Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Drinking sweet hot coffee at his usual table, he passes the necessary hour whilst the market stalls and the stage for the evening pageant assemble themselves to the attentions of robot crabs and the clang of poles and the shouts of a few largely unnecessary artisans. The town, meanwhile, stretches itself and scratches its belly emerges from its long meals and lovers’ slumbers. The girl with that Audrey Hepburn look, whom he now knows is called Jeannette, gives him a smile and goes over to say hi, bonjour. She thinks it’s sweet, that a mad old mountain goat like Tom should take the long way around to learning her language. And so does Michel, her boyfriend, who is as urbane and charming as anyone can be who’s got the muscles of a cartoon god and the green scaly skin of a reptile. They even help Tom carry his few boxes of stuff from the boot of his Citröen to the stall he’s booked, and wish him luck, and promise to come back and buy something later on in the evening, although Tom suspects they’ll be having too much fun by then to remember him.

  But it turns out that business at his stall is surprisingly brisk in any case. It’s been this way for a couple of weeks now, and if it continues, Tom reckons he’ll have to order some new SETI tee-shirts and teatowels to replace his lost stock, although the teatowels in particular will be hard to replace after all these years, seeing as people don’t seem to have any proper use for them any longer. They ask him what they’re for, these big SETI handkerchiefs, and then tie them around their necks like flags. Who’d have thought it—that teatowels would be a casualty of this future he finds himself in? But bargaining, setting a price for something and then dropping it to make the sale; that’s no problem for Tom. The numbers of another language come almost easily to him; he supposes his brain dimly remembers it once had an aptitude for maths.

  The Foire aux Sorcières seems an odd festival for summer, but, even before the darkness has settled, the children are out, dressed as witches, ghosts, goblins, and waving lanterns which cast, thought some technical trick Tom can’t even guess at, a night-murk across their faces. Still, the whole occasion, with those sweet and ghastly faces, the trailing sheets with cut eye-holes, the shrieking, cackling devices, has a pleasantly old-fashioned feel about it to Tom. Even the flyers, when they emerge, have done nothing more to change themselves than put on weird costumes and make-ups, although, to Tom’s mind at least, many of them had looked the part already. The scene, as the sun finally sinks behind the tenements and a semblance of cool settles over the hot and frenzied square, is incredible. Some of the people wandering the stalls have even dressed themselves up as old-fashioned aliens. He spots a bulge-headed Martian, then a cluster of those slim things with slanted eyes which were always abducting people in the Midwest, and even someone dressed as that slippery grey thing that used to explode out of people’s stomachs in the films, although the guy’s taken the head off and is mopping his face with one of Tom’s SETI teatowels because he’s so hot inside it. If you half-closed your eyes, Tom thinks, it really could be market day on the planet Zarg, or anywhere else of a million places in this universe which he suspects that humanity will eventually get around to colonising, when it stops having so much fun here on earth. Look at Columbus, look at Cook, look at Einstein, look at NASA. Look at Terr. We are, in the depths of our hearts, a questing, dreaming race.

  Small demons, imps and several ghosts cluster around him now, and ask him what is SETI? which Tom attempts to explain in French. They nod and listen and gaze up at him with grave faces. He’s almost thinking he’s starting to get somewhere, when they all dissolve into gales of laughter and scatter off though the crowds. He watches them go, smiling, those ghosts, those flapping sheets. When he returns his gaze, Madame Brissac has materialised before him. She is dressed as an old-fashioned witch. But she seems awkward beneath her stick-on warts and green make-up, shorn of the usual wooden counter which, even now that they’re attempting to talk to each in the same language, still separates Tom and her. Still, she politely asks the price of his SETI paperweights, and rummages in her witchy bag and purchases one from him, and then comments on the warmth and the beauty of this evening, and how pretty and amusing the children are. And Tom agrees with her in French, and offers Madame Brissac a SETI teatowel at no extra cost, which she declines. Wishing him a good evening, she turns and walks away. But Tom still feels proud of himself, and he knows that’s she’s proud of him too. It’s an achievement for them both, that they can talk to each other now in the same language, although, being Madame Brissac, she’ll never quite let it show.

  The music rides over him. The crowds whoop and sing. The lanterns sway. Down the slope towards the river, the lace-draped stalls look almost cool in the soft breeze which plays down from the hills and over the tenements as Tom sweats in his SETI tee-shirt. Jean-Benoît’s down there, dressed red as fallen Lucifer and surrounded by lesser demons, and looking most strange and splendid for his evening off. There’s no sign, though, of the woman in the dark blue dress whom Tom glimpsed standing in the sunlight all those week ago. He knows that Terr’s dead now, although the thought still comes as a cold blunt shock to him. So how could there ever be any sign of Terr?

  Tom’s got his days better sorted now. He’s never got so drunk as to loose one whole day and imagine Thursday is Wednesday. In fact, nowadays, Tom never has a drink at all. It would be nice that say that he’s managed it through pure willpower. But he’s old, and a creature of habit, even when the habits are the wrong ones. And this is the future, after all. So Tom’s taken a vial, just as he had done several times before, and the need, the desire, the welling emptiness, faded so completely that he found himself wondering for the first few days what all the trouble and fuss had been about. But that was two months ago, and he still rarely entertains the previous stupid thoughts about how a social drink, a sip and a glass here and there, would be quite safe for someone like him. Even on a night such as this, when the air smells of wine and sweat and Pernod and coffee and Gitanes, and he can hear bottles popping and glasses clinking and liquid choruses of laughter all around the square, he doesn’t feel the usual emptiness. Or barely. Or at least he’s stopped kidding himself that it’s something the alcohol will ever fill, and decided to get on with the rest of his life unaided.

  He sometimes wonders during the long hot afternoons of his lessons with Madame Brissac whether a woman in a blue dress and grey or blonde hair really did enter the bureau de post to enquire about an elderly American called Tom Kelly on that magical Thursday. Sometimes, he’s almost on the brink of interrupting her as she forces him through the endless twists and turns of French grammar, although he knows she’d probably regard it as an unnecessary distraction. He’s thought of asking Jean-Benoît, too—at least, when he’s not dressed up as Lucifer—if he remembers a woman who could have been old or might have been young coming to his café, and who undertook to pass on the message cards he’d forgotten to take with him. Would they remember Terr? Would they deny that they’d ever seen her at all? More likely, Tom has decided, they’ll have long forgotten such a trivial incident amid the stream of faces and incidents which populate their lives.

  Tom glances up from the bright Place de Revolution at the few faint stars which have managed to gather over the rooftops and spires of St. Hilaire. Like the Terr—or the ghost of her—he suspects they’ll remain a mystery that he’ll have carry to his grave. But there’s nothing so terrible about mysteries. It was mystery, after all, which drew him to the stars in the first place. Wonder and mystery. He smiles to himself, and waves to Jeannette and Michel as they pass through the crowds. Then Jean-Benoît , amid great cheers, flaps his crimson wings and rises over the stalls and hovers floodlit above the church spire to announce the real beginning of the night’s festivities, which will involve fireworks, amazing pageants, dancing…

  This Foire aux Sorcières will probably still be going on at sunrise, but Tom Kelly knows it will be too much for him. He’s getting too old for this world he finds himself in. He can barely keep pace. But he permits himself another smile as
he starts to pack up his stall of SETI memorabilia, the tee shirts and paperweights, the lapel pins embossed with a tiny representations of the Drake Equation which not a single person who’s bought one of the things has ever asked him to explain. He’s looking forward to the midnight drive back up his mountain in his old Citroën, and the way the stars will blossom on when he finally turns off the headlights and steps into the cool darkness outside his hut, with the glitter of his tripwires, the hum and glow of his machines. Who knows what messages might be up there?

  He’s Tom Kelly, after all.

  And this might be the night.

  He’s still listening, waiting.

  Afterword

  Some stories come in a rush. Others take years, or decades. Some, promising though their basic idea might seem, never arrive at all. “New Light…” belongs very much in the second of these groups. I’d don’t know why it came to me, but I had this vision, early in my twenties when I’d only just got back into writing, of this lonely guy tending a SETI installation in some pretty but remote spot. The idea, or at least the image, never went away, but it was a couple of decades before it started to take proper form. Then it did, indeed, come in a rush, and I still reckon it as one of my best works.

  Terr was, I suppose, the missing ingredient. That, and Tom Kelly’s age and alcoholism. He wasn’t some lonely young guy (as I’d always imagined) tending his signal receiving equipment; he was a lonely old guy, with a whole life to regrets to look back on. I’d also read up a great deal more about SETI and the Drake Equation by this point, too, or at least enough to bluff my way through.

  The years that have now gone by since I wrote this story in the mid-nineties have, to a certain extent, been positive ones when it comes to the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Comets have been shown to be dirty snowballs stuffed with many of the building blocks of life, some of the satellites of the outer planets look like promising havens, and most amazingly of all, many planets in life-friendly zones have been found in other star systems. Then, and still, there’s always Mars, even if, for good or ill, we’ve have to give up on the idea of finding ray-gun touting Martians hiding behind those red rocks.

  But, at least if seen from the viewpoint of hoping to find intelligent life, it could be argued that things have actually taken a turn for the worse. If, as now seems increasingly likely, life is common in the universe, the lack of any evidence that at least some of this life has reached conscious intelligence, and then found the ability to send out signals we could detect, or provide some other kind of sign, seems more puzzling rather than less. In other words, if the evidence pointing in the direction of life being fairly common the universe is increasingly persuasive, Enrico Fermi’s question about the lack of contact with intelligent life becomes more pertinent than ever: “Where are they?”

  If I was pressed to give my own personal view, however, I do reckon that alien intelligences are out there. In fact, they may even be here. But they are probably so very different to us, and so much more advanced, that their attempting to engage with us would be like me trying to have a meaningful conversation with an octopus. Or, perhaps, an ant. In fact, they may not even be “alive” or “conscious” or even “intelligent” in the crude sense that we (who clearly know very so little) think of such things, or see the universe in anything like the way we see it.

  So, yes, I am hopeful that alien intelligence of some kind is out there. But these intelligences probably don’t think we’re worth the bother of communicating with. And for that, considering what human history tells us about more advanced civilisations making contact with less advanced ones, we should be very, very grateful.

  THE MASTER MILLER’S TALE

  There are only ruins left now on Burlish Hill, a rough circle of stones. The track that once curved up from the village of Stagsby in the valley below is little more than an indentation in the grass, and the sails of the mill that once turned there are forgotten. Time has moved on, and lives have moved with it. Only the wind remains.

  Once, the Westovers were millers. They belonged to their mill as much as it belonged to them, and Burlish Hill was so strongly associated with their trade that the words mill and hill grew blurred in the local dialect until the two became the same. Hill was mill and mill was hill, and one or other of the Westovers, either father or son, was in charge of those turning sails, and that was all the people of Stagsby, and all the workers in the surrounding farms and smallholdings, cared to know. The mill itself, with its four sides of sloped, slatted wood, weather-bleached and limed until they were almost paler than its sails, was of the type known as a post mill. Its upper body, shoulders, middle and skirts, turned about a central pivot from a squat, stone lower floor to meet whichever wind prevailed. There was a tower mill at Alford, and there were overshot water mills at Lough and Screamby, but Burlish Mill on Burlish Hill had long served its purpose. You might get better rates farther afield, but balanced against that had to be the extra journey time, and the tolls on the roads, and the fact that this was Stagsby, and the Westovers had been the millers here for as long as anyone could remember. Generation on generation, the Westovers recemented this relationship by marrying the daughters of the farmers who drove their carts up Burlish Hill, whilst any spare Westovers took to laboring some of the many thousands of acres that the mill surveyed. The Westovers were pale-faced men with sandy hair, plump arms and close-set eyes which, in their near-translucence, seemed to have absorbed something of the sky of their hilltop home. They went bald early—people joked that the winds had blown away their hair—and worked hard, and characteristically saved their breath and said little, and saved their energies for their work.

  Although it took him most of his life to know it, Nathan Westover was the last of the master millers on Burlish Hill. Growing up, he never imagined that anything could change. The endless grinding, mumbling sound of the mill in motion was always there, deep within his bones.

  He was set to watch a pulley that was threatening to slip.

  “See how it sits, and that band of metal helps keep it in place…,” his mother, who often saw to the lesser workings of the mill, explained. “It’s been doing that for longer than I and your father can remember. Now it’s getting near the end of its life…” The pulley turned, the flour hissed, the windmill rumbled, and this small roller spun on in a slightly stuttering way. “…and we can’t stop the mill from working when we’re this busy just to get it fixed. So we need someone to keep watch—well, more than simply watch—over it. I want you to sing to that roller to help keep this pulley turning and in place. Do you understand?”

  Nathan nodded, for the windmill was always chanting its spells from somewhere down in its deep-throated, many-rumbling voice, and now his mother took up a small part of the song in her own soft voice, her lips shaping the phrases of a machine vocabulary, and he joined in, and the roller and the pulley’s entire mechanism revolved more easily.

  Soon, Nathan was performing more and more of these duties. He even learned how to sing some of the larger spells that kept the mill turning, and then grew strong enough to lift a full sack of grain. He worked the winches, damped the grist, swept the chutes, oiled the workings. He loved the elegant way in which the mill always rebalanced itself through weights, lengths, numbers, quantities. Fifteen men to dig a pit thus wide down at school in the village meant nothing to him, but he solved problems that had anything to do with grain, flour, or especially the wind, in his dreams.

  Sometimes there were visits from the rotund men who represented the county branch of the Millers’ Guild. On these occasions, everything about the mill had to be just so—the books up to date, the upper floors brushed and the lower ones waxed and the sails washed and all the ironwork shiny black as new boots—but Nathan soon learned that these men liked the mill to be chocked, braked and disengaged, brought to a total stop. To them, it was a dead thing within a frozen sky, and he began to feel the same contempt for his so-called guild-masters that any self-respecting mille
r felt.

  On the mill’s third floor, above the account books with their pots of green and red ink, and set back in a barred recess, leaned a three-volume Thesaurus of spells. One quiet day at the end of the spring rush when sails ticked and turned themselves in slow, easy sweeps, his father lifted the heavy boots down, and blew off a coating of the same pale dust which, no matter how often things were swept and aired, soon settled on everything within the mill.

  “This, son.…” He cleared his throat. “Well, you already know what these are. One day, these books will be yours. In a way, I suppose they already are.…”

  The yellowed pages rippled and snickered. Just like the mill itself, they didn’t seem capable of remaining entirely still, and were inscribed with the same phonetic code that Nathan saw stamped, carved or engraved on its beams, spars and mechanisms. There were diagrams. Hand-written annotations. Darker smudges and creases lay where a particularly useful spell had been thumbed many times. Through the mill’s hazy light, Nathan breathed it all in. Here were those first phrases his mother had taught him when he tended that pulley, and the longer and more complex melodies that would keep back those four apocalyptic demons of the milling industry, which were: weevils, woodworm, fire, and rats. As always with things pertaining to the mill, Nathan felt that he was rediscovering something he already knew.

  There were slack times and there were busy times. Late August, when the farmers were anxious to get their summer wheat ground and bagged, and when the weather was often cloudless and still, was one of the worst. It was on such late, hot, airless days, with the land spread trembling and brown to every cloudless horizon, and the mill whispering and creaking in dry gasps, that the wind-seller sometimes came to Burlish Hill.