by Glover, Nhys
She nodded her agreement with a heavy heart.
The red head stood at his door, a calculating look on her beautiful face. Luke frowned as he gestured for her to enter his apartment. He had been expecting someone to replace Faith as his watch dog. He just didn’t know who.
‘I would have thought they’d send someone bigger and meaner, seeing I’m such a dangerous animal. A grunt, Cara called me.’
Jane blinked a few times, and then laughed. ‘Grunt! Yeah, I guess you are. But don’t worry about me, I can look after myself.’
‘Yeah, right. I’ve seen chicken bones thicker than your arms.’ He was challenging her for no other reason than he was mad at himself for bringing this on. He had been given the perfect life with the perfect woman. Now she was gone, and he had no one to blame but himself. The last four days had been hell without her.
He knew she still lived next door. He hadn’t lied when he said he’d know when she was home. His uncanny senses had always been alive to his environment. It was what made him so good at his job. And his senses told him when Faith was home and when she was out. The silence was deafening when she was gone, even if he turned on the entertainment screen.
‘Want to take me on?’ Jane’s face lit up with mischief.
‘Babe, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m a bit past fighting girls.’
Jane’s sudden burst of laughter was mellow and pleasing to the ear. But it didn’t do to him what Faith’s laughter did. It didn’t delight.
‘Come on tough guy, let’s see what you’ve got. We’ll go to the gym and spar a bit. Your chest up to it?’
‘Sure, why not?’
In the two weeks he’d been in New Atlantis, his injury had healed to a red scar. He couldn’t believe how fast he’d recovered. If he still doubted that he was in the future, the fast healing injury would have been proof enough. That he’d survived at all, was another miracle of this world. And the speed with which he healed was obviously the work of the same know-how that had created fast growing clones. He still cringed when he thought about having been subjected to such science.
‘Bring it on, doll. But don’t cry if I hurt you, okay?’ He went to reach for his wallet and keys, but realised with a start that he had neither in this world. Doors weren’t locked here, and there was no use for money. Wacky.
They hustled along the pathways without saying much. He could tell she wasn’t pleased about her assignment, and he wasn’t any happier with the arrangement. If he had any say in it, he’d have been left to his own devices, rather than herded around like a black sheep that had separating itself from the flock. And for the last four days he’d thought that was exactly what was going to happen. Then Jane had appeared – his very own reluctant shepherdess.
They entered the gym, where Luke had already spent many hours on his own, experimenting with the different equipment. He’d met a few people here, but none had made an effort to get to know him. Everyone had been willing to show him how to use the different equipment, if he’d asked, of course. That calm politeness was only to be expected of these people. But more than that? Not a chance.
Did the gossip-mill have him pegged as an arse? Is that why people were so unfriendly? He tried not to care. It wasn’t like he wanted to be here.
Jane led him to a space covered with cushioned flooring. Quickly, she took off her sandals, tied up her glorious hair, and then hiked up her skirt, so her long, luscious legs were almost fully exposed. She then took a fighting stance in the middle of the twenty foot, square space, and waited.
Was she kidding? He couldn’t fight a woman! Women didn’t fight. They might have just approved WAC training, but it wouldn’t involve hand to hand combat. Women weren’t strong enough. He thought she’d been joking about taking him on.
‘Look doll, I appreciate a joke as much as the next guy. But let’s get serious here. I’m not fighting a woman.’
She just grinned at him and waved him closer. That look of amused arrogance was really starting to get to him. Her man needed to put her in her place, quick smart, if she acted like this with him.
Slowly, he walked toward her. He’d let her take a swing at him, and then drop her as painlessly as possible on her delightful little butt. That should put an end to her game.
To make it seem as if he was playing along, he removed his sandals and put them on the edge of the softened flooring. Then he walked over to her, offering her his chin.
‘Take your best shot, sweetheart!’
Before he knew what had happened, his legs had gone out from under him, and he was the one sitting on his butt. She laughed at him.
Cautiously he climbed to his feet. The move had reminded him of something he’d seen the Japanese use. It was called Ju-jitsu. They had done a short orientation on it when they thought they would be fighting the Japs.
‘Your turn. Take your best shot, sweetheart!’ Jane mimicked him impudently.
He felt almost mad enough to do just that. But hitting women was not his style. That was more up his father’s alley. No matter how tempted he was, he wasn’t going to be goaded into hurting her.
When Jane saw he wasn’t going to take her up on her offer, she stepped in and took his unresisting arm. Twisting her body, she used the force of her movement to shift him off-centre. Unexpectedly, he lost his footing, and found himself flying through the air. He landed with a soft thud.
Now he understood what this floor was for. It was designed to take the impact of such falls.
Suddenly he was having fun. She was not just a woman; she was an opponent worthy of his efforts.
‘Is this jujitsu?’ he asked with interest, as he climbed to his feet.
‘It’s an amalgam of different martial arts techniques. I think Aikido is its base. I learned it while I was trying to integrate with this body. This and ballet. But I don’t imagine my ballet moves are going to impress you much.’
‘Does everyone here learn martial arts? I thought it was a peaceful world.’
‘It is. And no, there’s a wide selection of physical skills-based programs people can use when they’re integrating. I just liked Bruce Lee in Green Hornet.’
‘Bruce Lee?’
‘A martial arts expert who became an actor. Big in the 70s, so I’m told.’
‘Did he go on to be President, too?’
Jane laughed in delight. ‘You’ve heard about that one have you? Wouldn’t have happened where I came from. But no, Bruce Lee died young. No political career for him.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘1968. Sydney, Australia.’
‘Well Aussie, I guess I better give your theory a bit of practise.’ He moved quickly, lowered his head as he brought his shoulder into her belly. In one effortless move, he lifted her smoothly off her feet. Then he threw her over his back, so she slid down him like a slippery slide, to the ground. It was a move designed to immobilize, but not hurt her.
The look on her face was priceless: surprise and pleasure, mixed in equal quantities. ‘Excellent. You’re starting to respect me as an equal. Welcome to the feminist movement of the 70s. I am sooo mad I missed that.’
‘Feminist Movement? I’ve heard of the suffragette movement…’
‘Same sort of thing, but this one was about women being able to do men’s jobs. You do know women won the right to go into combat, don’t you?’
‘Won the right to get killed? Great!’
‘Women got killed in wars, anyway. Why not be able to fight back?’
Jane had climbed to her feet, and was moving around him slowly, looking for a way in. When she struck, Luke just had enough time to block the move, and counter with one of his own. She sidestepped, and let his own weight carry him into another fall. For a second, he lay flat on his back, panting.
‘If a girl like you can best me, I wouldn’t mind learning these martial arts… How do I go about it?’
‘You can download the program directly into your brain. Have you been to the Knowledge Centre yet?’ When he sh
ook his head, she groaned. ‘Man, you have missed the best that this place has to offer. What was Faith thinking? Come on!’
Her enthusiasm was infectious, and a few minutes later he was following her out of the gym like a rat following the Pied Piper.
As they walked along the moving pathway into the research precinct, Luke realised that he was enjoying himself for the first time in days. Not since he’d last been with Faith, he realised with a start. It was starting to seem as if being left to cool his heals on his own for those four days hadn’t been what he wanted after all.
But though Jane was fun, in her out-there Aussie way, she couldn’t compare with Faith, his gentle, sweet-tempered angel. Faith – who had a laugh that sounded like tiny bells tinkling, and eyes that shone like silver when she was happy.
He missed her. More than he wanted to admit, even to himself.
As they entered the Knowledge Centre, which Jane said was like an old fashioned Library, only better, the first thing that struck him was the wall to ceiling mural of a classical scene. But the three dimensional images took it out of the past and rested it firmly in the future. Nothing so far had impressed him in this world as much as this artwork.
‘Cool, huh? Maggie did that. She’s another Aussie I lived with when I first arrived. An amazing talent, isn’t she?’
‘Amazing! It’s so lifelike. It’s like those Gods are literally stepping out of their background.’
‘Yeah, it’s some kind of special holographic compound. She says the new mediums available here have given her artwork a whole new lease of life.’
‘Why are they so keen to keep it all so classical? I mean, this whole place is a living museum.’
‘The Old Timers, you know that term right?’ He nodded. ‘Well, they were looking to recreate a time in the history of man that was peaceful and beautiful. They had this idyllic idea that Atlantis was such a world, no matter what Homer said about it. It turns out that the Atlanteans were remarkably advanced as a culture. That created a lot jealousy with the less developed nations around them. So they got a bad rep. They weren’t as peace loving as the Old Timers wanted them to be, though. But they weren’t warmongers like their neighbours, either.
‘I think the Old Timers just decided to idealize that time, and try to imitate its best features. The whole place is actually modelled on the original city, before the fall. Our researchers have done a great job collecting data on it. Would you like to see?
‘Or maybe there’s another time you’d like to visit? I spend hours at a time here, visiting other times and places in the virtual reality rooms. It’s almost as good as being there, I imagine. They even synthesise smells! Do not go to Elizabethan London, let me warn you. That is putrid!’
Luke laughed. He liked this girl. But she seemed terribly young. He felt a hundred years old, in comparison. Of course, her age could be an illusion, too. She might be eighty.
‘How old are you, Jane?’ He asked, as they moved on down the hall.
‘Twenty. What period would you like to visit?’
‘Let’s go to our future. What about the twenty first century.’
‘You can see up to 2030. After than there’s no Jumping, so no data.’
‘Why?’
‘The Dark Ages. They just want to forget it ever happened. It’s like they drew a line in the sand and said, “we explore up to here.” I think there’s probably a fear that if the time travellers got too close to their own time they might be tempted to Retrieve loved ones before the plague. That would cause massive temporal displacement.’
‘Like they’d go back to the week before that day they all woke up to find everyone dead, and just cherry pick their loved ones out of there. So they didn’t get sick?’ Luke asked.
‘Yes. But no one knows how long the Plague incubated, so they might bring it back here with them. And then there are the shifts that might occur if anyone of the Old Timers found their family missing. They might have died looking for them, and a temporal loop would be created. Not a bright idea. The way they work it now is that if it didn’t happen then, it can never happen. Their families didn’t disappear before the Plague, so they never will. Sad but safe.’
‘Did you agree to come here?’
‘No. I’m like you. Julio Retrieved me because I was dying. I jumped off a ferry trying to save this kid’s life, and got pulled into the propellers. Lost both my legs. Massive internal injuries. So they decided to see if I could be another Jac. This body isn’t mine. I was short and stubby, and not terribly pretty. I definitely upgraded.’ She laughed as she indicated her tall, slim dancer’s body and pretty face.
‘Doesn’t it get to you that they put you in a dead thing without your permission?’
‘I would have been the dead thing, if they didn’t. I got hung up on body image for a while, but I was never sorry I got this chance. My life is a million times better here than it was back there. And I have Julio. That man is the air that I breathe!’
Luke liked the sound of that. It described how he felt about Faith. It was as if he hadn’t been able to breathe properly before she came into his life, and it had only got worse since she’d left it. She was the air that he breathed. And the pain caused by that realisation almost floored him.
‘How’s Faith?’ He had to ask. He had wanted to ask it from the first moment he saw Jane at his door.
‘Sad. She feels she failed you.’
‘Geezus, what’s wrong with that gal? I failed her, not the other way round. I was a total dick, and she deserves better.’
‘Yeah, she does. Trouble is, you’ve breached her defences, and her emotions are all back with a vengeance. She’s drowning in them.’
The thought of her suffering was more than he could bear, in that moment. It hit him in the gut like a savage blow, and he staggered under the force of it. Suddenly, he saw clearly the direction his life needed to take.
‘Can we see the Twenty First Century another day? I need to see Faith.’ The wave of certainty was so powerful; he was suddenly riding it with a vengeance. He knew exactly where he needed to be, and with whom. It didn’t matter about clones, or any of the dozen reasons he thought he had for finding this new world unacceptable. All that mattered was having his angel at his side, so he could breathe. This was his one shot at happiness, and he didn’t want to fuck it up anymore.
‘Not a good idea, Luke.’
‘Well, that’d be just my modus operandi then, wouldn’t it? I’m the expert at following through on bad ideas.’ He pulled a funny face, and Jane’s cautious expression shifted to a laugh.
‘Okay, then. I think you’ll find she’s home. When I told her I was coming to take you out, she said she’d wait until we were gone before going home. She said she had a headache, though here people can get rid of headaches in the blink of an eye. I think she just feels like moping.’
‘Thanks, Jane. You are one fine lady. Julio’s a lucky guy. Must meet him some time.’ He dropped a kiss on her cheek and took off.
Chapter Thirteen
Luke could tell she was in there, although there was no sound from inside to indicate anyone was home. He pressed the small button next to the door, and waited for her to answer it. His preference would have been to knock, but that would have made a noise, and they didn’t like noise here.
He wondered if he’d ever get used to that: the quiet. There was something innately unsettling about the absence of sound. Life made noise, from a baby’s cry, to a dog barking its warning. Even breathing made noise. He remembered the sound of Faith’s harsh breathing as she lay beside him after her crying jag. It had broken his heart.
Before he could get too caught up in regret, the door to her apartment slid open. The woman he’d been missing stood before him, her eyes red and cheeks pale. His heart did a double take. Maybe this was a bad idea. She wasn’t well, he could see that. What was he doing here, other than making things worse? But, good idea or bad, he was here, and he would see it through.
‘Hey, angel.’
He tried to smile, but found his mouth wouldn’t co-operate.
‘Luke, you should not be here. Where is Jane?’ She seemed cool and aloof, as if she didn’t care whether he was there or not. It hurt.
‘I… I just left her at the Knowledge Centre. Hot damn, that girl can fight. I’m going to learn some of those moves.’
Faith’s eyes brimmed with tears, but she blinked them away. He didn’t know what he’d said to upset her, but clearly he had.
‘I am glad she is proving an acceptable replacement.’
Ah, that was what this was about. She felt he’d replaced her, and was happy about it.
‘You didn’t fail, Faith. I’m just a hard head. It takes me longer to accept change than most. I asked for a replacement because I could see I was hurting you. I didn’t want to hurt you.’
Faith turned, and walked back into her living room. He took the opportunity to follow her in. The door closed soundlessly behind him.
She sat down on the sofa that was the twin of the one in his own quarters. It made him feel more relaxed, being in familiar territory. He sat down on the matching chair, not wanting to invade her space.
‘I did fail, Lukas. This is not supposed to be about me. It is supposed to be about you. My feelings are not the issue. You needed someone who could stand back from their own baggage and be there for you. I could not.’ Her words were calm and rational, but there was an edge to them, as if she kept control only by a thread.
‘Faith, this is about you, as much as it’s about me. I seem to have stirred up your emotions. And I wish I felt more sorry about that than I do. But if you didn’t get all turned round about me, I’d feel like I was the only one.’
She frowned, and put her head on the side, as if trying to understand him. He wanted to go to her, put his hand to her cheek, and feel its softness and warmth. But he kept hold of himself, and went on.
‘That’s selfish, right? I don’t want you feeling calm and dispassionate about me. I’ve missed you so much I ache.’