The Rift

by Nina Allan

  She caught sight of me – I saw it happen – raised her hand.

  “Hi,” she said. She sounded pleased. “You decided to come, then?”

  Decided to come, as if we’d had an appointment, as if she’d been expecting, maybe hoping to see me, as I had her.

  “I’m giving it a go,” I said. “I’m not very good yet.”

  “Keep it up. You’ll soon get better.” We did a lap of the park together. She was obviously running more slowly than she was used to and I felt self-conscious, terrified I’d slip over or get out of breath or faint from exhaustion or something. As we came back round towards the gates I told her I had to go, that I’d be late for work if I didn’t. It was true, although I felt desperate to get away in any case, to leave before I managed to make a fool of myself.

  “Will you be here tomorrow?” she asked. I nodded and said I supposed so. Four days later we arranged to have coffee together after work. There weren’t that many coffee places – not back then, not in Coventry – so we ended up meeting in the cathedral refectory. I’d not been into the cathedral before that – I’d never had a reason. As I sat at a table in the corner, picking at a slice of lemon cake and waiting nervously for Lisa to arrive, I thought about how this was the first time I’d met anyone in a public place since my return to Earth.

  * * *

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

  Among the most renowned public buildings in Fiby are her temples, their gorgeously painted interiors illuminated by whale-fat candles and kerosene lanterns, their tiled floors strewn with richly embroidered prayer cushions. The temple refectory is usually kept open night and day. Many of the more spectacular temples are several storeys underground, with lift access. On viewing the hundred-feet-high central atrium of the Trehia Leviatan for the first time, the anthropologist and travel writer Pers Lilyane confessed to experiencing a sensation close to vertigo.

  “At street level, the Leviatan is invisible. Those unaware of its existence would certainly pass it by without stopping. It is only once you are inside that the scale of the structure becomes apparent. The peculiar disjuncture between the magnificent vastness of the interior and the knowledge that to all intents and purposes the Leviatan has no readily provable exterior existence gives rise to the feeling – part awe, part anxiety, part childlike astonishment – of verily being in the presence of the divine.”

  Fiby is an agnostic state. There are temples to the city herself, to the mountains that shield her from the worst of the winter ice storms, to the great-whales and ichthyosaurs, the megalodons and leviathans that serve her livelihood and provision her trade and found her legends. Worshippers might come to think, and sit, and light candles, to sample the fish chowder and millet bread served in the refectory, where refreshment is invariably excellent and cheaply priced. Mostly they come to pay allegiance to Terezia Salk, who founded the first Temple of the Leviatan after being rescued from rough waters by a fishing craft off the coast of the harbour town that is now named Marilly. This was before the first annals of the city proper were even encoded, and Marilly was just a scattering of fishing huts and a central eating place.

  Silver medallions of Terezia Salk can be purchased in most of the temples in Fiby. The practice of worshipping her as a saint is discouraged, but still widely perpetuated.

  Have you ever been to Coventry Cathedral, Selena? The remains of the old temple sitting in the shadow of the new, a ghost of itself, a memory carved from stone. The new building is constructed from red sandstone. It is deliberately angular, deliberately novel, nothing like the old cathedral. You would think a structure like that would be ugly, a modern monstrosity, but it’s not, it’s beautiful, especially inside. The building seems so aware of what it’s there for, it’s as if it can speak. When I first went inside there was an organ playing, someone practising for a recital later on that evening. I’d never heard organ music before that, isn’t that stupid? Well, only on television, at the end of Songs of Praise while we were waiting for The Borrowers to come on, or else at Christmas, Mum watching the carols from King’s on BBC2. I remembered the sound of the organ as a kind of low droning, like someone trying to hum a tune through greaseproof paper.

  When you hear an organ being played for real it’s completely different. Earth-shattering, like the voice of God, if there were a god, which there can’t be, can there?

  I sat on one of the benches at the side and listened. I thought of Terezia Salk, the saint who was fished out of the water by shark-hunters close to Marilly. When I stood up to go through to the refectory I saw there was a place near the altar where you could buy candles and then light them. I decided I’d light a candle for Terezia Salk, who was worlds away and who had most likely been dead for thousands of years.

  The organ was still playing, and I thought of the great ichthyosaurs, plunging through the icy waters of the Marillienseet. There is a painting in the Othar Gallery in Fiby, not far from where Cally has her studio, that shows Terezia Salk riding on the back of a silver-sheened leviathan, her arms clasped tightly about its scaly neck, her black hair streaming. I breathed slowly in and then out again, filling my nostrils with the scent of candle wax and stone, the sulphurous aroma of a hundred tiny dancing tongues of flame.

  For a moment, it seemed to me as if the rift were about to open again, that all I had to do was step forward into the music and I’d be gone.

  That tomorrow I would wake up in my room in Gren-Noor again, the muddy stable yard outside my window, the bald sun rising over the ocean like a blowtorch.

  * * *

  “Sorry I’m late,” Lisa said. “There were customers. You know what it’s like.”

  “You’re not late,” I said. I’d been trying not to check the time. Lisa worked in a garage, as a car mechanic. When she first told me I felt something go click inside, a cold, sick feeling I couldn’t explain, like a nasty little door closing, or opening. It was only later I realised it was Steven Barbershop I’d been thinking of, Steven Barbershop, who’d told me his ex-bandmate Jonno worked in a garage. A posh garage, he’d said. Jaguar.

  Lisa worked in a car repair workshop on the city’s eastern outskirts. She was the only woman there. When I asked her what that was like she made a face, then shrugged. “Most of them are all right,” she said. “At least they are when they’re by themselves. I get on with my work, mainly.”

  I sensed there was more, but I didn’t push it, not then. Months later, Lisa would tell me that one of the other mechanics, an older guy named Charlie, had once started pestering her for a date. When she refused he’d tried to get her sacked.

  “The boss told him to pack it in,” Lisa said. “So I was lucky, I suppose. He’s got two daughters. The boss, I mean. His wife’s from Pakistan.” Her voice trailed off, the way it did when she was still thinking something over. I asked her how she’d first got into mending cars. She said it was a summer job that started it, working behind the counter in a petrol station.

  “And I like mending things,” she said. “I always have.”

  * * *

  I thought we could be happy, and for a time we were.

  * * *

  Lisa came from a small village in Fife. Her parents still lived there, she said. She’d not seen them in almost ten years.

  “We’re exchanging Christmas cards now, at least,” she said. “I suppose that’s a start.”

  She smiled, raised an eyebrow to show me she was all right, she was able to joke about it, though I could tell she was upset. She’d come south with her first girlfriend, someone she’d been at school with. A woman who worked in the local supermarket had seen them holding hands outside the cinema and told Lisa’s mother.

  “Her face when I got home,” Lisa said. “It was like she’d decided to forget who I was.”

  “Are they religious, your parents?”

  “Not really. Not so’s you’d notice.”

  I
told Lisa I’d had an affair with one of my teachers. That it had been in the papers, that the teacher had lost her job and my parents had thrown me out. I felt sick while I was telling her – not because some of it wasn’t true, the bit about Mum and Dad throwing me out, I mean – but because I knew I’d never be able to tell her why I’d lied.

  I think that’s when I realised we could never be together, not properly. There would always be that distance between us.

  “Any brothers or sisters?” she asked.

  “A brother,” I said at once. “He’s still at school, though.”

  I invented him on the spot, a lovable tyke with a mop of dark hair and a habit of daydreaming. A brother I knew I might never see again but still loved anyway. “I’ll always love him,” I said, just to try out the words. I found them so convincing I could feel tears starting.

  “I’m sorry,” Lisa said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I wanted to tell you.” I knew she wouldn’t ask about my family again and I felt relieved. Afterwards I wondered why I hadn’t told her the truth – why the annoying fake brother with the curly hair and angel eyes when I had a sister who actually existed?

  Her name’s Selena. She’s three years younger than me but we’ve always been close.

  I could have told her stories then. Real stories, about us.

  Perhaps that’s why I didn’t. I didn’t want to remember you, Selena, because I wasn’t ready. A fake brother I could cope with, but not the real you.

  * * *

  Do you remember that film we saw about those girls in Australia who go missing, Picnic at Hanging Rock? We watched it together – I’m pretty sure it was during the summer of Mum and Bill. We watched so much TV that summer it was like a drug. For me it was, anyway, the only thing that muted my anger, that let me float above my own existence, at least for a while. It was an odd film, because you never found out what happened. To the missing girls, I mean. Even with the one who came back, you never found out.

  There’s a scene where they take her back to her old classroom to see her friends. They’re sitting there like a load of statues when she’s brought in, all those rows of silent schoolgirls behind their desks. The girl who went missing looks so different from them already, she looks so much older. For ages no one says anything. They just sit there, staring, like the birds strung out along the telephone wires at the start of The Birds. Then someone calls out: “Tell us what happened?” and it sets off the rest of them. The girls are screaming at her, yelling, leaping up from the desks to surround her. They’re not like schoolgirls any longer, they’re like an angry mob.

  The missing girl – Irma – cowers away from them. She covers her face with her hands, and for a moment you think the others might really tear her to pieces, they really might.

  6

  [From The Mind-Robbers of Pakwa: A True Account of a Friendship, and a Journey Taken, by Linus Quinn]

  There was a researcher I knew, a man named Farsett. He and his wife had spent many years in the field, returning to Silver only infrequently to stock up on supplies. Farsett and I got along almost from the start, I suspect because a man who makes his home in the wilderness and a man who spends his life suspended between one orbit and another would be bound to have attitudes in common. Farsett’s wife, Elina, was a woman I might have killed for, had I met her first: level-thinking and loyal and with an intelligence so keen and so impartial you might find yourself quailing before it, and yet still comforted, if that makes any sense.

  I still dream of her some nights, although the question of what became of her has made a hideous mockery of such dreams, rendering them more hopeless than they were to begin with, which was completely.

  The closeness between Elina and Farsett (Farsett’s given name was Eduard, although I never found reason to call him by it) was of a kind similar to that unbreakable, frequently unfathomable sympathy between a twinned brother and sister, only with the heat of sexual intercourse between them they were likely closer still. The idea of bringing discord between them would have been obscene. I felt lucky to name Farsett as a friend – for he accepted me as such upon our first meeting – lucky to know Elina, to accompany them on occasion into their elements, their beloved hinterlands, to have my imagination tortured by frequent, lewd and entirely fabricated intimacies with Elina, such intimacies intuited by her at least a little I fear, yet sweetly and, I hope, swiftly forgiven.

  Not since my boyhood friendship with Rachid, who died of the Yellows, had I dared to think of enjoying the kind of togetherness I enjoyed with the Farsetts. Aside from my bond with the ships, it was my chief delight.

  As a life’s vocation, being on the ships suited me in its entirety. The life is hard, they warned me. No one would expect you to serve for more than a decade, and the retirement pay is good after even five years. Among the shuttle crews, a decade stood as a shorthand for legendary service. I served for twenty-five years, past legendary into ornery, through ornery and into lunatique. I accepted the accolades, the shakes of the head, the cold shoulder, the steadily rising credit balance of my untouched deposit account. So far as the money went, I barely thought of it. I was simply being rewarded for what I excelled at, which seemed a natural expression of the laws of commerce.

  Being alone. Being alone and not wishing it otherwise. Having no friends but the glittering internal circuitry of the craft I nursed.

  Bettina Alis, with her faulty light cells. Parsen’s Glory, with her flooded cargo hold and malfunctioning energy-renewal systems. The Clairmont Wren, with her tendency to overcompensate during re-entry. I loved to imagine them as rash leviathans, these machinecraft I managed: their wilfulness, their anger, their depressions and exaltations, the ecstasy of their wild trajectories when they were flying right, their patched and fire-scarred hides rippling in the blackness, like the silverfish skins of their ocean cousins plumbing the bottomless depths of the Marilly Chasm.

  For much of the time they barely spoke to me but sometimes they did. Occasionally they’d cleave to me, my goddesses. Guiding them swooning to earth I would faint with desire.

  The steel and the girder, the anchor and the crystal, the reactor and the thrusters and the engine oil.

  The eye, the hand, the muscle, the heart, the blood.

  I am not of the kind that would spend half a lifetime warring with other, dissimilar mindsets over the rightfulness or the veracity of their convictions. What would be the point, when things are as they are, no matter what any of us might think or be inclined to believe? But not to share what I have seen, and my conclusions about its significance, would be a dereliction of my duty as a human being, and one I would not bear lightly upon my conscience.

  * * *

  I am an engineer, not a biologist, and with only a layman’s knowledge of Dea’s ecology, a hiker’s enthusiasm for the geology and natural history of that same planet. I know I am unlikely to engage the attention of those readers who are more particularly informed. I can write this memoir, though, this account of our expedition to the ghost-settlement of Pakwa and of what I saw there. I can write of what happened to Elina, and what Farsett did afterwards. I can report, the way an engineer should, paying attention to detail and the clearest interpretation of that detail, all this without forcing his captain’s hand, or seeking to advise his captain except in providing information of sufficient quality and quantity for the captain to come to their own conclusions in their own good time.

  You, my reader, stand in place of my captain. I shall make my report to you, neither falsifying nor exaggerating nor seeking to soften the fact of the matter. For when can softening the fact of the matter be a good route to take, save when the situation is past hopeless, and some final crumbs of comfort might be offered, in good conscience, to palliate hard truths?

  I am writing this in the hope that the outcome is not yet hopeless. I hope and trust that my captain, who is wiser no doubt than I am, or why else are they captain, may yet determine a means of averting ca
tastrophe.

  * * *

  Of course it was Farsett who told me about the Chelina ruins, the patterns of broken-down rock, of smoothed shale and engineered plateaux, situated in the mountains close to the Ancelly cave system, and which some students of Deani palaeontology, including himself, had taken for evidence of human habitation from a previous era. Until he showed me the survey maps, the drawings and photographs he and Elina had amassed from previous field studies and, during my next secondment, the stones themselves, I had firmly believed, along with most others of my generation, that Dea was a virgin planet when we first made landfall there, ten centuries before my birth or even earlier.

  Farsett, with a firmness of conviction that was unusual with him – Farsett always seemed to relish asking questions far more than he enjoyed delivering answers – thought otherwise. The idea of publishing a definitive study of the ruins and all they implied had, over the course of some years, become a passion with him.

  “There were people here before us, Linus,” he said to me. “All the evidence points to it. I believe it is our duty as scientists that we do our best to discover what happened to them, don’t you?”

  If I am honest, I could not see that it mattered much. People come and people go. Perhaps it was Tristane that was settled from Dea, and not the other way around, as is commonly believed. But if this happened to be true, then what of it? The discovery might count as interesting, but as to its practical importance, I could not grasp it. I would have said as much to Farsett, but he seemed so convinced, so enamoured of his theory that it seemed callous to question him. And I cannot deny that the idea of seeing the ruins for myself appealed to me. I was curious to learn more of the planet. The knowledge that Elina would be travelling with us only added to my enthusiasm.