If at First

would you like to try selling a venture capitalist the idea of Lara Croft five years before the first pocket calculator hits the shops? I did that. I was actually banned from some banks in the City.
    So I fell back on the easiest thing in the world. I became a singer-songwriter. Songs are ridiculously easy to remember even if you can’t recall the exact lyrics. Remember my first big hit in ’78, “Shiny Happy People”? I always was a big REM fan. You’ve never heard of them? Ah well, sometimes I wonder what the band members are doing this time around. “Pretty in Pink,” “Teenage Kicks,” “The Unforgettable Fire,” “Solsbury Hill”? They’re all the same; that fabulous oeuvre of mine isn’t quite as original as I make out. And I’m afraid Live Aid wasn’t actually the flash of inspiration I always said, either. But the music biz has given me a bloody good life. Every album I’ve released has been number one on both sides of the Atlantic. That brings in money. A lot of money. It also attracts girls, I mean I never really believed the talk about backstage excess in the time I had before, but trust me here, the public never gets to hear the half of it. I thought it was the perfect cover. I’ve been employing private agencies to keep an eye on Marcus Orthew since the mid-’70s, several of his senior management team are actually on my payroll. Hell, I even bought shares in Orthogene, I knew it was going to make money, though I didn’t expect quite so much money. I can afford to do whatever the hell I want; and the beauty of that is nobody pays any attention to rock stars or how we blow our cash, everyone thinks we’re talentless junked-up kids heading for a fall. That’s what you think has happened now, isn’t it? The fall. Well, you’re wrong about that.
    See, I made exactly the same mistake as poor old Toby Jenson: I underestimated Marcus. I didn’t think it through. My music made ripples, big ripples. Everyone knows me, I’m famous right across the globe as a one-off supertalent. There’s only one other person in this time who knows those songs aren’t original: Marcus. He knew I came after him. And he hasn’t quite cracked the rejuvenation treatment yet. It’s time for him to move on, to make his fresh start again in another parallel universe.
    That’s why he framed me. Next time around he’s going to become our god. It’s not something he’s going to share with anyone else.

    I LOOKED ’ROUND the interview room, which had an identical layout to the grubby cube just down the hall where I had interviewed Toby Jenson last time around. Paul Mathews and Carmen Galloway were giving me blank-faced looks, buttoning back their anger at being dragged into the statement. I couldn’t quite get used to Paul with a full head of hair, but Orthogene’s follicle treatment is a big earner for the company; everyone in this universe uses it.
    I tried to bring my hands up to them, an emphasis to the appeal I was making, but the handcuffs were chained to the table. I glanced down as the metal pulled at my wrists. After the samples had been taken the forensics team had washed the blood off my hands, but I couldn’t forget it, there’d been so much; the image was actually stronger than the one I kept of Toby Jenson. Yet I’d never seen those girls until I woke up to find their bodies in the hotel bed with me. The paramedics didn’t even try to revive them.
    “Please,” I implored. “Paul, Carmen, you have to believe me.” And I couldn’t even say
for old times’ sake
.

Read on for an excerpt from
    Mindstar Rising
    one of two novels contained in
    The Mandel Files, Volume 1
by Peter F. Hamilton,
    coming from Del Rey Books.

1
    Meteorites fell through the night sky like a gentle sleet of icefire, their sharp scintillations slashing ebony overload streaks across the image Greg Mandel’s photon amp was feeding into his optic nerves.
    He was hanging below a Westland ghost wing, five hundred metres above the Purser’s Hills, due west of Kettering. Spiralling down. Wind strummed the membrane, producing near-subliminal bass harmonics.
    Ground zero was a small crofter’s cottage; walls of badly laid raw stone swamped with some olive-green creeper, big scarlet flowers. It had a thatched roof, reeds rotting and congealing, caked in tidemark ripples of blue-green fungal growths. A two-metre-square solar-cell strip had been pinned on top.
    Greg landed a hundred metres downslope from the cottage,