Far, far away: part 1

And so, we return

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: On the run from the corrupt authorities they were trying to bring down, the former SDC detectives were rescued by Justin, a benevolent AI, and taken to Max-Earth for refuge. Time has passed…

Lower Merkado, Ceres.
2550.

If he looked closely, Clarke could see the tilt on the surface of the beer. Subtle enough that it had to be consciously observed, and could be easily dismissed as a drunken illusion.

“First time here?” The bartender leaned towards him, smiling. She was probably in her fifties, and attractive. Then again, everyone looked younger on Max-Earth. Good genes, good healthcare.

He shook his head and lifted the glass so he could watch the liquid from the side. “Been here a couple of times. Never had reason to come down this low, though.”

Lower Merkado was far enough from the docks that the tourists didn’t show up. He’d had to take the train down ten levels to get to it. Clarke liked the feel of the place. Real people lived there, drank there, linked up, fell out, had fights, made something of themselves, got into trouble and out of it again. It was a marketplace for stories. It’s where the locals spent their time.

The bartender pointed at the surface of the beer. “Coriolis,” she said. Her hair was dark brown and wavy, almost unkempt but without looking messy.

“Cori-what-now?”

“Coriolis effect. That’s what you’re looking at. The rotation speed of Ceres goes up a notch the closer down you go. Lower Merkado is pretty low, which means the rotation starts making everything tilt. You can only really notice it with liquids, though.”

“Makes me feel permanently drunk.”

She moved a cloth across the bar absentmindedly. “So does having half a dozen beers in an hour.” Grinning, she poured a glass of water for him. “I’m not complaining about the business, but if you’re from out of town you want to watch your metabolism. Hangovers in low gravity if you’re not used to it can be hellish. So I’m told.” She had an American accent, that way of speaking that was so common on Max-Earth, but with a slight lilt that betrayed her living in the Belt. Clarke had developed an ear for this sort of thing over the five years he’d been stuck on Max-Earth.

The bar was in a corner of the market. Smells of a thousand cuisines filled the space. The challenge on Ceres was in choosing; it sometimes felt to him like the centre of the universe. It was a port of call for anyone going in or out of the inner planets, at least when its orbit aligned in a convenient manner. Seasons on Ceres were defined by relative proximity to Mars and Jupiter, rather than the sun. It was an inside-out and upside-down place that left Clarke with the beginnings of a migraine just for thinking about it. He’d read about it on the first trip over, but none of it had stuck in his mind. All he knew was that the city was mostly below-ground, and that he was for some reason standing on the ceiling.

“If you don’t mind,” Clarke said, “and before I get too drunk, can I ask you some questions?”

“As long as the first one is ‘can I buy you a drink?’, sure.” She smiled. Perfect teeth, like everyone else there.

“OK, why not. Help yourself.”

She poured something dark and red into a shot glass, looking at him rather than what she was doing. “Actually, one question from me first. It’s not just that you’re from out of town, is it? You’re a Mid-Earther. Am I right?”

He nodded. “What gives it away. Is it the crooked teeth?”

“Among other things,” she said, not unkindly. She raised her glass. “I’m Shannon. Pleased to meet you.”

“Clarke. Yannick Clarke. Used to be a detective.” For a time, he’d gone under an alias, but that didn’t seem necessary. They’d all gone their separate ways, had kept on the move, but truth was that nobody was looking for them anymore. Nobody cared. They weren’t important. “Now I’ve gone private. Hence, questions.”

She downed her drink, then poured another. Clarke wondered if he was going to be paying for that one as well. “Sounds exciting. Go on, then, Detective Clarke. Interrogate me.”

After finishing the last of his beer, he slid the empty glass towards her then pulled a photo from his jacket pocket. “This kid,” he said, “went missing a month back. Koth, goes by the name Pa’kan. Their family hired me to find out what happened and bring them home.”

“You want another?”

Clarke nodded. “Recognise the face?”

She picked up the photo and examined it. “To be honest, and I’m not being racist here, but I struggle to tell koth apart. My fault. You just don’t see that many of them this far from home.” Waving the photo she grinned at him. “Also, this? A paper printout? Really?”

“Old habits,” Clarke said, watching as she pulled the pump. The ale was pretty good. Brewed on Ceres, supposedly.

“You do know we have computers?”

“Yeah, but I like having something physical. Jogs the memory in a way a screen doesn’t seem to. Or maybe I’m just an old, washed-up Mid-Earther.”

She handed him the fresh beer. “Could be a bit of both.”

“Thanks.” He took the photo back, his fingers touching hers briefly. “Not ringing any bells, then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She leaned on the bar, her face closer to his. “I have seen more koth coming through Ceres over the last, what, six months? No idea where they’re going or what they’re doing. I couldn’t say if he was one of them or not.”

Time was an imposed convenience on Ceres, where there was no natural sunlight in the halls and caverns that had been carved into the asteroid. The artificial rotation bore no relation to ‘a day’, and so the lights within shifted slowly through the spectrum as the hours passed, in a rough simulation of Earth time. It meant that Clarke kept losing track of whether it was morning or evening.

“It would’ve been too easy,” he said.

“Probably. But you got to meet me, so it’s not a total bust. Plus, I can ask around. There are particular shops and community centres that koth tend to hang out. Have you asked there?”

Clarke nodded. “I did on the upper levels, without much success. They pointed me in this direction. I haven’t been on Lower Merkado for long.”

Her head tilted slightly to one side. “You here alone?”

“Yeah,” he said, sighing quietly to himself. “Yeah, I am.” It had been that way for some time. Kaminski and Chakraborty were off doing their own thing, and the last he’d heard from them had been from Max-Earth’s Addis. Nobody knew where Holland had ended up, after he’d embarked on his grand tour of the solar system. On the hunt for the most exotic ways to spend his money, as usual. Clarke had carried on for a while, with Justin, trying to fight the good fight, but eventually he’d had to admit to being beaten.

“I thought great detectives had to have partners. Where’s your Dr Watson?”

There were so many cultural touch-points that went entirely over Clarke’s head, that he’d developed a particular combination of smiling and shrugging to deal with it — a non-committal response that evaded having to acknowledge his ignorance. “I don’t have much luck with partners,” he said.

Maybe picking up on his answer, Shannon didn’t probe any further, which was just as well. Clarke wasn’t in the mood for going over bad history. Some days he struggled to remember John Callihan’s face. Lola Styles’ face.

His life was a mess, but at least it wasn’t as messy as those of his clients. That was the benefit of working private cases: there was always someone in a worse situation than him, who was willing to pay to get themselves out of it. Or in this case, to get someone else out of it. Clarke looked at the photo again. Pa’kan had red and green filaments in their horns and a wry expression on their face: almost a mischievous grin. The family lived on Max-Earth but Pa’kan had wanted to see the planets before getting a job; three months into his travels he’d vanished. The paper trail had led Clarke to Ceres.

“I’ve got other customers to serve,” Shannon said. Clearly bored of the conversation. “But I get off in an hour. If you’re still in the area, come find me. I know a great noodle bar.” Perhaps not bored, then.

Unsure of what was on offer, Clarke nodded and tried to react as if attractive women invited him out all the time. “That sounds good,” he said.

“I know it does,” she said, winking. “And then in the morning maybe we can go ask around about your missing dragon.” She turned and moved to the other end of the bar, where more punters were waiting.

Ceres always brought the unexpected. It kept life interesting. It was a good place to forget about yourself, Clarke always thought. In the morning, she’d said. He checked his watch needlessly, as the shops never closed on Ceres. He needed to buy some mints.

Image from JPL

---

Thanks for reading.

This moment’s been coming for a while and I’ve been a little nervous about it; there have been big shifts in the story before, but never quite this seismic. I’ll talk more about all of that down in the author notes.

Some bits:

A new interview with me went up over on The Writing Grove, courtesy of

Lloyd Miner

, in which you’ll find me talking a lot of about serialisation, writing a newsletter and the books I’ve published. You can read it over here.

Earlier this week my Babylon 5 rewatch continued, with an episode that I found rather shocking.

It’s been hot in the UK this week (by our standards), so this piece by

Mike Sowden

made for an unpleasant read.

Right, let’s get down to it:

Author notes

So, five years later. I remember having a conversation with my 11 year old son about manga he’s reading, during which he mentioned the ‘time skip’ in One Piece. It was a piece of the puzzle I’d needed for a while: I knew after the finale in the ‘Assault on Stamford and Coin’ story that there would be a shift, and many of the lead cast would end up on Max-Earth. I also wanted to move certain aspects of the plot along, and push the characters into a different head space.

Long story short, a time skip was the solution to all these things. It was then a question of how long? Six months, a year, two years? I settled on five because it emphasises the hopelessness felt by Clarke, and the complete failure of Bakker’s plan to uncover the corruption at the heart of the triverse.¹ Five years emphasises that there isn’t going to be some genius counter-move by Clarke and the others: they’ve already given up.

That’s an opportunity to reposition all of them and shift their lives along. To see what that’s meant for each of them.

Due to there being so much change, I deliberately kept this chapter quite grounded and small scale. It’s Clarke, at a bar, the sort of place we’ve seen him many times, doing his detective thing. The context is different, but it’s a recognisable scene. It’s something familiar to hook onto.

Of course, he’s in a fricking asteroid, but otherwise…

We haven’t had many Max-Earth centred storylines. Usually it’s been brief moments, or Justin visiting Mid-Earth. The majority of the portal travel has been to Palinor, especially with Lola’s liaison role. Suddenly our focus is much more on the science fictional end of Triverse, which is part of why I’ve been nervous. Would readers who have been enjoying the 1970s police drama, and the quirky fantasy adventure stuff, enjoy being dropped into spaceships-and-space bases territory?

I guess I’ll find out.

The idea of spinning up asteroids and hollowing them out in some way I first read about in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, I think. He returned to the idea in 2312, and it popped up in The Expanse as well. Kicking off this new Triverse arc from Ceres seemed like a fun nod to what’s come before, as well as emphasising that we’re in new territory. It’s important to embed the fact that Max-Earth isn’t just another version of Earth, but is a dimension with multiple colonised planets.

One aspect I pondered for a while was how to retain the core structure of Triverse even with the main characters no longer part of the SDC. Having Clarke be a PI made a lot of sense, and retains the episodic structure of the overall story. I also like that Clarke, who has always been on the verge of retiring, now finds himself unable to stop. Being a detective is who is, and he doesn’t know how to not be one.

This chapter is deliberately coy with details, a) to avoid an infodump and b) to keep matters up in the air for the next few chapters. Lots more to come.

Thanks again.

1. Darkest before the dawn, etc.