Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF IAN R. MacLEOD

  The Light Ages

  “A meditative portrayal of an exotic society, fascinating in its unhealthy languor and seemingly imperturbable stasis . . . so powerfully recalls Dickens’s [Great Expectations] that this affinity animates the entire work.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “MacLeod brings a Dickensian life to the pounding factories of London in a style he calls ‘realistic fantasy.’ It’s a complete world brought to life with compassionate characters and lyrical writing.” —The Denver Post

  “Stands beside the achievements of China Miéville. A must-read.” —Jeff VanderMeer

  “An outstanding smoke-and-sorcery saga to rival Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.” —Michael Moorcock

  The House of Storms

  “Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic, or tragic . . . But it’s on the character front that MacLeod truly expends his best efforts and achieves the most.” —SF Signal

  “One of the finest prose stylists around, and—borrowing as he does much of the melodrama of Victorian literature, along with the revisionist modernism of later authors like D. H. Lawrence—his writing is unfailingly elegant.” —Locus

  The Summer Isles

  Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History

  “Projecting Nazi Germany onto the England of the [thirties] is a most effective counterfactual device; and in the opposition of the narrator, historian Geoffrey Brook, and Britain’s Fuehrer, John Arthur, MacLeod sums up very neatly the division in the British psyche at the time, between Churchillian grit and abject appeasement.” —Locus

  The Great Wheel

  Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel

  “A serious, thoughtful work of futuristic fiction, this haunting novel is a bridge between Huxley’s Brave New World and Frank Herbert’s Dune.” —Publishers Weekly

  Song of Time

  Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award

  “Confirms MacLeod as one of the country’s very best literary SF writers.” —The Guardian

  Wake Up and Dream

  “Set in an anti-Semitic U.S. drifting towards collusion with Nazi Germany, Wake Up and Dream slowly picks at the artifice of Hollywood to reveal its morally rotten core.” —The Guardian

  Snodgrass and Other Illusions

  The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod

  Ian R. MacLeod

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook onscreen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “The Chop Girl” © 1999 Ian R MacLeod first published Asimov’s Science Fiction December 1999

  “Past Magic” © 1990 Ian R MacLeod first published Interzone September 1990

  “Hector Douglas Makes a Sale” © 2011 Ian R MacLeod first published as part of a promotional booklet PS Publishing 2011

  “Nevermore” © 1998 Ian R MacLeod first published in Dying For It, ed. Gardner Dozois 1998

  “Second Journey of the Magus” © 2010 Ian R MacLeod first published Subterranean Online Winter 2010

  “New Light on the Drake Equation” © 2001 Ian R MacLeod first published in SciFiction Online May 2001

  “Snodgrass” © 1993 Ian R MacLeod first published in In Dreams ed. Paul McAuley / Kim Newman 1993

  “The Master Miller’s Tale” © 2007 Ian R MacLeod first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction May 2007

  “Isabel of the Fall” © 2001 Ian R MacLeod first published in Interzone edition # 169 2001

  Tirkiluk © Ian R MacLeod first published The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction February 2007

  “Grownups” © Ian R MacLeod first published Asimov’s Science Fiction 1992

  Introduction and Afterwords © Ian R MacLeod 2013

  Cover design by Andrea Uva

  978-1-4804-2213-1

  This 2013 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Chop Girl

  Past Magic

  Hector Douglas Makes a Sale

  Nevermore

  Second Journey of the Magus

  New Light on the Drake Equation

  Snodgrass

  The Master Miller’s Tale

  Isabel of the Fall

  Tirkiluk

  Grownups

  A Biography of Ian R. MacLeod

  INTRODUCTION

  IT’S NEVER A GOOD idea to look back. The past isn’t just a foreign country—it’s a dangerous territory where it’s all too easy to get lost in might-have-beens and what-ifs. All the more so if you’re a writer. The words you once wrote have a simple appeal that the ones you’re currently working on, or plan to write, generally lack. Old, finished stories are like dear, dead friends. They’re easy to reminisce about and glamourise because they don’t have the unfortunate tendency the living have to behave in awkward and confusing ways. Not because I think my old stories are dead, I hasten to add. But more because I feel that I’ve given them enough shape and consistency to walk away from me and lead a life—small or large—of their own.

  So it’s not without a little trepidation that I meet up with these pieces again. I believe they are some of my best work, and I hope also go some way toward demonstrating that the genre most often called “Science Fiction” is actually far broader and wider than most people choose to think—readers and writers included, and all the more so the great majority of both who generally head swiftly in other directions whenever they see the words. What I’ve always set out to do is to tell stories that have the depth of naturalistic fiction, but the breadth and wonder—and also the tighter plotting—more normally associated with genre works. You’ll find very few starships and even fewer aliens in my stories, but plenty of things that really happened in history, or almost did, or might do soon. Many are set in places we’d recognise, and involve people we might meet not far from our homes. There are edges of strangeness, certainly, and mythic twists, and broad horizons. But above all these are stories about the things that matter, be it love or loss, fear or wonder, growing old or being young, told as best as I know how. They spoke to me once, and I hope they speak to you.

  It’s a big world out there, and an even bigger universe. Let’s go out and explore…

  The Chop Girl

  ME, I WAS THE CHOP girl—not that I suppose that anyone knows what that means now. So much blood and water under the bridge I heard the lassies in the Post Office debating how many world wars there had been last week when I climbed up the hill to col
lect my pension, and who exactly it was that had won them.

  Volunteered for service, I did, because I thought it would get me away from the stink of the frying pans at home in our Manchester tea room’s back kitchen. And then the Air Force of all things, and me thinking, lucky, lucky, lucky, because of the glamour and the lads, the lovely lads, the best lads of all, who spoke with BBC voices as I imagined them, and had played rugger and footie for their posh schools and for their posh southern counties. And a lot of it was true, even if I ended up typing in the annex to the cookhouse, ordering mustard and HP on account of my, quote, considerable experience in the catering industry.

  So there I was—just eighteen and WRAF and lucky, lucky, lucky. And I still didn’t know what a chop girl was, which had nothing to do with lamb or bacon or the huge blocks of lard I ordered for the chip pans. They were big and empty places, those bomber airfields, and they had the wild and open and windy names of the Fens that surrounded them. Wisbech and Finneston and Witchford. And there were drinks and there were dances and the money was never short because there was never any point in not spending it. Because you never knew, did you? You never knew. One day your bunk’s still warm and the next someone else is complaining about not changing the sheets and the smell of you on it. Those big machines like ugly insects lumbering out in the dying hour to face the salt wind off the marshes and the lights and blue smoke of the paraffin lanterns drifting across the runways. Struggling up into the deepening sky in a mighty roaring, and the rest of us standing earthbound and watching. Word slipping out that tonight it would be Hamburg or Dortmund or Essen—some half-remembered place from a faded schoolroom map glowing out under no moon and through heavy cloud, the heavier the better, as the bombers droned over, and death fell from them in those long steel canisters onto people who were much like us when you got down to it, but for the chances of history. Then back, back, a looser run in twos and threes and searching for the seaflash of the coast after so many miles of darkness. Black specks at dawn on the big horizon that could have been clouds or crows or just your eyes’ plain weariness. Noise and smoke and flame. Engines misfiring. An unsettled quite would be lying over everything by the time the sun was properly up and the skylarks were singing. The tinny taste of fatigue. Then word on the wires of MG 3138, which had limped in at Brightlingsea. And of CZ 709, which had ploughed up a field down at Theddlethorpe. Word, too, of LK 452, which was last seen as a flaming cross over Brussels, and of Flight Sergeant Shanklin, who, hoisted bloody from his gun turret by the medics, had faded on the way to hospital. Word of the dead. Word of the lost. Word of the living.

  Death was hanging all around you, behind the beer and the laughs and the bowls and the endless games of cards and darts and cricket. Knowing as they set out on a big mission that some planes would probably never get back. Knowing for sure that half the crews wouldn’t make it through their twenty mission tour. So of course we were all madly superstitious. It just happened—you didn’t need anyone to make it up for you. Who bought the first round. Who climbed into the plane last. Not shaving or shaving only half your face. Kissing the ground, kissing the air, singing, not singing, pissing against the undercarriage, spitting. I saw a Flight Officer have a blue fit because the girl in the canteen gave him only two sausages on his lunchtime plate. That night, on a big raid over Dortmund, his Lancaster vanished in heavy flak, and I remember the sleepless nights because it was me who’d forgotten to requisition from the wholesale butcher. But everything was sharp and bright then. The feel of your feet in your shoes and your tongue in your mouth and your eyes in their sockets. That, and the sick-and-petrol smell of the bombers. So everything mattered. Every incident was marked and solid in the only time which counted, which was the time which lay between now and the next mission. So it was odd socks and counting sausages, spitting and not spitting, old hats and new hats worn backwards and forwards. It was pissing on the undercarriage, and whistling. And it was the girls you’d kissed.

  Me, I was the chop girl, and word of it tangled and whispered around me like the sour morning news of a botched raid. I don’t know how it began, because I’d been with enough lads at dances, and then outside afterwards fumbling and giggling in the darkness. And sometimes, and because you loved them all and felt sorry for them, you’d let them go nearly all the way before pulling back with the starlight shivering between us. Going nearly all the way was a skill you had to learn then, like who wore what kind of brass buttons and marching in line. And I was lucky. I sang lucky, lucky, lucky to myself in the morning as I brushed my teeth, and I laughingly told the lads so in the evening NAAFI when they always beat me at cards.

  It could have started with Flight Sergeant Martin Beezly, who just came into our smoky kitchen annex one hot summer afternoon and sat down on the edge of my desk with his blonde hair sticking up and told me he had a fancy to go picnicking and had got hold of two bikes. Me, I just unrollered my carbons and stood up and the other girls watched with the jaws of their typewriters dropped in astonishment as I walked out into the sunlight. Nothing much happened that afternoon, other than what Flight Sergeant Beezly said would happen. We cycled along the little dikes and bumped across the wooden bridges, and I sat on a rug eating custard creams as he told me about his home up in the northeast and the business he was planning to set up after the war delivering lunchtime sandwiches to the factories. But all of that seemed as distant as the open blue sky—as distant, given these clear and unsuitable weather conditions, as the possibility of a raid taking place that evening. We were just two young people enjoying the solid certainty of that moment—which the taste of custard creams still always brings back to me—and Flight Sergeant Beezly did no more than brush my cheek with his fingers before we climbed back onto the bikes, and then glance anxiously east towards the heavy clouds that were suddenly piling. It was fully overcast by the time we got back to the base, driven fast on our bikes by the cool and unsummery wind that was rustling the ditches. Already, orders had been posted and briefings were being staged and the groundcrews were working, their arclights flaring in the hangers. Another five minutes, a little less of that wind as we cycled, and they’d have been all hell to pay for me and for Flight Sergeant Beezly, who, as a navigator and vital to the task of getting one of those big machines across the dark sky, would have been shifted to standby and then probably court-marshalled. But as it was, he just made it into the briefing room as the map was being unfolded and sat down, as I imagine him, on the schoolroom desk nearest the door, still a little breathless, and with the same smears of bike oil on his fingers that I later found on my cheek. That night, it was Amsterdam—a quick raid to make the most of this quick and filthy cloud that the weather boffins said wouldn’t last. Amsterdam. One of those raids that somehow never sounded right even though it was enemy-occupied territory. That night, GZ 3401 with Flight Sergeant Beezly navigating, was last seen labouring over the North Sea enemy coastal barrages with a full load of bombs, a slow and ugly butterfly pinioned on the needles of half a dozen searchlights.

  So maybe that was the first whisper—me walking out of the annex before I should have done with Flight Sergeant Beezly, although God knows it had happened to enough of the other girls. That, and worse. Broken engagements. Cancelled marriages. Visits to the burns unit, and up the stick for going all the way instead of just most of it. Wrecked, unmendable lives that you can still see drifting at every branch Post Office if you know how and when to look. But then, a week after, there was Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson, who had a reputation as one of the lads, one for the lassies. All we did was dance and kiss at the Friday hall down in the village, although I suppose that particular night was the first time I was really drawn to him because something had changed about his eyes. That, and the fact that he’d shaved off the Clark Gable moustache which I’d always thought made him look vain and ridiculous. So we ended up kissing as we danced, and then sharing beers and laughs with the rest of his crew in their special corner. And after the band had gone and the village out
side the hall stood stony dark, I let him lean me against the old oak that slipped its roots into the river and let him nuzzle my throat and touch my breasts and mutter words against my skin that were lost in the hissing of the water. I put my hand down between us then, touched him in the place I thought he wanted. But Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson was soft as smoke down there, as cool and empty as the night. So I just held him and rocked him as he began to weep, feeling faintly relieved that there wouldn’t be the usual pressures for me to go the whole way. Looking up through the oak leaves as the river whispered, I saw that the bright moon of the week before was thinning, and I knew from the chill air on my flesh that tomorrow the planes would be thundering out again. You didn’t need to be a spy or a boffin. And not Amsterdam, but a long run. Hamburg. Dortmund. Essen. In fact, it turned out to be the longest of them all, Berlin. And somewhere on that journey Petty Officer Charlie Dyson and his whole crew and his Lancaster simply fell out of the sky. Vanished into the darkness.

  After that, the idea of my being bad luck seemed to settle around me, clinging like the smoke of the cookhouse. Although I was young, although I’d never really gone steady with anyone and had still never ventured every last inch of the way, and although no one dared to keep any proper score of these things, I was already well on my way to becoming the chop girl. I learned afterwards that most bases had one; that—in the same way that Kitty from stores was like a mum to a lot of the crews, and Sally Morrison was the camp bicycle—it was a kind of necessity.

  And I believed. With each day so blazingly bright and with the nights so dark and the crews wild-eyed and us few women grieving and sleepless, with good luck and bad luck teeming in the clouds and in the turning of the moon, we loved and lived in a world that had shifted beyond the realms of normality. So of course I believed.

  I can’t give you lists and statistics. I can’t say when I first heard the word, or caught the first really odd look. But being the chop girl became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Empty wells of silence opened out when I entered the canteen. Chairs were weirdly re-arranged in the NAAFI. I was the chop, and the chop was Flight Sergeant Ronnie Fitfield and Flight Officer Jackie White and Pilot Officer Tim Reid, all of them in one bad late summer month, men I can barely remember now except for their names and ranks and the look of loss in their eyes and the warm bristle touch of their faces. Nights out at a pub; beating the locals at cribbage; a trip to the cinema at Lincoln, and the tight, cobbled streets afterwards shining with rain. But I couldn’t settle on these men because already I could feel the darkness edging in between us, and I knew even as I touched their shoulders and watched them turn away that they could feel it, too. At the dances and the endless booze-ups and the card schools, I became more than a wallflower: I was the petalled heart of death, its living embodiment. I was quivering with it like electricity. One touch, one kiss, one dance. Groundcrew messages were hard to deliver when they saw who it was coming across the tarmac. It got to the point when I stopped seeing out the planes, or watching them through the pane of my bunk window. And the other girls in the annex and the spinster WRAF officers and even the red-faced women from the village who came in to empty the bins—all of them knew I was the chop, all of them believed. The men who came up to me now were white-faced, already teetering. They barely needed my touch. Once you’d lost it, the luck, the edge, the nerve, it was gone anyway, and the black bomber’s sky crunched you in its fists.