Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (20 page)

—and fell into unconsciousness, a dark, dark slope that went down and down and down ...

Six hours later, when the shuttle achieved lunar orbit on autopilot, a single, unobserved timer reached:

00:00

And stopped.

The Moon’s civilian medical centre was, like everywhere else in Armstrong Base, decorated in earthy browns and greens. Yellow strips in the walls cast a uniform but dim light through the corridors and nurse stations. Some of it spilled into ward 306, where Alek lay in a cot, temporarily kept company by Dr Ngairi Nelson. She had brought him a slightly droopy plant from the LEO Nature Reserve and nursed a satchel on her lap.

“Who would’ve thought?” she said, shaking her head. “A space pilot afraid of a little bug.”

“That’s why I’m in space in the first place,” he shot back. “No bugs at all, or so I thought.” He noted the way she smiled at his discomfort; no wasted sympathy, either. “I’m still surprised you came all the way out to the Moon to help me.”

“Don’t take it personally. As you say, they don’t see many cases of animal poisoning up here and Armstrong Base simply didn’t have the necessary equipment to duplicate the antivenom. I came as soon as I could with the necessary gear.” She shrugged. “Even then wouldn’t have been soon enough if the cold hadn’t slowed down your metabolism.”

He glanced down at his sorry body, still wrapped in aluminium-covered sheets. The frostbite was mostly healed, but his extremities still suffered from pins and needles.

“I was lucky, wasn’t I?”

“The pressure bandage you applied to the wound probably did more than anything to ensure you survived. Most of the spider’s poison was held in the subcutaneous tissue beneath the bandage, and your own body’s defences eventually destroyed most of it.”

Very
lucky. Alek shivered again. His mind was already making dim his memory of the pain and illness he’d experienced; he could only imagine what would have happened to him if all the toxin had been able to spread throughout his body.

“Thanks, anyway,” he said, meaning it.

She smiled again, more softly this time, then let it dissolve into a sigh. “Anyway, I have to be getting back. There’s urgent work to do.”

Alek looked at her questioningly. “Why so soon?”

“I want to get back to my laboratory to study your assailant.”

“I’m surprised there’s enough left for you to work on.”

Ngairi pulled a bottle out from the satchel and raised it so Alek could see its contents. He automatically reached out a hand to take it from her, but recoiled as soon as he recognised its occupant.

The creature twitched back at him, its legs roiling with contained malevolence.

“It’s alive!” he gasped. “Or was there more than one on
Whyalla?”

Ngairi’s smile widened. “No, that’s it.”

“But I’m
sure
I killed it!”

“Stunned, rather. I gather you didn’t get a close look at the time.”

He shuddered. “Not likely. Where did you find it?”

“I didn’t. The rescue team recovered it when they brought the clipper down, and kept it for me.”

“One tough little bastard.” He glared at it, willing it dead with his mind. “Doesn’t seem fair that it should survive while I nearly didn’t.”

“No? Well, in a way you saved its life. That’s a thought to keep you awake nights.” Her smile became a smirk as she rose to her feet.

He looked up at her. “What?”

“Well, think about it. Spiders are cold-blooded and are, as a rule, no more fond of freezing than most creatures.”

“Yes, but—”

“So the rescue team found it taking shelter in the warmest part of the clipper,” she said.

He stared at her. Ngairi shook the bottle. The spider wriggled furiously, its cephalothorax rising up to expose its fangs as though in salute.

“They found it on
you.”

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

...................THE END OF THE WORLD BEGINS AT HOME

I’m not a poet, but that doesn’t stop me trying. You’ll find fragments in stories like “Evermore” and
“Entre les Beaux Morts en Vie”,
and there may have been the odd haiku or two, here and there, but by and large I leave this particular job to the people best trained to do it.

So although the opening line of this story demands a truly execrable effort, reason in this instance prevailed—or maybe it was my inability to fit the message into
17
syllables. I can’t remember now. Either way, readers have been spared the indignity.

What I couldn’t resist, however, was the one single scene in my entire oeuvre demonstrating my utterly useless knowledge of economic theory.

The concept of the Velocity of Money stayed with me after the two and a half years I endured of an ill-advised university degree in the late 1980s. My plan had been to get a Real Job, at which I would make squillions, naturally, then retire to write in my 40s. Needless to say, it didn’t work, but not because economic theory is useless, not at all. I’m just useless at it.

I dropped out of uni in order to write full-time (and only returned when they started offering degrees in doing just that, much later). I’ve never looked back—except this once, and I was surprised by the good feeling it gave me. Perhaps I should have expected it. No one, after all, likes to think that they’ve needlessly thrown away two and half years of their life. Those years were full of experiences that would later inform my stories, yes, but what about all those hours spent poring over text books
?
What about all those damned assignments
?
Would I have nothing to show for them?

The Velocity of Money is not as exciting as it sounds, and, well, it’s already explained one too many times in this book. There are no cannons involved. Let it stand at that, and we’ll move on.

~ * ~

THE END OF THE WORLD BEGINS AT HOME

The opposite of a correct statement

is a false statement.

But the opposite of a profound truth

may well be another profound truth.

— Niels Bohr

Peter’s day had been almost tolerable until the insane Japanese poets caught up with him.

Your cells will DIE!

The cells in YOUR BODY

Will commit SUICIDE!

The pamphlet had been thrust into his hand. Cheaply printed on rough, recycled paper, it proclaimed its lunatic haiku in bold print. Otherwise, it was blank. He automatically turned it over and found on the other side an even briefer message:

You have NO-ONE to blame

but YOURSELF!

Underneath this was a simple design: a thick circle with a stylised arrow through it. A design he knew well—the symbol of OWE. He snarled by reflex and screwed the pamphlet into a fist.

Carol! How could you have fallen for this shit?

He turned to find the person who had shoved it at him. Only one face stood out from the crowd: yellow hair and grey eyes above a tall, gangly frame. The man was staring at him, and Peter briefly considered provoking a confrontation. Instead he just glared back.

The man came closer, parting the crowd like an icebreaker. Peter stood his ground and maintained his challenge.

“They’re wrong,” said the man when they stood face to face. “However close they may be at times to the truth, they are still
wrong
nonetheless ...”

This puzzled Peter, who had expected a fanatical rant. “What?”

But the man didn’t stop to expand on the comment. Before Peter could grab his arm, he had slipped away and disappeared into the crowd.

Left with a surplus of anger and no obvious vent, Peter threw the pamphlet into the nearest bin and stormed, shopping forgotten, back to the car.

Damn it, he thought, and damn
them.
Damn them all to
hell...

~ * ~

Jed came home shortly after seven-thirty. The house was dark. His cousin had taken residence in the lounge, listening to an old Mahavishnu Orchestra CD with a half-empty bottle of Scotch for company. A news channel flickered silently on the wall-screen. Sympathetic images danced in his eyes.

“Hey, Peter,” said Jed, dumping his rucksack by the door and taking a seat. Where Peter was tall and dark, with a lean body and neat features, Jed was overweight and fair, his hair dangling in coiled streamers to an untidy shoulder-length. Torn jeans, tatty sneakers and t-shirt said ‘student’ and didn’t lie.

“Hey yourself,” Peter replied without looking away from the screen.

“How was your day?”

“Shithouse. Yours?”

“Not bad. I made a new friend—someone you might like, for a change.”

Peter may not have heard for all the response he made.

Unfazed by the rebuff, Jed reached down to remove his sneakers. “I’m starving,” he tried again. “Feel like a pizza?”

“No, thanks.” Peter glanced at him this time. “There’s been another processed meat scare.”

“Damn. And I don’t suppose there’s anything in the fridge.”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Jed sighed mournfully. “That only leaves tinned food.” He waited for a moment to see if Peter would exhibit any further signs of life. “I’ll get cracking, then.”

Peter’s eyes returned to the wall-screen, where a blandly beautiful reporter was covering the situation in Tokyo. Jed followed the same report on the small TV in the kitchen. The containment facilities of a biotechnology lab had been breached by a minor earthquake, releasing unknown quantities of bioagents into the local water supply. The lab had been experimenting with a promising new cancer treatment involving a series of viruses designed to make rogue cells commit suicide. Although the newscast down-played the risks of a new plague—one potentially as deadly as AIDS or monkeypox—Jed noticed that the reporter remained carefully upwind of the wreckage.

He concentrated on preparing dinner, such as it was. Another night eating irradiated food didn’t appeal to him, but they had little choice. Tinned produce, even if it did nothing to reduce the possibility of inorganic poisoning, at least guaranteed a temporary reprieve from the risk of bacterial infection.

When he returned to the lounge carrying a steaming plate in each hand, the CD had finished but Peter hadn’t turned up the sound on the wall-screen. The bottle was now two-thirds empty.

“Here you go, grumble-guts. Get it in you and you’ll feel better.”

That, surprisingly, made Peter smile. “You sound like Aunt Jenna.”

“Like mother, like son. God, if Mum saw you like this she’d have a fit.”

“Yeah, I know.” Peter sat up and worried at his greasy scalp. Accepting the plate he scooped a mouthful of beans past a self-deprecating grimace. “But there’s no helping some people.”

“Sure there is,” said Jed. “You just need to leave the house more often; get some sunlight, meet some people—”

“I tried to today, and was hassled by lunatics.”

“You know what I mean, Pete.”

“Find another woman?” Peter’s eyes hardened.

“No, not necessarily. But that’s not a bad idea. Since Carol left, you’ve really let yourself go.”

“And why not? I can afford to.”

Jed shrugged. Peter had been hard to live with at the best of times, but since his wife had walked out on him he’d been almost unbearable. Sometimes he woke Jed in the middle of the night, stumbling around the house as though looking for something he couldn’t find; or he hid in his room for hours, weeping, letting the hurt and the despair pour out of him in retching torrents; or he drank himself into a stupor on the lounge, as on this occasion. Grief was normal, and different people dealt with it in their own way; it simply bothered Jed that Peter didn’t seem to be even
trying
to lift himself out of his misery.

“I’ve said this before, Peter, and I guess I’ll keep on saying it until it sinks in. Let her have the divorce, her own life, whatever it is she wants. Take responsibility for yourself, and you’ll start feeling better eventually. Trust me.”

“Why should I? What do you know about these things?”

“Well,” Jed smiled, hoping to lighten the mood, “I did take Psychology 1A—”

“Carol was my wife, not some laboratory rat.”

“Exactly: she
was.
See? It’s not that hard.”

Peter simmered in silence for a long, uncomfortable minute, then returned to his food. “You were going to tell me about someone you met today. A girl, was it?”

Grateful for the change in subject, Jed began to talk more animatedly. “No. A guy called Tate. We sat next to each other in the refec and just started talking—hit it off really well, as though we’d known each other all our lives.”

“Talking about what?”

“Mind-games. Physics, mainly.” Jed did his best to recall the thread of the conversation. “Imagine a particle travelling through space between two points, A and B, and an anti-particle travelling backwards in time from B to A. There’s nothing in the theory, Tate said, to suggest that the latter isn’t possible. An anti-particle travelling backwards in time appears exactly the same as a particle travelling in the usual direction. We wouldn’t be able to tell which is which. You don’t even need a time machine to do it, because the flow of time is symmetrical at that level; it works both ways.”