EVERYWHERE
Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod
This collection copyright © 2019 by Ian R. MacLeod
All rights reserved.
Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.
ISBN 978-1-625674-41-8
Cover design by Dirk Berger
“Grownups” first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1992
“Breathmoss” first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 2002
“New Light on the Drake Equation” first published online in e-zine Scifiction, May 2001
“The Master Miller's Tale” first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2007
“Papa” first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, October 1993
“Frost on Glass” first published as the title story in the collection Frost on Glass by Ian R. MacLeod, PS Publishing, 2015
“Ephemera” first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July/August 2018
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Grownups
Afterword
Breathmoss
Afterword
New Light on the Drake Equation
Afterword
The Master Miller’s Tale
Afterword
Papa
Afterword
Frost on Glass
Afterword
Ephemera
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Ian R. MacLeod
INTRODUCTION
I’m always slightly torn when it comes to writing anything about my own fiction. After all, the stuff should surely be able to stand for itself. I don’t particularly like looking back at old projects either; any writer worth his or her salt, so I reason, should always be looking toward what they might create in the future rather than back toward what they’ve done in the past. Then there’s always the risk that re-reading and re-examining my old work will cause me to conclude either (1) it’s so much better than what I’m writing now, or (2) no good at all, and I’m not sure which outcome is more disturbing. I might even become like the caterpillar who’s asked by a passing ant to describe how it manages to walk, and discovers it can no longer move at all after it’s done so.
Nevertheless, I love discussion, debate, criticism, argument, and all kinds of information of how any piece of writing I admire came about, just as I do when it comes to music, movies, and every other form of art, craft and entertainment. I even enjoy listening to the post-match views of football pundits—in fact, I sometimes think I prefer them to the actual games—and I’ll happily sit through a director’s commentary of my favourite films.
In other words, letting daylight in on other people’s magic, be it Lionel Messi or Nicholas Roeg, doesn’t ruin the experience me in the slightest. In fact, the more daylight and detail the better. To discover why Ennio Morricone’s brilliant score for Once Upon a Time in New York wasn’t even considered for an Oscar, for instance, or the circumstances of the break up of a particular incarnation of King Crimson, or where and how Tender is the Night was written (and re-written) only increases my insight and enjoyment. Of course, there’s a nerdish element to all of this (I’m also happy to learn about what kind of microphones are used in a particular recording studio) but there’s also the writerly part of me to satisfy, which is always on the look out for new insights into how the creative process can go right, or wrong.
I’m sure this schizophrenic approach to personal analysis is fairly common, if not close to universal, amongst writers, even if those readers who’ve encountered many actual writers will also have noticed that, once you can get them started on the subject of their own work, they can be very hard to stop.
So, in writing this introduction and the afterwords (which at least avoid the risk of spoilers) to the novelettes and novellas which make up this collection, and the following one, Nowhere, which includes a large sampling of my shorter works, I know I’m likely to find myself both drawn and repulsed. In one sense, I’m happy to look back, but in another, I’m not. You may or may not agree with my standpoint, either as a reader or a writer, but to argue my case further would be pointless. At the end of the day, and despite whatever I have to say about them, I hope my stories speak for themselves.
GROWNUPS
Bobby finally got around to asking Mum where babies came from on the evening of his seventh birthday. It had been hot all day and the grownups and a few of the older children who had come to his party were still outside on the lawn. He could hear their talk and evening birdsong through his open window as Mum closed the curtains. She leaned down to kiss his forehead. She’d been drinking since the first guests arrived before lunch and her breath smelt like windfall apples. Now seemed as good a time as any. As she turned towards the door, he asked his question. It came out as a whisper, but she heard, and frowned for a moment before she smiled.
“You children always want to know too soon,” she said. “I was the same, believe me, Bobby. But you must be patient. You really must.”
Bobby knew enough about grownups to realise that it was unwise to push too hard. So he forced himself to yawn and blink slowly so she would think he was truly sleepy. She patted his hand.
After his door had clicked shut, after her footsteps had padded down the stairs, Bobby slid out of bed. Ignoring the presents piled in the corner by the wardrobe—robots with sparking eyes, doll soldiers and submarines—he peered from the window. They lived at the edge of town, where rooftops dwindled to green hills and the silver curl of the river. He watched Mum emerge from the french windows onto the wide lawn below. She stooped to say something to Dad as he sat lazing in a deckchair with the other men, a beercan propped against his crotch. Then she took a taper from the urn beside the barbecue and touched it to the coals. She proceeded to light the lanterns hanging from the boughs of the cherry trees.
The whole garden filled with stars. After she had lit the last lantern, Mum put the taper to her mouth and extinguished it with her tongue. Then she rejoined the women gossiping on the white wrought iron chairs. The remaining children were all leaving for home. Cars were starting up, turning out from the shaded drive. Bobby heard his brother Tony call goodnight to the grownups and thunder up the stairs. He tensed in case Tony should decide to look in on him before he went to bed, but relaxed after the toilet had flushed and his bedroom door had slammed. It was almost night. Bobby knew that his window would show as no more than a darker square against the wall of the house. He widened the parting in the curtain.
He loved to watch the grownups when they thought they were alone. It was a different world. One day, Mum had told him often enough, one day sweet little Bobby you’ll understand it all, touching his skin as she spoke with papery fingers. But give it time my darling one, give it time. Being a grownup is more wonderful than you children could ever imagine. More wonderful. Yes, my darling. Kissing him on the forehead and
each eye and then his mouth the way she did when she got especially tender.
Bobby gazed down at the grownups. They had that loose look that came when the wine and the beer had gone down well and there was more to come, when the night was warm and the stars mirrored the lanterns. Dad raised his can from his crotch to his lips. One of the men beside him made a joke and the beer spluttered down Dad’s chin, gleaming for a moment before he wiped it away. The men always talked like this, loud between bursts of silence, whilst the women’s voices—laughing serious sad—brushed soft against the night. Over by the trellis archway that led by the bins to the front, half a dozen uncles sat in the specially wide deckchairs that Dad kept for them behind the mower in the shed.
Bobby couldn’t help staring at the uncles. They were all grossly fat. There was Uncle Stan, Uncle Harold, and of course his own Uncle Lew. Bobby saw with a certain pride that Lew was the biggest. His tie was loose and his best shirt strained like a full sail across his belly. Like all the uncles, Lew lived alone, but Dad or the father of one of the other families he was uncle to was always ready to take the car down on a Saturday morning, paint the windows of his house or see to the lawn. In many ways, Bobby thought it was an ideal life. People respected uncles. Even more than their girth required, they stepped aside from them in the street. But at the same time, his parents were often edgy when Lew was around, uncharacteristically eager to please. Sometimes late in the night, Bobby had heard the unmistakable clatter of his van on the gravel out front, Mum and Dad’s voices whispering softly excited in the hall. Gazing at Lew seated with the other uncles, Bobby remembered how he had dragged him to the moist folds of his belly, rumbling Won’t You Just Look At This Sweet Kid? His yeasty aroma came back like the aftertaste of bad cooking.
Someone turned the record player on in the lounge. Sibilant music drifted like smoke. Some of the grownups began to dance. Women in white dresses blossomed as they turned, and the men were darkly quick. The music and the sigh of their movement brushed against the humid night, coaxed the glow of the lanterns, silvered the rooftops and the stars.
The dancing quickened, seeking a faster rhythm inside the slow beat. Bobby’s eyes fizzed with sleep. He thought he saw grownups floating heartbeat on heartbeat above the lawn. Soon, they were leaping over the lanterned cherry trees, flying, pressing close to his window with smiles and waves, beckoning him to join them. Come out and play, Bobby, out here amid the stars. The men darted like eels, the women did high kicks across the rooftop, their dresses billowing coral frills over their heads. The uncles bobbed around the chimney like huge balloons.
When Bobby awoke, the lanterns were out. There was only darkness, summer chill.
As he crawled back to bed, a sudden sound made him freeze. Deep and feral, some kind of agony that was neither pain nor grief, it started loud then came down by notches to a stuttering sob. Bobby unfroze when it ended and hauled the blankets up to his chin. Through the bedroom wall, he could hear the faint mutter of Dad’s voice, Mum’s half-questioning reply. Then Uncle Lew saying goodnight. Slow footsteps down the stairs. The front door slam. Clatter of an engine coming to life.
Sigh of gravel.
Silence.
Bobby stood at the far bank of the river. His hands clenched and unclenched. Three years had passed. He was now ten; his bother Tony was sixteen.
Tony was out on the river, atop the oildrum raft that he and the other kids of his age had been building all summer. The wide sweep that cut between the fields and the gasometers into town had narrowed in the drought heat. Tony was angling a pole through the sucking silt to get to the deeper current. He was absorbed, alone; he hadn’t noticed Bobby standing on the fissured mud of the bank. Earlier in the summer, there would have been a crowd of Tony’s friends out there, shouting and diving, sitting with their heels clutched in brown hands, chasing Bobby away with shouts or grabbing them with terrible threats that usually ended in a simple ducking or just laughter, some in cutoff shorts, their backs freckled pink from peeling sunburn, some sleekly naked, those odd dark patches of hair showing under their arms and bellies. Maggie Brown with a barking voice you could hear half a mile off, Pete Thorn who kept pigeons and always seemed to watch, never said anything, maybe Johnnie Redhead and his sidekicks, even Trev Lee if his hay fever, asthma and psoriasis hadn’t kept him inside, the twin McDonald sisters whom no one could tell apart.
Now Tony was alone.
“Hey!” Bobby yelled, not wanting to break into his brother’s isolation, knowing he had to. “Hey, Tony!”
Tony poled once more towards the current. The drums shook, tensed against their bindings, then inched towards the main sweep of the river.
“Hey Tony, Mum says you’ve got to come home right now.”
“Alright, alright.”
Tony let go of the pole, jumped down into the water. It came just below his naked waist. He waded out clumsily, falling on hands and knees. He crouched to wash himself clean in a cool eddy where the water met the shore, then shook like a dog. He grabbed his shorts from the branch of a dead willow and hauled them on.
“Why didn’t you just come?” Bobby asked. “You must have known it was time. The doc’s waiting at home to give you your tests.”
Tony slicked back his hair. They both stared at the ground. The river still dripped from Tony’s chin, made tiny craters in the sand. Bobby noticed that Tony hadn’t shaved, which was a bad sign in itself. Out on the river, the raft suddenly bobbed free, floating high on the quick current.
Tony shook his head. “Never did that when I was on it. Seemed like a great idea, you know? Then you spend the whole summer trying to pole out of the mud.”
Around them, the bank was littered with the spoor of summer habitation. The blackened ruin of a bonfire, stones laid out in the shape of a skull, crisp packets, an old flap of canvas propped up like a tent, ringpull cans and cigarette butts, a solitary shoe. Bobby had his own friends—his own special places—and he came to this spot rarely and on sufferance. But still, he loved his brother and was old enough to have some idea of how it must feel to leave childhood behind. But he told himself that most of it had gone already. Tony was the last; Pete and Maggie and the McDonald twins had grown up. Almost all the others too. That left just Trev Lee who had locked himself in the bathroom and swallowed a bottle of bleach whilst her parents hammered at the door.
Tony made a movement that looked as though it might end in a hug. But he slapped Bobby’s head instead, almost hard enough to hurt. They always acted with each other as though they were tough; it was too late now to start changing the rules.
They followed the path through the still heat of the woods to the main road. It was midday. The shimmering tarmac cut between yellow fields towards town. Occasionally, a car or truck would appear in the distance, floating silent on heat ghosts before the roar and the smell suddenly broke past them, whipping dust into their faces. Bobby gazed at stalking pylons, ragged fences, the litter-strew edges of the countryside; it was the map of his own childhood. It was Tony’s too—but Tony only stared at the verge. It was plain that he was tired of living on the cliffedge of growing up.
Tony looked half a grownup already, graceful, clumsy, self absorbed. He hadn’t been his true self through all this later part of the summer, or at least not since Joan Trackett had grown up. Joan had a fierce crop of hair and protruding eyes; she had come to the area with her parents about six years before. Bobby knew that she and Tony had been having sex since at least last winter and maybe before. He’d actually stumbled across them one day in spring lying on a dumped mattress in the east fields up beyond the waste tip, hidden amid the bracken in a corner that the farmer hadn’t bothered to plough. Tony had chased him away, alternately gripping the open waistband of his jeans and waving his fists. But that evening Tony had let Bobby play with his collection of model cars, which was a big concession even though Bobby knew that Tony had mostly lost interest in them already. They had sat together in Tony’s bedroom that smelled of peppermin
t and socks. I guess you know what Joan and I were doing, he had said. Bobby nodded, circling a black V8 limo with a missing tyre around the whorls and dustballs of the carpet. It’s no big deal, Tony said, picking at a scab on his chin. But his eyes had gone blank with puzzlement, as though he couldn’t remember something important.
Bobby looked up at Tony as they walked along the road. He was going to miss his big brother. He even wanted to say it, although he knew he wouldn’t find the words. Maybe he’d catch up with him again when he turned grownup himself, but that seemed a long way off. At least five summers.
The fields ended. The road led into Avenues, Drives and Crofts that meandered a hundred different ways towards home.
The doctor’s red estate car was parked under the shade of the poplar in their drive.
“You don’t make people wait,” Mum said, her breath short with impatience, shooing them both quickly down the hallway into the kitchen. “I’m disappointed in you Tony. You too, Bobby. You’re both old enough to know better.“She opened the fridge and took out a tumbler of bitter milk. “And Tony, you didn’t drink this at breakfast.”
“Mum, does it matter? I’ll be a grownup soon anyway.”
Mum placed it on the scrubbed table. “Just drink it.”
Tony drank. He wiped his chin and banged down the glass.
“Well, off you go,” Mum said.
He headed up the stairs.
Doctor Halstead was waiting for Tony up in the spare room. He’d been coming around to test him every Thursday since Mum and Dad received the brown envelope from school, arriving punctually at half twelve, taking best china coffee with Mum in the lounge afterwards. There was no mystery about the tests. Once or twice, Bobby had seen the syringes and the blood analysis equipment spread out on the candlewick bedspread through the open door. Tony had told him what it was like, how the doc stuck a big needle in your arm to take some blood. It hurt some, but not much. He had shown Bobby the sunset bruises on his arm with that perverse pride that kids display over any wound.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 1
