by Ian McDonald
The adventure playground warden, who is a Youth Employment draftee dressed as Robin Hood — Nikes over the green tights — is calling out all the red badges. The kids are yellow badges, they’ve got about another fifteen minutes. This is how they get you. Forty-five minutes, you’ve just discovered where the fun is. Why the hell not? He can afford it. Littlejohn told him he should be able to make three times as a consultant what he would as an employee. For once he was speaking the straight truth. Not even therapy three hours a week seriously dents his reserves. Andy Gillespie, xenological consultant. Try telling them that down the Linfield Supporters’ Club.
Xenological consultant. You can’t get away from them, can you? They won’t let you go. They suit this city well, Nation of bitches. They need you, Andy. Both species. They need someone to stand between them and say, hey, wait a minute, stop and look and think. It’s a lonely place, the gap between. It had killed Eamon Donnan when he realized that he wasn’t human but he couldn’t be Shian either. But he needed to belong. You have something you belong to: hanging upside down from that trapeze, scaring the shite out of you; standing up there on the battlements ruling the world. And when he takes the rituals and becomes a genro, it won’t be so that he can feel he belongs to the Shian as well as the humans. It’ll be for his own reasons, his own rights, his own justice. Andy Hero. His place is between, the neither-place. You always said you didn’t consider yourself part of any Nation or culture. Your own Nation. The Gillespies, ourselves alone.
He finds he thinks a lot about Ounserrat. Her thoughts are frozen in time in the belly of the lander, his flow to her like water. The Harridis have been helpful to him. They’re all being helpful, and open, as the species study their positions. She hung a time over the edge of death, but she’s stable now. The regen facility out at the L5 point can rebuild her. It’ll take time. Months, a year, maybe more. They’ll take her up next time the lander is scheduled for a resupply trip to the fleet. Even for the Shian, space travel is expensive.
He’s glad her healing will be slow. Time for her to fade to grey in his memory. Time for him to change, so that if they should ever meet again, genro to genro, they will understand each other completely.
He leans back on the log bench and enjoys the touch of sun on his scalp. A sudden tremor runs through the wood. The bench is shaking. The ground is shaking. He can see the wooden fort quivering.
Stacey.
She’s on the flat platform behind the battlements.
‘Stacey! Talya! Come down now, come to me.’
Children are evacuating the wood fort like a burning skyscraper. Kids drop to the ground, run to be scooped up by their parents. The shaking grows. Earthquake. Can’t be. Ireland is the world’s most seismically stable country. It’s a Shian spacecraft switching on its Mach drive.
‘Stacey! Talya! Look!’
He turns them to look at the shipyards across the river. Follow the line of his pointing finger, there, between the cranes, do you see it?
They see it.
It lifts straight up, a big dark red arrowhead. Its kesh stripes have faded, all the colours of the Shian towns have faded, decayed back into the mundane sexlessness of season’s end. The ship goes up and up and up. Even to Gillespie, it’s impressive. The girls are thunderstruck. Up and up and up until it’s level with the tops of the Holywood Hills. It turns on its axis towards the south, tilts its nose upwards. It’s big. It’s wonderfully big.
Talya’s waving to it.
It seems a great idea to Gillespie. He waves, without shame or self-consciousness.
The trembling of the ground changes pitch as the Shian ship manipulates gravity fields.
‘Ooh,’ Stacey says, feet tickled by Mach’s principle.
And then it’s gone. Gillespie imagines he saw a dark streak stab the sky to the south. A sonic boom rolls across the lough. A long tube of white vapour tunnels up through the sky.
‘Wasn’t that something?’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘Wasn’t that quite something?’
Stacey and Talya nod their heads. The line of white vapour slowly blows away on the wind from the west. The girls slip their father’s hand, and run, shouting, back to play.
About the Author
Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Ian McDonald
Cover design Gabriel Guma
978-1-4804-3216-1
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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