Solaris Rising (10 page)

Suddenly the world seemed to invert like an old sock, and Arp saw everything differently.

“Let’s go find Blue and talk all this over with her.”

“Righteous!”

The boys found Blueberry home alone, so they could discuss everything without pretense or secrecy.

“So it’s like that,” concluded Arp. “The sweet spot’s somewhere in Chicago, but I can’t pin it down at this distance. It seems to shift back and forth across a small area. Plus, it looks like it will involve some major input to trigger the rube. And it’s the, um, densest one I’ve ever seen. Totally gnarly with connectivity. I don’t really understand the complexity of it. Some of the links seem to go down to the subatomic level. All those factors are why I just didn’t rush in and trigger it. Of course I want to save the planet. But who knows if I wouldn’t be causing something even worse?”

Her gaze earnest and wise, Blue cut to the heart of the matter. “Exactly what could be worse, Arp? You plunge the planet into the sun? Not likely, I say. No, you’ve got to take the chance.”

Arp felt truly heroic at last. “All right, I will!” He instantly deflated. “But how can we get to Chicago?”

“Just look around,” Jay said. “There’s got to be a useful sweet spot right under your nose.”

With Jason driving, it still took Arp two whole hours into the five-hour trip to Chicago to master all the dashboard controls of the stolen Lexus LX570, Blue offering helpful advice from the back seat. They didn’t feel rushed or nervous – at least in terms of the police; the threat of Armageddon was another matter entirely – since the decisive suicide note found along with the car keys on the seat of the unlocked vehicle indicated that the owner would not be reporting the theft anytime soon.

Around hour four, as they got into the city proper, everyone quieted down to let Arp focus his powers. Eyes closed, he began to issue directions based on his sweet spot GPS, until finally he called, “Stop!”

Opening his eyes, Arp found himself at an iconic spot.

The street at the base of the Sears Tower, once the world’s tallest building, and, coincident with its loss of that stature, redubbed the Willis Tower.

“Where now?” asked Jason.

“Up.”

The car-owner’s wallet afforded them the fifty dollars needed for three Skydeck passes. They rode to the 103
^rd
floor in silence.

At the point of exiting the elevator, Blueberry suddenly balked, letting the other visitors stream past. Jason held the door open.

“No, Arpad, I don’t feel good about this. Something tells me there’s danger ahead. Let’s turn back. It’s ridiculous to think you can do anything here to change the fate of a whole planet.”

Arp felt himself in the grip of dreamlike forces larger than himself. Vistas of luminous cosmic webs full of shining nodes of action swam before his eyes. “No, we’ve come this far. I have to try, now.”

Arp exited the elevator, followed by Jason and Blue, and headed straight for one wall.

Attached to the wall at intervals, glass boxes projected outward a few feet, so that visitors could step inside and have the illusion of standing unsupported in midair. As a family of tourists emptied out of one, Arp and his friends crowded in. The whole panorama stretched away below them like a Lego cityscape.

“It’s right out there,” said Arp. “The sweet spot to deflect the asteroid and save the planet.”

Jason squinted. “Where?”

“About five feet ahead at the level of my chest.”

“How can you possibly use it, Arp?” Blue asked plaintively.

Arp pressed his face to the glass separating him from saving the planet. “I
know
I can trigger it if I can reach it. But reaching it –”

Arp suddenly paused. “Of course! I just need to use
this
rube right here. A sweet spot whose function is to give me access to the other sweet spot!”

At once Arp knew why Blue had to be present. “Give me your bag!”

Blue’s bag in hand, he rummaged inside and found what he was looking for: Blue’s geeky science-girl laser pointer.

He turned back to the window and shone the little intense laser out and up at a precisely intuited angle.

Seconds later, a small plummeting object appeared in the sky.

Information flooded Arp’s brain, as if the sweet spot were talking to him.

The object consisted of a chunk of blue airplane toilet ice, discharged from a United Express flight. But more importantly, frozen in the middle of the chunk was a worker’s forgotten steel alloy wrench.

Arp yelled, “Get back!” He shoved Jason and Blue away from the observation box.

The glass shattered into a million fragments and rained downward to the street and inside the Skydeck. Freed from its icy casing upon impact, the wrench bounced along the floor until it hit the elevator door, wedging itself between the panels so that the elevator could not be easily opened to permit the arrival of any interfering authorities.

Arp stepped forward to where cold clean air gusted in. He could sense the floating sweet spot even more vividly now, since access had become unimpeded. It called to him. He couldn’t fathom the entire long and braided cascade of events connected with it, but he knew with a certainty that triggering the okiego would save the planet.

“What now?” said Blueberry.

“I jump!”

Jason was shedding atypical tears. “Do it, dude, do it! We believe!”

“Kiss me, Arp!”

Arp hesitated. His timing had to be perfect. Was a kiss allowed?

Intuition told him to go for it.

He hugged Blueberry and kissed her for what seemed forever. And at the same time, further illumination flooded his mind.

A few stories above the Skydeck, having duplicated the 1999 feat of daredevil Alain Robert, who had ascended the Sears Tower’s exterior human-fly-style by hand and foot alone, an illegal BASE jumper named Burnett Kershaw, resting on a ledge, was preparing to leap off, ripcord of his chute firmly in hand.

The very last part of the first stage of the rube fell into place as a TV station’s helicopter arrived.

Arp broke off his kiss, smiled, ran toward the empty window, and hurled himself into space, eyes tightly shut, praying wordlessly.

Something told him to tuck and roll.

He felt himself passing perfectly through the sweet spot, activating the rube.

He untucked at just at the right moment to intersect an extremely startled Burnett Kershaw in his descent. Arp clamped his arms around the guy’s torso, then burst out laughing.

And a quarter of a million miles distant in space, an asteroid named Perses began to shiver.

THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR THREE

KEN MACLEOD

Ken MacLeod is the author of twelve novels, from
The Star Fraction
(1995) to
The Restoration Game
(2010). In 2009 he was a Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. His forthcoming novel
Intrusion
(2012) is ‘a democratic dystopia.’ He has wanted to write a short story called ‘The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three’ ever since he saw an anthology of that title a scary number of years ago. Ken’s blog is: The Early Days of a Better Nation
at kenmacleod.blogspot.com.

In the Year Three,
l’année trois
as it’s called here, there are three kinds of Americans living in Paris: the old expats, the new émigrés, and the spooks. And then there are the tourists, who’ve travelled via Dublin, their passports unstamped at Shannon. You can find them all at Shakespeare and Co.; or they can find you.

I was browsing the bargain boxes for SF paperbacks when I noticed that the guy at my elbow wasn’t going away. At a sideways glance I identified him as a tourist – something in the skin texture, the clothes, the expression. He looked back at me, and we both did a double take.

“Bob!” I said, sticking out my hand. “Haven’t seen you since – when?”

“The London Worldcon,” said Bob, shaking my hand. “God, that’s... a long time.”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine. You know how it is.”

I nodded. Yes, I knew how it was.

“What brings you here?” I asked.

“Business,” said Bob. He smiled wryly. “Yet another SF anthology. The angle this time is that it features stories from American writers in exile. So I’m systematically approaching the ones I know, trying to track down those I don’t have a contact for, and commissioning. The deal’s already set up with Editions Jules Verne – the anthology will be published here, in English. In the US it’ll be available on Amazon. That way, I can get around all the censorship problems. It’s not so bad you can’t read what you like, but publishing what you like is more of a problem.”

“So bad you had to come here just to contact the writers?”

“That’s right. Trying to set this up online from inside the US might be... well. Let’s just say I didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Jeez,” I said. “That bad.”

I looked back down at the books and saw that my forefinger had landed, as if guided by an invisible hand, on the spine of a J. Neil Schulman paperback. I tugged out
Alongside Night
.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve found what I’m looking for. You?”

Bob shrugged. “Just browsing,” he said. “Fancy a coffee?”

“Sure.”

I nipped inside, paid a euro for the book, and rejoined Bob outside in the chilly February afternoon. He stood gazing across the Seine at Notre-Dame.

“Hard to believe I’m actually looking at it,” he said. He blinked and shook his head. “Where to?”

I indicated left. “Couple of hundred metres, nice traditional place.”

The cafe was on the Quai des Grands Augustins. The bitter wind blew grit in our faces. Along the way, I noticed Bob looking askance at the flaring reds, yellows and blacks of the leftist, anarchist and
altermondialiste
posters plastered on walls and parapets.

“Must be kind of weird, seeing all that commie kipple everywhere,” he said.

“You stop noticing,” I said.

The doorway was easy to miss. Inside, the cafe seemed higher than it was wide, a little canyon of advertisement mirrors and verdegrised brass and smoke-stained woodwork. Two old guys eyed us and returned to their low-voiced conversation around a tiny handheld screen across which horses galloped. I ordered a couple of espressos and we took a table near the back under a Ricard poster that looked like it predated the Moon landings, if not the Wright brothers. We fiddled with envelopes of sugar and slivers of wood, and sipped for a few moments in silence.

“Well,” Bob said at last, “I suppose I have to ask. What do you think of the Revolution?”

“It always reminds me,” I said, “of something Marx said about the French state: how all the revolutions have ‘perfected this machine, instead of smashing it’.”

Bob yelped with laughter. “Fuck, yeah! But trust you to come up with a Marx quote. You were always a bit of a wanker in that respect.”

I laughed too, and we took some time to reminisce and catch up.

Bob was a science-fiction fan, an occasional SF editor, and an anarchist, but none of these paid his bills. He was an anthropology professor at a Catholic university deep in the Bible Belt. He spent very little time propagating the ideas of anarchism, even in the days when that had been safe – ‘wanker’ and ‘hobbyist’ were among his kinder terms for ideologues. Instead, he worked with trade union locals, small business forums, free software start-ups, and tribal guerrillas in Papua New Guinea. This was all anthropological research, or so he claimed. Such groups tended to be more effective after he’d worked with them.

I hadn’t thought much about him over the years, to be honest – we were never exactly close – but when I had, I’d wondered how he was doing under the new order in the United States. Not too well, by the sound of things. Still, it would probably have been worse for him if I’d emailed to ask. This thought helped to quash my pang of guilt about not having kept in touch.

“Hey,” Bob was saying, “wait a minute – you must know some of these writers!”

I nodded.

“Maybe you could give me some contact details?”

At that moment I began to suspect that we hadn’t met by accident.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said.

I had the numbers of most of the writers Bob was looking for on my mobile. “But,” I went on, “I do know where you can find them tomorrow morning. Every SF writer in Paris, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Bob looked puzzled for a moment.

“The ascent,” I said.

He smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course!”

Like he’d forgotten; like he hadn’t timed his visit just for this. The date had been announced on New Year’s Eve, in a special Presidential broadcast from the Elysée Palace.

We exchanged phone numbers and finished our coffees.

“Fancy a glass of wine?” Bob said.

I looked at my watch. “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” I said. “But I’ll see you tomorrow. Jardin de Luxembourg, main gate, 11 a.m.”