Something Coming Through Read online

  PAUL McAULEY

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Paul McAuley 2015

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Paul McAuley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2015 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 473 20396 9

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  www.gollancz.co.uk

  For Al Reynolds,

  and for Georgina.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Just Another Snake Cult

  2. Landing Day

  3. Disruption Theory

  4. The Shadow of the Shuttle

  5. Midnight Flit

  6. The Hotel California

  7. Bob Smith

  8. Actual Ray Gun

  9. Carbon-Based Life Form

  10. Do The Right Thing

  11. Sleuthing

  12. Take Me To Your Leader

  13. Devil Squid

  14. Nothing Like Australia

  15. Red Weed Country

  16. Just Another Alien

  17. Sea Devils

  18. Blue Fairy

  19. Avatar

  20. The Leshy

  21. Unexpected Guest

  22. In The Can

  23. The Chapel

  24. Ease Up

  25. Max Predator

  26. Official Drunk

  27. Seriously Strange Shit

  28. The Worst Thing

  29. The Reef

  30. Death Knock

  31. Ugly Chicken

  32. Little Dave

  33. Anomalous Patterns Of Brain Activity

  34. The Cloud Tree

  35. A Different Sun

  36. Cold Store

  37. Little Hiccups

  38. The Shooter

  39. Drive-Through McDonald’s

  40. A Long Way Off Your Beat

  41. Through The Mirror

  42. Shit Becoming Real

  43. Gone

  44. Wire

  45. Honour And Revenge

  46. We’re Here To Help

  47. Run

  48. Downriver

  49. Downriver

  50. Deal

  51. The Black Room

  52. Local Grid

  53. Cavalry Charge

  54. Men and Monsters

  55. Some Kind of Connection

  56. Unlikely Astronaut

  57. The Gift

  Acknowledgements

  Also By Paul McAuley

  1. Just Another Snake Cult

  London | 2 July

  Four days till she was due to appear before the parliamentary select committee, Chloe Millar couldn’t take it any more. The rehearsals and group exercises, the pre-exam nerves and pointless speculation, the third degree about the New Galactic Navy…No to all that business. She banged out of there and minicabbed it down the A13 to check out a lead in Dagenham. Traffic glittering in hot sunlight, factories, housing estates and big box retail outlets, sewage works and power stations. A glimpse of the Reef’s dark blister and the river beyond. A welling feeling of relief with an undercurrent of guilt that she tried to ignore.

  The minicab was negotiating the Ripple Road junction when her phone rang. Jen Lovell, Disruption Theory’s office manager, wanting to know where she was and what she was up to.

  ‘I’m chasing a lead. A good one.’

  ‘We’ve all had to give up our Saturdays. Even you, Chloe.’

  ‘There’s a cult. Definitely turned, about to break out. They announced it on Facebook, a public meeting supposed to start at one o’clock. I’m late, but these things never run to schedule. I won’t have missed anything important.’

  ‘Preparing for the select committee: that’s what’s important.’

  ‘They haven’t shut us down yet,’ Chloe said. She wasn’t going to feel guilty. She was doing her actual job. ‘It’s probably just another snake cult, but I can’t be certain until I see it in action.’

  Her destination was a displaced-persons camp at the eastern edge of Old Dagenham Park. A row of single-storey prefab barracks and half a dozen L-shaped stacks of repurposed shipping containers, built a decade ago for refugees from flooding caused by climate change and rising sea levels, privately rented now.

  Chloe found a bench in the shade of a gnarly old chestnut tree, ate chips out of a cardboard clamshell, and watched people gathering around a makeshift stage where a scrawny old geezer in tattered jeans and T-shirt was setting up a microphone stand and a stack of speakers. Young children ran about, transformed by face paint into rabbits and tigers. A pair of policewomen watched indulgently. They were wearing new-issue stab vests, spun from tough self-healing collagen derived from a species of colonial polyp that rafted on Hydrot’s world ocean. The Met’s logo stamped in dark blue on the pearlescent material. High above, an errant balloon bobbed on an uncertain breeze, a silvery heart blinking random Morse code in the hot sunlight.

  It reminded Chloe of the music festival where she’d first been kissed, seriously kissed, by a boy whose name she’d forgotten. She’d been, what, fourteen. A late starter, according to her mates. She remembered a Hindu procession that wound through the streets of Walthamstow to the temple each year: drummers, men with painted faces in fantastic costumes, men animating giant stick-puppets of gods and dragons. She remembered one Hallowe’en, the first after First Contact, when every other kid had dressed up as a Jackaroo avatar.

  The geezer bent to the microphone, dreadlocks hanging around his face as he gave it the old one two one two. And a shadow fell across Chloe and someone said, ‘Give us a chip.’

  She looked up, saw Eddie Ackroyd in his uniform of black jeans, black T-shirt and abraded and creased black leather jacket. His pallid face was shaded by a straw hat; his ghostly blue eyes swam behind slab lenses in heavy black frames.

  ‘The café’s over by the tennis courts,’ Chloe said. ‘You’ve plenty of time to get there and back before the fun starts.’

  Eddie didn’t take the hint, settling beside her with a grunt and sigh, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it, fixing it back over greying hair he’d backcombed to hide a bald spot. He smelled of kif smoke and old sweat. The slogan on his T-shirt read I’m a secret lesbian.

  ‘Lostgirl X, large as life and twice as pretty. You may have taken the corporate shilling, but you still dress like you work the street. Kudos.’

  ‘When did you become the fashion police, Eddie?’

  Chloe was wearing her usual weekend gear: baggy knee-length shorts, a market-stall T-shirt with a stencilled peace symbol, New Balance hiking shoes. Her messenger bag, one
seam patched with Elephant tape, leaned against her thigh.

  Eddie said, ‘I bet you still carry that little blade. The one you pulled on Gypsy Nick that time.’

  ‘Keep pushing me and you’ll find out.’

  The members of this little cult were driven by urges they probably didn’t understand, prompted by some kind of alien algorithm or an eidolon, a memory fragment, that had crawled out of an Elder Culture artefact and infected them like bird flu, but they were also having fun. Chloe had been happy, waiting for them to put on their little show in the summer sunshine, but now Eddie Ackroyd’s sour little cloud was raining on her parade.

  He said, ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I don’t see you in the market or the Ten Bells…’

  His fish-eyed stare reminded her that he was the kind of guy who liked to sneak a glance at your tits when he thought you weren’t looking

  She said, ‘I guess we move in different circles now.’

  ‘And you don’t seem to be editing on LFM any more.’

  ‘You said that the last time you saw me, Eddie. Remember what I told you?’

  Chloe resented his assumption that they were colleagues. They had both been part of the Last Five Minutes wiki since its early days, they were both in the Elder Culture business, but as far as she was concerned that was it.

  When he didn’t answer her question, she said, ‘I quit. I have other things in my life now.’

  ‘We could use your help. There are still too many crazy people trying to impose their crazy ideas.’

  ‘That’s why I quit.’

  It wasn’t the only reason. It wasn’t even the main reason, which was that she’d finally realised that she’d never find out what had happened to her mother, and she wasn’t angry about it any more. But yeah, she’d also become tired of dealing with the relentless bat-shit paranoia of the green-ink merchants, and she’d suspected that Eddie and some of the other editors had been actively colluding with them. Most of the people involved with the maintenance and curation of the LFM wiki had lost parents or partners or children; Eddie had become an editor because he loved conspiracy theories, liked to believe that he was one of the chosen few with special insights about the Jackaroo and the Spasm, the lone-gunman plague, the Big Melt, blah blah blah.

  He said, ‘So how’s it going, running errands for those sociologists? Looking for stuff to prop up their theories – is that why you’re here? Or are you doing a little work on the side?’

  ‘I’m chasing a lead, Eddie. How about you?’

  ‘Well, right now I’m wondering if you’re following me.’

  ‘I might wonder the same thing about you.’

  Eddie pointed his chin towards the people bustling around the stage. ‘I’ve been working on them for three weeks. And this is the first time I see you.’

  ‘You’ve been working on them? What does that mean? Interviewing them? Gaining their confidence? Becoming their best friend?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping close tabs on them. Recording their stories for a client. And now they’re about to reach critical mass, the first time they try to reach out to the world, you just happen to pitch up.’

  ‘It isn’t a secret,’ Chloe said. ‘They put it up on Facebook.’

  It wasn’t much, a poster designed by someone who thought that rainbow gradients and dropshadowed text were cool. An image of a man with a Santa Claus beard photoshopped against a false-colour alien landscape overprinted with The Master Is Coming!!! in a shimmering banner, and a modest line of type stating time, date and place. A typical symptom of a small-scale breakout, but this one had caught her attention, she’d needed a distraction from the nonsense about the select committee, and here she was.

  ‘I found them,’ Eddie said, staring at her from beneath the brim of his hat, ‘the old-fashioned way. Asking questions, following leads. One of them from LFM, as a matter of fact. Someone who thinks they can predict significant breakouts. You would have seen it too, if you hadn’t “quit”.’

  He actually drew the quote marks in the air.

  ‘I found them because they’re trying to reach out to everyone,’ Chloe said. She was amused by Eddie’s petulance, wondered if he’d already taken a down payment for something he knew he probably couldn’t deliver. ‘Don’t take it personally. Besides, it doesn’t look like they’re anything special.’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. How we’ll sort out this little conflict of interest. I found them first, so I get first dibs on whatever these people are selling. After that, if your pointy-head academics want to interview them, add them to their database or whatever, it’s fine by me.’

  Chloe smiled. ‘We aren’t in the playground, Eddie. If these people stumbled on something useful, came into possession of an active artefact or whatever, I’ll tell my boss, and he’ll make an offer. And you and your client, if you have a client, can do the same.’

  Eddie stuck out his lower lip like a disappointed child. ‘So it’s like that.’

  ‘Same as it’s always been,’ Chloe said, ‘out here on the street.’

  Eddie stalked off to a spot in the shade of a stack of shipping-container flatlets and fired up a small drone that wobbled away towards the stage. A tall young man wearing blue jeans and a black windcheater was chatting to the two policewomen. Chloe spotted the Bluetooth headset plugged into his right ear and guessed that he was from the Metropolitan Police’s Breakout Assessment Team, a junior officer who’d drawn the short straw and given up his Saturday afternoon kick-about to check out this little gathering.

  Girls and boys in grey jumpers and black trousers or black skirts filed onto the stage and, conducted by a motherly woman in a dashiki, began to pipe out ‘Amazing Grace’ on recorders. Chloe dumped her half-eaten lunch in a recycling bin, put on her spex and walked towards the stage, and the guy in the black windcheater cut across the grass to intercept her, saying that he was surprised to see someone from Disruption Theory.

  ‘Isn’t this pretty vanilla for you guys?’

  ‘Everything’s a data point,’ Chloe said, quoting her boss, Daniel Rosenblaum.

  ‘Are you planning to interview Mr Archer and his acolytes?’

  Chloe supposed that Mr Archer was the white-haired guy on the Facebook page. She said, ‘Would that be a problem?’

  ‘Depends on how they do. Probably not. What about Mr Ackroyd?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘I expect I will. Take care, Ms Millar.’

  Just to let her know that he had her number.

  The schoolkids ran through a pretty good version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, bowed to the scattering of applause and were led off the stage by their conductor. Chloe could feel an energy gathering in the little crowd. An MC took to the stage, an amazingly confident young woman dressed in a metallic silver leotard and black tutu who hunched into the microphone and to a backing track of car-crash rhythms began a rap about the great change coming and hard times ending. When she was done and the whoops and applause had died down she asked everybody to raise their hands for the man with the plan, the man who knew.

  ‘Give it up for Mr Archer. Mr Archer going to speak the truth to you right now.’

  There was an awkward pause, some kind of hitch. The MC stood at the edge of the stage, talking to people, shaking her head. The sound system started to reprise the clanging smash of her backing music, then cut off abruptly. Several people were helping someone climb onto the stage.

  Mr Archer was a slight old man wearing what was probably the suit he planned to be buried in. His white beard was neatly trimmed; his pink scalp showed through his cap of fine white hair. The MC ushered him to the microphone stand and he clung to it and looked around like a grandfather dazed with pleasure at his own birthday party. A hush fell over the small gathering.

  Chloe’s spex were capturing everything. Eddie’s little drone hung in the sunlit air. The moment of silence stretched.

  ‘Uth,’ Mr Archer said. ‘Uth! U
th!’ And, ‘Penitent volume casualty force. Action relationship. Flow different. Uth! Uth!’

  Most in the audience chanted Uth! Uth! too. Those who weren’t part of the cult, who hadn’t drunk the snake oil, looked at each other. A couple of kids in front of Chloe started to jeer.

  Chloe felt a sinking sense of disappointment. She’d seen it all, in her time. Fiery-eyed preaching. A woman who spoke through a pink plush alligator. People standing face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, sharing significant gazes. Ritual bloodletting. A young girl walking amongst her followers with a silver wand, touching them at random, causing them to fall into faints and foaming fits. A hundred different attempts to express thoughts for which there were no human equivalents, no words in any known language. Speaking in tongues was commonplace. She’d seen it a dozen times.

  Mr Archer spoke for some time, enthusiastically expounding his thesis in his private language, repeating his catchphrase at intervals, smiling as his followers chanted in response. The two kids who’d been jeering walked away; others followed. Chloe wondered how it would end, a procession or a mass hug or a conga line, but instead the old man simply stopped speaking, laboriously stepped down from the stage, and hobbled off at the centre of a cluster of acolytes. His audience gathered up their children and drifted towards the camp. They looked pleased. They had spoken in public. They had marked their territory. They had let out the ideas jostling in their heads, like that ancient rock star who’d shaken out a box of butterflies at an open-air concert in Hyde Park. Most of the butterflies had died, but it was the gesture that counted.

  This was something that couldn’t be quantified by Disruption Theory’s surveys: the happiness of the people possessed by alien impulses and strange memes. The ecstasy of expression. The simple childlike joy of creating a channel or connection. Although the breakout was nothing special, Chloe was glad to be reminded of that. She took a flyer from one of the kids who were handing them out to the few non-believers who remained, slipped it into her messenger bag and got out of there while Eddie Ackroyd was packing up his drone.

  It was too late to head back to Disruption Theory, and she was too buzzed to fold herself into her studio flat. She returned to the park’s café and sat with a carton of iced coffee and wrote up a short report on her tablet. She studied the flyer: the speaking-in-tongues Santa Claus, Mr Archer, photoshopped against an alien landscape, with a single word, BELIEVE, printed above his head. After a minute, she pulled up the copy of the Facebook page that had led her to the park. The same kind of landscape in the background, a cluster of towers or spires in some kind of red desert.