CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER

by John Brunner

  Ellen gave a wry grin. “You said something about women swarming round him like flies on a rotting carcass.”

  “I must have been in a particularly grumpy mood… But anyhow: I’d realized my detachment wasn’t up to his, so the idea crossed my mind that I ought to know what happened to at least one of my—ah—offspring. I imagine you can guess the rest.”

  “You seduced her?” Ellen suggested.

  “I don’t know which of us seduced the other. But—yes, we had a brief affair. Two weeks.”

  “Was it her husband’s fault?”

  Peter nodded. “Presumably. But I never saw her again. So much for my original idea! As soon as she knew she was pregnant she rang me up and said good-bye. I hadn’t even learned her surname, let alone her address.”

  “Really?”—eyes wide in disbelief.

  “Really! She was much better off than me, used to pick me up from the hospital in a taxi, take us for a meal, go home with me, and then leave after a couple of hours. She and I never spent a whole night together… I hope you don’t mind my being so frank.”

  “No, it’s what I asked for.” Ellen hesitated. At length she went on, “You didn’t know I was on the way?”

  “Of course not! I’m not sure your mother did, even. At any rate she didn’t tell me until my involvement with Sindy was all over.”

  “So how did she find out? That was what broke you up, wasn’t it?”

  Peter thought carefully before replying. Now he had gone so far, though, he was bound to admit the rest.

  “It was one thing to know I’d fathered a child that was going to be accepted by a married couple, brought up as their own. That’s what I sincerely believed was going to happen, because Sindy had laid so much stress on the fact that her marriage would have been fine except for not having kids. But it was something else to take on responsibility for one of my own when I was so poor during my studies that I’d had to donate semen for extra income. I…”

  “Did you try to talk her into an abortion?” Ellen suggested.

  Her tone was utterly devoid of emotion. He tried to read clues in her face, but it showed no more than apparently casual interest.

  Well, she did say it all happened years and years ago…

  Gruffly, he confessed the truth.

  “And that upset her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was why you broke up?”

  “I think she might have seen sense and we could have got back together but for what happened a little later on, a few weeks.” Peter licked his lips. His belly was tense of a sudden. He always hated recalling what he now had to describe, and had never told anyone about it before.

  “Go on.”

  Were those words chill and reproachful, or merely curious? He hoped for the latter, and plunged ahead.

  “I said just now Sindy’s inability to conceive was ‘apparently’ her husband’s fault. In fact it was incontestably his fault, and it turned out that he knew all along. He was sterile, but he couldn’t face the fact. When Sindy became pregnant he knew it had to be someone else’s baby and he threw her out. She had my phone number and one evening in a fit of hysterics she rang up to tell me what he’d done.

  “Only I wasn’t there.”

  “Kamala was?”

  “Kamala was. Not for very long, though. I never found out exactly what Sindy said, but I can imagine. After that it was all over between us. We scarcely even talked again. Saw each other once or twice when the dust had settled, but—well, that was that. And now you know.”

  He finished his beer in a single angry draught.

  While he was still wondering what Ellen’s reaction would be to the naked truth, there was a shrill beep from her own computer in the next room. Jumping up, she ran to see what had provoked it, and shortly returned, holding a page of printout but looking downcast.

  “Is something wrong?” Peter demanded.

  “Oh, I just turned up another Louis Parker.”

  He almost choked. “What do you mean, another?” he exploded.

  “This is the fourth. None of them any good to us.” She thrust the paper into his hands and slumped back on the sofa, disconsolate. He read rapidly. It was true; she’d found four people of that name. But one of them was over sixty, living in retirement near Harrogate, and in any case his full name was Christopher Louis Parker-Haines; another was Louis X. Parker, an American citizen on the staff of the embassy in Grosvenor Square; and the third was an actor who had taken Louis as a stage name because his baptismal name was Lewis and Equity already had a Lewis Parker on its register. As for the fourth, whose details had just emerged, Louis Alan Parker had been born in Sydenham three months ago to a Frenchwoman named Suzette Legrand, and one Alan Raymond Parker, who was British, had acknowledged paternity.

  Nonetheless, it was an astonishing achievement. Marveling, Peter demanded, “How in the world did you come up with this lot? Bernie hasn’t produced a single candidate so far!”

  Stifling a yawn, Ellen hoisted her slim body off the sofa, supporting herself with feet and shoulders, until she was sufficiently stretched.

  “Trade secret,” she said with a mocking grin as soon as her yawn permitted. “But at least it’s a step in the right direction, hm? Well, I’d better turn in. I have to go to school tomorrow, remember.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Good night. And thanks again for another delicious meal.”

  “Any time,” she said. “Any time.”

  Peter himself was too wound up to sleep. Pacing up and down, wondering whether or not to check the late-night TV news, he was struck by a sudden inspiration. Perhaps Louis Parker had reverted to his family’s original name. If it was in fact Parikian…

  But though there were nearly ninety subscribers of that name in the national phone directory, none bore the initial L.

  What the hell could have become of him?

  Lead us not into temptation…

  The phrase echoed and echoed in David’s mind as the Rolls purred through the desolate hop-fields of Kent under a drift of rain. Now and then the cone-shaped roof of an oast-house appeared and vanished as the road curved and wound. There was something very curious about the next of his siblings that he hoped to recruit. From all the available evidence it seemed she had exercised her power once, and on one person.

  But once you’ve realized you have the talent…

  After the salutary lesson of his encounter with GianMarco, he was constantly worried about his precarious dominance of the group. Either this Mary Gall did not properly understand what she was capable of, and the way she got rid of her father had been the result of an instinctual reaction, never repeated because never comprehended, or (and David felt this was the more likely) she must have remarkable subtlety and self-control—or, putting it another way, the ability to resist the temptation implied by possession of absolute power over other people.

  David Shay not only did not possess that ability, but didn’t want to. There wasn’t enough time for luxuries like having a conscience…

  Which was why he had brought Crystal with him. Despite his initial contempt, he had come to like her much the best of his half-siblings. Her experience on the streets of London had made her cynical, admittedly, but beneath her shellbacked veneer she seemed to hunger, as he did, after an ideal. In effect, she had a vision of a better world.

  It was she, during the group’s endless arguments, who most quickly and most clearly grasped the import of his proposals, and more than once it had been her alliance with him that turned the mood of the meeting against Sheila’s sullenness, Terry’s crude desire for material belongings, Garth’s bitter detestation of all adults.

  He hoped Mary Gall would prove another ally. Outwitting the others, coaxing them around to his point of view, was draining his strength. He knew what must be done, and how little time was left to do it. But among the rest only Crystal seemed to have any inkling of urgency…

  If Mary Gall turns out to be another opponent—

  But he
didn’t want to think about that possibility. By way of distraction he lifted the armrest concealing the car’s computer keyboard and tapped out the code that interrogated the search-program hunting for Louis Parker. The screen mounted on the back of the driver’s seat informed him there was still no joy. With a sigh he switched to a map display tracking their progress.

  “Fork left at the next junction,” he told Harry. “We should be there in five or six minutes.”

  Both his guesses about Mary, as it happened, were quite wrong.

  She and her mother had left Marshmere in the end, unable to bear the pressure of gossip. The house had sold for a handsome profit, and their new home at Poppy Cottage was quite as luxurious if not so large, with a splendid garden. Neither of them wanted to keep the Jaguar, so that and the Citroën had been disposed of, but a medium-sized Volvo stood in the garage. A long time still remained before Richard completed his jail sentence; nonetheless Mary had insisted on Edna obtaining an injunction to prevent him from contacting them when he was let out. Everything should have been fine.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Despite her daughter’s reproaches, backed up by the use of her magic touch, Edna had grown more and more morose. She began to drink heavily, and avoided company. Often she would stay at home for days on end. When she had to go shopping, she bought at random, stocking the freezer with packages of food that later had to be thrown away unopened. Mary, who now attended a local school within cycling distance, took to playing truant purely in order to keep her mother under control. When teachers came to find out what was wrong, she of course had no trouble sending them away placated, but the task was a strain, and sometimes she found herself exhausted from the exercise of her powers.

  On top of which, little by little she started worrying about what she had done. Had Richard truly deserved his fate? She had, after all, only her mother’s word for it. Admittedly he had put his wife through a most unpleasant experience, but if he hadn’t, then Mary herself would not be here…

  Guiltily, she wrote letters in which she begged him to set her mind at rest, to say that he forgave her—and tore them up and flushed them down the toilet for fear Edna might find the scraps in the wastebasket and piece them together. Now and then, when she went to school, she reacted to taunts from the other pupils who had discovered (the tongue of scandal being long, long) that her father was in prison, and engaged in pointless, futile fights. Why, she wondered, did she never remember to use her magic instead?

  But when she was in a calm, normal mood, the idea never crossed her mind. When she had been provoked into a rage, she couldn’t take advantage. Sometimes, late at night, she would lie staring at the ceiling of her bedroom, planning the vengeance she was going to wreak on those who worst tormented her, and went to sleep chuckling. In the morning, though, she was always too preoccupied to recall her schemes, and they vanished as irretrievably as dreams.

  Now winter was drawing on, and the isolation of the house was preying on her mind. She hadn’t been to school for a full week; indeed it was that long since she last forced herself out of doors any further than the front gate. Edna hadn’t bathed in at least as long, and spent most of the day in her dressing gown, that was overdue for laundering. Formerly she had smoked little, if at all, but now she was burning up forty a day, and the air smelt permanently stale. To compound the problem, Mary’s period had started. She had lost her magic again.

  She always wept a lot during the few days it lasted. Now and then she cursed herself.

  The doorbell rang.

  “I’m not at home,” Edna snapped, reaching for another cigarette. Rain was beating a dreary rhythm on the leaded-glass windows that were supposed to add “period charm” to the cottage, but served chiefly to reduce the amount of daylight. She was pretending to read a book, but her gaze kept wandering away to watch a rerun TV game show. Why, Mary could not imagine; the sound was off.

  The bell rang a second time, longer and louder.

  “All right,” Mary sighed, hauling herself to her feet as though she were suddenly carrying twice her usual weight. Nervous, Edna’s eyes followed her out of the room.

  In the narrow hallway of the cottage, alongside a window next to the front door, hung a mirror intended for checking one’s appearance before venturing forth. Viewed from the proper angle, it showed anyone standing beyond the window. Mary paused at exactly the right spot, and was rewarded with a glimpse of a girl about her own age, and—so far as the window could show, which was only head and shoulders—not unlike herself in appearance.

  The bell rang a third time, impatiently.

  She had vaguely expected yet another caller complaining about her non-attendance at school, and as a second bet one of her fellow pupils—not that she had made many friends, and few who cared to visit her home more than once, a major reason why she had become so depressed of late. The idea of a stranger dropping in made her unaccountably excited. She hastened to open the door.

  And found not the girl she had glimpsed, but a boy. Who said, “You’re Mary Gall. I can tell. I’m David Shay. This is Crystal Knight.”

  Crystal advanced into the shelter of the porch. Short-haired, she wore an X-rated jacket, on whose front a red elasticated saltire cross framed and emphasized her bust, and tight black trousers splashed with yellow blobs: fashionable gear that Mary had envied but not dared to indulge, already being sufficiently persecuted at school. She said, not to Mary but to David, “No problem. No power.”

  What?

  Dizzied, baffled, by that matter-of-fact comment, Mary felt her jaw fall ajar, and would have shut the door in reflexive panic but that David caught her hand and said smoothly, “Aren’t you going to ask us in out of the rain?”

  Rain?

  Suddenly the world was a different place, and rain was far too ordinary to be real.

  “Whoever it is, tell the buggers to go away!” Edna shouted from the living room. The words were underlined by a familiar chinking-splashing noise: ice-cubes being dumped in a glass, then covered with gin and not nearly enough tonic. (Tonic water was becoming very expensive. No one had yet marketed a synthetic quinine cheap enough to be incorporated in drink mixers, and the authentic kind was disappearing with the rain-forests.)

  “We can handle her,” Crystal said assuredly, and marched past Mary. David put his arm around her and urged her to follow.

  Glancing back—they hadn’t bothered to close the door—Mary saw a car at the end of the path, and a man with a worried face staring toward the cottage.

  But she had no time to think about that.

  Indeed, for the next several minutes it seemed she had no time to think about anything.

  The rain had let up by the time David and Crystal led Mary out to the car, each carrying a suitcase full of her belongings. The man behind the wheel got out to open the rear door for them. David said, “Mary, this is Harry.”

  Harry nodded a sketch for a greeting. “Papers?” he muttered nervously.

  “All signed. Here.” David thrust a sheaf of documents into his hand, and he tucked them inside his jacket.

  “What about—uh—Mrs. Gall?”

  “The hell with her. She’ll drink herself to death. Or set the house on fire when she’s sozzled. She smokes like a chimney.”

  “David, don’t you think you ought to—?”

  “There’s no ‘ought’ about it!” the boy flashed back. “I told you already. You had the chance to think of ‘ought’ before—and passed it up! So all that’s left is must! Get in and take us home!”

  You’re watching TV Plus. Newsframe follows.

  Half a million people in the Midlands have been warned not to drink the public water supply without boiling. Tailored bacteria from an experimental biological laboratory were accidentally spilled down a drain last week and have allegedly survived normal treatment at a sewage plant.

  General Thrower today told a rally of his supporters in Surrey that Britain needs another war, quote, “to stiffen the moral fiber of
this spineless generation,” and brought the audience to its feet by quoting Rupert Brooke’s poem about the outbreak of the 1914 war, “Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour…”

  What was on the menu for today?

  Drearily Peter installed himself, as he did each morning after Ellen had left for school, in front of his computer, sipping now and then at a mugful of the latest horrid substitute for coffee. The real stuff was beyond his means these days—and, indeed, anyone’s except the superrich. Tea was about to go the same way, according to rumors that the government would not permit on radio or TV.

  If only they had heeded warnings about the deforestation of Northern India…

  Did the air in here smell bad? He sniffed, and decided: no worse than usual. He had a headache, but that was most likely due to overindulgence last night in Ellen’s homemade liquor—this time, red wine. So…

  First, his email, in the faint hope that someone might need his talent for a story with a medical bias, despite the fury his story about the royal horses had entrained in official circles.

  So strong had his reflexes become during weeks of boredom and frustration, at first he was about to dump the lot as not worth noticing. Just in time he checked his fingers on the way to wiping out the sort of message he had been dreaming of. It was from the Comet, and it was in caps emboldened and underscored.

  COME AT ONCE!

  When had the message been sent…? Foggily, for this ersatz coffee had none of the arousal effect he had been used to (how long ago? When Britain could still afford to buy crops from the world’s primary producers!) he scrolled back the screen display in search of the data he needed. They shocked him.

  0535? Jake, at work at that hour? It can’t be—must be a hoax! He wraps up the national editions at one or one-thirty and goes home to sleep…

  At which moment the phone rang. He snatched it up.

  “Jake,” said a distant voice. “Thank God you finally woke up! I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours! Get your arse over here, dammit!”