Zima Blue and Other Stories (68 page)

Authors: Alastair Reynolds

Tags: #02 Science-Fiction

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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Soon she saw the familiar landmark of the humpbacked bridge. She negotiated it slowly, her headlights shining high into the trees on the opposite side of the brook. The lights illuminated a pair of perched barn owls, freezing them into immobility. They looked like small stone ornaments, the kind you could buy in craft shops. Beyond, some way up the lane, Moira saw the lights of Ian's cottage.

He had called her about an hour earlier, sounding in a bad way. Not exactly depressed and suicidal - he was actually talking about how he
wasn't
going to kill himself - but manic and overexcited: a state of mind that she considered nearly as dangerous. With Ian's history it could quickly turn nasty. She wished, now, that she had kept him on the phone - kept talking to him - rather than promising to drive over. She should have checked the weather first, not to mention the time of day. But once Moira had put down the phone she knew that she could not back out of her promise.

'Bloody Ian,' she said.

They had met about fifteen years ago, during their last year at college. Both had been members of the skydiving society: Ian because he took it very seriously, Moira because she had fancied someone else in the club. It hadn't worked out for her, but she had developed an on-off interest in parachuting that she had kept up for a few years after graduation. And she had met Ian: not really her type, but good enough company that they'd meet socially away from the club. The thing Moira liked about him was that he was always fizzing with daft enthusiasms. During that last year she had lost count of the amazing get-rich schemes Ian intended to get into when he had his degree. She had to hand it to him: Ian had been convinced mobile phones were going to be huge, back when everyone else thought they were never going to be much use except as exercise aids. But - typical Ian - he hadn't actually done anything about it. For a while, before anyone had heard of web pages, he had pottered around with computers, constructing graphical interfaces to simplify internet navigation and file-transfer. Some of the ideas Ian had shown her then were
brilliant
: she was convinced, even now, that if he'd only stuck with it, the world would have swerved onto a different track, one in which Ian Caldicot was the 'father of the web'. But, no: another enthusiasm had diverted him, and his computers had sat gathering dust while he played around with radio-controlled battling pterodactyls made from balsawood. Moira had never quite worked out where all the money came from, but Ian didn't waste a penny of it on himself. The cottage was crumbling, and his wardrobe was basically what he had been wearing during college.

'Bloody Ian,' Moira said again.

She slowed, recognising the farm gate. A dozen metres further on was the turning onto Ian's drive. It was still snowing. She oozed the car around the bend, feeling the wheels spin before they bit into the gravel beneath the snow. She brought the car to a halt just in front of the cottage. Ian's Metro was a blue-white wedge parked in front of the derelict garage. Snow made all cars look exciting and sleek, Moira thought: like concept models fresh from the wind tunnel.

She turned off the headlights and ignition and sat looking at the cottage for a few moments. Now that she was here, the possibilities crowded in on her. Again, she thought back to the telephone conversation: Ian emphatic that he wasn't going to kill himself. If Ian had decided not to kill himself, then at some point he had presumably toyed with the alternative. Knowing Ian's general inability to stick to one decision for more than a few minutes, Moira couldn't help but worry about him changing his mind again.

What if he had done it while she was driving over? What if there was no one alive in that house now? It looked so warm and inviting, with the window on the lower floor casting an oblong of yellow light across the smooth carpet of snow before it. What if she had to wait here until the police and ambulance men came?

Moira got out of the Volvo, shut the door behind her and walked towards the front door. From far back along the country lane she heard the call of an owl: perhaps one of the pair she had seen earlier.

She knocked on the front door. Ian opened it. He wore red tracksuit bottoms and a grubby yellow Levellers T-shirt. His feet were bare.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

'So you bloody well should be,' Moira said, tremendously relieved.

'I didn't realise how late it was. Or that it was snowing.'

'That's your problem, Ian: you don't stop to think.'

He smiled coyly. 'Actually, I have been doing a bit of thinking. That's why I phoned.'

'Very pleased to hear it. I was sick with worry, Ian.'

'You'd better come in.'

'Yes, I better had, hadn't I?'

Ian let her into the house. She kicked the snow from her shoes. The cottage had looked warm and inviting from the outside, like something on a Dickensian Christmas card. Inside it was still just a bit too cold for Moira's tastes. She took off her coat and hung it on the banister at the bottom of the stairs, grateful for the chunky sweater she had on beneath.

'Fancy a cuppa?' Ian asked.

She thought about having to drive back again, once she had put her mind to rest about Ian.

'Coffee,' she said. 'Black. No sugar.'

Moira followed him into the kitchen. It wasn't too bad, considering. The fact that there was only one light - a dim electric bulb hanging from the ceiling - helped to throw much of the room into shadow, disguising the junk and clutter. There were many cardboard boxes around the walls, piled two or three high. They had drawings of monitors and printers on them. There were ghostly white chunks of polystyrene packaging material. There was a balsawood pterodactyl, its wing broken, one black eye gleaming back at her from the alien swoosh of its skull. A metallic-orange mountain bike rested against a pantry door, minus wheels. At one end of the kitchen table stood a couple of cereal boxes, some jars of instant coffee, half a pint of milk and an empty Pot Noodle container. There was nothing to eat or drink on the shelves. Instead of cookery books there were books on programming in Java, C and Perl, dog-eared paperbacks on Zen Buddhism, wild mushrooms and quantum mechanics, and a couple of Ben Elton novels Moira hadn't read.

He pushed a cup of coffee into her hands. She sat down in a rickety wooden chair on one side of the table, while Ian helped himself to the chair on the other side. Through the un-curtained window beyond, Moira saw the snow continuing to fall.

'Mind if I smoke?' she asked, taking out a packet of cigarettes.

Ian rummaged under some pizza boxes and produced an ashtray. It was the stamped-metal kind students stole from pubs. 'Hoped you might have given up by now.'

Moira tapped a fingernail against the packet. 'Not bloody likely. Lucky cigs. Remember?'

'Seriously?'

'Yes, seriously.' She took a sip of the coffee, grateful that she hadn't needed milk in it. Ian's white coffee had little icebergs floating in it. 'But this isn't about me. I didn't come here for a nice old chinwag. You worried me, Ian: all that talk about
not
going to kill yourself.'

'I suppose I was a bit overexcited,' Ian said.

'You aren't going to do it, are you?'

'That's not the point,' Ian said. 'I couldn't if I wanted to.'

'I'm glad to hear it.' Moira reached out across the table and took his hand. 'I know you've had some bad luck, Ian, and I know things haven't always worked out quite the way you hoped. But life's not worked out too bad for either of us, has it?'

'You misunderstand,' Ian said. Gently, he withdrew his hand. 'I'm not talking about being unable to kill myself because I've rejected the idea of suicide. I'm talking about something far more fundamental.'

Moira lit one of the cigarettes. She took a long draw on it, eyeing Ian the way she imagined prison psychologists eyed long-term offenders. 'Which would be?'

'I've reached the conclusion that I'm immortal.'

'I see,' Moira said quietly.

'Do you?'

'Yes,' she said, picking her words carefully. 'I remember what you talked about the last time we were in the pub: your latest mad enthusiasm. All that stuff you'd been reading about on the Internet, about how no one living will ever die. At least not if they don't want to, and if they make the right arrangements. What did you call it? Exhibitionism?'

'Extropianism,' Ian corrected, with a tolerant smile.

'Right. Getting your head frozen so they can revive you in the future? Or was it just about making sure you survive the next thirty years, so that you're still alive when the machines take over and grant us all eternal paradise? Waiting for the Singularity, wasn't it?' Moira drank some more of her coffee, noticing a pile of old popular science magazines on the table:
New Scientist
,
Scientific American
, stuff like that. 'Sounded like bollocks to me, Ian, but you never know.'

'It's not bollocks,' he said. 'Or it
might
be, but that's not the point, either. I'm not talking about achieving immortality through medicine or having my brain copied into a computer. Thinking about all the Extropian stuff was just the catalyst I needed to really see things clearly. But they're all missing the point. I've realised that immortality is a lot easier to achieve than anyone realises.'

She looked at the bookshelf again. 'Magic mushrooms?'

'Maybe I shouldn't have phoned you after all.'

'Look, I'm sorry, Ian. But you drag me out of hearth and home at some ungodly hour, wittering on about how you're thinking of killing yourself--'

'Thinking of
not
killing myself,' he corrected.

'And when I get here - having nearly crashed the car at least twice - all you can do is rabbit on about sodding immortality. Sorry, Ian, but this is pub stuff. It's not getting Moira out of the house late at night stuff.'

'Actually, I think it is.' Ian reached across the table and pushed aside the pile of science magazines.

They had been hiding a gun.

'Fuck,' Moira said. It was a handgun, a small revolver. It was horribly familiar, yet Moira did not remember ever seeing a real handgun in her life. 'Please tell me that's a replica,' she said.

'It is,' Ian said. 'But it's been converted into a real one. There's a website that shows you how to do it. You don't need any fancy tools, not if you already like to tinker around a bit.' He nodded at the balsawood dinosaur. Yes, Moira thought ruefully: Ian liked to tinker. If anyone could convert a replica gun into a real one, it was Ian Caldicot.

'I'm really not happy with this, Ian.' She wanted to ask him where he had got it, whether it was in some way legal, but what she mainly wanted was the gun out of Ian's reach before he did something with it. 'It's not loaded, is it?'

Ian picked up the gun and made the little revolving chamber swivel out, the way she had seen people do it in films. He held the chamber up to the light, lengthwise, so that Moira could see along the cylindrical holes where the bullets would have gone. Ian rotated the chamber slowly, until one blocked hole came into view.

'Can you show me to the phone, please?' Moira asked. 'I think I need to ring someone.'

'The phone's disconnected. You don't need it. You just need to sit here and listen to me, that's all.'

Moira nodded: anything to keep Ian talking. 'And then what?'

'Then I'm going to put the gun against my head and fire it. And I'm going to keep doing it. Ten times, twenty times, thirty times. And you're going to sit there and watch me, and then you'll believe me.'

Moira thought about grabbing the gun. Could she wrestle it out of Ian's hand without it going off? If she could get hold of it and run outside, she could throw it into one of the snowdrifts. It was dark out there, and the snow was still falling: if she gave it a good lob, she didn't think there'd be much chance of Ian finding it before morning.

But even as she was thinking of that, Ian slipped the gun down into the baggy pocket of his tracksuit bottoms.

No chance of reaching it now.

'I thought you said this was about immortality,' Moira said, her voice faltering. 'Playing Russian roulette doesn't sound very much like immortality to me.'

'You're right. But the point is I'm not
going
to kill myself. I just have to demonstrate the impossibility of that act in the most convincing way possible.'

'Why me?'

'Because you're a friend. Because you've always listened and you've always had an open mind. Because I knew you'd come over.'

'Because my name came early in your address book?'

Ian smiled. 'You're under Moira, not Curbishley.'

Moira sighed. 'OK. Here's the deal. I'll listen. You can tell me whatever it is you want to tell me. But I don't want to see that gun again.'

'You promise me you'll listen? That you won't laugh, or start arguing? Not until I'm done?'

'A deal is a deal.'

But she was not certain Ian had agreed to his side of it.