A Mosaic of Stars: Short Stories From Other Worlds (16 page)

It seemed Toby wouldn’t need to evacuate Dr Levsky after all.

Quarantined

The thermostat in the quarantine room was broken, telling Dan that it was at room temperature when he could feel himself breaking out in a sweat. He’d already shrugged off the spacesuit and sat on a metal cot in shorts and a t-shirt, waiting for someone to tell him what was wrong.

At last Jean appeared at the observation window, looking every inch the doctor in her white coat, a coffee mug in her hand.

“Hey Dan.” Her voice was crackly through the intercom. “Sorry about this.”

“It ain’t exactly a hero’s welcome.” Dan walked over to face her through the glass. She was still as stunning as she’d been on their first date, as vexing as she’d been through the divorce. “You remember I saved the other shuttle crew, right?”

“Oh yes.” She looked away, stiff with tension, sweat beading her brow. “That’s the problem. They came back with some kind of superbug. Not the first time a virus has got stronger in space, but it’s the first time we’ve seen it change so much. We’re fighting to contain it, and there’s a risk you were infected, so…”

“So here I am.” It made sense, Dan had to accept that. “How long will it be? No-one’s even brought me food yet.”

His stomach rumbled.

“I’m not sure.” Jean grimaced and bent over. “Sorry, I…”

The mug exploded in her hand as she let out a cry of pain.

“Hungry.” She looked at Dan with bloodshot eyes. “So very hungry.”

Hand pressed against the glass, looking at him with a strange longing, and then slid to the ground.

“Jean?” Fear knotted Dan’s stomach with its own pain. “Jeany, are you alright?”

There was no answer.

“Help!” Dan yelled. “Help!”

But there was no answer. The quarantine room was sound proof, and without someone standing outside the intercom would have switched off.

Jean needed his help. And he needed to see that she was OK, to hold her, to feel her warm flesh. The tension of the moment was muddling his thoughts, but he could find a way out.

He flung himself against the window and then the door, trying to break through, all the while shouting for help. But there was no response, and the door and window held.

A technician appeared on the other side of the glass.

“Thank God!” Dan’s relief turned sour as he saw that this man too was hunched over in pain, his grey overalls drenched with sweat. He stumbled to where Jean lay, then crumpled over over beside her.

“Dammit!” Dan was scared for himself as well as Jean. What if everyone in the base was infected? Would he be forgotten, left to starve in the quarantine cell, while Jean died inches away from him? His heart was pounding, his whole body quivering with tension.

Desperate, he looked around for something he could use, but there was only a toilet and the cot bolted down in the corner of the room.

The cot would have to do. He grabbed the aluminium bedframe, cold and hard beneath his hands. He’d expected it to be attached securely to the floor, but it came up surprisingly easily, metal screaming and screws popping as he wrenched it free. Then he ran at the window and swung the frame with all his strength, ready to batter the reinforced glass into submission.

It shattered with one single, explosive blow.

Leaping through the gap, he saw Jean and the technician on the floor. He could even smell them, an unexpected moment after so long alone.

The technician hadn’t collapsed as Dan had thought. The man was crouched beside Jean, blood on his lips as he chewed her arm.

In a rage, Dan grabbed the man and flung him aside. He hit the wall so hard that his head smashed open. The scent of blood was overpowering. Blood and something else.

Was that brains? Could Dan really smell brains?

He looked down at Jean, faintly aware that she needed help. But he was hungry, painfully hungry, a sensation he couldn’t even resist.

And the technician’s brains smelled so very good.

My Origami Heart

I met her two days before the rocket was due to leave, carrying me away to a new planet, a new job, a new life. I’d spent half my worldly wealth on that ticket, and just thinking about it made me grin from ear to ear.

“That’s why I wanted to talk with you,” she said as we lay tangled amid the sheets, watching the sun rise through the broken blinds of her apartment. “You were so lively, so happy. Just looking at you made me smile.”

“I know the feeling.” I ran my fingers across the scars above her left breast, remnants of an accident years before. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

“Amazing enough for a second date?” She smiled at me. We both knew I was going to say yes.

“I’m not sure last night counts as a date,” I said. “A couple of beers and a game of pool isn’t very romantic.”

“Then let’s have our first date now.” She leapt up and pulled on her jeans. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”

“You’re looking pretty miserable for a guy who just got laid.” Frank tightened a strap on his harness. It was our last chance to practise emergency procedures before the flight, and like everything else we’d done since the age of twelve, we were doing it together.

Almost everything, anyway.

“She bought me blueberry pancakes for breakfast.” I sighed.

“You love blueberry pancakes.” Frank looked at me with concern. “What’s the problem?”

“I think I love her. I don’t want to leave her behind.”

“Shit, buddy.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “That’s tough. But you’ve only known her for one night.”

“What if she’s the one?”

“Then lets hope you find the two when we make planet fall. That’ll take your mind off it.”

I shifted from one foot to the other, jittery and impatient as I stood outside the restaurant. After fifteen minutes a waiter came out.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you waiting to meet a woman?” He described her hair and build.

“Yes,” I said, and then a horrible thought hit me. “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all.” He smiled. “She was even earlier than you. She is waiting inside.”

I practically ran past him and over to the table where she sat, looking even more beautiful than I remembered. Then I froze, unsure how to behave around the love of my life, who I’d met twenty-four hours before.

“Come here.” She reached up, kissed me, and then pushed me down into the seat across from hers.

“I need to tell you something.” My heart hammered so fast I thought it might explode. There was no way I could keep the words in. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ve got a ticket on a transport to the colonies.”

“Oh.” Her face fell. “I…”

“Wait.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a plastic chit, the ticket I’d spent the remaining half of my worldly wealth on. “I know this is crazy, I know we’ve only just met, but I’ve never felt this way before. Will you come with me?”

Mouth hanging open, she stared at the ticket.

“Oh, god.” She blinked. “Oh, I’m so sorry…”

“No, I’m sorry.” I could feel my soul shrivelling as I shoved the ticket back into my pocket. “You don’t know me. This was a dumb idea.”

“You ass!” She grabbed my collar and hauled me halfway across the table before planting a kiss. “It’s the most wonderful, romantic idea. But I can’t.”

She took my hand in hers and placed it on her chest, where scars were visible at the top of her dress.

“It’s my heart,” she said. “The accident destroyed it. Paramedics put in an emergency replacement, one of those Japanese hearts that unfolds like origami and keeps everything in place. It’s the only reason I’m still alive, but it could never take the pressure of space travel.” She kissed my fingers, and there were tears in her eyes. “We have tonight. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.”

I didn’t have to be at the observation platform to know she would be there, watching my ship take off on a journey from which it would never return.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” I said as I walked up behind her.

She turned, eyes wide.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “You’re meant to be in space.”

“It’s my heart,” I said. “Turns out it’s made of origami too. It would have folded up and died without you.”

The Computer Whisperer

There were no blaring sirens or flashing lights as Liv dashed down the Eldontech corridors, but there might as well have been. Data streaming across one side of her goggles told her that she’d triggered the alarm when she took the hard drive stack. She had four and a half minutes until the police arrived.

As she reached the security door she was already sending signals to her devices connected into the system. A crude video relay looped images of the empty corridor into the security camera feeds. The data mining box cut the stream of keyword-laden signals with which it had been scattering the building system’s attention.

Grinning at her own ingenuity, Liv hit the unlock button. How many other thieves would have got in by manipulating the mood of a building’s computer systems? But then, how many other thieves understood the emergent emotional states of high end electronics?

This was why she had been hired.

The door failed to hiss open. She frowned and slapped the button again. Still nothing.

In the corner of her vision, the clock counted down toward the cops’ arrival. Three minutes left.

This was wrong. Scattering the system’s attention had effectively closed everything down. Removing that stimulus should have got the doors working again, along with the security systems from which she no longer needed to hide.

Stiffening with tension, Liv opened a data stream from the probe she had monitoring the building’s software. Calling up an overview, she could see that the system wasn’t scattered any more, but no other mood had come in to replace it. It was simply idling, with no reason to accept or deny any request it might receive.

She had left it uselessly indifferent.

Two minutes left. The thought of jail loomed before her. Years trapped in a cell, without even a data link to set her mind free. She had to get the system’s help fast. She needed it on her side.

At the speed of thought she reached out to the data miner and set it hunting for information about her, true or false, from anywhere in the vast web of the world. Not just her but people like her, ideas that would draw the system’s attention with greater and greater certainty onto how wonderful she was and why it should bend to her will. Fixation wasn’t the same as love, but it was the closest thing in cyber-psychology. The miner fed the links, however tentatively connected, straight into the system, along with her request to get out.

One minute left.

She tried the door again. This time it worked. She dashed through it and across the foyer, as the air conditioners filled the room with her favourite perfume and her most-listened musical track burst from the speakers. Liv grinned. This was escaping with style.

The counter hit thirty seconds as she reached her car, slung the drive in the back and hit the gas. She was out of the car park and into traffic just as flashing lights rounded the corner.

Liv sighed with relief. She’d done it. The units she’d left behind were untraceable. The cops would never find her now.

She looked back over her shoulder for one last gloat, and her heart almost stopped.

Her image was projected in the sky above the building, and beneath it the words “Let Liv Go!”

Maybe they would find her after all.

Sunflowers in the Snow

There was a crowd outside the cemetery gates. Tall men and women, warmly dressed against the cold snap. As Michael passed them he caught a glimpse of flattened faces beneath hoods, hats and scarves. They were Neanderthals, part of the community that had grown up in Longsight over the past decade. To social scientists it was a fascinating insight into the formation of communities. To Michael it was one more minority interest complicating his constituency.

“This way, minister.” Cowley, his slender and obsequious assistant, led him through the gates, snow crunching beneath their feet as they strode towards the cemetery manager’s office. Despite the cold and the intimidating presence of the crowd around the gates, relatives had been in to pay their respects, and flowers lay amid the snow on several of the graves.

“Mr Totman.” The woman who met him at the door wore a smart black suit, her hair tied back. “I’m Lydia Boyd, the manager here. I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” Michael never knew how to respond. What could you say? No words would ever bring his husband back.

“I’m afraid the heating is broken in my office,” Boyd said. “But the seats are more comfortable in reception anyway.”