Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  ‘Why do I need a coat?’ I asked, shaking it smooth against me. ‘I’m no one important.’

  ‘Everyone who works here is important,’ she said, raising a thin, tapering eyebrow, still smiling. ‘After all, we have control over everything.’

  ‘Everything?’ I laughed. ‘Is that really possible now?’

  She shrugged, her smile cooling off. ‘If you think not, then no. Follow me.’ She turned away and showed me up the clonking metal stairs where she left me standing on a mezzanine without another word.

  A man called Kish was waiting for me in CR7 – Control Room 7, you see. He too was a smiler – in fact, they all are here – and was also wearing a white coat, though his was embellished with gold lapels. He took me into a pure white room with no windows and a glowing, usual-looking control panel and, shutting the door tightly behind us, helped me to understand the machines. Though my training that day took hours, the machines seemed so simple – not at all dissimilar to my own videotv at home. But these, of course, were far more powerful – mattered so much more. You press this button, it rains. You press this one, the sun shines. He whirled my hands over the flat buttons, noted how quickly I learned the patterns on his voice recorder. I was quick.

  Although I can’t remember what things were like before we could control the weather like this, my father had told me about it. When he was a boy the weather was random and cruel. Whole cities wiped out in whorls of wind. People dead through drought. Famine because of too-hot summers, tidal waves the size of towns taking residence and killing the real inhabitants. He always said it was like a cruel woman (he was, after all, of an older generation), who changed her mind often and was as volatile as a teenager. He remembered Octobers, Novembers as hot as Junes, snow in Mays: crazy, out-of-control weather. When it was finally accepted that we could, and should, control the weather, my dad lived in awe of this, this seizing of control, this creation of Green spaces and summer days at the crank of a lever or the flick of a switch. And I took on his amazement, and even now I wear it, despite having grown up with this control, the last threads of my wonder wound into the whirls of my fingertips as I pressed the buttons and felt like God, a god – some kind of all-powerful man, anyway.

  When I got home after my first day, Marly was puffing and writhing on the floor, trying to participate in a videotv exercise class. I glanced up at the screen; it was segmented into parts showing other red-faced women squeezing their calf muscles to a rather sinister drum beat.

  ‘Five more minutes,’ she wheezed, upside down, sweat dripping into her black hair. Huffing, she lay on her back and prised her legs apart. ‘Thank God I took my meds. I can’t feel anything.’

  I left her to it and edged outside through the back door to watch the sun – the real sun, of course, yet somehow seeming so fake now – set over the dusty hills beyond us, far into the sandtowns and even further away than that. It seemed so stupid to me that I could touch a button and control any season, any gust of wind, any rain, any sunshine, and yet here was my index finger, ready to push, ready to help us grow our crops and ready to destroy the sandtowns with my unearned supernatural powers.

  I jumped as Marly tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Class finished?’

  ‘Yep.’ She pulled a tight, screwed-up face. ‘Thankfully. But I did it.’

  ‘It’s not long now, sweetheart.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ she said, pulling her sweater above her huge stomach to mop her face. ‘But you don’t have to do those classes. I hate being watched like that by the other women. And I hate the fact I’m forced to do them.’

  ‘They’re for your own good,’ I said, leaning against the doorway and closing my eyes. ‘I know you hate the control, but at least this law has your best interests at heart.’

  ‘This law, yes,’ she spat, narrowing her eyes. ‘But we all make sacrifices, don’t we? For the greater good.’ She put her hand on mine, and leaned in, her face changing. ‘We’ll get there. We’re so close now, now you’re actually a weatherman.’

  I nodded, mouth thinning to nothing.

  ‘So tell me about your first day, weatherman,’ she said, hands crawling down my back.

  ‘What does it feel like to be God?’

  I couldn’t tell her that it felt good.

  ■

  After I’d been working as a weatherman for a few weeks, Marly went into labour. Of course she didn’t feel it, because of her meds, but she knew when her water broke, and a message came up on my screen at work. I’d just learned, theoretically, how to create a storm. Thunder, lightning, humidity. Kish had shown me the panels on the computer that I had to open. Then he had taken me right to the ground floor, and stood me next to the wide tube that went up so high it went through the roof. All the time I had thought the huge floor space under the mezzanines was empty, but that day I learned differently. There was a special generator for the lightning that was so powerful it was kept underground, below a trapdoor. The lightning was conducted through the tube. Kish had warned me that the generator could throw out so much power there was a risk of electrocution in the under room. And for that reason I was never to go there alone, and he wasn’t even going to show me under the floor until we needed to go there. But, Kish said, we wouldn’t do many storms in any case. Storms were a problem because they devastated the sandtowns so much. They took great care when they created a storm not to cause too much damage elsewhere, and on our mezzanine Kish had to endorse them personally.

  ‘So why create them at all?’ I asked, resting against the control panel. ‘If they’re so damaging?’

  Kish was sipping some wheat tea, and frowned, looking into his mug. ‘It’s not a why. It’s just a sometimes. Sometimes we have to.’ He paused, and looked at me. ‘It’s not an answer, I’m afraid, but it will have to do. Storms are devastating, so we are careful with them. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘But isn’t that a problem with all of the weather we create? That is has to devastate somewhere, while we profit?’

  Kish cleared his throat, no longer looking at me. ‘What, exactly, are you asking me?’

  Kish and I worked together, but in that pairing, alone. He was a softly spoken man with rashes on the back of his hairy hands. His face was small and gentle, almost like a bear cub. In that moment I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him I was sorry, but if I did that I knew I would never ask, and I had to, because even then I was afraid, afraid that I couldn’t do what I had wanted to all my life, and I needed to hear it.

  ‘I just … Please don’t think I am trying to make any criminal statements, but surely whatever weather we make has bad effects for other states? The sandtowns?’

  Kish put on a smile and I knew it wasn’t real because he sucked his teeth as he did so. ‘You are very close to making a criminal statement, whether you wish to or not.’ He pulled his coat tighter around him. ‘See these gold lapels?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I didn’t get them by chance. It’s because I understand the full implications of everything we do here. I have studied for a very long time, and even I will never get to work on the upper mezzanine. Still, I know a great deal about this – more than you. You know that we control the weather here because if we didn’t, we would starve, just like so many in the sandtowns have done. It wasn’t a choice any of us made: we control the weather because we have to, else we’d have no food, no chance of survival. I pity the sandtowners, of course, but my loyalty lies with Green people, as should yours, as a Green person. Which is worse: if we all die, or if only some of us die?’

  It was an old, specious type of argument, the sort that Marly hated. And yet I was starting to see his point. The weathermen were the only reason Green people survived, and I knew that, felt it in my fingers, shivering in my stomach. It was the only way: I both knew it and believed it. And then Marly’s message flashed on the screen.

  ‘Go to your wife,’ said Kish, ‘And remember what I said. What would become of your family if we couldn’t b
e weathermen? Your child? What would become of any of us?’

  I nodded and ran down the metal stairs so fast I could barely breathe.

  ■

  Marly had a little boy, with her curly black hair and my round eyes. The doctor was pleased at our boy’s perfection.

  ‘I get paid double when they’re perfect,’ he said, smiling, ‘And your boy is perfection, as you can see. Not a blemish, bump, or bruise on him. Perfect organs. Perfect limbs. Perfect. You’re blessed to have such a perfect only child. Not everyone is as lucky.’ He leaned down to look at the boy’s fluffy dark head, rumpled against his white blankets. ‘You must have done everything as you were told, Marly,’ he added, not unkindly. ‘Perfect.’

  On that basis we called our boy Per.

  Marly had enjoyed the labour, she said, but her eyes were lost, disconnected, and she couldn’t focus on me at all. ‘It was very satisfying to push until he slithered out,’ she said. ‘But it’s not like I had a choice. I had to do everything I was told. I didn’t really feel it. Not really.’

  ‘I told you those classes were worth it,’ I said.

  She didn’t reply. I watched as she fell into sleep.

  ■

  After a week at home with Per, I returned to work as a weatherman. Marly, although in good health, had become quiet and perplexing, spending long hours locked in the bedroom with Per, or, and much worse, venturing as far as the edge of the nearest sandtown with him strapped to her now very ample chest. I’d called and called for her that day until she’d traipsed back, her face lined with orange dust, teary eyed and footsore. She’d put Per to bed and sloped into the kitchen, watching me under hooded eyes. As I’d boiled her some wheat tea, she sat on the floor and openly wept in a way I hadn’t seen since before we were married, when, in fact, we first met at the protest outside the weather station. She was crying now as she had been crying then.

  I put my hand on her shoulder as I handed her hot tea. ‘It’s all right, Marly.’

  She shrugged me away. ‘It’s not.’ She gulped and choked at once, like a child might. ‘I saw some sandtowners today.’

  ‘What? Marly, you shouldn’t go out that far, ever. Especially not with Per. You know that.’

  ‘You should’ve seen them! They were filthy, starving. Half dead. And here we are, us fat Green people, getting everything we want and destroying everyone else.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘Of course it is!’ Her eyes were red, and her cheeks puffed out. ‘While they are still in control, telling us what to do and ruining everyone else’s lives …’ she hiccupped, ‘… it’s not all right.’

  I gripped the side of the kitchen table and looked at her, pooled on the floor. ‘But we have Per now. Doesn’t that make a difference?’

  ‘The only reason you got the job was to destroy them! Don’t tell me you believe in being Green now? You can’t be that stupid. Or that shallow.’

  ‘I’m not saying that … I’m just saying there are other ways … Per is what matters – his future. I’m just thinking of that.’

  ‘You promised me when we married that you would always be loyal to the cause. It’s not fair, and you know it.’

  ‘But if I didn’t control the weather,’ I began, as delicately as I could, ‘what would happen to us? Us, Marly: I mean you, me, and Per?’

  Her face was pink in the steam of her tea. In one movement, she stood up and threw the scalding tea over me.

  ‘Marly!’ I screeched. ‘For God’s sake!’ I hurled myself under the cold water pump outside. The light was still redly golden in the sunset, and in it my raw hands looked almost bloodied. I stood under the pump until I couldn’t feel my hands, which had taken most of the scalds. When I returned to the kitchen, Marly had gone. She was shut up in the bedroom with Per, and when I tried to get in she ignored me and wouldn’t open the door. So I slept on the kitchen floor, listening to the scrabbling mice until it was time to get up and go and be a weatherman.

  ■

  I didn’t see Kish the day I went back to work, but there was a message on my screen from him congratulating me on Per’s birth. ‘I hear he is perfect,’ the message said. Marly’s voice was immediately in my head. ‘They know everything!’ it screamed.

  Without Kish, I didn’t want to press any buttons or make any weather. The instructions came in on my screen: light rain at this latitude, two degrees warmer over the wheat fields, and I followed them exactly, but the last conversation I had with Kish felt as if it were sticking on my skin and in my throat.

  At lunchtime, I went to the canteen on the thirteenth mezzanine. The canteen served the staples which we grow because of our weather: wheat bread, potato soup and wheat tea. Sometimes there was fruit, but rarely meat. Often we had dried insects milled into the bread or the biscuits, though people were still wary of eating them, despite the government’s advice, and instead opted for just grains and vegetables. My father had told me that years ago, people used to choose to be vegetarians, but now no one really chooses. I missed my father in a way that still surprised me. I spooned soup into my mouth and thought about how he would feel about me being a weatherman. It struck me that he’d be proud.

  After my soup I intended to stand outside and enjoy the rain, if only for a few moments, but I didn’t get past the ground floor, with its huge metal cover under which hummed the lightning machine. Given the rain, a sight in itself, or the tastiness of the potato soup, which might pull people back for seconds, it seemed strange that there was no one around. Shivering slightly, I pressed my hand to the pad and the trapdoor opened, and offered steps down. I flung myself inside and pulled the door behind me.

  Kish was right: the lightning room was guarded by further inner doors and there was a soft buzzing coming from behind them. The lighting was low and I realized most came from light boxes channelling the light from outside. The walls to the inner doors were sealed, and they were so thick that apart from the buzzing, I could hear nothing. I pressed my hand to the pad at the inner door, and it too opened. Behind it, a corridor with one more door, a red light flashing above it. I tried my hand at the pad: nothing. I tried a few more times but clearly I didn’t have access to the lightning room. I started to make my way back when the inner door opened. Kish came out, laughing with another man in a gold-lapelled coat. They gawped at me, and Kish frowned in recognition.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’

  ‘I was looking for you.’

  The other man cleared his throat. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, and ducked back into the lightning room.

  Kish was displeased; his frown barely left his face all the way up to CR7. ‘You didn’t know I was in the lightning room,’ he said, carefully, ‘because no one is told when someone is in the lightning room apart from the people on the upper mezzanine. It’s for safety. So what were you doing there?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking at my own burnt hands and Kish’s rashed-over ones, my stomach flipping over at my stupid lie. ‘The truth is it was just curiosity.’

  ‘The lightning room is dangerous,’ said Kish. ‘And the only time you will be allowed to go there is with me. Only my hand can open that final door on this mezzanine. If you have questions, ask me. Don’t go looking for answers. Do you understand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What happened to your hands?’ he asked.

  ‘My wife,’ I replied.

  ■

  One night I returned home and Marly was nowhere to be seen, but Per was wriggling in his cot. God knows how long he’d been there, but given his soiled towels I suspected all day. At a loss for what to feed him, I mashed some oats we’d dried last year into some water from the pump and fed him from the tip of my finger. He gurgled his thanks. Per’s eyes had become even darker and even rounder since his birth, and he was beginning to look a little like my father. As I watched him it became clear to me that I wanted Per to grow up to be the sort of man my father had been, and not the sort of man Marly expected me to b
e. It was one thing, I thought, as I washed Per in the water the sun had warmed, to disapprove of the system that governed our lives – the system that oppressed the sandtowners by controlling our weather so that we could flourish and they could not; that allowed us only one child and kept notes on exactly where we were and what we did through our handprints – but it was another to destroy it, as Marly had always planned. To begin with I had enjoyed her anarchic lilt, her swear words and her earnest hate – in fact, it was that passion that had attracted me most to her – but looking at Per as his cool skin flushed in the water I couldn’t possibly believe we were going about this the right way. Per made my chest hurt and my fingers tingle when I touched him; when he cried or gurgled it made my stomach flip. Barely weeks old and already he controlled me more than any government could. And perhaps even more than Marly could. I wrapped him in clean towels and lay with him on the bed where we had made him and waited for his mother.

  ■

  It was at work a few days later when another message flashed on my screen, ordering me to attend the hospital where Per was born. Kish let me go without question, and I ran so fast I threw up outside the doors when I got there. A doctor, different from the one who birthed Per, was waiting for me.

  ‘Your wife is … unwell,’ she said, ‘and we brought her here just in case. She has asked to see you.’

  I didn’t say anything, but followed her into a small suite where Marly lay strapped to a bed, Per in a clean cot beside her. Marly looked small in the bed, fragile almost, her black hair scraped back and the paper gown making her seem as if she could rip apart at any moment, somehow. She had her eyes closed but she knew I was there.

  ‘They pumped it all away,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left in me.’

  ‘How could you, Marly? After everything.’

  She actually smiled. ‘How could I? How could I? Can you hear yourself?’ She beckoned me nearer. She smelt terrible. ‘You are turning into one of them. You promised you’d do it, and now you won’t even talk about it. You promised you’d destroy the weather station and now you’ve just turned into one of them.’