The Deserter

by Peadar O'Guilin

  But nothing had affected his ability to run!

  Hiresh watched him weave between boulders, saw him leap over shattered walls, and smelled (as Stopmouth must have) the sharp burning scent of crushed moss. The hunter had outpaced his pursuers, but the creatures were patient, and blood leaking from his elbow meant they’d never lose him. ‘He may be a hero,’ muttered Hiresh, ‘but he’ll be gone soon, and next week we’ll be watching somebody else.’

  ‘Enough, Hiresh! You’re always so jealous of him.’

  ‘Jealous?’ Where did that come from?

  The tiring savage had clipped his foot and come to a halt. Tarini’s breath caught.

  ‘Oh, why must you all cry over him?’ sputtered Hiresh. The savage had ruined one civilized woman already, turning her into a disgusting meat-eater no better than himself. ‘He’s little more than a beast!’

  But he forgot all these thoughts as the hunter turned to face the creatures who’d been tracking him.

  At the back of his mind Hiresh was aware of a sudden and total silence in the real world of the trainee common room. A hundred young men and women held their breaths and tried to silence their racing hearts. The hunter’s pale muscles quivered. Across his shoulders, the garish tattoo of a snarling enemy shone with sweat.

  Hiresh allowed himself to slip further into the broadcast. Again his ears picked up the ragged breathing of the savage. The air down there was warm and thick and full of insects.

  Stopmouth pushed aside the dripping mop of his hair. He bent his head back, and for a moment stared his viewers straight in the eyes. The illusion was perfect – so perfect, in fact, that Hiresh muttered, ‘It’s nothing personal, savage,’ as if the Deserter could hear him. A human being, after all. A human being. Sort of.

  Stopmouth jerked back to attention. A moment later, Hiresh heard it too: a rain of small stones, some from behind, some ahead.

  The exhausted hunter crouched, his spear held before him, his strange grey eyes scanning for enemies. ‘C-c-come on,’ he muttered.

  And they did. Hiresh felt his empty stomach clench at the sight of them. Two squat aliens trundled out of the morning mist. They ran low to the ground like the lizards on distant Earth, and because Hiresh had chosen a point of view right behind Stopmouth’s shoulder, they looked like they were running right at him too.

  Yellowmaws, people were calling them. Huge bucket mouths hung open, wide enough to encompass a man’s head and shoulders. Black tongues lolled and jounced at every step. Their yellow bodies sported random clumps of hair where eyes and other sensory organs lay hidden. Hiresh could see the remnants of the creatures’ last meal in the form of undigested lumps across their mid-sections – entire limbs of one of their own that Stopmouth had killed the day before. Hiresh felt his gorge rise, and Tarini gripped his arm. Nothing went to waste on the surface.

  The hunter braced himself, waiting for the attack.

  There weren’t any Religious at the Academy, but Tarini muttered, ‘Gods help him.’ She wasn’t the only one in the room who said the words. In a few moments the cannibal might be no more than another undigested lump in one of these creatures’ bellies. Poetic justice, some might say, although it would be disgusting to watch, and Hiresh wanted to drop out of the broadcast. For some reason, however, he couldn’t bring himself to do that.

  Two yellow monsters raced up the hill. They looked so hungry, so terribly strong. They’d slide Stopmouth in and walk on, unconcerned, as he suffocated inside them.

  ‘Look out, behind you!’ cried Hiresh in spite of himself. Billions of fans in every part of the Roof must have been shouting the same thing. To Stopmouth’s rear, two more Yellowmaws approached, more quietly than their companions, stepping carefully as they climbed the little rise.

  The frontal attackers had almost arrived. They picked up their lumbering pace, calling sounds of encouragement to each other. Stopmouth dug his spear-tip into the soil before him and leaned on the shaft until it bent slightly under his weight. When the two aliens were almost upon him, he flicked it up suddenly, spraying soil, moss and poisonous insects everywhere. Much of it landed in the great bucket mouths of the aliens.

  ‘Oh, ingenious!’ cried Hiresh. The creatures screamed in fear, their momentum broken. One of them rolled back down the hill, its tongue and little hands working furiously to remove the insects, its sinuses burning under the assault of the acidic juices in the moss. The second reared up nicely on its hind legs. Stopmouth yelled in triumph as he sliced open its throat. Then he turned to murder the first beast, but he didn’t get the chance.

  The two Yellowmaws behind him were already storming the hill. He whipped his bloody spear round, but the foremost alien, bellowing in triumph, batted the weapon aside and cuffed its owner backwards. The spear tumbled down the little rise, and Stopmouth scrambled after it.

  ‘You fool,’ shouted Hiresh. ‘You’ll never make it!’ Tarini must have been thinking something similar, for she crushed her friend’s hand almost hard enough to pull him out of Roofspace entirely.

  As if to justify these fears, the Deserter fell just as one of his pursuers leaped for his back. For a moment the only thing the viewers could see was the tufted yellow behind of the closest alien.

  ‘No!’ whispered Tarini. Her grip tightened even more. All around the room, voices rose in horror.

  The attacking Yellowmaw roared in sudden pain, rearing up and waving its front paws. Something had got hold of it – Stopmouth, of course. Amazing! thought Hiresh. He’d only pretended to be fetching the spear, pretended to fall! The hunter’s knife sank into his enemy’s belly while his left hand twisted an eyeball out of the tuft that protected it. The two other living aliens danced around the savage and his screaming victim, trying to land a blow.

  The blood-spattered horror that was Stopmouth shoved his dying prey towards his enemies. He growled, for all the world like the rabid dogs of Old Earth.

  ‘You need your spear,’ said Hiresh. Yet he could see the aliens feared the savage, horrified by the groans of their dying companion. They retreated as he limped towards them, passing frantic signals between them as each tried to persuade the other to attack. Their situation was worsened by the fact that their bodies had not been made to walk backwards, and they looked especially clumsy moving down the steep, scree-covered slope.

  Stopmouth’s calf muscles began to tense, ready to spring. He took one step forward. Perhaps he’d meant it as a feint. It didn’t matter: he’d already made his mistake. The alien he’d gutted still lived, if barely. Its last action was to grab the human hunter’s foot. He stumbled, and the Yellowmaw to his left hit him with a sudden charge that knocked him backwards to where the other was waiting. He dropped his knife, teetered at the top of the slope, giving his enemy ample time to open its huge jaws. Stopmouth managed to turn round, but still he toppled over, his head and arms disappearing into the waiting mouth.

  Somebody in the common room screamed.

  With a sickening lurch that should never have been possible, Hiresh found himself back in the real world. For a moment he and the three girls stared at each other, jaws slack. Everywhere, people were blinking furiously, dazed expressions on their faces.

  All was silent. And then, like a wave smashing onto the shore, everybody was babbling at once. ‘What happened? Why didn’t we see the end? What’s going on?’

  A few Apprentices closed their eyes, trying to log back on to Roofspace. They found they could spy on Stopmouth’s tribe, or that of his brother. They could see any location on the surface they wanted – except the one where their hero had fallen into the mouth of the Yellowmaw.

  ‘I’ve asked the Roof what’s going on,’ Tarini told the others. ‘I’ve asked it explicitly, and it still won’t tell me anything!’

  ‘It’s politics, then,’ said one of the new girls. ‘The Roof wouldn’t interfere in our own affairs.’

  Rebels, everyone was thinking. Religious rebels must have sabotaged the broadcasts, and the Roof would keep their secret
s, just like it kept everybody else’s. Viewing the surface was one of the things they had promised to end if ever they seized control of the Roof. It was about the only matter on which Hiresh agreed with them.

  Above the confusion there came the roar of a single voice.

  ‘Hiresh! Gods kill you, Hiresh!’

  Chakrapani stood at the door, naked. His jaw, which should have been broken and slack, seemed in perfect working order, and suddenly Hiresh realized that his Elite master must have already been given Medicine by the Academy. The tiny machines would have done more than just heal the injuries of his encounter with Purami: they would have scrubbed the drugs from his system too, leaving him to wake up far earlier than Hiresh had anticipated. What they hadn’t fixed was the mood-swings.

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ Chakrapani shouted, and then he was flinging people out of his way, making a beeline for his new servant.

  Tarini jumped to her feet and pulled Hiresh up with her. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘But if I can just calm him down, I’ll be promoted – I’ll—’

  She cured him of that with a sharp slap across the face. ‘Door,’ she said to the Roof, and he knew she was transmitting the command at the same time. ‘I want an emergency door in this wall right now!’

  Meanwhile the middle of the trainee common room had turned into chaos, with people screaming in terror, throwing themselves out of Chakrapani’s way.

  The Roof obeyed Tarini’s command and a section of the wall in front of the two friends disappeared. Immediately, hundreds of new smells from the corridor beyond fought their way into the common room. An equal number of faces turned in surprise at the formation of the emergency exit. Some of the outsiders wore veils or scarves. There was long hair and short; shaved patterns and braids hanging over every imaginable style of clothing in every possible colour.

  What would the original colonists have thought if they could see this sight now? Oh, legend had it that a few were still alive, made immortal by their technology, but Hiresh didn’t believe in fairy tales of that sort. There’d been less than a few thousand of them to begin with. Severe men and women sent from Earth to be prison wardens for captured Deserters and, later, alien prisoners from the many wars of the Expansion … Their descendants now numbered over a trillion. They spoke more languages than had ever existed back home, had invented more gods, more strange customs. They had grown a home for themselves that wrapped right around the planet they were supposed to be guarding; that, until the Crisis, had kept growing upwards and outwards into space. It had been the finest, the largest human civilization that had ever existed. And this crowd represented all that for Hiresh. The sound it made – what Roofdwellers called ‘the Roar’ – washed over the terrified Apprentices within, and transfixed Hiresh, mesmerized him. He always loved this moment, loved it so much. Standing at an open doorway, like a cliff-diver, all vertigo and desire. ‘Am I ready?’ he’d ask himself. ‘Can I do this?’ It always reminded him of the day he’d left home. His glorious escape.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ shouted Tarini. ‘You idiot, you idiot, you have to wake up. He’s just behind us!’

  She dived for the first hole in the crowd, where an old Religious woman had paused to fix her veil. He found a gap of his own and slid into it as easily as a fish cuts through water in the reservoir. It helped that everybody was so thin these days, so hungry.

  A ripple in the crowd told him that Tarini was heading right, and he followed after her in the hope that she had a plan, for he had none. Left to himself, he would have just waited there, and maybe, having failed to talk Chakrapani down, he’d have pulled out the sleep dart he’d stolen and tried to stab his master with it. A stupid idea, since it had taken six of the things to bring him down last time. Soon, Hiresh was running parallel with Tarini, passing through the sea of people, always knowing where the next space would appear, always finding it. Ahead of him in the corridor, a young man had dropped something and was bending over to pick it up. The crowd tried to flow around him, which left enough room for Hiresh to run forward two steps and vault over his back and into the gap beyond. The man spluttered in outrage, but most people just laughed in spite of their hunger. Hiresh was already gone, using the speed he’d gained to slide, low to the ground, between a pair of arguing friends. Oh, brilliant! he thought, forgetting his danger for a moment.

  But the Roar was rising in pitch behind him. Chakrapani was coming on in a fury, too crazy to find the gaps, spreading a panic that rippled out ahead of him until Hiresh could sense it at his back. Roofdwellers died in stampedes every day, picked up by the herd and smashed against the walls. They lived in terror of these events the way their primitive ancestors had once feared fire and plague, and everybody, even the Religious, logged on to lessons in how to minimize the risks. Keep still and upright. Flow towards open areas. Shield the old.

  However, Chakrapani’s madness would not be smothered, and Hiresh knew the only way he and Tarini could survive the inevitable panic was by staying ahead of it. Keep up! he transmitted to Tarini. You have to keep up.

  You think I don’t know, you idiot? I’ve called Dr Narindi – he’s sending another squad. Yet she was falling behind him, her shorter legs tiring before his. He heard screams now and could imagine his master literally flinging people away from him. Hiresh had a sudden feeling of vertigo. People could be dying because of him. People who’d thought they were just leaving their apartment to cadge some extra food for their families. He had to find a way to stop Chakrapani, even if it meant simply turning round and facing the monster.

  Not far away the corridor split in two. One branch headed for the shuttle station, where cars shot through tunnels at enormous speeds, while the other led to the great Prairie Park in the next sector. Its wide spaces had been colonized by tens of thousands of refugees from the Upstairs. Even so, it would never be as full as the corridor at this time of day. There’d be enough room in the park for the stampede to dissipate safely. Of course, with more space to run, the Elite’s tremendous speed would soon bring the chase to a bad end. Hiresh felt his legs turn to jelly at the thought. To come so far, to be within touching distance of Elite status – only to be smashed to a nameless pulp.

  ‘Hiresh!’ screamed Chakrapani over the Roar. ‘Hiresh!’

  Hiresh signalled to Tarini that he was taking the right-hand turn.

  No! You’ll never get away from him in the park!

  But she stayed with him. A knot of people had clogged up the side of the corridor in front. Most of them wore the blue robes of the Free From Envy sect – a notorious bunch of hot-heads, well-known for fighting amongst themselves. They were packed in around two people whose shouts could barely be distinguished above the Roar. Religious scum, he thought, but he slid towards them without slowing.

  Any adult born before the Crisis would see the knot of gawkers forming around the argument and think, There’s no way through there! No way in all the Universe! But they just didn’t know how to wriggle very well. That was their problem. They didn’t see how a leg could be pushed right there or an elbow jostled or a bottom pinched to make its owner jump aside. It was simply a matter of finding the weak spot. Hiresh didn’t need to think about it. The tangle of skinny limbs before him might as well have been a highway.

  ‘Stupid child!’ somebody said. He was legally an adult, of course, and couldn’t help the fact that his whole generation looked so stunted. On another day he might have taken the time to knock the offender’s legs from under him. Instead, he squeezed through the group and ran out of the corridor and under the dizzying artificial sky of Prairie Park.

  It was so much brighter here, and huge too – seven square kilometres surrounded by the walls of apartments and the gaping entrances to tunnels and streets that projections from the Roof had transformed to look like the gaps between illusory trees.

  Nobody had been allowed to live here when he was a boy. It was all grass back then, seeming to stretch for as far as the eye could see, and he’d crie
d when his mother had brought him that first time. Children often had problems with open spaces. She had distracted him by walking him over a hill to a little pool where creatures known as ducks waited to be fed as they fretted and chased one another over the calm surface.

  Nowadays the grass had mostly disappeared under family groups of refugees from the disaster in the Upstairs – a whole layer of the Roof as large as this one, as crammed with homes and people and automatic farms and open spaces. Half the Roof’s inhabitants used to live there. It might be a year, people said, before the damage was repaired enough for them to go home. Until then, the Religious and the Secular refugees kept well apart from each other, and even now, in their reduced state, glared at their enemies in constant suspicion and resentment.

  And yet, for all that their plight seemed terrible, Hiresh knew that with the virtual wonders of Roofspace to enjoy, a lot of the people he saw were as happy sitting here as they would be in the most luxurious apartments the Roof had to offer. Many of them twitched as though ill. But their minds were drunk with happiness. They’d be living adventures; sharing feasts of the most exquisite chutneys and spiced vegetables while the greatest entertainers of all humanity’s long history performed just for them. It was only when their bodies’ need for real food woke them that they had to face up to their misery.

  He ran through gaps between the groups, exhausted already, feeling a growing fear that his end was coming; that, at best, he’d get away with being maimed. Keep away from me, he transmitted to Tarini, for he could see her moving in parallel with him. Keep away! He wasn’t sure he’d be able to run for more than another few minutes.

  He heard shouts of alarm and knew that Chakrapani had already entered the park. He turned, sliding to his knees in the mud as he did so. At the same time Chakrapani saw him and gave a wordless cry, for all the world like one of the beasts of Old Earth challenging a rival.