[. . .] The manifold conducer was a soundless apparatus, but it resonated at a frequency that charmed the bats at night—Cryck preferred to call them birdrats, and that always made him laugh. Albert had never thought of them as vermin until the evening of departure, when the treetops pullulated with the creatures and their constant swooping and affray so near to the equipment made him anxious. For such a large contraption, the conducer was still sensitive to the vibrations of his footsteps, which Cryck said were unusually heavy for a boy so young, and whenever she permitted him to enter its internal chamber, she made him put on special plimsolls that were three sizes too big for him. That night, she was evidently mindful of the birdrats overhead but didn’t have the time to worry. She was already busy in the chamber when he got there, running through her final checklist. She saw him waiting at the door and waved him in. ‘Shoes,’ she said, meaning the plimsolls. He slipped them on.
‘Have you seen what’s happening out there?’ he asked.
‘As long as they stick to the trees they shouldn’t disrupt the calibrations too much,’ she said. ‘We’ll keep an eye on them, though. The more of them gather, the more I’ll worry.’
‘What if they fly in here?’
‘They won’t.’
‘What if they do, though?’
‘If they do, they’ll destroy everything. Now please—you’re distracting me.’
He had never seen anything quite as remarkable as a manifold conducer in full working order. The quorhs were primed and they emitted such a pleasant light. The outer mechanism was blue-green with pulsing strings, which ran through the entire instrument from the groundlings to the shell, from the tower to the cable trunks and the paraxial mounts. The awe he felt for it, standing inside, was even greater than the time he’d visited St Paul’s Cathedral with his father and his sisters, when they’d looked up at the spire just as the morning bells began to toll. ‘Magnificent,’ his father had said, then. ‘Quite marvellous,’ his sisters had echoed, and they had lifted him up the steps, one arm each. He would miss them all when he got to Aoxi, but he would write to explain his reasons. He knew they would be happy for him.
Cryck said she could not eat the special meal he had prepared. It was plated up and waiting for them back at their compartment, her favourite: grish and pheasant soup with flatcakes. ‘I told you—empty stomach.’
‘You can’t travel without eating. You’ll get sick.’
‘This isn’t travel, Albert,’ she said. ‘It’s not like going from one place to another.’
‘What is it then?’
‘You’ll see.’ She opened a box console on the wall, checked its innards. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s how I’ll patch it,’ and she extended a short run of wires to the console, a length of cable that he recognised—they had salvaged it from a compartment by the reservoir last winter. She had said it was some of the most expensive cabling that was manufactured and unusual to find in such a basic unit. She had taken it as a positive sign. Presently, she stared towards the hollow of the tower above them. Quorh pulses encircled the metallic rim of it like glassy marbles sliding round and round inside a cup. ‘Imagine going to sleep with your eyes open and waking up with your eyes closed,’ she said to him. ‘That’s what you should expect.’ He couldn’t picture it. The marbles kept on sliding round and round above their heads, and there was a growing jerkiness to their movement that Cryck did not appreciate. She was looking fraught. ‘I don’t like the readings I’m getting from this patch. The shell is ceding too much power.’
‘Can you fix it?’
‘We’ve got ten minutes before it falters. Twelve at most. We can’t wait any more. It’s time to go.’
‘Now?’ he said.
‘Of course now.’
‘But what about—?’
‘No time. Just go through the procedure as we practised,’ she said. ‘Go.’
He did not even have a moment to remove the plimsolls. Outside, in the bowl of the forest, the trees were rippling with bats, the night sky was infested with them. Heading back to the compartment, he had to stoop under the hordes—he swatted them away before they tangled in his hair; two skimmed his shoulders, and he felt the wind-rush of others as they flapped past his ears. He was careful not to run, in case he tripped. A false step could undo everything that they had planned. When they had practised their departure, Cryck had followed close behind. They had gone in a straight line across the open field to reach the crooked section of the woods where they had set up their camp. They had taken their places on the crosses Cryck had marked for each of them with truxol, high up on the covered roof of the compartment. Cryck had snapped her fingers and said, ‘Whoosh! And there you have it! We’ll be gone!’ But now that it was finally happening their rehearsals felt like meagre preparation. He was almost in the middle of the field before he realised Cryck was not trailing him. Where was she? Had she fallen? Had the birdrats knocked her down?
He hurried towards camp. The problem of the dark increased as he got further from the conducer, and soon his feet were meeting the resistance of the crops that lined the field; his hands were being whipped by them; but he made it to the verges of the woods without a stumble—from there, he knew the ground without having to look at it. Pushing through the trees, he saw the glimmer of camp lanterns and allowed himself a long intake of breath. He rushed over the incline to the covered roof of their compartment. But where was Cryck? Her yellow cross of truxol paint was vacant, an arm’s length from his. He stood on his mark and waited, hoped. Ten minutes, she had said. No more than twelve. How long had it been since then? He watched the distant lights of the conducer, its gentle haze above the trees, a brightness Cryck said only true Aoxins would observe. How proud he was to see it. He began to wonder at the other sights that lay ahead of him. The landscape of a whole new planet to absorb. The plants and animals of untold strangeness and variety. Beauty of a type he didn’t know yet. A different kind of symmetry.
Hhhee heeaarrdd aaa ssccuuuu ■
[. . .] know yet. A different kind of symmetry. He heard a scuff of boots beside him in the gloom. Cryck was standing on her mark. ‘I want you to remember,’ she said, ‘that I did everything I could with what I had. If I made an error, I am sorry. Do you understand?’
‘I think so,’ he said.
‘Don’t let yourself forget. Knowledge is all. You remember what I’ve taught you.’ She tooookkk a sssttepppppp tooo herrrr lefffft aannnddd gaaavve ■
[. . .] what I’ve taught you.’ She took a step to her left and gave him something. ‘You’re going to need this.’ It was the old khav. ‘You’d better take good care of it. I want to bequeath it to my firstborn one day.’
‘I will.’ He clutched it tight.
‘Okay. Head up, arms flat by your sides,’ she said. ‘Remember to breathe out.’
He kept his eyes on the conducer site.
After a moment, a sheer blue haze began to reach up from the treetops in the distance. An intermittent flash, a noise like screeching birds. Getting brighter, getting louder. There was a bobbing torchlight in the trees. He heard a whistle. Silhouettes of people came running through the woods. And he was still standing there on his truxol mark, still on the Earth. ‘What happened?’ he called to Cryck, turning. ‘Did it break?’ But all he saw was the bare soil where she had been, and then the smear of her hunched shoulders as she scrambled away in the dark. She was muttering to herself: ‘Delegates, delegates, delegates, run.’
—————
A boy at school had told me about rubbing batteries to revive them when they faded. So when Maxine Laidlaw’s speech began to drag and deepen, I stopped the tape. I removed the flagging Evereadys from the walkman and buffed the ends of them against my thighs. It gave me only a few seconds’ worth of extra charge at first, and I thought I’d have to add the boy’s name to the list of people I would never trust again. But then I wondered if the effect of rubbing them could have more to do with temperature than friction. So I held the b
atteries in my fist until the metal casings were no longer cool when touched against my lip. I was lacking body heat, so it took a while to warm them, and I could already feel my mind starting to shift to other places, other people I didn’t want to contemplate. Still, the change of temperature was all it took. Maxine Laidlaw’s voice returned to normal, lasted to the end of the third tape. When the walkman clicked off after Cryck’s bungled departure, I knew I had a choice to make. If I listened to the final tape from the beginning, I might never hear the end. If I skipped ahead, to the middle of the next side, I might reach the resolution of the story on the strength of the remaining charge, but what else would I miss?
If this sounds like a trivial problem, given my situation, I can assure you that I’ve come to view it as one of the most important choices of my life. Because the more power I could eke out of those batteries, the less I had to be alone with my own thoughts. While I had those words, I had their goodness. I had peace. I had normality. I could keep my life intact. Without them, I had memories of lay-bys and thumping traffic, broken skulls and blood. I had burgeoning ideas of where Fran Hardesty was headed in the car. I had the kind of helplessness that chokes.
So I pulled the last cassette out of the box and wound it forward with my little finger. This was as much as I got:
[. . .] positive, but when the doctor laid the photograph upon the table, Albert could not keep his voice from quivering. He felt the room closing around him. ‘No,’ he tried to say, ‘that isn’t her. You’ve got the wrong person.’ So what if the woman in the picture had a hefty, slumping carriage like Cryck’s? And so what if her eyes appeared to have the same pale irises? And so what if she had the stumpy neck, the bean-sized nostrils, and the groove above the lip? There were still a lot of differences. He might even call them doubts. For one thing, this woman had a complete set of white teeth. Her hair was so much cleaner, straighter, pulled back off her face. The downward angle of the cheekbones was a fraction too obtuse. Her lips were fuller and her earlobes shorter. And then there was her skin: immaculate. No scars across her brow, or crackling patches, or blisters round her nose.
‘Look again,’ said Doctor Wendell. ‘She’d be twenty years younger in this picture.’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘You’re absolutely sure this isn’t her?’
He nodded sternly, turning to regard the view outside the window. On the grounds of his father’s estate, the gardeners were tending to the lawns and flower beds. The wind was shaking the trees in the backwoods. He could just detect the canopy of the tallest sycamore, to which he and his sisters used to race. And somewhere underneath a hummock in those woods was the first compartment Cryck had ever shown him—the only one that he had ever been allowed inside. He would no sooner give it up to Doctor Wendell and her team of toadies in white coats than he would give up breathing.
‘Would you like to know her name?’ the doctor said. He did not like how often she unhooked her wireframe spectacles to spit on the lenses and clean them. She had the habit of pausing in the middle of a sentence while she wiped them with her sleeve. It seemed like something she did for effect, to convince people she was ordinary.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Come on, Albert,’ said his father. He had given up stoking the fire and was now propping himself up against the mantelpiece. ‘There’s no reason to be difficult.’
The doctor did not seem to welcome the interruption. ‘We’ll get there in good time,’ she said, and locked her eyes on Albert. ‘It’s not a pleasant situation to accept, is it? This woman was your friend. She saved you. She looked after you. It’s not easy to face up to the idea that she’s not what she claimed to be. I understand how you would want to protect her.’ There was more falseness to the doctor’s smile than he had ever sensed from Cryck. He had not made his mind up about her: if Doctor Wendell was a delegate, she was a subtle one. And even if she was a proper doctor with his best interests at heart, he would never give her what she wanted—he would never give up Cryck.
‘That isn’t her,’ he said again.
Dr Wendell pleated her hands. ‘All right.’ She turned the photograph upside downnnnnn, sssssooooo alllllll thaaaaattttt ■
[. . .] photograph upside down, so all that Albert had to look at was a bare glossy backing and a typewritten label stuck to the left corner: MARION PATEMAN, 23 JANUARY 1934, BETHLEM ROYAL HOSPITAL. ‘Perhaps you’d let me leave her file here with you and yoouuccaannloookthrroughhhhhhiiii ■
[. . .] with you and you can look through it and tell me if there’s anything you recognise. Aaaaanndd iiiiinnnntthhhemmeeaannnttiiimmmmeee ■
[. . .] because Cryck had warned him that a day like this might come. On that rainy afternoon, many weeks ago, when they had drained the modified compartment, she had seemed disturbed by the weightier quorh they had salvaged. She had spent most of the evening dismantling it by the campfire, putting it back together again, making agitated noises as she worked. ‘You know, I’m starting to suspect this isn’t one of ours,’ she had said. ‘See those boltholes there—’ She jabbed the end of her bradawl into the device. ‘They’re much too fine-threaded. And these are dead-mounts, look. We never use dead-mounts in our quorh sets—they’re unstable at high pressure. There’s a subtle difference in the quorh mechanics here—it’s got me wondering.’ Leaning back against the tree-stump, Cryck had stabbed the bradawl into its roots. ‘Maybe that compartment was flooded on purpose.’
‘Who would do that?’ he had said.
‘Someone trying to cover his tracks.’
‘A prisoner, you mean?’ He had imagined crowds of escaped convicts roaming the countryside, and it had brought a shiver to his back.
‘All I’m saying is, there’s a good chance we aren’t the only species who have found your planet useful.’
She had filled his head with thoughts of malign delegates from worlds beyond Aoxi. Her ancestors had told her stories about roving ships who tracked Aoxin movements in this corridor of space, who came to loot the places they once occupied for resources and new technology. When he asked what the delegates looked like, she said: ‘They’re just stories, Albert. I don’t know for certain. But we’ll need to take more care from this point on—no more wandering out of camp without me, understand?’
He had agreed to be more watchful.
‘We’ll have to find the right place for the conducer, too. Somewhere out of sight.’
The idea had come to Albert that such delegates from other planets might look human. When he had suggested it to Cryckkkkkk, shhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaadddddddddd ■
[. . .] look human. When he had suggested it to Cryck, she had considered the notion, clucking her gums. ‘It’s possible. We’ll need to stay cautious. Some species are adept at blending in. But you’ll know a delegate when you see one, I expect.’
‘How?’ He was anxious that he would not be able to distinguish them when the time came.
‘Instinct, that’s all you need.’ She doused the embers of the campfire with the water from her flask. ‘They’re sure to have something about them you don’t trust. They’ll probably come snooping round with lots of questions about me, trying to get information about what I’m building.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he had said, ‘I’ll never tell.’
‘Of course not, boy.’ She had patted him ontheshhhhhhhooooulllldddddeeerrrrrrrr ■
[. . .] had patted him on the shoulder. ‘We’re iiinnnnntttttthhhhhiiiiiiiissssssssssssssssssssssss ■
[. . .] iiinnnnnnnnntttttttthhhhiiiissssttttoooogggggeeetthhhheeeeerrrrrrrrr ■
[. . .] iinnnnnnnnntttttttthhhhiiiissss t tttto ggg gggggg g g eeetthh hh errrrrrrrr rr rr r r
Some nights he stayed out so late my mother would surrender. She’d abandon her vigil at the bottom of the stairs and slump to bed, leaving the hall light on for him, and when she came into my room to check on me, straightening my duvet, brushing my fringe back with her thumb, I wo
uld say, as if I didn’t know, ‘What time is it? Is he not home yet?’ On the good nights, she would shush me, tell me everything was fine, now go to sleep. On the bad nights, she would perch beside me with the mattress warping, asking me to recount exactly what I knew about my father’s movements before he left the house: what he’d been wearing, if he’d eaten, if he’d taken his keys with him, if he’d put on aftershave, if he’d pinched the window cleaner’s money from the drawer. She wouldn’t let me rest until I’d answered all her questions. Then I’d hear her in the bathroom, clattering the lotion bottles in the cabinet for a while, running the taps to cover her weeping, and I’d lie awake imagining what he was doing out there in the world without us.
At that age, I didn’t know what adult misdemeanours looked like. So I pictured him in smoky pubs where drinkers gathered round to hear him telling stories—he’d have them spellbound, chiming in with counterpoints and friendly patter. In my head, he was a well-liked man, appreciated for complexities and traits my mother didn’t know he had. I suppose I couldn’t help but attach my own desires to the situations I created for him. I needed there to be extenuating reasons for his disappointments, something to redeem him in my mother’s eyes. And so I thought of him driving through the night to collect a special necklace he’d ordered from a craftsman in a workshop many miles away. I thought of him picking tulips from a local garden for a bouquet, having to explain himself to the disgruntled members of the household when they caught him in the act. I thought of him standing at the top of his painting ladder at the lamplit window of a cottage in a distant village—a rundown property that he’d been secretly restoring. I thought of him with two flat tyres on a dark road in the countryside. I thought of him waiting in the A & E department with a stranger he’d discovered lying in the street on his way home, an epileptic or a homeless woman. I thought of him sitting in a veterinarian’s consultation room with a cat he’d run over. I thought of him stuck in a lift. I thought of him working the night shift as a security guard in a fancy office building, an extra occupation he’d been too proud to divulge to us.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 20
