The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy Read online

  She drove the last six miles at a steady fifteen miles an hour, parked the car and sat down on her front doorstep, trying to find the energy to fish out her keys and open the door. Hit a tree, she told herself, mindlessly chewing the words like gum, I hit a tree, I hit a tree. There was a tree, really there was, and I drove into it. Wham crash tinkle. Really and truly, there was a tree . . .

  She stood up. She felt fine. When I hit the tree, I bashed my head. That’s why I imagined that I hit him, not a tree. But it was a tree I hit, not him. I know him from somewhere.

  She opened the door and let herself slump through it. Of course I think I know him from somewhere, because he was a hallucination, brought on by hitting my head when I hit the tree. When you hallucinate, you make up the picture from someone you know. That’s why I thought he looked familiar. But really, I hit a tree.

  Depressingly, she’d never felt better in her life; but that was probably a side-effect of the concussion too. Ought to see doctor, if bad concussion, seeing things. Too ill to see doctor. Best place for her was in bed; then, tomorrow, the doctor. Then the garage. Lots of incredibly tedious, boring things to do. Thinking about them made her feel a little better – nothing like extreme inconvenience to bring you back down to earth – and she managed to crawl into bed and close her eyes. She couldn’t sleep, so she tried counting sheep. Then trees.

  At half past three in the morning, she woke up out of a dream she instantly forgot. “Not him,” she said aloud, “tree.”

  She knew who he was. Except he wasn’t. No trace of a resemblance; not physical, behavioral or verbal. Never seen him before. Complete and total stranger.

  “Daddy?” she said.

  There were 26,865 messages on his answering machine when he got home. He wiped them all without listening to any of them, got undressed, brushed his teeth and went to bed. He’d have to be up bright and early in the morning, before NASA and the Europeans and the Chinese and all the rest of them figured out where he’d sneaked off to. He had a long way to go. He needed a few hours’ sleep.

  Which wouldn’t come, no matter what. Overtired, he realized. Jetlag – no, timelag; ought to be used to it by now, it wasn’t the first time he’d indulged in faster-than-light travel and arrived home after a six-week journey three hours before he’d set off. It had been a slice of luck, of course, picking up a lift on Mars from a passing Ostar survey ship (“You want to go where? Seriously? Oh, you live there. . .”); it had spared him the unspeakable tedium of a voyage home via human technology, as well as giving him a head start on his erstwhile colleagues, who wouldn’t be expecting him home until the stub end of the rocket went splash in the Indian Ocean, in approximately eight weeks’ time. He grinned briefly, imagining the look on their faces when they popped the hatch and found him absent; their shock, horror and disbelief as it slowly dawned on them that they were going to have to find someone else to blame . . .

  The hell with them, and all that. It had been a pretty fatuous hope to begin with; that the silly little red ball of dust and rock the humans called Mars would turn out to be his home. But, fatuous or not, it had also been his last, best shot, the culmination of centuries of hard work, subtle manipulation, unendurable patience and almost continuous tongue-biting.

  No small task he’d set himself, back in the dawn of European prehistory; to nudge, suggest and puppy-train Homo Sapiens into a state of technological achievement sufficient to enable the building of a space-going vessel capable of reaching that dusty red rock in the sky – and that had been a thin sliver of Battenburg compared with the job of creating a society enlightened, educated, scientifically curious and above all, gullible enough to want to send a rocket to the stars, all without letting anybody suspect that they were being used, or that the using had been done, from start to finish, by the same unknown and uncredited individual.

  On balance . . . Well, quite. On balance, he’d have been better off, three and a third millenia ago, settling down and getting a job. Never too late to plan for your retirement, the TV ads were forever screeching at him; just think. If he’d planned ahead – He frowned, did sums on his fingers. If he’d pulled his finger out the day he’d arrived on Earth, consulted an independent financial adviser and taken out an endowment mortgage linked to a with-profits term life policy, by now he’d have paid off the final instalment and be the owner of the entire planet.

  Instead; well, the first hundred years had been a gas, a riot, a ball. Soon as he’d realized that in this miserable little planet’s atmosphere he was effectively immortal, ageless and invulnerable, he’d been off in a whirl of larking about that had irrevocably altered history, founded half a dozen religions and left him with a permanent taste for dry white wine, feta cheese and impersonating supernatural entities. Good fun, until the homesickness cut in and he found himself staring bleakly at the raw fact that he’d done everything, been everywhere, sampled every experience that this cramped little pebble could possibly offer; and meanwhile, back home, Real Life was tapping its foot, glancing at its watch, wondering where the hell he could possibly have got to, with the implied proviso that if he was much longer, it would have no choice but to go on without him. If his calculations were accurate, a century on Earth was very roughly equivalent to a month back home. The general rule, essential in a spacegoing culture, was that once you’d been missing off-planet for eighteen months and your family and employers had no reason to believe you were still alive, the court declared you legally dead; your possessions were sold off, your dwelling unit was reassigned, your union memberships and Book Club subscriptions were automatically cancelled and your back pay was donated to the Ministry of Justice Probate Division Social Club and Beer Fund, to defray the expenses of your Statutory Wake. Once you were legally dead, of course, that was that. The Ministry of Justice hadn’t tamed a turbulent warrior species and established an ideal society by letting mere facts get in the way of presumptions of law.

  Eighteen months – eighteen hundred years, Earth time – and he’d be irrevocably screwed; his life as he knew it would be over, his spouse would be free to recouple with her loathsome cousin the insurance broker, and his unique collection of Strange Animal Noises vids would be split up and dissipated across the length and breadth of the Spinning Rose. Disaster.

  Just thinking about it made him wince, even now. It’s only when you watch what you’ve got slipping away through your fingers that you realize it was actually rather a lot, verging on unalloyed bliss; certainly when compared with what he had on rotten stinking Earth, in the company of fifty billion barely planet-trained hairless primates. Even when the deadline had passed, he was painfully aware that he’d give anything to be back home, living the half-life of a legal ghost, barred from owning property, contracting marriage or joining a video library, rather than be stranded here among the monkey people. If anything, his efforts to guide humanity became more feverish in their intensity. The camshaft, moveable type, democracy, the blast furnace, high-carbon alloy steel, the telescope, income tax, electricity, science fiction, the rocket motor, one by one he’d cunningly smuggled them into the sum of human knowledge and experience; hoping all the while that the planet they called Mars was indeed the Spinning Rose, just because Mars looked sort of reddish too . . .

  Wrong planet. He’d got there eventually, but it was the wrong bloody planet. Pity, really. Final crowning irony of ironies, that he should have set foot on Mars at precisely the moment when another space-travelling race, one with the technology to take him to the very furthest edge of the galaxy, was just about to leave – and that that race should be the rotten bloody Ostar . . . Nice enough blokes in their way, delighted to help out a fellow sentient being in any way they could, with just the one unfortunate exception; that they believed without question that the Spinning Rose was the planet where all their race’s lawyers went to when they died, which meant that nothing under the stars would ever induce them to go within fifty thousand light-years of it.

  Spiffing. Just for a split second
he’d toyed with the thought of asking them for a lift to Ostar Prime; but he’d been there, many years ago, and remembered that their entire culture was based around a game in which twenty-two Ostar chased an inflated egg-shaped bladder round a flat grass square. The hell with that. Suddenly, Earth hadn’t seemed quite so bad after all.

  He yawned, rolled over onto his back, stared at the ceiling. Tomorrow, he told himself, would be the first day of the rest of his everlasting life. Oh, what joy.

  “Daddy?” she repeated.

  Sitting up in bed, gormless expression on face, feeling about as bright and chirpy as a troll who’s forgotten that the clocks go forward; Daddy? Nah, can’t have been. Think, you stupid girl, think. Last time you saw Daddy was twenty-five years ago, when he would have been somewhere around thirty and you were two. Therefore it follows, as the night the day, that a man you bump into twenty-five years later who looks exactly, down to the last hair, like Daddy looked twenty-five years ago, cannot, in the very nature of things, be him. Besides, if it had been Daddy, he’d have had a newspaper; because the last thing he’d said to Mummy before he disappeared was that he was just nipping down the road to get a paper; and by now he must’ve found one he liked, surely – Her face hardened just a little. Of course it hadn’t been Daddy; but if it had been, she’d missed out on a wonderful opportunity to show him how much she loved him by reversing back over him a few times and parking her car on his head.

  But it hadn’t been him, it was just a tree. Tree. Big tall wooden thing with leaves. Big tall wooden thing with leaves that doesn’t suddenly piss off when you’re two and not come back. And therein lay the difference. She quite liked trees.

  Time to get up, dress, eat breakfast, go to work. She was at the office and taking the cover off her keyboard when she remembered she was completely out of cigarettes. Not that it mattered a damn, since she’d given up smoking for good, permanently and for ever nine hours, fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds ago.

  “Won’t be a moment,” she trilled at the office manager, as she grabbed her coat off the hook. “Just got to nip out to the shop.”

  The office manager pulled a face like a basilisk with toothache, but by then she was halfway down the stairs.

  Outside the newsagent’s, he opened the paper and scowled.

  They’d spelt his name wrong, of course; even more annoying was the fact that they’d announced that he was dead. Huh. If only.

  ASTRONAUT DEAD IN MARS PROBE HORROR. Yes, well. He had mixed feelings about his apparent immortality. On the one hand, anything had to be better than life on Earth. On the other hand, what if he died and got bundled off by default to some human-specific afterlife, which would inevitably consist of everything he found most objectionable about the planet, only more so? The eternity aspect of it wouldn’t be so terribly different to what he was going through now, but human beings floating on fluffy white clouds playing harps –

  Interesting line of speculation, nonetheless, and one he’d toyed with before. So far, in over three thousand years of boisterous activity, he hadn’t found anything on Earth that could kill him, or even give him a mild headache. Even so, just because he hadn’t found it yet didn’t mean to say it didn’t exist; and besides, he was limiting himself rather with that implied on-Earth proviso. He might be tougher than Clint Eastwood’s stunt double, but . . . He turned the page of his newspaper. A light flipped on inside his head, and he grinned.

  The headline on the top left of page three was something about some arms limitation initiative somewhere; presumably an effort to prevent the possibility of the planet getting blown to rubble as the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. Yes, he thought, what about that? If he’d learned one thing about humans, it was that they were distinctly touchy about certain things – borders and airspace violations and stuff like that – and also perfectly capable of blasting out the baby with the planetary bathwater over matters of ideological principle. Just suppose . . . If the planet got blown into space-dust, surely even he couldn’t be expected to survive that – or even if he did, surely a minute or so in the interplanetary void could be relied on to do him in. Furthermore (and this was the clever bit); if there was no planet Earth and no human race, would there still be a human heaven and/or hell (as far as he was concerned, the two would be interchangeable) waiting to snaffle him as soon as his soul broke out of his body? Logic would seem to suggest not. He had no idea how these things were supposed to work, but he’d been around for the rise and fall of more human religions than a millipede could count on its fingers, and they’d left him with the distinct impression that once people stop believing in them, gods die and heavens fade. Switch off the power at the mains, therefore, and inevitably the screen must go blank.

  Yay, he thought. Easy peasy. The tricky part over the last century or so had been stopping his unwitting proteges from exterminating each other, at least until they’d built the manned Mars rocket. Just a little bit of encouragement, a few tugs on the chain here and there, and he could be out of here inside a month – He looked up, suddenly aware that he was being stared at.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hello.”

  “You.”

  Some female; he was rather good at monkey-faces, but after watching so many generations go by, he couldn’t help getting just a little bit confused sometimes. He was pretty sure he recognized this specimen, but it was entirely possible that she was the spit and image of her great-great-great-grandmother, who might have been the waitress who spilt hot soup in his lap back in 1854.

  “You,” she repeated. She’d just lit a cigarette, and the forgotten match burned down and scorched her fingers. She hardly noticed. “I –”

  “Ah yes.” He remembered now. “You’re the silly cow who rammed me with a car last night.” He grinned. “You got home safely, then, after all?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Not,” he added with a sweet smile, “that I give a shit, because fairly soon, if everything goes the way I’m hoping it will, all that sort of stuff’ll be largely academic anyhow.” He grinned. “Private joke,” he explained. “See you around.” And, before she could say anything, he’d crossed the road without looking and walked round the corner, out of sight.

  “You are starting to feel sleepy,” said the voice. “You are completely relaxed. Your toes are relaxed. Your feet are relaxed. Your ankles are relaxed . . .”

  Balls, she thought; but her eyelids dropped anyway, and her mind started to drift, in the way which had by now become familiar. Waste of time, she thought, waste of money, this is pointless, doesn’t work – Oh, she thought.

  Rationalizing after the event, she decided it must’ve been because her second encounter with the strange, unpleasant man was still fresh in her subconscious mind, his face still plastered all over the screen there; so, when the brakes of consciousness were taken off and she started gently freewheeling through her own hidden preoccupations, the sight of the same face in a completely different context must’ve pulled her up sharp.

  Very different context, or series of contexts; her mind was now a bank of split screens, each showing the same face, his; each one as radically different as one century from another, one lifetime from another. Much, much better value for money than drowning or falling off a tall building; because instead of just one past life flashing in front of her eyes, there were dozens . . .

  Turned out she’d been – let’s see, she thought; in this life, a humble secretary in a government office. In her previous incarnation, by contrast, she’d been a professor of nuclear physics; before that, the wife of a world-famous astronomer; before that, a humble New England schoolteacher; before that, the widow of a wealthy industrialist; before that – oh, all sorts of things, right back to a little girl standing in the sun in a dusty courtyard watching a bald old man drawing lines in the dust with a stick, pointing something out to him – ooh look, uncle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the other two sides, just fancy that –

  So many lives. A
ll different. All me.

  All not so different as all that.

  Maybe if she’d been awake, she wouldn’t have been able to join the associational dots; too much would’ve got in the way. But as she watched the images flick past, the basic shape of the plot stared out at her like a turd in a bowl of salad; and quickly, intuitively, she put the story together.

  Each time round, he’d been her father. Each time, he’d suggested or argued or pressured her into a way of life – marriage, career, whatever – and each time round she’d been the vital link in the chain. As a scientist, she’d made the crucial breakthrough; before that, she’d drawn her husband’s attention to the little speck through the telescope that he’d overlooked; before that, she’d invested some of her late husband’s fortune in the company that went on to refine the necessary alloy; before that, as a schoolma’am, she’d imbued the child prodigy with his lifelong passion for mathematics; before that, talking her husband into bankrolling Hernan Cortes and his wild dreams of exploration. Each time around one more little step (and every time, nobody taking the slightest bit of notice, because after all, she was only a woman . . .) on the way to bringing about the grand design of her serial father. Daddy’s little girl.

  I’d like to wake up now, please, she screamed; but her mouth and lungs were fast asleep, while the hypnotist droned on about how much she hated the smell of tobacco smoke (liar). So instead she stepped back until she could make out the broad, bold lines of the big picture.

  Whereupon she understood.

  A rich, full day.

  He hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it, of course; mostly, he realized, because it would’ve been too bloody easy – too depressingly, predictably, disappointingly simple. A few calls, whispers in a few ears, some lies, some half truths, and he could have had a thousand bombers in the air before the pubs opened. But then, he’d thought. If it’s so easy, I guess there’s no rush. I can do it tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. If I really want to. Which I –