The Red Queen (26 page)

‘I would like that,’ I said, and while this was true as far as it went, my greater hope and intention was to be out of Habitat long before I had to undertake any training or work. But in the meantime, I would try to be as kind as I could to this gentle girl with her wistful face and warm eyes.

After she had left, it struck me that I could do with some clean clothes as well as a bath, but I would need to learn where they were stored. It might be as well to get some additional spare clothes at the same time, to make up for some of our lost supplies. That reminded me of the memory seed. I had completely forgotten to ask Ana or Dragon about it, but I must do so the first moment I saw either of them. With this in mind, I entered the eating hut and looked about hopefully once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, but there were only a few strangers seated at the tables. It was only the start of the sitting, I realised, and remembering I was supposed to see the woman who had tended my head the previous day, I sought her out. She examined the place where the bump had been and said in her soft way that I was healing well, though I still looked too thin.

I promised to take extra food and went to make my selection. None of the others had entered yet, and I gave up waiting and sat down in the nearest free seat. Inevitably, as I chewed my way through the bland fare, my thoughts were all of the questions I wanted to ask God the next time we spoke. There were important questions of course, connected to my quest, but I also had a multitude of smaller questions. For instance, how had Jacob known where to find a cryopod and how had he known how to use it, and why had he used it at all? Had he still had the wild hope that after years and years, Hannah would come to wake him? Love ought to be so steadfast, and in his case at least, his longing had borne sweet fruit.

Taking my plates to the washing room, and making my way out into the sunlight, I thought of how God had spoken of a Class B Cataclysm severing the quadrants from one another. That had obviously been the Great White, or some part of it, and maybe it had caused the upheaval in the earth that wrenched and cracked the
graag
and collapsed the secret Reichler Clinic at Obernewtyn, killing every single person there save Jacob, who had been in the house speaking to Hannah by means of some Beforetime device.

I stopped. I had reached the wall, and I needed to make up my mind if I would go to my hut and wait a little before visiting the Hub, or go to the fields and see Swallow or one of the others. I needed to tell them what I had learned.

The touch of a hand on my shoulder made me cry out in fright. I whirled to find a slender woman running slightly to fat around the hips, with yellow hair like Ana’s but dry looking and thin at the ends. She was staring back at me with astonished indignation.

‘I called your name twice,’ she said.

‘I . . . I didn’t hear,’ I stammered, remembering just in time to be simple Elspeth.

‘I hope your hearing is not defective,’ she said in a brisk voice. ‘That would be tedious.’ I blinked at her in a confusion that was not feigned.

‘You are to come to the weaving house where you will have your first assignment,’ she said. ‘I am Feeny. Balboa sent me to get you. She is preparing the loom.’

My heart sank, both at the thought that I was not free to do what I wanted, and at having to spend time with Balboa. If only I had walked more quickly, instead of dawdling along in a daydream.

The rest of the day reminded me of the period I had spent working in the cavernous kitchens after I first arrived at Obernewtyn. The enormous cook Andra had not been ill natured or malevolent, but Ariel had sent me to her as a punishment and so, dispassionately, she had obeyed his command to work me hard, filling my days with drudgery. What had made it bearable was that she had obeyed Ariel without any real animosity. Once she even told me with rough sympathy that it was unfortunate I had earned his enmity. I could have borne the drudgery easily save for the endless bullying of her vile daughter, who had possessed a streak of meanness that delighted in a helpless victim.

Yet she had mistaken me, for I had not been helpless nor was I afraid of her. I gave as good as I got, pinch for pinch and slap for slap in a silent savage war in which we had both striven not to be caught by Andra, for the cook would slap us both with a heavy hand if she caught us at our covert battles, because they disrupted her kitchen.

Balboa lacked the energetic ill will of Andra’s daughter, but when she looked up to see me being ushered into the weaving house, there was a flash of triumphant malice in her eyes that did not bode well.

Balboa’s lesson about threading a loom was surprisingly efficient, although far beyond the capacity of a beginner. I might even have been interested, but it was delivered without any pretence of liking or warmth. When I failed to answer her questions swiftly enough, for I was playing my simpleminded role, her corrections were sharply delivered, and well sauced with sneering asides to others working in the weaving hut.

She then gave me a small basic weaving of two colours and demonstrated how to go on with it on a little handloom. It was not exacting but it was new to me, and watching me struggle with it, Balboa frequently hissed and tore it from my hand to repair a mistake or show me how I should do something better. She did this less out of impatience with my slowness, I thought, than for the sheer pleasure of it. All the while, she indulged in sighs and groans and eye-rollings directed at the other people about the table working on small weaves, who offered her sympathetic looks. Nor did she truly instruct me, for all her play at it. It was swiftly apparent to me that I was supposed to learn my work from a teacher who had no desire to teach me anything and who had a positive desire to ensure I failed. She left out details and told me things in a muddled order, so that to begin with I truly seemed a fool.

I soon became wise enough to carefully weigh anything Balboa told me, and observe the other workers covertly to see how things were truly done. It was not, in the end, very exacting, for the fine and intricate work was done by Feeny and several other workers who shifted about the tables constantly, bringing their nimble fingers and this or that yarn or laying out a new bit of pattern, or examining what was being done and then resetting the pegs in the loom. I was careful not to work too quickly, but by the end of the morning I allowed myself to be reasonably competent at the work, for it was demanding of neither wit nor flesh once I knew what I was doing. Yet it was wearying to work alongside someone who begrudged every word she spoke to me and was at pains to let me know it, all the more so because her dislike infected the others at our table, men and women both, who needed no more reason or evidence for their dislike of me than that Balboa disliked me.

No one did me actual harm, but nor did anyone go out of their way to help me or welcome me. Indeed, if I failed to understand something, there were sly smiles and irritated huffs. My elbow was jostled at the crucial moment of tying off, when I had been warned to hold a thread tight, ruining hours of work so that even Feeny shouted at the waste of it. But no one criticised me so I was unable to defend myself. Nor could I have managed it within the limitations of the simpleton Elspeth I had offered them.

The ill treatment tapered away as the long day progressed, broken only by a message sent and a midmeal spent with these same people about me. Maybe it was because my lack of rancour or indignation seemed a strangely flat response to Balboa’s campaign of provocation that most of the people in the weaving hut seemed to lose interest in me. Not Balboa.

‘Leave her be, Bal, she is a proper fool but harmless,’ one man said finally, mildly, not troubling to lower his voice when Balboa let go of a box a moment before I had closed my fingers around it securely and it fell and broke, scattering needles all over the floor. It was at the end of the day when we were cleaning up the tables and putting away yarn and bolts of cloth and tools. Impatiently Feeny bade me hurry and pick them up, and though I smarted, I did not try to explain that Balboa had caused the accident. Feeny was not unkind, only too busy to take note of what had been happening in the weaving house because she was charged with deciding the patterns and seemed constantly half lost in a dream of shape and colour. Indeed her irritation at my clumsiness seemed to be more the result of having her dreams interrupted than because a needle or two might be lost. No one helped me to collect the needles and I saw Balboa give several a sly kick that sent them spinning under benches and tables, so that I must lie on my belly to retrieve them.

I felt foolish and pitiful grovelling under their feet, and yet I pitied the Speci, even Balboa, for surely all of their pettiness and dullness, and even Balboa’s malice, arose from the stunted lives they lived in Habitat. No matter that they were healthy, they were still prisoners and the life they lived was abnormal and constrained. There was nothing in it to test one or lift the spirits. The wonder was that they were not more profoundly disturbed.

Of course some had activities to sustain them – not mere make-work or basic labour but something that engaged their minds and hearts. Sikoka and the others in the Committee had the pleasure and challenge of their intrigues. Feeny’s mind was focused and enlivened by her work in the weaving house. Tash had her empathy and her growing awareness of her difference to occupy her, even if there was no joy in it. Balboa had her propensity for malice, not to mention her infatuation with Dameon. Having spent the day with her, I could not believe she loved him.

I was still collecting pins when the others carefully rolled up the weaves that had been finished and departed. I hoped for my release at last, but Feeny bade me sweep under the tables and vats and looms, and mop the floors after the others left. I thought it a punishment, but as she was leaving, she told me it was a task always given to the newest and least experienced person in the weaving hut for the whole of their first assignment period.

Then I was left blissfully alone in that large, silent chamber full of the scents of plant fibres and sap. I continued mopping, but slowly, knowing there was some time before the evening meal sittings began. One thing I had learned was that a circular device hung upon the wall showed a day divided into hours, and a small arrow moving upon it showed the passing of hours. Now the arrow pierced the hour of four, and outside, the light told me it was still afternoon.

As I swept and then mopped my way around the hut, I forgot about Balboa and the Speci. I thought instead of the Beforetimer who had made God out of Ines. Kelver Rhonin had survived the Great White without harm, because the settlements of Pellmar Quadrants seemed not to have been any sort of target, perhaps because they had been remote. They might even have been nearly deserted, given that God had said nothing about anyone other than Kelver Rhonin, but perhaps a computermachine program did not think much about people other than their makers and users. In a way, this long-dead man ought to have been of no interest to me, and yet, he had been of interest to Hannah, who might actually have met him before the Great White. Also, he had been a man who had intimately understood computermachines and whom at least one computermachine addressed by name, and there might be something I could learn from him that would serve me in my quest.

So I indulged myself in recalling the bare details of his story as God had related them to me. Following the Cataclysm, Kelver Rhonin had partly woken God before leaving Quadrant One to reconnect the quadrants. How God could have known that if it had been mostly asleep, I did not know. Perhaps it was possible for a drowsing computermachine to absorb information it would later examine more wakefully. In any case, he had then gone to Quadrant Four to try to reconnect the computermachines, presumably so that he could find out what had happened to the world, or maybe to find out if there was anyone else alive. That was where his story dissolved into mystery, for when Hannah had gone to see what had happened to him, she had found there was no computer link to govamen, according to God, nor had there been any sign of Kelver Rhonin.

I bestirred myself and set the mop and broom to rights before coming outside. The air was fresh and sweet and I was hungry enough that even the thought of the tasteless Speci fare made my stomach rumble.

‘Well that is a sound I have heard before,’ Ana said.

She looked frazzled and there were dark circles under her eyes. My smile faded. ‘Are you ill?’ I asked, dismayed.

She shook her head, eyes bright. ‘I am not ill but only deadly tired. I did not sleep much.’

My eyes widened and she nodded. The digging had begun. ‘Tash told Dragon and Dragon told me that you had been shifted to the early meal sitting. Then I overheard Balboa complaining about your clumsiness today, so I knew where you were and decided to come and fetch you. It is still too early to eat but I thought you might like a bit of fresh air. I always want that at the end of a day of work. Swallow and I have arranged to meet on the common just before the meal, so we can wait for him together.

I did not need to ask where they were to meet. I said only that I would like to go. The moment we reached the bush I asked her what had happened at the burying ground. ‘How deep have you got?’

‘Swallow brought a digging machine so we got right down to the bones last night, but there was no key,’ she began.

‘It is likely not a key as we know it,’ I interrupted her. ‘It might even be glass or some sort of plast . . .’

‘Elspeth, listen,’ Ana said forcefully enough that my questions died on my lips. ‘There was nothing in the grave but the bones of a single person and there was no key or any other device.’

‘It might have . . . but wait, what do you mean the bones of
one
body? That is not possible. God told me they were buried together.’

‘
God
told you?’ echoed a familiar voice, sharp with incredulity. I looked up to see Swallow approaching, with Dameon coming along behind him.

My heart lurched at seeing the empath, whose face, while not as lined with fatigue as Ana’s and Swallow’s faces, was drawn and sad. Yet the smile he gave me was as warm and loving as ever and I felt truly wretched that such a man should suffer for love of a person as full of spite and petty malice as Balboa.