This summer, Tor Books are due to publish the new, Essentials edition of The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed‘s debut novel. This edition also marks the book’s return to print after a few decades. With a new introduction by Jo Walton, this looks like a perfect way to (re)visit this classic science fiction novel. To celebrate the upcoming release, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt to share. Before we get to that, though, here’s the synopsis:

Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

On its first publication in 1996, The Fortunate Fall was hailed as an SF novel of a wired future on par with the debuts of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Now it returns to print, in advance of forthcoming new work by the same author. It is one of the great underground classics of the last several decades in SF.

Maya Andreyeva is a “camera,” a reporter with virtual-reality-broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. What she sees, millions see; what she feels, millions share.

And what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre. As she probes into the covert political power plays of a radically strange near-future Russia, she comes upon secrets that have been hidden from the world… and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself. Because in a world where no thought or desire is safe, the price of survival is betrayal — of your lover, your ideals, and yourself.

*

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know. I suppose I can’t complain. I knew the risks when I became a camera. If you see something important enough, your thoughts become a coveted commodity: they steal your memories and sell them tied in twine. Now you may find my life for sale in certain stalls, on dusty street and twisting alleyway; it is available on moistdisk, opticube, and dryROM. There are places on the Net where you can make a copy free, although the colors may have faded to sepia and the passions to pastel. You have taken my memories and slotted them into your head. And you have played them through, reclining on a futon in some neon-streaked apartment, reliving my every sensation and thought from the hour underground with the whale.

If you paid extra for the moistdisk, you have more than just that hour. You can peer around each thought to see the memories implied in it, the way you’d turn a hologram to see what lies behind the rose. You can freeze-frame at the moment I first saw the whale, and follow the associations back—to the argument over Moby-Dick the night before; to the first time Voskresenye said the word, in the café on Nevsky Prospect; to the dolphins that made me clutch my mother’s hand with fear, at the amusement park when I was six years old. You have searched me and known me: and when at last you put the disk away, you thought of my mind as a sucked orange, dry of secrets.

But what you saw, heard, touched, remembered, does not quite exhaust my meanings. With the moistdisk in your head, however bristled you may be with sockets, what you see is only the moment of experience, frozen forever. It excludes any later reflections upon the event—as the hologram of a rose in bloom excludes the flower’s swollen ripening and black decay.

I will give you my thoughts since that time, but not on moistdisk. I will not let you explore the twining pathways of my thoughts as I explore them—not again. I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

1.

ashes, ashes

“Okay, what’s this scent?”

“Roses,” I said.

“And this one?”

“Citrus. Grapefruit.”

“All right. What about this?”

“Cow shit.”

“Close.”

“Okay, horse shit.”

“Bull’s-eye. Olfactory systems are go. Let’s do hearing.”

I was standing by the River Chu, in Kazakhstan, staring at a little hill from which three naked chimneys rose. I stood alone; but a thousand miles away, in Leningrad, a woman I had never met was testing my senses. When she had finished, she would slide herself into my mind, like a rat into water. As my thoughts went out live to the Net, she would screen them through hers, strengthening my foreground thoughts and sifting out impurities, so that—if she was any good—the signal that went out on News One would be pure and clear. And when she drew herself out of my mind again, five minutes later, she would know more about me than a friend of thirty years.

“I think it’s an E-flat,” I said.

“Yes, but what instrument?”

“Brass.”

“Be specific.”

“Do I look like a conductor?”

“It’s a trombone. You can tell by the glissando. Now what’s this?”

I had never met this Keishi Mirabara. I had no idea what she looked like. But Keishi was a screener, so for her, our acquaintance of half an hour was already long. Hooking up mind to mind, the way they do, they can only scorn the glacial rituals the rest of us use to form friendships. By the end of the day, she might already hate me—not with some casual dislike, but with a deep, dissective hatred, such as is otherwise only attained after decades of marriage. It’s bad stuff, their hatred. Their love is worse: a surge of emotion that comes at you flood-fast, overwhelming your own feelings before you’re even certain what they are. And the poor camera, who can reach out to another mind only with mute eyes and vague bludgeoning words . . . well, it’s like being an amnesia victim, coming home a stranger to someone who’s loved you all your life.

“All right, stop me when this stripe is the same color as the sky.”

“Now—no, a little more—yes, there.”

“You’re coming through faded, then. I’m going to split your field of vision. What you’re seeing will be on your left, and what’s coming through here will be on your right. Tell me when the colors are the same. Ready?”

“Ready,” I said. I gave it only half attention. I had done this all before.

Keishi had come in to screen for me only that evening, when my last screener, Anton Tamarich, disappeared on the day of a broadcast. It didn’t surprise me—screeners go burnout all the time—but it left me stuck going live with a screener I’d never worked with before. It’s the beginning of any of a dozen camera nightmares. You’re working with a new screener who falls asleep at the switch just when you remember something you heard once about how to make brain viruses, and a Weaver possesses the man you’re interviewing and kills you on the spot. Or some especially compromising sexual fantasy flits through your head and out into the Net and is the scandal of the week. The untried screener is the camera’s equivalent of having your fly open. It was scary enough that—though I’d never thought I’d say it—I missed Anton. I hadn’t liked him, but I’d liked working with him. He was an informer for the Post police, and he hated me. I knew where I stood.

“Say the words that come into your head.”

“Excrescence. Trapezoid. Spark. Blanket. Bolus. Rust.”

“Verbal, go. Okay, Maya, I’m ready for link-up. Say when.”

I walked halfway up the hill, arranged myself facing the river, and started to prepare myself for contact. After all these years of having strangers in my head, it’s still not easy. I scratched my nose, adjusted the camera moistware in the temporal socket at the side of my head, and made sure for the tenth time that I really did not have to go to the bathroom.

“Relax, will you?” Keishi whispered in my ear, from Leningrad. “‘So Your Camera Has to Pee’ is chapter two in the Basic Screening textbook, and heck, girl, I’m up to chapter four already.”

At that moment gallows humor was not what I needed. Fear shifted in the coils of my intestines, like a restless snake. I would forget my lines. I would trip on a buried cobblestone and half the Russian Historical Nation would feel me break my nose. I fixed my eyes on the ground and began to hyperventilate, fighting for control.

And Keishi, knowing that anything she said would make it worse, did the only thing she could do to help. She plugged in her screening chip and patched into my mind.

There’s a sense of presence when the screener comes on line, a faint heat, a pullulation. Keishi’s feedback was clear and warm and reassuring, the strongest I’ve ever felt—as though someone had wrapped a blanket around my head. (“That’s me,” Keishi agreed. “An electric babushka.”) Maybe this would work out after all, I decided, knowing she heard the thought.

“Ten more seconds,” she warned me. “Five. Four. Three . . . and you’re live, girl.” I felt the “up” drug flood my visual cortex, making me strain my eyes to separate the river from the rolling hill behind it. Keishi fed the hours of interviews and research that Anton and I had done into my memory, so that the five-minute Netcast could imply a whole week’s work. And you came on line, a shadow audience that always stood behind me no matter how I turned my head.

“This is what’s left of Square-Mile-on-Chu,” I said aloud, panning slowly around from the river. You said it with me. In a single body, with the same volition, we strode forward up the hill. “Three crumbling chimneys and some scattered stones, half sunk into the ground.” I had reached the middle chimney now; I walked around it, running my hand over the cobblestones to transmit their tiled smoothnesses. “Typical Guardian construction: cobblestone instead of brick because of the thousands of hours of slave labor it took to gather the stones, carry them up here, and fit them together. The more labor-intensive, the greater the status.”

I panned around to view the river again, then carefully leaned against the chimney, feeling it cool and lumpy against my back. “It’s as idyllic a scene as you’ll find anywhere in Kazakhstan. You could spend hours in this place. Nature bounces back, you think, whatever humans do. The hills are leaved with grass, and laced with branches, growing the same as ever. The birds have long forgotten what happened here, if indeed they ever noticed, and are building their nests now. And the river flows on, just as it did when the word Guardian meant a good thing.”

I walked down the hill, slowly, letting the sun warm my back that the stones had made cold. It was an aggressively beautiful spring day, tyrannically perfect: the kind of day that spurs the suicide to action by its mocking contrast to her own despair. Lull them, Keishi, I subvocalized. Make them feel it.

“I’m lulling, I’m lulling” was her reply, as laconic as the mood I wished to set and as the day itself.

Walking slowly in the mild breeze, I approached the lake, reached it, and did not stop. Without removing my shoes or rolling up my cuffs or bracing myself against the touch of the water, I walked off into the muck. Skirls of shock and disgust mingled with the cold—your shock. Feedback to the limbic system, say the manuals; what it means is that what you feel, I feel. And vice versa: I took the feeling and intensified it, hurling it back out at you.

“It is a beautiful day in Kazakhstan,” I said, “and you are calf-deep in the ash of human bodies.” A second long wave of mute horror as the ash and mud cemented in around my legs, entrapping them.

“The Unanimous Army came through here in the fall of 2246,” I said when the audience had quieted. Calling on my imagination chip, I drew a sound of marching out of the white noise of the river. Then I looked up at the shadowed hillside and began to sculpt its waving grasses into men. “Imagine a solid column of humanity, twenty abreast, and so long that if you wanted to cross their path you’d have to camp here until dawn tomorrow. They have no uniforms, but wear whatever they happened to have on when they were absorbed: overalls, cocktail dresses—some are naked beneath makeshift coats. But all have the same round black chip, the size of a ruble coin, in their left temples. From time to time a memory unit passes, like the nameless man we met last week—”and here Keishi lifted a curtain from the memory “—people whose minds the Army erased and filled with its data, so the memories of the others could remain inviolate. The memory units can no longer even walk, so they are carried along—but upright, to confuse snipers. At this distance they are lost in the crowd, and you will never know them.”

By now the Army was almost as clear as reality, thanks to the imagination chip in my right temporal socket. Keishi flashed the word “re-creation” at the bottom of my field of vision, so credulous channel-flippers wouldn’t call the station thinking that the Army had returned.

“The first quarter mile of the Army consists of people who are weak or dying or otherwise of little use. Their only purpose is to walk blindly into everything and see if it will kill them. Now that they’ve marched through the Square Mile without harm, Sensors start to break away from the column: Eyes, Ears, Noses, Fingertips, each with its respective sense enhanced and all the others numbed. They swarm over the Square Mile in thousands, sniffing and prodding and tasting. They take nothing, but now and again they smear something with a fragrant paint they carry with them, or with urine or blood.

“When the Sensors return to the march, the column slows and spreads out to the width of the Square Mile. And when it has passed, hours later, everything in the camp—the barbed wire, the burnt wood, even the concrete from the foundations—is gone, digested into that great worm of meat that once was, and will soon again be, human.

“By November, every man, woman, and child over five in Kazakhstan had been taken up into the One Mind and was marching on Occupied Russia. And in 2248, when the Army software detected victory and suddenly erased itself from all its component minds, more than half the people in the world found themselves at least a thousand miles from home. It was a time of global confusion, during which millions starved or were murdered. Not many people were concerned with seeing to it that places like this were remembered.

“But is that the whole explanation?” (Okay, let’s wind it up, I subvoked.) “Or is there a deeper reason? The Holocaust and Terror-Famine both haunted the consciences of generations, yet the Calinshchina is barely remembered—why? We’ll have some answers for you next week, in the third and last part of our series.”

And then it’s back to fads and scandals for the both of us, I subvoked to Keishi, who chuckled politely in reply. I closed my eyes, calling up my quite beautiful and utterly fictitious Net-portrait, and signed off: “Maya Tatyanichna Andreyeva. Of News One hearth, a camera.”

No sooner had the audience fallen away than Keishi said: “I can’t believe you gave that whole speech standing in the water. I filtered out most of the cold and wetness, but even so, it wasn’t easy to keep their minds on history while water was seeping into their underwear.”

“If I’d walked out of the water and stood around dripping,” I said, sitting down on the grass to take off my shoes, “it would have been even more distracting.”

“You could have saved your swimming lesson for the very end,” she said. “You could—” but I had pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you’d find living under a rock. Vermin. I slipped it into a pocket and began to scrape the ash off of my shoes.

*

Cameron Reed’s The Fortunate Fall is due to be published in the new Essentials edition by Tor Books in North America and in the UK, on August 13th.

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