Rocket Fuel

by Andrew McEwan

  Bench 9 undulated, its yellow grasses sighing in the breeze, her every stride bending stalks, trampling ground. The insects roved, ants and butterflies, creatures cased and winged; they occupied each separate strata of air to a height only the birds knew for sure.

  At the island's centre was a clump of trees, elms and beeches, a single gnarled oak. They might have stood there since the beginning, but as the soil they owed their being to a comparatively recent ideology. They were inherently false, synthetic in all but facade, ersatz copies of a type, a primary...

  Amy was drawn to them. They felt real. She clambered into the oak's spread branches, as high as she dared, the thirst in her loins distracting, and wedged herself in a V of limbs. She had decided. She wouldn't return. Stylo had poisoned her and Amy had taken his poison willingly. She was as guilty. She would die in this tree that was not a tree, away from his double-headed seed. Her first act of bravery in a long time.

  And she'd stick with it.

  The sun went down, the moon waxed, the sweat of her skin made
nonsense of the cold - but she remained.

  The captain owed it to her crew...

  She was sorry.

  *

  Ernie put pen to paper, the numbness in his wrist irritating, and wrote...

  Last Of The Earth Men - issue 59.

  Morgan hit the floor; shots fired inches over his whitened knuckles, his head. The carpet threatened to choke him in its depth.

  The succeeding quietness was unnatural.

  ‘It's okay, you can get up now,’ said Henry Grey. ‘I got all of them.’ Casually, he wafted a smoking carbine.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ said Lumping Jack.

  The scientist laughed. ‘Me too! But I've a few tricks up my sleeve, eh?’

  Morgan examined the slumped bodies.

  Their skins peeled off. ‘What the...’

  ‘Pink-people,’ Henry told him. ‘I'm afraid I haven't been entirely honest with you,’ he added.

  Frozen Hound came padding into the room. The dog's nose was troubled by so much death, the smell of killing.

  The doctor shouldered his weapon, patted the dog with his one hand. ‘Come on, aboard the guppy, I'll explain.’

  Lumping Jack Morgan and his curious partner travelled from the Hightop building out into the Spanish midday sun.

  Nineteen- Glass Gangsters

  John Silver leant against the transparency, eyes surveying the drab planet, the now mated engines. The warship had mounted like some ponderous beetle, next to flood its consort with laser light and personnel, a hunting party Silver registered hypothetically, as there had been no word from the Terrans. He recalled his conversation with Sally, her dream-spawned ramblings. The mystery went deeper it seemed...

  There was nothing he or Upfront could do. Earth was too strong; Topica, perhaps, her ally.

  ‘You know the first time I heard of Byron Friendly,’ Silver told Mort, ‘I was fronting an investigation into the apparent theft, and re-selling...of machine parts; specialist material, you'll appreciate. And this one engineer, Friendly, came up to me brandishing a pair of stolen gyros - cool as you like. I thought he was pushing the stuff; still had the film on them.’

  Mortimer laughed.

  ‘Anyway,’ Silver continued, ‘it turned out he'd found a cache under his bunk, which he shared on rote with three other guys, and decided to turn it in.’

  ‘I've heard this story,’ said Mort. ‘Didn't he lock someone in a foot-locker?’

  ‘A drugs-cabinet. Yeah, his captain. Man got high on curejuice and confessed everything; had a ruse whereby he took delivery of duplicate parts. Clever.’

  ‘But the legendary Byron scuppered him.’

  Silver pushed off the glass. ‘The captain, four service vehicles and a brand-new reconnaissance craft to date...’

  ‘And that controller. What was his name? Pearson, or Price, a cousin of Admiral Gregorian.’

  ‘Parker,’ John corrected. ‘Right.’ And that was the end of the road for Byron; or maybe just the end of an episode.

  Mortimer flattened his moustache. ‘According to the computer,’ he said, ‘we've lost them.’

  ‘It must have crashed.’

  ‘No, I've checked: frame's sound.’

  ‘So why isn't it registering our guests?’ He could see the warship, the engine. ‘Mort?’

  ‘Hm? Oh. They dropped out...’

  ‘But they're here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you saying? That I'm hallucinating? That the computer is correct?’

  Mortimer came and stood next to him. ‘The software could've warped,’ he suggested.

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘Okay. The image is caught in the glass, like a photographic plate.’

  ‘It's moving.’

  ‘A screen then.’

  ‘Be serious. You're telling me there're a host of photons trapped in these few millimetres dutifully re-enacting past events?’

  ‘More or less.’ Mort looked embarrassed.

  ‘In that case,’ announced Silver, ‘I'm going out...’

  Mortimer grimaced. They both knew what he'd seen, was seeing. As the door closed behind Silver he stalked over to the computer and gave it a kick, cracking a toe.

  *

  Mordy glided through the early morning mist, skin damp and clothes adhering. Like wallpaper, he thought. The gloom lifted by degrees, so he tripped less often, the weight of a carcass across his shoulders.

  He wondered how real meat tasted, raw or cooked.

  Droover was waiting when he got back. Her hair shone, a lustre comparable to that of the broad fern-leaves. Like them she had a red flower behind her ear.

  ‘You didn't light a fire,’ Mordy said.

  ‘I was thirsty. I went to the stream. There's a waterfall not far from here.’

  ‘Really - what flavour?’

  ‘Strawberry...’

  ‘No chocolate?’

  ‘A choice of seventeen tantalizingly tempting tangs!’

  I'll bet...

  Something hit him from behind. Mordy fell on his face, the carcass to roll over his head, its own smashed by the crudely improvised shillelagh pushed behind his belt. A split-second glance told him of a stealth projectile, its silent trajectory meant to pass through his neck.

  Then he was up and running, Droover close, the two dodging low branches and vaulting obstacles they might previously have given a wide berth.

  But not now. They were targeted, and as such deeper instincts held sway...

  They moved as blurs, wraiths midst the darkened jungle, its trees providing shade and cover, its mostly hidden life glimpsed at speed from their flashing skulls. Legs working, arms pumping, lungs desperate to breathe on and on, not to slow or cease, never to collapse. Mordy broke from a thicket, bleeding, Droover on his right, to his left a blank wall of steel. It threw him; matt planes of metal, gaudy light and the scuffing of many feet. A fear was born in his chest.

  Both crouched, listened, exchanged glances. Droover grabbed his arm and hauled him off, lithe and determined. A projectile cracked above. Leaves and twigs descended. He didn't understand, concentrated on the terrain, its non-stop vegetation, and reached for Droover's thimbled hand...

  It cut him.

  And she, some slick black notion, had vanished.

  Sal peered at Friendly who peered at Sal.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ one asked the other. ‘Like a scream?’

  ‘Yes...Ernie?’

  ‘Who else? Unless, maybe.’ A nose was scratched. The light poured from fewer angles and the scents grew in number along with the spoor of animals.

  The timbered scene strobed. Out of the nascent cloud, which gained definition as they stared, dived a chattering, shining bird.

  Sally got the impression its copper wings were planished and its talons edged in bone. It reached the nadir of its arc, spun aside, end over end as if struck, glittering coloured spirals off its long tail, taunting her with the associations si
ght of it conjured in her mind...

  ‘Move,’ said Byron, and ran.

  The man was dead. The protective clothing he wore had let him down, fatally. Mordy was convinced, he didn't need to turn him over. A mask was a mask, he said to himself, dead or living, its shield remained. Anyway, he recognized the livery as that of the research section. Seemingly out to kill him. But why?

  Shaking, he loped away. He rubbed his wrist, wondering at Droover, his radio that she wore, a further, useless ornament. The key he'd given her was the key to his father's strongroom, that squared cavern below a mountain to which he had always been denied access. Amy Jones had duplicated it, passing it to him via a third party, a man whose shiftless eyes spoke of subtler plots than any Mordy could imagine. He'd treated it as a joke, initially, then the Tomcat's captain had arranged a meeting and together they'd hatched a plan to murder Stylo. Only Mordy's courage proved the weakest; he'd leapt at the chance to go after Droover, thus removing himself from her machinations. The woman was crazy. And the man, the third party, haunted his vision like a phantom out of some old movie.

  From him there was no escape. He was Mordy's guilt. He was Mordy's secret rendezvous. He was the man without a name; the man who adopted the names of others...

  He should have checked to see if the section agent had a usable weapon. That was the kind of luck Mordy needed now.

  He continued on foot, losing himself in the increasing hostile, both objective and subjective jungle.

  *

  Silver commandeered a chassis from a bewildered attendant and steered it for the engine. He had no idea how he was going to get in. Whether it was possible or not though, he would try. It was unlikely, he figured, that every access point was covered by the invading Terrans. At least not on the outside. Once the interior lay open to him he'd start worrying about diplomatic relations, but until then... ‘Fuck 'em.’

  He breezed against the giant hull and clung. The engine's mass seized the magnetism and the chassis was tight, immovable. He was on his own, literally.

  ‘It's definitely solid,’ he reassured himself. ‘So what are you waiting for, an invite?’ Curious, he tried to thread through a call to Mort. Nothing. He turned his head toward where the orbital station should be. Nothing.

  Already suited, he clambered from the tiny chassis and went walkabout on the lumpy metal, ignoring the timer in his helmet as the void, the homeless void, slipped by.

  *

  She wasn't anywhere; he'd lost her.

  In the canopy's blue-green ethereal shade he stooped, picked a stout branch from amid the leaf-litter, and cautiously retraced his too hasty steps. Had she fallen? Byron wondered, passing the wood from hand to hand, familiarizing himself with its weight. Was she able to move at all? Insects buzzed in his ear.

  A twig snapped. In front of him a distorted figure looked left and right. The man lacked solidity, as if he were liquid ice, constantly remodelled, smoothed under a gentle flame, edges smudged into the complex framework of trees, their elaborate, varihued subordinates clustered like - machines, he thought, tools and work-benches painted in lurid tones of red, yellow and green, blue, orange and violet, an overdose of verdant, sylvain colour; the impinging sound vaguely crystalline, that of fractured bone and torn cartilage, ruptured blood vessels and damaged skin, the hefty branch he'd wielded sending a tremor up his arms as it, like the figure, had broken...

  Byron regarded the corpse, closed his eyes a moment then walked around it to where the sun indicated firmer ground, a steadier landscape.

  The air in his lungs tasted sweeter. The wind in his face felt sharper, less ordered. It was like exiting a tunnel...

  Sudden.

  Twenty - The Hyperboreans

  Droover ran with the wind till it ran out. It stopped abruptly, metres short of an ancient tree from whose knotty limbs hung a body, that of Amy Jones, long and dry and twisted. She looked as if she'd been blown here too, caught up in the north wind and battered against the rocks, tossed on potent currents, their stamp yet evident on her pale flesh. Droover dropped slowly to the ground, seized by exhaustion, pleased to rest. She removed a comb of tortoiseshell from a pocket and carefully dragged it through her black hair.

  In the past, when they were kids, it had always made her sister mad to see her preen herself like this.

  From beyond the tree a man waved. His face was in shade, but she recognized him. He could wait a little longer...

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘I don't know, he puzzles me.’

  ‘In what way?’ Captain Jones leant on the bar, face alert to every movement in the room, its tables and chairs, pillars and shadows fixed in their pattern, each subtle change noted, each citizen and soldier marked.

  ‘It's difficult to say,’ admitted Kate. ‘I like him; he's good, we know that much. But...’

  ‘You can't forget Ernie,’ Amy finished.

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Me neither. But Ernie's dead, gone, and we need an engineer, unless you're planning to spend the rest of your life on this precarious edge, eh? Halfway between somewhere and nowhere!’

  Kate sipped her drink. ‘You've made your decision,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ confirmed the captain, adding, ‘I may be the majority shareholder in our little outfit - and a drunken whore to boot - but I still like to discuss these changes in...’ She paused, tensed.

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Sorry, Droover, touch of nerves.’

  ‘You drink too much.’

  ‘Right again...’ A man with brown skin and yellow hair watched them from the far side of the scantly peopled, grotesquely furnished restaurant. ‘No manners.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Guy in the corner there.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘Yeah, they have those eyes.’ She waved obliquely.

  Kate laughed, smothering it. ‘We leave in six hours,’ she reminded; ‘don't go getting us arrested.’

  ‘No chance,’ Amy rejoined. ‘What for, flirting?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Captain Jones shrugged. ‘Okay, okay...I’ll curb my less demure instincts; you just buy the drinks.’

  And so it goes...

  Naturally, he got what he wanted.

  Twenty minutes later Morgan was back on board his guppy, mind and fingers prying into the procreative wellspring of graphic information. What he had gleaned from a hapless nightwatchman; the stuff that made worlds pause. A mad scientist's ciphered elucidations, no less than Dr Grey's confidential papers, his instructions as to the handling and transportation of certain valuable cargoes...

  But what?

  ‘Rich.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing, I...’

  ‘Captain?’ He let the ball drop. It struck the gangway and rolled, nudged the toe of his boot.

  ‘You were giving me a lot of static just then.’

  He smirked. ‘It's fixed,’ he said.

  You can rely on the pitcher, for now.

  ‘Thanks.’

  If only they knew the truth, and listened to Dr Grey. ‘Henry, they bleed blood and sweat sweat, but unlike you and me - and Ernie - they don't know shit.’

  Round and round the stars they go, looping the loop, matching beginnings and endings, starting where they left off, never questioning, never realizing, as, like carbon atoms, they cycle and recycle the same old (new) routes, propelled by a desire to trade and be traded, a need to explore come what may, a gravity of lungs and muscles upon them, the beguiling siren's call, of nature's prey, and predator...

  *

  And to Sally, ‘Yeah,’ dissolving sugar in coffee, ‘he does sort of grow on you.’

  This is a land of plenty - past the tree, beyond the north wind, in aeternum: forever.

  Twenty-one - Exit

  The wind ran with Droover...

  He opened the way: a slippery handle, but Silver got to grips with it, bathing himself next in light.

  He climbed inside
and sealed the hatch, progressed to its sister lock. Beyond that stretched an interior he recognized from training films and mock-ups, the engine's supporting lattice of walkways and galleries, inspection tunnels and freefall zones, the connective tissue surrounding the major organs...

  Stroma.

  The fuel-tanks and converters hung in the void like an armoured maze around, before him.

  John Silver ventured deeper. To him, it was a whole new world, a whole new experience. He thought of Mortimer, what his friend might learn from this. He wished he could be here. Silver hated being lonely...

  He gagged at a sharp pain in his chest.

  ‘Droover K?’

  ‘Yeah...who is it?’

  He took another step.

  She kissed him.

  Proem - A Kitten

  It jumped off the chair and scampered toward the far side of the room. I watched its erratic voyage with a smile. It curved between chair legs and paused to examine an uprooted tuft of carpet, pawing the errant strand like it were special, there just for that purpose, belonging to no other outside realm of weave and colour and pattern, simply a toy placed in the kitten's path, for the kitten. But the young animal soon tired; the fibre proved no substantial challenge. It set away, flicked its tail, eyed those of us in the room, brushed our knees and elbows as it passed, disturbed the pieces on the game-board, their bright milieu laid out on the living-room floor. Stupid of us to be there, the kitten may have thought. But thoughts, the kitten may have amended, are stupid also, not for us cats who're born with smarts; thinking's for people, because they're uncertain how to behave and need to weigh up a situation. The kitten smirked wisely. It washed its tail, its hind legs, its belly, rubbed a forepaw over its cute furry head. The kitten was very neat and precise - in a haphazard sort of way. And then it continued toward the curtain, a peregrination the import of which should not be underestimated. The kitten sprang left, sudden. Sprang right, a reason for each movement or neither; a purpose or not a purpose. Who can tell? It turned around and came charging at the board, knocking cards and counters, mixing tokens, spinning dice, their spots reading differently after the kitten's assault: two and four now when previously they read three and one. Or was it one and three? I shook my head. Monica laughed. Frank plucked the tuft of carpet and tossed it up, but was ignored. The kitten jumped back on the chair, slyly winked. We settled back to the game. Whose turn was it? Kate's? Sal's? Nobody could remember. Then it was at us again, among our fingers and hands, stealing our attention from the confused game, a random hurricane of black fur the eye of which was paired and not quiet, but shiny, like a wet green leaf. I made a grab for its loose neck, just as its mother would - and missed. The kitten leapt. It reached the curtains in two great bounds and was soon frantically climbing, an ascent any bit as meaningful as that of K2 or Everest. At the lofty summit it looked around, regarded us strangely, seeing we'd altered, changed shape, shifted along with the perspective of the room. Its claws drew loops of fabric. Its tongue flew in and out as if sampling the rarefied air, dusty near the ceiling, spider-web height. It winked a second time, this time with excitement, not worldly-wiseness as before. And then its tail whacked the cornice and the kitten came speeding down like some fur-wrapped bobsleigh, a world record in its sights; flat out, braking at the last moment and skidding to a clumsy halt the wrong side of Byron's upended ashtray. The debris obscured part of the board, made areas difficult to negotiate, lettering hard to read, symbols to decipher. But the kitten didn't care. It was away once more, bolting into the kitchen, meowing as it rebounded off the cooker and hit the fridge, skating across the worn lino in every direction expect that which led ultimately to its dish, and food. I was glad it wasn't Christmas; the thought of the kitten scaling the tree was too much. But Christmas wasn't too distant, a month. As it was the uncontrollable creature slept for an hour on a pile of clean washing, dusting the coloured materials with ash and hair. And then it was here, in the wrong place, driving everybody crazy as it made the game impossible to play, stretching each round as the players teased and cooed and tickled and chuckled and spoilt and kissed and picked up and put down quickly, complaining of scratches, talking in silly voices, getting to their feet and walking around, stretching like the kitten and forgetting, in these exasperating minutes, all about the game the rules of which were largely forgotten.