The Rift

by Nina Allan

  Of the four planets in the Suur System capable of supporting life, only Tristane and Dea are known to be inhabited. Dea is much smaller than Tristane. The planet began to be colonised shortly after the founding of the third praesidium. For many centuries, trade and cultural links between Tristane and Dea were strong and mutually beneficial, with a regular shuttle service between the two planets as well as widely accessible public radio and later digital communications networks. Following the establishment of the sixth praesidium and in the wake of the armed conflict between Argene and Julippa, all private and commercial navigation between Tristane and Dea was suspended. The technology that enabled it became corrupted, and was eventually lost.

  “They said it was the war that stopped the shuttle flights,” Cally explained. “There was a fuel shortage. Prices went sky high and never came down again. That’s what they taught us in school anyway. The reasons seemed stupid to me. I’ve never been able to understand why people aren’t more curious about it.”

  Urfe Station itself continued to function for another hundred years. Although messages could be and were still passed between the two planets, bumping their way across the sky on the backs of radio waves like children speeding down a snowy hillside on a toboggan, the station’s function and importance was gradually eroded. What had once been a hub of interplanetary communications eventually became a oneway broadcasting studio for light entertainment programmes, recorded concerts and the occasional radio play.

  By the time Urfe Station closed for good, even the entertainment broadcasts had mostly ceased.

  “It was as if they’d stopped listening,” Cally said. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  “Not if there was no one there to listen,” I said.

  Cally frowned. “That’s what you said before,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean, though. How could all those people just disappear?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. How could I remember something I’d never said?

  There was something, though. A shard of terror, lodged in my mind, a splinter of knowing.

  Like a white van.

  Like a black hole.

  Things I didn’t want to think about, or even acknowledge.

  * * *

  If you stand outside in the darkness and look up at the sky, Dea is barely visible. She is closer to the sun than Tristane, but she is still far away. You need a telescope to see her in any detail. Cally showed me some old nitrate prints of the Vester Wall on Dea, and the great waterfall at Jerrefus. The Vester Wall is a natural rock formation that extends across the planet’s surface for two thousand miles. Scientific textbooks claim that Dea is a more dynamic planet than Tristane, which means that volcanic activity on Dea during her prehistoric era was more violent and caused more far-reaching changes, both to the planet’s atmosphere and to her surface terrain.

  Dea’s landscape is more diverse and more extreme as a result.

  “It’s supposed to be beautiful there,” Cally said. “The mountains especially.”

  She said something about a new government initiative, a lobby group that had been set up with the aim of reinitiating contact and eventually travel links with Dea, but it’s not something anyone ever talks about.

  Not openly, anyway.

  It’s as if everyone knows, deep down, that there’s something to hide.

  * * *

  What if there are things I don’t want to remember? Not what Cally says – the events at Sere-Phraquet, whatever they were – but something to do with my old obsession, Urfe Station?

  Why else would I have tried to return there?

  When I asked Cally what I did before, who I was before I became ill, she laughed and said I was as lazy and full of dreams as any other seventeen-year-old.

  “You were about to start college,” she said. “You were going to study languages.”

  I was about to ask her what happened to Dad, why I wasn’t living at home any more, but suddenly I realised I was afraid to. I didn’t want to hear what she might tell me.

  * * *

  The final shuttle transport from Dea returned to Tristane with only half of her crew. Among those that did return was a senior aeronautics technician named Linus Quinn. In Quinn’s luggage were his journals: factual accounts of his travels, mostly, as well as a long, fragmented memoir of his friendship with a naturalist named Eduard Farsett and his wife Elina. Quinn’s account contained numerous references to a deadly parasitic isopod he called the creef. Quinn insisted the creatures described in his journals were real, although when people asked him if he had proof he was unable to provide any.

  No one believed Linus Quinn, in any case. He was a difficult man, and solitary. He suffered from mood swings and a form of depression that made him prone to hallucinations. He claimed his ability as a technician, which by all accounts was considerable, was the by-product of a psychic affinity with inanimate objects.

  Now that Quinn could no longer travel into space, he took off for the mountains. He left his journals with his sister Jianne, who had suggested Quinn might raise some funds by having them published. She took them to one of the more independently minded publishing houses attached to the Greater University of Galena, who agreed they were of interest, although they were careful to stress that it was highly unlikely that Quinn or his sister stood to make much money from them.

  Chance proved otherwise. A critic from one of the more popular tabloids got hold of an advance copy, referring to it in his review as a novel. “Quinn’s desperate, terrifying narrative will leave no heart unmoved”, he enthused. The publisher’s small print run soon sold out, and after a short interval the book was repackaged as fiction and became a bestseller. The Mind-Robbers of Pakwa was thought of as a minor classic for a while, although today it languishes in obscurity, of interest mainly to those scholars who have chosen to make Deani literature their speciality.

  * * *

  I was six when Urfe Station was decommissioned, although the main transmitter wasn’t shut down for good until some years later. As a child, I barely knew the place existed, but later, after I read Quinn’s journals, it became an obsession. Cally told me that it would be a challenge even to get close to it, but the difficulties only made me more determined.

  Urfe Station had not been occupied since the transmitter was dismantled. It was just an empty building, and officially derelict. As far as Cally knew from her contacts in the cartographers’ union, the site was unguarded. Guards weren’t the problem, though. The station perimeter lay some fifty kilos beyond the city boundary, the final section of the route a lengthy hike over rough terrain. It was not difficult to imagine getting stranded, or injured. You could break a leg shinning over a fence, for example, or climbing in through a window. If that happened then no one would find you. It would be a death sentence.

  * * *

  Do you remember the time we went to Cannock Chase, Selena? You would have been six, I think, or maybe five, so perhaps you don’t. What people mostly think about when you say Cannock Chase are the murders that happened there in the 1960s. Dad took us there to show us the ruins. I remember we walked for what seemed like ages, then suddenly there they were – the ruins, I mean – a massive chunk of house sticking up from the ground. I remember thinking at the time that it looked as if a giant had torn the place apart with his bare hands, then dumped the pieces anyhow, like sections of a ripped-up cereal box.

  The section I remember seeing was a corner piece, three storeys high, tall windows like empty eye sockets. It was covered in ivy, with young saplings growing inside the walls, the kind of landmark you’d think would be visible from miles off, only it hadn’t been, not the way Dad brought us, it seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Dad told us the house had once belonged to an earl.

  “They knocked it down after World War One,” he said. “This is all that’s left.”

  We played around in the leaves, digging for treasure. I was obsessed with finding treasure, with the idea of uncovering things
, things that had once been secret, I suppose. I remember I found some shards of pottery, a green cup handle and the edge of a plate, cream-coloured with an ear of corn painted on it, dark blue. I remember that piece of china so clearly it gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. When I started to look up information about Cannock Chase the other day I was half convinced I would find the entire memory had been a fabrication, that there never had been a house there and us playing in the ruins and the pieces of pottery were all in my mind.

  The house was real, though, Selena. It was called Beaudesert, and was once the ancestral home of the Marquis of Anglesey. As I read about the break-up of the estate, the sale and eventual demolition of the house itself, I could feel my heart thumping in a kind of ecstasy. This memory at least was real. It had not betrayed me.

  Beaudesert was supposed to have been levelled, destroyed completely. The only reason the ruins remained was that the company in charge of the demolition went bust before the work was finished.

  * * *

  When I asked Cally if she’d gone ahead with the contract to survey Urfe Station, she told me she had. “The money was too good to pass up,” she said. “Because of the weather conditions, mainly. I had to camp there overnight. Bloody freezing.” She shivered. “I wouldn’t fancy going out there again, I tell you.”

  “What did you find?” I asked. I was trying to sound casual, as if I didn’t really care now, either way. “Anything?”

  “Letters, mostly,” Cally said. “There were thousands of them.”

  Not letters with envelopes and stamps, but voice messages sent from Dea by radio or satellite, transcribed by the station’s wireless operators, filed away in Ziploc folders and then just left. Cally said she found a whole storage room stuffed with these folders at Urfe Station, with messages dating back as long as ten years before the facility was finally closed.

  “Why did nobody pass them on?” I asked her. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Cally shook her head. What she meant was that she didn’t know. She told me about the half dozen or so pirate radio stations that used to broadcast to Dea during the final years the transmitter was in operation, piggybacking off the main signal at Urfe and beaming out music, chat shows, private telephone calls, whatever people felt like sending.

  “They weren’t illegal exactly,” Cally said. “It was more like no one cared.”

  Once the main transmitter shut down, the pirate stations perished – their technology wasn’t advanced enough for them to continue.

  “Can you imagine how it felt for people on Dea, being cut off like that?” Cally said quietly. “The suddenness of it.”

  Like being cast adrift, I thought but didn’t say. Alienated.

  There was a friend of Noah’s, Errol Maas, who used to run one of the old pirate radio stations from the back room of a scrimshaw cooperative in Purl. Maas’s great-great grandfather had been born on Dea, Cally said, and Noah seemed to think he still had relatives there. Errol Maas had left the city some years ago, but Noah had an address for him, in the gold-mining town of Red Cloak, which lay some five hundred kilos to the east of Seiolfar beyond the city wall.

  “I’ve often thought I’d like to speak to him,” Cally said. “I’d like to ask him what happened, why he thinks they shut down the transmitter. He was there right up to the end. He must know something.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  Cally was quiet for a long time. Her eyes seemed sad, or full of doubt, the emotions visible upon her face like small, swift eddies in a pool of water. “You know what Noah believes?” she said in the end. “He thinks something went wrong on Dea, something the praesidium doesn’t want anyone to know about. That’s why they stopped the transports, as a kind of quarantine. Then they shut down the radio station as well, so no one would find out. I’m not saying I think he’s right,” she said. “But I read some of those messages. They were awful, Julie. Those people knew they’d been abandoned. They were saying goodbye, mostly.”

  5

  Soon after I arrived in Coventry, I started working behind the counter at Southam’s, a chemist’s just ten minutes down the road from the bedsit I was renting on Coundon Road. Six months later I landed a job as a doctor’s receptionist. Dr Kapur kept on at me to go back to college, to do an evening class at least, but every time she tried talking to me about it seriously I changed the subject. I felt nervous of meeting people – of being around other people, even. I was afraid they’d realise I was different, that they’d mark me out as a freak, but that wasn’t the only reason. The world should have felt familiar to me, but it didn’t. I felt overwhelmed, every day, by the strangeness of everything. I was convinced that everyone already knew I was an alien, that they were only waiting for me to fuck up so they’d have definite proof.

  Things weren’t so bad when I was at work, because I had something concrete to do, a set of rules and procedures that gave each day a definite shape. Without rules, I felt naked. As a kind of test for myself, I began taking driving lessons. The lessons gave me something to do outside of work, but I still felt safe – safe, because the driving instructor would never need to know anything about me aside from my name and how well I was able to follow the rules and procedures I was paying him to teach me.

  I passed my test first time. I felt pleased, but also disappointed. Passing the test meant the lessons were over, that I would have to look for something else to do in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The week seemed empty suddenly, as if someone had died.

  * * *

  I bought a car, an ancient Ford Anglia. It had been well looked after, and still functioned smoothly. It came fully serviced. For a while, the Anglia was the only friend I felt I could trust. The car gave me freedom, even if that freedom consisted mainly of driving out of the city and into the flattish Midlands landscape, a landscape whose most outstanding feature is its lack of drama.

  I liked to walk by the Coventry Canal. I wondered what it might be like to live on one of the narrowboats, their greenish, gleaming exteriors like the tidily folded wing-cases of large beetles, but felt held back by my lack of expertise. Who would help me to fix the engine if something went wrong?

  Instead, there was my room above the bookies, Ladbrokes, its windows riotous with plunging green horses and featureless riders. The room was furnished with a fold-down bed and a fridge, a compact Baby Belling cooker and grill. I liked the room because it felt like mine, but still I was always nervous as I walked back from work, wondering if today would be the day I returned to find Dad standing there, waiting for me outside the betting shop. He would insist on bringing me home, and I could not come home. The thought of being back in Lymm terrified me more than the idea of being snatched back to Fiby.

  You probably won’t understand that. It’s hard to explain.

  * * *

  There was someone, for a while. Her name was Lisa. I met her early on, while I was still working in the chemist’s. She came in to buy a support bandage for her ankle. She was limping, favouring her left foot, and I asked her if she thought she should see a doctor. I don’t know why I spoke to her. I wouldn’t have done normally, I would have sold her the bandage she asked for then let her leave.

  I think it was maybe because she reminded me of Cally’s cousin Lila. I’d only seen Lila in a photograph, but I could still see that Lisa was like her: the fine fair hair, the slightly convex forehead, like the back of a spoon, the preoccupied expression, as if she were focussed on something in the far distance, or inside her head.

  “Don’t worry, it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s an old injury. It flares up sometimes, that’s all. I probably just need a new pair of trainers.”

  She spoke in an offhand manner, as if she’d known me for ages and didn’t feel like finding the time to explain something she assumed I already knew. She added that she went running every morning. Her wake-up call, she said.

  “Where do you run?” I asked.

  She named a nearby park.
“Perhaps I’ve seen you there,” she said. “I’m sure I recognise you.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve never been into jogging. I doubt I’d make it to the end of the street.”

  “Oh.” Her voice dipped, disappointed, and then immediately brightened again. “You should give it a go. You might find you enjoy it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I rang up her purchase. She paid with a five-pound note. After she left I did something weird: I swapped her five pounds for one from my purse, so I had her note and mine was in the till. I was careful no one saw me make the switch. I didn’t want anyone to think I was stealing money. I wanted that note, though – something she’d touched, something we’d touched together. I didn’t even know her name at that point.

  The next day during my lunch break I visited a sports shop in the nearby shopping precinct and bought myself a tracksuit and a pair of trainers. I felt as if everyone was looking at me – those sports places always make you feel like an idiot, don’t you find? – but I felt light-headed with triumph when I came out. One small battle won, though it was another three days before I plucked up the courage to put on the tracksuit and go to the park.

  I didn’t see Lisa. There were plenty of other people, though – dog-walkers, joggers – and I quickly realised there was no need for me to worry about looking conspicuous. Lisa had said she went running every morning, but she hadn’t mentioned what time. There was a chance she wasn’t running at all at the moment, because of her ankle. I managed one slow lap of the perimeter and then I went home. I ought to have felt depressed, but I felt elated, just to have done something different, something I would never have thought of trying on my own. I went the next day and then the next, enjoying the sensation of having a purpose. It was the same as with the driving lessons, I suppose.

  On the fifth day I caught sight of Lisa, running towards me along the diagonal stripe of asphalt that ran through the main part of the park, away from the football pitch and the three tennis courts you had to put your name on a list for if you wanted to use them. It was a shock to finally see her again, I think because I’d more or less convinced myself I never would. I geared myself up to run right past her, prepared to pretend I was there by chance, a nobody, no one she’d recognise, anyway. What had I been thinking, that she’d see me and stop, remembering? That we’d strike up a conversation, become friends?