So picture Terr making that climb alone in the brutal cold, no longer as young or as fit as she might once have been, but still as determined. She left messages in the village, which lay in Catayatauri’s permanent shadow. If she didn’t come back, she didn’t want anyone risking their lives trying to find her. The Incas had held Catayatauri with a deep, religious intensity, and so had the climbers who came after, and so must Terr, alone up in those godly mountains. She climbed unaided; no wings, no muscle or lung enhancements, no crampon claws on her feet or hands, no ropes, and no oxygen. The fact that she made it there at all was incredible, clinging to that ridge at the roof of the world. From Catayatauri, from that drop, nothing else was comparable. And Terr had stood there alone, a nearly old woman at the edge of everything. She’d bought vials at a shop in Lima. She’d emptied what little she had left in her accounts to get hold of them. These weren’t like the vials they sold along the Rue de Commerce in St. Hilaire. Scarcely legal, they were the quickest acting, the most radical, the most expensive. They tore through your blood and veins by the nano-second, they burned you up and twisted your body inside out like a storm-wrecked umbrella. And Terr had purchased three times the usual dosage.
And she probably did get there, and make the leap from the ridge on Catayatauri. It seemed like the most likely explanation, even though her body hadn’t been found. Terr had thrown herself from the precipice with the vials singing in her body, her bones twisting, the wings breaking out from her like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, although they would have been too damp and frail to do more than be torn to shreds in the brutal torrents of air. And then, finally, finally, she would have been buffeted on the rocks. Terr, it seemed, had chosen the most extreme of all possible ways of dying . . .
Was it like her, to do this, Tom wondered? Terr plummeting, twisting and writhing? Had she meant to kill herself, or just wanted to take the risk, and lived the moment, and not really cared about the next? The man in the Moorish garden was as lost and puzzled by all these questions as Tom was himself. But the thing about Terr, as they both realised, was that she had always changed moment by moment, hour by hour, year by year. The thing about Terr was that you could never really know her. Tom, he had always been steady and purposeful; long ago, he had laid down the tracks of his life. Terr was different. Terr was always different. She’d never been troubled as Tom had been most of his life by that sense of missed appointments, unfinished business, time slipping by; of a vital message which he had never quite heard. Terr had always leapt without looking back.
The man gave a smile and signed off. The Moorish garden, the dense scent of the flowers, faded. Tom Kelly was back in the morning as the shadows raced the clouds over his mountain; and he was wondering, like a character in a fairy story, just where he had been this previous night, and exactly what it was that he had witnessed. And if he could have been granted one wish – which was something that Terr, whatever she had been, hadn’t even offered to him – it would still be the thing for which he had always been hoping. He was nearly seventy, after all. He was Tom Kelly; Mr SETI. No matter what happened to you, no matter what wonders you witnessed, people his age didn’t change. He was still sure of that, at least.
Tom Kelly, speeding down his mountain. The sun is blazing and the chairlifts are still and the flyers are resting as shadow lies down next to shadow for the long, slumberous afternoon. He parks in the near-empty Place de la Revolution, and climbs out from his Citröen, and waves to Jean-Benoît wiping his tables, and then bangs on the door of the Bureau de poste. The sign says fermé, but Madame Brissac slides back the bolts. She seems almost pleased to see him. She nearly gives him a smile. Then they spend their hour together, seated beside the counter as bluebottles buzz and circle by her pigeonholes in the warm, intensely odorous air. Tom’s got as far as transitive verbs, and here he’s struggling. But after all, French is a foreign language, and you don’t learn such things in a day – at least, not the way Tom’s learning. It will be some months, he reckons late autumn at least – l’automne, and perhaps even winter, whatever that’s called – before he’s got enough of a grip to ask her about how she sorts the mail in those pigeonholes. And he suspects she’ll think it’s a stupid question in any case. Madame Brissac is, after all, Madame Brissac. But who’d have thought that she was once a teacher, back in the days when people still actually needed to be taught things? For every person, it seems to Tom, who gains something in this future age, there’s someone else who makes a loss from it.
Things are just starting to reawaken when he emerges into the blazing Place de la Revolution, and he has to move his Citröen and park it round the corner to make room for the evening’s festivities. It’s the Foire aux Sorcières tonight, which a few months ago would have meant nothing to him, and still means little enough. But the French like a good festival, he knows that much now at least. They have them here in St. Hilaire regularly – in fact, almost every week, seeing as there’s such a regular throughput of new flyers needing to have their francs taken from them. But this festival is special. Tom knows that, too.
Drinking sweet, hot coffee at his usual table, he passes the necessary hour whilst the market stalls and the stage for the evening pageant assemble themselves to the attentions of robot crabs and the clang of poles and the shouts of a few, largely unnecessary artisans. The town, meanwhile, stretches itself and scratches its belly, emerges from its long meals and lovers’ slumbers. The girl with that Audrey Hepburn look, whom he now knows is called Jeannette, gives him a smile and goes over to say hi, bonjour. She thinks it’s sweet, that a mad, old mountain goat like Tom should take the long way around to learning her language. And so does Michel, her boyfriend, who is as urbane and charming as anyone can be who’s got the muscles of a cartoon god and the green, scaly skin of a reptile. They even help Tom carry his few boxes of stuff from the boot of his Citröen to the stall he’s booked, and wish him luck, and promise to come back and buy something later on in the evening, although Tom suspects they’ll be having too much fun by then to remember him.
But it turns out that business at his stall is surprisingly brisk in any case. It’s been this way for a couple of weeks now, and if it continues, Tom reckons he’ll have to order some new SETI T-shirts and tea towels to replace his lost stock, although the tea towels in particular will be hard to replace after all these years, seeing as people don’t seem to have any proper use for them any longer. They ask him what they’re for, these big SETI handkerchiefs, and then tie them around their necks like flags. Who’d have thought it – that tea towels would be a casualty of this future he finds himself in? But bargaining, setting a price for something and then dropping it to make the sale; that’s no problem for Tom. The numbers of another language come almost easily to him; he supposes his brain dimly remembers it once had an aptitude for maths.
The Foire aux Sorcières seems an odd festival for summer, but, even before the darkness has settled, the children are out, dressed as witches, ghosts, goblins, and waving lanterns that cast, through some technical trick Tom can’t even guess at, a night-murk across their faces. Still, the whole occasion, with those sweet and ghastly faces, the trailing sheets with cut eye-holes, the shrieking, cackling devices, has a pleasantly old-fashioned feel about it to Tom. Even the flyers, when they emerge, have done nothing more to change themselves than put on weird costumes and make-ups, although, to Tom’s mind at least, many of them had looked the part already. The scene, as the sun finally sinks behind the tenements and a semblance of cool settles over the hot and frenzied square, is incredible. Some of the people wandering the stalls have even dressed themselves up as old-fashioned aliens. He spots a bulge-headed Martian, then a cluster of those slim things with slanted eyes which were always abducting people in the Midwest, and even someone dressed as that slippery grey thing that used to explode out of people’s stomachs in the films, although the guy’s taken the head off and is mopping his face with one of Tom’s SETI tea towels because he’s so hot inside it.
If you half closed your eyes, Tom thinks, it really could be market day on the planet Zarg, or anywhere else of a million places in this universe which he suspects that humanity will eventually get around to colonising, when it stops having so much fun here on Earth. Look at Columbus, look at Cook, look at Einstein, look at NASA. Look at Terr. We are, in the depths of our hearts, a questing, dreaming race.
Small demons, imps, and several ghosts cluster around him now, and ask him quel est SETI? which Tom attempts to explain in French. They nod and listen and gaze up at him with grave faces. He’s almost thinking he’s starting to get somewhere, when they all dissolve into gales of laughter and scatter off through the crowds. He watches them go, smiling, those ghosts, those flapping sheets. When he returns his gaze, Madame Brissac has materialised before him. She is dressed as an old-fashioned witch. But she seems awkward beneath her stick-on warts and green make-up, shorn of the usual wooden counter which, even now that they’re attempting to talk to each other in the same language, still separates Tom and her. Still, she politely asks the price of his SETI paperweights, and rummages in her witchy bag and purchases one from him, and then comments on the warmth and the beauty of this evening, and how pretty and amusing the children are. And Tom agrees with her in French, and offers Madame Brissac a SETI tea towel at no extra cost, which she declines. Wishing him a good evening, she turns and walks away. But Tom still feels proud of himself, and he knows that she’s proud of him to. It’s an achievement for them both, that they can talk to each other now in the same language, although, being Madame Brissac, she’ll never quite let it show.
The music rides over him. The crowds whoop and sing. The lanterns sway. Down the slope toward the river, the lace-draped stalls look almost cool in the soft breeze, which plays down from the hills and over the tenements as Tom sweats in his SETI T-shirt. Jean-Benoît’s down there, dressed red as fallen Lucifer and surrounded by lesser demons, and looking most strange and splendid for his evening off. There’s no sign, though, of the woman in the dark blue dress whom Tom glimpsed standing in the sunlight all those weeks ago. He knows that Terr’s dead now, although the thought still comes as a cold, blunt shock to him. So how could there ever be any sign of Terr?
Tom’s got his days better sorted now. He’s never got so drunk as to lose one whole day and imagine Thursday is Wednesday. In fact, nowadays, Tom never has a drink at all. It would be nice to say that he’s managed it through pure willpower. But he’s old, and a creature of habit, even when the habits are the wrong ones. And this is the future, after all. So Tom’s taken a vial, just as he had done several times before, and the need, the desire, the welling emptiness, faded so completely that he found himself wondering for the first few days what all the trouble and fuss had been about. But that was two months ago, and he still rarely entertains the previous stupid thoughts about how a social drink, a sip and a glass here and there, would be quite safe for someone like him. Even on a night such as this, when the air smells of wine and sweat and Pernod and coffee and Gitanes, and he can hear bottles popping and glasses clinking and liquid choruses of laughter all around the square, he doesn’t feel the usual emptiness. Or barely. Or at least he’s stopped kidding himself that it’s something the alcohol will ever fill, and decided to get on with the rest of his life unaided.
He sometimes wonders during the long, hot afternoons of his lessons with Madame Brissac whether a woman in a blue dress and grey or blonde hair really did enter the Bureau de poste to enquire about an elderly American called Tom Kelly on that magical Thursday. Sometimes, he’s almost on the brink of interrupting her as she forces him through the endless twists and turns of French grammar, although he knows she’d probably regard it as an unnecessary distraction. He’s thought of asking Jean-Benoît, too – at least, when he’s not dressed up as Lucifer – if he remembers a woman who could have been old or might have been young coming to his café, and who undertook to pass on the message cards he’d forgotten to take with him. Would they remember Terr? Would they deny that they’d ever seen her at all? More likely, Tom has decided, they’ll have long forgotten such a trivial incident amid the stream of faces and incidents that populate their lives.
Tom glances up from the bright Place de la Revolution at the few, faint stars which have managed to gather over the rooftops and spires of St. Hilaire. Like Terr – or the ghost of her – he suspects they’ll remain a mystery that he’ll have to carry to his grave. But there’s nothing so terrible about mysteries. It was mystery, after all, which drew him to the stars in the first place. Wonder and mystery. He smiles to himself, and waves to Jeannette and Michel as they pass through the crowds. Then Jean-Benoît, amid great cheers, flaps his crimson wings and rises over the stalls and hovers floodlit above the church spire to announce the real beginning of the night’s festivities, which will involve fireworks, amazing pageants, dancing . . .
This Foire aux Sorcières will probably still be going on at sunrise, but Tom Kelly knows it will be too much for him. He’s getting too old for this world he finds himself in. He can barely keep pace. But he permits himself another smile as he starts to pack up his stall of SETI memorabilia, the T-shirts and paperweights, the lapel pins embossed with a tiny representation of the Drake Equation which not a single person who’s bought one of the things has ever asked him to explain. He’s looking forward to the midnight drive back up his mountain in his old Citröen, and the way the stars will blossom on when he finally turns off the headlights and steps into the cool darkness outside his hut, with the glitter of his tripwires, the hum and glow of his machines. Who knows what messages might be up there?
He’s Tom Kelly, after all.
And this might be the night.
He’s still listening, waiting.
TURQUOISE DAYS
Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big books that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. His most recent book is a new novel, Pushing Ice. Coming up are two new collections, Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.
Here’s a visit to a serene, peaceful, quiet little planet, a sea-world, an idyllic world nearly covered by tropical turquoise oceans. But as we shall see, placid as things seem, you never know what’s lurking beneath the surface. Or when it’s going to come out to get you.
I
Naqi Okpik waited until her sister was safely asleep before she stepped onto the railed balcony that circled the gondola. It was the most perfectly warm and still summer night in months. Even the breeze caused by the airship’s motion was warmer than usual, as soft against her cheek as the breath of an attentive lover. Above, yet hidden by the black curve of the vacuum bladder, the two moons were nearly at their fullest. Microscopic creatures sparkled a hundred metres under the airship, great schools of them daubing galaxies against the profound black of the sea. Spirals, flukes and arms of luminescence wheeled and coiled as if in thrall to secret music.
Naqi looked to the rear, where the airship’s ceramic-jacketed sensor pod carved a twinkling furrow. Pinks and rubies and furious greens sparkled in the wake. Occasionally they darted from point to point with the nervous motion of kingfishers. As ever she was alert to anything unusual in movements of the messenger sprites, anything that might merit a note in the latest circular, or even a full-blown article in one of the major journals of Juggler studies. But there was nothing odd happening tonight; no yet-to-be-catalogued forms or behaviour patterns, nothing that might indicate more signifi
cant Pattern Juggler activity.
She walked around the airship’s balcony until she had reached the stem, where the submersible sensor pod was tethered by a long fibre-optic dragline. Naqi pulled a long hinged stick from her pocket, flicked it open in the manner of a courtesan’s fan, and then waved it close to the winch assembly. The default watercoloured lilies and sea serpents melted away, replaced by tables of numbers, sinuous graphs and trembling histograms. A glance established that there was nothing surprising here either, but the data would still form a useful calibration set for other experiments.
As she closed the fan – delicately, for it was worth almost as much as the airship itself – Naqi reminded herself that it was a day since she had gathered the last batch of incoming messages. Rot had taken out the connection between the antenna and the gondola during the last expedition, and since then collecting the messages had become a chore, to be taken in turns or traded for less tedious tasks.
Naqi gripped a handrail and swung out behind the airship. Here the vacuum bladder overhung the gondola by only a metre, and a grilled ladder allowed her to climb around the overhang and scramble onto the flat top of the bag. She moved gingerly, bare feet against rusting rungs, doing her best not to disturb Mina. The airship rocked and creaked a little as she found her balance on the top and then was again silent and still. The churning of its motors was so quiet that Naqi had long ago filtered the sound from her experience.
All was calm, beautifully so.
In the moonlight the antenna was a single dark flower rising from the broad back of the bladder. Naqi started moving along the railed catwalk that led to it, steadying herself as she went but feeling much less vertigo than would have been the case in daytime.
The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 97
