INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (6 page)

Mary’s passport goes on insisting that she hasn’t been born yet, that she will not in fact be born for another twenty years.

Sometime towards dusk, I retrieve some of Mary’s old newspapers from the waste basket. They are old and damp and brittle but still mostly intact. I lay them carefully on the bed and smooth them flat.

It is the dates as much as the stories that make my head spin.

More than at any time since leaving my village, I feel I am on the verge of losing my mind.

It is long past midnight. I realise I have not eaten, not since the samosa. There is a packet of stale pita bread, tucked into one of the drawers of my poor monster of a dressing table. I lie on my back on the bed, chewing on pita crust and trying to understand what the newspapers and the passport and the new-looking mobile telephone are telling me. The thoughts circle and collide inside my head, travelling many miles but always returning to this same conclusion which, even if it is impossible, is the only one that makes sense.

Mary Eleanor Truelove is from the future.

Of course she is, dumbass
, says Marielena.
What took you so long?

But that’s not possible, I murmur.

Why not? When you’re running for your life, the impossible and the possible sometimes switch places. You of all people should understand that
. She brushes back a stray strand of hair.
Anyway
, she says.
No one hides herself away in this shithole unless she has to
.

Finally, at around two o’clock, I fall asleep.

I wake to bright daylight. My father’s old stopwatch informs me it is two minutes to eleven. My first thoughts are of Mary, that she will be wondering where her trolley is, that she will be worried. I quickly wash and dress, then set out with the shopping cart, trundling it along Davenport Street in the direction of the Rowntree Road underpass.

When Mary comes to the door, I barely recognise her. The awful coat is gone and she has washed her hair. She looks younger, more like the woman in the passport photograph.

“Noah,” she says. She glances over my shoulder, looking for the trolley, which is parked by the kerb.

“I can hang on to it, if you like,” I say. “If you want to stay here another night, I mean?”

She shakes her head. “I’ll be all right.” She comes out on to the step. “Thank you for helping me.” She takes my face between her hands and kisses me, presses her lips against my mouth in a way that is intimate and so familiar. Familiar from the nights in the mountains, when the air was filled to bursting with the sound of crickets, perfumed with the entwined scents of incense and
retsina
. Marielena would come to me then, she would throw herself upon me like a maenad. I smelled the blood on her hands and did not care.

I would fall asleep to the sound of my poems, thudding on the walls of my skull like the hoof beats of mustangs.

“There’ll be good news for you today,” Mary says. Her hands and nails are clean and her hair smells of apple shampoo. “You mustn’t let those people get to you. Not ever. You’re stronger than they are.”

I want to ask her about her passport but I don’t quite dare.

“Where will you go?” I say instead.

“Not the canal. Not yet, anyway.” She laughs. “Don’t worry about me. The city will be safe for some time yet. But if I want to try and help change what is coming, it has to be now. That’s why I came back here. Do you understand?”

“You mean the things in the newspapers?”

“There are no newspapers, not any more.” She smiles wistfully. “Only in museums.”

When I arrive back at Davenport Street, I find the post has been delivered. On the table in the hallway there is a long, brown envelope, stamped with the initials and logo of the Border Agency. It is addressed to me.

I take it to my room, and place it on the polished glass kidney-shaped surface of my comrade the dressing table.

It is some time before I find the courage to open it, but in the end I do.

***

Nina Allan’s TTA Novella
Spin
won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction in 2014, and was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella. Her first novel,
The Race
, set in an alternate south east England, is available now from NewCon Press, and is reviewed in this issue. Nina lives and works in rural North Devon.

2014 BSFA AWARD WINNER

“Nina Allan’s reimagining of the Arachne myth, with its receding overlays of the modern and the antique, creates a space all its own. The scene is clean and minimal, the light Mediterranean, the story seems musing and sad: but by the last two pages, Spin has you in a grip that persists long after you put it down”

—M. John Harrison

“The writing is precise, the imagery vividly sensual; by reimagining ancient myth in a stunningly realised alternate Greece, Nina Allan traps you in a web of story”

—Paul Kincaid

“Allan’s prose is as adaptable as her juggling of SF and mythical materials: finely observed and realistic when it needs to be, lyrical when it begins to focus on romance and self-discovery. It’s an elegant, quiet, and quite satisfying fable”

—Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Expertly weaves SF, fantasy and mythology into a subtle, seamless, dreamlike whole. I loved it”

—Neil Williamson

“This is why we have novellas, to let stories unroll at their own pace, to give us Layla’s long journey by bus with her embroidery hoop across the Peloponnese, the encounter with the old woman, the drink from a spring of mountain-cold water, the African hotel clerk in Corinth. Journeys mean something in a story like this one. They shouldn’t be rushed. They should be full of places, of encounters: With the young man afflicted with a curse. A fascinating epic poem on which Layla bases her newest work. The masterpieces of ancient sibyls, catching dust in the museum. Spiders weaving in the sunlight, busy at their work. The details so clear, so well-chosen”

—Lois Tilton, Locus Online

“If you’re looking for an extraordinary and beautifully written story that will charm you, you’ve just found it. Spin is perfect entertainment for SFF readers, combining science fiction, fantasy and mythology. Excellent!”

—Rising Shadow

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JAY O’CONNELL

Illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey

I contemplated the unfinished piece dominating the studio corner of my studio apartment. Six foot two inches of swirling curvilinear blackness speckled with pinprick points of light, like stars.

Not.

Quite.

Right.

Still and always unfinished.

I liked working in the Utrecht Modeling Field, that this thing wasn’t virtual, you could see the sculpture with the naked eye. It wasn’t augmented reality, an overlay – it was real. Ferro-carbon buckyballs suspended in shaped electromagnetic fields generated by room-temperature super-conductors in the base…or something. I’m no scientist.

The field occupied a ten foot tall cylinder of space between two three foot diameter plates mounted floor and ceiling. I could work the stuff with my bare hands, without datagloves. The modeling material was neutrally buoyant at sea level, so it didn’t take much to hold it in place. I could output replicas at any scale, and license the work through a network of Utrecht platforms installed in banks, insurance companies, and other tedious evil institutions all over the world.

Something tickled the back of my knee. I stepped away and frowned at the churning maelstrom that had engulfed the base of the piece.

Faith, my four year old daughter, had awoken prematurely from her afternoon nap, slipped out of the futon we shared, and toddled over. I recognized the look in her eye, the concentration, as she stood at the edge of the field, her tiny fists pummeling the modeling compound.

She looked like her mother, when she’d painted.

I knelt, meeting her eye. Faith smiled wickedly. I only made art when she was sleeping. I was there for her when she was awake.

“Ta-da!” Faith’s hands shot up in victory. “All done!” We high-fived.

I hoisted her onto my shoulders, her pink pajamaed legs hanging down around my neck. She ran her fingers over my scalp. A great shoulder rider, she expertly shifted her weight, her center of balance, as I fiddled with the controls at the base of the Utrecht.

I collapsed the field. I’d rather have worked with traditional materials, clay, steel, wood, but the modeling field was the kind of compromise that made sense, living in one of the highest rent city-states planetside.

It was the kind of compromise that sane people made.

I got out the play dough and sat cross-legged beside her. Faith made a series of blue blobby people followed by a green mound, and placed the blue blobs carefully on the green hillock.

Her smile faltered. She brought her fist down. Stony-faced, she pounded the hill into a pancake with blue polka dots.

“Ta-da,” she said sadly.

Within minutes, she was asleep with play dough clutched in both hands, her head in her lap. I carried her to the futon, put away the unused dough, and reloaded my sculpture. I kind of liked the soaring ovoids emerging from Faith’s chaos…but it still wasn’t finished.

Before Faith, I was a different man. A life-logger, an artist and a bipolar, narcissistic fuck. I missed that guy, sometimes, oddly. He was dead and gone, buried inside me, and I have a hard time understanding the things he did, and why he did them, but this is as much his story as it is mine.

This is how he died.

***

I hadn’t thought I’d ever see Helen again.

But there she stood, on our front porch, smiling demonically. She wore a jean jacket over a skintight halter top, a black velvet skirt speckled with glittering cheap nanodiamond rhinestones, her skin fashionably pale. She’d picked up a little weight around her hips, a little rounded white belly, but she was still long and mostly lean. She wasn’t wearing the navel ring anymore.

Still breathtaking.

“Helen,” I said. “Uhhhh.”

“You lost your hair!” she wailed. “How disappointing!”

I ran my hand through the quarter inch fuzz lining my skull. I had a bad autoimmune reaction to the cheap implants, and regenerating the follicles from my own stem cells was expensive, so I’d just gone with the look.

“You look old.” She took a step closer. She’d accumulated a fine webbing of lines at the corners of her eyes herself, I noticed.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I deprogrammed myself.”

Sylvia made a gentle, questioning sound from the bedroom. She always fell back asleep for awhile, afterwards. I closed the door behind me, stepping out on the porch.

I felt dizzy. My morning coffee backed up a little bit, a bitterness at the back of my throat. “Your last text said I would burn eternally in hell.”

“I was mad at you.”

“You told me you’d never see me again.”

Helen put her hands on my shoulders. Her eyes weren’t blue or green exactly, but some impossible shade in between. I recognized her scent.

“I lied,” she said.

“Don’t do this.” I insist I said that.

She kissed me, her mouth opening, her tongue at once familiar and new. I ran my hand through her short, brown hair, my neck pivoting back the ten degrees needed to really kiss Helen right. She was six feet two, after all, a full two inches taller than me.

A tiny voice piped “Is he my logical father?”

I nearly bit our tongues off.

The toddler had been hiding behind her skirt. Helen started to laugh, hard, braying like a horse. I’d enjoyed her laugh, though it had embarrassed me in public. She drooled a little, she was laughing so hard. She wiped it on her jacket sleeve and swooped the little girl into her arms.

“Yes! He’s your bio-logical father. Evan, I’d like you to meet your daughter, Faith.”

The girl was small, waist-high, like kids are, dressed in a cute blue denim dress and mud-spattered white tights. Blonde hair, blue eyes, but all kids have those, right? She looked familiar. Very familiar. She’d been eating chocolate, or something like it, from the smudges on her cheeks. She smiled, revealing perfect teeth like white chicklets pressed into pink bubblegum. Her eyes were huge and placid.

“Impossible.” I tried to take a step back, encountered something hard, the door I’d closed behind me. “You, we. Us. Us. Ten years.”

I’d lost syntax. I felt cold.

“She froze your sperms,” Faith said solemnly.

“You were always talking about getting a vasectomy. You never did, did you?” Helen said.

I shook my head. “Frozen,” I repeated. “Sperm,” I added. “Ahh.”

“Men always talk about vasectomies. They never get them.”

“Oh.”

“Men don’t like little knives down there, do they?”

“My.”

“Teeth don’t scare you, though, for some reason. Good thing. That’s how I got your sample. That last date we had. Popped it in the freezer.”

“God.”

“Leave God out of this!” Helen frowned and set Faith down again. The little girl started fiddling with the beaded sash around Helen’s hips. “My Enclave is starving themselves to death. We’ve had three, count them three, failed Raptures. How many times can you shiver in the cold waiting to be taken and not feel like an idiot? But I couldn’t leave, either. So I found a BlackNet server. I bought a metaprogrammer, asked it to figure out what I really wanted. That would be you, Evan. Cheer up.”

“I can’t leave Sylvia,” I said. “Not after all she’s done to me. For me. I could never forgive myself.”

Helen fished around in a silvered purse. “Silly. The metaprogrammers do the forgiving. I’ve got a car, a gun, and two million in cash, off-shore digital. I did accounting for the Enclave. If they go through with the suicide, they won’t need the money. If they don’t—” she shrugged “—they get what they deserve for being assholes.”

“Assholes,” Faith piped up from Helen’s knee.

“Assholes.” We all agreed. The Enclave sucked.

“We’re headed to Galt,” Helen said. “I’ll buy us Oceanian passports. We can’t be extradited. Wanna come?”

I chewed my lip. A habit I dislike in other people. “I can’t.”

“Don’t be stupid, Evan. You can do anything you want to. You won’t feel guilt. Just take this.”

She held out a single capsule crawling with microprint. I took it from her and read the tiny black animated letters.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
, it read.

***

He went with her. Can you believe it?

***

“Why?” I asked.

Helen sped through the gatehouse of our complex. My bare feet gritted against the SUV’s filthy carpeting, rustling through sedimentary layers of fast-food takeout bins and collapsed drink bulbs.

“Why what?” Helen didn’t look at me.

Faith was babbling something in the back, bouncing up and down in her carseat. I wondered what I meant, too.

“Why me?” I decided on. “You married…what was his name?”

“Dean. Who turned out to be sterile.”

“Did he know? I mean, about Faith not being his?”

Helen laughed. “Christ no! Faith was our miracle child. I guess I wanted something to remember you by.”

“You said I’d burn in hell.”

“You probably will,” Helen said with a half smile. “At least we’ll have each other.”

I pondered that. The car smelled bad, that kid smell, pee and car sickness. My left foot encountered something sticky. I repressed a shudder.

“You have a slate?”

“Glove compartment,” she said. “Who you wanna call?”

“Who do you think?”

“Oh. Sure.” Helen frowned. “I can’t believe you left her really. Did you take the programmer yet?”

“No. I’m not sure I want to. I haven’t felt right since I took the cure. Since then I’ve felt happy about nothing. Just happy to be alive, you know?”

Helen nodded. “Pharmteks tinker with neurotransmitters. They can’t really change you. It’s like emulating a new personality in software. Metaprogrammers change the hardware. The wetware. It’s permanent, and there’s no cognitive dissonance.”

“How do I know I’m still me afterwards?”

“You don’t. Sharp tools. So think clearly about what you ask for.”

“What did you do to yourself?”

Helen’s eyes scanned the road. “I’m who I always wanted to be.”

“I’m hungry, Mom,” Faith piped from the back seat. “I have to pee.”

“I’m free,” Helen whispered.

***

Dear Sylvia,

I want to say I’m sorry, but I always say I’m sorry, and I keep doing these things, so I guess it’s stupid to apologize. Sorry doesn’t mean shit.

I’ve left you.

I never wanted to take the cure. I haven’t felt right since. I don’t think I’m meant to feel good, somehow. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this years ago. I guess I didn’t know.

I take responsibility for being a prick. I fully expect you’ll hate me forever. I’ll be lucky if you don’t put a BlackNet hit out on me. Maybe you should.

The weird thing is, I love you. But being with you was killing me. I don’t know what to say. Everything I had is yours. I know it isn’t much. Take the joint checking account. Take it all.

I’m sorry.

Damn. I wasn’t going to say that.

Evan

***

I thumbprinted this kilobyte of lameness and hit send. My stomach was doing 360s. I immediately wanted to take the message back. I fumbled around with a cancel command, but the mail server said that the message had already passed out of its domain.

“Oh God,” I said.

“You mailed her?” Helen asked. “No turning back now.”

“No turning back,” Faith echoed.

“No,” I said. “Turning back. Now.”

I did a search on Helen’s Enclave. I’d not checked on them in years. They’d gotten crazier, more militant as the end times had come and gone twice over the last five years. Accusations of gun running, unlicensed recombinant genetic work. Standoffs with child protective services. A missing journalist, presumed dead. She’d stolen money from these people?

Helen’s Kia fell into the turnpike’s control grid, and she retracted the steering wheel and turned to me, shaking her head.