Other Worlds Than These

“—and tried again. I brought him to Baltimore, got you the note; you reached him, and yet now you’ve come here and he will die alone; has died alone. You—”

“Can only return to death,” the queen said and threw away the rest of the now-rotted pear.

“Your uncle is dead,” Reynolds said. “The moment he returned, the years he had been here caught up to him.”

“But he wasn’t gone years,” I said. Surely there was a mistake. I felt desperate to make these creatures understand that. “Only overnight. I feared him drunk and sleeping it off.”

“Overnight to you,” Reynolds said and his voice skipped. “He was taken almost every night.”

And every day returned to his world, to my world. To live years over the course of a night; to wake each morning in his bed, thinking it all a dream. How I had once laughed at my uncle and his small circle of friends, all of them old, bent men. How young might they have honestly been?

“Miss Franks—” He clasped my hands within his own. “Agnes. I never intended for you to come here. You are dead to your world; time has gone on without you and made what it will of Baltimore.”

Though I wished to believe that all of this was some terrible dream, I knew within my heart that it was not. Edgar’s stories of this place should have prepared me. He had seen this place; its people had loved him and in the end destroyed him.

“Only overnight,” I said. “I can go back.” I had to know, what had become of my world? Was my uncle truly gone? Had the thing I feared most come to pass? It could not be. What if he still lived?

“What are you not telling me?”

Reynolds grabbed my arm. “Is isn’t just overnight—not for you.”

It was then that Reynolds’ trespass became clear to me. I had misunderstood what the queen showed me. Every day my uncle woke in my world, it was Reynolds who brought him to that moment. Reynolds unstitched the decades that had passed within this strange world to bring my uncle back into my time, so that I might have a living relation at my side.

How many times should my uncle have died? It was no wonder he tried to cut out his own eyes when at last he seemed firmly rooted here.

“It remains her choice,” the queen said to Reynolds. “You asked us to allow that, to never take another of her kind without their permission. This is no different because you love her.”

I looked beyond the queen’s star-wreathed head, to the vast sky where golden birds stretched their wings. No, not birds; angels. When I looked the right direction, I saw their slim bodies. But where was the sea my uncle wrote of, I wondered, and watched the slow ebb and flow of the entire city itself and realized the city is the sea and wanted to weep with the joy of it.

“You would live a full life here,” Reynolds said.

My eyes met Reynolds’. When I looked at him a certain way, I saw the truth of him, his true body, and if I looked deeper, I saw to the heart of him. Darker, fouler; a seam of brightness. He could take me back as he did my uncle, I thought, but he doesn’t want to. He wanted to keep me. “I want to go back.” I had to go. To look—to see whatever had become of whatever I loved.

The queen seized my chin in her pear-wet hand and my world went black.

When light returned, it fell in hazy curtains around me. The air was ashen, bits of burnt paper falling as snow would. Walls like skeletal fingers rose around me. Scattered bricks, the stench of burnt wood. I saw hunched figures in the street and ran for them, but as I neared they became only heaps of more debris. I saw no people.

Though my legs were tired and ached with each step, and my lungs burned, I walked on. I walked up streets once familiar to me; dead, burnt things crunched underfoot. I searched for anything I might recognize and while there were ruined shops aplenty, I knew none of them.

I walked through all the wreckage of this city, until the sun touched and began to fall below the horizon. Exhaustion dragged me to sit on a curb and I couldn’t find the energy to mind the rubbish I settled in.

How many years had passed Baltimore by? How long had the city lain in ruin? Was it God who decided to destroy this place, or man? Did it matter at all?

In the remains at my feet, I found a scrap of poetry, about a woman with hyacinth hair. It could not be my uncle’s handwriting—though perhaps it was, for as I stood to continue my journey, I could not remember his handwriting. I could barely remember his face.

It was his voice I remembered best of all, and the beat of those words in my head. The seam. It rested inside of me, unable to escape. He’d wept for it in the end, shouting for Reynolds to snatch him back to that world.

I folded the page into my hand and walked on. As far as I walked, the whole city through, there was only gray ruin. I yelled, but no one answered. Perhaps there was no one to answer.

“Anyone!” I cried as loud as I could from the middle of the street. I looked to the sky, the veiled sun now set in the gray west.

My world was dead. I had nothing. I looked at my filthy hands and saw them old and wrinkled. I was but twenty and felt the universe retreating from me.

“Reynolds! Fonderous Reynolds!”

The ring of hooves on cobblestones answered me. Sharp and distinct down the ruined street they came, pulling a claret and gold four-in-hand.

There was one thing left to me. Hope in the brightness in the seam above the floor. Hope that there existed in that place a life worth living, with beings I might one day love. My uncle was dead in both worlds, but I was only dead in one.

I stepped in the path of the carriage and my world went black—

But only for a moment.

SIGNAL TO NOISE ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry in 1966. He spent his early years in Cornwall, then returned to Wales for his primary and secondary school education. He completed a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD in the same subject at St. Andrews in Scotland. He left the UK in 1991 and spent the next sixteen years working in the Netherlands, mostly for the European Space Agency, although he also did a stint as a postdoctoral worker in Utrecht. He had been writing and selling science fiction since 1989, and published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. He has recently completed his tenth novel and has continued to publish short fiction. His novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times. In 2004 he left scientific research to write full time. He married in 2005 and returned to Wales in 2008, where he lives in Rhondda Cynon Taff.

FRIDAY

Mick Leighton was in the basement with the machines when the police came for him. He’d been trying to reach Joe Liversedge all morning, to cancel a prearranged squash match. It was the busiest week before exams, and Mick had gloomily concluded that he had too much tutorial work to grade to justify sparing even an hour for the game. The trouble was that Joe had either turned off his phone or left it in his office where it wouldn’t interfere with the machines. Mick had sent an email, but when that had gone unanswered he decided there was nothing for it but to stroll over to Joe’s half of the building and inform him in person. By now Mick was a sufficiently well-known face in Joe’s department that he was able to come and go more or less as he pleased.

“Hello, matey,” Joe said, glancing over his shoulder with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand. There was a