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

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “Did you do this in the last century, Papa?” Saul asks. “I mean, have picnics on the beach?”

  I shrug Yes and No. “Yes,” I say eventually, “But there was a problem if you sat out too long. A problem with the sky.”

  “The sky?”

  Saul reaches across the mat to re-stack his plate with something sweet and crusty that’s probably as good for you and unfattening as fresh air. He doesn’t say it, but still I can tell that he’s wondering how we ever managed to get ourselves into such a mess back then, how anyone could possibly as to mess up something as fundamental as the sky.

  Afterwards, Saul produces his metacam palette from one of the bags. It unfolds. The little pinhead buzzes up, winking in the light.

  “The sand here isn’t a problem?” I ask.

  “Sand?”

  “I mean... Getting into the mechanism.”

  “Oh, no.”

  From corner of my eye, I see Agatha raising her eyebrows. Then she plumps her cushion and lies down in the sun. She’s humming again. Her eyes are closed. I’m wondering if there isn’t some music going on inside her head that I can’t even hear.

  “You were saying yesterday, Saul,” I persist, “that it’s more than a camera...”

  “Well,” Saul looks up at me, and blanks the palette, weighing up just how much he can tell Papa that Papa would understand. “You know about quantum technology, Papa, and the unified field?”

  I nod encouragingly.

  He tells me anyway. “What it means is that for every event, there are a massive number of possibilities.”

  Again, I nod.

  “What happens, you see Papa, is that you push artificial intelligence along the quantum shift to observe these fractionally different worlds, to make the waveform collapse. That’s where we get all the world’s energy from nowadays, from the gradient of that minute difference. And that’s how this palette works. It displays some of the worlds that lie close beside our own. Then it projects them forward. A kind of animation. Like predictive suspension, only much more advanced...”

  I nod, already loosing touch. And that’s only the beginning. His explanation carries on, grows more involved. I keep on nodding. After all, I do know a little about quantum magic. But it’s all hypothetical, technical stuff; electrons and positrons. It’s got nothing to do with real different worlds, has it?

  “So it really is showing things that might have happened?” I ask when he’s finally finished. “It really isn’t a trick?”

  Saul glances down at his palette, then back up at me, looking slightly offended. The pinhead lens hangs motionless in the air between us, totally ignoring the breeze. “No,” he says. “It’s not a trick, Papa.”

  Saul shows me the palette: he even lets me rest the thing on my lap. I gaze down, and watch the worlds divide.

  The waves tumble, falling and breaking over the sand in big glassy lumps. The wind lifts the flags along the shore in a thousand different ways. The sky shivers. A seagull flies over, mewing, breaking into a starburst of wings. Grey comet-tailed things that might be things, ghosts, people or—for all I know—the product of my own addled and enhanced senses, blur by across the shore.

  “You’ve got implant corneas haven’t you, Papa?” Saul says. “I could probably rig things up so you could have the metacam projected directly into your eyes.”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  Probably remembering what happened to the VR—Saul doesn’t push it.

  I look down in wonder. “This is...”

  What? Incredible? Impossible? Unreal?

  “This is...”

  Saul touches the palette screen again. He cancels out the breaking, shattering waves. And Agatha calls the vendor for an ice cream, and somehow it’s a shock when she pushes the cool cone into my hand. I have to hold it well out of the way, careful not to drip over the palette.

  “This is...”

  And my ice cream falls, splattering Saul’s arm.

  Agatha leans over. “Here, let me. I’ll turn that off, Papa.”

  “Yes, do.”

  There’s nothing left on the palette now, anyway. Just a drop of icecream, and the wide empty beach. The screen blanks at Agatha’s touch, and the pinhead camera shoots down from a sky that suddenly seems much darker, cooler. Immense purple-grey clouds are billowing over the sea. The yachts and the flyers are turning for home. Agatha and Saul begin to pack our stuff away.

  “I’ll drive the car home, Papa,” Agatha says, helping me up from the deckchair just as I feel I first heavy drops of rain.

  “But...”

  The take an arm each. They half-carry me across the sand and up the slope to the end of the beach road where I’ve parked—badly I now see—the Ford.

  “But...”

  The put me down, and unhesitatingly unfold the Ford’s complex hood. They help me in.

  “But...”

  They wind up the windows and turn on the headlights just as the first grey veils strike the shore. The wipers flap, the rain drums. Even though she’s never driven before in her life, Agatha spins the Ford’s wheel and shoots uphill through the thickening mud, crashing through the puddles towards the first hairpin.

  Nestled against Saul in the back seat, too tired to complain, I fall asleep.

  That evening, we go dancing. Saul. Agatha. Papa.

  There are faces. Gleaming bodies. Parakeet colours. Looking through the rooftops of the port into the dark sky, I can see the moon. I’m vaguely disappointed to find that she’s so full tonight. Since I’ve had these corneas fitted, and with the air nowadays so clear, I can often make out the lights of the new settlements when she’s hooded in shadow.

  Agatha leans over the cafe table. She’s humming some indefinable tune. “What are you looking at Papa?”

  “The moon.”

  She gazes up herself, and the moon settles in the pools of her eyes. She blinks and half-smiles. I can tell that Agatha really does see mystery up there. She’s sat in the bars, slept in the hotels, hired dust buggies and gone crater-climbing. Yet she still feels the mystery.

  “You’ve never been up there, have you, Papa?”

  “I’ve never left the Earth.”

  “There’s always time,” she says.

  “Time for what?”

  She laughs, shaking her head.

  Music is playing. Wine is flowing. The port is beautiful in daylight, but even more so under these lanterns, these stars, this moon, on this warm summer night. Someone grabs Saul and pulls him out to join the dance that fills the square. Agatha remains sitting by me. They’re sweet, considerate, kids. One of them always stays at Papa’s side.

  “Do you know what kind of work Bill does these days?” I ask Agatha—a clumsy attempt both to satisfy my curiosity, and to raise the subject of Bill and Meg.

  “He works the markets, Papa. Like always. He sells commodities.”

  “But if he deals in things,” I say, genuinely if only vaguely puzzled, “that must mean there isn’t enough of everything...?” But perhaps it’s another part of the game. If everything was available in unlimited supply, there would be no fun left, would there? Nothing to save up for. No sense of anticipation or pleasurable denial. But then, how come Bill takes it all so seriously? What’s he trying to prove?

  Agatha shrugs So What? at my question anyway. She really doesn’t understand these things herself, and cares even less. The someone pulls her up into the dance, and Saul takes her place beside me. The moment is lost.

  Saul’s tapping his feet. Smiling at Agatha as her bright skirt swirls. No metacam tonight, no Picasso faces. She doesn’t dissolve or clap her hands, burst into laughter or tears, or walk back singing to the table. But it’s hard not to keep thinking of all those tumbling possibilities. Where does it end? Is there a different Papa for every moment, even one that sprawls dying right now on these slick cobbles as blood pumps out from fragile arteries into his brain? And is there another one, far across the barricades of time, that sits here with Saul a
s Agatha swirls and dances, with Hannah still at his side?

  I reach for my wine glass and swallow, swallow. Hannah’s dead—but what if one cell, one strand of double helix, one atom had been different...? Or perhaps if Hannah had been less of an optimist? What if she hadn’t ignored those tiny symptoms, those minor niggles, if she’d worried and gone straight to the doctor and had the tests? Or if it had happened later, just five or ten years later, when there was a guaranteed cure...

  But still—and despite the metacam—I’m convinced that there’s only one real universe. All the rest is hocus pocus, the flicker of an atom, quantum magic. And, after all, it seems churlish to complain about a world where so many things have finally worked out right...

  “Penny for them.”

  “What?”

  “Your thoughts.” Saul pours out more wine. “It’s a phrase.”

  “Oh yes.” My head is starting to fizz. I drink the wine. “It’s an old one. I know it.”

  The music stops. Agatha claps, her hands raised, her face shining. The crowd pushes by. Time for drinks, conversation. Looking across the cleared space of the square, down the shadowed street leading to the harbour, I see a grey-haired woman walking towards us. I blink twice, slowly, waiting for her to disappear. But my ears pick up the clip of her shoes over the voices and the re-tuning of the band. She’s smiling. She knows us. She waves. As my heart trampolines on my stomach, she crosses the square and pulls a seat over to our table.

  “May I?”

  Agatha and Saul nod Yes. They’re always happy to meet new people. Me, I’m staring. She’s not Hannah, of course. Not Hannah.

  “Remember?” She asks me, tucking her dress under her legs as she sits down. “I helped carry your bags to that car of yours. I’ve seen it once or twice in the square. I’ve always wondered who drove it.”

  “It’s Papa’s pride and joy,” Agatha says, her chest heaving from the dance.

  The woman leans forward across the table, smiling. Her skin is soft, plump, downy as a peach.

  I point at Saul. “My grandson here’s got this device. He tells me it projects other possible worlds—”

  “—Oh, you mean a metacam.” She turns to Saul. “What model?”

  Saul tells her. The woman who isn’t Hannah nods, spreads her hands, sticks out her chin a little. It’s not the choice she’d have made, but...

  “More wine, Papa?”

  I nod. Agatha pours.

  I watch the woman with grey hair. Eyes that aren’t Hannah’s colour, a disappointing droop to her nose that she probably keeps that way out inverted vanity. I try to follow her and Saul’s conversation as the music starts up again, waiting for her to turn back towards me, waiting for the point where I can butt in. It doesn’t come, and I drink my wine.

  Somewhere there seems to be a mirror—or perhaps it’s just a possible mirror in some other world, or my own blurred imagination—and I see the woman whose name I didn’t catch sitting there, and I can see me, Papa. Propped at an off-centre angle against the arms of a chair. Fat belly and long thin limbs, disturbingly pale eyes and a slack mouth surrounded by drapes of ancient skin. A face you can see right though to the skull beneath.

  Not-Hannah laughs at something Saul says. Their lips move, their hands touch, but I can’t hear any longer. I’ve been blinking too much—I may even have been crying—and I’ve somehow turned my eardrums off. In silence, Not-Hannah catches Saul’s strong young arms and pulls him up to dance. They settle easily into the beat and the sway. His hand nestles in the small her back. She twirls in his arms, easy as thistledown. I blink, and drink more wine, and the sound crashes in again. I blink again. It’s there. It’s gone. Breaking like the tide. What am I doing here anyway, spoiling the fun of the able, the happy, the young?

  This party will go on, all the dancing and the laughing, until a doomsday that’ll never come. These people, they’ll live forever. They’ll warm up the sun, they’ll stop the Universe from final collapse, or maybe they’ll simply relive each glorious moment as the universe turns back on itself and time reverses, party with the dinosaurs, resurrect the dead, dance until everything ends with the biggest of all possible bangs.

  “Are you alright, Papa?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I pour out more of the wine.

  It slops over the table.

  Saul’s sitting at the table again with Not-Hannah, and the spillage dribbles over Not-Hannah’s dress. I say fuck it, never mind, spilling more as I try to catch the flow, and I’ve really given the two of them the perfect excuse to go off together so he can help her to clean up. Yes, help to lift off her dress even though she’s old enough to be his—

  But then who cares? Fun is fun is fun is fun. Or maybe it’s Agatha she was after. Or both, or neither. It doesn’t matter, does it? After all, my grandchildren have got each other. Call me old-fashioned, but look at them. My own bloody grandchildren. Look at them. Creatures from another fucking planet—

  But Not-Hannah’s gone off on her own anyway. Maybe it was something I said, but my eardrums are off—I can’t even hear my own words, which is probably a good thing. Saul and Agatha are staring at me. Looking worried. Their lips are saying something about Papa and Bed and Home, and there’s a huge read firework flashing over the moon. Or perhaps its a warning cursor, which was one of things Doc Fanian told me to look out for if there was ever a problem. My body is fitted with all sorts of systems and alarms, which my flesh and veins happily embrace. It’s just this brain that’s become a little wild, a little estranged, swimming like a pale fish in its bowl of liquid and bone. So why not fit a few new extra pieces, get rid of the last of the old grey meat. And I’d be new, I’d be perfect—

  Whiteness. Whiteness. No light. No darkness.

  “Are you in there, Papa?”

  Doc Fanian’s voice.

  “Where else would I be?”

  I open my eyes. Everything becomes clear. Tiger-stripes of sunlight across the walls of my bedroom. The silver mantis limbs of my bedhelper. The smell of my own skin like sour ancient leather. Memories of the night before.

  “What have you done to me?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  I blink and swallow. I stop myself from blinking again. Doc Fanian’s in beach shorts and a bright, ridiculous shirt; his usual attire for a consultation.

  “Did you know,” I say, “that they’ve installed a big red neon sign just above the moon that says Please Stop Drinking Alcohol?”

  “So the cursor did work!” Doc Fanian looks pleased with himself. His boyish features crinkle. “Then I suppose you passed out?”

  “Not long after. I thought it was just the drink.”

  “It’s a safety circuit. Of course, the body has got one too, but it’s less reliable at your age.”

  “I haven’t even got a hangover.”

  “The filters will have seen to that.”

  Doc Fanian gazes around my bedroom. There’s a photo of Hannah on the far wall. She’s hugging her knees as she sits on a grassy bank with nothing but sky behind her; a time and a place I can’t even remember. He peers at it, but says nothing. He’s probably had a good mooch around the whole house by now, looking for signs, seeing how Papa’s managing. Which is exactly why I normally make a point of visiting him at the surgery. I never used to be afraid of doctors when I was fitter, younger. But I am now. Now that I need them...

  “Your grandchildren called me in. They were worried. It’s understandable, although there was really no cause. None at all.” There’s a faint tone of irritation in Doc Fanian’s voice. He’s annoyed that anyone should doubt his professional handiwork, or think that Papa’s systems might have been so casually set up that a few glasses of wine would cause any difficulty.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “It’s no problem.” He smiles. He starts humming again. He forgives easily. “If you’d care to pop into the surgery in the next week or two, there’s some new stuff I’d like to show you. It’s a kind of short-term mem
ory enhancement. You know—it helps if you forget things you’ve been doing recently.”

  I say nothing, wondering what Doc Fanian has encountered around the house to make him come up with this suggestion.

  “Where are Saul and Agatha?”

  “Just next door. Packing.”

  “Packing?”

  “Anyway.” He smiles. “I really must be going. I’d like to stay for breakfast, but...”

  “Maybe some other universe, eh?”

  He turns and gazes back at me for a moment. He understands more about me than I do myself, but still he looks puzzled.

  “Yes,” he nods. Half-smiling. Humouring an old man. “Take care, you hear?”

  He leaves the door open behind him. I can hear Saul and Agatha. Laughing, squabbling. Packing.

  I shift myself up. The bedhelper trundles out and offers arms for me to grab. I’m standing when Saul comes into the room.

  “I’m sorry about getting the doc out, Papa. We just thought, you know...”

  “Why are you packing? You’re not off already are you?”

  He smiles. “Remember, Papa? We’re off to the Amazon. We told you on the beach yesterday.”

  I nod.

  “But it’s been great, Papa. It really has.”

  “I’m sorry about last night. I behaved like an idiot.”

  “Yes.” He claps his hands on my bony shoulders and laughs outright. “That was quite something.” He shakes his head in admiration. Papa, a party animal! “You really did cut loose, didn’t you?”

  Agatha fixes breakfast. The fridge is filled with all kinds of stuff I’ve never even heard of. They’ve re-stocked it from somewhere, and now it looks like the horn of plenty. I sit watching my lovely granddaughter as she moves around, humming.

  Cooking smells. The sigh of the sea wafts through the open widow. Another perfect day. The way I feel about her and Saul leaving, I could have done with grey torrents of rain. But even in paradise you can’t have everything.

  “So,” I say, “you’re off to the Amazon.”

  “Yeah.” She bangs the plates down on the table. “There are freshwater dolphins. Giant anteaters. People living the way their ancestors did now the rainforest has been restored.” She smiles, looking as dreamy as last night when she gazed at the moon. I can see her standing in the magical darkness of a forest floor, naked as a priestess, her skin striped with green and mahogany shadows. It requires no imagination at all. “It’ll be fun,” she says.