Futures - Peter Crowther (ed.) v1.0 Read online

  LEGACY FROM THE YOUNG

  Out there on the other worlds, the ones defying any restriction, there was much to be proud of. Fiume, where the gas giants were being dismanded to build a vast shell around the star, with an inner surface capable of supporting life. Milligan, whose colonists were experimenting with truly giant wormholes which they hoped could reach other galaxies. Oranses, home to the original sinners, condemned by the Vatican for their project of introducing communal sentience to every living thing on their planet, every worm, insect, and stalk of grass, thus creating Gaia in all her majesty.

  All this glorious playground was our heritage, a gift from the youth of today to their sulking, inwardlooking parents…

  —from “Watching Trees Grow” by Peter F. Hamilton

  “A clever mystery, a fascinating premise, and a rewarding resolution.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle on “Watching Trees Grow”

  FUTURES

  FOUR NOVELLAS

  PETER F. HAMILTON * STEPHEN BAXTER

  PAUL McAULEY * IAN MCDONALD

  EDITED AND WITHN AN INTRODUCTION BY PETER CROWTHER

  An AOL Time Warner Company

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case nei ther the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Introduction by Peter Crowther © 2001 Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2000 Copyright © Peter F. Hamilton 2000 Copyright © Paul McAuley 2000 Copyright © Ian McDonald 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover design by Don Puckey

  Cover illustration by Jim Bums

  Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  This edition is published by arrangment with Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  1271 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

  An AOL Time Warner Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Warner Books Printing: December 2001

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents :-

  The Infinite Frontier - An Introduction by Peter Crowther

  Watching Trees Grow - Peter F. Hamilton

  One - Oxford. England AD 1832

  Two - Manhattan City AD 1853

  Three - Ganymede AD 1920

  Four - Raleigh Family Institute AD 1971

  Five - Earth Orbit AD 2000

  Six - Eta Carinae AD 2o38

  Seven - Life Time

  Reality Dust - Stephen Baxter

  Making History - Paul J. McAuley

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Tendeléo’s Story - Ian McDonald

  The Infinite Frontier

  An Introduction by Peter Crowther

  Let’s talk about space:

  Well, it makes a kind of sense, you’ve either bought this book (Hurrah!) or you’re thumbing through it—maybe thinking about buying it, maybe just hanging around until the counter queue disappears so you can hit on the assistant you’ve been eyeing up for the past few weeks, or maybe you’ve just ducked into a bookstore and you’re waiting for the rain to stop. Whichever, you’ve still picked up what is, to all intents and purposes (given the fairly obvious packaging), a science fiction book, so we’ll take it as read you’ve got some kind of interest in space.

  So we’ll move forward a little.

  Do you remember who first took you into space? Because, let’s face it, we’ve all been up there, either via the printed page, the movie theater or the TV set. So who was that person into whose care you entrusted your imagination…saying, albeit silently, “Here I am…make my senses spin and my jaw drop….feed me Wonder!”?

  If it was by the printed page then maybe it was in the capable hands of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, with their futuristic visions of space travel, in cumbersome rockets whose trajectory and power source were a little shaky even then, around about a century ago for most of those marvelous tales. Or maybe it was the pulp-fictioneers, those penny-a-word scribes who filled page after page of exotic planetary locations usually populated by scantily-clad females and horrible monsters (boy, it must have been tough being a girl on some of those orbiting rocks…at least until the tom-suited Earth astronaut crash-landed to save the day).

  Maybe it was the likes of the “serious” writers…guys like Isaac Asimov, with his agoraphobic investigator, his robotic hordes and the mind-boggling read that were the Foundation books; and Ray Bradbury, with his homespun humanistic homilies of interstellar needles descending onto the Martian quilt and poverty-line families constructing soapbox rockets in their back yards; and Arthur C. Clarke, with his barroom fables from the White Hart and the short story “The Sentinel” that became 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  In fact, maybe it was film—the sight of Spielberg’s mother ship descending onto the mountaintop or the spectacle of the alien toddler bursting out of John Hurt’s stomach—or TV (Joseph Stefano’s insectoid Zanti misfits from The Outer Limits, perhaps…or the scene when one of the folks in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone diner reveals he’s a Martian) that lit the fire in your soul and set you dreaming about out there.

  There are so many writers and artists and directors who, year upon year, decade upon decade, have continued the craft, fashioning their own voices and their own ideologies, that it’s a genre in which, no matter where you start into it, it’s eminently possible—and frequently essential—to travel back to earlier works for further entertainment and enlightenment.

  As we’ve been told through our TV sets for more than 30 years, space may well be the final frontier.

  Of course there’s Time to be unraveled yet, and Immortality, but the vastness of space—with its seemingly infinite possibilities of worlds, cultures, environments, eco structures and so on—invariably strikes the loudest chord in the minds of fiction readers and movie-watchers the world over. And no matter how far we manage to progress into the void, that frontier will still be there…the line just being constantly rubbed out and redrawn again and again, each time a little further away.

  Although I’ve spent much of the last 10 or 12 years involved with horror, dark fantasy and even crime—both writing it and editing anthologies of the stuff—science fiction (or, more specifically, space fiction) was my first love…fed from the British black and white reprints of frill-color American comic books such as Mystery In Space or curled up on a sofa listening to the BBC’s radio renditions of Charles Chilton’s Journey Into Space.

  But it was Patrick Moore who first took me into space via a book.

  The year was 1958, and it was probably my first hardcover…bought by my parents for Christmas (it’s neatly inscribed in my mother’s handwriting, penned, I’m sure, little realizing the effect such a gift was to have on her son) a book entitled Peril on Mars, written by the great astronomer himself. It was wonderful stuff and I had no hesitation in scribbling down the tides of the three earlier adventures of Maurice Gray and his friends on the Red Planet. I’ve since had the opportunity of acknowledging that formative experience by commissioning an Introduction from Patrick for Mars Probes, an anthology of new stories about
our closest planetary neighbor to be published in the US in late 2001—it’s always nice to square the books and repay your dues, no matter how long it takes.

  Anyway, back in the 1950s and hungry for more science fictional inspiration, I haunted the bookshops and quickly discovered Angus Me Vicar’s Lost Planet series, featuring young Jeremy Grant, and E. C. Eliott’s tales of Kemlo and his friends on Satellite Belt K. And then on to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds—which I had already read as a Classics Illustrated and so knew the story—and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess of Mars and its many sequels.

  After that, courtesy of my English Language tutor at Leeds Grammar School, came Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man …in which “Kaleidoscope”, a one-act tale of a doomed astronaut adrift in the void, brought the concept of space travel firmly into the realms of the possible—even the probable—and, paradoxically, its downbeat finale made the prospect of such adventure even more attractive than the ray-gun variety of SF favored by the comic books and the once-so-called “juvenile” adventures.

  From then I was firmly hooked.

  As I grew older and more adventurous and demanding in my reading, the emphasis on space gave way to terra firma tales set sometimes in possible futures, sometimes in the present and occasionally on an alternate version of Earth on which accepted historical facts and events had been altered…sometimes subtly and sometimes not. Thus it was that the science—or simply the developmental and speculative possibilities inherent in this brave and frequently audacious brand of literature—wove its spell.

  Now I can enjoy the so-called hard science (quite an achievement for someone who regularly marvels at both car and computer—and even, when the muse hides for a while, my desk lamp—when they obligingly respond to the flicking of a switch) just as much as the space opera of, say, E. E. Smith’s Lensman books and old issues of Amazing and Fantastic.

  All of these still grace my crowded bookshelves, though old faithfuls such as some of the ones I’ve already mentioned and the likes of Carey Rockwell’s adventures of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet are (despite, in the latter, the exemplary technical assistance of Willey Ley) a little more mannered today than they seemed to be all those years ago. But mannered or not, they all make up a glorious confusion of adventures and stories set both on Earth and on worlds near and far, and in strange futures…realities populated by fantastic creatures and barely recognizable versions of ourselves. And every single word on every page continues to fight the good fight and carry forward the baton of imaginative fiction.

  The quartet of novellas in Futures, the second in what will be a continuing series of the very best in long short fiction, comes from four writers working at the forefront of British science fiction…four writers who have carried that baton of imagination with tremendous vigor.

  There are echoes of many of the authors I’ve already mentioned—and a whole lot more—in these four great works.

  I could say that, for me at least, Ian McDonald’s latest tale of the rampaging alien infestation known as the Chaga and, specifically, of its effects on the life of a young East African girl, calls to mind much of J. G. Ballard’s work circa The Drowned World; that Stephen Baxter’s consideration of godhood and immortality on one of Saturn’s moons in the sixth millennium seems a touch reminiscent of Arthur C.

  Clarke’s almost mystical parables of Mankind’s true destiny set against a backdrop of supposed future utopias; that Peter F. Hamilton’s centuries-long murder investigation conducted, as forensic science develops, by descendants of the Roman Empire on an alternate Earth, carries the feel of both Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot tales and the Gil Hamilton stories of Larry Niven; and that Paul McAuley’s epoch stretching, post-Quiet War saga of politics, upheaval and opera at the edge of the solar system features all the very best in hard science and future history as exemplified by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation cycle.

  But that’s just my take—yours may well be entirely different: just as we all bring different things to the reading process, so too do we take away different things when that process has been completed.

  All that is certain is that great writing is here in these pages…great invention and great characterization, too—finally laying to rest (if such a ceremony were really needed anymore) the hoary old chestnut that SF cares less about humanity and personal relationships than it does about detailing the workings of a rocket’s engines. And you’re due for some of the most wonderful and disconcerting suggestions as to what may lie ahead for the human race.

  In their introduction to the 1992 edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute and Peter Nicholls rightly recognize that the secret history of SF is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside…and the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Science fiction is more popular now than ever before: moreover, having at last escaped the withering stigma imposed by the constraints of the old pulp magazines in terms of both content and execution, it’s finally finding warmer receptions in the one-time frosty corridors occupied by the literati—as surely evidenced by John Updike’s recent Toward the End of Time.

  What the great supporters of the field have always said is true: science fiction is the literature of ideas. Here are four more…but they are four covering a whole host of styles and images and approaches to the field.

  Space Opera, Future Civilizations, Alien Invasions, Scientific Advancement, Political Chicanery, Human Relationship and even Police Procedural—they’re all here. But then they would be…because those are what science fiction is all about. So no matter who took you into space the first time, you’re about to go again…in the safe hands of four of the best interstellar pilots in the galaxy. Enjoy the trip.

  Peter Crowther

  November 2000

  Watching Trees Grow

  Peter F. Hamilton

  One

  Oxford. England AD 1832

  If I was dreaming that night I forgot it the instant when that blasted telephone woke me with its shrill two-tone whistle. I fumbled round for the bedside light, very aware of Myriam shifting and groaning on the mattress beside me. She was seven months pregnant with our child, and no longer appreciated the calls which I received at strange hours. I found the little chain dangling from the light, tugged it, and picked up the black bakelite handset.

  I wasn’t surprised to have the rich vowels of Francis Haughton Raleigh rolling down the crackly line at me. The family’s old missi dominici is my immediate superior. Few others would risk my displeasure with a call at night.

  “Edward, my boy,” he growled. “So sorry to wake you at this ungodly hour.”

  I glanced at the brass clock on the chest of drawers; its luminous hands were showing quarter past midnight. “That’s all right, sir. I wasn’t sleeping.”

  Myriam turned over and gave me a derisory look.

  “Please, no need to call me, sir. The thing is, Edward, we have a bit of a problem.”

  “Where?”

  “Here in the city, would you believe. It’s really the most damnable news. One of the students has been killed. Murdered, the police seem to think.”

  I stopped my fidgeting, suddenly very awake. Murder, a concept as difficult to grasp as it was frightening to behold. What kind of pre-Empire savage could do that to another person? “One of ours?”

  “Apparently so. He’s a Raleigh, anyway. Not that we’ve had positive confirmation.”

  “I see.” I sat up, causing the flannel sheet to fall from my shoulders. Myriam was frowning now, more concerned than puzzled.

  “Can we obtain that confirmation?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. And a lot more besides. I’m afraid you and I have been handed the family jurisdiction on this one. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.” The handset buzzed as the connection ended.

  I leaned over and kissed Myriam gently. “Got to go.”

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  Her face had filled with worry. So much so that I was unable to answer in truth. It wasn’t t
hat she lacked strength. Myriam was a senior technical nurse, seeing pain and suffering every day at the city clinic—she’d certainly seen more dead bodies than I ever had. But blurting out this kind of news went against my every instinct. Obscurely, it felt to me as though I was protecting our unborn. I simply didn’t want my child to come into a world where such horror could exist. Murder. I couldn’t help but shiver as I pulled on my shirt, cold fingers making a hash of the small pearl buttons. “Some kind of accident, we think. Francis and I have to investigate. I’ll tell you in the morning.” When, the Blessed Mary willing, it might be proved some ghastly mistake.

  My leather attach^ case was in the study, a present from my mother when I passed my legal exams. I had been negligent in employing it until now, some of its fine brass implements and other paraphernalia had never even been taken from their compartments. I snatched it up as if it were some form of security tool, its scientific contents a shield against the illogicality abroad in the city that night.