Children of the Dust

by Louise Lawrence

  He tried to remember what he had seen outside. No village or settlement, just gravestones and a derelict vicarage, a few ruined cottages and a track leading downhill into a tangled valley with a river at the bottom. He tried to remember Sowerby’s map. If that was the river Wye he had seen below, then there were no settlements nearby. They were all to the north and he was too far west, outside the area Harris and Sowerby had planned to travel. He should have turned north at the standing stones, headed for the settlement at Newington. Now he could either go back the way he had come, or make for Timperley which was somewhere down in the valley . . . a good six miles in either direction. Simon knew he would never make it. He was trapped in the tower and no one knew he was there, except for the glider pilot.

  Who was it could fly a glider in these parts? Mutants had no technology so it had to come from a government bunker. Cardiff had not survived the holocaust, nor Cheltenham either. So it had to be Hereford, head-quarters of the Special Armed Services division, thirty or forty miles away. Communications had ended years ago but the Hereford bunker would still be there. Simon reckoned it would be morning before they could reach him, and the following morning if they had no trucks or petrol. But it gave him something to hope for, set a time scale for his imprisonment.

  Dogs gnawed at the woodwork of the inner door. Others prowled and whined around the perimeter walls. Night birds screamed in the belfry above him as Simon settled down to wait. It was only thirty-six hours at most, he told himself, but every minute seemed endless.

  Simon was gripped by a lethargy that made him feel almost comfortable, his mind drifting between sleeping and waking, gone beyond fear or pain. His shoulder had gone numb from where the signboard cut into it but he was no longer aware of that. Then a sound in the distance caused him to listen, a nickering whinny and a heavy clopping tread, some kind of large unidentifiable animal. The dogs snarled and snapped with their teeth, whined and retreated as the creature came on towards the tower and stopped outside. He could hear the creak of leather, the jangle of metal and the snort of its breath.

  ‘Simon?’ said Laura. ‘Are you in there?’

  In sheer relief Simon let go. The board crashed to the floor and he saw her sitting there, Laura in the moonlight with her pale hair blowing in the wind, white-robed and slender, riding a horse. He had not known horses still existed, but this one was real enough. Splotched piebald, it tossed its head and aimed a kick as the dogs approached it. Laura stroked its mane.

  ‘This is Timms,’ she said. ‘He was given to us by Morgan’s people who live in the north of Wales. Are you all right? I got here as fast as I could.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ Simon asked in astonishment.

  ‘Tyler told us where you were.’

  ‘Who’s Tyler?’

  ‘The glider pilot. Are you going to stay in there all night or will you come back to the settlement?’

  ‘I’m not coming out there with those dogs,’ said Simon.

  ‘I’ll get rid of them,’ Laura said.

  She slid from the horse’s back. The dogs were only a few yards from her, gleaming eyes and teeth showing white in the moonlight. She turned to face them, inviting them to attack. But they kept their distance, and she raised her hand, pointed away to the midnight hills. ‘Go!’ she said. And the dogs obeyed her, sank on their bellies and slunk away. She was stronger than they were. Stronger in her mind. And stronger than Simon too. He went giddy the moment he moved and collapsed on the ground.

  When he came to he was lying among the litter on the dirty floor. Single-handed Laura had shifted the heavy chest from the doorway, and a candle in a jam jar shed a flickering light, gleamed in the horse’s eyes outside and showed Laura kneeling beside him with a blood-soaked dressing in her hand.

  ‘That was stupid!’ she said. ‘A stupid thing to do! Why did you do it? Why run away from us? You had only to say you wanted to leave and we would have given you Timms, gone with you, shown you the way! You might have died if Tyler hadn’t spotted you. Don’t you care what happens to you? Are we so ugly and repulsive you couldn’t even bear to spend a few days with us? What’s wrong with us, Simon? What’s wrong with me?’

  Simon sat with his back against the wall. There was nothing wrong with Laura. She was a wonderful, beautiful person. Strands of her hair were the colour of moonlight and she might have been human. But her eyes were white and on her arms the pale fur shone with sheen. There was nothing wrong with that either, except that Simon could not accept it. He could not forget she was a mutant. He tried to explain.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s me who’s wrong. I’m prejudiced, I suppose. One hundred per cent human. It’s in me and I can’t change myself. I don’t measure up to you and I never will.’

  ‘In other words you have an inferiority complex?’

  ‘It’s how you make me feel,’ said Simon.

  ‘We don’t mean to,’ Laura said worriedly. ‘We respect what you are, just as we respect all forms of life. You’re sacred, Simon. Everything is.’

  ‘But I can’t buy that quasi religious bullshit!’

  ‘Surely it’s axiomatic?’ said Laura.

  ‘Axio-what?’

  ‘A self-evident universally accepted truth.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since, failing to see it, your kind engineered a nuclear war and almost destroyed everything.’

  ‘That’s what I mean!’ Simon said furiously. ‘That’s what it all boils down to! The sins of my fathers! I’ve inherited what they did, a madman on the road to extinction! I’m a member of a redundant species, don’t you see? I’ve got no future, and I’ve got no purpose, and I don’t need you to spell it out. I know I’m useless! I’ve been getting the message loud and clear from the moment I met you. Well, thanks for the lesson, but I’m not staying around to have it rubbed in!’

  Laura said nothing, went outside, took a compress and bandage from the saddle bag and rebound his leg. She gave him bread and cheese, water from a leather canteen, and the woollen shirt to wear beneath his caftan. Then she put on her over-gown, blew out the candle and waited for him to struggle to his feet. By now she had learned not to help him.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked.

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ Simon snapped.

  ‘I’ll take you to Timperley,’ she decided.

  ‘That’s miles away!’

  ‘You can ride the horse.’

  ‘I don’t know how to ride a horse!’

  ‘All you need to do is sit on his back,’ said Laura. ‘Surely even you can manage that much?’

  Timms was loaded with bed-rolls and blankets, standing patiently as Simon attempted to mount. But his leg felt dead, unable to support him, unable to provide the necessary thrust. This time Laura was bound to help him, slim fingers clutching his waist. And something boosted him, some huge force propelling him upward until he was suddenly sitting astride and looking down on her.

  ‘How did you do that?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘I eat spinach,’ said Laura. ‘Like the legendary Pop-Eye the Sailor blind Kate used to watch on television.’

  ‘Who the hell was he?’ Simon asked.

  Without bothering to reply Laura caught hold of the rein and led Timms from the churchyard as Simon swayed and steadied himself, gripped with his knees and clung to the saddle. He expected to take the track to the valley but instead they stayed on the high ground, and the moon on the river made a silver ribbon in the darkness below. Trees shivered on the wooded slopes, unreal and glittering, like the landscape of a dream. It had all gone dreamlike, and a girl with white-gold hair was leading him on through timeless distances under the vast expanse of starry sky in a world he did not know.

  The moon sank behind them. Simon was sagging with tiredness and his backside ached from riding before Laura suddenly stopped. He raised his head and saw a towering cromlech on the edge of a black abyss. Left and right a pathway wandered along the earth-bank borders between En
gland and Wales, scuffed smooth by the feet of ages. It was Offa’s Dyke on Sowerby’s map, old and ghost-haunted in Simon’s imagination. And the land fell away, hundreds of feet to the river below at the pitch black ending of the world.

  ‘They call this place the Devil’s Pulpit,’ Laura said, as she helped him dismount. ‘We’ll camp here till morning. I don’t want Timms to break his leg.’

  And Simon was too weary to argue.

  On a bed of heather with a blanket to cover him Simon slept soundly and awoke with a start. He could smell smoke, see fire, and twigs from the dead trees crackled as Laura held out her hands to the blaze. The surrounding darkness was intensified, moonless and still in the black hour before morning. A small wind whined around the Devil’s Pulpit, and the air was as cold as ice. Simon shivered, draped the blanket around his shoulder, and went to crouch by the fire. Laura added more wood.

  ‘It will be light soon,’ she said. ‘Then we can move on.’

  ‘We didn’t need to stop here in the first place,’ Simon muttered.

  ‘You’d had enough,’ Laura stated simply. ‘And I wasn’t leading Timms over the edge in the dark.’

  ‘You knew it was there, so why come this way?’

  ‘I wanted to show you.’

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘The view,’ said Laura.

  ‘You’ve brought me all this way to look at the blasted view? I suppose it didn’t occur to you I could lose my leg if I don’t get it seen to?’

  ‘If you lose your leg it’s your own fault!’ Laura retorted. ‘You shouldn’t have set out on your own in the first place. And criticizing me won’t make you any less stupid! So you may as well go back to bed!’

  She was not so perfect.

  She reacted as angrily as he did.

  ‘You can’t give me orders!’ Simon said belligerently. ‘I’ll do what I please! Go where I like, when I like, not when you say so! I’ll go to Timperley on my flipping own!’

  ‘I’ll tell them to expect you,’ Laura snapped.

  ‘Without a radio or telephone you can’t tell anyone anything!’ Simon said scornfully.

  ‘Can’t I?’

  He stared at her, sensing the significance.

  She was contradicting him.

  Hinting at something that was not rational.

  ‘How did that glider pilot tell you where to find me?’ Simon demanded. ‘He didn’t land at the settlement. He headed west in the opposite direction.’

  Laura smashed a broken branch and cast the dry wood chunks upon the fire. The flames leapt higher, reflected in her eyes, white and burning. Orange sheen danced on the fur of her face, showed scarlet on her hands as she once more spread them to warm.

  ‘If I told you,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t like it!’

  ‘So tell me anyway!’

  ‘We use telepathy!’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘The communication of direct thought.’

  Simon sat back. Maybe he had sensed it right from the beginning, powers such as he had never imagined, dangerous and inhuman. Maybe that was why he had run, not wanting to face the full meaning of mutation. He remembered Lilith’s black pin-prick pupils drilling into him. He remembered the terror of her smile. Across the scarlet red burning of the flames his eyes met Laura’s and this time there was no escape.

  ‘Can you read my mind?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Sometimes I can feel what you’re thinking, but not very often. If I could have read your mind we wouldn’t have needed Tyler to go looking for you. You’ve a closed mind mostly, like the rest of your kind.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Simon muttered. ‘I guess Tyler is also a mutant?’

  Laura shrugged.

  ‘We all are,’ she said simply.

  Simon nodded grimly. Apart from blind Kate there were none of his kind left living outside, and the white-winged glider had been nothing to do with the government bunker at Hereford. He had thought at the time there was something odd about it. Now he realized what that something was. No unpowered aircraft could fly like that, skim across the surface and rise using wind power alone. And what had provided the initial lift?

  ‘Who flies the tow plane?’ Simon asked.

  ‘What tow plane?’ said Laura.

  ‘You need a tow plane to get a glider airborne.’

  ‘They use the wind off Tressilech Beacon.’

  ‘That’s aerodynamically impossible.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Where’s your initial velocity? Where’s your thrust? That’s not a hang glider. You’ve got to have power to take off.’

  ‘PK,’ said Laura.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Psycho-kinetic energy. Mind over matter. The levitation principle. What else can we use? How else could we raise the standing stones, or build our settlements? How else could I have lifted you on to Timms’ back?’

  Simon closed his eyes. Black and crimson the firelight flickered on his closed eyelids and Laura’s voice seemed to come from far away, from the distances of the future or the past. Mental powers were nothing new, she said. They had been around since the dawn of time. Probably, in the beginning, everyone had possessed them and known how to use them. Like instinct they were necessary for survival in a world without cranes, or telephones, jet engines, sub-machine guns, antibiotics and geological instruments. But the old intuitive ways of knowing and doing things had been pushed to the back of human minds, passed over in favour of logical explanations, conscious understanding, and clever machines. They had survived only dimly in memories of magic and myth. But radiation from the nuclear war and an increase in ultraviolet light had caused genetic changes, changes which were not just physical but mental as well. Maybe mutants were a throwback to earlier stages of human development, but more likely they were the inheritors of all the stages of evolution.

  Simon struggled to accept what she was saying, the enormity of it, the huge implications. What kind of mind was it that could lift a glider from the ground? What kind of terrifying elemental force charged the neuronal circuits of the mutant brain? Allowed them to communicate over distances? Put to flight a pack of ravenous dogs? Locate gold? Heal wounds? And hoist him on to a horse? With powers like that the mutants did not need technology.

  ‘I think we’re a new species,’ Laura was saying. ‘I think we’ve hardly begun to learn, hardly begun to use our full potential. We don’t yet know our own minds, how they work, or what they can do.’

  Alpha and omega, Simon thought savagely.

  He was the last of his race.

  She was the first.

  And like Homo sapiens the mutants would find out.

  Laura read his mind.

  ‘No!’ she said desperately. ‘Why won’t you listen? Why can’t you see? That was your way, not ours! It’s what the holocaust taught us. Life is too precious for us to damage or destroy. What’s left belongs to all of us. We can share it, Simon, and we don’t need to fight or kill.’

  Simon looked at her in scorn. For all her power Laura was completely naive, and those who came from the government bunker would have no scruples. They might be willing to beg for houseroom among the mutant settlements but once it was granted, once they were all established, they would begin to take over, reclaim their rightful status in the social order. No one from the bunker would be willing to accept subservience. It was they who would rule, they who would become masters, and the mutants would be their slaves, put to work planting, and mining, and manufacturing machines. Mutants would build the underground cities, and fulfil their human dreams.

  ‘You’ll fight when you have to,’ Simon assured her. ‘When it’s either us or you, you’ll fight.’

  ‘Except that there’s not many left of you,’ Laura pointed out. ‘And every year there are less.’

  ‘We still have time.’

  ‘And we have the minds,’ she reminded him.

  Simon glanced at her, feeling suddenly sick.

>   ‘You could control us?’

  ‘Like dogs if we have to.’

  The firelight seemed cold.

  And there was nothing more to say.

  Simon sat on an outcrop of rock. Daylight brightened around him and the valley below was shrouded in mist. He was a shivering useless lump of human flesh, numb with cold, unable to help himself. His injured leg was stiff and hurting, but pain no longer mattered. Nothing mattered any more. Laura had stripped away the last vestiges of pride, and defeat had nothing to do with war. It was an emotional experience, a sense of futility as relentless as grief. He had tried to fight it, lashed out in anger against everything Laura was, but all that remained was the final acknowledgement of her supremacy, the final giving up.

  His caftan was soaked with overnight dew but the grey haze held a promise of sun. It did not cheer him any. He could not live in it, not without Laura. He would have to go crawling to her for everything he needed. It was her world now, not his, and he heard her saddling the horse, talking to it softly, making ready to go. She did not know what she had done to him. She did not know she had finally killed his hope.

  It might have been easier to bear if the mutants had conquered them, taken them by force and stormed the bunker. In war, or death, or even enslavement, Simon could have retained a kind of purpose, a concept of eventual freedom. But the war was fifty years over. His own people had fought it and lost it, and he had been born in their defeat. Laura was not his enemy. He had no enemy, except himself.

  It was himself he had to accept, not Laura . . . his pride, his aggression, his mistaken human belief that he was the lord over all creation, made in the image of God. There was no proof of that, and there never had been. If God was everywhere then He was no more in Simon than in the woodlouse that crawled at his feet, in the piebald horse and the seed-heads of grasses. And if God was in him then He was in Laura too, and in that case she was right, the world was made for sharing, even with him.