Savages Read online

  Poor JD was too crestfallen to see the wall breach coming. At least there was no violence or drama this time - Gubbins still had the cup in his hand, so he simply faded away.

  JD sat there still in uniform feeling sorry for himself as the music died and I revisibilised.

  “Bravo, JD.”

  He looked at me and said, “But we didn’t find out anything.”

  Even on this side one knows the young by their hope and their blind idealism.

  “We did our job, old chap. What he said is true - most people don’t remember.”

  JD was indignant, of course, to have been put through it all. I’ve never worked out where they get these ideas of their own importance. It was quite different in my day.

  “Then why all that...? What... What was the point?”

  “Ours not to reason why, old sport,” I said. “The Unchanging command, we obey.”

  “But...”

  “My dear boy, when you were on the other side, did anyone ever show you there was a point to it all?”

  They did not.

  “But you carried on anyway,” I said. “To the end. Did you not?”

  He did.

  “Well not everything changes when you cross over, JD. Come.”

  I rose, crossed the room, opened the door and waited, smiling. He still did not realise he had passed.

  “Fingers crossed,” I said, “I won’t be calling you that for much longer, will I?”

  I was just being friendly, of course. It was unlikely I would see him again. We’re a big organisation.

  I rated him as satisfactory, which on balance I think was fair. And one tries to be fair. One isn’t mean, but if one gives them a higher grade than they merit, one cheats those who would deserve it. One might well ask why one makes the effort - to do things properly, that is, to maintain certain standards in one’s work. It may be a habit one gets into. It may just be one’s default setting. Or perhaps, as I sometimes wonder, one is never quite beyond wishing that there might, after all, be a point.

  LUNAR SEAS

  The day I arrived on the moon colony the only two buildings outside the huge star-filled windows of the PortHotel, on that vast blank tablet of cratered rock billed as the great second chance, were a buggy rental centre and an Irish bar. The screens in the arrivals lounge said it was a morning in early October, and uniformed at the desks below them sat the first-generation exiles with their guns and rubber stamps.

  “Security, construction or services?”

  “Construction.”

  He stamped my passport.

  “Occupation?”

  It was the first time I ever had to say it.

  “Labourer.”

  He looked in my face, suspecting but not knowing what.

  “Blue channel. Shuttle to the lifts. Thirty-third floor. Follow the signs for Rivendale.”

  “Is that a place?”

  He handed back the contract.

  “That’s who you work for.”

  Along the walls in long aquaria swam fish like gift-box confectionery, through blended speakers came a trill of birdsong, and air-con scented the passageways with an aroma that to anyone else would have been harmless. But of all flowers natural and engineered I know the bouquet of only one, and that was the one they had chosen where all roads led to Rivendale.

  The name that smelt of money and the air that smelt of Azaleas could have told me most of what has followed. But when you’re as far gone as I was, you see what you want to see because it’s the only way to keep going.

  *

  There’s an old Slow Age song about what a difference a day makes. You don’t expect anything much to happen on the number 47 monorail even if you’re the imaginative type, which I’m not. I had seen girls there before - in the sibilant whoosh of the carriages and the screenlit flash of advertisements, amid the aisles and damp coats and handrails - but my idea of a good journey was to get off without blobs of bubblegum squelching my shoes or cult leaflets shoved in my bag straps.

  My first thought when I saw her face was that she looked like an alien. Something in the curves of her nose or jawline, with the autumn-leaf hair and the skin of pale marble, evoked some race of beings more enlightened, more graceful, more gentle and more magical than anything in ourselves or our creations. She stared out at the city in the long evening drizzle but saw none of it, lost in thought or memory, twining between finger and thumb a loose strand of long red hair. So I sat looking over the screaming headlines of the Tribune into the slant of the rain where her reflection in the dim grey window floated and trembled, a half-coloured Ophelia dream overlaying the wet concrete of the office blocks and the tinted glass of the shopping pagodas.

  Whatever the reason or unreason of the thing, I knew then, as I know now, that a man gets shot out of the saddle like that exactly once in a lifetime. For saying so I’d be laughed at by anyone I knew, but perhaps it was to get away from such people and such laughter, and not just from the visions, that I got the moon idea in the first place.

  *

  Up on the thirty-third floor they checked me over, stripped me down, chipped me up, retested me for plague and narcotics, told me I had a poor muscle quotient and sent me into a lecture hall.

  “You, the labourers, are the most important people on the colony...”

  The voice drifted over the seated rows of new arrivals self-grouped by nation or language: Chinese, collectively insular but taking no pride in the hegemony that had no need of them; sad-eyed Africans, lost-looking against all the chrome and tinted quartz; Hispanic survivors of lands drowned beneath the sea. There were English-speakers if I looked around - knowable by the lack of translation earpiece - but I was the only one with all my front teeth and no tattooed number on the wrist.

  “...so the surveillance systems are your badge of honour: the hands that build the future must be clean.”

  The Rivendale security filed in on cue, armed and bland and booted.

  “You will now be escorted to the residences.”

  It was a long job. The lifts could take only so many at once, each group under a guard that had to outnumber them till it handed them over below.

  “Basement 1: married quarters, offering lower tax rates and organic windows for the health of children’s eyesight...”

  Breeding new labour was cheaper than shipping it.

  “Basement 3: female quarters, no unauthorised access.”

  I counted before me a half-dozen necks seem to twitch where the chips were injected. A tingle went across my skin from the locket over my heart.

  “Basements 5 and 7: male quarters.”

  A sign showed a workman smiling beneath a camera emplacement: To See Your Deeds Is To Know Your Needs. The horde trooped along the corridors and were counted off in pairs into the balneal white caves with their videwindows, to share all but a ten-foot bedroom.

  I got a big Hispafrimerican who walked in ten seconds after me, whistling Red River Valley to no one but himself, and tossed his bag in the other berth. His badge named him as Monroe.

  “Howdy,” he said, not hostile but cautious, filling the doorway.

  “Hello.”

  He looked around and back into my face, scratching his numbered hand.

  “Kinda unwelcomin’, ain’t it?” he said, and I was not sure if he meant the colony or me.

  *

  You might say it would not have taken much to light up my existence. But my existence had been fashioned to be beyond lighting, a dark narrow hippodrome whose two posts were a dank bedsit and the Ministry of Knowledge. I was one of the faceless millions, educated into my office cubicle and allowed to possess just enough to fear losing it. I went in to work the next morning and sat down as if nothing had changed.

  “Roland.”

  He stood behind my shoulder with his silver patrician head up beneath the ceiling fan and his pillowy stomach almost in my ear.

  “Sir?”

  �
��We have instructions to raise the bar for anything related to philosophy or history. Please refer to me before granting Wén 5 or above to anyone younger than forty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He sighed down from his silver height.

  “Regrettable, of course, but it’s what things are coming to. Plebs can’t set a bank on fire without quoting Marx or Nietzsche.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If they can’t read responsibly, they bring it on themselves.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  He drifted away. Being even a subordinate custodian was a power of a kind, but to me it was something rather dirty that I tolerated for a Wén 9 clearance. And the silver head turned a blind eye if ever I took work home, so I tolerated him as well.

  Two things kept me safe in my cocoon: being attentive, I never slipped up on a permission grant; being lonely, I never shared anything I took. So if she or I had got on a different monorail that time and the others, I dare say both defences would have stood.

  *

  The first weeks were the hardest. Two hours at the rockface of the shuttle tunnels or laying down line alternated with two outside digging biosphere foundations in the marine and breathy silence of the suits, drill and shovel tied on in the darkness so as not to drift away, alone with thought and memory and past.

  The joke among the numbered hands of sneaking up behind someone to cut the bindings and watch him chase and grab at the floating tools went out of fashion when Rivendale made the work norms collective and docked everyone’s pay if they weren’t met. That was how they found out the Alphas in each group, and made them foremen.

  None of that concerned me. As we trooped back from Site 3, aching among the stars and watching the lights go on behind the organic windows of the married quarters, I felt my loneliness blessed with a kind of peace, as though I had somehow done the right thing.

  Then one evening they had a man waiting for me.

  The Rivendale ‘R’ shone gold in the blue cap of his uniform, and I had never seen his pug nose before but he called me by name right inside the airlock without even looking at my badge.

  “Would you please come with me, sir?”

  He took me along the corridor, waved me before him into the lift and pressed a number in the thirties. I asked where we were going.

  “No need to worry, sir.”

  I said, “I’m not worried.”

  He looked me up and down with a smirk.

  “Good for you, sir,” he said as the lift opened. “Probably.”

  The air was different on the high floors, thinner but cleaner. From a glass walkway I saw the site foundations I’d just been digging - a settler clinic - and we stopped outside a door that said Mind & Spirit Wellness. He frisked me, stuck his thumb in the sensor and swiped his card; the door came ajar and he stood back.

  “Thank you, sir. Please take a seat inside.”

  I entered a room empty but for an inner door, a camera and a chair. The lock clicked behind me. I sat down and waited.

  I still wasn’t worried. I was the closest thing to a model labourer anywhere on the colony - I kept my head down, did my work, made no complaints even in private. But they weren’t used to that and didn’t expect it from labourers, so that was what had got their attention.

  *

  On the second evening I gave up my seat to her, a rare act of boldness for me. She tried to decline but then accepted, with a smile as they must smile on her planet. She sat yawning behind a hand small and pale like the rest of her with round pink pearls at the fingertips; her stop arrived, and amid the drab sidling queue of shapeless middle managers she drained away and was gone. But from that moment she ruled my dreams awake and sleeping. I saw no chance of anything more and so no possibility of danger. Honi soit qui mal y pense, as the sign over the Ministry said, right below the wén character that looked like a dancer fleeing. And no judgement or laughter reach me where I am now.

  It was a bout of flu that broke the silence. I bought a plague test that showed negative, but was three days sick at home. I dragged myself out on the fourth and was holding myself up on the rail of the carriage - you never get a seat when you need one - when I opened my eyes and there she was before me. She raised one auburn brow with her unworldly smile and sank the hook in my heart:

  “I wondered what happened to you.”

  *

  I lay on the couch and watched the quartz twinkle in the ceiling as the voice drifted over from the desk.

  “Are you happy here?” It was another silver patrician head, this one with an office covered in posters of smiling Rivendale employees and diagrams of the brain. “Settling in? Not feeling too...isolated?”

  I said, “I came here to be isolated.”

  I heard a click and the patter of his fingers typing.

  “You’ve been doing a lot of reading,” he said; they could monitor every tablet, as I of all people knew. “Dante, Inferno; Proust, The Prisoner; Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons. Unfashionable tastes. And you’ve read the original Sima Qian.”

  Any educated man knows Chinese now, but that last is Wén 9.

  “It’s natural for a young mind to be enquiring,” he said. “You’re not the first or last boy to have breached school restrictions. But don’t you believe in putting away childish things?”

  He paused in typing and waited for an answer. If he knew all that, he knew about the Ministry.

  I said, “Someone has to know where to put them.”

  I heard his chair swivel but was too near sleep to look.

  “There must be a great deal in that head of yours,” he said. “And I am a head hunter. One day you could be part of our family - why not? But first we must see to your wellness.”

  “I break rocks four hours a day,” I said through a yawn. “And lay track four more.”

  “But at the other times...” His voice drifted over me slow and velvety. “Don’t you think you would be happier doing less reading and more of something...healthier? We think you would.”

  My chest must have risen and fallen with breathing because the locket slid up over the neck chip and somehow brought me sharp awake.

  “Do you mind if I go now?”

  “There’s a wellness session in the lecture hall on Sunday morning. Most helpful.”

  “And if I’d rather not?”

  He let the silence ripen as he drew in a breath.

  “Your Wén 9 clearance,” he said, “should have been revoked and adjusted to your new status.”

  I sat up and looked at him, his spectacled silver patrician head hard and cold as the quartz.

  “Are you blackmailing me?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Then what would you say?”

  He smiled back silverly among his cross-sections of the brain.

  “That some are born to wellness, some attain to it, and others have it thrust upon them. I work with all kinds - and from the last group come some of our best.”

  A labourer’s clearance means Wén 2, the lowest adult grade - consumer catalogues, comics and pornography.

  “Nine o’clock start,” he said, still smiling. “You’ll get an alarm at eight.”

  *

  From being strangers who recognised one another, we became something else with no name in any language. We would sit together in a shared quiet, she looking at her tablet or out of the window, I reading or trying to, the words on the screen blurring as I watched her in the high places of my vision; she would laugh like a child and lean over to show me the cause - most often photographs from the Slow Age, which fascinated her - or draw my attention with a gesture or nod to something passing outside, comic tragic sinister or bizarre, never needing to explain.

  Then one evening she limped on with her bag in one hand and a crutch in the other. With no free seats she had to accept mine. A thunderstorm broke, and at her stop the rain was falling in sheets. She had only two hands. I went ahead to
clear a way along the aisle, and when she got out I jumped down after her. The door shut before she realised I had done it. She looked up in surprise as I opened my umbrella over us. The surprise softened to gratitude.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  I said, “I wanted to.”

  She said, “I know.”

  We walked through the lamplight among the spattered shine of the puddles. She stopped outside a block like any of the others. I looked around and at once a shadow crossed my mind, prescient, as though an innocence had gone out of me at knowing where she lived.

  We stood a moment close beneath the black umbrella as the rain drummed and pounded, her hand holding the bag straps at her shoulder. On her finger was a ring I had noticed before with tiny crimson jewels set in a flower.

  I said, “Which flower is that?”

  Her mouth dimpled as she looked up through the lashes.

  “Azalea.”

  It meant nothing to me.

  “Your favourite?”

  She said, “My name.”

  *

  One Saturday night I went to the Irish bar with Monroe. It was called The Green Cheese then - the sign showed a green cheese moon spinning on the finger of a leprechaun. The few nightspots inside the complex boasted armed security and alcohol limits, so there had to be a place for certain types to let off steam. It had a cloakroom by the airlock for the breathing suits, and a closet in the back to throw anyone who passed out.

  Monroe was no great talker - to tell people to leave him alone he had no need of words - but must have decided it was time to take me in hand. We sat by the window looking out at the stars and quaffing baijiu from basalt tumblers; around us the Chinese gambled, the Irish talked, and the numbered hands just drank.

  “Man,” he said when I told him about my trip up to the thirties, “you just got no sense. How you last this long? I reckon trouble looked at you and yawned and went on by.”