Wants of the Silent

by McPartlin, Moira;

  ‘Sit and be quiet.’ Her tone held no room for argument.

  Ishbel felt her anger rise but contained it. She hated the idea of Dawdle seeing her on a back foot. She fiddled with her dead communicator and tried to find a signal in the room. After what seemed like an epoch the old woman straightened, she groaned and rolled her shoulders and creaked her neck muscles.

  She beckoned them all from the room into the narrow corridor. The older woman’s knees crackled and popped as she moved and Ishbel was so busy working out the elder’s age she forgot to hunker down and clattered her forehead on the stone. They all gasped but no one stopped to see if she was injured. When they were assembled by the main door the woman stopped. ‘It looks bleak, I know.’ They waited for the pronouncement. Ishbel’s mouth was dry. ‘We can try a few things but we have not seen this type of mutation before.’

  ‘It’s a DNA dilution.’

  The woman gave her a sharp look. ‘I know what it is. What I mean is we’ve never had to treat it before. We knew of the experiments. We’ve been expecting it, preparing for it.’ It seemed impossible that this woman was calmly explaining in these primitive conditions that they had been preparing to deal with mutation created by the State to turn natives into Privileged. She scratched her forehead with her fingernail. ‘You mentioned remote help.’

  ‘Yes, I can call, but I can’t get a signal.’

  The woman pointed. ‘Just outside and to the left. But once you’ve established a link you must leave your comms here. You can return home, and we will contact Dawdle with our results.’

  ‘No, I’m staying with him.’

  Dawdle stepped up. ‘Look, Ish, we need to go.’

  ‘No. Anyway I can’t leave my communicator behind.’

  The woman’s face raged. ‘What do you need more, young lady, constant communication with your friends or the mutant’s life?’

  Ishbel booted the communicator again and supressed the urge to chuck it at this elitist hag.

  ‘They will trace you if you use your normal frequency,’ the woman said.

  ‘They haven’t before.’

  ‘But that was in places where there is lots of frequency noise. Look around you, child. There’s nothing here. Any signal from this island will alert them to our presence.’

  ‘Then how will I contact our base?’

  ‘You must use the neo-frequency.’

  The old woman took a small key from her belt and inserted it into Ishbel’s communicator.

  The communicator fired up and almost immediately Ishbel saw the worried but scrambled face of Kenneth. She backed from the stone walls until his image cleared.

  ‘Ishbel, at last! Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Are you with Vanora and co?’

  ‘No, why do you ask? Isn’t she with you?’

  ‘She left with Arkle, Ridgeway and Sorlie aeons ago to visit an old friend. They’ve disappeared.’

  ‘What do you mean disappeared?’

  ‘We’ve no contact with them.’

  ‘Is this a trick?’ Ishbel didn’t mean to say this out loud.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  No, Kenneth sounded genuinely worried

  ‘What about their chips? Sorlie had a long-range inserted, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes but there’s nothing. They’ve disappeared into thin air. We haven’t even received a ransom demand.’

  Ishbel rested her back against the stone wall and dragged her hand through her hair.

  ‘Ishb..l, wha..’ Kenneth was breaking up. Something in this stone deflected the signal. She pushed off the wall.

  ‘Sorry Kenneth, repeat.’

  ‘I said what did you want from me? You didn’t know about the missing.’

  ‘It’s Scud.’

  ‘Scud?’ Kenneth’s voice sounded wary. ‘He was left on Black Rock.’

  ‘I rescued him.’

  ‘Why? He’s a danger to the cause.’

  Ishbel felt her anger return. ‘He shouldn’t have been left behind.’

  ‘He refused to come. He wanted his few days of glory as a newly mutated Privileged.’

  ‘He’s an historian.’ Kenneth of all people should understand the value of such a person. ‘No matter, I have him now but he’s very ill.’

  ‘Well, he would be.’ There was a pause. ‘I wonder what Vanora will say.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Ishbel said with as much calm as she could muster. She wondered what came first. Vanora’s ambivalence to her eldest, only son, or the wittering boy seeking approval.

  ‘Let him die.’

  ‘No! Kenneth, we are where we are.’

  ‘And where are you, Ishbel?’ He asked. The old lady nudged Ishbel and shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know, but you need to talk to the healer, they have suspended him. Can you advise her what to do next?’

  ‘If they have suspended him, they can keep him alive until I get there. OK, let me speak to the healer?’

  Ishbel passed the communicator to the healer and walked towards the sound of the sea.

  How could it be so peaceful here? They had said the beach was dangerous but there seemed no other sign of life. By the way the natives had harvested the seaware, there seemed to be no mines. They had their own food, their own source of income, an industry, no predators. It reminded Ishbel of her home in the North Western Territory. No, she should not think of home – it was past. But the memory persisted like a cloud of midges, nibbling at her. Her first memory was of collecting berries in the deep pine woods, those ground-hugging berries that only grew well in that area. She remembers eating the sour fruit and her mother laughing at her, saying ‘Don’t eat them raw, child, we need to cook them in pies and jams and juice to freeze the sunshine in for the dark days.’

  ‘How can you freeze sunshine?’ Ishbel had asked. She had a vision of catching a sunbeam in her hand and placing it in the freezer. But in the days when even the hair on her head snapped with the cold and the nights lasted more than twenty hours, Vanora would dig around in the big chest freezer she took everywhere with her, except that last move across the ocean, and pull out little blue plastic covers and would hand Ishbel a frozen stick of bright red berry. ‘A frozen stick of sunshine’ she would tell her with a great rollicking laugh. Her mother had seemed gentle then, it was only later that Ishbel realised Vanora carried a bitterness that could survive the coldest winter and the longest nights. There were no freezers now. They were banned in the first timetable of power shutdowns. She looked around, there weren’t even electric supplies here, wherever here was. She had no idea whether they were on an island or the mainland, but she saw no evidence of the natives leaving each day to serve their Privileged masters. They seemed to stand alone with no masters other than the elders.

  Ishbel had a pull in her gut to stay with these people but now she’d have to go to find her mother and Sorlie whether she wanted to or not. But before she went she had to pick an old scab. She still didn’t trust Vanora and had to make certain Merj was no threat, wounded or not.

  The old woman touched Ishbel’s arm. ‘He’s coming.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want him to know where you were?’

  ‘That was before he pointed out our limitations. He can teach us and if more DNA dilution victims arrive here, he can make us ready.’

  Ishbel wasn’t too convinced of that, after all Kenneth had spent the last twenty years in a cave, he had no opportunity to study recent developments even though he was the architect of the process.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Ishbel said. ‘Will you be able to keep Scud alive?’

  ‘Yes, he’s very ill but stable.’

  ‘He’s a great historian you know.’

  The woman arched her brows. ‘Is he now? We have great need of historians here.’ Her brow p
ringled. ‘And a survivor.’

  A nail of doubt raked the back of Ishbel’s neck. Scud the survivor, Kenneth the architect, a valuable pair. Dangerous in the wrong hands.

  The woman passed her the communicator. ‘You have to search for your mother, I believe.’

  Ishbel tried to hide the anger she felt for Kenneth. He was a stupid old fool to tell the woman about Vanora.

  She saw Merj in the distance, scraping round the corners of a wooden post with a chisel-like tool he seemed born to use.

  ‘Tell me about that man with the missing hand.’

  ‘Merj? My son.’ Llao’s voice softened.

  ‘Your son?’

  Llao blinked at the sharpness in Ishbel’s voice. ‘Why yes, why do you ask?’

  ‘Nothing, I thought I knew him. I must have been mistaken. How did he become injured?’

  ‘He was training for the Military. An accident, friendly fire.’

  Friendly fire indeed. ‘Military?’ This time she kept her voice even. The Military Base where Ishbel had served Sorlie and his parents had been for Privileged officers, she forgot the lower ranks were made up of natives. She looked at the woman again. Or maybe he was Privileged after all.

  ‘Yes, he had such a promising career.’

  Ishbel wondered why Merj did not tell his mother the truth. Why hide from her the fact he was the highest ranking officer in the revolutionary army of Vanora?

  Sorlie

  I punched coordinates for Freedom into my communicator. Nada. All I got back was the time of day. I couldn’t even be sure that was correct. It felt like afternoon, but the sky remained in perpetual grey mood so it could have been daytime, anytime. Next I tried to access my library. Wiped, the whole snaffing lot.

  ‘What? Even my SnapLib’s gone. I’d some real classics in there.’ Con, the bear, looked over my head as if waiting for something.

  I searched some more. ‘Oh, I can’t believe you wiped the Wresto-match Plus.’ I’d dumped it from Vanora’s system and had almost cracked Ultimate Showdown Level. I looked at the silent bear. ‘Why’d you have to wipe it? It took years to build that Snap collection.’ He shrugged. He might be a southern native but he had that north native shrug down to a tee.

  ‘Calm down, your folks will’ve backed you up. You can retrieve them when you get home.’

  There was that word, it had been a while since I thought of home. It was best forgotten.

  He runnelled his beard. ‘That’s if you want to of course, some of the content was pretty juvenile.’

  I bristled but didn’t rise to that bait. ‘How am I going to find my grandmother without a working communicator?’

  The man grinned and for the first time I noticed the gleaming white teeth, strong, with no sign of akceli rot.

  ‘We’ll take you back to the spot your Transport dropped you.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘Even if your folks aren’t looking for you, the Noiri will be searching for clues.’ He glowered at me. ‘No one messes with them and gets away with it.’ He tapped my useless communicator. ‘We’ll wait for darkness then head off.’

  The man steered me away from Harkin who’d lingered silently by my side during the whole exchange, and when we moved I felt her, trailing us. She seemed distracted, always turning to where the nonsense boy stood. Up ahead I could see the van I’d been squeezed into before the accident. The roof stoved in and the front bumper hung like a torn fingernail.

  ‘That’s not going anywhere,’ I said, pointing to the van.

  ‘No, we go on foot.’

  ‘What about the cargo, won’t the Noiri want it back?’

  ‘If they want it they know where to find it.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  He laughed. ‘Because we told them.’

  ‘And did you tell them about me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He didn’t answer. He thumped the back door with the heel of his hand and it popped but didn’t open fully, he dug his huge paws in the gap and yanked it open a crack. There was the smell of biocrates and pine freshener but that was diluted by something familiar, ancient. I must have been too scared to notice before. I knew what the boxes held even before the bear cranked the door fully. But the hold was empty.

  ‘Who moved them?’ he asked Harkin. She shrugged.

  They walked me to a low building on the plant site. Here, tall wire fences had long ago been breached and damaged with no care for a repair. Men and women stomped around without protective clothing, only regulation uniforms.

  ‘Why no protection?’ I hovered on the periphery. Years of scare stories stayed my feet. My bowels began to flutter.

  ‘Come, it’s OK,’ Harkin whispered. She put her hand out to me and I almost took it. But a tiny smile on the corner of her mouth spelled ‘coward’ to me, so I shoved my hand in my pocket and pulled in the fear.

  ‘Why no protection?’ I asked again.

  She tapped her bar badge. ‘These are all the protection we need. There’s a protected area inside, highly radioactive, but in these outer buildings there’s no need. We’ve had hardly any incidents.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘The Privileged run a mile from the stuff but in the right hands it can be tamed.’

  ‘You treat the spent fuel to create more, don’t you?’

  Con nodded. ‘Smart lad. It’s all very simple when you know how. There are native engineers here who developed a safe process to recyk the waste. A small reactor feeds the smelter where we recyk the plastic.’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘Fibre mostly, for barter with the Noiri, but we hope to make our own cloth soon.’

  Con held out his arm, the workwear looked like fine linen.

  ‘Feel that,’ he said with pride. ‘It’s made from plastic, recyk ocean waste. Small scale compared to the State’s operations but we’ve access to good recyk. The Noiri can’t get enough.’

  ‘What do they do with it?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Who cares? Sell it to the State probably.’

  ‘Is that what you’re studying?’ I asked Harkin.

  She nodded. ‘Alchemy, the best profession we have here.’

  Con slapped her back. ‘The most talented alchemist we’ve had in years.’

  ‘You should join forces with my grandmother. She needs good techies.’

  ‘What…?’ Harkin began but stopped. And then I heard it. A motor. Not a Transport, a boat.

  Con steered me to a door. He unlocked a rusting old padlock and crunched open the door. As I watched him shoo Harkin away and pull it closed behind, I felt a flare of fear. It must have shown on my face because when he turned he burst out laughing.

  ‘Look at you. There’s no harm found here. She has work to do is all.’

  Despite his words I felt for the hilt of my knife in my pocket and thanked the ancestors that these people had given it back to me.

  There was that familiar ancient smell again.

  ‘They’ll need to come for these soon, we don’t have the space or the climate control to store such a precious cargo correctly.’

  ‘They’re books aren’t they?’

  ‘Well done, lad. How did you guess?’

  ‘My grandfather had a library.’ I walked over to one of the crates and tried to open it but it was hammered shut. ‘Where did they get them?’

  ‘Search me but if they don’t come soon we will have to burn them before they get too damp and turn to pulp.

  ‘You can’t do that! When will they come?’ I stood in front of a case.

  ‘Soon I hope. The Noiri normally only come round here after every full moon, and we are only just into the third quarter. But for these they’ll come.

  ‘Can I look?’

  Con nodded. He pulled a crow bar fro
m a graith belt and popped the crate. The books were carefully packed. I lifted one and cracked open the pages and smelled it in exactly the same way I had when I first entered my grandfather’s library.

  I spotted some familiar titles. The History of Black Rock, the first native text I read while in my grandfather’s library. I had nearly spoiled the whole deal by falling asleep and folding back the pages to a crease. I opened this book in the middle, the back section creased over, and my mouth began to dry in anticipation.

  I picked up a copy of Brighton Rock. And turned to the back page. Sure enough there was the ragged remains of a torn page, the blank piece of paper I tore from the book and passed to Scud. He’d risked his life writing the message to me about the DNA experiments in the prison.

  ‘I know these books.’

  ‘Oh really, that’s a bit of a fluke is it not?’ he said with misplaced mirth.

  ‘This is my grandfather’s library. From Black Rock.’

  ‘Never heard of Black Rock.’

  I held out the history book.

  ‘Look at this.’ He blanked the book, and began tidying up the shed as if we had all the time in the world.

  ‘How did the Noiri come by these?’ I said more to myself.

  ‘Search me, lad, you’ll need to ask them.’

  ‘Can I take one?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The Noiri’ll have catalogued this little lot, see, they’ll want it back in one piece.’

  ‘But this belonged to my grandfather. Doesn’t it now belong to me?’

  He laughed so hard I thought he was going to croak. ‘You don’t understand, do you? These belong to the Noiri now, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘You make it sound like the Noiri are more powerful than the State.’

  Con flashed me a stiff smile. ‘And you’re just realising that, son.’ I heard his comms buzz and his smile eased. He placed a hand on my back and steered me away from the books. ‘Come on, let’s catch the brew run before it all goes. The domestics are always hungry when they return from the Privileged tasks.’

  We stepped from the shed into dull afternoon light and I felt myself being propelled along as if I had a bit part in a movie-caster and everyone around me were players acting out their parts before the curtain fell on evening darkness.