Futuretrack 5

by Robert Westall

  In the booths, all kinds of work was going on, inside the drapings of medieval flags. Men turning goblets of beechwood on treadle lathes, goblets so thin that if you held them up to the sun you could see the light shining through. Others plaited corn dollies under notices inviting you to “Buy a fairing for your love” in straggly Gothic lettering. I bought one for Keri and she twisted it into her hair; she was still wearing it when we started the attack…

  There were a dozen kinds of old-fashioned bread on sale: sultana, poppy seed, suet. Mulled wine done the proper way; chickens roasted on a spit over a mound of white wood ash, in a shaft of sunlight. Silversmiths and sword-swallowers, fire-eaters blowing out yards of flame and even a man inside a bearskin, pretending to be a dancing bear and bear-hugging all the Est females while he had the chance and no one could see his crafty, leering face.

  I must say the Ests entered into the spirit. I saw fifteen Henry VIIIs and at least ten Richard Ills, and from the looks they were giving each other, the Wars of the Roses were just about to break out all over again. But a lot of the women and children had formed medieval bands, and the sweet, sharp sounds of shawm and tabor followed us wherever we went.

  A blissful time. Keri hung on my arm like any village girl, her fair hair streaming down my black shoulder, face so bright it put the sun to shame. Only, suddenly, I would see her remember what we were going to do, and then her eyes would go to pinpoints.

  Then I did something stupid. The Cambridge Chess Club were lounging on bales of straw under a spreading oak, playing on rough wooden boards with perfect reproductions of the Isle of Lewis chessmen. Luring half-tipsy Fenmen into a game and taking the mickey out of them. One lad sat in the middle of a giggling crowd, staring from face to face, half-grinning, wanting to please; half-terrified. As we passed, he leaped to his feet amid hoots of laughter.

  “I can’t get the hang o’ they, maister, honest I can’t.”

  He fled. His tormentor looked up and saw me.

  “Come and have a game, there’s a good chap!”

  Feeling a flash of rage that should have blown the fuse of the nearest psycho-radar, I sat down. Oh, how I clowned! Calling the Queen the Duchess, and the King the Gaffer, and the knights “they fellers on hosses.” How merrily they laughed.

  But I had the guy in trouble, bad trouble, in six moves. He started to sweat, tried to cheat. But I told him I thought he had made a mistake “with they little castle, zur.” I was really loving it, till I realised he was a much worse player than I thought. All his mates gathered round, giving him advice. They’d long since stopped laughing. They were pondering longer and longer between moves. The atmosphere was getting ugly.

  I gave him an opening; they were by now too upset to see it. I gave him another, and they actually managed to turn it to my advantage. Now I was sweating more than them. I was making myself far too conspicuous.

  Then a big fellow with a bony forehead and formidable chin turned up. The rest sort of backed away to make room for him. This one knew his game, and I’d already made the last deliberate mistake I could, without giving the game away. His eyes looked at me like flint. “You’ve played before,” he said.

  “No, zur, no.” His eyes drilled into me, across the table.

  “Ere, Kit,” whined Keri, grabbing my shoulder, mimicking the Fen accent like a master, “ee a-goin’ to be here all day? Ee said ee was a-goin to buy me somethin’ pretty. C’mon, Kit. …”

  “Oh, shut up,” I roared, turning to glare at her, wriggling her hand off my shoulder.

  “C’mon. Ee buy me something, or I do be going wi’ that Tommy Melpash.”

  She turned away. I grabbed at her wrist. She gave a heave to break free that pulled me backward off the bale of straw. I felt my boots kick upward at the chessboard, and send the whole thing flying.

  There was a great roar of laughter from the Ests. I let her drag me away, yelling at me nineteen to the dozen. As we went I heard the big man say, “Ugly bugger, that.”

  “A natural, though.”

  “Except they’ve got no intellectual stamina.”

  “You bloody fool,” whispered Keri. “You come to blow up that computer or not?”

  The other moment was much worse. Keri, all woman suddenly, dragged me in to see a fortune-teller. An apple-cheeked Fenwoman, ordinary as an aunt.

  “You’m a-carryin’, dear, aren’t you?”

  “Ere, it don’t show yet, do it?” yelped Keri.

  “It’ll be a son, and ee’ll be right proud of him, for what he’ll do.”

  The woman turned to me, took my palm between her old, soft, dry fingers. I felt her stiffen; then she dropped my hand as if it was red hot. She reached into her bowl of change and gave me back my two credits. Gathered up her belongings with shaking hands and said she was finished for the day. Panic made me cruel. I grabbed her wrist with such force she winced.

  “What do you think you saw, Gran?”

  She took her hand back with great dignity. “I do have two things to say to you. You’ll regret what you’ll do tonight for the rest of your born days. An’ you’ll have plenty of time to regret it. They’ll never let you go, till the day you die.”

  Then she was gone.

  I think I gave a mad sort of cackle. “Well, at least she didn’t say I wasn’t a-going to do it!”

  Chapter 22

  Night. Flickering torches and fires among the booths. The perimeter lights of the Wire shining outward, making it as bright as day.

  A vast crowd watching. In the front, a ring of Est families, changed now, for comfort. The men in cashmere sweaters and cravats, the women with cardigans draped across their shoulders against the chill and dew. Most were holding glasses of something strong, in that typical Est way that makes a glass into a barricade, a sceptre, and a social weapon. Below, the staring, mesmerised faces of the Est children, and, behind, the frantically bobbing heads of the Fen people as they struggled to get a view.

  All watching us.

  The play was ending. I glanced at my watch. Bang on quarter to nine. Up at the Centre, they’d be getting ready to change shifts. I’d delayed the play’s start just right.

  Keri had already slipped away, to start the engines of the lorry and Mitzi, in the empty, quiet dark behind the crowd. I heard the lorry’s starter whine once, twice, thrice; then its old engine chugged sluggishly into life. Damn the wretched old thing; I’d serviced it till I was black with grease. … I wouldn’t hear Mitzi start. She’d be idling silently as a ghost.

  I’d finished my lines, slipped inside the shallow shadow of the proscenium, reaching for the ends of certain ropes. Razzer stepped forward toward the crowd, looking gigantic in the firelight and his scarlet coat.

  “For now our play is ended, we can no longer stay, But with your kind permission, we’ll call another day; It’s a credit to Old England, and the boys of the Manea gang.”

  As he said “Old England,” I heaved on the first ropes. With a gentle sliding of steel inside steel, smothered by grease, the thinner flagpoles began to extend upward inside the proscenium uprights. It was rather like the opening out of an old-fashioned telescope. Up and up climbed the flagpoles, till the tops were twenty-five feet in the air. I pulled another rope, and the Union Jacks broke out at the top and fluttered bravely. There was a tremendous burst of clapping for such patriotic ingenuity. “Oh, jolly good,” murmured somebody.

  Then I released the two front guy ropes that held the proscenium rigid and upright. Felt the whole structure begin to sway. Added to its sway by rocking the base backward and forward.

  Outside, somebody screamed. I could see the crowd giving back, pushing each other in their urgency. The actors began to turn, to see what was happening. Pete ran toward me, an alarmed look on his face…

  I gave a last backward heave, felt the steel tower begin to topple. Leaped out and grabbed Pete and turned him round, shouting, “Run, run.” Then I looked back, just as the falling proscenium hit the Wire.

  It was really mo
st spectacular: that Wire carried 20,000 volts. As the flagpoles fell across it, streams of blue-white sparks, like treble-power fireworks, arced in all directions. The flags and bunting on the proscenium caught fire. And the little drums of oily rags and tar I’d welded to the framework… The electricity travelled down the steel guy rope into the wheel of the Paramil patrol car. Its lights and radio burned out in a millisecond; its loudspeakers gave one metallic screech, then the patrol car blew up. Any Paramil inside must never have known what hit him.

  The effect on Laura must have been shattering. She was quite used to electrocuting birds, rabbits, and men on her Wire. They fell off with a little puff of smoke, and she didn’t even tremble a minichip. But this great mass of arcing metal was draining the life out of her whole electrical system, threatening her whole being with a short circuit.

  Being a sensible computer, she threw the fuse on it.

  Immediately, all the perimeter lights went out; everything in the defence line went dead. The dreadful Wire became just ordinary wire. We Techs had warned the Top Brass time and again that they shouldn’t have the Wire, the perimeter lights, and Arcdoses on the same power supply. They’d never listened. After all, it was only the third defence line, and the outer two were new and impregnable…

  All hell broke loose: the crowd, panicky in the sudden darkness, fled screaming through the tangled mass of the medieval fair, falling over guy ropes, putting their feet in steaming cauldrons, blundering into little canvas booths and not being able to find their way out again. I hoped no one got seriously hurt. Somewhere among them, Paramils would be trying to force their way through, and getting themselves trampled flat for their pains.

  I ran, too. But only as far as the lorry. The engine was still idling; Keri in place astride Mitzi, her face just a blur. She gave me a thumbs-up. Then I slammed the truck into first, and revved up the access road, really putting my foot down. If trucks can do wheelies, that old truck did one that night.

  Suddenly, the perimeter lights blazed on again, illuminating the billowing smoke from the proscenium and the scout car like a scene out of hell. Laura, wise old thing, had started up her back-up dynamos, knowing she lay unprotected. That, for the moment, suited me. I picked out the post of the perimeter wire that I wanted to hit. You have to hit a post, if you want to flatten a Wire; if you just hit a stretch of wire, it’ll bounce you off like a tennis ball. But if you’re lucky, a post snaps off at ground level, the whole Wire sags, and you drive straight over it.

  I headed for the post, going full out. Praying that all the spectators had got clear. If some little smoke-blinded kid wandered out now…

  Laura had started her reserve dynamos, all right. But the proscenium was throwing out great sparks again. The short circuit must be ripping hell out of those dynamos. She must pull a fuse again. If she didn’t, she’d fry me alive in two seconds.

  I think I was already screaming my death scream when the perimeter lights blinked, recovered, faded, and failed again. The massive framework welded onto the front of my truck hit the concrete post. There was a satisfying snap, the truck rocked alarmingly, then I was through and grinding on into the darkness, up the hill toward the Centre.

  I looked in my mirror, to see how Keri was doing. She was sixty meters behind, but coming fast…

  Then the perimeter lights came on again. Laura had activated her second back-up dynamos. Keri was going to be fried alive. If she braked now, the bike would go into a skid and smack into the Wire.

  But she didn’t brake—she put her foot down. Shot up the slope of the sagging wire, got airborne off the top, came down with a thump that nearly did for her shock absorbers, swayed, regained control, and came on, accelerating all the time.

  Thank God for rubber tires. If her footrest had touched… but it hadn’t.

  I’d meant to turn my old truck over, somehow, but she finally did it for herself. Perhaps a front tire burst. We weren’t doing more than twenty, so I wasn’t hurt. I climbed out, with the precious satchel over my shoulder. Keri pulled up, twenty yards ahead, like a dark ghost. I took out the old Smith and Wesson. My first shot punctured the truck’s petrol tank. My second shot was a dud. My third, a ten-foot balloon of red-hot gas, ignited the spilling petrol. I got up behind Keri damn quick, and we ghosted on uphill. Behind us, the truck really began to burn. That should distract our Paramil friends for a minute, wondering which misguided person was frying up inside…

  Silently, Mitzi sped on into the dark, leaving a wider and wider gap between us and the chaos behind. “Whee-hee,” yipped Keri.

  “Calm yourself, sister. The psychopters are scrambling.”

  “They won’t notice me. I’m happy.”

  Mitzi’s whine turned to a growl as we swung right, up onto the top of Idris Hill. There was dew on the grass now, and her tires were slipping a bit.

  It was quiet up on Idris Hill; just the night wind soughing gently through the little trees. Ahead, the Centre looked as undisturbed, unperturbed, brilliantly lit as ever. But behind, the recreation ground was a bedlam of distant screams and blowing Paramil whistles. The booths had caught fire; it looked like a second Great Fire of London.

  More ominously, there were already two Paramil cars pulled up beside the burning truck. How long before they rumbled it was empty and followed Mitzi’s tire marks on the dewy grass?

  Now or never! I stooped and fumbled in the rabbit hole where I’d stuffed my white Tech’s coat; five months ago, but it felt like a lifetime. Had the rabbits pushed the coat out, where it would have been spotted? No, it was still there, only a little crumpled in the light from the Centre. And my clipboard was still in the deep pocket. So I could dial open the doors of the Centre—if they hadn’t changed the combination…

  I glanced at Keri. She’d taken off her crash helmet, revealing hair pinned up in the stiff bun beloved of female Techs. She pulled another white coat from Mitzi’s top box. It had once belonged to a female snooper with the Fens Milk Marketing Board. I made sure only her top button was left undone… Her trousers would have to do; some Femtechs wore trousers. She pulled out a clipboard I’d faked for her. It looked perfect, but wouldn’t open as much as a can of beans. She put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and said, “Do I look correct?”

  I giggled. She had the niggling Computerspeak of a Femtech off to perfection: my endless coaching had paid off.

  I laid Mitzi on her side in a little hollow, where she’d be harder to spot. Combed my hair, took a deep breath, and started down the hill. The old feeling of being a

  Tech, of never having been away, closed around me, making the rest seem a mad dream.

  There was a gaggle of white coats on the steps of the Centre; the night shift waiting to go on duty. Mostly their eyes were on the red glow from the fair. But I knew some snidy beggar would spot us. So I started, in a loudy, sneery voice, talking fashionable treason.

  “Typical. Typical. If they will insist on playing silly-buggers with the Fenmen, I knew there’d be trouble sooner or later. …”

  Heads turned to watch us come. I continued loudly, “I expect our respected Headtech has raped some Fen virgin. Very fussy they are, about their virgins. …”

  “There’s no such thing as a Fen virgin,” Keri joined in. “They’re all raped by the time they’re ten… usually by their own brothers. …”

  “Good God,” said one of the gaggle. “I know that voice… the late-lamented Kitson.”

  “Who holds the world record for the longest razzle. Going in for the Olympics, Kitson?”

  “And look what he brought back. …” Every eye turned on Keri. Even the long white coat could not conceal the luxuriance of her shape.

  Keri turned sharply on the speaker. “We were taught how to deal with your sort at Dronfield.”

  She did it beautifully. Dronfield was a place of horrible legend: a little germ-warfare establishment up in Yorkshire, staffed entirely by Femtechs who were all supposed to be lesbians. The ice in her voice would have frozen the where
withal of the lustiest swain.

  “Watch it, Higgins, you’ve got a Dronfield Dragon there.”

  Attention swerved back onto me. “Can you see anything from the top of the hill?”

  “Not much. A burning truck’s made a hole. The Paramils are looking into it…” The hole routine was the oldest joke in the Tech joke book and got a satisfying groan.

  Just at that moment, a Paramil car swung up onto the top of Idris Hill, its headlights wheeling like searchlights in the sky.

  I turned as casually as I could and tapped out the door-opening numbers on my clipboard.

  The door refused to open: they’d changed the numbers. Or else the solar cell on my clipboard was flat with disuse. I dialled again, a bit frantic. Some of the Techs began to notice.

  “That damned door playing up again?” Everybody began dialling the new number. 9287021, blast it.

  The door swung open to ironic cheers. “There you are, Kitson, see what a bit of charm does?”

  “Your batteries must be a bit flat, after that razzle. …”

  But at that moment, the first carload of Paramils pulled up, with a shower of gravel. Not yet the bunch off Idris Hill, thank God…

  Techs, as I have said before, are not fond of Paramils; especially young Techs.

  “Hey, Mao-Tse-tung, what gives at the medieval fair?”

  “Got too hot for you, has it?”

  One Tech looked dramatically at the Paramil captain’s smooth chin.

  “Hey, the fire’s singed Mao’s beard off!”

  “And his moustache.”