“Liss?” I asked. “Is this something you can tell us about?”
But Liss was lagging behind. She walked around the floating path, looking among the remains of boxy monitors, keyboards, computers, office chairs and all the other detritus with a wide-eyed nervous stare. Ren went back to his patter.
“Now we can’t be sure what kind of work went on here, but you can see more indicators of their technology level — you see those units in the corners, mounted on the wall? Those are screens, believe it or not, and the reason they’re that size is they needed to have an electron gun behind the screen to project the picture onto it. I don’t imagine any of you have seen anything like that in the last few hundred years…”
“You would imagine wrong,” said Kwame.
Ren was slightly unnerved at Kwame’s grave tone, but picked up the tour guide patter again. “But as I say, we still don’t know what went on here, and we probably never will. The biggest problem is preservation—”
“It’s a call centre,” said Liss.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said it’s a call centre,” she insisted.
“A what kind of centre…?”
“They… have the headsets…” She pointed out the wired plastic earpieces lying between an arc of rust that could once have been a band connecting them across the top of a head. And from one of the earpieces projected something that could have been a microphone. Ren looked closely.
“I don’t know what you think that is, but we’re pretty certain that was a miniature music system, or a personal communications set—”
“I used to work in a call centre… I used to do this. And… and the photocopier’s in a locked room, that’s for security… they were taking calls in here… they were taking calls when it happened… they were taking calls…” The tears came and she couldn’t bear it any more. She fled.
I asked Veofol to stay with the group and complete the tour, while I ran out after Liss into the sunshine and found her throwing up on the grass under a safety line. I offered her a tissue to clean her mouth, but she was too distressed. “Why did you bring us here? Why did we have to see that?”
“Okay, Liss, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was going to have that kind of effect on you. You don’t have to see any more. We can go home if you like…”
“What home? I haven’t got a home!” she shouted back at me and stumbled to her feet, still weeping. She lost her footing again immediately, and collapsed into sobs. I knelt by her and let her weep into my shoulder. I felt terribly guilty; I’d been hoping for a reaction to break through her shell, but not an outburst like this. The possibility that her therapy would benefit as a result didn’t make me feel any better.
16. Leaving
The bus lifted up into the air, and everyone moved to the windows to see the landscape they now understood: the seemingly natural pattern of hills and valleys that was so clearly a street map once you knew what lay beneath the ground. Liss wasn’t at the window; she’d long since stopped the waterworks, but she’d been quiet since then. “Liss? Would you like to see the city?”
She looked up, distracted from her thoughts. “Hm? Oh, are we going?”
“Are you feeling better?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine now. Sorry!” she said, embarrassed.
“Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh. Guess I made a fool of myself, yeah?” She was back to her old self, only a couple of hours after her meltdown.
“We’ll talk about it later,” I said. A look of worry flashed across her face but a foolish smile smoothed it away. “This is your last chance to take a look outside.” She put her nose against the window.
“Oh, wow, you can really see it!” she said.
“Those poor people,” said Kwame, shaking his head.
Olivia snorted. “Those people. What about our people?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“That’s us down there,” she said. “They’ll be doing this to us in a few thousand years.” Kwame looked back down, frowning.
“Taking us on bus rides?” asked Iokan with a smile.
“No, you idiot,” she said. “I mean archaeologists. Alien archaeologists digging up our cities. And wondering how we managed to make such a mess, I don’t doubt.”
“They won’t like it on your world,” said Liss.
“Oh, they’ll bloody love it,” said Olivia. “They’ll never figure it out if they don’t know about revenants. It’s the perfect mystery. They can’t solve it and it’ll get ’em funding forever. Good luck to ’em.”
“No! I mean they’ll get bitten!”
“What do you mean—” Olivia stopped, realising what Liss meant, then smiled sardonically. “Oh, I get it. Bitten. That’s good. Hah!” She chuckled.
Kwame had a look of grim approval. “That is no more than they deserve. The dead teaching them a lesson for disturbing them.”
“It can’t actually happen,” said Olivia, chortling, “they don’t last more than twenty years…”
“That is a terrible shame,” said Kwame through something approaching a smile.
“But still… can you imagine if Ren was digging and he came back up with a head chomping on his fingers?” she said, cracking up again.
“He’d be all ‘Ow! Ow! Oh, wow, look at the cool specimens… Ow! Ow!’” said Liss, imitating his deep-voiced enthusiasm and making Olivia and Kwame laugh. It was infectious. Iokan soon joined in. Even Pew cracked a smile. Only Katie remained aloof.
I had half a mind to point out that something similar had already happened when the Exploration Service had found Olivia’s world; but as I saw them laughing together, even at such a terrible gallows humour, I could not bring myself to stop them.
Veofol joined me and spoke softly. “I think I might have been wrong.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “It depends on the next round of individual sessions…”
“Well… at least they seem a bit more like a group, now.”
“Yes. Yes, I think so.”
We flew back to the sound of conversation that stayed alive all the way home, a thin ribbon of shared suffering binding them together, and hopefully enough for their therapy to move forward.
PART FIVE — PROGRESS
1. Dinner
After the inevitable row with Bell once I returned to Hub Metro (he demanded I get an assignment where I wasn’t perpetually on call, as though I had the luxury of choosing), I decided spending time at home was more trouble than it was worth. I gave Veofol some time off and took some of his on-call shifts for myself, staying overnight at the centre and sharing the evening meal. Much to my satisfaction, the group were actually taking meals together now, although that was partly because I made sure the only alternative was a less than appetising emergency microwave meal. They hadn’t gone so far as to cook for themselves, but were more than willing to eat what was offered.
So tonight the group shared a very passable fish dinner, followed by a choice of puddings. The fish had never seen water, and had in fact been printed in the kitchen that afternoon. Importing food to Hub from other universes has always been prohibitively expensive, and it’s much easier to build it from scratch, especially when you need to be able to feed millions of people during an evacuation. It seemed perfectly natural to me, but then I’d grown up with it. For those who were used to food from a more natural source, it was edible enough, though it lacked some of the texture of the real thing.
Olivia had taken a liking to Pew, and spent much of the meal offering advice on his studies. “And the worst thing, the absolute worst thing you must never, ever do,” she said, “is take benzedrine for three days on the trot so you can revise, and then go into the exam thinking you know everything and you just need to sick it all up on the page, because that’s what Rory Holedner did in my second year, bloody idiot. And then he tried to sign his name in vomit. Now you don’t do that kind of thing, do you?”
“Uh… no,” said Pew, looking down at his dinner wi
th widening eyes.
“Of course, you don’t have to dissect any corpses. It’s not easy the first time you do it. They all thought I was going to faint, because I was a woman, of course. Huh! It was three of them that threw up, not me.”
“Did every activity at your university involve vomiting?” asked Kwame.
“It was a medical school! What do you expect? The first thing they did after lectures was pile in the pub, get bladdered and see how far they could chuck it back up again. All medical students are like that.”
“Is that what you did…?” asked Pew.
“Well, I had to pretend to be ladylike, so I went back to digs and stuck to tea. They weren’t used to women studying. You had to mind your step or everyone’d think you weren’t any better than you should be, if you see what I mean.”
Pew looked confused. “I’m sorry?”
“Oh, so it’s just me who had all that sexist rot, then,” said Olivia.
“No,” said Kwame. “It was much the same on my world.”
“Bet you never had to deal with it, did you…”
“My mother did. She campaigned for suffrage.”
“Did she win?”
“No. They arrested her at a demonstration, beat her and imprisoned her. She only survived because she was seventeen when it happened, and they had to return her to her father. She campaigned in secret after that.”
“And I bet you changed everything when you got in charge. Right?”
The sarcasm irritated Kwame. “My party made every change we could. You cannot turn society upside down overnight.”
“And what did mumsy think about that?”
“She was not satisfied. But we did everything we could. We changed the property laws so women could inherit. We made it illegal for husbands to beat their wives…”
“Oh, well, you must be a champion of women, then.”
“We ran out of time.”
“Kwame has a point,” I said. “That kind of change takes centuries. On my world, all the things Kwame’s talking about happened two hundred years ago, but we still didn’t have complete equality.”
“Huh. Well, there’s nothing like hordes of the undead to make men and women equal, that’s what I always say,” said Olivia.
Iokan, meanwhile, had been doing his best to engage Katie in conversation, still wearing his hiking outfit after a walk round the valley that morning.
“So what kind of world did you grow up on?” he asked.
“Earth,” she replied.
“What was Earth like in those days?”
“A nickel-iron core surrounded by silicate mantle and tectonic crustal plates.”
“I mean, what was it like living there?”
“It was sufficient to my requirements.”
“What kind of things did you do there?”
“Training.”
“Were you always a soldier?”
“Yes.”
“Even when you were young?”
“I was always a soldier.”
“Did you have any friends?”
“I had fellow soldiers.”
“Did you ever have a boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
“I had fellow soldiers.”
Iokan’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, so… you and your comrades were polyamourous?”
A tiny moment of pause. “Yes.”
“I’ve studied military history, well, military history on my world. It’s said that an army of lovers fight harder for each other, because they care more. Would you say that’s true?”
“I have no data for comparison.”
“But did it make it easier?”
The pause was longer this time. “No.”
“Did you… lose anyone?”
She turned to me. “May I leave the table?”
“We’d rather you stayed, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I said.
“Thank you,” she replied. The group watched as she got up and left.
“You can try,” said Olivia, “but you’re not going to get anywhere.”
“She needs our help,” said Iokan.
“Maybe what happened to her was so bad, she can’t talk about it,” said Pew.
“She’ll talk when she’s ready,” I said.
“She’s never going to be ready,” said Olivia.
“It is unimaginable. To be made only for war,” said Kwame, shaking his head. “I wonder if she even has a family?”
“How can she not have a family?” demanded Olivia.
“She might be a clone,” said Liss, with none of her usual perkiness. She’d spent the meal staring into her food, most of which was still on her plate. She hadn’t even tried very hard to irritate us with her clothes today, and barely wore a single item of pink.
“She does come from a very technologically advanced society,” I said. “It’s certainly possible.”
“Why are you so down in the dumps?” Olivia asked Liss.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Rubbish. You haven’t said a word all day. Now normally that’s a good thing, but you’re worrying me, girl.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed of it, you know.”
“What?”
“I said you don’t have to suffer in silence. Take some painkillers.”
“I don’t get it. I’m not sick.”
“That’s right. It’s not a sickness. Happens every month. So do something about it.”
Liss gasped as she realised what Olivia was talking about. “I’m not having a period!”
Kwame coughed on his pudding. Olivia shrugged. “If you say so. Now I used to take laudanum when it was my time of the month and that made it go swimmingly, I can tell you. Bastards here won’t let me touch the stuff. Takes all the fun out of pain medication.”
“I told you, I’m not having a period!”
“Is this conversation necessary?” asked Kwame.
“I think perhaps this is a private matter,” I suggested.
“Calcium works,” said Iokan. “About 600mg a day if you’re feeling really bad.”
“How do you know?” demanded Olivia.
“Standard ration for female soldiers in the field.”
“Huh. Never heard that one before. Sure that’s not just your species?”
“I suppose it could be—”
Olivia turned to Liss. “Go on, give that a go, see if it works.”
Liss bashed her cutlery down, pushed her plate away and left.
“Yep. Time of the month, all right,” said Olivia.
“Olivia. Maybe she regards that as something personal. That she feels embarrassed about. That she doesn’t want to discuss,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Kwame.
“What? Oh, grow up,” said Olivia.
“I simply do not see why you need to discuss these matters at the dinner table—”
“It’s because you don’t see it, you nit. If you don’t see it you don’t understand it. I bet that’s what it was like on your world, eh? Everything under the carpet so the men didn’t have to think about it?”
“I was a liberal. I campaigned for women. But there are some things — you are just impossible!”
“It’s not the men that are the problem,” I said. “If Liss comes from a society where menstruation is taboo, you need to respect that.”
“Yes. Exactly,” agreed Kwame.
Olivia sighed in exasperation. “If it’s not one thing it’s another. Fine. Vaginal discharge is off the table.”
Kwame almost choked on his water, while Iokan couldn’t help a chuckle.
2. Iokan & Katie
After the meal, Iokan went looking for Katie, and I watched him from my office. His intention to help the others could be a benefit or a hazard, and I or someone else kept an eye on him at all times to ensure he didn’t push things too far.
But Katie wasn’t in her room, or the common room, or the gym, or anywhere else he could enter. He asked after her with the sta
ff, who could not recall having seen her in the last half hour, and suggested she was probably in her room. Having searched the centre from bottom to top, he seemed about to give up — but instead found her in the stairwell beside the gravity tubes.
“Katie?”
She stood at the edge of the stairs, her toes over the first step. The stairs were carpeted, but still presented a risk to anyone who fell. They were only there as a safety backup, and were little used except by those who didn’t trust the gravity tubes.
“Katie, are you all right?”
She whipped round suddenly at the sound of his voice.
“What is it?” he asked.
Her eyes darted about. “Ket’erun lun?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ket’erun lun!” Whatever had happened to her in the trench at Kintrex had happened again. I alerted medics, and Iokan held out a hand.
“Just come back from the stairs. Okay?”
She seemed confused again, then looked around.
“That’s right,” he said. “The stairs are dangerous. You might fall.”
“Nunnon… nunnon… fall?”
“That’s right. I don’t want you to fall down the stairs.”
She closed her eyes. “Nunnon. Fall. Nunna. Fell. Nunnonos. Falling,” she conjugated, as though discovering our language for the first time. Her eyelids fluttered while her brain processed, then snapped open as she looked straight at him. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the centre.”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 15