Green Boy (10 page)

“That will do,” Sir said. He looked over at Lou and patted the seat of the chair. “Come here, small one. Your turn.”

Lou stood still, gazing at him, and my heart sank. If they tried strapping him on that chair, he'd start gasping and grunting and go into a seizure; he didn't mind children, but he hated being touched by any strange adult. Grammie hadn't yet been able to get him to go to school; it was the main reason why he couldn't yet read or write, though we were all trying to teach him.

I said quickly to Sir, “Please don't—he just can't do that. He's not like ...”

But my voice trailed away, because Lou was already trotting over to the chair, hoisting himself up into it. Sir gave him a helpful boost. I stood there gaping. Lou caught my eye, and grinned, as they put the bands over his arms and chest, and the metal circlet on his forehead. Nora had to shorten that, to keep it from dropping down onto his nose.

Then Sir began talking to him, and very soon I understood why Lou was so unconcerned. Always I kept forgetting, here in this Otherworld, that although I was still the same person I'd always been, my little brother was different. A hundred miles different, a whole world different. I hadn't the remotest idea of the things that he could do, here.

Sir said, quiet and friendly, “Are you homesick, Lou?”

Lou cocked his head to one side and then shook it, no.

I looked at the screen. It was blank.

“Are you hungry?”

Lou promptly nodded, and on the screen there was a fuzzy image of the candy bar Nora had given each of us. We all laughed.

“Those black creatures in the Wilderness,” Sir said, in the same calm voice, “why weren't you afraid of them?”

Lou smiled at him, but on the screen there was nothing but lines of crackling static, the way a TV set looks when the programs are all done.

Sir took a quick breath, and paused for a moment. “I see,” he said slowly. Then he said, “They killed two of my men, Lou—how come they didn't hurt you?”

The screen was still crackling and blank, and Lou turned his head to peer at it. He looked curious, as if he was checking to see whether it would show anything.

Nora checked the straps on Lou's body, and the metal circle round his head, but the screen didn't change. “There's nothing wrong,” she said.

“No. Once in a great while, it meets its match,” Sir said. “This is pointless—take those things
off
him.” He stood looking down thoughtfully at Lou for a moment while Nora disconnected him. He said, almost to himself, “You're the one they want, aren't you? Something happened to you in the Wilderness. Something they've been waiting
for
. We just have to find out what it is.”

Then he glanced over at me again. “Where did they take you, after my men died?” he said. “Back down the tunnel?”

I said, “I don't suppose you'll believe me, but we were back where we came from, in the very next second.”

Maybe he did believe me. He stood there looking into space, rubbing one forefinger up and down his cheek. Then he moved to a panel under the big screen and pressed some buttons. “For your interest,” he said, “here is the Wilderness as the Underground left it that day.”

The picture that filled the screen must have been taken from one of those helicopters. We were high up, looking down at a blackened, lumpy landscape from which the tall, burned stumps of trees jutted upward like black spines. Here and there a curl of smoke rose into the air. We moved to one side, then the other, then rose higher. All around, there was nothing but cinders and ash. The Wilderness had been burned into nothing. Of the lush green growth we had seen the last time, all that remained was a black desert.

“The fire my men had set was contained,” Sir said, “but your friends from the Underground set more fires as they ran. They were prearranged, those fires. They burned very fiercely, and the wind carried the flames to our research facility, deep in the woods. A very valuable place, where we did vital work on genetic mutation. When that caught fire, there were huge explosions that must also have been preset. They were all ready to destroy the Wilderness, they were just waiting. Waiting for whatever it was that had happened, that day.”

He squatted on his heels beside Lou so that he could
look him in the face. His skin was fairly dark, and the scar that ran into his beard stood out, in a nubbly white line. He glanced up at me too, and he said, quiet but fierce, “They are fanatics, do you understand that? Fanatics. Their only aim is destruction, of all the glories of our civilization. We have vanquished every major disease, we have found ways to feed and house every being on this planet, we have learned to resist the changes in climate as they come. Human kind has finally achieved control of life on Pangaia. But the fanatics of the Underground can see none of this. They fight their Greenwar to bring down the global government and substitute anarchy. They're mad, of course. But very dangerous.”

He stood up again, and put his hands under Lou's arms to lift him gently down from the chair. Then he took a little box out of his pocket and pressed a switch on it. It buzzed softly.

“And they brought you from your distant island for some dark connected purpose,” he said. “Related I think to an ancient festival that used to take place a few days from now, on August first. Ignorant superstition, like all their talk. They have been threatening doom for that date over the webwork, threatening a sacrifice. The end of our world, and the beginning of another. Mad. Unless this law and that law are changed, they are threatening, they will do such things. . . .”

He looked at Nora in a helpless kind of way. “Can
you believe I am trying to explain this to a pair of children?” he said.

“Why not?” she said. “One of them is . . . unusual.”

Lou was trotting round the room again, gazing up at the pictures. He reached out once more to touch the jeweled hummingbird, but paused at the last moment, and drew back his hand.

Sir gripped my shoulder, hard. I glanced up and saw the black eyes staring down at me, still fierce. He said, “Your brother has a talent that they need, and might kill for. Be warned, work with the Government, and we will keep you both safe.”

Before I could give that the smallest thought, the door opened and several people came hurrying in, men and women, all in the same sleek dark red uniform as Nora. Sir looked at one of them, a small thin man with sharp eyes and a completely bald head. “I want these two taken to Central, to be examined by Dr. Owen and Dr. Karminsky,” he said. “They will have been informed. Keep them there overnight, and then bring them back here.”

He looked me in the eye again. “Don't worry,” he said.

The small bald man nodded at me encouragingly, but it didn't stop me worrying. I didn't like the idea of being “kept safe” by the Government one bit. The whole group of police took us outside.

We never saw Sir again.

Along gleaming corridors they took us, past more of those war-filled screens, and then into a wide elevator
with metal walls. I saw Lou's eyes widen as the doors of the elevator swung silently together, and he felt the pressure of the rising floor under his feet. It was his first time in an elevator. He's never been to Nassau, he's never left our island, and though he's seen life in the rest of the world on television, there's a lot he hasn't seen or done.

In the Otherworld there was a lot that I hadn't seen or done either. The elevator doors hissed open and we were out on the top of the building, at the edge of a wide flat roof, with the airport's crisscrossing lines of lights spread all round us and a thick brown haze above, merging into darkness. You could see a star here or there in the sky, but very few, and none that I could recognize. We both know the stars, Lou and I; it's one of the things Grand's hot on. He says anyone who lives among islands and boats should know how to navigate by the stars. Looking at the darkness, I wondered suddenly whether it was night in our own world, whether Grand and Grammie would be frantic because we weren't back home. Somehow I didn't think so. Time in the Otherworld didn't match the way time passed at home.

The air filled with noise; a helicopter was hovering above us, coming down very slowly toward the roof. Its door opened as it touched down, and we were shoved inside, hands forcing our heads down so they wouldn't be chopped
off
by the rotors. The shape and size of the rotors looked quite different from the ones I'd seen in our world, but I couldn't figure out how.

Two men got in with us, and put Lou and me together in a seat at the back, and up we went, fast. Lou was next to the window, looking down, making soft little amazed noises. He glanced up at me, and grinned. I couldn't help grinning back, though I can't say I felt much like it. Looking out from up there, we must have been able to see for miles. And everywhere we looked, in every direction, there were lights: chains and necklaces of lights, moving strands of light that must have been roads, endless dots of light. Endless people.

First I thought how beautiful the lights were, but in the next instant I realized they showed how incredibly crowded this place must be. It was like the phosphorescence in the sea that Grand showed us sometimes after dark, at home; when you stirred up the seawater, it glowed like liquid fire—but the light didn't come from the water itself. It came from all the thousands and millions of tiny glowing creatures swarming in every inch.

The helicopter was very noisy. Nobody spoke to us. Sir and Nora had treated us like people, but now we were just objects, to be shuttled around. The only trouble was, I didn't know where we were being shuttled to. What was Central? A hospital? “We'll keep you safe” could have meant anything, even some sort of prison.

We flew for quite a long time, half an hour maybe, and Lou fell asleep, his head drooping against my shoulder. It was amazing how he could just tune everything
out. Still, he's young. It made me feel lonely. I sat there with my mind worrying away a mile a minute, staring out at those endless dots and strings of light, that went on and on without a break anywhere.

When we did come down, it was into a place really thick with lights, and as we slowly dropped closer and closer to the ground I looked out of the window and saw dozens of great tall buildings reaching up to meet us, skyscrapers I guess, all of them blazing with light. On the other side I saw only darkness, a broad strip of darkness before the sea of lights began again, hazy in the distance. When the helicopter touched down, with a gentle jolt, I realized that this darkness was a river, and that we were landing on a flat place where the river and the city met. Floodlights shone down over the landing area, and at its edge you could see the river lapping against a barrier wall. In the light, the water was a dark grey-brown.

Still, nobody spoke to us. They took us across a paved space and onto a moving staircase that rose steeply upward. Lou loved it, he chortled with surprised delight as it carried him up. People climbed past us even while we moved; the place was crowded and busy and everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Pangaia was a world I could never have imagined, from what I knew at home. Everywhere we had been, the land was paved or concreted and built over, jammed with people. The air was hazy and the water was brown, and no stars shone. Only the weird mutated Wilderness had been green, and now
that was black and dead. It was all about as different from Lucaya as any place could be.

We stepped off the staircase, with a silent man in uniform at either side of us. This place did look as if it might be a hospital; it was all glass and steel and white paint, with long bleak corridors, and plateglass doors that slid open when you walked toward them. Men and women in white coats or white overalls hurried about the corridors, murmuring to each other, each carrying a little flickering screen the size of a book. Everyone looked worried; nobody smiled.

Our two red-uniformed guardians marched us along miles of gleaming corridor and delivered us at last to an airy room filled with strange-looking computer equipment, all wires and screens and banks of levers and buttons. We found ourselves facing a small bald man with bright blue eyes and a nut-brown face. He wore a long white coat and white shoes, and he was sitting on a stool gazing at us both with great interest. He had one of those book-sized screen things in his hand. He was so obviously expecting us that when the two silent uniformed men brought us in, he just nodded at them and waved them away. And they saluted and went.

There was nobody else in the room. Some of the equipment was humming softly. The man's face was creased and friendly, and as our guards left, he got to his feet and held out a hand for me to shake. I took it with a firm grip, and got one back. Grand was very
big on firm handshakes, he told us they were a test of character.

“You're Trey and Lou,” said the nut-brown man, and he shook Lou's hand too. “I'm Dr. Owen, and I have to take some measurements. Don't worry. Nothing to scare you. Stand here—look.”

There were two round raised discs in the middle of the room, and he went over and stood on one of them. He beckoned to me, and pointed to the other. I hesitated.

Dr. Owen grinned at me. “Ah come on, Trey,” he said. “Have faith. I guarantee you everything's harmless in here.”

Cautiously, I crossed over and stepped up onto the disc. It was a little raised platform, about a foot high.

Dr. Owen whistled. It was a quick little two-tone whistle, the way you'd call a dog.

There was a whirring sound, and a squat, square box came trundling toward me over the floor. It moved like that chunky round robot in the first
Star Wars
movie, if you remember him, but that was about the only likeness. It wasn't cute and it didn't have flashing lights or make squeaky gurgling noises; it was dead quiet and rather sinister. While I stood there, nervously watching, it moved slowly round me, and I noticed there were half a dozen upright wires sticking up from its top like aerials, each with a glowing light on the end. The lights swiveled sometimes, and flickered.