The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

by George Mann

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Ash.”

  With a certain sadness Jerry swung the Banning on his back then threw his leg over the saddle. He was happy to be leaving the future.

  2. WHEN DID SUNNIS START FIGHTING SHIITES?

  GALKAYO, Somalia-Beyond clan rivalry and Islamic fervor, an entirely different motive is helping fuel the chaos in Somalia: profit. A whole class of opportunists-from squatter landlords to teenage gunmen for hire to vendors of out-of-date baby formula-have been feeding off the anarchy in Somalia for so long that they refuse to let go.

  -New York Times, 25 April 2007

  The holidays over, Jerry Cornelius stepped off the Darfur jet and set his watch for 1962. Time to go home. At least it wouldn’t be as hairy as last time. He’d had his head shaved on the plane. It was altogether smoother now.

  Shakey Mo and Major Nye met him at the check out. Shakey rattled his new keys. “Where to, chief?” He was already getting into character.

  Major Nye wasn’t comfortable with the Hummer. It was ostentatious and far too strange for the times. Resignedly, he let Mo take the Westway exit. “A military vehicle should be just that. A civilian vehicle should be suitable for civilian roads. This is some kind of jeep, what?” He had never liked jeeps for some reason. Even Land Rovers weren’t his cup of tea. He had enjoyed the old Duesenberg or the Phantom Seven. To disguise his disapproval he sang fragments of his favourite music hall songs. “A little of what you fancy does you good… My old man said follow the van… Don’t you think my dress is a little bit, just a little bit, not too much of it… With a pair of opera glasses, you could see to Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between…” They knew what he was on about.

  “So how was the genocide, boss?” Mo was well pleased, as if the years of isolation had never been. He patted his big Mark 8 on the seat beside him and rearranged the ammo pods. “Going well?”

  “A bit disappointing.” Jerry looked out at gray London roofs. He smiled, remembering his mum. All he needed was a touch of drizzle.

  “Heaven, I’m in heaven…” began Major Nye, shifting into Fred Astaire. “Oh, bugger!” Mo started inching into the new Shepherds Bush turn-off. The major would be glad to see the back of this American heap in the garage so he could start dusting off the old Commer. Thank god it was only rented. Mo, of course, had wanted to buy one. Over in the next century, Karl Lagerfeld was selling his. A sure sign the vehicles were out of fashion. As they drove between the dull brick piles of the Notting Dale housing estates whose architecture had been designed to soak up all the city’s misery and reflect it, Major Nye glanced at Jerry. In his 60’s car coat and knitted white scarf, his shaven head, he looked like some released French convict, Vautrin back from the past to claim his revenge. Actually, of course, he was returning to the past to pay what remained of his dues. He’d had enough of revenge. He had appeared, it was said, in West London in 1960, the offspring of a Notting Hill Gate greengrocer and a South London music hall performer. But who really knew? He had spent his whole existence as a self-invented myth.

  Major Nye knew for certain that Mrs. Cornelius had died at a ripe age in a Blenheim Crescent basement in 1976. At least, it might have been 1976. Possibly ‘77. Her “boyfriend,” as she called him, Pyat, the old Polish second-hand clothes dealer, had died in the same year. A heart attack. It had been a bit of a tragic time, all in all. Four years later, Jerry had left. After that, Nye had stopped visiting London. He was glad he spent most of his life in the country. The climate was much healthier.

  As Mo steered into the mews, the major was glad to see the cobbles back. Half the little cul-de-sac was still stables with Dutch doors. Mo got out to undo the lockup where they had arranged to leave the car. Nye could tell from the general condition of the place, with its flaking non-descript paint and stink of mould and manure, that they were already as good as home. From the back of the totters yard came the rasp of old cockney, the stink of human sweat. It had to be Jerry’s Uncle Edmund. Major Nye could not be sure he was entirely glad to be home; but it was clear the others were. This was their natural environment. From somewhere came the aroma of vinegar-soaked newspaper, limp chips.

  3. CAPTAIN MARVEL BATTLES HIS OWN CONSCIENCE!!!!!

  Knowing that we are slaves of our virtual histories, the soldiers play dice beneath the cross. A bloody spear leans against the base. A goblet and a piece of good cloth are to be won. “What’s that?” says a soldier, hearing a groan overhead. “Nothing.” His companion rattles the dice in his cupped hands. “Something about his father.”

  -Michel LeBriard, Les Nihilists

  “Up to your old tricks, eh, Mr. Cornelius?” Miss Brunner adjusted her costume. “Well, they won’t work here.”

  “They never did work. You just had the illusion of effect. But you said it yourself, Miss B-cherchez I’argent. You can’t change the economics. You can just arrange the window dressing a bit.”

  “Sez you!” Shakey Mo fingers his gun’s elaborate instrumentation. “There’s a bullet in here with your address on it.”

  Birmingham had started to burn. The reflected flames gave a certain liveliness to her features. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jerry rubbed at his itching skull. “They’ll never make anything out of it. I must be off.”

  She sniffed. “Yes. That explains a lot.”

  She wobbled a little on her ultra-high heels as she got back into his chopper. “Where to next?”

  4. ECCE RUMPO

  So where is he, the Yellow Star?

  Whose card you find upon the bar.

  Who laughs at Nazis, near and far.

  Escaping in his powerful car.

  So where is he, the Yellow Star?

  -Lafarge and Taylor, THE ADVENTURES OF

  THE YELLOW STAR, 1941

  Jerry was surprised to see his dad’s faux Le Corbusier chateau in such good shape, considering the beating it had taken over the years. Someone had obviously been keeping it up. In spite of the driving rain and the mud, the place looked almost welcoming. Mo took a proprietorial pleasure in watching Jerry’s face.

  “Maintenance is what I’ve always been into. Everything that isn’t original is a perfect repro. Even those psychedelic towers your dad was so keen on. He was ahead of his time, your dad. He practically invented acid. Not to mention acid rain. And we all know how far ahead of his time he was with computers.” Mo sighed. “He was a baby badly waiting for the microchip. If he’d lived.” He blinked reflectively and studied the curved metal casings of his Browning, fingering the ammo clips and running the flat of his hand over the long, tapering barrel. “He understood machinery, your dad. He existed for it. The Leo IV was his love. He built that house for it.”

  “And these days all he’d need for the same thing would be a spec or two of dandruff.” Miss Brunner passed her hand through her tight perm and then looked suspiciously at her nails. “Can we go in?” She sat down on the chopper’s platform and started pulling on her thick wellies.

  High above them, against the dark beauty of the night, a rocket streaked, its red tail burning with the intensity of a ruby.

  Jerry laughed. “I thought all that was over.”

  “Nothing’s over.” She sighed. “Nothing’s ever bloody over.”

  Mo remembered why he disliked her.

  They began to trudge through the clutching mud which oozed around them like melting chocolate

  “Bloody global warming,” said Jerry.

  “You should have concentrated harder, Mr. C.”

  5. THE WANTON OF ARGOS

  People claim that Portugal is an island. They say that you can’t get there without wetting your feet. They say all those tales concerning dusty border roads into Spain are mere fables.”

  -Geert Mak, In Europe, 2004

  Up at the far end of the hall Miss Brunner was enjoying an Abu Ghraib moment. The screams were getting on their nerves. Jerry turned up Pidgin English by Elvis Costello but no
thing worked any more. He had systematically searched his father’s house while Miss Brunner applied electrodes to his brother Frank’s tackle. “Was this really what the sixties were all about?”

  “Oh, God,” said Frank. “Oh, bloody hell.” He’d never looked very good naked. Too pale. Too skinny. Ahead of or behind his time.

  “You think you’re going to find the secret of the sixties in a fake French modernist villa built by a barmy lapsed papist romantic Jew who went through World War Two in a trenchcoat and wincyette pyjamas fucking every sixty-a-day bereaved or would-be bereaved middle-class Englishwoman who ever got a first at Cambridge and claimed that deddy had never wanted her to be heppy? Not exactly rock and roll, is it, Jerry. You’d be better off talking to your old mum. The Spirit of the bloody Blitz. Is that Bar-B-Q.”

  “They all had the jazz habit.” Jerry was defensive. “They all knew the blues.”

  “Oh, quite.” She was disgusted. “Jack Parnell and his Gentleman Jazzers at the Cafe de Paris. Or was it Chris Barber and his Skiff ling Sidemen?”

  “Skiffle,” said Jerry, casting around for his washboard. “The Blue Men. The Square Men. The Quarry Men. The Green Horns. The Black Labels. The Red Barrels.”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Mo. He was rifling through the debris, looking for some antique ammo clips. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring this place over, stone by stone, to Ladbroke Grove. Though, I agree, it’s a shame about the Hearst Castle.”

  “It was always more suitable for Hastings.” Miss Brunner stared furiously at Jerry’s elastic-sided Cubans. “You’re going to ruin those, if you’re not careful.”

  “It’s not cool to be careful,” he said. “Remember, this is the sixties. You haven’t won yet. Careful is the eighties. Entirely different.”

  “Is this the Gibson?” Mo had found the guitar behind a mould-grown library desk.

  Miss Brunner went back to working on Frank.

  “The Gibson?” Jerry spoke hopefully. But when he checked, it was the wrong number.

  “Can I have it, then?” asked Mo.

  Jerry shrugged.

  6. WILLIAM’S CROWDED HOUR

  “…and does anyone know what ‘the flip side’ was? It was from the days when gramophone records were double-sided. You played your 78rpm or your 45 or your LP and then you turned it over and played the other side. Only nostalgia dealers and vinyl freaks remember that stuff now.”

  -Maurice Little, Down The Portobello, 2007

  Christmas 1962, snow still falling. Reports said there was no end in sight. Someone on the Third Programme even suggested a new Ice Age had started. At dawn, Jerry left his flat in Lancaster Gate, awakened by the tolling of bells from the church tower almost directly in line with his window, and went out into Hyde Park. His were the first footprints in the snow. It felt almost like sacrilege. Above him, crows circled. He told himself they were calling to him. He knew them all by name. They seemed reluctant to land, but then he saw their clawprints as he got closer to the Serpentine. The prints were already filling up. He wondered if they would follow him. He planned to go over to Ladbroke Grove and take the presents to his mum and the others. But first he had to visit Mrs. Pash and listen to the player piano for old time’s sake. They always got their Schoenberg rolls out for Christmas Day.

  A crone appeared from behind a large chestnut. She wore a big red coat with a hood, trimmed in white, and she carried a basket. Jerry recognized her, but, to humor her, he pretended to be surprised as she approached him.

  “Good luck, dear,” she said. “You’ve got almost seven years left. And seven’s a lucky number, isn’t it?”

  Jerry turned up the collar of his black car coat.

  7. WILLIAM AND THE NASTIES

  With the Manchester International Festival lunching this month, and Liverpool becoming European Capital of Culture next year, the north is buzzing. But where is the region’s true artistic capital?

  -New Statesman, 25 June 2007

  “Belonging, Jerry, is very important to me.” Colonel Pyat glanced up and down the deserted Portobello. Old newspapers, scraps of lettuce, squashed tomatoes, ruined apples. Even the scavengers, their ragged forms moving methodically up and down the street, rejected them.

  Jerry looked over at the cinema. The Essoldo was showing three pictures for l/6d. Mrs. Miniver, The Winslow Boy, and Brief Encounter.

  “Heppy deddy?” he asked no one in particular.

  “There you are!” The colonel was triumphant. “You can talk perfectly properly if you want to!”

  Jerry was disappointed. He had expected a different triple feature. He had been told it would be Epic Hero and the Beast, First Spaceship on Venus, and Forbidden Planet. “Rets!” he said.

  8. A GAME OF PATIENCE

  Art, which should be the unique preoccupation of the privileged few, has become a general rule… A fashion… A furor… artism!”

  -Felix Pyat

  “There’s always a bridge somewhere.” Mo paced up and down the levy like a neurotic dog. Every few minutes he licked his lips with his long red tongue. At other times he stood stock still, staring inland, upriver. From somewhere in the gloom came the sound of a riverboat’s groaning wail, an exchange between pilots over their bullhorns. Heavy sheets of invisible water splashed against hulls. The words were impossible to make out, like cops ordering traffic, but nobody cared what they were saying. Further downriver, from what remained of the city, came the mock-carousel music inviting visitors to a showboat whose paddles, turning like the vanes of a ruined windmill, stuck high out of filthy brown water full of empty Evian and Ozarka bottles.

  Jerry called up from below. He had found a raft and was poling it slowly to the gently curving concrete. “Mo. Throw down a rope!”

  “The Pope? We haven’t got a pope.” Mo was confused.

  “A rope!”

  “We going to hang him?”

  Jerry gave up and let the raft drift back into midstream. He sat down in the center of it, his gun stuck up between his spread legs.

  “You going to town?” Mo wanted to know.

  When Jerry didn’t answer, he began to paddle slowly along the levy, following the sound of his pole in the water, the shadow which he guessed to be his friend’s. From somewhere in the region of Jackson Square vivid red, white, and blue neon flickered on and off before it was again extinguished. Then the sun set, turning the water a beautiful, bloody crimson. The broken towers along St Charles Street appeared in deep silhouette for a few moments and disappeared in the general darkness. The voices of the pilots stopped suddenly and all Mo could hear was the heavy lapping of the river.

  “Jerry?”

  Later Mo was relieved at the familiar razz-a kazoo playing a version of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. He looked up and down. “Is that you?”

  Jerry had always been fond of Berlin.

  9. PAKISTAN-THE TALIBAN TAKEOVER

  A mysterious young man met at luncheon Said “My jaws are so big I can munch on A horse and a pig and ship in full rig And my member’s the size of a truncheon.”

  Maurice LeB, 1907

  Monstrous battle cruisers cast black shadows over half a mile in all directions when Jerry finally reached the field, his armored Lotus HMV VII’s batteries all but exhausted. He would have to abandon the vehicle and hope to get back to Exeter with the cavalry, assuming there was still a chance to make peace and assuming there still was an Exeter. He leapt from the vehicle and all but ran towards the tent where the Cornish commander had set up his headquarters.

  The cool air moaned with the soft noise of idling motors. Cornish forces, including Breton and Basque allies, covered the moors on four sides of the Doone valley, the sound of their vast camp all but silenced by its understanding of the force brought against it. Imperial Germany, Burgundy, and Catalonia had joined Hannover to crush this final attempt to restore Tudor power and return the British capital to Cardiff.

  Even as Jerry reached the royal tent, Queen Jennifer stepped
out of it, a vision in mirrored steel, acknowledging his deep bow. Her captains crowded behind her, anxious for information.

  “Do you bring news from Poole?” She was pale, straightbacked, as beautiful as ever. He cared as much for her extraordinary posture as any of her other qualities. Were they still lovers?

  “Poole has fallen, your majesty, and the Isle of Wight lies smouldering and extinguished. Even Barnstaple’s great shipyards are destroyed. We reckoned, my lady, without the unsentimental severity of Hannover’s fleet. We have only cavalry and infantry remaining.”

  “Your own family?”

  “Your majesty, I sent them to sanctuary in the Scillies.”

  She turned away, hiding her expression from him.

  Her voice was steady when it addressed her commanders. “Gentlemen, you may return to your homes. The day is already lost and I would not see you die in vain.” She turned to Jerry, murmuring: “And what of Gloucester?”

  “The same, my lady.”

  A tear showed now in her calm, beautiful eyes. Yet her voice remained steady. “Then we are all defeated. I’ll spill no more senseless blood. Tell Hannover I will come to London by July’s end. Take this to him.” Slowly, with firm hands, she unbuckled her sword.

  10. THE EPIC SEARCH FOR A TECH HERO

  Music now blares through every public space-but sound art reminds us how precious our hearing really is.