The Portal (18 page)

‘Sorry to land you in it like this, but… I couldn't think of anything else. I know the Portal's working fine this end. You might need to check the one on Q'Vaar…' There was a green light flashing to one side and a section of the Portal wall opened out like a gate.

‘Time to go.' Mr Seward carried his wife into the centre of the circle and waited as the wall slid back into place. ‘Look after the boys, will you? Explain what happened… And tell them…' The flashing light changed from green to blue and William watched as the image of his parents began sinking through the base of the Portal. ‘Tell them we love them… Tell them we love them very much!'

For a while, after the image had faded, nobody spoke.

‘He forgot,' said Brin quietly.

‘Can't blame him for that,' said Uncle Larry. ‘In the circumstances.'

‘Forgot what?' asked William.

‘When he recorded the message,' said Brin, ‘he should have asked for it to be passed to Emma. So she knew what had happened.'

‘Never mind, eh?' Uncle Larry placed a hand gently on William's shoulder. ‘Let's go and tell the others the good news.'

‘Hi there, Mum… Dad… It feels a bit odd, talking to you when you're not here, but General Ghool said it'd be a good idea if we did. He said it was important to keep the channels of communication open, and that you not being here just made it more important not less.

‘So the plan is that we come down here every evening and say hi, and tell you what we've been doing during the day. You won't be able to see the messages until you get back of course, but when you do you'll be able to look through them all and see what we've been up to. General Ghool said that would be important for you as well. He said suddenly coming out of a Portal and finding your children three and a half years older was
going to be a shock, and that the messages would help you catch up.

‘I said I thought you'd never have time to watch them all, and you've already got thousands you'll have to read from other people. The story's been all over the Federation News, you see, and people have been sending in stuff from half the galaxy saying how glad they are to hear you're all right and what a clever idea it was to use the Old Portal.

‘It'd take you a month just to read all those, so if both of us send something every day it could take you another year to do ours as well. But General Ghool said you wouldn't mind that, so I'm going to go first and then Daniel's coming down to have his turn in a minute.

‘I'll warn you now that his news is going to be mostly about body bits. You know he'd started collecting skulls just before you went? Well, he still is, but he does quite a lot of dissection as well these days, and he likes to take out things like the hearts and the livers and keep them in jars in his room. I think that's why Amy moved into the spare room. She said the smell of the formaldehyde was getting into all her clothes – though it could be she just wanted a bigger wardrobe…

‘Anyway, I said I was going to give you my news, and I suppose the best bit of news today
was finding out that you're both going to be OK. Uncle Larry arrived an hour ago and told us the engineers have checked over the Old Portal on Q'Vaar, it's working fine, and he's already booked a medical team to be on standby when you come through. He says the medipac records show how Mum broke her neck and they can fix it quite easily, which is great.

‘The other bit of good news Uncle Larry had is that you both get sick pay while you're away and Mr Forrester – he's the head of the Altari Bank – is putting your money into a special account. He says after three and a half years you'll be surprised how it mounts up.

‘And while you're away, it looks like I'm going to be in charge of the station. I was a bit worried about that at first. I thought maybe Uncle Larry should find someone with proper qualifications – but he said the best qualification was finding someone who'd already done it for six weeks without too many complaints.

‘I hope he's right, but it's not like I have to do everything on my own anyway. Mrs Duggan helps with the bricks, Uncle Larry still calls in when he can and Brin comes over once a week, which is really kind of him. I was worried at first that he was being too kind, but then I noticed, when he does come over, that he spends quite a lot of time
with Mrs Duggan. Daniel says he's seen them holding hands. I'll let you know how that one goes.

‘I'm usually the one that looks after the passengers, and the only problem there was what would happen if they came through while I was at school – but Uncle Larry sorted that out. He went into school and told them I have this rare kidney disease and have to stay at home sometimes – so if there's a passenger in the daytime, that's what I'll do.

‘Life's kind of busy, but we're doing all right. We've shared out the chores so that everyone has stuff to do, even Timber – though I'm not sure we should have put him in charge of doing the washing. He's not good at separating out the delicates, which gets Amy a bit cross sometimes, but Mrs Duggan says it's important he makes a contribution so we live with it.

‘And I really enjoy working with the Portal. You never know what's going to come up next, do you? And when you get people like General Ghool and Lady Dubb coming through there's not much chance of being bored! General Ghool sends you his best wishes, by the way. He was the one who told me to stop dithering and take the job. He said if you were here it's what you'd both tell me to do, so that was that really. And when you get
back you can see if I've made a mess of it or not.

‘We think about it a lot. You getting back, I mean. We've put this calendar up in the wall of the lobby with all the days till three and a half years are up, and there seem to be a lot of days still to go. But at least we know you are coming back. It was a million times worse when we didn't know anything at all. All the same, we miss you. All of us do. Even Daniel.

‘We have the photos of you, which helps. At first we just had the ones you'd put up on the notice board in front of your desk, but then we found there were all these others in Emma's memory. Thousands of them. I'm looking at one now. It must have been taken a few weeks before you left, and you're both sitting on the grass beside the fruit cage, talking. I can't hear what you're saying but whatever it is it's making you laugh and… and it's good to see.

‘So… you're OK, and so are we. And when you get back, we'll all be here – me, Daniel, Mrs Duggan, Amy, Timber – we'll all be here, and things can go back to how they were. We're looking forward to that.

‘I can hear Daniel coming down the lift. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

‘Bye!'

*

William reached forward and touched the OFF pad on the camera, then leant back on the sofa. There were a lot of other things he could have said but that was probably enough for now. And anyway Daniel would want his turn in a minute – William could hear him making his way across the lobby.

He found he was feeling oddly cheerful. It looked like General Ghool had been right again. Talking to his parents, even when they weren't there, really did help. He'd certainly enjoyed it much more than he'd expected, and it had been a chance to say a lot of things he couldn't say to anyone else.

Though, of course, that bit at the end had been wrong. When he'd said how they were all looking forward to things going back to how they were, after his parents got back, he knew that wasn't true. After three and a half years, things could never go back to how they had been before. Too much would have changed. But at least he could try and make sure some things were still the same. He could make sure the farm, the house, the station, the Portal, and the family were still there, waiting to welcome them back.

That was his job, William thought. It was his task to make sure all those things were there when his parents came home. That was what he had to do. Yes, that was what he had to do.

He stood up and as he did so, just for a moment, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw his mother and father standing, as they had been in his dream all those weeks before, on the bridge of a great ship. His mother was at the chart table and his father, with his legs braced against the movement of the deck, had his arms firmly holding the wheel. The image was astonishingly vivid, almost as real as one of Emma's holograms, though it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

But, in the moment that he saw it, William was quite sure that his father had looked across at him, and smiled.