The Seventh Tide (9 page)

‘Look, we
know
you can do better than this!’ Her father waved the report in Jay’s face, barely missing her nose. ‘You just have to make an effort. You just have to
pay attention
’

Her mum took the report disk from him by one corner, as if it might bite.

‘Look, darling,’ she said calmingly ‘you
know
you have to work harder than other people. It’s not a punishment – it’s just a fact!’

‘It’s not like we don’t know how that feels, Jay!’ her father waded in. ‘Your mother would never have got her job as a neural technician without higher marks than the competition.’

‘Substantially
higher,’ murmured her mum.

‘That’s right. And the same for me. Let’s face it – there are only so many jobs available to people like us – unless you
want
to be somebody’s minder? Is that what this is about? You’ve decided on the noble career of making sure somebody
important
gets to work on time?
Is that it?!

Jay shook her head sullenly.

‘We’re O-class, Jay! And in spite of a lot of rubbish to the contrary, that’s always going to be a major disadvantage.’

‘Which can be overcome,’ prompted her mum.

‘Which can be overcome, yes – but
not
the
way you’re
going about it, is all I’m saying!’

Of course, it
wasn’t
all he was saying. The lecture was only beginning. But that was all that Jay actually
heard.
This was the stage at which she normally stopped listening.

‘Now, let’s not say any more about it,’ said her mum at last.

If only.
Jay heaved a weary sigh to herself.

‘Your father’s on rotation at the forest and I have my neuro-tech conference – and I want you to
promise
me you’ll work hard while we’re away. At least three units a day. You need to be caught up by the time term starts again. Right?’

Jay said she would. She said she’d be good. Her parents left, trying to look as if they believed every word, her father to his work for the Kelp Forestry Commission and her mother to the Annual Convention of Neural Technicians. Jay then got as far as opening a homework file titled ‘World Government Section A(a)(i)’ before giving it all up as a bad lot. She grabbed a bag and headed out into the Tubes of Greater Glasgow.

Greater Glasgow was huge, but it didn’t cover much ground. This was because the vast majority of this vast city was underwater. The monumental rise in sea level was ancient history, and the world’s enormous population had been almost exclusively sub-aquatic for generations.
Living quarters, industry, food production, transportation – everything that used to happen on land now happened beneath the waves.

At school, they were taught about the centuries of climate in turmoil, the millions dead, the extinction of species – but it was just words. The human population had more than recovered its numbers by Jay’s time, and society had adapted to the restrictions of living in an element that was basically hostile. And if some of the old images of chaos and death
did
come back to haunt you in the night, they were easily patched away. Anxiety, anger, sorrow, over-excitement – they were all managed by tranquillizer patch. With people living so closely packed together, it was argued that there wasn’t room for a lot of uncontrolled emotion. Breaking a window in a fit of rage didn’t just mean an unexpected glazier’s bill – living underwater meant that if someone decided to let off steam with an axe, it was quite likely to end in drownings.

There was no shortage of statistics for the levels of violence in the olden-day societies, and all those land-based cities just seemed to be willing to accommodate it. In the twenty-fourth century, things were tighter, cities more densely packed, and their inhabitants surrounded by an element for which they hadn’t exactly evolved –well, it made sense to keep a lid on things.

Wall dispensers were everywhere. Sensors picked up increased adrenalin breathed out by agitated citizens and politely but firmly offered sedation. The police force, known as the Guardians, was armed with paralyser guns and the instruction to shoot first, ask questions later. Someplace else, out of the public view…

Just like the historical land-based Glasgow, Greater Glasgow had an extensive Tube system. It was powered by hydro-pressure, and its pods were well stocked with sensors and dispensers in case rush-hour delays got on a citizen’s nerves. Trains of spherical pods floated through a complicated system of transparent reconstituted algae-plast tubes, a little like an old-fashioned marble run, up, down, round and at every conceivable angle, and about a third full of water. It was an
amazing
feat of hydraulic engineering but, like anything you use all the time, nobody much noticed.

The Tube was crowded – the end of the working day always saw enormous shifts of people desperate to get from one sector to another. Sometimes Jay loved all that. She would pretend she was part of the important grown-up world of commuting and being anonymous and purposeful in a crowd. She would stare out through the distorting curve of the tube walls at people passing and shops and lights coming on in the Housing Sectors. Sometimes she did it for hours, just in a daze, and would come to herself in an empty pod at the Inverness station, maybe, or even the suburbs at Ullapool.

But not today.

Today the Tube was just irritating. Jay got out at the next station and wandered along, looking in at the shops. She caught a glimpse of herself in a window and slowed down.

As a fifteenth birthday present to herself, Jay had gone to the hairdresser’s. She’d opted for a velvety black cap of hair, a bit like the fur of a wet otter. It hadn’t been cheap, but she knew she had a nice-shaped head and sexy ears – she didn’t need to disguise them under
elaborate curls and padding. Not like
some
people she could name.

‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it!’ the hairdresser said, and Jay had been happy to believe him.

Heads had been in style for a while now. It was legs before that. Irritatingly, long legs went out of vogue just as she had a growth spurt and got some. They still tripped her up sporadically and she didn’t always remember to duck going through doorways. And even when she wasn’t falling over herself, she had a tendency to fiddle with things, and almost invariably break them, which drove her parents to distraction.

‘She’ll grow out of it,’ they said to each other through gritted teeth. ‘I’m sure she will.’

‘Ooops – sorry!’ said Jay. She’d stopped paying attention and bumped a young woman’s arm as she passed. Fortunately, the woman just grinned at her.

‘You should wake up
before
you come out!’ she laughed.

That was lucky
! thought Jay. The rules on respecting personal space were pretty strict. Either the woman was better at remembering what it was like to be fifteen than most adults were, or else she must have just patched. Jay suddenly saw two Guardians standing by one of the shops. They were turning their heads away, their blank-faced masks scanning another part of the promenade. Clearly they had only just stopped watching her…

Jay felt cold sweat break out on her skin.

Everybody knew that Guardians were just people. They were recruited from O-class Sectors at a little younger than Jay was now, trained up in segregated installations that no one who
wasn’t
a Guardian ever saw
the inside of, and then assigned, always away from their home city. But still, just people – people who all looked exactly the same… It was the masks that really spooked Jay. They were designed so that the wearers were protected from attacks on any of their senses – sight, hearing, smell, even touch and taste. Nothing got through the mask membrane that shouldn’t. It covered their skulls completely, leaving the place where their faces would be blank and featureless. The masks protected them, but it also made them all look alike… not quite human.

You couldn’t tell them apart by their voices either – an integral microphone in the mask turned tenor, baritone and bass into one horrible breathy rasp. It was as if the Guardian behind the voice was only just in control of it. Jay remembered a classmate complaining once, ‘You’d think with all that technology, they’d be able to get the voice right!’ But
she
knew it was no mistake. It was the perfect voice, straight from nightmare.

Suddenly Jay didn’t want to be
there
any more either. She didn’t want to ride the Tube or shop or meet up with friends or go to a cafe or check out the new entertainment centre or
any
of it. She
certainly
didn’t want to go home and revise.

Up top
! she thought to herself.
That’s what I’ll do…

She set off through the crowds, doing her best not to be noticeable or bang into anyone. Up a few levels, over to another section of the Tube, up again – until finally she reached the part of the city nearest the surface. D-class and RD-class lived up here, so it was a good idea not to be spotted wandering about. Minders and Maintenance O-class were of course allowed into these Sectors, but Jay didn’t think she could pass for anything
like that. Finally, having first checked that there was no one watching, she turned down a little-used side tube. There was a ladder at the end of it, and in the ceiling, there was a hatch…

Jay had first started going up top about a year ago. It was a Restricted Sector, so being there unsupervised was absolutely not allowed. The old surface platforms were not all that safe any more. Before the perfecting of sub-hydro power, they’d housed solar-power panels and wave-power generators and windmills. Further back than that, they’d provided people with a place to be ‘in the air’, though it’d been a long time since the platforms had been used very often for that. Jay’s people adapted to underwater living long ago, and didn’t pine much for the sight of the sky.

If you fancied some spectacular seascape views, though, this was the place. On a clear day you could see islands as far away as Nevis and the Cuillin chain, where the seabirds bred in season and the air was filled with their screaming for space. The horrendous noise and the stink of guano – that’s what she remembered from a school trip round the archipelago – hellish. But from a distance, the islands were quite pretty, with their swirling haloes of birds overhead and the white waves round their feet.

It was already getting cold again and the birds would be gone soon. Once the winter storms set in in earnest, it wouldn’t be any fun at all coming up top.

Jay shivered. It wasn’t that much fun
now
, except for the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. She’d seen the view before – and she had promised her parents she’d get stuck in to her schoolwork… She
was just about to give in and go home, when suddenly she froze. There was a sound coming from the hatch.

Guardian
! thought Jay, crouching anxiously behind a box-housing for something, but it wasn’t the police. It was just a man, obviously RD-class, in a peculiar coat. She’d seen him here before. He seemed very good at giving his minder the slip. She wasn’t sure what he came up here of, but then nobody ever
did
know why an RD did things! He never stayed long, and of course he always left immediately if he saw her…

The hatch opening mechanism whirred again – and this time Jay hid in earnest.

‘Sir! Dr Horace, sir! Come inside at once!’ The minder was a middle-aged O-class woman with unconvincing hair rolls. She bustled up to her charge but was careful not to touch him. ‘Running off again – you shouldn’t make me worry like that!’

Jay saw the man’s face as he turned towards the woman. It was a surprisingly young face, unlined and wide-eyed under his old-man hair.

‘I shouldn’t?’ he said in mild surprise.

Jay didn’t hear the minder’s reply as she ushered the man back to the hatch. Then they were gone.

Jay sighed.
Better wait a while, till they’re well away
, she thought. She wandered to the railing and gazed out over the swell.

That could be me
, she thought glumly of the woman.
If I don’t get better marks, minding some D or RD will be the only work I’ll be able to get.

It was a prospect as bleak as the scene before her, nothing but the grey end of day, the cold flinty sea, the passing of the year…

She was just turning away to go in search of some warmth and light and, if possible, some cheerfulness, when it happened. She only saw it out of the corner of her eye – a completely impossible whirlpool the height of a tall man balanced
above
the surface of the sea – before it disappeared, leaving two bodies thrashing about in the icy water.

The RNLI (Robotic Naval Life-saving Initiator) deployed immediately. Sensor-directed netting shot out from the platform, snaring the targets on the first cast and winching them to safety with such enthusiasm that Jay had to leap out of the way. Two Medi-boxes opened automatically to receive them, then hissed shut and began their analysis. Jay rushed over and tried to see through the lids, but they had already opaqued. The boxes hummed busily, while giving nothing away. She would just have to wait to find out who on earth these people were and how on earth they’d ended up in the sea…

Which was when it struck her that she was not going to be the only one wanting to know those things. RNLI deployment would automatically set off alarms all over the place – medical staff for one, but worse than that, there were the Guardians. They’d be swarming out of the hatch before she knew it and she did
not
want
them
finding her here!

She had already started to sprint for the exit, when she remembered the man in the coat and screeched to a halt. She could blame it on him! RD-class were always pressing the wrong buttons at the wrong times…

Without stopping to consider the consequences, Jay turned on her heel, raced over to the RNLI instead, flipped open the control panel and punched in the
standard code all O-class were taught for ‘False Alarm’ and ‘RD Error’. She didn’t think,
But now the people in the boxes are
my
responsibility
or
What if they’re dangerous
? or even
What do I do if the Medi-boxes can’t save them and they
die?! She just banged in the codes and ran back to see if the strangers were ready to emerge.