Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

The waitress seems reluctant to come over, pretending not to see us, even though I’ve tried to catch her eye several times. We’d ordered our omelettes 40 minutes ago. How long does it take to crack a few eggs into a hot pan?

  “Do you think she’s post-human?” I whisper to my husband. She looks too good to be real.

  Caleb glances over. “Maybe. She’s very pretty, but mods are so subtle, it’s difficult to see who’s human and who’s not.”

  I wonder what such an attractive looking woman is doing working in a low-rent place like this, a greasy-spoon cafe in a habitat on the edge of Rhea.

  We’d booked into the habitat’s motel last night. It reeked of overenthusiastic, grandiose plans for the future that would never come true. At dinner, I’d watched the motel’s guests. I knew them, their small-time liaisons and their wild plans. They didn’t want much, just enough to be able to turn up on their home habitat and impress the ones who stayed behind, impress the ones who said they’d never amount to anything. They all ended up here, or someplace like it, scrabbling for success, trying to make a splash in an over-crowded system. This was a place for people who’d never escape the gravity well of their own failures.

  It was a sad place to end a marriage.

  “Is she ever going to come over?” I ask.

  Caleb says: “I see that we will get the omelettes. They’ll be … disappointing.”

  I smile. Caleb has a sense of humour about his gift. Even now, when he knows what I’m about to do, he still keeps cracking jokes.

  I take a deep breath and say: “I want a divorce.” I wait a moment to see if he’s going to make things easier on me. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t blame him. “I’m so sorry, Caleb.”

  “So am I.” He stares out of the window. “We’re on opposite sides of the reflection, Alice. You knew that when you married me.”

  I look at his reflection in the metal glass window. Caleb was a designer baby. A person designed for space. The multiple copies of his genome in each cell protect him against ionizing radiation. But modding is always erratic. There’s no way to predict how changes to the genome will affect the body — or the mind. Multiple-genome people, like Caleb, develop unusual connections in their brains. Precognition. They remember their future. And all of them are unable to pass the mirror test. They can see their reflections, but they can’t recognize themselves. Caleb hasn’t got the self-awareness that most human babies develop at 18 months. That used to fascinate me, that lack of self. It seemed so strange, so exotic; now I find it sad. When love turns to pity, it’s time to end the relationship. Caleb didn’t deserve my pity.

  I look beyond Caleb’s reflection to the habitat’s garden. Gardens don’t thrive in space. The light collected from the solar foils and retransmitted to the plants is wrong. Earth plants either wither and die or they go wild. The habitat’s garden was overgrown and mutated. Swathes of honeysuckle, with enormous monstrous blooms, smothered everything. “It’s a pretty lousy garden.”

  “All these mutants should be cut away,” says Caleb. “I’m designing Zen gardens for the Oort habitats, swirls of pebbles, low maintenance.” A heartbeat later, he says: “Why do you want a divorce, Alice?”

  He was going to make me say everything. “I’ve met somebody else, while you were working on the Oort Cloud project.” Caleb’s an architect, very much in demand in the ongoing push of colonization.

  “Did you?” The note of surprise in his voice is convincing. Caleb’s good at pretending to be something other than what he is. Every moment he swims in the seas of his future. Even when he met me, he must have known that one day we’d be here. Poor Caleb. No wonder most precogs end up in hospital, overburdened by the nature of their gifts, or more specifically, overwhelmed by the fact that they’re unable to change anything they see. “And you love him?”

  “I do. I’m going to move in with him. I’m sorry, Caleb.”

  “I know.”

  The waitress comes over. She places two plates of greasy omelette on the table. She looks at Caleb, her violet eyes widening in recognition. Caleb’s famous. There aren’t too many functioning precogs in the system. Every now and again, someone will put out a documentary about him, usually spurious, about how he’s refusing to use his precognition to help people. It doesn’t work like that. The future’s set. No amount of foreknowledge will change anything.

  “Thank you,” I say, trying to dismiss her. Just because I don’t want him, doesn’t mean that I want anybody else to have him.

  The waitress lingers at a nearby table, straightening the place settings, wondering how she can attract him, thinking that a knowledge of her future might bring her an advantage — just like I did when I met Caleb. She’s looking for her future, wanting to use Caleb, not realizing that the only thing we, on this side of the mirror, will ever have are reflections.

  “We’ll keep in touch, Caleb,” I say.

  “No, we won’t. Goodbye, Alice.” He leaves the table, walks over to the waitress. He says something that makes her laugh.

  I walk out of the cafe, stepping into my future, my unseen and unknowable future, without him.

  Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London where she now lives with her partner and two young children. Find her in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration.

  The Drained World

  Ian Watson

  The sun beat down on the private beach near Marbella.

  “Today the tide seems to have stopped short,” said the plutocrat Vasili Romanovitch, consulting his very waterproof Rolex. “Yesterday, the sea reached the top of that little green rock. Now, only the bottom.”

  A popular fallacy is that the Mediterranean has no tides, being the wrong size to resonate to the attractions of the Moon and Sun. On the other hand: what’s wet, and moves up and down a beach significantly twice a day?

  “Only the bottom,” Vasili repeated, eyeing Jacqueline Johnson as she fastened her bikini top and arose to peer.

  “And maybe,” she responded, blue eyes gleaming, “this is only the beginning.”

  Jacqueline’s speciality was defying conventional thinking, so she endorsed the opinion of the Spanish and Greeks and other circum-Med nationalities that their shared sea has tides. What’s wet, and regularly moves up and down a beach?

  “You mean the beginning of global warming evaporation?” asked Andrei, one of Vasili’s bodyguards, whose hairy gut hung out over his baggy trunks.

  This idiocy didn’t really deserve an answer, but she replied calmly: “Of the emptying I predicted as a possibility.”

  To be fair, Andrei probably mentioned evaporation because more water evaporated from the Med every day than was replaced by all the rivers flowing into it. Hence, constant replacement from the Atlantic Ocean.

  Jacqueline fished in her Gucci bag for her multifone and swiftly searched the web. “Of course, oceanic tide levels vary greatly from place to place, but in general it seems the Atlantic is half a metre lower than yesterday.” She swiftly calculated the very large volume of sea water that had been lost. “Vasili, we should return to the yacht.”

  “Before it cannot float?” asked Andrei.

  “That will be quite a while yet,” snapped Vasili, who understood science, hence his patronage of Jacqueline and her theory that, if true, would require much readjustment worldwide.

  “Where can so much sea water go to?” persisted Andrei. “Round the bottom of South America into the Pacific? Would not the planet lean over?”

  “Into,” said Vasili, “caverns measureless to man.” His plutocrat father had sent him to an English public school to be polished, and as a result he could quote Coleridge. “Porous regions deep beneath the ocean floor, which we may well call voids. And which we shall now seriously begin to measure. I shall establish the Romanovitch Foundation, to be headed by Jacqueline. We must try to discover how much ocean will disappear. How the map of the world will be redrawn. I shall need to liquida
te assets.”

  Andrei, who had been in the FSB, still thought of assets as informants, and of liquidation as assassination, and his hand now formed a pistol shape, but Vasili shook his head.

  “Our incomplete business with our contacts on this costa is at an end now. Forgive my referring to business matters,” he added to Jacqueline, as he wished to keep their scientific relationship unsullied. “We shall set sail. We have other fish to fry.”

  * * *

  Jacqueline, and her suspect alliance with the Russian plutocrat, had been vindicated. Even as they cruised through the Strait of Gibraltar, she was studying the latest news and getting ready to address a plenary session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by video link. Colder Atlantic surface water constantly flowed into the Med to replenish evaporation minus river input; and warmer Med water flowed out beneath the density boundary at 100 metres. As the greatest depth of the Strait of Gibraltar was 900 metres, the diminished Med would become landlocked in a mere 5 years. Yet, according to Jacqueline’s calculations, the rate of oceanic drainage might soon increase to a metre per day, or more.

  “As an analogy,” Jacqueline was soon telling the video camera, and the IPCC, “imagine enormous two-way trapdoors of stone in the depths of the Atlantic, and doubtless the Pacific too, as well as the Indian Ocean. The extra weight of sea water due to greenhouse melting has opened these gates — they reached the tipping point. Formerly some maverick scientists thought there might be giant oceans beneath the sea floor that pressure of magma might push upward, drowning even Mount Everest. But no, currently there are enormous unsaturated porous regions. The question is: how enormous?”

  * * *

  “Our bathysphere is stuck,” Jean-Luc radioed to the surface 18 months later. “The downward suction is too great. Thank God you didn’t come this time, Jacqueline. At least we’ll have time before our air runs out to determine the size of the void below us.”

  Three hours later Jacqueline finished calculating how much more of the Atlantic would fill the Jean-Luc Void, as the two-man bathysphere team breathed their last. This volume, plus those of other voids already plumbed, indicated a future worldwide sea level one kilometre below the 2010 mean datum.

  “Very acceptable,” said Vasili. “So we won’t have a desert world with no rainfall, nor any drop to drink except that obtained by a few hundred thousand high-tech survivors pumping water from the underground oceans for desalination to sustain them and their vege-tables and chickens and pet cats. This calls for champagne. Andrei, you may splice the main brace and cancel the Arks of Water project. We shall drink to Jean-Luc and Marc-Antoine.” Vasili mused. “The Med will be reduced to an Ionian Lake. With no North Sea, Britain becomes part of Europe again. Scandinavia joins the Baltic States. There mightn’t be much Caribbean apart from a Cayman Trench Lake. I expect many geopolitical changes.”

  * * *

  Two years later, the mass migration from Africa into Europe began. Enough fish trapped in pools sustained the advancing masses until relatively clean nuclear weapons detonated along the bed of the Med as a warning.

  With apologies to Stephen Baxter’s magnificent and unsettling Flood (which might even be true in view of the recent discovery that 3 times as much water as in all Earth’s oceans is trapped in ringwoodite 400 miles underground). New from PS Publishing are The Best of Ian Watson and The Uncollected Ian Watson, with bonus extras in the boxed editions. Watson lives in the north of Spain and his website with lots of photos is www.ianwatson.info. His story ‘Blair’s War’ is a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History of 2014.

  A Piratical Sabbatical

  Ian Whates

  You’re good, you know that? Well yes, I do realize that’s what you’re paid to be.

  No, really, I wasn’t being a smart-ass … sorry. I just never realized it was going to be this realistic.

  How it all started? At college; the usual vacation-time question: ‘What do I do now?’ Everybody’s doing something; even my kid sister’s gallivanting around the galaxy with her boyfriend. I wasn’t going to sit around kicking my heels now, was I? Then I saw this ad on campus…

  What? My parents? They’re off on some pampered luxury cruise: auto-masseuse, stimulants-on-tap — the works.

  Anyway, so I see this ad: Pirate Experience, the chance to be a buccaneer for a few weeks, how cool is that?

  I took the virtual tour and I was hooked!

  It was so well put together. We were all taken to this deserted corner of the old space port. Darkness, flickering lights — it already felt brimming over with skulduggery, even before we were in the air.

  I didn’t know any of the others, which was part of the adventure.

  No, I didn’t bother asking anyone. Pointless — I knew all my friends were fixed up already. I would have been too, if Marcy hadn’t dumped me; the two-faced…

  Okay, sorry. We boarded this rickety shuttle, and guess what they piped over the sound system as we took off? Old sea shanties: ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum’. Stewards even came round with mugs of grog. It was all so authentic.

  We docked with a larger craft waiting in orbit — The Queen Anne’s Revenge. What kind of crazy name for a ship is that?

  Sorry, haven’t a clue. I’m not very good with ships … a frigate maybe?

  Anyway, we boarded the Queen Anne and were each allocated a bunk — not hammocks thank goodness, but still pretty crude.

  Oh, I’d say 25, maybe 30 of us. I never bothered counting.

  We were divided into groups of four or five and given a rota of duties. One morning it would be minor patch work and repairs — there were plenty of those needed — the next it might be swabbing the decks … I kid you not. If that ship ever had auto-clean, it had broken down long ago, or been switched off especially for our benefit.

  The mornings were spent on chores, while the afternoons were reserved for more fun things: gunnery lessons in the simulator — I was particularly good at that — target practice with pistols in the ship’s range, even sword-fighting and some hand-to-hand stuff. Never realized there was so much involved in being a pirate, to be honest. It was exhausting but exhilarating.

  In the evenings, after dinner, the lights would dim and we’d sit around a holo-fire sipping grog and bumboo from our black-jacks — that’s a sort of cup — while members of the regular crew told tales of famous pirates and their exploits.

  The crew were great; they had all the jargon and would roar at us to ‘avast’ and say ‘ahoy’ instead of hello, stuff like that. There was even the odd ‘shiver me timbers’.

  And then, to cap it all, they ‘discovered’ a ship — a big ocean liner, ripe for plundering. We knew what that meant: time for some real piracy. Sirens sounded and everyone ran around. I was assigned to gunnery, as I’d done so well on the simulators.

  To be honest, the piracy bit wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped. It was mainly just waiting around. I wasn’t involved in actually breaching the cruise-ship’s hull — I hadn’t done that well at the simulators, apparently — but was given the job of mopping up. So when two shuttles launched from the target after it had been breached, I shot them down.

  Three shots, that’s all it took, and I hit them both. Big explosions. Wham!

  Of course I’m proud. It was some hot shooting and it’s not as if anyone actually died, after all.

  That’s ridiculous. What reason would I have for really plundering an ocean liner?

  Money? Come on, have you any idea how rich my parents are?

  Ha, ha, that’s a good one — no, of course I’m not trying to bribe you.

  Really, Officer, I’m not trying to bribe you.

  After the raid? Well, the crew were in fine spirits — extra grog all round and lots of singing.

  Next morning there were a few sore heads and dodgy stomachs, I can tell you. But instead of our chores we were given these two sealed chests …

  Yes, the ones you found us with. We were put ashore at some back-water
planet and told to wait, that someone would be along shortly to show us where to bury the treasure.

  Well, we waited and waited, until you lot showed up and took us all into custody. I have to say, the way you came screaming down in that cruiser with all those flashing lights and gleaming insignia was quite something — very convincing. The most authentic part so far.

  I realize you’ve done it many times before, that this is just another part of the Experience, but even so…

  That’s ridiculous. My folks are major wealthy. I’ve no motive for pulling something like this in the real world.

  What do you mean ‘inheritance’?

  The ship we hit? I can’t remember. If they told us the name, I missed it.

  Golden Star? Sorry, means nothing to me.

  My parents’ cruise ship? Oh that’s good, that’s really good. You had me going there for a minute.

  Lucky for me I know this is all part of the package. None of this is real, right?

  Right?

  Ian Whates lives in a quiet Cambridgeshire village with his partner, Helen, Honey, a manic cocker spaniel, and Calvin, a tailless black cat. He currently has two published novel series: the Noise books (space opera with a twist) via Solaris, and the City of 100 Rows trilogy (urban fantasy with steampunk overtones and SF underpinning) via Angry Robot. Some 60 of his short stories have appeared in various venues, two of which were shortlisted for BSFA Awards, while his work has received honourable mentions in Year’s Best anthologies. His second collection, Growing Pains (PS Publishing), appeared in 2013. Ian has also edited a couple of The Mammoth Book of … titles for Constable and Robinson, as well as the on-going Solaris Rising series of anthologies for Solaris, the latest of which found its way onto the Philip K. Dick Award shortlist in 2014. In his spare time, Ian runs multiple award-winning independent publisher NewCon Press, which he founded by accident in 2006.

  The Front Line

  Sylvia Spruck Wrigley