Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  The next morning I spent some hours at the scope. I told Rassundari my whole story. I still can’t be sure she hears me, but her upturned, attentive face gives me hope. She senses something, for certain, because she put her hand to her ear as though straining to hear. Another new thing is that she is sometimes snappy. This has never happened before. She snapped at her nephew the other day, and later spoke sharply to her husband. After both those instances she felt so bad! She begged forgiveness about twelve times. Both her nephew and her husband seemed confused, but accepted her apology. I wonder if the distraction I am bringing into her life is having an effect on her mind. It occurs to me that perhaps, like the dead man, she can sense my thoughts, or at least feel the currents of my mind.

  The loop in the time stream has stabilized. Unnikrishnan told me I need not be at the scope all the time, because the connection is always there, instead of timing out. The scientists were nervous and irritable; Kajori had shut herself up in her office. Were they waiting for the change? How will they tell that the change has come? Have we saved the world? Or did my duplicity ruin it?

  I was in the library in the afternoon, a book on my lap, watching the grey waves far over the sea, when the dead man shouted in my mind. At this I peered out – the hall was empty. The scientists have been getting increasingly careless. The lift was unguarded.

  So up I went to the floor above. The great wood-paneled door was open. Inside the long, dimly lit room stood Kajori, her face wet with tears, calling his name.

  “Subir! Subir!”

  She didn’t notice me.

  He lay naked in the enormous tank like a child sleeping on its belly. He was neither young nor old; his long hair, afloat in the water like seaweed, was sprinkled with grey, his dangling arms thin as sticks. Wires came out of him at dozens of places, and there were large banks of machinery all around the tank. His skin gleamed as though encased in some kind of oil.

  He didn’t know she was there, I think. His mind was seething with confusion. He wanted to die, and his death hadn’t happened on schedule. A terror was growing in him.

  “You promised, Kajori!”

  She just wept with her face against the tank. She didn’t turn off any switches. She didn’t hear him, but I felt his cry in every fiber of my being.

  “He wants to die,” I said.

  She turned, her face twisted with hatred.

  “What are you doing here? Get out!”

  “Go free, Subir!” I said. I ran in and began pulling out plugs, turning off switches in the banks of machines around the tank. Kajori tried to stop me but I pushed her away. The lights in the tank dimmed. His arms flailed for a while, then grew still. Over Kajori’s scream I heard his mind going out like the tide goes out, wafting toward me a whisper: thank you, thank you, thank you.

  I became aware of the others around me, and Kajori shouting and sobbing.

  “She went mad! She killed him!”

  “You know he had to die,” I said to her. I swallowed. “I could hear his thoughts. He... he loved you very much.”

  She shouted something incomprehensible at me. Her sobbing subsided. Even though she hated me, I could tell that she was beginning to accept what had happened. I’d done her a favor, after all, done the thing she had feared to do. I stared at her sadly and she looked away.

  “Take her back to her room,” she said. I drew myself up.

  “I am leaving here,” I said, “to go home to Siridanga. To find my family.”

  “You fool,” Kajori said. “Don’t you know, this place used to be Siridanga. You are standing on it.”

  They took me to my room and locked me in.

  After a long time of lying in my bed, watching the shadows grow as the light faded, I made myself get up. I washed my face. I felt so empty, so faint. I had lost my family and my friends, and the dead man, Subir. I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to Rassundari. And Siridanga, where was Siridanga? The city had taken it from me. And eventually the sea would take it from the city. Where were my people? Where was home?

  That night the maajhis sang. They sang of the water that had overflowed the rivers. They sang of the rivers that the city streets had become. They sang of the boats they had plied over river after river, time after time. They sang, at last, of the sea.

  The fires from the night market lit up the windows of the opposite building. The reflections went from windowpane to windowpane, with the same deliberate care that Rassundari took with her writing. I felt that at last she was reaching through time to me, to our dying world, writing her messages on the walls of our building in letters of fire. She was writing my song.

  Nondini came and unlocked my door sometime before dawn. Her face was filled with something that had not been there before, a defiance. I pulled her into my room.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. I sat her down in a chair and told her the whole story of how I’d deceived them.

  “Did I ruin everything?” I said at the end, fearful at her silence.

  “I don’t know, Gargi-di,” she said at last. She sounded very young, and tired. “We don’t know what happens when a time-loop is formed artificially. It may bring in a world that is much worse than this one. Or not. There’s always a risk. We argued about it a lot and finally we thought it was worth doing. As a last ditch effort.”

  “If you’d told me all this, I wouldn’t have done any of it,” I said, astounded. Who were they to act as Kalki? How could they have done something of this magnitude, not even knowing whether it would make for a better world?

  “That’s why we didn’t tell you,” she said. “You don’t understand, we – scientists, governments, people like us around the world – tried everything to avert catastrophe. But it was too late. Nothing worked. And now we are past the point where any change can make a difference.”

  “‘People like us,’ you say,” I said. “What about people like me? We don’t count, do we?”

  She shook her head at that, but she had no answer.

  It was time to go. I said goodbye, leaving her sitting in the darkness of my room, and ran down the stairs. All the way to the front steps, out of the building, out of my old life, the tired old time stream. The square was full of the night market people packing up – fish vendors, and entertainers, getting ready to return another day. I looked around at the tall buildings, the long shafts of paling sky between them, water at the edge of the island lapping ever higher. The long boats were tethered there, weather-beaten and much-mended. The maajhis were leaving, but not to return. I talked to an old man by one of their boats. He said they were going to sea.

  “There’s nothing left for us here,” he said. “Ever since last night the wind has been blowing us seaward, telling us to hasten, so we will follow it. Come with us if you wish.”

  So in that grey dawn, with the wind whipping at the tattered sails and the water making its music against the boats, we took off for the open sea. Looking back, I saw Rassundari writing with dawn’s pale fingers on the windows of the skyscrapers, the start of the letter kah, conjugated with r. Kra... But the boat and the wind took us away before I could finish reading the word. I thought the word reached all the way into the ocean with the paling moonlight still reflected in the surging water.

  Naihar chhuto hi jaaye, I thought, and wept.

  Now the wind writes on my forehead with invisible tendrils of air, a language I must practice to read. I have left my life and loves behind me, and wish only to be blown about as the sea desires, to have the freedom of the open air, and be witness to the remaking of the world.

  Solaris Rising presents nineteen stories of the very highest calibre from some of the most accomplished authors in the genre, proving just how varied and dynamic science fi ction can be. From strange goings on in the present to explorations of bizarre futures, from drug-induced tragedy to time-hopping serial killers, from crucial choices in deepest space to a ravaged Earth under alien thrall, from gritty other worlds to surreal other realms, Solaris Rising delive
rs a broad spectrum of experiences and excitements, showcasing the genre at its very best.

  ‘What, then, are Solaris publishing? On the basis of this anthology, quite a wide-ranging selection of SF, some of it very good indeed.’

  – SF Site on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction

  ‘A cliché it may be, but there really is something for everyone here... an ideal bait to tempt those who only read novels to climb over the short fiction fence.’

  – Interzone on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

  ‘The stories presented in this latest volume are intended to showcase the diverse nature of science fiction. Does it succeed? Absolutely.’

  – SF Signal on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 3

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Following the enormous success of the critically-acclaimed Solaris Rising, Solaris are proud to announce they've commissioned a follow-up, Solaris Rising 2, due out in Spring 2013.

  But you can't wait that long, and we honestly can't blame you! To that end, we present Solaris Rising 1.5, a short anthology of nine short stories from some of the most exciting names in science fiction today. From both sides of the pond - and further afield - these nine great writers offer you everything from a mystery about the nature of the universe to an inexplicable transmission to everyone on Earth, and from engineered giant spiders to Venetian palaces in space.

  So settle in, and enjoy yet more proof of the extraordinary breadth and depth of contemporary SF.

  “**** A well-presented buffet of tasty snacks.”

  – SFX on Solaris Rising

  “Essential reading.”

  – BBC Focus Magazine on Solaris Rising

  “One of the three or four best SF anthologies published this year.”

  – Gardner Dozis, Locus on Solaris Rising

  www.solarisbooks.com

  The universe shifts and changes: suddenly you understand, you get it, and are filled with wonder. That moment of understanding drives the greatest science-fiction stories and lies at the heart of Engineering Infinity. Whether it's coming up hard against the speed of light - and, with it, the enormity of the universe - realising that terraforming a distant world is harder and more dangerous than you'd ever thought, or simply realizing that a hitchhiker on a starship consumes fuel and oxygen with tragic results, it's hard science-fiction where a sense of discovery is most often found and where science-fiction's true heart lies.

  This exciting and innovative science-fiction anthology collects together stories by some of the biggest names in the field, including Gwyneth Jones, Stephen Baxter and Charles Stross.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND

  Those were Neil Armstrong’s immortal words when he became the first human being to step onto another world. All at once, the horizon expanded; the human race was no longer Earthbound.

  Edge of Infinity is an exhilarating new SF anthology that looks at the next giant leap for humankind: the leap from our home world out into the Solar System. From the eerie transformations in Pat Cadigan’s “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” to the frontier spirit of Sandra McDonald and Stephen D. Covey’s “The Road to NPS,” and from the grandiose vision of Alastair Reynolds’ “Vainglory” to the workaday familiarity of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Safety Tests,” the thirteen stories in this anthology span the whole of the human condition in their race to colonise Earth’s nearest neighbours.

  Featuring stories by Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds, James S. A. Corey, John Barnes, Stephen Baxter, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Elizabeth Bear, Pat Cadigan, Gwyneth Jones, Paul McAuley, Sandra McDonald, Stephen D. Covey, An Owomoyela, and Bruce Sterling, Edge of Infinity is hard SF adventure at its best and most exhilarating.

  ‘A strong collection of stories that readers of science fiction will certainly enjoy.’

  Locus Magazine

  ‘Stands as a solid and at times striking contribution to “the ongoing discussion about what science fiction is in the 21st century.”’

  The Speculative Scotsman

  ‘If you want science fiction, rather than space opera, this is for you.’

  Total SciFi Online

  www.solarisbooks.com

  A collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories where some of the genre's brightest stars and most exciting talents portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas - but neither a barrage of dystopias - Shine will show that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hard-fought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Let's make our tomorrows Shine.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  On the brink of perfecting the long sought-after human/AI interface, Philip Kaufman finds his world thrown into turmoil as a scandal from the past returns to haunt him and dangerous information falls into his hands. Pursued by assassins and attacked in his own home, he flees. Leyton, a government black-ops specialist, is diverted from his usual duties to hunt down the elusive pirate vessel The Noise Within, wondering all the while why this particular freebooter is considered so important. Two lives collide in this stunning space-opera from debut novelist Ian Whates!

  www.solarisbooks.com

  It's a time of change. While mankind is adjusting to its first encounter with an alien civilisation, black-ops soldier Jim Leyton has absconded from the agency that trained him, and allied himself with a mysterious faction in order to rescue the woman he loves.

  Since his death, scientist and businessman Philip Kaufman has realised that there is more to the virtual world than he'd suspected. Yet it soon becomes clear that all is not well in Virtuality.

  Both men begin to suspect that the much heralded 'First Contact' was anything but, and that a sinister con is being perpetrated on the whole of humankind. Now all they have to do is prove it.

  www.solarisbooks.com