Janus Read online

  JOHN PARK

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  Janus © 2012 by John Park

  Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr

  Cover design and interior design © 2012 by Samantha Beiko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-918-7

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Sandra Kasturi

  Copyedited and proofread by Brett Savory

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  PROLOGUE

  Had the stars changed?

  He opened his eyes. A small room, unlighted, and a square window of stars beside his head.

  Had they changed?

  Why had he thought that? Why was it important?

  Memory started to leak back.

  A blue-white segment of planet, Earth, his home. Then what? The shuttle—the transfer. The Knot. And the stars changing?

  What else?

  He couldn’t remember—

  And his arms, his ankles, his chest—strapped down, the electrodes—

  A timeless interval of noise and terror.

  Voices.

  “He’s coming out if it now.”

  “Get these fucking things off me! Who do you think I am?”

  Then a glare of light, and two white-coated men watching.

  He was back in his body. They had been talking to him. His throat hurt, and his arm. His eyes ached. But he was free of the straps. Perhaps later he would remember how it had happened.

  The taller man said. “Better? How much do you remember now?”

  Darkness.

  The stars—was that what he had seen, the stars swirling together?

  He gasped as if he had fallen into an icy lake. His jaw locked. Cold and dark and empty. The lights clotting and draining away . . .

  He heard himself moan.

  “Your name,” said the man. “Do you remember your name?”

  He groped desperately, close to drowning, then breathed. “Grebbel,” he whispered. “Jon Grebbel.”

  “Good. It’ll be all right now. I’ll tell you again. This is the planet Janus. You decided to emigrate and the shuttle brought you through the Knot. The jump’s just from Earth orbit, but it takes some people this way—amnesia. We’re in a dirigible, a blimp, on the way from the landing field to the main settlement. They’ll help you when you get there. Just keep taking deep breaths now. It won’t be much longer.”

  Inside his head: the lights all draining away . . .

  The next time he looked, the sky was blue-black about two brilliant moons, one high, one very low. Below was the silver thread of a river, and in the distance a cluster of lights. A little later the dirigible turned, hiding the moons and showing a sky faintly washed with light above a serrated horizon. He watched the ghostly aurora play over the sky of his new home.

  ONE

  For Elinda Michaels, each waking was a journey between worlds—a passage that shrank half-remembered nightmares into morning shadows and left them lying harmless on the rush mat beside the bed.

  But her clock showed her this wasn’t morning. And it wouldn’t be daylight for another twenty-odd hours on this godforsaken world. A bar of moonlight reached from the foot of the far wall to the edge of the pillow beside her face. Outside, the distant construction machinery was still silent. There were the permanent bass whisper of the river, a rustling from the woods, perhaps the wind, perhaps a night browser, and a deeper, persistent humming. As she recognised the sound, the moonlight vanished and then came back. A delivery, she thought sleepily, one of the dirigibles working graveyard again.

  In the official morning, under the lights on the landing field, the gasbag would be floating like a long, dull silver bubble, and its red-eyed crew would be besieged in the cafeteria by the night shift wanting gossip from back there.

  But that wasn’t what had woken her. As she reached across the bed, to where her lover had curled up in sleep, she realised why she had been listening to the quiet. She rolled onto her side. The bed beside her was cold.

  “Barbara,” she whispered, then sat up. She spoke the name aloud, and the stillness swallowed her voice. She pulled the blankets around her shoulders and gnawed at a fingernail. “Barbara, if you’ve gone off to sleep in the living room, you’ll freeze.” Beside her, the moonlight was edging onto her pillow.

  “Answer me, will you.”

  Elinda wrapped a blanket around herself and got out of bed. She shivered. In the living room, the couch with its neat pile of unfinished embroidery was undisturbed. “God damn it. I don’t want to start playing hide and seek at five o’clock in the morning again. We could talk about it, you know.” Only the moonlight shifted, minutely. “We could have tried talking about it. Shit, didn’t you even bother to leave a note?”

  Most of Barbara’s clothes were still in the closet, but her flashlight, parka and boots were gone from inside the front door. Elinda got dressed, made a cup of herb tea. Outside, the sky was paling where the second moon was about to rise, and silver edged the ice fields across the valley. “Another midnight hike, is that it? Brisk morning exercise, and back before I’m awake? No need to explain what I don’t know about? That it? You’d better hurry, dear; I’m off to work when I’ve finished this.” She wondered when she had started talking to herself.

  She finished her tea and dropped the ceramic cup into the sink. Then she sat down again, opened the slatted blind over the kitchen window and stared along the shadowed valley, with its rampart southern wall, thinking how the water would cover so much of it when the dam was complete—sandstone and black earth, woods and undergrowth and everything that crawled and burrowed and flapped there, hidden under a weight of black water.

  Her hands were rapping out a fast nervous rhythm on the wooden table. She watched them with a remote fascination as if they were unconnected to her. All the fingers were bitten around the nails. How long had she been doing that? How many other habits and memories were hidden behind that blank wall i
n her mind?

  She pushed herself up from the table. “That’s it, lover. I’m gone just as soon as I can get my coat on.”

  Beside the coat stand she and Barbara had built, she paused and looked back at the bedroom and the corner of the rumpled bed visible through the open door. She shook her head impatiently and shut the door behind her.

  The row of homes stretching beside hers was dark and quiet. She resisted the temptation to slam the door, shoved it closed and set off.

  The cold air was invigorating. She walked briskly down the slope, keeping to the gravel path beside the woods. Photolures glimmered among the trunks like fallen stars. The second moon was just clearing the rim of the mountains. Visibility was good: to the south, across the river the white peaks known as the Angel’s Hand gleamed like a set of talons from fifteen kilometres away. Almost overhead a pink blossom of aurora opened, bright enough to compete with the moons.

  No one else was out. By the time she passed the next cluster of squat timber bungalows on her right, the lower slopes of the valley wall behind her shimmered darkly in the light of both moons. Higher, a white tracery of brooks and waterfalls reached down the unwooded upper slopes, then converged into a couple of streams that vanished into the woods. Ahead of her, mist eddied over the river and the coffer dam.

  When the path curved she could see below her last night’s dirigible moored at the landing field.

  On her left she passed a track leading back up into the woods. Patches of snow still lay across it, between hollows of half-frozen mud. In the first patch there were footprints. They left the snow, went through the worst of the mud and were lost in the moonshadows as the track curved behind the trees. Elinda stopped. The prints were fresh—clear bootprints. She knew where the track led—to a stream you could cross on stepping stones, and up and along the valley wall. She had walked it several times with Barbara. Who had always been fastidious about keeping her boots clean.

  The woods gave a long muted roar in the morning breeze, and the fronds swayed above her. A handful of dead leaves, like tiny brown gloves, released from last winter’s snow came pattering towards her. She shivered. “Screw it,” she whispered. “If that’s you, just don’t track mud all over the carpet when you do decide to come back, that’s all.”

  She was too late to catch the crew of the dirigible in the cafeteria. Only a few tables were occupied, mostly by rock-cutters and a couple of security men. She didn’t want to talk to any of them this morning, and carried her cornflakes and soya-yoghurt towards an empty table; but then she saw someone else, a slim muscular man with black curling hair. On impulse she went to join him.

  “Good god, Carlo,” she said, sitting opposite him. “Your latest kick you out of bed?”

  He rolled his eyes theatrically. “If you’d seen how I fought—how I had to tear myself away—you’d have wept. And I thought it was merely duty that compelled me, not knowing that fate had decreed our paths would entwine this morning.”

  “Yeah, fate can be nasty that way.” She found she wasn’t in the mood for banter. Hearing the stiffness in her voice, she grinned to compensate.

  “Oh, so cruel, to a poor bachelor. Why are the prettiest ones always the coldest?” Carlo peered quickly at her and changed moods. “But fate will tear us apart soon enough. A new man came in on the gasbag last night. One, count him, one, from what was supposed to be a cargo shuttle. He was delayed somewhere up the pipe by medical complications.” He sipped at his steaming coffee. “Don’t ask me what, I only work here. And now he’s lined up for a session with the memory machine as soon as he’s through orientation. So of course Dr. Henry decides this is the occasion to try out his new algorithm, and guess who has to overhaul the machine and refresh our dear ruler’s overtaxed mind with what we do in his clinic. Are you going to tell me your excuse, or shall I start believing in fate again?”

  She preferred to deflect his question. “Dr. Henry is going to watch a memory session?”

  “He may well try to participate if we’re not careful,” Carlo said. “Just as soon as he comes in from his morning constitutional. He’s forgotten how long it’s been since he did any practical work.”

  “Phillip Henry with mud on his boots. Have I slept a couple of years longer than I thought, or were you telling lies about him all this time?”

  “We don’t evaluate the data, ma’am, just pass it along.”

  She tried to chew a mouthful of cereal and finally swallowed it in a lump. “You still believe that machine of yours works, Carlo?”

  He sipped again, then wiped his finger through the wet circle the mug had left on the table. “With patience, and a little luck,” he said, “yes, it works.” He hesitated. “At least, most people seem more comfortable with themselves after they’ve recovered some of their past.”

  “So which didn’t I have?” she asked, and heard the note of strain return to her voice. “The patience or the luck?”

  He peered at her again. “Both, perhaps. I did feel we were making progress when you gave it up. I’m not used to failing with a young woman. Are you going to give me another chance?”

  “I don’t know,” she muttered. “My memory isn’t coming back on its own, that’s for damned sure. It wasn’t very complicated—I just wanted to find out why I came here, what I wanted to be, or do.”

  He nodded. “And how’s Barbara?”

  “Okay.” She bent her head as she scraped the last of the cereal from the bowl. But there was no reason not to talk about their relationship with him, was there? “She’s started going for midnight walks again.”

  Carlo leaned back and watched her. “I think,” he said, sounding professionally cautious, “anything that reduces tensions might help you both. You’re both afloat in strange waters, not sure what you dare cling to. Perhaps you make too many demands on each other, because there are too many uncertainties in your lives. It might be good if you both decided to try again.”

  Elinda shook her head. “I don’t know. She’s sure she’s happy enough as she is.” Except, she admitted to herself, that Barbara kept writing down her dreams and trying to analyse them: she felt it was now that mattered, not the past. If there was anything to be done, she had to do it on her own. “We haven’t been talking much lately, again,” Elinda muttered.

  “All the more reason for you both to try something like that. Keep it in mind, at least.” Carlo looked at his watch. “And now I’d better tear myself away and start putting Dr. Henry’s toy through its paces. Take care.”

  The hut where she had her desk was still locked. Probably neither Larsen, her boss, nor Christopher, their assistant, would be in for half an hour yet. Rather than sit and be tempted to brood, she decided to make her morning inspection of the Greenhouse. She put her key back in her pocket and headed past the hut.

  The Greenhouse lay across the road from landing field and occupied almost as much land—terraced into the slopes and enclosed under shells of automated glass panels. As she entered, banks of strip lights under the transparent ceiling were starting to glow in a simulated dawn.

  The crops grew in trays of coarse sand. Each tray was fed its own nutrient mix from a set of troughs mounted on brackets above it. Nitrate, phosphate, trace elements . . . She walked the aisles, checking levels in the tanks, assuring herself that the sensors were in place, that none of the diseases they had fought were reappearing.

  At the far end, up the fourth flight of steps, were the vats where waste vegetable matter was processed into something like milk, and the cloned animal protein was grown. It worked both ways, Larsen had told her when she had started working with him: terrestrial life couldn’t eat the local food—plant or animal—without getting sick, but the crops they grew were safe from local pests for the same reason. If they could just get crops to grow in the natural soil, the colony would be one step nearer independence. Larsen himself spent long hours in the microbiology lab in the clinic working towards that end.

  She made a mental note of a couple of problems
and headed back to the office. On the way she caught sight of Carlo walking from the landing field towards the clinic. Beside him was a stocky, blond man who moved slowly, peering about him in a manner that could have meant either uncertainty or intense concentration. He must be the new arrival. He looked in her direction, but didn’t seem to notice her. Something made her think of snow, and warmth shared in a shelter from biting winds. She wondered when Barbara would return. Two steps to the man’s left, the taller, angular figure was Dr. Phillip Henry, the administrator, smiling animatedly and apparently talking non-stop while he pointed out things the others paid no attention to. Under the entrance light at the clinic she saw there did indeed seem to be mud on his boots.

  She shook her head and went inside.

  Someone had been in long enough to switch on the lights and turn on the heat, but she had the office to herself. She hung her coat behind the door and went to her desk. It faced south the window with a view of the river and the mountains. On a bright afternoon she had to squint to read her computer screen. As usual, the desk was littered with spare memory sticks, a couple of hardcopy botany texts and several piles of paper. The sheets had all been erased and recycled several times for reminders, lists, flow-diagrams, arithmetic, bits of computer code. Every unused space had been filled with her doodlings—curling, involuted shapes, chains of circles, blacked-in or empty. She could almost believe she was looking at an alien language, and wondered what Barbara, with her armchair dream analysis, would make of it all.

  She felt a pang of irritation, and switched on the terminal to confirm that what she had seen of the Greenhouse fitted the facts as the machine saw them. She began working through the energy and mineral budgets, and was fully engrossed when the door opened.

  “Early, this morning,” said Niels Larsen, carefully unbuttoning his coat. Something in his voice made her turn to look at him. He was wearing his usual black sweater; his clipped grey goatee and the lines that ran down from his nose around his mouth emphasised the doleful length of his face. “Did you take breakfast in the cafeteria before you arrived?”