Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1)

by Richard Fairbairn

  There was a loud thud, like someone had kicked the side of the car with a hard plasteeel soled shoe. The air alarm kept honking, but there was a new light on the dashboard. It was hiding in the space behind Silverman's hands that were gripped tight to the steering wheel.

  “What the fuck was that?” he laughed quietly, nervously.

  He thought of Matt, tucked up in bed. Matt, whose mother had died in childbirth. Matt whom he'd grounded for not cleaning his bedroom. Matt, who'd played with his earlobe when he was only an infant. Matt Silverman, who'd needed so much gripe water as he'd grown up.

  “You fucking fucking fucking... fucking idiot,” Richard Silverman grunted, adjusting the rear view mirror so he could see his own face, “You stupid stupid stupid...”

  He'd released his foot from the Honda's accelerator, but the car was still travelling at just over a quarter the speed of light. The honking alarm had stopped. He frowned, as he'd expected the second alarm to begin. This was his cue to end the fantasy and return to home.

  “Oh no,” he said.

  He saw the crack in the window out of the corner of his eye. He didn't turn his head toward it, just his eyes. They swivelled in their sockets. He was afraid to look. A cold, cold terror gripped him in a vice. He pushed the brake firmly, slowing the car as he started to turn the steering wheel.

  “Big blue ball, big blue ball..,” he mumbled, “Big blue ball, where are you?”

  Earth appeared in front of his windscreen. He did not realise how far he'd travelled. It was too far. He looked at the crack. A quick, frightened glimpse. It was the last thing he remembered.

  2186AD -Jann Linn Mountain, Relathon.

  The little creature had a name. Cass Linn did not know how to pronounce it. When she tried, strange sounds came from her mouth.

  The butterfly was sunning itself on a rock. Its rust coloured wings were spread out wide. The fake blue eyespots stared unblinking at Cass Linn. Cass stared back, utterly motionless in her fascination.

  There were tall, strongly scented flowers a few metres away. Multi coloured butterflies were settled on the clusters of long, tubular flowers. This was Cass Linn’s favourite place. It was only a short walk from the entrance to her father’s laboratory. Far enough that Jann Linn would not worry where she had gotten to. And she could get back to the retreat quickly if the bad men came.

  She did not want to think about the bad men.

  It was a beautiful day. The summer was almost ending and soon the rains would come. Sometimes the autumn rain would completely wipe away her little retreat. But the bush always grew back in the same place. But today was a fine and hot day. The rains would not come for another few weeks. Even then, Jann had assured her that her little haven would not necessarily be washed away. She trusted her father, but she did not remember the time before the last rains.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  He was behind her, suddenly. The butterflies on the stone ground flew off at this new intruder. Cass did not turn her head towards her father. She watched the butterflies disperse. After a few seconds they landed on the bush. Within moments their long tongues searched for the nectar that she knew they loved.

  “Are you… watching the butterflies?” he asked softly, tentatively.

  She turned her head towards him. He had grown frail. She remembered him younger than this. But perhaps it just seemed that way.

  “I like the colours,” She said softly, almost inaudibly, “Blue eyes.”

  He touched her shoulder. She did not feel his hand, but felt his presence. Her head tilted down to look at his fingers. She did not speak. She wanted to ask some things, but she could not make her thoughts into words. Then, when she was about to speak, it was too late.

  “The blue spots on the wings. They’re just markings. To frighten predators.”

  She stared at him without blinking. He took a seat next to her on the moss covered rock. There was barely enough room for both of them.

  “I know that,” She said, eventually, “I like the colour. It’s almost the same as the sky, but not quite.”

  He looked at her for what seemed like a very long time. She was thinking about the lines around his eyes. She could not look into his eyes. For a long time now, it had frightened her to do so. She knew that he understood this. He did not ask her to look him in the eye anymore.

  Twenty seconds passed. He touched her back and her neck. His fingers were old and frail. They trembled slightly and she sensed the vibration as if a butterfly had landed on her shoulder.

  “You can feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” She said quickly.

  “That’s good.”

  He stayed there for a long time, just looking at her with pride in his eyes. She kept her head where it was. She was able to see the butterflies out of the corner of her eye.

  “They’re very pretty.”

  “Yes,” She said, “They look so delicate, like thin paper. I find it… interesting. To see them move on the wind. Against the wind. Fluttering, tumbling in the sky.”

  He seemed interested with that answer. She was aware of him looking at her. His hands moved to her neck. She pulled away from him nervously.

  “I don’t want you to do that,” She said, “I don’t want you to touch me there.”

  He coughed. The autumn air was cold. His breath was a mist for a moment, then it was nothing.

  “Alright,” He said eventually, “I won’t do that again… for now.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t touch me - ever,” She said quickly.

  He was surprised to hear her say such a thing. He stood up, shakily. He reached out his hand to touch her, but didn’t.

  2186AD - Inverness, Scotland.

  The Triumph TR7 rattled. Whether the wheels were up or down. Driving along the road at one hundred miles per hour or hurtling through the sky at seven hundred miles per hour. Hurtling through space at eight tenths the speed of light. Somewhere behind the old glovebox, something was loose. It seemed to show itself when the car reached sixty miles per hour on the road, or passed Mach one when flying. There was no vibration or noise in space – besides the normal low hum of the engine.

  Surprisingly, a lot of the road to Inverness hadn’t changed very much in two hundred years. The mountains were the same, of course. Barren, snow topped and bitterly exposed in the cold October morning. The trees on Megyn’s right side were dark green and brown with the last autumn leaves clinging on in the wind. On the left lay the mountains, black dots visible like tiny flies in the sky beyond those. Cars flying along the new arterial skyway, but only barely visible in a deliberate effort to preserve the aesthetic.

  She knew that she had been here before, at least in a sense. In her diary, there were notes that she had made but forgotten about.

  The TR7 sped up as Megyn overtook a classic Ferrari People Carrier. It was a monstrous bulb of a machine, uglier in its old age than it had been when it had first trundled off the robotic production line in 2120. There were children waving from behind its massive glass dome, their faces smiling excitedly as they waved at Megyn. She pushed her foot to the floor and the TR7 shot by, touching eighty miles per hour. She smiled mildly for the children, raising an eyebrow. The scarlet bodied, half glass monster disappeared in the TR7’s rear view mirror. Megyn slowed down a little, only slightly breaking the speed limit. Ahead, the road was mostly clear. In an hour she’d reach Inverness.

  There was no hurry. She’d been driving for four hours and had ignored every skyway exit. There was something strangely comforting about the feel of the car’s old fashioned rubber tyres rushing along the hundred year old road surface. Somehow, it made Megyn Alexander feel happy. She didn’t really know why, but it appealed to some part of her old self that hadn’t been completely lost.

  There was a lot more sky traffic on the city outskirts. The arterial skyway ended here and vehicles of all shapes and sized descended from altitude to enter the city or travel beyond to the far north of Scotland. A much lesser num
ber of cars, skybuses and spacecraft made its way towards the southern skyway. Megyn barely registered the air traffic as she turned the car off the dual carriageway and down the slip road into the city.

  The hospital was located on the south side of the city, conveniently located a quarter mile from the slip road. There were a few more cars now. Not classic road cars like the TR7, but airborne cars forced to land by the city restrictions. They hovered, some precariously, a few inches above the surface of the road. Alexander’s antiquated sports coupe was the only wheeled vehicle in sight, but when she entered the busy car park there were a few older cars. None of them were as old as the Triumph, of course, and most of the wheeled vehicles were also capable of flight. There were many spaces free and Megyn parked the TR7 to the right of a silver Porsche.

  Her tall, elegant frame attracted some interested glances as she walked across the car park. Her hair, long and copper flecked, had a life of its own in the cold morning air. Her ankles were only just visible at the bottom of the rose coloured dress that clung to her physique teasingly. She walked with quick confidence, her antique brown leather handbag in her right hand, a one hundred and fifty year old Rolex Starfinder looking heavy on her elegant, slim wrist. The wedding ring on her other hand was cheap and old. It had belonged to someone else before she’d had it adjusted to fit her own hand. On her feet she wore brand new ultra-white Nike trance running shoes. They made no sound as she moved swiftly from the car to the hospital’s main entrance. A young doctor held the door for her, smiling shyly. She nodded only and breezed past him.

  Inverness Independence was a relatively small hospital with four wards and a small emergency and triage centre. According to Megyn’s diary, Richard Silverman would be in this hospital on this date. She wasn’t completely sure if this would be the case, as it seemed that sometimes she’d discovered that he was not there. As she walked towards ward two, she hoped that he would be there. The notes in the diary had been confusing, but they often were. But it was clear that she needed to come here, though it wasn’t clear why.

  There was a shiny new, rubber gripped black handgun in her handbag. It was a hybrid bullet gun with an encapsulated plasma energy blast mode. She’d carried it for fifty years in the same handbag. It was a weapon she had modified herself, long ago. Its new design was capable of stunning even the largest, most determined foe with a paralysing burst of energy. On its highest setting, Megyn Alexander’s weapon could have blasted a hole in the hospital wall large enough for her to walk through. She wondered if the gun would remain in her handbag today.

  She opened her handbag. The diary was there. In was a small, thick book with hundreds of scribbled entries from nineteen seventy six all the way to twenty two thirty eight. Two hundred and fifty years of cryptic, confused, overlapping notes. Predictions of the future, memories of the past. Events that might happen. Events that had and had not. It was a strange book, but it was the only thing she remembered of her previous life. Besides the dreams and ghostlike memories of his face, there wasn’t anything left of who she had once been. More important than that was the man who had loved her. The only person she had ever cared about.

  She reached the ward. Silverman was in there. Somehow, she knew that she’d find him. But the doors were closed, locked. She was early. Megyn reached out to touch the door but it opened outwards swishing sound that startled Megyn Alexander. A dark skinned, middle aged hospital orderly rushed through the door. She frowned with obvious irritation as she closed the ward door behind her.

  “You’re too early!” the woman snapped, “Visiting isn’t for another thirty minutes!”

  “I’m sorry,” Megyn called after her, “I’m looking for…”

  But she had gone. Once more, Megyn was alone in the corridor. She looked at the door to the ward. The lock did not look too substantial. She pressed her palm against it, feeling the cold metal of the door plate against the tips of her fingers and palm. It would yield, easily, but there would be noise. She decided to do it anyway and tensed her muscles. The strange, numb feeling on her fingertips stopped her. She withdrew her hand from the panel in surprise and examined her fingertips. The top layer of each finger was covered with a fine, white powder. She examined her thumbs carefully and realised that they were unaffected by the strange powder. Carefully, she touched each finger to her thumb.

  “Ow,” She whispered quietly, almost unconsciously, There was a stinging in the tips of her fingers, like the time she’d stroked a wasp’s back only to have it twist round and sting her.

  She rubbed her fingers against the soft fabric of her dress, but when she put her hand in front of her face two of the fingertips of her right hand were still white. The skin itself seemed to have changed colour. Now they were white and hard – like polished porcelain. One of them seemed almost glasslike, crystalline.

  “That’s not right,” She said to herself.

  She squeezed her hand tight, grimacing as the white fingertips cracked. She knew that she would see blood when she opened her hand and she was right. But the thin fragments of white matter fell away, leaving tiny sparkling fragments on the floor at her feet. She stood on them casually, just to feel the gritty feeling under the toe of her training shoe.

  “That’s… unusual,” She said.

  It was nine twenty five. Visiting time was nine thirty. Megyn had confusing, overlapping memories of this same time period. The ward doors could open earlier or later. Sometimes Richard Silverman was not here at all. Megyn even remembered standing amongst the smoking rubble of the city. In that memory the hospital had been completely destroyed.

  She waited in the corridor for the door to open. She decided against breaking the lock open. Once, when she’d done this, it had caused more problems than it had solved.

  “Patience,” she told herself, “A few minutes. What else are we doing, anyway.”

  The West Indian orderly re-appeared. She sauntered past Megyn Alexander with a wake of cheap cigarette smoke. She did not make any kind of eye contact and opened the ward door with her pass key. Megyn shrugged inwardly at the woman’s rudeness and followed her into the ward.

  The small ward had about eighteen beds. They were all occupied. Men, mostly middle aged, stared at Megyn Alexander as she sailed by. She reached the end of the corridor. This was where she found Richard Silverman.

  His corner of the ward was curtained off. But there was a small gap between the curtains. She slipped through this nimbly. Silverman heard her and turned his head.

  “Who are you?” he asked quietly, hoarsely. His throat was dry from the night. He’d missed out on the morning tea that had been offered an hour earlier. He’d been unable to sleep the previous night and, at 4am, had finally succumbed to an exhausted and restless slumber.

  He turned his head towards her. His face was covered in a green healing blanket. His mop of silver grey flecked hair was plastered to his forehead and to the white cotton pillow. A small part of his reddish forehead was visible. It glistened with sweat.

  “Diana?” he whispered.

  “No, I’m not her,” Megyn replied, taking the semi-transparent plastic seat on his left, “I’m just a visitor.”

  He was quiet, thinking about what she had said. She saw him lick his lips nervously.

  “Are you from social services?”

  “No, I’m just a friend of… a friend,” Megyn said carefully. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand. For a moment she hesitated, but then she touched his bandaged hand very gently. He flinched with the surprise of her touch. “I didn’t mean to startle you. In all honesty, I’m not even sure why I’m here.”

  He paused, thinking.

  “Who are you?” he repeated.

  “My name’s Megyn Alexander. I knew your son a long time ago.”

  “I don’t understand. You were one of his pre-school teachers?”

  “I was his wife.”

  Richard Silverman laughed. It was the first time he had laughed since the accident. The sounds were quiet and dev
eloped into dry, painful coughs.

  “I know, he’s a boy,” Megyn spoke softly, “But someday he’ll be a very important man. Someday, he’ll be everything to me. You see, he’s the man who taught me how to feel. Before Matt, I really didn’t know…”

  “Darling, you’ve got the wrong person,” Richard interrupted, “My son is nine years old.”

  “To you, in the now. Of course, that’s right. But to me he’s a man. He’s a dream and a ghost and a fantasy – and all at the same time. He’s everything to me, Mr Silverman. Everything I ever knew and everything I ever wanted. And I’ve been without him for two hundred years. Two hundred long, long years.”

  Richard Silverman stayed quiet. He felt afraid, but he didn’t know why. The strange woman didn’t make much sense, but there was something familiar about her. Somewhere at the end of the ward, a window had opened. Silverman felt his hair move as a slight breath of air drafted past him. It carried the woman’s perfume. He remembered her.

  “I remember you. From Glasgow SciTech. I remember you. I was with Matt.”

  “That’s right. I remember it too. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’m not supposed to be here now,” she wanted to tell him that she was lonely, but she couldn’t say the words. “I’m not supposed to be anywhere, I suppose. But it was wonderful to see him again.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’ve told you that already.”

  “But what does it mean? Of course you’re not his wife. He’s a child. He’s my child. Is this some kind of joke? Some kind of telly show joke? It’s not funny.”

  “It isn’t funny?” she said, nodding thoughtfully.

  “No, it’s not.”

  There were new footsteps in the ward. Brisk, purposeful high heeled footsteps. Richard heard them and so did Megyn Alexander. They both turned their heads to meet the approaching women. But it was a RoboNurse and not an actual person.

  “There is too much noise from this area,” the machine said, “You will need to reduce this noise or risk being asked to leave the hospital.”