Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

“I can’t go back.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what.”

  Of what not? The sky, the air, the noises, the interstices of words, the unspoken, the gazes, the emptiness between saccades of my own eye. I know there are things that could slip into those empty spaces and steal my agency. The unwritten, the unsayable, the cracks in the sidewalk.

  I don’t say any of that. I shrug, but don’t say:

  The AIs in the air can dismember you pretty much anytime.

  I finally manage to say, “It’s one thing to make Silence in the middle of unintentional junk noise, because that’s all that’s out here. Filtering out deliberate attacks in the commercial airspace is another thing. You said it yourself. People like Rob are deliberately making predators and setting them against their enemies at will. I can’t expose Mir to that. Look what happened to me.”

  My teeth are chattering, just thinking about it.

  “Stop shaking, Injala,” Karranga says fiercely. “Don’t collapse. You cannot afford to flinch.”

  Is she kidding? My whole life is a series of flinches. And retreats. And not showing up. It’s who I am.

  I train my one eye on her.

  “Tell Rob I said no. Just no.”

  My words are final. Karranga recoils from their force.

  “Okay,” she relents. “I’ll tell him.”

  Then Mir says, “I want to see my dad.”

  Mir takes me down by the willows and shows me where to dig up Rob’s soul. It’s misshapen and lovely and it smells of the bottom of the tide and long afternoons with nothing to do, of the things we never prized when we had them, which retroactively gleam.

  Mir squeezes it like a cantaloupe she’s testing for ripeness at the market. Her hands on the boundaries of his soul remind me so much of Rob’s hands that for a second I feel no gravity and I cannot move or think. Then I gently prise her fingers away.

  “Did you go looking for him?” I ask her. As gentle as I can.

  She shakes her head.

  “His soul just came here,” she says. “He didn’t want it any more, and it left him.”

  She swings up into an alder tree, singing.

  Kerranga takes us in the helicopter with her. Mir carries the soul in a Tesco bag, and I carry one of my oldest plants in a pot on my lap. For self-protection. This is my first time north of the river since I fled Hackney, and I’m not prepared for the greening of Covent Garden and Aldwych and Charing Cross Road. Buildings are covered in grasses, and walls are thick with moss. Mir presses her face against the cockpit window, foliage standing up stiffly from her shoulders and the backs of her wrists as her plants taste the waves.

  “What are you picking up, Mir?” I ask her casually. Yellow-toothed mouths gnaw at my breasts and throat. A litany of hatred pours into my ears and nostrils like smoke, and there are winged monsters in the air around us, every glance from their multiple globular eyes an indirect attack. Already I feel faintly suicidal.

  I do not yet see my old enemies, but I’m afraid. I tell Kerranga this and she shouts, “Oh, Rob’s product is high-end. He doesn’t let his work just roam the streets like any old headbug.”

  “The plants here are simple,” Mir observes. The attacks roll off her unnoticed. “None of them can do what we can do. They could learn a lot from our plants.”

  Still I keep expecting Rob’s agents to come out of somewhere. I still remember how the invisible, negating presence came at me that night in the lab. What did Rob do with the samples he took from me? How did he contain the influence of the emergent? How could he direct it when I did nothing more than cower before it?

  Maybe he deserves to be large. It seems he did what I couldn’t do.

  Mir flows through the fragrant coffee shop, dark and gracefully declarative as calligraphy. She inhabits the room with such vivid surety that the milling adults seem attenuated, incomplete. Rob is camped at a table whose data-rich surface he swipes to darkness as we approach. Pleasantries are exchanged and Kerranga makes her excuses.

  Rob’s baritone voice carries tension like a military base on lockdown. “I have all my biological output tracked. You can’t be too careful these days. I was worried about copying, assault. I never expected this. At least, I never expected that it could happen and you wouldn’t tell me.”

  There is hostility in the tapping of his fingers on the counter; he paints me as the betrayer. His expression says, How could you do this to me? See what a nice guy I am.

  He is a nice guy, as far as that goes. So?

  He stares at Mir like she is water or starfire. What does he want from her? I try to find the answer as I always did when we were together, in his smell and the set of his movements, the between places that are only ever implied, never named.

  “What are you doing?” I say. Mir begins to play a game in the interactive surface of the table.

  “She could have so much more in this world,” he whispers. “Please don’t deprive her of what she could become.”

  I am not parsing this. There is no point in trying to pretend, and I start to twitch and laugh and roll my solitary eye and if I’m lucky I won’t wet myself but you never know these days. I haven’t had an easy life. He is uncomfortable that people are looking at us, and I let out a few barks to put the boot in.

  Then I realise he’s sincere.

  He really thinks I would give her up.

  “I know how talented you are, Inj. And I’m sure you’ve passed it on to her. I give you all credit. You found the emergents. I couldn’t even see them. The thing that attacked you? I didn’t know what it was, so it couldn’t hurt me. But I knew it had to be something, because of what it did to you.”

  “Have you learned how to stop it?” I ask suddenly. There is always that hope.

  He spreads his fingers, crunches his face. “I sort of took it in the other direction,” he says. “I found out what this species of thing could do, and then I altered it. I derived the code and tweaked it so that I could do head trips on anyone I might name.”

  “So you turned it into a weapon.”

  “More like an agent than a weapon, but I guess you could –”

  “And then you sold it?”

  “I didn’t need it for myself! I don’t hate anybody that much. It really is a killer, Inj, and when it’s done with someone it doesn’t even leave a trace it’s ever been there. I mean, I’ve got to hand it to you. You are pretty tough to have survived, considering how susceptible you are to that sort of thing.”

  “Someone has spilled juice on me!” squawks the table, and Mir breaks up laughing. I mop up Mir’s spilt juice and remind her to sit quietly, but she isn’t used to polite society.

  Rob gives her a code for his system. “Here are the games,” he says, pointing.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I ask. “She can’t mess anything up, can she?”

  He waves a hand. “It’s fine. My stuff’s bombproof. Let her play.”

  He looks me in the eye, then.

  “I did what I said I would, Inj. I got the recognition. I’m large. I can’t be touched. I can give Mir the same thing.”

  Mir leans into my hair, whispering. “There’s a blobby thing eating his face, Mum.”

  I stroke her hair, hand her a piece of biscotti. I am secretly delighted about the blobby thing. It makes his authoritative air more bearable.

  “So, Rob, you talked to Abdul?”

  “He went to Australia. Won’t return my messages. Why? What’s Abdul got to do with anything?”

  I lean in.

  “We made some adjustments to Mir.”

  He stares.

  “Like what?”

  Now he is looking at her ears, her leaf-strewn locks, the pale green “hairs” on the backs of her arms. They are tiny spines that catch signals out of the air and alter them.

  In broad terms, I explain Mir to him. She swings her legs and trawls through his apps hungrily. She is bound to mess up his stuff; but I did warn
him. He is now too distracted, thinking about what is going on in her body, to give a moment’s thought to what her eyes and fingers are doing to his system. He’s getting angry, but clamping down on it.

  “You haven’t even taken her to a doctor, have you?” His eyes flash, proprietary. Accusing.

  “Do you really want to do this, Rob?”

  “No… Inj, you know I don’t want this to get nasty at all, I don’t want to make either of you uncomfortable. But I’m just… saying… have you taken her to a doctor? I can help. Let me do some things to help you. It doesn’t have to be so hard.”

  Yes, it does.

  “I have hung on out there a long time,” I say in a grey voice. “I don’t want to come back. Not any more. I don’t need what you have. Can’t you see that your work is feeding the emergents? You’re enriching their environment, increasing their sophistication all the time. The emergents are eating you alive and you don’t even care. They will use you up and move beyond you and by the time you realise what’s happening it will be too late.”

  He chuckled. “I forgot what you were like, Inj.”

  I am on a roll now.

  “But I didn’t forget what you’re like. You will give us away. We are sitting right on the underbelly of the system and it can’t see us, but now you know. It’s only a matter of time before you expose us. I guess you will take the Silence and sell that, too.”

  He runs his hand through his hair, clearly upset. “Now that’s unfair. I’ve worked like a dog all these years. I think I’ve earned my success.”

  Mir is sitting very still. She is watching him. She looks at me with a shrinking expression, as though I have slapped a puppy.

  “Inj, can’t we find a middle ground? Here’s the blue sky. I’m open. Tell me what you want to do.”

  I regret having brought Mir. We should have done this without her. But who could I have left her with? I am all she has. And I am at a loss.

  “I have something of yours,” I tell Rob at last. I put the bag on the counter. Inside, his soul twitches, chatters a little. Irritated at having been plucked from the happy oblivious mud under the bridge, I guess. “I’ve been keeping it for insurance purposes.”

  His eyelids clench into suspicious lines as he tilts his nose toward the bag. He doesn’t seem to guess what’s in there. Can’t he smell it? I tried to clean up the bag, wiping algal smudges off the orange plastic, but it still looks disreputable and it reeks of his soul.

  He stands up. I gather that I have insulted him, because he speaks with frigid courtesy.

  “OK. I can see it’s not going to work. I get it. We both need time to think this one through. Let me walk you to the station. Or maybe my car can take you somewhere?”

  I take Mir’s hand. I have to drag her away from Rob’s system. I hope she is messing up his personal organiser.

  “We’ll walk.”

  He walks with us, and because I don’t want to upset Mir, I let him. Out on the Strand he tries to make small talk. My heart is pounding. I don’t know how to stand down. I don’t know if I can stand down. I notice the wind on the river; I notice that the beech trees have been augmented. All the air is thick with transmissions. I hold my potted plant before me like a ridiculous shield. I am afraid.

  “The trouble is, Inj, you’re not stable. I know it. You know it. You could go down at any time, and then what happens to Mir?”

  I stop walking. I can’t believe he just said that in front of her.

  “Just stop talking, Rob.” I am impotent and he knows it. He is refusing to look at me, and at first I think he’s ignoring me. Then I realise he’s doing something with his cogs. He’s ordering something up.

  The beech trees overhead are boosting some creation of his, and emergents are crawling up from the ground. They quicksilver over my feet and up my legs. They drop like caterpillars from the trees and engulf me, thousands upon thousands of his trained vermin. They are in my eye socket.

  It’s happening again.

  I know I’m hyperventilating. He has staged this whole thing: to scare her, to scare me, to force my hand. I’m the witch and he’s thrown a bucket of water on me and I am melting.

  It’s the same old helplessness. I will end up in hospital and then he will take her.

  I grip Mir’s hand and push past Rob, beginning to run toward Charing Cross station. Seeking safety underground.

  But the pavement folds and remixes my kinaesthetic perception: my insides are visible, my flesh begins to strain and pop. I know this sensation. Soon I will lose myself entirely.

  I try to run but I’m going nowhere.

  Mir is tugging on my hand, pulling me toward her.

  “Don’t run,” she says. “Mum, don’t run away.”

  She throws her arms around me. I can feel the singing of her foliage in my teeth and along the tracks of my tendons.

  I can’t see.

  My intestines are spilling out through my vagina and my bones are gathering in my throat and poking through my eye sockets. The world is roiling away from me in a tide of dust, and there is a wordless power in the air that wills the end of me. Everything I have ever loved, every mercy, every kindness, is mown down by an ineffable storm of hate.

  I am shit.

  The worms are inside my head. They trawl through every pathetic effort I have ever made to pull myself together, every grant proposal and small article I have written, and they mock. Each tiny bit of progress I have made, they trash. Everything I have ever done or thought that was good, they take, until I can’t remember whether it ever was my own.

  They say they will come for my plants. They say they will come for Mir.

  This is happening with breathtaking speed. I try to remember where I am, what is going on. I don’t want her to see me like this. It will break her. He will break us both.

  “I have to get away, Mir,” I gasp. “I wish I could fight it, but I don’t know how.”

  She says, “You don’t have to fight it. Call the Silence. Close off. Play dead.”

  I don’t know how to play dead. I only know how to be dead. That’s where I’m going, right now.

  Mir’s mother never listens to her. She isn’t like a tree. She doesn’t know how to stand and take it. The plane trees that grow in a straight line along the Embankment, they are hard to kill. If you cut one down it would just sprout a bunch of new branches and keep going.

  Mir’s mother pulls away from Rob and drags Mir along the Embankment. Mir holds the plant they brought for protection. She calls on it for help. Just then her mother’s legs go out from under her and she falls to her knees. Mir holds the plant as her mother is sick on the roots of a plane tree.

  Mir can feel the killing thing in her own leaf follicles. She can taste it on the back of her tongue.

  She calls the Silence. She calls it around herself and the potted plant from Dartford. The Silence falls over them like a shadow. Then she calls it into the plane trees. They try valiantly to help. They are already expert at transforming human pollution into clean air. Mir could teach them to do the same with ideas, if she only had more time.

  Her dad has followed them. Mir senses him trying to contact his emergent, but he can’t because of the Silence. He has only his own body. But he’s still bigger than Mir. She can feel her mouth working and she’s trying not to cry.

  “I’m not upset,” she tells him. “It’s fine. She’ll be okay.”

  He closes his eyes for a moment, like something is hurting him. Then he kneels down in front of Mir the way adults do when they want children to think they’re being really fair. He takes Mir’s hand in his hand. Their hands are alike.

  “She isn’t okay,” he tells Mir. “You don’t have to –”

  “Stop killing her.”

  His hand withdraws. He doesn’t know where to look. Mir is still calling the Silence. The plane trees ride her wave and hold the Silence. She smells their oxygen. Their leaves shimmer in the wind. People’s heels are scuffing along the pavement and bike gears are
clicking and a dog rattles its chain. She hears everything so clearly, and she hears him say some more rubbish but doesn’t listen.

  “I saw the emergent in your system,” she tells him. “I’m not stupid.”

  He laughs.

  “You’re just like her. So sharp. I just want to know you, Mir. I want to save you so you won’t end up like… like…”

  Like her.

  He is sweating. The Silence around them is cool. Mir’s mother starts to pull herself together. She takes a tissue out of her bag and wipes her mouth.

  “You should have this,” Mir tells her father. “Then maybe you’ll stop.”

  She holds out the plastic bag. He waves it away. He’s laughing again in a fake way.

  “Maybe you don’t understand,” Mir says. It’s what her mother says to Mir when she’s getting ready to tell Mir off in a big way. “I’m blocking your emergent, Dad. I know what it is. I know how to stop it.”

  “But… Mir, I can give you the best education. Your potential. You could go so far, just let me –”

  “Take it,” Mir says. She shoves the bag at him and upends it. His soul falls out. He just manages to catch it before it hits the pavement. There’s this moment where he seems to recognise it, but then he shoves it in his jacket pocket and stands up and he’s backing away from her.

  “Please don’t drive it away again,” Mir tells him. Then she goes back to her mum, leaning on the plane tree. Mir is crying. She wanted it to be so different.

  It takes hours for Mir and me to get home by tube, train and bus. As the terror subsides, I find myself thinking of the young green walls of London today, of Karranga’s offer to help me grow the Silence. I am thinking of the plant I’m holding in my arms, how it saved me. I want to do something with the Silence. I know it’s important. If the plants saved me, they can save others.

  But even as the bus lets us out, a terrible weariness has come over me. I feel dark. Mir drags me through the industrial estate to the green waste beyond. I do not know how I will muster the energy to do everything that I have to do. It feels so much easier to run and hide. How can I find a way to carry on with this work when its outcome is something no one has ever seen?