Wisneski had been planning this trip for a while. He had bought along some proper liquor with him and was intent on spending some time in happy inebriation beside a camp fire. He scoured the riverbank for fire wood and found enough timber for a decent blaze. He was lucky to find any dry timber because of the service bots which roved the entire planet, endlessly tidying up like an ADD housewife with a hygiene fetish. The planetary surface outside the metro residential areas was manicured like a golf course.
The smell of freshly cut grass was in the air so he knew bots were active locally, but this far away from a major population centre the bots had a light touch. He soon had decent fire going with crackling flames consuming the wood and smoke tickling his nostrils. There was also something primal about it, which touched a deep nerve in him.
After they ate, he filled a cup with whiskey and drank liberally. He offered Janice a slug, but she wasn’t much of a drinker and so declined the offer. It might have helped the atmosphere between them if she had loosened up a bit, because the more Wisneski drank, the more nervous Janice became. Wisneski became quite drunk very quickly, and then turned very quiet. She didn’t know how to cope with this: anywhere else she could have caught a taxi and left. However, she was now in the middle of nowhere with a drunk man she didn’t really know.
Can you help? she asked Bert, a little desperately.
Wisneski is no danger to you. He’s hardly aware of your presence.
Wisneski stared morosely into the fire, wondering what came next in his life. Nothing would ever be the same again and he was struggling to understand where he might fit in.
He attempted to explain how he felt to Janice, because he thought she was probably in a similar position. Unfortunately, by the time he had worked up the courage to spill his guts to her he was incapable of making any sense to anyone.
The cup he was drinking out of slipped through his fingers and fell to the ground. He reached down to pick it up, found it was out of his reach, and then rolled out of his camp chair as he groped for it. He staggered to his feet, righted the chair with a mumbled apology, and stumbled off into the darkness, leaving a now thoroughly alarmed Janice by the camp fire.
She wondered what he was doing, then heard him urinating behind the camp. Once he had finished, he came back, retrieved his cup ready for another slug of whiskey, and sat down heavily in the chair, making the fabric stretch and creak.
He started to say something, and then he felt incredibly tired. He struggled to keep his eyes open and then could think of no good reason to stay awake. In moments, his head lolled backwards, and he started gently snoring.
Bruce arrived at the camp site the following morning as Janice and Wisneski were packing up and loading all the camping gear on onto the deck of the ute. Janice was doing most of the work, and Wisneski was uncharacteristically grumpy. Bruce quickly realised Wisneski was nursing a hangover, and Janice didn’t have any sympathy for him.
“Are you OK, mate?” Bruce chuckled. He could smell the stale whiskey on Wisneski's breath.
“I think he had too much to drink last night,” Janice snapped. Despite her tone of voice, Bruce sensed she was more amused than angry with Wisneski.
“I thought I’d tag along for the day,” Bruce said and sat down around the still smouldering fire. Shortly after he sat, a service bot appeared with a mug of black coffee, for each of them. Wisneski pulled out a hip flask and splashed some whiskey into his.
“Hair of the dog,” he said, offering Bruce the flask. Bruce was sorely tempted, but he thought he should lead by example. Besides, it was really a bit early in the day for him to be drinking.
“Come on,” Wisneski gently suggested, “the sun’s over the yardarm somewhere.” But Bruce remained firm in his resolve.
“I’ve just left Little Bruce with Sue, and I’m going to start checking on people across the planet to see how they are getting along with each other, sort of like a roving ambassador, but today I thought I’d come and see how you guys are getting on. I want to know if you have any bright ideas about making sure everyone’s issues are heard and dealt with fairly.”
“Fuck off, dog!” Wisneski snapped at Punch, who had leapt into the back of the vehicle beside them and was slobbering over all the neatly packed gear again.
Bruce picked up a half-scorched branch from the cold fire and hurled it into the river. “Fetch!” he commanded, and all three dogs made a beeline for the river.
Janice walked over and stood on the bank as Punch launched himself out of the water, dropped the stick he had retrieved at her feet and then shook himself, spraying her with water.
“You beast!” Janice laughed and picked up the stick, ready to hurl it into the river again. Punch leapt into the air, latched onto it, and attempted to wrench it out of her hands. Janice wasn’t having any of that, managed to free the stick and threw it as far as she could out into the water.
The other two dogs quickly lost interest in the game as Punch always beat them to the stick and gave up the chase.
“That stupid dog will run around after a stick all day if she lets him,” Bruce laughed. He pulled out his cigarettes and sat comfortably, smoking, and enjoying his cup of coffee.
After the first sip of coffee, Wisneski perked up noticeably. Bruce wondered why Wisneski’s medichines didn’t control the intensity of his hangover like they did for him. Bruce managed to drink to excess and avoid the misery of a hangover whenever he wanted to because the medichines dealt with it, unless he really wanted to punish himself.
Wisneski’s medichines haven’t reached their full effectiveness yet. They need to conform to some unusual metabolic characteristics, the Transcendents explained and then started off on a different track.
There’s an anomaly close by I need you to visit while you are in the vicinity. I have discovered a settlement not far from here that I didn’t know existed until I started to monitor your journey.
Are you following me? Bruce asked jokingly. He was aware the Transcendents kept a good eye on his whereabouts even when it said it wasn’t going to.
When we engaged the satellite system to track you, the Transcendents continued, ignoring Bruce’s barbed comment, we discovered an area where there was no coverage. For some reason this area has been excluded from the satellite coverage schedules for some months.
How long has this been going on?
Well that’s the interesting thing: for quite some time. We’ve gone back through the transmission records and it coincides with when we started work on planning to upload the current crop of newSkidians. Within the last two of your years. The Transcendents sounded disturbed by the discovery.
What does this mean? I thought you said you were the only team of Transcendents operating on the planet? Bruce reminded them asked with an uneasy feeling in his guts. Are there more of you or is this just a random bunch of Skidians who have managed to go off the grid?
I’m not sure. Nothing should happen on the planet without our knowledge. Someone or something has been interfering with the satellites. They paused. The data was deleted immediately it was captured. This isn’t a random event: this has been done deliberately, so we need you to investigate urgently.
The Transcendents were concerned and unsettled. They had interrogated the MPU and discovered to their horror there were several subroutines operating on Earth that it had no knowledge of, suspiciously close to Bruce’s offworld home. The AI had lost track of these sub-units somehow: their return signals had been diverted to a low priority partition or black box, so the data would escape casual scrutiny.
OK, so where is this place?
The Transcendents sent Bruce through the coordinates and satellite imagery of the small coastal settlement not too distant.
“There’s a couple of things to check out around here, close to the beach,” Bruce said to Wisneski, “but I thought we could do some fishing once we’re finished, and then I’ll leave you guys to it.”
“What kind of things?” Janice asked sitting
on the tail gate of one of the small trucks. She’d quickly tired of throwing the stick into the river for the big dog to fetch. Cop and Can were lying underneath the truck, but the big one just kept wanting to play. It jumped up on the tail gate pushing the stick towards her with its nose, to encourage her to throw it again.
“Um..” Bruce wondered how open he should be with Janice, but then he realised it didn’t really matter since she’d find out what was going on shortly anyway. “There’s a settlement or industrial plant close by that we knew nothing about. It must have gone off the grid somehow, so I’m going to check it out.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Nah, I don’t think so.” Bruce was confident in the Transcendents ability to protect them.
‘Are you sure?” Janice wasn’t sure Bruce was convinced.
There is nothing to fear, Bert told her. You are well protected.
“Pretty sure.” Though, now she mentioned it, Bruce now felt a little niggle of doubt in the back of his mind, but he wasn’t going to let it slow him down. “It’s probably an autonomous factory of some kind that’s been overlooked or was powered down, and now there’s more activity on the planet it’s fired up again,” he added confidently, trying to sound like he meant it. “You don’t have to come. You can stay here,” he suggested to Janice. “Wisneski and I can go and check it out.”
“No, I’ll come.” Janice’s natural curiosity overcame her nervousness. “I can look after myself, you know.”
“Well, let’s not shag around, let’s get going.”
Twenty-Four
The situation in the senate was rapidly spiralling out of control. The pushing and shoving between the newSkidians and indoSkidians who had entered the chamber this morning to find some newSkidians in their favourite seats was escalating. The newSkidians felt they were entitled to sit wherever they liked. The indoSkidians wanted to sit in the seats they had recently become accustomed to. They were creatures of habit who, after the last few years of upheaval, were resistant to change in any form. The cross words and the pulling and pushing would soon intensify, with feet and fists flying, unless Lake found a way to defuse the situation.
But he had no idea how he was going to manage to cool everybody down and impose some discipline on the group. Nobody was taking any notice of the pleas for calm from Mahmoud, who had tried to point out there were more than enough seats to go around in the chamber, until some form of compromise seating arrangement could be developed.
In all his time in the Senate, Lake had never experienced the kind of behaviour he was witnessing. In the past, when there had been disagreements there was a formal process to deal with them, so the disputes remained at a very low level of intensity. The only way a disagreement would ever spill over into any form of violent behaviour was when the Chief Mati decided to disinfect some unfortunate Senator for stepping over an imaginary and inconsistently applied line of no return.
The newSkidians were in the process of fulfilling all his prejudices regarding people from their planet, based on the contact he’d had with them on exploration missions in his days as a long-range patrol pilot. They were a disrespectful rabble, with no understanding how a decent society functioned, and were intent on inflaming the situation out of a sense of entitlement. The heated verbal exchanges and the pushing and shoving were unheard of on Skid. It was one of the hallmarks of sophisticated society that people transacted with each other in a civilised and dignified fashion.
Alongside him, Mahmoud was shouting furiously at the newSkidians, in a vain attempt to stop them fighting.
Mahmoud was bitterly regretting he had ever suggested the newSkidians he had met at the street party should make a statement by asserting their rights and join the proto-Skidian government. The invitation had since gone viral on newSkidian social media and much to his surprise, many newSkidians had heeded the call.
Small groups of new and indoSkidians tussled for the prime seats in the centre of the chamber. Others were standing off or making weak attempts to intervene and settle things down without success.
Morris Thwaites and Zarif Khan sat off to one side. They weren’t interested in being a part of the government. They were simply bored and had decided to come along for the show, which was getting more entertaining by the minute.
Morris could understand the depth of feeling on both sides of the conflict. The indoSkidians had been invaded by aliens, and they would interpret the way their seats had been taken by the interlopers as a takeover and a denial of their rights as indigenous people. They also must be aware by now that the newSkidians outnumbered them by a wide margin and there was nothing much they could do about it. The senate was their last hope, the last bastion against being overrun, and now it looked like even this was being taken away from them.
The newSkidians were equally determined to have their views heard in the institution, the nearest thing to the ‘authorities’ they had come across on Skid, and have their grievances dealt with in a timely fashion.
However, there was no notion of solidarity between the newSkidians either: many of them didn’t even realise they were in the same boat, whether they were a refugee from North Africa or a MFYer. They tussled with fellow new and indoSkidians alike.
“Bloody hell,” Morris remarked, “if they really come to blows, they’re never going to work together.” He turned to Zarif. “Once there are a few harsh words thrown about and the violence escalates, its bloody difficult to come back from.”
Zarif nodded. He understood exactly what his new friend was saying, and he had had first-hand experience of the impact on a community when the rule of law broke down and was usurped by unscrupulous strongmen who were not afraid of using violence to get what they wanted.
However, like Mahmoud and Morris, he felt powerless to intervene and halt the escalating violence.
Each time sanity began to prevail, and the little knots of men and women broke apart, straightened their clothing, and moved away, as some of the cooler heads worked together to reduce tensions, another scuffle would break out, and then another, and the process would repeat itself.
A few punches were being thrown, but none of them were connecting. However, some of them would land soon, then there would be a free for all, as newSkidian and indoSkidian anger and frustration at their plight escalated and boiled over into real violence.
What would Bruce do? Lake wondered. He had a pretty good idea what Bruce’s approach would be, but he didn’t have the confidence to pull it off.
He wished the ceremonial guards who had once stood at the door were still available. Their very presence would be a deterrent to the behaviour he was witnessing, and they would have waded in and quelled the violence if they needed to. They were long gone, along with the rest of the Skid he had grown up in.
Lake was also starting to worry a little about his own physical safety. Beside him, Mahmoud was edging away to the comparative security of his desk. Lake decided he should do the same, then caught sight of the main doors opening. Two large and imposing figures stepped into the chamber, stationing themselves on either side of the entrance and the doors slammed shut with a solid wooden whack.
They were impressive bare-chested men, wearing tall feathered headdresses, which added to their imposing presence. After Lake, they were easily the tallest men in the room. Both carried tall wooden staves, and they slammed the butts of the staves into the floor several times in unison, making a loud cracking sound which could be heard over the racket of angry raised voices.
Slowly at first, and then increasingly quickly, the Senators realised there was a new dynamic in the room. Like a Mexican wave petering out, people sheepishly disengaged themselves and found somewhere to sit. In a matter of moments, there was complete silence in the auditorium.
Lake didn’t know where the guards had come from, and he wasn’t about to ask how they had managed to arrive just in time. However, it was a powerful signal to all the Senators and the newcomers to the chamber that disruptive behaviour wou
ld not be tolerated. Importantly for Lake, he hadn’t panicked about the situation. He might not have known how to quell the disruption, but he hadn’t displayed any nervousness. Now, more by good luck than good management, he had had set the ground work to be able to assert his authority and he had the capability to enforce the rule of law he hadn’t realised he possessed.
It was also another signal for Lake and the indoSkidians, after the disruption of the last few years, the decimation of the population, and the physical and psychological impact this had on the survivors, that life on Skid was truly returning to normal.
It would be a new normal. While many of the old familiar institutions were being revived, there would be change. The Stim events were in the process of being resurrected, but now Lake was determined the Senate was going to function as the representative body for all Skidians.
He surveyed the Skidians seated before him, knowing he had to address them and stamp his authority on the entire body, to make them understand there were no longer new and indoSkidians, they were all Skidians. He began to speak, stretching his arms out to indicate he was speaking to everyone.
“Let us reflect on the behaviour of the last few minutes. Let us recognise this as a signal to all of us that we need to find a way to live together in harmony on this planet, wherever we come from. Many of us,” he said, speaking for the newSkidians, “are a long way from home, while those of us who survived the trials of recent times now live in a world very different from the one we grew up in.” Lake paused. His audience was now listening to him intently.
“We come from a variety of backgrounds,” he continued. “Despite what my fellow indoSkidians might like to think about our newSkidian brethren, they are not one people. They represent several diverse groups from their world. They are as different from each other as we are from them. They don’t know why they are here, or for what purpose. I know from talking to my newSkidian friends, Skid is the last place they imagined they would end up when they first journeyed from their home in search of a better life.”
The Colonists Page 48