Hub - Issue 10

by Mur Lafferty / Ellen Phillips / Alasdair Stuart

  #

  Halfway through the second tape, Paul took Susan's hand. She didn't withdraw it, even though his palm was hot and sweaty. After putting in the third tape, Paul closed the door to the room and returned to sit with her.

  "So is it too soon to ask you out?" he asked. His face was red. "I mean, it's not soon to me. I've been waiting for months. But soon after your breakup, I mean."

  She surprised herself by kissing him. He surprised her by sliding his arms around her middle and holding her tightly. His lips were soft and electrifying, nothing wet or insistent or Bruce-like about them.

  More surprising things happened, all of them quite good. The most surprising thing was that she initiated most of them. He let her lead, and she ended up on top of him, watching the animated heroine lose her ponytail during a battle scene.

  #

  Kevin had no idea what to do if he found her. Losing his seductive nature in his frantic search, he interrupted several people in the library looking for her. Inside the Student Union, he searched the top two floors and paused to rest on the way to the basement.

  What was he qualified to do if he lost this job? He had been trained in avoiding paradoxes, extreme time management, all the levels of seduction. Perhaps they would put him on a desk job. Less exciting, but at least he could still eat. Maybe he could find a wealthy older woman who wanted a boy toy. Heck, Susan had seemed to like his looks. The thought repulsed him.

  He got up, determined to finish the job, and descended the stairs. Susan now, so he wouldn't have to do Susan later.

  #

  They were experimenting again, this time letting Paul take a turn on top, when the door opened. Susan gasped. Paul swore and rolled off her. The lights were off, so there was only a silhouette of a man in the hallway.

  "Whoops," the man said. "Um, Susan?"

  Fuck. "Yeah, what?" she said.

  "Hey, it's Paul, you know, from... Econ 10... I needed, uh, to borrow some notes. But, crap, never mind. Sorry." The door closed.

  "Who the hell?" asked Paul.

  "I have no idea." she said.

  "Well. This isn't the most private place, now, is it?" he said, the still-running anime lighting up his wicked grin.

  She returned his smile. "I have a single room. It has a door that locks."

  #

  Kevin trudged out of the Student Union, head hanging. He could find no way to fix this now. He couldn't sneak back to the home office and use the machine without his superiors' knowledge. The time travel machine was a complicated device that required seven people to operate, and there was no unofficial company business to be conducted with it. He was fired for sure. Unless Susan didn't like the way this turned out.... but she had seemed pretty damn happy when he'd walked in on them.

  Not paying attention to his direction, he heard someone yell, "Paul!" It took him a moment before Kevin remembered to turn. Susan?

  He'd passed right in front of the outside coffee bar. Erica sat at a table, waving at him. He studied her for a moment, then checked his watch. One hour until the device would call him home. He had time to kill. Might as well enjoy his job while he still had it.

  #

  It was seven-thirty when Susan gasped, realizing that the memories that were flooding her mind had nothing to do with Kevin. Had she even met him? She had requested someone who had looked like Paul, someone who took the name Paul, without ever remembering her old college crush. Tears sprang to her eyes as her new past wove itself in her mind's eye. Paul. Their time together in college. Their letters when she traveled the world, studying other cultures and eventually getting work as a diplomat.

  She stood uncertainly - was her knee stronger? She couldn't tell. The pictures on her mantle were fading and changing. The picture of her shaking hands with Chen Chua Xing, the UN Secretary, morphed into a picture of her and an older Paul in front of a temple in China. She smiled. He had studied kung fu during the months that she served at the American embassy. The picture of her hiking in the Rockies didn't change at all, but she remembered that Paul had taken it. Instead of aiding children in Africa, she was passing out food crates to earthquake survivors in southeast Asia. And there was no walkabout picture at all; there was a statue of an open hand; an award for humanitarian aid that she and Paul had won.

  She smiled, tears streaming down her face. Her life was unchanged, only enriched by the man she'd chosen to spend it with. This was better than anything she could have expected. It took up to twelve hours for the current timeline to catch up to the restructured past, so she went to bed, looking forward to waking up beside her husband.

  #

  The memories hit her before she even opened her eyes the next morning, causing her to cry out. The hostage situation ten years ago. Paul had been planning on leaving Indonesia with the other aid workers - she had been in Australia on the walkabout she'd always wanted to experience - when the terrorists had grabbed him and twelve others. He'd been the first beheaded when the Australians hadn't complied with the demands.

  She wept, the pain that had dimmed in the past ten years suddenly new and fresh. She cried and screamed into her pillow until she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  She spent the afternoon flipping through photo albums and going through her house to find remnants of him. He had been a spearhead of humanitarian Internet news radio, and she discovered multiple CD's of his programs. She listened to several, laughing at the inside jokes he inserted for her.

  That night, there was a knock at her door. Sniffling, she shuffled to the door and opened it.

  Damn, but Kevin looked like Paul. She wondered if she had chosen him because of this, but couldn't remember. He glanced at her face and looked down at the floor. "Can I come in?"

  She held the door open.

  "This was all my fault. I... missed you and found another girl who looked like you, who was also crying. And I guess I caused you to find that guy. You aren't going to die a virgin like you feared, but this was not what you paid for. My company is here to offer you a money-back guarantee and an experience erase, free of charge." He looked as if he were going to cry.

  "You were the guy who bumped into me before I went to the Union," she said, her eyes widening. "I was going to go back to my dorm before you ran into me."

  He nodded. "I am so sorry. It looks like I really screwed up."

  She looked at the crumpled, moist tissue in her hand. Remembering what it was for, she dabbed her eyes again. "We got married after college. Traveled the world together. He died ten years ago."

  Kevin stared at her, stricken. "We can fix all of this. Really. For free."

  Susan looked at the apartment that still seemed new to her, a world of a man she never got a chance to experience. She focused on the throb within her chest, the ache that she remembered took two years to heal and still flared up on holidays and whenever she saw old anime. All she had wanted was not to die a virgin. She hadn't asked for this.

  She went to an open photo album that focused on their work with inner city children. Paul was hugging one of the many children they had sponsored, a girl who had shown a gift for languages and they'd padded her few scholarships so she could follow in Susan's footsteps in International Studies. She pointed to the photo.

  "What do you think will happen to her if Paul disappears from her life? Gunned down in a drive-by? Raped? Under appreciated in a minimum-wage job? There's no way of telling." She stared at the girl who grinned widely in the picture. Tasha still visited during some holidays, like most of the children they had helped out of bad situations. Having no children of their own, they had loved all they could of those who needed it.

  "I can't do it," she said quietly. "I can't remove him from their lives. I can't remove him from mine." She looked at Kevin's face. He was pale. "Are you going to get in trouble for this?"

  "I - they didn't say. I had to come here and offer a refund and fix. Then, I don't know," he admitted. "I'm still so sorry."

  "Don't be," she said. "It was a good life.
Not what I expected, but then life never is, is it? I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often. Butterfly wings causing hurricanes and all that. If you'd like, I will contact your employers and give you a recommendation. What I had with Paul was more fulfilling than a one-night-stand ever could have been."

  Kevin sighed, visibly relieved. "I can't tell you what that means to me. Thanks a lot. Is there anything I can do personally to make it up to you?"

  Susan motioned for him to follow her to the kitchen. She took two beers from the fridge and handed one to him. "I am curious. My college friend Erica told me that she, too, slept with a dark-haired, blue-eyed Paul the same night I did. We joked that we were Eskimo sisters, that my Paul had somehow made it into her bed after mine. But now I wonder..."

  Kevin smiled at last. "Mrs. Apple, I never give private information about my clients."

  About the Author

  Mur Lafferty is a freelance writer, published in over fifteen RPG books, and currently building a reputation for her fiction. Her podcast novel Heaven is a firm favourite (and can be downloaded from www.podiobooks.com, and she runs the weekly(ish) essential self-help podcast for wannabe writers I Should Be Writing (at www.ishouldbewriting.com - also downloadable from iTunes).

  Reviews

  Asylum Reviewed by Alasdair Stuart

  ASYLUM Written by Rob Williams, Illustrated by Boo Cook

  Published by Rebellion

  RRP: £11.99

  Rob Williams, in his startlingly self-deprecating introduction, spends a great deal of time apologising for the rough edges on Asylum, his first work for 2000AD. Best known for his work on the excellent political superhero comic CLA$$WAR, Williams’ script here has all the anger and energy of that series but stretched over a longer, more assured script.

  Over three centuries from now, alien immigration is common place. Thousands of aliens from hundreds of species come to Earth in search of a better life, and find themselves contained, at least temporarily, on a holding station in Earth orbit (Drawn by Cook as a colossal, inverted church tethered to the planet). From there, they go to an island on Earth and are gradually integrated into society. The few that escape are tracked down by hybrid agents, including Marshall Holt. Holt’s a nice guy, likes his job and accepts it for what it is until something awful happens to his partner. As Holt investigates, he uncovers not only stories of vivisection and horror at the alien compound, but the dark secrets his own organisation has been keeping.

  Asylum crackles with anger and relevancy, its addressing of the immigration issue both neatly handled and never getting in the way of the story. 2000AD has always been at its best when its addressed the concerns of the day and Asylum is no exception. Whilst it never once pretends to do so subtly, there’s a palpable anger to the perception of the aliens (and immigrants) that gives the story a great deal of its edge and power.

  This is further enhanced by Holt himself. An intensely likable, every man hero of the sort that 2000AD does so well, Marshall Holt’s rise from Hunter to reluctant leader of the opposition is handled with unusual maturity. There’s a moment early on in the second volume, also collected here, where he’s asked whether he’s proud of what he’s achieved. Holt’s response is that in three days of all out war they’ve all done things they’re not proud of, including him and his world weary approach to life only accentuates the tragedy of the book’s darker moments.

  This in turn is helped by an unusually even handed approach to the characters. Everyone, from the ghastly Reverend Ashcroft to Holt himself finds their actions questioned by others and to Williams’ credit, there are no easy answers and no clearly defined line between good and evil. Instead, this is a world where horrible things are done in a good cause as well as bad and where the best you can hope for is to be able to live with your decisions.

  Boo Cook’s artwork is the final piece of the puzzle, straddling the line between organic and hard edged. The technology, the bread and butter of any story like this, is impressive but Cook’s work really sings when he’s called on to draw the aliens. Skunk and Belly are particularly great, a laconic blue dog-like alien and his colossal, green rabbit-like friend whose unique view of the world is at the heart of several of the series’ best moments. Each one of them is a unique individual and each one of them is clearly sentient making the horrible violence of the closing pages all the more affecting.

  Rounded out with some of Cook’s sketchbook, this is a high quality package of a high quality story. Intelligent, bleak, darkly funny and savagely violent this is one of the best original stories to come out of 2000AD in years. Williams’ self-deprecation aside, this is a great piece of hard edged, contemporary science fiction.

  Stardust-On-Wye Words: Ellen Phillips

  The Guardian-sponsored Hay Festival takes place every Spring Bank in a little town called Hay on Wye. You may not have heard of the festival or the town, but if you're interested in reading fiction - and since you're reading Hub, I'm assuming you've at least a passing interest - you should check it out. For around 10 days every year, this tiny little town in the Welsh Marches plays host to a staggering array of writers, publishers, politicians and broadcasters, to say nothing of the increasing numbers of members of the public who come to hear them talk about their latest oeuvre. But why hold it in Hay, so far from any form of motorway or decent public transport? Because this little town, nestled in the green hills of the Wye valley and surrounded by sheep, this town has one feature which makes it the only place in which an event such as this unique festival could possibly take place. It is the second-hand bookshop capital of the UK.

  This year's g-literati included The Hairy Bikers, Gordon Brown, Sandi Toksvig and Bonnie Langford, John Major, Alexander McCall Smith, Simon Armitage, and so on and on and on. Stars of previous years have included Bill Clinton, who glad-handed a very welcoming crowd and described the festival as the "Woodstock of the Mind". And this year, on the second Saturday of the festival, a whole tent-load of people turned up bright and early to see Neil Gaiman.

  Neil Gaiman is, famously, the creator of the immensely popular Sandman series of comics, the Neverwhere TV series (and subsequent book and comic). He's written American Gods, a powerful tale of the Old Gods struggling for survival in the New World, now followed up with Anansi Boys. His books The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Fish and Coraline are wonderful children's books; but such is the cachet of the Hay Festival, Neil had flown all the way across the Atlantic and endured a tortuous journey across the country and into Wales to talk about something else entirely. Something magical and fantastic. Something now starring Clare Danes, Peter O'Toole, Ricky Gervais, Robert De Niro, Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sienna Miller. That something is Stardust.

  Stardust started life as a 4-part comic series published by DC Comics in 1997. It was quickly followed up by an illustrated novel, and followers of the esteemed Mr Gaiman's blog will know that the film has been in production since last year, with shooting in places as diverse as the Isle of Skye and in Oxfordshire. Excitingly, for a while it was rumoured that the entire film would be shown at Hay. By the time Neil landed in London last week, though, the production team were still working on the audio dub, and dragged him off to Soho to listen to different versions of sound effects. As Neil related to the amused audience, to his jet-lagged ears there was only one response: "Great. That's great. It's all great."

  Neil was still jet-lagged when he walked into the marquee. Looking a little older and greyer, and definitely rumpled, I suspect that had the entire film been shown, he would have been asleep in that gloomy tent. At least, that's the consolation I take from not having got to see the whole thing! As it was, Neil showed us clip after clip from the film, and talked about each of them. The story is magical; Neil claims he set out to produce a fairytale for grown-ups, and in that he has definitely succeeded. The sheer number of children in the audience, though, confirms his popularity as a writer for all ages. The clips Neil showed gave us glimpses of the love story, evil kings and scheming princ
es, wicked witches desperate to regain their youth and fallen stars with a sharp tongue and a quick wit. All of it is beautifully filmed, and the sound-effects that they included were, to my partisan and untrained ears, just great.

  The film follows the book fairly faithfully, except for the parts where it doesn't. More of which, later. The clips began with Tristan's (Charlie Cox) hopeless love for Victoria (Sienna Miller), and then the pledge which leads him over the Wall and into the Kingdom of Stormhold, in search of a fallen star. What he fails to realise is that in that faery realm, a star isn't just a lump of meteoric rock. In fact, the star, Yvaine (Clare Danes), is pretty annoyed at having been knocked out of the sky, and is clearly unimpressed with Tristan's wish to take her back to his village for his girlfriend.

  The path to love, and back to the Village of Wall, certainly doesn't run smooth for Tristan, as princes fighting for their father's throne search desperately to find the necklace worn by Yvaine, and a very wicked witch, Lamia, played beautifully by Michelle Pfeiffer, wants to cut out the fallen star's heart in order to regain youth for her and her sisters. In one fantastically creepy scene, she pauses in her quest (riding a mini-chariot drawn by two goats) to share Ditchwater Sal's meal of roast hare. Sal's attempt to drug the truth out of Lamia backfires spectacularly, as the wicked witch curses her in such a malevolent way that I had goosebumps on my arms.

  Neil explored some of the differences between his book and the film. He explained that there were places where, of necessity, they had to do things a different way to achieve the same effect. Notably, in the introduction of Ricky Gervais's character. He's a merchant, and the clip had him attempting to haggle with Robert DeNiro over the price of a barrel of lightning, caught by the sky-pirate at great personal risk. Neil admitted to having been very nervous about the character right up until he saw that same scene. Afterwards, he had no qualms about Ricky's character whatsoever.