Sometimes I think that memory and belief are no more than feelings. My father, in his final writings, speculated that our certainties, our sense of consciousness even, arose out of a swirl of mental imponderables like the froth of the manifest world on an unfathomable quantum ocean. In which case, our mutual lives are based on a necessary consensus rather than any bedrock of reality. We live by articles of faith rather than reason.
In the kitchen Tanya was holding the ultimate existential comforter: a mug of tea. She had on jeans and a peach-coloured mohair roll-neck. I hugged her from behind, burrowing my face into the crook of the neck, inhaling her deeply until she wriggled and squirmed away.
“What was that for?” she asked with amusement.
“Just fancied a sniff,” I said.
I ducked her tea towel swipe and began pirouetting around her, up on my toes, prancing about like an idiot, like an angel dancing on the head of a pin.
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Also by Christopher Evans
Aztec Century
Capella’s Golden Eyes
Chimeras
Icetower
In Limbo
Mortal Remains
Omega
The Insider
The Twilight Realm (writing as Christopher Carpenter)
About the Author
Christopher Evans (1951–)
Born in Wales in 1951, Christopher Evans won the BSFA award in 1993 for his novel Aztec Century. In the 1980’s, he co-edited three Other Edens anthologies with Robert Holdstock, and as well as the science fiction published under his own name, he is the author of a number of well received books for younger readers under the pseudonym Nathan Elliott, and a handful of film novelisations. His recent work, Omega, was his first for adults in almost a decade.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Christopher Evans 2008
All rights reserved.
The right of Christopher Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10258 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.