Reality Bites, Page 2

  7

  The director spoke into the mic; the wireless link conveyed his words to Cassandra via the radio bud in her ear.

  “Cassandra, slowly raise and lower your wand. The drone-cam will rise and fall, like it’s obeying your command. Yes, that’s it. Slowly point to your left; the drone will fly in that direction. Keep moving the wand, and give me that haughty look. Remember, you are the all-powerful goddess to these people. They worship you. Okay. I’ll pipe the theme music into your ear-bud. We go live in five-four-three-two-one.”

  The woman, a famous singer in the twenty-first century, yet who wouldn’t be born for thousands of years, slowly lifted the wand (a metre length of humble wooden dowel that had been painted gold). The drone-cam hummed, its small rotor blades whirled, carrying the aircraft that wasn’t much bigger than a dinner plate into the air. The villagers, who she’d been sent back through time to amaze with her ‘magic’, let out cries of astonishment. Cassandra knew that the drone-cam would be filming her face. A whole confabulation of sophisticated electronics would fire that television picture of her forwards through time to millions of homes across the world. This broadcast was important. Tribe Test had become the first live entertainment show to be transmitted from four thousand years in the past.

  The director told her that people suffering from bacterial-related illnesses would be brought to her so that she could perform her miracle cure – in reality, they’d receive shots of penicillin blended with a high dose of amphetamine so that those half dead men and women would seem to be magically restored to health. Cassandra had been reassured that she wouldn’t catch anything nasty from the locals; she’d been inoculated against every conceivable disease that Bronze Age Syria could throw at her. Even so, she wished that the right to wear latex gloves had been written into her contract.

  Still wearing the haughty expression she pointed the wand. The guy standing in the window operated the remote control, so the drone appeared to obey her commands. She pointed the gold wand to the left and the drone hummed just above the heads of the people that lived in the village. Many wore nothing other than a loin-cloth around their waists. And they were so thin! So enviably thin! Cassandra decided there and then to write a diet book. Bronze Age Eating – Be As Slim As You Want To Be.

  She raised the wand and the drone buzzed above the roof tops. She moved the end of the gold-painted stick in circles and the drone dutifully rotated on its axis.

  The crowd dropped to their knees, grovelled in the dust, and they worshipped their beautiful goddess until tears poured down their faces.

  8

  Tasshan watched the gigantic silver beetle fly. It hovered above the heads of the crowd who’d gathered at the house of the goddess. He watched the silver creature rise and fall at her command. He studied her actions with the wand. He observed that the creature had a number of spinning wings that made it fly. Presently, he noticed the fleshy-faced man standing in the window of the dwelling. He moved a stylus across what appeared to be a small ebony block in his hand. When he moved the stylus to the right, the beetle flew to the right. When he moved the stylus downward, the beetle descended. So… who commanded the silver beetle? The goddess? Or the man in the window?

  Tasshan noticed that poles had been driven into the ground. They each had a glass bead fixed to their sides. He thought about the glass beads he used to study the tiny creatures in the water from the well. He could see enlarged images through the glass beads. Did someone see images through the glass beads attached to the poles? He began to suspect that they did.

  After a while, people suffering from illness were carried toward the goddess and laid upon a raised platform. These sick people were in a poor state. They could hardly move their heads, let alone walk. Their breathing had become rapid and shallow; a sure sign that death would claim them soon.

  The goddess walked alongside the platform, which meant the ill people were level with her waist. Another fleshy-faced figure (that rounded, plump-ish face was a shared characteristic of all her companions) handed her a needle like the one she’d pressed into the arm of Tasshan’s sister.

  However, before she could prick the flesh of those sick men and women, loud yells came from the direction of the village gates. Young men, who’d left the village earlier, ran along the street. Several were wounded. Blood dripped from cuts in their arms and faces. A pale-faced woman, one of the goddesses’ attendants, ran with them. She had a wound on her hand.

  The injured woman called out to a man in that mysterious language that Tasshan couldn’t understand: “You wanted conflict, you bastard! You’ve got conflict! The kids from this village smashed a holy statue in the town! The people from there want our blood. We’ve gone and started a war!”

  The man who stood in the window laughed. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

  “It’s not funny, Kevin! I watched people get hacked to pieces. I got hit in the hand by a spear. Now armed men from the town are coming to kill us.”

  Although Tasshan didn’t understand the meaning of the words, he understood what these people were feeling from the tone of their voices. All those round-faced men and women were alarmed. Their eyes flashed with fear. They shouted at one another, while gesturing wildly. The goddess flung aside the shining needle. She called out to a man, standing on the platform with one of the poles embedded with glass beads. The goddess and her attendants were frightened. Their voices became higher as they started to panic.

  One of the young men from this village, who’d taken part in what appeared to be a mischief raid on the neighbouring settlement, clamped his hand to a gash on his forehead.

  As loudly as he could, he howled, “Arm yourselves, brothers! Take up your spears and your swords! They are coming here to slay each and every one of us!”

  Local people ran toward their houses. Soon they reappeared with bronze swords, axes, spears and shields. From the direction of the gateway to the village came the sound of chanting – a savage bellow that echoed from the walls. Men hurtled along the street to defend their settlement. Soon the invaders and the defenders clashed. Tasshan climbed up onto the platform where the sick lay groaning. He had a clear view of men hacking at one another with their weapons. An axe blow separated a head from a body. Spears flew through the air – some hit their targets, bodies toppled, and soon thick, red streams flowed along the street.

  The goddess and her attendants rushed back and forth in panic. The man who Tasshan believed controlled the flying beetle flung aside the ebony block. The silver beetle hummed as it flew around the village in big, slow loops until it hit the temple wall. The creature tumbled to the ground where it lay buzzing helplessly.

  At that moment, the goddess attempted to flee toward her dwelling. However, the relatives of the sick grabbed hold of her arms, preventing her from leaving. As the menfolk battled the attackers, the womenfolk clung to the goddess, beseeching her to cure the diseased who lay dying. She struggled, yelling loudly in a language that they couldn’t understand, but she could not break free.

  By this time, her attendants had vanished into the house where she dwelt. Tasshan entered the building, determined to find his sister, who was recuperating in one of the rooms. A remarkable sight met Tasshan’s eyes. He saw those round-faced men and women rush through a doorway, yet it wasn’t like any doorway that he’d seen before. It was formed from what appeared to be a vast ring of gold. Lights flashed around it. The opening was largely obscured by mist, yet as the attendants of the goddess fled through to the other side Tasshan glimpsed a vast room filled with people sitting on rows of seats – hundreds of them. When the last of the attendants sped through the gold ring the lights went out, the mist cleared and the room with all those seats had vanished. All that remained was the blank wall of this room. He touched the wall. It was nothing more than solid mud-brick. The vast cavern of a place that he’d glimpsed, filled with people clad in strange garments, had gone.

  “Magic,” he murmured, “or is it a means o
f transport made by mortals? Is it a way of travelling that I have never encountered before?” He ran his fingers along the golden frame of the round doorway. The lights were dead. For a moment, the metal frame vibrated slightly, the way a war trumpet does when someone sounds it. Soon, however, the vibrations faded away and Tasshan knew that this instrument of transportation was dead, too.

  The goddess ran through the room toward the gold ring that stood against the wall. She’d lost one of her sandals. Her toes were bloody where she’d struck against some object, yet she didn’t notice the pain.

  “They’ve left me behind! They’ve left me here!”

  Tasshan didn’t understand the words, yet he interpreted the emotion in her facial expression. The woman was stunned by what she saw. She was frightened… panicking. For a moment, she stared at the wall beyond the metal doorway. Then she approached the doorway and slapped her hands against the mud-brick wall.

  “Open up the portal! You can’t leave me here! You can’t… how will I survive here alone? Please… let me through. Please!”

  Her legs wobbled, bending at the knees; all the strength had been sucked out of her body. She knelt on the floor and wept.

  Tasshan saw the tears streaking her face. Her blonde hair now hung down in tangles. Blood seeped from a cut in her big toe.

  “The goddess isn’t a goddess at all; she is mortal.” He gazed at her thoughtfully for a moment before going to find his sister.

  He knew it was time to leave before the invaders entered this building. They’d kill everyone they found here. Their sacred ox had been broken and such damage could only be repaired by the spilling of blood.

  9

  E-mail to Tribe Test production team:

  Hey guys,

  Guess what! The time machine ate itself! That’s what the techies are saying over at the lab. They also jabbered a lot of stuff about physics and temporal equilibrium laws, but the upshot of it is the Universe doesn’t like time travel, and the laws of nature will cause any device that moves people back through history to self-destruct within a few days. That’s what happened during the live show when the battle broke out in the streets of Dog Village. Everyone made it back… apart from Cassandra. She’s marooned in the Bronze Age – wow, that’s a cool four thousand years ago. There’s nothing we can do to rescue her. The government won’t give scientists permission to build another time machine, even if it only works long enough to snatch Cassandra back to the present (they’re frightened of screwing up reality, or that politicians will breed with their own ancestors, or something). So, Cassandra stays back in the land of the Amorites, a world of chariots, swords, and all that antiquity stuff.

  Insurance lawyers have gone berserk! They refuse to pay Cassandra’s relatives any life insurance, because they insist that four thousand years ago she hadn’t even been born, so couldn’t possibly be dead now. Go figure.

  Okay, moving on: send me your ideas. We need to devise a brilliant new TV show to replace Tribe Test. We can do it people; we can deliver a ratings winner!

  10

  Six years had passed since the massacre in the village. Tasshan attended the wedding of his sister, Kai – she was marrying the son of a merchant from the port city of Tyre. The wedding feast was astonishing. Whole gazelles roasted on spits. A hundred clay jars full of wine sat in the shade of olive trees, allowing guests to refresh themselves with a cooling drink. Tasshan had paid for the wedding. He was a wealthy man now; he’d made his fortune importing spices from India.

  Tasshan sat with his own wife who he’d married three years ago. She nursed a sleeping baby in her arms.

  “Are you happy, Cassandra?”

  “Yes.”

  Tasshan had rescued Cassandra from the house when the men from the nearby town had attacked. It was only much later, after she had learned to speak Tasshan’s language, that she could explain that she had travelled from a distant land of the future, where carts could move without being yoked to oxen or donkeys. She’d spoken of many other wonders. He’d believed her and asked her to help him build such a cart. She’d shaken her head sadly and confessed that she didn’t know how something called an “engine” could be constructed.

  Tasshan stroked the cheek of his baby daughter. “Do you think your friends will ever return?”

  Cassandra shrugged. “I don’t think they ever will. Besides, I have adapted to this way of life with you, and our children. That’s what people do after they have survived a disaster, don’t they? We pick ourselves up and keep living. Yes, life might be different for us, but it carries on.”

  Tasshan gazed at her, trying to read the truth of what she was actually feeling in her heart. “Don’t you regret not being able to return to your homeland?”

  “Home is where the ones you love happen to be. That’s a line from a song I recorded.” She sighed. “Or will record four thousand years from now.”

  Cassandra gently kissed the sleeping baby on the forehead, and began to sing in a soft voice. The words she sang were in a language that Tasshan did not understand. What he did understand, however, was that there was true happiness in her eyes when she gazed at their daughter’s face. He felt reassured that Cassandra had embraced her life here as a wife, a mother, and an individual in her own right. He and Cassandra loved one another – that, undoubtedly, had to be one of the most precious gifts of all.

  Dead Right

  Janet Edwards

  The first thing I learned about dead people was that there were an awful lot of them. Of course, I wasn’t taking Arthur or his scanner seriously at that point. He was just another potential guest presenter that I was interviewing. A small, plump man in his fifties, with receding grey hair and an oddly intense expression in his faded blue eyes.

  “You see, Mr Wade,” he said, “the echoes of every person who’s died in the last thousand years, maybe even ten thousand years, are still drifting around this world. My scanner shows all the ones in this room, so the screen image is just a blur of grey mist with occasional darker flickers for more recent echoes.”

  I frowned at the scanner, which was taking up half of my desk. It looked like a television set had been involved in a high speed collision with a microwave oven and lost. “When you say this scanner shows echoes, you actually mean it shows ghosts?”

  Arthur leaned forward in his chair and gave me an earnest look. “I dislike that emotive term. Describing them as echoes is far more accurate.”

  I sighed. It was Wednesday, my regular day for interviewing potential guest presenters. I’d already suffered two psychics, a reincarnation of Alexander the Great, and a woman who’d seemed very promising until I discovered she was actually taking orders for a new sandwich delivery service. My patience was wearing thin. “Mr . . .”

  “Arthur Banks,” said Arthur.

  “Mr Banks, this company makes television series about haunted houses and ghost hunting. There is a very faint possibility we might be interested in a scanner that shows ghosts. We definitely aren’t interested in a scanner that shows echoes.”

  I could practically hear Arthur’s brain make a rapid gear change. “This is a scanner that shows ghosts,” he said.

  “Good.” I looked dubiously at the grey mist. “It would help if there were at least some shapes in the grey.”

  “It’s really a focusing problem,” said Arthur. “I’m currently unemployed, so I’ve been limited to working with parts salvaged from old electrical equipment. If you could just give me a small budget to buy new parts, then I could probably get the scanner to focus on the strongest, most recent echoes.”

  “Payments to guest presenters are calculated according to their screen time minutes in the final edited programme.” I gabbled the standard reply while I studied the scanner again. “Pity it doesn’t have some flashing lights.”

  “It doesn’t need any . . .” Arthur looked at my face, broke off his sentence, and rapidly started another. “Flashing lights could be added.”

  I thought for a minute. We were
on series seven of the show. Viewers were getting bored with watching our regular presenter, Celia, wander round dark empty buildings, while talking to a random guest psychic about strange chills in the air and the oppressive atmosphere. Arthur’s scanner could be the new gimmick we needed.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  I went out of the room, and down the corridor to see Jeremy. It always galled me that Jeremy’s office was twice the size of mine and had real carpet. I was thirty-six, with a first class degree in media studies, and fifteen years experience in the business. Jeremy was 22 years old, and his highest qualification was a Boy Scout badge for knot tying, but his uncle was the majority shareholder in the company. That meant he had the fancy title, while I did all the work. I’d been suffering this sort of injustice all my life.

  Jeremy looked up as I entered the room. “Oh, it’s you, Mark. Celia was in here a minute ago, complaining about you. She says that yesterday you took them to what was probably the least haunted house in the western hemisphere.”

  I shrugged. “What does the woman expect? We covered all the good places in the first three series. If we carry on and make series eight, we’ll be down to investigating haunted garages.”

  I waved a hand in dismissal. “Anyway, I wondered how you’d feel about trying something different for the next programme. Instead of having a guest psychic, we could have a man with a scanner that shows ghosts.”

  Jeremy’s eyes lit up like a toddler who’d been handed a big, shiny balloon. “A scanner that shows ghosts! Awesome!”

  Arthur and his scanner were a great success in the next programme. The screen was still only showing grey mist, but Arthur talked about the occasional dark flickers with wild enthusiasm, and explained that the newly added flashing lights signalled changes in levels of etheric activity. Celia was enthusiastic as well, of course. She was used to having to talk for an entire hour about nothing but chills in the air, so she could get a lot of mileage out of a flickering screen and a couple of flashing lights.