Fremder

3

Sometimes I think about the age of steam and those great locomotives that thundered into oblivion like the Spirit of Progress. Sometimes I think about the motorcars that poisoned the air and swallowed up the green and pleasant land and finally sputtered to a halt in gridlock. And sometimes I think about flicker drive.

My mind goes back to a few minutes before three o’clock in the morning of 4 November 2052, just over a year ago. Nova Central Cargo Spaceport outside London — the flicker docks under the purple stutter of the rhodolux lamps in the rain. Diesel and electrical smells of forklifts and cranes and juicers. Another smell, whispering and beckoning like the Erl King’s daughters: the smell of Out There. People move a little differently at three in the morning. Purple light and deep shadows. Figures in infraglo macs shouting. High-legged gantry cranes loading and unloading freighters and tankers. Lights and colour and motion reflected in the shine of the wet tarmac. Lots of noise but behind the hiss of the purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.

Looking down the line of buffers I see Uguisu, Miyazaki, Nippon Enterprises Universal; Aral II, Minsk, Sony Pan-Galactic (ISR) Ltd; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bremen, BASF Ausserirdisch GmbH; Candide, Marseilles, Corporation Française d’Exploitation Minière Interstellaire. Big names, billions of credits, millions of megaklicks. Beyond the dock lights the ruins of old Nova Central are ghostly, dim. Blackened grasses growing out of cracks in the tarmac; gulls wheeling out of the dark rain into the bright, circling over heaps of rotting refuse, rusting junk; empty buildings put up by somebody’s nephew with their roofs fallen in on floors laid by somebody’s brother-in-law; huge empty fuel-storage tanks with the Corporation logo fading on them; the control tower standing empty with broken windows. The sky is dark and heavy, no moon.

In Dock 14 (there’s no 13): Clever Daughter, a deep-space Corporation tanker, a huge battered thing like a discarded oil refinery all pocked and pitted from the dust and flying debris of seven galaxies, dull metal shining in the rain. Nothing sleek, nothing aerodynamic — it doesn’t need to be smooth and sleek like those old ships that went up on a pillar of fire and five million pounds a minute. Clever Daughter’s bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy with 500,000 hectolitres of protomorphic acid for De Groot Draconium.

The juicers have disconnected and pulled away. The transmission window’s cleared. ‘OK for flicker on 72.3 Ems,’ says the voice in the headphones. There’s a loud hum and a strong smell like burnt-out writing; the air shimmers in the purple rain under the lights. Clever Daughter and its reflection aren’t there any more. Nothing to see. Only the silence cruising like a shark. That’s flicker drive.