The Recollection

by Gareth L. Powell

  Kat looked over at Victor. His brows were drawn together and his mouth set in a hard line. He was leaning forward against his safety straps, as if willing the ship to move faster. His hands and face were still grimed with dirt and sweat, which made the wrinkles on his forehead much more obvious. His chin was unshaven, the bristles patched with clumps of white hairs. She could smell the staleness of his clothes, and see that his eyes were sunken and bruised-looking after three sleepless nights running with the survivors on the surface of Djatt.

  “You should rest,” she told him.

  He glared at her.

  “There’s no time.”

  “We’ve got the best part of an hour.”

  She unbuckled her own straps and climbed to her feet, ducking her head to avoid the overhead screens.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s at least get you cleaned up.”

  She led him down the ladder to the passenger lounge, and into her cabin, where she switched on the shower.

  “Get in there,” she said. “I’ll find you some clothes.”

  Ten minutes later, they sat facing each other on her bunk. Victor’s cheeks were pink and scrubbed-looking, his chin smooth. She’d found him some spare overalls and fleece-lined socks with rubber grips on the soles. She’d even rustled up some food, in the form of emergency glucose tablets. Since his outburst on the bridge, neither of them had mentioned the baby.

  “Here you are.” She handed him the tablets to chew on.

  “Thanks.” His eyes were still tired and bagged, bloodshot at the edges.

  “How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

  Victor unwrapped one of the glucose tablets and popped it hungrily into his mouth.

  “You’ve never asked me that before,” he said.

  “Well, I’m asking now.”

  He crunched the tablet between his teeth and swallowed, then started to unwrap another.

  “Do you mean my physical age or my chronological age?”

  Kat shrugged. “Either. Both.”

  Victor chewed and swallowed the second tablet. He scratched the bridge of his nose with the index finger of his right hand, as if pushing goggles into place.

  “As far as I’m concerned, I’m in my early sixties,” he said. “Sixty-five or sixty-six, somewhere around there. It’s hard to keep track with all this travelling. But if you want my real, historical age, I was born on Earth in 1985, which I guess makes me around four hundred and fifty years old.”

  Kat sat back.

  “1985?” It sounded like a date from ancient history, almost mythical.

  Victor smiled with one side of his mouth.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Kat looked him up and down. This man she’d loved and hated, this man she’d thought she knew; she realised now that he was a stranger to her. There was so much about him that she didn’t know.

  “So,” she said. “What happened? You must have come through the arch network?”

  Victor nodded.

  “I was one of the first. I used to be a journalist. I was on my way to cover a story. One minute I was on an escalator in the Tube station, heading down to the platform, and the next—blam!—I was lying in a desert, with bits of broken stairs crashing down around me.” He rubbed his nose again. “I didn’t know where I was, or what had happened to me.”

  Kat leaned forward and put a hand on his arm. She could feel the vibration of the engines through the mattress. “It must’ve been a terrible shock,” she said.

  Victor put his hand over hers. “There were a few of us there. Most went back through the arch, but three of us decided to go on, to see where the other arches led.”

  “Why didn’t you turn back?”

  Victor raked his fingers back through his thinning hair. “I was angry and jealous,” he said. “I’d had a fight with my brother. My wife was leaving me. I didn’t think I had anything to go back for.” He paused, sucking his lower lip. His eyes shone in the overhead light. “I guess they’re both dead now.”

  Kat watched him stand and walk to the mirror. He said, “Later, I found my way to Strauli. I was half-dead of hunger by then, but I managed to talk my way onto a spaceship crew. I did a handful of trips, and then I met you.” He broke a third glucose tablet in two and popped one of the halves into his mouth. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Kat climbed off the bed. She wanted to put her arms around him.

  “Oh, Victor,” she said.

  His reflection met her eyes in the mirror: a tired old man, far from home.

  “And there’s one more thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My name’s not Victor, its Verne. Short for Vernon. Vernon Rico. I changed it when I realised I couldn’t go back.” He shrugged. “I just signed the ship’s papers as Victor Luciano. No-one cared. I needed to make a clean break from the past, to put it all behind me.”

  He dropped his chin to his chest. Watching him, Kat couldn’t think of anything to say. He’d always been reticent about his past, but she’d never anticipated anything like this. All interstellar traders were running from something. Why else would they subject themselves to the temporal and physical isolation of space travel? Running was part of the job. But it was usually from something understandable. Maybe they had gambling debts. Maybe they’d embezzled the company pension fund, or killed a man in a bar brawl. Or maybe they were simply bored and restless. Sometimes it was easier to sign on as a member of a starship crew than to stay and face whatever had gone wrong in your life. But whatever the reasons that drove those men and women to life aboard a trading ship, Kat doubted many carried secrets even half as big as Victor’s.

  Not Victor, she corrected herself. Verne.

  She scratched her head. She didn’t know whether to feel anger or pity. She looked around her cabin, seeing it through the eyes of a stranger: the discarded underwear half-kicked under the bunk; the photos of Strauli beaches taped to the bulkhead, ripped from travel magazines; and the knick-knacks and curios bought from street traders, flea markets and antique dealers on a dozen different worlds. She reached out and picked up a cheap metal statue of the Eiffel Tower. It was only a few centimeters tall and sharp at the tip. It felt like a dart in her hand, with four splayed, sweeping legs like the fins of an antiquated rocket.

  A few clothes and some tat. It wasn’t much to show for four years of pain and loneliness.

  “Now, I’ve got to ask you something,” Victor said.

  Kat put the statue back on the shelf.

  “Is it about the baby?”

  He turned to face her. Despite the glucose tablets, he looked ready to drop.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Is it mine?”

  Kat blinked. She felt her face flush. “Of course it’s yours, Victor. Of course it is. Who the fucking hell else’s would it be?”

  Victor held his palms up in a placatory gesture. “I’m sorry. I had to ask.”

  Kat looked away, jaw clenched.

  “Only, you know, I always wanted kids,” Victor said. “I always did.” He sounded regretful. “I even asked my wife about it once, but she was seeing someone else and then I fell into that arch...”

  Kat closed her eyes.

  “Then why’d you walk out on me?”

  She heard him shuffle uncomfortably. The rubber grips on the soles of his socks squeaked on the metal deck.

  “Honestly?”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Yes.”

  Victor cleared his throat. “I guess I was angry,” he said. “After what happened with Alice, I didn’t want to trust anyone in that way again. And then I met you, and I thought you were different. But then you got rid of our baby without even telling me you were going to do it.”

  He lowered himself shakily to sit on the edge of the bunk.

  “I’d wanted kids so long,” he said. “I felt betrayed. I couldn’t take it.” Tears were rolli
ng freely down his face. Kat felt a lump in her own throat.

  “Oh shit, Vic,” she said, voice hoarse. “We really fucked up good, didn’t we?”

  He laughed in spite of himself.

  “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

  Their eyes met. Neither wanted to be the first to look away.

  Then the ship interrupted, its voice cutting through the silence between them.

  > We’re in the DZ. If we’re going to jump, we should do it now.

  Kat stiffened. She knew that what she was about to say amounted to a death sentence for the millions of people living on Inakpa, unaware of the contagion racing toward them; but what choice did she have? She couldn’t abandon her home, her family, her unborn child. And if she didn’t stop The Recollection at Strauli Quay, who knew how many more millions would die?

  They had to jump, and it had to be now. Without taking her eyes from Victor, she said: “Do it.”

  And in an actinic flash of light, they did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  DOWNPORT HUSTLE

  The city turned out to be every bit as hospitable as Ed had hoped when seeing it for the first time, through the canvas flap of the military half-track that had brought him and Alice to the hostel. The city’s name was Bekleme, and although it wasn’t the largest city on the planet Strauli, it was still an important hub for the transport of freight and personnel to and from the orbital docks. The Downport, which was what the Bekleme locals called the tangle of runways at the edge of town, spread out over a large swathe of land to the south of the city. Shuttles came and went at every hour of the day and night. Trucks hissed their hydraulic brakes. Arc lamps kept the loading areas bright. And all around the perimeter of the port, hotels and bars had sprung up, providing ample opportunity for both cheap accommodation and gainful employment.

  After asking around for a few evenings, Ed got a job tending bar in a budget-price chain hotel overlooking the main runway. He’d spent enough time in pubs to be able to find his way around a bar. He could pour a beer and mix a gin and tonic. Being so close to the runway, the optics on the wall clinked and shook when the big cargo shuttles launched. The rooms upstairs were clean and basic, and all exactly alike. There was just space to undress and climb into bed, which was all that the customers needed. The clientele were strictly transitory, few ever staying more than one night. They were all on their way somewhere else. Half were waiting for a flight up to the Quay, the others had just come down.

  Ed worked a twelve hour shift behind the bar, and there were customers at all hours. They all came from different time zones, and their body clocks had yet to adjust. They sat there blinking at him in the bar’s moody half-light, often with their luggage at their feet, listening to the generic piano music tinkling away on the sound system.

  He sketched their faces on the backs of menus and napkins. He took messages for people, and sold amphetamines under the counter to the port workers on the all-night shift. He learned to do the Downport hustle. He played pool for pin money. Sometimes he ran card games in the storeroom out back, with players who were usually too spaced with jetlag to concentrate properly. He was tending a bar instead of driving a cab, but otherwise his life here wasn’t all that different from his life in London. He did his drawings when he could and thought about getting some paints. Most nights, Alice came into the bar. He was renting a small room with her in a block up the street. He’d sold his old mobile phone and penknife to a collector in order to raise the first week’s rent money. The room was okay, but Alice didn’t like being there alone at night, so she came and perched on a stool at the end of the counter. When it was quiet, he talked to her as he wiped the tables and cleared the empty glasses. They talked of her photography. She wanted to start taking pictures again, and bitterly lamented the loss of her camera in the Land Rover crash.

  “There’s so much here to see,” she kept saying.

  They never mentioned the arches, or Kristin, and they never talked about Ed’s art, although it burned inside him like a secret fire. It was something he wanted to keep to himself.

  When the bar was too busy for him to talk, Alice watched him work. They were trying to save up enough money for shuttle tickets to the Quay; they wanted to be up there when Verne’s ship returned. Walking home before dawn, their breath steaming, they’d look up at the Quay’s vast revolving wheels, already lit like copper by the unrisen sun, and it would remind them of Canary Wharf. In the morning light, the Quay had the same otherworldly aura as Canary Wharf seen at sunrise. It was breathtaking and commonplace and untouchable, all at the same time.

  “Look at that,” they’d say, squeezing each other’s hands, both wishing they had a way to capture the image. Then they’d go home and have breakfast and sleep until mid-afternoon, when they’d get up and do it all over again.

  On the way to work, Ed enjoyed the way the morning light shone on the silver and glass office towers of downtown Bekleme, parts of which weren’t nearly as futuristic as he would’ve expected. Even though he was now four hundred years into his own personal future, he wasn’t the only one to have found his way here through the arch network. At the hostel, he’d learned that people had been showing up on Strauli since almost immediately after the network first established itself. There were people in this city from every century from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth. There were even a few rare ones, like him, who’d been born in the latter years of the twentieth, and they’d brought their own styles and customs with them.

  Walk down any city sidewalk and you’d experience a mash-up of clothing and street slang drawn from almost fifty decades and a dozen different worlds. Sometimes you even saw recognizably twenty-first century vehicles on the streets: Hondas, Fords, Volvos... all retrofitted with new, clean-burning hydrogen engines. The buildings also reflected this temporal diversity. Wedged into gaps between the futuristic spires with their roof gardens and wind turbines, you found improvised anachronistic shacks, housing dry cleaners, takeaways, key-cutters, shoe repairs, bookies, greasy spoons, and old-style newsagents. Alleyways housed makeshift favelas. Old warehouses had been repurposed as Japanese-style capsule hotels.

  Meanwhile, out at the landing field, arches had been collected from the deserts outside town and arranged in rows along the field’s edge. Some had been bricked up or broken. Others had an almost constant stream of trucks ferrying cargo containers back and forth through them, using only miniscule amounts of energy to transport their freight between worlds. Compared with the expense of carrying goods by starship, the trucks were virtually free and at first, Ed hadn’t understood why anyone used starships at all. Why venture into space when the arches took you directly from the surface of one world to the next?

  One night, he asked a pilot.

  “With ships, you choose where you want to go,” the man said. “With arches, it’s fixed routes only, and they aren’t always optimal. Take Djatt, for instance. It’s twenty-four light years from here. A lot of ships are there right now, for the Pep harvest. If they tried to make the journey through the arch network it would take them seven or eight jumps, because of the way the links pan out.” He broke off and took a sip of his drink. “The arches are okay for specific, well-established routes, but ships give you more flexibility.”

  Later that same night, a man came into the bar called Napoleon Jones. He wore a wide-brimmed Stetson and a long black lizard-skin coat, with matching boots. A pair of antique aviator goggles hung on a strap around his neck.

  “Beer,” he said, and waited as Ed selected a clean glass and began to fill it from the tap. His eyes kept flicking to the clock behind the bar.

  “Have you got a flight to catch?” Ed asked.

  Jones looked at him.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you, son?”

  Ed shook his head.

  “No, sorry.”

  “You ever hear of random jumping?”

  “Nope.”

  This seemed to amuse Jones. “Well then
, let’s just say I’m shipping out tomorrow, and I mayn’t be coming back. So, when you’ve finished filling that glass, why don’t you fill one for yourself.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  Ed topped off the two drinks and slid one across the counter. The hour was late and they were alone. There wasn’t even any music on the sound system. In between shuttle launches, the only noises were those of a hotel at night: steel trays rattling in the kitchen, the hum of the air conditioning, the whine of lift machinery.

  Jones took a sip of his beer. He pointed to a pack of playing cards and a case of betting chips that Ed had left on the counter.

  “Are those yours?”

  Ed smiled. He’d won some money earlier in the evening, from a couple of albino tourists en route to the beach resorts on the coast, and now he was feeling confident.

  “Would you like a game?”

  Jones looked around the empty bar. He took his hat off.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  They set up on a table by the window, where they could see the lights of the port and watch the departing passenger shuttles lifting up into the night sky.

  “So, where are you from?” Jones asked as Ed divided out the chips.

  “Earth.”

  “Ah, I know Earth. I’ve been there a few times. Which part?”

  Ed opened the pack and shuffled the cards, then started to deal the hand.

  “London.”

  “Yeah? Nice city. The bits of it that are still above water, anyway.” Jones picked up cards he’d been dealt. As he examined them, he scratched his chin thoughtfully, fingernails rasping on two day’s worth of stubble.

  “So, what’s your story, Ed? How’d you get from London to tending bar in this dump?”

  Ed shrugged. “Through the arch network.”

  “For real?”

  Ed put the deck aside and lifted his own cards from the table.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Rough, was it?”

  Ed glanced down at his right hand, the one which had dropped the rock that killed Otto Krous.

  “Something like that.”