Future Tense

by Frank Almond

  I walked back and jumped down to join her on the aft deck. She held the coat open for me to slip on. “There you go,” she smiled.

  “Thank you,” I said, staring at her. She stared back at me for a moment or two, as though remembering something, and then looked away.

  I was just enjoying being with her, without us niggling at each other. It felt just like old times—except for the very unEmma-like clothing. She was wearing a green anorak with a hood, a bit like an old-fashioned parka. It looked at least three sizes too big for her, but she had rolled up the sleeves and somehow managed to make it look quite stylish.

  “Where did you find that?” I said.

  “It’s Tree’s. Doesn’t it feel funny to be here?” she said, gazing around. “I mean, after looking at all those maps.”

  “It’s not like I imagined,” I said. “Everything’s so white—I can hardly pick anything out.”

  “I’ll get the shades,” she said, making her way back down the stairs.

  “Good idea. And put the kettle on!”

  “Watch it, Sloane.”

  I turned around and leaned against the wheel, looking back out over the stern. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I could have spent just a few more blissful minutes with her, undisturbed, without worrying about where we were exactly, or how much trouble we were in. Now I knew. Something very large and very fast was approaching us from what I took to be—going by the orientation of our landing and the track we had left across the ice—north, because although we had come from the east our stern had clearly slewed round to point in that direction. I was tempted to shout down to her something tough like, we’ve got company, but settled for:

  “There’s a big white thing coming!”

  “A what?” she shouted up.

  “We’ve got company!” I yelled.

  “God—where?” she cried. I heard her clattering up the stairs.

  By the time she reached me, the huge hovercraft-like vessel was alongside, towering over us like an enormous wedding cake. We were straining our necks to look up at the rail to see if we could see anybody—it must have been some fifty feet up. The next thing, there was a loud hiss and a portal opened in the hull—a metal gangplank shot out—half a dozen fur clad military types, wearing goggles and waving batons, charged out and boarded us. Four of them grabbed us by our arms; the other two started sticking slabs of what looked like plastic explosive everywhere.

  I was going to say, where are you taking us? But, instead, I said to one of them, “I bet you listen to Neil Diamond records when you’re off duty.”

  They never said a word back, but made us run into their mothership with them, because if we didn’t our feet would have dragged. We found ourselves in a large hangar. I noticed dozens of snazzy snowmobiles parked in bays and quaint slogans painted on the walls, saying things like, Security is Power, Purity is Order, and Unity is a Lovely Girl. Actually, I made that last one up, but you get the gist.

  A bad-tempered looking guy with an electronic clipboard and lots of gold braid and colourful insignia on his uniform—an officer—marched up to us, looked me up and down, and snapped:

  “You are Sloane!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What if I am? I’m allowed to be if I am.”

  One of his men prodded me with his baton and about forty thousand volts shot up my arm and rang the bell in the fairground test of strength contraption up in my brain.

  The officer stretched his neck to loosen his collar and stepped to his left to address Emma.

  “And you are the pregnant female,” he sneered.

  “No, that’s me,” I said.

  Another forty thousand volts shot up my elbow and stir-fried a few million more of my brain cells.

  Emma pointed sideways at me. “He made me do it, officer,” she said.

  I smirked to myself. Yeah, I remember that evening, I thought. I was like a wild animal that night. A beast.

  Suddenly, we heard a series of loud explosions coming from outside on the ice.

  The officer flinched each time one went off and then permitted himself a curt smile. “That was your boat,” he said. “We blew it up. No more picnics on the river for you.”

  “I have a confession to make,” I said.

  “Speak!” he yelped.

  “It wasn’t our boat.”

  Our interrogator nodded and another forty thousand volts sizzled my wok. And then he began pacing up and down, talking to us, but not bothering to look at us, in a mechanical voice.

  “You are mutants and time fugitives—there will be a trial, but the verdict will be guilty as charged, and you will both be taken to the Castle, from which no convict has ever escaped and lived to sell the film rights.”

  I raised my hand. “I have a question,” I said. “Can you give us a ballpark figure on the length of sentence we can expect to receive?”

  “Life!” he cried shrilly. “Life! You will each receive life sentences!” He calmed his voice right down. “But this may be commuted to fifty years for good behaviour and if, of course, you plead guilty.”

  “And is there a rehabilitation program in place?” I asked.

  “Rehabilitation? What is this?”

  “Re-training, help with housing, counselling—that sort of thing,” I said.

  “He means when we get out,” said Emma.

  “Oh, you mean when you go to the labour camp? Yes, you will get a hut,” said our interrogator. “Now, I will conduct the trial.” He checked his clipboard. “Let me see, ah, yes—if the prisoner pleads guilty, go directly to question five. Do you both plead guilty?”

  I looked to Emma. “Guilty, love—yeah?”

  “Yes, please,” she nodded.

  “So—both prisoners plead guilty—we go to question five—Will you ever do it again?” He looked up. “It’s multiple choice. Is it: a) Never, b) Unlikely, c) Maybe, or d) Definitely?”

  I looked to Emma to confer. “What do you think, love—unlikely?”

  “I would have said a) Never,” said Emma.

  “Yeah—we won’t do it again, will we? Put us down for a) Never,” I said. “And what was it we were pleading guilty to again?”

  I got the cattle prod again for that one.

  The officer keyed another tick in the box and marked other places with crosses, and then handed me the clipboard and his electronic pen.

  “Here, sign there, there and there—and then the female has to sign here, here and here,” he said.

  I signed and talked at the same time, “I was wondering—is the captain of this old bucket licensed to conduct marriages?”

  I heard a loud buzz and smelt the faint odour of burnt pork…

  * * *

  I came round in a metal box cell. There were no windows and little air. Emma was sitting next to me with her chin resting on her knees and her back against the wall, looking cheesed off. We were both wearing shackles on our ankles. I rattled mine.

  “Hey—wow! So they married us!” I cried.

  Emma elbowed me in the ribs.

  “A girl’s entitled to expect a nicer honeymoon than this,” she said. “Not to mention groom.”

  “Oh, darling, don’t go all picky on me—we haven’t seen our room at the Castle yet,” I said. “It sounds kind of swish—I wonder if they have medieval banqueting nights. I hope we get the Guinevere Suite.”

  “Really, Steve,” said Emma, “I’m feeling pretty uneasy about this.”

  “Uneasy?” I said. “I’m bloody petrified! But we mustn’t let these people see we’re frightened—they like frightening people. It turns them on.” I rattled my shackles again. “All this S and M.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, Sloane.”

  “Hey, Em. You remember in Orwell’s 1984 when they’ve got old Winston in room 101 and they’re threatening him with his worst nightmare—having his face eaten alive by rats?”

  “Oh shut up!”

  “No—listen—and then they say we’ll stop if you say, don’t do it to me, do it to Julia! You kno
w, Julia, his girlfriend? Me Julie.”

  “Yes,” sighed Emma. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “What if they said to you, you can choose one of you to go free—who would you choose?” I said.

  “Me, of course,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “It is?”

  “Yes—there’s two of me, isn’t there? Me and our unborn child,” she said. “You’d choose us, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah—absolutely! If you put it like that. Of course—no question, Em,” I said.

  The door swung open and two fur-coated guards looked in.

  “Right—who’s first?” one of them said.

  “Him!”-“Her!” we both blurted, pointing to each other.

  They pulled me roughly to my feet. “I love you, Em!” I called back, as I shuffled out with them.

  “Yes, I know you do!” called Emma. “If you see Travis—tell him I love him!”

  They led me along the wide passageway, which I noticed had sets of coloured lines painted along its sides. Like in a big hospital. I noted that we were following the white one mostly. The design of the ship was very plain, big and plain: big staircases, big walkways, big rivets, big doors—big bolts and knobs on the doors—every little thing was big! I think it was what you would call neo-Brutalism.

  “Why have you split us up?” I said, desperately trying to keep up, but it was difficult with the leg-irons on.

  “She goes to the women’s cells,” said one of my guards, giving me a helpful push along.

  “But I thought we would be together?” I said, remembering Tree’s drawings of male and female prisoners enjoying free association in their open-plan dungeons.

  “You might breed,” he sniggered.

  The other one—a surly looking guy—said something to him in another language—I think it was a future language, called Worldese—and they both laughed at me.

  We came to a big lift and they shoved me in ahead of them.

  “What is so wrong with breeding?” I said. “Where I come from it’s all we ever think about. What did they do to you guys—remove ninety-eight percent of your brain cells?”

  “Breeding is for filthy animals of the field,” said the talkative one.

  “Come on, guys—why should they have all the fun? In my time, we have magazines filled with great pictures of girls who look fit for good breeding—we even have demonstration videos showing all the best breeding techniques and variations—breeding’s an art form—in fact, I have a black suspender belt in breeding—I’m a breeding master—”

  “Silence! You disgust me, you degenerate!” said the other one.

  “Ah, so—you’ve seen my video!” I said.

  He poked me with his cattle prod thing and sent me crashing against the big white elevator wall.

  “You know that stick’s just a substitute for the one you should be using to breed with,” I said.

  He wanted to hit-me-baby-one-more-time with his shock stick, but his mate blocked his way and said something to him in their lingo to calm him down.

  The door hissed open and we stepped out on deck into highly reflected sunshine. I shielded my eyes. My guards pulled down their goggles. The walkway we were on curved around the vessel’s central superstructure, with a continuous rail on the outside and identical doors and portholes on the inside. There were big white pom-pom guns mounted at regular intervals around the rail, making it look even more like an iced cake. I knew there was no means of escape. If I jumped, there was a fifty-foot drop onto hard ice, and if I threw myself through a door I wouldn’t have got far in my shackles. So I bowed my head to avoid the dazzle and settled into a steady shambling gait between my captors.

  We were moored alongside what looked like an enormous iceberg, but then I realized it was the side of a hill—a hill of glaring snow. I looked up, expecting to see the Castle at last, but the summit of the knoll, which rose steeply from the flat landscape of the Somerset Levels, was obscured by mist.

  I could already see a strange bridge or jetty spanning the chasm between the vessel and the hillside. It was unusual because I couldn’t see any visible means of support or, more alarmingly, any handrails.

  “You expect me to walk across that?” I said.

  My guards said nothing, but when we came to the stepping off point, they shoved me on and it was too dangerous to resist. Once I was standing on the structure, which was no more than four feet wide, I found to my surprise that I did not have to move—the path simply carried us through mid air towards the hill, like a people mover at an airport. I couldn’t bear to look down but I did move my eyes to the left and right repeatedly—though there wasn’t much to see. I could make out a platform at the end of the moving jetty and miles and miles of ice sheet, stretching away to every horizon.

  “There used to be a motorway through here,” I said. “Which way is Weston-Super-Mare? We used to call it Weston-Super-Mud.” I chatted away. “Jeffrey Archer was born there—you must have heard of Jeffrey Archer—the literary genius? Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Archer—don’t tell me you don’t read these guys any more? Guys?”

  I knew my guards were right behind me, but I wasn’t going to risk turning round to look at them. I was just hoping they were going to say something—anything—anything that might tell me where we were and what the date was. Though I didn’t really expect them to answer me—it would probably have been a breach of security. On the other hand, they might quite genuinely not have known what the hell I was on about. I mean—I wasn’t that sure myself.

  I stepped onto the metal staging and stamped my feet on terra firma—though it was only the size of an opera box with a three-foot high handrail around it.

  “That’s better,” I said, turning round. My guards were gone and so was the bridge!

  But the piece of neo-Brutalist confectionery was still moored there and I could see a few tiny figures walking about on it, just following orders. I waved to two who looked like they might be the same ones who put me on the jetty thing, and shouted, but they were probably too far away to hear me.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” I called.

  Suddenly, there was a great roaring noise and the huge hovercraft rose several feet in the air and shot off across the ice sheet. I watched it until it reached vanishing point.

  * * *

  There was no way off the metal staging I was perched on—just sheer drops on all sides and no door. I was there so long, I thought it might be some sort of slow execution—instead of shooting people or hanging them, you just leave them on a lofty metal platform in sub-zero temperatures and let them freeze to death. The other thing that worried me while I was waiting there was I didn’t see Emma being brought off, so I had to assume she was still aboard and was being taken somewhere else. It was all very sinister. Naturally, I did what all Brits do when the chips are down and the situation looks hopeless, I stiffened my upper lip—which wasn’t difficult because it was frozen to my bottom one.

  * * *

  Help came from a most unexpected quarter when it arrived—a bosun’s chair bumped me on the head. These things must be the precursors of ski lifts—although they are nowhere near as lethal as a ski lift. They consist of a wooden board slung on a rope. Now normally they are used to hang off the side of ships so that the occupant can do repairs or paint the hull, but this one was suspended from somewhere far above me, so far above me that I couldn’t see where it was coming from or who had sent it down, because the other end of the rope disappeared into the mist. Actually, I ignored it at first because there was no way I was going to go anywhere on anything that flimsy—especially not a hundred feet or so up into the clouds.

  I cupped my hands and shouted up.

  “You must be joking!”

  The chair gave a little jiggle.

  I cupped my hands again.

  “I would rather freeze to death!” I yelled.

  The chair started swinging about, slowly
at first, but then more and more wildly. I had to duck and dodge out of the way. Eventually I caught hold of it and gave it a firm yank.

  It yanked back fiercely—almost lifting my feet off the ground. I let go and it flew up in the air and bounced around uncontrollably. Finally, it settled down into a benign swing. A metallic sounding voice crackled down from the mist:

  “Get into the chair! You will be perfectly safe.”

  “Safe? You call that safe?” I shouted up. “It’s a bloody death-trap!”

  “Get in!”

  “No!”

  “This is your last chance, mutant.”

  I folded my arms and looked out at the blank landscape.

  “I am going to count to three,” continued the metallic moron. “One…”

  I ignored him.

  “…Two…”

  I leant against the rail and stared at it.

  “…Three!”

  The chair began to rise slowly. I watched it get to about twenty feet before I broke.

  “All right!” I shouted. “I’ll sit in your stupid chair!”

  The chair carried on going up.

  “Are you deaf?” I cried. “Send it back down, you bastard!”

  The chair stopped. But it was way out of reach.

  “What did you call me?” crackled the voice.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Yes you did—you called me an illegal product of a bestial coupling,” said the controller of the chair.

  “Well, I’m sorry!” I said. “I lost my rag! Now lower the bloody chair—I’m freezing my bollocks off down here!”

  “That’s too good for your kind!”

  The chair started to descend. Very slowly.

  “Come on, you moron,” I said.

  The chair abruptly halted.

  “I heard that!” said the voice.

  This time the chair was just within reach—if I had been prepared to climb up on the rail and leap for it, I probably could have got it. I thought about it, because I didn’t want to have to snivel to whoever it was up there again, but then I took a look over the side and saw how I high up I was and changed my mind.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  There was a long pause.

  “How sorry?” came the metallic response.

  “Very,” I said.