Zima Blue and Other Stories

  'You're not the other Rachel,' I'd said. 'She's just . . . some woman Joe's married to. You're the only one that matters to me.'

  'The only one,' she'd answered tersely. 'When most men say that, they're talking about other women. You're talking about other copies of me, like I'm some kind of mass-produced Barbie doll. I can't deal with this, Joe.'

  'You could have a go.'

  'Life's too short,' Rachel said.

  When she left, I did what I always did in times of crisis: threw myself into the work. Cardiff had been the first to develop cold-calling technology, but that didn't mean other universities and corporations weren't snapping at our heels, trying to get ahead of us. We'd been the first to establish a video interface between parallel worlds, enabling one version of me to chat to the other, as if we were just sitting in different offices. We'd been the first to use presencing technology - pinched from the tourist agencies, developed for the masses who couldn't afford to fly any more - and later we'd moved from clunky robots to actual human bodies, equipped with implants so that you could take them over, as if you were physically present in the other world. All that was well and good, but none of it had come free. To stay ahead we'd had to bite into a big juicy poisoned apple called direct government funding, money that arrived independently of the usual academic research pools. On the surface, the new money was intended to ensure that the UK maintained its prestigious lead in this cutting-edge field. It was all about science for science's sake, the money supposedly untainted by any baser concerns beyond the sheer intellectual thrill of the enterprise.

  That was bollocks, though, and everyone knew it.

  In a time when the government could lock up just about anybody they liked for simply looking a bit odd, the technology had powerful security implications. Once a lock was established, two different versions of a suspect could be arrested and interrogated in parallel, with the relevant agencies cooperating with themselves to extract the maximum intelligence. Feed one story to the suspect in one timeline and see what he says. Feed another in the other timeline and see what you get from that. Have your cake and eat it, and sod the human rights.

  Of course, they never admitted to doing that kind of thing. But it wasn't blue-sky science that had paid for the new machines or their elaborate, bombproof installation in the basement. It was national security. What else?

  Did I mention that the apple was poisoned? As a condition on all that glorious funding, the government had their own 'hotline', their own super-secure communications channel running into our lab. Their mandarins could talk to each other through the machines without me or anyone else in the department having a fucking clue what was going on. They didn't get in our way and we didn't get in theirs.

  But sometimes, there were consequences.

  Like today, for instance.

  It's three months since the bomb went off. Our window into that version of Cardiff closed only four days after the event itself, so none of us has any idea how they're getting on. They hadn't come close to final casualty figures when the link collapsed, and no one was yet daring to talk about plans for the reconstruction. We'll never make contact with that version again, even if we kept on cold-calling for the rest of eternity. It's deviated so far from our own that the quantum lock just can't be established.

  In my version of Cardiff, it's not a bad day at all. The sun's out, the pavement cafes are doing good business and everyone looks remarkably happy and content. Nothing much has changed here in three months. Of course, everyone who bothers to keep up with world events knows that a version of Cardiff got wiped off the map, and they've seen the pictures and video clips to prove it. Some of them, like me, have even presenced over to that other reality. We've strolled - or in my case rolled - over the smoking ruins of what was once a city.

  For most people, though, the bombed Cardiff is receding into the past, like the memory of a bad summer blockbuster with overblown special effects. Lots of things have happened around the world since then, and we've cold-called hundreds of other realities, some of which have brought their own scandals and nine-day wonders.

  But some people - some very select people - have longer memories than that.

  Over my morning coffee, I flick through the paper. Buried somewhere on page three is a little item about the recent arrest and detention of a man living in Cardiff.

  His name doesn't matter. He's British, all right? Welsh, if you want to be pedantic about it, although he's not called Jones or Evans or anything acceptably Welsh like that.

  He's never done anything wrong. His only mistake is that he happened to blow up Cardiff in an alternate universe. Actually, that's an exaggeration. He wasn't directly involved in the planting of the bomb. All he did was inadvertently give house room to those who were. Maybe he knew something was going on, but it's equally likely that the perpetrators managed to keep their big secret from him.

  No one can ask them now, though, because - inconveniently - they're all dead. Their counterparts in the other Cardiff died when the bomb went off. In this version they committed suicide when, because of a tiny imperfection in a soldered joint, their copy of the bomb failed to detonate properly, maiming two of them. All intelligence leads to a wider network of specialists and financiers have dried up. We can cold-call into other versions of Cardiff, but each of those now shares the same history as ours, so the terrorists are dead there as well. Which means that the only man the government can get their hands on - and who might know something - is the man who gave them somewhere to live.

  His denials - according to what I can glean from the newspaper - have the taint of plausibility. He was related to one of the bombers, but only distantly, and nothing in his past suggested any involvement in extremist organisations. I'm left wondering this: in our timeline, the bomb failed, maiming two terrorists and eventually leading all of them to commit suicide. Civilian losses: nil. Radiation exposure: negligible. Damage to property: not worth mentioning.

  If we didn't know what had happened to the other Cardiff, we'd say: case closed. The detained man has no case to answer. Justice has already been delivered.

  Problem is, we do know. We do know and we like it when there's someone we can punish.

  According to the paper, the detained man is reported to have died of complications following a heart attack, suffered during incarceration. The government line is that he had a precondition that could have flared up at any time.

  Me, I'm wondering what they did to the poor, innocent bastard.

  I fold the paper, finish my coffee and ride the tram to the university. Coincidentally, it's another Sunday. When I get there the department is empty, except for a few hoovering robots. Anyone with an ounce of sense is somewhere else, enjoying the weather, enjoying their city.

  I tap the keycode and descend into the basement. The cold-calling machines loom around me, huge, humming horizontal cylinders, cold to the touch. There's always been something faintly sinister about them, although I'd never admit it aloud. I think of the government hotline running into this basement, into the machines, enabling signals to span the gap between realities. Without that connection, they'd never have come down as hard on that man as they did.

  I think, for a moment, about sealing myself in here and turning off the air circulator. Go out the way the other Joe did, with a suicide note to myself and twenty pounds clutched in my cold, dead hand. A pint and a bag of crisps. It wouldn't really be killing myself, would it? Even if I die here and now, countless other versions of Joe Liversedge carry on living. We won't all make the same decision.

  But then I think about what Rachel said, before she packed her bags. We're not Barbie dolls. If I've started slipping into a state of mind that allows me to believe that we are - that death is just the pruning of one local branch from an infinite, ever-growing tree - then maybe she had a point. Maybe I have been doing this a bit too long. Killing myself - no matter how noble the intention - would only reinforce her sense that I've let myself get sucked too far in.

&n
bsp; It's not that I want Rachel to like me again. Too late for that. But I can still make a stand, without dying like the other Joe did.

  Alarms will trip as soon as I start damaging the machines. Sooner or later they'll come and find me - they'll be able to break into the basement with or without the keycode. Then I'll be arrested - and, well, who knows? But no matter what happens to me, sooner or later they'll find a way to put the machines back together. But still: I'm Joe Liversedge. I'm a creative bastard. And I reckon I can do some serious damage if I put my mind to it.

  There's a big axe on the wall, next to the fire extinguisher.

  Let's get cracking.

  This very short story - little more than a vignette - was written for the Welsh edition of The Big Issue, the magazine sold in the UK by the homeless and vulnerable. Commissioned by the Cardiff-based crime writer John Williams for a special series of summer stories by Welsh writers, the idea was that the story should have a specific Welsh connection. This proved suitably problematic until I remembered that I'd already established a Welsh-themed near-future background for the novella 'Signal to Noise'. The Yorkshireman Joe Liversedge had been a background character in that story, but in this much shorter piece I put him (or copies of him, to be strictly accurate) in the foreground, a few years after the events of the earlier story. Once the elements were in place, the story wrote itself very quickly (good thing too, as the deadline was tight) and proved a refreshing exercise after some of the much longer pieces I had been working on recently. The title is a steal from the Manic Street Preachers, of course (as is, very nearly, 'Everlasting', also in this collection). Yes, I'm a fan . . .

  HIDEAWAY

  PART ONE

  There was, Merlin thought, a very fine line between beauty and terror. Most certainly where the Way was concerned. Tempting as it was to think that the thing they saw through the cutter's windows was only a mirage, there would always come a point when the mysterious artefact known as the syrinx started purring, vibrating in its metal harness. Somehow it was sensing the Way's proximity, anxious to perform the function for which it had been designed.

  It seemed to bother all of them except Sayaca.

  'Krasnikov,' she mouthed, shaping the unfamiliar word like an oath.

  She was the youngest and brightest of the four disciples who had agreed to accompany Merlin on this field trip. At first the others had welcomed her into Merlin's little entourage, keen to hear her insights on matters relating to the Way and the enigmatic Waymakers. But in the cutter's cramped surroundings Sayaca's charms had worn off with impressive speed.

  'Krasnikov?' Merlin said. 'Sorry, doesn't mean anything to me either.' He watched as the others pulled faces. 'You're going to have to enlighten us, Sayaca.'

  'Krasnikov was . . .' she paused. 'Well, a human, I suppose - tens of kiloyears ago, long before the Waymakers, even before the Flourishing. He had an idea for moving faster than light, one that didn't involve wormholes or tachyons.'

  'It can't work, Sayaca,' said a gangly, greasy-scalped adolescent called Weaver. 'You can't move faster than light without manipulating matter with negative energy density.'

  'So what, Weaver? Do you think that would have bothered the Waymakers? '

  Merlin smiled, thinking that the trouble with Sayaca was that when she made a point it was almost always a valid one.

  'But the Way doesn't actually allow faster-than-light travel,' said one of the others. 'That much we do know.'

  'Of course. All I'm saying is that the Waynet might have been an attempt to make a network of Krasnikov tubes, which didn't quite work out the way the builders intended.'

  'Mm,' Merlin said. 'And what exactly is a Krasnikov tube?'

  'A tube-shaped volume of altered space-time, light-years from end to end. Just like one branch of the Waynet. The point was to allow roundtrip journeys to other star systems in arbitrarily short objective time.'

  'Like a wormhole?' Weaver asked.

  'No; the mathematical formulation's utterly different.' She sighed, looking to Merlin for moral support. He nodded for her to continue, knowing that she had already alienated the others beyond any reasonable point of return. 'But there must have been a catch. It's clear that two neighbouring Krasnikov tubes running in opposite directions violate causality. Perhaps when that happened--'

  'They got something like the Waynet?'

  Sayaca nodded to Merlin. 'Not a static tube of restructured space-time, but a rushing column of it, moving at a fraction below light-speed. It was still useful, of course. Ships could slip into the Way, cross interstellar space at massive tau factors and then decelerate instantaneously at the other end simply by leaving the stream.'

  'All very impressive,' Weaver said. 'But if you're such an expert, why can't you tell us how to make the syrinx work properly?'

  'You wouldn't understand if I did,' Sayaca said.

  Merlin was about to intervene - tension was one thing, but he could not tolerate an argument aboard the cutter - when his glove rescued him. It had begun tickling the back of his hand, announcing a private call from the mother ship. Relieved, he unhitched from a restraint harness and kicked himself away from the four adolescents. 'I'll be back shortly,' he said. 'Try not to strangle each other, will you?'

  The cutter was a slender craft only forty metres long, so it was normal enough that tempers had become frayed in the four days that they had been away from the Starthroat. The air smelled edgy too: thick with youthful pheromones he did not remember from the last trip. The youngsters were all getting older, no longer his unquestioning devotees.

  He pushed past the syrinx. It sat within a metal harness, its long axis aligned with the ship's. The conic device was tens of thousands of years old, but its matt-black surface was completely unmarred. It was still purring too, like a well-fed cat. The closer they got to the Way, the more it would respond. It wanted to be set free, and shortly - Merlin hoped - it would get its wish.

  The seniors would not be pleased, of course.

  Beyond the syrinx was a narrow, transparent-walled duct that led back to Merlin's private quarters. He kicked himself along the passage, comfortable in free-fall after four days of adaptation. The view was undeniably impressive; as always he found himself slowing to take it in.

  The stars were clumped ahead, shifted from their real positions and altered in hue and brightness by the aberration caused by the cutter's motion. They were moving at nine-tenths of the speed of light. Set against this distorted starfield, far to one side, was the huge swallowship - the Starthroat - that Merlin's people called home. The swallowship was far too distant to see as anything other than a prick of hot blue light pointing aft, like a star that had been carelessly smudged. Yet apart from the four people with him here, every other human he knew was inside Starthroat.

  And then there was the Way.

  It lay in the opposite hemisphere of the sky, stretching into the infinite distance fore and aft. It was like a ghostly pipeline alongside which they were flying - a pipeline ten thousand kilometres thick and thousands of light-years long. It shimmered faintly - twinkling as tiny particles of cosmic debris annihilated themselves against its skin. Most of those impacts were due to dust specks that had rest velocities of only a few kilometres a second against the local stellar rest frame - so the transient glints seemed to slam past at eye-wrenching velocities. Not just a pipeline, then - but a glass pipeline running thick with twinkling fluid that flowed at frightening speed.

  And perhaps soon they would relearn the art of riding it.

  He pushed into his quarters, confronting his brother's image on the comms console. Although they were not twins - Gallinule was a year younger - they still looked remarkably alike. It was almost like looking in a mirror.

  'Well?' Merlin said.

  'Trouble, I'm afraid.'

  'Let me guess. It has something to do with Quail.'

  'Well, the captain's not happy, let's put it like that. First you take the syrinx without authorisation, then the cutter - and the
n you have the balls not to come back when the old bastard tells you to.' The face on the screen was trying not to smile, but Merlin could tell he was quietly impressed. 'But that's not actually the problem. When I say trouble I mean for all of us. Quail wants all the seniors in his meeting room in eight hours.'

  Just time, Merlin thought, for him to drop the syrinx and make it back to Starthroat. Not as good as having time to run comprehensive tests, but still damnably tempting. It was almost suspiciously convenient.

  'I hadn't heard of any crisis on the horizon.'

  'Me neither, and that's what worries me. It's something we haven't thought of.'

  'The Huskers stealing a lead on us? Fine. I expect to be comfortably senile by the time they get within weapons range.'

  'Just be there, will you? Or there'll be two of us in trouble.'

  Merlin smiled. 'What else are brothers for?'