The Transdyne Awakening (7 page)

An overlooked hypermart food container would have been a prize.

When she had come across two other people who seemed to have the same idea, she thought that her luck had run out. They were both pretty big and intimidating, but she had decided to go down fighting. There hadn’t been the need. The two she had met on the streets that night had been heading outbound, on their way to join an illegal community and had brought her to ‘The Way’. She had fallen asleep in the passenger berth of their battered old terraglide.

Waking with a start, she had stepped down into a new life in the community. She was grateful, but it soon became clear that she had not arrived without something to offer. The limited time she had spent in learning had revealed a practical intelligence and an aptitude for mathematics. From her parents she had gained a basic knowledge of languages and a deep appreciation of the literature of oldtime. Unlike many of the residents here, she could make herself understood in several tongues. New arrivals were put at ease as she spoke intelligibly to them and she had fallen into the role of interpreter.

She had not been idle and had honed her natural skills, using the vast library of studylearn books and electronic resources available in the Wisdom library.

Now she sat over a meal at the Community of the Way looking pensive. She showed little interest in the food before her. Her thoughts seemed to be somewhere else. Clay, once again, found himself shovelling the nourishment down faster than was good for him. Pausing from his feeding frenzy, he looked across at her. He had never seen a Russian woman before. He was taken with her appearance. A brunette with pale blue eyes, her thoughtful expression held his attention. He studied her pretty face with its high set cheekbones. Lost in her reflections, she didn’t notice Clay’s staring. He checked himself and drew his gaze away to others seated at the bench. One of the men sitting opposite to his left caught his eye.

“You like that?” he asked, pointing with his fork to Clay’s meal.

“Yeah, it’s unusual. What is it?”

“That’s lizard meat.”

“Lizard!? You mean like those big things with the fins I’ve seen out there?”

“Yeah, well Berta and her gang like to give us a little variety. Course, there needs to be enough of them to butcher up. If they bring her in enough meat, she’ll work her miracle touch on it. She reckons it takes around twenty of ‘em to make up a decent sized stew. She puts it on the menu and it’s first come, first served. When it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s never enough for everyone to get a taste. The ones who really like it take turns.”

Clay looked at the remains on the platter in front of him. ‘Too late to look back now!’ he thought, taking a big swig at his coffee to wash his meal down. Lizard meat, eh? Well these folks looked healthy enough on it so it couldn’t be all that bad.

“The coffee… this the stuff I brought you from Ahab’s store a while back?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Not all of it. We grow our own as well. We supplement our supply with your stuff. It can take a lot of land area. We’ve got plenty of that here as you’ve seen, but it took us a while to get going with the crops. It works because a lot of the people here like to drink coffee. They don’t mind putting the extra hours into helping grow it.”

Clay widened his focus, looking over the man’s shoulder. Something moved towards them and into the light. He checked that he was seeing alright. It was a dog, a real live dog, here inside a community building. Dropping his eating iron, he lifted his legs clear of the bench.

On his feet, he drew and aimed his pulsegun as the thing came bounding forward. The other diners looked up.

“No need for that, friend,” said a voice from across the room.

“Hello, Pushkin!” Skye greeted the animal, which came to a halt right next to her. It was panting and gazed up at her with big bright eyes. She looked down, smiling at it. The others at the long bench began laughing.

Once again Clay realized that he wasn’t on the same scan frequency as these people.

“Why do you do this?” Skye asked him, running her hand fondly through the slight mane at the dog’s neck.

“It’s a dog!” he stammered.

As the amusement subsided, an embarrassed Clay re-sheathed the weapon and sat down again.

“You do not like the dogs?” She was asking a question but it sounded like a statement.

“I’ve never seen a tame one,” Clay said. “In the Citizones there were plague dogs; killers!”

To Clay, dogs were diseased pack scavengers. The Nimrod series of Trans had cleared the streets of them after they had become plague carriers. Plague dogs were vicious and more than one Nimrod had been ripped to scrap in attacks. It had taken a while, but the Nimrods had eventually completed their task, exterminating every last canine in the Citizone areas. To anyone who had lived through that period, the notion of a friendly canine would have been a contradiction. A friendly dog?

Yet here was such a creature, sitting quietly at Skye’s feet and being fed scraps from her meal. Clay shook his head in disbelief. Next he’d be seeing some of their sheep flying by. Between fondling the animal and feeding it scraps, Skye asked Clay, “Where are you from, courier?”

“It’s Clay… my name is Clay,” he said.

“Ya, you are Clay I am called Skye. What is your story?”

What
was
his story? He’d never been asked that before.

“It’s not very interesting,” he said.

Skye laughed. “Everybody’s story is interesting.”

Clay hesitated for a moment. He wondered whether it was wise to share too much personal information with these people. After all, weren’t they still just customers for biomeds and seeds? Somehow he just didn’t feel that detachment now. He didn’t view them through that old, narrow lens any longer.

Her laughter put him at ease. When he had paused long enough to collect his thoughts, he started to recall his personal history. He realized that his account must have sounded faltering, but then this wasn’t something he had ever tried to do before. He started with his earliest memories of life in the Tenacamps; not knowing the man who had sired him, being brought up by his denfather, life on those tough streets, getting his chance to work for Ahab, the errands he had done initially and finally how he had got his chance to move ‘into the field’. “They’ve got to trust you for that,” he said with some pride. “Sometimes you’re out of sight for a while, carrying things that are worth a stack of ticks. They have to know that you’re not going to disappear with that stuff.”

Skye listened, all the while stroking the friendly dog.

“Why do you call him Pushkin?” Clay inquired.

“Why not?” she asked.

Clay shrugged.

Unprompted, Skye went on to tell her own tale. Clay listened, leaning over the bench towards her and not wanting to miss a detail. As her account went on, Clay once again had the feeling that, compared to her, in fact compared to almost everyone he had met here, he hadn’t really done anything with his life so far. She had travelled, she knew about things that he hadn’t even considered, she spoke in different languages.

She had a perspective on what had happened in the wider world, out there beyond Tenacamps, the restricted Citizones, beyond the world controlled by idiot politicos and power brokers. He was fascinated, most of all by her grasp of what he had always dismissively viewed as ‘oldtime’ study-learning. The more she talked, the more he understood her as seeing no division between the old wisdom learning and the best of ‘now’ thinking. To her it was all one, a seamless whole cloth. She talked in definite terms, about what was right and what was wrong.

Clay let her talk at length. He was inspired. He recalled what had overtaken him that day at Ahab’s place, that feeling of having a new kind of thirst to quench. He had made up his mind to drink as deeply as he could from this newfound well. Here he was listening, almost spellbound, to this fascinating person whose cup seemed to be overflowing with the very stuff he wanted.

They were still in conversation as they left the table together. Clay felt at ease with her. She was a lot like John; confident yet unaffected. Pushkin, the dog followed and now and again she would talk to it as if it understood her words. Pushkin certainly understood her tone and responded to her affectionate touch.

It was evening. As they walked beneath the vast camouflaged constructions, the sky on the horizon started to change. Clay became aware of a welcome breeze blowing gently through the place. He had never walked out this far from the main camp buildings. Once again he was overwhelmed at the ingenuity of these people. They passed some of the gardens and orchards where people were unhurriedly going about last minute tasks.

Skye showed him some of the animals. This place was big, Clay thought to himself as they leaned on the fencing to the sheep pasture. Skye said something briskly to the dog. It took off like lightning towards a gaggle of sheep way over on the far side of the grazing area. As Skye gently called commands, Pushkin crouched and silently repositioned himself. He did this several times, until he had brought the sheep from the far side to join the rest, jostling together at the near fence. Clay looked on in amazement. “That’s one more thing I’ve never seen in my life.”

Skye smiled broadly at him. “He’s a wonderful sheepdog, isn’t he?” She beckoned Pushkin over to the fencing. As he bounded up, she knelt down with her face at the dog’s eye level. She cradled his face with both hands and once again, talked directly to him. “You are a wonderful dog, aren’t you, my Pushkin?” she whispered. Clay watched this little exchange in absolute wonder. He was trying, he was
really
trying, to expand his thinking so that he could take it in.

When they returned to the dining area, John was still seated at a bench talking with one of the crew. Skye said goodnight and Clay took a seat, waiting for the two men to finish their conversation. Usually, when his head was buzzing like this, he would have sought escape with a couple of Neverminds. Tonight, he still felt like company. John was looking tired but stayed to talk with him, drinking coffee.

“You’re getting the feel of the place, then?” he asked.

Clay whistled quietly. “The more I see, the more questions I seem to have!” He was beginning to get beneath the surface of life here. He was beginning to grasp why these people took the risks they did in order to remain outside of the System.

The world in which they now lived had been shaped, carefully and slowly, by calculating political engineers. In the years before Clay’s birth, most of the earth’s population seemed to have been oblivious to the small, incremental steps that had led them into this dark, oppressive age. They appeared to have completely ignored the voices trying to alert them to the dangers of their complacency. The fabric of society that most people knew had begun to come apart from the centre, as the road was steadily paved for the near deification of the World Leader. Where the slide into chaos had needed a little nudging, it had been helped along by thousands of covert operations. Those behind the push for World Government had set up and used dozens of front organizations to fuel the unrest. Having caused the terror and engineered the confusion, they could then offer to restore the stability that the terror stricken masses craved above all else. Over a short period of time, men and women began clamouring for the restoration of some kind of order.

When Caesar Romano had finally stepped onto the world stage, he was welcomed like a messiah. Brilliant minds at work in the shadows had paved the way to his grand entrance. All he really had to do was look good and give out the powerful propaganda speeches put before him.

He was depicted as having brought peace to the most war-torn regions of the world, settling longstanding conflicts with his staged diplomacy. The people got what they had asked for, but at a terrible price. In the Megacities, martial law was enforced. The violent, starving mobs on the streets were simply eradicated. Polibro squads suppressed all opposition. The death toll went on mounting as the New World Order was forced into place. The time when there had been a division between the Military and a Polibro force was long forgotten. A Polibro trooper now saw no contradiction in turning his weaponry on citizens when ordered. Alongside the regular troupers, Trans were employed. By this time people were so confused and weary that they welcomed the strong arm of World Law. Before the big public viewscreens, crowds wept at Romano’s rhetoric.

“You can once again sleep safely in your homes, thanks to World Government. You can buy food from the State Hypermarts, thanks to World Government. You owe your security to World Government. There is only one peace - World Peace. There is only one law - World Law. There is only one way - The Way Of The New World Order.”

As the World Federation came into being, national standing armies simply ceased to exist. There was one Government, one rule, one law for all. To try to live outside this all-encompassing web was to risk death. If you were not in the system, you were an antisocial element. You could not officially buy or sell anything. You had no status. You became an ‘un-person’. The wise few who had foreseen the emergence of the Superstate had made their own preparations. It had taken many years to lay the foundations of a system as massive and overarching as World Government. As these foundations were being put into place, other builders had been at work.

Clay had heard John’s account of his father. He had been an engineer and had gathered around him a team of likeminded men. They knew that they would be marked out as antisocials. Once identified by the new surveillance grids, their spiritual principles ensured them an appointment with the guillotines.

John’s father had been one of the original planning group for The Way. His vision for a free community based on shared principles, along with brilliant engineering skills, had helped shape the scheme. Right from the outset, they had all pooled whatever possessions or real estate they had to invest in their goal. On the road between vision and the present reality, the people of this community had overcome hardship and tragedy. John’s father had been arrested while bargaining for a consignment of off-market electronic supplies. Both he and his contact had been executed as antisocials. The remaining group had continued, building on the template he had fashioned. Soon there were several small communities living outside the scope of the New Society.