The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  “Jason!” began Yorke again. “Can you remember when you were picked up? You were in a slug spacecraft. Now, can you remember getting into the liferaft when the Stella was hit? What happened afterwards? How did you get away from the alien vessel? Were you released, or did you escape?”

  Nothing. I’m not telling you any of that. You‘ll get nothing from me, except for my life-story. It’s my life-story that matters.

  “Jason! Where did the slugs take you? What did they do to you? How did you get away?”

  Nothing.

  “Look, please Jason, you have to tell us—for the sake of your family, if not for your own sake. Now, you escaped from the Stella in a liferaft. That’s right isn’t it?”

  “No.” This time, he condescended to pronounce the word instead of trying to shake his head.

  “But you must have. The Stella was wrecked. You could only have survived in a liferaft.”

  There was a pause; then Angeli said: “He’s not going to talk about any of that. I suspect that he honestly believes that we’re the enemy. After all, he is in a slug body—or what we suspect to be a slug body. He may even be a slug, pretending to be Jason.”

  One of the round black blobs moved from side to side, as if it were being shaken. It was an oddly bizarre and meaningless gesture

  “You must tell us, Jason,” said Yorke desperately. “What did the slugs do to you? Why on Earth won’t you tell us?”

  Oh hell! If I tell them that, maybe they’ll stop plaguing me about all the rest.

  Slowly, and with difficulty, his lipless mouth formed the requisite syllables. He managed to slobber out the barely intelligible words.

  “They killed me.”

  <>

  * * * *

  APPEARANCES

  1.

  Because Angie and her mother were making the car journey on their own Angie was allowed to sit in the front seat. It made little difference to the experience, because Angie spent the entire time solving the mazes in the new puzzle book her mother had bought her for the journey.

  “You might save a few for later, precious,” her mother said. “We’ll be at the cottage on our own for nearly a week—Cathy and your father won’t be coming down until Friday.”

  “I’m just doing the mazes now,” Angie said. “I’ll save the others for later. Anyway, I’ll be helping you, so I won’t get bored. If I do, I can go exploring.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” her mother said. “We’ll have to find out how safe it is before you go wandering off on your own. You can play in the garden, though—the front garden, that is. We won’t be able to sort out the back one for quite a while.”

  The cottage in the South Downs that Mr. and Mrs. Martindale had bought the previous year was called Orchard Cottage, because there had once been an orchard behind the property. Unfortunately, all the apple trees had died a long time ago, and the former orchard was now a jungle of hawthorn trees and brambles, topped off by a layer of bindweed.

  “I’ll be okay,” Angie assured her mother, as she began to trace a path through yet another maze with the point of her pencil. “I’ve got my library books and my drawing pad, and now the electricity’s on the TV will be working.”

  “You’ll be able to get out and about more when Cathy comes down,” her mother said, although she wasn’t able to make it sound convincing. Cathy wasn’t keen on “getting out and about”. Cathy disapproved of what she called “the whole cottage thing”—that was why she’d insisted on staying in Kingston with her father, who could only get time off work to come down for the Easter weekend itself.

  Angie didn’t bother to point out that Cathy wouldn’t be much use in assisting her to explore the neighborhood of the cottage. It would only have drawn the conversation out, and she needed to concentrate on the track she was following with her pencil.

  Her mother took the hint and concentrated on the road ahead of her. The A29 was a straight road, built on the course of one of the ancient Roman roads, but Mrs. Martindale was very scrupulous about not letting her attention wander. She was always reminding her daughters that driving required the utmost concentration, even though Cathy wouldn’t be legally able to drive for another three years, and Angie for nearly three years longer than that.

  When they arrived at Orchard Cottage Angie had to get out and open the gate so that her mother could back the car into the narrow drive, all the way up to the front door. Then they had to unload the bags from the boot, and transfer them into the house two at a time. They’d brought a lot of luggage, because the kitchen had to be properly equipped, now that it was properly fitted, and the new beds had to be made up.

  Once the bags were safely inside Angie went back into the garden to admire the new roof. The slates were exactly the same shade of grey as the broken ones they had replaced, but they seemed much brighter, almost as if they’d been polished.

  The front garden was still in a mess. The builders had piled up all their materials here while they were fixing the roof and doing the other repairs inside the house. They’d cleared up after them, but it would be some time before the crushed grass and trampled flowers would recover. As a play area, it wasn’t very inviting—although it still had a clear advantage over the thicket at the back of the house, which offered no scope at all.

  Angie went back inside, where her mother was busy putting things away.

  “There you are, treasure,” Mrs. Martindale said, “Could you take some of this stuff up to the bedrooms, please?”

  “Sure,” Angie said. “Which is which?”

  “Those are for your room, those are for Cathy’s. Cathy’s bedding could have waited until Friday, but I couldn’t trust your father to remember it in addition to his own stuff. That’s the trouble with engineers—too intent on the task in hand to remember anything else.”

  “Cathy could have reminded him,” Angie pointed out. Angie was still a little jealous because Cathy had got her own way, and would have the house all to herself while her father was at work. Angie couldn’t see why a fourteen-year-old had any greater need to be able to see her friends than an eleven-year-old. The argument that Cathy was better able to look after herself than Angie was silly, given that Cathy was so proud of her inability to boil an egg.

  “Cathy would have reminded him of all the wrong things,” her mother replied, proving Angie’s point. Her parents were always commenting on the fact that while Angie obviously “took after” her father, Cathy didn’t seem to resemble either of her parents, being far less tidy-minded.

  Angie distributed the two sets of bedding between Cathy’s room and her own. Cathy’s room was at the front of the house, next to what her father called the “master bedroom”, while Angie’s was at the back, next to the bathroom. Cathy’s room was larger, but Angie preferred her own because it had a lattice window.

  The window was one of the few “original features” the cottage had left, apart from the grey stone walls and the big fireplace downstairs. The window had a frame of seasoned wood that seemed as hard as stone, and instead of a single pane it had a lead lattice supporting more than forty smaller pieces of glass. The pieces were diamond-shaped, except for the triangular ones at the edges.

  The glass in all the downstairs windows had had to be replaced, but most of the glass in Angie’s window had survived the centuries of neglect that had left almost everything else in the building irreparably damaged. One central cluster of five diamonds had had to be replaced, but the others had only needed the thick layers of grime to be wiped away. The five new diamonds didn’t distort the light as much as the older ones, but that only added to the window’s individuality.

  Angie’s father had tried to explain to her why the older glass was slightly distorted. Because he was an engineer, he was very fond of explanations.

  “What you have to understand, treasure,” he’d said, the first time he’d shown her the as-yet-repaired window, the previous October, “is that making liquid glass set in flat sheets wasn’t always as ea
sy as it is nowadays. When your window was first put together some glass-makers were still using a method that involved swirling the hot liquid glass around to make it spread out. The parts near the centre of the swirl were thicker, and they retained the traces of circular waves. Those were the bits they used to make the cheapest windows. People didn’t worry much about views in those days—they just wanted to let in enough light for a room to serve its purpose. Luckily, you’ve got enough new sections to let you appreciate the view—which will be well worth looking at, once we’ve sorted out the back garden.”

  Angie remembered that she had looked out through the gap left by the missing diamonds at the overgrown orchard and said: “That won’t be easy.” She’d only said it because she knew exactly what her father’s reply would be.

  “Of course it won’t,” he’d said, “but you have to remember the engineer’s motto.” Then they had joined their voices together to say: “The difficult we do at once; the impossible sometimes takes a little longer.”

  When Angie had made up her bed and put her puzzle book down on the bedside table she went to the window in order to look out through the new diamonds.

  The plot of land behind the cottage extended for about forty meters to the rear wall of the property. The field beyond belonged to a farmer, who sometimes grazed cattle there, although it had been left to lie fallow this year. The estate agent had explained, when the family had first come to view the property, that the orchard wasn’t an “original feature”. The house’s name had been changed by a former owner, some time in the 1930s, when the doomed apple trees had first been planted.

  “Before the orchard there was probably some kind of vegetable garden,” the estate agent had said, during that first visit, “but you’ll be able to clear the hawthorns and the brambles and put in a proper garden. The cottage deserves that, don’t you think?”

  The estate agent had spent almost as much time talking about what the cottage deserved as he had about its potential. According to him, it deserved new and careful owners, who would make it into the kind of cottage it really ought to have been, but had never succeeded in becoming.

  Looking at the overgrown orchard now, from her high vantage-point, Angie wasn’t at all sure what it deserved to be, or what it was trying to be. The dense sheet of bindweed overlaying the various dead and stunted trees and the coiled-up brambles certainly seemed to be a commanding presence, which would resist any attempt to destroy it.

  In the 1930s, Angie supposed—a historical era so distant that her grandparents had been children younger than her—someone must have thought that the cottage deserved an orchard, but the land behind it obviously hadn’t wanted to be one. She could hardly see the lumps in the thicket where the dead crowns of the old apple trees must be.

  After looking through the new glass for half a minute, Angie moved her head sideways to look through the older glass. The greens became slightly darker, and the leaves of the bindweed seemed to become even greedier as they flooded over the underlying branches. The gentle movements stirred by the breeze gave the former orchard the appearance of a green sea billowing up in response to some mysterious force emanating from below.

  “Perhaps the cottage didn’t deserve an orchard because it had been naughty,” Angie murmured. “Or maybe it thought that getting an orchard wasn’t really a reward.” She knew that coming here with her mother to spend the entire fortnight of the school holiday didn’t really qualify as a reward, although her parents had been careful to talk about it as if it were, but she hadn’t been naughty. Cathy was the one who had started a big row in order to avoid coming here, and had got her own way in the end—which she clearly didn’t deserve.

  “I don’t want to go to your stupid cottage!” Cathy had yelled. “I didn’t want you to buy a stupid cottage in the first place. Don’t you realize that it’s people like us, buying second homes, who are ruining the countryside for the people who were born there and the people who work there, pricing them out of the market?”

  Her father had, of course, taken the trouble to explain to Angie, once Cathy had stormed out, why that argument was untrue, or at least irrelevant.

  “We’re not taking a home away from anyone else, Angie,” he told her. “No one’s lived in Orchard Cottage for almost fifty years. It’s not that the local people couldn’t afford to buy it—they just couldn’t afford to fix it up. What we’re doing is rescuing a property that would otherwise have to lie derelict until it was too badly ruined ever to be saved. We’re doing a good thing. You’ll like it, when it’s finished. It’ll be so beautiful. The perfect place to get away.”

  The problem with that perfection, Angie knew, was that Cathy didn’t want to get away at all. Everything in life she needed and wanted, at present, was in Kingston, or a short train ride away in London. It was different for her parents, who both had jobs and were always competing with one another to establish who had had the most stressful day. For them, the office and the sites where her father worked, and the primary school where her mother taught, were things that really did need to be escaped occasionally. For them, the opportunity to construct a refuge in the South Downs was a dream come true.

  But what about me? Angie wondered, as she stared down at the thorny jungle that would surely require the use of some kind of heavy machinery before it stood any chance of becoming a “proper garden”. Do I need to get away or not?

  She had felt a need to get away a year before, when she had still been at the primary school at which her mother was a teacher. She had made that escape, though, when she’d moved up to the secondary school. Being in a school where she had a sister in year nine wasn’t at all the same thing as being in a school where she had a mother who taught year three. It might even be reckoned an advantage to have an older sister around if Cathy wasn’t quite so determine to ignore her during school hours.

  Angie wondered whether she still needed to get away, or whether she too would now be better off in Kingston, hanging out with friends—or, at least, making some friends...or trying to.

  Angie turned away from the window, still uncertain. She honestly didn’t know whether she wanted to be at the cottage or not. Time would tell, she supposed. She didn’t know, as yet, whether she could be comfortable in the cottage—whether it was the kind of place where she wouldn’t feel the pressure of needing something to do, in order not to feel awkward and out of place.

  She tried to put on a smile before she went back downstairs, though. She knew that she ought to pretend to be glad to be here, for her mother’s sake. Her mother wanted her to be glad to be here, to count the time they spent here as a reward and not a punishment, and she had to keep up that appearance. She didn’t want her mother to be disappointed—not, at least, in her.

  * * * *

  2.

  Angie’s mother was still in the kitchen, looking round proudly at all the utensils for which she had found proper and permanent places. She was nursing a freshly-made cup of tea. “Do you want a drink, darling?” she asked. “It’ll have to be tea, I’m afraid, until I can get some juice from the village shop.”

  “I’ll just get a drink of water,” Angie said, hunting for a glass. “When are we going to start stripping?” The first job on their list was to scrape the remains of the ancient wallpaper off the walls in all the rooms, so that when her father drove down on Friday with a cargo of plaster and paint-cans he could start straight away on doing the repair work that had to be done before they could start “brightening the place up with a lick of paint”.

  Angie knew that the painting would make a big difference to the way the interior of the cottage looked. The wallpaper patterned with apple-blossom must have seemed cheerful enough when it was put up in the 1930s, to reflect the cottage’s new name, but the building work that had been done in recent months had added massively to the ravages of ordinary dirt. The walls were now so filthy that the apple-blossom inside had been obliterated almost as successfully as the apple-blossom outside.

  “We’
ve got to finish stocking the fridge today,” her mother said. “It’s Sunday tomorrow, and shops still shut on Sundays in these parts. You’ll have to come to the village with me and help me carry things back. There won’t be time to do much today. The best plan is to settle in and make an early start on the walls tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine,” Angie said.

  “We’ll walk to the village instead of taking the car,” her mother went on. “It’ll give us a chance to look around, and it’ll do us good to use our legs for once. We can get a taste of what life used to be like in the olden days, when your granny was your age.”

  “And all the glass was swirled around, so the world was always slightly blurred when you looked out through your windows,” Angie added—although she knew perfectly well, thanks to her father’s careful explanation, that glass of that sort dated from a much earlier era.