‘Are you going to be a sailor, then?’
‘ Yes. I will build such a ship as the world has never seen before. And maybe one day you will sail with me, Michael. A voyage to end all voyages.’
‘I’d like that. Remind me to take you windsurfing some time.’
‘Windsurfing? I would like that?’
‘Yeah, you’ll like it.’
Tourists one day, and tourist guides the next. All of us. We had nosed around each other for the first few days, kings of strut. Spitfires venturing near the elven’s woodland camp, Yannareth’s entourage stealing up to the edge of the forest to look out at Balford. But contact, acceptance, that was down to Russel and the prince in the end.
One of my photobyte history courses incorporated images of old Cold War summits; leaders meeting on neutral territory, carefully diplomatic. That’s what it was like, the same softly softly quality. Testing and probing. They talked, then they sat down on boulders beside a stream, and started to smile, then Prince Yannareth laughed at something Russel said. After that, they were inseparable, you couldn’t forge a stronger friendship.
~ * ~
It was Sendiryki who taught me to ride a horse. I hate to admit it, but for sheer exhilaration it knocked my electrobike for six. He also showed me the strength in the water that flows from the first forest, scooping it up out of an icy stream in a shallow goblet made from the palest gold I’d ever seen.
‘A tirkrih,’ he said. ‘A seeing chalice. It has been in my family since the time of Ardwen.’ He recited a lilting incantation over it.
When I looked at the surface of the water, I could see a pallid reflection of autumn woodland wreathed in serpentine coils of fog. Some of the trees were shattered, broken spears lay on the ground.
‘Where is that?’
‘Another place, another age.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘Try again.’
I saw a misty glimpse of a palatial white-coral castle festooned in garlands of bright flowers, pennants flying from high turrets. Hundreds of elven rode across the greensward in festival. The sky was the clearest blue. ‘Your home?’ I asked. It was achingly beautiful.
‘The hall of Yannareth’s sire. And beyond that, lies the sea.’ There was that wistful tone again.
I took him home when my parents were out, and showed him how to use the home terminal. We spent hours accessing govcentral data cores, reviewing scoutship planet survey records. I made a mental note to load up a holowafer with images for him. He could take it back to Yannareth’s camp and look at all the bug eyes to his heart’s content.
We spent one day at the beach, Sendiryki’s first sight of the sea. I found him some pink and blue Bermuda shorts and a baggy T-shirt with a hologram of the horsehead nebula, and we left Balford at dawn, riding down the crumbling old tarmac road on my electrobike.
Rounding the last comer as we emerged from the south Devon forest was like a theatrical spectacle. The blue water suddenly there, stretching out for ever. Sendiryki clutched at me in something almost like panic. I heard what he heard then, the song that the waves and the gulls weave, the siren call, drawing us forward.
Plymouth had been almost completely regressed; apart from the resort club above the shore there were only a few old stone buildings, which served as museums. We walked over the rolling ground that had been a city, Sendiryki looking more lost than I had ever seen him.
‘Such decay,’ he said mournfully. ‘And you say it was occupied less than a century ago?’
‘Fifty years. But it’s meant to be this way,’ I said. The land around us was cockpit country, steep mounds covered in reedy grass, stubbled with small gorse bushes. ‘These used to be blocks of flats. The regression teams have various species of cloned macerator algae which they spray on all the old buildings; there’s one for glass, and one for concrete, another for brick. The skyscrapers wind up looking like foam sculptures. It takes a couple of years, but the whole structure eventually crumbles away into sand.’ We reached the top of a mound, and I stamped my foot on a bare patch of marly soil. ‘Of course, there’s an awful lot of junk immune to the algae. We come out here and dig sometimes. It’s amazing what you can find.’
‘Did your ancestors really hate this world so much that entire kingdoms abandoned it?’ Sendiryki asked.
‘Some of them did, I suppose. We were in a bad state around the time starflight was perfected, you see, pollution and population pressure had shot the environment to hell. There was a big Fresh Start movement; you know, cut free from the mistakes of the past, that kind of thing.’
‘I would not enjoy a land where such turmoil lasted for centuries, yet you rejoice in it. How strange a song men sing. Why with all the powers at your command did you not heal your own world?’
‘We have now, more or less. Population was one of the biggest problems. And the stars were an easy solution. A lot of transportees were in voluntaries: dole conscripts, criminals, anti-gov protesters.’ I didn’t tell him about the weapons cache we’d found, digging in an old office block. Russel said it was probably left behind by an anti-expat group. The Sony pistols were less than thirty years old. Not everyone went peacefully. ‘England’s population is down to eight million now. Govhousing says that’s just about perfect for us.’
‘Millions!’ Sendiryki exclaimed in bemusement. ‘So few!’
‘It means we’ ve got room to grow the forests again,’ I pointed out, laughing as we ran down the slope together.
Sendiryki did get to windsurf after all. I hired us a couple of boards from the club, and spent the afternoon teaching him in one of the empty coves further down the shore. Talk about a duck to water. I wound up paying an overdue penalty. He just wouldn’t get off.
~ * ~
Kathy arrived at the start of August, the daughter of a regression team supervisor who moved into the Makings. We didn’t have girls in the Black Spitfires. Oh, we went out with Makings girls, kissed them when we went on trips to the beach, spied on them sunbathing topless. But they weren’t Spitfires. Not before Kathy.
She was sixteen, with hair so fair it was almost white. Her legs were as long as any elf s, and her smile shamed the sun. The first time I saw her I thought she had come from the first forest; she was unearthly, divine.
I fell in love with her. All the Black Spitfires fancied her, but that was just puerile adolescent lust on their part, in my case it was the real thing.
I never stood a chance. Too young. Besides, she was Russel’s. He made that quite clear from the start, and for some unfathomable reason she responded in kind. But I didn’t stop loving her just because of him.
Sendiryki was full of sympathy, if a little short on understanding. ‘What of your plans to explore the night void?’ he said. ‘Would she be able to travel with you in your metal starvoyager?’
“That’s years away,’ I protested.
He grinned. ‘Such a shallow song, Michael. Is your love so thin, then, that it would not last those years?’
‘Of course it would last!’
He sang me a song of noble lovers torn apart by some war, or black witchery, or cataclysm - something bloody morbid, anyway - how they didn’t get together again for centuries, and how the reward for all that faithfulness came in the elf version of heaven. ‘Now that is a love you should aspire to, Michael.’
Like I said, short on understanding.
The only time I could talk to Kathy alone was when we all trooped along to the govschool for a laser-imprint session. Russel didn’t go, he had been playing truant for seven months, saying he knew all he needed to to work on a regression team. I don’t suppose it occurred to him that regression was nearly over, that without a job he would be in line for involuntary transportation.
I told her of my giddy dreams as we walked through Balford’s stylish Victorian streets, the future I’d mapped out for myself amongst the constellations. The words tumbling out in a frenzied, probably incoherent, gush, so eager was I to impress her. She would nod at appropriate moments, in turn telling m
e how she intended to qualify as a bitek designer. Neither of us made any mention of how this would be compatible with Russel’s simplistic idea of the future.
I never did understand the attraction she felt for him. Russel was a dead end, a recidivist stuffed full of bravado. Strong and charismatic enough to lead a bunch of gullible teenagers, but that was the sum of him. I even started questioning the point of the Black Spitfires, it was beginning to seem like playacting to me. A mockery of true rebellion. I didn’t want to fight govcentral; govcentral built and operated scoutships.
The two of us were ambling back from govschool one evening at the end of August, when Brendan made a pass at Kathy. He was standing behind the flaky brick wall that ran around the town’s compact park. A tall, slender twenty-year-old wearing a dark trench coat and matching trilby; his skin was so white you’d think he was an albino. I couldn’t see his eyes, they were hidden behind a biker’s visor, a glossy black strip with streamline contours, covering the middle third of his face. Brendan was the leader of the Shadowhawks. We’d noticed them a couple of years back, about five or six of them, older than us, always in their trench coats. They never even acknowledged we existed. Posers all. I think someone said they lived in govproject houses on the other side of town. Each evening they would come to hang out in the old baptist chapel on the edge of the park.
‘We’re having a party tonight,’ he said as we drew level. ‘Open invitation for a girl like you. It’ll be a lot more fun than anything your kiddy friends get up to.’
‘No thank you,’ Kathy said sharply.
‘Where’s your fire? You’ve got to find out what real life is like sometime. I could show you tonight.’
‘I know all about real life.’
She moved a fraction closer to me. I risked a glance at the ramshackle yellow-stone chapel fifty metres behind Brendan. The Shadowhawks were lounging around the open door, trench coats flapping in the warm zephyrs that prowled the gloaming, biker visors tracking us like radar. I hadn’t realized there were so many Shadowhawks these days. Easily a dozen.
‘Oh, I don’t think you do,’ Brendan smiled, thin waxen lips parting to show needle teeth. ‘You just hope so. Real life isn’t about hope, it’s plain survival. And I’m an expert.’
‘I’ll manage on my own, thank you,’ Kathy said.
‘Sure you will,’ he crooned. ‘Tigress.’ He thrust his head back and started to bark like a mad dog.
Kathy slipped her arm round mine, and we rounded a corner. ‘Run,’ she hissed. And we did, all the way up the gentle slope to the Makings, Brendan’s eerie howling laughter chasing us the whole way.
Kathy persuaded me not to say anything to Russel. It was just as well, the Shadowhawks had me worried. Theirs was a presence that added an unwholesome tone of menace to Balford’s somnolent streets. I couldn’t help thinking life was sweeter in the days when we were less than nothing to them.
If the Shadowhawks were the downside of Balford, the elven were the boost we needed to convince ourselves life was worthwhile after all. Kathy was as dazzled and awestruck by them as the rest of us. Her face… Well, I suppose she looked like me the first time I saw the fairies.
I remember the time Russel introduced her to Prince Yannareth. The prince bowed deeply, taking her hand and kissing her knuckles. ‘You are truly the flower of your race,’ he intoned solemnly.
She blushed and her cheeks dimpled, flattered by the attention. Yannareth had that effect on people. All the elves were wondrous, but he had an unmatched grace; it was that nobility which set him as far above them as they were above us.
Russel swaggered about, ridiculously self-important. By royal decree, his girl was the most desirable in two worlds. Not bad going for a nobody.
The inseparable duo became the inseparable trio.
~ * ~
A week after my tangle with Brendan in the park, the Black Spitfires and the prince’s entourage clubbed together and went to the Stomping Mary gig in Southampton. The Stampers were a tight seven piece mood fantasy band, very hot, preaching their quasi-anarchy message along with the usual raw sex. Gods to anyone under twenty, rich or poor.
The Tube to Southampton took quarter of an hour, and I spent the whole time thinking malicious thoughts about the shock Sendiryki was going to get when they started playing. He thought someone accompanying a harp with a flute was pretty racy stuff.
The gig was in a grassy amphitheatre carved into a hillside on the west of the city. We all trooped in together, us Spitfires in our black jackets, the elven in borrowed, ill-fitting clothes.
The Stampers walked on stage, and twenty thousand adolescents roared in welcome. The elven joined in, for once swept along by our world’s song. They smiled incredulously at each other, that look which says you know you shouldn’t, but it’s great fun anyway.
The band struck up. Omni-directional sublim stacks on either side of the stage, like giant crystal pillars, began broadcasting. Hard synth rock slammed into my ears, and sequerced photons slipped along my optical nerves, tickling the secluded response centres in my brain. And I was suddenly this wild metallic-skinned pterodactyl streaking through interstellar space, wings ten kilometres wide beating against thin gusts of hydrogen atoms. I swerved around shimmering comets, rolled lazily over lonely tumbling asteroids, falling endlessly down the gravity slope. There were planets ahead, gas giants with their rings and colourful moons. I dipped and weaved and gyrated above the cloudscape’s ocean-sized stormbands, pale phosphorescent borealis serpents swam like fish shoals amid the darkside cloud peaks. I left it all behind, flying inwards, towards the bright call of the sun. All around me, space was filled with the triumphant cry of my kind, black wings aglitter as we beat our way towards the warmth. And there, gliding above the thermals of the corona, I found a mate. Necks entwined, wings outstretched as one, we soared I in the fountaining solar flares, surfed along the arching prominences, spiralling around and around. Free and invincible, lords of the cosmos. It was me, all I ever wanted to be, my soul’s song.
Sendiryki was laughing, his eyes inflamed. ‘Such danger! Such joy!’ he cried above the crushing music. ‘Oh Michael, why did you never tell me? Are they real? Are they creatures your star voyagers found?’
‘No. The Stompers make them up. They make it all up.’
‘What crazy minds you have. Oh to be mortal man for just one day. To know such beautiful insanity, such liberation.’
The one sour note of the evening came from Russel. Like every time, he wanted to go a step further than anyone else, so he infused one of the hallucinogens the filter churned out. I saw him later during the gig, crashing out alone, dancing in fractured jerks to a beat no one else could hear.
That was when I saw Kathy and Prince Yannareth dancing together, a graceful old-fashioned partnership. I turned back to the stacks, immersing myself in a grand ballroom of elegant people, men in dinner jackets, women in demure gowns, slow waltzing in time to a poignant ballad. Looking round again, Prince Yannareth’s arms had encircled Kathy, she was resting her head on his chest, smiling gently.
After the gig Sendiryki and I hiked up to the Café at the top of the amphitheatre hill. We ordered some beers and sat outside in the balmy night air, watching the spaceplanes slide in from the other side of the sky. Their swept delta heatshield underbellies glowed a deep orange against the smiling summer stars as they sank down towards the city’s spaceport.
‘You humble me, Michael,’ Sendiryki said slowly. ‘Amid the insensitivity of your changeful world is a grandeur I could never have conceived.’
‘You’ll find what you’re looking for out there on your sea.’
‘Perhaps.’ He tilted his head up again, silver-glitter eyes dark with longing.
~ * ~
It was Anton and his big mouth that did it.
We used an old stable block to hang out in; it was at the back of the Makings, surrounded by a thicket of hawthorns, which is probably why the regression team missed it. But we fixed up the roof,
and added some solar cells to power our gear.
He charged in late one afternoon, looking as if he had run all the way from the coast, face red, chest heaving. ‘I saw them,’ he yelled. ‘Yannareth and Kathy, they were having it off in the forest. God they never even saw me they were at it so hard. Hey, do you reckon it’s true about the elven having one as big as a horse? I mean, boy, you should have heard her squealing!’
We looked at him, every one of us, disconnected from time, numbed and secretly terrified.
He looked back at us, grinning savagely. ‘What?’ Then he turned as Russel rose to his feet, coming forward out of the corner he’d been brooding in. Anton’s elation drained away, replaced by real fear.
‘Where was this?’ Russel asked in a dead tone. He had infused something, and that filter really was way too old to reproduce the delicate molecular strings contained in the narc-programs. I could see the tiny capillaries in his eyeballs had turned sallow.
New Worlds 4 Page 20
