Omega Read online

  OMEGA

  Christopher Evans

  www.sf-gateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Part One: Altered States

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Capter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two: Brothers in Arms

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part Three: Looping The Loop

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Part Four: Manifest Destiny

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Website

  Also by Christopher Evans

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Omega opens with a shock; a literally explosive start to a story set in two worlds. Our narrator, Owen Meredith, is the victim of the bombing in our cosy, contemporary London. He’s the producer of Battlegrounds, a CGI television series recreating old battles, and a very popular programme. Recovering in hospital he begins to learn that his personal world is not the world he remembers.

  At the same time Major Owain Maredudd, in a brilliantly drawn wartime London of the 21st century, is also the victim of an explosion. But this time the source of the attack is a mystery. How eerie to have the whole of Soho a militarily guarded “forbidden zone”. Nelson’s Column topped by a gold eagle rampant!

  But of course, we are in Chris Evans’s territory. The confusion and interaction of alternatives that Chris always does so well; here, with this new novel, and in past tales.

  Chris is excellent at evoking a constant atmosphere of mystery, of uncertainty. Everything is clear—but is everything as it seems? As the two worlds run in parallel, the mysteries are different but oddly reflective of each other. We are constantly asking how the characters are being manipulated, and to what extent the reader is too.

  And when Owen and Owain start becoming aware of each others’ worlds, we are in for a mind-game to take the breath away.

  Both men are examples of a character trait that Chris does well: the displaced man, characters in search of their true ground. Perhaps this is how the author himself felt when he left a valley in Wales for the cold sprawl of London. Perhaps it is not. In any event, it’s a theme that often crops up in Chris’s work.

  And displacement is at the heart of Omega in several forms; and “Omega” itself is at the heart of it l.

  Chris Evans writes slowly and carefully and it shows in the incredible detail. He is also very strong on character. Though Owen and Owain are the same man, he shows the similarities in character as human and the differences caused by their individual situations. And the same goes for the women in the book. Chris is very strong on female characterisation. They inform his stories with power and insight.

  Omega is very much a story of relationships, from love, to authority; from brothers, to deception. But the most intriguing relationship in Omega is that between Owen and Owain, as each man becomes aware of the other.

  The dark world of Major Owain Maredudd that Chris explores is packed with facts and references, political and military. It’s tempting to redraw the political map of the world based on this section, the different alliances, the different war zones—America encroaching on Australian Pacific territory, statues of Field Marshal Montgomery celebrating his landings along the Baltic in 1943! Owen, in this world, would have a field day with his tv programme! The astonishingly vivid sequence set in Russia, in Major Owain’s war-torn continent, certainly takes Owen to a battleground.

  Omega is a story of dark, deep, sometimes desolate but always hopeful alternatives. We run our lives alongside the “what might have been”. We run those lives with compassion. And with humour. And with the persistence of love. Omega is two stories, both very human, both addressing the harsh realities of a world of this age and this time: one recognisable, the other sinister. We are invited to sympathise with both sides.

  I met Chris thirty years ago and we found we had much in common in our attitude and desires for what we wished to achieve from our writing, even though we were very different writers. We were both published at the time by Faber and Faber. His first novel was Capella’s Golden Eyes. In the early and middle 80s we enjoyed a little “time off”, co-editing a writer’s magazine (Focus)and three volumes of stories, Other Edens, which featured early work by some now well-known authors in the field.

  But importantly, Chris went on to write The Insider—a, story of alien occupation in the most invasive of ways—and In Limbo. In Limbo, a story concerning “Carpenter”, a man in care after a nervous breakdown, contains some of Chris’s funniest and most personal writing in the second of its three sections. Intensely political though much of his work is, he is also a very wry
observer with a great sense of humour. In Omega, for instance, Owen’s historian father is described as having a “prodigious appetite for disapproval. He had a special distaste for what he called ‘fantasists’—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes.”

  After In Limbo, Chris produced a collection of related short stories entitled Chimeras. Again, they are set in a world we can recognise but which is not our own world. They deal with the process of creation, of invention, of the desire to fashion beauty in a place where beauty is both ubiquitous and yet absent. They are Chris’s take on the way we live in two worlds: that y ie real and that of the imagined—the creative process, another theme that fascinates him. Art, in these tales, is conjured out of the air: “creations deliberately fashioned with an excess of ambition so that they dissolved away within minutes of their emergence, leaving nothing but dust behind.” An eloquent comment on the ephemeral nature of “art for art’s sake”? And yet, in another tale, an artist of genuine talent is described as claiming that “becoming an artist had given meaning to his life. He wanted to leave behind something lasting. When he had difficulties with a creation, he would pause… focusing his imagination.” He would become as a “locked door.”

  Imagination is fleeting, but it can leave dust or reality.

  Chris spent his childhood in South Wales. Hard work, respect for family, the courage to challenge authority informs his writing, the mood of his writing, the passion of his writing; and indeed, the politics of his writing. In his 1993 novel Aztec Century he takes a huge chance by setting up a Britain as it might have been if taken over by a fascist state; but he twists the tale to make the conquering forces the Aztecs, in a world where the Spanish had failed to conquer them and the Aztec kingdom has become all powerful. By so doing he doesn’t just set two political regimes into conflict and contrast, as happened in the middle 20th Century; he deals with the confrontation of belief systems and the role and respect of two hierarchical societies, the brutality of such societies, where the notion of sacrifice is played for everything that “sacrifice” means.

  I read a proof of Omega whilst on vacation. It was hot. Everything around me was lazy with ease. In the villa, I read a book that was dark and compelling, and which punched holes in the society that we have become. It is a story of two worlds, two men who are the same man, two lives that are entangled across a strange barrier. Chris often argues through fiction for an understanding of the way we live in a dual reality. Omega opens many doors, and there are scenes that are shocking in their truth and in their brutality. What Omega does very precisely, and very much for the time in which it is being published, is ask the big question about how we cope with our lives, how we deal with the dark, or the bright, that is in the lives of others; how we trust. And the question is both an alpha and an omega question.

  Robert Holdstock

  September 2007

  PROLOGUE

  I woke up in the back of an ambulance. Two men in short-sleeved shirts were standing over me.

  “I’m sure I’ve seen him before” one said.

  The other one leaned closer. “What’s your name?”

  For some reason I grinned. It probably looked cheesy.

  “Owen,” I mouthed. “Owen Meredith.”

  I wasn’t sure whether the words had actually come out.

  A gold Christmas-tree star hung from the roof, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. I tried to remember what had happened. An explosion. I’d been knocked over. The ambulance’s siren was wailing.

  The man who had loosened my tie was asking me other questions, but I couldn’t hear him properly. Pain was blossoming in my head. Everything began to fade.

  It was Lyneth who had insisted we take the girls Christmas shopping in the West End. We’d set off early, taking the train so that Sara and Bethany, seven and five, could peer excitedly at the industrial estates and wrecked car graveyards that lined the approaches to London Bridge station.

  We spent a couple of hours in Covent Garden, where there were jugglers and mime artists to keep the children entertained, before lunching in the Piazza. Then it was on to Regent Street, Lyneth already having accumulated three carrier bags of presents by strategic strikes on selected stores while I shepherded the girls away from ice cream stalls and street vendors selling helium balloons of Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter.

  As Lyneth led the way down Regent Street I felt myself beginning to flag. We were headed for Hamley’s, where the girls had been promised an audience with Santa Claus. The pavements were thick with uncompromising shoppers. I clung on tightly to Bethany’s hand as we wove through the crowds, dodging buggies and squalling toddlers, pulling up sharply at intersections where traffic lurched out of side streets the moment the lights changed.

  At the entrance to the store Lyneth stopped and marshalled us. She looked, if anything, fresher than when we had set out that morning, her bobbed blonde hair sprinkled with drizzle, her cheeks rosy, her eyes filled with the gleam of a good morning’s work already done, targets met, everything still on schedule. We’d met at school and had first gone out together when we were sixteen. Half a lifetime ago. So long a companionship only heightens those moments when you look at someone and see if not a stranger then someone whose familiarity is in itself strange.

  Of course I can’t honestly say I thought anything of the sort at that moment. I remember only her standing there in her navy gabardine coat, putting her shopping bags down to wipe Bethany’s nose before straightening.

  “Listen” she said to me in the considerate-yet-purposeful tone she always adopted when making a concession, “why don’t I take the girls inside while you pop off for half an hour and get something for Rees? A sweater or something.”

  Rees was my brother, always a problem to buy for.

  I grinned. “An hour would be better.”

  She gave me a firm look. “Forty-five minutes at most. It’s going to be heaving in there.”

  “OK. I’ll see you at the grotto.”

  “There isn’t one. He does the rounds.”

  “Then how will I find you?”

  “Mobile, silly.”

  This was Sara, always quick off the mark, just like her mother. I poked my tongue out at her and she responded in kind.

  “Make sure you switch it on,” Lyneth said.

  “Will do.” We had one each of course, so Lyneth could co-ordinate our movements in situations like this. She was always doing battle with my timekeeping and organisation.

  I watched her take the girls inside before crossing the road at a red light and heading down a side street for a swift drink to restore myself.

  I stood at the bar of a pub whose name I can’t remember, sipping a half. In the mirror I could see three men in their twenties sitting at a table. One of them was staring at me. Cropped hair, lots of muscles, a bit fearsome looking. He said something to the others and began making gestures in my direction. They looked blank. Before I knew it, he was at my side.

  “You did that series, right?”

  His accent was cod-cockney: grafted on, like a studied attempt at de-refinement. He was in his early twenties, a silver ring in one ear, his tight ribbed polo neck showing evidence of bodybuilding.

  I nodded amiably.

  “Battlezones, yeah?”

  “Battlegrounds”

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Those tank battles, man. Awesome.”

  His lips were pursed in approval. I made appreciative noises.

  “That Tiger tank—where was it? Same place as that submarine.”

  “Kursk.”

  “The way you took us inside, showed us what it was really like. The graphics were A-1. And that tank commander, he was a real hero. Six kills! He survive the war?”

  “He wasn’t a real person. We generated the character from a variety of original sources.”

  “You felt as if you were really in there, you know? All the controls, the bu
mping and hustle. You could almost smell the sweat and ammunition!”

  “We wanted to make it as realistic as possible.”

  “There going to be a PC game or anything? I’ve got Steel Storm and Red Star Rising, but I liked the intimacy, you know?”

  I wondered how to reply to this.

  “Excellent idea,” I told him. “I’ll talk to my brother. He’s the computer wizard.”

  “You’d rake it in. What about another series?”

  “It’s in the planning stage.”

  “Yeah?” He plainly wanted to know more.

  “We’ll be focusing on more recent conflicts—the Falklands, the Gulf, Bosnia, possibly Iraq.”

  “You travel there? All those places? North Africa and stuff?”

  “Some,” I said vaguely.

  “I’m in the T.A. myself. Hitched a ride on a Challenger on Salisbury Plain one time.”

  “Oh? Was it fun?”

  “Nearly fucking choked from the exhaust fumes. Those things can really motor.”

  I kept smiling, now a bit uncertain of the exact nature of his enthusiasm.

  “Best thing I’ve seen on the box in years,” he announced.

  “That’s great to hear.”

  He was offering his hand. I took it and shook. His grip was firm and muscular, and he pumped my arm as if he was sending me off on a suicide mission.

  “When’s it out on DVD?”

  “In the spring. Lots of background info on how we did the simulations.”

  “I’ll look out for it. You really opened my eyes.”

  He returned to his table.

  It was hard not to look in the mirror, to watch him enthuse to his friends. At the same time I’d learned to be wary of the enthusiasms of militaristic types. It wasn’t often that I was recognised and it still surprised me whenever it happened.

  Battlegrounds had been broadcast in the autumn on Channel 5. The series had been given plenty of pre-publicity emphasising the use of state-of-the-art computer animation to give tactical and strategic overviews as well as more intimate portraits of the actual experiences of individual soldiers in major battles. Although it had been designed to appeal to a wide audience the scale of its success exceeded everyone’s expectations.