First Family

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘John,’ said Steve. ‘I already feel lousy. Don’t keep knocking me – okay?’

  Chisum grinned. ‘Know your trouble? You take yourself too seriously.’ He slapped Steve on the knee. ‘C’mon. This is where we get off. Stay close. Act natural.’ They stepped off the shuttle but instead of going up the escalator ramp to One-1 – street level – Chisum walked past, going on towards the end of the platform.

  Steve’s heart missed a beat as he saw two Provos walking towards them. Both were armed with the usual heavy, three-barrelled air pistol, and had long white truncheons slung from their belts. It was the normal patrol you could expect to find doing spot checks on IDs on platforms and in station precincts. Most of the time they didn’t stop you but there was always the chance that they might. It was their presence that exercised a deterrent effect on potential cee-bees.

  ‘Look miserable,’ muttered Chisum. ‘You’ve just been pulled out of the clay to answer an emergency call. Leave the rest of the dialogue to me.’ Then, as they drew nearer, he said, ‘It’s okay. I know one of them.’ He gave a cheery wave, and fisted the shoulder of the nearest meat-loaf as they walked past. ‘Hey, there! How you doin’ – all right?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said the meat-loaf. ‘How’s it with you?’

  ‘Great,’ said Chisum. He kept going but turned so that he was walking backwards, holding onto Steve’s arm. ‘You guys on till 24.00?’

  The two Provos stopped. ‘Yeah!’ said one of them.

  Chisum raised his hand in acknowledgement. ‘Catch you on the way back! May have a little something for you!’

  The meat-loaf raised a thumb in reply then continued on up the platform with his companion.

  Steve saw Chisum’s cheery smile fade as he spun on his heel and went into forward gear. ‘What an operator. I can see I’ve got a lot to learn.’

  Chisum eyed him. ‘What you’ve got to learn to do, my friend, is to like people. In this world, nobody can get by on their own.’

  Steve smiled, thinking of what Lundkwist had said to him on Graduation Day. ‘That’s what people keep telling me.’

  ‘Then maybe it’s time you started listening.’

  Steve followed Chisum off the platform and down a corridor. ‘What’s this “little something” you promised the meat-loaf?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Chisum. ‘If I told you, you’d have heart-failure.’ He stopped at the end of the corridor, pulled out an ID-card and fed it into the controlled entry door. Just as the red voice-print prompt light came on, he pulled out a small pocket recorder and thumbed it on.

  ‘31075593,’ said a voice. It didn’t belong to Chisum. The green light came on, the door opened, then locked shut automatically as soon as they’d stepped through. Chisum pocketed the recorder and grinned as he saw Steve’s curious look.

  Steve found that they had entered a service tunnel that was twice as wide as it was high. Bands of pipes and electrical conduits ran along both walls, passing in and out of a variety of cut-off valves and junction boxes. Large fans, mounted at intervals along the walls, sucked air in through vents. There was a noticeable draught blowing through the tunnel, a constant background hum from the fans plus a low steady roaring noise from the air passing through. Parked near the door was a line of eight yellow wheelies – small open electric carts that could carry up to six passengers or haul a trailer.

  Chisum jabbed a finger towards his feet. ‘We’re in the A-Levels here. Ain’t too bad, is it? Apart from the noise that is. But you get used to that. This is A-l. They’re numbered from the top down to A-10, then B-l and so on.’

  ‘How far do they go down?’ asked Steve.

  ‘No idea. I just hope no one ever asks me to count ’em.’ Chisum walked confidently to the wheelie at the head of the line, climbed into the front seat and laid his case on the slatted bench behind. He beckoned Steve to sit beside him. ‘Can you drive one of these things?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Where to?’

  ‘Straight ahead, right at the Tee, then keep going till I tell you.’ Chisum pointed to a yellow toolbox lying on the floor between them. ‘Take that with you when we get off. Okay –’ he slapped the bonnet twice, ‘– let’s get this show on the road.’

  Steve looked along the spartan dash. ‘I can’t find the ID-slot.’

  Chisum sighed heavily and thumbed the start button. The motor whined into life.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ said Steve lamely.

  ‘That’s right, up top, you can’t. But in the A-Levels, things are a little more relaxed. After you’ve been here some time you’ll find you can do all sorts of things.’ Chisum saw Steve’s look of bewilderment and shook his head with mock resignation as they drove off. ‘Boy – you high-flyers… you really don’t know from nothin’.’

  Following Chisum’s directions, Steve parked the wheelie in a wide, pillared service bay, picked up the tool box and tailed his intrepid guide into a service elevator. Chisum hit the button for Level Three-8 and whistled tunelessly as they were carried swiftly upwards.

  Steve looked at the level indicator and saw it went from A-5 to Four-10. ‘That service bay looked pretty clean. Are we in one of the new towers?’

  ‘Yeah, Santanna Deep…’

  ‘I can’t figure it out,’ muttered Steve. ‘Nobody stopped us. We weren’t challenged once. What happens when someone finds out that wheelie is missing from the ramp? All it needs is for someone to check the cards put through that door and they’ll be on to us!’

  Chisum shook his head and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘On to you perhaps, good buddie, but not me. Didn’t use my own card.’

  Steve eyed him cautiously. ‘I know that wasn’t your voice on the recorder but how is it possible?’ he whispered back. ‘ID-cards are non-transferable!’

  Chisum grinned. He got a lot of innocent amusement from ribbing this serious young man. And much of the fun came from telling him the truth – like now – or getting as close to it as possible without giving the game away. ‘In theory, yes. That’s what most people think. But, in practice, some cards are less “non-transferable” than others.’ He winked at Steve and dropped his voice even further. ‘I’m gonna let you in on a big secret. I’ve discovered the system is not perfect. COLUMBUS makes mistakes. How about that?’

  Steve took a step back. ‘No. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘That’s okay by me,’ said Chisum. ‘Just keep on thinking that way.’ He nudged Steve in the ribs. ‘Listen. If everybody broke into the card game, I’d be out of business.’

  They rode the rest of the way to Three-8 in silence.

  The lobby on the thirty-eighth floor was covered in dark green rubber tiles that deadened the sound of their footsteps. The walls were covered with a woven fabric; broad alternate diagonal stripes of the same dark green and dark brown. Light panels running across the dark green ceiling linked up with the brown stripes on the walls. The doors to the eight accommodation units had a metallic silver-bronze finish, with an orange number on the wall by the top right hand corner. Soft, blue-sky ballad music oozed out of speaker grilles on the ceiling.

  Chisum ushered Steve towards Unit 8, put one of his mysterious cards into the slot that primed the lock, punched the entry code and stood back as the door eased back on its hinges. ‘Go ahead. It’s all yours.’

  Steve hesitated, suddenly wary about falling into a trap. ‘Are you sure it’s okay?’

  ‘Yeah, no problem. The guy it’s allocated to is on detachment up the line. Friend of mine – a computer engineer. He’s sorting out some problem in one of the relay centres that feeds data to COLUMBUS. He’ll be away for at least another four weeks.’ Chisum began to back-pedal.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

  ‘Later. I’ve just got to, uh – check up on a few things first. Y’know – smooth out the guys on the desk.’

  ‘What about the other people on this floor?’ whispered Steve.

  ‘Christo! You’re a real nail-nibbler!’ muttered Chis
um. ‘Listen, provided you don’t start knocking holes in the walls, nobody’s going to give a fart. Relax! I’ve used this place before. The only thing that makes the people here nervous is guys standing around whispering on the landing. Now git –!’ He propelled Steve through the door.

  Steve held on to the handle. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Around!’ hissed Chisum. ‘Don’t worry! If there’s any trouble, I’ll be the first person you’ll see.’ And you don’t know how true that is, he thought. He pulled the door shut in Steve’s face.

  Seven

  Steve moved cautiously down the short hallway followed by the same son background music. He peeked through the doors on either side. Some storage space, with shelves bearing various neatly folded articles of clothing. A large shower unit and then, behind the next door along, the can, a butt-bath and hand-basin. Yes, thought Steve. What a joy it had been, on his return to the Federation, to be able to sit on the can and crap comfortably instead of crouching bare-assed in the wild, wondering if some goddam bug was gonna leap up and take a bite out of your anus. Plus the sheer luxury of being able to clean off with a fresh, moist butt-rag instead of a leaf. Searching for something large enough, he had twice picked on poisonous nettles with a blistering delayed-action effect. Christo! It had been worth coming back to the Federation just for that…

  Steve opened another door. It was some kind of work space. A counter, with a basin and water supply, storage units, what looked like a small micro-wave oven, a glazed ceramic panel with a four-ring design and one or two electric appliances. The kind of thing usually found in mess-deck galleys. Steve was surprised by the sudden realisation that people living in Santanna Deep had their own private food preparation facilities. What a strange idea! He moved on through the open arch at the end of the hallway into the main living space and was immediately struck by its huge size. It must have been at least twenty to twenty-five feet square with a large bed space running off on one side on a raised floor. And the floor was not tiled. It was covered in a kind of thick, soft, stubby-haired material that Steve had not encountered before but reminded him of the thick hair on the shoulders of buffalo.

  The living space contained three free-standing, deep-padded seat units with wide backs and arms, and another big enough to lie full-length along it. There was the usual video setup, a table with six chairs and, on the wall behind, portraits of the current P-G and the Founding Father, but the most striking feature was the wide, floor-to-ceiling window that opened out onto a semi-circular balcony and a breath-taking view.

  Santanna Deep – the architectural twin of San Jacinto Deep that Steve had seen prior to going overground – was a free-standing six hundred foot high tower rising through four levels and containing balconied accommodation units on fifty floors. The surrounding shaft had been sculptured to form a backdrop of rocky terraces on which small evergreen trees, shrubs, grasses and moss had been planted. Streams of water trickled constantly from top to bottom through a series of cleverly linked pools, cascading over rocky ledges to the terraces below to fill a small horsehoe lake around the base of the tower.

  Like its twin, Santanna was occupied almost exclusively by gold-braided desk jockeys who worked in the Black Tower – the headquarters of the Amtrak Executive – plus top-grade technicians and other specialists who had worked their way up the rockpile from the cinderblock warrens of the Outer State bases to the marbled vistas of Grand Central. To the less successful, the envious, or the disaffected, the process was known as ‘riding the wire’. ‘All wired up’ was Tracker slang for promotion to executive rank – distinguished by the silver (junior) and gold (senior) wire rank stripes worn on the sleeve and cap.

  To someone born in Monroe/Wichita, or on a frontier way-station like Pueblo, a visit to Houston/Grand Central had the same impact as Imperial Rome must have had on your average Visi-Goth. No matter how many times a guy might have seen shots on tv, the sheer size and the glittering magnificence made his first visit a real jaw-dropper. One look at John Wayne Plaza and you knew you were on the winning side. That was the reason why it had been built, along with the new Deeps. They swept away any feeling of doubt; left room for only one conclusion: a nation led by people with the vision and energy to do this could do anything. Long live the First Family!

  Steve glanced around the living area and the bed space and called out softly. ‘Roz –’ No reply. He saw that some of the glass panels that opened onto the balcony were shielded by broad vertical blinds. ‘C’mon, quit hiding – where are you?’

  Steve slid open one of the window panels and was met by the sound of water in movement; trickling and gurgling over rocks and pebbled beds, cascading over tongue stones; long feathery plumes falling ten, fifteen metres then bursting into fans of spray as they hit rocks placed to break their fall and, in the background, the gentle drumming as the streams joined forces and emptied over the stepped wall around the base of the shaft into the lake.

  Standing at the open window, Steve listened intently, memories and feelings about the overground reawakened by the sights and sounds, and the faintly scented breeze circulating round the shaft. The only difference with what he had seen topside was that here, as at San Jacinto Deep, the foliage on the trees, the shrubs and grasses were not red, but green. According to the Manual, before the Mutes had fouled the blue-sky world with their poisonous presence, the overground had also been green. And would be green again when the Federation triumphed.

  Steve mulled over the middle lines of the last verse of the Talisman Prophecy ‘… Death shall be driven from the air and the blood shall be drained from the earth…’ Was that also a promise that the deadly sickness that blanketed the world would disappear? Did the Mute victory under the leadership of the mysterious Talisman herald the greening of America? If it did, it meant the First Family had lied again: the atmospheric radiation could not have been caused by the ‘poisonous presence’ of the Mutes. Likewise, they could not be blamed for the red grass and trees. The charge that they were a degenerate species of anthropoid was also patently untrue; the perfectly formed bodies of Cadillac and Clearwater were proof of that. Mr Snow had spoken the truth when he claimed that Tracker and Mute shared a common ancestry. The Heroes of the Old Time had also been the forefathers of the Minutemen and Foragers, the first Trackers who, under the leadership of George Washington Jefferson the 1st, had formed the Federation…

  Two arms snaked round his waist, and a body pressed hard against his as someone laid their head against his left shoulder blade. Steve looked down and recognised his soft-hearted assailant by the striped blue, white and green sleeves. ‘Hello, worm…’

  ‘Don’t move,’ murmured Roz, her mouth against his back.

  ‘Since when did you give the orders?’ said Steve. Lifting his right arm he twisted around, encircled her with his arms and squeezed hard.

  ‘Harder,’ said Roz. She laid her head against his neck, hugged him fiercely then covered his face with exuberant kisses. ‘Oh, you bastard! If you knew what I’ve been through on account of you!’ She kissed him hard on the lips and locked her arms round his ribs. Steve pulled his mouth away, sucking in his breath sharply.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ whispered Roz. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  The jagged pain in Steve’s chest faded. ‘It’s okay… just a little fragile. I keep forgetting that a couple of weeks ago, I was still a prisoner of the Mutes.’

  As Roz looked up at him her eyes widened and her hands flew to the cross-shaped scars on his cheeks. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘Someone stuck an arrow through my face.’

  ‘Christopher Columbus…?’

  ‘It was a test. One of the ways they have of sorting out the men from the boys.’

  ‘Did they, uh – beat up on you a lot?’

  ‘Not too much.’ Steve grinnned. ‘Most of the damage happened on the way here. Don’t worry. Nothing’s broken. Just, uh… bumped into a few things.’

  Roz caressed the two scars then slipped her arms
around his neck and planted a soft-lipped kiss on his mouth. ‘You pleased to see me?’

  ‘Of course I am. I just hate the idea of you risking everything on account of me.’

  ‘It’s okay. Provided I don’t say anything to Annie and Poppa-Jack, there’s nothing to worry about. Chisum –’

  ‘You’ve gotta watch that guy, Roz. He’s crazy. And so’s this.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Roz. Her arms tightened around his neck.

  ‘Did Chisum tell you where they’re sending me?’

  Roz placed a hand on his lips. ‘Don’t talk about it. I don’t want to think about it. Not tonight, anyway.’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t want to think about it either.’

  ‘Chisum says you’re okay. Otherwise, I mean. No deterioration in your blood cells, no tissue or bone damage, or anything. Well, you can imagine my reaction. I was speechless. But then he explained he thought the reason you hadn’t pulled a trick was on account of some new drug the First Family have been developing.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  Roz frowned. ‘Are you asking me do I think he’s lying, or do I think it’s medically possible?’

  ‘Both I guess. There’s something about that guy that worries me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roz. ‘He’s a nice, warm, happy human being – and that’s something you still can’t handle. Medically? Yes, I’d say it was possible. And you’re the proof that it works. Aren’t the First Family amazing?’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Steve. ‘Lucky, aren’t I?’

  ‘Be serious.’ It was the doctor, not his kid sister who was looking at him now. ‘Can you imagine what this could mean for the rest of us?’

  ‘I can, but I wouldn’t get too excited about it until they make an official announcement.’ He dropped his hands, patted her butt then led her over to the long seating unit. ‘Let’s sit down. I’ve been dying to try out one of these ever since I got here.’ He tested the upholstery with his hand then sprawled backwards into it, savouring its resilient softness. ‘Great – what do they call this?’