Dreams of the Chosen

by Cawell, Brian

  Bran shakes his head.

  ‘No point tempting fate. We survive by keeping a low profile. If I go in, they’re going to want to thank me – to do something for my family, maybe. It’s not controllable. It’s like Carlin told me once. “Never ask a question if you don’t know where it’s leading and never enter a room until you know how you’re going to leave it.” There’s no percentage in taking unnecessary risks.’

  ‘There is for me.’ She moves a step closer to him. ‘If they are grateful, I might be able to see you again. And I would truly like that.’

  He smiles and she returns the compliment. Then he looks away, staring up at the wall of the Fortress. ‘Are you sure you’re not a foundling? I mean, you don’t talk like Family. And you certainly don’t act like it,’ he says. ‘I’ve watched you, you know. In the meadow, drawing. A couple of times. That’s why I was there when the Fe’ls attacked. What do you draw?’

  ‘Whatever catches my eye, I suppose. It is an escape. I am really not very good. Will I see you again? After yesterday, they will not let me outside the walls without an army to protect me. Perhaps not even then.’

  ‘I’ll work it out. You go to the market, don’t you?’ A nod. ‘Good. Well, if you want to leave me a message, leave it with the birdman – the one with the stall by the Fortress wall, who sells the scrawny chickens. His name’s Ramon and he’s a friend. He knows how to reach me. And who knows, you might see me there. There’s safety in crowds. What are you going to tell them?’

  ‘I shall say I was saved by a handsome stranger, who brought me home, then disappeared.’

  ‘Handsome?’ Bran smiles.

  ‘That way, they will assume that they are looking for someone else.’

  ‘Cruel. Is that what they teach the daughters of the Families?’

  She is struggling to suppress a smile of her own. ‘Before we can walk or talk . . .’ Stepping forward, she kisses his cheek. ‘Thank you, my friend. For my life.’

  Bran nods. He watches her turn and walk away towards the gate.

  As she approaches, the guards rush out to surround her and usher her inside.

  He waits a few more seconds, staring at the gate, then turns back to the Village and the Wood beyond.

  Half an hour later, he is passing by the meadow with the Wood in front of him. Stopping beside the wall where she sat, he looks across the field at the small stand of trees. It is so peaceful in the late morning sun. There is no sign of the horror that took place there less than a day ago. Then he notices something in the long grass beside the old wall. Sharonne’s sketchbook. It lies where she dropped it in her haste to escape. He picks it up and flips through the pages. A horse, a tree, an old man’s face, each brought to life with a few sweeps of pencil.

  I’m not very good –

  Bran shakes his head.

  You’re a damn sight better than me, my Lady, he thinks, and slides the book carefully into the satchel he carries over his shoulder.

  As he enters the Wood, he pictures her standing facing him, with the sun on her hair and the impregnable wall of the Fortress behind her. He sees her smile and feels the gentle kiss on his cheek.

  Forget it.

  He is shaking his head, as he makes his way between the huge trees and back to the Village.

  11

  Après le Déluge II

  Melbourne Archive

  Republic of Australasia, Central Southeast Sector

  January 13, 2491ad

  (34 Years post-Meltdown)

  AIDAN

  It is almost over.

  Aidan Tan lies back on the makeshift bed in the corner of the huge underground room, and watches his son and daughter cataloguing. Julie is arguing about some point of classification, just as her mother used to do, and Travers is trying hard to ignore her – a trick his father never learnt.

  Aidan smiles. She is so much like her mother, even though her features favour him. And Travers has taken the best of them both.

  ‘When I look at them, I can’t help but feel hope.’ Den’s words, spoken so many years ago, the flames of the open fire reflected in her eyes, as she watched them sleep. ‘Even in the face of everything.’

  The thought of Denise extinguishes the smile from his face. He closes his eyes and the sense of loss that has buried itself like a burning ache in his chest begins its slow spread outwards.

  Two years without her. It seems like ten. Twenty.

  I should have gone first. The easy cliché. It rings hollow in the pit of his regrets. As if anyone has a choice in these things.

  Opening his eyes, he lets his gaze drift across the high curved ceiling of the vault. It is an old shelter, built by some scion of one of the Families some time before the Meltdown, to ride out any emergency – from civil unrest to an all-out thermo-fusion air-blast. Solid and impenetrable, it was; an underground mansion to protect family and loved ones, if the danger grew too severe.

  Denise had discovered the plans and the inner-urban location of the shelter among the thousands of hard copies kept by the Family’s law firm, which she had liberated from the storage basement of a burnt out office building in the no-go zone, the year they returned to the city from the North.

  It was in the area where the last and most violent of the city’s food riots had been brutally crushed in ’57, a year or so after the Fall and about six months after the realisation had dawned on the starving survivors that things were never going back to the way they had been. The whole area had been totalled and no one ever went there except Den and himself, because what they were looking for had nothing to do with food or weapons or fuel and everything to do with posterity.

  Even then, it had been dangerous to venture in so close to the old Centre. The surrounding streets were little more than rubble piles, inhabited by the Remnants – small gangs of street dwellers, wild animals, who killed first and didn’t bother to ask questions later. Who resorted to cannibalism, or so it was rumoured, to supplement their diet of cats, rats and stolen Farm goods.

  After two months of painstaking trial and error, they had eventually located the shelter. The Riots and the scorched earth policy of the reprisal raids had reduced the entire area to rubble, of course. There were no discernible landmarks left and none of the surviving maps made any sense.

  Then, when they finally found their way in, the ultimate surprise: the shelter had never been inhabited. What had happened to prevent the Family members from entering their refuge they had never been able to find out. Of course, the chaos that erupted in the hours and days following the Meltdown had made casualties out of more than one Family – even wealth and power were no defence, if you were in the wrong place when the lights went out forever.

  The door on the opposite side of the room opens and David enters, carrying a sheaf of cream coloured Plastisheets, covered in tables and graphs. Crossing to where Travers and Julie are still negotiating their elusive compromise, he kisses his wife on the cheek.

  ‘Just once, let him have his way, Jules. For all our sakes.’

  ‘And what are you?’ she asks, half-serious. ‘A foundation member of the testosterone support network?’

  He smiles sheepishly, but doesn’t reply. She wrinkles her nose, then turns back to her brother. ‘Okay. You win, but only because I can’t stand to see a grown man cry.’

  ‘Who, David? He wasn’t—’

  ‘No, you, brother dear.’

  Aidan feels his eyes sliding closed and part of him realises that they will never open again. The cold numbness around his heart swells slightly to an almost-pain and he is light-headed. The feeling is not altogether unpleasant. Across the room, the easy banter continues, but it is beyond his ability to focus on the words. He wonders if he is smiling.

  He should be.

  ‘They are children we can be proud of.’ Den’s last words. And, as usual, she was right.


  They continue the gathering and organisation of the Archives, as enthusiastically as their parents ever did, and they have assumed leadership of the dedicated group of collectors, who have joined them over the years.

  ‘It’s the new Dark Ages and we’re like the old monks.’ Denise’s words echo among the memories that drift through his fragmenting consciousness.

  ‘We’re a secret sect, sharing a delusion and calling it faith.’

  It was always a comforting delusion, though, Den – considering how badly it could have gone.

  Then he is floating beyond the pain and the conversation taking place across the room. The world becomes insubstantial and, as it slowly dissolves, he can feel her hand touching his, as it did every night for thirty-two years.

  A comforting delusion, perhaps, but he’ll take it. In his mind, he turns, moulding his body to her shape for the last time. Time fades. Thought falters, and all there is . . . is Denise . . . and sleep.

  12

  The Sleepers

  Expeditionary Ether-Shuttle Cortez

  in Transit, Ether Dimensions

  Jump-Time Elapsed, 34.6 Days (Standard)

  JORDAN

  In the time between moments, in the space between atoms, in the heartbeat between the beginning and eternity, they travel motionlessly.

  In a place where time has no meaning, the clock in the console above his head marks off the passing seconds with electronic precision.

  While he sleeps.

  Frozen in cryogenic stasis, all brain activity undetectable, he is dead by any reasonable definition of life.

  Any reasonable definition save one. Except in ancient mythologies, the dead do not rise.

  And he will rise. When the clock above his head has completed its job and counted out the year in tiny increments, a switch will click, a circuit will close and the chamber will begin its slow process of awakening the dead.

  That is the promise.

  And when he wakes, he will repeat the miracle for each of the sleeping crew, beginning with Erin.

  Does he dream? The scientists say no. But a thousand years of rising from the frozen death of stasis tell a different tale. People who wake with stories of the dreams that have filled their lost years; the books that emerged, complete, from minds newly freed from the ice; the paintings and the songs.

  The men and women of science explain away such phenomena as pathology, a kind of delusion; a burst of creative energy, triggered by the process of awakening.

  But the Sleepers know better, or say they do.

  When he wakes he will remember moments, conversations, gentle touches. He will remember her.

  But for now he sleeps. For now, there is just the counting of the clock and the passage of a non-existent ship through a non-existent dimension, in the absolute black between the stars.

  PART TWO

  DISCOVERIES

  . . . and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started . . . and know the place for the first time. TS Eliot

  13

  A Bit Like People

  ‘Fortress de Vries’

  Old Bourne

  November 22, 3383ad

  (926 Years post-Meltdown)

  SHARONNE

  The blue light from the glo-lamp throws a small circle of illumination out in front of her, lighting her way through the pitch darkness of the passageway, but doing nothing to banish the imaginary demons that people the shadows all around her, resurrected from deep in her racial memory by the musty coldness of the underground air.

  Control yourself. There is nothing there.

  She is angry at her weakness and almost says the words out loud. Not that there is any danger of being heard; the entry door from the Fortress basement is Plasteel and 40 centimetres thick. It was designed to keep out any intruder who chanced upon the passage – or even an armed raiding-party. She could probably scream the words at the top of her voice and they wouldn’t penetrate, even if, by some fluke, someone happened to be in the basement storeroom at the time.

  ‘No one knows about it but me, and now you.’

  She remembers the smile of pride on Adam’s face the first time he showed her the door and the passage beyond. He was two years older than her and flexing his independence, and the discovery of the secret escape passage was an adventure he could not keep to himself.

  ‘All the Fortresses have them. Secret passages to get you clear of the walls – just in case of a breach. Or in case you need to slip out on an adventure.’

  The memory of his smile evokes the mixed emotions that rise every time she thinks of her brother. It has been two years since he set out for the Citadel, three weeks’ journey to the north. Two years, with only the occasional letter delivered secretly by some stranger, who happens to be heading south, and is willing to risk the wrath of her father.

  My little rebel, Bran calls her, when she does things that most members of the Families would never dream of doing. But she is no rebel, not in the way Adam was a rebel. Is she not still here? Does she not still wear the mask in public? The dutiful daughter, future wife, the slave of convention.

  Only with Bran, during those short interludes outside the walls, does she feel free to take off the mask. Her small secret rebellion. Only with Bran can she be herself. At those times, she can imagine never going back; joining him in the WildWood and sharing the freedom that he has always known, under the spreading branches of the ancient trees. At those times, nothing is real but their love and the stolen time they spend together.

  But those interludes are rare, and each time she makes her way back along the passageway, holding the glo-lamp in her hand and steeling herself for another week or month behind the protective walls of the Fortress, she knows that it is all a dream – that she will never leave her mother alone with him. Even though they rarely talk any more. Duty is an instinct developed early and all the harder to shake as a result.

  Adam was right to leave, but his leaving has left her a prisoner, just as her mother is a prisoner.

  Her footsteps echo from the solid walls, as she inches her way under the huge ramparts that keep her family safe and isolate them from the real world outside.

  BRAN

  The glow of the lamp precedes her. He is waiting at the end of the passage, holding the heavy door ajar to allow in a thin shaft of sunlight.

  As usual, she runs the last few metres, tossing the globe of the glo-lamp towards him, freeing up her arms to throw them around his neck.

  Holding the lamp in one hand, he slides his arms around her and buries his face in her scented hair.

  ‘How long?’ he asks.

  She doesn’t answer immediately. Her grip on his neck is almost painful, but he does not pull away. Finally, her tension eases, she releases him and steps backwards. ‘We have until nightfall. He is attending a meeting of the Council and my mother is painting. She won’t realise that I am missing until the light goes.’

  ‘Then let’s get out of here. I’ve got something I want to show you.’ Taking her hand he leads her through the door.

  The bushes growing in front of the doorway hide them as they make their way outside. As it swings closed, the door merges with the stone pattern of the wall and disappears completely. Only when you know exactly where it is can you make out the tiny cracks in the joins between the large stones that mark its outline.

  A short walk south and west finds them beneath the spreading branches of a copse of once carefully tended trees. This is not the WildWood. This is nature, once tortured and sculpted into a form that someone from a preceding generation of the Family found pleasing.

  Over the years, however, it has slowly been reclaimed. Its carefully structured forms have grown dishevelled and rebellious – and the deep green exotics are dwarfed here and there by a few towering emergents. Huge eucalypts, sprung from seeds dropped to the fe
rtile soil by the wind, or birds; spotted gums and paperbarks, which have forced their way through from the forest floor to breach the canopy and claim the sky beyond.

  It is strangely beautiful. A symbol of the curative power of nature; an image of what would inevitably happen if man decided one day to give up the struggle and simply disappear.

  Vaguely, she wonders why she has never noticed it before. It is not so far, after all, from the Fortress.

  Of course, in all her excursions beyond the walls – before the Fe’ls’ attack, when such excursions were still permitted – she had always headed north towards the meadows that bordered the WildWood. And it probably looks very different from the southeast high wall of the Fortress. Everything looks different from up there.

  Finally, Bran stops. ‘Listen.’

  At first, she can hear nothing unusual; just the sound of the wind in the branches and the calling of the birds. But as she listens, imitating Bran’s stillness and tuning her hearing, one sound finally emerges from the background of green noise: a high-pitched whistling cry from somewhere far above their heads.

  She peers up through the branches, trying to locate its source. And then she sees it. High in one of the tallest trees, a long branch forks and, nestled precariously into the fork, an untidy nest of sticks and dry leaves sways in the erratic breeze.

  ‘Eagle chicks.’ As usual, Bran answers her unvoiced question. ‘Two of them. I come here sometimes, when you go back. It’s quiet, and different from the Wood. I like it.

  ‘It’s rare to find them this far south. Carlin says they almost died out completely in the years before the Fall. That they were only bred in captivity – to keep the gene-pool alive.’

  ‘The gene-pool? I do not—’ As usual, when he speaks of what the old man taught him, she is lost.