by Susan Cooper
“The fire my men had set was contained,” Sir said, “but your friends from the Underground set more fires as they ran. They were prearranged, those fires. They burned very fiercely, and the wind carried the flames to our research facility, deep in the woods. A very valuable place, where we did vital work on genetic mutation. When that caught fire, there were huge explosions that must also have been preset. They were all ready to destroy the Wilderness, they were just waiting. Waiting for whatever it was that had happened, that day.”
He squatted on his heels beside Lou so that he could look him in the face. His skin was fairly dark, and the scar that ran into his beard stood out, in a nubbly white line. He glanced up at me too, and he said, quiet but fierce, “They are fanatics, do you understand that? Fanatics. Their only aim is destruction, of all the glories of our civilization. We have vanquished every major disease, we have found ways to feed and house every being on this planet, we have learned to resist the changes in climate as they come. Human kind has finally achieved control of life on Pangaia. But the fanatics of the Underground can see none of this. They fight their Greenwar to bring down the global government and substitute anarchy. They’re mad, of course. But very dangerous.”
He stood up again, and put his hands under Lou’s arms to lift him gently down from the chair. Then he took a little box out of his pocket and pressed a switch on it. It buzzed softly.
“And they brought you from your distant island for some dark connected purpose,” he said. “Related I think to an ancient festival that used to take place a few days from now, on August first. Ignorant superstition, like all their talk. They have been threatening doom for that date over the webwork, threatening a sacrifice. The end of our world, and the beginning of another. Mad. Unless this law and that law are changed, they are threatening, they will do such things. . . .”
He looked at Nora in a helpless kind of way. “Can you believe I am trying to explain this to a pair of children?” he said.
“Why not?” she said. “One of them is . . . unusual.”
Lou was trotting round the room again, gazing up at the pictures. He reached out once more to touch the jeweled hummingbird, but paused at the last moment, and drew back his hand.
Sir gripped my shoulder, hard. I glanced up and saw the black eyes staring down at me, still fierce. He said, “Your brother has a talent that they need, and might kill for. Be warned, work with the Government, and we will keep you both safe.”
Before I could give that the smallest thought, the door opened and several people came hurrying in, men and women, all in the same sleek dark red uniform as Nora. Sir looked at one of them, a small thin man with sharp eyes and a completely bald head. “I want these two taken to Central, to be examined by Dr. Owen and Dr. Karminsky,” he said. “They will have been informed. Keep them there overnight, and then bring them back here.”
He looked me in the eye again. “Don’t worry,” he said.
The small bald man nodded at me encouragingly, but it didn’t stop me worrying. I didn’t like the idea of being “kept safe” by the Government one bit. The whole group of police took us outside.
We never saw Sir again.
Along gleaming corridors they took us, past more of those war-filled screens, and then into a wide elevator with metal walls. I saw Lou’s eyes widen as the doors of the elevator swung silently together, and he felt the pressure of the rising floor under his feet. It was his first time in an elevator. He’s never been to Nassau, he’s never left our island, and though he’s seen life in the rest of the world on television, there’s a lot he hasn’t seen or done.
In the Otherworld there was a lot that I hadn’t seen or done either. The elevator doors hissed open and we were out on the top of the building, at the edge of a wide flat roof, with the airport’s crisscrossing lines of lights spread all round us and a thick brown haze above, merging into darkness. You could see a star here or there in the sky, but very few, and none that I could recognize. We both know the stars, Lou and I; it’s one of the things Grand’s hot on. He says anyone who lives among islands and boats should know how to navigate by the stars. Looking at the darkness, I wondered suddenly whether it was night in our own world, whether Grand and Grammie would be frantic because we weren’t back home. Somehow I didn’t think so. Time in the Otherworld didn’t match the way time passed at home.
The air filled with noise; a helicopter was hovering above us, coming down very slowly toward the roof. Its door opened as it touched down, and we were shoved inside, hands forcing our heads down so they wouldn’t be chopped off by the rotors. The shape and size of the rotors looked quite different from the ones I’d seen in our world, but I couldn’t figure out how.
Two men got in with us, and put Lou and me together in a seat at the back, and up we went, fast. Lou was next to the window, looking down, making soft little amazed noises. He glanced up at me, and grinned. I couldn’t help grinning back, though I can’t say I felt much like it. Looking out from up there, we must have been able to see for miles. And everywhere we looked, in every direction, there were lights: chains and necklaces of lights, moving strands of light that must have been roads, endless dots of light. Endless people.
First I thought how beautiful the lights were, but in the next instant I realized they showed how incredibly crowded this place must be. It was like the phosphorescence in the sea that Grand showed us sometimes after dark, at home; when you stirred up the seawater, it glowed like liquid fire—but the light didn’t come from the water itself. It came from all the thousands and millions of tiny glowing creatures swarming in every inch.
The helicopter was very noisy. Nobody spoke to us. Sir and Nora had treated us like people, but now we were just objects, to be shuttled around. The only trouble was, I didn’t know where we were being shuttled to. What was Central? A hospital? “We’ll keep you safe” could have meant anything, even some sort of prison.
We flew for quite a long time, half an hour maybe, and Lou fell asleep, his head drooping against my shoulder. It was amazing how he could just tune everything out. Still, he’s young. It made me feel lonely. I sat there with my mind worrying away a mile a minute, staring out at those endless dots and strings of light, that went on and on without a break anywhere.
When we did come down, it was into a place really thick with lights, and as we slowly dropped closer and closer to the ground I looked out of the window and saw dozens of great tall buildings reaching up to meet us, skyscrapers I guess, all of them blazing with light. On the other side I saw only darkness, a broad strip of darkness before the sea of lights began again, hazy in the distance. When the helicopter touched down, with a gentle jolt, I realized that this darkness was a river, and that we were landing on a flat place where the river and the city met. Floodlights shone down over the landing area, and at its edge you could see the river lapping against a barrier wall. In the light, the water was a dark grey-brown.
Still, nobody spoke to us. They took us across a paved space and onto a moving staircase that rose steeply upward. Lou loved it, he chortled with surprised delight as it carried him up. People climbed past us even while we moved; the place was crowded and busy and everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Pangaia was a world I could never have imagined, from what I knew at home. Everywhere we had been, the land was paved or concreted and built over, jammed with people. The air was hazy and the water was brown, and no stars shone. Only the weird mutated Wilderness had been green, and now that was black and dead. It was all about as different from Lucaya as any place could be.
We stepped off the staircase, with a silent man in uniform at either side of us. This place did look as if it might be a hospital; it was all glass and steel and white paint, with long bleak corridors, and plateglass doors that slid open when you walked toward them. Men and women in white coats or white overalls hurried about the corridors, murmuring to each other, each carrying a little flickering screen the size of a book. Everyone looked worried; nobody smiled.
Our two r
ed-uniformed guardians marched us along miles of gleaming corridor and delivered us at last to an airy room filled with strange-looking computer equipment, all wires and screens and banks of levers and buttons. We found ourselves facing a small bald man with bright blue eyes and a nut-brown face. He wore a long white coat and white shoes, and he was sitting on a stool gazing at us both with great interest. He had one of those book-sized screen things in his hand. He was so obviously expecting us that when the two silent uniformed men brought us in, he just nodded at them and waved them away. And they saluted and went.
There was nobody else in the room. Some of the equipment was humming softly. The man’s face was creased and friendly, and as our guards left, he got to his feet and held out a hand for me to shake. I took it with a firm grip, and got one back. Grand was very big on firm handshakes, he told us they were a test of character.
“You’re Trey and Lou,” said the nut-brown man, and he shook Lou’s hand too. “I’m Dr. Owen, and I have to take some measurements. Don’t worry. Nothing to scare you. Stand here—look.”
There were two round raised discs in the middle of the room, and he went over and stood on one of them. He beckoned to me, and pointed to the other. I hesitated.
Dr. Owen grinned at me. “Ah come on, Trey,” he said. “Have faith. I guarantee you everything’s harmless in here.”
Cautiously, I crossed over and stepped up onto the disc. It was a little raised platform, about a foot high.
Dr. Owen whistled. It was a quick little two-tone whistle, the way you’d call a dog.
There was a whirring sound, and a squat, square box came trundling toward me over the floor. It moved like that chunky round robot in the first Star Wars movie, if you remember him, but that was about the only likeness. It wasn’t cute and it didn’t have flashing lights or make squeaky gurgling noises; it was dead quiet and rather sinister. While I stood there, nervously watching, it moved slowly round me, and I noticed there were half a dozen upright wires sticking up from its top like aerials, each with a glowing light on the end. The lights swiveled sometimes, and flickered.
Dr. Owen beckoned to Lou, and stepped off his round platform, and without even being told, Lou trotted cheerfully over toward him and hopped up onto it. I was baffled again by the way so few things in Pangaia seemed to frighten him; it was as if he knew what to expect.
The moving box finished circling me, and trundled over toward Lou.
“This is Fred,” said Dr. Owen. “Fred sees all. Though not inside your head, you’ll be happy to know. Here’s what he made of you, Trey.”
He pressed a few buttons on the book-sized thing he had in his hand, and in a wide metal cabinet against one wall, a big screen lit up. Pangaia seemed to be full of screens, as if nobody there wrote words down on paper, as if everyone thought only through pictures.
On the screen, I saw a larger than life image of myself, a spooky hollow 3-D image drawn in thousands of intertwining lines. It moved slowly around. Then it vanished, and was replaced by columns and columns of numbers, flicking down, over and over, a new screenful every second.
“Vital statistics,” Dr. Owen said. “You’re a toy, to Fred. He’s figured out how you work. He could replicate you—you wouldn’t have a mind, but you’d be a perfect clone otherwise.” He peered more closely at the screen for a while, studying the numbers, and his voice changed. “I must say,” he said more slowly, “you are an interestingly obsolete model, Trey.”
Fred was making his way round Lou, his antennae standing up like stiff hairs. When he had finished, Dr. Owen put Lou’s strange interwoven image on the screen in place of mine. He gazed at it for a long time, playing with the buttons on his hand keyboard to move it about in different directions. Then he switched it off, sat down on his stool again, and faced us.
He looked me in the eyes, his face serious and intent. “Where do you come from?” he said.
Perhaps it was the handshake that made me trust him.
“Not from Pangaia,” I said.
“No indeed,” said Dr. Owen. He was studying Lou now, and smiling a little, an amazed sort of smile. Lou smiled back. He stepped off the round platform, and sat down on its edge next to Fred.
“Possibly from Pangaia long ago,” Dr. Owen said quietly, almost to himself. “Possibly from some wholly other . . . place. But no, not from Pangaia.”
“The other man didn’t believe me,” I said.
“What other man?”
“They just called him Sir.”
Dr. Owen laughed abruptly. “I’ll bet they did,” he said. “We all call him Sir. No—he didn’t believe you, he thinks you are a product of the Underground.”
“Do you think we are?” I said.
“Of course not,” said Dr. Owen.
I said suddenly, just as it came into my head, “What do you think of the Underground?”
Dr. Owen sat there expressionless on his stool for a moment, as if he were trying to figure out what to say. I think he was one of those people like Grand, who take kids just as seriously as they do grown-ups.
He said at last, “I am a neuroscientist, Trey. A kind of doctor. I’m in the business of observing and preserving human life. So my occupation puts me on a different wavelength from the Underground. They don’t have a high opinion of Homo sapiens, those folks—they think we’ve ruined our planet.”
“But what do they want to do?” I said. I glanced at Lou, but he didn’t seem interested in this at all; he was sitting next to Fred, running a finger gently up and down one of his spiky antennae.
“Nobody knows,” Dr. Owen said. He sighed. “Perhaps they want to give us back our soul, our global conscience. But we lost that long ago.”
He lifted the book-sized keyboard thing to his mouth, and spoke to it. “Escort to RE Six,” he said.
I said uneasily, “What’s RE Six?”
“Forgive me for this, Trey,” he said, although he didn’t move a muscle. Fred made a faint clicking sound, and a kind of lever shot out from the side of his square body and touched Lou’s upper arm. Then it was gone again.
Lou looked down at his arm in surprise, and then gently keeled over sideways, so that he was lying on one side on the round platform. I shouted in fright and ran to him, but he didn’t seem hurt. He blinked at me, looking puzzled.
Dr. Owen said quickly, soothingly, “A muscle relaxant only, I promise you. It will wear off in half an hour. Some people very senior to your friend Sir have ordered a special psychological scan on your little brother, a scan that is harmless only if the subject is not tense.”
“You can’t scan him!” I said in panic. “He’s only a little boy!”
Dr. Owen spread his hands. “Not my territory, Trey,” he said. “I deal with the body. What they want is to see inside his mind.”
The door opened, and two men in green overalls came in. One was young, broad-shouldered, the other one older, with short grey hair. They were pushing a kind of trolley, like a hospital gurney, with a sheet on top. Without a word they picked up Lou and laid him on his back on the sheet. He didn’t make a sound, and he didn’t move.
I said, “I’m going too!” I heard my voice squeak, I was so frightened.
“Of course,” said Dr. Owen. He put a hand on my shoulder. “So am I. It’s not far—a test facility two floors up.”
The two men headed out of the door pushing Lou, and I followed with Dr. Owen. They walked fast along the glowing white corridor, which was completely bare except for little moving machines high upon the wall at each corner. Perhaps they were cameras, watching us. The men raced round a corner—and then suddenly skidded the trolley to a stop and swung round so fast I could hardly tell what happened. The younger one lunged at Dr. Owen, seized the little screen out of his hand and pressed it against the side of his head. There was a tiny muffled thud, and Dr. Owen fell to the floor without a sound.
The man grabbed my arm, the other one picked Lou up under his arm as if he were a parcel, and we ran down the corridor to a door wi
th a red light over it. They pulled the door open.
I looked back. I’d rather liked Dr. Owen.
The younger man said urgently in my ear: “We’re taking you to Bryn. Get down, now!” He pushed me down so I was crouching. “Curl up in a ball, arms round your knees,” he said, and he pushed me out of the door.
NINE
I found myself sliding down some kind of chute, very steep, very dark, with a sour smell. It swung sideways, and then I fell in a heap, out in light again, floundering in a pile of sheets and clothes. The others came tumbling down after me. An empty sleeve flapped round my neck; I saw Lou lying on his back in a white nest like an unmade bed. We had come down a laundry chute; we were all in a great heap of dirty laundry. If I hadn’t been so scared, I would have laughed.
And then the men were tugging us out, the older one with Lou under his arm again, and we were outside a door and in cooler air, on a dark street.
It was a narrow street with uneven paving, like round stones set into dirt. The men hurried us down it and turned into a side alley, and then another; it was so dark, I don’t know how they knew where they were going. The alleyways seemed to run between tall stone buildings with no windows, like a black maze. This was totally different from anywhere else we’d been in Pangaia.
Then we were out again in a wider street lit by the occasional dim lamp, and through a brown haze you could see battered doors and unlighted windows, some of them broken. The men paused at an entryway with two huge closed wooden doors, and pushed open a smaller door set into one of them. We stepped up and over, and found ourselves in a kind of courtyard, with the dark sky overhead and a blur of voices from all around. It was like a hollow apartment building. On both sides of the courtyard, iron stairways went up to a balcony, and then again to another balcony above that, and the doors of the apartments led off the balconies, three on each side of the square. The walls were scarred and peeling, the iron rusted. This building wasn’t in good shape.