Sacrifice of Fools (40 page)

A face peers round the kitchen door. A little girl’s face.

‘Daddy?’ she asks. ‘Can we come in now?’

There are sirens in the near distance, fast approaching.

T
WO POUNDS FIFTY FOR
forty-five minutes seems steep for an adventure playground to Andy Gillespie, even if it is a complete forest fort with five levels and underground tunnels and death-slides. At least parents get in free. When no one’s looking he might have a wee go on it himself. Why does no one have the courage to come out and build one of these for grown-ups?

‘Daddy! Look at me!’ Talya’s hanging upside down from the trapeze bars on the middle level of the wooden castle. Don’t think about a four-foot drop on to the crown of her skull, Gillespie tells himself. The therapist says that the children must be allowed to take risks. They’ve had a severe trauma, but if the parents over-protect them they’ll never properly heal.

Trust them, the therapist says. Trust Talya’s innate agility. Trust the impact-absorbent play surface. Trust you’re a good father.

That one will take time.

That’s another thing the therapist says. It will take time. She says a lot, this therapist. At least she insists that Gillespie and Karen both participate in the therapy process, and that Stacey and Talya must have free access to their father, to break the association with the bad thing. The trauma. The killings. You should say it, the therapist says. You need to be able to say it.

Eamon’s death.

It will take him time to be healed of that. His body is putting itself back together; the bruises are fading, the doctors say the limp will go but he may have trouble with rheumatism in that knee and his fingers in the coming years.

The coming years. He glances at the paper on the bench beside him that he brought to read but is so much less interesting than watching his children play. News heals with time, too. The Fool Killer scare has been relegated to the inside pages by the UDF/Dee Pee blackmail scandal. The party is disintegrating. Inspectors and accountants are peeling open Faith Tabernacle and exposing the maggots within to the sun. Peterson will go down. This world really isn’t your kind of place, Gavin. Get back to the Maze, to a world you can control and live in.

Stacey’s clambering purposefully to the very pinnacle of the fort. She balances herself on the battlements, carefully raises her arms in triumph.

‘I’m the King of the Castle! I can see for miles and miles from up here! I can see all the docks, and the other side of the lough, and Holywood, and there’s boats coming in.’

It is a damn fine adventure playground, Gillespie thinks. The view alone is probably worth two fifty. The designers have built it into the castle park on the side of Cave Hill; even from his safe parent’s seat, Gillespie can appreciate the sweep of his city laid out before him. It is a soft April day; shower clouds move fast and threatening, they cast their rain shadows over other parts of the city but they miss Cave Hill. She is some queen bitch, this city, he thinks. She’s ugly, she’s small, she’s mean, she treats you like shit, but you can’t leave her, you keep coming back to her. She fucks you like nothing else. She’s not even faithful, she fucks everyone who comes to her.

The adventure playground warden, who is a Youth Employment draftee dressed as Robin Hood — Nikes over the green tights — is calling out all the red badges. The kids are yellow badges, they’ve got about another fifteen minutes. This is how they get you. Forty-five minutes, you’ve just discovered where the fun is. Why the hell not? He can afford it. Littlejohn told him he should be able to make three times as a consultant what he would as an employee. For once he was speaking the straight truth. Not even therapy three hours a week seriously dents his reserves. Andy Gillespie, xenological consultant. Try telling them that down the Linfield Supporters’ Club.

Xenological consultant. You can’t get away from them, can you? They won’t let you go. They suit this city well, Nation of bitches. They need you, Andy. Both species. They need someone to stand between them and say, hey, wait a minute, stop and look and think. It’s a lonely place, the gap between. It had killed Eamon Donnan when he realized that he wasn’t human but he couldn’t be Shian either. But he needed to belong. You have something you belong to: hanging upside down from that trapeze, scaring the shite out of you; standing up there on the battlements ruling the world. And when he takes the rituals and becomes a
genro,
it won’t be so that he can feel he belongs to the Shian as well as the humans. It’ll be for his own reasons, his own rights, his own justice. Andy Hero. His place is between, the neither-place. You always said you didn’t consider yourself part of any Nation or culture. Your own Nation. The Gillespies, ourselves alone.

He finds he thinks a lot about Ounserrat. Her thoughts are frozen in time in the belly of the lander, his flow to her like water. The Harridis have been helpful to him. They’re all being helpful, and open, as the species study their positions. She hung a time over the edge of death, but she’s stable now. The regen facility out at the L5 point can rebuild her. It’ll take time. Months, a year, maybe more. They’ll take her up next time the lander is scheduled for a resupply trip to the fleet. Even for the Shian, space travel is expensive.

He’s glad her healing will be slow. Time for her to fade to grey in his memory. Time for him to change, so that if they should ever meet again,
genro
to
genro,
they will understand each other completely.

He leans back on the log bench and enjoys the touch of sun on his scalp. A sudden tremor runs through the wood. The bench is shaking. The ground is shaking. He can see the wooden fort quivering.

Stacey.

She’s on the flat platform behind the battlements.

‘Stacey! Talya! Come down now, come to me.’

Children are evacuating the wood fort like a burning skyscraper. Kids drop to the ground, run to be scooped up by their parents. The shaking grows. Earthquake. Can’t be. Ireland is the world’s most seismically stable country. It’s a Shian spacecraft switching on its Mach drive.

‘Stacey! Talya! Look!’

He turns them to look at the shipyards across the river. Follow the line of his pointing finger, there, between the cranes, do you see it?

They see it.

It lifts straight up, a big dark red arrowhead. Its
kesh
stripes have faded, all the colours of the Shian towns have faded, decayed back into the mundane sexlessness of season’s end. The ship goes up and up and up. Even to Gillespie, it’s impressive. The girls are thunderstruck. Up and up and up until it’s level with the tops of the Holywood Hills. It turns on its axis towards the south, tilts its nose upwards. It’s big. It’s wonderfully big.

Talya’s waving to it.

It seems a great idea to Gillespie. He waves, without shame or self-consciousness.

The trembling of the ground changes pitch as the Shian ship manipulates gravity fields.

‘Ooh,’ Stacey says, feet tickled by Mach’s principle.

And then it’s gone. Gillespie imagines he saw a dark streak stab the sky to the south. A sonic boom rolls across the lough. A long tube of white vapour tunnels up through the sky.

‘Wasn’t that something?’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘Wasn’t that quite something?’

Stacey and Talya nod their heads. The line of white vapour slowly blows away on the wind from the west. The girls slip their father’s hand, and run, shouting, back to play.

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in the short-lived British magazine
Extro
. His first novel,
Desolation Road
, was published in 1988. Other works include
King of Morning
,
Queen of Day
(winner of the Philip K. Dick Award),
River of Gods
,
The Dervish House
(both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel
Kling Klang Klatch,
and many more. His most recent publications are
Planesrunner
and
Be My Enemy
, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1996 by Ian McDonald

Cover design Gabriel Guma

978-1-4804-3216-1

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

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