The Deserter

by Peadar O'Guilin

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Indrani. ‘There’s still a bridge. I can’t make it disengage without help from the Roof!’

  ‘We have weapons systems,’ he cried. ‘Shoot it away! Away!’

  Impacts came from outside as well as in. On the big screen, Stopmouth could see slabs of wall breaking away from the sides of the shaft. A few were clean, burnished like mirrors, flashing as they passed; but most were pitted, rotten with slime. Some of them struck the bridge that was holding them back, but bounced off into the void.

  ‘I can’t hit it!’ said Indrani. ‘There could be people nearby.’

  ‘You must, you fool! Think of your baby, your savage! Shoot!’

  But although flashes of green light lit up the screen, Indrani didn’t seem capable of bringing her weapons to bear so close to the ship.

  The warship rattled and shuddered as a few smaller pieces struck it. Stopmouth wondered what damage he’d see if he could view its skin. As a boy, he’d believed metal could not be harmed by anything but time. After he’d seen his first smashed Globe, after pieces of one had rained down on Man-Ways, killing a child, he’d had to change his mind.

  The green-light weapons of the warship still weren’t getting any closer to the bridge. Dharam was screaming, ‘Hit the thing! Hit it!’

  ‘I can’t,’ Indrani shouted back. ‘I—’ Then she got that look on her face that meant, I have an idea.

  The wild firing stopped for a moment as Dharam continued screeching and the cabin shuddered with impacts. Then she aimed one single shot far from the bridge. The only effect was to bend a glittering section of the wall forward. Now she aimed for it again, and everyone gasped as the beam of light bounced off the polished surface straight down to the bridge below. Two more strikes, then the hunter felt himself pressed back into his seat and the vibrations lessened. The walls began sinking in front of his eyes.

  ‘We’re on our way,’ said Indrani, her voice trembling.

  The wrong direction, thought Stopmouth. Away from the tribe. Away. They were all Deserting together.

  Dimly he wondered why it was Indrani who had become the pilot. Certainly, their earlier escape from the Upstairs in a stolen Globe had shown that she was a better flyer than anybody else. But how could Dharam trust her? Except, of course, now that they were all in the warship together, she would have as much to lose as any of the cowards in the Commission.

  Stopmouth felt tears in his eyes. He wept for the loss of the tribe; he wept in anger at his own stupidity. Instead of taking the ship, he’d been the one to be caught. Like a fool, a fool. No doubt later, sometime when Indrani had done her job, one of Dharam’s friends would bring a knife to finish the tied-up hunter. No more than I deserve.

  The craft shuddered under more impacts as the view on the great screen shifted to show the top of the shaft. Stopmouth wished it hadn’t: a solid curtain of fragments was shooting towards them. Beams of light leaped from the warship to take out the bigger ones, but others penetrated the defence. One impact was so strong that the whole craft tipped over, and everybody in the room screamed until it righted itself again.

  ‘The shaft doors aren’t opening,’ cried Indrani. ‘I’m going to have to shoot them.’

  ‘If they tumble down on us—’ Dharam shouted. There was no need for him to finish the sentence. Doors large enough to cover the entire shaft were bound to crush the ship when they fell.

  Dharam screamed as Indrani fired off her beams of light. They had no effect that the hunter could see, but she kept them there while sweat snaked over her lovely face, changing course with every impact to the spacecraft’s shell.

  Then the doors seemed to burst into flame and fly upwards. Huge slabs of metal paused in their flight, hanging like the Globes that had once hovered over the world’s surface. They waited above the warship for what felt like a dozen heartbeats. Then they dropped down the shaft again, tumbling like spinning knives. Everybody in the craft cried out at once. Everybody except Indrani. She’d been watching, watching, ignoring the smaller impacts that constantly shook them now.

  She threw the warship into the sky. As the great pieces of metal fell, their tumbling pulled them apart for no more than an instant. Indrani found the gap and shot them through into sunlight and a field of scattered stars. In moments, the great curved Roof lay far beneath them.

  Stopmouth spent the rest of the day sagging against the straps of his couch as everybody else seemed to float into the air. How was that even possible? The sight of it roiled his stomach, and he wasn’t the only one, by the looks on some of the faces around him.

  ‘Can you let me out?’ he asked the white-coated people who were now moving about, engaged in incomprehensible tasks. They ignored him, except when he wet himself. Some woman took the time then to sneer ‘dirty savage’, until Indrani shouted her into terrified silence. ‘She’s another meat-eater,’ muttered somebody else under his breath.

  They could be smug now, thought the hunter. They’d escaped. They were free. And it didn’t matter that the price of their freedom had been paid by their fellow Roofdwellers and would soon be paid by the savages who lived below. His rage built against them. So this was how it felt to be Deserted. He strained against his bindings but could not move. He tried to force calm on himself, to save his energy for any opening that might come to him later on.

  ‘Not all our technology is primitive,’ Dharam was saying. A tenth earlier he’d been screaming his lungs out, but the experience seemed, if anything, to have raised his spirits and he grinned like a madman as he spoke. ‘We have the Talkers, of course, and some of the most powerful lasers ever produced. But everything we know tells us that the higher-level stuff is already infected. We have ten days at the most before the last Talker stops working, and we must be prepared for when that happens – yes? We need to know who can speak which language and so on. We need to decide who wakes and tends to the farm every few years, keeps it producing oxygen, gets it ready to feed us …’

  ‘I thought you’d have had all this worked out already,’ Indrani said.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Dharam shook his head. ‘Some things the Roof wouldn’t help us with, and some we couldn’t risk doing for fear that word would leak out. We wouldn’t want a stampede for the escape now, would we?’

  ‘No, we wouldn’t,’ said Indrani, her tone frosty.

  ‘We’ve got most of the skills we need, and that’s what counts. We always knew we’d have a bit of organizing to do when we got this far.’

  ‘And then we all go into the coffins?’ she asked.

  ‘Not just yet,’ he said. ‘We need you to take us to the Seed that the new Roofmind will grow from. It is programmed to obey only me, of course. But you mustn’t worry. I will order it to create a habitat for us with its own orbit around the star. We just need to make sure we’re close to where our new home will be when we emerge from hibernation, yes?’

  Stopmouth slept a few times, although probably not for very long. He thought he must be getting feverish. Sometimes he felt as if a great hand was pushing him back into his chair. At others, his whole body screamed at him that he was falling. He’d close his eyes when this happened, and try not to think about all the terrible things that crowded his mind.

  Mostly, when he slept, he had visions of those he’d abandoned on the surface. It seemed so wrong. They’d lived good lives; they had hunted well and would one day give their flesh in love so that others might make it Home. If any should be saved, it was them and not those who had laughed at the tribes’ struggles for centuries while keeping them imprisoned below. But even he knew there was no way back to them now. The injustice of it! And Indrani must be feeling it too. Sometimes she took time from her tasks to look at him. All he saw on her face was exhaustion and shame.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Dharam told her, triumph written on every feature. Stopmouth could see him watching Indrani, his eyes running over her body. ‘We’ll go into orbit near the Seed, and then you can join your baby in sleep. We’ll have a brand-n
ew Roof to wake up to. A Roof that does not choose which orders to obey! Oh no! My … our civilization will finally have the unity it needs to flourish properly.’

  She ignored him, her eyes on the screen. Finally she said, ‘I see it. The Seed.’

  A black cube floated in the sky, made visible only by the thousands of stars that hung behind it.

  ‘Strange,’ she said. ‘It looks … blurred or something.’

  ‘It’s just the screen,’ said a man others referred to as Dr Narindi. ‘There’ll be dust in our primitive sensors.’

  ‘Then why aren’t the stars blurring too?’ she asked. ‘We need a closer look. Magnification by one hundred!’ The screen obeyed, turning the blurring into a fine mist that, under further magnification, became tiny droplets: a million perfect little spheres.

  ‘Water?’ asked one of the white coats.

  But Stopmouth felt a chill settle on the room.

  ‘Slime,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Impossible!’ shouted Dharam. ‘The Virus wasn’t designed to live in a vacuum! We’ve been sabotaged. We—’

  He stopped suddenly, and the look on his face made it plain he’d said something stupid – though what that might be, Stopmouth couldn’t tell. Other people, however, were just staring at him, jaws hanging slack.

  A grey-bearded man whispered, ‘How … How could he possibly know what the slime was designed for?’

  ‘He said aliens planted it,’ a woman added.

  ‘He changed it to Rebels after, but why would they do that? They worship the Roof!’

  ‘I …’ said Dharam. ‘I was just speculating. Of course I didn’t make the stuff. I mean … What I meant was—’

  Indrani punched him hard in the nose, rocking his head backwards. Tiny globes of blood seeped from his right nostril to hang around his head.

  Everyone started crying at once – some, like Dr Narindi, in terror, for with the Seed’s infection, their plan to survive the downfall of the Roof had failed. Others yelled in anger, and a dozen of them pushed their way towards Dharam with murder in their eyes.

  The hunter felt almost glad the end had come. Except he had never wanted his wife and child to suffer. Flamehair deserved a chance at life. So did poor Hiresh, for that matter, and all the countless thousands who must be choking on bad air or starving on the decaying Roof.

  ‘Somebody let me out,’ he said. He wanted to go to Indrani. In the end she used her free hands to release herself. She magically floated over to him from her seat. So many people were crying, their tears filled the air much like the mist of slime that surrounded the Seed. Dharam had backed himself into a corner and could be heard threatening and begging.

  ‘I have a knife, husband,’ said Indrani. She sliced through the straps. Stopmouth’s arms were itching to hold her. She did not resist.

  ‘Flamehair?’

  ‘She’s already in a coffin. The gas could have … but it didn’t. They got her out of the room in time and put her into the long sleep. Your friend too. That girl.’

  ‘Why … Why were you the one flying this thing?’

  ‘I memorized the launch codes. I’m the only one it will obey now. I think they were going to torture you to make me write the numbers down, but I managed to waste a bit of time until the last quake came along and forced them to trust me.’ She looked sadly out to where the ‘Seed’ floated in a cloud of slime. ‘Not that any of that matters now.’

  ‘None of you have to die,’ Dharam was shouting. ‘I swear it. We still have a way out! Narindi sent a plea for help to Earth. The signal will reach them in another eighty years. All we have to do is sleep until they get to us. We just have to sleep.’

  ‘And why,’ said one of those hunting him, a cross-looking woman with bruises all over her face, ‘would anybody from Earth come here with your filthy Virus floating about?’

  ‘Oh, where is your courage?’ shouted Dharam. ‘We can beat this! It’s an adventure we’re on. The adventure of a lifetime! If we just—’ They converged on him all at once, as clumsy a group of killers as Stopmouth had ever seen. The angry knot floated in front of the view screen, blocking most of it.

  Suddenly shafts of light flashed through the gaps of their thrashing limbs as the sun came over the curve of the Roof. Indrani turned to look. She froze, her left cheek a sudden crescent of white. Then she burst out laughing as the glare spread further and further into the cabin.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Stopmouth asked. Other people were now staring too.

  She looked back at him, eyes shining in the new white light.

  ‘Do you still wish to save the tribe?’ she asked.

  ‘You found a way?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘But’ – she pointed a finger at the heaving mass of people – ‘things are about to get bumpy. Do we have any savages available to scare that lot back to their seats?’

  He grinned.

  ‘And,’ she whispered, ‘you’ll need to keep them there. Use the knife if you have to. They won’t like what comes next!’

  EPILOGUE: FALLING METAL

  IT WAS KUBAR who had saved the last of them, and he was proud of that. Nobody had congratulated him, but then again, what was the point and what had he saved them for? Their numbers had probably been too low to survive before the great Digger attack. Now extinction had become a certainty.

  As the fuel ran out and the fires died, the enemy swarmed over the walls, gripping masonry with diamond-hard claws. I won’t hide in the dark, he’d thought. Death would come quicker if the demons could see him.

  So he’d replaced firelight with the Talker’s illumination, and when he saw that the monsters feared it, he made it as bright as it could go, until the grubs on their backs shrivelled and died and the grieving ‘mothers’ fled before him. To think Stopmouth had gone to the Roof for a weapon, when they’d had one here all along.

  But the Talker wouldn’t last long without light from the Roof to power it. He knew that much, even if the others did not. So he kept it switched off now, while everybody waited to die.

  The big old savage, Rockface, stirred himself in the blackness. Kubar could tell it was him by the careful way he moved these days. ‘That’s not right, hey?’ said the big man.

  Kubar knew what he meant. He could feel the vibration in the parapet under his palms. Something was happening. Another Digger attack? Or were they trying to collapse the building again? People crept forward to join the two men.

  ‘Daylight!’ shouted Vishwakarma. ‘The day is coming back!’ Kubar wondered if the young man’s injury had driven him mad – but no. An enormous section of the Roof, maybe ten times the size of a park, had begun to glow only a few kilometres from their current position, close to where the Diggers had made their huge underground nest.

  ‘It’s the wrong colour,’ Kubar muttered, but nobody heard him. At first it was deep red, then orange, until finally it turned to a blinding white.

  ‘It’s melting,’ he said. Balls of molten metal dripped onto the plains below or splashed hissing into the river. Finally a portion of the Roof burst asunder with a sound that rolled over the surface and shattered many of the buildings the Diggers had weakened. The noise and the light had everybody scrambling back from the parapet, shading their eyes.

  But not Kubar. He saw it all. A spacecraft – a real spacecraft! – fell through the enormous hole it had made for itself. It plummeted towards the ground, only to be saved at the last moment by weak jets. Then it moved – quite deliberately, thought the priest – to hover over the Digger nest that had appeared on this side of the hills. A blast of flame, hotter than the sun, plunged into the earth, searing to nothing the field of victims and – surely – cleaning out the tunnels underneath. Then one final wobbly manoeuvre tilted the craft back towards Headquarters.

  ‘It’s coming this way!’ shouted Vishwakarma. ‘It will burn us all!’

  ‘Let’s kill it!’ said Rockface.

  He really hadn’t a clue, thought Kubar.

  ‘One last hunt,
hey? We’ll go out with blood on our spears!’

  The spacecraft hovered and roared. It managed to lower itself to within a metre or two of the ground before it crashed. Everyone started shouting and running.

  ‘Let’s get it,’ said Rockface again.

  Kubar didn’t bother correcting him. One of the children would do that soon enough. He stayed alone on the parapet, blinking away the blotches the spacecraft had left on his vision.

  When he could see properly again, he gasped at the beautiful destruction that spread out for kilometres before him.

  In all directions, the hillsides and plains lay covered with shards of metal and plastic. They sparkled brilliantly in the light that poured through the giant gap in the Roof. Sunlight! Sunlight! Incredible, shocking, thrilling. The sun!

  ‘Now,’ the priest said to himself, his voice shaking, ‘if that ship only has a few seeds aboard, we might actually make something of this place …’

  About the Author

  Peadar Ó Guilín has been writing curious stories for as long as he can remember. One of his school reports claimed that he had “a talent for communication, which he abuse[d].” Since then, he has written plays, published short stories and performed as a standup comedian. He has taken part in a project to translate the Linux operating system into Irish and is fluent in French and Italian. Peadar lives in Dublin where he works for a giant computer company. His first book, The Inferior, was also published by DFB.

  You can learn more about Peadar’s published work on his web-site: www.frozenstories.com. Come and visit!

  Also by Peadar Ó Guilín:

  The Inferior

  THE DESERTER

  AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 04876 3

  Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  A Random House Group Company