The Nuclear Druid

by Felix R. Savage

  She showed Ted the drone after the children were in bed. The elder Wilsons had gone to their own caravan. Lloyd remained in the young family’s caravan, citing the need not to disturb Daisy’s sleep, but in reality so that he could pester Bridget and Ted about going to Skye. This was his pet idea, which he would not let go of no matter how often she pointed out the impossibility of packing the nine of them and their goods into one small sailing boat, not to mention the dangers of the Minch. Ted put him off this time by saying they’d think about it when summer came. Peeved, he’d taken himself off to play one of his endless games of solitaire by the open door of the wood stove. But at the word ‘drone’ he was back, a towering scarecrow-like figure, blocking the kerosene lamp.

  “Let me see it.”

  Bridget pointed to the little machine on the fold-down table. It was a microcopter with a stealth-black fuselage that had an odd form factor, sort of bristly, like a dead twig. It was no bigger than a starling. Her bullet had torn off one of its rotors.

  “It’s from the Fleet,” Ted said. He was all lit up with this possibility, and heroically not blaming Bridget for shooting the drone down. “It’ll have been looking for survivors.”

  Lloyd picked the drone up in his long deft fingers. No matter how much he drank in the old days, his hands had never shaken. Bridget was dismayed to see them shaking now. The wobbling shadows exaggerated the tremors. “It’s not from the Fleet, you numpties.”

  “It is,” Ted protested. “Who else could it be from?”

  The Fleet was their last hope, given their implicit understanding that the government of Scotland, and probably every government on Earth, had gone the way of the hoteliers and shopkeepers of Ullapool. The Fleet had evacuated millions of people from the colonies, and then re-evacuated thousands of people from Earth. They could not possibly, said Ted, have left everyone who was not rich to die.

  Yes, thought Bridget, they could have. Her father seemed to confirm her cynicism. “It’s not got any weapons, just a camera, but that doesn’t mean it’s friendly. Why’d you shoot it?” he asked her.

  “I had a bad feeling about it,” Bridget said defiantly.

  Lloyd turned the drone over. Then he walked away with it, back to the wood stove at the other end of the caravan where the children were sleeping. An unfinished game of solitaire covered the table. It was a funny kind of solitaire he played, with the kings opposing each other across the table, black to red, and all the other cards swirling around in the middle. He cleared a space for the drone.

  Bridget scanned the sleeping faces of the children zonked out on the couches. “Jesus, Dad, not in here.”

  He paid her no attention. He sat down and held both hands out flat, about a foot above the drone. He did not move for several minutes, except to grimace and roll his shoulders to relieve the strain. Ted gave Bridget’s waist a gentle pinch, which meant: Your father’s a complete nutter, isn’t he? Bridget nodded. It was easier for Ted, she knew, to believe that old Mr. Mackenzie was a crank than to accept the truth, which was that he was a magician. Not just a conjuror, which was how he used to earn a living. A real, honest-to-God magician.

  The cards moved.

  The king of spades sliced into the air. As if blown by a wind from nowhere, a wind they couldn’t feel, it landed on top of the drone.

  Lloyd grunted. The king of hearts rose off the table. It slid under the black king and flipped it upwards.

  Ted’s mouth hung open.

  The king of spades fought back, slapping against the red king and pushing it away from the drone.

  Several of the other cards joined the fray. They whirled in the air above the table, slicing at each other, black versus red. Lloyd’s hands began to shake violently.

  “Fuck’s sake!” he said. “Help me hold my hands up!”

  Bridget squeezed around one side of the table, Ted the other. Meeting one another’s gaze with wide, frightened eyes, they planted their elbows on the table and supported Lloyd’s arms while the cards darted around the caravan like birds gone mad. A two of spades hit Ted in the face.

  “Ugh,” Lloyd grunted. The king of spades flopped to the table, face-down. The other cards followed.

  The king of hearts lay face-up on top of the drone.

  “You can let go now,” he added.

  Ted straightened up, looking dazed.

  Bridget caught movement on one of the couches. She panicked for an instant, thinking one of the children had woken up, and there she’d been thinking they had learned to sleep through anything—then she saw it was just Mickle, the cat, sticking her head out from under the edge of Scarlett’s duvet. She bent and checked on her daughter. The rattle in her chest didn’t sound good, but at least Scarlett wasn’t coughing tonight.

  Lloyd said, “Well, I’ve taken it off him. He’ll not be spying on us that way anymore. That’s the good news.”

  Ted cleared his throat. “Um, am I the only one who thinks that was rather odd?”

  Bridget laughed. She tucked her arm around her husband’s waist. How she loved him—naïve, English, ordinary. So blessedly ordinary.

  Lloyd turned a bleak gaze on his son-in-law. “We’ve been invaded by teleporting aliens who look like humans, and you think my wee tricks are odd?”

  Ted smiled, conceding the point, but he said, “You’re a magician, aren’t you, Lloyd? A real one.”

  Well, well. Not as naïve as she’d thought.

  Lloyd grudgingly nodded. “A few hundred years ago, they’d have burned me at the stake. A few thousand years ago, I’d have been prancing around the oak groves in a white nightgown, cutting the living hearts out of prisoners of war.”

  “And Bridget’s one, too,” Ted said. He was thinking, she knew, of the ‘bad feeling’ she’d had about the drone. Of her other ‘feelings’ in the past, including the one that had pushed him and her to move up north and go full prepper, at a time when other people were still telling each other the government would save them.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, low.

  “It’s in her blood,” Lloyd said. “But she’s not trained.”

  Too true, damn you, Dad, Bridget thought. And why? Because you never even tried to train me. You spent hours and hours teaching your tricks to Colm, and how did that work out? He ran away to space and never came back. I’m the one who stayed here to look after you and Mam, and what do I get for it? Nothing but grief.

  Ted said, “All I want to know is if they …” He trailed off, glancing at the three sleeping children.

  “No,” Lloyd and Bridget said together. Then, for the first time in ages, they laughed together. Of all the people on Earth, Ted Wilson—born in Birmingham, former media manager at an outdoor goods company—was the least likely to share the taint of the fucked-up Mackenzies. Morag, Ivor, and Scarlett were safe. “You have to get it from both sides,” Bridget explained. Ted relaxed a smidge.

  Lloyd stared gloomily at the cards. Bridget tried to divine what he saw in the pattern in which they had fallen. The black and the red were all mixed up together. She wondered if it meant anything that the other red king, the king of diamonds, hadn’t moved. The other black king, the king of clubs, lay all by himself on the far side of the table. “So what’s the bad news?” she said.

  “I need a drink,” Lloyd said.

  “You stopped the Magus from spying on us with the drone.” The Magus was a familiar bogeyman. It was Lloyd’s way of referring to whatever intelligence motivated the Ghosts. “You said that was the good news. What’s the bad news?”

  “Ah. Is it not obvious? He already saw you. So we’ll have to book it.”

  Ted jumped as if he’d been stabbed. “You think they’re coming for us?”

  “Definitely,” Lloyd said. “But all is not lost. They don’t like the sea, as you’ll have noticed. Can’t stand the bloody sight of it. Got no clue about boats. So we’ll be safe if we cross the water.”

  “Dad—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, and I’m n
ot saying we should go to Skye in that crapped-out dinghy. If you’d stolen a better boat, as I keep telling you … Ah well. The dinghy’ll get us across the loch.”

  “To where?”

  “There’s an island closer than Skye. You can see it if you step outside. Isle Martin. Aye, sure, there’s no nice cozy caravan site over there. But it’s better than being dead, isn’t it?”

  Bridget was about to object. But then Scarlett coughed in her sleep. She rushed to her side, consumed by worry about her daughter.

  She hardly heard Ted say, “So I take it you don’t think the Fleet is coming to save us.”

  Lloyd replied curtly: “That drone isn’t one of theirs. It’s from the sentrienza.”

  CHAPTER 21

  DHJERGA HAD TAKEN ALL the stuff home to Dam Lizp Hol. Well, he hadn’t known Colm was going to conquer the world while he was gone.

  The stuff took up an entire warehouse at the Lizp steelworks. The artisans sidled unhappily around the spools of fiberoptic cable and precision-machined engine bells. It offended them to have all these barbaric objects invading their domain, he knew. The steelworks were a boutique operation, dedicated to one-of-a-kind excellence. A dozen metalworkers with lifetimes of experience between them might labor for days over a single gun barrel, not content to make anything less than the best and most beautiful gun barrel in the universe. Only a few dozen finished items came out of the works every year; but each of those could be copied thousands of times without significant quality loss, because they were so good to begin with. The artisans discriminated in their choice of materials, going themselves to the mines and forests to obtain the very best metal ores and timber. Fate forfend they work with materials from a source they had not personally vetted. They took immense pride in their work. Wherever attempts to introduce Earth technologies to Kisperet had been made, they had failed, nine out of ten times, in the face of passive opposition from these freemen.

  “Suck it up,” Dhjerga told them. “Starting today, we’re going to be building a spaceship.”

  Then he had to explain what a spaceship was. Predictably, they didn’t like it. Flying between worlds in a metal tube?

  “The old ways are the best ways,” sniffed a veteran machinist.

  “That’s what Lady Diejen always used to say,” Dhjerga reminded them. “Now she’s gone. That filthy louse she was going to marry kidnapped her and Lord Dryjon. He’s taken them to Atletis.” The artisans’ faces crumpled in shock. They, too, knew that the Lizp-led rebellion had strewn corpses across Kisperet and—a worse crime—left thousands of illegal copies wandering around. The twins were under an automatic death sentence. They were not likely to ever come back from Atletis alive.

  But Dhjerga didn’t believe the Magus would execute them immediately. He’d keep them alive for a while, hoping to bait the rebels into trying to rescue them.

  Dhjerga was eager to accept that invitation, and he wasn’t going to let a bunch of bolshy freemen stand in his way.

  Having leveraged the steelworkers’ affection for Diejen to win their cooperation, he copied two dozen of them to Ilfenjium. He had also had to promise to copy their families with them, so he went into the town and explained the situation to the women and children and a few husbands. In the ordinary way of things, freemen would never let themselves be copied. It was at once a privilege reserved for the chosen few, like Janz, and a taboo rooted in a sound grasp of the health issues. Dhjerga ordered them to gather on the snow-blanketed cobbles of Electrical Square, and did it. Other townspeople stopped and stared and asked questions. Dhjerga answered them. It was just as well they should all know that the old ways were changing.

  The whole operation was pointless, to be honest. When the copied artisans met their copied families at Ilfenjium, they would barely know each other. Copies retained their skills but little of their humanity; the adults would have to be told the names of their own children, and would not care much about them. The children, lacking skills, would be virtually helpless. They’d have to be fed and dressed and led around like imbeciles until they came to themselves. And when the mothers and fathers came to themselves, there was no guarantee they’d still want to be married to the same people … Yes, there were many good reasons why what Dhjerga had just done was a capital crime. But it was far from the first one he’d committed, and the way things were going it would not be the last.

  He pulled some power from the steelworks and went home.

  Dam Lizp Hol was named after, and overlooked, the same dam that powered the steelworks. You could see the snowy roofs of the town from the upstairs windows. The turbines of the hydroelectric plant were actually in the cellar of the vast, ancient castle. Because of this, they had something virtually unknown elsewhere on Kisperet—electric light. Dhjerga’s mother had discovered incandescent light bulbs on the first colony world they conquered, and to this day, one artisan spent all his time making incrementally more perfect glass bulbs that enclosed carbonized wood splints in a vacuum, in memory of her. It had been the family’s first small defiance of the Magistocracy. Dhjerga changed out of his wet clothes beneath the light bulb in his chamber. First the Magus had taken his mother and father. Now the twins. He was the only one left.

  “Janz!” he shouted. He needed help polishing the lord prefect’s torc and cleaning his mantle. Dryjon never used to wear them, so the originals had got tarnished and shelf-wrinkled, respectively. He hated to make copies of them in this condition.

  One of his second cousins poked her head into the chamber, and pulled back with a scandalized yelp when she saw Dhjerga standing in his shirt-tails, his cock hanging out.

  “I need Janz! Where is he?” Dhjerga yelled at the door, hurriedly pulling a pair of breeches on.

  “Um, your freeman?”

  Dhjerga rolled his eyes. He didn’t really know any of his cousins and nor did they know him, since he’d been away at the front since he was seventeen. Still, it was inexcusable that this girl wasn’t even sure of the name of the Lizp family’s reigning champion. “Yes, my freeman! My best freeman. Where is he?”

  He was suddenly afraid for Janz. They had been fighting together for fifteen years.

  He put on his boots and went out to the corridor; no one there. He tracked his cousins down in Diejen’s chamber, at the end of the wing. Their female slaves knelt on the floor, with kirtles and leggings and blouses draped over their outstretched arms and heads. He had a horrible feeling that his cousins had been trying on Diejen’s clothes. But these girls were lionesses. They had helped to conquer the world. He was not going to fall out with them over a few frocks. Keeping his temper, he said, “Janz?”

  “Oh, yes, I know who you mean,” said an older girl. “Diejen took him south with her.”

  “Took him?”

  “Yes. She said she wanted to look after him herself.”

  Oh, Diejen. It figured that her idea of looking after Janz was dragging him on a thousand-mile trek through the forest. Dhjerga didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He settled on leaving. But before he left, he said to his cousins’ slaves, “Stand up.”

  They did as ordered.

  “Put those things on the bed, or on the chairs. Wherever you like.”

  They did so. A couple of them were too new to make sense of such a confusing order; they stared at him blankly, with kirtles hanging over half their faces.

  “Now you can sit down—or go get something to eat—or go to your quarters and rest. Whatever you like.”

  “Hey!” his cousins said indignantly. “We’re using them.”

  “Have you forgotten why we rebelled against the Magistocracy in the first place? They’re not slaves anymore! They’re free! Treat them like human beings.”

  He was aware of his own hypocrisy. After all, he had just made copies of a hundred people who’d served the Lizps faithfully all their lives. He didn’t give the girls time to point this out. He pulled power from the generator in the basement, and flitted.

  The nippy air of Diejen’s cha
mber turned into warmth. Electric light turned into the flickering light of Magistocracy-approved kerosene lanterns. The steelworks at dwarfed the Lizp operation. Giant forges and rollers loomed at one end of the factory floor. This was where they made tanks for the front—a recent and still controversial innovation, which had meant adopting the internal combustion engine. Dhjerga had already moved the spaceship parts here from Dam Lizp Hol. They lay scattered on the factory floor like a giant jigsaw puzzle, mixed in with tank armor and caterpillar treads. He saw his copied artisans poking at them, and then he stood among them.

  There was always an instant’s dizziness; a feeling of pins and needles in his bones. Then he was himself again.

  He smelled hot metal and lubricant oil, and saw Colm sitting on the edge of one of the giant anvils near the unlit forges. Swathed in a Lizp-green mantle, Colm was drinking from a flask as he pored over the big C-shaped faerie book. He had not seen Dhjerga appear. Dhjerga regarded him across the factory floor for a moment. He saw Colm as their savior, a mage with an innate grasp of the principles of freedom, who could teach them all a better way to be. Yes, there was the slight hitch that he was not a mage at the moment. But that was a good thing. It made him easier to control.

  “Hola,” Colm called out, raising a hand.

  Dhjerga went over to him, tucking in his shirt. In the end he’d forgotten to bring the lord prefect’s gear. It was probably just as well. He was not the lord prefect, and it might get his allies’ backs up if he started dressing like it.

  Colm touched a button and the screen of the faerie book went black. “First priority is setting up a power supply for that. Once the battery goes, it’s dead unless I can get AC current out of the generator. We’ll have to build phase transformers, too. Have some bee juice.” He offered Dhjerga his flask. Bee juice? Dhjerga took it and gulped. Mead. Dhjerga had had to get used to the concept of a savior who drank like a fish, but Colm looked really fried just now. “I keep thinking I could’ve done something to save them,” he said. “I just stood there with my thumb up my arse. Real Fleet preparedness.”