Lake Deja Vu

The lead article in this week’s Nature, summarised on JPL’s site, confirms previous reports that there are presently lakes of what is presumably liquid methane and ethane on Titan. There are all kinds of lakes in all kinds of places, it seems. Some have been compared to flooded volcanic calderas, like Crater Lake in Oregon, which I visited a couple of years ago while doing research for Players, much of which is set in the forests of the southwest of that state; here’s a low rez photo to prove it. The island in the lake is called Wizard Island, and it’s another, smaller volcano inside the much larger one. With its panoramas of volcanic cones, and pumice fields, it’s a truly alien landscape for the British visitor; how strange and wonderful that it may be replicated in different materials on Titan, where a couple of my characters will shortly be playing a desperate game of hide and seek...

Dead Tyrant Storage

Last week, Richard Dawkins gave a refreshingly different reason why Saddam Hussein shouldn’t have been hung. His mention of using a time machine to retrieve Hitler for psychological study rang a very faint bell - didn’t someone write a short story on this theme?

In other news, ‘Dead Men Walking’ has been picked up by David Hartwell for his Best SF anthology. Gosh.

Elsewhere

As threatened, I’ve posted the first two and a half chapters of Players on my much neglected web site.

Out There

From the good people who are swinging Cassini around the Saturn system, some choice images of moons seen previously, but never in such detail, and moons never before seen too. Glorious.

The Dreamer Awakes

The day after New Year’s Day, London is almost back to normal. On Christmas Day itself, G. and I walked down through Clerkenwell to the Thames, and at times were quite alone on streets where the only movement was litter blowing in the wind and pigeons pecking after it. All the buildings shuttered, asleep with that peculiar suspended stillness that’s so different to the quiet of the countryside, all except for St Paul’s Cathedral, lighted and open, getting ready for the Eucharist service, the sound of its bells floating after us as we crossed the footbridge to the South Bank. In the week between Christmas and New Year, many parts of the city were still so deserted they might have been sets from a movie depicting the aftermath of some depopulating disaster; but now everyone is back, and the city is awake again.

In the post today, the first of the year, a contract from Gardner Dozois, who wants to include my story ‘Dead Men Walking in his Year’s Best annual collection. Which is as good a start to the year as any.

End Times

I think the extract above should be the last I’ll post here. By now, if you’ve been reading these snippets, you’ve met all the principal characters in Players, progressing much further will give away too much of the rest of the plot, and in any case the novel will be published in February if you want to find out what happens next (it’s not too early to preorder). I’ll probably put up a couple of complete chapters on my web site, though. Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last day of 2006 reading through and printing out the manuscript for the edited version of Cowboy Angels; it’s sitting by my elbow on the desk, cooling from the laser printer, as I type this. And I have to get back to the new novel, too. Busy, busy, busy . . . I’m not quite up to the standards of Anthony Trollope, who would upon completing the last lines of a novel immediately begin the first lines of the next, so as not to waste a minute of the time he alloted himself each day for composition before going off to his work at the post office (I can’t help wondering how completely he made the switch from novelist to civil servant each day, especially as he insisted that authors must live with their characters ‘in the full reality of established intimacy’). No, I’m a little more indolent. Before I head out to the Moon, and the moons of Saturn, and renew my acquaintance with Macy Minnot, Cash Baker, Sri Hong-Owen and all the rest, I’m taking tomorrow off. Happy New Year.

Players - 22

Although he still hadn’t reached the save point in the ruins of downtown Los Angeles, Daryl was feeling pleased with himself. He’d closed out bids on three items he was selling on eBay, drawn from the store of gadgets, maps, and other valuables he’d acquired during Seeker8's adventures in Trans, and the deals had fattened his PayPal account by just over four hundred dollars. Even better, his partner, Ratking, finally had reached out to him, explaining that he’d had to attend to some urgent business out in the world, but now he could devote his attention to the final stage of the treasure hunt.

> I’ve developed a new strategy. I can’t come with you, but I’ll be watching over you. I’ll be your guardian angel.

> Lay it on me, Daryl typed.

They were instant messaging, East Coast to West Coast and back again. It was one in the morning in Brooklyn, just after Daryl’s latest attempt to get Seeker8 to the save point had failed.

> I purchased a hack that lets me watch anyone in the game. I’ve become a point of view, pilgrim. I’m the eagle that dwells on the rock. Wherever you go, I’ll be right there with you. I’ll be the voice in the burning bush. I’ll speak to you out of the whirlwind.

Daryl, reading this, hunched over the glowing screen in his hot dark cell in Brooklyn’s unsleeping anthill, wondered what had happened to his partner while he’d been out of the loop. Previously, Ratking’s messages had been terse and clipped, pure business and always straight to the point, but now he was on fire with self-importance and a Biblical fervour.

After a moment’s thought, popping gum with machine-gun rapidity, Daryl rattled out his reply:
> I’d rather you were watching my back, helping me knock down the warewolves.

Strictly speaking, Seeker8 had been taken down by tar babies this time, but it had been a pack of warewolves that had driven him into the broken channel of the Los Angeles River, with its smoking cinder cones, fields of congealed lava, and asphalt pits from which dozens of tar babies had clambered, lumbering stiff-legged towards him from every direction like giant teddy bears dipped in sump oil, eyes glowing red, stubby arms spread wide. He’d killed thirty or forty with incendiary bullets and grenades before he’d been caught from behind in an unbreakable embrace and carried off and drowned in a deep pool of oily water. The night before that, warewolves had chased him howling through the ruins, playing with him, nipping at his heels, harrying him with balletic coordination until they’d finally closed in and taken him down.

Each attempt to reach the next save point had been harder than the last. It wasn’t just that the warewolves were making things difficult. The game itself constantly evolved as players roamed across it and interacted with each other, finding treasures, trading secrets and weapons, making alliances, building or destroying fiefdoms. The game learned from players’ moves, adjusted itself to their strategies, messed up their plans by throwing storms and earthquakes, bandits and monsters into their paths. Daryl had been worrying that he had reached a no-win stalemate, reloading time and time again to try to make progress from a hopeless position, but now his partner was back with the promise of fresh information and this weird new mystical slant. Telling Daryl now:

> The eagle dwells and abides on the crag of the rock, and the strong place. That’s me.

Daryl massaged his forehead with one hand, and with the forefinger of the other hit the Caps Lock key and pecked ?

> Read the Book of Job, pilgrim. Meanwhile, you need to reach that save point. Let me make some suggestions.

Ratking might have started to have sound like the preacher at the church Daryl’s mother attended each and every Sunday, but his advice was as detailed and sensible as ever. After some back and forth, he told Daryl to wait until tomorrow evening before he tried to move on.

> I’ll be watching then. And when you reach the next save point, we’ll work out what to do next.

Players - 21

The blonde waitress, Janice, was a tall and big-boned young woman, with acne in the corners of her mouth and too much blue eyeshadow. She said that she’d heard about what happened to Edie on the TV news, just about everyone was cut up about it, and confirmed that Edie had been at work last Thursday but hadn’t turned up on Friday. ‘It’s a fucking shame what happened to her, excuse my French. She was a real darlin’. Everyone but Sneaky Pete liked her.’

‘Sneaky Pete?’

‘Mr Schopf, the manager? I don’t suppose he was much help to you.’

Janice had an accent from someplace three thousand miles south and east of Portland that lifted every other sentence into a question. She wore a candy-striped cotton dress and a white apron with a scalloped trim. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail fastened with a rubber band, and there was a ballpoint pen tucked behind her ear.

Summer said, ‘Mr Schopf thought you might be able to help me.’

‘I don’t know how I can, but I can try.’

The girl was shifting from foot to foot in her trodden-down flat-heeled shoes, easing the weight on her ankles. Summer suggested that they sit in an empty booth. When they were settled, she said, ‘Did you know Edie socially, or just here at work?’

‘Just at work. We talked when we snuck cigarettes out back? I know she was on probation, and she wanted to go straight. Her big idea, she wanted to go work in one of those big offices downtown. Excuse me.’ Janice pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of her eyes and said in a pinched voice, ‘I thought she was sweet, y’know?’

Summer said, ‘Did she have a boyfriend that you knew of?’

Janice blew her nose with surprising delicacy. ‘She sure did. Real nice boy, name of Billy.’

Summer felt a quick flare of hope. ‘Did you ever meet this Billy?’

‘Just the once. He came by on Edie’s first day. I think he wanted to see where she was working?’

Garrulous, sharp-eyed Janice, every cop’s idea of a dream witness, gave Summer a description of Edie Collier’s boyfriend: six foot nothing, brown eyes and cheekbones to die for, shoulder-length black hair, rangy, wearing Hi-Top sneakers, blue jeans out at both knees and a raggedy old T-shirt. ‘And he had a couple of fingers missing from one of his hands.’

‘Which hand?’

‘The right.’

‘Can you remember which fingers were missing?’

‘The little finger, and the one next to it.’ Janice wrinkled her nose, remembering. ‘They were cut off at the knuckle? He kept his hand behind him, or in his pocket, like he was ashamed of it, but I saw it when he lit a cigarette.’

‘Did Edie ever tell you how her boyfriend lost his fingers? Was it some kind of industrial accident, for instance?’

‘Uh-uh.’

‘How about his last name?’

Janice looked up at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. ‘I don’t believe it ever came up. Like I said, I only met him that one time.’

‘Did Edie mention what he did for a living?’

‘I believe it was something to do with computers. He played games in competition, something like that? I know when he came in that time he had one of those laptop cases. But whatever he was into, it can’t have earned him much money -- the two of them were living out of his van.’

Players - 20

The Black Rock Desert, Nevada. The sun a fiery nail hammered high in the wide blue sky; hot wind blowing threads of alkali dust across the playa towards bare mountains rippling behind glassy layers of heat haze.

Carl Kelley was standing in a thin wedge of shade at the rear of the big RV, wearing a baseball cap, an unbuttoned denim shirt and black combat pants, sipping from a bottle of spring water, and watching with edgy and uncharacteristic impatience as Dirk Merrit’s ultralight stooped and turned and climbed a couple of miles away. The buzz of the ultralight’s rear-mounted prop sounded like a bee at a window, rising and falling as Merrit harried the sacrifice to and fro across the dry lake bed, taking his bloody time about it.

The RV, a Coachman Cross Country SE finished with ten coats of hand-rubbed black lacquer and customized from stem to stern, was an ideal way of transporting sacrifices to remote sites where Dirk Merrit could act out his fantasies. The sacrifice could be kept trussed and gagged on the bed in the main sleeping compartment; Dirk Merrit liked to stretch out his unlikely length on the modified recliner behind the big, comfortable driver’s chair. And because people who own RVs often attach all kinds of leisure equipment to them, no one looked twice at the trail bike hung on the rear rack, or the Cumulus motor glider folded on its twenty-foot trailer.

The volume of the walkie-talkie clipped to Carl’s belt was turned right down because he was tired of listening to Dirk Merrit’s breathless whoops of glee, and he didn’t bother to follow the action with the pair of Bushnell field glasses hung around his neck because he knew from all the other times how it would go. If the sacrifice stood its ground, Dirk Merrit would fire shots around it until it ran; when it ran, he chased it and dive-bombed it and took pot shots until it was too tired to run any more, and then he landed and dispatched it with his crossbow.

All in all, it was an expensive, complicated, and dangerous way to get your rocks off, and Carl had lost all patience with it. Also, he felt a squirt of acid in his blood every time the flimsy little aircraft swooped low. Dirk Merrit took unnecessary risks because he thought he was smarter than anyone else and was going to live for ever. Carl would be glad enough to see the back of him, but it wasn’t quite time for him to die. Soon, but not quite yet.

Actuality

I’ve just received advanced copies of Players, and as usual had the strange feeling holding in my hand a physical representation of something that’s been in my head for the past couple of years. I must say the design and layout is striking and quite handsome. But as yet, I haven’t read any of it, being very aware of the Awful Curse of the About-To-Be-Published: an author, on reading in the first copy of his new book a random sentence on a random page will spot a howler that’s entirely his own fault. Unread, the book remains, like Schrodinger’s cat, uncollapsed into its final quantum state.

Players - 19

Summer sat at the back of the wood-panelled courtroom and watched things go down pretty much as Mark Kirkpatrick had predicted. A line of shackled prisoners shuffled in, mostly wife-beaters, petty thieves and hung-over drunks, all of them wearing orange jumpsuits with ‘Macabee County Correctional Facility’ stencilled in black letters across their chests and backs. Randy Farrell was hunched between a wincing teenager and a dignified black man with a shaven head. When he noticed that Summer was looking at him, something hardened in his face and he looked away.

The court officer, a balding man wearing an ancient Colt in a worn leather holster under his paunch, ordered everyone to rise, and the judge appeared from a door behind the bench like a figure in a medieval clock. Randy Farrell’s case was first up. Mark Kirkpatrick said that his client wished to plead guilty, and asked to approach the bench. He had a brief whispered conversation with the judge, stepped back. The judge fixed Randy Farrell with a sharp stare and told him that assault on an officer of the law was a serious matter, but given the circumstances and the recent tragic events she was minded to mitigate the sentence to a fine of five hundred dollars and a suspended sentence of a hundred days. The prosecutor made no objection, and the judge banged her gavel and moved on to the next case.

After that, everything moved with the smooth dispatch of a well-rehearsed execution. Randy Farrell was released into Summer’s custody, and after he had changed into his own clothes in a restroom and paid his fine at the cashier’s desk Summer drove him out of the parking lot and through Cedar Falls’s one-way system to the I-5.

Although no one followed them, Summer had the feeling that a hundred years ago they would have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. She let Randy Farrell sit up front next to her, but he hardly said a word on the long trip back to Portland.

Players - 18

Joseph Kronenwetter’s neighbour was a widow by the name of Rhonda Cannon, a sensible, sharp-eyed, garrulous old bird in jeans and a man’s shirt. She had no objection to answering Summer’s questions, telling her that she had known Joe Kronenwetter from birth, it was a darn shame he’d turned out the way he did.

‘He was a nice little boy, tow-haired and cute as apple pie. He got into a few scrapes with the law when he was a teenager, but it wasn’t anything serious, and he straightened up after he joined the army. His father, now, he was a drinking man. That’s how they reckon the house burned down, he passed out one evening with a lit cigarette in his hand. It was just after Christmas, in the middle of a snowstorm. My husband -- he was still alive then -- saw a light flickering through the falling snow, and realized the Kronenwetters’ place was on fire. It took the fire trucks more than an hour to arrive, not that it would have made any difference if they had turned up right away: the house was already alight from top to bottom when my husband spotted it. It was one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen in my life, that house throwing yellow flame and black smoke into the night and snow coming down all the while.’

‘Joseph Kronenwetter was in the army at the time.’

‘Yes, ma’am, getting ready for the First Iraq War. He was given compassionate leave when his parents died in the fire, came back for the funeral, stood straight and tall in his dress uniform by his parents’ grave, and then he went right back to Kuwait to fight Saddam. He’s the only one of his family left. He had an older brother that died in a traffic accident, and there’s a sister who upped and went to live in Los Angeles, no one knows if she’s alive or dead. Anyhow, either the deaths of his parents hit him hard or something happened to him in Kuwait, but when he quit the army and came back here you could see at once that he was a changed man. He’d never been what you could call talkative, but when he came back he didn’t hardly care to pass the time of day. He was drinking heavily, he grew his hair and shambled about in ragged clothes like he was some kind of hobo, and when he did talk to you it was most often to sound off about how people were out to get him.’

‘What kind of people?’

Rhonda Cannon looked away, shrugged. ‘Oh, it was just nonsense. He said that people were hiding in the woods and watching him, nonsense like that. I paid it no heed.’

Summer said, ‘I know you don’t want to speak ill of your neighbour, ma’am. But anything you know about him could help us understand why this happened. It might even help him.’

‘I can’t see how, seeing as you have him locked up.’

‘It might help get him the right treatment.’

Have A Very Cthulhu ...

...Christmas.

Players - 17

When his mother came back from work at half past midnight, Daryl Weir was still up, still deep in Trans. A slender, athletic black boy who looked a lot younger than his sixteen years, he was sitting cross-legged on a corduroy beanbag in T-shirt and boxers, hands folded around his customized controller, his face about a foot from the screen of his computer. The screen was the only source of light in the small, stuffy bedroom. It showed a solidly built man in a leather kilt and a harness hung with all kinds of kit marching at a steady pace down a ruined street, cradling an AK-47 in his muscular arms.

The man in the kilt was Daryl’s avatar, a fortune hunter with the handle Seeker8. Daryl was watching him from the usual player’s viewpoint, a few yards behind the back of his head, and steering him with his left thumb. The street stretched away across a parched plain gridded with low ruins and overgrown with a scrub of leafless bushes and a scattering of giant cactuses with crooked arms raised in surrender against a technicolour sunset. When he heard his mother call his name through the closed door of his room, Daryl hunched a fraction of an inch closer to the screen. He really didn’t need any distraction right now, not when Seeker8 was still a long way from the next save point and night was coming on fast.

The front door of the tiny apartment opened directly onto the living room, with the main bedroom and the bathroom off to the left, and the second bedroom, Daryl’s, and the kitchen off to the right. As Seeker8 marched along at an unvarying pace down the middle of the street, past the rusted shells of cars, low mounds of rubble, and street lights leaning at different angles, Daryl heard through the thin plasterboard wall the solid clunk of the refrigerator opening and closing, and knew that his mother was pouring herself a glass of chocolate milk. In a moment the TV would come on; when she got back from her night work, cleaning bank offices in Manhattan, his mother liked to relax in front of the TV with a comforting drink, a White Russian or iced chocolate milk spiked with vodka, before going to bed. But instead of the sudden blare of the TV, the door behind Daryl clicked open, and his mother said, ‘Sweetie, you still up?’

Quote of the Week

'Very few people would want to have their brain replaced by someone else’s...’

Professor Bruce Lahn, New Scientist

Players - 16

Across the room, the rack of TVs flooded with red light. All of them showed the same picture: a man with an unlikely muscular build in leather harness and a kilt jogging through the levelled ruins of a city.

Dirk Merrit said, ‘Remember him?’

Carl was getting a very bad feeling. ‘He’s the partner of your latest sacrifice. The one in Brooklyn. The one you said you weren’t interested in. The one you said would give up after he was left on his own.’

‘Because he was younger and more inexperienced, yes. But he has managed to reach the ruins of Los Angeles after all. He’s been beaten back three times, but he is persistent and clever. He’s a stayer after all. If I don’t do anything, I do believe he’ll reach the oracle soon. And if he has the password that gets him past the oracle, or if he can guess it, he’ll be one step away from the source of those valuable trinkets Mr Hunter Smith likes to sell on eBay.’

‘So put the wolves on him,’ Carl said.

The wolves were a bunch of players in a Romanian click farm, paid by Dirk Merrit to defend the Los Angeles basin from intruders.

On the TV screens, the muscular man jogged past a row of dead palms. Their shrivelled fronds were etched black against a swollen red sun.

Dirk Merrit said, ‘His game profile suggested that he was the junior partner. But now I’ve had to revise my opinion. Not just because of what he has achieved on his own: I’ve read the emails he exchanged with our sacrifice, too. He’s a prodigy.’

‘I thought you’d given up trying to crack that laptop.’

When Carl had kidnapped the latest pilgrim and his girlfriend, he’d brought the guy’s laptop back too.

‘It was quite a clever little bit of encryption. But as it turns out, I’m cleverer,’ Dirk Merrit said complacently. ‘I read every one of this player’s emails, and he’s easily the equal of his partner. Which means that he’s equally worthy of my attentions.’

Meanwhile . . .

I’ve been pounding away at the first draft of a novel for the past few weeks, getting up to speed, getting inside the beast. And at the same time I’ve been tackling an edit of another novel . . . Which is why I’ve been posting with decreasing frequency, I’m afraid.

Meanwhile, Al Reynold’s marvellous short-story collection, Zima Blue, for which I wrote the introduction, is available in trade and limited edition from Nightshade Books.

Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowter Is Out Right Now, and includes my short story ‘Dust’. About which I said:

The creators of Forbidden Planet made no secret of the fact that they’d borrowed and updated the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the same spirit, I hope that no one minds that my little homage to that marvelous film borrows and updates its robots, monsters, and super-technology hidden in an underground alien city.

And Jonathan Strahan has posted the fantabulous listing for the space opera anthology he’s editing with Gardner Dozois. I am not worthy . . .

Players -15

Denise and Summer drove down a road that switchbacked between trees and outcrops of rock, a sharp bend suddenly revealing a narrow valley blocked by a tall wedge of white concrete, stark in the floodlights burning along its top. Straight ahead, halfway up the side of the valley, was a broad shelf where three towers stood, also floodlit.

Denise said, ‘That’s the dam, and that’s Merrit’s house -- if you can call it a house.’

It was like a fairy-tale castle, Summer thought, or a trio of old-fashioned rocket ships. The tallest tower was easily a hundred and fifty feet high, with a little glass dome glinting at the top -- yeah, just like a spaceship. The other two towers were shorter; one looked half finished, ending in an uneven crown of rebar. Arrow-slits and round windows shone at different heights in their smooth, tan walls.

Denise parked her Jeep Cherokee behind a black Mercedes SUV at the foot of the tallest tower. She and Summer got out and buckled their bracelets to their wrists. It was very quiet. A steep wooded slope rose on their left towards the black sky. The other two towers were spotlit beyond rocks and stands of bamboo. Although Summer was amused by the obvious theatricality of this spooky setting, she felt a tickle of apprehension as she followed Denise to the smooth flank of the tower, where a castle door swung open silently, a touch straight out of some dumb horror movie. The foyer, pinched between a pair of curving staircases and lit by the lurid flicker of a cluster of TV sets that hung overhead like a chandelier, narrowed to a big steel door that, like the castle door, swung open when Denise and Summer walked towards it, revealing a large room with leather couches and armchairs grouped around an open fireplace in the centre. There were all kinds of objects in niches and behind glass in the adobe walls, clusters of animal heads hung above them, and a tall man stood on the far side, his back to Summer and Denise as he studied or pretended to study a flat-screen TV that was showing some kind of cartoon, a Mad Max-style warrior jogging along a ruined street towards a cluster of broken skyscrapers.

The man’s hands were clasped behind him, dead white against the green silk of his robe -- no, it was a kimono, Summer realized, that big red target on the back was a chrysanthemum. The tall collar of the kimono was turned up, so that she couldn’t see his head; its hem ended just above his knees. His shanks were as pale as his hands, and as hairless as a mannequin’s.

He kept his back to Summer and Denise as they approached. ‘Detective Childers, so nice to see
you again,’ he said. ‘Congratulations on the arrest, by the way. It’s good to know that our police are so efficient. Or should I say so lucky?’

His voice was a light baritone, as engaging as a chat-show host’s.

‘It was a little of both,’ Denise said. ‘This is -- ’

‘Detective Summer Ziegler of the Portland Police Bureau,’ Dirk Merrit said, and turned in a sudden flare of green silk.

Summer’s first thought was that it was a cheesy move that he must have practised a lot. Her second was that he was wearing a mask. Then he smiled at her, and it was as if a red wound had opened in his stiff white face.

Boy, Is My Face Red

I confess - I was wrong about the photo on the previous post being taken from the ISS, and Al Reynolds proved it (see the discussion thread for details). And from the thread on digg.com that Al Reynolds ferretted out, courtesy of CubicZirconia, these are the guys who took the photograph from their WB-57 reconnaissance plane. They look more like astronauts than astronauts. More links to cool pictures on that site by the way...

Why I Write, Part 12

I pulled this down from one of the message boards where I lurk. I think it came from NASA via Warren Ellis’s site, but I’m not privy to the latter and can’t locate it on the former. Anyway, it’s beautiful: a shuttle launch photographed from the International Space Station.