Feast and Famine
Adrian Tchaikovsky
NewCon Press
England
Imaginings 1: Cold Grey Stones – Tanith Lee
Imaginings 2: Last and First Contacts – Stephen Baxter
Imaginings 3: Stories from the Northern Road – Tony Ballantyne
Imaginings 4: Objects in Dreams – Lisa Tuttle
Imaginings 5: Microcosmos – Nina Allan
Imaginings 6: Feast And Famine – Adrian Tchaikovsky
All stories and story notes copyright © by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This collection and the introduction copyright © 2013 by Ian Whates
“Feast and Famine” copyright © 2013, originally appeared in Solaris Rising 2
“The Artificial Man” copyright © 1996 originally appeared in Xenos Magazine
“Good Taste” copyright © 2012, originally appeared in Now I Lay Me Down to Reap (Sirens Call Publishing)
“The Dissipation Club” copyright © 2011, originally appeared in Dead but Dreaming 2 (Miskatonic River Press)
“The Sun in the Morning” copyright © 2009, originally appeared in Deathray Magazine
“The Roar of the Crowd”, “Care”, “Rapture”, “2144 and All That”, and “The God Shark” copyright © 2013 and are original to this collection
All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Also available as:
ISBN: 978-1-907069-54-3 (hardback)
Cover art by Jim Burns
Cover design by Andy Bigwood
eBook design by Tim C Taylor
Minimal editorial interference by Ian Whates
Text layout by Storm Constantine
Contents
More Than Meets the Eye - An Introduction
Feast and Famine
The Artificial Man
The Roar of the Crowd
Good Taste
The Dissipation Club
Rapture
Care
2144 and All That
The God-Shark
The Sun of the Morning
About the Author
Adrian Tchaikovsky and NewCon Press
More Than Meets the Eye
An Introduction
by Ian Whates
There’s more to Adrian Tchaikovsky than meets the eye. He is the embodiment of a maxim I’ve become increasingly convinced of: never underestimate a writer. Human nature inclines us to pigeonhole people, to attach labels as easy identifiers. When I first met Adrian, I had him tagged as ‘epic fantasy writer’ due to the success of his Shadows of the Apt novels.
Please don’t misunderstand me, to become established in such a competitive field is no mean feat in itself – an achievement I would never dream of denigrating – but it soon became apparent that Adrian’s writing encompasses a great deal more than even that. I first realised this when hearing him give a reading at a convention in Derby. Rather than choosing a traditional fantasy tale, Adrian read “Rapture”, which proved contemporary, perceptive, witty, and thought-provoking. An impressive story all round and a piece that is, I’m delighted to say, included in this volume.
Adrian is a scientist by education, a lawyer by profession, and an enthusiast of historical weapons and martial arts by hobby. None of these things define him, but they do, perhaps, go some way to explaining the many facets that glitter in his writing. I’ve been privileged enough to help bring one or two of those facets to light, as Adrian’s work has already appeared in: Dark Currents (a reality-hopping SF fantasy), Hauntings (a clever ghost story) and A NewCon Press Sampler (high fantasy set in the Shadow of the Apt universe). But perhaps best of all is “Feast or Famine” – a science fiction story commissioned for Solaris Rising 2 – which features one of the most intriguing interpretations of ‘alien’ I’ve encountered in a long while. This proved to be one of the ‘hardest’ SF stories in the SR2 anthology, and one I was keen to include in the collection. Thanks are due to Jon Oliver at Solaris for facilitating that.
In many respects, this sixth volume of Imaginings provides one of the most varied collections of stories to date, but there are still some things a reader can be confident of. Whether it be the supernaturally Holmes-esque intrigue of “The Dissipation Club”, the enigmatic deep-space puzzle of “Feast or Famine”, the subtle craft of theatrical subversion unveiled in “The Roar of the Crowd”, or a dip into the fantasy-rich world of the Apt (which surely no collection of Adrian’s work would be complete without) provided by “The Sun of the Morning”, the quality of the storytelling and the level of entertainment remain consistently high throughout.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is a fine writer; a fact that holds true whatever he may choose to write.
Ian Whates
Cambridgeshire,
June 2013
Feast and Famine
“Mother, Prodigal, confirm crew and cargo secured, ready to depart. Telemetry incoming. Initial course mapped, confirm check on our exit solution. Prodigal out.”
(eleven minute pause)
“Prodigal, Mother. Telemetry confirmed flight path clear. Come on in. Mother out.”
(eleven minute pause)
“Mother, Prodigal. Commencing countdown, separation from Oregon in one minute.
“Twenty seconds.
“Ten... nine...”
Counting down to oblivion, the final transmission of Doctor Astrid Veighl, as she patiently numbered the last seconds of her crew’s lives down to zero. And then she died.
There was a general conspiracy, back at Mother, to pretend that there might just be a radio glitch. Even as we made our approach towards her last known location – a course plotted to more decimal places than even God normally bothers with – there was a vacuous suggestion that Veighl would have passed us in the night, would reach Mother any moment now, and our four day investigatory flight would turn out just to be a criminal waste of fuel and resources.
After the abrupt cessation of any transmission from Veighl a swift decision had been made to send us out after her. ‘Swift’ meant a seven hour prep for departure: that a returning, radio-mute Veighl would have arrived at Mother long before we reached her take-off point was the sort of maths that needed no computer. It was a subject that neither we nor Mother touched on when we checked in, as though to point it out would be to look in the box and kill a cat that we all knew was stone dead already.
Syrenka, to whose song everything danced, was an ugly green-purple bruise to starboard as we came in: a gas giant with twenty-one variously barren moons and enough of a debris ring to suggest the demise of at least five more. And in that ring, a secret, like the oyster’s pearl.
The computers back at Mother, our own Onboard, and Pelovska’s Expert System, had all put their heads together at our launch to plot out the sort of four-dimensional map that no unaugmented human mind could conceive of, so that when we kicked off from Mother on our fact-finder (nobody had ever said “rescue mission” in the briefing) our course would keep us clear of each piece of the great field of murdered moon clutter that was Syrenka’s waist. Oregon, our destination, was one of the larger pieces of rock, too small for a moon, but making a large asteroid. Very loosely comparable in length and breadth to Oregon USA, in fact. Eventually some peeved astronomer would throw something from the classics at it, but for now it proudly carried the monicker of the Beaver State because someone back on Mother was homesick for Astoria.
“There’s another beauty.” Osman was designated pilot, which meant that, unless someone had dropped a decimal back at Mother, he was here to sightsee. He meant a rock tumbling past, less than half the size of Oregon and a hundred kilometres away: he had magnified the image to show the blue starburst flower of Anch
orite. Or an Anchorite. Or some Anchorites. Veighl, the departed, had been working on the answer to that problem of nomenclature. Pelovska, our geologist and Expert System, had reviewed the raw data Veighl had sent before her decision to return home, and subsequent abrupt silence. The question had remained unanswered at Veighl’s death.
Gliese 876 had been the second extrasolar system reached by human technology. The supposed “earth-like planet” present had been a bust, but the probe, programmed for pattern-recognition, had sent back one picture, just one, that had sparked a furore back home. Passing through this very debris field within the shadow of Syrenka (then just Gliese 876f) – and minutes before becoming several billion dollars of metal pizza that must exist still on the side of some moonlet somewhere – it sent out an image very similar to what we were seeing now. There were plenty of them, in fact, throughout the debris ring and on some of the smaller moons – geometrically irregular crystal formations like sea-urchins clinging on in the vacuum of space. Life! had gone the cry, back home – the first indication that we might not be alone, and life within reach, just about, for a team that was willing to be severed from the planet of their genesis for decades. We liked to think that everyone back there hung on our every years-old word. Possibly nobody cared.
The Anchorite was a phenomenon that existed throughout the ring in quantities from the microscopic to the sunburst array that Osman had pointed up. Veighl reported the largest known such specimen at two metres ninety centimetres diameter, and one metre eighty-eight projection from its substrate. Veighl, who had qualifications in geology and biology to her name, had failed to get off the fence and come to any premature conclusion – a scientist to the end.
Pelovska summarised: “Veighl’s data shows that the Anchorite is a carbon-rich crystal lattice, the structure of which appears homogenous no matter how large or small the sample. Veighl’s data further shows that the Anchorite is capable of breaking down the material upon which, or within which, it is embedded and converting it into more Anchorite. It replicates. Does that alone make it life? If we are looking at an ecology, we’re looking at one with incredibly low levels of energy. Whatever tidal heating you can squeeze from an elliptical orbit around Syrenka, plus the background radiation and what pittance of light you can get this far out.” The system’s star was a cold, pale lamp far off in the alien heavens. You’d get more of a tan on Mars. “Still, Veighl took samples and treated them to the same intensity of illumination, and her results suggest that a day of that was enough for molecule-level conversion of asteroidal material into Anchorite.” Pelovska had come down heavily on the ‘geology’ side of the argument long before. Efficient geology, though, which took the faint light and heat of its surroundings and grew like lichen, converting its substrate into its substance so resourcefully that there was no waste, as close to thumbing its nose at the laws of thermodynamics as anything we had ever seen.
Our shuttle had been decelerating smoothly for some time and now Osman reported needlessly, “Oregon ahead.”
Just as there was no current need for our pilot to actually fly the vessel, as captain there was no need for me to give orders. A conclave of computers had already worked out the best way to approach this, and our vessel ran itself through its paces nimbly as the state-sized asteroid grew and grew before us, until it filled our universe, until the naked eye could make out the sparse blue pinpricks of Anchorite, each in its crater. That was another observation of Veighl’s. The stuff seemed to grow best at impact sites, if ‘grow’ is the word. That was why she had set down on Oregon in the first place.
Pelovska’s headset light was on, which told us she was communing with her Expert System implant, that was in turn taking advice from our Onboard. The light itself served no function beside the social – letting Osman and I know that her attention was away with the electronic fairies. In this case she was supervising our sensor arrays, bouncing signals off Oregon’s nearest neighbours to try for any sign of Veighl. By that time, our craft had matched velocity and rotation with the asteroid – so that we seemed, to our primate eyes, to be magically suspended above a stationary wasteland.
“Ping,” she announced, deadpan. “Captain?”
There was a moment’s silence before I was ready to catch that ball, because it was confirmation of what we had known all along, that Veighl had never left Oregon. I tried to form the words “rescue mission” in my head, but they wouldn’t come. “Let’s get them past the horizon and see what we’ve got. Generate a solution for coming down nearby if we want to - but not right on them.” Human social instinct prompted me to ask all sorts of other questions, to seek confirmation from her of what my own instruments could tell me just as easily. Principally: no signals, no signs of life. No surprises, therefore.
Then Veighl’s craft was hauled over the shallow horizon, and Osman swore, and we simply coasted in silence for some time while the Onboard, devoid of either wonder or horror, made the necessary adjustments to stabilise the motion of the rock beneath us.
Doctor Veighl had dodged the “is it life?” issue in her cursory report – and we would never hear the detailed one that she would have prepared back on Mother after processing her data. Veighl had talked about the life/not-life boundary, and whether we even had valid criteria to make the call - at what point self-replicating chemistry could be said to make the jump into something more like us than like rocks. Her data showed her painstaking experimentation on the Anchorite, taking samples and watching its glacial growth.
My first thought, unprofessional and yet unavoidable, was that the Anchorite had got its revenge.
There was a crystal flower there, but it was a jagged crown of thorns nineteen metres across and at its heart was some of Veighl’s shuttle, embedded, part-metabolised, like a fly in a sundew. Everything from midway back towards the thrusters was either buried or just gone. Only six metres of nose, canted at a slight angle, stood proud of the hungry mass.
We hung there above it, our stationary orbit re-established, and I numbly checked that our cameras were getting it all. Something terrible and sudden had happened here, that made a nonsense of all Veighl’s data, and I would keep transmitting a visual record of our mission in case terrible, sudden events came in twos. Still, I could not shake off the feeling that it would not help. Veighl had been in mid-transmission when this happened, cut off with no time to give a warning or to cry for help.
“At least it was quick.” Until the others looked at me, I hadn’t realised that I had said it aloud.
“Depending on how long life support lasted, or if it still active, there is a possibility that the crew may be alive, maybe in their suits,” Pelovska stated. In the stunned silence that followed I guessed that this thought had been given her by her Expert System, following its best guidance for the furtherance of the mission. It would be my decision, but the computers had already cast their vote.
“There’s no sign of anything: no signals, no emissions, no heat at all,” Osman reported. Then, more quietly, “It killed them.”
“No speculation,” I stated.
“Wasn’t aware that counted as speculation. So, am I putting us down?”
“Everyone suit up,” I decided, which entailed nothing more than securing our helmets. They were uncomfortable, restricted our vision, made our breathing stale, and nobody argued with me. The space around us, the asteroid below, now thronged with invisible dangers.
I ran some checks of Oregon’s surface, bouncing waves off it and cross-referencing with Veighl’s data, particularly the signature of Anchorite. The echo from the great spiked star of crystal matched its smaller brethren, and the balance of the asteroid showed nothing more than rock and the expected dusting of microscopic Anchorite flecks.
The Onboard tallied the cost of a stationary orbit over Oregon, not only the fuel and the constant adjustments to stay clear of the rest of the debris field, but the disruption to the asteroid’s course as Oregon, in turn, would be influenced by our inconsequential mass. The rock
’s tiny gravity was giving us very little help, and the projected adjustments we would have to make over the course of an hour were falling foul of fuel conservation. The entire mission was on a penurious fuel budget, and our little trip hadn’t been catered for in the projections.
The alternative was setting down, which would conserve fuel and fool with Oregon less, making any danger from other debris that much more foreseeable.
“Anna’s right,” I said reluctantly. “We need to be sure.” Meaning that we would be pilloried if we simply got the jitters and left. “Bring us down at least two hundred metres away and be ready for a quick exit if we need one.”
Osman swore again, and he and Pelovska put their heads together with the Onboard to come up with a landing solution, ran it through some quick simulations, and pronounced it good. Oregon gravity was something in the region of two per cent of earth standard, a great deal for an asteroid, barely enough for us to notice. It made me think of all those people back in the Beaver State, whether they felt that little extra patriotic pull as part of Earth’s grounding.
We had already matched Oregon’s speed and rotation, and now we were allowed to drift closer and closer into the weak, weak hands of Oregon’s gravity, so much in tandem with the asteroid that human senses saw only a very gentle approach to a stationary surface, when in reality we and Oregon were gyring our manic way through the cluttered ring of broken moons that belted Syrenka. Decelerating with our thrusters would have spoiled that close harmony, bouncing us back from the pull of that feeble gravity, and so the computers allowed us to drift, dream-like, until our craft’s extended feet were brushing the ancient, vacuum-corroded stone. All we felt, when the claws were deployed, was the faintest of grinding shudders. If we had been asleep, it would not have woken us. Except for Pelovska, of course. Her implant would update her moment to moment, so that she spent her life being immaculately well-informed and, I suspect, lonely.
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