Mortal Remains Read online

  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

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Blue Moon

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two: Beyond the Pale

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three: The Oort Crowd

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Website

  Also by Christopher Evans

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Richard Evans and Rog Peyton.

  Two stalwarts.

  All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.

  —Jacques Monod: Chance and Necessity

  Let the good times roll.

  —Ancient folksong

  Part One

  BLUE MOON

  One

  The houses breathed quietly in the dawnlight, leathery domes exhaling steam plumes into the chill morning air. Tired though she was after working all night in the city, Marea kept to the gravity trail, passing neat houses with their clusters of flowering oxygenia, her cloak tightly wrapped about her head and shoulders.

  The sky was turning rose-gold with the approach of dawn. High on the horizon, she saw a streak of light which she first took to be a shooting star; but it did not vanish as she stared at it.

  Their house stood apart from the others in a tree-fringed hollow. It opened a sleepy eye as she approached, then its doormouth parted, enveloping her in warm living air. As soon as she was inside, her cloak slid from her shoulders and scuttled over to the heart to bask in its warmth.

  Marea found her husbands in the living chamber, both in a state of agitation. Yuri lay feverish on his bunk, his blanket cowering on the floor as if it had been hurled there in rage or delirium. Salih was fussing over him, trying to dab his brow with a damp cloth.

  Marea hastened to the bedside. Yuri’s eyes were closed, though she was sure he was conscious. Their console squatted unheeded in one corner, its big bulbous optic showing the weather forecast for the Tharsis region.

  “Has he been like this all night?” she asked Salih.

  He nodded anxiously, touching the womb-sac at his side. Salih was eight months pregnant, and Yuri’s various sicknesses had grown ever more demanding each week that passed.

  “Have you called the doctor?”

  “I spoke to him myself!” Yuri cried, raising himself from his pillow. “He was rude, unprofessional!”

  He sank back down again. His face shone with sweat, and his eyes were glazed. They closed again.

  “The doctor said there was nothing physically wrong with him,” Salih announced sheepishly. “He said it was transference, sympathetic pregnancy pains.”

  Which was what they had known all along. And yet Salih continued to behave as if he was actively causing Yuri’s ailments.

  “Did he recommend anything?” Marea asked, barely controlling her impatience.

  “Bindweed tea,” Salih replied. “As a sedative and restorant.” He fiddled with the attachment joining the polymer umbilical to his navel. “We’re out of it. I didn’t like to leave him.”

  Marea gave a great sigh, then turned and went out, calling for her cloak. It was dozing, but it stirred reluctantly, loping over to her and clambering up on her shoulders. The door-mouth opened at her command.

  Outside, the sun was just rising over the rim of the canyon. The streak in the sky was still visible, broader, brighter now.

  Their horse was about to foal and could not be ridden. Marea went around to the back of the house where their tractor sat, its scandium flanks and balloon wheels coated with a season’s rusty dust. She wiped clean the sunsensors with a gloved hand, climbed up into the driver’s seat and punched the ignition. Nothing. She tried again. To her surprise, the engine began to hum, then whined into life.

  Grinning, Marea put the tractor into gear and headed off. The grin belied her irritation. Really, both her husbands were infuriating at times. Yuri was temperamental and demanding, while Salih was a caring and domesticated man who unfortunately lacked initiative. They tended the crops in their plantation while Marea pursued her career in the city. Two standard years into their marriage and she continued to debate the wisdom of the contract, as she had done from the start. Both Salih and Yuri had been persistent suitors, and in the end she had just given in. Now there was to be a child, and it might have been triplets or quads if she hadn’t stood firm. Not that the Marineris Valley was overpopulated—she simply hadn’t wanted the responsibility of more than one child, and damn the social stigma. Neither of her husbands knew that the egg which she had donated had come not from her own womb but from the ovum bank in Bellona.

  Of course it was unforgivable: a deceit and a betrayal of both men. But the truth was she could not envisage a permanent life with them, and leaving would be far easier if any child of theirs was no flesh of hers. There were times when she despised herself for even thinking this. Really, both Salih and Yuri deserved a better wife.

  She drove the tractor off the gravity trail, her weariness lifting a little with the diminished tug on her flesh and bones. She followed the rough track which wound gradually upwards through oxygenia scrub and crater plantations of omicorn that shone lemon and lime against the ochre earth.

  As the sun warmed the land, the frost around the houses’ vent holes melted away; water began to trickle in irrigation channels. To the south, vapours rose from the squat towers and pyramids of Bellona as the city stirred with the morning. The bright streak in the sky was more like a flaming meteor.

  “What do you suppose that is?” she said aloud to her cloak.

  The creature twitched on her shoulders but made no other response. It had no language, no intelligen
ce really, just the instincts and capacities for which it had been fashioned.

  “You can get down,” she told it, beginning to feel warm.

  The cloak slithered off her shoulders and curled up on the passenger seat, its pointed snout buried under black-furred paws, slitted grey eyes closed.

  At the very edge of the plantation she found the craterpool where the bindweed grew. The canyon walls reared up directly ahead of her, blotched with blue-green aquavines whose pods exploded like gunfire each spring, sending torrents of water down the slopes to irrigate the valley.

  Suckerflies were darting over the icy surface of the water, so Marea approached cautiously and cut a handful of the tall bindweeds at the pool’s edge. She sliced off the best of the leaves and put them in her pouch.

  A distant sound like a terrible shrieking carried to her ears.

  She looked up and saw the flaming meteor—huge now, and plunging directly towards the ground. The tortured sounds grew louder, and Marea saw that it was not a meteor but a mothership, irreparably damaged, blistered and blazing with friction heat, screaming in agony.

  Her cloak began to mewl in alarm. It scuttled out of its seat and darted for cover under the tractor.

  Marea stood transfixed. The ship was big, its serpentine head opening out into a bulging mottled body of fins and tendrils and a ragged, charred hole where the vent ducts should have been. Its neck reared and twisted, and the shrieking sounds continued, awesomely loud.

  All Marea could do was stand and watch. At the very last moment before the ship disappeared from sight behind a jagged elbow of the canyon, she thought she saw an emergency pod eject from its head and go spiralling down. Then there was a huge explosion which sent her reeling.

  As she lay there, tangled among the bindweed, fragments of the ship’s polymer hull began to rain down on her, drifts of fibre and organic coolant, shards of bulwark chitin and bone.

  She scrambled to her feet. A cloud of dust was rising from the side canyon known as Snake Vale. Without a moment’s hesitation, Marea hurried off towards it.

  The mothership had come down close to where Snake Vale joined the canyon proper. There was little left of it. As the dust settled, Marea saw that the head and neck were just a gory mass of charred tissue and splintered bone. There was no hope of finding any of the crew alive. Even the heat-resistant hull had burned away, and only the ship’s broken ceramic ribs and spine remained of the superstructure.

  She approached the wreckage with caution. The heat was intense, oils and other secretions sizzling on twisted metal plates, greasy smoke rising up into the pink sky. Then the ship lurched, and Marea leapt back in terror, thinking it was about to rear up. But it was only the foreribs collapsing as the great beast settled further in its death.

  Marea scanned the surrounding slopes. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, bloody flesh and plastic littering the aquavines. Then she saw it. Halfway up one of the slopes the emergency pod was flashing whitely in the dawn.

  Marea scrambled up the slope, stumbling through the woody vinestems which hugged the ground like coiled rope. She was puffing like a house by the time she reached the pod.

  There was a dark spot at the centre of the pod, and when she touched it the pod flipped open. Inside the small compartment nestled an egg.

  It was no bigger than a baby’s head, a perfect fleshy oval swirled with purple and red veins. A womb. Marea instinctively searched for the umbilical, intending to connect it to the navel implant which she had had put in in case Salih proved unequal to the pregnancy. But the womb had no umbilical.

  Gently, she lifted it out. It was warm to the touch, and she felt as if the life inside was snuggling in her arms, relieved to have escaped a death that Marea knew someone had planned for it.

  She clutched the womb to her breast and fled back to the tractor. Soon other people from the surrounding plantations and from Bellona itself would come to investigate the crash. She had to get the child away to safety, hide it in case the people who wished it harm should find it.

  Her cloak came out from under the tractor to greet her, its broad furry tail sweeping the dust in pleasure.

  “Look what I’ve got,” she said to it. “A baby.”

  She climbed into the tractor and opened the storage bin behind her seat. The cloak loped after her, curious and puzzled.

  “We’re going to look after it,” Marea told her pet. “But you mustn’t tell anyone. Not even Yuri and Salih.”

  She wrapped the womb in an emergency thermal blanket. It fitted perfectly in the bin. She closed the lid and locked the latches.

  “Not a word,” she reminded the cloak, who was peering into her face, eyes wide with uncomprehending inquisitiveness. “This is a secret between the two of us.”

  She swivelled around in her seat and started up the tractor. As she moved off, she realized that she had lost the pouch containing the bindweed. She gave the engine full throttle.

  • • •

  The room was white, and there was a window opposite with a pale blind drawn on it. For some time I knew nothing, registered nothing, apart from this. Then gradually I became aware that I was lying in a bed, groggy and weak, unable even to raise my head.

  Time passed, and I did nothing except stare at the featureless ceiling and walls. It was an effort to keep my eyes open, to do anything except register my shallow breathing. It was slow and delicate, like drawn-out whispers, or sighs.

  Then at length I became aware of a movement nearby. A woman’s face loomed in front of my eyes.

  She was fair-haired and olive-skinned, with strong, attractive features. Only by looking at her did it register on me that I was a man. She smiled down at me. I was seized with terror.

  I felt her hand behind my head, lifting me up. I tried to scream, but couldn’t. I wanted her away from me, was terrified without reason at the sight of her.

  She was holding a cup to my lips.

  Somehow she made me drink. The water went down my throat like a cool balm. I hadn’t realized how parched I was.

  Some of my terror must have registered in my eyes, because she stroked the side of my face with her fingers.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Just rest. You’re going to be fine.”

  Her voice was gentle, encouraging, and I sensed that it was important to her I did recover. But this did nothing to reassure me. I was certain she meant me harm.

  She lowered my head to the pillow. And then she was gone.

  • • •

  Marea met Tunde at the terminus on the outskirts of Bellona. His shuttle, a crystalline spirogyrator, landed on time but he was delayed at customs. There was a heavy security presence everywhere, helmeted politia toting pulse-pistols and stopping people at random for questioning. Marea had to show her identity disk, and its information was double-checked with a console before the officer was satisfied.

  When Tunde finally emerged, his big dark face broke into a broad grin at the sight of her. They embraced one another. Though they had met strictly through business and saw one another only infrequently, they had become good friends.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked her. “You at war or something?”

  Marea shrugged. “There’s some security flap. As usual, no one’s told anyone what’s happening.”

  Marea had a company gravlev waiting outside the terminus, a compact but racy two-seater into which Tunde’s frame barely fitted. He was tall for a Venusian, and might have passed as a native of Mars.

  “How long’s it been?” he asked her.

  “Nearly a year.”

  “That long? You’re looking as good as ever.”

  “You’re only saying that because you know I’m married.”

  He grinned again. “How are they both?”

  “We’re soon to be parents.”

  “Really? How many?”

  “Just the one.”

  He adjusted his seatbelt. “Very frugal of you. No instant family, eh?”

  “I persuaded th
em against it.”

  He eyed her. “This some sort of ideological statement?”

  Little did he know.

  “Maybe it is.”

  He didn’t follow this up. “Boy or girl?”

  “We decided to leave it in the lap of the gods.”

  She drove off, merging with the city-bound traffic.

  “How’s your trio?” she asked presently.

  “Blooming,” he replied. “Eight years old now. They keep Yolande and me occupied, I can tell you. You should come and visit us sometime.”

  “Venus? I’ve never even made Olympus Mons.”

  “You’d like it. Richer air, plenty of water.”

  “Bioforms oozing out of the slime everywhere.”

  He chuckled. “Something like that. Who’s carrying the baby?”

  “Salih. We were going to draw lots, but he insisted.”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. “You’ve broken my heart. I was hoping you’d pack them in and run away with me.”

  She pulled out to avoid a decipede that had halted and was retching in the inside lane. “You’d never leave Yolande and the kids, and you know it. Uh oh.”

  The traffic was slowing, piling up as they approached a toll gate. Once again, armed politia were checking IDs and baggage.

  It was half an hour before they were through. Tunde always travelled light, his attaché case containing a single change of clothing and his comlink. He kept another wardrobe in the company apartments, so regular were his visits to Mars. An officious female officer insisted on checking every detail of his business. While Marea simmered with irritation, Tunde remained implacably courteous and cooperative. Finally they were waved on.

  “I could have hit her,” Marea said as soon as they were clear.

  “Wrong move. You get their backs up and they’ll find ways of delaying you longer. Relentless courtesy, that’s the answer. It unnerves them, and they can’t wait to be rid of you. What are they worried about, anyway? Found a nest of Augmenters or something?”

  Marea kept her eyes on the road.

  They lunched in the company dome, overlooking the extractor pens. Some of the great beasts were dozing in the midafternoon warmth while others continued to munch their quota of ground rock.