If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  No, she would not make the same mistake twice.

  She withdrew her hands from his grasp.

  “I will not take advantage of suffering.”

  “The suffering will pass. And then we will all reap the benefit.”

  “That was what we believed when we submitted to the Process.”

  “The only people who thrived in the Seizure were the ones who stayed close to the algorithms that allow us to predict and control mass behaviour.”

  He took his hand from his right eye; it was fixed in a thousand-yard stare. Part of him was speaking from within the Process.

  “To survive change, you have to stay close to power. You know that. You’re the wife of the bailiff.”

  “I am James’ wife.”

  “No, you are the wife of the bailiff. If you deny your role, you will be moved from one network into another.”

  Was that him speaking, or an order direct from the Process?

  “I must be able to choose, Christopher. You cannot make a society in which people are fixed in that way. I will do what I want.”

  After brief consideration, he sat back and sighed.

  “Order is beautiful,” he placed one palm against the other. “Not an order imposed from above, but an order that emerges from below, the pebbles on a beach sorted by a wave, the numbers which fall into sequence. Don’t be disordered, Ruth. Because then you will be alone.”

  * * *

  She was not alone.

  Standing with crooked feet, Agnes chewed the ends of her wet blonde hair; it was the colour of her mother’s hair before she first gave birth. Jane served the soldiers, dutiful and downtrodden, but she was still her mother. If Agnes submitted to the implant, they could be together again; nibbling her split ends, the girl considered joining her mother within the Process.

  “My mum is not normally this slow or this quiet,” said Agnes. “She is only doing one thing at a time here. Normally she does three or four. And my dad is not angry anymore. He’s not anything.”

  “They are still alive,” said Ruth.

  Euan sat on the floor, at the foot of a stool.

  “They are very tired,” he decided.

  “Why was Christopher holding your hand?” asked Agnes.

  “He wanted me to agree with him.”

  She led the children upstairs. It was not enough that she serve these children, she also had to protect them. She had waited for Alex to recover in the hope that she would be fit to travel; she was not. They said goodbye to her, but she did not acknowledge them. Being ignored was familiar to Ruth. Her mother’s Alzheimer’s had ended this way. During the collapse, it was easy to disappear; she discovered how contingent the interest of other people is, how tenuous and weak social bonds can be. Fail to show up to work one day,unreturn a phone call, unopen an email, and you were gone. She and James had lived without a safety net, and when they took a step in the wrong direction, they fell instantly and they fell far.

  Agnes did not want to go.

  Ruth said, “Do you want to live every day knowing that at any time you might be taken into the barn?”

  “It might be okay.”

  “I’m not arguing with you, Agnes. I wish I could offer you an easy decision. It’s not fair that you have to make such a hard choice.”

  “What is the right thing to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Quietly, Ruth led the children from the estaminet and then out into the fields. The long meadow grass rippled in the light wind. She set a brisk pace, but had to relent when Euan grew tired. The boy had the physical capacity for the walk but not the mental persistence. She impressed upon him the urgency of their trip. He wept and she wasted more time mollifying him.

  She had no choice but to carry him, high up on her shoulders.

  So much for discretion.

  Every step took her further away from Newhaven and James.

  No, she would not doubt her decision.

  Agnes skipped ahead, gathering dandelions and daisies to sow into a chain. She performed an effortless cartwheel, first two-handed, then one-handed; not out of joy as such but with the unthinking physical confidence of youth. The gesture was so free and spontaneous. Now Euan wanted to run after his sister. Ruth set him down and off he went, running like a dog. They passed back across Blackcap and the chalk path where she had seen the horse. It was still in the bushes, still suffering. She ushered the children ahead before they saw it.

  A glitter upon the sea to the south. The sun seemed brighter and more intense over the coast. No, it was hotter. A thick heat haze shimmered over the sea. The lush greensward and the soft undulating forms of the Downs were gone; the land had been reshaped into high bare rock ridges, covered in patches of dry and thorny scrub. The machinery was beyond human scale; traction trucks and monster shovels grazed monstrously on the earth, moving around one another like itinerant cathedrals.

  Ruth put her hand over her mouth, her legs tremoring before the sublime otherness of the Process.

  “We should not go this way,” said Agnes. “We are high up. The Process will be weaker in the lowlands.”

  They followed a sheep track down into the valley. The sky darkened and, by late afternoon, it started to rain heavily. Their clothes were quickly plastered to their skin. Euan whimpered. The rain intensified and ran down her face and her neck.

  “It won’t last,” she shouted to the children. “It will pass.” The ground grew waterlogged and slippery underfoot, so they walked more slowly, holding hands. But the rain did not let up and settled in oily puddles upon the grass. Odours of sulphur and burnt plastic mingled with the fragrant green. The valley sides steepened, and the heavy dark clouds sank overhead. She wrung out the ends of her shirt.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Agnes.

  “It’s only rain,” said Euan.

  But it was unnatural weather, a side effect of the microclimate established at the coast. She pushed a heavy curtain of rain from her eyes again and again, but could not get free of it. The air grew very chill, as if all the cold air had been forced together then slid quickly across the wet ground. Their small path joined a wider track turning south toward the war zone. Here the earth was fearfully churned up into a layer of liquid mud. They would need rubber boots to cross it. Looking back up this wide churned track, through the rain, she saw heavy shadows moving and breaking apart: some kind of men approaching, blocking their way north.

  “Here, Ruth, here.” Agnes showed her a scar in the valley side, where holly and hawthorn had sprung. She followed the girl there, and lifted Euan up and set him down in a sweet-smelling divot. The air grew colder still and they huddled together for warmth. The creak of cartwheels and splashing of boots grew closer, and then the weary trudge of a convoy of the evicted; some soldiers wore helmets, others had wound rags on their heads. Their red-brown iodized faces set off the ceramic whites of their eyes. Their tunics were soaked. No one spoke. Omega John had likened humanity to sheep. This division of the evicted was mankind at its most dutiful and beaten, marching to the slaughterhouse on rails of glistening mud.

  She held Euan to her chest so tightly. His mother had been taken from him; he would accept Ruth’s affection as a reminder of his mother’s, not as a replacement. She understood that, and it was how she wanted it to be.

  The column marched through the waterlogged mud, up to their knees in it, a division of golems, formerly citizens with rights and possessions and loves and concerns, now half-human, half-earth, embodied numbers within the everlasting calculation of the battlefield.

  The convoy passed. She daren’t head north. Not yet. They crossed the quagmire and crossed back up the side of the valley. Rooks stood sentry on a line of fence posts. Agnes did not like the birds and held onto Ruth’s arm.

  “They are watching us,” she said.

  “Yes, they are,” said Ruth.

  “The birds have implants too,” said Agnes. “You can see it in their eyes. We used to sing it under the kiss-kiss tree: bewar
e the looks of the rooks.”

  Higher up, they heard the crack and thunder of the monstrous excavations to the south, the blasting and reshaping of the land itself, the ground warping under artificial sunlight and the grass visibly withering and charring. A distant fizz as a damp sea fret met fearsome hot filaments and evaporated in chugging white clouds. On the valley side, a stick in the earth thickened, as they watched, into a sapling, then gave forth twisted branches. The light had all the vitamins drained from it and became a grey byproduct. A hank of her hair came away in her hands.

  “We are too close to it,” said Ruth.

  The rain intensified into a stinging hail. All the elements were being stirred to loosen and liquefy the land so that it could be warped. Within the grey sludge, they came across something solid: a farmhouse. Agnes saw it first. Barbed wire had been strung right through it and out the other side. Ruth forced the front door and it was a relief to be suddenly out of the racket of the hail. In the hallway were dusty wellington boots and umbrellas, a rack of walking sticks, a bowl of maggoty dog food and on the tiled floor, fresh muddy footprints.

  Christopher sat in the front room beside a woodburning fireplace. He wore the same private body armour that James used for Eviction Night, a lightweight mesh of overlapping ceramic tiles set over a tough flexible fibrous interior. It was moulded to fit his torso. A personal gift from the Process. His irises seemed to have been replaced by discs of firelight. She told the children to explore the house, and find dry clothes and supplies for the next part of the journey, but her face indicated a different course of action: run and hide.

  She sat opposite Christopher in a battered sunken armchair. The shelves were lined with literature and philosophy; educated people had once lived here.

  The hail rattled against the windowpane like buckshot, and out in the farmyard, the diesel engines of the massive iron armour turned flabbily over.

  He was in discomfort. The armour was addictive. She remembered Eviction Night, how James would double over with the cravings for it. Christopher reached down, picked up a bundle of sticks, and placed them upon the fire. The fire flared momentarily and then resumed its brooding.

  She fetched a cloth and dunked it in a bucket of rainwater. She put it in his hand, placed his hand against his forehead, then against the back of his neck. This had always soothed James. Christopher let out a long sigh and then shivered.

  “I knew you would come here,” he said.

  “Just until the rain passes.”

  “No, you must stay until Euan recovers.”

  She withdrew her hand.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “The Process noticed it earlier,” he said. “I brought you medicine to bring his temperature down.” He took a vial of pills from his trouser pocket and put it into her hand, then he stood and walked over to the window so that he could gaze at the armour, the rain wriggling and sizzling over the surface of its twin exhausts.

  “I am to find more of the evicted and bring them to Saddlescombe,” he said. “I will bring you supplies, when I can.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Yet you will,” he said.

  25

  Euan lay under a blanket beside the fireplace. He was weak in a way that unsettled her. She was unaccustomed to caring for sick children; as a teacher, she would pack them off to the school nurse or back home at the first sign of illness. Neither she nor James had been ill since the onset of the Process. She could not tell how serious the illness might become.

  Christopher had brought her ibuprofen and she quartered the pills to take account of Euan’s age. His blond fringe matted against his brow and his arms seemed swollen; the symptoms were various and this ruled out a common diagnosis. She sat with him, but the pressure of her body against his sore bones caused him discomfort. She set him down on some cushions, and waited anxiously for his temperature to subside.

  The house lay on the boundary of the war zone. Two charred round sections had been excised in the brickwork so that the barbed wire could pass through the heart of the house and then out the other side. All night, the rain swirled and thrilled against the house; they slept together beside the fire, reluctant to take separate bedrooms.

  At four in the morning, Euan’s breathing became laboured.

  Agnes awoke in a panic.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’ll be fine. It’s just a chill,” said Ruth. She had no way of knowing if he would be fine or not. There was a doctor in Lewes: could they get word to him, or failing that, get Euan to him? She sat Euan up to shift the mucus on his chest, and then, when his breathing steadied, lay him down on his side again.

  Just before dawn, Ruth went outside and gazed across the valley; a thick undulating mist, two storeys high, drifted toward her like a memory of the sea. In the grounds of the farmhouse, she found a water butt and an overgrown vegetable garden with promising dark green leaves, a cluster of woody rosemary and raised beds laid to carrots and potatoes. A windbreak of tall trees – some kind of fir – sheltered the house with dense rook silhouettes stationed at various branches. Her arrival at the farmhouse with the children had been predicted and observed, Euan’s sickness also. The birds were attendants, surveilling the situation in the farmhouse.

  The night lifted, and, for the first time since she had left Lewes, the artillery resumed its fire. The explosions were close enough to retain their anticipatory treble notes, followed by drawer upon drawer of celestial cutlery being dumped upon a marble floor. The tremor underfoot was more than an indigestinal rumble, it was a hollowing knock.

  With one thought, the birds vanished.

  She went through the larder with Agnes and gathered all the edible stores together on the kitchen table; the absent owners had assiduously pickled, dried and jammed all their surplus fruit and vegetables, and there were containers of dried rice and a sack of flour. The meat in the larder was black and unspeakable, and had to be taken out on a shovel and buried.

  Agnes held her brother’s hand during his fever dreams. Her kindness moved Ruth so profoundly that, to compose herself, she had to stand alone and quiet at the foot of the stairs.

  On their third day at the farmhouse, Christopher returned. The armour, taller than the barn, came to rest at the edge of the farmyard, its metal flanks steaming in the light drizzle. There are many types of rain, and, in her brief time at the farmhouse, Ruth became acquainted with all of them. The rain was unnaturally remorseless. The bedding, dusty upon their arrival, all had to be washed by hand, and with no likelihood of drying it outdoors, she was hanging it on a line in the kitchen. She was too intent upon her task to stop. When she finished, Christopher had still not come in from the yard, so she went out to investigate.

  The armour had a colloid or hard transparent gel in its upper centre, a porthole. Through the colloid, she saw his swooning face, adrift in condensation. Through the downpour, she shouted his name.

  The armour idled like a spent bull. It would be foolish to get too close. And yet, strapped between the twin exhausts on the back, there was a large sack, containing the provisions he had promised. She tried to hook the bag down with a long piece of timber, but it was fixed tight. The armour was part of the bailiff, and so when she clambered up the enormous structure to untie the bag, the act seemed indecent.

  She climbed down again with the bag on her back, and no sooner was she clear of the armour than its engines revved and, with Christopher dangling loosely in its interior webbing, it strode purposefully up the valley side in the direction of the war.

  The bag contained cans of bully beef, hard inedible biscuits, a crate of miraculously unbroken eggs, and a vat of apricot jam. In addition to a bottle of ibuprofen suspension, there were three unmarked blister packs of medication stamped with their full names and with the day of the week above each tiny transparent dome of pills.

  By the light of the kitchen window, Ruth inspected the packaging for clues, trying to discern if there was
anything written on the pills themselves.

  “But I’m not ill,” said Agnes.

  “It may be preventative.”

  “Against what?”

  She didn’t want to alarm Agnes. She was a smart girl, but her experiences had made her skittish.

  “The environment here is different.” She took her pills with a glass of water and, after a few hours without ill effects, the children did the same.

  The farmhouse had been extended over the years. The attic had been opened up and the cellar was divided in two. The farmhouse was as unpredictable and extensive as the houses she walked in her dreams: the houses with secret upper gardens and long tunnels between rooms; the dream hotels with dark wide staircases and threadbare carpets and penthouse suites which swayed in the wind; the semi-detacheds with patio doors that never locked and garden fences that kept nothing out. With the house cut in half by the coils of barbed wire, which prevented access to a second staircase, she was nagged by the thought that she had not investigated every room.

  A stray shell vaulted over the jagged rock ridge and exploded halfway down the valley side, rattling the plates in the cupboard. At sundown, the big guns ceased, and it felt safe enough to stand in the porch and drink a mug of black tea.

  On the fourth day in the farmhouse, Euan’s condition worsened considerably. Agnes found him out of bed, lying on the white painted floorboards; he had eaten nothing since the illness set in, and had taken only sugared rainwater. His joints were swollen, accentuating the slenderness of his limbs. Ruth picked him up and he went entirely limp in her arms. She begged him to stop being ill and rubbed his arms to make life circulate within him once again.

  “We have to take him back to the village,” said Agnes.

  “We can’t carry him like this.”