The Discovered Country

IAN R. MacLeod

British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, publishing a slew of strong stories in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere, and his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity as we move through the first decades of the new century. Much of his work has been gathered in four collections: Voyages By Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, Past Magic, and Journeys. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella "The Summer Isles," and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette "The Chop Girl." In 2003, he published his first fantasy novel and his most critically acclaimed book, The Light Ages, followed by a sequel, The House of Storms, in 2005, and then by Song of Time, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 2008. A novel version of The Summer Isles also appeared in 2005. His most recent books are a new novel, Wake Up and Dream, and a big retrospective collection, Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod. MacLeod lives with his family in the West Midlands of England.

Here he tells an evocative and emotionally powerful story of someone sent on a mission to a virtual utopia reserved only for the superrich who have died on our mundane Earth, a sort of literal afterlife. It's a smart, tense, and tricky story in which the stakes are high and nothing is what it seems.

The trees of Farside are incredible. Fireash and oak. Greenbloom and maple. Shot through with every colour of autumn as late afternoon sunlight blazes over the Seven Mountains' white peaks. He'd never seen such beauty as this when he was alive.

The virtual Bentley takes the bridge over the next gorge at a tyrescream, then speeds on through crimson and gold. Another few miles, and he's following the coastal road beside the Westering Ocean. The sands are burnished, the rocks silver-threaded. Every new vista a fabulous creation. Then ahead, just as purple glower sweeps in from his rear- view over those dragon-haunted mountains, come the silhouette lights of a vast castle, high up on a ridge. It's the only habitation he's seen in hours.

This has to be it.

Northover lets the rise of the hill pull at the Bentley's impetus as its headlights sweep the driveway trees. Another turn, another glimpse of a headland, and there's Elsinore again, rising dark and sheer.

* * *

He tries to refuse the offer to carry his luggage made by the neat little creature that emerges into the lamplit courtyard to greet him with clipboard, sharp shoes and lemony smile. He's encountered many chimeras by now. The shop assistants, the street cleaners, the crew on the steamer ferry that brought him here. All substantially humanoid, and invariably polite, although amended as necessary to perform their tasks, and far stranger to his mind than the truly dead.

He follows a stairway up through rough-hewn stone. The thing's name is Kasaya. Ah, now. The east wing. I think you'll find what we have here more than adequate. If not ... Well, you must promise to let me know. And this is called the Willow Room. And do enjoy your stay ...

* * *

Northover wanders. Northover touches. Northover breathes. The interior of this large high-ceilinged suite with its crackling applewood fire and narrow, deep-set windows is done out in an elegantly understated arts-and-craftsy style. Amongst her many attributes, Thea Lorentz always did have excellent taste.

What's struck him most about Farside since he jerked into new existence on the bed in the cabin of that ship bound for New Erin is how unremittingly real everything seems. But the slick feel of this patterned silk bedthrow ... The spiky roughness of the teasels in the flower display ... He's given up telling himself that everything he's experiencing is just some clever construct. The thing about it, the thing that makes it all so impossibly overwhelming, is that he's here as well. Dead, but alive. The evidence of his corpse doubtless already incinerated, but his consciousness—the singularity of his existence, what philosophers once called "the conscious I," and theologians the soul, along with his memories and personality, the whole sense of self which had once inhabited pale jelly in his skull—transferred.

The bathroom is no surprise to him now. The dead do so many things the living do, so why not piss and shit as well? He strips and stands in the shower's warm blaze. He soaps, rinses. Reminds himself of what he must do, and say. He'd been warned that he'd soon become attracted to the blatant glories of this world, along with the new, young man's body he now inhabits. Better just to accept it that rather than fight. All that matters is that he holds to the core of his resolve.

He towels himself dry. He pulls back on his watch—seemingly a Rolex, but a steel model, neatly unostentatious—and winds it carefully. He dresses. Hangs up his clothes in a walnut panelled wardrobe that smells faintly of mothballs, and hears a knock at the doors just as he slides his case beneath the bed.

"Yes? Come in ..."

When he turns, he's expecting another chimera servant. But it's Thea Lorentz.

* * *

This, too, is something they'd tried to prepare him for. But encountering her after so long is much less of a shock than he's been expecting. Thea's image is as ubiquitous as that of Marilyn Monroe or...