“Come on.”
Reynolds kept hold of the shackles, pulling me alongside him. The ground beneath our feet became increasingly more solid, less sandy, and I walked with a little more assurance. Even if I didn’t have the first notion where we were going, we were certainly making a good pace.
“I want you to understand,” Reynolds said as we crested a slight rise in the land. I could see beasts in the distance, moving high in the sky. Even so, they were still tethered to the ground by long, spindly legs.
“Then speak plainly. I am your captive audience.”
A look of pain crossed Reynolds’ face; I had seen the same thing in my uncle at the hospital just that morning
“We must reach the city, Miss Franks,” he said. “Will you come back into the carriage? We cannot reach it on foot.”
I now saw the carriage awaiting us, a claret-colored shimmer in the strange air. There was no choice, was there? Go with Reynolds to his city, or stay here where I knew no direction and might wander forever. I lifted my hands.
“Unbind me and I will come with you,” I said.
Reynolds did not argue. He unlocked my shackles with a key he kept in his sleeve. We climbed back into the carriage and, without word to the driver, were off. Reynolds watched me the entire ride and I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t care.
I never witnessed stranger things than I did in the city itself. The light continued to play tricks upon my mind, and the buildings seemed half open to the sky. The people of the city were paper thin; on edge they could not be seen, though when they turned a certain way in the light their monstrous faces became dreadfully apparent. Some looked as our carriage driver did; others I could barely comprehend. I quickly learned how to look in order to see only the slimmest slice of them.
When I learned this manner of looking, I discovered something else. This city was not anchored to the ground. Indeed, the entire place was on the move, buildings and artworks balanced on the backs of immense creatures. A great distance below us, I could see their small feet moving; legs made of thin spire-wire upward to their fabulous bodies—bearing these incredible weights. So too I realized the carriage had come to rest upon its four horses; they carried us without effort through the buildings, the creatures, the people balanced upon a road of memory between.
“This place makes no sense,” I said and Reynolds laughed darkly. He pressed behind me at the carriage window, his hand beneath my ribcage. Did he fear I would jump again? Or did he just find pleasure in touching me?
“Your uncle wanted to understand it. Do you remember his stories? His poems?”
I had forgotten them (and indeed Baltimore, my uncle, the rain, the everything) until Reynolds brought them back to me. I had trouble breathing when I remembered it all. All I had now lost.
“He wrote of this place,” I said. Once the idea was voiced, I saw my uncle everywhere I looked. There, he had written of that strange creature with its shrieking hair; and there, he had written of that building, ever in flame. My uncle’s mind sparked in every shadow of this place; as the creatures made their roads of memory, so too my uncle made the roads, circling ever on, one begetting the beginning of the other.
“He helped create this place,” Reynolds said.
The horses carried us to an enormous throne, so large it took three of the creatures to support it. How they managed I’ll never know. Reynolds bid me to hold his hand, for I’d never walked a street such as this; it was alive beneath my feet, guiding us from the carriage up to the throne where a woman awaited us.
Her boundless hyacinth hair spilled down her body like water, to her feet and beyond, where gardenias and sand dollars scattered. Silver stars gleamed around her head. She wore a comet for a bracelet; endlessly circling, sparking with vilest fire. Near her throne sat dark, hand-woven baskets filled with fruit. She reached down, plucked a green pear, and offered it to me.
I did not take it. I had read my uncle’s stories and knew well enough what happened to young women who ate the fruit of strange lands. The queen, if she were such, took no offense. She smiled down at me, then looked at Reynolds.
“You failed,” she said.
“I did.” He bowed before her. “He has died alone yet again.”
“Speak plain, the both of you.” Granted, my uncle had also written stories of outspoken young women; their end was little better than that of those who ate the fruit. I didn’t care; I was somewhere beyond care.
Neither spoke. Rather, they showed me.
The queen twisted the pear in half and within its gritty flesh I saw my uncle writing. He wrote of this place, of a city near a sea. He slept each night and thought he dreamed, but his dreams were not that at all. He came here, snatched away by these people. Fairy, he named them, but they were not; it was the only word he knew to apply.
They stole him away every night, him and more of his kind, artists all, for these creatures loved their minds. I felt this love equal to my own for Edgar Poe. But this love had a dark side for as they loved these artists, they consumed them.
When my uncle made to escape and leave this place behind, they chained him. They held him, naked and dirty in an unlit cell. How many cells stretched in the darkness? I could not count them all. This placed smelled of your worst imaginings—darker, fouler. There was a seam of light that came through the door to hover above the floor. The seam! Within this light, dust sparked, dreams flicked.
In this place, my uncle wrote stories in his head. Despite their cruelty to him, some part of my uncle still loved the magic of these people, the impossibility. He loved that they made him create better stories, stories that helped create their fantastic reality.
Only one person visited my uncle; Edgar came to name him Reynolds. Reynolds came daily, to take stories for his people, to bring Edgar a measure of food and clean water. Eventually Edgar’s stories turned from madmen to a sorrowful young woman who did not even know she was sorrowful. The thing that pleased her most were the stories, so my uncle kept on spinning them. Reynolds fell in love with this young woman. With me.
My uncle escaped them—I laughed through my tears at the sight of him slipping his bonds like a magician. He stole clothes—no, see there, it is a hand! A hand offering Edgar clothing that was not his own. Reynolds’ hand.
“Death has little meaning here,” the queen said as she squashed half of the pear and tossed it away. “Though it means much in your world.”
“Please speak plain,” I whispered, the scent of pear and despair sharp in the air between us. I glanced at Reynolds. “Please.”
“I helped your uncle escape,” Reynolds said. “The first time, he died alone, unknown. I undid that memory—”
As one undoes a knot, I thought. I had looked into his eyes before; I had kissed that mouth once. I remembered these things though through a wash of water; they were blurred and indistinct. Reynolds had tried once before; I had not listened.
“—and tried again. I brought him to Baltimore, got you the note; you reached him, and yet now you’ve come here and he will die alone; has died alone. You—”
“Can only return to death,” the queen said and threw away the rest of the now-rotted pear.
“Your uncle is dead,” Reynolds said. “The moment he returned, the years he had been here caught up to him.”
“But he wasn’t gone years,” I said. Surely there was a mistake. I felt desperate to make these creatures understand that. “Only overnight. I feared him drunk and sleeping it off.”
“Overnight to you,” Reynolds said and his voice skipped. “He was taken almost every night.”
And every day returned to his world, to my world. To live years over the course of a night; to wake each morning in his bed, thinking it all a dream. How I had once laughed at my uncle and his small circle of friends, all of them old, bent men. How young might they have honestly been?
“Miss Franks—” He clasped my hands within his own. “Agnes. I never intended for you to come here. You are dead to your
world; time has gone on without you and made what it will of Baltimore.”
Though I wished to believe that all of this was some terrible dream, I knew within my heart that it was not. Edgar’s stories of this place should have prepared me. He had seen this place; its people had loved him and in the end destroyed him.
“Only overnight,” I said. “I can go back.” I had to know, what had become of my world? Was my uncle truly gone? Had the thing I feared most come to pass? It could not be. What if he still lived?
“What are you not telling me?”
Reynolds grabbed my arm. “Is isn’t just overnight—not for you.”
It was then that Reynolds’ trespass became clear to me. I had misunderstood what the queen showed me. Every day my uncle woke in my world, it was Reynolds who brought him to that moment. Reynolds unstitched the decades that had passed within this strange world to bring my uncle back into my time, so that I might have a living relation at my side.
How many times should my uncle have died? It was no wonder he tried to cut out his own eyes when at last he seemed firmly rooted here.
“It remains her choice,” the queen said to Reynolds. “You asked us to allow that, to never take another of her kind without their permission. This is no different because you love her.”
I looked beyond the queen’s star-wreathed head, to the vast sky where golden birds stretched their wings. No, not birds; angels. When I looked the right direction, I saw their slim bodies. But where was the sea my uncle wrote of, I wondered, and watched the slow ebb and flow of the entire city itself and realized the city is the sea and wanted to weep with the joy of it.
“You would live a full life here,” Reynolds said.
My eyes met Reynolds’. When I looked at him a certain way, I saw the truth of him, his true body, and if I looked deeper, I saw to the heart of him. Darker, fouler; a seam of brightness. He could take me back as he did my uncle, I thought, but he doesn’t want to. He wanted to keep me. “I want to go back.” I had to go. To look—to see whatever had become of whatever I loved.
The queen seized my chin in her pear-wet hand and my world went black.
When light returned, it fell in hazy curtains around me. The air was ashen, bits of burnt paper falling as snow would. Walls like skeletal fingers rose around me. Scattered bricks, the stench of burnt wood. I saw hunched figures in the street and ran for them, but as I neared they became only heaps of more debris. I saw no people.
Though my legs were tired and ached with each step, and my lungs burned, I walked on. I walked up streets once familiar to me; dead, burnt things crunched underfoot. I searched for anything I might recognize and while there were ruined shops aplenty, I knew none of them.
I walked through all the wreckage of this city, until the sun touched and began to fall below the horizon. Exhaustion dragged me to sit on a curb and I couldn’t find the energy to mind the rubbish I settled in.
How many years had passed Baltimore by? How long had the city lain in ruin? Was it God who decided to destroy this place, or man? Did it matter at all?
In the remains at my feet, I found a scrap of poetry, about a woman with hyacinth hair. It could not be my uncle’s handwriting—though perhaps it was, for as I stood to continue my journey, I could not remember his handwriting. I could barely remember his face.
It was his voice I remembered best of all, and the beat of those words in my head. The seam. It rested inside of me, unable to escape. He’d wept for it in the end, shouting for Reynolds to snatch him back to that world.
I folded the page into my hand and walked on. As far as I walked, the whole city through, there was only gray ruin. I yelled, but no one answered. Perhaps there was no one to answer.
“Anyone!” I cried as loud as I could from the middle of the street. I looked to the sky, the veiled sun now set in the gray west.
My world was dead. I had nothing. I looked at my filthy hands and saw them old and wrinkled. I was but twenty and felt the universe retreating from me.
“Reynolds! Fonderous Reynolds!”
The ring of hooves on cobblestones answered me. Sharp and distinct down the ruined street they came, pulling a claret and gold four-in-hand.
There was one thing left to me. Hope in the brightness in the seam above the floor. Hope that there existed in that place a life worth living, with beings I might one day love. My uncle was dead in both worlds, but I was only dead in one.
I stepped in the path of the carriage and my world went black—
But only for a moment.
SIGNAL TO NOISE
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry in 1966. He spent his early years in Cornwall, then returned to Wales for his primary and secondary school education. He completed a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD in the same subject at St. Andrews in Scotland. He left the UK in 1991 and spent the next sixteen years working in the Netherlands, mostly for the European Space Agency, although he also did a stint as a postdoctoral worker in Utrecht. He had been writing and selling science fiction since 1989, and published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. He has recently completed his tenth novel and has continued to publish short fiction. His novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times. In 2004 he left scientific research to write full time. He married in 2005 and returned to Wales in 2008, where he lives in Rhondda Cynon Taff.
FRIDAY
Mick Leighton was in the basement with the machines when the police came for him. He’d been trying to reach Joe Liversedge all morning, to cancel a prearranged squash match. It was the busiest week before exams, and Mick had gloomily concluded that he had too much tutorial work to grade to justify sparing even an hour for the game. The trouble was that Joe had either turned off his phone or left it in his office where it wouldn’t interfere with the machines. Mick had sent an email, but when that had gone unanswered he decided there was nothing for it but to stroll over to Joe’s half of the building and inform him in person. By now Mick was a sufficiently well-known face in Joe’s department that he was able to come and go more or less as he pleased.
“Hello, matey,” Joe said, glancing over his shoulder with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand. There was a bandage on the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He was hunched over a desk covered in laptops, cables, and reams of hardcopy. “Ready for a thrashing, are you?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Mick said. “Got to cancel, sorry. Too much on my plate today.”
“Naughty.”
“Ted Evans can fill in for me. He’s got his kit. You know Ted, don’t you?”
“Vaguely.” Joe set down his sandwich to put the lid back on a felt-tipped pen. He was an amiable Yorkshireman who’d come down to Cardiff for his postgraduate work and decided to stay. He was married to an archaeologist named Rachel who spent a lot of her time poking around in the Roman ruins under the walls of Cardiff Castle. “Sure I can’t twist your arm? It’ll do you good, you know, bit of a workout.”
“I know. But there just isn’t time.”
“Your call. How are things, anyway?”
Mick shrugged philosophically. “Been better.”
“Did you phone Andrea like you said you were going to?”
“No.”
“You should, you know.”
“I’m not very good on the phone. Anyway, I thought she probably needed a bit of space.”
“It’s been three weeks, mate.”
“I know.”
“Do you want the wife to call her? It might help.”
“No, but thanks for suggesting it anyway.”
“Call her. Let her know you’re missing her.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Yeah, sure. You should stick around, you know. It’s all go here this morning. We got a lock just after seven this morning.” Joe tapped one of the laptop screens, which was scrolling rows of black-on-white numbers. “It’s a good one, too
.”
“Really?”
“Come and have a look at the machine.”
“I can’t. I need to get back to my office.”
“You’ll regret it later. Just like you’ll regret canceling our match, or not calling Andrea. I know you, Mick. You’re one of life’s born regretters.”
“Five minutes, then.”
In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe’s basement. As solid as Mick’s own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds of researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedge laboratory.
In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. You couldn’t go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, but Mick knew that, and he’d been careful to remove all metallic items before he came down the stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten tonne bar of ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe liked to wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magnetic field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter six earthquake, and the bars wouldn’t feel the slightest tremor.
Joe called it the call center.
The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while two were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing was cold-calling: dialing random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waiting for someone to answer on the other end.
In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum state. By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron—what Joe called the back-chirp—the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto another strand of quantum reality—another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating with its counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.
Once that lock was established—once the cold-calling machine had achieved a hit—then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influence it but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those taps. It meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.
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