits up.

  A mild sunny evening, this fifth anniversary (in days) of my first meeting Svelte. I drive with the window down. My long denim skirt, its big pockets embroidered with swirls of daisies, laps pixie boots. White blouse, sleeveless denim bolero jacket. A bit Country Dance, but it takes all sorts. Alongside me, Svelte is in scarlet and black. In the back, Tony Cullen from Surveillance sports a box on his left hand—that’s his digicam disguised as an imped. His real imped is some sort of complicated groin truss. Consequently he doesn’t much like sitting, even on a commode chair at home, he told me. Usually, quote unquote, he sprawls on a sofa like a feasting Roman. Looks rather like a Roman, Tony does, with those crimped blond curls and eagle nose. He mustn’t see much gay action these days, what with his truss. He wears loose baggy fawn pants and an oversize cream sweater.

  There’s so much less traffic on the roads these days that the air almost smells sweet. Easy-peasy to park my disabled-adapted Volvo turbo-diesel on a street of shops; try finding a parking space in this part of London before the impeds. Walking half a mile with a knee-cage won’t be much fun but we’re being discreet.

  Out clamber Tony and I awkwardly. Svelte slides out and is instantly, gracefully upright. I admire her.

  The theory that we might all be atoning for something in our past by the type of impeds we wear is probably ridiculous. Must my leg be immobilized because I was captain of the hockey team at Oxford? Because Svelte was a singer, does she need an imped up near her vocal chords?

  Our pace along the street is determined by my need to swing my stiffened left leg in an arc. A hoop drifts overhead, ignored by most people. It’s easy to tell who’s heading for the party. Girl in a one-piece Spiderman bathing costume and short frilly skirt, her friend in black bra and panties, boots and cowboy hat. Girl wearing hot-shorts and an off-the-shoulder top, her knee-imped just like mine except it’s bright red. She must have painted or enameled the cage herself, which shows spirit. Various others.

  Svelte told me that Benny and Trev aimed to centralize studios for a half-dozen tekky groups, the idea being a synergistic commune all rubbing off each other while doing their own unique things. Wisdom was that you oughtn’t to live where your studio is because that way you’d become entrapped and not have a life, but as it turned out in the wake of hoops and impeds, The Studio provided a sort of sanctuary, an oasis. Some of the music made there is really demented, Svelte said with approval—such as the stuff by Psalms of Madness.

  We’re only interested in the original Quantum Entanglement band, which consists of Daniel and Sean and Alanjune—as those last two members call themselves, as though they don’t have separate identities. Maybe an imped locks Alan and June together nowadays—we’ll see.

  Passing a fish and chip shop, funky jazz drifts out along with the smells. A beautiful Chinese girl with long black hair is scooping chips out of a fryer. Personally I would put the hair up in a net in those circumstances. But oh, the hair partly hides her imped. A small red box—like a radio—is bonded to the side of her head. And that’s the source of the jazz! Does that box play all the time? How does she ever get to sleep? How isn’t she half insane? Yet she looks serene. Maybe she went deaf.

  “Sally, cop a look,” says Svelte. I’d told her to call me Sally—Miss Adamson would sound absurd at a gig.

  Generally one avoids gawping at abnormally impeded individuals, since basically we’re all in the same boat. However, the middle-aged woman crossing the street toward us is something else. Living impeds are rather rare, and that woman’s right forearm is a tortoiseshell cat.

  To be accurate, it’s most of a cat. Fused to the elbow-stump of the woman’s right arm, the animal lacks hind legs. She’s cradling the moggy against her chest, its front paws clinging to her shoulder, its tail flicking to and fro.

  “Imagine feeding it!” Tony is holding his boxed hand very steady—I think he’s filming the woman. At home, does he have a private video library of weird impeds? Heigh-ho, anything to keep sexuality alive and kicking.

  Imagine that poor woman kneeling patiently by Kitty’s food bowl, purring encouragingly. Imagine when the cat wants a crap.

  “What did she do to deserve that, eh?” says Tony. “Love her pet excessively?”

  “What did the cat do?” counters Svelte.

  We hush as the woman passes by.

  A lot of impeds seem arbitrary, while some do seem poignantly appropriate. So there’s the “snapshot” theory that the imped reflects what a person was thinking about at the exact moment of caging. People thinking banal thoughts received any old imped from stock; but obsessives tended to be thinking about their obsessions.

  “They’re practical jokers,” says Tony. “Somewhere in Varroa land, audiences are laughing their heads off and rolling in the aisles.”

  As if on cue, the noise intrudes: varrr-oh-aah, varrr-oh-aah-oh-aah, a wild wind rushing through trees, the sound of a giant bee flying. One of the Varroa comes cruising overhead, dangling scaly jointed legs, its glassy-looking wings beating fast. Yellow fur streaked with orange, black bulbous eyes, antennae like miniature antlers.

  “Sod off sod off!” a bloke shouts at it. He shakes his imped vengefully—a right-hand box. Most people look the other way.

  Rather higher in the sky, a passenger jet is descending across London toward distant Heathrow. That isn’t such a frequent sight as formerly. Tourism’s almost dead.

  A skinny black chap equipped with a full head-cage emerges from a newsagent. Cradling a toddler in his arms, he looks like a parody of an American football player. Of a sudden the black man legs it at quite a pace. Cottoned onto a Varroa in the neighborhood, did he? Whatever a daddy does, his child will receive an imped when it’s nearing a meter tall. Head-Cage is probably a bit nuts and is trying to stop his offspring from learni
ng to walk, so that the child never appears tall. Well, that won’t work, is the long and the tall of it. Long equals tall.

  A HIGH STONE WALL tipped by rusty spikes surrounds the grounds of the ex-rectory, ex-nursing home. Cedars, cypresses, and Scots pines rear up. At the gateway a couple of blokes stuff entrance money into the pockets of long, open leather coats. On account of his waist-cage, one of these collectors looks pregnant with some robot child, its curving spine and ribs and other metal bones wrapped around his bare midriff. The other fellow has a solid box on one foot—after a year, how the inside must stink.

  So NOW WE’RE heading up a long driveway through shrubbery—in company with teens and twenties mainly, a bass beat somewhere ahead of us. I’m wondering what homeowners in the area think about the noise, whenever there’s club night. Prior to the hoops, when people could get to gigs further afield, I guess no club nights happened here. Priorities have changed as to what annoys us. Tony covertly films a gorgeous black girl ahead of us wearing pinstripe pants cut into thin thongs exposing her ass and legs. Hand-cage resembling a medieval weapon. Maybe Tony isn’t gay. I don’t care a toss. I’d rather it was just Svelte and me here this evening, but there are proper ways to do things, as Tony’s presence reminds me.

  The black girl’s blonde friend sports a frilly skirt and a bulging grille of a metal bra, to the back of which is fixed butterfly wings of yellow muslin. I tell a lie—that bra is a breast-cage, which she has dolled up. Quite a crowd is heading for club night.

  A big marquee comes into view.

  “They’re brave, these kids,” says Svelte. “I admire them.”

  “Whistling while Rome burns,” says Tony.

  “You’re excited. Enjoy the view.”

  Grinning, Svelte says something that sounds like, “S’avem che bea shi fute!”