A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985 – 2011 by Paul McAuley

Author:Paul McAuley [McAuley, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul McAuley
Published: 2016-01-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Indira took the railway west from Phoenix, along Phineus Linea to Cadmus. The scarp stood to the north, an endless fault wall half a kilometre high. It was one of the tallest features of Europa’s flat surface. Mottled terrain stretched away to the south, textured by small hills and cut by numerous dykes and fracture lines. Lobes of brown and grey ice flows were fretted by sublimation and lightly spattered with small craters. This was one of the oldest landscapes of Europa. The ice here was almost five kilometres thick.

It was early morning, four hours after sunrise. Europa’s day was exactly the length of its orbit around Jupiter, and so from any point on Europa’s sub-jovian hemisphere Jupiter hung in the same spot in the sky, waxing and waning through the eighty-five hour day. At present Jupiter was completely dark, a louring circular black hole in the sky nearly thirty times as big as Earth’s moon. Indira was in the train’s observation car, sipping iced peach tea and watching the beginning of the day’s eclipse. It would last three hours and was the nearest thing to true night on the sub-jovian hemisphere, for when the sun set Jupiter was full, and there was almost always one or more of the other three Galilean moons in the sky.

There was a sudden flash of light that briefly defined Jupiter’s lower edge as the diamond point of the sun disappeared behind it. Darkness swept across the ice plain; rigid patterns of stars suddenly bestrode the sky. As her eyes adapted, Indira could make out the flicker of a lightning storm near the upper edge of Jupiter’s black disc – a storm bigger than Europa.

Indira talked with Carr. She talked with Alice and told her what she could see, and tried to patch up the row they’d had.

‘Carr misses you already,’ Alice said. She was riding one of the slideways of the city’s commercial centre. ‘He says he’s going to change your room. It’s a surprise.’ She didn’t want to talk about her project. When Indira tried to press her about it, she said, ‘This is where I need to get off. I have to go.’

The train was full of miners. They were all flying on some drug or other; it was their last chance to get high before they returned to work. They were native Europans, originally from South Africa. They wore leather jackets and fancy high-topped boots over pressure suit liners. One of them played a slow blues on a steel-bodied guitar; another, egged on by his comrades, tried to chat up Indira. He was a young man, tall and very handsome. He spent more time looking at his reflection in the diamond window of the observation car, ghosted over the speeding, star-lit landscape, than he did looking at Indira. His name was Champion Khumalo. Indira thought that it was a nickname, but no, all his friends had names like that, or names out of the Bible. Trinity Adepoju. Gospel Motloheloa. Ruth and Isaac Mahlungu.

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