I wanted to communicate with her so badly, sure that somehow, through some weird glitch of time, we had made brief contact. None of this was coincidence. We were mixed up in each other, close yet distant. I could not begin to understand why or how this had occurred. Maybe it was a phenomenon conjured by this ancient planet, where the weight of time hung heavily over the seas and mountains; where so much had happened, and the land remembered it all.
Shade examined the picture on the wall, a picture I myself at some future time must leave for her. Then, she was turning away, leaping up for the hole she had made in the ceiling of the chamber, pulling herself out, hurrying, almost frantically back to where her scudder was moored.
She would go to the cave for the secret waited for her there. It must still lie hidden, awaiting the light her entrance would thrust upon it. It had to be there. Some evidence of what had happened to us.
Ultimately, I could not speak to her with my living voice or my mind, but only with my memory. And yet she had seen me; the woman with the bandanna, smiling with her long-dead friends.
Long dead.
Night was grey and silver across the landscape. Outside my cabin, I heard the sound of merriment coming from the canteen. They were all so excited making their plans for a permanent settlement. A pioneer spirit had awoken within them. It seemed bizarre to me; only days ago everyone had been panicking about abandonment.
I stumbled away from the camp, heading out to Samedi Lake. Lucrezia came too, buzzing around me, but not communicating.
A group of abos were sitting around a fire on the diminished shores of the Lake. As I passed them, they looked up at me with curious eyes, as if I was some kind of apparition. Once they were behind me, I heard one of them begin to sing; a monotonous chant. The voice resonated in my head, made me feel dizzy and slightly nauseous. I felt as if I was having to push my body through the resistant air.
The entrance to the shaft had been covered with plasti-sheet and, as I approached, I was sure I heard it flapping in the lake breeze. But once I crested the slope of rubble that led down to the shaft, I saw only a gaping black hole. The sheeting must have blown away. A long time ago.
The landscape was different. Nothing had been built here, but neither did it seem so desolate. To my left, the lake looked healthy and there were numerous little jetties along its shores, where boats were tethered in the darkness. I could hear the sound of wood rubbing on wood, the plashing of wavelets against their hulls. Then, a spectral image of how the lake appeared in my time superimposed itself over the landscape, only to surrender seconds later to the scene of Shade’s time. I guessed that if I looked behind me, I would not see the lights of our camp; when I did glance over my shoulder, there was only a grey murkiness like a veil.
This was neither my time nor Shade’s, but a strange interface of both. I accepted it fully, as if this was something that happened to me every day. It didn’t feel strange, but somehow familiar. What or whose memories was I tapping into though? Landscape dreams?
I went towards the shaft entrance, my heart beating fast. Just as I was about to enter the darkness, someone came out of it in a hurry. We both yelped and jumped back. I looked into a startled face, lit by a greenish light from a lumi-cell.
‘Shade!’ I said. She would vanish. I was sure she would vanish. Or maybe I would. Was I the ghost or she?
Shade stared at me in what could have been horror or simple disbelief. ‘You,’ she whispered, and then glanced around herself quickly. I could tell she was shocked, slightly afraid, and wondering whether to run for it.
To reassure her, I reached out and took hold of her hands that were both gripping the lumi-cell. ‘It’s OK. I’m here. I’m really here.’
She did not flinch away from me. She was warm, alive. If I leaned closer, I knew I’d be able to smell her. Her startled expression was comical. I had to laugh. ‘This is incredible. I feel I know you... The rust islands... the device... Listen to me, Shade. You were right: there were no gods, only stranded people, castaways.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Have I made you appear here now?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Time is looping around us. We’re connected somehow; perhaps like calls to like, even across time.’
Shade managed a smile. ‘I’ve felt your presence,’ she murmured. ‘I thought it was my imagination, creating an audience for what I was doing.’ She reached up behind her ear. ‘It must be the device... some weird function everyone had forgotten...’
Suddenly, I was afraid she was going to remove the device and show it to me. My stomach churned, and a white-hot pain shot behind my eyes. I turned away from her. ‘No, don’t remove it, Shade. It already exists in this time... if this is my time. And I think you wearing it is one of the things that’s making this possible, if not the only thing.’
‘OK.’
I turned back to her. She was frowning.
‘This is the past... isn’t it?’
I shook my head. ‘Not exactly. I think we’re outside of both times, or somehow hovering between the two. All I know is that I found your recording in this place a while back and I’ve been interacting with it. You thought you were talking to the future, Shade, but you weren’t.’
‘So, I was talking to the gods themselves!’ She walked past me, and her image seemed to shiver before me. I reached out and held on to her, although she ignored my presumptuous move. ‘It’s so different,’ she said, in wonder, indicating the shifting landscape. Perhaps she saw more of my time than I did. ‘So desolate... empty.’ She glanced at me. ‘You made this place live?’
‘Not yet, but I think we will.’
‘But how did the device get here? Can I get back?’
I looked behind us, at the entrance to the shaft. Weeds grew around it and some were in flower. I nodded. ‘I think you can.’
She rubbed her face. ‘I have to ask you things. Quickly. What happened? Where did you go?’
I laughed. ‘I don’t know. We haven’t gone yet, have we!’ I told her about the team, how we were stranded and then how I’d found the cylinder and all that had happened since. She was interested in Lem’s plans; his realisation of his personal mandala.
‘Is that the only the only thing that makes the canals sacred? An engineer’s private joke?’ She shook her head in bewilderment.
‘Perhaps legends will grow up around it. I think, because of what Firetongue told you, that we must leave here eventually. Us, or our descendants. Some freighter will find us, or perhaps things will change on the Organic.’
Shade hunkered down beside me in the rubble, picked up a handful of ashy earth and let it sift through her fingers. Then she let her hands dangle between her knees, staring out over the lake. ‘Why did they abandon you here? Was it because your people destroyed this world, used it up? What is it they don’t want you to find?’
I sighed. ‘I don’t know. Whatever it is, I think it’s long gone; buried, corroded or stolen. Perhaps we’ll never know.’
Shade shook her head. I can’t believe I’ve been given this.’ She squinted up at me. ‘Hey, what’s your name?’
‘Serami.’
‘Serami the goddess.’ She grinned. ‘Perhaps I should start a cult!’ Then she frowned. ‘But how will my recording get back to you. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Leave it here,’ I said.
She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘But you’ve already discovered it in this time.’
I raised my hands. ‘So. We don’t know what’s going on, other than that time is weird. It’s the only thing you can do. Don’t show the recording device to me. Just leave it back in there somewhere.’ I flapped my hand at the dark entrance to the shaft.
‘In the old shrine?’
‘Is that what it is?’
She nodded. ‘I suppose I could... bury it or something.’ She did not sound convinced.
‘Just do it, Shade.’ I was finding it hard to keep her image before me now. It was as if I was only wishing her to be there, visualisi
ng her. ‘Do it now! Go!’
She stood up, reached out to me with one hand, but I felt only a shiver against my skin. Whatever fracture of time had allowed our meeting was closing up; I could sense it. Perhaps she could too. With one final glance behind her, and a grim smile, she walked back into the entrance of the shaft.
I filled up with emotion that spilled out of my eyes. It was over now. I knew we would not meet again. I sensed grief within me, but also a kind of awakening, as if I’d found something I could never lose.
It was only when I heard Lucrezia’s soft buzzing whine at my shoulder that I realised I had put my hands over my face.
‘Serami?’ Lucrezia hovered in front of my face.
‘She was here,’ I said. ‘Shade. We talked.’
Lucrezia was silent for a moment, a most human reaction I thought, but she was probably just scanning the surroundings for some kind of evidence. ‘That is impossible,’ she said at last.
I shook my head. ‘No. I’m not crazy, Luce. I know what I saw and heard.’ Around me, the lake was as it always was; a vast shallow puddle, devoid of life. Only irrigation would change that. It hadn’t happened yet.
‘Time to go,’ Lucrezia said sternly. ‘I think you’ve experimented enough.’
We went back to my cabin, because I didn’t want to face anybody yet. Already the experience at the lake was contracting in my memory. I knew that, eventually, it would seem like nothing more than a dream.
Lucrezia would not accept I’d witnessed a real event. She told me it was impossible because she had been with me the whole time, that I’d simply stopped walking, let out a yelp and put my head in my hands. She’d seen and sensed nothing. Had I been hallucinating? Now, I couldn’t be sure.
The following day I went out to the lake again, and after hesitating at the entrance to the shaft for a while, I went inside. What I expected to find was some evidence of Shade’s visit, but of course there was none. The cylinder was in my pocket, and there was no eerie duplicate lying where I’d first found it.
Lucrezia has theories for what happened - some kind of hallucinatory displacement, brought on my interface with the recording. After analysing the situation, she suggested that the information we’d received from the cylinder had somehow been created as we’d accessed it, that the device might have been something other than a journal chip; perhaps some sort of leisure VR device that stimulated the imagination.
I didn’t want to believe that and thought we should attempt to recreate the whole experience. Maybe I could even meet Shade again that way. But when we tried to access the data once more, we discovered that it had degenerated completely. Lucrezia said that the corrosion must have accelerated, damaging the cylinder irreparably.
Still, I sit every evening beside the estuary and gaze out to the place where the rust islands will be. Boats bob upon the placid waters; firefly fishermen trawl for shining treasures. I know that in some future time, Shade’s life continues, only now the memory of her meeting with me is lodged firmly in her mind. I speak aloud to her sometimes, wondering whether some dream-shred of my consciousness can somehow leak through my time into hers. This old world: it stirs in its sleep and dreams. We are simply part of the dreaming, I think.
The sky is infinite above me, and I think about how the universe buzzes with unseen life. Here I am: so small upon this spinning ball. How young we are. How little we know.
Built on Blood
The morning of the Carnival of Day. Long Green Meadows estate waking up again. The grey is kissed by dawn, a red light stains the windscreens of the auto wrecks sagging along the kerbs. Even the two burnups, a derelict pub and a deserted grocer’s shop, crooked black relics of last week’s riot, are lent a certain gothic grandeur by this innocent radiance. Scrawny animals – cats or rats or some weird estate-bred hybrid of both – slink along the walls of the alleys. Somewhere a child begins to cry, then another and another. The dawn chorus; infant human despair.
Sallyann wakes up from a dream. The moment she opens her eyes the image fades, but she is sure it was terrifying. There is the beginning of a shout in her throat. She stretches out her arms from the bed and touches both sides of her small room. It is a morning ritual with her. She doesn’t know why she does it, but she can’t stop. The day can’t begin without it. She rolls onto her side in the narrow bed, shrugging back the new Community Care-supplied sleeping bag (courtesy of registered charity number 5,000,123). Everyone in Long Green Meadows has been given these recently. Sallyann has to admit they’re warm, but she doesn’t like the flowers on them. It seems cynical somehow, because there are never any flowers in Long Green Meadows, unless you count the ones in those big tubs at the shopping mall, but they’re always being burned by the kids and, anyway, they’re artificial. Sallyann’s clothes cover the small space between bed and wall, and it takes her a few minutes’ rummaging to dig out the two precious roll-ups her friend Danny gave her last night. Danny lives in the fortress three streets away; two houses knocked into one and windowed by iron. Motorbikes are parked in the yard behind the house; one of them is Danny’s. She’d met him in the vaccination clinic of all places.
He’d been sitting across the waiting room frowning at the muzak speaker overhead; a fierce, forlorn warrior, constrained, with embarrassment, in an inappropriate setting. His head was shaven, but for the tangle of dreads at the back, his scalp covered with curling blue Celtic tattoos. Sallyann, pretending to read a pamphlet on sexual hygiene, had covertly admired his facial bone structure with its thin fringe of Lucifer beard, until he’d asked her what she was staring at. They’d started sparring then, a ritual of mutual circling and snarling. She’d thought he didn’t like her and had covered her disappointment with expletive gusto, but he’d been waiting for Sallyann after she’d come out of the nurse’s booth. They’d ended up going to Elli’s Drop In together to drink de-caf and share complaints about life, their right arms aching from the needle and beginning to swell. They were friends; nothing else. Neither of them felt the need for anything else.
Last night, Danny and Sallyann had climbed out onto the roof of the biker house to watch the sky. They were looking for stars because earlier Sallyann had heard on TV that shooting stars would be visible at 11 p.m. All they’d seen however, was the orange sicklight of the town and the ghost of the moon, but somehow the air had seemed sweeter up there. There’d been a breeze to muss their hair. The rotors from uptown had provided a lightshow of sorts. They carried cautious police units, who never set foot in Long Green Meadows, or else inner city rich kids, raving out in the sky, hovering over the sickpit for a perilous thrill. Somewhere sirens howled and at midnight, a Health Company flyer had winged silently over the estate, distributing Dominic Blair photopics, with the lyrics to his latest song on the back. ‘Dominic Blair is King!’ declared the slogans. ‘See him live at the Carnival!’
Danny had read the lyrics aloud and said, ‘Lucky world. Tomorrow, there’s Carnival.’ And he and Sallyann had laughed together, sharing a thin, bitter cigarette Danny had rolled earlier.
‘Are you going uptown to watch it?’ Sallyann had asked.
Danny shrugged and gave her one of those weird, thinking looks, perhaps the thing she liked best about him. He screwed up his nose. ‘Nah...’ Like her, he was intrigued by the prospect of the Carnival, but felt he’d be betraying some inner code by attending it.
‘I am,’ Sallyann had said defiantly.
‘Why bother, Sal? It’ll just remind you of all the things you hate about this country. Why bother?’
‘I dunno.’ She hugged her knees and peered through narrowed eyes across the estate. Parts of it were completely without light. In a couple of places, dull fires were burning, indistinct figures dancing against the flames. She could see a gang of kids on the rooftops a few streets away, leaping from roof to roof.
Danny, in comparison to Sallyann, is a very rich man. He has the protection of his tribe and the tribe are wolf-hungry and wolf-canny. They always have money, but Sallyan
n knows better than to ask how they get it. There are no police in Long Green Meadows; the bikers are the nearest there is to such a force. They kill rapists, child molesters and psycho murderers, but are generally involved themselves in most other criminal activities, which they prefer to conduct off their own territory. Sometimes there are terrible battles with biker tribes of other estates; people are killed. And yet, Sallyann knows it’s the only way to survive, and she appreciates the little luxuries Danny can provide for her: rolling tobacco, fiery alcohol, pure drugs. Still, she’d be Danny’s friend whether he was rich or not, because he can think, and sometimes she needs someone around her who can do that, just to remind her she can think as well.
Sallyann lives in Honeysuckle Crescent with her mother. All the tower blocks and tenements of the previous century are long gone, but the new houses, which were erected hurriedly in the first few years of the new century in an attempt to control public unrest, are tiny and drab. So, they’d had fitted kitchenettes and economy heating, and a government minister had even come to open the estate, but now, ten years on, the houses are beginning to fall apart. The boom had been brief and had burnt itself out quickly. Now, urban decay has reverted to conditions last seen in the 90s – and worse. There is mould everywhere and big shadowy insects. The little gardens are full of tall, yellow weeds and garbage. The road surfaces have broken up; the only cars in Long Green Meadows are stolen ones, used up quickly and trashed. All the patches of community lawn have worn away to dry, dry dust, where the gangs of feral children play. The place is cancerous and dying. Danny had once said this might be because Long Green Meadows had been built on the site of an old plague pit.