The Ice Garden & Other Stories

By Eric Brown

This collection gathers eight stories as varied in space and time as they are in theme, and features such tropes as alien visitors, space opera, near future satire, cloning, and even murder-mystery. 'Conway and the Aliens' is set in his popular Starship Seasons future, while 'Dimensions of Deceit' is the latest tale in the Salvageman Ed series. 'The Trees of Terpsichore Three' is a collaboration with Michael Coney. Three stories are original to the volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786369673

Eric Brown

Twice winner of the British Science Fiction Award, Eric Brown is the author of more than twenty SF novels and several short story collections. His debut crime novel, Murder by the Book, was published in 2013. Born in Haworth, West Yorkshire, he now lives in Scotland.

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Introduction

A FEW WEEKS AGO, while I was contemplating putting this collection together, I had an email from a reader with a question: How do you write a short story?

That gave me pause.

I’m largely an instinctive writer who believes that the answer lies in giving the subconscious free rein. I get an idea, a notion, a character with a dilemma, and I sit down with a setting in mind and start writing. A day or so later, as if by magic, the story appears. Then begins the longer task of rewriting the thing.

Which doesn’t really answer the reader’s question.

The best way to answer the question, I realised, was to think back to my last collaboration with my friend and fellow science fiction writer Keith Brooke, because, as I don’t have free access to Keith’s subconscious, with him I write short stories differently and of necessity the process is a bit more drawn-out and laborious.

One of us gets an idea, a notion, and tells the other about it; we bat this idea back and forth for a while, over many emails, until we’ve ironed out the gremlins. (I come up with a lot of half-baked ideas which, under Keith’s sharp-eyed scrutiny, sag and die.) The idea suggests characters, and conflict, because the powerhouse behind any story is conflict: What does the character want? What is stopping him or her from attaining it? How can he or she prevail over these problems?

Once we’ve got this far—with an idea, a cast of characters, problems that the characters need to overcome—a storyline pretty rapidly develops. One of us sits down and begins writing, and after a couple of thousand words hands it over.

That must have been how I wrote short stories back in the early days, when I had to think through every aspect of the story before I was confident enough to sit down and start writing. Nowadays, with over forty years’ experience at the keyboard, I’m more gung-ho about things, and I’m a great believer in rewriting. No story is ever right after just one draft. I’m not infallible, and I make mistakes, and those mistakes need ironing out over a dozen re-readings and a dozen re-drafts, or more.

Some ideas come in an instant, a dizzying inspirational flash that hits me and begs to be developed—while others take much longer to germinate. For instance, for the past six years I’ve been sitting on an idea for a SF story entitled Life in Orbit. It’s about an expeditionary survey mission to a far-flung world, and the two telepaths aboard the starship who compete to find sentient life. The backstory is that the funding for the expedition is due to be cut, and one of the telepaths will be made redundant—crudely, the telepath who discovers life will save their job. Also, if sentient life is discovered, colonisation of the planet will not take place. Now, for the purpose of the tale, one telepath will be investigating a shoal of aliens which float in the stratosphere high above the planet’s surface, while the second will be assigned to look into a race of herbivores which lives on the surface. The conflict, other than the need to come up trumps and save his or her job, will be heightened by the fact that the telepaths detest one another for reasons that will be explicated in the telling of the tale. Our viewpoint character will be the telepath investigating the herbivores—who thinks she’s been given the short straw, as the herbivores are just grass-munching bovines, right? The second telepath arrogantly assumes he will triumph, and rubs the other’s nose in the fact. However, thanks to the twist in the tale, which I won’t divulge here, the land-based telepath wins the day, discovers the sentient aliens and secures her posting.

Now, something is stopping me from beginning the story, and I don’t know what. Perhaps I need a second idea to rub against the other, in the manner of flint and stone, or perhaps I need to pass the idea on to Keith.

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The stories collected in this volume were written between 2002 and 2017, the oldest being the collaboration with the late, great Michael Coney. They run the gamut of the old, tried, and tested SF tropes: the coming of aliens to Earth, contact in space with a race of very odd aliens, near-future social satire set very much on our planet, clone technology and its potential misuses, an autistic character’s drastic life-choice and the repercussions it has on the people who love him, and a biological murder mystery set on a colony world. One story, Conway and the Almorans, features the characters and setting of my Starship series of novellas, and was written specially for this volume.

What they have in common, I like to think, is that they’re all character-oriented and, very importantly, are all stories in the traditional sense of the world, with coherent plot lines; a beginning, middle, and end, and satisfying resolutions.

I hope you enjoy them.

Eric Brown

Cockburnspath

Scotland

May 2019

The Ice Garden

In 2012 I was asked by the editor Gary Dalkin if I’d care to submit a tale to be considered for his anthology, Improbably Botany. The remit was wide—he wanted SF stories that would fit under that enigmatic title—and The Ice Garden was the result. I see, looking back over all my stories, and two or three in this particular volume, that I’ve written quite a bit on the theme of aliens arriving on Earth and bearing gifts of one kind or another. These aliens are benign, and the gifts they bestow are beneficial to the human race. One day I really ought to write an alien invasion story in which the extraterrestrials are just plain nasty.

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AS MY UNCLE HAD BEEN dead for the past forty years, his letter came as something of a shock.

My Dear Gordon,

This missive will no doubt be a surprise to you, but rest assured that I would not be writing if it were not absolutely necessary. I have followed your career with great interest over the years, and it is regarding this that I would like to arrange a meeting with you.

If you would be so kind as to drop me a line as to when you might be available, I would be most grateful.

Please don’t mention this communiqué to your mother.

Edward Benedict

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I laid the letter on my desk and stared out at the ice-bound countryside.

My great uncle Edward had gone missing, presumed dead, forty years ago while trekking across the snowfields of northern Norway. His skis had been found by a search party, along with a backpack still stocked with provisions, but of his corpse there had been no sign. This was in 1960, and he had been thirty at the time.

If the writer of the letter was indeed my great uncle, he would now be seventy.

He had been keeping an eye on my career, he wrote, and it was about this that he wished to speak to me. And that line asking me not to mention the letter to my mother, his only living sister...?

I picked up my mobile and rang my mother.

Gordon, how lovely to hear from you! she sang, as if we hadn’t spoken for months.

She asked how my work was going, and I replied with the usual platitudes, asking in return after her garden. In common with my great uncle, she had a passion for gardening on a large scale. She had managed a thriving market garden for over forty years. Now in her eighties and retired, she still maintained an abundant cottage garden.

Uncle Edward would be proud of you, I said, by way of introducing him, somewhat clumsily, into the conversation.

Indeed he would, Gordon. I wish he could have seen everything I’ve achieved.

I ventured, You’ve told me very little about how he disappeared.

She hesitated. That’s because there is very little to tell. He went hiking—against my advice, I might add—in Arctic Norway, lost his bearings and perished in the ice. It must have been a...a terrible death.

I would have thought, what with his disability, the last thing he should’ve been doing was hiking through the Arctic.

My mother laughed. Edward never let being disabled hold him back in whatever he did. If anything it made him more determined, more reckless.

How Edward had been injured, at the age of twenty, was almost as mysterious as the facts surrounding his disappearance. In 1950, apparently, Edward had been engaged in certain ‘experiments’ in the grounds of his father’s extensive estate in Hampshire. There had been an explosion, and Edward had crawled back to the house dragging—or so the much-embroidered family legend has it—his shattered left leg after him through the snow.

I said, Did you ever find out exactly what Edward was doing back then?

Oh, no, she said. It was kept quiet by the family. Daddy hushed it all up. Wouldn’t say a dickey bird on the subject. And I never asked Edward. Or, rather, I did once and was given rather short shrift. Never again.

You don’t suppose, I began hesitantly, that Edward might have survived his Arctic trek?

What a strange question, Gordon! Of course not. He would have been in contact, wouldn’t he?

I agreed, admonished, that indeed he would.

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I sat for a long time, after the phone call, staring through the window at the snow-laden trees.

Equable-Pharm—how I’d hated the name when Danbridge came up with it, and I hated it still—had expanded little in twenty years. We still occupied a crumbling Victorian school building on the edge of town, with a few prefabs where production took place. We could have sold the business ten years ago and made, between us, over two million. But I’d been reluctant to sell to a rapacious multinational drugs company which would undo all our good work in the name of increased profit.

I was an optimist. I believed that if you acted with the best intentions, with goodness in your heart, then rewards would accrue. I believed that if you sought what is best in humanity, and fostered that, then humanity would respond with positivity. Danbridge and I started Equable-Pharm in order to counter what other pharmaceutical companies were doing in Africa and Asia. We supplied affordable drugs to third world countries and ploughed the profits back into research and production.

My attention returned to the letter on my desk and I pulled it towards me. I read the letter heading: Halford Hall, Halford, Hampshire. It was where my great uncle had lived as a boy, and where as a child I had been taken on family visits once or twice.

I reread the letter, trying to make sense of it. Might Edward, against all probability, have survived the Norwegian expedition and resurfaced forty years later to take up residence in his family seat? But, to the best of my knowledge, the hall had been sold years ago.

I rang directory enquiries and requested the phone number, but drew a blank. I glanced at the wall clock. It was a little before noon. On impulse, I made a decision.

I would take a day off and motor down to Hampshire. Halford Hall was a three-hour drive south, which would give me plenty of time to consider my great uncle and his—if it were indeed his—letter.

I was about to leave the office when the phone rang and Danbridge said, Gordon. Hope you don’t mind my springing this on you.

Springing what? I asked, suspicious.

There was an uneasy silence at the other end of the line. I’m in the boardroom. If you could come along...

I was just about to go out.

This is rather important, Gordon.

Alarm bells should have started ringing then, but I was still thinking about the letter.

I’m on my way.

I passed through the outer office. I smiled at Alice, my secretary, but she feigned concentration on her PC’s monitor. I should have realised at the time, of course, but it was only later that it came to me: she knew.

I came to the boardroom and pushed open the veneered oak door. Danbridge was not alone. He sat at the head of the table, flanked by Wilson, our part-time accountant, and a smart, rather smug-looking stranger.

Danbridge stood and moved around the table, extending his hand and smiling like a poacher caught in the act. Gordon...This is Nigel Maltravers, CEO of Denning and Maltravers.

I shook hands weakly and slumped into the nearest seat. I felt suddenly deflated. A hot flush passed across my face. Explained: Danbridge’s shiftiness when broached on the subject of next year’s business plan. Explained: his phone calls suddenly terminated when I entered his office. I felt shafted, stabbed in the back.

Danbridge rubbed his hands together and said, You know how things’ve been of late, Gordon. Falling orders, increased overheads—

What’s happening? I said.

Maltravers cut straight to the quick. I’ve been appointed by the board of Denning and Maltravers, Mr Benedict, to make a formal offer for the business, stock and good will of your company. The offer on the table is two hundred and fifty thousand.

I stared at him. I wanted to laugh in his face, to show him in no uncertain terms what I thought of his offer.

Instead I sat very still, staring at him. At last I turned to Danbridge. He had the good grace to look sick.

Jim... I stood up and gestured him into the corridor. I moved from the room without waiting to see if he followed.

I paced the carpet, beyond anger. I heard Danbridge smooth-talking Maltravers behind the boardroom door, and a minute later he emerged. He couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye.

He strode to the window and stared out over the snow-covered fields. It’s the best we could hope for, Gordon, he murmured.

I said, Do you know what hurts the most, Jim? It’s not the paltry offer, the idea of everything we’ll lose...It’s not even that you’ve done all this behind my back.

He protested. I had to test the water. I knew you’d kick off if I even suggested...

I ploughed on, "Worse of all is that it’s Denning and sodding Maltravers. The biggest set of corrupt, cheating bastards in the business. So we sell to ‘Denying and Malpractice’, and what do they do? I’ll