The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

Callan came up behind her. “What is it?”

  “Someone’s here,” Jamie said.

  He glanced around the little room and nodded. “Be careful,” he said, walking back through the archway.

  A memory stirred in Jamie’s mind. That warehouse on Pangaea, not quite silent and not quite still.

  She pushed that thought away and followed Callan into the main room, where a single central aisle ran the whole length of the space, stacks slanting away to both sides. Gracie was already moving down the walkway, skirting around the little clusters of low-slung chairs. As Callan followed her, Jamie moved to the side, taking the walkway that ran along below the high arched windows at the front. You could play an endless game of cat and mouse in here, turning around one end of an aisle just as someone slipped away at the other.

  As though that thought had taken real form, something flickered in the corner of her eye, and she twisted around.

  There was nothing there. Just a trick of light and shadow, no doubt.

  She moved on.

  A sound. She spun around, this time fast enough to catch a flurry of movement at the end of the stack.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Jamie?” Callan’s footsteps came closer.

  Jamie didn’t answer. Moving as quietly as she could, she edged past the end of the shelves to look along the next aisle. Nothing. The next row was the last, and she inched forward to where she could see into the wider space at the end.

  She found herself staring into the frightened eyes of a plump, crop-haired girl in a rainbow-colored skirt and loose caftan top.

  “It’s okay.” Jamie lifted her hand as the girl took a step backward, swiveling her head back and forth as though trying to work out which escape route gave her the best chance. “It’s okay.” She risked a smile. “We’re not dangerous, I promise.”

  “Who . . .” Callan appeared, and the girl started and scuttled across the space to press her back against the shelves that lined the end of the shop.

  Jamie made a sharp gesture at Callan, and he fell still. Gracie appeared beside him.

  “What’s your name?” Jamie asked.

  The girl’s voice was a bare whisper. “Elsie.”

  “I’m Jamie. This is Callan, and Gracie. There are three others.” She smiled again. “Somewhere in here. It’s like a maze, isn’t it? I used to come here years ago. I lived not far from here.” She’d fallen into the soothing tones she used on frightened horses, where what you said mattered less than how you said it. “Do you live near here?”

  There was a long pause, during which Elsie’s gaze continued to dart between them.

  “Here,” she said, eventually. “I live here.”

  “In Alnwick?”

  She gave a half shake of her head. “In the shop.”

  “Is it yours?” Gracie asked. “This place, I mean.”

  Elsie gave another of those quick, nervous jerks of her head. “I used to work here. I came here after . . .” She looked down at her toes, clad in heavy purple boots. “After.”

  “Is there anyone else?” Callan asked.

  “I haven’t seen anyone,” Elsie said. “Not around here, anyway.”

  “But there are others?”

  “I’ve talked to some people.”

  “On the comm?” Callan asked.

  “Online,” Gracie put in. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Elsie nodded.

  “The signal,” Callan said. “That was you?”

  Another nod. “There’s an admin server hub across the tracks,” she said. “I hacked it ages ago. When I was first working here.” She smiled for the first time, a sweet, curved lift of her lips. “I used it to play games when we were quiet.”

  “What are you doing with it now?” Gracie asked.

  “Trying to keep some things running.” Her smile fell away, leaving a worried little crease between her eyebrows. “There’s a linked server network that supports a big chunk of the net. If it’s not managed, the whole thing will start breaking down.”

  “Does that matter?” Callan asked bluntly.

  “Yes, of course it does.” Elsie looked at him as though he’d just asked her what color the sky was. “If it goes down, we may not be able to get it running again.”

  Callan gave her an equally uncomprehending look. “You do know how few people are left, don’t you?”

  “I do know,” Elsie said, a little defensively. “But the network, it’s not just computers.” She screwed up her face, clearly searching for a way to make him understand. “You won’t get it, if you’re not . . . if you’re not into that sort of thing. We built a whole world online.”

  “There’s a whole world out there,” Callan said, nodding toward the window.

  “I don’t like it out there.” Elsie hunched her shoulders. “Not really. I don’t go out. I mean, I didn’t. My dad used to drive me to work and pick me up. It’s too big outside. Too busy.”

  “Not anymore,” Jamie said, gently. “Not busy.”

  Elsie shrugged. “Still big. And the network, it’s important. To lots of people like me. And some of them are still alive out there.”

  “You won’t be able to keep it running forever,” Gracie said. Her tone was softer than usual. “Not on your own. Sooner or later things will start to decay.”

  “I’m not on my own,” Elsie said. “There are others. All over the place. A girl in Japan. A couple of guys in the States. Someone in Delhi. I don’t know whether they’re a man or a woman. They won’t say. I’ve had about twenty contacts, although one or two haven’t been online again. We’re working out how to keep it running long-term.”

  “I don’t get it,” Callan said.

  “You don’t have to get it,” Gracie said. “I don’t get why you crash-landed your ship on a planet you didn’t want to come to in the first place. Not everyone wants the same thing. Not everyone wants to live in the same world.”

  “It’s not a world.” Rena was standing at the end of the row of shelves. “It’s not real.” Her face twisted. “None of it. We’re all looking in, when we should be looking out.”

  “It is real,” Elsie insisted, her cheeks and neck flushing the mottled pink of sunburn. It made her look raw and vulnerable. “People built it. Just like they built this station, or the castle down the road. Why are those things real, just because they’re made of stone, not numbers?”

  “Stones and numbers.” There was a fault line running through Rena’s voice, Jamie suddenly realized. A crack that could gape open at any time and swallow her whole. “Nothing we make is real. Only the void. Only the empty places, where God can speak to us. Only the space between the stars.”

  “Rena.” Lowry appeared at her side. “Come with me. Come outside.”

  “Outside.” Rena repeated the word like an incantation. “That’s where we need to be. Not trapped in here.” An offbeat smile. “I knew you’d understand, Marcus. You just needed to remember.”

  “Rena.” Lowry’s voice was low, shot through with something Jamie hadn’t heard there before. A sort of broken tenderness.

  “Do you remember?” Rena was growing agitated again. “I thought you’d forgotten.”

  “I remember,” Lowry said. “Come outside.”

  Rena gnawed on the edge of her thumb for a moment, and then she gave Lowry another of those unsettling smiles and allowed him to lead her away.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Elsie asked, once their footsteps had faded.

  “Bad case of religion,” Callan replied.

  “I think it’s more than that,” Jamie said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Once we get where we’re going she can sit on that holy rock she keeps going on about, and pray to her heart’s content to the stars. Or to the sea or the funny-shaped stone she found in her shoe. No doubt she’ll find something n
ew to believe in soon enough.”

  “Where are you going?” Elsie asked.

  “Lindisfarne,” Jamie said. “Well, Rena and Lowry are. I’m going to Belsley.”

  Elsie stared at her. “Why?” Then she blinked and looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I mean, it’s beautiful there. I’ve seen pictures. But why there? With everything that’s happened.”

  Jamie glanced around the stacks. “Why here?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just where I wanted to be. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Jamie said. “It’s beautiful, and I lived there once, and I don’t know where else to go.”

  The place that’s left when you’ve figured out all the places you don’t want to be.

  She glanced up at Callan and found him looking back at her. For a moment, they stared at one another, and then Callan looked away, turning to Elsie again.

  “We’re carrying on for another hour or so today,” he said. “Jamie knows somewhere we can spend the night. If you get your things together, we can head straight off.”

  Elsie blinked. “Head off?”

  Callan raised an eyebrow. “Well, you can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “Because you’ll be alone.”

  “I won’t be alone.” She spoke slowly, a hint of strained patience in her tone. “I’ve got all those other people online.”

  “But they’re not real,” Callan said, then made another irritable gesture. “Okay, you know what I mean. They’re not here.”

  “I don’t need them to be here,” Elsie said. “I like being on my own. When I woke up and everyone was gone, I panicked at first, but then people started coming online and asking if anyone else was out there, and then it was okay.” She smiled slightly. “It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that I like them better when they’re a long way away, and I can switch them off if I need to.”

  “But you can’t . . .”

  “Why not?” Gracie spoke, cutting him off. “If everyone were up for doing what other people think they should, this lot would still be stuck on Alegria—and you and I’d be off doing shuttle runs between the colonies.”

  “That’s different.”

  “It’s not,” Gracie replied. “People don’t have to be what other people think they should be.”

  “Fine.” Callan lifted his hands, palms up. “Stay. But what if you change your mind?”

  “I won’t,” Elsie said.

  “Give me the server details,” Gracie said. “When we get where we’re going, we can link up. Keep in touch.”

  “I’d like that.” Elsie gave the engineer a quick smile.

  “Fine,” Callan said again, turning to walk back toward the shop entrance.

  “Where’s your server link?” Gracie asked, then headed off in the direction Elsie indicated.

  Jamie stayed.

  “Are you sure?”

  Elsie nodded. “I couldn’t come with you.”

  “You could try,” Jamie said.

  “I don’t want to try,” Elsie said. “This is okay, what I’ve got here. I don’t need lots of people around. No one ever seemed to get that. They thought I was weird. They kept trying to make me join in. Now I can be on my own, and there’ll be no one to make me feel bad about it.”

  “What will you do?” Jamie asked.

  “Run the network.” Elsie smiled. “Be in charge. Make it whatever I want it to be. And I’ve got all these books, and I’ve been writing, drawing. It’s stupid, I know, but I’ve been making a comic, telling the story of what’s happened.” She gave Jamie a quick, shy glance. “Maybe you’ll all be in it.”

  “You can’t do all that forever.”

  Elsie shrugged again. “What else should I be doing?”

  “What about food?” Jamie said. “We’ll all have to start thinking about the future.”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  Still Jamie lingered, unsatisfied. “But what about . . . other things?” she said. “You’re human. Won’t you need . . .”

  “Sex?” Elsie broke in with an unexpected flash of a grin. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  Jamie nodded, a little embarrassed.

  Elsie sobered. “I tried it once. I didn’t like it. Maybe that was just because I didn’t really like him. It was just another of those things I thought I should do because everyone else did it. But there’s no everyone else anymore, is there? And this is okay. Really.”

  Jamie nodded slowly. This was something she ought to understand. All those times when she’d wished people would take a step back from her. But for Elsie, a step back wasn’t enough. Jamie had always felt like the world was a jigsaw puzzle, and she was the broken piece. But maybe everyone felt like that. Maybe they were all pieces of different puzzles, trying to force their curves and edges together to make a picture that just wasn’t there.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you know where we’ll be if you need us.”

  Elsie nodded. “And you can stop by. If you’re ever near.”

  “You won’t mind?” Jamie said.

  “Every now and again,” Elsie replied. “Every now and again is okay.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  Elsie didn’t come out to see them off. They left her in the little room at the front of the shop, where she’d gone to show Finn her mural. He’d studied it for a few moments, and then he’d opened his bag and taken out his pencils, glancing at Elsie for permission. When she nodded he leaned in close, elbows pressed against the wall, brow creased in concentration. After a minute or two he stood up straight and returned his pencils to his bag before walking away, not looking back. When Jamie went to look she found that he’d drawn Mila in the town square, the girl’s face sketched out in clear and confident lines, a wistful smile playing about her lips.

  As they walked away from the shop, Callan kept looking back, as though he expected Elsie to run after them. Stop, I’ve made a mistake.

  “She’ll be fine.” There was a trace of impatience in Gracie’s voice.

  Callan shrugged and picked up his pace, joining Jamie at the front of the group. Finn had taken over leading the horse and was taking the responsibility seriously, judging from the little furrow of concentration between his eyebrows.

  Jamie glanced sideways at Callan, who had his hand resting on his side again.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded. “Might need a check-over when we get where we’re going. Where are we going, by the way?”

  “Place called Walton Hall. I used to go there as a child. It had a tea room, and you could walk in the gardens. There was a room with all these strange things. A fish that looked like a porcupine, and a scale model of the Taj Mahal. I used to imagine getting locked in there at night and having to sleep in one of the four-poster beds.” He was studying her face, and she looked away. “Daft, I know.”

  “Not daft. Doesn’t everyone do that? Imagine things they can’t have?”

  “It looks like I can have it,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. “For one night, at least.”

  “There you go. End of the world’s not all bad. At least there are four-poster beds.”

  She was seized by a sudden image: Callan sliding off his shirt and slipping in beside her, behind the closed drapes of one of those ridiculous canopied beds.

  She turned away, looking out across the fields, in case he saw the thought sketched across her face.

  • • •

  It took them nearly two hours to reach Walton. Lowry had been walking more slowly since leaving Alnwick, and Rena seemed to be flagging too. She had a glazed look on her face and didn’t respond when Lowry spoke to her.

  They crossed a humpback bridge over a little river, heading for the four stone dragon heads that glared out ac
ross the road, marking the edge of the Walton estate. The square-fronted hall, with its ranks of floor-to-ceiling windows, sat at the end of the main drive, the woods forming a ragged mass behind it, dark and formless in the glare of the sinking sun.

  “There’s a lawn at the side,” Jamie said. “We can let the horse graze there.”

  “What’s his name?” Finn said, suddenly.

  “Who?”

  Finn jerked his hand toward the horse. “Him.”

  Jamie smiled at him. “Why don’t you choose one?”

  Finn frowned. “What are horses’ names?”

  “Anything you like.”

  The frown deepened.

  Jamie was about to tell him it wasn’t something to worry over, but at that moment the hall’s heavy wooden doors swung open and an elderly man stepped out. There was something wrong about him, and Jamie squinted for a moment before she realized that he was dressed like something out of an old period film. A high-collared coat with long tails, and breeches tucked into boots.

  As Callan moved forward, the man held up a polished cane with a silver top.

  “Can I trouble you to stay where you are and identify yourselves, please?” He enunciated each word with an unnatural precision.

  “Callan Jacobs. My ship crash-landed half a day’s walk from here,” Callan said. “These others are my engineer and survivors from two of the colonies. They’ve been trying to reach Earth.”

  “It would appear they’ve succeeded,” the man said, lifting a monocle to his eye and peering at each of them in turn. “We did see your ship pass over, but we weren’t aware you had experienced such an unfortunate ending to your journey. Can I ask your intended destination?”

  “Lindisfarne.” Jamie stepped forward.

  “And you are?”

  “Jamie.”

  The man studied her for a moment before walking down the steps, hand outstretched.

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance.” He turned to look at the rest of the group. “I’m Bernard Hendry.”

  “Are you alone here?” Callan asked.

  “Oh, good gracious, no,” the man said, smiling. “There’s a good little group of us.”