Children of the Dust (18 page)

The moon sank behind them. Simon was sagging with tiredness and his backside ached from riding before Laura suddenly stopped. He raised his head and saw a towering cromlech on the edge of a black abyss. Left and right a pathway wandered along the earth-bank borders between England and Wales, scuffed smooth by the feet of ages. It was Offa's Dyke on Sowerby's map, old and ghost-haunted in Simon's imagination. And the land fell away, hundreds of feet to the river below at the pitch black ending of the world.

'They call this place the Devil's Pulpit,' Laura said, as she helped him dismount. 'We'll camp here till morning. I don't want Timms to break his leg.'

And Simon was too weary to argue.

On a bed of heather with a blanket to cover him Simon slept soundly and awoke with a start. He could smell smoke, see fire, and twigs from the dead trees crackled as Laura held out her hands to the blaze. The surrounding darkness was intensified, moonless and still in the black hour before morning. A small wind whined around the Devil's Pulpit, and the air was as cold as ice. Simon shivered, draped the blanket around his shoulder, and went to crouch by the fire. Laura added more wood.

'It will be light soon,' she said. 'Then we can move on.'

'We didn't need to stop here in the first place,' Simon muttered.

'You'd had enough,' Laura stated simply. 'And I wasn't leading Timms over the edge in the dark.'

'You knew it was there, so why come this way?'

'I wanted to show you.'

'Show me what?'

'The view,' said Laura.

'You've brought me all this way to look at the blasted view? I suppose it didn't occur to you I could lose my leg if I don't get it seen to?'

'If you lose your leg it's your own fault!' Laura retorted. 'You shouldn't have set out on your own in the first place. And criticizing me won't make you any less stupid! So you may as well go back to bed!'

She was not so perfect.

She reacted as angrily as he did.

'You can't give me orders!' Simon said belligerently. 'I'll do what I please! Go where I like, when I like, not when you say so! I'll go to Timperley on my flipping own!' 

'I'll tell them to expect you,' 

Laura snapped. 'Without a radio or telephone you can't tell anyone anything!' Simon said scornfully. 

'Can't I?'

He stared at her, sensing the significance. She was contradicting him. Hinting at something that was not rational.

'How did that glider pilot tell you where to find me?' Simon demanded. 'He didn't land at the settlement. He headed west in the opposite direction.'

Laura smashed a broken branch and cast the dry wood chunks upon the fire. The flames leapt higher, reflected in her eyes, white and burning. Orange sheen danced on the fur of her face, showed scarlet on her hands as she once more spread them to warm.

'If I told you,' she said, 'you wouldn't like it!' 

'So tell me anyway!' 

'We use telepathy!' 

'You what?'

'The communication of direct thought.' 

Simon sat back. Maybe he had sensed it right from the beginning, powers such as he had never imagined, dangerous and inhuman. Maybe that was why he had run, not wanting to face the full meaning of mutation. He remembered Lilith's black pin-prick pupils drilling into him. He remembered the terror of her smile. Across the scarlet red burning of the flames his eyes met Laura's and this time there was no escape.

'Can you read my mind?' he asked.

She shook her head.

'Sometimes I can feel what you're thinking, but not very often. If I could have read your mind we wouldn't have needed Tyler to go looking for you. You've a closed mind mostly, like the rest of your kind.'

'Thanks a lot,' Simon muttered. 'I guess Tyler is also a mutant?'

Laura shrugged. 

'We all are,' she said simply.

Simon nodded grimly. Apart from blind Kate there were none of his kind left living outside, and the white-winged glider had been nothing to do with the government bunker at Hereford. He had thought at the time there was something odd about it. Now he realized what that something was. No unpowered aircraft could fly like that, skim across the surface and rise using wind power alone. And what had provided the initial lift?

'Who flies the tow plane?' Simon asked.

'What tow plane?' said Laura. 

'You need a tow plane to get a glider airborne.' 

'They use the wind off Tressilech Beacon.' 

'That's aerodynamically impossible.' 

'I don't understand.'

'Where's your initial velocity? Where's your thrust? That's not a hang glider. You've got to have power to take off 

'PK,' said Laura. 

'What's that?'

'Psycho-kinetic energy. Mind over matter. The levitation principle. What else can we use? How else could we raise the standing stones, or build our settlements? How else could I have lifted you on to Timms' back?'

Simon closed his eyes. Black and crimson the firelight flickered on his closed eyelids and Laura's voice seemed to come from far away, from the distances of the future or the past. Mental powers were nothing new, she said. They had been around since the dawn of time. Probably, in the beginning, everyone had possessed them and known how to use them. Like instinct they were necessary for survival in a world without cranes, or telephones, jet engines, sub-machine guns, antibiotics and geological instruments. But the old intuitive ways of knowing and doing things had been pushed to the back of human minds, passed over in favour of logical explanations, conscious understanding, and clever machines. They had survived only dimly in memories of magic and myth. But radiation from the nuclear war and an increase in ultraviolet light had caused genetic changes, changes which were not just physical but mental as well. Maybe mutants
were
a throwback to earlier stages of human development, but more likely they were the inheritors of all the stages of evolution.

Simon struggled to accept what she was saying, the enormity of it, the huge implications. What kind of mind was it that could lift a glider from the ground? What kind of terrifying elemental force charged the neuronal circuits of the mutant brain? Allowed them to communicate over distances? Put to flight a pack of ravenous dogs? Locate gold? Heal wounds? And hoist him on to a horse? With powers like that the mutants did not need technology.

'I think we're a new species,' Laura was saying. 'I think we've hardly begun to learn, hardly begun to use our full potential. We don't yet know our own minds, how they work, or what they can do.'

Alpha and omega, Simon thought savagely.

He was the last of his race.

She was the first.

And like
Homo sapiens
the mutants would find out.

Laura read his mind.

'No!' she said desperately. 'Why won't you listen? Why can't you see? That was your way, not ours! It's what the holocaust taught us. Life is too precious for us to damage or destroy. What's left belongs to all of us. We can share it, Simon, and we don't need to fight or kill.'

Simon looked at her in scorn. For all her power Laura was completely naive, and those who came from the government bunker would have no scruples. They might be willing to beg for houseroom among the mutant settlements but once it was granted, once they were all established, they would begin to take over, reclaim their rightful status in the social order. No one from the bunker would be willing to accept subservience. It was they who would rule, they who would become masters, and the mutants would be their slaves, put to work planting, and mining, and manufacturing machines. Mutants would build the underground cities, and fulfil their human dreams.

'You'll fight when you have to,' Simon assured her. 'When it's either us or you, you'll fight.'

'Except that there's not many left of you,' Laura pointed out. 'And every year there are less.'

'We still have time.'

'And we have the minds,' she reminded him.

Simon glanced at her, feeling suddenly sick.

'You could control us?'

'Like dogs if we have to.'

The firelight seemed cold.

And there was nothing more to say.

Simon sat on an outcrop of rock. Daylight brightened around him and the valley below was shrouded in mist. He was a shivering useless lump of human flesh, numb with cold, unable to help himself. His injured leg was stiff and hurting, but pain no longer mattered. Nothing mattered any more. Laura had stripped away the last vestiges of pride, and defeat had nothing to do with war. It was an emotional experience, a sense of futility as relentless as grief. He had tried to fight it, lashed out in anger against everything Laura was, but all that remained was the final acknowledgement of her supremacy, the final giving up.

His caftan was soaked with overnight dew but the grey haze held a promise of sun. It did not cheer him any. He could not live in it, not without Laura. He would have to go crawling to her for everything he needed. It was her world now, not his, and he heard her saddling the horse, talking to it softly, making ready to go. She did not know what she had done to him. She did not know she had finally killed his hope.

It might have been easier to bear if the mutants had conquered them, taken them by force and stormed the bunker. In war, or death, or even enslavement, Simon could have retained a kind of purpose, a concept of eventual freedom. But the war was fifty years over. His own people had fought it and lost it, and he had been born in their defeat. Laura was not his enemy. He
had
no enemy, except himself.

It was himself he had to accept, not Laura . . . his pride, his aggression, his mistaken human belief that he was the lord over all creation, made in the image of God. There was no proof of that, and there never had been. If God was everywhere then He was no more in Simon than in the woodlouse that crawled at his feet, in the piebald horse and the seed-heads of grasses. And if God was in him then He was in Laura too, and in that case she was right, the world was made for sharing, even with him.

Tumbled banks of earth and stone, gorse and bracken, swept down to the unseen water. Simon could vaguely make out the ruins of Timperley Abbey, gaunt and grey among a sea of mist. The first rays of the sun gilded the opposite-hills, turned trees to gold and burned the back of his neck. Automatically he raised his hood. Strange how he still retained an instinct for survival, self-preservation against all the odds. The whole of his species was genetically doomed to extinction, yet he clung to his own little life as if something inside him believed, in spite of everything, it was still worth living.

It was, of course. Life had always been a personal affair. Individuals had never much cared what had happened in the past, or would happen in the future, or how much others of their kind suffered or lacked. They did not care how many others died providing they lived. And government, to those who did not govern, had been largely a matter of indifference unless it happened to have a detrimental effect on the lives of individuals. Then, maybe, if the individuals had felt strongly enough, they had held protests, gone on strike, or started revolutions. Simon, if he were honest, did not give a damn who ruled him. Government by mutants could be no worse than government by humans, and it might even be better. If he were fed, and clothed, and looked after, what more could he ask?

It was the end of his pride but it did not hurt to let it go, experience humility and shame. He knew then that he was not answerable for others of his kind, nor could he change what others of his kind had done in the past. The future of the species had been sealed by the holocaust before he was born, but his own future was entirely personal. He had only one life and that was his own. It was not too late to make it a good one, to grow and give and gain in an individual way.

He could not be held responsible for the sins of his fathers, nor was he obliged to perpetuate their less desirable traits. He could never live up to Laura mentally, or genetically, but he could live up to her as a person. It was not too late for him to evolve both spiritually and emotionally, morally adapt to the mutant way of life, and be better than he was. If he could do that then it would not be defeat, but victory.

He lifted his head. Below, in the valley, the mist was clearing. He saw a flicker of river water and the Abbey walls glistened like gold. Roof tiles shone amber in the light. It should have been a ruin, a gothic pile immortalized by poets of the past. But the mist revealed it . . . turrets and towers, sunlight reflecting from the window glass, and a town built around it, gold and glittering in the Midas touch of morning, streets and houses of old yellow stone.

Simon recognized it at once . . . the El Dorado of every human mind, handed down from generation to generation. In the slums and housing estates and highrise blocks, in New York and London and Tokyo, people had dreamed of a golden city, and dreamed of it still in a crumbling bunker beneath the windswept hills of Avon. In every creed, in every culture, in myths and legends and written history, the archetypal city had existed. But the mutants had built it, Blake's Jerusalem, molten and shimmering beside an English river. It seemed to flow into the land around it, melt with the green of wooded hills and water meadows until the whole valley glowed, and the glory took away his breath.

'Timperley,' said Laura. 'It was what I wanted to show you. It's always best seen at this time of day.'

A few hours ago Simon would have hated her, accused her of boasting, but hatred had no place in a scene like this. He could understand how she felt about Timperley. It was like a scrap of heaven fallen to earth, the resurrection of something sacred, an architect's triumph, its foundations buried in time. No one could hate what was truly holy. 

'It's beautiful,' he admitted.

Laura sat beside him on the rock. She too looked beautiful, a golden girl with a sheen on her fur and her pale hair shot with sunlight, like a living fragment of the scene below, perfectly belonging.

'Do you know its history?' she asked. 

'It was sacked by Henry the Eighth,' he replied.