Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215 Read online

  "While I was working on Lucifer I got a call from Will Dennis, the editor of Hellblazer at that time. He called and asked if I would like a crack at the story after Brian Azzarello stopped writing it. Initially I turned him down because I couldn't imagine writing to two deadlines. A few years later I was writing to four or five. Luckily, he called me back, I succumbed, and he liked my ideas. Writing John Constantine was a marvellous experience. Everyone writes him a little bit differently, bringing a little of themselves into the mix: in Garth Ennis’ run there's a big emphasis on Constantine's friendship group, the pub as the place that cements those friendships and you get the Lord of the Dance appearing as a major character; Warren Ellis writes something darker and colder, more like urban horror; Azzarello gives you more of an American road movie version of Constantine. It's not like the X-Men because you get a high degree of freedom: this is probably because Constantine stands by itself, while the X-Men is a franchise with half a dozen books being written at any one time. In that situation you're part of a team wrangled by several different editors."

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  Where universes intersect

  Carey's work hasn't been confined to comics and novels, he has also worked on film scripts. imdb.com identifies two projects in progress and refers to a 2002 animated film of Tristan and Isolde (Tristan et Iseut). I haven't seen an interview in which Carey talks about this film so I ask if the script was by another Mike Carey. There's an extremely long and nerve wracking pause when I put this question. In a naff comedy sketch it would be highlighted by a cutaway shot of tumbleweed skittering across a desolate landscape. I'm beginning to wonder if I've caused offence.

  "Yes, alright, OK, it was me. That was an appalling movie: it passed beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness. But, yes, yes, it was me. What is invisible in relation to this is lots of work I did for European TV companies off the back of Tristan et Iseut. It was a bad film but it was a good script. The guy who was doing it approached a German TV company for funding and showed them the screenplay. They did eventually come up with money for the film but they also approached me to work on some TV projects. I have had three or four years happily writing away on TV animation scripts as a result of this awful film—I must have done around three dozen of them."

  The other films listed for Mike Carey are Red King and Frost Flowers—the latter slated for release in 2009 and set to star the quirky and beautiful Holly Hunter.

  "Red King is just in outline at this stage. Frost Flowers is an erotic ghost story, and I say erotic to avoid the word pornographic as it does have some very intense and very explicit sequences in it. It's the story of David and Cora. David becomes romantically and sexually obsessed with Cora, a dead woman who lived in the same building as him but a hundred years before. He's an actor and she was an actress when she was alive. Now she's dead but she's a voyeur: she's one of the very rare dead people who still see the living. Most dead people must have no contact with the living world at all: they still hang around in the same streets and buildings but they are invisible to us and we are invisible to them. Cora can see the living and she likes to watch people having sex. It kind of warms her up a bit to see people having what she can't have any more. David and Cora eventually drift into each other's orbit and really it's about how that relationship plays out. Without giving too much away, the relationship does become physical—he discovers there's a way to cross over into the world of the dead and touch Cora."

  The discussion veering back to the issue of spirits and undead souls allows me the opportunity to ask Carey if he accepts the notion of an afterlife or whether it simply provides a useful metaphorical and narrative structure for his storytelling.

  "I'm not a believer and I'm not a thoroughgoing sceptic. My mother saw ghosts everywhere, she had stories relating to all of the houses we lived in, but I have never seen anything. I don't believe in ghosts as extensions of human life after death, but I'm what you might call an animist, I believe there are universes of spirit and of matter, and I believe we exist at the point where these universes intersect. So there's nothing in the material world that can adequately explain what consciousness is. I believe, therefore, that rationalism can only go so far in explaining the way things work, but I don't believe in life after death in any conventional sense."

  * * * *

  Speculative perspectives and other stories for girls

  Carey's work on graphic stories targeted specifically at teenage girls is a fascinating departure: there's My Faith in Frankie, with art by Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel; Regifters, again with Liew and Hempel; and Confessions of a Blabbermouth, produced in collaboration with his teenage daughter Louise Carey and Aaron Alexovich. So how did this new venture come about?

  "In writing Lucifer I became more and more interested in female characters: it became a book with a huge female cast. And I discovered Lucifer played best against a cast of strong female characters. There's Mazikeen, his sometime lover who takes the title Morningstar when Lucifer leaves the building, so to speak, or leaves this creation; Elaine Belloc, his niece and daughter of the Archangel Michael; and Jill Presto, the stage magician who becomes a vessel for a godlike daughter. It was very interesting and rewarding to write their interactions with Lucifer, with them occasionally getting the better of him at times, or at least coming out even, which no one else ever does.

  "So, after I'd enjoyed all that, I came up with the idea for My Faith in Frankie, about a teenage girl with her own god. In a way it had the same conceptual frame as Lucifer, but it played as a romantic comedy. From a sales point of view it bombed, but it was well reviewed and we had a lot of fun."

  At that time Carey's editor at Vertigo, Shelley Bond, had begun working on Minx, a new graphic novels imprint aimed at teenage girls. On the basis of the critical response to My Faith in Frankie, Bond asked Carey to try out for the new line. The results were Regifters and Confessions of a Blabbermouth. So is there a qualitative difference between writing mainstream comics and producing material targeted at a young female audience?

  "It does involve using different muscles—it's a different style of storytelling. For Frankie and Regifters I had to turn myself into a teenage girl to tell the story: and it's a perspective I've never been able to take in the real world. In that sense, these books were more speculative—and more fantastic—than anything else I've ever written. I don't really know how realistic the characters are, of course, but writing for girls was always creatively interesting."

  I ask Carey if working with his daughter had been an advantage in this respect, or if it had merely created new challenges.

  "Initially, Blabbermouth was very difficult—but it got easier. Shelley asked us to have a go and our initially reaction was to laugh. When we decided to do it I found it hard, at first, to treat Lou as an equal collaborator. It was her first comic strip and it was my 350th, or whatever, and I found myself telling her how to do things—art direction, paste dialogue, panel breaks ... She needed that input for the first few scenes but, after that, when she didn't I was still on her back, you can't do this, you can't do that ... So she had to turn round and say to me ‘I have an editor'. She insisted on doing her full half, and wouldn't let me get away with doing more than my share just because I was faster. She's very much her own person and refused to let me ‘help’ her in ways that limited her involvement.

  "It was great, we both came away feeling proud of what we'd done and it was also a learning experience in terms of our relationship. I'd do it again, but it's hard work. In the process of doing this I discovered teenage girls have fuller and more complicated lives than middle aged men—complicated by social pressures and GCSEs. Her life is very full."

  Copyright © 2008 Andrew Hedgecock

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE ENDLING—Jamie Barras

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  Illustrated by Darren Winter

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  Jamie Barras recently had a story published in the first iss
ue of our sister magazine Black Static and a few more here in Interzone, including ‘The Beekeeper’ which made it on to Locus Magazine's recommended reading list. Jamie lives in London.

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  Asha closed on the nearest iceberg and painted it with sound. It spoke back to her in whispers, telling her that it was too amorphous to warrant a close approach. She let the current carry her to the next berg. This one rang like a bell when she echoed it. Much better; she surged forward, pushing through cross-currents that tugged at her surface tropes, and settled over the berg. Then she fired up her photolumisols, spread out her diffraction mat, and started her scan.

  "Where should I be looking?"

  "Nmibi's Forge. There's a small, diamond-shaped cluster of stars, strength two to three, between the hammer and the anvil. See them?"

  Antonov called up his star map. The routine took only a moment to find the constellation for him: a claw-like sweep of stars in the middle sky. Antonov centred the picture window over the stars then blinked, once, twice, zooming in. “I see them. Where now?"

  "Okay: head north from the easternmost star in that group about as far as the distance from that star to its nearest neighbour—that's the place."

  Antonov made the necessary adjustments then called up the position lock. He studied the image caught in the frame: a faint glow like a tiny drop of red paint dispersing through a vast black sea. He launched his star-picking routine; it flashed back no objects found. Antonov captured the image and closed the picture window. He turned towards Wright, and found that he was staring at him again.

  Wright stepped back and rocked his head from side to side. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I've got to stop doing that, I know.” His lips twitched in a nervous smile.

  His voice was high-pitched and scratchy, like a heavily compressed audio. The Melzemi had replaced his respiratory system to allow him to breathe Fesquin's air—this was a legacy of that. He bore other signs of his long captivity: the twitches and finger-flutters that accompanied his speech—gestures that he could only have picked up from the Hila child type—and his accent, the way that he spoke Englac, with a lilt rich in the complex rhythms of Child Common.

  When the Stro floater touched down in the reservation and he saw that there was an Acheron human on board, he had wept like a child.

  "Stare all you want,” said Antonov, “I'm not bashful."

  Wright laughed—a natural, unforced, human sound.

  "The siting of the reservation was deliberate?” Antonov gestured up at the night sky. “This is the reason why they built it here?"

  Wright's expression darkened. “Yes. They had it all worked out: for five base-years, starting nearly sixty base-years after we got here, Earth's murdered sun was the brightest object in the sky."

  The air filled with the hiss of static—the wind rolling in across the grasslands. It tugged at Antonov's data weaves, and his nursemaid appeared, telling him that the ambient temperature had dropped by three degrees. He keyed his heater.

  "How many of your fellow captives had died by then?” Wright had been just one of over 8,000 human beings that the Melzemi had removed from the nascent Terran colony on Chard IVe.

  Wright touched his chin to his chest. “3,917.” He caught Antonov's look of inquiry. “They opened the reservation archives to me—” he gestured back behind them, towards the reservation “—eighty base-years ago, now. Every detail of every death was recorded."

  "Nearly half of your fellow captives died in the first sixty base-years, then—victims of the agent experiments?"

  "Mostly, yes. Although, at the time, we knew nothing of that—people just ... disappeared.” Wright squeezed shut his eyes and tipped back his head. “The first we heard about the agent was when the Melzemi told us that they'd used it to wipe out the VXIIers, so, now, we were all that was left of the human race. I suppose we should be grateful that they didn't dispose of the rest of us at the same time."

  date conversation. “276 base-years ago?"

  "Yes."

  "But you're still around."

  "Yes.” Wright's gaze returned to the night sky.

  "You have to see it from the Stro's point of view,” said Antonov. “They didn't expect to find any ChIVe captives alive, not after nearly 400 base-years."

  "I understand."

  "But you, you're still around. Thousands died in the agent experiments, and the Melzemi allowed everyone else here to just wither and die—everyone but you."

  "No—I died too."

  "Yes, but then the Melzemi re-grew you."

  "And you want to know why they did that?"

  "Yes."

  Wright was silent for a long time. But, eventually, he looked at Antonov and said, “For the same reason that the Stro retrieved the Acheron humans from deep space, Merchant-officer Antonov, after they had gone to all the trouble of sending you out there in the first place. They did it because they needed somebody that was something close to human to stop Elena Andalian."

  Back reflections of the unit cell played over Asha's diffraction mat. She stored the dimensions in chiral sugars fused with one of her filaments and moved on to the iceberg's next lattice plane. As she moved she felt resistance in her tropes and awoke to how cold her surroundings had become. She had been so focussed on what she was doing that she had failed to detect a slackening of the current in the surrounding mesotypes and corresponding fall in temperature. She was the wrong side of the nous ship's brain/floe barrier—a long way from the radiant heat put out by the nous ship's core.

  She cursed herself for not having done a more thorough survey—she had no idea how long this drop in the strength of the current would last. Would it be safe to wait it out, or should she retreat? She was in uncharted waters.

  Called 83 In Honour Of Another Of That Name grasped a travelling epiphyte, scaring off the water droplets adhered to its leaves. He watched the water droplets fly off and break over several nearby vines. Within moments, slowly-spinning balls of water filled the air, sparkling in the glow from the chamber's epithelial lights like stars in the outer night.

  Called 83 moved deeper into the chamber, coasting from vine to vine. He could hear distant voices, muffled by the intervening greenery, sounding out from somewhere above him. He started towards them. The air was fresh and tart—rich with the scents of the circling-forest. That sudden thought of home stole away Called 83's breath and brought tears to his eyes. He blinked, shook his head, steadied his breathing, and pressed on.

  "Is the bombardment over?"

  Called 83 twisted on the vine and watched as Called Redback floated towards him, scattering water droplets as he came. “Yes. We will be moving off soon."

  Called Redback settled onto a vine opposite and whistled. “This isn't the way. This ... violence."

  "I agree—but what can we do?"

  Called Redback puffed out his chest. “Are the Far-Beyonders so weak?"

  The hiss of fluttering leaves and splash of colliding water droplets suddenly filled the air. Called 83 felt the vine to which he was clinging begin to vibrate. Somewhere deeper inside the thicket frighten—

  "There was no need, you weren't a threat to them."

  Wright looked sharply at Antonov, and Antonov felt his cheeks flush. He hated this job, hated that Zhukhova-Antonov had fought so hard to win the contract. He pressed on. “There were no births here?"

  Wright rocked his head from side to side: no. He touched a hand to his chest. “The breathers weren't the only things they put inside us."

  "So, over the years, the numbers continued to fall?"

  "Yes."

  "Until...?"

  "Until eventually I was the only one left. Yes."

  There was a catch in Wright's voice, like corrupted data. The Melzemi had kept secret from the ChIVe captives the fact that the Stro had returned to the ruins of the Earth and recovered what would one day become the crew of the Acheron. So, as far as the ChIVe captives had been aware, the only people other than them to have escaped the
destruction of the human home system had been the population of a second nascent Terran colony, Pridac XVII. And the Melzemi had used the viral agent that they had developed using the ChIVe captives as research subjects to kill off the XVIIers. So, once the last of Wright's fellow captives had died, as far as Wright had known, he had become the last human being alive, the final gasp at the finish line of the human race. The endling.

  "When was that—when did the last of your fellow captives die?"

  "Oka 29."

  Antonov had to call down his Melzemi overlay to perform the ed neonates began to hoot and screech. The epithelial lights dimmed.

  "The Hila have re-awoken the Expression,"

  he said. “We are leaving."

  Called Redback shifted. “Our people were hunters. We are hunters."

  Called 83 had had this argument too many times before. He brought his hand away from the vine and beat at the air. “And the Hila are murderers of children—it is written into their being. Give them cause and they will kill us all."

  "They need us."

  "No. They keep us so that they needn't tend to the ship themselves, but they don't need us."

  Called Redback grunted. He seemed ready to continue the argument, but then he tipped his head to one side and passed his hand over his eyes. “I will tell the others to prepare for a return to the outer night."

  Called 83 watched Called Redback move off. Then he turned away and launched himself back towards the chamber opening. The re-awakening of the Expression had altered his plans. He needed to return to the fibre nexus and find out what world they would batter next.

  If Asha lingered too long the wrong side of the brain/floe barrier, she risked dissociation. But, set against that, she wanted to know what it was that she had found, what secrets the iceberg contained, because it belonged to the neo-nous, and the neo-nous was something new—a completely new formulation of the nous ship's liquid-crystal mesomind. The patterns within the neo-nous had originated outside the nous-ship, with a shoal of beings that had penetrated the nous-ship's siliceous shell and migrated inwards through the ice floes towards its core. The invaders’ arrival had triggered a battle for control with the ship's original mesomind, a battle that the original mesomind had lately lost. Their victory won, the invaders had gone about transforming themselves into the neo-nous, rewriting all the mesomind's tropes with their own patterns. And then, they had built a back-up memory in a chamber outside the mesomind, fusing their secrets with the icebergs that the chamber contained.