The Deserter Read online

  A man appeared on the walls now, his handsome face the size of a house. ‘Dharam!’ exclaimed the hunter. This was his visitor when he’d been trapped in the white room just after his arrival in the Roof.

  ‘You know him?’ asked Indrani. But she didn’t have time to say anything else before the High Commissioner began speaking.

  ‘Citizens! Our victory over the Crisis approaches its final stages.’ Pictures appeared of gleaming, empty corridors; parks full of healthy trees. ‘More areas have been reclaimed from the Virus.’ Some people in the crowd cheered at the sight. ‘But these free sectors will not be ready again for human habitation for six more weeks …’

  Everybody groaned, for they knew what was coming. They’d be crushed together even closer than they were now. Rumour had it that in some sectors people were being forced to sleep standing up. A shiver of fear ran through the crowd. It only got worse when the announcement added that the newly ‘cleared’ area had contained food-purification centres. Stopmouth could actually feel the anger building around him. An explosion was coming: one of the great, horrific riots that would leave thousands trampled. Stopmouth’s little tribe would be right in the middle of it …

  ‘But there will be no shrinkage,’ cried Dharam. ‘No loss of space or rations.’ He waited a few heartbeats to let puzzlement replace anger. ‘Why should upstanding citizens like yourselves have to suffer when the very ones who have sabotaged us – those who introduced the Virus that now plagues us – still get to share in the fruits of our civilization?’

  Somebody, some human group, had actually planted the Virus? Stopmouth looked at Indrani. She looked shocked – everybody did. How could humans do such a thing?

  Images of empty parks on the wall disappeared, to be replaced by pictures of an angry chanting crowd of Religious. Their clothing differed greatly from that of the people around him. ‘A dangerous and ruthless minority sect,’ called Dharam. ‘They hate technology and sought to bring about the end of our civilization.’ The picture expanded to focus on a single hate-filled face. A young woman, ugly and thin, spittle flying from her mouth as she shouted some slogan.

  Around Stopmouth, even the Religious bellowed the young woman’s hatred back at her until the High Commissioner drowned them all out. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have decided to give them the primitive society they crave and save the rest of us from more shrinkage. Let’s see how these fanatics take to life on the surface!’

  The people cheered. Religious and Seculars together. Stopmouth had thought that some alien was responsible for the Crisis. No wonder the crowd was furious. He felt that itch in the back of his head that meant Indrani wanted to ‘call’ him.

  This can’t be right, she sent. Why would somebody plant a virus like that? They’d have to know they’d be killing themselves with it. Unless it was meant to accomplish something else and all the rest of the effects were only an accident. But it doesn’t sound like a tactic the Religious would use. Many of them worship the Roof.

  He lied to me, Stopmouth replied. When I first woke up here, he told me you’d gone mad, but he was just using me to find you.

  He interrogated you personally, Stopmouth? Of course he did. He wouldn’t trust it to one of his minions in case you knew anything useful. Dharam can be very convincing. I used to believe every word that came out of his mouth, and then it was me on the wall, spreading his poison for him. ‘The face of the Commission’, they called me. Her image shook its head. The Religious were closer to the truth with ‘the Witch’, if only I’d known it. I was his puppet. I thought he was a god.

  So are they really sending these people to the surface? he asked.

  The walls answered that question directly: the same fanatical men and women appeared now, in their thousands, strapped to the floor in cages that, in turn, rested in a huge pit. Stopmouth had seen a place just like it before, although its floor had been covered with bones and the sole occupant had been a huge beast, crazed with loneliness and hunger.

  A flash of light had the audience cursing and cheering. When the spots cleared from Stopmouth’s vision, the fanatics were gone, the cages empty. Screams of joy filled the air. People jumped up and down and hugged each other. A dancing group knocked Stopmouth over, forcing him to twist his body to keep Flamehair safe. She was so tiny! He felt their feet against his back, but then a dozen hands reached down to pull him to his feet, and men hugged him and laughed until he found himself laughing with them, while Indrani scowled from a few paces away.

  ‘We’ve done it!’ shouted a handsome but ageing Secular. Stopmouth didn’t know whether he meant the defeat of the Virus or the demise of those now being blamed for setting it loose.

  ‘What’s your wife so sour about?’ asked somebody else, a Religious woman who’d tried to give Flamehair a kiss but couldn’t bend far enough in the press.

  ‘Tummy ache,’ he responded.

  She laughed, her hood falling back to reveal twinkly eyes. A nice woman, as good as dead.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘You got tummy ache too?’

  Nobody had the energy to keep the celebration going long. After a few hundred heartbeats everybody sat down again, telling each other that they’d soon be moving into the cleared areas, and not long after that, each and every one of them would have their own apartment again – like the old days when the Upstairs had been barely full and the Roof had a whole new floor under construction.

  ‘Hey,’ somebody shouted. ‘They’ve arrived! The Commission already has a Globe watching the traitors!’

  A wave of silence spread through the plaza as more and more people – even Religious, who were supposed to be beyond such things – submerged themselves in the sounds and images broadcast to them by the Globes that spied on the surface.

  Stopmouth didn’t have to look to know what was going on. The ‘traitors’ would still be asleep, their bodies distributed in the buildings of some empty streets. Hungry beasts would have noticed the arrival and were probably already on their way to exploit this new, inexperienced flesh.

  If your world is ending, we must go home, he sent to Indrani. We can steal another Globe, or find that place where you said the land touches the Roof. The – the—

  The mountain, she said.

  Yes! The mountain! You can’t save the Roofpeople, and I’m sorry, truly I am sorry about that. But our tribe still have a chance. If we can get back to them before nightfall …

  She was still staring at the pictures of empty cages on the walls. Finally she said, Can you see in the dark, Stopmouth?

  What do you mean?

  I mean, where will your light come from when the Roof turns black with rot? How will the trees grow that give you firewood? Where will new flesh come from when you’ve eaten all the beasts on the surface or when they’ve eaten you? Because when the Roof dies there won’t be any more.

  We’ll find some seeds before we go back. You said yourself—

  You’re not listening, Stopmouth. Seeds need light to grow, and there won’t be any light down there. Ever.

  ‘What—?’ He shouldn’t be speaking aloud, so he shut his mouth and thought, What can we do?

  You won’t like it, she sent. I know you. I don’t like it either, but we have no choice.

  In real life, Indrani sighed. The picture of her in his mind remained totally calm. The Commission have a means of escape for a few hundred people, she sent. Her red-rimmed eyes looked straight into his. And they can’t get away without our help …

  She didn’t mean it. She couldn’t. To leave billions to die here. To abandon his people to generations of darkness followed by a slow extinction.

  ‘We can’t do this,’ he hissed aloud to Indrani.

  She reached over and took the baby from him. ‘I won’t let her die,’ she said, and whispered, ‘Or you, dearest Stopmouth. There is no world without you.’

  ‘We can’t,’ he insisted.

  I’m going to call Dharam, she said. We’ll make a deal.

  But you’re
the one who told me about the Deserters, Indrani! This is what they did, exactly what they did. Sneaking away and leaving the innocent to suffer! You’re saying we should be no different?

  ‘Flamehair,’ was all she could say, and Stopmouth had no answer to that.

  She and the baby fell asleep beside him. He didn’t know how she could do that, for he doubted he would ever sleep again. The tribe, the tribe! Even his brother’s tribe. How could he abandon them? Some of his ancestors may have been Deserters who left their people in their hour of need instead of fighting to the last to save them. But he was not like that.

  ‘Show me my people,’ he whispered to the dying Roof. ‘I want … I need to see them again.’ Even if it was just to witness the extinction he had failed to prevent.

  Night had fallen on the surface, but in Headquarters, nobody slept. His first sight of the complex of buildings was a confusion of lights – torches, Stopmouth realized – rushing this way and that. And then the shouting reached his ears: Kubar calling for more fires to be lit; Rockface yelling for spears and hunters. Something was moving out in the streets. It was like a river flowing past and between houses.

  ‘Closer,’ Stopmouth commanded, and the Roof obeyed, swooping him down over the alleyways. Of course, it wasn’t like a real fall; he felt nothing in the pit of his stomach. He just knew he couldn’t be hurt. But he gasped anyway at what he saw there. Beasts, all kinds of beasts: Fourleggers and Slimers, the ones that looked like the Clawfolk back home; hairy ones, and others with segmented bodies, ignoring everything around them, running, running for their lives. No species took the time to hunt any of the others. When a beast fell, feet trampled it and left it to die uneaten.

  Rockface shouted: ‘Hunters, to me!’ He looked fierce in the firelight and the young flocked to him. He was limping, but his face showed only joy. ‘There’ll be good eating tonight, hey? Hey? This will keep us for a ten of days.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Kubar. ‘You mustn’t go out there.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  The old priest pushed his way past an excited Vishwakarma and grabbed Rockface by the arm. ‘We’ll capture some, yes, but we can’t kill them. We need to know what they’re running from. Maybe we should be running too?’

  Stopmouth found himself nodding. ‘Listen to him, Rockface,’ he muttered, knowing he couldn’t be heard, knowing there was nothing he could do.

  The big hunter shook off the older man. ‘To the doors!’ he shouted.

  ‘What about the Fourleggers, at least?’ said Kubar.

  Rockface paused. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘All right, all right. No Fourleggers, but kill anything else you can find and drag it inside.’

  The stampede had almost ended by the time the humans got outside. Nevertheless they brought down seven or eight beasts of all types, the young men and a few women whooping as they fought creatures without the heart to resist them.

  Yama managed to cripple a Slimer. He laughed as it put up no fight, but kept trying to crawl around him. The boy continued poking it here and there until an angry Kubar finished the creature off.

  Sodasi had abandoned her sister to take up a place beside Rockface. When a beast got behind him and raised its claws, she was ready with her sling. She gave no shout of triumph as she broke its momentum with one stone and stopped it dead with another. Stopmouth felt sure she wanted to hide from Rockface the fact that she’d helped him. She’d never tell him how slow he’d become.

  ‘Enough!’ shouted Kubar. ‘Bring it inside – bring it all inside.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rockface agreed. Sweat streamed down his face, although he’d fought for no longer than a few hundred heartbeats. ‘Get … get it in, boys. In. And bar the doors tight.’

  Stopmouth followed them inside, passing through the walls to where a tiny machine spied for him, sending all images to a nearby Globe. He had a bad feeling. The streets were silent again.

  ‘Hey,’ said Yama, ‘there’s one still alive here!’ Sure enough, a hairy creature with two legs and six short arms growing from its chest and back lay slumped but breathing in a corner. The boy grinned and strode over to it with his knife drawn. But once again, Kubar was there to deny him.

  ‘This one’s mine, boy,’ he hissed.

  ‘We’ll see about that. Nobody made you Chief. Look at your grey head – you’re just about ready for the pot yourself.’

  ‘I have the Talker,’ said Kubar. ‘I’m going to question it, and if it answers my questions, I’m going to let it go. We have more than enough flesh.’

  ‘Let him ask his questions,’ said Sodasi. ‘Right, Rockface? We’ll let the priest talk to the creature?’

  Rockface shrugged. He hadn’t stopped sweating since the fight.

  ‘There,’ said Sodasi, her pretty face serious.

  The priest approached the hairy creature. ‘Did you hear?’ he asked. ‘Did you understand?’

  The six arms waved and a strange perfume filled the air. ‘Yes,’ said the Talker. ‘I wish to go. I wish to go or not to live.’

  A child came rushing down from the roof, all excitement. ‘A house,’ she cried. ‘A house just fell into the street!’

  Everybody jumped as a crashing noise came from outside. And then another, closer to them. The Sixarm suddenly shoved Kubar aside and rushed for the door. It was still trying to find a way to open it when Yama’s spear took it in the back. ‘What a kill! Another kill for me!’

  And then a crack ran up the walls in front of him. Dust sprayed down from the ceiling.

  ‘I can feel it through my feet,’ said Kubar. ‘There’s something in the ground beneath us …’

  Stopmouth saw Sodasi whisper in Rockface’s ear. The big man nodded even as more dust rained down from the ceiling. ‘The walls are falling!’ he shouted. ‘We need to get to the roof on the other side of the U before—’

  Abruptly Stopmouth found himself back on the Roof, snatched away from what was happening on the surface of the world.

  ‘I need to see,’ he cried. ‘I need to know!’

  But the floor beneath him groaned and shook as if the Diggers had come here too, and though the crowd shouted and prayed, he understood none of it. The tremors continued, heartbeat after long heartbeat. Flamehair woke crying while her mother cradled her from the buffeting of surrounding bodies.

  Liquid fountained into the air a hundred paces away – sewage, its foul stench billowing over the people with every lurch of the ground. The whole event lasted no more than a dozen heartbeats this time. At the end of it, the little family had to fight to hold onto their space as filth-covered refugees from the sewage spill fanned out, looking for somewhere cleaner to huddle.

  Stopmouth tried to see what was happening to his tribe again. But the Roof showed him nothing, nothing at all. As if it couldn’t; as if there was nothing left to see.

  Again Indrani went back to sleep, leaving him alone with his thoughts. All around him came grunts and curses; farts and snores and fighting; talking, and even the sounds of a couple making love not too far away, unconcerned by the presence of the crowd. Overhead, the random and twinkling stars shone through the same hole in the Roof’s many layers that had earlier brought him the sun.

  His people were probably already dead. Or worse, they might survive this night; prey to dark-adapted Diggers and who knew what else while he fled with a gang of cowards who despised him.

  Nearby, some doomed child angered the adults around it with its wails. He tried to roll away from the noise, but came up against some stranger’s back.

  Stopmouth wondered if the rulers of this place – the Commission – were able to sleep at night. They’d been planning their escape for at least as long as he’d been alive. That was the time they’d spent fixing up the warship. They’d kept the secret; they’d diverted resources away from saving the lives of everybody else. A whole generation of sickening selfishness.

  His body twitched, hatred threatening to overwhelm him, to make him stand up and scream out what was happening to all th
ose around him, even if it meant the certain doom of his small family. The people had a right to know, didn’t they? A right to prepare for death, if nothing else? He couldn’t bear it, he couldn’t.

  ‘I won’t Desert,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll get Indrani onto the ship, but I won’t go. I’ll die with my own kind.’

  Stopmouth’s dream of taking Indrani home could never happen now. He knew that. But at last he had found a way to keep her safe while still doing the duty to his people that had been bred in him since before he could talk.

  As he made the decision, his body relaxed. It was as if he’d been holding his breath ever since he’d gone looking for his woman, and now, finally, he could take a fresh gulp of air, and another, and another. His eyes closed out the stars.

  19. THE FALLEN LEAVES

  MORNING CAME TOO quickly to Sunshine Park. This was one of the reasons people disliked the place, or so Indrani said. The days were all the wrong length.

  Stopmouth heard laughter nearby and saw Indrani sitting up in the midst of a cluster of women. Most of them were Religious, he thought, and getting on in years, but a few had unlined faces. They were smiling at Flamehair and seemed to be competing for a chance to pick her up. She didn’t cry, but looked wide-eyed at each of them in turn. When she burped a bubble of milk, everybody thought it the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

  One elderly lady on the edge of the group looked too frail to hold the baby and contented herself with a wide toothless grin, half hidden behind curled fists. She noticed Stopmouth, and one feather-light hand drifted onto his arm.

  ‘Such pale skin! You’re the father?’

  For a moment he thought the fake pigment of his body had come off. ‘I—’

  ‘Where did you get the nanos to colour her so?’ wondered the woman. ‘A Cosmetic, was it? Oh, she’s so beautiful.’

  It was true, he realized. What a shame Flamehair wasn’t really his. If he could learn to fool himself, to pretend … His eyes met Indrani’s and she grinned at him, her despair all pushed aside for now.