The Deserter Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. The Deserter

  2. Yellowmaws

  3. The Running Savage

  4. The Racehorse

  5. The Fan

  6. Jagadamba

  7. Expecting Flesh

  8. A Kind of Hero

  9. The Hunger in the Dark

  10. The Volunteer

  11. The Monster

  12. The Uneaten

  13. The Shuttle

  14. Day Five

  15. Seeds

  16. Memories

  17. The Great Man

  18. Nothing Left to See

  19. The Fallen Leaves

  20. The Air of Pride Sector

  21. The Drowning

  22. The Last Mission

  23. The Seed

  Epilogue: Falling Metal

  About the Author

  Also by Peadar Ó Guilín

  Copyright

  About the Book

  To save his tribe, the cannibal Stopmouth must abandon it. Leaving the stone-age world of the Surface behind, he makes his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world suspended above.

  But the Roof has its own problems. The nanotechnology that controls it is collapsing. And now a rebellion against the ruling Commission is about to erupt.

  Hunted by the Commission’s nano-enhanced agents, Stopmouth must succeed in a desperate hunt of his own: to find the woman he loves. Only she knows how to save his tribe. But in this super-sophisticated world, all he has to fight with are his raw strength and fierce courage.

  Human primitivism collides with futuristic technology in this original and pulse-racing novel.

  To my mother, inventor of beans and mash

  Who art Thou, feasting thus upon Thy dead?

  Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter XI (translation by Edwin Arnold)

  Those who gave counsel to build the tower […] drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks […] Let us see whether heaven is made of clay, or of brass, or of iron. When God saw this He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest.

  Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, 3:5–8

  PROLOGUE

  THEY’RE HUNTING FOR Indrani, combing the Roof, projecting her picture everywhere. Squads burst into apartments. They wave weapons, shine torches in women’s faces. ‘Is this her, do you think? Man, for a reward like that …’

  But Indrani is hunting too. Everything she has seen in her short life has been recorded at ninety frames per second. Almost three billion images per year, and that’s just the visual information! Smells too have been digitized and stored away; every odour encountered since the age of four, immaculately preserved on the tiny chance that she might want it again some day.

  She can choose to play back the scent of her father’s skin from the first fight she had with a rival toddler in the care group.

  ‘Bad girl!’ he’d said, but whenever she accesses that recording (one of her favourites), she can hear the pride he’d been trying to suppress over her victory. He was training her even then, whether he’d meant to or not; moulding her into ‘the girl who never loses’. Until she lost him, murdered by Religious rebels.

  What she especially likes about that scene is the slightly damp feel of her father’s skin against hers. He’d been sweating, genuinely worried. Proof that he’d loved her, although he used to keep that kind of thing to himself.

  But Indrani can’t afford to wallow in childish triumphs. These days she spends far more time poring over the events leading up to the moment when she was shot down over the surface of the world. Somebody – Say it, Indrani, say it: the Commission, the rulers of the Roof, her supposed friends and allies – somebody had tried to have her killed. She can’t understand that, but even stranger is the fact that they later changed their minds and went to enormous lengths to rescue her instead. ‘We’ll take you back,’ they had promised. ‘We’ll allow your savage to live. Just come home …’

  The answers to that riddle lie hidden deep amongst the 42,601,850,100 images that make up her life, or in the terabytes of sounds and smells, or the recordings of everything she has ever felt … All she has to do to save herself and those she loves is to dig it out.

  Impossible, of course. More chance of a blind woman tracking down a single grain of rice on the surface of the world. Indrani cries sometimes at the thought of it. She never cried before leaving the Roof, but she’s not ‘the girl who never loses’ any more. She has killed intelligent beings and eaten their flesh. She has suffered enough horror to realize how fragile happiness is, how eager the universe is to take it away.

  So she keeps searching, always searching. And meanwhile the Commission, her pursuers, draw ever closer.

  1. THE DESERTER

  THE GLOBE HOVERED no more than two man-heights above the injured Stopmouth. Indrani hung out of the door, blood on her chin, one hand stretching down towards him.

  ‘Promise me you’ll come back,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’ll come back. I’ll find seeds for us to grow so nobody ever has to volunteer again. I’ll find weapons to fight the Diggers. And I’ll never leave you after.’ Her voice broke into a sob. ‘Never.’

  Stopmouth woke with a groan. I’m dreaming. And he was. The usual awful dream.

  Sweat drenched his body, and all the wounds he’d suffered the day Indrani left ached as though fresh. He missed her. He missed her so much. But in his sleep he never got to relive the great times they’d spent together. He only ever saw her leaving. Night after night.

  A fire hissed and popped beside him. All around were the moans and whimpers of his poor little tribe, still trapped in sleep. Stopmouth paused. Were they usually this noisy? He shook his head and grabbed a handful of pounded moss to mop away the chill of his sweat. As he raised his neck to wipe it clean, he chanced to look out of the window, and froze.

  I’m still dreaming.

  Stopmouth’s heart began to pound in his chest. Beyond the circle of firelight lay only darkness. Wake up, fool! Wake up! The sky was completely black, with no lights where the camps of the dead should be. None at all. As though the Roof itself had disappeared and taken his Indrani with it.

  He stumbled over to where the window should be, heart racing, his lips moving to childhood prayers. But even as he reached it, the grid of tracklights came on all at once for as far as the eye could see.

  He waited for something more.

  ‘Oh, go to sleep,’ somebody groaned at him. It sounded like Kubar, his voice rough at the best of times. ‘We’ve a big day tomorrow.’

  Of course. The dream was always more vivid on nights like this.

  A single big risk might win his vulnerable tribe a bit of breathing space, might even guarantee survival for generations to come. He’d need his rest. They all would.

  He listened. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the fearful sounds of nightmare seemed to have died down already.

  * * *

  ‘Liven up, Stopmouth!’ An elbow nudged him in the ribs and Rockface’s foul breath exploded over his face in a cloud.

  ‘Pay attention, hey?’

  ‘Sorry, Rockface.’ Stopmouth blinked. High above him the panels of the Roof glared with intense blue light. Once he’d believed the dead lived there – his ancestors and those of his enemies. ‘I was just—’

  ‘I know where you were, boy. The whole tribe knows.’ Near them, in the shadows, other hunters pretended to be watching the streets, not listening as the big man scolded their young chief. The sisters Sodasi and Kamala whispered to each other, casting sidelong glances at them. Big, twitch
y Vishwakarma struggled to keep still.

  ‘Indrani’s been gone a hundred and fifty days, but we’re still here, hey? And we need you, especially for the next tenth.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Stopmouth gripped the Talker in his hand, a piece of magic from the Roof that hid his stutter from the others. He could feel himself doing it, though. It happened most when he was nervous or simply ashamed. Before he could pinpoint the cause, something moved in the shadows and everybody jumped.

  Stopmouth hissed, ‘Vishwakarma, no!’

  Just in time.

  ‘Sorry, Chief.’ The man’s warped spear pulled back from the throat of a scout, a boy barely tall enough to reach Stopmouth’s shoulder and too young to realize how close he’d come to death.

  ‘They’re on their way!’ said the boy, panting hard.

  ‘Fourleggers?’ asked Stopmouth.

  ‘Yes, yes! A trio of them.’ The boy gestured into the alley behind him. ‘Just one trio.’

  Everybody smiled. These beasts always hunted in multiples of three. Had the ancestors wished the tribe ill, as many as nine might have been out there at once.

  ‘Yama’s leading them here now.’

  Stopmouth nodded and signalled Silence to the others. Everybody knew what he meant. Fourleggers had hearing so good they’d be able to tell that Yama was alone and limping. From now on, anybody talking could spoil the plan and jeopardize the future of the struggling human tribe. There weren’t enough of them to survive. Stopmouth had always known it. Sooner or later, one too many of his people would be hunted and eaten, or die in an accident, and their numbers would just collapse in a matter of days. It was always the way, always.

  This lot would have been extinct already had it not been for the arrival of Stopmouth, Rockface and Indrani. The little group had saved the bigger and had, in return, been granted a home. If only Indrani had stayed. If only he could see her lovely face just one more time …

  Rockface nudged him. Drifting again. Not allowed, not today. He had to get control of himself. He bit his lower lip hard enough to bleed, then stepped out carefully to where he could see the plaza, glaring in the unforgiving light of the Roof.

  A moment later, he spotted the hobbling figure of Yama, moving as fast as his recovering injury would allow him. The boy was arrogant, but there had never been any doubting his bravery – he’d volunteered for this job. ‘What if their ears are good enough to hear if someone’s only faking a limp? They’ll be looking out for trickery, but there’s no hiding my scars, is there?’

  As he ran, Yama never once glanced towards any of the places where his comrades hid. Good man, thought Stopmouth. The boy was learning at last, praise the ancestors.

  Mere heartbeats later, the shadows stirred in the alleyway that Yama had just fled. A voice the human ear should never have been able to detect said, ‘Hunting needs silence to listen.’

  ‘No,’ said another ‘voice’ translated by the Talker, ‘hunting needs speed! It flees alone.’

  ‘This one heard two of them,’ insisted the first.

  ‘Two, yes, but one strong enough to escape. Another is abandoned to us and waits only for our claws. We must not refuse it by delay.’

  Stopmouth’s eyes had adapted well enough now to see three Fourleggers, snouts pressed together in the shadow of a wall. They made no sound at all, but the Talker brought him what might have been their thoughts, or a language all of smells. Who knew? His hated brother, Wallbreaker, might have figured it out, but Stopmouth had escaped him long ago and hoped never to see him again.

  From the alley through which Yama had run, a rock crashed to earth, and somebody cried out as though in pain and fear. The Fourleggers immediately separated and surged towards the source of the sound, all claws on the ancient road, spraying dirt and moss with each step. Vishwakarma stood up too soon, but the beasts scattered enough rubble to mask the sound. Stopmouth waited for the last of them to disappear into the alley. Then he shouted, ‘Now!’

  Humans emerged from hiding in every part of the plaza. Almost half the able-bodied men and women of the tribe were out today – a terrible, terrible risk. But this was to be no ordinary hunt; no mere search for food. They had bigger plans than that.

  With the help of the ancestors, the Fourleggers would find that their limping prey had reached a dead end. He had climbed a rope ladder and pulled it up after himself.

  ‘In,’ shouted Stopmouth. ‘Everybody into the nets! Use your clubs, not the spears! Clubs!’

  And that was when everything went wrong.

  A great crack rang through the air, followed by screams of terror from the people he’d placed on the roofs surrounding the alley. One whole house slowly curved itself over, like an injured man bending down. Then it fell in an explosion of dust and flying splinters.

  Stopmouth saw the three beasts coming straight at him out of the cloud, running on all fours. Or trying to. One of them held a forelimb clear of the ground, and blood from a scalp wound dribbled over its eyes. Stopmouth knew it would have to dodge him to get away. He took aim with his club, but the wounded creature chose to smash into him instead, knocking him flying and tumbling with him to the ground.

  ‘The pain!’ it howled. But it scrambled to its feet before any of the humans could react, and only slingstones caught up with it after that. None struck home.

  ‘Help me,’ somebody said from the caved-in alley. Other groans were audible now as the stone settled down.

  ‘I’m cut,’ said Vishwakarma, blood streaming down his face. ‘I think … I think … Oh, by the gods, by the gods, don’t eat me, please don’t …’

  ‘Where are you, Vishwakarma, lad?’ Rockface’s breath was so bad, Stopmouth could actually smell him walking past. He reached the stricken Vishwakarma, a knife held behind his back. But he wouldn’t have to use it. Even from the ground, Stopmouth could see that the wound was little more than a scratch. Others might not be so lucky. At least two had fallen from the roofs where they’d been stationed.

  Rockface left Vishwakarma and walked back to the plaza, his back hunched over a little so as not to aggravate some of his old injuries.

  ‘Ha!’ he shouted.

  ‘Get everyone together,’ Stopmouth told Kubar. ‘Find out if anybody’s missing.’

  Rockface was peering at something on the ground, one hand resting on a pile of rubble, the other pressed against his back, as if he feared his spine were about to force its way out into the air. His face showed only triumph, however.

  Stopmouth crouched beside him and saw a small pile of rust-coloured scales smeared with sticky black blood.

  ‘You want a live one, hey, Chief? Just able to talk?’

  Stopmouth had a bad feeling about this. The big man was calmer since the injuries that had nearly stopped him hunting. Several times, in despair he’d volunteered the flesh of his body to feed the tribe, but small numbers and the battle for survival against the Skeletons had made food plentiful enough, so no such sacrifice had yet been necessary. Now he was almost back to his old cheerful self. A guarantee of trouble.

  Stopmouth reached a calming hand towards the man’s shoulder, but it was already too late.

  ‘Come on,’ said the grinning Rockface. ‘We can still catch it, hey? Come on!’

  ‘Rockface! Wait! We have to—’

  But the big hunter had lost his hearing and was loping off after the trail of blood. Had it been anybody else, anybody at all, Stopmouth would have let him go, never expecting to see him again. The adults of the tribe had grown up in the Roof and knew little of survival before they’d met him. He’d drummed it into their heads again and again that a lone hunter was little better than a free meal for the first pack of beasts to pick up his scent.

  He turned to the others. ‘Vishwakarma! There’s nothing wrong with you. Now, get up. Sodasi, Kamala, Kubar – you know what to do. You’re the scouts. Get everybody home in one piece. No hunting, no trouble of any kind.’

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Rockface had a
lready disappeared from the far side of the plaza. Stopmouth took off after him. As he ran, he checked his knife and sling. Apart from these, all he had was a club. There was no time to fetch a spear.

  He heard his friend shouting from only a few streets away and picked up the pace. His leg hurt a little, and the shoulder he’d dislocated the day Indrani left would probably trouble him for the rest of his life. Yet it felt good to run by himself again, with no pack of inexperienced and clumsy hunters to slow him up. Buildings whipped past and his feet slapped over stone or sank into moss with a scatter of insects.

  But then he ran round a corner to find the three beasts, one injured, two unscathed, standing over a fallen Rockface. Humans weren’t the only ones capable of ambush.

  He knew his friend was finished. In the old days, before the dozen injuries that plagued him and with his Armourback-shell spear in his hand, Stopmouth might have dared this fight with a slim, slim chance of success.

  The best he could do now would be to flee, because the moment Rockface was dead, the two healthy Fourleggers would come after him. They were strong enough and hungry enough to drag a pair of full-grown humans home to feed their people.

  ‘Go!’ shouted Rockface, his voice hoarse. ‘Go!’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Stopmouth. He knew he had to run – he was the chief. He was supposed to run. Nothing else made sense.

  One of the creatures looming above Rockface pulled back its arm, the claws aimed right at the fallen hunter’s neck. Stopmouth would never get there in time. He swung the club above his head, thinking it might put the Fourlegger off long enough for him to make one final suicidal charge. The two other beasts had gone back onto all fours in preparation for just such a move. Their jaws were working as though they could already taste his flesh.

  ‘Stop!’ said a voice.

  Everybody, man and beast alike, froze. Stopmouth realized that the words had been made almost entirely without sound and that only the Talker had allowed him to hear them.