A Mosaic of Stars: Short Stories From Other Worlds

by Andrew Knighton

  Flywheel swung at the junction switch with her wrench. The Silver Bolt turned onto a side track, any hope to catch up gone. Shaking her head, she watched the other train head down the straight line toward victory.

  “Shit.” Georgo sank to the floor. “We’re gonna regret this.”

  “Not us,” Flywheel said. “The thing about fearing splinted rails more than most folks, you get better at spotting them coming.”

  With a screech of tearing metal, the straight track twisted and snapped beneath the Crimson Inferno. One end leapt up, twisting into the wheels and dragging the engine from the track.There was an almighty crash, then a crack like lightning and a woomph as super heated steam burst in a scalding cloud from the boiler.

  “Slow down.” She took the shovel from Georgo’s hands. They both stared in shock as a figure emerged screaming from the steam, then collapsed in the dirt. “No way we can lose now.”

  Tick-Tock

  I can hear the clocks all around me filling the shop with the tick-tock of gears, the swish of pendulums, the chimes on the hour or the half or the quarter. One of them lies half-assembled in front of me, a collection of parts taken from the boxes that old Mistress Venables kept so meticulously labelled, laid out as she taught me.

  My face flushes at the thought of her. Her hand clipping me around the back of the head. The rebukes scattered among the lessons like numbers across a clock face. The sound of her screaming at me that she would find a new apprentice, that the shop would never be mine.

  The feel of my hands around her throat, squeezing tighter and tighter and-

  Damn it, the cam wheel won’t turn. I pull it out, glare at it, try to work out what’s gone wrong. But all I can think of is the ticking.

  It must be a faulty wheel. I curse Venables for leaving me such rubbish, fling it away into a corner and take another from the box. I peer through my magnifying glasses, place the cam wheel with needle-sharp tweezers, lining up its two sets of teeth with the others around it. I smile at my handiwork, wind the spring and release it. Gears grind instead of flowing then fly from their places, flung about the room by the flailing spring. I curse and hurl the lot away from me, its case shattering against the wall, pieces tinkling into the darkness beyond the lamplight.

  I breath deeply, trying to calm myself despite the ticking of the clocks growing ever closer around me. How did Venables find this racket soothing? How did I? How does anyone?

  I reach for the boxes again. There’s her tiny, meticulous penmanship on the labels. ‘Locking wheel’. ‘Third wheel’. ‘Rack hook’.

  That’s the problem, isn’t it? These are her parts, her clocks. They’re out for revenge, trying to stop me working. Even dead she can’t leave me in peace. Every clock in this room, every clock in the shop, they’re full of her parts.

  I’ll throw the old parts out in the morning. They’ll be costly to replace, but what price sanity?

  Still, this clock is due tomorrow, and I want to be paid. I curse myself for wasting the first frame, turn to fetch another from the shelf.

  The clocks are closer. They loom over me out of the shadows, louder and louder. Never quiet. Never still. Their endless tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Her parts. Her clocks. I see what they’re doing, stopping me working, ruining my reputation, ruining me.

  I won’t have it.

  I reach down into my toolbox, never taking my eyes off the clocks. I don’t dare. My hand closes around a hammer.

  Then fast as a second hand I’m up, sweeping the clocks from the shelves, smashing in their stupid faces just like I did hers. I grab and throw and swing and hit, the workshop a whirl of flying gears and crumpled cogs. I realise that I’m laughing, drowning out the sound of the ticking, and I go with the noise, relish it along with the shattering sounds.

  The clocks are all smashed, scattered across the floor. I stop, bent double to catch my breath, my broken laughter turning into a hoarse wheeze.

  Tick-tock.

  I look over my shoulder but there are no clocks left.

  Tick-tock.

  This time from the other direction.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  It won’t stop.

  I back up against the workbench, pull my legs up beneath me as I curl up on top, as far from the ticking shadows as I can get.

  But the sound won’t stop. It’s coming at me from every direction. Louder and louder, like an itch in my brain that won’t ever end. Not as long as I can hear.

  With trembling fingers I reach for the one tool left out on the workbench. The noise is overwhelming, a cacophony of ticking filling my workshop, my ears, my mind. Only one way to stop this.

  I jam the needle point of the tweezers down into my ear.

  Soon the ticking will stop.

  Science Fiction

  As Cool As Elvis

  Those velociraptor talons seemed such a good idea at the time. Sure, Mark lost the manual dexterity he’d long taken for granted, but in a world full of body mods, opposable thumbs weren’t the must have item they’d always been.

  And damn but he looked cool. The kind of gut-wrenching cool that made grown men jealous. This was what it must have felt like to be Elvis in the early days when he was a bright blazing star across the cultural firmament, not a fat guy passed out in spandex.

  The talons came in handy for work. Almost no-one messed with a bouncer who had claws for hands. The police gave him dark looks when unruly drunks turned up screaming and bleeding in the alley by the Kitty Lounge, but they never charged him. Legal definitions of ‘self defence’ and ‘reasonable force’ were murky enough, and it wasn’t clear whether those claws counted as a weapon. Besides, half the cops were glad that the weekends were calmer around the old warehouse clubs, even if it was a tense sort of calm.

  Susie left him. He’d always thought that she was only teasing, that she’d like the claws once he got them. Turned out he was wrong. But the claws provided a consolation as well as a cause for the break-up. A certain sort of woman – and man for that matter, though that wasn’t to his taste – liked a guy built for the primeval jungle. It worked better than any of his tattoos, drawing in the kind of pierced, leather-clad women he’d dreamed of in his youth. A succession of death metal t-shirts and black lace panties wound up shredded on his bedroom floor, ripped apart in the heat of passion. He tried things Susie never would have dreamed of. His mind was blown.

  Idly surfing the net one morning, waiting for last night’s girl to sober up, he saw a documentary about other dino-punks, as they were now being called. He’d hit the trend early but their numbers were growing. Some of the early adopters had set up an island reserve, a jungle habitat where dino-punks could run free, giving in to their prehistoric instincts. Why would anyone want that when they could be the coolest guy in town? It seemed such a waste.

  It was Jimmy, the deputy manager of the Kitty Lounge, who gave him the bad news. There had been an incident with a cybernetically enhanced doorman at the Red Cat. The news sites were up in arms and politicians were taking an interest. The police were cracking down on so-called assaults by bouncers, putting pressure on the clubs to get rid of their more dangerous staff. And while Jimmy knew that Mark wasn’t dangerous, a pile of emergency room reports said otherwise.

  They’d have to let him go.

  Mark kept his cool, thanked Jimmy, then got drunk and trashed a police car. With his suspended sentence the only job he could get was opening boxes at a supermarket delivery dock. The pay was awful, but his claws proved their worth on the cardboard packaging.

  Next time he trashed an empty police car, and they didn’t catch him.

  Friday nights were a consolation. He’d hit the heavy metal clubs, get loaded, let the ladies get excited over his arms. The ones he got weren’t as pretty as they’d once been, and no-one came back for seconds, but he wasn’t often lonely.

  Not often.

  One night when he couldn’t afford to go out he found himself surfing the inte
rnet, one claw hooked through the handle of a specially adapted whiskey glass. He browsed through pictures of himself in his glory days, both before and after the operation. He found some pictures of Susie, got nostalgic and phoned her for the first time in months.

  A bloke answered the phone. Mark hung up.

  He hadn’t felt this alone in a long time. He found a chat room for other dino-punks, started getting to know his own people. Before long his Friday nights out were Friday nights in with a bottle and a rant about how ordinary sapiens didn’t understand him.

  The other dinos understood. They were in this together.

  Then one day someone shared a link labelled ‘hope’. It led to the documentary Mark had seen before, the one of that island.

  Now Mark lives here with us on Isla Monstruo, with his fellow dinos. And for only $10,000 you can too. Come and join your people. Live where the monsters run free.

  Sweetpeas

  Toby Goodwin’s eyes watered at the thick scent of sweetpeas in bloom. From the safety of her doorstep Bridget Levsky glared disapprovingly up at him, wire-frame glasses glinting beneath her grey curls.

  “Young man, Professor Levsky and I spent forty years perfecting our White Supremes. I’m not going to leave them to die because some oaf can’t steer straight.”

  “Mrs Levsky, I work for the council.” Toby flashed his ID for the third time, then pointed at the tanker crashed across the road, police officers busily taping it off. The driver’s body lay beside it, blood and a few green tendrils creeping out from beneath the white sheet. “That man’s chest exploded minutes after the crash. Whatever was in the tanker, it’s not safe for you to stay here.”

  “It’s Dr Levsky to you.” She pointed at the tracks the lorry had left on her lawn. “What’s the council going to do about this mess, that’s what I’d like to know. Now get off my garden or I’ll set the dog on you.”

  A bedraggled mongrel yipped half-heartedly from the floor.

  “That goes for you too, Thomas Bell!” Dr Levsky shouted as a small boy shot through the flowerbeds on a BMX. As he stopped to stick out his tongue the wind changed. His face went white, eyes widening as he gagged on the greenery shooting from his throat. Police rushed to his aid, but Toby could only stare in horror.

  #

  There was something reassuring about the thick rubber seals of the biohazard suit. It kept out the pollen as well as whatever had been in the tanker, helping Toby to breath more easily.

  Dr Levsky’s skin looked different looked paler through the condensation inside the mask.

  “Have you died your hair?” he asked.

  “It’s no good buttering me up.” She declared patted her brown locks. “I wasn’t going yesterday, and I’m not going today.”

  “Everyone else has.” It hadn’t been hard to convince them – half the neighbourhood had seen little Tommy reduced to red lumps and squirming roots. Even Toby, who had never met the boy, felt sick at the thought.

  “I’m not everyone else,” the old lady declared.

  “Neither is Albert Brooks anymore.” Toby pointed to the empty house two doors down.

  “Serves him right,” Mrs Levsky said. “Letting his nasty dog dig up people’s gardens. You don’t do that, do you Ruffles?”

  Joints clicking, she bent to scratch the mongrel’s head, and Toby saw past her into the hallway. At the far end a door stood ajar, revealing rows of seedlings in tall test-tubes, spiralling glass pipes feeding dark liquid to their roots. The seedlings were moving, stems turning towards Toby as if caught by a gentle breeze.

  An uneasy feeling tickled at his mind.

  “What did you think of Mr Hardbottom from next door?” he asked.

  “Interfering old so-and-so.” Dr Levsky frowned. “Kept threatening to cut back my Restormels.”

  “Janet Stevens?”

  “Nosey cow.”

  “The postman?”

  Dr Levsky listed the failings of one casualty after another. As he listened, Toby’s uneasy feeling grew.

  #

  Toby felt a little ridiculous as he scrambled down the fence and into the shadow strewn back garden. Not as ridiculous as he’d felt in the police station, trying to explain to the desk sergeant why they should investigate the little old lady with the lovely flowers, and not the contents of the tanker crash. The police had treated his theory with contempt, but he still believed there was something wrong. Someone had to investigate.

  His nose tingled feverishly as he brushed past the sweetpeas, pale petals glowing in the moonlight. He wished he still had the biohazard suit, but the fire brigade wouldn’t let him keep it overnight.

  Carefully opening the back door, he tip-toed into a hallway that smelt of old boots and compost. At the far end Bridget Levsky stood alone in her kitchen, muttering to rows of seedlings. Her hair was ginger now, fingers and nose more pointed.

  “You’ll keep the nasty men away, won’t you precious?” She caressed a plant and its fronds stroked her wrinkled hand. Tendrils like those that had burst from poor Tommy Bell turned towards Toby.

  Heart pounding he backed away through a thick curtain. His nose twitched again, and he turned to see row upon row of lush, green leaves swaying in the glare of industrial lights. In their midst stood two more Bridget Levskys, a bottle blonde and a fading brunette. Between them half-a-dozen more near-identical old ladies lay in a pool of thick yellow liquid, each a little sturdier, a fraction less wrinkled than the last.

  The blonde pursed her lips and whistled. At the sound, a cluster of fragile purple flowers turned towards Toby, spraying pollen into his face. His allergies went into overdrive as something squirmed in his nostrils. He gave an almighty sneeze and fine green fragments rocketed from his nose, sailing across the room and hitting the women. Those fragments erupted in to a web of roots and crawlers, sprawling across their bodies and into the bubbling vat. Green veins throbbed as the plants guzzled the thick goo, burying the two Bridget Levskys in a mound of trailers as they expanded at an ever-increasing rate beneath the glow of the industrial bulbs.

  Toby stumbled through the door and out into the road, the mongrel dog yapping at his heels. Greenery burst from every orifice of the house, smashing windows and doors, stretching out in search of sunlight. With one last, desperate thrust towards the pale moon, the vines over-reached and collapsed amidst a cloud of softly scented petals, all perfectly lovely and perfectly dead.

  A wrinkled hand pushed out of the greenery, and then flopped and hung still.

  It seemed Toby wouldn’t need to evacuate Dr Levsky after all.

  Quarantined

  The thermostat in the quarantine room was broken, telling Dan that it was at room temperature when he could feel himself breaking out in a sweat. He’d already shrugged off the spacesuit and sat on a metal cot in shorts and a t-shirt, waiting for someone to tell him what was wrong.

  At last Jean appeared at the observation window, looking every inch the doctor in her white coat, a coffee mug in her hand.

  “Hey Dan.” Her voice was crackly through the intercom. “Sorry about this.”

  “It ain’t exactly a hero’s welcome.” Dan walked over to face her through the glass. She was still as stunning as she’d been on their first date, as vexing as she’d been through the divorce. “You remember I saved the other shuttle crew, right?”

  “Oh yes.” She looked away, stiff with tension, sweat beading her brow. “That’s the problem. They came back with some kind of superbug. Not the first time a virus has got stronger in space, but it’s the first time we’ve seen it change so much. We’re fighting to contain it, and there’s a risk you were infected, so…”

  “So here I am.” It made sense, Dan had to accept that. “How long will it be? No-one’s even brought me food yet.”

  His stomach rumbled.

  “I’m not sure.” Jean grimaced and bent over. “Sorry, I…”

  The mug exploded in her hand as she let out a cry of pain.

  “Hungry.” She looked at D
an with bloodshot eyes. “So very hungry.”

  Hand pressed against the glass, looking at him with a strange longing, and then slid to the ground.

  “Jean?” Fear knotted Dan’s stomach with its own pain. “Jeany, are you alright?”

  There was no answer.

  “Help!” Dan yelled. “Help!”

  But there was no answer. The quarantine room was sound proof, and without someone standing outside the intercom would have switched off.

  Jean needed his help. And he needed to see that she was OK, to hold her, to feel her warm flesh. The tension of the moment was muddling his thoughts, but he could find a way out.

  He flung himself against the window and then the door, trying to break through, all the while shouting for help. But there was no response, and the door and window held.

  A technician appeared on the other side of the glass.

  “Thank God!” Dan’s relief turned sour as he saw that this man too was hunched over in pain, his grey overalls drenched with sweat. He stumbled to where Jean lay, then crumpled over over beside her.

  “Dammit!” Dan was scared for himself as well as Jean. What if everyone in the base was infected? Would he be forgotten, left to starve in the quarantine cell, while Jean died inches away from him? His heart was pounding, his whole body quivering with tension.

  Desperate, he looked around for something he could use, but there was only a toilet and the cot bolted down in the corner of the room.

  The cot would have to do. He grabbed the aluminium bedframe, cold and hard beneath his hands. He’d expected it to be attached securely to the floor, but it came up surprisingly easily, metal screaming and screws popping as he wrenched it free. Then he ran at the window and swung the frame with all his strength, ready to batter the reinforced glass into submission.

  It shattered with one single, explosive blow.

  Leaping through the gap, he saw Jean and the technician on the floor. He could even smell them, an unexpected moment after so long alone.