New Atlantis Bundle, Books1-3 Read online

  Even as she’d said those words, she could come up with at least three arguments against what she was saying. She wasn’t even sure she believed any of it. They were only randomly collected ideas that had popped into her head at different times, when the news was on.

  Like how suspicious it seemed that Prime Minister Harold Holt had conveniently drowned so that John Gorton could come to power. The idea that a James Bond character had assassinated him, because another nation’s political agenda didn’t like his policies, was just absurd. But there it had been, an uneasy, random thought that she hadn’t been able to dismiss. Thank goodness she hadn’t shared that one with Julio or he’d really see her as a paranoid freak.

  She looked up from the rice she was pricing to see his tall, athletic body lope slowly toward her. Not much more than twenty, he had the air of a much older man. And though he dressed to blend in with the inner city rough necks – jeans and tight fitting, black T shirt – there was nothing remotely rough about him.

  His black hair was cut very short; the way they cut it in the army. She would peg him as a recruit, if it weren’t for a lock of long hair that fell down over his forehead like the blue-black wing of a raven. His olive skin was dark, as if he spent time at the beach, and those delicious dark-chocolate eyes were surrounded by a thick brush of lashes that would make any girl envious.

  When he saw her looking at him, Julio smiled his 1000 watt smile at her, his teeth Macleans White against his dark skin. If she were to describe the prince in the fairy stories she wrote, he would look just like this man. But without his animal magnetism, of course. Her princes never had that sort of sex appeal. They were always perfect gentlemen; polite, sensitive, even deferential. They didn’t send out tendrils of sex, to wind around a defenceless girl, so that she would be both afraid and attracted at the same moment.

  ‘Hey, Jane, how’re doing?’ he said in that low, gravelly voice that contained no discernible accent. She knew he was Brazilian, and that his native tongue was Portuguese, but there was nothing Latino in his carefully enunciated words.

  She’d used his nationality in his defence the day before, when her boss, Maude Robbins, had called him a “greasy diego”.

  ‘Don’t care where he migrated from, darlin’; a diego’s a diego,’ she’d said. ‘You stay away from ‘im, or you’ll be up the duff before you know it. Blokes like ‘im are only after one thing from nice Aussie girls, and they don’t care how plain they are. So be warned!’

  Jane blushed just remembering that foul, racist diatribe. It made her wish she could find another job. Somewhere better. But without her School Certificate, she was lucky to have this dead end job. No one wanted to believe she was intelligent, and had left school to support her invalid mother. To them, no School Certificate meant she was as dumb as a doorknob.

  And her appearance didn’t do her any favours: brown, stringy hair she kept short; solid, stocky body; and watery grey eyes.

  It didn’t matter that her eyes were watery because she read so much they stung. And because she needed glasses, but couldn’t afford them, as every penny she earned went into paying the rent. All people ever saw were small, water eyes that seemed shifty, unwilling to meet another’s gaze for more than a second.

  No, she was stuck where she was, and would have to listen to Maude rave on about the diegoes who were overrunning their country, taking their jobs, and turning their girls into RCs – if they deigned to marry them when they got them up the duff.

  She forced her brain off that painful subject and back onto Julio, who was still smiling at her, waiting for her to reply.

  ‘Hey! Packet of Malboros?’ she asked, trying to smile back at him, but knowing her expression was closer to a grimace.

  ‘Yeah, thanks Jane. Quiet again this morning. Where’s the old hag?’

  She tried to stifle the guffaw. It wasn’t right of her to encourage his rudeness. Jane should be loyal to her employer, no matter how much she agreed with him.

  ‘Gone to the wholesalers. She goes every Thursday morning.’

  ‘And she trusts you enough to leave you in charge? I find that hard to believe.’ He wiggled his expressive eyebrows at her.

  ‘Oh, she’s not all bad. She was good enough to give me a job when I needed it.’ She tried for loyalty, but it fell as limply from her mouth as a piece of lettuce after an hour in the early February heat.

  ‘She takes advantage of you. I’ve watched her. Treats you like her personal slave, while she does nothing but paint her claws.’

  Jane shrugged, at a loss what else to say to defend the woman. The facts spoke for themselves. She was lazy, usually sitting around gossiping with customers all day, while Jane did all the work.

  That was why Maude resented the few minutes each day Julio engaged Jane in conversation. She was worried it might take her away from her work. Of course, she never let it. Keeping working, while they chatted, was a matter of pride for Jane. It made it look like she was less in awe of him.

  ‘If you could do anything you wanted, for a career, what would it be?’ He asked the first of his strange questions for the day.

  She thought for a moment, trying not to give one of her stupid answers for a change.

  ‘Umm … a reporter?’ It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was close. She would never reveal her true passion was writing children’s stories. How stupid would she look to him then?

  ‘No, not pushy enough.’ He smiled at her, leaning against the glass counter and tapped the pack of cigarettes she’d put in front of him.

  ‘Then, I … I… don’t know. I’m sort of interested in … umm… people, and what makes them tick. Maybe I’d be a psychologist. If I … well, if I could get the marks I’d need for something, you know, something like that.’

  He studied her from under his dark lock of hair, his eyes reminding her of a spy’s. Not a James Bond, flashy spy. But what she thought real spies would be like – chameleons who blended in, observing everything, and letting not one detail pass them by.

  ‘Maybe. But you’re too soft hearted. You’d want to take every client home with you, and wouldn’t charge them for their sessions.’

  He was laughing at her now, and it stung. She wasn’t such a bleeding heart was she? Turning away abruptly, she made a grab for a bag of rice.

  ‘Oh, I’ve offended you. I’m sorry Jane. It was not my intention. You have a kind heart that people take advantage of. That’s all I meant.’

  She busied herself stacking the rice on the shelves behind her, surreptitiously wiping the beads of sweat from her forehead. It was still early, but already the temperature was up in the nineties. It would climb to over the hundred by lunch time. The long hot summer still had a month to go, and the current heatwave wasn’t predicted to break until the following week.

  But more than the heat, Julio’s compliment made her sweat. It wasn’t what she expected from this mysterious young man who was usually so cool and aloof.

  ‘You deserve better than you’ve got here, Jane. A lot better.’ He said this almost to himself.

  Maybe he was from Social Services, checking into her wellbeing. But no, she was no longer young enough to be their concern. They’d stopped coming around as soon as she turned sixteen. But the expression was the same. That look that said, ‘You deserve better than an alcoholic mother whose boyfriends can’t keep their hands off you.’ The kind of look that had always made her stick out her chin and defend her mother. It wasn’t her fault. She did the best she could. And she’d learned how to handle those men, eventually, hadn’t she?

  The memory of the way she’d handled one such man still made her cringe with sick guilt. That she’d learned less extreme methods to stay safe over the years didn’t let her off the hook for that one crime. It just made it easier to meet her own gaze in the mirror.

  ‘I … I do all right. There are a lot worse off than me.’ She knew her chin was out, just as it used to be when she was a kid – challenging him to feel sorry for her, challenging him t
o insult her mother.

  If her dad hadn’t died from the injuries he got in the war, her mother wouldn’t have turned to drink. She would have been happy, and Jane would have been happy. Wars were bad. They took everything good away from you.

  That’s why she didn’t like this latest war. Boys her age were dying in those jungles in Vietnam for no good reason. It was all well and good to talk about the Red Peril and the Domino Effect; about how the Commies were working their way down South East Asia to get to them. But didn’t those countries have a right decide for themselves what kind of government they had? When they directly threatened Australia, that was the time to send our boys to fight, wasn’t it?

  ‘Yes, there are people worse off than you. But I don’t know too many girls your age who would see it that way. Better get going. See you, Jane!’ His words were delivered lightly, as if they carried no importance at all.

  And just like that he was gone again. The little bell tinkled to announce his departure. And the shop fell silent in his wake.

  It was stupid to feel as if all the colour had just gone out of her world. It was foolish to miss him, even after only a minute of him being gone. But stupid and foolish she was. Because her heart hurt, now that he’d left her. And it would stay hurt until 9.30 tomorrow morning, when he would reappear for his next packet of cigarettes.

  Julio lounged on the hotel couch, his eyes glued to the small TV screen. He found TV endlessly fascinating. They had nothing quite like it back home. Not the screen, of course. They had screens the full length of a wall, which could provide all manner of entertainment. But not this kind of entertainment: this TV fare was his guilty pleasure.

  ‘Well, my visit to the school went well today. No problems with my credentials as a minor Education Department lackey checking on the school before inspection. They fell all over themselves showing me files, letting me meet students and teachers.’ Dorothy Victoria she spread the dossier across Julio’s double bed.

  She always came to his room to work, preferring to keep her space only for sleeping. It was part of her ritual to help with her insomnia, so she told him.

  An insomniac ever since she turned sixty five, it always got worse when she was away from New Atlantis and her own personal space. Even fifty years in the peaceful surrounds of the 24th Century couldn’t give her back regular sleeping patterns.

  ‘Did you meet him?’ Julio asked, only listening with half his attention, as he watched Bonanza. Little Joe was the best! Not in a sexual way, of course. He was only interested in women that way.

  And even that interest was merely lukewarm. He could count the number of short term affairs he’d had on one hand in the last few centuries. Without a biological imperative to breed, his clone bodies became largely disinterested in sex. Unless his mind happened to be stimulated by a woman, his body would barely register her presence, no matter how beautiful she appeared.

  That’s why Jane was such an enigma to him. He’d gone into the corner shop, where his dossier on Tommy Samuels said she worked, just to get a sense of her – to know what to expect on D Day.

  Her obnoxious boss had done nothing but put Jane down, from the moment he started showing an interest in the girl. She’d called Jane’s mother a drunk and Jane a stooge for putting up with her antics. All the while, Jane had just stood there like a shadow behind her, taking it all, without a word in her own defence. In all his two hundred and twenty years, he couldn’t remember ever meeting such an obnoxious human being as Maude Robbins.

  Maybe it was his loathing for Maude that had him paying more attention to the shy little drudge than he should have. After all, her only part in the D Day exercise was that she would die attempting to save the life of his Target. She didn’t even know the boy.

  Or maybe there was something about the girl that touched him. He recognised that look of fear and uncertainty in her eyes when she glanced his way. It was obvious that she had been the victim of sexual abuse. A common enough story when an alcoholic mother’s only interested is in a pay-packet to feed her addiction: Look the other way if a meal-ticket pays a little too much attention to her child, try not to notice the haunted look in those young/old eyes, and shut them down before they got the chance to voice their pain.

  Oh, he’d seen it all before, in his first ten years of life. Sometimes, it seemed as if everything since then had been just a hazy, pleasant dream. Only those first ten years seemed distinct and real.

  And so he’d spent a few minutes each day dropping in for cigarettes he didn’t smoke, to get to know the shy girl. He noticed how she dressed to stay under the radar, so she didn’t attract the unwanted attention of men. It was a common ploy.

  Not that she would have attracted too much attention, even if she made the most of her assets. Being short and over-weight, with irregular features and eyes that squinted, probably because she needed glasses, didn’t do her any favours. There was nothing in her looks that could have fired up his own lethargic sex drive, that was for sure.

  But she had a nice voice, rich and smooth, that slid over his senses in a pleasurable way. Half of the questions he asked her were designed just so he could hear her talk, even when she stammered a lot of the time from shyness, or said ‘Umm,’ with irritating regularity.

  The other reason he asked her questions was only just starting to become clear. He found her answers surprising, and often challenging. He didn’t know a lot about the history of this time, especially not from an Australian perspective. But he found it hard to believe too many uneducated teenage girls had the insights into politics that she seemed to have. Or into people.

  She’d said today that she would like to be a reporter. And he could see her inquisitive mind digging for answers like those reporters who’d uncovered the Watergate Scandal. And he could see her as a psychologist, digging deep for the less obvious reasons for her patient’s condition. Hers was a mind that thought laterally, intuitively, and looked beneath the surface. And it was so different to his own mental processes that he was fascinated.

  She reminded him of Cara Westchester and her friend Millie Solano. And he was dying to put her with those women, and watch her blossom under their influence. Even though she was not his Target, being too old for the Child Retrieval program, and too young and unproven for the Adult Retrieval program, he was considering taking her with them when they Retrieved Tommy. After all, the records all said that both bodies were never found.

  He had lost track of Dorothy’s reply, and where he was up to in his TV show. The commercials were on now, bombarding him with their consumer imperative. No wonder people of this time wasted so much of the planet’s resources. They were encouraged to do so every minute of their waking life by the media that surrounded them.

  ‘Julio, are you listening to me?’ Dorothy said, with barely concealed annoyance. Even though she was a hundred years younger than he was, she still treated him like a child. It was probably because she had only known him in this young body. She hadn’t been with them long enough yet, to ignore the age of the body a person inhabited.

  Hers, at this time, looked to be a youthful fifty, courtesy of a clone body she’d taken on shortly after joining their world. The clone body could stay healthy and active for a hundred years, although it did age in appearance. In the early years, people upgraded their clones when they got to Dorothy’s current age, more for the aesthetics, than for any other reason. He hadn’t bothered. His appearance had never been important to him.

  People told him he was good looking, in an exotic, Latino way, and women found him attractive. But he just didn’t care. He found it hard to care about much of anything anymore. He’d taken on his first clone body at eighteen, his Original so diseased by that point that it had been a biological necessity. He’d stayed with both his clones for the full one hundred years. And had only recently upgraded again, mainly to make him more acceptable to the Child Retrieval Program.

  It still concerned him how out of character his obsession to get on this program had be
en. Retrieval had never interested him. He’d been raised on one of the agricultural communities of the Gaian Confederacy, whose capital was New Atlantis. Most people just thought of themselves as New Atlanteans even if they lived on one of the other communities. They were just names and places to him. Politics had never interested him.

  Watching crops grow and be harvested to feed hungry mouths: that was what interested him. It had, since those days of hunger on the streets of Florianopolis.

  He guessed that was the impetus for his unexpected, unwanted, and out of control obsession to be part of the Child Retrieval Program: The idea that lost children could be found. He had been a lost child, during the troubled times of the Dark Ages. And then again, as a ten year old survivor of the Last Great Plague. He knew what it was to be desperate and alone, forced to do whatever you had to, to survive. And he wanted to make sure those missing children from the past didn’t experience what he had known.

  ‘Julio!’ Dorothy’s voice was angry now.

  ‘What?’ he snapped back at her with equal fury. He was not a man who worked well in partnership. Especially not with a snotty woman who saw herself as his superior, just because she looked older.

  He would have preferred to work alone on Jumps, as Retrieval had been carried out, up until recently. But the number of in-situ deaths had become a concern for the government. And with population numbers growing steadily since the inception of time travel Retrievals, assigning two Jumpers to a team had become the safest and most effective choice.

  Effective, if the team played well together. Not so effective, if they hit heads like he and Dorothy did.

  ‘I asked you whether you wanted to look over any of this information.’ She spoke in the formal English common to New Atlantis, and he replied in kind, while letting a few idiomatic terms common to their current era slip in to annoy her.