Another World Read online

  ANOTHER WORLD

  Samuel Best

  For the explorers

  PROLOGUE

  It was a wet, dirty morning, like all the rest of them.

  The ticket man didn’t care.

  He whistled as he walked down a pedestrian lane, drumming his fingers against the large folded cardboard advertisement under his arm. Puddled sludgewater seeped into his tattered boots with every step. The intermittent oil-slick rain drizzle soaked his dark green jacket as water trickled down his back from a hole just under the collar.

  Despite the dreariness, the ticket man’s taut face twisted in a grin, revealing yellow teeth.

  Above him, beyond the crumbling towers of downtown Houston, a pale, forgotten sun gleamed through a dense haze.

  Ramshackle booths crowded each side of the narrow lane, some no more than a skeleton of pressed laminate planks connected by twine.

  They advertised to the ticket man in faded, misspelled words, offering discounts on booze, smokes, and lottery tickets. Only a few were staffed. Their stalwart occupants were, without fail, toothless and weathered, clearly unable to afford even the most basic dermetic rejuvenatives. They grunted and turned away when they recognized the ticket man, waving him off dismissively.

  Still, he didn’t care. In less than a month, he would buy his Suncruiser yacht and sail away from the filth, into the Gulf and toward the golden horizon.

  One month, he told himself.

  The countdown had become his mantra, his lifeline. He’d made a promise to himself: no more scraping by. No more begging. He would escape, once and for all.

  He would write his own destiny.

  Naturally, escape required money. Where better to find it than with those who were also searching for a way out — or at least for a temporary escape from their sad reality?

  The ticket man stopped in front of an empty booth. A few rain-soaked brochures lay in puddles, disintegrating on the pressed laminate counter, left behind by someone who had probably once held the same dream of escape clutched to their own malnourished heart.

  He glanced up and down the lane. Seeing that no one was watching, he swept away the remnants of someone else’s dream. With a flourish, he unfolded his cardboard advertisement and propped it on the counter. Gaudy colors exploded in fireworks behind plastic holding racks. Reaching into the inner pockets of his long jacket, he produced several thin stacks of glossy brochures and set them in the plastic holders.

  He stepped back to admire the display.

  See the World from Your Bed! promised one of the brochures, offering a near-impossible discount on the latest altered-reality body system.

  Tickets to Sunrise Station — CHEAP! exclaimed another. Sled rides to the orbital station went for a premium price, but there were still a few bulk crates lying around in warehouses waiting to be discovered by those without black market qualms.

  His best seller, though, showcased the simple silhouettes of a couple at sunset, overlooking a red canyon.

  Find Love, read the brochure cover. Inside was a coupon for a one-night singles cruise over the city of Houston, booze included. The ticket man wasn’t sure how the red canyon factored into it, but no one ever asked.

  He wiped off a flimsy crate that had been kicked aside and sat on it.

  There was no hurry. He only needed a few sales each week for the next month to buy his yacht. Through scrupulous planning and devious opportunism, he had tucked away enough money for retirement. To truly last in the business of sales, one constantly needed to unearth new ways of increasing one’s profit margin — and the ticket man had been in the business a very long time.

  Admittedly, it was getting harder and harder to dodge the authorities. A chronic indifference had plagued the local police until recently — an indifference which had allowed him and his ilk to thrive. Some recently-elected council member had undoubtedly lit a fire beneath them in order to stir up more votes for their next campaign, making the ticket man’s job all the more difficult.

  Perhaps that explains all the empty booths, he mused.

  Back when he’d started hawking his wares in every avenue of greater Houston, this particular lane was bursting with activity. Tourists — such as they were in those days — could find anything the legal shops were unable to sell. This included not only items one would be ashamed to carry around in public, but harmless trinkets and everyday novelties that were banned for obscure reasons.

  The ticket man listened to the gentle patter of rain on the ripped canvas roof of his temporary storefront.

  The booth directly across the lane had been removed so a new billboard could be installed on the smeared wall behind. In a cartoonish, purposefully unrealistic style, it depicted a man in a robber’s mask reaching for a young boy. The protective mother held on to her child with white-knuckled hands, recoiling in horror and screaming for the police. Bold lettering on the billboard proclaimed, Stop Snatchers Before They Strike! It’s YOUR Responsibility!

  The ticket man rarely reflected on his past, yet he never regretted not having children. Billboards like the one across from his booth only served as a reminder that he’d made the right choice. The minuscule amount of pity he occasionally conjured for his fellow humans was generally reserved for the adults who managed to bring offspring into the world.

  He intended to ponder the subject in greater detail, but his reverie was interrupted when he heard a deep voice down the lane.

  The ticket man leaned forward on his rickety crate to look. The lane was empty except for one man near the far end. He wore a loose plastic poncho and an oversized, misshapen backpack.

  The booth occupant he spoke to pointed down the lane, toward the ticket man.

  As the stranger approached, the ticket man leaned back in his booth well out of view. His eyes darted back and forth as he thought of every possible outcome, every possible escape route from the lane should the stranger turn out to be a policeman. By all the rules of law, the ticket man owned every ticket in his pocket, yet he hadn’t come to own them in the traditional manner. A policeman surely wouldn’t appreciate not being able to trace their origins.

  The man in the poncho appeared before his booth, dripping wet from the rain. He looked up and down the lane, hesitating. He had the bearing of a strong man made weak by the vat-grown soy diet inflicted on the populace since Earth’s soil had turned.

  One month, thought the ticket man.

  His jack-o-lantern grin split his face, and he asked, “A good, fine morning, innit?”

  The ticket man laid out his offerings, conspicuously sliding the singles cruise brochure to the forefront.

  “What are you searching for, friend?” he asked. “Eager to travel from your couch? Need to find a partner? No one should be alone.”

  The man in the poncho picked up the brochure offering a discounted ride to Sunrise Station.

  “Ah,” the ticket man said, nodding sagely as his potential customer flipped through the brochure. “Looking to leave all of it behind. You know, I hear Sunrise has entire rooms dedicated to one type of food.” The ticket man had heard no such thing. “Stuff you can’t get here anymore. Fruits, vegetables, even meat proteins. They grow it up there, in space.”

  The man in the poncho tossed the brochure onto the counter.

  “I need to go a little farther,” he said in a low voice.

  The ticket man studied him more closely. Square face, dark beard stubble, weary eyes full of suspicion, and clothes so shabby they made the ticket man’s look as if he’d just plucked them off a store rack. The potential customer adjusted the straps of his over-sized backpack, hoisting the load higher on his shoulders. If the ticket man didn’t know any better, he would have thought something inside had moved.

  “No offense, friend
,” he said, “but you can’t afford a ticket to the lunar colony. Everyone who can is already there, and the rest are at the end of that infamous hundred-year waiting list.”

  “I need to go farther than that.”

  The ticket man laughed. “But the only thing farther is—” He stopped laughing and sobered up in a snap. His eyes narrowed. “So you do have money. How’d you get it, I wonder?”

  The man in the poncho offered no explanation. He stood still as a statue, dripping in the rain.

  The ticket man shrugged nonchalantly. “What if I don’t have the tickets?”

  “Then I don’t need you.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Ho there, wait a minute!” said the ticket man, nearly falling off his crate. “Let’s not jump to the end just yet. How many tickets do you need?”

  The man turned back. “Just one.”

  “Why don’t you buy it from the shuttle company?”

  “I’m…traveling with someone.”

  “Ahhhh,” said the ticket man as it all clicked together in his mind. “And you don’t want them turning up on the official registry.” He made a big show of scooping up the brochures on the counter and tucking them away in his jacket. “Well, look. I’d love to help you, but my operation is one-hundred-percent legal. I can’t afford to be associated with black market sales.”

  He pretended to look for other customers, indicating the conversation was over.

  “I can pay double,” said the man in the poncho. He showed his credit card-sized hellocard, squeezing its worn metal grip reluctantly. The other half was a translucent screen, its orange glow flickering as rain spattered its surface.

  The ticket man chewed on the proposition a moment. He reached into an inner jacket pocket and produced a card-reader cube, several inches to each side, worn and cracked. The screen on one side emitted a flickering orange glow, the same shade as the hellocard. He quickly tapped a long series of numbers on the screen and set the card-reader on the counter.

  “Make it triple.”

  Enough to buy my yacht today, he thought.

  The man in the poncho looked down at the glowing sequence of numbers on the small cube: 300,000. He stared at it for a long time. Just when the ticket man was going to pick it back up, the man in the poncho stepped forward and pressed the flat side of his hellocard to the screen.

  The cube beeped, and the ticket man snatched it up greedily.

  “My ticket,” said the man in the poncho, leaning closer.

  In no great hurry, the ticket man pulled out a black wallet from a zippered pocket in his jacket. He kept the contents hidden as he thumbed through the various rectangles of hard plastic. He found a stiff, transparent ticket with vibrant blue etchings, then read the name of the passenger as he held it out.

  “Have a safe journey, Mr. Boone.”

  The man in the poncho took the ticket and walked away without looking back.

  After he had turned the corner at the end of the narrow lane, the ticket man sprang to his feet. He whistled a cheerful song as he folded up his brochure-filled cardboard advertisement and tossed it behind the booth, then dramatically wiped his hands and kissed the whole mess goodbye.

  As he strolled down the lane with his hands in his jacket pockets, rubbing one thumb over the screen of the card-reader, he made it a point to greet all of the other booth occupants — the bottom feeders who would still be there, soaking in the rain, fighting for scraps, while he lounged on the deck of his yacht that very evening.

  He looked up at the tepid sky, grinning, and took a deep breath of polluted air.

  What a sucker, he thought.

  PART ONE

  LEAVING EARTH

  CHAPTER ONE

  MERRITT

  To enter Houston Spaceport, one first had to show proof of passage at the security gate. The gate was a series of stalls, each occupied by an employee whose sole responsibility was sifting wheat from chaff so that only verified passengers got past.

  Merritt Alder stood in a light rain under a gloomy midday sky, watching those employees from under the dripping hood of his poncho. Between him and the gate, three security guards wearing full body-armor patrolled the entrance to the port, strolling slowly from one end of the stalls to the other. Each cradled a large rifle in their muscular arms. Black face shields under fitted helmets hid their faces.

  Behind him, dilapidated skyscrapers shrugged in the rain, their broken windows sagging like sad eyes.

  Merritt shouldered his heavy, awkward backpack higher and tightened the straps. His arms had gone numb an hour ago, but he knew it wouldn’t be long until he could remove the load.

  A wide tickerboard above the security stalls displayed a scrolling list of departure times for the bus and hyperrail depots — hundreds of them throughout the day — and a time for the next sled launch to Sunrise Station. If Merritt missed it, he wouldn’t catch his connecting flight.

  He swiped a finger over the cracked screen of his watch.

  There was still time.

  The concrete exterior of the spaceport vaulted up at an angle behind the tickerboard and disappeared into a thick haze. An orange glow bloomed deep within the mist: the burning engine of a sled as it launched into the sky, heading for Sunrise Station.

  As the glow faded, a lone taxi rolled to a stop in front of the gate. A businesswoman in an expensive suit got out and hurried for the nearest security stall, waving her plastic, rectangular ticket at the employee.

  The employee, an older gentleman with a face like stone, was unmoved by her demands for special treatment.

  Merritt turned his attention toward the other stall employees.

  He’d been watching them interact with passengers after they emerged from old, beat-up taxis. He’d been studying their mannerisms and their behavior patterns as they scanned ticket after ticket and answered the same questions again and again.

  An older person would be ideal. Pensions were a thing of the past. Those beyond mandatory retirement age were always looking for a way to earn extra income. A small bribe could be enough to get Merritt through the gate without being interrogated. He had his hopes set on old stone-face in stall five, but after the back-and-forth with the businesswoman, he decided against it.

  Eight of the ten other stalls were staffed by employees a decade younger than Merritt. He instinctively wanted to avoid bright-eyed overachievers — too much risk of them blowing their whistle for a chance at a commendation.

  He needed someone halfway between hungry and indifferent — and if he couldn’t get either of those, he’d have to settle for oblivious.

  An elderly woman stood in the tenth stall, a permanent smile on her serene face. She waited for the next passenger with her bony fingers laced over her stomach. Most passengers went straight for the middle stalls, causing lines to form, but stalls one and ten were usually wide open. Either of those would allow for a modicum of privacy during the unavoidable conversation Merritt expected to endure.

  He slowly walked toward stall number ten, pretending to be more interested in the empty street ahead of him than in the older woman.

  There was a sharp bwoop-BWOOP! from behind. Merritt spun around to find the source, his heart thudding. An unmanned police cruiser rolled past, its blue-and-red lights flicking against the buildings on either side of the street.

  “Keep a hand on your wallets,” said a robotic, monotonous voice from a loudspeaker on the roof of the cruiser. Bullet holes pocked the car’s scratched and dented exterior. “Mind your child. Don’t let the snatchers get another one. Curfew is 10 PM. Be smart. Stay safe.”

  It disappeared into a heavy mist down the lonely street, its looped, endless warnings fading to eventual silence.

  Merritt shook off the temporary fear and approached stall number ten. He presented two translucent rectangular tickets, each one etched with glowing blue lettering, but the old woman held up a finger for him to wait. A moment later, a young man entered the booth. He exchanged a few quick word
s with the older woman, then she left.

  Merritt took a step back.

  The young man’s name tag read EDWARD. A black caterpillar mustache clung valiantly to his upper lip. He pulled on his headset and adjusted his seat, muttered something unflattering about the older woman, then crisply gestured for Merritt to approach the stall.

  “Where you headed, poncho man?” he asked.

  Merritt looked around, stunned with indecision.

  “Yo!” said Edward. “What’s the hold-up?”

  One of the heavily-armed security guards strolled past, glancing in his direction. His hand moved noticeably closer to the grip of his rifle.

  Merritt stepped toward the stall and slid his two tickets through the small slot at the bottom of the thick plexi window.

  “Sunrise Station,” he said.

  Edward slid the tickets over a scanner built into the surface of his desktop. He typed rapidly on his keyboard. “Is that your final destination?”

  He stopped typing and whistled as he read the screen, his eyebrows rising slowly. For the first time, he made eye contact with Merritt.

  “You’re going through the Rip? Well, lemme just get the red carpet ready for Mr. High Roller!” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Gonna leave Earth behind, is that it?” He smirked and typed on his keyboard. “I’m seeing one stop at Mars on your way out.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Is it? Great.”

  He stopped typing abruptly, then swiveled his chair around toward Merritt, a look of concern on his face.

  “Two tickets,” he said, holding them up. Then he pointed at Merritt. “Only one you.”

  Another security guard walked past the booth. Merritt waited until the guard was out of sight, then he carefully took off his unwieldy backpack and unzipped the top.

  He held the opening toward Edward, who leaned forward uncertainly to look inside.

  It was the second time he was surprised since Merritt approached his booth. He plopped back in his seat, rubbing his open mouth thoughtfully.