Pattern of Shadows

by Jonathan Burke

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Time Travel

Synopsis

He was suspended alone and unprotected in the sea of forgetfulness where Saturn looked brilliant against the sunless black of deep outer space. It was like an elusive dream of a past only half-remembered, forever just out of reach amid the shifting galaxies of deep space. Somewhere out there he had lost his memory - space amnesia they called it. But they had found him and brought him back and given him a memory again. But was it his memory?

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 128

Sample

THEY TOOK ME home in a plodding old surface vehicle that bumped over the desert and raised clouds of acrid, choking sand. It was sand that floated lazily, that drifted with exaggerated slowness about you and took an unreasonable time to settle. The light gravity of the planet did not reclaim dust any more quickly than it reclaimed the lurching, erratic truck.

“Not far now, son,” said my father.

“No,” I said. I thought for a moment, and then added: “Beyond that spur of land, where the vegetation belt starts.”

“That’s right, that’s right.” He was eager, delighted, immediately responsive … as though in need of reassurance. He needed to know that I knew just where I was. “Reckon you’ll be glad to get back.”

“Yes,” I said, because it was expected of me.

Words had lost their resonance in my mind. They had no associations. “Home” was nothing until I willed myself to think about it; and then, although the answer came swiftly enough, it aroused no emotion. Home was only a word. I had forgotten the reality.

I clutched the side of the truck, turning my face away from a spurt of sand, and wondered what the house was like.

At once the picture was there in my mind. It was a long, low farmhouse in the middle of a narrow vegetation belt. I thought of the door, and remembered where the door was. The background was cloudy until I concentrated on it, and then it resolved itself into the familiar shape of the distant Gregorian hills, sharp in the thin atmosphere.

It was odd. My mind seemed to be lame. It hobbled. As soon as I thought about or was reminded of any specific thing, I remembered the details accurately enough. The appropriate memory clicked neatly into position. But why the delay, slight as it was? Why was I not instinctively aware of all these familiar things without having to set my conscious mind to work on them?

My mother leaned forward from the seat behind.

“Feel better now?” she said timorously.

“Fine,” I said.

“You’ve got to take things easy and not exert yourself for a while.”

My father said: “A good dose of the work he’s used to will be the best tonic—eh, son?”

“Clive isn’t going to be rushed into another breakdown just because you’ve got grand ideas about doubling the crop.”

Clive. That was my name. Clive Rayner. For the hundredth time I tried it over in my head, and knew that it was right—and yet at the same time didn’t get any satisfaction out of it.

I glanced at my father. He had tough, work-roughened hands that dragged on the wheel of the truck. His face was dark and under his heavy brows his eyes looked sullen. But when he turned to meet my gaze I saw only an echo of my own bewilderment and uncertainty. We both wanted answers to questions, but we had no idea what the questions ought to be.

“There’s the boundary fence,” he said abruptly.

I looked at it, and recognition came neatly. I said: “Yes.”

“The last mile home,” he said with forced heartiness. He was at a loss, unsure of how to deal with such a strange sickness.

But I’m not sick, I protested to myself: it’s over, it’s been dealt with, I’m all right now.

It was only a matter of being patient. In time I would get back into the swing of things. For a while memory had been blotted out and I had been a stranger even to myself—and there’s nothing more terrifying than that—but it had been restored to me, and all in good time I would learn reliance on it once more.

We ran suddenly on to a crude road through the grass and sparse trees. Here the heat was less intense, and even the small amount of water vapour in the atmosphere came as a wonderful relief. The puny leaves of the trees stirred in the wind of our passing.

The road cut a gash through two cultivated fields. I didn’t let myself look at them. I played an absurd sort of game with myself: I tried not to force my mind into recognising any features of the landscape, and waited for familiar knowledge to come welling up of its own accord. I didn’t want to nudge my memory in order to find out what lay beyond that clump of grey trees: I wanted to know without having to concentrate. The game wasn’t very successful. My slightest attentiveness produced the sensation with which I was now all too familiar—the not quite instantaneous click of a relay, and the supply of neatly packaged information. I felt a sweat of irritation breaking out on my forehead. I was working like a machine rather than a human being, and it wasn’t pleasant. It was frighteningly unnatural.

Several small brown creatures scurried out of the undergrowth and began to run beside the truck. My mother called to one of them and it made a jaunty spring in the air.

These were characteristic animals of the planet. They were domesticated. The one with three legs and the pathetic face was …

No. I wouldn’t let myself go on.

The truck slowed. I was aware of the tension between my mother and father, and between them and myself. We had not spoken much until now. After that strange séance when we had held hands and that contraption had been fastened to my head, resulting in my recognition of my parents, we had been too busy getting ready for this long return journey to exchange conversation of any real significance. Now the truck stopped, and this was the true beginning. This was where we had to take up the living of our lives together again.

This was home.

During the days that followed, I accepted my father’s advice rather than my mother’s. I didn’t want to have time on my hands. The essential thing was to get out and do the work that I had been accustomed to. The regular rhythm of familiar tasks ought to bring about an instinctive relaxation. The more plodding and unstimulating the job, the better: it would restore the assurance of belonging which is so essential if you are to feel at ease, in tune with life.

So I went out into the poor, wretched fields with a spade. I dug until I was dizzy—and it didn’t take long before that happened. Gravity on Mars doesn’t help you when it comes to thrusting a spade down into the ground; but the planet holds on to its earth firmly enough, so that each attempt to drive the spade in sends a jar up the haft into your hands and shoulders. The atmosphere doesn’t help, either. The air is denser over the vegetation belts, but there’s still not enough of it for human lungs.

And yet I ought to have been used to it. I had been born and brought up here, hadn’t I?

Several times earth and sky began to revolve about me, and I fell down. The third time I felt so sick that I had to stay where I was for several minutes, gasping in agony, trying to take a deep breath and finding there wasn’t enough goodness in the air to give me what I wanted. The fifth time, my father saw me and came hurrying over with a long, loping stride.

“Take it easy,” he said. “Take it easy. No sense in killing yourself. Wait till you get the hang of things again.”

I said: “I didn’t used to be as rocky as this, did I?”

“You’ll be all right.”

“Yes, but before I went away—before I lost my memory—”

“Go back to the house for a bit.”

“But I want to get things straight. I want—”

“Go back to the house,” he said with a rasp in his voice. He looked heavy and threatening, but there was an incoherent fear in his voice rather than brutality.

I went back and sat down for a while. Then I came out and tried again, not forcing myself too much.

I didn’t need to be told how to do the work. I knew what had to be done, and knew how to do it … when I concentrated. And that wasn’t the way it ought to have been. It was like doing something out of a book: I made the correct motions by an effort. You can learn to swim or to pilot a space ship by studying the instructions, but it’s not a method to be recommended. There should come a time when you fall instinctively into the correct rhythm, and then you never bother to open the book again; but my mind was a book to which I was continually referring.

My father tried to help, but he was too uneasy and bewildered to be of any great assistance. There was a barrier between us. We were both conscious of an unnatural restraint. Perhaps he was afraid my mind had been seriously affected and that before long this would show in some alarming way. Perhaps I was afraid of the very same thing myself.

A couple of times a day a large passenger ship would come falling out of the heavens and disappear over the horizon in the direction of the city from which we had recently come. At infrequent intervals smaller patrol ships would climb above us.

On every such occasion, something stirred within me. I had done my space service. I had flown in just such a ship. But my recollections of those months were somehow drab and stereotyped. I could remember no details. It was as though only enough memories of that phase of my existence had been filled in as would make the story coherent. Yet that was reasonable enough. The treatment I had been given at Marsport had relied largely on a sort of telepathic link with my parents’ minds, so that I could regain awareness of myself from their past knowledge of me and the pattern of our life together; and as they had not shared my experiences on space service, they could not be expected to supply those particular details. I was still not whole, and never would be. I must resign myself to that state of affairs.

Despite this obvious conclusion, I was still resentful and unsettled. There were moments when something seemed to be forcing its way up out of the dar. . .