Children of the Dust (15 page)

It was humiliating, because in a way it was true. They had achieved nothing in the bunker which could prove her wrong. She was well clothed, well fed, secure in her way of life with her primitive religious beliefs and her Geiger-counter mind. For her, reality was good and she had no need to dream of a better world. And Simon was as well schooled as Sowerby and Harris, in theory, but he could do damn all in practice.

'We can make bricks,' Laura had told him. 'I suppose you use them for building hovels?' Simon had asked.

'We build cathedrals,' she replied.

Simon hated her for that. Perhaps it was automatic. Her appearance alone made her different from him, and human beings had always feared and hated anyone who was different. Two thousand years of history saw it being repeated over and over, the perpetual struggle of one race, or tribe, or creed, against another . . . each one thinking they were right, superior, morally justified, or chosen by God. Simon saw himself as normal, Laura as abnormal. He was human, she was a mutant. But her kind had everything, his kind nothing, and he resented it. Blood ran down his leg and soaked his moccasin as she stopped and looked back.

'Are you all right, Simon?' called Harris. 

'Want us to chair-lift you?' Sowerby asked. 

'I'm not a cripple!' Simon shouted. 

And Laura laughed.

They were already half-way down the hill when Simon reached the top. The valley was below him, blurred by plastic, and indistinct. He stood with his back to the sun and raised his visor, drew in his breath. It was an incredible place. Fields of oats and barley rippled in the wind and there were trees as he had never seen before, towers of leaves swaying and sighing. Birds sang and bean flowers smelled sweet, and green woods grew on the hills beyond. Yet Simon hardly saw all that. It was just a setting for the great building that dominated everything.

This was not the place his mother had visited, a village of tin-roofed shacks and battered glasshouses. The building Simon was seeing was not even western in design. It reminded him of a Tibetan monastery he had once viewed on the computer video screen before the electronics broke down. Sheer walls rose several storeys high, smooth and plastered and coloured dusky yellow. Rows of tiny windows watched him like eyes and the slate roofs shone silver in the light. It was built in a square enclosing a vast courtyard, and on each side an archway led in beneath its walls. East, west, south and north, four tracks led away from it.

North beyond the building the stream had been dammed, making a small lake where wild duck nested in the reed beds and naked children swam. Willow trees grew on its banks and sluice gates let out the water. The stream flowed on through meadows where cattle grazed, past haybarns and milking parlours and a flour mill where a great wheel turned, and on again past the sewage beds where the arms of sprinklers slowly revolved.

These people had thought of everything. Not the technological revolution dreamed of in the bunker, but a way of life that was simpler and more wholesome, age-old methods that were tried and tested and seen to work. They had no need for dreams of underground air-conditioned cities, subway tunnels where solar-powered trains linked bunker to bunker, synthetic food production, or eventual colonization of worlds around other suns. They did not need qualified architects, nutrition experts, genetic engineers, army personnel training schemes, military supervision, or administration by a central government. They had managed without, flourished and survived. And not only was this place beautiful, it was functional as well.

Simon's head started to spin and his vision darkened. He had been travelling for three days and had hardly eaten anything since they had left the bunker. Comparisons appalled him. He saw an alien fortress in an English valley, a gold-white girl walking free in the sunlight, a community that lived and thrived on the harsh outer surface of the world where he could have no place. He thought of crumbling concrete rooms, dark decaying passageways, and broken-down machinery. His mother was right. They were dinosaurs in a bunker. They could not live beneath the sun that whirled and spun and blazed its yellow light. Extinction stared him in the face as the world turned black and Simon hit the dust.

Simon hardly remembered arriving at the settlement. It was just an impression of yellow outside walls and dark inside shade, a feeling of relief when someone stripped him of his suit. He saw vague white faces. Heard a babble of indistinct voices before he went spinning away through the black empty spaces of unconsciousness. Someone made him drink . . . icy water from an earthen-ware cup. His leg hurt like hell and he was lying on a scrubbed table with a straw pallet under his head, in a room that was whitewashed and cool. Harris and Sowerby were standing in the doorway. He could see the courtyard beyond them, flowering baskets hanging from the cloistered walkway, the shaded overhang on the upper floors, and a covered well with a pool of sunlit water in the middle.

'We're moving on,' Harris was saying. 'Thanks for the meal. You've been most helpful.'

'We'll look after Simon,' Laura said.

'Okay,' said Harris. 'Tell him we'll call for him on the way back.'

Simon went to sit up.

A fast hand held him down.

And Laura returned to him.

'Lie still! You'll disturb the pins!' she said.

Simon remembered then. He had not been unconscious all the time. He remembered Laura telling him that someone called Johnson had taken the pins from the offices of a practising acupuncturist who had died in the holocaust, learned how to use them from instruction manuals and passed the knowledge on. Now Lilith was using them on Simon to block the neuronal pathways. She was going to suture the gash in his leg and he would not feel pain. But he would not be able to walk either, at least not well enough to keep up with Harris and Sowerby.

'Enjoy yourself, Simon,' Harris told him.

And Lilith laughed.

It was a mad laugh, guttural and imbecilic, the sound of a deaf-mute for whom Laura translated. Lilith too was a mutant, a middle-aged hairy albino with white stringy locks and those same white eyes. Her smile showed a mouthful of rotting teeth and black pin-prick pupils led deep into her mind. There was something about her Simon did not like, a look of gloating satisfaction, like a prophetess seeing in him the truth of her own predictions. Fear shot through the nerves of his stomach as he saw the cat-gut thread and needle in her hand.

Suddenly he was screaming. 'Don't let her touch me!' Struggling like a wild thing to be off that operating table. He forgot about the four hundred people in the government bunker who needed to be rehoused. He forgot about survival being dependent on outsiders. He only knew he was not being operated on by a witch-doctor, or left behind with a load of goddamn apes! His language was rude and abusive, completely irrational. Diplomatically Harris acted in the only way he could. A hard right fist to Simon's jaw sent him spinning away into a black oblivion.

When he awoke, hours later, he had been moved to another room ... a whitewashed cell with a small window set high in the outer wall. Or maybe it only seemed high because his bed was a mattress on the floor. From the dimness of the light he guessed it was evening, although he was not sure if it were today or tomorrow, or how long he had slept.

He turned his head. A person was seated on a stool by the door, a shrunken unmoving human figure, the most hideous creature he had ever seen. An old grey dress informed him she was female, and her mouth sagged open as she slept showing toothless gums. Her hair was gone and her scalp was a mass of festering sores. Red burning skin, puckered and wrinkled and suppurating, made up her face. She was bones covered by flesh, rotting away even as he watched her.

Simon could not have guessed her age, but Grandfather Harnden had been almost ninety when he died and he had never looked like that. This aged woman must have lived right through it, the nuclear war and the radioactive fall-out, the fire and the dust. She must have survived outside during the great cold that followed, fifty-five years of struggle and suffering and sickness such as those in the bunker had never known.

Naked beneath the blanket Simon turned away his head, unable to look at her, unable to escape, trapped with her in the prison room as the twilight deepened and the evening grew chill. He could hear voices and laughter in the rest of the building, far away and muffled by walls, but he had never experienced such total isolation. It was as if he was the only human being left alive, and the thing by the doorway In-longed to some other species. Then the door quietly opened.

'I've brought you some soup,' said Laura. Almost eagerly Simon turned to face her. Her simian appearance no longer mattered. She was someone he knew, young and beautiful, compared to that festering old woman. His stomach was hollow with hunger but Laura had not been speaking to him. He watched as she placed the dish and spoon in the old woman's hands. Shrivelled fingers gripped like a baby's and Laura guided the spoon to her mouth. Simon realized then that she was blind, and from across the room the white eyes of the mutant girl met his own. He could actually feel the pity, not for the dying creature she was feeding, but for him.

'This is my grandmother,' she said fondly. 'She is blind Kate now but she taught us how to see things clearly. . . who we are and how we came to be.'

'God looked on the earth and saw it was wicked,' the old woman muttered. 'That men had corrupted His ways with their evil and violence, and He decided to destroy them.' She laid down her spoon. Her clawed hands gripped at Laura's arm. 'Is he awake?' she asked.

'He's awake,' Laura confirmed.

'Ask him,' said blind Kate. 'Ask if he knows them.' 

'It was thirty-five years ago,' Laura objected. 'Simon was not even born then and your kind of people seldom live very long.'

'I have,' blind Kate retorted.

'You had a reason to,' Laura said. 'And not everyone has your will power.'

The old woman sighed and went back to her spooning. 

Soup dribbled from her chin as Simon watched.

'Do you want something to eat?' Laura asked him.

'Yes,' Simon said sourly. 'And where are my clothes?'

'We washed them and they fell to pieces. I'll bring you some new ones in the morning. I didn't expect to find you awake. Aunt Lilith gave you a sleeping draught and we thought you would sleep through the night.'

'She had no right to do that!' Simon said angrily.

Blind Kate waved her spoon.

'He
talked like that,' she said. 'That Colonel Allison who came from the government in Avon. He talked about rights. He said we had no right to our own cattle and tried to steal them. It was the day your mother was born, Laura, and we named her after him. Johnson always said they would be back. But they haven't come to steal this time, oh no. They have come to beg. And we give, of course, just as we always do.'

Simon sat up.

His voice was sharp.

'What's she talking about?'

'Sometimes,' said Laura, 'she gets confused.'

'I've survived for more than sixty years,' blind Kate went on. 'Sarah said I was meant to but I knew it anyway. I thought she was Sarah come back . . . Sarah and my father and Colonel Allison. But she wasn't Sarah. She had another name. Amelia, I think it was, Amelia Harnden, and she was my sister too. Ask him if he knows her.'

'It was too long ago,' Laura repeated.

'Ask him,' blind Kate insisted.

White eyes turned to Simon.

'Do you?' Laura asked.

'No,' he said.

But he did. The name was not Amelia ... it was Ophelia. She had married Wayne Allison and was Simon's mother.

This was the place she had talked of. This was the place she had visited with Grandfather Harnden and Grandpop Allison all those years ago. Blind Kate was his mother's sister and Laura was his cousin. He was actually related to them, cousin to a mutant, just as human beings had once been cousins to the apes. Simon was not sure how he felt . . . sort of sick and revolted. It was a relationship he could never accept, never admit, not even to himself.

Simon did not sleep too well during the night. His thoughts plagued him, and the strong cheese he had eaten for supper gave him indigestion. His leg ached uncomfortably. He was accustomed to silence and absolute darkness, but here the moonlight was as bright as day. Night birds screamed and dogs howled on the surrounding hills, and Lilith came creeping into his room to check on him. She made incomprehensible guttural noises which were meant to soothe but instead served to alarm him, and examined his injured leg by candlelight. No blood showed through the linen dressings, so she smiled her gloating smile and went away.

The flax plants had come from Ireland, Laura had told him during supper, and now they grew them locally at another settlement, acres of blue flowers in a nearby valley. Soon her people would have summer clothes as well as winter ones, she said. It was one more accomplishment she had to boast about, and one more reason for Simon to hate her. But he was not afraid of her, not in the way he was afraid of Lilith. She was the hag out of fairy tales which Grandfather Harnden had told him as a child, a wise-woman weaving spells and brewing sleeping draughts, the archetypal witch in the midnight darkness. When she came to his room a second time he looked at her in dread.

But it was Laura who came with the morning, smiling to see him, bringing him clothes to wear and a wooden crutch to help him walk. Gooseflesh prickled his skin as he dressed in a long-sleeved shirt of creamy wool, a short brown over-tunic, brown knitted ankle socks and leather sandals with carved buckles of bone. He had never worn clothes like that before. Each garment seemed like a work of art, fine and comfortable. He needed a mirror to admire them and opened the door to find Laura waiting outside . . . her face in the sunlight white and furry, his cousin, an ape. Simon leaned on the crutch and she moved to help him, an ape-girl touching his arm. He shook her away. 

'I can manage!' he said violently.

He thought for a moment she would cry. Then she shrugged and he followed her along the balcony. Above and around him the building was coming awake, doors being opened to let in the morning light. Every family had their own apartments, Laura told him, but everything else was done communally. Voices of children and people sounded on the upper levels but the well of the courtyard below was silent and empty, dark with shadow. Walls towered over him as Simon clung to the railings and descended the stairs.