Requiem (32 page)

He had expected
to find a thick, heavy duty chain tangled around the front doors
but found nothing. He pushed on the left door but it didn't budge.
He tried the right but it only rattled loosely on his hinge. He
stepped back from the door and noticed a worn sticker on the inside
of the glass that said
PULL
. He pulled the door on the right
this time and it opened with a shudder and a loud creak. Not until
he came to Earth did he ever have to worry about pushing or pulling
doors; everything had slid to the side or up or down. Like many
things on this world, he knew this was one thing he'd never get
used to.

He walked past
an empty reception desk and the dark square patches along the walls
where posters had once been tacked up. The glass on the doors at
the end of the hall had been boarded over so he couldn't see beyond
but he could hear voices. He waited, listening. One of the voices
was deep, a baritone. A man's voice.

Sear placed his
hand on the door and pushed but it didn't budge. He pulled instead,
but only a little, and looked through the open slit.

There was a
small, concrete court. The court was entirely walled in by
classrooms. A curved, metal awning, rusted and dented and coated in
sand, ran at the height of the classrooms around the outside.

The voice was
louder now. It was coming from one of the classrooms. A teacher
narrating his lesson to his pupils.

Sear stepped
through the door into the courtyard. He took the gun from his
pocket but stopped himself. He thought about what he was doing here
and who he was looking for. This man was a teacher. He was running
an orphanage out of an abandoned school in the Insolvency. Would he
really be much of a threat? In front of a classroom of
children?

In this place
you don't survive without knowing how to defend yourself.

What about the
children? They're his to protect and he may be willing to kill or
die to protect them.

But you don't
go into a peace negotiation waving a gun around.

This is Earth,
there's no such thing as a peaceful negotiation.

Compromise.

Sear held the
gun in his left hand and tucked it back into the big pocket on the
left side of his coat, keeping his fingers wound tightly around the
grip. He walked towards the classroom, his eyes scanning the space
around him for any sudden movements.

He could see
the man, the teacher, through the glass pane of the door. Even from
here he looked to be almost two metres tall. He was wearing denim
jeans and an old fashioned tweed jacket with brown patches stitched
into the elbows that looked like it barely fit him. Sear could only
see the tops of the heads of the students through the windows
running along the side of the classroom wall.

Sear thought
about opening the door and announcing himself, he thought about
taking his gun out of his pocket and levelling it at the teacher
but he did neither. He kept his hand and the gun in his pocket,
stepped to the door and knocked.

The teacher's
eyes darted over to him and his hand pulled from the open drawer of
the desk. The teacher turned to him and the hand shifted behind his
back. He stared directly at Sear and, without looking away,
gestured for the children to be silent and to move towards the back
of the classroom. No one spoke but Sear could hear the scraping of
desk chairs on the wooden floor and the pattering of feet.

There was a
scar running down the left side of the teacher's face. It created a
barren path through the dark bramble of his beard. It looked as
though someone had slit the side of his face open as if they wanted
to peel it from his skull. Combined with the jagged angle of a
previously broken nose, the fully dilated pupil of his left eye,
this man was beginning to look less like a teacher and more like a
prize cage fighter. His finger rested on the trigger.

The teacher
stopped just behind the door.

'You have a gun
behind your back,' said Sear, not a question.

'And
you
have one in your pocket,' said the teacher, also not a question. 'I
saw you come through the main corridor but since you weren't
pointing that thing at me I figured,
hoped
, that you weren't
looking for trouble.'

'Then why did
you grab your gun?'

'Hope and
stupidity may be related but they aren't exactly twins.'

Sear looked at
him curiously. He liked him already.

'So why don't
you tell me why you're here?' said the teacher. 'I've still got ten
minutes left of this lesson and I don't want to waste it.'

'How about we
both give our trigger fingers a rest first?'

'How do I know
you aren't alone?'

'How do I know
one of your kids doesn't have a gun either? Besides, how many
Yurrick have you seen on this planet? If anyone's alone down here,
it's me.'

The teacher
watched Sear carefully, thinking for a moment. He nodded. 'Slowly.
At the same time.'

The teacher
slipped the gun into the back pocket of his jeans. He steadily
pulled his arm from behind his back. Sear's fingers slid off the
grip and his hand emerged from the pocket. The teacher's hand was
now out from behind his back, fingers spread slightly and no gun in
sight. They both raised their hands in front of themselves as if
they were both holding one another hostage.

'Satisfied?'
Sear asked.

'For now.'

Sear lowered
his arms and the teacher, not removing his eyes from Sear, leaned
forward and opened the door. He looked down at Sear from his extra
foot of height. His eyes staring straight into him. One wrong move
and he would snap him in two.

'I went to the
market earlier today. Is that where you tracked me from?' said the
teacher.

Sear nodded.
'The wind was calm today. You left tracks.'

'So I did.'

'You don't have
much here in the way of security,' said Sear.

The teacher
looked out the door, over the court, towards the main entrance
corridor. 'Even so much as a chain across the front door would be
incentive enough for someone to come snooping around in here. In
Vale, playing dead is the best way to stay alive.' He looked back
at Sear. 'So, why are you here? What do you want?'

'I'm looking
for information.'

The teacher
kept staring at Sear with that one dilated pupil and the other
smaller one. The hardness that he held in both of them softened a
little. He spoke up, this time addressing the children, 'The
lessons over for today, kids.'

There was a
murmur from the far side of the room.

'Tragic, I
know. But I have a few things to discuss with our guest so I want
you to get your butts outside. Kick the ball around while we have a
little palaver. And keep your voices down.'

He gestured for
the kids to come forward. Sear stepped to the side and the kids
filed out the door. About a dozen of them, none over the age of
seven, all of their eyes staring up at him as they walked past,
wide and wondering. Sear said nothing and they said nothing in
return, at least not to him. Once they were on the court the
private chatter began to pass between them.

The teacher
invited Sear into the class and closed the door behind him. The
teacher walked back to his desk, opened the top drawer on the right
side, pulled the gun from his back pocket, and placed the gun
inside. He closed it and locked it with ring of keys he'd left in
the lock. He pulled the keys out and stuffed them in the pocket of
his jeans.

'I heard there
was a Yurrick hanging around the market,' said the teacher. 'I also
might have heard that this particular Yurrick was looking for
me.'

'Are you saying
that you wanted me to follow you here?'

He shook his
head. 'Not exactly. That would've been too risky with the children
here.' He opened his mouth as if to say more but stopped
himself.

'So you simply
got lazy with covering your tracks?'

'I heard that
you were looking for me,' said the teacher. 'That you wanted help
with something. Folks told me you were going around asking about a
teacher, about an orphanage.'

'I was given a
lead from one of the locals at the bar, a very thin lead which cost
more credits than I'm willing to tell.'

'Folks around
here don't like your kind too much. Hell, folks anywhere on this
planet don't seem to like you at all.'

'I make
do.'

'You said you
were looking for information. Information on what exactly?'

'On anything I
can, really. I've been informed that you collect books-'

'Books?' the
teacher said. He shrugged and walked past Sear and picked up one of
the student's chairs and stacked it upside down on one of the
desks. 'I don't know what you're talking about...'

'Sear.'

'I don't know
what you're talking about, Sear, but we don't have any books here.
All the books were burned in the purge over fifty years ago. Just
carrying
a book with you is cause enough for imprisonment or
worse.' The teacher sighed to himself. 'Books are relics from a
much more ignorant time. The world views from the times when paper
books were popular were rife with misconceptions and superstitious
thinking.' He pulled up another chair. 'The best place to get
information is from a NeoCorp exonet archive, don't ya know?'

Sarcasm.
Something a lot of the humans he'd spoken with seemed fond of.

'NeoCorp's
archives do not interest me,' said Sear.

'They've
documented everything that previous generations got right and
removed the things that they got wrong.'

More
sarcasm.

'And by wrong
do you mean the things that they disagreed with?'

The teacher
smiled a little but said nothing and placed another upturned chair
on the desk. Sear looked over the walls of the classroom. Tacked
along one of the walls were children's crayon scribblings. Large
circle with lopsided faces and short sticks for arms and legs.

'Is that what
you teach the children in this place?' asked Sear. He turned back
to the teacher. 'Do you teach them to trust the words of
NeoCorp?'

The teacher
placed the last of the chairs on the desk and looked directly at
Sear. There was more life in his voice. 'I teach them what they
need to survive in the Insolvency. I teach them the things that
will help them see another day, that will give them a future. I
teach them to be careful who they trust.'

He walked
towards the doorway in the front corner of the room. He opened the
door but didn't walk out. Sear stood by the front desk.

'I've been here
long enough to know sarcasm when I hear it. And I know you've got
information that I can use. You've got books.'

The teacher
sighed. He glanced down at Sear then back out at the court. 'I had
hoped to get a chance to scope you out first, to get as much as
background as I could on you but you showing up here kind of puts a
dent in that plan.'

The children
were running and screaming, chasing a large ball of rolled up
paper, covered in sticky tape from one end of the court to the
other, booting at it with as much effort as they could.

'But since
you're here, would you mind telling me what exactly a Yurrick is
doing on Earth anyway? I thought you'd want to be as far away from
this place as possible.'

'As I said, I'm
looking for information.'

'And you came
to an orphanage in Vale? A dying town in the insolvent slums of
North America?'

'North
America?' asked Sear. 'That doesn't sound like correct NeoCorp
geography to me.'

The teacher
turned to Sear. There was a loud cheer from the children, playing
their imaginary game.

'Gooooooaaaallll!'

'No it wasn't!'
cried one of the girls. 'It was outside the line you big, fat
cheater!'

'So why do you
want this information? Any information you can find in a book is
going to be dated by at least fifty years,' said the teacher.

'I don't work
for NeoCorp if that's what you're worried about. I work for the
Yurrick government. I've been placed on Earth as a part of a
participant observation programme that all Yurrick must complete in
order to be eligible for the first contact teams.'

'The Yurrick
special-ops?'

'If that term
suits you, then yes.'

The teacher
looked away and thought for a while. Sear watched him. The distance
in the teacher's eyes lessened as he watched the children playing
on the court. Sear had noticed, in the other humans he'd met, that
they would blink constantly, almost every other second. It had been
one of the first things he'd noticed upon his arrival on Earth and
he found it unnerving at first. It made everyone appear as if they
had something to hide, as if they were all lying and nervous that
they might be found out. But this man almost never blinked and
this
he realised was even more unnerving to see.

'So you're here
to watch us?' said the man. 'That's it? You watch us for...'

'About a
year.'

'About a year
and then you go back home?'

'Before we
arrive we have to put forward a research proposal. I won't bore you
with the details but part of my proposal was to find and bring to
light a more historically based account of human civilization. I've
found out what I can about NeoCorp and the Insolvency but what I
haven't been given is a clear picture of is what it was like before
the collapse. A lot of what we know has been taken from exonet
sources that, we believe, have been heavily modified if not
outright fabricated by NeoCorp. We want a less partial account of
your history.'

The paper ball
wrapped in plastic rolled down to the teacher's feet. He stopped it
with his foot and gently kicked it back onto the court. He looked
up at the children who were all watching him and the alien
stranger. He shook his head at them and they reluctantly returned
to their game.