by Mike Ashley
“But at last it was decided the Starstone should be given to a faithful friend of the Prince. He would search the galaxy for this maiden. If she existed, he would find her.
“So he departed with the blessings of many worlds behind him, vowing to find the maiden and give her the Starstone.”
He stopped again, cleared his throat, and let the silence grow.
“Is that all?” she said, at last, in a whisper.
“Not quite all,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I tricked you.”
“Tricked me?”
He opened the front of his coat, which was still draped around her shoulders. He reached in past her bony chest and down into an inner pocket of the coat. He came up with the crystal. It was oval, with one side flat. It pulsed ruby light as it sat in the palm of his hand.
“It shines,” she said, looking at it wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
“Yes, it does. And that means you’re the one.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Take it.” He handed it to her, and as he did so, he nicked it with his thumbnail. Red light spilled into her hands, flowed between her fingers, seemed to soak into her skin. When it was over, the crystal still pulsed, but dimmed. Her hands were trembling.
“It felt very, very hot,” she said.
“That was the essence of the Princess.”
“And the Prince? Is he still looking for her?”
“No one knows. I think he’s still out there, and some day he will come back for her.”
“And what then?”
He looked away from her. “I can’t say. I think, even though you are lovely, and even though you have the Starstone, that he will just pine away. He loved her very much.”
“I’d take care of him,” she promised.
“Maybe that would help. But I have a problem now. I don’t have the heart to tell the Prince that she is dead. Yet I feel that the Starstone will draw him to it one day. If he comes and finds you, I fear for him. I think perhaps I should take the stone to a far part of the galaxy, some place he could never find it. Then at least he would never know. It might be better that way.”
“But I’d help him,” she said, earnestly. “I promise. I’d wait for him, and when he came, I’d take her place. You’ll see.”
He studied her. Perhaps she would. He looked into her eyes for a long time, and at last let her see his satisfaction.
“Very well. You can keep it then.”
“I’ll wait for him,” she said. “You’ll see.”
She was very tired, almost asleep.
“You should go home now,” he suggested.
“Maybe I could just lie down for a moment,” she said.
“All right.” He lifted her gently and placed her prone on the ground. He stood looking at her, then knelt beside her and began to gently stroke her forehead. She opened her eyes with no alarm, then closed them again. He continued to stroke her.
Twenty minutes later he left the playground, alone.
He was always depressed afterwards. It was worse than usual this time. She had been much nicer than he had imagined at first. Who could have guessed such a romantic heart beat beneath all that dirt?
He found a phone booth several blocks away. Punching her name into information yielded a fifteen-digit number, which he called. He held his hand over the camera eye.
A woman’s face appeared on his screen.
“Your daughter is in the playground, at the south end by the pool, under the bushes,” he said. He gave the address of the playground.
“We were so worried! What . . . is she . . . who is—”
He hung up and hurried away.
Most of the other pushers thought he was sick. Not that it mattered. Pushers were a tolerant group when it came to other pushers, and especially when it came to anything a pusher might care to do to a puller. He wished he had never told anyone how he spent his leave time, but he had, and now he had to live with it.
So, while they didn’t care if he amused himself by pulling the legs and arms off infant puller pups, they were all just back from ground leave and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get on each other’s nerves. They ragged him mercilessly.
“How were the swing-sets this trip, Ian?”
“Did you bring me those dirty knickers I asked for?”
“Was it good for you, honey? Did she pant and slobber?”
“My ten-year-old baby, she’s a pullin’ me back home . . .”
Ian bore it stoically. It was in extremely bad taste, and he was the brunt of it, but it really didn’t matter. It would end as soon as they lifted again. They would never understand what he sought, but he felt he understood them. They hated coming to Earth. There was nothing for them there, and perhaps they wished there was.
And he was a pusher himself. He didn’t care for pullers. He agreed with the sentiment expressed by Marian, shortly after lift-off. Marian had just finished her first ground leave after her first voyage. So naturally she was the drunkest of them all.
“Gravity sucks,” she said, and threw up.
It was three months to Amity, and three months back. He hadn’t the foggiest idea of how far it was in miles; after the tenth or eleventh zero his mind clicked off.
Amity. Shit City. He didn’t even get off the ship. Why bother? The planet was peopled with things that looked a little like tenton caterpillars and a little like sentient green turds. Toilets were a revolutionary idea to the Amiti; so were ice cream bars, sherbets, sugar donuts, and peppermint. Plumbing had never caught on, but sweets had, and fancy desserts from every nation on Earth. In addition, there was a pouch of reassuring mail for the forlorn human embassy. The cargo for the return trip was some grayish sludge that Ian supposed someone on Earth found tremendously valuable, and a packet of desperate mail for the folks back home. Ian didn’t need to read the letters to know what was in them. They could all be summed up as “Get me out of here!”
He sat at the viewport and watched an Amiti family lumbering and farting its way down the spaceport road. They paused every so often to do something that looked like an alien cluster-fuck. The road was brown. The land around it was brown, and in the distance were brown, unremarkable hills. There was a brown haze in the air, and the sun was yellow-brown.
He thought of castles perched on mountains of glass, of Princes and Princesses, of shining white horses galloping among the stars.
He spent the return trip just as he had on the way out: sweating down in the gargantuan pipes of the stardrive. Just beyond the metal walls unimaginable energies pulsed. And on the walls themselves, tiny plasmoids grew into bigger plasmoids. The process was too slow to see, but if left unchecked the encrustations would soon impair the engines. His job was to scrape them off.
Not everyone was cut out to be an astrogator.
And what of it? It was honest work. He had made his choices long ago. You spent your life either pulling gees or pushing c. And when you got tired, you grabbed some z’s. If there was a pushers’ code, that was it.
The plasmoids were red and crystalline, teardrop-shaped. When he broke them free of the walls, they had one flat side. They were full of a liquid light that felt as hot as the center of the sun.
It was always hard to get off the ship. A lot of pushers never did. One day, he wouldn’t either.
He stood for a few moments looking at it all. It was necessary to soak it in passively at first, get used to the changes. Big changes didn’t bother him. Buildings were just the world’s furniture, and he didn’t care how it was arranged. Small changes worried the shit out of him. Ears, for instance. Very few of the people he saw had earlobes. Each time he returned he felt a little more like an ape who has fallen from his tree. One day he’d return to find everybody had three eyes or six fingers, or that little girls no longer cared to hear stories of adventure.
He stood there, dithering, getting used to the way people were painting their faces, listening to what sounded like Spanish being spoken all around him. Occasional English or Arabi
c words seasoned it. He grabbed a crewmate’s arm and asked him where they were. The man didn’t know. So he asked the captain, and she said it was Argentina, or it had been when they left.
* * *
The phone booths were smaller. He wondered why.
There were four names in his book. He sat there facing the phone, wondering which name to call first. His eyes were drawn to Radiant Shiningstar Smith, so he punched that name into the phone. He got a number and an address in Novosibirsk.
Checking the timetable he had picked – putting off making the call – he found the antipodean shuttle left on the hour. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and took a deep breath and looked up to see her standing outside the phone booth. They regarded each other silently for a moment. She saw a man much shorter than she remembered, but powerfully built, with big hands and shoulders and a pitted face that would have been forbidding but for the gentle eyes. He saw a tall woman around forty years old who was fully as beautiful as he had expected she would be. The hand of age had just begun to touch her. He thought she was fighting that waistline and fretting about those wrinkles, but none of that mattered to him. Only one thing mattered, and he would know it soon enough.
“You are Ian Haise, aren’t you?” she said, at last.
“It was sheer luck I remembered you again,” she was saying. He noted the choice of words. She could have said coincidence.
“It was two years ago. We were moving again and I was sorting through some things and I came across that plasmoid. I hadn’t thought about you in . . . oh, it must have been fifteen years.”
He said something noncommittal. They were in a restaurant, away from most of the other patrons, at a booth near a glass wall beyond which spaceships were being trundled to and from the blast pits.
“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble,” he said.
She shrugged it away.
“You did, some, but that was so long ago. I certainly wouldn’t bear a grudge that long. And the fact is, I thought it was all worth it at the time.”
She went on to tell him of the uproar he had caused in her family, of the visits by the police, the interrogation, puzzlement, and final helplessness. No one knew quite what to make of her story. They had identified him quickly enough, only to find he had left Earth, not to return for a long, long time.
“I didn’t break any laws,” he pointed out.
“That’s what no one could understand. I told them you had talked to me and told me a long story, and then I went to sleep. None of them seemed interested in what the story was about. So I didn’t tell them. And I didn’t tell them about the . . . the Starstone.” She smiled. “Actually, I was relieved they hadn’t asked. I was determined not to tell them, but I was a little afraid of holding it all back. I thought they were agents of the . . . who were the villains in your story? I’ve forgotten.”
“It’s not important.”
“I guess not. But something is.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should tell me what it is. Maybe you can answer the question that’s been in the back of my mind for twenty-five years, ever since I found out that thing you gave me was just the scrapings from a starship engine.”
“Was it?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it was more than that. I’m asking you if it wasn’t more.”
“Yes, I guess it was more,” she said, at last.
“I’m glad.”
“I believed in that story passionately for . . . oh, years and years. Then I stopped believing it.”
“All at once?”
“No. Gradually. It didn’t hurt much. Part of growing up, I guess.”
“And you remembered me.”
“Well, that took some work. I went to a hypnotist when I was twenty-five and recovered your name and the name of your ship. Did you know—”
“Yes. I mentioned them on purpose.”
She nodded, and they fell silent again. When she looked at him now, he saw more sympathy, less defensiveness. But there was still a question.
“Why?” she said.
He nodded, then looked away from her, out to the starships. He wished he was on one of them, pushing c. It wasn’t working. He knew it wasn’t. He was a weird problem to her, something to get straightened out, a loose end in her life that would irritate until it was made to fit in, then be forgotten.
To hell with it.
“Hoping to get laid,” he said. When he looked up she was slowly shaking her head back and forth.
“Don’t trifle with me, Haise. You’re not as stupid as you look. You knew I’d be married, leading my own life. You knew I wouldn’t drop it all because of some half-remembered fairy tale thirty years ago. Why?”
And how could he explain the strangeness of it all to her?
“What do you do?” He recalled something, and rephrased it. “Who are you?”
She looked startled. “I’m a mysteliologist.”
He spread his hands. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Come to think of it, there was no such thing when you left.”
“That’s it, in a way,” he said. He felt helpless again. “Obviously, I had no way of knowing what you’d do, what you’d become, what would happen to you that you had no control over. All I was gambling on was that you’d remember me. Because that way . . .” He saw the planet Earth looming once more out the viewport. So many, many years and only six months later. A planet full of strangers. It didn’t matter that Amity was full of strangers. But Earth was home, if that word still had any meaning for him.
“I wanted somebody my own age I could talk to,” he said. “That’s all. All I want is a friend.”
He could see her trying to understand what it was like. She wouldn’t, but maybe she’d come close enough to think she did.
“Maybe you’ve found one,” she said, and smiled. “At least I’m willing to get to know you, considering the effort you’ve put into this.”
“It wasn’t much effort. It seems so long-term to you, but it wasn’t to me. I held you on my lap six months ago.”
“How long is your leave?” she asked.
“Two months.”
“Would you like to come stay with us for a while? We have room in our house.”
“Will your husband mind?”
“Neither my husband nor my wife. That’s them sitting over there, pretending to ignore us.” Ian looked, caught the eye of a woman in her late twenties. She was sitting across from a man Ian’s age, who now turned and looked at Ian with some suspicion but no active animosity. The woman smiled; the man reserved judgment.
Radiant had a wife. Well, times change.
“Those two in the red skirts are police,” Radiant was saying. “So is that man over by the wall, and the one at the end of the bar.”
“I spotted two of them,” Ian said. When she looked surprised, he said, “Cops always have a look about them. That’s one of the things that don’t change.”
“You go back quite a ways, don’t you? I’ll bet you have some good stories.”
Ian thought about it, and nodded. “Some, I suppose.”
“I should tell the police they can go home. I hope you don’t mind that we brought them in.”
“Of course not.”
“I’ll do that, and then we can go. Oh, and I guess I should call the children and tell them we’ll be home soon.” She laughed, reached across the table and touched his hand. “See what can happen in six months? I have three children, and Gillian has two.”
He looked up, interested.
“Are any of them girls?”
PALELY LOITERING
Christopher Priest
We close with two more stories that look at the manipulation of time. I have saved them to the end because of their unusual scenarios which I will let the authors unfold.
Christopher Priest is one of Britain’s most respected writers of science fiction and the fantastic. His 1995 novel, The Prestige, about the rivalry between
two stage magicians, was filmed by Christopher Nolan in 2006 and has since been adapted for the stage. His other work, some of which incorporates elements of time and a psychic distortion of reality, includes The Inverted World (1974), The Space Machine (1976), A Dream of Wessex (1977) and The Separation (2002).
i
During the summers of my childhood, the best treat of all was our annual picnic in Flux Channel Park, which lay some fifty miles from home. Because my father was set in his ways, and for him no picnic would be worthy of its name without a joint of freshly roasted cold ham, the first clue we children had was always, therefore, when Cook began her preparations. I made a point every day of slipping down unnoticed to the cellar to count the hams that hung from steel hooks in the ceiling, and as soon as I found one was missing I would hurry to my sisters and share the news. The next day, the house would fill with the rich aroma of ham roasting in cloves, and we three children would enter an elaborate charade: inside we would be brimming over with excitement at the thought of the adventure, but at the same time restraining ourselves to act normally, because Father’s announcement of his plans at breakfast on the chosen day was an important part of the fun.
We grew up in awe and dread of our father, for he was a distant and strict man. Throughout the winter months, when his work made its greatest demands, we hardly saw him, and all we knew of him were the instructions passed on to us by Mother or the governor. In the summer months he chose to maintain the distance, joining us only for meals, and spending the evenings alone in his study. However, once a year my father would mellow, and for this alone the excursions to the Park would have been cause for joy. He knew the excitement the trip held for us and he played up to it, revealing the instinct of showman and actor.
Sometimes he would start by pretending to scold or punish us for some imaginary misdemeanour, or would ask Mother a misleading question, such as whether it was that day the servants were taking a holiday, or he would affect absent-mindedness; through all this we would hug our knees under the table, knowing what was to come. Then at last he would utter the magic words “Flux Channel Park”, and, abandoning our charade with glee, we children would squeal with delight and run to Mother, the servants would bustle in and clear away the breakfast, there would be a clatter of dishes and the creak of the wicker hamper from the kitchen . . . and at long last the crunching of hooves and steel-rimmed wheels would sound on the gravel drive outside, as the taxi-carriage arrived to take us to the station.
