Futuretrack 5

by Robert Westall

  “Anyway, when I was lying in bed that night, the wardrobe began banging and jumping about. I was shit-scared… but everything seemed to go all right for me after that. …” He waved a hand at the marble Adam fireplace, the corgi, the whole of Glasgow…

  I looked again at the painting, at the battered wardrobe standing in the corner. At Blocky’s rosy cheeks and shining eyes. Then I wanted to run out of that room as fast as my legs would carry me.

  “Be reasonable, Kitson,” he said gently. “You’re a Tech. You’ve been trained to be open-minded. What did they use to say at Cambridge? If a technique works, it’s a good technique. That’s all this is, Kitson. Think of this as a technique for staying alive. I made a bargain— He’s kept His side of it. I’d have been a heap of ashes in a little plastic urn, if He hadn’t. Can’t be bad.”

  “I’m not making any bargain with that thing.”

  “Who’d you think you are—Jesus Christ? After what you did to Vic Huggett?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Oh, we know most things here. Only we don’t have to prove they’re crimes… unlike the Paramils. I still don’t see how you got away with it.” There was a tinge of admiration in his voice, like a soft hand reaching out for me. “What do you want most in the world?”

  “I want to know what some bastard called Scott-Astbury’s up to.” It was foolish to say it, but I wanted to wipe his Cheshire-cat grin.

  The shine went off his face. “You want a lot.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Oh, but I do. It was when I found out what Scott-Astbury was up to that I made my final bargain with Him.” Just for a second, as Blocky looked inward at something, he looked human, tired, old. “I’m not giving Scott-Astbury to you for free, either.”

  “I’m still not making a bargain with that thing.” The painted face kept drawing my eyes, try as I might.

  “All right,” he said soothingly. “This bargain is with me. Your part is just losing one National Championship—or persuading her to. And, when you’ve found out all about camping, and Scott-Astbury, you can come back and make a bargain with Him. If you don’t wake up saying goo-goo in the lobo-farm first.”

  His bright, sunny smile came back: his world was wonderful again.

  I fled. He was talking to somebody as I left. I hoped it was the corgi.

  Chapter 14

  “All set?” asked Blocky, brimming with glee. Wearing his Est country-gent gear, white riding mac, cravat, and corduroy cap. With his tininess, he could take the mickey out of it and still look elegant.

  He’d kept his word. Mitzi, resprayed matte green, her chrome blacked, had new registration plates. Which must tally, in Laura’s memory banks, with my new ID, John MacDonald, a lowly Tech servicing agri-robots in the Scottish lowlands. Keri was now Mrs. MacDonald, fetching, domestic, and wifely in a humble green anorak.

  The MacDonalds must once have been real people… I didn’t ask.

  Grubs, pans, tent—were all stowed. Blocky had even offered me a Paramil blaster, in case we got caught camping red-handed. I refused: if I took it, I’d only end up using it, and Blocky was pushing me down the broad road to hell fast enough already.

  We’d kept our word, too. It took three days to persuade Keri, but in the end she’d lost her championship most artistically, riding wilder than ever, in apparent desperation. Giving her fans a last show. I’d spent two days with my heart in my mouth, but she was safe now, all mine again. Another girl, wearing Keri’s old helmet and leathers, would go on riding, further and further back down the field, till the media lost interest and went back to London. In a few weeks, all these riders would be dead, and Keri and I lost forever.

  “All set?” asked Blocky again. Grinning from ear to ear like a kid launching an expensive model yacht, bought by some silly uncle, into a North Sea gale. I couldn’t be sure he hadn’t packed a time bomb in our camping gear. I wasn’t sure the warehouse door we were about to ride out of wasn’t several stories up. But I guessed he liked his jokes longer than that. He’d be amused if we came back disillusioned and made a bargain with his dreadful boss; he’d be amused if we got caught and sent to the lobo-farm. He’d reached some diabolical nirvana where everything was funny.

  This warehouse was part of the Glasgow perimeter. Blocky nodded to one slim, black girl to put out the light. Another slid aside a well-oiled door, letting in a gale of wind, a sky of fast-moving cloud and broken moonlight.

  “They’ll never spot you from the air tonight. Keep calm, and the psycho-radar won’t spot you, either. The psychopters only patrol ten miles out—first ten miles are the worst. And …” He held up a finger like a conductor’s baton, consulting his expensive watch. Then, as he dropped his arm, all hell broke out back in Glasgow. Screaming, homemade pistols, the whoof of petrol bombs.

  A red light grew on the wall of the next ruined warehouse, outside the Wire.

  “What the? …” I said weakly, pretending to be surprised.

  “Someone’s dying for you, Kitson. Don’t waste it.”

  Keri did a wheelie up the steep ramp, then we snaked across the usual pattern of crumbling tarmac. In a minute, we were on the Cumbernauld road. We kept the speed right down. Mitzi didn’t even whisper. Her engine made no heat to show up on a psychopter’s heat scanners. Inside our green anoraks, cooled by the rush of air, our bodies sent out no more heat than a running dog. We hummed our favourite songs, to keep happy; the frame of mind of a canine on the razzle. So to a psychopter overhead we’d present the speed, heat, and pleasure pattern of a dirty-minded Fido. We kept our headlights off, because Fidos don’t have headlights. That was illegal; but we could outrun any patrol car we met on the ground.

  We met nothing. No car or person, house or farm. Only the wind, making us sway and wobble on corners. And the ancient smell of greenery, even if it was only the lousy hardy-vines and hardy-hops, mutated by our wonderful Techs to grow here in the cold north.

  The loudest sound, apart from the wind, was the endless whirr and clatter of the agri-robots in the fields, watering, trimming, weeding, even in darkness.

  “Psychopter!” It swung high overhead, an evil dragon, blinded by its own lights flashing red, green, white. Its pinging filled our brains, but Keri was gently happy with the bike between her knees, and I was happy holding her waist between my hands. Besides, their radar would be clogged with all the hell breaking loose in Glasgow.

  Was it a harmless riot that would fade quickly? Or a suicidal attack on the Paramils’ HQ? With Blocky, you never knew. Were they dying for us? Why hadn’t I asked him seriously, made him answer? But Blocky had that effect on you; it got worse the longer you knew him. The dying ghosts of Glasgow flickered uneasily in my mind. Ugly, hating, destructive, pointless, but still human; not paper money in Blocky’s endless game of Monopoly.

  The psychopter faded. Empty dark-green silence, with the ticking and chirring and endless stealthy movements of the mickey mouses. Keri shivered.

  “I feel lonely.”

  I squeezed her waist. “You’ve got me.”

  For once she didn’t grumble. “First town’s Cumbernauld. Five miles.”

  “Skirt round the side roads, once you spot the perimeter.

  But we didn’t spot any perimeter. The white-lined road wound on and on, under the cloud-dodging moon. Once a fox stared out, with moon-green eyes; and there were rabbits. But as for the smell of man, not a whiff.

  “We should’ve passed Cumbernauld,” said Keri. “We’re on the wrong road.”

  I glanced at the glowing map on Mitzi’s windscreen. Checked it with a glimpse of the Plough and Pole Star. “No, we’re going east by north. Mitzi’s computer must be on the blink. …”

  Keri grunted, went faster. The minutes ticked away. We passed road junctions, trees, huge agri-robot sheds. But not a single signpost, let alone Cumbernauld. I kept staring from Mitzi’s windscreen to the countryside in disbelief.

  After forty minutes, Keri braked abruptly, and swit
ched on the headlights. A hundred yards on, a big sign shone:

  WELCOME TO HISTORIC STIRLING CASTLE.

  “What happened to Cumbernauld?” Her voice had a tremor.

  “The road must have by-passed it.”

  “The road goes right through the middle of it, according to your precious bike.”

  “You can miss things in the dark.”

  “Like a town of a hundred thousand people? We’ve seen nobody.”

  “If you’re that lonely, I’ll whistle up a psychopter.”

  Silence. I said more gently, “For goodness sake, we can ask in Stirling. What’s so marvellous about Cumbernauld? It was only built in the 1950s. Nothing worth seeing.”

  “A hundred thousand people are worth seeing.”

  “You’re tired,” I said. “It’s all that racing.”

  With a sniff, and a slam of her visor, we rode on. The way to historic Stirling Castle, on its cliff, was amazingly well signposted. We pulled up at the gatehouse in five minutes. There was still a light on. Comforting.

  “There you are!” I said. “Stirling Castle, safe and sound!”

  “Stirling’s not just a castle. It’s another town of a hundred thousand people. Where is it? Where are they?” From the castle’s commanding height, under the now-clear moon, I could see nothing but huge green fields.

  Behind us, a small door in the castle gate creaked open; light streamed out. Outlined against it was a woman, holding back a dog with one hand, and holding what looked like a shotgun in the other. “What do you want?” She sounded about fifty, and bossy.

  “Is this Stirling?” I blurted out stupidly, for once quite lost for words.

  “Finish up this coffee,” said Mrs. Nairn. “I get so few visitors.”

  “Must be lonely. …”

  “The dog’s company.”

  “Must’ve been different thirty years ago,” I said cautiously.

  “Aye.” She sighed. “Though they do say there’ll be new people next year… English. When they’ve finished doing up those old houses down by the bridge. I think it’s a sin, all those good, new houses smashed flat by the bulldozers, and only these dreary old ruins left and done up at God knows what cost. I sometimes think they want the place to look like it did before the Battle of Bannockburn… such nonsense. You won’t tell them I said that?” she added, anxiously.

  “It’s between friends, Mrs. Nairn. When did they move all the people out?”

  “Ten years since. Sent a lot of removal vans and buses, and took them to Glasgow. Rationalisation, they called it; better housing, they said. I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I was only in Glasgow the once and didn’t like it.”

  “Were there many people?”

  “Not so many at the end. The young ones were gone already—to Glasgow for the racing and the pop groups. After that, there was scarcely a bairn born. And such a lot of deaths… when there’s no grandchildren, the old yins have nothing to live for. And the young ones never wrote, once they got to Glasgow. I often wonder where it’ll all end. When I lie awake at night, listening to those machines ticking, all across the valley. You’re in the government service… where d’you think it’ll all end? You must know.”

  “Only about my machines, Mrs. Nairn… I’ve got to keep them ticking.” I got up. “Thanks for the lovely dinner. We’d better be getting back to Glasgow. …”

  “You’ll keep well south now, won’t ye? You know the forbidden zone starts just ten miles north of here? I wouldn’t like to see you getting into trouble. …”

  My heart leaped, though I kept my face straight. Blocky hadn’t mentioned any forbidden zone; but then he wouldn’t. And one reason for a forbidden zone might be Scott-Astbury’s big mistake…

  Nothing marked the boundary of the forbidden zone, not even a strand of barbed wire. The country was too big and rugged. It would have taken ten thousand Paramils to police it. Instead, they would stay in the air. With psycho-radar, infrared image intensifiers, heat cameras, metal detectors, and sound amplification, what could get through?

  Answer—a running dog. We slid through so easily it made us giggle. Or were they playing with us, letting us get well in before they pounced? Time would tell.

  Meanwhile, the forbidden zone closed round us. The night had clouded over, but we could still sense the huge darkness of the mountains, smell the heather, hear the silence behind the soughing of the wind. Our only comfort was the dim glow of the dashboard and a faint touch of radio we allowed ourselves—music and chatter from ten thousand miles away, where the sun was coming up. It made us feel that Mitzi was a person, too; that there were three of us, not two, moving into the cold, empty dark.

  Keri grumbled about keeping the speed down. “I could walk faster.” But it was just as well we did; because as we reached the main Fort William road junction, the steering went berserk, we slewed all over the road, and ended up in a ditch.

  “Jap crap.” Keri kicked the recumbent Mitzi.

  “Jap crap nothing.” I pulled the bike upright and gave a twitch of headlights.

  The whole road junction was breaking up. Mud-filled ruts, with huge islands of loosened chippings in between. A stream was actually flowing across, where a culvert had been blocked, making as many gurgling tributaries as the delta of the Nile. And it hadn’t happened yesterday: on the islands of chippings grass grew, even small silver birches.

  “Nothing’s been through here for years. Except …” There were were deep patrol car treads in the mud.

  “I’d better use dipped headlights,” said Keri, “or there won’t be any bike left.”

  We made fair time. Some stretches of road were as good as ever, but other bits were swamp or thickets we had to push the bike through. We tried a few side roads, till we came to collapsed bridges. From what I could see by dipped headlights, the bridges had been blown up. Quite a while ago. Bindweed and ivy hid the old explosion scars.

  “It’ll change in a few miles,” I said. “We’ll find the roads as good as ever. It’s just Paramil bluff.”

  Instead, we got a last-minute warning, on the edge of our dipped headlights, of big things moving, crossing the road. We braked just in time.

  “What the? …” said Keri.

  I reached over her shoulder, and flipped on full beam.

  A herd of red deer were crossing, cool as cool. Not taking a blind bit of notice of us. Except the great, antlered male standing guard on the flanks, whose eyes reflected our headlights so he looked like the devil in a horror video.

  The last of them crossed and were gone into the dark.

  “I feel kind of… irrelevant,” said Keri.

  “That’s a big word for an Unnem.” But she didn’t rise to the bait.

  Five miles on, we were stopped by a herd of black highland cattle, a sea of humped, woolly backs lying all over the road. Their leader moved up on us; we had to back off and take a side road. It was only Mitzi’s glowing road map that stopped us getting lost altogether. But even that was going haywire.

  “That’s the tenth village she’s shown that’s just not there.”

  “It’s a Japanese map. How would the Japs know what’s been going on here?”

  Ten miles south of where Fort William ought to be,

  our lights picked out the green, glowing eyes of a group of smaller animals. Big, pointed ears, waving tails. Tearing at a hump that lay in the road.

  “Alsatians—they’re running wild, Kit. They’ve killed something.” But these creatures were too pale for Alsatians; too big in ear, head, and jaw, too long in the leg.

  “They look like wolves,” whispered Keri. “They can’t be, can they? How would wolves get here?”

  “Perhaps they escaped from Edinburgh Zoo,” I said, as flippantly as I could. “The last wild wolf in Scotland was killed in a cave on Ben Mhor in the eighteenth century. Drive straight at them—they’re nervous.”

  “They’re nervous? …”

  “We can’t stay here all night. And you know what wolves do to anyth
ing that tries to run away. …”

  She gritted her teeth, put down her head, and went. I prayed the road surface would hold. I didn’t fancy being thrown off injured and bleeding in the middle of that lot.

  The road surface held; the wolves scattered. The hump lying in the middle of the road stayed where it was. A big red deer, its spilled entrails glistening.

  I was glad of the dawn. The first paling of the sky showed, from the top of a hill, an ugly scatter of prefab huts, petrol tanks, barbed wire, and parked helicopters, where Fort William should’ve been.

  “Paramils?”

  “I don’t think so.” I peered through Blocky’s binoculars. “Too untidy. These helicopters are painted yellow, all muddy. There are robo-dozers and robo-shovels. I think it’s some kind of construction camp.”

  “What’re they making?”

  “Nothing. Maybe it’s a depot. Maybe they fly out from here all over the Highlands and come back here for safety at night.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  “I want to watch this lot, but we’d better get off the road. They probably fly off to work half-asleep, but even a hungover navvy would spot us standing here.”

  We went back a bit and found a crag with a deep overhang. It was damp with moss and trickling water, but it hid Mitzi.

  “Here you are,” I said. “Your highland cave as promised, with running water and all mod cons.”

  “This isn’t the cave on Ben Mhor, is it?”

  “Have a bite to eat. That’ll keep the wolf from the door.”

  She straddled a rock and lit a fag. “I can see why Unnems leave holiday making to the bloody Ests.”

  Chapter 15

  Four days later, I sat on the banks of a burn, waiting for sunrise. Sunrise spread remarkably quickly; upward through the little pink, torpedo-shaped clouds; downward, stroking the rounded dark of the hills with pale, tufted gold. But even if it had been slower, I wouldn’t have been bored. There was the burn to listen to, trickles inside trickles inside trickles. A darkling thrush, singing in the burn-side thickets. The huge, low sound of the morning wind, stroking the heather.