Spring 2007 (13 page)

“
Everybody
knows,” she said. “There’s data that
shows the earth’s temperature has been rising every year for the last fifty
years. No one argues that.”

He had to clamp down on a laugh. It was always funny to
him, when Georgia used words like
data.
He was maybe not entirely
successful at disguising his amusement, because she threw the cap of her wine
cooler at him.

“Will you stop throwing shit at me?” he said.

She turned away on her heel, glared back into the open
fridge for something to munch on. Her lips were moving, as she whispered
angrily to herself. He caught just a word here and there:
fuck; Jude;
ignoramus.

He eased around the chopping block, slipped up behind
her, and put his arms around her waist, clasping her body to his. At the same
time he peered over her shoulder into the refrigerator. Nothing to drink except
those fucking wine coolers.

“C’mon. I hate when we fight about stupid shit,” he
said, and slid his hands up to give her melons a squeeze.

“It isn’t stupid shit,” she said, elbowing him off her,
and wheeling around, her eyes giving him the old death ray. “Take a look at
your cars. Why you got to drive everywhere in those shitty gas guzzling old
cars of yours? Just because they make you feel like a badass? First it was the
Mustang, then it was the Charger. They both get about three miles to the
gallon, and when people are stuck behind us in traffic, you can see ‘em turning
black in the face from breathing your exhaust. You ever thought about taking
yourself out and buying a nice responsible hybrid—one of those superlow
emissions vehicles that get such great mileage?”

“I was thinking about taking myself out to get some
beer,” he said, and burped in her face. “Oops, sorry—runaway emissions.”

She punched him in the chest, gave him the finger, and
told him to eat shit, roughly all at the same time. He turned away, laughing,
grabbed his black duster off the back of a chair.

“The people who drive hybrids look like weenies,” he
said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead.”

He left her in the kitchen, and cut through Danny’s old
office, headed for the driveway. Jude opened the side door, shaking his head,
and stepped out into the Atlantic Ocean.

He hadn’t expected it to be there—the ocean hadn’t
been waiting outside the front door yesterday—and he sank straight down,
his motorcycle boots filling with icy seawater.

“Blub,” he said. A jellyfish moved past him in pulses.
He turned to go back inside, but the currents already had him, and he was
rolled away through dark water. The hubcap of his Dodge Charger sailed by.
Shit,
he thought,
the Charger.
It had to be underwater too. The engine, the
leather upholstery, the custom radio system…the whole thing was probably fucked.

Then Jude drowned.

Fiction:
Missile Gap by Charles Stross

It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is
in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve
of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond
the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a
new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further
glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they
exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably
warped.

Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn’t talking.
Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go where New Soviet Man has
not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert,
beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face
with humanity’s worst fear…

You can order a copy of Missle Gap by Charles Stross
here at the
SubPress site
, or
here at
Amazon.com.

From Booklist:

“With the dazzling success
of his last two novels, including the Hugo-nominated
Accelerando
(2005),
Stross is rapidly establishing himself as one of the preeminent masters of hard
sf. Here he takes a breather from weightier fare with a bizarre, nevertheless
brilliant alternate-history novella featuring a protracted U.S.-Soviet cold
war…Once again, Stross sets the bar high for his colleagues, should they be
feeling competitive, in this mind-bending, intriguing yarn.”

From Publishers Weekly:

“The
result is a blend of 1900s H.G. Wells and 1970s propaganda, updated for the
21st century in the clear, chilly and fashionably cynical style that lets
Stross get away with premises that would be absurdly cheesy in anyone else’s
hands.”

From Green Man Review:

”There are some
pretty creepy moments here including one that remminded me of the Cthulhu
mythos. Or possibly the Pod People. Really. Truly. And the ending was a proper
surprise, as I wasn’t sure how Stross would wrap it up. Indeed that’s the gold
standard for good storytelling for me — interesting characters in a
plausibe setting (no how farfetched it seems at first glance) with an ending
that I wasn’t expecting. Bravo Stross!”

Chapter One:
Bomb
scare

Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the
sirens go off.

A stoop-shouldered forty-something male in a dark suit,
pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his
attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass
that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer
pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread-crumbs. Filthy,
soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump
white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t
smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread, is a deadly business for the
birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to
the human condition, he ponders. It’s all a matter of limited resources and
critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained
understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air raid sirens
start up.

The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of
wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not
just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path towards him,
waving one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”

Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is
the nearest shelter?”

The constable points towards a public convenience thirty
yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t make it inside, you’ll have to
take cover behind the east wall–if you’re caught in the open, just duck
and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black
boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply.
Shaking his head, he walks towards the public toilet and goes inside.

It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet
attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the
cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves
Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue
uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in
three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days,
Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime
role properly the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a
humanly comprehensible enemy.

A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes
down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big
fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners
sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a
louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an
unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he
snarls in Gregor’s direction.

Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t
possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a
refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet
more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He
glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the
marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small-talk, verbal primate
grooming: “Does it happen often?”

The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself.
He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO
dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by
the communists. Taking in the copy of
The Telegraph
and the pattern of
stripes on Gregor’s tie he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You
should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to
visit the front line, eh?”

“I am here in this bunker with you,” Gregor shrugs.
“There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down on the bench
opposite the businessman gingerly. “Cigarette?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s
cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace-offering accepted, they sit
in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain
call for world war four, or just a trailer.

A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling
tone that indicates the all-clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned
for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll
dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the
nuclear bunker!” he screams.
“Get out!
Out, I say!”

Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish
disposing of his stale bread-crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette
case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to
be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile,
Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on
this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.

Chapter Two:
Voyage

It’s a moonless night and the huge reddened whirlpool of
the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the reddish-white pinprick glare
of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.

Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was
something else: when darkness stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter
spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed
their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi,
astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German
accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed.
That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course it first stopped making sense
a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in
Cuba, but there was a difference between the lunacy of
brinksmanship–Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the UN as he
shouted “we will bury you!”–and the flat earth daydream that followed,
shattering history and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist
geography.)

But back to the here-and-now: she’s sitting on the deck
of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere to nowhere, and she’s
annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into
their precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news sheet
(mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading into the ship’s
wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling
depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
surveyors–in a fit of uncharacteristic wit–named the Nether Ocean),
and she’s half out of her skull with boredom.

When they signed up for the Emigration Board tickets Bob
had joked: “A six month cruise? After a vacation like that we’ll be happy to
get back to work!”–but somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink
in until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they’d
crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing to refuel twice
from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to
Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non-sequitur in the ocean
that replaced the world’s horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they
passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the
stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents.
Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the sub-arctic chill
of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the ship was reduced to the
proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between skyscrapers. Maddy
had taken one look at these guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered,
and retreated into their cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from
between the slabs.

Bob kept going on about how materials scientists from
NOAA and the National Institutes were still trying to understand what they were
made of, until Maddy snapped at him. He didn’t seem to understand that they
were the bars on a prison cell. He seemed to see a waterway as wide as the
English Channel, and a gateway to the future: but Maddy saw them as a sign that
her old life was over.