Now We Are Ten: Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “And then you sold it?”

  “I didn’t need it for myself! I don’t hate anybody that much. It really is a killer, Inj, and when it’s done with someone it doesn’t even leave a trace it’s ever been there. I mean, I’ve got to hand it to you. You are pretty tough to have survived, considering how susceptible you are to that sort of thing.”

  “Someone has spilled juice on me!” squawks the table, and Mir breaks up laughing. I mop up Mir’s spilt juice and remind her to sit quietly, but she isn’t used to polite society.

  Rob gives her a code for his system. “Here are the games,” he says, pointing.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I ask. “She can’t mess anything up, can she?”

  He waves a hand. “It’s fine. My stuff’s bombproof. Let her play.”

  He looks me in the eye, then.

  “I did what I said I would, Inj. I got the recognition. I’m large. I can’t be touched. I can give Mir the same thing.”

  Mir leans into my hair, whispering. “There’s a blobby thing eating his face, Mum.”

  I stroke her hair, hand her a piece of biscotti. I am secretly delighted about the blobby thing. It makes his authoritative air more bearable.

  “So, Rob, you talked to Abdul?”

  “He went to Australia. Won’t return my messages. Why? What’s Abdul got to do with anything?”

  I lean in.

  “We made some adjustments to Mir.”

  He stares.

  “Like what?”

  Now he is looking at her ears, her leaf-strewn locks, the pale green “hairs” on the backs of her arms. They are tiny spines that catch signals out of the air and alter them.

  In broad terms, I explain Mir to him. She swings her legs and trawls through his apps hungrily. She is bound to mess up his stuff; but I did warn him. He is now too distracted, thinking about what is going on in her body, to give a moment’s thought to what her eyes and fingers are doing to his system. He’s getting angry, but clamping down on it.

  “You haven’t even taken her to a doctor, have you?” His eyes flash, proprietary. Accusing.

  “Do you really want to do this, Rob?”

  “No... Inj, you know I don’t want this to get nasty at all, I don’t want to make either of you uncomfortable. But I’m just... saying... have you taken her to a doctor? I can help. Let me do some things to help you. It doesn’t have to be so hard.”

  Yes, it does.

  “I have hung on out there a long time,” I say in a grey voice. “I don’t want to come back. Not any more. I don’t need what you have. Can’t you see that your work is feeding the emergents? You’re enriching their environment, increasing their sophistication all the time. The emergents are eating you alive and you don’t even care. They will use you up and move beyond you and by the time you realise what’s happening it will be too late.”

  He chuckled. “I forgot what you were like, Inj.”

  I am on a roll now.

  “But I didn’t forget what you’re like. You will give us away. We are sitting right on the underbelly of the system and it can’t see us, but now you know. It’s only a matter of time before you expose us. I guess you will take the Silence and sell that, too.”

  He runs his hand through his hair, clearly upset. “Now that’s unfair. I’ve worked like a dog all these years. I think I’ve earned my success.”

  Mir is sitting very still. She is watching him. She looks at me with a shrinking expression, as though I have slapped a puppy.

  “Inj, can’t we find a middle ground? Here’s the blue sky. I’m open. Tell me what you want to do.”

  I regret having brought Mir. We should have done this without her. But who could I have left her with? I am all she has. And I am at a loss.

  “I have something of yours,” I tell Rob at last. I put the bag on the counter. Inside, his soul twitches, chatters a little. Irritated at having been plucked from the happy oblivious mud under the bridge, I guess. “I’ve been keeping it for insurance purposes.”

  His eyelids clench into suspicious lines as he tilts his nose toward the bag. He doesn’t seem to guess what’s in there. Can’t he smell it? I tried to clean up the bag, wiping algal smudges off the orange plastic, but it still looks disreputable and it reeks of his soul.

  He stands up. I gather that I have insulted him, because he speaks with frigid courtesy.

  “OK. I can see it’s not going to work. I get it. We both need time to think this one through. Let me walk you to the station. Or maybe my car can take you somewhere?”

  I take Mir’s hand. I have to drag her away from Rob’s system. I hope she is messing up his personal organiser.

  “We’ll walk.”

  He walks with us, and because I don’t want to upset Mir, I let him. Out on the Strand he tries to make small talk. My heart is pounding. I don’t know how to stand down. I don’t know if I can stand down. I notice the wind on the river; I notice that the beech trees have been augmented. All the air is thick with transmissions. I hold my potted plant before me like a ridiculous shield. I am afraid.

  “The trouble is, Inj, you’re not stable. I know it. You know it. You could go down at any time, and then what happens to Mir?”

  I stop walking. I can’t believe he just said that in front of her.

  “Just stop talking, Rob.” I am impotent and he knows it. He is refusing to look at me, and at first I think he’s ignoring me. Then I realise he’s doing something with his cogs. He’s ordering something up.

  The beech trees overhead are boosting some creation of his, and emergents are crawling up from the ground. They quicksilver over my feet and up my legs. They drop like caterpillars from the trees and engulf me, thousands upon thousands of his trained vermin. They are in my eye socket.

  It’s happening again.

  I know I’m hyperventilating. He has staged this whole thing: to scare her, to scare me, to force my hand. I’m the witch and he’s thrown a bucket of water on me and I am melting.

  It’s the same old helplessness. I will end up in hospital and then he will take her.

  I grip Mir’s hand and push past Rob, beginning to run toward Charing Cross station. Seeking safety underground.

  But the pavement folds and remixes my kinaesthetic perception: my insides are visible, my flesh begins to strain and pop. I know this sensation. Soon I will lose myself entirely.

  I try to run but I’m going nowhere.

  Mir is tugging on my hand, pulling me toward her.

  “Don’t run,” she says. “Mum, don’t run away.”

  She throws her arms around me. I can feel the singing of her foliage in my teeth and along the tracks of my tendons.

  I can’t see.

  My intestines are spilling out through my vagina and my bones are gathering in my throat and poking through my eye sockets. The world is roiling away from me in a tide of dust, and there is a wordless power in the air that wills the end of me. Everything I have ever loved, every mercy, every kindness, is mown down by an ineffable storm of hate.

  I am shit.

  The worms are inside my head. They trawl through every pathetic effort I have ever made to pull myself together, every grant proposal and small article I have written, and they mock. Each tiny bit of progress I have made, they trash. Everything I have ever done or thought that was good, they take, until I can’t remember whether it ever was my own.

  They say they will come for my plants. They say they will come for Mir.

  This is happening with breathtaking speed. I try to remember where I am, what is going on. I don’t want her to see me like this. It will break her. He will break us both.

  “I have to get away, Mir,” I gasp. “I wish I could fight it, but I don’t know how.”

  She says, “You don’t have to fight it. Call the Silence. Close off. Play dead.”

  I don’t know how to play dead. I only know how to be dead. That’s where I’m going, right now.

  *

  Mir’s mother never
listens to her. She isn’t like a tree. She doesn’t know how to stand and take it. The plane trees that grow in a straight line along the Embankment, they are hard to kill. If you cut one down it would just sprout a bunch of new branches and keep going.

  Mir’s mother pulls away from Rob and drags Mir along the Embankment. Mir holds the plant they brought for protection. She calls on it for help. Just then her mother’s legs go out from under her and she falls to her knees. Mir holds the plant as her mother is sick on the roots of a plane tree.

  Mir can feel the killing thing in her own leaf follicles. She can taste it on the back of her tongue.

  She calls the Silence. She calls it around herself and the potted plant from Dartford. The Silence falls over them like a shadow. Then she calls it into the plane trees. They try valiantly to help. They are already expert at transforming human pollution into clean air. Mir could teach them to do the same with ideas, if she only had more time.

  Her dad has followed them. Mir senses him trying to contact his emergent, but he can’t because of the Silence. He has only his own body. But he’s still bigger than Mir. She can feel her mouth working and she’s trying not to cry.

  “I’m not upset,” she tells him. “It’s fine. She’ll be okay.”

  He closes his eyes for a moment, like something is hurting him. Then he kneels down in front of Mir the way adults do when they want children to think they’re being really fair. He takes Mir’s hand in his hand. Their hands are alike.

  “She isn’t okay,” he tells Mir. “You don’t have to –”

  “Stop killing her.”

  His hand withdraws. He doesn’t know where to look. Mir is still calling the Silence. The plane trees ride her wave and hold the Silence. She smells their oxygen. Their leaves shimmer in the wind. People’s heels are scuffing along the pavement and bike gears are clicking and a dog rattles its chain. She hears everything so clearly, and she hears him say some more rubbish but doesn’t listen.

  “I saw the emergent in your system,” she tells him. “I’m not stupid.”

  He laughs.

  “You’re just like her. So sharp. I just want to know you, Mir. I want to save you so you won’t end up like... like...”

  Like her.

  He is sweating. The Silence around them is cool. Mir’s mother starts to pull herself together. She takes a tissue out of her bag and wipes her mouth.

  “You should have this,” Mir tells her father. “Then maybe you’ll stop.”

  She holds out the plastic bag. He waves it away. He’s laughing again in a fake way.

  “Maybe you don’t understand,” Mir says. It’s what her mother says to Mir when she’s getting ready to tell Mir off in a big way. “I’m blocking your emergent, Dad. I know what it is. I know how to stop it.”

  “But... Mir, I can give you the best education. Your potential. You could go so far, just let me –”

  “Take it,” Mir says. She shoves the bag at him and upends it. His soul falls out. He just manages to catch it before it hits the pavement. There’s this moment where he seems to recognise it, but then he shoves it in his jacket pocket and stands up and he’s backing away from her.

  “Please don’t drive it away again,” Mir tells him. Then she goes back to her mum, leaning on the plane tree. Mir is crying. She wanted it to be so different.

  *

  It takes hours for Mir and me to get home by tube, train and bus. As the terror subsides, I find myself thinking of the young green walls of London today, of Karranga’s offer to help me grow the Silence. I am thinking of the plant I’m holding in my arms, how it saved me. I want to do something with the Silence. I know it’s important. If the plants saved me, they can save others.

  But even as the bus lets us out, a terrible weariness has come over me. I feel dark. Mir drags me through the industrial estate to the green waste beyond. I do not know how I will muster the energy to do everything that I have to do. It feels so much easier to run and hide. How can I find a way to carry on with this work when its outcome is something no one has ever seen?

  It’s too much pressure. The very air seems to weigh on me, making thunder in my mind. I nearly lost everything back there.

  “Mum,” says Mir, poking me. “Stop listening to the waves. Just stop.”

  I put my fingers in my ears but it doesn’t help.

  Mir’s shadow is tall and gangly when we make our way to the pewter coolness of the river, the weed-scrambled bank with its leaning tents and smoke-scarred air. Even as electric trucks glide along the A206 and over the bridge, our renegade plants lunge this way and that toward the sky. The Butcher is just finishing up a day’s work of transplanting along the bank, and I watch him walking along the footpath with a spade over his shoulder.

  At last the Silence reaches out and embraces me. My weariness dissolves, and that’s when I remember it was never quite real.

  Mir skips ahead of me, through the nettles and toward the restless treetops of our home.

  As she runs, she waves the empty plastic bag in the air, like a flag.

  The Time-Travellers’ Ball

  (A Story in Ten Words)

  Rose Biggin

  It took ages to organise.

  Are you going? I did.

  Dress Rehearsal

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  In Doje we played The Beetle which, though everyone knows it as one of Molodori’s more boisterous comedies, has a solemn little soliloquy in Act Four that I’ve always coveted. It goes to the old pantaloon role, of course, who spends the rest of the play being duped by his niece and her foreign-officer-of-a-lover as they parade their affair through his house without him being any the wiser. And then, just when the audience is practically howling in their contempt for him, he has the stage alone and gives them eighteen lines of utter gravitas, a guardian’s lament of how he might have been a better uncle, and all the lost opportunities we recognise only when it’s too late to act on them. And the audience – if you do this right – is spellbound. And the older amongst them see themselves in the man they’ve been ridiculing, and perhaps he gets a little extra applause at the curtain call.

  I, of course, was the dashing foreign lover with his colourful past, and that’s ostensibly the lead, but the uncle’s by far the role they remember. “Next Time Doctor Kampfe dusts off this play,” I promised myself, “I’ll audition and give him such a risible old fart he won’t be able to see anyone else doing the role.” But Doje was the third time we’d done The Beetle since I joined the company and, unless something happened to our senior clown, I probably wasn’t in with a sniff of a chance.

  We were booked for seven nights in the Majestic Blood Theatre, the name of which might suggest Grand Guignol but instead derives from the place’s use, in the middle-distant past, as a site of gladiatorial spectacle. The people of Doje are very aware of their barbaric history, and rather too fond of it. We filled the house on every night, but twice as many turned out for the public hangings in the square.

  Seven nights of rapturous applause, and then Doctor Kampfe went to the Majestic’s owner and haggled for another two because we’d been turning people away at the door all week. Sufficient lucre changed hands that the stage magician booked after us was persuaded to vanish for a couple of days to give us another two packed houses. After the last night we all came away from the standing ovation quite drunk on show business. There really is no feeling like that intense camaraderie with people you know you’ll be bickering with come morning.

  And then there was a fanfare, I kid you not. Some flunky with more scrambled egg on his uniform than I ever ate off a plate turned up and bugled the devil out of our little dressing room, shocking everyone into silence, and in came a big man in velvet eveningwear who I recognised from the local coinage.

  Actors are good at bowing and we put our practice to good use, for here was Cornelius the Fifth, a.k.a. ‘the Conqueror’, King of Doje and its subject territories and Scourge of Nicrephos. I have no idea what Nicrephos did to deserv
e a scourging, but I’m willing to bet old Cornelius didn’t spare the rod.

  He was a rather angry man by nature, I’d heard, but right then he was charm itself because he was saying nice things about the performance. His had been that big booming laugh from the gilded box to stage left, and I let him off a bit of the scourging, because a good laugh in the audience is worth an encore all on its own. Especially when you’re the king and everyone laughs with you. Anyway, Cornelius Five had most definitely had a good night and had come down to our level to tell us so. We were properly honoured. Felice simpered and flirted a little; Alfonso, senior clown, repeated some of his funnier lines on request, and I modestly said that I didn’t really know anything about sword fighting, it was all for show, Your Majesty. I’ve found that’s the safest line wherever there are strict laws as far as bearing arms is concerned.

  And then His Majesty announced grandly that we would all, of course, come to his Spring Palace for a command performance for the court.

  We were looking at our lord and manager Doctor Kampfe, who was frozen midway through sipping his wine. I could see the very narrow slice of time in which he was going to say no. Now, there are Kings you can say no to, and Cornelius the Conqueror was not one of them. On his most recent campaign, he was notable for his treatment of captives whose religion differed from his own in some very trivial way. Impaled, don’t you know. On spikes. So he wasn’t going to react well to a group of travelling players – foreigners to boot – turning him down.

  And so Doctor Kampfe gave his most ingratiating smile and said how very happy we would be to oblige the King, and Cornelius turned up his own enormous grin and told us how very rich such obliging would make us, and we all toasted everyone’s health and the King’s long reign.

  The King went about his regal business assured that we would pack up our flats and properties and set our wagon on its way to the Spring Palace with all speed. And then Doctor Kampfe’s Famed October Players jumped on our wagon and got the hell out of Doje.

  It was Doctor Kampfe’s iron decision, that. And we bitched and moaned and threatened to jump ship, but he would not be swayed. Almost everyone in every world will tell you there’s no way to make a decent living as an actor, and this isn’t actually true. If there’s one way to put aside a decent nest egg, it’s royal command performances. But our complaints broke against the Doctor’s resolve like waves against the cliffs, and then we’d crossed the town limits and were gone into the night like thieves. I guessed that it was Cornelius’ volatile reputation which informed the good doctor’s decision. For myself I’d have risked a little volatility for the chance of that most legendary of things: a genuine pouch of gold. As it was, we left so quickly we didn’t even get the takings from the last and most lucrative night, and the owner of the Majestic kept our deposit. All in all, a victory for neither art nor commerce.