Bruce shook his head sadly. It was almost too much for him to assimilate – and this was not the end of it. Down at the homestead were a whole lot of people looking to him for leadership, for direction. Cocky and confident as he was in his own abilities, he was not sure he was up to the governance task. On top of which it appeared not only had Wisneski engineered the release of Trev Todd and got him flown home, he had managed to get Sue out as well.
Bruce was not looking forward to that meeting. He had almost forgiven her betrayal of him and actually felt a little sorry for her. However, their relationship was done and dusted. It had taken him to that moment to realise that Ngaio was the embodiment of what he wanted in a woman.
He was a little unsure how to proceed with Ngaio. He just knew he didn’t want to fuck anything up. Everything else was secondary. That thought perked him up no end. So did the thought of how the fur might fly when Ngaio and Sue came face to face.
You think you have all the answers, don’t you? the Transcendent muttered, almost emotively in his head. You think you know it all.
Bruce wondered how a machine, essentially a piece of software, even a very sophisticated piece of software, could project such a huge amount of emotion when it wanted to. It was a bit like a woman turning on the waterworks at the drop of a hat to get her way.
“Well,” Bruce retorted, “if I’m not good enough, go right ahead and find someone else to do your dirty work and leave me in peace. I’ll take my chances without you.” Bruce knew it was in his best interests at the moment not to walk away from the Transcendent. In fact, he knew he was in a very poor negotiating position and he really needed them more than they needed him at the moment, even if it was just to keep the long arm of the biggest governments in the world off his back.
Bruce wondered whether the Transcendent realised any of this. Maybe it did and did not care, or maybe, given it was now essentially a chunk of clever software programmed to act in a certain way, or perhaps remembered, somehow, how to act but was without a soul, so knew no better. Like a very sophisticated computer, possibly, once the situation veered off the path it had been set, or even more likely, the Transcendents could not change a course of action mid-stream – as this would indicate they were not as omnipotent as they would like to believe and this could not be allowed. Which made Bruce stop and think about how similar the mind-set was for the flesh-and-blood Skidians he had met on Skid. Maybe some of the original Skidians had never left, they just inhabited some new bodies. Maybe the Transcendents were much more attached to real bodies than the Transcendent was letting on? The Transcendent remained silent at this observation.
Bruce snapped back to attention as he found himself stopped at a gate. He had no idea how long the ute had been sitting there idling away as he switched between chatting away to the Transcendent and running through his options in the private pathways of his mind.
Twenty-seven
As Bruce pulled up at the house the dogs leapt off the back of the ute and started tearing around and having an investigative sniff at the number of new bosses who seemed to swoop on him from all sides. Even the two Skidians who normally seemed so aloof seemed to want a piece of him for some reason; maybe they were spooked by all the ruckus.
Holy fuck! He’d only been gone an hour or so and he was being feted as though he had just been released from half a lifetime in exile. Bruce briefly considered beating a hasty retreat back to the rear of the farm. However, before he could execute this plan his parents rolled up and parked behind him, blocking him in.
Bruce’s mother jumped to the top of the queue vying for his attention and immediately started to give him a piece of her mind, and she wasn’t planning on holding anything back.
“Who are all these people?” she demanded. Mavis Harwood was put out for two reasons. Not only had her son not got rid of his unwelcome guests while she was gone, but even more people had turned up at the house, including Bruce’s wife Sue. To make matters worse, none of them looked like they were going anywhere in a hurry.
“Jeez, Mum, where do you think these guys are going to go? There is nowhere else at the moment,” he said with a wave of his arm to emphasise his point.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. They simply can’t stay here.” Mavis saw life through a pretty simple lens. There were two ways of doing things, her way and the wrong way, and logic was rarely part of the decision-making process.
Then Sue started on him as well.
“What about me, what about my rights? This is my home to.” She still seemed to think she had some kind of entitlement and started banging on about her rights as a parent and how she wanted to bring her baby up and where she thought she would be staying. No doubt she also thought she was entitled to half the family farm even though they had only been married a few days. To make matters worse, Sue and Mavis had never hit it off in the same way Cyril had with Sue’s family.
“How dare you talk to me like that in my own home?” Mavis retorted, essentially stifling any further debate.
Sue wasn’t venting particularly in Mavis’s direction but Mavis took the opportunity to make the most of the affront and stomped into the house, slamming the front door behind her so hard Bruce was sure he saw the house rock on its foundations.
Sue flounced off equally melodramatically with the baby in her arms. It was not clear to Bruce what she hoped to achieve. It was a bloody long way to anywhere carting a heavy baby in her arms, along a metal road, in flimsy shoes.
Then Shelly, Dr Shelly Shaw, Bruce reminded himself, decided she wanted a piece of him by starting to talk about lifeboats and stuff, which just went straight over his head for the moment. What was this woman jabbering on about, and what was it with these pushy, self-absorbed women anyway? he asked himself.
He was delighted to see Ngaio had wandered off down the drive after Sue. Hopefully she would talk some sense into her and get her to come back up to the house. Sue was already struggling with the baby writhing in her arms as he appeared to want to stay where all the action was. The sun was also starting to heat up, adding to her misery.
Not for the first time Bruce felt completely overwhelmed by the situation, he felt, for a moment he had the weight of the whole world resting on his shoulders and all he wanted to do was run away from the real and imagined responsibility. Preferably in a nice warm bed with the blankets pulled up over his head.
He nodded at Dick and Trev and felt a twinge of guilt as he did so – he had dragged the both of them unwittingly into a situation from which there was no escape. Well for Trev, at least.
Wisneski had already started a conversation with the local cops. “No, not you, you silly fucken animal.”
Cop, who had been lurking at the edge of the crowd under the veranda, pricked up his ears at the mention of his name.
And the Skidians, well they were doing what Skidians did best – standing aloof from the crowd, not really knowing what to make of the growing mob, but at the same time wanting to make sure they were not left out of anything that might be important to them.
Bruce looked at his father. “Well, I think we should have a cup of tea and work out what we’re going to do with this lot.”
“OK, son,” Cyril Harwood replied. “I think that’s a great idea. I’ll go in and put the jug on but whatever’s going on here is way out of my league.”
And mine, Bruce added in his mind for the benefit of the Transcendent who had decided to remain silent. It had an excellent knack for picking and choosing when and when not to intervene. Which was okay, as Bruce had already had enough, however vague the indications the Transcendent wanted him to take the lead.
“Come on,” he said to everyone. “Let’s go inside and have a cup of tea.”
“Oi, Sue!” he called. He noticed she had not stopped for Ngaio, and seen sense yet. “You’re not going to get very far in those shoes, and the next-door neighbour lives five kilometres away and is standing right behind you.”
Bruce managed to ignore Shelly while he greeted he
r then shook hands with Dick and Trev, ignoring their thanks for getting Trev released from the shadowy quasi-legal US Government agency which had them in their grip. He then said a warm hello to Wisneski as a plan slowly coalesced in his mind.
“How many bodies do you actually want?” Bruce asked the Transcendent again. “How many before your requirements are satisfied?”
A billion.
The response shook Bruce a little, yet it should not have surprised him the Transcendent had upped its tally. During his first sojourn on Skid one of the fleshie Skidians had mentioned the population of the planet had stood at around one billion.
“That’s a shitload of people, and it’s not as if a billion people are not going to be missed on.” As far as Bruce was concerned the number would have to be trimmed somehow. He tried to concentrate on what the Transcendent was saying but it did not seem to be making all that much sense.
No, not a billion to start off with. That is the number that will satisfy our final population requirement.
Bruce was finding it impossible to focus and concentrate while trying to comprehend how they could find and dispatch millions people off to Skid as well as dealing with the crowd of people clamouring for his attention. Ngaio, Sue, Leaf and Myfair, his parents standing on the veranda – all looking at him and trying to catch his eye. Beside him Shelly, with Bruce trying not to fix his gaze on her cleavage, was saying something which resonated with him on one level but was struggling to really make much sense of it all.
‘OK, you lot, shut the fuck up, will you!” he yelled above the racket. “How do you expect a man to think with you all yapping at me at the same time? Let’s go and have that cup of tea, and we’ll work out our next move.”
“I think there is a real …” Shelly began, trying to exploit the resulting silence. But Bruce held up his hand to silence her.
“I hear you,” he said. “But I can’t cope with all this at the moment.” Bruce had no idea what to do next so having a cup of tea was a good as any, and the fact he had to suggest the idea three or four times before anybody really took any notice was probably a signal he should have picked up on about the frustrations to come.
The situation was getting more confused and complicated as time went by. Why were all these people here, and why did they think he could, or should, be the one they looked to for direction and guidance? Why? Why? Why?
He was struggling to understand the motivations behind Shelly and Wisneski’s presence. Wisneski was a decent enough bloke, but he saw Shelly as an agent of a corrupted American industrial military complex hell-bent on supporting ultra-right-wing, almost fascist regime that saw the world outside the United States as a resource to be exploited for their benefit alone. Well this was Bruce’s narrow-minded view of them, based on his recent experiences. All he had seen of it was a bunch of people he wouldn’t trust as far as he could kick them. When he had shown he was not going to play ball, they had tried to destroy him, simply reinforcing his native prejudices.
Bruce smiled wryly; he had a lot of sympathy for the way everyone felt. The reason he was standing in front of them, with their expectations weighing heavily on his shoulders, with this group expecting a level of leadership he did not feel qualified to offer, was because he had made a stand and had successfully resisted the overbearing demands of the most powerful nation on Earth. Even the Transcendent, for all its apparent clever sophistication and superiority, was waiting for a lead from him. The irony of it all was this had all come to pass by some kind of cosmic accident – he had been in the right place at the wrong time. He could trace all the events in his life leading to this point, back to that fateful day when the original Skidian space patrol ship had plucked him off a windswept paddock and whisked him back to Skid for no better reason than he was walking across a paddock in the middle of nowhere.
“When are all these people going to leave us in peace, Bruce?” his mother asked, intruding on his thoughts.
“I dunno, Mum. They might be here for a while unless I can think of something.”
“So how do you think we’re going to manage to feed them all?”
“You what?” His mother’s sudden change in attitude stunned him.
“I said, how do you think I am going to feed all these people?”
And then he twigged. It was her way of telling everyone to bugger off.
While he tried to conjure up a diplomatic retort for his mother, and thinking he might have to send her off to stay with her sister for a while, he tried to recall anything he had ever learnt about project management. Not much, though there were some practical things he could do. Like make a list.
You don’t actually have to do anything, the Transcendent reminded him. Your job is to provide guidance, be an SME and thought leader.
“SME? Thought leader?”
Subject matter expert.
That sounded okay; maybe the level of expectation on him was lower than he thought. But somehow Bruce knew it was unlikely the process would be that simple. He still felt the weight of expectation on his shoulders. In fact, he felt a very heavy weight of expectation on his shoulders, given the way everyone was staring at him expectantly. Subject matter expert about what?
“You’re not going to believe this,” he blurted before the Transcendent could stop him. “The Skidians, the real Skidians, want us to repopulate their planet with humans – and there’s more. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Or the second,” he added for good measure, as the implications of the statement percolated through everyone’s minds, including the two fleshie Skidians.
Twenty-eight
Nothing was ever going to be the same for this group of people after the revelations regarding some of the most basic truths about how humanity collectively viewed its origins were proven false. While many millions worldwide would happily subscribe to the theory that could be used to explain how the Egyptians built the pyramids, while most of the proto-Europeans were still nomadic hunters struggling to survive in an ice age, many others would have to deal, on one level or another the shaky foundations of their faith based belief systems. Bruce decided, for the moment, the spread of this truth should be limited and he was not going to be a part of any process to publicise the impact of the Transendent’s behaviour on humanities varied belief systems.
As far as Bruce was concerned there was no reason to believe these revelations were not true. A number of the people now at the farm had seen or been exposed to enough evidence to satisfy themselves of that. But even Bruce, who had had the most exposure to the Transcendents and their plans, had a parade of little lightbulb flashing moments of understanding and comprehension going through his mind as he spoke to the group.
Bruce started to relate the full story of how he and Sue had become involved with the Skidians, and now the Transcendents, and the demands the Transcendents had placed on him – the full catalogue of events leading to them all crammed into the kitchen and spilling off onto the veranda at a relatively isolated farmhouse in a country almost as far away as you could get from the centre of perceived, real power on the planet.
He related how he and Sue had been captured by a group of ultimately power-hungry but, at least in the first instance, mostly well-intentioned Skidians, who wanted Bruce and Sue to assist them in developing solutions to the famine was unfolding on their planet.
Bruce glanced at Myfair to see how he was reacting to his explanation – Myfair had been the pilot of the first spacecraft. Myfair had also been the pilot of the ship that had returned him and Sue to Earth and home through some temporal window which had them arriving at almost exactly the same time as they had left. Bruce was still confused as to how that could possibly have happened because it shouldn’t be possible to travel back in time.
Myfair, as it was with the Skidian way, was inscrutable. He was not giving anything away.
Bruce did not dwell too much on the original trip to Skid and their experiences there – or the subsequent trip for that matter – and the impact
these events had had on his and Sue’s lives. Although the experience was some months behind them now and there had been plenty of time for the mental and emotional wounds generated by these trips to heal, the impacts were in fact still very raw in many ways.
Bruce also did not want to dwell too long on his original stay on Skid as he felt he could have made more of the situation, handled it better, which might have led to a better outcome for hundreds of millions of fleshie Skidians who had lost their lives in the great famine. Successfully resolving the food production problem would mean the Transcendent Skidians would not be looking to repopulate their planet with fresh new human bodies. Even if he was an unintended consequence there was at least one good thing that came out of the first trip to Skid he was very proud of, and that was little Bruce.
Bruce’s description of their second trip to Skid accompanied by President Mitchell drew a few gasps of disbelief. Neither Shelly or Wisneski seemed all that surprised, and their reactions seemed to confirm their suspicions that something untoward had happened to the President. Quite a few people, it seemed, had known that he had gone AWOL, which made it one of the best-kept secrets of all time!
He skipped over many of the events of the last year or so – this lot did not need to know everything.
“Go on, tell them about the talking dog, that’ll really get them going!” Cop taunted him.
“Fuck off, you silly old coot.”
These people needed to know the truth about the asteroid Automedon and its true purpose and how its presence was not an accident. So he began to describe what little he knew about the Transcendents and how they were in communication with him and him alone.
Then he began to explain their requirements of him and, because he had shared his knowledge, by default, the whole group. His audience reacted in very different ways to the revelation the Skidians were not the indigenous Skidians at all.
Myfair looked stunned for once. Not only had he been stripped of control of technology he had taken for granted his whole life, but he now realised he was not the superior being he thought he was. His people’s entire heritage was now called into question: if they weren’t superior beings who were the masters of the universe, then just who were they?
The Lifeboat Page 40
