by Steve Haynes
I could smell the flowers that grew along the towpath long before I reached it. They were weeds really, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was too warm for a suit. The midday sun beamed its benevolent, life bringing light so strongly that after a few minutes I could feel it burning the top of my head where my hair has thinned recently. I took my jacket off and slung it over my shoulder as I headed down to the broken wall where I had sat so many times.
It didn’t seem a problem that I would get my suit trousers dirty, the important thing was that I had made the effort to wear the right sort of clothes for a special day. The strange thing was that I didn’t see a single bird or animal. Not a fish jumping in the canal. Not even a fly or wasp about its business. The flaming blue day was empty it seemed, except for me. So, by the stillness of the canal with its green smells and its secret views, I sat and spun on the edge of the world without even knowing that I was moving.
Well.
All those moping bloody faces. All those unhappy souls destroying themselves like that. How could they have found life so disheartening? How could they give up so, so easily? Perhaps they didn’t feel they had anything more to look forward to. If they felt that, then they were wrong.
I’m looking at the most gorgeous thing currently on the planet. It is not the face of my beloved, as I don’t have one. It is not a religious icon that will give me hidden strength and succour. It is not an object that changes the meaning of anything or gives my existence any more purpose than I ever thought it had. It is a fish pie.
It is the best-looking fish pie I have ever seen. This may well be because I haven’t eaten a scrap of food for almost a week but I’m not too concerned about why the pie is beautiful. I just know that it is, more certainly than I’ve ever known anything. It is crispy on the top and seems to have risen slightly as if imbued with inner power. The crispiness is just right. I know because I have been unable to stop myself from tearing a bit of potato off and testing it. I have a feeling that I may eat the entire pie if there is time. It is fluffy in a heavy, wholesome sort of way. It is proud without being arrogant – a noble pie, therefore.
It smells of after football hunger pangs when food is so completely deserved and desired. It smells of the security of my mother’s care. It smells of goodness, but most of all it smells of creamy, baked fish and the whole house is warm and moist with its scent. I pour myself a beer. It’s a special occasion, after all.
Out on the tiny back porch I sit at a card table with my beer and my plate and my scorching hot pie on a wooden board so that it doesn’t burn the baize. I serve myself a healthy portion and even more aroma bursts free from the pie. I feel slightly faint as the steam hits my face. My stomach is suddenly alive with little cramps and gurgles and churnings. I cut a small piece away from the rest of the pie, making sure there is an even amount of fish and potato, and put that forkful of heaven in my mouth. What a complete moment it is.
I’m smiling all over my face now. I take another sip of beer and glance at my watch. Somehow the time has skittered away from me again and I see that it’s now twenty past one. But I can’t stop smiling because I know it’s just enough time for me to finish the pie if I want to.
More sips of malty beer. More mouthfuls of pie. I’m surprised to find that tears are escaping from my eyes and I realise it’s because I’m so happy. I’m filled with warmth from the fish pie and clothed in the warmth from the sun. But as I chew and sip it seems that a cloud has passed between the earth and the sun, a permanent shadow. There is a certain chilliness now but I am warm inside because of the pie.
And a true night is finally falling.
E. J. SWIFT
The Complex
Those who go mad do so when the sun rises. Gill told me this on my first day, over forty years ago now. I’ve been awake through the night, sat by the window, listening to my lungs wheeze and thinking about tomorrow’s hearing. Now I watch dawn seep through the darkened glass. I imagine, on the horizon, rows of tiny figures going mad. What do they do, the chosen ones? They hoot and hop, lift their hands to the sky and sing worship to the red dunes. Or they lie quiet, prone, as the whistling wind covers them with sand. First the feet and hands are buried, then the torso, then the neck. Those who go mad do so when the sun rises, because in the night it is possible to hide. But in the day, this planet is a vast, barren rock.
Nine o’clock. Hum of the air conditioner pumping air through the complex, but it’s hot, always hot. My t-shirt sticks to my back. The three of them face me. On the left, the Warden, grey haired and austere. The woman, Karrow, is younger than me. She’s a native. The third man I do not recognize. He must be from the Cities. They like to have an outsider at these meetings, for validation.
I sit in my chair with my hands resting on my lap, palms upward, to show that I pose no threat. The faint glow from behind is my file on the wall, backlighting me. Age: fifty-five. Height: one hundred and sixty centimetres. Lung capacity: I do not need a figure. The tightness in my chest tells me everything.
Karrow’s eyes flick up and around me, scanning the information I cannot see.
‘How do you feel, Yun? Physically?’
‘I feel well,’ I say.
Karrow and the Warden exchange barely perceptible glances.
‘The next ship is due this month,’ says the City dweller. ‘We expect its arrival within two weeks.’
‘Two weeks?’ I have to suppress my dismay. ‘That’s sooner than I expected.’
‘You will be allocated a bay for the return passage to Earth.’
‘I would like to stay here.’
‘Yes, we have noted your request.’ He frowns at me. There is a tickle in my throat and I bite down on it. I feel as though they can see the red dust lining my lungs, as though my contamination is fluorescent. I wait.
‘There is no provision for ex-convicts on Botoni, Yun,’ says Karrow. ‘You are not permitted to join the New Cities.’
This I know already. Nothing can be allowed to pollute the New Cities, not dust, not bad blood. I choose my next words carefully.
‘I’d be content to remain in the complex and work for my board. To me it seems false economy to be preserved in abeyance for the considerable journey, when you consider the state of my general. . . health.’
The City man frowns and it is the Warden who speaks. He is a man for whom I have a distant respect, a tolerance, I suppose. He was young when I arrived.
‘You have always been an oddity here, Yun. I remember your rages in the early days, but it was a surprise to find murder on your file.’
I keep my hands soft, my eyes lowered.
‘With respect, I hope you will consider my request.’
After my hearing, even though the sun is lethal at this time of day and my head feels light and giddy, I go and stand outside. The white light strips the moisture from my lips and back. It sears through the soles of my shoes. I squint at the naked sky. I stand there until spots begin to appear in my vision. Then, I retreat inside and rest my forehead against the dark glass.
The ship is due in a fortnight. I imagine its descent, the blip in the sky slowly materialising into a silver bird. I imagine the hatch opening, the procession of silver oblongs elevated onto gravity carriers for delivery to the complex. They bring them in at night, so we cannot stare, although of course we watch from our rooms. Thus we arrived, thus we depart. We call them coffins, though they tell us we are – we were – not dead inside.
Over the months of faster-than-light travel in my silver coffin, my skin didn’t sag, my muscles didn’t atrophy, my heart was still. I had no brain waves. Nothing in my chemical makeup altered. But since they revived me I’ve wondered if, in that act of carbon freezing, the flicker of consciousness that makes me me underwent any change. The neuros say as your cells die and replace themselves, you’re a different person from one day to the next. There’s no such thing as personality, they say
. But if that’s true then why are we given labels? Why am I a criminal for forty years, and not merely for the day the crime was committed?
It is dangerous to be fluid. To let yourself flow. I have learned to hold myself in check.
Al finds me staring at the dunes. He’s a kid, only six months into his sentence, ten years to donate. He was indicted for taking part in a protest.
‘How’d the hearing go?’ he asks.
‘They’ve booked my flight.’ Saying it aloud makes it real. My heart beats faster.
‘Shit, man. That’s come round fast.’
I nod. I haven’t told anyone about my request. If it is not granted, I do not want them to feel sorry for me. And I am not sure they would understand why I have asked, that I had no choice but to ask.
‘I’d kill to see proper water again,’ says Al. ‘Grass. Forests. Anything but this fucking red dust.’
‘I don’t taste it anymore,’ I tell him. He looks at me dubiously, as if I’m old and potentially senile, but it’s true. Even the little flecks you see in your food, or as sediment at the bottom of a glass of water, I don’t notice them.
‘D’you think they’ll make rivers out here?’ Al asks.
‘Not in our lifetime.’
‘The seas are so weird and lifeless, it freaks me out. Do they even know what’s in there?’
‘Only bacteria. It’s too acidic for shellfish.’
‘You are the Oracle, aren’t you. Everyone says you are.’
I gesture vaguely. Up there on the horizon, is that movement? In the shimmering air, it is possible to witness false images, and speak to them too.
‘I’ve been here a long time,’ I say.
‘And that you don’t talk much. Everyone says that too.’
‘I’m talking to you, aren’t I?’ He’s right though. I don’t talk much.
‘And that you killed someone.’
‘I’ve been here a long time,’ I repeat.
‘You don’t look like a murderer.’
I see the shadow of my face reflected in the glass and I remember Gill’s terror when she was due to go back. She was right to be afraid: once our sentence is up we have no purpose, and those back on what we should call home no use for us. To them we’re no better than robots. In fact, our stock is worth less than a robot, because we’re damaged. Gill was convinced that the silver coffins or perhaps merely their contents would be ejected into space mid-flight, and she would be left to float for all eternity, not alive, not dead. If that’s true, I told her, you’ll never know the difference. But now I feel the same fear creeping over me. I don’t want to go back in a box. Alive is alive and dead is dead. Frozen is something else.
In the evening I take a booth in the Pod and listen again to the last letter Shu spoke me. While I listen I imagine Shu’s clear eyes and tiny, intricate braids. I remember the fingers, rough skinned but dexterous, that shaped those braids. Despite the photos she has sent I still think of her this way, this young.
Shu’s voice is calm and fluid.
You know of course that the family will take care of you, but I’ve heard disturbing reports. The people who come back are not welcome here, even on Moon. There have been attacks. It is a peculiar thing when you consider that you were sent there to be punished, but it seems to me that this behaviour stems from a kind of jealousy. Everyone wants a pass to the New World. I don’t know what they imagine your life is like. I have seen videos of the complexes and even now I struggle to picture you there, where they say it is so hot that the air seems to be alive and makes you see visions, or ghosts.
We will have to keep you a secret, Yun.
By the time I get back to Earth, Shu will be over twice my age, or dead. Time dilation makes it impossible to know until I get there. And now my time is up I do not want to know. I do not want to go home and find a sister riddled with age or worse, a stone in the ground.
That, or else this planet has bewitched me. But is it not better to go mad than to go home, to lead at worst a reviled, at best a dwindling life, creeping about like a shadow?
In the week following my hearing I work in the kitchen, although my sentence expired six months ago, and I am not required to. I do not know what I would do if I did not labour. I don’t think my fellow convicts would resent my freedom, although since Gill went I have cultivated no new friends, and perhaps I am mistaken and they would look at me jealously, even hatingly, if I spent all my hours in the Pod, lulled by Shu’s voice.
My mind is skittish and I am glad of mundane tasks. Today I prepare greenhouse potatoes for the cook. They go into a stew with protein supplement. There is a rumour that in the Cities they have managed to breed livestock successfully, and that there is meat. It pleases me to believe this; that Botoni is making progress.
The cook bangs dishes around me. He is fond of banging things; it is his way of exerting authority, of making himself more than a chef for Earth’s scum. As I scrape dirt from the potato skins I remember what Al said about the seas here and I think about the few occasions I ate fish, about the silvery scales crisping on a hot grill, the white flakes falling out hot and delicious and their salty tang on my tongue. I would say I miss fish, but I suppose I do not really miss it because none of these sensations can actually be recalled, except as concepts.
I wonder, if I go back, if there will still be fish.
‘Chef?’ I say, meek and respectful. Shu would not recognize this timid woman.
‘What?’
‘You could do with an extra pair of hands, couldn’t you? On a more regular basis, I mean.’
He snorts.
‘Got someone in mind to replace you? Want a soft job, do they? It’s a fucking joke.’
I freeze.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ship’s due isn’t it? You’ll be off in a silver box.’
For a moment my old anger bubbles up and I imagine what it would feel like to stab the chef, to feel his blood in my palm. I take a knife and slice through the potatoes, making clean, exact quarters.
In the evening I serve the food I have helped to prepare in the canteen. I like doing this. It allows me to study the other inmates with the most cursory engagement, and then I can go and eat without being disturbed. But towards the end of the queue, I notice a pair of severely shaking hands. I look at the man’s face and see the hallmarks of a shock-gun episode. I take his bowl myself, fill it, and hand it back to prevent the stew sloshing as best I can.
When the line has ended I go to sit next to the victim with my own dinner. His fingers are struggling to hold the spoon steady.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
His lips can barely form the words.
‘It’s barbaric.’
‘I know.’
‘They did it to you?’
‘More than once.’
I remember the first time. I had dared to complain about something, the quality of the tools I was using perhaps. The foreman in my work party was on me in seconds.
‘Repeat that?’
I repeated it. I was so full of rage in those days I could barely keep my mouth shut. The foreman jabbed my stomach with the shock gun and my body convulsed. When my vision cleared I felt as though a hand had reached into my belly and scrambled everything inside me. I couldn’t tell which way was up. My hands had switched places with my feet. I retched over and over, utterly disorientated.
‘Get up!’
I couldn’t move. I saw the gun approaching and tried to cringe away. He zapped me a second time, for longer. I was aware of all my limbs jerking frenziedly. I heard laughter and jeers. Then I lost control of my bladder and urine seeped down my trousers.
‘Get up!’
Someone pulled me to my feet, pulled me along with her. A rough hand gripped my hair.
‘Walk,’ she said. ‘Don’t let them see you weak. Left
foot. Right foot. Walk.’
Gill.
She rescued me that day, and many days after. I cannot rescue this man. I am leaving in a fortnight, unless they offer me respite. The man’s story shakes me. Towards the end of my sentence, with my deteriorating health, they have given me less physical labour. I have forgotten the brutality of our treatment. I have forgotten that my body is still muscular, because gravity here is greater and the effort to do any small thing correspondingly so. I feel no ownership of this body. It’s as if the planet has moulded me without consultation.
Why would they let me stay? And why would I wish to?
I became conscious on Botoni in a transparent box, with something beeping over my head, regular and insistent. Two white-clad figures on the other side moved slowly. I took a breath, my first. My lungs were desperate for air, I couldn’t inhale quickly enough. I gulped and flailed until my breathing began to settle. When they took me out of the box the doctors had to help me with my first steps, one holding each arm, unused as I was to the stronger gravity.
Before I came here I had seen images of the complex, as everyone does. They are supposed to act as a deterrent. I had seen the glinting, silver domes; I had seen the endless red dunes. I could never have imagined the heat. Or the thick, stifling air.
The impossible silence.
In general they treat us well enough, in the sense that livestock are treated well. We serve a purpose: we need to be strong and healthy, get the right vitamins and stay clean. Each day, the bell pulled me out of bed at six. A wash at the sink with cold water. Six-fifteen: dressed and tidied. Inspection at six forty-five, breakfast at seven. Desert caterpillars took us out to the worksites; we could travel between ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes each day. Under colossal, wire rigged sunshades, we took raw materials and turned them into buildings.
We went in teams, rotating projects every six months. I dug canals, riveted pipes, mixed cement, placed bricks, pumped and sprinkled water, ploughed dust, planted seedlings, hoed soil, laid rails. I did these things until my hands were blistered, my body aching as if beaten, and then they ferried us back for the evening meal, and what remained of the evening, if we could stay awake for it.