By Proxi And Error
A David Sands Competition story by Joy Wright
An entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition
By Proxi And Error by Joy Wright
I must stress, before we go any further, that I was not supposed to be there.
Not in the Capsule. Not on Earth. Certainly not in Edinburgh in the year 1822.
I originate from Proxi, short for Proxima Centauri b. Essentially two doors down from Alpha Centauri A and B. The slightly scruffier end of the galaxy but it keeps us alive.
It is not the easiest of worlds. The stellar flares can knock out your communications without warning; the surface storms regularly rearrange an entire settlement block; and the ground itself has the unnerving habit of humming under your feet when the magnetics spike. It causes havoc with static on the chair. But it is home.
That morning, my involvement was minimal. A tray of tea. That was all. A tray of tea rolled across the bay while the Chrono-Capsule was prepared for a routine local hop.
Then Mandy X got involved.
She always does.
“Only a smidge,” she said, adjusting the settings with her habitual disregard for procedure. “This will shave a fraction off the power curve.”
Mandy X is a Chrono-Capsule Operator charged with the dubious responsibility of locating a new home for us for one hundred-or-so years whilst Proxi has a close brush with a black hole. She spends her time wandering the planets and time-lines, creating data logs and research. She feeds all these back to Director Stowe. He’s the Director of the Institute of Applied Chronology and Stellar Cartography. His intention is to relocate us, temporarily, until we are less likely to be slurped off the planet like a like a milkshake through a very long interstellar straw. In theory it’s a measured, carefully audited operation; in practice it means Mandy X joyrides the continuum while I file the reports, pack the biscuits, and pray the new address comes with rails.
A Chrono-Capsule operator with imagination is a dangerous thing. Particularly when Proxi’s magnetic field is already playing skittles with precision. A Chrono-Capsule operator who is slightly clumsy and scatter brained and hasn’t picked up the chronodriver she dropped earlier is even more dangerous. Possibly lethal.
Normally, the droplet of tea that leapt from my tray onto the controls would have produced nothing worse than a hiss, perhaps a spark. At most, the Capsule might have twitched twenty metres sideways and deposited me outside the archives last Tuesday.
But not under a Proxi stellar flare. Every small error is magnified four thousand times. The droplet became a calamity.
The Capsule convulsed. The world went blue and tore sideways. We were flung through time and space like a cork from a champagne bottle.
When the Capsule steadied, the screen offered its verdict:
Coordinates: Edinburgh. Planet: Earth. Chronodate: 15th August 1822. Location: 4.3 light years from Proxima Centauri b. Local hazard: Cobbles.
The door squeeeed open. And smoke poured from the console.
I pulled myself to the door which now opened out onto a wide courtyard. The stones before me were uneven, slick with damp. The air smelled of coal smoke and wet wool. Somewhere nearby, a piper was torturing an instrument.
And there, looming over me, was a building that scratched at the back of my memory. Tall windows. A turret. Carved reliefs. Beautiful architecture, unlike anything I’d seen in person before.
Buildings are cut into the rock on Proxi, with two metres of stone on all sides, to protect us all from the radiation. I knew I had seen that building before, despite never having visited Earth, but I couldn’t fathom it. Not then. Not in the moment.
Mandy X stepped out, arms folded. “You’ll never manage on those cobbles in that chair and they’ll think it’s from outer space with all that chrome.”
“It is from outer space. And I don’t intend to manage,” I said, clinging to the Capsule doorframe and considering the smoke. “I intend to sit here until we go home.”
“We need to purge the smoke and kill the power,” she said, already on the manual levers. “But the cloaking only comes on properly with the door shut. And we can’t leave it open because it looks like a door hanging in mid-air. People notice that sort of thing.”
“Charming,” I said, eyes watering. The little space was filling faster and the smoke was pouring out of the door. “So I can’t stay inside, and you can’t shut the door if I do.”
“Exactly. Also,” She said squinting past me. “we’ll need a coupling for the cooling vanes, something I can bodge from a bit of strapping or something. I am not leaving you alone to go shopping in 1822.”
I looked at the smoke. I looked at the chair. I looked at the very real prospect of being discovered inside a glowing cupboard from nowhere. “Right, we close up. The chair stays. I go with you.”
“Thank you,” she said, already moving “On three.”With one hand on the jamb and one on her arm, I hopped out, practiced, undignified, and braced on the threshold. The smoke made a grab for my lungs.
“Ready?” she said.
“Shut it,” I croaked. She folded my chair with ruthless efficiency, shoved it back inside.
The door sealed; the cloak hummed; the Capsule vanished. Which is to say, it stopped being a conspicuous, smoky rectangle with an open door in the middle of the air. There was a strange vision of smoke suddenly appearing several feet above our heads but I doubted if anyone would notice that amongst the peaty smell of wood fires and the smoky miasma which hovered above.
“Right,” she said briskly. “Cobbler for a strap. Maybe an oil-lamp wick as packing. Also spirits to clean the contacts, if whisky is the only spirit available, we shall make sacrifices.”
“Grand,” I said, eyeing the cobbles glaring back. “Unless Edinburgh has invented ramps in the last thirty seconds, you’re going to need to find me something like crutches.”
“Understood,” Mandy X said, taking my weight for the first careful step into the close. “We fetch the strap together. Then we come back and pretend this never happened.”
Which, of course, is how the rest of it happened.
“Won’t be a jiffy,” she declared, and left me on a short grey stone wall.
I could hear fuss, hundreds of people and voices, though the square we were in was quiet. A few stragglers passed, scarcely noticing me. They hurried ahead, through an arch and vanished into the noise.
She returned a few minutes later with a pony.
A broad, shaggy beast with a mane like unwashed yarn and the eyes of a sardonic teenager. The pony considered me with mild interest, as if to say: You? Really?
“This is Morag,” said Mandy X. “Bombproof.”
“I don’t ride,” I said.
“You do now,” she said.
There are three things you need to know about hoisting oneself onto a horse when you are me.
First, saddles are not chairs. Chairs are dependable, predictable, and inclined to stay where you put them. Mostly. Saddles, by contrast, are wedges with delusions of grandeur.
Second, balance is suddenly your entire personality. I am, under ordinary circumstances, quite content with the balance I’ve got. It allows me to reach the kettle, shuffle my papers, and wheel sensibly down corridors without incident. What it does not allow me to do is perch atop half a ton of living animal whilst people make loud noises. Therefore making the considerable heft of the animal a new threat which could boost me like an ejector seat at any moment.
Third, horses seem to know things. Morag in particular knew I had no business being anywhere near her back. She rolled one eye at me with infinite resignation, like a teacher confronted with yet another hopeless essay.
Mandy X, of course, was all encouragement. “There you are. Look at you! Perfect.”
“I look,” I muttered, “like laundry on the wrong piece of furniture.”
But the damage was done. We clopped out of the close onto the Royal Mile, and that was when the crowd noticed me.
Edinburgh in August 1822 was thrumming with excitement. Walter Scott had convinced the King to visit Scotland for the first time in over a century. Tartan had been dusted off, invented, or borrowed wholesale, and every man, woman, and child was determined to look more Scottish than the next. The result was a riot of plaid, bonnets, banners, and bagpipes.
And into this sea of tartan clopped one reluctant man on a pony.
They saw the plaid shawl Mandy X had flung across my knees, a scrap of cloth wrapped where my foot had been, my pained expression from sitting aside what felt like a barrel and the lingering cough from the smoke. That along with the resigned pony which carried me slowly and they drew the least obvious conclusion.
“A veteran!” someone cried.
“God bless ye, sir!” shouted another.
A child saluted me with such fervour I nearly fell off saluting back. Women dabbed at their eyes. Men raised flasks in my honour.
I tried to protest, but when you’re clinging to a pony with both hands, protests come out as strangled squeaks.
It occurred to me, in one of those bleak flashes of clarity you get when you’re being cheered for something you didn’t do, that I was here entirely by proxy.
Not Proxi, my world of storms and stellar tantrums, though yes, technically that too. I mean proxy in the sense of standing in for someone else.
Normally it would be Mandy X swept along, applauded, saluted, and probably setting something on fire.
This time it was me.
I was Mandy X by proxy. And believe me, that is not a role I auditioned for. I yearned for the safety of my office, the limits of excitement either being the antics of Mandy X, or the characters of my latest novel.
A burly gentleman in a bonnet thrust a silver flask into my hand. “To yer health, sir! For service rendered to King and country!”
I opened my mouth to explain that my service was largely confined to filing cabinets and tea trays. He misunderstood, assuming I was too overcome by emotion to speak, and clapped me heartily on the back. Whisky sloshed over my lap.
“You’ll feel better once you’ve had a dram,” Mandy X said sweetly, though her eyes danced with wicked amusement before she vanished into a shop with a low hanging canopy outside.
The crowd roared their approval. Someone struck up a chorus of Scots Wha Hae. A flag waved dangerously close to Morag’s nose. I did the only thing I could do. I drank.
It burned. It scorched. It set up permanent residence somewhere near my socks. My eyes watered. My dignity wept. My spine relaxed.
“That’s the ticket!” bellowed the man, refilling it.
The second dram went down easier than the first. So did the third. By the fourth, I was humming along with the pipers as we gradually made our way up the hill and patting Morag’s mane as if I’d been born in the saddle.
“See?” said the man, nudging Morag forward with a grin. “You’re a hero.”
“You know,” I said grandly, “I could be.”
More whisky was passed along, a nip here and a slug there. “Slàinte mhath.” A voice cried and everyone with a flask took a drink. I quickly learned this toast was an indicator to take a sip and over Morag’s impossibly slow hooves I participated often and she climbed the hill behind the crowds
Mandy X appeared beside me, a length of something in her hands and a glint in her eyes.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“Semantics,” I replied, waving regally at a knot of cheering women who responded by throwing posies at me. One struck me squarely in the face. I sniffed it, decided it was not unpleasant, and tucked it behind Morag’s ear. She flicked an ear at me but bore it with stoic dignity.
The whisky blurred the edges of panic. The cobbles no longer seemed quite so malicious. Even the King himself, perched absurdly in tartan and pink tights, seemed less like a catastrophic mistake in upholstery and more like a kindly uncle at a wedding. He sat on a throne that looked as if it must have come with him, all fancy and shining against the grey of the Edinburgh stone, dull even in the Scottish sun. He was dabbing at his brow with what might once have been a handkerchief, beaming in that vague way of men assured they are having a marvellous time. He lifted a goblet, attempted a gallant nod in three directions at once, and muttered what I think was meant to be “slàinte,” whereupon the crowd cheered as if he’d personally invented whisky.
“Good fellow!” he boomed when I drew close. “Wounded at Waterloo, eh?”
I blinked. “Possibly,” I said, because the whisky had eroded my ability to argue.
The King’s eyes misted. “Splendid! Brave chap! A toast!”
Before I could object, another steward materialised with a goblet of something amber and perilous. I drank it, because the crowd was watching, and besides, it seemed rude not to.
By the time the goblet was retrieved, I was beginning to feel quite… agreeable.
Which is how I very nearly ended up drafted into His Majesty’s retinue.
“Symbolic!” declared the steward with the wig. “A wounded veteran to ride beside the King! Scotland’s gratitude incarnate!”
“Yes, yes,” I murmured, swaying slightly in the saddle. “Very grateful. Quite incarnate. Lovely day for it.” I squinted at the sun.
Mandy X pinched my arm. Hard. “Time to go,” she hissed. “Three minutes or the Chrono Window will close.” She glanced anxiously at the device on her wrist. “Or we’ll be here until tomorrow.”
Whisky had ploughed a furrow in my thoughts and suddenly it seemed like a good idea. I could stay with Morag who would take the place of my wheels and perhaps my sanity. Maybe even my decision making.
“No.” Said Mandy X, seeming to see the dawning of bizarre and intoxicated ideas crossing my features. “We’re going now. Back to Proxi.”
“I was just about to suggest it myself,” I said, because by then I had entered that perilous stage of intoxication in which one believes oneself charming.
The steward beamed, entirely misinterpreting. “Splendid! This way!”
He reached for Morag’s bridle. Morag flattened her ears, not impressed.
Mandy X leaned close. “If you let him lead you to that platform, you will be in every painting, sketch, and broadsheet produced this year.”
I pictured it: me, draped over a pony, whisky-flushed, forever immortalised beside George IV in pink tights. Even in my condition, I recognised disaster. Stowe would not like it. Not one bit.
“Absolutely not,” I said firmly.
Morag chose that moment to sidestep neatly, dislodging the steward and clearing us a path down a side close.
“Good girl,” I whispered. “You and I understand each other.” She took this as an invitation and we were off like a Flare Skiff on Proxi. Cantering down the streets though without the finesse of the lower thrusters of the Skiff. Instead the flight through Edinburgh was chaos wrapped in tartan.
Pie sellers shouted. Children darted underfoot. A piper skidded sideways when Morag brushed past. Mandy X strode ahead as if a mag-halo had shouldered the dust squall aside scattering onlookers with brisk elbows and an air of unimpeachable purpose.
“Two minutes!” she called back.
“I’ve never felt better!” I called, because the whisky was singing in my veins and Morag’s steady gait had convinced me I was practically cavalry. “Let’s do this again sometime!”
“You are insufferable,” she muttered, though I swear I saw her grin.
We burst back into the courtyard away from the crowds and hustle and bustle. I burped whisky flavoured burps cheerfully as Mandy X opened the Chrono Capsule and helped post me back through the door and onto a seat. She had the repairs made double quick time whilst Morag stuck her head through the doorway and licked suspiciously at the smokey spilled tea on the floor.
“Here, all done! Window opening in forty seconds!”
“What window?” I asked cheerfully, though by now I had a fair idea.
“The one that saves us,” said Mandy X, grabbing Morag’s bridle and pushed her backwards, but Morag refused, so Mandy X pulled her inside instead.
The console hiccuped as the door squeeed back into place. The world went blue.
The delivery yard had never looked so beautiful. The familiar smell of oil, stone, and damp paper wrapped around me like a blanket. The Capsule shimmered into view, smugly humming as if to say you dropped tea on me, but I fixed it anyway.
Morag shook herself. The posy fell from behind her ear. She bent and ate it.
Mandy X was already unfolding my chair with the efficiency of a woman tidying away evidence. “See? Perfectly fine.”
“I am not fine. I am whisky-soaked, flower-strewn, and quite possibly a decorated veteran of a battle I wasn’t at.”
“You were magnificent,” she said.
“Morag was magnificent,” I said. “I held on.”
“That counts,” she said.
Later, after tea (real tea, not history-ruining tea) and a restorative biscuit, I wrote the report which Stowe insisted upon.
Incident: Edinburgh, 1822.
Cause: Tea.
Complication: Cobbles, Kings, Whisky.
Local Solution: Pony.
Outcome: Embarrassing.
Recommendations: 1) Forbid Mandy X from consoles. 2) Suggest to Director Stowe he arranges to install cup holders in Capsules. 3) Purchase apples for Morag.
Then, in my private digi-book, the one where I write things down under false names and never admit how true they are, I scribbled the whole sorry tale. And here it is. A secret. My first true manuscript, one I might never publish. Who knows. Because if history insists on dragging me along, whisky-flushed and unwilling, then I might as well be the one to tell it.
And if anyone asks, no , I did not consent.
I never do.
But I will, inevitably, end up bouncing around time and space again. Because I report to Mandy X and Mandy X is a product of chaos. Next time, however, I’m bringing the whisky myself.
And it was only later, leafing through a battered Earth history volume about Edinburgh, its plates smudged and faded, that I saw the photograph. Stone façade, tall windows, turret, carved reliefs. Edinburgh, 21st century.
The Writers’ Museum.
I stared at the image for a long time, realising with a shiver that I had stood there myself, two centuries earlier, in the wrong year, on the wrong planet, dragged along entirely against my will.
And I laughed, because it was absurd, and because on Proxi we have another saying: if the universe insists on making you the punchline, you might as well deliver it well.
About Joy Wright:
A fan. A wannabe writer with several manuscripts loitering digitally on my laptop. One is out gallivanting with agents, or rogueishly it may have escaped into the wild which would explain the silence. Vaguely/slightly/sort of published at the BBC and British Museum, which sounds far fancier than the reality. Theatre reviewer. Therapist. Cat slave -aka possessor of thumbs. Mother of three; I would say dragons but that’s taken. So I’ll go with young people, its mostly the same. Stood outside the Writers Museum In Edinburgh and had this idea :)
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