Dawn rose outside the arcology. A clean dawn, the kind which Earth hadn’t seen for centuries; the sun huge and red-gold, casting brilliant rays across the dingy landscape. It shone directly into the apartment, warm and vigorous.
Gerald sighed like a small child, and held his hands out to it. “It’s so beautiful.”
“You’re relaxing. That’s good, Gerald. We need you relaxed; and I’d prefer you to reach that state by yourself. Tranquillizers inhibit your responses, and we want you to be clearheaded.”
“What do you mean?” Gerald asked suspiciously.
“Where are you, Gerald?”
“At home.”
“No, Gerald, this is long ago. This is a refuge for you, a psychological retreat into the past. You’re creating it because something rather nasty happened to you.”
“No. Nothing! Nothing nasty. Go away.”
“I can’t go away, Gerald. It’s important for a lot of people that I stay. You might be able to save a whole planet, Gerald.”
Gerald shook his head. “Can’t help. Go away.”
“We’re not going, Gerald. And you can’t run from us. This isn’t a place, Gerald, this is inside your mind.”
“No no no!”
“I’m sorry, Gerald, truly, I am. But I cannot leave until you have shown me what I want to see.”
“Go away. Sing!” Gerald started to hum his lullabies again. Then his throat turned to stone, blocking the music inside. Hot tears trickled down his cheeks.
“No more singing, Gerald,” Harry Earnshaw said. “We’re going to play a different game. Dr Dobbs and I are going to ask you some questions. We want to know what happened to you on Lalonde—”
The apartment exploded into a blinding iridescent swirl. Every sensory channel splice into Gerald Skibbow’s brain thrummed from overload.
Riley Dobbs shook himself as the processor array broke the direct linkage. In the seat next to him Harry Earnshaw was also stirring.
“Sod it,” Dobbs grumbled. In the room through the glass, he could see Skibbow’s body straining against the webbing. He hurriedly datavised an order into the physiological control processor for a tranquillizer.
Earnshaw studied the neural scan of Skibbow’s brain, the huge electrical surge at the mention of Lalonde. “That is one very deep-seated trauma. The associations are hotwired into almost every neural pathway.”
“Did the AI pull anything out of the cerebral convulsion?”
“No. It was pure randomization.”
Dobbs watched Skibbow’s physiological display creep down towards median. “Okay, let’s go in again. That trank should take the edge off his neurosis.”
This time the three of them stood on a savanna of lush emerald-green knee-high grass. Tall snowcapped mountains guarded the horizon. A bright sun thickened the air, deadening sounds. Before them was a burning building; a sturdy log cabin with a lean-to barn and a stone chimney.
“Loren!” Gerald shouted hoarsely. “Paula! Frank!” He ran towards the building as the flames licked up the walls. The roof of solar cell panels began to curl up, blistering from the heat.
Gerald ran and ran, but never got any nearer. There were faces behind the windows: two women and a man. They did nothing as the flames closed around them, simply looked out with immense sadness.
Gerald sank to his knees, sobbing.
“Wife Loren, and daughter Paula with her husband Frank,” Dobbs said, receiving their identities direct from the AI. “No sign of Marie.”
“Small wonder the poor bastard’s in shock if he saw this happen to his family,” Earnshaw remarked.
“Yeah. And we’re too early. He hasn’t been taken over by the energy virus yet.” Dobbs datavised an order into the AI, activating a targeted suppression program, and the fire vanished along with the people. “It’s all right, Gerald. It’s over. All finished with. They’re at peace now.”
Gerald twisted around to glare at him, his face deformed by rage. “At peace? At peace! You stupid ignorant bastard. They’ll never be at peace. None of us ever will. Ask me! Ask me, you fucker. Go on. You want to know what happened?
Daylight vanished from the sky, replaced by a meagre radiance from Rennison, Lalonde’s innermost moon. It illuminated another log cabin; this one belonged to the Nicholls family, Gerald’s neighbour. The mother, father, and son had been tied up and put in the animal stockade along with Gerald.
A ring of dark figures encircled the lonely homestead, distorted human shapes, some atrociously bestial.
“My God,” Dobbs murmured. Two of the figures were dragging a struggling, screaming girl into the cabin.
Gerald gave a giddy laugh. “God? There is no God.”
• • •
After nearly five hours of unbroken and mercifully uneventful travel, Carmitha still hadn’t convinced herself they were doing the right thing in going to Bytham. Every instinct yelled at her to get to Holbeach and surround herself with her own kind, use them like a fence to keep out the nemesis which prowled the land, to be safe. That same instinct made her queasy at Titreano’s presence. Yet as the younger Kavanagh girl predicted, with him accompanying them nothing had happened to the caravan. Several times he had indicated a farmhouse or hamlet where he said his kind were skulking.
Indecision was a wretched curse.
But she now had few doubts that he was almost what he claimed to be: an old Earth nobleman possessing the body of a Norfolk farmhand.
There had been a lot of talk in the last five hours. The more she heard, the more convinced she became. He knew so many
After Titreano had spoken about his former life to the fascination of the sisters, he in turn became eager to hear of Norfolk. And that was when Carmitha finally began to lose patience with her companions. Genevieve she could tolerate; the world as seen through the eyes of a twelve-(Earth)-year-old was fairly bizarre anyway, all enthusiasms and misunderstandings. But Louise, now; that brat was a different matter. Louise explained about the planet’s economy being built around the export of Norfolk Tears, about how the founders had wisely chosen a pastoral life for their descendants, about how pretty the cities and towns were, how clean the countryside and the air were compared to industrialized worlds, how nice the people, how well organized the estates, how few criminals there were.
“It sounds as though you have achieved much that is worthy,” Titreano said. “Norfolk is an enviable world in which to be born.”
“There are some people who don’t like it,” Louise said. “But not very many.” She looked down at Genevieve’s head, cradled in her lap, and smiled gently. Her little sister had finally fallen asleep, rocked by the gentle rhythm of the caravan.
She smoothed locks of hair back from Genevieve’s brow. It was dirty and unkempt, with strands shrivelled and singed from the fire in the stable. Mrs Charlsworth would have a fit of the vapours if she saw it thus. Landowner girls were supposed to be paragons of deportment at all times, Kavanagh girls especially.
Just thinking of the old woman, her sacrifice, threatened to bring the tears which had been so long delayed.
“Why don’t you tell him the reason those dissidents don’t like it here,” Carmitha said.
“Who?” Louise asked.
“The Land Union people, the traders flung in jail for trying to sell medicine the rest of the Confederation takes for granted, the people who work the land, and all the other victims of the landowner class, me included.”
Anger, tiredness, and despair spurted up together in Louise’s skull, threatening to quench what was left of
