Collected stories alasta.., p.1
Collected Stories: Alastair Reynolds, page 1
COLLECTED STORIES: ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
Cover illustration by Marc Simonetti
Copyright © Alastair Reynolds
All rights reserved.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.alastairreynolds.com
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Deep Navigation
Nunivak Snowflakes
The Fixation
Feeling Rejected
Fury
Stroboscopic
The Receivers
Byrd Land Six
The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice
On the Oodnadatta
Fresco
Viper
Soirée
The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter
Tiger, Burning
Zima Blue
The Real Story
Enola
Signal to Noise
Cardiff Afterlife
Hideaway
Minla’s Flowers
Merlin’s Gun
The Iron Tactician
Angels of Ashes
Spirey and the Queen
Understanding Space and Time
Digital to Analogue
Everlasting
Zima Blue
Thousandth Night
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Thousandth Night
Troika
Sleepover
Vainglory
Trauma Pod
The Water Thief
The Old Man and the Martian Sea
In Babelsberg
Galactic North
Great Wall of Mars
Glacial
A Spy in Europa
Weather
Dilation Sleep
Grafenwalder’s Bestiary
Nightingale
Galactic North
Monkey Suit
The Last Log of the Lachrimosa
Night Passage
Diamond Dogs
Turquoise Days
Open and Shut
Plague Music
Afterword
Belladonna Nights
Belladonna Nights
Different Seas
For the Ages
Visiting Hours
Holdfast
The Lobby
A Map of Mercury
Magic Bone Woman
Providence
Wrecking Party
Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee
Death’s Door
A Murmuration
Slow Bullets
Ascension Day
Lune and the Red Empress
Sad Kapteyn
The Big Hello!
The Six Directions of Space
Remainers
Permafrost
Slow Bullets
The Face in the Machine
At Budokan
Scales
Polished Performance
Things To Do In Deimos When You’re Dead
Extra
Closing Contact
Story Notes
About the Author
Introduction
by Stephen Baxter
Here are fifteen science fiction short stories by Alastair Reynolds. You’re sure to enjoy them in their own right—but you’ll also find that they provide a retrospective on Reynolds’s career as a published writer, which, remarkably, already spans twenty years, and which in 2010 is about to enter a new phase.
I first met Al Reynolds, as I recall, at a party thrown by the publishers of the UK magazine Interzone in 1990. I had first been published by that magazine a few years earlier, and Reynolds was kind enough to say (and he’s repeated it since in print, in the afterword to his 2006 collection Galactic North) that my work was among his influences. Along with Paul McAuley I had, in the 1980s, shown that it was possible to sell what Reynolds called “stories with spaceships in” to Interzone—just the sort of thing he wanted to write himself.
At that time Reynolds was 24 and a graduate science student (studying neutron stars). He already had some experience as a writer, with two whole novels completed in his teens, though unpublished. Now his first successful stories were in the process of appearing in print. One of them (“Dilation Sleep”, 1990) would have lasting significance as the first work published in his Revelation Space future history sequence.
You’ll find another of those early publications here: “Nunivak Snowflakes” (1990). In this early story, I think, you can perceive many of the strengths of Reynolds’s writing: the ability to deliver huge yet new ideas (“viral spacetime”!), the way those ideas are integrated into plotline and characterisation, the glimpses you get of a wider universe as context, and a striking depth of thinking and intensity of imagination. All these are the hallmarks of authentic hard sf. And this very early story’s unusual setting shows too that Reynolds was always interested in writing more than just “stories with spaceships in”.
From 1991 Reynolds became a research astronomer with the European Space Agency, and moved to Holland. Over the next few years his creative energies were focussed on the hugely ambitious project that would eventually become the novel Revelation Space, and the associated future history. But Reynolds reappeared in the pages of Interzone in 1995, with another piece included here: “Byrd Land Six”. You’ll find it’s a return with a bang, with another astonishing high concept wedded to a breakneck page-turner plotline, and a setting and characterisation that perhaps reflect Reynolds’s own new world of corporate and government science.
After “Byrd Land Six” Reynolds’s writing seemed to come into focus. In the next few years, as well as publishing short fiction in the Revelation Space sequence, he showed the growing range of his ideas and technique in other works, some of which are included here. “On the Oodnadatta” (1998) is a subversion of a familiar sf trope with a patina of visceral horror: there has always been a striking noir streak to Reynolds’s writing. “Stroboscopic” (1998) is a fine illustration of Reynolds’s maturing narrative technique, in which the discovery of a stunningly original ecosystem perturbs the ongoing conflicts of a polarised human solar system. “Viper” (1999), meanwhile, reads like a slab from a crime novel from fifty years hence. Reynolds’s futures, though always firmly based on scientific and social extrapolations, are neither utopias or dystopias but are, like the real world, messy—full of conflict, uncertainty and moral ambiguity, with plenty of dark corners.
Everything changed for Reynolds with the publication, at last, of Revelation Space in 2000. After such a long gestation the novel was a torrent of ideas and energy that thrilled its readers and received immediate critical acclaim—and it launched Reynolds’s career in earnest. Two pieces included here illustrate the way Reynolds’s profile quickly grew beyond the confines of the genre: “Fresco” (2001) and “Feeling Rejected” (2005), written respectively for a UNESCO internal publication and for the esteemed science journal Nature. Both short-shorts, they are elegant, respectively touching and funny—and, by the way, fiendishly difficult to write.
In 2004 Reynolds left ESA to concentrate on full-time writing, and has since returned to his native Wales with his wife Josette. He has become a reliable deliverer of high-class fiction in long and short forms, including, to date, five novels in the forty-millennia-spanning Revelation Space sequence. There’s one Revelation Space story here, in “Monkey Suit” (2009). In stories like this, and “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” (2008), Reynolds shows he can do sublight space opera better than anybody else since Larry Niven—and, arguably, outdoes that master himself. And you’ll discover that “Monkey Suit” shares a startling common idea with “Fury” (2008), a saga of galactic empire sketched in a few thousand words.
In other works you’ll find Reynolds spreading his wings further in terms of theme and narrative strategy. “Tiger, Burning” (2006) is a mind-blistering homage to everybody’s favourite Shakespearean space opera. “Soirée” (2008), a tale of a starship and a singularity, is a collision of sf tropes old and new. “The Receivers” (2009) is a fine alternate-history tale of different world wars. “The Fixation” (2007), going further with a story of realities in conflict, has a telling as delicate as the ancient mechanism at its heart. “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” (2007), a gritty tale of a fallen world at the heart of an incomprehensible war, is a particular favourite of mine because it’s set in a part of the north of England close to where I live.
Recently Alastair Reynolds has grown into a new role as something of a figurehead for the field as a whole. In June 2009 Reynolds made headlines around the world when he signed a remarkable deal with his British publishers for ten books to be published over the next decade—the first will appear in 2010. Much attention was focussed on the advances quoted, but what’s much more significant is the evidence of his publishers’ faith in the continuing quality of his work, their ongoing support for the kind of thoughtful, deep sf Reynolds writes—and, more important yet, Reynolds’s own commitment to the field he has mad
After twenty years of publication, and ten years after Revelation Space, Reynolds has become a senior and respected figure in the field. Always charming, always knowledgeable, I can attest he is extremely popular among his peers, he has become a familiar figure at conventions around the world, and he has shown himself in turn more than generous to the next generation of budding writers, whether they want to write “stories with spaceships in” or not (for example we worked together as judges on a British Science Fiction Association writing contest).
For me it has been a pleasure to know Al and his work for twenty years. I look forward to his third decade of publication—and I’ve no doubt that even by 2020 there will be much more to come.
Stephen Baxter
December 2009
Nunivak Snowflakes
Seaplane days had always been special for Naluvara. Even now, troubled by love and adult doubt, seaplane days were special. Like many of his people, therefore, he found himself trudging out to the frozen shoreline, scanning the white sky for the growing orange speck of the aircraft.
It was rare, though, for the plane to arrive with anything interesting, unless you counted crates of SRA school books and videotapes, refrigerated medical supplies, greased machine parts, and, of course, fish—especially fish; trout and salmon, processed and irradiated at Point Barrow until they tasted deader than fossils.
The people of Nunivak made do with the imports. They still hunted walrus and seal, but not very successfully, and fresh fish was infrequent enough to count as a luxury. If a lot was caught it was customary to make some kind of offering to the ‘helping spirits,’ the invisible tunraq. Many of the islanders still cherished such beliefs; Naluvara was one of them.
Anyway, seaplane days were exciting. The men would drag their flimsy boats into the frothy waters of the Bering Sea, then wait patiently for the seaplane to silence its two engines. The tannik men in the aircraft always had beards and sunglasses, their faces blanched by UV barrier cream, and they always handed small white boxes out the cockpit window, before unloading the main cargo from the side door. Naluvara was shrewd enough to detect a black market in cigarettes, which amused him richly. The tannik men themselves often smoked, yet their whole race was paranoid about picking up melanomas under the fringes of the ozone hole.
The boats were propelled by a makeshift combination of oars and loud, roughly tuned outboards. Outriggers made them almost impossible to capsize, despite being top-heavy on the return leg. Now and again a nervous passenger would come back with them, often a tannik doctor, but very occasionally a visitor from one of the other settlements, further north, further east. Today was such an occasion, which made the day doubly special. But for Naluvara its immediate significance lay elsewhere, for it was a day that the tunraq had chosen on which to communicate with him.
Earlier that morning a strange silvery fish had dropped in the snow outside his home. Past experience told him how to unlock the fish’s message: taking care to avoid his mother, he scuttled indoors, first locking his bedroom door then placing the dead creature on a filched chopping board. Swift slashes of a flick knife opened its red belly. Inside was the usual mode of tunraq communication, a rolled sheet of grey paper which his gloved fingers strove to flatten on the desk. He brushed aside the messed reams of school notes; physics and biology problems that required Tania’s expert advice. None of that mundane stuff mattered for the moment. When the tunraq spirits spoke, he listened.
Nibbling the end of a plastic-wrapped salami stick, he pondered the utterance. As usual it was deadeningly simple.
Avoid the Wind Farm today.
—T
And that was it: the standard laconic message, neatly typed on the slightly soggy grey paper. This had been going on years; sometimes the messages were specific, sometimes not. Today’s did not unduly worry him, nor was it the first to warn him clear of the generators north of the settlement. Perhaps one of the hungry Netsilik dogs was prowling there, maddened by rabies. Or a million other possibilities.
The customs of the Netsilik clan would ensure that this was a memorable time to visit the island, even if the newcomer was Innupiat. Nunivak Island was a smouldering intermix of previously isolated northern cultures, a UN-sanctioned melting pot. Times of celebration were eagerly shared—as were times of misery. As now, when a Netsilik family mourned the death of their grandmother. For five days they retreated into a workless stasis, a customary observation which reached the other families soon enough. Dogs went hungry. Hair went uncombed. Generators that broke down went unrepaired, so that clumps of gloom were slowly absorbing the community’s autumnal lights.
This afternoon her two sons would drag her body away on the back of a skin sledge. Tonight they would leave her uncovered body under the stars and satellites, but her soul would long have departed for the beautiful Netsilik afterlife. Shortly Nunivak would celebrate its twentieth anniversary, but there would be fewer fireworks than usual.
· · · ·
So who was this newcomer? Was she fully Innupiat, like Naluvara’s family, or was she mixed Caucasian? She looked a little Chugach, one of the Amerindians from the warm south. It was hard to tell. She certainly lacked any of Naluvara’s Mongoloid genes.
She wore spanking new snow gear in sky blue and canary yellow, and gripped a grey plastic case in woollen mitts. In vain, Naluvara hunted for a red cross or some such symbol to signify her as a doctor or ecologist. He watched sullenly as her escort plodded toward the closest cluster of homes. In the far distance the propellers of the plane signalled its imminent departure. Skulking, he observed it climb into the air, banking south. He was skulking to avoid any of the day’s tedious muck-in household chores, particularly those concerned with the imported fish. He was also scheming—plotting another’s downfall.
Snow fluffed out of the pale sky. Some women heaved and tugged fresh gas canisters across the ground, ready to install them in the big community kitchen. Western music thudded out of a tumbledown shack half concealed behind a small knoll. An unlit neon sign, in wavy handwriting letters, proclaimed ‘Spike’s’ to be the name of the establishment.
Naluvara’s friend Apik had been coming on too strongly with his beloved, Tania. In under a fortnight a passenger plane would carry her back to Anchorage to resume her University studies. That was bad enough, but worse still was that Naluvara had caught the pair of them giggling outside Spike’s, in broad daylight, in public. Electing to take young Apik down a peg or two, Naluvara had embarked on a protracted period of psyching out. Now it was time for a showdown.
There were rules which governed the correct behaviour of an angagok, an Innupiat shaman, and Naluvara was well aware that this broke most of them. But if the other islanders were so intent on not accepting him as a shaman, what did it matter? Screw the whole lot of hypocritical fatheads. Only the helping spirits mattered.
Coldly fuming, he stalked toward his family home. But a gritty old voice stopped him in his tracks, booming across the settlement.
“Oi, Nalu!”
He grimaced. “What now, Ugrook?”
Which wasn’t his name at all. The oldster was a relic from the bad days, deluded by Alzheimer’s, utterly unreliable. Truth to tell, even Naluvara considered him a shade crazy, but he stopped at shunning the frail, white-haired hunter. Grinning, he revealed his excellent, false dentures. He walked with a vague stoop, but that stoop had once been much worse. He was as thin as a pipe-cleaner man.
“I hurt my poor hand!” bawled the hunter. Blood oozed out of a handkerchief bandage, leaving dilated pink irises in the fresh snow.
“Is that all?” asked Naluvara grumpily. “Oh, bring it to my room.” At least he would have an excuse if he was pestered by his mother. She always turned a blind eye when he was… working.
Clad in shiny silver moon-boots, they both stomped past the hulking body of a snowcat, its innards cannibalised for generator parts—on past a quaint cluster of Iglulik huts, around a spidery totem pole adorned with a variety of satellite aerials, past an Innupiat woman feeding thin dogs, into the side of a shoe-box shaped prefab. Snow flicked up its corrugated sides.
· · · ·
By now Naluvara had calmed down enough to offer the old man some grudging reassurance. “How did you do that, then?”
Indoors, they kicked powdery snow off their boots before it had a chance to melt. Naluvara ushered his patient into a warm room smelling unharmoniously of percolated coffee and dissected fish, walls covered in monochrome French film posters.
