He was shocked. “Go back? To my world? That is death!”
“Not for real. We have some very large rooms here that we don’t use. And we can model those rooms exactly the same way you can model yours.”
“I do not understand.”
“We can make a simulation of the bunker. Some of it, anyway. I think we have the schematics on record. I’ll need to get some people in but it’s doable. What do you think?”
He stepped back.
“You want me to go… back there.”
“The bunker’s the biggest gap on this list. I don’t know if it’ll work but it’s worth a try.”
He couldn’t find the words. He was dreading it.
“Or if you’re not ready we can…”
“No!” He found his backbone quite suddenly. “I must. I must know!”
I nodded. “Okay, then. I’ll get everything started.”
6. Olivia
It was no surprise that Olivia was angry; I’d long since given up being surprised at how she continually generated new bitterness. But on this occasion, I found myself thinking she had a point.
She came in with her ICT representation already prepared, inconveniently written in pen and ink. She was never keen on using keyboards — she said she was no one’s secretary and never had been so why should she learn to type? This made sense from the point of view of gender relations and historical typing machines, but was more likely a way to avoid any therapy that required her to write something down.
So I had to read the representation she thrust in front of me on a sheet of paper, scrawled in a language that only she and the computer that translated it for me knew. It could be summarised as a demand for the IU to prosecute itself, followed by a number of surly complaints that such a thing would never happen so why should she even bother to ask.
“Okay. I’ll pass that on,” I said.
“Won’t do any good.”
“I’d like to discuss it, if you don’t mind.”
“There’s nothing to bloody discuss. Just give it to them. They can use it as cigarette papers if they want.”
“Why do you feel so hostile about this?”
“Because you left us there to die! And now you come along and you say you’re going to do what’s right and you’re not going to do anything of the sort!”
I nodded. This was going to be difficult; I didn’t have anything new to give her.
“Well, I’ll certainly pass it on. And I do hope they do something about it…”
“They won’t. They won’t do anything for poor old Pew either, and his troubles are a damn sight worse than mine…”
“Actually, that’s a good point. It might be worth connecting the two cases, given that they’re both about negligence…”
“And what good’s that going to do?”
“Even if you can’t get some prosecutions out of it, it might change IU policy.”
“What rubbish.”
“We can’t go back and save your world, but it might save another species in the future.”
“And what good’s that to me? Or Pew?”
“You’re right. No good at all. So what do you want? I mean, what’s your goal here?”
“I want someone to pay for letting us all die.”
“Okay. But who’s ‘us’?”
“My species, who do you bloody think?”
“I mean something a little more concrete. If you keep it vague, they could just say they had no proof of survivors and had to follow health and safety procedures—”
“That’s what they bloody did say!”
“Yes. But what else could they have done? Even if they couldn’t land because they didn’t know what they were dealing with, what else could they have done to save you?”
“They could show a bit of backbone and use some of that godsdamned technology you’re all so proud of!”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know! Fight them. Find us. Get us out of there!”
“Right. Something constructive. If you’re going to prove negligence, you have to show that something could have been done. Could you have been found? Was there a way?”
“I don’t know, we lost radio contact with everyone by then—”
“Radio. Good. You had radio. So they could have done a radio survey.”
“We didn’t hardly use it any more. No one to listen to.”
“But you did try sometimes?”
“…Yeh.”
“Did you keep trying, even after you were alone?”
“Yeh. I didn’t give up like the others.”
“So there you are. That’s a better way to present it. You were broadcasting. If the Exploration Service didn’t try to listen, or didn’t try long enough, then the ICT might find that worth looking into.”
“I suppose.”
“And it’ll help if they know more about what happened in those two years.”
“Why should they care?”
“If two years makes the difference between one survivor making it and a species making it, they’ll care. You need to show there were people who could have been saved. Give them locations they can search in. Use your own group as an example. Were there other people still alive on the day the expedition left?”
“We didn’t know, that’s why they all bloody went!”
“Okay, but you still had some hope. So what could you put in? What happened?”
“We lost contact with the last station about a month earlier. As long as everyone could hear another voice out there, they could pretend someone was coming. But once the last station went dead…” She sighed. “I couldn’t keep them there any more.”
“Was it that dangerous?”
“Of course it was! We’d sent out expeditions before. They never reached the other stations. They never made it anywhere. But they wouldn’t listen. They thought there was some country out there that didn’t have any revenants, or an island or something. And there wasn’t, was there?”
“No. We never found anything.”
“And we were doing all right. We weren’t starving, not as long as there were enough of us to keep the place going. There were always a few more revenants coming over the hills. We could have hung on for years but the others wouldn’t hear of it. Fifty of us to start with and we were down to eighteen at the end. It wasn’t food they were worried about. That bloody Mike, he was the one who wanted to go.”
“Your lover?”
She stopped for a moment. “Not by then, he wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Stop… being… sorry!”
“Do you want me to be glad?”
“No, I want you to shut up and let me finish!”
“Please. Go on.”
“So they went. Everyone except me. And that was after your ship had come down and got bitten and buggered off. All you had to do was look for us…”
“Did your children go as well?”
“Yeh. They went.”
“How had they been handling it?”
“What do you think? They were about ten or twelve when I had to tell them they couldn’t go back home. They’d ask me when they were going to become revenants. They didn’t have any idea what real life was like, all they had was that patch of dirt and we tried, we tried to give them an education but they gave up, they knew they weren’t getting out, what do you think that’s like for a child?”
“Were there any other children there?”
“A few. Eight. Seven after we lost Tymothy when he went out by himself.”
“But more must have been born while you were there. There were men and women. And married couples, I think you said before…”
“Yeh. Married couples.”
“And you had a boyfriend yourself.”
“I was past it.”
“You weren’t that old…”
“We were all past it!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“We had no children. Not one. D’you und
erstand that? All of us were barren.”
“Do you mean… you were infertile?”
“That’s what barren means, you nit. Not my fault it doesn’t make sense in Interversal.”
“That must have been painful.”
“I promised them, you see. I promised them we’d be able to start something. I thought we could get our own little civilisation going and wait for the revenants to die off. But you need children for a civilisation.”
“And the children that were there, did they turn out to be infertile as well?”
“Yes. Not for lack of trying. I swear I had to put a leash on my two when they got old enough. The poor buggers were bored. But there were never any pregnancies.”
“Do you know why?”
“Yeh, I know why.”
“What was it?”
“The marinade. It eats away at your liver and everything else as well. Ovulation goes wrong, the eggs come out dead or shrivelled or something.”
“And you knew that then?”
“No. That’s what your doctors said when they got hold of me. If it was happening to me it must have been happening to the rest. And the men as well, I don’t doubt, not that they’d admit it.”
“So. You staked everything on being able to build a community.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And when that failed?”
“I told them to hang on until someone got us out. And that was fine until there wasn’t anyone to talk to on the radio. And then they went.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I wasn’t all that keen on having my guts chewed out.”
“But you let your children go.”
“I know what you’re thinking. You think I abandoned them, but they made their own minds up. They didn’t want me with them. They wanted to get away. Not just from that place, they wanted to get away from me.”
“And you let them?”
“That was up to them.”
“You didn’t want to go yourself?”
“There wasn’t anything out there. Except revenants.”
“You were certain?”
“I was right.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they came back.”
“Oh. Do you mean…?”
“Yeh. They came back dead. Not all of them. Just a few. They probably got caught by a swarm and most of them were too badly eaten to make it back. Mike did.”
“And your children as well? That must have been… terrible.”
“No. They came back before that.”
“They died before the others?”
“No. They didn’t die. Not on the road.”
“So what happened…?”
“They got scared! They hadn’t been out past the valley for ten years. They didn’t know what it was like. They ran away from the others and came back.”
“You must have been happy.”
She looked away. “Yeh. I was.” And was that a hint of a tear? She wasn’t normally one to cry.
“Did they stay with you, after that?”
“No. They didn’t come home to be with their mother. They came home to die.”
“Oh.”
“And there’s me, the biggest fool of all. I started cooking for them, putting on a celebration. Then I found them in Vicktor’s room. They’d both slit their wrists.”
“I’m…” the urge to say ‘I’m sorry’ was almost overpowering, but I managed to avoid it. “And… afterwards?”
“I put them in the pens before they got up again.” She stared at me, hard. “That’s who they could have saved if they’d lifted one bloody finger!”
“Then you should put that in the representation.”
“All right. I will.”
“Olivia, is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you put your children in the pens, after they… died.”
“That’s right.”
“Along with the other revenants.”
“Yeh.”
“Which you were using for food.”
She didn’t reply.
“Olivia… is there anything you want to tell me?”
She looked straight at me.
“No,” she said.
7. Iokan
Iokan couldn’t keep his hands still. He tapped at the arm of a chair as he sat in my office, trying to articulate what was wrong. He lifted his mug of chakchuk to his lips, then put it down again. He looked about the room, as though searching for an escape from the dilemma that had been preying on his mind ever since the last group session.
“He’s wrong.” His voice was a rasp but he was at least recovering.
“What’s he wrong about, Iokan?”
“It’s ridiculous. You can’t compare the Soo to the Antecessors… it’s…” He shook his head. His hand tapped away at the arm of his chair. “It’s just ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
He looked at me. He’d been hoping for more support.
“Look. On the one hand you’ve got divine beings and on the other this… squalid little species that can’t find anything better to do than abuse anyone they get their hands on…”
“I don’t think Pew was saying they were exactly the same in every respect.”
“The Antecessors saved us. The Soo are an abomination.”
“Both of them may be responsible for the extinction of a species.”
He sat forward, hand on his heart, desperate to convince me. “But we’re not extinct!”
“That’s only true in a sense.”
“They were taken up, not killed!”
“The streets are full of skeletons, Iokan. Would you like to see?”
He paused there, realising the implications of what I’d just said.
“You’ve had something back from my world.”
“Yes. I wanted to talk to you about that today but you seem to be very disturbed by what Pew said…”
He sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry. It just… got to me.” He coughed, and put a hand to his throat as pain stabbed at him. “You say there are skeletons in the streets?”
“Yes. And worse. I’ve spent several evenings going through the material I was sent. It wasn’t pleasant.”
His expression turned from anxiety to sympathy. “If you want to talk about it, I might be able to help you understand.”
“I’m the therapist, Iokan. I’m here to help you. Remember?”
“Of course.”
“When the expedition went back to your world, I asked them to send me information that might be relevant to your therapy. So I have your service records now.”
“I see.”
“I also have a lot of material from the last few weeks before the end.”
He frowned. “That’s not why I gave you the codes.”
“No, but it confirms a lot of what you’ve said.”
He paused for a moment. “You mean you believe me now…?”
“We have your reports on the Antecessors. What they really are. How they attacked you. How you tried to defend yourselves. It’ll all go to the ICT. They’ll take it into account.”
“I hope they’ll reach the right decision.”
“That’s not up to me. We need to look at what happened to you. I’d like to go through some of the material today, if that’s all right?”
“Certainly.”
“Some of it’s going to be distressing. Do you feel up to it?”
He coughed, and swallowed. His voice was still rasping, but he seemed determined. “I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”
“Let’s start with how your world is now.”
I turned the wall into a screen. “Here’s a view from orbit.” I foregrounded a full shot of the planet: it looked like any other Earth, save for broader icecaps. “Let me zoom in on your part of the world…”
I pushed in towards the Indonesian islands, the hub of Zumazscarta, Iokan’s nation. Then further in towards
an advanced city: wide green spaces bridged by shuttletubes hanging between skytowers that stretched their shadows across the parks. But several shuttletubes were smashed, lying in pieces on the roadways and parks below, and fire had burnt charcoal holes in the parklands.
Further down in scale, there seemed to be debris scattered everywhere, as though rubbish hadn’t been collected for weeks. Closer still, you could see it wasn’t rubbish that filled the streets. It was the remains of the city’s inhabitants. A view of the central square of the city showed it rumpled and spotted with corpses.
“This is where we found you,” I said. “Here’s a view from the ground.”
A handheld camera walked through an ancient imagining of hell. Many corpses had been reduced to skeletons with tattered rags around them. Some were still in the final stages of decomposition. Lips were peeled back from teeth. Eyesockets lay empty. A torso roiled with maggots beneath the skin. Verminous mammals darted from empty rib cages to a suppurating groin, picking away at the remaining meat. A swamp of bones floated in a pool where hundreds of people had drowned themselves.
Iokan looked away and blinked at tears.
“Would you like me to stop?” I asked.
“No. No, go on,” he said, rubbing his eyes and turning back to the screen.
“This is what it looks like across the whole planet. We haven’t found a single survivor other than yourself.”
He swallowed back the horror. “They’re… safe. With the Antecessors.”
“And they chose that?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“I’d like to move on to some of the files we found. I expect you’ve seen a few of these before.”
“Probably,” he admitted. He looked up at the wall without focussing on any one thing as I backgrounded the video and brought up an interface for the documents.
“This is an early one.” I magnified a report dated six months before the end of Iokan’s world. He looked outside. “Iokan?”
“Yes. Let me just…”
“Do you need to take a moment?”
“No, no, I’m fine…” He took a sip of his chakchuk, and grimaced. “It’s gone cold…”
“I’ll order some more,” I said. “Tell me about the document.”
He scanned it while I ordered another mug of chakchuk.
“I remember this…” he said. “There were a few suicides we looked into. Lights were seen by neighbours around the time they died, and they were found with smiles on their faces. We decided there wasn’t enough to go on so we closed the case.”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 42
