The Rift

by Nina Allan

  “Weird,” I said. I glanced up again, briefly. “It’s gone now.”

  She took a pack of Marlboro Lights from her jacket pocket. “Got a light?”

  “I don’t smoke. Sorry,” I said, wishing for a moment that I did smoke, simply because that would mean I’d have a lighter on me. I’d lean across and flip the wheel, touching the flame to the end of her cigarette, our heads momentarily closer together in the dark.

  “No worries,” she said. “See you, then.”

  She seemed to hesitate, and I waited also, wondering what else she might say, but after a moment she turned away from me and moved off down the street.

  See you, I thought. I tipped back my head and gazed upwards into the darkness, hoping I might catch another glimpse of the alien spacecraft, but no such luck.

  * * *

  How far had she come to see me? Was she checking that I was OK, or was it all just chance?

  * * *

  “The way you write,” Allison said to me. This was before, when we were in the coffee shop. “It’s very honest. Very fearless.”

  I told her that couldn’t be true, because I was scared of everything: nuclear weapons, sharks, bringing dogs’ mess inside on my shoes, talking to people I didn’t know, thinking about the future, my sister dying, my best friend going to college to become a doctor, drowning, fire, murderers, getting lost at airports, forgetting my name, life, the universe and everything and especially black holes.

  “Why are you frightened of black holes?” Allison asked.

  “I just am,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining. It was too stupid and too terrifying.

  “I’d like to see you write an essay about that. Do you think you could?”

  I said I would try. Allison smiled. She touched my hand, just for a second, and that’s when I first noticed that feeling between us, something sweet and sour at the same time, like salt and vinegar crisps, or someone scraping their fingernail across the blackboard. If I’d known what was going to happen to Allison because of me I’d never have gone to her flat, never watched Schindler’s List with her, never had coffee with her either, probably.

  I don’t think Allison knew about Lucy or even laid eyes on her. Lucy’s A levels were in Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Advanced Maths. She never went near the English department – she had no reason to. Lucy never said anything to me about the problems I was having, trying to make up my mind which courses I should apply for, for university, but I had the feeling she was annoyed at me for being so indecisive. She must have thought I was an idiot. It was all right for her, she knew what she wanted. I bet no one in the history of the world ever got criticised for wanting to be a doctor.

  I remember Lucy telling me about some girls in the village her mum came from, or her gran, I can’t remember which, how some of those girls weren’t allowed to go to school because their dads or uncles or whatever were against it. How a woman Lucy’s mother still wrote to was beaten and locked inside for two weeks for trying to sneak into a maths lesson. “There were men in the class,” Lucy said. “Her father went mental.”

  She was upset talking about it, I could tell. I made a face, and said it was a good job her mum married an Englishman then, wasn’t it? Lucy didn’t speak at all for a moment, then she said it wasn’t that long since women hadn’t been allowed to graduate from Cambridge University.

  “They could go to lectures but they weren’t awarded degrees,” she said. “That was only fifty years ago.” She sounded more hurt than angry. I didn’t know what to say. Lucy never normally talked about India much, or her family there, and I never asked her. India was one of the things I was scared of. Because I didn’t understand it, and because I was afraid it might eventually take Lucy away from me.

  I think Lucy was trying to tell me that for some people, deciding to become a doctor was the scariest, most dangerous thing you could choose to do.

  * * *

  Cally’s family were from Purl originally, an affiliated coastal township some two hundred kilos to the east of the city, a sprawling, low-rise suburb of overhead tram lines and kitchen gardens, fish markets and scrimshaw factories and the Jara-mira julippa works.

  “What’s it like?” I asked her. I was curious. If I could picture Purl at all, I imagined it to be a bit like Barrow-in-Furness, where one of Catey’s aunts lived. Catey was dragged off there every now and again to spend wet weekends traipsing through the grounds of Furness Abbey, or hunkering down in fish-and-chip shops with her rowdy cousins. Catey said the place was a dump and I was lucky I never had to go there but I secretly envied her. Barrow’s bleakness was appealing to me, the acrid scents of salt and blistering iron.

  “There’s nothing there, really,” Cally said. “Just the factory.” Her father owned and managed one of the scrimshaw workshops. Cally didn’t mention what her mother did, and I had the feeling they didn’t get on, although she never said so specifically. Once, when Cally was away at the studio, I took down one of the large albums containing her prentice pieces, maps she’d drawn when she was younger, before she became a licensed cartographer. The maps were immensely detailed, beautifully drawn, but even I was able to see that they weren’t to scale. Many of them were of Purl, which turned out to have a castello and a labyrinth as well as the allotments and the julippa factory. I was surprised. Cally had given me the impression that Purl was a windswept, primitive place, almost entirely without culture.

  I was still poring over the pages of the album when Noah came in from the yard. Noah never spoke to me much usually, and I alternated between feeling convinced that he disliked or disapproved of me in some way, and rationalising that he never seemed to speak much to anyone. He was a gaunt, untidy man. He looked so much like Cally it was unnerving, although it was difficult to believe he was only a year older than her. I felt uneasy around him, not because I believed he wished me harm, but because I found it difficult to tell what he was thinking.

  I turned in my seat as he entered the room. We stared at each other.

  “I was just having a look at Cally’s old maps,” I said. I was gabbling slightly. With Noah, I always felt I had to give a reason for what I was doing. He made me feel like a waste of space, the same way Mum did sometimes. I smiled. Noah didn’t smile back, though once again I had come to realise that this was simply the way he was.

  “Cally loved Purl,” he said. He had an abrupt way of speaking, like an engine suddenly coughing into life. “She wouldn’t tell you that, though.” He came closer, leaning over my shoulder and turning over the pages of the album until he came to some images near the back, not maps this time but drawings in pencil, lots of them. Wooden shacks, a stone jetty, three squarish clapboard structures I thought might be drying sheds. There were other things, too – an animal that looked like a porpoise, or a dolphin, the elongated head of a creature I didn’t recognise at all.

  “Our father used Cally’s designs in the workshop,” Noah said. “They were very popular.” He drew his finger gently along the margin of the right-hand page. “That’s an amber shark. You have heard of it?”

  I shook my head, bemused. This was the most Noah had ever spoken to me.

  “They’re dangerous beasts. I remember my father telling me about one that came ashore when he was a child. It was old, and sick, and would have died soon anyway. There are fragments of its skeleton still, at the shrine to Terezia Salk at the end of the harbour.”

  “In Purl?”

  “In Purl.” He pronounced it ‘pawl’, with an odd twang that made it seem to me for a moment that he and Cally weren’t related at all.

  “If you liked it there so much, why did you leave?” The words leapt out of me like errant fishes, slippery and wet. I couldn’t remember ever asking Noah a direct question before. He stepped back from the table, put both hands behind his back.

  “I wanted to be an astronomer, you know? I wanted to learn about the stars.” He balled his hands into fists. There was real anger on his face. I’d never seen him like that befo
re. I was surprised, and a little frightened. Just for a moment he reminded me of Steven Barbershop.

  “Why didn’t you, then?” I said. “Become an astronomer, I mean?”

  I was trying to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want him to know that I’d been afraid. I didn’t expect him to answer – he seemed to be speaking more to himself than to me. I was mistaken, though.

  “Because I happened to love my sister, and refused to lie about it. You won’t know this, because Cally never speaks of it, but our mother disowned us. She said that if it hadn’t been for my sister’s selfishness and my idiocy, I would have cleaved with Lila, and our family would have been spared the disgrace we seemed determined to inflict on them. None of this is true. For me to cleave to Lila when I knew there was no possibility of happiness for her would have been abominable. And Cally and I – we are not the first, we won’t be the last, and not all families are so determined in their devotion to convention. Our decisions and actions have no bearing on our mother’s standing. Yet she preferred to disown Cally, and disavow me. We came here to Gren-Noor because these matters are of no account in the city. But without my mother’s sanction I could not attend the Lyceum in Galena, as I wished to. And so here we are.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by needing sanction. I knew of the Lyceum – Cally had mentioned it often enough – but as to why Noah would need his mother’s permission to attend, I had no idea. I thought perhaps it was not permission exactly, but something equally important: money, or sponsorship. Not exactly an alien concept, even on Earth. Better to find out from Cally – asking Noah straight out felt like asking for trouble. The whole subject was clearly a problem for him, even now, years later. I didn’t want to make matters worse by displaying my ignorance.

  “What about your father?” I asked instead.

  “What about him? Our father has his own troubles. He mostly solves them by going fishing.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “That’s par for the course with fathers, I should think.”

  “Par for the course?”

  “Typical. What you would expect.”

  “Par for the course then, yes.” It took me a moment to realise he was smiling.

  “I miss my dad,” I said. I realised it was true.

  “I’m sure you do.” His expression was hard to read. I sensed he was trying to goad me but didn’t know why. My continued presence in his home must be difficult for him, I could see that, but there was something more behind it, I could tell. Was it simply because I was young, as he had once been, and seemed equally determined to squander my chances? Because he thought I believed, as young people do, that time is endless and therefore unimportant?

  I tried to imagine Noah as a young man – his lip curled, contempt in his eyes, no grey in his hair. Had he sworn at his mother, taunted her as a slave to convention, called her bluff? It was easy to imagine, because it was easy to see that Noah then had been pretty much the same as Noah now. Except for his bitterness against the world, which had curdled inside him and fractured his will.

  It was easy for me to see myself in him. If the same was true in reverse, then his anger was understandable.

  “Is there no chance you could study astronomy on your own?” I suggested. “From books, I mean. There are many great scientists who never went to – to the Lyceum.”

  “I read every book as soon as it is published. But to progress – to have your work noticed – you need the Lyceum. They have the best equipment, the best telescopes. And unless you are one of their number they don’t give a damn.”

  I fell silent. For the first time I wondered what life was like for Noah and Cally when they were alone together. Did they speak of these things, or keep them hidden? Did they know one another so well there was no need? I turned back to Cally’s album, opening it at random – at the Labyrinth of Purl, where in Cally’s angular, not-to-scale drawing the streets of the township narrowed and narrowed, drawing in upon themselves until they became straitened passageways, mere cracks between the buildings, so constricted you would need to squeeze yourself flat against the stones to pass through them. I wondered if the labyrinth was really like this, and what it was for. What would be the sense in making a part of the town all but impenetrable?

  To contain a minotaur, I thought, and felt a twinge of alarm, even though I knew the idea was ridiculous.

  “Have you ever read that novel by Linus Quinn?” I asked. “The Mind-Robbers of Pakwa?”

  Noah raised his eyebrows, questioning, then sighed.

  “Must we play this charade again? Of course I have read it. Every schoolchild has read it. It is a popular horror story.”

  “You mean you don’t think it’s true?”

  “What is truth? Tenets that are true for one person are blatant lies for another. Or amusements. A game. You do understand the concept of dramatic irony?”

  “Of course. But Linus Quinn didn’t sound as if he was joking.” It was the chapters about Elina I was thinking of, the horror of what happened to her, Quinn’s agony at being forced to witness it. And Farsett as well, of course, the way he too seemed to change, although in his case it was science and not the creef that made a monster of him. Quinn insisted it was grief that altered his comrade, but I don’t think even he believed that.

  This man who was once my friend, Quinn said at the end. Was that Quinn excusing Farsett for what he did, or Quinn saying that Eduard Farsett was no longer his friend?

  We can argue about that for centuries, but we will never know for sure.

  “I agree,” Noah said. “It does not read like a joke.” He gazed at me steadily, his eyes a curious gunmetal grey that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Cally’s eyes are grey too, but of a lighter shade. “Most people will insist that the creef are a fable, the product of a disturbed mind, or else the fruit of a nightmare. But there are others prepared to believe what Quinn has written.” He fell silent. I waited for him to continue. I found I was unable to rid myself of the idea that he was testing me in some way. “There are those who believe all human life on Tristane originates from Dea, that the ruins at Pakwa are not ten thousand years old, as Farsett conjectured, but closer to one million. That a once mighty civilization was turned to dust by this pernicious insect, that the last survivors sought refuge on Tristane, that they hoped to rebuild here everything that was lost. There are books, stories, articles. I can show you, if you are interested. Some of them will try to persuade you that the mind-robbers became extinct along with Pakwa. Others will insist that the creef are still rife on Dea, that we must remain vigilant.”

  “And those who believe this…?”

  “Are close to power. Many of them, anyway. How else would our links with Dea have been so thoroughly severed?”

  “But that was centuries ago. Because of the war.”

  “So we are taught.”

  “But you believe it was deliberate – a conspiracy?”

  He laughed, a startling crack, like a branch breaking. “What I believe, for what it is worth, is that whatever measures were taken, were taken too late. They are among us already – they are bound to be. We traded with Dea for centuries. It is impossible to think – ludicrous, almost – that in all that time there was not one contaminated water tank, one infected deck steward. If the creef exist they are here on Tristane, and it is only a matter of time before what finally happened at Pakwa happens here also.”

  He strode to the window and then back again, as if trying to allow me time to assimilate his words.

  To let their iciness paralyse my veins, like poison darts.

  “We are a big planet,” he said, more quietly. “Much larger than Dea. But size does not guarantee immunity. Not forever.”

  “You don’t believe that,” I said. My voice was trembling slightly, and I was filled with the same panic at being held captive that I had experienced in the van with Steven Jimson. I think it was then that I began to realise all over again what the creef really were: a bla
ck hole, spreading through the fabric of the universe like an ink stain. If there really were rifts in the fabric of space – potholes in time, like the one that brought me from the shores of the Shuubseet to my bedroom in a house in the village of Lymm, near Warrington, Cheshire – then why should not the creef make use of them also, make use of them as stepping stones from one naively acquiescent civilisation to another? Whether by accident or conscious design, it hardly mattered. No world would be safe, not forever. Not even ours.

  “Don’t I?” Noah said. “Why not?”

  “Because no one could live with that knowledge. It would be unbearable.”

  He laughed again, more softly this time, a wisp of wind flickering through the carcases of fallen leaves. “The things I hoped for in my life are lost to me already. I live from day to day. I look out for Cally. We have our love, or what is left of it. Sometimes when the night is clear I harness Marsia and drive out into the wilderness so I can look at the stars. I think about what I might have been in another life. Perhaps it is another life that they offer, these monsters, have you thought about that?”

  I didn’t answer. The idea occurred to me – the obscene idea – that Noah was infected, that he was beginning to turn, like Elina Farsett, into something else.

  “You don’t believe that,” I repeated. I gulped. My throat felt dry. “Why is no one doing anything?”

  “For something to be done would first mean gaining an admission that a danger exists. Whole generations, whole dynasties of political power have been founded on the assumption that the ruins at Pakwa are simply the remnants of an abandoned settlement on an abandoned colony. If you think such an ironside can be turned around so easily, then you do not know politics. I for one would not waste my life on such a fruitless endeavour. Not that some have not tried. My old comrade Erroll Maas, for instance. And your father.”

  “What do you mean?”

  My whole body felt cold, the tips of my fingers as numb as they had been the night Cally and Noah brought me home from the outlands to Gren-Noor. I felt the numbness and I thought again of the sensation of resistance, of negation, that results from trying to force together the two like poles of two magnets. A reality that denies itself. It is difficult to explain or to describe.