Paul McAuley - Something Coming Through

‘So?’

‘It caught my attention. It’s a sweet piece of work. Would you mind talking about it? Your inspiration, and so on,’ Chloe said, putting on her spex.

‘You want to record this?’

‘It’s our standard procedure. I mentioned a small payment, didn’t I?’

‘No way.’

‘That’s okay, we can do it without,’ Chloe said, and made a big deal of taking off her spex and folding them away. Hoping that she’d got a nice steady shot of the pictures.

A chubby little girl of four or five, cute as a button in dungarees with an appliqué flower on the bib, came up behind Freddie and gave Chloe a bold stare. When Chloe said hi she looked away, looked back. Ringlets tangled over her forehead. A piece of paper was crumpled in one fist.

Chloe said to Freddie, ‘Is this your sister?’ Said to the little girl, ‘How are you, sweetie? Rana, right?’

‘I made a drawing,’ the little girl said, and held up the multicoloured scrawl so that Chloe and her brother could inspect it. A red string was tied around her chubby wrist, a single green bead threaded on it.

Freddie told her, ‘I’ll take a look in a minute. Go on inside now.’

‘Ugly Chicken says she’s nice,’ the little girl said.

Freddie’s tone hardened. ‘Go on inside. Now.’

The little girl waved bye-bye, hand flapping at her wrist, and toddled away.

Chloe said, ‘So your sister’s an artist too.’

‘Exactly what is it you’re trying to sell me?’

Freddie Patel was attempting to project an attitude, but he looked away when Chloe met his gaze. He didn’t have the fuck-you stare of a real street kid.

‘I work for a little company, Disruption Theory. Here’s my card,’ she said.

Freddie glanced at it, shrugged.

‘You can check out our website, see that we’re totally valid. What I’m interested in, all I’m interested in, are your pictures. If you have anything else like the flyer, I’d love to see them, talk about them.’

‘No way,’ Freddie said again, and started to close the door.

Chloe said quickly, ‘Maybe I could buy one.’

‘You don’t go away, I’ll call the police,’ Freddie said, and the door clicked shut and the curtain fell.

Chloe wrote call anytime on the back of the card Freddie hadn’t taken from her, and stuck it between the glass door and its frame. A bare-chested man sitting on a canvas stool at the end of the walkway was watching her. She resisted the urge to give him the finger and went down the stairs, feeling that something or someone was tracking her, following her through the stacks of containers and into the park beyond. But when she looked around, half-expecting to see Eddie Ackroyd or his damn drone, there was no one there.

Mangala | 24 July

Astronauts and aliens paraded down Petra’s main avenue. The astronauts were the surviving members of the Thirty-Eight, the first people to land on Mangala. Dressed in white tracksuits and standing on the backs of two flatbed trucks, waving to crowds that pelted them with confetti and paper streamers. The aliens marched behind the trucks. Lizard aliens, frog aliens, cat aliens, gorilla aliens. The cats brandished ray guns; the gorillas wore space helmets with spiral antennae. There were people dressed in black leotards stuck all over with clusters of black balloons; people in aluminium foil costumes and silver facepaint and blue wigs. A solitary Dalek trundled along, squawking about extermination. There was a troupe of dancers costumed as Jackaroo avatars, black suits and white shirts and gold-tinted plastic masks, high-stepping in jerky stop-go synchrony. There were floats and three school bands, a steelpan orchestra on the back of a truck decorated with artificial turf and fake palm trees and two real parrots. The Mayor and his wife rode in a vintage open-top Mercedes imported by a tomb raider who’d struck it rich, followed by a phalanx of motorcycle cops, four fire engines, the Salvation Army brass band, representatives of two dozen professions and trades, and a group selected from the latest arrivals on Mangala, newbies dressed in white T-shirts and blue jeans and blue denim jackets, the uniform of the orientation camp.

It was the thirteenth anniversary of the first landfall of the shuttle that tirelessly cycled between Earth and Mangala, of the first human footsteps on one of the fifteen worlds gifted by the Jackaroo. The shuttle had returned from its latest trip to Earth just two days before. A ring of fireworks had exploded around the giant spacecraft as it slid out of the sky, and there were more fireworks now, flowering in the chill sky above the city.

The last cannonade was fading and falling as Vic Gayle plunged into the narrow streets of the old quarter, heading towards a Landing Day party with a bunch of comrades from the early days. Back then, this had been all there was to the city. Quonset huts, a couple of big steel-frame sheds, small mud-brick domes built over the entrances to cut-and-cover bunkers. A precarious foothold in the howling alien wilderness. There were almost a million people on the planet now, most of them living in Petra, and the huts and bunkers in the old quarter had been made over into restaurants and tanning parlours, cafés and souvenir shops. Man, look at that: a Starbucks.

Vic’s friends had taken over the big round table at the back of the city’s oldest Chinese restaurant. They were all veterans of the second shuttle to Mangala, making a lot of noise, helping themselves from little dishes and bamboo baskets as waiters brought more food and fresh bottles of wine, brought Vic a bottle of Tiger beer. Most were much older than Vic, baby boomers who’d won the emigration lottery and decided to shed their old lives and chase after dreams of their Space Age childhoods. Thomas Müller owned two supermarkets and a thriving import/export business. Alice and Marek Sienkiewicz dealt in Elder Culture artefacts. Victoria Cheshire had built up a transport company that ran road trains between Petra and Idunn’s Valley. There were lawyers, surgeons, teachers. Maria Luis Pereira owned a chicken farm, the biggest on Mangala.

Vic Gayle was an investigator in the city’s police, a stocky middle-aged man in a dark brown suit and black shirt and green tie. Close-trimmed hair going grey at the temples, sleepy eyes that didn’t miss much. Sitting quietly amongst his friends as they ate crispy duck and pancakes, drank white wine from Idunn’s Valley or imported beer, talked about the old days, their children and grandchildren back on Earth, the latest political scandals, the big dust storm blowing up out of the west, the panic buying in shops and supermarkets. Vic finished his beer and switched to jasmine tea. Although he was on call, working on Landing Day so that colleagues with families wouldn’t have to, he’d decided at the last minute that he didn’t want to miss the annual party with his old friends, had told his new partner to hold the fort for a couple of hours, ignore the phone if it rang, call him if there was a problem. But now that he was here, he was feeling out of place. Everyone was talking about new business opportunities, their new cars and houses, their kids, their plans for the future, and he was back to living in an efficiency apartment, his ex was nagging him about collecting the last of his shit from what had been their home, and he was still working violent crimes, putting down murders. A righteous calling, no doubt, but after seven years it was beginning to feel like the same old same old.

Someone said, ‘Next year, we should do this in Red Rock Falls.’

Someone else said, ‘Only tourists and newbies go to Red Rock Falls these days.’

‘Time we reclaimed it, then.’