Chapter 4
I sat atop a rocky outcrop; it had taken me twenty minutes to climb up to this point and it was worth it. The blank peace I’d been enjoying was fading away now and my brain was waking up once more. Slowly, conscious thought pushed its way back into my head forcing me to acknowledge the niggling questions I had shut out on my climb. But the thoughts were not overpowering just yet, and I was able to let my mind wander a little longer.
As I waited I brushed my hands lightly over the small tufts of grass beside me, prickling my skin slightly as the blades stabbed upwards at my fingers. It was a coarse, dry grass that existed here on the rock, unlike the lush and tended lawns of the other parks. It was the reason I loved this place. It was one of the things that made it real.
This grass was a natural occurrence in the formulaic and manufactured world I existed in and distrusted so much. The sparse soil pockets that the grass seeds planted themselves into were not placed on the crevices by design, but had sprung up over time as the air circulation system of the station forced minute amounts of dust into the atmosphere of the Family Quarter. In most places this dust would be invisible where it settled or was periodically cleaned away, but not up here. There was no one to clean the dust away here because no one really came to this park except me. (I’d already made sure of this by checking the scanner records, once I’d found a way to hack in to the system. Very few people even ventured into the park, let alone stayed long enough to indicate they had travelled sufficiently far to reach my current location). Over time, seeds from the parks and residential zone lawns must have mingled into the dust and found their way here. Then they settled themselves into place, to wait for the opportunity of light and moisture to make them grow. Nature always finds a way, I mused dreamily. It was a reassuring notion.
My gaze drifted lazily over the landscape of the Family Quarter spread out before me. Park 42 sat at the outer edge of the quarter, reportedly close to the external walls of the space station itself. Not that my calculations on gravitational pull would support the theory that we would have such a strong gravitational field on board if the Family Quarter truly was the largest section of the space station. But, I had no proven alternative to offer at this point in time, as to what the alternatives might exist, and so I dismissed the problem, just as I had many times before.
Up here I could see pretty much everything, whilst remaining near invisible myself: the rock face was so similar in colour to the grey external walls at the edges of the Family Quarter that it blended in almost completely. If I hadn’t been climbing out here in the park one day – something that was not permitted due to the dangers it posed – then I probably would have been ignorant to its existence myself.
There was no denying that the view was impressive: it was the highest reachable point within the station. In the distance to the left, my eyes picked out three tall buildings stretching from the middle of a group of smaller ones, that made up the main hub at the centre of the Black, Green and Blue residential zones. The Clinic – where Mother worked – was the tallest of the three. From here they appeared small and almost unreal, like a model I might have made and placed on a table to walk around and peer into, as though I were a giant.
I was no giant. If I had been I probably would have smashed the towers into pieces, enjoying each snap and crack as I destroyed another of the symbols of the lies we were told about ourselves.
How could the others not see it? This question troubled me now, just as it always did. Was I more observant than them, or were they just more a part of the system than I was?
Not for the first time I considered again whether it was me who was the problem – some genetic throwback with inherited mental imbalances – I dismissed that, as usual. I’d already tested myself extensively to see if my observations were hallucination or paranoia. They were neither.
My thoughts drifted back to the day I’d found the secondary receiver inside my viewing screen. I remembered immediately my anger at being proved right once more: we were being lied to and watched. What was the purpose of it? Surely, it would only make sense to lie, if there was something to hide…?
It always surprised me how much I wanted my research and investigations to prove me wrong and not the system I in lived within. I wanted to be the failure and anomaly, not everyone else. After all, that would be the easier thing to believe. So far, that had not happened. I had always been proved right and it had been that way since the first day I began to suspect. Before I could stop myself, I found I was tumbling headlong into a memory I usually kept hidden.
The Rainbow Maker's Tale Page 6