The Red Queen (29 page)

After I had eaten my bland meal, I left and made my way as quickly as I could along the path to the wall, taking care not to make eye contact with any of the Speci coming towards me. With luck, if I was wanted, no one would be able to remember having seen me, and they would search elsewhere before coming all the way to my hut. I passed several going in the same direction before it struck me that I was moving faster than anyone else. I immediately slowed down, but in fact no one took the slightest interest in me. Even so, I did not relax until I turned onto the gravel path leading to my hut. As I did so, I noticed the retreating backs of two people I presumed were going towards the Hub, or perhaps beyond it to the huts where the cacti were refined. That confirmed me in my decision to wait until after all the breakfast sittings to go to the Hub myself. But it did mean I would have to while away several hours.

I did the exercises Tash had set me outside the hut, and then my own, all the while hoping no one would come to summon me to the weaving hut. By mid morning, I was beginning to believe I had not been expected there, and sat on the bench in front of the hut in the shade to drink a cup of water, and think again about the questions I wanted to put to God.

In the end, it was late in the afternoon when at last I set off for the Hub, because of a visit from a Speci who came to tell me I was to move out of the hut the following day. I had been assigned a regular hut with someone called Rikan whom I was to meet that evening after the nightmeal. Knowing that I would have no real privacy after this day made me all the more determined I would not leave the Hub without finding out how to get out of Habitat. I would ask God bluntly where Jacob’s bones were, just as Dragon had suggested, and I would also ask if God was responsible for the killings of Speci, and why. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I had become that God must send the Tumen into Habitat to perform the executions, for how should a Speci be responsible for killings that had been happening for generations? Finally, I would find out, if I could, whether God had some instructions about Speci who showed Talent. But I must be very careful to frame this question in such a way that I did not implicate myself, or my friends. Or indeed Sikoka and the other empath Dameon had mentioned.

The odour from the cacti flowers was dreadful and I tried to breath through my mouth, marvelling that it should have the ability to so completely alter its scent in the dark. The only consolation was that the foul reek could not befuddle me. It occurred to me once more that whoever had left the plums outside my hut might actually have intended to kill me. Intoxicated, I would almost certainly have stumbled off the path and into the cacti needles. That I had found them just before my first walk there might be a coincidence, and yet a number of people had known of my intention to go there. It seemed to take a long time to reach the Hub, but at last I saw it ahead through the cacti. The thought came to me again that if Hannah had futureseen me trapped inside Habitat, she would have done something to ensure I could free myself.

And quite suddenly I thought I knew what that was.

‘God are you listening?’

‘I am always listening, Speci Elspeth,’ came the same smooth, female voice that had spoken to me before.

I felt a surge of relief as I moved to the altar, half of which shone in a square of bright sunlight on the floor beside the shaded half of the altar. I saw there was a small bottle and a device of some unknown kind. I stared at them, knowing they must have been brought into Habitat by one of the Tumen at God’s behest. But rather than asking about this, I lifted my head and asked in a voice that sounded breathless to my own ears, ‘God, did User Hannah Obernewtyn give you any instructions concerning Elspeth Gordie?’

‘She did not, Specimen Elspeth,’ it answered.

My spirits plummeted, for I had been absolutely convinced that Hannah had left instructions to God commanding it to free me when I identified myself. Perhaps she had tried and had lacked the power to make God release me. Better still, she might have foreseen that I would discover how to get out of Habitat. That was preferable to Ana’s suggestion that what Hannah had seen might be an alternative future to the one that had unfolded, a future in which I had never been taken by the Tumen in the first place. ‘God, what is the means by which the andrones get in and out of Habitat?’

‘They enter and exit through the Hub,’ God said.

I bit my lip. It was the same answer as before, and yet it told me no more than I already knew. I tried another question. ‘God, where is Jacob Obernewtyn buried?’

God answered, ‘The body of Jacob Obernewtyn is buried in Northport, Speci Elspeth.’

I was struck dumb for a moment, because before, God had said Jacob was buried in Habitat. But then I thought about that previous conversation and realised that was
not
what the computermachine had said. It had told me that Hannah was buried with Jacob, and that Hannah was buried in Habitat. Yet it came to the same thing. ‘You told me Jacob was buried with Hannah’s bones!’ I said.

‘That is so, Speci Elspeth,’ said God.

I frowned in exasperation and wondered if God had taken Hannah’s instruction to bury her with Jacob, for she must have asked that, to mean that her body should be removed from its grave in Habitat and transferred to wherever Jacob was buried, so it had sent its andrones to do this.

‘Where is Northport?’ But even as I spoke, inspiration struck. ‘Is it in Pellmar Quadrants? Is it one of the Quadrants?’

‘Northport is the name given to Quadrant Four,’ God said.

I felt a thrill of triumph at having finally got some useful information from the computermachine. From what I had been told, Quadrant Four was the most distant of the settlements. In my spirit-travelling beyond the walls of Habitat, I had located three settlements, and so Northport, being farthest away, must be the one I had not visited. It was also, according to God, the quadrant containing a computermachine that both God’s maker and Hannah had sought out, in an attempt to make contact with a govamen terminal. So Jacob and Hannah must be buried
there
. If I had not somehow misunderstood God, that, then, was where I would find Cassandra’s key. Not in Habitat. So the grave the others had dug up must be that of a Speci after all.

Did that mean our time in Habitat
had
been a mistake? Perhaps not, since how else should I have made contact with God? And for all I knew there was something more here that I needed to know; after all, Hannah and Jacob had been here, and Hannah had communicated with God over a number of years. At the very least, I would be able to get information enough to lead us directly to Northport.

With this in mind, I asked God to tell me more about the relation of the quadrants to one another.

‘Pellmar consists of four physically discrete districts, known as quadrants,’ God said at once, as if all it knew was instantly available to it without any need for it to ponder or remember. ‘Three were established at the location of water bores cut through narrow chimneys in the stone shelf underlying the desert sands. The first of these is Quadrant One, also known as Midland. The second is Quadrant Two, known as Westside. It is situated thirty-eight kloms north-west of Midland. Subio, or Quadrant Three, is fifty kloms east of Quadrant One. Northport, or Quadrant Four, is two hundred and seventy kloms north-east of Quadrant One, and is the only one of the quadrants not situated at a bore site.’

I pictured the settlements in my mind; three grouped together, and one some way distant from the others. Mentally I positioned myself at Midland, adding the Blackland Range and the swathe of virulent poison lands we had travelled under through the
graag
. Westside was the westernmost settlement, which put it closer to the Blackland Range than the others. Probably we would have seen it, had we continued along the range rather than cutting east from the observing house. Subio was further east than Midland, which suggested it was the settlement I had seen last when I had spirit-travelled. Northport lay in the direction we had originally been travelling, and although I did not know what kloms were, it was roughly six times further away than the other settlements. I wondered why Northport had been situated so far from the others if its location had not been dictated by a water source. I had calculated from my spirit-travels that the nearest settlement was a day’s walk from Habitat, which made Northport several days distant, but it was only a guess for it was hard to calculate distance in spirit-form. Of course, it also depended on the terrain. If it was sand with a lot of dunes, or if there were areas that had to be circled like Blacklands or obstacles, it would take longer. I wondered with sudden excitement if Northport was not the settlement where I had dreamed of Maruman prowling. If Jacob was buried there, Maruman might very well have been told so by the Agyllians, or he could have dreamed of me there, and was now waiting. The thought filled me with longing and impatience. There had been scrapers behind him in the dream, and even a glimpse of the place he was in suggested it was many times larger than any of the settlements I had visited in my dreamtravels.

‘Is Northport bigger than the other quadrants?’ I asked.

‘Northport Quadrant was designed to be the capital of the Pellmar development, Speci Elspeth,’ said God. ‘It is three times larger than Subio and Westside Quadrants combined. Midland is almost as large again as Northport, but nine-tenths of it is subterranean whereas only one-third of Northport is subterranean.’

I nodded absently, wondering if Northport might not be the city Jacob had described in his journal, given that it was the only one of the four settlements with an independent capacity to communicate with the govamen’s terminal. If so, he would have found what Kelver Rhonin had discovered, and what Hannah later learned: the connection was useless. Something else occurred to me. ‘God, you told me before that the Tumen could only go one hundred kloms away from you, but that Hannah had asked you to make it so one of them could go further. Is that so it could bury Jacob in Northport?’

‘Neither of the Tumen buried Jacob, Speci Elspeth,’ God said. ‘Hannah buried Jacob Obernewtyn.’

Neither?
I thought, thinking I must have misheard. ‘How many andrones are there?’

‘There are two in Midland. Unit B is on subterranean level fifteen in a workshop undergoing a minor maintenance cycle. Unit A is seeking specimens in Subio.’

‘How many andrones are there in the other quadrants?’

‘None,’ said God.

I closed my eyes.
Two men
, I thought incredulously, not Tumen! God had even spoken of two andrones, I remembered, but I had not realised it meant there were
only
two! ‘What is the range of an androne, including the area outside of your direct control?’

‘The optimal roaming range of the androne model in use in Pellmar is a thousand kloms, but the two in Midland were modified by Kelver Rhonin to prevent the andrones going beyond one hundred kloms from Midland as a way of preventing them moving over high-level radioactive terrain that would erode components, resulting in loss of data.’

I was about to ask how the Tumen had brought us back to Midland, when it occurred to me that Hannah might well have wanted to leave some sort of instructions concerning me, but may
never have known my name.
Certainly neither she nor Cassandra had ever named me in any of my past visions. They had always referred to me obliquely as
the Seeker
.

I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry, and asked, ‘God, did User Hannah leave any instructions for the Seeker?’ I was so tense with expectation that I was trembling slightly.

‘Yes, Speci Elspeth,’ said God.

‘What were her instructions?’ I asked in a voice that shook.

‘User Hannah left instructions about a data cache for a person codenamed Seeker. Release of data requires input of key code.’

I racked my brains, trying to think what code Hannah might have given the computermachine to enable me to identify myself.

‘Jacob?’ I said.

‘Incorrect,’ said God.

‘Obernewtyn,’ I said.

‘Incorrect,’ said God.

I thought for a moment, then I said, ‘Cassandra.’

‘Incorrect,’ said God.

I scowled, frustrated by the thought that I might be prevented from leaving Habitat simply because I was unable to guess what code word Hannah had devised for me. Yet it must be something obvious. She had not been trying to trick me or even test my wits, after all. In truth I could not imagine why she had bothered setting a password at all. It must be something God required.

All at once I heard the sound of running feet.

Startled and alarmed, I moved quickly to the wall farthest from the sunlight, which had shifted from the end of the altar to the floor and was beginning to creep up the wall. Two figures appeared in the door, both women.

‘Elspeth?’ Dragon called, and I saw it was Tash with her.

‘I am here,’ I said, stepping out from the wall. ‘What is it?’

‘We have to hide,’ Dragon gasped. ‘The Committee have taken Ana and the other two and all of the adults are out looking for you and me. The only reason they didn’t get me was because Tash overheard some people talking in the kitchens saying it was a pity about Ana and Dameon, and she came to warn me. I was in the bathing hut and she bade me come out with her. I got dressed as fast as I could, but before we could get out, some of the Speci men came. I . . . I made them afraid. I know we are not supposed to use our Talents but . . .’

‘It seems the time for playing it safe has come to an end,’ I said grimly. To Tash I said, ‘You saw what happened with Dragon and the men who were sent?’

‘I saw they were terrified but I did not see what they saw,’ she said. ‘What Dragon said she made them see.’

‘She has an unusual Talent,’ I said, wondering belatedly if someone was listening to us. Abandoning caution, I added, ‘As do we two, though all of our abilities differ. But tell me, why were the others taken and where are they now?’

‘They are being prepared to be given to God,’ Tash said.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘They are not . . .’

‘People to be given to God are put to sleep, and once that is done, none may wake them save God,’ Tash said. ‘As to why they were taken, Dameon, Ana and Swallow were caught in the burying ground and it was discovered that Naha’s grave had been dug up. Balboa convinced the Committee that it is your fault, that you are trying to disrupt harmony in a way that will cause God to abandon Habitat because you are mad and you commanded it of them. She told the Committee that she had seen you at the grave the day before and that the rest of us are somehow under your sway. You must go from here, else they capture you and put you to sleep as well.’

‘Go where?’ I asked in despair, for I felt sure it was only a matter of time before I worked out the code Hannah had left with God, and the last thing I wanted to do was to leave the Hub.

‘There is a place . . .’ Tash began.

‘No,’ Dragon said fiercely. ‘Tash, you have done enough in warning me and helping me to find Elspeth! Those men did not realise you had come to warn me at the bathing hut, and you made sure they did not see me with you, but it is known we are friends and maybe someone is listening to our words even now. You must leave us, otherwise the Committee –’

‘The Committee will do nothing to me for I have been in God’s hands since He sent me the red token. Now please, come. The place I would take you is within the cacti grove but no one knows of it. It is a clearing – difficult to reach and you will have to be very careful not to let the needles prick you. We must go now before the scent changes.’

‘What about the others?’ Dragon asked me. ‘We can’t just let them be killed.’

‘Speci do not kill Speci,’ Tash said primly. ‘God’s Tumen will come to take Dameon and the others. They will not be harmed physically but they will have their minds wiped clean. That means when they are resurrected again, they will have to relearn everything: how to speak and eat and walk. Like babies. That is why the people I heard were sorry. At least for Ana and Dameon.’

For a moment I was unable to speak for the horror and fury that raged through me at the thought of Ana, Dameon and Swallow being erased as mindlessly and comprehensively as a wave washing away footprints in the sand. I knew computermachines really had the power to destroy minds because Ariel had used one to transform children on Norseland into Nulls. The thought of my friends’ minds being erased seemed to me worse than if the Speci had been plotting to murder them. Indeed it
would
be killing them, since whatever was left behind would be the emptiness of a baby who had yet to be formed.

‘Let’s get away from here while we can,’ I said, and was amazed at how calm I sounded.

We left the Hub, but instead of striking out along the path, Tash led us around the back of the Hub. The cacti plants grew a little distance from the walls, so there was no danger of our being pricked. Once we were out of sight of the path, Tash bade Dragon take off her overtunic and drag it along the ground behind us to obliterate any footprints we had left that would show our pursuers where we had gone. A serious search would find traces of our passing, but the first searchers were like to make a cursory search of the whole of Habitat to begin with. Leaving Dragon to wipe away our passage, Tash got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the cacti plants, warning us both to follow her exactly, which we did.

It was slow going at first, but then the cacti plants began to grow further apart until at last there was room to stand. We moved mostly sidelong for the gap was nowhere near as wide as the path, getting steadily narrower as we moved deeper into the grove. When I stopped at one point and looked back, I was both relieved and dismayed to find that I could no longer see the Hub. When the gaps between the cacti plants began to close up again it seemed we would have to retreat, but Tash merely gathered her tunic, tied it in a knot that bared the whole of her legs, then got down on her belly. To my amazement, she used knees and elbows to propel herself forward, passing
under
cacti whose needles were so long they meshed with those on the adjacent plants. Dragon and I exchanged a glance then followed. It was an awkward and uncomfortable way to progress and it was not long before the thin fabric of our clothes began to wear at the knees and elbows. I ignored the stinging pain and the occasional vicious tug I got when my hair snagged on a needle. It was soon after this that we finally came to a little bare clearing in the midst of the cacti. Someone had transformed the clearing into a slight depression by digging out a bowl shape, and there was a neatly folded blanket on one side with a cloth bag atop it.

Tash spread the blanket over the bottom of the depression and bade us in a very soft voice to sit. ‘Here we can stand and even sleep without fear of rolling into prickles. But while we are close to the wall, we are also quite close to a curve in the path, though you cannot see it, so we must keep our voices low.’

I surveyed my raw knees and elbows, regretting that there had been no time to rip the overtunics into bandages to protect our skin. But the main thing was that we were safe for the moment.

‘However did you find this place?’ Dragon asked Tash softly.

‘Sometimes I . . . I wanted somewhere quiet and alone. I heard . . . there was a rumour of a secret place in the cacti where even God did not hear. Many searched but I found it.’

Dragon opened her mouth, then glanced at me and closed it again. A third deaf place, I thought. But I merely said, ‘We can’t stay here forever. The scent . . .’

‘Don’t worry about the flowers,’ Tash said. She dug purposefully into the cloth bag and withdrew some soft plast devices. Offering us one each, she kept one for herself. They were masks with clear plast eye places but the lower part was some sort of small machine. ‘I found two of these when I first came here.’ She added that the masks were used when burning off certain fields as protection from the fumes. Some long time past, a Speci had requested them of God and they had been in use and replaced regularly ever since, because the soft plast did not last more than a few years. God created them anew, she added, and I wondered how she knew that. Or was it simply common knowledge in Habitat, which I had been here too short a time to absorb. Tash added that she had begun by supposing that whoever used the clearing before her had obviously used the devices to block the noxious daytime scent of the cacti flowers. Only later had she wondered if they would block out the dangerous night scent as well.

‘The only way to test it was to try it,’ she said. ‘I did not dare try it here of course. I took a flower and when I was alone in my hut I tried smelling it with the mask on and then off. The mask stopped the scent. Later I tried it here at night.’

‘We can stay here even when it gets dark then,’ Dragon said eagerly. ‘And even if they discover where we are in daylight and send someone to fetch us out, it will be almost impossible because the way is so narrow.’

‘If the Committee guess we are here they will send in people with slashers to fetch us,’ Tash said.

‘But the Covenant forbids Speci destroying anything . . .’ Dragon objected.

‘Cacti arms don’t count because they regenerate,’ Tash said. ‘But the cacti grove is not the first place they will look. They will concentrate on the empty huts and the crops.’

‘No matter how quiet and cunning we are, eventually they will catch us,’ I said, ‘especially if they ask God to help them.
Would
they ask?’ I addressed this question to Tash.

‘They might,’ she admitted. ‘But when two people are permitted to make the blood offering it usually takes several days before God says if they can be together or not. And it always takes at least a day for a wish-prayer to be answered. If you can evade capture for a time, I will try to talk to Sikoka and convince him that Balboa was lying.’

‘I think she tried to kill me,’ I said, suddenly certain of it. ‘She left plums at my hut and they made me sick and dizzy, then I fell unconscious. That was when you found me on the floor, Tash, but I didn’t tell you the truth because I didn’t want to worry you or cause any sort of dangerous fuss. The thing is that Balboa knew I was going to the Hub, and if I had eaten the plums when I first discovered them, I would almost certainly have blundered into a cacti plant. What’s more,
you
were with me, Dragon, so you might have been hurt too.’

Tash looked distressed. ‘If she truly did try to kill you, it is a very serious charge and they will not give you to God until they have investigated it. Perhaps you can convince them that she lied about you ordering the others to dig up Naha’s grave. But Dragon . . .’ She hesitated then said, ‘They will give you to God no matter what is said because you have shown yourself to be an anomaly and all such are claimed by God.’

I stared at the Speci girl, genuinely astonished, because this was the first time anyone had said God laid claim to anomalies. And how did it fit with the fact that the Tumen had called me an anomaly
before
I had been resurrected in Habitat? Had the point been to find out if I would use any anomalous ability consciously?

All at once it struck me that none of this mattered now. The only important thing was to work out the code word Hannah had given God to identify me so that I could get out of Habitat and stop the others having their minds wiped clean. Of course, at some level I had been wrestling with possible code words ever since we left the Hub, but I had not yet come up with anything that felt right. I did not now make the mistake of trying to force it. My mind always worked better at this sort of puzzle if the question was allowed to sink deep, while my superficial thoughts wandered aimlessly.

Tash and Dragon curled up at the edge of the blanket, heads close, talking softly. I lay on my back, closing my eyes and letting my thoughts rove over all the events that had occurred since I had woken in Habitat. I remembered waking in the Hub; my relief that my friends were safe and my fears for Ahmedri and the others; the long days of waiting to recover; the bland, strange food which I now understood was so because it had been prescribed by a computermachine with no notion of taste; the meetings on the Common; the walk to the burying field.

I thought of Balboa and my mind sharpened at the thought that, in betraying me, she had betrayed Dameon whom she had claimed to love. Perhaps she wanted to punish him because she believed he did not return her love. Of course, her main aim had been to damage me, and Dameon and the others had already been exposed as having dug up the grave of someone revered by the Speci. The bleak irony of her betrayal was that Dameon
had
cared for her but had not allowed himself to explore or express his feelings because my quest made any relationship between them impossible. I rued his failure to sense her malevolence, for he might have turned both love and hate harmlessly aside. No doubt he had been oblivious to her growing rage because he had blocked her emotions to save himself anguish. But even if he had nullified her bitterness, it would not have saved him or the others.

In a sense what had happened to them was my fault because I had bidden them dig up the grave. In this, at least, Balboa had been correct, and in the end, it had not even contained the bodies of Hannah or Jacob, or Cassandra’s key. I opened my eyes to see the moon visible above, wondering suddenly whose body lay in the grave if not Hannah’s, and if Hannah’s body had been taken from the grave and buried in Northport with Jacob.

I looked up to see that Dragon and Tash were already sitting up.

‘What is the red token?’ Dragon asked Tash.

The Speci girl gave her such a queer look, in which pride and misery were perfectly comingled, that I was distracted from my thoughts.