Zima Blue and Other Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  THE REAL STORY

  BEYOND THE AQUILA RIFT

  ENOLA

  SIGNAL TO NOISE

  CARDIFF AFTERLIFE

  HIDEAWAY

  MINLA’S FLOWERS

  MERLIN’S GUN

  ANGELS OF ASHES

  SPIREY AND THE QUEEN

  UNDERSTANDING SPACE AND TIME

  DIGITAL TO ANALOGUE

  EVERLASTING

  ZIMA BLUE

  Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:

  Novels:

  Chasm City

  Revelation Space

  Redemption Ark

  Absolution Gap

  Century Rain

  Pushing Ice

  The Prefect

  Short Story Collections:

  Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

  Galactic North

  Zima Blue and Other Stories

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  An Orion ebook

  Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2006/2009

  Introduction © 2006/2009 by Paul McAuley

  All rights reserved

  The right of Alastair Reynolds to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This collection first published in this form in Great Britain

  in 2009 by Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  ‘The Real Story’, first published in Mars Probes, edited by Peter Crowther, DAW Books,

  2002.

  ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift’, first published in Constellations, edited by Peter Crowther, DAW

  Books, 2005.

  ‘Enola’, first published in a somewhat different form in Interzone, December 1991.

  ‘Signal to Noise’, first published in Zima Blue and Other Stories, Night Shade Books, 2006.

  ‘Cardiff Afterlife’, first published in The Big Issue Cymru, August 2008.

  ‘Hideaway’, first published in Interzone, July 2000.

  ‘Minla’s Flowers’, first published in The New Space Opera,

  edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos, 2007.

  ‘Merlin’s Gun’, first published in Interzone, May 2000.

  ‘Angels of Ashes’, first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1999.

  ‘Spirey and the Queen’, first published in Interzone, June 1996.

  ‘Understanding Space and Time’, first published as a chapbook by the

  Birmingham Science Fiction Group for Novacon 35, November 2005.

  ‘Digital to Analogue’, first published in In Dreams,

  edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1992.

  ‘Everlasting’, first published in Interzone, Spring 2004.

  ‘Zima Blue’, first published in Postscripts, Summer 2005.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 5750 8610 4

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  To the members of the Short Story Clearing House, past, present and future, with deep gratitude.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  By the time this book first appeared, more than five years had passed since the idea of it was first mooted in an e-mail to me from Jason Williams of Night Shade Books. Not long afterwards, Marty Halpern (better known for his work with Golden Gryphon Press) generously consented to shepherd the book towards publication. At the time, it was a very real possibility that the book might be produced sometime in 2002, or - failing that - 2003 at the very latest.

  Unfortunately, other factors intervened (novel deadlines, job stuff, real life, etc.) and I had to keep backing out of commitments to deliver the stories by an agreed date, with the result that the book - as the years ticked inexorably by - began to look less and less likely to actually happen. Thankfully, Jason (and Jeremy Lassen, his partner in Night Shade Books) kept the faith, and when I finally did announce that I was ready to tackle it again, they responded not with howls of disbelief but with gratifying enthusiasm. So too did Marty, who was as energetic and diligent an editor as any writer could ask for.

  So, thanks, guys - Jason, Jeremy and Marty - not just for sticking in there, but also for valuing short fiction in the first place, and I promise that if we ever do another one of these . . .

  Alastair Reynolds

  Noordwijk,

  The Netherlands

  May 2006

  A Note on the UK Edition (2009)

  When Gollancz agreed to bring out a British edition of this collection, it seemed sensible to take the opportunity to slot in the third (chronologically second) Merlin story - ‘Minla’s Flowers’ - which had not actually existed at the time Marty Halpern and I put together the original collection. At which point, of course, we had a subtly different book on our hands . . . so why not add something else while we were at it? I wanted to include ‘Everlasting’, which for some reason I had never submitted to Marty when we were making the cut for the Night Shade edition (we wouldn’t have had room for it if I had in any case; something else would have had to go). It also seemed right to include ‘Cardiff Afterlife’, a sequel to ‘Signal to Noise’ and another near-future piece.

  It’s time to reiterate my thanks to Marty Halpern for being a sterling editor on the Night Shade edition, to Jason and Jeremy for making the original collection happen, and to thank Jo Fletcher and Malcolm Edwards of Gollancz and Lisa Rogers for their enthusiasm and hard work in producing this expanded edition.

  Alastair Reynolds

  Rhondda Cynon Taf,

  Wales

  October 2008

  INTRODUCTION

  I’m pretty sure that it was a dark and stormy night when I first met Alastair Reynolds. This was no pathetic fallacy, you understand, just the usual weather for a winter’s evening on the east coast of Scotland, on top of a ridge that looked out towards the North Sea and Norway: even though I lived about two miles inland, it wasn’t unusual to find salt spray frosting the windows of a morning. It was 1990. I was working as a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University; Al was finishing his Ph.D. at the astronomy department. He’d found out from the biographical matter at the end of one of my stories in Interzone that I lived in St Andrews, had given me a call, and come slogging up the hill for the first of many pleasant evenings spent in the village bar, talking about science and science fiction and the business of writing and publishing. I don’t want to give the impression that I was Al’s Svengali. Far from it. Al was an SF fan, but he was also, most definitely, no two ways about it, a writer. He’d been writing SF since his early teens; he’d sold a couple of stories to Interzone; he was in for the long haul.

  But before I tell you about Al Reynolds and the stories collected here, I need to say something about the New Space Opera. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to attempt to analyse Al’s role in the resurgence of space opera, or define his place within the group of British science fiction writers who in one way or another are associated with it. For one thing, if you ask a bunch of people like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, M. John Harrison, Ian McDonald, Ken MacLeod, Justina Robson and Charles Stross why they’re writing the stuff, you’ll get a different answer from each and every one. For another, there are plenty
of American writers who, like the Brits, have been engaged in reinventing and refurbishing space opera’s cherished but almost fatally tarnished and rusted tropes. In short, the New Space Opera is more of a confluence than a movement: a wide range of writers working on a broad spectrum of themes without the benefit of either a prophet or a manifesto.

  While individual writers each have their own interests and reasons for reworking space opera, they’re all building their various fictions on a common foundation. Like the old space opera of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Edmund Hamilton and a host of unsung pulp writers, the New Space Opera sets its stories against vast backdrops of both time and space, and its characters are often engaged in superhuman efforts on which the fate of humanity is hung, but it’s also closely engaged with hard science (from quantum physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, bioengineering and cybernetics) and asks tough questions (who are we? why are we here? where are we going?) about humanity’s place in a hostile universe. Its stories are informed by a sense of Deep Time and secret histories imperfectly understood and closely associated with cosmological mysteries, and are played out against a culturally rich patchwork of governments, economies, alliances and alien species rather than the monolithic empires of old.

  Al Reynolds is best known for a series that’s deeply imbued with the virtues of classic New Space Opera. His first four novels, Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap, together with his seventh novel, The Prefect, and shorter fictions collected in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North, fit into the overarching framework of a future history that spans some forty thousand years and describes the conflicts and struggle for survival of two rival branches of humanity in a galaxy littered with the artefacts of ancient civilisations and patrolled by alien killing machines. Most commonly called the ‘Revelation Space’ series, it’s notable for its darkly tinted moral ambiguities, the gothic rococo detailing of its vast machineries and cosmic backdrops, and multiple storylines that begin in different times and places and gradually and relentlessly converge.

  Now, none of the stories in this collection are part of the ‘Revelation Space’ series, but it’s clear that they’re all drawn from the same well of themes, concerns and tropes, most notably a tough-minded depiction of the fragility of ordinary human life, and the defiant persistence of human spirit, in the raw wild deeps of space and time. And as in the ‘Revelation Space’ series, their protagonists are most often ordinary working stiffs caught up in huge events whose ramifications they can barely glimpse but must unriddle in order to survive, and whose cynical attitudes and side-of-the-mouth quips tinge their narratives with a noir hue. Spirey, in ‘Spirey and the Queen’, for instance, can’t resist making a characteristically caustic remark with what might be her last breath while fighting to gain control of a spaceship that’s the only way of escaping a seemingly insignificant splinter of ice whose secret chambers are being riddled with kinetic weapons fired by what was once his own side, in a war for control of the resources of a protoplanetary disc. Crammed with eye-kicks, pell-mell action, and big ideas about what it means to be human and the future and nature of intelligent life, it could easily stand as the taxonomic-type specimen of the New Space Opera, the golden mean to which all others aspire. And if you think that’s pretty impressive, bear in mind that Al Reynolds had published just five stories before it appeared. We’re talking about some kind of writer, here.

  Although, as Brian Aldiss once remarked, you no more need to be a scientist to write science fiction than you need to be a ghost to write ghost stories, Al has professional qualifications in Thinking Big. Until just a little while ago, he was an astrophysicist working for the European Space Agency, with a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in astronomy. And as in the ‘Revelation Space’ series, he brings to the stories in this collection a scientific rigour that firmly grounds his speculations in theories and ideas current in the happening world. Many of his stories are set on other planets or around distant stars, and most are large in scope, and their plots often turn on lacunae where characters drop out of history for decades or centuries, because of a steadfast refusal to violate Einsteinian principles. Even when some kind of faster-than-light travel is featured, as in the three related stories, ‘Hideaway’, ‘Minla’s Flowers’ and ‘Merlin’s Gun’, it’s both difficult and dangerous - and with typical irony the grail of their protagonist’s quest turns out to be something other than the superweapon he was expecting. This sense of cosmic agape (and goofy riffs on a certain singer with a penchant for big boots and even bigger spectacles) informs the redemptive arc of Al’s last-man-alive story, ‘Understanding Space and Time’; in ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift’, accidental exile isn’t something you can get around by reversing the polarity of the neutrino generator; and in ‘Angels of Ashes’, human survival is revealed to be a matter of quantum probability rather than the predestiny or special pleading that’s typical of old space opera. Like all the best New Space Opera writers, Al is deeply in love with the tropes and spectacular disjunctions between human and cosmic scales of the old stuff, but it’s a tough love that takes no prisoners.

  Other stories are more human in scale, but no less uncompromising. There are explorations of the way in which time affects personality, and how personality and consciousness are defined by memory: the Rashomon-style riddle of the true history of the first Mars landing in ‘The Real Story’; the slow transformation of a killing machine and the hope implied by its link with a young girl in ‘Enola’ (in which that name is redeemed from its association with Hiroshima); the unriddling of the significance of a particular shade of blue in the work of an artist in the moving and wonderfully observed ‘Zima Blue’. Two stories share a novel twist on communication with parallel worlds: ‘Signal to Noise’ is an affecting love story structured as a long goodbye; ‘Cardiff Afterlife’ uses a War-on-Terror plot to explore the moral implications of importing information from a closely similar history. Another riff on the parallel worlds trope, ‘Everlasting’, is a two-hander about the implications of the Everett many-worlds hypothesis on individual good fortune, with a neat twist in the tale.

  Last, but by no means least, we come to ‘Digital to Analogue’. Set in the club scene of the early 1990s, spicing a conspiracy theory about a kind of viral meme that entrains human consciousness with vivid speculation about hive minds, it’s perhaps the most atypical Al Reynolds story in the collection (if you define a ‘typical’ Al Reynolds story as a baroque widescreen space opera in which the hero’s fate is interwoven with some kind of cosmic catastrophe). But it’s the story in the collection that has the most personal meaning for me, for it was first published in In Dreams, an anthology I edited with Kim Newman. Kim and I put out a general call that netted great stories from new writers such as Cliff Burns, Peter F. Hamilton, Steve Rasnic Tem and Jonathan Lethem and Lukas Jaeger; but like all anthology editors we also nagged writers we knew and trusted to produce something suitably wonderful. And Al Reynolds was on my list because it was clear from the get-go that his modest, self-effacing manner was the Clark Kent disguise of an ambitious writer possessed of a boundless enthusiasm for the science fiction and crime genres, eager to push at his limits and experiment with new ways of telling stories.

  Like me, Al had a long apprenticeship writing fiction, dating back to his early teens. Unlike me, he managed to keep writing even while engaged in the long hard slog towards winning his Ph.D. And after reading and re-reading the stories collected here, I’m reminded all over again just how much care and craft he puts into his stories. The variety and density of ideas is impressive, the structure and development of their narrative frames are elegantly and solidly wrought, and there’s no sense that they strain to achieve their twists and payoffs - a sign both of native talent and of the hard work that goes into disguising the hard work of creating well-rounded stories about unusual situations inhabited by believable and sympathetic characters.

  They also demonstrate, like his stand-alone novels Century Rain, Pushing Ice and Hou
se of Suns, that he’s definitely not a one-note writer. In short, they show exactly why I asked him for a contribution to In Dreams, why ‘Digital to Analogue’ passed the stiff test of Kim Newman’s scrutiny with flying colours, and why, some 18 years after we first met, he’s still riding at the very cutting edge of science fiction.

  Paul McAuley

  London, October 2008

  THE REAL STORY

  I cupped a bowl of coffee in my hands, wondering what I was doing back home. A single word had brought me from Earth; one I’d always expected to hear but after seventeen years had almost forgotten.

  That word was shit: more or less my state of mind.

  Grossart had promised to meet me in a coffee house called Sloths, halfway up Strata City. I’d had to fight my way to a two-seater table by the window, wondering why that table - with easily the best view - just happened to be empty. I soon found out: Sloths was directly under the jumping-off point for the divers, and one of them would often slam past the window. It was like being in a skyscraper after a stock market crash.

  ‘Another drink, madam?’ A furry robot waiter had crossed the intestinal tangle of ceiling pipes to arrive above my table.

  I stood up decisively. ‘No thanks. I’m leaving. And if a man asks for me - for Carrie Clay - you can tell him to take a piss in a sandstorm.’