The stranger looked at me desperately. I tried to mouth the word ‘plague’.
“It’s an… illness,” he said.
“Yes,” said Harry grimly, “an illness. So now tell us what it does to a man.”
“It’s… like flu to start with and then…”
“It makes your balls go purple and swell up like footballs,” snapped Rod Stone from behind the bar, “and then they burst and you die.”
“Everyone knows that, my friend,” said Harry reprovingly, “everyone knows that.”
There was a moment of silence.
*
“You know what he is, don’t you?” said Rod. “He’s one of those shifters you hear about. He doesn’t belong here. He’s slipped in from another world.”
Harry whistled softly.
The stranger stood there like a prisoner in the dock.
Harry spoke very quietly “So you come from a place where TTX never happened, do you? The women never took over?”
“Maybe he’s got some of that stuff on him,” Rod said. “You know, that shifter drug they use, maybe he’s got some.”
“Well let’s see if he has,” said Peter Hemlock.
“You know what they say, don’t you?” said Lily. “If a shifter’s swallowed all his stuff, you can still get it out of him by drinking his blood!”
Her painted lips parted, revealing yellow fangs. The stranger gave a sort of low groan and started to back away.
“Not so fast,” Harry said, “we haven’t finished with you.”
He and Peter took hold of the stranger’s arms.
“Hey!” I yelled. “He hasn’t done you any harm. Leave him alone!”
“Or you’ll tell your mummy, eh?” snarled Peter.
But they loosed their grip all the same, for my mother had power. The stranger broke free and ran, out of the door at the back, off in the direction of the wood.
Harry and Peter settled back onto their bar-stools, both a little flushed and breathless. Lily gave a cold snort of contempt. None of them looked at me.
“Do you think he was really a shifter, or was he just off his head?” asked Rod, after a moment.
“Just some nutter more likely,” said Harry with a shrug. “I mean I’ve heard these rumours about shifters the same as you have, but I’ve never been able to see how a drug could make people cross to another world. Even if there squat about are such things. I mean I know the slits have abolished science and we don’t know anything anymore, but it just doesn’t sound plausible does it?”
“I suppose not,” said Peter, “but I wish we’d searched him all the same.”
“I wished we’d sucked him dry,” hissed Lily.
She glanced venomously in my direction. So did Peter.
“Pussy-licker!” he whispered.
I picked up my stick and hobbled away from them with as much dignity as I could manage, through the back door, following after the stranger.
*
There was no pool in the wood. He was standing by a small concrete reservoir with a locked metal lid. He jerked round in alarm as he heard me coming, preparing to run again.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not about to drink your blood.”
He nodded and turned away from me. “This is the place. The pool was here. Jazamine was here. But it was another world I suppose.”
Tears came to his eyes but I laughed harshly.
“Well, even if you could find her, so what? You don’t believe men and women can really get on together do you? You don’t really believe that? Harry and his crew – okay I don’t like them and they don’t like me – but they’re right really. So are the RadFems. We’re rivals. It all boils down to one thing: them or us.”
I lashed out at a nettle with my stick.
“The fools are the ones like my dad, the good men, the gentle men, the ones who try to smooth things over by denying their own nature…”
I grinned at him.
“What…” he began. “What are you…”
He voice tailed off. He stared at me with those dazed eyes of his and I felt ashamed of what I was doing but carried on anyway, determined to crush his dream, and even more determined to stamp out in myself the cruel impossible hope that opposites could be reconciled.
“Oh I know, I know. You and that girlfriend of yours made sweet music together. It happens even here sometimes. But all that’s based on a delusion, isn’t it? What you wanted and what she wanted weren’t really the same thing. Just for a moment they seemed to coincide, that’s all.”
Still he stared, wide-eyed. He was confused, a little frightened, but even more than that (I now realise in shame) he was just plain puzzled by my hostility.
Well, I was puzzled by it too, but my bile boiled up inside me anyway. I grinned mirthlessly in his face, I waved my stick at him. There in that little scrap of a wood with evening falling, I – who knew better than most what it was to be alone and to be picked on – ruthlessly attacked a young man who was completely alone in the world, and had done nothing to harm me at all:
“We think that if we long for something there must be a someone out there in the world that’s there to quench our longing. But why should that be?”
I laughed. “Do you know what a lamprey is? Do you know what it longs to do? A lamprey longs to fasten itself onto the skin of a fish and suck out its insides. That’s its heart’s desire! But do you think that the fishes it preys on are longing to be eaten alive? No, of course not. If the fishes had their way, the lamprey would go hungry. He could pine himself away with longing, for all they care. He could fucking starve.”
I gave a bark of loud triumphant laughter. The stranger shivered. It was getting cold and he had only his jeans and his torn shirt, while I had my jumper and my sensible green anorak. I suppose my thought was that when I’d finished tearing his dreams to shreds, I would offer him a bed for the night.
“That’s biology for you, mate.” I chuckled grimly. “That’s life. Not harmony and resolution, not peace – just conflict and desperation and struggle …”
Suddenly he winced. Ah good, I thought, I’ve made him cry.
But no, that wasn’t it. It was nothing to do with me. He winced again, gave a groan – then grabbed out wildly at the air.
Slow-witted as I am, it was only at that moment that I realised what was happening.
“No!” I found myself crying out. “Don’t leave me! Please! I didn’t mean…”
But it was too late. He was gone. There was a popping sound as the air rushed into the empty space. And then: nothing, no trace of him, only a faint electric smell.
*
I was alone. It was growing dark. A cold wind had begun to blow through the branches above my head.
“Come back!” I cried into the empty little wood.
It was pointless of course. He was somewhere else entirely.
He was searching for Jazamine in the green wood.
He was falling. He was falling through the worlds.
Dark Eden
Tommy:
Space is a very dangerous place but for me personally it always felt like a safe haven. And especially this time. In the final days before our mission, it seemed to me, just about every newspaper and TV station on the planet had been carrying revelations from Yvette. I couldn’t pull back a curtain without a storm of flashbulbs and a chorus of voices. I couldn’t pass a newsstand without seeing my own name:
Tommy Schneider’s Ex Tells All
Sex-Mad Schneider Broke my Heart
The void between the stars, sub-Euclidean nothingness, life in a metal box with nothing but vacuum beyond its thin skin – all that was fine with me. It always had been fine. Living in space was simple and straightforward compared to trying to live on earth. But now it was beginning to look as if this sanctuary of mine would soon be closed off.
“I think this could be one of the last trips before they shut down the program, yes?” said my crewmate Mehmet Haribey on the shuttle out.
; He was a Turkish Air Force officer. We usually had one non-American seeing as the program was nominally international. I’d worked with Mehmet several times before and liked him. He was an open sort of guy, and he had warmth.
“I guess, but I so hope not,” I said. “Who in God’s name would I be if I had to spend my life on Earth?
Mehmet grunted sympathetically.
“Or it would be one of the last trips,” said our captain, Dixon Thorley, “if it wasn’t for the fact that this time we are going to find life.”
Mehmet and I exchanged glances. Dixon Thorley was okay when he was just being himself, but he found it very hard to forget that God Almighty had called him personally to carry the good news of Jesus Christ to alien civilizations. It was a tale he had told to many a rapt congregation and many a respectful interviewer on the religious networks: God had put him on Earth to perform this one task. And for him it was just inconceivable that the program could end without contact with any other life form.
Poor guy, I suddenly thought. He’s in for quite a fall.
The fact was that over two hundred fantastically expensive missions had traversed the galaxy and found no trace of any living thing. Human beings had trodden lifeless planets right across the Milky Way and now it looked as if their footprints would just fill up with stardust again. Silence would return like nightfall to all those empty solar systems whose planets held nothing but rock and gas and ice and sterile water.
I say ‘like nightfall’, but really it’s not the right word to use because of course in any solar system it’s really always daytime, always sunny everywhere, except in the tiny slivers of space that lie on the lee side of planets, and in the even more miniscule areas on planetary surfaces that are cut off from the light by clouds. As we approached it in the shuttle, the galactic ship Defiant basked ahead of us in a perpetual noontime, an enormous cylinder half a kilometre long, covered in gigantic pylons that made it look like some kind of weird spiny sea-slug. It was huge, but 99% of it was engine. The habitable portion was a cramped little cabin in the middle. We crawled through into it from the shuttle, closed the airlock doors behind us, and gratefully breathed in the familiar space smell of dirty socks, stale urine and potato mash. How I loved that smell! It was the smell of freedom. It was like coming home.
“God I’ll miss this,” I said as I began switching on monitors.
(I’ve been thinking about this recently – I’ve had a lot of time to think – and what I’ve come to realize is that I have always been most at home in transient, and dangerous places. Even when I was a kid, danger was always somehow reassuring to me. Safety and security always made me feel uneasy and afraid.)
Dixon flicked the radio on to a county music station and we settled into our positions and started running through the pre-activation procedures. Soon we’d start the ship’s gravitonic engine and then we’d head out into deeper space while the engine built up power for the leap. Finally – blam! – we’d let it loose. In a single gigantic surge of energy it would drive us out in a direction that was perpendicular to all three dimensions of Euclidian space. A few seconds later, we’d bob up again like a cork. We’d be back in Euclidean space but we’d be a thousand light-years away from home.
“The spaceman who wrecked my life,” said the radio, “New revelations from Yvette Schneider! Exclusively in tomorrow’s Daily Lance.”
“Poor Tommy,” Mehmet said. “You can’t get away from it, can you?”
Dixon gave a snort, but refrained from saying anything. He’d already told me that as far as he was concerned I’d only got what I deserved. And of course he was right. I didn’t expect sympathy. But I couldn’t help responding to the self-righteous baying of the radio ad.
“There’s always another side to the story,” I muttered. “I behaved badly, yes. But there were things she did too.”
This was too much for Dixon.
“Tommy, you just can’t…”
But he was interrupted by a voice from Mission Control.
“Tommy, Dixon, Mehmet, this is going to come as a shock…”
It was Kate Grantham, the director of the Galaxy Project, in person.
“The mission is cancelled boys. The whole project has been terminated. Sorry, but the President has decided to pull the plug, and as the US funds 95% of the project, that means the end of the project itself. We all knew this was likely to happen soon but I’m afraid it’s happening now. The shuttle is coming back for you. Please shut all systems down again with immediate effect. The Defiant will be mothballed pending further decisions.”
“But excuse me the project has barely started!” Mehmet protested. “Of course we haven’t found life yet. Doesn’t the President know how big space is? The galaxy would have to have been bursting at the seams with life for us to have found it already.”
“The President has been thoroughly briefed,” the director said shortly. “He has a number of competing priorities to consider.” And she couldn’t help adding: “The bad publicity around Tommy hasn’t helped.”
“Oh that is logical!” I burst out. “One of the explorers gets caught cheating on his wife, so cancel the exploration of the entire galaxy.”
Dixon switched off the radio.
“I must say,” he said, “I’ve never been able to understand how people can do things they know are wrong and then still get indignant when it causes problems for them and other people. But that’s for another time. Right now, crewmates, I’ve got a simple proposition to make. We have power and provisions enough for one trip. Why not do it anyway?”
“Dixon!” Mehmet gave an incredulous laugh. “This isn’t like you!”
“I’m quite serious,” he said. “How can they stop us?”
“How about by sending an interceptor after us?” I said.
There were interceptors in Earth orbit, a dozen of them at least at any one time, looking out for illegally launched communications satellites and for the killer satellites which big business and organized crime sent up to disrupt the communications of rivals.
“It’ll take them an hour to figure out what we’re doing,” said Dixon, “and an hour after that to decide what to do about it. By then we’ll only be about six hours from the leap point. And it could take six hours at least for one of them to catch up with us. It’s not as if they are going to try and laser us.”
“Yes but…” Mehmet stopped himself and laughed. “Well, okay. This is a very stupid idea. But, yes, I’m up for it if Tommy is.”
I thought about the alternative. Going back to live among daily revelations of my own duplicity. Walking down a street in which every passerby knew what, precisely, I liked to do in bed. And maybe never again coming up to this place – or maybe non-place would be a better word – which was where, more than anywhere else, I actually felt at home.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in. Even though it’ll mean a court martial when we get back. Who cares?”
“Oh we’ll be okay,” Mehmet said. “The public will love us won’t they? The public will think we’re heroes.”
“It’s the goddam taxpaying public who’ve pulled the plug on us,” I pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” said Mehmet. “But that makes no difference. When they see us defying the bureaucrats they’ll yell at the bureaucrats to leave us alone and get off our backs. They won’t remember that the bureaucrats were acting at their own request. They never do!”
So we were agreed. Contrary to our orders we started charging up the engine.
Angela:
People laughed at me when I put myself forward for secondment to the UN’s ‘space-cop’ service. The British police forces had only been given a quota of four secondees altogether and I was only twenty-five, black and a woman. Plus I was only an ordinary uniformed cop and had no training as a pilot beyond what I’d done with the air cadets at school. But then my mum and dad had always taught me to believe in myself.
Yeah and look at me now, I thought, as our hundred million dollar interceptor pass
ed five thousand miles above India. Who says a black girl from Peckham can’t get on in the world?
This was my third patrol. My captain Mike Tennison and I were looking for Mafia satellites, which we would either tow to destruction points or, if they were very small, simply nudge down into the atmosphere to burn up like meteorites.
Mike was an air force secondee, a former RAF fighter pilot. He was decent, sporty, stiff upper lipped. He was a brave man too. He’d served and won medals in several recent wars. But something was happening to him that neither he nor anyone else could have predicted. He was becoming a cosmophobe. Space was starting to scare him.
“It’s a silly thing,” he’d confided on our previous mission, “I’ve flown in all kinds of dangerous situations and never thought twice about it. I didn’t think twice about this at first either. But now I can’t seem to forget that out here I’m not really flying at all, I’m just constantly falling. Please don’t tell anyone, Angela. I’ll get over it I’m sure.”
But it was getting pretty obvious to me that he wasn’t going to get over it. His face streamed with sweat. He kept wiping his hands so as to be able to grip properly on the controls. And his eyes, his weary frightened eyes, were just unbearable to look at. I was going to have to confront him about it at the end of this mission, I knew. I couldn’t sweep this under the carpet any more. He was putting us both in danger.
But that was for later. Right now we were heading towards a rogue satellite which had been launched a few days ago from Kazakhstan. We were just about to get close enough to actually see the thing when we received an unexpected order from ground base. The intergalactic ship Defiant had been hi-jacked by its own crew and they were taking it out of orbit. We were the nearest interceptor and we were to go after it, grapple it if necessary and prevent it from making a leap.
“Jesus!” I breathed.
Mike gave a kind of groan. I realized that up to that point he’d coping by counting off the minutes until we could drop out of orbit and return to base.
But he was a professional. He put his fear to one side, located the Defiant and calculated a trajectory which would intercept theirs in about three and a half hours. Then off we went, me leaning out of the window to stick a flashing blue light on the roof.
The Turing Test Page 17