Welcome To My World

They had taken away the memory that Alejandro cherished most. He wanted it back. The Muninn in his shoulder whirred warmly and recalled everything. The old man relaxed, allowing the device to take him back, he did not hope – did not allow himself to hope – that this time would be different. He accepted the pain that must come.

*

Alejandro, as he has always done, looked around at the faces of friends and family. So many were now long gone. Even the community centre was rubble today, cleared for some office building that was never finished. But here were the people, young and bright. And here was the room still filled with the smell of fresh paint.

He let the soft rumble of conversation enfold him, Arsene’s barking laugh, the tinkling of glasses and the scraping of chairs on the red-tiled floor. He felt the warmth of the summer’s day seeping through the building’s thick walls and the gentle breeze from the single fan that stirred the air above the hastily cleared dance floor. His stomach felt heavy from drink and food, his head light from an unexpected depth of joy.

Gull idled. This was what she lived for, these moments high above Freedom, released from the city’s grasp. Pedalling just fast enough to keep her paracycle in the air, she circled and ignored the stall light fluttering orange on its console. The city span slowly around her, but Gull was not part of it.

Even here where the black towers of the corporations pressed against the dome’s sharply sloping roof, she could glimpse The Elle through the city’s artificial canyons. The needle at the heart of Freedom rose from Rhaeticus’s floor to the dome’s roof. Close up it was too large to comprehend, it was overwhelming, but from out here, on the edge, it seemed slender and graceful.

Lifting off her goggles, she twisted her head and stretched to look upwards to the point where The Elle met the top of the dome and passed through. It glowed, sunlight reflecting off its smooth white walls, throwing light into the shadows between the towers. It lifted Gull’s heart. The Elle was the only way out of Freedom. The Elle was escape.

Our journey to Paris and the Exposition Universelle de 1889 did not begin auspiciously. The trip required us to catch a train from Victoria Station, which is a terrible place. From Victoria Street the station appears to be nothing more than a shabby wooden shed, held together only by the many layers of paint that have been plastered on it over the years. The station’s exterior, however, offers barely a hint of the horrors within. The inadequate walls conceal the most chaotic, the most crowded and, assuredly, the dirtiest place I have ever seen.

And I am from Calcutta.

Everything was stained black by the smoke and clouded by billowing steam. I felt certain that, if I could but find a moment’s pause to contemplate it, I should be able to feel the station’s grime smearing itself across my face.

But there was no pause. The crowd heaved back and forth between the great hissing beasts of the engines. Men pushed and grunted, women screeched and shoved, and the children scuttled like rats and bellowed like savages. In terms of both volume and shrillness the noise of the crowd was almost a match for the whistling, rumbling, rattling, and hissing of the great steam engines that loomed over us all.

Solomon and I had tried to push too far the previous night and so we spent the daylight hours lying in a ditch at the side of the road. It had seemed a comfortable enough spot to start with, a slightly deeper hollow hidden by the branches of a willow and an ancient, overgrown hedge. It was out of the wind and pleasantly shady in the early morning sunshine. But the rain started falling heavily from about midday and the ditch quickly filled and the hollow became a freezing pool.

Solomon refused to move on – he was certain there was a pod nearby but the rain and the whipping wind were making it difficult for him to pin them down. So he sat and strained to hear and I just got soaked, too afraid to make a sound and getting colder and more miserable as the day went on.

The rain stopped just before nightfall, the clouds cleared and a sparkling frost began to crisp the grass and spread rainbow crystals across the tops of small pools of rainwater. It was too early, the Western sky was still a stripe of burnt orange, but we had to move or we were going to freeze.

We took the chance that the cold would have sent any pod back wherever it had come from and clambered out of the ditch.

Chen was outside, blowing the dust from the mirrors of the solar collector. The sun was low and distant and gave no warmth. The ground was hard and barren. The job he was doing was tedious and pointless. The damned solar collector barely worked, a failed experiment that was already half-forgotten by the engineers at Earth Control.

     Everything was made more complicated by Chen’s suit. The gloves were stiff and hard and Chen had already lost one fingernail to their predations. A little stream of sweat burbled between his shoulder blades, an itch he couldn’t scratch though he twisted and shrugged in an effort to get some relief from the growing discomfort. Chen would have been happier in one of the old Orlans he’d lumbered around in while training in Star City and on the ISS. He was going to write another memo about the Mars suit to the design committee. Maybe they’d listen this time.

     When his suit radio buzzed to life and Commander Arsenyev told him to stop what he was doing and come to the living quarters, Chen’s first reaction was a sigh of relief… which distracted him from the peculiar tone of the commander’s request. By the time he registered that there was something wrong, Commander Arsenyev had cut the connection.

     Chen thought about contacting Brad and asking him what was going on, but he decided against it. The commander had said he was calling the whole crew together. That had never happened before. The commander liked his schedules, and if he was breaking them it meant there was something urgent he felt they all needed to hear at the same time.