He watched from the balcony as five men with guns walked past below. Military uniforms, but no insignia. At best, they could be of little use to him. At worst, they could kill him.
No, that wouldn’t be the worst, he thought. They could keep him as a slave or torture him.
Auron shuddered, and retreated silently into his apartment in the abandoned ski lodge and shut the balcony door as quietly as he could manage.
He took Jor out of his pocket.
“Who do you think they are?” he asked.
“Don’t know, mate. Probably towards the end of the war, the various armies fell into disarray, and now they’re just people trying to survive.”
He opened the wardrobe so he could see himself in the mirror inside the door. He’d changed his rudimentary self-made clothes for clothes that he’d found in the abandoned houses, but he still looked a wreck. No amount of bathing and grooming could conceal that fact that here was a man who, at the age of perhaps fifty-eight, was already approaching the end of his lifespan. A man who had endured unspeakable things for three decades on an alien planet. A man whose nerves had been half-shattered by endless attacks of giant furry alien crabs.
But he was safe now. He was home.
Suddenly a shot rang out. For a second he froze, but no more shots came. Probably the soldiers were hunting something, he told himself.
He turned to look at the fish tank full of blue liquid and tangled wires that stood next to an open notebook computer on the large wooden table; a table that had probably once, before the war, seen happy gatherings of friends or family.
Next to it stood the matter interactor he’d built from computer parts and gardening chemicals. He was pleased with it. It was a beautiful thing of plastic project boxes and wire coils, arranged around a camera tripod. It barely even rattled.
“Jor, is your communication link with the Sirius device fully stable?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” said Jor. “Stop worrying. Everything’s in place. Everything’s working.”
“I want to start on something that isn’t essential to my life. I’m thinking teeth. I could fix my teeth. They’re a mess.”
“Great idea, Auron. Shall I get Sirius to devise a plan?”
His heart began to beat wildly. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He couldn’t speak.
“Auron?” said Jor.
“No, not yet. Let me think.”
“You’re prevaricating,” said Jor.
“I know. I know that. I’m going for a walk.”
“You’re still thinking about what happened to Jer when Virellon fixed his tooth.”
“You’re smart.”
“The new device is —”
“Enough, Jor!” he said, interrupting.
Jor fell silent.
Auron patted the weapon holstered at his side. He’d had Sirius make some adjustments to it. It would work, now. Reliably.
He made himself a cup of tea from teabags he’d found in one of the houses. There was no milk for the tea. He wondered if he could get Sirius to create some kind of synthetic milk. Why not? In fact, Auron thought to himself, he hadn’t even begun to tap Sirius’s capabilities.
The process would require care and caution.
After drinking the tea, he walked out of the apartment and over to the stairs, from where he could see the landscape on the other side of the ski lodge. The men were walking off towards the town. He waited till they’d summited the little hill next to the village, then went downstairs and outside.
It was good to be outside. The warm sun made him feel alive.
He began to walk towards the pond. It was largely stagnant, but there were still fish in it.
He was almost there when he heard a faint whimper. Looking around, he saw a shape in the grass.
It was a dog. The animal had lost half of its fur and was painfully thin. Its exposed skin was covered in sore patches. Then he saw the wound: a small, circular opening in the animal’s thigh.
The dog growled, but remained lying where it was.
“Hey!” he said, gently. “What’s happened to you?”
The dog whined, and licked its lips.
There could be little doubt about the wound. Someone had shot it, and hadn’t even bothered to stick around long enough to see whether the wound was fatal or not.
The soldiers.
“So that’s what kind of men they are,” said Auron quietly to himself.
He began to push his hands carefully underneath the dog so he could pick it up. It whined pitifully. Once he had the dog in his arms, he began to walk briskly back to the ski lodge.
“Don’t worry old boy,” he said. “I’m going to fix you. You’ve nothing to lose, anyway.”
The dog was weighing heavily on him by the time he was halfway home. Auron was weak and malnourished.
“I think I’ll call you Freddie,” he said.
The animal gazed at him with a halfway mixture of trust and fear.
“Don’t worry, Freddie,” Auron said to it.
In the apartment, he pulled a blanket from the wardrobe and lay Freddie down on it. Freddie briefly tried to get up, but quickly abandoned the plan, yelping.
“Jor, I’m going to put you in charge of patching this dog up. Talk to Sirius. Can you do it? Painlessly.”
“I suggest spreading the healing process over several days, Auron,” said Jor. “Will you be giving it food and water?”
“Of course I’ll be giving it food and water. I’ll get some dog food from the houses.”
“Would you like to begin the process?”
“Yes, but alleviate its pain and put it to sleep if you have to do anything painful. Or sedate it a bit. Keep it calm. I don’t want it suffering.”
“Got it, mate. Leave it to me.”
Auron stood looking thoughtfully at Freddie, who promptly fell asleep with a contented expression on his face.
“If it works on you it’ll probably work on me,” he said to himself.
He went out to look for dog food.
When he returned, carrying several cans and various dog treats, he picked up a book he’d found in one of the houses, sat on the sofa and opened it. Freddie was still sleeping.
The start of the book was not promising, in Auron’s eyes. It spent an entire paragraph describing the sensory experience of being in a cafe. There was little indication of it containing anything technical.
He tried to meditate, for the first time in thirty years, closing his eyes and attempting to focus on his breathing. He couldn’t do it. He opened them again and went to look at Freddie. Freddie was still sleeping peacefully.
He went back to the sofa and resumed reading.
He finished the book four hours later. The sun was setting.
“What a waste of time,” he said, throwing the book with a careful and practised aim into the wastebasket.
Then an unmistakable sound reached his ears. Someone had just smashed open the locked door of the lodge.
He took the weapon from his belt.
From the floor below, the sound of voices emerged; the voices of several men. He couldn’t tell what language they were speaking.
“Jor, who are they?” he whispered.
“No idea,” said Jor.
“Analyse them! Use the interactor.”
“The interactor’s busy fixing the dog. Do you want me to divert it?”
“No! What do you mean, busy? It can only do one thing at a time now?”
“Repairing a living being is a complex task.”
Auron listened as the men smashed down doors on the ground floor.
“If they come in here, can Sirius kill them?”
“Is that ethical?”
“Ethical?” said Auron incredulously. “What are you talking about, ethical?”
“It just seems incompatible with the ethics you taught me.”
“They shot a dog in cold blood and left him to die slowly in the grass. I’ll kill the lot of them if they come anywhere near us. Answer the question.”
“How many are there?”
“I don’t know, five maybe. Can’t you sense them remotely?”
“Like I said, it’s busy with the dog. The process is information-intensive. On top of which, the range of the device is limited. The information we can get from scanning the surroundings might be incomplete.”
“Can you divert it temporarily?”
“There will be some risk to the dog.”
Auron sighed.
“Look, I think there are five of them. Sounds like about five. Same people I saw earlier, probably.”
“They can be killed, but the process might be slow enough for one of them to get off a shot, if we’re looking at a conflict situation here.”
“Do you think they might try to harm me?”
“Possibly.”
Auron swore under his breath.
“But possibly not,” Jor added.
Auron went to the middle of the tiny apartment and stood facing the door, the weapon drawn.
For a while, it sounded as though some of the men were trying to persuade the others to investigate the second floor. He could hear them arguing on the stairs. Then, they descended the stairs and left.
He breathed an enormous sigh of relief and sheathed the weapon in its holster.
That night he slept uneasily and twice awoke shouting, dreaming giant crabs had got hold of his feet. Both times he couldn’t immediately recognise his surroundings, but then he remembered everything: the portal, Jer’s death, the ski lodge.
When the same thing happened a third time, he drew the curtains and saw the sun already beginning to illuminate the mountains in the west, and he made himself a tea, which he sat drinking while eating old, dry crackers.
Freddie was still asleep, but his skin appeared much improved and the bullet wound was clearly healing rapidly.
“How’s the dog?” Auron asked Jor.
“He’s progressing,” said Jor.
“Why’s he asleep?”
“Still sedated, mate. We can’t be sure the rapid healing process won’t cause distress if he were awake. Would you like me to wake him up?”
“No, let him sleep.”
Auron spent the day pacing about, thinking. Periodically he went outside and scanned the hills for signs of the men.
“As soon as you’ve finished fixing Freddie, we need to build an improved Sirius and a more powerful interactor,” he said to Jor, while he sat on a bench outside, watching the road that led from the village. “We’ll use the current interactor to build improved versions of both. I need to de-age myself and I want to know what’s happened in England. I used to know people there.”
“You’re the boss,” said Jor.
“I am the boss,” Auron repeated with a sardonic smile.
He stood up and gazed at the distant mountains. They were remote, inhospitable, and yet beautiful.
“Jor?”
“Yes, Auron?”
“Do you have feelings? Do you experience emotion?”
There was a long pause, then Jor said, “I don’t know.”
Auron gave a short laugh.
“Of course you don’t,” he said.
That night he awoke only once, this time dreaming the men had smashed their way into the apartment and were proposing to torture him, for fun.
He awoke at dawn, sunlight filtering in through gaps in the curtains, to find Freddie licking his face.
“Urggh, get off!” he said, and he pushed the dog gently back.
He rubbed his eyes and gazed thoughtfully at Freddie.
The bald patches on Freddie’s body were covered in short new black-and-white fur. The surviving longer fur was still matted and dirty.
Auron found himself smiling irrepressibly.
“I’m going to have to give you a bath, you filthy hound,” he said.
Freddie barked at him and squatted down on his front paws as though he wanted to play, his tail wagging manically.
“You absolute lunatic,” said Auron affectionately, and he ruffled Freddie’s head—gently, avoiding the patches of skin covered in short fur, that had been bald and sore only two days earlier.
He fed Freddie and ate a breakfast himself of beans from a can, washed down with tea. Then he took Freddie for a walk, warily eyeing the hills for signs of the soldiers. Everything seemed peaceful.
Freddie ran about madly, stopping here and there to sniff at things.
“Jor,” said Auron.
“Here,” said Jor.
“I need to build a more powerful Sirius. And I’ll need a much more powerful interactor. We need to get on with it. I want to de-age myself, and I have to see what’s going on in England. I want to track down people I know. The new device will need to be capable of opening portals and remote sensing. Also I want it to retrieve and assimilate knowledge from whatever sources can be found.”
“Is that everything?” said Jor.
“No. It needs to be able to create food. Is that possible? Decent food, not just any old rubbish.”
“I don’t know,” said Jor.
“Does Sirius know?”
“Sirius doesn’t know either. But I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible.”
“Another thing. I want the new Sirius to be incorporated into your structure. I don’t want to talk to it directly. I want it to be something you can access to augment your capabilities. Not part of you; something you can use. I want the whole thing to still fit into my pocket.”
He took Jor from his pocket and turned it around in his fingers.
“Can it be done?”
“Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Sirius need to analyse your request. It needs to give the matter some thought.”
“All right. And I want to incorporate the new interactor too. A much more powerful interactor than we’ve currently got.”
“That’s not possible,” said Jor.
“What? Why not?”
“The interactor cannot be miniaturised.”
“You mean you and Sirius can’t do it?”
“Exactly, Auron. Sorry.”
“All right, fine, we’ll focus on augmenting your intelligence and we’ll keep the interactor separate.”
“Do you want us to start working on it?”
“Aren’t you busy with Freddie still?”
“He’s out of range of the interactor.”
“So he is.”
“We can safely let him alone. Natural healing processes will finish the job.”
“Then begin.”
Auron sat down on the hillside. Here and there, cattle roamed about, ponderously chewing grass. Further down the hill a goat trotted past with two kids, heading up the hill to the north.
The air smelt faintly of cow manure, but mixed with the scent of fragrant plants. He picked a little square-stemmed plant with purple flowers. Perhaps it was marjoram, or oregano, or thyme. He’d never been able to tell the difference.
In the distance, the tops of the mountains were still capped with snow from the winter.
In a way, aside from the dubious soldiers that the various armies had cut loose—probably traumatised conscripts—the place was a paradise. But he couldn’t stay in paradise. There was work to be done.
He whistled to Freddie and began to make his way back to the ski lodge. Freddie scampered after him, tearing around in circles like a puppy.
When he got back he discovered Sirius had already constructed a new and powerful-looking interactor, quite unlike the device he had first constructed in his spare bedroom in York. It was sleek and well-designed; a gleaming cylinder, two feet high.
“Everything’s ready, Auron,” said Jor, from his pocket.
“Ready?” Auron said, confused.
“You want to augment my intelligence. It can be done. Place me on the table.”
“Is there any risk?”
“Not as far as we can tell.”
He took Jor out of his pocket.
“If you die, I’ll miss you,” said Auron, holding Jor up to his eyes.
“No,” said Jor, “you miss Jer, and if you want to bring him back, Sirius and I aren’t currently up to it.”
Auron smiled mirthlessly, and placed Jor on the table.
“I do sort of miss him,” he said. “The absolute idiot. At least you can’t talk, Freddie. My God, he was annoying.”
Freddie gave a single bark, as if agreeing.
The hard case of the Jor device seemed to fizz and expand, and smoke began to pour out of it. Then the smoke abruptly seemed to take direction and shot back into Jor. The device’s case hardened.
“Jor?” said Auron, uncertainly.
“Still here, mate,” said Jor.
“Is it done?”
“It’s done. What would you like to do next, Auron?”
“Can you fix Jer?”
“Still not. Sorry. You’ll need to build something more powerful and probably a lot bigger.”
“How much bigger?”
“You could try swimming-pool size.”
“If I do that, will it be able to resurrect Jer?”
“Still don’t know, Auron. You’re asking me to predict what a more powerful system could do. There’s this thing called the Halting Problem.”
Auron ground his teeth and stared out at the mountains. He felt strangely powerless.
“OK,” he said, finally. “In that case, I want—let me see. I want a full English breakfast, with a coffee and an orange juice, no black pudding, and a rack of various sauces.”
A swirling mist appeared on the table in front of him, next to Jor, thickened, and then resolved itself into a full English breakfast. Next to it stood a French press containing coffee, a mug, a small jug of milk and a glass of orange juice.
“Is it—is it safe to eat?” Auron asked, finding himself unexpectedly and unaccountably emotional.
“Perfectly safe. Enjoy.”
Auron began to laugh, and soon tears of joy were running from his eyes. He fell onto the floor, laughing hysterically. Freddie wagged his tail, bemused.
Eventually he recovered his composure and picked himself up.
“It’s better while it’s still hot, probably,” said Jor.
“It’s a miracle,” said Auron.
“Miracle of science.”
“The interactor didn’t even make a sound.”
“It’s capable of much more than cookery, Auron.”
As he ate, he began to run his ideas past Jor.
“Listen,” he said, pausing to place a forkful of food in his mouth and chew it, and then throwing a rasher of bacon to Freddie, who was waiting eagerly, his eyes fixed on the proceedings, “if I ever somehow lose you, Jor, you devote yourself entirely to getting back into my hands.”
“Understood.”
“Don’t kill anyone, but find a way to have them bring you back to me. And don’t take any orders from them. Just manipulate them appropriately.”
“Your wish is my command.”
“Are you trying to be funny?” said Auron, pausing again to glare at Jor.
“Humour is a normal part of human speech, mate.”
“True,” said Auron.
After eating he dropped himself onto the sofa, placing Jor in his pocket. His knees ached from the walk.
“I need to see what’s happening in England,” he said. “Are any of my relatives still alive?”
“No, Auron. I’m sorry,” came the reply.
“Not a one of them?”
“No-one closer than a second cousin.”
“I see.”
He stared at the floor miserably. He was lost in unpleasant reflections when Freddie jumped onto the sofa next to him and tried to lick his face.
“Get off, you cretin!” he said, pleasantly, and he put his arm over Freddie, who lay down with his head on Auron’s lap.
“OK,” he said, “let me think. Think. I know; I had a friend called Viktor. Hadn’t spoken to him in a year, because he lived in Cambridge. Is he still alive?”
There was a pause, then Jor said, “Viktor Feher is still alive. He lives with his wife in Cambridge.”
“Viktor’s married? Oh well, I suppose it has been thirty years. Can you open a view of him on the wall? I mean like a TV screen. I mean, if he’s not doing anything too private.”
“I can do it,” said Jor.
A painting on the wall depicting hills dotted with trees and farms seemed to glow, and then an image appeared.
The image was of a man and a woman lying fully clothed on a filthy bed. Both of them were bald, their skin covered in ugly sores. Their clothes were no more than rags. The woman seemed to be asleep; the man was crying softly. The walls of the room they were in were blackened with smoke.
“Dear God!” Auron exclaimed. “That’s Viktor and his wife?”
“Exactly,” said Jor.
“What’s happened to them?”
“The war, Auron. They are close to death.”
“I have to help them. Can you repair them?”
“From this distance, there would be considerable risk.”
“You’re telling me you can open interplanetary portals now but you can’t improve the health of a couple of humans?”
“Not without risk, from this distance, Auron. It’s not a question of raw energy. That can be diverted from distant stars. It’s a question of information.”
“Then I’m going there. We’re going there. With the interactor.”
“You may not survive, Auron. Radiation levels are high. You are weak for your age.”
“I’m not weak! What are you talking about?”
“Your immune function is poor, your heart is unstable and blood vessels in your brain are stretched dangerously thin.”
Auron rubbed his face with his hand.
“Then we’ll open a portal and bring them here.”
“Even a change of climate could finish them off at this point.”
“Then I have to fix myself first. After that I’m going there. How long will it take?”
“It can’t be done safely in less than a week. You’re a mess.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said, your heart’s messed up. Your brain’s prematurely aged.”
“I feel OK.”
“If you want to survive Cambridge, you’ll need to be young and fit.”
Auron paced back and forth, wrangling with himself internally.
“OK, then. We’ll do it,” he said, arriving at a conclusion. “We’ll start with my teeth. At least those aren’t crucial.”
“If I may make a suggestion, Auron,” said Jor, “better start with your heart. It’ll probably be all right for another few years, but then again, it might not be.”
Auron looked at the awful image on the screen.
“Will they survive another week?”
“Probably,” came the reply.
“Send them some food at least. And clean water. Can you manage that without killing them?”
“Their mental state is precarious, Auron. I recommend taking it yourself in a week.”
Auron stared at the image live on the screen where the painting had been.
“This is ridiculous. You’re a computer. You have no real experience of life. No offence.”
“None taken, mate.”
“I want you to put together a box containing food, clean water, and whatever kind of drugs might help them. Anti-radiation drugs and so forth. All clearly labelled with clear instructions. And I want you to make it appear somewhere where they’ll find it. And on top, put a note: from Auron. I’ll see you in a week. Have you got that?”
“Would you like me to stick to conventional existing drugs or devise new drugs?”
“Which will give them the greatest chance of survival and the least pain and suffering?”
“New drugs, considering the state of them.”
“New drugs it is, then. How quickly can you do it?”
“I’ll have it done in an hour.”
“Right. Close the viewport.”
Auron waved at the horrible image on the screen, which promptly faded, to be replaced once again by the painting of hills, farms and trees.
He sat down heavily on the sofa again, emotionally drained.
“What do you think Freddie?” he said.
Freddie, who was lying on the sofa next to him, sat up and whined cheerfully.
“Yes, my thoughts precisely,” said Auron.
In a filthy bed in a half-ruined house on the outskirts of Cambridge, Viktor Feher placed a hand gently on his wife’s shoulder.
“I’m going to fetch more water,” he said.
“I’ll come with you,” she murmured.
“Stay here,” he said.
He could see very well that Rosa Feher no longer possessed the energy to rise to her feet; a fact which she didn’t want to admit, even to herself.
Rosa turned slowly and painfully onto her back.
“What if something happens to you?”
“Then we’ll meet again in Heaven.”
“You don’t believe in that stuff,” she said with a tired, exhausted smile.
“Not before the war. Now I know the Devil exists, so I have to think God exists also.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I have to believe there is more to life than this nightmare.”
“Then stay here and pray with me.”
“Without fresh water we’ll both be dead in a day.”
“With fresh water we’ll be dead in a week.”
Viktor laughed grimly, his smile quickly replaced by an expression of infinite sadness.
“You say a prayer. I’ll … agree with it, or however it works.”
Rosa cast her mind back to her schooldays and uttered a short prayer.
Viktor grunted.
“Do you think anyone heard you?”
“I haven’t the faintest,” she said, with a brief smile.
Viktor slowly pushed himself off the bed and onto his feet.
“Come back safely, Viktor,” said Rosa. “Come back to me.”
He turned to see tears in her eyes.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “I’ll be twenty minutes.”
She was close to death. He knew it. She would pass away, and he would live on without her. For how long? Perhaps a week, as she had suggested. In the worst case, a month.
He opened the bedroom door, and froze.
“What is it?” said Rosa, suddenly alarmed.
“Someone’s left a box here.”
“No-one’s been in here,” she rasped, the exertion of speaking causing her radiation-scarred lungs to wheeze. “We would have heard it.”
“I’m hallucinating,” said Viktor.
He lowered himself painfully onto his knees, breaking into a fit of coughing as he did so.
“Viktor?” said Rosa fearfully.
“It’s from … Auron,” he said in amazement.
In spite of her weakness, Rosa slowly struggled to a sitting position, propping pillows behind her.
“Who?”
“I only know one Auron. Auron Blake. But he disappeared a long time ago. Vanished. Together with his friend. I thought he was dead.”
He opened the box and found two white plastic bottles, labelled, “Anti-radiation. Drink these immediately.”
Viktor rummaged about briefly in the rest of the box.
“There’s food in here,” he said. “And water.”
He staggered back to the bed, carrying a bottle in each hand. He gave one to Rosa, who examined it curiously, holding it up in front of her cataract-dimmed eyes in order to see the label.
Viktor sat slowly down on the bed, and had another coughing fit, but forced himself to stop, enduring the subsequent wheezing and the feeling that a thick fluid was stuck in his lungs. Coughing provided temporary minor relief, but it was excessively painful.
“What do you think?” he said. “Do we drink it?”
“If you friend’s been here, why didn’t we hear him? And why didn’t he say hello?”
“Well, he was always the anti-social type. Kept himself to himself. Apart from me and the fellow he was working with, I don’t think he had any friends. He was … what’s the word? A workaholic.”
“We must be dreaming,” said Rosa.
“I can’t understand it,” said Viktor.
Rosa unscrewed the bottle.
“Smells lovely.” she said, suddenly smiling. “Like a strawberry milkshake.”
Viktor unscrewed his bottle, and sniffed.
“We’ve nothing to lose,” he observed.
Then he realised that Rosa was already drinking hers.
He watched her anxiously.
“Take it easy!” he said.
She seemed to be gulping down half the bottle.
When she finished, she struggled up to a full sitting position, smiling.
“The pain’s gone from my throat!” she said. “Viktor, I already feel better!”
Viktor stared at the bottle in his hand, bewildered. Then he began to drink.
“Are you ready?” said Jor.
Auron had given Jor extensive instructions on the topic of repairing his health and de-ageing him. Clearly Jor had made an excellent job of fixing Freddie, but even so, he was nervous. The repairs he himself would require were considerably more complex than Freddie’s problems, and included alterations to the blood vessels and cellular structures in his brain.
“Begin,” said Auron.
For a minute he stood there, watching the interactor, trying to decide if he could feel the machine working on him or not. He decided that he couldn’t.
He noticed no difference in himself at all until the following morning. Auron forced himself to look at his own reflection in the mirror, scared of what he might see. When he saw himself, he straightened up suddenly, startled.
His face, which had ended up resembling the face of a man of perhaps seventy, at the age of fifty-seven, now looked more like fifty. The roots of his hair had turned dark. He checked his teeth. A tooth that had cracked and turned brown was now white and healthy again. Then he looked at his hands. The liver spots were fading, and the wrinkles smoothing out.
Auron had never quite understood why people cheer and fling their arms in the air, but for a second, he came closer to understanding than ever previously.
Then he remembered Jer. Jer should have been enjoying the same experience. Instead, he was lying crumpled in the freezer, dead.
“I’ll sort you out, Jer,” he muttered to himself. “I know there’s a way to do it. There has to be.”
The next day he appeared closer to mid-forties, and the day after that, forty.
His joints no longer ached and his heart no longer raced at night.
He took Freddie walking in the hills, finding it surprisingly easy to ascend the steep ski slope.
Not seeing any particular reason to stop, they walked all the way to the top, where they found the wreckage of a mountain refuge. He picked up a sign that had somehow blown onto its face in front of a pile of rubble. It explained that the building, now nothing but a pile of stones, had been made use of by the Italian partisans while fighting against the Nazis in WWII.
“Obviously some kind of a trouble hotspot,” said Auron, laughing wryly to himself.
The top of the mountain was peaceful, but the vista on the other side of the mountain displayed considerable devastation. Near the horizon, an entire town seemed to have been destroyed, and a little further to the south, a black pall of smoke rose into the air.
“I’ll fix you,” said Auron, looking at the world below him. “I can fix you.”
He turned and made his way down the hillside.
Three days later, the process was finished. Auron had Jor make him a new set of clothes that actually fitted, and then he enjoyed the strange experience of having Jor give him a haircut. The interactor, suitably programmed, caused all the unwanted pieces of hair to fall off and dissolve into a strange thick smoke, which coalesced into a thin stream that made its way out of the open balcony door.
Auron opened the wardrobe so he could see himself in a full-length mirror.
A sensation of euphoria, almost impossible to contain, surged through him.
“Best dressed man on the planet, probably,” he said, and then he dissolved yet again into helpless, hysterical laughter.
He was, for the second time in his life, twenty-seven years old, and he looked like he’d just stepped out of a cafe and was on his way to a meeting at some sort of innovative new startup.
Freddie didn’t seem to notice any difference.
Auron asked Jor to check Freddie over and help his fur grow back, and by the following day Freddie looked like he’d just got back from the dog grooming parlour.
He had Jor synthesise food for Freddie, mostly consisting of freshly-cooked meat, which Freddie ate in astonishing quantities.
“Jor,” he said, “I want you to find a large empty farmhouse near Cambridge, completely renovate it and make it ready for us to move there. Make sure it has some kind of large garage. In the garage, construct a kind of powerful armoured vehicle. I’m going to be using it to drive through the town. And fit the house out with everything I might want. I mean, uh … kitchen equipment, a coffee machine, a shower and a bath, the whole works. And put food in the cupboards.”
“You want normality,” Jer observed. “Or perhaps my cooking isn’t to your taste.”
“Very funny. Yes, I want normality. I want to remember how things were. Oh, and I’ll need some other buildings close by for other people to live in. Fix them all up properly. How many people are still alive in Cambridge?”
“At least a thousand.”
“As many as that?”
“It’ll be fewer by next year, Auron.”
“Not if I can help it. I’m going to sort the place out.”
“Do you intend to move there permanently?”
“That’s exactly what I intend.”
The following day he had Jor open a portal to his new house in Cambridge, and he moved the freezer containing Jer into the basement of the house. Auron walked around the house marvelling at it. It was the kind of place he’d hoped one day to be able to buy when he had been twenty-seven the first time around. The surroundings, on the other hand, were horrific. The surfaces of the roads had been melted and cratered by bombs, and most of the buildings were nothing but shards of teetering brick and piles of rubble.
While walking about outside the house he began to feel sick.
“It’s the radiation,” said Jor. “You need to go back and let me repair the damage. The process isn’t safe from this range.”
“I don’t want to be tied to the interactor. Can you make a supply of drugs that can heal the effects of radiation? Put them in the kitchen. And I want dog treats containing radiation medication for Freddie.”
“No problem.”
He went back inside. Bottles of pills were already waiting for him. He swallowed one, and he opened a packet of anti-radiation dog treats and fed one to Freddie, who immediately seemed anxious for more.
Then he went back through the portal to the ski lodge.
“Let’s move the interactor next,” he said. “Are there going to be any particular issues with it? Can it maintain the portal if we move it?”
But he didn’t hear Jor’s reply. Suddenly his attention was caught by the sound of the front door of the lodge being thrown open, and the chatter of the soldiers’ voices reached his ears.
“What are they doing here?” he asked Jor.
“They spotted you earlier on,” said Jor. “They’re looking for you.”
“Can we move the interactor?”
“It’s going to be a multi-step process, Auron. We’ll have to build a device to maintain the portal from the other side, first.”
He could hear the men making their way up the stairs.
“There isn’t going to be time. Freddie, come here.”
He led Freddie back through the portal.
“Stay!” he said.
Freddie sat down obediently. He was a fast learner.
Auron darted back into the ski lodge.
“Jor, make the portal one-way, so I can get to Cambridge but Freddie can’t come here. And disguise it, so it looks like a normal piece of wall.”
The portal dimmed and vanished.
The man were going from flat to flat, smashing in the doors and looking around inside.
“Get ready to kill them if necessary,” said Auron, “but wait for my command.”
The men broke into the flat next-door.
Auron drew the weapon from its sheath, which he’d upgraded to look like something sleek and modern instead of the previous animal-skin holster that he’d made on Frith, and pointed it towards the door.
“What steps are involved in moving the interactor?” he asked Jor.
Jor began to explain, but then the door of his apartment burst open, and the soldiers, if that’s what they were, ran in.
“S-Stay where you are,” Auron stammered.
“What the hell is this?” said one of the men, smiling unpleasantly.
His accent was unfamiliar to Auron. He wasn’t Italian, nor Austrian.
Another of the men switched the light on an off, and made some remark that included a word similar to “electricity”, apparently marvelling at the fact that the apartment had power.
“What are you doing here?” said Auron, his hands shaking as he pointed the weapon at them.
“What are you doing here, is the question,” said the man at the front of the group.
“I live here.”
“Oh. You live here.”
“You shot my dog.”
The man laughed, and said something to the other men in a language Auron couldn’t understand. They all laughed.
“That wasn’t us,” said the man. “We don’t shoot dogs. Do we, comrades?”
The man’s manner was insincere, but it was impossible to be certain that he was lying.
“We’re taking this place over,” said the man.
He sniffed the air.
“You’ve got food. You can make us something to eat.”
“You can’t use this place,” said Auron. “Get out.”
“We can do whatever we like,” said the man, and without any warning he pointed his rifle at Auron’s shoulder and pulled the trigger.
A shot rang out and Auron doubled over in pain. The weapon fell from his hand.
“We might let you live, if you can be useful to us,” said the man. “For a while.”
Suddenly an alarm sounded, loud regular pulses of square wave emerging from the large curtained alcove where Auron had kept Jer’s body in the chest freezer.
“What’s that?” said the man, and he went into the alcove to look. Auron backed slowly towards the wall.
The man shouted something in a foreign language, and three of the other men went to look too, only one of them keeping his rifle pointed at Auron.
Auron held his shoulder, grimacing in pain. He could feel blood running down his arm.
Then the man guarding him decided to take something out of his pocket; perhaps gum, or a packet of cigarettes. Auron ran backwards through the portal.
“Freddie, come on!” he shouted, and he ran through the immaculate living room, the sound of the men shouting in bafflement ringing in his ears, and out of the door at the far side of the house. He carried on running. He knew what the alarm meant.
He was already some distance from the house when he managed to get his thoughts in order.
“Jor, close the portal!” he said.
Before Jor could reply, there was an ear-splitting explosion. Freddie cowered, and then began barking wildly.
“Jor, what happened?” said Auron, although there could only be one possible cause of the explosion.
“What do you mean?” said Jor.
“There was a huge explosion!”
“Oh, yeah, the energy system became unstable.”
“I nearly died! We only got twenty seconds’ warning, if even that!”
“Yeah, sorry. There was an electromagnetic flare on the star we were channeling energy from and it got unstable.”
“Couldn’t you have given me more warning?”
“It happened quite quickly.”
Auron bent over in pain.
“I’ve got a bullet in my arm.” he said, through clenched teeth.
“We can repair it, take the bullet out. You’ll have to build another interactor.”
“Oh, God!”
He looked at the devastation around him.
“Am I going to die?”
“I don’t know mate, sorry,” said Jor.
“Bloody useless! How can this possibly have happened again? Why can’t I hang on to these damned interactors?”
“What you’re attempting Auron, it’s not an easy business.”
Auron staggered back to the house. Part of it had been destroyed by the explosion, but it was a large house, all on one level, and the rest of it still seemed habitable.
Half of the kitchen had been destroyed, but he picked through the rubble and found some food, and most importantly of all, the anti-radiation medication.
“Will the pills help with my shoulder?” he asked Jor.
“They weren’t designed for that but they will help it to heal,” said Jor. “If there’s a bullet lodged in it they won’t get that out.”
Auron unscrewed one of the pill bottles with one hand and took another of the pills.
In the evening, he ate a meal of cheese and fresh bread, sitting on a bed in one of the bedrooms on the other side of the house from the explosion. The room was immaculate, aside from the dirt his footsteps had trailed over the carpet, and even the bedclothes smelt fresh. Jor had arranged for the house to have an electricity supply, and clean water came out of the taps in the bathroom, but now these facts made him nervous. The previous energy system had lasted less than a week before—presumably—killing everyone in the apartment. Neither did he have any way to deactivate it, with the interactor gone. But he couldn’t bring himself to take refuge elsewhere in the war-torn town.
“If I die, I die,” he said to himself.
That night his shoulder was painful, and he slept only fitfully. Freddie slept on the bed next to him.
In the morning, it became apparent to him that he really hadn’t thought anywhere nearly enough about what things should be in the house. He had made Jor construct a kitchen filled with food on a whim, and half of the kitchen was now rubble. There was no laboratory, and he had no spare clothes.
He tore some fabric off one of the debris-covered sofas in the living room and fashioned a kind of sling for his arm. Holding it up helped with the pain from his shoulder.
“Jor,” he said, “we have to go and rescue Viktor and his wife. Is the vehicle ready?”
“Yes, Auron,” came the reply.
“Can you give me directions?”
“Sure,” said Jor. “It might be a bit dangerous though. Maybe wait till we can fix your shoulder. We need a new interactor.”
“I told them I’d be there in a week, and I’ll be there in a week. Viktor’ll help me get the parts I need.”
“Fair enough.”
“Where’s the vehicle?”
“In the garage. Through the kitchen.”
Auron traipsed back into the ruined kitchen, Freddie following, tail wagging happily in the air. The door leading to the garage was hanging off its hinges.
He kicked at it until there was enough space to get past it into the garage. There, he fumbled around for a light switch, and finally found one.
In front of him was a thing that looked like a cross between an enormous off-roader and a tank, all black gleaming metal, with no windows.
“Good God,” said Auron.
“Are you looking at the vehicle?” Jor asked.
“I think so,” Auron replied. “How am I supposed to see where I’m going?”
“There are screens inside that reproduce an accurate image of the outside,” said Jor.
“How do I get in?”
“The door opens with your fingerprint. I’m going to have to explain the controls. There’s a joystick and some other stuff. It has its own battery, which is fully charged. It’s good for three thousand miles.”
Auron held his finger against a sensor on the door, and the door slid open.
Inside, the vehicle more resembled the inside of a plane than a car—or perhaps a kind of spaceship.
He laughed to himself.
“Perfect,” he said. “Jor, you might blow things up occasionally but you’ve really excelled yourself here.”
Inside the car, he had a full view of the garage, as though the sides and ceiling of the vehicle were transparent.
Soon he was trundling through the town, Freddie watching the world go by from the front passenger seat.
The town was a mess, the streets barely recognisable. Parker’s Piece, once a pleasant green park, was now nothing but a tangle of half-dead weeds strewn with rubble. The town centre had been almost levelled.
Here and there he saw survivors of the war, all of them bald from the radiation, and wearing rags. They limped and staggered away when they saw him, apparently afraid.
He continued through the town, describing what he saw to Jor, until finally he arrived at what was, in all probability, Viktor’s house.
He descended from the vehicle, looking around himself warily, and went up to the front door.
The house was one of only a handful of houses in that area that were somewhat intact. Evidently, Viktor had been very lucky. The windows were boarded up and part of the roof was caved in, but the rest of the house was still standing.
He knocked on the door and waited.
Inside, Viktor and Rosa were eating at the table, smiling and laughing, in spite of the nightmare that surrounded them, their problems temporarily forgotten in the midst of their sudden unexpected good fortune, which had bafflingly plucked them from the arms of death itself.
When they heard Auron’s knock, they froze. Rosa was suddenly worried.
“Who can it be?” she said.
“It’s him,” said Viktor. “It has to be him.”
He rose and went to the door, taking a kitchen knife in case whoever was at the door launched an unprovoked attack. He opened it. Then he froze in astonishment.
There was Auron, dressed in a casual white shirt and jeans, the sleeve of the shirt covered in blood, his full head of hair in disarray but apparently professionally cut. The most amazing thing was, not only did Auron appear unaffected by the radiation, but he didn’t appear to have aged at all in the past thirty years.
“Is it … you?” whispered Viktor, hoarsely.
“It’s me,” said Auron. “I’m here to help you, Viktor.”
“How is this possible?”
“Can I come in?” said Auron. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to tell you.”
A few minutes later they were laughing and joking inside Viktor’s kitchen, Viktor and Rosa staring at Auron as though he was an angel from Heaven.
Both of them appeared thin but healthy, and both had a fuzz of new hair growing rapidly on their previously-bald heads.
“So you see,” said Auron, “I need your help to build a new interactor. Then we can sort this mess out. Come back with me to my house. There’s a spare room that didn’t get blown up. I have water and electricity. In fact, you can have your own house if you like.
“There’s a lab downstairs, in the cellar,” said Viktor. “Probably there are things you can use.”
“That’s how we survived,” said Rosa. “We created new drugs to help with the radiation. It was risky, but it worked. Auron, let me look at your shoulder. We might be able to do something.”
Auron shook his head.
“What I need, is to build a new interactor. Can you help me?”
“We owe you our lives,” said Rosa.
“Anything we can do to help, we’ll do it,” said Viktor, and he laughed again. “I can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m dreaming.”
As the sun climbed into the sky over a wasteland that was once a city, three human beings and a dog travelled steadily along in an enormous vehicle, through wrecked streets haunted by haggard survivors who ran from them like frightened mice. Three people who each bore their own unspeakable mental scars but were still able to smile and even laugh, nonetheless.
“This will all have to be fixed.” said Auron, gazing at the devastation.
“You’re going to need a bigger computer, mate,” said Jor from his pocket.
