by Alex Scarrow
He’s waving.
She waved back, hoping that he could see her.
The shuttle suddenly began to rise, the thrusters whining noisily. She watched it sluggish at first, but then swiftly begin to ascend in a straight line up to a couple of hundred feet, and then it swung around to the east and headed across the landing field, towards the crater’s edge in the far distance. She remained at the top of the steps, watching the shuttle go until it was no more than a faint dot in the red morning sky.
Oh crap. What am I doing?
OMNIPEDIA:
[Human Universe open source digital encyclopedia]
Article: Ellie Quin - ‘The trail grows cold’
Historians attempting to retrace Ellie Quin’s early life will know that when she’s supposed to have left her home for the city of New Haven, details of her life there become thin on the ground. Years after her death, a number of denizens of that appalling city, people of dubious character, emerged to claim they had been close friends of Ellie’s, offering sordid details of her life inside, that most probably weren’t true. Many of these so-called ‘friends’ crawled out of the woodwork for money, in some cases, enormous sums of money, because, in the immediate aftermath of The Event, Ellie Quin was very, very big news. The News Media went into a feeding frenzy for a while, desperately seeking tit-bits about her, but as it turned out, finding very little. And it is probably for this reason that there is little reference to her name today. The News Media went on to find a great deal more to report on after her death, as sweeping changes began to engulf all of Human Space.
There exists today only one piece of evidence that Ellie Quin actually did go to live in New Haven. In the Smithsonian-Matsushita Institute on Galilea, on the other side of the universe, their most prized exhibit is a preserved DNA swab taken from Ellie Quin at the point of entry to that, long gone city. It resides in storage in a cryogen case, surrounded by the museum’s tightest security system.
Until she emerges from this city some time later, there is nothing on her, nothing at all. All that exists is simple speculation.
User Comment > CrazeeBeeff
i bet its worth a bazillion creds. Imagine that? For a drop of blud.
User Comment > DaPrinz-ezz
my boyfrend sayz Elliz blood could have germs in it that could wipe us all out. Thats why its all frozen and locked away.
User Comment > Emilia DarkStar
on my planet theres this old story about a girl who was a vampire. I bet that story is, like, maybe a version of the Ellie Quin story. Right?
CHAPTER 19
‘Ow!’ Ellie whimpered.
‘Oh don’t be silly girl, it’s not painful,’ said the immigration officer; a middle-aged woman with a hairy upper lip and not even a hint of laughter lines.
‘Really? It’s not you who has to use that thing,’ she muttered toward the Gene-o-Pass machine as she extracted her hand and rubbed away a small dot of blood from the tip of her thumb.
‘Do you knowingly have any of the following medical conditions; Meningitus-Plus, Strapilitus-D, Carpolhungus Syndrome, Off-world Weasels?’
Ellie shook her head, ‘no.’
‘Any sexually transmitted diseases from non-human species?
‘What? People actually…?!’
‘That’s a simple yes/no question, miss. I’ll ask again. Any sexually-’
‘No!!’
‘Respiratory problems?’
‘No.’
The immigration officer looked at her wearily. ‘Well you will soon, honey. Okay, let’s see your citizenship papers.’
Ellie pulled them out of her bag and handed them to her. She held them at arm’s length with hands sheathed in elbow-length rubber gloves and placed them on a self-illuminated counter. She swung a large machine over the documents and a bright beam of light travelled across the document as it was scanned.
The Immigration Processing Center was a large open-plan chamber that looked like at one time it had been some sort of maintenance hangar. It was packed tightly with people who looked exhausted and defeated. Many of them carried with them even less than she did; some of them seemed to have nothing but the clothes they were standing in.
Refugees from Celestion.
She supposed these were people like the Quin family; people who had been strong and hardy enough to be amongst the first wave of settlers on that troubled planet. They had been prepared to brave the extreme environmental conditions there, as the rapidly-implemented climate-control system began to kick into action.
Ellie knew there was more to the disaster story of that planet than sheer bad luck and bad planning. The terraforming process had been undertaken by some large company like Oxxon - she couldn’t recall the name of it. Normally, it took a couple of hundred years to tame a planet, but this particular company had claimed it could do the same work in a quarter of the time, some fifty years.
A quarter of the time, a quarter of the cost.
She noticed there were no children amongst them, not a single one. But then she remembered reading somewhere that first-wave terraformers rarely had paternity requests approved. The official line the authorities took was that an ‘uncooked’ world was no place for a child. The more cynical, like her Dad, suggested that the authorities didn’t want the ‘first-wavers’ distracted from their work with parental responsibilities. On Harpers Reach, being a world where terraforming was well-established, the official line was a little more relaxed.
Amongst the long queues snaking across the hanger, she saw a few off-worlders who looked markedly different. One genetically-modified family she spotted had livid, orange skin. She watched them discreetly, fascinated by their skin color, their different body gestures. Against the background noise of the place she strained to listen to them as they talked. She thought she heard a few words exchanged. It was unintelligible, another language entirely but with a distinct melodic quality.
She had hoped that she might see at least one alien amongst the crowd, but today it seemed there were none trying to seek entry to the city.
‘Okay, it seems your papers are in order,’ the immigration officer said. ‘But you sure as shuck don’t look twenty to me.’
‘Well I am.’
She raised a hand. ‘Save it. The papers check out, so you’re fine on that score.’ She put a hand on her hip and studied Ellie intently.
‘What?’
‘You ain’t going to make it inside, is what I’m thinking. You got family or friends in here to sponsor you?’
Ellie wondered whether the question was a trap. ‘Yes…yes I have.’
‘Hmmm, and the name?’
‘Aaron Goodman.’
The immigration officer spoke the name into a microphone mounted on the collar of her dark red uniform. A hologram display screen appeared in front of her face and she scanned the details.
‘What is he? An Uncle or something?’
‘Like a big brother really.’
‘And he’s resident here?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Mostly.’
‘Cancel,’ she muttered quietly, and the display screen vanished.
The immigration officer ran her eyes up and down her. ‘And what are those marks on your hands and wrists? That looks like some sort of skin infection.’
Ellie looked down at them and then held them out. ‘What these? They’re tubweed stings.’
‘Ahh, a farm girl huh? Let me guess, you’ve come to the big city to make your fame and fortune, eh?’
She scowled at her. The woman was mocking her. ‘No. I’ve come here so I can earn some money so I can get a ticket off Harpers Reach.’
The immigration officer laughed. ‘That’s rich! Okay, fine. I’ll see you then in a few weeks on your way back out again.’ She winked at Ellie. She wasn’t sure if it was a gesture of encouragement or derision.
‘Well, for what it’s worth, you’re good to enter.’ She stamped Ellie’s citizenship papers and handed them back along with a small plastic ID c
ard for the city. ‘Don’t lose the ID card or you’ll be totally screwed.’
‘Okay.’
‘Oh, and yeah….Welcome to New Haven,’ she added waving her along without a second thought.
Ellie proceeded towards a small grimy bulkhead ahead of her, marked with a small and easily missable sign. ‘Access: South.’
‘So that’s it,’ she said to herself, disappointed that the entrance bore no resemblance to the grand one she’d imagined passing through over and over in her dreams. Someone, sometime had sprayed a line of yellow paint across the floor in front of it and graffiti, now worn and fading, said ‘Welcome to Shit Hole City’.
She stepped over the painted line and through the bulkhead into a long and narrow corridor of rusting carbo-steel plate walls covered in yet more graffiti. It seemed New Haven was doing its level best to discourage and dishearten new arrivals by presenting them with such a soulless and dispiriting first impression.
There were few others in the corridor and only one other person followed after her. The vast majority of the people in the hangar waiting desperately for admission and an invaluable ID card were being turned away for one reason or another. It looked like the city authorities were toughening their stance on immigrants now.
She found a v-phone booth halfway down the corridor and decided now was as good a time as any to make the call. She’d promised Aaron. The machine swallowed a depressing number of credits before it allowed her to tap in the number on an ancient looking keypad. She found herself hoping that no-one would answer it and she could leave a message. If Mum or Dad answered, she knew there would be floods of tears from both ends and a barrage of desperate pleas for her to come home. She wasn’t ready for that, not right now.
The v-phone chimed several times before Ted answered. His face immediately lit up when he recognized Ellie on his screen.
‘Hey Ranger!’ she said, hoping she sounded cheerful and confident.
‘Ellie!’ he yelled, and then, as if embarrassed at such a raw display of emotion, his eyes narrowed. ‘Oh boy, dogface, you are in big trouble.’
Not ‘Ellie I’ve missed you’ or ‘I’m so glad you’re alive and well’…but ‘oh boy, are you in trouble’.’
‘Listen Ted, this call’s costing me mega-creds, tell Mum and Dad I’m okay. Okay?’
‘You know they called out everyone to look for you? They all turned up and drove around out there for ages.’
Ellie squirmed with guilt.
‘Mum and Dad called the Eltwoods and they spoke to Sean on the big army ship and he told them you were going to run away to…’
‘Ted, listen!’
‘…to New Haven. IS that where you are now?’
‘Ted!’
He shut up.
‘Listen, tell Mum and Dad I’m okay. Yeah, I’m in the city.’
‘Double-cool!’ he roared excitedly.
‘Tell them I’m doing fine and I’ll call again soon, okay?’
‘Sure.’
The readout on the screen showed the call had already cost her four of the five creds she had pumped in. ‘I’ve got to go Ted, this is costing me a fortune.’
‘Ellie, when are you coming back?’
‘Not yet Ted, but I will. Take care alright? And tell Mum and Dad, and Shona, I love them.’
‘Okay.’
‘Love you too, you little scroat.’ She blew a kiss at the screen and found herself laughing as Ted shot it down with an imaginary gun; it was an old gag between the two of them. Never was particularly funny but she laughed anyway.
The call ended abruptly as the last cred she had inserted was used up. She had spent five credits on a call that had lasted less than a minute. She began to wonder how long the remaining three hundred and fifty-one were going to last her.
She resumed walking down the remaining length of the corridor. At the end she could see another bulkhead that slid open for a couple ahead of her. Ellie caught the briefest glimpse of the city; a bright, brash, gaudy, sparkling glimpse. She quickened her pace as she passed down the final fifty yards and broke into a jog as she neared the end. The door registered her proximity and slid open with a grinding rattle and she stepped out of the entrance corridor into New Haven.
‘Oh my…’ she whispered.
She stood on a small plasticrete plaza that overlooked a busy intersection below. The intersection was filled with mingling pedestrians, a churning sea of people. Most of them were wearing brightly colored city-fashion clothes; the sort of cheaply mass-produced stuff that would have Shona frothing with envy. The two bisecting streets below were narrow and almost obscured from above by a layer of free-floating advertising banners and holographic billboards. Tall watermelon-shaped tenement blocks rose up from the street and towered towards the domed sky, every available surface on them that wasn’t a window covered with slogans and brand names, animated information screens, and more banners and billboards. She looked up and saw a dense layer of sky-car traffic going nowhere, gridlocked and hovering at an intersection four hundred feet up. Beyond them, still higher, she could see pedestrian walkways and what looked like a shopping mall with a clear, glass floor. And, beyond that, the buildings tapered off just beneath the ceiling of the enviro-dome. The whole dizzying panoramic view, from the ground to the very top of the domed ceiling, seemed to be bathed in a thick syrupy heat haze.
Aaron had mentioned that the south entrance side of town was up-market and expensive. Ellie looked at the chaotic scene, a riot of color and grime, steam, smoke and noise, and wondered what the hell down-market must look like.
To her left, down some steps from the little plaza, she saw the Slap’n’Grill he’d said they would meet at in three weeks’ time. Dionysius. A small grimy window, fogged with condensation, obscured the goings on inside the canteen. Outside, in front of it, a scruffy collection of plastex bucket chairs around wobbly tables played host to a number of men who all looked vaguely like Aaron; drab clothing, unkempt and eagerly tucking into the sort of meal that a FoodSmart could never hope to deliver.
CHAPTER 20
The man behind the plastic security screen already looked like he didn’t want to waste another moment listening to her, and she’d only spoken five words to him so far.
‘Sixty-five,’ he drawled.
‘A week?’
‘No, a night. Sixty-five creds a night.’
Her face drained of color. The man leant forward to get a look at her. His eyes ran slowly up and down her like some lecherous security scanning device. He sneered displaying a mouthful of multi-colored gemstone teeth.
‘I can do you a little discount though, bidi-chick.’
Ellie pulled back from the screen a little. ‘Uh…how much?’
‘Say, a little something between us that we keep outa’ the books. Hmmm bidi-chick?’ he said, sticking out a tongue riddled with pins, and waggling it at her. ‘Booty bonus.’
Ellie’s mouth dropped open with dawning surprise and disgust. ‘I…uhh…’ was all she could produce.
‘Hey? Whadya say, does the girl wanna’ deal on that?’
She backed away from the man in the cubicle and stepped out from the small foyer into the street.
‘Hey! Watch it limp-chick!’ someone grunted at her as they passed by. She watched the pedestrians moving around her, all of them irritated that she wasn’t moving along with the flow. Ellie stepped back and flattened herself against a wall to allow the steady current of foot-traffic to shuffle past.
Sixty-five creds a night?
‘Oh freg,’ she whispered.
I’m not going to last three nights, let alone three weeks.
This was the cheaper side of town, the northern end, the ‘Service Sector’ that both Sean and Aaron had warned her to steer clear of. Ellie had spent a good half of the day fighting her way along the crowded pedestrian-only streets, following a grossly inaccurate map she’d found in a discarded ‘Newcomer’s Handbook’, to get here. She had hoped that the price of a cube in this sector
would be a fraction of those charged on the other side. They had to be, or she was in trouble.
And now she knew she was in big trouble.
Opposite her, across a sea of moving heads and handheld light-sticks, she saw a small boutique offering promises of exotic pleasure from a collection of off-world beauties. A sticker slapped onto the window of the boutique, read ‘Alien Lux films, now in stock!’ Next to it she saw a small canteen, no bigger than her own habi-cube back home. She decided she needed to take stock of her situation, get out of the crush of humanity, away from the deafening noise of traffic and bleep-talk, blaring billboards clamoring for attention. There was no way she could hear herself think out here, bustled and bumped by an incessant stream of rude pedestrians. The canteen looked like an oasis of calm.
She squeezed her way over, attracting a barrage of mostly unintelligible curses from nearly every person whose path she dared to cross. The door to the canteen opened automatically as she touched it, and she stepped inside.
A row of stools faced one long plain wall with a long shelf-come-table only a few inches wide mounted on to it. At the far end stood a counter, above that, a depressingly limited menu of items were available; most of them she didn’t recognize. She ordered a synthi-caff from a woman behind the counter who looked liked she’d happily have traded Ellie’s old life on a three acre agri-plot for whatever grim existence she tolerated here. She repeatedly asked Ellie if she wanted Sweetox in it, but Ellie struggled to understand her clipped, off-world accent. In the end, Ellie just nodded idiotically and smiled as the lady gave up asking and added the chemical sweetener anyway.
She settled down on one of the stools near the window of the canteen and stared dispassionately at the throng of people passing by. Most of them looked beaten by the city; beaten, expressionless faces, downcast eyes fearful of meeting those of others.
Three weeks. Just got to hold it together for three weeks until Aaron comes back.
The thought provided little comfort. It was like an acknowledgment of failure already.
‘Okay Ellie, let’s take stock of this tricky little situation then. Let’s sit and think,’ she mumbled to herself. She opened her bag to study the contents. Perhaps, she wondered, there might be a few things she could sell to buy her another night or two’s rent.
