Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  Mick was hearing it, and not hearing it. It couldn’t be right. People still got knocked down by cars. But they didn’t die from it, not any more. Cars couldn’t go fast enough in towns to kill anyone. Being knocked down and killed by a car was something that happened to people in soap operas, not real life.

  Feeling numb, not really present in the room, Mick said, ‘Where is she now?’ As if by visiting her, he might prove that they’d got it wrong, that she wasn’t dead at all.

  ‘They took her to the Heath, sir. That’s where she is now. I can drive you there.’

  ‘Andrea isn’t dead,’ Mick said. ‘She can’t be. Not now.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ the policewoman said.

  SATURDAY

  For the last three weeks, ever since they had separated, Mick had been sleeping in a spare room at his brother’s house in Newport. The company had been good, but now Bill was away for the weekend on some ridiculous team-building exercise in Snowdonia. For tedious reasons, Mick’s brother had had to take the house keys with him, leaving Mick with nowhere to sleep on Friday night. When Joe had asked him where he was going to stay, Mick said he’d go back to his own house, the one he’d left at the beginning of the month.

  Joe was having none of it, and insisted that Mick sleep at his house instead. Mick spent the night going through the usual cycle of emotions that came with any sudden bad news. He’d had nothing to compare with losing his wife, but the texture of the shock was familiar enough, albeit magnified from anything in his previous experience. He resented the fact that the world seemed to be continuing, crassly oblivious to Andrea’s death. The news wasn’t dominated by his tragedy; it was all about some Polish miners trapped underground. When he finally managed to get to sleep, Mick was tormented by dreams that his wife was still alive, that it had all been a mistake.

  But he knew it was all true. He’d been to the hospital; he’d seen her body. He even knew why she’d been hit by the car. Andrea had been crossing the road to her favourite hair salon; she’d had an appointment to get her hair done. Knowing Andrea, she had probably been so focused on the salon that she was oblivious to all that was going on around her. It hadn’t even been the car that had killed her in the end. When the slow-moving vehicle knocked her down, Andrea had struck her head against the side of the kerb.

  By midmorning on Saturday, Mick’s brother had returned from Snowdonia. Bill came around to Joe’s house and hugged Mick silently, saying nothing for many minutes. Then Bill went into the next room and spoke quietly to Joe and Rachel. Their low voices made Mick feel like a child in a house of adults.

  ‘I think you and I need to get out of Cardiff,’ Bill told Mick, when he returned to the living room. ‘No ifs, no buts.’

  Mick started to protest. ‘There’s too much that needs to be done. I still need to get back to the funeral home.’

  ‘It can wait until this afternoon. No one’s going to hate you for not returning a few calls. C’mon; let’s drive up to the Gower and get some fresh air. I’ve already reserved a car.’

  ‘Go with him,’ Rachel said. ‘It’ll do you good.’

  Mick acquiesced, his guilt and relief in conflict at being able to put aside thoughts of the funeral plans. He was glad Bill had come down, but he couldn’t quite judge how his brother - or his friends, for that matter - viewed his bereavement. He’d lost his wife. They all knew that. But they also knew that Mick and Andrea had been separated. They’d been having problems for most of the year. It would only be human for his friends to assume that Mick wasn’t quite as affected by Andrea’s death as he would have been had they still been living together.

  ‘Listen,’ he told Bill, when they were safely under way. ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Andrea and I had problems. But it wasn’t the end of our marriage. We were going to get through this. I was going to call her this weekend, see if we couldn’t meet.’

  Bill looked at him sadly. Mick couldn’t tell if that meant that Bill just didn’t believe him, or that his brother pitied him for the opportunity he’d allowed to slip between his fingers.

  When they got back to Cardiff in the early evening, after a warm and blustery day out on the Gower, Joe practically pounced on Mick as soon as they came through the door.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Joe said. ‘Now.’

  ‘I need to call some of Andrea’s friends,’ Mick said. ‘Can it wait until later?’

  ‘No. It can’t. It’s about you and Andrea.’

  They went into the kitchen. Joe poured him a glass of whisky. Rachel and Bill watched from the end of the table, saying nothing.

  ‘I’ve been to the lab,’ Joe said. ‘I know it’s Saturday, but I wanted to make sure that lock was still holding. Well, it is. We could start the experiment tomorrow if we wanted to. But something’s come up, and you need to know about it.’

  Mick sipped from his glass. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ve been in contact with my counterpart in the other lab.’

  ‘The other Joe.’

  ‘The other Joe, yes. We were finessing the equipment, making sure everything was optimal. And we talked, of course. Needless to say I mentioned what had happened.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The other me was surprised. Shocked, even. He said Andrea hadn’t died in his reality.’ Joe held up a hand, signalling that Mick should let him finish before speaking. ‘You know how it works. The two histories are identical before the lock takes effect: so identical that there isn’t even any point in thinking of them as being distinct realities. The divergence only happens once the lock is in effect. The lock was active by the time you came down to tell me about the squash match. The other me also had a visit from you. The difference was that no policewoman ever came to his lab. You eventually drifted back to your office to carry on grading tutorials.’

  ‘But Andrea was already dead by then.’

  ‘Not in that reality. The other me phoned you. You were staying at the Holiday Inn. You knew nothing of Andrea having had any accident. So my other wife . . .’ Joe allowed himself a quick smile. ‘The other version of Rachel called Andrea. And they spoke. Turned out Andrea had been hit by a car, but she’d barely been bruised. They hadn’t even called an ambulance.’

  Mick absorbed his friend’s words, then said, ‘I can’t deal with this, Joe. I don’t need to know it. It isn’t going to help.’

  ‘I think it is. We were set up to run the nervelink experiment as soon as we had a solid lock, one that we could trust to hold for the full million seconds. This is it. The only difference is it doesn’t have to be me who goes through.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I can put you through, Mick. We can get you nervelinked tomorrow morning. Allowing for a day of bedding in and practice once you arrive in the other reality . . . well, you could be walking in Andrea’s world by Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning at the latest.’

  ‘But you’re the one who is supposed to be going through,’ Mick said. ‘You’ve already had the nervelink put in.’

  ‘We’ve got a spare,’ Joe said.

  Mick’s mind raced through the implications. ‘Then I’d be controlling the body of the other you, right?’

  ‘No. That won’t work, unfortunately. We’ve had to make some changes to these nervelinks to get them to work properly through the correlator, with the limited signal throughput. We had to ditch some of the channels that handle proprioceptive mapping. They’ll only work properly if the body on the other end of the link is virtually identical to the one on this side.’

  ‘Then it won’t work. You’re nothing like me.’

  ‘You’re forgetting your counterpart on the other side,’ Joe said. He glanced past Mick at Bill and Rachel, raising his eyebrows as he did so. ‘The way it would work is, you come into the lab and we install the link in you, just the same way it happened for me yesterday morning. At the same time your counterpart in Andrea’s world comes into h
is version of the lab and gets the other version of the nervelink put into him.’

  Mick shivered. He’d become used to thinking about the other version of Joe; he could even begin to accept that there was a version of Andrea walking around somewhere who was still alive. But as soon as Joe brought the other Mick into the argument, he felt his head begin to unravel.

  ‘Wouldn’t he - the other me - need to agree to this?’

  ‘He already has,’ Joe said solemnly. ‘I’ve been in touch with him. The other Joe called him into the lab. We had a chat over the videolink. He didn’t go for it at first - you know how you both feel about nervelinking. And he hasn’t lost his version of Andrea. But I explained how big a deal this was. This is your only chance to see Andrea again. Once this window closes - we’re talking about no more than eleven or twelve days from the start of the lock, by the way - we’ll never make contact with another reality where she’s alive.’

  Mick blinked and placed his hands on the table. He felt dizzy with the implications, as if the kitchen was swaying. ‘You’re certain of that? You’ll never open another window into Andrea’s world?’

  ‘Statistically, we were incredibly lucky to get this one chance. By the time the window closes, Andrea’s reality will have diverged so far from ours that there’s essentially no chance of ever getting another lock.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mick said, ready to take Joe’s word for it. ‘But even if I agree to this - even if the other me agrees to it - what about Andrea? We weren’t seeing each other.’

  ‘But you wanted to see her again,’ Bill said quietly.

  Mick rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, and exhaled loudly. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Andrea,’ Rachel said. ‘I mean, Joe spoke to himself, and the other version of him spoke to the other Rachel. She’s been in touch with Andrea.’

  Mick hardly dared speak. ‘And?’

  ‘She says it’s okay. She understands how horrible this must be for you. She says, if you want to come through, she’ll meet you. You can spend some time together. Give you a chance to come to some kind of—’

  ‘Closure,’ Mick whispered.

  ‘It’ll help you,’ Joe said. ‘It’s got to help you.’

  SUNDAY

  The medical centre was normally closed at weekends, but Joe had pulled strings to get some of the staff to come in on Sunday morning. Mick had to sit around a long time while they ran physiological tests and prepared the surgical equipment. It was much easier and quicker for tourists, as they didn’t have to use the modified nervelink units Joe’s team had developed.

  By the early afternoon they were satisfied that Mick was ready for the implantation. They made him lie down on a couch with his head encased in a padded plastic assembly with a hole under the back of the neck. He was given a mild local anaesthetic. Rubberised clamps whirred in to hold his head in position with micromillimetre accuracy. Then he felt a vague sense of pressure being applied to the skin on the back of his neck, and then an odd and not entirely pleasant sensation of sudden pins and needles in every part of his body. But the unpleasantness was over almost as soon as he’d registered it. The support clamps whirred away from his head. The couch tilted up, and he was able to get off and stand on his feet.

  Mick touched the back of his neck, came away with a tiny smear of blood on his thumb.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I told you there was nothing to it,’ Joe said, putting down a motor-cycling magazine. ‘I don’t know what you were so worried about.’

  ‘It’s not the nervelink operation itself I don’t approve of. I don’t have a problem with the technology. It’s the whole system, the way it encourages the exploitation of the poor.’

  Joe tut-tutted. ‘Bloody Guardian readers. It was you lot who got the bloody moratorium against air travel enacted in the first place. Next you’ll be telling us we can’t even walk anywhere.’

  The nurse swabbed Mick’s wound and applied a bandage. He was shunted into an adjoining room and asked to wait again. More tests followed. As the system interrogated the newly embedded nervelink, he experienced mild electrical tingles and strange, fleeting feelings of dislocation. Nothing he reported gave the staff any cause for alarm.

  After Mick’s discharge from the medical centre, Joe took him straight down to the laboratory. An electromagnetically shielded annexe contained the couch Joe intended to use for the experiment. It was a modified version of the kind tourists used for long-term nervelinking, with facilities for administering nutrition and collecting bodily waste. No one liked to dwell too much on those details, but there was no way around it if you wanted to stay nervelinked for more than a few hours. Gamers had been putting up with similar indignities for decades.

  Once Mick was plumbed in, Joe settled a pair of specially designed immersion glasses over his eyes, after first applying a salve to Mick’s skin to protect against pressure sores. The glasses fitted very tightly, blocking out Mick’s view of the lab. All he could see was a blue-grey void, with a few meaningless red digits to the right side of his visual field.

  ‘Comfortable?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I can’t see anything yet.’

  ‘You will.’

  Joe went back into the main part of the basement to check on the correlation. It seemed that he was gone a long time. When he heard Joe return, Mick half-expected bad news - that the link had collapsed, or some necessary piece of technology had broken down. Privately, he would not have been too sorry were that the case. In his shocked state of mind in the hours after Andrea’s death, he would have given anything to be able to see her again. But now that the possibility had arisen, he found himself prone to doubts. Given time, he knew he’d get over Andrea’s death. That wasn’t being cold, it was just being realistic. He knew more than a few people who’d lost their partners, and while they might have gone through some dark times afterwards, almost all of them now seemed settled and relatively content. It didn’t mean they’d stopped feeling anything for the loved one who had died, but it did mean they’d found some way to move on. There was no reason to assume he wouldn’t make the same emotional recovery.

  The question was, would visiting Andrea hasten or hamper that process? Perhaps they should just have talked over the videolink, or even the phone. But then he’d never been very good on either.

  He knew it had to be face to face, all or nothing.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked Joe, innocently enough.

  ‘Nope, everything’s fine. I was just waiting to hear that the other version of you is ready.’

  ‘He is?’

  ‘Good to go. Someone from the medical centre just put him under. We can make the switch any time you’re ready.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Here,’ Joe said. ‘I mean, in the counterpart to this room. He’s lying on the same couch. It’s easier that way; there’s less of a jolt when you switch over.’

  ‘He’s unconscious already?’

  ‘Full coma. Just like any nervelinked mule.’

  Except, Mick thought, unlike the mules, his counterpart hadn’t signed up to go into a chemically induced coma while his body was taken over by a distant tourist. That was what Mick disapproved of more than anything. The mules did it for money, and the mules were always the poorest people in any given tourist hotspot, whether it was some affluent European city or some nauseatingly ‘authentic’ Third World shithole. No one ever aspired to become a mule. It was what you did when all other options had dried up. In some cases it hadn’t just supplanted prostitution, it had become an entirely new form of prostitution in its own right.

  But enough of that. They were all consenting adults here. No one - least of all the other version of himself - was being exploited. The other Mick was just being kind. No kinder, Mick supposed, than he would have been had the tables been reversed, but he couldn’t help feeling a perverse sense of gratitude. And as for Andrea . . . well, she’d always been kind. No one ever had a bad word to say about Andrea on that s
core. Kind and considerate, to a fault.

  So what was he waiting for?

  ‘You can make the switch,’ Mick said.

  There was less to it than he’d been expecting. It was no worse than the involuntary muscular jolt he sometimes experienced in bed, just before dozing off to sleep.

  But suddenly he was in a different body.

  ‘Hi,’ Joe said. ‘How’re you feeling, matey?’

  Except it was the other Joe speaking to him now: the Joe who belonged to the world where Andrea hadn’t died. The original Joe was on the other side of the reality gap.

  ‘I feel . . .’ But when Mick tried speaking, it came out hopelessly slurred.