“I’m talking euros,” Bob said. “Half a euro a word.”
My wife heard that, and yelped. I must admit I sat up sharply myself.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “A few grand a story?”
“Not for every story,” said Bob, ostentatiously glancing around to make sure no one had overheard. Not much chance of that – the bar was loud, and the conversation of the SF writers made it louder yet. “From you, I’ll take ten-kay words. Five grand.”
For the first time in weeks, I had a craving for a cigarette.
‘I’ll have to go outside and think about it,’ I said.
I bummed a Gitane off Nicole, grinned at my wife’s frown, and headed out. The rain had stopped. The street was dark, half the street-lamps out. My Zippo flared – I keep it topped up, for just these contingencies. After a minute, Bob joined me. He took a fresh pack from his pocket, peeled cellophane, and lit up.
“You too?” I said, surprised.
He shrugged. “Only when I’m travelling. Breaks the ice in some places.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. I glared at him. “Fucking Yank.”
“What?”
“Don’t mess with my friends.”
“What?”
“I know what you’re up to,” I said. “Checking them out, seeing who’s all mouth and who’s serious enough to be interested in one of your little schemes.”
“Have you got
me
wrong,” said Bob. “I’m not interested in them. I’m interested in you.”
He spread his hands, flashed me a conspiratorial grin.
“Forget it,” I said.
“Come on, you hate the bastards as much as I do.”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “You don’t.”
“What do you mean by that?” He sounded genuinely indignant, almost hurt. I knew that meant nothing. It was a tone I’d practiced often enough.
“You don’t hate the revolution,” I said. I waved a trail of smoke. “Civil war, terror, censorship, shortages, dictatorship – yeah, I’m sure you hate all that. But it’s still the beginning of socialism. It’s still
the revolution
, isn’t it?”
“Not my revolution!”
“You were never a wanker,” I said. “Don’t mistake me for one, either.”
He tossed his cigarette into the running gutter, and continued the arm movement in a wave.
“So why... all this?”
“We have perfected this machine,” I said.
He gave me a long look.
“Ah,” he said. “I see. Like that, is it?”
“Like that,” I said.
I held the door open for him as we went back in. The telly over the bar was showing yet another clip of the disastrous flight. Bob laughed as the door swung shut behind us.
“You didn’t perfect
that
machine!”
We picked our way through the patrons to the gang, who by now had shoved two tables together and were all in the same huddle of heads.
“Describe what happened,” I said, as we re-joined them. “At the Jardin.”
“Well,” Bob began, looking puzzled, “we all saw what was
claimed
to be an anti-gravity flying machine rise in the air and blow up. And some of us think –”
“No,” I said. I banged the table. “Listen up, all of you. Bob is going to tell us what he saw.”
“What do you want me to say?” Bob demanded. “I saw the same as the rest of you. I was just inside the park, I saw it on my phone and when the thing cleared the treetops I saw it with my own eyes. The machine, or what we’d been told was a machine, rose up –”
“Not that,” I said. “Start from when you got to the park.”
Bob frowned. “The Place was crowded. I couldn’t see what was happening around the crate. There were people in the way, trees...” He shrugged. “What’s to say?”
“Describe the trees. Think back to looking up at them.”
Bob sipped the dregs of the green drink in front of him, shaking his head.
“Bare branches, clear blue sky.”
“Were the branches moving?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, were they?”
“Of course not!” he said. “There wasn’t a breath of wind.”
“Bingo!” I said. “There was
a clear blue sky
. There
wasn’t a breath of wind
.”
“I don’t get it.”
Nor did anyone else, by the looks I was getting.
“The machine moved straight up,” I said. “And we’re all fairly sure it was some fake, right? An arrangement of balsa and mylar, hydrogen and magnesium.”
I took out my Zippo, and flicked the lid and the wheel. “That’s all it would have taken. Whoof!”
“Yeah,” said Jack, looking interested. “So?”
“The ascent was announced a month and a half ago,” I said. “New Year’s Eve. Announced to the day, to the hour, the minute! Noon, Saturday fifteenth Feb.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Imagine what today’s little demonstration would have been like,” I said, “if there had been... a breath of wind. Or low cloud. The fake would have been blatant.” I held out my hand, fingers spread, and waggled it as I gestured drifting. “Like that.”
Jack guffawed, and Bob joined in. Everyone else just frowned.
“You’re saying the French have weather control?”
“No,” I said. “I’m saying they have weather
prediction
. That’s what they demonstrated today, not anti-gravity – and that’s what is going to scare the shit out of the Americans and the Brits. Probably has already.”
“It’s impossible to predict the weather forty days in advance,” said Catherine. “Chaos theory, butterfly effect, all that, you know?”
“Apparently not,” I said. “A lot of mathematics research going on at the Sorbonne, you know.” I turned to Bob. “Take that back to your revolution.”
He stared at me for a long moment.
“Fuck you,” he said. “And the horse you rode in on.”
He stood up and stormed out.
None of us heard from him again. Editions Jules Verne, the publishing company, never heard from him either. They honoured the contracts, but nothing came of the anthology.
The ascent at the Jardin de Luxembourg is still the best science fiction of the Year Three.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
TRICIA SULLIVAN
Tricia Sullivan is the author of seven SF novels including the Clarke-winning
Dreaming in Smoke
and most recently
Lightborn
, which was shortlisted for the Clarke. Tricia works from home, cares for three children and studies fitfully with the Open University. She says of ‘The One That Got Away’ that this is one of those unusual stories that invent themselves without much authorial interference, so anybody wondering what it’s trying to say please don’t ask her… go ask the nearest fish.
Lately there aren’t enough corpses to go around. The flies sell stories about how being a rag is a lost way of life. They interview the rags who have left the beach for good, taking their afflictions and overall stinky atmosphere with them. Sad birds, migrating. Some are bitter about the lack of death, about the fact that what there is gets monopolized by celebrities like Jacques Trachea. He doesn’t even call himself a rag. No, he’s a fucking
pilgrim
, he is.
As the sun goes down, Trachea’s team are busy setting out extra receivers so that his cloud can float him for the big duel between Daw and Drake. Flies scramble the air, waiting for their Man.
Nobody interviews Gran. She couldn’t speak if she wanted to, but it bothers me that nobody even tries. She’s one of the last of the old school rags. She must know something. I find her… what’s the word? I don’t know how to put it.
It’s like this. Of all of the rags, Gran is the one who has most reason to leave. She has family in the Meta. She could stay with my parents; they have money. Poverty may have forced Gran to take up the rag to start, but it’s no longer an issue. Does she care? No. Gran won’t go. Ever. She doesn’t even care how sick she gets.
So what if she’s never, ever found core? She won’t
– can’t? –
leave the beach. She’s so much a fixture that she shows up on postcards and tourist videos. Rich people from faraway think she’s poetic, or pathetic. Both.
Mysterious.
That’s the word. I find her mysterious. And mysterious works for me, especially because when I first came down here it was to hide. Get away from Karl and his friends and their fucked-up scams and schemes. Lick my wounds. Deal with the fact that all my education had done for me was turn me into a petty criminal. Gran’s never judged me.
Actually, being around her cheers me up. By comparison with Gran’s problems, mine look like a premenstrual zit or hangnail. She’s totally fucked in this life, and it’s only going to get worse. She needs my help. So I live in her tent that was designed as an emergency shelter for hurricane victims but has lasted her fifteen years because she’s so careful with everything she does. I live with her and try to convince her to walk away from the beach – because that’s what you do, right? You say, “Come away from all this mess and suffering. You’ve done your best, but it’s over. Come on up to the Meta, we’ll have a barbeque and a few beers.”
Even though you know every word dresses you in your hypocrite suit, you say it. Because it’s hard to watch somebody slowly die.
I’ve thought about going straight. I might even do it, if she asked me. But she doesn’t ask me. I get the feeling she doesn’t care about anything but what’s on this beach. Or – lately – what’s not on it.
Tonight brings the world to this beach. Drake and Daw have bet on whether Daw’s prediction dog Genji can pinpoint the location of core. They have wagered a case of Mountain Dew. Daw says his dog is a core-detecting algorithm. Drake says the nature of core is elusive, that the spirit of nature will not be tamed. Daw says the gods are already dead so being ‘tamed’ is a barn with no horse left in it.
Then he releases his dog. Genji runs up and down the beach, a blue searchlight strapped to his head like a miner’s lamp. Flies zigzag in an effort to track the dog, their commentators talking faster and faster, like it’s a hockey playoff and the game’s gone into overtime. The commentators’ little moustaches of anti-microbial ointment make them look like Charlie Chaplin or Hitler.
The smell won’t reach the restaurants overlooking the beach. The Meta people can look out over the waves and the corpses and watch the rags work without ever scenting death. They have suction devices and air current regulators and a whole outfit of microbial helpers so that they won’t have to smell anything but their Lobster Thermidor. Up by the rock pools, closest to the promenade, spectacularly expensive microbial colonies are strewn across the beach like sand dollars, turning shit to sugar with modern efficiency. The brilliance from those colonies is a thousand times brighter than anything ever derived from all the core found by all the rags who ever lived, all put together.
Yet that old core built Meta. I know that because I have an expensive education. And we can all see where that got me.
Genji trots along the sand, snout to windward. His searchlight strokes the sky, core-seeking.
Jacques Trachea’s crew have set up a rack of power tools down near the water. He makes a point of hacking off tendrils, sawing ribs, gouging dead eyes and searching the rotting meat with the smart core-detectors his swanky pilgrim’s contract affords him. I try not to look too closely but you can’t miss the silver nimbus over his head where a representative sample of his followers display themselves: the grieving, the sick, the dying, the prisoners, the out-of-work, the bored, the lost. The battered believers with their deep-fried soul, they need Jacques to find core and he needs them to need him.
The other rags have weaker haloes. Each has a cam or two fleabagging them, and each cam represents several thousand people who have put their faith in that rag, like bettors backing a greyhound. Even a glimpse of core can sustain a person for years.
Her armpits permanently stained by the entrail-slime of dead gods, my grandmother displays no followers at all. In seventy-two years of cleaning she has processed and removed tons of dead godflesh from this beach. She has bent her back and ruined her knees and her eyes. Her voice is lost and some say so is her mind. But every day she’s here, rags, bucket, spade. Hope.
I claim I’m here to help her but she knows I’m on the run from Karl and his friends. Sleight of hand is my game, and I’m good at it. I don’t even feel guilty because in my experience people are asking to be fooled. But I don’t like being used by assholes, and things came to a head. I work on my raft by night, hiding it in the dunes. It should have been done by now, but I find myself stalling. Gran vomits a little every morning. I don’t know how long she can go on.
I’m stuck. Some people have grandparents they can go to for money when they’re in trouble. My Gran’s home is only useful as an aromatic deterrent to pursuers. Plus, no one would think to look for me here with the stupid old people, who believe in something.
And the thing is, as soon as I start thinking about how stupid she is and how annoying it is that she’s not like a normal grandmother, it makes me feel guilty and kind of nasty. Which, let’s face it, I am. Gran loves me. Gran has time for me, no matter what mess I’ve made. Mess doesn’t phase Gran one single bit. And I love her, too, but I wish to fuck she’d find some core and retire.