World Engine Page 9

  Government was mostly local. The big assemblies seemed to intervene only when there was some major cross-regional issue to handle, such as a natural disaster. As Prefect Morrel had told him, there were rules, a constitution, laws, but basically it all seemed to work on goodwill. Every representative on these councils was a volunteer, there was no pay or privilege – and while it seemed pretty hard to get yourself elected, to get noticed above the clamouring crowd, it was very easy to get voted out, especially if you showed the mildest hint of becoming a crook or a despot.

  ‘Couldn’t you vote at home?’

  ‘Sure. You can do it through your bangle.’

  ‘So why come line up at a polling booth like it’s 1969, not 2469?’

  She grinned. ‘For fun, Malenfant. To meet people, to talk, have a drink, share the gossip. Chew over the issue of the day, maybe. Why does anybody do anything?’

  He looked around. ‘The same with this line for the food printers. Right? You could come any time, avoid the queues.’

  ‘Sure. Or you can get stuff delivered, just by asking. But where’s the fun in that?’

  They got to the front of the queue. The in-store printers, of food, clothes, tools, other goods, were simple to use. For one thing they recognised you from previous visits, and generally anticipated your needs. Malenfant knew he could approach any one of them and ask for bacon prepared the way he liked it; out would come a package of the stuff, smoked and cut and ready to cook, slices of perfect bacon that had never been remotely close to a pig.

  ‘You take this for granted,’ he said to Deirdra as they packed up the food. ‘The matter printers. Everything free. Everybody – relaxed. Compared to this, my world was a stress-test laboratory. The cities, anyhow.’

  ‘Well, some people in your day imagined it could be like this.’ She frowned, remembering, or perhaps consulting her bangle. Then she said, ‘With “the elimination of drudgery from human life through the creation of a new race of slaves, the machines . . .” people would “cease to do irksome work under pressure, and will work freely, planning, making, creating according to their gifts and instincts . . . Every little country town could become an Athens . . .” Do you know who said that, Malenfant?’

  ‘Jean-Luc Picard?’

  ‘H. G. Wells. The man who wrote about the Eloi – I looked him up when you talked about that. I thought you’d recognise the quote. He could imagine a world like this. Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘Did I ever meet H. G. Wells? Hell, no. He died long before I was born.’

  Again, that absent look. ‘Only fourteen years before, Malenfant.’

  ‘Really? Jeez. Now I do feel old.’

  Their stuff all packed, they drifted away. Malenfant was faintly aware of people smiling at them, exchanging a few words, mostly backing off. Everybody around here knew he was the man out of history, but they were still a little shy of him, and were biding their time. And that affected Deirdra, because while she was his companion they were a little shy of her too. All of this unspoken.

  Malenfant renewed a personal long-term vow not to clutter up Deirdra’s young life too much, even though she’d volunteered for the job. He was with her mother in that regard. Well, mostly.

  ‘Listen,’ she said now. ‘I thought we could take a detour on the way back. We have friends, the Webers, they’re called. And they’ve asked if they can have the Ostara house this year.’

  ‘Ostara? What’s that?’

  ‘The spring equinox.’

  ‘I never heard that word. Some new coinage?’

  ‘No. Very old, I think.’ Another absent look. ‘The language comes from old traditions, dating from before the Romans in Britain – or at least what were imagined to be those traditions at some later date. So spring is Ostara. The winter solstice is Yule. Christmas.’ She grinned.

  A non-religious celebration, he knew already. Or at least non-Christian.

  ‘Anyhow, every Ostara we get together to build a house for somebody – or, more often, rebuild it. So this year the Webers have a new baby on the way and they need more room. So we’ll all go along and tear down the old place and build the new. I’ve worked on a couple of builds. We should get it done before the end of the month. What do you say, would you like to help?’ Then she looked hesitant. ‘I mean, if you’re fit enough. I didn’t mean to press you.’

  ‘I bet there’s something I can do, enfeebled as I am. If not, I’ll bring a six-pack and watch Bartholomew do it all.’

  She frowned, looked absent again. ‘A six-pack?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Walking slowly with her, he said, ‘You know, maybe I’m starting to see how your system works. If you can call it a system. Well, I guess it was the same in my day, locally anyhow. You’d walk the dog for the old lady next door, take out the trash for the guy on vacation. The parents would get together to run the kids’ sports teams . . . People organised themselves, at the level of neighbourhoods anyhow. Without anybody forcing them to do it under threat of destitution, now I think about it. And now it’s like the whole world is one big neighbourhood.’

  ‘I think I know what you mean,’ she said. Studying him, she looked concerned. ‘Malenfant, are you OK?’ She reached for his hand.

  Maybe he wasn’t as good at concealing his feelings as he thought he was. ‘Hell, yes. Just thinking about home. Let’s go see this house of yours.’

  She seemed uncertain, but eventually she smiled. ‘Well, right now it’s not so much a house as a hole in the ground . . .’

  14

  At the Ostara house he did overdo it, not for the first time since his awakening. By the end of the day he had run out of steam.

  Dinner that night was an ordeal. It would have been even if Prefect Morrel hadn’t shown up.

  Malenfant retired to his room early, knowing it would take long hours before he could escape into sleep.

  He had diversions. His room gave him access to much of the world’s news feeds and entertainment outlets; he just had to say what he wanted, and the screens would fill up with whatever was available.

  The news generally baffled him, and always seemed remarkably small scale – local disasters such as earth tremors or toxic waste spills, notable deaths such as of artists, writers, philosophers, sports stars. He had soon got the feeling that, year on year, nothing much changed here, that the flow of news was a steady, imperturbable stream on which small incidents were soon borne away – ‘news’ in a time in which one day, one year, one century was much like another.

  Once or twice a day, even now, he found himself staring back at his own face, some follow-up on his notorious defrosting. It made him want to hide away even deeper.

  The contemporary entertainment generally left him baffled too, the cultural references too remote, or simply alien. Like the news, dramas tended to be small scale, very intense, human affairs, heavy on the dialogue, light on the action, location shooting and special effects – delving deep into character, no doubt, but leaving him cold.

  That was even when he was told, by some commentary, that the work he was watching was a piece of utter brilliance. Or the music: such as a violin piece he kind of liked called the International Concerto, by someone from the twenty-fourth century called Inga Sladek, who was thought to have outshone Mozart. Malenfant couldn’t tell. He supposed it made sense. There were fewer people in the world than there had been, but people didn’t need to spend their lives on drudge jobs to stay alive, and talent had a chance to shine. Nowadays Einstein wouldn’t have had to waste his super-brain on chores in a patent office.

  But Sladek’s work meant little to Malenfant, because it had no nostalgia value, no attached memories. And besides, when the Destroyer came, none of it would mean anything anyhow.

  It wasn’t hard to access back catalogues of stuff from his own time, of course, the big movies, many of the TV series – though there were baffling blanks, and he had the sense that there had been some major loss of data over the centuries. A burning of the library of Alexandria, that had s
wept away, for instance, a 2030s big-budget remake of Blake’s Seven. He had found a reference to its existence, and that was all. An agonising loss.

  He found he couldn’t watch too much of this stuff, however. Destination Moon, playing out on some virtual surface, to Malenfant stranded alone in the middle of this strange, bland society, made him want to cry.

  Sports distracted him, predictably. Save for athletics – the ancient disciplines of running, throwing, jumping – none of the sports from his own time seemed to have survived. But the most appealing modern sport, to his taste, was quickball, which looked to him like a variant of Aussie rules football, or a kind of fast-moving, low-contact offshoot of regular American football – or maybe British rugby, a dubious pleasure Nicola Mott had tried to share with him. It seemed to develop a sort of all-round athleticism, so its players looked like super-fit hunter-gatherers. There were male, female, adult, junior and mixed leagues, and Malenfant found the more mixed-up versions, with their complex tactics, the most diverting.

  Not today, though.

  After a half-hour of being unable to settle, Malenfant shut down his terminal with a barked command.

  In the silence he paced his room.

  After a couple of hours, he wasn’t surprised when Mica and Morrel came to see him.

  Malenfant bleakly looked past them as they sat down. ‘No Bartholomew? I thought he’d be the one bringing the straitjacket.’

  ‘The what?’ Morrel frowned, and looked into the air. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Quick on the uptake as ever.’

  Mica touched Morrel’s arm. ‘Never mind. Look, Malenfant, there’s no need to be so touchy. We’re here to help. We can see something is wrong. Everybody can. Your mood is – unstable. Deirdra is upset, you know.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry about that. She doesn’t deserve it.’

  Mica said awkwardly, ‘No, she doesn’t. Do you know what you want yet, Malenfant?’

  He faced her. ‘You know what I want. I need to follow this lead to Emma. Face whatever the hell mystery is unfolding out at Phobos. That was why I was thawed out, remember.’ He glanced defiantly at the Prefect. ‘And I want to figure out what your countdown to doomsday is all about. This Destroyer you speak of, and you behave like it doesn’t exist. But above all . . .’

  Mica said, still gently, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I want to go home. I guess.’

  Cracking a can of the cool stuff straight from the fridge. Monday night football.

  The look in Emma’s eyes in the morning.

  To their credit, both Mica and Morrel waited until he had control of himself.

  ‘No matter how kind you are here, I’m a tooth out of its socket. And, yes, I’m concerned about Deirdra too. This is about her father, right? So he’s gone. He belongs to the past. But there is no past. Not for this society. You drive around in machines your grandparents used. Doing exactly what they did. You are lost in an unending, unchanging present.’

  Morrel snapped, ‘Earth is at peace, Malenfant. Maybe for the first time since we started building cities. Maybe we ought to at least try it this way for a while, don’t you think?’

  ‘Sure,’ Malenfant admitted. ‘But this rolling, ever-pleasant now is just erasing all traces of Deirdra’s father. Like he never existed at all. I’m not her father. She knows that. But she is looking for some kind of meaning – I think, anyhow.’

  Morrel turned to him. ‘A meaning outside her life? Outside her world? What kind of meaning is that, Malenfant? And the more you fail to fit into her world, the more you are pulling her away with you.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’ Although, he sensed with a twinge of guilt, in fact there was a grain of truth in the Prefect’s charge.

  Mica stood up. ‘I don’t want to be cruel to you, Malenfant. It’s just – you don’t fit here. In my home. In this time. You said it yourself. And you don’t fit into Deirdra’s life either. I think we tried our best. As soon as you’re capable, I want you gone. I’ve already told Bartholomew this.’

  ‘That’s clear enough.’

  As she left, Morrel stood and loomed over Malenfant. He picked up the Shit Cola can from the bedside table, looked at it, put it down with contempt. ‘And I, Malenfant, will do everything I can to speed you on your way.’

  ‘I’m sure you will. Night night, Officer Dibble.’

  Morrel glared, and left.

  Oddly, the confrontation seemed to clear Malenfant’s head.

  He slept well that night.

  And in the morning he woke with a new sense of purpose, a determination.

  He even had a plan.

  15

  As soon as he was done with Bartholomew and his health and physio routine, and they had got through a somewhat stiff breakfast, Malenfant drew Deirdra aside and asked her to show him how to register for his stipend.

  ‘This benefit you have, the free money, right?’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t know that I’d put it like that. You have to go to the diocese office.’

  He frowned. ‘That sounds like a church, not a benefit office.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s just a name. I don’t know what it means. I could look it up—’

  ‘Never mind. Can we walk there?’

  ‘A short drive. I’ll take you, umm, later in the morning, OK?’

  ‘House building?’

  ‘House building.’

  ‘I appreciate it. See you later.’

  When she’d gone, Bartholomew trailed him back to his room. ‘So,’ he said. ‘I hear you, Mica and the Prefect had a few words last night.’

  Malenfant frowned. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Mica. Came to me for medical reasons, she said. Thought you might be unbalanced.’

  Malenfant snorted. ‘Ha! That’s an old trick, and a dirty one. Some of the guys would use it in the astronaut office to bump themselves a couple of places higher in the launch rotation. “Hey, Bob, you can’t let Joe or Frank take this flight, he’s feeling the pressure, you know what I mean?” . . . Listen, we had an argument, yes. And I think we’ll keep on having arguments as long as I stay here. I’m a man out of time, Bartholomew. I’m disruptive just by being here, by existing.’ He glared at the android. ‘Though I do wonder how secure this shiny new society really is if it reacts so strongly against a stranger.’

  Bartholomew considered that. ‘Well, you might have a point there. But I could argue the other way. That maybe you, the outsider, should try harder to adapt, rather than expect the whole world to adapt to you.’

  ‘OK. You might have a point. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to rip everything up. Look, I don’t want to make a single person unhappy. Not even that asshole Prefect Morrel. Why would I? I didn’t know the guy even existed a month ago. I didn’t even know I still existed. But what I do want—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have goals to achieve. So I’ve realised. After sleeping on it for four hundred years.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘I know. You’ve said. Your dead wife. The doomed planet. And that’s why you want to go after a stipend? You do understand that you don’t need a stipend to fulfil most of your basic needs? You can just walk up to the stores and ask for food, clothing, whatever.’ He mockingly pointed at himself. ‘All health care is free. There are offices where you can be found housing, if you need it. Even transport—’

  ‘But there’s some stuff I have to pay for. Otherwise there would be no such thing as money at all in this world, right? Such as, I’m guessing, research? Historical, for example. Or access to places people don’t generally go?’

  Bartholomew grinned. ‘Most people spend their stipends on luxuries. Theatre shows, maybe. But, yes, you may need a stipend to achieve some of that.’

  ‘There you go. Better to have it in hand before I need it, right? Also – look, it’s a start, for me. A start to achieving a little more independence in this society.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true. You need to ask at the diocese office.’

  ‘Yes,
Deirdra told me that.’

  ‘I’ll set it up. And I’ll drive you there. From what Mica told me, you don’t want to put any more pressure on the family than you need to.’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Bartholomew. Yes, please drive me over. But I’ll go let Deirdra down myself.’

  Half an hour’s brisk drive away, the diocese was just another building in this world’s default modern style, a bubble of ceramic, brilliant white to reflect the Sun’s glare. There was some signage that Malenfant couldn’t make out from a distance.

  He was somewhat surprised to see, when he got up close, that a Christian cross was fixed over the main entrance, gleaming silver. No crucifix, no body of a dying Christ, but the proportions of the cross were unmistakable. Just like the Pylons, another obvious reference to that tradition.

  And the young woman waiting for him at the door, wearing a functional, pale grey suit, had a white dog collar around her neck.

  Malenfant glanced at Bartholomew. ‘I thought you said this place isn’t religious.’

  Bartholomew grinned. ‘You’ll work it out.’

  Malenfant got out of the car. ‘What will you do in the meantime?’

  ‘Oh, go find some shady corner where small children will order me to disassemble myself, I expect. We robots are infinitely patient.’ He raised his arm, shook his own bangle. ‘Just call when you’re ready.’

  He drove away.

  The woman approached Malenfant, holding out a hand to shake. She looked perhaps thirty, her blonde hair cropped short – and a little nervous, even over the handshake. ‘This is your custom, isn’t it? Shaking hands, palm to palm. I did look it up, but such practices died out—’

  ‘I know. It’s fine. Thanks for making the effort. It’s good to meet you—’

  ‘Thera. Kapoor Thera. My title is pastor, formally, but you can call me Thera. Please. Come in, Colonel Reid.’

  He suppressed a sigh. ‘Malenfant will do.’