Green Boy (11 page)

Dr. Owen beckoned to Lou, and stepped off his round
platform, and without even being told, Lou trotted cheerfully over toward him and hopped up onto it. I was baffled again by the way so few things in Pangaia seemed to frighten him; it was as if he knew what to expect.

The moving box finished circling me, and trundled over toward Lou.

“This is Fred,” said Dr. Owen. “Fred sees all. Though not inside your head, you'll be happy to know. Here's what he made of you, Trey.”

He pressed a few buttons on the book-sized thing he had in his hand, and in a wide metal cabinet against one wall, a big screen lit up. Pangaia seemed to be full of screens, as if nobody there wrote words down on paper, as if everyone thought only through pictures.

On the screen, I saw a larger than life image of myself, a spooky hollow 3-D image drawn in thousands of intertwining lines. It moved slowly around. Then it vanished, and was replaced by columns and columns of numbers, flicking down, over and over, a new screenful every second.

“Vital statistics,” Dr. Owen said. “You're a toy, to Fred. He's figured out how you work. He could replicate you—you wouldn't have a mind, but you'd be a perfect clone otherwise.” He peered more closely at the screen for a while, studying the numbers, and his voice changed. “I must say,” he said more slowly, “you are an interestingly obsolete model, Trey.”

Fred was making his way round Lou, his antennae
standing up like stiff hairs. When he had finished, Dr. Owen put Lou's strange interwoven image on the screen in place of mine. He gazed at it for a long time, playing with the buttons on his hand keyboard to move it about in different directions. Then he switched it off, sat down on his stool again, and faced us.

He looked me in the eyes, his face serious and intent. “Where do you come from?” he said.

Perhaps it was the handshake that made me trust him.

“Not from Pangaia,” I said.

“No indeed,” said Dr. Owen. He was studying Lou now, and smiling a little, an amazed sort of smile. Lou smiled back. He stepped off the round platform, and sat down on its edge next to Fred.

“Possibly from Pangaia long ago,” Dr. Owen said quietly, almost to himself. “Possibly from some wholly other . . . place. But no, not from Pangaia.”

“The other man didn't believe me,” I said.

“What other man?”

“They just called him Sir.”

Dr. Owen laughed abruptly. “I'll bet they did,” he said. “We all call him Sir. No—he didn't believe you, he thinks you are a product of the Underground.”

“Do you think we are?” I said.

“Of course not,” said Dr. Owen.

I said suddenly, just as it came into my head, “What do you think of the Underground?”

Dr. Owen sat there expressionless on his stool for a
moment, as if he were trying to figure out what to say. I think he was one of those people like Grand, who take kids just as seriously as they do grown-ups.

He said at last, “I am a neuroscientist, Trey. A kind of doctor. I'm in the business of observing and preserving human life. So my occupation puts me on a different wavelength from the Underground. They don't have a high opinion of
Homo sapiens,
those folks—they think we've ruined our planet.”

“But what do they want to
do?”
I said. I glanced at Lou, but he didn't seem interested in this at all; he was sitting next to Fred, running a finger gently up and down one of his spiky antennae.

“Nobody knows,” Dr. Owen said. He sighed. “Perhaps they want to give us back our soul, our global conscience. But we lost that long ago.”

He lifted the book-sized keyboard thing to his mouth, and spoke to it. “Escort to RE Six,” he said.

I said uneasily, “What's RE Six?”

“Forgive me for this, Trey,” he said, although he didn't move a muscle. Fred made a faint clicking sound, and a kind of lever shot out from the side of his square body and touched Lou's upper arm. Then it was gone again.

Lou looked down at his arm in surprise, and then gently keeled over sideways, so that he was lying on one side on the round platform. I shouted in fright and ran to him, but he didn't seem hurt. He blinked at me, looking puzzled.

Dr. Owen said quickly, soothingly, “A muscle relaxant only, I promise you. It will wear off in half an hour. Some people very senior to your friend Sir have ordered a special psychological scan on your little brother, a scan that is harmless only if the subject is not tense.”

“You can't
scan
him!” I said in panic. “He's only a little boy!”

Dr. Owen spread his hands. “Not my territory, Trey,” he said. “I deal with the body. What they want is to see inside his mind.”

The door opened, and two men in green overalls came in. One was young, broad-shouldered, the other one older, with short grey hair. They were pushing a kind of trolley, like a hospital gurney, with a sheet on top. Without a word they picked up Lou and laid him on his back on the sheet. He didn't make a sound, and he didn't move.

I said, “I'm going too!” I heard my voice squeak, I was so frightened.

“Of course,” said Dr. Owen. He put a hand on my shoulder. “So am I. It's not far—a test facility two floors up.”

The two men headed out of the door pushing Lou, and I followed with Dr. Owen. They walked fast along the glowing white corridor, which was completely bare except for little moving machines high upon the wall at each corner. Perhaps they were cameras, watching us. The men raced round a corner—and then suddenly
skidded the trolley to a stop and swung round so fast I could hardly tell what happened. The younger one lunged at Dr. Owen, seized the little screen out of his hand and pressed it against the side of his head. There was a tiny muffled thud, and Dr. Owen fell to the floor without a sound.

The man grabbed my arm, the other one picked Lou up under his arm as if he were a parcel, and we ran down the corridor to a door with a red light over it. They pulled the door open.

I looked back. I'd rather liked Dr. Owen.

The younger man said urgently in my ear: “We're taking you to Bryn. Get down, now!” He pushed me down so I was crouching. “Curl up in a ball, arms round your knees,” he said, and he pushed me out of the door.

I
found myself sliding down some kind of chute, very steep, very dark, with a sour smell. It swung sideways, and then I fell in a heap, out in light again, floundering in a pile of sheets and clothes. The others came tumbling down after me. An empty sleeve flapped round my neck; I saw Lou lying on his back in a white nest like an unmade bed. We had come down a laundry chute; we were all in a great heap of dirty laundry. If I hadn't been so scared, I would have laughed.

And then the men were tugging us out, the older one with Lou under his arm again, and we were outside a door and in cooler air, on a dark street.

It was a narrow street with uneven paving, like round stones set into dirt. The men hurried us down it and turned into a side alley, and then another; it was so dark, I don't know how they knew where they were going. The alleyways seemed to run between tall stone buildings with no windows, like a black maze. This was totally different from anywhere else we'd been in Pangaia.

Then we were out again in a wider street lit by the occasional dim lamp, and through a brown haze you could see battered doors and unlighted windows, some of them broken. The men paused at an entryway with two huge closed wooden doors, and pushed open a smaller door set into one of them. We stepped up and over, and found ourselves in a kind of courtyard, with the dark sky overhead and a blur of voices from all around. It was like a hollow apartment building. On both sides of the courtyard, iron stairways went up to a balcony, and then again to another balcony above that, and the doors of the apartments led off the balconies, three on each side of the square. The walls were scarred and peeling, the iron rusted. This building wasn't in good shape.

We clattered up a stairway and past open doors on the first balcony. A spicy smell of cooking came from one of them, and another must have been a toilet, and smelled terrible. There were holes in the floor, here and there, though not big enough to fall through.

A woman's voice called softly from a lighted window, “A rescue, Steven?”

Our older man called back, “A rescue!” in a kind of loud whisper, and the woman clapped her hands.

Then we went through a door and a stuffy carpeted entryway, and into a room filled with light and people, all sitting round a table, and at the head of the table was Annie, smiling like sunup, with the girl Gwen sitting beside her.

They gave us such a welcome, it was as if we'd come
back from the dead. They'd been eating, and they gave us bread and cheese and fruit—apples and cherries, things that don't grow on Lucaya—and a sort of spicy chocolatey drink. Gwen made room for me next to her, with Lou on my other side next to Annie. He seemed to be getting movement back in his arms and legs now, gradually. The man who'd been carrying him propped him in his chair, and Lou leaned his head against Annie trustingly. She put her arm round him. It was almost as if he'd come home.

There were seven or eight men and women round the table, a mixture of ages, all of them sort of scruffy-looking, with shaggy hair and clothes that looked homemade and didn't quite fit. They were all important people in the Underground, we found out, and the only reason they were here above ground, in hiding, was because they'd been looking for Lou and me.

“When the worlds touch,” Annie said, “we know if you are here, but not where we shall find you. Gwen is our seer, she tells us where you are. And if the authorities have you, someone from the Underground will always be able to reach you, to carry you away. We are everywhere in their spoiled world, everywhere in their government, but they can't tell who we are, even with their wonderful technologies.”

I glanced at Gwen, and she gave me her quick squinty-eyed grin. She didn't look like a seer, more like Marty Black, who sat behind me at school and was always in trouble for giggling.

Annie had me tell them everything that had happened
to us since we arrived, and they listened very intently. They exchanged looks once in a while, specially at the bit where Sir told me the Underground wanted Lou's talent and might kill for it. I paused, then.

“Is that true?” I said.

“Yes,” Annie said. “We would kill, or we would die. But you knew that, didn't you?”

I suppose I did, after seeing what happened to the Wilderness.

When I'd finished, Annie said, “We have very little time left now. They will be looking for you everywhere.” She took a deep breath, and turned her head to me. “Trey—I told you your brother was prophesied, in Pangaia. That we were waiting for him. Now we should tell you why. This is the prophecy all of us in the Underground learned when we were children, from our parents and our parents' parents and who knows how many generations before that.”

She looked round the room, and she said in a loud, firm voice, “For love of life, Gaia sends Lou.”

“Silent as stone,” said the old man on her left.

A redheaded young woman beside him said, “The tree speaks to him. He walks through stars.”

“Out of the labyrinth. The weaver spins him,” said a dark, narrow-faced man next to her, and I saw that it was Math.

“Into rebirth,” said his neighbor, a heavyset, grey-haired woman.

“Towering green,” said the next man, younger and fair-haired, with pockmarked skin. “At Loonassa.”

The man beside him had a hesitation in his speech. He said, “T-to save P-Pangaia.”

“For love of life,” said Gwen quietly, beside me. She saw the baffled look on my face, and reached to the center of the table for a thin, leather-covered book. She opened it. “Look, then, Trey,” she said.

I looked at the neat handwriting on the page.

“For
love of life
Gaia sends Lugh
Silent as stone.
The tree speaks to him
He walks through stars.
Out of the labyrinth
The weaver spins him
Into rebirth
Towering green
At Lughnasa
To save Pangaia
For love of life.”

I looked up from the page and found myself facing Lou. He sat there unconcerned, smiling a little, and I suddenly felt he had known these peculiar words all his short life.

I looked back at the page. I said stupidly, “The spellings are different.”

“The sound of the words is the same,” Gwen said. “Lou is Lugh.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Lou knows,” Annie said. “Don't you, Lou?” Her white hair was in a rough knot at the back of her head, her elegant chin held high; she looked like a raggle-taggle queen.

Still smiling his half-smile, Lou reached to the plate of fruit on the table and held up half an apple to me.

Annie laughed. “All right. Lou knows half of it.”

I was getting cross. “But I have to know too!”

“Of course you do,” she said at once, and reached over to pat my arm. “Trey—those words are very old. They are carved into a wall deep down at the start of the labyrinth, the maze of old tunnels under the deepest part of the city, which has been there for centuries. Deeper even than we live. Underneath the Underground. Gaia, the central force of our world, she put those words there.” Her dark eyes were looking straight into mine, and I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck.

She said, “We who are the children of Gaia know that those words are there for a crisis, and that the crisis is now. They tell Lou to go into the labyrinth, to accomplish there whatever the tree has told him to do, and thus to achieve the rebirth of Pangaia. He must do this, and he knows it. It is why he chose to come here.”

It was true that Lou was the one who'd brought us
here this time, by urging me to go to Long Pond Cay at the moment the worlds touched, between tides.