Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

The train stopped. Plaquette’s heart just about did, too. Her only adventure would be jail. How could she help Ma and Pa from inside the pokey? She scanned the walkway for Msieur and his friends, coming to demand justice.

But no one showed. The shouts for her and Ma to stop grew fainter. The train started again, more slowly. Suddenly Ma was there, yanking Claude desperately by his cord. She’d pulled his crate off. It was on the platform, slowly disappearing into the distance. Together, Ma and Plaquette lifted Claude like he was luggage, tilting him to scrape over the carriage’s narrow threshold. As they did, the tray holding the books caught on the edge and was dragged open – and it held more than book scrolls. Cool metallic disks, crisp or greasy slips of paper – Msieur’s money!

How? Plaquette wasted a precious moment wondering – he must have put the day’s take into Claude when she surprised him in the showroom.

Ma’s eyes got wide as saucers. She was still running to keep up, puffing as she hefted Claude’s weight. With a heave, she and Plaquette hauled him into the car. He landed with a heavy thump. The train was speeding up. There was no time to count it; Plaquette fisted up two handfuls of the money, coins and bills both, and shoved it into Ma’s hands. Surely it was enough to suffice Ma and Pa for a while. “I’ll come back,” she said.

The train kept going, building speed. Ma stopped running. She was falling behind fast. “You a good girl!” she yelled.

When it seemed sure the train wasn’t stopping again anytime soon Plaquette stuck her head out – a risk. A yellow gleam in the shadows was all she could see of Ma. Plaquette shoved the sliding door closed.

Well. She’d gone and done it now. Pa’s note was no use; this wasn’t the train making the Frisco run. It for sure wasn’t no sleeping-car train. A porter had no business here. The train could be going to the next town, or into the middle of next week. She had no way of knowing right now. For some reason, that made her smile.

She fumbled her way to Claude’s open drawer. The money left in there was all coins, more than she could hold in one hand. She divided it amongst the deep, deep pockets in her trousers and jacket.

She was a true and actual thief, and a saboteur.

Finally she found the wardenclyffe. Feeling farther around her in the loud blackness, she determined the carriage was loaded as she’d imagined with trunks, suitcases, parcels of all shapes and sizes. Nothing comfortable as the beds at home, the big one or the little. She didn’t care.

When the train stopped she’d count the money. When the train stopped she’d calculate what to do, where to go, how to get by. She could slip off anywhere, buy herself new clothes, become a new person.

She settled herself as well as she could on a huge, well-stuffed suitcase and closed her eyes.

Claude would help. She would punch more books for him to read, and collect from the people who came to listen. Send money home to Pa and Ma every few weeks.

She’d write the books herself. She’d get him to punch them. She’d punch a set of instructions for how to punch instructions for punching. She’d punch another set of instructions and let Claude write books too. And maybe come back one day soon. Find Billy. Take him away and show him a new life.

The train ran toward the north on shining steel rails. Plaquette’s dreams flew toward the future on pinions of shining bright ideas.

ALASTAIR REYNOLDS(www.alastairreynolds.com) was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland, the Netherlands, where he spent twelve years working as a scientist for the European Space Agency, before returning to Wales in 2008 where he lives with his wife Josette. Reynolds has been publishing short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published fourteen novels: the Inhibitor trilogy, British Science Fiction Association Award winner Chasm City , Century Rain , Pushing Ice , The Prefect , House of Suns , Terminal World , the Poseidon’s Children series, Blue Remembered Earth , On the Steel Breeze , and Poseidon’s Wake , Doctor Who novel The Harvest of Time . His short fiction has been collected in Zima Blue and Other Stories , Galactic North , and Deep Navigation . Coming up is collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Medusa Chronicles , an as-yet-untiled new novel, and new collection Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds . In his spare time he rides horses.

THE ‘HUT’ IS a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. There is a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities. Two or three of us can share the hut at a time, but there is not normally a need for more than one to keep an eye on the equipment. Resources being tight, lately we tend to come out on our own.

In all honesty, I prefer it this way. Birds draw out the solitude in us. They repay patience and silence – long hours of a kind of alert, anticipatory stillness. The days begin to blur into each other; weekends and weekdays becoming arbitrary distinctions. I find myself easily losing track of the calendar, birds and weather my only temporal markers. I watch the migration patterns, record their altering plumage, study the changeful skies. I could not be happier.

There is just one thing to spoil my contentment, but even that, I am confident, will soon be behind me.

I will finish the paper.

IT SOUND EASY, put like that. A vow. A recommitment, a redoubling of my own efforts. One last push.

But I have been here before.

It started easily enough – the usual set of objections, no real hint of the trouble to come. Very few papers ever go through without some amendments, so none of us were bothered that there were a few issues that needed addressing.

But when we had fixed those, the anonymous referee came back with requests for more changes.

We took care of those. Hoped that the paper would now be judged fit for publication. But still the referee wanted more of us. This kept going on. Just when we think we have addressed all possible doubts, the referee somehow manages to find something new to quibble with. I do my best to be stoic, reminding myself that the anonymous referee is just another scientist doing their job, that they too are under similar pressures, and that I should not feel under any personal attack.

But I only have to glance at their comments.

The authors are inconsistent in their handling of the normalisation terms for the correlation function of the velocity modulus. I am not convinced that their treatment of the smoothed Dirac delta-function is rigorous across the quoted integral.

My blood boils. I entertain a momentary fantasy of meeting the referee out here, on some lonely strip of marshland, of swerving violently and running them into a ditch.

Asking, as I watch them gag on muddy water: “Rigorous enough for you now?”

THE BASIS OF our experiment is a ring of twenty tripods, arranged in a two kilometre circle. The hut is on one side of the circle, the wind turbine the other. During the day I check all the tripods, picking the least waterlogged path in the 4WD.

Each unit carries a pair of stereometric digital cameras. The lenses need to be kept the power and electronic connections verified. The cameras should be aimed into the middle of the perimeter, and elevated sufficiently to stand a good chance of catching the murmuration’s epicentre. The cameras are meant to be steerable, but not all of the motors work properly now.