He jerks awake, a hand over his drum-thumping heart. “It’s me!” Jane sing-speaks, opening the door. She assesses him. “Were you just asleep?”
“How’s the painting?”
She makes a noise of mock disgust and waves her hands away.
“Go on then,” he says, and nods. Contrails of the past stream before his eyes. It’s all he can do to focus on the present. He had killed only Ben’s body. His mind had already been taken. “Sit down, Jane. What do you want to talk about?”
“The children, Jack and Bea . . . It feels like we’ve made it because of them. They’re first generation. Never knew the way things were. Never had old-style jobs. And now Bea’s going to be six next week. I remember when I turned six. It was a very big thing, you know.”
There’s something in her eyes that she’s not saying; Tom thinks he can see that at least. Something strained, something tearful. He’s learning these people signs.
“Your memory, Jane,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “Since Guy, mine’s been all . . .” His fingers swirl around his head.
“We’ll get you all there,” she says smartly. “We’re getting your brains working again.”
“You and Graham were lucky, not having the Feed.”
“It gave us a head start,” she concedes. She taps her temple and winks. “I can’t remember my brief fling with the thing, can’t even remember what it felt like, it was that long ago.” She makes a face like she’s eaten something bad. “If I could go back in time and change one thing in my life, that’s what it would be. The only way I’ve ever been untrue to that man is by not telling him about it, but it would make him so unhappy. It’s still in there somewhere . . .”
“And that’s where it’ll stay. Graham need never know. Your secret’s safe with me. So tell me about that dream. The funny dream. You said you had one earlier.”
Jane blinks, caught off guard. A scowl shadows her face but then she fixes him with her eyes. “Well, it wasn’t funny ha-ha—”
“But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To talk it out?”
She makes a noise in the back of her throat. “Fine. I’ve had it before. I was inside a stinking, hot metal place. Outside was . . . awful. Like a desert. I knew it was here, but it was like Mars. Do you remember the pictures? Dunes of earth, all scorched. I had a desperate hope that things might change . . . And that was it. That was the dream. It was really horrible. Happy, Mr. Freud?”
“It’s strange,” Tom muses. “You just made me mem the vids—”
“Remember.”
“Remember the vids Fed back from the expedition to Mars. I was fascinated by those underground cities they said they’d make. I remember—you just reminded me—realizing Mars had been there for thousands of years and that it would always outlive us. And it has. It’s up there now, undisturbed by what we’ve done.” He shakes his head. “I wonder what happened to those colonists, abandoned up there . . .”
“Doesn’t bear thinking about,” Jane says, and shivers. “And you and Danny better look after yourselves too, going back to the facility again. Here’s no more forgiving than Mars.”
After dinner, Graham runs a knowledge session on the lawn. As the colors drain from the sky, they discuss famous paintings and what they imagine they looked like. Jane sketches them out to order and Bea and Jack watch, rapt, as the images unfurl. Still in dirty shorts and T-shirts near translucent with wear, they chatter in the warm evening. They try to remember the names of the planets, but apart from Mars and the Moon, they can’t, not even Graham and Jane, who, as Resisters who’d never had the Feed, can usually bring more to mind than the others.
Graham reminds them of the use of some words. He quivers between seriousness and glee as he describes how mem is to remember and how mundles are memories. Emotis are emotions. How to talk is to talk and not stream, which is a small river, like a brook. He spreads his fingers in delight. He makes them do grammar drills and write. That’s the journalist coming through. They do memory exercises, remembering what plants they can eat, what happened that day, the day before, the previous weeks and months, stretching the muscles of their brains.
As the last rays of sun pick out the treetops on the hills, Graham reminds them how important a thing it is to remember, and at his cue, Danny lays three lanterns on the lawn. He has constructed them from thin willow ribs and what scraps of paper he could find. He is trying to hide his tears, Tom notices, but only when Bea wraps her arms around the young man’s leg and Danny squats down to be hugged by her. She plants a little kiss on his forehead, on the old circular quickcode there; she thinks it’s something special.
“So . . .” Graham says. He stands to look at them all. Sean lays a hand on Jack’s shoulder. Tom glances at Kate. Jane toes a shape into the dirt. Deep breaths all around. “We must remember Guy, folks. Remembrance lets us learn. It reminds us. Re-minds us. Right? What are we if not what we remember?” He presents the children with pencils and taps the side of his head. “Jack, Bea. This is your chance to say to Guy whatever you would like to say and to remember it forever.”
“Can I ask if he’ll still show me the fish?” Bea asks.
“What if I don’t have anything to say?” Jack warbles, and Sean’s scarred fingers tighten.
“Then you have nothing to say. That’s all right,” Graham reassures the boy and his father. “But if you do, write it here. Nice and gently. It might just be good-bye. And don’t forget your ds and bs, Jack; make sure they go the right way around.”
Tom watches first Danny, then Kate and Sean, write on another of the lanterns. Graham and Jane take the third. What the hell can he say? What does he actually want to remember here? Not the way it ended. The good work Guy did, positioning the turbines; the . . . how he . . . Tom shakes his head. No more memories will come, and in the end he simply writes, Sorry.
When all three lanterns are patterned with words, Danny holds out an oil-soaked rag. Sean takes up a rusted, gummy battery and rubs steel wool over the terminals, after a while spitting sparks, igniting it. It’s a trick Guy showed them, some knowledge that he had brought as an Electrician that they will now practice to remember, for however long it works. The flaming light flickers Sean’s face, licking into the hollows of his eyes. He sets fire to the wicks and passes the lanterns to Bea and Jack, who in silence let them go. They rise, glowing from within. They are taken by a breeze and spread apart, drawn separately away toward the south, small points above the dark canopy of leaves. Tom glances at Kate, at Bea; through the thickening blue of night he scrutinizes their faces, tries to imagine what they’re thinking and fails. But he feels the imprint of them on himself, the weight of their meaning on his life. He looks up again. The three lanterns have risen. He wonders, fleetingly, if anyone else, elsewhere, has seen them too. And then, in silence, they disperse.
They lie in bed as the curtains flutter in a balmy breeze and it’s still just light outside. The leaves patterned on the wallpaper are faded. Late-night flies still drone around as he rubs the back of Kate’s neck.
“What kind of a world is this to grow up in?” she whispers. “Weren’t we better off with Energen and all that lot? Remember them? That company? All that time I spent trying to stop it. And look at the world now.”
“Oh, Kate. She doesn’t know any other. She’s happy. I look at Bea and I think there’s hope, you know? Her brain works better than ours. Her memory’s amazing. She reads all the people signs—it’s like she sometimes reads my mind. We’re achieving something here. How shall we celebrate her birthday?”
“What are we achieving?”
The tone of her voice makes Tom’s thoughts lock defensively. “Knowledge. Food. Science: the filtration tanks.”
“But why, Tom?” Something eases in her voice. Something becomes softer, eroded. Maybe she’s not angry with him, he thinks; maybe she’s angry with the world. “What are we doing this for?” she continues. “Let’s imagine they don’t get taken, it’s just Bea and Jack. What, are we
going to mate them? And then . . . ?”
This stuns him. He’s not really thought about the future in any real way; it’s enough to concentrate on the present. Kate shrugs his hands off and turns to him.
“I really think we should leave, Tom. Something bad is going to happen, I can feel it. Please don’t go back to the facility.”
She rolls toward him and wraps his heavy arms around herself. Tom listens to the sound her eyelids make as she blinks beside his ear, as she settles onto his chest. He doesn’t want to believe her, but he’s worried too, of course. The world has stopped being predictable. The structures they had put on it have been destroyed. The stats and metrics to bring understanding to chaos have been dissolved, burned away like paper. He feels her breathing, high and fast, with no idea what she’s thinking, or who she is anymore. With the Feed he would have felt her emotions directly, like they were his own. He would have called up a mundle to remind himself of their catalog of happy times. Not even to remember them: to put himself right back in his mind exactly as it had been then, like a wormhole through time. But curled together in the future on this bed, they’ve become different people, their memories of the past fractured at best, painful at worst. Good things in there somewhere, he hopes.
“If we don’t get that fuel, we’ll die, Kate.” He tries to sound patient. “It’s not like I want to go, you know.”
“Let’s not fight, Tom. We’re both tired.” She rolls away. “Can I sleep first?”
He nods, watches her as she falls asleep, and then, when she’s deeply gone, eases out of bed. Looking down at her, he flexes his fingers in the gloom. He tests himself: tries to remember the bedroom in their old house. Nothing comes. He touches her throat. Then, though he knows he shouldn’t, he goes out walking. Not far. Just around the grass, keeping to the shadows so he isn’t seen. Sean is watching the children tonight, upright, his hands spread flat on their little table. He has the stillness of a waxwork, and who knows what deeply entrenched thoughts ooze through his sleep-deprived brain. Danny dozes on a thin mattress in Graham and Jane’s hut, with Graham asleep in bed and Jane watching. They changed the sleeping rota to give Tom and Kate some time alone tonight. The rotas will have to be changed again now Guy’s gone, and Tom will be away again so soon with Danny. Back inside, he winds the old grandfather clock in the corridor. The rotas are pinned to a noticeboard here: for cooking, for foraging; who’s on washing; the vegetables; checking the dam, the generator; the sleeping schedule, who’s in with whom. Questions they have, about knowledge. Their lives are contained on this board. The world they have forged.
As he eases open the bedroom door to slip back inside, he sees that Kate is sitting up in bed. His heart jolts as she turns to stare at him, turns to look at the empty chair, sleepily confused. Back at him. “What are you doing?”
“Come on.” He reaches for her shoulders.
“No, Tom!” She shakes him off, her eyes wild. “What are you—”
“Kate—”
“Don’t you dare leave me asleep alone!”
“Kate,” Tom groans. “You’re overreacting. I was gone for a moment and nothing happened. Come on.”
“You have to watch—”
“You think I don’t know that? I just killed Guy! It was . . . I couldn’t . . . I . . .”
“And you’d have to kill me too if—”
“Kate!”
“I don’t want someone joyriding my corpse, Tom!”
She flinches as he shoves past her, his hands to his face, a meaningless noise roaring from his throat. He opens the curtains. Forces the window closed. Thumps the frame. Throws the curtains shut again. The candle’s greasy light flickers bronze shadows as he stands, fists clenched, shoulders heaving. The shadows stop moving. The darkened mirror, florid with age, reflects only darkness. The room so cold, so quiet. The flies have all disappeared. Tom undresses silently, but his heart’s thumps are still escalating. He suspects she’s expecting him to talk, but he won’t. And he won’t think about this, he won’t think about her being taken, or any of them, or the consequences. He will sleep, and he knows that she’ll watch him while he does so; she’ll be watching him for signs.
The next morning, leaving the house by the back door, he climbs the slope to the barn. The plow squats inside, its missing blades replaced with ancient phone cases and spoons. Its fuel tank is open, hungry, dry. He fumbles in the darkness under the hayloft, where a stinking pile of barley they don’t know how to process lurks. It doesn’t smell healthy anymore. A diminishing row of tins with square-blotched quickcodes grins at him from the shadows. Impossible to know what’s in them now; they’re keeping what they think is dog food for a special occasion. He slips into the harness and heaves the cart outside. It’s made of slight planks of dry and whitened wood with a metal rim and rusted wheels that resist the slope down the hill to Danny, in the vegetable patch. Together they coax the cart to the mildew smell of the generator shed, where they load on four empty fuel kegs. Then, back in the farmhouse, in the study, Tom takes maps from a dusty shelf and lays them out on the table.
“Here’s where we’re aiming for, then.”
“And where are we starting from?”
A blank patch sits between the contours at the end of Tom’s earthy finger. On the page it looks unassuming. Unimportant. But it is everything to them.
“That’s quite a way.” Danny blows out his cheeks.
“Yes, it is.”
“I didn’t realize.”
Tom kneels, reaches deep into a cupboard, and brings out a metal box. Flips the catches. Opens the lid and gives Danny the gun. “Have you ever used one?”
Danny shakes his head. His eyes are bright, but something nervous flickers inside them. The useless quickcode on his forehead crumples as he frowns, trying to scoop out a memory. “My uncle always used to say, ‘It’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.’ He was a right Prepper,” Danny adds, and judges the weapon’s weight. “No preparation would have saved Guy, though, would it? I mean, is what w-we—” Danny’s eyes twitch. Again. Again. Again. His mouth contorts as his breathing sticks. “I f-feel—I—I—look, I—”
“Danny!” Tom grabs Danny’s shoulders. “Tell me what you’re looking for.” He talks fast, seeing that Danny has lost the outside world to the Feed reflexes within. Like someone still reaching for a branch that snapped long ago, he will fall unless Tom catches him.
“I—look, I—I’m—I’m looking for my uncle—have a gun need a gun—I’m in his house but—but—but—” Danny’s eyes lock, flicker, fix, and skew about in his head as he tries to access a memory that’s no longer there. Cleaved off but twitching. Tom takes Danny’s face and pinches the skin, trying to lead him back to reality. “A map, Tom, a map!”
“That’s great, Danny. Why do you need a map?”
“To, to, to—look, I—a map, Tom, to, to, to work out our route. Route. Rou—I’m, I’m—” A smile breaks through the pain. “I’m trying to get the G, the GP, GPSloc. Location. The place. Like he said. To work out where we are. Plot the route to the facility. I’m—”
“Okay, Danny. Just breathe. Come on now. What do you know about where we are?”
“I know we’re at the camp, Tom. I know we’re here. Now.” Danny stops. He flaps his lips and shakes his hands. His eyes focus back on Tom. “Fuck me, that hasn’t happened in a while.”
“What were you trying to access?”
Danny shrugs, quiet. “Something about my uncle. Some memory when I was a kid. Those maps were his, you know. After the Collapse, I got to his place but he wasn’t there. I grabbed some tools, the maps . . . I think I was locked on the smell of his place, a memory that . . .” He twirls a spindly finger at his own head and vaporizes his fist. Then he grins, but Tom can tell his voice is falsely keen. “I’m damaged goods, mate! Still want to take me?”
Tom’s expression doesn’t change. He doesn’t want anything bad to befall this man. He’s always been so good with
Bea. But can he trust him? Probably. Can he assure his safety? No way. But he has no choice if they want to get the turbines working.
“Sure.” He smiles and takes the weapon back.
“It’s incredibly annoying,” Graham says. “I can remember it clearly in a book, an actual book about Aztecs. One of the characters is shortsighted and learns to polish a clear stone so finely that, when placed over his eyes, he can see again. The memory of this scene comes into my mind daily. Hourly. Tom, it’s driving me frantic! Every time I can’t see something properly, there it is.”
“It sounds frustrating.”
“I can’t remember the name of the book. That’s the torment.”
“Can Danny and me try and find you some glasses at the facility?”
“I. Danny and I. I had my eyes lasered, with a lifetime guarantee.” Graham eases himself back into his chair and raises an admonishing finger. “They called it a miracle cure.”
Tom stretches his feet out. “Do you believe in miracles?”
“No.” Graham pats his palms flat on the arms of his chair. “No God; no miracles.”
Tom rubs his fingertips into the fuzz of his own armchair. “And how’s the writing?”
The Feed Page 4