In the Blood
Authors: Jackie French
To Bree and Makala French, Josh and Naomi Darvill, Fabia Pryor, Lori Floden and Bridget Moller…something for your advancing years!
‘H
ouse?’ squeaked the Centaur. His sloping forehead wrinkled with concentration. It looked furry, a softer version of horsehair.
I leant further out of the floater window. ‘Yes, a house,’ I repeated. ‘These are the coordinates I was given, but there’s no house here.’ I gestured at the trees, which were white-trunked with straggly bark. ‘I know coordinates aren’t always accurate in the Outlands…’ My voice trailed off.
The Centaur was still thinking. ‘House,’ he muttered. I’d expected a Centaur would have a deep voice. I hadn’t expected the smell of sweat either, or how naked his body seemed so close to the window of my floater. The bare chest was wide and furry too. I tried to keep my eyes off the penis hanging heavily between his rear legs. Suddenly it began to lengthen, all pink and grey. I forced my eyes upwards.
‘House!’ exclaimed the Centaur triumphantly, as though he had solved the secret of the universe. He pointed in the direction I’d been travelling. ‘Creek,’ he added. ‘Up hill!’
‘I go along the creek, then up a hill?’
The Centaur nodded happily. ‘House,’ he agreed. Suddenly he raised his tail. The shower of droppings hit the ground, lightly steaming. They smelt sour and fresh at the same time, like the creche’s hydroponics compost when I was small.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I switched the floater onto manual.
The Centaur grinned. His teeth were wide and very yellow. ‘See you later, alligator,’ he squeaked surprisingly, and cantered off.
I accelerated, and headed towards the line of darker trees that marked the creek, and the house that they had found for me.
I
t was a good house. At least they’d done that much for me.
The house was two-storey, of weathered stone with that calm, blank-faced look of houses built long before the Decline. It was halfway up a hill of yellow soil and limp-leafed gum trees.
The fence was of stone too: heaped uneven rocks enclosing a garden, or what had once been a garden and might be again. The afternoon sunlight dappled through the tangle of briars and vines and a few limp-petalled roses, and at the back was a raised sunny spot that I supposed had once held vegetables.
Except for the solar paint on the roof, the house and its setting might have been from any age. Houses looked like that four hundred years ago; in four hundred years time this house might still look the same. Had some unusually sensitive bureaucrat decided that I’d be happier with the old fashioned, the unmodified, the human things that lasted? Probably not, I thought. More likely it was just the first one they found available in their hurry to get me out of the City.
I supposed the track to the gate had been a road once, long ago. Someone had recently felled the trees that punctuated the crumbling grey of ancient bitumen. Well, they weren’t in the way these days when a floater could easily hover over them, so they lay there still, like fallen soldiers still guarding the house even in death.
It looked like a good house.
I opened the door. It needed painting, but I liked the grey wood. I could use that image…
I slammed the thought away.
A lingering smell of dust and mouse, both recently removed, and some sort of cleanser in their place; wooden floors that shone with recent polishing, a wide hall, ancient mats…well, of course they’d be old, I told myself. They wouldn’t have bought fresh ones just for me. But these looked like they had been crafted to age well, back when people made that sort of thing.
A door to the right, a door to the left, another door at the end of the hall and a stairway in between.
I opened the door on the left first. It opened onto a study or living room, or a dining room, or perhaps all three. Two walls of books, two walls of windows, a long table recently polished (whoever had prepared the house for me had done a good job), another soft and ancient carpet.
I hadn’t expected the books. I inspected them. Most were old, pre-Decline at least. Some even older than that, which made sense. Few books were printed after Linking became common. But there were a few recent printouts as well: a bird survey, a basic gardening text, and even a few modsongs put into text. Chosen for
me
? Perhaps.
The door on the right led to a kitchen. One wall was fridge and freezer. I looked in the freezer, well stocked, with familiar City brands. There were three stoves: a rusted gas range, which once would have been fed by long-gone cylinders of Liquid Petroleum Gas—unusable now; a small Truemetal fuel stove; and an even smaller ultrawave, the first new thing I’d found.
‘I’ll have to learn to cook then,’ I thought to Mel, but of course she wasn’t listening. She’d never listen to me again.
The back door led to an elderly bathroom, a laundry, ditto, and a windowless storeroom made of reinforced concrete blocks with none of the elegance of the house. A later addition, then, from the days of the Decline and uncertainty, or perhaps from the even more troubled decades that preceded it.
There were three scrubbed-down bedrooms upstairs, and another bathroom. I arbitrarily designated one of the bedrooms as mine, then went down to the floater to get my bags.
The floater looked alien in the sunlight, the pale blue metal stark amongst the subtle tones of leaves and sky and shadows. I hauled my bags out, slammed the door and pressed the ‘Return’ button. The floater rose, hovered for a second, then headed back between the trees. My last link to the City gone.
Unpacking didn’t take long. I had accumulated very few possessions, never having had the time or inclination. When you live in the vast complex of Linked minds, the endless possibilities of Virtual, you don’t care enormously for physical things.
Maybe I’d learn to love things now. I went downstairs again.
I’d lit fires often enough in Virtual. Humans have an atavistic longing for fires; all of my most popular designs incorporated them. Lighting one now in RealLife should have been simple.
It wasn’t. But finally the flame from the paper lit the tinder, the tinder lit the wood. I found the lever that appeared to open the flue to create an updraught (but if
it starts roaring shut it down, in case you start a chimney fire, said the voice in my head from who knows what long-past data scan. In case of fire, damp it down with sand and…)
I found a kettle on the bench and water flowed from the taps when I turned them on, more slowly than in the City, but not quite slow enough to be irritating. After all, what did I have to do with my time now?
Tomorrow I’d have to investigate the water supply—it could be erratic and I’d have to learn to fix it. That’s what you did in the Outlands, I supposed: maintain all the basic systems that I’d always taken for granted.
I began to investigate the supplies. I’d been promised the house would be stocked with enough food to last me for a few days while I settled in. It seemed this promise had been kept. There was tea in a canister and popgrain coffee next to it—the cheap sort they serve in offices to keep your caffeine levels up—and a bottle of Cool-It too. Standard City supplies.
I opened the fridge.
A Truelettuce, crisp green leaves still damp. Four strangely striped tomatoes. A glass jar of what looked like genuine butter and, when I sniffed it, was. A jar of dark red jam, almost black, homemade by the look of it. No label to tell me what it was. Plum? Cherry? Blackberry? Perhaps some Proclaimed Outlands modification that I’d never come across before. Bread, uneven enough in shape to be homemade too. Milk. Two avocados, each a different shape. A pottery bowl of eggs: white, brown and uneven sizes. One had a stain on the side. A small Truecheese with a yellow wax coating.
I shut the fridge and opened the cupboard door beside it. More jars, with handwritten labels. I picked one
up. ‘Fig Chutney, May’, it read. There was an old-fashioned cake tin. I opened it and smelt the fruitcake even before the lid was off. I put the tin back slowly.
I’d expected Basics—the standard six flavours, twelve textures, guaranteed TrueLife sensation in the mouth, or any other flavour, TrueLife or not that you want to Link up on Virtual. Not this. Only the rich bother with Truefood. This had cost a month of average City wages.
I could afford it, of course. I could afford almost anything, apart from a small army perhaps, or my own research laboratory. Well, even that, possibly. But I hadn’t ordered these supplies, just as I hadn’t ordered the house. I hadn’t paid for them either.
These were a gift. For a moment the muscles of my heart contracted—they must be from Michael or from Mel.
But Mel couldn’t and Michael wouldn’t. Michael was protecting his own life now, not thinking of me. These were a gift from someone else. And Mel was…
I couldn’t find a toaster. I knew how to make toast on a wood stove. Or thought I did.
There was a slug in the lettuce too. I’d created a Reality about giant slugs once, the sort of minor horror theme that’s good for screams and giggles.
So I ate bread and butter with a boiled egg. Both tasted different from bread and egg in the City, or perhaps it was me that was different now.
I had a cup of tea and a slice of the cake, and then I went to bed.
T
he scratching woke me. I shut my eyes again, to see the time, found my mind empty and instead groped on the bedside table for the watch I’d bought before I left the City. 2.54 a.m.
I slipped out of bed, turned on the light, fumbled my uniskirt and ‘sox on and ran down the stairs.
The scratching came from the front door. I switched on the hall light and looked out.
A Wombat stood on the doormat. He blinked at me shortsightedly. ‘Goodeveninghowareyoutoday?’ he demanded, all in one word, as though repeating exactly the greeting he had learnt.
He was the first Animal I’d ever seen, apart from the Centaur. You don’t see Animals in Virtual any more—once a modification is proclaimed, even the image of that modification is banned from the City. But of course I’d heard of Animals—Mel had even studied modification techniques at one time.
The Wombat sniffed, probably trying to see me by smell instead of sight. He was short by human standards, although taller than his Truewombat ancestors. I’d seen a Truewombat years ago, in the park on level nine in the City. He stood on his hind legs, so that his genitals melded back into his fur, but unsteadily, as though he was only trying it for my benefit.
The rest of him was wombat-like—the coarse dusty fur, the axe-shaped head, the lack of neck. But his arms
and legs were long, perhaps half human norm, and his chin and mouth were almost human too. The human genes would have been several generations back, maybe ten or twelve I calculated, possibly more. Human genes are engineered to be dominant, but their effect erodes over time.
‘Hello,’ I said uncertainly.
The Wombat peered closer, then sniffed up and down and all around me, about 100 centimetres from my body. ‘Human,’ he grunted.
I shrugged. I suppose I was, to him.
‘Human no go on heat,’ he added. He seemed disappointed.
‘No, I don’t go on heat,’ I agreed.
He sniffed again. ‘Carrot? Bread?’ He brushed his way past me into the house, hesitated, then dropped to all fours and padded towards the kitchen. Either he’d been here before or, more likely, he simply smelt the source of food.
I shut the door and followed him. Most Animals will stop if you say ‘no’ firmly enough, or so I had been told. But after all, he was my first visitor, and possibly the only one I’d have for months or years.
He was sitting uncomfortably on a kitchen chair. He grinned at me, with thin black lips, proud of his achievement. ‘Chairandkitchen,’ he declared. ‘Carrot? Bread?’
‘I don’t have any carrots. There’s bread though.’
I took it out of the cupboard, then hesitated. My first inclination was simply to cut off a chunk and hand it to him. But I knew what it was like to be treated as less than human. So I cut the bread into slices instead and placed them on a plate and put them on the table in front of him.
‘Would you like some butter? Jam?’
He ignored me. All attention was on the bread. He ate it slowly, holding it with difficulty in his paws, concentrating on each mouthful, the crumbs dropping into his fur and onto the floor. Only when it was finished did he turn to me again. ‘Goodnighthaveanicenight,’ he said, and slipped off the chair.
‘No, wait!’
He turned and blinked up at me.
‘Where do you live?’
He had to concentrate on that. ‘Holehousethere,’ he said, as though that answered everything.
‘Can I come and see it?’ I hadn’t felt lonely before. Now the thought of an empty house and the loneliness struck like a blade.
The Wombat shrugged and kept on going.
I grabbed a torch from the table by the door and followed him.
It was easy to keep up with him. Once outside the door he dropped to all fours, but kept to the track. Down to the creek first of all, then along another path beside it. An animal track, by the look of it, but well worn. Then up the next hill from the one my house stood on. About halfway up he paused.
‘Holehouse,’ he announced.
He had been so silent I thought he’d forgotten I was following, but Truewombats are single-minded, said the data in my head. They can concentrate on only one thing at a time. I supposed Wombats were the same.
He looked at me enquiringly. ‘Holehouse?’ he asked.
I shone the torch at it.
I had assumed that it would be just a Wombat hole—larger, perhaps, with more bedding. But this was a
hybrid, just as he was. And as, in my own way, I was as well.
This was more hut than hole. The hill had been dug out to form a platform, then the hut constructed on it; rough certainly, with dirt mounded high between the raw logs, and branches to plug the gaps, but still a hut. I wondered if this Wombat had constructed it. More likely it had been a more dexterous ancestor, with a stronger need to ape humanity.
There was even a door, although there was no sign of door handle or hinges. I was just wondering how it worked when he pushed at it, and it swung inwards – a flap, held with ropes tied to the top lintel.
Suddenly his face reappeared.
‘Humancome,’ he ordered.
So I followed him.
It was dark inside. Naturally. What use had a Wombat for windows? I shone the torch around.
Dirt and wood walls, dirt floor; a large hole in the back wall, presumably leading to the area where he slept. A pungent smell of fur. No furniture, but two mounds of hard-packed soil. He sat on one, so I sat on the other. I tried to think how to make conversation. ‘My house,’ I said slowly. ‘Has anyone lived in my house before?’
He blinked at me. For a moment I thought he hadn’t understood. Then he said, ‘Mother’s-mother’s-timegoneoverhill.’
I thought about this.
‘Someone used to live there, but they moved over the hill?’
He nodded. Human gestures seem to outlast words. ‘Peopleoverhillcarrotscornapplesparsleyrootbreadgood peoplenowthenalways.’
‘There are people living over the hill now? You visit them? What sort of people?’
Too many questions. The Wombat looked vacantly at me for a moment, then said slowly, ‘Many many corn apples bread carrot sore itch visit good.’
There was an even longer pause while I worked that out. ‘You visit them and they give you food and cure your itch?’ Mange, I thought. Animals got mange. I suppose Wombats did too. ‘Do the people come this way ever?’
Another nod. ‘Person person your house bread stay go.’
So—someone who lived over the hill from me had put the supplies in my house, and probably had cleaned it too.
It had not occurred to me that I might have been placed near other people. It made sense though. The people who sent me here weren’t unnecessarily cruel. A nearby community or Utopia would mean that I had access to medical treatment and to companionship.
It also meant, I thought cynically, that I would have to rely less on the City for supplies. I might even grow contented, less likely to use whatever City contacts I had retained to try and reverse the Proclamation.
What would this Utopia be like? Utopias vary as much as the individuals in them, from groups of moon worshippers to yabby farmers.
For perhaps the millionth time since it had been taken from me I longed for my old Link to the databanks—or even a merely human link. But that was gone and there was no point wishing it back. I would have to find some other way to find out. Perhaps there was a reference work on Utopias in one of the books in the house…
It struck me then: the easiest way to find out would be to walk over there. ‘Over the hill’ was a vague enough direction, but surely I’d be able to find it. I grinned in the dusty darkness; legs, not Link. Was this what it meant to become human?
The Wombat was watching my grin, confused.
‘Which way are the houses?’ I asked him.
‘Follow smell.’
I gave up. A Wombat’s sense of smell was as much denied to me as Linkage.
I got to my feet and tried to resist brushing off the dust and Wombat hair. ‘I’d better be going,’ I said.
He stood up too, blinking at me in the torchlight. ‘Humanfriendfriendfriend,’ he said, and held out his paw.
I hesitated only a moment before I took it. I remembered other hesitations before someone had taken mine.
‘It was good to meet you,’ I said, and meant it. ‘I hope you’ll visit me again. I’ll try to get some carrots for you. Grow some carrots too.’
‘Carrotscarrotscarrotsfriend,’ he said, peering up at me with his tiny eyes.
Then I went back to my house.