Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 25

The switches would pa.s.s, he reminded himself. It would only be a day or two before they stopped coming at him like this.

'I'd better just check, though,' he muttered. 'I'd better just make sure that there's nothing left in that drawer.'

The envelope hadn't been sealed, after all, and a seed could have fallen out. He wouldn't want to be ambushed by it years from now, when he thought all this had been left behind.

He opened his sock drawer and pushed the socks around.

'Nope, nothing.'

There was a little disappointment there, he couldn't help noticing as he pulled the drawer out and tipped its contents onto his bed, but he decided not to worry about that. It was like giving up smoking. There was bound to be some regret at first.

He began separating the pairs of socks, checking each one and then putting the two socks together again and dropping them back into the drawer. He'd replaced four or five pairs like this when he saw the solitary blue sphere lying there in the middle of his duvet.

He had the strange sensation that something or someone, miles away, was reaching towards him, seeking him out, trying to pull him towards them. And then, right in front of his eyes, but without any visible motion taking place, what had been one sphere became two.

Author's Acknowledgement.

Marcher began as a group of six short stories: 'Marcher,' 'Watching the Sea,' 'The Welfare Man,' 'The Welfare Man Retires,' 'Tammy Pendant' and 'To Become a Warrior'. They were among my most popular stories the short story 'Marcher', for instance, won Interzone's annual popularity poll and one of them, 'Tammy Pendant', was also my most controversial.

Marcher was first published in 2009 in the US, by Cosmos. The present edition is not simply a re-edited version of that book, however. It has been very substantially revised, with a completely different ending, a shift from 1st to 3rd person, and cuts and additions throughout the book. I regard the present version as the definitive one, and I am very grateful to Ian Whates for giving me this opportunity to have another crack at a book which I never felt I'd quite finished.

I would also like to thank David Pringle and Sheila Williams for publishing the original short stories, and Sean Wallace for publishing the book first time round. Neil Williamson, Roy Gray, Tony Ballantyne and Clive Seale looked at drafts of this book (either the first version, the second version, or, in Tony's case, both) and I'm extremely grateful to them for their time and their advice. I would also like to thank Niall Harrison for his review of the earlier version in Strange Horizons. I found his balanced appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses particularly helpful when reworking the book in its present form.

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