The summer sun washed down over my knitted brow but away in the forest something stirred. It seemed a well-worn line, but definitely leaves were being parted fifty yards away and I was being examined with what I hoped was pleasant curiosity. "You down there!" I yelled, producing a shiver in the distant leaves and a loud screech from Mary.
"What?" The question floated up coated with irritation.
"Visitors!"
The word produced an instant flurry of activity as all three of them popped out of their lair and hastily climbed up to cluster beside me, staring around them with much energy and little skill because they saw nothing and said so emphatically. Melanee, of course, eventually noticed where my gun barrel was pointing and let out a squeak of alarm. Repressing an urge to chuckle at the sight of the biggest brain in the universe reduced to near panic at the sight of what was probably an inquisitive hog, I told them all to sit down.
Mike gave me one of his accusing looks but subsided, clutching his rifle like a teddy bear. "What now? Gunfire?" He whispered dramatically. Mary frowned severely but Melanee touched my arm nervously although I had already seen it.
The trees, oaks again, I noticed, parted and a woman commenced to climb the steep, grass covered slope towards us. Behind her, dark forms flitted to and fro, but she seemed unafraid and decisive because she waved them back, a flick of her hand that showed authority. In silence we watched her approach steadily until she was standing just a few feet away, gazing up at us. Long, dark hair, with streaks of grey, a dress that looked like expensive suede and remarkably modern seeming shoes sprouting leather tendrils which wound round her legs up to the knee. A sunburnt face, lined but not old, with two very blue eyes under dark eyebrows regarding us with intelligence. Her look passed from one to the other of us, assessing, noting, but not showing any fear. She ran her gaze over the aircar, taking in the metallic gleam of it with a slight frown.
"No weapons." Mary muttered.
"They could have a machine gun in those trees." Mike said huskily, earning him a disdainful glance.
The woman heard the talk, listening intently, but she took a pace back when Melanee stood up. "I shall talk to her." She announced and before I could exercise any veto, she slid off the casing on to the top of the construction, jumping athletically down to the long grass.
"Bloody hell!" I snarled. "Mike, watch out behind us!"
The two women, common citizens of this odd planet, much closer to each other than we were to either of them, examined each other's clothing with what was obviously some fascination, ignoring the snarl of irritation I let out from above. Ten thousand years had not, it seemed, eradicated shopping instincts. I half expected Melanee to start asking about dress sizes but instead she leaned forward and felt the material on the woman's arm. In return the woman, who appeared to be struck with Melanee's blinding smile, let out a long sentence in low voice. The words were distinct, unhurried and inquisitive. Melanee replied and a conversation started up.
"I'm going down there." Mary announced. Sliding an eyebrow at Mike I caught the look of exasperation tinged with resignation. A female conference was going on and Mary was not going to be left out. Slithering down, she joined them and soon a rising volume of chat wafted into the summer morning. It was all very pastoral and interesting, no doubt, but the woman's allies, lurking in the trees were getting agitated. The shapes of several men emerged from the undergrowth clutching a variety of weapons. A male yell of some volume and heavy menace floated up to us.
"Two more coming up behind." Mike's throaty whisper informed my left ear.
"Enough." I growled, standing up from my crouch. Hefting the rifle, I cocked it loudly, the metallic clang sounding harsh. The chatter stopped and faces lifted up.
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but there's two guys creeping up the other side who are going to be consulting ancestors before long. If you can understand what she says, tell her to get them to back off or..." I lifted the rifle. Mike, standing close, shuddered, I felt it.
"No!" Melanee held out her hands as if to push me away. Turning to the woman who had retreated a step, she pointed up at me, talking rapidly. The woman certainly didn't like what she said, her face changed, became older almost, the calm expression dissolving into a grimace of hatred. Recognising the symptoms, I fired a shot in the air, the report making them all jump. Swivelling round to the two men gliding up the steep slope behind us, I was gratified to see that the gunshot had switched on their survival syndromes, because they were now retreating. Hastening their efforts with several shots under their noses, I snarled at Mike to watch them and leaped down to the grassy bank, landing beside Mary.
"You!" I pointed the rifle at the woman. "I'll kill every bastard, every one, understand!"
"No! David please!" Melanee grabbed my arm as the woman retreated, her face twitching with sudden fear.
"Tell them to run, to go back where they came." I said clearly, pointing the gun at the woman because it was obvious that she, at least, could understand. "Not you, you stand still."
"She wants to know where we came from." Mary explained nervously.
Yeah?" I grunted, aware that the shadowy figures in the forest edge had obeyed the woman's hasty gesture and moved back until they were mere outlines, dimly seen. "What did you tell her?"
"It's amazing." Mary was gazing at the woman with astonishment. "The language is mangled but it's still there."
"Just like the Scots, eh?" I agreed nastily. "What were you going to do, kill us?" I glared at the woman with no very friendly gaze. The first thing the inhabitants of this planet wanted to do when they saw us was fill us full of holes. Melanee's long dead companion, the Picts and Scots and now her tribal allies, they all appeared to want the same thing. Considering how empty this world was, one would have thought that fresh faces would be welcomed.
The woman regarded me with icy reserve, flicking her glance from me to my rifle. "You come from the sky." She said after an interval for thought. "We have memories, we know who killed the world."
Sharing Mary's astonishment, I found myself staring at her. The accent was atrocious but the syntax wasn't. All the same, her so-called racial memories had awkward implications. If they all thought we were the ones who had assassinated the teeming population then no wonder they were slightly cool. But, surely, this had to be no more than folklore, legends, after ten thousand years.
"She think you kill the Earth." Melanee explained, her smile reappearing. "I tell her it is not true, you come back after huge journey, asleep all the time and you find this." She waved her hand to include the endless forest. "But she does not believe me." She added, sadly, the smile disappearing.
We all stood and stared at her. It was odd, more than odd, uncanny. Mary, having subsided from her apprehensions about gunfire, took my arm and showed me the entrance they had found, a steepish trench, leading downwards at a sharp angle to a black opening.
"See?" She said quietly. "The other one didn't have this and when you go in there's the usual terminal plus a set of those ear blasters or whatever. That one up there," she gestured vaguely towards Scotland. "It must have been more damaged than we thought."
"Under here," Mike continued the story, pointing down the slope. "There's got to be some kind of nuclear regenerator or rechargeable cells, but I don't see where the solar arrays can be." He frowned furiously as if it was my fault.
"Does it matter?" I muttered. "Have you done what you wanted?" It was time we left this enigmatic woman and her band of merry men to their forest gloom.
"Not quite." Melanee said. "We have to be careful because of those neural trigger things. We don't want to switch them on, do we?"
"Shoot the things to bits." I suggested snappily, thinking of the time we were wasting.
"No!" The woman entered our conversation with a decisive exclamation.
"No?" I gazed at her coldly. "Why the hell not?"
She struggled to explain, spluttering about magic protection and sundry catastrop
hes that would descend on them if we wrecked everything, but listening to her somewhat mangled expostulations, it occurred to me that she was by no means the bucolic specimen which we had supposed. Memory recalled also the sharp intelligence of the Scots brigade, not bovine at all, quite the opposite, so what about the presumed loss of free will which Marie had waxed so eloquent about?
"Addiction." The word penetrated my musings. Melanee, of course, was dissecting the local representative with pitiless understanding. She nodded peacefully at the woman but glanced at me with a wry expression.
"We should have thought of it." Mary muttered. "That's why there's always hundreds of the things."
The woman stopped her lecture about latter day Luddites, listened to our talk and frowned furiously. "We...we must have food from Gods or we die."
"She's too bright." Mary muttered. "How come?"
"And those Scots maniacs, they were no vegetables." Mike added from his perch above us, obviously listening to this strange conversation with interest.
"Evolution, mutation." Mary said suddenly. "Ten thousand years and no damned pill is going to keep us down to gorilla standard. They've evolved out of it."
"What about the genetic line?" Mike enquired. "Supposed to carry on, isn't it?"
"Marie told me it was just a small alteration and it would only take two of them to break the pattern, to render the dominant gene latent." Mary said slowly, frowning. "Of course, it won't get them free of the three-child rule."
"How many of the white food do you take." Melanee suddenly shot the question at the woman who had been listening to us with a bemused expression.
"We must have the food!" She was getting excited but then the sense of Melanee's question seemed to seep into her cortex because she stared at her with some surprise. "Only man children have the food."
Light dawned on me. "What a splendid idea!"
Melanee smiled her inscrutable smile. "Women rule the world."
"What's new?" Mike enquired, earning him a thin smile from Mary.
"Everything is new." Melanee said calmly, staring at the woman.
Chapter 26
DEEP FRANCE
In the end, the women took our new friend down with them to the mysterious chamber containing the terminal and God knew what else. Mike raised alarmed eyebrows at me, said something brief and anatomical and slid down to join the scrum inside this damned odd edifice, leaving me to contemplate the new population of Hampshire who were peering at me from the green wilderness all round us.
"Great." I muttered, annoyed with myself for being unable to think of any better plan than simply flying down to greet Selena and Max with a cheerful blast of cannon fire and then scraping the bodies off the floor afterwards. The trouble was, this satisfying scenario was never going to work. They knew we were coming or they soon would if we crossed the Channel and they must surely have a fine variety of American goodies just waiting for us, like radar guided rotary cannon, or maybe infra-red homers ready to tear our engines to bits. Of course, the clever set now fiddling with ten-thousand-year-old keyboards underneath me needed to be kept alive or Selena's empire would never take off. The beautiful brains of our two lady loves had somehow scrambled the operating code of this ever loving system buried in France and sundry other places. Without the code, no millions of new slaves to dance in the greenwood, so Max and co wouldn't kill us right away.
"Bugger." I said to the surrounding scenery. It didn't help because I got no reply. There were a lot more of them than us. We'd started out even, nine of us and nine of them but we'd had casualties and the Jules/Marie axis was absent. Whatever we did, I could see us being surrounded by guns.
But then, sitting on an English hill top, on a spot where the Emperor Claudius might well have decided to lunch on British captives had he felt hungry enough, a bright thought arrived. Someone, Marie I remembered, had told us that there was more than one terminal in France besides the Quissac complex. Where was it? Was it live? Suppose we creep off and set it up so that Selena and co have to go there to switch on the New World? Surely the genius could arrange a simple thing like that?
An arrow whistled past my nose to bring me back to current problems. The natives were getting restless. Putting two rounds close enough to the bowman to make him take up ancestor worship brought back peace and quiet until the investigation committee swarmed out of the hole downstairs. Loud and uncomplimentary language floated up which ceased when I fired a shot in the air. The female tribal boss lady was clearly not among my admirers and Mary seemed to agree with her.
"Can't you stop killing people? For God's sake, David, why are we doing this? We want a better world where we don't murder one another!"
"There's no blood, not even mine." I told them mildly.
"Then what...?" Mike looked round him suspiciously, fingering his rifle.
"A warning." Melanee explained placidly, smiling gently at her new friend. "You should go back and tell your people we will soon be gone and they need not worry."
The woman seemed bemused, gazing at Melanee as if she had a halo over her head but then she gave me a black look, bestowed a half smile on Mike and Mary, turned without a word and retreated back to her allies in the trees. We all watched her depart, seeing the shadows retreat and stillness returned to the forest. You couldn't see twenty yards but we knew they had gone.
"What goes on?" I enquired. "Why don't you all come up here and have a spot of lunch while I tell you the master plan I've just thought up." Since they didn't move I added a sweetener. "It's infallible." Modesty is one of my virtues.
"That bloody woman knew how to stop the brain controller working." Mike stated, gazing with a morose expression into the dense forest.
"I have been thinking." Melanee said, causing a subdued chorus of groans. She smiled her superior smile, held up a hand for me to boost her up to the car casing, and ignored the looks of irritation. "Such a lot of time." She added composedly, increasing the irritation quotient considerably by making us ask her what she was talking about.
"Come on, Melanee." Mike snapped. "You're getting worse than him."
I grinned but listened as we all did. It was becoming a habit. "Ten thousand years. Up to the time of your journey that was nearly twice the time the human race took to evolve to the high standards of knowledge you took to another star."
"So?" Mary had her best frown working. "We didn't have genetic inhibitors in our genes."
"It would only take one." Melanee said. "They could not, you see, do anything about the birth rate, but they could give themselves a degree of free will, of intelligence if you like."
"Really? How the hell did they do that?" Mike demanded.
"You are not a genetic scientist." She told him sweetly.
"And you are?" I enquired politely. Pretty soon, I could see we would all have to be polite around Melanee. That brain of hers kept on growing.
"Oh, yes." She nodded. "I do not want to be but I am. It is in my head. You know about surplus DNA? Yes? There are quite large segments of the spiral that do not seem to do anything. It was thought that they were leftovers, histories of past orders that had lapsed, mutated possibly."
Mary's frown was now painful to see. "So what? We know the code."
"Yes, but whoever thought up this Old Testament plan, they used part of the surplus DNA to respond to those neurone control capsules. They made them addictive so that the message was reinforced."
"Yes, I see." Mary switched off the frown and smiled rather devastatingly at Mike. "We could have done with her back then. My God...never mind. You see? The message gets passed on but it's on DNA that's not used for anything else and it would only take one person to stop taking the damned things to pass on genes down the line far enough. Maybe it took ten, fifteen generations but eventually there was a child whose parents didn't having matching genes carrying the code. It clearly didn't get rid of all of it because there's not enough people around, but it let some of them think."
"And this woman is one
of them?" I asked, enlightenment descending slowly. "And those bloody Scots? All over the world there must be people who know, who understand."
"Yeah." Mike breathed. "Prisoners in their own heads." He thinned his lips and gazed at me. "I think I'd like to get my hands on Max and Selena. What's this master plan?"
"There's another terminal in France, right? Remember what Jules was telling us?" I gazed into the green haze surrounding us, musing. "You know, we've all been slow. Why did Jules and Marie flit off? To live ever after chewing wild chestnuts? I don't believe it. They knew where that terminal is and they knew that they only had to talk to Max and he would welcome them back with open arms."
"Would he?" Mary stared at me with frown lines like railway tracks across her forehead. "Why should he?"
"Because Marie knows how to work the program." Melanee stated with certainty. She frowned at me in a disapproving way. "How did you know?"
"She was pretty damned slick with those computers back at Quissac, right? How did she know how to work out what those damned pills did? Never mind that, did you do the deed?"
"She did." Mary said, removing her frown and glancing slyly at Melanee. "I stood well back. I don't want no special program to start up in my head." She spoke lightly but the fear was there and plain to see. For an instant, we all stared at each other, remembering Linda.
"OK." Mike muttered. "It's done. They will be denied access..."
"Access? Access to what and where?" I demanded. "What about that terminal in France? Can we work anything from there?"
"Why?" Melanee enquired before answering her own question. "Of course, Jules and Marie will be there." She nodded as if confirming some impending delinquency on my part.
"You got it." I sighed and wished ten-thousand-year-old whisky would suddenly appear. "We've got to get them out from that Quissac place. We'll be sitting ducks there, so, we tell them they have to go to the other terminal and Melanee here taps in all sorts of juicy things. We convince them that everything can be run from there."
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