Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley

Author:Aliya Whiteley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

381

I stood in the booth. The disquieting feeling grew that my mother had not even realised that she was speaking to me, her daughter, rather than to some random quester.

I thought back through our previous conversations. Had she ever known she was speaking to me?

I made my way back to a familiar place: Old Joe’s.72 The bar where I had lived, and worked, and felt the first beginnings of happiness, I think, although I didn’t know it at the time.

The place had been updated with neon and silver tubular stools, but I could see the same old bar underneath it all—Sam stood behind the counter, chatting to the few customers who occupied that blank time between lunch and the evening rush. I gave him my best smile, but he didn’t seem to recognise me at first. Then it came to him—I saw the exact moment—and he said my name. He looked genuinely pleased to see me. He told me I could have a drink on the house.

This illusion of personal connection was enough for me. I took a seat on a tubular stool and he leaned in, delivering my tall glass of white wine. I told him of my adventures, and my ticket to space. He whistled. ‘That’s a hell of a prize,’ he said.

‘I could go home instead,’ I said.

‘They’d be glad to see you, I’m sure.’

I thought of the village. The farming and baking and the small schoolhouse, and the severe way of living, without cars, without rockets to watch in the sky. The question was not whether they’d be pleased, but how long I could bear to stay there. I could never slot back into that tiny gap from which I’d emerged.

‘I don’t think I’m meant to go back,’ I said.

‘To the stars, then!’ said Sam, and it sounded like the end of that strand of the conversation. He went back to serving, and I thought about the way other questers must have returned to the village and found a way to become part of that life again. Had their experiences been so different from mine? Had my mother’s quest been nothing like my own? How, then, could she claim the knowledge to be a speaker?

381

It’s strange how we look for the past in every place we go.73 We find it in familiar shapes and evocative feelings. We see it in smiles. Sam said there was nobody in the top room and he could do with extra staff that night, so I climbed back into my old role as a server and spent the evening giving people one drink after another. Then I slept in a room in which I thought I felt the ghost of myself, watching with disappointment to find me there, even though every stick of furniture had been replaced and the walls painted over.

The sound of the drunkards spilling out on to the street and singing their way home: that was my memory, and my safe place for that night. I used it to latch on to the way I had felt when I first came to Telezon, keen and nervous, and younger.

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