Parallax View (25 page)

What had the Kryte told him, back there on the hell of the surface? That he was being carried towards enlightenment?

What the hell had it meant by that?

He came awake suddenly, surprised that he had lapsed into unconsciousness.

Another surprise awaited him: a Kryte crouched beside him, and he recognised it: his captor, his saviour.

It watched him with large unblinking eyes.

Abbott said, “I wondered where you were. Not far away, heh?”

The alien blinked, not deigning to reply.

He went on, “What now?”

“We have... repaired you. Made you
shreeth
...”

Abbott repeated the word, fear dinning in his head. “What do you mean?”

“Like us... shreeth, long-lived–”

He sat up, surprising himself that he could do so. Miraculously his body did not protest. He swung into a sitting position and faced the alien. He looked at his arms and legs, raised his right hand, turned it in the sanguine light of the visceral cell. He slapped his thigh. Solid muscle. He
was
whole again.

He said, “Immortal?”

The Kryte said, “Virtually so, yes.”

He was aware of his increased heartbeat. He said, “To what end?”

The Kryte blinked, “To enlightenment.”

Abbott laughed, then. He flung back his head and laughed, and the crazed sound echoed back dully from the walls of his fleshy prison.

He knew then what the alien wanted of him. He said, almost shouting, “You have made me immortal so that you shall live, am I right? Without me, you are a dead man...” He said the word without realising the irony, and then laughed belatedly. “So, now I am your slave. I must follow you to the end of existence, to keep you alive...” He wept as he said this, and dared not look ahead to the hell his life would be. He wished then that he had died out there on the surface of the planet; anything, rather than the living hell his life had become.

The Kryte blinked at him. “You are wrong, as ever, Abbott. Do you not think that we, who can grow human parts from your DNA, who can grow cities from our own cell structures, do not possess the means by which to remove the crude slave device from my body?”

Abbott stared at the alien, trying to work out where this revelation was leading.

The Kryte went on, “I am no longer slaved to you, Abbott. I am free. I can move as my will dictates.”

Abbott gestured with his regrown right hand. “Then why...
this
?”

The alien stood suddenly. By some process unknown to Abbott, the domed, veined ceiling of the cell expanded in a quick spasm to accommodate the Kryte.

The alien looked down on Abbott and said, “Stand, follow me.”

Abbott stood. He looked down at his legs, marvelling at their solidity, their strength. He took a deep breath. His chest swelled. He was free from pain.

He would have given thanks, but for the fear that lurked at the back of his mind.

The Kryte moved towards the end of the cell. The puckered anus in the wall expanded rapidly and the alien stepped through. Abbott followed it, his physical well-being buoying him as he stepped after the alien and down the winding corridor.

The gut-like tunnel widened, and Abbott made out a gallery on either side, packed with staring Kryte. They were motionless. Their massive eyes followed him. He felt at once awed, and very close to terror.

They came to another sphincter opening, which dilated and admitted them into a familiar chamber. Abbott stopped dead on the threshold, fear clutching him.

“No...”

He felt pincers grasp his arms, and he was powerless to resist as he was carried into the chamber and laid once more on the floating slab.

This time, his head was braced in a metal frame. He stared up at the dangling tentacles of the spider-like machines.

“What are you doing to me!” he cried out.

A face slipped into view, his captor. “We are giving you enlightenment, Abbott. You are blessed.”

“Blessed?” he cried. “Damned, more like!”

Then a tentacle descended with alarming alacrity and sliced off the top of his head, and Abbott remained awake throughout the entire process as his brain was eased from its casing and the Kryte went to work on his hypothalamus.

He came back to consciousness, having blacked out briefly – or so it seemed, for the same small group of Kryte were still gathered around him, chittering away in their high-speed language.

He reached up, and in doing so he realised that he was no longer being restrained. His head was intact, no sign of the surgery he so vividly recalled: the hot parting of scalp under the fast blades of the surgical – what were they? robot arms? no, too biological, but it was no beast... some kind of biological device, the tentacles and blades...

He turned his head to one side, so he could see the Kryte more directly. “Enlightenment, you say?”

Their scratchy warbling stopped, and all five Kryte turned their heads to face him. One of them – Abbott’s former travelling companion, he believed – said, “Enlightenment is an opening of the ways. The blessed must choose to step through that opening.”

Abbott just stared. He had no time for such pieties. He knew that with hard certainty now: he had no need to find refuge in platitudes and rote. He was no longer the man who had accepted such things. The Kryte knew this: they understood that he was a new man, changed by experience, wiser now. They started to talk again.

Abbott swung his legs around so that they hung free from the bench on which he had been stretched out. He felt a slight dizziness and paused, one hand to his forehead, the other supporting his weight.

He felt strong. Stronger than he had felt in many years. Whatever the Kryte had done to him, they had done it well. Only now did he start to take in what he had been told: immortality, or as near as damn it. He could still suffer a violent death, of course, just as the Kryte could, but...
immortality
. He would remain this fit and strong for... for times measured on a scale no human could ever have been able to contemplate before now.

If he could get away... His mind raced with the possibilities of a humankind granted the secret of immorality – the secret now bound up in the cells of his body! The march of his kind across the galaxy really would become unstoppable – the scale of the universe would be as nothing when timescales ceased to matter.

He shuddered, felt dizzy.

The Kryte had ceased their chatter again, and were watching him. He saw that one of them held the comms unit his Kryte had confiscated from one of the dead soldiers.

“You going to call me a ride?” asked Abbott.

They did not answer.

Abbott was tired. He wanted to sleep. He had been through such an ordeal.

“Come,” said the Kryte.

“Where...?” Abbott began.

But the Kryte was already hurrying from the chamber. Compelled, Abbott followed. He caught up with the alien and asked, “Where are we going?”

The Kryte turned to look at him. “To the planet’s surface,” it said.

They stood on a hillside, concealed behind a spur of igneous rock. Later, looking back, Abbott would realise that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the Kryte he always thought of as
his
Kryte. The view across the wide river and jungle was commanding, the ever-present buzz of Kryte minds – in the cellcity beneath their feet – dimmed to a gentle background susurrus.

“Love,” said the Kryte. Again, it seemed content to leave it at that: a single word so loaded with import, rich with meaning.

The two remained silent for long minutes.

Then, Abbott raised an eyebrow. “Love,” he repeated. A meeting of minds, finally: across the gulf of the species, a sliver of common ground, of understanding.

The Kryte gestured.

Down below, skimming across the waters of the river, Abbott saw two inflatables, body-shielded soldiers jostling shoulder to shoulder, ready to disembark.

They approached the tangled jungle at the near shore and slowed. Abbott willed them on. If they could only find a way through to land, he could go to them, escape, return to his people with the secret of immortality!

The background chorus of Kryte minds had dimmed now – anticipation, a hint of fear...

Abbott threw his hands to his head – what had they done to him? He stared at the Kryte.

“We shared with you,” it replied. “We gave you love.”

And suddenly Abbott was aware of the voices again, the seething mass of voices, of minds – his head filled with the sound of angels singing, individuals as one, as more than one, of ch’tek, of kreer.

He felt their love.

He turned to look again at the inflatables, the landing parties armoured and armed, heads pumped full of battle narcs and combatware.

The boats skimmed the river, struggling to find a landing place, and he was glad. Even at this distance he could sense the angry jabber of their minds, a hostile buzz that drowned out all else... He closed his eyes and the ch’tek flooded his mind, understanding and love and awe on a scale beyond the individual, beyond even the collective – another level altogether. And the angry jabber cut through it all.

Abbott opened his eyes and looked at the Kryte and in its eyes he saw nothing but in its mind he saw a deep, existential panic at this intrusion, this swamping of all that was good...

And then he became aware of a change, a rebalancing of the equation.

He looked across the dark waters to the landing parties as they blasted vegetation clear with bursts of laser, clearing a place to land.

The inflatables picked up speed again, and within seconds the soldiers were running up the rocky bank at the foot of the outcrop.

Abbott looked at the Kryte.

It was holding the comms unit it had taken from the dead soldier. Abbott understood.

“You wanted this, didn’t you?” said Abbott. “You wanted them to find us. You knew they would be able to trace us through the comms unit... You want me to go with them. You show me the riches of heaven, and then you banish me!” He paused, and then asked, “But why?”

The Kryte spoke, its words not sounds, but thoughts in his head.

We are a peaceful people
, it began – and something primitive in Abbott’s mind bridled at that until, a second later, he knew it to be true.

The truth flooded his mind, and he almost passed out.

The Kryte were a peaceful race, who had left their homeplanet looking for other worlds on which to live, though unlike humanity they did not change worlds to suit their purposes, or subjugate other races to their own ends. They had kreer, the joined consciousness of their kind, and a conscience that dictated they respect the sanctity of other races.

So they settled dozens of planet in their spread along the galactic arm, and lived in peace until the coming of the human race, those aliens with their own god and an implacable, righteous objective that could not be stopped.

The old Abbott would have asked, here: why then the unprovoked attacks on innocent human settlers? But the new, remade Abbott knew...

Humanity was like the cloying spores of the jungle down below, and the din of its mindnoise – the ceaseless static of humanity’s collective psyche, the pulse of id and ego, of aggression and competition – was an invasion that attacked the peaceable Kryte and had to be stopped.

Abbott turned to the Kryte and said, “Please, let me hear...”

The alien stared at him. Abbott thought he detected something like compassion in its gaze, as it spoke into his head: Abbott, that is impossible. You are human. You live with the noise by default... But I can show you in part what the experience is like for me... and bear in mind that this is after I have shielded the noise, damped the pain...

Floodgates opened in Abbott’s head, and pain poured in. The human troops making their way up the hillside were its source, but behind that, ever present, was an even greater background noise. Except that it was not noise, but pain, an awareness of evil made almost tangible.

Abbott fell to his knees and cried, “Stop!”

The Kryte reached out, compassionately, and touched Abbott’s shoulder. Mercifully, the pain in Abbott’s head ceased instantly.

We live with this constantly, the alien told him.

Abbott stood. He stared down the slope. The tiny human figures were making their slow way towards the summit of the hill.

He said, “What do you want from me?”

The Kryte blinked its huge eyes. You are our... ambassador. You are the emissary of truth. You can go among your own kind, effect the processes that will bring about a truce, a lasting peace.

Something ached deep within Abbott. His head understood and concurred with the alien’s words, but his soul craved the compassion of the Kryte, the kreer...

“Go,” the alien said, touching his arm.

Abbott reached out. He wanted embrace the creature, take it in his arms. Instead, weeping, he touched its scaled cheeks and said farewell.

He moved from behind the rock and stumbled down the slope. When he turned, the Kryte,
his
Kryte, had vanished into the pocked hillside as if it had never been.

He stumbled and fell, grazing himself. Ahead, a soldier saw him and pointed. Abbott reached out, the gesture less one of hope than of despair.

Within a minute he was surrounded by troops, and assisted down the slope. From nowhere a flier appeared, swooping down to land on the rock before them, and seconds later they were airborne. Abbott watched the hillside fall away.

Around him, a dozen troops stared at him with something little short of awe, and Abbott was repulsed.

But how, he thought then. How, alone, will I convince my kind...?

He never finished the question.

Into his head came the words of the Kryte,
his
Kryte:
Do not fear, my friend.

I fear the task ahead, Abbott thought.

I am with you,
replied the alien.

Abbott smiled to himself, and gave thanks, as the flier carried him at speed across the surface of St Jerome towards the sanctuary of Fort Campbell.

Parallax Views

Keith Brooke and Eric Brown
in discussion

Keith Brooke and Eric Brown are two long-standing members of the
Interzone
generation: the group of mainly UK-based writers whose careers grew around this magazine in the 1980s and ’90s.

Both started publishing short fiction in the late 1980s: first Brown with “Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal Zen Equation” in Autumn 1987 and then Brooke (after two small press stories) with “Adrenotropic Man” in July 1989. Each had a story in Chris Evans and Rob Holdstock’s
Other Edens 3
, and they met at the book launch in September 1989.

Brooke has published twelve novels to date, including four for teenagers under the pen-name Nick Gifford. His most recent novels are
Genetopia
,
The Accord
,
The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie
and
alt.human
: His short fiction has been collected in six volumes. He is also editor of several books, including
Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the sub-genres of science fiction
.

Brown has written over forty books, beginning with the collection
The Time-Lapsed Man and other stories
and the novel
Meridian Days.
His more recent books include
The Kings of Eternity, Helix Wars,
and the first volume of a shared-world series,
The Devil’s Nebula.
His collections include
Blue Shifting, The Angels of Life and Death
and
Ghostwriting
. He’s published over one hundred SF short stories in magazines and anthologies in Britain and the US.

Keith Brooke: I suppose in one sense, we’ve collaborated almost as long as we’ve known each other. Back in 1991 my publishers wanted some changes making to
Expatria Incorporated
which I wasn’t too sure about. You and Steve Baxter very kindly agreed to look at the manuscript and I ended up making most of the changes Gollancz and the two of you suggested and the novel was much stronger as a result. Ever since then, we’ve critted each other’s work before it’s submitted, so I suppose all stories appearing under our names are collaborations to some extent. I know
my
stories are better as a result.

Eric Brown: Having work criticised is a scary and fascinating process. Like collaboration, it isn’t something you’d undertake with anyone. There’s trust involved, and a recognition of the other person’s ability and insight. Over the years I’ve given many people my stories to read and comment on, and in general I’ve found that their comments were either too flattering, or that they missed the point of what I was doing. It’s great when you come across the rare person who’s on your wavelength and can dissect a tale, point out where it’s going wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it.

As for collaborating on stories...

KB: I remember walking back from the pub with you one night in Haworth and tentatively asking what you thought about the idea of collaboration. You said you couldn’t see how it could work, you didn’t like talking about ideas until you’d written the story. I pretty much felt the same (although simultaneously I was intrigued by the idea of collaborating) so I didn’t mention it again.

EB: The night is lost in the after-effects of too much Timothy Taylor’s Best Bitter – but I know why I was reluctant. Two main things. One was that I probably thought that collaborations were never as good as single author stories – they were either compromises, or third rate stories worked over by a second hand. (Which is perhaps true in some cases – but not in others, for example the Pohl/Kornbluth collaborations.) The second reason for my reluctance was more personal. I was unwilling to share with someone the rather inept way I go about thinking up and plotting a story. (The route from original idea to finished product is long and tortuous, involving many detours, discarded ideas, completely off-the-track speculation...) To articulate an idea for a story to someone would be to open up the creaky way my brain works. However, as I recall, our first collaboration wasn’t built up from an original idea, was it?

KB: You sent me a story you weren’t happy with, called “The Girl Who Loved Beethoven”. You knew it didn’t work, but said you didn’t know how to fix it. You wanted to get on with your new novel and you said you were just going to put “The Girl Who...” away and forget about it.

I read the story and, although it needed a fair bit of work, I saw quite clearly how to do it. When I’m workshopping someone else’s story I always try to resist the temptation to wade in and say, “You should be doing it like
this!
” It’s a process of finding the right questions to ask, rather than supplying my own answers. But the thought of such a striking idea simply being discarded was too much for me and I suggested that if you really
were
going to abandon the story then maybe I could do something with it. I was wary of intruding on your territory – it was your story, after all – but you responded enthusiastically. So I took the story to pieces, built it up again and then we bounced it back and forth by post so many times that I suspect neither of us could confidently say who contributed which elements. That story became “Appassionata” (
Interzone
, July 1996).

EB: We did a couple more stories like this. From my point of view it was nice to see stories that I liked – but that I had to admit didn’t work – turn into good pieces. What amazed me with the finished results was not only that they worked, and worked well, but that you’d incorporated your own take into the story and produced something that I, alone, would have had no chance of accomplishing. I think this synergy is the true benefit of collaborating.

KB: It’s funny the way it works: I always feel that I’ve contributed less than my 50% worth to any of our collaborations, yet you insist that
you’ve
done less than half. And yet the result is something neither of us could have written on our own... What is it, do you think, that makes a writing partnership work?

EB: Well, it’s necessary to know and trust the other person – at least, I know it is in my case. Also, you need to believe in the other writer’s ability. I think we’re very much on the same wavelength in terms of interests, views, outlook. We’re good friends and there’s certainly no ego problem about who should do what in a story, or who’s name should go first, stuff like that. I’d find it hard to write a story that meant anything with someone I’d never met, or didn’t particularly like.

I’ve collaborated on two stories with Steve Baxter, another friend. We have very different writing styles, and approaches to science fiction. What happened was that I had a couple of ideas for hard SF stories – with the disadvantage of knowing nothing about science. Steve deconstructed the ideas, told me why they wouldn’t work, and then we set about building them back up. The result was two stories I certainly wouldn’t even have attempted solo, “Sunfly” in
Interzone
100 (October 1995), and “The Spacetime Pit”
Interzone
107 (May 1996).

KB: I think it’s possible to roughly categorise SF authors into two schools: those who
do
SF, and those who
use
it. Steve is one of the best doers in the business, with the big science-fictional idea always central, and the story and character a means of exploration. You and I are users, taking established SF tropes, twisting them and remixing them into something that we hope is new: the ideas in an Eric Brown story are often striking, but they are always secondary to the exploration of plot and character. The extra something in a Baxter/Brown story comes from the space between your two approaches; I suppose the extra something in a Brooke/Brown story comes from where we overlap and reinforce each other.

EB: I think that what you add to the collaborations is a keener intelligence and a logical approach; you never let me get away with any scientific sloppiness or convenience, which I’d be quite happy to use in my own stories if so doing aided my overall intent – the communication to the reader of emotional intensity and atmosphere. As far as I’m concerned the science in my stories is secondary, and often not even that.

KB: The process of collaboration has moved on from my early reworkings of your stories. You came down for a weekend and on the Sunday we locked ourselves away and brainstormed a story virtually from scratch. In the space of a couple of hours we went through a process that, working independently, would take us a fortnight or more: expanding the initial idea, discarding elements that didn’t work, bouncing plot twists and speculations back and forth until we had something just waiting to be written. Writing’s not exactly a spectator sport, but that’s about as close as it gets...

For the rest of the week I wrote in the evenings after work until the story was well under way, then I e-mailed the part-written story to you (so much faster than relying on snail mail, as we used to!). You picked it up, continued the story, and sent it back to me a week later. I didn’t know what you’d done with it, and couldn’t wait to read it. That story grew and grew and then went through the usual process of revision, shuttling back and forth between Essex and Yorkshire until we decided it was ready to send out into the world. That story became “The Denebian Cycle” and was published in
Interzone
152 (February 2000).

If only the history of our collaborative collection had been as smooth... As I recall it, we both had the idea of collecting our stories together in book-form independently.

EB: But it was you who actually got the ball rolling. You were in contact with Anthony Barker at Tanjen Books, a small press outfit based in Leicestershire. We signed a contract for a modest fee and the collection, entitled
Parallax View
, was due out in May 1999. It contained our five collaborations, and a solo tale by each of us – plus a fantastic introduction by Steve [Baxter]. I was looking forward to seeing the collection in print – Tanjen produced lovely looking books, and they were stories I believed in. And then, due to financial troubles beyond Anthony’s control, Tanjen went out of business. I was more than a little disappointed. It was the second book to be contracted for and then never published. (Pan bought my fix-up book
The Fall of Tartarus
, way back in 1995, only to scrap the title when they dumped me and a whole load of other SF authors.)

The following year, the small press outfit Sarob Books stepped into the breach and put out a very handsome limited edition of
Parallax View
with lovely cover and interior illustrations by Dominic Harman. Seven years later, Storm Constantine’s Immanion Press brought the book’s first paperback edition.

KB: Yes, for that 2007 edition we decided to change the mix a little, dropping the two solo stories and replacing them with a brand-new, never before published novella,
In Transit
. Again, for this one we bounced ideas back and forth for a bit, then took it in turns to write the first draft. I was really pleased with the end result, and delighted to have had a hand in it.

EB: And now, a few years further on, here’s a new edition of the book, with the same contents list as the Immanion edition, plus this interview. So for a book that had a rocky start, it’s not done too badly, after all, has it?

KB: Our writing backgrounds couldn’t really be more strongly contrasting, could they? I wrote a handful of stories as a student then, after graduating, I took a year out and sold
Interzone
the first story I wrote during that period. Then I wrote a novel and ended up with a three book deal with Gollancz. It wasn’t quite an overnight success, but it all happened very fast.

The first novel,
Keepers of the Peace
, was my angry young man novel: an answer to that unpleasant right wing sub-genre of military SF. I wanted to write something that appeared to fit into that category but subverted it, something that might make a few teenaged boys question the mindset of some of the writers they enjoyed. It’s a thoroughly flawed book, of course, but it still means a lot to me. I followed it up with
Expatria
and
Expatria Incorporated
, high-spirited SF adventure stories, set on a low-tech colony world that’s lost touch with the rest of humankind. The novels are the culmination of my GenGen future history: Max Riesling, the protagonist of my first Interzone story, has become the figurehead of a new capitalist techno-religion whose leaders want to recover their abandoned assets on Expatria. The GenGen short stories are collected separately in
Faking It
, which came out in 2010.

EB: Why did you turn to self-publishing with
Lord of Stone
? [Since published by Cosmos Books – EB.]

KB: Put simply: because no-one else would do it and I still believed that the novel was better than anything else I’d had published by that stage. This was many years before the likes of Amazon made self-publishing a far more conventional route.

If anything, I was successful too early and had a lot of learning to do in the years that followed. After the first three novels I thought I could do whatever I wanted. With the best possible intentions, my editors told me to write my important book next. I thought the timing was right: I’d written a serious book, then two ‘entertainments’, so it was time for something a bit heavier. So I wrote a war novel that was consciously influenced by Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
.
Lord of Stone
is about the death of magic in a secular world, a fantasy thriller without much fantasy, set in an early 20th century world that wasn’t quite our own. Despite the fact that it didn’t fit any of the neat publishing categories, Gollancz said for a time that they wanted to publish it, then for some unexplained reason they changed their minds. The book did the rounds, but never found a home, and I finally realised that it was time to put it away and forget about it. Or put it on the web, which I did in December 1998. It did well there – far better than I had dared hope – and then US publisher Cosmos picked it up for hardback and paperback editions a few years later. It was a valuable learning experience, and interesting preparation for how the publishing market developed ten years later with the advent of self-publishing and flourishing indies, with the ebook revolution.