I must admit I didn’t know I was on Carson Square until I emerged from the subterranean transport system. I saw a sign on the wall next to the exit. It said in nice big clear Gill Sans font ‘Carson Square’ and underneath a small plaque explaining that the Square had been named thus to commemorate Rachel Carson in 2164, two hundred years after her death.
I’d heard of ‘Silent Spring’, her famous book criticising the overuse of pesticides and weird chemicals used in agriculture. I also suddenly knew it was originally published in the early 1960s, but of course I’d never read it. Now she had a square named after her in what was possibly the biggest city ever created by the human race.
I turned left out of the exit and walked about a mile down the side of the square. This place was very different, the buildings were smaller, the square itself was a mass of colour and trees making up an expansive and very well tended garden busy with people working. I noticed that quite a few of them were men, digging, planting and I assumed harvesting various crops. It was urban gardening on a truly impressive scale. I could see in the distance that there was another multi-storey agricultural complex, the structure of which was only intermittently visible such was the density of foliage tumbling down its flanks.
I stopped outside a fairly nondescript building. It didn’t look enormously different from the rest of the structures facing the square, a delightful five storey building with large windows, its paintwork seeming to glow in the sun.
I entered through a large pair of glass doors that slid open silently as I approached. Inside was a spacious lobby or gallery decorated with fairly explicit images of very fit young men in various states of undress and amorous arousal. In the centre of the space was a kind of circular desk behind which sat an equally well-built and seemingly naked man. I can’t confirm that he was totally naked but his torso was very much on display and it was nothing short of magnificent. He smiled at me, I smiled back and gave a little nod. That was all, nothing was said.
I wasn’t alone in the hall but a glance around the space confirmed that nearly all the other people were women and already quite a few of them were staring at me. There were a few men in evidence, small groups of men hanging around together. I noticed two of them holding hands. I tried to wander around as if I was at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I was attempting to look interested and nonchalant. It wasn’t easy.
This space was, to say the very least, fairly challenging for an average, run-of-the-mill heterosexual man from any century. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen images of naked men before but the particular images on display on the wall were very confronting to the averagely endowed male.
‘Gavin, I’m Anne,’ said a very hushed voice behind me. ‘Don’t turn around, just give a few beats then follow me from a good distance.’
I knew at once her name was Anne Hempstead and she was thirty-eight years old, she lived on Curie Square and had no children. She was a well-known worder with a very high reader count and was a leading writer on the Weaver supporters log. I knew all this instantly she spoke to me although I admit I didn’t really know what half of it meant.
I can’t explain how I knew, where the information was coming from or if the source was reliable but I was getting used to suddenly knowing stuff. I moved forward casually as if I was studying the anatomy of a young man who was nursing a reproductive organ that resembled nothing short of a well-polished Jacobean Chair leg. Eye watering.
After a few moments staring at his enormous and frighteningly high definition image I turned and saw a women in a floor length grey gown walking away from me toward a doorway into what I assumed was another gallery. I followed at a distance, aware of the many women who turned to stare at me as I passed. Some of them smiled, some looked slightly shocked.
I entered the next room which had a very different theme, many more paintings some of which even I recognised as an old Rembrandt and possibly a couple of Renoir-type things. I’m not very good at remembering painters but I recognised some of them. Some highly explicit paintings of men and women making love, women and women making love, men and men making love, basically a room full of massive sex paintings.
I almost lost sight of the woman who was now going through yet another doorway, she turned to her right as soon as she’d gone through the door, I wandered around for a short while pretending to look at the plethora of naked bodies on the wall then entered the same doorway.
She was standing by the wall as if hiding, a staircase led up to another floor and it seemed there was no one else around.
‘Follow me, quickly,’ she said. She bounded up the stairs at such a rate there was no way I could keep up with her, the speed of her ascent was inhuman and I sensed that she was wearing some kind of mechanical enhancement on her legs.
Two flights later I caught up with her, I was panting like a long distance runner after a particularly hilly section of a marathon, she was totally calm.
‘In here,’ she said.
We entered a large brightly lit library room, she pulled something out of her bag and put it on the reading table we were standing beside. A small black container that looked a bit like a trendy glasses case.
‘Blocker,’ she said nodding to the small box. ‘We have about five minutes so please listen.’
She was speaking in very hushed tones, constantly looking toward the door. ‘Sit down over there, I’ll find you something to read in case anyone comes in. If they do, you don’t know me.’
She scanned the bookshelves beside her and pulled out a large illustrated volume of erotic drawings from 2130 according to the cover. I opened it with the full intention of going along with her deception but the images inside this beautifully printed tome were a little distracting.
‘I just want to know what’s going on,’ said Anne Hempstead. She spoke incredibly quickly, faster than I’d ever heard any human being speak and yet I could follow what she was saying. ‘I’m writing a story about you and I’ve been getting a lot of intervention. This is unusual, we have free speech, we can say anything we like, we can criticise the current administration and not fear reprisals but clearly you are seen as a special case. Who sent you here?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Who sent you?’
‘Who sent me? Nobody sent me, I came here by some completely weird set of ridiculous circumstances,’ I said.
‘So you’re claiming you’ve not been sent here by any organisation, public body or military unit?’
‘No, what? A military unit, no! What are you talking about?’
‘I want to know how you really got here, and where did you really come from? Is it your plan to reinstate the patriarchy, to teach men how to rape, defile and oppress womankind, to help return the world to the dark times?’
This woman was clearly mad, maybe she’d escaped from the Institute. On the other hand my arrival in this place was so utterly implausible, the circumstances so unfathomable and the technology so advanced, maybe she knew much more about my circumstances than she was letting on. Maybe she knew that the authorities in London did bring me through the cloud without my knowing it, brought me through for some bizarre purpose I didn’t at that point understand.
Then I looked at her again, decided she was mad and I wanted to leave.
‘I don’t know what you’re on about. All I know is that I came here from 2011, there’s no way I could have planned it. You’ve got no idea what I’ve been through, it’s a nightmare.’
‘I think you know exactly what’s going on, Gavin Meckler. I think you knew why you came here, you knew what an impact your arrival would make; the timing is too perfect for it to be chance. You knew you could travel back in time and change history.’
It was at that point I decided she really was crackers, I got up to leave but she put her hand on my shoulder to stop me.
‘I have the right to know, we all have the
right to know who you are and who sent you,’ she said incredibly quickly. I shrugged her hand off and stood up. I felt angry and tired and very confused.
‘Look, Anne Hempstead, whoever you are. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I know nothing, as far as I’m concerned time travel is impossible, well, as far as I knew before I arrived here. I’m just a man who arrived here due to some kind of freak, meta-physics, I’m an ordinary man, I don’t believe in patriarchy, I don’t even really know what patriarchy is. I certainly don’t believe it’s my right to rape women, I don’t want to crush women back to the dark times, I don’t want to be the dominant master race, I don’t think women are second class citizens who should live their lives barefoot and pregnant at the kitchen sink or any other nonsense. I’m just a bloke from two hundred years ago who wants to go home.’
Anne stared at me and possibly smiled, I couldn’t tell, she had a weird mouth, one of those people with a mouth that looks a bit like a cat’s bum. Not attractive.
‘Quite simply, Gavin Meckler, I don’t buy it,’ she said eventually. ‘You are clearly here for a reason. It’s possible you genuinely don’t know that, but believe me your arrival is anything but accidental. You are here at a crucial time in history. Your sudden arrival could not possibly be accidental. You know about the Assembly vote, I take it.’
‘The Assembly vote?’
The look this rather fierce woman gave me can only be described as an unpleasant mix of hatred and disbelief.
‘The Assembly vote next month, that must be why you are here.’
‘I wish I knew what you’re on about,’ I said.
She wiped her mouth with her hand. It was a rather ugly gesture.
‘You know exactly why you are here, no one else does yet, but they soon will understand.’
She picked up the black box and secreted it into her gown.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘You should try and get some help.’
‘Why would I need help? Are you threatening me?’
‘Threatening you! For goodness sake, you’re the one being threatening and aggressive. I don’t know what your problem is lady, but clearly it’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I’m afraid it’s very much to do with you. The established authorities know if they don’t do something soon,’ said Anne Hempstead much more slowly. ‘Then the world will become a hundred per cent female within a generation.’
‘And that’s a good thing?’ I asked. Her face gave her away; although she didn’t say anything, I could tell there and then that I’d just met a fully kosher Weaver woman.
16
I Want Him!
I returned to the institute immediately after leaving the Erotic Museum. I kept my eyes resolutely on the floor as I left, I didn’t want to see or remember the multitude of stimulating images on display.
So I was in London in 2211 and the world wasn’t in chaos due to running out of fossil fuels, food or building materials, it was running out of men.
I became increasingly aware of the imbalance of genders as I walked back to the transport entrance, I only saw women, hundreds of women and I have to say most of them didn’t look all that happy.
But the men I had met, they all seemed like decent blokes, they didn’t come across as bullies, rapists or violent murderers. They were proper men, big tall hairy blokes who seemed if anything unusually gentle. Okay so 5-G nephew Ralph presented as rather camp and Akiki had to be on the extreme gay end of the human sexuality spectrum, but the rest, Pete, Yuseff and all the men who watched the Yuneec being rebuilt, they were just regular blokes. They dressed differently, they were a bit over emotional for my liking but they were men and there seemed to be enough of them to make a respectable crowd.
What was even stranger about the world I had landed in was the intrigue. It wasn’t even clear there was any intrigue or subversion or gun-toting revolutionary elements buried deep and unseen. Not that the guns would have been much good, they couldn’t shoot guns with bullets any more, that was obvious.
I then considered not only what Anne had told me, but what she could have done to me. I was alone with her for a short while, if she was as mad as she seemed and saw me as a direct threat to the Weaver women’s aim of eradicating men from the planet, then why didn’t she kill me?
Maybe she didn’t need to, maybe the blocker thing she had used in the quiet library was really a knacker adaptor, a testosterone terminator, maybe she had used some subtle technology to ensure I could only ever create female babies.
It just didn’t make sense, I’d seen no sign of dissent and everything I’d seen pointed to stability, sustainability in both technology and politics. London struck me as an incredibly stable and safe place. I hadn’t been mugged or set upon by gangs of dangerous-looking youths, in fact, I hadn’t seen any gangs of youths. I pondered this for a moment, soon realising that by definition gangs of youths who might attack and rob you tended to be men and there weren’t that many men or boys in evidence.
There were no obvious uniformed police, though there had been the women who walked along with Ralph and I on my first outing and the four women watching me when I was in Pete’s store witnessing the Yuneec rebuild. They looked like they could be some kind of security detail and there probably was surveillance of some kind but it was so universal, so embedded that everyone seemed to know everything anyway. It wasn’t surveillance as I would have understood it, secret agents listening into conversations or reading e-mails, it didn’t feel like there was a GCHQ somewhere keeping tabs because everyone was able, so it seemed, to keep tabs on everyone else.
Yet the unpleasant Anne had used the blocker thing. I’d been a fool, I’d assumed at the moment she revealed it to me it somehow blocked the signal from the kidonge. I have no idea how I knew that and as I lay on my bed that night I started to doubt my initial assumption. What on earth could a blocker do? I remembered she said she couldn’t read me so maybe the blocker meant she couldn’t sense what I was really thinking as Nkoyo and Doctor Markham seemed very adept at doing. The very idea of something like a blocker existing suggested that indeed someone could keep very close tabs on me. Anne’s secret agent behaviour in the Erotic Museum also suggested that she knew how to work around the systems that I had to assume were in place.
I had already accepted that my kidonge meant it was possible to discover where I was located at any time but it hadn’t really worried me. My old twenty-first-century phone did that, so it was nothing new. I had nowhere to go anyway, I didn’t want to do anything subversive or dangerous, the whole experience of landing in their rather mysterious city was danger enough.
These thoughts clanging around in my head must have eventually worn me down because I slept for a long time.
As the tint changed on my window when I woke up, it was already bright outside.
After my morning ablutions I made my way downstairs with the intention of getting some breakfast. As I approached the bottom of the extra big stairs I heard shouting. A woman was making a lot of noise somewhere down the long corridor, I couldn’t make out anything that was being said but it sounded a bit dramatic. My normal reaction to such events in the past has always been to close down, to try and ignore, to keep moving and get away from the emotional turmoil. I’d never felt the need some people have, to grab any chance to witness anything upsetting. If I passed by people having a row on the street back in the old days I’d always keep moving, keep my eyes on the ground and hope they ignored me. I’d never wanted to watch disaster clips on YouTube, I didn’t want to see people making stupid mistakes and either injuring themselves or dying as a result of their actions.
Now, however, I found myself approaching the ruckus like a pin being drawn towards a magnet, I wanted to know what was going on. Instead of being desperate to get away, I wanted to see if I could help, it was as if I felt an emotional pull from he
aring the cries of despair.
I glanced into the big room where I’d done my first interview with Doctor Markham and the panel of powerful ladies. One of the silent big-armed women appeared to be hugging a struggling dark haired woman who was standing in the middle of the room. Beyond them I could see Nkoyo and Doctor Markham looking very concerned. As soon as Nkoyo saw me she moved across the room at speed. The struggling woman turned her head and I could see the anguish on her face. She reached out an arm towards me as if begging for help. I felt hugely torn, should I intervene? Should I rush to try and rescue her from her beefy captor?
The woman’s face was twisted with anguish, she screamed ‘I want him! That one! I want him!’
Before I could react Nkoyo was beside me, she grabbed my arm and ushered me along the corridor. I don’t want to imply that I am physically weak or that Nkoyo was unladylike in her strength but clearly she was no wilting wallflower when it came to imposing her physical dominance on a dramatic situation. She gripped my arm hard and pulled me along with some quite distressing force.
‘Hey, easy!’ I complained, as she ushered me into the canteen room. As soon as we were inside the door slid up silently behind us.
‘I didn’t want you to see that, Gavin,’ she said as she looked directly into my eyes. Awkward. She was standing very close and there was nowhere for me to look without making a point, I just had to hold her gaze, stare directly into her large dark eyes. Okay, it wasn’t that bad.
‘What’s wrong with that poor woman?’ I asked, rubbing my upper arm, I was definitely going to get bruises.
Nkoyo relaxed a little, sighed and composed herself, she sat on the edge of one of the canteen tables, reached over and a box in the wall opened, inside was a tall metallic liquid container, she extracted it and passed it to me.
News from the Squares Page 17
