Begin End Begin: A #LoveOzYa Anthology Read online

  ‘Yeah, we’re a very select group, AyeAyes. Just me and a couple of hundred others, worldwide.’

  ‘AyeAyes?’

  ‘Implant Intolerance people. It’s a special club. We won’t have just anyone.’

  Tekura squirmed a little. I could see that she was curious, but also that she knew how rude it was to probe people about conditions like Implant Intolerance. I held up a hand. ‘Look, I know what you want to know so I’ll answer before you ask. First of all, it’s genetic and it can’t be cured because I can’t tolerate any of the gene manips that usually fix up genetic conditions. Second of all, no I can’t access the Stream like everyone else. That’s what the doodad is for.’

  I didn’t go into the third question that people ask, because I was sick and tired of it. How do I feel being cut off from the modern world and unable to join in like everyone else? How do you think I feel?

  Tekura nodded. ‘Kharaab kismat.’

  Yep, bad luck in a bonus-sized package — but that was almost the last I heard of it. She rarely mentioned it again, and when she did it was in a way that made AyeAye sound completely ordinary and boring.

  The Port Vila really was the bottom of Uncle Jayden’s barrel, right underneath the clunkers, hacks and floating bombs that usually end up there. These mini-freighters were designed to run with a minimal crew, a dozen people maximum, and, as usual, the crew quarters were primitive. No private cabins, just a shared dormitory area with triple bunks and walls — bulkheads — a more-than-dull shade of metal grey. The ablutions area was three tiny, side-by-side shower cubicles. The kitchen — the galley — opened onto a tiny living/recreation area, with a table that folded away when it wasn’t being used. Chairs likewise.

  This was stripped down, pared back, a no-frills style taken to the extreme. If you ripped out every bit of flair, then sandblasted away every ghost of colour, then exterminated any idea of comfort, then you’d nearly have the Port Vila, the place Tekura and I would be spending the next three months.

  Cosy.

  So it turned out that Tekura was sensational with AI systems. When we got down to work, she thumped the Port Vila resident AI into shape in a couple of hours. She complained about it while she was working, going on about how cutting corners was the way to disaster and how some people wouldn’t know how to set things up if their life depended on it. Mostly, I fetched and carried for her, while trying to wallop the life-support systems into working order, a job that got a lot easier after Tekura looked over my shoulder and pointed out exactly what needed doing.

  She’d been on Banger Station for a month, which was about twenty-eight days too long, according to her. But it did mean that she’d made some contacts. She was able to lean on a drive specialist to come and recalibrate the Port Vila’s drive for mates’ rates. I still nearly fainted at the cost, but the Port Vila wasn’t going anywhere without a calibrated drive.

  Things were actually going okay, until I got thrown in jail.

  After some successful heavy-duty arc welding on some external sensor flanges, Tekura and I decided to take a morning off. It was the first downtime in two weeks since we’d started on making the old bucket space-worthy. We’d been working hard.

  We left the space dock and since Tekura had had time to explore Banger Station with her mother before the massive argument and the storming off, she was able to lead the way to the tourist-trap sectors. Welcome to casinos, bars, music from holospeakers and buskers, restaurants, souvenir shops and other, seedier possibilities that you could only access through side alleys. Tekura pointed them all out, in a voice loud enough to get me blushing and to annoy the barkers, who stood at the heads of these alleys touting for business. It was noisy, colourful and about as classy as a two-buck yo-yo with extra glitter, and with Tekura there it was the most fun I’d had in ages.

  Cheery.

  Tekura was pointing out which of the burger joints used real meat and which used processed recycled algae, when a hunched-over figure shambled out from between two of the shops that lined the street. He had a flat hat that obscured most of his features, and a beard that finished the job, and overalls that only stayed on because of the amount of duct tape keeping them in one piece. And I had awful imaginings of duct-tape underwear. He glanced at us, then glanced around so furtively that I had to look to make sure we weren’t being set upon by assassins. He was apparently reassured by what he didn’t see, so he sidled up to us. ‘Spare any change?’ he growled out of the corner of his mouth.

  We didn’t get a chance to answer. Sirens sounded and lights flashed. Doors banged open. Three squads of different uniforms pounced on our beggar.

  He didn’t run. He put his hands to his face, threw back his head and howled like somebody who had lost all hope.

  The yellow team reached him quickest, but not before half a dozen floating spy eyes homed in, hopeful of getting some juicy shots to make money out of on the Stream. The Yellows didn’t slow down at all, bowling him over and grappling him to the ground. They wrapped him up in one of those elastic restraining webs, but it was the laughing and high fives that got to me. I stepped up. ‘Hey, take it easy, he’s not resisting.’

  That was all it took. Bam. I was stunned, wrapped in another restraining web and locked up until I could pay the fine for interfering with lawful processes. And when I say, ‘I could pay the fine’, it actually meant Tekura paying the fine and getting me out because I had no money.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she ordered when I was escorted out of the holding cell. ‘Just come with me.’

  I held it in until we were back on the Port Vila. I kicked the nearest bulkhead. ‘Can’t wait until we’re out of here. Money-grubbing, soulless, heartless, brainless hellhole this station is.’

  Tekura was looking off into the distance. She flicked left to right. ‘There. I’ve hit your bank account with a request to reimburse me for the cost of the fine, and the accommodation. Pay it back when you get the money.’

  ‘Accommodation? What accommodation?’

  ‘You were in their cell for hours. User pays.’

  I ground my teeth. ‘I take it back. This place isn’t heartless. It never had a heart in the first place. And what about the old guy? What happened to him?’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do, Damien. I made some enquiries. He was a stallholder, small time, couldn’t afford to renew his licence, went broke and had no backers. His family left him, and finally he was reduced to asking tourists for money. A big no-no, that. The bounty hunters love scooping up those guys.’

  ‘Bounty hunters?’

  ‘It’s a thriving business off Earth. No police, except in the really big places, so it’s up to bounty hunters to snap up any lawbreakers or loan defaulters. For the reward.’

  ‘He won’t be able to pay for his cell.’

  ‘He won’t go to prison. He’ll become an indentured worker. That’s supposed to mean he can work off his fine, but it really means he’s a slave from now on and that’s the way he’ll die.’

  I kicked a box of welding rods. It hurt. I did it again. ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Out here, the market rules. User pays is God. Business is business.’

  ‘Whatever happened to taking care of people?’

  ‘Oh, that’s okay. Lots of money in patient care, child care, geriatric care.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘I know.’ She patted me on the arm. ‘And it’s sweet to find that some people are still naive.’ She swung her arms wide. ‘Travel the universe, remember? See other places and other ways. Learn about the differences that unite us.’

  ‘Someone should do something about travel writers.’ I thumped the bulkhead with a fist this time and scowled. ‘They have a lot to answer for.’

  In the end, what I thought was going to take a couple of months took a couple of weeks, thanks to Tekura. I felt awkward about it, as I hadn’t put anything in the ad about getting the ship ready for the journey. She didn’t complain, though. She complained abo
ut the stupid programmers, stupid engineers, the stupid systems analysts and the stupid cargo configurers, but she didn’t complain about the work. She didn’t complain about my cooking, either, but then again she would have had to be really picky to do that. I’m a great cook, even with the sort of basic ingredients that I was able to scrounge up on a limited budget.

  That’s when we talked most, I guess, over meals. At least, after about ten or fifteen minutes when we’d finished stuffing our faces. Hard work makes you hungry, right?

  We raked over the usual stuff about where we went to school and what was on the horizon, ambition-wise, and about what we were looking forward to while poking around the solar system. I was glad she was looking for the same sort of out-of-the-way places that I was. She thought that visiting a mining colony on Calisto sounded exciting, and the prospect of a visit to Tycho Crater made her punch me on the shoulder, her eyes bright with excitement.

  It was on one of these sessions that I finally made out that her ear-lobe tattoo was a little cat, one of those statue ones that wave their paw up and down. Once I worked it out, it was hypnotising. I couldn’t stop looking at the way its paw bobbed, bobbed, bobbed.

  Cute.

  I got so comfortable I even told her about Uncle Jayden. I had to pick and choose carefully, though, because I didn’t want her to think that I came from a family of total crazies.

  Uncle Jayden is a strange mix of the old-fashioned and the new-fashioned. He owned a fleet of mini-freighters that ploughed all over the solar system, but he preferred old hardcopy books to text on display. He taught me how to cook by preparing and combining my own ingredients instead of printing out meals. And he wanted to be called ‘captain’, but he was happy with ‘skipper’ if no-one else was around.

  He ran everything by the Law of the Sea, too. That’s how he used to talk about it, with the capital letters. I think he really wanted to be back in the days of sail and oceans, to tell the truth. He had an antique brass barometer that he took with him onto every vessel he commanded, even though it was one hundred per cent pointless out in space. He loved buying old charts, unrolling them and poring over the details of sand bars and currents. His favourite books were by people like Melville, Forester and O’Brian, and he read passages out loud to me. Liked the sound of his own voice. And, like lots of people, he was into true-life history. His favourite stuff was maritime disasters. Shipwrecks, mutinies, castaways, especially those with a bit of cannibalism, lost-at-sea episodes that end up with people drinking their own urine, all that sort of goodness. He loved the idea of the war, too, in a way that was the opposite of my parents, most likely because it was so far away from the other side of the galaxy. He always had sensors on maximum gain just in case one of the spaceships from the Green–Blue war made it all this way and wanted to go hostile on us. Not that there was much we could do about it, since none of Uncle Jayden’s freighters was armed. All we’d be able to do was turn tail and run.

  So I gave Tekura an edited version of that and then remembered my manners. ‘And you? Tell me about your family.’

  Her face set like stone. ‘My family is out of bounds.’

  ‘What? Come on, family is juicy. Share all the embarrassing details.’

  She shook her head. ‘Promise me you won’t go sneaking around my family, all right?’

  ‘Now you’re making it irresistible.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. If you do, I’m jumping ship the first chance I get and you can whistle for your money.’

  It wasn’t the money I was worried about. Tekura was being serious. No fun stuff here, no playfulness, complete opposite of her normal self.

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to hit a sore spot like that.’

  She sighed. ‘My family. Sore spot. That’s about right.’

  ‘And I’ve officially lost interest in them. I promise.’ I yawned and stretched. ‘What were we just talking about?’

  Eventually, the Port Vila was ready. She squeaked through the space-worthiness test and I don’t think the inspector was totally joking when she asked me for the name of my next of kin, just in case.

  We were fully provisioned — at least as well as we could afford. I’d managed to scavenge some stuff that we might be able to trade, but I wasn’t hopeful and it wasn’t the main point of our journey. We were tourists, footloose and fancy-free, just having a good time following our noses across the solar system. I filed a departure request as soon as the inspector left and it was granted immediately. I took the pilot’s chair. Tekura took the copilot’s chair. We ran through our lists, double-checking each other.

  ‘Looks like we’re all set,’ I said.

  ‘There’s one thing.’ Tekura had tied back her hair and I could see more of her face and the waving cat. ‘What’s our first destination?’

  ‘Mars looks lovely at this time of year.’

  She grinned and strapped herself in. ‘Mars it is, then.’ She gazed off into space, then used a finger to flick in front of her eyes. ‘No solar-flare warnings, but it looks as if the Greens have attacked several Blue-held systems in the fourteenth quadrant.’

  ‘As if that’s going to worry us.’ The fourteenth quadrant might be one of the closest to our solar system, but it was still thousands of light years away. Before I was born, my parents — Rob and Daz — did a tour of duty as special advisers to the Blues. Now, they didn’t want anything to do with that stupid war and the way it dominated politics back on Earth. Politics was banned in our house and that suited me because it was possibly the most boring thing in the whole universe, sports-star biographies included.

  ‘Don’t you care about the war?’ Tekura asked.

  I punched the engine-priming display. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  Tekura gave me a look but didn’t say anything.

  Less than twenty-four hours out, I was still getting used to being in space again when I remembered what I’d forgotten. It’s always like that. Whenever I go anywhere I’m always sure I’ve forgotten something. It burns away at the back of my mind until it hits me and then I swear a lot at how stupid I’ve been.

  This time, it was a sensational forget: I hadn’t organised entertainment. This might not sound like a big deal, but it was. It takes ages to get anywhere in a solar system. In fact, it takes less time to hop from star to star than it does to chug around planets. That’s because once you get outside a star’s gravitational field, the Asoka drive can be engaged. That’s the one that folds up space and lets you travel light years in a couple of minutes. Without it, humanity wouldn’t have spread halfway across the galaxy like it has. The downside is, though, that once you reach the planets circling whatever star you’ve arrived at, you have to use good old impeller drives. They’re a whole lot better than the rockets they used back in the early days of space flight — those guys were basically strapping themselves on top of bombs, something I wouldn’t do in a million years — but it still takes a long time to get from planet to planet.

  On our trips together, Uncle Jayden could have happily spent the journey immersed in the Stream for entertainment, but he knew I couldn’t. So when we visited Venus and the asteroid belt, he made sure to have the latest movies, plenty of books and lots of games aboard. He even interrupted his favourite between-planets pastime (making those stupid ships in bottles, naturally) to do stuff with me. Some of my happiest times as a kid were those long weeks between planets laughing away with Uncle Jayden at those old-time flat-projection classics like Simple Jack.

  My wail brought Tekura running. ‘I forgot the entertainment!’

  At first, she didn’t understand. Why should she? She had the Stream to keep her amused. ‘Can’t you read books on your doodad?’

  She was right. I’d just associated good old-fashioned hardcopy books with long, boring space flight. ‘Okay, okay, it’s not as bad as I thought. Nice one. Thanks.’

  ‘You don’t sound very grateful.’

  ‘No, really, it’s fine. I like reading. I’ll read a lot. See you when we reac
h Mars.’

  The next day, Tekura dropped a large square of plastic shielding on our table. It was marked up in a square grid. ‘I’m going to teach you Go.’ She saw my startled expression. ‘Calm down. This shielding is spare stuff. I didn’t rip it off the walls.’

  ‘Bulkheads,’ I said automatically. ‘On a ship — or spaceship — walls are bulkheads.’

  She emptied her pockets of dozens of hexagonal nuts. Half of them were white. ‘I found these right at the back of cargo bay two. I used nearly all my nail polish on them.’

  ‘You don’t wear nail polish.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who thought of trade goods. Someone on a lonely outpost would pay an arm and a leg for something like that.’

  ‘And you used it to make white nuts?’

  She looked at me very seriously and held one up. ‘Stones. The pieces are called stones.’

  And so began my initiation into the complex and meditative game of Go. Tekura was patient and knowledgeable, and put up with me asking the same question over and over again, like, ‘What’s a liberty?’ She had an interesting approach, too, to welcoming a newcomer to the world of Go. She did it by thrashing me in every game. She could have been an expert, she could have just been a little bit better than me, I couldn’t tell, but she definitely had no intention of letting me win a game or two to encourage me. At the end of each game she’d simply bow, grin and ask, ‘Again?’

  I’d almost always agree. This was an eye-opener, as I was never the world’s most gracious loser. In games, I mean, not out there in real life. I could handle trying hard and losing out in a competition for a job, but there was something about the whole business of game playing that brings out the competitive streak in me. Uncle Jayden found that out early on and as a result we never played cards or anything like that. The only games we played were cooperative, where we were both working towards a goal, which would take days to complete.

  Go with Tekura was different. I lost, but I never felt like jumping to my feet, flipping the board over and scattering the pieces — stones — all around the room. Maybe it was something about the nature of the game, or maybe it was who I was playing it with.