The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  Dogs with two heads. Or three heads. Cerberus. But Cerberus wasn’t real. It was something out of a myth, that someone had named a computer after, and the computer had made a virtual world on the Internet and made itself look like the Cerberus from the myth in it.

  “Is it all right to use animals in experiments and kill them?”

  Tarrow stared at Dana with an expression of concern. “Of course it is, if the animals’ welfare is properly looked after. If we didn’t do experiments, we wouldn’t have any medicine or surgery for either people or animals.” Her attention shifted to the knife and fork leaning on Dana’s empty plate. “Well, since you’ve finished now, come to think of it Blake did want to have a word with you, if that’s all right with yourself.”

  -10-

  OUTSIDE, clouds had obscured the clear sky. A curtain of rain descended over the olive grove and the orangery. Long, wet streaks dashed the glass that spanned the length of the cafeteria’s outer wall.

  At least it appeared to be a cafeteria, with a pulled-down hatch as in the canteen at school, and empty islands of tables and chairs filling the long gallery that looked out over the fields and the suddenly-turned weather.

  Jananin Blake stood leaning against the sliding door, her chin high and with her usual impassive expression as she beheld it.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” said Jane Tarrow, and she went off into a corridor and the door fell shut behind her.

  She wasn’t wearing her katana, or her brown leather trench coat. Since Dana had last seen her, she had almost become an abstract figure in her mind, someone she’d studied avidly from afar, her face in the news every day, her thoughts reiterated over a network of a thousand blogs. Now she was here, and she was turning her head to face Dana, a towering storm filling the sky behind her, and it was as though no time had passed at all, like it had been back on Roareim when Cerberus had trapped them there, and when Jananin, filled with grim determination to finish what had begun, had dragged her through the chaos they’d caused in London that fateful day. And there was still that awkward gulf between them. Jananin was Dana’s genetic mother, but she barely knew her, and Dana’s knowledge of Jananin was based almost entirely on information gleaned from the Internet and the news. Jananin had never even carried Dana inside her, nor given birth to her — that role had been taken by another woman, someone Dana had never even seen a photograph of — so there was not even that connection between them.

  They stood there, and Dana couldn’t think of what to say, and apparently neither could Jananin, and all the time the room grew darker and the air charged and more oppressive under the gathering storm. Rain clattered against the window and a flicker of lightning glanced off the pane, and then a loud crack of thunder sent a violent reverberation through the frame. At the heart of the storm Dana thought she could make out a dark nucleus, descending to the tall pylon at the far side of the fields, and forked lightning jumped from the clouds to the mast.

  “The Stormcaller,” said Jananin, breaking the silence at last. “Quite possibly the most remarkable feat of engineering since the sound barrier was broken.”

  “So what is it?”

  Jananin folded her arms and leaned back and waited for the thunder to pass before replying. “Experimental technology, a prototype of a new aircraft we call a gyromag. In the base of it is an enormous rotating cryomagnet with an engine that discharges electrostatically charged particles. The shape of the design of the craft at the base tends to trap the particles and funnel them in a particular way, whereas the magnetic field generated by the cryomagnet repels the ions and generates a downward thrust. It’s extremely efficient, but it does seem to attract rather odd weather conditions.”

  After the last stroke of thunder, the sky began to lighten. “Did it leave?” Dana asked.

  Jananin shook her head. “Earthed and grounded.”

  “Where’s the wyvern?”

  “It’s safe.” Jananin contemplated the scene outside for a moment. The storm clouds appeared to be thinning, evaporating into a mist. A bulky shape now appeared to be balancing on the top of the pylon. It didn’t have wings or features resembling a normal aircraft. “When I received the information that you had gone missing, I took a gamble and released the wyvern, and gave Commodore Rajani instructions to track it. It made sense to me that if it had found you once, it might be able to do so again. Then Rupert Osric received a letter, and we had a reasonable idea where it might go.”

  Yes, that letter. Where was Eric? Dana hoped he had gone home.

  “Would you mind telling me first where the boy it seems you dragged into this with you has ended up?”

  Dana thought again with a sense of shame of the circumstances in which she’d parted from Eric. “We split up. We had a disagreement. He helped me get out of the Emerald Forge, but I think he went home after that.”

  She moved away from the window, found one of the tables scattered around the room and a chair beside it on which to sit. Jananin watched her. Dana could see vestiges of Cale in her still expression and dark wavy hair, despite the thick streaks of grey it had gathered at the temples. She could see resemblances of what she saw when she looked in a mirror in Jananin’s face, made heavier and more severe by age. If she could not give Dana an answer that made sense, no-one could.

  “You know if when you grow up and someone might like you?”

  Jananin pulled out another chair and sat on it. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “How would you know if you like them back?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You would know it if you felt it.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  A few extra years since Dana had last seen her had further exaggerated Jananin’s strong nose and distinctive mouth, but expression had remained mostly unimpassioned and cold, like that of a marble statue. Now, however, a frown managed to furrow her forehead. “Surely that would be a more appropriate question to ask your foster mother?”

  “She’s my adoptive mother, now. I ask her about stuff, but her answers are never any help. She says I’ve got to become a woman. And if I say I don’t like it, she just says everyone else has to put up with it, so why should I be any different? But I don’t want to be a woman. It’s bad enough just dealing with school and everything without having to be a woman as well. And I don’t like men, or boys or whatever I’m supposed to like. Not in that way. Does it mean I’m gay?”

  Jananin pressed on, showing none of the embarrassment or indirect approach other adults usually did. “If you don’t like boys, or men, do you instead like girls, or women?”

  Dana tried to conceptualise what girls and women meant. The only examples that came to mind were Abigail and her henchgirls, foul sweaty bosoms squeezed into grubby bras, implacable sickly stench in toilets where people had urinated and bloody sanitary products discarded on cubicle floors, grotesque bodies and the smell of shame and embarrassment crammed into a PE changing room full of steam and claustrophobia. She tried to think of someone less abhorrent, of Pauline, but even though Dana could see through Pauline’s appearance to the person she was, she still did not want to be like Pauline, with lumps and fat in odd places under her clothes, doing her hair and make-up every day so she could go to work and look presentable. Jananin... Jananin was the only person Dana had met who seemed to be able to rise above having to be a woman to be something more ideological, but even she must have that same disgustingness going on under her clothes that the very idea of repulsed her so much.

  “No, I don’t like girls or women. What should it feel like, to like someone that way?”

  “It is like... were you ever obsessed with something? Perhaps a particular topic? Perhaps collecting some sort of object? To the extent that you feel utterly at peace with yourself and engrossed when you are engaged in it?”

  “Like making Airfix models? Or looking at carnivorous plants?”

  “Could be. It’s the same neurological pathways in your brain that are activated when you are addicted to a drug
, or when you ‘fall in love’ with another person as people call it.”

  Dana tried to think of how it would be to feel the same way she did about a person as she did when she sat down at her desk to make an Airfix model, with all the parts and her glues and paints arranged just how she liked them at her fingertips. It was ordered, secure. When she did that, she felt as though she was enclosed in a little bubble separate from reality, where things that went on in the real world couldn’t get at her. When she read seed catalogues for the exotic plants she loved, she pored over the diagrams and read over and over the complicated Latin names until she knew them by heart, and she fantasised about the Sarracenias she could grow in the bog garden Graeme was helping her set up, and about when she was older, she wanted to buy a house with a garden and build an enormous greenhouse and fill it with Nepenthes. She couldn’t imagine how or why a person could make her feel that way. “It’s all just disgusting. Puberty, and what’s happening to me and other people. I don’t want to know about other people’s private parts.”

  “Is it that you would rather become a man instead of a woman?”

  Dana stared uncomfortably at Jananin, the adult’s eyes as ever obscured behind the dark lenses of her spectacles. It sounded like an insult one of the children at school would use, to call a girl man-like or a boy girlish. But Jananin Blake didn’t do sarcasm and bullying games and that sort of thing; the question had to be in earnest. Dana tried to think about men and how she could fit into that. Men: Graeme and Mr Kell and Ivor, and Eric and Cale, sort of. Men grew beards that they had to shave off every day, and they liked beer and had penises and testicles and vast amounts of bodily hair stuffed inside their clothes. That didn’t sound like something she could contemplate herself turning into either. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Then by that process of elimination, you are not gay, because the definition of being gay is being attracted to persons of one own sex, and you are not a transsexual, because the definition of a transsexual is one who sees oneself as the opposite gender to the one identified at birth.”

  “What am I if I’m none of those?”

  “Probably asexual or agender. Possibly you simply haven’t finished maturing and an appropriate sexual and gender identity will become apparent to you at some later point.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “Then—” Jananin Blake shifted in her seat and exhaled. Perhaps it was irritation, frustration, something like that. “It is not really anything worth mourning. In many ways, it’s an advantage. That kind of thing is a bane, a distraction from the pursuit of more noble things. I lament how much more research I might have got done in my younger days had my attention not been swayed by certain of my colleagues.” As Jananin had been speaking, she had been staring at Dana’s face, apparently finding some fault with it. “Have you been outside in the sun, wearing a hat?”

  “No,” said Dana. “I don’t wear hats.”

  Jananin stared at Dana a few seconds longer, her eyebrows contorting behind her dark glasses. “You have what looks like UV burns, but only on the bottom of your face.”

  Dana had been aware of a hot itchy sensation in her face and one forearm since she’d woken up, although it had been just one of several aches and niggles in the background, along with the ache across her entire back and hips and shoulders, soreness in the soles of her feet, and the stiff discomfort where the drip had been inserted into the vein inside her elbow. Probably it was the sun, or an allergy to something after the sweaty, itchy time she’d spent camping with Eric.

  “What is this place?” When Dana had checked on GPS, she could see very well where this was, but there was nothing to identify it. According to the maps she had in her head, there wasn’t anything in this place, just empty farmland with not even the road leading off marked on it.

  “It has no name as such, just the codename Site Twelve. It’s a research institution. For research funded by the Meritocracy.”

  “Then what’s Torrmede?”

  Jananin started, her eyes widening behind the dark lenses. “Where did you hear that name?”

  Dana took her hands off the table and leaned back against her seat, disconcerted by the sudden change. “Torrmede... I think I remembered it right. It was Jane Tarrow. She said that the Stormcaller travels between here and Torrmede.”

  “Then you had better forget it, and Jane Tarrow had better forget it as well.”

  “Okay,” said Dana, thinking that now Jananin had drawn attention to it in such a way, she was unlikely to be able to forget it, whereas had she not reacted to it at all, the unfamiliar name would probably have slipped her mind by the next day. “What kinds of research get done at Site Twelve?”

  “The main focus is technology that will enable this country to meet its own food and energy demands in their entirety, without it being necessary to rely on imports to any degree.” Jananin gestured to the window. “Hydroponics pyramids, fuel crops genetically tailored to gain maximum productivity from the climate here. All projects of this nature are nominated by referendum, all public knowledge, although there are some private projects by independent research groups ongoing here that are in the development stage and have not been revealed to the public yet as funding candidates for further development.”

  The sky outside was lightening, the sun breaking through the clouds once more. Dana studied the distant shape of the Stormcaller on the mast. It looked to be shaped like a bivalve clamshell that had been taken apart at the hinge and put together back-to-front. She couldn’t make out any other features over the glare of the sun on the reflective surface of its hull.

  “It’s necessary we press on with the subject I wanted to discuss with you,” Jananin said. “This wyvern as you call it, and how you came to find it and where you have been, and what information you may have obtained there.”

  “I was in detention at the school, and—”

  “I don’t mean here. I suggest we go somewhere more suitable, such as my study.”

  Jananin led Dana down several corridors, until they reached a suite of offices. Jananin’s door didn’t have her name on it or any other distinguishing features, just the number 57. Perhaps there was something significant in it, such as Jananin needing privacy and secrecy because of her status as a Spokesman, or something to do with the Meritocracy’s ideal of people all being equal, but their ideas being what sets them apart.

  The room inside was arranged around the desk in the middle. The far wall was taken up with bookshelves, and further shelving was also built in around the doorway. Of the remaining walls, one was taken up by a window, very modern in comparison to the aging ones in the Emerald Forge, and the other was covered with a slick surface to which various pieces of paper had been pinned with small magnets.

  Jananin took her seat at the desk and pressed a button on the front of it. The computer monitor flickered on.

  Dana examined the things pinned to the wall while Jananin sorted out the computer. There was one photograph near the top of Jananin receiving the Nobel Prize, and Chemistry diagrams of molecules made of Cs and Hs and Os, and there was a map of an island, rounded and more or less featureless apart from a curling quill of a peninsula pointed towards a cluster of much smaller islands. Superimposed on each upper corner of the map were the translucent heads and shoulders of two women, and between them a flag made up of the Union Jack and a shield with a sheep and a ship on it. One of the women was middle-aged with fastidiously styled hair and a prim, artificial smile. The other had short untidy hair and a friendly face.

  “Wasn’t she a politician or someone?” Dana blurted out.

  Jananin glanced at the map, and then at Dana with a disgusted expression. “She was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Margaret Thatcher commanded the British Armed Forces to retake them. What History do they teach you in that school of yours?”

  “I dunno. Just stuff about what date Henry the 8 married someone or other, and what religion
people followed then. Who’s the other woman?”

  “She is Trudi Morrison, a Falklands citizen and a farmer who led the opposition during the occupation of the islands by the Argentine forces. A very courageous person who deserves to be celebrated rather more than she currently is.”

  “So what’s the Falklands?”

  “Do they not teach you Geography in that school of yours either?”

  “It’s the Meritocracy’s school, and you’re a Spokesman.” Dana found herself laughing awkwardly. “If the school’s crap, aren’t you supposed to bring about reform to make it not crap?”

  Jananin made an ironic grimace that might have been humour. “The Electorate are supposed to decide what reform must take place. The Spokesmen’s duty is merely to ensure it is carried out. However, school reform is something that has been brought up in every referendum so far, and it’s likely it will come to a head soon and some sort of action will be taken. The Electorate just needs to consider the alternatives that have been put forward and decide which one is most suitable. Anyway, the Falklands were a self-governing overseas British territory in the South Atlantic. When Great Britain declared Meritocratic rule, the Falklands elected to also, making them the southernmost province of the Meritocracy. The archipelago serves as a base for excursions into Antarctica, and the oceans around it provide sites for oil drilling.”

  Jananin appeared to have finished setting up her computer now, and Dana found a chair and seated herself on the opposite side of the desk. “Why Antarctica?” She hadn’t done anything about Antarctica at school, but a precursory search of the wLAN she could detect suggested it was a frozen desert and nothing much had gone on there, other than an explorer called Scott who didn’t reach the South Pole and died out there.

  “America, Europe, Russia spend their time squabbling over the Arctic, a place science predicts ten years hence will be nothing but open water every summer. The Meritocracy, however, is free to reach out to the south relatively unopposed. Our South Pole base will not only secure untold reservoirs of oil vital to the Meritocracy’s expansion, it will provide a bastion of security away from these exposed isles, and it will become our port to beyond the skies.”