Authors: John Park
Janus
ChiZine Publications
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
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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
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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.
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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.
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 in 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.