FOR COLIN
Acknowledgements
Writing is a solitary business but it also involves team work. I would now like to thank;
Colin Baird, Frances Wright and Liz Small, the early readers who weeded out the rubbish and cleared the path for future drafts. Alan Green, the tough guy, who cut me no slack and embarrassed me into killing my darlings. The experts; Sebastian Russo, the scientist and Dez Burt, the sub-mariner – they both gave excellent advice and any errors in the novel are due to my misunderstanding of the facts and are mine alone.
Particular thanks go to Clare Cain and all at Fledgling Press for making the Sun Song brand come alive. Also thanks to Saraband Books for publishing the first edition of this book.
Lastly I would like to thank my family for keeping me in the here and now, especially my sons, John and Gary and my sister Liz, who is my runner’s conscience and librarian extraordinaire.
Part One
Base Dalriada
Lesser Esperaneo
2089
Chapter One
The last time I saw my mother was three days after my sixteenth birthday.
The wrestling bout was on but already I was pestered by the morning winterlight blighting the Games Wall and reflecting dust onto the rim of my headgear. I don’t know how many times that native had been told to suction this room to full proof; the lazy bint never did.
My parents’ prime birthday gift to me was the Cadenson Wrestling Station, the most excellent deluxe model with a hyper-pain module. Epic. For five months already I had to endure Jake Hislop bragging about his CW stat. His parents, being Upper-Corp, had access to mega leisure bars. Jake only had to snap his bony fingers and his wish was granted. He never had to wait for his birthday. It was beamervilles enough having only Mid-Corp parents without the added reds of waiting an era for their weeny leisure bar quota to mount up and eventually get the gift of the century. Now the CW was mine and I’d been locked into a Jake grudge match ever since I peeled the wrapper off.
That day as Ma stood in the doorway dressed in her crisp grey uniform, Jake’s impression held me fast in a stranglehold. It was like he was right here, in the room with me. I could smell the oats he had for breakfast – rank. The machine began to count. Soon it would cancel me out and shunt the victorious Jake back to the reality of his unit to gloat. I kicked the wall and twisted from his grasp. The room tossed as I heaved his impression off me, I head-dived over the low table, bounced backwards, and landed on top of him. He side-shifted, rolled his skinny impression under the table, hove from the other side and, snatching my hair, viced my neck with his arm.
‘I’m leaving now, Somhairle.’ I heard Ma’s voice but saw only her feet, shod as always in polished military boots. As I flailed my arms to grab a corner of Jake, I skittered and raked at his face; the warmth of imagined blood tickled to my wrists. His return blow to my belly was exact and buckled me, forehead to knee. I bent double like a native working in the fields, winded and almost beaten.
The machine called break and began to count again.
‘Somhairle, switch that off for a minute please. Send Jake back. We need to say goodbye.’
‘No, not now, I almost have him.’ I took a knee and knuckle, long enough to catch some O2. The room swirled with invading dust. ‘Ma, the dust. Close the damn door.’
I looked up and caught the eye of the native, ever faithful. She stood tall in the shadow behind Ma.
Ma was going on another mission. So what? She’d been going on missions all my life. What was the big deal this time? She’ll be back in a couple of days. Then Jake offered a hand, I took it, he yanked and threw me over his shoulder like a sack of laundry. When I landed I twisted my ankles round his lower legs, flipped over and brought him down. Before he reacted I had him pinned.
‘Unu, Du, Tri, Kvar, Kvin, Ses, Sep, Ok, Naŭ, Dek,’ the machine counted.
‘VICTORY!’ I roared as Jake’s image evaporated.
‘Nice one Sorlie,’ the machine purred. I fired up my communicator and watched Jake slouch in his unit, an empty sack waiting to be carted to the recyk midden.
‘Jake the snake, crawl on your belly, loser,’ I voice-overed. ‘That’s called a supreme advantage wipeout.’ I cut the connection before he had a chance to spit back.
What a crazed game. Oh man, I could join the ladder league and reach the top in click time. I glanced round for Ma’s approving smile but she’d gone. Only the native remained, and no smile cracked that face.
I looked around me. The room was trashed. The table lay upended, a pile of regulation magazines were scattered and the Games Wall was marked with a boot-heel score the length of my arm. Pa would rage about that if he saw it. All the utilities should have been moved out before the bout but, you know how it is, time’s short. The battleground debris belonged more to a battalion than a couple of teenage boys. I ordered the native to pack the Cadenson Station and clear the room, but she didn’t move. Her breasts pushed for freedom under her drab green overalls. I could feel my face pink at the memory of my nocturnal fantasies of her and wakening to the familiar crusting wet patch on the sheet. She was just a native for jupe sake, just a Celt. I shouldn’t even be considering her and she was old, at least twenty-five. But there was something about her that made my skin prickle. It was more than her breasts. She was nothing like the other natives on the Base who were bland; she freaked my friends with her presence, but that never stopped them ogling her.
And now Ma had left me yet again in the native’s care, as she had done since I was small. Only this time, because Ma refused to wait, we didn’t have a chance to say goodbye properly.
‘What are you waiting for? Clear up this mess. That wall needs cleaned, native. Attend to it.’
She tiptoed into the room as if her feet were made of china and would shatter if weight bore down too hard. It was a disconcerting trait that always left me searching for her in the house just to make sure she wasn’t spying. Everyone knows natives spy on their Privileged owners.
‘Your Ma has left for the Front.’ Her soft voice held a steely note. She reeked of the workfields but it didn’t hide her overriding stench of pickling vinegar.
‘She’ll be back in a couple of days.’
‘You think so?’ She had the cheek to turn her back on me as she tiptoed from the room.
‘You haven’t cleared up,’ I shouted after her. ‘If it’s not done by the time Pa comes home you’re in deep trouble, missy.’
• • •
The native did put the room to rights after a while, when it suited her, and before Pa was due to return. She had vanished to the fields by the time I surfaced from my pit next morning. A bowl of breakfast oats sat on the kitchen table and a prepared lunch of beans and wheat paste still steamed under the cooling hood.
After lunch I heard Pa’s Jeep turn into the block. I wanted to run to him and smell that peculiar foosty smell that clung to his clothes whenever he worked on the Base, but I stuck to my room and listened to the Jeep reverse into the garage, waiting for the connecting door to slam. Let him come to me.
After an hour, when he still hadn’t appeared, I ventured into the bare corridors of our unit and found him in the store room, dragging camping gear into the middle of the floor as if he were preparing a bonfire.
‘What’s going on?’
He recoiled and flexed his gun hand. The already sunken sockets of his eyes were rubbed red. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand then stretched it out for me to take. It was cold and brittle, just like the man I saw before me, withering before his time. My stomach lurched and blackened. I could almost smell the snuffed-out candle of our
previous life.
‘What’s happened? It’s the Hero in Death thing, isn’t it?’
Chapter Two
You get used to being a military kid. In fact, my first memory was of Ma and Pa deserting me, of being scared of that now familiar grey uniform – especially Ma’s. I remember the first time they disappeared as an epoch spent under the tyranny of a dour-faced native nurse who treated my toddler tears as a minor inconvenience. When I clamped my jaws shut, refusing to eat her disgusting gruel, she skelped my bare knee; this brought about a scream which she used to wedge my jaw open with thumb and index of one hand while shovelling the food in with the other. I choked on oats mixed with my tears and snot. The witch stood and smirked as spew and urine puddled at my feet. By the time Ma and Pa returned, the chubby, cheerful boy they left had morphed into a skinny, feeble sniveller who had learned to eat up then hide. Whenever they left, after that first time, I would scream and kick and beg them to stay. Ma would sometimes cry, but the State was more powerful than my tantrums. It wasn’t until the witch suddenly left in the night and my parents openly welcomed this strange new native who tiptoed into our household that the nightmare eased.
I remember once when I was about ten years old, Ma was talking to the native in the kitchen. Miss Tippie-toes stood with head bowed, cutting vegetables; a sullen pout plumped her mouth as if she had something in her teeth she couldn’t shift. She caressed the paring knife with her thumb and hitched her hip as if she carried a weight there. Ma’s voice stuttered with urgency.
‘If word comes back from the Service of our release, take Somhairle to his grandfather.’ She handed a thick biobag packet to the native. ‘Give the old bastard this; he’ll know what to do.’
‘Natives aren’t allowed presents,’ I piped up. ‘Where’s my present?’
‘I’ll bring you one back, Somhairle. I promise, if you promise always to remember me when I’m gone.’ Ma kissed my head then hugged me to her. ‘You must remember me,’ she whispered, ‘because memories are the one thing the State cannot take from you.’ That was the first time she spoke this mantra, and she never failed to repeat it each time she left thereafter. ‘Memories are the one thing the State cannot take from you.’
Unlike Pa, whose smell changed depending on whether he worked at the Base or not, Ma always smelled sweet, like the fields of the Pleasure Lands we always visited in the second quarter. I would discover years later the sweet aroma was lavender. Pa too kissed me goodbye that time. His earthiness overpowered the essence of Ma, and it was this earthiness I took with me when I lay in bed that night wondering what present Ma would bring back. Maybe Pa would bring me something too. Looking back on this now, it must have been the desire for presents that stopped me asking the obvious. Who was this grandfather, this old bastard? I wasn’t to find this out until much later.
When Ma came home that time, her eyes were panda’d with black smudges, her sweetness had fled; she stank of diseased animals, carrion left out in the elements to be picked clean by scavengers. When I asked her where my present was she squeezed me so close my skin nipped. ‘I’m so sorry Sorlie,’ was all she said. That was when I knew something was wrong; she never normally called me by my anglicised name.
Pa arrived home from his mission a few weeks after Ma and although he didn’t look as tired as she, I knew better than to ask for a present. His silence simmered as he moved his kit from the room my parents shared into the sleeping quarter next to mine. The native melted into her tasks and manoeuvred me away from parental contact for the rest of that day.
My parents never spoke to each other after that time but I often caught them communicating with their sorrowful eyes.
‘They are forbidden to speak to each other,’ the native confided to me.
‘Why?’
‘Your mother has received instructions to be a Hero in Death.’ She held her hand up to halt my question. ‘Don’t ask me what it means. Just accept that our lives will change. Don’t mention this to your parents,’ she added, ‘just be kind to them while you can.’
Sometimes in the night I heard Pa thump his bed like a punch bag and gasp as if in pain. The sadness never left his eyes even when I performed well in school or we spent time together fishing in the Designated Water Parks.
• • •
The day after my sixteenth birthday Pa drove me to the coast for the first time.
He had to stand on tiptoes to set my hat straight, not that I would have let him. Body hair was appearing in every crack and orifice and my voice took regular trips into far-off octaves in search of that perfect pitch. When he first announced the trip, I resisted; it was my birthday after all and the Cadenson Wrestling Station grudge match beckoned, but Pa wanted to leave the next day.
We were sitting at the kitchen table eating the celebration meal prepared by the native who, as usual, tiptoed around the edges of our life with barely a breath out of place, lifting bowls and filling beakers as she went.
‘It’s time,’ was all Pa said, but his face said much more.
Why did they have to spoil my birthday with this? I looked to Ma for support, but she only nodded. Lately she had grown silent and as haggard as the old crones who cleaned the Base latrines, but that evening she changed from her uniform into one of her prettified utility suits. The native helped her brush and style her hair into the fashion she preferred when I was a tot, and they painted her face from a dried and crusted palette Ma produced from the same memory box she used to store my ‘firsts’. Before she retired to her solitary room for sleep she packed Pa’s bag with care, even though it was the native’s duty. For once the dark circles that plagued her eyes faded into the blush of her cheeks as she smoothed and folded each item of Pa’s clothing, finishing by tucking a small sprig of lavender under the collar of his sleepwear.
That night through the thin walls of our unit I heard Pa fight hard with his pillow.
• • •
It was the end of the third quarter, between soft and hard harvests, when most vegetation withers and browns and the natives scrape and gather what they can for the Privileged stores. We drove past gigantic rusting pylons and through vast cracked grey concrete forests of derelict wind-turbines – evidence of failures from the century’s hardest winters, when the developers ran to the sun, leaving behind their crumbling installations and a country struggling to see in the dark.
‘Look at them, useless creatures, impotent and ugly,’ Pa said with relish as if he enjoyed the way the words ‘impotent and ugly’ lassoed his tongue.
The vehicle we travelled in was his military Jeep. On our journey of several hours we passed only one other vehicle, also military.
‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘the roads were jammed with cars and trucks. Even ordinary natives had vehicles.’
‘No way. Natives can’t drive.’
‘In those days they could. People from these communities mixed and married. Some natives even married Privileged.’
‘No way!’
‘Mixed marriages were only banned after the Nationalist uprising, when the Purists came to power. And then ten years later the Land Reclaimists mounted the coup and banned all native and non-military transport in a futile attempt to save some of Esperaneo’s environment and to conserve the dwindling fuel supply. Natives used to be just like us, only difference was they had predominant Celtic genes.’
Why was he spouting this crazy talk? My mouth dried with the taste of the unknown and forbidden. Suddenly I wanted the Jeep to be pulled up at a checkpoint and for the Military to take me back to the Base. Then he smiled.
‘You think we’re in trouble? Well maybe we will be, but not yet. See.’ He thumped the roof of the Jeep, he played drums on the dashboard, he stroked the door as if it were a cat. His laugh was the deep hearty eruption I remembered from before the time he moved into the room next to mine.
‘See, Sorlie? No surveillance. It doesn
’t work up here. The mountains block the signal.’
‘What about the satellites?’
‘They can’t listen to everyone, so they ignore these isolated parts.’
He must be lying.
‘What about our chips?’
‘Oh, they know we’re here. I’ll be disciplined for leaving the Safe Zone, but so what?’
Pa was a quiet man who normally spoke only if he had something important to say. That day in the Jeep his stories made my head fizz; he infected me with his history. He spoke of his upbringing on the small arable farm his family had owned and lost to the Land Reclaimists, of how his position in the Military ensured that his parents would be looked after in their failing years. I never knew my grandparents, but when I asked him to elaborate he jumped topic, swatting his history dead like a swipe at a mozzie. Then he slipped into dwam-time, silent, staring at the road ahead.
Memories are the one thing the State cannot take from you.
The Jeep rumbled over a broken and potholed road not much bigger than the path to our front door. Climbing higher up the mountain side we ascended into a soupy clag that clung to the brown bracken and obscured the view. The wipers squealed into action on torn rubbers, making little headway on the rain-
splattered screen.
Pa wasn’t fazed. ‘Remind me to report that fault,’ he said as he halted the offending blades.
At the summit, the cloud lay behind and below us. Pa pulled over and stopped in a car park strewn with cairns. To the west lay an expanse of water that I took to be an enormous lake. In parts I could just make out a farther shore, at others the water reached the horizon. In the near distance, the smoky mountains of an island danced in silhouette against a streaked crimson and pink sky. The dimmed headlights left us in the gloaming, and we climbed from the cab, spellbound in the grip of the sunset. Great gulps of cold sweet air quenched my urban-stained lungs; I’d never tasted anything so clean, so sweet. The air chill tweaked my nostrils, making me sneeze. The wind brought tears to my eyes.
Ways of the Doomed Page 1
