"You don't have to thank me, it's no problem. Here, come on."
"Why, where are you going?" he asked.
"I always stay over at the far end. Out of sight, out of mind. And there's a robot right outside the fence, so they're less likely to try anything."
He shook his head."Sentinels wouldn't stop them if they did."
"Maybe not, but they're still less likely to steal all my crap if they think a robot's watching. It'll be better with two of us. I've got some stuff I've hid in a plastic garbage bag. We can trade that in this afternoon, then we need to find something else just in case this stuff is no good."
He looked around as if fearful someone were listening, then turned back to me and spoke low in a conspiratorial undertone. "That's if we have to stay here much longer.”
"Why, how long do they keep us here?" I'd asked several people the same question since we arrived, and every time I heard a different answer. Two years seemed about average.
"I don't know," he said; "I don't think they do. If they did they'd have to keep track of when they brought people here and they don't seem to. They'll probably just keep us here and keep on bringing more people until we've cleaned out the first layer of the landfill. After that they'll excavate some more and start us on the second. And so on.”
"Then how do you know they're going to let us out?"
"It doesn't matter whether they do or not." He leaned closer to me. "What would you say if I told you there might be a way to escape - a way that's so risky you could die doing it, but it just might actually work?"
My heart leaped, but I kept my face expressionless. He might have hatched some crazy plan like climbing the fence. "I'd say any risk is worth it to break out of this hellhole. But tell me what it is first. Here, sit down, but be careful." I sat down gingerly on a mound of garbage and dirt. "No, wait. You'd better get some rest, you can always tell me later."
"No. I want to tell you now in case I don't make it. You remember when it rained last week?"
"Of course I remember," I said, "it was bloody miserable. I had to make a poncho out of fucking garbage bags.”
"Yes, but just think about the rainwater. That's what I was thinking about, because after I gave up looking I spent a lot of time thinking. It took me a while but I realized something strange happened when it rained. This end of the landfill, where we are right now, is the lower end, right? You see how the ground outside the camp slopes this way. So the water should have all collected on this side, right around here where you are. But it didn't. It ran this way but it didn't collect," he said with heavy emphasis.
"And-"
"And ordinarily you'd think the water would take a long time to soak through the landfill, wouldn't you?"
"I'd think it would, yes.” I was beginning to see his point.
"Now - I happen to know just a little bit about landfills. How they were designed. It's something I know from years and years ago. Never thought I'd need to know it, but I never thought I'd be stuck in one. Some landfills used to have boreholes like shafts running down through the landfill all the way to the bottom," he said, speaking in a low voice, his eyes glittering feverishly. "Any water that soaks through the landfill collects in the borehole and once in a while people used to pump the boreholes fuc So you'd think now there's no one there to pump it out, the water would all collect in the boreholes and overflow. But it hasn't."
"So you think it's escaping from one of the boreholes to the outside of the landfill somehow?" I asked.
He nodded. "A lot of it. The water's escaping from one of the boreholes by some kind of pipe or conduit. So if you figure out which borehole is closest and climb down – and if the pipe is big enough to crawl through – you could get out.”
"Why would there be a pipe from the borehole to the outside of the landfill?" I wondered aloud. "How do we know where it goes?"
"My guess is the Mods stuck a pipe through to drain the landfill. Beyond that I don't know. We could climb down there and find it's too small for us, we could find it's blocked, we could get stuck or fall climbing down. We might even climb down and not have any way to come back up. It's not a sure thing, it's just a chance, but it's the only way I can think of to get out that might work."
"Wouldn't somebody else have tried already?"
"I don't know. Maybe someone has. But the thing is boreholes don't run to the outside of the landfill and there's almost always water in them, so I don't think anyone would try."
"That's true," I said. "I know I wouldn't have. Which borehole is it?”
"I'm not completely sure. I've got a good idea where it is but I want to make certain first. Now you've done something for me, so - I wanted to tell you so you can use it if I don't make it.”
I forced myself to keep my face inscrutable, but inwardly I was elated. This was good beyond anything I'd imagined. Quickly I checked to see if anyone was listening. We were alone.
It was true, of course, that it was only a slim chance. It was entirely possible in plumbing the depths we'd find ourselves a slow death trapped underground; but a fleeting chance was better than nothing at all. "Don't be stupid, you'll make it," I said. "I've got a few things saved up. I can get enough food for both of us this afternoon, then we can start looking for this escape well of yours."
Kamal shook his head. "We want to look for it during the daytime, but once we've found it we have to try at night.”
“Why?”
“If anyone sees us they'll try to follow us. The Mods won't miss just one or two prisoners, but they'd notice five or ten.”
"Climbing down a well at night? We'll break our necks,” I objected.
"It'll be pitch-dark down there anyway. It's dark down there in the daytime. It doesn't matter what time you go,you won't be able to see a thing." That startled me so badly I nearly changed my mind. For some reason I initially imagined that when we climbed down the borehole, we'd have light to see by. Now that I realized what Kamal's plan actually entailed it was a sobering thought: we were going to climb a couple hundred feet down into pitch-black darkness and squeeze into a muddy pipe. I imagined all the accidents that could occur - falling down the well, becoming stuck, suffocating. His eyes met mine and he nodded. “Sure you want to try?"
I wavered for a moment. I was desperate, but was I really that desperate? I glanced around us at the barren landscape and the few scattered figures picking through the refuse. Beyond, outside the fence, the green fields and the blue sky were like another world, a world that had forgotten me. I thought of Becky again, and of Shelley. Remember. After a moment I turned back to Kamal. "I'll do it. If you'll do it, I will."
"Good. But don't tell anyone. No one else can know. If it's just two of us, they'll never even notice we're gone. As soon as people start trying to follow us it's all over."
"No, of course I won't tell anyone. But you'd better get some rest, you look knackered.” I didn't want him to die on me.
"I guess I'm pretty thin," he said, grinning. "I've always been thin, so I'm not much thinner than I was anyway. But seriously, I feel better already. I can help you look for more stuff if you want.”
"No, you don't. You just rest for right now."
"All right. But only for a few hours," he said. "We want to look at the boreholes once the sun's really high in the sky. So high it's almost straight overhead."
"Yes, yes, that's fine. But for now, just stay where you are and keep quiet."
"That's easy enough." He stretched out and in a few minutes he was asleep.
The midday sun bore down brutally on the landfill as we trudged our way through the garbage. Two women, their faces burnt brown by months outdoors, glanced at us then went back to their work.
"It's not as high up in the sky as I'd like," Kamal said.
"It's as high up in the sky as it'll get."
"I just don't know if we'll be able to see down there."
"Why do we have to? I thought we knew which one it was."
"We don't, unless - Ah. See ri
ght there." I followed the direction of his finger. The uneven ground sloped into a shallow bowl-shaped depression. The water had worn gullies to the centre of the hollow, where a PVC-rimmed aperture over a meter wide yawned like an open mouth. "This is the lowest point in the landfill. So you'd expect this would be a lake right now. But if I'm right-"
I dropped to my hands and knees to peer down the well. The sunlight barely illuminated its depths. "There's no water down there. There's a pit at the bottom and it's dry. And there's handholds on the sides to climb down."
"I thought it'd be dry," he replied.
"How did you know that anyway?"
He grinned. "It's just common sense. The Mods don't want the landfill to get soggy, because then we can't dig, so they're going to pump the water out. The water collects in the boreholes. But if it's not collecting-"
"It's escaping," I said.
"Exactly. So how soon do you want to try and do the same thing?"
I hesitated, my mouth gone dry. "Tonight."
A chill wind blew that evening, and a cloud bank looming on the horizon presaged an end to the welcome weather of the last few days. We'd stationed ourselves near the borehole so that we could get to it easily after dark. I picked idly through the trash, partly to provide for tomorrow in case our plan failed and partly just to quell my impatience. I couldn't wait for nightfall. I paused for a moment to scratch my itching scalp and deftly pinched another louse between my thumb and forefinger; a wriggling, greyish insect a tad smaller than a grain of rice. I crushed it in disgust.
"Filthy bloodsuckers," I said.
Kamal grinned. "Just try and forget it."
"I know," I said irritably. The most annoying thing about lice is that no matter how many you kill, they multiply faster than you can massacre them. They conceal themselves in the strangest places. They lay their eggs in your hair, in your pant seams; they become intimate with you against your will.
"It's crazy," Kamal remarked, "they have us dig up this junk. It was us Mongrels that put it all down here in the first place. Now we get to dig it up again." He seemed talkative in spite of his near brush with death.
"Just goes to show, at least the bastards have a sense of humour."
"You know, I don't know they're that different from us."
"Different, maybe not. Just better," I said, emptying out a garbage bag. "Didn't we create the Mods anyway?"
"That's what I've always heard. Supposedly it started with rich people that wanted perfect children. They'd go to clinics where they could pick one of multiple embryos, screen for diseases, decide what hair colour their kids could have, that kind of thing. They'd have their kids take special drugs to make them smarter in school. Eventually the science got good enough the clinics could offer genetic modifications. Only the rich could afford any of this, and their governments encouraged it, because they didn't want to fall behind other countries, you know. So over time the rich families kept improving. Each generation was better than the last. After the first generation they stopped marrying with ordinary Mongrels because they despised us. Compared to them we were ugly and stupid.”
"Because we were ugly and stupid. So that's why they tell us what to do and stick us in work camps if they feel like it," I said.
"W-e-ell, I've heard it didn't used to be like that. Back before the war you could do whatever you wanted, you could even go to other countries or drive your own car. But the war must've scared them pretty badly.”
"You've heard. Well, I don't know, I've heard all kinds of things. Maybe there's always been Mods and Mongrels."
He frowned, bemused. "Maybe. I don't know, I'm just saying. I don't know. I was a kid back when the war happened, so I don't know about before that."
"Yes, so was I.” I could remember when homo sapiens and homo excellens went to war; but the human memory is an unreliable historian. The things I remembered from my childhood weren't the headlines that scream at you from an Internet terminal. They were little things, memories preserved as if at random, a child choking up blood, a man cutting up a golden retriever's carcass for food, and another memory, the most terrible of all – but I suppressed that one like thrusting an unwelcome object underwater, back below the surface. I'd tried hard to forget it and I didn't mean it to haunt me now.
"The thing is I know things were better back then," Kamal said, raking through a pile of trash. "I know they were because my family came over here from India when I was two. So I know they used to let us travel."
"You've got family in London, then?"
He nodded. "Just my brother. My brother and my sister-in-law live in Hackney."
"Ah. What'd they get you for anyway?"
He hesitated a moment, then he grinned. "It's - you won't believe me if I tell you."
"Try me,&uot I said.
"I was fixing a - I guess I should explain first I don't actually work for the Mods, I've got my own business. I'm a plumber, and a lady had called me out to look at her water supply because the water'd gone off in her building. As it turned out she wasn't the only one who had a problem, the water company had shut off the water to six whole blocks. So I cycle over to the water company office to ask them about it and they said, there's nothing we can do, the government wants it shut off, don't know why, you'll have to ask them. So finally I go down to Central London – you know, to that building they've got off the Strand - to complain about it and they accused me of sabotage."
"Sabotage?" I said.
"Well, I guess they'd got some sort of project going on. They'd shut the water down. It was just temporary. They were re-routing one of the water mains or something so they could have water for a new fuel plant."
"And they hadn't bothered to tell us," I said. "Of course not. Why bother telling those filthy Mongrels, that lot'll mess it all up anyway."
He nodded. "Exactly. So when I stopped by that building to complain about it they thought I was trying to mess up their project.”
"That's crazy.” It was often like that. I'd learned a great deal in the months since I'd been arrested, and I was beginning to notice there was no pattern to the arrests. They were completely inconsistent. Sometimes trivial offenders were arrested while flagrant violators went free.
How could we know what they were thinking? Perhaps it made sense if you thought about it differently. The Mods wanted the vast majority of their Mongrel workforce in the cities, but they also needed a set number of people to stock their work camps and their labs. Probably they sometimes found themselves short on criminals, and at times like those the labs and camps might begin to run out. They'd want to avoid rounding us up - that might provoke an unnecessary riot, and repressing riots is a waste of time and money – but you can always count on a few people to break some minor rule, just as I had done. At other times, when they had more criminals when they needed, they'd permit lesser offenders like us to escape and go unpunished. It was only speculation, but it made sense. Of course it seemed irrational to us, just as the squirrel who strays into a steel-jawed trap must wonder why he alone is singled out to die.
"I said you wouldn't believe me.” Kamal chuckled.
"No, I believe you. But it's still ridiculous."
"I know. But what am I going to do about it. I could complain to those robots outside the fence and see if they'll let me go.”
"Nice idea."
"So what did they get you for?" he asked.
I was out after dark in Central London.”
Kamal laughed. "At least I know - sorry to say this, I don't want to be rude, but that makes me feel better. At least I'm not the only one that's that-"
"Stupid," I suggested.
"Well, I wasn't going to say that."
"But you thought it." I chuckled. "Oh, come on. I didn't know they could nab me for that.”
"I mean, the West End is where they have their complex, their headquarters or whatever, so they want us to stay away from that at night. I thought everyone knew that.”
I'd talked to plenty of people who d
idn't know that, but certain knowledge was hard to come by. Without the Internet, phones, newspapers, books, all our ancient means of communication, information travelled by word of mouth, and we all know how reliable word of mouth is. “That must be everyone minus me. I knew they had a 10-2 curfew but that was it.”
“What'd you have to cross the City for?”
“I live in Islington – I work at a fuel plant they have over where Covent Garden used to be.” The Mods had no use for our monuments or our old buildings. They'd carved out space for themselves in London as ruthlessly as a butcher slicing up a corpse. “I'd been down to Norwood, there was a co-worker of mine told me he knew where I could find one of those old laptops, you know, like what they used to have.”
"So you thought you'd cross the whole of central London by night?" Kamal said.
"Well, I tried.”
Kamal shook his head in disbelief. "You're a daredevil. You're crazy. What did you want to go to Islington the same day for?”
"My girlfriend and I live in Islington, so – I don't know, I wanted to get home. It wasn't very smart. I guess you could say I took a bad shortcut."
"Mark - all I can say is, if you get back in one piece, that will have to be the longest shortcut you ever took."
“If we get back in one piece. I hope this borehole or whatever it is actually leads somewhere,” I said in an undertone for fear of being overheard.
“You know, at this point I don't much care if it doesn't. If you stay here much longer you'll get killed. Someone's getting desperate.”
“How do you know?”
He stopped raking through the trash. “You remember that Chinese lady who died the other day?”
“No, I don't.”
“Well, I saw her body a couple days ago. I think she cut herself on something, because she was bleeding all over the place. Maybe she killed herself, I don't know.”
“No, I don't remember her.”
“You know something?” he said and his voice sank to a lower pitch. “The body's gone already. I noticed just now because we passed the same spot. It wasn't there.”
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