Zima Blue and Other Stories

  He left her then, as the dawn sun began to pick out the golden threads of the balloons, kilometres across the city. She slept peacefully, dreaming of the coming day, of the smell and noise of Cockatoo's Crest, of the music of the syrinx-boxes, of the rainbow-shimmering faces of the dead people, of the empty sky.

  'Enola' was my third sale to Interzone in a relatively short space of time. I'd placed my first and second professional sales there, and with 'Enola' I got my name onto the front cover for the first time. The story appeared at the end of the magazine, graced by some fine illustrations. I thought it augured well for my future as a regular contributor to the magazine.

  I couldn't have been more wrong. The stories I submitted after 'Enola' turned out to be very much not to Interzone's liking, and it was to be almost four years before I appeared in the magazine again. When one invests so much energy and time into breaking into a market, it can be disheartening to hear the door slam shut and find oneself standing outside in the cold again. Even more so in my case, where I felt that the stories Interzone was now bouncing were in all respects superior to those it had already bought. What was the problem? I wondered. In hindsight, having looked over some of those rejected stories, I can see it all too clearly. They were leaden and ponderous, inflated with their own self-importance. It was only when I kicked back and wrote something fast and furious ('Byrd Land Six', not included here) that the door creaked open again. As for 'Enola', the story I'd hoped would herald the next phase of my career, it sank without a trace once it was published. I've always been rather fond of it, though, all the more so because it encapsulates many themes that turn up elsewhere in my work. A German translation of this story, incidentally, helpfully directed readers to the fact that 'Enola' was an anagram of 'Alone'. Quite what bearing this has on the story, I've never learned.

  SIGNAL TO NOISE

  FRIDAY

  Mick Leighton was in the basement with the machines when the police came for him. He'd been trying to reach Joe Liversedge all morning, to cancel a prearranged squash match. It was the busiest week before exams, and Mick had gloomily concluded that he had too much tutorial work to grade to justify sparing even an hour for the game. The trouble was that Joe had either turned off his phone or left it in his office where it wouldn't interfere with the machines. Mick had sent an e-mail, but when that had gone unanswered he decided there was nothing for it but to stroll over to Joe's half of the building and inform him in person. By now Mick was a sufficiently well-known face in Joe's department that he was able to come and go more or less as he pleased.

  'Hello, matey,' Joe said, glancing over his shoulder with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand. There was a bandage on the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He was hunched over a desk covered in laptops, cables and reams of hardcopy. 'Ready for a thrashing, are you?'

  'That's why I'm here,' Mick said. 'Got to cancel, sorry. Too much on my plate today.'

  'Naughty.'

  'Ted Evans can fill in for me. He's got his kit. You know Ted, don't you?'

  'Vaguely.' Joe set down his sandwich to put the lid back on a felt-tipped pen. He was an amiable Yorkshireman who'd come down to Cardiff for his postgraduate work and decided to stay. He was married to an archaeologist named Rachel who spent a lot of her time poking around in the Roman ruins under the walls of Cardiff Castle. 'Sure I can't twist your arm? It'll do you good, you know, bit of a workout.'

  'I know. But there just isn't time.'

  'Your call. How are things, anyway?'

  Mick shrugged philosophically. 'Been better.'

  'Did you phone Andrea like you said you were going to?'

  'No.'

  'You should, you know.'

  'I'm not very good on the phone. Anyway, I thought she probably needed a bit of space.'

  'It's been three weeks, mate.'

  'I know.'

  'Do you want the wife to call her? It might help.'

  'No, but thanks for suggesting it anyway.'

  'Call her. Let her know you're missing her.'

  'I'll think about it.'

  'Yeah, sure. You should stick around, you know. It's all go here this morning. We got a lock just after seven o'clock.' Joe tapped one of the laptop screens, which was scrolling rows of black-on-white numbers. 'It's a good one too.'

  'Really?'

  'Come and have a look at the machine.'

  'I can't. I need to get back to my office.'

  'You'll regret it later. Just like you'll regret cancelling our match, or not calling Andrea. I know you, Mick. You're one of life's born regretters.'

  'Five minutes, then.'

  In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe's basement. As solid as Mick's own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds of researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedge laboratory.

  In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. You couldn't go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, but Mick knew that, and he'd been careful to remove all metallic items before he came down the stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten tonne bar of ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe liked to wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magnetic field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter-six earthquake, and the bars wouldn't feel the slightest tremor.

  Joe called it the call centre.

  The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while two were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing was cold-calling: dialling random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waiting for someone to answer on the other end.

  In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum state. By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron - what Joe called the back-chirp - the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto another strand of quantum reality - another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating with its counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.

  Once that lock was established - once the cold-calling machine had achieved a hit - then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influence it but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those taps. It meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.

  'This is the boy,' Joe said, patting one of the active machines. 'Looks like a solid lock too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think this might be the one that does it for us.'

  Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe's neck. 'You've had a nervelink inserted, haven't you?'

  'Straight to the medical centre as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was nervous - first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was up and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea biscuit.'

  'Ooh. A Rich Tea biscuit. It doesn't get any better than that, does it? You'll be going through today, I take it?'

  Joe reached up and tore off the bandage, revealing only a small spot of blood, like a shaving nick. 'Tomorrow, probably. Maybe Sunday. The nervelink isn't active yet, and that'll take some getting used to. We've got bags of time, though; even if we don't switch on the nervelink until Sunday, I'll still have five or six days of bandwidth before we become noise-limited.'

  'You must be excited.'

  'Right now I just don't want to cock up anything. The Helsinki boys are nipping at our heels as it is. I reckon they're within a few months of beating us.'

  Mick knew how important this latest project was for Joe. Sending information between different realities was one thing, and impressive enough in its own right. But now that technology had escaped from the labs out into the
real world. There were hundreds of correlators in other labs and institutes around the world. In five years it had gone from being a spooky, barely believable phenomenon to an accepted part of the modern world.

  But Joe - whose team had always been at the forefront of the technology - hadn't stood still. They'd been the first to work out how to send voice and video comms across the gap to another reality, and within the last year they'd been able to operate a camera-equipped robot, the same battery-driven kind that all the tourists had been using before nervelinking became the new thing. Joe had even let Mick have a go on it. With his hands operating the robot's manipulators via force-feedback gloves, and his eyes seeing the world via the stereoscopic projectors in a virtual-reality helmet, Mick had been able to feel himself almost physically present in the other lab. He'd been able to move around and pick things up just as if he were actually walking in that alternate reality. Oddest of all had been meeting the other version of Joe Liversedge, the one who worked in the counterpart lab. Both Joes seemed cheerily indifferent to the weirdness of the set-up, as if collaborating with a duplicate of yourself was the most normal thing in the world.

  Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to something even better.

  'Think about it,' he'd said. 'A few years ago, tourists started switching over to nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly foreign city when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can move around and pick stuff up, but they can't give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat, the contact with other people.'

  'Mm,' Mick had said noncommittally. He didn't really approve of nervelinking, even though it essentially paid Andrea's wages.

  'So we're going to do the same. We've got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of piss. All we need now is a solid link.'

  And now Joe had what he'd been waiting for. Mick could practically see the Nature cover-article in his friend's eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking that long train ride to Stockholm.

  'I hope it works out for you,' Mick said.

  Joe patted the correlator again. 'I've got a good feeling about this one.'

  That was when one of Joe's undergraduates came up to them. To Mick's surprise, it wasn't Joe she wanted to speak to.

  'Doctor Leighton?'

  'That's me.'

  'There's somebody to see you, sir. I think it's quite important.'

  'Someone to see me?'

  'They said you left a note in your office.'

  'I did,' Mick said absentmindedly. 'But I also said I wouldn't be gone long. Nothing's that important, is it?'

  But the person who had come to find Mick was a policewoman. When Mick met her at the top of the stairs her expression told him it wasn't good news.

  'Something's happened,' he said.

  She looked worried, and very, very young. 'Is there somewhere we can talk, Mister Leighton?'

  'Use my office,' Joe said, showing the two of them to his room just down the corridor. Joe left them alone, saying he was going down to the coffee machine in the hall.

  'I've got some bad news,' the policewoman said, when Joe had closed the door. 'I think you should sit down, Mister Leighton.'

  Mick pulled out Joe's chair from under the desk, which was covered in papers: coursework Joe must have been in the process of grading. Mick sat down, then didn't know where to put his hands. 'It's about Andrea, isn't it?'

  'I'm afraid your wife was in an accident this morning,' the policewoman said.

  'What kind of accident? What happened?'

  'Your wife was hit by a car when she was crossing the road.'

  A mean little thought flashed through Mick's mind. Bloody Andrea: she'd always been one for dashing across a road without looking. He'd been warning her for years she was going to regret it one day.

  'How is she? Where did they take her?'

  'I'm really sorry, sir.' The policewoman hesitated. 'Your wife died on the way to hospital. I understand that the paramedics did all they could, but . . .'

  Mick was hearing it, and not hearing it. It couldn't be right. People still got knocked down by cars. But they didn't die from it, not any more. Cars couldn't go fast enough in towns to kill anyone. Being knocked down and killed by a car was something that happened to people in soap operas, not real life.

  Feeling numb, not really present in the room, Mick said, 'Where is she now?' As if by visiting her, he might prove that they'd got it wrong, that she wasn't dead at all.

  'They took her to the Heath, sir. That's where she is now. I can drive you there.'

  'Andrea isn't dead,' Mick said. 'She can't be. Not now.'

  'I'm really sorry,' the policewoman said.

  SATURDAY

  For the last three weeks, ever since they had separated, Mick had been sleeping in a spare room at his brother's house in Newport. The company had been good, but now Bill was away for the weekend on some ridiculous team-building exercise in Snowdonia. For tedious reasons, Mick's brother had had to take the house keys with him, leaving Mick with nowhere to sleep on Friday night. When Joe had asked him where he was going to stay, Mick said he'd go back to his own house, the one he'd left at the beginning of the month.

  Joe was having none of it, and insisted that Mick sleep at his house instead. Mick spent the night going through the usual cycle of emotions that came with any sudden bad news. He'd had nothing to compare with losing his wife, but the texture of the shock was familiar enough, albeit magnified from anything in his previous experience. He resented the fact that the world seemed to be continuing, crassly oblivious to Andrea's death. The news wasn't dominated by his tragedy; it was all about some Polish miners trapped underground. When he finally managed to get to sleep, Mick was tormented by dreams that his wife was still alive, that it had all been a mistake.

  But he knew it was all true. He'd been to the hospital; he'd seen her body. He even knew why she'd been hit by the car. Andrea had been crossing the road to her favourite hair salon; she'd had an appointment to get her hair done. Knowing Andrea, she had probably been so focused on the salon that she was oblivious to all that was going on around her. It hadn't even been the car that had killed her in the end. When the slow-moving vehicle knocked her down, Andrea had struck her head against the side of the kerb.

  By midmorning on Saturday, Mick's brother had returned from Snowdonia. Bill came around to Joe's house and hugged Mick silently, saying nothing for many minutes. Then Bill went into the next room and spoke quietly to Joe and Rachel. Their low voices made Mick feel like a child in a house of adults.

  'I think you and I need to get out of Cardiff,' Bill told Mick, when he returned to the living room. 'No ifs, no buts.'

  Mick started to protest. 'There's too much that needs to be done. I still need to get back to the funeral home.'

  'It can wait until this afternoon. No one's going to hate you for not returning a few calls. C'mon; let's drive up to the Gower and get some fresh air. I've already reserved a car.'

  'Go with him,' Rachel said. 'It'll do you good.'

  Mick acquiesced, his guilt and relief in conflict at being able to put aside thoughts of the funeral plans. He was glad Bill had come down, but he couldn't quite judge how his brother - or his friends, for that matter - viewed his bereavement. He'd lost his wife. They all knew that. But they also knew that Mick and Andrea had been separated. They'd been having problems for most of the year. It would only be human for his friends to assume that Mick wasn't quite as affected by Andrea's death as he would have been had they still been living together.

  'Listen,' he told Bill, when they were safely under way. 'There's something I've got to tell you.'

  'I'm listening.'

  'Andrea and I had problems. But it wasn't the end of our marriage. We were going to get through this. I was going to call her this weekend, see if we couldn't meet.'

  Bill looked at him sadly. Mick couldn't tell if that meant that Bill just didn't believe
him, or that his brother pitied him for the opportunity he'd allowed to slip between his fingers.

  When they got back to Cardiff in the early evening, after a warm and blustery day out on the Gower, Joe practically pounced on Mick as soon as they came through the door.

  'I need to talk to you,' Joe said. 'Now.'

  'I need to call some of Andrea's friends,' Mick said. 'Can it wait until later?'