Hot Head

by Simon Ings

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk

Synopsis

An ambitious SF novel that is at once post-cyberpunk and post-modern. Complex, multi-layered, it combines hard science, tarot and images of late 20th-century Europe to make something utterly original. And introduces a memorable new heroine to the genre ... Malise has a problem. She's come downwell to Earth, but years of space combat have ruined her: her muscles have wasted away, her past is a confused torture of events and her brain is wired to addictive military hardware that's illegal on Earth. But with an AI mining probe returning to Earth, having bred and grown until it is hundreds of miles across, Malise is in the firing line again. The probe is indestructible and it is insatiable for more metals. No one knows how to stop it. Malise doesn't know she has a blueprint for humanity's survival wired into her head.

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 288

Sample

If there was ever a universal culture on this planet, then it came in a cardboard box and on the side were stamped the words: made in Japan.

This culture might once have been called, with some justification, ‘the West’, but in the post-war period its economic influence was so vast, and its cultural heritage so etiolated, that no single name could embrace its intellectual glories, its catastrophic mundanities, its cherished and deadly contradictions. Even the most hostile actions undertaken or contemplated against this culture were but a renunciation of it, and implicit in each renunciation was the expectation of that alien, necessary culture continuing to survive and create.

This is the story of a woman born to Muslim parents; her cultural inheritance was drawn in part from her elders, from the old ways of her repudiative culture, and partly – from the age of six she was brought up in ‘the West’ – from the aggressive modernity of a newly unified Europe.

The flaw – the expectation of others continuing to create, to be – sits at the heart of a repudiation, and this is as true for Malise Arnim (this name was given her when her father brought her to Europe) as it was for the particular Muslim society into which she was born.

So while this appears to be a story about a Muslim woman, it is in fact about a Western woman; and vice versa. Repudiations were nested within her, contradictory and subtle, and if at times during this story she seems immensely strong, or weak – or simply strange – then some of that will be a consequence of those forces within her, breaching no argument yet fatally undermined, opposed and yet dependent. Worlds within, not admitting of each other.

In Fundamentalism, Malise Arnim’s elders thought they had found a way to consider themselves inviolate of Western influence. No longer did they follow the rich and contemptuous descendants of their colonial rulers. For a while the flaw in their argument was hidden. The repudiated West produced, in return for oil, goods the Islamic states themselves did not produce. Equipment, journals, textbooks: these goods were not associated with learning, effort or culture. They were barter goods – just one more natural resource.

Only when the Muslim world ran out of oil, and the West, gripped by recession, ceased to generate the communications, transport and arms by which the Muslim nations were governed, did those Fundamentalist states, riven from their revenue, wake to their predicament. They had, in the long Indian summer after the Iranian revolution, believed that all existing institutions were un-Islamic, and they had undone them one by one until – state after state found that this was so – only the army could rule. Military juntas have their own, irreligious prerogatives: Iranian forces overran Azerbaijan barely ten years into its new-found independence.

Soviet forces contained the action but they and their fellow Europeans were jittery and unhelpful at the conference table. There was a nuclear crisis: the Herzegovinian civil war was into its fourth month, and the States had just smuggled eight lightships through EC peacekeeping lines to rebel Finnish nationals.

The States itself, a month before, had been politically skewed by the Hispanic Lobby’s bloodless coup d’état. No one knew who was in power, or why, or whether the lightships were a remnant of curtailed policy, or an omen of things to come.

At the age of six Malise fled with her father from Azerbaijan; they settled in the north of Italy, just outside Urbino.

When they first came to Italy, Malise’s father tried to find work in Tarquinia, but all they had were factory jobs, and anyway, the oil was running dry; the factories were closing. The townsfolk wanted no more refugees.

He worked for a time in a seafood restaurant by the coast, and Malise followed him around while he waited on tables. Once an American man at a corner table asked her name, then said, ‘Tell your father I’ll have the Bacalhau Portuguese and a litre of red. Can you do that?’

He had haunted eyes. She wondered if he was Lobby, selling arms for oil. Because of her father’s Francophilia, she was fast becoming a child of the United Europe: the thought of guns made her sick.

‘Yes sir.’

‘You live here?’ he asked, smiling, when the food was brought to him.

She nodded.

‘Is it a good place?’

She shrugged.

He stopped smiling. ‘Do you know why I’m here?’

She didn’t say anything. Lobby men were dangerous. It said so on the news.

They’re sending us back. Hysteria, mind, but they’re sending us all back.’

It was the first time she’d seen an American. Boats came and took them away. Only the rich could afford a sea crossing, a lonely port, a new set of papers. The rest flew on the government ticket, into Washington and Dallas and New York. Malise had seen pictures of them on TV, being driven from the planes in trucks.

He ate some more then said, ‘It must be strange living here.’

‘I like the sea.’

‘Surely it’s a horrible place?’

‘It’s beautiful.’

He looked at her as if she was alien. ‘But all those dead things—’

‘They’re interesting,’ she said, and smiled, to show him how interesting they really were to her. She hated him, and because she hated him she wasn’t going to let him see her hurt. It upset her to see dead things washed up along the coast, even while it fascinated her to pick apart their corpses with lengths of driftwood.

She hated the American because the States poured effluent into the seas and killed the things that lived there. She did not know that this was a recent development – that the States had not always been like that, that it had in fact pioneered the environmental cause that was so much part of her as a European.

(The United Europe into which Malise was being initiated was, like any young state, economical with the truth.)

The American sighed and put down his fork. ‘Well, you live here, I don’t. How strange, that it should all be so normal to you, so – nice.’ He laughed.

It was not a laugh she ever wanted to hear again.

‘Do you want anything else?’

‘Ice cream. Liquorice, if you’ve got it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He was still laughing when she left his table.

Her father was looking out of the door, wondering where the custom had gone. She thought, how can people get in, if he stands blocking the door like that?

She brought the American his ice cream. He was in a jovial mood but there was panic behind his eyes. ‘Kid, I like you. You want a present? Here.’ He took off his watch and handed it to her. She didn’t take it, so he put it on the table. It was a Rolex.

‘Nice, eh? Go on, take it, before your father sees. I don’t want anything for it. No favour, nothing. It’s yours. What use is it to me? I don’t need it. I can get another. There are lots of watches in America. Thousands of watches, and I can afford all of them. If I had any money. Only customs is going to take all my money, when I’m home. It’ll be taken from me at the airport. With my clothes and my contact lenses and my crowns and false teeth. It’s very safe, you see. America is a very safe place now, and it plays for safety. If you send us back, it doesn’t know who it’s letting in, does it? A quick debriefing might be enough, but then it might not. They use ice water. Hoses. Rubber hoses.’

‘Get out.’ The proprietor of the restaurant was standing behind the Americans chair. He was very big. ‘Pay and get out.’

When he left Malise giggled. The American had frightened her and it was good to see him go.

Every day Malise went to the beach. She sat in the sand and played with the dead things there till the wardens shouted at her to go away. It’s poisonous, they said. It’s dangerous to play here. She ignored their advice till one day she walked down to the surf and there was a line of seals – not dead, but dying. Vomiting worms.

Her father tried to explain it to her. Yes, he said, there are still walruses, and seals, and belugas. More every spring. Things are getting better. The EC and the Soviets and the Pacific Rim are making it better. It just takes a long time.

He gave her some pictures of the animals in the sea – animals she had known only as bleached bones till then. Dolphins, beluga whales, porpoises. Victims of the previous century’s pollutants. They were beautiful, especially the dolphins.

One day she asked her father, ‘Are there still dolphins?’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘No dolphins. Not any more.’

They moved to Urbino. The thing she most remembered about their first day was the pottery market. The bright baked-earth colours glistened like mica; they tore at her eyes. The day before a fierce wind had blown dirt over the roads, and the dirt had formed drifts, making the way to their house very difficult and tiring. The dust was thick under their feet, deadening their footsteps. By the road was a wooden hut with a Coke sign nailed to its roof. Aquamarine paint had peeled from it like a snake skin – great metre-wide tatters of it clung to the leeward wall. Nearby a man and two women were clearing a patch of land. The man manoeuvred a mechanical cutter through bracken and weeds. The women, dressed in baggy black dresses and wide brimmed hats, raked away the leavings with home-made rakes.

Above them, halfway up a gentle slope, stood the ruin that was to be their home.

‘You see?’ said her father. ‘That’s our life now. A pioneering life!’

Malise started to cry.

Malise was too young to understand the contradictions upon which her new homeland was founded. Europe was the fastest growing economic state in the new world, and yet it was beset by agricultural crises: seasonal holes in the ozone layer over the Mediterranean, soil erosion, mutations in species genetically engineered for pest-control. It had the most highly trained working population in the world, yet huge influxes of refugees from Africa and the once oil-rich states of the Middle East were a perpetual threat to its economic stability. Its cultural influence had outstripped that of the United States, and yet it was in the middle of a violent crisis of federal identity.

Since the 2000 drought and the Oil Drain, European governments had had to learn to deal with mass immigration as a given, not a ‘problem’. Since the turn of the century Europe had become the focus of the largest movement of world populations on record. The starving masses of Africa and Arabia saw in Europe their only hope of survival. In the space of a decade, Europe’s demography was changed out of all recognition. Europe now was neither predominantly Caucasian, nor Christian.

Europe had once been the hub of the old Universal Culture: the main distribution point for brown cartons stamped with famous names: Grundig, General Electric, Yamaha, Peugeot, Toshiba. Now popular demand led it to attempt something new, something more sustainable.

These popular pressures were as much religious and cultural as they were environmental. Europe’s indigenous population had since the late nineteen sixties become intellectually concerned with environmental issues. African migrants from outworked and desertified rural areas brought a more than intellectual sense of immediacy to the long-running debate. Some thirty years before, the fall of east European Marxism had driven socialist opinion under the wing of the environmental lobby; the newly-emerged African left-wing intellectual caucus, therefore, found in environmental issues their natural political agenda within the European state.

The influence of Islam was also significant. The great self-betrayal of Fundamentalism had been to suppose that the jame towhidi, the ‘society of believers’, was the given state of things; that when post-Mohammedan forms of political organization were swept away, the jame towhidi would be left. Intellectualism had been killed off, and in its place had come not the society of believers, but a cargo-cult culture, bartering its natural wealth in return for alien learning and foreign skills. Droughts, the Oil Drain and subsequent wars had destroyed the Fundamentalists’ precarious parody of statehood; now Europeanized Muslims, brought up among Westerners, educated in Western universities, repudiated the jame towhidi. At the heart of that repudiation, and for a Muslim it is a great and terrible one, there lay of course a flaw; it was assumed that an ideal society must be possible for the jame towhidi not to be it.

The very romanticism of the indigenous environmentalist movement drew the Islamic caucus to espouse its policies. They drew away from the jame towhidi only to seek heaven on earth.

For many years, Europe would find itself trapped between a rock and a hard place: neither a bastion of the old culture nor yet a champion of the new. Its environmental projects floundered even as its oil-built multinationals crashed. It was the richest state on earth and its economy was littered with big, unmarked graves.

When Malise was seven she contracted epiglottitis. She could not speak. Then a complication set in, a minor infection she hadn’t the strength to resist, and she went deaf. There was no question of permanent damage, but how do you explain this to a scared seven year old?

This loss of speech and hearing, however brief, was, she decided later, the worst thing that could ever have happened to her; certainly, it changed the course of her life, shaping her in ways she could never wholly map, let alone redeem.

Malise had always been a talkative child, very much in love with her own voice, and her father had encouraged this. (He often said how he loved the noise children made; he loved children and this was one of the few qualities which endeared him to his indigenous Italian neighbours.) Now that sound itself was snatched from her, a sense of isolation stole upon the girl, far greater and more terrible than the circumstances of her illness really justified. She was at that age where the self becomes distinct from the objects around it. Recently everything had seemed alien to her, and her being unable to talk and to name the things she saw was the most frightening thing imaginable. Because everything seemed alien, nothing could comfort her. Her father, who did his best, seemed terrible and threatening.

She often woke up in the night because of the fever. Her father heard her tossing and turning on the bed, and he came in and picked her out from the sodden sheets to hold her and comfort her. She kicked and bit him. He put it down to her frustration and the fever and tried not to be too angry. The little bit of anger he did display terrified his daughter so much that afterwards she hid from him whenever she could, seeking relief and comfort solely from within herself. Here, in the realm of her imagination, the terrors were at least hers; they were not the world’s.

Then one night, one of these terrors took on a life of its own. It was a nightmare. She knew it was different from the other dreams the very first time she experienced it. It visited her, night after night. It would not go away. It would not be controlled. Now, of course, not even the inside of her head was safe.

In the dream, Malise found herself walking along a footpath by the sea. The iodine stench of seaweed filled her nostrils and refreshed her. To her right, the water span little spirals of reflected sunlight over its undulating surface. To her left there was a wood – strangely succulent, blue-green and brooding. The path curved along a narrow headland. A woman was selling ice cream from the open window of a chalet. There were benches, looking out to sea, and some yards further on, there was a steep hill made of cracked concrete. At its top stood a castle. The castle had many thin black towers.

A strange whispering hung in the air when she looked at it. It was not any language she knew or recognized. It was like all languages, run into each other, a semantic haze which distorted the air and made the highest tops of the castle’s towers shiver against the sun, like the legs of an upturned insect. On the highest tower there was a woman sitting on a kind of balcony.

The woman was very beautiful. In order to see her properly, Malise had to bend her head back. But when she looked up, she saw that there was something in the sky – a tiny blot; the woman on the balcony was staring at it, too, and she was talking to it, very quietly at first, and then, as the little blot grew bigger, and heavier, she spoke more loudly, until at last she was shouting. The blot got bigger, heavier, terrible, monstrous.

The woman on the balustrade put her hands to her head and started screaming.

‘STOP!’ she cried.

STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP . . .

Then Malise would wake up, choking.

Her hearing returned. Her throat took longer to heal. It stung for hours afterwards if she spoke above a whisper. She did not talk if she did not have to. By then, of course, she had grown used to the dream and so she did not, in the end, tell her father about it. The opportunity to share her burden of fear with him was past.

The dream was her first secret. Now, she would be hidden from him.

Two years went by. The crisis in Herzegovina passed. The Brazilian petroleum nut crop failed. There was a civil war in the United States, and the Hispanic Lobby were overthrown. Democracy was restored. Canadian soldiers patrolled the polling stations in sensitive areas to ensure a free election. A new president came to power on a Public Transport pledge. Some generals met in a shack somewhere on the outskirts of Vegas and shot each other. They bequeathed a bizarre political inheritance, and not all of it was undone. Brazil remained part of the Union. The depopulated states of Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas were evacuated to make way for a nature reserve.

Meanwhile in Europe the first faltering steps were taken to establish Heaven on Earth.

There is a dictum – untrue, but widely held – that societies shape themselves to suit their technology. The West had held to this dictum and had eventually strung themselves up by it: on oil, ran their argument, depends our universal culture; and sure enough one day there was no more oil.

The new Islam had rejected the dictum, but had found nothing to put in its place. You can have technology without society, they found, but not a society without technology.

Not surprisingly, given the tendency in people to fill any intellectual vacuum bequeathed them, it was a predominantly Muslim team of engineers who developed the world’s first working Von Neumann machine. It was five foot high by three foot wide by six foot long; it lived for six months and built two copies of itself before breaking down. Neither of its ‘children’ worked, but then, nobody had seriously expected them to. These were, after all, pioneer experiments. The technology available to the team was not yet equal to their vision; they were the Charles Babbages of their day.

Of what did their vision consist? For the spokesperson of that team, Von Neumann machines – machines that eat and breed – ‘will enable advanced human societies to be guided by the balances and checks of an unspoilt natural evironment.’ Von Neumanns would, he said, act like a buffer or interface between the human and the natural worlds. Behind the scientist lay the Islamic visionary.

Had his computer science not been so revolutionary, he would have been dismissed as a crank. History has shown that he was not in fact a crank. He was a genius.

His name was Maulana Suryadi.

A German company who in the oil-rich days had funded the revolutionary space shuttle HOTOL bought its way into Suryadi’s project. It dedicated half its working capital to the development of self-generating and self-sustaining machinery. HOTOL’s philosophy was more practical than Suryadi’s, more obviously. . .