Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  And I leave him like that, gaping at me in astonishment and fear. I surf the consequence wave into the new realtime. I’m not afraid, it is exhilarating. I watch him make his choice, the right choice, stamping on the syringe, breaking it.

  Gabriel lives. He goes on to record Paradise Unglimpsed, which charts high. Then goes on to record his next album. People flock to his gigs. They hear his songs and sing them loud.

  Changes flood out from the wave. Multiplying. The changes carry his message of love and hope with them, spilling right across the world. The difference builds and builds.

  Until the Reading Rock Festival in ‘77. Thousands of happy people sailing across a sea of mud swirl around me. The consequence means it’s now Gabriel Ivins who headlines on Sunday night, not the Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

  My mother is in the crowd, her arms raised above her head, swaying from side to side as she chants Gabriel’s anthem: Beyond a Dream. Absorbing the love he evokes. Questions about the way we live are kindled in her deepest thoughts. But she doesn’t meet dad there. The consequence has put him somewhere else.

  And I’m witnessing the world I want born. It is the most exquisite moment I know. Ten simple honest songs, my gift as I am unborn –

  Beyond the Heliopause

  Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

  As soon as the recorded message pinged in her peripheral vision she accepted and listened to the call on her cochlear implant. “Suzanne, I need to see you. It’s urgent. I... well, I’ll tell you when I see you. All my love.”

  She was in a borrowed apartment in Paris, finishing a piece about corruption in the European Parliament. She rounded the story off with a couple of vox pops and some infographics, squirted the file to her editor in London, and then forwarded it to her street team to get the social buzz going.

  Folding her screen away, she sat back and replayed her father’s message, but she didn’t pick up anything new from his words or tone. Then she booked a seat on the noon flight from Orly to Stansted and took a taxi to the airport. She would be in the sleepy Suffolk village of Little Tinningham, if all went well, before the early December sunset.

  Her father had sounded weary. If the call had been from anyone else she would have replied instantly, but her father hated his days to be interrupted by ‘importunate calls’, as he called them – even from loved ones.

  She wondered why he needed to see her so urgently.

  Suzanne looked away from the window as the jet took off. Across the aisle she saw a big, silver-haired man in his forties, and for a second she thought it was Charles. She even wondered what her ex-husband was doing back on Earth when the man turned to speak to the hostess and she realised her mistake. She felt a surge of relief, sat back and closed her eyes as the take-off forced her back into the seat.

  She summoned a retinal menu and selected a news channel. Thoughts of Charles made her wonder how the Heliopause Project was progressing. Two years ago there had been nothing else on the science and technology newsfeeds but the joint Europe-US mission to send a scientific research station out beyond the orbit of Pluto – to map the vast universe beyond, as the pop-hacks termed the project. Since then, the news had dried up.

  Sometimes, in her more paranoid moments, Suzanne wondered whether Charles had used the project as an excuse to leave her. He’d been offered the directorship of the mission: an offer too good to refuse, he’d told her, and almost off-handedly added, “And anyway, you and me... our relationship... it was never going anywhere–”

  “Never going anywhere’? My God. We’re married... Doesn’t that mean a damned thing to you? I love you, Charles!”

  He’d smiled his insufferably arrogant smile and said, “No, Su, you just think you do.”

  And so he walked out of her life for ever.

  Stansted was as busy as Orly, but a few minutes after taking a taxi from the airport – as they left the A120 and took a B road north to Suffolk – she was staring out across open fields and peaceful villages consisting of clusters of thatched cottages. She tried to visit her father every month and, as always, it was like going back in time to an earlier, more innocent age. She could forget the modern world, the ceaseless influx of information, forget the space race that saw the superpowers staking claim after claim to chunks of Mars, Venus, and individual asteroids – switch off her implant and for two days at a time enjoy the company of her father. He was nearing ninety, and she knew that her visits would one day end.

  She wondered if these trips were nothing more than a reversion to her childhood, a reaction to her husband’s leaving her. When she had been with Charles her visits had been far less frequent but then, when he left, they had saved her sanity. Her father’s company and the village where she had grown up were a refuge, a haven of familiarity and reassurance in a brash and complex world.

  Half an hour after leaving Stansted, Little Tinningham appeared through the mist, a collection of ghostly houses, a church steeple and, next to it, her father’s rambling thatched house. An orange light showed in a small downstairs window, and she knew he’d have a log fire blazing.

  She paid the driver and hurried inside.

  Over a dinner of minestrone soup followed by roast beef, prepared by her father’s housekeeper, he asked her about her work. She told him about the recent conferences she’d attended and the corruption piece she’d finished that day.

  Her father was a tall, perilously thin man, stooped and grey. His dog collar, which he still wore even though he’d retired as a Church of England rector twenty years ago, hung loose on his wattled neck. Suzanne thought he looked ill since her last visit, and lacked energy. He ate a small meal slowly, without appetite.

  He suggested a brandy after dinner and they sat in the front room before the roaring fire. This was Suzanne’s favourite room in the house. She imagined the previous inhabitants warming themselves here on long winter’s nights: Elizabethans, Stuarts and Georgians... right up to the present day. The house was over five hundred years old and the sense of history in the air was like a physical presence.

  During a lull in the conversation – her father had been bringing her up to date on the doings of various villagers, and for a time he had seemed his old, animated self – she sipped her brandy and asked, “You said you wanted to see me urgently. Is something...” She had been about to say ‘wrong’, but she paused and her father interrupted.

  “I know you don’t believe, Suzanne.” He smiled. “What did you once say? That you haven’t a spiritual bone in your body?”

  “I’ve always been impressed that you never tried to make me believe. Never. I respect you for that, you know?”

  He sighed. His fingers, curled around his brandy glass, seemed as white as bone. His eyes regarded the flames. “Well, you were right.”

  She blinked at the discontinuity in the conversation. “About?”

  “About the idea of a God. There really is nothing... nothing... is there?” His gaze remained on the dancing flames.

  Suzanne felt sick. Her father’s faith had been his rock, his foundation. She could not imagine how he might exist without it.

  “What makes you say that?”

  He lifted his gaze from the fire and looked at her. “I’ve lost my faith, Suzanne. I look back and think of all the years I believed. I wonder what sustained me. I wonder why I believed, what gave me faith. It was an inner conviction, something as elemental within me as my... as my life blood. And it is as if that life blood, that faith, has suddenly drained away, leaving nothing. A terrible emptiness.”

  He looked back at the fire, gripping his glass tightly.

  She felt tears sting her eyes. She shook her head. “But why, so suddenly?”

  He gave a weary smile. “But it wasn’t sudden, Suzanne. It happened years ago, little by little, a gnawing doubt. The diagnosis...”

  The word pierced her like an arrow. “Diagnosis’?”

  He drew a heavy sigh. “I’m old, Suzanne. We can’t expect to live for ever. They found a tumour d
uring my last check-up.” He tapped his balding skull. “Up here. Inoperable. They give me three to six months. I’m sorry, Suzanne. I... I didn’t want to tell you, but that wouldn’t have been fair, would it?”

  She set her glass aside, rose and crossed to the settee where he sat. She held his hand in silence, words beyond her. She felt his old bones, his frailty, smelled his old man odour.

  She gripped his hand and said, “Perhaps the tumour…e laughed. “What? Do you think the tumour might be responsible for my loss of faith? You know better than that. Anyway, according to the specialist it’s only been there for a year at most. My doubt began long before that.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, and wondered if she was referring to his illness or his doubt.

  “I really believed the whole Christian offering, you know? The reward of Heaven for the virtuous. Now...” He sighed. “Now, it feels like a weight has lifted, being able to say these things aloud.”

  “It’s been your life,” said Suzanne. “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Some,” he said. “Do you know what I miss most? The notion that we were created for some purpose... That all this–” he gave a brief wave of the hand, a simple gesture which conveyed so much more “–is not for nothing.”

  She had no answer to that. She sat gripping her father’s hand and stared into the flames.

  The following morning, the glow on the beamed ceiling of her bedroom told her that the forecast snow had fallen during the night.

  She slipped out of bed and stood before the tiny mullioned window. She looked out over a landscape transformed, softened. Snow covered the lane and the rolling fields beyond, relieved only where vertical surfaces resisted its attention and showed black: tree trunks and stone walls. A dazzling sun hung low in the east.

  She would have breakfast and then go for a long walk.

  Her father was already up, and it was as if their conversation of the night before had never occurred. He was bright and alert over toast and coffee, chattering away about the Christmas Lights committee, of which he was chairman.

  After breakfast she asked him if he was up to a hike, but he held up an old hardback book, a detective novel dating from the last century. “Mrs Humphries has built a fire. I’ll spend the morning reading, Suzanne.”

  She wrapped up well and set off. The morning was bitter cold but bright; frost had created a crust on the snow and thick panes like shattered glass over puddles in the lane. She climbed a stile and set off over the rising meadow opposite her father’s house. The snow was a virgin expanse, not yet marred by footprints.

  Fifteen minutes later, at the crest of the rise, she turned and stared down at the village nestling, impossibly tranquil, in the fold of the hills. She pictured her father in his chair by the fire, rug over his lap, absorbed in his whodunit.

  Tears found tracks down her cheeks, stinging in the freezing wind. She dashed them away with the back of her gloved hand and set off again.

  Her father was eighty-nine; he’d had a long, rewarding life. But, she realised later as she rounded the wood where she’d played as a girl, and approached the village from the east, it was not his imminent death she was mourning as much as the announcement of his lost faith.

  He should have been able to go in peace, she thought, comforted by the belief in an omnipotent Creator in whom he had believed all his life. And yes, she was very aware of the irony in a humanist mourning the loss of another’s belief.

  As she turned into Church Lane, she saw a big black Lexus pulled up outside her father’s house.

  Two tall figures, garbed in black suits, stood on either side of the car and stared at her as she approached.

  Confused, she thought at first that something had happened to her father. She hurried up the lane, then realised that she was wrong. These men were nothing to do with the medical profession.

  “Ms Lingard?” one of them enquired as she approached. “Ms Suzanne Lingard?”

  “Yes?” She stopped in the lane, staring from one man to the other. “What is it?”

  “You’re offline. We’ve been trying to contact you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “We’re with the Heliopause Project,” said the man to her right.

  Her heart thudded as if her blood had turned to molasses. “And?”

  “And we have an urgent communiqué,” said the man to her left.

  Urgent. That word again. “From...?” she asked, but she knew very well who it was from. What she wanted to know was why?

  “If there is somewhere we could be private?”

  She showed them into the house, past the room where her father would be reading and into the library. The men stood before the empty hearth and one of them said, “If you could reconnect to the ’net, Ms Lingard?”

  She did so, her peripheral vision pinging with a dozen missed calls. She silenced them, dismissed the retinal menu, and stared at the men.

  “Very well.”

  “We’ll be waiting outside the room,” one of them said. “This is for your information only.” He nodded, and a figure appeared before Suzanne.

  She moved to the table, reached out to steady herself. She noticed the men slip from the room; the door clicked shut behind them.

  Her ex-husband stood before her, only the slight pixilation at his extremities belying the fact of his physical presence. He had aged; his hair was greyer, his face a little heavier. He’d never been one to mask his imperfections with virtual overlays; she’d give him that.

  For a second she thought that this was a real-time interactive communiqué, then realised her mistake. The distance would have made that impossible.

  If he were still beyond the heliopause...

  He spoke, and she was relieved to see that it was a recording.

  “Su, I hope you’re well, and I hope you’ll hear me out and not shut this down or walk out... though I’d fully understand if you did. I’m sorry for what I did, back then. The thing is, I’d like to make amends.” He raised a hand. “Hear me out,” he went on, anticipating her reaction. She pulled out a chair, dropped into it, and stared at her ex-husband’s avatar.

  “I’m beyond Pluto on the research vessel. I won’t beat about the bush. We’ve found something. Something big.” He smiled, as if his words were ironic. “It will change everything – everything we know about everything. I’d like you to come out and meet me here. I’ll show you what we’ve found, and then you can break it to the world. I’ve cleared this with our backers, and they’ve conducted all the requisite security checks on you.” He smiled. “I know it’ll never really make up for what I did, Su, but it’s the only way I can think of to apologise.”

  He waited a second, then went on. “You’d leave right away, with Jeffries and Usher, for the spacefield at Utrecht. From there you’d take a shuttle to orbit, and then a cruiser out to the heliopause. Journey time, a little under a week. I’d show you around here for a day, maybe two, then you’d return with your scoop. After that... well, you’d be in demand, let me assure you of that.” He laughed. “I hope you accept. Just tell Jeffries and Usher, and you can be on your way.” He lifted a hand. “Goodbye, Su.”

  His image vanished. She heard a discreet cough behind her. She’d never even heard the pair enter the room.

  She stared at them.

  The Heliopause Project had found something, something big.

  “Well, Ms Lingard?”

  “I need a little time to talk this over with my father.”

  “We can give you thirty minutes, but the schedule is tight.”

  She brushed past them, hurried along the warped passage to the front room, knocked and entered.

  Her father looked up, smiled, and laid aside his detective novel. “Is something wrong?” he asked, his smile faltering.

  She knelt before him, took his hand and said, “Something’s happened out there, with the Heliopause Project. I just had a call from Charles. He wants me to go out there, report on it.”

  She explained w
hat Charles had said.

  For a fraction of a second she saw fear in his eyes. “For how long?”

  “A little over two weeks.”

  He smiled. Relieved, she thought. He gripped her hand. “And do you want to go?”

  Did she want to see Charles again, he meant.

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Then go, Suzanne. It’s an opportunity you’d be a fool to pass up.”

  “I’ll come straight back to you,” she said. “You’ll be the first person I’ll tell about what I find, I promise.”

  He echoed her words. “It will change everything we know about everything...” he said.

  She lifted her father’s frail hand and kissed his fingers.

  She started to drip feed the story from the shuttle flight to Utrecht, warning her networks and street team that she was going to have some downtime for the next couple of weeks, and hinting that Christmas was going to bring something big this year.

  Her editor called almost immediately, wanting to know what was going on. “I don’t know,” she told her. “Something big is all I can say. You just have to trust me, like you did with Jencke, okay?” The Jencke story had won her the first of her European Press Awards, six years ago, and it was guaranteed to win pretty much any argument with her editor on the rare occasion she felt the need to wheel it out. “Could you get Nikki to cover for me?”

  “Nikki’s on a break to finish her new documentary,” said her editor. “Seems like everyone wants a long Christmas this year.”

  There was only one other person waiting in the executive lounge at Utrecht when Suzanne arrived, escorted by Jeffries and Usher.

  “Nikki? Is that you? I thought you had a documentary to edit?”

  “Suzanne?”

  The women approached each other, kissed cheeks and hugged, then stepped back like wary animals.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Nikki asked. She was short, with spiky dark hair and cheeks that tended to pinkness like those of a china doll. “I thought I had an exclusive...”