by Sam Kates
“If she contacted you two nights ago,” said Tom, eyes narrow, “why haven’t you told us this sooner?”
“I wanted to mull it over myself, though I haven’t been able to come up with any answers, only suppositions that I’d prefer to keep to myself for now. And I expected you—you, Tom, in particular—to want to go and get them immediately. But they are on bicycles and it will take them at least two days to reach Nottingham.”
“Nottingham?” said Tom. “What are you talking about?”
“Milandra’s Deputies want to capture the girl. Study her to find out how she has developed these abilities. Milandra warned the girl and told her to flee to Nottingham. She wants me to go and fetch her. The boy, too. Bring them back here where they’ll be safer.”
“It’s a trap,” said Diane immediately.
Peter shook his head. “There was no sense of deception in Milandra. Only doubt. She thinks she’s doing the right thing, but isn’t certain.”
“Nottingham’s not a tiny place,” said Tom. “I went to uni there. How are we supposed to find them?”
“Milandra told the girl to go to a pub. Um, something about Jerusalem.”
“Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem?” said Tom.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“I know it well,” said Tom. “It’s by the castle. What are we waiting for?”
“We?” said Diane. “Milandra wants Peter to fetch them. Do we all need to go?”
“Absolutely,” said Ceri. “No matter what, we stick together. Bad things happen when small groups start splitting up. Don’t you ever go to the movies?”
“Ceri’s right,” said Peter. “We either all go or none of us go.”
“Not going isn’t an option,” said Tom. “We’re talking about two children who will likely be exhausted and terrified. Despite what you just said about not splitting up, I’m going to Nottingham even if I have to go alone.”
“I’m going too,” said Ceri. “My son was eleven. If he had survived, I would hope that someone would try to help him. Do we know how old the boy is?”
“No,” said Peter. “I know the girl’s name. It’s Brianne, though she goes by Bri. Okay. We’ll need to take food and water. There’s enough spare diesel in the boot—that’s the trunk, Diane—and we can top-up as we go. Anything else?”
“Flashlights,” said Diane.
“First aid kit,” said Ceri. “Blankets. We don’t know what condition these kids are in.”
“Shotguns,” said Tom. “Just in case.”
“Okay,” said Peter, “but they stay in the boot. You know how to find this pub?”
Tom nodded. “Not so sure how to get to Nottingham from here, though all we need to do is follow the main roads south from Edinburgh. It will be signposted as we get nearer. I can guide us to the pub once we’re there.”
“You’re up front with me, then,” said Peter. “It’s been dark for, what, two or three hours? It’s probably around eight o’clock. Provided we don’t encounter too many obstacles that force us into going the long way round, we should be in Nottingham by early tomorrow morning.”
* * * * *
Colleen O’Mahoney had long fancied staying in The Burlington Hotel, but that would have been an extravagance she could ill afford. Now that she could stay there, she found that it didn’t meet her expectations. Mind, those expectations had been founded on there being a body of staff and other guests present. Of course, she giggled, there was the occasional body present, though whether staff or guest she couldn’t tell and, truth be told, they weren’t good company. They tended to merely lie around exuding foul odours.
After a few days of confinement, of eating as often and as much as she wanted, of drinking fruit juice all day and whiskey all evening, she felt stronger in body if not in mind. That wavered between frivolous hysteria to dark chasms of madness that threatened to swallow her whole unless she drank more whiskey.
Clutching the golf club that she’d found in one of the hotel bedrooms, she began to venture outside. At first, she managed only a few hundred yards before becoming overwhelmed by the feeling that unseen eyes were watching her. Contemplating her. With a cry, Colleen fell to the ground, the golf club forgotten, and wrapped her arms around her head. Tucking her knees to her chest, she waited for the owners of the eyes to come for her.
All that had come was a rat. She felt its whiskers brush her hands and recoiled in revulsion. Grabbing the golf club, she bounded to her feet and swung wildly at the rat. It scooted out of reach with an indignant squeak.
Each day she ventured a little further, always making for the river and one of her favourite areas of the city, before turning back to the hotel. In this manner, it took her five days to reach Temple Bar.
Many of the pubs were unlocked, but occupied. She had become so accustomed to the smell of death that she would have been willing to share with a few leaking corpses if she hadn’t found the door to one of her favourite watering holes, The Quays, firmly locked. Using the club to smash the glass of the front door and remove the shards, she had been able to wriggle inside without cutting herself. Loose her mind might have become, but she retained sufficient self-awareness to realise that sustaining a serious wound would not be advisable in these days of solitude. Another thought followed hard on that one’s heels: might she be the only person still alive?
She was certainly the only living person in The Quays. Thankfully, she could detect no signs of formerly-living persons either. She made her way across the echoing wooden floor and around the bar. It had been a long walk from The Burlington, interrupted by heart-pounding dashes into doorways or behind parked cars until the dogs had passed by. One had spotted her cowering in an alleyway between two locked buildings and trotted over to investigate. As she held the club shakily towards the dog in sweat-slickened hands, it had uttered a faint rowf? and gone on its way without a backward glance.
It was mid afternoon, a few hours before she usually indulged, but she felt she deserved a whiskey or two.
She found a glass and held it up to the Jameson’s bottle. No sooner had she pressed the glass against the optic to release the amber liquid than her grip slackened and the glass fell to the counter below, smashing to pieces.
Colleen groaned. She had suspected she was on the verge of insanity; here was the proof. A voice was speaking inside her head. She didn’t believe it was real, yet had no choice but to listen.
When the voice fell silent, she glanced wildly around. The pub remained empty and still.
Bodies. She must burn bodies. She giggled. That shouldn’t be a problem. The pubs around here were full of them.
She mustn’t go far. The voice had been quite clear on that. It might not be real but neither was it a voice that could be readily disobeyed.
Colleen shrugged. There were plenty of snacks behind the bar. And whiskey. A lot of whiskey.
She reached for another glass.
* * * * *
They took a couple of pillows with them. Tom propped one of them between his head and the front passenger door. They had not travelled more than fifteen minutes from Wick along the coastal road when he began issuing soft snores. Peter turned on the CD player and hummed along to some classical tunes that Ceri didn’t recognise. He had not turned it up very loudly and it provided a pleasant background noise. Soothing.
Ceri sat behind Peter, Dusty pressed against her left leg to keep as far from Diane as he could. They had made room between the diesel, shotguns and provisions in the rear compartment for his basket so he would be able to curl up there on the way back. Two children should be able to squeeze comfortably into the rear seat between Ceri and Diane.
Eyelids growing heavy, Ceri was about to prop the other pillow in the corner by her head when Diane spoke to her. Softly, so that she could only just hear her above the music and the purr of the engine.
“You had children?”
“Just one. A son. Why?”
“What was it like?”
“What was what l
ike?”
“Being a mom.”
Ceri glanced at the other woman. In the muted light given off by the dashboard display, she seemed to be watching Ceri closely, intently, as though she was genuinely interested in Ceri’s reply.
“It was wonderful,” she said. “Rhys gave my life new meaning. New focus. He made me complete.” She raised a hand and pinched the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb. “Why do you ask? Have you never had children?”
Diane shook her head. “We do not possess your urge to procreate. Did it hurt? Giving birth?”
“It was the most excruciating twelve hours of my life.”
“Yet many women put themselves through that ordeal many times. If it is that painful why have more than one child?”
“It is painful. It was also the most rewarding experience of my life. To hold my son for the first time. . . .” Ceri wiped at the corner of her eyes as they misted with memory. “We remember that feeling more than we remember the pain.”
“The pain was designed to limit your urge to reproduce. Although it was desired that you should expand your population, it was deemed prudent to put in place a check to limit that expansion within reasonable bounds. It clearly did not work.” Diane uttered a short laugh. “But you did not put yourself through it again?”
“I’ve already told you, I only had one child.” Ceri did not want to tell her any more. She did not trust Diane; doubted that she ever would. “Tell me why you’ve never had children.”
“There are no children among our species.”
“No children? How can that be?”
Diane shrugged. “Children are weak. Vulnerable. Needy. They take away from the whole, not add to it.”
“Well, they are certainly needy,” said Ceri. “They take over your life. But that’s what being a parent is all about. Nurturing and protecting your children until they can fend for themselves. Unless they’re snatched away from you, that is. . . .”
Ceri glimpsed an expression pass across Diane’s features that she had not seen there before. Guilt. Maybe even shame. She felt a stab of vicious pleasure. Suffer, you bitch, if only a little, for what you and your kind have done.
“So tell me,” said Ceri, “if you don’t have children, how do you reproduce?”
“You were made broadly in our image, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Then you’ll realise that your reproduction processes are broadly similar to our own. The key word here is ‘broadly’. We don’t derive physical or sensual pleasure from the act of fertilisation. We don’t have a sexual drive. We don’t experience orgasms. We reproduce when, and only when, it is considered to be for the greater good.”
“I almost feel sorry for you. Almost. But why, then, do we have libidos and orgasms?”
“You were genetically programmed that way to encourage population growth. You were brought to this planet to begin to colonise it in preparation for the Great Coming. Had we known that it would take five millennia for that to happen, we wouldn’t have made you quite so, er, rampant.”
Diane smiled. It was brief, but transformed her from dour sourpuss to something more. . . . human. Perversely, the thought reminded Ceri that she regarded Diane as inhuman and drove the impulse to return the smile firmly away.
“So,” said Ceri briskly, “the sexual act to you is, what, mechanical?”
“Oh, totally. We derive infinitely more pleasure from eating. Reproduction is a purely functional process for us, which is why we can choose not to reproduce. The last birth among my people here on Earth Haven occurred more than two thousand years ago.”
“Earth Haven?”
“Our other planet is Earth Home.”
“If you say so. Why no births for that long?”
“When we first arrived and landed in the Atlantic Ocean, some of our number were lost in the attempt to reach land.”
“Peter has told us that tale. How most of those who survived congregated on Salisbury Plain. And built some sort of beacon.”
“Had we landed in the Pacific, Stonehenge, or something very like it, would have been constructed in California or Chile or on one of the Japanese islands. And that is where we would now be preparing to reactivate it.” She shrugged; apparently her favourite gesture. “But most of us landed on this island so this is where the beacon was built. Anyways, although humanity had multiplied and started to spread across the planet, there remained great swathes of unpopulated land where we could replace some of our lost brethren in safety. And we still held dominion over humans so could keep them away from the nurseries.”
“What d’you mean, ‘in safety’?”
“You need to understand how we reproduce. The act of fertilisation is essentially the same as humans’. The male produces semen that is used to fertilise an egg in utero. However, the female produces one egg—just one—at will, and can choose never to produce one without any ill effects.”
“No periods . . .” said Ceri.
“None. The male produces semen at will. No ill effects if he never produces any.”
“No wet dreams.”
“No pent-up aggression, sexual frustration, desire to dominate, or rape. Sex is a constant undercurrent in human society. It is irrelevant in ours.”
“Okay. So suppose you choose to become pregnant. What then?”
“The gestation period in the womb is around two weeks. The foetus will be much further developed than a human foetus of the same age, but can still be expelled comfortably without distortion of the cervix. The contractions necessary are not painful, so I understand. The placenta is thicker and tougher than a human’s. A little like a sheep’s bladder. It is expelled whole and continues to expand while the foetus grows. As the foetus becomes a person, the placenta thins and becomes more like a shroud. It dries out as its occupant’s need for nutrients decreases. When the newborn is ready to emerge, he or she will pull back the placenta like shrugging off a sheet.”
“How long does it take? From when the foetus is expelled, as you so charmingly put it, to when the new person emerges?”
“It varies depending on what sources of energy are available to nurture the newborn. On Earth Home it could take up to six months. Here, with such a powerful sun, it takes half that.”
“And the newborn, when it emerges. . . . how old is it?”
“He or she will be just three months old, but will emerge fully developed and matured.”
“How old do they look?”
“In human terms, anything from mid twenties to early fifties. Physical beauty is unimportant to us. Some of our newborns are white, some black, others in between. Some will look Caucasian, some Oriental, some Negroid or Hispanic or Latino or Aboriginal. Others Slavic or Aryan. Just like your ancient architecture echoes that on Earth Home, so the different physical characteristics of humans reflect their creators.”
“Does Earth Home suffer from racial tensions?”
“Have you not been listening? Looks do not matter. The only difference a person’s skin tone makes is that the darker the colour, the more suited the person will be to working on the planet’s surface where solar rays and winds can quickly damage lighter skin.”
“Sounds almost utopian.” Ceri thought for a moment, wrinkling her brow in concentration. Strong as her distaste for this woman ran, she had long held a fascination for science fiction. Diane’s tale intrigued the side of her personality that had driven her to seek out recordings of old BBC series like Dr Who and Blake’s Seven and sit absorbed in them long after her husband had gone to bed. “Okay, let’s see if I have in fact been listening.” She took a deep breath. “You off-world types don’t get it on like us mere mortals. At least, not for the last couple of thousand years. When you did, it was a little like taking the car for an MOT: served a purpose, but not much fun. No passion, pleasure or pain. No post-coital cigarette.”
Diane nodded. She gave no hint of a smile.
“So,” continued Ceri, “your fertilised ovum develops i
nto a foetus in just a couple of weeks and is born with the placenta still intact. Within less than three more months here on Earth—oops, I mean Earth Haven—a walking, talking, fully-functioning grown-up emerges from the placenta.”
“That’s pretty much how it works.”
“Okay. But how does the newborn emerge with the ability to talk? How does it acquire knowledge and skills if it’s not even connected to its mother?”
“Do you know about the Keeper? What she does?”
Ceri thought for a moment. “Doesn’t she act a little like a hard drive, storing your people’s knowledge and experiences?”
“Milandra would be amused to hear herself described as a ‘hard drive’ but, yeah, that’s essentially it. She is permanently linked to every one of our people here on Earth Haven. If one of us dies, that person’s memories, knowledge and experiences pass to Milandra and are absorbed into the whole. This is what would have happened when the helicopter exploded and Bishop burned. I doubt that his memories were altogether pleasant. Couldn’t have been much fun for Milandra.”
“My heart bleeds. But what has this to do with the newborns?”
“Well, when they are approaching maturity, almost physically ready to emerge from their cocoons, the Keeper will awaken their consciousness. She will impart basic skills like speech and mobility, together with knowledge of our history and culture. In turn, each newborn will become linked to the whole through the Keeper.”
“Each one is born with the same level of knowledge and skills?”
“Not necessarily. If it is desired that a newborn should acquire a particular specialism—engineering, say, or quantum mechanics—someone possessed of the necessary knowledge will attend the nurseries and impart that knowledge to whoever has been chosen to receive it.”
“How is the knowledge imparted?”
“By placing hands on the placenta—contact isn’t necessary, but it makes the connection easier—and entering the newborn’s intellect. Then it’s merely a case of sharing the knowledge. To borrow your analogy, it’s a little like copying a file from one computer to another.”
“What role do the parents play in all this? I mean, once the baby, or whatever it is, has been born and taken to the nurseries?”
