Other Earths (collection)

The Templars came for it once. They set out from their temple with a great rumbling caravan of trucks and Jeeps and tanks, bristling with guns, and they lost two hundred vehicles and a thousand men in a mighty sandstorm. Not long after, reports started to appear in the papers about the problems they were having within their banking and gaming empire.

Never, not even in jest, not even to impress the pilgrims, would Em ever claim the cup had miraculous properties. She just knew that it made pilgrims happy to see it. For ten dollars, they could have their picture taken with it.

THE RECEIVERS Alastair Reynolds

With the ambulance sealed and the Rutherford counter ticking nice and slowly, we cleared the hospital checkpoint and sped through the lanes to Sandhurst and Rye, then took the main road east to Walland Marsh and the junction at Brenzett to New Romney. It had been sunny when we departed, but as we neared the coast, the sky turned leaden and overcast, with a silvery-gray mist keeping visibility to a mile or so. The coast road to Dungeness was a patchwork of repairs, with the newest craters either barricaded off or spanned by temporary metal plates. Ralph took it all in his stride, swerving the ambulance this way and that as if he had driven this road a thousand times, never once letting our speed drop under forty miles per hour. I held onto the dashboard as the ambulance lurched from side to side, creaking on its suspension. Ralph wasn’t my normal driver, and he took a bit of getting used to.

“Not getting seasick are you, Wally?” he asked, with a big smile.

“In an ambulance, sir?”

“It’s just that you look a bit green!”

“I’m fine, sir—right as rain.”

“You’re in safe hands, don’t worry about that.”

Between jolts I asked: “Been driving long, have you, sir?”

“Twenty years or so, on and off. Started off a sergeant with the Special Constabulary Unit, then got myself signed up as a private with the London Field Ambulance.”

“In France were you, sir, before the retreat?”

“Steady, lad. If the Patriotic League catches you calling it that, they’ll have your guts for garters. It’s the ‘consolidation,’ remember. Well, I was there—doing this job. So was Ravel—he was driving for the French, though, and we never met again.”

“Ravel, sir?”

“Old teacher of mine. A long time ago now.”

I didn’t know much about Ralph, truth be told. Mr. Vaughan Williams was his name, but no one ever called him anything other than Ralph, or sometimes Uncle Ralph. He was a familiar face at Cranbrook, always organizing a singsong around the mess piano. They say he used to be a composer, and quite a good one, although I’d never heard of him. Most of the chaps liked him because he didn’t have any airs and graces, even though you could tell he was from a good background. I guessed he was about sixty, but strong with it, as if he could go on for a few more years without any trouble. There were plenty like him around: men who had signed up at the start of the war, when they were still in their early forties, and who had hung on ever since. Sometimes when I listened to Mr. Chamberlain’s speeches on the wireless, I wondered if I’d still be around in twenty years, with an ambulance mate young enough to be my son.

We passed a gun emplacement that was still in use, two barrels sticking out at an angle, like a pair of fingers telling the Huns where to shove it, and then another one that had been bombed, so that it was just a broken shell, like a concrete-gray hat box that had been stepped on; then we slowed for a checkpoint at a striped kiosk hemmed in with sandbags. The guards had boxes hung around their necks, stuffed with masks in case the gas alarm went off. We were waved through without stopping, and then it was a clear dash along another mile or so of chalky road with barbed wire on both sides. Out of the mist loomed a tall shape, the same gray color as the gun emplacements, and a little further along the road was a similar shape and a third barely visible beyond that. From a distance they looked like tall gray tombstones sticking out of the land. Drawing nearer I saw that the structures were all alike, although I still had no idea of what they were. I couldn’t see any doors or windows or gun slits, at least not from the angle we were approaching.

“I don’t suppose you have much idea what this is all about,” Ralph said. “Never having been to Dungeness, after all. There are some other stations at Hythe and up the coast at Sunderland, but I don’t imagine you’ve been there either.”

“No, sir,” I admitted.

“What were you doing before you ended up with the Corps?”

“Artillery, sir. Antiaircraft emplacement at Selsey.”

“Shoot down much?”

“A few spotter planes. One flying wing and a couple of zeppelins. Then I got wounded in Sevenoaks.”