Wisneski sighed. That little bastard Duke. He had been looking forward to putting his feet up on the trip and resting, and not having to worry about what was going on in the world and now this.
“Don’t worry, Mr Todd, I will ensure that you get to speak to your brother soon, and we will resolve the issues related to why he was taken into custody as quickly as possible.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line and Wisneski sensed he had taken the wind out of Dick Todd’s sails.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“Give me a few minutes and simply ring his mobile again.”
“We’ll want an apology, and compensation for the destruction of our bar and loss of income.”
“I don’t see a problem with any of this, Mr Todd. Perhaps we can touch base when I’m in New Zealand and sort this mess out to our mutual satisfaction.”
“What has my brother got himself involved in, may I ask?”
Wisneski mulled the question over in his mind. He would have to be careful what he said, otherwise Dick Todd could be further collateral damage. His calls were probably being monitored now, and Dick Todd would be an easy target.
“Are you acquainted with Bruce Harwood?” Wisneski asked, as he seemed to think he would be.
“Bruce, I knew it,” Dick Todd muttered under his breath. “What has that bastard got my brother involved in?”
“It’s not what you might think. I suggest you contact Bruce, er Mr Harwood, and ask him to take you in for your own safety.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me, Mr Todd. Contact Bruce and explain the situation to him and then ask to join him. I believe he is at his parents’ farm.” Wisneski decided it was not relevant to add he was headed there himself as long as the plane kept on course and someone decided not to blow them out of the sky over the ocean in order to tidy up a few loose ends.
Sixteen
Bruce was getting more than a little frazzled by everything going on in his head. Despite what other people might think, when he was in the process of losing his rag he personally considered he handled stress quite well. Cop and the other dogs, if asked, would provide a very different response. But then who believed in talking dogs? His normal coping strategies – a few beers and a cigarette – could in no way be considered a healthy response.
Today was different. Today his brain seemed about to burst, and his mind was in complete turmoil – there seemed to be so much going on he could not process it all.
The intermittent mobile calls were unhelpful – they simply served to stress him even more and remind him, his life was getting more complicated and it was unlikely to get any easier any time soon. Luckily the mobile coverage was pretty patchy on the farm. The only place outside the house with its booster unit was at different spots along the beach. If he moved away from the beach, and away from the house, he was basically out of reliable coverage and contact with the rest of the world. It didn’t occur to him to turn the phone off for a while.
Dick Todd getting on to him was a turn-up for the books. Bruce had forgotten Dick might have his number, let alone call him. But all he had got out of the call was a garbled message about Trev.
Bruce felt a bit guilty about the situation Trev and Sue were in. He should have realised the American authorities would take them into some form of custody once he escaped. Trev was merely guilty by association; he had no idea what was going on. Actually, Trev didn’t seem to know what was going on most of the time. Bruce struggled to understand how someone so ignorant of the world about him could be, well apparently reasonably successful.
Still, in their pursuit of an outcome for the greater good they might consider a foreigner’s life of no consequence. He hoped they would not start on Sue’s family. The old boy was an all-right sort of guy once he got to know him and gently ignored his attempts to convert him from his heathen ways. He wondered whether Wisneski could help them out. Bruce glanced at his mobile and considered ringing him.
You don’t need that gadget now; we can interface with any communications network you choose, the Transcendent informed him.
“Oh thanks very much. Reading my mind now, are you?”
Only when you let us.
Bruce drained his beer and stalked up to the house to get another. A large crowd was still watching him intently from the veranda. They all needed him for something, or wanted part of him for some reason, he thought rather truculently. Surely they could sort their own shit out?
Bruce knew he would have to deal with them all, one way or another, at some stage. It was unfair to blame any of them for looking to him for leadership as he was the direct or indirect cause of them all being here. Even the Skidians would have been elsewhere were it not for him. For the moment he decided to ignore everyone as he made for the fridge and grabbed a few beers to take back down to the beach for a few minutes’ peace and quiet before he faced up to his new responsibilities.
Rangi opened his mouth to speak but Bruce pushed past the older man, trying not to be too rude about it. Bruce supposed he wanted to take up where he had left off and continue to give Bruce a good piece of his mind about how he had endangered his precious daughter. Fair enough too, really, Bruce thought. But not now.
He glanced at Ngaio and indicated with a subtle cocking of his head she could join him. She responded with a slight shake of her own head that her father was oblivious to but her mother noted and understood: ‘Not now, but I’ll be back.’
Doris Tauroa was far more perceptive in these matters than her husband, and she trusted Ngaio’s judgement. If Ngaio thought Bruce was on the level the she trusted her daughter’s judgement.
“Come on, Rangi, let’s leave these two alone,” she told her husband, confirming one thing many of the locals had long suspected. Doris Tauroa was the one who really wore the pants in their household.
Ngaio chose to ignore her mother’s offer to stay behind, and followed her parents down the drive to their ute without a backward glance, though she looked over the cab and smiled back at Bruce and gave him a shy wave as she got in the back seat.
Bruce purposely left his mobile on the kitchen table and went and sat outside on the veranda. Thankfully, nobody was brave enough to approach him – not the policemen and women who still hovered around the kitchen, nor the Skidians, nor Mrs Pratt – except, for little Bruce, who decided to waddle out and toddled up to him with outstretched hands.
Bruce picked up his son and dangled him on his knee. There’s something odd about this kid, he thought. The boy’s eyes seemed to penetrate his very soul.
Bloody hell! How can this kid be walking already? He’s less than six months old. Actually, Bruce thought, he’s not even that old!
“What have you guys done to him?” Bruce asked the Transcendent.
The MPU made a few enhancements while the baby was in the womb. Nothing to be concerned about, the Transcendent assured him. The MPU did it for all the right reasons.
“So Sue has the same kind of interfaces I have to communicate with you?”
Not at all. The MPU implanted applications which allowed it to monitor her, which we have uninstalled by the way. Our interface with you is much superior to the one you had with the MPU, the Transcendent said with that hint of snobbery Bruce had come to associate with the Transcendent distancing itself from anything it considered a lower form of life or technology.
Bruce picked the boy up and held him above his head for a moment then sat him on his knee again. They had a funny sort of relationship already, and Bruce was not sure it was healthy one, though the boy seemed happy enough as far as he could tell. To be honest, Bruce still found it hard to credit that he had a child. It still had not really dawned on him until that very moment he was a father with newfound responsibilities.
Holy shit, he thought. This was an even bigger responsibility than being charged with building and then filling an ark full of people and shipping them off to Skid, if that’s what they wanted him to do. How he was suppo
sed to pull that one off, he had no idea.
Suddenly Bruce felt the burden of being responsible for repopulating Skid as a physical weight on his shoulders. With a sudden stab of insight, he understood how Moses or Noah must have felt when they were tasked with the same job and how useful their faith must have been to sustain them and their families through the process. He assumed Moses and Noah were not just biblical creations but were actual historical figures who, just like him, had been tasked by the Transcendents to gather up their people and lead them to the promised land on a new planet. Mind you, they probably left the bit about the new planet out. Unless they were actually Skidians in human form – and he wasn’t too clear on that.
He wondered how they did it. Did they create religion, did religion come before the ark and the Exodus or afterwards? Was it developed as a way of explaining the inexplicable, what happened when people were hoovered up by the Skidians or whatever they did?
One trip to Skid for a Moses or a Noah, or some other prophet or disciple, would be enough to convince them heaven did in fact exist, or a better world existed in the heavens. That there was better life to be had in the afterlife, and it was not too far a stretch to see how a Transcendent could be viewed as an angel, or some other heavenly body, to a low-tech, unsophisticated society. All anyone had to do was follow the teachings of the prophet, and paradise would be theirs for the taking.
It must have been an intoxicating proposition, and Bruce could see how easy it would have been to sell the unsophisticated people of the time on the benefits of living in an environment where all their wants and needs were fulfilled, without too much overt technology which, one generation removed, would be seen as normal anyway. At the level human beings would be able to access it, the technology available to them on Skid was not too far removed from the level of sophistication experienced by people living in some of the major human civilisations of the time. All they had to do was follow the teachings of the local prophet. Too easy.
Even if it was slightly immoral to entice people to breed spare bodies for the Transcendents to download into as the ultimate contingency there were far worse things to lure people into, when you thought about it.
Bruce opened one of the bottles of beer and offered a sip to curious little Bruce.
“Hey, don’t do that!” a suddenly reanimated Mrs Pratt yelled as she stormed up to him and plucked little Bruce off big Bruce’s knee and swept him up in protectively in her arms, displaying a lot more energy than he seen her display before. In fact …
“What are you doing with Mrs Pratt?” Bruce asked. The old woman seemed to be growing younger and more vital before his eyes.
We took the opportunity to provide this woman with a few enhancements. She has a pivotal role as the caregiver for your offspring so her health needs to remain optimal.
“Is it the right thing to do?” Bruce was not sure he really wanted to know the answer to those questions or make the decision himself.
You’re infused with medicines yourself. Is it fair to deny their benefit to others? It is a simple matter for you to consciously or unconsciously share them with anyone you come into contact with for their benefit. We can, as we did with Mrs Pratt, ensure we target these at people we feel are pivotal to our programme and ensure they live the rest of their lives in relatively good health.
“And then you turn them off?”
It’s not like that. We have pretty good modelling to determine how long someone will live. We can ensure they live out their allotted years without falling victim to the various illnesses which blight your race in its old age.
Holy shit! Bruce thought. Not only was he about to build an ark, a lifeboat for the human race, and lead a group of people to the promised land and in the process provide a supply of warm bodies to fulfil a final fall-back for an alien race, but he could also heal anyone he liked just by breathing on them. Talk about a moral dilemma. Was this the right thing to do?
He possessed at his fingertips all the attributes of a prophet; well, most of them. He could heal and feed people, he could lead people to a new promised land. He did not have a religion or creed to offer, though, except for people to do the right thing. He could probably invent one if he really applied himself, he decided.
In his mind he conjured up a vison of the great Kiwi egalitarian dream as the way forward, where everyone was more or less equal and, more importantly, had equal opportunities, and a safety net if required. However, even as he was thinking it, he knew he had led a life of relative privilege. Not everyone would share his version of Godzone or the half-gallon, quarter-acre, pavlova paradise.
It was a rather intoxicating feeling, and he understood for the first time how seductive having such a huge amount of power could be and realised just how easily it could be abused if he lost touch with the real world.
Then it struck him how down through the ages there must have been many people thrust, completely unprepared into positions similar to his current one. There must have been many previous missions to procure warm bodies for the Skidians, if he believed the Transcendents, and he had no reason to doubt them. He wondered how many of these missions had failed if the chosen ones decided to use their new powers without leaving home – which would have been much to the chagrin of the Skidians – instead of fulfilling the Skidians’ requirements on a faraway planet. But there must also have been a number of leaders - kings and queens, generals, presidents, prophets, and prime ministers who had, for different reasons, found themselves in situations similar to his own.
Some of your most renowned prophets were real historical figures, some of whom honoured the agreements they entered into with us and some who didn’t.
“So what did you do with the ones that didn’t?”
Nothing, except we stripped them of any enhancements we had provided. This did nothing to diminish the allure of the sects and religions these people created about themselves, many of which we note still survive to this day. As do the majority of the most enduring structures on your planet that were built with assistance from our Moses and Noah’s over the last two to five thousand of your years.
Bloody hell! This was explosive knowledge indeed. Bruce had no idea how he might use the information, or perhaps more importantly, he had no desire to use it for any purpose. Like taunting his soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, or his mother, about their misplaced faith. This meant the inspiration for all the major world religions was based on a bunch of aliens actually looking for better bodies than their own to download into if the end of the universe was nigh. What an irony. Fat lot of good that would do them in the long run – the Transcendents anyway.
The human race had been engineered by those very same aliens in many ways. It seemed human technological development had been spurred either by accident or design. Quite possibly, if it had not been for their intervention and the unintended consequences of this interaction, and (Bruce would not have put it past the Transcendents to engineer some enhancements from time to time to suit themselves) humans could possibly still be limited to prowling the African Savannah worrying about big cats sizing them up for their next meal or taking the first simple steps to develop agriculture.
This thought did not do much for Bruce’s ego. If it had not been for the Skidians, even the Bronze Age could still be a long way in the future. The very thought that this might be true raised a huge number of questions in Bruce’s mind.
“How did those who you chose to gather people and populate your other arks from less sophisticated eras react to this knowledge?”
In some cases, not very well, particularly as your race started to question their origins and you developed your own, flawed I might add, explanations for your existence. Those ones mostly chose to stay on Earth, and these are the people that formed the concepts your main religions are based on.
“Figures,” was all Bruce could think of to say. He took a long swig on his beer and shook his head. He had a huge task in front of him and he had no idea how to go about it. He felt a risi
ng sense of panic, and his guts lurched at the thought of it and the amount of work ahead of him.
There was really no question he would not do the Skidians’ bidding. He really had no choice in the matter, and he also felt a degree of responsibility for their plight. Besides, he could not stay here, he could not even see he could really stay anywhere on the planet, unless he used the Skidians to defend or conceal him.
On the other hand, even though he had no idea how it was going to work out, the very thought of building an ark of some kind was quite exciting. It also made him feel much better when it struck him how he had been instrumental in saving the world and mankind from a catastrophic asteroid impact. He had not taken the time to consider this before, it was quite an achievement really, which made him feel pretty good about himself.
The Transcendent watched as Bruce grappled with the realisation his world had irrevocably changed; there was no going back to his former life. Little did Bruce know fate had little to do with it. Rather, it had been his response to the extreme situations he had found himself in recently that had been noted by the Transcendents.
Bruce’s exposure to Skid and the fleshies, which Bruce has been led to believe were Skidians, might have been an accident of cosmic proportions, but the rest of it was all his own doing.
The Transcendent chose to leave Bruce alone with his thoughts for a while. There was plenty of time to get him organised. Over the next few months he was not going to have little time to himself. So he could be left to enjoy a few earthly pleasures for a while.
Bruce felt some shutters come down over his thoughts. He did not associate it with the Transcendent withdrawing, but it was the weirdest feeling and he felt more at peace than he had in a long time.
Don’t worry, a soothing voice seemed to say. Just relax.
Suddenly the background noise in his head, a racket Bruce hadn’t even known existed until then, ceased as though someone had turned off a radio in the next room that he hadn’t noticed was on and annoying him.
The Lifeboat Page 33
