New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  ‘Mr Fischer?’ Blakey looked at him keenly. ‘You look as if something’s troubling you. Can I help?’

  It was surprisingly easy to spill the beans. Something about the thin doctor’s dour bedside manner encouraged confidences.

  Blakey stared at Quentin, aghast. ‘Just as I suspected; the man’s utterly crazy. He really would transform everyone in his own image!’ The doctor shook his head. ‘Mund’s ego has swollen in direct proportion to his body. This is his way of impressing his personality on the Moon for ever!’

  ‘But what are we going to do?’ demanded Quentin.

  ‘We’ll have to blow the whistle on him, cried Blakey. ‘Give the media the story - let them inform the public—’

  ‘But the media’s under Mund’s thumb,’ objected Quentin. ‘They’d never broadcast the story without his permission.’ He sighed. ‘Maybe we should advise Earth of Mund’s intentions. Though I don’t much like the role of informer.’

  Blakey was frowning. ‘If what Mund says is true, and he really can turn people into planets, then Earth ought to be very worried. Even if most of the colonists reject Mund’s crazy vision, there’ll be enough fanatics for him to put his plan into operation. Think of it - scores, hundreds of new gravitational bodies suddenly appearing in the solar system ...Think of the effects that would have on Earth, not to mention LunaColony. We’ve got to stop him somehow!’

  Events were precipitated even more rapidly than Blakey and Quentin had expected. The following day the LCC authorities announced the compulsory deportation of all thin people from the Moon. They were given twenty-four hours to pack and wind up their business, then they were to report to the space terminal, where a shuttle would be waiting to take them back to Earth.

  Quentin got a call from Blakey. ‘You heard the news?’ raged the doctor. ‘They’re kicking us out!’

  Quentin nodded ‘So we go into action - tonight.’

  ~ * ~

  They parked Blakey’s buggy in the centre’s compound. Under his spacesuit, the doctor was wearing an overall which Quentin had purloined from the hydroplant, padded out with folded-up clothing to make him look fat.

  It was surprisingly easy to gain admittance. ‘Uh... Dr Mund sent for us,’ said Quentin anxiously. The guard nodded vaguely as they flashed their passes, and waved them through.

  Inside an air of expectancy pervaded the atmosphere. White-overalled technicians hurried to and fro. Nobody took any notice of the two newcomers.

  Quentin studied a plan of the centre. ‘This way,’ he said, thinking back to the brief tour of the place that he had been given on his previous visit.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ hissed Blakey as they hurried along the corridor.

  Quentin had been trying not to think too closely about what they were to do. To confront Mund, to threaten to inform Earth of his plans, to provoke open hostility between the Colony and Terra unless Mund abandoned his mad ambitions ...The futility of such an ultimatum was overwhelming. Mund would never allow himself to be blackmailed like that. Even a rational person would balk at having his aims challenged in such a fashion; and Mund was anything but rational. So where did that leave them?

  ‘In here,’ croaked Quentin. It was the control centre, the base from which the whole ghastly, Frankensteinian operation was co-ordinated.

  They slipped inside. Some thirty technicians worked silently at their tasks, moving with all the inhuman certainty of automata.

  Quentin scanned the arrays of winking computers, struggling to recall what he had been told on his ‘instructive’ tour. ‘Wait here,’ he whispered.

  ‘Where are you going?’ demanded Blakey.

  ‘I won’t be long.’ Quentin slipped away.

  He didn’t know what compulsion drove him to the chamber in which Dr Mund was steadily releasing his hold on his own humanity. He knew that blustering threats would be useless. But he also knew he had to speak to the doctor before the latter was completely engulfed by his own body. It was his obligation, as a friend.

  At his approach the door obediently slid open. Quentin paused for a second, pulse racing at what he might discover within the vast chamber. Then he stepped inside.

  ~ * ~

  The room was filled with a huge greenish-white blanket, which seemed to billow outwards. The great mass quivered and throbbed with a hideous animation. Squinting upwards, Quentin saw that the semi-spherical object, was just recognizable as a human body.

  He stared in mingled awe and horror. Here was a transmogrification of the body more grotesque than anything conceived of by the most decadent surrealist. Mund’s bloated form pulsated, as the ravenous tissues devoured the nutrient that coursed through them, endlessly expanding like some demented empire. Quentin could almost see the altered cells turning proteins into fat, swelling the engorged planetoid in an orgy of consumption.

  ‘Ed!’ he shouted.

  A pause. Then, a voice, subterranean: ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Fischer!’ yelled Quentin. ‘Listen, Ed! Stop this process! You’ll destroy yourself, you’ll destroy the Colony! For God’s sake order them to abort this insane scheme!’

  ‘Too late, Quent,’ boomed the doctor. ‘I’m only the first; others will follow. Soon my body will reach optimum, old pal; I will form my own atmosphere, an outer “skin” of oxygen; then I will be launched into space, a fully autonomous world. I will continue growing, generating my own mass.’ His voice rose to a shriek. ‘Gloria Mundi! Goodbye, gravity! “I am a little world, made cunningly... ‘“

  Quentin backed away, further pleadings dying on his lips. The vast living carcase seemed to shudder. He looked up at the roof in fear. A sudden intuition hit him. Of course. It must be almost time for the Director to leave the Moon for good. Almost, but not quite.

  He turned and ran.

  ~ * ~

  Slowly, the cathedral dome slid open. The air rushed out, and space slipped eagerly inside to welcome its newest planet…

  ~ * ~

  The door of the control centre opened, and one of the technicians darted out. He turned wildly, then gestured furiously to Quentin, who was panting down the deserted corridor.

  ‘Come on, Fischer! I opened the roof! Let’s get the hell out of here!’

  Nobody stopped them. All were too shattered, like sleepers awakening from some wonderful dream to grey reality.

  ~ * ~

  The news of Dr Mund’s demise leaked out almost reluctantly, by accident rather than design, as if every inhabitant of LunaColony slowly but spontaneously became aware of the withdrawal of a great presence, the massive, weighty presence of a tremendous mind and ego and body which, departing, left behind a curious vacuum.

  The details were vague; the Director had suffered a sudden stroke, perhaps, or a coronary. The Moon mourned the loss of her genius. LCC would never be quite the same again.

  The expulsion of the Colony ‘ s thin population was rescinded, though many chose to return to Earth voluntarily, among them, Dr Blakey.

  The skinny doctor paused at the gangway of the shuttle. ‘So long, Quent. I hope you can make something of this place. You’re the kind of guy it needs, not another damned prophet.’ The cold, bony hand gripped Quentin’s briefly.

  Blakey waved. Quentin waved back. Soon the shuttle was climbing through the darkness towards the radiant blue-green orb of Earth.

  ‘Hey, Quentin! Howya doing? Haven’t seen ya around for a while.’

  It was Jemma. Quentin felt suddenly glad to see her.

  ‘You’re looking down in the mouth, Quent; I know how you feel. We all miss him. But life goes on, right? Come on, I’ll buy you a gateau ...’

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Starlight Dreamer

  Peter F. Hamilton

  The sky was washed with gold and crimson streaks when we walked into the glade, tall ivy-clad oaks around the perimeter dowsed in a pinkish hue from the sinking sun. Fuchsia and her sister fairies skimmed through the air, dragonfly wings blurring. Their spark
ly contrails were twisted into impossible loops as they chased purple emperor butterflies around the foxglove spikes. The flock saw us, calling out happily in their high musical voices without interrupting their lightsome sport.

  There were twelve of us hunting the elf prince. The Black Spitfires, we called ourselves, dressed in our black leather jackets and navy-blue jeans, heads crammed loosely into a variety of military-surplus helmets, optic-booster eyestrips wrapped round our faces. Trying to come over the part, major league lads out looking for trouble, rather than over-hyped teenagers lost in a power combat fantasy. We bristled with hardware; fhermo knives, Enfield magnetic barrel rifles, we’d even dared to take our treasured cache of laser-targeted Sony plasma pulse pistols out of their hiding place. I was loaded down with a dozen electronic modules clipped on to my webbing belt, readouts plumbed directly into my eyestrip. Half of the image pumped down my retinas was obscured by bright blue digital displays. The inertial compass coordinates were going crazy. Surprise surprise.

  ‘Hey, Fuchsia,’ Russel called. ‘Come here, my darling.’ He held out a gauntleted hand. There was nothing surplus about his gear; full anti-impact armour, with an energy dissipater web woven into the carbon titanium composite. The devil’s own space marine.

  His visor was open, and he smiled a counterfeit smile as Fuchsia came to hover trustingly in front of him. She bobbed up and down in the air. As long as his forearm, she was so exquisitely beautiful, so fragile. I had holograms of the flock on my bedroom wall, taken that first day I saw them, over three summers ago, by far the loveliest of all the folk to wander out of the realm of the first forest.

  ‘Russel,’ Fuchsia trilled. ‘So silly, clad in iron furs, in sunlight time. Hot Russel, shed your silly furs.’

  ‘Where is she, Fuchsia?’ he purred.’ Where’s Kathy? Tell me, my darling.’

  ‘Not here. Not here.’ Fuchsia shot straight up, spinning round and round for the sheer joy of it. I could watch the fairies play all day; I would even put up with their teasing to do it.

  Fuchsia arched over, and zoomed back into the middle of the glade to join her sisters. They started to giggle.

  Russel snapped his visor down. ‘Take them out,’ he said.

  And so we did. Because Russel was seventeen and our leader. And because the way he was freaked he would have turned his plasma pistol on anyone who disobeyed.

  Ruby targeting-lasers raked the glade, followed by an incandescent horizontal rain of fizzing plasma pulses. Fairies screamed in bewildered terror as they were torn apart in mid-air. I saw one hit by an Enfield harpoon disintegrate into a plume of pink fog. They fell en masse, thudding to the ground, thin streamers of blood replacing their cometary sparkle.

  It was the first time we had used our weapons, the waking smile of the beast within.

  When it was finished Russel walked into the middle of the glade. Fuchsia had survived. Don’t ask me how. She was sitting on the shaggy emerald grass, with another fairy, Marigold, lying across her lap. Marigold was dead, but Fuchsia kept stroking her forehead. Like me, I suppose, she couldn’t believe what we had done.

  ‘Get up, get up’ she kept saying, tiny tears twinkling on her porcelain cheeks. ‘Lazy thing, we’ve the day left to play. Fly and sing, Marigold. Fly and sing.’ Fuchsia’s two right wings had been scorched off by a plasma pulse. The remaining two fluttered uselessly every few seconds, buzzing like a fly hitting a window pane.

  She looked up when Russel’s shadow occluded her.

  ‘Tell me where Kathy is,’ he said.

  ‘Marigold won’t play any more. Lazy Marigold.’

  Russel lifted his boot and stamped down hard.

  We moved on deeper into the forest.

  ~ * ~

  To be a Black Spitfire you had to live in the Makings, a govproject housing estate on the outskirts of Balford. It was a forty-year-old cluster of ground-coral domes set in a square kilometre of parkland, planted over a regressed district of twentieth-century houses. Our parents weren’t rich, most of them worked on regression teams, sweating away on the awkward dirty jobs that bitek and cydrones couldn’t quite handle. Switching the country back to its pastoral prime, shovelling up the filth left behind by previous generations.

  There were other kids in Balford, but they couldn’t join the Black Spitfires, no way. They lived in the old houses preserved at the town’s heart, little grandee palaces of stone, brick and slate, where the winding streets are cobbled, and red telephone boxes stand on most corners. They didn’t have the attitude, with their flashy expensive day clubs, and their sports teams, and their themepark trips; every minute organized and taken care of. Mummy’s darlings, every one of them.

  We roamed free, us Spitfires, our only obligation a fortnightly trip to the govschool for a didactic laser-memory imprint. I was focusing on science subjects, hoping to make university grade when I reached sixteen. Mr Talbot, our assessment officer, said I would do it easily, something in my neurone structure made me an ideal receptor subject, I could absorb the photobyte courses with very little dataloss. I was already twelve levels higher than the other Black Spitfires my age. The original impressionable youngster, Mr Talbot called me.

  My grade meant I was in charge of our illegal equipment. OK, it wasn’t that illegal, a wonky clone vat, a programmable molecular filter we used to synthesize mild hallucinogens, unlicensed network receivers, and all the guns we dug up. But we thought it was pretty spicy stuff. It gave us something to congregate around, a kernel of identity.

  Balford didn’t have anything else to offer us. A market town in an age when markets had ceased to have meaning, it had become a rural dormitory for professionals and govworkers, visually idyllic, and macro-boring. It sat in a broad rolling valley, surrounded by the south Devon forest.

  England’s forests had been the first stage of regression after bitek made farming obsolete, and starships started to syphon off the surplus population to the colony worlds. The south Devon forest was ninety years old; oaks and ash mixed in with fifty other deciduous species. Traditional trees, yearning for what was. It extended northward from the coast, right up to Dartmoor, spreading east into Dorset, and west over to Bodmin Moor.

  The trees began a hundred metres beyond the Makings. We had explored the paths and glades and pools and streams our whole lives. They had been put there for our entertainment; gloomy and mysterious in winter, bursting with life and colour in summer, more of a home than Balford had ever been.

  We accepted what we found in there without question. Glimpses of the smaller forest folk accumulated until they lost any surprise. As we grew up, we would extend our territory a little deeper each year, seeing more and more of the forest community. The gnomes, pixies and fairies belonged there as much as we did.

  Then in the spring of my fifteenth year, Prince Yannareth and his entourage came riding out of the first forest.

  ~ * ~

  ‘We heard the hinterland forest growing again, and came to see for ourselves as why this should be, after so long a barrenness,’ Sendiryki told me.

  Sendiryki and I got to be good mates that summer. Both of us the same, in a way. Both of us the dreamer. Same dream even, that one of far off places. He was a typical elf, towering an easy thirty centimetres over me, and at one metre seventy-five I’m no slouch. Yet for all his size, he weighed nothing; he could race over a meadow without bending a single blade of grass. He wore a green and yellow tunic, as soft as deerskin, which made him near-invisible in the forest. He was young too (for an elf, anyway). But then they all looked like hundred-year-old teenagers.

  ‘How can you hear a forest growing?’ I asked. It was a sultry day in June, when the air was clotted with pollen from the wildflowers. We sat on the fringe of the forest, looking down on Balford, while bumble-bees droned between the honeysuckle and the hollyhocks.

  ‘The song it sings became a chorus to the melody of the first forest,’ Sendiryki said.

  ‘First forest, that’s where you live?’

  ‘Ye
s.’

  ‘And you came for a look at our forest?’

  ‘My prince is young, he has a restless tune singing in his blood.’

  ‘So do you,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘And so do you.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right there. I want to join a scoutship after I qualify; explore the galaxy, discover terracompatible worlds.’

  ‘You mean worlds where you can live?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such a strong song, Michael. I envy you.’

  ‘When I make captain, I’ll take you along.’

  ‘To sail amongst the stars.’ There was a wistful tone in his voice. He rolled on to his back, and looked at the sky as if he’d never seen it before. ‘The stars above the first forest are not as yours. But we have our seas. They sing a long chorus of enchantment to me.’