The Recollection (30 page)

When the bar was too busy for him to talk, Alice watched him work. They were trying to save up enough money for shuttle tickets to the Quay; they wanted to be up there when Verne’s ship returned. Walking home before dawn, their breath steaming, they’d look up at the Quay’s vast revolving wheels, already lit like copper by the unrisen sun, and it would remind them of Canary Wharf. In the morning light, the Quay had the same otherworldly aura as Canary Wharf seen at sunrise. It was breathtaking and commonplace and untouchable, all at the same time.

“Look at that,” they’d say, squeezing each other’s hands, both wishing they had a way to capture the image. Then they’d go home and have breakfast and sleep until mid-afternoon, when they’d get up and do it all over again.

On the way to work, Ed enjoyed the way the morning light shone on the silver and glass office towers of downtown Bekleme, parts of which weren’t nearly as futuristic as he would’ve expected. Even though he was now four hundred years into his own personal future, he wasn’t the only one to have found his way here through the arch network. At the hostel, he’d learned that people had been showing up on Strauli since almost immediately after the network first established itself. There were people in this city from every century from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth. There were even a few rare ones, like him, who’d been born in the latter years of the twentieth, and they’d brought their own styles and customs with them.

Walk down any city sidewalk and you’d experience a mash-up of clothing and street slang drawn from almost fifty decades and a dozen different worlds. Sometimes you even saw recognizably twenty-first century vehicles on the streets: Hondas, Fords, Volvos... all retrofitted with new, clean-burning hydrogen engines. The buildings also reflected this temporal diversity. Wedged into gaps between the futuristic spires with their roof gardens and wind turbines, you found improvised anachronistic shacks, housing dry cleaners, takeaways, key-cutters, shoe repairs, bookies, greasy spoons, and old-style newsagents. Alleyways housed makeshift favelas. Old warehouses had been repurposed as Japanese-style capsule hotels.

Meanwhile, out at the landing field, arches had been collected from the deserts outside town and arranged in rows along the field’s edge. Some had been bricked up or broken. Others had an almost constant stream of trucks ferrying cargo containers back and forth through them, using only miniscule amounts of energy to transport their freight between worlds. Compared with the expense of carrying goods by starship, the trucks were virtually free and at first, Ed hadn’t understood why anyone used starships at all. Why venture into space when the arches took you directly from the surface of one world to the next?

One night, he asked a pilot.

“With ships, you choose where you want to go,” the man said. “With arches, it’s fixed routes only, and they aren’t always optimal. Take Djatt, for instance. It’s twenty-four light years from here. A lot of ships are there right now, for the Pep harvest. If they tried to make the journey through the arch network it would take them seven or eight jumps, because of the way the links pan out.” He broke off and took a sip of his drink. “The arches are okay for specific, well-established routes, but ships give you more flexibility.”

Later that same night, a man came into the bar called Napoleon Jones. He wore a wide-brimmed Stetson and a long black lizard-skin coat, with matching boots. A pair of antique aviator goggles hung on a strap around his neck.

“Beer,” he said, and waited as Ed selected a clean glass and began to fill it from the tap. His eyes kept flicking to the clock behind the bar.

“Have you got a flight to catch?” Ed asked.

Jones looked at him.

“You don’t know who I am, do you, son?”

Ed shook his head.

“No, sorry.”

“You ever hear of random jumping?”

“Nope.”

This seemed to amuse Jones. “Well then, let’s just say I’m shipping out tomorrow, and I mayn’t be coming back. So, when you’ve finished filling that glass, why don’t you fill one for yourself.”

“Thanks very much.”

Ed topped off the two drinks and slid one across the counter. The hour was late and they were alone. There wasn’t even any music on the sound system. In between shuttle launches, the only noises were those of a hotel at night: steel trays rattling in the kitchen, the hum of the air conditioning, the whine of lift machinery.

Jones took a sip of his beer. He pointed to a pack of playing cards and a case of betting chips that Ed had left on the counter.

“Are those yours?”

Ed smiled. He’d won some money earlier in the evening, from a couple of albino tourists en route to the beach resorts on the coast, and now he was feeling confident.

“Would you like a game?”

Jones looked around the empty bar. He took his hat off.

“Sure. Why not?”

They set up on a table by the window, where they could see the lights of the port and watch the departing passenger shuttles lifting up into the night sky.

“So, where are you from?” Jones asked as Ed divided out the chips.

“Earth.”

“Ah, I know Earth. I’ve been there a few times. Which part?”

Ed opened the pack and shuffled the cards, then started to deal the hand.

“London.”

“Yeah? Nice city. The bits of it that are still above water, anyway.” Jones picked up cards he’d been dealt. As he examined them, he scratched his chin thoughtfully, fingernails rasping on two day’s worth of stubble.

“So, what’s your story, Ed? How’d you get from London to tending bar in this dump?”

Ed shrugged. “Through the arch network.”

“For real?”

Ed put the deck aside and lifted his own cards from the table.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Rough, was it?”

Ed glanced down at his right hand, the one which had dropped the rock that killed Otto Krous.

“Something like that.”

“Are you sure you don’t wanna talk about it? I lost a few people myself, you know. Along the way.”

Ed curled his hand into a fist on the tabletop. Otto Krous, Kristin Cole. All he wanted was to wipe their images from his memory. He took a mouthful of beer, rinsed it around and swallowed. Then, with as much energy as he could summon, he said:

“Are we going to sit here all night, or are we going to place some bets?”

Jones cracked a smile.

“Okay, hotshot.” He tossed a stack of chips into the centre of the table. “Let’s play.”

The game went on for several hours. At one point, not long before daybreak, as Ed rose from the table to refresh their drinks, Napoleon Jones said: “If you love her, Ed, you gotta tell her.”

They’d been talking about Alice, and the situation with Verne.

Ed said: “I think she knows.”

The other man raised his eyebrows doubtfully.

“She’s still looking for her husband, ain’t she?”

“Yes, but—”

“You ain’t the first person to fall for someone you shouldn’t have, Ed. Hell, we’ve all been there. But if you truly love her, you gotta fight for her.”

Ed filled the glasses, one after the other, from the beer tap.

He said, “It’s not as simple as that.”

Jones picked up the cards and started dealing the next hand.

“Ain’t it?”

“No.”

Ed came back to the table, handed one beer to Jones and set the other down next to his own stack of betting chips. By his standards, he wasn’t doing too badly. He was almost five hundred up, doubling his winnings from earlier in the evening. Now, though, he was getting tired, and wanted to wrap things up, so he could go home to Alice.

They played on for a few minutes in silence, until Ed had a promising hand. Then, when it was his turn to bet, he pushed half his chips into the middle of the table.

Napoleon Jones raised his eyebrows.

“I can’t match that.”

“You could go all-in,” Ed said.

The other man gave him a sly look. “Or I could raise you.”

“With what?”

Jones reached down and pulled off his cowboy boots. He slapped them on the table.

“These are handmade,” he said. “Genuine American lizard skin. They’re worth ten times what you have there.” He gave a wide grin. “And I’ll bet them against everything you own.”

“Everything?”

“Yep, every penny you have.”

“Are you crazy?”

Jones shook his head, eyes shining. “Life’s a gamble, Ed. You’ve just gotta learn to go with it. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Hell, every time I fire my ship off into the unknown, I’m laying a bet with fate. One day, I just won’t come back.”

Ed squirmed on his chair.

“Are those boots really worth that much?”

“Take it or leave it, Ed. That’s my bet.”

Ed took a deep breath. The room felt suddenly very warm. The sky outside had started to get light. Elsewhere in the hotel, people were moving around. Guests were rising to catch their early morning flights. Breakfast was being cooked. Pipes clanked as baths were run.

Ed screwed his eyes tight shut. His heart was beating hard. He knew he held a good hand: a full house, three jacks and two aces. The only way he could lose would be if Jones held a royal flush or four of a kind.

“Okay, then,” he said, mouth suddenly dry. “I’m calling you.”

Ed laid down his cards. Jones considered the full house and gave an appreciative nod, his green eyes giving nothing away. Then slowly, he peeled off his cards and, one by one, laid them face-up on the table.

Four queens.

It was the game with the Serbians all over again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

RETURN OF THE TRISTERO

Napoleon Jones left the bar as dawn broke, taking his boots and his winnings, leaving Ed with nothing.

Ed sat at the table and looked at his reflection in the window. The rising sun threw long shadows across the runways of the Downport. The arc lights by the hangars were going off, one at a time. His shift had finished and his replacement had already installed herself behind the bar, but still he couldn’t leave. He knew Alice was waiting, and he was too ashamed to face her. All he had left was his pack of cards, a plastic comb he’d stolen from the hotel, and the St. Christopher medal his brother had given him, which was on its chain around his neck.

Maybe I can sell a kidney, he thought. The idea was a desperate one, only half serious.

With one hand, he fished the St. Christopher medal out from beneath his shirt and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. As he did so, Verne’s words came back to him:

“This is typical of you, Ed. It’s just one disaster after another. When are you going to grow up?”

When indeed?

Deserts, beaches, savannahs. He’d fought through them all to be here. He’d even killed a man. And yet here he was, falling back into old patterns, repeating the same stupid mistakes.

Maybe I
am
just a fuck-up, after all?

He still had half a beer left. He watched the bubbles clinging to the inside of the glass. Around him, the day began: guests came down and ordered breakfast, people wrestled suitcases from the lift to the checkout desk, the other tables in the bar became slowly occupied. The place started to smell of coffee. Ed hardly noticed. All he could think of was Alice. She’d been counting on him and he’d let her down. He’d gotten greedy when he should have backed off, and he’d paid a hefty price for his impatience.

He banged his fist against his forehead.

Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

Now they wouldn’t be able to catch the shuttle up to the Quay to meet Verne. There wasn’t time to start saving again. They’d had their chance, and he’d blown it for both of them. All he could do now was hope that Verne would pick up the messages they’d left for him on the planetary Grid, and that he’d come down from the Quay to find them.

Ed clasped his hands on the table and let himself tip forward until his hair touched the knuckles of his thumbs. A small, frustrated moan escaped his lips.

Couldn’t he do something right, just for once?

He closed his eyes.

Around him, the sounds of the bar continued. No one paid him any attention. They assumed he was drunk.

Eventually, two men walked into the bar, and instead of ordering drinks, strode straight across the room.

“Edward Rico?”

Reluctantly, Ed looked up. What new trouble was this?

One of the men was dressed as an Acolyte, clad in the black robes of the order. Age had tightened the skin of his face, giving him a skeletal aspect and whitening his fair hair to the point of invisibility. The other wore a chocolate-coloured leather coat, the seams of which had been abraded by age and wear to the colour of weak tea. He had wide, brown eyes and hair just starting to grey at the edges.

“Mr. Rico,” he said, “my name is Tobias Drake. This is Mr. Hind. We need to talk to you, urgently.”