The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  From Simon Ings and Titan Books

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Three

  9

  10

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available From Titan Books

  One of the most original and accomplished science fiction writers working today.

  NINA ALLAN, AUTHOR OF THE RIFT

  A singular, uncompromising achievement.

  WARREN ELLIS

  A haunting, beautifully written tale of edgelands and edgelives.

  ROGER LEVY, AUTHOR OF THE RIG

  Fearsome, tender, witty and weird, The Smoke is a searingly inventive, sumptuously written novel about love and grief in the Yorkshire space age. A masterful vision of another past – or future.

  M.T. HILL, AUTHOR OF ZERO BOMB

  As weird and jittery as a caffeine overdose, and possibly the most heartbreakingly evocative book you will read this year.

  GARETH L. POWELL, AUTHOR OF EMBERS OF WAR

  Compelling and beautifully realized.

  LOCUS

  Fulfilling and thought provoking.

  BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY

  An intense meditation on loneliness, capital and cognition.

  RISING SHADOW

  Simon Ings has created a distinctive world and style that captures the weirdness of what might have been.

  SFCROWS NEST

  From Simon Ings and Titan Books

  The Smoke

  Wolves (January 2020)

  The Smoke

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785659225

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659232

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  titanbooks.com

  First Titan edition: January 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2018, 2019 Simon Ings. All rights reserved.

  First published by Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, London, 2018

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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

  For Michelle

  ONE

  This desert, stretching in every direction visible to the observer, is not smooth. Its topology is in fact absurdly disordered. Yet the observing eye, unable to parse its complexity, flattens everything. Simply to comprehend it, the eye must reduce its thousand thousand defiles and dried riverbeds, stands of silver gidgee trees and banks of Mitchell grass, to a flat monotony.

  This desert is made of stones and sand and indeterminate things which, alive or not, have found little use for the living state. Anyway they are so coated with dust that they are already halfway mineral.

  The sun has risen too far to reveal, by way of shadows, Woomera’s natural topography: how the ground rises to the north; the geological remnants of an ancient coastline to the west; to the south-east, the rubbed-out, filled-in sketch of an archaic meteor strike. The blast pits, on the other hand, are as clear as an artist’s first marks with charcoal upon an orange paper. The lips of three, four, half a dozen arcs of pitch-black shadow are distinguishable by plain sight, with a suggestion of further, similar pits stretching as far as the horizon.

  The pits are all the same size, curvature and depth. The nearest of them may stand for all: a great scorched hole in the fractured ground, suggesting not so much a massive blast as a caving-in and blackening, as if, in this diseased zone, the rocks themselves have shrivelled.

  Between the pits run lines of finer, whiter stuff that might be roads, though they are in fact just the crushed marks left by heavy vehicles rolling from one pit to another. Not roads, then; only desire lines. (Desire lines: a strange expression to apply in a place like this.)

  The wall is made of glass. The observer – your own brother – looks down through the wall and sees, reflected there, the white rubber boots encasing his feet, the white tiled floor on which he stands, the grey-green grout between the tiles. Focusing past this Pepper’s Ghost, he sees, in an oblique and foreshortened fashion, the lip of the pit in which this structure stands. High as this eyrie seems – twenty storeys at least – the whole structure must be even bigger, to rise so high from so deep and sharp-sided a bowl cut in the sickened earth.

  Around the pit he spies little vehicles, and little men, wielding white hoses that from this vantage point resemble nothing so much as strands of spaghetti, trailing across the ground and down into the pit. Your brother leans his head against the glass wall, straining for the angle. He glimpses a ring of small, windowless towers – units threaded like beads around a great metal girdle which curves out of sight to left and right.

  These are the shock absorbers. The angle of observation is too steep, the pit too dark, for your brother to see more, but he knows that below them there is a shallow domed plate weighing a thousand tons, built of steel and coated on its underside with a rubberised concrete. And above that, in a hermetically sealed zone, there is a pipe, and down this pipe the bombs are meant to fall: bombs that are held in magazines arranged within the ring of massive shock absorbers.

  The bombs, each weighing half a ton, will drop at a variable rate, sometimes once a second, sometimes much less frequently, their speed matched to – indeed, dictated by – the resonant frequency of the shock absorbers. Once they have fallen a precise distance through the small bomb-shaped hole in the centre of the curved plate, the hole will clam shut and the bomb will detonate with the force of five kilotons of TNT – an atomic blast about half as powerful as that which devastated the city of Berlin in 1916, ending, at the cost of some 40,000 lives, the bloody farrago of the world’s Great War.

  The bombs boast virtually no propellant; a smear of tungsten paint. Material just enough to spread a hydrostatic wave across the surface of the plate. The heat generated by each explosion is immense – ten times the temperature of the visible surface of the sun – but very short-lived, so that the inner surface of the plate is hardly ablated. It will survive this treatment for years.

  The pressure exerted by the blast pushes the plate. The shock absorbers dissipate the kick, spreading the acceleration along the length of the tower. By the time the shocks reach that part of the structure where your brother is now standing, he and his fellows will hardly feel them.

  In this manner, the whole ungainly structure will rise from the ground and through the air and, at an altitude of around 300 miles, be serviceably clear of Earth’s gravity well. From this comfortably high orbit, the stars beckon. The Moon. Mars. Even Jupiter is not beyond this ship’s projected range.

  Whether your brother will see Jupiter, and explore its rings with an unaided eye, remains a secret. Before Jupiter, before Mars even, there is a necessary duty he and his fellows must perform, a mission only the captain knows about – and yo
ur brother is not the captain. He is a midshipman (first class, mind) and his name is Jim. Jim steps away from the window. (There is plenty of room to manoeuvre – the economics of this kind of propulsion favour big craft over small, and this vessel is as big as a frigate.) He reads his name, backwards, reflected in the blast-proof, heat-proof, cold-proof, pressurised and tinted glass of the wall. James Lanyon. Over his name, a Union Jack. Over that, stitched to the breast of his white leather flight jacket in gold thread, the name of his vessel.

  HMS Victory.

  1

  Troy has fallen. The belly of the wooden horse has splintered open in the town square, vomiting forth Greek elites. The gates are torn open and the city, gaping, lost, runs with blood. Priam, King of Troy, is dead, slaughtered on his throne; his lieutenant Aeneas saw it happen. Now all the heartsick warrior can do is try to save his family. His wife Creusa. Ascanius, his son. His father Anchises.

  Anchises, that Venus-lover, that lame old goat – you’re put in mind of Billy Marsden the fitter chasing after the barmaid of the Three Oaks, out Halifax way three winters past, and laugh.

  Two men you do not know look up from their game of cards and stare at you. Their eyes, carrying no hostile intent, are nonetheless like crossed staves barring your path. No overtures. No gambits. Stranger, keep to yourself. Four years in London have made you a foreigner here, who grew up in streets not three miles from this spot.

  Helplessly irritated, you feather the onion-skin pages of your mother’s Aeneid, turn and read on.

  Aeneas’s other half, Creusa, she’s no slouch. She’s set, little Ascanius upon her hip, sandwiches packed, water bottled, tickets in her purse, scarf tight around her chin, Let’s go! Bus leaves in ten! Ancient Anchises feels all his years and wants to stay put, Here I was born! Here I will die! Not a shred of Billy Marsden now, and much more like your own drear dad.

  It is a relief to you – if only for a moment – that by tomorrow you will be free of Yorkshire and back in London for a while. For a moment (only a moment) you wish you were already embarked on the long, rickety journey back to the capital. There is very little left for you to do. In this home that has forgotten you, all you can do is wait. Weather the afternoon. Weather another Friday night fish-and-chip supper with your dad, self-stoppered Bob Lanyon (who, according to persistent rumour, nonetheless slapped Billy silly once, for grabbing at your mother). Weather another sleepless sleep in that garret bedroom you know as well as the cavity of your own mouth. The room’s absurd: it is too small to accommodate a grown man, and the truckle bed is even more ridiculous, your feet hang over the end of it at night. At one and the same moment, however, that room feels too big for you to bear. When you were little, you used to share it with your brother Jim. But you are on your own now, and Jim is off to outer space, by Woomera.

  You drink off your pint and set the jar down a good distance from you. The tabletop, black with varnish, is getting wet from your beer, and you do not want to damage the book.

  Ascanius’s head bursts into harmless flame. Aeneas, resourceful, grabs a water jug from under the sink and chucks its contents at his son’s head. Creusa meantime chides the dripping boy, How many times must I tell you with the matches? Clueless, the lot of them; deep in defeat’s addlement, they don’t even realise that these harmless flames around their infant’s head are a sign from the heavens.

  So the Gods, feeling generous, provide the family with yet another hint that all may be well, if only they’d get a bloody move on. Aeneas sees it first, scudding the heavens outside their door. It is an asteroid: a chunk of rock, about half a mile on its longest axis, white hot and shedding gobs of flaming stuff into the superheated air. It streaks over the dying city. This signal is unmistakable.

  Time to go, says Aeneas, and loads his chumbling father on his back.

  You leave the pub to catch the last of the daylight. October: the air is restless, the clouds intermittent and dirty against a sun that still thinks it’s summer. There’s rain on the other side of the valley, and a band of low blue cloud sweeping along like a curtain, so you take a short cut and turn off the road down a paved gutter, still wet from the morning and treacherous with dropped leaves, to a path above allotments. This is a route you found as a boy, cheating on a school run. It leads to the wooded cut where the remains of old engines founder among the roots of trees that only pretend to be ancient, and stone basins send fingers of rusty water rushing hither and thither, from terrace to terrace, to power the ghosts of freshly rotted wheels.

  The local coal diggings were exhausted a generation ago, so the town regrouped on the valley floor to feed off coke that’s hauled up daily by railway from the strip-mines of Nottingham and Derbyshire. These days the town is busier than ever. New works, great mechanical mouths agape, belch smoke through stacks built tall as cathedral spires, taller, all to protect the lungs of the town, but it doesn’t make any difference. Smoke dribbles out of the chimneys, dribbles down and around them, especially on a day like this, and gathers in the streets and smuts the washing.

  The old brick donkey path weaves behind a moss-green outcrop. As you follow it, you catch a brief glimpse of the town, steeped in its lake of smog like blue milk. The town is arranged as a series of terraces spreading like ripples from the big brute facts of spaceship factories. The town drowns in waves of smoke while up here, where the town’s story began – the first fires lit, the first iron smelted, sweet waters of the peat bogs blasted into screaming steam, and the region’s future literally forged – here the air is as sweet and rotten and brambly as any untouched hollow out by Byland or Rievaulx.

  A cart rail hidden under dead leaves proves as slippery as black ice, and down you go. You pick yourself up, mouldy, cursing, and pat your coat pocket to check that your mother’s book is secure. Your hand meets your hip. You cast around. The Aeneid lies open in a muck of twigs. You pincer it up with forefinger and thumb and blow dead leaf fragments from its blue cloth covers and its frayed and faded spine. Not much damage done. You shake the thing, not hard, to free a leaf that’s stuck to an open page. A slip of paper falls from the back of the book. You put the book in your pocket and pick up the paper. It is folded once and you open it.

  The paper is headed ‘Gurwitsch Subscription Hospital’ with an address in Queen Square in Holborn, London. It is the hospital your mother attended when she first took the rays. The letterhead is fancifully antique, but below, the details of an upcoming appointment – B-P ‘therapy’ and a date nine months old – have been dashed off by an ink-starved dot-matrix printer.

  * * *

  The ‘BP’ in BP therapy stands for biophotonics. The biophotonic ray is a cytological phenomenon discovered by the embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch. For that reason, it’s often called the ‘Gurwitsch ray’ or G-ray.

  Gurwitsch, a Munich graduate and a Russian Jew, was born towards the end of 1874, the year of the Yellowstone Eruption. So far as biographers can ascertain, young Gurwitsch was the only member of his family to survive the global ten-year winter which followed North America’s fiery end. And thanks to the quick and generous actions of the family’s lawyer, he thrived.

  Contemporary memoirs describe a bright boy, obsessed with colour. This was no uncommon obsession back then. Yellowstone’s profound effect on the atmosphere of Northern Europe, especially at dawn and dusk, fuelled a short-lived generation of consumptive and hungry artists. Gurwitsch’s first ambition was to join their starving ranks, and this, unusually, met no opposition from his patron. But he was no good, and after two busy yet barren years, Gurwitsch returned from the soup kitchens of Paris, his paintings and diaries consigned (ritually, and with a certain amount of drinking) to his friends’ fireplaces. He later quipped that his art had served the essential function of warming hands more talented than his own.

  In starving Saint Petersburg, where a ban on domestic cats had brought forth rats the size of dogs, in rooms heavy with the smoke from burning furniture and even floorboards, the young Gurwitsch set ab
out his second career. He became, of all things, an embryologist, fascinated by the mysteries of development.

  Why do things grow the way they do? Why is growth such an orderly business? Especially: how does every part of the expanding foetus know at what rate to grow? At every stage of life, the foetus is exquisitely symmetrical, its internal organs developed in a manner perfectly suited to support its periphery. How is this possible? What constrains and encourages this roiling ball of fast-dividing cells to fashion itself into so intricate a form?

  There were at the time two broad answers to this question. Gurwitsch’s lecturers were wont to throw up their hands and talk about the existence of pre-existing ‘templates’. But Gurwitsch, a young liberal, radicalised in Paris and hiding seditious German pamphlets behind his stove, preferred the more radical alternative. This hypothesised that the cells of the foetus actually communicate.

  Gurwitsch’s militant materialism and powerful, disciplined imagination marked him out as a radical. He was arrested, served out a short period of exile, and maintained a secret correspondence with political and scientific figures in Vienna, London and Berlin. There was a revolution going on in the life sciences quite as profound as the revolution brewing among the trades unions of Paris and London, and Gurwitsch’s letters offer a fascinating, if bewildering, glimpse into years during which scientific and political questions were virtually indistinguishable.

  The trouble was, Gurwitsch couldn’t get the painterly monkey off his back. He had all the makings of a liberal martyr, a Duma minister, a scientific entrepreneur like Koltsov or Vavilov, but, one by one, all the key public moments passed him by. His time became entirely absorbed by the conundrums of colour. Pigments and spectra. Constructed colour. Colour mixes. Colour wheels. Goethe’s anti-Newtonian maunderings. John Clerk Maxwell’s mistakes. The nonsense of the primaries. The tapestries of Le Blon. Canvases of Signac and Seurat. He wasn’t, by a long chalk, the only Russian intellectual to succumb to the temptations of ‘internal exile’, using personal study as a shelter from the political chaos outside. Read any short story by Turgenev. Attend any play by Chekhov. And so his tale might have ended: another one of Russia’s lost generation of Francophile pantaloons.