The Rift

by Nina Allan

  When I suggested that I accompany them on one of their trips, Farsett agreed at once. He seemed delighted, delighted that I should be interested. The fact that I was a layman, of no more help to him in making his findings than a tourist, did not appear to deter him in the slightest. Of course, our journey to the Chelina ruins, in the diesel-fuelled buggy that Farsett himself (together with Faro M’wule, lately deceased) had engineered for the traversing of larger tracts of difficult terrain, was not the first such expedition I had undertaken with the Farsetts, though it was without any doubt the most ambitious. I hoped at least I would be of some practical assistance, for example if there were problems with the buggy. Farsett responded he had no doubt of that, but that this was not the reason they were pleased to invite me.

  “You’re our friend, Linus,” he said. “It’s good to have you aboard.”

  There are those who believe in the gift of foresight, who have journeyed to the Noorsmen, who are said to possess it, in hope of initiation. As for myself, I am inclined to believe in the phenomenon, if indeed it exists, not as a gift but as a curse. I am not of a religious tendency, but as a native-born southerner I honour Terezia Salk, the same as anyone. If I were to thank her for anything in particular, other than the decades of safe passage among the stars, then it would be for the years I spent in ignorance of what we encountered at Pakwa, the Farsetts and I, and of the papers Farsett would press upon me for safekeeping, the last time I saw him.

  I would like to say the years of our friendship are still sacrosanct, innocent of their ending, but alas! they are not.

  When I asked Cally about the way she shelved her books, the map books and histories jostling side by side with novels and travelogues and lives of the poets, she looked at me strangely, as if my question came as a surprise to her.

  “I’ve arranged them that way since I was a child, you know that,” she said. “No book is completely true or completely a lie. A famous philosopher at the Lyceum once said that the written word has a closer relationship to memory than with the literal truth, that all truths are questionable, even the larger ones. Anyway, it’s more interesting. When you shelve books alphabetically you stop noticing them, don’t you find?”

  “I’ve never thought about it,” I said, although the longer I thought about it, the more it made sense. Categorisation is a kind of brainwashing. How do you know which books will turn out to be important to you, until you’ve encountered them?

  * * *

  The Mind-Robbers of Pakwa was one of those books everyone at school was into suddenly, the kind you bolt down in a single night and then press on your friends, insisting they read it immediately because you can’t not talk about it. I don’t know now who started the craze – just that it happened. I wasn’t even among the first wave of readers – they were postulants mainly, final-year students studying sixteen hours a day for their Lyceum entrance examinations, high as kites on adrenalin and sexual frustration. They made a big deal of how important Quinn’s novel was as a cultural artefact, how significant, but I suspect they were mainly interested because of the shagging. Once the lower forms got hold of the book their secret was out. For most of us that read it, Quinn’s writings were our first encounter with such explicit material. I lingered over those pages, I suppose, the same as the rest of them, but my interest in Quinn’s sexual fantasies was secondary to my growing obsession with what he claimed Eduard Farsett had discovered in the Ancelly cave system. The book terrified me, but I couldn’t stop reading it. I also found myself identifying with Quinn as a narrator. I enjoyed his disregard for convention, his misanthropy, his habit of describing machines as if they were alive.

  “Was he real?” I asked Cally.

  “Quinn was real, yes. Look him up if you like. He has an entry in the GAE archive – that’s the Guild of Astronomical Engineers. He was the serving chief engineer on the Silver Sword when she made the final crossing from Dea to Tristane.”

  “Was any of it true, though? The stuff about the ruins?”

  “It’s true that he knew Eduard Farsett, I do know that. There are papers by the Farsetts in the Grand Geography, at the Lyceum. They wrote about insects, mostly. New species were being discovered on Dea all the time, which is probably why they wanted the placement, even though it meant years away from home. Elina Farsett died out there – a rare kind of haemorrhagic fever. Most people think Quinn’s story grew up out of that, a kind of nightmare reimagining of what really happened. He was strange enough in the first place. Watching Elina writhing in agony must have sent him over the edge.” She paused. “You do know he wrote about spaceships as if they were people?”

  [From Tristane in Wonderment: A Book of Beasts and Mythologies through the Centuries]

  A fully adult creef is as large as a man and sometimes larger, but has the uncanny ability to sequester itself, to fit itself into a space that is many times smaller. The creef’s singularly durable exoskeleton can contract itself in the manner of a concertina, one section sliding over another as in a series of closely aligned metal plates, thus allowing the creature to slide through a narrow aperture – beneath a doorframe, for example – or to secrete itself inside access ducts or wall cavities or any one of a hundred similar spaces that at first glance would appear several times too small for the containment of so large an animal. Thus a room or storage space that on first glance appears empty of parasites may in fact be swarming with them.

  Even an adult creef moves quickly, with the rushing, surfing gait of a silverfish or centipede, covering a large distance in a relatively short span of time, sweeping themselves undercover at the first intrusion of light or extraneous sound.

  If there is no human host to hand, creef at any stage of their life cycle – egg, nymph or adult – can switch into deep hibernation, a state that mimics death so closely it will often be mistaken for it. Creef can survive in such a state for as long as a century and perhaps much longer. A rise in the ambient temperature or significant alteration to the surrounding air currents – both reliable indicators of human activity – will bring adult creef to breeding readiness within a matter of weeks. The creef are parthenogenetic – any adult individual is capable of producing fertile eggs and larvae.

  The adult creef is impervious to cold, radiation and extremes of heat in excess of a hundred degrees centigrade. It can survive full immersion in water for extended periods, perhaps indefinitely. Creef are able to ingest and neutralise many poisonous or radioactive substances. The only sure way of killing them is to blow them apart.

  The creef’s particular method of parasitism is insidious, uncanny, and possibly unique. Once ingested, or otherwise absorbed into the bloodstream of its human host, the creef egg or larva begins an immediate process of organic bonding with the host’s bio-material. The bond takes place at the sub-atomic level, gradually parasitizing and then dissolving the host’s internal organs whilst using the host’s skin and muscle structure as a secure ‘container’ for the process of metamorphosis to be brought to fruition. This process might suitably be compared with that which takes place inside the chrysalis of a moth or butterfly: a complete tissue breakdown, followed by a radical restructuring in advance of the emergence of the new organism.

  First-stage creef larvae are waterborne. Ideally, the adult creef will lay its eggs in or close to running water, although clean still water would be an acceptable substitute. If the water source dries up unexpectedly, unhatched eggs will lie dormant until a viable water supply is re-established. The free-swimming larvae are small – approximately the size of a grain of wheat – and may enter the host body in a variety of ways, including accidental ingestion or through any bodily orifice including flesh wounds or even a deep skin abrasion. The initial stages of metamorphosis are slow – it may be many weeks before the host or the people around them begin to notice symptoms. The preliminary signs of infection – forgetfulness, an increased tendency to fatigue, a slow response to vocal stimuli, a heightened sensitivity to cold, a dislike of bright lights or l
oud music – may often be confused with unrelated conditions such as dementia or other brain diseases.

  As the process of assimilation continues, however, the host’s human personality will become increasingly erratic and compromised. Infected hosts will begin to lose cognitive awareness of themselves as distinct individuals. They will fail to recognise others, even members of their own family or close social network. Self-identification as a human being will become degraded or distorted. Once brain, organ and bone dissolution reaches its advanced stage, the host will finally become comatose. Life signs will appear to cease until such a time as metamorphosis is complete. This stage may take anything from two days to three weeks, depending on prevailing external conditions.

  Finally, the now-brittle human ‘shell’ is shucked off, revealing the fully grown adult creef, a semi-aquatic isopod whose appearance might best be compared with the pelagic trilobite, or with a very large woodlouse, or pillbug. A newly hatched adult will become reproductively mature within a period of one to three months.

  The discarded human skin is glasslike in appearance, and as easily shattered, having been fully converted to silicon during the metamorphosis.

  Any medical or surgical intervention at any stage of the assimilation process will almost invariably result in the death of the host. Although the process of metamorphosis from human to creef can sometimes take as long as eighteen months to complete, the biological identity of the host becomes compromised within a few hours of infection. Creef bio-material spreads rapidly throughout the human system at a micro-level, and is ineradicable. Full metamorphosis is best prevented by euthanizing the host and cremating the body.

  Whether the creef are sentient is not fully known. It should be noted that suicide rates among first-stage infected hosts are surprisingly low. Rather, hosts have been observed to become secretive and reclusive, emotionally distant but with a rarefied sensitivity in matters of hearing, touch and smell. Before transforming, hosts will become intent on seeking out a ‘safe place’ in which to complete their metamorphosis. Hosts prevented from accessing their sanctuary will occasionally become violent or distressed, though for the most part they remain tractable and finally mute, perhaps in an instinctive attempt to pass unnoticed.

  7

  I liked Allison Gifford. I went to a coffee bar with her once after class, where we talked mainly about my coursework. The next day she came up to me in the corridor and asked if I’d like to go and see Schindler’s List with her. She said we could go for a meal afterwards, if I had time. There was an essay competition she wanted to tell me about, something that was being organised by the Warrington Guardian.

  “I think you stand a really good chance of winning a prize,” she said. “We can pop back to my place and I can give you an entry form.”

  I said maybe, I wasn’t sure, and I thought that would be that. I did feel flattered, that out of all the people in our tutor group it was me she was paying attention to and not Shauna Wainwright – Shauna, who was taking extra English lessons after school to help her get into Oxford and whose dad was running for parliament or something. At the same time I found her difficult to talk to. I was always afraid I was going to say something stupid, that she’d realise her mistake and want nothing more to do with me. She seemed different from the other teachers, probably because she was part-time and didn’t get sucked into the departmental bitching the way the rest of them did. Also, you didn’t have to sit an exam for her course, so it didn’t matter so much if you happened to miss a week. The course was called Life Writing, although Allison said right from the start that no one should feel under pressure to write about their own lives if they didn’t want to. Memoir was just one of the directions we might choose to go in, she told us, but it wasn’t the only one. The point of the course was to find out what most interested us, and write about that.

  “If you want to research your grandmother’s family history then that’s fine,” she said. “But if you’d rather write about nuclear disarmament then that’s OK too.”

  Allison told us she used to work as a journalist, in London and in Manchester and for a year in Beijing. Now she was back in Manchester for good, teaching in two sixth-form colleges and in a women’s prison.

  I couldn’t understand what would make someone want to listen to a bunch of Warrington school kids all day when they could be conducting secret interviews with political dissidents in China. “What happened?” I asked her. This was when we were at her flat. I suppose it was cheeky really, coming out with such a personal question when I barely knew her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She laughed, the kind of laugh that said she’d been asked this question a bunch of times already and she was used to it.

  “Someone close to me died,” she said. “I came back for the funeral and realised I was tired of travelling. It does happen, you know.”

  “I can’t imagine it,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if I meant I couldn’t imagine growing tired of travelling, or what it would be like to have someone you loved die like that, when you were on the other side of the world and probably didn’t even hear about it until it was over.

  Would the dead person even seem real any more?

  Every time I think of Dad now I think of Allison too. I wonder if she was as scared as I was, coming home.

  When I asked Allison what it was like to teach in a prison, she said it wasn’t really all that different from teaching in school. “The people inside don’t want to be there, and they’re convinced the teachers know nothing.” She laughed again, properly this time. “They’re right though, we don’t. Most teachers are just muddling along, the same as everyone else. The one thing I can say to the women in there is that most of the reason they’re on the inside and I’m on the outside is down to chance. We can’t always control what happens in our lives, but we do have our voices. We can talk about our experiences. Our anger too, if we want. The idea of talking about their lives is very new to some of these women. No one’s ever given much of a damn what they feel or think, you can tell. Some of the best writing I’ve ever read has come out of prisons.” She paused, resting her cheek upon her hand. “There’s something about it though, something evanescent. You can’t always harness that kind of energy. With some of them, letting out the anger is like striking a match. It flares up so brightly, but afterwards there’s just the charred remains, no fire, nothing to build on. It’s as if they don’t know how to imagine a future, or else they’ve forgotten. It’s a shame.”

  I listened, filled with nervous excitement and a strange kind of horror. The thought of any prison was terrifying to me, even the kind of prison Allison worked at, where there were colour TVs in all the rooms – no one called them cells, according to Allison – a gym and a library and open grounds you could walk in by yourself. Imagine being locked up, I thought to myself. You’d never get over it.

  When I read about Allison being arrested, the first word that came to me was chance, the same word Allison had used to describe her relationship with the women prisoners. Allison was in custody for just forty-eight hours before being released on bail, but for weeks and months afterwards she was forced to endure more police interviews, court appearances, harassment by the media and – eventually – a forced resignation from two of her jobs. The women’s prison stood by her, but both of the sixth-form colleges made it obvious they would prefer it if she left.

  In some ways she’d have been better off staying in prison for a while. At least the papers wouldn’t have been able to get to her there.

  I felt my own anger flare up, like a struck match. Was what happened to Allison Gifford my fault? I remembered – though I hadn’t thought of it in years – the small living room of her flat, overflowing with books and the large number of objects she’d brought back with her from her various travels: a soapstone Buddha, a silk wall-hanging showing a dragon hovering in the summer sky above old Nanking, a tailor’s mannequin, covered in pin badges, that Allison said had belonged to her best friend in college.

&nbs
p; Things, beautiful things. I longed to touch them all. Because they were new to me and I was curious, because no one knew I was there except me and Allison.

  That sense of no one knowing, which is the opposite of prison, that strange feeling filling the room when we were in it together. Allison sitting next to me on the corduroy sofa and then ten minutes later getting up and moving to the armchair opposite, a battered old thing with a chintz cover that looked as if it might have belonged to someone’s gran.

  “There’s more room this way,” she said, and smiled, and though I felt immediately more comfortable I was disappointed too. All I could think as I nibbled on one of the lemon sandwich biscuits Allison had put out for us to eat – not that Allison ate any – was I bet Lucy would be jealous, if she saw me now. I bet you anything you like.

  * * *

  Afterwards, on the street, I stood looking up at the sky and thinking thank God that’s over, breathing in the black night air and wondering what it might feel like to have just been released from prison – would you be frightened or would you be ecstatic or would you mostly be confused, like I was now?

  There was a light in the sky, I saw it quite clearly, a small flash, like a meteor speeding overhead or some other unidentified flying object. Aliens, I thought, which made me want to laugh. I was so busy gawping up at the sky I almost walked right into the woman with the dark skin and long hands who was also standing there, outside on the street, looking up.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. Mumbled, really. I saw she had a blue streak in her hair. Cool.

  “That’s OK,” she said. “Did you see that?”

  She was talking about the UFO, of course – what else?