Aldo
Cramming the last handful of corn chips into his mouth, Aldo Salinas reaches for the remote and kills the power on the TV.
The clock on the VCR reads 1:39.
With difficulty, he bends down to pick up the bowl from the floor at his feet, and the voice takes him by surprise.
‘And now, Aldo, here is tomorrow’s news.’
Damned remote must be acting up …
He looks up at the screen. The girl looks very young to be a newsreader, though she isn’t bad-looking. Except for the fact that her teeth are a tiny bit crooked, and she has a strange little birthmark on her left cheek which looks like a piece of dried fruit.
Focusing as he is on the girl’s face, he doesn’t notice that the digits on the video recorder have suddenly frozen.
It is 1:40 precisely.
ELLIE
Half to forget the wandering and the pain,
Half to remember days that have gone by,
And dream and dream that I am home again.
James Elroy Flecker
… and with a single, short glance over her shoulder, Ellie says goodbye.
Then she steps forward into the blinding light and through it into the Shadow. And the concrete sidewalk, the red-brick wall that borders the nearby school yard, and the solid, ancient paperbark which shades the eastern corner of the Stephensons’ home, all seem to melt and run together like plastic in a fire. Their darkening colours merge and their shapes become distorted, then grotesque, then unrecognisable, and within the space of a few moments they are gone. Everything is gone.
She is alone in a dimension of absolute black; blacker than night, without sensation. She can feel nothing, as if her body has ceased to exist along with the rest of the physical world, and only her mind remains, adrift in a universe of silence.
As lives go, it has not been a bad one.
It has been comfortable, considering the limited technology of the period, and peaceful, in comparison to most other lives. And it has been interesting to see the birth of the Revolution, the beginning of an era that will forever change the world.
But it is over – with little warning, as usual. And, as usual, it hurts more than a little to be unable to bid a proper farewell to friends and family’. To the home of half a dozen years. Another chapter. Another dead-end …
Even though we knew it had to come – and probably soon – we never really expected it to happen. And if that sounds strange, I guess it’s fitting. The whole situation with Ellie was strange from the start.
But we wouldn’t have changed a thing. She was such a blessing. She added something to both our lives that can never be taken away. Or replaced. And even though she was only ‘on loan’, as she once put it, she was ours for a while, and that made all the difference. To both of us.
I remember her sitting right there in the rocking-chair with her feet curled up underneath her, fidgeting with the ring we gave her on her fourteenth birthday and staring into the fire with those strange violet eyes of hers. She always felt the cold more than most, and we usually had a fire on all but the hottest summer days. Still do. I guess you get acclimatised.
Anyway, she was talking, watching the flames dance and letting the words flow. That was something you had to get used to – the way she’d talk to you, filling in the gaps, telling you about herself, her feelings, but almost never looking at you, as if she was really talking to herself.
‘Every life I live is borrowed time,’ she said, and she brushed her hair from her forehead with her left hand. ‘When I get back … if I get back … it’ll be at the exact moment that I left. I won’t have aged a day, except that I’ll have all these centuries of memories, all these lives …’ Then she smiled and actually looked across at me. ‘I guess it solves the problem of what I’ll do with my future. With all this hands on experience, I’ll have to become a historian.’
I had to smile at that. Ellie, a historian. Ellie, who even at ten or eleven had known so much more maths and physics and chemistry than any of the teachers at school, but had hidden her talents with such care in order to, as she put it, ‘blend in’. Ellie, a historian.
She must have read my mind – or my expression. ‘I was never really good at maths and stuff, not in my own time. Don’t forget, we’re talking about nearly three hundred years in the future. Just because I can cope with a little elementary number-crunching —’
‘You do a little more than cope!’ I interrupted, recalling some of the demonstrations she’d given us in private.
‘Yes, but it’s all so primitive.’ I remember she paused, gathering her thoughts. Then she slid from the rocker and moved across to the sofa where I was sitting. ‘Look. You … We are living in one of the most exciting, mind-blowingly progressive times in history. In the last half-century there has been an explosion of –’ she searched for the right word – ‘knowing. But it isn’t all just going to stop. How clever would you look if you went back three hundred years, or even fifty? Back home, I’d be considered about average, but I never considered a future in anything mathematical. Besides, I quite like the idea of being a historian. It would make a change from being history.’
At times like that I felt a little guilty wishing that we could hold on to her. She sounded so weary. And though I knew she loved us – in her way – we were only a way-station; an old couple, sharing one of her endless sequence of lives, caring for her and feeding our own loneliness with hers.
She did love us, I’m sure. But you have to understand that it was a reserved kind of love. How could she give herself totally when she knew that one day, any day, it might be over. This life. This brief span of five or six years. That she might have to start again, to give herself again. And each time, hoping that maybe this time would be the last, that she might emerge from the Shadow and find herself home. Truly home …
Home … The thought drifts through her. Not through her mind, but through her. For within the Shadow there is no difference. Herself, her mind. There is nothing else. Absolutely nothing …
A moment, an eternity. In the Black, the thoughts come and then they are gone.
So many thoughts, so many memories. So many lives. But always, through it all, she dreams of home, and prays into the silence, into the emptiness of the Shadow, that this time, when the transition is complete, it will finally be over.
She prays. And she believes. Even after all the disappointments; the endless, empty string of lives lived waiting for the blinding light to come again and claim her, for the Shadow to take her. Off again, in Time.
One time, one day, it must return her home.
So every leaving is a hope, and each transition is a prayer. And every prayer an act of desperate faith.
In the distance the light appears, a pinpoint of intense white, swelling against the fabric of the Black. And she senses it. The current in the darkness that carries her towards the Light …
She holds a breath she cannot feel, and tries to close her eyes against the growing brilliance. She never can, but every time she tries. The moment, the eternity has past and it is time again.
Silently, she prays. Perhaps this time.
Iris misses her terribly. In the week since Ellie … disappeared, she’s hardly said a word. We both knew it had to happen, but it doesn’t make it any easier. I only hope that this time the poor kid gets her wish.
I always thought that it would be great to be young again, to throw off the years and be a kid knowing what I know now. But not any more.
She was only ten years old when it started. Exactly the age she was when she ‘adopted’ us. Ten years old. Just a kid. But she was born into a very different world. And she’d been through so much.
Do you have any idea what it will be like three hundred years from now? I do. Ellie told me. But I won’t tell you. I promised I wouldn’t, and besides, I don’t think you’d really want to know.
So, she wasn’t a kid the way we think of kids. I mean, I have grandkids around ten years of age and the
y are real kids – TV, X-Boxes, football, dolls, radio-controlled everything, and the occasional bit of schoolwork when it can’t be avoided.
But not Ellie. Controlled, she was. Never a thoughtless action, always serious yet caring. But never emotional. In all the time she was with us, I never once saw her cry. Even when Sandy died – Sandy was our dog, and Ellie loved that animal – she never shed a tear. Never even mentioned him again. At first I thought she was hard, but Iris, as usual, knew better.
‘How else can she hope to survive?’ she said. ‘How much has she lost already? How much more will she lose before it ends? She can’t afford to become attached.’
But I think she was wrong there. Ellie controlled her emotions ruthlessly, but she cared. Through all those hundreds of lives in all those times and places, caring was what kept her going. And the dream that one day it would be over.
Until then, she was trapped in an endless cycle.
We talked about it often. I remember I asked once how it had all started. She stared for a moment at the fire, then began speaking in a whisper.
‘The Light,’ she said. ‘It began with the Light. I was on my way home, after school it was, when it appeared right there in front of me, hanging in the air, like a … doorway, I guess. And I just walked into it and into the Shadow behind it. I had no choice. I just couldn’t resist …’
And so it began. Shuttled around from century to century, continent to continent, life to life, for no purpose that she has any chance of discovering. Forever young, yet old beyond her years. Each life a life that starts at ten and ends before her sixteenth birthday.
‘I have tasted immortality,’ she said once, ‘and it is bitter …
But she never ceased to hope. Or care.
Yes, I miss her. And I wish she could have stayed. But mostly I just hope that she remembers us.
Something is wrong. She is trapped inside the Light instead of passing through, and it is tearing at her soul. It holds her fast and sears her mind. Blinding, painful, but she cannot close her eyes.
As every memory, every moment of every short lifetime is torn like living flesh from the core of her mind…
She screams but no sound comes. She bites her lip but feels no pain. Only the pain of remembering. A hundred lifetimes in an instant, the love, the pain, the empty longing. The whole history of humankind, lived one bite at a time, remembered in a moment, then drawn, somehow, into the Light and gone.
She screams again and falls into the darkness.
Of escape.
Of peace.
Of …
… home.
Slowly she opens her eyes. Above her, her father’s face is worried.
‘Ellie? Are you all right? You blacked out on the way home from school and they brought you here, but the scanner could find nothing wrong with you. Your mother and I have been frantic. What happened?’
She looks at him but no words come. Her mind is numb. Sitting up, she looks around.
Home …
Her hair is in her eyes and she raises her hand to brush it away, but freezes as she catches sight of the unfamiliar ring on her little finger.
Then she remembers. An old woman holding out the tiny box, carefully wrapped in pink paper and ribbons. An old man, smiling.
A birthday present.
She remembers …
Vaguely she can hear her father’s voice, still worried. ‘Ellie, are you crying?’
She can taste the tears.
She is.
CASSANDRA’S SECRET
One’s friends are that part of the human race
with which one can be human.
George Saruayana
Cassie’s story
The problem with being an alien is … well, everyone treats you like an alien.
At least they do if they know you are one.
Which is why the Grand Council spends so much time training us before it sends us to primitive planets to ‘check them out’.
I mean, it’s not so bad on some planets. They’re so excited to meet someone from another world that they treat you like a hero. The worst thing about those places is that you don’t get any privacy and everyone wants you to show them stuff.
But then you get the places where they’re just as likely to shoot first and ask questions when they’re in the lab dissecting your body. Because they’ve always been told that you just can’t trust anyone who’s different.
On planets like that, you don’t go up to someone and say, ‘Hi, I’m from the planet Yyedda in the Galactic Federation. Could you please take me to your leader?’
So when I found out we were going to Earth, I was a bit nervous.
Earth doesn’t have a very good reputation. I guess it comes from the fact that Earthlings can’t even get on with each other.
I mean, there are only four planets in the whole Galactic Federation which even have a word for war, and three of those haven’t had a war in the last forty thousand years.
Of course, there are a number of primitive non-Federation planets scattered through the universe where the natives still kill each other as part of their way of life. But that’s what makes Earth so dangerous.
Earth isn’t all that primitive.
On Earth they have computers and TV and cars and space-shuttles, and they’ve even landed humans on their moon. They should have already been invited to join the Federation. Except that at last count they have, world-wide, fourteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one different words for war, murder and other forms of violent killing.
Of course, they do have a lot of different languages on the planet, but still, all those different words. It’s a scary thought.
Jamie’s story
No one saw them move in. Not even Mrs Preston, who spends just about her whole life sitting at the window of her front room watching the street. When she isn’t out walking her psychotic poodle, that is.
Of course later, when everything that happened had happened, Mrs P was the first to say that it was suspicious that no one actually saw them move in. But she’s really good at saying ‘I-told-you-so’ when she never actually did.
Me, I didn’t think it was particularly suspicious at all. I was just interested to find that there was finally someone in my street who was the same age as me. Especially a girl.
Of course, she did have these strange violet-coloured eyes, which was another thing that made Mrs P suspicious – afterwards.
Spencer Street is a funny place. It’s a very long street, full of old people and families with grown-up kids or tiny babies. I was fifteen years old and I was at least eight years younger or older than anyone else in the street. This meant I was lonely a lot of the time.
So when Cassie moved in two doors down, I was interested.
Interested?
I was excited.
I even got my mum to bake scones and let me take them over, as a welcome-to-the-street present. It was the day after they’d arrived, and Mum said they probably wanted to be left alone to unpack, but I went anyway.
As I stood there at the door, I could feel Mrs Preston’s eyes boring holes in the back of my head from the other side of the street.
Cassie’s story
I answered the door and he was standing there with a plate in his hands and a nervous smile on his face.
‘I … that is, my mum …’ he began nervously. ‘We thought you might like these. I’m Jamie.’
The plate was covered with a cloth. I lifted it up and saw the scones, but of course I didn’t have a clue what they were. It doesn’t matter how well they train you, they can’t teach you everything. Being an Observer Family Class One, which is what we were, means that you learn to think on your feet.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m Cassie. Cassandra. Would you like a cup of tea?’
This is a custom on Earth – or so I’d been taught. If someone visits you, you offer them a cup of tea, then you talk to them about the weather. They can’t control it (the weather, I mean) and they never kn
ow what it will be like the next day, so they like to talk about it.
That’s what Elidor my trainer had told me. Elidor has spent fifty years studying the Earthlings.
Of course, Elidor didn’t know everything.
‘I don’t drink tea,’ Jamie replied. ‘But if you have some orange juice …’
Orange juice?
I didn’t have a clue what orange juice was. I guessed it must have been a drink when he said, ‘Or anything cold. I’m dying of thirst. Hottest February in forty years they reckon.’
Talk to them about the weather …
‘I believe it is a result of a temporary climatic disturbance resulting from the combination of global warming, the El Niño effect and increased sunspot activity on the solar surface,’ I began, before I remembered that on this planet boys of my age don’t understand anything about weather patterns.
‘Would you like to come in?’ I asked.
He would.
He did.
Jamie’s story
Cassie was fifteen going on forty-five. At least that’s what my dad reckoned. He met her a couple of days after my visit with the scones.
By that time we were already friends.
I was teaching her how to play basketball, and she was teaching me the quickest way to do my maths, which is why she was over at our house when Dad came home from work.
‘She’s just very clever,’ I replied. She was my friend. I had to defend her, even if Dad wasn’t really serious.
Still, there was something weird about Cassie. And her whole family.
Like that first day when I’d visited. They’d only been in the house a day but there were no boxes in the lounge or any other room. In fact, there was no mess anywhere.
They looked like they’d lived in the house forever.
And Cassie knew more two-dollar words than Miss Duncan, my English teacher, and she was a whiz at maths and science, although she hadn’t seemed to have a clue what orange juice was.
And even when she had managed to find me a can of lemonade, she didn’t know how to open the ring-pull.
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