Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  Well anyway. It’s gone now. Problem is, so has everything else.

  I presenced into Cardiff less than a day after the atrocity. Most civilians - whether they were in that timeline or not - couldn’t get near what was left of the city. But because of my connection to the cold-calling project, and because so much of our equipment was in the university basement at the time of the detonation, I got a security pass and freedom to wander as I chose. I couldn’t presence in via a live body, not with the radiation levels as high as they were, and I didn’t fancy (though it was always an option) using a recently deceased corpse, puppeted back to life by electrical stimulation. So I presenced via a robot, a clunking military-grade thing with tracks and arms and armour shielding. It was like a souped-up version of the kind of thing the army used to use to defuse bombs, back when terrorists were content with blowing up small things like cars and buildings.

  From the point where I assumed control of the machine, it took six hours to creep and crawl through the devastation to the remains of the university labs. There were other robots about, there were Chinook helicopters scudding through the mustard-yellow sky and a few soldiers and government personnel in full protective gear, but I didn’t see anyone else alive. Apart from a few stragglers who didn’t want rescuing, everyone who had survived the blast was now being treated in the emergency field clinics beyond the radiation zone. Tens of thousands had died in the first twelve hours. For tens of thousands more, the prognosis wasn’t exactly rosy.

  Because our equipment was important, we’d taken pains to protect it against all eventualities. A plane could crash into the university and we wouldn’t feel it down in the basement with the cold-calling machines. Cardiff could have a magnitude eight earthquake and the instruments wouldn’t register more than a blip. Terrorists letting off a homemade atom bomb was at the extreme limit of what we could reasonably protect ourselves against, but it had still been factored into the plans.

  Better safe than sorry, eh? Not (we told ourselves) that it would ever happen.

  So what had survived? Fuck all, truth to tell. The surface buildings were scorched rubble. It took an hour of digging before I found the secure, pressure-tight hatchway that led into the basement. I opened it (I knew the keycode, of course) and managed to get the robot down the stairs, its tracks orientating to keep the body upright even as it descended.

  What did I find?

  Me, for a start. I’d been on duty in the version of Cardiff that had taken the hit, just as I was on duty at the time in the version that hadn’t. And, miracle of miracles, the cold-calling machines were still running, being fed by a backup generator in a separate part of the basement.

  Actually, it wasn’t a miracle at all. I knew at least one of the machines had to be running, or we wouldn’t have been able to establish the cross-link that permitted presencing. The question was, how stable was that cross-link? Was it going to hold out for another five or six days, or pop at any moment?

  No use asking me, Joe Liversedge. I was dead to the world. Literally: when the robot encountered my body, it was slumped over a workstation console. I’d been the only person down in the lab at the time, since it was a Sunday and most of the other departmental staff didn’t work weekends if they could help it. Me, I was a proper little workaholic.

  ‘Paid for it now, didn’t you, you silly sod,’ I told the corpse, speaking through the robot’s voice system. ‘You daft bugger, Joe. Why couldn’t you have gone with Mick to that beer festival in Stoke?’

  Arguing with a corpse, of course, doesn’t tend to get you very far.

  It wasn’t immediately obvious why I’d died. The life-support system was supposed to be able to keep us alive in the basement for weeks on end. Then I noticed that there was a note in my - Joe’s - handwriting, next to him.

  ‘Dear Joe,’ it said. ‘Air fucked - dodgy seal, I reckon. But machines okay. Link holding. Cheerio, old mate - it’s been a blast. Yer pal, Joe.’

  Followed by:

  ‘PS - have a round on me.’

  Clutched in his hand was a twenty pound note. Nice touch. When was the last time twenty quid got you more than a pint and a packet of crisps? Typical tight-arsed Yorkshireman, as Mick would have said.

  I couldn’t take the money back with me. But I suppose it was the thought that counted.

  Maybe I need to back up a bit.

  If it seems I was acting more than a little oddly on being confronted with my own corpse, there are perfectly sound reasons for that. Thing is, it isn’t the first time I’ve met my counterpart - another version of me, Joe Liversedge. In fact, it happens all the time. So much so that I’ve become more than a little hardened to the idea that there are multiple copies of ‘me’ out there, going on with their own lives. If one of us dies, then there are still a lot more carrying on. I know that. So did the version of me in the basement.

  Twelve years ago, my team at Cardiff University was the first to open a portal into a parallel world. We did it with one of the big machines in the basement - ‘cold-calling’ across quantum reality until we established a lock with an identical copy of that machine in another version of the lab, in another version of Cardiff. The way it works, the two Cardiffs are identical at the moment the lock is established - and everyone living in those two Cardiffs has exactly the same identity, exactly the same past. But from the moment the lock is established, the two worlds start peeling apart. Although both versions of me had come into the lab on a Sunday, the one in the basement had a shaving nick on his right cheek and a different shirt on. We were only a couple of days into the lock. By the end of the week, the two histories would have pulled so far apart that Cardiff City might get a win in one and lose in the other. Having terrorists let off a bomb in one Cardiff and not the other was a huge deviation to happen at this point in the lock, but sometimes that was how it played out. I wondered what had happened to our terrorists - had their bomb not worked, or had Secret Services caught up with them before they had a chance to let it off? No one was saying much yet, although there were rumours of ‘intelligence leads’.

  Big-scale changes or not, sooner or later the cumulative differences would become so acute that the quantum link couldn’t be sustained. The portal closes on that world, leaving its occupants to carry on with their lives without being in contact with ours. Eventually we’d establish a lock with another Cardiff and begin the whole thing again. And always it was me, Joe Liversedge, who I spoke to the first time.

  It does things to you, that. It’s why Rachel left me, in the end. She said she couldn’t deal with living with a man who had such a warped take on reality, let alone my own mortality.

  ‘Do you talk about me behind my back?’ she’d asked. ‘The two of you, comparing notes?’

  ‘You’re not the other Rachel,’ I’d said. ‘She’s just . . . some woman Joe’s married to. You’re the only one that matters to me.’

  ‘The only one,’ she’d answered tersely. ‘When most men say that, they’re talking about other women. You’re talking about other copies of me, like I’m some kind of mass-produced Barbie doll. I can’t deal with this, Joe.’

  ‘You could have a go.’

  ‘Life’s too short,’ Rachel said.

  When she left, I did what I always did in times of crisis: threw myself into the work. Cardiff had been the first to develop cold-calling technology, but that didn’t mean other universities and corporations weren’t snapping at our heels, trying to get ahead of us. We’d been the first to establish a video interface between parallel worlds, enabling one version of me to chat to the other, as if we were just sitting in different offices. We’d been the first to use presencing technology - pinched from the tourist agencies, developed for the masses who couldn’t afford to fly any more - and later we’d moved from clunky robots to actual human bodies, equipped with implants so that you could take them over, as if you were physically present in the other world. All that was well and good, but none of it had come free. To stay ahead we’d had to bite i
nto a big juicy poisoned apple called direct government funding, money that arrived independently of the usual academic research pools. On the surface, the new money was intended to ensure that the UK maintained its prestigious lead in this cutting-edge field. It was all about science for science’s sake, the money supposedly untainted by any baser concerns beyond the sheer intellectual thrill of the enterprise.

  That was bollocks, though, and everyone knew it.

  In a time when the government could lock up just about anybody they liked for simply looking a bit odd, the technology had powerful security implications. Once a lock was established, two different versions of a suspect could be arrested and interrogated in parallel, with the relevant agencies cooperating with themselves to extract the maximum intelligence. Feed one story to the suspect in one timeline and see what he says. Feed another in the other timeline and see what you get from that. Have your cake and eat it, and sod the human rights.

  Of course, they never admitted to doing that kind of thing. But it wasn’t blue-sky science that had paid for the new machines or their elaborate, bombproof installation in the basement. It was national security. What else?

  Did I mention that the apple was poisoned? As a condition on all that glorious funding, the government had their own ‘hotline’, their own super-secure communications channel running into our lab. Their mandarins could talk to each other through the machines without me or anyone else in the department having a fucking clue what was going on. They didn’t get in our way and we didn’t get in theirs.

  But sometimes, there were consequences.

  Like today, for instance.

  It’s three months since the bomb went off. Our window into that version of Cardiff closed only four days after the event itself, so none of us has any idea how they’re getting on. They hadn’t come close to final casualty figures when the link collapsed, and no one was yet daring to talk about plans for the reconstruction. We’ll never make contact with that version again, even if we kept on cold-calling for the rest of eternity. It’s deviated so far from our own that the quantum lock just can’t be established.

  In my version of Cardiff, it’s not a bad day at all. The sun’s out, the pavement cafés are doing good business and everyone looks remarkably happy and content. Nothing much has changed here in three months. Of course, everyone who bothers to keep up with world events knows that a version of Cardiff got wiped off the map, and they’ve seen the pictures and video clips to prove it. Some of them, like me, have even presenced over to that other reality. We’ve strolled - or in my case rolled - over the smoking ruins of what was once a city.

  For most people, though, the bombed Cardiff is receding into the past, like the memory of a bad summer blockbuster with overblown special effects. Lots of things have happened around the world since then, and we’ve cold-called hundreds of other realities, some of which have brought their own scandals and nine-day wonders.

  But some people - some very select people - have longer memories than that.

  Over my morning coffee, I flick through the paper. Buried somewhere on page three is a little item about the recent arrest and detention of a man living in Cardiff.

  His name doesn’t matter. He’s British, all right? Welsh, if you want to be pedantic about it, although he’s not called Jones or Evans or anything acceptably Welsh like that.

  He’s never done anything wrong. His only mistake is that he happened to blow up Cardiff in an alternate universe. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. He wasn’t directly involved in the planting of the bomb. All he did was inadvertently give house room to those who were. Maybe he knew something was going on, but it’s equally likely that the perpetrators managed to keep their big secret from him.

  No one can ask them now, though, because - inconveniently - they’re all dead. Their counterparts in the other Cardiff died when the bomb went off. In this version they committed suicide when, because of a tiny imperfection in a soldered joint, their copy of the bomb failed to detonate properly, maiming two of them. All intelligence leads to a wider network of specialists and financiers have dried up. We can cold-call into other versions of Cardiff, but each of those now shares the same history as ours, so the terrorists are dead there as well. Which means that the only man the government can get their hands on - and who might know something - is the man who gave them somewhere to live.

  His denials - according to what I can glean from the newspaper - have the taint of plausibility. He was related to one of the bombers, but only distantly, and nothing in his past suggested any involvement in extremist organisations. I’m left wondering this: in our timeline, the bomb failed, maiming two terrorists and eventually leading all of them to commit suicide. Civilian losses: nil. Radiation exposure: negligible. Damage to property: not worth mentioning.

  If we didn’t know what had happened to the other Cardiff, we’d say: case closed. The detained man has no case to answer. Justice has already been delivered.

  Problem is, we do know. We do know and we like it when there’s someone we can punish.

  According to the paper, the detained man is reported to have died of complications following a heart attack, suffered during incarceration. The government line is that he had a precondition that could have flared up at any time.

  Me, I’m wondering what they did to the poor, innocent bastard.

  I fold the paper, finish my coffee and ride the tram to the university. Coincidentally, it’s another Sunday. When I get there the department is empty, except for a few hoovering robots. Anyone with an ounce of sense is somewhere else, enjoying the weather, enjoying their city.

  I tap the keycode and descend into the basement. The cold-calling machines loom around me, huge, humming horizontal cylinders, cold to the touch. There’s always been something faintly sinister about them, although I’d never admit it aloud. I think of the government hotline running into this basement, into the machines, enabling signals to span the gap between realities. Without that connection, they’d never have come down as hard on that man as they did.

  I think, for a moment, about sealing myself in here and turning off the air circulator. Go out the way the other Joe did, with a suicide note to myself and twenty pounds clutched in my cold, dead hand. A pint and a bag of crisps. It wouldn’t really be killing myself, would it? Even if I die here and now, countless other versions of Joe Liversedge carry on living. We won’t all make the same decision.

  But then I think about what Rachel said, before she packed her bags. We’re not Barbie dolls. If I’ve started slipping into a state of mind that allows me to believe that we are - that death is just the pruning of one local branch from an infinite, ever-growing tree - then maybe she had a point. Maybe I have been doing this a bit too long. Killing myself - no matter how noble the intention - would only reinforce her sense that I’ve let myself get sucked too far in.

  It’s not that I want Rachel to like me again. Too late for that. But I can still make a stand, without dying like the other Joe did.

  Alarms will trip as soon as I start damaging the machines. Sooner or later they’ll come and find me - they’ll be able to break into the basement with or without the keycode. Then I’ll be arrested - and, well, who knows? But no matter what happens to me, sooner or later they’ll find a way to put the machines back together. But still: I’m Joe Liversedge. I’m a creative bastard. And I reckon I can do some serious damage if I put my mind to it.

  There’s a big axe on the wall, next to the fire extinguisher.

  Let’s get cracking.

  This very short story - little more than a vignette - was written for the Welsh edition of The Big Issue, the magazine sold in the UK by the homeless and vulnerable. Commissioned by the Cardiff-based crime writer John Williams for a special series of summer stories by Welsh writers, the idea was that the story should have a specific Welsh connection. This proved suitably problematic until I remembered that I’d already established a Welsh-themed near-future background for the novella ‘Signal to Noise’. The
Yorkshireman Joe Liversedge had been a background character in that story, but in this much shorter piece I put him (or copies of him, to be strictly accurate) in the foreground, a few years after the events of the earlier story. Once the elements were in place, the story wrote itself very quickly (good thing too, as the deadline was tight) and proved a refreshing exercise after some of the much longer pieces I had been working on recently. The title is a steal from the Manic Street Preachers, of course (as is, very nearly, ‘Everlasting’, also in this collection). Yes, I’m a fan . . .

  HIDEAWAY

  PART ONE

  There was, Merlin thought, a very fine line between beauty and terror. Most certainly where the Way was concerned. Tempting as it was to think that the thing they saw through the cutter’s windows was only a mirage, there would always come a point when the mysterious artefact known as the syrinx started purring, vibrating in its metal harness. Somehow it was sensing the Way’s proximity, anxious to perform the function for which it had been designed.