The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Maust snorted, then took the gun from me. Its lights flicked off. “How do you switch it on?” He turned it over in his hand.

  “By touching it; but only I can do it. It reads the genetic makeup of my skin, knows I am Culture. Don’t look at me like that; it’s true. Look.” I showed him. I had the gun recite the first part of its monologue and switched the tiny screen to holo. Maust inspected the gun while I held it.

  “You know,” he said after a while, “this might be rather valuable.”

  “No, it’s worthless to anyone else. It’ll only work for me, and you can’t get round its fidelities; it’ll deactivate.”

  “How…faithful,” Maust said, sitting down and looking steadily at me. “How neatly everything must be arranged in your ‘Culture.’ I didn’t really believe you when you told me that tale, did you know that, my love? I thought you were just trying to impress me. Now I think I believe you.”

  I crouched down in front of him, put the gun on the table and my hands on his lap. “Then believe me that I can’t do what they’re asking, and that I am in danger; perhaps we both are. We have to leave. Now. Today or tomorrow. Before they think of another way to make me do this.”

  Maust smiled, ruffled my hair. “So fearful, eh? So desperately anxious.” He bent, kissed my forehead. “Wrobbie, Wrobbie; I can’t come with you. Go if you feel you must, but I can’t come with you. Don’t you know what this chance means to me? All my life I’ve wanted this; I may not get another opportunity. I have to stay, whatever. You go; go for as long as you must and don’t tell me where you’ve gone. That way they can’t use me, can they? Get in touch through a friend, once the dust has settled. Then we’ll see. Perhaps you can come back; perhaps I’ll have missed my big chance anyway and I’ll come to join you. It’ll be all right. We’ll work something out.”

  I let my head fall to his lap, wanting to cry. “I can’t leave you.”

  He hugged me, rocking me. “Oh, you’ll probably find you’re glad of the change. You’ll be a hit wherever you go, my beauty; I’ll probably have to kill some knife-fighter to win you back.”

  “Please, please come with me,” I sobbed into his gown.

  “I can’t, my love, I just can’t. I’ll come to wave you good-bye, but I can’t come with you.”

  He held me while I cried; the gun lay silent and dull on the table at his side, surrounded by the debris of our meal.

  —

  I was leaving. Fire escape from the flat just before dawn, over two walls clutching my travelling bag, a taxi from General Thetropsis Avenue to Intercontinental Station…then I’d catch a Railtube train to Bryme and take the Lev there, hoping for a standby on almost anything heading Out, either trans or inter. Maust had lent me some of his savings, and I still had a little high-rate credit left; I could make it. I left my terminal in the apartment. It would have been useful, but the rumours are true; the police can trace them, and I wouldn’t have put it past Kaddus and Cruizell to have a tame cop in the relevant department.

  The station was crowded. I felt fairly safe in the high, echoing halls, surrounded by people and business. Maust was coming from the club to see me off; he’d promised to make sure he wasn’t followed. I had just enough time to leave the gun at Left Luggage. I’d post the key to Kaddus, try to leave him a little less murderous.

  There was a long queue at Left Luggage; I stood, exasperated, behind some naval cadets. They told me the delay was caused by the porters searching all bags and cases for bombs; a new security measure. I left the queue to go and meet Maust; I’d have to get rid of the gun somewhere else. Post the damn thing, or even just drop it in a waste bin.

  I waited in the bar, sipping at something innocuous. I kept looking at my wrist, then feeling foolish. The terminal was back at the apartment; use a public phone, look for a clock. Maust was late.

  There was a screen in the bar, showing a news bulletin. I shook off the absurd feeling that somehow I was already a wanted man, face liable to appear on the news broadcast, and watched today’s lies to take my mind off the time.

  They mentioned the return of the Admiral of the Fleet, due in two days. I looked at the screen, smiling nervously. Yeah, and you’ll never know how close the bastard came to getting blown out of the skies. For a moment or two I felt important, almost heroic.

  Then the bombshell; just a mention—an aside, tacked on, the sort of thing they’d have cut had the programme been a few seconds over—that the Admiral would be bringing a guest with him; an ambassador from the Culture. I choked on my drink.

  Was that who I’d really have been aiming at if I’d gone ahead?

  What was the Culture doing anyway? An ambassador? The Culture knew everything about the Vreccile Economic Community, and was watching, analyzing; content to leave ill enough alone for now. The Vreccile people had little idea how advanced or widely spread the Culture was, though the court and Navy had a fairly good idea. Enough to make them slightly (though had they known it, still not remotely sufficiently) paranoid. What was an ambassador for?

  And who was really behind the attempt on the ship? Bright Path would be indifferent to the fate of a single outworlder compared to the propaganda coup of pulling down a starship, but what if the gun hadn’t come from them, but from a grouping in the court itself, or from the Navy? The VEC had problems; social problems, political problems. Maybe the president and his cronies were thinking about asking the Culture for aid. The price might involve the sort of changes some of the more corrupt officials would find terminally threatening to their luxurious lifestyles.

  Shit, I didn’t know; maybe the whole attempt to take out the ship was some loony in Security or the Navy trying to settle an old score, or just skip the next few rungs on the promotion ladder. I was still thinking about this when they paged me.

  I sat still. The station PA called for me, three times. A phone call. I told myself it was just Maust, calling to say he had been delayed; he knew I was leaving the terminal at the apartment so he couldn’t call me direct. But would he announce my name all over a crowded station when he knew I was trying to leave quietly and unseen? Did he still take it all so lightly? I didn’t want to answer that call. I didn’t even want to think about it.

  My train was leaving in ten minutes; I picked up my bag. The PA asked for me again, this time mentioning Maust’s name. So I had no choice.

  I went to Information. It was a viewcall.

  “Wrobik,” Kaddus sighed, shaking his head. He was in some office; anonymous, bland. Maust was standing, pale and frightened, just behind Kaddus’s seat. Cruizell stood right behind Maust, grinning over his slim shoulder. Cruizell moved slightly, and Maust flinched. I saw him bite his lip. “Wrobik,” Kaddus said again. “Were you going to leave so soon? I thought we had a date, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly, looking at Maust’s eyes. “Silly of me. I’ll…stick around for…a couple of days. Maust, I—” The screen went grey.

  I turned round slowly in the booth and looked at my bag, where the gun was. I picked the bag up. I hadn’t realized how heavy it was.

  —

  I stood in the park, surrounded by dripping trees and worn rocks. Paths carved into the tired topsoil led in various directions. The earth smelled warm and damp. I looked down from the top of the gently sloped escarpment to where pleasure boats sailed in the dusk, lights reflecting on the still waters of the boating lake. The duskward quarter of the city was a hazy platform of light in the distance. I heard birds calling from the trees around me.

  The aircraft lights of the Lev rose like a rope of flashing red beads into the blue evening sky; the port at the Lev’s summit shone, still uneclipsed, in sunlight a hundred kilometres overhead. Lasers, ordinary searchlights, and chemical fireworks began to make the sky bright above the Parliament buildings and the Great Square of the Inner City; a display to greet the returning, victorious Admiral, and maybe the ambassador from the Culture, too. I couldn’t see the ship yet.

  I sat down on a tree stump, drawing my
coat about me. The gun was in my hand; on, ready, ranged, set. I had tried to be thorough and professional, as though I knew what I was doing; I’d even left a hired motorbike in some bushes on the far side of the escarpment, down near the busy parkway. I might actually get away with this. So I told myself, anyway. I looked at the gun.

  I considered using it to try to rescue Maust, or maybe using it to kill myself; I’d even considered taking it to the police (another, slower form of suicide). I’d also considered calling Kaddus and telling him I’d lost it, it wasn’t working, I couldn’t kill a fellow Culture citizen…anything. But in the end, nothing.

  If I wanted Maust back I had to do what I’d agreed to do.

  Something glinted in the skies above the city, a pattern of falling, golden lights. The central light was brighter and larger than the others.

  I had thought I could feel no more, but there was a sharp taste in my mouth, and my hands were shaking. Perhaps I would go berserk, once the ship was down, and attack the Lev too; bring the whole thing smashing down (or would part of it go spinning off into space? Maybe I ought to do it just to see). I could bombard half the city from here (hell, don’t forget the curve shots; I could bombard the whole damn city from here); I could bring down the escort vessels and attacking planes and police cruisers; I could give the Vreccile the biggest shock they’d ever had, before they got me….

  The ships were over the city. Out of the sunlight, their laser-proof mirror hulls were duller now. They were still falling, maybe five kilometres up. I checked the gun again.

  Maybe it wouldn’t work, I thought.

  Lasers shone in the dust and grime above the city, producing tight spots on high and wispy clouds. Searchlight beams faded and spread in the same haze, while fireworks burst and slowly fell, twinkling and sparkling. The sleek ships dropped majestically to meet the welcoming lights. I looked about the tree-lined ridge; alone. A warm breeze brought the grumbling sound of the parkway traffic to me.

  I raised the gun and sighted. The formation of ships appeared on the holo display, the scene noon-bright. I adjusted the magnification, fingered a command stud; the gun locked onto the flagship, became rock-steady in my hand. A flashing white point in the display marked the centre of the vessel.

  I looked round again, my heart hammering, my hand held by the field-anchored gun. Still nobody came to stop me. My eyes stung. The ships hung a few hundred metres above the state buildings of the Inner City. The outer vessels remained there; the centre craft, the flagship, stately and massive, a mirror held up to the glittering city, descended towards the Great Square. The gun dipped in my hand, tracking it.

  Maybe the Culture ambassador wasn’t aboard the damn ship anyway. This whole thing might be a Special Circumstances setup; perhaps the Culture was ready to interfere now and it amused the planning Minds to have me, a heretic, push things over the edge. The Culture ambassador might have been a ruse, just in case I started to suspect….I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I was floating on a sea of possibilities, but parched of choices.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  The gun leapt backwards, light flared all around me. A blinding line of brilliance flicked, seemingly instantaneously, from me to the starship ten kilometres away. There was a sharp detonation of sound somewhere inside my head. I was thrown off the tree stump.

  When I sat up again the ship had fallen. The Great Square blazed with flames and smoke and strange, bristling tongues of some terrible lightning; the remaining lasers and fireworks were made dull. I stood, shaking, ears ringing, and stared at what I’d done. Late-reacting sprinterceptiles from the escorts crisscrossed the air above the wreck and slammed into the ground, automatics fooled by the sheer velocity of the plasma bolt. Their warheads burst brightly among the boulevards and buildings of the Inner City, a bruise upon a bruise.

  The noise of the first explosion smacked and rumbled over the park.

  The police and the escort ships themselves were starting to react. I saw the lights of police cruisers rise strobing from the Inner City; the escort craft began to turn slowly above the fierce, flickering radiations of the wreck.

  I pocketed the gun and ran down the damp path towards the bike, away from the escarpment’s lip. Behind my eyes, burnt there, I could still see the line of light that had briefly joined me to the starship; bright path indeed, I thought, and nearly laughed. A bright path in the soft darkness of the mind.

  I raced down to join all the other poor folk on the run.

  Paranamanco

  JEAN-CLAUDE DUNYACH

  Translated by Sheryl Curtis

  Jean-Claude Dunyach (1957– ) is a critically acclaimed French writer with a PhD in applied mathematics and supercomputing who works for Airbus in the city of Toulouse, France. Dunyach has been writing science fiction and fantasy since the beginning of the 1980s, and has already published eight novels and nine collections of short stories, garnering the Grand Prix de la science fiction française, four Rosny-Ainé prizes, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the Grand Prix Tour Eiffel de science-fiction, and the Prix Ozone. His short story “Déchiffrer la trame” (“Unraveling the Thread”) won both the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire and the Rosny-Ainé Award in 1998, and was voted Best Story of the Year by the readers of the magazine Interzone. Dunyach’s works have been translated into English, Bulgarian, Croatian, Danish, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Dunyach also writes lyrics for several French singers, which served as an inspiration for one of his novels, about a rock-and-roll singer touring in Antarctica with a zombie philharmonic orchestra.

  In his introduction to Dunyach’s story collection The Night Orchid (2004), the US author David Brin writes that “Jean-Claude has a trait that is rare among authors—variability [with a] sense of the author’s deeper drive to experiment…To surprise. He also always seemed to have something wry and relevant to say.”

  The story reprinted here, “Paranamanco,” is a unique take on the idea of the biological city. Toulouse (nicknamed “the Pink City”) is mostly built of red bricks, and some of its most famous buildings—including the dome of the Hôpital de la Grave and the bell tower of Saint-Sernin Basilica—resemble bizarre body parts. The idea for a city made of flesh, an “animalcity,” came to Dunyach on the banks of the Garonne River, during an early morning stroll in the mist.

  “Paranamanco” (1987) is the first story based on this concept. However, animalcities play a central role in two of Dunyach’s novels: Étoiles mortes (Dead Stars) and Étoiles mourantes (Dying Stars), the latter written in collaboration with Yal Ayerdhal.

  PARANAMANCO

  Jean-Claude Dunyach

  Translated by Sheryl Curtis

  When Paranamanco broke out of her mooring lines and flew off into the night, I was hardly surprised. I remembered the words of the old navigator I’d interviewed a few months earlier, shortly after the animalcity project had been abandoned. I took the recording cube of our conversation out of a drawer and played it, wondering if I’d have the time to listen to it until the end….

  —

  “An entire herd? Can you imagine it? Twenty or so wild animalcities floating like medusas in space. The smallest could have served as the capital of any empire; the largest…No doubt you observed Paranamanco while orbiting in the transit satellite before landing here. You flew over it for several hours, skimming over the outgrowths we incorrectly call dwellings; maybe you even strolled along her avenues, with their disorderly striations carved by meteor dust. You may believe that you’ve seen her, but she continues to elude you as a result of her size, her topography with its folds and strangeness. There are entire neighborhoods which no one has penetrated yet, alleys that are not shown on any map, buildings of flesh waiting to be explored.”

  The old man stopped to finish his glass. On a corner of my desk, the cube reader wove the image of a tavern, purring busily. I don’t like mute objects. We created things to fill our solitude with their omnipresent company, not for them to fall silent and echo the
waves of our own silence back at us, amplified.

  “If you’ve got the heart for it,” the old man said, “buy a recent plan and then have them drop you off anywhere in the city. You know the rule: when you find a street that hasn’t been identified, you can name it as you see fit and register it with the land titles office. There’s a bonus for each discovery, but it will hardly cover the cost of purchasing the one hundred sixty microfilmed volumes of the plan. Yet, how many people do you think are wandering about like that, shoulders bent under the weight of the microfilms and the viewer? Several thousand?”

  He shook his head and glumly contemplated his empty glass, which was starting to crackle and release an unpleasant odor. After the last swallow, the glass walls, deprived of humidity, decompose rather quickly, obliging drinkers to order another round immediately.

  The strident ring of the communicator shrilled through the apartment. I cut it off and went back to listening.

  “You have your own opinion of Paranamanco. It’s undoubtedly incorrect, but mine is no better. It was a living organism before we decided to make it a city. A creature like that never really totally dies. Certain outlying neighborhoods rise and fall like respiration that is barely perceptible; the hollow filaments that we plan on using as transportation tunnels or sewer mains are sometimes animated by nervous shudders, like the axons of a failed brain.

  “No, Paranamanco isn’t completely dead; I’ve known her far too long to be wrong about that. Before I landed on her surface, I observed her in the middle of the herd, in deep space. Then I explored her for months, looking for the control points of her nervous system. I planted thousands of needles randomly in her flesh before discovering her pleasure centers and mounting her like an elephant driver, armed with the whip of my electrical discharges. I forced her to follow me here, by trial and error. Once in orbit, I moored her, practically all on my own.