It was horrible.
“Are you okay?” It was Janey’s voice.
I turned my head, trying to look anywhere except at Mr Fleet, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something brilliant, blazing with white light like a captive star. As it came fully into view, I saw it had a human shape - a shape I knew. “Oh,” I said, and the glory of revelation drove everything else from my mind for an instant. “Oh, Janey! You’re beautiful!”
“Shut up,” she said, and snatched the glasses off my face, but I glimpsed a pleased grin as I stood blinking in confusion. Then the grin vanished, and Janey jerked her head just a tiny fraction in the direction of Mr Fleet. “Did you see?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get away from here.”
We fled.
Mr Fleet was gone less than six months later. Nobody said anything to us kids at the school, but there was ... talk. Two of the older boys also left the school, and didn’t come back. No explanation was given.
I didn’t play football at school that year.
~ * ~
Where do you get all your ideas?
That’s the question they always ask. You were wondering, right?
It’s easy. There’s a place in my head where I can go. A part of me that remembers what it used to be like. Hiding under the covers, breathless with fear of the long-armed thing muttering and grumbling from within the shadow in the bedroom cupboard. Riding upon a wild unicorn beneath a beneath a snapping, soaring banner of brilliant silk while trumpets called for daring and battle and courage. Blazing between the stars on a column of searing atomic fire as the missiles and the death-rays tore the very fabric of space all around.
I remember. That’s where the ideas come from. I close my eyes and I ignore the television and the Internet and the stereo and the calendar and the bills and the letters and the cellphone, and I remember. It’s not the same as when Janey lived across the gully and we could be there, when we lived in those bright and glorious worlds, but at least I can remember.
So this is what I do: I gather the brightest jewels of memory, and polish them until they gleam and then I give them to you. But no matter how carefully I choose them, how diligently I polish and shape them, they’re still only broken fragments of fading memories. I’m sorry. I wish I could give you more, but I’m lucky to have anything at all.
~ * ~
After a while, I somehow got the trick of it, and a few of my inventions started to work as well. By that time, our roles had solidified, and the games we played had rules, of a kind. I’d developed an alternate persona named Lincoln Steele. Pretty often he was an officer: Commander Steele. He was everything a hero ought to be. He was smart, tough, courageous, superbly loyal; and he was dashingly handsome too.
Link Steele wasn’t a leader, though. He was the brawny, rugged and reliable helpmeet to the indomitable Captain Janey, whose quick wit and daring got the pair of them into and out of trouble on half the worlds of the galaxy. Armed with whatever unlikely and outlandish devices we happened to have invented lately, we vanquished evil empires and vile aliens, rescued countless prisoners and discovered priceless treasures hidden inside fiendishly booby-trapped labyrinths.
At the end of the gully between our two houses was a kind of paradise for kids like Janey and me. Nowadays it wouldn’t be tolerated. An unofficial junkpile full of abandoned cars and forgotten industrial relics is no place for modern kids to play. Our headquarters proper was a kind of cave made by two granite boulders that leaned together next to the tiny creek, and we had a host of hiding places - like the roots of a giant fallen eucalypt that concealed a pit which could only be seen if you practically on top of it - but it was the junkpile that provided us with the raw material of a thousand adventures.
Day after day, Janey and I remade the world to suit ourselves.
I think the best invention of all was mine: the Mental Telejectors that I made from two motorcycle helmets and a ferocious array of electronics from an old television set. The Mental Telejectors let Janey and I project our minds across space and time, even between the universes, into the minds of other creatures and people wherever we wanted to go. We helped Batman capture the Joker in Gotham city. We raided alongside Robin Hood with the other Merry Men. We even tried to give poor, doomed King Arthur a fighting chance at that last battle against Mordred, but the temptation to play out heroic death scenes of our own kept getting in the way.
It was brilliant.
The summer I built the Mental Telejectors, I turned ten years old, and Janey came to my birthday party. She didn’t stay very long, because she never really got along with most of the kids I knew, but she gave me one of those ID bracelets that were popular back then.
“See?” she said, when I unwrapped it and put it on my wrist. “It’s engraved and everything.”
I turned it over. “Commander Lincoln Steele,” I read. “From Captain Janey.” I looked at her. “It’s fantastic!”
“It’s stainless,” she said, tapping it with a bitten fingernail. “Solid steel. It’ll never rust.”
“Solid steel,” I said, liking the sound of it. Then I laughed.
Janey got the joke, and giggled. “Solid Steele,” she echoed, and rapped at her temple with one knuckle. It became our private salute, and a catchphrase that lasted the rest of the summer between us. It was the greatest summer of my whole life, and nothing I’ve ever done or been since has been as good.
It was the last summer I ever spent with Janey.
~ * ~
I think it must be the same with everyone who writes these stories. I think we all remember, and we all know what we’ve lost. Why else would you keep seeing the same story again and again; different names, different authors, but the same sad, lonely idea?
It’s that story about growing up and losing the path into the magic kingdom, and maybe catching a glimpse of it again as an adult, way too late to do more than wish and wonder. It comes in many shapes and sizes, but it’s always the same: a metaphorical story about the loss of innocence, the passage into adulthood, and the end of magic.
Or maybe not so metaphorical. How would I know what others remember, after all? They’re beautiful stories, in any case. Kelly Link, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, H G Wells - even J M Barrie and his Peter Pan: the same story in a thousand guises.
They’re great stories. They’re much better than mine. That’s why I’m telling you Janey’s story instead.
~ * ~
Janey was working on a surprise. Spurred by my success with the Mental Telejectors, she was devising a special invention, one that she said would take us farther than we’d ever gone before. She put in a lot of work on it, and dropped so many hints that giving her my bad news was almost impossible to bear.
“I have to go away on a music camp,” I told her one evening, after I found my courage. We were perched in the branches of the big fallen eucalypt. “For a month.”
Janey’s face fell. “A whole month? But you don’t even like music!”
“I do, kind of,” I said. “Not a whole month’s worth, but I do like playing the flute. I don’t want to go, though. It’s my parents.” I was trying not to tell her: my parents said they were worried about me. They felt I was spending too much time playing make-believe games with “that little Clayforth girl”. She was nice, they said - but they said a lot of other things too.
“When do you have to go?” She swung her bare feet back and forth, brushing against the tree while we talked. There was a smooth patch on the trunk, where countless previous conversations had worn the bark clean through.
“Saturday,” I told her. “They’re making me go Saturday.”
“A whole month,” she said again. Then she brightened. “Hey, Steele! I’ve got a better idea. If I work really hard, I can finish the new invention before Saturday. Then we can use it to get away!”
“Get away?” The thought hadn’t occurred to me. Of course Janey and I had talked about run
ning away from home. What kid didn’t? We’d even half-heartedly tried it a couple of times. “How will it help us do that? Won’t we just come back, the way we always do?”
She grinned at me, and shook her shaggy mane of sunstreaked blonde. “Not this time. This is way, way better than the Mental Telejectors, Steele. I wasn’t going to tell you until it was ready, but this counts as an emergency. I’ve been building a space-ship!”
And so, of course, in the failing evening light we had to go down to where the gully opened out and led into the abandoned industrial space on the next block over, and there amidst the old cars and the mysterious, rusting hulks was the Blazer, for so Janey had named it.
“It’s not finished yet,” she warned me, as we clambered over the hull. “It’s not far off, though. It runs on fusion power from the hydrogen in water. It’s got a gravity drive for planet-hopping, and a null-space drive that will let it go hundreds of time faster than light.”
I slid my hand admiringly over the curved metal. “What about defenses?”
“I guessed you’d ask,” she said. “If the Monoclates try anything on the Blazer, they’re going to get a nasty shock. Meson shields!”
The Monoclates were our arch-enemies, fiendish aliens from Algol with an impregnable battle-fortress lodged deep within the forbidding, starless wastes of the Galactic Rift. They opposed everything that we stood for, and tried to destroy us at every turn.
“What about guns?” I had to ask.
“Quark Cannons,” said Janey. “With computer targeting, like in Star Wars.” She touched the Blazer nervously. “So what do you think?”
“Pretty slick,” I said. “The Monoclates won’t know what hit them.”
“So you’ll come with me? You’ll help me finish building the Blazer so we can go?’
I can still see her now if I try: slim and strong, with the last of the sunset shining from her eyes as she looked at me. I knew what she wanted me to say, and part of me wanted nothing more, but there was another part of me that thought of my parents and said: It’s only a month.
I tried to explain it to her. It wasn’t easy, without using words like ‘strange’ and ‘make-believe’, and I floundered when I tried to tell her about my parents’ ideas.
Janey saved me the trouble. She put her hand over my mouth, and shook her head. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I get it. Your parents are goons, but you’re going off to this camp anyhow because it will make them happy and then they’ll leave us alone. I still think you’re crazy. I still think we should just take the Blazer and go. But I can’t make you do it, and even if I did it wouldn’t work out right. You take that month. I’ll get the Blazer ready. When you get back, we’ll go for a trip you’ll never forget.”
“Solid Steele?” I said.
Janey tapped her temple with one knuckle. “Solid Steele,” she replied.
When I returned, a month later, they told me Janey was three weeks dead.
~ * ~
The story could end there. It doesn’t. There’s more to come, but before that, you have to make up your mind. What kind of a story are you reading? Did all these things really happen, or am I simply revisiting the imaginary realms of childhood? Did Janey’s X-Ray glasses reveal Mr Fleet’s true nature, or did they just allow me to accept the messages from my own subconscious about his behaviour? You have to choose. It’s Janey’s story, but you are reading it, recreating it in your head as you go.
If it was a story I’d made up, then Janey would be dead in the bushfire she started, playing with her ‘spaceship’ built from an abandoned industrial dryer at the bottom of the gully. In a story like that, I would come home after the music camp and discover my world shattered. There would be grief, and implications of guilt, and you would have to decide whether my storytelling was an act of love, reconstructing and honouring the lost, marvelous world of childhood - or an act of atonement, admitting my own part in Janey’s destruction, acknowledging that my breach of our loyalty to one another meant that I wasn’t there at the critical juncture, when I might have saved her life.
I didn’t make the story up. It’s not about those things. What it’s really about is for you to decide. It happened like this ...
~ * ~
I never believed what they told me about the bushfire. Even though the gully was a blackened ruin, and Janey’s house was gone - the old wooden place went up like kindling, so hot that nothing was found of Janey or her grandparents - I never for a moment believed that Janey started the fire.
I couldn’t even believe she was dead. Sometimes I tried to imagine being dead. Being nothing. It didn’t work. I couldn’t even make myself understand the idea of not being. How could Janey not be?
Time passed. The gully turned green again, and the council cleaned up the junk-pile, dragging away all the old machinery. Then they landscaped the whole place, and called it a ‘green space’. Every now and again I used to go down to the creek. I’d walk down to our cave and look around. Sometimes I’d go to the big fallen eucalypt, and check the space under the roots. Just in case.
I never found anything. After a while, I mostly stopped looking. Soccer and music took up a lot of my time. So did riding around on my bicycle with my school friends. I started writing, too.
There was one night though, just before I turned thirteen. It was hot and still. The moon was bright as a skull, and I squirmed, itching, against my sheets. Then there was a tap at my window - just a single, sharp noise, like someone had thrown a gum-nut against the glass. I lay still, listening.
It happened again.
I got out of bed, and opened the window. Outside, someone stood in the shadow of the spreading poinciana. Someone small, and slender, with blonde hair cut ragged at her shoulders.
“Steele!” It was a stage whisper, clear and sharp. “Hey, Steele!”
“Janey?” I said, and rubbed my eyes. The idea that I might be dreaming occurred to me. “Is that you, Janey?”
“Who else? Hey, are you gonna come down?” The figure in the shadows moved. It had arms, and legs. I wasn’t dreaming.
I looked back over my shoulder. The light from the TV showed under my door. My parents were still awake. “I can’t,” I said. “Where have you been? They said ...”
“What would they know?” she answered, and stepped into the moonlight, real and solid and just the same - exactly the same, I swear - as she was when I last saw her, two years before. “It was the Monoclates. They detected my test run of the Blazer’s space drive and launched an attack. I barely had time to get away. I came back for you, Steele. I need your help.”
“My help? What can I do?” Link Steele, reporting for duty. Same as ever.
“They’re too fast for the automatic weapons on the Blazer, Steele. I need someone to operate the Quark Cannons while I fly her through the Rift.” She paused, and shifted her weight. “You could do it. You’re a really good shot.”
“I- “ My voice seized up as I began to take in what was happening. “No,” I said finally. “Once you get through the Rift, you’ll still have to face them hand to hand. You need something smaller than the Quark Cannons. Why don’t you come home for a while? We can work on it together.”
She flashed that quicksilver smile I knew so well. “Hey, Steele, this isn’t home. You know that. Home is out there, flying among the stars. Get out of bed and come with me!”
“I can’t.” The words were out of my mouth before I knew it, and even in the uncertain moonlight, the look on her face - half disappointment, half sadness - cut me to the bone. “You could come back, though,” I said hopefully, desperately. “You could stay, just for a while.”
She turned then, as if to go, but hesitated.
“Tomorrow night, then,” I said. “Just tomorrow night. I promise if you come tomorrow night, I’ll have something better than a Quark Cannon for you.”
Janey tilted her head. The motion was so familiar that it hurt, inside, to watch. “You mean it?”
“Solid Steele,” I said,
and touched my knuckle to my temple.
“Okay,” she said over her shoulder as she trotted into the dark. “I’ll come back.”
Why didn’t I go?
I’ve asked myself that question so often it’s become meaningless. Boil it down: I was afraid. After more than two years, I couldn’t find the courage, even with Janey standing there in the moonlight in front of me. I made up a thousand excuses, but the truth is that I was afraid.
Not of Janey. Never of Janey.
I wasn’t even afraid of dying. In the end, I think I was afraid that I just wasn’t big enough inside, where it counted. I might have been solid Steele, but it was Janey who glowed with the inner fires of a star. She belonged out there.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 9