Scatterlings

by Isobelle Carmody

  They rode another elevator several floors down in the same building before stopping in a pale green hallway. Seeing her reaction to the colour, Sacha smiled. ‘The savages responded best to that colour.’

  Merlin’s anger faded into bewilderment. From the sound of things, she had been in the city in the first place for some task which only she could perform, and which was somehow vital to the Citizens. She had been prepared in some way for this task, and had never been intended to come into contact with the clanpeople because this had damaged the preparations. For some reason, they had not wanted her to know about the people living outside the dome.

  She couldn’t imagine what they wanted her to do, that they with all their technology, could not. But thinking it through, she knew it lay behind the taking of clanpeople.

  With a chill, she guessed whatever she had to do was dangerous, and might reduce her to a mindless, drooling Void, too. That answered her question about why the Citizens did not use themselves.

  ‘Here,’ Sacha said, passing her hand over the blinking red light on the door and it slid smoothly aside. Merlin felt her mouth drop open at the green painted room filled with plants and hauntingly familiar classical music. There were paintings and prints on all available wall space, some of which she recognised, and books piled in shelves and on benches.

  Rather slow, dragging footsteps came slowly closer, then another door opened and a very thin boy with white blond hair came out. The dragging noise was the sound made by two metallic rods he was using to hold himself up. His legs were visibly withered, incapable of supporting even his slight weight.

  He stopped dead at the sight of Merlin.

  ‘Andrew wants you to tell her everything,’ Sacha said, her voice faintly conciliatory. This told Merlin the sickly looking boy was important.

  ‘Sedgewick will come over later, but if you have any trouble with her, use this.’ Sacha handed the boy the activating switch for the new collar, turned on her heel and departed, the door closing after her with a faint electronic hiss.

  The boy dragged himself nearer, eyes questioning. ‘We’ve met before but I don’t suppose you’ll remember.’

  ‘I don’t remember anything,’ Merlin said coldly. She didn’t care how important he was.

  ‘Do you mind me calling you Merlin?’ the boy asked, again with a quick apologetic smile. ‘My name is . . .’

  ‘I don’t care who you are or what you call me,’ Merlin retaliated.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ the boy said gently. ‘This will take a while and we may as well be comfortable.’ He walked very slowly to a chair and lowered himself awkwardly, carefully laying the metal supports across his knees.

  Merlin flung herself into a seat facing him. ‘Andrew said you would tell me who I am.’

  The boy seemed not to mind her unfriendly tone.

  ‘I don’t actually know who you were originally,’ he said. ‘In fact, I don’t even remember you coming here. You first came into the dome about the same time I was learning to talk. Andrew found you wandering half starved and witless. I suppose your parents had been killed somehow. You were very young, and the trauma of seeing your family die had taken away your senses. But that is only a guess.’

  ‘Then I am a clanperson?’ Merlin interrupted.

  ‘Your body is the body of a clanperson,’ he corrected. ‘Your mind . . .’ He shook his head. ‘This is no good, I’m telling it in the wrong order. You come into the story later. We have to go back a long way before then. How much have the clanpeople told you about us?’

  Merlin frowned. ‘Only that the dome was here for as long as anyone could remember, then one day your people came out and started murdering everyone in sight. Then you turned yourselves into gods, drugged the clan leaders and made them sacrifice their people. You told them the spirits of those you took would live forever in perfect happiness. In truth, you made them mindless idiots and sent them back, calling them Blessed Walkers.’ Merlin’s tone was accusing.

  ‘You did not learn those things from the clanpeople,’ the Citizen boy said, his eyes alight with a curious pride. ‘You worked all that out for yourself.’ He sighed. ‘It’s true of course. I don’t say that what happened was right in a moral sense, but I can see how Andrew and the others believed it was their only choice.’ He looked into Merlin’s eyes and she had the fleeting impression that he was much older than he looked.

  ‘They believe using the clanpeople was not just the only thing to do, but also the right thing. But I’m not a scientist.’ He smiled unexpectedly. ‘My father was an historian. I think I should have been an historian, too, if things had been different. Do you know what an historian is?’

  Merlin nodded coldly. ‘I don’t know how I know, but that’s one of the things you’re going to tell me, if you ever get round to it.’

  He pretended not to hear the hostility in her voice. ‘It must have been odd to wake with memories that have nothing at all to do with the world you find yourself in.’

  He broke off, coughing violently. Then he sat back and his face was so pale his eyes were like burnt ashes. He gasped air in a shallow jerky rhythm until his breathing became closer to normal. Merlin felt an unexpected stab of pity for him.

  ‘This whole mess has more to do with history than anything else,’ he went on as if the coughing fit had not occurred. ‘We, the Citizens, are all that remain of the old earth. That’s the world you remember. Think about that world. Can you remember the pollution, the damage to the air and water, the thinning of the ozone layer?’

  His words evoked a vivid set of pictures in Merlin’s mind, as if he knew exactly which words would trigger memories of industrial chimneys belching black smoke and spewing invisible poisons into the atmosphere and pipes leaking oily sludge into the sea.

  ‘What you remember is only the beginning,’ the Citizen boy said. ‘It became much worse, and happened faster than anyone expected. The scientists had warned people, but the industries and technological people refused to listen. They persecuted the scientists and conservationists, calling them greenies, and saying they cared more about trees than people, never seeing that humans are just part of a complex infrastructure of lifeforms where the death of one has repercussions for all.’ He shrugged, seeming exhausted by his eloquence.

  ‘When the scientists’ predictions started coming true, the technologists came up with the idea of building domes because the atmosphere had become poisonous. For a while that was all right, except there were a lot of people who were too poor to live in the dome cities, so they stayed outside, dying slowly and horribly of disease, squalor and hunger.

  ‘But that wasn’t the end of it. The earth’s weather pattern changed dramatically causing tremendous upheavals: hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes which damaged the domes and killed hundreds of people.’

  Merlin sat forward, sickened by the tale of destruction. ‘What has all that to do with me, or with your barbaric treatment of the clanpeople?’ she demanded.

  ‘Everything,’ the Citizen boy said simply. ‘Your clanpeople are the descendants many times removed of those people who were refused admission to the domes, and who somehow adapted to the poisons, the increased strength of the sun, and the heat. We are not descendants – we are members of the survivors who lived in the domes.’ He closed his eyes for a moment.

  ‘When it was clear the domes would not protect us for as long as it would take the earth to heal, scientists and technologists came up with the idea of going some place else; finding a new clean planet and starting again, except there weren’t any close enough. Then an astrophysicist invented the Dimension jump. I don’t really understand how it works, but it meant a spaceship could travel billions of light-years across the universe in only a couple of centuries of real time. With frozen sleep, travellers only aged about ten years in a journey that otherwise would have taken generations to complete. Of course, the co-ordinates fed into the ship computers were based on minimal data since it was impossible to know what existed so far aw
ay. Even the best telescopes only showed information that was already a long way out of date by the time it reached earth.

  ‘It was a gamble because a ship might just as easily come out of a D-jump in the middle of a star or a black hole as find a planet that could sustain life. Another likelihood was for ships to end up in a dead solar system, in which case they could just turn around and come back, guided by a signal transmitted continuously by a homing device. The real time for the round trip meant that although they would only have aged about twenty years, centuries would have passed on earth, and there was a good chance the planet would be clean again.

  ‘Given the alternative of staying on earth, trapped in degenerating domes, it seemed the best hope. So they built ships and started D-jumping people who could afford the passage all over the heavens. The pollution and the tremors got worse, and civilisation started to decay completely, especially since the people who hadn’t been inside the domes began to revert to savagery, and ancient terrible diseases like the black plague started again.

  ‘Then a couple of the last scientists started to worry about what would happen to humanity if none of the ships that D-jumped survived the journey to carry on the human race either on a new planet, or back here on earth. So they spent a tremendous amount of money building this special dome around the homing device which would guide the D-jumpers back, sinking it in the ground to protect it from tremors. Then they froze hundreds of volunteers too poor to afford to fly away, or wealthy people too scared to D-jump, to repopulate the earth in case none of the D-jumpers survived to come back. They designed a super computer to nurture the sleepers through their endless night, and to wake them when it was safe.’

  Merlin was transfixed by the queer story.

  The boy smiled a melancholy smile. ‘It seems I am ever destined to be telling you stories. Well, you might guess what happened next. The super computer tried to wake the sleepers but five centuries too soon. Something went wrong and it ended up killing all but twenty people. I’m one of the lucky ones,’ he said with bitter irony.

  ‘We woke to find ourselves on the verge of extinction, with no hope of reprieve in a world filled with lethal poisons.’

  There was a long pause, and Merlin seemed to come from a long way off, back to the present, and her own dilemma. ‘Then the whole city . . .’

  The boy nodded with a bleak smile. ‘Is empty, except for this single building.’

  Merlin shook her head. ‘But what has any of that got to do with me?’

  The Citizen boy stirred, as if from a deep sleep. ‘Well, once we realised how things stood, most of us accepted that we were a kind of postscript to humanity on earth, and set about like good scientists to make a record of the last days, just in case some of the D-jumpers ever did return. Then we discovered we weren’t the last.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a bit of an irony when you think about it that the people left for dead were the real survivors. No one had suspected that. It was Andrew’s idea that we take a closer look, for research purposes, and note the changes that made them able to cope with the environmental upheavals. It was then we found that the clanpeople, your people,’ he added with gentle emphasis, ‘had developed more than an immunity to atmospheric poisons. They had a primitive form of telepathy and telekinesis.

  ‘That changed everything,’ he said grimly.

  14

  Merlin stared past the Citizen boy in amazement. On a small table sat a tiny village trapped in a dome-shaped glass ornament.

  The boy looked around to see what had caught her attention, reached over and picked up the ornament. The movement disturbed the water inside, showering silver rain onto miniature roofs. He watched Merlin’s expression with a strange smile.

  ‘So, you do remember? I always wondered if you saw anything I showed you.’ He shook the ornament and then set it down on the chair between them.

  Merlin opened her mouth to speak, but found her lips were dry as paper. She felt suddenly frightened, as if she had reached into a familiar corner and touched something completely unknown.

  ‘My name is William,’ the boy said.

  ‘You are William? But . . .’ Suddenly many of the whispered memories made sense. ‘What did you do to me?’ she said at last. The words seemed curiously limp in contrast to the surge of questions in her throat.

  William took his time answering. He shook the ornament and watched the silver rain fall, mesmerised by the slow movement. ‘This is us,’ he said softly. He looked up into Merlin’s eyes, his expression grave.

  ’I don’t understand,’ she said flatly, sick of his hints. It was hard to accept that the William of her innermost thoughts was a Citizen god.

  William sighed heavily. ‘Sometimes I envy the outsiders not needing to bother with words. Words are so slow. If I could just tell your mind . . .’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Merlin said, without meaning to. She knew little of how the telepathy worked, but she seemed to have the ability anyway, and that meant she knew a great deal more about it than William. The pallid boy seemed to imagine it meant a whole lot of grand things, as if it were the magic Sear lusted after. Because of her memory of a world in which telepathy was nothing more than a story, Merlin could understand exactly how the Citizen boy felt. That seemed an important and significant realisation, but there was no time to think it through. William was staring at her expectantly.

  ‘It’s like someone whispering inside your head. You still have to have the words,’ she said.

  The boy smiled. ‘So, the teacher is taught. That’s the way it should be.’ He looked sad again. ‘So. The dome people, my people, were curious about these new powers. Andrew more than the others wanted to know everything about them. You see, he understood what it meant long before the rest. He had always been strong, but when he told us his plan, he became the leader of the dome. Not much of a kingdom, but Sedgewick envies it and styles himself as Andrew’s successor. Andrew thinks him a fool,’ William added with faint disparagement.

  ‘His plan?’ Merlin echoed, feeling certain they were about to get to the heart of the story. She had a sudden desire to stop William from speaking, an irrational fear of what she might learn.

  ‘I said before that all the ships D-jumped, but that’s not exactly right. One last ship was built and set to D-jump before the last scientists went. That ship was a final safeguard just in case the calculations were wrong and the earth never did heal well enough to support humanity again. It gave the sleepers a chance for life, since the dome life-support systems would not last forever.’

  ‘Why don’t your people fly away, then? Or aren’t there enough of you to fly this ship?’ said Merlin with the sudden suspicion that Andrew was trying to train the clanpeople to help pilot the spaceship.

  ‘The ship is set to D-jump,’ William said. ‘That means one person could fly it, if they had to, with the right code. The problem is that the computer won’t let us near the ship.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was a flaw written into the computer program as far as it concerns us humans, but there was nothing wrong with the ship protection part of the program. You see, the ship was set to be released from the force-field protecting it in twenty centuries, at the same time as we were to be wakened. But we woke five centuries too soon.

  ‘The computer won’t let us near the ship for another five centuries.’

  ‘Can’t you switch the computer off?’

  William sat back and looked up at the roof. ‘There’s the rub. You see, the master computer and an auxiliary power-pack are inside the force-field with the ship. You can’t switch it off because you can’t get to it. And we daren’t try to upset the computer linkups because the whole city is booby trapped to explode. If the computer is tampered with there’s a good chance the city will be destroyed.’

  ‘Why explosives?’ Merlin demanded. ‘In fact, why a force-field to protect the ship if you were all supposed to be asleep?’

  William shrugged. ‘History again. Apparently the people who put
us to sleep were afraid of other people. Not the outsiders, but people from another country. In those days the world was all divided up into . . .’ He stopped. ‘But you know that, don’t you? You remember that world.’

  He seemed tired. ‘Waking was dreadful. Most of us had friends or family who had died. The outside world was still poisonous to us, and once we started sorting it all out, we understood why. And then someone shouted that we were saved because there was a last ship which existed solely in case all else failed, so that we could follow the last D-jumper and join their colony. Only we couldn’t get to the ship because of the computer, and we couldn’t alter its program because of the danger. We couldn’t repopulate the earth because it was poisonous, and because there was too small a gene pool.

  ‘Most of the survivors resigned themselves. Only Andrew refused to accept that there was no hope for us. He would stand for days without taking his eyes off the ship inside the force-field, staring like a madman. He said there must be a way. No one believed him until he called us altogether and suggested that the clanpeople with their telepathy might be able to do what we couldn’t.’

  William looked around as if he were frightened of being overheard. Merlin wondered why, since Andrew had instructed him to answer her questions. ‘He believed that an outsider with telepathy might be able to reach the computer’s mind without having to touch it and alter the program so that the computer would switch off the machine.’

  Merlin was confused. ‘But why take so many? Why not ask the clanpeople to help. They would have.’

  William shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. To begin with, to Andrew and the others, the people outside weren’t – aren’t – human. They are a corruption of true humanity. Garbage left over from the old world.

  ‘The religion thing was a second thought. In the beginning, Andrew had outsiders rounded up, stunned and brought in. Naturally they went mad when they woke up and found themselves in here. They had to be killed or stunned again. He tried all sorts of ways to get the people here calmly so that he could tell them what he wanted them to do. But he treated them like animals and they reacted like trapped wild things.’ A flicker of revulsion crossed the pale bony face.