by Mike Ashley
I’ve tried to describe it, even to draw it, for the doctors and policemen who have questioned me since. It was a rat, but a big vat, maybe a metre tall, upright, with some kind of metal mesh vest over its upper body, and holding a silvery tube, unmistakeably a weapon, that it pointed at Amanda. Even as it appeared it opened its mouth wide – I saw typical rat incisors, just like Rutherford’s – and it screamed.
And it started to glow.
Amanda had told me how the scientists had hoped to detect the Pevatron’s miniature time machines by flashes of light: all the radiation that would ever fall on those wormholes, as long as they lasted, all pouring out at the moment of their formation. And right at the beginning of the affair Penny said the babies she found in the vacuum sphere were warm too, warm in their little bellies where the wormholes lay like tumours. Maybe there’s a limit to how much of that gathered radiation an organic time machine can stand – a limit to how far a much-evolved rat thing can throw itself back in time.
I think the post-rat that tried to attack Amanda knew this. It was sacrificing itself in a hopeless attempt to save its timeline. If so, it was a hero of its kind.
I saw it die. Light shone out of its mouth, its boiling, popping eyes, and then out through its flesh and singed fur, as if it exploded from within. I closed my eyes, thus probably saving my sight. When its body detonated I was knocked to the ground, burned. Amanda, closer, did not survive.
But she had pressed that damn button, and I felt a second concussion as her plastic explosive went up, and the quantum computer died.
When the Harwell security officers found us, shouting, cocking pistols, there was not a trace of that damn rat to be seen – and none of its swarming ancestors who had been under my feet moments before – nothing but the body of Amanda, and me with a head full of memories of the Pevatron rats that nobody else shares, not even Penny.
THE EDGE OF THE MAP
Ian Creasey
I’m a sucker for stories of lost worlds and lost races. There are still a few remote places on Earth that are unexplored, but the great stories of explorers encountering lost races in the Amazon jungle or in the centre of Australia or on a remote island are pretty much a thing of the past – though the TV series Lost is doing its bit in keeping the spirit alive. With a dearth of such stories you can imagine my delight when I first read this one. It’s not really a lost world story, not in the traditional sense. But that’s what’s so wonderful about it.
Yorkshire born-and-bred, Ian Creasey (b. 1969) has been selling stories to magazines and anthologies since 2002 but has yet to have a book of his own published – though surely that is only a matter of time. He is one of the most original and exciting talents to emerge in science fiction in recent years. This story was inspired by Creasey’s interest in Fortean phenomena and what might still survive in the wilds of the world.
SUSANNA LISTENED resentfully to the helicopters spraying nano-cams over the foothills. She kept her gaze locked on the plantation, rubbing her tense neck as she waited to get the shot. It was a long time since she’d filmed her own footage. She fiddled with the controls on her ancient glasses, practising framing the scene, zooming in, panning back for a wide angle.
“How long will this take?” asked Ivo. “This isn’t what I’m here for. We need to head off soon.” In her peripheral vision, she saw him twitch restlessly as he kept glancing in all directions, like a nervous bird in a garden full of cats.
“I want to film a few things before I’m finally obsolete,” Susanna said. “It shouldn’t be long now.” She saw no sign of movement downhill. The cannabis plants, which had grown four metres tall in the African sun, might still harbour a few defiant hippies. Should she move along the ridge for a better angle?
A bar of green light split the sky in two. The crack of ionized air rolled across the mountain like a manmade thunderbolt. Susanna adjusted her glasses, zooming in to focus on the flames. The smell of burning cannabis rose up the hillside.
She gave the glasses to Ivo, then walked a few steps down the hill. “Keep looking at me, but film as much fire behind me as you can.”
Ivo donned the glasses with little enthusiasm. He brushed aside the fringe of his ash-blond hair, then gave her a perfunctory thumbs-up sign.
Susanna stood up straight, took two deep breaths, and raised her voice over the crackle of flames. “As the Blind Spot shrinks, more secrets are revealed.” Another zap echoed around the hills. “When the nanocams found a drugs plantation, American satellites fried it.”
A gust of wind fanned aromatic smoke toward her, and Susanna suppressed a tickle in her throat. She wiped her brow with a sponsored sweatband. “I can smell the burning from here. With the sun and the fire and the lasers from the sky, I’m roasting like an ant under a magnifying glass.” She included these sensory details to emphasize that she reported from the spot, unlike all the bloggers who’d comment on the nanocam footage from the comfort of their own homes.
“In the last few days, soldiers have arrested dozens of terrorists as soon as the cams spotted them. But who else – and what else – is still out there?” She left a dramatic pause before signing off. “This is Susanna Munro reporting from Zaire.”
Now she let herself cough volcanically. Her eyes watering, she stumbled up the bare slope, following Ivo to his battered Land Rover.
The vehicle, parked in the shade of a huge rock, was a blessed harbour from the heat and smoke. Ivo started the engine and turned up the air-conditioning, then returned her glasses with a grimace of distaste.
“Thanks,” said Susanna, smiling. “They won’t bite you.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Ivo said, and she felt that he only barely refrained from adding “old chap”. Despite the heat, he wore a formal shirt and waistcoat as if he were starring in a twentieth-century movie about a nineteenth-century explorer.
Susanna played the recording. The obsolete glasses pixellated the image on zoom shots, and Ivo had jiggled his head while filming her. But the segment was usable. Watching her spiel, she winced at the sight of her grey hair. The last time she had used these glasses – or their backup system – her hair had been Pre-Raphaelite red. And in those days, simple moisturiser had kept wrinkles at bay. Throughout the past week she had felt the tropical sun beating through her high-factor sunblock, scouring crevasses in her skin, tanning it like old leather.
But that hardly mattered now. There would be no more stories after this one, no more despatches from the field. The advancing nanocams made images accessible to everyone, and frontline journalism redundant.
A black helicopter roared overhead, spraying its invisible cargo. Inside the Land Rover, both their comps beeped to signal Net access. Susanna plugged in her glasses, uploading all the footage recorded this morning and last night – when the doomed hippies had got high for the last time, vowing that the Man could have their joints when he pried them from their cold dead hands. She sent the update to various channels she freelanced for, then began scanning her mail.
Ivo interrupted. “That’s where we’re going,” he said, pointing to a map on his laptop screen. An overlay showed nanocam coverage at ninety-eight per cent, and the Blind Spot shrank by a few more pixels as she stared. “Are you ready?” he asked. “Forward, forward, let us range.”
Susanna hesitated, thinking of the desperate criminals who could still be out there, hiding from the advancing cameras. If she met them, she might be giving them their last chance to commit rape, torture, murder.
And yet this was her last chance too, her last opportunity for an old-fashioned scoop, here in the continent where scoops began when New York Herald reporter Henry Stanley said, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
She nodded. “Let’s go.”
Ivo revved the engine, and the Land Rover shot forward into the glare of the sun. Susanna’s comp chirped indignation as they left the Net behind and re-entered the Blind Spot. She read the mail she’d downloaded. Her husband had sent a Happy Birthday message,
in case she stayed out here another week. Her daughters were baking cookies – chocolate for Michelle, and almond for Vanessa. In the background the kitchen looked like chaos, as always, and she saw Toby scooping chocolate dough from an abandoned mixing bowl.
Susanna took off her glasses, and put them in the pocket of her once-white blouse, now stained with sweat and smoke and dust. The children, she thought. The children were one reason she had stopped chasing stories across the globe. But it wasn’t just that. It had seemed a promotion to become the anchorwoman in the studio, to become an armchair pundit filing expert opinions from home. And yet as the nanocams spread, everyone became a pundit. Anyone could bookmark footage and post comments, edit montages and record a voiceover. Susanna had once been proud to call herself a journalist, but the label meant nothing now.
Well, the bloggers weren’t out here, breathing the parched air, clutching a broken seat-belt as the Land Rover bumped over stones and fallen branches. There was hardly any trail, just a network of goat tracks and dry stream-beds. Ivo zigzagged up the mountain, leaving the contour-hugging helicopter behind. The nanocams could only advance slowly and methodically, needing to knit together in a network. From their inception as an anti-terrorist measure in the USA, they had spread remorselessly across the world. War and disease had kept this remote corner of Africa clear, a haven for the hunted, but now the last Blind Spot would disappear – Ivo’s laptop predicted – in less than two days.
She watched Ivo drive. Every few minutes he turned his head for a sudden glance out of the side window, as though trying to catch something by surprise.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“We’ve been through this already,” he said. “I’m not telling you what could be out there. The power of suggestion might make you imagine anything I mentioned. I’m bringing you because I need an independent pair of eyes. You’re the journalist – shouldn’t you see for yourself?”
Susanna thought of pressing him, but decided to wait. Sometimes silence created its own pressure. People gripped by an obsession – and Ivo’s had brought him to the remotest corner of the Earth – could rarely shut up for long.
But he didn’t speak again until the Land Rover crunched to a halt. Susanna hopped out and helped Ivo heave a dead shrub from their path. She swallowed hard, trying to relieve the pain in her left ear. They had climbed many hundreds of metres, but even in the thin air, the midday sun still broiled the landscape. The rocky hillside, pockmarked with tufts of dry grass, felt hot through her shoes, as if the long-extinct volcano plotted a comeback.
Ivo said, “Can you see anything?”
She paused and looked around. Bar the Land Rover, she saw no sign of human presence. The only movement came from a single bee darting between small purple flowers.
“Can you see anything in the corner of your eye?” Ivo asked. “Can you feel anything brushing past you – running from the nanocams ‘like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’?” He spoke with the intensity of a true believer, though she still hadn’t figured out precisely what he believed in.
“Maybe you inhaled too much of that burning dope,” said Susanna. She hoped this might sting him into saying more, but he only shrugged and joined her back in the Land Rover.
They crawled on, stopping more frequently as the slope grew rugged. Eventually a huge jumble of boulders halted their progress.
“From here, we walk,” said Ivo.
Susanna rummaged in her holdall. “Coke?” she offered.
Ivo stared in disbelief. “Where did you get this? There’s not a bar or a vending machine in 200 kilometres.” When he opened the can, froth spurted out and soaked him with cola.
They both laughed. “Sorry,” said Susanna. “I guess we’re pretty high up. And you just wasted about a hundred dollars worth of Coke, by the way. Some guy airlifted it all in and charged me $1000 for a six-pack.” She tried to ease open her own can, and relieve the pressure gradually, but she only succeeded in spraying foam out of the window. Bubbles hissed as they fell on the Land Rover’s sun-heated metal.
“Unless the forex markets just exploded, that’s a lot of money for Coke.” Ivo wagged a finger in mock disdain. “And it’s not even chilled!”
“Yeah . . .” She sighed. “It was my little nostalgia trip. Back in the old days, when there were dozens of reporters chasing every story, we used to compete to see who could get the most outrageous item through expenses.” She remembered Pink-Slip Pete, the BBC veteran who’d mentored her through early assignments. He would have applauded the $1000-Coke, and topped it with some ludicrously expensive taxi or minibar tab. Pete had died before the newsroom started sourcing all their pictures from the nanocams.
Ivo clinked his can with hers. “Cheers.” He started checking the contents of his rucksack. “Are you going to hump your bag up the rest of the hill?” he asked.
Susanna frowned. “How far is it?”
“The more you carry, the farther it’ll feel.”
She hefted the holdall, which contained exactly what she used to pack in the old days. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
“Fair enough.” Ivo pointed to her blouse pocket. “But you’re leaving those behind.”
Susanna pulled out the thick-framed glasses. “These? Why?”
“Because they’re a camera. Okay, they’re not the nanocams, but they’re a camera nonetheless. Why do you think I’m here in the Blind Spot?”
“I don’t know. You won’t tell me what you’re looking for.”
“No . . . but the reason I’m looking here is that there are no cameras. Not yet, anyway.” Ivo looked up, as if to check for helicopters, but silence shrouded the mountain. “And that’s why you can’t bring your glasses.”
“But I’m a journalist,” Susanna said. “When I find the story, I need to film it.”
“Ah, but what I’m looking for can’t be filmed.”
She turned to stare at him. “Run that by me again.”
Ivo drained his can of warm Coke. “In ancient times,” he began, “when people made maps, they wrote ‘Here Be Dragons’ at the edge, and drew sea-monsters in the ocean. Over the centuries the dragons got pushed back and back.
“Even in the scientific era, people still saw strange sights. Giant apes, rains of frogs, lights in the sky, fairies at the bottom of the garden. All sorts of stuff, but with one thing in common – they didn’t show up too well on film. When the nanocams blanketed North America, you didn’t hear much about Bigfoot any more.
“So there are two possibilities. Anyone who ever saw anything weird was mistaken or lying – or all those weird things retreated from the cameras, just as expanding civilization has always made wildlife retreat.”
“Or die out,” Susanna said.
“Cheery soul, aren’t you?” said Ivo. “Yes, many creatures have died out. But wildlife isn’t all extinct. And there were so many different weird things, they can’t all have died, just as those witnesses can’t all have been wrong.”
“So we’re looking for Bigfoot?” she said, pleased to have finally winkled out Ivo’s obsession, and a little amused by it.
He shook his head. “I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned anything specific. No, unless Bigfoot managed to swim all the way across the Atlantic, it seems unlikely he’s here – if he ever existed. The same applies to most of what used to be called the unexplained, before the nanocams showed exactly how rains of frogs occurred.
“But if there’s anything left, if there’s just one single weird thing left in the world, it’s right here. The nanocams have driven it back and back, and now the Blind Spot is the edge of the Earth. And that’s why you can’t bring your camera-glasses. The weird is like a superimposed state in quantum mechanics – when you record it, you destroy it.” He said the last sentence as if it made sense.
“So you invited a journalist along, and now you’re asking her to leave her camera behind?”
“‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen’ – but what if it can
only blush unseen by mechanical eyes?”
“Then I wonder what it has to hide.” Yet Susanna felt sympathetic to Ivo’s bizarre request. Journalism wasn’t just about taking pictures, otherwise she could have stayed home and let the nanocams get the footage. Journalism was about being on the spot, talking to the locals, getting the real story rather than just a picture of it. Yes, she could leave her glasses behind.
After all, she still had her backup system.
“Okay,” she said, putting her glasses into the Land Rover’s glove compartment. “Let’s go.”
They clambered over the boulders that had blocked the vehicle’s ascent, and then began trudging the rest of the way up the mountain. Susanna kept transferring her holdall from one shoulder to the other, in ever-diminishing intervals as the weight grew harder to bear. She wanted to rush to the top, to get the climb over with, but found herself panting for breath in the thin air. She felt dizzy, and saw black spots floating in her vision.
Were they what Ivo was looking for? When she asked, he smiled and shook his head. “You’re just trying too hard, using too much energy. It’s easier if you take small steps.” He demonstrated walking with tiny heel-to-toe steps that Susanna remembered from childhood games.
“Let’s catch a yeti, hitch a ride,” she said.
Ivo disdained to reply, and climbed onward. She followed him, grateful for the nanobots maintaining her osteoporosis-stricken bones. The sun descended the empty sky.
Susanna only noticed that Ivo had stopped when she bumped into him. “Take a rest,” he said. “From here it’s easier.”
They’d reached the rim of the ancient volcano. Before them a vast lake stretched as far as Susanna could see. She sat on her holdall, too tired to even speak. Ivo, ten years younger, looked just as glad to take a breather. She watched him staring out into the lake, and wondered what he had expected to find. Only windblown ripples broke the surface.