Mariam laughed, and realised to her surprise that she was happy.

It was nice, she thought, to have someone who brought you flowers.

She took his hand in hers.

“Come on, then,” she said, and drew him close.

They went in together, hand in hand, and the world vanished behind them.

Afterword

I’ve always loved future histories. There was something about science fiction writers exploring the same fictional universe over time, and something else again in the experience of a reader slowly discovering them, one story or novel at a time.

My favourite future history has to be Cordwainer Smith’s “The Instrumentality of Mankind,” with its giant diseased sheep on Norstrilia producing the immortality drug called Stroon, with its underpeople and manshonyaggers, with C’Mell and the E’telekeli, the crazy computers and that dead lady of clown town. I loved Smith for his poetry and his invention, and I loved him for just how slim his production actually was. All we ever get to see of the Instrumentality are fragments—but they open into worlds.

When I started writing, every story was a new adventure and a new discovery. They were not all good by any means. But with each one I learned something, and one day, in 2002 or so, I wrote a story called “Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs,” about the machines seeding the solar system with a new communication network, which I named the Conversation.

I discovered something called the Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition at the time, so I sent them the story and promptly forgot about it. Time passed, until one day I came back from lunch to the rather dreary office I was working in when I wasn’t studying and was told I had a phone call.

“From who?” I said, surprised, since no one ever called me there.

“The European Space Agency.”

Naturally I assumed it was a joke, but they’d eventually tracked me down and informed me that I’d won the contest, and would I like to come to France?

I was a long-haired kid who’d barely written one science fiction story. I got to go to France and hung out with a bunch of my literary idols, had a very strange interview with a German satellite TV station, and, in one particularly bizarre incident, got mistaken for Terry Pratchett (that’s a story for another time, although I still have no real explanation for it).

I was shown an e-mail from Arthur C. Clarke, who apparently read my story and said he must accuse me of “preemptive plagiarism”—some book he was writing at the time apparently touched on similar themes. Then he started talking about how an asteroid was about to hit Earth and how he predicted something or other.

Still.