by Anne Corlett
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Her old rucksack was stuffed at the back of the cupboard. It was a tattered canvas thing that had once belonged to her grandfather. Jamie had taken it on school camping trips, along with his heavy, oilskin-backed sea blanket, which was folded in the bottom of the bag now. It had taken up a fair chunk of her baggage allowance when she left Earth, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to leave it behind. She grabbed the rucksack, stuffing some clothes inside, before heading out of the cabin.
Down in the field the cattle ambled behind her as she opened the three gates that would give them access to the stream and the best grazing. She hesitated over the gates to the bulls’ enclosures but eventually propped them open too.
The station’s battered off-roader was missing from its place behind the barn, and her ID wasn’t logged for any of the other vehicles. She knew there were various ways of circumventing the security systems, but she had no idea where to start with that sort of tinkering. Her gaze fell on the paddocks to the side of the cabin. She couldn’t see the three scrubby cattle ponies, but when she whistled, Conrad lifted his graying head and wandered over to nose at her pocket. The swaybacked roan had endured years of little feet drumming at his sides, and he had an air of world-weary patience. Jamie rubbed his neck, her breath snagging on the sudden lump in her throat.
The cattle, the birds, their presence hadn’t made a dent in her sense of alone. But Conrad was different. She knew him—his name, his quirks and foibles—and seeing him here gave her a pang of emotion that fell somewhere between relief and despair.
Conrad made no objection to being tacked up—beyond a token exhalation that meant she had to set her shoulder against his side and dig him with her elbow to get the girth tightened.
“Sort yourself out.”
He shoved her hard with his head, leaving green-tinged slobber down her side.
Jamie tightened her rucksack across her shoulders and pulled herself into the saddle.
“Come on, then,” she said, clicking her tongue to push him into a rolling plod.
• • •
The spaceport was a couple of hours away. Conrad settled into a steady enough pace once he realized he was in it for the duration. Jamie even broke a clunky canter out of him at one point, although she couldn’t persuade him to maintain it. She still had that hurry hurry beating inside her head, but she knew Conrad wouldn’t be hurried. His hoofbeats were hypnotic, and by the time Jamie realized she was counting them, she was already well into the hundreds.
Counting kept the other thoughts at bay. She’d been so sure when she’d set off, but the closer she got to the port, the more that zero point zero zero zero one shouldered its way in. How could she expect to find survivors, with those desperate odds?
It was midafternoon when she arrived. Her mouth was dust-dry, and there was a dull throb at the back of her head. When she’d been here before, the port had been one great clatter of noise from the shipyards and trade depot, but today the stillness was unnerving. At least at Calgarth there’d been a backdrop of sound as the nonhuman world went about its business. But there was no birdsong here, the silence broken only by the scrape of an open door swinging in the breeze.
She dismounted in the square and Conrad wandered over to the scrub of grass in front of the store. He wouldn’t need tethering. Give him a patch of unfamiliar green and he’d be happy for hours, like a gourmand sampling some new fare.
Jamie walked over to the open gate of the shipyard.
The concrete landing site was empty. No ships in port.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t. There could be ships up there, just waiting for a signal from any survivors.
There was a speaker system mounted outside the yard office. She remembered it shrilling on the day of her arrival, loud enough for most of the settlement to hear.
Inside the scruffy little office she found a microphone on the desk, and when she flicked the main switch a red light came on. The electricity was working, then. She felt a lurch of relief. There’d been a nagging fear in the back of her mind that she’d get here to find the power down, and no way of contacting the outside world.
“Hello?” Her voice was thin and uncertain. “If anyone’s here, I’m at the shipyard.” She paused, then added, “My name is Jamie,” as though that might sway some undecided listener. She repeated the message a couple of times, then replaced the microphone before heading back outside and around the corner to the comms station.
When she’d come here after that last mail from Daniel, the portmaster himself had set up the call. She hadn’t watched what he did, not sure she wanted to be there at all. The public booth still smelled the same now: sawdust mixed with a whiff of cleaning fluid. The chipboard walls had holes drilled for wires, and the stool was bolted to the floor. A couple of the fastenings were loose and the seat tipped under her weight as she sat down.
When she flicked the biggest switch, a few lights came on, and something began to click beneath the counter. She tried another switch, and the display flickered with a few darts of static. She turned the tuning dial slowly back and forth in the hope of catching something, but the screen stayed stubbornly dark.
She pressed the microphone button anyway.
“If anyone can hear this, I’m on Soltaire. At the port. My name is Jamie Allenby and I’m a veterinary scientist at Calgarth.”
She paused, conscious of her flat, monotone delivery. But was an impassioned plea for aid any more likely to be answered than a matter-of-fact message? Was it about deserving rescue? Earning it?
She took a deep breath before continuing. “I don’t know if there are any other survivors here. If there’s anyone out there, this is Jamie Allenby at the port on Soltaire.”
It felt like there was more she should be saying, but she didn’t even know if the message was transmitting. She left the console switched on and sat there for a moment, as though there might be an instant reply.
Got your message, be there soon, pip pip, over and out.
She’d sat like this after speaking to Daniel. Well, he’d done most of the talking. But she’d listened, as hard as she could through the static and the lag, for the things that must be there, hidden in the cracks. The things that would mean there was a way back to him.
When she thought of Daniel as a whole, she couldn’t make up her mind if she missed him. But if she broke him down into small, specific things, she felt a little nip of something. The conspiratorial smile he flicked at her when someone they didn’t like said something particularly stupid. The sound of his homecoming routine—shoes carefully removed inside the door, then thrown unceremoniously into the hall cupboard. The way he made toast for her—soft and buttery, and much tastier than when she did it herself.
Shaking the memory away, Jamie turned off the console and walked out of the booth.
• • •
Back outside, she looked along the street toward the bar where she’d waited the day she’d arrived. Cranwell had been late, and she’d found a table in the corner, away from the serious business of drinking going on at the bar. She’d surprised herself by ordering a fruit juice. She’d been drinking more since she lost the baby. It dulled the sharp edges of the world, muffling the constant questions and platitudes. She knew the reason well enough, but she hadn’t expected that need to fall away so sharply when she left Alegria.
Now she could feel that old craving tightening around her. The sharp taste of alcohol on her tongue. The slow-creeping haze, blurring sense and memory.
The bar was a scruffy-looking establishment, with peeling window frames and a couple of letters missing from the sign above the door. Inside, it was tidy enough, but there was a layer of dust on the floorboards.
It would be so easy to go around behind the counter, pour a measure of whiskey, and throw it down her throat. But once she started she wouldn’t stop, and there was no one here to p
ick her up off the floor, no one to get her into bed and hold on to her as the world pitched and spun.
She was suddenly bone-tired. Her whole body felt heavy, and she wanted to slide down onto the floor, close her eyes, and never move again.
The whiskey would help.
No.
With a wrench of will, she turned her back on the bar and headed back outside.
The port was sinking into night, the last dregs of sunlight draining away behind the horizon, and the first pinpoints of starlight just breaking through. Soltaire’s twin moons were facing off across the sky, one a bare sliver, the other swelling close to full. They were always out of sync with one another, one waxing as the other waned. They kept to their own corners of the night sky, never meeting, never reaching a consensus.
The port’s distinctive scent of oil and soldered steel was sinking into the background as the chalky smell of night won out. Funny how the darkness smelled the same everywhere. She could have been anywhere in the universe, anywhere at all.
One of the guesthouses was unlocked, and she found an empty room, made up for someone who’d never arrived. It didn’t feel as intrusive as sleeping in someone’s own bed. There were no remnants of human life here.
No dust.
As soon as she lay down, she felt herself tipping toward sleep. The darkness that rose up to meet her was deep and viscous, and she just had time for a flash of fear and a sharp stab of a thought, before the world slid away.
Alone.
CHAPTER
3
Three days passed in a tangle of fear and loneliness, broken by the occasional lighthouse-beacon flash of hope.
Jamie tried to find a routine to stop herself from getting lost in the endless hours. She ate her breakfast at one of the tables in the dining room, everything laid out just so. After washing up she’d head out to the square where Conrad was steadily working the grass down to stubble. She’d linger over the task of grooming him, and then she’d saddle up and ride out.
She drew mental trajectories around the port, mapping out the space around her, just as she mapped out the hours. At every settlement and smallholding, she’d stop to check for signs of life, but everywhere she went she saw the slow, empty drift of the dust.
In the evening she walked through the streets of the port, feeling the tug of temptation every time she passed the bar. By the third night she no longer had the energy to resist.
Inside, she found a bottle of whiskey and a glass and made her way to a table next to one of the windows.
The whiskey sounded a familiar note. It had been her drink of choice after the baby. It was an efficient drink; short and sharp and to the point. She and Daniel had already been fighting about her refusal to discuss the baby. Then they fought about her drinking and her refusal to discuss the baby. He’d laughed once, leaning on the kitchen counter, fingers spread as though he’d been stretched beyond any hope of snapping back. Most people talk too much when they’re drunk. You shut down even more. He rubbed his hand across his eyes. It was my baby too.
She took a deep gulp of whiskey, swirling the liquid around the glass before the second mouthful. The sun was setting, the window just starting to turn opaque. Her reflection looked back at her. She’d never carried much extra weight, but her slightness had always had a strength to it. Now she looked fragile. Her olive complexion didn’t suit pallor. She was drawn and sallow, her face all shadows and hollows.
Zero point zero zero zero one.
At that moment she believed it. She felt like a fragment of a person.
Something shifted behind her reflection.
At first she thought she was mistaken, that it had just been the glass catching her movement, mocking it back to her. But as she leaned closer, her reflection fell away, and the street came into focus.
A man. A woman. Walking toward the bar.
The glass skittered across the table as Jamie’s hand lurched. The man was pointing toward the window. The woman followed the line of his gesture, shielding her eyes with her hand.
A surge of adrenaline took Jamie to her feet, her chair crashing to the floor. Her heart was hurling itself against her ribs as the door creaked open and the man stepped into the bar. He was small statured, in his late sixties or thereabouts, his white hair peppered with remnants of an earlier steel gray. He wore a loose, collarless tunic over cotton trousers. The woman behind him was younger, early fifties perhaps, thin and gaunt with eyes a sharp enough blue to be striking, even from a few meters away. Her hands were tucked under her armpits, as though she had to hold herself together.
Jamie felt an incongruous surge of triumph, as though she’d beaten some unseen opponent in a complex game of chance.
The statistics were wrong.
The corners of the man’s mouth lifted in a cautious smile.
“Hello.”
Jamie tried to reply, but something caught in her throat. She coughed and scrubbed at her face with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry.” She tugged her sleeve up to wipe the tears from her other cheek. “I thought . . .”
The man crossed the room and took her hand. There was something cool and reassuring about his grip. He didn’t hold on too tight, or lean in too close. It was just a touch, just a simple I’m here, we’re here, we made it.
She breathed in hard. “I’m sorry. I’m okay.”
The woman walked over to join them, moving with a jerky, hesitant gait that made her look as though her knees weren’t jointed properly.
“This is Rena,” the man said. “I’m Lowry.”
“Jamie.”
“Jamie,” he repeated. “Are you from here?” A brief smile twitched at his lips. “The settlement, I mean. Not the bar.”
That smile scraped against her emotions, trailing a scratch behind it. How could he be standing there, all smiles and casual introductions, as though they’d met at some party? But there were two of them. They hadn’t had to work their way through the full horror of being alone, maybe the last one alive.
“I was working,” she said. “Out at Calgarth.”
“From the capital, originally?” Lowry tilted his head. “That’s not a local accent.”
“I lived on Alegria for a few years.” Jamie felt a squirm of discomfort at the idea that her life was marked out in the way she spoke. It wasn’t even an accent. It was what was left when you stripped accent and dialect away, leaving neutral vowels and measured beats. It wasn’t the way she’d spoken when she was young. One day she’d woken up and realized she sounded like everyone else around her. She’d felt a little stab of guilt, and it was the memory of that feeling that made her add now, “But I was born on Earth.”
“Long way from Earth,” Lowry said.
“Yes.”
A pause. Jamie reached about for something to break the silence.
“What about you?” The usual courtesies felt brittle and irrelevant. There were more important things to say, surely. Who were they? What did they want from her?
What did she want from them?
But they seemed to be stuck in some social holding pattern: all polite introductions and mundane questions.
“We’re from Longvale,” Lowry said. “Out near the Lhun valley.”
“The monastery.” She’d heard the farmhands joking about what the holy men must get up to alone out there.
Lowry smiled. “No monks. Just a few people in need of a bit of space from the world.”
“Are you . . .” She didn’t know anything about Longvale beyond the jokes and speculation.
“I’m a preacher.” Lowry correctly interpreted her uncertainty. “I travel a fair bit, but I come back every few months. I was on retreat when the virus hit. Like Rena here.”
“Was it just two of you?”
Lowry shook his head. “There were others.” He looked away, his gaze falling
on the whiskey. A faint smile twisted his lips. “Is that for sharing?”
“It could be.” Jamie couldn’t find a smile of her own for the idea of the three of them sitting together, drowning their sorrows. But she could have been drinking alone, drinking until she could drink no more.
She went to the bar for two more tumblers while Lowry and Rena sat down at the table. When she pushed the bottle toward him, Lowry poured a generous measure into each glass.
“There should be a toast.” There was a wry twist to his lips again. “To the human race? Still here despite it all?”
Jamie looked down at her glass. She didn’t want to be the human race. It sounded too big a responsibility. She hadn’t even been able to keep one tiny not-quite person alive inside her.
“To salvation.” Rena’s voice was lower than Jamie had expected from someone of her sparse frame. She was rubbing at her glass with her thumb, a frown furrowed between her brows.
“To salvation, then.” Lowry took a cautious sip, grimacing as the drink hit the back of his throat. “An acquired taste, whiskey. And I never seem to be around it long enough to do the necessary acquiring.”
“Don’t clergymen abstain?” Jamie said.
Lowry grinned. “Most do. Every religion seems to have something that’s apparently the root of humanity’s troubles. Whether it’s wine, women, or song, if they were all right, there’d be nothing left we could touch without damnation.”
“What church do you belong to?” Jamie asked.
“No particular denomination. Longvale has something of an open-door policy.”
There was something bitingly unreal about the situation. Drinking whiskey and talking about faith in an empty bar on an empty planet.
“So what do you do?” Lowry asked.
“I’m a vet,” Jamie said. They were all clinging to the present tense. “I was working with the breeding stock at Calgarth.”
“I’ve heard of it.” Lowry hesitated before asking the inevitable question. “Any others?”