Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

She does not look at either of us; it’s as if she is no longer aware of us.

  I can make the hammer larger, more enticing, Red both in colour and nature – and wait for Jones’s hippocampal cognitive rehearsal to kick in, with irresistible compulsion.

  …But would this make me an accomplice? Will I then be guilty of murder too?

  Alice hovers uncertainly by the door and Jones looks up at me again.

  Fuck it; mamma had always told me to do the ‘right’ thing.

  (Until she’d left me.)

  “Okay,” I say, dropping down from the ceiling and fleshing myself. “Let her go, then, if that’s what you really want to do.”

  Alice stays, though: frozen, immobile, her face contorting with the effort to move.

  I turn to Jones. His face is dripping with sweaty exertion: “I can’t free her,” he says. “Help me, please.”

  But, try as I might, I have no point of contact with her – she is not my dream imago to shift. I turn to shrug helplessly, but Jones has already picked up the hammer, now swollen and red, again.

  “My name is John,” he says, “Just John Jones. Get that? Guilty – I’m guilty.”

  He hesitates for a moment and then hands the hammer over to his wife. He bends forward submissively. “Do it,” he says.

  I open my mouth, but I’m unable to scream.

  “Do it!” he shouts.

  “Lizzie?” I croak.

  Alice Jones raises the hammer over her head and brings it crashing down on the large man’s head. The hammer bounces off his skull with a crackling, crunching sound, spraying a flash of blood across the room.

  The blood laces my tongue – metallic, salty, explosive. I am falling sideways, grunting, winded, as I land on a crumpled and broken body.

  John Jones’s wife looks down at me; the bath is empty and dry.

  But she is not Alice anymore – she is Shireen, my ex-wife, whom I’d lost patience with -but only once or twice, I swear, mamma – until she left me.

  This time though, Shireen is the one holding the hammer. She smiles, dark hair swishing across her face.

  Shit, there is no dream-breath from this body beneath me. Jones’s head looks misshapen – splayed at an odd and bloody angle on the floor.

  Shireen lifts the hammer over her head.

  “Fuck it, Lizzie!” I scream, “Get me out of here.”

  Shireen swings the hammer.

  The bathroom walls start to shift externally, crumbling, roaring, as if an empty storm is sucking them inexorably outwards. The bathroom cabinet and a wall explode and beyond, all I can see is a vast and complete emptiness. No sound, no shape, no colour.

  No dreaming.

  Just …

  Nothing.

  “Li-zzie!”

  And then I start falling sideways, sucked and stretched into the black hole beyond. I catch a flicker of images flashing past me – Old Man, Hero, Trickster, a flash of bleeding Jungian archetypes. Then dead-eyed animals, increasingly bizarre, mostly mute and long extinct.

  I hurtle helplessly towards the empty hole at the heart of it all.

  An old woman watches me from a place where everything has gone out. I think I know her, her hollow eyes are like burnt out planets.

  “Mamma?” I call in desperation, flailing to stay away from the blackness above and beneath me.

  Her head tilts, as if turning towards me – her face is creased with concern, brown eyes focusing on my face.

  She holds her right hand out at me, clawed, but tendon-etched strong. “Ngibambe ngesandla,” she says.

  “What?” I say, wondering if I should give in to the sucking darkness.

  “Have you learned nothing of where’re you’re from, Peter – hold my fucking hand!”

  But she smiles as she says it and I realise it is the only thing that might just save me. I scrabble at her, but miss.

  The darkness desiccates words, drowning everything.

  Something grips my arm and yanks me sideways.

  Two hands are huge on either side of my cheeks. The woman seems to be holding my face up.

  I recognize her and start to cry.

  “Lizzie, thank God…”

  “I’m here,” the Doc says. Her voice is warm and reassuring.

  I continue to see hints of – fractured images and beasts, drifting in nothing with a vast void behind, the nothing that fudges the boundaries and certitude of everything I can now see — or perhaps it’s just that my eyes keep leaking, smearing my sight and sense of surety?

  Leaking…

  Jones’s words – were they meant for him – or me?

  Guilty.

  I’d certainly… hurt Shireen.

  Twice.

  Perhaps more?

  And yes, I remember mamma had told me, when I was still a teenager at secondary school, that even once was too much.

  Lizzie holds me against herself; her shoulders are bony, but warm. “It’s okay, Peter,” she says.

  “What- what the hell happened to Jones?” I choke.

  And how can I turn this fucking face tap off?

  “He’s dead,” she says. “Jesus, they’re going to crucify me for overdosing him on sedatives.”

  “But,” I say and stop, unable to find words; it’s all I can do to focus on the warmth of her body and the strength in her hands, still cradling my shoulders and head.

  Then she leans back and moves away, starting to decouple electrodes and tubes from the large, still body lying alongside me.

  Exhausted, I lie back on the pillow and watch her, unable to move. She switches off the Loom™. The Doc is decoupling me with smooth professionalism and I can see her show of warmth and compassion is past.

  My tears stop and dry, prickling my cheeks.

  We had a legitimate court order to dream-jack him, but John Jones had already decided to face his guilt head on – and, unable to free his wife, had preferred to die.

  Still, where the hell does that leave us?

  I look across at Sledgehammer.

  There is just the barest hint of a smile at the corner of the dead man’s lips.

  The bastard had left me with my ex-wife and the hammer.

  My body is starting to warm up, just the teeniest little bit, and words free up inside me. “Listen Lizzie, I will testify that Jones chose to die. They will see that for themselves too.”

  They.

  Dream Justice, Inc. – that part of the privatised English Crown judiciary.

  I pull the sheet off and stand up, my body – now well on the pudgy side of thirty, and sagging in readiness for forty – crackling stiffly in its jumpsuit. I stretch upwards, my blood needling harshly through arteries and veins again. Every year, my stretches get harder and harder.

  Lizzie has covered Sledgehammer Jones’s torso and looks up at me with a smile. “Thank you – that may just help, Peter, a devastating nocebo effect, perhaps…”

  I wipe my face with a forearm as I stiffly step across to the body next to my bed.

  “I’m sorry… John,” I say. Given proper training and circumstance, it is clear that he would have been the greatest Dream-Rider in the world, not me.

  Funny thing is; it suddenly didn’t matter to me anymore.

  I’d made my own share of mistakes too – and I was no longer the best anything.

  Dream-Hunter Two? Not quite the same ring to it.

  More, I’d caught a glimpse of what lies behind both dreams and waking.

  I open the door to leave and hesitate, “Bye, Lizzie.”

  “Bye, Peter,” she does not look round.

  “No,” I say, “I mean bye.”

  She pivots slowly in her chair and looks at me again. Her eyes are a deep and penetrating brown. “You’re quitting, Peter?”

  I nod. “Don’t think I can Ride again on the criminal justice system.”

  “Bye Peter,” she does not get up.

  “Did you see…her, at the end?” I ask.

  “Who? I just saw you rising out of the darknes
s – as if dragged by hope.”

  I close the door behind me.

  Hope lives by the name of Precious Msimang; she has claimed back her old clan name, I remember.

  I have forgotten her number but it takes my smart-watch only two seconds to patch me through.

  The old woman from my dreams stares at me with apparent disbelief.

  “Mamma!” is all I can manage.

  “Peter,” she says – and then the line freezes.

  I know why – she always hated to cry in front of me – especially after… he – had hit her.

  It flickers on again – mamma looks old and worn, but with the faintest of smiles, watching me closely. “Why have you called now, what do you want?”

  “To visit,” I say, “…and to talk about you and the family, and South Africa.”

  “A good place, now that Rhodes Has Fallen,” she says. “This is my place to die.”

  “Let’s not talk about death,” I say, “Ngibambe ngesandla, mamma.” (This time it is me who freezes the screen.)

  I lie back and stare up at the numb white ceiling of my small flat.

  I have taken women for granted, including the one who carried and birthed me, with both pain and love.

  Guilty as charged.

  Time to start my redemption.

  It will be a long, long flight home, to a place I hardly know.

  Still, time to live a new dream.

  Dream-Hunter, they call me.

  But my name is just Peter John Scott Msimang.

  Shooting the Messenger

  Robert Bagnall

  “...yesterday I met a young Swiss man for the first time. He had hopes for this war-ravaged land. Today we buried him. This is Dave Kite, signing off for ZBC News.”

  I watched my grainy image standing against boulders, scrub, dust, and sky on the screen of the laptop, allowing a moment before looming towards the screen to switch the camera off.

  I rather liked the sign-off. Portentous.

  It took half an hour before I found out that Scott back in DC didn’t. His unfocussed face filled the laptop screen for a moment before he sat back down adjusting a headset mike in the comfort of some office. He put a cup of coffee down by the keyboard. The distorted Starbucks logo filled an entire edge of the image. It could have been deliberate; I could have killed for a decent cup of java.

  “Davey, I’m sorry, I can’t use this.”

  “Why not?”

  I’d been squatting outside my tent for fifteen minutes trying to get the satellite link up and my haunches were beginning to kill me.

  “It’s background. It’s travelogue. It’s not even context.”

  “It’s real.”

  “Davey, some Swiss tourist gets himself killed in a bus smash. So what? You’re thirty miles from the frontline. Find a real story.”

  “There are real stories here too, Scott. It wasn’t a bus smash. It was live fire. Civilians. And it wouldn’t have happened without the mercenaries. It’s about escalation.”

  Scott was getting impatient. “Five, ten years ago we may have run it. We’ll drop the facts of the matter into a link but we’re not running your piece, Davey. Get to the frontline. Check out these stories of the Chinese backing up the Taliban. The things that are happening post-US withdrawal. That’s escalation.”

  He took a slurp of coffee, this time putting the paper cup down just off camera. “Nothing personal, Davey, but I’ve got twenty-four seven rolling news to fill and I’m too busy to nursemaid. Find me a story. Then I’ll run it.” He leant forward and spoke slowly, like to a child. “Keep asking yourself one question: is this a story?”

  And then the laptop screen went blank. Scott was gone.

  You know how well groomed, pearly toothed people forever appear on your television set telling you that they’re the Moscow correspondent, or London correspondent, or Paris, Rome, or somewhere else sexy correspondent? Well, years before, when their grooming wasn’t so effortless, they were the Lima correspondent, or the Senegal correspondent. And before that they covered Boise, Idaho, or whatever the left-hand armpit of the planet is. And they’d only crop up on your screens once every three years looking shell-shocked, mouthing clichés, when an airplane crashed into a train that smashed into a pick-up carrying a beauty queen, or some such. Well, that was where I was aiming to get. Left-hand armpit correspondent. And then I’d take it from there.

  I tried explaining the whole hierarchy of correspondents thing to a very pretty girl at the bar of the Intercontinental in Hyderabad before finding out that she’d just been promoted to Cairo correspondent of some West Coast outfit. I felt like everybody at the Intercontinental was laughing at me that night. In reality it was probably just everybody in Hyderabad.

  The story about the Swiss, I called him that because he had a Swiss flag embroidered on to his epaulette, was more or less true.

  We, or at least I, afforded him as good as a funeral as we could. I covered his body with boulders, the ground being far too rocky to dig a grave, even if we could summon the energy to do so. Then, assuming he had some Christian sympathies I stumbled over some words of contrition. The irony did not escape me: a ceremony in English for a German-speaking Swiss in some God-forsaken, war torn, unpronounceable province, the native language of which seemed to consist of vowel sounds interspersed with the retch of phlegm being brought up.

  The tribesmen, huddled in the shelter of the blackened skeleton of the dead bus smoking the filterless cigarettes that kept them fluent, looked on in bemusement at me. The mercenaries that had fired on us when the driver inexplicably tried to run the roadblock had long since melted away.

  Then the dozen or so tribesmen and I ascended the valley. They had wanted to bury him up the escarpment, nearer to Allah or something, but, in desperate signs, I had tried to explain the danger of planting the dead upstream. One of the words they knew and understood was ‘No’.

  Not that it would have made any difference as I couldn’t stop them doing what they wanted to their own dead.

  How the hell had I ended up here?

  Ten years old. I remembered the national elation when Bin Laden was killed. I wanted to be part of it, but childhood asthma meant that the best I could hope for was to cover it. Years later I had come armed only with a camera, laptop, solar charger, cheap satellite linkage from a discount website, and those romantic notions that make men throw themselves into the furnace of battle with the belief that they’ll emerge the other side. Plus an introduction to Scott at ZBC.

  I like to think that I found the motley band, tribesmen without a tribe. In truth they had probably been watching me for days as I cut across the high hills to where I thought the highway to the one town with electricity twenty-four seven lay. They had let me walk straight into their shantytown encampment, hidden in a cleft up an incongruously picturesque valley, all wildflowers and burbling water.

  Confused, I tried signalling my intention of fighting for their cause via twenty-four hour rolling news, whatever that may mean, if they would consider me ‘embedded’. But they just laughed at me, their craggy dirty faces breaking into black-lined ridges of mirth.

  I was taken through the tented village. Dark eyes under suspicious furrowed brows watched me. Smoke from cooking fires hung in the air. Goats with their ribs protruding as if they were vacuum-wrapped bleated rudely. Women washed their clothes in the stream, turning to silently watch me.

  I was half-pushed, half-guided towards a tent from which the rest of the shanty seemed to spread. It was roughly in the shape of a flattened cube in the process of collapsing, its walls made of green tarpaulins and goatskins. A complicated arrangement of guy-ropes formed a lobby leading to the interior where we disturbed three tribesmen huddled in discussion, drawing on hand-rolled cigarettes. They seemed angry and shooed the lackeys away with snarled insults.

  I was left standing in front of the three of them, unsure. It took more than a moment for my eyes to adapt to the cold darkness of the interior. They could see m
y confusion and took the opportunity to spit questions at me in their rough throaty tongue. I just stood there, scared and alone. Finally the thin lizard-like leader in the middle made what I presumed was a joke. The others laughed and by their eyes I guessed it was at the expense of my mismatch of inadequate army surplus and denim. I tried breaking the ice by laughing along.

  A barked order and the lackeys that had led me into the tent re-entered and relieved me of my pack, roughly searching my pockets. The contents were tipped out onto the carpeted floor and much clucking and murmuring was made as they rifled through their booty. They ripped open the plastic bags in which I kept my dry clothes and held up my harmonica for the amusement of all. One of them blew into it creating a screeching noise. He waved it in my face, jeering something like “Sheesh, sheesh”. It was passed around and they all had a go. There was little I could do other than stand there and take it, with fear drying my mouth and loosening my bowels.

  It was when they found my maps that the atmosphere tensed with a sudden new interest in me. The maps were passed reverently to the leader. My eyes had become accustomed to the gloom and I could make him out much better now. He had a face like a deflated football, thick, brown and leathery. Above yellowed, exposed teeth, displayed like a braying donkey, he sported a pencil thin moustache. Imagine the severed head of Clark Gable hollowed out, sucked in, and played with in the dirt looking up at you, leering.

  They kept the maps, I kept my life.

  I lived with them for six days during which I discovered a number of things. I discovered they were just refugees searching for peace from the militia and the mercenaries. I discovered that if I really needed to I could stomach the way they cooked their goat. And I discovered that I wasn’t really a prisoner. They returned my pack – I think the technology was too advanced for them to barter and they simply didn’t know what to make of it.

  I shot some pieces, the first of which Scott liked, and the second he tolerated. The third brought the first of his verdicts of ‘travelogue’ that, to him, meant the highest form of damnation. Find a story, he said. So I left. The tribesmen gave me some dried meat and I walked away.

  Two days later I thought I had a story.