Futuretrack 5 Read online

  Once, the medic came out and peered into my mouth. “You’ve lost one, clean. Five others a bit wobbly. Don’t let your tongue play with them or you’ll lose them for sure. …” Still, he gave me a mouthwash that eased the pain.

  “How is he?”

  “In hand,” said the medic. But his eyes roamed shiftily. “By the way, that bottle was Valium—we’ve got it.” He sounded quite proud. “I don’t think he’s taken Valium, though. That bottle was a trick. He’s not responding to the Valium antidote.”

  Alone again, I thought, Please God, don’t let him die. Which God? Techs didn’t believe in God, only computers. The Est’s God? A large Union Jack, and the college padre preaching duty to one’s country? I prayed to the Est’s God, in whom no Tech believed…

  Must have dozed. Wakened about four, my body cold and stiff as a rusted machine. Listened in terror; but there was still noise in the sick bay. The weary, far-off murmur of medics, the heart-machine pinging, the feathery beat of other machines, pumps and drips.

  He was still alive.

  But a formless questioning kept ballooning inside my head.

  Only about a third of my mind was noticing the cold, the stiffness, the noises. Only about a third of me seemed to have come out of sleep.

  The other two-thirds of me was aware of nothing but that formless questioning that swelled and swelled till it filled the whole, white-walled room.

  Was I still dreaming? Desperately, my tongue reached for my teeth. They were real. They didn’t seem quite so wobbly…

  But my head stayed full of that formless questioning. Well, more a pleading.

  The sounds next door sounded strangely like a bird, beating its wings against the door of its cage…

  “Oh, Idris, mate,” I said aloud, “wherever you are… go, if you want to go.” I said it without thinking. Then listened to the noise of the heart machine, my own heart in my mouth.

  It went on and on and on.

  Then stopped.

  A frantic flurry among the medics. Unthinkable noises of flesh and bone parting. After ten minutes, the pinging hadn’t restarted. I no longer wanted it to.

  After twenty minutes, the matey medic reappeared. He didn’t have to say anything: all losers look the same. I walked past him.

  Idris lay, covered to his chin with a white nylon sheet, in the midst of the biggest array of pipes and tubes I’ve ever seen. It must have been a terrible battle, but he’d won. He looked like a Roman emperor, arrogant nose still jutting in the air and that faint, sarcastic smile back on his face.

  The machinery did look like a cage.

  “He tricked you with that Valium bottle,” said the medic.

  It wasn’t me he tricked, I thought.

  Be free, Idris, be free.

  I turned to go, and nearly fell.

  “You all right? Maybe a couple of days in bed and a jab to make you sleep?”

  He meant well; but he was offering me the same cage Idris had just escaped from.

  “No, thanks—it’s just these teeth. I’ll see a dentist.”

  “Yeah—see a dentist.”

  I walked out of the waiting room and out of the Centre, and went and sat on a little hill outside. It was man-made; little more than a mound. Idris always boasted he’d designed it, to hide the perimeter Wire. Other times he said Laura designed it, to cure claustrophobia in the staff while they were working. It had three silver-birch trees on top, and a few rabbits were allowed to breed. Laura had worked out the ideal allocation of 2.6 silver birches and 10.7 rabbits, but Idris had graciously rounded the numbers upward. Superfluous rabbits were humanely put to sleep. We called it Idris Hill. The best thing was, it gave you a chance to sneer down at the Centre. To see it as the futile scurrying antheap it was. To rise above it. Young Techs sat there a lot.

  But not at four in the morning. I sat in perfect solitude, my back against a birch tree and feet in a rabbit burrow. I scuffed my toes about, making marks in the soil. The rabbit droppings had a comforting smell.

  “Oh, Idris, mate!” I was nearly out of my mind. There seemed to be three Idrises now.

  The cooling body in the mortuary that they’d tear apart in the morning, to find out how he’d tricked them.

  But my mind sheered away from that. My mind insisted that if I just went back to Laura’s room in a couple of hours I’d find him still there, waking up cross, coughing over his first fag of the day, scratching his smelly armpit and shouting insults to Headtech down the phone. That was the ordinary day I wanted to run back to…

  But there now seemed to be a third Idris, up here on the hill with me. The same ballooning thoughts that had first come to me in the sick bay. Not pleading now, but pressing down on me, terribly, terribly angry.

  “Steady, old mate,” I whispered. “You’ll be okay now. You’re free. You’re super-Idris now. You must know everything. They can’t hurt you anymore. Go and find your real Laura.”

  But the press of his anger grew.

  “What do you want, Idris? What do you want?”

  Only a name came into my mind: Scott-Astbury.

  That’s stupid, I thought. That’s like when you’re very tired, and a queer word like “mollycoddle” sort of gets stuck in your mind and you can’t get it out, and it keeps repeating till you get a good night’s sleep. It’s just my mind, I thought. My poor tired mind playing tricks.

  The ballooning anger grew unbearable.

  “All right, mate,” I said. “Scott-Astbury, if you insist.”

  Suddenly, there was just the dawn wind and me, on the hilltop.

  I looked down on the Centre; it reminded me of an egg factory we’d studied, where light burned night and day to encourage egg production. The on-shift Techs even looked like white hens, each cramped in its own cage. A broiler house for brains…

  Well, they’d never broil mine. They’d never get me back in the Centre. Idris had been the greatest, and in the end he just wanted to die. … I got up, took off my white coat, threw it on the ground, and walked away. But when I looked back, it glimmered in the gloom, stuck up on the hill like a flag, a danger signal. In half an hour, everyone would see it. I went back and stuffed it down a rabbit hole, clipboard and all. Hard luck, rabbit; dig another burrow. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re not going anywhere. I am.

  But how? I was too weary to think. My feet took me down to the hostel, already feeling naked without my white coat. I fell on my bed and went out like a light.

  Up out of sleep, not wanting to come. The digital clock on the wall said 20.04. I’d slept the clock round; only most clocks in the Centre didn’t go round.

  Sellers, my roommate, getting changed. Not a bad guy, for a Tech. Kept himself to himself, but never sneaked on you to the Top Brass.

  Sellers had reached the ugly, trouserless stage; long white legs shone in the lamplight. Fair hairs on them, invisible except where the lamplight glinted. His back was turned. His jeans and jean jacket lay tossed on the bed. Unnem credits spilled out of the pockets, all over the neat green bed cover.

  Sellers had been on the razzle. Most young Techs went on the razzle occasionally. Getting dressed up as Unnems, going into the Unnem estates for a day, hungry for Unnem breakouts and Unnem women. See how the other half lives… tours of the Amazon jungle, complete with real carnivores…

  For some young Techs never returned, despite the tiny distress-bleepers they carried in their breast pocket that could summon a psychopter within minutes. Five or six a year never came back. Sometimes the Paramils returned their belongings in a neat parcel, sometimes not even that.

  Headtech didn’t like it, but Headtech allowed it. Worse things had happened when young Techs weren’t allowed out at all. Five or six dead a year was an acceptable price to pay. Tech-intake figures were adjusted accordingly.

  Most gave up the razzle by thirty. Got hooked on digit-bridge or computer-archaeology instead. Only a few ever married. If unmarried female Techs got pregnant, they were aborted. If they insisted on having t
he kid, both were sent to Unnem.

  I’d never been on the razzle, though I’d considered it. Idris had been a full-time job….

  A shutter crashed down in my mind. I wouldn’t think of Idris; Idris had failed, left me, gone. Well, that was Idris’s business; he could get on with it.

  “Where y’been?” I asked Sellers.

  He didn’t turn his head, but his neck went rigid. He’d heard about Idris… Then he said, “London… cooorr!” making himself turn and mimic satiated lust. Revolting. Sellers with his gold-rimmed spectacles, glinting gold whiskers, and pale green eyes. He wiped a speck of drool off the corner of his mouth. “You ought to try it… their women are desperate for it.” He made them sound like zoo animals. Who’d want to mate with zoo animals? I couldn’t stand him being near me.

  “You on the 21.00 shift?” Sellers lived in permanent terror of being late. He departed thirty minutes early, buttoning his white coat, except the top two buttons, a nervous look spreading across his face. Anxiety is the cure for lust. … I laughed in disgust—at Sellers and myself.

  But there were Sellers’s jeans. Much better made than Unnem jeans, but bleached and frayed to look like them. And there were his Unnem credits, enough for a week. And his unexpired razzle pass.

  And the London razzle wagon left the gate every evening at nine.

  It was a way out. I wouldn’t have to face the sneers and the plotting … or Laura … or Idris’s unmade bed. I, too, was on the 21.00 shift; they’d be paging me in a minute…

  Sellers’s stuff fitted me; just a bit tight across the chest. I wrote him a credit note to pay for everything, dropped it on his bed.

  On my way out, I checked my pigeonhole for letters, automatically. Four envelopes. I stuffed them in a pocket and headed for the gate.

  Chapter 6

  I travelled alone; it was Sunday night and raining. The damp crept in, clouding the stainless-steel seat backs. The empty bus leaped on its springs at every bump in the road, jolting air from my lungs. Dreary.

  I opened my letters to pass the time. A pay statement; I was getting rich. Too busy looking after Idris to spend it.

  Don’t think about Idris.

  An advert for cut-price Japanese octaphonic sound. One way of wasting my money, as Idris would’ve said.

  Mess bill. They’d take it out of my salary whether I was there or not…

  The fourth envelope was also computer typed. But handwriting inside… Idris’s… the old fake… he’s not dead… fool… written before he died. Crafty old sod: put it in my pigeonhole, where no one would think of looking—yet.

  The handwriting was big and savage as ever. But splotched with pale, blue blobs… drunken tears.

  “I can’t destroy her—you can have her. What has she done wrong? Keep an eye on her AM input—they are trying to override her sensors and do for her. …” That much was the Idris I knew. The rest was mad, like graffiti on a lavatory wall, getting bigger and bigger. In several places his pen had gone right through the paper. Just the name Scott-Astbury over and over. Then at the bottom, the words “Kill, kill, kill” scrawled right over Scott-Astbury’s name.

  I was very aware that I was running away. I’d never meet Scott-Astbury where I was going. The hair rose on the back of my neck; I waited for Idris’s ballooning rage to hit me.

  But no rage came. Either Idris had gone, wherever he was going. Or he no longer minded. Perhaps he was past such things now.

  The empty bus bounded on through the night.

  The entrance to razzle land didn’t match up to the nods and winks in our dining hall. Extra-high Wire; guard post with Paramils, leashed Alsatian and gas-thrower pointing inward. Techs had been known to return to that gate prematurely, in a hurry and with unwelcome company.

  Otherwise, an endless vista of council blocks marched away downhill into the drizzly night. The pale blue nicker of the Box came through every uncurtained window. Unnems only had one TV program, black and white, so every block of windows jumped and flickered simultaneously, like a huge and boring light show.

  I gave the Paramils a casual flourish of Sellers’s razzle pass, my thumb half over his photograph. They hardly looked. They were only bothered who came out of that gate, not who went in. They’d examine Sellers’s pass a sight more thoroughly coming back; except I wasn’t coming back. My heart gave two enormous thumps, and I felt alive for the first time since Idris’s heart stopped. Not that there was much to feel alive about. Just boring light shows descending the hill, dank grass and wet roads between.

  At first, grass and roads were thick with half-bricks. But halfway down I met a line of machines coming up. Litter-eaters, big as cars, moving low to the ground in caterpillar tracks, silently cramming paper, tins, and bricks into gaping mouths with crablike claws. Their armoured sides were dented and charred.

  I chose two further apart than the others, to walk between. They sensed me, for they paused in their eating, turning slightly inward. Then they sensed I was too tall to be litter or too alive; it was enough to snap their electrical relays over and send them on their way. Too close for comfort; their battered metal hides were electrified to knock out vandals. Suppose one of their relays had been defective? Would my electrocuted body count as litter? To be stuffed in with the bricks and cans and regurgitated straight into the heat-exchange furnace in the morning?

  I was halfway down before I saw where I was heading. The totally cleared area behind the litter-eaters had fallen away. Tomorrow’s litter was building up, though I’d seen no one. I was heading for a noise that came and went, as I twisted through the council blocks, like the beating of a huge heart; for a pink flashing in the sky, punctuated with yellow and blue.

  It was against this flashing light I saw my first Unnem, his footsteps already muffled by the giant heartbeat. Luckily, he was walking away from me. I overtook him, studying him carefully. Male; no female could be so ugly. Shoulders hunched; head thrust forward like a tortoise, shining, cropped as a cannonball. Arms never still, joggling and waving like a bird that cannot fly. Knees bent, and outward-turned feet scraping and flopping and quarrelling with the ground.

  Something warned me to mimic him; that he wasn’t an odd freak. I practiced humping my shoulders and dragging my feet; I couldn’t face the ridiculous arm movements. When I was about five yards behind, he stopped and turned.

  “What yer following me fer?” Voice ugly and forced as the body. Quick as lightning, I mimicked, “What yer walking in front of me fer?”

  “I’ll smash yer.” The creature raised a fist holding something.

  “Try it.” I walked straight at him; he was smaller than me.

  “Lob off, lobo!” But his challenge was over; he crabbed sideways out of range and I passed at my new ridiculous gait.

  Ten yards on, something made me look back. In time to see a brick coming straight at my head. I dodged; then found my foe had vanished. Only from the top of a steep grass slope came a faint repeat, “Lob off, lobo.” The voice sounded female, now it was safe.

  I wiped my brow. If this was a ritual exchange of greeting, it was a miracle so many razzling Techs survived; except Techs learn new techniques quickly.

  By now I could see the source of light and sound. Three geodesic domes loomed above the blocks of flats like triple rising suns. A random light show boiled across their surface, marbled pink, yellow, blue like the heart of an erupting volcano. The great heartbeat was the distant sound of music; a dozen sorts of music quarrelling savagely, rising occasionally to an unplanned crescendo. Amplified human voices, bells ringing, buzzers sounding;

  already too loud for comfort. Above the domes, a flashing neon said:

  LABOUR EXCHANGE

  As I entered the final street, light and sound hit me like a fist; sent me ducking back round the corner into the shadows. I fumbled in the top pocket of my denims. I’d found a pair of Polaroid sunglasses there, nearly thrown them away, thinking them some ridiculous pose of Sellers’s.

  I knew better n
ow. But suppose real Unnems were used to the light and noise? The glasses would make me stick out like a sore thumb. … I lingered, behind some garbage skips. Somebody was already there, somebody soft, small, and timid. Somebody snuggled up to me confidingly.

  “I’m scared. Are you scared?” A girl’s voice, nervous and light. An Est voice…

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Pushed through the Wire, a year ago. God, it’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “How’ve you survived?”

  “Hiding, mainly.” She snuggled tighter. “Will you look after me?” Her hands dived through the top of my denim jacket, roved across my chest. “Hey… big muscles. Will you look after me?”

  I hesitated. She was the last thing I needed.

  “I was at school on the Island. Were you?” Her hands were roving further. Exciting little hands, if only I hadn’t been so tense, if my teeth hadn’t still ached. Still, soothing…

  “I know somewhere dark and safe,” she whispered. “I’ve got some Coke … no one’ll find us.” Her hands, busier than ever, were roaming across my backside.

  “You’re tired… come on, I’ll look after you. Till you get used to it. …” Her hands were really very clever. If only Sellers’s jeans hadn’t been a bit too tight, so that I felt her reach into the pocket with my Unnem credits…

  Her wrist was tiny; I was frightened I’d break it.

  “All right,” she said. “Yes, I am a pickpocket.”

  “You weren’t at school on the Island at all.” That lie seemed worse than stealing my money.