Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1)

by Richard Fairbairn

  Megyn Alexander stared at the RoboNurse. It was tall, with a ballerina’s frame and the blue-eyed, red-cheeked face of a Victorian doll. The eyes did not blink. The waxy, long fingered hands were limp at its side.

  “I’m sorry,” Megyn said to it.

  “Please comply, that’s all.”

  The RoboNurse departed. It turned on its right leg and marched off. It disappeared out the ward door. Some of the men on the ward had turned to look at Megyn Alexander. Most of them smiled. She waved back flightily, smiling thinly at them.

  “I think you’ve got the wrong man,” Richard Silverman said, “I don’t really have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  She was genuinely confused. Matt’s father was agitated

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t listen to any more of this. Will you please leave? They’ll be bringing Matt to see me soon. Please, you must leave.”

  “I can’t see him here,” she said, “Somehow, it makes things worse if he sees me here. I can’t remember why, but it does…”

  “Will you please, please get out!” he shouted the words now, “Please, before I have to ring the buzzer.”

  “Just… just don’t let him quit karate,” she said, “He needs to learn to fight. And… and you mustn’t fight back. When they try to hurt you. You have to let them. I’m sorry, but when it happens you have to let them kill you.”

  “Nurse!” Silverman shouted. He had already been pressing the buzzer, “Nurse, someone, help!”

  The other patients in the ward looked in Richard’s direction. None of them were in any position to leave their beds. There were four visitors in the ward – three elderly ladies and an old man. None of them made a sound or movement as the tall woman walked past them on her way out.

  Megyn Alexander started to leave as the RoboNurse reappeared through the sliding ward door. It was running, with a very obvious mechanical rhythm. Its unblinking glass eyes looked at the centre of Megyn Alexander’s face. It came to a halt in front of her, blocking her way.

  “Please excuse me. You are blocking my way. A patient is in need of attention.”

  Megyn Alexander looked into the lifeless, glass eyes.

  “Of course,” she said to the machine, “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Megyn stepped aside. The RoboNurse hastened by. Megyn watched her go. Richard Silverman was holding his hands to his face, trying to remove the green bandages. He seemed agitated, almost frantic. She did not understand why. The RoboNurse rushed to stop him.

  Megyn Alexander left the hospital without looking back. She didn’t know what to do or where to go next. She decided to take a drive to Arderseir, a little fishing village a few miles nearby. She enjoyed driving the TR7 along the winding, archaic roads. The road seemed unchanged from her last, terrible visit to this place in 1983.

  She drove the TR7 through the small fishing village. The streets and houses remained faithful to her vague memories of the place. She enjoyed the vague sense of familiarity. The shop fronts seemed the same, though she couldn’t remember precisely what they had been. There were hair and body shops, and next to that a pet parlour. The weathered faces that flashed past looked oddly familiar. Ghosts of another time. They watched the beautiful blonde in the strange car with a very slight interest. No one of them knew what the car was or had any idea how old it was. There were only eight cars like this one left on the whole planet. All of them were in museums thousands of miles away.

  She parked the car outside the town. Long ago, she’d shared a picnic there with the only man she’d ever loved. It had been a warm, sunny day. Their Belgian Shepherd dog had chased his ball on the pebbled beach. The sharp stones had torn the rough velvet of his pads into pink, sensitive shreds. She’d held him lovingly. He’d laid his head on her lap with his eyes closed. He’d done this since he’d been the tiniest of puppies. Laddie’s memory was crystal clear, but she did not remember the road to the cemetery. She drove past it before she realised that the next stop was Fort George and the locked metal gates of the army base there.

  She stopped the car. On her right there were thick, caramel scented gorse bushes. On her left a sand spattered green carpet led down to the rocky seashore. The paint on the old iron gate was flaking away. Large chunks of it fell away as she pushed the gate open. A dog barked somewhere far away. The gate creaked as it opened. She had to push hard. More pieces of the paint fell away, taking rusted metal with it. The barking dog sounded like a big dog, she thought. She liked big dogs. Matt had liked big dogs. The bigger the better, he’d said.

  She squeezed through the gate, almost catching her brown leather jacket on the jagged metal. Making her way through the dense weeds Megyn almost wondered if she had come to the right place. The low, stacked stone wall around the small piece of land was completely obscured by bushy, yellow flowered sharp spined gorse in places. The bush had spread right to the shore. Her memory seemed increasingly sketchy. She had been here before, but had flashes of the strange and the new.

  Occasionally she felt like this was her first time coming here. She found what she was looking for and reached down to the white marble stone.

  “Ouch!” she pulled her hand back quickly. She’d been careless and the sharp weed had scratched a ragged white line across the back of her hand. A tiny red droplet appeared near the knuckle of her little finger where the little tear in her flesh ended. In an instant the blood turned into the tiniest of diamonds. It landed invisibly on the ground, twinkling amongst the dirt.

  She stood to her full, considerable height. With the heel of her left boot she kicked the weeds away from the stone. She stared quietly for a long time. Twenty eight seconds of silence. It seemed like enough. She breathed quietly. The cut on her hand was already healed. There was not the faintest of signs that her skin had never been harmed.

  She reached towards the weathered stone. The black writing was faded already. Some of it was hard to read, but she knew what was written there. Her memory of that was very clear.

  Matt Silverman

  Born January 8, 2176

  Died August 4 1983

  She closed her eyes, remembering his body lying on the satin sheets. Warm, becoming cold. Soft, bright skin becoming waxy and dull. His mouth open, gaping, but his eyes mercifully closed. She couldn’t get his mouth to shut. She’d almost broken his jaw trying. She remembered that day clearly. It was a painful memory, but one of the very few clear memories she had of her husband – her soul mate. Her very reason for being. The day he had died was the saddest day of her long life. Two hundred years ago, but somehow it might have been yesterday. Everything was so clear in her mind. But the feelings were not the same. She remembered that she had been crying. As his life slipped away she’d felt lost, hopeless, distraught and acutely terrified. He’d left her alone on this alien, inhospitable world. She’d screamed as the thin sheet was pulled over his face. She remembered how much her throat had hurt when she’d no more air left to make sound with. But it was a memory that seemed to belong to someone else.

  His ashes were here. Buried in the ground in a stainless steel flask. Maybe two feet down, maybe three. He hadn’t cared too much about where his remains would go. She hadn’t cared too much either. For some reason, he’d asked her to plant daffodils in various locations along the south east coast of Scotland. She’d complied dutifully, not really understanding why he had asked her to do this. But she knew that there were many things that she no longer understood. Staring down at the weather-worn stone, she knew that she should have felt something more than the abstract echo of pain that she now experienced.

  “I don’t know why I came,” she said, “I saw your father in the hospital. I wanted to see him, but I didn’t really have anything to say to him. So I told him that you shouldn’t quit your karate. Isn’t that the stupidest thing ever? As if it would make a difference now?”

  FIVE

  2195AD - Glasgow, Scotland

  The city was busy. There always
seemed to be more people. Rushing back and forwards. Going somewhere. Doing something. It was the rush hour. Thousands of people struggling to make it to a day they’d rather avoid completely. A fortunate handful heading home from late shifts. Most of the faces Sloane saw were cold and tired like his. Some from the weight of the day and others weary of the day to come. Dead, cold eyes gazing at handheld TVs and updating social statuses as they ambled blindly towards the subway in slow and relentless wave.

  Jack Sloane was headed there too. He enjoyed the subway. He had the ghost of a memory about the place, and it was a good memory. But he had been too young for the memory to be more than just a vague fog of something pleasant. The more he examined the fog, the more it dissipated. But sometimes, when he did not pay attention to it, the joyful feelings associated with this place solidified. For a moment, as he joined the steady wave of morning commuters, a fragment of the memory resurfaced. There had been crowds. He hadn’t been used to crowds. It had been exciting. Walking to the subway had been exciting. When he’d been young. A long, long time ago.

  He slid down the steps into the little station. Most of the people coming down the steps with him were taking the inner circle. He decided to go the other way and headed right through the turnstiles. An escalator led down to the platform. A train was arriving as he descended. He stepped to the side so that the few people behind him could rush past and catch the train. He didn’t bother running or rushing. By the time he arrived at the station the train was leaving. The platform was empty, but only for a short time. Another train was trundling on its way to the station. Eight minutes away.

  The doors slid closed and the little train rumbled away like a roller-coaster. He took a seat next to a tall, Asian lady with shining silver hair. It darkened into raven black as he took his seat, settling on a mottled purple hue as he smiled in her direction. He was early for his meeting. He rode the subway for a complete circuit, all the way round the city. He got off at Buchanan street and walked around the station for a while. Some crazy person was stuffing leaflets into people's hands about something or other. Sloane found himself taking one. It was easier to do that than to refuse. He found himself opening it. It was something about Haven. He gave a slight smile and frown at the same time on one side of his face as he dropped the crumpled piece of paper to the floor, the animated figures on the paper waving their arms frantically.

  Something buzzed in his pocket. Belinda was calling him, he saw. The happy picture he'd chosen to represent her no longer made any real sense. He thumbed the ignore call button and pushed his organiser back into his deep coat pocket. The organiser said something to him, but he didn't want to hear it.

  Pam buzzed again. More insistently. Her voice sounded again and this time he could make out the odd word from the smart personal assistant. He recognised his son's name - Paul - and pulled the little computerised device out of his pocket a second time.

  “Pam, I don't want to talk to her,” he gruffed, “I have a hard enough day ahead of me without this.”

  “She wants to tell you something about Paul,” Pamela said softly, “I'm sorry, but you told me that calls related to your son were very important.”

  “They... are,” he swished his finger across Pam's screen and called his wife back. The phone barely rang before she answered. He couldn't see her face. She couldn't see his. He'd curtained the call.

  “I need to talk to you about your son,” Belinda's voice was cold and hard, “Have you got time for him today? Is there room for him in your world? Where the Hell are you? Sitting in the dark somewhere like a bloody weirdo?”

  Her words filled him with an intense and painful combination of emotions. He didn't know how to answer her. In fact, he could barely contain the urge to scream at her.

  “I always had, always have, always will have time for Paul,” he said very slowly and calmly, “What is it that you want?”

  Buchanan Street was waking up. It never really slept, but the blinds that closed during the night were opening. The bigger rush hour skybuses were filling up, ready to fly hundreds of people to London, Manchester, Paris and beyond. The station was noisy. The buses made a surprising amount of noise as they manoeuvred. The air displaced by their massive bulk disrupted the holographic advertisements that hovered around the edges of the bus platform and they shimmered in strange patterns like a heat wave in the desert.

  “The school want to plant a tree in the orchard. They wanted one of us to be there. I... I told them I can't.”

  There was an advertisement for a new razor. It had thirty nine blades, each one about a half dozen microns thick. They were calling it the Microwave razor. A famous footballer was standing in front of a mirror holding the razor in his huge right hand. He had a naked female companion on one side and a semi-nude male companion on the other. They were both kissing his cheek. Then the advertisement shimmered into a wavy mess as a two hundred seater bus hovered low overhead, its electromagnetic engines disrupting the ad generator.

  “I'll speak to Mrs Gibbon,” Jack Sloane said, his shoulders suddenly relaxing and slouching forward, “I can be there, I guess. I'll make the time,” he stopped talking for a moment. “I don't think you should be there. It would be too difficult.”

  “And it won't be difficult for you?” she said the words harshly, her tone biting, but when she spoke again her voice was slow and calm. She wasn't fighting anymore. There was a hint of compassion, reflecting his own.

  “It’s taking place on the 2nd November. Sunday. At... at eleven o'clock I think. Do you think you can be there for this?

  “Yes,” he hissed, “I think I can handle it. I'd like to see the village again. Things are hectic right now, but I'll manage to find the time one way or another. Thanks for letting me know.”

  There was a long pause. He watched the people coming and going in the cold morning air. The big bus had landed, or at least hovered a few inches from the ground. A large queue of people seemed to have appeared from nowhere and jostled for position as the large double doors opened in the centre of the bus's belly.

  “I have to go now,” his ex-wife’s voice was quieter, calmer, “Michael's getting ready for work. I have to... it doesn't matter. I should go now,” Sloane could hear the faint sound of a man's voice in the background. Then his wife said, quickly, “Thanks for helping.”

  The line went dead. He tilted the phone so he could look at the palm sized screen. Pamela's little round face was there again, but her usual smile was lopsided and sad. The little yellow eye dots seemed to stare at him apologetically.

  “Did you add that to my schedule?”

  The personal assistant's digital features changed to the default smiley face.

  “Of course, sir. There's nothing else scheduled for that day. It should be nice to visit the village once again.”

  He tuned Pamela out and thought of the school's orchard. The last time he'd seen it there hadn't been any trees. The farmer who owned the land - Robert Simpson - had cleared the ground for the school. A hard core of parent helpers had helped tidy the scrubbed and rugged ground using hand tools only. The last time Sloane had seen the orchard it had been quite barren. The trees had just been planted - about two dozen of them - and there had been a carved storyteller's tree stump with four smaller logs circling it in one corner. Paul had always pointed, with pride, the tree that he'd helped to plant.

  The big bus had filled up. It was destined for the Shetland business centre off the north east coast of Scotland. Another two buses were headed the same way, packed with men and women half his age.

  He bought a cappuccino from a vendor inside a painted cardboard stall. The coffee was hot and strong. He sipped it slowly as the Shetland buses went on their way. Smaller local buses replaced the big Shetland people movers and the automatic platforms repositioned themselves to suit the lighter buses. After about five minutes his bus arrived. He stepped onto it and flashed Pamela's electronic face to the fare machine's bizarrely grinning little grey screen. The two electronic de
vices exchanged information. The fare was paid - deducted from Sloane's credit account - and the bus driver nodded him aboard.

  The bus trip to Manchester took thirty minutes. Sloane spent most of it staring into the thick rainclouds and thinking about nothing. The actress’s monologue echoed in his mind like a tic. He tried not to think about her. But it was difficult to forget her eyes.

  The bus landed with a bump and he waited patiently for the other eighty seven passengers to get off. Then did he make a stiff, reluctant move towards the exit. He thanked the driver as he walked by.

  “Not a problem,” the old man nodded, “Go safely, son.”

  “I will, thanks,” Sloane smiled automatically, “You too.”

  Manchester hadn't changed. Piccadilly bus station seemed quieter than Sloane remembered and the local buses had changed to a newer design. They were smaller and lighter machines painted sky blue with a large advertising slogan for the new Ferrari Family Funzo. The medium sized buses became almost invisible as they climbed into the mid-morning sky, but they stayed below the clouds.

  The woman in the green dress was quite striking. He noticed her immediately even though he was used to spotting people in a crowd who would glance or look his way. It was impossible not to notice her. The green dress was completely wrong in so many ways. It was too cold for something so revealing, to begin with. Her blonde hair had slightly dark roots. Her green eyes looked gentle and almost apprehensively in his direction. The left corner of her mouth pinched inwards to form a slightly nervous half smile. He guessed that she was in her early forties, though her healthy, curvaceous physique made her seem younger on first impression. Her facial features gave her age away, and only just.

  It was very cold in the open aired Manchester Piccadilly Station. The electromagnetic shield designed to invisibly repel the rain and foul weather was offline. Yet again the station was exposed to the elements. Thin plastic sheets and carbon fibre scaffoldings reminded Sloane that the weather shield had been in disrepair for some time.