Solaris Rising (14 page)

“Are you really going?”

She nods. She blows me a kiss with her mucky fingers, and then she turns into Bettina’s halo and walks away just like that. Daw throws up his hands.

I return to the shoreline to see Genji sitting on one of Gran’s rags, whining. Daw tries to get him to make another prediction, but he refuses.

Drake is dancing because he has won a case of Mountain Dew, if not respect in the scientific community. He is dancing and almost singing. Daw scowls at his dog.

“What you got there?”

It’s two days later. I forgot how well Karl knows me. He is in the tent, pointing to the baked bean tin. I try to shrug, but I’m shaking.

“Your Gran pull that out god’s ass? I heard something about that shit.”

“Nah, we threw that away. This is just… you know. Just a regular fish.”

His eyes are so big and dark and long at the edges. He blinks slow. If Karl were a woman people would call him a siren.

“Regular fish. You keeping it why?”

Another attempt at a shrug by me. “No reason.”

He lunges past me, displacing the air so suddenly that the sides of the tent billow. Before I can move, he has the tin in his hands. The fish lies sideways in the water, still looking up with one eye.

“You got core in this fish. Don’t lie to me, Bucky. I already know. You think I’m stupid? Genji the core dog pointed to your old Gran. Not Jack-off Trachea. Now I’m giving you a chance. You want to split the fish, you pay what you owe and keep the rest, then we go our separate ways.”

Yeah, right. Pay what I owe? He wants the whole fish.

“You can’t sell this fish, Karl. It isn’t core. It isn’t anything. It’s just a fish.”

“Bullshit. So core’s usually some kind of man-made object. So what? A fish is a god-made object. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is the gods are dead.”

“Only if Daw’s right. And if Daw’s right, then his dog picked your Gran. So that’s core.”

“It’s not core. Anyway, Drake won the bet.”

“If Drake won the bet, then we
can’t
understand nature. I’m not stupid, Bucky. I get how this works. So the gods can’t all be dead after all. That fish is a symbol of hope.”

“Karl, you’re not making sense. They could both be wrong. Maybe we don’t understand nature. But the gods are dead also. God being dead is a fact. Can’t you smell it?’

He touches his nasal plugs, smiles.

“It has to be one or the other. Maybe Daw’s dog made a mistake this one time, but he could improve the design.”

All my conversations with Karl, always, are this discursive. Exactly this discursive, no more and no less.

“I thought we were arguing about who owns the fish.”

“That fish is mine,” says Karl, heatedly.

I fuck him two or three times to get rid of him. Agree to meet him at the pricing outlet up in Koko-mart. He seems spooked by the fish, and leaves it with me when he goes away beating his hands on his thighs and chanting to the rage track in his ears.

Later. Washing Karl’s doomed little fishes out of my blowhole. Thinking, ha, die little fuckers. You not eat my sweet. I can’t even imagine a world where every little pleasure could represent someone’s whole lifetime, exploding out of me.

Gran trying all those years to serve the gods. Who knows what gods want anyway? It’s not like they tell you. Not now, in death. Not ever. Probably.

On my way to Koko-mart with the fish I see something dark lying too close to a patch of city bugs, just at the edge of the beach. It’s angular and shiny, and for a moment I think Trachea has left some of his equipment behind. Then I blink and recognise Dordogne. The bugs are onto him.

“It’s over,” he whispers. “New dawn. New day. I wasted my life. Can you take me to hospital?”

He’s skinny, but it’s hard getting him up and taking his weight. His muscles are like soup all the way up the beach to the train, but there’s a stickiness to his skin. Maybe it’s the bugs, but he feels like rubber.

“I stick to you,” he sighs in my ear. “That what I do now. I stick to you.’

I keep him going all the way from the train to the hospital waiting room, where his eyes turn yellow in the artificial light. The last thing he says to me is, “You sell that fish, Bucks. Don’t waste your chances. Fish gonna be big. Offspring of a god? Gonna be big. You get a piece of it. Don’t be like me and your Gran. Bless you, Bucks, you gonna be alright.”

On my way home I look up the numbers wagered at Koko’s to try and get an idea of the possible value of this fish. The numbers, in theory, are big. The fish’s existence is just a rumour and that makes it special, like it’s glowing with some kind of potential energy. If I’m going to act, I need to do it soon, before people forget all about Drake and Daw and their bet.

Standing in the crowd outside Koko-mart, the fish and I observe each other extensively. There’s something wrong with that one fin. It swims on its side, looking up at me out of its left eye.

Offspring of a god? Really? Hnh. I doubt it.

I should take that money. It would be great. But the thing is, in all of this whole thing, nobody ever asks the fish about its own plans. And that doesn’t seem fair after all Gran went through, and after all the fish (presumably) went through.

Then again, Gran gave me the fish. It was all she had to give and now it’s worth money. She turned out to be a proper money-giving Gran, in the end.

I’m a little surprised with myself when I say, ‘What you want, fish?’

It doesn’t answer me. It’s not like Genji. Nobody has improved it. It’s just a fish that swims slightly screwy.

So I have to guess. I have to guess at this, just like I have to guess at everything else.

The unfinished raft, I leave it behind. I’m a thief, remember. So I steal this boat. I go out by night, no motor, only a paddle.

When I loose the fish in the sea I don’t say anything. I don’t even think anything. If the fish is god, it knows what I’m thinking anyway.

When it’s in the open water I look hopefully for a sign that something’s changed. All it does differently is stop swimming on its side with only one fin working, stop looking up at me from the water. It straightens itself out and swims down and away into darkness.

After it’s gone I feel quiet. I wish I could stay out here, never go back to land. Out here on the moving water with the bioluminescence starring my wet hands like I’m five years old playing with glitter. Galactic me.

Wish I could stay, but I’m not made for this place.

When finally I turn back, paddle in hand, I see the Meta gleaming on the shore. The bluffs on either side are dark and blurry, but the Meta is so sharp and bright that even from this distance my throat tightens and I catch my breath. The memory of Dordogne’s skin sings against my palms. I know what I have to do. It doesn’t even feel like a choice. I put the paddle down and kick off my shoes.

The whole world can’t be like Meta. There must be other places, other shores or certainties, where the tide doesn’t cast up toxic brilliance. I can swim for one of them. The water’s fucking cold tonight, but I can swim.

ROCK DAY

STEPHEN BAXTER

Stephen Baxter has some 35 novels to his credit and has won the Philip K. Dick, the John W. Campbell, the BSFA, the Sidewise, and the Locus awards. Stephen’s latest project has been the Northland trilogy:
Stone Spring, Bronze Summer,
and
Iron Winter
, a saga of a different prehistory. He is involved with the international SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme, and a study to design a starship with the British Interplanetary Society, both of which activities fed into the inspiration behind the story in this volume.

Matt woke that morning to the usual noises. The buzz of a lawn mower, probably Mister Bowden’s a few doors down. The soft pad of a dog’s paws outside his bedroom. That was Prince.

He rolled out of bed in his pyjamas, and walked barefoot to the door. But the door wouldn’t open. He almost walked right into it. He took a step back and tried again. The door was straightforward promat, it should have broken up at his approach and folded back into its frame. It remained a stubborn blank panel.

Matt was eleven years old. He rubbed his face, greasy with sleep sweat. Maybe he wasn’t quite awake yet.

Something smelled funny.

He looked around at his room. It seemed messy, the bed with the crumpled sheets, heavy cobwebs up on the ceiling, the smart-posters inert and peeling off the walls. He didn’t remember the room being this bad. He wasn’t that much of a slob. Dad would kill him, if he saw it.

And the Mist wasn’t working. Everywhere he looked stuff should have been sparkling with messages sent and received, his projects and games, reminders about school. Nothing. Maybe Dad had grounded him, shut it off. But for what? He couldn’t remember doing anything wrong, or at least no more wrong than usual.

He tried the door again. It still wouldn’t open. But there was always a backup system, as Dad would say, in this case a handle and hinges. He turned the handle, the door was sticky in its frame, but it opened with a tug.

And there was Prince, waiting outside Matt’s bedroom just like every morning. Prince was a blue roan cocker spaniel. He’d been lying there with his head between his paws. Now he got to his feet a bit heavily, as he was ten years old, and, tail wagging, jumped up for a tickle. Then he grabbed the toy he’d brought this morning, a chewed rubber bone, and Matt had to wrestle him for that for a bit. And then Prince curled up against the wall again and raised his front paw so Matt could stroke the soft hairs on his chest. The same every morning, just the way boy and dog liked it.

But the hallway light hadn’t come on, and the floor here was dusty too. Maybe Matt really was the slob his Dad claimed he was, if he didn’t even
notice
this stuff
.

He walked down the short hallway, past his Dad’s bedroom where the door was Closed, a sign that Dad was asleep or working and not to be disturbed. He found the bathroom door stuck on open, whereas his bedroom door had stayed closed. He went in to use the toilet.

But he found he didn’t need to pee. He tried, but there was nothing there.

There was muck and mess in the bowl, however. He passed his hand over the flush panel, but it wouldn’t work. Another stupid thing gone wrong. Matt decided he’d come back up later with a bucket of water to flush it through, if Dad didn’t fix it first.

Prince was waiting, tail wagging, pink tongue lolling. “Come on, boy!” He ran down the stairs two at a time, and the dog tumbled at his feet.

In the downstairs hall there was more muck, he saw, and little pellets that looked like mouse droppings. Yecch! And the news panel by the full-length mirror near the door was frozen on a Liverpool EchoNet shoutline:

ROCK DAY!

4
^th
JUNE 2087!

DOOM OR JOKE?

WE’LL KNOW BY 3pm –

OR NOT!

PAGING ALL ALIENS...

Was it Rock Day today? He felt confused, as if he’d forgotten something. He tried thumping the panel, but the wording wouldn’t refresh.

He tried to let Prince out of the house, but the front door was another non-opener. He had to turn an emergency-exit handle and practically yank the door out of its frame.

Prince trotted out into bright morning sunshine, and began sniffing around the grass, choosing a spot for a luxurious leg-raise. Matt followed him out and, in his bare feet, stepped to the end of the path. He pushed through patches of overgrown mod-potato plants, their big black leaves heavy. Dad wouldn’t be pleased they’d not been earthed up.

Luckily the gate was closed, Matt hadn’t thought to check, but even if Prince had got out there was no traffic. Or at least nothing moving. There was a pod bus that had come off the road a little way down the avenue of neat identical houses, the bulbous passenger pods empty and tumbled against the side of the road.

This was Wavertree, an inner suburb of Liverpool, only a few kilometres east of the city centre and the docks. It should have been buzzing with activity, the noise from the city a dull roar. But this morning there was only silence, save for that mower a few doors away. And things looked – shabby. The houses were dark, the big solar-power panels on their roofs mucky and peeling, their gardens overgrown. One house down the road looked burned out, that was the Palleys’, and he didn’t remember that happening and you’d think he would, you didn’t see a house burn down every day.

Mister Bowden came into view around the corner of his house, three along from Matt’s. Of course Mister Bowden didn’t need to be following his mower around the lawn, but he evidently liked the gentle stroll. Mister Bowden was a widower, about fifty. He’d always been friendly to Dad and Matt, especially after Mum had died, and it was as if he and Dad suddenly had something in common. Matt was less interested in him now he was growing up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to old Mister Bowden, in fact. But this was a funny morning.