Skyfall

by Anthony Eaton

  ‘Who…’ Lari began, but stopped. The girl was moving, just slightly. As his eyes adapted to the brightness, he could make out the soft rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. ‘Does she know we’re watching her?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. We’re not here to protect her modesty.’

  ‘No, Lari,’ their father said. ‘This room is soundproof and lightproof. She has no idea.’

  Lari stared. It was impossible to guess how old she was. She seemed young – possibly around his age or even younger, though it was hard to tell. She seemed so different, so … alien. Even from up here, he could clearly make out her ribs.

  ‘She’s thin.’

  ‘All the subjects are. They’ve adapted to different nutritional requirements to us. They can live largely on unprocessed protein and some small amounts of vegetable matter. Don’t let her build fool you, though. She’s not weak.’

  Despite Janil’s words, Lari couldn’t help feeling pity. Her thin arms and legs seemed so fragile against the white mattress on which she lay curled.

  ‘Where’d she come from?’

  ‘The Darklands. Where else?’

  ‘I thought Darklanders couldn’t reproduce viably any more.’

  ‘So did we,’ his father answered. ‘So did everyone except your mother. But two mornings ago a field patrol discovered her standing alone out by the western perimeter wall.’

  ‘And they brought her in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why? Why didn’t they just leave her there where she belonged?’

  ‘Because that girl might just be the answer to our problem.’

  ‘We don’t know that yet, Father.’ An impatient tension lurked behind Janil’s words. ‘You said yourself that the probability of her being stable enough to—’

  ‘I know what I said, Janil. But the fact remains, she’s the only shot we have left.’

  ‘If she turns out to be stable. If we’ve got time to isolate and extract the appropriate proteins. If we can even identify the correct strands in the first place. If the whole bloody sky doesn’t fall down around us before we can finish the work. That’s a whole lot of “ifs”, Father.’

  Lari tuned out while Janil and his father argued. Part of him wanted to turn away and stop looking through the window, but at the same time he couldn’t tear his eyes from that slender form, curled so tightly in on itself. She had no breasts to speak of, no body fat of any kind really, and her face, shrunken under the fierce lighting, looked almost skeletal. Her skin seemed stretched across her bones.

  As he watched, she twitched slightly in her dreams, her body convulsing in response to some unknown terror. From a speaker a small whimpering noise echoed around the observation room.

  ‘She’s frightened.’

  ‘It’s just nightmares.’ Janil broke off arguing with his father. ‘She has them all the time. It’ll pass in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘What are you going to do with her?’

  The two older men hesitated. It was his father who answered.

  ‘Several things. We should go back to my office and explain what this is about, Larinan. And where you fit into the equation.’

  ‘You can’t explain it here?’ Now that he’d seen her, Lari found himself reluctant to leave her alone again, unwatched.

  ‘She’ll be fine. She’s being closely monitored. And you’ll be less distracted by … emotions … if she’s not right there while we discuss this.’

  ‘What’s to discuss?’

  ‘History, Larinan. Some buried, secret history.’

  ‘To do with her?’

  ‘To do with you. And Janil. Family history.’

  ‘What?’ Lari turned to face his father. Dernan Mann’s expression was blank, unreadable. Behind him, though, Janil’s eyes had narrowed.

  ‘What are you talking about, Father?’

  ‘Larinan, that girl down there’ – Dernan Mann nodded in the direction of the observation window, but didn’t look – ‘is one year and three months older than you. She’s the reason your mother decided to break protocol and have a second son. She’s the sole reason you exist.’

  They’re watching her

  She knows this now.

  Somewhere, up in the brightness, the nightpeople are watching. Sometimes she thinks she can even hear them, their quiet voices a whisper against the background hum of skyfire.

  When she can move, when her body is hers, she squints up into the light, trying to see them.

  But she never does.

  Most of the time, though, her body is theirs, or at least not hers. Most of the time her body is a dead thing, prone and motionless, no matter how hard she tries to move it.

  Not her mind, though. Her mind is hers.

  She wonders what they want.

  She wonders if this is what they did to her mother.

  And always, the skyfire itches and pulses around her, through the cold white walls, through the hard floor, through the soft flat mat on which they’ve placed her useless body, though the air itself.

  Burning …

  Burning …

  Falling.

  And she tries to cry out, but nobody hears …

  And nobody answers.

  In the pale, filtered light which cast through the clearcrete windows from the exposure chamber, Janil watched his brother looking down at the girl as their father tried to find the words to explain her presence here in DGAP.

  He looks so pale, so weak, he thought. Even that girl down there looks stronger

  But then, that was nothing new to Janil. The copygen had always seemed that way, for as long as Janil could remember. That hadn’t stopped him from being their mother’s favourite, though, from the moment he was born right up until that final night when she soared out through the heavens for the last time.

  Of course, she’d loved Janil too – he’d never doubted that. His memories of those first few years – before his parents went and changed everything forever – shone like some perfect dream, almost buried now by time and responsibility.

  But still, sometimes, lying alone in his tiny apartment at night or flying out to the field through starlit darkness, Janil remembered. He remembered her touch, her voice, the stroke of her fingers across his hair while he lay in the darkness pretending to sleep.

  ‘Goodnight, my little man. Dream big dreams for me.’

  My little man. That’s what he’d always been to her. Never a child. He remembered once, before the copygen came along and made him a social pariah, she’d taken him to a kidsrec dome. He’d been begging for weeks. Some of the other kids in his kinder class had been with their parents, and it was the talk of the advanced school. But Dernan and Eyna Mann were always busy, even back then: busy discovering the impending end of everything, busy running DGAP and briefing the Prelate, certainly too busy to take the time to let their only child play silly games.

  But he’d nagged and pleaded and finally she’d relented, and one evening when she wasn’t on fieldwork they’d gone to the kidsrec dome.

  Even now, so many years since she’d left him, he remembered magging across the city, gripping his mother’s hand in sweaty excitement.

  And then when they got there he’d hated it. Swing-bars and chase mazes, it all seemed so … childish. Even back then.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ she’d asked on the way home.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘You don’t seem excited. Do you want to go again next breakday?’

  ‘No. It’s okay.’

  ‘Janil, what’s wrong? I thought you were looking forward to kidsrec.’

  ‘I was. But it wasn’t very good.’

  He felt her stare on him, through him.

  ‘Would you like to do something more exciting?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Okay, then.’

  She hadn’t said another word, and they’d magged the rest of the way to their dome in silence. But when they stepped out into the common, instead of taking him to their tower as normal, sh
e’d led him into a tight alleyway, then through a blank, metal doorway and down a tight spiralling staircase into a dim machine room which four-year-old Janil had never known existed. There, she’d stopped and knelt beside him.

  ‘Shall we have an adventure, darling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come this way.’

  Taking his hand, his mother had led him into a gloomy warren of racks and equipment, blinking lights and strange, oscillating whines, stopping at a low, square hatchway in the wall, a green light burning above it.

  ‘Janil, listen carefully. You must never, ever come down here without me, all right? And you can’t ever tell anyone about this place. It’s a special secret, just you and me, okay?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I need to hear you say it, sweetheart.’

  ‘Okay. I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Including Daddy.’

  ‘Why not?’ Even then, the idea that he could share a secret with her but not his father had seemed somehow wrong.

  ‘Because your father doesn’t like adventures, Janil. He likes protocol. He likes to do things … scientifically. And going through this door isn’t scientific at all.’

  That made sense. If there was one thing that Dernan Mann had taught his son it was the importance of being scientific. Almost as soon as Janil could talk, he was learning to reason, under his father’s strict tutelage.

  ‘What’s out there?’

  ‘An amazing experience. Far better than any rec dome. But it’s not something most people like, or understand, darling. That’s why this has to be just between you and me. All right?’

  ‘All right.’

  Then Eyna Mann had scanned the access plate and the hatchway slid silently into the plascrete wall.

  It was the smell he remembered the most – the acrid, dirty smell of the air that heaved into the sterility of the dome with a dusty sigh.

  ‘This way.’ His mother went first, ducking her head through the low hatch coaming and stepping through the short passage beyond. Janil hesitated a moment before following. Of course, he didn’t have to duck, even a little bit, and when he stepped out onto the balcony he was still too short to see over the solid safety railing that curved away from him in either direction.

  Above him, though, when he looked up, he could see the stars. The stars! They shimmered and twinkled like he’d never seen them before.

  ‘Twinkle twinkle little star,

  Through the clearcrete, oh so far…’

  He’d sung the words softly, barely more than a hum. He’d thought that song nonsense until this moment.

  His mother was watching him intently. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s …’ He regarded her seriously. ‘What’s wrong with the stars?’

  ‘Nothing at all, darling. This is how they’re supposed to look. This is normal.’

  ‘But they’re … twinkling.’

  ‘They’ve been doing that for millions and millions of years. Since a long time before you or I have been around. Do you want to know something even more interesting?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A lot of those stars aren’t even there anymore. In the time it takes for their light to travel all the way here, they’ve twinkled out of existence.’

  ‘Where do they go?’

  His mother had laughed, a silvery chuckle that wasn’t in the slightest bit at his expense.

  ‘Nowhere, darling. At least, not that we’ve been able to discover.’

  Janil digested this for a moment. ‘Then one day, I’ll find out.’

  ‘I think that sounds like a wonderful idea, Janil. You could be a scientist like your mum and dad.’

  They stood there under the starlight. The clearcrete was fully transparent at this time of night, and a pale blue shadow washed down from inside the dome onto the balcony.

  ‘Would you like me to pick you up so you can look over the edge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Without another word, Eyna Mann leaned down and lifted up her son, holding him tight above the level of the railing.

  At first the night-lit skycity looked just as it did through the clearcrete windows of their apartment, just … brighter. Beacons atop com arrays blinked silent warnings into the empty night. Dull, sulphurous glows etched like cancer across the underworld. The dim, filter-lit echoes of shadows reflected inside distant domes.

  Then a slight breeze ruffled the tiny hairs on the back of Janil’s neck, and suddenly the view seemed to shift, whirling into awesome perspective, spinning and spinning. The lights became a whirling blur and, in a moment of sickening clarity, the bottom fell out of his stomach and he knew he was going to fall, down and down and down …

  The young boy closed his eyes against the terrible, vertiginous city and screamed.

  ‘Darling … darling …’

  His mother’s voice was coming from somewhere distant, too far away, too quiet over the screaming that felt as though it was coming out of every pore of his skin.

  ‘DARLING!’

  His thoughts were spinning too, fast, crazy, out of control, out of reach.

  The young boy was only vaguely aware of his mother propelling him through the hatch and closing the access. Only when it was fully sealed and the old, dry air filtered away completely did he open his eyes again, reassured to find himself surrounded once more by walls of solid plascrete, the comforting hum of machinery like a background lullaby.

  ‘Janil, sweetheart, are you all right? Look at me.’

  And he’d looked up into those eyes, those beautiful blue eyes, the colour of the sky.

  ‘Darling, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d react like that. Do you feel okay?’

  His legs were shaking and he didn’t trust his voice, but he managed a mute nod.

  ‘We’ll never go out there again, all right? I promise you. I’ll never put you outside ever again. Will that be okay?’

  He looked at her. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  Then Janil lowered his gaze.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Sorry? Whatever for?’

  ‘For not being strong …’

  Eyna Mann kneeled, putting her face at the same level as Janil’s and taking his chin firmly but gently between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Janil, don’t ever apologise for something you have no control over. All you can do is try things and if they don’t work out it’s not your fault. Do you understand?’

  A nod.

  ‘And you’re not to feel bad about it either, even on the inside. Most of the people in Port can’t go out on the balconies like you just did. I bet that none of the kids in your kinder would be able to. You did better than most of them, and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘Why can’t they?’

  ‘Because …’ She paused for a moment, letting go of his chin and choosing her words carefully. ‘Most of the people who live in skycities like Port lost the ability to live outside a long time ago.’

  ‘Because of the radiation?’ All Port children grew up knowing about exposure. It was the first thing taught at kinder.

  ‘Partly, but even when there’s no risk, like tonight, when people have spent their whole lives living under a skydome their brains don’t like it when you take that dome away. It makes them feel—’

  ‘Dizzy?’

  ‘Vulnerable. And dizzy too.’ She stood up. ‘I think we’ve had quite enough adventure for the moment, don’t you?’

  They’d made their way back up and across the common. In the internal lift his mother had taken his hand again and smiled at him.

  ‘I’ll always be proud of you, Janil. No matter what you do. You remember that, okay?’

  ‘Okay. And I’ll always be proud of you, too, Mummy.’

  And he’d meant it. Whether his mother realised it or not, when he said those words he had never meant anything more. Even at three, he realised that it wasn’t just a compliment. He was making a promise of such gravity that he’d never b
reak it, no matter what.

  And then, of course, a little over a year later she’d given him a baby brother. A copygen. His father had taken him over to the med dome to see them.

  ‘Your mother will be tired, Janil, so you’re not to pester her with too many questions. Do you understand?’

  ‘Why does Mum have to stay in the med dome? When Bryneya’s little brother was born, his mother was home that night.’

  ‘Your mother did it … differently.’ Dernan Mann studied the newspanel in the roof of the maglift intently. ‘Just be a good man, all right?’

  ‘Okay.’

  And when he’d been led into her room, there she was, the mother who he’d promised to always be proud of, and sucking on her breast was a …

  ‘This is your brother, Janil. This is Larinan.’

  Janil remembered the crumbling feeling that word brought with it. Brother. The crumbling of a promise. He looked at the pale, sucking bundle.

  ‘What do you think? Do you like him?’

  Be like Dad. Be scientific.

  ‘I guess. He’s small.’

  ‘He’s perfect.’ From the bed, Eyna Mann gave her eldest child a quick, almost perfunctory smile before dropping her gaze back to the infant nursing at her chest. ‘Promise me you’ll always watch out for him, Janil.’

  Janil had studied the baby. He’d heard the other kids at kinder and prep talk about families that had two kids the same. Copygens. They were the lowest, worse than shifties.

  ‘Janil?’

  ‘I promise.’

  He was replacing one promise with another, he knew. But somehow it didn’t make him feel any better.

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ Janil stalked the perimeter of their father’s office, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You don’t seriously expect us to believe this, do you, Father?’

  ‘Janil, sit down!’ Dernan Mann leaned back in his chair and didn’t try to hide his irritation. ‘You’re making far too much of this.’

  ‘Far too much? Are you listening to yourself? You and Mother have used this family as some kind of experiment. We’re nothing more than’ – he searched for the right word – ‘subjects’.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Lari interjected. ‘You told me that you had no idea the girl existed until a couple of days ago.’