“Not out!” Mandy had said. “I want to stay in with you. We watch the show together, then we have sex together.”
“You mean…?” Norton shrugged because he wasn’t sure what she did mean. “You don’t mean…?”
A hot date, perhaps. Even a Death Valley, midsummer, midday date. He wished he was more used to the speeded-up, stripped-down language. It sounded as if Mandy was promising to go all the way. What girl would do that on a first date?
“I’ve had sex with old men,” said Mandy, “but none as old as you.” She smiled. “Maybe there’s something you can teach me, some little trick that’s been forgotten.” Her smiled widened. “But I bet I can teach you a lot more.”
Having grown up in Vegas, Norton never gambled. Whatever the odds, Mandy was bound to win.
He looked at her. She looked at him. Her smile grew even wider.
And he knew he couldn’t lose.
What a strange and wonderful place he’d woken into.
He was the oldest virgin in the world, but not for much longer.
Then he’d begun to panic, thinking he should have a shave and haircut. How much would that be? Whatever the cost, it was worth paying. Not that he’d ever pay. Before Brendan could add up the bill, Norton would have escaped.
Perhaps he should buy Mandy some flowers. Were there still such things as flowers? Or a box of candy. Did candy still exist?
His long hair and beard didn’t matter. Mandy believed in free love. The hippies had taken over the world. Flower power meant that flowers were unnecessary. Wanting to give her something because of what she was going to give him was probably far too outdated.
While she watched the screen, Norton watched her. Over the centuries, the world had changed. Separate nations might have vanished, and different races now lived together, but despite her crazy hair and strange clothes, Mandy still matched his original impression: she could have been a regular all-American blue-eyed girl. Even if one of her eyes was a camera.
“So,” asked Mandy, on screen, “what did you do in your first life?”
“I was a police officer.”
“Really?”
Norton watched himself answer, “Well… not exactly a cop. That was just my cover. I was a private eye, you know. More of a spy, really. A secret agent.”
Mandy’s questions had been purely professional, with one exception.
“The women of your day, Wayne, what was the period’s predominant fashion statement, and were accessories colour coordinated?”
This was the one question which was was edited out, perhaps because he’d been unable to invent much of an answer.
Apart from that, neither Mandy nor Brendan showed any interest in the past. If Norton had met someone from the seventeenth century, would he have cared? Probably not. What could they have talked about? Probably nothing.
“Let’s watch it again,” said Mandy.
“What? You mean it’s over?” Norton glanced at the spinning carousel of colours on the screen. “But… er… what about… ah…?”
“My feeling is good, very good. The feeling will be even better after a repeat. And during a repeat.”
While she spoke, Mandy undid her jacket. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
She was looking at Norton, the version of him on screen, watching as Norton’s eyes opened for the first time. Or the second time. Meanwhile, his non-screen eyes were gazing at her. In the flesh. The flesh between the open edges of her jacket.
“Take your clothes off,” she told him.
Norton began to undress. Over the last few centuries, it seemed, zippers and buttons had been uninvented. He wasn’t wearing much, and even though he did it as slowly as possible, it didn’t take him long.
He sat on the edge of the bed and kept his back turned toward Mandy, feeling very shy even though she’d already seen him naked.
Not that she was watching. She was far more interested in what was on screen.
“Now you,” he said.
Mandy shrugged off her jacket. Her back was to him. Her naked back.
Norton looked at her, but she was still watching at the screen.
Until it blanked.
Then the room became black.
The door suddenly flared open.
And a dark figure stood there, silhouetted against the light. A man with a gun.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Hey! Can you hear me?”
Kiru could hear. And if she could hear, she was alive.
They hadn’t killed her.
Yet.
She opened her eyes and stared up at the sky. It was grey, cloudy—and alien.
“Anything broken?”
She moved her left arm slightly. It didn’t hurt. She tried the right, then her legs. There was no pain.
“Not you! Have you broken any of my stuff?”
Kiru looked around. She was in the middle of a junkyard. If something was junk, it was already broken. She kept on looking, further around, and saw a man standing at the edge of the waste tip.
She coughed. Coughed again. Tried to inhale. Couldn’t.
No air. Couldn’t breathe. No oxygen in her mask.
Was this their final joke? Letting her survive the fall, then choke to death on the poisonous atmosphere?
The man seemed human, seemed alive. Kiru was human, and had to breathe to be alive. She tugged the mask away from her mouth. Then breathed. In. Out. In. Out. In. She lived.
Carefully, she stood up and slowly picked her way through the debris. Like the air, the gravity was the same as on Earth. Two reasons why this world had been chosen. She halted a few metres away from the man.
He must once have been tall. Now his shoulders were stooped, his back bent, and he leaned on a metal stick. His long beard was pure white, and he was almost bald. He must once have been young.
“Just landed, son?”
Kiru had been called a lot of things, but “son” was not one of them. Her face was still mostly hidden by the air-mask. She pulled it off over her head, ran her fingers through her hair.
“How can you tell?” she asked.
“A wild guess,” he said, watching as she dropped her mask and shrugged off the gravpak. “Where you from?”
“Earth.”
“Earth? Ha! What a dump.”
Kiru glanced around.
“This may be a dump,” said the old man, “but it’s my dump.”
He was a fool, Kiru realised.
She hadn’t been alone, but there was no sign of any of the others. Having fallen such a long way, they must have been scattered over a wide area. She stared up into the alien sky.
“The ship’s gone,” he told her. “Cheap tin trays to the far ends of the universe.”
“What?”
“You weren’t even cargo. Just a piece of flotsam thrown overboard. Or maybe I mean jetsam.”
Kiru looked at him. “You from Earth?”
“Why do you say that?”
“First, you know it’s a dump. Second, you look human. Third, we talk the same lingo.”
“First, every world is a dump. Second, never believe what you see. Or hear. Or touch. Never believe anything. Third, we do. There are no slates here. Or none that work. Nothing works.”
Kiru glanced back at the tip again, realising it consisted almost entirely of abandoned technoware. Everything from autocams and biodeks, comsets and datascreens, through to things she couldn’t identify. There were also facemasks and gravpaks, which must have come from others who had arrived by the same vertical route. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They’d been dumped because they were depleted, but everything else?