Reunion

Ch-ch-ch-changes

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

Previously: It’s been five years, and Yannick Clarke had assumed that Lola Styles, stranded on Palinor, was long dead…until he received a message with instructions to meet her…

Space.
2550. February.

The realities of space travel drove Clarke up the wall. He’d fully expected the boffins of the future to have worked it all out, so that it was like getting a bus to the shops. Instead, he was trapped in a spaceship for days, the sensation of gravity building, dropping and building again over the course of the journey, generating an unpleasant queasiness that he never quite got used to. Ceres hadn’t been at the full gravitational power of Earth, but it was at least constant.

Halfway through the journey all the passengers had to strap themselves into specially designed seats, while the spaceship flipped 180 degrees and began its long deceleration. There was something oddly archaic about the whole thing. It was still rockets pushing objects around, albeit on a massive scale and with essentially limitless power reserves. None of that impressed Clarke: all he knew was that he was stuck inside a shopping mall for over three days with no possibility of escape.

Other than during the mid-journey flip, passengers were free to roam about the various floors, enjoying the sanitised family entertainment, socialising in the lounges or watching the interminably slow red dot move along the white line on the various displays dotted about. He could have paid more for a faster ship, but that would have meant being drugged and stuffed in a dampening pod for the duration. Clarke wasn’t keen on being dampened in any context. There were other options with more luxurious interiors, finer food, even swimming pools, but his wallet didn’t stretch that far. For all its pretence of being a post-currency society, the reality of Max-Earth was very different. Poverty was exceedingly rare, but equality was still nowhere to be seen.

By the time the ship arrived at Earth and docked with the orbital station, Clarke was quite ready to get his feet back on solid rock.

Addis Ababa.
1980. February.

Clarke hadn’t been back since their escape five years earlier. There was the blink, the slight sense of vertigo, and there he was, on Mid-Earth. It didn’t feel like home, given that he was still several thousand miles from London. Addis felt like a shard of Max-Earth, sliced off and transported through the portal. Culturally, architecturally, technologically, it had more in common with its future counterpart than it did anywhere else on Mid-Earth.

It was a vision of what could happen when the dimensions played nice with each other, in stark contrast to what had happened in Europe. The difference was most noticeable in the air, which was dry and clear, entirely free from the smog that cloaked London. Whereas the Kingdom had doubled-down on home-grown solutions to power, pushing steam and coal as far as it could go, Ethiopia and its surrounding nations had learned from Max-Earth, adapting much of its tech to work on Mid-Earth. Solar farms, hydroelectricity, banks of people-powered gym generators dotted around the major cities.

To a born-and-bred Englishman like Clarke there was no small amount of embarrassment. He’d grown up fully committed to the notion that Britain knew best, that the wider empire was the crown jewel of Mid-Earth, that London would always be the centre of the universe. That it had two portals had played into that sense of national pride all the more, with the Joining more-or-less making London the literal centre of the triverse, as well as the metaphorical. Witnessing the leap that was Max-Earth was one thing; they had a six century head-start. But to see that same sophistication mirrored in Ethiopia, and across the wider UAC on Mid-Earth, raised uncomfortable questions.

Great Britain had been left behind, and it had happened decades ago, without anyone back home even noticing.

He stepped off the portal travelator and took in the grandeur of the Addis portal station. There was none of the tacky opulence of the London station, or the gimmicky, tourist-friendly recreations of the other dimensions in the form of themed bars. Instead there was a cavernously high ceiling, modern and clean but borrowing from the shapes of European cathedrals, merged with the sensibility of regional heritage. The concourse and surrounding station was its own ecosystem, home to plants and animals from across the continent. It was a bold welcome and a promise of what visitors to Mid-Earth Africa might discover for themselves.

A man was waiting on the other side of the security check. Detective Daniel Birhane, a local cop that Clarke had met when running in the opposite direction. The man smiled, his grin wide and big and genuine. “Detective Clarke! It is good to see you back in Addis.” He shook Clarke’s hand, then reached out to take his bag.

Clarke waved away the offered help. “I can handle my luggage,” he said. “Not as old as I look.”

“I don’t doubt it. How are you, detective? How has the future been treating you, my friend?”

“Not a detective any more,” he said, a little ruefully. “Just a civvy playing at being one.”

“I don’t know,” Birhane said, laughing and clapping him on the back, “once a police detective, always a police detective, I always think. No retirement for any of us.” He tapped a finger to his forehead. “Not up here, at least, am I right?” Birhane led them both through the portal station, clearly a route he knew well, past enormous tropical plants and fountains. “I booked you all a conference room. You don’t even need to leave the station, if you don’t want to!”

Clarke grunted. “It’d be good to see something of Addis this time.”

“You were in quite the hurry when you came through before.”

“I’m still a little nervous about being this side of the portal, if I’m honest,” Clarke said. “Last thing I want is being snatched back to London.”

“Trust me,” Birhane said, still grinning, “if anyone tries that here, we’ll make sure they regret it. The Kingdom of Great Britain can’t afford to damage relations with us.”

“You sound confident.”

“I know my country, detective. I know the UAC. As long as you’re on African soil, you are safe.” He paused at a nondescript, grey door. “Here we are. Detective Styles has yet to arrive, though she is in the city and I met with her a few days ago. The others are waiting.”

Nodding, Clarke took a deep breath and put his hand on the door handle.

For a second, Birhane looked as if he was going to say something else, and a flicker of concern passed over his face, then he gestured towards the door. “After you, detective.”

Swinging the door open, Clarke entered the room and immediately saw Nisha leaping up from the conference table, her chair nearly tipping over behind her. “Clarke!” she shouted, hurrying over and giving him a hug. He stood there awkwardly and glanced over at Kaminski, who smiled wryly and shrugged. Nisha smiled at him. “You’re looking good.”

He raised an eyebrow. “We haven’t seen each other for so long, and the first thing you say is a lie?” He laughed, then shook Kaminski’s hand. The guy looked somehow fresher than he remembered, and wasn’t wrapped in the usual stink of his cheap fags.

Another chair scraped across the floor and Holland got to his feet. He slowly crossed the room, sizing up Clarke as he did so. “Howdy, partner,” he said.

“Frank.” Clarke extended his hand.

Holland snorted slightly, as if something was funny, then shook the offered hand. “This better not be bullshit,” he said. “Only flight I could get from Venus was cheap and nasty. I’m surprised I’m not floating in a vacuum. I thought I’d be the last one here.”

“I was out on Ceres,” Clarke said, aware that their conversation verged on the absurd. “We’ve both been a long way from Southwark.”

“They’ve made us all into fucking astronauts.” Holland jabbed a finger at Nisha and Kaminski. “Except these two lovebirds, who only had to get a plane from India.”

Ignoring Holland, Nisha looked to Clarke. “Have you met with her yet? Have you seen Lola?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I think we’re all in the dark.”

“I thought she’d croaked five years back when all the shit hit the fan,” Holland said. “Must be tougher than she looks.”

“You can say that again,” Clarke said. It took not some small amount of determination to remain as optimistic as Lola Styles, in the face of all the awfulness the world put forward. Especially as a cop, dipping your toes in the mire every single day. That courage, that fortitude, had rubbed off on Clarke, he liked to think. A little of it, but just enough. Clearly she’d not had time to have a similar impact on Holland.

“The bigger question,” Kaminski said, looking strangely out of place without a cigarette in his hand, “is why she waited until now to contact us.”

That’s what had been keeping Clarke up at night. Communications through portals was a pain in the arse and fiddly at the best of times, let alone with transit to Palinor clamped down by London, but still. The attack on the Atlantic portal had to have something to do with it — the reopening of that portal had shifted the playing field considerably, and somehow was not yet back under the control of the Kingdom. Perhaps that had opened up an opportunity for Lola to get back to Mid-Earth, and get a message out.

Another door at the other end of the room clicked open, and then there she was. Lola Styles herself, walking back into their lives.

She was changed. He noticed the most obvious differences first: the clothing, which was entirely Palinese and bore no resemblance to the restrained, jeans-and-jumper combo that had always been her trademark. Instead she wore a sturdy, heavily layered outfit, patterned with what might have been a kind of camouflage in a different setting. A scarf of sorts was around her neck, looking as if it could be pulled up to partially hide her face. On her sleeves dangled trinkets that Clarke didn’t recognise, and on a belt around her waist hung unfamiliar tools. Her hair was thicker and longer, matted in places, tied into braids, with what seemed to be feathers used as a form of hair band. Her ears proudly displayed multiple rings and cuffs, her nose a stud.

As she approached, he saw the more subtle changes. A light-coloured scar ran down one side of her face, cutting into her eyebrow. She held herself somehow taller and firmer, her presence in the room more confident than he remembered. Her expression was harder, lines visible around her eyes that hadn’t been there before, as if she’d lived a lifetime in the five years they’d been apart.

She looked like a warrior.

“Hi, everyone,” she said, and Clarke was relieved to hear that familiar voice and the little spark of optimism that was carried on her words.

He hurried over to her, ahead of the others, and gripped her first by the shoulders, staring into her older eyes, then embraced her, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight. He could feel something in his eyes, and determined not to let Holland see.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, his voice faltering.

She pulled away and smiled her lopsided smile, and he could swear she was taller than before. Perhaps it was her boots. She held his hands. “So did I,” she said, “but I got better.”

That was when he noticed the skin on her hands: on her left it was a dark red, almost the colour of sunburn but without apparent damage. Her right hand was different again; a cobalt blue, with a slightly mottled pattern of freckles running up and into her sleeve.

Nothing made sense. “Lola,” he said, staring at her hands, then up at her scarred face. “What happened?”

She breathed in deeply, still that familiar smile on her face, but accompanied by a new steel in her gaze. “I’ll tell you everything,” she said, with an affirmative nod. “You’ve all got a lot of catching up to do.”

---

Thanks for reading. What do you reckon’s been going on in Lolaworld, then?

We’re travelling to Wales today to spend a week looking at waterfalls, clambering up and down hills and reversing up very, very narrow roads. It will be a fun time. That also means the schedule has been crunched this week even more so than usual during the school summer holiday period.

Rather than push myself until my fingers are bleeding, I’m instead giving myself permission to take it easy for the next week. As such, I probably won’t send out a newsletter on Monday, and there won’t be a new Babylon 5 rewatch newsletter. I do still fully intend to get the next Triverse chapter out the door on Friday, though.

Sparkle Summit: all-day writing festival!

Two events for your calendar. The first is the Sparkle Summit, coming up on 16 August:

Join us at 'THE SPARKLE SUMMIT'

Organised by

Russell Nohelty

and

Claire Venus

, this is a feature-packed day of panels and workshops, including giveaways! It’s a mini-festival, hosted on Substack. I’m taking part in a panel about Substack and fiction, alongside

Evelyn Skye

and

Meg Oolders

. The festival itself is an interesting experiment and looks like it’ll be crammed with useful information.

Scrivener workshop

At the end of the month we then have Scrivener x Simon K. Jones: How to Write Serialized Fiction in Scrivener, a Zoom workshop I’m doing with Literature & Latte, the creators of Scrivener. As you may know, I’m a big Scrivener fan:

I’m going to be talking about how Scrivener helps me write serialised fiction on a weekly basis. That’s 30 August at 5pm UK time. I can’t wait! Excitement is me. So yes, you can head over here to register your place for the webinar.

Author notes

I spent an absurd amount of time faffing about with solar system star charts, mathematical equations, planetary orbits and distances, all while trying to work out how long it would take Clarke to get from Ceres to Earth. Lola had just summoned everyone, but they were coming from different locations. While it wasn’t a major plot point, it still had to make sense.

Being science fiction, I am more-or-less free to do whatever I want with the future tech. Any scifi writer has to set some parameters, and that depends on the types of stories being told. If travelling between planets takes only hours, that enables a particular set of stories. If it takes days, that shifts things. If it takes weeks, or months, that’s going to impact on the drama. They are all valid approaches, it just has to be consistent.

I’m no engineer or mathematician, which complicates matters. In the end I settled on “pretty dang fast, but still takes a few days”. I didn’t want the zippy flight of Star Wars, where planetary travel is a bit like hopping on a plane to go to a neighbouring country. I also didn’t want it to be super laborious and slow. My reference point in fiction was primarily The Expanse, where space travel is still dangerous and difficult, but it’s a matter of days to get between planets, rather than months or years.

The two key factors are energy and g, as I understand it. The ‘Archimedes drive’ of Max-Earth and their use of fusion reactors takes care of the power end: a Max-Earth spaceship can more-or-less have it engines on for as long as it wants, accelerating constantly. The limiting factor is usually human passengers: while Just Enough can go as fast as the want, a human on board will become increasingly uncomfortable at higher accelerations, or even physically harmed.

I’ve actually gone back to the ‘Interludes and contemplations’ one-off chapter and tweaked a detail in there to bring it into line.

The end result is intended to feel a bit like 19th and early 20th century ocean travel, where the fastest liners could cross the Atlantic but it’d take a while.

Anyway, it was a fiddly thing that had to be nailed down, and now it is, so that’ll make subsequent travel times much easier to figure out. I want Triverse to ‘feel’ realistic, but I’m not about to become the next Kim Stanley Robinson: hard science fiction this ain’t.

Meanwhile, this is a big chapter for Clarke and the others. We get lots of insight into Clarke himself, and then there’s the Lola reveal at the end. The bulk of the chapter is slow paced and mostly about Clarke’s travel and arrival, my idea being to push the actual meeting with Lola until the very end.

Talking of which: big reveals in an ongoing serial are an interesting thing. I write and publish as I go, which means that committing to big shifts in the story is a risky thing. I have a policy of not going back tweaking plot points to make things easier for me. The more detail I put into the description of Lola in this chapter, the more I’m limiting what I can do next chapter, and further down the line. Writing a serial is a continual series of decisions, which all serve to narrow the narrative wiggle-room.

Evidently there’s a story to tell, so next time we’ll be answering some of those questions about what Lola has been up to this whole time.