Dreams of the Chosen

by Cawell, Brian

  Taking his hand, she sits down on his knee.

  – I think that’s what Carl fears, too. He didn’t say anything, but I could read it in him.

  – It’s not the only worry, Leana. If they did make it and one of the patrols found them, well, they might be wishing they’d died.

  24

  Blind Luck

  The Village

  Centre of the WildWood

  November 30, 3383ad

  SHARONNE

  Overhead, the sun has reached its zenith and the smooth blue of the sky curves away in all directions. Surrounding the Village, the trees tower like sentries, cloaked in shadows, but above the huts and the common buildings there is nothing to block the sky or the sun.

  Shading her eyes with her left hand, she watches the path that leads back from the Western Clearing. They are almost here. The normal business of the Village has ground slowly to a halt, as Bran, Reggie and Alek approach with the strangers. Other-Worlders they are calling them. Humans, but not of this Earth.

  The concept is strange to them, but not to her. Not to a daughter of the Families, who has lived her life with access to the huge Fortress library and has grown up with a brother for whom a mystery was something to be pursued with passion.

  The library was at the centre of the family’s private residence, surrounded by the bedrooms and the living areas, its huge doors permanently closed, except when one of the servants entered to clean and dust, or the two de Vries children sneaked in to taste the forbidden fruits that waited in endless rows along the shelves lining its walls.

  As always, it was Adam who had begun the secret visits.

  ‘The world was not always like this, you know,’ he had whispered one afternoon, when the house was quiet and their father was away in the north at a Council Gathering. ‘Before the Fall, it was a place of magic and knowledge and, look, I have been reading about them. The Old Ones. A lot of it makes no sense, but if we keep trying – Anyway, come on. I want to show it to you.’

  And so had begun what they called the Age of Discovery. Hours spent together mining the shelves for information, teasing meaning from words and images, following lines of enquiry until the world began to assume a different proportion.

  ‘I think it is the reason that Adam finally left,’ Sharonne told Bran once, when the library and its contents had come up. For someone who had lived his entire life in the Wood, without books or an education, he had an unquenchable thirst for knowing. ‘The lies. The superstition. All the years of ignorance, when there was knowledge sitting right there on the shelves and who knows where else. Knowledge that made nonsense of the Families’ claims about the magic of the Old Ones. And of their fear of change.

  ‘In the end, I don’t think he could take it any more. The fights he had with our father were mostly about the questions he asked and the fact that he would never accept an answer if it didn’t have reason to back it up. My father was never strong on reason. Obedience, yes. Blind faith, certainly. But reason takes risks and no one in the Families has taken risks for a very long time. Except for Adam, of course.’

  At that, Bran had smiled. ‘And his little sister.’ Then he had kissed her. ‘My rebel,’ he had whispered. Then he had sighed, his breath warm on her neck. ‘What I’d give for a day in that library. What Carlin would have given.’

  It is fitting that it is Bran who is bringing these Other-Worlders here, these links to life before the Fall. If anyone deserves to make contact with them, it is Bran. And if any- one deserves to learn what they have to share, it is Carlin’s star pupil. He will value the lessons, make them into sense. He will ask the questions that the world has long forgotten how to ask. In that, he is much like Adam: a dreamer, a questioner, someone for whom the world is a book waiting to be opened and read.

  She looks along the western path, waiting for the movement in the distance that will announce their arrival.

  She does not have long to wait.

  ERIN’S STORY

  Blind luck.

  That was what Alvy called it and I had to agree. In a world where telepaths weren’t supposed to exist, where we could have chosen to land on any continent, near any of the ancient cities and head in any direction, we had chosen to land here.

  To be rescued by three – Espers, they called themselves – just seconds before certain capture. In my less rational moments, I might have been tempted to think it was –

  – You know, I think I’m beginning to believe in destiny.

  . . . fate.

  As usual, Jordan had beaten me to the punch.

  Sympatico.

  – I mean, he went on, blind luck is just a bit too random. Maybe there is some force, moving the universe towards, I don’t know, some kind of resolution.

  – There is. I cut in, interrupting his momentum with a smile. It’s called gravity.

  I remember once, as a child, visiting one of the Elokoi settlements in the Wieta Clanlands of Vaana. It was nestled on a narrow bay, just to the north of the Skeleton Coast, with the vast expanse of the inland sea stretching out before us, red in the dying sun, and Pyrrha and Pandora rising in the western sky.

  We were on a history field trip and the flyer had dropped us just beyond the settlement limits, as was the custom. The Elokoi of the Wieta Clan live a traditional lifestyle and are far less comfortable with the trappings of human society than the Clans further south.

  Walking into the village that first time was eerie. The Elokoi stopped what they were doing to watch us, then resumed their work in silence as we passed. Walking into the Esper village, years later and countless kilometres distant, I felt the same strange, empty-stomached nervousness. This was the first contact we had all anticipated for longer than we cared to think about, and it was somehow less than I’d expected and yet, so very much more.

  We had expected what? Difference? An alien culture? I don’t think so. Perhaps we should have, but we were victims of the official histories, steeped in the stories and the songs of a world already old beyond reckoning. The mother-planet. The symbol and the source of all we knew and all we were.

  Logic said it must be different – evolving in isolation, like creatures on a remote and inaccessible atoll, growing ever more distant with the passing centuries. But –

  I guess, what we know and what we dream are rarely compatible and so we choose the romance of the dream.

  Almost a thousand years. What did such a span of years do to a world hurled suddenly and without mercy from its hard-won pinnacle? Where did it lead? On the short trek back to the central village, Bran, Alek and even the reluctant Reggie, had filled in a large number of blanks and we were beginning to get a picture of life in the world we had come so far to find. Or, at least, this small corner of that world. It was a world without long-distance communications, if you didn’t count the inspired inventiveness of the semaphores – a world full of superstition and fear, where the power of the ruling classes was based on a fluke of history and knowledge was feared at best and, at worst, actively persecuted. A world where being Icaran, or Esper, placed you in grave danger.

  But we weren’t thinking about all that, as we entered the village. We were children again, gazing around, wide-eyed and curious. Hanni stopped and picked up an earthenware pot from one of the cold fireplaces. It was decorated with a simple pattern of lines and circles and finished with a primitive glaze, but he held it reverently, running the tips of his fingers across its surface, reading its texture.

  Jordan crouched before a small boy. The child had moved out in front of him, staring up at the stranger who had fallen from the sky. They Shared in silence for a few seconds, then the child smiled and scurried away to stand beside his mother, holding her skirt and following us with his eyes as we moved on.

  I meant to ask Jordan what they had spoken about, but things moved quickly in the days that followed and then it was too late.


  The Village Council, when we stood before it, was divided about us. They were polite, of course, and welcoming, as was their custom, but there was an undercurrent of – I guess you’d call it fear, though their aura of calm muted the emotion. They understood, far better than we did, the implications of our arrival for the existing balance of power, and the likely reaction of the Families, once they realised the significance of what we represented.

  A threat to their dominance, the dismantling of their mystique of power and magic. A crack in the foundations of everything that made them who they were. And, being the Families, they would do anything it might take to limit the damage and reinforce their hegemony, even if it meant tearing down the WildWood tree by tree, bush by bush, until it gave up its secrets.

  – We have survived this long by being no threat. Allysin Brown was the leader of the Council this cycle and she sat brushing her white hair away from her piercing blue eyes. She continued addressing her words to me, as leader of the group, but taking in all of us with a sweep of her gaze. Make no mistake, Erin Mathieu—

  – Just Erin, please.

  Her formality was tiring and I was trying to find ways to put them all at ease. Even though I was feeling anything but easy myself and I was struggling to keep my emotions masked.

  I watched her make the conscious adjustment. It seemed difficult for her.

  – Erin, make no mistake, the Families would love to be rid of us once and for all – especially the Hartmans. They seem to have a particular hatred for the Esper. But until now, they have been willing to curb their bloodlust and capture us one or two at a time, rather than risk our defences. After all, the existence of this safe haven actually serves to confine us. To destroy it would mean that the survivors would disperse among the entire population, making us infinitely harder to control – and we are under no illusion. That single fact is the reason that the WildWood villages still exist.

  Their discomfort suddenly began to make sense.

  – But with us here—

  – With you here, the balance shifts. The patrol you evaded will already have found the wreckage of your transportation, and it will not take them long to deduce where you have taken shelter.

  I was beginning to get an uneasy feeling and beside me I could feel Jordan tensing, too. Were they planning to give us up to the Guard, in order to save themselves?

  Bran had given us an insight into the powerful Hartman Family and the vicious activities of the Black Guard and I couldn’t imagine these peaceful people contemplating such a course, but how much did I know?

  We were talking about survival here. The sacrifice of the few for the good of the many.

  I tried a new tack.

  – We are sorry to have brought this threat into your midst, I began. The crash of the lander was—

  – Unforeseen. The Council Leader smiled sadly – the first sign of warmth I had seen from her. She masked her emotions better than an Etiquette tutor. So the question is, ‘What do we intend to do about it?’

  – If I may? Jordan cut in and Allysin Brown waited for my assent before nodding. It seems to me that the problem is one of fear. The Families fear what we represent and you fear the Families and how they will respond. We can’t make them less fearful of us, not in the short-term, but I think we can make sure that they don’t attack the Village because of that fear.

  – And how do we do that? The old woman beat me to the question.

  – By making sure they know that we’re not here. If they have no reason to believe we’re in the Village, then they have no reason to behave any differently towards you than they ever have. Here’s how we could do it.

  The plan was simple and effective. Jordan called it ‘misdirection’, and it consisted of dressing up volunteers in our distinctive uniforms and having them sighted in locations as much as 20 clicks from the boundaries of the WildWood.

  Obviously, we couldn’t actually go ourselves. We didn’t know the lie of the land, and we would run into trouble before we got a click from the trees. But it wasn’t as dangerous as it might sound, he pointed out, when I objected that we didn’t have the right to ask others to take risks for us. After all, they wouldn’t actually be wandering around the countryside dressed like Other-Worlders. All they’d have to do would be to smuggle the uniforms to the chosen spots, put them on, and make certain they were seen, then disappear again, making their way back to the Wood, dressed in ordinary clothes.

  Besides, they wouldn’t be doing it for us. Not exactly. They’d be doing it for the welfare of the Village. As unfortunate and unforeseen as our pyrotechnic arrival might have been, what we were all interested in now was minimising the damage it had caused.

  – If you have a problem, Jordan argued, you can sit around debating whose fault it is, or you can work together to solve it. The more places we can get them looking, the less likely they’ll be to look in the most obvious place.

  If we do nothing, they’ll focus on the place closest to the crash site, but we have the advantage of mystery. They fear us. The mere fact that we arrived in a flying machine means that we’re capable of things they can’t even imagine – so we play on that.

  Hit and run, he finished. Get them chasing their tails everywhere but here and they’ll spend their mental energy wondering how we can move so easily from one place to another without being seen. It’ll drive them crazy.

  Knowing Jordan better than anyone, I could see he was enjoying the whole situation. Not the fact that we’d brought this problem on the Village and its inhabitants, but the opportunity it afforded him to use his creative skills to solve it. For a moment, he was thirteen again, playing chicken with an irate Yorum, while I stood by and watched the excitement light up his eyes.

  JORDAN’S STORY

  So it was arranged.

  Groups of young villagers, organised by Bran and his friends, were assigned different locations, which they could reach easily and escape from safely.

  Over the next week or so, the Guard, who had arrived in the area with great dispatch, were chasing up sightings in a 20-click radius of the castle, and the whole countryside was talking about the mystery. We were a legend and we hadn’t even left the Village.

  Once the novelty of our arrival had worn off, we were able to gain masses of information far more quickly than we had expected. Stumbling on the Esper had been a godsend, because they could communicate with us at a level that other humans could never match. They didn’t have a vast written history, of course, but like the Elokoi, they had developed a huge repertoire of Thoughtsongs – centuries of stories passed down from generation to generation through History-Tellers.

  Hanni and Eliita, our historians, were about as different as it was possible to be. While he was stocky, dark featured and talkative, she was pale skinned and slim. When she shared her thoughts, it was with a shy, uncomfortable reluctance, as if she was unsure of her right to hold an opinion. Unless, of course, the subject was history. Then, she could be as enthusiastic and opinionated as Hanni himself.

  It was as if two people lived in the space behind those blue eyes: Eliita the withdrawn, and Eliita the historian. And there was nothing withdrawn about the Eliita who devoured every morsel of information she could, from the Village Tellers, Iain and Sybilla.

  Hanni and Eliita spent hours absorbing the stories and building up a picture of what it meant to be Esper in a world that feared and hated everything you represented. And how it felt to live free and intimately connected to the forest and its creatures, while the rest of the world struggled to survive its baser drives.

  Erin and I spent most of our time with Bran and Sharonne, focusing on life beyond the WildWood. They were an amazing source of information – he from the cache of knowledge he had absorbed from Carlin, his mentor, and from his own insatiable curiosity, and she because of her unique perspective as a member of the Families with a passion for learning and an eye for de
tail.

  They were, according to Erin, the real item – even though Sharonne was deaf to his inner thoughts.

  I couldn’t imagine loving someone and not being able to Merge or to share at a level beyond words, but Erin just got all romantic on the subject.

  – I think it’s beautiful, she said, when we were alone in the woods. Think about it, Jord. Perhaps the challenge makes it all the more worthwhile for them.

  Maybe. Personally, I was quite happy the way we were.

  I would have given anything to have got inside the library of the Fortress de Vries. What it could have told us about Earth, the Fall and its aftermath would have been pure gold. When Sharonne described everything it contained, we spent a few minutes contemplating a raid, but sanity prevailed.

  ‘Besides,’ she pointed out, ‘just about every volume in it dates from before the Fall. They were magic to me, but they’re probably available where you come from, anyway. There was no publishing after the lights went out and the few handwritten manuscripts produced post-Fall tend to be the ravings of Family mystics and fanatics, denouncing the Ancient Ones and their evil machines and declaring the Fall to be God’s Wrath.’

  She had a point.

  But then it was Bran’s turn to make us salivate. ‘There’s an easier way.’ He paused for effect, watching us for a three-count before he continued. ‘If you want some quality information about anything.’ He used speechwords, because Sharonne was with us, but I could taste the excitement building in him, as the idea took shape.

  ‘Before he died, Carlin taught me how to get the attention of the Sect. He couldn’t tell me how to get to the Archives themselves, of course, because I was too young and a little too reckless and if I were to get captured by the Guard, he didn’t want them to torture the location out of me. But one day, he said, if I wanted to follow my natural curiosity, I might want to join them.’