The Rift

by Nina Allan

Of Linder Traas and his comrades themselves, no trace was found.

  “How can that be?” I asked Cally.

  She shrugged. “No one really knows what’s out there,” she said. “Probably they just starved, though.”

  Testament was supposed to be the true story of a Noors palaeontologist who came from beyond the mountains to settle in Fiby. She claimed there were still southern felids living in the Noors mountains, though of course no one in Fiby believed her, Cally said. Most people thought the book was a fake anyway, though that did nothing to stop it becoming a bestseller.

  * * *

  Cally has a cousin who went to live in Davis, a small mining town in the northern belts, about halfway along the northern railroad between Galena and Twin. That’s a long way out from the city, Cally said. She hasn’t seen her cousin Lila since she left Gren-Noor.

  “What made her go?” I asked.

  “Teachers make good money in the belts. And Lila always wanted to travel.”

  Many months later, Cally told me the real reason Lila went north was because she was in love with Noah. “She asked me if I’d give him up,” Cally said. “I felt like punching her stupid fair face, only her eyes were already puffy from where she’d been crying. I told her it was pointless her making a drama out of it, Noah and I were already cleaved, she’d have to get over it. Two weeks later she was gone.” She paused. “It’s so cold up there in winter, much colder than here. Some of the settlements are two days’ travel from one another, even by cutter. I can’t imagine what it must be like, growing up in one of those places.”

  Lila has a child now, apparently, a daughter of eight.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Cathrin. Cathrin Noa.”

  “Is Lila married, then?”

  “I suppose so. Someone she met out there, I think. Another teacher.”

  She was trying to sound as if these things didn’t matter to her, but I could tell they did. Cally and Lila had grown up together, they were like sisters. Cally showed me a photo of the two of them together when they were children. Lila was lanky and shy-looking, with fine blond hair, like corn silk.

  “So pale,” Cally said. She briefly touched her fingertips to Lila’s photographed face. “Her father was a Noorsman.”

  I wondered what it had been like for Lila, having to travel thousands of miles from where she’d been born to live in one of the block-built, slate-roofed miner’s homesteads I’d seen only in photographs. Having to bring up her child there.

  I wondered if Noah had known about Lila being in love with him. When I asked Cally if she had any photos of Lila as an adult she looked at me strangely.

  “You should know,” she said. “You helped me clear out her place.”

  I turned away from her, half in frustration, half in fear. These odd statements of hers still unsettled me. We’d go along for a while as normal, and I’d think she’d stopped pretending, then suddenly and out of nowhere she’d come out with another one. I couldn’t get used to them, I suppose because they made me doubt everything I believed I knew – about my life and what I thought had happened in it, about who I was, even.

  Cally kept insisting my memories would return but every day I’d wake up, still me, still knowing I was from Warrington, Cheshire, that Cally and Noah and Fiby didn’t really exist.

  [From Our Planet, Our History, Our Home: Elementary Studies in the geography, mythology and culture of Tristane and her Golden Satellites]

  The people of the northern belts are mainly farmers, or miners. The belts are rich in mineral deposits of silver, copper, lumia, platinum and coal. Most belts settlements are small- to medium-sized. They are based mainly around work, although there are also theatres, reading houses and racing tracks, with regional festivals drawing crowds of many thousands, especially in summer.

  Dwellings in the belts are built low to the ground and close together as extra protection against the mistrals and winter snowstorms. Over the centuries, the people of the north have striven to attain economic parity with the city dwellers, though their overall way of life remains strikingly different.

  Tristane’s forests are hot and wet. Around fifty percent of the forest trees are julippa, and it is the julippa’s bark and resin that yield the soft, pliable material of the same name. Julippa is the most versatile natural substance on the planet. In its raw state it is similar to rubber, but it can be easily processed to form hard and soft, brittle and flexible variants of itself. Julippa is strong and extremely durable. Almost anything can be made out of it, from picnic cups to modular housing units to entire sewerage systems. Julippa processing and manufacture forms a central strand of economic activity in all the six city-states.

  There are six greater city-states on Tristane: Seiolfar, Argene, Galena, Julippa, Clarimond and Fiby. As well as the city-states themselves, there are several dozen semi-autonomous satellite cities, varying in size from the vast underground metropolis of Staerbrucke, a protectorate of Clarimond, to the scattering of village-states that flank the northern shores of the Marillienseet and fall under the jurisdiction of Fiby.

  The Marillienseet is the only true ocean on Tristane: a vast expanse of brackish water that covers roughly one-third of the southern hemisphere. The northern forest regions are crisscrossed by great-rivers, some of them several miles across in places, and there is also the Norraspoor, the giant inland lake that defines the landscape of southern Argene. There are many thousands of natural braes, tarns and freshwater lakes throughout the northern belts, as well as the network of artificially constructed canals known as the skein.

  The oldest of the six city-states is Seiolfar, founded some fifteen thousand years ago by plainsfolk travelling westwards through the belts, a straggling line of pushcarts and water barrows and camp dogs and great-oxen. Some say that Seiolfar’s founders were miners in search of new silver deposits. Others insist they were farmers, driven from their homelands by a succession of especially brutal winters and rainless summers. Most likely they were both. Seiolfar’s first buildings were a cluster of wooden shacks, built around a larger central meeting house constructed from julippa beams. The meeting house was later rebuilt in stone, becoming what would eventually be called the first praesidium. By its fifth century the city was growing more rapidly, upwards and sideways and downwards, eating up hundred-mile swathes of forest in its advance.

  A century after that, Marin Clair, a great-descendent of one of Seiolfar’s original founders, gathered together a band of like-minded fellow citizens and headed south along the forest boundary until they came to the Norraspoor. It was here that they founded what would be the new city-state of Argene.

  Argene has always seen herself as a rival to Seiolfar, both economically and in terms of ideology. The city-state of Galena, which lies to the north-west of Seiolfar and deeper into the forest, is Argene’s closest ally. In terms of her politics, Fiby is closer to Seiolfar, though geographically she lies closer to Argene.

  Julippa is the largest of the city-states, a vast, overheated citadel surrounded entirely by forest. Julippa forges alliances pragmatically, although traditionally she has preferred to stand alone. Julippa, grown high and mighty through the limitless, inherited fortunes of the great plastics dynasties, has been a pioneer of advanced communications technologies.

  Clarimond is similarly unaffiliated, though her isolated position, just beyond the forest’s northern boundary, makes the city similar to Fiby in both climate and outlook. Clarimond was the site of the first interplanetary communications centre at Mel-Niki. Even though all known space travel between Tristane and her sister planet Dea ended several centuries ago, Clarimond, like Julippa, still prides herself on her technological accomplishments.

  Clarimond’s southern railway station, whose colonnades are made entirely from toughened lead crystal, is widely celebrated as one of the artistic and architectural wonders of the world. Cutters entering the Grand Terminus make their final approach over the Fennc Bridge, a granite and titanium structure
which is a uniquely grandiose feat of civil engineering in itself. The bridge’s support plinths, hand-carved with more than ten thousand sigils from the Antrobus Cantor, stand at more than two hundred metres in height, and are still judged by certain scientists at the Lyceum to be a logistical impossibility.

  3

  Cally and Noah live in Gren-Noor, which is a suburb of Fiby, five or six miles outside the city wall. Their home is a single-storey timber-frame casa with a stable yard and half an acre of vegetable patch. Noah, who is an algebraist, works mainly from home. Cally divides her time between Gren-Noor and the studio she rents in Tarq, one of the more affordable central districts of Fiby proper. Accommodation in Tarq is cheap because of the factories. A lot of artists are based there.

  “It’s good for Noah and me to spend time apart,” Cally said. “We’re so close it’s too much, sometimes. We can’t hear ourselves think.”

  In four out of the six city-states, sexual relationships between siblings are legal, even if they are frowned upon. When I explained how things are here, she stared at me hard, the way she did when she was trying to work out if I was being serious or not. When she realised I meant what I said she shook her head.

  “That’s inhuman,” she said. “Why would you invent something like that? What would be the point in such a law?”

  I mumbled something about genetics, and she shook her head again. “Who said anything about children? Anyway, that’s what gene therapy is for.”

  She told me it was accepted in Fiby that brother-sister marriages would occasionally produce children, that children might be desired even, but that any such couple who did produce offspring would be looked down upon socially unless the foetus was fertilized in vitro and genetically adjusted.

  Cally and Noah never wanted children. It wasn’t about sex either, Cally said, not any more, not for a long time. Mostly it was about memories. She and Noah had known from puberty that they would make their connubial promises each to the other.

  “Our memories are genetically bonded,” she said. “That’s something you never have with an outsider. I wouldn’t feel right with anyone else. Not for living together.”

  I understood what she meant, some of it, anyway. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Lucy about her cousin Jaina who lived in Kolkata. Jaina had been promised in marriage since the age of twelve. Her fiancé was the son of a friend of her parents, a paediatrician who had done part of his training alongside Lucy’s mother.

  “Jaina could have said no, if she wanted,” Lucy explained. “But she’s met this man several times now and says she likes him. They write to each other all the time when he’s in London. I think it’s romantic.”

  I thought it was weird, like choosing a husband from a Littlewoods catalogue. But the more I thought about it the more I wondered if it was any more peculiar than promising to spend the rest of your life with someone you happened to meet on holiday or at the school disco. A lot less, probably. At least Jaina and this doctor guy would know from the start they had things in common, family connections, support from both sets of parents. What did Catey have in common with Richard Lovell, apart from the hots for him?”

  * * *

  Remember when we were small, Selena, the worlds we made? I was happy then, at home in the world in a way I’ve never been since. Perhaps it was my dis-ease with the world that lost me my place in it.

  * * *

  I slept so soundly that when I woke it was at least a minute before I began to regain my memories of the day before. I was lying on a pallet bed, covered with a woollen blanket in a narrow, box-like room with plank walls and high ceiling beams. The room smelled pleasantly of wood resin. I could see my clothes – the jeans I’d been wearing, the grey T-shirt and grass-stained trainers – folded and placed neatly together on a chair in one corner. There was a wooden chest, a high shelf with what looked like a clock on it, only the numbers seemed different somehow.

  I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, then stood up and went to the window. It was daylight outside, though barely. The mist-blurred outlines of nearby buildings, the bare expanses of dirt lots beyond. A rutted yard and pockmarked road, low-lying, scruffy-looking scrub vegetation. From somewhere further away a low booming, followed by a higher, keening sound. A klaxon of some kind, or an alarm? Perhaps a factory whistle?

  A sense of displacement crept over me, of being utterly and completely lost in a way that surpassed any normal understanding of the word. Vast and vertiginous, for a number of seconds it consumed me utterly, and I felt I would faint from it. I didn’t, though. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again a moment later it was all still there.

  The idea that there was still a present day, a July 17th 1994, a Sunday morning on which Mum and Dad were worrying their brains out and calling the police – these things seemed so far outside the bounds of possibility suddenly that it was not simply as if they could not be happening, but rather as if they never could have happened, as if the world in which they might have happened had been a fabrication, nothing but a conjuring trick. Folded paper and playing cards, a swiftly palmed coin.

  What seemed most real to me in those moments? You, Selena. However far away you were in space or in time or in some other dimension I had no idea of, I knew you were out there somewhere. For a second, I could almost feel us touching and that meant everything. It meant that in spite of the impossible thing that was happening I was able to retain a sense of who I was.

  Let’s see how we go, I thought. I rubbed the weave of the blanket gently between my fingers. Rough, coarse fibres, rust-coloured. Someone made this, I thought. Someone spun the fleece, carded the wool, wove the cloth. A real thing that exists, even here. Simple facts, but of the kind that can sometimes help to salvage your sanity.

  In describing the blanket, I was describing a world I could recognise, a world I could live in.

  Warm blanket, red wool.

  Let’s see where this leads, this ball of yarn.

  I put on my clothes, then lay back down on the bed with the blanket over me. I watched the day grow brighter against the wall.

  * * *

  Cally said: “You do know where you are?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I told her.

  “You’re speaking, anyway.” She sounded relieved. She gave me breakfast, something like porridge. I wolfed it down. I realised I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime the day before. What did we have? Tomato soup or pasta salad? I couldn’t remember, and I felt like I needed to remember, isn’t that strange? I thought about it until there were tears on my cheeks, but it still wouldn’t come.

  “Do you remember where you’re from?” Cally said.

  “Lymm. It’s a village near Warrington, in Cheshire. That’s where my parents live, anyway.” I knew it was a stupid answer, or at least not the answer Cally was looking for. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. Cally fell silent. She was sitting beside me at the table. The table was wooden, with metal legs. The bowl containing my porridge was made of terracotta.

  “Warrington? Is that somewhere in Noorland? Beyond the mountains?” She hesitated. She had no idea what I was talking about, I could tell, yet she seemed not to want to come out and say so.

  Because she thought I was crazy, probably. That’s the rule with crazy people, isn’t it, don’t get them worked up.

  “The Pennines, you mean? They’re not that high though. Not like the Himalayas.”

  “The Himalayas?”

  “You know, Mount Everest.”

  “I have never heard of such a mountain.” Cally was frowning. “We are in Gren-Noor, in Fiby, capital of the southern provinces. The city’s hieroglyph is a harp in silver. This is where you were born.”

  I shook my head again, more slowly. I felt like an idiot. I also felt frightened. This woman seemed convinced she knew me, yet she said nothing of our one and only meeting, in Manchester, outside Allison’s flat.

  Something made me not want to mention it either, in case she denied it had even happ
ened. “Are we in Sweden?” I said instead. “Or Denmark? It feels very cold here.”

  “I don’t know these places.” She pressed her hands together, entwining her fingers, and then stood up. “Let me get the atlas and you can show me.” She left the room.

  A few moments later she returned with a book, a bundle of stitched-together papers really, parchment-like and dishevelled-looking, like those notebooks made from handcrafted paper you can buy in Paperchase. Cally moved aside the porridge bowls and placed the book on the table between us. She opened it near the front.

  “This is Tristane,” she said. She swept her hand across the open pages. I could see two images, twin circles, bright with colour, green and grey and sand. The images looked hand-tinted, like pages from The Book of Kells.

  Each circle represented half of a world, I realised. I could make out land masses, forests, the jagged edge of a coastline. Which coast, though, which land masses? Nothing about the drawings made any sense.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Here is Fiby,” Cally said. She pointed to a greyish blotch, irregular in shape, like a patch of mildew on a damp cellar wall, in the bottom left-hand quadrant of one of the circles. I looked more closely and saw the place name printed across it – F.I.B.Y. – in darker grey capitals. The blotch of Fiby rubbed up against a larger blotch, blue instead of grey and clearly an ocean, or perhaps a large lake. There was a strange word printed across it – Marillienseet – and a tiny delicate engraving of a fish.

  There were other blotches on both of the circles, one of them red as the red spot of Jupiter, the others grey, or greyish-green, like the blotch of Fiby. A planet, circled by bands of russet and ochre and sage, like a china marble. Which planet, though? I remembered the geography module I’d studied for GCSE, the maps and diagrams showing continental drift and volcanic activity and the ancient, gigantic continent of Pangaea. Could this be Earth, but at a different time? The idea made sense in a way, but not completely. There were no cities in Pangaea, no people. Pangaea was just glaciers and mountains, covered in dense Carboniferous forest and surrounded by ocean.