News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘What are these?’ I asked Noshi, who was working on the next slowly rotating machine to mine. The plants that mystified me looked like miniature pea pods but longer and thinner, growing on a bit of a scrawny stalk.

  ‘You don’t know what those are? For real?’ he exclaimed. Thinking about it, if Noshi was a woman she had quite a deep voice.

  ‘Beans?’ I suggested weakly.

  Noshi laughed and embraced me, ‘You are so funny.’

  He reached up and plucked a little bean pod from the unfamiliar plant.

  ‘Lentils,’ he said. ‘These are the Masoor variety. In the same bed we have green Puy lentils, yellow lentils, Richlea lentils and at the end over there, Macachiados.’

  ‘Lentils,’ I said, ‘well I never. I’ve heard of them, I’ve eaten them but I’ve never seen them growing.’

  Noshi ran his hand through the lentil plants as he walked back to his station. ‘They are kind of important, very high levels of protein, we use them as a base stock for a lot of the food products. They grow fast and these varieties are very hardy. One day, maybe not in my lifetime, but one day, maybe they can grow outside again.’

  That made me stop and think. I’d not really considered it but of course nothing could grow outside. It really hit me at that point. The human race in this world was literally hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Nothing was growing outside, it had all been levelled by the winds. The effect this must have had on the environment had to have further exacerbated the climate in ways impossible to imagine back in 2011.

  ‘Have you ever lived outside?’ I asked, as I got back to pulling little weeds out of the soil beneath the dense rows of lentil plants.

  Noshi looked at me and smiled. He had such a beautiful and indeed peaceful, confident smile. ‘No, never. My grandfather remembers living outside but he lost a lot of his family in the early storms. He’s from Da Lat Culvert. Have you heard of Da Lat?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, it’s in Vietnam,’ I said, ‘Southeast Asia.’

  ‘I guess so. Anyway, we’ve had to live in culverts for many years. When the weather is kind I like to run in the rubble, just to feel the sun. I like that very much.’

  ‘Wow, so you only ever go out of the culvert when you know the weather is calm.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Noshi with that enigmatic smile again. ‘Many of us go running or walking when the weather is calm. We find things in the dirt, things from the old world. People like to collect old things if they are not too broken. Look at this.’

  Noshi reached into his pocket and pulled out a small item, which he leaned across and gave to me. I stared at it feeling slightly dumbstruck. It was a die-cast model of a Ford Anglia, a toy car. It didn’t have any wheels and the paint was badly chipped. It had at one time been painted white and was clearly a couple of hundred years old.

  The thing that made me start was the fact that it was a Ford Anglia, a British car from the 1960s. It was a model of the same car I’d seen in the Museum of History in London. I think I only ever saw one real, running Ford Anglia back in 2010, sometimes classic car clubs drove through Kingham village as they wound their way through the Cotswolds and I’m sure I remember seeing one drive slowly past, leaving a trail of white smoke in its wake.

  ‘That is amazing,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ asked Noshi, it sounded like he truly didn’t know. I knew I had to be careful; for all I knew Noshi could be a sleeper for the Original Five. This could be a test, a trick to see if I blurted out my true origins.

  ‘I think it’s a child’s toy. I’ve seen one in the Museum of History in my home city. It is very, very old, like 250 years old. I think it’s a model of a thing called a car.’ I said carefully. When confronted with something as bizarre and unexplained as a model Ford Anglia I felt compelled to explain.

  ‘What does it do?’ asked Noshi.

  ‘Well, I don’t think it actually does anything. It’s a toy, a child’s toy.’

  It was fairly clear that Noshi didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. ‘A toy, you know, a thing for children to play with. Didn’t you have toys when you were a child?’

  ‘I had a lizard,’ said Noshi, ‘but it died.’

  ‘Right, I see,’ I said. ‘Okay, well this is a model, a miniature model of a real car, d’you know what a car is?’

  Noshi shook his head. ‘Okay, well, way back in the past, hundreds of years ago, people travelled around in cars. It was a simple machine for moving around in. In the old days you could go outside, the winds were not strong, you could go outside at any time you wanted and if you wanted to travel a long way you got in one of these.’

  Noshi made an odd face, which I took to mean he thought I had to be joking.

  ‘No, I don’t mean one of these actual things, this is just a small version of the real thing. The real thing was big enough to get in, it was a machine that could move along. You see these shapes here,’ I said, pointing to the empty wheel arches where the wheels would once have been. Noshi nodded.

  ‘That would have had wheels when it was new,’ I explained. ‘So that meant it could go along the ground.’

  ‘What, over rubble without legs?’

  ‘No, they didn’t have rubble, they had roads, long smooth strips of road all over the world, everywhere, and thousands of these machines to move them.’

  Noshi gestured to the next bed of lentil plants that had appeared in front of me. I handed the model back to him.

  ‘A car,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, a toy car.’

  ‘Thank you for explaining it to me. I have wondered what it was for years. I found it many miles from the culvert when I was running.’

  I shook my head in bewilderment. Noshi struck me as an intelligent and aware person but he clearly knew nothing about the world that had been ravaged to rubble by hundreds of years of brutal hurricanes.

  But it was spooky, a Ford Anglia. Why had I seen that car in two different time dimensions? It had to mean that wherever I was, whatever weird time warp connected reality, hyperspace alternative dimension world I was in had a very similar history to both the Squares of London and Gardenia.

  Of course I wanted to ask Brad about this, but he was nowhere to be seen. Since I’d spent a few days working in the garden factory I hadn’t seen him.

  Later that day I moved to another area with Noshi, where we picked hydroponically grown lettuces, thousands of them. We stacked them into boxes and other people loaded them up into stacks and walked out of the garden factory with them balanced on their heads.

  I never once saw a walking machine inside the culvert, they were clearly only used outside the walls of the facility, but it did strike me that this very labour-intensive aspect of life in the culvert could have been done by machine. They had plenty of sophisticated machines at their beck and call. I pondered this as I washed my hands and arms after a long day’s gardening. Maybe they just chose to grow food like this because it was so beneficial to their mental health. I imagined it would be easy to go a bit stir-crazy, locked away in this cocoon of safety month after month while the elements went apeshit outside the walls.

  ‘I’d like to go for a walk outside, when the weather is calm,’ I said to Noshi as we climbed the metal stairs out of the garden factory. ‘Not sure I could keep up with you if you were running, but the glimpse I got of the outside before this storm was amazing.’

  ‘I will walk with you if you like,’ said Noshi. ‘The weather will be better in three days, we can go then. Many people will leave the culvert then, it will be nice to see the sun.’

  ‘How do you know it will be sunny?’ I asked. It was late October by this time and I’d assumed the winter would be setting in. I knew that Chicago had once been a very cold city in the winter.

  ‘Oh, it will be a hot sunny day. We always know exactly wha
t the weather will be like, that is something we learned to do many years ago. Sometimes it is too hot, sometimes it will be too cold to go out for long, but in three days’ time it will be just fine.’

  19

  ‘I heard today that the storm finishes at 3:14 tomorrow,’ I said to Theda a few days later. She had just washed her hair and was using a very bizarre little ball of material to dry it. I assumed she was drying it; she was rubbing the small ball over her head, which seemed to leave her short, mousey hair very dry.

  I was sitting on my little chair cleaning under my fingernails with a bit of wood I’d found in some of the soil I’d been planting shallots in. Life in our little apartment had become reassuringly domestic.

  ‘Yes, I heard the same information today,’ she said without looking at me.

  ‘So, does that mean a cloud could come and visit?’

  ‘I imagine it’s a possibility, although I have been working with the dimension committee so I have been a little preoccupied,’ she said as she finally finished rubbing her fluffy hair and sat down opposite me. She smiled. ‘I think we are in the same ship. We would both like to go home, is that not correct?’

  ‘Yeah, although it’s the same boat.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The old English phrase is, “we’re in the same boat”, not ship.’

  ‘It means the same thing does it not?’

  ‘Yes it does,’ I said. I enjoyed this little moment simply because it was simple. It was the sort of conversation that could have happened in any century for the last thousand years, two people with different native tongues learning the intricacies of each other’s language. Of course it would have been simpler if it had been two people from the same time period, the same dimension in space–time, the same bloody world. It would have been simpler if it didn’t involve an utterly baffling relationship requiring me to think of this older woman as my great-granddaughter. I preferred to think of Theda at that moment as just a German woman with fluffy hair who claimed we were in the same ship.

  ‘I’m going out for a walk tomorrow as soon as the winds drop,’ I said. Theda looked up at me a little alarmed.

  ‘You mean you are going outside the culvert?’

  ‘Yes, not on my own or anything brave and foolhardy, I’m going with Noshi.’

  ‘Noshi!’

  ‘Yes, Noshi. He’s fine, he’s very charming and kind, I know he was once from one of the Original Five clouds but he’s left them now and I can tell he’s not one of them.’

  Theda just looked at me without saying anything.

  ‘I work with him when I’m gardening,’ I added. ‘By the way, you’ve got to try his apples, they’re bloody amazing.’

  I handed her an apple I’d carried back from the garden dome. ‘Noshi told me it was okay to take a couple.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She took a bite and chewed for a while, nodded and said, ‘Well, he can grow a good apple.’

  ‘Hydroponic apple trees. The most bizarre things I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

  ‘You have to be careful, Gavin. You and I are strangers here, we don’t know the intricacies of Noshi’s history, who he is in contact with. We don’t know where his true allegiances lie and why he asked you to go outside the culvert with him.’

  ‘He didn’t ask me, I asked him,’ I replied. By this point I was getting a bit indignant; Theda wasn’t my mother and I wasn’t ten years old.

  ‘I want to see what it’s really like, I only got a glimpse when we all went out before the storm, I want to see what’s happened to the world.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ said Theda. ‘If the weather is calm and a cloud is able to make contact, we need to be ready to go. Noshi could have befriended you in order to…’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I don’t know, to maybe delay your departure so the Original Five can capture you?’ Theda’s confidence faded as she was saying this. It was as if as she spoke she understood how ridiculous the notion was.

  ‘I don’t know, Gavin!’ she wailed. ‘I am worried for your safety. Is that so bad?’

  ‘No, it’s very kind of you,’ I replied.

  ‘Out of all the millions of people in this culvert, you become friends with a member of a subversive group, does that not make you a little anxious?’

  ‘Okay, fine, I’ll be careful, okay? Noshi does not strike me as a heavily-armed member of a violent terrorist cell. He’s a gardener. Anyway, this is all speculation, we need to know if a cloud is due to arrive, don’t we?’

  Theda smiled at me. ‘You are correct, we need to know. Let us find out.’

  So we left the small apartment and I followed Theda along the endless low-ceilinged corridors. I assumed she knew where we were going because I wasn’t concentrating at all, I was just walking alongside her.

  ‘So you want to get back to Munich in 2411?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it, I assumed you’d just jumped through the cloud on a kind of one-way ticket.’

  ‘It was a risk, we knew that, but from what I have gathered here, combining our understanding of the science involved and the very advanced knowledge the people here have developed, it should be possible for us both to get back home.’

  ‘Can you go straight back to Munich from here?’

  ‘At the correct time, yes I can.’

  ‘So why have I got to go back to Gardenia?’ I asked, feeling somehow cheated, that I had got the super economy ticket with more stopovers.

  ‘I jumped back in time. I cannot damage my brain returning from here, the damage has already been done.’

  ‘Oh, so you did suffer brain damage coming here?’ I asked. Theda had not struck me as someone who was anything other than super bright.

  ‘I was very confused when I first arrived, I did not know where I was or who I was. It is the memory stored in my hardened enhancements that allowed me to reconnect with myself. You do not have such enhancements.’

  ‘I’ve got a kidonge.’

  ‘That is not the same, that is not protected from current surges and will be disabled on your return journey. When I arrive back I will remember everything. You jumped forward, if you go back to 2011 any changes you have made to your brain could have very dire consequences for you.’ Theda stopped walking and looked at me. ‘Not only that, it’s a safety mechanism for everyone. This moment here, now, it is very delicately balanced, it is surely easy to understand how the actions of one person could spread and alter over many years.’

  I think I grimaced because I didn’t really understand. Of course if I went back and started a nuclear war or introduced a lethal virus that wiped out the human race things could get sticky down the line, but I was hardly in a position to do either. Theda started walking again. ‘That is why you need to go back from the place you first landed in. From Gardenia.’

  We walked in silence for a moment. My mind was blank and I felt quite calm. I was slightly surprised at this because in my previous experience when I didn’t understand something I would get very anxious. Now, because it seemed my very existence had been taken completely out of my control I felt very relaxed. Not only that, I knew I was feeling relaxed as the relaxed feeling swept through me. I did allow myself to ponder if this newly aware state of mind would also exist when I got back to 2011. If I got back.

  We went through a low door and along another corridor. It took ages. We might have walked a couple of kilometres by the time we entered the final corridor. This one had glass panels down one side and inside the small rooms we were passing, groups of people seemed to be sitting around talking. It was almost like a university campus except the ages of the people were too varied. Some of them were kids, some were old women, ancient-looking blokes and a few teenagers here and there.r />
  Theda stopped outside one of the glass-fronted rooms and waited. ‘Brad should be finished soon, we will wait here.’

  I looked into the room we were standing outside and there was Brad. It looked like he was in full flow and he was gesturing in the air. I noticed everyone in the room with him was looking at his gestures and studying what looked to me to be empty space.

  ‘He’s using the same graphics system we saw in the conference room a few days back, the time you did not listen to anything.’

  I smiled at the memory. ‘The thing with all the swirly circles?’

  ‘Yes, exactly like that.’

  ‘But I can’t see anything from here.’

  ‘No, you won’t be able to, not unless you are in the room. It has a very limited range, specifically so when you are not intended to see anything.’

  ‘That sounds a bit ominous.’

  ‘No, it is not ominous, it is not being hidden from you, it is being kept from some of the people who live here in this time. Because life is rather hard here it is feared that many people would try to do as you and I have done, migrate to an easier, more amenable dimension.’

  ‘So the people in there are learning how to jump from one dimension to another – is that what Brad does?’

  ‘In a way, yes. That is a research group, all the people in there are very advanced scientists.’

  ‘Some of them look like kids,’ I said, looking at a girl who could not have been more than 12.

  ‘They are usually the most brilliant thinkers in this field. They have no fear of the technology or the theories, they are all involved in developing technologies which it is hoped will help us to understand the science and aid the communication between dimensions.’