Solaris Rising (15 page)

On impulse Matt waved. “Mister Bowden!” His voice echoed off the blank faces of the houses.

Mister Bowden stopped dead, as the mower tooled on, and looked around. When he saw Matt he stared, as if he was surprised, or, oddly, as if he’d just woken up. “Matt? Are you all right?”

Yes. No. Nothing’s
working
. Matt said none of these things. Suddenly he felt as if he’d acted like a little kid. He ran back into the house, Prince at his heels, and slammed the door.

Covering his embarrassment he went straight to the cupboard under the stairs and pulled out the vacuum cleaner. “You! If you’re not cleaning the muck off the floor, go out and earth up the potatoes!”

The cleaner shuddered, gave a kind of burp, and lurched forward. After all that had happened this morning Matt was faintly surprised it responded at all. But it didn’t head for the garden, and it didn’t switch modes. It should have dissolved into a puddle of programmable-matter component parts, and then reassembled for its gardening function. Instead it lurched past Matt, heading back along the hall to a point on the wall where it began to bump its base against the skirting board. Matt saw what it was trying to do. There was a power outlet there, fed from the solar cells on the roof, but the wall wasn’t opening up. Thump, thump, thump. Matt was reminded of his own attempts to open his bedroom door. The longer it went on the slower the cleaner got – thump... thump... thump...

Matt couldn’t bear to watch any more.

He pushed on to the kitchen. But that was another disappointment.

This had always been the most Mist-dense, gadget-laden room in the whole house, where Mum and Dad used to have competitions cooking each other the fanciest meal, and Matt aged nine or eight or seven would be roped in to help one or the other, while the living room furniture noisily reassembled itself for dining. Since Mum had died Matt and Dad had enjoyed coming in here to work together, remembering her in a sweet and sour sort of way, as Dad expressed it.

Today the kitchen was dead. Every surface was flat, plain, inert. He couldn’t even open the big fridge, which had none of its usual scrolling updates on the freshness of its contents. In most of the cupboards there was nothing but rot and damp and mould, and cardboard packets chewed by hungry little teeth. But when Matt checked the cupboard where they kept the dog food he found it stacked high with cans – plain, no label, that was funny – and a manual can-opener on the door that he didn’t remember seeing before.

At least there was plenty of food for Prince, when it was his meal time later. But there was nothing at all in the kitchen for Matt to eat, or Dad, and it looked like there hadn’t been for a long time. That just baffled him. What had he eaten yesterday, then? He couldn’t remember.

He stood there.
Why
couldn’t he remember? Strangeness upon strangeness. And on Rock Day too, if the Echo was up to date, “the day those idiots in space are playing out their game of cosmic chicken with God,” as Dad described it, and the world ended or it didn’t. Matt started to get a panicky, fluttery feeling in his stomach. What was going on?

But here was the dog, wagging his tail.

Prince’s blue plastic water bowl was empty. That was one thing Matt could do. But nothing came out of the taps when he waved the bowl under them. He had to force open the back door, which was as inert as all the other doors, and he went out to the rain barrel and bent to fill the bowl at the tap.

“Hi again, Matt.”

Here was Mister Bowden, looking in from the street, leaning on the fence.

“Mister Bowden.” Matt felt oddly uncomfortable. He put down the dog’s bowl. Prince lapped up the water.

Mister Bowden was a little on the portly side, but with a round, fleshy, open face, big eyes, and a wide grin. “Everything all right this morning?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t mean anything by it.” He looked faintly confused himself. He had a strong, coarse Knowsley accent. “It’s just, you know… How was your breakfast this morning?”

“Breakfast?”

He nodded to the kitchen, through the open door. “What did you have, cereal, juice, toast, coffee? Water from the tap?”

“I…”

“What about your father? Is he around today?”

Suddenly Matt panicked again. “Prince, come.” He grabbed the water bowl, spilling half of what was left.

“Matt, I think we should talk –”

Matt dashed through the door back into the kitchen, and as soon as the dog was inside he slammed the door shut. He could see Mister Bowden through the murky window, standing patiently, leaning on the fence, looking in. Then, with the gentlest shake of his head, Mister Bowden withdrew.

Matt stood there in the dark, stuffy, smelly kitchen, heart thumping, breathing hard. Something was wrong.
Everything
was wrong.

Prince looked up at him, eyes wide, wagging his tail. It was time for the fetching game they always played before his morning walk.

But Matt had to see Dad, Closed Door or not. He ran upstairs. Prince followed, thinking he was playing, wanting his walk.

Of course Dad’s bedroom door didn’t fold away. Matt took the handle, and hesitated. Once, long ago, he had been the one who found his mother dead, lying in bed, of a heart attack. You didn’t forget a thing like that. Now he didn’t know what to expect on the other side of
this
door. Buzzing flies?

He turned the handle, and shoved the sticky door.

The room was dark, the curtains drawn. He avoided looking at the bed and went straight to the curtains, and pulled them back to allow in the daylight. Then, holding his breath, he turned around.

There was nobody on the bed but Prince, who had jumped up. The duvet was pushed back, as if somebody had just got up – or you might have thought that if not for the thick layer of cobwebs that lay over everything, and the smell of mould.

No bones, no rotting corpse. On the other hand, no Dad. He had that feeling of panic again.

He had to get out of the house. Anyhow, Prince needed his walk.

He ran to his own room and found jeans and a shirt, he didn’t recognise them but they were his size, and got dressed quickly. Then he went downstairs to the front door. “Prince! Walk!” The dog came running, jumping up at him the way he did at walk time. His lead was hanging by the front door, and Matt hooked it on his collar. He pushed open the front door, and out the two of them went. Matt shoved the door closed, but it wouldn’t lock.

“Don’t worry.” That was Mister Bowden. He was back in his own garden now, with the mower inert at his side. “I’ll keep an eye on the house.”

“Thanks.” Matt turned away and started walking, down the path and onto the road.

“If you need anything, Matt, just knock…”

Matt didn’t look back. Half-running to get away from Mister Bowden, he headed west towards town, with Prince trotting at his heels.

Everything was wrong, out here too.

There was nobody around. No people on the street, no traffic, nobody behind the blank windows of the houses and offices and shops. Not even any other dogs. Stuff was broken down, fences fallen, windows smashed, doors gaping open. In some places fires had taken out a house or two from the neat suburban streets, like gaps in a row of teeth. The pavements were in a bad way with the stones lifted and broken by tree roots. It was easier to walk on the tarmac of the road surface, but even that was potholed and cracked, broken up by weeds and roots, and he had to step carefully.

And none of it was smart any more. As he walked down these familiar roads there should have been icons crystallising out of the air all around him, as his buddies called, or he got updates from school on the day’s schedule, or ads competed to grab his attention, everything a riot of colour and constant communication. This was the Mist, a blanket of smartness laid over the whole world, the product of tiny instruments embedded in every surface, his own clothing, his skin, suspended as minute particles in the air. Today there was none of that. Everything was plain and flat and dead, and it was all kind of old-fashioned, like he was in some museum recreation of the 1990s.

After a few hundred metres Prince paused and squatted. Matt had bags ready in his pocket. Expertly he wrapped a bag around his hand, picked up the waste and tied off the bag. There was a bin nearby, and he popped the bag in there. He wondered who would ever come to empty the bin, then shut off the thought.

With no traffic around, he decided he could let Prince off his lead. The dog went darting around the tarmac slabs. It wasn’t long before he was chasing rabbits out of a ruined garden.

Matt passed a church with a gigantic stained-glass window facing the street. Every time he came this way Matt had an impulse to lob a rock at that window. Now he supposed he could do it. Who was going to stop him? He thought about it for a full five seconds, before moving on. With nobody around it would have seemed an odd and sad thing to do.

He turned onto Wavertree Road, one of the main roads heading west into town, and came to Mount Vernon. From this high point, the site of an open modern development, the ground fell away, and there was a view across the centre of the city all the way to the river, whose water pushed deeply into the heart of the city to lap at the feet of the buildings. Matt picked out the two cathedrals separated by no more than a kilometre or so, and the modern glass blocks of the shopping and business centre, and the tapering silver and green multi-storey city farms, and the older buildings of the docks. Had things changed? There was more green than he remembered, threading along the crumbling roadways and spilling out from the parks and public places. And many of the buildings were damaged. Some of the big glass blocks looked as if they had exploded, and the red sandstone mass of the Anglican cathedral was soot-smeared from fire.

Nothing moved, nothing but a flock of gulls flapping casually over the Pier Head. No sound but the rustle of the breeze in the trees. And no Mist, which from here should have been like a shining translucent dome hanging over the whole city.

Matt, feeling lost, sat on a wall. Prince wagged his tail and jumped up so his front paws were on Matt’s knees. Matt tickled his ear absently. The sun was rising, it was going to be a warm day, and in a deep blue sky Matt thought he saw a glimmering lens shape, like a very long, very high cloud. Probably a Sunshield. And there was a spark, brilliant as a bit of the sun, slowly tracking the horizon. A plane? No, there was no contrail, no noise. A satellite, maybe.

“Matt Clancy, welcome to Liverpool!”

Matt’s heart nearly stopped. He jumped up and whirled around. Prince backed off, barking ferociously.

The man was short, slender, in his twenties maybe, with a sad moustache. He wore a brilliant pink old-fashioned soldier’s uniform, complete with peaked cap. He was standing to attention and smiling.

“You nearly – oh, hush, Prince – you nearly scared me to death.”

“I’m Mister Mersey. Matt Clancy, welcome to Liverpool! Port of empire in the nineteenth century, hub of artistic creativity in the twentieth, as you can see,” and he did a sort of twirl, showing off his costume, “and pioneer of eco-adaptation and climate resilience in the twenty-first twenty-first the twen-twen-twenty-first –” He froze and glitched, blocky pixels scarring his face.

Matt saw that he was tilting slightly away from the vertical, and that his feet hovered a few centimetres above the broken road surface. A bit of the Mist still working then, just.

It never occurred to him to wonder how this virtual tourist guide knew his name. The Mist knew everybody’s name.

Mister Mersey recovered. He even straightened up a bit. “Matt Clancy, welcome to Liverpool! Ask me anything!”

“What happened? Where are all the people?”

“Ask me anything!”

“Is this Rock Day? What happened on Rock Day?”

That seemed to trigger a new routine. The virtual blinked, and came back looking a little more sombre. “Vote!”

“What?”

“Your opinion counts. What do you think’s going to happen today?”

“Today?”

“Rock Day! Is asteroid 2021 MN
really
going to strike the Earth? Do you
believe
the astronomers when they say we’re safe? Are they lying to keep us all calm? Do you
believe
that Singles, Park and Rossi really aimed that rock so it would hit the planet? The City of Liverpool values your opinion!”

“Why? What difference does my opinion make?”

Blink. A different tone again. “Background. 2021 MN. A rock that was coming close to the Earth anyway, within a million kilometres. Harmless! We’d never have known it was there. Not until Singles, Park and Rossi went out and redirected it. If you believe that’s what they did!”

Blink. Another voice. “Nearly half a century after the first manned mission to an asteroid, the encounter with asteroid 2021 MN was supposedly for scientific purposes, mineral evaluation and a test bed for asteroid deflection technology.” He pointed to a non-existent visual in the air. “The four Orion T-23 spacecraft, with their solar panels like butterfly wings, were launched from –”

“I know this. Go on.”

Blink. “The crew. Benjamin Singles. Passionate atheist, and believer that we are not alone in the universe. Jennifer Park, one of the first female Catholic bishops, but a fringe figure in the Church for her controversial views on
Silentium Dei
– the Silence of God. Mario Rossi, spacecraft engineer, who –”