Solaris Rising 2 (2 page)

Some years ago, when my own NewCon Press first started, I exchanged emails with the then editor of TTA Press’ review webzine
The Fix
. Her name? Eugie Foster. We’ve never met, but Eugie was always helpful and impressed me as a genuine, likeable individual. I took an interest in her writing career thereafter and was chuffed to see her novelette (and that’s just a reference to the length of its title) “Sinner, Baker...” make the shortlist for both the Hugo and BSFA Awards, even more so when the same piece went on to win the Nebula. Eugie’s was one of the first names I pencilled in when drawing up an approach list for
SR2
and, needless to say, she hasn’t disappointed.

I’m not sure that James Lovegrove has yet forgiven me for mislabelling several online photos of him with another author’s name (for no reason I can explain). Actually, he has, because James isn’t the sort to hold a grudge... I hope. I first discovered James’ writing more than a decade ago via the novella “How the Other Half Lives” and his novel
The Foreigners
. Both demonstrate what a thoughtful yet entertaining writer he is; qualities that have seen his Pantheon series of novels breach the New York Times best seller lists in recent years, and which infuse “Shall Inherit”.

Before I ever met Adrian Tchaikovsky I was aware of him as the ‘new kid on the block’ in the epic fantasy scene, making a significant impression with his
Shadows of the Apt
series. Subsequently, I discovered that his writing encompasses a great deal more than that. Having already commissioned and published a couple of pieces by Adrian – a modern ghost story as well as a slice of reality-hopping SF – I felt confident that he could write something a little more ‘hard SF’. My faith was fully justified by “Feast and Famine”, which delivers on all fronts.

My first experience of Mercurio D. Rivera’s work came via “Longing for Langalana”, a story that appeared in a 2006 issue of
Interzone
. I rated this the best thing I’d read in the magazine for quite a while, and evidently I wasn’t alone: it went on to win the readers’ poll for that year. Nor has Mr. Rivera sat on his haunches since, producing a growing number of original and well-crafted tales for
Interzone, Asimov’s
and elsewhere. “Manmade”, which he referred to as ‘a reverse Pinocchio story’ when submitting, is the latest in a long line of gems from this exciting, still-emerging author.

Kay Kenyon writes science fiction of sweeping scope in plausibly-depicted settings populated by vividly-drawn characters – as evidenced by her
Entire and the Rose
novels. But she doesn’t write enough short fiction for my liking; a situation I determined to remedy to some small degree. Thankfully, Kay accepted the challenge, and duly delivered the intriguingly named “The Spires of Greme”, which proved just as inventive as its title and should not, under any circumstances, be confused with Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s 2009 novella “The Spires of Denon”. Kristine is someone who has succeeded as author, editor, and publisher (no mean feat, trust me). In the process, she has covered almost every area of genre fiction. It was SF I was interested in for this project, though, and Kristine has come up with a clever story of time travelling academia that manages to avoid stepping on Connie Willis’ toes (which is no mean feat either).

I initially crossed paths with Mike Allen when submitting for his first
Clockwork Phoenix
anthology. He declined my effort with an encouraging ‘I really like this, but...’ rejection message. Tempting though it was to respond in kind, his madcap and frenetic “Still Life with Skull” proved too good a piece to turn down. Damn!

Martin McGrath is someone I know as a dedicated and hard-working individual from our years of service together on the BSFA committee, but I hadn’t appreciated how good a writer he is. Not until I ran a ‘blind reading’ competition (how’s that for a paradox?) to choose a story for an anthology,
Subterfuge
. Although Martin’s story didn’t win, it came a close second and later featured in the anthology
Conflicts
. A very good piece, but one that ill-prepared me for just how effective “The First Dance” would be.

Allen Steele’s
Coyote
novels comprise one of the most compelling and convincing accounts of humanity colonising a new world in recent memory. I came into contact with Allen when Ian Watson and I included his story “The War Memorial” in
The Mammoth Book of SF Wars
(2012), and didn’t hesitate in approaching him regarding
SR2
.

I recall reading Norman Spinrad’s novels with a combination of pleasure and awe. It never occurred to me that I would one day have the opportunity to communicate with Norman, let alone commission a story from him. Then, by coincidence, I discovered that we have a mutual friend in the form of author Michael Cobley. I contacted Mike and, kind fellow that he is, he instantly put Norman and I in touch. The rest, as they say, is history.

I haven’t read enough Vandana Singh; though, in this particular instance, I suspect the only worthwhile definition of ‘enough’ is ‘everything by’. What I
have
read has unfailingly impressed me, and Vandana is another author I determined to approach from the off. Unlike many of the contributors, I had no real link to Vandana – either direct or otherwise – and feared that my invitation would be given short shrift. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Vandana has been enthusiastic and gracious throughout. Her “With Fate Conspire” was one of the last submissions to arrive, but it proved well worth the wait.

There we have it: the component elements of
Solaris Rising 2
; a collection of stories that will take you from the furthest reaches of space to the deepest corners of the human psyche. Enjoy the ride.

Ian Whates

Cambridgeshire

August 2012

TOM

PAUL CORNELL

Paul Cornell has been Hugo Award-nominated for his work in prose, TV and comics. He’s won the BSFA Award and the Eagle Award. His latest novel is the urban fantasy
London Falling
, out from Tor.

Y
OU EXPECT THE
platform to be stable. But actually it sways like a boat, gently, even though its legs are sunk into rock under the reef. That means if you come out on the launch just about keeping your nausea under control, you should get underwater as quickly as possible, let your inner ear sort itself. Having been an instructor here for five years, I’d stopped noticing that sway. But now I appreciate it again, because Tom appreciates it.

That feeling, looking at Tom’s face, takes me back to a moment when the platform was swaying more violently. When the big guy showed up. I never got a name. Swav would never tell me. I don’t know who that was meant to protect. Or maybe the males don’t bother with names. I can see him even now, leaping, all blue muscle, with bright yellow stripes down his flanks, all the other colours on his skin that were at the edge of what we’re able to see, that made strange rainbows through the spray. He hurled himself against the platform, time after time, making the tourists and the other scuba guides scream and fall around. He was the size of two or three orca. I couldn’t see any similarity between him and Swav. I couldn’t see a face, even. If there were eyes they were hidden in the dark lines along what might have been his head. I couldn’t imagine how they could ever be together. I was holding onto Swav, both of us getting soaked. All I was thinking was that, emotionally, I was fucked. I could hear him calling her name. He was booming it underwater, her name vibrating the platform as much as the waves did.

I looked into Swav’s face, and there was an expression there I couldn’t read at all. It was an arrangement of muscles on something very like a human face that wasn’t akin to any expression I’d seen before. She broke from my arms, suddenly slippery, like I’d loved a mermaid. She ran for the rail. She leapt into the water as I was calling her name, my shout lost in his. She jumped into water that was suddenly full of him rising around her, an enormous mass that overwhelmed her. He twisted her round and slammed her against the side of the platform, so hard I was sure it had killed her. He held her there with slaps, battering her, left and right with his fins or wings or whatever they were. I’d run to the side, but there was nothing I could do but shout. She’d told me what she expected, but she’d never experienced it. Would she have dived in if she’d known what it would be like? She was pinned there, against the metal over the underwater dock, her fingers gripping the wire netting now, her knuckles, suddenly so human, white with the effort. I remember Annie, the biologist, came up behind me and grabbed me when I looked like I was going to jump in after her. I don’t know if I really would have. We watched together as that huge white puppet snake of a penis rose out of the water, a flap like a flower jerking atop it, sucking air. Swav threw her head back and I could see something odd at her neck, kind of like a wound, and I screamed her name again because again I thought he’d killed her. And then the penis wrapped round her, impossibly fast, and the flap rose above her head like a snake about to strike. In that second, she turned and looked at me, and this time what I saw on her face I read as terror. Then the flap grabbed her around her head. He let himself fall from the platform and with an enormous splash took her with him into the depths.

I recall the water hitting us again. How we were swept aside. And then how we all found ourselves just sliding against the rails, the water draining off in seconds, as it was meant to, children screaming, guides yelling to grab onto the cables. But everyone was safe, it turned out. Except me. I felt as if I’d been beaten. I’d had something ripped out of me. Annie made me look her in the face, and I could see every detail of what she was feeling, such a contrast, like coming back to reality after a dream, just for a moment. “She’ll come back to you,” she said. “I’m pretty sure of it.”

I
WAS ONE
of the first, I guess, to have that experience. My working on the Great Barrier Reef made it more likely. The Carviv always asked to visit reefs, and because they always asked to work, a lot of them in the first party ended up as tour guides, things like that. Their hosts tried to dissuade them, but the companies that took them on were delighted. Mate, we’ve got a guide who is herself a tourist attraction. The Carviv presence funded the regrowth initiative and the carbon sinks. It was so unthreatening, you know? They didn’t want to see our armed forces, they wanted to be near our water. The females separated, integrated by not staying in groups at all, spreading out all round the Pacific Rim. The males, we saw on television, lay on the ocean surface, somewhere off Hawaii, sleeping most of the time. Aussie blokes identified with that. That was a good first year, with the whole planet kind of sighing in relief. We’d met the aliens, and they turned out to be quite like us, really. None of the predictions of outrage and uprising came true. After a little while, nobody had that much of a problem. Humanity looked at itself in comparison with these guys, and decided we weren’t that bad or that good, and stopped worrying so much about the end of the world. There was, after all, another one just over there, seventy light years away, and those guys didn’t seem to think we were so bad. Looking back, I guess we started tidying the place up, now that the neighbours had come visiting. So much ecological repair in such a short time. The Carviv refused, even when asked, to express any negative opinions about the world they were visiting. But I think their love for the water contributed to us turning a corner, ecologically.

And the years after have continued to be good. But I still occasionally feel... well, just sometimes I don’t know how I feel. Until I look at Tom.

E
VERYONE TURNED OUT
to welcome Swav when she arrived at the platform. She travelled on one of their boats, those slim white shells, their hulls shaped reassuringly like our own yachts, but with some sort of power source that made no sound, the sail only for braking, billowing out to do so as it approached us.

“Hi, everyone,” she said as she stepped off the ladder onto the platform. Her accent already sounded Aussie. “Thanks for having me.” She was sparkling white, a rounded head like a bowling pin, a diagonal sash that was decorated with dense designs as her only clothing, slim shoulders, big, three-fingered hands like a cartoon character. She swept downwards to a tiny pair of feet, her whole body leaning to one side or the other with every step. There were no visible... well, it’s weird to use a word like “genitalia” thinking back to that moment, but that’s how biologists, how Annie, actually, would have been looking at her. Her chest was just... rounded, as if she was a clothed human. But it was her face that was the most extraordinary thing. Those enormous blue eyes; utterly like ours, but impossibly expressive. The ridges above them which danced like extraordinary eyebrows. The button nose with a single nostril. The wry squiggle of a mouth, never open enough so that you could see her teeth, but always in motion, saying so much even when she wasn’t. She had a waterproof rucksack on her back that looked like she’d just bought it.

The others clustered around her, Helena, the boss, doing the air kissing which we’d been told delighted the Carviv. And it seemed, indeed, to do the business with Swav. That was when I heard that huge, honest, laugh for the first time. I was holding back for some reason, Annie, her arms folded, beside me. Swav glanced over and looked at me. And held my gaze, her laugh suddenly turning into what looked like quite a shy smile. I found myself smiling back.

U
NDERWATER,
S
WAV WAS
incredible. She swam in a blur of motion, her whole body vibrating, able to turn on a dime and talk to us in our scuba gear by directing individual yells right at our ears. Which must have been, as Annie put it, like shooting daisies from a rollercoaster. The fish, initially, hated her. Carl, our bump-headed parrot fish, who’d learned to come to the diving pit beside the platform twice a day for food and photo opportunities, actually left. Which made the crew feel kind of awkward: nobody knew how long swimming with Swav would be a tourist attraction, while Carl had served us well for a decade. There was one night at dinner when Swav became aware that there was something nobody was talking to her about. She made Helena tell her about Carl. And the sadness on her face when she heard, oh man! It was breaking my heart. She suddenly got up, and ran to the door, and stopped and made a gesture for nobody to follow her, that it would all be okay. And then she was gone and we heard a splash, and we all got to our feet, and went to see, but all there was in the moonlight was a trail of foam that already stretched out past the reef.