Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215

by TTA Press Authors

  "That's it?” I say.

  He shrugs. “Yeah."

  "Fuck it, Howie. You dragged us out here for that?"

  He shrugs again.

  "Jeez."

  Howie drops his head, and in that motion I recognise the old Howie for the first time today, recognise him as clearly as if it was yesterday. And I know he's lying.

  "How long have you been having these dreams?” I ask.

  "Years,” he says. “On and off. Sometimes more often, sometimes less."

  "And now?"

  "More. Much more."

  He removes his little glasses and squeezes his knuckles into his eyes. “I'm not sleeping much. Not well.” He lifts his head again. “Am I the only one? Doesn't anyone else dream about ... about all that?"

  The silence is broken only by the cry of a bird swooping low over the estuary, its silhouette sharp against the silver mud, and the dispirited crackle of our failing fire. Then Sophie flicks away the glowing butt of her cigarette, pulls another from its packet and lights it with a match. She breathes in deeply. “I do,” she says.

  I blink at her. “You?"

  "Yeah. Why not?” Smoke drifts from her nostrils, up past her eyes. “It's like Howie said. We're on the beach, just about where we're sitting now, and I can feel the windmill behind us. So I get up and walk towards it. The last of the evening light is catching on the top sails. I walk up to the windmill, and it seems to be leaning over me, as though it's a giant face peering down at me. I reach the steps and start up them, and just as I get to the door, I find myself wondering: Where have all the dragonflies gone? And then I wake."

  She's telling more than Howie, but I can't shake the feeling that Sophie isn't letting on completely either.

  The rest of them look at me.

  I shake my head. “Not me. No dreams here."

  "Trish?” Sophie said.

  "No. Sorry."

  "Why the hell is it just us?” Howie demands.

  A look flashes between him and Sophie, and my eyes narrow. What did that mean? No one says anything. The last flame flickering in our fire dies, leaving a weak collection of dulling embers.

  "We should go,” Trish says.

  "Where?” I say.

  "Back to the pub. It's late."

  We kick dirt over the almost-dead fire and pick up our beer cans.

  Behind me, I think I hear a tired creak, like the sails of the wind-mill, but when I turn, there's nothing.

  Howie has booked us all rooms in a bed and breakfast not more than a mile away. Hasn't bothered to ask, of course, just assumed. But, folks, I'm so hammered by then, I couldn't have got my keys in the ignition let alone driven. We have dinner in the pub—fake Thai food, all chillies and not much else in the way of flavours, washed down with more beer than was strictly necessary—then Howie drives us to the B&B. Trish and Howie head off to their room as soon as we got in, leaving me and Sophie alone in the corridor.

  "You're a teacher now, right?” I say, even though she told me so earlier. I'm slurring my words and noticing it.

  "Yeah."

  I pause. “I work in finance.” In finance. That's not a job. It's a fucking abstract. The phrase has never sounded so empty to me.

  Sophie agrees. “Fuck, Paul,” she says. “You used to have dreams."

  That hurts. If you've never had someone take a look at your life and then kick it away like a kid with a sandcastle then you don't know how much. “Thanks,” I say.

  She fumbles in her shoulder bag for another cigarette.

  "You smoke too much,” I say.

  "Fuck off,” she mumbles around the cigarette.

  The corridor is dim, the wallpaper is seventies-patterned and textured, worn thin by a thousand brushing shoulders. The wall is hung with the kind of prints of horses you only see in cheap little guesthouses like this one. The whole thing depresses me.

  I indicate the door to my room with a nod of my head. “Do you want to...?"

  "Fuck, no.” She must see the spasm of pain on my face, because she lays a hand briefly on my arm. “I've learnt one thing in these twenty years,” she says. “You can't go back. Ever. There are gates you walk through, and they close behind you. You can't storm them, you can't break through. You just have to keep going forward, wherever it leads you."

  Then she unlocks her room and leaves me standing in the corri-dor. The last of us. Again.

  My room has a view out over the estuary. When I can't sleep, I stand there and watch the dark river slip by beneath the bright moonlight.

  You can never go back.

  I never wanted to. Until now, and all the doors are shut behind me. The river slips by. It never turns back. Until the tide rolls in.

  The beginning and the end. One at the start of that summer, the other at its finish. The days could have been swapped around with little change. Bright blue skies. A furnace of a sun. The canal choked with reeds and rushes. Birdsong in the trees and bushes. Sophie slipping her hand into mine.

  No. That last bit only happened on the first day we were all to-gether, not the last. That was a difference.

  She slipped her hand into mine, and I was so startled I almost stumbled. Startled and heart-stoppingly delighted. Dragonflies hovered in and out of the rushes and reeds in the canal and over the towpath. I gave Sophie an astonished look. She winked at me and kick-started my heart again. I remember I found walking difficult that afternoon.

  Howie looped his arm over Trish's shoulders (that didn't happen on the last day either—all those signs of the coming storm, and not one of us stupid kids realised).

  We were all laughing at some crap joke when we came around the corner and saw the windmill for the first time, bulking incongru-ously from an expanse of grass between the canal and the estuary.

  I had a good time at University. Okay, the lectures were mind-numbing, and the labs seemed to stretch on forever. But that was only the days—the mornings, mostly—and the rest of the time was mine. There were some bad moments, too, of course—some storming hangovers; being dumped at a party with half my friends watching—but it was a good time on balance.

  OnthatfirstdaywithSophie,Trish,andHowie,itseemedtotakea step up. The sun seemed brighter, the colours more vivid, the sounds sharper and clearer. As though we'd opened a door in the clouded glass that had always separated us from the truth of the world.

  Later, on that last day, when it all turned to ash, it was as though we stepped back out that door and shut it behind us.

  I think Sophie must have seen the windmill first, because I heard her shout, “It's perfect,” and then we all saw it, looming above us.

  Pulling me along by the hand, Sophie raced towards it. Moments later, I heard Trish and Howie come chasing after. We all clattered up the steps, burst into the windmill, and stopped. The space was still, eerie. Light filtered in strands through cracks in the brickwork and between shutters. The windmill seemed to hold the ghost of an indrawn breath. A word struck me at that moment: potential. Not potential as in the mundane sense of this-could-be-renovated-into-some-yuppie-apartment-full-of-chrome-and-spotlights potential, but potential as in the physics I was half-heartedly studying. This place seemed to exist at a higher state of energy. An electrical poten-tial difference drives a current around a circuit. This place seemed poised to drive ... something through us. Enliven and quicken us. Power us.

  "Yow!” Howie screamed, and a faint echo bounced back.

  We laughed, and tumbled together into the potential.

  I sleep eventually. Most nights I don't sleep well, and tonight is no exception. I don't dream about the windmill, even though I'm half expecting to. Instead, I dream of the slow river flowing on through the estuary to the sea. It's not a restful dream, and sometime in the night I awake to find tears streaming down my cheeks. I'm sobbing.

  I left my soul in 1987. I left my heart and my love and my dreams, and I want them back. I want them back.

  My tears taste of salt and whiskey.

  Normally, I sleep b
adly—hangover sleep—but I'm hard to wake in the morning. I have two alarms, one by my bed and the other across the room, staggered by a couple of minutes. Most days it's enough. When it's not, I skip breakfast. This morning, it's different. I'm awake and up by six, pacing my bedroom. It's cramped and claustrophobic, even when I throw the window open and let the cold dawn air in, but breakfast isn't until seven, and there's nowhere else to go. I wonder what I'm doing here. These people aren't the people I knew when I was at University, and remembering what they were—what I was—leaves me empty. There was potential, then, and now it's gone. The people we were are gone. Sophie was right. You can't walk back through those gates.

  Suddenly it's too much. I don't want to see Howie or Trish or Sophie anymore. I don't want to stare back at the past and see a future that should have been but never was. I thump out of the room, downstairs, and out the front door. My car is still parked where I left it the day before, but that's only a mile or so away. I start to walk. I'm light-headed from lack of breakfast and dehydrated from drinking too much.

  I intend to get straight into the car and head off, never look back, never see any of them again. I even slide myself in behind the steer-ing wheel and fumble the key into the ignition. But then I sit there, staring out at the morning-painted river and silvery mud banks. We came here once in the early morning, Sophie and me. We snuck out of dorms while it was still dark, and Sophie drove. We bumped the car over the potholes then pulled it off the track, against the brambles. In the dawn, the windmill was a silhouette against a pastel-blue sky. We hung around, smoked a bit, then tumbled, naked and chilly, under the old sacking. The dragonflies were already there.

  Trish and Howie turned up before we were dressed. Howie looked away while we crawled out, laughing, and pulled our clothes on, but Trish kept looking, watching me get dressed, with that sardonic curl to her lip. That was the first time I reckoned I might have a real chance with her. I don't think Sophie noticed.

  I decide to take one last look all on my own, before I leave all this behind forever. Maybe I'm hoping the windmill will be there.

  It isn't. There's no sign it ever was. The grass is unmarked. There are no dragonflies.

  I walk out to the edge of the mud banks and wait. I'm not sure what for.

  "You're a bastard."

  The sudden voice makes me turn. Howie is standing there behind me, his thin shoulders pulled up tight.

  "Yeah,” I say.

  "It was your fault it went wrong,” he says. “You and your fucking dick. So why the fuck aren't you the one haunted by it?"

  I shrug. “Guess it never bothered me. Anyway,” I glance at him, “she was a beast in bed. Why—"

  I don't get time to finish. Howie might be scrawny, but he's still got that punch. He lashes out and catches me square on the jaw. I fall to the ground.

  "She was my first girlfriend,” he shouts. “My only girlfriend. I loved her."

  My jaw hurts, and I'm lying in the mud. “You've still got her,” I say.

  He kicks me, hard, flipping me over. “It's not the same. It's never been the same.” He kicks me again. I feel something crack.

  "I'm sorry,” I say. I don't know where it comes from.

  He pauses, foot drawn back, staring down incredulously at me.

  "I'm sorry,” I repeat, and I mean it. I'm sorry for all of it.

  Howie drops down beside me, sitting cross-legged in the wet mud, not seeming to notice it.

  "I'm not going home with her,” he says, quietly.

  I force myself up onto an elbow. My rib grates agonisingly.

  "Shit, man,” I say. “I'm sorry."

  That first day, we drove out here fast in Howie's battered old car. Howie had a new Whitesnake album. He played it over and over in the cassette deck and drove way too fast. He already knew all the words, and he belted them out, even though he couldn't sing a note. I was breathless with laughter.

  The last day that we all came up together (just a few days before the very last time any of us were here), we drove in silence. It wasn't our worst day, but it was close. In truth it had been coming for a week. Trish and Howie were hardly talking. I was getting bored with Sophie. We drank a few cans, but no one said much, and we left before it was fully dark.

  Two or three days later, I came out of my last exam—I'd failed it, I knew that; I'd known before I even went in—and Trish was standing there, opposite the exam hall, leaning on the wooden railing. Smoke drifted from a long cigarette. She levered herself off the railing, that sardonic, faintly-amused expression still settled on her face.

  To be honest, the idea of getting Trish out of Howie's bed and into mine had palled in the last week. Maybe even then I knew it was over. Maybe that was why I walked up to her anyway and took her face in my hands. I kissed her hard, tasting the tobacco on her lips and tongue, breathing it in from her hair.

  "The windmill,” I said.

  She writhed briefly against me, then stepped back with a laugh. “The windmill. Always the windmill."

  And that's where Howie and Sophie found us, four hours later.

  The sound of a footfall behind us makes me look back. Sophie and

  Trish are standing there together.

  "The windmill,” Trish says. “Always the fucking windmill."

  And there's not much more to say. There is no windmill. There never has been. Call it hallucination or magic or collective delusion. It doesn't matter. We are all that there ever was. Our present defines our past as much as our past ever defines our present. If there was a windmill, once, a potential, then now there never was. It's over.

  We stand together, for a while, all four of us, as though nothing has changed, looking out over the estuary. The tide has turned and is coming in. Water eddies into the channels cut in the mud. It swirls against the river flowing out. A small tidal bore, no more than a couple of inches of water, makes its way up the estuary and is gone. A single dragonfly darts by.

  Slowly we trail away. First Sophie and Trish together, then Howie on his own, not looking up from the ground, his thin shoulders hunched, until I'm left standing there on my own.

  It's almost a pain inside me, the regret. We could have done it. We could have done anything. But we didn't.

  The air is full of dragonflies now. They've come in with the tide.

  I turn and walk away, heading back towards my car.

  Behind me, I hear the windmill creak. I smell the dust and old sacking and rotting wood. But I don't look around. We had our chance, and we blew it. There's no going back.

  That night I dream of the windmill.

  We're sitting on the thin strip of sand between the grass and the mud banks that lead down to the water. There's a small fire burning, more glowing coals than burning wood, and thin smoke rising into the still air. There are some empty cans on the ground, and an empty bottle. Howie is telling some wild, ridiculous story, and the rest of us are laughing. The air is thick and sticky, but, unusually, there are no dragonflies. The tide is on its way in, but there are no dragonflies.

  I hear the creak of the windmill, and feel it lowering over us like a great, black storm. I turn, and there it is, as clear and real as it ever was. I walk towards it, climb up the steps, and then I wonder: Where are all the dragonflies?

  I pull open the door.

  My feet crunch on something. It sounds like very thin glass. I look down. The floor is covered in dead dragonflies. Under my shoes, they are brittle.

  I press on. I walk around the cracked millstone to the wooden steps that lead, ladder-like, up to top level. I climb.

  Up here, the dragonflies are thicker on the floor. They're almost ankle-deep. I kick through them, like through autumn leaves.

  I see us lying there in the corner, Trish and me. Naked. Young.

  "Was that all?” I want to scream. “Was that all that killed it?” A bit of stupid, physical, meaningless sex. It wasn't even that good.

  I surge forward, angry, ready to pull us apart. To kick some sense in
to us, to tell us it wasn't worth it. To change the inevitable. But it's too late. The door is opening downstairs. Howie and Sophie are on their way up.

  Copyright © 2008 Patrick Samphire

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CRYSTAL NIGHTS—Greg Egan

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  Illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

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  Greg Egan last appeared in these pages with ‘Singleton’ (IZ176). His novel Incandescence will be published by Gollancz in the UK and by Night Shade Books in the USA in May. A story collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories, is out in March from Subterranean Books. For more information on these books and much more please visit Greg's website at gregegan.net.

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  1

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  "More caviar?” Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to trans-parent. “It's fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning."

  "No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk.

  Daniel said, “I'd like to show you something.” He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he suggested.

  Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me,” she said.

  "Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I'm not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I'd just like you to tell me what you think of this machine's performance."

  She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she'd been expecting, but she wasn't seeing double.