by Geoff Wolak
‘Her Majesty’s minions … must be starting to doubt that divine power,’ Jimmy suggested. ‘This many set-backs would affect anyone.’
‘Maybe the wider population don’t know about the set-backs,’ Susan stated.
‘Dictators cover up failures,’ I said. ‘So maybe the press over there don’t report the losses. And those loses are alien loses, not humans. So if the subjugated masses are … well, subjugated, they don’t know what’s going on.’
‘I suspect that some know,’ Jimmy told me. ‘And that some are working hard to screw up the Zim plans. I think we have friends over there, an underground movement worthy of Dr Singh himself. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me, because they should have won against us – they were sampling the future and reacting accordingly. You could do that thousands of times. So something is stopping them, and maybe the underground is that something.’
‘Question is,’ I began. ‘Do the aliens have friends out there in the vastness of space? Have they made a call and asked for help, or … are they a long way from home and lost, isolated, or … just the first wave?’
‘Given how poorly they’ve done against us,’ Jimmy began. ‘I’d say they’re isolated. And I damn well hope so.’
‘Any word from Sandra’s world?’ Susan broached. Up to now we have avoided the topic; it had only been a few weeks.
‘We’ve not dialled in yet,’ Jimmy explained.
‘I have a trip-wire system set-up,’ Baldy admitted. ‘If that planet goes EM silent we’ll get a message.’
‘And what?’ Susan began. ‘Start all over again, watch him die again and again.’
‘Susan!’ I firmly called.
She stared back for a moment, before lowering her gaze.
‘You have the right to care,’ Jimmy told her. ‘And Toby … he has the right to fight for what he believes in. You, Susan, undertook a dangerous mission when you came to us. And how do you think your own parents reacted?’
We waited, the table quiet and uncomfortable.
‘He’s hardly spent any time around here in the past few years,’ she softly complained.
‘He’s doing what he loves,’ Baldy said. ‘And something that very few ever get to do. I’m jealous as hell of him.’
‘Me too,’ I admitted. ‘Flying orbital craft – into combat? What a lucky bugger.’
Susan shot me a look.
‘You have your hands full as it is,’ Jimmy reminded her. ‘And the reason that you miss that trouble-maker so much … is because you never did get to control him, to make him do what you wanted him to do, to be what you wanted him to be. That’s your fault, not his.’ She stared back at Jimmy. ‘You have the right to raise them, not control them, and then they have the right to forget your birthday.’
‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘When Jimmy told me to let Shelly go I could have hit him.’
I could see Baldy nodding. ‘They get to be too big to hug.’
‘And as for my brood,’ Jimmy began. ‘It would be unseemly for the lord and master of an English country mansion to hug his kids. I used to hug my girls in bed, when they were asleep, and without my wife seeing. I’d sit for hours and just watch them breathe.’
‘You told me off for doing that!’ Baldy said.
‘It’s sometimes easier to give the advice, than to take it,’ Jimmy quipped.
Galactic Pleb
A week later I set-off for Manson, soon back at the embassy after my extended break away. I caught up with Henry, a long discussion about the conflict on Toby’s world over a bottle of wine, or three, and spent an evening with the security staff, beers downed as they brought me up to speed on football practice – and which teams were doing better than the others.
I settled into reading reports, and caught up on the principal reason for me being here; the development of the Seether. Oil production in the north was still growing, and had to be cut back due to surpluses. Some of the human staff had been sent to other regions to teach and to help out.
On the Hawaiian Islands, life was reported as being idyllic, but the males were proving to be pretty damned useless fathers, so much so that the kids were now back in the care of Rescue Force. The males meant well, but had no paternal instinct that could be detected, and not much of an interest in wasting time playing with babies. It was a set-back, since we had hoped that the Seether would become a little more like us.
In Cuba it was a similar story, where males had to be paid to look after the babies. But the news from Cuba was less idyllic, and more industrial. Oil was flowing, small quantities refined for dated petrol cars and for domestic heaters and boilers, some oil earmarked for the transport ships. The roads were being cleared at a great rate, and now we had miles of road that went from nowhere – to nowhere. But at least those roads were clear. Fields had been ploughed, crops planted, native coconuts and bananas harvested, fish caught on a daily basis.
In Havana, Seethan fishermen sold their catches to the small human population now living there, and Seethan farmers sold their bananas and coconuts to the “ancestors”. A few concrete structures, that had once been hotels, had been fixed up, and now we allowed a certain number of tourists to visit, but just Cubans on sentimental journeys of self discovery.
And the Seethan bachelors, they were excellent at clearing the barnacles off the bottoms of the old cargo ships we had received from the Azores, many of the bachelors gainfully employed. They could hold their breath for at least four minutes without any side effects, and swam down with scrapers to clean the ships’ undersides – sharks avoided from time to time.
But the largest project, and the largest movement of Preethans, was down the Kansas road. Small villages had sprouted up throughout Kansas, or along the route south, and ranches had been created by Preethans that seemed more entrepreneurial than I would have given them credit for. They did, however, all seem to have government contracts for what they produced. And by produced, I mean what they rounded up running wild around Kansas and Texas. I was also informed by the guards that steak was now readily available in Seethan territory, and cheap, sold to local merchants by the Preether.
Henry and I discussed whether or not we had averted a war this summer through oil and cattle, and both of us figured that recent developments must be having an effect. Pleb had suggested that the Preether bombed each and every summer, and so far we had witnessed nothing other than an attempt to bomb the first football tournament at our new stadium.
Down in Texas, oil was flowing again with the aid of our human engineers, tanker trucks being filled and sent north, a small refinement plant now operating, enough gasoline produced to just about service the Preethan convoys. And, according to the estimates made by the aerial drones, there were some eleven thousand Preether now residing in either Texas or Kansas. Whilst I had been away, the Seethan Government had moved another five thousand bachelors north to the Canadian oil fields, and the two warring factions were putting some distance between themselves.
One report I read suggested that there was still a population of some eleven hundred people in the Azores, mostly the descendants of the indigenous Portuguese peoples. Some of those families were now being offered homes on the Azores, but on other worlds, and a few families had gone for a visit. Those that remained did not quite understand why they should move anyway, despite the prospect of an alien attack. There was no hurry, so we left them to their own devices for now; Jimmy was going to deal with them himself.
In Africa, New Kinshasa was a patch of mud with the beginnings of a road through it, but many mines had been started in the region, and oil was flowing. Farms had been created, including fish farms, and a large number of volunteers now toiled away in the heat and the flies, working on very basic road structures from the 1960s.
In Britain, the young Seethan lad from our time known as Paul was busy organising collectives in a fashion that would have made Castro proud. But to the Seether they were normal, and if the bachelors could see that their hard work came back to bene
fit them they were happy enough. A single Seethan could never manage a farm, they all knew that, and so groups formed, tasks being allocated. Trading markets were run every Saturday morning, and those with too much sold or swapped their stocks with others.
Horses had been rounded up, but they were useless as farm animals until tamed, and that process would be long and difficult. So tame horses had been brought through from future Britain, and ploughs were soon seen being pulled by horses. It was primitive and backward, but we could not just hand the Seether advanced technology. The young Seethan leader did, however, receive two dozen dated tractors, petrol engines, and soon had them in use on the farms. Such tractors were available to the Seether and Preether in America, and so no one was worried by the technological move.
After a week back at the embassy, I considered that things were ticking along nicely, and that the likelihood of war had abated. Since that was what I considered my main aim, I was happy, or rather contented that things were progressing. I often thought about Toby, and from time to time it did bother me, more so than I would have admitted to Susan or Jimmy.
Pleb had crashed a car, set fire to some curtains, and life was back to normal at the embassy. Then one morning, as we sat around Henry’s desk, a portal crackled into life at the end of the room. Pleb jumped through dressed oddly, stared at us, and looked over his shoulder as we stood, alarms sounding.
‘Fluck it,’ Pleb said, heavily accented. To me, he said, ‘Sorry, not correct place in time … and things.’ He jumped back through, the portal closing, leaving us stood there as guards burst in, weapons in hands, the curtains smouldering and singed.
‘A portal opened!’ they shouted.
‘It’s OK,’ I told them. ‘It was … a future version of Pleb, but … he dialled the wrong place and time.’ I stood and stared at Henry and the staff, then shook my head, smiling. The staff started laughing, some tackling the smouldering curtains.
Henry began, ‘I thought we agreed to keep Pleb away from sharp objects, let alone a portal!’
I shrugged. ‘Sometime in their future he gets access to a portal and … wants to go somewhere. Guess he may just find it, eventually. That or he’ll appear at the Battle of Waterloo.’
Figuring I would do the rounds on this world and review the outposts, I hopped back to 1938-world and flew across to Britain, a brief chat to Susan on the flight over the Atlantic. Back on Seether, British Seether, I was met by my Seethan name sake, Paul.
We shook. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked.
‘All progressing as per my plan,’ he responded as we made our way towards dated cars.
‘Your … plan?’
He puzzled my meaning. ‘I have, naturally, made a plan, or my time here would be not efficient.’
‘Well, we can’t have you not being efficient, can we,’ I quipped.
He gave me an odd look. ‘Is there something wrong, Mister Holton?’ he asked we slipped into the back of a car that reminded me of my youth in London.
‘No, so long as you notify me of exactly what you’re doing here, step by step.’
‘I believe that your staff here would notify you if I did something that was considered inappropriate.’
‘So what is your … particular plan?’ I pressed as we drove, noisily, towards the main population centre.
‘Simply to organise the people here as they are organised over in Seether, and then to advance a few areas.’
‘Which … areas?’
‘Farming, and farm-related technologies. In order for the population to expand, they will need a wide agrarian base. That base would then offer individuals free time gained from efficiencies, and that time could be spent working on metals and machines, so that a support sector develops, such as furriers, builders, carpenters.’
‘Furriers or farriers?’ I queried.
‘Both.’
I waited.
‘A furrier works with animal hides, a farrier with horse shoes,’ he pointed out.
‘Just testing,’ I said, no idea which was which.
He shot me a puzzled look. ‘That … service sector will develop - and need currency, which develops a financial sector, and the negotiated contracts of produce.’
‘Futures and options,’ I noted. ‘I was a trader a very long time ago.’
‘I would hope that the farms spread shore to shore here, and that the barter system will soon be replaced by currency.’
‘And progress?’
‘The men already here soon learn that they can farm in small groups, and the hostels have gone, groups of perhaps six to eight now running farms.’
‘That’s a great many farms.’
‘Yes, over a hundred, the farthest some forty miles north of us,’ he enthused.
We pulled up at his headquarters, a concrete structure that had withstood the test of time, many large tents dotted around a field that had received a haircut recently. The building sat surrounded by tall trees, and had been cleaned up, canvas patching up holes in the ceiling. He walked towards the building, but I wanted to drive the car. ‘I’ll be back,’ I shouted towards him. ‘Haven’t driven one of these for … eighty years or so.’
Brake, clutch, turn the key. It roared back into life, a guard sat with me and puzzling the dated controls. First gear, ease off the clutch, stalled it. Bugger. Start again, ease off the clutch, more gas, and away we go. I brought it back ten minutes later, just the one smashed light.
Inside, I found a few of my human staff, a group of Rescue Force reconstruction staff, and my host. Maps were pinned to the walls, old Ordnance Survey maps from 1974.
I studied the maps. ‘What use are these?’
‘We clear the main roads, and the maps tell us where they should be,’ Paul informed me. ‘The map also tells us where buildings are, possibly buried, and river courses.’
‘How far do your roads extend?’
‘The A1 is the main highway. It goes north as far as Peterborough, and down to the A41, which we have cleared around to the A34, and we are progressing west and making good progress down the A420 towards the M4.’
‘I used to drive along the M4 all the time,’ I said with a smile, remembering the old apartment in London. ‘If you clear it all the way to Wales, there’ll be a few sheep wandering around that you can pinch.’
‘We wish very much to reach the Welsh foothills, since sheep could be reared there in great numbers, as well as cattle. The area offers good soil.’
‘Been left fallow for seventy years,’ I said. ‘That’s why. Probably overgrown with trees by now.’
He led me outside and showed me around a nearby farm, and I met many of the farm hands, the ‘bachelors’ working as a commune. About to leave, I noticed a football.
‘Do you play?’ I asked, Paul translating.
‘Saturday league,’ they responded.
I stopped dead. ‘Saturday league?’
Paul informed me, ‘We have twelve pitches spread around the area, and twenty-two teams.’
My eyes widened. ‘Twenty-two teams?’
‘I have created a league, and we play on a Saturday afternoon, as it traditional in Britain.’
‘How do they … like it?’ I asked.
‘It is a game which, one started, cannot be stopped; there is always next week’s match, livestock wagered on occasion.’
‘Oh, well … good. It’s good to see that they’ve taken to it.’
Paul led me outside. ‘Sir, I fail to see what you do – in your desire for the spread of the game. It is an enjoyable pastime for the men, certainly, but what do you hope to gain from it?’
I led him towards a rusted red tractor. ‘Back over in America, the Seether and the Preether have evolved societies that are easy to control, and by control I mean lie to and start wars. What the population over there don’t realise … is that most of the reported border skirmishes never happen – it’s politics.’
‘Never happen?’
‘No, the presidents use the threat of conflict to
rally the downtrodden masses, and life in the hostels is not great for the bachelors. Football was sold to the leadership as a combat training exercise, so they allowed it, and now it’s out of control – which is good. Bachelors shout, cheer and smile, and they lift their heads out of the mundane lives they have.
‘But, most importantly, it’s my aim to have the Seether play the Preether, and to break down a few barriers. But, more than that, I’d like to see a combined league, and teams based around towns and cities, Seethans meeting Preethans on a weekly basis and getting to know one another, not seeing enemies on TV screens. We can’t organise a joint picnic or fun run, but we can organise a competitive game of football.’
‘You will undermine the leadership,’ Paul said with a nod. ‘But you could just use force of arms to take control here.’
‘We aim to develop the Seethan, not mould them. They need to be their own people, but with some guidance from us. Look what happened on Fiji: we gave them babies and they lost them, no paternal instinct at all. So we can’t just take our society and use it as a blueprint. They have to develop as they develop, and slowly, the aim not being to make them humans.’
‘The aim, surely, would be to develop the best political structures for the future,’ Paul puzzled.
‘No, Jimmy doesn’t want that approach. We found the Seether developing, and we’ll help, but we won’t change the course too much. They are their own people, their own race, and their future cousins have already made changes. We’re guardians and custodians of your race, not parents or politicians.’
‘How, exactly, do you plan the development of my people, knowing how we turn out?’
‘I don’t try and make a plan with Sandra in mind, I … just do what I do, which must be correct, or it would be a paradox. Jimmy plucked your mother from a future date, a peaceful and prosperous Seethan world. Whatever I do … is what I did before, so I just make it up as I go along.’
He shot me a puzzled look. ‘That appears to be a most inefficient plan … for something so complex.’