Other stories are more human in scale, but no less uncompromising. There are explorations of the way in which time affects personality, and how personality and consciousness are defined by memory: the Rashomon-style riddle of the true history of the first Mars landing in 'The Real Story'; the slow transformation of a killing machine and the hope implied by its link with a young girl in 'Enola' (in which that name is redeemed from its association with Hiroshima); the unriddling of the significance of a particular shade of blue in the work of an artist in the moving and wonderfully observed 'Zima Blue'. Two stories share a novel twist on communication with parallel worlds: 'Signal to Noise' is an affecting love story structured as a long goodbye; 'Cardiff Afterlife' uses a War-on-Terror plot to explore the moral implications of importing information from a closely similar history. Another riff on the parallel worlds trope, 'Everlasting', is a two-hander about the implications of the Everett many-worlds hypothesis on individual good fortune, with a neat twist in the tale.
Last, but by no means least, we come to 'Digital to Analogue'. Set in the club scene of the early 1990s, spicing a conspiracy theory about a kind of viral meme that entrains human consciousness with vivid speculation about hive minds, it's perhaps the most atypical Al Reynolds story in the collection (if you define a 'typical' Al Reynolds story as a baroque widescreen space opera in which the hero's fate is interwoven with some kind of cosmic catastrophe). But it's the story in the collection that has the most personal meaning for me, for it was first published in
In Dreams
, an anthology I edited with Kim Newman. Kim and I put out a general call that netted great stories from new writers such as Cliff Burns, Peter F. Hamilton, Steve Rasnic Tem and Jonathan Lethem and Lukas Jaeger; but like all anthology editors we also nagged writers we knew and trusted to produce something suitably wonderful. And Al Reynolds was on my list because it was clear from the get-go that his modest, self-effacing manner was the Clark Kent disguise of an ambitious writer possessed of a boundless enthusiasm for the science fiction and crime genres, eager to push at his limits and experiment with new ways of telling stories.
Like me, Al had a long apprenticeship writing fiction, dating back to his early teens. Unlike me, he managed to keep writing even while engaged in the long hard slog towards winning his Ph.D. And after reading and re-reading the stories collected here, I'm reminded all over again just how much care and craft he puts into his stories. The variety and density of ideas is impressive, the structure and development of their narrative frames are elegantly and solidly wrought, and there's no sense that they strain to achieve their twists and payoffs - a sign both of native talent and of the hard work that goes into disguising the hard work of creating well-rounded stories about unusual situations inhabited by believable and sympathetic characters.
They also demonstrate, like his stand-alone novels
Century Rain
,
Pushing Ice
and
House of Suns
, that he's definitely not a one-note writer. In short, they show exactly why I asked him for a contribution to
In Dreams
, why 'Digital to Analogue' passed the stiff test of Kim Newman's scrutiny with flying colours, and why, some 18 years after we first met, he's still riding at the very cutting edge of science fiction.
Paul McAuley
London, October 2008
THE REAL STORY
I cupped a bowl of coffee in my hands, wondering what I was doing back home. A single word had brought me from Earth; one I'd always expected to hear but after seventeen years had almost forgotten.
That word was
shit
: more or less my state of mind.
Grossart had promised to meet me in a coffee house called Sloths, halfway up Strata City. I'd had to fight my way to a two-seater table by the window, wondering why that table - with easily the best view - just happened to be empty. I soon found out: Sloths was directly under the jumping-off point for the divers, and one of them would often slam past the window. It was like being in a skyscraper after a stock market crash.
'Another drink, madam?' A furry robot waiter had crossed the intestinal tangle of ceiling pipes to arrive above my table.
I stood up decisively. 'No thanks. I'm leaving. And if a man asks for me - for Carrie Clay - you can tell him to take a piss in a sandstorm.'
'Well now, that wouldn't actually be very nice, would it?'
The man had appeared at the table like a ghost. I looked at him as he lowered himself into the other chair, and then I sighed, shaking my head.
'Christ. You could have at least made an effort to look like Grossart, even if being on time was beyond you.'
'Sorry about that. You know how it is with us Martians and punctuality. Or I'm assuming you used to.'
My hackles rose. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Well, you've been on Earth for a while, haven't you?' He snapped his fingers at the waiter, which had begun to work its way back across the ceiling. 'We're like the Japanese, really - we never truly trust anyone who goes away and comes back. Two coffees, please.'
I flinched as a diver zipped by. 'Make that one . . .' I started saying, but the waiter had already left.
'See, you're committed now.'
I gave the balding, late-middle-aged man another appraisal. 'You're not Jim Grossart. You're not even close. I've seen more convincing--'
'Elvis impersonators?'
'What?'
'That's what they said about Elvis when he came out of hiding. That he didn't look the way they'd been expecting.'
'I haven't got a clue who or what you're talking about.'
'Of course you haven't,' he said, hurriedly apologetic. 'Nor should you. It's my fault - I keep forgetting that not everyone remembers things from as far back as I do.' He gestured towards my vacant chair. 'Now, why don't you sit down so that we can talk properly?'
'Thanks, but no thanks.'
'And I suppose me saying
shit
at this point wouldn't help matters?'
'Sorry,' I said, shaking my head. 'You're going to have to do much better than that.'
It
was
the word, of course - but him knowing it was hardly startling. I wouldn't have come to Mars if someone hadn't contacted my agency with it. The problem was that man didn't seem to be the one I'd been looking for.
It all went back a long time.
I'd made my name covering big stories around Earth - I was the only journalist in Vatican City during the Papal Reboot - but before that I'd been a moderately respected reporter on Mars. I'd covered many stories, but the one of which I was proudest had concerned the first landing, an event that had become murkier and more myth-ridden with every passing decade. It was generally assumed that Jim Grossart and the others had died during the turmoil, but I'd shown that this wasn't necessarily the case. No body had ever been found, after all. The turmoil could just as easily have been an opportunity to vanish out of the public eye, before the pressure of fame became too much. And it was worth remembering that the medical breakthrough that triggered the turmoil in the first place could have allowed anyone from that era to remain alive until now, even though the
Hydra
's landing had been a century ago.
I'd known even then that it was a long shot, but - by deliberately omitting a single fact that I'd uncovered during my investigations - I'd left a way to be contacted.
'All right,' he said. 'Let me fill you in on some background. The first word spoken on Mars was
shit
- we agree on that - but not everyone knows I said it because I lost my footing on the next-to-last rung of the ladder.'
I allowed my eyebrows to register the tiniest amount of surprise, no more than that. He continued: 'They edited it out of the transmission without anyone noticing. There was already a twenty-minute delay on messages back to Earth, so no one noticed the extra few seconds due to the censorship software. Remember how Neil Armstrong fluffed his lines on the Moon? No one was going to let that happen again.'
The waiter arrived with our coffees, hanging from the ceiling by its four rear limbs while the long front pair placed steaming bowls on the table. The waiter's cheap brown fur didn't quite disguise its underlying robotic skeleton.
'Actually I think it was Louis who fluffed his lines,' I said.
'Louis?'
'Armstrong.' I took a sip of my coffee, the deep butterscotch colour of a true Martian sky. 'The first man on the Moon. But I'll let that pass.'
He waved a hand, dismissing his error. 'Whatever. The point is - or was - that everything said on Mars was relayed to Earth via the
Hydra
. But she didn't just boost the messages; she also kept a copy, burned onto a memory chip. And nothing on the chip was censored.'
I took another cautious sip from the bowl. I'd forgotten how we Martians liked our drinks: beer in Viking-impressing steins and coffee in the sort of bowl from which Genghis Khan might have sipped koumiss after a good day's butchering.
'Tell me how I found the chip and I might stay to finish this.'
'That I can't know for sure.'
'Ah.' I smiled. 'The catch.'
'No, it's just that I don't know who Eddie might have sold the chip to. But Eddie was definitely the man I sold it to. He was a Rastafarian, dealing in trinkets from early Martian history. But the last time I saw Eddie was a fair few decades ago.'
This was, all of a sudden, beginning to look like less of a wasted trip. 'Eddie's just about still in business,' I said, remembering the smell of ganja wafting through his mobile scavenger caravan out on the gentle slopes of the Ares Vallis. 'He never sold the chip, except to me, when I was making my investigations for the
Hydra
piece.'
He pushed himself back in his seat. 'So. Are you prepared to accept that I'm who I say I am?'
'I'm not sure. Yet.'
'But you're less sceptical than a few minutes ago?'
'Possibly,' I said, all that I was going to concede there and then.
'Listen, the way I look isn't my fault. The Grossart you know from your investigations was a kid, a thirty-year-old man.'
'But you must have obtained longevity treatment at some point, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.'
'Correct, but it wasn't the instant the treatment arrived on Mars. Remember that if the treatment had been easily obtainable, there wouldn't have
been
any turmoil. And I was too busy vanishing to worry about it immediately.' He rubbed a hand along his crown: weathered red skin fringed by a bristly white tonsure. 'My physiological age is about seventy, even though I was born one hundred and thirty-two years ago.'
I looked at him more closely now, thinking back to the images of Jim Grossart with which I'd become familiar all those years ago. His face had been so devoid of character - so much a blank canvas - that it had always seemed pointless trying to guess how he would look when he was older. And yet none of my expectations were actually contradicted by the man sitting opposite me.
'If you are Jim Grossart--' My voice was low now.
'There's no "if" about it, Carrie.'
'Then why the hell have you waited seventeen years to speak to me?'
He smiled. 'Finished with that coffee?'
We left Sloths and took an elevator up sixteen city levels to the place where the divers were jumping off. They started the drop from a walkway that jutted out from the city's side for thirty metres, tipped by a ring-shaped platform. Brightly clothed divers waited around the ring - it only had railings on the outside - and now and then one of them would step into the middle and drop. Sometimes they went down in pairs or threes; sometimes joined together. Breathing equipment and a squirrel-suit were all they ever wore; no one ever carried a parachute or a rocket harness.
It looked a lot like suicide. Sometimes, that was just what it was.
'That's got to be fun,' Grossart said, the two of us still snug within the pressurised viewing gallery.
'Yes. If you're clinically insane.'
I immediately wanted to bite back what I'd just said, but Grossart seemed unoffended.
'Oh, cliff diving can't be that difficult - not if you've got a reasonably intuitive grasp of the Navier-Stokes equations and a few basic aerodynamic principles. You can even rent two-person squirrel-suits over there.'
'Don't even think about it.'
'Heights not your thing?' he said, turning - to my immense relief - away from the window. 'Not very Martian of you.'
He was right, though I didn't like admitting it. Gravity on Mars was only slightly less than two-fifths of Earth's - not enough to make much difference if you were planning on falling more than a few metres - but it
was
enough to ensure that Martians grew up experiencing few of the bruising collisions between bone and ground that people on Earth took for granted. Martians viewed heights the way the rest of humanity viewed electricity: merely
understood
to be dangerous, rather than something felt in the pit of the stomach.