The Fall of Chance
Read The Fall of Chance Online
Authors: Terry McGowan
The Fall of Chance
By Terry McGowan
Text copyright © 2014 Terry McGowan
All rights reserved
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Marc Thompson for his fantastic cover artwork, Helen Cross for building the website, Mark Campbell for editing duties and Pamela McGowan for being the first guinea pig to read it.
Additional thanks are owed to Adrian Rush for the various help he’s been roped into. The author would also like to apologise to all the other poor souls who’ve had to listen to him prattle on about this for so long.
Needless to say, huge thanks go out to my wife, son and parents. This wouldn’t have been possible without all of your support.
About the Author
Terry McGowan is a graduate of the University of Sheffield and lives with his wife and son in Cumbria, England. He also produces children’s books under the pen name James Edwards and miscellaneous titles under the initials TXM.
This is his first novel with a great many planned for the future. His second novel,
The Tall, Tall Tower
will be released in 2015. You can keep up to date with upcoming titles and other news by visiting his website:
www.terrymcgowan.net
For Sarah - of course.
2 | The Councillors |
3 | The Medics |
4 | The Educators |
5 | The Managers |
6 | The Clerks |
7 | The Functionaries |
8 | The Makers |
9 | The Labourers |
10 | The Protectors |
11 | The Hauliers |
12 | The Artisans |
(If you are having difficulty viewing this table try viewing it in landscape on a smaller font)
| A | B | C | D | E | |||||
Censure | | | | | 1 | | 1-2 | (1) | 1-3 | (1-2) |
Stocks | | | 1 | | 2 | (1) | 3 | (2) | 4 | (3) |
3 Months Imprisonment | 1 | | 2 | (1) | 3 | (2) | 4 | (3) | 5 | (4) |
6 Months Imprisonment | 2 | (1) | 3 | (2) | 4 | (3) | 5 | (4) | 6 | (5) |
1 Year Imprisonment | 3 | (2) | 4 | (3) | 5 | (4) | 6 | (5) | | (6) |
2 Years Imprisonment | 4 | (3) | 5 | (4) | 6 | (5) | | (6) | | |
4 Years Imprisonment | 5 | (4) | 6 | (5) | | (6) | | | | |
8 Years Imprisonment | 6 | (5) | | (6) | | | | | | |
Exile | | (6) | | | | | | | | |
Death | | | | | | | | | | |
The second month of the new year was an exciting time in the community. The spring crop was in full force, the high-climbing sun told promises of eternal summer and for those who had come of age, the Fall of Chance was upon them.
The Fall, as it was known, was due to happen tomorrow. For Unt, this year’s Fall was particularly important because it would be his own. His entire future was about to be set out for him: his profession, his spouse, his home. Everything.
The Fall was the foundation of the community, the manifestation of its central belief. The isolated town was built on a single idea: that it is the choices of Man that are responsible for the world’s troubles. The people here sought to make a utopia by giving up their freedom to choose and surrendering themselves to Fate. Only Chance controlled their lives.
Desire didn’t come into it. Politics didn’t come into it. Personal attributes didn’t come into it. The hazards of personal interference had been removed from the equation. All that remained was the roll of the dice: the Fall of Chance.
For Unt, as a child of the third generation, there was nothing remarkable in this idea. It was simply the way things were and - to all intents and purposes - always had been.
The founders had been young men when they built this place and now they were all old or dead. There was no written history of what had come before; no aural tradition either. The town might well have sprouted from the ground like a fungus in the morning dew, spontaneous, whole and complete. There was no place in the young folks’ minds for the consideration of any other possibility.
Because things had always been this way, they didn’t question it. Their thoughts were taken up with much more exciting questions: what job would they find themselves in, where would they be sent to live and most of all, who would they be living with? This last mystery, fuelled by hormones, had them all in a frenzy of speculation.
If Unt’s thoughts had ever strayed into wondering if he thought it a good system, he would have found it hard to say. It was a system made to level the playing field but what did that mean if you were already one of those people in the middle?
Unt was, in his own mind’s eye, the most average young man possible. He wasn’t particularly handsome or ugly, tall or short, strong or frail. He imagined he was acceptable to the opposite sex but had no pretensions he was the stuff of their dreams.
His mind was also unremarkable. In his private thoughts he’d admit to being a pip above the average, a steady seven out of ten: sharper than the majority but with plenty of room above for the truly smart or especially gifted.
Morally, he fancied himself a good person. He’d done things he wasn’t proud of and he’d neglected to do other things where he probably should have acted. He had missed opportunities for goodness, sometimes slipped into meanness and had acted out more minor misdeeds than he could name. But to Unt, the fact that he recognised and regretted these wrongs - the fact that he cared - was proof enough to himself that at least he had common decency.
“Common” was a nice label to put on your own morality: another word for average. There are people of pure goodness and there are people who are truly nasty but between those extremes there are the majority of people who know their own faults but see themselves as essentially good.
Yes, Unt was normal in every way: the epitome of averageness. Except he wasn’t. One big, yawning chasm set Unt aside from all the other young folk, an absence that was his defining feature: Unt was an orphan.
Unt’s parents had been killed when he was just eight years old. They had both been swept away when flood waters destroyed the bridge they’d been working on. Ever since then, Unt had been alone, left to raise himself among protective neighbourly eyes.
Without that parental hand to guide him, Unt was as much a product of the social system as it was possible to be. He was a leaf on a clear pond, ready to go with whichever little eddy claimed him first.
So, did he face his Fall and think it would do him well? He couldn’t know. He stood to gain as much from the way the dice fell as he had to lose. It was, in essence, the same lottery that life held with every one of its new arrivals. Some can be born into modest means and be happy with their small lot while others can have everything and still know ambition and envy.
Come the Fall, most people would be hoping for a place among the Councillors. The Modifying Council was the closest the town had to a government and this year had a rare opening for a posting among their ranks.
The Council was responsible for the upkeep of the Modifications Handbook. This was the manual carried by every member of the town. It was almost their society’s sacred text. Whenever someone had a choice to make, they would roll dice to decide the outcome: the Handbook was used to dictate the odds so that the roll was measured with sense and not just an even chance.
As children, the Council’s function had been explained to them all with the example of a burning house: if your house was on fire, you wouldn’t let a fifty-fifty chance decide if you were going to put out the flames. The Council set the odds in favour of a sensible outcome.
The Council had to tread a very fine line between the town’s principles and the common sense of reality. Theirs was a responsibility that was almost holy and to be a Councillor was a position of great esteem. All professions did their part for the town and all were supposed to be socially equal but power engenders respect. It was an unspoken truth that some positions were deemed better than others and foremost among them was a place on the Council.
This was another area where Unt would admit to being different. He wasn’t particularly bothered about being a Councillor. He had no calling for leadership and was happy to let others have the responsibility if they wanted it.
Unt wanted something different: he liked growing things and it was his hope to become a Farm Manager. A Farm Manager was no ordinary field-hand but one of a few people who determined where the colony would plant its crops and what would be planted. It was the Farm Managers who devised new ways of working. It was a balance between thought and action that suited Unt.
All the posts in the town were divided into eleven Orders. Each Order included posts of a similar type and every Order had a number. The lower the number, the more intellectual the nature of the posts within it. The higher the Order number, the more physical the work. The Educators, for example, were Order number three while the Labourers were Order number nine.
Unt’s parents had been engineers and belonged to the Order of Labourers. Had they lived, the assumption would have been that they’d have passed their knowledge on to their son. This would have made it more likely that Unt would have followed in their footsteps. Instead though, Unt was a blank page. The only legacy his parents left him was the house he lived in.
Housing was another of the ways that the odds of the Fall were stacked toward a certain outcome. It was the town’s policy that people of the same Order would be likely to end up living as neighbours. It was just a question of efficiency: it helped people to start work sooner if they didn’t have to wait for their colleagues to arrive from the other side of town. What that meant for Unt was that the home he’d been left was among the Labourers, on the slope of the western part of town.
The town had been built on the broad, flat plateau of a low hill and had four sides that were almost straight. In the early days this position with its steep slopes had been chosen for defence. Now, those slopes were the perch which let the workers fly quickly to their jobs and then swiftly home at the end of the day.
In Unt’s mind, there was no better place than where he sat right now: the porch at the front of his house. It was a position that gave panoramic views over the surrounding valley and as he reclined on his veranda, he could not have been more content. His eyes fell over the rolling fields, envisioning the grand designs he had planned.
This was Unt’s favourite time, the point where the sun committed to its daily descent, swamping the greenery in lush hues that warmed the eyes while the sun itself warmed the skin. A subtle breeze from the north stumbled its way across the slope and freshened the compost-warmth of the evening.
It was that perfect period between the end of the day’s work and the beginning of the night’s social hours. Soon, the whole town would be congregating around Fortune Square. This was common most nights but tonight was the eve of the Fall and that was cause for everyone to celebrate.
On most evenings this was called Promenade but tonight’s gathering was called the Pride. It was a handle that some wag had started off when they pointed out that Pride came before a Fall. The joke had stuck and now it was more than that: it was a true celebration of the town’s collected pride.
There was no compulsion or order to attend any of the nightly gatherings but people did it anyway. It was as routine as having supper. For most of the day, everyone was in their own enclaves, working away with little contact beyond their colleagues. But at the end of the day, everyone came together and mingled, exchanging the day’s news and asking after one-another. Unt had no family of his own but he imagined that this was the essence of family.
He leaned his head around the back of his recliner, peering around the corner and up the street. The view led all the way to Fortune Square which was just visible. Knots of people were already wending their way up the thoroughfare; groups of boys, girls, adults and families.
People would arrive together but the families and adults would soon go their separate ways. The kids would gravitate toward their own age and sex, collecting like shoals of fish that clung to their own familiar places.
It had been the same throughout his childhood. Unt had always gathered with the same group of boys but it was only as he grew older that he started to become aware of it. There was an invisible power that drove them together, a force of nature, but Unt could now feel that something was about to change. A pressure was building, strong and quiet, that would soon reach breaking point.
It felt the way that water collects behind a dam, a slow escalation toward a critical mass. Soon the dam would break and all those little shoals would spill out to mingle with the fish in the greater body of water below.
That breaking point would have a trigger and Unt had no doubt what that trigger would be. His eyes were good and he could see right up to the Square itself. Clusters of girls were joining one another, massing into a single impenetrable group. There was nothing more daunting. Even from here, he could pick up the excitement of their body language, that skittish energy that was tantalising and intimidating all at once.
They would be speculating over the Fall, he didn’t doubt. They’d be imagining who their husbands would be and excitedly discussing it with their friends. Unt wondered whether any of that excitement was created by the thought of him. Was there anyone among them who scribbled his name next to theirs at the back of their school ledgers?
“What you leering at, perv?”
Strong hands clamped on Unt’s shoulders. He whipped his head around and was confronted with a broad blond face set upon matching broad shoulders. But the square jaw was grinning, the blue eyes mischievous. The face belonged to Bulton - or Bull as he was better known - Unt’s neighbour and best friend.
Bull was aptly named. He had the build of a bull, even if he didn’t quite have the height. Stocky and benign, simple but not as simple as he liked to make out, Bull was like a six-year-old in the body of a man.
Bull was the same age as Unt: he’d been born a month before and the two were like brothers. When Unt’s parents died, a roll had been made to determine if he would be adopted or left to raise himself with the supporting care of neighbours. It had been an outcome of low probability but the dice had decided that Unt would be brought up on the collective care of the community. Everyone had been generous with their time and efforts but it was Bulton’s family who had lent the most support. Unt could treat their home as his own and he ate with them more often than he ate alone.
“Prick”, he said to Bulton.
“Arse” replied his friend. “So, what
are
you looking at?” Without waiting for a response, Bull poked his head around the corner, leaning on Unt for support. When he stood down, he was grinning.
“Oh, I see,” he said, smiling slyly. “Admiring the scenery, are we? Any vistas take your fancy?”
Unt rolled his eyes. “A vista’s the whole scene”, he grunted, pulling himself up from the recliner.
“You think too much”, said Bulton.
That was something that people often said of Unt but he didn’t see it that way. It was just that when the words were in his head, he thought of them right, but as soon as they escaped his mouth, they tumbled over themselves and fell out all wrong.
Some people, speaking more politely, said he was reflective but that just meant the same thing. The thing was, Unt couldn’t understand how anyone could be different: surely no-one went through their lives without looking at what was going on in their own head.
Bulton hooked his hands under the lintel of Unt’s door and started doing pull-ups. “Stop that”, said Unt and punched him in the ribs with a languid arm.
Bull laughed. “What about my question?” he said, “Do you see anything nice up there?”