The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  Dana stared at him. “You want me to help you make animals into intelligent robots, and control them?”

  “For the greater good, of course. We wouldn’t have to fight the Meritocracy. All I ask is that you call off the battle and tell them Prendick and I have already left. We can rendezvous somewhere else later.”

  “And what would happen to Gamma?”

  Sanderson shrugged. “Either leave her to the Meritocracy to deal with, or do to her what she did to you: use her as a source of the moiety.”

  Dana tried to solidify what she felt about this into something meaningful, but what she felt about Gamma didn’t make sense. On the one hand, she had felt the misery and self-pity of the individual trapped in the hospital. On the other, she could not reconcile this with the ruthless person who tortured and maimed and had no compassion for anyone, inflicting that same suffering on others. “But why do you need an army made of mechanical animals?”

  Sanderson leaned toward her, eyes wide and bright. “Don’t you see? This is Pilgrennon’s work. This is the sort of breakthrough that started the revolution that destroyed the old ways and brought the Meritocracy to power. The Meritocracy has ANTs — powerful computers that have transformed the function of society. Think how the function of society could be improved with this technology at its disposal.”

  “But Jananin Blake stopped Pilgrennon. It was her that supported the Meritocracy. Pilgrennon said he didn’t agree with it. And Blake said Pilgrennon’s work would lead to autistic people being exploited if it went public.”

  “Blake is a genius, but she won’t see things through all the way. She’s too besotted with the equality side of the Meritocracy and the idea of everyone having a say no matter how insignificant they are. The null tier was an excellent idea — that people who can’t support themselves can forfeit their right to a vote in exchange for benefit money — but they should have pushed it harder. Is it right that someone on null tier should be able to sit in social accommodation doing nothing, making a career out of breeding more null tier people? The stupid and the worthless will always outnumber the intelligent and the constructive, unless we end this subversion of Darwin’s laws and let the natural equilibrium rebalance itself.”

  Dana wasn’t sure how this fitted with what she understood — something about the first-tier people being so numerous that if all of them voted one way on any particular referendum, they would outnumber the higher-tiered people no matter how they voted. Jananin had said nothing about the null-tier people. Dana knew who they were, of course; people living in council houses who couldn’t find jobs, and didn’t vote in referenda because they’d been given money to live on and a house to live in by the Meritocracy. Did that mean Jananin didn’t think they were important either, as Sanderson seemed to? How many null-tier people were there, compared to how many first-tier people?

  “And the Meritocracy’s stance on the threats from foreign powers is deeply lacking. America. Land of the free.” Sanderson scowled and turned his head to spit on the floor. “Land where a minority of intelligent people work in state-of-the-art facilities to advance scientific understanding, so their majority of obese illiterate religious-fundamentalist rednecks can have weapons of mass destruction to go with their fast food meals. We could put an end to that. The European Union, for too long has that Nazi power axis been a thorn in our sides. Before the rise of the Meritocracy it robbed the public coffers, flooded us with immigrants, and interfered in the affairs of private citizens and businesses; now the Meritocracy has come to power, the bureaucrats sit in Brussels making hollow threats and clogging up our trade routes with their red tape. We could destroy it.”

  “But those aren’t part of this country.” Dana knew little of these foreign places. She’d never been abroad. America was a place from the television, where a black man with a photogenic smile sat in a white temple, under a stripey banner with a rectangle of stars in one corner. The European Union was some kind of government that controlled a lot of countries in the east. She didn’t know who led it, only that it used a symbol that was a circle of stars, and it made lots of laws and the emblem was stuck to a lot of imported things made there. Ireland had recently left it, and so had the UK when the Meritocracy had risen to power, so if countries could leave as and when they wanted, surely that was up to them. “Isn’t it up to the people who live in them how their country is run? It’s not up to the Meritocracy to go there and change how they do things.”

  “It is if those places interfere with the Meritocracy’s freedoms, if they obstruct the rights of the Electorate.” Sanderson paused, his face intense. “We could raise an army out of the birds in the sky and the beasts of the land. We could make machines more powerful than anyone else can. We could build an alliance of life and technology that would stand undefeated. We could destroy corrupt governments and remake the world in freedom. We could finish what Pilgrennon started.”

  With these words, something that made sense leapt from Dana’s confusion, and the memory of the moment in the helicopter before the jump, the icy water below, and the explosion high up in the sky above, accompanied by an aching sense of loss. Perhaps Ivor hadn’t really been there with her in the hospital room, but it was immaterial now. What that memory did give her was a feeling of surety and security, and she held on to it, the touch of his hand on her arm, the sound of his voice, his smell.

  Pilgrennon had died off Cape Wrath all that time ago because he had made a choice, because he had made the right choice, to end what he had started. If Dana made this choice now, then Ivor’s death and everything he had done for her would be in vain. His sacrifice would be rendered meaningless.

  “No.”

  Sanderson straightened in his chair, moving his face away from hers. “No what?”

  “No, I won’t help you.”

  Sanderson apparently considered this for a moment, rubbing his finger between his top lip and his nose. Then he took hold of Dana’s arm and rose from his chair abruptly, pulling her with him back out of the room. He grabbed her other wrist as they emerged into the corridor and held her up by both arms, hauling her along sideways. “There’s no more to discuss,” he muttered.

  Dana had become disoriented from the loss of signals, but from her memory of the building, she estimated he was heading for the long, high room where they collected the blood. Where was he taking her? To Gamma? It occurred to her that if she’d done as Sanderson had said, it might have been a much quicker and easier way to stop Gamma, stop the Compton bomb, and free Cale and Peter. She’d thrown it away by letting him confuse her.

  “Okay, I’ll do what you say!”

  “You’re lying. You’ve had your chance and made your choice. If we’re to work together, we need to be able to trust each other. The decision has to be made of your own free will.”

  Sanderson reached the door to the hall and kicked it open. The long room was filled with sun stained green from the filters of the filthy windows.

  “I shall say I cut too deep, I waited too long. She’ll be angry, but she’ll get over it.” He dragged Dana to the basin and kicked her feet out from under her. Her kneecaps crashed into the concrete floor so hard it felt like they’d shattered, and the pain was so terrible she couldn’t move to resist or fight back, only gasp for breath and struggle to think through it. Sanderson forced her down over the basin.

  “Get off of me!” Dana managed to force the words from lungs that wouldn’t obey. She thought frantic distress signals, but nothing would transmit through the foil wrapped around her head. After everything, was this how it would end? That she would die here, unable to do anything, and Cale and Peter would die for her failure?

  A blur of movement flashed into her peripheral vision. Something large and heavy crashed into the side of Sanderson’s head and the weight bearing down on her ceased. She pushed herself off the basin and fell on her back on the floor, drawing up her knees and pressing her palms against them to try to stop the pain. A buffeting draught from enormous wings rushed
over her. She looked up to see Prendick’s eagle fly across the room, towards the windows, before she lost sight of it. Dana rolled onto her side, but her knees hurt too much to roll onto her front. Sanderson and Prendick were fighting, but Prendick’s bird mustn’t have been looking. The bigger man threw a clumsy punch. Sanderson ducked, and Prendick lurched, unbalanced.

  With a grating screech, the bird launched itself back across the room, flying with its talons outstretched at Sanderson’s head. He flailed in desperation to defend himself, him and the eagle spinning like a hurricane of limbs and feathers. Dana put her weight on her elbow, trying to sit upright. Prendick hurled his fists into empty space, searching for the attacker he couldn’t see.

  Sanderson by now appeared to have got hold of something. The enormous bird still pounded its wings, but he held it aloft, by the legs, his arm shaking under the weight of it. A triumphant grin spread over his face.

  “Don’t hurt her, please.” Prendick’s voice came out thick and lispy through unyielding lips.

  Sanderson turned to face Prendick, so his back was towards Dana. He held the bird higher and grasped its head with his free hand, bending it back like Ivor had done with the rabbits he meant to kill.

  Dana seized the handle of the tantō from her belt and threw herself forwards onto her stomach. She slashed as far as her arm could reach for the back of his legs, and the blade tore through sock and tendon and cartilage at the back of his ankle, just above the level of his shoe. Sanderson staggered and lost control of the bird — it started to flap as though it was trying to take off, dragging him in the direction of the door. He lost his grip and fell on his front. Dana caught sight of his face, full of anger and pain, through the flurry of the bird attacking his back. Sanderson struggled on hands and knees out of the room, blood pouring from his leg. The bird refused to follow him into the corridor and flew back to land on Prendick’s gloved fist.

  The huge man reached down, offering his free hand to Dana. The skin was rough with scars and calluses.

  “Please help me,” she begged him. “I must stop Gamma, or the Meritocracy will set off a Compton bomb and you and I and Peter and Cale will all die!” Dana was up on her feet. It hurt to bend her knees, but she could stand, and probably walk. “Where is she?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Prendick.

  It was time to face this and get it over and done with. There was one way to find Gamma.

  Dana took off her helmet and threw it on the floor. As signals flooded back into her consciousness like warm sunlight into a cold, dark dungeon, she waited and searched for that one she couldn’t mistake, the one Gamma gave out.

  -18-

  THE number and intensity of the signals were so great, Dana could at first make no sense of the bewildering clamour. Out of the riot, a single signal rose that she recognised. And it recognised her in return...

  “Get down!” Prendick pointed to the window. A shadow blotted the light; Dana sensed the signal growing closer fast. She ducked under a bench an instant before the tall window caved inwards with a terrific noise, shattering into a thousand green fragments that cascaded to the floor around what appeared to be a mass of metal limbs driven in by a blade of bright daylight.

  As the sound of falling glass faded away, Dana turned around and pulled herself back upright against the pain in her knees. Hard rays of bright light flared from the jagged hole in the window. A long neck made of segmented metal plates rose from the destruction in the middle of the floor, and the wyvern lifted its great cruel head, setting more glass jangling on the stone floor with every movement. Streams of tiny shards trickled off when it stood up and flexed its wings.

  Dana’s last memory of the wyvern flashed through her thoughts, a silvery tail disappearing beneath a grey frothy surface. It came back? What had happened since then?

  The wyvern as ever didn’t seem able to convey answers as such, but it did manage a narrative composed of visuals and emotions. Streamlined silhouettes in the water, familiar from a deep, primal memory: first came elation and recognition, curiosity and novelty, but then, disgust, ridicule, the sting of rejection.

  The wyvern no more belonged with them than Dana fitted in with the children at the school. With the realisation came shame and guilt from the wyvern. It had abandoned her in pursuit of something inferior, false. Dana’s reassurance it didn’t matter, that she was simply glad the wyvern had come back, were met with a stoic assurance that the wyvern would not let her down again.

  Prendick’s hawk flapped over to the broken window and perched cumbersomely on the concrete sill. Prendick’s mouth tightened. “What’s that?”

  Glass crunching under her feet, Dana stepped around the wyvern and looked out. A storm gathered on the horizon, and in the midst of it lay what looked like a large solid mass. Lightning flickered over the undersides of the cloud as she watched. Almost without thinking, she started counting. Fifteen seconds later, the concrete reverberated with thunder.

  “It’s the Stormcaller. We don’t have much time.” As she spoke, she noticed other things in the sky, large, shaped like elongated spheres, zeppelins maybe. She could see three from her position, drifting up into cloud and towards the Stormcaller. Dana shielded her eyes with her hands and squinted at the closest, trying to see what it was. Long crane-like appendages reached from below the main bulk, and gouts of flame blossomed in the distance. The wyvern was a prototype, Jananin had said, and surely this was the developed version, a bag of hydrogen with a dozen fire-breathing necks. A dragon for all intents and purposes.

  She turned to Prendick. “Did you make that?”

  He nodded, not looking very proud of his work.

  Dana caught sight of motion in her perhipheral vision and looked out to see a dark horse galloping, pursued by a flock of birds, a man in the uniform of the Meritocracy’s Sky Forces leaning forward in his saddle, urging his mount faster. It might have been Rajesh. The horse swerved about, doubled back on itself to face its pursuers, hoofs tearing up the dry ground. The air distorted in front of the horse’s chest where the four trumpet-like devices were arranged, and most of the birds fell to the ground as a dull crack echoed over the landscape. They spun and flapped while those that had not been downed by the shockwave swarmed over the horse, which began bucking wildly, lashing out at its attackers with its hind feet while its rider fought to stay in position.

  “I have to find Gamma and stop her now.” There was no time left to look for Gamma. Dana would have to make her come.

  Dana closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears to keep out as much distraction as possible while she sought Gamma’s signal amidst the noise. She had to be here somewhere, so were the walls blocking her position, or was Dana just not looking hard enough?

  At last she found it, weak, from somewhere above. Making the connection instantly gave away her position. Anger oozed out of the walls. The wyvern rasped its spark-teeth, lowering its head and taking a heavy step backwards. Prendick too seemed to sense it, his eagle shrinking her head down into her shoulders and hunching her wings to form a protective mantle. “If Gamma finds me here...”

  “Send your bird away.”

  Prendick launched the eagle with a swing of his arm: it flew out through the hole the wyvern had made in the window. Now Gamma couldn’t threaten him, but without his eyesight he would be next to useless in anything that might follow.

  A shadow formed in the corridor. Dana faced it, the tantō ready in her hand.

  Gamma entered the room with slow, deliberate steps. Her eyes were locked with Dana’s, and she did not look away. The claustrophobic control room, deep within the rock of Roareim came back to Dana. Alpha had faced her like this, Alpha unthinking, her actions controlled by a program Cerberus had written into her. Gamma wasn’t unthinking. She wasn’t like Alpha, but her mind worked in the same way, the same as Cale’s and Peter’s did. Peter had once tried to push his thoughts into hers, and she had pushed him out. Many times she would push into Cale, usually when he was daydream
ing about beetles and she wanted to join in, and he would push her out. If she could push into Gamma without being pushed out, she might be able to make her see sense.

  Dana concentrated on all the anger and hate that flowed out of Gamma, focusing on that point and trying to press through to what lay behind it. Gamma pressed back. Dana fought to suppress private memories about Ivor and Jananin, things she’d promised never to tell others about, and by that lapse in focus, lost the control she had and succumbed to Gamma’s intrusion. Her last thought was of the Stormcaller readying destruction in the sky above, and that she had failed Jananin, and Cale and Peter with her.

  *

  The sun is setting over a flooded garden. Poking up out of the water are bits of Greek statues and funny effigies, and imitation monuments on pillars that are too small to really be what their grandiose forms suggest. You’ve been somewhere like this before. A made-up place where there lived a dog... with three heads... and something else about a fish that breathed air. There had been someone with you, a boy, you think, but something had happened, your fault, and trying to remember only brings a feeling of embarrassment and self-disgust.

  There is someone else here with you, although it’s not the boy, but a girl. When you try to speak, your mouth won’t respond, but this doesn’t bother you a great deal. You’ve always been able to get by just by thinking.

  Where are we?

  Lips that aren’t yours but feel like them move in response. “We’re safe, Epsilon. Remember? The other place isn’t real. This is real, this is better. Let’s stay in this place. We don’t have to go back to the other.”

  You don’t remember how you got here. You know you have a life outside of this, that you have a name you just can’t recall. This is a dream, but you’re not sure if you’ve had it before, or if you’ve just dreamed you had it before.