“Weeding.”
“Yeh. Is that beneath you or something?”
“No. It’s fine. Got any gloves?”
“Haven’t you got super hands as well?”
“I heard what happened to Pew. They’re not that super.”
“There’s some on the cart.” Liss went to the toolcart floating at the edge of a patch of cabbages and took gardening gloves from a drawer. Olivia watched with disapproval, waiting for Liss to do something wrong. Liss sighed, shook her head, and set to work ripping up weeds around tomato plants. She eliminated them with a mechanical obstinacy to all of Olivia’s expectations and pretty soon, the tomato bed was free of sandgrass.
“Good enough for you?” asked Liss.
Olivia sniffed. “It’ll do. Now get on and do the rest.” She wedged her hat on her face. Liss looked at her with naked irritation, then went back to work. Olivia paid no more attention for several minutes, until she lifted her hat to observe the hard work in progress. She lowered the hat, satisfied. Then raised it again when she realized exactly which plants were coming up out of the soil.
Olivia was out of her chair and across the garden in record time, but not fast enough to stop Liss ripping up a line of green shoots tipped with tiny buds that, with gentle care and attention, would have flowered and brought forth the pungent mustard seeds Olivia craved.
“You—! You—!” Olivia couldn’t express how livid she was. Apoplectic red-faced fury was all she could manage.
“Finished the weeding!” said Liss with a smile.
“Those weren’t weeds!”
“Oh? Looked like weeds.”
“You little tart, you knew what you were doing!”
“Anything else you want weeding?
Olivia grabbed for the gardening gloves. “Give me those!”
“Hey!”
Olivia got hold of one hand and dragged the glove half off. Liss pushed back, and knocked Olivia two metres through the air into the tomato bed. Liss’s hands flew to her face as Olivia cried out in pain.
“Oh, shit, sorry—”
“You bitch!”
Olivia tried to get up, but cried out again.
“What is it?” asked Liss.
Olivia gritted an answer through the pain. “You’ve put my back out, you cow!”
“Um. I’ll, er, get some help…”
Liss slipped away.
10. Asha & Bell
“…the nurse put Olivia’s back in order but she’s not happy. Like I said, she wants out.”
“Surely this is something we can get her to sleep on?”
“She wants out now. She’s outside my office. She won’t leave.”
A crumpled sigh escaped me. “Put her on, then.”
I heard the fumbling sounds of the line switching to a physical handset for Olivia’s benefit.
“Bad day at work?” asked Bell, enjoying it far too much.
“Just shut up,” I said.
Olivia came on the line. “I want to leave. What are you going to do about it?”
“Olivia, don’t you think it would be a good idea to sleep on it first?”
“No I bloody don’t! I want to go now. Right now!”
“I’m sure Liss didn’t mean it. We can talk in the morning and then I’ll be happy to arrange a move if you—”
“I’ll say it again because you’re not listening: I want to go and I want to go now!”
“Olivia—”
“Now. Right now!”
“I don’t think—”
“Right now means right now!”
“Yes, however—”
“I’ve been assaulted, nearly raped, thrown at a ceiling and chucked across a garden! Your bloody therapy centre isn’t bloody safe!”
I looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. But she did have a valid point.
“All right, Olivia. If you don’t feel safe I can give you a few days back in the Psychiatric Centre while we conduct a safety review.”
“And then you’ll drag me back, no doubt…”
“If your complaint is on health and safety grounds then that’s something we can address. That’s all I can do for you at the moment.”
She made an grumping sound. “Fine. Just get me out of here.”
“Hand me back to Veofol.”
The line fumbled again as Veofol picked up. “Asha?”
“Yeah. Listen. We’ve still got a bus there, haven’t we? Can you get Olivia back to the Psychiatric Centre?”
“Er… okay. But shouldn’t we have a cooling off period first?”
“That’s the idea — let her cool off somewhere else. And she’s got a point about health and safety. We’ll get her back in a week or so, I’m pretty certain of that. Can you make the travel arrangements?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll talk to the Psychiatric Centre and let them know.”
“That’ll make them happy…”
“Yeah. I’ll let you know when it’s arranged.”
I ended the call as Bell handed our menus back to a waiter. “I ordered for us,” he said.
“Go on, tell me,” I sighed, expecting something completely inedible.
“Mammoth roulade on a bed of pan tossed algae.” Which was a pleasant surprise. Much of the ‘cooking’ on Bell’s world involved burying things and letting them rot. At least he wasn’t being vindictive. But then he was the one heading off to a new life. He could afford it.
“I need to make one more call. Sorry.”
“I’ll get some wine.”
“Thanks.”
11. Departure
Olivia’s departure was a disorganised affair. She wanted to pack everything she owned so she could make it difficult to return, but Veofol gave her no time. She had to make do with only a small bag, and leave behind all her favourite garden tools. There was, after all, no point in allowing her to profit by running away.
Pew was distraught on hearing she was going, and a tearful scene followed in which he asked why she was leaving, and she refused to say. Pew was convinced it was all his fault despite Olivia’s grumpy silence. Few of the others cared that she was going. Liss retired to her room and put on a screenshow to numb her brain. Elsbet was stable in the infirmary, but unlikely to wake any time soon. Kwame stayed in his room. Iokan was the only one to go to the courtyard to wish Olivia farewell.
“I might have known you’d come to say goodbye,” she muttered.
“The least I could do,” he said. “But I don’t think you’ll be gone long.”
“Hah! Watch me!” She turned her back on him and boarded the bus. Iokan lingered patiently. Olivia did not. She came back to the door and demanded: “Where’s the bloody driver? Pilot? Whatever they’re supposed to be called…”
“I’ll go and look, shall I?”
“Yeh. Go on. Have a look. I’ll sit here.”
Iokan went back and almost walked into Veofol, who had a cross look on his face to match his determined march to the bus.
“Where’s the driver?”
“I’m the driver.”
“You’re the driver?”
“The usual drivers are off site. We have to keep one qualified driver here in case of emergencies, and that’s Satna in security. Which leaves me.”
“You’re qualified to fly one of these?”
“It’s not flying. It’s driving. And yes, I am qualified.”
“I’m impressed.”
“The computer does most of the work. It’s not that impressive. Don’t tell me you’re coming along as well?”
“No. Just here to see you off.”
“Well. Thanks. I’m sure Olivia appreciates it.” Iokan chuckled but Veofol didn’t smile. “I’m serious. It’ll make it easier to bring her back if she thinks someone cares whether or not she’s here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“Has anything I’ve done… helped?”
Veofol paused on the steps of the bus. “At least you’
re trying.”
Iokan nodded.
“I’ll see you in a couple of hours. We can talk about it then.”
“Yes. I’d like to.”
“Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
Veofol boarded to a grumpy “about bloody time you damned elf!” from Olivia. The door slid shut, an automated voice warned people to stand clear, and Iokan dutifully backed off as it rose up into the sky.
12. Asha & Bell
As we tucked into steaming chunks of rolled up mammoth meat flavoured with krill paste, I found the evening growing easier to bear. He was leaving for another world, and wouldn’t be coming back. Somehow I skipped the usual stage of distraught pleading. Had I actually loved him? I felt fond of him. He was still funny, in his own way, making little linguistic jokes and waiting while my translation system caught up. But I didn’t love him.
“It’s strange,” I said.
“No, really, it’s completely genuine!” he assured me.
“Hm?”
“The meat comes in every week. It’s frozen but it’s still the real thing.”
“I didn’t mean that…”
“They don’t bring in the real delicacies, though. Some people swear by the mammoth penis stew back home.”
I choked, then very carefully finished chewing and swallowing.
“This isn’t…?”
He smiled. “No, of course not. Penis is too expensive.”
“Anyway, that’s not what I meant. I mean I feel strange. I ought to be angry. I ought to be making a scene. I thought it would be terrible, if this happened…”
He looked hurt. “Oh.”
“I didn’t mean it that way! I meant…”
“You feel like you dropped the tent.”
“What tent?
“A tent you were carrying through winter drifts that wasn’t even yours. And you didn’t feel the weight until the straps broke and it fell into the snow. You look back, and it’s a broken thing with cracked poles and worn hides. You were only carrying it because you needed shelter in case the blizzard came. But there was no blizzard. And once it’s gone, it’s easy to get through the snow by yourself.”
“That’s really… accurate.”
“It’s from a poem. You can look it up.”
“I will. I wish it was that easy for everyone.”
“Your patients, I suppose?”
“Yeah. Actually, let me look at that poem…”
I fished in my bag for a small pad, and searched.
“It’s called—” he said.
“No, don’t tell me, let me see if I can… huh.”
“You might find it under my name. I, uh, translated it into Interversal.”
“I can’t find anything.”
He sighed. “Try The Tents of Love and Ice, it’ll be in the collection.”
“No, I mean everything’s gone…” The data connection had dropped. I’d seen this kind of thing happen in distant therapy centres where we depended on a local retransmitter, but never in Hub Metro. I looked up and saw people all over the restaurant fumbling with devices and putting hands to their ears as if straining to hear something. I checked my own implant and found myself cut off from all outside services.
“It can’t be everyone…” said Bell, shaking his watch and finding that he, too, was cut off.
“It’s probably a local failure,” I said.
Every light in the restaurant went off. People gasped. The lights flickered back on. Then off again. The gasps were deeper. No one knew what to make of it.
The room jumped. Plates scattered. Glasses splashed wine and fell. People stumbled. I grabbed the table to steady myself.
“Earthquake…?” said Bell, hardly believing it.
“We need to get out of here,” I said. My crisis training pushed aside all thoughts of the impossibility of tremors in Hub Metro: all I knew at that moment was that the most dangerous place during an earthquake is inside a building. I grabbed Bell’s hand and we ran for the door.
The lobby was full of people with much the same idea, and I mistook the orange glow on their faces for a fire still burning in a stone hearth. But the light came through the glass frontage, and as we were carried along the human stream to the doors, we saw what was lighting us up, and what had made the ground shake: a vast, mangled twist of metal and ceramic that had crashed down from the sky and was scorching trees and grass and people in the park opposite the restaurant.
“Oh no. No…” said Bell, distraught by the wreckage. But I was driven by rigid, trained impulses for survival: if one had crashed, what of the others? I looked up.
Above the orange glow, the sky was alive with the flash and thunder of an awesome lightning storm, sudden sheets of blue making the clouds burst and glow, forks cracking through the air from cloud to cloud and down to hit the tops of buildings, exploding their lightning conductors in showers of sparks.
And below the lightning, the aircraft suffered. A small flyer struggled to stay in the air. The driver did his or her best as it was punched across the sky by an invisible fist. It wasn’t just the datastreams to our devices that were down: the computers that made gravity-assisted flight easy had failed. Everything that could fly was coming back to earth.
13. Crisis
Liss snapped awake. The romantic adventures of Ellera had put her to sleep with their familiarity, but another sound made her jump. Something at the edge of her hearing. Something that triggered old instincts.
She burst out of her room and ran down the stairs to find Iokan in the common room.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“I didn’t hear anything…”
She heard something else that made her look up. “It’s outside.”
She ran out of the building with Iokan behind her.
“Shit…” she muttered as she looked in the direction of Hub Metro, and saw the lightning storm like a cap over the city, spreading outwards and touching the clouds over their own heads. Thunder rumbled and crashed over them as forks of lightning spread a web of light across the sky.
Iokan followed her out, and looked up. “Ancients…”
“Anyone you know?”
He shook his head. “They never came like this…”
A low thud drew their attention towards the dark horizon — and a sudden burst of flame in the canopy, followed by smoke.
14. Asha & Bell
Hub Metro was in chaos, drowning in fire and screams. We fled the restaurant along with the crowds flooding the streets. Above us, the lightning roared and gravity drives trembled in the air if their pilots were skilled, or fell if they were not. At least a dozen crash sites were scattered across the city and in the sides of buildings, spewing fire and smoke as lightning cracked down from above.
A woman staggered in tattered, smouldering rags from the nearest burning flyer, her hair razed off, screaming that aliens had come from beyond and set fire to the sky. Two people calmed her and tried to lead her to safety. A man Bell knew from work grabbed him and shouted that invaders had come from another universe and he had to hide! Now! This was just the beginning of the invasion! Bell shook him off and we stumbled on, just trying to get away from the massive conflagration that was unbearably hot even as far away as we were. A security officer waved us on, yelling at everyone to keep moving, keep moving, get out of the area. We asked her what was going on, but she didn’t know, she just needed us to move, to move, to keep moving.
And there was still no data. No way to get information, any kind of information. No visual overlay to say where we were or offer suggestions for routes. People staggered blindly on, some of them looking as though they saw the city for the first time and were daunted not by the disaster but by the massive unknowable scale of the buildings. We hoped we might find AIs in their robot bodies who would have their own local records — but we saw one collapsed in a heap by the side of a road, smoke pouring from the chest cavity. Every robot we saw had died the same way. “It can’t be,” I muttered, remembering wh
at had happened to the Exploration Service mission that had found Katie.
“Can’t be what?” asked Bell.
“Gravity pulse…”
“Gravity what?”
But it didn’t make sense. I looked up again. “No. It’s not a gravity pulse. It’s an electromagnetic pulse… that’s what the lightning’s for…”
He tried to take me by the shoulder and pull me away with the crowd. “Come on!” But I’d had disaster training. It was standard for anyone who worked out in the refugee centres among hordes of damaged people: firstly, to understand what they had been through, but also to help us survive in similar situations. And what we were doing felt wrong. A crowd directed by the authorities towards points of escape from the crisis is a crowd you want to be in, but a confused mob just heading away is a terrible idea. The only security officer we’d seen had no idea what was going on: she’d just been trying to get people away from the crash.
“I have to get to the Refugee Service!” I shouted to Bell over the screaming and thunder.
“We need to get out of the city!” he shouted back.
I shook my head. “None of these people know where they’re going! Nobody knows what’s happening! Do you want to go with them or do you want to be in a government installation?”
“Wait, are you trying to check on your patients?”
He couldn’t believe it. But he was right. I had to know. I couldn’t answer for a moment. He shook his head. “Fine. Whatever. Which way?”
I pointed down a side avenue with a shoe. “That way.” I ran on in my bare feet and he followed.
15. Rescue
Sirens went off throughout the centre, and outside in the courtyard. Lomeva Sisse came out after Iokan and Liss. “You two! Get inside! Now!”
“What’s going on?” demanded Liss as thunder reached them and forced them to shout.
“I don’t know! You just need to get inside! Now!”
“Who crashed?”
“I don’t — what?” She turned and saw the burning hole in the forest. “Oh lord. I need a medical team, I need transport, we have a crashed flyer—” And then she realised no one could hear her. “There’s no data…” She looked suddenly helpless.
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