Star Chasers

by Viola Grace

  “Provided I submit to the rules?”

  “For your own good.”

  “Get out!” She waved at her servitor. “Secure the door. No one gets in or out unless I approve it, Understood?” The servitor flew to obey, beeping rapidly, lights flashing. The door sealed against the alien’s bewildered expression.

  She barely noticed the passing of time. By the clock’s reckoning, she endured her self-imposed exile for six weeks. In that time, she read, slept, cried an ocean of tears, writing in her journal every thought, every conclusion.

  No relationship was perfect, however much she had thought Gil was perfect. Like so many women before her, she had surrendered a little of herself, to keep the peace. She had woven a fantasy around a memory, fuelled by grief and loneliness—made Gilland more than he had been, forgetting the reality.

  The loneliness was unbearable.

  Come to the garden. The hand-written note emerged from the dispenser that day. A coincidence? Or had he been spying?

  She found him in the garden, sitting under the rose arbour. He looked paler, thinner than she remembered, much like her own reflection—thin and wan.

  She sank onto a wide cushion on the grass opposite him.

  “You are well?” he asked finally.

  “Yes.”

  They chatted about inconsequential things—the garden, their servitors, their days.

  “I can still change this Retreat to whatever you wish,” Gilland said. “If Xanadu now displeases you?”

  She glanced up as the sky swirled, became the azure blue of home, with fluffy white clouds. In the distance, she saw the pyramid, the silhouette of Old Cairo beneath the glass skyscrapers of New Cairo.

  “I prefer Xanadu.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it reminds me that nothing endures.”

  He sighed. “You are torturing yourself.”

  “Not so much, because I have you to do that for me.”

  “I have never laid violence upon you.” He looked truly shocked, and she had to smile.

  “You don’t have to. You are the façade of someone I loved, but who I need to forget.”

  “But love endures. All your literature says so.”

  “Depends on what you read, Gil,” she said.

  He smiled then. “You called me Gil.”

  “What else am I to call you?”

  “I could teach you my name.”

  “Maybe.” In the future. She could only take one day at a time. “I want to show you something.” She waved her hand, and her servitor, hovering in the shadows flew forward, a wooden box clasped in is claws. The machine deposited it onto the table. Suleah unpacked the box and set the carved pieces on the board. “Come and take a seat, Gil, at the table. I’m going to teach you how to play chess.”

  “Ah, a game? I have read about them. These are for pleasure, a hobby?”

  “Yes. It’s also an ancient game of skill and strategy.” She explained the various moves. “The aim is to capture the king to checkmate your opponent.”

  “What is opponent?”

  “Er, who you’re aiming to defeat.”

  “Defeat, as in how?”

  “By out-thinking, by strategy. You beat them.”

  “No,” Gilland said.

  “No, what?”

  “I do not beat any, cause harm to any.”

  “It’s only a game.”

  “Perhaps, but the rationale behind it, is to harm, to beat, to win at all costs? I find that offensive.”

  She stared at him. “But didn’t you tell me long ago, that your kind had a propensity for self-destruction? You must have had winners and losers.”

  “Long ago. Now, we support each other to exist.”

  Suleah sighed. So much for chess. She thought through other games. Poker—he lacked the subtlety, and she could read him most of the time, she realised with a shock. Gilland, unlike his namesake, was naive in many things. A creature of his own world. He lived in a Retreat—in more ways than one.

  “I guess we could try cards.”

  “I sent you cards.”

  “These are different. Wait here.”

  Suleah returned to her apartment and keyed in the dispenser. Since her arrival, she found that she had honed her mental skills. It took little concentration to get the dispenser to produce what she imaged, though sometimes she suspected it teased her, delivering quirky goods, like the pearl-studded work overalls.

  Retrieving the two decks of cards, she re-joined Gilland in the garden. When she sat down, she noticed that Gilland had ordered green tea.

  “This is a card game called ‘snap.’ No challenge, no strategy, unlike chess, just eye and hand co-ordination.” She explained the rules and the first few games were tediously slow, until Gilland understood. He was a fast learner. When he won his first game, he looked suitably pleased with himself. His laugh was so human...

  “Suleah, there are other card games and board games?”

  “Lots.”

  “Will you show me more?”

  And for the days following, each afternoon, she introduced him to a new game. He would never be good at poker, but he enjoyed the complexity of backgammon. His favourite was snakes and ladders. Scrabble was another challenge. He learned Terran-standard words, and she learned words translated from his language into Terran-standard. The scrabble board was a mix of human and alien, challenging them both.

  “You aren’t happy, here,” Gilland said as she packed up the Monopoly board. These places remind you of home?” He touched Mayfair on the board.

  “Gil and I went there, to Mayfair. An old hotel. His family owned it.”

  “Ah. I could replicate it for you?”

  “No. Some things are best forgotten.”

  “It holds unhappy memories for you?”

  She shrugged.

  “I do not understand this place. Go to jail.”

  “That’s where criminals go. As punishment.”

  It took her a long time to explain these two concepts. He looked at her askance. “A person is a criminal if he, or she, breaks a rule? How do you know these rules?”

  “You learn them as you grow up, get taught by your parents, or at school. Or laws made by legislature. You have laws here you must obey.”

  “Of course. Order must overcome chaos.” He studied her, head askew. “You have laws, but yet you still have criminals on your world.”

  “Yes, because some people are evil.”

  “Define evil.”

  Cripes. “I guess it’s a matter of perspective. We called the Jalan Empire evil when we fought them in the war, and they called us monsters for what we did to them. Both of us evil, from a different perspective. Truth always lies somewhere in the middle.”

  He smiled. “Did you always think so?”

  She paused, chewing her lip. No, she’d been like everyone else, not questioning, but here she had time to analyse every moment of her life, her beliefs and in some cases, she had found herself wanting. She slammed the box shut. “You’d make a good psychiatrist, Gil. You know that?”

  He lifted a dark brow over rainbow eyes.

  “You get inside someone’s head and do stuff, make them think too much.” She paused. “I can never be the person you need. One day I will find a way to escape this prison. Don’t you ever want to leave here?”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “Because a prison is a prison, no matter how comfortable. Freedom is everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And that is the difference between us, Gilland. You accept your prison. I do not.”

  “A prison can be of one’s own making. Or it can have bars. Only a thought can set you free.”

  She stared at him, then turned on her heel and stalked away.

  That night she left the Retreat, having locked up her servitor in her wardrobe. The machine, like a faithful dog, had beeped alarm as she flung essentials into a bag. “You can’t come with me, Igor,” she told the machine. The
name had come to her, after reading a Victorian Penny Dreadful, dredged up from her library computer—a library that contained every known Terran and alien work. A thousand lifetimes of reading and she had chosen Blood Murder on the Moors—a shockingly bad novel of murder, myth and mayhem and a vampire who loved a mortal woman...

  Igor whined and beeped as she strode through the large doors and into the garden.

  No matter how long she walked, the shimmering walls of the Retreat remained in the distance. Around her, the landscape changed, transforming to more lush gardens, blue skies, or a sky lit with unknown constellations. Something or someone was feeding from her mind, transforming images to reality. As she walked for days, she learned to keep her thoughts to herself, and slowly the red sky and the red sand stretched in every direction.

  Come back to me, Suleah...

  She blocked his mind-call time and again, and then all was silent. Ominous.

  This creature is unsuitable.

  She was chosen.

  It was a mistake.

  “Who the hell is speaking?” she demanded of the red sky.

  We who exist here. In harmony. Your thoughts and actions are acrimony.

  “Then let me leave.”

  You would die. You have been changed, so your form can exist here. This was explained to you.

  “You found a way to make this Retreat, find a way to unmake it, so I can leave.”

  Their horror rolled over her.

  To do as you wish would destroy the life within. Your life, and that of your chosen. Is death the price of your freedom?

  She pondered that question over more miles of walking. By now the nutri supplements in her bag were gone, and the Retreat voices were silent.

  Suleah dreamed of him again, that night. They danced the intricate court dances he had learned as a boy and which he taught her for their own private balls. She had never been to court, of course, but he had, and often. An Imperial son from old aristocracy, with blood ties to the Emperor, the palace had been his second home.

  Gilland had met her at a science lecture in the Academy. To escape the rain outside, he had chosen the first building to offer shelter, so he had said. She was there to participate in the presentation. At the cocktail bar, Gilland had cornered her, asking her questions that left her in no doubt he had not understood one word of her lecture. His ignorance had been refreshing, intriguing... She had been with scientists so long, she had forgotten there was a world outside waiting for her to discover, and Gil was happy to act as guide. Their friendship had grown quickly into love. He defied his family and their rigid social expectations, to have her. He had the courage to defy, she had been the coward and acquiesced, done all that was expected of her and hating every moment of it. Until Gilland... had set her free. But in that freedom were his limitations. His and those he imposed upon her.

  In the dream, he swept her around the room, her layered silver gown billowing about her. Closer and closer he held her, his hands fanning over the small of her back, pressing her to him. They laughed and kissed, ignoring polite, courtly convention. Escaping the palace, they had made love in an arbour of rainbow roses.

  The dream-scape shifted. She found Gilland in the Xanadu arbour, alone and dying, not from an alien disrupter beam as her Gil, but dying from a broken heart. “You have a heart?” she asked, her palm against his chest.

  His fingers rested against her hand, pressing her to his flesh. Beneath her fingers, she felt the slow, erratic beat of his heart. Cool, too cool, his skin. His smile was gentle, sad, as his rainbow eyes were full of regard for her. Only for her. As her Gil had once regarded her. His kiss was gentle, smouldering.

  He retreated from her embrace; rainbow rose petals swirling around him as he fragmented into a thousand colours. She heard someone crying and struggled to find its source.

  Oh, how it hurts, this emptiness, this sorrow, this chill, his words echoed about her, through her. The dark sky twisted in on itself, destroying the rainbows.

  Suleah startled awake, to find her face wet with tears. The red-scape shuddered, and she found herself lying in her bedroom. On the shelf, the roses had turned brown. Near death, as he. She knew that. She mind-sensed him. No response.

  She had walked for nearly four days, and in a moment, she was back where she had originated. The wardrobe door was broken, and on the floor, she saw Igor, shattered into a hundred pieces. She rose from the bed and lifted the machine into her hands. The servitor had destroyed itself to escape its prison—the one she had made for it.

  “I will make you whole, Igor.” She put the remains on the dispenser shelf and sent instructions for the servitor to be renewed. The dispenser whirled and clicked and scooped Igor into its maw with a tractor beam.

  A prison, Gilland had once said, was made by one’s thoughts, or actions. What was the nature of freedom? Freedom meant the ability to choose.

  Alien-Gilland had chosen, so had she.

  She searched the house and could not find him. Where could he be? As the shadows of late afternoon stretched across the lawn, she found him in the arbour. The white roses had shrivelled. Were they somehow linked to him? Did the roses reflect his life-force?

  “Gilland?”

  At her voice, he turned from where he reclined among the cushions. Beside him lay an empty sheet of paper and a discarded stylus. An anachronism: paper and a laser stylus to write his verses.

  “I dreamed of you, Gilland.” She frowned at him. His face was pale, gaunt, and his eyes were haunted. “I know you’re dying. But why? How?”

  He was silent for so long she thought he would not answer.

  “It was wrong of me to bring you here. I thought... I was mistaken. And now you are here. Alone. As I.”

  “We learn to endure loneliness,” she said.

  “A living death, Suleah.”

  “Yes.” She had prayed for death, but she had lived, while millions had fought for life and liberty, dying in the war. The universe’s greatest irony. She had prayed she would die in the red dust. “Gilland, why are you dying?”

  “It is the nature of my kind. Even after the transmutation from energy to flesh, we retain part of our former self. As your kind, we need more than nourishment to survive.”

  “You need love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gilland.” She knelt at his side and touched his chest. He was cold. Fear constricted her throat. “Gilland! Live! Live!” She leaned over him, her lips a fraction from his. “Live, Gilland. I love you.” She kissed him gently, fleetingly and then wrapped her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his chest. Against her ear, she heard the slow thrum of his heart.

  I love you. She sent to him, mind to mind. For she knew she loved him, had loved him for so long. The real Gil gone forever, alien-Gilland, a mixture of her Gil and another who breathed new life into a man she could barely remember. She loved alien-Gilland. She loved his poetry, even if she could not understand it all, she loved his language, his smile, the play of rainbow-lights in his eyes. His frustrating manner when he played snap. His game of scrabble when he used alien words.

  “Live, Gilland.”

  “I am so tired, so hollow,” he whispered.

  She sat back on her heels, her hands in his. “It’s loneliness, Gilland. It’s a living death. I’ve been more dead than alive these past four years, but in the last weeks, I’ve become alive again. Whole. Happy, sometimes. I have you to thank for that.”

  “I would not have you love me to spare my life. To deceive me. I will know. It will make no difference. Let me take the final sleep.”

  “No, Gilland.” She leaned over him again. “I want you. Read my thoughts and know I speak the truth. Don’t die. I couldn’t bear it.” She wept, her tears falling on his face, as she kissed him again. “The universe rarely gives a person a second chance at happiness. We both have this chance. Live for both our sakes!”

  “But I have made a prison for you.”

  “A prison is just a matter of perception. I made a p
rison for myself outside this Retreat. I’ve made one here, denying myself, and you... I am so sorry.”

  With a sigh, he touched his mouth to hers and wrapped his arms around her. Turning on the cushions, he drew her to his side. He kissed her gently, then fiercely, dragging in life and love with every moment.

  “Yes,” she said. “Take from me what you need. I give it freely. I want you, Gilland. Now.”

  She felt the soft-as-down touch of his mind to hers. There was a moment of resistance as her mental barriers resisted his intrusion.

  “Have no fear,” Gilland said with his mind and his mouth.

  His thoughts swirled over her, through her. He probed, and she allowed him access. Areas she had not dared to read, to re-open, memories of childhood and later, the hurts and the pain and the desires, he learned them all. And in turn, she read his needs and wants and fears. She gasped mentally and physically.

  Oh, how it hurts, this emptiness, this sorrow, this chill... Their thoughts merged. Both lonely, afraid, wanting love. Again, his mind touched hers. She finally understood.

  Their kind could not survive The Alone. Before the bridge between dimensions and worlds had been established they had died, those survivors of the destruction, because they had been alone. A few star-farers returned with creatures willing to share their lives within their retreats. It was the beginning.

  They sought the lonely, the afraid, finding them in the space-lanes, living their living deaths and the aliens visited them in dreams, offering them hope and life in a place where no pain would ever reach them. Thousands now lived within the Retreat, sharing life and love with the aliens who took on the form of those they saved.

  Gilland, now human for his human Suleah.

  She wept in his arms, and he stroked her body and her mind, to soothe. But the touch fanned dormant desires. She touched his body, to find his flesh hot and shivering.

  Sully, I do not know this fever, this need. It hurts!

  I do.

  I am ignorant. You must teach me how to satisfy this craving... your craving and mine.

  Yes.

  She kissed him, her mouth and tongue blazing a trail over his virgin flesh. She laughed against his skin. Gil had not been a virgin. With all those court beauties vying for his title, he had been bedded at age twelve.