Dinn heaved another shovel-full of dirt into the wheelbarrow. Her job, in the abandoned airport where she lived and worked, was to grow new shoots, as many of them as possible. She loved hand-watering most of all: the gentleness of it, the joy of glimpsing the first hint of green, the relationships she formed with new life before she passed the shoots over to others to turn into mature plants.
She missed her children, both of them embedded in the mainstream world of Rise, both of them still convinced that Walker’s way was the right way, or at least the better of two options. But they weren’t dogmatic about it, at least. They could see her point, unlike Dunk, who had signed up for Commander Sala’s Home Force, and spent his nights on the roof of some tall building or other, watching for enemy incursions. He’d sent the separation documents to Holland because he didn’t know how to contact her direct. She hadn’t signed them. She didn’t care who owned the house.
Dinn worried most about her mother, who had lived longer than she had any right to and who had too many tumours. They hadn’t discussed it, not explicitly, but her mum knew what she was doing. And she certainly knew all about the crimes of Holland, her darling, forever-absent son. He wasn’t merely fraternising with the enemy. He had become the enemy. Dinn supposed that she and Holland were fighting on the same side, but she found it hard to tell. He was off doing his grand thing. She supposed somebody had to be a leader, but she found all the posturing distasteful. And she doubted it helped much, in the end. But at least he had found this space just beyond the fringes of Rise, where the rain fell free.
Dinn looked out over the airport hangar. They were barely using one-tenth of the space, and they hadn’t even started adapting the other empty buildings, but she believed that they had made a magnificent start. Before her stood rows and rows of plants, some of them thriving, some of them — there was no point in avoiding it — a little sickly and suspect.
Dinn was drinking a glass of water — perhaps her favourite thing to do in the world, and an act that made leaving the family behind worthwhile — when an air vehicle dropped out of the sky. (The sky. Who could believe it?)
The raid was over in seconds. The soldiers lobbed a few bombs onto the crops, shot some holes in the water tanks, injured a few rebels, scuffed up some dirt. Dinn was far enough from the action that she didn’t bother to take cover. Besides, she knew that nobody wanted to be responsible for shooting the beloved sister of Commander Holland, even if he was a dirty traitor. She watched the brief battle closely, though, and was struck by the precision of the enemy soldiers. There was nothing random about the victims that they chose, or the injuries — not too major, not too minor — that they inflicted.
And to turn up in a flying machine: a helicopter, she heard one of the others call it, and she remembered. This was progress, she supposed. Or grandstanding. But if the other side — it’s okay to call them the enemy, she told herself — believed the once-poison air was safe for travel, even for a short time, then she knew she was on the right side of history.
In the hours that followed, Dinn let the others survey the damage, call meetings, review security, debate on whether to move, where to move, how to move. She would keep tending to her plants: they were too small to endure disruption, and she’d already decided that she was staying put, at least until she could move the plants without losing them.
She stopped work only when her friend Moore called for her. Moore, it turned out, had a plastic bullet lodged in her thigh. In normal circumstances, the bullet would have broken down, allowing the wound to heal in a couple of weeks. But Moore’s bullet sat too close to one of her tumours. The medic — a lovely young lad called Slumpe, self-trained but efficient enough, so far as Dinn could tell — had decided that the bullet must come out.
‘Did you hear?’ Moore said to Dinn.
Slumpe pushed a painkilling injection into Moore’s leg and whispered, ‘Be still, be still, be still.’
‘Did I hear what?’ Dinn asked.
‘They say Sala herself was on the raid,’ Moore said.
‘I very much doubt it.’
‘She’s right. I saw her myself,’ Slumpe said. ‘Just a few seconds,’ he said to Moore, ‘and your whole leg should be numb.’
‘Got anything for the rest of my body?’ Moore asked.
‘Nothing non-permanent, sorry,’ he replied.
‘You’re a dear boy,’ Moore said. To Dinn she said, ‘They say the whole raid was filmed.’
‘Surely not,’ Dinn said.
‘They say we’re going to be famous.’
‘Terrific.’
‘Oh well. You’re famous anyway. Famous by association.’ Moore lifted one hand and started stroking Dinn’s hair. ‘Hey, Slumpe,’ she said.
‘Yeah, Moore?’
‘I’m going to close my eyes now. Do you think you could go ahead cut that thing out of me?’
‘Sure thing.’
As Slumpe took up the laser scalpel, he met Dinn’s gaze. She’ll be fine, he mouthed, and Dinn nodded. He turned an autoscreen on, watching it intently while adding a new cut to the untidy wound. Then he added a needle to the end of the laser and inserted it into the bullet. He began to gently tug.
‘Let me know when you start,’ Moore said, still stroking Dinn’s hair.
Slumpe pulled the bullet free, dropped it in a bowl, turned the autoscreen off, and examined the wound.
‘Looks good,’ he murmured to Dinn. But as he reached for the tube of skin glue, the wound split wide open and hot red blood burst from Dinn’s leg.
‘Shit, she’s haemorrhaging,’ Slumpe said. ‘I’ve never seen this.’
‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know, push down on the wound, quick, keep the pressure on while I … Just keep pushing.’
Dinn used her whole body to push down on the wound while Slumpe prepared every tube of the skin glue he had. He lined them up.
‘Okay, on the count of three, get off her,’ he said to Dinn. ‘Ready: one, two, three.’
Dinn rolled away and Slumpe emptied tube after tube into the wound. The flow of blood slowed and then stopped.
‘Okay?’ Dinn asked.
‘Too soon to say,’ Slumpe said. ‘Oh no.’
‘What?’
He pointed as the skin on Moore’s thigh began to bulge. ‘It’s going to burst,’ he said.
‘What can we do?’
‘With what we’ve got? Nothing but wait and see.’
Suddenly the noise of the helicopter filled the air. It flew low, just above the roofline, and lowered itself onto the ground beside the hangar. Sala’s soldiers jumped out, arms aloft to show they held no guns. They ran through the hangar, yelling ‘medical ceasefire, medical ceasefire, medical ceasefire’ all the way to where Moore lay.
‘I’m a doctor,’ one of them said to Dinn and Slumpe. ‘If you let us take her, we will save her.’
Slumpe looked at Dinn. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘We should ask —’
‘Yes. Do it,’ Dinn said. ‘But I’m coming too.’
The doctor nodded. Some of the soldiers lifted Moore onto a stretcher and strapped her down. They sprinted to the helicopter, dragging Dinn along behind, leaving Slumpe behind to clean up the blood, all of them — Dinn too — yelling ‘medical ceasefire, medical ceasefire, medical ceasefire’ as they went.
Dinn hauled herself into the helicopter. She felt it lifting off the ground, and it was like nothing she’d ever felt before. And then she turned and watched as the doctor began working on Moore’s leg, only now remembering that Moore had reached out and touched her so tenderly. She wondered what it meant. Probably nothing.
***
Nights later, Geraldina and Flake and the children — the girl, now named Belt, and the boy, now named Dutch — watched footage of the raid on Dinn’s plant-growing group for dinner. When the camera lingered on Sala, on her face, Gerald
ina and Flake roared their approval and clutched each other. The children watched them, bemused.
‘Bloody treasonous bastards,’ Flake murmured, as the footage scanned across the plants. ‘Why don’t they just line us up and kill us all?’
‘Don’t worry, love,’ Geraldina said. ‘Sala has things in hand.’
And there she was again, the last one back into the flying machine, holding her weapon above her head in victory as she lifted off the ground.
The screen went black for an instant before a plea appeared in stark white letters: ‘Resist dissent’. And then, as always, came the final message: ‘Thanks be to Walker.’
***
One morning, the citizens making their way through the city centre of Rise paused, as they always did, for the morning meal. As the people looked up, ‘The Battle of Dry River Bed’ played. It was an oldie but a goodie. But just before the key moment in the battle scene — when a soldier called Kenn loses an ear, clean as a whistle — two men disrobed right there in the middle of the street, exposing their swollen bellies, their body sores, their shrivelled genitals. The crowd shifted away. Most of them had been present for this sort of stunt before. The official advice was to politely ignore them, and to feel pity, not fury, for them. Only one or two people stole a glance at the men, who slapped their big, bold bellies and squeezed their body sores until pus oozed.
The military police arrived quickly to walk the two men away. They helped the men into a windowless van, drove them out to the Grand Lake area — the famous battlegrounds now abandoned — and left them there. The two men stood there, naked and confused, for less than a minute before a vehicle from Shine picked them up.
***
Late at night, and despite fifty or more sentries spread out around the property, a posse of dissidents broke into the secret hospital known as the National Concert Hall. Unchallenged, they reached the vast angled room, full of desperate and dying patients. They spread out, popping frozen cubes of concentrated vegetable pulp into the mouths of patients. It was a methodical exercise, well-planned and well-executed, carried out by experienced feeders. They knew which patients were critical and which could hold on until the next time.
When all of the patients had eaten — except for a woman called Patter, who refused her cube and demanded to watch ‘The Battle of Burning Hair’ — the military police flooded the room with light. They sauntered in, arresting three dissidents but allowing the rest to leave. A film crew took in the action, the director good-naturedly grumbling about the work required to edit out the inaction, speed the footage up, add some yelling and maybe a splash or two of blood.
As the room cleared of dissidents and police, a fleet of nurses moved in. First, they moved to the most seriously ill patients, checking their vital signs, adding notes to records, and in some cases reassuring patients that it was okay to swallow, not spit out, the strange stuff melting on their tongues.
‘Who was that?’ one prostrate old man asked a nurse.
‘That was the enemy,’ the nurse said, ‘doing their bit to help you.’
A woman called Singh heard the nurse’s reply. She threw back her sheet and stood up. Her legs shook, but she managed a few steps before she had to pause to rest and retch.
‘What are you doing?’ the nurse asked. ‘It’s best you stay in bed.’
‘I’m going with them,’ Singh said. ‘You can’t stop me.’
She tried to walk, managing a few more steps before she sagged at the knees.
The nurse murmured into his wearable. ‘It’s okay,’ he said to Singh. ‘They’ll wait.’
Another nurse came to Singh, took her arm, and walked her out of the hospital.
***
The autoscreens of Rise appeared for another morning. But instead of a battle scene, Walker’s face filled the screen. His real face: seared skin, sunken orange eyes. The camera then retreated to show that he was sitting at a table, a bowl of fruit and vegetables on the table. He picked up an orange, brought it to his nose, sniffed it deeply, and, after a long moment, hurled it away. With a mocking sweep of his arm, he knocked the bowl of fruit and vegetables from the table.
It took Walker a considerable effort to push his chair back. With his hands bolted to the table for support, he hauled himself up. He unzipped his shirt — his breathing harsh and uneven now, his arm bleeding from his assault on the bowl of fruit and vegetables — and exposed his distended stomach. He stared straight at the camera. He said nothing. No music backed him. He held that pose for more than a minute, long enough to be sure that the people of Rise were staring back at him, fully informed.
***
The robotic bird had been flying loops around Walker’s bed, and fake rain falling on fake plants, for nearly thirty minutes when Curtin and Sala disabled the door’s lock and forced their way into the bedroom. A film crew followed behind.
Walker lay face down on the floor. Curtin placed her open palm on his back. He did not stir.
‘Is he dead?’ Sala said.
‘No, he’s warm.’ She felt his underarm. ‘God, he’s burning up. Help me. We need to turn him over.’
As they rolled Walker, he let out a short breath, almost a whistle, through papery lips. The manoeuvre hurt him dreadfully, but he didn’t have the energy, the awareness, to complain or even to properly groan. But then, all of a sudden, he came to life. He tried to stand up, but lost his balance. Before they could catch him, he collapsed again, his torso on the bed, his legs thumping the floor. There he stayed, unmovable.
‘You can leave now,’ Curtin said to the camera crew.
‘No, not yet,’ Sala said.
‘Doctor’s orders. You can leave the drone camera, okay? But that’s it.’
‘Did you get a decent shot of him falling?’ Sala asked.
‘Yes,’ the camera operator said. She backed out of the room, still filming, wondering if she’d just recorded the great Walker’s final moments.
‘Is he dead?’ Sala asked again.
‘He’s so close to dead. We could let him go this time.’
‘It’s too soon.’
‘Too soon for who?’
‘We need him longer. Just a little longer. Do whatever you can. Whatever it takes.’
‘But as a doctor —’
‘It’s an order.’
‘I don’t answer to you.’
‘It’s his order. You know it is. I’m sorry, but we have no choice. He doesn’t care about death. He wants to die. But if he dies today, there will be mass starvations, famine.’
‘All right. I’ll do my best. But no guarantees.’
‘I know.’
Curtin opened multiple autoscreens and moved them all over Walker’s body, swaddling him like blankets. She stuck patches to his temples. ‘Turn the Liffer Machine on,’ she said into her wearable. After a moment, Walker’s body began vibrating fiercely as every battle scene ever filmed rushed through him. Curtin kept the machine running as long as she dared.
‘Stop. Off,’ she said eventually. ‘Off. Now. Any more than that,’ she told Sala, ‘and he’ll burst.’ She placed her flat palm on Walker’s chest.
‘How long until we know?’ Sala asked.
‘A few hours. Less, if it fails.’
As they stood over him, Walker opened his eyes, but all he saw was the plastic parrot, still circling overhead, still whistling the chorus of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.
‘You’ve got to laugh,’ he murmured.
***
Cleave sat in her work room, facing fifty or more screens, all of them scrolling data or images. This was her favourite place on earth, a windowless room in which she monitored the earth. Here she read reports on water quality, soil quality, air quality, she tracked lifeforms, she typed, she interpreted data, she threw numbers together, devising strategies, abandoning them or refining them. But here she also d
id her hardest work, comparing everything she knew about the here and now with the state of the earth in the Old Time, before the troubles and the poisons and the climate really took hold.
Today, she had revisited a group of islands that sat in what had been called the Pacific Ocean. Once home to many thousands of people, to coconut groves, to rainforests, what wasn’t submerged was covered in a murky grey sludge, out of which bent elbow trees, for the most part leafless, occasionally forcing their way up towards the dirty sky. There was a species of worm that seemed capable of eternal life, a tick that lived and died in a matter of hours, and fish that floated bloated as if dead when they were alive and then sank without trace when they actually died. But recently, inexplicably, there was something that looked something like rice poking out from a swamp. Cleave had sent a note to the section head for that region, who had sent a drone to take a sample and test it.
Notes. Messages. That’s how she communicated with everyone, mostly using templates, except for Walker and Barton, who shared her counsel.
Cleave didn’t mind seeing the broken world. It was what it was. Still, the need to compare, the need to look back, defeated her most days. It was hard to be productive while mourning the world. She had her method for recovery: silence, stillness, solitude. She didn’t empty her head entirely. She’d tried that and found it taxing. Artificial. But she focused on one tiny element of the here and now: a single banana tree, twisted, with garish blue leaves, that appeared in a toxic desert; a species of prawn, seventy-four per cent of which were born with two tails and no head; the gradual but unmistakable decrease of toxins in the rain over the cities of Rise and Shine.
Many years ago, only a few weeks after she’d isolated herself, she had disabled the sole door that led out of her mini-compound. She wanted no temptations to leave the work unfinished. Disabling the door still left her with two ways out of her self-imposed exile. She could climb out via the courtyard, across the roof of her compound until it met the main compound. But her ankles were wonky these days. They clicked as she walked from room to room. She doubted that she could scale a wall anymore. The other option was to break her way out. She had an Old Time sledgehammer leaning against an outside wall. A few hefty blows — her shoulders were in much better shape than her ankles — and she was sure she could break through the plastic bricks. But the sledgehammer was only for an emergency, if the isolation defeated her, or if remembering the Old Time too often got too much.
Rise & Shine Page 17