Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (8 page)

Mouse moved forward grinning,
while I followed more slowly.

“This is Mouse!” Dawson said
beaming at Mouse proudly. “He’s one of our best! He can sniff goods
out anywhere, and he can liberate them like a pro.”

Mouse nodded vigorously and
grinned more.

“And this,” Dawson said with
considerably less enthusiasm, gesturing in my direction, “is
Nolan.” He paused a beat. “He’s new”.

I nodded to the newcomers.
There were seven of them and they were like no one I had ever seen
before. They were beautiful. They wore clean, colourful clothing,
jewellery, and their hair was long and styled. There was something
else too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. They not only looked
different, I was sure they
were
different; they seemed to
radiate something. Self-confidence? Power? Authority? Serenity?

By comparison we were loutish,
grimy riffraff stuffed into layers of ill-fitting scavenged
clothing.

“And I am Maelduin,” said one
of the newcomers, a tall, tanned har whose dark blond hair hung in
a neat braid down his back. “These are Acorn, Aydenn, Osiris,
Zekki, D’rik, and Inari.” He flashed a disarmingly charming smile;
Dawson was clearly bewitched.

Our guests were all easy on the
eyes. I will admit to being fascinated by them as well. The one who
piqued my interest the most was the dark-haired swarthy beauty with
big dark eyes, and a slightly aquiline nose, who’d been introduced
as Inari.

Someone had started a fire in
an old metal crate, and our crew members sat around it while our
guests listened to Dawson talk about us. Actually, he talked more
about himself and how wonderful his plans were, and his gripes
about the world, which constantly failed to recognize his genius.
He was pathetically desperate to impress our guests, but to me he
came off as even more of an unimpressive braggart than usual. Most
of our crew egged him on, flattering him, and encouraging his
antics, but I saw that Dawson was a garish caricature compared to
our guests and their composed self-assurance. I gave total credit
to our guests, who managed to remain flawlessly gracious, their
smiles never wavering.

“Dawson, you are unbelievable!
A genius to be reckoned with!” Maelduin chuckled affably.

From my vantage, on the outside
edge of the circle gathered around the fire, I was pretty sure that
several of our guests exchanged a faint smirk, but no one else
appeared to notice.

“That story, my friend,
deserves a toast,” Maelduin went on. “Allow us to offer you and
your hara some refreshment so that we can offer up a toast to your
continued success.”

The suggestion was met with
whoops of approval by members of my crew. Our guests began
producing green bottles and fanned out among the twenty or so of us
in Dawson’s crew. Inari passed a bottle along to the eager hands of
one of my gang with a smile, but he stayed seated next to Maelduin.
I observed him for a moment, he seemed withdrawn, resigned, tired.
To me he was the most intriguing and beautiful of them. I kind of
identified with him, or at least I projected my own feelings of
discontent onto him.

I watched my crew squabble over
the bottles, each grabbing one and taking a swig before it was
snatched from them. When one bottle was emptied another appeared.
If these strangers had as much booze as they seemed to, I really
needed to make myself scarce; no good came from bullies like Dawson
and his ‘favourites’ when they got drinking. My attempt to slip
away would have been successful but for the visitor named
Acorn.

“No! Don’t go, tiahaar! You
mustn’t go!” He called out. “Stay! This is good stuff. I promise.”
He grinned at me as he grabbed my wrist and flicked his long brown
curls over his shoulder.

I was caught and Dawson had
noticed. He glared at me as he got to his feet. “Where were you
sneaking off to, Nolan?” he demanded. “Being rude to my
guests?”

“I was going to go see about
starting dinner.” It was the first thing that popped into my head;
the wrong thing. I should have just said I was going for a pee.

Dawson froze for a moment and
then his eyes narrowed. We had precious little food. The case of
peas we’d found today would be barely a mouthful for our own gang –
sharing would only mean less for everyone. Dawson wasn’t generous.
He wouldn’t think twice about accepting the strangers’ offer of
alcohol, but he’d not voluntarily offer them food in return.

“You were, were you? How…
thoughtful.” His voice was low and dangerous; he took a few steps
towards me.

Acorn reacted; smooth and
lightening fast. He dropped my wrist and slid his arms around my
waist, and in a dancer-smooth move had swung me out of the way,
inserting himself between me and Dawson. With his arm still firmly
around my waist, Acorn fairly oozed ‘sensuous soume’ at Dawson,
placing his hand lightly on our leader’s chest.

“Dawson, you treasure!” Acorn
purred. “How generous to offer us dinner! I might have known you’d
try to do such a sweet thing. Hospitality like yours is a rare
treat these days. You are to be commended! But we can’t let you!
No! No! No!” He shook his head emphatically.

Dawson looked confused for a
moment but then swaggered smugly at the flattery.

“Of course not!” the har called
Osiris laughed. “It would have been rather rude and pushy for such
a large number of us just to descend on you unannounced and expect
to be fed. We’re trying to make a good impression on you, so we
brought you and your hara dinner.”

A murmur rippled through our
crew and attention shifted away from us as the clan anticipated
dinner. As I met his eyes, Acorn gave my waist a slight squeeze. I
mouthed, “Thank you”, and he responded with a slight nod and a
ghost of a smile.

Dinner was not fancy; there
were no table-cloths or cutlery, no plates or crystal, but it was
divine. These hara had brought sandwiches – yes, huge chunks of
juicy tender chicken, thick slices of plump tomatoes, crisp
lettuce, in enormous crusty bread rolls. I was in bliss. When
Osiris passed around enormous chocolate chip cookies for dessert I
wanted to kiss him, but I didn’t.

Later, much later, I was still
sitting by the fire; full, content, and after several drinks,
feeling mellow and sleepy. I was staring into the dying flames
trying hard not to think of how long it had been since I’d eaten
food like that and trying even harder to think about how long it
might be until we ate that well again.

The box of books landed with a
loud bang startling me out of my reverie. Mouse took a couple of
paperbacks and tossed them into the fire.

I love reading. I love books. I
had been taught to respect books, long ago in that other life I’d
once had. Burning them just seemed so wrong but I had given up
trying to teach my fellow crew members a love of books. I sat
mutely watching the cover of one of the cheesy romance novels begin
to bubble and then darken as the flames took hold: a picture of a
buxom woman in a pale mauve gown swooning into the arms of a
shirtless muscular man, a castle visible in the distant
background.

“Don’t let Nolan see you
burning those books,” Dawson sneered. “He’ll cry.”

The crew guffawed loudly; I did
my best not to react.

“Do you like books, Nolan?”
Acorn asked brightly.

“Yeah…” I mumbled
self-consciously. “Love ‘em.”

“And burning them bothers you?”
Maelduin asked, an eyebrow arched.

The dark one called Inari was
suddenly alert, roused and now focused on the conversation.

“Well,” I said carefully, “I
understand why we have to burn them, fuel being as scarce as it is,
but…. I dunno, it just seems wrong… and sad. It’s such a
waste.”

“A waste?” Maelduin cocked his
head to one side.

“There is so much art in them,
so much information, and so much to learn from them. They represent
most of the knowledge and ideas that the world has ever had. If we
burn them, that information and those ideas are gone.”

“Who cares?” said Mouse as he
threw a few more books into the flames. “It’s just human knowledge.
Humans are finished. We’re Wraeththu – we’re a million times
better.”

“But, we
were
human,” I
couldn’t help responding. “All of us. We can’t forget that. How are
we going to know we’re better unless we can prove we’ve gone
farther than humans did?” I pointed to one of the books he’d tossed
into the pyre,
Basic Math and Pre-Algebra
“Basic Math isn’t
going to change just because we’re now Wraeththu, nor will other
basic facts…”

“Humans are stupid fucks,”
Mouse pronounced darkly.

“They weren’t always,” I
insisted. This was a subject I felt strongly about. “Humans were
around for thousands of years. They invented all sorts of brilliant
things; they put people on the moon, created great works of art,
and built strong civilizations… Humans weren’t always like they are
now. I know there were always wars and conflict, empires rose and
fell, but there were always groups, and individuals that were
trying to make things right… until something happened and all of
society fell apart. Civilisation failed completely and Wraeththu
emerged.

“If we don’t preserve the
written human record, we may never know who we are and why we are
the way we are. If we want to understand today, we have to
understand yesterday! Learning about all of humanity will help us
know what things we must do and what things we need to avoid. We’re
moving out of human history into our own history…”

I suddenly realised how much I
had said and how enthusiastically. Shame and fear silenced me then,
but I was over the moon when I saw Inari’s swarthy face break out
into a wide grin; he appeared more engaged at this moment than he’d
been all afternoon. He leaned over and grabbed one of the
paperbacks. He held it up for me to see – it was another romance
novel – one whose cover depicted a muscular man with a cowboy hat
staring stoically off into the sunset as a woman with long hair
clung to him.

“And what, pray tell,” Inari
asked with a mischievous grin and a twinkle in his eye, “will be
learned from this… literature?”

I grinned back, thoroughly
delighted. “Perhaps, some day in the future, a Wraeththu scholar
will want to compare…”

“SHUT UP!” Dawson roared.

I shut up immediately – damn
the booze for having sent my inhibitions and instincts for
self-preservation packing!

“SHUT UP!” His voice was a
shrill shriek, his face was red and his limbs flailed like those of
a child before a tantrum. “No one gives a fuck what you think …
you’re just a fucking piece of shit … SHUT THE FUCK UP!!”

I ducked and rolled backwards
out of the circle. The empty bottle Dawson had hurled at me glanced
off my shoulder and skittered across the floor.

Dawson’s abuse continued as I
retreated behind the rows of stacked pallets. Howls of derisive
laughter followed me as I stepped out into the freshness of cool
evening air. Gangs are ‘substitute families’, my ass.

I swung myself up onto the
broken bit of fire escape that still clung to the warehouse wall
and climbed to the expansive flat roof. I heaved myself up onto one
of the vent outlets that peppered the roof. I came up here often;
to think, to escape, to cry, to dream. This evening it was to
escape.

I hugged my knees and rested my
chin on them. I hate my life. I hate Dawson. What purpose does any
of this serve?

“It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
despair.”

It was an quote from an ancient
book called
The Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens and it
played on an endless loop in my head. Its author wrote of
revolution; peasants rebelling against aristocratic cruel
oppression. While the storyline is full of chaos, violence, and
repression, there is also a belief in the possibility of
transformation, both personal and societal. The author had
supported his revolutionaries’ ‘cause’, but he had also pointed out
the evil of fighting cruelty with cruelty. It is a slippery slope
from being the oppressed to being the oppressor. Perhaps we were
now facing this same plight; humans had treated Wraeththu cruelly,
and now that humanity was failing, were we in danger of merely
becoming the new oppressors? Same shit, different day? Maybe we
stood at that point where foolishness became wisdom? When despair
became hope? Or, I sighed with resignation, maybe I’m just a
fucking piece of shit that spends too much time thinking and trying
to make sense of things that just ‘were’.

I sat on the roof brooding for
some time, long enough for the sun to sink below the horizon on the
other side of the river. The sky above me was now a dark indigo.
Across the river, lights had begun to appear, twinkling in the
darkness. A few moments later the flood-lights in the tall
armed-guard towers burst to life and began their ceaseless roaming
vigil, guarding the human occupants of the gated community from
threats, from Wraeththu, from me. Ironically I felt like I was the
most helpless creature on the planet. On our side of the river,
there was darkness; the army had cut the power ages ago in a vain
attempt to subdue both human and Wraeththu insurgents.

The crunch of gravel drew my
attention. Inari crossed the roof casually and hopped up onto the
vent box next to me. He didn’t say anything as he stared out across
the river at the prowling searchlights. I noticed his dark hair had
a slight and regular wave; it hung loosely over his shoulders.

“You shouldn’t be here with
these hara,” Inari stated.

“Ha!” I sounded bitter. “You’re
right, I shouldn’t, but all life’s a crapshoot isn’t it? My
Grandmother shouldn’t have gotten sick, but she did. She shouldn’t
have put me on that bus, but she did. There should have been
someone to meet me at the bus terminal, but there wasn’t. I
shouldn’t be here, but I am.”