“I suppose not,” said Peter, “but I wish we’d searched him all the same.”
“I wished we’d sucked him dry,” hissed Lily.
She glanced venomously in my direction. So did Peter.
“Pussy-licker!” he whispered.
I picked up my stick and hobbled away from them with as much dignity as I could manage, through the back door, following after the stranger.
There was no pool in the wood. He was standing by a small concrete reservoir with a locked metal lid. He jerked round in alarm as he heard me coming, preparing to run again.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not about to drink your blood.”
He nodded and turned away from me. “This is the place. The pool was here. Jazamine was here. But it was another world I suppose.”
Tears came to his eyes but I laughed harshly.
“Well, even if you could find her, so what? You don’t believe men and women can really get on together do you? You don’t really believe that? Harry and his crew – okay I don’t like them and they don’t like me – but they’re right really. So are the RadFems. We’re rivals. It all boils down to one thing: them or us.”
I lashed out at a nettle with my stick.
“The fools are the ones like my dad, the good men, the gentle men, the ones who try to smooth things over by denying their own nature…”
I grinned at him.
“What…” he began. “What are you…”
He voice tailed off. He stared at me with those dazed eyes of his and I felt ashamed of what I was doing but carried on anyway, determined to crush his dream, and even more determined to stamp out in myself the cruel impossible hope that opposites could be reconciled.
“Oh I know, I know. You and that girlfriend of yours made sweet music together. It happens even here sometimes. But all that’s based on a delusion, isn’t it? What you wanted and what she wanted weren’t really the same thing. Just for a moment they seemed to coincide, that’s all.”
Still he stared, wide-eyed. He was confused, a little frightened, but even more than that (I now realise in shame) he was just plain puzzled by my hostility.
Well, I was puzzled by it too, but my bile boiled up inside me anyway. I grinned mirthlessly in his face, I waved my stick at him. There in that little scrap of a wood with evening falling, I – who knew better than most what it was to be alone and to be picked on – ruthlessly attacked a young man who was completely alone in the world, and had done nothing to harm me at alclass="underline"
“We think that if we long for something there must be a someone out there in the world that’s there to quench our longing. But why should that be?”
I laughed. “Do you know what a lamprey is? Do you know what it longs to do? A lamprey longs to fasten itself onto the skin of a fish and suck out its insides. That’s its heart’s desire! But do you think that the fishes it preys on are longing to be eaten alive? No, of course not. If the fishes had their way, the lamprey would go hungry. He could pine himself away with longing, for all they care. He could fucking starve.”
I gave a bark of loud triumphant laughter. The stranger shivered. It was getting cold and he had only his jeans and his torn shirt, while I had my jumper and my sensible green anorak. I suppose my thought was that when I’d finished tearing his dreams to shreds, I would offer him a bed for the night.
“That’s biology for you, mate.” I chuckled grimly. “That’s life. Not harmony and resolution, not peace – just conflict and desperation and struggle …”
Suddenly he winced. Ah good, I thought, I’ve made him cry.
But no, that wasn’t it. It was nothing to do with me. He winced again, gave a groan – then grabbed out wildly at the air.
Slow-witted as I am, it was only at that moment that I realised what was happening.
“No!” I found myself crying out. “Don’t leave me! Please! I didn’t mean…”
But it was too late. He was gone. There was a popping sound as the air rushed into the empty space. And then: nothing, no trace of him, only a faint electric smell.
I was alone. It was growing dark. A cold wind had begun to blow through the branches above my head.
“Come back!” I cried into the empty little wood.
It was pointless of course. He was somewhere else entirely.
He was searching for Jazamine in the green wood.
He was falling. He was falling through the worlds.
Dark Eden
Tommy:
Space is a very dangerous place but for me personally it always felt like a safe haven. And especially this time. In the final days before our mission, it seemed to me, just about every newspaper and TV station on the planet had been carrying revelations from Yvette. I couldn’t pull back a curtain without a storm of flashbulbs and a chorus of voices. I couldn’t pass a newsstand without seeing my own name:
Tommy Schneider’s Ex Tells All
Sex-Mad Schneider Broke my Heart
The void between the stars, sub-Euclidean nothingness, life in a metal box with nothing but vacuum beyond its thin skin – all that was fine with me. It always had been fine. Living in space was simple and straightforward compared to trying to live on earth. But now it was beginning to look as if this sanctuary of mine would soon be closed off.
“I think this could be one of the last trips before they shut down the program, yes?” said my crewmate Mehmet Haribey on the shuttle out.
He was a Turkish Air Force officer. We usually had one non-American seeing as the program was nominally international. I’d worked with Mehmet several times before and liked him. He was an open sort of guy, and he had warmth.
“I guess, but I so hope not,” I said. “Who in God’s name would I be if I had to spend my life on Earth?
Mehmet grunted sympathetically.
“Or it would be one of the last trips,” said our captain, Dixon Thorley, “if it wasn’t for the fact that this time we are going to find life.”
Mehmet and I exchanged glances. Dixon Thorley was okay when he was just being himself, but he found it very hard to forget that God Almighty had called him personally to carry the good news of Jesus Christ to alien civilizations. It was a tale he had told to many a rapt congregation and many a respectful interviewer on the religious networks: God had put him on Earth to perform this one task. And for him it was just inconceivable that the program could end without contact with any other life form.
Poor guy, I suddenly thought. He’s in for quite a fall.
The fact was that over two hundred fantastically expensive missions had traversed the galaxy and found no trace of any living thing. Human beings had trodden lifeless planets right across the Milky Way and now it looked as if their footprints would just fill up with stardust again. Silence would return like nightfall to all those empty solar systems whose planets held nothing but rock and gas and ice and sterile water.
I say ‘like nightfall’, but really it’s not the right word to use because of course in any solar system it’s really always daytime, always sunny everywhere, except in the tiny slivers of space that lie on the lee side of planets, and in the even more miniscule areas on planetary surfaces that are cut off from the light by clouds. As we approached it in the shuttle, the galactic ship Defiant basked ahead of us in a perpetual noontime, an enormous cylinder half a kilometre long, covered in gigantic pylons that made it look like some kind of weird spiny sea-slug. It was huge, but 99% of it was engine. The habitable portion was a cramped little cabin in the middle. We crawled through into it from the shuttle, closed the airlock doors behind us, and gratefully breathed in the familiar space smell of dirty socks, stale urine and potato mash. How I loved that smell! It was the smell of freedom. It was like coming home.