* * * * *
v1.0 by the N.E.R.D's.
* * * * *
Sharp flurries of hot November rain chased across Stone’s wharfs as I loaded Slowdancer’s bales of poly-grass seed. Most people scurried for cover under the branches of gene-tailored ash trees that grew around the edge of the semicircular polyp basin. Me, I kept working. Nottingham and Catherine were fifty-five miles away at the end of the Trent and Mersey canal. If Slowdancer left by noon, we’d be there by tomorrow morning, my berth paid for by the graft of loading.
I’m not really sure why I kept up the drifter persona after my contract with the Warren ran out. I had enough money now to buy stability, respectability even. I suppose because it was effortless, I’d been drifting for the past five years.
There were plenty of us doing it. Mid teens kids, disfranchised, bored with our rigidly orthodox communes, coop farms, cults, city zones; blued out by the Rose parties and their ever more desperate attempts to register voters. The country was alive with different cultures and ideologies. Somewhere, there was bound to be one that suited. It was just a question of looking.
Now I’d found part of what I was looking for. Catherine. Found her in the oddest place, a set of second hand memories.
Halson, Slowdancer’s owner, stood on deck catching the bales I slung up at him, stacking them in the forward two holds with an ease and tidiness which betrayed a lifetime’s experience. The barge was twenty yards long, six broad, her structure painted a glossy navy blue with fancy scarlet and yellow trim. Her bioware was standard: sub-sentient processor array, nutrient system in the bilges, eight snail-consanguineous skirts along the portside, and twelve on the bottom of the hull. I could see the port-side skirts, glistening blue-green bulbs a yard in diameter, just below the gunwale, sticking to the wharf like limpets.
She was an elegant craft; been in the family for three generations, Halson told me. He was a nice old boy in his late fifties, about five foot two; UV-proofing had tinted his skin a muddy-bronze.
We finished the loading just after twelve. Halson’s wife, Lori, had finished filling up Slowdancer’s nutrient reserve bladders from the dock arteries. Lori was a doll, twenty-three, a couple of years older than me, and standing a good seven inchestaller than her husband. UV-proofing gave her dark ebony skin a lustrous glimmer.
For all their disparity, their relationship seemed successful enough. The first thing Lori did was invite me into the little aft cabin to look at baby Andria. Three months old, and sleeping blissfully under a lacy Victorian canopy.
Slowdancer cast off, her hull-bottom skirts gurgling softly as they slid us across the bed of the shallow basin. Halson’s eyes were closed as he used his affinity bond with the barge’s processors to steer us towards the deeper water of the canal.
“I always relish this moment,” Lori said. “Moving on. It gives me a sensation of security. You understand? Docks are an interruption to our life.”
Slowdancer dipped down into the channel of the Trent and Mersey canal which bisected the crown of the basin, edging into the colourful stream of barge traffic heading towards Nottingham. As the draught grew, Halson angled us in towards the smooth pearl-white polyp wall rising out of the southern end of the basin.
The portside skirts flared out and stuck to the near-vertical surface of the wall as the canal bed fell away. Slowdancer began to accelerate until we reached the canal standard of three miles an hour. “Catherine must be quite something,” Lori ventured quietly. She was sitting on a carved bench just outside the cabin door; Halson had his arm around her shoulders. I think she enjoyed the idea of a questing romantic. “A girl who can make a drifter come after her. How come you got split up?”
I settled on the decking, my back against theftaffrail. “We didn’t split. I’ve never actually met Catherine in the flesh.”
“A girl you’ve heard about?” Her eyes lit with delight.
“Heard about, seen, smelt, touched. I have two sets of memories for the last twelve months. One of them belongs to Catherine’s lover; ex-lover I should say. He deserted her.”
“And you’ve fallen for her because of these recollections?” Halson asked.
“Yes.” How could I convey it? The blind animal longing for agirl who ghosts through my mind. I know how beautiful she is, how kind, tender. I know what makes her laugh, the same things that do me; what makes her sad. I know the foods she can’t resist nibbling, the Sussex rose wine she adores. I know her vulnerabilities, her quiet admirable strengths.
I love her the way she loved him, and she doesn’t even know I exist.
“Why did he do it?” Lori asked. “This man, Gilchrist, who left her. If she is so wonderful that even a memory can inflame you like this, why would he leave her?”
“He was acting out a fantasy. Because she was the right girl in the right place, at the right moment in his life, he deluded himself that he’d fallen in love with her. He hadn’t, of course; he’d fallen in love with the ideal she represented. So when the time came to move on, he could override his pantomime til death do us part schmaltz. Just cut her out. Bang, no regrets, no remorse even. He was finished, so it was okay.”
“And he really felt he had to move on so badly?”
“Oh yes, that’s the way his life is lived.”
* * * * *
Hilchrist Augustine Philips-Calder. Note the name, because it’s an old one; old name, old family, old money; pre-Warming. The only way he’s survived so long is due to his wealth. He’s a major shareholder in one of the orbital manufacturing companies. And contrary to the propaganda which The Church Of The Lord’s Earth pumps out, the orbital manufacturers are the most consistently prosperous enterprises in existence.
Gilchrist’s memories had an unbroken lineage stretching back over one hundred and fifty seven years, and thanks to his money they wore a twenty year old body. He was tall, broad shouldered, deep chested; a handsome face with a slightly flat nose. His eyes were grey, his short cut hair was chestnut, he dermal-tailored skin had come out a smooth olive-brown.
The girls adored him, and not just for his looks; some aspect of his time-refined personality seemed to hover around him. In a land swarming with the boringly phlegmatic, his urbane cosmopolitan style was unique. Small wonder they flocked to his bed.
He was drifting when he met Catherine. It was late last November, a place called Clumber Park, on the outskirts of Worksop. Clumber’s old trees had been scorched out by the Warming - the pines, oaks, and sycamores - and replaced by gene-tailored varieties. The leaves are glossier, the bark darker, they thrive in the year-round heat and UV saturated sunlight.
It’s the same the world over; we’ve spread a modified carpet of greenery across every continent, retaining shape but not intent. Their cells have an almost mechanical purpose spliced in. In another century they’ll have replaced the ozone, reduced the carbon dioxide. The date seems to have been sequenced into people’s DNA; we treat the interregnum like a long sunny winter, nothing gets done, there’s no real progress, no technical nor social revolutions; we’re marking time.
Gilchrist had been drawn to Clumber to recapture the full illusion of youth, of lazy days spent picknicking under mild blue skies. The park alluded to the twentieth century in its layout and atmosphere. It was being used by the New Puritans for a fair. They’re a countrywide vagrant cult, whose code prohibits them to use bioware to enhance their bodies or brains. They’ve even got a special shielding gel they rub on so they don’t need to be dermal-tailored against the UV.
The Park and the Puritans had a double appeal to Gilchrist. Both natural, or as near as you can get in the modern world. He felt curiously at home mingling among them.
Trading was brisk; Puritans don’t limit themselves to handicraft. Gilchrist saw plenty of bioware, simple units like water cordiators, liquor glands, and cotton spiders. They were mixed among the carvings, and carpets, and pottery, and refurbished hardware modules. Any gypsy from the last five centuries would’ve felt perfectly at home with the loud bustle and colour clashes.
Gilchrist’s first sight of Catherine was against a backdrop of purple flowing rhododendrons that ringed the fair’s glade, standing behind a stall at the side of her family caravan. The girl looked like she’d been stretched to her present height; she was tall and wafer thin, with wide bony shoulders, but her legs were sensational. He reckoned her age at around seventeen or eighteen. She was wearing a white cheesecloth dress, with long puffy sleeves, and a skirt which swirled just above her knees. Thick, boldly ruffled, raven black hair hung below her shoulderblades, a red leather band keeping windtugged strands out of her hazel eyes.
An unsullied girl, straight out of his youth.
He walked over and bought a beer.
* * * * *
* * * * *
Four hours after we left Stone, Slowdancer was passing Rugeley. The HJH bleached concrete cooling towers of the town’s antique powerstation had begun to decay; cracks were multiplying, the constructions were buckling, leaning. Lori watched the mid-industrial epoch relics slide by. Quiet and contemplative; it’s an age which exerts a dark fascination on all of us. Junk consumerism gone mad. Fast and exciting, though. Gilchrist knew, first hand. Occasionally I can animate the hulks with fragments of his earlier memories.
“So Gilchrist chatted her up?” Halson asked.
Our view of the powerstation was cut off by leafy willows. The canal was running through an avenue of them. Tall, sturdy trees, with thick boughs curving over the water, they’d obviously been trained, coiling round each other like wrestling snakes at the apex, near-solid arches.
“Nothing so obvious.” I said. And laughed, not out of respect, but forced admiration. “He kept going back, telling her snippets of his life. Well, the drifter life he’d assumed. He’d been a drifter before; it wasn’t a problem for him.”
“And she swallowed it?”
“Yeah. The fair lasted a week; Catherine spent the last two days doing nothing but listening to him. The door into everything she’d ever wondered about.“ Lori turned from the green wall enclosing Slowdancer. “What about you? Where were you when all this was happening?“
“Last November? I was getting close to Saturn.”
* * * * *
It was a sensorium memory. There had been a probe exploring Saturn, forty years ago. Gilchrist and his associates sent it prospecting. A real long term venture for them. It’ll be centuries before we get out to Saturn at any sort of meaningful level. But then, I suppose centuries are the sort of terms people like Gilchrist think in.
The probe’s Optronics gave me a high-definition image of the gas giant’s cloudscape, capturing the bland brown and yellow storm bands, the pale saffron ribbon around the equator. Both polar regions were uniformly dull, although I could bleed in false-colour definition if I wanted. I’d tried it once, but the result was too artificial, as though some child had been let loose with primary crayons.
Encounter phase. Starting close enough for the ring system’s concenctric ribbons to appear grooved, then slowly resolving into their myriad component ringlets, non-dimensional threads of light. With the magboom cut in. I could see the colossal energies seething through them, thickly braided streamers of pink and blue fogs, generated by interaction with the planetary magnetic field.
I’d never ever been abroad before, and now I was being overloaded by silent cosmic wonders. That identical bewitchment Catherine had felt in Gilchrist’s presence.
Even knowing the fallibility of such fascination, I don’t think either of us would’ve abdicated the past year, despite the heartbreak which lay waiting at its end.That year I grew up in classic style. Taking a long trip, an experience to broaden the mind. Even from my lofty synthetic Olympus I thought that was funny. How much further out could you get, how much wiser?
* * * * *
We passed through Fradley junction after dark. It was another big polyp basin, where the Coventry canal joins the Trent and Mersey. Slowdancer rose out of the canal on her hull-bottom skirts, turning left and slotting into the orderly circular progression of barges.
Voices spilled out of the night, quiet private talk, amplified by the stillness. Fradley, at least, maintained the image of grand structure, of purpose; the canals giving lie to a cohesive country, disowning the sameness of scrupulous difference practised beyond the water.
“Space really caught you, didn’t it?” Halson asked.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe how matchless it is. No alternative, you’ve got to receive the memory firsthand to understand.”
“That’s good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ll have something if she rejects you.”
I tried to imagine that. Failed. It was a null zone, one whose edges were painful to probe. “You think she might?”
“Dunno. This is all beyond me. I can’t think how I’d react if some woman turned up with the memories of one of my former lovers, professing undying love. Maybe the New Puritans are right to keep their minds free of contamination, after all. We don’t seem to be doing so good out of it. Take Gilchrist, does bioware serve him, or him it? That’s the measure of technology, it ought to exist to lighten life’s load.”
“If you’re asking does it make him happy, then the answer is yes.”
* * * * *
Gilchrist’s happiness gathered cohesion all throughout that long week in Clumber Park, a function of expectation. Catherine was his grand prize, a sketch of total normality. The other player in his quintessential boy-meets-girl opera. A first love idyll that would rejuvenate the dreadfully jaded soul inside the youthful body. He could shadow the unique sweetness she’d experience, savouring it all year long, an emotional parasite. She never knew how calculated his moves were. I could see the trust she placed in him, the value in which she held his words. At nights I would lie awake watching her succumb.
I remember her face, not beautiful, but pretty, a long nose, narrow eyes, thin lips. Looking through Gilchrist’s eyes I can see the interest he awakens, the delight, the insidious growth of dependence.
They walk together through the park, skirting the lake, finding the small mock-Hellenic temple opposite the ruined Christian chapel. A perfect setting for young lovers; the rain has left it clean and shining, droplets refracting a multitude of rainbow coronas.
I can feel the warmth of her hand in his, squeezing firmly as if she’s afraid he’ll break free. There’s her high voice confiding childhood’s secrets and more recent ambitions. Cautious at first, eyes alert for his mockery.
Then his thorax grumbles softly, and I hear his murmurs of encouragement, dredging up or inventing similar incidents of his own youth. Never telling her how far away they are. Each one superbly timed, reinforcing the bond of apparent similarity.
Bastard. A puppet master. Unequalled.
His eyes lingering on her breasts and legs. His heart quickening with excitement, a dryness in his throat, warmth in his belly. He’s so sure.
And all the time she falls deeper. She can’t see it. Nobody could, he’s that good. Even her parents take a shine to him.
When the New Puritans disperse, Gilchrist and Catherine are left behind in the centre of an empty glade of solemn elms and gilded gorse.
* * * * *
I rolled out my sleeping bag on Slowdancer’s deck around eleven o’clock. We were passing through Burton on Trent, not that there was much to see. Rectangles of light, and dark geometric shadows silhouetted against a nebulous horizon. The town had pretty much shut down for the night. I couldn’t sleep, muscles knotted with high voltage dubiety, waiting for morning. I lay on my back. The sky was clear, leaving the Halo visible, a thin hoary arc stretching across the southern sky. Hazy tonight, there must’ve been a lot of high-altitude vapour. It isn’t a patch on Saturn’s rings, but as an inspiration for poets, dreamers and lovers, it’s unrivalled.
The Americans and Russians started it seventy years ago; thumping asteroids into Earth orbit with nukes, then fragmenting them into big chunks. They counted on the Kessler Syndrome to carry it from there.
The Kessler Syndrome: pack enough of those rock chunks in one orbit and engineer a collision between two; it’ll produce a hornet swarm of gravel and boulders, triggering a cascade of secondary collisions. Once it starts it’s a chain reaction. Unstoppable.
Theory had the original chunks being pulverised into sand, producing a broad, high-albedo shield, cutting down the solar infall. It was supposed to kill the Warming dead in its tracks.
They abandoned it fifty-five years ago. There were multiple factors -- the Currency Fold, Gulf Deluge, rickety central governments, but mainly it was the plants. Gene-tailoring had come into its own, and seeds were both cheap and self-replicating. They were an answer people could understand, blossoming all around them, seen to be working; not some remote macro-project solution. Earth’s last space programme went the way of all the others. Flawed by bright brash optimism, shot down by politicians.
It’s starting to break up now. Tides generating small whirlpool accretions of particles, which grow larger with each year. Solar wind blowing the dust motes out into interplanetary space.
The Halo hung low above Burton-on-Trent, a handle you could lift the Earth with. It reminded me of the irregular F-ring.
* * * * *
The probe sank in towards Saturn, passing three hundred thousand kilometres inside Titan. I had the impression of a ball of amber mist hovering in space; the smoothness seemed malleable somehow. I wanted to reach out and stroke it, make it mine.
Was that why Gilchrist had sent the probe? Did he hold ambitions of terraforming it? The right elements were there, frozen - nitrogen in the atmosphere, ice in the rings - waiting for technology and determination to thaw them out, fuse them. My generation doesn’t have that kind of self-belief. But Gilchrist, victor from an age where problems were solvable, he’d be drawn to the challenge. And he practised eternal patience, biding his time until his era returned.
I watched Titan fall behind, strangely attracted to the thought of what could be. My mind was free to roam, speculating, wishing with an uninhabited freshness I hadn’t exercised since I was a child. It was all part of the voyager’s magic. Out here nothing was impossible.
Approach phase. Months spent watching the planet expanding to dominate the probe Optronics. With the particle sensors linked in I can feel the storm of ions sweeping out from the rings.
The electric breeze blows straight at me as I cruise inwards, swinging round towards the penumbra. Rings shimmer with auroral phosphorescence, starlight twinkling through. If I had eyes, I would cry.
* * * * *
The Halo above Clumber Park that first night was radiant with reflected moonlight. It was intense enough to dapple the grass on the floor of the glade, silver beams streaming through the leaves. I remember how it painted Catherine’s pale skin with a platinum sheen. A gossamer silvan creature lying on Gilchrist’s air-mattress under the open night sky, shivering in delight beneath his skilful tender fingertips.
It was so grossly unfair. Sex with Gilchrist was exquisite. It couldn’t be anything else. A hundred and fifty seven years of experience, guile, and cunning, put into practise with all the vitality which came with a twenty-one year old body.
I try and forget, to smother it in a crust of guilt and shame. But it’s a temptation beyond my strength. I keep returning to spy on her. Safe in the heart of the forest, uninhibited, alone with her diabolically talented lover.
I can feel his lips parting in a triumphant smile. She doesn’t recognise it for what it is. Never guessing that her orgasm is a forgery, that it is simply a chapter in his Grand Romance. For it is a beautiful forgery, far superior to any original masterpiece. But, still, a forgery.
“Tea?” Lori asked.
I blinked awake. I’d missed the dawn. The Halo was a suggestion of a line in the pink watercolour sky. Venus stared out of the horizon. Tranquility was organic to the scene.
Lori stood over me, wearing a brown chunky wool sweater with worn elbows, and baggy olive-green trousers tucked into suede boots. First light had brought a wash of cool air with it, everything was coated in dew, even my sleeping bag. Her eyebrows arched inquiringly; there was a mug in her hand, steaming. The brew smelt slightly minty.
“Sure,” I croaked. I must’ve looked wrecked.
She smiled, a quick flicker of ivory teeth. “Two hours, and we’ll be in Nottingham.”
“Great.” I struggled to a sitting position, and accepted the mug.
Lori pushed her hands in her trouser pockets and inhaled loudly, looking about. “Good day to be alive. Good omen.”
“I hope so.”
“Catherine really means that much to you?”
I ducked a nod and drank some more of the tea. Hot and bitter, just right. “You think I’m crazy?”
“No.” She shook her head, then sat next to me, looking out over the prow. “This devotion of yours. No girl is going to walk past that without a glance. I didn’t.”
“Halson?”
“That’s right.” She hugged her legs, smiling secretively. “I was drifting, just like you. Came on board Slowdancer at Skipton, on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. He said he wouldn’t let me off till we were married. Didn’t either.” Her eyes met mine, shining bright. She shrugged ruefully. “Small story. Lacks encouragement. Sorry.”
“Nice ending, though. That’s what counts.”
“Yeah. At least we wound up with Andria. It doesn’t come much better.”
“But Gilchrist dropped her from such a high place, Lori. I guess I’m a little bit frightened what I’m going to find. The shock of me appearing so soon after him. Catherine is hardly likely to be objective about me. It’s scary, instinct is going to rule. She might not give me a chance to explain. That’s all I want, just to talk to her, to set the record straight.”
Lori looked back down the river. “We all of us have our heart broken sometime. It hurts, hurts bad when it happens, but it isn’t lethal. In the long run it even helps. She’s young, she’ll do all right.”
“But she knows nothing that good will ever happen again. And the trouble is, she’s right. While they were together, it was magnificent. I’ve lived through each one of those days they had, and I can’t match Gilchrist. Education, class, style, humour, wisdom, he’s got them all, they’re intrinsic.”
“You’ve got something he hasn’t. Most important of all.”
“What?”
“Honesty.”
* * * * *
Gilchrist was clever taking Catherine to a city. She’d visited before, of course, dived in, skipped through markets and shops, then dived out before nightfall. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But the point is, she didn’t know the flip-side, didn’t even know it existed. To her, city houses were New Puritan caravans which didn’t move.
Gilchrist changed that, he gave her the diversity, the pace, the electric colours, the vices. Supported her through the giddiness as her senses were swamped by the intricacies and differences and dangers. He changed her. Inwardly, her perception, her outlook, was gradually warped away from that delighted acceptance of everything life threw at her. He taught her to recognise the shifty black currents below the thriving surface, the necromantic network of oiled politicians, traders and bureaucrats which branched down every street.
Even after that. After she’d learnt cynicism, and shrewdness, and self interest. After the roughcut country girl had been laid to rest. I still loved her. So did Gilchrist. She’d matured, blossomed, acquired poise and elegance, a hint of devilment. She was complete.
They set up home in a converted bookshop on the second floor of what used to be an arcade of exclusive shops. The long main room had a plate glass frontage, looking out over the arcade’s mock-Edwardian interior. Catherine filled it with big potted palms and Indian rugs and cane chairs; covered its bare plaster walls with charcoal prints of extinct animals, a long frieze of animated foxes and badgers and robins.
There was a storeroom at the back, with a tall vaulting window that gave the briefest glimpse of the river Trent to anyone standing on tiptoe. Gilchrist put their bed in there, king sized, with a battered tubular brass headboard. They’d wait until midnight, then make love for hours under the open window, letting the cool night airflow over their entangled bodies.
Catherine was slow to adapt to permanency. Gilchrist often watched her packing everything neatly away at the end of the day, ready to move on. Habit dying hard. She had to get used to neighbours, to people who didn’t vanish after a few fleeting hours. Friends. It was all so new and bold and exciting.
Gilchrist did what he does best, dealing, shuffling gear and knowledge. He established himself cautiously, developing contacts, dropping money in the right places. A fun game, a maestro running rings around first year apprentices. Winning, always winning. With a reverent Catherine at his side, high on the spice of exotica only he could provide.
* * * * *
* * * * *
While Gilchrist was consolidating his reign in Nottingham, the probe was gliding in towards Saturn.
Flyby phase. And I’m streaking into the penumbra, the ionosphere only five thousand miles below me. Continent-wide lightning webs sizzle across the dusky nightside cloudscape, terrifying wavefronts of white, purple-white, and blue-white discharges riding the pinnacles of supersonic typhoons, melding and ebbing.
It’s a supreme vindication of Gilchrist’s probe. Saturn is rich beyond my generation’s comprehension. Metal, water, minerals, energy, planets, it has them all within its gravity empire. One day he’ll see all this with his eyes. His destiny, I suppose. The future belonging to the past. Humiliation stabs at me. Catherine, all the Warmed Earth can offer; ephemeral, entertaining diversions to tide him over the current lull. Hibernation fodder.
Closest approach. Transiting the ecliptic, a thousand miles above the ionosphere. The midnight equator is alive with light. Here, at the bottom of the rings and the extremity of the atmosphere, a necklace of shooting stars wraps the world. Ring particles in their death throes, dragged down from their precarious orbit by atmospheric friction, engulfed within coronas of dazzling plasma. They descend in long decay-curves which end in spectacular disintegrations, debris plumes expanding like photonic flower buds. I listen to their dying screams overthe radio bands, plasma emissions blasting apart the fragile silence of the empty interplanetary medium.
Slingshot. Slaloming round the gas giant’s back. So low, so fast, details dissolve into carnival ride streaks. Round and up, flung away. The receding image suturing my gaps in human nature. Understanding Gilchrist’s motivations, his drives. Divined from the splinters of insight I’ve gained from his mind. Without him, I would’ve drifted for the rest of my life, no matter where I’d settled. He’s given me Catherine. Twice.
Saturn and all its sublime glory vanishes into night.
* * * * *
Nottingham’s outskirts sailed past Slowdancer. Old brick and concrete buildings mottled by the harlequin scales of modern life’s necessities, the black squares of solar panels, translucent emerald heart-shaped precipitator leaves.
“I’m taking Slowdancer down the Grand Union canal to Leicester,” said Halson. “Got a cargo of powerspheres to load once we get shot of the seed bales. So we won’t be leaving until this evening. There’s a berth for you, if things don’t work out between you and your lady.”
“Thanks, but however it turns out, Catherine and I aren’t going to settle this in a day.” Even through the growing dread I could work that out.
Halson shrugged lightly. “Okay.” I’d been slumped on the prow all morning, staring ahead, watching Nottingham saddle the rucked skyline. New city, new daydream: drifter philosophy. Each city is going to be the one that connects, each commune has the ideology you’ve been hunting.
* * * * *
Last November it’d been Birmingham, a sprawl to rival either half of London. I’d worked round the fringes, picking up casual labour among the hundreds of orange groves dotted around the city. Open eyed for a coterie which suited my nature.
But there’d been nothing; the usual rag bag of cults eager to save my soul, communes keen to have my strength and youth toiling in their fields.
I was in a pub in Cannock, drinking away my disappointment, when Jilliane hooked me.
She was twenty-five, medium height, interesting oval face with bobbed ginger hair. Her clothes were smart and clean, brown leather jacket and black jeans, knee length boots. It wasn’t the right pub for her, full of drifters and grove pickers, sun-hardened empty faces and little money. But she marched in, a queen of poise, and went straight up to the bar, buying herself a lager topped before anyone could make a play. They tried anyway, the local struts and some of the drifters. She turned them down flat; sometimes she didn’t even have to speak.
After her first drink she came over and sat next to me. It was kind of embarrassing, everyone looking at me, figuring what I’d got that they hadn’t. I didn’t know either.
I bought her another lager topped, which halved the number of shillings in my wallet. “Why me?” I asked.
She flashed me a roguish grin. I liked that, easygoing, but hard as iron underneath; I could tell that much.
“I have a proposition that might interest you,” she said.
“I’m all yours.”
“Not that. If I’d wanted you I would have had you by now.”
I opened my mouth to protest innocence. No sound came out, she was right.
“You’re quick. That’s good.” she said. “It’s a job, pays well. Two thousand pounds a month. You interested?”
“I’m a drifter. What do I have to do?”
She sipped her drink, tiny beads of condensation rolling off the glass onto her hands. “Just enjoy yourself.”
“Too good to be true. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me.”
“I’ve recruited before. I recognise what my client wants. You fit the bill like your were born for it.”
“Client?”
The challenge went out of her grin, becoming warmer, conspiratorial even. “My great great grandfather.”
* * * * *
* * * * *
The one regret I have in discovering Catherine is that last memory of her, the morning Gilchrist left. He just upped and walked out.
I can see his hand on the door of the bookstore; dull chrome metal, cold and hard in his palm. I can hear muffled sobbing from the storeroom. The door closes behind him, banishing the sound. Raffia blinds are drawn behind the plate glass windows, he walks away from them at a brisk pace. There’s no looking back, not even a furtive flick of eyes to see if she’s watching him.
He takes the steps of the iron staircase two at a time. His feet ringing with that peculiar dry echo which is the signature of the arcade’s cavernous crystal roof. Outside the gated entrance, pale orange sunlight is falling onto the damp pavement. There is ozone in the air from last night’s thunderstorm. I sense it percolating into his bloodstream, invigorating him.
Still, he doesn’t look back.
* * * * *
Jilliane chattered spryly as she drove us out to the Warren, the first time I’d ever been in a power car. It wasn’t a commune, she told me, it didn’t have rules. More like a club, a country retreat. The only entrance qualification was wealth.
How much wealth, I didn’t realise until we emerged from the picket of woodland which surrounded it. The protective band of Spanish oaks enclosed a patch of mead-owland over a mile wide, with a vast crater in the middle. Seven executive tilt-fans were parked around the edge. Camels grazed peacefully between them.
“It’s an old granite quarry,” Jilliane explained. “Perfect for us.”
The crate was terraced with concentric balconies, like an amphitheatre, completely tiled in slabs of white marble. Two-hundred penthouse apartments stared out over the central pool with its fountains and statues and willow trees.
I was given a guest suite for the night; the most bioware intense environment I’d ever seen. The walls were polyp, inlaid with glowing lumstrips; furniture was pseudo-amorphous, jelly pillows which conformed to verbal orders; food and drink came direct from a secretor. Jilliane turned up the next morning. She ordered a pillow into chair form and sat behind my table, placing a phone wafer on the steel-hard surface. “We would like to hire your body for a year,” she asked. “To do what?”
“As a repository for someone else’s thoughts.”
“You mean affinity sensorium?” I’d heard of that, someone old, bedridden, seeing the world through another set of eyes, a youth’s, mobile and vigorous. The thought left me feeling queasy; not that I would’ve minded acting as a highly-paid remote-tourist, not if seeing was all there was to it. But there’d be every sense and action involved - eating, peeing, farting, sex - all put on exhibition.
“No,” said Jilliane. “The principle has been taken a stage further at the Warren. We’re proposing a thoughtswap with my great great grandfather.”
That cooled me. Thinking of a year spent prisoner in an emancipated incontinent body. Wondering just how far I’d go for the money. It’s always an interesting question, in abstract. “Where is he?”
“I’m right below you,” said a male voice from the wafer.
“Grandpa died seventy-two years ago,” Jilliane said levelly. “His memories were translated directly into a bioware neural network.”
“Bloody boring, though,” said the voice. “You can only get so much entertainment from sensorium memories, they begin to pale after a time. I like to get out and about once in a while. It keeps me sane.”
I looked at Jilliane in a daze. She nodded shortly.
“If you can afford all this, why not simply buy yourself a clone body?” I asked.
“This is the wrong world for me,” said the voice. “It’s stalled. There’s no ambition out there, no interest in accomplishment. It’s just a phase, a mass wintermind season. When it’s over, when the ozone’s back and England has snow again, then I’ll come out for good.“
“And me?” I asked. “What would I do during this year?”
“We have a vast library of sensorium memories,” said Jilliane. “You can indulge yourself in any way you like.” There was a note in her voice, a twang of success. My question had been acceptance. She’d seen much more than build and youth in that Cannock pub. She’d seen I could handle the concept, someone so blued out with drifting they’d take the money as a cheap escape.
* * * * *
Nottingham’s docks were similar to Stone’s, but on a larger scale. Five of those big basins strung out in a line. Barge traffic was thick; wharfs piled high with cargoes; porters, captains, and merchants shouting gamely.
Halson and Lori stood together on Slowdancer’s deck to say goodbye, holding each other close. Their faces said it all, long and uncertain, sorrow for the fool and his hopeless pursuit.
Hot humid air hangs cloyingly over the dock, rich with the smells of ripening food. I’m threading my way past giant pyramids of apples, a desperate tangle of exhilaration and qualms, focussed inwards.
All I have brought is questions, for Catherine, for myself. I say I love her, what if she asks me to give my body back to Gilchrist? Do I love her that much, or is it selfish love? A lust to relive the past year again and again, myself cast as a pale shadow of Gilchrist. Their time together was almost unbearably good, the mythical sanctum of fulfilment at the end of the drifter’s road. The reason I started out.
I leave the bedlam of the docks behind me and set off towards the arcade, walking without hesitation down the familiar maze of streets which I’ve never seen before.
Soon now, soon I’ll know. Catherine will show me my naked self. I’m afraid.
PETER HAMILTON
Peter Hamilton has had short stories published in Fear, The Gate, R.E.M., and Dream/New Worlds. He has also placed stories in Dreams anthology and New Worlds, both of which are due out in 1992. His first novel, “Mindstar Rising”, a SF detective thriller will be published by PAN this year. He has just finished working on the sequel.