Divisions (8 page)

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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘Could you please explain things to them?’
Malley shrugged. His hands were quivering. He wiped the back of one hand across his mouth and stood up, gripping the rim of the buggy’s windshield.
‘Hey, friends!’ he called out. ‘Listen to me! Thanks for your concern, but everything’s all right. I’m going away for a short while with this woman from the … outside. I’m going of my own free will. So please don’t worry! Let us through, please.’
The tallest and toughest-looking man in sight shouldered his way to the front and stood right in our way.
‘I’m sorry, Dr Malley,’ he said. ‘But we ain’t sure you
are
going of your own free will. Those space-folks, those
socialists
, they can do things to your brain so’s you
think
you’re doing what you want, but you’re doing what
they
want, see?’
‘Not
that
old lie,’ I muttered under my breath. I should have guessed that the non-co dominant ideology could only be a full-blown paranoid delusional system.
‘I’m sure they can,’ Malley said. He’d recovered some of his poise. ‘But I very much doubt that they can do it in half an hour.’
The tall guy looked nonplussed for all of two seconds.
‘Well then,’ he said with implacable logic, ‘she must’ve threatened you. That they’d zap the village, or some’ing. It’s all right, Dr Malley, you tell us! We ain’t scared of them!’
‘I assure you—’ Malley began, but I knew it was of no use. Argument
would get us nowhere. I couldn’t credibly threaten Malley, and if it came to threatening the crowd my pistol (now inside my suit, and pressing painfully against my hip) was no match for their guns. Whether the suit could recreate the helmet in time to protect me from a shot was an experiment I didn’t care to try.
‘Scroll helmet up,’ I whispered, and turned on the engine. In the moment of blackness I reached up and caught Malley’s shoulder.
‘Get right down!’ I yelled, pulling hard. With the other hand I caught the wheel. I groped with my foot for the control pedal and pushed it down. The buggy leapt forward and as the view cleared I saw the man in front of us hurl himself out of the way at the last possible second. The others did likewise, scattering like skittles. And then we were through, careering down the village street in a flurry of chickens and a shower of stones. One or two shots were fired, but they whizzed overhead—I doubted that they were seriously aimed to hit. The only people between us and the end of the village were more interested in getting out of our way than in stopping us. But one of them, glimpsed as we hurtled past, was holding a rectangular chunk of plastic with a yard-long thin rod poking up from it. He held it with one end at his mouth and the other at his ear, and was speaking rapidly into it.
I had a nasty suspicion that this was a radio.
 
 
‘I told you I taught them electronics,’ Malley said a few minutes later, as we bounced along yet another forest track, heading in completely the wrong direction for any return to Alexandra Port.
‘How irresponsible can you get!’ I yelled. ‘Radios can pick up viruses, you know that.’
‘Yeah, and melt in your hand—so what!’
‘What about
mind
viruses? Have you thought about that?’
‘Of course I have,’ Malley said, struggling to get the seatbelt on. ‘They’re just a fancy term for ideas you don’t like.’
‘Ideas
who
don’t like?’
‘You lot,’ Malley said, waving his hand around his head. ‘The Union. The Division. It’s just censorship.’
I laughed so hard that the buggy swung dangerously as I steered around a log. ‘Sure, like taking what you want is rationing!’
‘Exactly my point,’ Malley said, with unaccountable triumph.
I sighed. ‘Dr Malley, I have great admiration for you and all you’ve accomplished, and I can even see you’ve been doing good to these people, but I respectfully suggest that you’re a bit out of touch, or maybe misinformed—’
‘Hah!’
‘—and you’ll see things differently once you get out to the Division.’
‘No doubt,’ Malley chuckled, wheezing. ‘No doubt I will.’
The map—still patched to my eye—showed that we were nearing Gunnersmere, one of the first fens of the Thames Estuary. The village of Under Flyover was marked as a straggle of houses along the shore. Ahead, I could already see the trees thinning, oak and beech being replaced by alder and birch.
‘What do you think they were using the radio for?’ I asked.
Malley gave me an evil grin. ‘Oh, warning ahead, probably.’
‘Skies above, man!’ I applied the brake gently and we slithered to a halt in a spray of leaf mould and beechnuts. Suddenly our surroundings seemed very quiet, apart from sinister cracklings under the trees, and deserted, apart from flitting shapes in the long shadows. ‘You mean we’re heading straight into an
ambush
?’
‘
You
are,’ Malley said calmly. ‘I would have stopped you any minute now, but I was waiting to see how long it’d take before you realized you needed my local knowledge to get you out of this.’
I took a deep breath. ‘OK, Dr Malley. I need your local knowledge. That, or a rescue chopper.’
‘Maybe both. First things first. Let’s get this buggy off the road, preferably somewhere not too obvious. There’s a bit of exposed roadway a couple of hundred metres ahead, and some ruins alongside. Tracks shouldn’t be too conspicuous, especially in poor light.’
I restarted the engine and let the vehicle roll forward quietly to the area Malley had indicated, where the chances of wind and weather had laid bare the cracked tarmac. I sought out a ruin whose approach wasn’t itself covered with plants or plant remains, and found one with a battered concrete ramp leading to the gap where its doors had been. Within a minute or two we had the buggy stashed inside a rectangle of crumbled wall, within which nettles, willow-herb and hemp grew to a height of over six feet. I looked down at the former contents of the rucksack, scattered forlornly in the rear well of the buggy. I changed the suit into a rucksack and a dappled black-and-green jumpsuit, then repacked, with the weighty addition of the deflated boat, its electric outboard engine and fuel cell, and the spare gas cylinder.
‘That’s one possible way out,’ Malley acknowledged.
‘Now what?’ I asked.
‘Do you have any way of contacting the nearest Union outpost?’
Outpost, indeed. ‘Not directly,’ I said. ‘I could contact them via my ship. It’ll be above the horizon in about—’ I blinked up the watch floating in my left eye, and checked ‘—fifteen minutes. But I’d really rather not do that, or send out some general distress—’
At that moment I heard a rhythmic thudding along the trail in the direction from which we’d come.
‘What’s that?’
‘Galloping horse,’ Malley said. ‘Get down!’
We ducked behind the wall. I drew my pistol, wishing as I did so that I’d known of the properties of nettles before changing my suit: my hands were coming up in a nasty rash. The thudding sound got closer, then slowed and changed to a clatter as the horse encountered the stretch of paving. As it drew level I peered out through the stems of weeds.
A young woman was sitting on the back of the strange, huge beast, holding on and controlling it by an arrangement of leather straps and metal footrests. She was riding quite slowly now, looking from side to side. Her clothes were filthy, as were the sides of the horse, and a trickle of blood was drying below a bruise on her temple. As she turned to the right, almost facing me, I recognized her.
‘Suze!’ I called, standing up.
She jumped and the horse shied and whinnied, then she tugged on the straps she held and said something, and the beast settled. Malley, with a grunt and a glower, straightened up and followed more slowly as I skipped over the tumbled brickwork and down to the path.
‘Are you all right, Ellen?’ She looked past me at Malley, and her eyes widened. ‘Is that—?’
‘The great man himself, yes,’ I said. ‘But Suze, what about you? What happened?’ Not that it was hard to guess.
‘I followed you,’ she said. ‘I know you didn’t want me to come, but—’
‘It was a kind thought,’ I said.
‘Well.’ She smiled down at us, uncertainly. ‘I took a barge up the canal and borrowed Bonnie here.’ She patted the horse’s neck. ‘I’ve ridden her before, and she’s much better on the forest paths than a buggy, you know. When I rode into the village back there the locals saw I was Union, and some sort of riot started, all yelling and running. They pelted me with stones and, uh, shit. I didn’t know what was going on, so I just put my head down and dug in my heels. And here I am.’
Here you are. Another innocent to look after.
‘Anybody follow you?’
She shook her head. ‘What about you?’ she asked.
I introduced her to Malley and outlined our plight.
‘Oh!’ she said, peering anxiously around. ‘You mean there might be people out looking for us right now?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Over to you, Dr Malley.’
‘Call me Sam,’ he said, possibly irritated by Suze’s star-struck glances at him. ‘Everybody does. Short for Isambard. Right. Suze, can you put a call through to Alexandra Port, arrange a chopper pick-up?’
‘Yes, of course, Doc—Sam.’
‘OK.’ He closed his eyes and pinched his forehead with thumb and forefinger, looking as tired as I felt. ‘You do that, ask them to be ready for take off in about an hour. We make our way through the trees to the east of the path, around the back of the village, hide out by the shore, and then no doubt Ellen here will be able to give them our exact coordinates from her magic suit’s gee-pals link, right?’
I nodded.
‘Okay,’ said Malley. ‘Suze, you’re going to have to say goodbye to the horse, I’m afraid, but I assure you the locals won’t maltreat her.’
Suze removed the horse’s harness and sent her cantering away southward with an affectionate slap on the rump. Then she unclipped a narrow-band transmitter from her belt, tuned it to the nearest communications satellite relay, and called up Alexandra Port. She frowned and shook her head.
‘Message got through, but there’s no acknowledgement.’
Malley shrugged. ‘Try again when we get there.’
He turned, and Suze and I followed him under the trees to the east of the path. The way through the trees, bearing generally rightward, was much harder than one might expect. They were old woods, so the canopy was high and thick enough to choke off most undergrowth. However, the ruins underneath the deceptive layers of leaf mould more than made up for this lack. We banged our shins on hidden blocks, plunged knee-deep into hidden pits. What appeared to be a dead branch could turn out to be a disconcertingly solid and sharp prong of rusted metal. Malley persisted in staying in the denser part of the wood, and walked its treacherous footing with confidence, carrying his overnight bag like somebody heading for a transport terminal. We concentrated on avoiding injury and struggled silently—or at least inarticulately—along behind him.
After about half an hour of this Malley began to bear a little further right and we shortly emerged in a more open area of long grass dotted with bushes and low trees. The water was about a hundred yards away and at this point was almost two miles across. A mile to our left was Under Flyover with its surrounding fields and gardens. Only a few pillars remained of the structure which had given it its name.
Spread out across the fields was a line of people with dogs, working their way systematically towards where we were and communicating with other people, no doubt out of sight in the forest, with their hand-held radios. We crouched down and Suze tried again to raise Alexandra Port.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand this. It’s like they’re deliberately ignoring us!’
‘Could this be policy?’ I asked her. ‘Is it something to do with the ruckus we—I—caused back in that village? Like, if you stir up the non-cos, you’re on your own?’
She shook her head fiercely. ‘No way. You’d have some explaining to do, but we always pull our own people out. Hey, we even help non-cos if they ask for it.’
Malley grunted. ‘Huh, usually those who least deserve it—village hooligans or thieves.’
Suze was agreeing with him and the searchers were getting closer.
‘Enough,’ I said. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’
 
 
What we did was run hell-for-leather down to the shore. I tore through the long grass, not bothering to hide or dodge, slid down banks, felt my feet grit on gravel, and pulled the inflation cord of the boat. Putting the gas cylinder and the motor in place was the only preparation we’d made.
The dinghy
whoomphed
into shape in about five seconds, even as I was throwing it forward onto the water. Suze came panting, Malley puffing, behind me and we all splashed through the shallows and pushed the boat out until the water was knee-deep, then clambered in. It all took less than a minute, which was more than enough time for yells and yaps to break out. By the time the first of our pursuers had reached the water’s edge I had the engine started and we were about ten yards out. A couple of men waded in after us and a dog plunged in and bravely paddled in our wake.

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