Surviving Arkadia

In the weeks that followed our days began to form the pattern of our new lives. We moved our few possessions to a couple of rooms under the eaves of a tall apartment building in the Mosbach district.

Mosbach was the cheapest district surrounding the Citadel. It was close to the University side of the Citadel district, and was full of scholars. It was also known to have the thinnest and most permeable dome so it was famous for the howling winds and the unusually heavy rains.

I liked the weather. It made me feel alive. It also made our flat a lot cheaper. We each had a room to use as we saw fit. We shared a bathroom and a tiny kitchen with an attached dining nook that led to a balcony. Everywhere else in Moonstone the balcony would have doubled the rent. In Mosbach it was free because nobody wants a balcony that they’re afraid to use in case they get blown or washed off it.

There was a spirit stove in the kitchen and cooking over it wasn’t much different to cooking over a campfire. In theory there was also an oven, heated by a magical thermal stone, in practice it was a bit knackered and the stone no longer got hot enough to do much more than reheat things. I didn’t mind that too much. We were amongst students, so we were surrounded by places that sold simple, hearty meals that only required heating up.

Some of our days were Salvage days. We went where the mayor told us and we came back with our pockets full of old coins and jewellery plus whatever antiques the mayor wanted and whatever good quality whittling wood Jethro could find.

The work was profitable enough that we could cover our rent with just one Salvage day a week. Sometimes we had a good enough day to cover our food costs as well. Most weeks we did a second Salvage day to cover the rest of our costs and put some money away.

Jethro also took on some gardening work on the days when I was busy elsewhere. I didn’t inquire too closely about what he was doing with his time but I was aware that he was spending at least some of it with the Librarian he’d been seeing, Anika Madder. She was good for him, though I worried about how someone as outdoorsy as Jethro would make it work long term with someone as indoorsy as Anika.

While Jethro was Gardening and courting I was mostly in the Outlander Archive reading my way backwards in time. The first level of the Archive was interesting to me but useless for Nurse Trudy. I stuck with the first level until I got OUTLANDER SIGHT to level one.

In that time I noticed a few things about my fellow Outlanders. Nobody wanted to talk about how they’d got here but the few hints they did drop suggested traumatic memories from right before they woke up here. They had come from all over Earth and they’d left it during the tail end of the 20th century or the early 21st. Anything older than that had been moved deeper in the Archive. If I could trust my memory of recent Earth history they’d all left it at times and from places experiencing an unusual level of violence. It was hard to be sure since so much of humanity is at each other's throats for so much of the time but it was telling that the one Londoner I found was from Brixton and his memories of Earth stopped in 1981.

The time thing was confusing. As far as I could tell, from the dates that various Outlanders last remembered Earth and the dates they seemed to have arrived in Arkadia, the passage of time wasn’t the same in the two worlds and the difference wasn’t consistent. Some of the notes that I’d read dropped hints that this was something I would learn about in more detail when I got deeper into the archive.

When I wasn’t spending my day Salvaging, or in the Outlander Archive I was discussing my findings, such as they were, with Gertrude or Nurse Trudy. I’d found depressingly little. It was as if the Fever’s ability to cut itself out of the memory could extend to written memories. I couldn’t see how that could possibly work but then my career ability to find things in containers that hadn’t been in them until I searched proved that I could not rely on either common sense or science.

#

Increasingly I was also spending time with Amris, the Librarian Cat-Kin and most dapper man in Moonstone. He often took his breaks in the courtyard garden where the Outlander Archive stood. He would see me coming and going but never intruded on my space until one day he asked me how I’d got on with the contract books he’d recommended. I had already returned the books but it had been on his day off and I’d missed the chance to thank him for his help.

I went over to him, since I didn’t want to shout across the low hedges and break the peace of the garden. As I approached I realised that he didn’t have his customary porcelain teapot. Instead there was a taller pot with less florid decoration that gave off a familiar overpowering smell.

“Is that coffee?” I said.

“Yes, couldn’t sleep last night, felt the need for something a little stronger. Would you like some?” said Amris.

It was only then that I noticed that he had two cups on his tray. Not the delicate tea-cups that he usually used but sturdier, straight-sided cups on plainly decorated saucers that matched the pot, and looked like a mini version of the mugs from back home. The tray also carried a bowl of sugar crystals, a small jug of cream, and a plate holding something that looked a lot like shortbread. Everything, including the tray, matched the pot.

“Well if you’ve gone to all this trouble,” I said, flourishing at the tray. “I also won’t say no to a biscuit*.”

I sat down on the bench with the tray between us. Amris poured me a cup of coffee and handed it to me with a shortbread balanced on the saucer. He poured himself another cup and added a crystal and a tiny bit of cream.

“I can’t tell you much about what I needed it for,” I said.

“Obviously,” said Amris.

“But your recommendations were useful. I mainly used the For the Common Man book but the ones you recommended helped me to understand what I was doing. I’ll be better prepared for future compacts.”

“Hmmm. Our beloved Mayor is not a bad man but he is a politician.”

“And thus not to be trusted,” I said. “I know. I’ve dealt with local politicians before and even the good ones are arseholes. I think they have to be.”

#

After that we would often meet in the garden for tea or coffee. I introduced Amris to Nurse Trudy, which slightly annoyed Gertrude, who’d been trying to introduce them to each other for months.

So it was that when I finally descended to the next level of the Outlander Archive and found something useful to the Fever Hospital, both Amris and Trudy were waiting for me when I hurried out, holding a slim, handwritten journal.

“I found a mention of claw marks from that last outbreak,” I said, as Trudy poured me a cup of some fragrant tea that was definitely far too delicate for my palate, ruined by cheap coffee as it was.

I gulped the tea down. My throat was dry and I didn’t want to try reading aloud without lubricating it a little.

“This book dates back 21 years, if I’ve got my head around the dating system properly,” I said. The writer had been in the US Navy and seemed to have died in an attack on a Naval vessel in the early 21st century. He didn’t mention the exact date in any of his notes that I’d found but from my memory it was more than 20 years before the last thing that I remembered. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought that time passed at the same rate in both worlds. I didn’t tell Trudy and Amris any of this because it felt like I was violating the man’s privacy. If he’d wanted any of that known he would have stated it clearly in his account.

“That’s right in the middle of the last Fever outbreak,” said Nurse Trudy.

“I think he managed to catch the transition from the Fever as an illness to the violence that follows,” I said.

“Well read it out,” said Nurse Trudy, pulling a notebook and a pencil out of one of her many apron pockets.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Amris. “I can tell this is outside my area of expertise. I’ll just keep the tea coming so you don’t dry out.”