Chloe looked from screen to flyer, flyer to screen, then dropped the Facebook page into an image editor, cropped out a portion of the background and fed it into a search engine. Got a hit for the website, a bunch of old sci-fi flicks, landscape photos from the fifteen worlds gifted to the human race by the Jackaroo…And, hey, look at that, a set of images posted on a tumblr by someone calling themselves Mangala Cowboy. Drawings and paintings of red cliffs, dunes of red sand saddling away towards distant hills, a crowd of thorny spires glowing in orange sunlight. A view of the spires from a distance, a view from a high angle, as if from a plane or helicopter. The same spires at night, outlined in dabs of red phosphorescence. A close-up of thorny projections silhouetted against a pink sky. They looked like teeth, or the ends of broken bones. A tangle of grey vegetation with a fleck of incandescent yellow burning in its centre. A pavement of black slabs winding around red rocks. Some kind of room or space outlined in dense black scrawls. A flock of what might be balloons drifting across the freckled face of a fat sun. And over and over again, the same cliffs, the same dunes, the same spires.

  One summer, fifteen years old, restless with self-pity and unexamined anger because she felt that the death of her mother, how her mother had died, had denied her any kind of ordinary life, Chloe had taken to cycling long distances. From Walthamstow into the City of London. Down the course of the River Lea, past the Olympic Park to Bow Creek, where she now worked. Across Epping Forest, through the banal suburban landscapes and strip malls of Enfield. She’d taken her bike on trains out to Kew and Richmond; once, one day close to midsummer, she’d ridden all the way to Amersham. And from Amersham she had cycled through a maze of B-roads into the Chilterns, and as the sun had begun to set she’d come out at the top of a ridge and seen a patchworked valley spread beyond: immemorial England parcelled into fields and stands of trees aglow in that magic hour when light is a property of the air. As if she had intruded on a secondary world, a fairyland where everything wore its True Name.

  She felt that same vertiginous recognition now. A freezing pleasure, an emotion as deep and poignant as nostalgia for places she’d never before seen. And then she thought of Eddie Ackroyd, slouching like a malignant shadow through the displaced-persons camp, searching for Mangala Cowboy, and a sliding sense of urgency seized her and sent her hurrying through the late afternoon sunlight and the ordinary little park.

  The stage and sound system had been cleared away, but a gang of little children were chasing each other across the dry grass and several pre-teen girls clustered around the bench under the chestnut tree, sharing images and clips on their phones. Chloe went up to them and got into a conversation with their leader, Niome, a sharp-faced girl dressed in pink shorts and a blue T-shirt, hair scraped up and exploding in an afroball at the top of her head. Chloe told her about Disruption Theory, asked about Mr Archer. Who’d just been this geezer until a couple of months ago, apparently. No bother to anyone, spent most of his time sitting outside his front door or in the café gossiping with other geezers. He carved stuff, Niome said, birds and shit like that from bits of wood. Sometimes gave them away, sometimes sold them in the local street market.

  ‘Then he started having meetings,’ Niome said. She was perched on the back of the bench, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her bright red sneakers planted on the seat. ‘Him and a few geezers at first. Then other people too. It was like they were in church. Like Mr Archer was giving a sermon, or they were singing hymns. But in this funny language.’

  Chloe asked her if she or her friends had ever gone to these meetings.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Niome said. ‘Get mixed up with that chump ranking? No way. But Bunny did. Her mum got caught up, and she took Bunny along. She played recorder today, didn’t you, Buns?’

  Bunny was a shy plump girl who ducked her head and shrugged.

  ‘Tell her what it was like,’ Niome said.

  Bunny shrugged again, pleased and embarrassed, said she couldn’t exactly explain.

  Chloe showed the flyer to Niome, said that she was wondering who had made the picture.

  ‘Oh, that,’ Niome said. ‘That’s one of Freddie’s.’

  Freddie Patel and his little sister, Rana, had come to live in the camp about three months ago. No sign of their parents, according to Niome, who didn’t seem to think it was anything unusual. Mr Archer was Freddie’s upstairs neighbour, she said, and the old man had taken a shine to him because of his drawings.

  Chloe said, ‘Is he part of this thing of Mr Archer’s?’

  ‘He isn’t really part of anything.’

  ‘But he did the flyer for Mr Archer. And a poster they put up on Facebook.’

  ‘Yeah, but Freddie was never into Mr Archer’s church stuff. I mean, you never seen him there, did you, Buns?’

  Bunny shook her head.

  ‘Freddie mostly keeps himself to himself,’ Niome said. ‘Man of mystery innit.’

  ‘Niome’s in love with Freddie,’ one of the other girls said, half-singing it in a teasing lilt, and Niome said, ‘I am so not. He’s lush, yeah, but he’s sort of weird, too.’

  ‘Weird in what way?’ Chloe said.

  ‘Like he’s lost in his head. You say hi to him, he say hi back. But otherwise it’s like he don’t see you.’

  ‘What about his sister?’

  ‘Oh, Rana’s just a cute little thing.’

  ‘A normal little girl.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘She doesn’t ever talk about ghosts, or anything similar?’

  The stuff that encoded eidolons interacted with people’s optic nerves on some deep quantum level, generating weird, blurry images. Shadows and shapes. Ghosts and monsters.

  Niome said, ‘I don’t think so. She’s just this little girl.’

  Chloe said, ‘Have you seen anything weird, you and your friends?’

  Niome laughed. ‘You mean like spooks and such?’

  ‘Or strange animals, strange noises, strange dreams.’

  ‘What kind of strange dreams?’

  ‘Dreams about the kind of places Freddie draws, for instance.’

  Niome asked to see the flyer again. She studied it carefully, shook her head, showed it to her friends. ‘This mean anything to you?’

  More head-shaking.

  ‘There’s this bunch of shiners who sit around the other end of the park,’ one of the girls said. ‘They see all kinds of stuff that isn’t there.’

  ‘She means ordinary people seeing, like, super-strange paranormal shit,’ Niome said, and smiled at Chloe. ‘If you want, we can ask around. Do some detecting.’

  The girl was bright and bold and inquisitive, far more together than Chloe had been at her age. It occurred to her that Niome had never known a time when there hadn’t been aliens in the sky and a lottery for easy travel to other planets. It made her feel old.

  She gave one of her cards to Niome, and a couple of five-pound coins for her help. Niome asked if that meant she was one of Disruption Theory’s informers now.

  Chloe said, ‘Be sure to let me know if you hear about any super-strange stuff. Meanwhile, how about pointing me at Freddie’s home?’

  It was in the nearest cluster of container flatlets. The steel boxes had big windows at either end and were stacked side by side in an L shape three storeys high, with steel-mesh walkways on the inner side. People sat on stairs, in open doorways. The mingled murmur of TVs and radios, a domestic hum and clatter.

  Freddie Patel’s flatlet was in the middle of the second storey of the short arm of the L. Like most of its neighbours, its window and glass-panelled door were blanked with curtains. Freddie Patel twitched the heavy blue material aside when Chloe rapped on the glass, then cracked the door open to ask what she wanted.

  He looked much younger than she’d expected, a slender teenager a good head taller than her, dressed in cargo shorts and an oversized T-shirt. When Chloe showed him the flyer and asked if he was the artist, his suspicious look darkened.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Chloe introduced herself, speaking quickly before he could shut the door in her face. ‘The people I work for are interested in happenings, festivals, that kind of thing. Like the one here today? I was wondering if you could help me, answer a few standard questions for a survey. It will only take a couple of minutes, I promise. And there’ll be a small payment for your time and trouble.’

  ‘Mr Archer’s meeting? I wasn’t even there. You want to know about that, you should talk to him,’ Freddie Patel said.

  He was looking past her, scanning the walkway as if expecting to see someone else. Over his shoulder, Chloe could see a wedge of wall tiled with a mosaic of mostly red drawings.

  She said, ‘You helped Mr Archer with his flyer. His website, too.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It caught my attention. It’s a sweet piece of work. Would you mind talking about it? Your inspiration, and so on,’ Chloe said, putting on her spex.

  ‘You want to record this?’

  ‘It’s our standard procedure. I mentioned a small payment, didn’t I?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘That’s okay, we can do it without,’ Chloe said, and made a big deal of taking off her spex and folding them away. Hoping that she’d got a nice steady shot of the pictures.

  A chubby little girl of four or five, cute as a button in dungarees with an appliqué flower on the bib, came up behind Freddie and gave Chloe a bold stare. When Chloe said hi she looked away, looked back. Ringlets tangled over her forehead. A piece of paper was crumpled in one fist.

  Chloe said to Freddie, ‘Is this your sister?’ Said to the little girl, ‘How are you, sweetie? Rana, right?’

  ‘I made a drawing,’ the little girl said, and held up the multicoloured scrawl so that Chloe and her brother could inspect it. A red string was tied around her chubby wrist, a single green bead threaded on it.

  Freddie told her, ‘I’ll take a look in a minute. Go on inside now.’

  ‘Ugly Chicken says she’s nice,’ the little girl said.

  Freddie’s tone hardened. ‘Go on inside. Now.’

  The little girl waved bye-bye, hand flapping at her wrist, and toddled away.

  Chloe said, ‘So your sister’s an artist too.’

  ‘Exactly what is it you’re trying to sell me?’

  Freddie Patel was attempting to project an attitude, but he looked away when Chloe met his gaze. He didn’t have the fuck-you stare of a real street kid.

  ‘I work for a little company, Disruption Theory. Here’s my card,’ she said.

  Freddie glanced at it, shrugged.

  ‘You can check out our website, see that we’re totally valid. What I’m interested in, all I’m interested in, are your pictures. If you have anything else like the flyer, I’d love to see them, talk about them.’

  ‘No way,’ Freddie said again, and started to close the door.

  Chloe said quickly, ‘Maybe I could buy one.’

  ‘You don’t go away, I’ll call the police,’ Freddie said, and the door clicked shut and the curtain fell.

  Chloe wrote call anytime on the back of the card Freddie hadn’t taken from her, and stuck it between the glass door and its frame. A bare-chested man sitting on a canvas stool at the end of the walkway was watching her. She resisted the urge to give him the finger and went down the stairs, feeling that something or someone was tracking her, following her through the stacks of containers and into the park beyond. But when she looked around, half-expecting to see Eddie Ackroyd or his damn drone, there was no one there.

  2. Landing Day

  Mangala | 24 July

  Astronauts and aliens paraded down Petra’s main avenue. The astronauts were the surviving members of the Thirty-Eight, the first people to land on Mangala. Dressed in white tracksuits and standing on the backs of two flatbed trucks, waving to crowds that pelted them with confetti and paper streamers. The aliens marched behind the trucks. Lizard aliens, frog aliens, cat aliens, gorilla aliens. The cats brandished ray guns; the gorillas wore space helmets with spiral antennae. There were people dressed in black leotards stuck all over with clusters of black balloons; people in aluminium foil costumes and silver facepaint and blue wigs. A solitary Dalek trundled along, squawking about extermination. There was a troupe of dancers costumed as Jackaroo avatars, black suits and white shirts and gold-tinted plastic masks, high-stepping in jerky stop-go synchrony. There were floats and three school bands, a steelpan orchestra on the back of a truck decorated with artificial turf and fake palm trees and two real parrots. The Mayor and his wife rode in a vintage open-top Mercedes imported by a tomb raider who’d struck it rich, followed by a phalanx of motorcycle cops, four fire engines, the Salvation Army brass band, representatives of two dozen professions and trades, and a group selected from the latest arrivals on Mangala, newbies dressed in white T-shirts and blue jeans and blue denim jackets, the uniform of the orientation camp.

  It was the thirteenth anniversary of the first landfall of the shuttle that tirelessly cycled between Earth and Mangala, of the first human footsteps on one of the fifteen worlds gifted by the Jackaroo. The shuttle had returned from its latest trip to Earth just two days before. A ring of fireworks had exploded around the giant spacecraft as it slid out of the sky, and there were more fireworks now, flowering in the chill sky above the city.

  The last cannonade was fading and falling as Vic Gayle plunged into the narrow streets of the old quarter, heading towards a Landing Day party with a bunch of comrades from the early days. Back then, this had been all there was to the city. Quonset huts, a couple of big steel-frame sheds, small mud-brick domes built over the entrances to cut-and-cover bunkers. A precarious foothold in the howling alien wilderness. There were almost a million people on the planet now, most of them living in Petra, and the huts and bunkers in the old quarter had been made over into restaurants and tanning parlours, cafés and souvenir shops. Man, look at that: a Starbucks.

  Vic’s friends had taken over the big round table at the back of the city’s oldest Chinese restaurant. They were all veterans of the second shuttle to Mangala, making a lot of noise, helping themselves from little dishes and bamboo baskets as waiters brought more food and fresh bottles of wine, brought Vic a bottle of Tiger beer. Most were much older than Vic, baby boomers who’d won the emigration lottery and decided to shed their old lives and chase after dreams of their Space Age childhoods. Thomas Müller owned two supermarkets and a thriving import/export business. Alice and Marek Sienkiewicz dealt in Elder Culture artefacts. Victoria Cheshire had built up a transport company that ran road trains between Petra and Idunn’s Valley. There were lawyers, surgeons, teachers. Maria Luis Pereira owned a chicken farm, the biggest on Mangala.

  Vic Gayle was an investigator in the city’s police, a stocky middle-aged man in a dark brown suit and black shirt and green tie. Close-trimmed hair going grey at the temples, sleepy eyes that didn’t miss much. Sitting quietly amongst his friends as they ate crispy duck and pancakes, drank white wine from Idunn’s Valley or imported beer, talked about the old days, their children and grandchildren back on Earth, the latest political scandals, the big dust storm blowing up out of the west, the panic buying in shops and supermarkets. Vic finished his beer and switched to jasmine tea. Although he was on call, working on Landing Day so that colleagues with families wouldn’t have to, he’d decided at the last minute that he didn’t want to miss the annual party with his old friends, had told his new partner to hold the fort for a couple of hours, ignore the phone if it rang, call him if there was a problem. But now that he was here, he was feeling out of place. Everyone was talking about new business opportunities, their new cars and houses, their kids, their plans for the future, and he was back to living in an efficiency apartment, his ex was nagging him about collecting the last of his shit from what had been their home, and he was still working violent crimes, putting down murders. A righteous calling, no doubt, but after seven years it was beginning to feel like the same old same old.

  Someone said, ‘Next year, we should do this in Red Rock Falls.’

  Someone else said, ‘Only tourists and newbies go to Red Rock Falls these days.’

  ‘Time we reclaimed it, then.’

  ‘Who ordered these chicken feet?’

  ‘I hear StrangeWare is organising another attempt on the North Pole.’

  ‘Those people have more money than sense.’

  ‘They can afford to bet on long shots. And who knows what’s under the ice?’

  ‘A secret Jackaroo base.’

  ‘Atlantis.’

  ‘Every sock ever lost.’

  ‘The mapping satellite didn’t find anything.’

  ‘It’s a lot of ice.’

  ‘It had sideways radar.’

  ‘It’s a lot of ice. Forty kilometres deep in places.’

  Familiar faces animated in the red light of the sconces on the red and gold walls. Laughing and talking. Hands wielding chopsticks, fluttering in the air over bowls and glasses.

  ‘Did anyone ever find out what happened to that satellite?’

  ‘A secret Elder Culture city shot it down.’

  ‘Two of its gyroscopes failed,’ Maria Kawelec said. She was an engineer and an amateur astronomer. ‘It couldn’t be aimed at anything any more, so it was de-orbited.’

  ‘They should put up another.’

  ‘They should send probes to the other planets. Seriously,’ Maria said. ‘Anything could be out there.’

  ‘That’s where we should go for our fiftieth. The North Pole.’

  ‘And miss the parade?’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it. Every year the same.’

 

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