Praise for Chung Lee Loves Lobsters:
“This timeless tale by PEI’s Poet Laureate has long been a favourite in PEI, winning the L. M. Montgomery Children’s Literature Award when it was originally published. Now, almost 20 years later, it has been has been updated with new illustrations and a revised text and released for a new generation of children to enjoy.”
- Canadian Materials
Praise for The Last Wild Boy:
“This novel reminds me of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and, peripherally, Bumped by Megan McCafferty. It has echoes of the style of Among The Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix and Jeanne DePrau’s The City of Ember as well, and is a new, thought-provoking novel for YA readers from Canadian poet Hugh MacDonald.”
- Tantina Davis, Turning Pages
“Hugh MacDonald, poet laureate of Prince Edward Island, has applied his craft and created an elegant concept novel that deals with issues of constructed gender and sexual identities.”
- Canadian Materials
“Best Book for Kids and Teens pick”
- Canadian Children’s Book Centre
And All The Stars Shall Fall © 2017 by Hugh MacDonald
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
P.O. Box 22024
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
C1A 9J2
acornpresscanada.com
Edited by Penelope Jackson
Cover design by Matt Reid
eBook by Joseph Muise
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
MacDonald, Hugh, 1945-, author
And all the stars shall fall / Hugh MacDonald.
Sequel to: Last wild boy.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927502-97-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-927502-98-3 (HTML)
I. Title.
PS8575.D6306A82 2017 jC813’.54 C2017-906695-1
C2017-906696-X
The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada, The Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program and the Province Of Prince Edward Island.
I would like to dedicate this book to the planet earth and all who strive to save it and to live in peace and justice upon it.
Part I
Chapter 1:
Aahimsa Under Attack
The general alarm shattered Alice’s dream and brought her suddenly upright in her bed. The dream had been pleasant, about an upcoming birthday party. In her dream she would be twelve years old in a few months. She remembered that the party had been fun and she was wearing a brand new dress. It was blue to match her pretty eyes — like her mother’s, only lighter.
She sat there in bed, her dream shattered, feeling stunned and frightened, wearing a frilled, ivory cotton nightdress, and rubbing her sleepy blue eyes. Her long blond hair, though tousled and in disarray, made a halo around her lovely, almost twenty-eight-year-old face. Sometimes she wished she were still almost twelve, like her daughter, Tish. Life had been so much simpler back then.
Blanchfleur, Alice’s mother, stood in the doorway of her daughter’s bedroom, her tired, round face ashen in the sudden electric brightness. It was obvious to the daughter that her mother, the mayor, had taken no trouble to fix her full head of blond hair or to apply makeup. Her usually attractive face looked drawn and angry.
My daughter, the independent young mother, thought the agitated mayor, still looks like a frightened little girl sometimes.
“Turn off those damned lights, Mother,” Alice snapped. The fiery blue rings within her almond eyes still burned with a nagging resentment toward her mother that hadn’t completely eased since the day the mayor almost murdered Alice’s once-beloved companion, Nora, intentionally and in cold blood.
“No time. Get up and come with me now. It may already be too late to save the City of Aahimsa,” said Mayor Blanchfleur. “Not to mention Tish, and ourselves.”
Alice rose up on her elbow, about to answer, but her mother had already left the room. Alice scrambled to her feet, wrapped herself in her plush housecoat, stepped into furry, ivory-tinted slippers, and hurried down the hall with rapidly beating heart. The fierce, unrelenting scream of the emergency alarm had begun to drill itself into her consciousness and already had upset her stomach. What was going on? She had never heard this particular deafening alarm before.
She found her mother seated in the same dimly lit control room where the two had struggled and even tried to injure one another a few short years before. Blanchfleur, dressed in yesterday’s rumpled grey suit, sat rigidly upright in her tired old chair and stared open-mouthed at the flickering screen.
“Could you turn off that alarm?” Alice growled, then moved up close enough to the screen to read the message that was printed there in bold script.
“I can’t,” Blanchfleur said, her voice unable to cover up her despair and near panic. Alice had never seen her mother like this. “I tried several times and I don’t seem to have control of the system anymore. The message on the screen was already here when I arrived. It must have come before we lost contact with the Manuhome.”
The Manufacturing Homeland had always been her mother’s passion. The vast agricultural and manufacturing centre, well outside the walls of Aahimsa, had brought great wealth to the city from its sales throughout the feminized city-states of the world. It was operated by the world’s last outsiders — slaves, in Alice’s opinion — who had had the bad luck to be born male.
Alice turned her attention back to the screen. It held a simple, curt text message: Minutes ago received urgent message from Agrihome exterior: deadly night spray action conducted by drones across entire Agrihome area, everyone on the outside dead or dying. Get your family underground and hide. We’re on our way down to the escape tunnels. Best of luck. U
“It’s from Ueland.” The mayor turned to Alice, who was still barely awake. “Get yourself and the child dressed quickly and grab a few necessities for you both.” Blanchfleur stepped to the window. There was unusual, frantic movement in the sky outside, like flocks of birds gone wild. Somehow the protective dome wasn’t functioning. Numerous drones flitted about, cute little things if they weren’t so deadly, some of them a bit too close to them. In the near distance a blinding flash, and they watched as the Palace of the Temple Donors disappeared in a brilliant ball of light. The Manor House that served as Council Headquarters for the City of Aahimsa as well as the Mayor’s Residence shook violently.
“Great Goddess,” said Alice, clinging to her mother’s arm. “Can’t you do something?”
“This is what we feared,” said Blanchfleur. “Get Tish up out of bed as is and let’s get quickly underground. Never mind your things. Hurry! Meet me at the elevator.” As she finished speaking, all the electric lights went to black and the nearest window shattered, spraying shards of glass that rolled like waves of blood around the room as red emergency lights popped on overhead. “Go,” she snapped, pushing Alice outside, then slamming the heavy steel door and locking it. “Get Tish and nothing else. Hurry!” Her voice now left no room for argument as it rose to shrill panic.
The elevator in the nearby hall took them rapidly down, the three generations of females: Mayor Blanchfleur in her rumpled suit, Alice wrapped in her baby-blue housecoat, and Tish in pink flannel pyjamas and matching cotton wrap.
The only concession to their comfort and safety were the three pairs of shoes they had put on to replace their slippers. Eleven-year-old Tish carried a small suitcase containing all of her fashion dolls.
When the elevator reached the basement level, Blanchfleur removed her normal skeleton key and inserted a second one, this with a longer tongue. Alice had never seen it before. No sooner had her mother turned it clockwise than the car began to shudder and shake. Blanchfleur pushed several of the buttons and the elevator began its rapid descent again, and after a minute or so lurched to a sudden stop. The mayor removed her key and pocketed it as the door slid open, revealing an underground area of deep darkness.
“Everybody out, quickly. We have only a couple of minutes.” She retrieved a small flashlight from her pocket and the two younger women followed, not wanting to remain too long in the lightless void they had entered. Blanchfleur unlocked a solid metal door and they entered a second smaller darkened room, locking the first door behind them. She stepped to the left and they heard a soft click and the room lit up. “Wait,” she whispered.
Moments later they heard a muffled explosion in the distance and the earth shuddered, causing a fine rain of dust to fall from the rough ceiling overhead.
Alice was frightened, but when she saw the terror in Tish’s eyes she steeled herself and managed a forced smile. She laid one arm across her daughter’s shoulders and pulled her close. “What now, Mom?” she asked Blanchfleur as calmly as she could manage.
“We wait until the ground settles and then we enter Ueland’s tunnel and see where it takes us.”
“Ueland…he is the outsider who runs the Manuhome, isn’t he?” Alice asked.
“Used to be. The Manuhome is, in all likelihood, destroyed and non-existent by now, and maybe Doctor Ueland is gone with it,” said her mother. “I warned you this might happen.” She saw the faces of her daughter and granddaughter wince and stiffen. “But maybe not,” she said, managing a weak smile. “Let’s hope. Are you prepared to travel on a real adventure?”
“I’m cold,” said Tish. She was tall for her age, long-legged and blond and pretty like her mother. She was also an intelligent child, strong and determined. She would certainly need strength and determination as well as brains in the days ahead, her grandmother thought.
Blanchfleur smiled at Tish. “Yes, it’s cold down here. But there’s no time to worry about little things like the temperature. This isn’t going to be easy, but let’s show Grandmother we can do it. Let’s get going while we still can.”
“I’d rather go back up to our house,” said Tish. Alice looked from her daughter to her mother.
“We can’t,” said Blanchfleur. “That explosion you heard destroyed the shaft. The elevator won’t go up; it won’t go anywhere. But we wouldn’t want to go back anyway, because by now they’ve destroyed the Manor and everything in it. I’m sorry, Tish, but we’re still alive and together, and for the moment, that’s all that matters.” Blanchfleur stepped to the door marked “EXIT TO TUNNEL. PLEASE WATCH YOUR STEP.” She pushed the door, but it wouldn’t budge. She shrugged and entered her password into the small keyboard next to the door and it beeped and said “PASSWORD INVALID” on the tiny screen. She tried again and got the same result. She returned to the door through which they’d entered the room and it wouldn’t budge. “Oh my,” she said, and sat on a bench along the wall. She did her best not to panic.
“What’s wrong, Grandma?” asked Tish.
“I don’t know, dear,” she said. “Let’s just give it a minute.
Alice tried one door after another and looked out through the glass panel in both into the exterior blackness. Then she began to punch the glass in frustration.
“The glass is very strong and thick. You couldn’t even shoot a bullet through it,” said the mayor.
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to remember the plan. Perhaps we were supposed to wait. It’s a long time since Doctor Ueland and I discussed a situation like this as a possibility. Perhaps we are supposed to wait until someone comes. I’m not sure, but I don’t know what else to do. There’s one good thing, though.”
“What’s that, Mother?” asked Alice.
“If we can’t get out, no one can get in either.”
Alice lowered her voice so Tish wouldn’t hear. “But what if no one comes to help?”
“That could happen, I guess. But let’s hope not. Someone will come. I’m counting on it.”
As Blanchfleur finished speaking, Alice hugged her mother, and Tish, who was becoming more and more alarmed, moved close beside them, observing the looks of desperation on both of their faces.
Then a huge tremor shook the floor under their feet, the result of the most recent distant but violent explosion. Blanchfleur, though she knew it had been a massive blast, attempted to send her daughter and granddaughter a comforting look just as all the lights blacked out, leaving them in total darkness.
Chapter 2:
Ueland Saves Adam
Doctor Ueland hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d lain in bed, his thin face grim, his small dark eyes darting about the walls of his room, following the racing shadows of fast-moving clouds the full moon had been painting across his walls, his lean body clamped tight with tension and stress. He’d received reports from several of his best workers of a marked increase in the number of surveillance drones dipping and swooping around the various parts of the Manuhome over the past few days.
He had suspected that something bad was in the offing, his first guess being that the global authorities had been searching for any signs they could find of Adam, the bright young boy who had been raised among the old ones at Happy Valley in the wild outside Aahimsa. The long-rumoured wild boy who Mabon, the former Ranger, and Nora, former companion to Blanchfleur’s daughter, Alice, had risked everything to save and to raise lovingly as their own child. The same wild boy Ueland had been harbouring in the Manuhome these almost three years.
Ueland wondered if the two runaway lovers who had raised the boy as their own had been killed, or if they were still on the run, hiding from the insiders. He hoped Nora and Mabon had escaped the Forest Rangers, the powerful and violent outsider police force in the wild. The Rangers did whatever the controllers in Aahimsa ordered them to do. They lived every moment having their every word and every angry thought monitored by the controllers. Each of them carried a device buried under the skin at the base of their necks that not only spied on them, but also could be exploded by the controllers at any instant.
The boy, Adam, would certainly be happy and relieved if his adoptive parents had managed to escape capture.
Ueland had just begun to doze when the Manuhome alarms had started going off all around him and he’d begun to receive a series of frantic calls from his various managers, and suddenly there was no more time for wondering.
When those scattered reports started arriving from all across the Agrihome only minutes before, reports of flares and bright explosions lighting up the Agrihome and blasting everything apart, of fields drenched with toxins and luscious greenery turned almost instantly black, of the windows of all its buildings and residences shattered by violent explosions, of broken bodies of scattered, dead, and dying outsider labourers: some smothered in their beds by the toxins, others fallen wherever they may have been standing in the residences, or while trying to flee on the outside; some few still living but aware of death’s inevitability even as they spoke to the doctor who had, at once, sent off a brief warning message to Blanchfleur in her Manor House in Aahimsa.
Most callers had warned him to get away at once, as there was no escaping the odourless gas, or whatever it was. He knew this horror wasn’t Blanchfleur’s doing; she would never do anything like this. She was capable of ordering horrible actions when necessary, but she, too, was fighting for her life and for her principles. The Manuhome and its workers were a vital part of
that fight.
So Ueland reasoned that if the mayor’s beloved workers were a target, then she and her family were also slated for death, and with them the end of everything he and Blanchfleur had been hoping to accomplish.
Shortly after sending the note, the whole of Aahimsa’s communications system had been shut down. He was surprised. Someone in the Manuhome must be betraying him — poor fool, he would be killed with all of the others. Ueland wondered if Blanchfleur had even received the message. He hoped so. He knew what he had to do. The emergency procedures he and Blanchfleur had agreed on should they ever come under attack from outside would have to be followed. He would know soon enough if she had received the message.
Now he was using his key to open the boy’s door. Adam always locked it when he was inside by himself. He was a fine eleven-year-old lad, nearly twelve, an obedient boy. Ueland had knocked several times. But the boy was a very deep sleeper who had trained himself to wake to his alarm. He rarely heard a knocking on his thick door. The doctor was forced to use his skeleton key.
Ueland opened the door silently and stepped inside the darkened, windowless room. He moved past the open door, and suddenly he was knocked to the floor by the wiry boy, who assumed he was fighting for his life against an unknown intruder in the pitch black. Adam was on him, holding a butcher’s knife against his throat, his fierce dark-brown eyes burning in the room like those of an angry, wild dog.
“Adam,” he gasped, “don’t cut, it’s me, Ueland.”
“Sorry,” the boy mumbled, fighting his way out of his trance-like fury.
“’S okay,” said Ueland, getting to his feet and rolling his head around, trying to ease the stiffness and to compose himself. He had to be sharp and decisive. Their time to flee was likely almost up. Whatever was killing his workers would soon be upon them also. “We have to run. Come now, leave everything. It’s the World Council. They are ending everything. I have all the gear we need below. I’ve ordered the evacuation of the Manuhome. It will not help everyone, but there’s nothing else we can do. Let’s get below.”
And All the Stars Shall Fall Page 1