My name’s Rilla. Rilla Green. Actually, it’s Amaryllis Lucinda Boudicca Green, but I don’t admit to my full name as a rule. I don’t know why I got landed with a handful like that – my mother died a week after I was born, and I was raised in the city orphanage. All I have is the outlandish name, my birth certificate, and a piece of jewellery that belonged to my mother. You have to leave the orphanage when you’re eighteen, and do the best you can for yourself. This is my best.
It’s a pretty grotty best, really, but it’s dry – more or less – and warm, sometimes.
How do I make a living? Sorting through the rubbish at the dump.
Every so often, I manage to find something that’s worth salvaging. I earn enough to keep myself fed, and clothed – more or less – but I’d like to earn enough to be able to study and get a proper job. But I’d need better clothes. And a proper address. The Hut At The Dump doesn’t really cut much ice on an application form. But I can’t afford a real room until I’ve got a job – and I can’t get a job without a real address.
Then one day I was looking through an old newspaper someone had dropped, and I saw an advertisement. “If Amaryllis Lucinda Boudicca Green would call at the offices of Ivor Barrett, Solicitor, with proofs of identity, she would hear of something to her advantage.” And the address, and the opening hours.
So I went. And showed Ivor Barrett my birth certificate, my mother’s piece of jewellery, told him where I’d been brought up and so on. He said he’d have to check everything out, and I was to come back next week. When I returned there were two other people there as well – Cynthia Hall-Green and Christopher Whitby-Green. They were so smart, I felt even more scruffy than usual.
When Christopher heard what the solicitor had to say, he looked furious. Apparently, I was the next in line for the Green millions!!!!!! I was to inherit a fortune! He’d thought it was going to be split between him and his cousin Cynthia, but no!
Cynthia wasn’t too happy either. She started yelling at the solicitor, saying how dare he not let them have it, and what had they paid him for, and why had I ever seen the advertisement? He was supposed to have only advertised in obscure papers. He tried to explain that he had to keep the law, but she wasn’t having any.
I just sat there, stunned. I couldn’t believe it! I could have a real house at last. And I could do all the things I’d planned – study and get a job, and build a garden and playpark for the orphanage, and endow some scholarships for the orphanage, for people who wanted to go to college, and…..
Then Christopher started in on me. How dare I inherit his money – a useless little guttersnipe like me! It was scary.
Cynthia was sounding off at the lawyer, and at me, when she suddenly totally changed track and went all quiet and self-controlled. And then she apologised, rather stiffly, and said, “Come, Christopher, and let us consider what we can do to alter this unfortunate situation. There must be some way we can make amends.” And she swept out with him. I rather hoped she would come round: I liked the idea of having relatives. And by all accounts, there was enough money to share with them if I wanted to.
And sure enough, next day, I got a note saying could they meet me to try and patch things up. How about meeting at the lawyers, as he had a pleasant garden at the back of his office, where we could be private, and as it was Sunday tomorrow, there wouldn’t be any clients calling. Ivor Barrett was happy to be of any service to us all. So I went there (wishing I already had some of my money so that I could go and buy some better clothes: Cynthia was so elegant). The whole street was quiet and empty. I went round the back towards the garden, when I heard a sudden noise behind me – and then I knew nothing more.
When I came round, I was lying on a hard wooden floor, in a place I’d never seen before. It was dark, but lit by a couple of cheap electric lights. I got to my feet, rather groggily, and looked round the room.
The plaster on the walls was peeling off the old brickwork. Someone had lived here once who’d been a football fan – at least judging from the poster on the wall.
A pile of old pots on one corner suggested that this room was nothing more than a dumping ground now. I suddenly realised that it had no windows. Why was I here? How had I got here? The last thing I remembered was going to meet…Cynthia and Christopher! Had they kidnapped me and locked me up here? What was their plan? More to the point, where was the door? I was busting out of here, no matter what it took.
Then, in the corner of the room, I found…Not a door, but a fresh brick wall! Were they planning to starve me to death or something? Well, I wasn’t going to settle for that either. That brick looked new and strong, but the other walls were older. I figured I could probably chip away some of that old mortar and plaster, and make a way out. Was there anything I could use to help me? I looked around the rest of the room.
There was a dirty, smoky old cooker in the corner of the room. If it had some shelves in the oven, I could probably use one of them as a tool.
Then, as I went towards it, it burst into flames!
I stared at the flames in disbelief at first. How could this have happened? Then panic took over. How was I going to get out? This must have been Cynthia and Christopher’s doing! With me dead, they could claim the Green millions after all.
Then suddenly, I heard the oddest of sounds behind me. And a huge rush of air whooshed past me. I spun round, hoping that part of the wall had collapsed or something like that. Hoping that there was a way out somehow. But what I saw was so odd I thought I was hallucinating. A huge box-thing was in the corner of the room. And it hadn’t been there before.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I ran over to it. There was a door, with a panel of buttons next to it. A lift! That was it! It must be an odd, old-fashioned lift! This room was old enough. I know you’re not supposed to get into a lift when there’s a fire, but I couldn’t see any other way out of the room.
I got in and the door closed behind me. I turned to look for the control panel, but everything started to go hazy and the walls began to shimmer before my eyes. I could feel myself losing consciousness, and I fell to the floor.
When I came to, I was lying on a bed in a dimly-lit room. It looked a bit like a hospital. I still felt very strange. The place was quiet. And peaceful too. I got off the bed and started to look around. I felt odd – as though I wasn’t really myself. Or as if I’d been given some strong painkillers, and they were still in my system. Or as if it was all a dream.
I wandered out of the bedroom and found myself in a kitchen/dining/sitting area. The décor was odd – the walls were covered in what looked like metal. The room reminded me of a cross between a ship and a laboratory. It smelt odd too – not unpleasant, just different. I felt odd too – moving and walking was strange.
The next room was even odder in a way. It looked like a maternity unit, but with no babies and no nurses. Maybe I was in a maternity unit that wasn’t in use at the moment. But the place was so quiet.
The next room I found was a fairly normal looking bathroom, which I was pleased to find for future reference. I was definitely feeling odd by now, so I went back into the bedroom.
On my way back in, I spotted the mirror behind the door. But when I looked at myself in it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. What had happened to me? And then I looked at myself properly, and saw the outfit, the tubes, felt the slight weight of the small pack on my back, touched the metal helmet on my head. What had Cynthia and Christopher done to me now?
Later on I realised that someone had switched some monitors on or something, and was keeping an ear on me, because when I yelled with surprise at the sight of myself in the mirror, Adri came in pretty promptly. Not that it was much of a comfort to see him, because he was blue! And had these weird stars on the side of his face. But I was so frantic by then that I don’t think I would have cared if he’d been bright green with seven arms and two heads. Actually, he looked fairly normal, if you discounted the blue skin. And hair. And stars. But I just poured it all out to him – I remembered the fire and then I woke up here, and what was going on, and why did I look like this, and….Adri listened very patiently. I think he knew how scary it all was for me.
He did explain everything to me in the end, but only bit by bit. To start with, he explained that they’d rescued me from the fire, and that the medi-suit I was wearing was delivering essential drugs into my system, to counteract the effects of the fire, and the damage that it had caused to me. This wasn’t the whole truth, as I learned later, but it was what I could cope with at the time. I didn’t have to be afraid, I was somewhere safe, and nobody was going to harm me in any way. That was definitely the whole truth, and then some, as I found out later.
Then he made a meal for us both, and ate with me – he said he wanted to check that I was ready for solid food now, and if I was, then he’d turn down the nutrients I was receiving. He told me his name was Adri Adrin, and that he was a doctor, and he was my doctor too. And it was unmistakeable. He might have had blue skin, but he was so obviously a doctor. I think that my medication at that point must have included some sort of sedative or tranquiliser, as I wasn’t half as freaked out by all this as I should have been. The most important thing, he said, was that I continued to rest and get better. He would always be on call for me, and would visit every day and continue to tell me what was happening. The one thing that was really clear to me was that I was important to him. Very important.
And that was the pattern for the next days. Each day Adri would call and talk, and answer all my questions. I think I soon realised that wherever I was, it wasn’t home. He was so different. And the smells weren’t the same. And although the furniture looked the same, that things it was made of were subtly strange. I asked Adri, and he said that they had pleated time and space, to make two points touch and to reach me. A few days later, I asked him why.
He reached out and touched me for the first time. “Because you needed rescuing. And because we needed you.” “But why did you need me?”
There was a long pause. Then, finally, he said, “Because we have no children. And no hope of having any.” And his eyes filled with tears. Then he told me the story: how a terrifying plague had hit the colony, affecting the women the worst. They had finally managed to find an antidote, but too late to save any of the younger women. Only those well past child-bearing age had survived.
“We know how to hold time at bay,” Adri said, “and how to speed up our aging as well, but we cannot turn back our biological clocks. We cannot make the old young again. Our old women died, along with our old men, but the rest of us have held our aging still for many years. Searching for someone like you.”
The next day, when he came and ate with me again: “No children?” I asked. “No schools, no playgrounds…”“No hope and no future,” he said.
“But why me? And what do you want from me?” To own the truth, I was a bit frightened by then, but Adri was so reassuring.
“Nothing,” he said, “except what you yourself want to give us. We will take nothing from you. You don’t have to be afraid at all. At the moment, we have put your aging on hold as well as ours. We can do that by taking the drug orally – you are a little more complicated. That’s why you’re wearing the medi-suit. And why you? Because we couldn’t just kidnap someone – that would be wrong. But if we hadn’t rescued you, you would have died in that fire. You can choose what you want to do next.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “I want you to take me back.”“I think you should see what you will be going back to first,” Adri said, and took me on a journey. When we arrived at the building, I saw the strange lift-like thing I’d seen in that upstairs room. It was pretty blackened by fire, so maybe Adri hadn’t been exaggerating my danger.
“These are the only co-ordinates we can set,” he said. “We pleated space and time to reach you, but we cannot unpleat them.” And a screen cleared slowly, and showed me that windowless, doorless room, with a hungry fire inside it.
“If we could take you to another place, or another time, we would. But we cannot.”
And looking at him, and listening to him, I knew he was telling me the truth. I had been rescued from a certain death, into a strange and unknown future. And it was up to me to choose what I did in it.
Adri said that I should just take my time to think about things. I’d got a huge amount of adjusting to do, but the medi-suit meant that I had all the time I needed. There was no rush. I was right about the place looking a bit like a cross between a ship and a laboratory – I was living in part of the old space ship. And the large lake outside the house – that was where they had crash-landed several generations ago. This had been a maternity unit once, though they’d since built a hospital. There had been a garden here once too – I began to rescue it from its neglect.
As the days went by, and the garden began to grow, and Adri called each day to see if I was all right, I grew more and more attached to the place. It was better by far than my hut at the dump. And I was being offered a chance to make a huge difference. I was being offered a chance to change a world, never mind a garden.
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