The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  When Jamie shook her head, he pressed his lips together, dipping his chin, as though offering a silent prayer.

  Jamie had never been religious, but she’d spent a few of her formative years at a Catholic school. Her mother’s faith came and went in broken bursts, but she’d cared enough to fight her ex-husband over Jamie’s schooling. Or maybe it was just the fight she cared about. Lowry seemed very different from her school’s dogmatic visiting priests. He had a calm and easy manner that was apparent, even at a first meeting as fraught and unreal as this one.

  She glanced at Rena. There was a fidgety intensity about the older woman. Her hands shifted constantly on her glass, occasionally going up to tug at some stray strand of graying hair, or to the corner of her mouth so that she could chew on the edge of a blunted nail.

  Rena looked up suddenly, catching her staring. Jamie stumbled into a clumsy question. “What about you? What do you do?”

  The other woman started to put her glass down, then seemed to change her mind, her fingers tightening around it. “I was a research scientist. On Alegria. I was . . . I left.” She stopped abruptly, lifting her chin to give Jamie a look with a hint of challenge in it. “Why are you here?” Her gaze flickered. “I mean . . . all the way out here in the colonies.”

  “A bit of space.” Jamie glanced at Lowry. “Like you said.”

  “Plenty of that out here.” Lowry hesitated. “Have you lost anyone?”

  The moment stretched out. “Yes,” Jamie said, and then felt guilty because it wasn’t true. Not in the way he’d meant. Her baby had been gone long before everyone else, but it didn’t seem right to tell them that. There were too few of them to start diversifying their tragedies. And it didn’t matter. He was still gone.

  There was a stark intimacy to the scene: the empty bar, and the three of them huddled around the little table, with the darkness pressing against the window.

  “What was your job on the capital?” Lowry changed the subject. “Not many cows on Alegria.”

  “Research.” She glanced at Rena, with the faint thought of drawing her into the conversation, but the other woman was looking at Jamie’s left hand, where her travel ID circled her ring finger.

  “That’s an upper-echelon mark,” she said. “Why would you need to come out here for a job?”

  Jamie dropped her hand to her lap. She hated the way people always looked for your mark when they first met you. Sometimes it was just a quick flick of a glance, buried in the middle of the conversation. Sometimes it was more blatant. It was an indelible marker of what your life meant to everyone else.

  And more than that. It was a reminder of all those protests and lost causes from Jamie’s youth on Earth. She’d done all the right things. She’d joined the campaigns against the resurrection of the old forced emigration programs. She’d been in the marches, protested against the casual ousting of whole communities from the planet just because they’d suddenly been deemed undesirable in the greater scheme of things. When she’d left Earth it had been on one of the protest ships. If they have to go, then we go too; that had been their tagline. And then the measures had been forced through anyway. First the emigration programs, then the mandatory ID marking, and somehow she’d found herself turning up to register, the same as everyone else.

  She’d seen a couple of other old protesters at the ID office, and they’d avoided one another’s eyes, concentrating on their forms. No one in authority ever admitted that the data on those forms was used to sift the population into groups, and there was no acknowledgment that the placement of the ID mark had any meaning. But everyone knew. After the procedure, the sting of the lasering process already fading, Jamie felt as though a piece of her had been scuffed away. It was official. She was part of the upper echelon, a member of the strata of society that had forced people from their homes and burned their value into their skin.

  Rena was rubbing the edge of her shirt between the fingers of her left hand, her own upper-echelon mark visible. Lowry’s was in the same place, a little worn, but functional enough.

  “We were on retreat,” Rena said, defensively, when she saw where Jamie was looking.

  “And I was on a cattle station.” Jamie couldn’t keep the sharp edge out of her voice, and Rena shifted in her seat, her frown deepening.

  Jamie turned back to Lowry. “How long were you at Longvale before the virus?”

  “A couple of months,” he said. “Rena only came in, what, a month ago?”

  “Five weeks.”

  “That long?” Lowry said. “I suppose it was. You got in about a week after we spoke on the long-range.”

  “You knew one another before?” Jamie said.

  “We worked at the same hospital a few years ago.” Jamie noticed that Lowry glanced at Rena before answering. “I was the visiting priest.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  “I was. I’m a little less strict these days.”

  Rena made a sharp gesture. “All beliefs come back to the one God. It’s all the same in the end.”

  “The end?” Jamie felt a kick of blurred and offbeat anger. “We seem to be there. But I’m not seeing trumpets and the gates of heaven opening up.”

  Rena glared at Jamie, and Lowry put his hand on her arm.

  “There are different types of salvation,” he said, diplomatically.

  “No.” Rena shook him off. “There’s only one. In the voice of God, speaking through the space between the stars.”

  The words had the resonance of a prayer, and Jamie almost expected Lowry to dip his head and say Amen. How had they moved so swiftly from What do you do? to What do you believe?

  Rena looked down, a tear glistening on her cheek, and Jamie felt a pang of something that might have been guilt. Just three of them here, and she still couldn’t find a gentle word for another broken soul.

  She looked around the bar, feeling for a change of subject. “Do you think it’s like this everywhere?” Something was nagging at her. Something about the statistics. “It’s odd,” she went on, slowly. “Most pathogens want to survive.”

  “Want?” Rena interrupted, her tone suddenly brusque. “They don’t want. They just are. You’re a scientist. You know that.”

  “Want,” Jamie said. “Need. Everything pushes toward life. What’s the point of a parasite that destroys its host?”

  “That’s what viruses do,” Rena said. “They kill.”

  “But most don’t burn their host away to nothing.”

  “Things happen.” Rena was fidgeting again, tugging at her cuff. “Sometimes things go wrong.”

  Silence settled over the table once again. It was Lowry who broke it, turning to Rena. “Do you think we should check the signal?”

  “I set an alert. If anyone answers we’ll hear it over the speakers.”

  “An alert?” Jamie said.

  “We set up a distress signal,” Lowry said. “It goes off every three minutes. If anyone comes within range they should pick it up.”

  “The system was turned off.”

  Rena shook her head. “Not in the booth. The main unit in the office. The public system hasn’t got the power to reach farther than the first relay.” She was brisker, more focused when she talked about practical things.

  “Do you think there’s anyone out there?” Jamie said.

  “We listened on the airwaves for a while,” Lowry said. “There were some traces. Nothing close, but it sounded like people trying to get through to someone.”

  “People will come.” Rena pressed her palms together, like a child saying her prayers. “Then it will begin.”

  “What will?” Jamie said.

  “The new world.” Rena looked surprised that Jamie had to ask. “We’ll start again. Build something better.” Certainty blazed briefly on her face, then faded, leaving her looking lost and unsure. “We’ll start again,” she r
epeated. “That’s what God wants us to do.”

  It sounded so simple. The world they’d known, over and done. Time to start again, and get it right this time. There was an attraction to the idea, like a book of fairy tales, with every The End followed by a turn of the page and another Once upon a time.

  But even if there were other survivors, there were vast swaths of empty space between them. What if the three of them had to find a way to start again right here?

  It felt like all that space was contracting around her, the emptiness of it pressing close like a second skin.

  “Hey.” Lowry touched her arm. “It’s all right.”

  She shook her head, wrapping her arms tightly across her body. Her breath was growing shorter, more labored.

  “Jamie?” Lowry’s voice sounded farther away.

  She couldn’t feel her fingers. She couldn’t feel anything. Perhaps she wasn’t here at all. Perhaps she was still lying in those musty sheets out at Calgarth, wandering the tangled paths of her final, failing dreams.

  “Jamie.” Lowry reached for her shoulder. Somehow she shoved herself back from the table, her chair scraping on the floor. It was vitally important that he didn’t touch her, although she couldn’t work out why. Her thoughts were splintering. Lowry’s voice stretched out, vanishing into a rush of white noise, like water or static. Her last coherent thought was that he’d never been there at all, that the math had been right all along.

  Zero point zero zero zero one.

  CHAPTER

  4

  When Jamie came back to herself, she was lying on the floor with Lowry sitting next to her, holding her hand. As she tried to push herself up, he put a soothing hand on her back.

  “Steady.”

  Rena appeared, looming over Jamie. Water slopped over her wrist as she shoved a glass toward Jamie’s lips.

  Jamie twisted her head away. There were too many people trying to occupy the same space. All this empty world, and here they were, crowded together on a foot-square bit of floor.

  She sat up. Lowry shuffled back, but Rena was still hovering, and Jamie took the glass, forestalling another attempt. It had the flat taste of water sitting too long in the pipes, but it eased her dry mouth and she drained the glass in a few gulps.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll get some more.” Rena seized the glass and scuttled off. When she returned, she handed it over with the first smile Jamie had seen from her: just an uncertain stretch of her lips that made her look out of practice.

  Jamie looked at Lowry. “Sorry. I’m not sure what happened.”

  “Nothing to apologize for. We’re all going to have our moments, I’m sure.”

  “So what now?” The stilted calm of their odd meeting was broken, and she felt cramped and restless. She climbed slowly to her feet.

  “We’ve got the signal set up,” Lowry said. “Not much else we can do. We’ll have to set ourselves up somewhere while we wait.”

  And if the skies stayed empty? How long would it be before they stopped calling it waiting and found some other name for it?

  “Let’s say someone does come,” she said. “What then? Where do you want to go? The capital?”

  “Where else would we go?” Rena said.

  “Earth,” Jamie said. “I need to get to Earth.”

  “Do you have people there?” Lowry asked.

  “I’m from there.” Jamie looked away, not quite sure why she wasn’t telling them about the blank message, about Daniel. Maybe it was because she could picture the precise shape of the look Lowry would give her before gently dismantling her reasons for thinking Daniel might be alive.

  “Whereabouts on Earth?” Lowry asked.

  “England. The Northumbrian coast.”

  He tilted his head, looking interested. “I spent some time on Lindisfarne. Holy Island. Whichever name you prefer. I was thinking recently that I might go back there sometime.” He frowned, pinching at his forehead. “Or maybe I dreamed it. When I was sick. It’s been in my head for some reason. Where did you live?”

  “Belsley. Just down the coast.”

  “I know it,” Lowry said. “Beautiful place.”

  Jamie was assailed by an image so crystal clear that she might have been looking at a photo. A great, sweeping curve of pale sand, brushed by a blue-green sea.

  Home, she thought, feeling her way around the shape of that word.

  And then, a heartbeat later, Daniel.

  “Why don’t we go too?” Rena’s face was suddenly alight. “We could go back there.”

  Back?

  “Earth’s a long way away,” Lowry said. “And we’ve no idea what state things are in. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “But it’s a sign.” Rena stepped close, clutching his arm. “Three of us here, connected by the same place.”

  Her expression was fervent, but with an edge of something that looked almost like desperation.

  You hadn’t even thought of it till just a moment ago, Jamie thought, with a flash of irritation.

  Lowry shook his head. “I was only there for a while, and it was a long time ago.”

  “It’s a place of pilgrimage,” Rena pressed. “We could start over.”

  Lowry gave her a searching look. There was a wary tenderness about his expression.

  “A new start,” Rena said again, her voice low, and with a hint of a tremor.

  Lowry rubbed his face, then gave a faint smile. “Well, we have to go somewhere, I suppose.”

  Jamie found herself wanting to scream at them. Here they were, trapped on a deserted planet, playing at lives they couldn’t have. That thought scraped at her like sandpaper, and some of that roughness found its way into her voice. “What now?”

  “How long have you been here?” Lowry asked.

  “Three days.”

  “No sign of anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “There could be others,” Rena said. “There are other settlements.”

  “I’d imagine any survivors would make their way to the port,” Lowry said. “We’re probably best off waiting here.”

  There it was again. Waiting. Of course there’s someone out there. Of course someone will come.

  That was what waiting meant. You waited for. You waited till.

  Jamie made herself speak in a level tone. “It’s getting late. I’ve been staying at the guesthouse on the square. Where are you going to sleep?”

  Surely she should be urging them to take some of the other rooms there. Wouldn’t that be the normal thing to do? But the guesthouse suddenly felt hers in a way it hadn’t before.

  “We left our things at a place on the edge of town,” Lowry said. “We can go back there tonight and move closer tomorrow.”

  There was another pause, as though none of them quite knew how to bring the encounter to a close. Once again, it was Lowry who broke the silence, his tone brisk. “We’ll come by the guesthouse in the morning, shall we?”

  “Okay.” Jamie forced a smile. “Well, good night.”

  “Good night.” Lowry reached for her hand. “I’m glad we found you.”

  “Yes.” She should have smiled again, but when she lifted the corners of her mouth it felt more like a grimace. “Yes.”

  She cleared away the glasses, lingering over the task until Rena and Lowry had gone. She could feel the whiskey as a sluggish flow in her veins. It had dulled the edges of her feelings, like it had after the baby. Tomorrow she’d feel like she should.

  She wasn’t alone. They had the signal. They had hope.

  But there was a cold feeling in her lungs. She’d been so focused on finding other survivors that she’d given no thought to what came after.

  Outside, the port was silent, as though there’d never been anyone else there at all. She was tired. It will be different tomorrow, she
thought, as she went inside the guesthouse and closed the door.

  • • •

  Another day passed, and another. Jamie still rode out for most of the daylight hours, ranging farther each time. The first time after finding Rena and Lowry, she had been going for an hour or so when she was seized by an overwhelming urge to turn around, ride back to town, and check that they hadn’t disappeared. She felt exposed, like a child who’d wandered too far from its parents. When she got back later, the memory of that feeling made her gentler toward them, and she answered Rena patiently when the older woman quizzed her about her search, the questions framed within semicoherent ramblings about God and his purpose.

  In the evenings they ate together, sitting out on the guesthouse’s little terrace. Lowry was a reasonable cook and he took on most of the culinary duties.

  “I’m too old to be riding out,” he said, waving away Jamie’s offers of help. “But I can at least have dinner ready when the search party gets back.”

  On the fourth night, Jamie arrived back to find that Lowry had gone to extra effort, setting the table with the guesthouse’s best dishes and livening up their usual simple fare with a few fancy bits from the store.

  “A celebration,” he said. “No, that’s not the right word for it. Just a recognition. That we’re here together.”

  When they sat down for dinner, the shadows were just beginning to stretch out. As Lowry picked up the serving spoon, a siren shrilled across the settlement.

  Rena started to her feet, hands flying up to her mouth. Then she turned, stumbling over her fallen chair, and set off across the square at a lopsided run.

  The sound of the siren punched into Jamie’s chest, almost knocking the breath out of her. There had been so little noise over the last days. It felt as though she’d lost the ability to process it, like a lifelong vegetarian who can no longer digest meat. She should have known what it meant, but right then it was just noise noise noise.

  Lowry was saying something, but it took a moment for her mind to override the distorted blare of the siren.

  “. . . the signal. The comms station.”