Scatterlings

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘There was always a lot of violence until Sacha dreamed up the collar whose circuitry introduced a current which interfered with brain waves. It was a much more efficient way to control the outsiders, since, collared, a captive would do literally anything they were told. The trouble was that the business with the computer couldn’t be forced. It had to be voluntary.

  ‘The other big problem was that some of our people were killed in the raids, not many compared to the outsider death figures, but with so few of us, it couldn’t go on.

  ‘It was Sacha who came up with the idea of making the clanpeople want to come into the city. She designed a mythology which focused around the city and the Citizens, and she brought in and brainwashed a number of tribal wardens using a highly addictive drug to ensure they stayed obedient. But you have discovered that, though Sacha said it was impossible. She had been examining their society to identify key figures. She did this by watching their tribal meetings in secret, and photographing those to whom the rest deferred, those who made judgements or gave commands. These were later captured. Those successfully addicted were freed, and allowed to go back to their tribes to tell stories of the generous, misunderstood Citizen gods, who wanted only to offer immortality and paradise to a lucky few who would be taken into the mysterious domed city. In return, Sacha supplied them with the drug.’

  ’But why turn the clanpeople into mindless idiots at all?’

  ‘Can’t you guess, Merlin?’ William asked. ‘Those who come to us are tricked into attempting to access the computer telepathically. But for some reason, their minds are unable to cope. Andrew refuses to accept that his great plan might not work, and so the trying goes on.’

  Merlin was appalled. She could accept, almost, the desperation of the doomed Citizens to find a way out of their dilemma. But not their callous abuse of the clanpeople. She wanted to scream her disgust at William, but something in his expression was ambivalent, as if he liked all that had happened as little as she. Merlin found herself wondering about the loyalties of the sickly Citizen boy. Belatedly she remembered that he had said ‘they’ far more often than ‘we’ when he spoke of his fellow Citizens, almost as if he had mentally divorced himself from them. She thought of his furtive glance around, and wondered if he would help her.

  But there was one question he had not answered. ‘What about me?’

  William looked up. ‘Yes. You were the next stage. You came to us without a mind, so there was nothing to burn away, but also nothing to think with. Andrew had the idea that if we could raise you as one of ourselves and give you a mind that would help you align with us, you would be able to access the computer where the others couldn’t.

  ‘He appointed a number of us to organise a sleep-learning program that would plant in your mind all the technical information you would need to access the computer program. We also had to give you enough of a social background to act as a foundation for the personality we meant to create.’ He smiled. ‘I proved to have an unexpected talent in this. And since all the people who knew about computer learning had died, I became valuable in spite of everything.

  ’I did not have enough knowledge to reprogram the learning computers with anything new. But I could use what was available, and that turned out to be old history tapes of a time long before ours, but it was better than nothing. We planned to tell you that you had been in cryogenic sleep and we had woken you, to explain the gaps. I even planted information that would make it seem feasible.

  ‘After a long time, I put together a patchy program, the best we could do considering what I had to work with. Then we linked your mind up to the computer and waited.’

  Merlin had a vivid memory of the dry inner voice offering her information, and realised it had been the voice of the sleep-teaching computer. It struck her that she had scarcely heard the voice after meeting the scatterlings. And now, she supposed, the William voice would fall silent.

  Merlin looked up at the Citizen boy. ‘You . . . your voice was in my head too,’ she whispered.

  ‘You remember?’ he asked simply, his eyes shining inexplicably. ‘You see, it was I who watched over you all the long years of sleep learning. Once the program was set there was no need for a team. Just one was needed to watch to make sure nothing went wrong, and I was useless for most other things.

  ‘The others thought it a tedious job and pitied me, sitting and watching you for hours and weeks and years. They never understood that I had shaped the learning that went into you. It was a painstaking job, like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. And I had done much more than they guessed.

  ‘Andrew only wanted you to have enough of a mind to be able to understand what they wanted. They didn’t care what went into you, as long as you could function and reach the computer when you were wakened. But I wanted more than that. I wanted you to have a real memory, and so I pieced together a world for you to remember. Not just a world of places and things, but a world of songs and voices that disagreed and argued, and books and stories, and plans that worked and plans that didn’t work. Some of it I fed through the computer, but more often, I spoke to you myself. There were times when I spoke to you of my own thoughts and problems. I never knew if this would go in. Sometimes I really felt like a god, creating life out of nothingness and chaos.’

  ‘And then?’ Merlin asked.

  ‘And then came the day of waking,’ William said.

  ‘You were unhooked from the computer and taken by flier to a smaller dome where you were to be “found” by Andrew and Sacha. It was reasoned that you could be brought in over the dead city, to make the story of your being “found” more plausible. Andrew also wanted you to see the dome from the outside, so that you would understand the dome was all that remained. You were never meant to see that there was life going on outside the dome. You would live among us, and bond with us.

  ‘But you never got to the small dome.’

  ‘The accident!’ Merlin hissed. Then it dawned on her what she had been told. ‘Then . . . I never lost my memory because I never had a memory.’ She felt a terrible anguish at the realisation that there was no memory to be found, no self to rediscover. She was nothing more than a programmed human being who had returned to her masters.

  ‘If Andrew had not brought you here, you would have died,’ William reminded her.

  ‘I am dead,’ Merlin shouted. ‘I thought coming here would make it right. I thought knowing the truth about myself would fix everything. Instead I find I’m programmed like a robot. I would be better off if I had never asked any questions.’

  ‘Impossible,’ William said with such insistance Merlin looked up at him.

  ’What?’ she asked dully.

  ‘It would have been impossible for you just to accept your memory was gone,’ the Citizen boy said indignantly. ‘I told you. I didn’t just throw a lot of facts into your mind and hope you’d come out all right. Your mind is a delicate, complicated jigsaw puzzle that took me years to weave out of broken bits of computerised memory, and I had to do it mostly in secret in case they stopped me. I wanted you to be able to think, and to have something, somewhere, to think from.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ Merlin said hopelessly.

  William sat forward eagerly. ‘The fact that you were capable of saving yourself in the accident, and of finding and communicating with the outsiders could only happen because of the way your mind was put together. You were able to think and reason. That was why you had to search for the truth. I made you a mind hungry for knowledge, a mind that would wonder and ask questions. A mind that would demand answers, that would search for them.’

  ‘What about the collar?’ Merlin asked, trying to take in his words.

  William smiled. ‘You never guessed? I tampered with the collar circuitry after Sedgewick installed it. Andrew wanted it done in case you woke before they were ready, but I could not bear to think of you collared.’

  Merlin stared at the youth, wondering why he looked so happy. She felt empty. ‘W
hy?’ she asked.

  To her astonishment, a faint blush stained the boy’s cheeks. ‘You were so strange and beautiful when they gave you to me. So still. Like a sleeping princess. I didn’t see you as the others did. I did not want them to cut your hair, but it had to be done because of the computer electrodes. I didn’t start out to disobey Andrew, but bit by bit, that’s what I did.’ A shadow crossed his features. ‘I think he has guessed some of it, but there is nothing he can do to punish me.’ He looked into Merlin’s face with a dreamy tenderness that reminded her vividly and painfully of the way Ford had stared at her.

  ‘I used to watch you and talk to you and play you music. I tried to imagine what you would be like. I didn’t let the others know how I felt, in case they took you away and gave you to someone else. I used to call you “princess”, and in the end I think I actually believed that was what you were. And one day, you would wake up, and . . .’ His eyes flickered away, hiding whatever he might have said.

  Merlin had a brief vision of the sickly Citizen boy, sitting in the endless twilight of the dying city, watching over her sleeping body, telling stories to a corpse. It was a sad and rather pathetic picture, reminding her of Bramble’s vigil with the dying Ranulf.

  ‘But I remembered the ruined city!’ Merlin said suddenly. ‘How could that be?’ She clutched at the flaw in his tale, wanting desperately to believe that he was lying, and that she was normal.

  But William shook his head. ‘You remembered a hologram. Sometimes the learning required you to see. Your eyes were sewn open and bathed. You saw pictures and heard sounds. That’s when I showed you the little dome ornament. You were never really in that city.’

  Merlin slumped back in her seat. ‘I wish I was dead,’ she whispered.

  At last something of her reaction filtered through to William.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Merlin laughed at the smallness of his question, as if he had offered a bandaid for an amputated limb. She felt the laughter bubble shrilly into hysteria and stopped abruptly. William looked at her uneasily.

  ’I’m not going insane,’ Merlin said, sinking her head in her hands. ‘I probably can’t, or did you program me with that too?’

  Comprehension filled his eyes. ‘No! No, what you are thinking is wrong. You are not programmed like a machine. Your mental processes are your own, and perfectly normal. If you were really a machine you couldn’t think for yourself. You wouldn’t be capable. I didn’t program you. If you like, I fertilised the ground and you planted the seeds. Not the seeds you were meant to plant. The scatterlings put paid to that. You made yourself what you are and your thoughts are your own.’

  Merlin shook her head.

  ‘Merlin . . .’ William’s voice was shockingly intimate, and Merlin was shaken from her mindless despair by a tone so knowing that she felt naked before those burning eyes and his utter knowledge of her. ‘My sleeping princess,’ he murmured, and reached out a frail hand to her cheek. ‘Do you know, I even gave you your name. There is a story behind it. Do you know what it means? Do you remember?’

  Merlin shook her head dumbly and the boy looked disappointed.

  He said: ‘In the olden days, there was a legend about a city. The most beautiful, peaceful, perfect city in all the world, ruled over by a wise and good king. But the secret of the wondrous kingdom really lay in the king’s advisor, a sorceress who had been born outside time and contained the wisdom of all ages, because she was confined by no era. Her name was Merlin.

  ‘I called you after her because you don’t really belong to any time either. Your body is like an outsider’s, immune to the poisons of the old world. But you are also the inheritor of the wisdoms and dreams of the old world and the new. You are of both times and no time. You are outside time,’ he said, a note of triumph in his voice.

  A stranger who remembers nothing and everything . . . the Conclave Rememberer had said. And it was true. But she had also predicted Merlin would bring an end to the flow of the deadly visiondraught.

  ‘If I survive,’ Merlin whispered.

  William looked taken aback and Merlin realised the boy lived in his dreams and stories. He had not given a thought to why she had been programmed.

  ‘The computer. That’s what it was all for, wasn’t it? I may be your special creation, but that’s what it was for. And maybe I’ll end up Void as well. Then you can lay me down and tell me stories forever.’ Merlin had an inexplicable desire to disturb the dreamy calmness in the boy’s eyes.

  William’s face told her she had succeeded. ‘You hate me that much?’ he whispered.

  Merlin stared at him for a long moment, wondering if the terrible emptiness was a kind of hate. ‘I don’t feel anything for you,’ she said in a thin voice.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you feel,’ said a voice Merlin remembered as vividly as waking in the flier. Sedgewick. She turned to find a thick-set youth with flat, sleepy, green eyes, coarse black hair and a soft small mouth. She had thought herself incapable of feeling, but she reacted to the boy’s arrogance with instant antagonism. No wonder Andrew saw him as a poor heir.

  ‘Sedgewick.’ William greeted him in a neutral tone nothing like the gentle, eager way he had told her the story of her past.

  ‘So, it doesn’t matter,’ she hissed, and from the corner of her eye, she saw William gape at her tone. Her rage focused on Sedgewick. ‘Then it won’t matter either that I have no intention of trying to mind-read your rotten computer and you can tell your precious Andrew that.’

  Sedgewick grinned with infuriating complacency. ‘We’ll see. Perhaps you have forgotten that the lives of the two savages you brought with you depend on your behaviour.’

  Merlin was taken aback. For a moment she had forgotten Sear and Ford. Then her expression hardened. ‘I won’t do anything unless they go free and I see them go free. I don’t want any of your worthless lying promises. I’m not as gullible as they were.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand,’ Sedgewick said pleasantly. ‘You don’t have any say in what will happen. You will do exactly as you are told and no more, or else your two friends will die, and then we will hunt up the scatterlings one at a time, and put them to death in front of you until you get the point. Andrew believes in reason, but I favour more direct persuasion. Either way, you will do as you are told.’

  Filled with impotent fury, Merlin opened her mouth and closed it again. She looked down at William, willing him to defend his sleeping princess, but he only looked at his hands, folded loosely in his lap.

  15

  Andrew was leaning over Sear’s cage when they entered the laboratory the following morning. Merlin had spent the night in a cramped cubicle locked from the outside.

  Though a new day had begun, there was little change inside the dome. It was still dimly lit and cold, and inside the tower there were no windows. Almost all the tower rooms were lit by the bright artificial lights of the city. Merlin wondered if Sear would admire the forbidden city so much if he could understand how barren it really was. She began to long to feel the sun on her face.

  ‘This one is taming nicely, but I’m afraid the other is just too wild,’ Andrew observed, hearing them enter.

  Merlin felt a queer thrust of triumph to see that Ford refused to allow himself to be petted like an animal. It seemed the collars had degrees of effectiveness. Neither Ford nor Sear were like the Void zombies, but then, the two scatterlings were not mindless. Yet.

  ‘I’ve brought her,’ Sedgewick announced.

  Andrew turned to face them with a smile which did not reach his eyes. ‘I think we can call Merlin by her name, Sedgewick.’ The Citizen boy’s hand tightened painfully on her forearm at the rebuke, but his expression showed nothing.

  He’s learning to control his face, Merlin thought. He’s learning to be a liar and a cheat, like Andrew. He’s becoming civilised.

  The word ‘civilised’ had taken on a whole new set of meanings since she had entered the dark city. She was not the same
ignorant girl who had entered the dome the day before. She saw the true worth of the scatterlings and the clanpeople now, but that awareness made her feel even more of an alien than ever. William believed her to be a sorceress who stood outside time, outside the rules of those bound by time, but it was more than that. Being on the outside meant she could never truly be one of either the Citizens or the clanpeople. She had lain awake for hours the previous night, thinking about all she had seen and been told, and had woken with a clear knowledge of what must be done.

  Strangely, although she felt very alone, she had a purpose which her life had previously lacked. She wanted to do as Andrew demanded. If she were able to get the Citizens their ship, they would go, and the clanpeople would be free of their tyranny. So if she could, she was going to do as they asked. If.

  She also wanted to make sure Sear and Ford were freed, and she would have to convince Andrew that she would do nothing unless they were let go. She was certain he would not free any of them if she succeeded.

  She wasn’t the person who had lain down to sleep in the Citizen sleeping cubicle. She understood that even if Andrew refused to free the scatterlings, she would do as he wanted so that the Citizens would fly away in their spaceship and leave the clanpeople in peace.

  She clenched her teeth, trying to decide how to frame her words to the scientist. But Sedgewick spoke before she could announce her ultimatum, repeating her words to him.

  ‘She wants them freed before she’ll do anything,’ he said. ’She doesn’t believe you’ll free them after. I say they should be kept. She will obey as long as we have them,’ he announced.

  ‘I do not remember asking for your opinion,’ Andrew said.